47. Nora
NORA
There was no wire. I keep circling back to that, the way your tongue keeps finding the gap where a tooth used to be.
For the first six months of all this, I never once undressed without first accounting for the small machine warmed against my ribs, and now I stood in the dark of Mikhail’s bedroom with the greystone gone quiet and soft around us, and there was nothing taped to my skin at all.
Nothing gathering my voice for a room full of strangers.
Nothing I had to keep alive but myself. My hand went to the old place anyway, up under my arm, along the seam of a dress that hid no secret tonight, and found only me.
“You are doing it again,” Mikhail said from the doorway.
“Doing what?”
“Reaching for the wire that is not there.” He came in without hurry, the way he does everything, as though the room had agreed in advance to wait for him.
“Your hand goes to your side, and your eyes go somewhere I cannot follow, and then you remember where you are, and you come back to me. You have done it every night since you signed the papers.”
“So you have been counting my hands.”
“I have been reading the whole of you for a year. The hands were only the first page.”
I should have had something sharp for that.
Six months at the start, I always had something sharp, a line polished smooth for whoever might be listening on the other end of the little machine.
But there was no other end tonight. There was only him, close now, close enough that I could smell the cold air still on his collar and the faint bite of the coffee Baba Vera brews too strong on purpose.
“Say something,” he murmured. “You are never quiet. It worries me when you are quiet.”
“I am trying to decide if I trust it.”
“That it is really over?”
“That nobody’s coming. That there’s no meeting after this, no report, no careful account of tonight I have to keep straight well enough to write down.
” I put my palm flat on his chest, over the slow, stubborn drum of him.
“I spent so long living every good moment twice. Once for me, once for the file. I forgot you could just have it the one time and let it go.”
He covered my hand with his and did not answer that in words, because the answer was in how he looked at me, which was the way a man looks at the one thing he stopped believing he was allowed to keep.
Then he kissed me, and it was nothing like the first time.
The first time I had kept a part of myself standing off to the side, taking notes, cataloguing him for the strangers on the wire.
Tonight there was no one off to the side.
There was only my mouth on his and the low sound he made when I opened for him, and the whole of me arrived in one place at one moment, all of me present at once, which had not happened with a man in longer than I could name.
His hand slid into my hair and closed there, gentle and certain, tipping my head back so he could take the kiss deeper, and I let him, and I did not narrate a single second of it to anyone.
“The dress,” he said against my lips.
“What about it?”
“I would like it on the floor. If you are asking my opinion.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Ask me anyway.”
I laughed, and reached back, and found the zipper myself before he could, because I wanted him to watch me choose it.
The dress went down my arms and slid to the floor with a whisper, and there was nothing beneath it to hide, no recorder strapped in against the soft skin below my ribs, no wire threaded up along my spine.
Only me, bare in the low light, offered to exactly one person in the world.
His breath changed. I felt more than saw it, the catch of it, the way his hands stilled on my hips as though he needed a second to believe the evidence.
“You look at me like that,” I said, “and I forget how to be careful.”
“Then forget. There is no one here I would ever hand you to.”
He walked me back until the bed caught the backs of my knees, and I sank down onto the cool spread, and he followed me down slowly, deliberately, still half dressed, so that the starched cotton of his shirt dragged rough over my bare breasts before his mouth ever did.
When his lips finally closed over one, warm and unhurried, his tongue circling until the peak of it drew tight and aching, I arched up off the bed into him and heard myself make a sound I would once have swallowed whole, a sound far too honest to have survived a single night on the wire.
I let it go into the dark of his room, where the only ears left in the world were his.
I got my hands under the shirt and shoved it up the hard plane of his back, and he broke off just long enough to drag it over his head and send it somewhere neither of us would think about again.
Then there was the heat of his bare chest coming down against mine, skin to skin the whole length of us, and I pushed up into him greedy for more of it, every inch of contact a thing I was finally allowed to want out loud and take.
His mouth came back to my throat, my collarbone, the soft rise of each breast in its turn, and he took his slow time over all of it, as though we had every year still coming to us to do nothing else, which, I was only starting to let myself believe, we did.
“Louder,” he said, moving lower, his mouth tracing the line of my ribs, over the exact patch of skin that used to carry the machine. “I want the sound you were never allowed to make.”
“Someone will hear.”
“Let them. Let the whole house hear that you are happy. There is no version of tonight anyone gets but us.”
He kept moving down, his open mouth hot against my stomach, over the flat of me below the navel, his jaw rough on skin that had never once in its life been touched with this much unhurried attention.
He settled himself between my thighs and looked up the length of my body, checking, the way he always checks, and whatever he found on my face was answer enough for him.
Then his mouth was on me, and the first slow stroke of his tongue took the breath clean out of my chest and turned it into his name.
He learned that the way he learns everything, patient and thorough and impossible to hurry, his hands spread warm and flat across my hips to hold me exactly where he wanted me while I came apart at the seams. I got a fistful of his hair and could not have told you whether I was dragging him closer or trying to survive him, and he hummed low against me like a man who would happily stay there until the house came down around us both.
The pressure wound up bright and low and merciless until I was strung right at the trembling edge of it, and then he gentled off, unhurried, and left me hanging there wanting, and I heard myself beg, out loud, in a voice I had never let another living soul hear.
“Not yet,” he said against the inside of my thigh, and gave me his fingers instead, one and then two, deep and slow while his thumb took up exactly where his mouth had left off, and I let my knees fall wider without one thought spared for who in that house might hear.
The sheer reckless freedom of it undid me nearly as much as his hand did, the being loud, the being seen, the wanting something with the whole of my body and reaching for it out in the open with the lamp still burning.
He worked me back up to the brink and held me there, reading every sound I made, until I was rocking helpless against his hand and saying his name with nothing left in my voice but the plain truth of it.
“Mikhail.”
“I have you.”
“I need you to stop making me wait.”
I pushed up onto an elbow and got my hands on his belt, because I wanted my half of this, wanted to be the one undoing him for once, and he let me, going still and watchful while I worked the buckle loose, and his stillness was its own kind of loud.
When I finally freed him and took the hot, heavy weight of him into my hand, the breath left him in a rough, broken sound I felt against my mouth more than heard, and Mikhail Morozov giving up that small piece of his control did something to me that no confession on any wire ever had.
“You have made a whole life out of waiting for the right moment.” He stripped off the last of what he wore and settled the warm weight of himself down the length of me, skin against skin from my mouth to my knees. “This is the moment, Nora. There is not going to be a better one.”
He kissed me once more, deep and slow, and reached down between us to guide himself to me, notching the blunt, hot length of him against where I was slick and open and aching for precisely this.
For a moment he held right there, barely inside, the both of us breathing one unsteady breath, and I felt that first thick stretch of him at the entrance of me, and the sound that came out of me had no shape to it at all.
Then he pushed in by slow, careful degrees, giving me all of him a little at a time, sinking and easing back and sinking deeper, watching my face the whole way down, reading each flicker of it the way he once read men across a table for the shape of what they meant to do.
There was nothing to guard against now, nothing to give away and nothing to keep.
There was only the thick, deliberate stretch of him filling me by inches, one slow press after another, until he was seated deep and there was no space left anywhere between us, the two of us fitted together the way we always had been, since the very first night I lied to myself that it was only the job.
I hooked my legs high around him and drew him that final inch, all the way to the hilt, and the sound I made then was the loudest yet, and I made no move at all to catch it back.