Her father was the quietest Kozlov, more interested in books than territory. Her mother cooked with the radio on and sang off-key to songs that were already twenty years old when Polina was born. She describes a house that was always warm because her father insisted on a fire in the hearth, no matter the time of year. Her voice stays even all the way through, the way it does when someone has told a story so many times that the telling has become its own armor. It dips near the end just once. She clearsher throat and picks her wine back up, covering the misstep so expertly that it cracks my heart.
She shouldn’t have to cover up her vulnerable side with me, but given the topic, I’m almost grateful she has.
“I became a surgeon because I needed to be the one who decides,” she explains. “Whether someone lives. I needed to be on the right side of that equation for once.”
I look across the fire at this woman who rebuilt herself from something that should have finished her, and I make a choice I know I’ll spend years answering for.
I say nothing.
It’s not that I don’t have the words. I have dates, names, and a complete account of what my father ordered and why, sitting in a file I’ve looked at only once since I found it. I remain silent because the truth isn’t a single, clean thing. It comes with three others attached: The Kozlov side might have been complicit, that I’m the son of the man who killed her parents, and that I spent two years watching her while carrying that knowledge.
There’s no version of that confession that doesn’t blow everything apart.
I tell myself I’m protecting her. That part is true. The full truth would do real damage to her relationship with Dmitri, to the stability she’s spent years building, and to whatever this is between us that I’m not willing to lose. But underneath all that is something smaller and harder to defend: I don’t want to watch her face change when she looks at me. She’s never looked at me like a weapon or a liability or a thing to manage. I’ve been looked at that way my entire life by everyone who was supposed to matter, and I’m not ready to add her to that list.
The lie settles low in my gut and lodges there.
I refill both our glasses, and she accepts hers without looking up. I suspect she’s still somewhere inside the memory, and I let her stay there. She’ll come back when she’s ready.
And she does, albeit slowly. She sets her glass on the arm of the chair and looks at me, harder this time. I hold eye contact and give her nothing that looks like pity, because she’d hate that more than silence, and I know her well enough now to understand the difference.
“You’re not going to say anything?” she asks.
“What would you like me to say?”
She draws in a deep, shaky breath. “Nothing, probably. That’s why I told you. I knew you wouldn’t offer platitudes.”
“Then nothing is what you get.”
She cocks her head and studies me, then nods once, like that answer passed some secret test.
The tension she’s carried since she started talking about her parents drains from her. Her shoulders drop, and she exhales. In a matter of seconds, she stops looking like a woman bracing for impact. She reaches over and sets her hand on my knee, not looking at me, and I cover it with mine, and we stay like that until the fire starts to go down.
She uncurls from her chair and crosses to me, and I reach up, catch her hand, and pull her onto my lap. She settles against me, and I feel the long breath that comes out of her, like she’s been carrying something since before dinner and is only now setting it down. I rake one hand through her hair, and she tips her chin up to look at me, and from this close, I can see how she’s looking atme. She needs a distraction from the past, and I’m already hard just thinking about giving it to her.
Fuck. I’m a piece of shit.
I kiss her anyway, and she moans against my mouth as she turns toward me and slips her fingers into my collar. I pull her closer until she’s straddling me, and she rolls her hips against me. I jut my hips up, grinding my cock against her core so she can feel what she’s doing to me, and her cheeks go bright pink.
“You have terrible timing,” she complains against my mouth.
“How so?”
“I was being emotional. You’re not supposed to be attractive right now.”
I settle both hands on her hips and hold her still before she finishes me before we’ve even started. “I can wait.”
“Don’t.” She pulls my mouth back to hers.
She reaches between us and untucks my shirt, and I slide my hands up under the back of the sweater she borrowed from me. Her skin is scorching hot, and I have wanted to put my hands on her all evening. She arches into it, and I take that as permission to keep going.
Polina presses her mouth to my throat, grazing my pulse point with her teeth, and I groan against her skin as I glide my hands up her back and pull her flush against me.
Piece by piece, we pull each other apart with the fire still burning low in front of us and the countryside holding its dark outside the windows, and I think about what she said about needing tobe on the right side of something, so I hold onto her tighter than necessary. She lets me. That might be the best part.
Later, when she’s asleep against my chest and the fire’s gone to coals, I stare at the ceiling and run the same account I’ve been running for two years.
The truth would free her. It would also destroy her. And it would end this the moment it left my mouth.
I’ve never wanted to keep anything the way I want to keep this. Not territory. Not standing. Not the approval of a man who’s never offered it freely. None of it comes close to the weight of her against my chest and the way she says my name.
I close my eyes, and the boulder of guilt stays where it is.
