Chapter 7 Polina
Polina
I tell myself it’s reconnaissance.
Knowing the enemy’s son could be useful. If I ever need Dmitri’s help, having something on Lev Morozov puts me ahead. That’s the story I’ve been telling myself since I typed in the address and got into the cab.
It’s a good story. I almost buy it.
The restaurant is tucked onto a side street in a neighborhood where neither of our worlds have any reason to intersect. I didn’t dress up. Dark jeans and burgundy cashmere, what I reach for when I’m off-duty and not thinking too hard.
I will absolutely not think too hard tonight.
He’s already there when I walk in.
Lev stands near the entrance with his hands in the pockets of a charcoal jacket, and my stomach pulls tight when his eyes find mine. He looks nothing like a man who spent days in a hospital bed. He looks just like the kind of trouble women make poor decisions about.
“Doctor.” The corner of his mouth curves, and his eyes slide down my body before he drags them back up with an appreciative grunt.
I resist the urge to cover myself as I reply, “Stop calling me that. We’re not in the hospital.”
“I know.” He still doesn’t stop smiling. “I just like it.”
The hostess seats us at a corner table in the back, far enough from neighboring diners that conversation won’t carry. He pulls out my chair before I reach it, and I sit without commenting because making a thing of it would be its own acknowledgment.
He orders wine without looking at the menu, and the sommelier nods and leaves.
“You’ve been here before,” I comment.
He sets down the menu and looks at me, and I chew on my bottom lip under his scrutiny. “Once. A while ago.”
There’s something in the way he says it, but the waiter reappears before I can pull at the thread.
The wine arrives, and when Lev fills my glass, his forearm skims mine where it rests on the table. It’s brief, but I feel it like a match struck against skin, a slow drag up the inside of my arm that I have no business feeling. I keep my eyes on the menu.
“I want to tell you something,” he says.
“Should I be worried?”
“Probably.” He holds his glass without drinking. “My name isn’t Luka.”
I keep my face neutral and wait, even though we both know I’ve known that since the moment I looked down at him in the trauma bay.
“Lev Vadimovich Morozov.” He says it without ceremony. “I have no interest in sitting across from you pretending otherwise.”
I let a few seconds pass before I give him anything back.
“Polina Ilyinichna Kozlov. In case you needed the full version.”
The smile that crosses his face then is different from every one I’ve seen since he opened his eyes in my ICU. There’s less armor attached to it. It suits him more than he probably realizes.
For a while, we talk like two people whose last names won’t set the table on fire. He asks about the Ring Road pileup he read about last month, and I tell him it brought in four critical patients and a surgery I can still feel in my forearms.
He listens without interrupting. Then he asks follow-up questions that are sharp enough to throw me off.
“You know medicine,” I observe.
“Enough to cause problems.” He refills my glass, his fingers brushing the base of mine on the stem before he sets down the bottle. The touch is gone before I can decide if it was on purpose.
I press my thighs together under the table anyway.
It was nothing. Barely a second. And my body reacts like he fired a starting gun.
“I passed the entrance exams.”
I look at him, hiking up a brow. That’s not nothing. “And?”
“And my father told me that Morozovs don’t become doctors.” He delivers it lightly. “So, I didn’t.”
Those entrance exams take years. There’s stiff competition involved, and not everyone is built for the process. He passed, then walked away because his father said so. And he says it like it’s nothing.
It is not nothing. It is a whole life he didn’t get to live.
I fought for six years for my spot in an operating room. He earned his place in medical school and handed it back because he was told to. That sits like a stone in my chest.
I start to say something, but he redirects, asking why I chose trauma over other specialties.
I answer, and a few minutes later, he does it again when I ask about his brother.
He flips it to my residency. Then I mention his father, and suddenly, we’re back on a patient case I referenced earlier.
I can’t even pinpoint the moment the subject changes.
By the third time, I’m done.
“You do that a lot,” I comment.
He tilts his head. “Do what?”
“Every time I get close to asking you something real, you turn it back around.” I set down my wine.
I expect him to deny the habit, but to my surprise, he simply nods.
“You’re right,” he concedes. “I do.”
“Why?”
He waves me off, “Because my answers aren’t interesting. Yours are.”
It’s an evasion wearing the clothes of a compliment, and we both know it. But the honesty of admitting it takes the edge off, and I find myself studying the line of his jaw and the way he holds his glass, and thinking about things that have nothing to do with reconnaissance.
When the khachapuri arrives, I pull a piece of bread from the edge. The egg yolk breaks across the surface, and I let out a satisfied groan that I immediately regret.
Lev just watches me silently with pale eyes and lets the moment sit between us. The expression on his face makes the back of my neck warm.
“Good?” he asks, the word doing double duty.
I drag the bread through the melted butter slowly. “Why did you choose this place?”
“Someone wrote about it online. Called it—” his eyes stay on mine “—the kind of bread that makes you want to cancel your plans and stay.” He smiles. “I never forgot it.”
The wine glass stops halfway to my mouth.
Word for word, that’s the title of a post I wrote on a food blog I abandoned three years ago after eleven entries. Back when I was newly attending and apparently the kind of person who wrote about bread on the internet at midnight because I had no one to eat dinner with.
He couldn’t know that. Could he?
Except he chose this restaurant, and now he’s quoting my words back to me like they’re his memory.
I feel my pulse spike in my throat.
I set down the glass and run my tongue along my bottom lip, which he evidently takes as an invitation, because he refills my glass. This time, when his fingers graze mine on the stem, he lingers just a half-second longer than before, but it’s long enough to make my heart skip a beat.
“Live up to the review?” he asks.
He’s watching me too closely when he says it. Like the question has a second meaning.
“Better,” I admit. “Whoever wrote it undersold it.”
The smile that crosses his face does nothing good for my ability to think straight.
His knee finds mine under the table. He doesn’t move or acknowledge it, and neither do I. We keep talking like nothing happened.
Except I’m tracking every word and feeling every bit of contact at the same time. By the time the bottle is empty, I’ve stopped pretending those two things aren’t connected.
The candle has burned low. The neighboring tables emptied at some point, and I didn’t even notice. Now it’s just us, and the quiet that settles in when neither person wants the night to end.
When the check comes, I open my mouth, but he raises a hand. “Don’t.”
The server takes the folder and disappears.
Outside, the street is empty and cool. My cab is waiting half a block down, and Lev walks beside me. His shoulder is close enough that I feel every inch between us.
When we step around a crack in the pavement, his hand settles at the small of my back. It’s there and gone, but my spine keeps remembering it.
We reach my cab, and I stop and turn to face him. The streetlight catches the angle of his jaw and the faint scar along his collarbone, just visible above his collar. His eyes move over my face like he’s taking me in, letting himself have this.
My breath stutters, and I look down at my purse strap to hide it. “Thank you for dinner,” I manage.
“Thank you for showing up.” His eyes drop to my mouth for a second, then lift again. “Get home safe, Doctor.”
I stand there a beat too long, close enough to feel his heat, waiting for him to close the distance. He watches me with an infuriating smirk that tells me he knows what he’s doing.
He’s going to make me want it.
And it’s working.