Chapter Text
In the dark of the night, the rain had stopped somewhere over the bridge, and Brighton Beach came up out of the dark in pieces — a laundromat still lit, a fruit stand shuttered under green tarp, a hand-painted sign for a place that had been selling pelmeni since before Yelena was born. The taxi's headlights swept a puddle and turned it, for one second, into a sheet of moving gold.
Bob had not said anything for four blocks. He was holding his gym bag against his chest like a man on a bus in a bad neighborhood, and he had that particular expression he got when his brain was doing laps without him.
"You are quiet," Yelena said.
"I'm fine."
She gazed more intensely at him.
"Sorry. I just had a whole picture in my head? Of what all this was going to be? And I think I built it out of movies and something Alexei said." He laughed — that short apologetic laugh, the one that came out sideways. "And although you've assured me it's a good place, I'm still nervous it's going to be a lot of men in towels doing crime."
"Doing crime?"
"Passing envelopes. Under benches. That kind of crime."
"Bob." She turned to look at him across the back seat. The streetlight slid over his face in bars. "It is a wonderful bathhouse where I conduct my own business. There is an old man named Ivan who is stoic or nice to you depending on the weather, then there is hot water, and there is me."
"Okay."
"Say okay again, but like you believe it."
"Okay," he said, and it came out about forty percent more convincing, which for Bob was a triumph.
The lobby was warm wood and low amber lamps, with a stone fountain by the desk where water ran over dark rocks — a sound like rain three streets away, soft enough to make the whole room feel further from the city than it was.
Bob stopped just inside the door and blinked at it.
"Huh," he said.
"What."
"Nothing. It's just — it looks like a hotel. Like a mid-range one." He shifted the bag on his shoulder.
"Is that an insult?"
"No! No, God, no, it's —" He rubbed the back of his neck, the tips of his ears going pink. "There was a stretch where a mid-range hotel was the best possible version of a day for me, when I was homeless. If somebody gave me seventy bucks while I begged on the street, I could get a room with a lock on it and sleep on a bed where nobody could hurt me for a whole day." He shrugged, and the shrug was too fast and too light and did not come off at all. "It didn't happen much. So I remember all of them. Anyway, weird thing to say out loud, sorry, forget it —"
Yelena did not forget it. She put it somewhere careful, the way she put everything he handed her by accident, and then took his sleeve and pulled him toward the desk before he could apologize a third time.
The man behind the counter was in his sixties and built like a mooring post. He looked up.
"Yelena Belova."
"Ivan."
"You are late."
"I am eight minutes late."
"You are late," Ivan repeated with a huff. His eyes moved to Bob, took in all of him, and came back. "This is him?"
"This is him."
"Hm." Ivan pushed two wristbands across the counter and said nothing else, which Yelena had learned over two months was as close to a blessing as the man came.
Bob trailed her down the corridor with his eyes very wide.
"He knows you."
"He knows everybody."
"No, but he knows you. He said your name like you're a person who exists here." Bob's voice did something complicated. "Lena, you're a regular. I've never seen you be a regular anywhere."
"I am a regular at many places. You just do not have many opportunities to see my life beyond the Watchtower."
"Name one for me."
"The bodega on Fourth."
"I remember that one. Doesn't that one have a picture of you behind the register with a red X through it, after you —"
"That is a misunderstanding," Yelena said with great dignity, "and it has been resolved."
She did not take him into the public bath.
She could have. It would have been fine. It was Thursday, and through the frosted glass she could count maybe fifteen bodies moving in the steam, and by eleven there would be four. It would have been fine, and Bob would have been pleasant and lovely and would have spent ninety minutes with his back to a wall counting exits and pretending he wasn't, and afterward he would have thanked her for it and meant it.
So she went left instead, past the doorway where steam and amber light came pouring out, down to the end of the corridor, and stopped at a plain wooden door with a brass number screwed into it.
"What's this?"
She took the key out of her jacket. An old one, brass, worn smooth as a river stone, hanging off a wooden fob with the number burned in.
"I got us a private room." she said, and winked, and unlocked it.
Bob looked in, and did not go in.
It was warm and it smelled like cedar and eucalyptus and, under both, hot wet stone — a clean mineral smell like a river in summer. Along the left wall ran a bench of pale wood sanded to a shine in the middle by forty years of people sitting on it, iron hooks above, a stack of towels that were grey rather than white and thick enough to stand up by themselves.
