23. My Guiding Star
Twenty Three
My Guiding Star
Evelyn
Daisy is saying it wrong on purpose. I know she is, because she is looking at me while she does it.
“Ne solzhyot,” she says, flattening every vowel like a Chicago parking sign.
“That’s not even close.”
“It’s close enough for a courthouse.”
Kostya, three feet away with a folder open against his forearm, turns a page and does not look up. “It is not close enough for a courthouse.”
The hallway smells like floor wax and radiator heat and the particular cold that comes off a marble bench when nobody has sat on it since morning.
Somewhere down the corridor a metal detector chirps twice.
Misha is sitting on the bench between Daisy and the wall with his heels swinging four inches above the floor, and he says the line correctly, twice, without being asked, and then goes back to reading his own sleeve.
“It’s long,” he says.
“You asked for long.”
“I asked for slightly long. This is a strategic allowance.” He holds his arm out and considers the extra inch of gray wool covering half his hand. “I’m going to keep growing. It would be stupid to buy a suit that’s finished.”
Daisy makes a noise into her coffee. Kostya closes the folder, checks something in it again, and opens it once more.
Three days from now this room will hold six people.
Right now it holds four and a security guard who has been eating the same bag of pretzels for eleven minutes, and I am standing in a courthouse hallway in a coat I have had since I was twenty, watching a seven year old defend the tailoring choices of a man who intends to grow into them.
I have been practicing not saying thank you for things I did myself. It is harder than the Russian.
The morning of the ceremony I make coffee before anyone else is up and Andrei comes into the kitchen already dressed, which is unusual only in that his tie is not done yet, and he stands at the counter drinking what I hand him without asking whether I slept.
“I authorized it,” I say.
He sets the cup down. The click on the marble is small and exact, the sound I have heard every morning for eleven months and can now identify from two rooms away.
“Last night at eleven. I logged in, I read the whole disclosure page, and I clicked the button.” My hands are steady on my own cup, which surprises me. “The balance is zero. Principal, interest, the collection line from the second servicer. All of it. It’s gone.”
He does not say anything for a moment. He reaches across the counter and takes my hand, the signet ring cool against my knuckles, and he holds it there.
“It was my decision,” I say. “And the timing was mine. I wanted to do it before today, not after. I didn’t want it to be a wedding present.”
“I know.”
“You don’t get to know that faster than I say it.”
“I know,” he says again, and there is something behind his mouth that is almost a smile and does not fully commit.
I think about a nine year old checking a mailbox for the second check that never came.
I think about how many years I built a whole personality out of never asking.
Nobody paid this for me. I paid it, with a hand somebody handed me, and those are not the same thing, and it took me five months to be able to hold both facts at once without one of them eating the other.
Misha comes in with his shirt buttoned crooked and asks whether the ceremony is going to be embarrassing.
“Almost certainly,” I say.
“Good. I’ve prepared for that.” He climbs onto the stool. “I have a version where I don’t look at anyone.”
The room holds six of us. The officiant has a voice like a woman reading a train schedule, which is exactly right. Kostya stands at the back with his hands folded, wearing a suit I have never seen and will probably never see again. Daisy cries almost immediately and is furious about it.
Misha reads the inscription from memory.
He does it in Russian first, slowly, with the accent he has been sanding down all week while I pretended not to listen from the hallway.
Then he does it in English, and when he gets to the last line he stops, and looks up, and does not look at the paper he is not holding.
“She found the door,” he says. To me. Only to me.
The radiator ticks. Daisy makes a sound she will deny later.
Andrei says his vows in the English he no longer smooths for anybody, the consonants landing where his mother put them, and at the end of the standard text, after the part everyone says, he adds two words that are not in it.
“Moya zvezda.”
The officiant smiles at her page. I do not look away from him. I say my part clearly and I hold his eyes the entire time and I do not lose a single word, which I had privately budgeted for.
That night Kostya takes Misha for the evening, which was Misha’s idea, pitched to me in three structured points with the rebuttal handled in point two.
Andrei and I go up to the roof.
The orchid room breathes out at us the moment I open it with my own key—warm and wet and green, that heavy sweetness of soil and living things rising to meet us.
The city is a long way down, a glittering grid of light going about its business without us.
He has put a blanket on the wooden bench, folded with uncharacteristic precision, and the sight of it is so carefully arranged that I laugh at him, soft and surprised.
“Say something,” I tell him.
“I have been saying things all day.”
“Say it badly.”
He turns me toward him with one hand at my jaw, the gold of his ring warm now instead of cold against my skin, and he kisses me the way he does when he has finally stopped calculating—slow first, almost reverent, the press of his mouth learning mine all over again.
Then it deepens, turns hungry, and my back finds the edge of the potting table.
His other hand is already at the row of small buttons running down my spine, working them open one by one with that same deliberate patience he brings to everything.
