Lust, Loathing and a Little Lip Gloss

by Kyra Davis

  Scott tapped his sore jaw gingerly. “I’m not sure I do.”

  “You have done nothing but stab me in the back and I still took the time to warn you about Venus. So yes, you owe me, and the first thing you can do for me is get out.”

  “Sophie, don’t be like—”

  Anatoly took an advancing step on him, his fist clenched.

  Scott threw his hands up in the air. “Fine!” he shouted. “I’m outta here. Just remember, Sophie, you don’t know what I was going to say when I first started calling you again because you wouldn’t pick up the damned phone! And when I did get a chance to talk to you I tried to tell you why I had been calling, but you didn’t want to hear it! It’s kinda hard to betray the trust of someone who perpetually holds you in suspicion!”

  He started to leave, but he didn’t notice that Mr. Katz had moved under his feet. Scott stumbled, grabbing onto the fireplace mantel to keep himself from falling. “I hate this cat!” he yelled.

  I pointed dramatically at the front door. “Out!”

  Scott grumbled, snarled at Anatoly and stormed out.

  There was a long, awkward silence that followed. Anatoly and I were frozen in our respective places, contemplating different aspects of what had just transpired and what was to happen next. It was Anatoly who spoke first.

  “So Venus had a sex change?”

  “It would seem so.” My mind was still focused on Scott’s parting words.

  “Interesting.”

  “Kane asked Scott to bring me to this house. It was a setup from the beginning. Scott would never have told me,” I said firmly, “even if I had given him the chance.”

  “I don’t know about that.” Anatoly stretched his neck to the right and then left side before taking a seat on the couch. “I think Scott’s the kind of guy who will do the right thing if you make it easy for him.”

  “And I didn’t make it easy.”

  “You never do. You’re a challenge.” He smiled. “I love a challenge.”

  It was getting cold, but I didn’t move to turn on the heat or light a fire. Nor did I go to Anatoly and wrap myself up in his arms. I was afraid that one clumsy misstep might erase the implications of his last statement. So instead I reached out to him with a question. “Do you love all challenges? Or just me?”

  His brown eyes were so intense. I loved the way they penetrated me, like Superman looking through my clothes and examining the woman underneath. “I love you,” he said simply.

  I half expected a celestial choir to start up, but instead the only response came from me. “I love you, too.”

  It had been so long since I had said those words, and this was the first time I had said them to the right man. But there was still a shadow cast over this reunion. “Last time you saw me here with Scott you walked out.”

  “You were in his arms.”

  “Did you think…”

  “Sophie, I’ve never killed a man outside of combat. I had to walk out in order to maintain that record.”

  “You wouldn’t have really killed him.”

  “You were in his arms,” he said again.

  “He grabbed me when I wasn’t expecting it. It meant nothing…not to me, at least.”

  “I know that now. But right then I wasn’t thinking straight.”

  “And now that you’re not so befuddled, do you still trust me?” I asked.

  Mr. Katz, who had been moving aimlessly around the room, finally settled on the sofa cushion beside Anatoly. His claws extended and retracted as he kneaded the fabric beneath him. “I trust you. With some things.”

  I laughed. “Considering our history, I suppose that’s as much as I have the right to expect.”

  “Considering our history, you should have expected a lot less.”

  I raised my eyebrows tauntingly. “And yet.”

  “And yet,” Anatoly repeated. He held his hand out to me and when I accepted it he pulled me onto his lap.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Anything,” he said.

  “Did you buy me a tin of Strawberry Shortcake lip gloss?”

  “No, why would I do that?” Anatoly pulled back and looked at me quizzically. “Am I missing something?”

  “No,” I said quietly. I glanced up at the photo of my father, studying the laugh lines around his eyes. A real prankster, my mother had called him.

  “I’m going to check into your accusations against Venus,” Anatoly said, bringing me back to the here and now. “I’ll find out what she’s guilty of, if she’s guilty of anything at all. I would like to trust that you’ll leave the rest of the investigation to me.” He planted a kiss on my neck before adding, “Too bad I can’t do that.”

  “Yeah, it’s a shame.”

  “I don’t think Maria’s a killer.” He was nibbling my earlobe now. “Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to prove that yet. Most of the evidence still points to her. Even the chain locked door.”

  “You know about the bird trick?”

  “Maria told me. I take it she told you, too?”

  I nodded. “Parrots are smart.”

  Mr. Katz, apparently feeling jealous, hopped on my lap, making us a stack of three.

  “You want to tell me the details of what you and Scott were talking about? When and why did Kane and Venus tell him to call you?”

  I sighed heavily. We had just admitted that we loved each other! The girly part of me wanted to dissect that. I wanted to examine every aspect of what had brought on those declarations. I wanted to think about what all this meant for now and the future. And just for a moment I wanted to pretend that this love, now fully acknowledged and appreciated, would make everything in my life easier.

  But the part of me that knew better pushed the girly part of me aside so I could answer Anatoly’s questions. I told him about my latest conversation with Kane and what I had found out from Amelia. Anatoly listened quietly, his index finger idly moving up and down my outer thigh.

