Page 16 of Rookie Mistake
"Right," he says. "So we're doing this."
"You said that this morning."
"I'm saying it again because you spent eight hours acting like the elevator happened to someone else, and I am done pretending that your version of processing is healthy."
"My version of processing is my concern."
"It became my concern when you kissed me."
He walks past me into the apartment. The walking-past is the Mercer method: forward, at speed, without waiting for the space to be offered. The space is taken. The taking is the chaos and the chaos does not respect the control and the not-respecting is the siege.
"You kissed me," he says. "Not a peck. Not an accident. You braced your hand against a mirror and you put your mouth on mine and your fingers were in my hair and your breathing was not controlled and your body was not controlled and for one minute in that elevator you were not performing the discipline and you were not managing the proximity and you were not protecting yourself from whatever happened to you that made you build this." He gestures at the apartment. The clean apartment. The controlled apartment. The fortress.
"And then you woke up and put it all back. The coffee for one. The silence. The not-looking. Like the kiss was a malfunction and the control is the fix and I am the thing being managed."
My jaw is tight. The tightness is the control's physical manifestation. The tightness is the last line.
"Be careful," I say.
"With what?"
"With me."
"I'm a little done with that, actually. I've been careful with you for five days. I've been patient. I've been the guy who says goodnight instead of pushing. I gave you last night. I walked to the guest room after you kissed me like the building was on fire and I gave you the night because you needed it. I'm not giving you another one."
"You do not understand what you are asking."
"Then tell me."
"I am telling you that if I touch you the way I want to, I will not stop at one kiss."
For one stupid second I hear a different voice, three years old and smiling while it cuts: too intense, man. Too much. The memory is enough to make my hand curl.
The sentence lands in the kitchen like a detonation. The sentence is not flirtation. The sentence is a confession delivered with the flat, Russian-accented precision of a man who has calculated the trajectory of his own desire and found it unmanageable.
The kitchen is quiet. Not the safe quiet. The loaded quiet. Two walls looking at each other across four feet of hardwood, and the four feet are the neutral zone, and the neutral zone is failing.
"That's exactly the problem," I say. "That is exactly the problem. I do not do this. I do not lose the control. The last time I lost the control, the person I lost it with used the losing against me and the using was..." I stop. The sentence has a destination I have not traveled to out loud. The destination is Alexei. The destination is the eight months and the access and the betrayal. "The using was enough to rebuild every wall. And the walls have held for three years. And you have been in my building for five days."
"And they're cracking," he says.
"Yes."
"Good."
"It is not good."
"It is good because the walls are not protecting you. The walls are keeping you in a clean apartment drinking coffee alone at six in the morning and cleaning things that are already clean and not looking at me during practice because looking at me would mean the elevator was real and the elevator was real, Nikolai. The elevator was the realest thing that's happened in this building since I got here."
He steps forward. He fists the front of my T-shirt. The fisting is the chaos. The chaos takes the fabric and the fabric is the control and the control is being gripped by a twenty-two-year-old with brown eyes and no grin and the absolute, unwavering certainty of a person who has decided that the fortress is coming down and that the coming-down is not destruction but rescue.
"Then stop me," he says.
I do not stop him.
I kiss him hard enough to drive him back into the counter.
ELI
