Chapter Text
It’s pretty, his cock.
Pretty as he strokes it, slow; kneeling on the bed between her wide open legs. Pretty and swelling with blood, the wide head a pink-purple that looks angry, positively fuming. Alina fights the urge to reach down and touch herself, to disturb the view he is staring at so hungrily. She gets the sense her cunt is being committed to memory.
“Protection,” he mumbles, his other hand smoothing down her thighs.
“You don’t have any?”
His eyes snap up. “No, I—” a shimmer in his eyes, a joke she is not yet privy to, “—didn’t see you coming.”
She grins, despite their predicament. “It’s fine,” I’m deciding I can trust you. “I’ll figure something out in the morning.”
He leans forward, hands coming fast to rest by her head. “Want me bare, then?”
It’s words as aphrodisiac. A confusing heat explodes from her cunt and zaps like lighting to her throat, a straight line made of heat. His looming upper body, every muscle hard and important — size that isn’t for show — the smooth skin over them. The certainty that he will be inside her, all that skin, inside her.
Alina reaches out to trail fingers down his chest, and down to his stomach, counting one, two, three, four, five, six ridges. Curves without give. Ah, she thinks, wistful, men.
“Say it,” he demands, softly. “Say you want me raw inside your pretty little pussy.”
Her hand wraps around the base of his cock — his beautiful cock — and watches as a breath catches in his throat from a single stroke.
“Yes,” she whispers, clenching her core and lifting her body off the sheets to be closer to him, to say the words right up against his mouth. His mouth that still smells of her. “Fuck me, Aleksandr.” Give me something hard to forget. “Fuck me. Come inside me.”
It lights him up. A certain fury, wild, blooms in his eyes; he shoves her back down. All the air leaves her lungs. “You shouldn’t be so trusting with strangers, sweet girl.” His hand wraps around hers, their bodies drawing together, lodestone and metal. The purple of his head, the red of her clit. The slip of her wet. Her mouth opens, insides clenching. Both of their hands push him down. “It’s—” a notch; a force catching on a hole, “—ah, stupid.”
His cock slips inside her, and their hands find each other, fingers interlocking over her pubic bone.
“Just this once,” she hears herself saying. “Just for you.”
“Promise.” He thrusts in and her legs lift of their own accord, trying to find room where there is none. “Promise.”
He holds her head, and there are eyes drinking her face.
“Promise me you’ll only be this fucking stupid for my cock.”
A pull. A push in. Another thrust. She closes her eyes and breathes, for the first time, with him inside her. A searching breath, scanning her body the way she would when she is dancing; looking for the pain, meticulous; muscle-point precision, identifying muscles, recognizing bones.
Where are you? Where else?
“Fuck—” A mumble under her breath. Fizzing in her all-filled cunt, gushing wet. “Yeah,” she can barely push words out, lost in the burning heat of the moment. “Only for you.”
It’s a mess, the way they fuck. He tries over and over again, to be rougher — more appropriate, for strangers — but he can’t do it to save his life; distracted by her lips and her breasts, the overwhelm gathering into tears in her eyes. She is so lost in desiring him, she notices every little thing.
The flat of his tongue on her nipple. Jaw wide, spit warm; greedy for a clear taste.
His teeth on her neck; hunger, magnified by glut. She will find bruises there in the morning. That, and beard burn on her collarbones; raised skin that fought his burrow.
The gasps he sucks off from the hollow of her mouth as the too wet between her legs leave him shuddering. There, looming over her, carving himself inside her, he has no idea, none, how much better she can do, can be, for him—
“God, that’s good,” he murmurs — whimpers — and it’s a fact, not a question. “That is so fucking good.”
So good, she agrees. Good and too close. Arms around each other, too intimate for a first time. Lover, lover, lover. Kissing as he thrusts so slowly, so gently. She drives her nails into his back, addicted to how a man — this man — can be so soft and so hard, at the same time. All this strength, and I can still break you. Looking into his eyes, she gets the sense he wouldn’t even move if it were acceptable, that he’d be happy to just be buried in her body.
