“Stardust.” I placed my elbow on her doorframe, staring down at her.
She looked a little confused by my being there. Like she still couldn’t believe I actively sought her out.
That makes both of us.
“You look pissed,” I observed.
“You told your friends I’m having a poop crisis.” She blinked slowly.
“Telling them the truth would’ve given you a heart attack. Besides, Alfie and Lucas started looking at you like you were their next meal, and I didn’t like that. Two birds. One stone.”
“Why are you here?”
Because I can’t bear the thought of Lucas standing in my spot.
“Wanted to check if your head is still intact and not blown up from embarrassment for doing something dirty with a boy. That’s the chivalrous thing to do, correct?”
She hugged the door and nibbled on that poor lower lip of hers, all cracked and bruised. “First of all, you’re giving yourself way too much credit, and second of all, you’re as chivalrous as a Tasmanian devil. Your business is hanging all over the tabloids, literally and figuratively. Your penis is the new kittens on YouTube, for Chrissake.”
“I see you finally decided to Google me.”
She shrugged. “Lucas gave me his laptop until the end of the tour.”
Red cloth.
Angry bull.
Clenched fists.
Don’t kill Lucas. He’s not worth the jail time.
I grabbed her hand and yanked her out of her room. “You just earned yourself a new laptop. My treat.”
I bet if I’d told Alex that Lucas let me crash at his place, he’d buy me a whole house just to spite him. It was obvious that whatever was happening between him and me was also a direct result of trying to keep me away from his drummer. A different girl may have taken a step back, but my life was such a hot mess, on and off the tour, Alex was the least of my problems.
After he bought me a laptop—which I insisted on not taking, but he maintained I’d make use of after the tour ended—we took a ride. Moscow was cold, gray, and old, like a stern grandmother. When I got back to the hotel, I immediately installed Skype and tried to call Natasha, but she didn’t answer. Then I stared at my crack-screened phone and willed it to ring, feeling hope slither out of me like blood from an open wound. Finally, I threw in the towel and started working on my Paris dress. It was well after eleven p.m. local time, and I was just starting to relax, the hum of the mini sewing machine lulling me out of my anxiety about Craig. Only two more months until I’d get back and take care of them. Already, the bi-monthly payments helped pay for so many necessities back at home.
This particular dress I was working on was a difficult one to make, because I had to write on the patches with a fine pen. It took twice the amount of time to produce, but I knew too well that things we earn through hard work are always more precious.
My window overlooked the Red Square, which I’d been to earlier that day with Alex. We had a driver, and that made me feel like some kind of a princess, and not in a good way. When we were walking toward the Kremlin, Alex gave me the brief history of the place. He said it costs two hundred thousand dollars a year for the museum to maintain Lenin’s corpse in perfect condition, and that it was already one hundred forty-seven years old.
“I’m telling you, Stardust, I’ve seen pictures. He doesn’t look a day over fifty-six. A little waxy, sure. But no more than the average Hollywood starlet.”
Alex told me he’d been to Moscow three times before, and if the tour wasn’t so condensed, he would’ve loved to have shown me around. I didn’t believe him at all, knowing he was a liar, but it was still nice to hear. When darkness blanketed the Russian capital, Alex asked the driver to take us to see “the ugliest, most awesome thing in the world.” I laughed as I tucked myself in the back seat of the Renault Duster and tried to swallow down my excitement when butterflies cartwheeled in my belly. He scooted so close I could feel his breath on my skin again, and my thighs clenched when I thought about the last thing he’d said to me about being on my knees for him.
“It’s pretty dark out.” I tried to sound indifferent to spending time with him. Alex wasn’t wrong, I decided, when I drank in Moscow like bitter coffee with a bite. It looked new, with skyscrapers and manicured parks and smoggy air, virtues of a fast-paced city. At the same time, it looked old, with trains of mass-built buildings from its Soviet past stretched out for miles.
I found out what Alex was talking about when the car rolled toward an embankment. The driver cut the engine and sat back. The monument was unmistakable, because it hovered over the Moskva River like a monster. Winslow, once again, had been correct. It was huge, elaborate and…scary. Yes. Plain creepy. Like something out of Game of Thrones . Of a man on a ship. The statue was holding something in his hand, staring in the distance.
“That is…” I started.
“The tenth ugliest building in the world according to the Virtual Tourist,” Alex finished for me, sticking his head near my shoulder and grinning to catch a glimpse of the statue, too. “Peter the Great. The irony is, not only is it quite ugly, but Peter the Great didn’t even like Moscow. He changed Russia’s Capital to St. Petersburg before they switched it back. Welcome to human logic.”
Our driver started texting, making himself invisible, and it was easy to forget we weren’t alone.
“How do you know all these things?” I asked.
“I like history.”
“Why?”
“Because it gives me better tools to understand the future.”
I nodded. Alex wasn’t being patronizing or blabby. In another rare time since the first time I’d met him, he showed genuine interest in something, and was sharing it with me. It frightened me. The idea that he could be open and real. Because the very thing that held me together was the idea that Alex Winslow was, in fact, a pile of stereotypes sewn together into a persona even he couldn’t distinguish anymore. He ticked every single box: rock star, troubled, drug addict, tattooed. It was embarrassingly familiar.
I swiveled my head to the window again.
“Can we go back to the hotel?”
“Why?”
Because I want to survive you.
“I would like to call my family.”
Alex shrugged in a women-huh-what-can-you-do, catching the driver’s gaze in the rearview mirror, who returned the same international ‘man, woman’ signal.