Chapter Text
In Sanya, the Russians all tan like lobsters and the Chinese march to the beaches in wetsuits armed with umbrellas and sunblock.
The man is sitting under a sunshade and Alina is wearing a bikini.
It's searingly bright outside, one of those days when the landscape is so saturated with light it begins vibrate with unreality. However, the man Alina has been watching while sunning her back seems entirely unperturbed by the weather. Unlike everyone else lounging in various states of undress on this private hotel beach, he's fully clothed in black linen and sitting at a table; posture precise, one long black-clad leg propped on the other to reveal a protruding ankle bone. His only acknowledgement of their location is in his rolled up sleeves and dark sunglasses. He's holding a book and, instead of reading her own, she looks on as he periodically turns the pages, the face of his gold watch reflecting the south China sun.
That same sun presses down on her back with gentle warm pressure and presently she finds herself dozing off, waking groggily when someone carefully lifts her head, hand firmly digging into her hair, to pull away her novel from where she has turned it into a pillow in her sleep. She's still drowsy enough to catch the tail end of her dream — a velvety one where she's on her knees, but the ground doesn't hurt and her face is resting against the cloth covered thigh of the reading man — before it dissolves. Slowly, she opens her eyes against the sun.
The man in black is leaning over her, it's his hand that's tangled in her hair, but half-asleep it all makes perfect sense to her. She notices that he's taken off his shoes, stares as his toes flex in the sand.
"You were watching me," he says in English. His voice is rough, low, and intimate. Before she had drifted off, she had been idly wondering about his nationality and his accent confirms her tentative guess of Eastern European.
Alina thinks about pretending not to speak the language, has done it many times before, but he's holding her copy of Can You Forgive Her? — the English contents of which would easily give away her lie.
"Was I?" She asks faintly instead.
His grip on her hair tightens, not enough to hurt, but just enough to apply pressure. "Come now," he chides. "You were nearly grinding your hips."
She inhales at this, coming more fully to wakefulness, but as she begins to rise his hand presses down more firmly into her hair. Not enough for her to be unable to break free, but enough for her to understand what he prefers. Pressed down like this, she can feel every grain of sand that has slid onto her beach towel while she slept, the grains prickling her limbs and body.
It seems like he is waiting for her to demur, so she just says, "Maybe a little bit."
"Then keep going," is his reply.
Her field of view is restricted by her position, but as she flicks a glance around them, she realises that most of the lounge chairs and brightly coloured towels around them have emptied out while she slept. For lunch? wonders the still rational corner of her mind.
He laughs at her apprehension, "Don’t be afraid people will see, it’s already obvious what you are.”
Despite his words, he rocks slightly up, free hand reaching past her head, and she feels the gauzy material of her coverup descend onto her body like a shroud.
Feeling like she's observing the actions of another person, she slides one hand into her bottoms — one of the side ties coming loose slightly as she stretches them. The beach is loud, waves are crashing mere metres away and shore-birds are calling, but they both hear how slick the slide of her fingers are.
"Just from looking at me?" He asks, amused.
"You—" she begins, but her words end in a moan when the man reaches over and jerks the loose tie the rest of the way open so he can see better, her already skimpy swimsuit bottom dangling open.
Throughout this his right hand remains in her hair, gently stroking, although occasionally she can feel the bite of his watch band. She grinds down on her palm as she slides in a second finger. She feels herself slowly building up, but can't quite get to the place she wants. Her body is willing, but a corner of her mind is still distracted, speculating about this man who has pinned her down like a butterfly. Up close, she notices that his clothes are as expensive as his timepiece. The one benefit of not doing much lately except drift from one designer atelier to another — floating the gentle cloud of inebriation provided by endless gratis champagne — is that she can tell when a fabric will feel nice from fifty paces, can see the careful tailoring of his hem—
"Come back," he says, tugging her hair again. "You have work to do. Quickly, people are beginning to return."
