18. Lev
Lev
“You’ve been polite to me for six days. I’d rather you screamed.”
She’s on the terrace when I say it, wrapped in a blanket against the cold, watching the city she’s supposed to help me take, and she doesn’t turn around.
“Politeness is free, and it annoys you more. I’m a public school teacher, Lev. I know how to make a budget stretch.”
I’ve tried to fix it three times this week and made it worse each time, because I negotiate with violence, not with whatever this is, and every time I open my mouth to close the distance I hear myself widening it.
When a man came to my mother’s kitchen with a watch in a bag, I learned that words are how they lie to you before they do the thing.
I don’t have the other kind of words. I never learned them.
So I stand on my own terrace behind my own wife, and I try, badly, the only way I know.
“Krutov moved a man to Coney Island watching your father. That’s why the locks. That’s the reason I couldn’t—”
“I know why. You told me. My own good.” She pulls the blanket tighter. “That was never the part that broke it, Lev. You could’ve said the reason. You chose the locks instead of the reason. That’s the problem.”
I don’t have an answer, so I go inside, and I’m three steps down the hall when I hear her rolling behind me silently, and she says my name in a voice that isn’t the Antarctic and isn’t the fight, it’s something new, low, and it stops me the way nothing else has all week.
“Lev.”
I turn.
“You want me to stop being polite.” She rolls toward me, and there’s a thing in her face I haven’t seen before, and I’ve spent months learning her face. “Fine. Bedroom. Yours. Now. I’m done being furious at you from across a kitchen. I want to be furious at you up close.”
I lead the way to my bedroom because she wants me to, and right now, I’m willing to do whatever she wants.
The second the door clicks shut, she’s got her hands on my shirt, and she’s pulling me down to her level, and I don’t think; I just go, and she kisses me.
It isn’t soft. It’s teeth and heat and all the things she hasn’t been saying in words, it’s her anger, it’s her hands fisted in my collar, it’s her leg braced against my hip, the good one, the one she still uses like a lever, and it’s everything I’ve wanted and everything I’ve been terrified of.
I kiss her back, hard, and my hands are in her hair.
She wraps her arms around my neck, allowing me to pull her up and onto the bed, and I can feel her whole body shaking underneath me, and I realize she’s crying, but it isn’t the tears from the clinic, it’s the tears from the fight, and I don’t know which ones are worse.
I pull back, just enough to look at her face, and her eyes are like the night she found the file, wet and furious and wide, and she’s looking at me like I’m a ghost.
“Make me feel something else,” she whispers, and it’s not a request, it’s a demand, and it’s the most dangerous thing she’s ever said to me. “Anything else. Just for a minute. I’m so tired of being angry. I’m so tired of being betrayed. Just make it stop.”
I don’t say anything. I just kiss her again, and this time it’s softer, slower, and I can feel her body start to relax under my hands, just a little, just enough for me to know that she’s not fighting me anymore, she’s fighting the memory, and I can work with that.
I can fight with her against that. I slide my hands down her back, and I can feel the scars there, the ones from the accident, the ones she never talks about, and I trace them with my fingers, and she shivers, and I know I’ve got her.
I’ve got her for right now, in this room, with the city lights outside and the locks on the doors and the guards downstairs and all of it, for this one second, it’s just us, and I want to keep it, I want to keep this feeling for the rest of my life, and I don’t know how, because it’s the one thing I can’t buy or build or steal.
She pulls away from my mouth, her breath coming in short, sharp bursts, and she looks at me, and her eyes are clear.
“Don’t be gentle,” she demands. “I don’t want gentle right now.
” She yanks my shirt, pulling the buttons.
“Gentle is what you do to a thing you don’t want to break.
I’m not breakable, and you don’t get to treat me like I am.
I’m not the crown, I’m not the asset, I’m not the girl in the photograph.
I’m the woman you locked in a cage, and you don’t get to pity her. ”
She’s right. I have been pitying her, and it’s the one thing she can’t stand.
I kiss her again, and this time it’s harder, more demanding, and I can feel her respond, her hands in my hair, her body arching up to meet mine, and I know I’m not winning, because there’s no winning this, there’s only the losing, and I’m losing so good I can’t even remember what winning was supposed to feel like.
