3. The Orchid Room
Three
The Orchid Room
Evelyn
Misha knocks a full glass of water onto his mattress at ten fifty at night, which he reports to me with the gravity of a man announcing a maritime disaster, and now I am padding down the corridor in bare feet hunting for the linen closet Mrs. Petrov pointed at exactly once, six days ago, while saying four other things.
The marble is cold enough to make my toes curl. Everything up here is cold. The apartment doesn’t creak, doesn’t tick, doesn’t have a neighbor’s television bleeding through a wall. It just holds its breath and waits for you to make noise first.
Third door: a closet full of coats nobody wears. Fourth door: something that appears to be a room whose only function is to contain one chair. I’m starting to think this place was designed by a man who has never once needed a spare pillowcase.
I try the door at the end of the hall.
It opens.
Warm air comes at me first, humid and green, thick with wet soil and something sweet under it, and my brain files this as wrong before my eyes catch up. Not a closet. Glass and low light and rows of them, orchids in white and pale gold, arched on their stems like they’re leaning toward something.
And Andrei.
He’s got his back to me in shirtsleeves, no jacket, no tie, the cuffs pushed to his forearms, and he has one fingertip resting against a single white blossom. Not holding it. Resting. The way you’d touch a sleeping person’s hair when you don’t want to wake them.
I count three seconds. That’s all I take. Then I step back into the corridor and pull the door to without letting the latch click, and I stand in the dark hallway with my heart going like I’ve been caught doing something instead of him.
I find the linen closet on the way back. It was door number two.
I get Misha’s bed remade, and he informs me from the doorway that the whale is the largest animal that has ever lived, including dinosaurs, which he has now told me nine times and which I receive as if it is brand new information, because it is his and he’s saying it out loud and three weeks ago he wasn’t saying anything at all.
He falls asleep in eleven minutes. I know because I count.
Then I go to my own room and lie down and the ceiling and I have a long, hostile conversation.
Because here’s the thing about that man’s fingertip on that petal.
I have spent six days building a very reasonable file on Andrei Orlov.
Employer. Terrifying. Speaks in complete sentences roughly twice a week.
Has a jaw you could use to open envelopes.
Not a person, exactly, more of a weather system in a suit, and the correct response to weather is to stay indoors and mind your own business.
The file does not survive a man touching a flower like it’s the last one on earth.
I roll onto my side. I roll onto my back. I try thinking about my student loan amortization schedule, which has never failed me, and it fails me now.
His forearms. That’s the detail that keeps landing. The shirt pushed up, the tendon in his wrist, the fact that he was completely alone up there in warm wet air and had taken his armor off one piece at a time to be alone with something fragile.
Fine. Okay. Fine.
I slide my hand down over my stomach in the dark, under the waistband of my sleep shorts, and I stop pretending I’m going to redirect anything.
The first touch of my own fingers makes me exhale hard into the pillow. I’m already slick, embarrassingly so—hot and wet between my thighs like my body has been waiting for this all day—and I hate that and I don’t stop.
I set two fingers against my clit and move slowly, small, deliberate circles, because slow is what he’d do.
That’s the shape my brain insists on. Everything about Andrei is deliberate.
He would take his time the way he takes his time answering a question, that awful patient stillness while you wait to find out what he’s decided.
He would make me wait. He would make me feel every second of it.
I imagine him behind me in that humid greenhouse, the air thick with the smell of damp soil and green growing things.
His hand covering mine on the glass table.
The heat of the air on my throat. I let the imaginary version of him turn me around, let him put one large hand flat on my sternum and press me back against the potting bench until the wood digs into my spine.
In my head his eyes are dark, focused, the same intensity he gave to that single white petal now turned entirely on me.
He doesn’t speak. That’s what makes it unbearable.
He just watches, that fingertip tracing slowly down the center of my chest, between my breasts, over my stomach, lower, learning the shape of me before he takes anything.
My fingers keep circling, slow, stubborn. I force them not to speed up even as my hips start lifting off the mattress on their own.
My other hand slips under my tank top, palm cupping my breast, thumb dragging over my nipple until it tightens into an aching peak. I pinch it the way I imagine he would—firm, controlled—and a soft, broken sound slips out of me into the pillow.
I’m grateful nobody in this building can hear through these walls.
In the fantasy his hand keeps moving. He unbuttons my jeans with the same unhurried care he does everything, slides them down just far enough, then hooks his fingers in the waistband of my panties and draws them down too.
He looks at me. Really looks. At the way I’m already glistening for him, at the soft folds of my pussy, at how my thighs tremble when his knuckles brush the inside of one.
He still doesn’t speak. He just presses two fingers against my clit the way I’m doing now and starts those same small circles, learning the exact pressure that makes my breath catch.
I bite the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste copper. The sheets are damp under the small of my back.
I press two fingers inside myself and my whole body arches at how much it isn’t enough—how tight I am, how empty I feel, how desperately I want a hand that isn’t mine.
My virgin body clenches around the intrusion, slick and greedy, and I imagine it’s his fingers instead, thicker, longer, curling carefully to find that place inside me that makes my vision blur.
He would go slow. He would stretch me open with infinite patience, watching my face the entire time, waiting until I was shaking before he gave me more.
I drag my fingers back out and return to my clit, no longer patient. The circles get tighter, faster, wetter.
