47. Maxim
MAXIM
Three weeks of physical therapy had taught Sofia to walk into a room without favoring the leg that still ached when it rained, and three weeks of watching her do it had taught me that I would never again take the sight of her crossing my own floor for granted.
"You're staring," she said, setting her bag down by the door of my penthouse like she'd done it a hundred times instead of exactly once.
"I'm allowed."
"Says who?"
"Says the man who spent three weeks convincing himself you'd actually walk through that door tonight instead of finding a reason to cancel."
She crossed the room slow, unhurried in a way that still felt new on her, like she'd finally stopped counting how fast she could reach the nearest exit.
The evening light through the windows had gone gold and heavy, the kind that made the whole city look softer than it actually was, and it caught her hair, her jaw, the small permanent scar along her forearm that I still thought about more than I probably should.
"I almost did cancel," she admitted. "Got as far as the elevator twice."
"What stopped you?"
"You did. Standing down here texting me that you'd ordered too much food for one person and it would be a genuine waste if I didn't show up."
"That part was true."
"The food's cold now."
"I stopped caring about the food the second you walked in."
She stopped in front of me, close enough that I could see the exact moment her nerves gave way to something steadier, and reached up to straighten a collar that didn't need straightening, an old habit of hers I'd missed more than I'd ever admit out loud.
"Neither do I," she said.
I kissed her before she finished the sentence, slow at first, careful the way I'd been careful with her since the hospital, like she was something I still couldn't quite believe I'd been allowed to keep.
Her hands found my shirt, fisting into it the same way they had the very first night, on a dock in the middle of the night with coffee running down my chest instead of her fingers, and something in that repetition undid the last of whatever restraint I'd been holding onto.
"Maxim."
"I know."
"We don't have to rush this."
"I don't want to rush it." I pulled back just far enough to look at her properly, her eyes bright in the fading light, her breath already uneven in a way that matched mine. "I want to actually feel every part of it this time. No countdown. No gate waiting on the other side of tonight."
She smiled at that, soft, and pulled me down by the collar I'd apparently failed to keep straight for more than a minute.
We moved toward the bedroom without hurry, stopping twice along the way, once at the doorway where she caught the front of my shirt and pulled me down into a kiss that lasted far longer than either of us admitted, once beside a bookshelf neither of us cared about in that moment, her back against the spines while my mouth found the curve of her throat and drew a small, unguarded sound out of her that loosened something low and tight in my chest.
Every piece of clothing came off slower than it needed to, like speeding up would have wasted something neither of us wanted to waste.
I worked the buttons of her shirt open one at a time, watching her face instead of my own hands, listening for the catch in her breath each time my knuckles grazed skin.
The evening light followed us the whole way, warm and gold across her collarbone, and I wanted to remember all of it, the exact shade of her skin in that light, the small hitch in her breathing when my hand finally settled at the small of her back.
I traced the thin white line on her shoulder where the surgeons had gone in after the terminal, and she let me, watching my face instead of flinching away from the attention the way she might have months earlier.
"You keep looking at it like it's going to disappear," she said.
"I keep looking at it because I remember exactly how close it came to being the last thing I ever touched on you."
"It didn't happen."
"I know. I still remember it."
She pulled my mouth back to hers instead of answering, her fingers working the last button of my shirt open and shoving the fabric off my shoulders with an impatience that told me exactly how finished she was with talking.
I laid her back against the pillows and took my time anyway, kissing an unhurried line down her throat and over the curve of her collarbone, pausing at every scar old and new like each one deserved its own separate apology.
She arched under my mouth, her hands finding my hair, and by the time I'd reached her hip bones she was saying my name in a voice that had stopped sounding like a request.
"Maxim."
"I'm not rushing this."
"I'm not asking you to rush it. I'm asking you to stop being so careful for exactly one minute."
"One minute."
"Longer than that would also be acceptable."
I laughed against her skin, low, and finished undressing her the rest of the way, slow enough that every newly bared inch got its own moment of attention, my mouth following the same path my hands had already mapped weeks ago from memory alone.
