Sex, Lies & Nikolai (28 page)

“And you’ve taken care of me,” I stress.

He fumes. “I give you
money
.”

“And that’s more than enough. I don’t need a knight in shining armour to take care of all my problems. I’m strong enough to do it myself.”

“Strong enough,” he repeats, quietly, looking at me strangely. “But how could you be strong enough if you gave her money?”

I just stare at him, stunned. “How did you know that?”

“Because I know you better than you think.”

Shit.

I drop my face into my hands, groaning into them. It’s one thing to tell yourself you fucked up. It’s another thing when someone you care about – fuck, and I really do care about him – knows it too.

“I just wanted her gone,” I try and explain. “I wanted her gone because…fuck, it was the easiest thing to do. I didn’t want to wake Scarlett up. I didn’t want her to see the state of that woman and have it affect her, because Scarlett still loves her, and she’d be devastated if she got cast aside and abandoned again. So, yeah, I took the easy route. I gave that bitch money, and she’ll come back, won’t she?”

He runs his hand down my spine. “Maybe.”

I stare darkly at a spot on the wall. I’m angry again, because all she does is make me angry. “She ripped my innocence away. She never cared when those men came into our place and they wandered into my room, drunk and feral. I didn’t have someone to lean on. I had to sleep with a knife under my pillow, and I pulled it out every time they tried to do something.” I pause, images flashing through my mind, memories of how terrified I was.

“And Grant? Did he ever try anything?” Nikolai’s words are calm, but I know better than to believe he is.

“Grant did things differently at first,” I muttered, fighting to keep the shakes at bay. “Some days he’d be great, other days he’d make me crawl around the unit for food.”

Nikolai’s hand halts in the middle of my back. His body language changes, but he doesn’t say a word. He listens, and for the first time ever I’m actually talking about something I’ve buried so deep inside me.

“He touched me once, when he was drunk. I was sixteen. He followed me to my bedroom, and then climbed into bed with me. He didn’t make it far past touching my legs.”

“Why?”

“I stabbed him.” My lips break into a dark smile. “Got him right in the arm and he stumbled out of there, trying to stop the bleeding.”

“Did he retaliate?”

“No, he’s odd that way. He can be logical one second, and crazy the next. He woke up, stared at me that morning with this…peculiar look on this face, and he never said a word about it. He never touched me again, either, except to backhand me every now and then, but never sexually. I think he was a little afraid of me. I’m nothing like my mother. She would never fight him. I think he understood that, maybe even respected it. It’s fucked up, isn’t it?”

Nikolai shrugs. “I know fucked up, Alina. I grew up in it.”

“Then you know why I’m trying so hard to protect Scarlett. I don’t want her to grow up as fucked up as me. I don’t want her to push people who care about her away. I don’t want that, Nikolai.”

“I know.”

I brush a tear from my eye. “I’ve never talked about this before. It’s weird.”

He pulls me to him, and I let him. I rest my head against chest and close my eyes, breathing him in. He doesn’t have to say sweet words to me. He just needs to hold me like this to make me feel alright.

“I really like you, Nikolai,” I admit quietly, tracing the tattoos along his chest.

My face is burning. It takes a lot for me to say something like that. To be so open. It’s a scary thing.

He takes my hand just then and lays a soft kiss on the inside of my palm. “You have no idea, Alina,” he murmurs, throatily. “You have no idea how I feel about you.”

That night Nikolai comes to my unit, bags of ingredients in hand. Scarlett is quiet for the first part, entering the kitchen to study him, and then leaving when he starts to pay her attention.

“She’s shy like you,” he remarks to me after the second time she’s done this.

“I’m not shy,” I argue, jokily.

“Keep lying. I see the places you blush –”

“Shh!” I smack him on the arm, glancing out the kitchen cautiously. “Not within earshot of her.”

He laughs and returns to the task at hand, chopping onions with his dexterous hands. He doesn’t flinch once, and the knife goes flying up and down.

“I never took for you a cook,” I remark, watching him.

“No?”

“I thought you’d have a housekeeper around.”

“I take care of myself.”

“I’d love to be a fly on the wall,” I muse, grinning mischievously. “See you tackling the laundry, vacuuming the floors –”

“Doing the dishes,” he cuts in, smirking.

“The scary Russian man tackling on household duties, it’s strangely hot.”

Nikolai chuckles, settling the knife down as he comes to me, caging me in against the counter. He drops his head, but he doesn’t kiss me. He knows I don’t want Scarlett to see anything remotely hands on between us, but I can tell he’s pushing his boundaries.

“Stick around after sex for once,” he says, his gaze penetrating, “and you’ll see the magic happen. I even have kitchen gloves.”

I bite my lip. “What colour?”

“Bumblebee yellow.”

I fake moan. “This is really getting me hot and bothered now.”

“I can bend over the sink, give you a little ass action. A little twerk.”

“I do love the ass.”

“Well, you can ass-ault me all you want.”

Oh, my God. I can’t stop laughing. “Keep going with that mouth and I won’t find you intimidating anymore.”

Grinning, he drops his hands and turns to the stove top, stirring the minced meat in the saucepan over one of the burners. “I don’t want to intimidate you ever, Alina.”

We eat on the couch in the living room, and it’s genuinely the best spaghetti I’ve ever had. Even Scarlett can’t resist the taste. She finishes her bowl, practically licks her plate clean and then watches Nikolai inquisitively.

When we’ve all finished, I quickly do the tidy up and gather all the plates into the kitchen. I let them soak in the sink, and then I quickly clean the counter tops. When I return, I catch Nikolai just as he moves off the couch and settles on the ground next to Scarlett. I stop there and watch as they both scatter the pieces of a puzzle around, flipping them over.

