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I look at his handsome face, a face that I’d once woken up to and thought that I loved, and I feel as if I’m being split apart. I don’t want to go, don’t want him to touch me, don’t want to live this lie.
But I have to.
“Okay,” I say quietly. “I’ll go back to your place. Just for a drink. To talk. We’ll try to see how this can work, but I don’t know—”
The bitter cold is seeping in. Grisha is already calling his driver, telling me that he has to go in and pay our bill. I stand there, frozen to the sidewalk, feeling numb. I think he tries to get me to come back into the warmth of the restaurant, but I can’t seem to move.
I know what comes next. I can see the path unfurling in front of me, full of hurt and danger, but I can’t see where it’s going to lead. And I’m terrified.
Grisha comes back out as the car pulls up to the curb, our food packed up and in a thick plastic bag with the restaurant logo on the front. He opens the door for me and I slide inside, feeling my heart sink as I do. I’m back here, in the warm leather interior of his fancy car, and as he slides in next to me and shuts the door, it sounds like the slam of a jail cell.
He takes my hand, and it takes everything in me not to pull it back.
“Ivan, take us home.”
Lidiya
It only takes a moment before Grisha holding my hand isn’t just that anymore. His thumb brushes over the back of my hand, rubbing over the soft skin, and then his fingers slide up to my wrist, caressing me there. I feel my jaw tightening as his hand slides up my arm, my heartbeat ratcheting up a notch, but not the way it used to.
There was a time when Grisha’s caresses would have made my heart race for an entirely different reason, but that’s over now. Now it’s just fear and anxiety, worry that I won’t be able to go through with this, having to force myself not to yank my arm away. I know the way back to his apartment from L’Flor. I’ve been there so many times, headed back from a date on this same route, and with each minute that we get closer, I can feel the knot in my stomach tightening, making me feel more and more as if I’m going to panic.
Somehow, I make it out of the car when we arrive though, stepping out as Grisha opens the door for me, and up the stairs to his luxurious, minimalistic apartment. Despite the many, many times we’ve fooled around in his car on the ride to or from a date, he didn’t try to go further than putting his hand on my thigh, which helped. I hadn’t been prepared for him to try to do more, and even the weight and warmth of his palm pressing against my leg had been enough to make me cringe inwardly, wanting to pull away.
Now, as we step into the apartment that I haven’t been back to since our big fight, I feel the urge to run welling up again. Grisha lets me walk in first, closing the door behind us, and I can feel myself flinch at the sound of it shutting. I feel trapped, like a small animal unable to flee, and I have to take several deep breaths to quell the rising panic.
“Are you okay, Lidiya?” Grisha touches my arm as he walks past, and I can hear what sounds like genuine concern in his voice. His hand lingers for just a moment, and then he continues on into the kitchen. “Follow me,” he adds. “We can eat at the island and share a bottle of wine and talk—here, where it’s more private.”
It wasn’t just the lack of privacy in the restaurant that had made me need to go out for air, but I’m happy to let Grisha think that’s the case. Better that than him picking up on the fact that I’m not here of my own will, that someone else is using me to set him up.
Slowly, I follow him into the kitchen, giving myself enough space to pull myself together. As I sit down at the white quartz island, Grisha immediately busies himself pulling a bottle of wine out of the temperature-controlled case, his favorite red that I became partial to as well, while we were dating. He moves around the kitchen easily, pulling out plates for our leftover food, pouring the wine into two of the softly rounded, long-stemmed glasses he prefers.
Everything in Grisha’s apartment is sleek and modern, done in lacquered blacks and smooth whites and greys, right down to the rugs and curtains and textiles. He’d had an interior decorator come in—a man like Grisha doesn’t spend time picking out the things for his own apartment, I know that much. He has his wife do it, or in Grisha’s case, he hires someone.
“Why didn’t your wife just decorate?” I blurt out suddenly, looking at the white-and-glass cabinets that I can see Grisha’s dishware through. It’s all black stoneware, neatly lined up in stark rows. “Why spend money on an interior decorator?”
Grisha turns to face me, wine glasses in hand, and sets one down in front of me. “She hates this place,” he says simply, as if he were telling me some everyday fact. “She hates the style of it, the monochromatic color palette I wanted, the fact that it’s here in the city. She hates Moscow, she hates crowds and traffic and noise. This place felt cold to her, she said, the one time she visited. Before the other day,” he adds, almost apologetically as he sets a black stoneware plate with my dinner on it in front of me, the duck still warm.
“Is there anything she doesn’t hate?” I glance up at him, stabbing my fork into a piece of the duck, but I don’t actually eat it. I’m not sure I can stomach food right now.
“The countryside. Horseback riding. Our children.” Grisha shrugs. “Once, I would have said that she didn’t hate me, but I’m not so certain of that now.”
“And that doesn’t bother you?” I swirl the wine in my glass, take a sip. “That you think your wife hates you?”
Grisha lets out a sigh, tapping his fingers against the edge of his glass. “Once upon a time it would have,” he admits. “When we were first married, the first few years. I did love her then. But now—” he shrugs, looking up at me. His eyes are a deeper grey-blue in this lighting, looking at me with an intensity that sends a shiver down my spine. “We were wrong for each other,” he says simply. “And she refuses to admit it. But when I met you, Lidiya—”
“I know what you said earlier. A breath of fresh air.” I lick my lips nervously, poking at the food on my plate, though I haven’t taken a bite. I wish suddenly that we were back at the restaurant, where at least I had the benefit of having other people around. Something keeping Grisha from touching me too intimately, from going further than that. I can feel from the way his eyes are on me that he’s thinking about the things we used to do together, about what happens after dinner, after we’re done talking.
“You were everything I thought I’d never have again,” Grisha murmurs, touching my hand. “Beautiful, full of life, passionate.”
“Your wife is beautiful.”God, Lidiya, what is wrong with you?I’m supposed to be encouraging him, pushing us back together, not pulling away. Not trying to change his mind. But I can’t seem to make the words coming out of my mouth reflect that.
“In a certain way, I suppose. But she’s—different now, from when we met. When she was a student. She has become a different woman since becoming a mother.”
Oh for fuck’s sake.I stare at Grisha, wishing I could slap him in the face on his wife’s behalf and mine. “How so?” I force myself to ask instead, trying to keep him talking until I can calm down enough to play my part.
“She kept her figure of course, but she has become more—elegant. Mature. Sophisticated.”
“Isn’t that what a man like you needs out of a wife?”
