“Okay?” he whispered under his breath.
“Okay.”
MY MOTHER’S DOORBELL WAS THE color of vomit.
Dirty, overused. Kind of like me. It gave me a strange sense of familiarity. People came. People went. Sonya Protsenko always stayed, her shoulder always ready for me to put my head on it. Her fridge always full with homemade potato dumplings and cabbage soup. There was comfort in that. In having a functioning mom. Not that shit between us was simple—I wasn’t the best son in the world.
I wasn’t the worst, either.
For instance, I always did as I was told, because I felt a sense of gratitude that she hadn’t scraped my ass out with a hanger, which I wouldn’t have blamed her for. Raped at eighteen by a Russian mafia vor, she’d fled the country with me when I was a few months short of three. Mom had attended college here. Graduated as a therapist. Found the time to come to my bullshit school stuff, and to buy me a surfboard, and to sit on the sand all by herself—because she didn’t know anyone and was much too shy to talk to people—and watch me compete.
So I’d always done the dishes. Taken out the trash. Helped the neighbors fix the roof. Kept my grades up and played the whole perfect-kid charade in front of her friends and colleagues.
But I had the bad gene in me. The one that craved power. I could feel it running through my veins, making my blood hotter. That’s where my being a not-so-good kid came into play. I didn’t rape or murder or do any of the nasty shit my piece of busted condom father had done, but I still stole.
And sold pot.
And fucked women who weren’t mine to fuck.
Loving my mom the way I did—unequivocally—reminded me that I was human. Intimacy scared the shit out of me, otherwise. That’s why I’d never gone bareback with anyone. Not even my ex-girlfriend. I didn’t mind missing out on some of the pleasure if it meant not giving them my all.
But let’s not talk about fucking and my mom in the same sentence. Point was, I had a good relationship with Mamul. I loved that we spoke Russian with each other. It put a wall between us and them. Gave us another layer of closeness other kids didn’t have with their parents. And I loved her take on English, because that was fun, too.
Like when she’d written endless letters to my teachers and principals when I’d gotten into trouble, she would always refer to me as “my sun”. “My sun didn’t do this.” “My sun didn’t say that.” She’d been right most of the time. I was scapegoated a lot for being the Russian, single-parent kid. Still, I would slap the letter onto the kitchen table with my palm and growl, “Mom, it’s s-o-n, not s-u-n,” and she would yell back, “I know exactly what I meant. You are my sun. Why do you think the words are so similar?”
I walked into her house, bringing the sand and saline scent of the ocean with me, wearing nothing but my surf shorts. Today, Jesse had started her job at Café Diem, and I had Gail guide her through it. I chose not to be there, because I knew I was already in too deep with the girl, especially considering I’d nearly jizzed my pants holding her hand. Yeah, spending more time with her than necessary was a hard pass for me. So, I’d gone surfing instead.
“Mamul,” I barked, heading into the kitchen. She was standing over the stove, boiling beets and talking on the phone in Russian. Loudly. Mom motioned for me to wait with her hand. She was talking to Aunt Luba about…oh, who the fuck knew? Probably gossip. My mom still went back to St. Petersburg whenever she could afford it. Everything was crazy expensive in Russia, and she would buy me the most useless shit, like coats that could protect you from an apocalypse, even though I lived in a place where people got hysterical when it started to drizzle.
“Roman!” Her eyes lit up, and she muttered a quick goodbye before turning off the stove and pulling a chair for me to sit down. My childhood house was very…Russian, from the flowery pale wallpaper, heavy curtains, and quilted everything to the kind of heavy carpets you could roll bodies in. In her defense, Sonya Protsenko gave everything a modern twist, so our house looked like a funky IKEA display room. “How are you doing, my darling sun?”
I took the glass of vodka she had offered me, planting a soft kiss on her head. She was dwarfed by my six-two frame, the top of her head barely reaching my shoulders. “I’m drinking vodka in the middle of the day with no shirt on and hanging with my favorite girl. Nuff said. You?”
