Chapter Text
Alina quits smoking and Aleksander on the same day.
It doesn’t happen quietly or gently, but it’s not like they were ever gentle or quiet to begin with. Fickle, tempestuous, argumentative on their worst days; passionate, lava boiling over soil, belly-aching euphoric on their best. Always too quick, too stubborn, two flames burning down towers of wax, too and two sounding just the same in their ears because everything they did was always intense and multiple.
They fucked an hour after meeting and married just a few months after that. On a whim.
She quits him much the same way.
Over breakfast.
Not lunch, not dinner, not tea, not after sex or post-shower. Not even after an argument.
She quits him over eggs and pancakes and early morning birdsong, seconds after squashing her last cigarette in the ashtray by the window. Why?
Not for any reason at all. Maybe because watching his balled-up fist land smackdab in the middle of his sunny-side up fills the tension with ridicule; maybe because she likes the idea of death over coffee, of murder over orange juice, almost like it’s mundane, like it convinces her she’s capable of doing more with her knife than spreading butter and syrup over her pancakes. Maybe because she woke up that morning with the radio sizzling in her ears and the sudden urge to be divorced.
It’s over, isn’t it?
It’s been over before it began.
She’s twenty-two and built by pretentiousness when they meet. It’s her first ever exhibition, at the infamous Théâtre des Expositions of the Beaux Arts de Paris—the result of years of hard work and studying, huddled over her tiny desk in her nine square-meter studio all the way up the 18th district.
And he’s here to buy art.
The rumour mill has not stopped spinning since word of his venue has reached the curious ears of her peers. A modern Russian oligarch, who made his fortune during the Yeltsin era, rimmed with white gold and rubies, clean-cut and decked in Tom Ford and Burberry from head to toe, boasting millions hidden in offshore accounts and a taste for expensive art. Some of the students thought to protest his venue, painting signs saying no to tax evasion and slave labour and Putin, while others kept their head low and hoped the man would pull crisp pink five-hundred euro notes from his pocket and buy one of their pieces.
Alina was of two minds on this—until, that is, he steps foot into the gallery.
Until she sees him.
A tower of shadows, salt and pepper along the edges, dressed in clean and sharp lines, cocky in his step and confident in his smile. He turns his nose up as most of her classmates’ artwork, like it’s not worthy of landing in his line of sight, like his dirty money is too good for them—Alina finds herself torn between wanting him to adore her work and hoping he’ll despise it just so. Her lust for gold versus her political conscience, a tug-of-war that has played out incessantly in her mind since Aleksander Morozov has been rumoured to make an appearance.
She goes from staring at him to pointedly looking away from him, even if she knows it’s all just the same and looking away isn’t proof of disinterest—to him, or to the others, or to herself. Quite the opposite, actually.
“You’re quite the Frida Kahlo enthusiast, aren’t you?”
So consumed in her desire to look disinterested in him that she doesn’t notice his presence, and startles when he speaks.
“Yes. She’s been a major source of inspiration for me.”
He’s standing in front of her self-portrait, tall and rigid, his nose not turned up at her art, but to her art, staring at it with something that feels like reverence.
“Couldn’t be bothered to come up with your own style, then?”
Alright, not reverence, then.
“That interpretation speaks more to your ignorance than it does to my faults as an artist,” she retorts. If he came here just to insult her, she sees no need for his money. No need to remain smiling and good-natured. “The point of view Frida Kahlo adopted in her art and the things she chose to represent and speak to are completely different from mine. She wasn’t just known for self-portraits—and framing it that way is so unbelievably sexist!”
He smiles, baring teeth—mocking, infuriating. “I was just teasing you.”
“It wasn’t very funny.”
“No, probably not.” He pauses, turning back to her painting. “But it was effective.” His eyes drift up the slant of her painted nose and down her hair. “I think I’ll buy that one.”
Alina should feel elated—rejoice, shake his hand enthusiastically and think of all the things the money will buy her; instead, she balks. “Why?”
“Well, because I like it. Why else?” Lemon juice drips from his words, sour and threatening her with the burn of acid. Like a test, or a game, or a threat.
“Well, I guess I can’t see why anyone would want a Frida Kahlo rip-off hanging in their living room when they can clearly afford the real thing.”
