CHAPTER 38 #2
So, I looked. I unbuttoned his shirt slowly and I read him the way I read everything, in order, out loud.
The vor stars at the collarbones, for a man who kneels to no one.
The eleven cathedral domes, four his own years inside and seven his father's, carried without permission.
The two bad lines low on his ribs, put there at seventeen by a boy with a sewing needle.
Spi, moy mal'chik. Sleep, my boy. I knew the whole song by heart now.
I learned it in the dark, on purpose, so that I would have it.
"You're cataloguing me," he said.
"I'm reading you," I said, and put my mouth on the first of his father's domes, and felt the breath go out of him. "It's different. Cataloguing is work. Reading is pleasure."
He let me take my time. That was its own kind of surrender in a man built like a fist. He gave it to me in the light, in the middle of the room where they married us at gunpoint.
I undressed him and then he undressed me.
He wasn’t careful, but he wasn’t rough either.
He was slow. He looked at me the way I had looked at him, in order.
He said my name. Then he said the Russian word he had not let himself finish two weeks ago in a dark library.
Bozhe, ya lyublyu tebya. God, I love you.
He finished it this time. He said it against my throat, and my collarbone, and lower.
We did not make it to the bedroom. There was a low couch in the light of the tall windows.
We ended up there. There was nothing in him of the man who commands rooms. He knelt on the floor in front of me the way he knelt in a skhodka over the man he killed.
This was the opposite of that. This was a man on his knees for the living.
He put his mouth on my clit and worked me open slowly.
His hands spread flat on my thighs. His father's ink and his own moved under my fingers. And when I came it was with my hands in his silvering hair. His name came out of me in a voice I didn’t bother to keep level. There was no one to keep it level for anymore.
Then he came up over me and I pulled him down.
There was no foil packet, no pause, no admin.
We had settled all of that on the moya night, doctor to patient, in my own flat voice.
There had been no one else for either of us since.
He pushed his cock into me slowly and I felt every inch of it.
He held still when he was all the way in.
The way he did the first time. The way that undid me. He pressed his forehead to mine.
"Say it again," I said. "The plan. I want to hear you say it, so I know you have it."
His mouth curved. He knew exactly what I was doing. I had said those words to him on the morning of the skhodka, in his funeral black, holding his unsteady hands.
"I love you," he said. "I am going to spend the rest of my life in this house with you.
I am not going to decide one single thing for you that is yours to decide.
And every morning you are going to wake up and get to choose it again.
Every morning I am going to be terrified you won't. I am going to do it anyway.
That is the only version of you I want. The one who gets to leave and stays. "
"You have it," I said, and I moved under him, and that was the end of the talking for a while.
It was not the first time. It wasn’t the most desperate, or the darkest, or the one where I cried. It was the first time we did it as two free people with nothing coming, in the light. That turned out to be its own thing entirely.
He moved in me slowly and then not slowly, and I met him.
It built the way the good ones build, unhurried and then all at once.
When my orgasm took me, he was watching my face in the daylight, saying my name and lyubov moya.
I was saying his. His real one, the intimate one his mother gave him, over and over.
He went with me a breath later, his face in my neck and my name in his mouth like the only word he had left.
Afterward, we lay tangled on a couch too small for it, in a slant of low sun.
We didn’t move for a long time. My head was on his chest, over the bad lullaby lines.
His heart went slow and steady under my cheek, back down to its resting rate.
I timed it without meaning to. I will never entirely stop being what I am.
"Sixty-two," I said. "Your pulse. That's a resting rate. You haven't had a resting rate since I met you."
"No," he said. His hand moved slow up and down my spine. "I havn’t had a resting anything since you walked into my life with a bullet in your pocket." He was quiet a moment. "There is a thing I did not tell you. On the tape. My father's last tape."
"Tell me."
"He said, at the end, that he was not afraid to die.
That he had been afraid of only one thing his whole life, which was that his sons would inherit the war and not the peace.
That we would spend our lives the way he spent his.
Holding a house together with both hands, and nothing left over for a single hour of rest." His hand stilled on my back.
"I have his house. I have his peace, finally, today.
And I am lying on a couch in the middle of the afternoon with my whole life resting on my chest. I keep thinking I have to tell him.
That the thing he was afraid of did not happen.
And I cannot, and it is the only wound this day has left me. "
I lifted my head and looked at him. Then I sang him the two lines. His mother's song, low on his ribs and now, I found, low in me. Spi, moy mal'chik. Sleep, my boy.
I didn’t have a good voice. It didn’t matter.
I sang it to him the way she sang it to a boy.
A boy who grew up to carry his father's prison on his back, and his father's enemy at his table.
Forty years of not-resting went out of his face.
And I thought, this is what I am for. Not the bullet.
Not the case. This. An old song, given back to the person it belongs to, in the light, with no one coming.
"You told him," I said. "Just now. You told him with your resting heart rate. I heard you. Sixty-two. He heard you too."
He didn’t answer. He put his hand in my hair and held my head against the song on his ribs.
His chest went uneven once, and evened out, and I let him have it.
Outside the tall windows the first clean light in months went slowly gold.
For one afternoon the city had stopped trying to take anything from either of us at all.