Chapter 13
MILA
The room is dark and the day won’t settle.
I’m on my side, the chain moving with my breath, and I count what’s wrong the way I used to count exits.
The man at the reception desk was gone. A woman in his place who looked at the list and said Sofia before she said my name.
Two doors that never locked, locked. An unfamiliar vendor name on the stamp at the top of the list. Cassia’s voice through a door that should have been open, saying Thursday the way she says things that are already decided.
The counting doesn’t stop.
Don’t.
I’ve lived in places where a change meant being moved, and being moved never meant somewhere better. I know what it feels like when the ground shifts under you and you don’t get to choose what comes next.
I want to do this alone tonight, to count my breath down to something even and prove I can do it without him. Without anyone.
Don’t.
I press my back flat against the mattress and stay.
I close my eyes and don’t mean to sleep.
I sleep.
The dream doesn’t start like a dream.
It starts like a memory.
Concrete under my knees. The cold seeping through fabric. The smell of cigarette ash on a suit jacket. Turkish tobacco, the expensive kind Papa used to smoke before Alexei decided what Papa smoked.
A hand clamps the back of my neck, heavy and possessive.
My heart is pounding in my throat.
A voice, low and amused, saying my father’s name like he owns it.
Dmitri’s daughter.
The hand tightens.
Dmitri’s daughter.
I try to move and can’t.
Dmitri’s daughter.
I’m screaming in the dream. The scream builds in my chest, climbs my throat, tears out of my mouth against the pillow.
“Alexei—”
The room snaps back.
I’m on my back. The covers are on the floor. My hand is fisted in the sheet so hard my nails are cutting into my palm. The chain at my throat is soaked. Sweat or tears, I don’t know which.
My breath comes in fragments, my heart slamming against my ribs, loud in my ears, the room too dark and the walls too close.
He’s here. He found me. My body hasn’t caught up to the room yet. I’m still in the dream, still on my knees on that concrete, and the voice through the door could be his.
His voice. Through the door.
Low. Not Alexei’s voice.
The basement. The man who carried me without making me fight him. Nico. Not Alexei. Nico.
“Tishe.”
Quiet.
“Ty v bezopasnosti.”
You’re safe.
My breath catches, stops, starts again.
I sit up. My hand is fisted in the sheet. My heart hasn’t slowed.
His voice again, low.
“Mila. Mozhno voyti?”
Mila. May I come in?
The first sound out of my mouth isn’t a word. Half breath, half syllable. Small enough he shouldn’t hear it through the wood.
Through the door, even quieter: “Skazhi ‘da’ ili ‘net.’”
Say yes or no.
I don’t say yes.
He’s there. Of course he’s there.
I’m going to open the door myself.
I get out of the bed, my legs shaking, and cross to the door and turn the knob with my own hand.
He’s standing close enough that his chest moves when he breathes.
The lamp at the end of the hallway is on low and the light catches the side of his face. His jaw. The line of his throat.
My heart, which has been slamming since the concrete, slows the moment I see his face. Not because it’s safe. Because it’s him. I reach for the doorframe with one hand because my legs have gone soft.
His eyes are dark. The same look from the basement, the one that said I see you, not I want something from you.
He doesn’t move toward me. He waits. Nobody has ever waited for me to decide. I don’t know what to do with a man who waits.
My heart is pounding and slowing at the same time.
He’s here. He’s not Alexei.
I nod once.
I turn and walk back to the bed.
I sit on the edge of the mattress facing the wall.
I wait for the door to close behind him.
The door closes. The sound is soft. Careful.
His footsteps cross the wood. He doesn’t come close. He stops on the other side of the room.
The air is warmer. He’s in it.
“Ya zdes’, na drugoi storone komnaty,” he says.
I am here, on the other side of the room.
“Skazhi mne, kogda mozhno podoyti.”
Tell me when I can come over.
I don’t turn my head.
I lift my right hand and let it fall to the blanket beside me.
He crosses the room.
Every step counted. The floor doesn’t creak but the air moves when he crosses it.
