She supposes it’s stupid, really. Thinking she could let all of it—Get on your knees, his grip on her throat—just fade away. That astounding rush of letting go, the relief of that silence.
After docking her Citi Bike on Mercer, she’s racing down Spring towards the go-see address Jackie texted her, imploring Lili to bring her the heels she’d forgotten at home—(9:34 a.m.) please lili im begging you (9:34 a.m.) since it’s already on your way? (9:34 a.m.) please i’ll take the compost out for a week i PROMISE—before she goes uptown to campus.Dodging tourists spilling off Broadway, she clutches the tote with Jackie’s shoes, already late.
“Lili.”
A familiar voice. Like autumn, like wealth: a complicated warmth of old libraries, low laughter, heavy cuff links—
“Oh. Hi.”
In a banquette by the open window at Balthazar, it’s him.
“Please, join me,” Aleksandr says, folding his newspaper. He sets it down on the table beside a half-empty cup of coffee. His stare, clear and appraising, makes her flush.
Lili hovers in the street. She really shouldn’t.
Aleksandr inclines his head towards the empty seat across from him.
Five minutes. She’ll stay for five minutes.
She ducks into the restaurant.
It’s too lavish and intense for breakfast—rich red leather seating, faded saffron walls, tarnished mirrors, high tin ceilings—but breakfast is what’s being ferried out around them, eggs Benedict and Bloody Marys, as she slides into the banquette.
“People actually eat here?” she asks. She musters a laugh, trying to diffuse whatever this is. The thread of something frantic thrums inside her.
The hint of a smile at his lips tugs into a smirk. “Evidently. Coffee? Food?”
“Oh, no, I’m—”
“Another black coffee,” Aleksandr orders from the waiter who’s appeared. “The omelet, French toast, eggs en cocotte. Both of the eggs Benedict, too, and whatever pastries are freshest.”
The waiter departs, and Aleksandr looks back at her.
“So, Lili.” His tongue holds her name. “Do you usually run away after fucking?”
The obscenity in his accent—formal, clipped tones with the undercut of Russian roughness, his history she’s discovered in the days since that night, reluctant Google searches that end with her slamming her computer shut—is ungodly.
The waiter returns with her coffee. Aleksandr doesn’t look away, his faint smile unfaltering.
There are bruises on her hips, still. Shadows at her throat. She’drun her fingers over the marks just that morning, disappointed they were fading.
Lili grips the hot cup of coffee. “Shouldn’t you be at work?” she asks. “It’s the middle of the week.”
Aleksandr raises an eyebrow. “They can get by without me for a few hours.”
That mix of condescension and amusement should infuriate her. Instead, she wants to lie down and abdicate all agency; be forced to let go again, like she did that night.
She swallows, forcefully. “You know, your entire industry is evil,” Lili says, words clumsy. She’s acutely aware of the fact that she doesn’t look like she did that night. Her nose piercing is restored, dirt under her nails from extra work shifts she picked up over the last week at the farm, messy bun, short skirt with combat boots. She grasps for intellectual contention to exert distance, to push him back. “Helping the disgustingly rich get richer. All you do is entrench systems of oppression and inequality to benefit elites. Billionaires shouldn’t even exist.”
“Is that so?” he says. His arm rests on the back of the banquette, shoulders broad under the cut of his suit. Commanding space, it’s like he’s the center of this entire godforsaken restaurant. “What about you? What do you do?”
“I’m a radical anarchist freegan tarot card reader with a strong communist bent,” she deadpans. She tries not to stare at his fingers—his mouth—as he takes a drink of coffee; tries to smother all her want. “Eat the rich, all of that, you know.”
“I’d think the anarchism and communism incompatible,” he muses.
Lili freezes.
“But I’m not clear on what the youth are espousing these days,” he concedes. “We were still passing aroundThe German Ideologywhen I was an undergrad. Probably passé now.”
