22. Lev
Lev
“You’ve been awake an hour, and you haven’t moved, which means you’re running through the list of things. Stop it.”
She says it into my chest with her eyes still shut, hair everywhere, one leg hooked over both of mine because that’s how she landed at five in the morning and neither of us has renegotiated it since.
There’s yellow enamel dried on two of her knuckles and a stripe of it up the inside of her forearm where the brush got away from her.
“I’m not running a list.”
“You’re running a list in alphabetical order, and it has subheadings.
” She gets one eye open. The light’s coming off the water and up the glass, and it’s doing the thing to her freckles I’ve never had a word for, bringing them all the way up out of her skin.
“I’m a first-grade teacher, Lev. I can tell when a body in front of me is thinking instead of listening. Louis does the exact face.”
“Then you’ll know I’ve stopped.”
“You haven’t. Your hand’s been in the same place on my back for forty minutes. You’re guarding, not touching.”
She’s right, which is going to be the general condition of the rest of my life.
I woke at five to no war in the room, and I’ve been lying in it ever since like a man in a house with the alarms cut.
Every person who’s ever been in a bed with me wanted a thing I could put a number on.
She’s got nothing left to want off me. The whole file’s open, my father, the paper, the four months of long lens, the chair I mean to sit in, and she took all of it last night and told me she loved me anyway.
I have no idea how to hold a thing that isn’t pulling in the opposite direction.
“You got up in the night,” I say.
“You heard me?”
“You painted at four in the morning at my kitchen island. The whole floor smells like a hardware store.”
“So you were awake, and you didn’t come out.” She props herself up on an elbow, hair sliding off her shoulder, and the sheet goes with it. “Why not?”
“Because it wasn’t mine to help with.”
Her mouth does something she can’t get on top of fast enough, and she puts her forehead down on my sternum to hide it, which is the least effective thing she’s ever attempted.
“One coat’s on,” she says to my chest. “It needs a second. It always needs a second; the first one goes on like water, and you feel like a fraud the entire time.”
“How long does the second take?”
“Twenty minutes, and then eight hours of nobody touching it, and if Danil so much as breathes on that frame, I’ll have him doing craft corner through the summer.
” Her palm comes flat over my ribs, over the cathedral, and she starts moving her thumb across the domes one at a time. “How many are there?”
“Five.”
“Five domes, and you’ve got them going right up under your arm where nobody would ever see them, which tells me they’re not for anybody.” Her thumb stops on the fourth. “What are they for?”
“A dome’s a term served. Two of mine were served, and three were paid off.” I take her wrist and move her hand one rib lower, to the one nobody’s ever asked about. “That one’s the year my mother died. It doesn’t go with the others, and the man who put it there charged me double for the argument.”
She’s quiet for a stretch, and then her mouth is on it, on that one, once, and her hair comes down over my whole side.
Nineteen years I’ve kept an inventory of what every person in a room could take off me. She’s got the entire list now, and she’s kissing the bottom of my ribcage at seven in the morning with paint on her knuckles.
“You’re not breathing,” she says.
“I’m breathing.”
“You’re doing the thing where you hold it and then let it out in one go so nobody hears the first part.
I’ve been studying you since December; I’m extremely good at this now.
It’s my only hobby.” She comes up onto her arms over me, and her hair falls in a curtain on both sides of my face, and the whole room goes down to what’s inside it.
“Say something honest before I lose my nerve.”
“I don’t want the day to start.”
“That’s not honest, that’s a man scheduling.”
“I’ve been afraid twice,” I say. “Once at fifteen in the back of a fish house. Once two weeks ago on a couch with another man’s blood in your hair. That’s the whole list, and you’re on it twice, because the first one made me, and the second one is going to unmake me.”
Her breath goes out of her all at once against my mouth.
“Okay,” she says. “That’s honest. Fuck.”
Then she slides a leg over me, slow, and the sheet drags with it, and my body comes up off the bed without any permission from me, because her body is a promise and mine is the only honest liar I’ve got left.
Her hands go into my hair, and her thumbs trace my temples, and for the first time in weeks I’m not being held by a woman who’s performing for a stranger in the dark.
