by Tessi, Zoya
Who knows, maybe he really is a hitman. I mean, who would be a better choice to protect me from hitmen, if not one of them? With all the tattoos and bullet wounds, he definitely looks like one. Not to mention his circus tricks with knives.
An anxious feeling crept over me as I tried to push it from my mind, but it seemed vital to know how far he’d go, and how far he’d gone. Not able to bear the agony any longer, I finally plucked up the courage to ask, feeling sort of like I was looking down from a great height and about to fall.
“Alex...”
“Yeah?”
“Have you ever killed anyone?”
At first it seemed like he hadn’t heard me and went on staring at the screen in silence. I was about to ask again when he turned to look at me. As I expected, his expression was blank, but I wasn’t prepared for what I might see in his eyes, and suddenly I had to swallow hard. It was like gazing into an open wound. Blinking rapidly a few times, he seemed to sense my reaction and moved his gaze back to the television.
The long silence continued and I felt I had my answer.
And I wished I’d kept my mouth shut.
Chapter 6 - Lines and Their Stories
It seemed the serious conversation I had with Alex that night had triggered some defense mechanism inside me. What scared me most was that, on several occasions, I caught myself searching for reasons that might justify his admission. Disgusted with myself, I decided to steer clear of him for good.
For the next ten days I did my best to ignore him and kept communication to a minimum, responding to questions with “yes” or “no”, or sometimes just a nod. I spent most of the time holed up in my bedroom studying, and when I had to go to classes I made sure we sat far apart. Unfortunately, there was nothing I could do about the ride to the university and home again. Alex wouldn’t hear of us going by bus, so I regularly had to hold him from behind on the single seat of his bike. Every time I clutched him tightly I’d feel a slight tremble in my fingers, like an ex-addict tempted by a fix.
Alex acted as if everything was perfectly fine and didn’t once comment on my technique of avoiding him. ‘The conversation’ from the other night wasn’t mentioned again, and in some ways it was like it hadn’t happened at all.
There were times when I’d catch him watching me, like when I caught his reflection in a mirror. Once, when I got a close but fleeting look at his face, it seemed he might be wondering how long I could keep pretending he wasn’t there. Or maybe I imagined it.
If you’d asked me why exactly I was treating him that way, I’d have told you it was because he killed people, but that wouldn’t have been the whole truth. The main reason was that I felt let down somehow. It may have been irrational, but somewhere deep inside I’d been hoping he was different. His revelation had left me feeling hurt and betrayed, however little sense that all made.
When we got back from classes on Wednesday afternoon, Alex saw me up to the apartment and went back down to the parking lot to fix something on his bike. I was looking through my purse for my set of keys when the first beats of Flashdance reached my ears, followed by the squealing of a tortured cat as Bethany attempted to sing along.
“Great. That’s all I need!” I grumbled as I slipped the key into the lock.
If Beth was playing Flashdance, that could only mean one thing - it was time to clean the apartment.
Before I’d even kicked my sneakers off, the cleaning fairy appeared from nowhere with a look of reproach on her face. She was wearing a pair of bright pink rubber gloves, which dripped soapy water, and a sort of floral-patterned turban on her head. It reminded me of a wedding bouquet.
“It’s about time!” she thrust a wet cloth into my hands and disappeared again into the living room.
From time to time, a particular demon took possession of Bethany’s body, under whose influence she’d declare war on the ‘invisible menaces’ of dust and bacteria, demanding the entire flat be thoroughly disinfected from top to toe.
I took a breath and went to my room to change clothes and prepare mentally for the hours of toil ahead. Throwing on an old pair of pants, I tied my hair into a tight ponytail and fixed a martyred expression on my face as I went to join the front line on the hygiene battlefield.
“What's the plan?” I asked, but Beth paid no mind to me at all.
She was standing on a chair in front of the bookshelf, wiping away dust with one hand and holding an improvised candle stick microphone in the other, screeching away with the full force of her lungs. I was pretty sure that exposure to her singing was deadly enough for microorganisms, and had even told her so once. Nonetheless, we still had a full arsenal of disinfectants and detergents at our disposal. A complete waste of money, if you ask me.
Watching her crooning, I laughed for the first time in over a week, waving a hand in her general direction as I made for the bathroom, which I guessed from experience would be mine to clean. Armed with a large brush and a chemical agent that smelled like rat poison, I knelt down inside the tub and started attacking some traces of mildew between the tiles.
After several more minutes of listening to Beth murdering pop classics my resistance failed me. Probably much to the horror of the neighbors two floors down, and even those in the buildings nearby, I heard the first few bars of Sex Bomb and joined in with Beth’s howling, wiggling my hips to the rhythm.
“Interesting,” a deep voice burst my happy bubble from behind, making me jump.
“If it’s so interesting why don’t you take over?” I snapped and turned to stare at Alex, who was standing in the doorway with his hands deep in his pockets, looking at me with a mixture of amusement and disbelief.
“Wouldn’t be nearly as much fun as watching you doing it.”
