He shakes his head. “I’m not nice.”
I turn my head on the pillow so I can look at him. He’s right there. Closer than I thought. Is he sneaking up on me when I’m not looking?
“I can’t tell you his name,” I warn.
“Why not?”
“Because you’ll do exactly what you said you’ll do. And then my whole life explodes.”
“Maybe that would be a good thing.”
“Maybe,” I concede. “But I don’t get to decide that tonight. I’m not exactly in a good decision-making space.”
He pauses, then eventually, sighs and nods. “Alright then. You don’t have to tell me. Not yet, at least.”
I wipe at my good cheek with the back of my hand. “You’re confusing the hell out of me, Matvei.”
“Understanding what’s going on is overrated, in my experience.”
I look down. His hands are still on his knees, though they’re twitching like he wants to put them elsewhere. His knuckles are scabbed over again, which means whatever he’s been doing in the last six weeks, it hasn’t been sitting still.
“Come here,” I beg.
He rolls the stool in until his thigh is against the mattress. I reach out and grab a handful of his shirt. He stands up off the stool and bends over me, one hand braced on the rail of the bed, the other on the pillow near my head. His face hangs above mine, breath feathering across my stitches.
“If you keep looking at me like that, I’m going to kiss you,” he whispers.
My breath goes thin. I hadn’t realized that’s how I was looking at him. But now that he’s named it, I can’t un-name it. I can feel it humming in the back of my throat, in the little gap between us, in how my fingers are still knotted in the front of his shirt like I don’t plan on letting go.
“Would that be so bad?” I ask.
He shrugs. “You tell me.”
His free hand comes up, and I think for a second he’s going to cup my jaw, but he doesn’t. He hovers an inch away from my skin, like he knows better than to put pressure on any part of my face right now.
His mouth lowers toward mine.
And I turn my head.
Just an inch. Just enough.
“You’re right,” I breathe. “I can’t.”
He freezes.
“My face,” I say quickly. “The stitches. It’ll—it’ll pull. It’ll hurt. The nurse said don’t.”
That’s a lie. The nurse said nothing of the sort. Plus, despite all the violence that seems to follow people like Matvei and me, I can tell that this kiss, if we did let it happen, would be so soft as to be practically nonexistent. A hummingbird kiss. There and gone again.
But if I kiss him, that’s it. Game over. No take-backs. There’s no version of my life that survives putting my mouth on his in this curtained little bay, with Raymond’s ring still on my finger and his bruise still on my face.
If I kiss Matvei, I will belong to Matvei, and Matvei will belong to me, and everything else will have to burn up to make room for it.
I’m not ready for the fire.
Not yet.
Matvei starts to straighten up.
