Chapter Twenty-Eight - KATYA
“Hey,” Oliver says, wrapping his arms around me. My face is resting on his chest. My fingers play with the little trail of blond hair that leads beneath the covers. His are tracing light circles on my upper arm. “I gotta go to work in about an hour. You wanna shower with me?”
“And wash off all this talent?” I say, smiling up at him. “Not a chance.”
“OK.” He laughs. “Let me rephrase the question. Would you like me to carry you into the bathroom and fuck you in the shower?”
“Well, when you put it like that…”
But I’m too comfortable to even think about getting out of bed. And he must be too because he makes no move to make good on his offer.
“What are you gonna do today?” he asks.
“Work,” I say. “Like usual, I guess.”
“What does that look like?”
I close my eyes and enjoy his soft touch as I think about my answer. “Well, I guess I’ll have to start over with the body art.” I squirm a little so I can look up at his face. “Since you’re insisting on washing it off me.”
“I said fuck you, not wash you.”
We both take a second to laugh.
“But if you want photographs, that camera can take stills. Besides, I used the waterproof markers. It’ll come off, but it might take a few days.”
“Well.” I sigh. “Decision made for me I guess. I won’t be working today after all. Not on anything original at least.”
“My work is original.”
“I can’t sell your work.”
“What if I sign over copyright?”
“Oliver.” I laugh. “You’re on drugs if you think I’d sell photos of your words on my body.”
He lifts up the hair covering my left ear so he can kiss my tattoo. “My words are on all your pictures.”
“I edit them out.”
“Nah,” he says. “I saw them in that pic you uploaded on Hook-Me-Up.”
“Yeah, because I was sending it to you and only you.”
“About that…”
Shit. We are getting dangerously close to the reason I’m back in town.
“You could’ve just… called me up, you know? Like on the phone. Or came over to the office and said, ‘Hey, I’m back in town. How about a fuck?’”
“You and your fucks.” I laugh. But I don’t want to talk about this right now. It only leads to the bad stuff.
“I’m serious.”
“I just didn’t know how you’d feel about me. It’s been four years. More than four years.”
“I thought about you almost every day of those four years. I’m not just saying that either.”
I know he’s not.
“I pictured you at school.”
Fuck.
“Your life there. What you were doing. Who your new friends were.”
“I dropped out,” I say quickly, before he can say anything else. “I went, but…” Shit. “It wasn’t for me.”
“Hey, you know what?” Oliver’s finger lifts my chin up so I have to look at him. “I totally skipped college too.”
We laugh for a few moments.
“I mean, yeah, I’d have probably finished if I wasn’t, you know, accused of rape freshman year. But whatever. I kind think it would’ve been a waste of time. Plus, I probably would’ve never come home. Would’ve never have met you. Hook Me Up was just a stupid college gig. I had no plans of being Mr. Match for real. It was always Ariel’s project.”
This interests me. Not the part about us meeting. That was a little bit more than just fate. But the part about what he had planned for himself before that shit went down with the rape accusation. “What was your thing?” I turn and prop my head up on the hand that rests on his chest.
He shrugs, his eyes less thunderstorm and more light showers. “Bikes, maybe. Tattoos? Art? Probably art. You know what’s funny?”
“What?” I say, enjoying this morning talk.
“Nolan Delaney.” He laughs. “I kinda hate that dick. But he and I are a lot alike.”
I scrunch up my nose. “I don’t see it.”
“No, most people wouldn’t. But he’s an artist. And I’m an artist. Maybe not as talented as him. Or twisted.” Oliver winks at me. “But he puts his fucking soul into his work. I’m just a dabbler.”
I throw the covers off us and bare my body to him. “This is not dabbling. And I do want pictures. Do you have time to take them?”
“I would make time, even if I didn’t,” he says. “But back to you. Your days. Your life. What was it like? I only ask because I’ve been stuck here in my home town for a…”
He suddenly stops talking.
“Oliver?”
He just stares at the ceiling.
“Oli?”
“Sorry,” he says, distracted. “But you know what I just realized?”
“What?”
“It’s been eleven years.”
“What?”
“The eleven-year anniversary was two weeks ago and I never even noticed.”
“Do you usually notice?”
“Every fucking year,” he whispers. “Every fucking year I get up, get on my bike, and ride until the day is over.”
Suddenly he makes a lot of sense. “‘Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road. Healthy, free, the world before me. The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.’”