I felt a blush rising to my cheeks and wondered how long he might have been watching me as I shook my hips in time to the music and let rip with my attempts at vocals. Sex Bomb – every second word was ‘sex’ after all. I grabbed the edge of the shower curtain and pulled it violently across to hide myself from view, then pretended to get back down to work.
“What, no more entertainment?”
“No,” I tossed over my shoulder, “I suddenly lost my muse.”
“Too bad... I was just starting to get off on it.”
Suppressing every urge to respond, I looked up at a stubborn stain on the faucet of the tub and started to rub at it energetically, hoping that Alex would get the message and disappear. I didn’t intend to change my policy of keeping him firmly on the sidelines.
Maybe the environment I’d grown up in had screwed up my sense of right and wrong, but I still knew where the limits were. Nikolai definitely labored under the delusion that I had only a vague idea of what happened in his world and how far people were prepared to go, but no one who’s spent eighteen years surrounded by mobsters and mercenaries could really be naive. However hard all those thugs might have tried to hide things when Nikolai’s little girl was around, ‘Uzi’ still featured in my vocabulary along with ‘Barbie’ when I reached school age. By fifteen I knew most of the channels of sale and the names of all the major clients. I knew firsthand how disputes should be handled and debts collected. Still, I didn’t want to think of Alex being a part of it. I didn’t want to know he could dispatch someone in cold blood.
“Sasha!” Alex's urgent voice brought me out of my thoughts.
I heard the shower curtain rings rattle across the bar behind as two strong hands grabbed me around the waist. Without any effort Alex lifted me up and sat me down ungracefully next to the sink.
“Hey!” I protested, but he wasn’t interested.
Looking me full in the face, he seemed to linger intently on my eyes. After a moment had passed he let go of me and backed away a little, obviously satisfied by what he’d seen.
“What the hell is wrong with you?”
“I had to check if you’re OK.”
“Of course I am!” I almost choked, “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“I call
ed to you twice, but you didn’t answer. I thought you might have passed out from all the fumes coming off those damn chemicals.”
“And it didn’t cross your mind that maybe, just maybe, I was trying to ignore you?” I snapped, jumped down and going around him, started rinsing the bath angrily.
Alex stood behind me for quite some time and then left without a word. I grabbed a sponge and started to work on the mirror for a second time, hoping the effort might take my mind off things a little.
When I could finally do no more, I hauled my weary bones over to the kitchen, where Beth had just finished scrubbing the stove. Collapsing into a chair and throwing back my head, I took a deep breath.
“Why do we have a bathroom the size of someone else’s living room?” I asked, rubbing my temples.
“Don’t ask me. This is your apartment sweetie.”
“If I were smart, I’d have rented something half this size. A two-bedroom place with a compact little kitchen would have been just fine.”
“Well that’s true, but where would we put Alex?”.
“Exactly.” I replied, sounding not a little bitter.
“But we’d be missing the wonderful view...”
“You call that a view? Apart from the rooftops and some patches of city between, there’s not a lot to see.”
“I wasn’t thinking of that view, my dear ...”
“What then?”
With a conspiratorial smile, Beth winked at me and gestured with her head towards the hall. I slowly turned in my chair and followed her eyes, wondering what she could be talking about.
Naked from the waist up, there was Alex, doing pull-ups on the bar he’d fitted to his doorframe the day before. Transfixed, I could only watch, because each time he flexed the muscles in his back, dark patterns rippled as though coming to life. Until that moment, I hadn’t known there were so many muscles in that part of the body.
Either because I’d inhaled some fumes after all, or because it was my time of the month to feel that way, my body came alive to a hot sort of feeling and a buzzer started ringing in my head. I suddenly wanted to jump all over him.
After around twenty pull-ups, Alex let himself down from the bar and went into his room, throwing a glance in our direction before he closed the door. I quickly turned my head, twisting my neck quite painfully in the process, and pretended to wait for the toaster to go ‘ping’ on the table. My movements were so fast that he couldn’t have caught me staring, but it looked like he might have started to smile anyway.
“What a jerk. He makes me sick,” I murmured under my breath, still not taking my eyes off the toaster and Beth began to laugh.
“Oh, Sasha...”
“What's funny?”
“You, the ice queen! You put so much effort into pretending you can’t stand Alex…”
“I’m not pretending about anything. It’s a fact.”
“Ah, how much I adore you!” giggling, she sat in a chair across from mine. “I hope you and Alex are very distant relatives.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because, my dear, I saw how you looked at him a minute ago, and trust me that’s not how you look at someone you have blood relation with.”
“Is that so? And how was I looking at him?”
“With pure lust, girl. There’s no other word for it.”
“Shut up! That’s crazy!” I got up and went in long strides to the bathroom with Beth’s laughter echoing in my ears.
I took a quick shower, brushed my teeth and, still feeling pissed off, went to my room and crawled into bed. It took half an hour of twisting and turning and trying to get Alex out of my head before I finally fell asleep.
***
A strong clap of thunder woke me from a very deep sleep. Pressing my eyes closed even tighter, I gripped some folds in my quilt as my knuckles turned white.
