Page 21 of The Pakhan's Secret Babies
“I appreciate you saying that,” I say. “I do. But my answer hasn’t changed.”
“Your circumstances have.”
“My answer hasn’t.”
He looks at me for a long moment. The warmth in his expression doesn’t go anywhere. That is somehow worse than if it did. “I’m not going anywhere, Elena. When you’re ready to have a real conversation, I’ll be here.”
I stand up. “I have to get back.”
He stands too, and walks me out of the wine bar and onto 54th Street and falls into step beside me.
The evening air is cold, the building is forty meters ahead, and he is still talking, still easy, still warm, still saying nothing that could be called pressure if you wrote it down, but adding up to something that presses from every side regardless.
I am looking at the building entrance and calculating how many steps it will take before I can reasonably say goodbye when I hear my name.
“Elena.”
I turn.
Roman is coming out of the building entrance ahead of us, jacket over one arm, keys in his hand, and he sees me, and he sees Aleksei beside me, and he stops walking, and everything about the way he stops communicates that he has already assessed the situation and drawn his conclusions.
“Mr. Petrov.” I hear my own voice come out steady. “I was just heading back up. I forgot my?—”
“I’ll walk with you,” he says.
It is not a suggestion.
Aleksei looks at Roman, and Roman looks back at him with no expression at all, which is considerably more effective.
“We were in the middle of a conversation,” Aleksei says. Pleasantly.
“Were you.” Roman looks at me. “Were you in the middle of a conversation?”
I look at Aleksei. “I’ll call you,” I say, which means I will not call him, and we both know it.
Aleksei holds it for one more second. Then he smiles, the full, warm smile, and says, “Of course,” and turns and walks away. I watch him go and breathe for the first time in a while.
Roman is still standing next to me.
“Who is he?” he says.
“No one important.”
He looks at me in a way that means he does not believe that and has decided not to press it tonight.
We walk back into the building side by side, and neither of us speaks. The lobby is quiet at this hour, the evening staff, a security guard who nods at Roman without making eye contact with me. Roman presses the button for his floor, and the elevator arrives, and we get in, and the doors close.
The silence in that elevator is the loudest thing I have experienced in recent memory.
He is not looking at me. He’s looking at the numbers above the door, his jacket still over his arm, his jaw set. I’m aware of every inch of space between us and of the specific effort it is taking to maintain it.
Then he looks at me, and the air catches fire. One second, we are still pretending this is professional. Next, my back hits the mirrored wall, and his mouth crashes down on mine.
I kiss him back like I’m trying to crawl inside his skin. My fists yank at his jacket so hard that the fabric tears. He doesn’t care. He slams his hips forward, pinning me, and swallows the broken moan that rips out of me. His name tears from my throat, rough and pleading and already wrecked.
“Roman.”
That is all it takes.
