19. Kira
Kira
We flew to Dubai on his plane, which meant there was no getting away from him. I had counted on that being harder than it turned out to be. Ian had taken a commercial flight so he had extra time to check out the arrangements, and that left just him and me on board.
For six days, we'd spoken only in the language of the deal. It was a good language for people avoiding a different one.
We'd built the final pitch over shared screens and short emails, every exchange correct and bloodless, and I'd told myself I preferred it, the way I'd convinced myself of a lot of things since I stood in his office and watched him choose putting up walls over me and call it security.
Now there were sixteen hours of sky between Seattle and Dubai and nowhere on the plane to be that wasn't eight feet from him.
We worked the first hour out of Seattle. There was still preparation to do, and it went as it had all week. I'd give him a change and he'd take it, correct and grateful and about as warm as a receipt. He'd give one back and I'd take it the same way.
We were very good at it, two professionals who'd built the best pitch either of us had ever made, passing it across a gap you could have flown the plane through.
At one point he said, "The Tariq open is landing," and I said, "It is," and that was the conversation.
I turned to the window so he wouldn't catch the look on my face. The worst part of losing him wasn't the anger. It was how easy we still were at the part he'd let us keep.
The route needed fuel twice. We set down first in New York, in the late afternoon, and I looked out the small window at the skyline I remembered from a rooftop eight months back, and I didn't say anything. Neither did he.
We both knew what city this was. It was the one where I'd given him my middle name and just wanted one pleasurable night that couldn't follow me home.
He turned out to be the man across the aisle from me now running his pen through notes on our closing argument, not looking at me, knowing exactly what I was looking at out the window.
A ground crew moved under the wing in the dusk. He capped the pen, and for a second I thought he might say it, the name of the city, or my name, or anything. He didn't. He uncapped the pen and went back to the notes.
We taxied and climbed into the dark, and I knew that we could fly straight over the roof where this began. He would still choose the pen. He'd set fire to the house he lived in before he'd let me see the one room he kept locked.
We fueled again in Shannon, in a gray Irish morning, and then came the long leg, the one with no stops left. Eight hours of air and the Gulf somewhere ahead and we were sealed in a cabin the size of a small apartment with the crew gone quiet up front.
No more cities to land in, nowhere left to avoid the thing we weren't saying.
Somewhere at forty thousand feet, with him asleep across the aisle for an hour and his guard down without knowing, I did what I always did, which was to make a decision.
I was good at decisions, it was the job.
I'd gather what I could, accept I'd never have all of it, and commit before the moment closed.
I'd been treating him like a document I couldn't close because I didn't have every page. Somewhere at that altitude I understood I was never going to get every page, that he was never going to hand me the last one. I'd been using its absence as the excuse not to decide what I'd already decided.
I wanted him, and the distance he created with the security didn't change that. What I felt for him was more than desire, a lot more. I decided that was what mattered.
I waited until the cabin lights went down and the windows went black and he woke. He finally set the pen aside, and then I said it.
"I'm not going to get it out of you," I said. "Whatever it is. The real reason you put me behind glass. I've watched you almost say it and stop, more than once, and I've stopped waiting when you don't."
He got very still, the way he did when something got too close.
"Kira—"
"I'm not finished." I kept my voice even, which took work.
"I read people who are protecting something, it's what I do.
You're protecting something that isn't even about me.
Somebody got all the way in once and it hurt you, and now every time a person gets close you keep them away.
I don't know the story, you've made sure of that and I've decided I'm done trying to win it out of you. "
He was quiet for a while, nothing but the engine noise in the cabin. When he spoke, he was careful, and the care he took told part of the story. "You should know it was never about your work. Whatever you think I decided about you, I didn't. Your work is the best I've ever seen."
"I know it is." That part had never been the question, and we knew that it wasn't. "You restricted the person, Evan, not the work. You know the difference. So do I."
He didn't argue, and with him, that meant you were close to the truth.
"Then why are you here?" he asked quietly.
"Because what I do is the smart, careful thing, being right about what I read in people, and then going home alone with my integrity intact and my bed cold."
It came out steadier than I felt. "You told me something once, on a terrace in the city we just left. You said you'd built a life you'd choose again most days, in a house where nobody was waiting. And then you said, but not tonight."
He remembered it, I could see it on his face.
"I've made the same trade you did, Evan. For the same reasons, for a lot of years." I stood up in the dark of the cabin. "Most days I'd make it again. But not tonight."
He looked up at me, and he dropped his defenses and let me in, past the control that had been driving him for years. He wanted this as badly as I did and had decided long ago that wanting things was the most dangerous mistake a person could make.
I knew the feeling, I'd built my life on it. I was done building.
I crossed the distance. He started to stand and I put a hand flat on his shoulder to keep him in the seat.
The small shock of not getting to move first surprised him.
It was what I wanted, what I could give him that his protections couldn't. For once he didn't have to be in charge, he just had to let me.
I kissed him the way I'd wanted to since Aspen and hadn't allowed myself, slow, but constantly deepening, my hands in his hair, his hands coming to my waist and gripping me like he'd been holding onto the armrests for days and finally let go.
When I pulled back for air he tried to turn us, to take it over, and I pressed him back down.
