17. Cora
CORA
The door clicked shut behind us, and neither of us reached for the light, and for a second we just stood there in the dark, close enough that I could hear him breathing, close enough that the whole apartment seemed to hold its breath along with him.
"You're sure," he said, not really a question, more like he was giving me one last chance to change my mind before he stopped being able to offer it.
"I have never been more sure of anything in my color-coded, over-organized, mildly unhinged life."
"That's oddly specific."
"I contain multitudes. You said so yourself once."
"I don't remember flattering myself that thoroughly."
"You absolutely did. First morning, folding tables, very mysterious about your job history.
I noticed." I reached up and undid the top button of his shirt, mostly to have something to do with my hands, since apparently even now I was incapable of standing still in a silence without narrating my way through it.
"I keep a mental record on everything. It's a whole system. Color coded, obviously."
"Obviously."
"You're allowed to be nervous, for the record. I promise not to hold it against you. I'm fairly sure I invented nervous."
"I'm not nervous."
"Everyone's a little nervous. Even the terrifying ones."
"I've spent half my life learning not to let anyone see it when I am.
" He caught my hand before it reached the second button and pressed it flat against his chest instead, where I could feel exactly how fast his heart was actually going, nothing at all like his voice.
"So no. I'm terrified. I'd just rather you find out through my pulse than my face. "
That undid something in me faster than anything he could have said out loud.
He laughed, low and real, the kind of laugh I felt more than heard, and then his mouth was on mine and every clever thing I might have said next dissolved somewhere behind my ribs.
My apartment, in the dark, was a familiar shape around us, the bins on the shelf color-coded by category and somehow still spilling their contents onto the floor, three seating charts taped to the wall in a color scheme only I understood, a stack of mail I had been meaning to sort since the week I met him.
None of it mattered. He walked me backward through it like he'd already memorized the layout, one hand at my waist, taking his time in a way that made the patience itself feel like the point.
"Bedroom," I managed, somewhere between a direction and a plea.
"I'm following your lead."
"You say that like you're not currently the one doing all the leading."
"I like watching you decide things." He said it against my jaw, quiet, like it cost him something to admit. "You do it so fast most of the time. I wanted to see what it looked like when you slowed down."
We made it to the bedroom eventually, though eventually turned out to mean several detours, a lamp I nearly knocked off the hallway table, a moment of us both laughing into each other's mouths when my shoulder caught the doorframe, one truly undignified stumble over a pair of shoes I had absolutely meant to put away days ago.
Nothing about it was smooth or practiced, and that was somehow the best part, two people who usually had a plan for everything, discovering in real time that neither of us had one for this.
His shirt came off first, then mine, neither of us in any rush, his hands mapping me like he intended to remember every inch of it later, like he was building a file he planned to keep.
I had spent three years being the most composed person in every room I walked into, the one who never lost her place on a checklist, and here I was losing every single thread of thought the moment his mouth found my collarbone.
"You've gone quiet," he said, echoing my own line back at me from the plane, and I felt the smile against my skin before I heard it in his voice.
"I'm processing."
"Take your time."
"That is exactly the problem. I don't currently have access to time. Or words. You've taken both."
"Good," he said, and meant it, and kissed me again until neither of us needed words for a while.
We fell onto the bed in a tangle of limbs and half-laughter, and for a long stretch after that there was no more banter, just his hands finding the places I hadn't known were waiting to be found, just the slow, deliberate honesty of two people finally done circling each other.
He kissed me like the ballroom, like the kitchen table, like every careful, patient thing he had done since the morning he first set down a folding table exactly where I told him to, except now there was nothing careful left in it, only certainty.
I gave him the same honesty back, every reflex I usually reached for, the joke, the deflection, the fast clever line, set down somewhere on the floor with the rest of our clothes.
It was somewhere in the middle of all that, his hand braced beside my head, mine tangled in his hair, that he went suddenly, comically still.
"What is a Worst Case notebook?"
I opened my eyes. He was looking past me at the nightstand, at the battered spiral notebook I kept there, fallen open to a page with WORST CASE written across the top in block letters, underlined twice, because a woman in my profession needed somewhere to write down every catastrophic scenario a wedding could produce before it produced one.
"Now? You're asking me this now?"
"I read labels. It's a compulsion."
"It's a notebook. For work. Every disaster I've ever imagined happening at an event, written down so my brain will stop imagining it at three in the morning.
" I pulled his face back down to mine, laughing despite myself, despite the fact that I was currently half undressed underneath the most powerful man in Chicago while he interrogated my stationery.
"This is possibly the least romantic question anyone has ever asked me during a moment like this one. "
"I disagree. I think it's an extremely important question."
"Dmitri."
"I need to know if I'm in it."
"You were the entire first chapter."
That got a real laugh out of him, rare and unguarded, his forehead dropping to my shoulder while his whole body shook with it, and something in me went soft and warm at the sound of it, at having been the one to put it there.
"Good," he said again, once he'd recovered, his mouth finding my jaw, my throat, working steadily lower. "I'd hate to be a footnote."
"You're not a footnote. You're the whole appendix."
"That's oddly flattering, considering the source material."
"Everything I do is oddly flattering if you look at it from the right angle."
He didn't answer that, not with words, and I stopped needing him to.
His mouth moved from my jaw to my throat, deliberate, like he had all the time in the world and intended to use every second of it.
When his hands finally slid beneath what was left of my clothes, I felt every nerve I owned light up at once, arching into his palms before I had consciously decided to, my body answering questions my brain hadn't finished asking yet.
