Perfect Opposite (13 page)

I fidgeted nervously, wondering what his job for Nikolai really involved. ‘Making sure deals didn’t go wrong’ explained almost nothing. I’d been consciously avoiding one thought, but it rose
to the surface insistently now.

Who knows, maybe he really is a
hitman. I mean, who would be a better choice to protect me from hitmen, if not one of them? With all the tattoos and bullet wounds, he definitely looks like one. Not to mention his circus tricks with knives.

An anxious feeling crept over me as I tried to push it from my mind,
but it seemed vital to know how far he’d go, and how far he’d gone. Not able to bear the agony any longer, I finally plucked up the courage to ask, feeling sort of like I was looking down from a great height and about to fall.

“Alex...”

“Yeah?”

“Have you ever killed anyone?”

At first it seemed like he hadn’t heard me and went on staring at the screen in silence. I was about to ask again when he turned to look at me. As I expected, his expression was blank, but I wasn’t prepared for what I might see in his eyes, and suddenly I had to swallow hard. It was like gazing into an open wound. Blinking rapidly a few times, he seemed to sense my reaction and moved his gaze back to the television.

The long silence continued and I felt I had my answer.

And I wished I’d kept my mouth shut.

Chapter
6 - Lines and Their Stories

It seemed the serious conversation I had with Alex that night had triggered some defense mechanism inside me. What scared me most was that, on several occasions, I caught myself searching for reasons that might justify his admission. Disgusted with myself, I decided to steer clear of him for good.

For the next ten days I did my best to ignore him and kept communication to a minimum
, responding to questions with ‘yes’ or ‘no’, or sometimes just a nod. I spent most of the time holed up in my bedroom studying, and when I had to go to classes I made sure we sat far apart. Unfortunately, there was nothing I could do about the ride to the university and home again. Alex wouldn’t hear of us going by bus, so I regularly had to hold him from behind on the single seat of his bike. Every time I clutched him tightly I’d feel a slight tremble in my fingers, like an ex-addict tempted by a fix.

Alex acted as if everything was
perfectly fine and didn’t once comment on my technique of avoiding him. ‘The conversation’ from the other night wasn’t mentioned again, and in some ways it was like it hadn’t happened at all.

There were times when I’d catch him watching me, like when I caught his reflection in a mirror. Once, when I got a close but fleeting look at his face, it seemed he might be wondering how long I could ke
ep pretending he wasn’t there. Or maybe I imagined it.

If you’d asked me why exactly I was treating him that way, I’d have told you it was because he
killed people, but that wouldn’t have been the whole truth. The main reason was that I felt let down somehow. It may have been irrational, but somewhere deep inside I’d been hoping he was different. His revelation had left me feeling hurt and betrayed, however little sense that all made.

When we got back from classes on Wednesday afternoon, Alex saw me up to the apartment and went back down to the parking lot to fix something on his bike. I was looking through my purse for my set of keys when the first beats of Flashdance reached my ears, followed by the squealing of a tortured cat as Bethany attempted to sing along.

“Great. That’s all I need!” I grumbled as I slipped the key into the lock.

If Beth was playing Flashdance, that could only mean one thing - it was time to clean the apartment.

Before I’d even kicked my sneakers off, the cleaning fairy appeared from nowhere with a look of reproach on her face. She was wearing a pair of bright pink rubber gloves, which dripped soapy water, and a sort of floral-patterned turban
on her head. It reminded me of a wedding bouquet.

“It’s about time!” she th
rust a wet cloth into my hands and disappeared again into the living room.

From time to time, a particular demon took possession of Bethany’s body, under whose influence she’d declare war on the ‘invisible menaces’ of dust and bacteria, demanding the entire flat be thoroughly disinfected from top to toe.

I took a breath and went to my room to change clothes and prepare mentally for the hours of toil ahead. Throwing on an old pair of pants, I tied my hair into a tight ponytail and fixed a martyred expression on my face as I went to join the front line on the hygiene battlefield.

“What's the plan?” I asked, but Beth paid no mind to me at all.

She was standing on a chair in front of the bookshelf, wiping away dust with one hand and holding an improvised candle stick microphone in the other, screeching away with the full force of her lungs. I was pretty sure that exposure to her singing was deadly enough for microorganisms, and had even told her so once. Nonetheless, we still had a full arsenal of disinfectants and detergents at our disposal. A complete waste of money, if you ask me.

Watching her crooning, I laughed for the first time in over a week, waving a hand in her general direction as I made for the bathroom, which I guessed from experience would be mine to clean. Armed with a large brush and a chemical agent that smelled like rat poison, I knelt down inside the tub and started attacking some trac
es of mildew between the tiles.

After several more minutes of listening to Beth murdering pop classics my resistance failed me. Probably much to the horror of the neighbors two floors down, and even those in the buildings nearby, I heard the first few bars of Sex Bomb and joined in with Beth’s howling, wiggling my hips to the rhythm.

“Interesting.
” a deep voice burst my happy bubble from behind, making me jump.

“If it’s so interesting why don’t you take over?” I snapped and turned to stare at Alex, who was standing in the doorway with his hands deep in his pockets, looking at me with a mixture of amusement and disbelief.

“Wouldn’t be nearly as much fun as watching you doing it.”

I f
elt a blush rising to my cheeks and wondered how long he might have been watching me as I shook my hips in time to the music and let rip with my attempts at vocals. Sex Bomb – every second word was ‘sex’ after all. I grabbed the edge of the shower curtain and pulled it violently across to hide myself from view, then pretended to get back down to work.

