Domino (The Domino Trilogy) (18 page)

Rostovich
appeared just to my left, carrying a sweating bottle of lime Pellegrino and a glass of ice. “Will this do?” he asked.

“The mineral water, or the media reception?”

He set glass on a coaster in front of me, then poured the Pellegrino. “Both.”

“Yes, Mr.
Rostovich, it’ll do.”
“Peter, please. I hate being called Rostovich.”

“And yet, that’s how
everyone refers to you.”

He pulled out a chair across from me and sat, twiddling his thumbs. He seemed nervous. Maybe I was having an effect on him. Score one for me then. My inner self gave me a sly smile, reminding me that she expected results tonight. “I have found that in certain circumstances, it pays to maintain a certain level of, shall we say, distance. But my intimates always call me by my first name. I don’t have many intimates, mind you.”

Intimates
. In what sense, I wondered? “My boss calls you Pete.”

He smiled. “Yes, he does. But he’s the only one who can get away with that without being shot.”

“Do you shoot a lot of people?”

He paused and
reflected for a moment before answering. “Only with cameras.”

“I see.” I
sat down and sampled the Pellegrino. It was cool and crisp, exactly what I needed at the moment, especially since my mouth had gone cotton-dry. Meanwhile, my palms were so sweaty I wasn’t sure I’d be able to grip a pencil to take notes. I decided the digital recorder was probably the best bet. I switched it on.

“Will you turn that off?”
Rostovich barked the minute I set it back down on the table. “I hate being recorded.”

“No, I won’t. You set your conditions for the interview, and this is one of mine. I can’t write fast enough to record what you say accurately. I’ll turn it off for the off-the-record portion, of course.”

Not entirely the truth. Maybe I would switch it off, maybe I wouldn’t. It all depended on how well he decided to cooperate. “Let’s start the interview,” I said, doing my best to focus on the business at hand instead of the growing heat deep in my body. “I was hoping you could tell me a little bit more about your childhood.”

“Why is my childhood relevant to my art?”

I cleared my throat and glared at him.  We’d barely begun and he was already answering my questions with questions of his own. This man could have had a very good career as a lawyer---or an investigative reporter. I wondered if that was why he found me attractive. “If you don’t answer my questions, Mr. Rostovich, I will terminate the interview and leave. I’m not here to waste time.” My voice had a sharp, cold edge to it that surprised even me. Rostovich picked up on it, too; he actually winced.

“Mr.
Rostovich, I will ask you once again. I would like to know a little bit more about your childhood in the Ukraine. How does it impact you today?”

“It doesn’t.”

“I find that tremendously hard to believe.”

“Believe it. I don’t discuss my childhood with anyone. I’ve already discussed it with you more than I have with almost anyone else alive. Can we move on to the next question, please?”

I picked up my digital recorder and held it to my mouth. “Subject reacts angrily when probed about his childhood,” I barked into it, sounding more like an anthropologist observing chimpanzees than a journalist. “Refuses to answer questions, demands to change the subject. Hmm, I wonder what he’s hiding? Note to probe further, via third parties, if necessary.”

Rostovich
winced again. “Do you do this to all your interview subjects?”

“Only the ones who don’t cooperate,” I chirped.
“My boss Benny Logan told me about his relationship with you,” I said, pivoting to another topic for the moment.

“Oh? And what did he tell you?”

“Quite a lot. About the fact you rescued his brother’s bar in New York financially some years ago. In a rather mysterious fashion, no less.”
“I was an investor,” he snapped, though I could tell I’d already managed to touch a nerve. “I invest in a lot of small businesses. I have since I was a teenager.”

“Yes, that’s also what he said. Which makes me curious---how does a teenage
Russian immigrant boy living in a poor neighborhood like Brighton Beach come up with the cash to infuse a bar in Manhattan?”

“
As I’ve told you before, I’m a Ukrainian Jew, not Russian.”

“D
on’t change the subject. Answer the question, please.”

“I have always been very resourceful,” he replied, skirting the spirit of the question. “I kn
ew a lot of people back then. Still do.”

“What sorts of people?”

“People from the old country, people from my neighborhood who were always looking for good investment opportunities.”

“So the money wasn’t yours, then? It was someone else’s? What were you, a broker of some sort?”

“No, it was my own money. At least in Benny’s case it was. I was quite flush by then. Though my first few ventures were on a brokerage basis, yes.”

Hmm. Now we were getting somewhere, though
Rostovich was being plenty stingy with the particulars. “Were your, shall we say,
contacts
part of the Russian mafia?”
“My contacts were Ukrainian, mostly. We don’t tend to get along well with Russians, except for Russian Jews.”

“You didn’t answer the question.”

“I believe I did.”

I leaned back in my chair and folded my arms across my chest. “You really don’t want to do this at all, do you?”

He ran his fingers through his sandy hair twice, opened his mouth to respond, then shut it. He didn’t say a word, though his chest was rising and falling at a rapid rate. I could hear his labored breathing from across the room, and I noticed that a fine sheen of sweat had broken out on his forehead. All right, so I
was
making him nervous. But why? Was it my line of questioning, or was it something else? Something physical? Was his body feeling the same waves of heat that mine was? Was he as distracted from the task at hand as I had become?

There was only one way to find out.

At that moment, it was as if invisible forces took over my body. I was no longer in control of what I said or did; instead I was somewhere high above, watching the proceedings. My inner self had taken over. Clearly she was unsatisfied with my progress thus far this evening, and decided to take things into her own hands.