Her forehead against his, their eyes fighting to spot, anchors to each other’s pleasure.
“Fuck,” he goes, a whisper under a whine. He sounds disappointed. He sounds besieged.
“What?”
He presses a quick, heated kiss to her lips.
“I’m in so much fucking trouble.”
Alina can’t help it; she starts to laugh.
Hands on her hips, a blink, and quickly, she’s on top of him. A miscalculation, she thinks, smiling down at him. He makes a picture to remember — sweat beading, that glorious brow bone, thick mass of hair over the frilly silk, pink, of her sheets.
“Is my gladiator tired?” she taunts.
Something he frowns at, eyes darkening, muscles snapping at attention. “I’ll make you regret tha—” Alina, quickly, clenches her trained inner muscles around his cock, and whatever anger, whatever action that may have bloomed in his body disintegrates. “—ah.”
The rush of power — watching such a large man crumble. Alina is smiling as she bucks, up and down, over him, core engaged to the teeth. Cunt as suction. He’s struggling to breathe, eyes rolling into the back of his head, a vein popping, strong, on his forehead. He tries to speak — again, multiple times, he tries — but they all melt into moaning groans. Mouth open, arms useless on the bed.
Alina laughs, hand instinctively wrapping around his throat, lost in this most carnal reminder of her vigor. I make art with this body, she thinks. I can make you, too. “Does it feel good, Aleksandr?” She tightens her thumb and index finger on the sides of his neck; creates a rolling wave of tight, tight, tight around his cock.
He gasps, and she feels a breath shake through her palm. “Alina,” he begs, every vowel drawn out.
“I know,” she sing-songs, mocking. She leans forward; the angle changes and he grimaces, releasing a crestfallen sound of agony. “It’s so tight and wet, isn’t it? Is it too good? Are you too close? Maybe I should stop.”
His hands catch her hips so fast, she doesn’t even see it until she feels him — his grip, strong, holding instead of moving. “Don’t—” words through gritted teeth, pulled from his last vestiges of control, “— you fucking dare.”
She doesn’t. She would never. She presses a kiss on the corner of his open, gasping mouth and watches him die from her cunt.
It’s not long. This move makes every man she’s ever been with shatter so quickly. She knows he’s about to come when his great big chest — strong, so strong — begins to vibrate, and that she has never seen. Eyes wide, she watches a structure — a veritable unit — tremble. A hand sneaks under her jaw, and whatever part of her may have tasted power flutters when it squeezes.
“Look at me,” he growls, and I was. “Look into my eyes when you make me come.”
She does, she does; feeling her own orgasm — small, tiny, inconsequential compared to his — burst in a swell as he floods all the remaining emptiness inside her. Warmth. So much of it, pulse after pulse, seemingly endless. He’s groaning loudly, hips thrusting, pushing himself deeper.
Alina gasps, taken on this tide of bodies. The swirling dark of his eyes. His arm, a bar behind her back, wanting her close, needing her to hold him together.
She presses a kiss to his forehead and wraps him up in warmth of her own.
“Aleksandr, are you okay?”
He’s slumped onto her sheets, nothing but air. She has a great big smile on her face that he cannot see — eyes resolutely closed, heartbeat thundering. It takes him a minute to answer, cunt-struck and slurring:
“No,” he goes. “You sucked my soul out.”
She laughs, and with whatever strength he has left, smiles for her.
It’s midnight when he finally sees her fire escape.
Alina is naked save for her favorite lavender blanket. It’s fleece, but still had nothing against the bite of February air. She would have been freezing had she not been sitting on the lap of a bare-chested furnace.