Why is she so intent on blowing this sale? Maybe it’s her political conscience. Or maybe it’s just that the man irritates her enough that she’s willing to lose out on thousands of euros for the sake of her pride. Or maybe she just wants to show him she can’t be bought.
“You’re funny,” he muses. “Almost as much as you’re pretty,” which should sound sexist and outdated, but doesn’t for some reason. “And it so happens that I enjoy collecting pretty things.” He’s speaking about the painting, but not really—he’s speaking about a representation of her face, oil paint in the shape of her, and so, he’s speaking about her.
It’s an invitation—has to be. There’s no other way to explain how, shortly after he says this, once the sale is concluded, she finds herself on her knees in the Théâtre’s bathroom, with his hands pressing down on her skull and her lips around his cock. He’s venous; sinuous; fibres slipping past her defences and infiltrating the remote corners of her mind; tentacled and multiple, present everywhere and nowhere all at once; invasive flesh and twisted knuckles, hitting the back of her throat and the top of her head all at once, claiming the woman in the painting for himself; an offering and a swallow.
That day, he buys her art and she gifts him her youth.
Zoya’s couch sticks to her skin—cream leather in sticky summer heat will do that. The fitted sheet she gave Alina never stays on—it slides off with her endless tossing and turning, and it’s on the floor by the time she falls asleep.
So she wakes with a burn lingering on her limbs—the feeling of a glue trap, of drowning in quicksand, and she winces as the sound of her skin being peeled off from the leather clogs her ears when she gets up to make some coffee.
When she was twenty, bare-knuckled and raw, sleeping on a friend’s couch was a fun memory, an exultation pouring from the threads of life, something to enjoy for what it was.
She’s thirty-three now, worn down by a body that begins to fail her for the first time and a beaten down spirit—the couch is not a memory to laugh about huddled over drinks with her friends, or a token of her adventurous spirit.
It’s a symbol that she has failed.
The first night she rolled over in his Egyptian cotton sheets—fifteen hundred thread count, thank you very much—she thought this is it; I made it.
But it was a lie, wasn’t it?
Making it is a phrase adults created to comfort themselves over the loss of their childhood and the wearing down of their innocence; it’s a phrase they speak when they can neatly line up the milestones they’ve reached in search of a perfect life and realize it never really meant anything; it’s an illusion crafted from delusions, a careful deception built by the lies of those around them, who also aspire to make it, and who also weep once they realize what it truly means.
The Egyptian cotton sheets were as much an illusion as anything else.
“I’m never sleeping in my own bed ever again.”
“Should I be flattered?”
Alina shakes her head. “No, your bed should be.” She stretches far and wide, skin slipping over silk, lulled by the comforts he surrounds himself with. “It beats my pull-out couch every time.”
He hands her a cup of coffee and lies down by her side. “Really living up to the starving artist cliché, aren’t you?”
“Someone has to!” She blows on her cup and shuffles back until she’s sitting upright, her back lined against his headboard. “Not that you should be the one to lecture me on clichés, Mr. Russian-Oligarch.”
Aleksander laughs, a rumble in the sheets, a mountain shaking quietly by her side. “You are an amusing one, Alina Starkova.”
“Starkov,” she corrects absent-mindedly.
“Not in my mother tongue. Have some respect for your origins, girl!” He rolls over to her and slips a hand beneath her chin. “Starkova,” he repeats, thick with the tonalities of Russian, so distant from the guttural melodies of French.
He holds her like this until she repeats it, until she says it just right, not letting up for a single second. His dark eyes burn through hers, unwavering and strong—he doesn’t even seem to blink. He just captures her like this; holds her in his stare, in his hand, in his command, entrenched in his assurances.
“Good girl,” he whispers against her hair when she’s finally given him what she wants, but all she hears is girl.
“I may not even be Russian, you know,” she says. She could also be Ukrainian, Belarusian, maybe even Polish. She is whatever her father was—but what that was, or is, she’s never known.
Her mother has never said much about him. Just that they met beyond the Iron Curtain sometime in the late 1980s and spent a slurry of drunken nights talking shit about the KGB and dreaming of a world that was yet to exist. She was an immigrant passing by on her way to other tomorrows; he was stuck in the past, and the present, and his place of birth.
She walked beyond and he stayed behind.
