Extended Epilogue #2
"I am allowed to smile at my own wedding. It is practically required."
"You can smile at other occasions too. I would like to formally propose a metric. More of this. Across all categories."
"That is not how metrics work."
"I run a technology company. I determine what constitutes a metric."
"I run the finances. I outrank you."
"We are married. The hierarchy is now collaborative."
I look up at him and his expression is warm and direct and not performing any of it, and the feeling in my chest is the good unbudgeted kind, the kind that showed up in my apartment in Harvard sweats and made eggs without asking and refused politely and consistently to leave and turned out to be the best thing that never fit into any schedule I built.
"Alright," I say. "More smiling. I will add it to the binder."
He kisses my temple once, warm and deliberate, and we keep dancing until the band plays its last song and the last guests find their boats and the candles burn low and Villa d'Este settles into the particular peace of a place that has been beautiful long enough to know how to rest.
The suite is high-ceilinged and stone-walled with French doors open to the lake, the air coming off the water cool and clean, carrying the smell of the lemon trees from the garden below.
Candlelight from the terrace below flickers through the sheer curtains and moves on the ceiling. I am at the window when Nik comes in and his hands find my waist from behind and his mouth finds my neck.
I close my eyes.
"Husband," I say.
"Wife," he says, against my skin. He says it the way someone says a word they have been waiting to use.
I turn. He is looking at me with nothing managed and nothing filed away, the full direct attention of it, and I reach up and open the one collar button he still has done up because he always leaves one for me, and push his jacket off his shoulders.
It drops somewhere behind him and neither of us looks.
"You have been very patient all evening.”
"I have a very long history of being patient with you."
"Then stop," I say.
He finds the clasp at the back of my dress and the silk drops and his hands are warm on my back, pulling me in slowly, and I spread my palms flat against his chest and feel his heartbeat, steady and close, the most familiar sound in my life.
"Kolya."
"Natasha." He says my name the way he always says it, fitting it exactly where it belongs.
He walks me back toward the bed with his hands at my hips and I go completely willingly, which I am not documenting anywhere, and he lays me back on the white linen and stands above me for a moment in the candlelight and moonlight coming through the open doors and his expression is everything the vows said and then some.
"You are extraordinary," he smiles.
"I know. Come here."
He is never in a hurry. I stopped fighting it a long time ago because I know by now what he is working toward and what he works toward is worth every single second of his absolute commitment to taking his time.
His mouth moves over my collarbone, my throat, the place below my jaw that makes my breath go completely unsteady, and his hands trace my waist and the curve of my hip with the focused intelligence he brings to everything he has decided to fully understand.
I stop managing anything at all.
My hands are in his hair. The lake sounds below the open doors. He kisses down my sternum, and his hands move lower and I exhale hard at the ceiling and grip the white linen above my head.
"I have been thinking about this since the ceremony," he says, against my ribs.
"That is extremely distracting during vows."
"My vows were flawless. I was multitasking." His mouth moves lower and I stop finding words for anything and stop trying to find them.
He takes his time with everything. His tongue on my clit is slow and deliberate and reads every shift in my breathing with the focus of someone who considers the response to be the entire point, and I have been here enough times to know how this goes and knowing how it goes does absolutely nothing to make it less effective.
My hips tilt up toward him. My fingers curl tight in his hair. I say his name and he makes a low sound against me that vibrates through every single nerve ending I have.
"Fuck," I breathe at the ceiling. Then, because he does something specific that makes full coherence unavailable: "Kolya. Right there. Do not stop."
"I know," he says. He always knows. That specific knowledge is the thing that undoes me completely, every time, the way his hands understand my body the way a musician understands an instrument, with real instinct and the genuine investment of someone who considers pulling the right response out of me to be the entire point of the exercise.
He works with his mouth and his fingers in concert, patient and thorough, and the release gathers in long rolling waves and breaks through me completely and I say his name on the way out, not the formal whole of it, the Russian diminutive, the one that belongs to this room and no other, and I feel him smile against me.
He rises and I reach for him and pull him down and he settles between my thighs with his weight on his forearms and his eyes on mine and everything outside this room is fully irrelevant.
"Ya tebya lyublyu," he says.
"I love you. With every light on."
He pushes inside me slowly and my hands pull at his hips and he gives me what I ask for because he always does when I ask directly, which is something I have learned to do without the old circling and deflecting, and the sound I make is entirely unguarded and I have long stopped being embarrassed by any of it.
We move together with the easy fluency of two years of learning and the deeper knowledge that comes from choosing the same person over and over until the choice becomes something quieter and more essential than a choice.
His hand moves between us and finds where I am most sensitive and I groan against his shoulder and pull him closer, my nails pressing in, and what he says low against my ear is in Russian and belongs only here, only to us, and I feel it move through me like a current.
"You feel incredible," he says against my jaw, and then his rhythm deepens and I stop thinking in full sentences.
My second release gathers differently than the first, slower and fuller, and when it breaks I say his name again and feel his breathing come completely apart and his rhythm stutter. He shudders against me with his forehead pressed to mine and my name in pieces against my lips.
We stay still for a long time after. His heartbeat slows against my chest. His hand moves in a slow, absent pass along my spine. The lake sounds below the open French doors and the curtains move in the cool air off the water.
"The binder," he says eventually, into the dark.
"What about it."
"Was sixty-two tabs the right number?"
I look at the ceiling. The moonlight moves on it where the breeze catches the curtain. The sound of the lake. This room. This man. His hand rests open and warm on my stomach, where it always finds its way.
"It was sixty-four by the end," I say. "I added two when Katya suggested the additional arrangement on the east terrace."
He makes a sound against my hair that is entirely a laugh.
I close my eyes.
Outside, Lake Como does what it has been doing for four centuries, indifferent and magnificent and completely unconcerned with the two people in the suite above its water who have just, between them, decided what everything from here forward looks like.
The lights are all on.
Every last one.
THE END