Aleksandr’s smoking a cigarette, hand hanging over the railing, speaking to Ivan on her phone. His own had died, and he’d vehemently rejected her offer to plug it up. No, they’ll just disturb us. “Da, da,” he’s saying, hand moving for a quick hit. One small suck and he exhales through his nose, smoke curling around delicate nostrils.
Alina bites her lip. Jesus fuck. Poetry as movement. Why am I not tired of wanting you yet?
“I ask Alina with help for this — the car, but this, in morning.” His English is so broken, it’s pieces on the ground. Beautiful. Proof of perseverance. “Okay, brother. Bye, bye.” A click, and Alina takes her phone from his hand, feeling that same hand fall, eventually, to wrap around her stomach.
In a snap, Russian on his tongue, smoother and lower: “Call time’s at seven.”
She turns on his lap, her shoulder to his chest, face in his neck. “I’ll be finished with you before then,” she jokes, pressing a kiss to his jaw.
“Is that right?”
I hope so. “How long are you in the city for?” she asks.
“Until Sunday. We fly back to Indio in the afternoon.”
She perks up. “Coachella, Indio?”
“Not in the valley itself, but close.” She grins at this, but doesn’t say, no, I meant the festival. “Ivan’s father has a gym there. He trains me when I’m in America.” A spark of remembrance in his eyes, and then he’s glinting for her. Smiling at her smile when he says, “He’ll murder me for this. We’re in camp, the fight is in a few weeks.” Flicks his cigarette ash down onto the street, grin stretching, ear to ear, “I’m not supposed to be smoking.” Kisses her cheek, “And I’m definitely not supposed to be having sex.”
Her laugh pulls so deeply, she feels it in her stomach. He joins in, too. The picture of them, in a fire escape in the wintertime, laughing at the momentary destruction of his self-control.
We will never be this young again, a fleeting thought, interrupted before it can be a feeling—
“How am I going to explain this to Coach, hm?”
She quirks an eyebrow at him, still chuckling. “I met a ballerina and couldn’t help myself?”
He shakes his head, no. “I met a devastating temptress and she — flirted with me so outrageously—”
“You haven’t seen outrageous,” as she pushes him lightly on the chest, loving this, the play.
He affects a tone of boyhood beseeching, “And I was weak, pathetic, she’d goaded me into it—”
“Oh, I just had to, Coach—” rolling her eyes, she mocks his voice, all deep, ringing in her chest. “She said I was sexy —
“—and in the same breath, accused me of being bitchless—”
And, her laughter is back, forcing her voice back to its normal tenor. “And then, this woman—”
“Devastating temptress—”
“Shut up. She dragged me to her home, against my will—”
“And I just had to!” He playacts a helpless cry, “She spread her legs and begged, begged, for my come. How can a man resist?”
Alina is laughing so hard, her shoulders are shaking. “You scumbag,” she says, covering her eyes. She feels his lips on her ear, hears his happiness, rumbling straight from his throat. “God, you’re wonderful,” he says, quiet, breathing her in.
For a long while, it is just this — smiling stupidly at each other, moonlight-bright with post-filth silliness.
He kills the cigarette eventually, pushing the burning end into a metal rung. “Ivan calls you Bleachers,” he says, sticking the mashed butt into a corner in the railing. “Why?
She tells him — I went to high school with Kaminsky and he used to… — and he’s laughing again. It is so easy, she thinks, to make him laugh. Greedy for the simplest things.
“How old were you?”
“I don’t know. Fifteen, fourteen. It was before I was homeschooled.” She gets an image of herself from that time; her too-powerful legs, her pigtails. “I was a cute little thing. Irresistible in a cheerleading uniform.”
He nods. “He’s bisexual, then? Fedyor?”
“I don’t know — we didn’t really, uh, keep in touch.” Feels a small pang of sadness from this and all the relationships she’s had to neglect in favor of an art that does nothing but hurt her. This is her life: ballet and swimming in the shallow end of life for ballet. “I know he likes guys. I knew even back then.” She shrugs, moving to alleviate the pricks of ache in her chest. “But he was curious, and I was curious, and I don’t know. We were kids. He was nice to me. He let me cheat off him in Algebra.”
