Perfect Opposite (9 page)

Rain lashed against the windowpanes and flew in through the open balcony doors, their white curtains billowing in the wind. I moved forward to close them, but felt my foot knock against something hard. Dropping to my knees, I brought my hands down to feel for whatever had tripped me, the darkness of the room seeming to fill me and rise like bile in my throat.

“Mom?” I stammered, terrified.

My hands made contact with something soft and warm. A thick liquid was spreading around my palms and between my finge
rs. It felt like I’d dipped my hands in syrup. Raising them up to try to see, a cold blue light filled the room like a strobe, shining a blackish red against the silhouette of my hands. The thunder came then, and I started to scream.

Suddenly, someone’s hands came around my chest, locking me in place. Every effort I made to lash out was met with equal resistance, and all my kicking and screaming could not set me free.

“No… No!” I shrieked as loud as the thunder.

“Sasha!” the sound came to me as though from the end of an old, crackling telephone line.

I continued to lash out with my arms and legs, spittle flying from my mouth as I put my heart and soul into the violent struggle, never gaining so much as an inch of freedom. When I’d used up all my energy there was nothing left but to go limp like a rag doll, cold now and shaking madly.

“Sasha! Look at me!”

Thoroughly wild and beyond comprehending, I opened my eyes slowly, reality edging back to me in short, tentative steps.

Alex was sitting with his back to the wall of the
hallway, holding me tightly from behind as I, clamped between his arms and legs, shivered against him in a tight ball. One small candle flickered nearby, from the shelf where we left our keys, but apart from that we might as well have been at the bottom of a well.

“
Shh, it’s only the power. It went out,” I felt Alex's fingertips against my cheek, pulling free some wet strands of hair.

Lifting my head, I could see through the gloom that his eyes were worried.

It was horrific when this happened, but there seemed to be nothing I could do to escape these… episodes. Whether they were panic attacks or whatever, it seemed I’d have to keep on reliving the worst night of my life, over and over again. Two years had passed, and still I could do nothing to fight back when the flashbacks came on this intense. Having someone close made it easier to come out of it, but then I always felt embarrassed and ashamed. My raw nerve exposed for all to see was an awful thought, but imagining being alone at times like that was even worse. Alex might have been the last person I wanted to see, but I was glad he was there.

I wished my body would stop shaking, but that wasn’t happening any time soon, so it seemed best just to stay where I was, lying against Alex until some daylight came to replace the night.

“You'll catch a cold if we stay here.”
he said few minutes later and started to get up off the floor, lifting me up in his arms.

He was starting to carry me through the living room when I ca
ught sight of the large windows and the flashes of lightning beyond. They were further away now, but still I dug my nails into his arms and struggled against the awful sight.

“No!” I cried as the rumble of thunder passed through me again like a dentist’s drill.

Visibly confused, Alex he put me down on the floor, and as soon as the cold floorboards met my feet I rushed back into the hallway. I curled up on the floor next to the wall, bringing my hands up to cover my ears in an effort to block out the storm. Staring down, I started counting yellow floor tiles, but they seemed blurred somehow and I couldn’t decipher where one ended and other followed. I saw something move out of the corner of my eye, but still held my gaze glued to the fifth tile. Or maybe it was the fourth... I wasn’t sure.

Holding a thick white blanket, Alex
sat next to me on the floor. Muttering something under his breath, he took me in his arms again, wrapped the blanket around my shoulders and hugged me protectively. My teeth were still chattering, but I didn’t know whether it was from cold or fear.

“It's OK, baby. We’ll stay here as long as you want, just please stop shaking,” he whispered softly in my ear.

The low tone of his voice set me strangely at ease. Little by little, a sense of calm descended. With one arm around my waist, he gently ran his fingers through my hair and for the first time in a very long time I felt safe, curled up in the arms of my nemesis.

Opening my eyes by degrees, the first things to come into focus were the muscles on the strong arm draped around my shoulders. The image under my nose at that moment showed a mythical beast, a sort of snarling dragon with flared nostrils snorting fire, and a slithering body coated in various shades of black scales. Its grotesque trunk narrowed into a tail, which circled the bicep twice before disappearing somewhere near the elbow. Processing the image and why it was under my nose wasn’t the best way to come out of my slumber.

W
e were still in the hallway, and from the light creeping through from the doorway to the living room it seemed that dawn had long since broken. Shocked to realize I’d spent the night huddled against Alex, my breaths became shallow as I wondered how I might get away without waking him.

“
You seem comfortable there...” his hoarse voice came from beside me.

I slowly lifted my head up from his chest, pulled back a bit and looked at his face. His eyes were red around the edges and dark underneath and it was obvious that, un
like me, he hadn’t slept a wink.

“I'm sorry...” I started, but he stopped me in my tracks with a finger against my lips.

“You scared the shit out of me last night,” he took his finger away, picked the blanket up off the floor and wrapped it around my shoulders. “How do you feel?”

“Better,” I whispered, glad of the warm sensation on my skin where his hands had been.

Lightheaded, I continued to look at the lines of his face and the shadow of his one-day beard, aware of the knots forming in my stomach.

“I'm going to take a shower and get dressed,” I said quietly,
got up out of his lap and hurried to the bathroom, leaving Alex sitting on the floor in the hall.

Clicking the door shut behind me, I pulled off my
PJs frantically and got into the shower. The water felt magical as it washed over me, and I sensed my soul returning to my body, recovering from the trauma of the night before but also from the effect Alex was having on me. I could still sense his smell lingering on my body, so it felt like a relief to let everything just wash away.

