When I arrive at Aleksandr’s building, Martin holds the door open with a flourish, saying, “Welcome back, Ms. Volkova. Do you want help with your bags?”
I glance down at the two bags I’m carrying, one with wine bottles and the other with a layered sponge cake with sliced strawberries and whipped cream. “I’m good, thank you.”
His white caterpillar-like mustache dances above his lips as they curve into a smile. “Right this way.”
He leads me through the lobby once again, and it feels less intimidating this time, now that I’m not taking it all in for the first time. Now, it’s almost cozy. The low leather chairs sitting on those Oriental rugs, the mirrored coffee table in the middle of them, the gilded chandeliers—it’s the perfect, elegant place to sit with a book and people watch.
When we get to the elevator, Martin inserts his key card for me, and the lift rises to the sixteenth floor so quickly that I’ve barely had time to collect my thoughts before the door is opening and I’m stepping into the empty entryway.
Well, this feels intrusive. I’m already uncomfortable coming to a family dinner when I’m not family, and now I’m standing here alone, not sure what to do with myself. I listen for some indication that the space isn’t actually empty, and I can hear faint voices coming from the opposite end of the apartment, a part I’ve never been in. I step into the dining room and the voices grow louder, so I follow the sound through a swinging door into a butler’s pantry that’s as big as my kitchen and twice as nice, then through another swinging door into a kitchen. In typical New York fashion it’s a galley-style because even in apartments this big, space is still at a premium. Everything in here looks original—painted white cabinets, white subway tiles that have so many hairline cracks in them they look intentionally aged, and worn soapstone countertops with a big soapstone farmhouse sink. People pay astronomical prices to remodel their kitchens to look like this, and here’s an original.
And at the end of it, standing around a little peninsula with a stand mixer on top, are Stella and Sasha. Covered in cake batter. It’s all over Sasha’s T-shirt, but even on her step stool Stella only comes up to his armpits, so she’s got much more on her: it’s on her face, in her hair, splattered across her dress. And they’re both laughing like it’s the funniest thing that’s ever happened. They probably haven’t noticed it on the walls yet.
“Petra!” Stella says, her face lighting up when she sees me.
Sasha’s laugh stills when he notices me standing there. “Hey, I didn’t realize you were here already.” He sounds happy to see me, but his face is expressionless, so I can’t tell for sure. He clasps Stella’s shoulder when she tries to step off the step stool toward me. “You’re covered in cake batter,” he reminds her softly.
“Can people always get in this easily without you knowing?” I ask as I set the bag with the cake on the counter, then use both hands to set the bag of wine on the counter next to it so I can make sure neither bottle falls over.
He uses a dish towel to wipe some of the cake batter off Stella’s face, but she swats his hand away because she’s clearly enjoying licking all the batter she can reach with her little tongue. “I have a list of people who the front door staff know can access the apartment any time they want, which is why you were let up.” He wipes the towel slowly along the counter, but his voice is defensive, which means he doesn’t realize I was teasing. And also—what?—I’m on this list of his?
“Who else is on your list?” I lean my hip against the counter and cross my arms under my chest, keeping my voice teasing and my pose casual.
“The nanny will be when she starts next week.”
“So I’m the only one?”
My eyebrows knit together. He eyes me, then glances down at Stella. “Do you want to go take a quick shower before CeCe and Tony get here?”
Stella nods and hops off the stool.
“Do you need help?” he asks.
“No, I can take a shower myself,” she assures him. “I’ll be right back for my hug,” she tells me as she runs past me on her way out of the room.
Sasha looks down at his shirt, then glances around at the mess. “So much for dessert.”
“Lucky for you, I brought some.” I reach into the bag and take out the box so he can see the cake through the cellophane wall on the front and top.
“And you picked Stella’s favorite bakery. She’s going to be very happy.”
“Need help cleaning this up?” I ask as I glance around, trying to figure out how many surfaces are covered in cake batter.
