CHAPTER 14 #3
Call room. East end of the corridor. The fluorescents Stefan replaced with the warm-tone tubes.
The smell of laundered cotton. The single window onto the air-shaft where the storm is now nothing more than wet glass.
Alexei nudges the door open with his hip and carries me in.
He sets me on the twin bed, gets my Hokas back on me with the laces loosely tied, pulls my scrub bottoms back up over my hips. Kisses my forehead.
"Water again, please," I say.
Gabriel goes to the small sink. He fills the same tumbler. He brings it. He sits on the floor by the head of the bed, his back against the wall, his hand on my brow when he is not holding the glass. He waits.
Alexei pulls a blanket from the laundry crew's rotation off the chair.
He shakes it out. He covers me to the collarbone.
He undoes the belt that is on the bed's foot where he set it; he coils it; he sets it on the chair beside the call-room door — as he sets a coiled tourniquet on the cart after a code.
He sits on the bed beside me. His weight is along my right hip.
I drink the second tumbler in five swallows. Gabriel sets it down.
"Alexei. You said it once tonight. Thank you. That was the one I needed."
His face does a small thing reserved for rare occasions.
He bends and kisses my mouth — the first kiss of the night — and his stubble is the burn of a fact against my upper lip.
He stays silent. The ring on his thumb brushes the medallion at my sternum once on his way back up, the cold steel against the silver for the after-image, then he sits up and lets me have the breath.
Gabriel's hand is still at my brow.
I look at him. The corridor light is now along his jaw because someone has left the call-room door cracked open three inches.
The light from the corridor lies in a thin strip across his cheekbone.
The Naples leather notebook he carries in his left lab-coat pocket is angled visible at his hip where his coat fell open.
"You are going to sit in the corridor," I say. A statement.
"Yes," he says.
"With the door cracked."
"Yes."
"With the notebook."
"Yes."
He skips the question of how I know. He knows I know. I have kept the number his silences since the doorway.
Alexei looks at Gabriel. Gabriel looks at Alexei.
The witness function holds. The look passes between them without nod or word.
Then Gabriel stands. He bends and lays the back of his hand once more against my brow, the four spread fingers, the small declarative pressure that says here is where I am, here is where I will be.
He goes. The call-room door clicks behind him, then opens three inches again, then settles. The corridor light comes in through the gap in a thin slow strip and lays itself along the bedside table.
Alexei lies down beside me. He turns onto his right side.
He puts his right arm under my head and his left arm around my ribs, palm flat against my belly, the ringed thumb against my left hip bone where it has always gone.
He fits himself behind me. The cot frame is gone.
The bed under me is soft. The steel is on his thumb at my hip and that is the only steel left.
"Krasivaya. Breathe."
"I am."
"Count me. I'll keep it. Four."
I follow Alexei's breath. One. Two. Three. Four. He matches me. He goes longer on the exhale — the trauma-bay trick to bring down a tachycardia at the bedside. I go with him. My pulse comes down to where his is.
The clock on the wall says 04:30. I have lost time in the count. The storm has cleared while I was inside it. The wind is down. The rain is down. The hiss of the leaking O2 regulator from two floors down does not reach this room. The corridor outside the cracked door is quiet.
I lift my head one inch. I look toward the door.
Gabriel is in the corridor. I can see him through the three-inch crack.
He is sitting on the floor against the wall opposite the call-room door — long legs out, knees slightly bent, the Naples leather notebook open in his lap, the corridor's hallway light overhead falling on the page.
He has reading glasses on, the thin black wire frames he wears in the lab. He turns a page. He reads.
I listen through the silences again. One.
Two. His eyes stay on the page. He is reading.
He is here. He has held to the corridor because I named the corridor, kept clear of the room because I kept the room for Alexei, settled at the door because I asked him to stay close.
The architecture is exactly the architecture I named. He has built it.
I let my head go back to Alexei's arm.
"He is there," I say.
"He is there," Alexei says. "Sleep, krasivaya."
I touch the medallion once — third time, the cap — and I leave it be. The pad of my right index finger to the silver. Saint Raphael under my finger pad. The chain warm now from the heat of Alexei's arm and from the heat of being held.
I let one more thing settle before I let myself go.
I follow Gabriel's silence in the hallway through the three-inch crack. One. Two. Three. The light from the corridor on the page. The notebook open at a page I have not seen and will see in the morning.
I test safety.
I let my eyes shut.