“Yeah,” he says. “When I came home from Brown about a week after the accusation, the first thing I did was stop by the tattoo shop to see my sister, Jasmine. I had a thing for that poem. Song of the Open Road. I already had the bike. She did it the summer before I left. The second I turned eighteen—and I do mean the second, because I was hanging out in the shop the night before my eighteenth birthday—I had her ink me up.”
He stops to smile. Like this is a really good memory.
“My fucking parents. My dad threatened my Uncle Vic. Said if that tattoo machine put one speck of ink on his only son a minute before he turned eighteen, he’d kick his ass.”
I picture it in my head. I don’t know who would win that fight. Probably the guy who had something to fight for, and not something to fight against.
“He was being dramatic. They used to fight a lot, but hadn’t fought seriously for a few years. Vic took the warning to heart. Anyway, Jasmine had already done the bike. So that evening I came home from Brown she did the words. Because all I wanted to do was disappear. And it didn’t seem fair that I couldn’t. I was out on bail.”
God, that sucks. “You know what I was doing that night?”
Oliver pulls himself out of his past and enters mine. “That night?”
“The night you were accused of rape I was getting my throat cut.”
“That night?” Oliver squints his eyes at me.
I nod. “That same night. I was eleven.”
“What the fuck?” He’s looking at me like he has no idea who I am. And he doesn’t. Not really.
I shrug. “I don’t know. I don’t know what it means. I was young. I had some clue what my parents were into, ya know? But not really. Little kids have a hard time imagining the dirty shit that happens in the dark. So I would hear the word Bratva and my American mind would translate it to brothers. I called the Vory uncles. My father was Shestyorka. Associate. A nobody. But he wanted to be a somebody.”
“No,” Oliver says. “Tell me he did not give them permission.”
“He did. I didn’t understand then and I don’t understand it now. Because I would never let anyone hurt my little sister. No matter what the promise was. I’d take her cuts myself before I let them do that to her.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this?” Oliver asks, propping himself up on his elbow.
“I think they loved me,” I continue without answering. “My parents. They left me money after it all went to hell. An escape plan. A very well-thought-out escape plan. That’s how I got here.”
I want to tell him that last tiny detail about how I got here. But I can’t. Not yet.
“But before it went to hell, they made my father Vor. Thief. Bratva. Family. He earned his respect by letting them cut me with that scalpel. I wasn’t supposed to fight back.” I look up at Oliver. “But I’m just a fighter, I guess.”
He traces the words that cover the scar on my shoulder, looking down at it for a few seconds before looking back up at me. “This one was an accident.”
I nod. “And it wasn’t pretty. But it was my fault. They made that very clear when they sewed me back up.”
“Jesus fucking Christ.”
It’s funny how you hold things in for so long they almost start being a fantasy. But then there is one moment that changes everything. One moment and the words just come spilling out. One moment to make them real again.
“But just because you’re made Vor in the Bratva doesn’t mean you stay that way forever.”
“What did he do to lose favor?”
“He refused to give me to one of the Italians. The one who cut me.”
“Lucio Gori.”
“Senior,” I add, because it makes a difference. “Senior. I was promised to Senior and Victoria was promised to Junior. At least he was close to her age. I lied about which one did it because I wanted Tori to feel a connection to me. But it wasn’t Junior who ruined my life. It was his father.”
“Did he rape you?”
I don’t answer.
“They killed my parents a few months before I met you.”
Oliver sinks back into his pillow. His arms tightening around me once more. “I don’t need to know the rest.”
No. No, he really doesn’t. And I don’t need to talk about it either. I came to terms with it a long time ago. No amount of talking can change the past.
“Where did you really go when you left me?” He asks the question with fear in his voice.
“I lived at Lucio’s house. But it didn’t matter. Lily was here at the Parson School for Girls. Far, far away. Just like I planned.”
I wait for the next question. Why did you come back? But he is silent for a very long time after that. Ten minutes. Fifteen, maybe.
He leans in and kisses my neck. The place he likes to start. Right where the scar begins. I have always wondered how he knew. The cut goes from ear to ear. How did he know that the starting point was on my left side instead of the right?
I don’t know.
“We better take those pictures. It would be a shame to waste the moment.” Oliver slips his arm out from under me and swings his legs over the side of the bed.
I sit up in bed but don’t make to get out. “Do you really think we need to keep this moment?”
Oliver is pulling a pair of jeans on. I stare at his tattoos while he does this. The ravens. The words. The wings. The bike. More words. “Fuck, yes,” he says in a low, deep voice. “Fuck, yes, we need to keep this moment.” And then he looks at me.
His eyes are no longer rain showers, but a tornado of hate, and anger, and fear.
“Because this is the moment that changes everything.”