ROMANCE: CLEAN ROMANCE: Summer Splash! (Sweet Inspirational Contemporary Romance) (New Adult Clean Fantasy Short Stories) (112 page)

“I’ll pick you up at eight,” Anton tells her.  “I know a cool place, with some chill people where we’ll have a good time.”  That’s Anton, all right, and she pictures, allows herself for the first time in a long time, such a place, somewhere by the sea, with white tables, umbrellas, and the soft chatter of the living around her.  Guilt sets in.

                         “I can’t go,” she tells him, regret setting in almost immediately.

                         He pauses, does not ask for explanations.  As the seconds beat by, each louder than the next, he says only, “You can’t let yourself die with him.”

                         She is ready at five to eight.

                         The streets are busy as he drives; now is the time when their former compatriots have all gotten home from work and are doing their own mini-celebration of the day, sitting outside on their tiny balconies sipping tea or vodka with their wives or buddies.  Anton turns a corner and the streets get decidedly more abandoned, and she realizes that he has taken them, not to what she imagined would be a quiet, intimate restaurant, but rather a lone hookah bar, where she imagines he knows the owner quite well.  He simply opens the door and walks in, bypassing the line outside; he is a regular, it appears, and he has a special room reserved for them.

She sees the eyes of women latch onto him as he walks.  Anton started mixed martial arts back when he was just a young boy, as a way to keep himself protected on the streets; he was originally from Omsk, a neighborhood in Siberia known for its organized crime.  His mother had moved them to Moscow as soon as she had saved up enough money, but the love of the physical exertion and power had stayed with him all throughout his life, and as a result, he had a splendid figure.  He was built solidly on top, arms roped with heavy muscle, and had the kind of stomach Anastasia was sure she could scrub her clothing on.  He was solid, but had an antelope gracefulness to his walk that reminded women of what he might be like in bed.  The stares at his fine head of dark hair and flashing dark eyes ceased only when he closed the door behind her in their room.

He ordered a full spread for them, inviting her to feast.  They talk of old times, his mother and hers, and even wax nostalgic over those first few years in Moscow; what was it like, they wonder together, eating dolma with their fingers.  Would they still be welcomed there, or were they now the rich aunties and uncles from America, as the saying went? As her laughter rises through the air, she feels light, until he asks her about the business.

Her silence is all he needs to understand the gravity of the situation.

“You know, I’ve always wanted to invest in a food store,” he tells her after a few minutes, and she catches herself looking into his dark brown eyes appreciatively.  She feels a warmth towards Anton that has nothing to do with his good looks; in his presence, she feels protected.

“I don’t accept charity, although I’m sure Maks would be happy to know that you are trying to look after me,” she tells him, sipping her tea.  She catches an odd look on his face, and decides she will not let it slide by unobserved.  “What?” she prompts.

He does not look at her at first.  She senses that he is embarrassed, but cannot understand why that would be so.  Finally, he speaks.  “I am not doing it for Maksim.”

The oddness of his facial expression begins to translate into some kind of though in her mind, one that she wants to avoid as much as possible, even though its possibility is beginning to thrill her.  “Then why are you doing it?” she asks him, her thudding almost painfully in her chest.

Time stretches as Anton unfolds his hands and looks at his fingers, giving himself time to word what he wants to say properly.  She notices that he has moved closer to her, although he has not allowed himself to breech propriety just yet.  It is hard for him to speak, she understands, and it must be especially so if he is about to say what she thinks he is.

“I met Maks my first day in my new Muscovian school.  He was getting the living shit kicked out of him by a bunch of guys who decided to prove to him that they were tougher than he was.  I wouldn’t get involved, normally, because my trainer always said to fight your own battles, but he was such a little thing, and there were four of them.  I could never understand why people always prey on the weaker.  There is no point to prove with that.”  He pauses.

“He loved you a lot,” Anastasia tells him gently.

