Breathe Me In (5 page)

She spoke then, in a raspy whisper. It startled me. But what startled me even more was that it was Russian, and I understood it.

I couldn’t have repeated it or directly translated it, but I knew it meant, “We’re family. You, me, Asher. We take care of each other.”

I nodded, because now I was the one who couldn’t speak.

But it meant that I could leave Asher with Chloe knowing he was safe, even if it hurt. Even if it was hard. Even if I hated myself for what I had to do.

So the next day I left Chloe and Asher in the apartment with plenty of food and diapers and new baby clothes and I said I was going down the street to apply for a job at the pizza joint on the corner. Instead I caught a bus to Kane’s apartment, rubbing my clammy hands on the knees of my jeans and biting my lip. Going to a total stranger’s apartment wasn’t the stupidest thing I’ve ever done by far and it didn’t make me nervous. What had my foot tapping furiously was the idea of attempting to seduce Kane. I wasn’t exactly known for my flirtatious wittiness and sexy body language. Usually my method of hitting on a guy was just telling him straight up that we should hook up. That probably wasn’t going to work with this guy.

I had showered, washed my hair, borrowed a clean shirt from Chloe, even put on lipgloss. This was as good as it got, unfortunately.

Hopefully it was enough.

Kane hadn’t mentioned any sort of girlfriend or whatever so hopefully I wasn’t stepping on someone else’s turf. Nor did he seem like the type of guy who was hard up for dates. So most likely this was doomed to failure.

Then again, he’d agreed to it. He didn’t seem like the type to agree to see another woman if he had a girlfriend, nor did he seem to have misunderstood my intention. He’d called it a date. But I wasn’t sure why he’d agreed to it, honestly.

I guess if he murdered me, that would be that.

But I could certainly promise to haunt his ass for all of eternity if he did.

When I pulled the door open Anya was standing there, playing with the stud in her lip with her tongue. She smiled. “Hey.”

“Hey. Come on in.” I tried not to sound skeptical and focused on studying her. “You look good.” She did. She’d lost that vacant stare and the dark bruises under her eyes were lighter. Her hair was loose and down around her face and unlike when I’d seen her two days earlier, she wasn’t wearing heavy eyeliner and mascara. It brought the focus back to her eyes, instead of the makeup, and she looked younger, less hard. She was beautiful.

“Thanks. It’s amazing what a shower can do.”

“And food.”

She gave a soft laugh. “Ha. Yeah, and food.”

I stepped back so she could enter my apartment. She looked around, clearly curious. “How is Asher?” I asked. “Settling in okay?”

That made her stop suddenly and look up at me. “How do you know his name?”

“You told me. Or said it. I don’t know.” I ran my fingers through my hair, wondering if this was a complete mistake. Maybe she was emotionally unstable or something. “Should I call him Baby instead? Or pretend that you don’t have a child?”

Anya frowned. “Well, don’t be a little bitch about it. I just don’t remember telling you his name.”

A little bitch? Seriously? I felt my eyebrows rise. “Um, I don’t think that you were completely with it when we met. You might have said all kinds of things you don’t remember.” I gestured for her to have a seat on the couch.

“Like what?” She sat down, but didn’t relax into the cushions. She sat on the edge, hands on her knees.

It was a perfect opportunity to mess with her a little. “About how hot I am.”

She rolled her eyes. But then she paused, taking a deep breath. Like she was steeling herself. “You are hot. But I’m guessing you know that.”

Not at all what I was expecting her to say. “You don’t seem like the type to blow smoke up my ass. Would you like a glass of wine and then you can tell me what the hell is really going on here?” Because this was not just a girl showing up to get laid. I didn’t think.

She tucked her hair behind her ear. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Uh-uh.” I let it go because she was looking me straight in the eye, and I doubted pushing would get me much more information. If she was a liar, she was a confident one. “What color is your hair naturally? Blonde?”

“No. It’s brown. Boring old brown. My sister’s hair is chestnut. Mine is just brown.”

“How old is your sister?”

“Twenty-one, like me. We’re twins.”

“Identical?” There was a fantasy I’d never had but suddenly was picturing in a very pornographic way.

