by Nicole Fox
I don’t want new or different.
I want Courtney.
I slide my hand into my pants to adjust myself before walking into Tati’s old room.
Tati is standing in the middle of the room, eyes wide, mouth open in a smile, taking in the changes I’ve made.
“I thought you were redoing the bathroom?” Courtney says from just a foot away inside the door.
“I did that, too.” I nod to the en-suite bathroom which now has a jacuzzi tub and a white-tiled shower with three shower heads. “But I also did this.”
This being a new dance studio.
The floors are smooth and wooden and shiny. Floor-to-ceiling mirrors cover one wall with a bar running down the length of the opposite wall.
For me? Tati signs, her cheeks glowing pink with excitement.
Whatever the Italian man said to her the other day, Tati never told me. But I know it had something to do with her parents. Clearly, he didn’t tell her they’re dead, but he made her think more critically about it. So, seeing her excited and unburdened is like seeing a triple-fucking rainbow.
I nod. “For you.”
As I say the words, I look to Courtney as well. Her eyes meet mine for just a second before she throws herself at me.
I grunt in surprise and then instinctively wrap an arm around her waist.
Her body is warm and soft, and she stretches up onto her toes to press herself more firmly against me. I’m very grateful I paused outside to adjust myself, otherwise she’d know exactly how excited I am.
“It’s perfect,” Courtney says, spinning away from me to help Tati practice at one of the barres.
Soon, Tati wants Courtney to show her moves, and I stand in the doorway, content to watch them swirl around the room. Tati worships Courtney. They’ve only known one another a few weeks, but my niece is smitten, and I worry what it will be like when Courtney is gone. When it’s just me and Tati alone in the house.
Right now, I’m Uncle Dmitry, but will that change if I get busy with work? If I can’t be here every day to dance with her and listen to music?
I try to push the worries away, but the more I look at how happy Tati is next to Courtney, the more I can’t imagine how she’d ever be happy with just me.
The thoughts eat away at the bright moment until the doctor arrives to take her for more physical therapy. To me, it looks like she doesn’t need it, but the doctors insist Tatiana still has a lot of recovery ahead of her.
Tati grabs the doctor’s hand and runs down the hall. When I move to follow, Courtney reaches for my arm.
“She does okay on her own,” she says. “Actually, the doctor asked to see her alone today. They don’t want any distractions.”
I look down at where her fingers are wrapped around my forearm and swallow. “She won’t be upset we aren’t there?”
Courtney pulls her hand away slowly, and I miss the warmth immediately. “She’ll be okay. It’s good for her to be a bit more independent. As long as she knows someone she loves is close by, she does okay.”
Love.
That’s what I feel for Tatiana. I have no trouble saying that.
But what do I feel for Courtney?
For this brave, bold woman who stormed into my life and invaded every corner of it? A few weeks ago, I would have said that I was the one holding Courtney captive, but now the roles feel reversed. I can’t imagine walking away from her.
“You’re probably right about the independence,” I admit. “After what happened at the mall, I can’t let Tati out of the house for a while. If she doesn’t learn to be alone more often, I’m worried she’ll get sick of us.”
“Maybe sick of you,” Courtney teases, nudging me with her elbow. “She likes me. I’m cool.” She does the sign for ‘cool,’ showing off her newly acquired sign language skills. “Though, with this dance studio, you’re pretty cool yourself.”
I shrug. “It was kind of for you, too.”
She looks up at me, a smile pulling on the corners of her mouth, and I know she knows. Tati has only taken a few dance classes in her life. She would have been just as happy with a dog or a trampoline.
The dance studio was for Courtney.
“Thank you,” she says softly, stepping towards me.
Her toes hit the floor first, moving like a dancer. I move to hold onto her, but she walks past me. For a second, I think she’s going to leave, but then she closes the door and twists the lock. When she turns around, her back pressed to the door, her lips are pouty, eyes lidded, and I understand perfectly what is happening.
I’ve shown enough self-restraint for a lifetime, so I finally give in to my baser instincts.
The moment she’s within reach, I drag Courtney’s body against mine and capture her mouth with my own. I kiss her like I need her lips on mine to be able to breathe. I run my hands over her body, groaning whenever my fingers meet skin.
When she jumps up and wraps her legs around my waist, I immediately walk us further into the room and find the nearest wall. I press her against the mirror, pinning her in place with my lower body, and lean back to allow her to unbutton my shirt.
She sighs as she runs her hands over my chest, and I bite back a growl when she leans forward and nips at my bare skin.
I want to enjoy this. Her.
But my mind is still torn. So, I decide to let it all out.
“I’m sorry about what happened at the mall.”
Courtney freezes and looks up at me, brows knit together. “Are we talking about this now?”
I roll my hips against her, making her lips part in a sigh and nod. “Yes. I should have prepared you for what to look out for, what to do. I shouldn’t have left you two alone. It was my fault.”
Courtney kisses her way up my neck, nibbling on my earlobe. “I’m sorry for not staying with her. I shouldn’t have let her out of my sight.”
