I looked at us in the fogged mirror. The shape of him behind me. The shape of me in his shirt. My eyes met my own eyes in the glass.
I am his. And I said yes with all of me.
7
DANIIL
Icame back into my body before she did.
The light coming in through her cheap white curtains was a thin amber, the kind of light that did not belong to a city, the kind of light that belonged to a girl who slept with her windows facing the wrong way and did not mind because she was a person who liked to be woken up gently. Her room smelled the way it had smelled when I had walked into it last night, except now it also smelled like me. That was not a thing I let myself think about for long. I let myself think about it for one breath. I did not name the breath.
She was on her side, facing me, hair a tangle she had not bothered with after the shower, one hand tucked under her cheek the way a child sleeps. The soft white shirt of mine she had put on at the end of last night had ridden up past her hip in her sleep, and the line of her was a line I had spent a portion of my life trying not to look at and had spent the rest of last night looking at and was now looking at again.
Mine.
I propped on my elbow and watched her sleep for exactly the length of one slow breath that I did not let myself name, andthen I leaned in and I put my mouth at the side of her neck. Soft. The kind of kiss that did not ask for anything. Then again, lower, where her hair started, where her shoulder began. I breathed her in. She had a smell that lived under the soap and the shampoo, and it was the smell of her, and I had walked around for two months not knowing it and now I knew it and I would not be able to forget it.
She stirred. She did not open her eyes.
"First you ruin me last night," she said into her pillow. "Now you ruin my sleep."
"Your mouth is dangerous."
"Says the bratva."
"This bratva is out of his mind for you."
She smiled against the pillow. It was a slow smile, the kind that came up out of a person who was warm and sore and not regretful.
"And I am... hungry," she said. "Feed me."
I laughed the two notes of it. It came out of me before I had a chance to be careful with it. It was my mother's laugh. I let it go. I got out of the bed.
She made a small noise of protest when my weight left the mattress, and I bent down and pulled the sheet up around her again, and she rolled onto her back and stretched, one long line from her wrists to her toes, and I had to look away from her on purpose, because what I had said about her mouth was true and what she had said about being hungry was true, and one of the two had to wait.
I went to the kitchen.
I came back two seconds later because I had remembered her floor.
"Up," I said.
She blinked at me from the pillow. "What?"
"Floor is cold. You are not putting your feet on it."
"I have socks."
"You are not putting your feet on it."
She lifted her arms in the air. She did it without thinking about it, the way a small girl lifts her arms when she has decided that an adult is going to handle a thing for her, and the inside of my chest did something I did not have a word for.
I picked her up in the sheet. The sheet was warm from her. I carried her the few steps from the bed to the kitchen and put her down in one of the two chairs at her small kitchen table, careful, like she was a thing I had been given and was responsible for not breaking.
"Sit. I am the one who cooks today."
"Mm," she said, sleep still in it.
I moved around her tiny kitchen the way a man moves who has been in a kitchen long enough to know the cabinets. The cabinet above the sink had the plates. The drawer to the left of the stove had the wooden spoon. The fridge had eggs on the second shelf and butter in the door and the heel of a loaf of bread on the counter under the cloth she covered her bread with, and on the door of the fridge in a small glass jar she kept the kimchi she made herself in batches, the one she ate out of with a spoon when she thought no one was watching. I had watched her. She did not know.
