Drinking

"You drink a lot," I said to my girl. She was pouring her third glass of something after a long day's reconnaissance work.

She grinned. "I have to drink enough for both of us, since you won't have any."

"No," I said, putting my book down, "I'm serious."

"Are you trying to tell me what to do, Mr. Kuryakin?" she asked.

"No," I said again, "but you drink a lot."

She turned away, her face toward the wall, a faint pinkness in her cheeks. "I—can't sleep if I don't drink."

"Oh," I said. I understand things like that.

I didn't ask anything else, but she kept going. "When I was fourteen, they took my mother. Came and got her in the middle of the night. They said she was a spy. I don't know if it was true, but she never came back. A few months later, a policeman came to my house and said she was dead. Ever since then, if I try to sleep without drinking, I hear them coming and see them take her away, and I—remember that I didn't do anything to stop them."

"I'm sorry," I said.

She turned her face back toward me. "Don't be. We all have stories like that."

I nodded. "That doesn't make them any less horrible." She crossed the room to fill her glass yet again. "Come here," I said.

She turned around and stood still in the middle of the room, her hair loose around her shoulders, a look of vulnerability in her eyes that I'd rarely ever seen there before. "Why?"

"Just—put that down and come here." She set her hotel glass down carefully on the desk and came to where I was seated in the room's one armchair. As soon as she reached me, I pulled her down and into my lap.

"What are you doing?" she asked, beginning to resist.

I opened my arms so she wouldn't feel restrained. "Trying to return your favor from the other night, when I had my nightmare."

"Oh," she said. "That's all right then." She curled up on my lap then, snuggling into my chest like a small child and closing her eyes. I held her gently, thinking about the little girl she must have been and feeling anger course through me at the thought of those who had taken her mother.

"Illya," she said after a while in a sleepy voice.

"Yes?" I asked.

"I think I might love you."

Her words knocked the wind out of me as hard as if she'd punched me in the gut. How on earth could a woman like her love a creature like me?

"You're drunk," I said, patting her back.

She sat up suddenly and took my face in her hands. "Do you love me?"

"Of—of course I do," I sputtered. How could a creature like me not love a woman like her?

"That's all right then," she said, repeating herself and laying her head on my shoulder. This time, she fell asleep.

I think she did it on purpose so I'd carry her to bed, but I didn't mind. Her half-full glass, abandoned on the desk, showed that perhaps, even if I couldn't make the horrible things go away, I could help her bear the memory of them a little better.