“Ah, yes. Algebra.” He tightens his grip on her, moving her further up his thigh. “The great teenage aphrodisiac.”
“What about you? Any notable Mathletes I should know about?”
“No.”
“Not even one?”
“No, I was too angry at fourteen. Even angrier at fifteen.” He turns his face to the street, and Alina has known enough of regret to see it in another person’s face. Instinctively, she wraps her arms around his neck. “I was too aggressive for uh, curiosity.” He clears his throat. “Got into more street fights than I did pants.”
Soft, against his hair: “Are we getting into sob story territory?”
He chuckles, “I suppose we are.”
She breathes and doesn’t think before she says, “Tell me about it.” Tell me everything.
“Dead dad. Alcoholic mom who, in time, also died.” He pulls away to smile at her, and she wonders why he feels the need to give her this comfort, this reassurance. “Hell of a life, huh?”
“I’m so sorry, Aleksandr,” she says, and means it, running a hand through his hair. “That must’ve been very difficult.”
These words mean nothing, she knows that. She hopes he can see past them and to her compassion — real and massive; she hopes, she hopes — because she has nothing else to offer. I’m happy you got out of that feels like a worse thing to say. Something even she would take offense to. She, who knows struggle but not tragedy.
All her tragedies happened before she could remember them.
“It was a long time ago,” he says, kindly. “Are your parents alive?”
So many ways to answer this question. Yes and no. I’m adopted. It’s not a big deal. She doesn’t want this conversation just yet, not knowing who he will be in her life. It’s not a sob story at all. It’s just what happened.
She swallows.
“Yes—” They died almost immediately after I was born. “They are.”
“Are they good people?”
“Yeah. They’re really great. The best I could’ve asked for.” They were from Sakha. Close to Magadan, actually. Would you look at that? Have you ever been? “They still live in Boston.”
“What do they do?”
Something strokes her cheek — his thumb, warm, smelling of smoke — and she blinks to eyes that are seeing inside her. Nearly gasps at this — attention. A slash of worry, there, in his brow, which she hopes to eradicate by flashing a bright smile, as real as she could make it.
“Dad is a scientist, I guess.” My love, he’s a biostatistician, her mother would correct. Put some respect on your father’s name. “One of those guys who works in a lab, you know? He’s also a professor.” She clears her throat. “My mom—” is very bored at home, “—used to be an equestrian, when she was young.”
A brief smile. “Horses?”
“Yeah,” she laughs, and it sounds nervous. “Ma’s a real horse girl. They’re great, both of them. Really. Warm and kind and—” she rolls her eyes, slipping into brat, the role of her childhood; groaning in disgust when her parents kissed at the dinner table, running away screaming whenever she saw them dancing in the living room. You people are repugnant! “—sickeningly in love.”
He smiles at this. “That makes sense.”
“What do you mean?”
He speaks plainly, stating a fact: “You. Only love could have made you.”
Inside — a spell past one in the morning. Two half-full glasses of water sit untouched on the storage cube in the center of the living room. Bits and bobs for sandwiches, forgotten on the kitchen counter across the way. A different consumption — much more wanton — underway:
Alina is on her knees for her perfect stranger, licking at a dick so pretty she couldn’t resist even its outline on half-done, well-worn jeans.
“Haven’t had enough, sweet girl?” He asks her, leaning back on the couch, arms thrown wide. Smiling, cocky, getting harder by the second.
In lieu of an answer, she drips spit down his pink-purple head, and spreads this wetness down the thickening shaft. A twisting stroke, I’ll show you outrageous. He groans, throwing his head back, slow, like he can’t bear not to watch but can’t take not to feel. She does it again.
“Goddamn,” he mumbles, eyes closing, lungs emptying out. “You’re trying to kill me, I think.”
