15. My Fallen Star
Fifteen
My Fallen Star
Evelyn
The pipes knock twice and stop, the way they always do at half past six, and I lie there listening to the heat come on and realize the sound is not making me count anything.
That is the difference. For eleven weeks I have kept a running tally in the back of my head, days until the thing goes wrong, exits, the fastest route to the service elevator with a seven year old on my hip.
This morning the tally is simply not there.
Somebody quietly removed it while I was asleep, along with the arithmetic that used to run underneath it, and I stretch one foot into the cold part of the sheets and let myself notice that my chest is loose.
Down the hall, chess pieces click against a board. Three clicks, a pause, and then a small voice saying something in Russian that I am fairly sure is a swear word he learned from Kostya.
Misha has the notebook open beside his cereal when I get to the kitchen, and he does not look up.
“You’re in the wildcard section,” he says.
“I’m sorry?”
He turns the notebook toward me. It is half full already, in handwriting that slants uphill, and he has ruled the columns himself with a butter knife as a straight edge. Opening. Response. Result. Notes.
“I made this before I knew the real notation existed,” he says. “The real one is more efficient but mine has feelings in it.”
I lean over the counter. Under Notes, in the row where he has recorded a game against Andrei, he has written: too aggressive, emotionally compromised.
“Which of you was emotionally compromised?”
“Both. He was worse.” He turns the page, taps a section headed with a wobbly star. “This is wildcard. Players who don’t follow patterns. You’re the only one in it.”
“Is that good?”
Misha considers this with the gravity of a small tax auditor. Then he pats the back of my hand twice, the way you comfort someone whose dog has died.
“It’s manageable,” he says, and goes back to his cereal.
I put toast in and turn away so he cannot see my face doing whatever it is doing.
Kostya finds me at the counter twenty minutes later, after Mrs. Petrov has taken Misha down to the building library with two of the detail. He does not sit. Kostya has never sat down in this kitchen in his life, as far as I can tell, which I assume is a policy.
“Your summary is in,” he says. “Forty-one pages, attributed. The two word order segments are attributed as well. Your name is on both.”
“Attributed how?”
“By name. Marsh, E.” He shifts the laptop bag on his shoulder. “He told me to tell you the contribution was material, not supplementary.”
I put the coffee pot down. “Did he tell you to say it exactly like that?”
“He did.” Kostya’s face gives me absolutely nothing, which is how I know he finds this funny. “He also said if you asked whether he told me to say it exactly like that, I should say yes.”
“That man is a menace.”
“That has been my professional opinion for twenty-two years.” He nods once, the way he does, and leaves.
I stand at the counter with my hand flat on the marble and something rearranges itself behind my ribs.
Material, not supplementary. Four months ago I was a set of loan statements with a person attached, and this morning my father’s account is going into a federal file under my own name because I put it there.
I do not finish the coffee. I go down the corridor and open the study door and close it behind me.
Andrei looks up. He is in shirtsleeves, cuffs turned back, and the room smells like paper and the cedar of whatever the cleaner uses on the shelves.
“I’m staying,” I say.
He sets the pen down.
“Not because of the salary. Not because of Misha, although if you tell him I said that I’ll deny it.” My voice does something unhelpful in the middle and I keep going anyway. “Because I’ve spent my whole life letting fear write the last page for me. I’m done doing that.”
He crosses the room. He does not do it quickly, which somehow makes it worse, and then his hands come up and frame my face, and the signet ring rests along my jaw, warm this time, body heat and not cold metal.
He says something low in Russian first. Then, in the accented English he no longer bothers to sand down for me, “I will keep telling you the truth. Even the parts that make my life harder.”
“That’s the whole point of the parts that make your life harder.”
“I am aware.” His thumb moves once at the corner of my mouth. “Evie.”
I get my hands into his shirt and pull.
He kisses me the way he does everything, deliberately, and then somewhere between the study door and the hallway the deliberateness thins out and by the time we are in his bedroom with the door shut he has stopped narrating himself entirely.
“Mrs. Petrov has him until three,” I say against his mouth.
“I know exactly how long she has him.”
“You checked.”
“I checked twice.”
There is nothing careful about this afternoon.
The first time was urgency in a kitchen—quick, almost desperate, the edge of the counter digging into my hips while he held me steady and we both pretended we had all the time in the world when we didn’t.
This is not that. This is his hand at the small of my back, firm and guiding, walking me backward through his apartment until the backs of my knees hit the bed.
My cardigan goes somewhere behind us, discarded without ceremony. His belt follows.
My own fingers work at the buttons of his shirt, competent for the first three, then suddenly clumsy when his mouth finds the hinge of my jaw and he breathes against my skin like he’s already tasting me.
“Slower,” he says, low, almost amused, and takes over.
