ROMANCE: CLEAN ROMANCE: Summer Splash! (Sweet Inspirational Contemporary Romance) (New Adult Clean Fantasy Short Stories) (111 page)

“For you, Nastush?” he asks, his voice and accent bringing her straight back to where it had all started; Roman was a native Belarusian, just like she was, gone off to Moscow for university, where he met Maks.  Those sharp gs made her think of her mother.  “For you, a mere pittance.”  And then he named the price.  It was, as he had promised, a mere pittance.  It was lower even than Gosha’s price, and Nastya has a feeling it has more to do with the appreciative way he is eyeing the top of her apron than anything else.

“I can’t accept that,” she tells him, refusing to acknowledge the way he is looking at her.  “I never took charity and never will.”

Now the look on his face is one of pain, and he momentarily looks away from her.  “It’s not charity.  You’re barely scraping by as it is.”

It was true.  Maks had always been the one to handle the finances, and now that he was gone, it was all left up to her, and she had never had much of a head for figures.  What does she know, she, a simple blini fryer?  Roman is right, and she would have to concede to him; she knows she couldn’t afford the flour she needed without his special concession.  And for just a moment, she understands that she is not the only one who misses Maks.  Because he works for Gosha, Roman feels partly responsible for what happened, all those long weeks ago.

She had been scared when he refused to join Gosha’s team, but Maks assured her that they did not have to play by those rules to really make it in America.  He conceded to ordering the basics from Gosha, because flour was flour, and for all the doughy goodies that Anastasia made, they didn’t need a specific kind of flour.  Besides, he told her, tickling her nose as the first rays of morning sunlight filtered in through their tiny bedroom window and she trapped him underneath one of her long, smooth legs to trap him, just for a few more stolen moments, in their bed before he rushed off to receive more shipments, he liked the way native American flour looked on her.

“Like a vision in white,” he would say, then lower his mouth to hers and kiss her, warmly and tenderly, his tongue probing her lips without any questions between them.  What questions could there be between husband and wife?

First it was Roman, then it was Anton who came to see Maks and tell him that Gosha was displeased with this display of rebellion.  Every other food market in town belonged to him and rumors had spread about what Maks was doing.  It was a show of disrespect, they told him, and Maks laughed at them, asking them when grown men had managed to turn into such cowards.

“Anyway, I’m not disrespecting him.  I just want nothing to do with him.”

“That’s exactly what he means,” Roman complained.

“Isn’t it enough that I’m paying for krusha?” Maks asked him, the heat rising in his tone.  It had been news to Anastasia, but he assured her that this small discretion was necessary to keep Gosha from troubling them too much.  He hoped it would prove to be enough, but as the months went by, it became appallingly clear that Gosha wanted to control their tiny little store from the inside out.

It began with a case of spoiled kefir, the buttermilk having been taken out of the cooling case and left out for the night.  It curdled, and ruined their fried sour grits for the week; Nastya had needed to think fast on her feet, and even though she managed to stir up some fish soup, it worried her that somebody had managed to breech the backdoor security of their little shop.

Next came the splintered window of their storefront.  Maks had called in the police, but the police listened to Gosha as much as Roman did, and they could offer Maks no compensation, no real assistance.  They claimed it must have been a neighborhood trick, some boys being rowdy, but as she watched Maks’s face darken, she knew who the real culprit must have been, and he had not been an innocently playing little boy for a very long time.

She recognized the final warning even when Maksim had not.  It should have been most clear to him, as he was the pinpoint of the attack, but he was so lost in his hopes and dreams that he denied it vehemently.  As he was walking home from his mother’s apartment, just a few blocks away one night, two thugs caught up with him, entrapping him between them and beat him almost to a pulp.  When he arrived home, Nastya had to bite her lip to keep from crying out at the split eyelids and blackened nose and eyes, knowing how much Maks hated any kind of fuss or drama.

“Oni tebya ubyut!” she couldn’t help but cry, “They’re going to kill you.”

“Nonsense, he had croaked out hoarsely, allowing her to minister to the worst of his injuries.  “He just wants to show that he’s in charge.  And when everyone sees me, there’ll be no doubt that he IS in charge, and he will leave me alone.”

Anastasia closes her eyes and starts lifting the sack of flour where Roman has abandoned it on the floor.  Maks was so young, so foolish.

She remembers it well, that day that had begun like any other.  Maks often left bed long before she did, needing to check his orders and set up shop before her services in the kitchen were needed.  She rolled out, pulling her cotton robe over the length of her body and belting it at the waist.  It was eight in the morning, and since it was early fall, the sun had made its strong presence known in the room not twenty minutes before.

The store waited quietly.  Too quietly, she realized as she entered it, dragging out bowls and spoons, and filling a huge canteen with water for the day’s mixings.  Usually Maks made an incredible ruckus in the back, except on those mornings when he wanted to surprise her in the front with a few minutes of languorous kissing before customers came in for their breakfast.  She had smiled, excepting at any moment to feel his warm arms sliding around her, but the clock ticked, and minutes came and went.  There was no rush of secretive footsteps, no scrapes of accidental sounds.  That was when she had realized that it was much too quiet, that not even the refrigerators were humming, and a sickening dread seeped in down her throat and her heart began to beat out a rapid tattoo. 

She pushed her way past the cases of jelly-filled cookies that stood by the entryway to the storeroom, and unlocked the huge double doors.  The back was silent, and she called out in fear, “Maks?  Maksik, where are you?”

The morning was as quiet as ever.

Something urged her forward, an unknown but tangible force, towards the entryway to the back, and as she unlatched the door, she felt a prayer begin on her breath, a prayer that had no words but was spilling out from her mouth nevertheless, a helpless
please please please pozhaslto
that she could not staunch and worded mindlessly.  But when she discovered his broken body on the trash bags by the Dumpster, she knew that there was no God, not anymore.

They had broken his body, bone by bone.  The bruises of his earlier beating had yet to fade, and she could trace their faint outlines underneath the caked blood on his face and body that had congealed overnight.  By the time she had figured out how to call the ambulance, hope had diminished to a tiny spark, burning low, and when the EMTs pronounced him dead in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, Nastya felt herself tumble down into a despair so deep she had no idea where to find the ladder to get herself out again.

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.