The Audition (3 page)

I’m back upstairs, kneeling at Nikolai’s feet like a good little pet while he feeds me lunch. No surprise there. What is surprising is that he is an excellent cook. I’d heard him rattle around in the kitchen while I played, and when I came upstairs, there was a big pot of a spicy chili bubbling away at the stove, and warm slices of bread on the table.

I open my mouth and he feeds me spoonfuls of chili, blowing on the food to make sure I don’t burn myself. And when I’m not busy resenting that he’s treating me like a pet, I’m secretly enjoying being taken care of. Nobody has done this for me since my mother died.

We make small talk while we eat. We avoid all landmines. We talk about our favourite foods, we talk about movies we’ve seen lately. Nikolai confesses with a quick grin that he’s addicted to Japanese samurai movies. “Like Kill Bill?” I ask with a wrinkle of my forehead, and he shakes his head. “Like the stuff that Tarantino watches as inspiration for Kill Bill,” he replies. “We can watch something tonight if you’d like.”

Tonight
. While his suggestion of watching a movie sounds really good, I also know that I’ll be sitting at his feet, and when we are done, I’ll be relegated to the cage in the dungeon to sleep. I’m self-aware enough to know that while I’m turned on by the way he’s treating me, I also don’t feel very respected. If this was something we did in a sexual context, I would be entirely okay with all of it. With the kneeling, with the leash, with eating morsels of food from Nikolai’s hands.

But he’s shown no sign that he’s attracted to me. All this is for him is a training method. His words from this morning come back to me.
Perhaps treating you like an animal will help you remember how to survive.

I want to be more than an experimental subject to Nikolai, more than a student unable to reach her full potential. I want to
matter
to Nikolai.

***

I’m allowed a few moments to myself after lunch, while Nikolai washes dishes and cleans the kitchen, declining my offer of help. I watch him silently, admiring the economy of his movements as he efficiently fills the sink with hot water. As his hands dip in the suds, I shake my head. Those hands used to be so valuable that they were insured. Dishes seem like such a let-down.

“How did you cope?” I don’t know if he will answer my question, but I have a sudden, burning need to know.

His back is to me, his hands engaged in the mundane rituals of cleaning. But when he speaks, his voice is relaxed. “After the accident, you mean?”

“Yes.”

He doesn’t turn towards me. But his voice is meditative. “For three months,” he says, and I strain to hear above the sound of the running water, “I moped and pouted. I listened to my old recordings. I went to concerts, and I railed against fate, so envious of the pianists on stage. But then, I got over it.”

“How?”

“Was there a magic moment, you mean? One shining point that I could use and say – this, here, this was the moment?”

I nod, but of course, he has his back to me, and can’t see the movement.

“There wasn’t any,” he clarifies. “The hospital had a therapist on the staff, and we would talk. My mother was a pianist too, you know, until she needed to support herself and a child, when my father died in a mining accident. She should have been bitter and resentful at how life turned out for her, but if she was, she never showed it. She still played, every chance she got. And when she was at a piano, it was like there was a light inside her, illuminating her from the inside out.”

I swallow the lump in my throat. His mother had died a couple of years before mine, weakened by the harshness of Norilsk. Nikolai had been trying to bring her to America, to an easier life. I’d seen him cry that day for the first and only time.

“Two, three months after, I realized I could give up, or I could try to emulate my mother. There’s always joy in music. You just have to let it in.”

I blink back a stray tear. “When the door opens, other things come in. Pain. Sorrow. Fear.”

He turns to me. “The parable of Pandora’s box,” he says intently, “is that there’s always hope. You just have to remember that.” He looks into my eyes. “You are too young to give up on life, Allie. Now, get downstairs. I’ll join you in a moment.”

***

I’m handed a large glass dildo when Nikolai walks into the room. “Use it.” His voice is an order, but there’s an undertone of amusement to it.