“Don’t apologize.” I grab her hands away from my body, mostly because I can’t focus while she’s touching me, and pin them against the glass above her head.
Suddenly, the expression on her face changes. Her eyes narrow, one eyebrow raised, and I think I’ve made her angry.
Her legs drop from around my waist and land on the floor. Keeping eye contact, she slips her fingers into the waistband of her shorts and slides them down her legs until they’re a useless puddle on the floor.
My pulse quickens when I realize she’s taken her panties off with them.
Courtney grabs my hand and lays it on her bare hip. Then, she turns around so her perfect ass is in front of me and her palms are flat on the glass.
When she looks over her shoulder at me, it’s a miracle I don’t lose control right there.
In a second, my pants are unbuttoned.
I feel more unwound than I’ve ever felt before. Less in control than I’ve felt in a long time. My fingers are jittery and my legs shake as I position myself at her opening. She arches her back, pushing into me, and I groan with every centimeter of contact between us.
Courtney moans, and I look up to see her watching me in the mirror.
This position has always appealed to me for the lack of eye contact, the lack of intimacy. It was about relief and physicality and that was it.
However, I’m not so certain anymore.
Courtney licks her lips and bats her eyes. She slides up and down my length while nibbling her lower lip between her teeth, while watching me to see exactly what every roll of her body is doing to me.
There is a whole other level of connection happening that I’ve never felt before, and I want to look away, to break it off, because who the fuck knows what happens if I let this continue? But I can’t.
So, I grab her hips to ground me and slam into her.
Her mouth opens in an ‘o’ of surprise, and then she smiles.
The smile undoes me.
I thrust into her again and again until the sound of our bodies fills the room and echoes off the new floors.
Courtney reaches back to grab
my thigh, and her eyes stay on me the entire time.
And my eyes stay on her.
I watch as her breathing gets more ragged, as her fingers flex on the mirrored surface. I watch as her brows pull together and her lips part in a moan.
When she comes, I see it and feel it, and the force of it brings me down with her.
I collapse forward onto her back, throwing out a hand to catch myself on the wall so we both don’t fall down.
Still inside of her, I wrap my other arm around her stomach and pull her to standing, pressing her body against the wall. Bodies flat together, I hug her from behind and pulse into her with the last remnants of my energy.
When we finish, our handprints are smeared all across the glass, along with the perfect outlines of Courtney’s breasts.
I’m tempted to ask the maid to never clean it off.
16
Courtney
Another day, another fight.
Dmitry stares at me, his gaze hard and immovable, and I want to grab him and scream.
Up and down, up and down.
Usually, I’m good at reading people, but I never know what Dmitry is thinking.
All I know is that sometimes he seems to like me—like at the mall before the kidnapping stuff and in the dance studio—and other times, he looks at me like I’m a piece of gum stuck to the bottom of his very expensive shoes.
“It’s just a suggestion,” I say, rolling my eyes.
“A suggestion you’ve made loudly and repeatedly,” he says. “I hear you, and I disagree. Drop it.”
So, I do.
I leave the kitchen and go back to studying and try to focus on my schoolwork, but it’s difficult with my six-year-old shadow.
I love Tati. More than I ever expected to. Before her, I was never great with kids. But she likes me. Most of the time when I leave for class, which started up again not too long ago, she wants to come with me. It’s only thanks to the superhuman strength of her nanny that she doesn’t rush out the door every morning and cling to the bumper of the car.
She’s trapped inside without even an hour of yard time a day offered to most prisoners. I understand Dmitry is worried about the Italians waging another attack or trying to hurt her, but she’s just a little girl. A little girl without her parents or any friends or any sense of normalcy.
I wish I could help, but the decision isn’t mine to make.
A week after Dmitry put in the new dance studio, which Tati and I have been enjoying thoroughly, I wake up to her screaming.
I’ve only been asleep thirty minutes since Dmitry climbed into bed with me and distracted me for over an hour, but I bolt upright at once. The covers are on the floor and I’m in the hallway before I’ve even fully grasped what is happening.
I’ve never heard her scream before.
Usually, if she wakes up in the night, she rings the bell until one of us comes to her. But now, she’s shrieking.
I sprint down the hallway and suddenly run into a wall of half-naked man. It’s Dmitry, and once he ascertains that I’m not an intruder, he takes off for Tati’s room.
The guards are already there when we arrive, bleary and confused.
Tati is sitting up in bed, eyes closed, and screaming at the top of her lungs in a panic.
Dmitry and I rush for her and envelop her in hugs until she calms down and begins breathing normally.
She refuses to let us leave her alone, and we end up staying with her until the wee hours of the morning, stroking her hair and reminding her we’re with her.
Dmitry barely looks at me the entire time, and I know it’s because he knows I’m right.
Something needs to change.
Dmitry comes home the next night and goes straight to his office. I try to catch him before he shuts the door, but I’m too late, and when I go to knock, I can hear him on the phone.