The sauna was in the near corner — a cedar box behind a panel of clouded glass, its own low door, a light inside the color of a struck match.
And the rest of the room was water.
The big pool took up most of the floor, sunk two steps down and tiled in dark green, the old kind, small squares with the grout gone the brown of strong tea. It was long enough to lie back in and had a ledge running around the inside at exactly sitting height. Steam came off it in a slow unhurried sheet and hung under the lamps. It was, Yelena knew from considerable personal research, thirty-nine degrees, and it was the single best thing in the borough.
And beside it, set into the floor like an afterthought and separated by one narrow band of tile, was the cold plunge. Small. Deep. Big enough for two if they were friendly and one if they were sensible. The water in it was so still and so clear that it took a second to work out there was any water in it at all.
A brass pipe came out of the wall above the cold pool and dripped, unhurried, about once every four seconds. Each drip traveled all the way out to the rim as a widening ring.
There was no ceiling light. Two lamps in wall sconces, both low, both gold, and a frosted window up near the roofline gone the color of honey from the streetlamp outside.
There were no cameras. Not one, not anywhere, and Bob checked. She watched him do it, the fast sweep he did in every new room — corner corner corner ceiling — and it took him under two seconds, because there was nowhere in the room for anything to hide.
And there was a bolt on the inside of the door.
Bob looked at the bolt for a long time.
"There are three of these rooms," Yelena said, dropping her bag on the bench. "You book them by the hour. Ivan hates giving them out because it is extra work for him, but he gave me this one, because I am extremely charming. Also I found his nephew a lawyer."
"There it is." Bob laughed.
She crouched to unzip her bag. "Get changed. There is a stall through there if you want one."
He did not move.
"Yelena."
"Mm."
"How long did you book it for?"
"Ninety minutes."
"How far ahead?"
Her hands stopped on the zipper — just for a second, just long enough that she knew he had seen it.
"Some days ahead."
"How many days?"
"I do not remember."
"You remember everything." He was smiling now, slow and delighted and horrible. "You told me what color socks John was wearing on a Tuesday in March."
"Yeah. The loser wore a mismatched pair with sandals, Bob. It was a crime scene."
"Lena."
She stood up with her towel over her arm and lifted her chin, because if she was going to lose she was going to lose in good order.
"Seven days," she said. "I booked it in the taxi. On the way home from your room, after I said that thing about the boxes. Are you happy now?"
Bob's face did something she could only describe as structural collapse.
"Don't," she warned.
"I'm not doing anything."
"You are doing the whole sad face thing."
"I'm having a normal reaction to information —"
"Your eyes are wet."
"It's a steam building, Yelena!"
She made a noise of profound disgust and went to get changed, and she was smiling the entire way, which she would be denying later under oath.
He took ten minutes. She knew exactly why — he would have looked in the mirror and decided his swim shorts were wrong somehow and then stood there running an audit on them — and she let him have it, because there were about four things in the world Bob got to be vain about and she was not going to take one away.
When he finally came out she was already sitting on the ledge inside the warm pool with the water at her collarbones and her hair combed flat and gleaming under the lamp.
"Hi," Bob said.
"We came here together. In a taxi. Forty minutes ago."
"I know. I know that." He was staring. He was absolutely staring, in the specific way where he thought he was being subtle and was in fact broadcasting on every frequency. "Hi, though."
"You are doing the thing."
"I'm not doing a thing."
"You are staring so hard I can hear it in my teeth."
"That's not —" He gestured vaguely at all of her and then abandoned the gesture halfway. "Okay, in my defense, this is a whole different context, and my brain has to recategorize —"
"You have seen me with no clothes on at all."
"That's completely different."
"How?"
Bob opened his mouth. Nothing came out. He closed it.
"Exactly," Yelena said, and hauled herself up onto the rim to lay the evening out on her fingers, because she had planned this and she was going to deliver it. "It goes in a circle. Sauna first. Then cold. Then in here, to come back. Then again."
"Sauna first."
"Yes."
"So why are you in the warm one?"
Yelena looked at him for a long moment.
"I was waiting for you," she said, with enormous dignity.
"Uh huh."
"Do not start with me. Get in the box."
"Great. Love two of the three."
"Which two?"
"Sauna's fine, this one's great, the murder pool is a hard no."
"It is good for the circulation."