  “Something’s not right,” he finally said when I had finished.

  “I think that’s what they call an understatement.”

  Mr. Katz blinked in agreement.

  “Kane dismissed everything you said about the lights flickering?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did the lights flicker?”

  “More than flicker, actually. They turned on and off on their own and then the doorbell rang even though there was no one there to push it. And yes, I did hear footsteps and no, I’m not crazy. I’m just telling it as it is.”

  “And none of that impressed Kane?”

  “No.”

  “And the information you had about his mother and her feelings for your father, did your family give you that, like he suggested?”

  “Yeah, they told me this whole long, convoluted story about Kane’s mom and her relationship with my family. It’s seriously twisted.”

  “Where did they tell you about this?”

  “Where?”

  “Yes, where? Did they take you out to lunch? Were you at Leah’s place?”

  “I was here, why?”

  Anatoly paused. “No reason.” He pushed both Mr. Katz and me off his lap and pulled a small notepad and pen out of the inside pocket of his leather jacket. He put his finger to his lips to hush me and then wrote the words, in which room did your family tell you about Kane’s mom?

  Confused, I started to ask him what the hell he was doing, but he quickly put his hand over my mouth and then, when he knew I got the hint, moved his hand back and gave me the pen and paper, urging me to write my response.

  In this room, I wrote, why can’t we talk?

  Anatoly looked at what I had written and nodded. But instead of answering he got up and started feeling around the fireplace mantel. He found the Strawberry Shortcake lip gloss I had left there and held it up, questioningly.

  “It’s a long story,” I said aloud. I got up and took it from his hand and shoved it into my pocket. “Anatoly…”

  “I’ve never
seen you in pink lip gloss,” he said, cutting me off. His hands continued to explore the fireplace and then he moved over to the bookcases. “Your lips are perfect the way they are.”

  “Why are you talking like that? You’re never that corny.”

  “I’m paying you a compliment, Sophie.” He was running his fingers over each bookshelf, taking extra care to explore the corners.

  “Anatoly, why are you…”

  “Why am I undressing you? I’ll give you three guesses.”

  I looked down at my clothes that were all perfectly in place. Anatoly took that moment to cross back to me and he picked the notepad back up.

  Do you have a ladder? he wrote.

  Yes, in the laundry room. WHY AREWEWRITING NOTES?!?!

  Again, Anatoly didn’t answer. Instead he said, “I’m going to make us some drinks. I’ll be right back.”

  “Wait,” I said. “What…” Again Anatoly put his hand over my mouth and with his free hand he wrote, just say okay.

  “Okay?” I said, and then he turned on the only lamp I had in the living room, turned off the overhead light and left the room. I sucked in a sharp breath and wrote another note in anticipation of his return. It read:

  Tell me what’s going on or I will hang you from a flagpole by your jockstrap.

  When Anatoly returned he was carrying my ladder. He was extra careful to make sure that it didn’t bump into anything. Even with his heavy load his movements were stealthy and precise.

  I tried to thrust my note in his face, but he ignored me and put the ladder under one of the built-in light fixtures. After taking out a penlight from his pocket he climbed up. I watched as he moved his light this way and that so as to examine every angle. Then he froze, and from my spot on the floor I thought I could see the veins in his neck bulge. He silently climbed down and took the notebook from me. He read my comment dispassionately and then underneath gave me the answer I sought.

  Your house has been bugged.

  23

  A therapist once told me couples shouldn’t try to solve their problems with sex. I stopped dating her after that.

  —The Lighter Side of Death

  IF YOU REALLY WANT TO TORTURE SOMEONE, MAKE THEM SO FRUSTRATED that they want to scream, and then force them to hold it in and make idle small talk. That was the task Anatoly gave me as he led me from room to room, identifying bugs as we went. In addition to the living room there was one in the dining room, one in the kitchen, my makeshift office, my bedroom…Kane had actually listened to Anatoly and me having sex! And I knew it was Kane. It explained so much. I had never told him that I didn’t believe in ghosts; in fact, I had suggested the opposite. Yet he knew the truth. He knew exactly what my mother had told me about his family, and while I had been hiding in his bathroom with Marcus, Kane had told Scott that Anatoly had urged me to move. The man knew everything! By placing those bugs he had stolen my privacy, but worse yet—he had violated my home.

  But Anatoly wouldn’t let me speak of these things. As he searched for the electronic devices we talked about politics, the proposed suicide barrier for the Golden Gate Bridge, the strangulation of a child that Anatoly read about in the New York Times: subjects that allowed me to touch upon my anger and pain without ever revealing its true source. And as I railed against Putin and the people who would use a national monument as a means to take their own life I was really, secretly telling Kane how much I hated him. When I said I wanted to rip child abusers to shreds, I was really telling Kane what I was planning to do to him.

  After checking the upstairs hallway thoroughly, Anatoly muttered something to himself and then carefully closed the doors to the bedrooms and bathroom that lined the corridor. “It looks like this is the only room in your house that isn’t bugged, that and the closets and the laundry room.”

  I leaned against the wall and trailed my toe against the floorboards. “Wouldn’t it be ironic if I took up one of these floorboards and used it to beat Kane to death with? You know, like, you fuck with my house and I’ll make sure it fucks with you?”