“Strong girl like you? I can’t see it any other way.” He swipes an arm below her knees, another behind her neck, and carries her off wrapped in his bedsheets, like a newlywed carrying his bride across the threshold.
Alina laughs and laughs and laughs and a part of her wonders if her dad would have carried her like that, if he’d met her as a child.
The thought is slippery and insidious—as easily erased as it was conjured, but not without leaving the faintest trace of pencil in the corners of her mind.
The first sketch she draws after leaving Aleksander is of him.
She doesn’t use colour—doesn’t need to, because he’s always been painted in shades of grey, from the salt and pepper in his hair to the shadows slipping over his skin. The pencil deconstructs him, peeling away the layers of the man she lived with for nearly eleven years.
It looks nothing like him—and she wonders if she’s ever truly known him.
For years, the self-portrait he bought on the day of their meeting hung on the living room wall, surrounded by a glossy black frame he’d gotten from a local antique store. And, for years, that portrait stared back at her, unchanging and unmoving as she grew older. The eyes, dark and stormy, filled with the tenacious anger of youth, would stare back at her and wonder—is the woman standing here the same as the one who once painted her own reflection?
Was the reflection ever real?
Even as the years came to pass, even as time ticked on with that relentless click, Alina never lost sight of the changes slinking down her skin; she watched herself become complicit in the making of her own unhappiness, kept count of the shadows moving from Aleksander’s face to her once bright eyes, rubbed over the lines anchored in her forehead and associated them each to a new emotion, a new challenge. She looked up at the vision she once had of her youthful face and kept a running tally of all the ways in which she’d become different from that. From her.
From herself.
She doesn’t expect to find herself unable to do the same with that sketch of Aleksander. Even drawing him as he is, without trying to remember who he was, is an exercise in futility—just a week since she’s announced her separation from him, and his traits are already blurred, as if smoothed over by a filter.
She swipes through the photos in her gallery—the many photographs she has of him, including those she took with an analogue camera and spent hours curing in a black room—and holds each one up next to the sketch.
All the darkness is on the page—none of it on the phone. He’s smiling on that photo she snapped during their trip to Morocco—tall, tan, dressed in white linen, walking ahead of her with his head whipped around and split open by a buoyant smile—and on that one she took when he sat across from her in the train (the one they took to see her mother, which she remembers only as the calm before the storm) and even on those more intimate shots of him, those taken as he woke up or while he held his morning cup of tea.
The darkness on the page is made from all the shadows she’s held for him, deep in her belly.
He’s given her many, in eleven years. Handed them to her, or slipped them down her throat, or fed them to her by mixing them in her food. He’s rid himself of the shadows that burdened him by making them his wife’s problem.
The self-portrait that still hangs in their (his) living room is an image of her before the darkness, before the marriage, before—when he was still dark. When the sketch she’s made of him still looked like him.
“Oh, hey, you’re drawing again!”
“Yeah.”
“It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”
It’s been…
“Five years, I think.” Alina lets the page slide on the coffee table and gets up from the couch. “Since Mum died,” she adds as she joins Zoya in the kitchen.
“Well I’m glad you’re back at it!” Zoya never lingers on the uncomfortable—she’s too glib for that. Too Epicurean, she would tell you, too fun! “Who knows, maybe you’ll start selling paintings again. Wouldn’t that be fun?”
Alina used to sell out art shows. Galleries would fight over her paintings, auction houses would attempt to bribe her agent to get exclusivity rights to her work, and Aleksander would smile knowingly, like he was the architect of her success. Artcurial and Sotheby’s each sold a piece of hers for big numbers, obscene numbers—something in the millions.
Even in the history of meteoric rises, Alina’s was exceptional.
“I don’t know if anyone will be interested, but that’s okay. I don’t need the money.” What she needs is to get out of Zoya’s hair, but she’s not quite ready yet, and Zoya doesn’t seem to mind the company, even if said company drools on her couch.
“Maybe not, but you need something to do, you know?” She turns on the espresso machine, and Alina isn’t sure she can decipher what comes out of her mouth next. “Aleksander can’t … winning … —that … humiliating!”
How does one win a divorce?
Being the one to leave seems like a good first step—so Alina can check that off the list.
And then—dating?
