IRINA VOLKOV
I didn't sleep.
This was different. This was lying in the dark in a room that had stopped feeling like a prison a long time ago, staring at a ceiling, turning something over in my hands that I wasn't sure I knew how to hold yet.
He'd kissed me back.
I'd kissed him first, which meant the decision was mine, which meant I owned it, which meant I couldn't explain it away as something that happened to me. I had moved the inch. I had made the choice. And his hands on my face and the way he'd said 'I'm finished being interrupted' and the silence after it — all of that was going to require a new category in my filing system I used to manage my interior life.
Gosh.
I didn't have a new category ready.
I got up at six and went to the kitchen.
He was already there.
We looked at e
