Page 125 of 10 Days to Surrender

His turn.He clears his throat. “Ariel… You were on the other side of a door when I met you,” he rumbles. “A bathroom stall door. Amen’sbathroom stall door, actually.” A laugh ripples through our friends and family. “But do you know why that’s so perfect, Ariel? Funny enough, you do know the answer. You read it from a book for me once.”

I close my eyes, because I can picture the moment: me pinned against a shelf in the New York Public Library, Sasha huge in my field of vision as he plucked a book from over my head and thrust it into my hands. Long before love was ever a concept inour heads, he knew that there was more to this than we knew how to face. So he borrowed someone else’s words to say what we refused to.

Under my breath, I recite the words fromAnna Kareninain unison with him. “‘He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun. But he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.’”

When we finish, he smiles. That lone tear glistens untouched on his cheekbone. “You are my sun, Ariel. You are the bird that flies above it. You are the light I cannot be—so let me be the shadow that keeps you pure. Let my hands be dirty so yours can be clean. Let my sleep be broken so yours can be whole. I’m not your nightmare; I’m the nightmare of anyone who would ever think of dimming one second of your shine. So this is my vow: I vow to keep you flying,ptichka.For as long as we both shall live.”

48

SASHA

There are kisses, and then there arekisses.

This is the latter.

But then again, this part has always been so easy for us. As I pull Ariel into my arms, lower her halfway to the floor, and press my lips to hers, it’s not that it feels so different than any kiss before.

It’s that it feelsexactlythe same as the very first time.

The same tremor, low in my stomach.

The same certainty. The same fear.

The same nuclear, undeniable, blasphemous, holy fucking heat ripping through from me into her, from her into me, scorching us both and then remaking us from the ashes, over and over again, a million lifetimes passing with every second.

It felt like this when I kissed Ariel in a bathroom, before I ever knew her name. It feels like that now. And then in so many places in between: libraries and forests, bathhouses and mountains, New York and Paris, day and night, in love andin hate, in lust and in longing. The world has changed shape around us a thousand times. But this—the feeling of her mouth searing against mine—has always, always been here.

Coming back up to standing feels like bobbing back to the surface of an ocean in the middle of a hurricane. It’s wild up here. Everyone is losing their minds.

Feliks learned how to fuckingwhistle,apparently, and Gina must be to blame, because the two of them are like goddamn tea kettles as they blast off repeatedly.

Zoya found what appears to be an unlimited supply of dry rice. She and Kosti are hurling it at us with matching wicked grins. For a pair of old fogeys, their aim and velocity are both surprising. It’s like getting hit with shrapnel.

Belle is clapping along as Marco starts up on an accordion, which, safe to say, is not my preferred brand of music.

At least Pavel and Lora aren’t actively assaulting us. That’s probably because no one has ever cried as hard as Lora is crying without needing an emergency IV to rehydrate. There is a literal puddle in her lap, and it’s all Pavel can do to keep her upright. Happy tears—I think—but lots of them.

“Bozhe moy,” I mutter against Ariel’s mouth. “Can we not have one moment of peace?”

She laughs, the sound pure sunshine. “Peace was never really our style anyway.”

At some point, the hooligans ease up and let us walk down the aisle without an excessive number of projectiles aimed at our heads and eardrums. Laughing, they pour in behind us as we all go to the banquet table set up for the reception.

The tables themselves are as at-risk as my wife and I are. They’re sagging beneath the weight of metric tons of Zoya’s pierogis and bottle after bottle of Marco’s reds.

I nudge Ariel. “Which one of those bottles do you think is our ‘special blend’?”

Her cheeks go scarlet as she elbows me hard in the ribs. “If you breathe a word about that to anybody, I will kill you. Husband or not, you will not be safe from my wrath.”

I laugh as I drape my arm over her shoulders and pull her into my embrace. “You should’ve put that in your vows.”

We settle into our seats in the midst of all our loved ones. Fairy lights shiver in the warm breath of night—fireflies trapped in glass. I count them and shake my head in amazement.

One of them for each time I almost lost this.

I’ve never been one for parties. Too many variables, too many opportunities for things to go wrong. But watching my wife—my wife;hell, I’ll never tire of saying that—glow in the candlelight as she listens to Gina tell a story, I find myself enjoying it in a way I never knew was possible.

I’mat ease.Not at arms, but at ease. Completely unconcerned.

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