“How do you put them together?” he asks her. “Random pieces?”

“I do the border first,” she answers. “I find all the pieces with the straight edges and put them in a pile.”

“That’s a good way to do it.”

“How do you do it?”

“I match the colours.”

She pauses in her quest for all the edge pieces and watches him take all the same coloured ones aside. He fits them together and she smiles a little, but she’s still cautious of him. I see her guard is up. She’s comparing him to Grant. She’s waiting for him to flip out.

He never does, and I think it confuses her. She’s never had any positive male figures in her life, and for once – I don’t know why I think it but I do – I hope desperately for Nikolai to never get tired of me, because I can see us doing this a lot.

I like how tentative he is. Like her, he stays quiet, and when she speaks, he gives her all of his attention. By the time they’re finished the puzzle, I stop hanging back and call Scarlett in for bedtime.

“Say good night to Nikolai,” I tell her after she cleans up.

“Good night,” she hastily says, racing to the bathroom, like she doesn’t want to confront him any longer.

He smiles softly over his shoulder, looking me dead in the eye as he quietly remarks, “Exactly like you. With a little time, she’ll bloom.”

Scarlett brushes her teeth, and I settle her into bed. I relax next to her for a while, and tell her the story of Belle. She listens but doesn’t interrupt. She lets me talk, her tired eyes never leaving my face. When I finish, she wraps her arm around my neck and gives me a tight squeeze.

“I like him,” she whispers in my ear just before she pulls away. Before I can respond to that, she turns her back to me, gathers the sheets around her and pulls it to her chest.

I step out moments later, disappointed to find Nikolai already at the door, dressed and ready to leave. I smile at him, but he looks shut down all of a sudden, barely meeting my eye as I approach him.

“Why are you leaving?” I ask.

“I have to go,” he simply replies.

“You’re running.”

“No.”

I tilt my head to the side, studying him, recognizing the distress because I’ve felt it too. “Was it too much? Meeting her?”

His blue eyes glisten as he looks at me. “She’s beautiful. She has the softest nature, and you’re very lucky to have her.”

I take another tentative step closer to him. “Then what is it, Nikolai?”

Looking ragged, he takes me by the arm and pulls me to him. Then he presses his forehead to mine and, closing his eyes, he whispers, “You’re Belle.”

Instantly my heart pinches in my chest. My eyes gloss over. I search for words, but I can’t speak, so I simply nod once, and he lets out a long breath of air.

“You want to rescue yourself,” he continues. “You’ve been saving up to find your own little pasture, haven’t you?”

I just look at him, the answer clear in my eyes.

He nods once, pressing his lips against mine in a short, tender kiss. Then he pulls away, swallowing hard as his fingers wrap around my necklace. “I’m falling for you, Alina.”

Just like that, everything stops.

I can’t process…

I’m not even sure I heard him right at first, but I know what he said. I can see it reflected in his eyes.

He kisses me again, but my lips are barely responding. Even my eyes remain open as I try to make sense of his words. He pulls away, and he knows I’m tongue-tied and staggered. He smiles warmly in return. Then he steps back and gives me a final look before he leaves.

*

He doesn’t mention what he said to me for the rest of the week, but he doesn’t need to. I think about it a lot, and by a lot I mean
all the time
.

I’ve never had someone care for me. Except Scarlett, and maybe even Roberta, but nobody on an intimate level has ever looked at me and said those words to me. I feel…special. Important even, and I don’t know what I did to Nikolai to warrant those very scary words, but I want to keep them, cherish them, hang them up somewhere inside me I can easily find whenever I feel down.

Everything’s changed. I can
feel
it. Nikolai lets go, parting from the wall he stood behind. And I let go too, no longer lying to myself to process life easier.

There’s affection behind every look, every touch – and maybe it was there all along but I refused to see it until now.

A week later, cooking becomes routine after sex. Usually he leaves me in bed and gets started on a meal in the kitchen. He’s just as efficient as the first time with his cooking, and the smell of food is typically what gets me up and moving to him, a loose shirt of his on.

We eat at the island, falling either into a comfortable silence, or an easy conversation. Everything about Nikolai is comfortable and easy, and the more I’m with him, the more I start to accept he’s not just a paycheque. He’s more.

And it scares the living shit out of me.

As we sit and eat now, I stare at him for some time, my eyes glued to his face, fascinated by all things Nikolai. My heart warms when he catches my gaze and he smirks at me in that cocky way I love. He knows I’m swooning.

Looking down at my food, I take a moment, hesitating as I try to form the words. I learned the hard way I need to just blurt them out or else it’ll never come out. So I steel myself and quietly say, “I don’t want the envelopes anymore.”

He looks up, surprised by my outburst.

We exchange looks for some time. He’s trying to assess if I’m being serious, and I’m trying to tell him I am. This isn’t random. I’m not in some kind of lovey state and saying things I don’t mean. No, I’ve thought it through a lot.

I don’t want to do it anymore.

“Alina,” he replies after a tense moment, “don’t say something you might regret.”

I shake my head. “I’m not going to regret this. I don’t want the envelopes anymore. I have more than enough money to look after bills for the next year. I don’t want the money, Nikolai.” I pause, swallowing hard as I come to terms with the truth. “I don’t…I don’t think it was ever all about the money.”

When I finally find the courage to look at him, I’m softened by the affection I see in him. It makes me stand by my words all the more.

“It’s there if you need it,” he tells me, but even I can hear the hope in his voice. He doesn’t want the envelopes anymore, either.

With another bite of food, he takes my hand and squeezes me tight.