Chapter Eleven – Sasha
I paused as I stood in the doorway, staring over at the bar, where Jo was getting everything set up for the night. I knew I had to talk to her about the way I had acted the day before, but shit, I wasn’t sure exactly how to put it into words.
When she’d thrown that joke out there about me having a crush on Avda, I couldn’t have reacted worse. Because I knew there was no way she actually believed it – no way she actually thought that I had anything other than complete disdain for the guy, given the way we’d been coming up against each other at work. But, instead, I had freaked, and probably given her way more to think about than I had intended.
And the last thing I fucking wanted was for Avda to find out about that. I knew his reputation in this city, and it wasn’t exactly progressive – nah, he was all about women, hooking up with whoever he could get his hands on, including Jo. He was a little older than me, and everything I knew about him, he would turn on me in an instant if he got the idea that I was into him on any level. No, I wasn’t going to let myself admit that to anyone, let alone him, and if Jo knew, it was only a matter of time before she spoke to Avda about it.
Which left me no option but to go to her now, and apologize for the way I had acted. Leave it behind us, so I could hope that she would just drop it, forget about it, and make it like it had never happened in the first place. That was my plan.
She had come in a little earlier today, to get ready for the busy shift we were meant to be having tonight, and while it was still quiet, I was intending to catch her and talk to her about what had happened. I had been tossing and turning all night, thinking about it, thinking about how she must have read into that conversation we’d had, but there was only one way that I could actually make sense of it once and for all – and that was by clearing the air in person.
I made my way over to the bar, and she glanced up at me. Her expression didn’t shift as she locked eyes with me, clearly not exactly delighted to see me.
”Oh, hey,” she greeted me.
”Hey, Jo,” I replied. ”Have you got a minute?”
She glanced around, clearly looking for a way out of this conversation – but, finding none, she just sighed and nodded.
”I guess so,” she replied. She crossed her arms over her chest and looked at me expectantly. ”What is it?”
”I wanted to talk to you about what happened yesterday,” I admitted.
”What, you mean with that guy who was giving me hassle at the bar?” she asked. She still sounded defensive, and I couldn’t blame her. After the way I had acted, she had every right to be doubtful about what my intentions were here.
”No, about...I wanted to talk about what I said afterward,” I confessed. Fuck, this was tough. I wasn’t used to speaking about my feelings like this, it just wasn’t the kind of person I’d ever been, but I knew it was what had to happen. It was the only way I was going to make sense of this.
”Oh, yeah?” she replied, her jaw tightening slightly. ”You seemed pretty pissed...”
”Yeah, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have stormed off like that,” I replied. ”I didn’t mean to be such an asshole.”
”Yeah, I didn’t know you’d have such a problem with me talking about you and Avda like that,” she remarked. ”Unless...”
She let that word hang in the air between us for a long moment. Shit. If I was going to come clean with her, then it had to be now – it had to be this. I couldn’t keep ducking and diving to the point, not without her figuring out there was something seriously wrong.
She leaned in a little closer, seemingly able to sense how doubtful I was about coming clean about this.
”Look, you can talk to me about this if you want, Sasha,” she told me quietly. ”I know...I know it’s not easy for you guys, talking about what goes on in your heads, it’s not exactly the line of work for that...”
”You can say that again,” I agreed, with a sigh. She was right. There was so much macho bullshit in the Bratva world, sometimes, it felt like having a single emotion was going to get you hung out to dry. I tried not to let it get to me too much, but it was hard not to take in at least some of that.
She stared at me, those sweet green eyes on mine – and I felt something shift inside of me. Everything I had been trying to keep back all this time, everything I had been trying to contain, came bubbling to the surface faster than I could control it.
”Do you have feelings for Avda?” she asked me softly, her voice low enough that I knew nobody else would be able to hear her. No, this was just between us, completely and utterly. And yet, still, I wanted nothing more than to shut this down. I had worked so hard, for so long, to try and ignore the desire I felt for men, there was a part of me screaming to just take it back, screaming to walk away from this conversation before it had a chance to go any further.
”It’s not like that,” I replied, my voice catching at the back of my throat. She shifted a little closer to me.
”But it...it has been, right?” she asked me. ”With guys, I mean?”
My shoulders tensed.
”Yeah.”
There it was. Those words, finally out of my mouth. I couldn’t believe it. It seemed almost surreal, putting that out into the world. All the shame, all the doubt, all the questions I’d thrown at myself – all the close friendships I’d had in high school that had tipped over into something more, the real want, the real need. All of it, rising up inside of me, and distilling into this moment, a moment I knew I wasn’t going to be able to take back.
She reached for my hand, giving it a light squeeze. Her touch brought me back down to Earth, grounding me once more.
”You’re so brave for saying that,” she murmured to me. I shook my head, and drew my hand away from her.
”No, I’m not,” I muttered. ”It’s just...it’s just a passing thing-”
”Yeah, maybe,” she agreed. ”But it might not be. And if it’s not, you know that’s fine too, right?”
I lifted my gaze to look at her. She was being so kind about this, and I couldn’t figure out why, especially after how I had brushed her off the day before.
”Why are you...why are you talking to me about this?” I asked her finally, the words stunted as they escaped my mouth.
