44. Sergei
SERGEI
The evening started the way most of ours did now, without an agenda.
Elena had kicked off her shoes by the door and left them where they fell, which used to bother me and now didn't, and I had poured two glasses of the red she liked and one glass of the sparkling water I actually preferred, and we'd eaten standing at the counter because neither of us could be bothered to sit at a table built for people with better manners than we had that night.
She was telling me about a bug in the new authentication layer, something involving a race condition that had taken her team four hours to trace, and I was watching her hands more than I was listening to the technical details, the way she used them to draw the shape of the problem in the air between us, quick and certain, like she was debugging the world itself.
"You're not even listening," she said, not accusing, just noting it plainly, without judgment, same as she noted most things about me.
"I'm listening," I said. "You said the token was expiring before the handshake completed."
"That was ten minutes ago."
"I have a good memory."
"You have a memory like a filing cabinet that's also somehow flirting with me."
I set my glass down. She was standing close enough that I could smell the wine on her breath and something warmer underneath it, her, just her, and I put my hand at the curve of her waist where the fabric of her shirt had ridden up, skin under my palm, and she stopped talking about race conditions entirely.
"Sergei," she said, and it wasn't a warning, it was an invitation dressed as my own name.
We didn't make it to the bedroom in any hurry, though we did eventually make it there, her fingers working the buttons of my shirt with the same brisk competence she brought to everything, mine slower, deliberately slower, because I liked watching her patience fray at the edges when I took my time with her.
I liked the small sound she made when I finally got her out of that shirt and put my mouth against her collarbone, unhurried, learning her again as though there were new things to learn every time, which there always somehow were.
Her hands found the back of my neck and held on, not gripping, just resting there like she had a right to that particular piece of me, which she did, which she'd had for months now whether either of us had said it plainly or not.
We were on the bed, tangled in the kind of quiet that only exists between two people who have stopped performing for each other, her leg hooked over mine, my mouth at her throat, when the front door of the penthouse opened without so much as the courtesy of a full knock first, three quick raps that were less a request for entry than an announcement that entry had already been granted by the person doing the knocking.
"Sergei? I know you're home, your car's downstairs. I've got soup."
I went very still, and not in the way I was about to become still later that same night. This was a different kind of stillness, the kind a man gets when the universe has decided to remind him that dignity is optional and rarely his to keep.
Elena's whole body shook against mine, silent laughter she was trying and failing to suppress into my shoulder.
"Odette," I said, to the ceiling, to Elena, to whatever grants an eighty-something concierge free run of a penthouse's access codes.
"Chicken and barley," Odette called from somewhere near what I assumed was my own kitchen. "It's got to be eaten while it's hot or it's no good, you know how barley gets."
"I did not know how barley gets," I said quietly.
Elena had both hands pressed over her mouth now, and her eyes were streaming, and I loved her so much in that moment that it was almost as disorienting as the interruption itself.
"I'm not decent," I called out, which was, if anything, an understatement.
"I'm not looking, I'm just leaving it on the counter. You eat when you eat. I've got Tank's dinner to get to next, that man would starve himself to death working if I let him." A pause, footsteps, the particular clink of a lid being set down. "There's bread too."
"Thank you, Odette."
"Don't let it sit."
The door clicked shut. I counted three full seconds of silence before Elena dissolved entirely, burying her face against my chest, shoulders shaking, and I found myself laughing too, low and helpless, the two of us a tangled wreck of limbs and breathless noise instead of anything more urgent.
"She has a key," Elena managed. "She has an actual key to your penthouse."
"She has had a key since before I met you. I've stopped asking why."
"Chicken and barley," Elena said, wiping her eyes, "in the middle of this."
"Don't."
"I'm just saying, the timing."
"I'm aware of the timing."
We settled back into each other slowly, the laughter easing into something softer, her mouth finding mine again, patient in a way we hadn't managed all evening, and I had just gotten my hand back to the small of her back, had just felt her breath catch again the way it did right before she stopped thinking in words at all, when the door opened a second time.
"I forgot to say," Odette's voice, closer now, definitely in the hallway just outside the bedroom, "I left the soup on the counter, it needs to be eaten while it's hot."
"Odette," I said, not moving, my forehead dropping against Elena's collarbone in something between a laugh and a prayer for patience.
A beat of silence from the hallway. I could picture her exactly, standing there in her cardigan, absolutely unbothered by anything she might or might not be interrupting.
"I'll go," she said, in absolutely no rush about it, and we heard her footsteps retreat at that same leisurely pace, the front door clicking shut a second time with the finality of a woman who has delivered her message and will not be rushed off the premises by anything so trivial as another person's privacy.
Elena laughed so hard that time she had to roll onto her back, one arm thrown over her eyes, her whole body shaking with it, and I lay there beside her doing the same, the two of us useless with it for a long moment, gasping, wiping our eyes, neither of us able to look at the other without setting the other off again.
"I love that woman," Elena said finally, when she could speak. "I genuinely love her. I want to be her when I'm eighty."
"She terrifies me and I pay her rent."
"You don't pay her rent."
"I have offered. She refuses on principle. Something about not wanting to be beholden."
Elena turned her head against the pillow to look at me, and whatever had been urgent a few minutes earlier hadn't gone anywhere, it had just changed shape, softened at the edges into something that felt less like hunger and more like ease, the kind of closeness that doesn't need to prove anything to itself.
She reached up and traced a finger along my jaw, taking her time about it.
"Where were we?" she asked, though we both knew exactly where we'd been.
I didn't answer with words. I kissed her instead, slow, one hand coming up to cradle the back of her head while the other found her hip and drew her in against me, and she made a small sound into my mouth that had gone entirely serious.
Her lips parted under mine, and I took my time there too, tasting the wine still faint on her tongue, feeling her breath go unsteady against my cheek before she caught it back.
This time when her hands came up to my shoulders they stayed there, steady, fingers pressing in like she wanted to feel exactly where I was, and I felt the last of the laughter drain out of both of us and leave something quieter behind, something that had been waiting patiently under the humor the whole time.
What happened after that was not fast and it was not showy.
I undressed her slowly this time, the laughter behind us now, nothing but calm in its place, just my hands finding the hem of her shirt and drawing it up inch by inch, watching her skin come into the lamplight like something being revealed on purpose rather than taken.
She did the same for me, her palms flat against my chest, pushing my shirt back off my shoulders and letting it fall wherever it landed, and when there was nothing left between us she simply looked at me for a long moment, in no hurry at all, the way she never used to let herself look at anything in those first months, always half watching the door.
I laid her back against the pillows and started at her mouth, because I never got tired of her mouth, and worked down slowly from there, learning her throat, the curve of her shoulder, the soft skin just under her collarbone that made her breath hitch every single time no matter how many times I found it.
She arched under me, quiet at first, her fingers threading into my hair, and I took my time in a way I had never let myself take time with anything, memorizing the exact place low on her stomach that made her hips lift before she meant them to, the way her breath went ragged and open-mouthed when I finally settled between her thighs and put my mouth where she needed it most. She said my name like a question and then like an answer, her hand fisting in the sheet, her whole body drawing tight and then loosening in long, helpless waves, and I did not stop until she was shaking under my hands and pulling me back up her body with a strength that had run clean out of patience.
"Now," she said, breathless, her nails dragging lightly down my spine. "Sergei. Now."