“No. I just told you her hair is different than mine.”

That was the Anya I remembered meeting. Prickly. “All right. I got it. Settle down.” I sat down next to her.

Her body shifted away from mine.

“Red or white?”

“What?” She looked at me like I was nuts.

Clearly I was for having her in my apartment.

“Wine. What kind of wine do you want?”

“I don’t know. I’m not really a wine drinker.”

“What do you drink then? Maybe I have it.” I tested her by shifting my knee towards hers. This time she stood her ground.

“When I was young and stupid I drank vodka. And when I was on stage sometimes I’d drink whatever a customer bought for me. It was like a PR thing, I couldn’t really say no. But I don’t for the most part because of my son.”

“On stage?”

“I sang in a band in the Village. Mostly screamer metal.”

That didn’t seem like too much of a stretch to me. I could definitely picture her up on stage yelling expletives at a microphone. “I don’t have any vodka. And I don’t really want to get you drunk. I’ll give you a glass of red wine and you can sip it or not, okay?”

She shrugged, like it meant nothing to her one way or the other. “Sure.”

That did it. “What gives, Anya? What are you doing here, seriously?”

“I told you, I want to repay you for helping me out.”

I wasn’t buying it. “I don’t see forty bucks in your hand. And I don’t need or want you to pay me back. I’m pretty sure I made that clear.”

“So you don’t need your house cleaned?”

Her expression was impossible to read. She would be deadly at poker. I was going to answer but she continued speaking before I could.

“I can do it naked if you want. Is that your thing?”

What the fuck? I admit it, I was both speechless and turned on. “Let me get this straight. You’re offering to clean my house. Naked. For how much?”

“Fifteen an hour. So the first three will be comped since you already gave me forty bucks.” She looked around the apartment. “I can do this place in two hours, tops, so if I come once a week, you’re only out thirty bucks starting next time, and it would help me a lot.”

I had no clue what she was all trying to do. None. And I hated both that I found the idea intriguing and that I couldn’t figure out her angle. I knew she had one, I just couldn’t guess what it was. That frustrated the hell out of me.

“Are you underage and you’re trying to pull some kind of sting on me?” I asked. “Because this is fucking weird, Anya.”

“I’m trying to do two things. Flirt with you and get a job, asshole,” she snapped, angrily launching herself off the couch. “Look, I suck at being a flirt, okay? Flirting is for cheerleaders.”

That made me laugh. “You’re no cheerleader, that’s for damn sure.” That sounded more like what I would expect from her. I still didn’t get what she was after, but she was so different than every other girl I’d been involved with, I couldn’t help it. I was drawn to her. I was curious. Big time, hard on out, stupid idiot kind of curious. “But why the urgency? Why not just let it happen naturally if it’s going to happen?”

“I don’t know how to do that.”

In the past, the girls I had dated were accomplished flirts. They were pretty and pleasant and did their hair and wore false eyelashes and spray tanned. So basically the total opposite of Anya. Athletic girls weren’t my thing and bad asses had never been either. I wanted to be around nurturing women, caregivers. But usually what I’d found was the girls I chose were selfish, or at least self-centered, not at all nurturing. They were putting on a façade and what you saw was not what you got. I didn’t know how to be with a girl like Anya any more than she knew how to be a giggly flirt. I wasn’t even sure why either of us wanted to try.

But when I looked at her, I felt a pull deep inside me, a raw base attraction that made it so I couldn’t let her walk away at the store the other day and couldn’t let her stomp off out of my apartment now. Even with the standoffish behavior I felt like she couldn’t entirely hide who she was and I wanted to dig, get to see a little more of her.

“Then what do you usually do when you think a guy is hot?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I kiss him. Climb on his lap. I’m not very subtle.”

My dick got even harder. “No, you’re definitely not subtle.” If she climbed on my jock I was going to be hard pressed to do anything but fuck her so deep she couldn’t breathe. I looked at her and I felt two opposing needs- the desire to protect her and the rough driving urge to take her. Neither was logical. Both were base. “But I’m going to take a stab in the dark here and say that the money is more important to you than any attraction you have to me, right?”

