The words came out the way things came out when you had stopped managing them.
Viktor became very still.
“I loved you before I had the right to,” I said. “Before I had done the things that would make it honest to say. I loved you in the desert, and I loved you in the penthouse, and I loved you when I was sitting in a motel room six blocks from the Strip with a plan to disappear, and I couldn’t disappear because you were the part of the plan that didn’t work. The part where I got to the edge of gone and found you there.”
He looked at me for a long moment.
“Fear was the weakness,” he said. “Not love.”
“And you should know how much I love you, too,” he uttered, his voice low. “I spent thirty years believing love was the vulnerability and fear was the instrument of protection. If you don’t love it, you can’t lose it. If you control it, you can’t be surprised by it.” He held my gaze. “You were the thing I tried to control because I had already loved you past the point where control was available, and I couldn’t—” he stopped in the way he stopped when finding was required— “I couldn’t name it as love without naming it as the thing I was most afraid of losing. So I named it as everything else. Strategy. Protection. Containment.”
“And then you lost it anyway,” I said.
“And then I lost it anyway.” A pause. “And found out that the losing was less about love and more about fear. That what broke was not the love—the love remained—but the fear’smanagement of it.” He looked at me with the full weight of his attention, which I had learned to stand inside rather than be undone by. “I love you, Sofia. I have loved you from a corridor in which you should have been terrified and were furious instead. The fury was the first true thing I had seen in a long time, and I didn’t have a name for what it did to me, so I called it a problem and tried to solve it.”
“How is that working out for you?” I asked playfully.
The corner of his mouth moved.
“I have concluded,” he said, “that you are not a problem that can be solved.”
“Good,” I said. “I would hate to be solved.”
“However,” he started, bringing his arms around my waist, “there’s a particular problem to be solved.”
He pulled my lower body into his, giving me a feel of his erection through his trousers.
“I wonder who started that problem,” I remarked.
“Oh, you did. You started it with that extra kiss.”
He steered me towards the hallway.
“How do you intend to get it solved then?” I pressed as he opened our bedroom door.
“By satisfying you until I can no longer hold back. Then I’ll give you all I have, and you’ll take all of it. All night.”
Knowing my husband, it was a promise that would be fulfilled to the letter.
“Not bad.”
“You’ll be saying a lot more than that,” he said as he shut the door behind us.
Outside, Las Vegas was quiet.
Inside, it was about to be anything but, again.
And it was ours.
Epilogue
Sofia
Two years later, Las Vegas still smelled the same.
Smoke and cologne and money and underneath it all.
I walked through the Golovin Casino’s main floor on a Wednesday evening. I did not carry a tray.
