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They play each other in Lille, Munich, Belgrade, Paris again. The competitions have lately started illicitly managing the draw to ensure they come up the same side of the leaderboard; there’s only so many times chess fans are willing to watch the same two players duke it out in the final. Better to have one of them take the other out early on. Create a little more jeopardy.
They swap wins. Beth, then Borgov, then Beth, then Borgov. She is learning that she likes playing against nobody as much as she likes playing against him. She knew already that he was a genius, but she understands the full extent of that fact now. His genius is of an entirely different breed to hers – a genius with no flash or show or conceit. He doesn’t care if she or anyone is impressed. Only whether he’s playing the game to the best of his capabilities. And those capabilities are monumental. Never-ending.
Despite their vastly different styles they are almost perfectly matched; the result on the day seems to come down to which one of them has woken up in a sharper frame of mind. He beats her in the second round in Munich and she sticks around to watch him advance coolly to the final. Against Benny, as it happens. Borgov beats him in six hours. Beth commiserates with him that night and then lies awake until dawn replaying the game in her head, making all the moves he didn’t, beating Borgov again and again on the ceiling.
She translates it to real life in Yugoslavia the next time they come up against each other. The semi-final this time. She wears her shortest white dress even though she promised herself she wouldn’t. There’s an intimacy to playing him she has not found anywhere else. To sit across from him for hours and hours and watch him in silence as he considers his moves. To feel the cold burn of his gaze as he watches her in turn. He gives nothing, Borgov. A stone wall of a man. She was obsessed with him the first time she ever saw his picture, when he was a goliath on a distant horizon for her to set her slingshot at. What she feels for him now she has shared space with him, tangled with him in the flesh, is something else entirely.
She learns to read the minutest twitches of his face. By the fifth game in Budapest, she thinks maybe she knows his micro-expressions better than anyone else in the world. The rare, barely-there curl in the corner of his mouth just before he makes a game-changing move. The tightening around his eyes when she surprises him. The near-paternal pride when she at last takes the game by the throat.
Her body learns to react to his without her consent; breath catching when she realises he’s about to box her in before he’s even lifted his hand to move a piece, her hips shifting minutely when he looks up at her in that way of his right as she starts to slide the final lines of a gambit into place.
He is, always, impenetrable. What she would give to crack open his skull and paw around in his thoughts.
She thinks he feels the same draw she does. An intellectual fascination, of course, for the only other person who can match them. But a sexual one too. It comes with the territory, she thinks, she’s never been truly attracted to a man who couldn’t match her for brains. She never tries to hide it from him – feels no shame in it at all, in fact. He’s handsome and familiar, with a consistent solidity to him that appeals to her after the slippery, whippet-thinness of Benny. Beth is a person with a bad habit of clinging onto the familiar whether it’s good for her or not. She’s been watching him on screens and in pictures since she stole her very first copy of Chess Review ; she knows his face better than most men in her life. And, anyway, this can’t be worse for her than the pills.
What seals it mostly, though, is that his ego is of an entirely different nature to all the men she’s been with in her life so far. It’s quiet and unshakeable. Never snarls when she beats him, never takes its insecurity out on her. So sure of himself he’s unassailable, even when he loses. The man he reminds her of most in those first few minutes after he realises he’s won or lost is Mr Shaibel, truth be told, and that’s not something she’s willing to look at more closely.
She’s inexorably drawn, too, to the rigid control with which he lives and plays. So very different from her. She wants to know if he fucks like that too or if in bed is the one place he loosens up, lets himself go.
Their looks linger longer in every game. Studying each other’s faces with careful intent. By the time she sits down opposite him in Budapest, they ought to be familiar enough to at least smile at one another. Instead he stands and shakes her hand with no expression at all.
All the same, she’s sure by the time she wins a day later that she has not read him wrong. That for all his Soviet stoicism he too wants to peel a little more of her back. Get at the marrow of her.
He’s in the bar when she goes down that night. It’s the first time she’s ever seen him in a hotel bar – the Soviets tend to cluster together in one of their rooms, smoking and rerunning plays. But tonight he is sitting with a glass of something clear in front of him. She knows already that he’s waiting for her.
“I still have the piece you gave me,” she tells him as she slides onto the barstool beside him. “When I won that first time.”
His mouth curves just a little. He gestures at the bartender to get her a drink and she leans up on her elbows to call, “A soda, please!” after him.
Borgov swirls his vodka. He says nothing. Beth feels the familiar old itch to be brilliant and impressive. To sparkle, to scintillate, to make him want her madly. She could kill for a drink.
“Good endgame today.” She presses her fingers into the brass top of the bar and doesn’t look at him. “I thought you had me for a while there.”
He shifts on his stool. Silence hovers for a moment, and then he says, “Yes, I thought too.”
“But I gotcha.” She grins, risks a glance at him. He’s watching her steadily, the same way he does during a match. “This time, anyway.”
His gaze doesn’t waver. “My turn next time.”
It takes her a half hour of conversation to be sure that he’s flirting back. As best Borgov seems capable of flirting, anyway. It’s truly hard to tell; he’s so carefully blank that Beth spends a good ten minutes convincing herself that she’s read him wrong. But she hasn’t. She can’t have.
“I don’t know if you remember,” she says when he’s on his second drink and his eyes haven’t left her face, watching her with the same steady intensity with which he watches a chessboard, “but in Mexico City before the first time I played you – I was in an elevator when you got in. Your colleagues were talking.”
He doesn’t look away. “I remember. I felt that you understood us.”
“I did.” She flashes a smile, half-embarrassed even now. “I took Russian night classes at the local college until I was seventeen. I’m not great at it, but I’m good enough.”
He sighs, glances away. “I’m sorry.”
“No. I mean – I needed to hear what your colleagues said at the time. But you… you said I was a survivor.”
She gets no response to that, just that same steady stare.
“Nobody had ever said that about me before. Nobody had ever taken me that seriously.”
It comes out almost like a question. He takes it as one, too, tipping back the last of his vodka, resting an elbow heavy on the bar. Still, still he’s watching her. That impenetrable gaze.
“I knew even then, I think,” he says after a moment, “where you were going. What that meant for me.”
What does it mean , she wants to ask. A rival? A usurper? Or more, more, more. His eyes don’t leave hers. He’s old enough to be her father, they both know that. Beth would like to say that chess makes it not matter at all, that it’s about a meeting of minds, and maybe that is part of it. But the truth is that she likes it. Likes his age, his precision, his world-weariness. She wants to climb inside him and take some part of it for herself.
He pushes his glass back abruptly and stands. “May I see you back to your room?”
She smiles at him. Eyes half-lidded, bottom lip pressed between her teeth.
“Yes please,” she says, and slides from her stool.
He walks close behind her all the way up the stairs and down the corridor. In her room, he pulls off his jacket and undoes his cufflinks with careful deliberation. Beth sits on the bed with her legs crossed. She’s breathless already. She hasn’t felt this submissive with a man since she was sixteen losing her virginity to some pretentious college student back in Lexington, and she hated it then. But now – now. Borgov comes over to her and puts his hand on her throat to tilt her head back, his thumb pressing into the hinge of her jaw.
