Authors: Jessa Hawke
“What do you do?” I asked him. He finally turned around to face me, those baby blues the color of the sky after the clouds have cleared.
“I own a store,” he said, and offered no other information.
I suppose I should have known then, realized it and saved myself a world of pain afterwards. But being with Arkadii was intoxicating, more intoxicating that this nation’s love affair with alcohol, like the movies, like the stories of sacrifice for love. I hardly recognized myself. Who was this girl on this handsome, lean man’s arm? Everywhere we went, people knew who he was. The best tables were reserved for him; he danced with grace and pizazz. When he held me, it was nothing like the engineer I had danced with; nothing about it felt sleazy. In Arkadii’s arms, I felt like a woman, rather than Mama’s little girl. It had something to do with the honesty I sensed behind the jokey manner in which he presented himself. Maybe I was just searching for the vulnerability behind the charisma he oozed from every pore; maybe I took it as a sign that for the two weeks he wooed me, he never even looked at another woman. There was, as he put it, no other girl for him, and I believed it.
Before him, I always thought of kisses as nothing but a mashing together of mouths, an exchange of bacteria-filled saliva between two people as some strange demonstration of love that is accepted by no species other than human. But by the end of our first week together, all I could do was stare at his mouth and wonder why he had not kissed me yet. Was it because I did not rouge my cheeks like the women he was used to? Was it that my breasts were too large and my hips too wide to be fashionable? One night, we danced together, and he walked me to the outskirts of the tent city where I was staying. There, underneath the trees, I wished him a peaceful night, and leaned in for a hug, feeling misery overtake me as I realized that if he had not kissed me by now, that it was surely over between us. I sighed deeply to myself, and turned to leave. He caught my hand and pulled me back into his arms.
His lips were soft. I never thought that that would be something I would notice in a kiss, but it was. He opened his mouth against me and I felt my head tilting, felt my arms slide up around his neck of their own accord, felt my hands close around his face, and felt myself falling into him. It was never like this, not even in books, and certainly not in the movies. There were no fireworks, no Puccini playing. Instead, there was a visceral presence of being together in the moment, a sudden realization that my heart was thudding painfully in my chest. I felt him respond to me, and was amazed. Somewhere down the line, I had forgotten that she was feminine. That someone could still appreciate my softness, my curves. I did not think about this now. Instead, I pushed him against a tree trunk and forgot to care that my neighbors might be watching. He pulled his head back from the kiss with a slight sucking sound, and for a moment, I was terrified that I had done it wrong, that he was going to tell me to stop it, terrified because I was hungry in a way that was so new, so fledgling, that to abandon it would make me forever lost.
Instead, he bit his bottom lip with his top teeth, put his hands on the curvature of my waist, and pulled me into him with an intensity that caused me to stand on my tiptoes, leaning my whole body into the kiss. Suddenly, I was very glad that he was strong, that his forearms and shoulders were curved with muscles that I had never before appreciated in a man. I felt a little sigh escape my lips and laughed at the sound I imagined it to make. He pulled back and smiled at me, sweetly, acceptingly.
“What, dorogaya? What’s so funny?”
“Nothing. Oh, nothing,” I breathed, cradling his face in my palms and drawing it back to me. I kissed his top lip and then his bottom, felt him push open my lips with his tongue, felt the muscle inside and sucked it. What had come over me? I was not thinking about anything; I had lost her mind. I didn’t care. All I cared about was that we had not even come up for air, that he keep squeezing my waist between his hands, that he not cease the run of his palms along my backside, a side I did not ever imagine someone enjoying, that he not stop touching me because the moment he did, surely I would fall apart into some other version of myself, the brainy one, the one where the softness of my hair and the secret hidden roundness of my breasts did not matter.
We leaned away from the tree and I laughed, laughed aloud with the sheer incredibleness of it all. Arkadii, whose arms wrapped around me like I was small and precious. Arkadii whose ripple of abs was tangible beneath my fingers, whose shirt collar I was grabbing in a fist, Arkadii whose face I was pulling towards me, Arkadii whose blue eyes were lost in a haze of arousal, whose lips were coming to me, a freight train I wanted to hit me with full force. He teased me, brushing against my lips, and then pulled me in close again; I could feel herself push the length of my body against him, and knew he felt my breasts against his chest. The students might think me a common tart, but who cared about the students when Arkadii’s hands were roaming independently free of his mind, shaking me, changing me from the inside out.
He paused and stepped back, looking me straight in the eye. In that look there was no room for words. He took one purposeful stride forward, gathered my small face into his large hands, trapping me in one spot with his eyes in a gaze that was so intimate that I felt herself blush from my head to my toes. I could not stand the intensity of it, I could not, and so I felt her eyelashes flutter down, me, who never backed down from anything! With one gentle pull, he drew me towards him, and I went, so willingly, gave myself so vulnerably that it was a transcendental experience. My heart hammered in my chest so rapidly I thought surely it would explode; I threw my arms around him and disappeared inside the kiss, felt him finally quicken his breath against me, and knew, in that moment, the total experience of life, its joys and lamentations, the first intake of air and the last exhalation of death. I had never known you could stay inside a kiss forever.
I barely made it back to my tent. The next morning, I was a ghost person, spooning kasha into my mouth like I had forgotten that sustenance was a basic life necessity. I hardly noticed the whispering around me, rather than the convivial general nature of the students. In fact, I noticed nearly nothing at all until Tolik settled his tray down at my table.
