Who: Lidia and Gus. When: October 23rd, Afternoon. Where: 103 Orchid Road. Rating: PG-13. Summary: Gus reads Lidia’s journal and a discussion ensues. Warnings: The discussion involves a lapdance.
Since they’d decided to play along - to ‘give the bosses what they wanted’ as she had put it - Gus had been feeling oddly mellow. Having a regular lay was just relaxing, especially if he divorced it from the inevitable consequences. It’d probably take a little while, though considering the frequency with which they fell on each other, he didn’t know if that was just wishful thinking. On one hand, it’d be great to just have it done so he could start adjusting to the idea, but on the other... denial was a wonderful thing.
He stepped out of the shower, and in the midst of drying off, noticed that Lidia had left. Gus didn’t know where - work wasn’t for a little while - but what he did know was that she’d left her journal on the Helper screen. She’d made an entry and then left it without closing it.
Don’t, he warned himself, staring at the Cyrillic sprawl on the screen, Not a good idea.
It was probably all ‘Comrades, my horrible American husband hasn’t washed his jeans since he moved in’ and stuff like that. Private stuff, like how his conversation with his mother had been private. Not necessarily incriminating, but still. Private. Things that she wasn’t comfortable talking to him about.
Gus wrapped his towel around his waist and sat down, squinting at the blocky letters. A moment later and the Helper helpfully offered up a translator for him. And a moment after that, he was reading a private message from Lidia to her brother.
His eyebrows drew together almost immediately. The whole thing was pretty eyebrow raising - apparently he wasn’t the only one who’d shown up under dubious circumstances. He was sort of annoyed at first, in fact, considering. Why wouldn’t she just tell him that?
And she was scared? He almost didn’t believe it, but just because his wife was a hardass didn’t mean she didn’t have feelings. She just declined to share them with him.
Quickly, he closed up the entry and got dressed, heading downstairs to pour himself a coffee and mull over what he’d just read. Should he say anything? She wouldn’t say anything, but they weren’t the same. Shit, she couldn’t even tell the truth about the tattoo behind her ear for some reason - why would she mention that she was on the run from some serious shit? That she was afraid?
He looked uncharacteristically deep in thought when Lidia returned, sipping his coffee and looking at one of their newest pamphlets without actually reading it.
Lidia wasn’t exactly used to being the ‘neighborly’ kind of person, but there was a certain expectation that she knew she had to keep up in this place, and that included being smiley and actually offering help to the tiny Asian woman who suddenly showed up at the front door. Apparently she was just starting to learn how to drive, and had locked her house keys in her husband’s car. Sweet little thing, Lidia guessed. She wondered if the woman wasn’t made of paper.
After a little effort and some skills she’d picked up on the streets (she told Dohna how her mother was always locking keys behind the doors they belonged to--not that she was often behind those doors as well), she fished the ring out from the little electronic roller skate that passed for Hou Ren vehicles and headed back inside.
She wasn’t surprised to see Gus out of the shower, but the fact that his attention was on one of the pamphlets... that was out of the ordinary.
“Learning something new?” she asked mildly, passing him toward where she had composed a letter to her brother, which she thought she’d sent.
“Yeah,” he said, tossing the pamphlet aside and rising to follow her, “I want to be serious with you for a minute, Lidia.”
He didn’t ask if it was all right, or look sheepish, or any of his usual mannerisms - Gus did try to interact with her like some kind of supplicant most of the time. It was easier, mostly because he was glad to keep things running smoothly. Sometimes, he felt, in spite of her.
“I know you lie to me pretty much constantly,” there was no sour accusation in his tone - he even shrugged, like it was besides the point, “But I’m thirty-nine, Lidia. I’ve been around the block a few times and been kicked in the teeth plenty. You can talk to me about shit and it’ll stay between us. And I know you’ve got your brother,” he put a hand up, “I’m just saying. I’m on your side. We’re kind of in this together, even if you don’t like to think of it that way.”
Unable to help himself, he tapped behind his own right ear and raised an eyebrow at her, “Gemini. The twins.”