“You want this?” he asks, careful and slow so there can be no mistaking it.
“I want this,” she replies in Russian, and sinks to her knees.
The only noise he makes the whole time is when he hits the back of her tongue and Beth, obliging, opens her throat to take him deeper. Benny taught her how, a trick perhaps more useful than most of those he’s taught her about chess. Borgov’s bigger, and she feels her whole chest jerk with a gag, but it’s worth it to hear that rough, surprised curse. He’s been married since he was eighteen, she knows, so maybe nobody has ever done this for him before. The idea of it sinks low to pool between her legs.
He comes with a controlled push down her throat, one hand wrapped in her hair and the other tracing a thoughtful line over the jut of her cheekbone. She pulls off him with a gasp, spit dangling and lips wet, and just stays there on her heels looking up at him. He’s breathing fast. His hands still on her, cradling her head. He wipes cum away from the corner of her mouth with one big thumb and pushes it back onto her tongue.
Then he smiles. The only time she’s seen him smile since she beat him that very first time.
“My turn,” he says, and lays her out on the bed.
Married since eighteen, but with a wife or mistress who’s taught him well. He eats Beth out with such exacting precision that she curls up and comes faster than she ever has before, two of his fingers pressing inside her, the shine of her on his chin.
When she’s collapsed back down, her throat scraped raw, he wipes his fingers on the comforter and pushes back to his feet. Both his knees crack and he shakes them out with a muttered curse. He buttons himself back up as she props herself up on her elbows, her dress still bunched around her waist, and watches him. His movements are so precise.
He pauses once he’s slid his jacket back on, looking down at her on the bed. The corner of his mouth lifts in what’s almost a smile. “I will see you in Mexico City?”
Beth grins. She can’t help it. “It’ll be a back-to-back win for me.”
He snorts. “We will see.”
He closes the door behind him with a gentle click. Beth flops back down and rolls her spine, all of her so pleasantly undone. Still grinning at the ceiling like a fool.
They fuck for the first time in Mexico. He screws her with the same clinical efficiency with which he plays chess; quiet, ruthless and exacting. Beth has never felt so possessed in her life. It nearly frightens her that she likes it as much as she does.
He is a man who lives his life in moderation. He can have one drink and just stop. Beth’s obsessed with it. She watches him relentlessly, fascinated each time he shakes his head no to another like it’s easy, like he isn’t fighting himself with everything he’s got to do it.
He has a wife, definitely. Multiple kids, probably. Good little Soviets all of them, she imagines. She remembers seeing him with a wife and son in Mexico, dark-haired and dark-eyed and neat as the day was long. She wonders if he talks to his wife more than he talks to her. If, after they fuck, he turns onto his side towards her and tells her what’s going on in his head. After he fucks Beth, he sits up in bed leaning against the headboard like all the strength has been drained out of his body and lights a cigarette, watching her in contemplative wordlessness all the while. Beth watches right back. She can do cryptic silence better than anyone she’s ever met, and she’s not letting this Russian beat her at her own game.
“Who do you play tomorrow?” he asks finally, and she smiles at the little victory.
“The Bulgarian,” she tells him, “Petrov. You?”
For the first time, she sees him playful. He says, eyes crinkled, “Benny Watts.”
“Ah.” Beth grins. “Poor Benny.”
“A friend of yours, no?”
“Yeah. He’s part of the reason I beat you in Moscow.”
“A good player. But—”
“But not us,” agrees Beth, and pushes up for another kiss.
In Rome, Beth beats him in the first round and goes running the second her hotel bedroom phone rings that night. He opens the door with his pants and shirt still on and pushes her straight down onto the bed. He doesn’t say a word the whole time; not when he yanks her panties off, not when he unzips himself to push inside her, making it burn, no foreplay to ease the size of him in. His teeth are gritted as he puts one socked foot up on the mattress and starts to thrust into her, punishing, relentless.
Beth angles her hips up higher and writhes back against him, legs spread as wide as she can get them, choking on moans as he surges into her. It nearly hurts like this. A bit too deep. She pushes back into it anyway. Puts her fingers on herself and finds her clit slippery and hot.
He doesn’t let up. Fucks hard and fast until she hears that telltale shift in his breathing, the minute thickening inside her cunt. She rubs frantically at herself and tips over into an orgasm at the same time as he drops all his weight down against her ass and starts to come, grunting with the effort, his hands spasming on her hips.
Beth folds forward as soon as her muscles release and he goes with her, heavy. They end up face-down on the rough hotel duvet, his belt buckle digging into the back of her thigh, his cock softening inside her.
“The queen’s gambit,” he says on an exhale, “again. Blyad .”
She laughs weakly against the rumpled sheets and lies, “You make it too easy.”
“I do not make it easy .”
His indignation makes her giggle. The sound is more fond than she should allow; to cover it, she shimmies forward, letting him slip out of her so she can turn over to look at him properly. He pushes himself up slowly. His hair is falling a little forwards, more dishevelled than she’s ever seen him. He’s frowning at her like a reproving schoolmaster. Her cunt pulses in response and his eyes go down consideringly. She stills as he wraps his hand around the top of her thigh and runs his thumb up the seam of her, gathering his cum as it leaks out so he can push it, with clinical detachment, right back in.
“I should go,” she says after a moment, feeling herself flutter. “The others’ll be waiting.”
“Mm.” He strokes over her clit, making her flinch, and pulls back. “Don’t shower.”
“I—”
“Don’t shower.”
She picks a fight with him in Sarajevo on the anniversary of her mother’s death after he beats her in the final, furious at everything and in need of a place to put it. He takes it in patient silence for five minutes and then, in one swift movement, he wraps her arms behind her back, hooks a foot under her legs and tumbles her down into the bed. As they go, a lamp crashes to the floor. There’s a knock immediately at the door and he barks at the KGB agent outside to go away in bitten-off Russian.
“Let me go ,” Beth heaves out, squirming under him, her dress rucking up around her thighs. “Fuck off, let me go, you pig.”
“In this room you are not in charge, Lizik.” He is calm and careful, yanking his clothes open one-handed as he pins her in place. “And you do not want to be, not really.”
Beth lashes out with a foot. Raging. But she can’t make her mouth open to deny it.
“I know what you really want.” His hand slides up her spine and anchors at the base of her skull. Holding her there, crushing her in a way that makes all the blood in her body pool between her hips. She is flat on the duvet; he jostles her thighs apart with his knees and leans forward until the hot hard weight of his cock comes to rest between her ass cheeks. She is pinned and helpless. When he takes his cock in one hand and pushes it lower, against her cunt, he finds her the wettest she’s ever been.
“Yes.” He slips the first inch inside and Beth’s breath hitches, her body spasming beneath him. “You like this. You like it like this.”
Beth shakes her head but doesn’t mean it, just needs a way to express what’s building inside her. He sinks inside her relentlessly, a constant pushing drag, pressure building as he opens her up.
