Nick
She falls asleep on my chest.
It happens in degrees. Her breathing slows first, then her fingers loosen where they were curled against my ribs, and then her weight settles into me the way water settles into a glass. I don't move. My arm is going to be dead inside ten minutes and I don't care. I've had her in my arms for less than an hour and I'm already learning that I don’t want to let her go.
I look at the ceiling above us.
It's water-stained in one corner. The paint is peeling near the light fixture. The light fixture itself is a bare bulb. The walls are bare, but at least look like they’ve had a fresh coat of paint in the last decade or so.
I shouldn’t be here.
I think it clearly, because it's true. My father is fading away sixteen miles east of this apartment, and my uncle is at his bedside smiling, and I don't know which morning I will wake up to the call that changes everything. When it comes, Viktor will move. I don't know how. I only know that he has been waiting a long time and that waiting men always have a first step ready. My father, in the last clear voice he had, told me Viktor would come for the thing I love. I didn’t entirely believe, when he said it, that I had a thing that I love.
But I know now because she is asleep on my chest.
I reach for the blanket with my free hand and pull it up over her shoulders, because the window has no curtain and the fire escape is leaking cold air through the glass.
She makes a small sound against my chest.
It's not a word. It's a sleeping sound, the kind a person makes when they're warm and safe and their body has decided to trust the surface it's on. I feel it in the flat of my sternum. I feel something else there too. The thing that began to unfurl the day I woke to her dressing the wound on my arm.
I close my eyes.
I don't sleep. I'm not going to sleep in her bed the first night she has let me into it, not unless she asks me to. I rest my hand on the back of her head and stroke her hair with my fingers. I listen to her breathing change into the long slow pattern of real sleep, and I let myself have this. An hour. Maybe two. Whatever I'm given before something in the world remembers where I am and comes to collect me.
Time passes.
I don't know how much. The lamp on the floor is the only light in the room, and it doesn't change. My arm goes numb and I shift her, carefully, so that her head is on my shoulder instead of my chest and my arm has some blood flow again. She doesn't wake up. Her mouth is a little open. Her lips still swollen from our kisses.
She stirs.
Her eyes open slowly. She looks at me for a moment as if she's checking that I'm still the same man she fell asleep on, and then her mouth softens and she lays her palm flat against my chest.
"Hi," she says.
"Hi."
"How long was I out?" she asks, stretching her body in a way that wakes up ever nerve ending in mine.
"Not long."
She props herself up on one elbow and looks down at me. Her hair is a mess. The blanket slides off one shoulder and she doesn't grab for it.
"You stayed," she says.
"I stayed," I repeat, stroking my thumb over her bottom lip.
"You could have left,” she offers, the blush in her cheeks telling me she’s glad I didn’t.
"I didn't want to."
She lowers her head and presses her mouth to the side of my throat. It's such a small thing. It's such a careful, thought-out, deliberate thing, and I feel it all the way down my spine. My hand comes up to the back of her neck without any decision on my part.
She lifts her head. Her eyes are clear now. Whatever sleep took out of her, it put back something else, and she's looking at me with a steadiness I’ve only seen on her in the sedan and on the sidewalk, both times when she was making a decision and meant it.
"I want more," she says, stroking her fingertips over my chest while I try to control my pulse rate and the way my cock reacts to seeing her like this. Still naked, flushed, and wanting.
"You're sure?" I want to give her the world, I realize. And I’m not sure I can give it to her piece by piece in a way that she would feel comfortable accepting. I want to snatch it all up and lay it at her feet.
