23. Ruby #2
And then he was inside me, finally, slow and deep and complete, easing into me by degrees as though he meant to memorize every second of the joining, and the sound he made as he sank home was the most honest thing I have ever heard leave him, low and wrecked and almost disbelieving.
I held him there, both of us gone still for one long breath, two people who had spent weeks at war with the same thing laying down every weapon at once.
Then he moved, and I rose to meet him, and we found the rhythm the way you find your own pulse, like it had been there the whole time only waiting to be noticed.
There was nothing careful left in either of us.
He gave me everything, slow at first and then not slow at all, deep and certain and unguarded, and I took all of it and gave it back, his forehead dropped against mine, my breath and his tangling in the dark until I could not have told you whose was whose.
There were no walls left in him, not one.
The careful man who measures every word and counts every exit in every room simply stopped existing for a while, and what was left in his place was someone I am fairly sure no one else alive has ever met.
Undefended. Cracked all the way open. Mine.
He said my name like a prayer he had given up believing he was allowed to say, and when he felt me start to come apart the second time he let go of the last of what he had been holding back and followed me over, the two of us going together, all the way down, into the place there are no words built for.
I had been wanted before. Wanting is common.
Any stranger in any garage can want you.
What he did was rarer and it had no off switch.
He chose me on purpose, eyes open, knowing precisely what loving me would cost a man in his position, and he kept on choosing it, second after second, the whole night through, like a man signing his name to the same dangerous document again and again and never once reaching for a safer pen.
And after, when the shaking had finally left us both, there were no further small moments, only the single long quiet one, both of us past speech and past strategy, past the years and the war and every guarded thing either of us had ever learned to be, having finally become, in the plain old dark, each other's.
That is the only word I have ever found for it.
We became each other's that night. Everything that came before it turned into prologue, and everything that came after had already been paid for in advance, right there, in a bed inside a fortress, while the men who wanted us dead slept somewhere across the city, not yet knowing they had already lost the one thing they were never going to be able to take.
Afterward I lay with my head on the scar from the night I first refused to let him die, listening to the heart I had personally argued back into beating go slow and even beneath my ear.
"Say something," I told him, because he had gone quiet in the specific way that meant he was thinking much too hard about something.
"I was trying to memorize it." A pause. "I have a habit of memorizing the things I am most afraid of losing. I am reliably informed that this is morbid."
"It is a little morbid."
"You did ask."
I felt him smile against the top of my head, a thing I had taught him to do and was quietly proud of, the way you take pride in any miracle you had a hand in building.
"Can I ask you something," I said into the dark, "and have you answer it like a person, instead of like a man giving a deposition?"
"I can try. I make no promises. The deposition voice is load-bearing."
"Were you ever, before all of this, before me, happy? Even once?"
He was quiet long enough that I thought he might let the question go unanswered, which is its own answer and we both knew it.
Then he said it carefully, like a man setting down something breakable.
"I was content, once or twice. I had decided content was the most a man like me was allowed to want, and I built an entire life to fit that exact size.
" His hand moved slow along my spine. "You did not fit it.
You came in over the wall, and you were too large for the life, and I have had to build a bigger one around you in a hurry, in the dark, while people shot at the foundations. It is the best work I have ever done."
For a while after that neither of us said anything at all, and the silence was not the kind he keeps from people. It was the other kind, the kind you let someone all the way inside of, and I lay inside it and let myself believe, for one hour, that we were going to be allowed to keep this.
And then, because the world has a sense of timing and it is a cruel one, his phone went off against the counter in the next room.
Once. Twice. The particular rhythm I had learned to read as the war remembering our address after all.
He did not move. I felt him decide not to move, felt the whole patient machinery of the soldier try to start up and then, for the first time since I had known him, simply fail to turn over.
"You should look at it," I said. I did not mean a syllable of it.
"It will say the same thing in an hour," he said.
"Lebedev is tightening a clock. He has put a date on something.
I can feel it through the wall like cold coming off a window.
" He pulled me closer instead, deliberate and unhurried, a man robbing his own funeral.
"He can have the hour after this one. This one is already spoken for. "
"You are going to have to tell me eventually," I said. "What he is counting down toward. The thing you are not saying."
"Eventually," he agreed. "Not tonight. Tonight I am not the head of anyone's security. Tonight I am only a man who got luckier than he had any right to, and I would like sixty selfish minutes of being nothing else, before I have to put the other one back on."
So I let him have it. God help me, I gave him the hour, because I wanted it every bit as much, and because I did not yet know how few of them were left for us to spend.
We lay in the dark on the wrong side of a buzzing phone and a tightening clock, and we did not say the name Aaron, or the name Lebedev, or speak of the date whose shape neither of us yet knew, and I spread my hand flat over the scar and the steady heart underneath it and made myself a promise I had no right at all to make.
That I would keep this man breathing if I had to restart him with my own two hands a second time.
I did not know yet that I was already carrying the single reason both of us would have to live through what was coming.
I only knew that the hour belonged to us, and that somewhere out past the door the war had started its countdown, and that for sixty more minutes I was going to be far too busy being loved to remember to be afraid.