“No,” she moans, meaning the opposite.
His mouth is right by her ear. “Yes,” he murmurs, and pushes all the way in.
“You ever think about defecting?”
He makes a noise, quiet and scornful. “I love my country. Don’t you?”
Beth doesn’t feel one way or another about America. She lifts a shoulder to communicate this and he sighs that tired, fatherly sigh.
“Do you ever think about it?”
She rolls over onto her front. The sheets are cool and silky against her bare breasts. They’re in Istanbul. Heat clings to them both, sticky on their skin.
“A few times. The way you Soviets love chess…”
“Yes, we love it. But – Moscow, it would not suit you. A person must keep their head down. Be quiet. Be humble.”
She turns her head on the pillow. Through a rumpled red curl, she dimples up at him. He’s propped up against the headboard, as usual, a cigarette in his mouth, his cock softening on his thigh. She can see a row of four crescent-moon imprints in his shoulder where she gripped him. He doesn’t smile back, but his eyes gentle.
“You think I’m incapable of quietness?”
He pushes that curl back out of her eyes. “I know it.”
“You’re probably right.” She hauls herself up onto her knees and reaches for his cigarette. He surrenders it without complaint, watching her in that silent way of his as she puts the filter between her lips, breathes in big. “Would you divorce your wife? If I moved to Moscow?”
He goes on looking right at her. “Would you ask me to?”
She thinks about that one. Smoking while she does, still watching him. She reckons she could spend a lot of her life watching him and not be bored.
“I think I might, actually.” The revelation surprises her almost as much as it seems to surprise him. “I never thought about marriage except to not want it. But you—”
He does smile now, a small thing. One she’s sure not many people get to see.
“Ach, I don’t know. You are too much for me to handle as a wife, I think.”
“But you like it,” says Beth, leaning forwards, pressing the cigarette back between his lips, “handling me.”
He takes a final lungful of smoke and stubs the cigarette out on the nightstand. His hand comes up to her head, gathering her curls in one big fist. She couldn’t believe it when she first saw him, how delicately those fingers move pieces around a board. His grip tightens and she breathes out sharply through her nose, smiling, settling into the burn of it.
“I do, malysh ,” he allows, and pushes her head down towards his lap.
Beth goes. Pliant. Like this only with him.
She realises she’s in too deep as she’s watching him play his countryman Laev in New York City. It’s the final; he defeated her in the quarters two days ago and took his triumph fuck that night, bending her over in the shower and leaving round purple bruises on her hipbones.
She’s up on the balcony, leaning over. Benny beside her is restless, foot swivelling, eager to be gone. Borgov beat him in the semis and Beth commiserated with him afterwards with Borgov’s cum still trickling into her panties. Benny is bored but Beth cannot leave. Borgov knows she’s here; his eyes flick up to the balcony every now and again, as though he’s just thinking.
Both men are playing with determined seriousness, barely looking at each other, their eyes only for the board. Beth’s gaze lingers on the width of Borgov’s shoulders, the lines on his face, the sleek dark shine of his hair. So much of her life she’s spent staring at him in print or in person and still she wants just a lick more, just a second extra.
Beside Beth, Benny rolls his neck, stretches. His arm comes down along the back of her chair, the kind of thing they do to each other without thinking twice. Beth adjusts into it, glancing down to fix her skirt. When she looks up again, Borgov is just looking away. She doesn’t think anybody else will see it. But a frown is settling into his forehead. He shifts in his seat irritably and, with an uncharacteristically jerky movement, reaches for his bishop.
“Hm.” Benny straightens up slightly beside her. “Interesting.”
Beth’s eyes flick to the board. She sees it right away. A mistake. Borgov’s made a mistake. There are a few players in the audience good enough to grasp it right away and a low murmur goes around, dying quickly away. Beth only has eyes for him. He’s seen the error as soon as he’s made it, she knows. His shoulders slump just slightly.
He resigns less than twenty moves later, expression flat and still.
“Hey, how about that,” says Benny, surging to his feet with the applause, delighted. “That’s got to be the first mistake he’s made in twenty-five years. Nice to see him get beaten even if it’s not us doing it, right?”
It isn’t. Beth’s stomach has sunk right into her shoes. He is hers to beat. Just as she is his.
“I have to go.” She gives Benny a quick pat on the elbow and melts into the crowd. He turns after her, calling her name, but she’s already nearly to the door.
The KGB agent outside his bedroom sighs when he sees her.
“Oborin,” she says, chin lifted, smile on, “пожалуйста?” Please?
Ivan shakes his head and says, his English heavily accented, “You are distraction, Beth Harmon. You are bad news.”
“I know.” She rocks forward onto her toes. “But I’m not trying to take him away, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“Then what are you trying to do?”
She rocks back down onto her heels. Thinks about that one for a moment. And then, as honest as she knows how to be, “I’m just trying to beat him at chess.”
“Chess,” snorts Ivan, but he does unlock the door and let her in.
A cluster of voices comes down the hall to the bedroom. Beth has been lounging impatiently on the bed; she pushes herself up hastily and conceals herself out on the balcony, veiled on the other side of the curtain. Her shoes are tucked neatly beneath the vanity. There’s no time to hide them.
The door crashes open and Borgov comes in breathing hard, loosening his tie. Two of his teammates have followed him in, both of them talking at once, more at him than to him. Beth peers around the curtain to watch. She can only pick up snatches of the conversation with both of them talking over each other like that, a litany of remonstration. One of them takes him by the shoulder and bites out, “You haven’t made a mistake like that since you were a teenager,” and Borgov yanks his arm away, scowling.
Beth can tell the moment he spots her shoes. He stops pacing at once and turns to his colleagues, both hands up as if in surrender.
“I know,” he tells them, “I know. Please. I would like to be alone.”
“We need to analyse—” one of them starts, but he lifts his hands higher.
“No need. I know where, how and why I went wrong. Please. Leave me.”
They go, muttering to each other, the door slamming shut behind them. Beth comes out immediately, weaving over the carpet towards him like a cat. He stops her at arm’s length, his hands on her shoulders.
“It was me, wasn’t it,” she asks, without needing to truly make it a question, “me and Benny.”
He says nothing. His fingers flex on her.
Beth wraps both hands over his wrists and clutches him there. “We’re not anything but friends. We used to be more, but it didn’t work out. He actually said no to sex with me the first time.”
Borgov’s face is loosening by millimetres. “A fool.”
“Yeah, I thought so.”
That makes him almost smile. His hands slide down, gentle, his fingers tracing the neckline of her blouse before they dive under it. “I cannot claim any hold on you. You should be with him if you want to be.”
She tilts her head back, eyes fluttering closed. “No. We’re – don’t stop – much better as friends. He still thinks of me as a chess player first and a person second.”
“And you wish to be a person first?”
“I wish to be both of them at the same time. Just myself.” She sighs as his touch roams, thumb and forefinger twisting over her nipple, making her shudder pleasantly. “He gave me my first ever orgasm and then he told me I should play the Sicilian against you in Paris. I don’t know. Maybe I should’ve. It still would’ve been a disaster.”
