Tanya #2
Truly alone, for the first time since Prague, and the awareness of that presses against my skin like a change in air pressure.
It's my wedding night.
The thought arrives fully formed and unavoidable, and with it comes a rush of something I refuse to call anxiety.
I don't get anxious. I control the variables and I execute.
But standing here in this warm, quiet house with the man I married four hours ago, the man whose hands I can still feel on me if I let my guard down for even a second, I realize I have no strategy for this.
I don't know what he expects. I don't know what the rules are. In my father's world, the rules were clear. The bride performs. The husband takes. The marriage functions. But Aidan has not followed a single rule I expected him to follow since this started, and I'm running out of scripts.
"There's a bedroom through there," he says, nodding toward a hallway to the left. "Bathroom attached. Your things were sent ahead. Everything should already be in the closet."
I stare at him. "My things are already here?"
"Your father called my brother it earlier this week. Ma sorted your things. I hope that’s okay."
Of course, this was all arranged before I even said I do . The house is built. The room is ready. The closet is full. And I walked into it like I was choosing to, when the truth is every step was laid out for me long before I took it.
Something snaps inside my chest like a thread pulled too tight finally giving way.
"What are you playing at?" I ask.
My voice is quiet. Controlled. But the ice in it is thinner than usual and we both know it.
Aidan turns to face me fully. He doesn't look surprised by the question. He looks like he's been waiting for it.
"I'm not playing at anything."
"You are. You requested me. You built this house. You had my things moved in before the wedding. You've been calm and patient and perfectly behaved all day, and I want to know why."
"You know why."
"I want to hear you say it." I clip each word out like it has spikes, and hope that he feels them.
He holds my gaze. The quiet intensity is back, the same look he gave me across the reception, but closer now. Unfiltered. There's no room between us to dilute it.
"I waited years for you to notice me, Tanya. At every function. Every dinner. Every time we were in the same room and you looked straight through me like I wasn’t even there.
" His voice is even. Unhurried. Like he's reciting something he's thought about so many times the words come out smooth.
"And then Prague happened. And you came to me, and you let me touch you, and for one night you were honest. And then you left. "
I hold my breath, steeling myself against his words which aren’t spikey at all.
"I've spent two years since that night thinking about you.
" He takes a step closer. "That's what I'm playing at.
I'm not trying to trap you. I'm not trying to own you.
I'm trying to get back to the woman I met that night, because she's the only version of you that was real, and she is the only woman I want to spend the rest of my life with. "
The words seem to enter me. Get into the small box inside myself that I keep locked.
The place where I stored the memory of his voice against my neck and the way his hands shook, just slightly, when he touched me for the first time.
Like I mattered. Like I wasn't a body he was using but a person he'd been aching to reach.
"You don't know me," I say, but it comes out wrong. Too soft. Too close to a question.
"I know you better than you think. I know you hate this life and everything it's taken from you.
I know you built that wall of ice because it was the only way to survive inside your father's world.
I know you came to me in Prague because you were trying to burn down your own future, and I know it didn't work because you can't burn something down when part of you still wants it to stand. "
My throat tightens. I swallow against it. "That's a lot of assumptions."
"They're not assumptions. They're observations. I've had plenty of years to make them."
I don't have a response to that. Even though I always have a response.
I always have the next line ready, the deflection, the cutting remark that keeps people at a distance.
But Aidan isn't people. Aidan is the man who held me in a hotel room in Prague while I pretended I wasn't falling apart, and he didn't say a word about it then, and he isn't throwing it in my face now.
He's just standing in front of me, steady and sure, telling me he sees me.
It's the most terrifying thing anyone has ever done.
"So what do you expect from me?" I ask. "In this marriage. In this house. What do you actually want?"
He doesn't hesitate. "Honesty."
I blink. "That's it?"
"That's everything. I don't want the Tanya Savitskaya you show the world.
I don't want the ice queen or the dutiful wife or whatever version of yourself you've been rehearsing on the drive over.
I want the woman who kissed me in a bar at midnight and meant it.
I want whatever is underneath all of this.
" He gestures at me, and I know he doesn't mean the dress.
He means the armor. "That's all I've ever wanted. And I’m hoping that one day you feel like you can be Tanya Orlova, and like who she is. "
I stare at him, and I feel it happening. The thing I swore wouldn't happen. The careful, controlled exterior I've spent my entire adult life constructing is cracking, all because he's standing on the other side of it, patient and certain, and asking me to open the door myself.
I don't open it. Not all the way. But something shifts in me, something loosens, and when I speak, my voice doesn't have the chill in it that it would usually have.
"I don't know how to do that," I say. And I mean it. It's the most honest thing I've said in years.