“Later.”
I nodded, looking down at the water, dark blue and shimmering. I’d never seen a private swimming pool before, marble-tiled and sumptuous, all for one person to enjoy alone—or not alone. My heart ratcheted up into my throat, and I swallowed. “Let’s swim.”
I peeled out of my uniform, down to my new silky American underthings, and entered the water with a neat dive. Kostia shed his black-tie finery like a fish leaving its scales behind in a scatter of silver, slipping into the water seemingly without disturbing the surface. A second later I felt steel-strong hands link around my wrist and yank me into the deep end; I pivoted underwater and got my heels into his ribs, yanking free as an underwater laugh surprised me in a stream of bubbles. We thrashed and fought and finally fetched up gasping for breath on the far edge of the deep end, arms folded side by side on the lip of the pool, bodies hanging light in the water. My heart was still cannoning inside my chest.
“Your leg,” I managed to say, nodding down through the ripples toward the livid scar I’d seen on his leg when he dived in. The gash gouged from the knee almost to the ankle. “From the end of Sevastopol . . . I know all your other scars but that one.”
A drop of water slid down his sharp jaw. I resisted the urge to smooth it away. “Do you?”
“Of course I do. I was never more than a few meters away from you whenever you were wounded.” I wasn’t sure exactly what I was saying, just that I had to keep putting words into this dark, bottomless silence. “You didn’t usually get hit badly enough to land in the hospital battalion; you were always luckier than me. But you got the bad cut on your trigger hand at the beginning of the Sevastopol siege—” I was talking too fast. Forcing myself to slow down, I nodded at the ridged line running along his thumb where it rested on the pool’s tiled edge. “The slash from a German combat knife, clearing out that nest of snipers on No-Name Height.” I reached up to touch the puckered seam running along the crown of his head under the razored-short hair. “And the splinter wound on the back of your neck, the one I stitched up for you in Sevastopol.” Sliding my fingers across the jagged mark on his neck. I let my hand stay there, resting against his pulse. “Four near misses,” I said quietly.
He didn’t name my scars, but his hand found them under the water—sliding over the hip I’d wrenched outside Gildendorf; running up my spine along the forked shrapnel scar, up through my wet hair to find the splinter wound from Odessa, coming to rest on the side of my face, fingers brushing the ear that had had to be stitched back to my head. “Those are just the scars we can see.”
Lyonya, I knew we were both thinking.
And then Kostia was looking at me through the dark, thinking I love you. He didn’t need to say it for me to hear it. I took a deep, unsteady breath, looking down at the tiled ledge where my hand had found his and linked finger to finger.
“You’re my partner,” I said unsteadily. “You’re my shadow. My other half. I trust you like no one else in this world. No one can do what we’ve done and not be closer than two humans can ever be, in this world or the next.” My parents, my child, my friends, either of the men I’d called husband—none of them knew me like Kostia. No one would ever know Kostia like me.
His trigger-calloused forefinger caressed my knuckles. “You could have just said I love you, Lyudmila Mikhailovna.”
“I do,” I whispered. I loved Lyonya, too. Maybe I’d loved them both all along, my husband and my partner. Maybe it wasn’t moving too soon; maybe it was this has always been.
The second kiss, slower and fiercer than the one by the canoe. “Why are we always in water when we do this?” I murmured as he pulled me against him through the silky ripples of the pool. He still tasted of iron and rain. We clung, coiled together, mouths locked, silent as a countdown. With Lyonya, things had been all jokes and laughter, even curled in bed; falling into Kostia felt like falling into a well down to the middle of the world. My fingers skated over his skin, satin over granite. He’d looked deceptively slight next to Lyonya’s golden height and breadth, but naked in my arms, Kostia looked like he’d been forged rather than born, bolted together out of piano wire and iron rivets rather than tendon and muscle. My head fell back against the lip of the pool as his mouth found my breast, and that was when we heard tipsy shouts from the house above. Yuri’s voice, calling my name—the delegation, tipsy and happy, was returning to the hotel.