“What, no more entertainment?”

“No.” I tossed over my shoulder, “I suddenly lost my muse.”

“Too bad... I was just starting to get off on it.”

Suppressing every urge to respond, I looked up at a stubborn stain on the faucet of the tub and started to rub at it energetically, hoping that Alex would get the message and disappear. I didn’t intend to change my policy of keeping him firmly on the sidelines.

Maybe the environment I’d grown up in had screwed up my sense of right and wrong, but I still knew where the limits were. Nikolai definitely labored under the delusion that I had only a vague ide
a of what happened in his world and how far people were prepared to go, but no one who’s spent eighteen years surrounded by mobsters and mercenaries could really be naive. However hard all those thugs might have tried to hide things when Nikolai’s little girl was around, ‘Uzi’ still featured in my vocabulary along with ‘Barbie’ when I reached school age. By fifteen I knew most of the channels of sale and the names of all the major clients. I knew firsthand how disputes should be handled and debts collected. Still, I didn’t want to think of Alex being a part of it. I didn’t want to know that he could dispatch someone in cold blood.

“Sasha!” Alex's urgent voice brought me out of my thoughts.

I heard the shower curtain rings rattle across the bar behind as two strong hands grabbed me around the waist. Without any effort Alex lifted me up and sat me down ungracefully next to the sink.

“Hey!” I protested, but he wasn’t interested.

Looking me full in the face, he seemed to linger intently on my eyes. After a moment had passed he let go of me and backed away a little, obviously satisfied by what he’d seen.

“What the hell is wrong with you?”

“I had to check if you’re OK.”

“Of course I am!” I almost choked, “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“I called to you twice, but you didn’t answer. I thought you might have passed out from all the fumes coming off those damn chemicals.”

“And it didn’t cross your mind that
maybe, just maybe, I was trying to ignore you?” I snapped, jumped down and going around him, started rinsing the bath angrily.

Alex
stood behind me for quite some time and then left without a word. I grabbed a sponge and started to work on the mirror for a second time, hoping the effort might take my mind off things a little.

When I could finally do no more, I hauled my weary bones over to the kitchen, where Beth had just finished scrubbing the stove. Collapsing into a chair and throwing back my head, I took a deep breath.

“Why do we have a bathroom the size of someone else’s living room?” I asked, rubbing my temples.

“Don’t ask me. This is your apartment sweetie.”

“If I were smart, I’d have rented something half this size. A two-bedroom place with a compact little kitchen would have been just fine.”

“Well that’s true, but where would we put Alex?
”.

“My point e
xactly.” I replied, sounding not a little bitter.

“But we’d be missing the wonderful view...”

“You call that a view? Apart from the rooftops and some patches of city between, there’s not a lot to see.”

“I wasn’t thinking of that view, my dear ...”

“What then?”

With a conspiratorial smile, Beth winked at me and gestured with her head towards the hall. I slowly turned in my chair and followed her eyes, wondering what she could be talking about.

Naked from the waist up, there was Alex, doing pull-ups on the bar he’d fitted to his doorframe the day before. Transfixed, I could only watch, because each time he flexed the muscles in his back, dark patterns rippled as though coming to life. Until that moment, I hadn’t known there were so many muscles in that part of the body.

Either because I’d inhaled some fumes after all, or because it was my time of the month to feel that way, my body came alive to a hot sort of feeling and a buzzer started ringing in my head. I suddenly wanted to jump all over him.

After around twenty pull-ups, Alex let himself down from the bar and went into his room, throwing a glance in our direction before he closed the door. I quickly turned my head, twisting my neck quite painfully in the process, and pretended to wait for the toaster to go ‘ping’ on the table. My movements were so fast that he couldn’t have caught me staring, but it looked like he might have started to smile anyway.

“What a jerk. He makes me sick
.” I murmured, still not taking my eyes off the toaster and Beth began to laugh.

“Oh, Sasha...”

“What's funny?”

“You, the ice queen!
You put so much effort into pretending you can’t stand Alex…”

“I’m not pretending about anything. It’s a fact.”

“Ah, how much I adore you!” giggling, she sat in a chair across from mine. “I hope you and Alex are very distant relatives.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because, my dear, I saw how you looked at him a minute ago, and trust me that’s not how you look at someone you have blood relation with.”

“Is that so? And how was I looking at him?”

“With pure lust, girl. There’s no other word for it.”

“Shut up! That’s crazy!” I got up and went in long strides to the bathroom with Beth’s laughter echoing in my ears.

I took a quick shower, brushed my teeth and, still feeling pissed off, went to my room and crawled into bed. It took half an hour of twisting and turning and trying to get Alex out of my head before I finally fell asleep.

***

A strong clap of thunder woke me from a very deep sleep. Pressing my eyes closed even tighter, I gripped some folds in my quilt as my knuckles turned white.

Please, pl
ease, please, let it be morning.

Very slowly, I opened my eyes.
When darkness came from all around, my body began to shake. Forcing myself up on one elbow, I reached out and was halfway to touching the switch when light flooded the room.

“Hey...”
I heard a low whisper.

In some loose pajama bottoms, Alex was sitting by my bedside in the big pink chair, watching me with a profound expression of concern. If I hadn’t been frantic with fear at that moment, I’m sure I would have laughed to see his tattooed body framed by so much lace and so many pink cushions. Another round of thunder broke the tho
ught and I shuddered violently.

Alex got up and moved closer to me, reaching for my hand, which now gripped a pillow tightly.