"So is walking! People walk!"
"You are scared."
"I'm not scared of water."
"Cold water."
"I have been in space. kinda. When I was one of my other selves."
"Space is not wet." She stood, collected her towel, and added, without any particular emphasis, "Also, at some point tonight you are going to have an argument with yourself about the shorts."
Bob's head came up. "The — what?"
"Banya rules. Nobody wears anything."
"Nope."
"It is not a sex thing, Bob, it is a hygiene thing. They make you shower first, there are signs, there is a diagram —"
"I'm good. I'm great. I'm extremely comfortable with my choices."
"We will see," said Yelena, and opened the sauna door.
Inside was three tiers of bench, the wood gone dark and honey-colored with age, every board worn into a shallow dip where forty years of shoulders had rested. The stones sat low in their iron cage, grey and round and river-smoothed, the top ones pale with mineral crust. One small bulb behind a slatted cover striped the whole box with the shadow of its own housing, so that everything in there — the thermometer with its needle in the red, the sand timer, the bucket of birch twigs standing in water — was cut into bands of gold and dark.
Yelena stretched out on the top tier with her hands behind her head and let out a breath she had been carrying since Tuesday.
Bob got as far as the middle bench and stopped.
"This is a hundred and ninety degrees."
"Two hundred. It is good."
"Nothing about this is good. This is what an oven is. This is what we do to a chicken."
"Sit down, Bob."
He sat.
For about four minutes there was nothing but the tick of the stones and his breathing, and Yelena let her eyes close and let the heat press down on her like a hand on the back of the neck, and thought about nothing whatsoever, which was the entire point and the only reason she paid the membership.
Then:
"Is this supposed to be hard?"
She opened one eye. "What?"
"No, I'm not being a jerk, I honestly can't tell." He turned his hand over and looked at it, red-skinned, steaming faintly. "I can feel all of it. Every bit. It's enormous, it's the most anything's happened to me in about a month and I like it a lot, actually —" He waved a hand. "But it's not going to do anything. It's just going to keep happening at me."
The silence from the top tier contained a considerable amount of arithmetic.
"I forgot what you are," Yelena said.
Bob's shoulders came down half an inch.
"That's kind of nice, actually."
"It is not nice. It is a catastrophe. I made a bet with a man who has been on fire."
"Twice."
"Twice." She lay back with real disgust. "You are ruining my sauna. This is my sauna and you are ruining it with your stupid indestructible skin."
"Do you want me to pretend?"
"No."
"I could pretend a little."
"I do not want charity," Yelena said. "I want suffering." She sat up, reached for the ladle, and gave him a look over the edge of the bench that he would later describe as the single most alarming thing he had seen in eighteen months. "Let us find out what you are actually made of."
"Wait — what are you —"
She emptied the ladle over the stones.
It was not heat. That was the thing every first-timer failed to account for: it was not temperature, it was pressure. The steam came up off the rocks in a white wet wall and went over him and through him, and it did not hurt him — nothing hurt him, nothing had hurt him in years — but it went straight into his open eyes and his open mouth and every part of him objected at once without consulting him first.
Bob made a noise like a man being sat on and was out of the door in under three seconds.
Yelena settled back into the steam, arms behind her head, and smiled at the ceiling with the deep uncomplicated satisfaction of a woman who had just been proved right about something.
She found him four minutes later crouched at the edge of the cold plunge, splashing handfuls of water into his own face with the grim application of a man rinsing out a chemical spill.
"You cheated," he said, without looking up.
"I used a ladle. It is a ladle, Bob. It is in the room for that purpose."
"You waited until I was looking at you." He got another handful and pressed it into his eyes. "I had my eyes open. You waited."
"Yes."
"You admit it!"
"Of course I admit it, it was the best part." She crossed to the plunge and sat on the edge above him. "How are they?"
"Streaming. They're just — going. Constantly." He blinked up at her, red-eyed and betrayed and dripping. "This is the first thing that's got me in about less than a yea and it's sauna water."
"It is called steam, Bob. It is the entire point of the room."
"It's a loophole."
"It is a thousand years of Slavic engineering."
"Doesn't stop it being a loophole. Now come with me inside the cold pool".
"Absolutely not."
"Bob."
"That's not a pool, that's a punishment. There's a warm one right there. It's right there, Lena, it's four feet away —"
"The warm one is after. Hot, cold, warm, repeat. That is the order and the order is not mine, it is nine hundred years old." She put one arm along the tile. "Get in."