She’s holding her husband. Her husband is hard against her in a room with the sun coming up, and she’s not hurrying.
Her hands slide under the blanket down my abdomen.
I sleep in my underwear. She sleeps in a nightshirt.
It’s the difference between a body that’s always ready and a body that requires strategy.
Her fingers trace the waist of my boxers, once, twice, and then dip under, no hesitation.
Her thumb finds the head, circles it once, slowly, and my hips move without me telling them to.
“I want you to fuck me,” she says into my ear.
I roll her, and the sheet comes with her, and she’s naked under the nightshirt, and that’s it for the slow one.
That’s the end of that plan. I get the shirt over her head and her hair is everywhere, and her breasts are small and perfect, and she’s looking at me like she’s got all the answers to a test I didn’t know I was taking.
My hands go to my boxers, and I pull them down to my thighs. Her eyes go dark.
“You’re not a patient man, are you?” Her smile is small and wicked.
“I’m a patient man,” I say, and I put a knee between her legs and push them apart. “I’m not a gentle one.”
“Show me.”
I go in. Not all at once. She’s wet, but not ready, and I feel the stretch of her, the way her whole body tightens around the head of me, the intake of her breath.
I push in a little more. Her hands come to my hips, her nails digging in.
I push in a little more. Her head goes back, her throat a long line of pale skin.
“Look at me,” I say.
She does. Her eyes are dark, her pupils blown. She’s in there. She’s not hiding.
“Okay,” she says.
I push the rest of the way in. Bottom of her. Her whole body arches, a bow pulled taut, and I feel her all around me, hot and tight and mine. My hands go to her face, thumbs on her jaw, and I hold her still.
“You’re a terrible liar,” I say.
“I’m an excellent liar,” she says, her voice breathless. “I’m just out of practice.”
I move then. Not fast, not slow, but deliberate. Long strokes, all the way out, all the way in. Her hips meet mine, and we find the rhythm of it, the way two bodies do when they stop thinking about it and start talking to each other.
I want to fuck her, I really do, but looking into her eyes, I want nothing more than to be gentle with her, to feel her, to make love to her.
So I slow it down. I’m slow with her, and she doesn’t fight it.
She meets my pace. My thumb goes to her clit, and I circle it, once, twice, three times, and her whole body shudders, and she comes, a quiet, breathless gasp against my mouth.
“Lev,” she whispers.
I keep my thumb there, and I keep my pace, and I watch her face, the way her brows draw together, the way her lips part. She’s not thinking about anything but me. About my thumb on her clit. About my cock in her.
“Again,” I say.
“Again,” she says.
And she does. It’s a bigger one this time. Her whole body goes rigid, and she cries out, a sharp, beautiful sound that I’m going to remember for the rest of my life.
“I love you,” I whisper. “I love you, Vasilisa.”
“I love you, too,” she whispers back.
That’s it for me. The control I’ve been clinging to, the last of it, it shatters. My hips piston, and I bury my face in her neck, and I come, hard, deep, and long. I fill her up, and I keep moving until I’m spent, until I’m empty, until there’s nothing left of me.
I don’t pull out. I stay inside her, my weight on my elbows, my face in her hair. Her arms are around my back, her hands flat against my skin. We’re both breathing, hard and ragged.
“Okay,” she says. “That was honest.”
I laugh. A real laugh. The kind I haven’t had in months, maybe years.
“It was,” I say.
I roll us, so she’s on her side, and I’m behind her, still inside her. I pull the blanket up over us, and I wrap my arms around her.
“Now what?” she asks.
“Now we wait,” I say.
“For what?”
“For the second coat to dry.”
She laughs. I love her laugh. I love the way her whole body shakes with it, the way it sounds in my ear.
“You’re a romantic, Lev Etush.”
“I’m a patient man, Vasilisa,” I say. “I’m not a gentle one.”
She turns in my arms, so she’s facing me. Her eyes are soft, the morning light catching the gold in them.
“You were gentle with me,” she says.
“I was honest with you,” I say. “And you were honest with me.”
“It’s a good place to start,” she says.
“It’s the only place to start,” I say, then I sigh. “Yefim called at six. You were still sleeping.”