I---or rather, my body---got up from its chair and crossed to where
Rostovich was sitting. I watched myself as I pulled his chair away from the heavy teak table and sat down onto his lap. Or rather, straddled him. I could feel his hidden erection----rock-hard, thick and full, it could be nothing else---through his clothing against my groin. It was the most incredible sensation I’d ever experienced, and I wanted more of it. “I think it’s high time we take another tack,” I heard myself say. I ground into him then, not even realizing what I was doing. I was proceeding on pure instinct. I’d never ground on anyone before in my life, and yet it felt like the most natural thing to do in the world.

He didn’t reply. He didn’t say or do anything for a moment besides lean back in his chair, breathing hard, his mouth gaping open and his expression showing a state of shock. Delighted shock, mind you----but still shock.

After opening and shutting his mouth several times, he finally spoke. “Why Miss Delaney, I had no idea you felt this way.”

“Neither did I,” I breathed back. “Neither did I.” My lips found his, and we kissed passionately, as I ground myself onto him harder, down, down, down, feeling his hardness against my most tender spots. You’d never know from my behavior that I was a virgin. It shocked me most of all.

We kissed for several minutes, me exploring the inside of his mouth with my tongue. This was nothing like the slobbering, sloppy attempts of my high school prom date. The sensations were exquisite----the rough-yet-smooth surface of his tongue, the knobbiness of his back teeth, the sweep of his lips, his hot breath mingling with mine and sinking deep into my lungs, becoming one with my being.
This
was why people kissed.
This
was why people fucked.  All that had been so mysterious and nonsensical to me for so long suddenly made perfect sense. I wanted to know more, to feel more. My body was long past overdue for this, and could wait no longer, interview be damned. I no longer cared about getting my story, or saving face, or even making next month’s rent. All I cared about was getting Peter Rostovich’s cock----that’s what people called it in situations like this, right?---inside of me right away.

Inside of me.
What did that really mean? I understood it in theory, but not in practice. I wanted to know what I’d been missing all of these years. I wanted to know how my body felt with part of someone else’s body inside it.  I wanted to know what it meant to know another person in the Biblical sense.

I wanted to
know.

“Do you have a bed?” I heard myself whisper, breathless and gasping. That’s usually where people did this sort of thing, though I supposed the dining table would work just as well. It was closer.

Peter nuzzled my neck, sucking and biting for a moment, then seemed to catch himself. He pushed me away from him then, holding me out at arm’s length, gripping my shoulders hard. “Are you sure you want to do this now?” he said, his voice as breathy and raspy as mine, his chest heaving with desire. “Because we don’t have to.”

“I want to.”

He closed his eyes then, breathed deeply, then opened them again. “So do I. I want you with every fiber of my being, Nancy Delaney. But that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.”
“Funny, I thought men men think sex is always a good idea.”

That emitted a hearty laugh from him. “Yes, that’s true,” he said. “But I’ve reached an age where I’ve learned that what the body wants isn’t always what the mind needs, to say nothing of the heart.”

I leaned in and traced the veins standing out on the side of his neck with the tip of my nose. It was a strange, yet delightful sensation, and a little dangerous----almost like a moth’s wing dancing too close to a flame. “Philosophical to the end,” I whispered into his ear, then traced its outline with the tip of my tongue. He sucked in his breath and pressed his groin hard against mine in response. I was surprised at how much my body seemed to know how to do these things entirely on its own, without thinking. My Human Sexuality professor had always said that the fundamentals of sex are hardwired into our DNA, that we would know what to do when the time came, whether or not we’d ever been told. I hadn’t believed him then, but I believed him now. “You are such an enigma, Peter Rostovich, do you know that?”

“Yes, I do. And Nancy, I would advise you to stay far, far away from me. I am bad news.” He said this as he drew me closer and gripped me harder. I was sure his fingertips would leave marks on my arms and shoulders where they
dug into my skin like vises. His words didn’t match his actions; he was like a spider attracting its prey with a web that sparkled with morning dew. As he warned me away with his mouth, his body just dragged me in deeper and deeper.

“I don’t want to stay far away,” I whispered.
“I want to know more. I want to know everything there is to know about you.” It was true. My interest in him wasn’t just physical, either. I wanted to know him intimately in every possible sense----where he’d come from, what motivated him to make the choices he had, what he desired and why, his deepest, darkest thoughts. Whether he’d ever done things he’d regretted. Whether he still did. I knew that the only way to get to that part of Peter Rostovich was to strip him naked, make him moan, capture him with my feminine powers----powers that I was only just now beginning to understand.

On the other hand, I wanted to surrender myself to him completely. I wanted to render myself powerless in his arms, to succumb to his will. In a way, I already had. It was a paradox that made
no logical sense, yet I seemed to understand it in the same way that my body understood how to breathe even when I was fast asleep. “Let’s just do it here,” I whispered. “On the table.”

He shook his head. “No, I’m taking you to bed. You deserve to be made love to properly, Nancy.”

Made love to properly.
That conjured up images of satin sheets, soft candlelight, the ethereal metaphors of Victorian novels that embedded sex into secret codes that used roses and the strategic placement of stamps and wax seals on letters and envelopes. It all seemed very romantic, but my inner self didn’t want romance. I’d frittered away too many years reading dog-eared novels and watching costume drama marathons that only pretended to be romantic. I wanted the real thing, and my inner self told me that the real thing was hard, sweaty, fast, and rough.

Silks, satins and rose petals wouldn’t satisfy the ache that throbbed deep within my body. Only a fast hard fuck could. I knew it the same way I knew that seawater tasted salty, the same way that I always knew which way to turn on the highway, even when I didn’t have a map. It was like a homing instinct
.

“Take me, Peter. Now. Please.” I reached down for his belt buckle, loosened it, then fought to lower his zipper---no easy feat given how his cock pushed hard against the fabric of his chinos. My hands shook and my breath caught. The room began to spin around me a bit. I wondered if it was because I was hyperventilating. Or maybe it was just what happened to everyone who was about to get fucked.