He noticed. He noticed everything about me by now, filed away and put to immediate, devastating use.
"Tell me if I get something wrong," he said against my skin, his voice rougher than I had ever heard it, stripped clean of its usual polish.
"You won't."
"I want to hear you say it anyway."
So I did, in fragments, in unsteady breaths, in the kind of honesty I usually reserved for spreadsheets and worst case scenarios, guiding his hands with mine when the words gave out entirely.
He learned me slowly and thoroughly, the give of my hip under his palm, the exact place behind my ear that made my breath catch, the precise pressure that turned my usually clever mouth into something closer to a plea than a sentence.
Clothes disappeared somewhere between one kiss and the next, no urgency to it beyond the urgency of finally being allowed.
I had never been undone this deliberately before, this completely, by someone who treated my body like a question worth answering properly instead of rushing past.
When he finally settled his weight over me, braced on his forearms, his eyes found mine and held them, steady even now, even here, and something in the way he looked at me made my chest ache in a way it had never ached before.
"Still sure," I whispered.
"Still sure," he said, and then there were no more words for a long while, only the slow drag of him against me, patient at first and then not, both of us finding a rhythm that felt less like something brand new and more like something we had simply been waiting all this time to remember.
My hands found his back, his shoulders, dragging him closer every time he tried to slow down and be careful about it, because careful was the last thing either of us actually wanted from this.
He said my name once, low and wrecked, like it cost him something to hold onto that long, and I said his back the same way, over and over, until the two syllables stopped sounding like a name at all and started sounding like the only sentence I had left in me.
The headboard knocked against the wall once, hard enough that I laughed even through everything else I was feeling, and he laughed too, breathless, his forehead dropping to mine for one suspended second before neither of us cared anymore whether the whole building heard it.
Everything sharpened and blurred at once after that, his mouth back on mine, his fingers lacing through mine against the pillow like he needed an anchor exactly as much as I did, the heat building slow and then all at once, relentless, until it finally broke over both of us together, close enough that I felt it happen to him the same instant it happened to me.
He said my name one last time like it was the only word he had left to give me, and I held onto him through all of it, through the shaking and the stillness after, not wanting to let go of a single second of it.
We lay there afterward, still tangled together in sheets that had clearly given up on staying tucked in, both of us breathing hard, his forehead resting against my collarbone while my fingers moved slowly through his hair, neither of us in any hurry to move.
When I finally lifted my head enough to survey the wreckage of my own bedroom, it was, I noted with a kind of proud horror, extensive.
The seating chart color key had come unstuck from the wall and drifted to the floor at some point without either of us noticing.
A throw pillow I had spent actual money color-matching to my duvet was somewhere near the closet, upside down, defeated.
My phone charger had been kicked entirely off the nightstand.
For a woman who alphabetized her spice rack and could locate any receipt from the last three years within ninety seconds, the sheer, gleeful disorder of the room felt like its own kind of accomplishment.
"I did that," Dmitri said, following my gaze, sounding entirely too pleased with himself for a man who had just single-handedly undone years of painstaking interior organization.
"You absolutely did. I hope you're proud."
"Extremely."
"That notebook is getting an addendum," I said eventually, into the dark, my head on his chest, listening to his heart slow down from wherever it had been.
"What kind of addendum?"
"A new category. Best Case. I've never needed one before."
He was quiet for a moment, his hand moving slowly through my hair, and when he spoke his voice had none of its usual careful distance in it.
"I haven't done this in longer than I told you on the plane.
Not just the flights, or the dinners. This.
All of it, together, without holding part of myself back in case I needed to leave quickly. "
"What does it feel like, not holding back?"
"Terrifying. And the best thing that's happened to me in longer than I can remember." He tightened his arm around me, easy, certain, like a man who had finally stopped bracing for an exit. "I don't regret a single minute of tonight."
"Neither do I." I meant it more than I'd meant almost anything I'd said all year. "Even the part where you interrogated my notebook mid-crisis."
"Especially that part."
I traced a slow line along his forearm, thinking about my father's cards with no return address, about my mother holding a house together with nothing but stubbornness, about the version of myself who had built an entire company specifically so nobody would ever again have the power to leave a hole in my life the size of the one my father left behind.
"I spent years deciding I'd rather build something sturdy alone than risk needing somebody who might not stay. "
"And now?"
"Now I'm lying in a demolished bedroom with a man who runs half of Chicago, and it's somehow the safest I've felt in years." I propped myself up on one elbow to look at him properly. "I don't know what to do with that information yet."
"You don't have to do anything with it tonight."
"That's suspiciously reasonable of you."
"I contain multitudes," he said, stealing the line right back, and I laughed until my ribs ached, until the laughing turned into something quieter, softer, both of us just looking at each other in the dark like neither one of us quite believed our luck yet.
We lay there for a long while after that, not talking, just breathing in the same slow rhythm, the city outside going on without either of us for once.
I was nearly asleep, warm and wrecked and happier than I had any reasonable right to be on a work night, when the screen on my phone lit up on the nightstand, bright and sudden in the dark, Beckett's message from earlier still sitting there under a newer one, unread and unanswered since I'd first glimpsed it waiting for an elevator back in Chicago.
I looked at it for exactly one second, long enough to register Beckett's name at the top of the screen and nothing else, long enough to feel the old reflex rise in me, the one that wanted to solve every problem the second it appeared, worst case notebook and all.
Then I reached over, turned it face down against the wood, and didn't look at it again that night. Whatever it was could survive until morning. For once in my very organized life, so could I.