He looks at the sleeveless shirtdress I’m wearing with a pair of wedges. “I don’t want you to get batter all over yourself too,” he says. He reaches behind his neck and pulls his T-shirt over his head effortlessly.
There is about half a second where I’m so captivated by his body—by the ridges and valleys of each muscle stretching and contracting as he drags his shirt up and over his head, by the sheer size of his powerful abdomen, chest, and shoulders—that I stop breathing. I forget who I’m looking at.
But then the shirt crests his head and I see his face and I remember: the loss, the devastation, the desolation. I feel it all like it was yesterday, and I remember how I promised myself I’d never let him, or any man, make me feel that way again. I am who I am, and how I am, because men like him exist.
“Can you hand me that towel,” he gestures opposite me. I tear my eyes from his body to see another dish towel hanging on the bar of his eight-burner Wolf range and oven combo. Grabbing it, I take opposite corners in each hand and spin the fabric around itself until I have a long rope of towel. He eyes me warily. “Don’t you dare.”
For so many reasons, I should heed those words and keep my distance. Instead, I take another step toward him.
“But it was always so funny when it was you chasing me around the big kitchen at Whitehall.” I can’t help but smile at the memory of us as kids, and how the Ivanov’s cook would always chase us out of the kitchen threatening to butcher us and serve us for dinner if we didn’t learn to behave ourselves. “Not as funny if you’re on the receiving end?” I walk toward him slowly, each step measured so I can retreat if needed.
“You realize I have a dish towel right here,” he says, nodding toward the towel he used to wipe Stella’s face and then the counter. It’s covered in cake batter, which makes this game twice as risky because I don’t have anything to change into if he decides to whack me with that dirty towel. He wouldn’t dare.
“You wouldn’t get me covered in cake batter before your sister-in-law shows up,” I remind him. “I’m counting on you to be a gentleman.”
“I am so many things,” he says, his voice low and steady, “but a gentleman is not one of them.”
He covers the space between us in two huge steps and a fraction of a second. For a man of his size, he moves with remarkable speed and before I know what’s happening, he’s directly in front of me, ripping the towel out of my hands.
“You always were terrible at this game,” he says, looking down at me. His voice has that growly quality that competition always brings out in him, but it’s the heat in his eyes as his body holds mine in place against the cabinets that startles me most. It seems impossible, but it’s like his pupils are molten—liquid steel churning over and over.
“Maybe I was never trying to win,” I say, my voice barely audible. It feels like the most vulnerable thing I’ve said in a long time. I watch him process this information—is it a revelation to him? Because losing at this game is not just getting whipped with the towel, but getting caught.
Is that what I wanted? To be caught by Sasha, not just temporarily in the game, but for good?
He tilts his head to the side, studying me, and I watch those molten steel orbs as they skim across my face—assessing, questioning, affirming. He opens his mouth to say something when there’s a bloodcurdling shriek somewhere in the apartment.
He’s through the door so fast I only see his back for a second before the door swings shut behind him. I follow, heading through the dining room, into the entryway, and then down the hallway where I hear his footsteps. The door to Stella’s room is open, and by the time I catch up, he stands in the doorway with a sobbing six-year-old plastered to his legs.
He looks over at me and mouths spider, rolling his eyes so hard that it makes me laugh. I cover my mouth just in time, so the laugh is inaudible. I’d never want Stella to think I was laughing at her expense.
I approach slowly, ignoring the way Stella’s death grip on Sasha’s leg has his jeans riding low on his hips and the waistband of his briefs standing out against the deep grooves of his abdomen. I sink down so I’m sitting on my heels with my arms wrapped around my knees.
“Hey,” I say to her, and she looks at me with enormous tears spilling over her eyelids. “What’s going on?”
“There’s a spider in my bathroom.”
“I don’t like spiders either,” I tell her. “You know what I like to do when I find them in my apartment?”
Her eyes get even wider. “What?”
