AllFreeNovel
Share Us
It’s been a long time since I’velaughedwith a woman like that. And with Lidiya it felt easy. It felt as if we’d slipped past the boundaries of who we are to each other, into a normalcy that I’ve never experienced with a woman. I’m not the dating type, not the type to have breakfast together or share meals. A drink at a bar or club or lounge is usually the best I can do, with sex as the end goal. I’ve never had any complaints—I make sure to make it mutually pleasurable for both of us, and in the end, everyone walks away happy.
But with Lidiya tonight, it felt different. It felt like early memories I had of my parents laughing together, joking and kissing and touching, the epitome of what a loving relationship ought to be—or so I’d thought, before it all fell apart.
Before my father cheated on my mother and she shot him and his lover, before she too ended up dead in an alleyway, victim of the woman’s brothers who came to avenge her, and left me an orphan at fifteen, taken in by my father’s boss and put to work cleaning blood off of the basement floor for Vladimir until I could be trained properly to take over the job my father used to have. It had been a formative lesson for me—that love isn’t always what it seems, and that it’s better not to involve yourself with a woman than risk scorning her. My father had hurt my mother and she’d hurt him in return, and the cycle had continued.
I’d always wondered how it had happened, how my father had gone from enamored with my mother to sleeping with another woman. Now, lying on the uncomfortable couch with Lidiya lightly snoring in the bed, I wonder if he’d ever found himself in a hotel room like this, watching over some woman who sparked something different in him, who made him feel something that he perhaps didn’t feel with my mother, who filled in some missing space in him. If he’d been taken off guard, surprised with a depth of feeling that shouldn’t have existed.
The difference, of course, is that even if that had been the case, he should never have been unfaithful to her. He should have left, rather than hurt and shame her in such a way. They would both be alive still, if so—or at least my father wouldn’t have died by her hand. He might be dead anyway, after all, he’d lived the same dangerous life that I do now, and I—
I wonder what I would be doing, if that had been how it all played out. Would I still have followed in my father’s footsteps? Would I still be in this hotel room, half-hard listening to a woman breathe who is as off-limits to me as that other woman should have been to my father? Or would I be someone different, a banker or a professor or an engineer, someone who comes home at night to a wife and children, who learned how to show love and kept believing that it was a real thing?
I close my eyes, letting out a breath. There’s no point in thinking about it. Idon’tusually, for the most part. I’ve never found that there’s any reason for looking backward, only forward. The past is full of blood and pain and tears, and it’s only the future that I can still shape.
But right now, the only shape that I can think about is the shape of Lidiya in that bed, and how good it would feel to drag my hands over her, to feel all of her in my palms and hold her as I thrust—
Good god, man.I force the thought out of my head, but sleep won’t come. I sit up, pouring myself another glass of vodka and drinking it down quickly as I look away from the bed, studiously avoiding looking at the shape of her underneath the blankets. When that glass is finished I down another, and then stretch out on the stiff couch again—as stiff as my cock still stubbornly is, pushing against the fly of the jeans I haven’t changed out of. I don’t trust myself to go into the bathroom and change into anything more comfortable to sleep in—I’ll either wind up jerking off again and risk waking Lidiya up and spooking her, or wind up in bed with her, convincing her to take her clothes off too. And whether she was willing or not, that wouldn’t end well.
I already hate the idea of her with Grisha. And since my attraction to her seems to be more than purely physical, how do I think that’s going to go if I fuck her? It certainly won’t lessen the odd, possessive jealousy that she seems to arouse in me, that no other woman ever has.
The second glass of vodka stills my whirling thoughts enough for me to finally fall asleep. When I wake up again, the early morning light is starting to shine in, and Lidiya is still asleep, her face buried adorably in the pillow with her blonde hair tangled around it, still softly snoring with the sound muffled by the down underneath her face. I unfold myself uncomfortably from the couch, feeling my muscles ache in places that no twenty-six year old man’s backshouldache, especially not one in good shape, and cross the room to the bed, gently reaching for her shoulder to shake her awake.
