by Amanda Jones
She snorted. “Of course you are.”
The End.
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American Tigers:
Siberian Soul Book 1
By Claire Ryann
I never thought I'd be standing in the Yaroslavsky Railway Terminal in Moscow.
Of course, beyond that, I was completely lost.
At 28 years old, I had no memory of the cold war but my parents grew up during a time when Russia was a spectral enemy looming on the horizon. Their perception of life in the Soviet Union was that everything there must have been black and white and grainy like an old film strip.
Naturally, they were mortified when I told them I had already crossed the border.
But why not? After five and half years of college to earn a masters degree right out of high school in order to get a "good" job and make a "decent" living, I'd recently been handed a severance package, a box of my personal belongings from my office, and a pat on the back assuring me that the company wouldn't fight my unemployment claim.
I sulked in my upscale apartment for two weeks, nursing wounds from the seeming betrayal of having done everything "right" in order to make the transition to adulthood as painless as possible. I briefly considered tethering myself to a tree with the rest of the Occupy movement until I realized that the stars had just aligned themselves properly for a good, old-fashioned adventure.
It took me another month to work out the math, sell most of my worldly possessions and put in notice to my landlord. With my severance, my unemployment payments, savings and the proceeds from selling my stuff, if I stuck to my budget I should be able to hold out for 22 months before being forced to head back home to the U.S. of A. to look for work.
18 months later I found myself in Helsinki being offered an opportunity to hitch a ride on a boat that would ultimately land me in St. Petersburg. In a round-about way.
I couldn't pass up the opportunity to go to Russia. When I found myself standing on a rather spooky shipping dock with my backpack and a rough map that had been hand drawn by the sweet old man who'd let me hitch a ride on his trawler, I thought I must have lost my mind.
What the hell was I doing in Russia? I had managed to commit exactly two phrases to memory in Russian: "Take me to the American embassy," and "Where can I get a meal?" Both carefully taught to me by Andrei on our journey from Finland while learning to drink vodka without grimacing and playing cards.
Andrei had reminded me of a jolly old grandpa, with his round face and hearty laugh. I had met him in a small cafe in Helsinki and he had immediately adopted me. He was concerned about a young woman traveling alone, but he was also curious and proud of me for doing so. When he'd offered to bring me to Russia for the mere cost of playing cards with him on the voyage, it sounded like the opportunity of a lifetime.
Unfortunately, I have little talent for learning new languages quickly. I'd done well through most of Europe between 4 years of high school French, a full immersion course in conversational Spanish for a business project I'd been assigned to that required working closely with a company from Ecuador, and Europe's tendency to speak English. Once I'd wandered into Poland, however, I was lost and at the mercy of the kindness of strangers.
I made my way into St. Petersburg and found an English speaking taxi driver who helped get me situated with my legal documents. I proceeded to spend two more weeks running the streets of Leningrad, soaking up the history and beauty, meeting colorful characters both kind and notsomuch managing to communicate somewhat effectively despite not understanding a word of what we were saying to each other.
I'm pretty sure my lack of language skills were responsible for both a stay in an elderly woman's dining room-turned-hostel for the night, and a young man walking away my iPod, apparently under the impression that I'd given it to him voluntarily.
Getting to Moscow took me three days for what should have been a 10 hour drive. But that's the way traveling goes when you're not on a schedule. A series of friendly strangers offering me lifts, a night in someone's barn somewhere that my driver kept saying the name of the town, but I couldn't find it on any map, and here I am.
The Trans-Siberian Railway. That was going to be the coup de grace for my epic journey. It seemed like my best plan for getting see a wide section of the country with the least amount of freaking out everyone back home.
I stood in the Yaroslavsky terminal, trying to decipher the train and fee schedules. There were plenty of people here who could help me with the language barrier, it was trying to do the currency conversions and figure out the time schedules.
I could purchase one ticket straight to Vladivostok, or I could purchase multiple tickets to cities along the route so I could explore between train rides.
I counted my...rubles? and considered my options. I was near the end of my funds and I had to make sure I still had money for the ferry to South Korea and the flight out of Seoul back to San Francisco.
In the end, I decided I wanted to stay a few days in Siberia and that meant saving money. I purchased tickets to Irkustk on the Rossiya for second class and waited for my train to arrive.
The man at the station assured me in broken English that my tickets would take me to Irkutsk and that I would be able to purchase tickets there for the train to Vladivostok.
