21. The Glass of Water
The Glass of Water
Karl woke to a hand shaking his shoulder.
At first, he didn’t know where he was. His body felt like lead. His back hurt, his knees throbbed, his hips were sore, his throat bone-dry. Yet beneath all those aches lay a strange sense of well-being—the feeling of a dehydrated body that had been wrung out to the very last drop.
He slowly opened his eyes. Nadja’s face was very close to his.
She had showered. Her dark hair was still damp, a few strands clinging to her neck. Her skin was clean and smelled faintly of shampoo. She was back in her house clothes, modest and covered up: a light gray turtleneck and thick black leggings that hugged her hips.
The jarring contrast left Karl dazed for a moment. The woman who had been moaning beneath him only a short while ago and the cool, orderly wife standing in front of him now were one and the same. As if all the filth of that afternoon could simply be showered away, wiped clean.
“Get up,” she said curtly. Then she lowered her voice. “Eat something before you go. It’s late.”
Karl struggled into a sitting position. The blanket had slipped off his body. He was still naked—wrinkled skin, soft belly, sunken chest, his entire body limp and exhausted as though someone had beaten the hell out of him.
The memory came back. Not in order — it surfaced in fragments, tearing through the dull ache in his limbs.
The disgusting taste on his tongue. Nadja’s hoarse “Keep going.” The sight of her pulling her own bare thighs against her chest. Her mouth stretched wide around his fingers even though they were dripping with her own wetness.
Dark shards of memory piled on top of one another, hot and filthy, and Karl remained sitting motionless for another moment.
Fuck. He had really done it. After Nadja slapped him, he had thought he’d lost everything. He had thought she had put him back in his place again, like a mangy old mutt shown his place outside the door.
But this time he had fucked the young woman right on Markus’s marital bed. Not just fucked her. Broken her.
Karl laughed quietly. A laugh full of triumph, almost disbelief.
Nadja had already turned away and was walking toward the door. Behind her, Karl’s eyes widened.
Her full ass strained against the leggings.
The flesh moved only slightly with each step.
Just enough to send another image crashing back into his head: her hands holding her legs wide open, the deep cleft of her ass against the white sheet, and that small pink hole he had slowly forced open directly beneath the wedding photograph.
Karl swallowed against his dry throat. Deep in his lower belly, his spent flesh stirred sluggishly. A stab of regret went through him as Nadja disappeared from the bedroom.
He looked down at himself, then surveyed the wreckage around him as though trying to burn every detail into his memory.
The sheet behind him was completely rumpled, a dark damp stain left in the fabric. The pillows lay crooked, far from where they belonged. Beneath the fresh scent of shampoo, the sharp, heavy smell of sex still hung in the room.
Karl looked at the mess. Then he raised his eyes to the framed wedding photograph above the bed.
Markus looked clean in the picture. Respectable. Smiling like the perfect husband. Karl smiled back. He almost felt sorry for the man.
“Are you planning to lie there until tonight?” Nadja called from the kitchen.
“I’m coming,” Karl answered hoarsely.
He got to his feet. Pain shot from his knees up into his thighs as he shuffled naked out of the bedroom.
Nadja stood at the dining table. She turned, and her eyes inevitably dropped between his legs. Karl stared at her lips and remembered how she had swallowed. A hot shiver ran down his back. His cock twitched weakly and began to stiffen halfway.
Karl bared his teeth in a filthy grin.
Nadja saw it. Her face turned icy, but a betraying flush colored her cheeks. Distant and dangerous at the same time.
“Get dressed.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Karl grinned broadly.
He gathered his wrinkled, sweat-smelling clothes from the floor and put them on. Then he looked around the kitchen.
The countertop had been wiped spotless. The empty beer bottle, the dirty plate, the puddle of water—everything was gone. The torn knit dress was nowhere to be seen either. The kitchen looked completely normal again.
A simple supper had been set out on the table: dark bread, rolls, butter, cheese, ham, pickles, and sausage.
Karl’s stomach growled and cramped with hunger.
He grabbed the food and chewed greedily. He ate like some broke laborer after a brutal day on a construction site that had squeezed the last bit of strength from his body.
“Damn good,” he muttered with his mouth full.
Nadja sat in the chair across from him. She watched him tiredly, a trace of undisguised disgust still in her eyes.
“Disgusting. Eat slower. I don’t need you choking to death in my kitchen.”
Karl laughed and nearly did choke. Her words were ice-cold, but buried inside them was something that almost sounded like concern.
Karl leaned forward and placed his rough hand on Nadja’s thigh. She looked down at it but didn’t push it away. He lightly stroked the coarse fabric of her leggings.
His voice dropped. “I’m not going to die. I plan to fuck you many more times yet.”
Nadja only looked at him. No shouting. No recoil. Just an exhausted stare accompanied by that faint color in her cheeks.
Karl kept eating. After a while, he raised his head and said in the most sincere voice he could manage: “Thank you.”
“For the food?”
“Yeah. It’s good.”
Nadja was silent for a few seconds. Then she asked quietly: “Do you want something to drink?”
“Sparkling water.”
She opened the refrigerator, took out a bottle of mineral water, and poured him a glass. The gesture was completely ordinary, an inconspicuous little act of care.
Karl watched her hand as she poured. A satisfaction he could barely hide rose in his chest. He took the glass and drank deeply. Nadja poured herself some water too.
