CHAPTER 28 #2
She makes a sound that is not a word. The sound is in her throat under Nikolai's mouth. Her wrists shift in the silk against the brass — a small movement; the silk holds; the bind does not pull. She stands well back from the edge. I have only been at her for ninety seconds.
I curl my fingers forward. I find the coordinate that has become a fixed point on the map of her since the loft. I press. Her hips would rise except Nikolai's palm at her sternum is the limit and she rises into his palm by half an inch and stops.
"Tell me green again," he says low into the side of her neck.
"Green."
I keep going. I take her toward the edge slowly — slower than I took her at the loft, because tonight is the second night in a sequence and the body remembers.
I have my mouth on her clit and three fingers in her cunt and my left palm on the un-injured side of her pelvis as a brake; the brake waits idle for now, ready when the climb steepens. The slick on my fingers is thickening.
The pulse at her throat is climbing — I can see it climb under Nikolai's lips because his mouth is on it. He counts; my count has gone quiet; the room counts.
She climbs. She climbs slowly because the architecture asked her to.
The thigh under my left hand goes taut. The breath catches against Nikolai's mouth.
Her reflection in the glass over her shoulder is her wrists in the silk and the medallion on Nikolai's palm and the line of her open throat under his teeth.
She is close. The inside walls of her pussy clench around my fingers once — a question — and her color holds green.
I take her over.
I move my mouth and my fingers in the same beat and her hips rise into Nikolai's palm and her wrists shift against the silk and her throat opens against his mouth and her thighs grip my shoulders and she comes around me.
She comes hard. Her hips lifted against Nikolai’s palm before he eased her back down. Her wrists pulled against the silk and the silk held. The sound she makes belongs to the glass, the brass, and the dark below.
I keep going. I gentle. I bring my tongue off her clit by a millimeter and I keep my fingers inside her and I let her ride down.
Nikolai's mouth has moved from her carotid to the side of her jaw and he is saying something — I can hear his low — and I am saying sì, sì, c'è, c'è against the inside of her thigh because I am not allowed to say one of the Italian words tonight and the others I am saying as long as she wants them.
"Give us the word that anchors you," I say.
"I am. " Her voice is wrecked. "I'm with you. With both of you."
I stay between her thighs. I rest the cheek of my face against the inside of her left thigh for one count of four. The silver line of her flank is two inches from my temple. My cheek only leans. The acknowledgment is the hold.
Nikolai's palm at her sternum has stayed exactly where it was.
The medallion under his palm has risen and fallen under his fingers through the whole thing.
The chain remains exactly there. The medal does not move.
He has been doing what he has been doing since the chief's office in October — being the wall at her sternum while another man does the work she has agreed to.
I lift my head. I look up at her.
"See yourself," I say again. The line carries differently the second time. The first time it landed inside the glass. This time it lands inside her.
Nikolai a beat behind: "Mine."
"Ours."
"Yours," she says. "All of you. Mine."
The room is quiet for six beats.
I withdraw my fingers in one slow motion.
I rise from my knees. I bring my mouth to hers across Nikolai's shoulder and she leans her head back over his arm and I kiss her — the only kiss tonight — and her mouth is warm and her tongue tastes of her own salt.
I have wanted to put that taste in her mouth from mine since the first time I took her at the lab table in October.
I have waited four years and I have waited the difference.
I step back.
Nikolai brings both arms around her now. His left hand comes up to the silk at her wrists. His pale gray eyes meet mine over her shoulder. I nod.
He undoes the silk with one pull. The wrap releases — it takes him under two seconds; he has practiced — and her wrists come down from the rail.
The silk slides off the brass into his left palm.
He passes it to me with his right. I fold it once and put it back into the left pocket of the research-wing coat.
The faint pink pattern of the rail's curve is on the inside of her wrists. The marks will be gone by morning.
He lifts her against his chest. He carries her one measured step at a time across the gallery, and I open the alcove door for him.
The bath alcove is warm. The water is at one hundred and nine because I reheated it the third time at nineteen oh-five.
The Epsom salt is dissolved. The unscented Castile soap is on the rim shelf in a small teak bowl.
The white towel is folded along the back of the tub.
The teak bench is against the wall. The black-framed mirrors hold our reflections — three of them — at the wall over the sink.
Nikolai lowers her onto the bench. He does it gently.
He kneels in front of her. He takes the dress at the hem and lifts it over her head in one motion and lays it folded over the teak.
The medallion at her sternum stays. The chain is silver.
The hairline crack on the angel's wing catches the alcove's overhead light.
"Map the wrists for me," he says.
"Warm. The brass was cold. They are warm now. The silk did not pull."
"Map the flank for me."
"It is silver. It did not pull. The standing held it. Your palm held it."
"Good."
He lifts her into the tub. He skips the wrist-test for water temperature — he ran the gallery glass on a different protocol than the bath in the master suite and he trusts me here.
He has trusted me with her body before tonight and tonight he is trusting me at a third venue.
The water comes to her collarbones. The medallion floats.
He sits on the floor at the side of the tub.
I sit on the teak bench against the wall.
We wash her together. Nikolai takes her hair.
I take her hands and her wrists. He pours water from a brass cup over the crown of her head; I run the linen washcloth around the inside of her left wrist where the silk wrapped.
We work in silence for what feels like a hundred breaths.
The room is acoustically dead. Secrets carry well here. We have none to make.
She is at the surface of sleep by the time he lifts her out.
Nikolai dries her in the order he undresses her, because he has learned the order from me.
He leaves the medallion on her chest because the medallion stays.
He wraps her in the warm towel from the wire rack.
He lifts her against his chest. He sits down on the teak bench with her in his lap.
She lets her head fall against his sternum.
Her cheek finds the keloid at the base of his throat from his own central line at twenty-three.
I have known the keloid is there since he showed me the photograph of the kitchen in 2018; she has known since she found it with her mouth at the foyer glass in November.
He puts his right hand on the back of her neck.
He breathes against the crown of her hair.
He says it now. "Mine. Always. The protocol is yours to name."
He says it low and slow, the same way he says everything, and the line is the line I knew was coming because I have been the architect of the room he is saying it in.
She lifts her head against his throat for half a second. Her eyes find mine over his shoulder. Then she lays her cheek back against his sternum at the keloid.
"Nikolai," she says.
One word. Small. Present.
He closes his eyes. Twelve nights of under-five-hour sleep sit on his lids.
He sleeps now — for nine quiet seconds — with his hand on the back of her neck and her cheek at his keloid in the warm of the towel in a bath alcove at the end of an OR gallery in a hospital on East 68th, and his pulse evens out, and his shoulders drop.
Then he opens his eyes again. His sleep tonight will happen beside her. The bench is only a waystation.
I take the towel from his shoulder and lay it on the bench.
I lift one of the heavy white robes from the hook by the door — I keep two on that hook; I keep the supplies as architecture — and I put it around her.
I roll the sleeves once. The hem comes to her shins.
The robe is mine; it is too long; she fits inside it as she fits inside the research-wing coat at the loft.
She makes a sound that is not a word. The sound is half a question. Nikolai answers it before I can.
"Bed."
"Yes."
She closes her eyes. She is asleep against his sternum before he stands.
He stands. He lifts her against his chest. He carries her out through the alcove door into the gallery.
I follow with the SIG from the film-board and the silk in my pocket.
The pilot lamp below us is still on; the warm coin still sits in the glass.
He crosses the gallery to the chairs and sets her down on the middle of the three.
He kneels in front of her. He arranges the robe over her knees.
He puts his thumb at the inside of her left wrist where the brass-rail mark is faintest.