I tried again. “If love doesn’t mean much to you, do you mind if I ask what does?”
“Hmm?” I must have lost him a little to his grief.
“What does mean something to you? What are you looking for?”
“What I’m looking for…” he repeated, as if he’d never encountered those words in that order before. And then, rather dreamily, “What I’m looking for is to be owned.”
“And is there anything I can do for you now that would feel a little bit like that?”
I really didn’t think he would answer. It was a wildly intimate thing to ask, and even vulnerable, Ilya was one of the most put-together people I’d ever met, the confidences he permitted himself to share as self-contained as hard-boiled sweets.
“Yes. You could hold me…” His voice caught, then steadied. “You could hold me like you need me.”
I was so relieved not to be useless to him that I probably got far too excited. “Oh my God, I can totally do that.”
“You shouldn’t feel you have to.”
“Are you kidding me? This is right in my wheelhouse—even though, now I think about it, I don’t actually know what a wheelhouse is, and since I’m not a wheel, then maybe it would be overall a bad thing if I was put in one.”
“I think it’s to do with the steering of a ship.”
“Point is, I’msuper needy. Roll over.”
He rolled over with the kind of instinctive obedience that eluded me even in my subbiest moments, and then I hustled up behind him like I was the biggest spoon in the goddamn universe. I pretty muchgluedus together, shoving my ever-chilly feet between his knees, and pressing my face to the gorgeous silky planes of his back.
Finally, I inveigled an arm over him and used that to pull him in even tighter. “How’s this?”
“Surprisingly effective.” In that moment, he sounded both more like Bellerose and more like Ilya—an unexpected combination of sharp and soft that reminded me of the horse chestnuts I used to collect in autumn. After all, they too had smooth and secret hearts.
Remembering the way Caspian had touched me sometimes, and how much I’d loved feeling possessed by him, I lifted my head and dragged my teeth lightly against the nape of Ilya’s neck. He responded with a deep, blissed-out shudder. And within a matter of minutes, was fast asleep.
It took me a little longer to drop off, mainly because I wasn’t used to the position, but the events of the day, general exhaustion, and the luxurious warmth of Ilya slumbering trustfully in my arms did the job in the end. He was gone, of course, when my alarm went off next morning, and his phone just rang and rang when I dialled his number—which I did, a bunch of times. Honestly, it was probably for the best he didn’t have voicemail. God knows what I might have said.
In any case, a couple of days later, I came home to find a parcel waiting for me, hand-delivered, and wrapped with terrifying precision. No note, but inside was a long rainbow scarf, knitted from wool so soft it was like having a cloud wrapped round my neck. Ilya still didn’t answer when I called him, but somehow I knew he was okay.
Chapter 15
Between finishing my article, editing the living fuck out of it, and worrying about Ilya, I was hoping Nathaniel would think better of inviting me to dinner. I mean, I got why he’d done it in the moment—it was a textbook power move. But actually going through with it just seemed pissy. I was essentially out of his life now. He’d won. He had Caspian. I didn’t. And so there was no need for us all to get together and pretend we were friends. Maybe he needed the reassurance of it—my love stripped, chained, and forced to wear a mask—but he must have known how much that would hurt me. Of course, he had no reason to care about my feelings. But as much as I wasn’t his biggest fan, he’d never struck me as intentionally cruel. Anyway, tl;dr and fml: Nathaniel did not think better of inviting me to dinner.
Said invitation came in the form of an email that was better written and better pitched than any article I’d ever put together, and cc-ed to Caspian, so I couldn’t say no. I said yes, and there followed a low-key excruciating exchange in which we had to agree to a date, and Nathaniel had to tell me where he lived, and I had to let him know about any dietary requirements I might have and blah blah blah. Basically, it was kind of like being capitally punished in the seventeenth century, and then having to have a polite chat with the judge about whether you were available to die on Monday and if you were allergic to hemp. And no, I hadn’t lost all sense of proportion.
In any case, I did what I usually did when I was having a crisis—which was Skype Nik in Boston, and panic.
“…and now,” I finished, throwing myself on the bed so dramatically I nearly kicked the laptop onto the floor, “I have to go to dinner with the bastards. And Nathaniel’s going to be smug and perfect and use the right fork, and Caspian’s going to be allnothing nothing nothing nothingfuck with my headnothingnothing. What am I going todoooo?”
Nik idled back and forth in his wheelchair as he pondered. “You’re going to have to kill yourself. It’s the only way.”
“Someday you’ll say that to me, and I actually will, and then you’ll be all sorry and sad andoops, I shouldn’t have been sarcastic.”
“Oh, come on, Ardy. Just tell them no.”
“I can’t. I’ve already said yes.”
He did this thing that was half sigh, half growl. “You know that’s not how consent works.”
“Does that apply to dinner parties?”
“It applies to everything. You taught me that, you daffy twit.”
