9. Vasilisa
Vasilisa
“You’ve been holding that glass for fifteen minutes, and you haven’t drunk any of it.”
Lev says it from across the penthouse, still in the black shirt, tie gone, sleeves rolled back over the knife on his forearm. There’s a split in his bottom lip that I put there in front of ninety witnesses and God.
“I’m pacing myself. I got toasted forty times today by men who drink like it’s a competitive sport, and I’ve got a spine that files a formal complaint when I mix vodka with the good drugs.”
“So don’t drink it.”
“I’m not drinking it. I’m holding it, it’s a prop.” I set the champagne on the low table. “Do you know what a woman looks like at her own wedding with nothing in her hands? Available. Somebody comes over and starts a conversation.”
“Nobody in that building was going to start a conversation with you.”
“No. They were going to bow.” I pull the flowers out of my hair one at a time and drop them beside the untouched glass.
They’ve been dying since eight this morning, and they smell enormous.
“Nine people bowed at me today. I counted. Two of them had guns on under the jacket, which I could see, because at this height you get an unbeatable view of a man’s waistband, and nobody has ever thought that through. ”
He doesn’t answer. He’s over by the glass with the whole city burning behind him, and I keep talking, because the alternative is quiet, and quiet in this apartment tonight has a subject.
“My best friend called nine times. I’m going to have to tell her Monday that I got married Saturday, and she’s going to eat me. There won’t be a body.”
“Tell her the truth.”
“Which one? The one where a man bought me at a card game, or the one where forty murderers talked about my mother?” The last pin comes out, and my whole scalp lets go, my shoulders dropping two inches with it. “You didn’t dance.”
“I don’t dance.”
“You stood in a corner all night doing a headcount at your own funeral. Yefim danced. Yefim’s got a hip made of gravel, and he danced with me for a full minute while I sat, and he moved around the chair, and it was the best minute of the day.”
“He’ll dine out on it for a year.”
“Good. He earned it.”
I get my hands back on the rims. The reception ran six hours, my shoulders have complaints about every one of them, my back is a live coal, and the leg that quit in the church has been sending bulletins ever since.
I pushed myself harder than ever. Broke my own record.
With the pills too, which is why I managed.
“I’m going to bed.”
“Vasilisa.”
He says my name and my stomach drops out from under me.
Here it comes. I’ve been braced since the ring went on, the whole speech queued up behind my teeth to remind him about the separate rooms, cold marriage, neighbor I don’t care for.
It’s Saturday night, and there’s a paper with both our names on it in a drawer in this apartment, and I know what a paper like that means to a man like this.
I turn the chair to face him and put my chin up. Whatever this is, he’s saying it while I’m looking straight at him.
“Spit it out.”
“Nothing happens tonight.”
“What?”
“Nothing happens tonight,” he repeats. “You’ve been up since six, you stood on a borrowed cane, and I watched your leg go out from under you. You’ll go to your room, you’ll lock the door, and I’ll be down the hall. That’s what happens tonight.”
Every wall I built today comes down at once, and what comes in behind it is worse than the fight I was ready for.
“You don’t want me.”
“Don’t put words in my mouth. I’ve never once done that to you.”
“Then what is this?” My voice goes gravelly.
“Because I’ve heard this before, Lev. I know the whole script.
It opens with you’re tired and closes with a man packing a bag while I’m still on painkillers, telling me it’s for my own good, telling me he can’t stand to watch me struggle.
Three weeks after they fused my spine. Three.
So if this is where you take stock of what happened in that church and decide the merchandise came home damaged, say it in a full sentence and let me get on with my life. ”
He crosses the floor in four steps and crouches.
The crouch. The one thing I’ve hated most on this earth for two years, the folding down to the spaniel, and he does it anyway, forearms on his knees, his face where I can’t send my eyes anywhere but into it.
“I don’t care about the chair, Vasilisa. You’re a woman. A very beautiful one,” he says, his eyes locked on mine. “My body reacts to you whether I want it or not. That’s a fact.”
My heart is going so hard I can hear it in my ears.
“Then why?”
“Because you didn’t get a choice on any of this. Not really.” His eyes stay on mine. “I’m the man who took your choices away, and I’ll probably do it again in the future. But this… this is the one choice I won’t make for you.”
No one says anything for about four seconds.
“Here’s the offer, and it doesn’t change, tonight or in a year.
