31. Nikolai
NIKOLAI
I stood outside the apartment door for a full minute before I let myself use my key, which was not something I had ever done before in my life.
I had spent the drive over rehearsing nothing, which alone told me how far I had already traveled from the man who used to script every sentence before he let it leave his mouth.
I did not have an apology prepared, no careful accounting of what I owed her, only the plain, terrifying fact that I intended to sit down across from her and actually talk instead of finding somewhere useful to disappear to.
Matvei had called an hour earlier about a lead on the storage facility, a second location that Kirill's information had never turned up, worth checking before the raid made the question academic. I had told him it could wait until morning.
I had never once, in six years, told Matvei that something could wait. I stood there a moment longer with the key already in my hand, turning that fact over as carefully as I turned over anything unfamiliar enough to need checking twice, and found it held.
Isla was curled on the couch when I let myself in, a book open and unread on her knee, her eyes going straight to my face first, checking for damage before anything else registered. She did not find any tonight.
"You are early," she said.
"I made a decision instead of an excuse."
"That sounds ominous."
"It is not. I promise you it is not." I sat down beside her, close enough that our knees touched, and made myself stay there instead of pacing the length of the room the way every old instinct wanted.
"I want to tell you something, and I do not want to leave in the middle of it this time."
Something in her face went very still and very open at once, the particular stillness she reserved for moments she understood mattered before I had said a single word to confirm it.
"Okay," she said. "I am listening."
I looked at my own hands for a moment, because it was easier to start there than at her face.
"You asked me once why I keep leaving instead of talking. In the kitchen, the day I found out about the timer. You called it a pattern, and you were right, and I did not have an answer for you that morning because I had not looked at it closely enough myself yet."
"I remember."
"I have looked at it now." I made myself keep going, because stopping would only prove her right about the pattern all over again, and I had spent enough years proving her point without meaning to.
"Every time something in me needed to be said out loud, I found an errand instead."
"Kirill. The storage facility. A phone call I did not need to make tonight."
"It was never really about the information. It was about being somewhere my hands could be useful instead of somewhere my mouth had to be honest."
"Why?"
The question landed exactly where I expected it to, and I let myself sit inside it a moment before I answered.
"Because the last time I let someone matter enough to be honest with, I did not speak the truth fast enough, and it cost him his life instead of just my pride." My voice had gone rougher than I wanted it to.
"Pasha asked me once, months before the fire, why I never told anyone what I actually thought about anything, not even the men who would have died for me without asking why."
"I told him it kept me useful. He told me it would eventually get someone killed, and he was not wrong, only early."
"He was talking about the crew. About trust in general."
"I did not understand until much later that he might have also been talking about me, specifically, and what I would become if I never learned the difference between being useful and being honest."
Isla did not say anything right away, and I was grateful for it, because the next part needed room to arrive on its own.
"Every time I run from a conversation with you, some old part of me is convinced that leaving is safer than staying and getting the words wrong. That if I go handle something instead, nobody I love gets to watch me fail them out loud." I looked up at her finally.
"It is not logical. I know that. It has not stopped me from doing it anyway, not once, not until tonight."
"That is the most honest thing you have ever said to me without me having to drag it out of you first."
"I am aware. It costs less than I expected it to."
She reached over and took my hand, turning it palm up the way she had the night she first cleaned my knuckles at this same table, except tonight there was nothing to bandage, only something to hold.
"I am not asking you to stop being who you are," she said. "I am asking you to let me stand next to whoever that actually is, instead of the version you send out the door when it gets hard."
"I would like to try that."
"Just try?"
"I would like to succeed at it. I am simply aware that wanting something and being good at it immediately are not the same thing." A small, unfamiliar warmth moved through my chest at the sound of my own honesty, arriving without effort this time instead of costing me something to say.
"You could practice on me," she said, quieter now. "I am not going anywhere."
"I know that. I am only now starting to actually believe it."
She studied my face a moment longer, then leaned in and kissed me, slow, nothing like the desperate, borrowed-time kisses we had traded in a lockdown or a kitchen full of flour. This one had nowhere it needed to be.
I kissed her back the same way, one hand finding the curve of her jaw, and felt something in my chest finally stop bracing for the conversation to go wrong.
"Stay," she said against my mouth. "All the way through this, whatever it turns into."
"I intend to."
She pulled me up off the couch by the front of my shirt, unhurried, and I let her lead the way toward the bedroom instead of counting the exits between here and there like I usually did without deciding to.
There was no light left on tonight out of some deliberate statement about being seen. I simply forgot to think about it at all, which felt like its own kind of answer.
She undressed me slowly, working each button like she had nowhere else to be for the rest of her life, and I let her take exactly as long as she wanted, my hands finding her waist and staying there instead of rushing ahead out of six years of habit.
"You are allowed to touch me," she said, laughing softly against my throat. "I am not going to break."
"I know. I am simply not in a hurry tonight."
"Since when?"
"Since approximately ten minutes ago."
She laughed again, warmer this time, and the sound of it undid something in my chest more thoroughly than her hands had managed yet.
I kissed the line of her throat, taking my time with it, learning the exact place her breath caught when I lingered there, filing it away with the same patient care I gave everything else about her.
My shirt came the rest of the way off under her hands, and she paused there simply to look at me, unhurried, her palm flattening over the old scar tissue along my ribs with a familiarity that had lost every trace of clinical distance months ago.
"I have looked at this more times than I can count," she said quietly, tracing one particular ridge. "It still is not the first thing I see when I look at you anymore."
"What is."
She pressed her palm flat over my heart instead, steady, and I felt my own pulse answer the pressure of her hand before I could decide whether to allow it.
"This," she said. "It always was."
I kissed her again for that, slower than before, and felt her fingers find the waistband of my trousers with an unhurried confidence that told me exactly how much restraint she intended to allow either of us tonight.
We came together slowly this time, no lockdown clock running out above us, no argument still smoking in the air between us, only the two of us and a bed and nowhere either of us needed to be until morning.
I peeled her shirt over her head slow enough that she made a small, impatient sound low in her throat, and I tucked that away too.
Her skin was warm under my palms, soft everywhere mine was not, and I traced the line of her collarbone with my mouth before my hands found the clasp of her bra, patient, watching her face for the exact moment her breath caught.
She arched into my hands the second they found her bare skin, a soft, helpless sound escaping her that lit something low and urgent in my chest. I bent to take one peaked nipple into my mouth, slow, savoring the way she gasped and threaded her fingers through my hair, holding me there like she never wanted the sensation to stop.
I gave the other the same patient attention until her hips were rocking against nothing, searching for a pressure I had not given her yet, and when I finally slid a hand lower, tracing the shape of her through the last thin layer of fabric she had left, the sound she made was nothing short of desperate.
"Nikolai." My name came out of her rough, half a plea.
"I have you." I said it low against her skin, working my way down the length of her with the same slow deliberation, tasting every inch as I went, learning the map of her one unhurried kiss at a time. "I am not finished with you."
I settled between her thighs and looked up once, giving her every chance to tell me to stop.
She did not tell me to stop. She threaded her fingers through my hair instead, guiding without pushing, and I lowered my mouth to her, unhurried, learning exactly what made her back arch off the mattress and what made her breath stop altogether.
She was slick and warm against my tongue, and I took my time with her, thorough, savoring every gasp and every helpless roll of her hips against my mouth.
I found the rhythm that made her fingers tighten hardest in my hair and stayed there, deliberate, drawing it out until her thighs began to tremble around me and her breath came in short, broken pulls above me.
"Do not stop," she managed, barely a whisper, her hand fisting tighter in my hair. "Please, do not stop."