“Couldn’t be better.” She took a seat across from me, leaning forward and cradling her drink between her fine fingers. “What’s new?”
“I met a girl.”
“You met a girl?”
“I met a girl.” I couldn’t really talk about Jesse with anyone. Beck was an idiot, Hale was a frenemy, and Gail and Edie were chicks, and it just felt like a whole new level of pussy to consult them. Mom was a safe bet because she’d never say shit to anyone else. Other than Aunt Luba, and I guess I could live with a few relatives on the other end of the planet knowing about Snowflake.
Mom asked more questions, and I ended up telling her everything. About the gang rape and the sex tape and all the other shit that made Jesse’s life sound like a Netflix show.
Thirteen Reasons Why I’m Going to Kill Emery and Co.
I was telling Mom how I was helping Jesse get out of the house more when she put her hand on my bearded cheek and looked deep into my eyes.
“I love you,” she said, and I went uh-oh in my head, because that sounded like the beginning of a speech that I’d hate.
I rubbed my index finger over my front teeth. “You’re not too bad, either.”
“But,” her voice rose, cutting through my shitty joke, “for the sake of being honest, and as a rape victim—please don’t take this the wrong way. I’d never replace you, never not have you. You’re my fate, my blood, the sunshine upon my skin.” She took a shaky breath, closing her eyes. “If you get into this girl’s life, you cannot leave without a trace. You know that. Right, Roman?”
I blinked at her with a mixture of annoyance and rage. “I’m not an idiot.”
But did I really know that? I had a six-month contract with Darren. A month of it was already gone. I’d never stopped to think about the consequences of my deal with Darren, because I figured I would just continue my relationship with Jesse as if nothing had happened. But it wasn’t so simple, was it? I was deceiving her, lying to her, and, in a sense, really fucking her over, making her put her hard-earned trust in someone who didn’t deserve it. It was the first time it dawned on me that I would have probably done this favor to Darren even if there weren’t a huge chunk of money involved. It was sobering, but hell, it was also very fucking depressing. I didn’t do emotions. There is little to no room for them when you fuck for a living.
“Make me proud, Roman. Do the right thing by her.”
I promised her that I would, and when I came out of her house, my heart cracked open. I felt the blood of a savage, rapist mafia rat pumping in my veins. They were like snakes beneath my skin. I wanted to tear them out of my body and dump them on the ground. To fall on my knees and bleed to death.
Because most of the time, I didn’t feel like a good person.
But today, I felt like a bad person.
The kind of bad Jesse didn’t need in her life.
The kind of sun that didn’t caress and nourish life, but burned shit to the ground, turning everything to ash.
The next thing I did was pretty goddamn stupid, even by my standards, and trust me when I say I’d done some stupid shit in my lifetime.
I went to see her after her shift.
If you’re trying to find the logic in that—don’t.
Everything in the situation screamed for me to take a step back. I needed to gather my wits and try not to be pussy-whipped by a girl whose pussy was more forbidden than incest. But, of course, what do you expect from a dude who sold his cock to the highest bidder? Exactly.
I contemplated texting Jesse beforehand, but she never checked her cell phone. So I went to her house after taking a shower and a piss, bypassing my we
ekly hookup with a forty-two-year-old realtor who’d helped me with my hotel refurbishment. I punched her doorbell a dozen times, walking back and forth, waiting for her to answer. I wanted to make sure she had a good first day. Gail said she was quiet and attentive—wasn’t that the definition of Jesse?—but the overwhelming, out-of-nowhere notion that I should have been there for her consumed me.
Guilty. I felt guilty. And I never felt guilty in my life.
“Bane,” Pam answered, hugging the door, her smile borderline arsenic. My face fell. At this point I was happy to fuck a goddamn tuna can before I laid a hand on her. The lights were dimmed behind her, and I wondered if Jesse was even there. Maybe I should have started my search at Mrs. Belfort’s.
“Is Jesse around?”
She cocked her head to the side, pouting. “Maybe.”
I parked my elbow on the doorframe. “I wouldn’t fuck with me, Pam.”
