Don't Make Me Want You

Tell me whose you are.

The question lands in the middle of the office like a coin dropped on the long table, and it rolls, and I watch it roll, and I do not put my hand on it to stop it, because the second I touch it I have answered.

Count. Three pages over the heart. One locked drawer. One key that is mine. One man in the doorway who has never once lied to me and is therefore the only liar in this house I would ever believe. The count holds. It holds because there is something to hold: I built this room before he climbed the stairs, I locked the drives away, I left the visible body out as a tell, and a woman who has prepared the ground is a woman who can stand on it.

He does not move toward me. That is the first thing I read, and it tells me more than the question did. A man who comes to take an answer crosses the floor. Dima Volkov stands inside his own doorway in cologne and gun oil and the particular stillness of the very dangerous, and he lets the space between us stay a room wide, and he waits, and the waiting is the most honest thing he could do, because it says I am asking, not seizing. In this house, where everything is taken, a man choosing to ask is a man spending something.

Gleb sets the green ledgers down on the table, slow, in his own arms as I told him, and he looks at the two of us the way he looked at the cotton rope in the basement, like a man who has learned that the soft quiet things in this house are the ones that cut, and Dima says, without turning his head, "Out, Gleb."

Gleb goes. The door does not quite close. He leaves it open an inch, the same inch the skimmer left my door open in, the same inch on the desk that neither of us has ever closed, and I file the inch and let it sit.

"Whose I am," I say. I keep my voice flat, the boxes-voice, the one I use when the sentence is load-bearing and I do not want my face carrying any of the weight. "You want a one-word answer to a question you don't have the vocabulary for."

"I have the vocabulary." He comes off the doorframe now, one step, no more. "I learned it the day you told me forty thousand became two hundred and eighty by somebody's design and not by my orders. I learned it watching you find a thing in my house that nobody in my house can find." His eyes go to the drawer, to the turned key still in it, to the three pages squared against the red over my heart, and he does the only arithmetic he has, the reading of the woman instead of the money. "I'm not asking whose possession. I gave up that word somewhere on the stairs and didn't notice till just now. I'm asking whose side. There's a woman across the water standing in my rain who came for you and not for me, and you knew her before my men did. So." The gentleness underneath, the one that is more dangerous than the gun. "Tell me you're not already gone."

---

And there it is, the fork, laid out on the table next to the rolled coin.

Here is the arithmetic, stated as a position, which is the only honest way I have ever known anything.

If I show him the price sheet now, I am his partner naming her terms while the enemy waits in the rain, which is strong, and which is also the act of a woman who has decided which side of the river she stands on, and I have not decided, and a forensic accountant does not post an entry she has not verified.

If I lie, if I give him the warm clean word he is asking for, yours, only yours, never gone, I keep the leverage and I lose the one thing in this house I have been quietly hoarding without admitting it: the fact that he does not lie to me, and that a thing only stays valuable if it is not counterfeited from both sides. The day I lie to the man who does not lie, I have spent the rarest line on the ledger between us, and I have spent it cheap.

And if I tell him the truth, the whole shape of it, I have not decided, and the reason I have not decided is that I am no longer something either of you gets to decide, then I hand him the most dangerous page I own without taking it out of my coat, and I do it standing in a room I just spent ninety seconds fortifying against exactly the kind of taking a sentence like that invites.

The order matters. The order is everything. And I realise, watching him wait a room away with his honest dangerous patience, that there is no clean order here, because the woman at the front door has already changed the figure, and the man in the doorway is changing it again right now, by asking instead of seizing, by spending the one currency that buys from me, which is the truth.

So I do the thing I do. I pay in truth, but I price it. I give him the real answer and I keep the leverage, and the only way to do both at once is to make him understand that they are the same answer.

"I'm not gone," I say. "And I'm not yours." I let it sit one beat, the boxes-voice, eyes level now because the sentence is too important to look away from. "Those aren't two answers, Dima. They're one."