"I genuinely don't think it works on me, though. I can tell it's cold, I have all the information, it's just not going to —"
She reached out, hooked an arm behind his knee, and pulled.
Bob came off the rim and went in to the chest and made a sound with absolutely no dignity anywhere in it, and Yelena laughed at him with her entire face, out loud, the way she almost never did in front of anybody except him and occasionally Kate.
"Yelena!"
"Now you are in."
"That's — okay, that's — oh."
It was appalling for about eight seconds. She watched it happen to him. Not dangerous — nothing in this room had been dangerous to that man since he was thirty-one years old — but loud: the flat white shock, every muscle in his back locking at once, his breath going somewhere he could not immediately find it.
And then the cold stopped being a temperature and became a kind of noise, and then the noise stopped too, and she watched his whole face open up like a window in a hot apartment.
"Oh," Bob said.
"Yes."
"Oh, that's — okay, that's why."
"That is why." She let her head tip sideways against the tile. A drip came off the brass pipe and traveled out to the rim in a ring. "Now we stay here until we can feel our hands. Then the warm one, and everything in you goes soft at once, and nobody believes me about any of it until I put them in it."
They stayed.
About two minutes later, Yelena opened one eye.
"Bob."
"Mm."
"Why is it warm?"
There was a pause as Yelena came to a realisation of where the heat source was coming from. Yelena sat up. The water around his ribs had gone visibly soft at the edges, little curls of steam ghosting off a surface that had been mirror-flat ninety seconds ago, the whole plunge sliding gently from glacial toward pleasant.
"Bob! You are heating the cold pool!"
"Oh," Bob said. "Oh no. Sorry — sorry, that's me, I uhh can't control that sometimes..."
"Bob. There is a warm pool. Four feet away. I showed it to you. You have been in it.""
"I know —"
"That is what it is for, Bob, we do not need two of them —"
"I know! Okay, hang on, hang on —"
He shut his eyes and did the thing Dr. Worth had taught him for the other kind of overheating, which was counting backward from twenty, his lips moving slightly on the numbers. Yelena watched the entire process with her chin on the rim.
The steam thinned. The cold came creeping back in from the edges and closed over her shoulders again like something settling into place.
"That is extremely annoying," she said, "and I want you to know I am not impressed."
"No, you're a little impressed."
"I am a little impressed."
The warm pool afterward was exactly as advertised. Bob went down the two steps and sat on the ledge and made a noise she had previously only heard from him during a nap, and then slid down until the water was at his chin and stayed there with his eyes shut and an expression of total structural surrender.
"Oh," he said. "Oh, okay. That's it. That's the actual thing, isn't it."
"That is the actual thing."
"I take back everything about the murder pool. The murder pool is a setup. It's a setup for this."
"Yes."
"You could have just told me it was a setup —"
"You would not have gotten in," Yelena said, and lay back with her arms along the rim, and let the steam close over the both of them.
The second round he stayed in the sauna for the steam on purpose, which she called progress and he called a personality disorder. The second cold plunge he got into without being pulled.
It was somewhere in the third that he lost the argument with himself.
She was flat on the top tier with her eyes shut when the sauna door opened. She heard him hesitate in the doorway. Then she heard him sit down on the middle bench with a small self-conscious cough, and she heard his shorts land on the hook.
Yelena opened one eye.
"Ah," she said.
"So I thought about what you said," Bob announced, to nobody in particular.
"Mm."
"About the hygiene thing. And the diagram."
"Mm."
"And I've decided I'm a very modern guy."
"Congratulations. Was there a ceremony?"
"I'd like it noted that this took me three rounds."
"It is noted," Yelena said. "It is noted by me. In my head. Forever."
She did the cold pool ahead of him and was already back on the ledge in the warm water when he came down the two steps and sat beside her.
Neither of them said anything for a while, and neither of them looked away, and the whole room went quiet except for the brass pipe dripping into the cold pool.
He was, objectively, ridiculous.
That was the only word for it. Bob had mentioned to her he used to have scars but whatever serum had been given to him had gone through his body like a flood through a house and taken everything with it — the needle tracks, a scar on his eyebrow from his father's ring, a few burns on his hand from an accident, a badly set collarbone, random tattoos he'd gotten on his body from stupid dares and of his own free will and so on so forth.