Anton nods, but it is a few more seconds before he is able to speak again.  “We were best friends ever since that day.  I always felt responsible for him, even before we came here, before—before all the mess.”  She hears the pain in his voice as he remembers the day that they buried Maksim and her own heart swells in empathy.  “I always vowed to protect him and I couldn’t.  But there was one other time before that that I felt I couldn’t protect him.”

“Why couldn’t you protect him?” she asks.

He looks up at her, finally.  “Because I didn’t want to,” he tells her, carefully and slowly.  “It was the day he proposed to you.  I couldn’t believe he had gotten a girl like you, so good, so—so familiar, like home or the taiga, or soup on the stove. Everything about you made me understand why men fight wars over women, and I would have gladly picked up a gun and gone myself if that was what it took.”  He swallows painfully, the words seeming to stick in his throat.  “And that day, Maks came to me, gibbering with excitement, and suddenly, he didn’t seem so weak anymore. He was not the one I needed to protect.  He was my enemy, because he had what I wanted.  He had you.”

Anastasia’s head is reeling.  She has never known any of this, and the way Anton is looking at her now tells her that none of this is any joke.  How did she miss the signs, for all of those years?  It is almost as plain as day, what Anton is telling her, all the secret half-looks, the refusals to be in the same room with her if the three of them had gone somewhere.  “Why didn’t you say anything?” she asks him, her voice almost a whisper.

His eyes are locked on hers, as if trying to gauge her reaction.  “How could I?” he asks her.  “I would have taken a bullet for him.  He was like a brother to me.  As long as you were with him, I could do nothing.  You belonged to him.”

She senses the anguish in him, in this great bull of a man.  For all his muscles and flashy cars, and throngs of beautiful women, there is something sensitive in him, a fierce loyalty that has no bounds.  She understands now why she has always felt protected with him; in Maks’s stead, in light of his loyalty to his best friend, he thinks of her as his, if not to have, then to keep safe.  This is why, even now, when she can sense every fiber of his being wanting to reach out and touch her, he will not.  She is still not his and will not be unless she says so.  She may be a quarter of his size, but the power she holds in her hands now is far greater than anything he has.

Without even thinking about it, she reaches out and grabs his hand in her own.  She can barely encapsulate the size of it, but that she has warmed him she can see.  Anton looks at her with complete and utter trust in his eyes, and, if she is not mistaken, the first strong sparks of hope.

When she kisses him, she knows that she will run blindly from the room and will not be able to face him again.  She melts her mouth onto him, and runs, leaving him behind.

It is only later, at home, sitting on the couch in her cotton nightgown, that she can begin to even consider the situation.  Roman.  Skinny hips, mafia connections, lust ringing so sharply in his eyes that he does not even bother to hide it.  Anton.  The gentle giant with the head of a businessman and the soul of a poet.  What will happen to her, with nobody to rely on to help run the business?  There are offers all around her, but what are they truly offers for?  What is it that she truly needs?

She leans her head against her arm as she rests against the arm of the couch.  The pillow is soft and firm beneath her, and there is a freshness to her body after a shower that makes her stray towards thoughts she would much rather not be having.  They are the thoughts of how the fabric feels against her skin, like a soft, familiar kiss, and they bring, unbidden, Maks’s face to mind.

She will always love her husband, but he is far away now.  And she is left behind in the corporeal world, with financial troubles and a lonely, cold bed.  She bends her knees and lets her hand stray onto her stomach, delicately stroking the soft skin there, and then dip into the pink fold of her underpants.  Her mind wanders, and for the first time since Maks left, she allows it to.

Blini frying.  The sharp tang of sour cream as she lays great, heaping dollops of it onto each perfectly round crepe.  She is so busy that she does not notice, at first, that someone is moving behind her in the storeroom.  A man comes, and loops his arms around her waist, and she lets out a cry of surprise, turning around to beat at him wildly with her spoon, the only protection that she has.

