Coming again, I tighten around him. It makes him grunt and, rising back onto his forearms now, with his eyes back on mine, he pumps inside of me, again and again and deeper and harder. When he finally releases, it comes with the rake of my nails dragging over his back, comes with my hands dragging hard down his sides. Dragging and gripping because, even with so much of him to hold onto, it is still not enough. I still want more.
When he comes, he gives a short, urgent gasp of pleasure, and it is so unlike my man, who keeps so much of himself reserved, that even this small emblem of the loss of control drives me wild. Even as his body settles against mine, and the phantom thrusts of his release are still pulsing inside of me, I whisper to him, “I’m not done with you, baby.” My smile brushes his ear. His lips brush against my neck. Then, wrapping his arms around me, he rolls to his side, taking himself away from me, a thing that makes me pout. He’s gathering me to him, to curl himself around me, but I push back, and turn the other way, so I am facing him.
My hand wraps around his still-hard shaft. We look at each other through the dark. Alexei and I have gone for hours before. It’s not a usual thing...this is real life, and we’re tired and we’re hungry and there are more nights than not when this isn’t even something we do at all; so many nights when closeness means curling up next to him with a good book and listening to him breathe while he drifts off to sleep. Other nights are like this one: we get started, and neither of us want to stop.
Slowly, I pump him; I thumb over the head of his cock. “We might not eat tonight,” I tell him.
“Maybe not you.” His small smirk is positively wicked. “I ate well,” he says, and his dark eyes glint. His hand settles on my hip. His eyes are on my eyes, still lit with that look that makes me shiver inside.
I’ve never loved anyone like I love Alexei. In so many ways, we are so perfect together.
And, in so many ways, ways I try not to think about too much, we aren’t.
His thumb soothes over the ridge of my hip. In my hand, I feel him stiffening.
“Baby.” I reach out with my other hand, cup the side of his cheek.
His eyes shadow. I wonder if he knows what I’m about to say. It won’t be the first time I’ve said it. He knows what I want.
His phone hums on the bedside table and his eyes linger on mine for a moment before he turns onto his back, twists his torso to be able to reach for it. I used to get infuriated when his phone would ring at times like these. I used to get infuriated when his phone would ring at one o’clock, two o’clock, and three o’clock in the morning. I used to tell him to turn the ringer off, or I’d threaten to throw the phone down the compactor. He’d understood. But he’d been firm. His work meant he had to answer the phone when it rang. I kept protesting, until he’d put it more bluntly. “Radiah,” he’d said. “It could mean someone's life.”
I don’t want to let his work control him, or control us. So, when he goes onto his back, I rise too. On my knees, I lower my head, to brush my lips against the head of his cock.
His free hand lifts, touches the ends of my hair. I see the look in his eyes. He wants me. He wants this. But he’s talking business.
Deliberately, I ignore the look he’s giving me. I want to taste him. Slowly, I circle the tip of my tongue against him. My hand closes tighter around his shaft. He’s being still, but I can fully see...and feel...the effects my attention is having on him. Opening my mouth a little wider, I take him a little deeper.
His next words catch and he spreads his hand open at the back of my head. Whether he’s doing that to coax me lower or to coax me to take my mouth off of him for now, I don’t know. Maybe he doesn’t even know.
Until he does know. I feel the change coming over him before I see it. His hand is still there, still cupped on the back of my head, but his fingers start to stroke at my hair in an absent, distracted, only half-there way.
His breathing evens out.
Glossing my lips against him, I rise up to the tip, then turn my head to look at him. He’s looking at me, but there’s an apology in his eyes.
Still, it’s only when he starts talking in Russian that I let him go. Without looking back at him, I scoot to the edge of the bed, grab some clothes from the dresser, and head towards the shower.
With the warm water filling the bathroom with steam, I catch sight of myself again in the mirror. I don’t mind not being twenty anymore. Honestly, I feel sexier now, at thirty-four, than I ever did before. But still. I feel it. I feel the years going by and more and more everyday, I want something different. I want something more than the billions of dollars, I want something more than the penthouse. To be honest, it’s not those things I really want at all. I mean I love this penthouse and I love not having to worry about money. I love going to the best restaurants, taking vacations in exotic places. I wasn’t raised with nearly this kind of luxury, and I’m not going to pretend it isn’t something I enjoy.
But I’d give so much of this up. It’s not this I want.
What I think I want is Alexei. And I want children. I want the kind of happiness that comes with getting older, not the kind of happiness that comes with being young and carefree. I feel ready for responsibility. I feel ready to settle down. I do not want to be a twenty-year-old woman again; in so many ways, I’m glad to be getting older. I feel good about it. We’ve talked about it before. Alexei has made it clear that I am the woman he wants. And, while he hasn’t done it, he’s hinted in those conversations that he wants to marry me, and that he wants to spend the rest of his life with me. But, babies, he has said, and he has shaken his head. “I cannot bring children into my world,” he has told me.
