34. Taylor
TAYLOR
By the third week in Mikhail’s house, I’m considering climbing out a window.
Not because I’m being held prisoner. I am definitely Not A Prisoner. Mikhail has made that very clear. I’m free to go anywhere I like. As long as I tell him, take a driver and three guards, and clear my route with Mikhail first.
“I need to leave,” I tell him.
We are in his study because I came looking for him with purpose. I didn’t get lost this time, which feels like a personal achievement.
“The threat has not been eliminated yet,” he says, looking up from the papers spread across his desk, his glasses sliding down the bridge of his nose.
I didn’t realize that he wears glasses to read until I started living with him.
It is yet another trait that makes Mikhail frustratingly sexy. “Orlov is in hiding.”
I shake my head and look away purposefully like he’s the sun in my eyes. “I need to go outside somewhere. Get out of the house. Just me and you.”
He tosses his pen down, leans back in his chair, and holds his hand out for me. “Where do you want to go?”
I let him wrap an arm around my waist and pull me between his legs. “I don’t know. Somewhere normal,” I say, my stomach fluttering.
“Define normal,” he mumbles, running his nose along the waistband of my shorts and swaying me.
I rest my hands on his shoulders and try to ignore that the fluttering has traveled between my legs. “I saw an advertisement for a flea market happening today. It’s once a month. That would be normal.”
Mikhail pulls the waistband of my pants down, just a little, and kisses my hip bone. My stomach dips like I took a drop on a roller coaster.
I swallow and sink my fingertips into his shoulder, ignoring the groan my fingernails elicit from him. “I want to go anywhere that doesn’t have men standing silently in corners.”
“The men would have to come with us,” he mumbles into my flesh, pushing my shirt up and kissing my stomach. His hand slides under the back of my bra strap so easily it could be mistaken for an accident until he pulls down one of my bra cups, freeing one of my breasts.
“But why? There will be so many people there,” I groan, trying to focus on my mission of getting us out of the house even as his hands make it so hard. It always goes back to those hands, so strong and big…
“They are not decorative, Taylor,” he says, his fingers curling around my nipple.
I sigh at the gentle touch and gasp when he pinches it.
“You truly want to spend the afternoon looking through other people’s discarded possessions when I could buy you anything you want?
I know something we could do just the two of us that you always like. ”
His word choice triggers a memory. I flash back to the last time I asked about leaving the house and going on a date. He told me that was a great idea and asked where I wanted to go while his hand made circles on my upper thigh, his pinky sneaking into my underwear…
“Oh my God!” I yelp, pulling back.
“What?” he asks me, his hands dropping dramatically to his knees like I have left them empty.
“You’re using sex to distract me from leaving!” I accuse, pulling my bra back up and over my chest.
“That is…someone who would do that would be a truly…messed up individual.”
I narrow my eyes at him. “Yeah, we’re going. Get ready.”
I stride toward the door and Mikhail teases, “So I have an hour before you make it back to your room then.”
I whirl around and explode, “I’m getting better! Be downstairs and ready in ten minutes or I’m going without you and who knows if I’ll come back!”
The market is held beneath a long iron roof at the edge of the city, though the word roof is generous. It does very little against the wind, and the crowded stalls shudder against it.
It’s perfect.
It would be more perfect without the guards, but they at least hang back far enough that I can pretend that Mikhail and I are just a man and woman on a date, something I have never once been able to do.
I stop at a table covered in costume jewelry. Tarnished chains. Mismatched earrings. Brooches. I pick up a small ceramic pin of a red fox. Its paint is worn around the edges, and one of the ears is chipped. “This is cute,” I say.
Mikhail glances at it. “It is damaged.”
“It has character.”
The woman behind the stall names a price before I’ve asked. I reach for my wallet. Mikhail says something in Russian before I can open it. The woman blinks. She looks at the table, then at him, then back at the table. She begins gathering jewelry into a wooden box.
“No,” I say. Mikhail ignores me. “What are you doing?”
“Buying it.”
“The pin?”
“The stall.”
I stare at him. The seller is now calling to someone at the next table. A man appears with two more boxes. “Mikhail,” I groan.
“You said you liked it.”
“I said I liked one thing.”
“You spent ten minutes looking at the others. You liked them also.”
I grab his sleeve. “I was browsing. You can’t buy an entire stall because I said one pin was cute.”
He looks down at my hand. I release him immediately.
“Clearly I can,” he says with a glint in his eyes.
I lower my voice. “You’re embarrassing me.”
“Well, stop arguing loudly in public about it, and no one will know.”
I narrow my eyes at him. He’s enjoying this. “You think you’re funny,” I say.
“Sometimes.”
“You’re not.”
“What do they say? Humor is subjective.”
The seller hands me the fox pin personally and tells me something that I don’t understand, a Russian colloquialism. “What did she say? I don’t know that one.”
Mikhail’s gaze shifts to the pin. “She said it suits you.”
“God, does a saleswoman ever stop?” I thank her in Russian, but she just beams at me, not moving. “What does she want?”
Mikhail sighs and takes the fox from me and pins it to my coat.
She says in English, “You like?”
For one absurd moment, I feel like I could cry.
