Chapter 4 - Viktor #2
She’s right there in front of me, in motion. So fucking alive.
She jogs toward a café I’ve known about since its reopening.
The Great Escape, a token of Iosif Yuri’s love for his wife.
Her clothes are a one-eighty from anything I’ve seen her in so far.
But it’s good to know the ripped jeans and oversized tee do it for me just fine.
Her hair is piled up in a messy knot atop her head.
When she beams out the window, flipping open a menu, there’s something so fucking free about the way she smiles.
It’s nothing like the smirk outside the club, or the lifeless smile at whatever soiree. She effuses light.
The deflating sensation from last night is already a memory.
So much for disappointment.
On Saturday night, I tracked her through a gallery opening in Seaport.
She shows up in a tiny strapless dress in a shade of pink that I’ve made her entire body flush before.
The sight of her makes my fingers itch to touch her.
I watch her while she works the room, gracious and unhurried, except for the ever-fidgeting hands.
There’s something inside of Nadya Yuri that can’t keep still.
***
Technically, the event is all hush-hush. Or at least it’s fucking supposed to be. I hadn’t secured an invite through the most legal means, but I’d read the fine print.
Low-key isn’t even close to how I’d describe this mayhem.
The lot is fucking enormous. It’s some decommissioned industrial space by the waterfront; the kind I’d doubt would show up on city zoning maps.
The floodlights rigged on the scaffolding track the perimeter, powered by generators that hum out of sight.
The thick, heady cocktail of exhaust fumes and asphalt assaults me as soon as my car rolls up.
It doesn’t matter if the windows are closed.
The odor is as undeniable as the thudding bass of the music spilling in from seemingly every which way.
I search along the assembly of bikes, separating what looks to be a pit area along the western wall.
There are people—men and women of all sorts of ages, colors, and sizes—clustered in crews, scoping out one another’s vehicles with a feral curiosity.
My own isn’t directed toward a fucking motorcycle, but I can still relate.
What is this unfurling heat within me if not hunger?
All it takes is the question of her. She is the cause.
It doesn’t need verification and is proven all the same when I find her in the mob.
Silver hair spilling all over the place, contrasting starkly with the oil-spill black of her leather jacket.
When she pivots, I see the bared slice of her stomach, offered by the cut of her cropped top.
The piercing in her belly button winks at me.
My tongue feels thick and dry in my mouth. I understand rabid dogs.
Nadya is a vision astride that fucking Ducati.
When she isn’t riding, she’s still leaning against it.
She gesticulates wildly when she talks, animated and in technicolor.
She takes up space with her sprawling limbs and eager hands.
If I didn’t know better, I’d call my biblical knowledge of both a mirage.
I know better.
My brain is fried watching her turn corners ruthlessly, disappearing into the lead as she races, and returning to cross the finish line. She soaks in the crowd’s hollering, incandescent. She rips the helmet off her head, and her eyes put the floodlights to shame.
It’s impossible not to be entranced by her when she throws her head back and whoops.
She throws her helmet up in the air just to catch it on its way down.
When she grins, she looks like she’s just gotten away with mischief.
It isn’t exactly performative, but it does relish in the attention.
She thrives off the eyes affixed on her; it’s plain to see.
Who could begrudge her, though? This uncontainable supernova, sweat-damp and crowing at the sky.
Without contest, she’s a thing to behold.
A thing difficult to look away from.
I know this because I’ve been watching her all week.
And I know now that her brothers may have concocted an elaborate fiction to conceal this woman until she barely exists as an entire entity.
But here, right here, in motion, she is so relentlessly, recklessly alive.
It strikes me from across a parking lot.
I’m so deeply lost in the mesmerizing spectacle of her that I never see it coming when she stops mid-laugh. When she turns, her eyes land right on me. They lock onto mine from several paces away. She doesn’t look surprised. Immediately, she looks furious—but not surprised.
For a brief, suspended moment, neither of us moves.
And then, just like that, she does.
In the span of two blinks, she cuts across the crowd to me in long, ferocious strides. The world not moving out of her way never crosses her mind, and she’s right for it. The sea itself for part of her. Why shouldn’t my heart, too, pick up its fucking pace?
It stops in my chest when her fist comes down hard against the window. The rings decorating all four fingers threaten to shatter it.
My smile sprawls without permission when her eyes flash at me.
“Get the fuck out of the car,” she demands.