“But I would.” Her voice was lace and lust, and that damp thing between them that I had no interest touching.
I pushed my way into her house, bulldozing in like a hostile army, knowing she had little to no say about this shit. Darren had hired me. He would have my back if need be. “I want your daughter,” I told her, because a part of me no longer cared about hiding it.
“You’re kidding me.” She followed me across the landing of her house.
“Fucking wish I was. But I know better than to go after her, so don’t worry your little head. At the same time—I’m never going to dick you. Not in this lifetime, and probably not in the next one. So do us both a favor and pretend to be a decent mom.”
Her mouth dropped open, and she stood in front of me, probably waiting for an apology that never came. I turned around and climbed up the stairs to Jesse’s room, feeling the weight of my words on my shoulders.
I wanted Snowflake. I did. I wanted to feast on her pussy and fuck her tight little body senseless and kiss that tattoo on the back of her neck, telling her that I’d seen it before and liked it. That I saw her before and wanted her. That she wasn’t just a goddamn sob story for me.
I knocked on her door. No response.
Then did it again. Nothing.
Third time. “Go away,” she yawned from the other side of the door.
“Not happening. Open up.”
“Bane?” I liked that she was still naïve enough to be surprised.
“We need to talk.” I was pacing again. Why the fuck was I pacing again? Silence rang in my ears before her door slid open. I drank her face through the gap. She was so beautiful, it nearly hurt to see. I dated a lot of beautiful women. I fucked a ton of them, too. No one was pretty the way Snowflake was. Everything around her faded, like a poem with burned edges. She was the lyrics inside it, so focused and sharp. I pushed my shoulder against her door, moving into her room, and it nearly knocked the hell out of my breath.
Hanging from her ceiling was a chandelier made out of small memorabilia: old-school CD-ROMs, pens, remotes, postcards, letters, keychains of her favorite indie bands. It looked like her soul had exploded and poured down between us. The wall behind her queen-sized bed was covered with Polaroid pictures of people’s backs. I recognized her mom. A dark-haired man who was probably her dad. Darren and a bunch of cheerleaders and maybe even a bunch of strangers. Some push pins clung onto nothing. My guess was that they used to hold on to the pictures of the people from her previous life, before they’d fucked her over in every sense of the word. Though I did notice one picture curled under a pin. The back of a young man, his hair light brown and full. Emery, was my guess. His neck was stabbed a hundred times with the pin that was holding it up, until there was almost a pea-shaped hole in the middle.
A fairy lights Mason jar sat on her windowsill, making me wonder how many dreams she still had that were trapped inside. Smutty books scattered on the floor. She had black and white striped Beetlejuice linens and a rusty No trespassing, we’re tired of hiding the bodies sign hanging on her door. Her room had character. Personality. And lots of it.
“Who did all this?” I asked, acutely aware of how close our bodies were, and how her chest went up and down like she was feeling what I was feeling, even though I had no idea what the fuck that was.
“I did,” she said quietly. Her hair was still wet from the shower she must’ve taken after coming back home from the shift. She wore tiny pajama bottoms—again, orange—and a baggy Sleeping with Sirens black top. I didn’t know why, but it was the sexiest thing I’d ever seen.
She was a person.
She was a teenager, on the verge of breaking twenty.
She was a fucking girl, a woman, an in-betweener, with tits and hormones and sass and that layer of ice was melting too fast, and I wanted to fucking drink every drop of it while it did.
My toes touched hers. The proximity made both of us sway a little. My eyes on hers. Green on blue. Tough on soft. A dirty liar on the purest, kindest girl I ever knew.
“How was your first day?” I asked.
“Uneventful. Where were you?” Her voice was small, but the meaning behind her words was colossal.
I couldn’t face you without breaking a six-million-dollar contract.
“Surfing.” I took a step back, popping my gum. “I’m training Beck for a competition at the end of the month. That’s why I looked for a new barista. He quit.” I was bending the truth so much it was about to snap.
“Okay.”
“But is it really okay?”
