Chapter Twenty Five
Alexei
I’m not coming out!”
I jiggle the handle of the bathroom door, behind which Katya has been locked for the last fifteen minutes. “Koshechka, I will tear down this fucking door.”
She wails pitifully, “I look ridiculous!”
“You let me be judge of this,” I tell her.
I jiggle the door handle again. There is a rustling sound behind the door.
Probably she is tearing through the bags full of lingerie, searching for something else that makes her feel less ridiculous.
“Katya, open the door.” I shove my hand into my pocket, hunting for my pocket knife.
“No!” she cries. More sounds behind the door, with greater desperation. I flick open the knife, use the edge to turn the screws. The door handle falls off into my hand. She does not even notice the sound above the rustling of the tissue paper. She does not notice me pushing open the door.
She is buried nearly to her knees in mounds of tissue paper, between sheets of which all of her new lingerie was once carefully packed.
Upturned bags litter the floor. Dozens of panties stretch across the floor, tangled together like a net.
A mound of bras is piled upon the closed lid of the toilet.
A single thong dangles from a lamp above the countertop.
Katya is bent over, rooting through another bag.
At last she withdraws her fist, which is clenched around a ball of silk, significantly more substantial than those items she has already discarded.
One of her new nightgowns, probably. Even with its thigh-high cut and its thin shoulder straps, it might as well be a nun’s habit in comparison to what she is wearing.
“Hah!” she declares triumphantly as she holds it aloft like an athlete brandishing a first-place medal.
“That one is for sleep, Katya,” I tell her.
She shrieks, whirling around so quickly that sheets of tissue paper become airborne, floating up around her. Her face burns with embarrassment as her lips purse into a pout. “You,” she seethes, shaking her little fist full of wrinkled silk at me, “are such a dick!”
This is true. But today, I am the dick she chose.
Maybe she thinks I do not know this. Probably she did not know I watched her today in the bookstore, watched her realize I had left her alone.
That I could see her even when she could not see me.
That I watched her consider her options, each of them crossing her face as they crossed her mind.
And still, when she thought the option was there to run—she stayed.
For three minutes while she waited for me to return to her, she stayed. By her own choice.
Of course she says nothing to me of this. But she will, I think. Eventually.
With a vicious growl, Katya throws the silk in her fist at my face. “I told you to stay out!” she huffs as I bat it away.
“Nyet. You said you were not coming out.”
“It’s the same thing.” She folds her arms over her chest. Over her breasts, which are covered—barely—in tiny scraps of violet lace. “You didn’t have to—to take off the door knob!”
“I told you I would do this. Where are your polka dots?” She dances away as I reach for her, nimble as a deer.
The bathroom is large; she has plenty of room to maneuver.
In her bare feet, she steps right across delicate silk and lace.
I cannot do the same in my boots unless I want to ruin all this new lingerie she now owns before there is the chance of seeing her wear it.
“I don’t know,” she says as she attempts to dart past my outstretched fingers back into the bedroom.
“I couldn’t find them.” The panties she wears are more nothing than lace.
Less fabric even than the bra. I manage to hook one finger through the waistband and drag her back.
“Alexei!” she gasps as I catch her around the waist, lift her off her feet, and throw her over my shoulder.
And then screeches as I pinch her ass, for which her panties offer no protection whatsoever.
“Alyosha,” she corrects herself breathlessly. “This lace is really itchy.”
But it is pretty. She has achieved a perfect tan, having spent so many hours in the pool or laying out in the afternoon sun.
The violet lace is a rich contrast against her glowing golden skin.
“So wear the polka dots,” I tell her. They’re not pink, like those first panties of hers I saw.
But they are the same sort of material. Soft cotton. Not a scrap of itchy lace to be found.
She beats a fist against my back as I carry her toward the bed. “I told you, I couldn’t find them!”
“This is not my problem.” I heave her down, and she bounces on the bed, her blonde hair briefly obscuring her face as she splutters and attempts to scrape it out of her eyes.
I splay one hand against the smooth skin of her belly as I climb over her.
“I like this lace on you, Katya,” I tell her, and I bury my face in her throat, where I can smell the perfume she has sprayed there; one of the dozens that are scattered across the bathroom countertop.
I never know which it is going to be. Like a surprise she wears upon her skin only for me.
“Really?” There is suspicion in her voice, as if she cannot tell whether or not I am being truthful with her.
“Really,” I tell her. “But I like it better off.”
∞∞∞
I do my mobstering, as Katya calls it, mostly when she is occupied with something else.
It is like an open secret, I think, but one I am careful to keep separate from her.
On those occasions when it is necessary to conduct business I know she will not want to see, I tell her where she must stay and for how long.
After Ivan, she does not disobey again. She knows there are some things she is better off not knowing, happier not seeing. And so long as she does not—she holds on to that peace she has attained.
So even though she knows that, like her papa, I am involved in a number of illicit activities, I do not make her a party to them.
I do not tell her these things which would weigh upon her inconvenient conscience.
And she does not make the mistake of asking, when she does not want the answers she might receive.
Anatoli cannot understand why I cater to her delicate sensibilities in this manner. Why I wrap up our meetings swiftly and stash away anything that might call to mind the unsavory nature of my profession when I see her coming in from the pool or hear her footsteps on the stairs.
He heaves a sigh as I zip up a duffel bag full of bricks of cocaine and toss it at him to disperse amongst our drug runners who, in turn, will sell to local dealers. And he asks, “Will you take her to Moscow?”
The question surprises me. He is not the sort who usually asks such things. But then, probably before now there has never been an occasion to ask, a reason to ask. I have told him that I will keep Katya—but it is possible he did not believe this.
Until now. Until my schedule, which was once whatever I determined it to be, became governed by Katya’s presence, the routines she has established.
“I don’t know,” I tell him. The truth is something more like I do not want to do this.
Maybe Anatoli has a fondness for our home, but I do not.
Though in the past, I have split my time between Chicago and Moscow, I like it less each time I return.
I find myself reverting to a version of myself I hate, one I once had to be for my own survival.
Cold, sharp, and hard—like the city I was born to, and from which I fought to escape. My temper becomes too easily provoked.
I do not want to take Katya to this place, where what I am will be impossible to ignore. I do not want to take her somewhere there is no place for her softness. I do not want her to cut herself on the sharp edges of this place that once shaped me. I do not want to cut her with my own sharpness.
“Will you go without her?” he asks. Anatoli returns more frequently to Moscow than I do. I have put off returning now for several months; I know he will return soon himself. He is asking if I am coming with him this time. Or if he must again go alone.
“No,” I tell him. Other than Anatoli, there is no one I trust enough with her safety to leave her behind. “I don’t go without her.”
Anatoli pinches the bridge of his nose, heaves a longsuffering sigh.
“You don’t have to like her,” I tell him.
“Of course I don’t like her,” he snaps. “You are distracted, always doing stupid shit like swimming and”—he gives an agitated gesture of his hands, as if he cannot believe what he is about to say— “painting her fucking toenails!”
I shrug. “Her fingernails were wet.”
He makes an annoyed sound beneath his breath, scrubbing at his face with one hand.
“She is bad for business,” he says, and probably he is right.
Katya is bad for business. And maybe I am less attentive to it than I have been to her.
“But,” he says, begrudgingly, like this is an admission given despite his better judgement, “she is good for you.”
And this is how I know that regardless of his opinion of her influence upon business, Katya will have his loyalty, too.