“Mm.” He pulls his hands out, starts on her top button. “You were drunk that day?”
Shame rises inside her, fast and vicious. She turns her head aside.
“Hungover. Maybe still half fucked up. I don’t really know. It’s kind of a blur. But I do remember – I remember the way you looked. I was expecting disgust, but you were just… so disappointed in me. Almost disbelieving.”
He’s four buttons down now, unpicking one tiny gold circle at a time. “I was. I had been worried about facing you.”
That brings her eyes right back to his, incredulous. “Worried about me ?”
“Why is that strange? You were beating everybody. How old were you – eighteen?”
“Nineteen,” she says, still standing there with her hands dangling at her sides, the revelation shocking up through her. “ You were worried about facing me .”
“Of course. I studied your games, Lizik. Even then you were merciless. I thought, if I cannot force my play from the start, I will be in real trouble. And then, tch ,” he gets her last button open and pushes her blouse back off her shoulders, running his thumbs down the white straps of her bra. “You rolled over and gave it to me.”
Beth reaches behind herself and unhooks her bra. Her reward is the expression only she gets to see – and perhaps his wife. She doesn’t know and she doesn’t ask. His face contracts with satisfaction and desire, pupils widening, his hands sliding onto her, cupping her breasts with easy proprietariness. Those hands that move pieces with such calm deliberation.
“I’m not interested in Benny,” she says, breathless. “I’m not interested in anybody but you.”
He pauses for a moment. Still fully dressed, tie loose, brow furrowed. Her there in front of him in her stockings and skirt and nothing else.
“And here we have the problem.” He thumbs over her nipples, makes her curl forwards, gasping. “Never mind, malysh . Come to bed.”
He kisses her long and hard this time. Rolling his body overs hers and holding her down, one hand around her wrists, the other roaming up and down her with leisurely satisfaction. Beth blooms under his touch, twisting sinuously up into him, legs twining around his.
They never talk about where this is going. What they are even doing. It is a thing only for tournaments, for foreign countries, for big hotels and stolen evenings. He has his wife, his children. Beth has – well. She could have all that, if she wanted.
They never play against each other, either. Even though they both have boards in every hotel room they fuck in, never once has he pulled one towards him after or before and said, “A game?”
Beth doesn’t want to play him. She doesn’t want this to be what she had with Benny or even Harry; built over a board, built on one. It’s like practise games would dilute the thrill of playing only when there’s blood or glory on the line. And she doesn’t want to give that up. She doesn’t want to live in a world where she sits down opposite Borgov across a chess board and doesn’t feel that shivery rush of adrenaline, that tightening in her cunt.
His hand moves between her legs. Beth lets her thighs part and licks at his tongue, eyes screwing shut, pleasure winching tighter. He strokes her with near-scientific precision, that spot just above her clit she loves best, his two middle fingers wedging deep inside her.
After she’s come, he sits back on his heels and pulls her into his lap, his hands wide around her hipbones, sheathing himself inside her with a grunt that makes her even wetter. He fucks her slowly, moving her up and down. She is limp, unresisting. Content to be owned like this. His thumb moves back to her clit and presses there firmly. Beth shudders, toes curling against the comforter. His cock is at an unusual angle inside her, thudding firm and fast in a way that feels almost dangerous.
The hair on his chest has silvered more since the first time she saw it. She wants to run her fingers through it but she can manage only arching her spine, hooking her ankles together behind his back.
He kisses her when he comes, dragging his thumb against her to pull another little orgasm out of her. Just a small one this time, shivery. Then he rolls her onto her side and nestles in behind her, the rough fronts of his thighs against the tender backs of hers. And he holds her. Just holds her.
“Stay,” he says when she makes as if to leave. “Please. Tonight. Stay.”
She shouldn’t. Both his KGB minders saw her come in, and she’s sure the Americans have the room bugged besides. She’s under no illusions that this is a secret from anybody in authority but still clings, perhaps foolishly, to the hope that it is irrelevant enough for them not to care. Or at the very least for each side to believe it’s worth the shot at enticing one of them over.
All the same, neither of them have ever stayed before. What might they think, those anonymous suits with their bulky headphones?
“Does your wife know?” she asks quietly as evening falls among the skyscrapers outside.
He yawns. She still can’t believe it, sometimes, that the great Vasily Borgov, champion of champions, tsar of the chess world, is as human as this. The hair on his legs, his old-man yawns, the way his eyes screw shut when he comes.
“She knows.” He places a hand over her breast, thumbs back and forth over her nipple fondly. “I have said before, no? We were matched when we were young. She was a great player. They thought we’d do well together. But after Aleksander was born, she gave it up. She never did love it like we do. It was just a thing she was good at. Like being a wife, a mother.” He hesitates. “I respect her highly.”
“But,” Beth dares, knowing she shouldn’t ask, “you don’t love her.”
His hold on her tightens just slightly. “I do. But – she does not need me. I like to be needed.”
“And you think I need you.”
He sighs so hard it stirs her hair at the nape of her neck. “ Da . I do.”
Back in Lexington, she lasts less than two days before she gets in her car to go visit Jolene. She comes out with it over Mexican food in a downton shack four hours later, dripping red sauce into a paper napkin.
“I think I’m in love.”
Jolene is immediately intrigued. She probably never will lose that little part of her that delights in Beth’s misfortune the way sisters do the world over.
“Who is he?”
“He’s a Soviet.” Beth stares mournfully down at at her enchiladas. “And he’s married. And forty-four.”
Jolene’s eyebrows have climbed higher with every new statistic; by the time Beth dares look up again, they’ve almost disappeared under her hairline.
“Holy jeez. He a chess player, then?”
“Yeah.” Beth licks a finger miserably. “Their best one.”
“My god.” Jolene sits back, both hands still on her taco like she’s forgotten they’re there. “Wait. Their best— Elizabeth .”
Beth goes scarlet.
“It’s not the Soviet, is it? The one you were so afraid of playing? The one you beat in Moscow?”
Beth lets her silence do the talking. Jolene just stares at her in absolute astonishment for what feels like a whole ten minutes. Then she lets go of her taco, puts her head back, and starts to laugh so loud the tables around them all turn to look.
“For fuck’s sake,” hisses Beth, grabbing at her, “stop it, shut up.”
“Well,” manages Jolene at last, wiping away tears, “at least this one’s not a homosexual.”
Beth stares at her for a moment, her fingers wound tight in her long bell sleeve. And then she can’t help it. She starts to laugh too.
Jolene asks so many questions. Beth fields them all, alternating between mortified and delighted to finally have somebody know about it. Every sordid, desperate part of it. Then, right as they’re finishing up, when Beth is having one frozen margarita to prove to herself that she can have one and stop the same way Borgov does, Jolene sighs and levels a long, hard look at her.
“What do you want from it? From him, I mean. For him to defect? Leave his wife, come here?”
Beth’s whole face screws up. “No way.”
“You wouldn’t like it?”
