Page 48 of Bedazzled
Shrugging, I admitted, “It wasn’t the same without you.”
She linked arms with me, directing the girls out into the really spectacular garden at the back of the house. It was one of my favorite places, with curved iron arbors and a pond, with lush lily pads. The girls ran through the sprawling storksbill geraniums, and I brushed my hand over the wall of Virginia creeper already turning a vivid red. It was only the end of August, but apparently, autumn came early in St. Petersburg.
We moved to the beautifully carved wooden pergola, Lucya kicked off her heels and relaxed into one of the squishy cushioned wicker chairs. “This is heaven,” she sighed happily.
“It will be even more heavenly now that Anya is bringing out the little frosted cakes for the girls and cocktails for us,” I promised. The housekeeper gave me a wink as she put the big tray down.
We toasted each other with our mimosas. “Do you spend a lot of time out here?” Lucya asked, happily taking another sip.
“Even when it rains,” I said, trying not to sound pathetic. “The mansion is really beautiful, but it’s so…”
“Dark? Grim?” she teased, “In desperate need of more modernization?”
“It’s too easy to get lost in my thoughts and it gets harder and harder to pull back out,” I said. “I feel as useless here as tits on a bull.”
Lucya almost spat out her drink.
“I haven’t heard that one before anywhere outside of Texas,” she wheezed.
“One of my stepmothers was Texan,” I admitted. “I learned all the really good Texanism’s from her.”
“One of them?” Lucya probed.
“Eh,” I shrugged, “Dad got married more as… a hobby, I guess? He’s on wife number six. After wife number five left him, he turned to me in all seriousness and said, ‘Tania, I’m beginning to think it’s me’.”
She looked at me nervously, wondering if it was okay to laugh, so I did first, the awful half-snorting chortle I get when something is really funny and she joined in.
We calmed down after a couple of minutes, and she asked, “So that probably impacted your ideas about marriage.”
“Yeah,” I shrugged, “it means that most people think it’s a disposable feature in life. I never planned on getting married until Yuri…”
Until he was forced to marry me to save my life?
I flinched, “Well, until Yuri anyway.”
“I don’t know you as well as I do Ella, but I’m certain you’re not the kind to give up. And honestly, drifting around that - admittedly magnificent - mansion like an extremely sad little ghost doesn’t seem like your thing.”
She smiled a bit to take away the sting, but it was true, and it made me feel even more pathetic. I’ve never been a sit around the house person who waited for someone else to make my life interesting. What was happening to me?
“Let’s start small,” she continued. “You have some time right now, what’s something you’ve been wanting to do but haven’t had the time before?”
I remembered the evening I had waited for Yuri to come over, to dance with me, to have the most intimate sex of my life, and then throw me out like leftovers from the fridge. As I’d listened to “Satin Birds,” I had missed playing the violin, and my fingers had unconsciously moved along with the melody. So much went wrong that night, but I wanted to salvage one or two good memories from it.
“I used to play the violin as a teenager,” I admitted, “I’ve been missing it.”
“There you go!” Lucya said approvingly, “Take up the violin again. While I’m in town, we’ll go visit a couple of other yoga studios and find one that isn’t so… snobbish?”
Squeezing her hand, I felt a rush of gratitude so strong that it was almost embarrassing.
Yuri walked through the huge double doors from the house to the garden and my smile died. My small steps toward having a friend here, reclaiming bits and pieces of myself seemed insignificant now, watching the man who apparently despised me approach us.
“Lucya Turgenev? How nice to see you.”
He leaned over to kiss my cheek and then hers. I appreciated that he had the courtesy to kiss me so it wouldn’t be pathetically obvious that he hadn’t touched me since saying “I do.”
He smelled so good; like pine trees, salt air, and warm cotton. I missed burying my face into the little hollow between his neck and shoulder. He used to pull me on top of him after sex and I’d breathe in the wonderful scent of him and we'd fall asleep together.
Looking up, I caught Lucya’s concerned expression and pushed away the memories.
