7. Luna
LUNA
The dress this time is deep burgundy, which is growth in my book.
It’s still dark, still me, floor-length with a slit that behaves until I walk, but the color is warmer than black.
I spent a genuinely embarrassing amount of time deciding what that meant before concluding it meant I liked the dress.
Sometimes a dress is just a dress. Sometimes a woman tells herself that in a fitting room mirror while her own reflection declines to cosign.
Ivan’s guy, Lev, drives me to the gala in a car so quiet I can hear my own pulse. He says four words the entire ride, two of which are “ miss ” and two of which are “ we’ve arrived ,” and honestly, after a week of Cherry’s interrogations, the silence is a spa treatment.
Cherry’s final text reads, Report back everything. EVERYTHING .
Mike wants to know if there’ll be swans. I don’t know why Mike thinks there will be swans. Neither does Cherry. Neither, probably, does Mike.
Ivan’s waiting at the entrance, not checking his phone, his watch, or the perimeter. He’s watching the car, but it feels like he sees right through it, through my dress, that he sees me beyond my skin.
For some reason, I like that about him.
Here’s the thing nobody warned me about. I’ve now seen this man in a coat closet, a ballroom, an elevator, but the sight of him still does something to my insides. He’s in a midnight blue suit tonight, scarred hands quiet at his sides, and when he sees me for real, his whole face changes.
Not the polite-greeting change. The lines in his handsome, grizzled face fade for a flash, brief and unguarded, and then the usual control closes over the top.
It shouldn’t make me happy to see that I shake him. This is theater. I’m here to be seen on his arm by his idiot stepbrother. The happiness is staged.
It looks really, really real, though. That’s all I’m saying.
“Burgundy,” he says, by way of hello, taking my hand.
“You said the gala had a color scheme. I researched it. Did I get it right?”
“Da,” he says, scanning the room over my head with that air-traffic-control attention of his, and tucks my hand into his elbow, warm and certain, and we go in.
The gala is a fundraiser for a children’s hospital wing, which means 200 people in formalwear networking while a string quartet drowns out the noise. I clock Hugo, because my body apparently maintains a dedicated Hugo radar I’d love to have surgically removed.
He’s tan. Honeymoon tan, golf tan, the tan of a man who has never once worried about skin cancer because he has access to the best doctors in the city.
He’s holding court near the silent auction with his head thrown back mid-laugh, and the laugh is the fake one, the one he practices. I’ve heard him practice it.
Then he sees us.
I feel it hit from twenty feet away. The laugh doesn’t stop, but it goes hollow in the middle, scooped out, and his eyes do a fast triangle, me, Ivan, my hand on Ivan’s arm, and his timing stumbles on whatever he says next, because the man he’s talking to has to ask him to repeat it.
Ivan doesn’t look over. Neither do I. We did this choreography at the wedding. Attention is currency, and we are running a deflation.
“He’s recalculating,” Ivan murmurs, accepting two glasses from a tray and handing me one without breaking his survey of the room.
“You can’t even see him.”
“I can see you watching him. Your face does a small accounting when something satisfies you. Lower lip, left side.”
I take a sip of champagne to reposition my lower lip on the left side. He watches me do it with one degree of a smile, and we proceed into the room.
What follows is two hours of Ivan conducting business the way other people breathe. Introductions without explanations, a word here about freight, a senator’s wife who wants to talk about candles the moment she learns what I do, and so on.
Somewhere in hour two, I recognize I’m enjoying myself, which was not on the itinerary.
Hugo orbits the whole time, never approaching, drinking faster than his child bride notices.
By the time we leave, he has the look of a man doing long division in his head and getting a different answer every time.
Mission, presumably, accomplished, invoice paid in full. I expect the car, the kiss, and possibly the elevator again if I’m honest about my expectations, which, around Ivan I’ve learned to be.
Instead, Ivan invites me to dinner.
“Wait, really?”
“I thought you might be hungry.”
“Starving, actually. I thought they’d at least feed you at an event like this.”
He smirks a little. “Sometimes. Sometimes not.” He motions with his head toward his fancy car, then opens the door for me. “So, dinner?”
“Yes, please.”
We end up at a Georgian place with no name outside, where the owner greets us in a language I don’t speak and seats us in the back at a table with a candle in an old jar.
It’s a candle I could improve, but it’s trying.
The restaurant is small. Not small like intimate.
Small, like they forgot to build the other half.
Six tables. No windows. The lighting is the color of old whiskey, and the walls are exposed brick that someone actually bothered to clean, the mortar still pale between the red. It smells like garlic and rosemary.
No one in this room cares who we are. There’s no Hugo here to distract, which is the part I keep turning over while we order.
“You didn’t have to do this.” The wine comes, and the owner withdraws. “The Hugo portion of the evening ended at the gala. I’d piss him off for free, you know. As a hobby. You don’t owe me dinner.”
“It isn’t payment. The gala had two hundred people in it. This room has nine. I prefer this over that, as a place to spend time with you.”
I’m not used to directness. My romantic history is three years with a man who communicated through implication and withheld approval, and before that, a series of men who treated wanting me as a thing to be admitted under pressure.
Something in my chest goes warm and stupid about Ivan’s intentions. “Okay. Then you should know what you’re spending time with.”
“Enlighten me. I understand you have an uncle you’re close to. Hugo mentioned him.”
