ROMANCE: PARANORMAL ROMANCE: Coveted by the Werewolves (Paranormal MMF Bisexual Menage Romance) (New Adult Shifter Romance Short Stories) (130 page)

Roman and Anton came to the funeral, of course, their faces ashen with the knowledge of what had happened.  Roman and Anton had met at university, but Anton had known him for long before; they had sat at the same desk together in school, used the same overseas sharpener to create points on their Soviet colored pencils.  Anton had gone on a different path after Gosha had deemed him too car-obsessed and savvy to be of much use, and he had managed to make his business dealing in exclusive men’s nightclubs where billiards, tennis, and high-stakes poker were the norm.  From a meaningless nothing, he turned himself into a general manager, and now the cars he drove and the women he was seen with were of the highest quality, that which Gosha with his country roots could not even begin to appreciate.

Did Maks ever hold it against them, their participation in what he deemed to be an insult to their creed?  They had come to America not to be owned, but to be owners themselves. She certainly did not hold it against them; they had helped Maks out in the business as was promised, and they had needed to do something to survive.  They had, after all, mothers to support, and no wife to draw in customers at the front of house.  And now, nobody had anybody, and she no longer had Maks.

Roman jerks her out of her reverie by laying a hand on her skin.  How long has it been since she’s felt the touch of another, Anastasia wonders as she draws away, skin tingling in response to the contact.  He takes the bag of flour from her and begins spilling it into the bin that she always uses; how long has he been watching her that he knows her habits, knows where she keeps her flour?

She admires the way his slim-built haunches lean under the give of the weight, then pulls out of the moment.  It would be improper, with Maks only so recently gone, to look at another man this way.  Still, her mind wanders, imagines what he looks like beneath the denim of his thrift-store jeans, until she is so filled with guilt and confusion that she can hardly breathe.

“Nastya, are you listening to me?” he asks, and she realizes he has been talking to her the whole time.  She smiles, gently, and his face relaxes in response.

“No, izvini, I was thinking about Maks.”

That same sadness from earlier traipses across his face like an interloper in their exchange.  “It’s not the same since we put him in the ground, Nastya.  You can’t run this place by yourself.”

She raises her chin defiantly.  “And why not?”  How she hates this, the old-school mentality of the woman behind the man.  But Roman’s answer, firm and rapid, reassures her.

“Because you don’t have the cash for it,” he tells her, and the look in his blue eyes says that she is liable not to like what he has to say next.  “Maybe if you just let Gosha sell you a few products, you can earn back enough to re-invest in the place.  He’s got some people who can man the deliveries for you and then—“

“And then I’ll belong to him!” she shouts, almost spitting in his face, and she can see him take a step back at her sudden, if not wholly unexpected outrage.  Her body is beginning to shake, from the legs up, and she cannot seem to stop it no matter how tightly she wraps her arms around herself, all the proprioceptive input she is trying to give herself not enough, never enough, and she knows she cannot even stand up alone, let alone do anything else.  So before her limbs can fail her, she raises her face, looks Roman dead in the eyes, and says, “I couldn’t do it to Maks, not even to his memory.’

And the tears roll, in a warm, wet stream, down her face, and she begins to sink to the floor.  All she knows is that the world around her has narrowed down to the expanse of her tiny field of vision and the fact that someone else has caught her.  Roman has her in his arms, and he is surprisingly solid for such a slim-built guy, not unlike Maksim was, and he is holding her, whispering something into the finer strands of her hair that she almost cannot catch, almost does not want to hear, but cannot help but listen to.

“Ponimayu, ponimayu, I understand,” he is crooning, soft as a song, and together, they are on the floor, and she begins to wonder what her neighbors back home would have thought, that she was wild, that she was crazy, but now and here, there is nobody to judge her, nobody to take away the arms holding her until the shaking begins to subside, nobody to tell her no.  Not even Maks.  Roman holds her for seconds, minutes, and then what seems like an entire eternity goes by.  The shaking and anguish is replaced by something warmer, deeper, and ultimately more forbidden.  Roman is stroking her hair, and her response has travelled far beyond the valley of comfort into something as familiar and old as time itself, and there are goose bumps standing on end on her arms, and her skin is responding to him with tiny little glimmers of electricity.

She moans low in her throat and pushes him away.  She gets up, dusting off any lingering specks of dirt on her pants and stands facing her kitchen counter, palms flat down.  She cannot look at him as she says, “I can’t.”

He gets up and stands next to her, too close and yet somehow, not close enough.  He leans in his face, just a little bit, so that she can feel the warmth of his breath tickling her ear.  His nose nudges against her cheek, and she turns to look at him, his blue eyes with their black pupils wide, and she sees herself reflected, vulnerable and tousled, in his eyes.  And when they are drawn together by some kind of magnetism that is borne of shared grief, Anastasia cannot honestly say what it is that passes through her—guilt or lust.  After he kisses her, he leaves.  And that night, for the first time since Maks died, she sleeps without dreaming.

Misery loves company, she has heard the Americans say, and it is this that she imagines prompts Anton to call her the following week.  They have not had much interaction since what happened, and Anastasia cannot say whether or not she misses his counsel.  In Moscow, after they were introduced, she saw him, simply, as Maks’s main friend, the one who knew how to get him out of any funk, the one who would be loyal to a fault.  And even here in the states, Anton had not abandoned them, promising to give Maks a share in his business as soon as it got big enough for that sort of thing.

So when he calls her, his light, unassuming voice filling the receiver and her ear, she assumes that he wants to simply get her out of her funk, protect her.  She ignores the odd sense of foreboding that fills her, waving it off as simply the result of finally getting enough sleep after so many weeks of being out of sorts.

“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.