4. Ivan
IVAN
She’s still asleep when I wake.
Nothing about it is unusual. I’ve never required much sleep since my thirties. However, what is unusual is the feel of the morning. The fact there is another person in a space that’s ordinarily only mine.
I lie still for a beat before I stroke up her arm. I can’t help myself. Her skin is velvet, nearly as soft as her dress from last night. A slow smile spreads over her lips, so I kiss her there.
She opens her arms to me, and I arrange her onto me until she is seated on my lap, still half-asleep and smiling. Her small hands lean on my chest. Her weight is nothing, but the heat of her is something otherworldly. “Morning, Big Guy.”
“Good morning. Sleep well?”
She giggles. “Did you really wake me up to find out if I slept well?”
“I find it’s good manners to ask?—”
“Is that what you call pulling me onto you just to sit on your morning wood? That’s good manners?”
I move to ease her off me, but she swats my hand away. “I thought I offended you.”
“Hardly.” She bends to my mouth while her small hand strokes my cock to full attention.
Her words drift over my lips. “I’d be offended if you didn’t wake me for this.
” She grinds up and down my length, not letting me slide inside.
She’s not ready for that yet. But when she moans as she works herself on me, I might die.
Last night was something that defies description. The way she tastes, the feel of her, her curious nature… Luna is intoxicating. I didn’t expect her to want to try a little bondage when I brought her upstairs. But then again, I didn’t expect to meet Luna.
She wasn’t on the guest list.
Not that I didn’t know about her. I know all of Hugo’s contacts, and on more than one occasion, heard him gripe about her.
“She’s so weird.”
“She has too many issues.”
“Luna’s crazy.”
Never did he ask my advice, so I never gave it.
But if he had, I would have told him to dump her, because he didn’t deserve her.
That bastard wasted three years of her life.
He even proposed about eight months ago.
Gave her a plain diamond ring, then complained that she wore it on a necklace instead of on her finger.
I asked, “Did you have it sized for her?”
He looked confused. “That’s her job.” The dolt.
All thoughts of Hugo vanish when she notches me inside that silken, wet pussy.
I grab her hips, taking her forward and back.
Her head tosses back, her long black hair a cape around her shoulders, when she comes forward again.
I can’t stop watching her tits, though. Heavy, coming to full pink points as she bounces on my dick.
If I were a lesser man, I’d come right the fuck now.
Instead, I roll her onto her back and plunge deep. I pin her hands to the bed, and she play-struggles in my grasp for just a moment, then grins.
“Babydoll, you’re too fucking much.”
She bites her lower lip, so I move in for another kiss and do it for her while I fuck her into the mattress. Her moans rattle my brain, and I let go of her hands just to see what she’ll do with them.
To my surprise, she strokes my cheek. I pause and look at her to check in. She’s studying me as much as I’m studying her—those bright green eyes tracing lines all over my face. When she realizes I’m looking at her, she pulls me down for another kiss, and we begin again.
We’re moving together now. It should be awkward, shouldn’t it?
But it’s not. It’s anything but that.
When her soft body goes rigid beneath me, I know she’s close. So, I slow my thrusts. I want her to fucking work for it.
And she does, tilting herself to receive more of me with every pass. Her little hands grab at my back as if she could pull me down if I didn’t want to go there.
But I do. I wanted to make her work for it, but I can’t hold out any longer. I need to feel her come on my cock. My balls tighten when I speed back up, and she shatters on me, crying out. I pour myself into her, joining her on the other side as I kiss that pouty mouth of hers.
Not a kiss so much as a feast.
When we separate, she barely makes it to the bathroom without stumbling, and when she returns and crawls into the sheets, her yawn is impressive.
I kiss her forehead. “Sleep. No need to rush out of here.”
“That’s good,” she mumbles into the pillow.
She’s asleep before I finish dressing.
When I go to make coffee, I find Darya is already here. “Good morning.”
“I imagine it was,” she says with no small amount of judgment.