”Because I know how hard it can be to keep a secret,” she replied, her eyes dropping slightly. ”And I...I got the feeling that was why you acted the way you did yesterday. Because you were having a hard time with your feelings. And you were holding something back.”
”Shit, you’re good,” I joked, and we both laughed, some of the tension lifting at last. I gazed up at her for a moment. I felt so vulnerable, so exposed, but at the same time, so sure she would do nothing to hurt me with this – she wasn’t going to turn this around on me and use it to strike back at me later down the line. She just didn’t hit me as that kind of girl.
”You’ve had these feelings for a long time?” she asked me gently. I nodded.
”Since I was a teenager,” I admitted. ”I’m still into women, don’t get me wrong. I love women. But I...I felt like there was something I was missing with a lot of my male friendships, you know? Like so many of them were...closer than the ones everyone else seemed to have. Like most guys just saw their friends as friends, but I got jealous about them, I got possessive. I wanted them all to myself. I didn’t want anyone else getting close to them, not like I was...”
”You ever act on it?” she wondered. I shook my head.
”No, never,” I replied. ”I never got the chance. And, working in this business, it wasn’t as though I could let anyone know about that...”
”No?” she replied, cocking her head with interest.
”Oh, hell, no,” I shot back. ”They don’t take well to that kind of shit here. It’s old-fashioned, a lot of the Bratva guys come from religious families, and that shit...it stays hidden if it happens at all.”
”I can imagine,” she sighed. ”But you shouldn’t let that keep you from-”
”Maybe if I met the right guy,” I replied. ”A guy I knew I could trust with it. But there aren’t exactly a lot of those working in this industry, you know?”
”I guess you’ve got a point,” she agreed, smiling slightly. ”You want a drink?”
”Fuck, yes,” I replied, and she laughed again. I eyed her as she went to grab me a beer, trying to work out just how she really felt about this – was she being honest with me, but she seemed to put forward this front that it didn’t bother her? Was she telling the truth, or was she just barely holding in her disgust at the thought of me being attracted to guys? Her expression didn’t seem to shift when we broke eye contact. Maybe she really didn’t mind...
She handed me the beer, and I snapped back into the moment. If she was going to be the first person I spoke to about this, then I wanted her to be straight with me.
”Be honest,” I told her. ”Would that put you off a guy, if you were interested in dating him?”
She paused for a moment, as though considering the question. I watched her carefully. I didn’t know how she was going to react to this. I mean, I knew that I was attracted to her, but now I had said that, I might well have just blown my chances with her...
”No, it wouldn’t,” she replied, locking eyes with me once more. ”I think it could be...kind of hot, actually.”
”Hot?” I replied, surprised.
”Yeah,” she nodded, her teeth resting on her bottom lip for a moment, a slight pink tinge warming her cheeks. ”I mean, we could talk about hot guys together, maybe even, I don’t know...”
She trailed off. I got the feeling I knew where her mind was going. I raised my eyebrows.
”Oh, like that, huh?” I asked, chuckling. ”I didn’t know you were wild like that, Jo.”
”Neither did I,” she laughed. Oh, there it was, the tension between us again, but this time, it seemed to have shifted in tone – shifted to something a little more honest, something a little more open. I wasn’t concealing a part of myself from her now.
”So you think some women might be into that?” I remarked. ”In theory, I mean?”
”In theory, I guess they could be,” she agreed, her eyes sparkling. She had been so reserved when I’d first come down here to talk to her, clearly not exactly warming to me after what had happened the day before, but right now, she couldn’t keep the smile off her face.
She sighed and glanced down at her watch.
”I should get down to work,” she told me reluctantly. ”But maybe we could talk about this later, yeah? If you want to, I mean.”
”I think I would,” I replied. Knowing that she didn’t see this as a turn-off – knowing that, if anything, she actually saw it as a plus – made the attraction to men that I had been doing my best to hide all of this time seem a whole lot more appealing. And yeah, I knew I couldn’t just expect other people’s acceptance of it to turn into a personal embrace of this, but damn, it helped.
”I’ll catch you later, then,” she told me, and she flashed me another smile before I turned to leave her to it. My mind was racing with the shock of what I had just done – not just the shock of the confession, but the shock of how she had taken it, too.
Maybe there were more people out there who would have handled the news the same way. It would have been worth considering, right? Guys who I met through this line of work who were hiding their own secrets, looking for the perfect time to meet someone and...
Yeah. And. I didn’t exactly know where that led, but I liked the thought of it, liked the possibility that seemed to hang in the air when I thought those words to myself.
Could Avda have been one of those guys? I had no fucking idea, and there wasn’t a chance in hell I was going to complicate our already-antagonistic relationship by trying to read more into it than I knew was there. I mean, yes, I did think he was attractive – and my bad attitude towards him had been a way of getting him to pay attention to me, that much I could tell now.
The last thing I needed was to get ahead of myself, and let myself get distracted by the thought of what might happen, when I was only just wrapping my head around all of it myself. Whatever came after this, whatever came next, at least I had finally been honest with myself about my desires – I had finally come clean about everything that I had tried to hide for so long, and damn, there was a part of me that felt really, really good about it.
And that part of me was curious to find out if Jo really meant it when she told me she found it hot.