Chapter 6
NORA
Aweek of sharing a bed with a naked man you're not allowed to touch will do things to a person's judgment.
I've held the border. Five nights now of the foot of cold sheet between us, of lying on my own edge listening to him breathe and pretending the dark isn't full of him. I've been a model of restraint. A nun. A saint of the unfair situation I signed myself into in red ink.
It hasn't been free. Three nights ago his hand found my hip in his sleep, just rested there, a warm dead weight, and I lay rigid until dawn with my whole body humming around a few ounces of accidental contact.
Two nights ago he came out of the shower in a towel, and I had to go pretend the view off the terrace was suddenly urgent.
I've taken to handling things myself in the long morning showers, one hand braced on the cold tile, my own fingers a poor argument against the man on the other side of the wall.
I think he knows, too. He hasn't pushed once.
He just sleeps there, naked and patient, leaving the gate open, waiting to see how long my pride holds out against the rest of me.
My pride has a shelf life of one week.
Tonight he ruins it by getting out of bed.
It's past two. I'm awake because I'm always awake now. He gets up for water, no shirt, no shorts, no apology, crossing the moonlight from the window like the floor belongs to him because it does.
And I look. I'm done pretending I don't look.
The long muscles of his back, the dent of his spine, the way his shoulders cut down to a waist that has no business on a man who sits in meetings all day.
The scar low on his ribs I still haven't gotten the story of.
His ass. A piece of information I didn't consent to receive and can't now return.
He turns at the door to the hall, I get the front of him in silver light, all of it, and my whole body files a complaint with the management.
He's half hard. Not from me, or not knowingly from me, only the ordinary state of a big man two hours into sleep.
My mouth goes dry looking at it anyway, looking at the part of him I've spent a week with twelve inches and a treaty away from.
A decent woman would close her eyes. I keep them open.
I've been a lot of things this week. Decent stopped making the list around night two.
He catches me looking. Of course he does. He stops in the doorway, unhurried, the bastard, and lets me get an eyeful like he's doing me a favor.
"Something you need, wife?" His voice is rough with sleep and pleased with itself.
"Water. You're blocking the kitchen."
"I'm blocking the hall. The kitchen's the other way." He doesn't move. "You were looking."
"I was checking the exits. Force of habit. You happened to be standing in one, dick out, blocking the only good one."
"Mm." He comes back toward the bed instead of going for his water.
That's the moment I should have rolled over.
I don't, because a week is a long time, because I am only human, because he is standing there like the answer to a question I keep refusing to ask out loud.
"You've been checking the exits for five nights," he says. "From very close range."
"Don't flatter yourself."
"I'm not flattering anybody. I'm telling you what I see.
" He's at the edge of the bed now, close enough that I have to tip my head back to keep his eyes.
That's a mistake too. It puts my throat out, and I watch him notice it.
"You want to fight about the thermostat.
You want to fight about the cigars. You've picked nine fights in a week, Nora, and not one of them was ever about a thermostat. "
"You don't know what they were about."
"I know you slam doors when you want me to follow you through them.
I know you wear my shirts to breakfast and call it laundry.
I know you've been sleeping with one ear open like I'm the wolf, when the truth is you keep checking to see if I'm awake.
" He tilts his head, unbearable. "Which one was the lie, Nora? The hating, or the looking?"
"It's not one or the other." My voice comes out lower than I meant it to. "I can do both. I'm very talented."
"I've noticed." One corner of his mouth tips up, the start of that quarter-inch I want to bite off his face. "It's the most interesting thing about you, and you have a lot of interesting things."
"Careful. That almost sounded like a compliment. People will think you've gone soft."
"Then tell me to get back on my side of the bed and I'll go." Quiet. The dangerous quiet, the one that drops instead of rises. "I've never in my life touched a woman who didn't ask me twice. Say it and this is over."
He's handing me the off-ramp, clean. All I have to do is say the word, roll back to my cold border, keep hating him from the agreed distance. He'll go, too. I can see it in him, the patience of a man who has decided he can wait me out for years if that's the price.
That's what breaks me, in the end. Not the body in the moonlight. The fact that he'd actually let me say no and mean it. That he'd lie there beside me all night with everything he wants in arm's reach, taking nothing I didn't hand him. A week of that is more than my pride can survive.
I get up on my knees instead, fist his hair, and kiss him like I'm trying to win an argument.
He makes a sound against my mouth that I feel in my teeth.
Then his hands are on me, both of them, big and certain, hauling me up off the bed until my legs lock around his waist. The cotton of his shirt I'm wearing is the only thing between us.
He carries me three steps and puts my back to the bedroom door hard enough to rattle it in the frame.
The wood is cold through the shirt. He isn't cold anywhere.
I am done, so far past the border there's no flag in sight.
"This is a terrible idea," I tell his mouth.
"The worst." He strips the shirt off me in one motion, then just looks, my tits bare in the moonlight, and the look on his face does more to me than the hands did. "Say it again. Tell me how terrible."
"Shut up and earn the rent."
He laughs, low and rough, then gets a hand between my legs.
Whatever I was going to say next stops being words.
He's not gentle. I didn't want gentle. He works me open with two fingers while I'm pinned to his own bedroom door, his thumb finding the spot that makes my hips chase his hand.
I'm wet enough that I can hear it, can hear what he's doing to me in the dark, and I bite down on his shoulder so the whole building doesn't hear it too.
