“Then why did you—” She stops, swallows. “Why keep me if you knew it might end like this?”
“Letting you go was impossible.” [15]I bring her hand to my lips, press a kiss to her knuckles. “I’m selfish. Obsessed. Probably incapable of healthy love. But you’re mine. And I’m yours, whether you want me or not.”
***
The house outside the city is smaller than the Moscow estate. Isolated. Surrounded by forest on three sides, the only access a private road with security checkpoints.
Safe. Secure, and far too intimate for the tension between us.
Elena explores the space with her usual careful attention. Cataloging exits, windows, patterns. Even now, even pregnant and exhausted, she’s looking for vulnerabilities.
I watch her from the doorway, trying to decide if that survival instinct is admirable or heartbreaking. Probably both.
“There’s only one bedroom,” she says, turning to face me.
“Yes.”
“You planned this.”
“No, but I’m not complaining about the circumstances either.” I move into the room slowly. “We can make it work. I’ll take the couch if you prefer.”
“Don’t.” She shakes her head. “Don’t offer me distance you don’t want to give. I’m tired of the pretense.”
“Then what do you want?”
“I want—” She breathes out shakily. “I want honesty. Even if it’s ugly. Even if it’s possessive and unhealthy and everything I should run from. Just honesty.”
I close the distance between us. Stop when I’m close enough to touch but don’t yet.
“Honest? I’m obsessed with you. I think about you constantly. Where you are, what you’re doing, if you’re safe. I can’t sleep properly when you’re curled away from me on the opposite side of the bed. I watch you unconsciously touch your stomach and want to touch it too, want to feel proof that our child is real and growing. The distance of the past three weeks has been torture. I’m not patient enough to keep giving you space I don’t want to give.”
Her breathing has gone shallow.
“That’s honest,” I continue. “That’s what I want. You. Not compliance. Not polite distance. Just you, choosing me or fighting me or anything that’s real instead of this careful nothing.”
“What if I don’t know how to choose you?”
“Then choose this moment. Just this one. We’ll figure out the rest as it comes.”
I back her gently against the wall, hands coming up to brace on either side of her shoulders. Not trapping. Just surrounding. My forehead rests against hers, breathing her in.
“You say you want control,” she whispers. “This feels like begging.”
“It is begging.” I don’t deny it. “If it were just control, I’d take. I wouldn’t be standing here asking. Hoping. Needing you to choose this.”
Her hands come up to rest on my chest, feeling my heartbeat. “I hate how much I want to choose it.”
“Then choose it anyway.”
My hands slide down from the wall to her waist, pulling her closer. She comes willingly, hands moving to my shoulders, then my hair.
I touch her like I’m memorizing her all over again. Slower than before, more reverent, like this moment is binding in ways all the others weren’t.
This is the moment she stops choosing distance. The moment I stop pretending this is strategy or possession or anything other than what it actually is.
I pull back just enough to look at her. “Are you choosing this? Me? Right now, in this moment?”
“Yes,” she breathes. “I’m choosing this. You. Right now.”
