She said yes.
An hour after he’d sent her the poem, Elena sent a note back saying she would be home at five, and the guys immediately sprang to action. They shaved him. Fixed his hair. Dressed him up in his best suit. Noah asked Alexis to make a special dinner, and then the two of them arranged the patio table outside the same way he’d arranged it her first night in America.
With a half hour to spare, Vlad took to pacing with his crutches as the guys tried to calm him down.
“Take deep breaths,” Malcolm said.
“I can’t. I’m too nervous.”
“About what?”
He stopped and glared.
Malcolm held up his hands. “There is no reason to be nervous about that right now. This is your first chapter of a new story together. Sex might not even happen tonight.”
“But what if it does?” Oh, God. He was going to puke.
“If it does, congratulations,” Mack quipped.
“But what if she doesn’t . . .” He couldn’t even finish the sentence. He could even say the word orgasm.
Malcolm stood in front of him. “You know what? There’s actually a really good chance she won’t just from intercourse itself.”
Vlad groaned.
“But that could be true whether it’s your first time or your fiftieth. No matter what, just remember to take care of her first.”
Vlad closed his eyes. And then wrenched them open. “Oh shit. What about condoms? I don’t—I don’t even know if she’s on birth control.”
Mack patted his chest. “Taken care of, my dude. We bought you some and put them in the drawer next to your bed.”
Vlad wished the ground would open up and swallow him. “This is so embarrassing. I can’t believe I have to talk to you guys about this.”
Mack scoffed. “Are you kidding? This is what we’re here for, man. Think about how much healthier all men in this world would be if we could be this open with one another all the time.”
Malcolm nodded and crossed his arms. “Virginity is nothing to be ashamed of. It’s just one more artificial measurement of how we define manhood. We raise men in our society to treat sex like a contest, a race to be won, instead of the joyful expression of love that it can be. And that’s not to say that casual sex is wrong, or that a person’s reasons for wanting to have sex are ever a reason for judgment. Sex for pleasure’s sake is perfectly healthy and normal. But so is waiting. We tell women they’re sluts for not waiting long enough and men that they’re losers for waiting too long. It’s a twisted message that hurts everyone. But look at you, nervous and embarrassed, when you actually have a chance to experience something amazing.” Malcolm gripped the back of Vlad’s neck and squeezed. “You are going to get to fully experience your first time with a woman you love at an age when you can actually appreciate it.”
“You’re just saying that to make me feel better,” Vlad said.
“No,” Mack said. “I don’t even remember my first time. I remember the girl, but not the act itself. I was in a rush to shed my virginity, and that was all that mattered to me. I’m ashamed of it now. But you? You waited, man. You put yourself in cold fucking storage for years to wait for the woman you loved. You really are a romance hero.”
“But my leg . . .”
“Means you can have fun and get creative,” Malcolm said.
“The important thing is to just be honest with her about everything,” Mack said. “Tell her you’re nervous and why. Tell her you’re afraid she won’t orgasm. Tell her you’re concerned that you might have to experiment to find the right position. Tell her all of it. Intimacy is an act of communication. Hold nothing back.”
“But remember,” Malcolm said. “The most important thing tonight is to talk. Tell her what you should have said last night.”
Colton ran into the room. “She’s on her way,” he said. “Everything is ready.”
Oh, God. Vlad had never been this nervous. Not even when he proposed to her.
“Okay, we’re going to take off now,” Malcolm said. “Just be honest with her, man.”
Vlad listened to them leave. The sound of their cars’ departure, however, was quickly followed by another car pulling in.
She was here.
Vlad scraped his hand down his jaw and swore. He was already growing a shadow. He crutched to the front door and pulled it open just as she slid from the front seat of the car. She wore a black dress and high heels that made his heart pound and his eyes bug out and his chest break open with the surge of floaty champagne bubbles.
She stopped halfway up the sidewalk. “Hi,” she whispered.
He tried to calm his breathing, but his voice shook anyway. “Welcome home.”
And then all his careful plans collapsed, because she burst into tears. Shit. SHIT.
She quickly closed the distance between them, walked into the house, and threw her arms around his neck. She buried her face against his clean-shaven jaw and clung to him. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.”
Vlad cupped the sides of her cheeks and tugged her back. “For what?”
“For everything. For leaving. For crying. For six years. For everything.”
“Don’t do that,” he murmured. “Not yet. Just be here with me.”
“Okay.” She nodded, sniffled, and backed up. “This was not what I was going to do when I saw you.”
A bubble of laughter found its way north as he wiped a tear from her cheek. “What were you going to do?”
She sucked in a breath and stood tall. Then, in a clear but shaky voice, she said, “ ‘Bound for your distant home, you were leaving alien lands. In an hour as sad as I’ve known, I wept over your hands.’ ”
The champagne bubbles rose all the way to his eyes and began to pop and fizz until a sheen of water formed across his vision. She was reciting the first stanza of another Pushkin poem, “Bound for Your Distant Home.”
“Elena,” he whispered.
In a breathy, smoky voice, she continued the story, a tortured tale of two lovers exiled from each other, surviving only on a futile fantasy of seeing each other again and sharing a long-awaited kiss. To Vlad, the poem had always felt despairing, forlorn and full of loss. But now, hearing it from Elena’s voice as she stood in his doorway, finally home and gazing at him with tears and the promise of something more in her eyes, the words became symphonic, the message hopeful. In her voice, there was nothing futile about having faith in a fantasy of finding each other once more.