“They can’t get to another shipment. We have to cut them off or risk looking like fucking screw-ups.” He pauses, waiting for the other person to respond. “I don’t care. Take care of it. If you have any questions, call Rurik.”
I wait a few minutes after he has hung up before I knock on the door.
“What?”
Not exactly a warm welcome, but I take what I can get and go inside.
Dmitry is in a pair of jeans that hang low on his hips, his shirt is in a ball in the corner, and his hand is running through his hair.
All of it is enough to distract me from my true purpose, but I swallow the ball of lust in my throat and focus on my task.
“We need to talk.”
He looks up, one eyebrow raised. “About?”
“Tatiana,” I say, sitting down in the chair across from him. “You need to tell her, Dmitry.”
He sighs. “If that is what you’re here to say, then go. I’ve heard it.”
“No you haven’t,” I argue. “Well, you’ve heard it, but you aren’t listening. I know what I’m talking about.”
“Your parents aren’t dead,” he says. “I talked to your dad about you just this morning.”
His eyes widen like he didn’t mean to say that, and I make a mental note to circle back to that surprising revelation.
“My mother might as well have been dead.” I take a deep breath and blow it out through pursed lips. “My mother left me and my father, which was bad enough. But worse, my father refused to acknowledge it. He swore to me over and over again that she would come back. Then, she’d come back for a weekend, and I’d think he was right. I’d believe him. And then she’d be gone again.”
“You had a shit mom,” he says, his voice wavering between a question and a statement.
“I did,” I agree. “It would have been nice if someone had told me that at the time. If my father had been honest with me, it might not have hurt so bad when she left. I might not have been as hopeful when she’d come back for a visit. If he’d been honest with me, it might have kept me from resenting him so much.”
I’ve never said that out loud before, but it’s true.
I resented my father. Resent him still; present tense.
I love him so much, but part of me doesn’t trust him. Part of me always feels like he’s hiding something from me.
That feeling was only made worse the night I walked into his shop and overheard him talking with Dmitry. My father had been paying Dmitry off for years and never told me. He never explained why we were in financial trouble or why he couldn’t buy me the nice things all of my friends had.
If he’d told me, it wouldn’t have bothered me so much. I could have found a job and helped him out. He could have come to me when he got behind on payments, and we could have figured it out together.
“Honesty is always the best policy,” I say, hating how cliché it sounds. However, it’s true.
Dmitry stares at me for a long while, not saying anything. But I can tell he’s thinking.
His fingers are drumming against his denim-clad thigh, and his jaw is working in the way it only does when he’s deep in thought.
Finally, he sits down at his desk and lowers his chin, looking up at me beneath thick brows. “How do you suggest I approach this subject?”
I’m momentarily stunned because I didn’t expect to get this far in the conversation.
I wanted to make my opinion known, but I had no reason to believe Dmitry would ever take my advice. Or ask for.
So, I stammer for a moment before finding my footing. “Oh. Well, I mean … I think the best thing to do is tell her the truth. About all of it. Tell her what happened and then explain that it’s normal to be sad. Explain that you’re sad, too. Let her know that grief is a normal process and that you will be there for her through it all.”
Dmitry lets me finish, but I can almost see another few feet of wall going up around his heart.
Showing any emotion isn’t exactly Dmitry’s strong suit, let alone grief.
“Thanks for the suggestion,” he says coolly. Then, before I can say anything else, he grabs his phone and s
lides it across the table to me. “Speaking of your father, he called me this morning wanting proof you’re still alive. Apparently, he doesn’t trust me.”
I reach for the phone but hesitate at the last second, my hand hovering over it. “You want me to call him?”
He nods and then shrugs. “Or video chat. Whatever.”
My heart leaps, and I grab the phone and find my father’s name in his contacts. I stand up, but Dmitry clears his throat and points to the chair.
“Stay here. I want to know what is being said.”
I call my dad, and he answers on the first ring. “Hello?”
The screen is black. “Dad? Where are you?”
“Courtney!” He screams my name and then lets out a sob. “You’re alive.”
The screen is still dark, but I see a shift in it, and I realize my dad has the phone pressed to his ear.
“Pull the screen away from your face.” Two months away and nothing has changed. It almost makes me cry.
He pulls it back and then stares down at me, confused for a second before he understands. When he finally gets a good look at me, he sobs again.
Sadie was right. He looks thinner than I’ve ever seen him. There are dark circles under his eyes and a gray color to his skin I’ve never noticed before. He looks older, if that’s possible in two months’ time.
“I’m alive,” I say. “I’m fine. Better than fine. Things are great.”
Dmitry shifts in his seat at that, and I hope he knows I’m exaggerating for my father’s sake.
Then again, am I exaggerating?
This arrangement began as a bargain, but more and more, I find myself excited when I hear Dmitry come home. Nervous when he knocks on my door. Thrilled when he crawls into my bed.
His presence is electrifying in a way I’ve never experienced before, and while I’m still counting down the days until our arrangement is over, I’m no longer certain whether I’m happy to see the number of days remaining shrink smaller and smaller.