She picks up the cup Zoya is handing her and takes a moment to blow on it, as if chewing on her thoughts, before responding. “I think he’s humiliated enough with the way I left things.”
“Nah, men like him always come out on top. Hot, rich, older—he’s every woman’s dream! Plus he got dumped, so he has a sob story. He’ll be dating in no time—you need to prepare for that.”
Dating. Ugh.
“So he’ll date,” Alina shrugs. “And I’ll paint.”
Zoya laughs and puts a finger to Alina’s nose, like she’s a pet. “You’re so clueless, darling. You’ll see what I mean once I download Tinder on your phone.”
Alina changes the passcode to her phone that evening. Then, she waits until Zoya has retired for the night and sneaks out the door—she’s sixteen again, and Thomas has begged her to meet her out in the fields so they can make out under the glittering stars and a half-crescent moon.
But there are no fields in Paris, and Thomas has since long married a girl from the village, with whom he’s had three kids already.
Alina sneaks out not because she’s doing anything wrong—not really, anyway—but to grasp the feeling of that twenty-two-year-old vision of her. The one still encased in the frame hanging on her future-ex-husband’s living room—the one he keeps preserved, far away from her.
She settles on the subway at Alésia and rides it until Cité, just beneath the Seine. Tonight, she’s drawing on the riverbank.
Tonight, she steals back a little of who she used to be.
Thảo Nguyen is an intimidating woman. You don’t get to flee Vietnam and cross the Eurasian continent by foot without being one—or, at the very least, becoming one.
She grew up in Bảo Lộc, a city nestled in the Central Highlands, with a father and the memory of a dead mother to keep her warm at night. Her beloved Banyan trees were the centre of her universe as a child; and her father’s B’lao, a seepage of green Oolong he brewed every evening for them to share around the kitchen table, was the liquid that kept her nightmares at bay during the night.
When she left, five years after her father’s death, all she had was a linen sachet of his Oolong and enough French to get her by somewhere else. Somewhere new—away from the memories of death that plagued the very air she breathed and turned the trees she’d loved so much sour and rough.
All these things are told to Aleksander by his paramour on their way to the village of Cornille, where Alina’s mother still resides to this day, having refused to move to Paris with her daughter.
“Here you are, quýt! How I have missed you so,” exclaims Mum when she picks them up at the Abzac train station, an hour ride away from the village.
Alina hugs Mum tightly—the familiar scent of B’lao drifts from her skin, thick with honey and fruit in her nostrils. “I’ve missed you too, mẹ.”
Aleksander stays on the side-lines, rigid like a tree, contained in the layers of secrecy he harbours like a pirate with a treasure in the hull of his ship. He does not partake in the effusion that drifts from the mother-daughter reunion—
But it makes sense. This is his first time meeting Mum.
“You’re the boyfriend, then?”
He nods, and Alina waits in suspension, hovering above them both, anxious to see if he’ll gravely misstep, if he’ll fuck it up for them both, if—
“I’m very pleased to meet you, Ms. Nguyen.” One hand out, one shake, and a smile plastered on his face. Ten out of ten—he even made sure to get her name right.
“And I, you, Aleksander.”
Disaster escaped—for now.
Once they’re in Alina’s childhood home, Aleksander excuses himself and rushes up to the guest bedroom. Urgent business, he says with a contrite smile on his face. I promise I’ll make it up to you both.
Mum nods in silence but doesn’t tell him he’ll never get online. High-speed Internet still hasn’t made it here, and the mobile network is… spotty, at best.
Alina gives him ten minutes before he returns.
“Let me make you some tea, quýt.”
The house hasn’t changed since she’s left for the capital. The thick stonewalls are still beige; the kitchen table is still covered by the same checkered wax cloth Mum found in a flea market; the telly is turned on with the volume down, playing an endless loop of BFMTV, even if Alina has said and repeated over the years that the channel is full of shite and only meant to cater to the racist white old bats that plague Cornille; the couch is still covered in a dozen different quilts, all sewn together by Mum and spread out like fine silks. Under Alina’s feet, the tiles are still cold and the world seems unmoved, moored in the same rules she grew up with.
She doesn’t mind.
It’s home.
“I probably shouldn’t say that, quýt, but I see you share the same taste in men as your dear old mum.” Mum sets down two cups of her father’s Oolong on the kitchen table—the chairs scrape the burnt orange tiles as they sit down, close to one another—two confidantes sharing secrets.