Second class on the Trans-Siberian meant sharing the compartment with 3 other people. I settled into the tiny space that would be home for the next 4 days and waited to meet my new roommates.
I was soon joined by a woman traveling with a 10 year old boy. I smiled at the lady who eyed me suspiciously. I was learning to understand the Russian culture of not automatically returning smiles, but I wasn't sure I'd ever get used to it.
The young boy chattered at me from his seat, intently telling me a story that I didn't begin to understand. At least he was out going and friendly, even if his grandmother (I presumed) didn't seem to approve of his instant trust of me.
Just when I started to think the 3rd seat would remain unoccupied for the first leg of our journey, another woman appeared in the compartment doorway. She eyed her new roomies with disdain, then stowed her bags and took her seat. She had no patience for my embarrassing attempt at a greeting nor for the young boy seated opposite her. She opened a book and the rest of us promptly ceased to exist as far as she was concerned.
The first hundred miles or so were exciting for me-- and the young boy. Together we kept our faces pressed to the windows, watching the landscape speed by outside while we adjusted to the steady rock of the cars along the tracks.
Eventually the boy went back to his seat and fell asleep. I was still mesmerized by the view but less enthusiastically. I sat with my head resting against the window and let my mind wander.
28 years old. 18 months of backpacking through foreign countries, meeting new people, eating new foods, sleeping in strange beds and none of those beds had been shared.
I guess som
ewhere in the back of my head, I'd entertained the notion that my time abroad was going to be filled with romantic nights spent with seductive men from around the world. Men from cultures that appreciated curves in their women, who would eye the wideness of my hips and the roundness of my ass with hunger and need. Men who would be helpless to resist the American tourist and find themselves compelled to show her the ways of their country...in bed.
I had imagined passion filled nights, sweaty and naked on El Salvadoran beaches. Maybe letting the rum and the full moon talk me into a wicked menage on the Peruvian highlands. Certainly, Italy and France would have offered opportunities to discover the sounds of love whispered and moaned in its native tongue?
Not once.
It's not that I hadn't gotten an offer here and there, but those offers were mostly from drunken old men in bars and one skinny redheaded boy who hadn't bathed in weeks,despite the access to the showers down the hall in an Argentinian hostel.
I hadn't even been faced with the decision of whether or not to explore a lesbian tryst, despite having had to share a bunk with another woman on two separate hostel stays.
At this point in my adventure I had to reluctantly resign myself to the fact that there would be no cross continental affairs in store for me. Apparently I was universally unattractive.
I watched the city outside turn to wide open expanses of countryside. I blinked back the self pity and approached my plight from a different angle. It's not that I'd never had a boyfriend, or even a fling or two, it'd just been a really long time. I was tired, very far away from home, down to the end of my funds, and stuck on a train with bunk mates who not only didn't understand a word I said but didn't show the slightest interest in my even if they did.
I'd been having a grand adventure so far. Well. OK. Not really much of an adventure. More like a great trip. Despite having seen some of the road less traveled by other American tourists in an effort to save money I'd still been pretty much just traveling from one place to the next.
Sure, I'd met lots of nice people. Some assholes. Tasted lots of new foods; some good. Some notsomuch. Some downright weird. I had thousands of photos of all sorts of interesting things. But everything had just continued on without much drama.
Without drama, it's not much of an adventure.
I guess I thought this was going to be a little more exciting.
A lot like this train ride. In theory, riding across Russia on the mother-effing Trans-Siberian Railroad! WOW! That sounds so romantic, an epic voyage in a totally foreign land. An experience ripe with possibility.
In reality, I was 7 hours in and I was bored out of my fucking mind. 3 more days till Irkutsk and another 3 days from there to Vladivostok. I was seriously considering ending the train ride in Irkutsk and finding another way home from there.
I ate dinner in the restaurant car, enjoying the time away from my room mates. The old lady with the boy had brought much of their own food and whatever it was was more like what my parents thought Russians ate than what I'd found in restaurants so far. It looked like a gray glob and it smelled worse.
The woman with the book hadn't looked up once since she'd entered the compartment.
I understood why so many of the travelers chose to bring their own food. The dining car served perfectly fine meals, but they also charged perfectly fine prices. I sat at my table in the mostly empty car long after meal time had ended and ordered another of the Russian beers. I was on my third one and I still hadn't decided if I liked it.
