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Margo waits until they are two of only four people left in the conference room before calling out. “Director Catiche, can I take a minute of your time?”
“Ah, yes. There was something you wanted to discuss?”
Margo keeps her tone light. “You and your employees do not need to have Sergei within sight at every instant.”
When Lenara smiles, it’s pointed, like sharp ice. Margo smiles back the same way. She may not be a Russian snow queen but she’s a daughter of Huntsville, Alabama, and she remembers the fake pleasant faces on the ladies at her mama’s church. Bless your damn heart, Catiche.
“Margo. This is how we operate.”
“I’m not going to take him anywhere,” Margo protests. “Though I wouldn’t mind a better meal than what we can get here.” That isn’t, strictly speaking, true. She doesn’t really care. But it’s helping her make her case. “Look, I can’t work well within these constraints. I need to at least be able to meet on my own time in my own apartment with an old friend.”
“‘Old friend’?” Lenara repeats, almost mocking.
“Oh, come on, you already knew that,” Margo snaps. “It has been a bear of a week, Lenara. Do not push me.”
She’s bracing to keep fighting when Lenara raises her hands, relenting. “Fine. Meet with your ‘old friend.’ But you will deliver on resources and satellite time.”
Margo lets Catiche turn on her heel and walk away as though she were the winner of the conversation. Margo knows better.
When they reconvene half an hour later to keep poring over documentation, a call comes in for Vassilovich, Sergei’s minder. Margo notices how Sergei relaxes, ever so subtly, the moment Vassilovich is gone. A few minutes later the door opens and she can see Sergei brace himself, but Lukacs is the one who comes in with the latest set of readouts. Margo smiles to herself.
After the fourth or fifth time someone comes or goes from the room, and Vassilovich continues to not return, Sergei looks at Margo, tipping his head quietly toward the door but not saying a word. The question is clear in his eyes.
“Might be a little quieter in here now,” Margo agrees. “Still wouldn’t try to leave the building if I were you.”
The expression on his face is unreadable. “Margo,” he says, and then his voice trails off, as if he doesn’t know what to say.
“Just… doing what I can.” Margo keeps her voice bright. “Take a look at this, will you?”
*
The heat is working too well in the conference room, and Sergei and Margo have both shed their jackets. Now that the work day is finally ending, she goes to pick hers back up again. His sports coat is still too big for him, though she thinks he’s beginning to look healthier with every day he spends in Houston. Eating real food. Not… enduring whatever they put him through.
Lungs. God. What did they do to his lungs? He coughs like he’s drowning.
She doesn’t want to think about that.
He looks up from his screen and though his mouth is serious, his eyes smile at her. “We did what we could do.”
“Good work today,” Margo says, crisply. And then her mouth keeps going, without apparent direct permission from her brain. “Come upstairs for a drink?”
His eyes glance quickly to Catiche, who is at the far side of the conference room. “I don’t know if I may.”
“A drink. C’mon. I can even make it vodka, if that’ll make your superiors happier.” Margo keeps her tone light, almost chirpy. She knows Catiche is listening.
There’s an almost infinitesimal pause, and then Sergei straightens ever so slightly. It’s not as though Catiche doesn’t know that they matter to each other. Maybe that’s what he’s thinking. She doesn’t ask.
“Brandy is harder to come by at home,” he acknowledges, and gestures that he will follow. Margo makes her way triumphantly toward the elevator, listening to his footsteps just behind, feeling prickles along her spine all the way.
Inviting an old friend for a drink at the end of a long day.
She’s not going to ask him to kiss her this time. No KGB agent will barrel his way into her sanctum. Just a drink. That’s a thing that people do, isn’t it?
*
Margo toes off her pumps by the door, sighing a little bit as her nylon-clad toes encounter the floor, and walks over to her rarely-used bar. She has brandy, but it’s not the good stuff, and she doesn’t want to serve him anything sub-par. “Are you open to trying something new?”
“Of course.” Sergei walks over to the windows and gazes out at the nighttime Houston sky. It looks almost purple. It’s overcast, so there’s no moon and, of course, no stars. You’d have to be well outside the city to see those. Margo wonders what he could see from his cell in Lefortovo. Did he even have a window?
She pours a generous highball glass of Dalwhinnie for each of them, neat, and brings one to him. Reflected in the window she can see half of his profile. He looks serious, contemplative, his face bared by the razor in the boyish clean-shaven style he sported long ago when they met.
There is a vulnerability in that. Or maybe it’s within him, now, after whatever the Soviets have done to him.
Margo doesn’t want to think about what they did to him, or for how long, or why. She’s not as good at compartmentalizing now as she used to be. The last few days she hasn’t been able to think about much else, honestly.
