Page 5 of Vasily the Nail

I inhale, holding back a gag at the stench of tobacco on his fingertips. I’ve been trying to escape the stale, rancid odor since walking into this place.

This strip club.

“I take care of you,” Vasily promises again in his thick, dark accent, his scant English. I’ve never hated myself as much as I do in this moment, because I like it. Icraveit. What he says, it’s the one thing I knew better than to hope for. I’ve only ever been a trinket. My value has never been about me but about the price others put on me. I’m not a nail; nails are useful. I’m a diamond. A Faberge egg. A vintage baseball card.

Vasily is a hammer. He has no reason to take care of me, no reason to promise me that. It’s weak and shameful of me to beg my enemy, aRussian, to do what no other man in my life has ever done, but I take his giant hand between my small hands andtilt my head up to where I imagine I’d be looking into his black, bloodshot eyes as I whimper, “Please help me. Please?”

He brings that hand back to my face, to rub my cheek. The calloused thumb is warm and alive against my soft, pampered flesh. “Poorovechka,” he says. I can’t possibly know what the pet name means, but he doesn’t say it in an insulting way. “I can only help you one way. I take care of you, yes?”

For all his faults, Tony has been good to me since our father’s passing. He’s kept his promises. I’ve never once felt anything less than safe despite what I know my family does.

I was just finishing up my daily swim when I was nabbed and gagged by these Bratva goons for the trip to frigid Flagstaff, but Tony would have made sure I was bundled up in an angora sweater, my Burberry coat, and my lambskin boots if they’d given us the time. I should be in my Saturday Shakespeare class at the state college right now, a privilege most of my friends inla famigliadidn’t get. They don’t teach you how to be a wife and raise kids and keep your vision tunneled away from your husband’s activities in college, after all.

I’ve followed the rules. I get great grades. I spend an hour every day making sure my hair, make-up, and outfit are perfect so my future husband won’t be embarrassed or punish me for looking slovenly in photos. I go to church at least twice a week and volunteer whenever I can.

I don’t deserve this.

But I can’t say that. I know what happens to petulant girls. They get slapped across the face, and then they have to spend an extra half hour every day getting their makeup just right to cover the bruise.

I’m a good girl, so I have no choice but to nod.

Heat on my face, a touch I think is a soft, uncalloused finger, but then I feel his breath. Vasily is kissing me gently, a brush at the corner of my lips. Then his thumb slides fully across them as he says, “Everyone out!”

I hear the scuff of chairs on the tile floor and feet shuffling out, and I give Vasily a heartfelt ‘thank you.’ I’m not going to enjoy this, but bad things aren’t quite as bad when you don’t fight them. I’ve most recently learned this from my best friend, Camilla, who was married off before she could even finish high school.

I’ve also learned from her how valuable being the good girl has been. I’m so unimpeachable that I’m the only unmarried friend Camilla’s still allowed to have. Because I’ve been such a good girl, I don’t need the birth control pills I’ve been palming over to her for last two years.

I haven’t needed them until now.

Hopefully Tony believes me when I ask him for a morning-after pill tomorrow just to be ‘safe.’

“I undress you now,” Vasily says, and again, it strikes me that he’s about to do this terrible thing to me, but he isn’t manhandling me. He’s done nothing to spook me since whatever menacing thing he said in Russian as he walked in.

He could have bent me over, pulled my swim bottoms down, and taken me while I was cuffed to that stripper pole. Instead, he’s being gentle and letting me touch him, not complaining about how I’m mangling his shirt, a surprisingly soft linen button-down. Odd for the season and the temperature, but nowI’m wishing I noticed what color it was. Light. Blue, maybe, but maybe mint or lavender. Buttoned not so high, so his white undershirt is visible.

“Da, you undress me if so wish,” he says encouragingly, and I realize I’ve relaxed my grip on his shirt to study it. “You may touch.”

I recoil. Immediately, I regret it. There was so much comfort in his warm, solid chest and soft, casual shirt.

“Whatever you like,” he murmurs, unoffended, as his hands finally move back to my top and unfasten it. He doesn’t pull it away immediately, instead touching my wrists and tracing up my arms, letting me feel his movements as he makes his way to my shoulders to pull the straps down.

We’re too close for him to see my body as his hands run down my back to my bottoms, pressing into my skin to slide under the spandex to cup my rear and squeeze.

I whimper.

“You like that,” he says. Again, nothing more than an observation, although I shake my head vehemently.

The squeeze turns into a massage, something I’ve had probably hundreds of times, spa days being a popular way to keep the women occupied while the men are doing their work. But this one is more intrusive, more intimate, and I’m not sure if it’s because the way he digs into me forces me to lean into him or if it’s because I’m standing and gravity is simply shifting my body differently.

Or if he’s being more intimate with the way he lifts and parts my cheeks, playing at exposing me but beneath my bathing suit.

“No shame here,” he says, and I swear his accent has gone thicker, his voice deeper. “Your body knows touch. Likes touch. Is biology.”

His fingers fan out past my bikini and to my thighs, still digging in and making circles. The motion is slow but broad, making my inner thighs gape on each pass, forceful enough that I stumble slightly and have to lean into him as one of my feet steps out.

His body is mostly solid and flat, his muscles defined but only faint ripples through his clothes.

Pressed against my stomach is a thick, long rod.

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