Page 92 of 10 Days to Surrender

But it’s the only way to make room for life to come in from underneath.

“You’re right,” I rasp.

Ariel freezes mid-tirade, her fury stuttering. “What?”

“I said you’re right.” I step back, hands raised in surrender. “I took what wasn’t mine. Again. Old habits. I’m sorry, Ariel. Not just for the man I am. But for… this. For all of it.”

She blinks. “I almost think you mean that.”

I laugh humorlessly. “I want to. Fuck, I want to so badly, Ariel. I just have to convince myself that it’s okay to love something I might one day lose.”

Surprised tears stud her eyes. “Why are you so sure you’ll lose me?”

“How can I not be?” I grit out. “One minute, you’re under my hands, screaming my name. The next, you’re halfway out the door, taking my unborn children with you. I needed?—”

“A cheat sheet?” Her laugh cracks. “Some secret code to tame me?”

“To understand you.”

Silence thickens. Owls hoot from the treetops outside.

“Writing… helps,” she says finally, tracing the laptop’s logo. “Sorting the mess in my head. What’s real. What’s fear. What’s just… you.”

I crouch before her, eye level with the swell of our children. “And what am I?”

Her fingertip grazes my scar. “That’s a question I’m still learning how to ask.”

I press my forehead to her knuckles. “Let me know when you figure it out. Maybe by then, I’ll know how to answer.”

Ariel laughs, though the sound is stained with unshed tears. Then she bends down to kiss my forehead. “You’re insane, Sasha Ozerov.”

“Utterly and irrevocably,” I agree. “I can’t promise that’ll change. But I can promise that I won’t look again where I shouldn’t. You have my word.”

A ghost of a smile touches her lips. “The great Sasha Ozerov, making promises about boundaries? Who are you and what have you done with my brooding Russian mobster?”

“I took the good bits of him and buried the rest in the garden. Though I do still wonder whether you’ll run when you put them all together and see what kind of picture it forms.”

Ariel tilts her head to the side. “What if I don’t hate it as much as you think I will? What if I’m starting to like the view, hm?” She laughs softly and touches my cheek. “Even the jagged parts.”

I move her palm to my scar. “Even this?”

“Especially this.” Her breath hitches as my lips touch her fingertips. “It’s where you end that matters to me, Sasha. Not where you begin.”

The leather chair creaks as we both settle onto it, Ariel nestled in my lap. The laptop’s glow illuminates her face in the predawn darkness as she opens it and scrolls back to the document.

“You don’t have to,” I tell her, but she shakes her head.

“I want to. Just… some of it. The parts I choose.”

I nod, and she begins to read. Her voice is soft but steady as she shares fragments of our story through her eyes—the first meeting in the Met bathroom. The night on the mountain. The moment in Paris when she realized she was falling for me despite herself, when Jasmine played violin for us long before Ariel knew just how close we were to perfection.

She falls asleep eventually, trailing off in the midst of a sentence, the laptop still lying open.

I could keep reading. Or I could do what I do instead:

Close it, leave it behind, and carry her to bed, where I hold her until the dawn comes. Right when it’s breaking through the windows, I whisper into her ear, “Marry me, Ariel.”

She’s asleep, so she doesn’t hear me and doesn’t answer.

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