Alina smiles, tongue sneaking out, smearing his taste of cleanliness and salt all over her mouth. Sucking him in, letting him fill another hole. Torturously measured; oh, so slow it forces him into action. His hand comes to rest on the back of her head, and she lets him pull her closer; allows him to force himself all the way down her throat. Chokes on him, takes pain for him, spit spluttering in the struggle.
“Fuck.” His voice drips liquid; fire and gravel. “God, yeah, baby, take that cock.”
Breathes through the suffocation. Swallows and makes him groan.
Power, again. It’s a drug.
I am strong, I am brave — she thinks, tongue dancing at the very base of him, nearly smiling when he squirms, thrusting up — and I’ll show you devastating.
He’s staring. Not at her but at her.
She’s a polaroid girl, Alina. Loves the quickness of it, loves how the photos are never quite perfect as a result. Her bathroom mirror is filled with them, taped, edges overlapping. Not quite perfect photos. Zoya’s smile, the empty rehearsal studio, the mess of the costume department and their thousand-dollar tutus, older than she is, resting in mannequins; a close shot of a pointe shoe, the pink stained with a shocking flow of blood. It’s Inej, dancing Odile’s coda during last season’s production week, powering through the thirty-two fouettés. She hadn’t even noticed she was bleeding. Or perhaps she did. And then, there, at the very top: a twenty-year-old Alina, executing an irritatingly imperfect penché en pointe without a partner. If she knew someone had been taking a photo, she’d have lifted her spine, made it more stable, made her glutes stronger, done better—
“I was still in the Corps when that was taken—” she spits out the excuse along with the toothpaste bubbles. “A few years ago.” She snorts, and it’s rueful. “I wanted to quit every day. Every single day.”
“Why?”
She looks up, and his eyes are on her, not on her. She looks away immediately, ashamed. It’s heavy, and not entirely welcome, on this perfect, magical night. She wishes she never said anything.
“Plenty of reasons.” Walks out of the bathroom, wet hair swinging, trying to keep her head high.
“Like what?” He calls from the bathroom. As she changes into her pajamas, she hears him spit. The tap turning, a rush of water. Half a second later and she’s perched on the bed, he’s padding towards her. This great big hulk of a man, unapologetically naked in her apartment.
He sinks on his haunches by her feet. Attempts to make himself smaller, ducking down, trying to catch her eyes. Wet, his hair weakens into curls. It’s boyish, almost. Kinda cute, she admits. How can someone be hot and cute?
“I was new in the city,” she finally acquiesces, warmed by his gentle eyes. “The pay was shit. I didn’t want to ask my parents for help, I was having a really prideful…moment.”
Her mother, God bless her, had grown up a Khakum Wood WASP, and was horrified the first time she came to visit Alina in New York. She’d been living in Queens at the time — with eight roommates. Nine people in a shockingly small one-bedroom infested with cockroaches.
This is unacceptable, Ma said. Petrified looked ghastly with her pearls. Tell me my only daughter is not living like this.
“So, I worked three, four, five jobs just to — just to eat and pay rent.” She smiles, watching his eyes harden. “Everything hurt, all the time. It always did. It still does, but when everything hurts and you’re that broke, it — it does something to your brain.”
It had been a shock to her, that strip of strife after a whole childhood of nothing but comfort. She’s grateful for it now — in hindsight, she is always grateful in hindsight. “There were days where I’d be so exhausted but still couldn’t sleep. The only way I could calm down was to visualize an end.”
At the worried furrowing of his brow, she’s quick to say, “No, I didn’t want to—” kill myself, Jesus, of course not, “—it’s not like that. I just wanted to quit.” She shrugs, arms wrapping around her middle. “It was comforting. It made me feel better.”
The minute she admits it, she falls back on the bed. Drained from it, perhaps. This admission of weakness.