A whimper stole from Vlad’s chest, and he tugged her close again. As he buried his face against her shoulder, her hands threaded into his hair. She held him like that, cradled him, as she whispered the remaining lines of poetry until she reached a fevered verse about a sweet kiss at last.
He couldn’t take it anymore. Vlad lifted his head and repeated the words with her. Then her hands came around to cup his cheeks, and she kissed him.
Oh, how she kissed him. Slid her hand around the back of his neck, drew his mouth the rest of the way to hers, and breathed in the little sigh he made when he slanted and slid into her. She moaned low in her throat, and he was gone. Just like that. Gone. He dug his fingers into her back and poured all the longing and sweetness and fireworks he felt into his kiss. Their pose was awkward because of his crutches, but it didn’t matter. Their mouths mingled and merged in a sensual conversation that was six years in the making.
He reached behind her and swung the door shut. Then he wrenched his mouth away to suck in a breath. If he could, he’d carry her upstairs right then, but Malcolm’s reminder was fresh in his mind. They needed to talk. “There’s something I want to show you,” he said.
It took a giant’s dose of willpower to remove his lips from her body, to set her apart from him, to grab hold of his crutches instead. She followed closely to the patio outside. The guys had set it up exactly as he instructed. Candles flickered on the table. Their plates were set for dinner, which was warming in the oven, and on her plate was a wrapped present he should have given her a long time ago.
When she saw it all, her hand fluttered to her mouth. “It’s just like . . .”
“Your first night here. I wanted to try it again, since I screwed it up so badly the first time.”
“No, you didn’t. It was me.”
He nodded toward her seat. “Open your present.”
Elena’s heels clicked quietly on the concrete patio as she walked to the table. She picked up the gift, the paper now dusty and faded. As she peeled away the tape, the paper fell away and revealed a picture frame.
She bit her lip. “Where did you get this?” She slowly sat down in her chair, staring at the photo.
He made his way to his own seat next to her and sat down. He set the crutches on the ground and stretched his leg out under the table. “My mom took it.”
The picture was from their wedding just after his father had offered a toast. The moment was seared in his memory. He and Elena stood next to each other, and halfway through his father’s speech, Elena had looped her arm through his and leaned into him. Surprised by the affection, he’d looked down to find her smiling up at him. For one split second, it all felt real. And somehow, his mother had captured it in a snapshot.
“Do you remember what I said to you when you walked down the aisle?”
“That I looked beautiful.”
He lifted a corner of his lips. “After that.”
“You said everything was going to be okay.”
“I promised you.” His voice wobbled. “I haven’t kept that promise.”
“Yes, you have. You’ve taken care of me. You’ve made so many sacrifices for me.”
“But that’s not the same thing. You were right, what you said last night. I shouldn’t have just let you go to Chicago without telling you how much I wanted you to stay. I thought that if I let you go, that if I gave you the space you needed to heal and to find yourself after what happened with your father, that you would find your way back to me. But you never did. You just slipped further away, and it’s my fault. Because I never made it clear that I wanted you to come back.”
When she looked up, the candlelight caught the glint of the tears shimmering in her eyes.
“I waited way too long to tell you what I really wanted out of our marriage. That’s my fault. So, I’m telling you now. I didn’t propose to you only because my mom suggested it. She simply gave me the courage to do what I always wanted to do.” He started to shake on the inside. “Maybe we were too young to be married. Too young to know how to say the things we needed to say. To understand the problems we created by not saying them. But we’re not too young now.”
Her chest rose and fell in deep, shaky breaths as she absorbed his words, let their meaning settle into her mind.
“I don’t want you to go, Elena.” His voice was thick, and his eyes stung again. “When I said that last night, what I meant was, I don’t want you to go. I never wanted you to go.” He wiped away the tear that slipped down his cheek. “I will learn to be okay with whatever you decide, but if you think there’s a chance that you could want to start over—”
“Shut up.” She laughed thickly.
“Wh-what?”
She stood and gazed down at him. “Shut up and kiss me.”
Vlad rose on wobbly legs, using the table for leverage. With a gentle tug, he pulled her flush against his body. She rose on tiptoe and placed a soft kiss upon his lips that took his breath away. Not with its passion, but with its promise.
“Do you want to eat dinner?” he murmured.
She shook her head.
“What do you want?”
She caressed his cheek. “I want my husband.”
His entire body trembled. “Are you sure? Because if you’re not ready, Elena, we can wait.”
“Don’t you think we’ve waited long enough?”
Yes. Yes, they had. He crushed his mouth to hers, devoured her in a single slant. Her hands slipped inside his jacket and explored his chest, his back, his stomach. Oh, God. This was really going to happen. Between them, the urgency of so many years of pent-up desire swelled and nestled against her stomach. She gasped and pressed against him until he saw stars. He’d never wanted to be naked so badly in his entire life, but at the same time, he was grateful for the boundary of clothing. He didn’t want to go too fast. Every second of this was precious, and he wanted to stretch each one out as long as possible.
He pulled back and rasped against her lips. “Meet me in bed.”