“Are you kidding? It would be a circus. And we’d be – you know, stuck together. If he left everything for me I’d be all he had. I’d go crazy.”
“So, what.” Jolene lifts one eyebrow. “You’ll defect to him?”
“And leave behind the only family I’ve got?” Beth lifts an eyebrow right back. “As if.”
“Yeah.” Jolene eyes her. “Russia wouldn’t suit you, anyhow.”
“Yeah. I know. He said the same thing. I’m not ‘quiet’ or ‘humble’ enough.” She does a terrible approximation of his accent on the quotes and laughs when Jolene does, hugging the memory to herself.
“So what’s the endgame, then?” Jolene leans forward, sincere enough to make Beth pause. “I don’t want to see you hurt yourself again.”
Beth gives it due consideration. And then she has to admit, “I truly don’t know. I don’t know what I want. I just know that I want to be around him when I can, and so long as I know I’ll see him again soon I’m just fine by myself. I don’t want a grand romance or declarations of love or anything like that. I think I’d rather die. I just want to play chess and have him and that’s about it.”
Jolene sighs and slumps back in her chair, shaking her head. “Only you could seduce one of the USSR’s most valuable assets and not even care about getting him to defect.”
Beth rolls her eyes. “I didn’t seduce him.”
“No?”
“No. Seriously,” she insists at the look Jolene gives her then, “honestly I didn’t. It just – it was just there. As soon as I gave him a good game. I knew it was there.”
“My god.” Jolene’s grinning so wide it must hurt her cheeks. “The things you get yourself into, Cracker.”
“Oh, fuck off,” Beth tells her, but she’s smiling too.
They’re back in a Budapest, almost a year to the day since that first drink in the hotel bar. Beth caught a cold last week and she can’t shift it, but she could no more give up the chance to see him than she could look at a bottle of wine and not want it with her whole body.
It’s a smaller tournament, invite-only, where everyone plays everyone. She draws Luchenko in the first round. He keeps making her grin, fighting laughter, moving his pieces with a great flourish as his eyes twinkle under his wild white fringe. He lends her his handkerchief the first time she sneezes, to the dismay of the slender youth overseeing the game.
It takes her five hours to beat him. After, he takes her to the bar to buy her a drink.
The whole game, she was aware of where Borgov was in the room the way a deer is aware of a hunter. His broad back to hers while she played, sat ramrod straight in his seat as he dealt with some new French wunderkind.
Luchenko, to her embarrassment, has noticed.
“Trouble there, my dear,” he says as he waves a waiter over to get himself a vodka and her a lemonade.
Beth folds her hands into her lap. “I know.”
“It is not unusual.” His eyes are so keen behind his glasses. “When two people are so evenly matched – well. We cannot help ourselves. The nature of being human, I think.”
Beth so badly does not want to be discussing this with him. It’s impossible to tell how much he knows; whether he has just caught her mooning cow-eyed over his teammate and is trying to save her the heartache of unrequited love or whether Borgov has told him more, confessed to him what they do to each other in anonymous hotel rooms in cities that aren’t their own.
“I just want you to be careful.” Luchenko accepts his vodka from the waiter and takes a sip, eyes closing briefly in pleasure. “This is not an easy world for such entanglements.”
Beth drinks her lemonade too fast. The bubbles go up her nose and she has to cough to hide it, pressing his handkerchief to her mouth. Luchenko watches her through all of it, still smiling slightly, fonder than he ought to be considering how little they know each other.
“I am not surprised, though.” He pats his own knee absently, still watching her. “After he beat me the first time, I was half-obsessed myself. If he had been a woman – well. I can understand his position now, with you.”
Beth sniffs wetly. “I’m not asking for anything from him.”
“Oh, I know, I know. Myself, I have been told to talk sense into him. To make him persuade you to come to us. He has refused entirely.”
“Good.” She blows her nose into his handkerchief. And then, because she can’t help it, feeling like a child all at once, “Do you think it’s really as stupid as all that? Me and him?”
“Oh, of course, my dear.” Luchenko lifts his glass to her, his eyes glittering. “But I have always found the best love affairs are the stupidest.”
She tells Borgov about it that night, wrapped in his arms, watching him turn her watch around and around on her wrist.
“He is right.” He frowns as he twists again. “It is stupid.”
Beth blows out a huge sigh. “We ought to be allowed to be a little stupid. Since we’re usually so much cleverer than everyone else.”
His eyes flick up to her face. He studies her intently for a moment, brow furrowed. And then he smiles – one of his wide, rare smiles, the one so few have ever seen.
“Yes. I suppose we should.”
He doesn’t show up to the tournament in Mexico City. Beth has no phone number to get hold of him on or address to write to him at. She could ask the State Department, she knows, but the idea of it makes her feel sick. She enquires of the organisational board, the man in charge visibly fuming at the unexpected absence, and receives only a vague excuse about a family matter.
She beats everyone she plays. It doesn’t feel the same without him lurking over her shoulder and climbing the rankings beside her.
In the evenings, she takes Benny and a Bostonian newcomer, Samuel Taschen, to all the restaurants Alma came back from drunk and giggling during that years-ago trip. She doesn’t say anything about it to either of them. Just twists her watch on her wrist and debates openings with them until they all fall back into the hotel exhausted, chess pieces swimming behind their eyes.
She dreams of him most nights. Always half in shadow.
She doesn’t get invited back to Moscow. The other Americans are outraged to a man. Beth’s anger is spliced with shame, since she knows the most likely reason for it.
She’s been writing to Luchenko on and off since Budapest four months ago. Even though it galls her to do it, she sits down that night in Benny’s austere apartment and pens a few lines. The State Department and KGB and maybe CIA will read it, of course, but it’s not like they don’t already know all the sordid details anyway.
I can’t say I blame them for not having me back given everything , she tells him in Russian, labouring over the Cyrillic, but I had so hoped to play chess in the park again. Maybe to see a little more of how you all live there. I hope you’re all well. I heard your comrade had a family matter to attend to over the Mexico City tournament. Nothing too serious, I hope?
She gets a reply two weeks later. It’s been badly resealed; some agent somewhere tore the envelope as they were getting into it. Luchenko’s written English is neat and precise. It doesn’t fit at all with the slapdash manner of him in person.
I was sorry not to have you there, but you at least left room for another young thing to come and menace us. One of our own this time. A new boy, Kariyev. He managed Laev impressively, and took Girov out too though he made a better showing of it. Borgov saw to him in the end. His son is much recovered from his pneumonia, you will no doubt be glad to hear. His mother is moving him [redacted].
Are you planning to attend the tournament in Rome? I cannot face the travel, but USSR will be well represented. They’re sending Kariyev with high hopes for his chances against you (poor boy) along with Madjitov and young Girev. And Borgov of course.
Of course. Of course. Beth reads it five times and then puts the letter down, exhaling hard. Rome, then. She has her ticket booked already. She’d been thinking about asking Townes or the twins along just for the company, since Benny can’t go, but she won’t now. She’ll go alone. She wants to see him with an urge that is nearly paralysing. Terrifying for its proximity to the urge for a drink or a vial of pills.
