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I tell myself I still love Yelena. I have told myself so for twenty years, until the telling itself became load bearing. But that old feeling is a knot of other things now, pride, failure, and a box I never opened, more monument than living love.

I can’t name what this thing with Delaney is. I only know she landed in my life through a single wrong digit, a stranger’s number saved by pure mistake, and that fate doesn’t hand out errors this generous by accident. Yelena taught me that holding too tight drives the good things straight out the door, and I’ve not forgotten the lesson. But looking at this woman asleep against my chest in a room held together with cardboard and thread, I find I’m willing to learn a gentler grip if that’s the price of keeping her. She feels like the one chance I’ve been given at a different kind of life, and God help me, I’ve already decided that I’m going to take it.

12

DELANEY

I nearly choke on my coffee when his filthy text lands.

Lev

How do you want my hands on you right now, solnyshko?

It comes from the number I once mistyped by a single digit, the wrong number that turned out to be his, saved in my phone now under a single word, Lev.

He’s been in meetings at his other companies since dawn, closing some deal worth more than I will earn in a lifetime, and apparently, he would rather send my heart up into my throat and heat pooling between my legs than pay attention to any of it.

I glance at the closed door, then quietly slide my phone under a stack of his invoices even though I’m completely alone in the office. My own giddy nervousness almost makes me laugh.

You are supposed to be in a meeting.

Lev

I can be in a meeting and still think about you.

His low voice reads itself into the words, and my ears go hot. I cannot believe the man who breaks noses and signs away entire buildings sends me something one filthy breath away from a love note.

Are you just using me to kill time?

I can’t get the smile off my face.

Lev

I’m giving myself a reason to end this meeting early.

Somewhere under my ribs the name he gasped into my spine that night, Lena, glows warm all over again. I remember exactly how it fell out of him, wrecked and helpless, when his control finally cracked, and I’ve decided, foolishly or not, that a man doesn’t look at a woman the way he looks at me and feel nothing at all.

Lev

You never answered my question.

I feel myself get pulled right back in.

I want you bending me over and lifting my skirt from behind.

I hit send before I can lose my nerve. My face is on fire and I don’t care.

It’s not the kind of filthy thing I ever say. Picturing him reading it at a long conference table full of serious men sends a hot thrill straight through me.

Lev

And then what?

And then you fuck me until I’m sorry I wore anything under it.

My fingertips tingle. He keeps dragging some bolder, filthier version of me up to the surface.

Lev