“What are you doing?” he asked me, keeping his voice low, his eyes scanning the environment.
“Eating what looks like perlovka, why?”
“Not that! What were you doing with Akrasha last night?”
I felt myself flush with the memory of what exactly Arkadii and I had been doing the night before; it had kept me awake for hours. “I think that’s my own business, don’t you, Tolik?” I hissed at him, suddenly noticing that the people around us had suddenly gone silent.
Tolik looked at me with barely veiled disgust. “I thought you knew better than to go around with a guy like that,” he said.
“A guy like what?” I did not like where this conversation was going, not one bit.
“Well, for starters, he’s a partiinuii. And for another, I think he’s got a wife back in Omsk.”
I felt the bile rise in my throat. “He does not!” I cried, slamming my spoon down on the table. “He would never be with me if that was true.”
Tolik looked embarrassed, but I suspected it was for me, not for himself. “Well, either way, I never thought of you as prodazhnaya, as a sellout. What’s he giving you, anyway?”
“He’s not giving me anything, durak, idiot,” I snarled at him, feeling my fists clench together as I realized that everyone at the tables closest to us, plus the cooks, were listening in on our conversation.
Tolik had the nerve to smirk at me, and I wanted to wipe it straight off his face; in fact, I wanted Arkadii to wipe it off his face for me. Without the slightest remorse, Tolik looked me right in the eye and said, “Yeah, you’d have to be just a little prettier for him to give you anything, wouldn’t you?”
The slap cracked the silence of the morning and reddened Tolik’s cheek substantially. “Don’t you ever talk to me about anything ever again,” I said, getting up from the table and gathering my tray into my hands.
“Ah tu skotina, why you bitch,” Tolik yelled, and started to disengage from the table when his friends rushed up behind him and grabbed his arms. I did not look back as I walked away, but Tolik just carried on. “What did he say he does for a living, huh? Did he tell you that that shop he owns he owns because his uncle is someone way high up? That his uncle has connections with Vovik in prison and Vovik is his krisha, his roof? Did you know your new boyfriend is a thug?”
I said nothing, but my heart thudded fearfully all the way back to my tent. I collapsed onto my sleeping bag and wondered. Could it be true? After all, I had been having such a magical time with Arkadii that I had never asked how it was that he always said, “Oh, they know me here,” every time we entered a café. Or how it was that he always had concert tickets to sold-out shows.
Was Arkadii who Tolik said he was?
I told myself it did not matter. I told myself that the green monster of jealousy had bitten Tolik and the other students, who all proceeded to whisper behind my back as I continued to see Arkadii for the next week. I would come back, delirious from the swooning kisses I was receiving from my handsome man, only to have the evening soured by their whispering and hateful looks. I called to tell my mother about it, and she listened, quiet until the last. She asked me only to be careful; she said that love can make you so dizzy you forget where the ground is and where your head is in relation to it. I shook it all off because I had never met a man like Arkadii.
We could laugh together. I could share my hopes, my dreams. He loved that I wanted to write and have my own career, he admired my independence. I could see us coming here every summer, to this place where the water runs clear on the white sands of the beach. I saw us having a child together; I never even considered that somebody else could have already taken that place because Arkadii was always so open.
And the touching. There was no place I would not be willing to touch him, I knew that as his palms climbed over my body, but I was still me, I was still gently bred and shyer than a country mouse at a city party. He never rushed me; instead, he kneaded the muscles of my thighs when we had had a particularly vigorous swim, pushed down on the collarbones above my chest in a possessive manner, and made me burn. We were in the middle of one such lovely evening outside of his hotel one night when it finally occurred to me that underneath the heat, something was bothering me. I broke away from our kiss with a loud sucking motion that would have, at any other moment, made me laugh along with him.
“Arkasha,” I said, leaning my head against his chest and pressing my palms against where I could feel his heartbeat. “Where did you get the money to start your own business? You’re only twenty-five.”
He looked down at me, and for a moment, the man I had been with all week became a stranger, someone who I did not recognize, someone with who all the rumors suddenly made sense.
“Who’s been talking to you? What did they say?” he asked, but his voice was mild, non-accusatory.
“Just some of the students,” I said fearfully, softly.
“Look,” he said, taking my hand and settling us both down on a nearby bench. “I am not going to apologize for my success. It’s like you with your intelligence—would I ever ask you to stop being that way? I am happy, I am healthy, I am loving, of myself and of others. Would you ask me to change that?”
I listened to his speech and my heart pounded a crazy little beat that I could not help. He was right, he was so right, and in the next moment, he was kissing me, and I did not care anymore about his uncle, his connections, or the fact that he had not answered my question directly or much at all.
It was I who had turned into the beast. I kissed him with a fervor that almost took him backwards, that knocked his head against the door of his hotel room, but neither one of us cared at that point. We stumbled through the door once he got it opened and I peeled his shirt off, unrolling it from his gorgeous shoulders like he was a feast and I was a starving person who had waited for this my entire life. We had not even gotten to the bed when I grabbed for his belt, bumbling inexperience mixing with hazy lust, and then he put a hand on my hand to stop me.
To stop me.
I turned my head away in shame and settled into one of the overstuffed armchairs, refusing to look at him, but he followed me. He kneeled at my feet as if I was perching on a throne, stroked my hair once, twice, and then his face creased in concern as I stifled a sob.
“Chto takoye, what is the matter?” he cried.