Ava
I need to pee.
Nikolai’s sound asleep by my side, his heavy arm draped over my waist pinning me to the mattress. If I weren’t so fully cautious of the warmth of his body against mine, I’d think I was trapped in a cage or better yet, that I still had a fever.
But my fever broke a while ago, leaving my husband as the only cause of the inexplicable burning sensation shimmering just beneath the surface of my skin.
I try sitting up, but my bones feel like they’ve been crushed by a bag of cement, and my muscles are fatigued. Nikolai’s weight wasn’t making it any easier for me to wiggle into a sitting position.
Ugh, why is he so heavy?
He’s solid, unmoving, like a big boulder in the middle of the wilderness, completely unaware of my predicament.
The room was still dark but the curtains had been drawn sometime earlier, so I guess it didn’t count.
I wonder what time it is.
I try to move out of his grasp again, but every time I think I might’ve made some level of progress, Nikolai manages to tighten his hold around me, sealing me tightly to his side.
I wanted to scream.
My bladder was begging for release but my husband was making it incredibly difficult to move.
I turn to find him lying on his stomach beside me, his face turned to me. He looks so peaceful when he’s asleep. Almost angelic.
His brows furrow slightly and his lips are parted just enough to let soft breaths escape him. Dark stubbles scatter along the lines of his jaw, something I hadn’t noticed until this very moment.
Nikolai has always been clean-shaven since I married him. I’d never seen him with a beard but I’ve often imagined what he’d look like.
I once asked him if he was interested in ever letting his beard grow out, and he’d shrugged and replied with a nonchalant maybe. I then proceeded to tell him how I wouldn’t mind seeing him with a beard and how I thought it would look good on him.
That was almost five days ago.
Could it be that he’d taken my comment to heart and was now growing out his beard because of me?
The thought sends a warm feeling through my chest but I’m quick to discard it.
Nikolai wasn’t the kind of person who cared about other people’s opinions, so I highly doubted that my little comment had any influence on his decision to grow a beard.
Still, my fingers itch to run the lines of his cheek and trace the stubbles on his jaw.
I squeeze my eyes shut, wincing at the feel of something sharp piercing behind my eyelids. Peering over at my husband sleeping like a man without a guilty conscience, I sigh in defeat.
Fuck, I just might wet the bed if I don’t get up this instant. And there’s absolutely no way I would be able to recover from that.
Like ever.
Forcing what little strength I have to the surface, I manage to push Nikolai’s arm from my waist before doing the same to the blanket and easing my legs off the bed.
The first step is completed.
My head feels woozy and the sudden movement of my body causes the room to spin. I grit my teeth, squeezing my eyes closed.
Determination. That was what was going to get me to the bathroom without my bladder exploding. Determination because there was no way I was going to allow my husband to carry me to the bathroom and place me on the toilet seat so that I could pee.
Not a chance in hell.
A whimper slips from my throat as I try and fail – miserably might I add- to stand up from the bed. The mattress might as well have been a magnet with the number of times I stand and fall back against it.
“Solnyshko?”
Shit. No, no, no, no, no.
A heavy hand slaps the mattress behind me and I feel my husband’s movement before I hear his voice.
“What are you doing up, baby?”
There’s that nickname again. Baby. I’m beginning to lose track of his colourful assortment of nicknames for me, but so far, I have no complaints.
The bed shifts, and the next thing I know, Nikolai has rounded the furniture and is standing in front of me, gripping my shoulders, in his warm hands.
“I need to pee” The words are soft, pleading and I hope he gets the message.
“You should’ve woken me up”
No, that’s the opposite of what I should’ve done. If anything, I should’ve gone back in time and developed wings for sick people so that I could’ve avoided this entire situation altogether by flying to the bathroom.
“I… Can you just… I really need to go to the bathroom, so if you could just…”
Nikolai’s arm goes around the back of my thigh, the other on my back as he lifts me in one swift scoop, carrying me towards the bathroom before I get to finish my sentence.
