I snort. Trust Jackson to temper a compliment with an insult.
“Thanks, Jackson,” I say. “You’ve been surprisingly helpful. Guess you’re not completely an asshole after all.”
He scowls, swallowing back the retort he so clearly wants to give me.
Mikolaj comes to see me almost every night. We take walks along the lakeshore. He tells me about growing up in Warsaw, about his biological parents, and about Anna. He tells me all the places she wanted to visit. He asks me where I’d like to go, of all the places in the world.
“Well . . .” I think about it. “I always wanted to see the Taj Mahal.”
He smiles. “So did Anna. I was going to take her, once we had money.”
“My parents never wanted to go because it’s too hot.”
“I like heat,” Mikolaj smiles. “Much better than snow.”
It’s snowing right now. Big, heavy flakes that drift down in slow motion. They’re catching in Mikolaj’s hair, and blanketing his shoulders. We had to bundle up for our walk. He’s wearing a navy peacoat with the collar turned up. I’ve got on a white parka with a fringe of fur all around my face.
“What about this?” I ask him. “Isn’t this pretty?”
“This is the first winter I haven’t hated,” he says.
He kisses me. His lips feel burning hot on my frozen face. The snow is so thick that I can’t see the lake, or my house. We could be the only two people in the world. We could be two figures inside of a snow globe, suspended for all time.
I want to do so much more than kiss him. I unbutton his coat so I can slip my hands inside. I run my hands over his hard, warm torso beneath his shirt. He doesn’t care that my fingers are cold. He pulls me closer, kissing me deeper.
I’m careful not to touch him in the places that are still healing. The bandages are gone, but the wounds were deep, and the stitches haven’t been taken out yet.
Usually my father’s men are spying on us, wherever we walk on the grounds. Today the snow is too thick. They won’t be able to see us.
I slide my hand down the front of Miko’s jeans, inside his underwear. His body has warmed my hand. He doesn’t flinch when I take hold of his cock. He groans and gently bites my lip between his teeth.
“I want to be close to you again,” I tell him.
“I’m supposed to be earning trust with your parents,” he says.
“That could take a hundred years,” I moan. “Don’t you miss me?”
“More than I ever thought I could miss anything.”
He strips off his coat and spreads it over the snow. Then he lays me down on top of it. He unbuttons my jeans and pulls them down just a little—the same with his own. Positioning himself on top of me, he slides his cock into the narrow space between my thighs, and pushes it in.
Because I’m still wearing my jeans, my legs are close together. This makes the space for his cock smaller and tighter than ever. The friction is insane. He barely thrust in and out of me. I’m squeezing him tight, along every inch of his length.
At the very first thrust, he gasps like he might pass out.
“Good god, Nessa,” he groans. “You’re going to kill me.”
“Why?” I say.
“It’s too much. It feels too good.”
It does feel outrageously good. But it’s so much more than that. I feel connected to him, like we’re becoming one soul as well as one body of tangled flesh. I know he’s feeling what I’m feeling. Thinking what I’m thinking. He’s loving me as I’m loving him: insanely, without reason, without limit.
Even though our motion is so constricted, it doesn’t matter. We’ve both been pent up and aching for each other. The release is almost immediate. In less than a minute, I feel that blooming warmth and pleasure that builds and builds inside of me until it overflows. Then I’m cumming, clenching tighter than ever around his cock. Miko lets go too, wrapping his arms so hard that my bones bend. He erupts with a strangled sound, trying not to shout too loud.
We want to lay there longer. It’s too cold. My teeth are chattering. I stand up, pulling up my jeans and buttoning them again. I can feel his cum dripping out of me, soaking my underwear. I love that sensation. It’s so primal and raw. The surest mark that I belong to him, and him alone.
Once we’re dressed, he kisses me again.
“I’ll bring you home soon,” he promises me.
He knows my parents’ house isn’t my home anymore.
Sometimes he brings Marcel and Klara to visit me. We watch movies down in the theater, with Polish subtitles for Klara, because her English is still shit. I can tell it disturbs my parents, hearing us speak Polish together. They look at me like a changeling.
They haven’t adjusted to the difference in me. My mother wants to take me to do the things we used to do: shopping, brunch, shows. I go along with her, and I try to be cheerful, to be what she wants me to be. But I miss Miko terribly. There’s this barrier between my mother and me. She doesn’t want to talk about that month I was missing. She wants me to be exactly as I was before. I just can’t, no matter how hard I try.
Strangely, the person who seems the happiest to have me back is Riona. She was holed up at her law office the night I came home, working on briefs till the early morning hours. When she saw the message from my parents, she abandoned her folders and came speeding home, hugging me for about ten times the length she’d ever hugged me before. I might even have seen the tiniest of tears in her eye, though she never would have let one fall.
Since then, she’s swung by Lake City Ballet several times to have lunch with me, something she never bothered to do before. We never used to spend much time together, so she doesn’t expect me to behave in any particular way. She just asks how the ballet is coming along, and whether we have a date set for the first performance. She asks me which music I’m using, and she makes a playlist out of the songs to listen to on her drive to work. She even books pedicures for us both on a Saturday morning, to ease my aching feet, though I can tell it’s killing her to sit there for forty whole minutes without checking her email.
Stranger still is the friendship that’s sprung up between Riona and Dante Gallo. She spent several weeks trying to get him released from jail the first time around, then she had to spend several more after he was “abducted by a rival gang” during a fraudulent prisoner transfer. In the end, she used Officer Hernandez’s shady history to get the murder charge dropped. It helped that Officer O’Malley agreed to testify against his ex-partner. I don’t know who paid the bribe for that—Mikolaj or the Gallos—but I’m sure it wasn’t cheap.
I guess Dante and Riona talked a lot, all the times Riona visited him in prison. Dante is a very calming presence. Riona seems less brittle around him, less ready to bite somebody’s head off at the slightest provocation.
I screw up my courage to ask her if she thinks he’s handsome. She rolls her eyes at me.
“Not everything is a love match, Nessa,” she says. “Sometimes men and women are just friends.”
“Alright,” I say. “I just thought you might be curious to see that particular friend with his shirt off . . . seeing as he’s built like the Rock.”