17. Nikolai
NIKOLAI
Renee settled onto one of the kitchen stools like she intended to stay until dawn, wine in one hand and an expression that suggested she had already decided this evening was hers now.
"Okay," she said, pointing a finger at me with the casual authority of a woman who had clearly interrogated worse men and won. "Sit. I have questions."
"I do not know what that means."
"It means sit down and answer things. It is not complicated." She patted the stool beside her, and I looked at Isla, who only shrugged and mouthed a single word at me that looked suspiciously like sorry.
I sat.
I could not remember the last time I had willingly placed myself in a chair across from someone whose only weapon was curiosity. It should have felt more dangerous than it did.
"What do you actually do for work?" Renee said, no preamble, like she had been saving the question up for weeks.
"I handle security and logistics for people who need it handled quietly."
"That is the vaguest sentence I have ever heard a human being say out loud."
"It is also entirely accurate."
She narrowed her eyes at me the way I imagined she narrowed them at charts that did not add up. "Where are you from originally?"
"Russia. St. Petersburg, until I was young enough that it stopped mattering where I was from."
"Do you miss it?"
"I do not think about it enough to know."
"That is either the saddest thing you have said all night or the most honest one." Renee took a long sip of wine, studying me over the rim of the glass. "How long have you known Isla?"
"Fifteen days."
"Fifteen." She looked at Isla, delighted. "You have known this man fifteen days and he already cooked me a soup better than anything my actual grandmother ever made."
"It is not a competition," I said.
"It is absolutely a competition, and you are winning it." She turned back to me, undeterred.
"Hobbies. Do you have any that are not, and I say this with love, deeply concerning?"
"I read. I run most mornings before it is light."
"Anything that does not sound like training for a job you would need a permit for?"
"I am teaching myself to cook things that are not borscht."
"That is genuinely sweet, and I hate that it is genuinely sweet." She pointed her wine glass at Isla like evidence in a trial. "Do you see this?"
"This is a man who learns hobbies to impress you. This does not happen. I have dated men who considered texting back within the hour a grand romantic gesture."
"I did not learn to cook to impress her."
"Sure you didn't."
"I learned because she stood in my kitchen and told me it was a human right, and arguing with her seemed like more effort than simply learning."
Isla laughed at that, quick and surprised, and something in my chest loosened at the sound of it in a way I had stopped expecting from conversations that were not directly about survival.
"Are you dangerous?" Renee asked, apropos of nothing, like the question had simply arrived and she saw no reason to hold it back.
"Yes."
"Just like that? No hedging, no defining dangerous first?"
"You asked a direct question. I do not see the use in answering it any other way."
Renee looked at Isla, eyebrows raised so high they nearly vanished into her hairline. "I like him even more now."
"That is concerning information to be delighted about," I said.
"This whole evening has been one revelation after another. I am simply choosing to enjoy it."
"Why her?" Renee asked, quieter now, some of the performance dropping out of her voice. "Out of everyone you could have decided to be terrifyingly devoted to, why Isla specifically?"
I considered several answers, all of them true, before settling on the one that mattered most. "Because she looked at the worst parts of me and did not flinch, and I had never once in six years given anyone the chance to do that before her."
Renee did not say anything clever back to that. She just looked at me for a moment, something unguarded crossing her face, and then reached for her wine again like she needed somewhere to put her hands.
"Last question," she said, setting her glass down with the gravity of a woman about to ask something that actually mattered to her. "Are you good to her? Actually good, not the kind of good that looks good from the outside and is something else entirely once the door closes."
The room went quiet in a different way than it had for the rest of the questioning.
"I have hurt her once already, with my own mouth, on purpose, because it was easier than being honest." I did not look away from Renee while I said it, because the sentence deserved that much.
"I do not intend to make a habit of it. I am not certain I have earned the right to call myself good to her yet. I am trying to become someone who has."
Nobody said anything for a moment. Renee looked at me for a long time, the kind of look that assessed rather than judged, and then she nodded once, like I had just passed a test neither of us had known she was giving.
"Okay," she said. "I like him."
"Renee."
"No, I am serious, I actually like him. He is terrible at small talk and answers everything like he is under oath, and somehow that is the most charming thing I have witnessed in a year." She stood, gathering her coat with the brisk efficiency of a woman who knew exactly when to make an exit.
"Do not screw this up. Either of you. I mean it."
"I have every intention of trying not to."
"That is such a specific, joyless way to say you care about someone, and I love it." She kissed Isla's cheek, pointed one final warning finger at me, and let herself back out with the same lack of ceremony she had let herself in with.
The door clicked shut, and the apartment went quiet in the particular way it only did when it was actually just the two of us.
I had spent most of the evening bracing for Renee to ask a question I could not answer honestly, and instead I had simply answered everything, and the apartment had not fallen apart because of it. That alone felt like something worth sitting with.
Isla leaned against the counter, arms crossed, watching me with an expression I could not fully read. "She likes you."
"She interrogated me for forty minutes."
"That is how she shows it. Trust me, if she did not like you, she would have been much more polite."
I crossed the kitchen toward her, slower than I needed to, giving her every chance to tell me to stop. She did not tell me to stop.
"Where were we," I said, "before we were interrupted?"
"I believe you had flour on your hands and very little self-control."
"I still have both of those things."
She raised an eyebrow, arms still crossed, but there was nothing guarded left in the way she was looking at me, none of the deliberate space she had put between us the moment Renee walked in an hour ago.
She smiled up at me, flour long since washed away, nothing left of the evening's chaos except the warmth still sitting low in my chest, and I closed the last of the distance between us and kissed her the way I had wanted to since the moment her thumb landed on my cheek.