He gets the last three buttons open in about a second and a half, which is pure showing off, and then the shirt is gone and there is only the heat of his bare chest under my palms, the fine dark hair, the hard planes of muscle that shift when he moves.
Then I am on my back on his bed and he is going down my body without hurry.
Mouth at my throat first, open and wet, sucking lightly until I feel the blood rise under the skin.
Then my collarbone. Then the soft underside of my breast, lingering there long enough that I start to shift restlessly beneath him.
He closes his lips around my nipple and draws on it with deliberate suction, tongue flicking the tightened peak until I make a sound I have no control over—high, broken, needy.
He hums against my skin, the vibration traveling straight down my spine. He knows exactly what he is doing to me. He has done it before. He remembers the results, and he is taking his time collecting them again.
“You’re mapping,” I manage, voice already unsteady.
“I am confirming.” His mouth drags lower, over the soft plane of my stomach, tongue dipping briefly into my navel. His hands slide under my thighs and push them wide, wider than I would have opened them myself, until I am completely exposed to him. “Hold there.”
I do.
His mouth settles on my clit and the room goes narrow. Everything else falls away—the city twelve floors down, the light through the blinds, the faint sound of traffic. There is only the heat of his breath and the slow, devastating work of his tongue.
He starts with the flat of it, long strokes from my entrance up through my folds, gathering the wetness that has already soaked me, then switches to the point, circling my swollen clit with focused precision.
Two fingers press inside me, thick and deliberate, curling upward until they find the place that makes my hips jerk.
He works me open slowly, stretching me, stroking that spot in time with the rhythm of his tongue, and I have one hand fisted in his hair and the other twisted hard in the sheet.
I am not being quiet. He does not want me quiet.
Every time I try to swallow a sound he stops completely—tongue still, fingers still—until I let it out, raw and shameless.
I catch on fast, because I want him to keep going more than I want whatever is left of my dignity.
The wet sounds of his mouth on me fill the room.
My thighs start to tremble around his shoulders.
When I come it takes my spine with it, a full-body wave that arches me off the mattress, my pussy clenching hard around his fingers, my clit pulsing under his tongue while he works me through every last shudder.
I pull at his hair, insistent, and he comes up over me, mouth wet and shining, breathing hard. His eyes are dark, almost black.
“Now,” I say.
“Are you sure.”
“Andrei.”
“I am asking.” His forehead rests against mine. The head of his cock is already nudging against my entrance, hot and thick, sliding through the slickness he just drew from me. “Tell me.”
“Yes. Please. I need you inside me.”
He pushes into me and it is a slow, full stretch—every inch deliberate, the thick ridge of his cock dragging against my walls as he sinks deeper.
He stops halfway, eyes locked on mine, waiting.
I lift my hips and take the rest, feeling myself open around him until he is buried to the hilt, the pressure of him filling me completely.
For a moment neither of us moves. I can feel the throb of his pulse inside me.
After that neither of us is managing anything.
His control is somewhere on the floor with my cardigan.
His rhythm starts measured—long, deep strokes that let me feel every inch of him sliding out and pushing back in—but it unravels fast. It turns into something with no shape at all, hips snapping harder, deeper, the wet slap of skin on skin filling the room.
I get my heels around the back of his thighs and hold on, nails digging into the muscle of his shoulders. Whatever he is saying is in Russian now, low and broken in the middle of words, and I do not need a translation for the sound of a man who has stopped choosing them carefully.
His cock drives into me again and again, the head dragging over that sensitive place inside me on every thrust, and the friction is perfect, relentless, building another orgasm low in my belly that feels meaner and sharper than the first.
Then, against my ear, unmistakable: “Moya zvezda.”
I hear it clearly for the first time, all four syllables, soft and rough at once, and I hold it like something fragile and precious.
I come again with my nails in his shoulder and his name coming out of me in broken pieces—“Andrei—fuck—Andrei—” while my pussy clamps down around him in hard, rhythmic pulses.
He follows a stroke later, burying himself deep, face pressed into my neck, a low, guttural sound vibrating against my skin as he spills into me in long, hot pulses.
Afterward he does not get up.
The city is doing whatever it does twelve floors down and none of it reaches us.
He lies with his palm spread flat on my stomach, fingers splayed, his ring warm against my hip. His cock softens slowly inside me; neither of us moves to separate.
His breathing takes a long time to level. I lie there filing those two syllables away where I can find them again—moya zvezda—pressing the memory of the way they sounded against the memory of his mouth on my clit and the stretch of him filling me.
The blinds are still open when the light goes gray-blue over the lake. I wake sometime later with his arm heavy across me, his chest solid against my back, the faint ache between my thighs a quiet reminder of everything we just did.
“What does moya zvezda mean?”
He does not move. There is a pause, one beat longer than the question deserves, and I feel it happen in his chest under my ear.
“It is something my mother used to say,” he says.