Aleksandr stands up, and for a small beat, she’s afraid he’d walk out the door. You disgust me, on his lips, perhaps. I don’t fuck quitters. It’s a ridiculous and over dramatic thought — and yet, she smiles when he picks her up and rights her on the bed. Head on the pillow. Feet by the end. He grabs the covers they’d stained with come and spit and pulls it over her. Only comes in once she’s settled and comfortable; grunts as he hits the sheets.
He looks exhausted.
I did that to you. Pride, a nice little salve: “I’ve never told anyone that, so you legally can’t judge me.”
He turns to the side, close to her. “I’m not. I understand.”
“Do you?” A bit of ugly in that tone. Something she doesn’t want to examine.
His eyes close, and for a long while she thinks their night is over. Bites her lip, curses herself, brave and stupid are not the same, really, you little bunhead idiot—
“Sometimes, I forget things.”
Alina blinks. “What?”
“I forget things. Birthdays. Names. Faces. Words. When it’s bad, I forget entire days.” Her eyes are wide open, and she tries to sit up, but he stops her. Wraps his arms around her waist and pulls her into his body. All his naked against all her silk. “If I train too hard or if I take too many hits to the head in a fight—” he groans at this, eyes opening, remembering, existing in a memory. It stains his words with torment, even just the memory of it: “A splitting headache, the minute I wake up. Pain like you wouldn’t believe.”
He breathes in and her mouth is open.
“I understand,” he says. You, he doesn’t.
Wanting to quit something you love that does nothing but hurt you, he doesn’t either.
He must see something in her face then, because his thumb smoothes her forehead — gentle, gentle — and only then does she feel how deeply she’d scrunched it up. “None of that,” he goes. “It’s just the way it is.”
“I —” what the fuck, ringing in her head. “There’s no treatment, right? For—” she stops herself before she can say it. Afraid of it, almost. “I learned that from — I watched a documentary that said that.”
He smiles, then, as if she amuses him. “Yeah. Stop is the treatment. I’ve seen doctors about it.” He blinks, sleepily. “But I can’t stop, just like you can’t stop.” He yawns, and as he blows air onto her face, she hitches her thigh up his body. Close, closer. “It’s this or go back to Magadan. Fight men or fight ice.”
They hold a stare — the kind that simmers, full of the unsaid — until he loses. Eyes falling closed — a boy, a boy, a boy.
Alina always held the belief that she knew pain better than most; that it is her friend, a call from her body she’d rather listen to than avoid. She holds herself tall from this belief. Nothing can break me, but myself. She kisses Aleksandr’s forehead, closing her eyes as it dawns: not like most. This one is not like most.
She knows what it is to live and die for something, but for all her struggle and all her pain, always rested comfortably — cheerfully — at the faith that one came before the next.
“You’re really something,” she murmurs against his head.
“Something?” He’s still speaking, but it’s less speak than it is slur. Half-asleep.
“Yeah. Ivan is right, you know.” She tightens her legs around him, feeling something strange in her chest. Admiration, perhaps, though she’s felt that enough times to know it well. “You’re just on the cusp. You’ll make it, you’re too tough not to.”
“Haven’t seen me—” his entire body twitches, and he’s trailing off, out like a light, “—fight…”
Alina chuckles, pressing quick kisses, as the snoring begins.
“I don’t know,” she says, still. “I think I’m seeing you fight right now.”
She breathes him in — soap and spice — and doesn’t remember how she falls asleep.
Aleksandr is grumpy in the morning.
Slow moving, communicating in grunts. Eyes in a perpetual squint, avoiding the sunlight. Alina rolls her eyes at it — this murderous energy he’s emanating, as he pushes him into the kitchen where his coffee — that she made! — is waiting. “Move it. Come on, come on. It’s six, you’re going to be late.”
She leaves him there, getting herself together in private. Hair in a bun, body wrapped up in more clothes. Clothes for comfort. T-shirt, sweater, rough and too-large jeans. Her uniform, which most days hides leotards and tights, but not today — she smiles as she sings it in her head — not today. She puts socks on to hide her feet before she brushes her teeth.
