“You’re not getting in a car with a stranger at midnight when you can’t walk a straight line,” he said. The Russian undertone was slightly more present than it had been at the fundraiser, which I filed next to the observation that his jaw was tighter than it had been there too, that something in him was less composed, that the specific quality of his stillness tonight was different. Not looser, exactly, but—
I stopped analyzing and focused on the argument.
“You’re a stranger,” I pointed out.
“I’m Yegor’s cousin.”
“I met you four days ago.”
“That’s four days more than zero.” His eyes held mine with an evenness that made arguing feel like it was moving through resistance. “Come on.”
I wanted to push back. I genuinely wanted to—not out of recklessness, not because the Uber idea was actually good, but because the alternative was getting into Gregory Kamarov’s car while I was incapable of maintaining the kind of careful, calibrated distance I needed to maintain around him, and that felt like exactly the kind of situation that was going to produce consequences I hadn’t consented to in advance.
But his hand was on my arm and the floor was still tilting and it was midnight and Camila was already gone, and the honest part of me—the part that had been thinking about him for three days without permission—was already moving.
He walked me out.
His car was black, immaculate, and smelled faintly of something that was becoming inconveniently recognizable to me. He opened the passenger door—not with flourish, just with the matter-of-fact efficiency of someone for whom opening a door was a neutral act and not a performance—and I got in, and he closed it, and I sat in the seat and stared straight ahead and told myself very firmly that I was in control of myself.
I was an adult. I was a medical student. I understood human biology and neurochemistry and the specific, documented effects of alcohol on decision-making. I was completely capable of sitting in a car for ten minutes without doing anything I would have to account for in daylight.
Gregory got in on the driver’s side. Pulled out his phone. Looked at the screen for a moment—Yegor had clearly given him my address, because he entered it without asking me—and started the car.
We drove.
The city moved past the windows in its nighttime configuration—gold and dark and the particular hazy beauty of Chicago after midnight, when the edges of everything softened and the lights reflected off wet pavement in long, liquid streaks. I watched it without seeing it.
I was aware, in the way you’re aware of things you are trying not to be aware of, of every detail of the person sitting eighteen inches to my left. The way his hands sat on the wheel—easy, relaxed, the hands that looked made for a different world and somehow looked equally at home here. The line of his jaw in the passing light. The leather jacket. The faint smell of something that wasn’t cologne and wasn’t quite gunpowder either, just—him, some combination of things that had no business being this specific inside my memory.
Somewhere between the third and fourth traffic light, the warmth of the car and the lateness of the hour and the four drinks reached some kind of critical consensus, and I stopped fighting them.
I woke up with a jolt, suddenly conscious without being certain how I got there or how long I’d been gone.
The car had stopped.
I was still in the passenger seat. The engine was off. The city outside the window was the specific, familiar configuration of my block, my building, the amber glow of the entrance light I’d come to know as the marker of home.
And Gregory was leaning across the center console.
Close.
His face was close, and his hands were at my waist—not holding, just present, the warmth of them reaching me through the fabric of my dress—and the sound I’d half-registered was the click of my seatbelt unbuckling, which he had apparently just done.
I came fully awake.
“What the hell are you doing?” I said.
The words came out with less alarm than I’d intended, possibly because the alarm was arriving slightly behind the observation, which was: He was very close, and his eyes in the low light were a shade of blue I didn’t have a name for, and the warmth of his hands was doing something to the part of me that had been cataloguing details for three days and had very strong opinions about all of them.
He went still.
Our eyes met, and the question hung between us—what the hell are you doing—and the space where the answer should have been filled with something else entirely. Something that was the absence of distance, the specific thickness of air between two people when the gap has become too small to maintain with certainty.
“What do you think I was doing?” he said.
Low. Quiet. The accent more present than it had been all night.
I looked at him.