Chapter 16
NAROD
She smiles up at me, and it is the specific smile she has that I have catalogued thoroughly over the past weeks, the one that starts at the corner of her mouth and travels upward with complete deliberateness, like she has considered the smile and decided it is warranted.
It reaches her eyes. It always reaches her eyes.
"I've run the numbers," she says. "I'm certain."
I spent my entire adult life managing risk.
I calculate it the way other people breathe, automatic and continuous, and the risk I have assigned to this, to her, to the specific vulnerability of being entirely believed by someone, has been classified as catastrophic since the first night she grabbed my wrist across the table at that bar and looked at me with something that was not fear.
I have been hedging against this outcome for weeks.
I have been building my exit with the careful, miserable architecture of someone who believes the exit is inevitable.
The transfer request is in sixty pieces on the floor.
I stop hedging.
I bring my other hand up so I am holding her face in both of them, which requires extraordinary care because my hands are as large as her face. She is worth it. She has always been worth it.
I lower my head and kiss her very slowly, giving her the full length of the movement so she can read the intention in it, and she makes a small sound against my mouth that reorganises my thinking entirely.
Her hands come up and grip the front of my shirt, not gently, with real intent, pulling, and the controlled professional apparatus I maintain around my own physicality begins to come apart at significant structural points.
"Narod," she says, against my mouth.
"Yes," I say.
"Stop being careful."
The request goes through me like a current.
I pull back just far enough to look at her, to make sure, because I always make sure, and her expression is perfectly clear and utterly without ambiguity, the expression of a woman who has run her numbers and is presenting her findings with full confidence.
I lift her.
She makes a startled, delighted noise as I pick her up, both hands around her waist, her feet leaving the floor entirely.
She wraps her legs around my hips, which is ambitious given the geometry involved, and laughs into my shoulder, and the laugh is warm and entirely unafraid and I carry her through to the bedroom with her glasses pushed sideways against my collar.
My bed is reinforced. Every piece of furniture I own is reinforced, which has always been a point of mild embarrassment when humans visit.
I reach over and take her glasses off, very carefully, and set them on the bedside table. She squints up at me with the expression of someone recalibrating her visual data.
"I can still see you," she says. "You're very large. Hard to miss."
"Yes," I say.
I pull my shirt over my head and watch her face go through several rapid expressions in sequence, which I find I am no longer inclined to interpret anxiously.
She is not alarmed. She is the opposite of alarmed.
She reaches up and puts her hands flat against my chest, against the scars, and her palms are warm and very small and she presses them in like she is taking a measurement, and I stay completely still and let her do it because her touching my scars is something I have never been able to receive without enormous internal commotion and I am working through it.
"You stopped hunching," she observes quietly, her fingertips still resting against the raised ridge of an old scar that runs diagonally across my sternum.
"I stopped hunching," I confirm. Her hands are still on me and I am acutely aware of every point of contact between her skin and mine.
She tilts her head back to look up at me properly, and her eyes track upward, cataloguing the difference in our heights now that I am not folding myself into a smaller, safer shape.
"You're much taller like this," she says, and there is no anxiety in her tone, only a kind of fascinated observation, as though she has just discovered a particularly interesting variable in an equation she thought she had already solved.
"Seven centimetres, approximately," I say, because I have measured it, because I measure everything, because knowing the exact dimensions of my own body when I allow it to exist at its full height versus the compromised posture I maintain in public spaces is the sort of data I cannot help but collect.
She looks up at me and something in her expression goes very soft and very fierce simultaneously in the specific combination she has when she is feeling something large and has decided to act on it rather than file it away.
She sits up on her knees on the mattress, which brings her to approximately my chest height, and begins to work the buttons of her blouse.
She drops the blouse. She reaches back and removes the rest of it, all of it, with the calm practicality of someone who has made a decision and is executing the plan, and I look at her in the full, unguarded way I have been prohibiting myself from looking at her because I was always terrified of what the looking communicated about the depth of my interest. I am done prohibiting things. I look at her completely.
"There," she says, and there is a slight flush across her chest and her chin is lifted and she is trying very hard to look composed, "that's the primary data. Run your numbers."
I put my hands on her hips, properly, without the fraction of restraint I have been building into every touch since the first night, and feel her breathe.
I pull her forward to the mattress and the physics of the size difference mean she tips immediately into my chest, her hands catching against my ribs, and I close my arms around her and hold her there for a moment, just that, just the reality of her against me at my actual size without any apology built into the angle.
She turns her face up. I bend and find her mouth and the kiss goes deep immediately, none of the careful graduated progression I have been managing, just depth and weight and want, and she makes a sound that is specifically the sound she makes when something exceeds her expectations and she is revising her forecast upward in real time.
I have memorised this sound. I plan to continue collecting instances of it.
I lower her back onto the mattress and the frame absorbs the weight without incident, as it was designed to do, and I follow her down and brace over her and for a moment I am just looking at her, the full visual reality of the size differential that I spent months trying to mitigate and minimise, her slight frame under the architecture of mine, my forearms bracketing her head.
The old anxiety moves through me briefly, reflexive, the calculation of how easily I could accidentally, how much care is required, how the margin for error is essentially zero.
"Stop calculating," she says.
I look down at her.
"I can see you doing it," she says. "Your expression goes very precise when you're calculating. Stop."
