I flipped onto my back to find him kneeling over me with a self-satisfied smile—and that heavy ridge even more pronounced behind his briefs.
Guilt twisted my stomach as I reached toward him again, “Let me…”
He pushed my hand away for the third time that night. “Nyet,zayka.”
“You’ve more than made up for that first misunderstanding,” I assured him, reaching out again—only to have my hand pushed away.
“I saidnyet.” The smile fell off his face.
And my afterglow dissipated in a cloud of unease. “Why won’t you let me...”
The phone on the nightstand let out a shrill ring before I could finish, and Yom jumped out of bed to pick up the receiver.
“Yes?” he said instead of “Hello” like an American would.
He listened for a few moments. Then said: “I understand. Tell them I am paying for their rooms. You will charge all bills to me.”
He didn’t wait for whoever was on the other side of the line to answer. Just hung up without so much as a goodbye.
Then he picked up his own phone and said, “You will excuse me,zayka. I must make call. Get some sleep.”
Was he kidding? “But?—”
He disappeared into the bathroom before I could finish. Closing the door behind him on a stream of Russian directed toward whomever he’d called.
What the…?
I waited for him to come out. Only to find my eyes fluttering awake a little while later in a completely dark room.
The mattress depressed, and I turned to see Yom’s faint shadow climbing into the bed with me. The smell of hotel soap and mint let me know that, unlike me, he’d taken a shower and brushed his teeth.
“What’s going on?” I asked sleepily, turning over to face him.
“This bed is too small,” he grumbled, pulling the covers over the both of us. “I am trying not to wake you.”
“And I was trying to wait up so we could talk,” I shot back. “What was that all about? Why did the hotel call in the middle of the night?”
Silence.
“Yom?”
“You will sleep,” he finally answered. “And in morning, I will be sure to cover your mouth when I make you come again.”
“That’s not an answer—” I began to say, only to cut off when I realized it was. An abject embarrassment that paled in comparison to anything that had come before it washed over me. “Wait, are you saying the hotel called up to complain about me being too?—”
“Zayka, none of this.” He hauled my dirty body to his clean side before I could do a running dive into a pool of mortification. “Sleep.”
“Did they really?—”
“Sleep,” he insisted, squeezing me tighter to his side. “Yom is taking care of everything already. You are not worrying yourself.”
I huffed into his chest, wanting to argue. But Yom’s breath had already steadied, letting me know he was one of those lucky people who could drop right off to sleep.
I should take a shower, I thought to myself. Also, answer the thousands of messages Mom probably left me after what happened with Paul.
It was kind of hard to move, though, curled up as I was against Yom’s side. I wasn’t one of those people who dropped right off to sleep, but after a few moments of lying there, wrapped up in his arms, it became weirdly hard to keep my eyes open or even think about taking a shower of my own or voice texting my…
My eyes fluttered closed, and a boneless black sleep consumed me before I could even finish that thought.
