16. Tasha
TASHA
Iwoke to a bed gone half cold on one side, which told me two things before I'd even opened my eyes: that Grisha had been gone longer than a minute, and that some part of me had already learned the exact temperature of him well enough to notice its absence in my sleep.
I lay there a moment, listening. Water ran somewhere in the tiny kitchenette.
A cabinet door clicked shut with more care than the hinge actually required, the sound of a man trying not to wake someone and failing at the one variable he couldn't control, which was the hinge itself.
We had ended up back at the cottage sometime after midnight, his idea more than mine, something about not wanting to explain a second morning in a row to anyone walking the east wing hallway before six.
I hadn't argued. The cottage had my coffee, my sheets, and a door that locked from the inside instead of a corridor full of men with radios who noticed everything.
I found him standing at the little two-burner stove in yesterday's shirt, unbuttoned, a mug already going in front of him and a second one waiting empty beside it like he'd known the exact minute I'd wander out.
His hair still had the flattened look of a man who'd slept on his side and hadn't bothered to fix it, which felt like the single most human thing I'd seen him do since the night we met.
"You're doing the thing again," I said, leaning against the doorframe in an old T-shirt that had definitely once belonged to him and had definitely not made it back to his side of the bed.
"What thing?"
"The thing where you're up and dressed and making coffee at an hour that should be illegal, the morning after.
" I crossed the small room and took the empty mug out of his hand before he could pour into it, mostly so I had an excuse to stand close enough to feel the heat coming off him.
"Some men roll over and go back to sleep.
You get up and reconnoiter my kitchenette. "
"It's not reconnoitering. It's coffee."
"You checked the window latch. I watched you do it through my eyelashes."
He didn't deny it, and somehow that landed heavier than an outright denial would have.
He poured for me instead, unhurried, the same care he brought to everything, and quiet settled over the two of us, both just standing in the small kitchen with the early light coming slant through the one window over the sink, green shutters throwing a stripe of shadow across the counter.
"You're always up early," I said, echoing a line from a different morning, a different table, and watching for whether he caught it.
"I'm always up early," he agreed, and something flickered across his face that told me he had.
I cupped the mug in both hands and let the heat sink into my palms, and that was when I noticed it, half tucked under the folded jacket he'd left on the single kitchen chair the night before.
It was dark metal, a shape I recognized from a lifetime of action movies I'd never taken seriously until I started dating a man who apparently lived one.
"Is that what I think it is?"
He followed my gaze without any particular urgency, the way he might have looked at a set of keys. "Yes."
"You brought a gun. To my cottage. For a sleepover."
"I brought a gun everywhere. This wasn't a special occasion." He said it so plainly, so entirely without drama, that it took me a second to catch up to what he'd just told me.
"Do you always sleep with a gun in reach?"
"Yes."
"That's not even a little reassuring."
"It wasn't meant to be." He took a sip of his own coffee, watching me over the rim of the mug with an expression that was almost amused, the kind of look he gave me when he knew exactly how he sounded and had decided not to soften it.
"Reassuring would be a lie. I'd rather you know what you're actually getting. "
"What I'm actually getting is a man who wakes up at five in the morning to check my window latch and keeps a firearm within arm's reach of my pillow."
"You forgot the coffee."
"I did not forget the coffee. The coffee is the only reason I'm not currently reevaluating my life choices out loud.
" I took a sip, and it was better than the burnt sideboard sludge from the big house, which felt like it should mean something.
"Does it have a name? Please tell me it doesn't have a name. "
"It doesn't."
"Good. I was going to leave you over that."
"Duly noted." He set his mug down and reached for me instead, an arm sliding around my waist with the same unhurried certainty he brought to everything else, and pulled me in against him before I'd finished pretending to be scandalized.
He smelled like coffee and sleep and, faintly, like the soap from my own shower, which did something warm and unguarded to me that I chose not to examine too closely at six in the morning.