His world.
He says that like he is saying...nothing. He says it like he is stating that he is heading down to the gym. But for me, saying that is shutting down a whole world of possibility. It’s extinguishing a whole universe; it’s telling me that all of my dreams will never be realized. Not if I stay with him.
It’s made me cry. I hide my tears from him, but I don’t think I can do it for much longer. This is what I always do and I’m afraid the same thing that always happens will happen with this too. Eventually, I can’t keep my feelings in any longer and I snap. It all comes out in a torrent of sudden, agonizing emotion. I don’t want that to happen. But I need him to know how much it means to me.
Maybe I need to know how much it means to me. Maybe I need to stop pretending to myself. Maybe I need to force that door open he keeps closing. It’s my dream, and it’s not his dream. Sometimes I think I love him. But can people who don’t dream the same dream together really love each other enough to make up for everything they are losing?
Maybe I can’t have it all. Maybe I can’t have Alexei and the life I want.
I cry about it in the shower. Under the hot water, alone, the tears slide down my cheeks. Why can’t I stop thinking about all of this today? Why can’t I make it go away like I normally do? I have no answer, no understanding of why tonight is different from any other night.
Maybe it’s because I keep thinking about my mother lately. The spring makes it hard to pretend I don’t miss her. This was always her favorite time of year. She loved the flowers blooming and she loved the birds singing and she loved the warm, sweet-scented air. I remember the way she used to take me to Prospect Park. I remember sitting with her on the benches side by side, feeding the pigeons from a little bag of bread. Ugly birds, so many people say. But my mom never saw them that way. My mom saw beauty in everything. She was amazing, and beautiful, and brilliant, and she was gone way too young.
I didn’t have the time I wanted to have with her.
Everyday, I miss my mom with all of my heart.
Everyday, I’m reminded of how quickly everything I love can go away. I’m reminded of how precious every moment is. I don’t want to take the good for granted.
But there are certain things I want that I feel like, if I don’t have them, I’m always going to be, in some way, empty.
/> I don’t know how to heal that loss; I don’t know if I ever will be able to. All I know is, since I was small, my dream has been to have a family. My dream has been to have children. My dream has been to have a husband, to live in a house, to get up in the morning and kiss the same man I can’t wait to come back to my bed at night.
I want to take my own kids to the park. I want to sit with them on a bench and feed the pigeons together. I want to make them feel safe and I want to make them feel loved. I want to make them feel like they are beautiful and like they are brilliant—the things my Mom made me feel about myself.
I can’t make these thoughts leave my mind, or leave my heart, but when I walk out to the living room, there is no sign of it. For a moment, because I know I’ve mastered my exterior, I think I will be able to do what I always do. I think I will be able to just let it go again. I think I will just put it off; maybe we will talk this weekend, or maybe we will talk about it the next one.
Maybe we will talk about it on my birthday.
I tell myself that I will focus on the good and I will just let the rest fade away. But I keep doing this, I keep feeling this way, and I keep closing myself off from my feelings. I keep pretending them into this nothing. It’s not good for me. It’s not good for him. It’s not good for us.
Am I living a lie? Am I lying to myself and lying to him?
I think I know the answer to that. And the answer is yes. With yes as the answer, how can we hope to have a real future, how can we hope to have a real future together?
In the living room, Alexei is standing, looking out through the window. He’s off the phone, and he’s pulled his jeans on, has left the rest of himself bare. The tattoos on his back rise and fall with the even inhale and exhale of his breaths. The tattoos curl around his shoulder blades; when they catch at the lines of muscle, they accentuate the muscle definition.
I can see the tension there.
Alexei, I think, is lying to himself too. He knows he isn’t giving me what I need.
Neither of us have what we need from each other.
He turns away from the window when I walk in. He gives me a small, strained smile.
“Dinner is heating.” He looks away, and then, just as quickly, he looks back again. If he was the kind of man to hesitate, I think he might hesitate now. But he isn’t that kind of man, and he doesn’t. “I have to make a short trip tomorrow,” he says. He says it like his short trip is something like going to Ikea or to a simple business meeting. But I know what a ‘short trip’ means. I understand that, in his muted, conversational tone, he is telling me he will be in a little more danger than normal tomorrow. I know he is telling me to be a little more vigilant tomorrow too.
Nodding, because I don’t even know what to say to this anymore, I slide down into one of the brown leather armchairs. Exhaustion makes my shoulders slump low. It’s not a physical exhaustion. It’s mental, and it’s emotional. I’m tired. I feel like crying. All of the joy I’d felt earlier feels like it has slipped away into some dark tunnel. I don’t know whether I should try to chase it down, to get it back again. Or whether I should seize this moment to make something happen. I know we can’t go on the way we have been, not for much longer. As much as I love him, and as much as I know he loves me, I know this too: we are at a dead end unless one of us has the courage to bring this into the light. Bring it into the light and be brave enough not bury it again just so we can get through one more night and then one more day.