Her expression didn’t change. “Money is really damn important to me, because yes, I don’t have any. But at the same time, sometimes you need to be thoroughly and totally distracted from the fact that you’re homeless and broke and have no way to feed your kid.”

Yeah. I could totally see that. It felt like the most honest thing she’d said so far. “So you want to use me for my body?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said boldly. “You got a problem with that?”

I didn’t totally object to the idea. No one wants to think they’re nothing but a talking dildo, but at the same time, I was damn attracted to her. I could tell myself it felt kind of like a public service. She needed to be distracted, reminded of the fact that she was a woman. Was that really any different than me giving her the forty bucks? If anything, it was less charitable, because she was asking straight out for it and I wanted to give it.

Now wasn’t I just the Good Fucking Samaritan?

Justification was easy enough when my cock was hard. But fuck it, she was an adult. We were both clearly a good distance out from our last orgasm with another person in the room, so why not? I was pretty sure her plan was to screw me, wait until I fell asleep than steal whatever she could find in my apartment. My phone would probably be the first thing to be tucked away in her bra before she took off.

I would just have to make sure I didn’t fall asleep after sex.

Hell, I wasn’t even sure I cared if she stole from me. She needed the money. I had insurance for my phone. Let her sell it and feed her kid. At least I knew what she would do with it and then there wouldn’t be any hints of me paying her for sex, which made me uneasy. The moral ground was dicey, at best.

But with all that out on the table, there was really no reason we couldn’t have a little mutual satisfaction. The lust I felt for her was pulsing through me, spurred on by her defiant sexiness.

“I don’t have a problem with that, no.” I sat back on the couch and spread my legs a little, lifting my arms. “Come on over here and use me however you want.” I’d be her little bitch if that’s what she wanted. I never did this- I never had one night stands or casual hookup sex. Not because I didn’t want to. Not because I wasn’t tempted. But because my whole fucking life I’d been responsible, the good guy, the designated driver, the law abiding citizen, the one cleaning up other people’s messes and doing the right thing.

What it gave me was a conscience I could live with and the knowledge that I’d taken care of my family and friends. What it hadn’t given me was a whole lot of fun or pussy. For a year I’d been chomping at the bit, wanting to cut loose a little, be selfish. But when push came to shove I never did anything about it, despite my buying condoms and going to bars with every intention of taking home a stranger.

Here was the perfect opportunity. It was an awkward one, true, and knowing myself I’d feel guilty about it later, but if she wanted to play chicken with me I was ready to play. No more Mr. Nice Guy helping old ladies across the street. I was feeling dangerous. Or at least so damn turned on I wasn’t going to be able to keep a lid on my lust.

“What happened to the glass of wine you promised me?”

My instant reaction was to rise and get her the glass of wine. I had offered her one. That was the polite and right thing to do. But none of this was about being polite. Not the way she’d started it. So I stopped myself. Instead, I stood up and stepped over her legs with one foot, so that my legs surrounded hers, right knee on the cushion next to her thigh. I put my hands on the back of the couch on either side of her head and I bent down so our faces were aligned. She was pressing herself against the back of the couch, her breathing shallow, anxious. Her eyes snapped with irritation, like she disliked being trapped by me. But she didn’t push me off and she didn’t protest.

“Of course,” I said smoothly. “But can I have a kiss first?”

I didn’t expect to enjoy kissing Anya. She was stiff and her lips were constantly pursed, her shoulders rigid. But I couldn’t do sex without our mouths meeting. That just wasn’t me. Casual or not, I couldn’t reduce the night to glorified masturbation. She was going to have to look me in the eye and she was going to have to kiss me.

She made a sound of impatience, like I annoyed her to no end. But she leaned forward and she brushed her lips over the corner of my mouth, a nothing kiss. The kiss you give your ancient aunt.

“What the hell was that?” I murmured, indulging my desire to touch her by brushing her hair back off her face. It was as soft as I’d imagined it to be, the silken strands slipping through my fingers. I could see up close the darker roots of her natural hair growing out. Running my finger down her cheek I touched the tip of her lip ring before dipping my mouth down and brushing it over the tiny metal stud.

She jerked away. “I could ask you the same fucking question.”