Total pages in book: 95
Estimated words: 89090 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 297(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 89090 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 297(@300wpm)
Needing air before I make the same foolish mistake I made last week, I head for the balcony. It’s hidden behind a thick pair of drapes. No one knows it is here but me, so it will be a good space to gather my thoughts.
As usual, they’re quick to steer toward Polina. Fuck me, that woman doesn’t seem to age. She is like a bottle of wine—she gets finer the older she becomes. I knew seeing her again would lessen the heaviness on my chest enough for me to breathe without pain, but my fucking god, it smacked me with a ton of remorse as well.
For the first time in a long time, not all the guilt revolved around Feo.
Polina looked tired and as emotionally drained as me, and I can’t help but wonder if part of her angst is compliments to the douchebag who glared at her the instant her arms curled around my neck.
Alek rearranged faces just for looking at his baby sister a certain way, so there’s no way he’d let her be around a bottom-dweller like Vasily Cabanow without having something to say about it.
It means he’s as clueless about Polina’s budding relationship with Vasily as I was when I rammed him to the ground.
I’ve considered updating Alek multiple times over the past week. The only reason I haven’t is because I want to hear from Polina herself what the fuck is going on.
Only six months ago, she was a ball-busting take-no-shit-from-no-one kind of woman.
Now I struggle to recognize her. It is as if she took the submissive woman she is between the sheets and gave it a whirl on the streets.
I hate how much she’s changed, but part of my response may be because she’s test-running her new features with a fuckface like Vasily Cabanow. He shouldn’t be allowed to breathe in her direction, much less associate with her.
She deserves better than a dickhead with half a brain. That’s why I stopped her last week. I’d still give my left nut to have a woman as devastatingly beautiful as Polina stroke my cock, but I want her to do it because she’s desperate to be reacquainted with the taste of my cum, not because she thinks it will lessen my grief.
It will never leave me, but neither will the feelings I developed long before I realized they ran deeper than lust.
I’m drawn from my thoughts when glass splintering booms out onto the balcony. As I scrub a hand down my tired face, I cuss under my breath.
When I enter my living room to discover my television hanging off the wall bracket used to mount it above the fireplace, my fists are at the ready. I just need to work out who to direct them at first. A dozen people circle my broken television.
“What the fuck?”
“Sorry, man,” says a drunken baboon with an ugly face tat. “I didn’t know she was your girl until Micah told me. I wouldn’t have groped her if I had known.”
I take in the obvious head imprint in the ruined device before slinging my eyes to Micah, eager as fuck to work out who the hell the stranger is referencing.
Those couple of pumps Polina issued before I stopped her is the most action I’ve had in the past six months. Not even the blonde waiting for me naked in my bed last week could entice me.
She thought me walking in on her fondling her dripping cunt with a vibrator would entice me.
All it did was enrage me.
I kicked her out of my room, stripped my sheets so I didn’t have to sleep near her skanky scent, then guzzled whiskey until the wish to rip Vasily Cabanow a new asshole faded to a possibility instead of an outright certainty.
Micah’s reply knocks me on my ass better than the three lines of coke I snorted. “Polina.”
There’s way too much hope in my tone when I blubber out, “Polly was here?”
I don’t need to see Micah’s head bob to know his answer. Peering past his wide shoulders tells me everything I need to know.
A bag of beer bottle caps is on the coffee table.
Every one of them has a foreign stamp on the top.
I’m the first to admit I fucked up last week when I confused sentimental value and material worth. I knew it the instant Polina fled down the emergency exit stairwell, but it smacked into me full force when she ran into Vasily’s outstretched arms.
He saw me standing in the shadows and knew I’d be able to comfort her more than he ever could, even with me being the cause of her hurt. But still, he guided her toward his chauffeur-driven ride like I was chasing her down with a gun instead of a ton of apologies, and I let him.
I was a damn coward.