It’s a mountain I don’t know if I can keep climbing.
“Alexei.” I say it, and I look up at him.
He’s still looking at me. The lamplight shines on one side of him, and it leaves the rest of him in shadow. It is so much the thing I feel right now, this half shadowed, half light of him, of myself, of us. If he’d look down now, at his own body, would he see it too? Would he see all of the darkness trying to take the light? Would he want to change that? I know Alexei is not like most other men. I know he did not grow up the way most other men grow up. He is hardened to so many things. Sometimes, he seems like an element more than like a man. He seems like an energy that is being forced to somehow be finite in a collection of shapes that can hardly contain him. I know he has stared death in the face in a way not many of us do. I know he’s lost friends. I know he’s lived this life for so long he might not understand that there is another way to live. But I know, too, how smart Alexei is. I know, likely better than he does, that he would be able to change his life. He’d be able to adjust. It’s not that I don’t want him and love him for who he is. I admit, I like the danger of him, the thing in him that makes him, as Carla says, a bad boy.
I don’t think that what he does is the same thing as who he is. I don’t think that the same things that attract me to him so deeply are the things that are quietly, stealthily, tearing us apart from each other. The essence of what Alexei is won’t go away no matter what he is doing in life. I think that’s a good thing. But I’m pretty sure Alexei doesn’t see himself in the same way. I’m pretty sure Alexei thinks he isn’t cut out for the kind of life I dream of having. He blames it on the organization but I think it goes much, much deeper. I think it goes to such a deep place that I’m afraid I can’t even reach him there. Maybe I’m afraid Alexei can’t even reach himself there.
So, I say what I have said before. I say what he has said before.
“Alexei. I want to talk. About what you…what you said before. That you weren’t ready to get married. That you weren’t ready to have children. You—”
He cuts me off. Even before he says anything, the look in his eyes makes me fall silent.
Then, he says what his eyes were saying. “If that’s what you heard, then I need to be more clear. I’ll never be ready for children, Radiah.” He looks at me, intent-eyed, as though he is trying to will me to understand this. But then, maybe willing me doesn’t feel like it’s enough for him. Maybe he’s as worn out by our little dance as I am. Because now he says it as plainly as he possibly can. He says it without any kind of qualification or quantifier. “I don’t want children, Radiah. It’s not for me. Ever.”
“You don’t want children,” I echo. “Ever.” The words taste like ash, like an emptiness surging up from the pit of my stomach. I want to clamp my mouth shut. But I’ve never been good at that, not once I start. Once I start, I rarely stop, which is why I’ve been so careful not to start. “How can you say that, Alexei. How can you say never when you know it’s something I want so much? How can you say that when you say you want to be with me and you know it’s what I want more than anything?”
His eyes flash. More than me? he doesn’t ask. But I see the question there, and it’s something I’m asking myself too.
“I can say that because you know my life, Radiah. You know it well. And it’s bad enough.” His words are short, curt, rough sounding in his thick accent. “That I put you at risk. Bad enough if I can’t protect you the way I want to. Which…” He draws a deeper breath, as though he is trying to steady himself. “To that end, you won’t even let me assign a guard to you. But babies?” He looks down. For a long moment, he stays silent before his eyes rise once more. He shakes his head, once. A finality. “Do you really want to risk that? Risk something happening to them? I know what that would do to you, Radiah.”
He knows how much losing my mother hurts me everyday. He knows how much I worry about him when he has ‘meetings tomorrow.’
I think I might see pain there, the flash of some deeply felt regret. For the moment, I don’t care. And I don’t care about the truth in what he is saying either because what I am saying is just as true. “That’s a risk every parent takes, Alexei. No one’s life is guaranteed. Horrible things happen to good people everyday.”
“I’m not a good person, Radiah.” His words are heated, and hard.
I ignore them. I push on with what I need to try to make him understand. “And you.” I feel helpless and it’s a feeling I hate. It’s a feeling I won’t give into. Stand
ing, I walk nearer to him. The helplessness is something I know I need to take, to turn, to use. Something I need to seize. I am not helpless. I am not caught in this limbo, and neither is he. Or rather, neither of us have to be. We don’t have to keep going on the way we have been just because it’s what we’re used to doing.
I don’t have to be here. I don’t have to be with him; we don’t have to stay together.
Not for the first time, the thought comes to me.
And that thought won’t go away.
I don’t have to be with him anymore. I don’t have to give up everything else that I want so much just to be with the man I love…today.
“You…” I try to find my words. Only a few feet away from him, I stare up at him.
Because today isn’t enough. Today isn’t the rest of my life.
I don’t want today to be the rest of my life.
“You could walk away from them, Alexei.”
He looks down. Not at me. He looks down at the floor.
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