Chapter 1 #2
We come to a halt in front of my address, one and a half hours later, in a black Range Rover. The bodyguard who hasn’t said a word carries three bags of stuff, following us all the way to the elevator and up to my studio.
A slightly awkward feeling crawls up on me.
First of all, it is the first time I have someone over. In forever. In this new life, as me. Well, the kind of me, whoever that is. I’m new in town, new to being me without my role. Secondly, I don’t know what she expects from me and my studio.
I hesitate with my key in the door.
“What?” she asks. She registered it immediately, which tells me she is not as dumb as her father portrays her.
“I am not used to having a man hovering behind me,” I lie to navigate the conversation elsewhere.
“Shush,” she says to the bodyguard and takes the bags from his hand. “You can wait in the car.”
He nods and leaves.
“Do you not like men?” she asks as I open the door.
“Hate ‘em,” I say. “They’re the reason for all the evil in my life and this world.”
“You tell me,” she says, puts the bags on my wooden couch desk, pulls out a bottle of champagne, and walks over to the big open kitchen and opens the cupboards. “Do you have glasses?”
I am weirdly mesmerized by her, because I would have never dared to walk into someone else’s apartment as I own it.
“Second to the right,” I say. I bought the studio fully furnished; I wouldn’t even know what I’d like to have in here or how to decorate it.
She opens the bottle with a loud pop that resounds from the high ceiling and brick walls like a cannon blast.
“Here,” she says and hands me a glass. “Cheers to not being a minion.”
I laugh.
“Cheers,” I say, and taste the champagne. It’s the first time I’m drinking champagne, and it goes down like silk.
There is a moment of awkward silence, where I sip some of the champagne that prickles silently against the glass.
Warmth spreads through me. I haven’t had any alcohol in my life before.
My father told me to always keep a clear head so as not to get in trouble with my last job; we couldn’t risk my getting drunk blowing up the entire thing.
“What’s the matter with this apartment?” she asks as she glances around.
“What’s wrong with it?” I ask.
“Are you subtle? You don’t look subtle. Who furnished it?”
Her eyes narrow as she looks at me. She knows something is off. Here I was, thinking I could just be someone and no one would notice.
I need a lie. A lie to conceal a past she can’t know about, a lie that holds some truth, so she doesn’t see more.
“My dad always taught me not to draw attention to money,” I say carefully. “He always ruled everything, decided everything.” There it is, the small truth in the lie. “After he died, I had all that shitton of money, and I’m still figuring out who I really am.”
She hums out a huh.
“What did he do, your dad?”
Next lie needed.
“Owned several companies in France,” I say. “Until he ran his car with him and my mother over a bridge. Drunk driving.”
“Men are idiots,” she says. “You need art. And style. You don’t look like a princess. And this here gives too much princess with all the rose shades. This needs to be refurnished. Cooler, more edgy.”
“Feel free,” I say as I let myself fall onto the fluffy champagne couch, because I agree that this here is not me.
“I mean it,” she says.
“I mean it, too. I don’t fucking care, just don’t make it pink. Here,” I say as I fumble my cardholder from my pants pocket and throw my own black Amex onto the table.
She laughs. I cringe. Because flexing money feels so wrong to me.
“You know, you turned out to be hell of a catch,” she says and sits next to me with the bottle of champagne in her hand.
She leans sideways to put it on the table and grabs her bag. She pulls a small package containing white powder from the bag. I have never done drugs before—for the same reasons, I have never done alcohol.
“Are you in for some fun?” she asks and wiggles the pouch in her hand.
“Fuck yes,” I say without thinking twice about it and grin. The world I grew up in was filled of drugs. The men who contracted us were mafia, which is why I was never allowed to step out of line. One wrong move and it would have all blown up in our faces.
“That’s what I thought,” she says and grins as she throws some of the powder on the table and takes my card to prepare several lines.
She grabs a Benjamin from her bag, rolls it up, and does a line; then she hands me the rolled-up bill.
I take it.
Lean down.
Place the rolled-up bill in my right nostril.
Close the other nostril with my left pointer finger.
Somehow it all comes so naturally.
So I don’t question what I’m doing here. It is my time. My time to catch up on the time that was taken from me.
I sniff.
My nostrils burn, spreading up into the area behind my eyes, before they get numb, and a horrible, bitter taste runs down my throat.
And yet, there is this thrill.
Elation.
My head falls back as I just feel.
This is epic.
“Here,” says El, and when I bring my head back up, I see her wipe with her finger over the rest of the cocaine on the table. She turns to me.
“Open your mouth.”
I look at her, slightly perplexed.
She holds her middle finger with the white powder up for me to see.
I open my mouth without thinking.
She leans in on me, and her finger enters my mouth as she brushes it over my gums above my front teeth.
The bitter taste appears, and my upper teeth and gums become numb.
She looks at me with her head slightly tilted as she doesn’t remove her finger but pushes it in my mouth and plays with my tongue.
Suddenly, she is so close.
So close that I can see every one of her non-existent pores, because she has silk-like skin from heaven.
Her perfectly shaped and trimmed eyebrows.
The long lashes.
The lips.
My chest starts heaving up and down.
“Suck it,” she says.
And I do. Not without blushing first, because I have no, abso-fucking-lutely no experience with women at all, and I get nervous. Nervous like a thirteen-year-old girl.
I mean, I had sex with boys in the past, exactly three times, because it was part of my job, pretending to be something I am not. But I always knew I was not interested in boys in any way. I hate men. They disgust me. And now, finally being with a woman, I am lost.
So, I do as she says.
I close my lips around her finger and suck. I move my head up and down, trail with my tongue around it, and suck slightly.
I have no idea what I am doing here, but it is somehow strangely erotic. I glance at her, into those mesmerizing blue eyes, trying to figure out if what I do is what she wanted.
She gulps down her glass as if it weren’t a bottle of champagne that costs $800, while she watches me intensely.