Chapter 9 Polina
Polina
I sit in my car outside my building for twenty minutes before I make myself go inside.
The engine is off, and the windows are fogged. I don’t usually cry after losing a patient. I stopped doing that somewhere during my second year of residency. Tonight is different, and I let it happen. No one can see me. I’m too exhausted to shove it down.
He was sixteen.
Two gunshot wounds to the torso and one to the neck. I operated for forty minutes. He died on my table at 11:14 p.m. while his mother screamed in the hallway.
I had to walk out and tell her. I had to use the words we’re trained to use, and none of them were enough. I stripped off my gloves in the scrub room and stood at the sink until I could breathe again.
I wipe my face with the back of my hand and stare at the steering wheel.
My phone lights up on the passenger seat.
How was your day?
I stare at it. I know who it is without checking the name I saved him under, which isn’t his real one. I should deflect; I’m good at that. I have a perfectly adequate non-answer ready to send. I could go upstairs alone, pour a glass of wine, and sit with this the way I always do.
Instead, I call Lev.
He picks up on the second ring. “Polina.”
Just my name, nothing else, and the way he says it makes my throat go tight.
“I lost a patient tonight,” I blurt out. “He was just a kid who got caught in gang crossfire.”
“Do you want company or silence?” he asks after a moment.
“I think … I think I need some company. If you’re not busy.”
“I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
He’s there in seven. I buzz him up without going down, and when I open the door, he looks at my face and doesn’t say a word about what he sees. He just comes in, shrugs off his coat, and hangs it on the hook by the door.
I notice his hands when he does it. He’s got such long fingers, and there’s a scar across one knuckle I’ve been wondering about. I think about those hands on me and look away before I do something stupid.
I meander to the couch and plop onto the cushion with a heavy sigh.
He doesn’t try to close the foot of space between us, which is right.
He finds the whiskey on the counter without being asked, pours two glasses, and sets one in front of me without a word.
I pull up my knees and wrap my hands around the glass.
I open my mouth to talk about the surgery, and what comes out instead is, “Do you carry them? The ones you lose in the line of fire.”
The second it leaves my mouth, I hear it. I’ve just asked him about his body count. I’ve asked him about a part of his life I’m not supposed to know anything about. I watch his face and wait for him to shut it down.
He stills. I watch him register what I’ve asked and what it means that I asked it. We don’t acknowledge it out loud.
He draws in a shuddering breath as he holds eye contact and replies, “Yes.”
He could have pretended not to understand, and he didn’t. For a man like him, in his position, that’s not nothing. I take a long sip of whiskey and keep going.
“I carry all of mine,” I say. “Every single one. Their names, ages, sometimes the time they died. I remember what their families looked like when I walked out to talk to them.”
He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t try to soften it, and I’m grateful, because people who haven’t been there always try to fix it, and it never helps.
“Some nights it doesn’t reach me. I close up, go home, and sleep just fine. Other nights, it follows me to the car and just sits there.”
“I know that feeling.” His voice drops in a way that tells me he means it.
“Tell me.” I realize I’m crossing another line even as I say it.
He turns his glass in his hands. “Four years ago, my employer needed a message sent. There was a building involved. I was told it would be empty.”
My stomach goes tight. I keep my face neutral, but I’m a Kozlov, and I know what “a message sent” means, and I know what kind of employer sends those kinds of messages. And he’s sitting on my couch telling me, and we’ve been pretending for weeks that I don’t know anything about who he is.
“It wasn’t empty,” I surmise.
“No. Four confirmed dead. Maybe more. I stopped trying to get the number because knowing it didn’t change anything, and not knowing was the only way I found to keep functioning.”
He’s not trying to make me feel better or drawing a parallel. He’s telling me because he knows what it’s like to carry faces you didn’t choose, and the fact that he’s telling me at all sits in my chest like an anvil.
“Does it get easier?” I ask.
“No. You just get better at carrying it.”
As we talk, the whiskey gets lower, and with every sip, I become even more aware of his hands, shoulders, and mouth, which I’ve thought about more than I’ll admit.
After the night I’ve had, I want to pull him on top of me and stop thinking for a few hours.
This has been building for weeks, and tonight, I’ve got very little left to fight it with.
But I stay where I am for now.
“Every job I’ve been sent on,” he begins, “there was a reason for why it had to be that way. I believed it for a long time.”
“What changed?”
He shrugs lazily. “The reasons kept sounding the same, and the faces kept looking different.”
I’m not sure when it happened, but his knee is almost touching mine.
He’s watching me in that calming way of his, and then he reaches over and rests his hand on my knee.
He just settles it there and drags his thumb in a slow line back and forth.
It sends heat zipping up my inner thigh, and I forget what I was going to say.
“I spent ten years building something very specific,” I manage through the lump in my throat. “I was sure about all of it. And then recently—” I stop. We both know how that sentence ends.
He doesn’t move his hand, and I don’t ask him to.
We sit there with his palm on my knee and the whiskey nearly gone. I think about why this is a terrible idea, and I don’t care.
We stay like that until our glasses are empty, and the building goes quiet around us. And I realize if I don’t send him home now, I’m not going to.
“It’s late,” I say finally. “You should go.”
He lifts his hand off my knee, and I feel the loss of it right away.
He sets his glass down and stands, and I follow him to the door.
He takes his coat off the hook, and I lean against the doorframe and watch him, and I’ve already decided.
If I’m honest, I made it the second he walked through the door.
He turns back, and we’re close the way we keep ending up close, and his eyes drop to my mouth for a second before they come back up.
Before I can talk myself out of it, I push up onto my toes and kiss him.
Soft and quick, just my mouth against his for a few seconds.
He sucks in a breath and then kisses me back, barely anything but just enough, and I feel it everywhere.
My nipples go tight, heat floods to my core, and my body wants to close the six inches between us and find out what he does when someone doesn’t make him stop.
I’m not ready for what comes after that, and I know it, so I step back.
“Goodnight,” I breathe.
He looks at me for a long moment, like he’s waiting for me to change my mind. Then he nods once, and I close the door.
I stand with my back against it and my heart beating twice the speed it should for a four-second kiss. I kissed him and shut the door in his face right afterward, but I started it, and I knew what I was doing.
I knew who he was before he ever hit my table. We’ve just been playing dumb.
Tonight, we stopped for a minute, and he didn’t push.
I don’t regret kissing him until my phone vibrates on the counter.
I look down to see my sister’s name on the screen. She’d hear it in my voice in thirty seconds, and she’d want to talk about it, and I’m not ready to talk about it. I don’t even know what to say.
So, I silence it and walk away.