What was left was a man built like a sculpture out of the Borghese gallery, gold-lit and unmarked, and it was beautiful and it was faintly obscene and it made her want to put her hands on him and also, obscurely, to grieve.
Because a body was supposed to be a record. Hers was. Every stupid thing that had ever happened to Yelena Belova was written somewhere on her and she could find any of it with her eyes shut.
He had nothing. Thirty-odd years, wiped smooth, like a table cleared at closing.
She was almost envious. Then, he was looking at her.
She let him. That was its own kind of work, and she had gotten better at it across eight months, but it was still work. Athletic, yes. Strong, yes — she had spent her entire life being an instrument and it showed in the shoulders and the thighs and the flat stomach.
It also showed in everything else. The white seam down her left thigh from Budapest. The knot of tissue under her collarbone she had picked up on a Tuesday and never thought about since. The starburst on her ribs. The small neat hole in the back of her shoulder with its matching one in front. Three across her forearm. One at her hairline that had bled so much a stranger had cried.
And low across her abdomen, silvered and thin and old as her own name, the one that had not been hers to agree to. The Red Room had put that there with her strapped down and a nurse who had been kind about it, told her that what would be taken from her was a great gift, which was the worst part of the whole ordeal.
"Say what you are thinking Bob. You will say it eventually anyway and it is worse when you have carried it for an hour."
Bob considered it seriously, the way he considered everything.
"I was thinking I've got no idea what happened to me," he said. "Physically. There's no proof. I know what my dad did and I know what the street did and there's nothing on me that says so. Sometimes I can't tell if I made it up." He lifted one shoulder. "And then there's you. And you've got everything. Nothing that ever happened to you got taken away from you."
Yelena sat with that, because she had been about to say something sharp and now she could not.
"That is a very strange compliment."
"It wasn't a compliment. I was jealous."
"You are jealous of my scars?"
"A bit. Yeah. I do miss some of my old tattoos and I doubt I can have one ever again." He grinned, crooked and awful. "That topic was ummm a whole session with Dr. Worth."
The steam moved under the lamps. Somewhere far off, the plant room hummed.
And she thought — aware even as she thought it that it was the ugly one, the thought she would not say aloud in this room or any other — he could have anyone. He is invulnerable and kind and looks like that, and he could have a woman with an unmarked stomach who wanted him in the ordinary way, and instead he is in a bathhouse in Brighton Beach with a sterile assassin who does not experience attraction and was assembled out of other people's damage.
The thought had teeth. It always did.
And it always ran into the same wall, which was this: whenever he got his hands on her, Bob went toward the scars. Not around them. Not politely past them. He put his mouth on the seam in her thigh and the starburst on her ribs and the entry wound in her shoulder like a man reading names off a memorial, slow and unhurried, as though each one were a piece of information he was grateful to have been given.
The low silver one he treated exactly the same. He had never once gone still at it. He had never once done the thing men did — the small careful flinch and then the extra tenderness afterward, which was pity wearing a coat.
She had asked him about it once, at three in the morning, in a voice she had barely recognised as hers. Does it bother you? My Scars?
And Bob had blinked at her, genuinely baffled, and said: What do you mean? I see nothing wrong with them Yelena.
"Now you're the one who's doing a sad face." Bob said, "You're doing the one where you're saying something mean to yourself."
Yelena opened her mouth. Closed it.
"It is not important."
"Okay." He did not push. That was the other thing about him — he never pushed, and it made her want to tell him everything, which she suspected was the least deliberate manipulation in human history. He slid down the ledge until the water reached his chin. "It's important to me, though. If you want it later."
"Later then." she agreed.
She reached over and put her hand flat on his chest and found nothing under her palm at all except a heartbeat.
"You are silly," she told him, fondly, "and very beautiful."
"Thank you."
"It was not a compliment."
"Yeah," grinned Bob happily. "It was."
They stayed in the warm water a long time after that, and the heat worked its way back into both of them, and at some point Bob reached toward the bench for a towel — and then did not get up.
The towel came to him instead. It lifted off the stack, unfolded itself in the air about halfway across the room, and settled over his shoulder.
Yelena watched the entire flight path.
"You are not supposed to do that."
"I'm not supposed to do that in the building, or in the street, or in a store, or on camera, or in front of anyone who might have a phone." He pulled the towel down and turned it over in his hands, not looking at her. "There's no camera in here. You said. You checked."