“Ew!”
“Now, don’t be like that—you’re a woman, now.” Mum leans back and twirls her spoon in her tea, like a French woman would.
Some things were never meant to stay.
“He’s still going to sleep in the guest room while you two are here.”
Alina rolls her eyes but doesn’t protest—she knows Mum, knows her rules and preoccupations, knows some things, like spoons, may change, but others, like rules, will not. “Yes, mẹ,” but even if she understands, she can’t help the bite in her tone. The same one she had for Mum when she was fifteen, full of arrogance and bloated by certainties, the way only teenagers can be.
“How’s school?”
“School is fine.” One blow on her steaming cup of tea. “I have my final exams in a few weeks.”
“And you’re studying, right? Tell me you don’t spend all your free time with that boy.”
“Boy? He’s practically your age!” She’s trapped in her teenage years again, rebelling for the sake of it—for the sake of getting a rise out of her eternally calm mother. “But yes, the studying is going fine. Don’t you worry about it.”
Not that Mum would stop worrying. She’s been worrying ever since Alina was born, about everything—about food, about roots, about tea, about school, about boys, about names, about the French and the lack of French and the French people and everyone else, about family, about lack of family, about having an only daughter studying fine arts, about having an only daughter leaving. About death.
And now, she has to add a forty-three-year-old boyfriend to that list. (One who is older than her, actually. By a year. Alina has done the maths.)
“Isn’t he a bit too old for you?” Alina knows this question has been burning Mum’s lips since they got off the train, but it still hits her in the face—she’s not sure why.
“Boys my age are stupid.” Bastien was her boyfriend before Aleksander—he was everything Aleksander is not. Age-appropriate, sullen, out drinking every Friday night, obsessed with Fight Club, just as quick to get it up as he was to finish, content with mediocrity and always critical of her art in the way only men can be. “Aleksander is supportive and stable. He bought my first painting! At least get to know him before you judge him.”
Mum frowns in that way only she can—slight, with invisible lines drawn on her forehead and a slight tremor in her bottom lip. “I just don’t want to see you get hurt, quýt. Men like this, they get everything they want—nothing gets in their way. No one.”
“Like Dad?”
A line is crossed. A point of no-return. A taboo is broken and splattered across the kitchen table, thick with the crimson and the iron taste of blood.
“Alina…”
Murder over tea. A gash across Mum’s throat, bleeding profusely, gushing and spilling into the B’lao, filled with betrayal.
“No, tell me what’s so wrong about Aleksander! You don’t even know him!”
“I know men like him.”
I see you share the same taste in men as your dear old mum. Not a compliment, not a bonding moment—a warning, blaring alarms and flush with blinding red light.
“Whatever. I’ll never do anything right for you, anyway.”
Alina stomps up the stairs and bursts into the guest room without much ceremony, leaving that conversation hanging in the air, shattered and incomplete.
“Did you manage to get online?”
Aleksander is lying down on the bed, fully-clothed bar for his shoes (removed in the entryway, as is the custom) and holding his brand-new phone in hand—a smartphone, something Alina could never dream of owning with her current means. “No, but I figured I’d let you and your mum catch up,” he says without looking up. “Everything okay?”
“Take off your trousers.”
The moment marinates in silence for a few seconds, just long enough for Aleksander to dart a quizzical look Alina’s way, but not long enough for him to engage in protest. He sits up, unbuckles his belt, and slips out of his trousers without saying anything.
Alina knows she’s breaking a million rules right now—an oath, really.
It’s too bad she’s never inherited Mum’s endless sense of calm.
She kneels between his legs and pulls down his boxers—he’s already hard, but that’s not much of a surprise; Alina has been quick to learn she has that effect on him.
“Are you sure? Your mum’s downstairs.”
Precisely.
She gives him one long lick, from base to tip, the same way she tastes her cola Mr Freeze during the summer, and whatever protest Aleksander has left in him dies in his throat—he throws his head back and a long, drawn-out grunt pops out of his mouth. “Putain.”
Satisfaction slides down her head, syrupy and oozing—just as it does every time she elicits that response in him. Pride is not an easily won prize when you’re lesser in every respect to the man you’re dating—younger, poorer, less experienced, less travelled, less knowledgeable, more sensitive, more impulsive.