He wasn’t as big a moron as she probably thought he was, and maybe it was time she acknowledged it, even if it made things more uneasy. If they were going to have a fucking baby together, she could at least tell him the truth a little more often. Maybe every other day instead of once a week.
Since noticing the closed document that she hadn’t closed, a good chill frosted over Lidia’s eyes. It was there when she looked back up at him, with a new edge in his gaze that didn’t necessarily seem threatening, though she was hard-wire to assume it was. Lidia’s mind raced for a moment, though you wouldn’t know it, with the default half-smile pulling at her lips, and the casual looseness in her shoulders.
She cocked the same brow at him, tipping her chin in that direction, as if she was impressed. “So you know zodiac signs. Congratulations.” There was a little sarcasm evident, but it wasn’t harsh. If anything, it was jovial, like it had been when they talked about the tattoo before; the look in her eyes, however, was far from it. She went on in light explanation. “Where I am from, tattoos are not good to be shown on women. Is very...private, to me.”
“Uh huh,” he said, looking as though he wasn’t sure if he was buying it or not. He wanted to buy it, but she had a fucking good poker face.
“Here’s the thing, Lidia,” he said, “We’re in this weird little zoo, and at some point, we’re going to have a baby. For a year after that, contractually, we have to stay together for the baby. Neither of us are here because we want to be, but from now until whenever that year is up? We have to be here. In this ridiculously amazing house, living together, raising a child.”
Being mature and authoritative didn’t come naturally to Gus, but there was a worry-line on his forehead that told her he needed to get it off his chest. To make himself heard instead of being placidly underfoot. Usually going with the flow worked out, but in this particular case? They couldn’t keep this up indefinitely. Not when there was more to consider.
“If there’s shit I need to know, Lidia,” he said, “I’d like to be prepared. I know I’m not some genius international art thief, but for all the prison time I’ve done, I’ve gotten away with plenty of other shit. I’ll help you if you’ll let me, Lidia, but you have to tell me the truth. I’m not asking for your life story, either. I’d just like to be able to trust you a little, considering what we’re going to be doing together.”
Gus put his hands on his hips and frowned. He wasn’t sure he’d fully communicated everything he’d needed to, but he felt a little better, having said it. There was maybe a little more he could add, but after his little tirade, he figured he’d better let her get a word in edgewise.
She didn’t offer one. At least, not for a good few heartbeats, where her expression barely changed. Slowly, however, something in her eyes seemed to thaw. There was a part of her that really wanted to unload, the part that had her writing that letter to her brother in the first place. But though this man was her legal husband, and everything he’d just made sure to point out did indeed look like their future, Lidia had nearly thirty years of protectively keeping herself closed.
Something had knocked him into this conversation, whatever it was. This was a sharp shift in the somewhat tolerable dynamic they’d settled into. Lidia weighed her options, rolling her lips. She leaned back on the couch, crossing her arms loosely around her middle.
“What exactly do you think I should tell you? If not my life story.” Her voice was even, though not frosty, it wasn’t exactly warm.
Gus looked visibly irritated by the question and he rubbed the back of his neck, obviously trying to think of a pleasant way to express himself in spite of how he was feeling.
“I’m not going to play this game with you,” he decided, looking her steadily in the eye, “You left your journal open. I read it. I guess I’m a little pissed you’re keeping me in the dark about that kind of shit. Do you think that’s something I don’t need to know? If people are after you?”
He shifted his weight and exhaled an irritable noise.
“I like you, Lidia,” he said, “We get along pretty well, the sex is great, and our arrangement isn’t bad. But if you’re going to treat me like a fucking idiot and keep me in the dark, I don’t really see how this is going to stay tolerable. This whole situation is completely insane, but at the end of the day, I don’t want to be a fuck up about this. I don’t want something to happen to you or to a future mini-you just because you couldn’t bring yourself to tell me that I should keep an eye out for trouble. I’m not sure what you really think about me, Lidia, but I don’t want anything to happen to you. Or hypothetical mini-you. I want to keep you safe, and I can’t do that if you shut me out like you’re doing.”
He shrugged uncomfortably. Dread was knotted pretty firmly in his stomach - Good luck getting laid now, champ, he thought glumly.