"Look at you," he says into my hair, reverent and filthy at once. "All that mouth. You've wanted this since the round pen."
"You scared my horse." It comes out a gasp instead of the insult I meant.
"I'll apologize to the horse later." He pulls his hand free. I make a sound I'll deny in the morning. Then he's got my thigh hitched over his arm, the blunt head of his cock right where I want it. He stops. Of course he stops. "Last exit, Nora."
"If you ask me one more time," I pant, "I will end you."
He drives in on the word end. I take all of him on a sound that isn't an insult or a verdict, that is nothing but his name, and for the first time in a week neither one of us is keeping score.
He gives me a second to adjust, which I don't ask for, then sets a pace that's anything but careful. The door takes it and complains about it. So do I, into his neck, into the salt-and-cedar skin of him, my nails dug into a back I've spent five nights pretending not to picture.
It's better than the version I built in those long showers. That's its own kind of insult. He's thick enough to feel at every stroke, deep enough that I lose the thread of whatever I was going to throw at him.
Every time he pulls back I'm already chasing, hips tilting up to keep him.
He learns that fast, the bastard, in about three strokes, and starts holding me right at the edge of empty before he gives it back.
The first time he does it I gasp something filthy.
The second time I bite him for it. He just laughs against my hair, ruined and delighted, then does it again.
He's strong enough to hold me up like I weigh nothing, one forearm under me, the other braced flat on the wood beside my head.
I get to watch him come apart from up close, the shut-down man losing his grip in pieces.
A vein stands out in his throat. His mouth is open against my temple.
Whatever else this man is, he's not faking the way he wants me, and that ruins the certainty I needed kept whole.
"Still hate me?" he gets out, rough.
"More than ever." I drag his mouth back to mine. "Don't you dare slow down."
He doesn't. He gets a hand between us, thumb working me right where I'm strung tight, saying something low in Russian I don't understand and don't need to.
I go off around him with my heel digging into the back of his thigh, his name coming out of me like a thing I lost and found.
He follows a few strokes later, my name in his mouth this time.
He buries himself to the root and holds there.
I feel him come, feel the hot pulse of him spilling inside me while his whole big body shakes apart against mine and the door holds us both up.
It's only after, with him still in me and both of us breathing like we ran somewhere, that the obvious thing arrives.
Nobody stopped. Nobody reached for anything.
I'm somewhere in the reckless middle of my cycle, by my own loose count, and I decide, drunk on him, that it's a tomorrow problem.
Tonight it's just the warm, smug fact of him filling me up, of having wanted exactly this and gotten it without a word about consequences.
After, he carries me back to the bed we've been treating like a demilitarized zone and lays me down on his side of it. I notice that, and decide not to examine it. We're both spent. There's a bruise coming up where the door caught my shoulder blade and I don't care.
He's on his back. I'm half across his chest, his heart going hard under my ear, and for about a minute the whole apartment is quiet in a way it hasn't been since I moved in.
The war's gone off the board. The border's gone.
We're just two people who finally stopped fighting the one fight neither of us wanted to win.
He traces something along my bare shoulder, slow, the bruise from the door, light as he can make a hand that size. "I'll be gentler next time," he says, and there's no smirk in it. That's the dangerous part.
"Who said there's a next time?"
"You did. With your heel." His mouth quirks against my hair, almost, and then stops. "Bruise like that, I'm honor-bound."
I should say something cutting. I have a hundred of them stocked for exactly this kind of softness, this kind of easy warmth that wasn't in the contract.
What comes out instead is nothing. I just lie there in it, lulled, stupid, letting a wanted man trace my bruises in the dark like we're something other than what we are.
It lasts a minute. Then I feel him go somewhere else.
It's nothing I could point to in a courtroom.
His hand keeps moving slow up and down my spine, easy as ever.
But the rest of him changes underneath me, the way a horse changes the half-second before it bolts, some animal quiet coming into him while he stares at the ceiling and thinks about a thing that isn't me.
His breathing stays even on purpose. His arm stays soft on purpose.
Every part of him goes guarded and deliberate.
I have spent my whole life around things that go that still right before they break.
It's the same thing I felt off him the night he stood in my kitchen and told me he didn't do it.
That blank, weighted hush, a held breath with something he's decided not to say.
I felt it then. I feel it now, with my cheek over his sternum, close enough to hear him decide what to keep from me.
Whatever he's turning over up there behind those wolf-pale eyes, it isn't tenderness, it isn't sleep, and it isn't me.
I should ask. A different woman, a softer week, I'd say what is it, where'd you go.
Instead I do the closed-off thing, the thing I do now.
I add it to the case against him. Even here, even still half-joined to him, with my hand over a heart I just heard pound, the man has a room in himself he's locked against me.
A man with nothing to hide doesn't keep a locked room.
So that's my answer, isn't it. I came into his house to find out if he killed my father. I just let him have me against a door, and the first quiet minute afterward he proves he's still hiding something. I roll off his chest before he can feel me reach the same verdict I walked in with.
"Don't get ideas," I tell the dark. "I still don't trust you as far as I could throw you, and I've thrown a bale further than you'd think."
"I know exactly how far you trust me," he says, easy, like he agrees, like it costs him nothing. "Go to sleep, Nora."
But his hand finds my hip under the sheet and stays there all night, a heavy, certain weight holding me on his side of a border that doesn't exist anymore.
I let it. I hate that I let it. I lie awake on the wrong side of the bed, deciding what kind of fool falls for the man she's planning to put in the ground.