I’m sure my face flames. I avoid reaching out and touching my cheeks to check, but they burn with warmth and embarrassment. I cannot masturbate in front of this man. I just cannot. “Please, no,” I whisper in complete mortification.

“Yes.” His voice is firm. He unbuckles his belt and draws it from its loops, doubling it upon itself. “Use
red
to stop me, and
yellow
if you want me to ease back.”

I thought I wasn’t going to have a safe word,
I want to reply. But, though I’m probably being naïve and romantic, I’ve never seriously believed that I’m in danger from Nikolai. No. The real danger is my emotions, swelling up to unbearable pressure behind the walls I’ve built. When those walls burst, I’m not sure what exactly will happen.

“Move that dildo in and out of your cunt, Allie.”

I’ve been naked for two days, yet this feels like the greater embarrassment. This is personal and revealing. As many men as there have been in my bed, I’ve never masturbated in front of one of them. This is entirely too intimate. This is something I’d do in front of a lover that
mattered.
 

In that basement, sitting on the piano stool, with my legs spread apart, and a warm breeze touching the inner folds of my cunt, I realize that I want to matter to Nikolai because he matters to me.

I keep my eyes lowered. I’m not sure what mine will reveal. There’s fear of what I’ve discovered. But there’s arousal as well, and though my erect nipples and the wet, squishing noises that my pussy makes already reveal that lust to Nikolai, I still hide my gaze. I’m less exposed if he just thinks I’m physically attracted to him. If he realizes the extent of my caring, I don’t know what I would do.

My body thrums with pleasure as I move the dildo in and out of me. Nikolai moves around me as my fingers curl around the phallus and thrust it into my body. The belt starts kissing my skin. Each lash has me groaning out loud, shuddering with mingled pleasure and pain. The flaming in my skin is met with answering fire in my cunt. My entire body feels like it is about to combust from a stray spark.

Nikolai moves behind me, and the belt curves around my breasts. I stare into space, a slave to the sensations churning through my body. I can smell leather, mingled in with the clean, crisp scent of his aftershave. I hear the whistle in the air as it lands on my nipples and I find myself moaning like a wounded animal.

But I don’t pull away, and both my hands wrap around the dildo, pistoning it in and out of my pussy, imagining that it is Nikolai who is thrusting into my body.

Now, my inside thighs are lashed. Each stripe makes me whimper, but I keep my legs open for him. I watch my skin redden and I feel the response of my cunt, weeping in pleasure at the punishment he’s putting me through.

My fingers find my clitoris, and I grind the dildo into me, hard, as if I can fuse it into my body. When my orgasm claims me, I slip off the piano stool from the force of it and rest on the floor, utterly drained.

My skin is red and sweaty. My hair sticks to my forehead in damp waves.  I’m completely unsurprised by the words that come out of his mouth. “Play for me now, Allie.”

***

After a long afternoon of practice, I’m allowed upstairs. “Can I go out for a walk?” I ask him hesitantly. I’ve been stuck in his house for two days, and I crave fresh air.

“Of course,” he says. I hug myself inwardly. I’ve no doubt that Nikolai would have sent me back to the dungeon if he’d been unhappy with my playing. I can feel the progress I’m making, and his permission underscores it. “But, let’s get you properly attired for the cold. Go get dressed.”

When I come back upstairs, he has a scarf and a hat in his hands. They must be his. They smell like him. I try not to breathe it in, afraid of acting like a silly teenager. He wraps the scarf around me, and pulls the hat down over my head. Pulling me close, he kisses my lips, a brief, fleeting touch.

“You should take better care of yourself,
lapochka
,” he says, pulling back. “How long are you going to be gone for?”

“An hour, maybe? I just can’t play anymore.”

I thought I’d get a stormy reaction from him at that, but he nods again in understanding. “Do you have your phone with you?” He gives me his phone number, and makes me give him mine.

“I have almost no battery left,” I tell him, and he frowns.

“It’s the same model as mine. Use my charger and plug it back in when you get back home.”