After, she finds him half-dressed and holding his coffee on the same bright orange couch she’d sucked his cock in. Frowning, one hand covering his left eye. Looking so irritated, she really almost laughs. Where’s my sweetheart? She grabs his shirt where she’s left it folded, on — the best thing in her entire apartment! — the emerald green barrel chair; a gift from her grandmother.
“Aleksandr.”
He grunts.
She drops on her haunches in front of him, mindful of the coffee. “I need you to start moving, baby.”
“I know.”
She smiles, and gently, “You want to look at me?”
It’s slow, but he gets there. A single shaky breath, and the hand over his eye falls between his legs. One eye first — open — and then another. He doesn’t smile back, but he does blink. Blink and hold his head up. He does, he does, she thinks, he does want to look at me.
She watches him carry his pain, and feels her heart give just a tiny bit. Stranger, boxer, she reminds her stupid little heart. Get a hold of yourself.
“Does your head hurt?”
“Long spar yesterday,” he answers, toneless.
And I kept you up all night long. I made you come one too many times. I should have given you ZMA before we went to bed.
“It’s not me?” She fishes, kindly.
More blinks. “You’re—” he sighs, touching her shoulder. The only reassurance he can give, right now. “No. It’s not you. It’s just—”
“Mornings. Okay, yeah.” She takes his mug and sips from it; offers him his shirt as she stands. It still smells like the night before, smoke and snow and New York. “I’d love to get you back to bed but Ivan said seven. Do you want me to call and tell him to go fuck himself?” She smiles when his mouth twitches. “Because I can do that.”
“No, little one. Thank you,” he burrows his palm into his left temple before taking his shirt. “Thank you but no.”
He’s about halfway to fully dressed when she remembers—
“Wait!”
He freezes.
“Don’t move.”
She walks quickly back to her bedroom and snags her phone off the side table.
“Okay, this might sound weird.” He has his shirt hanging off his shoulder when she returns. “But can I take a photo of you?”
When he stands, he fills up the entire room. It’s a zing of excitement in her stomach, a fluttering in her chest. So big, cavewoman thoughts, my man so big. When he smirks, she knows he still feels like shit, but has decided to ignore it. She knows, she knows, she understands—
“Something to remember me by, now that you’re finished with me?”
She grins. “Something like that. Don’t put the shirt on.”
Phone over her face, camera ready. The picture on the screen is not the picture in her head. “Smile, Aleksandr.”
“I feel like a piece of meat.”
Smile, like you did, when you found me. She snaps one, anyway.
“Well, then play ball, Prime Rib.”
“Alina. This is awkward—”
She takes a step back. The angle changes but the picture doesn’t get any better. It’s just a man, who looks like a monster, being uncooperative. “Think of it as practice for later.”
He looks at her and says nothing. She takes a couple of snaps, all terrible—
“Can we take one together?”
She drops the phone and the relief on his face is near-comical.
“Yes,” he holds his arm out. “Come here.”
A miracle, that she doesn’t immediately jump him. She sets up the camera on her fireplace, pressing buttons. Timer, five seconds. “Let me just—” gives up on the front camera, switches to video before turning her phone around; knowing it would be better, for later, picking frames rather than imperfect pictures. “Alright, it’s on.”
Feeling his chest on her back, his lips on her cheek. She smiles up at the camera, giddy that this is all being captured. Real, real, this was real. His hands around her waist, his aching head on her shoulder.
When he looks up, she reminds him, “Smile, Aleksandr.”
“I am.”
She turns her head and finds him decidedly not smiling. Frowns — “Don’t do that. Lie. Not even about small, stupid things.”
He doesn’t think she’s being serious before he sees her eyes, she can tell. He has to blink a few times to read her. She hopes she doesn’t seem disappointed. “Okay,” he says, gravely.