She goes for dinner with Jolene to take her mind off it and mostly succeeds. But that night, on Jolene’s couch, she finds herself moving chess pieces on the ceiling, playing again and again just to slide the white queen towards the black king and feeling like a fool for doing so.
She goes to stay with Benny for a few days before she’s due to fly to Europe. She’s anticipating a couple of evenings cleaning out the walters of loud-mouthed New Yorkers during speed chess, maybe walks along the Hudson and a few good breakfasts. Harry’s in town too, and Levertov, and even Townes.
For twenty-four hours, it goes as planned. Then Benny’s phone starts ringing off the hook, and the first call he picks up makes him go cold and white and disappear from the apartment with a monumental slam of the door, leaving the phone off the hook behind him. Townes arrives for breakfast ten minutes after he left and finds Harry, Levertov and Beth pushing pieces idly around a board and arguing about endgames.
“Beth.” Townes’ voice is unusually serious. “I think you’re going to want to see this.”
She’s glad enough of the excuse to ditch the game; Harry has developed an irritating habit recently of picking at all her arguments just for the sake of doing it. She levers to her feet and goes over, pushing up onto her toes to press a kiss to his cold cheek and taking the newspaper from his hands.
“Page four,” he says carefully. Beth spreads it wide on the kitchen counter and finds a picture of herself and Borgov staring seriously at each other over a chess board. It was the Sarajevo tournament, she thinks, she recognises the wild look in her own eyes and the potted palms behind him. The headline above it screams, AFFAIR BETWEEN TWO CHAMPIONS.
Her hands start to shake immediately. To cover it up, she says flippantly, “That’s got to be the least imaginative headline I’ve ever read. When all those chess puns are right there.”
“Beth.” Townes steps closer. “Is it true?”
“Is what true?” Harry comes over, Levertov on his heels. They both stop dead at the sight of the article.
“Look,” starts Beth, without any clue at all of what she’s going to say. She thinks she’s been spared when the apartment door crashes open, but it’s Benny coming back in, fingers white from the cold outside, waving another paper ferociously.
“It’s all over their newspapers.” He throws a Cyrillic tabloid down in front of her. She looks away from it. “Is it true, Beth? Are you fucking him?”
“I don’t see how it’s any of your business.”
“My— Beth, it’s Borgov . I can’t even— how could you not tell us, I—”
“It isn’t about chess.” She shoves back from the counter. She can’t look any of them in the eye.
“Everything we do is about chess!” Benny explodes. Levertov beside him leans backwards, eyes slanting sidelong at him, pushing his hair awkwardly out of his face.
Harry is quieter. “What do you even talk about with him?”
She shrugs. “We don’t talk that much. But when we do, it’s – you know, about life . Books and places and food. His wife. My mother. He’s the first person who’s ever asked me about Mr Shaibel. I mean about what he was like, not just what he taught me about chess. He’s—"
“He’s old enough to be your father.”
“So? It’s not like I ever had a father for that to matter.”
“Beth—” Benny breaks off, too angry to speak.
Townes picks up the slack, far gentler but just as reproving. “What are you even hoping to achieve? He’s married, he’s – you always say you want it to be about your game. How can it be now? They’ll say he threw his games against you. All the ones you won, they’ll make it so he let you do it.”
“No way.” She pushes away from them, arms folded. “They’ve seen me beat everyone else same as I beat him. And it’s – he’s Borgov . He doesn’t throw games.”
“It doesn’t—”
“Enough.” She shakes her hair back, plants her feet. “This isn’t something I’m asking for input on. It’s happening. Nothing you say is going to change that.”
“And all this coverage won’t change things?” Benny shakes the paper almost violently. “His wife will see. The Kremlin will definitely see.”
“They probably planted the story,” she huffs, wishing the hardest she’s ever wished that she had a number to call him on, an address of his to run to. “Those KGB agents that follow him round have known for ages.”
“KGB,” says Benny in complete disbelief, and throws himself dramatically down onto the sofa. “For Christ’s sake, Beth. Hear yourself.”
“What are you even hoping will happen?” Townes lays a hand atop hers. When he feels her shaking, he squeezes her fingers. “It can’t end well.”
“I’m not hoping for anything.” She pulls her hand away. “It’s just happening. I’m going for a walk.”
“It’s freezing out,” protests Harry, but Beth is already reaching for her coat.
“I’ll be back in a couple of hours. If you could all be a lot calmer about this when I get back, I’d appreciate it.”
“Calmer,” she hears Benny say in disgust as she shoves through the front door, and then the murmuring sound of Townes trying to smooth things over. It’s more than she deserves, she thinks. She’d be furious to have been lied to for so long. But knowing that feels awful, like nausea, and so she turns away from it and forces herself to think only of the cold in New York, the icy sidewalk beneath her feet, the tickets to Rome and Borgov in a week’s time.
The State department take her in three days later. Her old friend from Moscow is in the room. She truly can’t remember his name, if he ever told her, and she doesn’t dare guess. Still she swans in with her usual insouciance, draping herself into the uncomfortable chair, looking for all the world at ease.
The man behind the desk stays nameless, but there’s enough of an air of power about him for Beth to make some educated guesses about his rank and role. Head of something, for sure. Unlikely the State Department.
“Elizabeth Harmon.” He puts his fingertips onto a surprisingly thick file. “Quite the kerfuffle you’ve caused.”
She gives him nothing more than her best blank stare.
He sighs, tapping twice. “Aren’t you going to refute any of it?”
She lifts one shoulder in a delicate shrug. “I can’t imagine there’s any point.”
“Yes, that’s true.” He watches her a moment longer. “Have the Kremlin made you any offers through him?”
“No. In fact, he advised against me defecting. He thinks Moscow wouldn’t suit me.”
The nameless man’s mouth pulls up briefly at the corners, like he’s finding himself in agreement on that matter and surprised to be so. His frown returns swiftly, though, and it stokes Beth’s irritation.
“It’s really none of your business,” she says firmly, same as she said to Benny, “who I do or don’t choose to consort with.”
“When they’re one of the USSR’s most powerful PR pieces,” says the man, “it is absolutely our business.”
Beth folds her arms. “I’ve got nothing to tell you. We don’t talk about politics, we don’t talk about our governments, and I don’t know anything that would be useful to the Kremlin anyway.”
“We’ll see,” says the man, and flips her file open to a photo of Borgov.
They keep her in for nearly a day. The questioning relentless, full of names she doesn’t know and political hot topics she doesn’t understand. Her longing for a drink or some pills grows in direct proportion to the number of inane questions she’s asked, and by the time they release her into a waiting car outside she can barely think around the clamour of it.
“The City Hotel, please,” she says to the driver, and presses both palms over her eyes. She holds them there all the way through the crawling Manhattan traffic and takes them away only when the car pulls up to the sidewalk and disgorges her into the freezing evening.