He crouches beside the bed, his hands visible, his knees on the rug, his eye-line below mine.
He doesn’t touch me.
The room is quiet. His breathing is slow and even in the dark.
“Vdokh. Vydokh. Schitay so mnoy.”
Inhale. Exhale. Count with me.
His voice is low. Steady. Papa’s register, and he cannot know that.
“Raz.”
I don’t breathe with him on the first one. I’m not ready.
“Dva.”
I breathe on dva. My chest moves. The air comes in.
“Tri.” In.
“Chetyre.” Out.
“Pyat’.” In.
He keeps counting. Past five. To ten. Past ten.
He stops counting.
He stays where he is, his shoulders still, his jaw angled down toward the rug, not reaching.
I reach for him without deciding to.
I pull his sleeve.
He freezes.
I want him closer. I don’t know how to say that.
I count the freeze. Raz. Dva. Tri.
Then he stands, slowly, and the mattress dips when he sits on the edge of the bed beside me, on top of the covers, not under them.
Black pants. The white shirt, soap and the river, sharp and close in the dark.
He doesn’t lie down. He doesn’t put his arm around me.
He puts one hand on my back, lightly, between my shoulder blades.
The hand doesn’t move. His breath doesn’t change.
Mine does.
The warmth of his palm comes through the fabric of my shirt and stays there. Heat moves low in my stomach. Not fear.
I turn my face into his shirt.
The cotton is soft. My nose is in the place where his shoulder meets his collar. Warm through the fabric. For the first time in five years I breathe a man in on purpose.
I want to press closer. I want to feel his arms come around me. I want to stay here all night, and I stay exactly where I am.
My breath stops once.
I want to lift my face and put my mouth on his throat and feel his pulse against my lips. I want to press my whole body against his and stay there until morning. I don’t.
I can feel it in the stillness of his palm, in the breath that catches once before it evens, in every inch of him that stays where it is. He is not taking what he wants. I don’t know what to do with that either.
My heart is beating too fast but it’s slowing against him.
The word comes out anyway.
“Spasibo.”
His hand on my back doesn’t move. His chest rises once, slow.
His voice comes from above, quieter than mine.
“Vsegda.”
Always.
He stays. I stay.
The warmth of him is the last thing before I sleep.
The light at the window changes before he does.
I open my eyes.
His face is close. Dawn light across his cheekbone, the shadow beneath it. His eyes are open and on mine. I have not seen them this close before. Dark. Steady. The same as the basement but softer now, and I don’t look away.
He’s awake.
The hand on my back is exactly where it was when I fell asleep.
He looks at me and doesn’t speak.
The lines at the corners of his eyes are deeper than they were when he crouched beside the bed. His eyes are bloodshot.
I open my mouth. My voice is rough from sleep.
“Idi spat’.”
Go to sleep.
He lifts his hand off my back and stands.
He looks at the bed, then the rug beside it, then at me.
He lies down on the rug next to my bed, black pants on cream wool, and one corner of the sheet trails off the edge of the mattress near where his hand rests.
I am jealous of the floor. It gets to feel his warmth and I don’t.
I want to be closer to him. I want his arms around me and his breath against my hair and I want to press my face into his chest and stay there, and I don’t know how to ask for that.
I’ve never asked anyone for that. He is the first person I have wanted to ask.
He closes his eyes. The line of his shoulders drops an inch.
He sleeps.
I do not move.
I’ve never seen a man asleep this close to me. Not safely.
The shape of his brow in the dawn light. His lashes against his cheek, dark, longer than I expected. Then his right hand, curled loose near his face, the sheet corner touching his knuckle.
I want to touch his hand. I want to close my fingers around his and hold on. I don’t. But I watch his hand until the light moves across it and my eyes go heavy.
He used to sit on the floor outside my door. Now he’s on the floor inside it. That is the distance between where we were and where we are, and I don’t have a name for where we are, and I don’t need one yet.
The light moves across the rug. The first bird is on the magnolia outside the window.
I say it quiet.
“Spi, Nico.”
Sleep, Nico.
I close my eyes.