"Three times."
"Right." He turned his hand over.
The ladle came off the rim of the bucket in the sauna, floated out through the open door, crossed the room at the height of her eyes, and landed neatly in her palm.
Yelena looked at the ladle. Then at him.
"Do it again."
"Do what?"
"The towel. The way it opened in the middle." She sat up straighter, water sheeting off her shoulders. "Do it with the other one."
So he did it with the other one, and this time he made a performance of it, because he was Bob and because she had asked. The towel came off the stack and shook itself out flat in midair like a sail catching wind, hung there turning slowly in the gold light, then folded itself in half, and in half again, and lowered onto the bench as gently as a hand setting down a sleeping animal.
Yelena made a sound she had not authorized.
"That was so sweet of you. Doing that all for me," she said, "Now try do the water."
"What?"
"The water." She flicked a hand at the cold plunge. "Come on, Bob, do the water."
And so, Bob telekinetically lifted a fistful of the cold pool up out of itself, about the size of a grapefruit, and held it in the air between them where they could both look at it — wobbling, lit blue-white from underneath by the sconces, turning slowly on an axis that only it knew about. It was very cold and very clear, and Yelena, who had personally watched a god get punched through a ceiling, found it to be one of the most beautiful things anybody had ever done in front of her.
"Bob," she said softly. "That is —"
He threw it in her face.
The noise Yelena made brought crust off the sauna stones.
She came across the tile at him like something launched from a tube, and Bob was laughing far too hard to defend himself, and the next forty seconds were the least dignified of his adult life. At the end of them he was underwater with a woman sitting squarely on his back explaining to him in two languages what he was, and when he finally came up he was still laughing — the real one, from underneath, the one she had not heard once in the first five months she knew him.
And then she watched him stop, mid-breath, and go quiet in a different way.
"What?" she said.
"Nothing. It's stupid."
"Bob."
He pushed his wet hair off his forehead and looked around the little room — the gold lamps, the honey window up near the roof, the steam lying in a soft layer under the ceiling, the closed door with the bolt on it.
"I haven't looked at the door in an hour," he said. "I do it every eleven minutes. Dr. Worth had me count once. Every eleven minutes, everywhere, all the time, and I haven't done it once since we got in here."
Yelena's chest went tight in the way that always annoyed her.
"Bob —"
"And I know what you did," he said. "With the room. I worked it out when you said seven days." He was looking at the water, not at her, and his voice had gone careful, the way it did when he was trying not to wreck something. "You booked it in the taxi. Coming home from the conversation where you told me you'd put me in the same box as the Watchtower. You went straight out and got me a room with a bolt on it."
She did not answer immediately, because her throat had done something inconvenient.
"It is ninety minutes in a private room," she managed. "It is not a kidney donation."
"It was still kind of you".
Somewhere in the fourth round, it stopped being about circulation.
They were on the ledge with the water at their shoulders, and she had her legs across his lap like a piece of furniture she owned, and his hand was resting on her shin under the surface, and the conversation had trailed off a minute ago and neither of them had done a single thing about it.
She tipped her head onto his shoulder. He turned to say something about it, and she was already looking up at him, and whatever he had been about to say died a quiet death somewhere behind his teeth.
He kissed her. She kissed him back.
There was nothing hurried in it. His hand slid up into the wet hair at the back of her neck, and the water moved around them, and Yelena felt the exact moment his brain stopped filing paperwork — the moment where the five little questions he always kept running went underwater and stayed there.
He surfaced enough to say, "Okay?"
"Bob."
"Yeah."
"If it is not okay I will tell you. Immediately. With words." She kissed the corner of his jaw. "You ask every thirty seconds."
"Sorry."
"Do not apologize. I like this."
"Yeah?"
"Yes." She let him have exactly two more seconds of that and then put a hand flat on his chest. "Hold on."
He blinked. "What?"
"Rules."
"...Rules?"
"Safety briefing." She said it in the voice she used before a drop, and watched it do something extremely gratifying to his entire nervous system. "One. Feet on the floor. Both of them. The whole time."
"That was one time."
"That was the first time on your bed when you were...the Sentry. One minute we were in the afterglow of our first orgasm and then suddenly, we were four feet in the air."
"Was it really that ba —"
"Two." She held up a second finger. "Hands stay on me, or on the tile. Not on anything structural. This is so you are aware not to break anything. Even me".
