He pulled his fingers from my mouth slowly, wet to the second knuckle, and I sucked in air and let myself drop boneless into the mess we'd made.
For a second, neither of us moved. Then he found the bad hand in the wreck of the sheets, laced his fingers through the gap where my finger wasn't, and held on, and that—after all that filth—was the thing that put the sting behind my eyes.
"Yer goin' soft on me," I mumbled, half dead.
"Don't get used to it." But he didn't let go of the hand. He lay there a minute with his fingers in the gap, breathing, and then he said, to the ceiling, "By the way, you need to cancel your plans for Thursday.”
I frowned and pushed myself up to look at him. “Why? I’ve got nowhere to be except—”
“The courthouse,” he finished for me and rolled his head to the side to look at me. “Unless you expect me to marry my own shadow.”
I stared at him. "...Come again?"
"You heard me."
I sat up all the way and gave him a pinch on the arm.
“Ow! What the—”
"Aleksi Laskin, did ye just book us aweddingand tell me the way ye'd tell me the bins want putting out?"
He scowled and rubbed his arm where I’d pinched him. “Christ, thathurt!”
I rolled my eyes. “Oh, boo-hoo. Look at the big bad vor crying ‘cause his trophy wife weren’t invited to his own bloody wedding!”
“You are invited! What the fuck do you think I’m doing right now, huh?”
"Ye're shouting at me is what ye're doing."
"I'm—" He scrubbed a hand down his face and muttered something in Russian that didn't sound flattering. Then he reached past me into the nightstand drawer. He came back with a little box that he shoved at my chest like it was nothing. "Here. Christ. I'm no good at this part."
I took it and opened it. My hands weren't quite steady, and I hated that he could see it.
It was a plain band. No stone, no fuss, just heavy dark metal worn smooth, the kind of thing a man could work in and never have to take off. The bastard had thought about the fact that I worked with my hands and picked a ring I could wear at the bench.
"Left hand," he said, gruff. "If—I mean. If you're—"
"If I'm saying aye?"
"Yeah."
I took it out of the box and held my left hand out to him, the ruined one, and let him do it himself. He slid it onto the middle finger, and neither of us said a word about the finger that wasn't there.
I let him hold the hand a moment. Then I pulled it back, because if I let him keep holding it, I was going to do something soft, and we'd both have to live with it.
"Right," I said, and cleared my throat. "Well. Ye've gone and ruined my surprise, ye impatient sod, because I got ye something an' all."
"Fin—"
"DinnaeFinme. Stay there." I rolled out of the bed, found my pants, didn't bother with more, and padded out to the workroom on legs that weren't entirely cooperating after what he'd done to them. It was on the bench under a cloth where I'd kept it the last week, finished, waiting for the right day. Turned out that was today.
I brought it back wrapped in the cloth and stood at the foot of the bed and lost my nerve for a second, which wasn't like me.
"I didnae ken when to give it to ye," I said. "There wasnae ever a good time. And then ye went and proposed at me like a caveman, so." I shrugged. "Now's as good a time as any."
I pulled the cloth off.
It was his da's jacket, the yuft leather gone deep and living again where it had been dying. The cracks I'd spent weeks consolidating under the loupe had healed so fine you'd have to know they'd been there. I'd re-oiled the whole of it, fed the birch oil back into a hide that had been suffocating in plastic for years, feathered the color at the shoulders so the new work vanished into the old wear. It hung from my hands, supple, whole.