She popped into Townes’ room when he first came to town last week and she weaves her way there now with gritted teeth. He opens his door in a soft blue sweater and slacks. Roger, lounging on the bed behind him, says, “Holy shit, she looks terrible.”
“I fucking feel terrible.” Beth pushes into the room and jams her hands into her armpits to keep them there. “I am literally this close to drinking everything in your minibar so please for the love of God help me not do that.”
“Yeah, alright.” Townes pushes her onto the bed and switches the tiny hotel kettle on. “Start talking.”
Beth’s teeth are chattering. “About what?”
“The Russian.” Roger isn’t actually grinning, but his voice is full of wanting to. “Nicely done, by the way. He’s got incredible machismo.”
“Easy,” says Townes, fond and reproving. But Beth’s letting out a relieved, startled laugh. It’s slightly hysterical, but it’s better than screaming.
“It was last year. After the Belgrade tournament. I found him in the bar and he came up to my room. I liked,” she says, not sure whether to laugh at herself or cry, “how in control he was. I thought he could teach me.”
“It might not help to tell you this,” admits Townes, leaning with his arms folded against the wall beside the kettle, “but you’ve seemed a hell of a lot steadier the past year.”
Beth sighs. “Yeah. I feel it. Or at least I did, you know. Before it got out.”
“I’m amazed you’ve kept it quiet this long.” Roger nudges at her buttocks with his toes. “You’re not exactly subtle.”
“To be fair,” says Beth, feeling suddenly and completely exhausted, “it wasn’t technically a secret. The CIA have known the whole time, and so’s the KGB. We’d have had to be able to turn invisible to sneak past his minders.”
The kettle is boiling. Townes pours the strongest cup of coffee Beth’s ever seen and brings it to her. He’s frowning.
“Are you in any danger? Will the Soviets do something to you?”
“I think they’d have done it already.” Beth takes a too-large gulp of coffee and nearly hacks it right back up with coughing. “Christ, are you trying to transport me to an alternate dimension? How much coffee did you put in this?”
“Enough,” he says, unrepentant, and sits down next to her. “What are you going to do next?”
“Well, first I’m going to be awake and hearing colours for the next twelve hours,” she says thinly, taking another wincing sip, “but then I’m going to sleep, pack for Rome, and fly over there.”
“And he’ll be there?”
“Yeah. Luchenko said he was planning on it.”
“Luche – you’re corresponding with the other Soviets, too?”
“Oh, no, just Luchenko. I like him a lot.” Beth shrugs. “He’s always been kind. You’d like him, actually. And he’d really like you, Roger, he’s got almost your exact sense of humour. Just more Russian.”
Roger beams. “Ha! You’ll have to introduce me next time he’s Stateside.”
“I’ll add it to the itinerary,” says Townes, but he’s smiling too. He lays a hand on Beth’s knee and pats there once, fondly, leaning his shoulder into hers. “I just want to know you’re going to be alright, Harmon. There’s enough going on without adding a torrid affair with a Soviet into the mix.”
“It’s not a torrid affair.” Beth takes another mouthful of coffee and forces it down. The caffeine is already hitting her, brightening the room around her, easing off some of that terrible, gut-churning need for a drink. “And honestly I think it’s too late, anyway. I can’t give him up.”
“Well then.” Townes looks back at Roger briefly, wraps his fingers around his shin. “We’re never going to put you off chasing something everyone else thinks is ill-advised.”
“Too right,” says Roger, and scoots down the bed to give Beth a hug from behind. She leans back into it with a sigh, jaw at last unclenching. Her head on his shoulder, her hand in Townes’, she sighs out the tension of the last week and says, meaning it with her whole being, “Thank you.”
She’s looking for Borgov from the moment she walks into the hotel in Rome. Ignoring the whispers and the sidelong stares. People still asked for autographs on the way in, so that has to count for something. She’s not been totally iced out, or at least not yet. She refuses to be deflated when there’s no sign of him. She leaves a message at reception with a blessedly oblivious young woman and retreats to her room.
The knock comes when she’s soaking in the bath and she clambers out to answer it, the towel around her short and white. When she opens the door, his face is entirely serious. She’s missed him more than she realised. Her whole body relaxes down the moment he’s within arm’s reach, leaching out tension she hadn’t realised she was carrying around.
He moves closer. “I’m sorry about Mexico. My son was ill.”
Beth steps back to let him in. “It’s okay.”
“About all this other nonsense – I did not say a word.” He sits down on the edge of the bed and curling a hand around the back of her thigh to draw her close. “I swear it.”
“Me neither. Have they given you a hard time?”
He sighs. One hand goes up to tug at where she’s tucked the towel into itself to hold it up. “Yes. They are convinced I will defect for you.”
Beth bites down a smile. “They should be more worried I’ll defect for you. They’re not ready to handle me.”
He doesn’t match her playfulness. He pulls the towel away, pushing it off her ribs, letting it slither to the floor. She hovers in front of him as he stares at her, only half-seeing her, his expression a million miles distant. She isn’t sure what she’s expecting him to do next, but it’s not what he does. He puts both hands on her hips and pulls her forwards, into the vee of his legs. When he leans forwards, his forehead comes to rest between her breasts.
“I am so sorry, Beth. It was stupid. To think we could just… drift along as we have been.”
She runs her thumbs over his brow, down his cheeks. Cups her palms under his jaw and lifts his head. He comes up slowly. So full of regret she can hardly bear it. She clutches him harder, cradles his head against her like a baby.
“I don’t regret any of it. Not for a second. I’ll only regret it if you stop now.”
He sighs through his nose, tired and sad and resigned.
“We must stop, though, I think. My wife has left me.”
“Oh.” Beth stops rubbing her thumbs over his cheekbones. “I’m sorry. I thought she knew already.”
“She did. And she didn’t mind, as long as it was hidden. But now… she took him south after his illness. To Sevastopol. She was going to return when he was better but she has decided to make the move permanent. Her parents are from there. It suits her, I think. She loves the sun.”
“I’m sorry,” Beth says again, helpless. She has lost every parent she’s ever had but she cannot imagine how it feels to lose a child. “I wish that hadn’t happened.”
“This is the problem.” He runs his palms up from her hips, closes his hands around her waist and clutches there like he’s a ship in a storm and she’s a safe haven. “I regret it utterly. But I cannot wish it had not happened, because that would mean I would not have had you.”
“But you still want us to stop.”
“We are putting ourselves in great danger. It is a foolish move.”
“Hm.” Beth leans back a little, pushing both thumbs under his jaw to make him look up at her. “Isn’t it worth it? The danger?”
“I don’t know.” He looks exhausted. He looks like he’s given up. “I really don’t know, Beth.”
She thinks for a moment. And then she says, “Look. I can’t fix this. I’m not going to nobly walk away from you so you can get your wife and son back. If you want that, you have to be the one to go. And I’m not going to offer you a replacement family to make it easier. I don’t want children. But – I’m still in this. Whatever shape it comes in. Even if I only ever see you at tournaments. That’s enough for me.”
His hands tighten on her waist. “Not for me.” His eyes close. “It is asking me to exist on scraps. I will not.”