“No, no. You are not carrying me to the bathroom.”
Please, let me keep what little is left of my dignity this man.
“You can barely stand, Solnyshko. There’s no way I’m going to let you walk all the way to the bathroom by yourself.”
“It isn’t even that far.”
It’s literally seven steps. I can crawl to it if I must. Just anything to save me from this situation.
I push my hand against his chest weakly, “For god’s sake Nikolai, You can’t carry me to the bathroom.”
“Seems like I can.”
“I swear to God, Nikolai, if you put me on that toilet seat, I will kill myself.”
He didn’t laugh, which was fine because I was not joking. What isn’t fine, though, is that he isn’t stopping. He walks us into the bathroom and my legs are too rubbery to make a run for it.
When we’re in the bathroom, he sets me down on the tiles, and I’m instantly grateful for the feeling of something solid beneath my feet. That is until my feet almost give out, and he has to steady me with a hand to my waist.
He crouches dipping his fingers underneath the waistband of my shorts, tugging the fabric. My eyes go wide and I quickly wrap my hand around his wrist.
“No,” I exclaim, twisting his wrist, “I won’t let you do that for me.”
He tips his head back to look at me, brows furrowed, “Why not?”
Why not? Was this man being serious?
“Because it’s inappropriate”
“You are sick, Solnyshko and can barely stand, not to talk of taking off your clothes.
“I’ll manage” I insist. He doesn’t let up and instead, continues to stay in the same position.
“Please, Just…” I squeeze my eyes, “Let me do this okay? I need the privacy.”
A beat passes and then he lets out a heavy sigh before pushing himself upright on his feet.
Thank God.
“You need my help, you call, alright?”
I nod not able to fully meet his eyes. He leaves the bathroom, shutting the door behind him with a soft click and I’m left alone to struggle with the problems that come with having wobbly legs.
Somehow I manage to safely make it to the toilet and do my business. When I’m finished, I hobble over to the sink and wash my hands. I catch a glimpse of my mattered hair in the mirror and sigh, not bothering to look at the rest of me. It was no use anyway. I was already sick, and the last thing I needed was to get a load of the trainwreck that was fever-ridden Ava.
When I step out of the bathroom, Nikolai is still by the door of the bathroom. My face reddens at the thought that he might’ve heard me in there but I have little time to feel embarrassed because he scoops me up again.
Sometime after I’d gone into the bathroom, he’d taken the opportunity to strip out of his shirt and was currently carrying me over to the bed in nothing but his pyjama bottoms. I press my cheek against his bare skin, relishing the comforting warmth it provides before he lays me down on the mattress.
He slips in beside me, and I move towards him because, like most people, I’m needy when I’m sick.
He covers us with the blanket, tucking it snugly around me before wrapping an arm around my waist and pulling me against his chest. His warmth seeps into me, soothing the remnants of my fever and the exhaustion still weighing down on my body.
I let out a small sound and drag my hand from his stomach to his chest and then down again.
“Sleep Solnyshko. You’re sick so I’m going to assume that you have no idea what you’re doing.”
Oh, but I do. I have every idea. My fingers linger on the spot where the bruise he’d had walked into the house with a couple of days after our first date was, before drawing upwards and tracing the lines of the old bullet wound on his chest.
“Did this hurt?”
I remember asking a similar question when I first saw his scars in the kitchen all those months ago. My mind is too foggy to recall the exact stream of events in detail but I can never forget the look in his eyes when he told me who caused his scars and what he’d done to the person in return.
He belongs to the devil now.
Those were the words he’d said to me when I’d asked him if he killed his father. I’ve never been one to believe in hell. My mother was catholic, and we would go to church every Sunday when she was still alive, but after she died, my father was too busy to keep up with the tradition, and eventually, we stopped going.
Somewhere between adolescence and my teenage years, I became agnostic, but after everything Nikolai had told me about his father, I needed to believe in hell so that I could at least find comfort in the fact that his father’s soul did belong to the devil.
