‘Never,’ he said. ‘This is not a game and I never lie. Bed or here?’ he said again, and she knew it was his final offer.
‘Bed.’
* * *
‘Tut-tut-tut,’ Demyan said. As his mistress he could have made her. ‘Remember the number?’ he asked as they stepped into his home.
‘You didn’t change it!’
‘I didn’t change a thing.’
He hadn’t told her he loved her, but as she walked into his house, Alina knew then that he did. Somewhere in the future, if she ever doubted it, if ever she forgot just how much he loved her, all she had to do was remember this.
She was everywhere, Alina realised as she wandered around.
Her wine glass was still on the table, not a thing had been tidied or changed.
It had never been nicer to come home to a messy house.
She walked upstairs and there was her hair tie on the pillow of an unmade bed and it was all just as she had left it.
‘Where have you been sleeping since you came back?’
‘At the hotel,’ Demyan said. ‘I could not bear to be here without you.’
She tasted his tenderness then. Not for the first time, but it was the first time that neither pretended this love was not real.
His mouth roamed the changes in her body, her swollen areolae and then down, ever down to intimate, engorged petals that dripped with a nectar more designed for him than any bottled scent.
She tasted herself on his lips as he spilled inside her and she would taste him for herself one hour soon, she said, yet Alina still hadn’t told him she was pregnant.
Demyan lay there and wondered whether, had he not found her, she ever would have told him.
He felt her surface from orgasm, back now beside him.
It was question time.
‘Did you think of going back to her?’
This time he didn’t lie. ‘Yes, I thought about it, if it was the only way I could keep Roman, but the more I thought about it, the more I knew I could not have another marriage for the sake of a child.’ There was just a touch of colour flooding her cheeks. ‘No point,’ Demyan said. ‘Then my mind moved to other things.’ He smiled.
‘Like?’
‘Taking your virginity.’
‘What were you doing in Russia?’
‘Sorting things out.’
‘With Roman?’
He didn’t answer.
‘With Nadia?’
‘A bit.’
He heard her sharp intake of breath and he told her something he couldn’t tell Mikael, something Alina might not understand.
‘I never loved Nadia and I have always told myself I gave our marriage our best, that it did not last because I did not make enough money...’ He turned and told her the rest of the truth. ‘My aunt was sick when I married Nadia, I was as closed off as I have ever been. I owed Nadia an apology. The death of our marriage was not all about her,’ Demyan said, ‘but mainly I was in Russia to sort out me.’