“Then find a way to have more.” She bends, hovers her mouth right over his. “Whatever we need to do. Make it happen.”
The scandal has drawn one of the biggest crowds the Rome tournament has ever seen. Beth plays her first match with more cool determination than she’s ever felt before, blisteringly aware of Borgov across the room from her, the crowd looking between them like they’re watching tennis.
She draws Kariyev in the semi-final, the wunderkind Luchenko warned her about. He’s good. So good he nearly beats her. It goes right down to the wire and Beth is genuinely convinced he’s about to push her over the edge when she looks up and find Borgov, his match already finished, watching her steadily from the back of the crowd. His lips curve. His gaze says, I think not, Lizik.
And yeah. She thinks the hell not.
Half an hour later, Kariyev offers out his hand with a martyred, embarrassed sigh. Beth shakes it firmly, swallowing down her smile.
“I guess he taught you as well as fucked you,” says the boy in Russian when they pause to pose for a photo. Beth was expecting it; the angry glint in his eye was too pronounced to allow for anything else.
“Aw,” she says, photo-ready smile still plastered on, “don’t be jealous just because he thinks I’m so much more interesting than you.”
Kariyev’s strained smile vanishes. “ Slut ,” he hisses, and it’s loud enough that people nearby hear. One’s a barrel-chested American man and he starts forward in outrage. Beth almost has to laugh; he’s undoubtedly said the same thing to his friends – she’s seen him leering at her the past couple of days – but when a Soviet says it, well. That can’t stand.
“It’s alright.” She waves the American back. “I know some smaller-minded men find it particularly difficult to lose to me. Maybe you’ll have better luck next year, Kariyev. Though you might want to study a little Morphy first. I think that would help your openings.”
Kariyev’s rage is almost palpable, but Beth just smiles for one last photo and steps away. What does it matter if he hates her? She’s the best in the world. And on the days she’s not the best, the man she loves is instead. It’s a powerful way to be.
Borgov comes to her room that night ahead of their final the next day and fucks her long and slow, his hands all over her, taking her apart with ruthless control and then holding her after and putting her back together one careful piece at a time.
“I am going to make this work,” he promises, her head tucked under his chin. He’s running his finger over the curve of her watch on her wrist, right where it rests on his chest. “I must. I cannot be without this. Without you.”
Beth sighs deeply. Her mother – her first mother – made her promise, once, that she would never let a man own her like this. Whole body and soul. But now that she’s here she cannot regret it.
“I didn’t think,” she says quietly, “when I beat you in Moscow, I never thought it would lead here.”
A low chuckle thrums through him, vibrating up into her cheek. “Do you know? Even then, I think I knew. Maybe not here, exactly. But in this direction.”
Beth pulls up to look at him. She still feels wrung-out. Whole body like jelly.
“What’s it like?” she wants to know, gazing down at him. “Being so sure of everything, I mean.”
He traces the curve of her cheek with his finger. “I will show you. Give me time, Lizik. I’ll show you everything.”
He beats her. She doesn’t even get to congratulate him properly before his minders hustle him away.
She’s been home less than a week when her phone rings. She doesn’t dare hope when she picks it up; her knees nearly give way when she hears that blissfully familiar voice saying, “Beth?”
“They’ll be listening,” she whispers, eager like a schoolgirl, both hands wrapped around the receiver.
“Yes. I have told them, anyway. Before ringing.”
“Told them what?”
“I do not want them thinking I will defect. I have said, it is not about defecting or America. It is about you. If they want me to continue to play chess for the USSR they must let me have you also.”
She clutches tighter. “How will you have me?”
“I have an apartment in Paris. I am there now. They will let me have four months a year here, the rest in Moscow or at tournaments.”
“Four months.” She tilts her head. “I can work with four months and tournaments.”
“Yes. And you—” he pauses and she imagines him half a world away, his sleek dark head bent over a telephone, that dear familiar blank stare boring a hole into the tabletop. “You understand what will happen, what people will say, if you come to me? It will be far worse than before. I do not know the words to describe it. Blood in the water. Many sharks.”
Impossibly, Beth finds herself giggling. “It’s alright. Really it is. I’ve been a scandal since I started playing chess, I can handle far worse. At least this time it’s for something that’s good for me instead of something that’s bad.”
His voice drops. “I am good for you?”
Beth breathes out hard. Deadly serious as she says, “The best.”
“Okay. Good. Come soon, Beth. Come to me soon.”
“I will.” She presses her mouth into the speaker. “I will.”
She gets a letter a week later. The handwriting is feminine and unfamiliar, the postmark Soviet. It’s been opened and read already, though the intrusion is far subtler than usual. The agents are getting better.
Over a too-strong coffee, she reads it once and then twice. A bitter feeling curling through her.
Miss Harmon, it reads, I do not know if you will get this letter but I must try. I am begging you to release my husband. He is incapable of walking away from things once he feels he has committed to them; it must be you who does. He should be at home with his people, with his family. Please. I entreat you. Let him go.
The rest is much the same. Imploring. Beautifully written. A litany of all the reasons Beth is not good enough for Vasily Borgov and all the ways she is going to ruin his life.
Once she’s finished her coffee, she sits there for a moment imagining how she might reply. She would point out that he is a grown man, far older than her, far better at making decisions. That his wife was the one who left him, not the other way around. That Beth has never asked him for anything except himself, whenever he can spare it.
Instead she takes the letter into the kitchen and sets it alight on the stove, dropping it flaming into the sink to char away to nothing.
If he wanted to be with his wife, he would be with her. Beth knows what it’s like to have all your decisions made for you. She will never, ever presume to make his for him.
Beside the sink, her passport waits. Two days until her flight leaves. Maybe she should miss it. Leave him there alone in Paris, waiting for her, sadder and angrier by the day until at last he turns tail and returns to his wife. It’s the morally right thing to do.
She taps her fingernails on the countertop, a compulsive rattle. She thinks about him holding her in New York, the urgency in his plea ( come soon, Beth, come to me soon ), the firm way he pushes her down into the mattress when she needs it and the steady way he gazes at her across a chess board.
Fuck morally right. She picks up her passport. She gets to make this decision. And she’s making it for herself.
The Paris apartment is central. It’s only a short cab ride for Beth to get there, the arrondissement full of wide boulevards and white buildings. She finds the address easily enough: the first floor has high windows and a green wrought-iron balcony with a chess set on it, two chairs propped opposite one another at it. There are two familiar KGB agents sat at the café across the street. Ivan waves at her and she waves back, half outside herself.
She stands for a moment on the sidewalk, one hand on her case, the other clutching at the piece of paper with the address on it. Then she pushes in through the front gates.
The stairs are an easy climb. The door, when she knocks, is solid and warm.
He opens it. For a moment, he just looks at her. Those familiar blue eyes softening.
“Beth.” To anyone else, his voice would be wooden and cold. But she hears it all: the wonder, the longing, the disbelief. “You came.”
“I came,” she says, and goes up her on her toes to kiss him.
.