She breathes through that knowledge, that she’s being taken seriously.
“I’m sorry, Alina.” He leans in, kisses her, smiles, smiles. The real thing. “Won’t happen again.”
“Good.” Rises up, finding purchase in her center, does the perfect relevé, and presses the answering kiss he didn’t bother waiting for on his lips. It was only supposed to be that — a forgiving peck, an I’m letting you off the hook affection — but he catches her head before she could land on the balls of her feet.
She hangs there for long minutes, suspended in the air, on the tips of her toes, neck arched, anchored by his kiss.
He’s yawning. Without grace, she thinks, a little amused, a little disturbed, watching his mouth open and shut. In the morning light, exhaustion looks unbearably heavy on him. Winces, every time a particularly determined cabby honks at them. Looks like he’d kill for either sunglasses or a cigarette but asks for neither. Takes the bright sun raw on his headache, jaw tight, back straight.
Alina wonders if there would be a world where she could have this man, where this man could have her; I’d have to take care of him, she realizes, and struggles not to feel anything from this realization. To distract, she glances down at her screen.
“Three minutes,” she says, scrolling up to close the app.
He says nothing — just places an arm around her shoulders and squeezes around the base of her neck, high up her trapezius. Casual. A move that says, I can touch you because I’ve touched you. And I’ll do it again, and again, and again. Her lungs hold, and she waits to feel a contraction in her stomach before she asks, “What time are they letting you go?”
“Around noon.”
“Lunchtime, huh?” She hopes what she’s doing is casual, too. “That sounds nice.” All I’ve ever eaten around you is come, she thinks. Is this allowed? She hates this, the uncertainty of the beginning. She doesn’t know what to do with her hands. “I love a lunch.”
“What a coincidence.” That tonelessness again, as if having an emotion is just too much. “I, too, like lunch.”
Pinches her wrist, forces a smile, tries for coquettish. “Gosh, we have so much in common.”
At this, his grin finally breaks out and Alina feels a frightening sort of unknotting. Shit, she thinks. I’m in trouble.
“Any lunch places you want to recommend?” He asks. The Prime Rib, finally playing ball.
“I know a great one in Brooklyn,” she says, shrugging. “But it’s pretty hard to find. Hole in the wall, you know? You couldn’t find an address online. You might need someone to take you there.” She wiggles her eyebrows and a sliver of hair, coming loose from her bun, slips into her mouth. His fingers, gentle, fish it out. She swallows. “Someone who’s lived here a while and doesn’t have any rehearsals on Saturdays.” She hums. “Wonder who might be free.”
Bite, Aleksandr. Please.
“Yeah.” His grin is wide now, and despite the clear pain etched into the smooth ridges of his face, he has the same easiness to his eyes as he did when they were walking up this same sidewalk the night before; did that happen? Did I really fuck you? “I’ll have to figure that out.”
She nods, lips pursing.
He nods, too, eyes bright. Thumb, still on her cheek.
A car pulls by the curb, and it is finished. This wondrous night of her life is almost over. You can only cry about this today—
Aleksandr glances sideways — a split-second of nothing —at the gleaming silver of the Saab before he’s on her. Bending down, pulling her up. The tip of his nose on the side of hers, his lips landing first on her cupid’s bow before slipping down. A deep kiss, not meant for one-night stands. She holds his face in her hands and gives him her very best. She hopes it is enough.
He pulls away and as soon as she catches his eyes, she knows that it is not the night that is finished, it is the game.
Not certainty, exactly.
Just — an awareness.
Alina smiles.
“I’ll see you in a few hours?” he asks.
She nods, swears she can feel relief everywhere she could. Her head, her chest, her cunt. “Break a leg. Text me once you’re finished?”
It is gentle, the way he puts her down. Still, she sways on her feet, head swimming with rush.
“I will.”
He waves from the backseat, and the car speeds away.