18. Sergei #2
I reached between us and guided myself to her, notching against her slick entrance, and the first press of me made her breath catch and her hips rise to chase it.
I gave her only the first thick inch and held there, letting her feel the stretch of taking me begin, and when she made a low desperate sound and tried to take more, I pressed her hip flat to the bed and made her wait.
“Slowly,” I said against her mouth. “Let me give it to you slowly. We have an hour, and I mean to spend every minute of it.” Then I sank into her by deliberate degrees, feeling her open around me and close again on every inch, the wet heat of her drawing me deeper, until I was buried to the root and there was nothing of me left outside of her.
We held there a moment, joined and unmoving, breathing the same air, and then she wrapped herself around me and breathed, “There. There you are,” and whatever had been holding the last lock in me gave way.
I loved her slowly and then not slowly at all, with my mouth at her ear telling her things I had never told a living soul, that she was mine, that I had been waiting fifty-five years to be undone like this, that I would burn the whole world down before I let it touch her.
She held my face in both hands and took every word, and called me the name she only uses in the dark, the one that turns this hard old man to something soft and ruined, and I was hers, completely, helplessly, with no part of me left over.
She met me stroke for stroke, her heels pressed to the backs of my thighs to take me deeper, her voice fraying into the broken half-words of a woman who has stopped editing herself.
I felt her begin to climb a second time, felt the tension wind tighter and tighter through her, and I braced on one forearm and brought my other hand to where our bodies joined and worked her there in the rhythm she set, and I told her against her temple to let go, to come apart for me, to give it to me and not be quiet about it.
She did. She clenched around me and broke with a cry she made no effort to swallow, and the feel of her coming undone tore the last of my own restraint loose behind it.
She set the pace and then surrendered it and then took it back, and I followed her every time, learning the language of her like a man who had been handed one night with a book he would never be allowed to read again.
When she tipped over the edge a second time she pulled me with her, my name and that other tender word breaking apart together against my throat, and I held her through the long shudder of it and felt, for one impossible minute, like a man who got to keep things.
And that was when the polka started.
From the pocket of my discarded jacket, my ancient folding phone, the cheap one I keep only for family, burst into a frantic accordion, a tune of relentless and idiot cheer.
Lev. He had got his small hands on it at the dinner and changed the ring and said nothing, the little criminal, because he had wanted exactly this, had wanted to picture my face in precisely this moment.
Claire's forehead dropped to my shoulder and she came apart all over again, this time laughing, helplessly, her whole body loose with it for the first time since I had met her at the foot of those stairs in a borrowed kind of courage.
“Your grandson,” she gasped into my neck, “is going to be running that entire organization by the time he is nine.”
“He already runs me,” I said, and reached out and killed the thing without looking at it, and she lifted her flushed and laughing face, and I kissed the laugh out of her mouth and turned it back into the deeper thing, and the dark room closed around us again with nothing left in it but the two of us and the truth I had told and the truth I had not.
And when we found our way back to where the music had stolen us from, I did not last, and I did not try to.
Not with her watching me the whole of the time.
Not with her whispering that she wanted, just once, to feel me lose the control I wear like a second skin.
I followed her over with my face buried in her hair and her name breaking apart in my throat, and for one white and weightless moment there was no enemy, no inherited name, no door left unopened.
There was only her, and the ruin she had made of me, and the enormous and foolish peace of it.
“I am keeping the coat,” she murmured against my chest, drowsy and smug. “For the record. It is a very good coat and it had nothing to do with you.”
“Noted,” I said. “The coat, then, and the house around it. There is nothing under this roof I would not give you to make you stay.” She went quiet at that, the kind of quiet that is listening hard, and I felt her decide to let the size of it pass without comment, which is its own form of grace.
After, she lay along my side with her ear over my heart, drawing slow shapes on my chest, soft and unhurried and mine, and I lay there and gathered the last of it into words.
I had decided. I would tell her who the man was.
I would tell her what mercy I had once shown a child, and how that mercy had grown teeth and come back for the both of us. I had the first words in my mouth.
“Claire,” I said. “The man. The one I would not name. I need you to hear the rest of it now, while I am still brave enough to say it.”
And the other phone rang.
Not the toy in my jacket. The black one in the drawer of the bedside table, the one whose number lives in six heads in the world and no paper anywhere, the one that does not ring for anything that can wait for morning.
I felt Claire go still against me, felt her understand from my body alone that this was different, that this was the real one.
“Take it,” she murmured, already drifting, her voice thick and trusting and nearly asleep.
“Tell me the rest tomorrow. I know what you are now, Sergei. Whatever is left is only the details.” And there was the mercy and the blade of it together, because she believed the worst had already been spoken, believed she had heard the whole shape of the danger and chosen to stay inside it with me.
I told her I came from dangerous men. I did not tell her I was the most dangerous thing she would ever choose to keep, because I wanted, for one more hour, to be only hers.
I slid out from under her and she made a small sound of protest and curled into the warm hollow I left and was gone, down into a sleep so complete and so unguarded that I had to stand over her for a moment just to bear it. Then I took the black phone to the window and put it to my ear.
It was Grigori. He does not waste words at this hour.
He told me that Yuri had sent word, that the date I had been counting toward, the anniversary I had built every plan and every prayer around, no longer existed.
He had moved it up. The weeks I believed I had to make her safe, to finish the confession, to find the single narrow road out of this that did not run through her, had just been cut in half and then in half again.
She slept on behind me, certain at last that she knew me, the lamplight gold on her bare shoulder, her face emptied of everything but trust. She knew what I was now. She did not yet know how little of us was left.