“I like to catch them in a cup. Then I slide a piece of paper under them so they are trapped. Sometimes I let them crawl around in there for a couple hours thinking about the error of their ways.” Above us, Sasha’s chest shakes with silent laughter. “But then, because I’m benevolent, I take them outside and let them go so they can eat all the bad bugs.”
“What’s benevolent mean?” she asks, perking up as the tears stop falling.
“It means I try to use my powers for good.”
“Even to help”—her lower lip is practically trembling at the word—“spiders?”
“Spiders don’t want anything to do with us. They’re just looking for bugs to eat. So if I put them outside, they can eat bugs, like mosquitos, that might bite me and then they’re actually working for me, right?”
“Do you want to catch the spider on the wall by my shower?” she asks.
“Sure thing,” I tell her. “You know, girls need to know how to catch bugs.”
“Why?” The word is part curiosity, part revulsion.
“Well, what if when you’re older there’s a spider in your room and there isn’t someone else around to catch it for you? It’s important to know how to do these things for ourselves.”
Her face manages to perk up a bit while still looking skeptical. I slide my eyes up to Aleksandr, who looks at me with that same mask he wore when I first entered his kitchen. Gone are the eyes that were burning as they slid across my face.
“How about if I show you how I do it so you’ll know how next time?” I say as I hold my hand out to Stella.
“Okay.” The word is fear and bravery wrapped inexorably together.
I glance up at Sasha. “Could you get me a glass and a piece of paper? Or something stiff like an envelope?”
“Sure,” he says. Now that Stella has released her hold on his legs, he steps around me and hurries down the hall.
I take her hand and say, “Why don’t you show me where this spider is, and then I’ll explain how I’m going to catch it.”
She follows me to the bathroom door but stops on the threshold and won’t come in. Instead, she points her hand up toward the glass door of her shower. There on the wall is a light brown spider, smaller than a dime. “Okay, so what I’m going to do is put a glass over it. Then, I’ll lift one side of the glass ever so slightly and slide a folded piece of paper or an envelope under it. Once the spider is on the paper or glass, the trickiest part is getting your hand under the paper so you can carry the spider in the glass outside, without the spider getting out.”
“But when you put the cup over it, won’t it jump or run around?” she asks. I notice that she’s looking at the spider with some degree of curiosity. At least she doesn’t seem petrified anymore.
“Maybe. But spiders can’t jump or run through glass, or through plastic if we use a plastic cup. And even if the spider gets away somehow, believe me, it’s trying to run away from you, not toward you.”
She takes a small step into the bathroom so she’s standing next to me.
“What makes you so scared of them?” I ask.
“They move so fast.”
“Think how fast you could run if you had eight legs,” I say. Where the hell is Sasha with the glass? I don’t like spiders any more than the next person, but I do want her to know that it’s important that she learn to do things like this for herself. As a rich kid growing up on the Upper East Side, it would be too easy to end up spoiled and entitled and unable to do anything for herself.
I never had anyone teach me how to be independent, how to take care of myself, or how to advocate for myself. My parents did everything for me when I was a kid, then my mom died and my dad became what I generously call ‘emotionally mute.’ I had to learn how to be an adult overnight, and I had to figure everything out myself because my dad was so wrapped up in his grief he was utterly useless as a father.
“Here you go.” Sasha’s voice startles me. He stands in the doorway, his hand extended with the glass. At least he has a shirt on now.
“For someone so large, you move remarkably quickly and quietly,” I say as I take the glass. I try to ignore the shock of his skin on mine when our fingers touch, but I bobble the glass and he has to catch it and hand it back to me again.
“You’ve seen what I can do on skates. This should not be a surprise.”
Still, how does a two hundred-pound man not make a sound when he walks?
I show Stella how quickly and easily a spider can be caught, then I leave the bathroom with the offending arachnid. Aleksandr tells her to take a very quick shower and shuts the door behind him.
He eyes the way I’m holding the spider between the glass in one hand and the folded piece of paper in the other. “How mad would you be if I tickled you right now?” A sly smile barely cracks his lips enough for me to see his teeth.