Taking a cup of hot streaming coffee, I sat by the kitchen window and leaning my head against the glass, watched a fine drizzle falling from the gray sky outside. These panic attacks always left me drained, as though someone had wrung the life right out of me.

I can’t go on like this
any more.

Knowledge of the fact that my problem was serious didn’t spur me to visit a doctor, or a shrink, probably because of the questions I’d have to answer. There’d be no choice but to lie, and
that would surely make the whole effort pointless. The first thing they’d surely ask would be ‘when did the attacks begin?’ and I could never answer that honestly. Sometimes I imagined the face of a psychiatrist, as I put in a levelheaded voice :

“
Well, two years ago I found my mother hacked to death in a hotel room. They killed her and sliced her up to show my father that he shouldn’t do business on their patch. He sells guns and other weapons to gangs and terrorists, you see.”

Hearing steps approach the kitchen, I looked up to see Alex enter, muttering something to
himself. He did that a lot. Usually in Russian. Curses mostly. His vocabulary was hideous most of the time, but when he spoke his mother tongue, well... he got really creative then. Other than that, I’ve never heard him speaking Russian. Except when he was fighting with Nikolai over the phone, of course.

While he was passing,
on his was way to pour some coffee from the pot, I noticed that his movements were slower than usual and that it seemed to cause him pain to put his weight on his right leg. He brought his cup to the table and sat down in a chair across from mine, a pained expression catching his features for a second before they settled into a sort of sulk; that, at least, wasn’t unusual.

“Something wrong?”

“Nothing. Why?”

“What happened to your leg?”

“I have a cramp,” he barked and looked away. “And you? I hope you feel better than you look.”

This was wonderful. First thing in the morning and he’d already started showering me with compliments. I’d seen my face in the mirror and knew I looked washed out and upset, but no girl likes to have her suspicions confirmed.
But, I had a feeling that he did that on purpose to change the subject.

“You’re intolerable, really.”

“Good to know.” he shrugged and continued to sip his coffee. “Do you want to talk about what happened last night?”

“No.”

“OK…”

“But thank you.
”

“For what?”

“You know what… for staying with me up all night, on the floor. You didn’t have to do that.”

“Any time.”

I was really hoping, for the sake of my sanity, that there wouldn’t be a next time. I didn’t exactly like this feeling I had when he was that close to me. It was too plain unsettling being drawn to him so forcefully, when that was obviously such a dangerous road to travel.

When he’d finished his coffee, Alex went to the hallway and came back with two sets of keys in his hand.

“I'm going to crash for a few hours. When I wake up we can go wherever you want, but till then you have to stay here.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that I can’t do my job if I’m dog tired, and since I won’t risk you sneaking out, I’m taking these with me.”

“You can’t keep me locked up here like a prisoner!”

“Take some of those gossip magazines to read and time will just fly by. It’s for your own good, Princess.”

“Screw you. St
op calling me that!” I shouted and thundered to my room.

Slamming the door behind me, I went to sit
on the side of the bed, all the while asking myself what on earth was going on. One moment he was holding me tenderly, and then next he seemed hell bent on driving me nuts. Irritated, I grabbed a pillow and sank my face into it, letting out a loud but muffled scream. Feeling at least a little better, I let myself lie flat on the bed and looked over to the window, wondering whether I might be the irrational one after all.

This is not normal..
.

I’d never been so attracted to someone that I’d gone off the rails and acted stupid. Nor had anyone ever made me so angry. The fact that Alex worked for my father was really just the icing on a cake made from all the worst possible ingredients; he was ill mannered, rude, stubborn, aggressive, morose and arrogant. And even if I hated when anyone called me Princess, I literally melted every time when Alex did.

“You need to sort yourself out, girl, or you’ll go cuckoo,” I mumbled and covered my head with the quilt.

Maybe it’s unusual for a girl, but I had a pretty good collection of sci-fi books on my shelf and eventually I spent some time re-reading one of them. It didn’t hold my interest for more than a couple of hours and I decided to zone out with a movie instead. I found ‘Die Hard’ still on my laptop, so I watched that from start to finish. Bruce outwitted the bad guys yet again and near the end, when the bombs started going off, I almost turned up the volume so as to wake Alex. I thought better of it, though. No matter how irritating he might be, he had spent the whole night watching over me. When the final credits started rolling, I heard my stomach growl and realized that hunger was most definitely at my door.

I went to the kitchen and took some bread out of the cupboard, reached over for a tub of jelly on the counter top and froze. The next moment, before I could catch it in my throat, I let out a loud high-pitched scream.

There, near my hand, was the biggest cockroach I’d ever seen. It didn’t seem to be going anywhere, either.

Hearing footsteps from behind
me , I turned and almost screamed for a second time. With a knife gripped in one hand, Alex was poised in the doorway, ready to attack and looking mean. The pose didn’t hold for long, maybe only a fraction of a second after he realized there wasn’t any danger, and then all his muscles relaxed at once.

“What the fuck was that for?”

“I... I was hungry, and I saw...”

I felt ashamed when I realized I’d acted like such a sissy over a bug. With a hangdog expression, I regarded Alex in silence for a few moments, while he stood waiting for an answer.

“A cockroach.”

“What?” he asked in disbelief.

“A cockroach. A big ugly black one.” I bent my head and pointed my finger over to the sink.

“A
bug ? Jesus! I’d thought they’d come for you or some shit.”