A heavy feeling settles in my chest and slides down to my stomach. Instinctively, I put my hand over it. The warm, soft flesh of my abdomen grounds me a little. “Yeah.”
Ilya doesn’t respond. She just looks off toward the house, a pensive look in her eyes. “It’s possible that he’ll like him, you know. If he’s everything you say, who wouldn’t like a man like that for their daughter?”
It’s an excellent question, one I’d been asking myself once I realized that Andrei and I had gotten serious. In school, everyone who had met him told me how lucky I was. Andrei has designs on becoming a surgeon and he’s been accepted into the best medical school in the country. His family has connections among the elite, high-ranking political officials and tech billionaires. His is the kind of bloodline that most fathers hope their daughters link up with.
But most fathers are not Vladimir Petrov. Most fathers don’t chase away every man that their daughters bring home, regardless of their financial or social standing. The worst part of that is just that I’m clueless as to what the problem is. I honestly don’t even know what kind of man would pass muster with my father.
“I think it’ll be okay,” Ilya says. “I mean, all the other guys you brought home were scrubs who didn’t have a future ahead of them.”
That makes me laugh. “Lee, most of the guys I brought home were in high school. What were they supposed to be? CEOs of their own companies?”
Ilya shrugs. “Maybe?”
It’s ridiculous. My father is ridiculous. When I think back to every boy I brought home… Jack Galland in my freshman year, Nakia Volkov in my sophomore year, Dmitri Williams in my sophomore year… I got it the worst about him because he was half black. My father stopped talking to me for a month. After Dmitri, I just stopped bringing them home. I decided that if there wasn’t any definite sign that I might marry them one day, then it wasn’t worth it.
“You know what I think?” Ilya says. “I think you should bring Andrei over out of respect, but no matter what, you should keep things going with him. Fuck your dad and his opinion. You’re a twenty-three-year-old woman now. You can make your own decisions?—”
The back door opens suddenly, making us both jump. Ilya shuts her mouth so quickly that her teeth clatter.
My father stands in the doorway. He’s wearing a black tracksuit with the zipper pulled down to display the graying hair over the tattoos on his chest. His bald head is covered in beads of sweat, a sure sign that he’d just been working out. His well-trimmed white beard glints like silver in the sunlight.
His glare travels out to me, intense blue eyes striking me across the face. “Natalya,” he says. “I’m about to go into a meeting. Go and put some clothes on. Both of you.”
Without another word, he disappears back into the house. I sigh and sit up. I wasn’t going to be out here for long, anyway. “Come on. I’ll make us some drinks.”
We grab our things and walk back to the pool house. Inside, the cool air conditioning greets us. Ilya walks across the front room, making a beeline for the bathroom. “I had to pee anyway,” she says as she disappears behind the door.
The pool house is, for all intents and purposes, about as close to having my own apartment as I’m probably ever going to have. It has a little living room with a couch and flat screen television on one wall. The door leading out to the pool has a sliding door that overlooks the whole back yard. I’ve got a little kitchenette with a sink, stove, and refrigerator. And right down the hall are my bathroom and bedroom.
It’s not very much, but it’s bigger than my bedroom in the house and much bigger than my dorm room. Makes it kind of easy to forget that it’s still my father’s property.
I go to my bedroom to change. As soon as I walk in, I catch a glimpse of myself in the full-length mirror on my door. This plain black bikini is probably the most conservative one I possess, with which I can still get a reasonable tan. It doesn’t have any frills or sequins. It’s not cut too high in the hips or low in the bra. It’s just black with strings to hold it onto my body. But even with that in mind, I guess I can understand why my father wanted me to cover up.
I have round hips and ass, a small waist, and a flat stomach, combined with my full breasts that, while completely covered with this top, usually tend to spill out on the sides of my other bikini tops. My skin isn’t very tanned. I’m still kind of pale, or maybe I just look it in comparison to my long, crimson hair. It’s probably for the best, anyway. I hate sunburn.
I give myself a quick once-over, then go to my dresser to put on some clothes. I start thinking about what Ilya said before we were interrupted. She’s right. I am an adult now. For years, I dreamed of the day when I would be seen as one in my father’s eyes. Then maybe I could come and go as I please. Maybe he would treat me with something other than disdain when I walked into a room. Maybe he’d actually step up and be a real father to me.
But, no. I get nothing even close to that. I’m twenty-three and I can’t get my own place because my father says it would look bad if I were out there working a job when he had ‘all the money in the world’. It’s funny how he no longer has the power to ground me, but he could easily cut off my funds. He could leave medestitute… and I have absolutely no reason to believe that he wouldn’t do just that if I ever made him angry enough.
I put on a tank top and cut-off shorts, then leave the bedroom to join Ilya for drinks. Ilya’s already in the kitchen, still wearing her swimsuit and standing in the open door of the refrigerator. “You need to go grocery shopping,” she says.
“I will. Bedroom’s free.”
“Thanks,” she says. As she leaves, she adds, “You know, he never said I couldn’t walk around in my swimsuit.” She wiggles her skinny hips and sticks her tongue out playfully. Her suit is fire engine red and much smaller than what I’ve been wearing. I’m sure to my father that doesn’t matter, though. Just the fact that he saw her in it means that I’ll probably hear about it later like I was the one wearing it.
“You do want to keep coming over, right?”
Ilya rolls her eyes. “Yeah, yeah. Be right back.”
I go through the cupboards for glasses, then look for the bottle of vodka I keep chilled in the refrigerator. Of course, it’s not there.
This is the third time this week that my father’s come into the pool house and taken something without my permission. His little games are getting old and tired.
“I gotta run to the house,” I call out to Ilya. “Be right back.”
“Okay!” I hear faintly.
I walk quickly on bare feet alongside the pool until I get to the back door of the house. Inside my father’s kitchen, I can hear talking coming from the next room. The last time, I found the vodka in his den. This time, I hope that he was absent-mindedenough to store it in the kitchen instead. As I rummage through the cabinets, a name floats to my ears and it makes me stop in my tracks.
