35
Polina
With seven hours left before Lev walks into hell, I give up on sleep.
I get up before I can talk myself out of it.
The west wing is quiet at this hour. One guard nods when I pass the junction, and I keep walking before he can ask why I’m wandering hallways in the middle of the night with bare feet. I have an answer, and it is humiliating, so I move faster.
Lev opens the door before I knock. He’s already dressed in dark trousers, a dark shirt, and a tactical jacket. He looks at me standing in the corridor in my sleep shorts, and he drags in a long breath.
“After everything, were you really going to leave in the morning with things like this between us?” I ask.
He looks around before he steps back and opens the door wider. I go in because I have already made my worst decision of the night by coming here.
Maps are scattered all over the table next to a glass he hasn’t touched. He has been sitting in this room alone, waiting for morning, and the sight of it pulls something loose in my chest that I can’t afford to lose right now.
“I thought you came to say goodbye,” he comments.
“I came because I couldn’t stay away.” I get it out before I can dress it in something more dignified. “And for the record, I hate that.”
He crosses the room to me, and I hold my ground because I always hold my ground, but my pulse hammers with every step. When he stops close enough that I have to tip my chin up, his eyes move over my face with the attention that has always made me feel both entirely seen and completely undone.
“You should go back to your room,” he tells me.
He doesn’t move away. Neither do I.
The space between us is nothing. I can feel his body heat through my sweater, and we both stand here doing the very adult thing of pretending we can’t. His eyes drop to my mouth for exactly one second before they come back up.
The control he usually carries dissolves right in front of me, and what replaces it is something I’ve never seen from him before. Not want alone, though that’s there, but something closer to desperation. Like he’s out of time and fully aware of it.
“I wrote you a letter tonight.” He pauses once, then pushes through it. “In case I don’t come back.”
“Don’t,” I snap.
“There are things in it I should have said months ago.” He takes one more step, and now nothing separates us but the decision neither of us has made yet.
“Say them now,” I tell him. “To my face.”
He looks at me for one long, destructive moment. Then his hand finds the back of my neck, and he walks me backward against the wall with his forehead dropping to mine. His breath hits my mouth, and I relish in how familiar it feels.
“I know I don’t deserve this,” he mumbles. “I know what I did. I’m not asking you to forget it.”
“Then what are you asking?”
“Nothing.” He slides his thumb along my nape, and my knees lose the structural integrity I was counting on. “I’m not asking for a single thing.”
He kisses me then, the way a man does when he’s run out of reasons not to and time has finally called his bluff. Both of his hands cup my face, and his full weight flattens my back against the wall. I grab his jacket and pull him in, and the sound he makes against my mouth is low and broken and nothing like any version of him I’ve seen hold himself together in front of men who wanted him dead.
He swivels us and walks me toward the bed without losing contact with my mouth. When the backs of my knees find the mattress, he steps back. He lifts my sweater over my head slowly, nowhere near teasing tonight, paying attention to every inch of me like he needs to memorize all of it before morning comes and takes this from him.
He unhooks my bra and slides my sleep shorts and underwear down in one move before he steps back and draws one long, unsteady breath through his nose.
“You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” he declares, and it doesn’t sound like a line. It sounds like relief.
I reach for his jacket and push it off. He lets me work through his shirt buttons while he holds eye contact, motionless except for the muscle working in his throat and the way his hands keep finding my waist like he can’t stop them. Then he catches my face and kisses me again, slower this time, and his fingers thread into my hair while I finish with the buttons and push the fabric off his shoulders.
Then he sinks to his knees.