Her hand slides down to my trousers, and she fondles my cock through the fabric, squeezing hard. I groan, and my hips buck.
“I hate you,” she breathes.
“I know,” I respond, my voice hoarse. “I hate me, too.”
She unfastens my trousers and shoves them down. My cock springs out, thick and hard. She grabs it again, her thumb sliding over the head, smearing pre-come. She moves to my balls, squeezing and twisting hard. It’s her payback. Pain and pleasure. I’ll take it. All of it.
“Get the fuck on top of me,” she commands.
She shoves me, and I stumble back onto the bed.
She struggles with her own clothes, her fingers fumbling.
I help her, yanking her shirt over her head, unhooking her bra, tossing it aside.
Her breasts are perfect, tipped with hard, rosy nipples.
I lean in to take one in my mouth, but she pushes me away.
“No. Get in me. Now.”
I rip off her trousers and panties, revealing her to me. Her cunt is bare, glistening with wetness. I don’t wait. I position myself between her legs, and I thrust into her in one hard stroke.
She cries out, her back arching off the bed. “Yes,” she hisses.
I’m still for a moment, buried deep inside her, just feeling her. She’s tight, hot, and wet. She’s everything. I start to move, slowly at first, then faster, harder. Her hips rise to meet my every thrust, her legs wrapping around my waist, her nails digging into my back.
I’m so close, but I don’t want this to end.
I don’t want to leave this place, this feeling.
I slow down, pulling out almost all the way before sliding back in, deep and hard.
She moans, her head thrashing on the pillow.
I feel her body tighten, her legs clenching around me, and she pulls on my hair hard enough to bring tears to my eyes.
I move faster, my control snapping, and with a final, brutal thrust, I come, emptying myself into her with a strangled cry. I collapse on top of her, my body shaking, my heart pounding. I’m ruined. I’m done for.
We lie there for a long time, our bodies slick with sweat, the only sound our ragged breathing. The city lights paint patterns on the ceiling. The silence is heavy. Unspoken.
I roll off her, my arm draped across her stomach. She doesn’t push me away. She lies there, staring at the ceiling, her chest rising and falling.
When her breathing calms down, she moves to the edge of the bed and returns to her chair. She doesn’t bother collecting her clothes before leaving. She just goes. And the not staying is the message that hits harder than any physical pain could.
She wheels out of my room without looking back once, leaving me lying in the wreckage of my own bed.
I’ve watched men die with less going on in my chest than there is right now.
I’ve stood over bodies and felt the temperature of a room and thought about dinner.
And I’m lying here, staring at a ceiling I own, in a building I own, in a city I own a door into everywhere, and I understand with a clarity that arrives like the shot you don’t hear that I am not in control of anything.
I hunted her for four months. I rigged a table.
I bought her debt and her recovery and her rooms and her wedding, and I told myself the whole way down that the plan was the thing and the girl was the crate.
And she just took me apart in my own bed with my own wanting, made me hand her every ounce of the control I’ve spent nineteen years making sure no one on earth could take, and then she left without looking back.
I’ve spent my whole life believing love was the one form of power a man could never seize, only be handed, and I built my entire climb around the seizing because the handing was for men like my father, loyal men, men who gave everything and got a watch in a paper bag.
And I’m lying in the dark understanding that I’ve fallen into the exact trap I spent nineteen years learning to avoid.
I want the one thing I can’t take. She’s shown me I can’t take it. And the wanting doesn’t care.
I don’t move for a long time. There’s no next move. For the second time since I was fifteen, there’s no next move, and both times it’s been because of her.
Down the hall, her light goes off. I can’t see it, and I don’t need to; I know the rhythm of her nights now, the way I know the count of freckles on her shoulder, the way I know she leads left, the way I know she counts seconds like coins and hates that I saw it.
She’s the last living blood of the man who murdered my father, and I was supposed to wear her like a crown to his grave, and instead she’s the only thing I’ve ever been afraid to lose, and I still can’t say it, not even to an empty room, because the word my father never taught me is the one word that would cost me everything I have left.
I get up. I find the shirt on the floor.
And I go down three stories to the office, to the picture face-down on the desk, because there’s one thing I can still do while I can’t do the other, and it’s the thing I do when there’s nothing else, which is work out how to keep her alive whether she ever forgives me or not.