The kiss is slow at first, deliberate, his mouth warm against mine—and then something shifts, the way it always does with him, from patience into want, and I stop cataloguing the difference and just follow it. He tastes of coffee and something warmer underneath.
He picks me up and carries me to the couch in the corner, and the urgency between us does the rest—his hands sure and careful, mine less so, both of us stripping away the distance we’ve been maintaining today. When his hands move over me there’s nothing performative about it. No theatre. Just the particular attention of someone who has wanted this and waited and is no longer doing either.
I have missed this. Not the heat of it—though God, yes, that too—but the specific quality of being known. The way he reads my body without asking. The way four years collapsed the moment he touched me and somehow it felt like no time at all, like my body had simply been waiting with more patience than I’d given it credit for.
His mouth finds my throat and I exhale against his hair and outside the window the city carries on, indifferent anddistant, and in here there is nothing but this—his hands, his weight, the way he says my name like it means something.
It always meant something.
He keeps the pace slow, deliberate, like he has something to prove that has nothing to do with urgency. I press back against him and feel him exhale—that small, undone sound he makes when his control slips—and something in me responds to that more than anything else. Not the pleasure, though that’s considerable. The fact that I do this to him. That after everything, after four years and all the distance and all the grief, it’s still this between us.
I feel him everywhere. Not just where we’re joined but outward from it—warmth spreading to my chest, my fingertips, the backs of my knees. My body has been waiting a long time to remember this, and it’s remembering now with considerable enthusiasm.
“Nikolai—”
“Lapochka moya. I have you.” Low, certain, right against my ear.
He does. He always has, and that’s the thing I’ve been most afraid to look at directly.
When the pleasure crests it takes everything with it—thought, breath, the careful architecture of self-possession I’ve been maintaining for days. I come apart quietly, face pressed into the cushion, his hands steady on my hips through all of it.
He follows a moment later, his forehead dropping to my shoulder, a sound leaving him that he’d never make anywhere else.
We stay tangled together afterward, his heartbeat gradually finding its way back to something ordinary beneath my cheek. The office is dark and quiet. Outside, the city hums its low indifferent note.
He tucks the hair back from my face, his touch unhurried now, and holds me against his chest.
“I love you.” His voice is low, rough at the edges. “I have for a long time.”
I close my eyes.
I’ve known it. Some part of me has known it and refused to let it land because landing it made it real, and real things can be taken away. But it’s already real. It’s been real since before Hannah was born, since before he disappeared, since before I spent four years learning to live around the shape of him.
I turn my face into his chest.
“I love you too,” I say. “I’ve been terrible at it. But I do.”
His arms tighten around me.
Neither of us says anything after that.
The quiet holds, warm and complete.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Nikolai
She’s tracing something on my chest, her finger moving without purpose, and I’m watching it when she stops.
“What is it?” I ask.
She takes a breath. Holds it for a moment. Then lets it go.
“Lauren.”
“Claire.” She says it quietly, like she’s been holding it at the back of her teeth for hours. “She’s been acting strange.”
The tiredness leaves my body in an instant. I sit up straighter, the warmth of the last hour receding, something colder and more familiar taking its place. “Define strange.”