“Of course he did. Does that man even sleep? He must be running on spite and pickled herring.” She doesn’t lift her head. “Say it.”
“Three weeks from Sunday. The whole organization sits down and confirms Krutov, and after that it’s finished, because a man who’s been raised up by the room can’t be pulled down by it without a war nobody wants.
” My hand’s in her hair, and I keep it there.
“It’s at your grandfather’s house. Sea Breeze Avenue, closed up eight months, the same room where he did every piece of business he ever did. ”
That gets her up onto her elbow.
“I’ve never seen it.”
“You’ve never been in the borough it’s in without a car around you.
” I sit up against the headboard because this is a conversation I want my spine straight for.
“Here’s the plan as it stands. I walk in as the man married to the last of his blood, I put six captains in my pocket with what’s in Grisha’s shoebox, and I outbid Krutov in front of a room that’s already stood up for you twice. You don’t have to be in the building.”
“No.”
“Vasilisa.”
“No, and I want you to hear the whole thing before you go granite on me.” She pulls the sheet up around her and sits, hair a catastrophe, both hands in her lap.
“You’d walk in holding my name like a receipt.
That’s you carrying me in a folder, Lev, that’s the file with the long lens all over again in a nicer suit.
Those old men didn’t stand up in that restaurant for your marriage certificate.
Yefim didn’t hand a cane over a rail for you. ”
“They stood up for a bloodline.”
“They stood up for my mother’s face, and I’m the one wearing it.
” Her chin comes up. “So I go in. Not as your wife. As Milyena Ustinovna’s daughter, in my own name, on the day her father’s chair gets handed to the man who spent ten years burying everyone who shares her blood, and I let that entire room look at me while it happens. ”
Nothing in my chest is behaving. I put both hands on my own knees to keep them still.
“You’d be bait,” I say.
“I’ve been bait since I was born, and nobody consulted me about it. A man sold me across a table for nine thousand six hundred dollars, and I exiled him for it.” She doesn’t raise her voice at all. “The difference this time is I pick the hook. That’s the only part that’s ever been mine to pick.”
“He’ll move on you.”
“He’ll have to. That’s the point, that’s the whole trap, isn’t it?
He can’t touch me in that room; nobody draws in the room.
You told me that yourself over the veal, God rest Malenko’s hand.
So he has to do it before, in the open, on a clock, and a man in a hurry makes exactly the kind of mess you’ve been waiting your entire life to hold up in front of witnesses. ”
She’s sitting in my bed with paint on her hands, taking apart a succession she learned about a couple of months ago, and I understand I’ve been outworked by a woman who spent this morning laughing with her mouth against my throat.
“I’ll say no,” I tell her.
“You can say it. You’ll say no, and then you’ll spend three weeks building the room around my yes anyway, because you’re not actually an idiot, you’re just a man who wants everything nailed down, and I’m the one thing on earth that won’t hold a nail.
” She reaches over and puts her hand flat on my sternum, over the pocket where her photograph rode for six days in December.
“You can’t take this one off me. You knew that at the altar.
You’ve known it since you got down on your own floor and made me say the words out loud. ”
I put my hand over hers and hold it there.
“There’s a chair in that room,” I say. “Green leather, brass on the arms. He signed my father’s name on a piece of paper sitting in it.”
“I know. You’ve been climbing nineteen years to sit in it.
” She turns her hand over under mine and laces her fingers through.
“So here’s what happens instead. I’m going to hand it to you.
In front of every one of them, out of the blood that signed the order, into the hands of the son.
You don’t get to take it, Lev. You get to be given it, and I want you to sit with how much worse that is for you. ”
“It’s worse.”
“It’s so much worse,” she agrees. “I’ve thought about nothing else since you told me about it.”
I don’t have an answer for that. My throat’s doing a thing I’ve got no vocabulary for, and she watches me not have one, and she has the mercy not to make a joke, which from her is a gift with a receipt in it.
“Three weeks,” she says finally. “I want to do the doorway standing. Not the room, the doorway, six or seven steps on the cane and then I sit, and every man in that house watches Milyena’s daughter come in on her own feet.”
“Ask Natasha.”
“I did. She said no.” She’s already reaching for the robe. “So I’m going to spend three weeks making her say maybe.”