"No," I said against his mouth. "My turn."
He stilled under my hands, and then he let go of whatever he was always holding back, and in a rough voice he said, "Okay.
" It was bare and raw and the best thing I'd gotten out of him in weeks.
The seat was a bad idea and we worked that out at the same time, laughing, half undone, my knee jammed against the console.
"There's a cabin in the back," he said in barely a whisper.
"Why didn't you lead with that?"
"Because you told me not to lead."
We both laughed and it was the first time it felt easy between us in a week.
In the back cabin, the bed was small and the engines were a low steady sound under everything. I took my time getting him out of his shirt. Then he was under me, his face and eyes on me and not holding anything back. I understood that I was getting what I'd wanted most.
It was never his body, it was this, him with his guard down. It was him letting me in.
I kept the lead. I set a pace slow enough to feel unfair, my mouth moving down his chest and his stomach, and I got his belt open and the rest off before I wrapped my hand around his cock and stroked slowly.
I took him into my mouth while he watched me with wanting in his eyes and then he pushed me back up to sitting.
I let him get me out of the rest of my clothes; letting him do that was not the same as letting him take back the lead.
He put his hand between my legs and touched me exactly where I needed it, and it drew a long moan out of me.
His fingers circled my clit and slid through the wet until I was done waiting.
He reached into the drawer built into the wall without being asked, and I loved him a little for that, for not making the careful thing clumsy. I rolled the condom onto him, and held him for just a moment longer than it needed.
I moved my leg over him, put his hands where I wanted them and sank down onto him slowly, an inch and then another, until there was nothing left to take. We were both still, breathing hard, the plane carrying us through the dark.
Neither of us moved at first, and I looked down at him in the low light, this man who negotiated for a living but had gone completely unguarded under me.
I let myself feel the magnitude of what he was giving up.
He'd spent years making sure nobody ever got exactly here.
I'd gotten here, and he was letting me stay.
Then I moved, a slow rise and fall, and he let me keep the rhythm. His hands gripped my hips and followed my lead instead of steering. He let go of his control in pieces, each piece something I'd seen for weeks and was only now getting him to let go of.
His eyes grew dark and intense. He moaned deep in his chest.
"Fuck, that's so good," he said, quiet and wrecked. His eyes closed and his hands held tighter.
I'd remember that sound along with everything else I'd kept learning about him.
"Tell me," I told him, not entirely sure what I was asking for. "The thing you can't say. You don't have to tell me all of it. Just give me one true part."
His eyes came open and he looked hard at me. "I'm terrified of you," he said. It was him being the most exposed I'd ever seen him, and I understood it was also "I love you" in the only language he could find.
I leaned down and kissed the confession off his mouth and kept moving. It stopped being about who had the power and turned into what was driving it, which was that I loved him and had finally run out of reasons not to.
I'd led the whole way. That was the only way I knew to do this, and then even that left me. He got a hand in my hair and pulled me down and I let him kiss me, deep and slow while I moved.
Giving up that much of the lead didn't take away what I'd always been afraid it would. That was the real surrender in that cabin, and it was mine. I didn't think he even knew he'd won it.
My hand slid down between us and I worked my clit with two fingers, chasing the last of it.
When I came, it wasn't loud like I'd have expected.
It went through me low and long and full, my forehead dropping to his, and it took away the last bit of being careful I had left, in a way I had never once let happen on purpose.
He held me through it and said my name, my real one, Kira, like he was making sure we both knew who it had been all along. He followed a breath after, his hands finally closing hard, finally taking instead of holding back, and I felt the last of him give.
After, we lay tangled in a bed that was way too small for two people who'd both spent years sleeping alone, and neither of us reached for our clothes.
I'd thought choosing him would feel like a risk. It didn't. It felt like the first real thing I'd done since that rooftop in October, and that frightened me more than a risk would have. A risk you could walk back.
This I couldn't. I'd decided something in that cabin with my whole body, out loud, and there would be no pretending in the morning that I hadn't.
He fell asleep before I did, which I hadn't expected, his breathing going slow and even against my hair, with his guard down and me beside him.
I lay awake in the dark and tried to figure out the cost of giving in to him against what it got back. For the first time, it didn't come out clean and I didn't care. I'd stopped keeping that ledger somewhere after we took off. I just hadn't told myself yet.
He'd said he was terrified of me, and I'd heard the sense of the story he couldn't finish, the one with somebody else's name in it, the one about the last person he let get this close. I still didn't have the name, and I'd made a kind of peace with not having it.
Lying there with him, I let myself know what I'd been holding off since Aspen, which was that I was in love with a man who was used to running at the first sign of exactly this, and that I had just made myself that first sign.
We landed in Dubai into a wall of heat and gold light, the city standing up out of the desert like it had just decided to exist. I held his hand from the second the wheels touched until the door opened. The world we both had to be professional in came back in with the heat.
I'd chosen him with my eyes open. That was the part I hadn't planned for. I knew now, better than anyone alive, exactly what he was capable of when he got scared. I'd stood on the wrong side of his glass and felt it close.
And I'd chosen him anyway, not blind, not hoping he was better than he was, but knowing.