“Marty.” I spin my wine glass. The stem is thin enough to snap if I squeeze. I don’t squeeze. “He’s in a throuple. Has been for decades. Aunt Gerty and Uncle Fred. People think it’s a joke when I say it, but it’s just family.”
Ivan doesn’t laugh or ask if I’m serious. He waits. His attention is the kind of thing you can feel, weight and warmth at once. He’s not looking at his phone or scanning the room or thinking about what he’s going to say next.
He’s just listening. It’s disarming.
“Gerty was a porn actress,” I continue. “Popular one, back in the day. Pin-up work too. Fred directed horror movies. Low budget, high cult following. Marty writes gardening books. Surprisingly successful gardening books. Everyone thinks gardening is boring until they figure out they can grow their own food and stick it to capitalism.”
“Three of them,” Ivan says. “For decades. That’s impressive.”
“They’re the happiest people I know. They throw an anniversary party every year, and the neighbors fight over invitations, because they like to keep it small-ish.
” I tear a piece of bread. “My sister Star couldn’t handle them.
Too weird for her. She wanted normal relatives so badly that she decided the best people in our family were embarrassing , so she cut them off. ”
“And you?”
“I dropped out of college, Marty taught me bookkeeping at his kitchen table, and Gerty and Fred offered to co-sign my business loan because that’s who they are. That’s my whole pedigree. Weird fields, weird family, and one weird shop. I come by all of it honestly.”
He listens the way he listens, fork down. “My mother died when I was nine.”
A record scratch of a sentence if I’ve ever heard one. I lost my mom much more recently than that, and that was hell. I can’t imagine losing her at such a young age. “I’m so sorry, Ivan.”
He nods once. “My father passed me the family business when I was old enough. My family… We’re known here. The owner here has known me since I was a boy. He still overcharges me out of respect.”
“How is that respect?”
I get a smile out of him for that. “Because he knows I can afford it. He overcharges people like me, so he can undercharge people who cannot afford his prices.”
“That’s oddly sweet.”
“Speaking of…” He motions toward the owner, and the dessert menu arrives.
But I have another dessert in mind. This man, this colossus of a man, makes me want to do things I shouldn’t. He’s been like that since the moment we met, and now is no exception.
I reach under the table. Hook my thumbs in the waistband of my panties and slide them down, over my hips, down my thighs, shimmying out of them without much movement. My heart kicks up while I do it, but I’ve committed to this, and there’s no going back now.
My underwear is balled in my palm.
I don’t look at him as I stand to leave. I tuck them into his suit pocket as I pass and keep walking.
The bathroom is single occupancy, thank God. I’ve never done this before, not exactly, but I’ve thought about it. I’ve thought about him. The way he looks at me like I’m the only real thing in the room.
The door opens behind me. He doesn’t knock. He doesn’t need to.
I turn. He’s holding my panties in one hand. His nearly black eyes are darker than they were at the table in the dim light. The door clicks shut behind him. The sound is loud in the small space.
“Turn around,” he growls.
I do. My hands find the edge of the sink. Porcelain. Cold. I can smell him now, that clean scent, something expensive and subtle underneath. His breath is warm against my neck, his body hot and hard against my backside.
But more than any of that, I see me. My expression in the mirror that hangs over the sink.
I look hungry.
His breath falls hot on my earlobe. “Open your mouth. I have to keep you quiet, or they’ll hear you.”
“The lock?—”
The moment my lips open, he uses the panties to gag me. Not rough, but not gentle. The fabric tastes like me. He purposefully dangles a bit of the nude lace out of my mouth as he stares at me in the mirror. “There. Now you’re perfect. And if I wanted the door locked, I would have locked it.”
His hands find my hips and push my dress up over my ass. The cool air chills me there before he spanks me, and I grunt against the lace. His hand swipes over my pussy from behind, then he’s suddenly inside me, and I’m biting down on silk and trying not to scream.
So fucking full. So fucking good.
He rambles in Russian—or what I think is Russian—behind me. No translation needed. I know the tone of pure filth. This is so fucked up, and there’s not enough money in the world to make me stop.
The mirror is in front of me, and I can see us, his face buried in my neck, my eyes wide and dark and rolling back when he digs deep into me and stays there. It’s too intense.
“I feel you twitching on me, baby,” he murmurs. “You’re so close.”
I nod. I can’t speak around my underwear.
“Do you want to come?”
“Mm, hmm.”
Half his masculine smirk is visible in the mirror from this angle. He thrusts somehow deeper, making me jump. “Perhaps I shouldn’t let you. Gives you an incentive to stay over.”
My whimper comes out in broken bits, shattered by his thrusting.
He bites my earlobe. Hard enough to make me wince and shudder on his cock. “But you’ve been so good tonight. You’ve earned it.” On his last word, he begins an onslaught of my body, slamming deep, hitting my rhythm so hard I might die.
It’s fast, but not fast enough. He cups a hand over my clit, mashing in time with his thrusts.
It’s not three more before my vision goes white, and I’m screaming on my underwear as the climax crashes into me.
His hand latches over my mouth, the panties between his palm and my teeth, his breath hot against my ear.
He follows a moment later, groaning low and private against my skin.
We stay like that for a moment. Connected. Breathing. Soaked. Then he pulls out, wipes me clean, adjusts my dress, and removes the gag with surprising gentleness.
His thumb traces my lower lip. “You’re extraordinary. You know that?”
I don’t answer. I don’t know how. What are words again?