It was another thick pause that hung between them, settling in like the noxious fog that came into Moscow from the slums in the east. Inwardly, she’d stopped whipping herself for leaving that letter open, even if it was in Russian, it had been a slip-move. Gus had proven a point in way he may not have realized; she was too easy with him. She had let too much of her guard down, not necessarily because she was growing used to him, but because she hadn’t thought his investment in this ‘relationship’ went beyond her fucking him when the opportunity came up.
She studied him, not unlike a bear would a hunter venturing too close to it’s den. Then with a soft, long sigh, she dropped her eyes, and her chin to her chest. She bumped off the couch and nodded to it, slowly wandering around toward the coffee table. “Please... sit.”
Gus eyed her with open suspicion now, the sinking feeling he’d felt the first day they’d discussed this whole business coming back full force. She wasn’t even remotely genuine, was she? Maybe physically she was, but everything else was just complete bullshit. He’d met some psychos in his time, but Christ-!
Easy, he cautioned himself. He was tense and unhappy and looking for a scapegoat, and who knew? Maybe she actually had something to say.
The American did as she bid him, sitting down, his eyes never leaving her.
Lidia slowly paced the length of their large, open living room. On bare feet and the short cotton shorts she’d gone to bed with, she kept her arms pretzel’d around the smooth plane of her middle. “Aleksey and I were bastards,” she started quietly, filtering each thing she would say in her mind at least three times before it left her lips. She sighed again, tightening her proximity to Gus with subtle shifts in her path. She also pulled the little rubberband from her hair, loosing it from the high ponytail so it twitched from the swell of her bust when she walked. “Our father--he had many families.” On that, she paused, twisting her hips toward him. Locking eyes for a brief, but pointed moment. “--and many enemies.”
He watched her closely, and for the moment, he didn’t think anything of her sort of... provocative stance. She was just fidgeting, right? It was a little distracting, but he was interested in hearing something about her that helped him get a better idea of who the Hell it was he was trying to knock up. Gus hadn’t asked for her life story, but if what was happening involved her life story, he’d be glad to sit through it.
Gus didn’t speak up, however, simply nodding at Lidia when she paused. He was listening.
“They called him Jakal,” she continued, though her voice had steadily dropped in volume. It’s timbre took on the warmth of red tinted glass. Her feet moved again. Toward where he sat on the couch. She stopped the instant her thigh brushed the outside of his knee, looking down at him from the swaying curtain of her hair. “He was murdered about a month before we came here.”
He actually leaned back a little when she approached, not sure what her game was. She could still be lying through her teeth to him, but he had to accept what she said at some point, right? He was painting a picture in his mind, their situation, but the way she was moving and looking at him was really, really distracting. His eyes, briefly, flickered away from her face and over her body before he bobbed his head in another nod - he was still following. Despite the distraction.
Lidia saw that detour. She saw it as a green light.
Her bottom lip rolled in, wet by her tongue then scraped by the sharp tip of one canine. Her movement was smooth, intentionally fluid enough to be natural; she straddled him one knee at a time, making damn sure to push her chest forward in a subtle roll. “Gus...” she purred his name in a mix of warm and icy tones. “Do you know what happens to the offspring of a jakal... when a new alpha moves in?” Irony of the situation was, despite her now very obvious ploy to pull his mind in certain direction, Lidia was actually telling the truth.
“Oh, come on,” Gus muttered when she straddled him. Even though he looked peeved, he certainly didn’t try to push her off, although he keep his hands to his sides like he might at any strip club. Why the hell was she... he didn’t even know. She was telling him some important stuff, but doing it via lapdance, apparently. Gus had no idea how to feel about it - his body did, but his brain was still staunchly put out by the situation.
“So you two wind up here,” he knew trying to fill in gaps would just have her nodding, even if it wasn’t true, but it seemed to make logical sense with what she’d written, “Safely in the clutches of the Government. Until they find some way to get to you and Aleksey.”
Gus was making a real effort to look at her face and not her breasts, and his success rate was about half. If he didn’t find something else to say, it’d be very easy to just handwave the rest of it.
“Is that about right?” he wondered, “Long story short, you’re afraid those gangsters might come after you and your brother?”