She bobs her head up and down on his cock, gladly eating him up inch by inch—his hands wander in her hair, tugging and violent, demanding she give him more—more than she’s giving, but also more than she can take, more than she can offer. He demands everything from her, and she pushes past the boundaries of the physical, gagging on him as he slips past her mouth and into her throat. Salt burns her eyes and runs down her cheeks; a flush spreads from her neck to her forehead, wrapping her face in a sheen of sweat and blood rush; the sound of her mucosa tensing around his cock is obscene, amplified by the squelching of her saliva coursing down her tongue.
“Good girl,” he moans when she’s finally taken the whole of him. All she feels is his flesh—everywhere; against her lips and in her hair and inside her body. “Just a little more, bébé, I’m so close.”
She chokes on him and he chokes on the feeling of her, dripping liquid salt down her throat in a single burst—his every muscle tenses and churns, pulling harder on her hair until she’s nothing but pain and victory.
Mum is somewhere nearby and Mum knows—
Mum hears, and Mum disapproves.
Afterwards, dinner is conducted in silence, and when it’s time to retreat for bed, Mum knows Alina will slip into the guest room the moment the lights are turned off—she will hear the headboard knock against the concomitant wall and feel her daughter slipping from her fingers, fluid as silk and quick as sand.
And, since she finds herself helpless to do anything about it, Mum stops speaking to Alina.
The next time they meet, Alina stands over her grave with a whiskey in hand—she unblocks the number once blackened from her contacts by Aleksander and watches with tears in her eyes and alcohol in her throat as years of buried messages start pouring in.
Cosmopolitan, White Russian, Sex on the Beach.
Every cocktail on the menu reminds Alina of him.
“I’ll just have a mojito,” she finally decides before handing the menu back to the server. She leans against the back of her chair and stretches, the sound of bones crackling ripping through the air. “God, I really needed this. Thank you for coming out with me, guys.”
“What are girlfriends for?” muses Genya before raising her glass in the air. “To Alina Morozov’s newfound freedom!” and they all clink, as if this were a celebration.
It should feel like freedom, like she broke free from the chains that kept her tied to an unsatisfactory marriage and a man as volatile as the summer skies—
instead, it feels a little like grief.
“Hand me your phone. You really need Tinder now that you’re a free woman,” insists Zoya, with an open palm idly placed on the table.
“I told you I’m not ready to date.”
“It’s not about dating, babe—it’s about winning.”
Maybe it’s the alcohol swimming in her brain, maybe it’s the fact that Zoya is like a dog with a bone, or maybe it’s that Alina is not as opposed to the idea as she appears—whatever it is, her phone ends up in Zoya’s hands before she can think of a clever response. The screen is shoved in her face for a split second and her friend exclaims in victory.
“Ha! Got you.” Her thumbs are faster than light—Alina can already tell by the motions that she has found the application and clicked on “Install.”
“I’ll just remove it as soon as you give me back my phone, you know.” A cigarette would be fan-fucking-tastic right about now—she pokes into Genya’s handbag and bums one. “I’ll pay you back,” she mumbles by way of an apology, but Genya doesn’t seem to have noticed or heard—she’s hunched over the table, watching as Zoya sets up a profile on Alina’s phone.
“Ooooh, that one! You look so hot there, Lina.”
“Aleksander’s on it, though,” Marie interjects, mousy and discreet as ever.
“I’ll just crop him.”
Alina brings a shaking hand up to her cigarette and lights it—the smoke is a breath of fresh air down in her lungs, a call-back to all the things she’s left behind because they were unhealthy and bad for her and—whoever said toxicity is bad for you is a fucking idiot, really.
She thrives on it.
As the evening progresses, her friends take turns swiping for her without letting her see what they’re doing—her phone becomes an ancient relic that only her touch can destroy, something that captivates the eye of all who hold it until nothing else matters, until they’ve been consumed by it so entirely they step into another world the moment they see it.
It would be an apt metaphor for phones in 2023 if it weren’t so trite and overdone.
