Tears pooled in her eyes. Oh God, why did he always have to make everything so hard? He was just manipulating her again. She knew that. Doing whatever it took to get his way. It only sounded like he was sincerely hurt, she reminded herself.
He interrupted her mind’s scramble to harden her heart to his questions by once again grabbing her by her twists, so she had no choice but to look at him. “Talk to me, zhena. I want you to talk to me.” He punctuated each question with a hard, desperate stroke. “Tell me why you won’t stay.”
She closed her eyes, not wanting to be swayed by what looked like real anguish on his face. She knew better. It’s just another manipulation, she told herself. Yet another damn manipulation.
“Why do you hide from me, zhena?” he asked. “Why can’t you talk to me?”
She whimpered, hot and sticky pleasure making its way through her core, despite the seriously messed up nature of this sexual transaction.
“You will tell me reason,” he growled, pushing into her harder. “Tell me.”
“No,” she moaned, finding it harder to hold on to her determination with every thrust.
“Tell me.”
She clamped her mouth shut and shook her head back and forth.
“TELL ME!!!” he roared, pushing into her with one final thrust.
It was like pushing the button on a detonator. The orgasm exploded inside of her like a bomb, making it impossible to hold on to herself, to her pride, to keep what she’d been refusing to tell him inside any longer.
“I heard you!” she cried as she came apart for him. “I heard you on the phone with Alexei at the hotel. I heard what you said about me!” And then she couldn’t talk anymore.
The orgasm lasted a very long time, her body convulsing with the aftershocks of her climax even after she thought it was done. But eventually she fell right back to down to earth, her post-climax euphoria rapidly fading only to be replaced with a deep sense of humiliation.
And then there was Nikolai pulling out of her and falling onto the couch beside her like she’d just punched him.
40
Nikolai sat on the couch, and so did Sam. For several minutes it was very quiet in the plane, with nothing but the soft whooshing of the aircraft eating up the miles.
It didn’t take long for the chill to set in. Sam was still completely naked and her confession hadn’t exactly left her feeling warm and fuzzy. More like cold and ashamed.
But before she could reach down to gather her clothes, he came out of his fugue. “You heard phone call?” he said.
“Yeah… I heard it.” Sam reached down to pick up her blouse and put it on without the bra, just wanting to cover herself up, to hide from this conversation and Nikolai in any way that she could. “I heard it all. About how I’d fallen right into your trap to make me perform like a real wife in bed.” A fresh dose of humiliation surged through her and she grimaced.
“And that is why you hate me? Because I take advice about how to make you real wife?”
“I don’t hate you,” she whispered as she did up the last button. “I hate the way you make me feel.”
He looked over at her then, his eyes deeply troubled.
“What? Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked him.
“I also think this to myself,” he answered. “Several times I think it. I hate way you make me feel.”
“No, Nikolai, it’s not the same,” she said with a bitter shake of her head. “I’m frustrating to you because I won’t act the part you want me to play. Because I won’t surrender and be the perfect wifey and let you fuck me whenever you want. The way I feel about you, that’s different.”
He stilled. “Different how?”
She sighed, and decided to tell him all of it, to kill every last ounce of pride she had.
“The reason I can’t have a sexual relationship with you is because it would hurt me too much. It’s stupid. I know it’s stupid. But I’ve fallen in love with you and I’m going to work on not being in love with you, but I can’t do that if we’re having sex, or if we’re still married, so I can’t be married to you anymore…”
Nikolai’s mouth worked and at least six different kinds of distress registered across his face, before he finally choked out, “You love me?”
“Yes, I love you,” she admitted with a shake of her head. “Because I’m a masochist, who apparently doesn’t know how to not become overly attached to every walking sob story that comes across my path.”
Nikolai frowned in that Russian way of his. “So this love has happened before. Man tell you he has bad past and you love him?”
“No,” she answered, wishing she was anywhere but stuck thousands of miles in the air having this conversation with Nikolai. “I’ve never been in love before. Believe me, if I’d thought it would be a possibility with you, I wouldn’t have agreed to the marriage in the first place. But I’ve started two domestic violence shelters. And it still breaks my heart whenever one of my intakes goes back to her abuser. Every single time—but keep in mind, I still want to open forty-eight more Ruth’s House shelters.”
She looked away from him. “I fell in love with Pavel pretty much from the first moment I saw him in your laundry room, all dirty and skinny. And I couldn’t adopt Back Up soon enough after I read the little card outside her cage at the rescue fair, talking about the abuse she’d suffered.” She took a deep breath, and forced herself to meet his eyes again. “Obviously, I have a problem…”
“Obviously,” Nikolai agreed. A look of deep consideration came over his face. “So you are saying you love me like you love Pavel and Back Up. Because I am broken man and my story makes you sad.”
“Yes, I guess so,” she answered. “Though, I maybe wouldn’t have put it in such a harsh way. But yes, I stupidly let myself fall in love with you. Maybe I could have prevented it from happening if we’d just kept it contained to sleeping in separate places back in Indiana, but c’mon… Greece… and the Veronica Mars movie… and your gruesome back story… and then you ordered me breakfast! Why did you have to order me breakfast? Nobody’s ever done that for me before, and it really messed me up.”
“So you are in love with me now because of date, my sad story, and breakfast I order.” He considered this information with a heavy frown, then he shrugged and said, “Okay, I take it.”