I can hear how soaked I am every time I move.
My heels dig into the mattress.
My free hand keeps working my breast, pinching and rolling the nipple until it stings in the best way.
In my head Andrei is still silent, still watching, but now he’s pushing my thighs wider, settling between them, the heat of his breath ghosting over my pussy right before his mouth replaces his fingers.
I imagine the first slow lick, the flat of his tongue dragging through my folds, the way he would suck my clit between his lips and work it with devastating focus.
It builds low and mean, tight behind my hipbones, a coiling pressure that makes my stomach tremble.
I chase it with short, desperate strokes, two fingers rubbing hard over my swollen clit while the other two stay buried inside me, fucking myself in shallow, frantic thrusts.
My breath comes in broken pieces.
My thighs start to shake.
The fantasy collapses into pure sensation—Andrei’s imagined hands pinning my hips down, his mouth relentless, the low sound he might make when he tastes how wet I’ve gotten just from thinking about him.
When it breaks, I make a noise I bury deep in the pillow, something raw and helpless.
My pussy clenches hard around my fingers, pulsing in waves that roll through my whole body. My thighs shake violently. I keep rubbing through it, slower now, drawing every last tremor out until the aftershocks fade into a soft, oversensitive ache.
I ride it out with my fingers still inside myself, still holding, still feeling the slick heat of my own release coating my hand.
For a long time I just lie there in the dark, breathing hard, legs open, the sheets sticking to my damp skin.
My clit throbs under my palm.
I can still feel the ghost of him between my thighs—the weight of his attention, the deliberate care of his hands, the way he would have looked at me while I came.
I press my face deeper into the pillow and whisper his name like a secret I’m not supposed to keep.
“Andrei…”
Then I’m lying in the dark, sweating, breathing like I ran here.
The ceiling is exactly where I left it.
Twenty-three years old. Never been touched. And now my employer—a man old enough to remember the fall of the Soviet Union, a man I’ve known for only six days—is short-circuiting my entire nervous system.
I put my arm over my eyes. Excellent work, Marsh. Really tremendous professional judgment.
In the morning the light comes in gray off the lake and Misha is on his second bowl of the cereal with the cartoon tiger, and when I hear the study door, my hands are already moving. I pour the coffee black, no sugar, into the plain cup, and set it at his place before he reaches the counter.
Andrei stops. He looks at the cup. Then he looks at me.
“Good morning,” I say.
He doesn’t answer. He picks it up. Six days ago that silence would have felt like a verdict, and this morning it feels like a door standing open somewhere in the apartment.
I turn back to the toast. Misha explains that a whale’s heart is the size of a car, which is not correct but is close enough that I let it live, and I’m scraping butter to the corners the way he likes when I notice I’m humming.
That low thing, four notes down and up, the one my mother used to do over the sink and I apparently inherited like a mole.
Andrei sets his cup down on the marble. One small precise click.
I stop.
“Sorry,” I say. “Habit.”
He looks at me for a beat too long. “Misha. Shoes.”
Misha goes. Andrei takes the coffee with him, which he has never done, and I stand at the counter with a butter knife in my hand and my face doing something I’m glad the reflective surfaces in this kitchen are too far away to confirm.
The rest of the day behaves itself. He leaves at six for a charity gala in a tuxedo that makes me deeply grateful I am sitting down at the time.
Misha and I build a city out of blocks and then destroy it with a sock.
Bedtime at eight thirty. And at half past eleven I’m at the kitchen counter with a paperback and cold tea, because apparently I now live in a state of low-grade insomnia, when the front door opens.
He comes in with his jacket over one arm and his bow tie hanging loose, and he stops when he sees me.
“You’re up.”
“I’m reading.” I hold up the book like evidence. “It’s a whole thing people do.”
He doesn’t respond to that. He crosses to the cabinet, takes down the whisky and a glass, and pours two fingers. The sound of it hitting the crystal is the loudest thing in the room.
I should go. I stay.
He stands with his back half turned, looking at the glass, not at me.
“He asked tonight whether I was going to leave too.”
The refrigerator hums. Down the hall, a door is closed on a seven-year-old who counted his sheets being changed like it was a ceremony.
I don’t say anything. Not because I don’t have anything.
Because whatever I have is smaller than what he just put on the counter, and I have spent my entire life filling silences for other people so they don’t have to sit in them, and I know, standing here, that if I fill this one he’ll take the exit.
So I stay quiet.
He turns the glass a quarter inch on the marble. Doesn’t drink.
“Good night, Miss Marsh.”
“Good night.”
He goes. I hear his footsteps stop at the end of the hall, and the lock.
I wash my cup. I turn off the kitchen lights and walk back through the dark to my room and lie down, and it’s two in the morning before I let myself say the true thing.
The orchids were his. He didn’t hand them to me. I stole them off him through a door he forgot to lock, and there’s no version of that where I get to hold it.
But he said the thing about Misha out loud. To a person. With his mouth. And that’s worse, because he chose it, and he chose me to say it in front of, and now I have to live in this apartment knowing what his voice does when it isn’t giving instructions.
I’m not in trouble over the man who opened the door on Monday and priced me like a property.
I’m in trouble over the one who presses his fingertip to a white petal like it’s the last fragile thing he has left.