So Alina drinks—her friends are busy gushing over the polished, smoothed-over images of modern-day Greek heroes, pumped full of protein shakes and vomiting inanities like “healthy lifestyle” in their bios; her phone is held hostage and no longer for her to hold; her mind is buzzing with that first mojito she drank on an empty stomach—what else is she to do but smoke cigarettes she steals from Genya’s purse and drink beverages the server seems all-too-happy to provide her with?
“I’ll have a Sex on the Beach, please.”
They spend their first official holiday as a couple on the beaches of Saint-Tropez.
“I’ll bet all you Russian gangsters have a little pied-à-terre here,” she teases on their first day, as they walk along the pier.
“Some. Most of them are in Antibes and Nice,” and it doesn’t sound like a joke coming out of his mouth—it sounds serious and true and Alina wonders for a split second if she’s gotten herself into something dangerous.
“And you didn’t like either of those places?” She tries to remain light-hearted, like they’re discussing the best tourist destinations of the south of France, or the surging prices of real estate in the region. Something real, or normal, even if holidaying here or thinking about rich people real estate has never been her normal.
“Do you think I’m a criminal, Linka?” The shadows in his eyes shimmer and shine with something more than the sunlight—mischief, maybe.
“Sometimes I wonder.” They’re getting married as soon as the town council approves their licence—better to know now than never, she reasons. “Are you?”
“Just a businessman—maybe not an honest one, but not a criminal either.”
She rushes in front of him and latches onto his arm, two hands white at the joints gripping like it’s a question of life or death—overcome by something that tastes like despair, or fear, or thirst. “Tell me, then.”
So, as they walk down the pier, past the extravagant yachts of the unbelievably rich, bathed by the glittering sun above and trapped in the sweltering heat of June, he tells her about the voucher privatisation programme, in which vouchers with shares of state-owned companies were either given or sold to citizens; he explains how the fall of the Soviet Union allowed those with a more entrepreneurial spirit to take advantage of those vouchers, that by arbitraging the vast difference between old domestic prices for Russian commodities—for natural gas and oil in particular—and the prices prevailing on the world market, one could turn a pitiful pile of paper vouchers into a mountain of gold; he talks about the Yeltsin era, and the control all those newly-minted oligarchs exerted on the local economy and on the political balance of things; he recounts how most of them lost their fortune in the 1998 banking crisis.
“But not me, because I left long before that—I placed my holdings in Swiss banks, on offshore accounts when possible. I bled the motherland dry and left for greener pastures,” he concludes.
Alina wonders if her father did the same—if he’s some millionaire hiding out in Western Europe, or in the Americas, enriched by the downfall of a regime that once trapped him.
“Unsavoury. But not criminal,” she comments, but doesn’t say much more.
The other students at the Beaux Arts would make of him a target for their political rage—some of them tried, when he was first rumoured to come by the Théâtre des Expositions. Alina nearly counted herself as one of them—
nearly.
She lives a different life, now—she’s been given a golden ticket and a tour of the factory. She walks on red carpeted floors in Michelin starred restaurants, drinks her morning tea on the terrace of his two-hundred-square-metre 17th district flat, wears couture, only buys the most expensive linens for her canvasses and the kind of paint that costs her monthly rent per bottle. The taste of luxury and stability is sweet on her tongue—spun sugar and crème pâtissière from a Stohrer croquembouche.
“We’re getting married,” she says without mulling it over first.
“We are.”
“What if we get divorced?”
“I’m never divorcing you, Linka,” but he says it like it’s a threat, so she swallows her next question.
What if I divorce you?
They shove the discussion out of the way and never bring it up again—he takes her on his yacht, then to a restaurant, then to his bed.
Those were the good days. The early days. Before the passion consumes her. Before she begins waking up alone every morning and wondering where he is. Before she realises that being with someone who is like cigarette smoke eats her up from the inside. Before she realises that she’s in love.
Busy beaches on the Mediterranean coast are a staple of any Saint-Tropez vacation—except one taken with Aleksander Morozov, it would seem.
It’s hard for a beach to be crowded when it’s private.
Someone will see us, but Aleksander doesn’t care and keeps trailing her stomach with his lips, nibbling and biting a path down to her navel. I don’t care as he bites the string holding her bikini together and pulls on it; they can fuck off as he slides the fabric on the sand and tosses it away; Hell, they can watch if they want to as he massages her inner thighs.
