CHAPTER 5 #3
A man who took it I could survive. A man who pressed and pushed and pressed me to a door and took — I have an entire architecture built for that man, a lifetime of armor cut and fitted to exactly his measurements.
But a man who holds my throat like a vow and my hip like a prayer and then steps back and says ask — that man has reached past every wall I own and set the next move down in my open palm, and now I have to live with the weight of it, and the weight of it is that I want to.
"That's a tactic wearing fairness like a borrowed coat," I manage. My voice comes out unsteady and I hate that he hears it. "You think I won't ask, so you make the asking the price, and you get to keep your hands clean and your story straight and tell yourself you were honorable."
"Maybe. " He goes back to the globe-bar.
Picks up the decanter. Pours, this time, two fingers of something colorless, and I notice his hand isn't quite steady either, and the noticing helps.
"Or maybe I've learned the hard way to tell the difference between taking a thing and being given it, and I've decided I'm done taking.
" He doesn't look at me when he says it.
"You'll have your loft. Pavel drives you.
The terms stand. " He lifts the glass, not to drink, just to hold. "Go to bed, Amara."
I should say something that cuts. I'm good at it; it's half my repertoire.
Nothing comes. Or rather everything comes, all at once, jammed in the doorway of my mouth, and none of it can decide whether it's a curse or the thing he's waiting for, so I say nothing at all.
I turn. My hand finds the cold brass and I pull the door open on the dark hall.
Behind me, in the quiet, I hear it: the small decisive click of his watch closing. Brass on brass, final as a coin set down on a counter. He's done deciding. He's put the choice on me and shut the case.
I get the door shut behind me before my legs quite give out.
The corridor is cold and dim, one wall sconce burning low at the far end, the marble icy through my stockings, and I press my whole back to the wall beside the oxblood door and let it hold me up because right now my own spine isn't equal to the job.
My mouth still feels his. My hip still feels the span of his hand.
The thimble has come to rest cold against my breastbone and I cover it with my palm like you'd cover a wound, the dented steel my mother left me, and I breathe, and I curse — soft first, the way I always start, hell, then sharper, under it, the word I keep for when I'm truly cornered — and none of it helps, because the thing I'm cornered by is in my own body and it doesn't speak any language I can cut to shape.
I think about the seam in the bodice waiting on the form upstairs, the bias pulling wrong, the grain fighting me, the work I could go do with my hands right now instead of standing here undone in a dead family's hallway.
I think about my father's records, ten miles downtown in a box in the back of the loft I just bought back the right to visit, though I don't fully know yet why that should matter so much, only that it does, only that the chess part of me filed Pavel drives you, the loft stays open away the moment he conceded it, a door I now have the right to walk through whenever I please.
A card I didn't know I was holding until he handed it to me while we were both pretending the negotiation was about something else.
I touch my own mouth. Two fingers, the scarred one and its neighbor, against my lower lip where the certainty of him still sits.
I should not have come down here in my stocking feet.
I should not have pulled instead of pushed.
I should not, ever, under any fog this city can throw at me, want the man whose blood-name wrote the ruin I came up out of — and I draw the line right there, in my own head, in the cold, the way you'd chalk a cutting line on cloth: here, and no further.
You may want him. You will not ask. I dare myself to hold it. I'm good at holding a line. It's the whole job.
But God, the way he said it.
Not until you ask.
I curse the cold steel under my palm. I curse my mother for leaving it to me and my father for dying before I could say half of what I owed him and Lev Sokolov for being the kind of monster who smiles before he cuts and the whole gray drowned city for its fog and its foghorn pulsing out on the black water like a thing that wants something it can't name.
I curse, last, the certain heat of a careful man's mouth, and the door he just declined to walk through, and the fact that he was right — that a thing taken I could have hated clean, and a thing asked for I will have to own.
Ask, he'd said.
I press my back harder to the cold corridor wall, both hands pressed flat over my breastbone now, my heart still going like a needle through too many layers, and I make myself a promise in the dark that I already half-suspect is a lie.
I would rather burn this whole house to the ground than ask.
I am very much afraid that I'll ask.