“Here,” he says against my mouth. Not a question, but he waits for the answer anyway.
“Here.”
The dress slips from my shoulders.
The humid air lands on my bare skin like a second touch, and I feel every inch of where his mouth goes after it—first the line of my throat, open and wet, then the hollow of my collarbone, then lower, over the soft swell of my breast.
He takes his time, closing his lips around one nipple and drawing on it until it tightens and aches, tongue flicking the peak while his hand cups the other breast, thumb stroking slow circles.
I make a sound I can’t swallow.
He hums against me, the vibration traveling straight down.
By the time he has me sitting on the edge of the table my knees are already around his hips and his tie is somewhere on the floor among the pots.
I get his shirt open with less patience than he showed me, buttons scattering, and I put my palm flat against his chest the way I have been doing for months without ever explaining why.
His breath leaves him in a sharp exhale at the contact. That is still the part he cannot control—the way his body answers mine before his mind can catch up.
“Tell me,” he says, voice rough.
“I want your mouth.”
He goes down without a word.
He has learned exactly what I like and he takes his time with it anyway.
His hands spread my thighs wide, thumbs pressing into the soft flesh, holding me open. The first drag of his tongue is slow, flat, from my entrance all the way up through my folds, gathering the wetness that has already soaked me.
He does it again, and again, until I am shifting restlessly on the table, then he focuses on my clit—circling it with the point of his tongue, then flattening it again and applying steady, relentless pressure.
Two fingers press inside me, thick and sure, curling upward to stroke that sensitive place while his mouth works.
I have to grab the edge of the table with one hand and fist the other in his hair.
I am not quiet up here.
There is nobody for eleven floors and I let every sound out—broken moans, sharp gasps, his name when he sucks harder.
He groans against me when I do, the vibration sending another pulse of heat through me, and that is the thing that finishes me: him losing composure over the noise I make.
I come with my thighs shaking hard around his shoulders, pussy clenching around his fingers in tight, rhythmic waves, my clit throbbing under his tongue while he works me through every last tremor.
He stands.
He is breathing hard, mouth wet, eyes almost black.
I get his belt open with unsteady hands, shove his trousers down just far enough, and wrap my fingers around his cock.
He is thick and heavy and already leaking at the tip. He says something in Russian that I only catch half of—something low and filthy—and I pull him toward me by the hip.
“Now,” I say.
He pushes in slowly, watching my face the entire way.
The stretch is familiar now but still intense—every inch of him filling me, the thick ridge of his cock dragging against my walls as he sinks deeper. When he is all the way in he stops, forehead pressed to mine, and I feel him fight for one more second of control before it slips.
“Don’t be careful,” I tell him.
He is not careful.
He fucks me on the edge of the potting table with one hand braced behind my back to keep me from sliding and the other under my thigh, holding me open.
Deep, steady strokes at first, then faster, harder, the wet sound of him moving inside me filling the humid air.
I hook my ankle behind his thigh and take all of it, heels digging in to pull him deeper.
The pots rattle with every thrust. Somewhere behind us a flower stalk gives up and drops with a soft sound.
His accent thickens until the English is gone entirely and there is only the Russian against my ear—broken, half-swallowed, words I know now mixed with ones I don’t. T
he table creaks.
My breasts bounce with the force of his hips.
I can feel another orgasm coiling low and mean, building with every drag of his cock over that perfect place inside me.
“Moya zvezda,” I say back to him, and I say it right, the way Misha taught me, careful with the syllables.
He goes rigid for one whole second like he has been struck.
Then he says my name—just “Evelyn,” rough and ruined—and comes with his mouth open against my shoulder, body locking deep inside me as he pulses hard, filling me in long, hot waves.
I go again a heartbeat behind him, holding onto his back with both hands, nails digging into muscle while my pussy clamps down around him and the pleasure rolls through me in sharp, shaking pulses.
Afterward he wraps the blanket around me and we sit on the bench in the warm dark with the orchids breathing around us and my legs across his lap.
His shirt is entirely ruined—half the buttons gone, the fabric damp with sweat and humidity.
He tells me, in Russian, what it sounded like when I said those words to him, and I understand enough of it to know he is not decorating anything.
His voice is still rough, still a little broken.
“You’re going to have to teach me the rest,” I say, tracing the edge of his ring with one fingertip.
“Yes.”
“Not tonight.”
“No.”
He kisses the top of my head, slow, and we stay like that while the city keeps glittering far below.
In the morning we come down the stairs from the roof and the apartment smells like tea.
Kostya is standing at the counter in yesterday’s shirt with the kettle already off the burner, arranging two cups on the marble with the exact seriousness he applies to everything, and he does not say a word about where we have been or what time it is or the fact that Andrei’s collar is still open.
He hands Andrei a cup. He hands me one.
“He is asleep,” Kostya says. “He annotated the entire wedding. There is a consequences column.”