Maxim Matusevich
“Did it hurt?” He made an effort to sound tender. They were spooning after sex and she took his question for pillow talk.
“Hurt? You silly. I’m just noisy. It didn’t hurt at all. It was nice.” Playfully, she pressed her buttocks into his groin — a lighthearted sign of no regrets harbored. “It was really nice. Did you know that by touching a man with her bare butt, a woman signals trust?”
He couldn’t see her face but knew that she was smiling, a sly and contented smile of a woman flattered by her lover’s concern. Her lover, her man… well, that was an overstatement. To say the least. But at the moment, at that early morning moment it did feel like they belonged to each other. One-night stands can be like that — deceptively intimate, out-of-thin-air immediate. “Instant coffee, one-day mayflies, or, if you prefer a cliché (which I know you always do), a flash in a pan,” that’s how his ex, Lisa, talked about her own past casual hook-ups.
Lisa’s sarcasm drove him mad and eventually drove him away. At least, that was the convenient explanation he came up with and then perfected in the course of numerous faux-therapy, post-break up sessions with his friends and occasional lovers. She drove him away, which really meant that he was a coward and a weakling — an unpleasant, but easily provable fact that Lisa never failed to bring up in their increasingly rare phone conversations. It was an amicable divorce and as such a source of some pride for both of them. “What could be more civilized,” Lisa quipped, “than parting ways like true adults?” He agreed, but a divorce is still a divorce and once in a while a thought of Lisa made him wince — as if someone pricked at a tender spot with a tiny safety pin. And presently he promptly felt that quick pinprick, but it only lasted for a second, half-a-second to be precise, and the discomfort was gone before he’d been able to process it.
Not now — now was different, now he was lying in bed next to Mariam, her trusting butt pushed up against his wooly lower stomach, his right arm over her side, slipped through under the warm armpit (Lisa’s voice again: “Remember how back in childhood they would stick a thermometer under your arm? Remember how you were desperate for the mercury to hit the magic 37 degrees and then move just above the fateful red dot? You got a fever, sweetie, no school tomorrow. Oh, the joy, the happiness of having a fever!”), his hand cupping the fullness of her breast, its nipple flattened innocently against his palm.
Mariam laughed: “Hurt?! Oh my, it’s like you’re not Russian anymore. They must’ve added something to your water in America. Or what is it you drink over there? Coke? Budweiser? Whatever it is — you have stopped being a Russian man. You even made love like a polite foreigner. Next thing I know you’ll start speaking Italian with me. I once had a fling with an Italian guy. On Cyprus. Just as sweet before sex as after. Not Russians though, oh no, sir, not Russians. Our guys,