"Is this about the bed frame now?"
"It is partly about the bed frame in my apartment. It is mostly about my wall."
"The wall was already cracked! It was going to —"
"There was a hairline settling mark that the landlord photographed on move-in day. After you decided to take me against it, there was a hole. In the shape of a hand. At exactly the height of my head".
Bob put both hands over his face.
"Four hundred dollars," she groaned. "I did not tell you, because you would do this."
"Do what?"
"This. The sad face again."
"I'm not doing a sad face, I'm mortified, that's a completely different —"
"Three." She pulled his hands down and kept hold of his wrists, and her voice came down out of the briefing register into something much worse for him. "If you feel the other thing starting — the gravity, or the light, or the heat — you say so. Out loud. You do not manage it quietly and hope I will not notice, because I always notice, and you always ruin something."
"Okay."
"I am not finished." Her thumbs moved once across the insides of his wrists, and she made herself say the rest of it, because it was true, and because he needed to hear it, and because nobody else in his life was ever going to say it to him. "You do not get tired, Bob. You do not get sore. You do not run out. Nothing in this room can stop you and nothing in this room can hurt you. So the only thing that has ever stopped you is you, deciding to."
He went very still under her hands.
"That is a great deal to be the only thing," Yelena said. "So tonight there are also rules. And I am also here. You are not the only one holding it."
Bob looked at her for a long moment. Steam curled off the water between them and his eyes had gone bright and enormous in the gold light, and she thought, not for the first time, that the most dangerous man on the eastern seaboard was about to cry over a set of household regulations.
"Okay," he said, hoarse.
"Say it back."
"Feet on the floor. Nothing structural. Tell you if it starts."
"Good." Yelena let go of one wrist. She did not let go of the other. "There is also no bed in here. And no wall that I am paying for."
Bob opened his mouth.
"Yes," she said. "That too. Now get over here."
He got over there.
And for a while it was only the warm water and the gold light and his hands, and Yelena stopped keeping track of the order of things, which almost never happened to her and which she had learned to recognise as a gift.
She noticed the ceiling first.
Not because it moved. Because the sound changed — the water noise dropped away underneath them, went thin and far off, the way a radio does in a tunnel.
She opened her eyes.
They were about a foot above the surface of the pool. Water was coming off the both of them in long unhurried strings that fell back down into the steam, and the light from the sconces was hitting them from below, which was not where light was supposed to come from, and Bob had not noticed even slightly.
"Bob."
"Mm."
"Bob."
"Mm — yeah — what —"
"Rule one," Yelena said.
He opened his eyes. Looked at her. Looked down.
"Oh no."
"Do not —"
But they were already going up.
It was not fast. That was the thing that saved them — it was not violent, it was panic, a soft awful acceleration like a balloon let go in a stairwell, and they went the remaining four feet and Bob got his hand up between her head and the cedar boards about a quarter of a second before her head would have got there instead.
His palm hit the ceiling flat. The whole room made a sound like a struck drum.
"I'm sorry — I'm so sorry — okay, I've got you, I've got — oh God, okay, we're — how did we get — how are we at the ceiling —"
"Bob."
"I can put us down. I can put us down right now —"
"Do not put us down right now."
They had gone from pleasant to horizontal-and-eight-feet-in-the-air in under fifteen seconds, and Yelena had, in her professional life, been in freefall on six separate occasions, and she knew exactly what a man sounded like when he was about to let go of something.
She got a hand around the back of his neck, flat and firm, the way you would hold a horse.
"Look at me."
"I'm —"
"Look at me."
He looked at her. His eyes were enormous and gold at the edges, and there was steam coming off his shoulders in the lamplight.
"Breathe out," Yelena said. "Slow. All of it."
"If I let go we're going to hit tile, Lena, that's — there's no water under us, we drifted, we're over the floor —"
"Then do not let go. That is why we are not doing it fast." She kept her hand where it was. "Out. All the way out. Good. Again."
He breathed out again, and they dropped about four inches, and he made a noise.
"That is fine. That was supposed to happen."
"That was not supposed to —"
"It was supposed to happen, Bob, because you are doing it on purpose now, which is a different thing entirely from what was happening a minute ago." She could feel the muscle in the back of his neck under her hand, locked solid, starting to come loose. "Again."
Another breath. Another few inches. The hum of the plant room came back up through the floor from somewhere below them.