“No. It was my first day working. The first day I faced the world again. I thought you were going to check on me.” Her voice shook. I’d betrayed her, and she was pissed. “I thought you were my friend.”
“I am your friend.”
“Friends care.”
“I care.” And that was becoming a fucking problem. Case in point, the next thing to come out of my mouth made me want to punch myself.
“Have dinner with me.” What the fuck was I saying? Asking?
She nearly leaned on me—nearly—and I smelled her everywhere. Even the musky sweet scent of her pussy. And it killed me that I couldn’t help her with what she really needed to see. That she could enjoy sex again. With me.
My reckless moments were piling up quickly. The next thing I did was stupid, too. I clasped her chin between my thumb and my index finger to guide her face up, so that our lips were aligned. The door was still half ajar, and I knew how much I was putting on the line. But I needed to do this with eye contact. Because my mom was right. I couldn’t fuck it up.
“You need to say no. I’m a bastard,” I whispered.
Kick me out of here. Before I’ll be the one who won’t be able to let you go.
She looked up and shook her head. “Yes.”
“No, Snowflake, you don’t understand. I am literally a bastard. My sperm donor was married, but not to my mom. Of course, it wasn’t her choice. She was brutally raped by him. And I’m the constant fucking reminder of that. I have his hair. His eyes. His lips. I have his height and his build. I’ve never met him, but I’ve a feeling that if I ever did, I would tear my fucking limbs apart just to make sure I’d never be capable of doing what he did to her. That’s why the tattoos. And the beard. That’s why I’m hiding. I don’t want to be him, understand?”
I’d never told that to anyone before, and whoever said the truth will set you free needed to have their head examined. The truth felt like a five-ton chain around my neck. The truth was, the beard was my armor. I’d started growing it when I started getting paid for sex. Less of my face to look at in the mirror.
And for my next trick, ladies and gents, I will become the whore my father pegged my mother to be. Only worse. She didn’t ask for it. For the right price—I will.
Jesse’s eyes widened at my confession, and I hated what I saw there. Pity swam in her pupils. I wanted her to blink and give me anything else instead. Lust. Anger. Confusion. Hate. I’d take anything, really, other than fucking pity.
“That’s why you said my story was persona
l to you. That’s why you said she couldn’t be saved.”
I didn’t nod—wasn’t really capable of doing anything other than shrugging—but she continued. “That’s why you don’t want to sleep with me.” Her fingertips fluttered across her lips.
“Among other reasons. Look, you’re not a tragedy to me, okay? You’re a person. An adorable, talented, funny—hotter than fire—person. But that’s the thing. I can’t touch you. I won’t touch you. As long as we keep this shit platonic, we’ll be gold. I just can’t have this on my conscience.” It was already soaked with deceit. I owed Darren more than I’d ever have in my bank account. Even if I wanted to break the contract, I’d already spent a quarter of the money.
She took a step forward. There was no more space between us, so her inner thigh pressed against my outer thigh through my surf shorts. My eyes dropped to her milky flesh. She pressed harder. I looked up, my pulse thrumming on my eyelids.
“I don’t care what your father did. He is the bastard. Not you. And you’re the only man I’m not afraid of. You make me feel brave. Powerful. You make staring at myself in the mirror without flinching slightly easier. And I want to, Bane. I want those things I read about in the books.” She licked her lips fast, shifting her gaze so I wouldn’t see all of her through her eyes. “So, by all means, kiss me.”
I wanted so badly to twist the collar of her shirt, pull her into me, crash my lips on hers, and fuck her against the wall. More than that—I knew that it was what she probably needed.
“Snowflake,” I warned, my voice a soft growl. She squeezed both her thighs together against my leg, riding it, her eyes cool and daring, her movements so subtle I wasn’t sure if I was imagining it or not. I swallowed hard as she found a hesitant, slow rhythm. I couldn’t push her away. Other than the very simple fact I didn’t want to, she was also a rape victim. Shutting her down would be the kiss of death to our relationship. The choice was mine to make. Six million bucks or her pussy. It sounded like an easy choice, though it was anything but.