"For what it's worth, the gun's never once been the interesting part of this. "
"No?"
"No." He tipped my chin up with two fingers, unhurried, and kissed me slow enough that the coffee went briefly, completely forgotten between us.
When he pulled back his mouth had that faint dry curve it got right before he said something designed to needle me.
"The interesting part is that you noticed the window latch before you noticed the gun.
I'd call that a promising sign, professionally. "
"I hate that you're right."
"I usually am. It's a burden." He let me go, finally, and reached for his jacket off the chair, and the whole ordinary weight of him getting dressed in my kitchen at six in the morning, tucking the gun away somewhere I didn't ask further questions about, hit me with a kind of tenderness I hadn't expected an ordinary morning to hand me.
He caught me watching and paused, half into one sleeve. "What?"
"Nothing. I'm just cataloguing."
"Cataloguing what?"
"You. In my kitchen. Being ordinary." I shrugged, feeling my own face do something soft and unguarded that I didn't try very hard to stop. "It's a good addition to the collection."
He didn't answer that with words. He crossed back to me and kissed my forehead, brief and certain, the kind of gesture that felt more like a signature than a kiss, and told me Fedya would be expecting me at the training yard by nine if I still wanted the lesson I'd been badgering him about for a week.
Then he was gone out the cottage door into the cool early light, and I stood in my kitchenette in his old T-shirt finishing coffee that tasted, for no reason I could name, distinctly better than it had any right to.
The training yard sat behind the security office, a flat stretch of packed dirt and one worn blue mat that had clearly seen better decades, ringed by a chain-link fence Fedya had personally strung himself the summer he turned twenty-two, a fact he informed me of with real pride.
He was already out there when I arrived, bouncing lightly on the balls of his feet like a man who had been waiting since dawn, which, knowing him, he probably had.
"Finally," he said, grinning wide enough to show the gap in his back teeth. "I've been asking Grisha for months if I could teach somebody something. He usually just puts me on gate duty like I'm a golden retriever who needs exercise."
"You are a golden retriever who needs exercise."
"I prefer golden retriever with a gun." He clapped his hands together once, businesslike, and gestured for me to step onto the mat. "Okay. Rule one. Nobody who wants to hurt you is going to ask nicely or wait for you to get your feet set. So we start ugly. Grab my wrist like you're mad at me."
I grabbed his wrist. He looked at my grip with the polite disappointment of a man being handed a poorly made sandwich.
"That's a grip you'd use to steady yourself on a bus. Try again like you mean it."
I tried again. He nodded, marginally more satisfied, and then, with a speed that startled an undignified yelp out of me, twisted his arm in a small sharp circle and stepped through the space where my grip had been, suddenly free.
"See what I did? I didn't fight your strength. I went around it. Your grip's strongest in a straight line. Turn against the thumb, not the fingers, and you're out almost every time." He reset himself. "Now you. Grab me again."
It took me four tries to get the angle right, my wrist twisting the wrong direction twice, once nearly taking my own shoulder out of socket in the process, before something clicked and I felt his hand slip free of mine with almost no effort at all.
"There!" Fedya looked genuinely delighted, the kind of delight usually reserved for men watching their favorite sports team score. "That's it exactly. Do it again so I know it wasn't luck."
I did it again. It wasn't luck. Something lit up in me that belonged entirely to my own hands finally doing what they'd been told to do, no Grisha in it anywhere, which turned out to be its own small, specific kind of thrill.
"Okay, hotshot, don't get cocky yet." He held both palms up in front of him, flat. "Strike. Heel of your hand, not your knuckles, knuckles break, heel doesn't. Aim through the target, not at it. Hit me like you mean to end up somewhere behind me."
My first attempt landed with the enthusiasm of someone knocking politely on a door. My second, thrown with actual effort behind it, snapped his palm back half a step and made him laugh out loud.
"There she is. Again."