“Aren’t you scared?” she asks.
A sound of disbelief in his throat. “Of course, I’m scared. I’m terrified. I hate all of this—uncertainty, swallowing pride, all this stupid hesitancy—but I still want you. I still want you, and I want to believe forgiveness is a real thing, that I can be the type of person who forgives, and doesn’t lose something, in that.”
“Why did you—I mean, not to say you’ve forgiven me, but—”
“Because I’m selfish,” he says. “I’m selfish. Like I said, I want this. I still want this.”
“Me, too,” she whispers. “Me, too, and that’s—I don’t mean to make this about me, I’m sorry, but—just to say, it frightens me, how much I want this. I’m just... I’m so scared to lose something again. After my parents... I—I’m terrified. Scared, too, I think, to live past the loss of them—I feelguilty even saying that. Those are myparents, and I’m saying what? That I found happiness that makes me forget them? I just—I don’t know.”
“Do you plan never to be happy?” he asks.
“No, but—I’m scared of forgetting. Losing them, again.”
He considers what she’s said. “I don’t think it’s a matter of forgetting,” he says. “I think that’s what you’re supposed to build your life on. The give-and-take of loss and happiness, over and over.”
“Would you say you’re happy?”
“Not recently, no. But before, yes. I was happy, with you. That honestly made me angry, for a while there.”
“Angry?” she asks, confused. “Do you mean, after I—after I left?”
“No, before that. Right in the middle of everything. The night we went to dinner, after Greene’s party.”
A look, while they’d waited in the rain after dinner: wet pavement, rush of traffic, gleam of lights, heat of alcohol.What?she’d asked.What are you looking at?Tension in his jaw, looking away.Nothing, he’d said.
Now, Aleksandr sighs.
“I never apologized,” he says. “For that night.”
“Oh. No, you don’t—you don’t need to—”
“Let me,” he says. “Let me, that was... It was too far, that time. That’s when I realized what this was between us—or rather, what it was shaping into, what I wanted it to be. I didn’t like that. I didn’t like that at all—I hated it, and I’m sorry for that. For hurting you with it, rather than—speaking to you, I suppose.”
“It’s okay,” she says, small voice. “I understand. And it’s okay. The sex, like that, it was what I wanted—you can be rough with me, you know that. I want that. It’s the... not talking to me, that hurt me, that confused me. The not explaining. But I... I did the same thing, if not worse.”
Because there was another glance in the rain, a different night:I didn’t see myself marrying her.
Different words, similar reactions, push and pull.
“When you have sex with other people—is it like that?” she asks. “I don’t mean just that night, I mean—all of this, what we’re... what we’re like.”
“No. No, it’s not.”
She exhales a breath that’s been waiting, silent and heavy, in her.
“And for you,” Aleksandr asks, “is it like that, with others?”
“No,” she whispers. “No, it’s never been like this with anyone else.”
Lili glances at their hands again. She traces his lifeline, the warmth of his palm. Left hand, bare ring finger.
“How do I... ” It’s so unbelievably selfish, what she’s about to say. “How do I trust that you won’t do that to me? Sleep with someone else, as some way to punish me?”
He stiffens. “I’ve fucked enough people these few weeks to last several years.”
Lili flinches, instinctive. Aleksandr’s gaze immediately softens.
“Sorry,” he says, “I’m sorry, that wasn’t—”