I hoped the dining car wouldn't close and I'd be able to sit here drinking beer all night. If they did come by and shoo me away at least, I figured, I ought to be drunk enough by then to manage to sleep through Bookwoman's snoring which she'd begun shortly after switching to a new book.
I had curled up in the dining room chair, pulling my feet under my and leaning against the wall of the car, my beer close beside my hands on the table while I attempted to type up a sort of blog post for the folks back home on my tablet.
Two other tables were occupied, a group of German businessmen arguing over something I couldn't quite catch, and a sullen family eating in silence when a man walked entered the car.
Not just a man. A man. The movement at the door of the car caught the corner of my eye and when I glanced upward my nonchalance was replaced with rapt attention.
For starters, he was gorgeous. The kind of unreal attractiveness you see in heavily Photoshopped magazine ads for mens' cologne or underwear. He was huge, his head nearly high enough to graze the ceiling of the car, his shoulders proportionately wide. The sheer size of the man dominated the space and the train car suddenly felt claustrophobic.
Or maybe that was just me, since it seemed all the air had rushed out when he'd opened the door.
The thing that really set him apart from every other person I'd seen on the train-- including those who worked aboard-- was the way he seemed to be gyroscopically stable in the constantly rocking, lurching movement of the carriage. He was perfectly balanced, walking upright without tilting or stumbling. He didn't hold his arms out to the side for balance or lean against any fixtures. It looked as if he were merely walking down a perfectly stable street and the train moved around him.
The other people in the car noticed him too. Everyone looked up when the door had opened, but instead of acknowledging the newcomer and continuing with their meals, we all continued to take notice of the large man. It was if a herd of deer had suddenly caught the scent of a nearby predator on the changing wind.
Of course, the man wasn't just a perfectly balanced hulking beast looming toward us, he was also wearing pajamas. Very nice ones. They appeared to be very soft cotton, like 12,000 thread count Egyptian cotton sheets made into pajamas. I wanted to reach out as he walked by me to touch the fabric to see if they were really cotton or if they might be silk.
Who am I kidding? I wanted to reach out and touch more than those pajamas!
The pajama pants hung loosely and dangerously low from slightly protruding hip bones, the drawstring cord tied delicately over a stomach so flat and toned you could use it as a trampoline.
Naughty images flashed through my head flashed through my head at that thought. With a stomach that tight I could straddle his hips and bounce up and down on his cock with out having to work at it at all. His abs would provide enough spring to keep me in perpetual rebound.
I felt the heat rising in my cheeks as the heat gathered between my legs. I shifted my position and put my feet back on the floor, squeezing my thighs together to distract myself from the arousal.
Holy hell this man was hot.
He was wearing the pajama shirt too-- technically-- but it was left unbuttoned and hanging open across his chest. That magnificent broad chest with just a hint of a furry trail that started just below the rib cage that was surely under the sculpted pecks and trailed downward till it disappeared behind the waistband of the pants.
At this point I started wondering why it had taken this long for the beer to hit me? I'd seen hot guys before, I'd never had a reaction this strong to any of them. It must be the beer.
I knew better. Something about this man tugged at a very primal part of me.
Or maybe it was the beer.
He seemed completely unfazed by the stares. Totally comfortable in his own skin and didn't show the slightest trace of concern for his inappropriate state of dress. He simply moved with that feline grace and power toward one of the servers and spoke in a low tone.
The waiter nodded and smiled and disappeared for a moment, leaving the big man with time to turn and take in his surroundings in earnest.
It was as if he'd suddenly heard his name being called. He tilted his head almost imperceptibly and then turned his face up and to the side. As if he'd heard something or maybe caught a whiff of something on the air. A whiff of something good, like a steak being grilled to perfection or the delicate scent of jasmine in the night air.
I was captivated by the way his shirt fit his shou
lders perfectly, the seems hanging just at the break where his thick arms began. The muscles along the back of his neck rippled and flexed, his waist narrowing as he twisted his torso to follow whatever had caught his senses. The pajamas had to have been made specially for him. There was no way a man that size could have found clothes that just happened to fit him like that.
He turned in slow motion, his head following his nose, his shoulders following his head, the rest of him following his shoulders. Until he had turned completely around, and then he seemed to have found the source of whatever it was he was looking for.
He looked intensely at me.
The rest of the diners had long since returned to their conversations. The look the man was giving me was just between him and me.
I squirmed, pressing my thighs together more tightly. The tingling feeling between them growing to a throbbing moistness while I tried to remember how to breathe. I was frozen in his gaze.