Jason Matthews - Red Sparrow

Nate softly closed the door. The safe house was dead still, they could hear car doors chunking, then the sound of them driving away. “Well,” said Nate, “did you like the Director?”

It was twilight and running lights ghosted along the inlet, and happy voices came over the water through the open window. Two glasses of wine stood untouched on the table as they sat in the dark, Dominika on the couch, Nate in a chair. The ambient light caught her hair and the eyelashes on her right eye. She had worn a summery dress for the day, tight in the bodice, with heels, like for a job interview. She didn’t feel like talking, and Nate didn’t know what to say, worried that their arguments and now this visit had broken her back, that she was going to tell him she was backing out. Nate was her handling officer. It was his responsibility to keep the case going.

Fuck, he thought, lots of pitches get turned down, agents are lost in the CI grinder, there’s bad luck, or bad timing, you miss a train by thirty minutes and it changes everything. But who loses an agent because she thinks we’re all shitheels? He could imagine the heads bent forward in the Headquarters cafeteria. Yeah, it was Nash, in Helsinki. Hall file was right after all, usually is. Langley would cable, Time for a CONUS tour, sit a spell, let’s talk about your future. His father would write, Welcome home, son, all is forgiven. A pitch-black mine shaft, steep and airless. He registered that she had stood up and was walking toward him.

The dark room affected her, a cocoon, invisible, she didn’t know, but she stood in front of him, looking down at him. The usual deep purple of his background was there, and strangely she could feel a heat emanating from it, still and steady. She knew he was suffering, the too-serious professional worried about the equilibrium of his career, but there was vulnerability under the professional seriousness. Whatever he thought about her personally—she wasn’t sure—his fretting and worry were endearing. She realized that she herself was feeling the strain, living constantly with the ice-cold secret. Goaded by anger at first, she had fallen into her new role, a different role. She had pushed herself for the Americans because she trusted them, they cared for her, they were professionals.

But especially for Nate. Part of what Dominika was doing was for him, she realized. If he had asked her, she would have told him she had no thought of quitting. She was determined and focused.

But right now she needed something more than the rush of deception, of the knowledge that her will was stronger than all others’, that she was besting the Gray Cardinals. She needed to be needed. By him. She could feel her secret self open the hurricane-room door and step outside. Dominika put her hands on the arms of Nate’s chair, bent over, and kissed him on the lips.

She hadn’t foreseen this. (She knew he certainly had not.) In her service as well as his, Dominika knew it was zapreshchennyi, strictly forbidden, to become physically involved with an agent. Emotional complications are death to a clandestine operation. It’s not for no reason they whisk the Sparrow from the room after the honey trap and “Uncle Sasha” takes over, all business, because passions get in the way, you can’t get anywhere with an agent who is thinking about his khuy, the old instructors used to say, cackling and trying to get her to blush.

She was in his arms, kissing him, not frantically, but slowly, softly; his lips were warm and she wanted to drink them in. She felt a pressure building in her body, inside her skull, in her breasts, between her legs. His hands pressed on her back and she felt sweet and edgy, as if they were childhood friends who years later had discovered each other as adults. He breathed deep purple heat into her ear, and she felt it down her spine.

“Dominika,” he said, wanting to slow down. They had argued days before, it was folly to become involved like this, the stability of the case required—

“ Za molchi, ” she whispered, shut up, you fool, and she brushed her lips along his cheek and held him tighter.

His head was spinning, from indecision, from alarm, from an unbidden lust growing in his guts. Nate knew he wanted her; it was insane, reckless, forbidden. He couldn’t remember what happened next.

They were naked and feverish in the little bedroom, and Dominika raked her nails lightly between his legs to make him follow her—she thought she must have just invented a new come-along technique—and they were climbing ridiculously over the footboard onto the bed wedged between the bedroom walls. She kept her hand on him, fixing her fingernails a little tighter, and she laughed, her mouth dry with desire. Feeling his skin for the first time, trailing her lips across his stomach, was unreal and dizzying. He looked at her in surprise as she pushed him back, her hand on his chest. Prurient and tender and shy and slutty, she tasted him, and savored the mouthfeel of him, and it was as if they had been lovers since forever. There was never a thought of Sparrow School, or numbered techniques. Dominika simply wanted him.

It was becoming more urgent, her secret self was expanding and filling her head and constricting her throat, and just in time Nate blessedly flipped her on her back and she pointed her quivering toes at the ceiling and the light of a bloated moon rising over the harbor islands came through the window and got in her eyes. She was night blind and moon blind, and Nate was only a silhouette above her, then a crushing weight. Dominika felt a sudden, excruciatingly sweet expansion, and the moonlight was rocketing around behind her eyelids, and she hoped he could keep her heaving body from blowing away like a piece of paper. She felt the hollow rush expand inside her, and then a rogue wave rose up from the deep, bigger than the others, hanging, curling, and she said, “ Bozhe moj, ” from way back in her throat, and a white-eyed state of grace rolled through her like the wind bends a wheat field.

They lay side by side in the crushing moonlight. Dominika waited for her thighs to stop quivering before turning to look at his moon-wet body. “ Dushka, you are very good at agent handling,” she whispered.

The night air had not yet dried their bodies when they heard a key turn in the lock of the safe-house door, and they rocketed out of the bed, and Nate pulled on shirt and pants and shoes, Dominika grabbed a handful of clothes and ran into the bathroom. Nate walked into the living room to see Gable in the kitchen, leaning into the open refrigerator.

“Thought I’d come back to do damage control after the Director’s tour-de-force performance,” said Gable. He turned back to look into the refrigerator. “Any more of those dumplings left?”

“On the bottom shelf,” said Nate. “Yeah, I talked to Dominika about all that shit. I think she understands the diff between us and the suits.”

“I was laughing my ass off when she got pissed at the old peacock. She’s got spirit,” Gable said. He put a container of dumplings on the counter. “So you calmed her down okay?” he asked.

“Yes, Bratok, ” said Dominika, coming out of the bathroom, “I am calm now.” She was completely dressed, hair combed and features composed. Nate watched Gable’s face. “Let me reheat the pelmeni for you,” said Dominika. She lit the burner, rattled a pan. “They are best the second time,” she said, “especially like this.” She poured the boiled dumplings into the skillet with butter and fried them until lightly brown on all sides. “But now this way they are best with vinegar,” she said.

The deadly domestic prattle continued as they stood around the kitchen counter eating out of bowls. No one spoke, and Gable occasionally looked from Dominika to Nate and back again. Nate studiously looked at his food, but Dominika returned Gable’s look unperturbed, reading the bloom around his head. Finished eating, Gable ran water in the sink as Dominika put on her coat and said good night. She didn’t look back at Nate as she went down the stairway. Nate closed the door, turning with dread to face Gable, who was walking to the living-room couch with two glasses held between his fingers, a bottle of scotch in the other hand.