He lets out a loud laugh, and she realizes that it is Roman.  He is so close to her that she can smell the flour he has brought in for her on his skin, warm and yeasty, and delicious.  The spoon drops from her hands at the look in his eyes, so knowledgeable that she knows what is to happen has been inevitable from the first moment he laid eyes on her.  The spoon clatters onto the floor as he backs her up against the table and she feels her bottom slide into the sharp metal edge, somehow not bothering her in the least.  He is sliding her apron to the side and her blue-patterned dress up her knees and thighs, pressing his warm lips into her neck.  He quickly unbuttons the top of her dress and presses his face into the swell of her cleavage, the sensation sending hot shivers all the way down her stomach.

And she strokes herself in the living present, parting her lips to find a sweet spot.

Suddenly, he is torn off of her body, and she realizes that they have not been alone for at least a few seconds.  From the jumble of the men on the floor, she realizes that Anton has torn Roman off of her and they are tumbling over the ground, each with a firm grip in the other, and their bloodlust as they tackle each other spurs on a feeling in her that is like a pleasure edged with pain, her blood roaring loudly through her veins.

She almost doesn’t catch how it happens, the turn from the fight into something else, but when she sees it, she knows.  Roman has somehow gained the upper hand and has pinned the great elegant bulk of Anton to the ground.  A look passes between them that is one of first sheer rage and utter jealousy, a silent battle over ownership of a property, but then the memory of Maks passes between them and they both soften.  Suddenly, while Nastya holds her breath, Roman lowers his mouth to Anton, and pierces him with his tongue.

Such things are not allowed where they come from.  But they are in a new place now, a place that celebrates the forbidden.  As she imagines what they do to each other, she probes herself, hooking her fingers inside for a place that only she knows.

It is masculine, their kiss, and in wrenching off their clothes, they appear almost to be fighting again.  With a groan, Nastya sinks to the ground on her knees, and adds her own feminine touch to the art of their undressing.  They allow her to slide her slim fingers over them, buttons too delicate to rip, and she catches Anton’s eyes as she unbuckles his pants.  She knows, in that moment, that she wants to be the one who undoes the beast.

She has not seen a member so large in her entire life; certainly Maks was not this large.  But she keeps her eyes locked on Anton’s as she lowers her mouth on him, allowing her tongue to slide over him as he looks down at her unbelievingly.  Behind her, she feels Roman lifting her dress again and sliding down her underpants, applying his own tongue to her in the manner in which she is ministering to Anton.

The bigger man is nude, his great chest towering over her, but instead of feeling diminutive in his presence, Anastasia feels herself grow bold.  She ducks her head towards the piece of skin between his balls and his anus, and from the great, hoarse groan above her, she knows that it is she who is in control.  Her excitement builds at her own motions, but also from the intense slickness that is growing within her nether regions.  She hears the unzipping of Roman’s pants, and feels, as she encloses Anton’s penis with her mouth, Roman probe against her once, then twice, until finally he pushes inside of her, and an ache is fulfilled.

They work in tandem.  There is something that is so fitting, but also so wrong about the scene that she can see it from the side, and it is the very wrongness of what is happening that spurs her own.  Everything is wet behind her, and she can hear the slickness of her opening against the long, thick rope of Roman, and she can feel Anton engorge until there is nowhere left for him to go except to give himself over completely to the feel of her mouth.  It is the release of power, the obvious giving over to a smaller soul that shakes her own body, the knowledge of it all, even as Roman hits the spot inside of her that feels so good she begins to cry.

She joins with her imagination as the feeling of being cared for twice over fills her.  In the safe cocoon of their imagined bodies, Nastya is cradled, and feels, finally, the surge of her own power.  When she pulls her hand away from her pants, she is sticky with her own juices.  She draws her hand in front of her face in wonder, and then draws a finger into her mouth.

She tastes like sunshine, like her blini.

Warm night lulls her to sleep, finally, and she knows that just for that night, she can package away the sweetness of her dream.  She can bury beneath it the worry of what to do with the dream that Maks began for her, the one that she feels compelled to continue, because this is her home now.  She can bury beneath the sensual luxury of being with two people at once the final question of which one she must eventually choose, if she decides to choose at all.