Please, please, please, let it be morning.
Very slowly, I opened my eyes. When darkness came from all around, my body began to shake. Forcing myself up on one elbow, I reached out and was halfway to touching the switch when light flooded the room.
“Hey...”, I heard a low whisper.
In some loose pajama bottoms, Alex was sitting by my bedside in the big pink chair, watching me with a profound expression of concern. If I hadn’t been frantic with fear at that moment, I’m sure I would have laughed to see his tattooed body framed by so much lace and so many pink cushions. Another round of thunder broke the thought and I shuddered violently.
Alex got up and moved closer to me, reaching for my hand, which now gripped a pillow tightly.
“Everything’s alright. You’re safe. Try to relax,” he looked deep into my eyes.
I drew in a deep breath, aware that I should try to follow his advice, and hoping I could. Another cruel flash of lightning lit the room, followed by a deep rumble that defeated my best intentions. I wanted to crawl under the floorboards and wait till morning,
“... I have to get out of here...”
“Princess...”
“No! I have to... now...” my voice was becoming hysterical as I started to throw the covers off the bed.
“You can’t sleep in the hall every time there’s a storm.”
“Yes, I can...” I said through chattering teeth.
“Shh... easy...Look at me.”
Alex whispered in my ear as he lifted a blanket up off the floor and placed it over my shoulders. Feeling his hand brush against the back of my neck, I felt goose bumps rise and made an effort to look up into his eyes.
“That's good. Now I want you to breathe in deeply a few more times and try to stop shaking.”
The storm outside was getting worse, but I kept my eyes fixed on his, sort of like a drowning man reaching for driftwood. Whether it was his proximity or his commands I couldn’t tell, but slowly my breathing did seem to slow and I stopped shaking, taking each pulse of revulsion from the lights and the sounds in my stride.
“You see? It wasn’t so hard. Now you’re gonna lie down and try to go back to sleep.”
I felt a sick wave of fear at the thought he might leave, so I quickly pressed my body close to his.
“Don’t go.”
“No need to be afraid, Princess. You couldn’t make me leave even if you wanted.”
I took another deep breath, nodded and lay down, curling my body closer to his, still clutching the edges of the blanket he’d wrapped around me.
“Can you lie next to me... Please?”
I knew it sounded stupid, and I expected him to stay where he was, but instead he did as I asked. He threw the quilt across the bed and got in next to me, stretching out to his length and placing one arm around my waist, drawing me closer to him. Only a fold in the quilt separated our two bodies and I could feel his warm breath against my neck. The beat of his heart and the rhythm of his breathing came to me as little by little I started to calm down.
“Alex?“
“What?“
“Are you sleeping?”
“Nope.”
“OK.”
Several minutes passed in silence. The only sounds came from the rain pattering against the windows and the glass clacking against the howling wind. Lightning came in irregular bursts, but feeling Alex’s body next to mine had brought about a new kind of tension.
“Alex?”
“Mhm?”
“Talk about something...”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Anything... When everything’s quiet, I start to think about the past.”
I would never admit it, but I liked the sound of his voice, so soothing and disquieting at the same time.
“OK. Well...” he said after a pause, “ When I saw you in the bathroom today I was real surprised. I would have bet money that someone like you didn’t know how to pick up a scrubbing brush.”
“Someone like me?”
“You know what I mean. Nikolai’s sitting on a big pile of money. You must have been surrounded by maids your whole life. I
’d have thought you were in the habit of paying someone to do those things, rather than risk chipping a nail.”
“You have such high opinion of me.”
“I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just ... you puzzle me.”
“Let’s say I wanted to forget about what my life was like before. Maybe it’ll sound stupid, but scrubbing the pans in the kitchen and making my own toilet shine seemed like one of the ways. My start in that kind of work was... sort of interesting”
“I'm all ears.”
“You mustn’t tell anyone, on your life. Is that clear?”
“Sure is,“ he chuckled under his breath.
“Believe me, it’s not funny when you’re eighteen and someone has to explain to you how to use a sponge, or that you have to put detergent in the washer before you switch it on. One of the big surprises was that I couldn’t put footwear in the machine.”
“No shit? I never would have guessed.”
“ And... The first time I washed the windows, I used liquid soap. Bethany had a nervous breakdown when she came home and saw my masterpiece. It took us two days to get the streaks off.”
“You and Beth are very close.”
“You could say that”.
“How much does she know about where you come from, and all the rest?”
“Nothing. I wanted to tell her about it a thousand times, but I haven’t. I guess it’s safer for her. Beth, Paolo, they’re all in the dark. They don’t have a clue about me in that way.”
A pause followed, in which it seemed to me Alex was deciding whether to ask me something.
“And how much do you know, Princess? What do you really know about what Nikolai does?”
”Too much,” I replied quietly.
“Too much? What exactly do you mean by that?”
“I mean you can tell me what goods you need and I‘ll tell you who to speak to, what price you’ll have to pay, who to ask about delivery and how to transfer the funds to make it all look kosher. And what will happen if you don’t come through on your end of the bargain.”