” It’s the same voice he used to tell me a man wasn’t walking back out of this building.
“Nothing happens. Or it does. You decide, and you say it out loud, because I’m not going to be reading your face or guessing, and I won’t have you telling yourself in a month that I took a decision away from you again. ”
“That’s not a proposal. That’s a term sheet.”
“It’s the only thing I’ve got.”
“You’re actually going to make me say it.”
“Yes.”
I want to hit him. I want to run over his foot with both wheels and reverse.
I want to tell him to go fuck himself, roll to my room, throw the bolt, and lie in the dark, being furious in the only language I’m fluent in, because he’s done it again.
He’s found the one thing nobody’s given me in two years, and he’s holding it out on his palm as if it costs him nothing.
Nobody asks me. The doctors decided. The therapists decided.
Aidan decided three weeks after, standing next to my mother’s tin with a bag in his hand and my whole future in his mouth.
My father decided across a card table for three hundred and forty grand.
Every man who’s put his hands near my body since the accident has decided first and informed me second.
This one’s down on his own floor with my teeth marks in his lip, waiting.
“I can make you feel good,” he says. “If you want it. That’s on the table too.”
“Wow. That’s your opener.”
“I’m not opening. I’m telling you what’s available.” He doesn’t blink. “You want flowers and a speech, I’ll pay somebody to write it. This is what I have.”
Two years. Two years since anyone looked at me and saw a woman instead of a chair.
Two years of being transferred and spotted and assisted and admired for my attitude, while everybody talked over my head about my range of motion.
My body still lights up everywhere it lights up, all of it intact, all of it going to waste.
Two years of being the brave one, and I am so tired of being the brave one.
“Once,” I say.
He doesn’t move.
“That’s the deal, so listen to the whole thing.
” My hands are shaking on the rims. “Once. Tonight. I want to feel again. But this doesn’t change anything.
I’m not falling for you. I’m not moving down your end of the hall.
Tomorrow I get up, and I’m still the woman who says good morning to you like you’re a neighbor she doesn’t care for. ”
“All right.”
“Don’t do that. Don’t process me.”
“Say the words, Vasilisa.”
My chest is going like I’ve just come off the bars.
“I want it. Tonight, once.” All of it, out loud, in my own mouth. “And if you’re careful with me, I’ll throw you off that terrace.”
A little life comes into the corner of his mouth. Just enough to make me want to kill him all over again.
“I won’t be careful,” he says. “I’ll be thorough.”
He puts a hand under the back of my knees.
The gasp is out of me before I can stop it.
Not a sound, just the air leaving my body, because nobody’s done that since the hospital, and I hate it.
I hate the sudden helplessness, the way he just lifts me like I’m nothing.
His other arm goes behind my back, and I’m up, held against him, my whole weight on him, and I make myself stop fighting because that’s not what I said I wanted.
“I got you,” he says into my hair. “That’s the only promise I’ll make for the night.”
He carries me down the hall like he’s been practicing.
No bumping, no hesitation. The door’s already open to his room, and it’s exactly what you’d expect: dark wood, no clutter, a bed made with the kind of corners you could cut cheese on, and a view of the bridge that would make a poet weep. It’s the room of a man who owns things.
He puts me on the bed like I’m made of glass, then stands back.
My shoes are still on. The white dress is bunched at my hips. My arms are dead weight at my sides. My body doesn’t know what to do with this much stillness.
“Let me,” he says, and gets down on one knee.
Not a crouch. On one knee. Like he’s about to propose again.
He takes my left foot, unfastens the ankle strap, and slips the shoe off. Then the right. His hands are warm, and he doesn’t linger. He just gets the shoes off and sets them side by side on the floor like soldiers. Then he stands up.
“Tell me,” he says.
Tell him. He’s going to make me tell him every single thing. The man who bought me is going to make me beg.
“Unzip me,” I say.
He turns me so I’m facing the window, the bridge glittering across the water like a necklace. He puts one knee on the bed beside my hip, leans over, and finds the zipper. He pulls it down slowly, one inch at a time, the fabric parting down my spine. His knuckles brush against my skin, and I jump.
“It’s okay,” he says, right against my ear. “I’ve got you.”
He pulls the dress forward, over my shoulders, and down my arms. He doesn’t try to get it over my hips. He just leaves it pooled around my waist. Then he reaches around and unfastens the bra. The clips give, and the fabric goes slack.