That was pretty fucking terrifying, actually. Russian gangsters. Not cool. He thought his childhood had been a little screwy - at least he’d had his mother, and things hadn’t been so bad once his father was out of the picture.
Lidia set her hands on the solid shelf of his shoulders, sliding them to the back of his neck. At the same time, she spoke, and dropped her hip and waist in a slow, deliberate cobra sway. “Is never a ‘short’ story--but yes.” She’d paid attention in her time with him, especially their first night together, with a learning curve of his sensitive spots and personal likes ever since. She could tell a lot about a man on sight, but spending as much close time with one as she had with him--she was going straight for certain buttons, and didn’t care that he knew it. She had a reason. Actually, she had several.
“You say you want nothing to happen to me,” she continued, dipping in close, but not actually touching his face with her lips. She lightly dragged her nails down from his neck toward the barrel chest--the way that’d made him shudder in her ear the last time.
His jaw ticked a little as she did some ticking of her own - every little check box of what he liked, nevermind that she was in his lap and seeming to promise exactly what he wanted. Gus’s hands lifted for a moment, but he pressed them into the couch, making the leather squeak a little.
“I’m not bullshitting you, when I say that kind of stuff,” Gus said, probably looking like a total asshole, frowning at some hot blonde giving him a lapdance, “I mean, Jesus, Lidia, I-”
Gus lifted his hands again and held her shoulders, trying to hold her still and get her to maybe stop eye-fucking him for a second.
“I don’t want to raise a kid like I was raised, or like you were,” he said, pretty sure he was sucking all of the amazing sexiness out of the room at an exponential rate, “My father was a drunk piece of shit that nearly gouged my eye out,” most people were too polite to ask about the scar carved into the right side of his face, and if they did ask, he just said it was from a sword fight and let it go, “If I’m being forced to have a family, Lidia, I want to at least be more of a man than he ever was.”
There. He was a big bleeding heart pussy, although she’d probably already figured that out. It was his way of trying to accept the situation, he supposed - she was burrowing deep into her safety net of (sexy) misdirection, and he was just trying to keep the peace for the inevitable hodge-podge family they’d be down the road.
Gus wondered if they could have possibly been more different, right at that moment.
Lidia’s slow, purposeful movement did stop. Or at least, pause. She eased back, just enough to be able to focus clearly on his face. Something deeply buried in her gaze momentarily surfaced before flicking back, but it left a softer impression on her otherwise very well masked expression.
It was honesty; a thought that still lingered on her lips without being said, not until she deemed it suitable. It also seemed to clear a path through this conversation (which was incredibly uncomfortable to her, in many ways). Lidia rested her palm flat on his chest, while the other tucked gently under his chin. To make sure he knew she was making deliberate eye-contact for that moment.
“You are more a man than any I have known.” Hopefully the tone she used would help sort out the type of men Lidia was accustomed to knowing. ‘Besides Aleksey’ went without saying, of course. Her brother would hold prevalence over any man or woman, in Lidia’s eyes... but what she said was the truth. She grazed the slightly-gnarled skin below his cheekbone with the pad of her thumb before letting it drop.
Even though it might’ve been crazy to do so, he believed her, and he smiled at her crookedly. It was an uncomfortable, stomach-churning topic, but he had a feeling the two of them weren’t really accustomed to doing things the easy way.
Gus caught the hand she’d touched his scar with and squeezed it briefly before shifting his hands to her hips, exhaling a heavy sigh.
“Thanks for being straight with me,” he said, voice quiet and earnest, “And for the lapdance.”
He wasn’t going to belabor what had just passed between them, but he wasn’t going to forget it, either.
The air between them felt lighter, and though the guarded, spiney thing inside Lidia that detested sharing details about who she was and where she came from was unhappy with the direction it’d taken, she would adapt. That, and the smile on Gus’s face was oddly comforting, and not just because they were switching topics. She mirrored it, turning her hips down on his with a slick flex from her thighs. Her hands sank to his large, sprawling mitts on her hips, and guided them to the flimsy button at the neck of her cotton tank top.
“Is not done yet,” she promised, her voice smile-warmed.