He mentioned his kidneys.
And his family.
Jesus.
When she hands him the glass, their fingers almost touch. Like two objects not quite in the same orbit. He takes a sip and makes a sound of appreciation, which warms her. “Sweeter than most Scotch,” he observes.
“That’s why I thought you’d like it,” Margo agrees.
“Music?” he asks, while with his other hand he makes a gesture like a pencil writing on paper. Of course: he thinks her apartment is bugged. It’s been a few days since they brought him here. Probably every place they routinely go is bugged, now. It shouldn’t be possible, in NASA’s own building, but that doesn’t mean much. Something to ask maintenance to look into tomorrow.
At least he seems to think it’s audio only. There’s a small mercy in that. And in being in the tallest building around. Even with a telephoto lens, no one could shoot photographs through these windows.
“Any requests?” Margo makes her way to the kitchenette and finds a pad of post-its and a ballpoint.
“Up to you.”
Margo puts on a Ray Bryant album and pads over to the couch. Sergei hands her a post-it. In his spidery handwriting, it reads, I don’t know how you achieved this. Thank you.
“This isn’t that wonderful pianist we heard the first time we met for a drink, is it?” he asks, his voice intentionally light.
Margo feels her face flush, remembering the 11:59. The intimacy of letting this stranger see her play, when none of her own colleagues knew where she went or what she did to blow off steam. He’d been a stranger, then. He still is, in so many ways, and yet.
“I’m pretty sure she was an amateur.” She reaches for the pen and paper. I told her to lay off, that’s all. She owes me.
“You sound authoritative on this,” Sergei says, quietly. Responding to her written words as much as her spoken ones. “So who is this, then?”
“Ray Bryant,” Margo says, on autopilot. “I saw him play at Rockefeller’s a few years ago. Probably my favorite club in Houston. It’s a tiny little concert hall inside what used to be an old bank.”
“Jazz inside a bank! Could there be anything more American?”
“Maybe not,” Margo agrees. They tip their glasses together, though she doesn’t think they’re drinking to jazz or banks or America.
“To the cosmonauts and the astronauts,” she offers. “Working together.”
“And staying alive,” Sergei agrees, and they drink. He picks up both of their post-it notes in one hand. “You don’t smoke anymore, do you?”
“I shouldn’t, these days, but I’ve been known to indulge. Out here, let me get matches.” Margo gestures to her tiny balcony and slides the glass door open. The air outside is cold – cold for Houston, anyway. There is one chair and a tiny table, and a big, Texas-sized glass ashtray, though she hasn’t used it in eons.
They burn the two pink pieces of paper in the ashtray, not speaking. Sergei coughs a bit and she shoos him back inside. The air is damp and cold; he shouldn’t be out in it, anyway. She makes sure the paper is all burnt up, with no chance of anyone discerning the words that were there, before she comes back in.
*
“Will you play for me?”
Margo intends to politely refuse. She hasn’t practiced much lately. She isn’t up to performing. It’s what she would have said to anyone else, other than Sergei.
Instead, she sits down at the piano bench and closes her eyes for a moment, her fingers on the keys, and then lets herself play. Some Guaraldi, because it’s music she has by heart. Some old standards: Ellington, Baker. Just… letting her hands go.
Margo doesn’t forget that he’s there. His presence in her quarters is like a flicker of lightning up her spine. She feels like a plant constantly aware of the location of the sun. But out of the corner of her eye she can see him marveling as she plays. There is genuine joy in his face, and it looks so unfamiliar on him that it makes her want to keep going.
When at last she wraps up, he wipes one eye with a hand. In the silence, the space between them feels as vast as ever. “Margo, thank you. More than I can say.”
“Of course,” she says, standing up and stretching a little bit. Her back aches. Her white blouse has come untucked.
Before she can say anything else, Sergei places his empty rocks glass on a coaster and stands. “I should go.” His voice is apologetic.
“Do you have to?”
Margo’s words hang between them like smoke from the cigarettes neither one of them enjoys anymore. Sergei’s eyes are startled. He didn’t expect her to say that. Margo hadn’t expected herself to say it, either, until she did. She holds herself very still, as though he were a frightened white-tailed deer frozen in fear on a rural highway.
“People may talk,” Sergei says. It’s not a no. It’s not a yes, either. She’s pretty sure he wants it to be a yes.
Margo thinks of Catiche. “We are grown adults,” she points out. “I think I can handle a little gossip.” Honestly she isn’t sure the office gossip mill has paid any attention to her in decades. Granted, there’s been no reason to.