---

He goes very still. Not the dangerous stillness. A different one. The stillness of a man hearing a language he was taught was a trap and finding it is only a sentence.

"Say the rest," he says. Low. "You're building toward something. You always are. I can't read the column but I can read that your hands have stopped." He looks at my hands, flat on the green ledger, the perfect nails, the one thing of mine nobody in this house has been able to touch. "Say the rest."

So I take it out. Not the price sheet, not yet, I keep that one folded over the heart where it lives. I take out the truth that comes before the price, which is the line I wrote at the foot of the page in the smallest hand I own, and I say it to him from memory because it is already memorised, it has been memorised since before I wrote it, since the kitchen at nineteen, since every column I ever balanced to build myself a room that locked.

"There's a woman at your door who wants to buy me, and there's a brand on me that says you already own me, and they think those are the two choices." I take the half step he did not take, closing the room from a room to most of a room, near enough now to smell the gun oil under the cologne, near enough that the inch on the desk has a sibling standing between us. "They're both wrong, and they're wrong in the same way. I'm not the thing being fought over. I'm the thing that can read the war. The body of this family is on that table, and I am the only hand alive that can keep it breathing or stop its heart, and a thing like that does not get bought, and it does not get owned, it gets chosen, by itself, for its own reasons, on a morning it decides." I am close enough now that I have to look up at him, and I do not like looking up at anyone, and I do it anyway because the agency is in the looking, not in the height. "I haven't decided. That's the whole truth. The day I decide, you'll be the first to know, and it will be because I came to you, not because you asked me in a doorway while I was holding a knife behind my back."

He breathes out. Slow. And the thing that happens in his face is the thing I have been keeping in the third column, the one that fits in neither what he wants nor what he is owed, and it spills over the rule of the column and I cannot post it anywhere, because what is in his face is not a pakhan losing a possession. It is a man, the wrong kind of glad, glad in a way that costs him, because what I have just told him is that I am dangerous to him in a way no enemy across the water is, and he is standing there in his honest terrible stillness looking relieved.

"Don't," he says. Quiet. Almost nothing.

"Don't what."

He closes the last of the room. Not a grab. A choice, slow, telegraphed, so I can step back, and the fact that I could step back and do not is the whole sentence, his hand coming up to the side of my face the way his hands come up to a glass, deliberate, gloveless, and stopping a breath short of my skin so that the touch is mine to finish or refuse, the consent of it laid bare in the half-inch he leaves, and I feel the heat coming off the palm that is not quite touching me, and I count, and the count comes apart in my mouth, one, just one, and goes quiet, not from fear, from the other thing, the thing that has no number.

"Don't make me want you," Dima Volkov says, against the half-inch, his voice gone rough at the root of it. "I can keep what I own. I have never in my life been able to keep what I wanted. My father saw to that." His thumb moves, not touching, tracing the shape of where it would touch. "You stand there and tell me you belong to nobody, and you think it's a wall. Sofiya. It's the first thing you've ever said that I can't survive."

And I am about to close the half-inch, or refuse it, I do not yet know which, my hand is already rising to do one or the other and I have not told it which, when the door he left open an inch opens the rest of the way, fast, and Babushka Yelena Volkova is standing in it in her black with her tea forgotten in her hand, and she is not looking at the two of us a breath apart, she is looking past us, out the rain-streaked window, at the front of the house, and her old voice is flat and clear and carries the way only the truly unafraid can make a quiet thing carry.

"The woman with the umbrella is gone," she says. "She did not wait. She walked back down the middle of the street twenty minutes ago, and she did not come empty across the water and she did not go back empty either." A pause, and the tea trembles, once, in the cup, the first time I have ever seen Babushka's hand do anything she did not order it to do. "Your brother's room is open. His coat is gone. Gleb's man on his door says a boy can leave a house he was never locked inside, and Lev walked out the front not ten minutes after she did, on his own two feet, toward the river." The old eyes come to me, clear and pitiless and not unkind. "She did not buy you, Sofiya. She did the cheaper thing. She bought the only person you would cross the water to get back."