"There is a legitimate—"
"Narod." She puts her hand flat against my jaw, her thumb against my cheekbone, and looks at me with complete seriousness. "I am not breakable. I am not a teacup. I am a woman who audits corporate fraud for a living and once chased a bus for four blocks in heeled boots and won. I can handle you."
The specific accuracy of this assessment, and the confidence with which she delivers it, does significant structural damage to my remaining hesitation.
I lower myself and let her take my weight, carefully still, always carefully, but not the apologetic careful, not the performing-smallness careful, the real kind, the kind that is about her specifically rather than about my own terror of myself.
She exhales under me and her hands press against my back and the contact is vast from her perspective, I know this, the sheer surface area of what she is touching, but she does not treat it like a problem to manage.
She treats it like something she wants. Her fingers trace the line of each scar with attention, cataloguing me the way I catalogue everything, and it undoes me in a way I have no professional framework for.
The sounds she makes as we move together are very specifically hers, particular and real, and I listen to all of them with the full attention I give to data that matters, which is the only category of data I have any genuine interest in.
She is precise about what she wants, which I appreciate deeply, she does not require me to estimate, she tells me, with her hands and occasionally in words, with the calm specificity of someone who has done a full needs assessment and is presenting her requirements clearly.
At one point she says, directly into my ear, "you are extremely good at this for someone who spent three hours practicing small talk in a mirror," and the laugh that comes out of me is real and unguarded and she grins against my shoulder and the intimacy of it, the specific warmth of being laughed with rather than at, adds an additional layer to something that is already operating well above my projected parameters.
I am thorough. I am an actuary. Thoroughness is not a professional trait that ceases to apply in personal contexts.
She is also thorough, which I respect enormously.
Afterward, she lies in the curve of my arm, which is the only practical position available given the scale, and my arm is essentially the width of her torso, and she has pulled the blanket up and is doing the soft, settling breathing of someone who has moved rapidly through satisfaction into the early stages of sleep, and I stay very still so as not to disturb the process.
Outside, the rain has quieted to a steady low percussion against the windows.
The city makes its nighttime sounds, muffled and distant.
I look at the ceiling of my own apartment, which is at the correct height, which has never required me to duck, and the familiarity of it is different with her here.
The room is different with her in it. Every room I have ever occupied has been organised around the project of making myself fit, of reducing my footprint, of calculating the minimum space I need to take up to avoid alarming anyone.
This room, at least, has always been correctly sized.
I built it that way precisely so I could have one room where the calculation didn't apply.
She is here and the room is correctly sized and I am not calculating anything.
This is a very unusual state for me. I am not certain how long it will last before my professional instincts reassert themselves. But for the present, lying in the dark with her weight against my side and the pelting rain against the glass, it simply is.
Morning happens gradually. The city light changes quality before it changes brightness, grey going to the specific yellow of early sun through cloud, and Livia sleeps through the transition with the committed stillness of someone who has decided sleep is the highest priority task and is executing it optimally.
I am awake before she is, which has been true every morning, I require less sleep than humans do and I rise earlier, but this morning I do not get up. I stay on my side and look at her.
She sleeps with her mouth slightly open and her hair pushed sideways and she has pulled most of the blanket to her side of the bed through some unconscious territorial negotiation I did not observe but clearly lost, which I find entirely acceptable.
Her glasses are on the bedside table beside a glass of water I put there without thinking about it, automatic, because she always needs water in the night and I have been paying attention.
I reach over, very slowly, and trace the line of her jaw with the side of my index finger. She is warm and real and here in my bed in my apartment at the correct ceiling height, and the transfer request is in pieces on the floor of the other room, and she told me she was certain.
She makes a small sound and her eyes open, unfocused first, then finding me, and her expression does the rapid processing sequence, location, context, recent events, conclusion, and then settles into something relaxed and direct.
"You're awake," she says.
"I am generally awake before you," I say. "I have not left."
Something moves through her eyes at that, quick and a little painful, and I understand it. I left before. I understand that the not-leaving requires explicit confirmation.
"Good," she says. She closes her hand around my finger, the one tracing her jaw, her whole hand barely encompassing the width of it.
I look at her for a moment, assembling the sentence I have been building since approximately three in the morning when I first had the full clarity of what I am deciding.
"If I stay," I say, "I will not hide what you are to me anymore. From anyone."
She is quiet, looking up at me, fully awake now.
"I have been operating under the assumption that minimising my visibility was the responsible approach," I say.
"That if I made myself small enough, inconspicuous enough, I could reduce the social cost to you of being associated with me.
The dinner party was an extreme example of a problem I was already aware of. "
"Narod—"
"I am not finished." She closes her mouth.
"I have run the model, and the model is flawed.
The variable I omitted was what you actually want, as opposed to what I projected you should want in order to be socially optimised.
I omitted it because I was afraid of the data.
" I look at her steadily. "If I stay, I will be myself.
The full version. And what you are to me will be evident. To anyone who looks."
"You practiced that," she says.
"Since three forty-seven AM," I confirm.
She sits up and takes my face in both of her hands, which requires reaching up considerably, and she pulls it down to her level and looks at me at very close range and says, with the precise quiet firmness she uses when she has made a final determination on something and is issuing the conclusion,
"Stay."