But he doesn’t have it that easy . His handlers could easily use this against him, like everything else. Damn the whisky; she’s not thinking straight. Needs to offer him an out. “Wouldn’t want to harm your reputation, though. Hanging around with a loose woman like me.”
The joke works as intended; he cracks a smile. “On the contrary, I think my social standing would rise.”
He’s not saying no. That knowledge sings in her blood.
“Up to you,” Margo says quietly, and waits. She hopes that her eyes are saying, you know the risks better than I do. This is in your hands.
Sergei takes a deep breath, which leads him into coughing. He gropes in his interior jacket pocket for a handkerchief to muffle himself, and Margo’s heart breaks a little further. “I am not the man I was.” His voice is quiet. “I don’t know if I can–”
He’s looking away now, and Margo can feel her face burning. It is the worst thing about being a redhead. Stupid autonomic nervous system. Blushing is embarrassing. Having a body is embarrassing. Everything about this is embarrassing. But none of that matters in the face of Sergei’s obvious discomfort.
“I don’t care about that!” It comes out louder than she intended. Well, if Catiche is listening she definitely heard that. Margo modulates her tone. “I just want to be good to you.” Meeting his vulnerability with her own.
We’re already in this. And they already know I care. Let me be good to you.
For a long moment, it seems they will be frozen just a few feet apart forever. And then his stiffness breaks. “I know I shouldn’t say yes.”
She knows she may come to regret it later, but at this moment she just doesn’t give a damn. “Do you want to say yes?” She comes out from behind the piano bench and stands in front of him, waiting.
In response he draws her close, and then they are kissing. His lips are soft. He tastes like whisky. There is none of the desperation of their previous kiss, the overwrought eagerness that Margo came to understand after the fact as a combination of his desire and his terror. This time, the kiss is slow and tender. Soaked in awareness of how rare this moment has turned out to be.
Margo kisses Sergei gently, as though he were breakable. He is breakable. He has been broken and only barely put back together again, and she will be damned if she causes him an instant of pain.
*
One press of a dimmer switch and the whole apartment is darkened, lit only by a handful of glowing lights on her stereo over here and coffeepot over there and the many distant sparkles across the skyline outside.
Margo leads him to the oversized closet that serves as her bedroom. The space is small and minimalist in its appointment; she never needed it to be otherwise. His jacket goes on the chair by the window. So do her pencil skirt and the nylons she had on underneath. But when his hands move to the buttons on his shirt, she can see his fingers shaking.
“Hey,” she murmurs, and takes his hands in her own. One of his hands quivers. She presses a kiss to his fingers, and then another. “C’mon.” She didn’t bother to make the bed this morning, so it’s a moment’s work to lead him there, half-dressed as they are. They settle with his head on a pillow and hers pressed against his chest, arms around each other. “What do you need?” She is whispering. These words aren’t for whoever’s listening.
“‘Need’ is a funny word. I’m not sure I remember how.” Sergei’s whisper sounds different right beneath her ear. Deeper. Sweeter.
“Okay,” Margo says. “Can I keep doing this?” She kisses the patch of skin she can reach in the vee of his open collar. He sighs and seems to melt beneath her, so she does it again.
It’s been a very long time, and under other circumstances she might feel nervous. Worried about what he likes or doesn’t like. Whether he’s looking at her or not. Whether she’s doing it wrong.
But none of that bubbles up. All she can think about is how much she wants to be good to him. Not just because of what he’s been through, though Margo would erase it if she could. Just because he’s… Sergei. Brilliant and distracted and kind. And beloved. She can’t say that, but she can mean it with every kiss, and she does.
His lips. His face. His neck. She lingers at the pulse point there, able to feel his heart beating beneath her mouth. And now their hands are moving together down the placket of his shirt and she’s able to kiss his chest through sparse hair. His small pink nipples, tight beneath her lips. That wrings another gasp, so she does it again. His ribcage, thinner than it ought to be. So many kisses, like a benediction, like gentle spring rain.
However long it has been since he consciously allowed himself to want anything, his body remembers how to yearn. She unfastens everything enough to bring her mouth and hands to bear. There are tears in her eyes, which she ignores. (Margo has long practice at ignoring anything embodied that is inconvenient.) Sergei’s tiny sounds of surprise and pleasure kindle her like wildfire.
Margo finds her own pleasure, after, clinging to him and hitched against his thigh while he presses kisses to everything he can reach, murmuring in Russian.
Afterwards they lie together, holding each other, for a silent eternity. It’s probably only half an hour. But while it’s happening, she can almost imagine that it will be forever.
*
Many months later, on the other side of the world, when she learns the phrase ljubimaya moya – my beloved – her heart will ache in memory.