Our arrangement is inconvenient to hosting overnight guests, but since that’s a rare occurrence, it’s not generally an issue. I’ve never determined exactly when she arrives or how she moves through the penthouse without making sound, and I stopped trying to work it out years ago.
She’s at the counter with her back to me, doing something efficient with the bread maker, and she does not turn around when I come in, which means she already knows everything she needs to know about the morning.
“Do you plan to start in on me this early?”
“There’s a bra on your living room floor,” she says to the bread maker.
“That’s odd. Are you sure?”
All I get is a side-eye glare. She says nothing further on the subject. She pours my coffee, sets it in front of my morning spot at the kitchen table, and picks up the small stack of correspondence she’s sorted from whatever arrived last night.
I take the coffee and the correspondence and sit, while Darya moves through the kitchen making messes, cleaning them, then presents me with the outcome. A plate with fresh bread, fruit, bacon burnt black, and far too many eggs for normal people.
“Should I have made a second plate?”
“And a third.”
That statement lifts her gray brow. “You had two overnight guests?”
I smirk. “Just the one, actually, but I was a busy boy last night, and I have quite the appetite this morning.”
The next thing I see is a kitchen towel flying toward my face. I don’t bother to catch it. I let her win this one. The perfectly burnt bacon makes up for a little indignation.
Darya has opinions. She always has opinions. She expresses them the way she expresses everything—sidelong, to no one in particular, in the tone of a woman making an observation about the weather.
“I put the good cups out. I thought you might want to impress your lady friend,” she says, setting two of them on the counter.
Not the everyday ones. The better ones, the pair she reserves for what she privately considers worthy occasions, the existence of which she has never directly acknowledged to me.
Does she question my judgment when it comes to women? Yes.
Does she try to help me with them all the same? Also, yes.
Darya Banachek is a woman of complexity, and I stopped trying to figure her out a long time ago.
She was a doctor in her youth, but found housekeeping was better for her nerves.
Every now and then, she tells me tales of her former life, and it’s fascinating to see life and death from her perspective as opposed to my own.
In my world, life is cheap. In hers, it was everything.
Luna emerges forty minutes later.
She appears in the kitchen doorway in one of my blue button-downs, her dark hair loose and the white streak catching the morning light.
She looks entirely unself-conscious about all of this.
She takes in the kitchen, the coffee, Darya’s back, and me at the table, in that order, and says, “Good morning,” to the room at large.
“Good morning,” Darya says. “Coffee?”
“Yes, please,” Luna says.
Darya pours. She sets the cup—one of the good ones—in front of the chair across from mine, and Luna sits down and wraps both hands around it and takes the first sip with the focus of someone for whom this is a sacred act.
“The bra is on the end table,” Darya tells her pleasantly. “Didn’t want to vacuum it up. In case you were looking.”
Luna blinks. “Thank you.”
“Of course.” Darya picks up a dish towel and does something unnecessary with it near the sink. “It’s a very nice bra. Very expensive. Good construction. A woman should keep tabs on those things.”
She takes herself out of the kitchen with the particular energy of a woman who has said exactly what she intended to say and requires no response.
Luna watches her go, then looks at me. “I like her.”
“She’ll be insufferable about that. Don’t tell her.”
She drinks her coffee. “So. Last night.”
“Last night,” I agree. “And this morning.”
“That was—” She stops. Considers. “I was going to say unexpected, but I think I’d be lying. It felt pretty expected by the end of it.”
“By the elevator, at minimum.”
“By the second dance, honestly.” She says this without embarrassment, which I appreciate. There’s no pretense with her, no management of how she appears. It’s a nice change from what I’m used to. She wonders aloud, “Can I ask you something?”
“Always. Though I may not be able to answer all questions.”
“Hugo. You said he made difficulties for you at work. How bad is it?”
I look at her over the rim of my cup. She meets it evenly—not pushing, just asking, with the directness that appears to be her natural mode.
“Manageable,” I finally answer. “He’s recently made choices that complicate certain professional relationships. I’m in the process of addressing it.”
