Page 19 of Hold On to Me
The silence was so complete she could hear the engines changing pitch as they met a headwind.
“On the tarmac. In the rain. You kissed me back. And then you called your brother to find me a husband.” She kept her voice even. It took everything she had but she kept it even. “So either you felt nothing, and it was reflex, adrenaline, an accident, or you felt everything, and you’re a coward.”
Coward.
The word impacted him visibly, causing his jaw to harden and his shoulders change angle.
And then he stood.
The cabin was already small. With him standing, it became a space that couldn’t contain him: his height, his width, the sheer physical mass of a man who had been designed for a kind of violence he held in constant reserve. He rose from his seat and the shadows shifted around him and suddenly the dark cabin wasn’t a cabin at all. It was a room with one exit and he was between her and it and she wasn’t afraid.
She didn’t step back. She had stood up when he did, instinct, or defiance, or the refusal to have this conversation with him towering over her, and now they were standing in the aisle, facing each other, closer than the siege had brought them all day.Close enough to feel the heat of him through the air between their clothes.
“You don’t know what you’re asking for.”
Low. Dangerous. Not a threat, a warning. The voice of a man standing at the edge of something he had spent his entire adult life building walls against, and the walls were cracking, and he could hear them, and he was telling her to run not because he didn’t want her to stay but because he wasn’t sure what would happen when the last wall came down.
She looked at him. The scar. The jaw. The eyes that were no longer still but moving, searching her face with a desperation he wasn’t bothering to hide because the dark made hiding impossible and the word coward had stripped away the last pretence.
“Then show me.”
He kissed her.
Not like the tarmac. The tarmac had been her: her hands, her reach, her mouth on his, hard and brief and anguished. This was him. This was Andrei Almazov kissing a woman for the first time without the wall between them, and the difference was the difference between a match struck in wind and a fire that has been burning underground for months finally breaking through to the surface.
Slow. Deliberate. Consuming.
His hands rose to her face. Both hands, the scarred one and the unscarred one, framing her jaw, her cheekbones, the sides of her neck. She felt his fingers tremble. Not a fine tremor but a deep one, structural, the kind of shaking that came from a manholding back a force he was no longer certain he could control. He was shaking and kissing her and the two things together, the violence of his restraint and the tenderness of his mouth, were so contradictory, so impossibly, devastatingly Andrei, that something inside her cracked open and she stopped counting.
She stopped counting.
For the first time since she could remember, since childhood, since before her father’s first disappearance, since before she had learned that the people who are supposed to stay never do, she wasn’t counting. Not seconds, not exits, not the distance between her skin and his. She was in the dark cabin at forty thousand feet with his hands on her face and his mouth on hers and time wasn’t a sequence of numbered moments but a single, continuous, borderless now.
She pressed into him. Her palms flat on his chest, over his shirt, over his heart. She could feel it. Slamming. The heartbeat of a man who had spent months building a three-hundred-million-euro perimeter around the thing he wanted and had just torn through it with his bare hands. His heart was enormous under her palms, she could feel it in her wrists, in her arms, in the vibration that travelled through his ribcage and into her body as though they were sharing the same pulse.
He murmured something against her mouth.
Russian. She didn’t understand the words. She understood everything else: the texture of them, the weight, the way they came from somewhere below language, below thought, from the place where a man keeps the things he won’t say in any tongue his audience can translate. The words were low and rough and anguished and they tasted like the sound he had madeon the tarmac stairs: involuntary. Confession. A man’s mouth admitting what his mind still refused to.
She’d never ask him to translate. She didn’t need to. Some things were more honest in a language you couldn’t decode, because decoding them would have required reducing them to meaning, and what he was saying had nothing to do with meaning. It had to do with the shape of her name in his mouth, and the way his breath came apart against her lips, and the trembling of his hands as they slid from her face to the back of her neck and held her there. Held her, with a gentleness that made the shaking worse, as though the effort of not pulling her closer was more than he could sustain.
She pulled herself closer instead. Rose on her toes. Let her hands slide from his chest to his shoulders to the back of his neck, where his hair was short and warm and she could feel the tension in the cords of muscle beneath his skin. He made another sound, not Russian this time, not any language, and his forehead dropped to hers.
They stood there. Forehead to forehead. Breathing each other’s air. His hands on the back of her neck, hers on his. The dark cabin around them like a room with no walls. The engines humming a single, sustained note. The world outside the windows was black and featureless and irrelevant, and for one perfect, suspended moment, there was nothing in the universe except the two of them and the sound of breathing and the heat where their foreheads touched.
His phone rang.
The sound was obscene.
A sharp electronic trill that shattered the silence like glass, and the cabin that had been a sealed world, dark, warm, theirs, became a cabin again. An aircraft. A workplace. A space that belonged to a man who had a phone and a brother and a promise and a life outside the three inches of air between their mouths.
He pulled back. Not far, his forehead was still against hers, his hands still on her neck. But the pulling-back was there, in the tension that re-entered his body like a current switching on. She felt him return to himself. Felt the walls re-materialise around him, brick by brick, in the seconds between the first ring and the second.
He answered. One word. Wrecked.
“What.”
Not a question. A demand. The voice of a man who had been interrupted in the middle of the first honest moment of his life and wasn’t interested in pretending otherwise.
