Page 14 of Hold On to Me
He said her name.
Once. Low. “Ciana.”
Like it cost him something. Like saying it was the first honest thing he’d done in months, and he wasn’t sure he could afford it. The way her father’s name had never sounded in anyone’s mouth: weighted, full, a word that meant more than its syllables. He said her name as though it were a confession he hadn’t meant to make, pulled from him by the proximity and the snow and the grey light and the fact that he had spent the morning telling her about his dead father and she hadn’t flinched.
She didn’t breathe. She didn’t move. She stood with her back to the counter and his breath on her mouth and his name for her still hanging in the air between them and she waited for the thing that was about to happen to happen.
He stepped back.
One step. Then another. The space between them re-opened like a wound, and the air where his breath had been went cold, and he turned and walked to the cockpit without a word and the door closed behind him and she was alone in the galley with her hands on the counter and her lungs remembering how to work.
She gripped the edge. Counted to ten.
She lost count at four.
Four. Because four was the number of seconds his breath had been on her mouth, and after four her brain had stopped tracking numbers and started tracking something else entirely: the angle of his jaw, the heat of him, the almost-unbearable nearness of a man who wanted her and wouldn’t let himself have her and had said her name like it was the last word he’d ever say.
She stood in the galley. The cafetière was still wet in the sink. The snow was still falling. And the ghost of her name in his voice was still in the room, and she knew, the way she knew the exits, the way she knew the distance between one heartbeat and the next, that she’d hear it in that voice for the rest of her life.
The snow cleared at four. Geneva approach reopened. The captain filed their new routing with the subdued relief of a man who had spent sixteen hours trapped in a cockpit that smelled like coffee and regret, and by five they were wheels-up over the Alps, climbing through a sky that had been washed clean by the storm.
Istanbul. The routing had been amended. Whatever business Andrei had in Monaco had been deferred, and the jet was now headed east instead of south. He hadn’t explained why. She hadn’t asked. They had exchanged exactly seven words since the galley, “Tea?” and “Please” and “Milk?” and “No” and “Thank you,” and each word had been a careful brick in a wall they were both pretending to rebuild because the alternative was admitting that it was already down.
They landed in the dark. Istanbul at night was a scatter of gold light across black water, the minarets lit against the sky like punctuation marks in a sentence she couldn’t read. A car took her to a hotel near the Bosphorus, not extravagant, but good. A room on the third floor with a balcony she didn’t step onto and a bed she sat on without undressing and a silence that was nothing like the silence on the jet.
She called Raven.
“We’re in Istanbul.”
“Of course you are. Normal people go to Geneva and come home. You go to Geneva and end up in a different continent. How was the snowstorm?”
“We talked.”
A pause. “You talked.”
“He told me about his family. I told him about mine.”
“Ciana Reyes. The woman who once made me play twenty questions for three months before she’d tell me her middle name. You told a Bratva prince about your father?”
“Yes.”
“And was there, anything else?”
Ciana thought about the galley. The breath. The name. The four seconds she had stopped counting. “No,” she said. “Nothing happened.”
“Liar. But I’ll let you’ve this one. Text me tomorrow.”
“Goodnight, Raven.”
“Goodnight, you impossible woman. And Ci?”
“Yeah?”
“Whatever didn’t happen, I hope it happens again soon.”
She hung up. Sat on the edge of the bed. The Bosphorus was a dark ribbon beyond her window, and the lights of the Asian shore flickered like something you could reach for but never touch.
A sound at the door. Not a knock, quieter. The soft friction of paper against carpet.