She nods. She doesn’t ask what choices, or which relationships, or what addressing it entails. She just takes another sip of coffee.
“Your candle shop. How long have you had it?”
“I take it that Hugo mentioned it?”
No. “Yes. In passing.”
“Four years. I opened it when I was twenty-four. My mother left me a small amount when she died, and I used it for the lease and the first round of equipment.” A beat. “Everyone told me it was a bad idea.”
“Was it?”
“No. I’m good at it.” She says this without pride, just a fact.
“I know what things should smell like. I know what people want when they come in, even when they don’t know themselves.
Someone comes in and says they want something fresh.
I know fresh to them means they want to feel clean, which means they want to feel like they’ve started over, which means they want eucalyptus and something citrus with a cool base.
Someone says they want something cozy, they mean they want to feel safe, which means vanilla and sandalwood and something just slightly smoky. ” She stops. “Sorry. I do that.”
“Do what?”
“Talk about candles like they’re psychology.”
“They sound like they are.”
She looks at me for a moment like she’s deciding something. “Hugo used to change the subject when I talked about the shop.”
I have nothing to say to this that would be appropriate to say, so I say nothing, and she seems to understand that too, because she moves on again.
“I have two employees. Cherry, who has worked for her since the beginning, and who appears to function as both a confidante and a one-woman quality control operation. And then there’s Mike.
He’s enthusiastic in the way of large friendly dogs and reorganizes the window display when he gets bored, which is often. ”
“Sounds like you hired a pair of friends instead of candlemakers.”
She shrugs. “You can train anyone to make candles. But you have to hire for personality. Candles sometimes sell themselves, and sometimes they don’t.
It’s the people who sell them. And the neighborhood…
” She tells me about the neighborhood, the regulars, a woman who comes in every Thursday and always buys the same vanilla rose and has never once varied.
“…that’s Rebecca for you, though. She’s steady and calming, the perfect woman to be a kindergarten teacher. ”
“That’s a tough job. She’s stronger than most.”
“Oh—she’s not a kindergarten teacher. I just think she’d be good at it. She’s a firefighter.”
I like that I can’t predict her, so I ask questions. More than I need to, and I’m aware that I’m asking more than I need to, and I do it anyway, because she answers in a way that’s interesting.
Also, I like hearing her voice.
By the time we finish, the morning has slipped away and gone gray outside the windows, the lake visible in the distance as a flat silver line.
Luna stands, retrieves the bra from the end table with remarkable composure, and disappears for a few minutes.
When she comes back, she’s dressed, has done something with her hair that makes the white streak deliberate again, has the clutch from last night tucked under her arm, and looks, somehow, entirely put together.
“Not that I don’t enjoy your company—I do—but I have to open the shop. ”
“The car is available.”
“I can take the L?—”
“I’ll call my driver. Just a moment.”
She looks at me for a moment with the expression of a woman deciding whether this is worth arguing about. “Okay.”
Darya appears from somewhere to hand Luna a container of something that smells like food and did not exist five minutes ago, which is either sorcery or preparation, and with Darya the line between those two things has always been thin.
Luna accepts it with genuine warmth, says goodbye to her in a way that makes Darya smile, much to my shock, then follows me to the door.
In the private foyer, waiting for the elevator, she turns to me. “Last night was not what I thought it was going to be. For the record.”
“No,” I agree.
“Better, though.”
“Significantly.”
The elevator arrives. I put my hand on her jaw, tip her face up, and kiss her goodbye. She makes a small sound against my mouth that I file away for no reason in particular.
“Thank you. For last night.”
She looks up at me, and there’s something in her expression that’s open and unguarded and not quite what I expected. But before I can pick it apart, she steps into the elevator, the doors close, and she’s gone.
I stand in the foyer for a moment. Then I go back inside, where Darya is clearing the breakfast things with the energy of a woman who’s already composed several opinions she intends to keep to herself.
“Not a word,” I tell her.
She says nothing, smiling at the kitchen counter, which is somehow worse.