His kiss scrubbed my brain of the images haunting me— even if just for a fraction of a second.
Tightening his arm around me, Sascha cupped the back of my head. “What do you want to eat?”
My mouth wasn’t dry anymore, the taste of him blossoming on my tongue as it touched his tentatively. “Pizza?” Being with Sascha was bittersweet, a window into a life I wanted but couldn’t have.
Sliding out from underneath me, he smiled so sweetly that it made my heart ache. I reached to thread my fingers through the longest part of his beard; it didn’t even reach his Adam’s apple, but it couldn’t be any longer. “You think I should have a new nickname now? ‘Oppie’ was just to piss off my parents.”
“It’s grown on me like a nasty fungus, Oppie.” He winked at me. “Peppers and sausage?”
Flames licked my cheeks as that wonderful heat flooded my veins. “You know me so well.” Sitting up myself, I hugged my knees. There was nothing more pure, better, than this moment. Even so, worry throbbed against the backs of my eyes. “So… my family is gone. My sisters are in Saint Petersburg. Maybe you and me have a shot…?”
“We’ve been together for four years, Ophelia. We shot our shot when we hit year 2, and your parents didn’t manage to break us up. Your parents hated me because I’m almost twice as old as you and just a university professor. Things are going this way, and it’s a good way, Ophelia. It’s not perfect, but you need to replace the lack of relationship tension with relationship tension to balance the universe.”
“You’re an atomic scientist, you cracked the universe, Sascha.” Crawling onto my knees towards him, I wrapped my arms around his shoulders to kiss his neck. “What kind of equipment do you need to crack my nuclei?”
“I’m not going to fall for your science talk, you vixen. I bet you don’t know the first thing about gastronomy. Come on.” Long arms curled under my ass, and Sascha hoisted me up with a grunt. “Pizza’s not going to cook itself.”
“This would be more fun if I didn’t have a nightgown on.” That inappropriate sense of normalcy hung like a veil in front of my eyes.
Sascha hummed softly but didn’t answer immediately as he reached to turn on a lamp. “You don’t have underwear on, that’s good enough.”
Light spilled to banish the consuming darkness that threatened to overwhelm me, and I nuzzled his neck and shoulder greedily. Snorting a laugh, I hugged Sascha with my knees as spittle stained my lips.
He smiled, rounding the bed with strong strides that rippled through me. “I have an early class, so I’m not sure how long that’ll last. Especially considering you’re numb right now, and pretty soon… you’ll be mad. Real mad. That’s when it’ll get fun, Oppie.”
“So, you think I’m… boring…?” Kissing his bare shoulder, I hummed at the beauty of that word. “I like it.”
5
Sascha
“Who are you?” Frowning as I sat my briefcase on my desk, I cast a curious glance at the woman sitting on the sofa.
She flipped her hair over her shoulder before standing up. The long, lean pants, the vest, the glasses… a professional of some sort.
Definitively not one of my students. Too confident to be one of my students. “You’re not one of my students.”
“I’m Malda. I’ve been assigned to you by Vyachaslav Makovich. You’re dating the Cherinivsky girl.”
My cheek twitched, and I gazed at her from under furrowed brows. “Vyachaslav Makovich… not Aleksander?” Curiosity colored my tone.
Malda nodded firmly.
“Wonderful. I have the both of them on me, now?”
“Better the father than the son, if you ask me. Aleksander’s a monster of a man. I promise not to interfere with your life, but it’s my job to find out how much you know.”
Rounding my desk, I sat down to take a deep, steadying breath.
Malda didn’t hesitate to walk over and drop across from me. “I do not want to be here, Sascha. I don’t like Moscow. I don’t like school.” Malda physically shivered in disgust, her eyes bouncing around warily between lines of dark charcoal. She crossed her knees, somehow managing to look sophisticated and impudent at the same time.
The silence stretched, and I opened my mouth when it became apparent that she wouldn’t, “So… considering you’re not going to understand most of what I teach, and you’re not going to just go away, what are you really doing here in my office, specifically? Why did Vyachaslav Makovich send you, not his darling boy?” Maybe there was more going on than just wanting to keep an eye on Ophelia. That ‘maybe’ was only worried by the fact the old man sent Malda. Unless she was lying. “I doubt it has anything to do with the fact that, theoretically, I could build an atomic bomb.”
“Please! Makovich doesn’t care about that. Anyone with the internet can make a bomb. He assigned me to you because he thinks it’s interesting that you know everything about Cherinivsky, but you don’t do anything with it. Everyone has an ulterior motive, it can’t be just because you fell in love with a teenager.”
Covering my mouth to stifle my scoff, I flopped my head back to inhale a stabilizing breath.
Malda eyed me critically, but nowhere in those shrewd eyes was the disgust she felt for my profession. “When did you two really meet? And before you try the same thing on Aleksander on me…don’t. Aleksander allows it because it amuses him. Vyachaslav is a crotchety, old bastard whose sense of humor shriveled smaller than his balls.”
“… At the Summer Festival in Vladivostok. She was 17. Ophelia was alone, trying to win a fish… a blue one. That festival is 12 days long. On the last day, I asked for her number, and she gave it to me.” The memory was so strong, even after 5 years. Ophelia wore this cute dress with spots on it ‒ a black dress with matching black shoes. She’d gathered her hair, but not all of it. Her face was long but soft… like an angel. “Ophelia wanted to wait until she was 18, when she could move out of her parent’s house. They hated me from the second they found our texts. Someone from up high kept them from exercising their parental right to step on her neck.”
“That’s not all of it, is it? You just found this gorgeous, rich girl so intriguing that you kept up a relationship with her entirely through text for months?” Incredulousness thickened Malda’s tone, her eyes widening with skepticism. “You’re obviously not a dumbass, at the very least, Sascha Matheson. Explain to me how you managed.”
“I didn’t fall in love with her through a cell phone screen, if that’s what you want to know. When she moved out, I went to her place a few times. She went to my place a few times. Then, she stayed the night, and that turned into a few nights a week. We didn’t have sex until Ophelia’s 19th birthday. 20th birthday, we went to an aquarium. 21st birthday, she got black out drunk for the first time. I was sober. 22nd birthday, I bought her a ring. She keeps it in my left nightstand, second drawer ‒ are you going to check if it’s there?” My tangent came to an end. “Do you want to know what I’m going to do for Ophelia’s 23rd birthday?”