When I get back home.
Though there is hidden longing in my heart, this isn’t home. Home is New York. Home is my messy condo, with its detritus of empty pizza boxes and old take out containers. Home is a coffee table littered with empty bottles of beer, and with ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts, since most of my friends insist on smoking inside.

Home isn’t this clean, bright house, warmed by the smell of cooking, with this delectable man who frowns down on me in concern.

“Okay,” I say, and head down the road.

***

I’m not ready yet to face my feelings for Nikolai. Things feel different in the gathering dusk, in the clear crisp air of oncoming spring. Whatever I felt in the dungeon is real, I know that. But I also know I’m capable of seeing warmth in Nikolai’s eyes where there might be none.

Pandora’s Box. Am I supposed to feel hope? That seems like such a luxury to me.

Instead, I think about Juilliard, though my feelings for Nikolai have wound through that as well. I want to reproach myself for being a fool. He hasn’t touched me. He hasn’t looked at me with lust. I’m a project, a broken doll, waiting to be fixed.

That’s not precisely true,
the more logical part of me points out. Nikolai has also devoted his entire Saturday to me. He’s cooked meals for me, and fed me. Yes, he had a leash in his hands, but that’s somewhat my fault for suggesting it snidely.

Nikolai isn’t a saint, I know, but neither am I. If he’s using me for sex, then I’m using him as well to get into Juilliard. But his kindness is an unanticipated bonus. He didn’t have to be nice to me. He didn’t have to wrap a scarf around my neck, kissing me gently as he told me to take care of myself. He didn’t need to make me feel cherished.

It feels good to be outside and to clear my head. The last six years seem to be a fog that swift applications of a riding crop have dissipated. That’s unduly dramatic – and I’d already started the process of rescuing myself this January. But there’s no doubt that the last two days have helped.

This afternoon, after my orgasm with the dildo, I heard it in my playing. It was softer. More feeling came through. Part of it was that I was sated from my orgasm. But you don’t need a lot to seize on, when you are looking for a lifeline, and god help me, I’m looking for one. Nikolai, with his crop and his insistence on my nakedness, with his leash and with his ruler, has offered me a helping hand, and I’m determined to seize it and start climbing.

***

“Tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner?” he asks me. I beam at him. Another favourite treat from my teen years, and once again, he’s remembered.

“Is this a reward because you were happy with the way I played?” I tease him. I don’t know where the teasing comes from, but I’m assuming it springs from the hope I felt on my walk.

He grins. “Happy is overselling it a little,” he remarks dryly. “But it is an improvement. Evidently, repeated applications of the crop are good for you.”

I wink at him. “Evidently,” I agree.

We sit on two ends of the pleasantly-worn leather couch, and we watch a movie about a blind ninja monk. It’s Japanese with English subtitles.  I want to snuggle in next to Nikolai, but I stay where I am. I’m trying to summon up courage to approach him.

On my walk, I told myself that I was doing all of this for Juilliard. And I am, but it’s more complicated than that. I have feelings for Nikolai.

He was the first guy I fell in love with, so many years ago. The first guy I wanted with aching desperation but I couldn’t have. But there’s a world of difference between the unrequited crush of a sixteen year old, and the very adult longing I have right now.

Yet one thing has stayed the same. I’m terrified of approaching him and I’m terrified of rejection. If I didn’t care for him, I could have been as forward as I wanted. I could have asked for what I wanted. But because he matters, I am paralyzed, unable to move.

Stop being such a pussy,
I scold myself.
The worst he can do is say no. You won’t know unless you ask.

In a burst of clarity, I remember Nikolai’s words from yesterday.
I won’t rape you, Allie,
he had said when I’d asked about safe words. I had assumed that he had arrogantly thought that I’d be willing to throw myself at him. Which happens to be true, but perhaps that isn’t what he’d meant. Perhaps he was telling me that I needed to show him I wanted him.