“How mad would you be if there was shattered glass all over Stella’s floor and a spider loose in her room?”
“You play dirty, Volkova. Always have,” he mutters.
“Sometimes winning is dirty work,” I say, throwing the words he always used during our childhood right back at him. He never apologized when we were kids and he tripped me or knocked me out of the way during a game. Back then, he’d win at any cost. I wonder if the same is true today?
Our eyes size each other up in a mini staring contest, both of us, I’m sure, remembering our competitive childhood relationship that turned to deep friendship before his betrayal.
“Can you show me where to let this thing out?” I say, not wanting to dwell on the past I thought I’d left far behind me until he showed up in a lawyer’s office two days ago.
He leads me back through the living room and opens one of the glass doors. I follow him through it and onto the terrace. The sound that leaves my mouth when the spectacular view of Central Park hits me is almost a grunt of pain. The view I saw the other night was amazing, but he was right, it is even better in the daylight, especially now that I can see this terrace. We stand on travertine tiles laid in a diamond pattern, and there’s a low stone wall that runs along the perimeter with a short glass wall above it—high enough that you can’t accidentally fall over the edge, but low enough that it doesn’t interfere with the view. A large wrought iron table and chairs sit near one wall, and lush planters full of small trees, shrubs, and flowers surround us. I follow the length of the terrace with my eyes. “Is that a . . .” I search for the word but can’t find it.
“It’s a solarium,” he says. The glass walls and ceiling easily soar twelve feet from the floor to the peaked roof, and it runs to the end of the terrace. Inside it’s loaded with plants and another table and chairs.
I take a few steps closer to the solarium so I can better see the inside. “This is magical,” I say, because I cannot for the life of me think of another word for this space.
“The solarium is another thing that sold me on the space.” His breath falls against my neck, which leads to the same tingling in my spine I felt when he had me backed into the cabinet in the kitchen. “My bedroom has glass doors that lead out to it,” his arm extends past me, pointing to the end of the terrace. “So does the guest room.”
“Wow, to wake up in a place like that.” My sigh is laced with appreciation for this life he’s built for himself.
“It would make a lot of sense for you to stay here, Petra. In the guest room,” he quickly adds, as if I might have thought he meant in his room. “If you’re willing to help me and Stella, we’ll need to find a way to live together, at least some of the time.”
My spine stiffens. “I have a life, and a career. I can’t just walk away from them. Even if I wanted to help you, I can’t move to New York, and it’s unfair of you to ask me to.”
I glance over at him and there’s a flash of pain in his eyes. I do want to help you, I almost say. But I bite my tongue instead, because I don’t know how to help him without hurting myself.
“I know this is a big ask . . .”
“A big ask is ‘Hey, can you watch my kid for a week while I go on vacation.’ This is life-changing. A fake marriage that needs to be real? A kid to adopt? Getting you US citizenship? You’re not talking about helping you out. You’re talking about me changing everything, giving up much of what I’ve worked for over the past few years, relocating . . .”
“Petra, I don’t know what else to do. The thought of Stella ever ending up with her aunt and uncle . . .” He trails off as his body visibly shudders.
And as if they knew we were talking about them, a doorbell sound chimes inside the apartment.
Aleksandr rolls his eyes skyward. “That’s Martin letting me know they’re here.”
I quickly set the spider trap on the ground, lift the glass, and then pick up the paper after the small spider scurries away. When I stand, I feel like I’m going to face a firing squad—I don’t even know these people, I’m not sure why I am involved, or why I care what they think.
“Can you get Stella and I’ll entertain them? I don’t want you to be stuck with them while I get her.”
Even though I still don’t think they can be as bad as he’s making them out to be, it sounds like he’s giving me the better end of the bargain. “No problem,” I tell him.
He opens the door to the solarium. “First door on the right leads to the guest bedroom. When you come out in the hall, Stella’s room is to the right.” With that, he turns and heads back through the door to the sitting room and is gone.