They’re trapped beneath the lutescent light of a radiant sun, burning sand scraping and rubbing along their skin as they move and touch and fumble; the heat around shapes the air into waves, blurring the horizon and the edges of the waves lapping the wet sand beyond; they’re hungry for each other, impulses tugged by the moving particles around them and the kinetic energy sizzling in the air, dragged to debauchery and drowning in desire.
Aleksander laps at her cunt like a man who’s known nothing but the desert, parched and famished and having finally reached an oasis—his fingers dig into the flesh of her thighs, deep enough to bruise, and his mouth is ravenous, swallowing her whole; Alina is overwhelmed, shaking from limb to limb with sensations that assault her from every side: the sun and the heat and the sand and his desire for her and his mouth toying with her nerves. More please, harder, harder. He edges her on, tongue everywhere and muscles tense, pushing past the boundaries of her flesh until she’s molten gold, malleable and soft between the hands of the blacksmith.
She’s quick to surrender and quake under his touch, I’m coming, yes, yes, yes.
Silence dilutes as the whipping breeze of the sea returns to her ringing ears, liquid in her mind, like a memory of pleasure her thoughts swim in. Aleksander, the carnivore who has just cannibalised her, slides above her frame, eclipsing her from the sun with his rapacious shadows. I’m going to fuck you until you forget to breathe, and Alina holds her breath in anticipation, almost as if to fulfil the prophecy herself.
The sun stretches its rays across the sand and the shadows slip in-between to swallow the heart of light at the centre, thrumming with a steady rhythm and forceful thrusts—taking the light for themselves, feeding themselves on it until it’s nothing more than a flicker, and a gust of fuck me swimming in the warm summer air.
Back in his home—a classic southern structure with white lime-coated walls of stone balanced by a modern interior—Alina finds a painting she began earlier in the week changed. Black streaks that she does not remember painting have been added over the eyes of her subject, Mum.
“Did you touch my painting?”
He scoffs, somewhere between impatience and outrage. “I would never do that.”
Alina places a hand on the canvas, feather-light and fascinated. “I must not remember doing that.” She stares back at the image of her mother, at those black lines in lieu of eyes, at the ignominy of wiping your own mother’s eyes from her face, at the distance between the past and the present, at the vacuity of a face that looks nowhere and everywhere all at once. “I must have wanted to try something new.”
He and his shadows wrap themselves around her, holding her tight and contained against his frame, rocked by his certainties. “It’s gorgeous.” He blows in her hair and lowers his voice. “I could easily find you a buyer, you know.”
The painting isn’t ready—it’s missing Mum’s soul, Mum’s contradictions, Mum’s impatience, Mum’s love. It lacks the colours of oolong and the taste of B’lao, the landmarks of Cornille and the nuances of the landscape, the one she knows back home and the one that her mother would call back home. It’s not ready—and yet.
It’s sold to a novice collector with euro bills lining his pockets by the following Monday, in Aleksander’s living room. Alina makes enough to pay her rent for a few years, enough to afford the expensive pesto she always looks at bitterly when she shops, enough to pay off Mum’s mortgage and buy them both a new lease on life.
But Mum won’t talk to Alina and Alina hates her flat, so the money is stashed away, the studio emptied out in Aleksander’s home, and the world turns a new page.
The first night Alina settles in Aleksander’s arms, not as a guest, but as an equal, she stares at the locked door until she falls asleep.
Still woozy with the taste of liqueur sloshing in her mouth, Alina knocks on the frame before she knocks on the door. Zoya will be home soon, though it is no home at all—a temporary refuge, at best. One filled with the haunting of Tinder profiles swirling above Alina, relentlessly taunting and humming; one clouded with the sense of being a thirty-three-year-old failure sleeping on a sticky couch and losing to the battle waged by age. One she’s not desperate to return to, not when her thoughts are clouded by rum, vodka, and peach schnapps.
“Open up!”
She knocks again, harder this time, knocks until the air is heavy with the whispers of neighbours annoyed at this late-night disturbance, until her phalanges are red and bruised and the walls stop spinning around her, she knocks and knocks and knocks though she knows the door will remain closed to her as long as she's combative—and, as, expected, only when she’s ready to put her back to it and slide down in tears does it open for her.
On the other side, there is only silence.
Alina casts aside her pride. “Can I stay with you tonight?”
On the other side, there is only silence.