Silence settled over the kitchen.
Karl’s hand was still resting on her thigh. And she left it there. He should have felt like a complete victor.
But when he looked at Nadja’s face—clean, tired, a little sad, without a trace of fire in her eyes—his throat suddenly tightened.
“I’m sorry,” he said abruptly.
Nadja stopped in the middle of the movement. Her grip on the water bottle loosened. She looked up.
Karl stared down at the wooden tabletop, rubbed the bridge of his nose, and for one tiny moment looked awkward.
“Earlier… I was too rough.” A short pause. “Are you hurting?”
Something changed in the kitchen.
The question had nothing to do with the filthy game from before. It wasn’t some psychological trap either. It was clumsy. The question of an old man waking from his madness and suddenly realizing that the woman in front of him was more than a naked body.
Nadja set the water bottle down hard on the table. “You had a big enough mouth on you earlier.”
Karl laughed softly. This time there was no triumph in it. “Yeah… I don’t know. It’s as if, in those moments, I turn into someone else.”
Nadja looked straight at him. “And which one is the real you?”
Karl fell silent. The question hit somewhere deeper than he had expected. He stared at the bubbles rising through his glass.
“Both,” he said slowly. “Maybe both.”
He was quiet for a moment, then continued in a subdued voice: “Sometimes a person has to have two faces.”
The silence pressed heavily on the room.
“Like you,” he murmured.
Nadja breathed out almost soundlessly. She didn’t argue. This time it wasn’t a blow meant to knock her to her knees. It was a bitter truth they both hated.
The silence afterward belonged to both of them.
Karl’s hand was still resting on her thigh. This time it stayed still, making no attempt to move higher. Nadja sat quietly and allowed it.
Karl watched her from the corner of his eye. She wasn’t crying. She wasn’t angry. There was only a quiet sadness in her face. A sadness that struck a place inside Karl he rarely touched.
He wanted her. He wanted her body. He wanted to turn her into his secret toy in the dark. He wanted her moaning again, insulting him again, spreading her legs for him again.
But seeing her like this made something deeply unpleasant rise inside his chest.
He wanted to be the horny predator, the man who made her come so hard she screamed and called him a horny old goat.
He had absolutely no idea what to do with this empty, exhausted, sad face.
Nadja drew a deep breath and stood. “Go now.” Her voice sounded infinitely tired.
Karl nodded and hauled himself to his feet. A cold emptiness suddenly opened inside his chest.
At the door, he stopped for another moment and looked back at Nadja. She had her back to him and was putting the glasses away without looking at him.
Karl opened his mouth to say something. Something obscene. A promise. Some dark reminder that he would come back and break her all over again. But he swallowed the words, opened the door, and stepped outside.
The dull evening light fell yellow across his hunched back in the stairwell.
It was only a few steps from Markus’s apartment to Karl’s door.
But the moment he left the orderly, lavender-scented rooms behind, his own apartment seemed like a dark cave: the smell of stale smoke in every corner, sour beer, damp clothes, yellowed wallpaper, the sagging sofa, the low table covered in scratches.
This was Karl’s real life. A whole world away from the wet dream that had just taken place across the hall on the white marital bed.
He shut the door firmly behind him and dropped heavily onto the sofa. For a few seconds, he sat without moving.
Then he opened a drawer and took out a red pack of Marlboros.
Lately, he had been trying to smoke less. He had tried to avoid the stink because Nadja had once told him she hated it. But right now he needed a smell from his own shabby past. Something bitter and familiar to bring him back down to earth.
Karl lit a cigarette. He inhaled deeply. The smoke entered his lungs, hot and harsh. The wrinkles in his face relaxed a little.
Gray smoke drifted in front of his eyes. He sat there staring at the glowing red point at the end of the cigarette.
He tried to think about the afternoon the way a sick, perverted old man was supposed to think about it.
About Nadja’s hot body. Her young breasts. About how beautiful she was—so blindingly beautiful that an old man near the end of his life could almost believe he was alive again.
That was what he should be thinking about. That was what he wanted to think about.
But the goddamn image that stubbornly kept returning to his mind wasn’t her wet mouth swallowing his cum. It was the way she had poured him a glass of water. Her clean hand. Her damp hair. The smell of shampoo. That simple, almost caring gesture.
Karl took another deep drag and drew his brows together.
Then he remembered the moment Nadja’s face had twisted in pain when he tried to enter her from behind. For one instant, he had simply held the pressure instead of immediately forcing himself farther in.
Fuck. Why had he done that?
In his whole miserable life, he had never learned to be gentle for anyone. But in that moment, when he saw real pain tighten her face, he had not been able to push forward right away.
“Fuck…” The whispered word broke into the silent room.
He couldn’t name whatever was tightening inside his chest. But it was there. And it wasn’t going away.
Karl gave a hoarse laugh. Bitter. Utterly self-contemptuous. “Have you completely lost your mind now, Karl?”
Gray smoke hung heavily in the air before him. He had no answer for himself. The red Marlboro burned almost all the way down to the filter between his wrinkled fingers.
In the yellowed apartment, an old man sat alone on his sagging sofa—he had just won the filthiest, greatest victory of his life, and yet he was trapped in an emotional chaos that frightened him more than he would ever admit out loud.