She huffed in exasperation. “You just said so yourself that he wanted me. He was grilling you to find out if you’re the competition – not because he suspects you were bratva. It was simple, stupid machismo, nothing more sinister than that.”
His face did something complicated that made her laugh.
“Oh, please. As if you weren’t behaving in the exact same way.”
“I…” His jaw worked, and he took a hard drag on his cigarette.
“See?” She stood, and tightened the belt of her robe. “I’m in desperate need of a cuppa. Want some?” When he hesitated, she said, “Chamomile. It won’t keep you up.”
He nodded.
It was after two, and the flat was dark. Miles wasn’t over tonight – she had no idea where he was staying, only that he’d promised to check in tomorrow (today, at this point) – and Cass’s room was on the far side of the flat, in a hallway off the living room, across from the office. Little chance anyone had heard them. Still, she tiptoed into the kitchen, where the light over the stove, and the plugged-in tree over by the mantel in the next room, were the only light sources. Shepherd snored loud and deep from the sofa, and she moved silently on bare feet to fetch down the kettle and two mugs.
When she returned to the bedroom, two steaming mugs in hand, she found the linens turned down, and Toly, dressed in his black boxers, sitting against the headboard, finger-combing his hair in an absent way as he paged through a large, familiar coffee table book.
The sight of its white covers spread across his lap sent a jolt of electricity across her nerve-endings. Anxiety. Doubt.
She went to sit beside him on the bed, and passed over a mug that he accepted without looking up, murmuring a quiet thanks as his gaze shifted back and forth across the glossy pages.
“I keep that here in the bedroom instead of on the bookshelves out there to avoid this very thing. You don’t have to look at it.”
In answer, he sipped his tea and turned the page. Her own face stared up at them, her hair in a low bun, her makeup muted save deep burgundy lipstick. She wore a black, strapless dress, throat draped in four diamond necklaces of varying lengths, studs big as quail eggs winking at her earlobes.
The book wasn’t one sold on any store shelves, but one printed – at a hefty price – at a vanity press, the white leather cover embossed with her initials. Her mother had had it made for her one Christmas, a collection of all her photoshoots, the dates and brands printed in the corners of each page. There were some getting-ready, behind-the-scenes shots, too, most in black and white. Some candid travel snaps, including from the French Riviera trip she’d dreamed Toly into. For Mother, a scrapbook, with photos slid into clear covers, with stickers and handwritten captions, hadn’t been good enough. Oh no. Why be handmade when you could be fabulous?
Raven never paged through it; she had the memories, and her own reflection in the mirror. What sort of ego neededthatkind of stroking? Her own face on a two-page spread, put down for all eternity with cloth binding and gold edges?
Toly turned the page again, and she resisted the urge to bat his hands away and snap the cover shut. She wasn’t the sort of person who squirmed, and she didn’t now, but she found his cigarettes and lighter lying on the coverlet and lit herself a fresh one. When she was done, old-fashioned silver Zippo snapping shut with a click, she noted that he hadn’t turned the page again. That he seemed to be stuck on this particular page, and he’d stopped blinking. He’d gone utterly still, actually; if not for the shallow rise and fall of his chest, he could have been mistaken for a statue.
Raven exhaled smoke over her shoulder and said, “I’m serious, that isn’t–”
“I’ve seen this one.” His voice had become a rough, strangled-sounding croak, and the sound of it surprised her not only into silence, but into scooting closer so she could lean against his shoulder and peer down at the dreaded book.
It was the La Passion perfume ad she’d shot at twenty-one. Her face fuller, softer with youth, the coy look the photographer had asked for shaky at the edges, uncertain; she’d mastered her harsh, runway expression by that point, but posed, still photos were another matter entirely; she couldn’t use her strut, couldn’t prop a hand on her hip at the end of her walk and project savagery out at a crowd. She remembered the hot lights, the way her makeup had run; the cold Coke cans pressed to nipples not even visible in the picture. Remembered feeling like a specimen under glass, as an army of people dressed in black shifted beyond the ring of blazing lights and reflective umbrellas. The photographer: “Give me more, that’s it, no, the other way, darling, one more, chin down, reallyfeelit.”
Toly was transfixed. His lips had parted, breaths rushing faintly through them, the hitch in each one audible because she sat so close. As she watched, he lifted a hand and hovered it over the page, as if he meant to touch her face in the photo; he retracted it, folded it up tight against his stomach instead.
Raven, in turn, was transfixed by him, by this wholly unexpected reaction from him. When it became clear that he would continue to stare, not speaking, wanting to touch, not blinking – she was concerned for his eyes, at this point – she said, “They ran that advert in Russia. Did you see it back home? Before you came here? It must have been…God, it was more than a decade ago.”
He didn’t respond right away, but finally grated out, “There was a billboard.”
“Goodness, a whole billboard?” She aimed for light, but it fell flatly in the narrow gap between them. He was off in his own little world of reverie. “Keep in mind, no one’s skin looks flawless when it’s blown up that big for a billboard.”
He said, “It was mounted on top of a building. They had lights shining on it. I used to sit on the roof next door, and…”
And stare at it, the same way he was staring at it now, in the book.
Raven reached over and slowly closed the book. She thought he might resist, but he didn’t, nor did he when she pulled it from his hands, turned, and set it on the nightstand out of reach.
She meant to tease him, gently, and only a little, but when he lifted his face to meet her gaze, the urge died quietly away. He looked…lost. Years younger, suddenly, uncertain, unmoored.
Raven wanted to tuck his hair behind his ear, stroke his cheek. Wanted to draw his head down to rest on her shoulder, stroke his neck, call him darling some more: intimate, tender urges she’d never felt for anyone besides family. But she thought that might spook him, so she kept her tone even and said, “How old were you when you first saw it?”When you first saw me?
His throat jerked on a painful-looking swallow. He was looking right at her, but his gaze was faraway, drawn inward. “Fifteen.”
“Oh,” she said, and then, thoughtoh.
Slowly, like sunlight peeking through thinning clouds, the implications of what he was revealing, with only a handful of stilted words, took shape. Gained shape, and weight – a gravity that she realized, more and more completely by the second, had been pressing heavy across Toly’s shoulders, likely from the moment they’d met.