This time nothing interrupted us, the kitchen light still on behind us, and I did not care, and neither, apparently, did she.
She kissed me back like she had been waiting exactly as long as I had, her hands finding my shirt, my jaw, the back of my neck, and I lifted her onto the counter without breaking the kiss, because some decisions did not need to be discussed first.
"Bedroom," she said against my mouth, breathless. "Now would be good."
I did not need to be asked twice.
I carried her there, and she laughed against my throat the entire way, and by the time we reached the bed the laughter had gone quiet and turned into something else entirely, something slower and more certain than anything either of us had let ourselves want out loud before.
I set her down at the edge of the mattress and knelt to work the buttons of her shirt open one at a time, unhurried, watching her breath catch a little more with every inch of skin I uncovered.
She reached for the hem of my shirt in return, impatient where I was deliberate, and between the two of us we made slow, uneven work of getting each other out of everything that still stood in the way.
Every other time had happened in shadow, in stolen minutes, in rooms where the dark did half the work of hiding what I did not want seen. This did not feel like stealing anything.
I left the light on.
Isla noticed, of course she noticed, her eyes finding mine in the lamplight instead of the dark I had used every other time to hide the worst of what she would see.
"You do not have to," she said quietly, her hand already at the collar of my shirt.
"I want to." I caught her hand, held it there against my chest, over the place where the scarring started.
"I want you to see all of it. I am tired of choosing the dark."
She did not say anything to that. She simply reached up and finished what her hand had started, and this time I let her look for as long as she wanted, in a light I had once considered my own personal punishment and now, somehow, did not.
She kissed the worst of it first, unhurried and deliberate, her mouth finding the ridge of scarring along my collarbone like she meant to prove something to both of us at once, and I felt the last of my restraint go out of me on a breath I did not manage to control.
We came together on the bed with none of the caution either of us had managed downstairs, her hands moving over the length of me like she had been waiting weeks for permission and had finally gotten it, mine learning the shape of her in the same unhurried way she had learned my scars, patient where every instinct in me wanted to rush.
I kissed my way down her throat, her collarbone, the soft skin just beneath it, feeling her pulse jump under my mouth every time I found somewhere new to linger, and by the time the last of what stood between us was finally gone, her hands had found their way into my hair, pulling me back up to her mouth like she could not stand the distance a moment longer.
I settled between her thighs, braced on my forearms, and stopped there long enough to look at her, flushed and open and watching me with none of the caution I had grown used to seeing in anyone who let me get this close.
"Now," she said, soft and certain, and it was answer enough to every question I had not asked out loud.
I entered her slowly, giving her every second she needed to tell me to stop, and she did not, she arched up to meet me instead, a low, broken sound catching in her throat that undid something in my chest far more thoroughly than anything she could have said aloud.
She was tight and slick around me, and holding still long enough to let her adjust took more discipline than anything I had managed in six years.
"Move," she said against my ear, her nails finding my back, and I did.
She was warm everywhere I touched her, giving in a way that had nothing guarded left in it, entirely unafraid of anything I put in front of her, and every deliberate roll of my hips pulled another one of those helpless, honest sounds out of her that I intended to spend the rest of the night chasing.
I took my time with her, despite everything instinct wanted, learning exactly what made her breathing stutter and what made her fingers dig into my shoulders and what made her say my name again, quieter the second time, like she had forgotten she meant to say anything at all.
What happened after that was not something I had words ready for.
It was slow where I expected urgency and certain where I expected doubt, our bodies moving together in a rhythm neither of us had to think about finding, her hands tracing every scarred inch of me like it was worth keeping rather than hiding, and I gave her more of myself in that hour than I had given anyone in six years combined.
Her breath came faster against my throat, uneven and honest in a way nothing about her had ever been anything less than honest, and I held onto the sound of it like it was the only thing in the room that mattered, because for that hour, it was.
When she finally came apart beneath me it was with my name on her lips and her hands fisted in the sheets, and the sight of her like that, open and unguarded and entirely mine to witness, was the closest thing to undone I had felt in longer than I could measure.
I followed her a moment later, spent and wrecked in a way that had nothing to do with exhaustion and everything to do with her.
There was no part of me left standing guard by the end of it, no corner of my attention still counting exits or measuring distances to the door. For the length of that hour, there was only the room, and her, and the astonishing fact of being entirely known and still wanted.
Afterward, we lay tangled together with the lamp still burning low, her head on my chest, my arms around her in a way that had stopped feeling like a decision and started feeling like the only place either of us belonged.
"That was different," she said eventually, tracing an absent pattern along my forearm.
"Different how?"
"Slower. Like you weren't just letting me stay. Like you actually wanted me here."
She was right, and I did not know how to tell her that the difference had nothing to do with technique and everything to do with the light I had left on, the choice underneath it, the fact that for the first time in longer than I could measure I had wanted to be seen more than I had wanted to be safe.
"I did. I do." I pressed my mouth to the top of her head, breathing her in, and felt the old, familiar weight of six years of silence pressing up against the back of my teeth, demanding to finally be let out.
"There is something I have never told anyone. I want to tell you."
She went still against me, careful and quiet, giving me the same undemanding space she had given me once before, the last time I had gotten this close and lost my nerve.
This time I did not intend to stop. Whatever it cost me to say out loud, it could not possibly cost more than six more years of her wondering what she had actually agreed to love.
"The fire was not an accident," I began.
My phone lit up on the nightstand before I could get any further, the screen bright enough in the dim room to catch both our attention at once.
CRUZ, it said. CALL ME NOW.