The Prelude (23 page)

I want to let you in, but I’m scared. Can’t you tell?

Instead of opening up and being honest with him, I do what I’ve always done when someone gets too close. I turn the situation around on the other person. “You don’t tell me everything.”

He scoffs a light laugh. “What would you like to know?”

“For starters, I’d like to know the real reason Adriana chose to come crash at my place. And then, you can tell me why you’re always checking out our surroundings when we go out this way. I can’t believe, you think I haven’t noticed? And I‘d love to know why Katerina, an American woman who uses a Russian name, lives in a completely different country from her estranged husband. Should I go on?”

“I think you’ve made your point.” He inhales deeply. My assault affects him more than I thought it would.

He takes a large gulp of his White Russian. “My father isn’t a very kind man, Erin. He did something long ago that changed our relationship, for the worst. My mother and father have been separated for years. She pisses a tough-as-nails businesswoman act. But deep down inside she’s just as fragile and frightened as you are. The two of you are more alike than you think.”

I’m the one who scoffs this time. “There’s no one alive who is like your mother.”

“Now, it’s my turn,” he says. “Tell me the complete story behind this.” He fingers the butterfly necklace I’ve worn ever since we returned from our mountain getaway. I avert my eyes right away. I’m not ready to expose the part of me that belongs to the memory of my sister.

“Don’t keep shutting me out, Erin. I just opened up and told you things about my parents. Being open and honest this way is hard for me too.”

His eyes ask for so much. If I were to really let go, then I’m sure they’d pull everything from inside me. “If this is all about sex, then why do we need to have this conversation?”

Alek lets out a frustrated sigh. “I don’t know. Kill me for saying this, but I was thinking we were moving beyond the dog chasing the pussy cat game.” Several heads in the café turn in our direction, but Alek doesn’t flinch a bit.

I lean toward him. “That’s what me, the female, is supposed to say.” I’m trying to lighten the moment. I don’t think it’s working.

“Her name. Can you at least tell me your sister’s name?” he asks.

What harm is there in telling him her name?

“Jada. She was my best friend.” I lower my eyes.

Damn the stupid tears that just won’t go away. Alek reaches across the table, taking my small hands in between his large ones. His shoulders slump and he keeps blinking, a lot. I’m touched by his emotional response to what I said.

He calls over a waiter, pays the check, and then we leave the restaurant. I insist we head over to his condo, because I figure that Adriana and Luca are more than likely crashing at my apartment. And I don’t want my boss to have a heart attack when he sees Alek standing over him while he’s screwing around with his sister.

We go to Alek’s apartment this time. The sex we have is tender, less rushed, more exploratory. It’s the kind of intimacy that two people experience when they’re moving beyond the physical aspects of each other. Alek is right. This thing we’re doing, this partnership as Alek calls it, is no longer about an arrangement between two horny people.

This has become the crutch for a two people that are emotionally crippled and terrified of commitment. And to my slight distress, it has quickly become the one thing I feared the most—the loss of control over my emotions as I allow another person to enter my heart.

Alek

I dreamt of her again, the girl who died in my arms.

The nightmare involves a fire of some type.  There’s a deserted road close to a marsh or a swamp. I’m not sure. I do know that I’m terrified. Smoke surrounds the car I’m inside, choking me. I kick my door open and fall out of the vehicle. I cough so hard, I’m thinking my insides will come up if it continues.

I glance across the area. The lump always lies in the road. I know what I’ll see before I move my feet in that direction. But still, I walk over there. She wears a yellow dress as bright as the sun.

The girl’s face belongs to Erin.

“Please don’t leave me here all alone,” she pleads.

I bend down, reaching out to comfort her, and cradle her in my arms. And then,  both our bodies catch fire, the flames licking at our skin. I scream in agony just before I wake up.

I
’m not burning alive. Erin isn’t dead.

She lies beside me
, holding me in her arms.

Erin

“What happened in your dream?” I ask, massaging his hair and caressing his back as we lay in bed, our naked bodies entwined together. He’s visibly shaken. I’m not sure what to do for him. He embraces me, burying his face against my chest. A long moment passes, and I’m thinking he has fallen asleep again.

But then he says, “Eight years ago, I was in a gang run by a man known as the Phoenix. This wasn’t a kiddy street gang. This was a group of kids who had influential parents. You know the kind, the ones like your frat boys sometimes form. It was a vital thing to do. My father’s overbearing ways got on my nerves. In his eyes, my older brother, Dmitri, could do no wrong. He was the perfect pure-blooded Russian son I could never be. Father always said my American blood made me weak. I set out to prove him wrong. So, at the stupid and impressionable age of fifteen, I found the Phoenix through my cousin, the son of my father’s sister. I had to agree to go through an initiation, and I would be marked.”

“Your tattoo,” I say, completely wrapped up in his story. He nods and subconsciously massages his arm. I knew he’d tell me about his past one day, but I guess I figured it would happen later on in our arrangement. 

“There were ten disciples. That’s what the Phoenix nicknamed his errand boys. He was very excited to have me on the team, since I travelled back and forth between Russia and America with my mother on a regular basis. He even gave me my own unique nickname, the Scarlet Phoenix. I thought being in this gang would solve everything.

“What I didn’t know was how much the Phoenix hated my father. They’d been enemies since childhood. He used me and my cousin as bait, a way to make our parents suffer. Between my father’s illegal firearms he smuggled through the country on a regular basis, and the correspondence the disciples carried back and forth between enemies, something was bound to fall apart. And it did.

“Father somehow ticked off some members of the Sicilian Mafia. Something about a batch of guns they never received. They accused Father of fraud. The Phoenix sent Nikolai to deliver the note telling them this news. That didn’t work out so well for my comrade.