"There," said Yelena. "You see? Down is just up, backward."
"That's not — that's not how physics —"
"I do not care about physics, I care about the tile. Again."
He laughed, which was the first good sign, and they dropped a foot all at once, and he swore and caught them, and she said "again" in exactly the same flat tone, and he did it again.
It took about ninety seconds to get to the floor.
He put them down so carefully at the end that she did not feel the moment her shoulder blades met the tile — only that the floor was there, warm from the room, and had been there for a second or two before she noticed.
Bob stayed exactly where he was, braced over her on his forearms, and did not move at all.
"Okay," he said, to the floor beside her head. "So that was rule one."
"That was rule one."
"That was ninety seconds after rule one."
"Yes."
"I'd like to apologize to the entire room —"
"Bob."
"— and to Ivan, personally, who has been nothing but —"
"Bob." She got both hands on his face and turned it toward her. "Look at me. You caught it. You put your hand up before my head got there. You did not drop us. You brought us down."
He blinked at her.
"You told me," she said. "Out loud. Exactly like I asked. You said if I let go we hit tile, and that is the entire rule, that is rule three. You did rule three perfectly while breaking rule one."
"That's —" His mouth did something complicated. "That's a very generous scoring system."
"It is my scoring system," Yelena said, "and I am the only judge."
And then, because he was still shaking slightly and because the floor was warm and because the door had a bolt on it and there was nowhere either of them had to be for another forty minutes, she pulled him back down.
Afterward, the room was very quiet.
The water had gone still. The lamps had burned down, the frosted window up near the roofline had gone from honey to bronze, and the whole small cedar world smelled of hot stone and eucalyptus and, faintly, of her.
They got back into the warm pool eventually, because the tile had begun to give up its heat and because Bob would not stop apologising to the floor. She put her back against the ledge and he settled in beside her, and she ended up against his chest with his arm across her, which was where she had intended to end up about forty minutes ago.
"Yelena."
"Mm."
"I can still see it."
She opened her eyes. Followed his line of sight up and across, to the broad wet handprint on the cedar boards eight feet above them, exactly where he had put it.
"Yes."
"It's not coming off, is it."
"It is steam on a wet board in a room that is wet all the time." She put her head back down on his chest and shut her eyes. "It will be gone in an hour. Ivan will never know."
They stayed like that. Water lapped once against the ledge and went flat. At some point his hand started moving slowly up and down her back, and she did not think he knew he was doing it. The brass pipe dripped into the cold pool beside them, and the ring traveled out to the rim and came back smaller. Through the wall came the hum of the plant room and, further off, somebody's radio playing something old with an accordion in it.
"Thank you for tonight," Bob said.
Yelena did not answer that out loud. She moved her hand under the water, found his, and threaded her fingers through it, which was the same thing.
"I want to say something else," he said, after a while.
"You have already done a thank you. Any more and it becomes a speech."
"It's not a thank you."
He shifted so that he could see her face, and found that she had already turned it toward him, which meant she had been waiting.
"What, then?"
And Bob — who talked constantly, who over-explained, who apologized in advance for sentences he had not yet begun — did not have it. She watched him go looking. She watched him fail. He had been building the sentence since somewhere around the taxi and it had not come, and it was not going to come in the next four seconds either.
So he leaned over and kissed her forehead instead, just above the eyebrow, where her hair had dried into a shape it was going to have very strong opinions about in the morning.
Yelena went completely still under it.
"That is not words," she said, eventually.
"No."
"That was the deal. Both of us say what we need to say out loud, even when it is bad."
"It isn't bad, though. That's the — that's the whole problem." He tipped his head back and looked up at the steam under the ceiling. "If you were hurt right now I'd know what to say. I'd have it ready. I've got words for every bad thing that's ever happened to anybody, I've had them since I was nine." He stopped. Started again. "And you're just lying there being — and I've got —"
He gave up.
"Nobody taught me the happy half. So all I've got is —"
He tried.
"It's good?" said Bob.
The pipe dripped. The ring went out to the rim and came back smaller.
"That is the worst sentence I have ever heard," Yelena sighed.
"I know."
"That was terrible."
"I know, Lena —"
"Then we work on it," Yelena said.
She settled against his shoulder, and neither of them moved again, and for the rest of the hour there was nothing in the building, or outside of it, that needed either of them at all.
[The End]