Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 73372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
Silence. Alexei’s silences are not empty. They are full of calculations I will never be privy to, run on hardware I don’t understand.
“Are you certain?” he asks.
“I’m always certain.”
Another silence. Longer than the first.
That’s what concerns me.
The line goes dead. Alexei doesn’t do goodbyes.
I set the phone down. I stare at it. I stare at the harbour. I stare at the glass in my hand and the ice that has melted and the whisky that has diluted and I think about a girl from Idaho who buttoned her cardigan to her throat and told me she kissed me on a balcony because she wanted to and not because it was strategy, and I think about the tremble in her voice on the word truth, and I think about Alexei’s silence, which was not agreement.
That’s what concerns me.
I set the glass down. I stand. I go to the window.
If she’s lying, I’ll prove it. I’ll go to her apartment. I’ll touch her. I’ll take her to bed. Because a woman who is performing innocence will perform it to the end, and a woman who is telling the truth—
I don’t finish the thought. I pick up my keys.
Tonight.
Chapter 8
ANTON
Her door is unlocked.
I don’t know what that means. In my world, an unlocked door is an invitation or a trap, and I’ve spent years learning to distinguish between the two, and tonight I cannot tell the difference and I’m standing in her corridor with my keys in my hand and my thesis burning in my throat and her door is unlocked.
I knock anyway. Because even the version of me that has come here to prove something isn’t the version that walks into a woman’s apartment without permission.
She opens it.
She’s been crying. I can see it in the swelling around her eyes and the rawness at the bridge of her nose and her hair loose and tangled, pulled free from whatever she was wearing it in when she left my penthouse, and she is standing in her doorway in a t-shirt and bare feet and she is wrecked and she is beautiful and I’m the reason for both.
“Anton.”
Not a question. Not a welcome. Just my name, spoken by a woman who has run out of everything except the ability to say it, and the sound of it in her voice does something to my ribs that I push aside because I’m here to prove a thesis and the thesis requires me to not feel anything.
“Can I come in?”
She should say no. Every version of this that I’ve constructed on the drive over ends with her saying no, because a woman who is performing innocence would close the door and regroup and come back stronger, and a woman who is telling the truth would—
She steps aside.
I walk in. The apartment is small. Clean. A kitchen counter with a single coffee cup, unwashed. A bookshelf with mystery novels, spines cracked. A cardigan draped over a chair. Everything in this apartment is real and lived-in and unglamorous and it looks exactly like a girl from Idaho who took a job at a law firm because her aunt offered it, and I push that thought aside too.
She closes the door behind me. She doesn’t lock it.
“Why are you here?”
“Because I can’t stop thinking about you.”
True. Ruinously, inconveniently true. The thesis is that this is strategy. The reality is that I drove here with my hands white on the steering wheel because the taste of her forehead is still on my lips and the tremble in her voice when she said I am telling you the truth is playing on a loop in my skull and Alexei’s silence is louder than every certainty I’ve ever held.
She stands with her back against the door and her arms crossed over her chest and her bare feet on the cold tile and she is young and she has been crying and she is looking at me with eyes that hold no performance, no strategy, no game. Just exhaustion. And underneath the exhaustion, the thing I came here to disprove: want.
She still wants me.
After everything. After the proposition and the rejection and the forehead kiss and the walk home in the dark. She still wants me and she can’t hide it, not tonight, not with her defences stripped and her hair loose and her eyes swollen, and I cross the apartment and I take her face in my hands and I kiss her.
She kisses me back.
Not immediately. There is a breath where her mouth is still under mine and her hands are at her sides and I think she is going to push me away and I deserve to be pushed away and then her hands come up and they find my hair and she pulls me closer and the sound she makes against my mouth isn’t performance. I have heard performance. Performance is calibrated. This sound is broken and raw and comes from somewhere she doesn’t have words for, and my hands tighten on her face and I’m lost.