“I begged the Phoenix to go and get him out. I knew he was being held at a place in downtown Leningrad, but I wasn’t sure exactly where. He’d saved me from a vicious attack by a gang member. I owed him my life. With the help of my cousin, I found the warehouse where Nikolai was being held. The three of us almost made it out undetected. Things weren’t meant to happen that way, though.” He pauses, closes his eyes, and takes a deep breath.

“You don’t have to go on with this story, Alek.”

“Yes, I do. I want you to understand who I truly am, where I’ve come from. Where I want to be,” he says, lifting a hand up to my face, caressing it.

“On the way out of the complex, we’re spotted by one of the guards. He opened fire, taking my cousin out, a straight shot to the head.” Alek closes his eyes and pauses a short moment. I’m holding my breath too. 

“He almost hit Nikolai. We make it to the woods. I use the phone I took off of my dead cousin to call my brother, Dmitri. He answered, listened to my story, and tells me how I chose to take the side of a band of rebels that are hell bent on destroying our father. So now, I’ll have to find a way out of it myself.”

“Oh, Alek, I’m sorry he did that to you,” I say, not knowing exactly how to comfort someone who has experienced something like what he has just told me.

“It wasn’t my brother’s neglect that bothered me. He’s always been an asshole towards me. What hurt the most is that I’m almost certain I heard my father’s voice in the background. I know in my gut that he overheard our conversation,” he says, glancing deep in my eyes, pain storming inside them.

I want to kiss away every bad memory so he’s left with nothing but good ones, the kind we can make together.

“What happened to this Phoenix guy?” I’m almost afraid to hear his answer.

Alek shakes his head. “I have no idea. He could be anywhere, though. He’s a chameleon, Erin, the charming kind that can make you think jumping off a fifteen story building is doable. A few years after the Phoenix incident happened, Mother found a way to leave our father. He did something terrible that even she couldn’t forgive. She took me, Adriana, and even Nikolai out of Mother Russia. And even though she and father were separated, he still takes care of our financial needs. That doesn’t make up for the way he treated us, though.

“Shortly after that, Mother took us away and focused her attention on turning us into child prodigies, enrolling us in the best music schools Europe had to offer. And now, here I am.” He gives me a weak smile.

“Wow, he must be a real head job.”

“Which ‘he’ are you referring to?”

“This Phoenix guy,” I say, thinking his father could easily be lumped into the deranged group too; but I don’t want to hurt his feelings by saying so.

“To put it lightly, yes.”

“Is that why you had the nightmare?”

“No. That’s another story for some other time,” he says as he stares in my eyes, a sadness riding inside his. 

“Thank you for sharing that with me.”

“You don’t have to thank me Erin. I’d trust you with any of my secrets.”

Right, so he’s fishing now. It’s my turn to open up and demonstrate my trust. But I can’t.

“You can trust me in the same way. You do know that, right?” he asks and lifts my chin up so I’m now staring into his eyes.

“What do you want to know? My life isn’t half as interesting,” I answer. The way he gazes at me as we lie here in bed together punches through me.

“For starters, I’d like to understand who you are.  I want you to feel free enough to open up to me, to trust me.

“I do trust you,” I say.

“Then tell me about your family. A name, a place, anything to give me a hint of who Erin Angelo truly is.”

I can’t tell him those things just yet. He’d never look at me the same way again if I told him about the events that happened in my life five years ago. So I go for a diversion tactic. “For this to be an arrangement based on sex, we sure do cover some deep shit.”

“Don’t do that, Erin. Please.”

“Do what?”

“Push me away. Let me help you get through this,” he pleads.

“I’m working on it. Opening up more, I mean.” That’s about all I can promise him right now.

The way he touches me this time feels differently from any of the previous moments we’ve had before. He kisses my lips gently as he enters me. We don’t make a marathon of thrusts, grunts, and gasps out of our sex this time. Alek and I are no longer at war. Sharing our bodies becomes more of a need, a desire to experience something beyond the physical. Even the orgasm that rocks through my body rushes through the core of my soul, my heart.

After I stop trembling, Alek comes next. As his body vibrates, I wrap my legs around him and massage his back. I kiss him as eagerly as he has done for me and do my best to keep from hiding all of myself as he stares into my eyes.

I still can’t shake the feeling that he’s searching for something with the way he glances into my eyes. And he still hasn’t told me which part of his awful story fuels his nightmare, the one where he cries out in his sleep, asking for someone to save ‘her’.

Don’t kid yourself, Erin.

I know what he searches for in my eyes. He wants to know that I trust him. For Alek, the word means everything. Tonight, I learned about a terrible part of his past. I hate that I’m not able to do the same thing for him just yet. I can’t tell him about what I did five years ago.

Eventually, I will. Or I think I will. It just won’t happen tonight. There’s one thing I’ve figured out in all of this, though. Alek’s happiness means the world to me. And why is that? Even Rightous Me knows the answer to that question.

Because you’re falling for him.

* * *

Sitting in La Scala’s VIP section, we get the best view of Alek when he steps out to the podium. Luca, Carla, Rafe, and yes, Adriana sits to my left. By now, the word has gotten around that I’m the new woman in the great Maestro’s life. I don’t usually mess around with gossip columns, but Selene calls almost every day to tell me about an article she saw describing Alek Dostov’s latest plaything, a designer from an up and coming label called Black Butterfly. Hey, whatever they want to believe let them do it.

The more gossip we have, the more publicity there’ll be for Black Butterfly. And then Rafe and Luca won’t have to worry about anyone buying out everything we’ve worked so hard to create.