#contnder

He swings her around in the kitchen — not slow-dancing so much as playing with an unreasonably careful rag doll. She never lets herself fall into cabinets or corners, never lets their bodies collide too aggressively. A Molchat Doma hit plays from Sasha's tinny phone speakers. The device rests on the kitchen table, occasionally dinging with a notification from Vanya or Amada or Mariya, but Spirit doesn't care.

He's here. For at least this song, he's hers.

He holds her close for one brief moment, and she kisses his clavicle. He laughs it off, or at least seems to, before hoisting her onto the kitchen counter, lifting up her dress.

TWO.

When he's kissing up her leg, he notices the scars on her ankles. His lips linger here, and he looks up to her with an unspoken question.

She thinks about home, about the lab. She thinks about what they did to restrain her. It's a hazy, half-memory — she was drugged up like crazy, back then, and it's been a decade and a half.

Yet her eyes are watering. She tries to smile, tries to guide him back to her legs and what's between them, but he kisses the knob of her ankle instead, then straightens up and holds her.

THREE.

She makes him jealous, one night. She isn't expecting to — is surprised that their text conversation persists for as long as it does. But she's talking to some jerk at a club and complaining about it to Sasha, and something about the way this stranger treats her strokes a nerve.

Finally, she comes over — to his, always to his, always to him — and he opens the door and takes her up into her arms, kisses her almost like he missed her, almost like he actually likes her.

I'm yours she says, and he makes a face, but she pretends not to notice — and they fuck anyways, don't they?

FOUR.

A club. On the other side of town — in another town entirely, as far as New York is concerned. Nobody here cares about mob rules or Porchenko's or Harris Harris. Nobody here would take a photo and make their business someone else's business.

It's strange, being in public together and getting to touch each other. Spirit keeps grabbing Sasha's wrist, just because she can. Her fingers hardly go all the way around. He shakes her off.

Still, on the dance floor, they wrap their arms around each other and grind against each other and kiss like they care.

FIVE.

When he wants to do coke, which is seven-out-of ten times he's with her, he wants to do it off her tits.

She lies on the couch and he crawls on top of her, plugs one nostril, and snorts a line that runs from her nipple to the top of her breasts. She can't stop giggling, she's already done a line of her own, off the coffee table, like a normal person.