She pulled at my belt with fingers that had lost all patience for buttons, and I let her have that small victory, shedding the last of my own clothes without ever fully breaking contact with her skin.
Her hands moved over my chest, my shoulders, down to where my pulse was already hammering out of rhythm, and when her fingers finally wrapped around me, sure and steady, I had to bite back a groan, every muscle in my body going tight with the effort of holding still.
"Sofia."
"I know." She guided me exactly where she wanted me, her legs already parting to make room, her eyes steady on mine like she needed to watch this part happen instead of just feel it. "I'm not made of glass, Maxim. Stop treating me like I might break."
"I'm not." I settled between her thighs, braced on one forearm, my other hand smoothing back the hair that had fallen across her face. "I'm just making sure I remember every second of this one properly."
She was warm and soft and entirely mine in a way I hadn't quite let myself believe three weeks earlier, standing in a hospital corridor with no idea whether I would ever get to hold her like this again.
When I finally pressed into her, inch by inch, both of us going still and breathless the second I was fully seated inside her, I felt something in my chest crack open in the best possible way.
Nothing about the hour that followed was fast. I moved over her unhurried and deliberate, watching every flicker of her face for the places that made her breath catch or her nails press half moons into my shoulders, learning the new shape of a body that had survived something neither of us had been sure it would.
She met every slow drag of my hips with one of her own, her back lifting off the mattress, her voice breaking on my name somewhere between a plea and a command, and I gave her more, deeper, still measured enough that every second of it landed somewhere permanent instead of blurring past the way our first weeks together once had.
"Don't stop," she gasped, one hand fisting in the sheets, the other clutching at my back like she needed something solid to hold onto.
"Not planning on it."
Her hips rose to meet mine again and again, faster now, both of us chasing the same building pressure, her breath coming in short, broken sounds against my ear that stripped away whatever composure I had left.
I felt her tighten around me first, her whole body going taut and trembling, a cry she didn't bother muffling breaking loose against my shoulder, and the feel of her coming apart underneath me dragged me right over the edge after her, both of us shaking, both of us gasping like we'd run the length of the dock and back.
When she finally arched into me one last time, gasping something that wasn't quite my name, I understood for the first time in months what it meant to have nothing left between us worth hiding.
Afterward, she lay curled against my chest, one hand tracing lazy shapes over my ribs, the city going quiet outside the way it only did at this hour.
"I should probably go check on the cold food," she murmured, not moving an inch.
"In a minute."
"You said that ten minutes ago."
"I meant it less then."
She laughed, low and real, and I felt it against my skin the way I felt very little else in this life anymore, easy and unpracticed, the kind of sound nobody bothers to fake.
I let myself lie there a while longer before the thing I'd been carrying around in my chest for three weeks finally got too heavy to keep sitting on.
"Stay there," I said, easing out from under her.
"Where exactly would I go? You have my clothes."
"Fair point."
I crossed the room and unlocked the cabinet I kept behind my desk, the one Kirill had never once asked about in twenty years of walking past it, and pulled out the chart I'd restored the week after everything fell apart, working on it at two in the morning because my hands needed something to do besides shake.
"What is that?" Sofia asked, sitting up, the sheet pulled loosely around her.
"Come look."
She crossed to me, unselfconscious in a way she never would have managed three weeks earlier, and I spread the chart flat on the desk under the lamp.
Lake Michigan, 1911, hand inked by a surveyor who'd probably died thinking nobody would ever care about the exact shape of a coastline that had changed twice since.
"You restored another one."
"I restored this one for a reason." I found the spot with my finger, the small notch at the mouth of Calumet Harbor, the place a chain had snapped on a raised load and changed the entire direction of my life without asking my permission first. Beside it, inked in a different hand than the surveyor's, sat a date and a small, deliberately imperfect ring.
Sofia went still, tracing the mark with one finger before looking up at me.
"Is that supposed to be a ring?"