“Lidiya.” I say her name softly, once and then twice, and on the second time her eyes flutter open lightly, a small smile curving her lips as she looks up at me sleepily—in the moment before she remembers who I am and where she is. I can see the exact instant when it all comes back to her, because she pulls back, her brow wrinkling with annoyance as she pushes herself up sleepily on the pillows, a grumpy expression marring her pretty face.
It’s clear that Lidiya Petrovna is not a morning person.
“What?” she mumbles as I reach for the phone to order breakfast up to the room.
“It’s time to get up.”
“No, s’not.” She slides back down against the pillow, her blue eyes fluttering closed. “No class, no reason to get up this early.”
“Other than the fact that we need to go collect your things from your apartment, and go over the details of what you’ll be trying to find out while you’re with Grisha. And then—”
“Can I at leasteatsomething first?” Lidiya’s eyes open again, just slightly, two blue slits in her pretty face.
“That’s why I’m calling room service now,” I inform her.
I’ve never even really been one to eat breakfast, and like I’d told Lidiya last night, my meals have tended to be eaten at the bar—orabar, out somewhere in Moscow. I have to admit though, once breakfast arrives, that Lidiya might have been on to something with ordering from the hotel menu. I haven’t had a breakfast like the one they send up to us courtesy of the hotel breakfast buffet in ages—crispy waffles, fluffy eggs topped with crème fraiche, chives and smoked salmon, real maple syrup for the waffles, juicy sausage links, fresh squeezed orange juice accompanied by a complimentary bottle of champagne.
“What is this for?” Lidiya picks up the bottle of champagne, wrinkling her nose at it. “I like a good mimosa as much as the next person, but it’s aTuesday morning.”
“They think we’re married,” I remind her, taking a sip of my champagne-less orange juice. “They probably think we’re staying here on some anniversary trip or second honeymoon, or something.”
I know that’s not strictly accurate. The hotel is very aware of who I am and who I work for—that’s how I’m able to get away with the things I do here so easily, like carting unconscious women up to my room. But since Lidiya told them that she’s my wife, they’ve probably assumed she actually is, come to visit me—or chastise me—and sent up the complimentary extras as a result.
“Do you want some?” Lidiya holds out the bottle by its neck from where she’s sitting on the bed, her robe modestly tucked around her legs. I’m on the sofa, keeping my distance for this meal. As fun as it was sharing the fancy dinner with her last night, I can’t afford to keep doing things that stir up these feelings for her in me. I can’t afford tohavethese feelings at all, really.
“No, that’s fine,” I tell her, stabbing my eggs with my fork. A pale pink sliver of salmon slithers off the tines, and I stab it again, maybe with more force than strictly necessary. “You enjoy, though.”
“Thanks. I think I will.” Lidiya eyes me from the bed as she pours a couple glugs of the champagne into her orange juice. There’s a tension between us that wasn’t there before, and I can feel both of us tiptoeing around it. We finish our breakfast in silence, and then Lidiya gathers up her clothes from the day before.
Her outer coat and stockings are a bit too dirty to wear after her tumble down the stairs, but the sweater and skirt she had on before are fine. When she comes out of the bathroom, opting to change in there while I dress in the main bedroom, I hold up my spare coat for her.
“Here, so you don’t have to wear the dirty one,” I tell her, and Lidiya slowly takes it from me with an expression of mingled gratitude and suspicion in her face. She doesn’t entirely trust me still, which is wise of her. I’m not someone sheshouldtrust, and she isn’t someone I should care about. We’ll be better off if she remains a job for me and I remain a dangerous stranger to her, someone that she should extricate herself from as soon as possible.
Lidiya gathers up the remainder of her dirtied clothes, folding them so she can carry them back to her apartment, and I catch a glimpse of her underwear, tucked in between her stockings and her coat—which gives me a piece of information that I absolutely did not need to know, for my own sanity.
Under that long, demure black skirt, Lidiya isn’t wearing any panties.