But immediately afterward, the absurdity of it hits me, and I turn and stifle a laugh into Mikhail’s chest. He pets the back of my head and tells her in Russian that I like it so much I am crying with joy and thanks her.
When she leaves, he hisses to me, “You are mean.”
I pull away and flatten my hair down and pat my face, saying, “Sorry, sorry. I don’t know what came over me.” But I immediately break into a fit of giggles again.
He envelops me again, laughing with me about it, and he whispers into my ear, “I love you. Thank you for letting me spoil you.”
I don’t know what to say. When we pull back, his thumb is on my chin, and his brown eyes are absent the usual tight calculation.
“Fine,” I relent, “But if you are insisting on doing this to me, you have to wear your…wares.” I dig through one of the boxes Mikhail has apparently just purchased and find a brass pin shaped like a cluster of grapes. I hold it against his coat. “This one is you.”
“Why?”
“What a question. It’s about the vibes, Mikhail.”
He gives me a look but lets me pin it to him. I keep digging, and he points to a tray of cheap rings buried beneath a pile of tangled necklaces. He chooses one for me that is fake gold with a giant emerald gem, and I pick one for him that is crusted with fake rubies all around it.
“This is hideous,” I tell him as he slides it onto my ring finger like a joke.
“It has personality.”
“Well, that’s good because it’s hideous.”
“Now what if I really liked that?” he asks, lifting my hand up and inspecting it. “What was that American idiom you told me about? If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all?”
“Yes, well, what was yours? A foe will flatter you, but a true friend will tell hard truths?”
I smile and try to let it feel silly, but when he drops my hand and links our fingers, all I can think about is the weight on my left hand and how it would feel to have real metal there.
We continue through the market, and I make a point of not praising anything, but I slip up once or twice.
By the time we return to the house, the guards are carrying four boxes of jewelry, two paintings I did not ask for, a record I mentioned my father used to put on when we cleaned, a brass candlestick Nikita might like, and a stack of books by an author I said is good.
It is absurd. I feel flushed with joy.
That night, I lie awake in Mikhail’s bed thinking about the afternoon. He’s still somewhere downstairs working, but his side of the bed is already turned down, his reading glasses folded on the nightstand beside a stack of reports.
I look down at my finger, at the fake gold ring turning my finger green. If I think hard enough, I can still conjure the buzzing in my hand I felt when he slid it onto me and linked his fingers with mine.
When I moved to Russia, I thought my favorite sights would be cathedrals and palaces and fountains, but Mikhail laughing has quietly slipped into the top spot.
It makes no sense that I could picture myself with a politician or with my boss or with a forty-three-year-old man or with a pakhan. Any one of those things would make no sense. Putting them together makes it insurmountable.
But somehow I just fit with him. I feel light. I feel seen. Protected. Chosen.
A few low notes drift through the hallway, faint enough that they could be the backdrop of my happy musings. Then the melody continues. Piano.
I sit up to make sure I’m really hearing it, but it’s still too distant to quite make out. I follow it down the corridor, past the staircase, turning toward a part of the house I vaguely remember from the time I was imprisoned here.
I don’t want to remember that time, but it’s seared into my memory. For all my fantasizing about Mikhail, I have to keep it at the forefront of my mind that that’s him too.
I find Mikhail sitting at a grand piano. I vaguely remember now. He was sitting there before at the bench with his mother. I hadn’t really computed that in my state.
His sleeves are rolled to his forearms, and his head is bowed slightly as his hands move across the keys. He’s still wearing the ridiculous ring on his finger too. I have never seen him like this. There is no calculation in his face. No sharpness or awareness of who might be watching.
I stop in the doorway to watch, and the floor creaks. Mikhail opens his eyes, looks at me, and stops. His hands go still on the keys, and I watch his unguarded expression close like a window shutting. He stands. “I woke you, I am sorry.”
“No, don’t stop.” I lean against the doorframe. “I was just starting to believe you had a soul.” He remains seated, unsmiling, but he does not play. I take another step into the room. “You’re very good,” I say quietly.
“I was better once.”
There are a thousand questions I could ask. What do you mean once? Who taught you? When did you start learning? Did you like it then? Do you have other hidden talents? What is your favorite piece? Why do you keep hiding every soft thing about yourself like someone might use it against you?
But I can already see him retreating back inside himself, so I ask an easier one. “Can I stay?”
Mikhail considers for a moment, then moves slightly to make room. I sit next to him, close enough that our legs nearly touch, and resist the urge to rest my head on his shoulder. Instead, I put my hand on his thigh and leave enough room for his arms to move freely.
“Keep playing.”
“That sounded like an order.”
“I’ve learned from the best.”
He looks at me for another moment. He places his hands back on the keys. Then he begins. The first notes are soft, but they build and layer. The music builds. The room seems to disappear around it.
I stop thinking about guards. About my apartment. About the warning sitting like a stone in my stomach. I stop thinking about the fact that I am living inside the house of a man I do not fully understand.
He begins another piece. This one is quieter.
“I forgot to tell you earlier that I love you too,” I say into the music and kiss his cheek.
In response, he drops his head so that his cheek touches the top of my crown.
I sit beside him in the dark while he plays, and think that maybe for the first time since meeting Mikhail, he is letting me see a part of himself he hasn’t sharpened into a weapon or hidden behind a wall.