Nadia #3
He is warm and salt. I hold him on my tongue for a moment before I start to move.
When I do start to move I take him slow, deeper each pass, my hand following at the base of him where my mouth cannot reach.
He says my name. Quietly, into the air above me.
Then again, when I take him deeper than he expected, the word coming out broken in a way I have not heard from him.
I look up at him.
He is watching me. His other hand has gripped the edge of the couch cushion beside him.
The cords stand in his forearm. His shirt is still open and his trousers are at his thighs and I am on the floor with my mouth on him and he is looking at me like a man who has decided to let himself be exactly where he is.
I work him with my mouth and my hand together.
I find what makes his hips lift the small amount they lift.
I find what makes his breath catch. He does not press my head.
The hand at the back of my skull stays only as weight, only as connection, even when his thighs go tight under my free hand and his stomach pulls in and I know he is close.
"Nadia," he says. The third time. A warning.
I do not move.
He comes in my mouth with his hand still careful at the back of my head, and I take it, and swallow, and stay where I am until he has finished.
The taste is salt and bitter and him. His thighs are shaking under my palms. I keep my mouth on him through the aftershocks, gentle, the way he was gentle with me.
When I lift my head he has his eyes closed and his head tipped back against the couch.
I sit back on my heels and look at him.
He opens his eyes. Finds me on the floor. The look on his face is not one I have catalogued before and which I will be working out for a long time, and underneath it, plain, the specific weight of trust in the fact that he let himself fall apart in my mouth while his hand stayed gentle.
He reaches down and pulls me up.
I let him. He pulls me up onto the couch and into his lap and his arms close around me and he holds me against his chest with both arms and his breathing is not yet steady. He presses his mouth to my temple.
"You are going to make this very complicated," he says.
"I know."
"I am not asking you to fix it."
"I know that too."
His heart is loud under my ear. The wool of the couch is rough against my bare thigh where the skirt has ridden up. His shirt is still open and pressed against my cheek. The flat smells like coffee from the kitchen and outside a car door closes and further away a siren begins and grows and fades.
I close my eyes.
I let him hold me.
Afterward, the flat is the same flat and the car park is still visible through the window and the yellow security light is still on in the flat grey daylight, and I am sitting on the floor with my back against the couch again — the position that seems to be where I end up in this room — and he is beside me this time rather than above me on the couch.
His shoulder is against mine.
"I need to go back to the apartment," I say. "Not because I want to leave. Because I've been dark to Viktor for five days and if it goes to six he's going to send someone to the Astoria building to check the signal in person, and whoever he sends will be better than the man you hired."
"I know," he says.
"And I need to contact Dara. She's been—"
"I know."
"I'm not running," I say. "I want to be clear about that."
"I know that too." He is quiet for a moment. "Come back tomorrow."
"That's not a sustainable arrangement."
"It doesn't have to be sustainable yet," he says. "It has to work for tomorrow."
I look at the car park. The yellow light. A pigeon doing something purposeful near the far wall.
"Tomorrow," I say.
He turns his head and looks at me in the specific way he has of looking at things he's decided to let himself look at. "Tomorrow."
I get up. I collect my coat and my bag and the burner from the drawer I put it in three days ago. He stays on the floor and watches me and doesn't offer to drive me, which I didn't ask for, and I don't ask for it.
At the door I stop.
"Liam," I say.
He looks at me.
"I meant the please," I say.
He is quiet for a moment. Then: "I know you did."
I go down the stairs and out into the cold and walk three blocks before I call Dara, who answers on the second ring.
"Are you alive," she says.
"Yes."
"Are you all right."
I think about the question. About what all right means when you've just made several decisions you can't take back in a flat above a laundromat with a man who kept the window unlatched.
"I think so," I say.
"That's not the same as yes."
"No," I agree. "But it's more than I had a week ago."
She is quiet for a moment. Then: "Come home. I'll make tea."
"I'll be there in thirty minutes."
I walk. The city moves around me in its usual way, indifferent and continuous, and I think about the word home and the word protection and the specific weight of please when you mean it, and the yellow security light that was on all day above a car park that nobody uses.
And I don't step back from any of it.