  Anatoly stared down at the floorboards. “This is where you heard the footsteps?”

  I nodded. “I know this isn’t the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, but it’s making my top ten. I feel so—”

  “I saw some tools in the laundry room. I’m going to get them.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “I’ll explain later.”

  Anatoly went downstairs while I stayed in the hallway. Long hallways are usually the rooms that give children nightmares. They imagine monsters jumping out at them from invisible doors. But my hallway had suddenly become my sanctuary. The monsters were in the other rooms, hiding in the light fixtures.

  Anatoly came back with his arms full of tools that I had never used. An electric drill, a large hammer (not the cute little Ikea hammer that I had become accustomed to), a wide chisel that I don’t remember buying, and a tire iron that I had purchased a few months earlier when Leah and I decided to learn to change our own tires. We hadn’t actually taken the time to figure that out yet, but we both had the equipment and we liked to pretend that meant something.

  Anatoly got down on his knees and started knocking on the floorboards.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Shh!” He tapped on another few boards. At first they all made the same basic noise until one sounded just slightly different. Anatoly stood up. “The bugs aren’t powerful enough to pick up sounds in the next room, but as an extra precaution I would still like to put a towel under each of these doors.” He waved his hand toward my bedroom, the guest room and the hall bathroom. “I also think you should plug your iPod into the portable speakers and play it full blast in your bedroom.”

  “Anatoly, what exactly are you going to do?”

  “Sophie, I need you to trust me with this.”

  I rolled my eyes, but did as I was told. When there was a towel under each door and my iPod was blasting the latest Linkin Park single, Anatoly started drilling into one of the floorboards.

  I dropped to my knees by his side. “What are you doing to my floor?”

  “Just one floorboard,” he said as he finished with his last hole. “You can get it fixed.”

  “I don’t want to get it fixed! I want it to stay as it is!”

  But Anatoly already had the wide chisel out and was using the hammer to wedge it between the board he was working on and the one adjacent to it. Then, using the tire iron like a crowbar, he pulled up the board. I was seriously considering using the tire iron on Anatoly’s head when I looked down and saw what it was that he was trying to get to.

  Underneath that floorboard was a speaker.

  “I bet there’s more of these,” Anatoly said. “Just enough to project footsteps moving through your hall.”

  My rage had a rhythm now. It throbbed inside my temples like a drum. “How could he do this?” I asked. “He’s turned my life into a bad episode of Scooby-Doo!”

  I sat back against the wall and Anatoly put the board down and took his place at my side. For a few minutes we didn’t say a word. We just sat there as the edgy and bittersweet notes of Linkin Park filtered into the hallway.

  “You know what you have to do, don’t you?” Anatoly finally said.

  “No,” I said honestly. “I don’t have the slightest clue.”

  “You have to call the police, Sophie. Kane can’t record your every move without your permission, even if he does own the house. This is enough to have him put away.”

  “But then I’ll lose the house.”

  “Yes, you will.”

  “My father wanted to buy this house, did I tell you that?”

  Anatoly shook his head.

  I reached down and rubbed the small bump in my pocket where the lip gloss was. “He was barely sixty years old when he died,” I whispered. “I wasn’t prepared for it. And this house…it’s like my connection to him, you know?”

  Anatoly kept his gaze straight ahead. “I lost my f
ather when I was five,” he said.

  I looked up at him sharply. “You never told me that. You just told me your family was in Israel now!”

  “My mother and brother are in Israel.”

  “How did he die?”

  “I don’t know if he did. He just disappeared.”

  “You mean he just up and left?”

  “Maybe. You have to remember that I grew up in the old Soviet Union. Outspoken people sometimes disappeared.”

  “Wait a minute. You’re telling me that the Soviet government may have taken your father from you and then, once you were of age, you joined their army?”

  “The Soviet Union was about to fold when I enlisted, but yes, and I had my reasons.”

  “You’re not going to tell me what those reasons are?”

  “Not now. I just wanted to tell you that I lost my father. The circumstances were different, but I know what it’s like to miss someone who’s supposed to be there.”

  “Oh.” Again we both fell into a brief silence. I wanted to be irritated, but who was I to judge him for keeping his secrets when I had so many of my own?

  “Living in this house isn’t going to bring him back, Sophie. The only people it connects you to are Kane and Scott. You need to let it go.”

  I put my hands flat against the floor, hoping to find some kind of stability there. “I can’t call the police now. Not tonight. You have to let me wait until tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow then. Why don’t you pack up an overnight bag? You can stay at my place tonight.”

  I nodded and with an enormous amount of effort got to my feet. Once I had packed up some things, Anatoly escorted me down the stairs, immediately bringing the conversation back to politics. I couldn’t respond this time. I could barely breathe.

  Anatoly took my keys from me and locked the door behind us although it seemed like a pointless exercise. Kane was already in my house and nothing short of an exorcism was going to get him out.

  As I followed Anatoly back to his place I kept the music off so that the rantings of the pop stars wouldn’t mingle with my own ranting thoughts.