Nikolai’s thumb traces the curve of my hip under the blanket, his fingers working absent-minded circles into my skin.
“Like a bitch.” He replies, huffing out something that sounds between a laugh and a breath.
“Can you tell me what happened?”
He seems to think it over for a moment before nodding once.
“It was shortly after my brother died. I’d just become Kira’s father. Her only family, and while she still had me, I’d lost the one person I’d spent my entire life trying to protect. I went out for a couple of drinks. I do not usually drink to the point that I do not have control of my senses but that night, I just needed something, anything, to numb the pain. And yes, I admit now that it was indeed foolish on my part but the booze seemed like the only thing willing to comfort me. So I took it. I drank until I lost all feeling and when I stumbled into enemy territory that night, drunk out of my mind, I could barely protect myself against the men that attacked me.”
The muscles in his shoulders grow tense and I wonder if asking him what had happened was a good idea. He sounds hurt and pained, like he could hardly believe what he’d done and how lucky he was to escape it.
“I was shot before I was able to escape but luckily, someone stumbled over my body before I bled out on the streets.”
Saved by a stranger.
My fingers still around the bullet wound and I push my head back to peer up at him.
“Do you know who saved you?”
He sighs, shaking his head.
“Not a clue. I was only told that it was a teenage girl and I was lucky enough to have her stumble over my body when she did because if she hadn’t I would’ve died.”
My mind halts at the mention of that word. Death. I despised it. I shut my eyes and try to imagine a world where Nikolai doesn’t exist. By now, I would be Antonio’s wife, trapped in a marriage I never wanted. Enduring night after night of him hovering over me, grunting and straining as he tried to fill me with his child.
I shudder at the thought.
I brush my lips over the scar, soft and featherlight. To my surprise, Nikolai tenses beside me. He hadn’t expected that and to be honest neither had I.
“I’m glad that you’re okay” I murmur pulling back just enough to peer up at him once more.
He has an expression on his face, one I fail to recognize as he darts his eyes over my face, searching. He makes an agreeing sound, squeezing my hip once.
My lips flatten into something that I hope looks like a smile and I press my cheek to his chest while he drops a kiss on my curls.
It feels immaculately normal having him hold me like this as we both try to sleep. I close my eyes willing tiredness to take over but it decides to sit at the back of my mind longer.
Snapping my eyes open, I look up at my husband to find him watching me.
“Hey Nikolai” He looks down at me, “Can I ask you something?”
“Da. Chto-libo” (Yes. anything.)
I don’t recognise the second word in his response but I am familiar with the first so I continue.
“If you find my father, would you still kill him.”
It was a question that had been haunting my mind over the last few days. I’d gone through denial and anger before skipping right over to acceptance because I was honestly tired of trying to convince myself that the man I’d seen at the hospital couldn’t possibly be my father.
I spent my week trying to find him. I had even gone back to the hospital a couple of times to see if I could spot him. Nothing.
It was almost as if he’d vanished into thin air. Again.
His fingers pause their absent-minded tracing on my hip, and for a moment, he says nothing.
Then, finally, he speaks.
“Yes.”
it’s not cruel the way he says it, not designed to hurt me either. It was simply the truth. One I’d expected.
I inhale sharply, clenching my fingers against his chest I ask, “Even if I begged you not to?”
Even if I told you that it would kill me to have the only parent I had left, die at the hands of my husband.
A husband that I’m starting to have irrevocable, undeniable feelings for. A husband that I was falling fast and completely for.
He hesitates, his fingers picking up their pace again.
“I’ve never considered myself a forgiving man Solnyshko. Never once thought about a life where I didn’t avenge my brother. So yes, Solnyshko, even though there are a million things that I would give you in a heartbeat, this is not one of them.”
oh.
“I will kill your father Solnyshko. I will make him pay for everything he’s done to me and the pain his actions caused that little girl sleeping barely two doors down. Do you understand what I am telling you?”
My throat tightens but I manage to nod despite it.
“Yes.”