At these words she feels herself clench around her fingers, but then she starts wondering whether her friends are coming as well and feels a sliver of apprehension puncture her bubble of arousal.
"I— I can't," she says in a small voice, "It's not enough."
"And?" He's implacable and unsympathetic.
"Please touch me." She's beyond embarrassment at this point, has been for quite some time.
"Are you this helpless when you are alone?" He mocks, but lifts his hand from her hair.
To her surprise, he merely moves it to the small of her back and presses down firmly. The extra pressure and the thought of him impassively examining her as he pushes her down onto her hand wipes the last bit of thought from her brain and she gets there.
"Good." He says simply when she comes — as if she had delivered him a report, not an orgasm. He gently re-ties her bikini string.
Her head clearer, Alina sits up, cover-up sliding down her back, and gathers herself to say something — anything — but to her surprise the man is standing up and brushing the sand off his trousers. He's kept his sunglasses on the entire time and she can't make out his expression, can't decide if it's soft or sneering. He bends to gently run his fingers through her hair one more time, and then turns to leave.
"What—?" she calls after him, but he doesn't turn, only waves a hand lazily as he heads up the sloping beach.
Alina doesn't get up to follow him; she still has some pride and also her legs are weak. As the glowing feeling of her release fades away from her limbs, she slams back into reality and begins gathering up her scattered things with shaking hands. What the absolute fuck—
The only sign that this interlude might have similarly affected the man is that he has taken the wrong book. Made off with her Trollope and left his novel behind instead, the embossed Cyrillic letters of the cover glinting.
She finds out that the book is a collection of short stories from Leonid Andreyev, in Russian. She orders a Chinese copy, decides the translation is trash, and downloads an English edition.
She takes to reading the book in her bed, trying to imagine the man's perspective that day as he watched her while reading the stories. He must have watched her back at least? If only a glance between turning pages? Although in her case she's scrolling her phone in her bed, fingers tweaking her nipples and running along her clit as she reads a story about a young man and woman entering a dark forest. It's rather misogynistic, she thinks with a corner of her mind, but comes on her fingers nonetheless, imagining in Nemovetsky, the male protagonist, the desire of another man whose name she does not even know.
Or maybe it's she that is Nemovetsky? After all, the reading man had barely touched her at all.
They are slightly too loud for the Waldorf Long Bar; she can tell because members of the neatly pressed staff cut sharp glances at them every time Jesper laughs too loudly. The other patrons are international businessmen for the most part, temporarily alighting in Shanghai, shaking out their newspapers, and talking in low tones over top shelf drams of alcohol.
When Alina slides up to the bar to order another round of drinks, she chats up the bartender in Mandarin, feeling the need to explain loosely that the seven of them are having a rare reunion, having previously gone to the same international school in Shanghai together.
"In Pudong?" He asks, demeanour not terribly interested, but likely picking up details for when he fills in the rest of the staff with the gossip.
"Gubei," she replies.
Alina was the result of a momentary indiscretion between her Shanghai Circle actress mother and American singer cum reality star father, which left her with both genetic material and an US passport. Her mother then married a budding tech industrialist who, having been a factor of ten poorer at the time, generously agreed to adopt her. They then enrolled her in international school so she could learn English all year in order to speak fluently with a father who only visited her several days out of them. Poor little rich girl, she even had a larger number of parents than normal and yet she still felt greed.
The rest of her classmates had also been a mix of the connected and international: Kaz's mother was the BBC's China Bureau Chief; Mal's father had been dispatched from Hilton's American headquarters to oversee operations in China; Inej's parents did something for HCL; Jesper's family was involved in coordinating the Power Construction Corporation of China's expansion of Nigeria's electricity grid; and the twins's grandmother was a former Party bigwig who had pulled some strings to exempt them from having to take the National Exam. They had all spent many years growing up together in their cloister of a school before departing, like falling meteorites, to various universities abroad. She and the twins, Tolya and Tamar, had returned back to their families in Shanghai, but the other four stayed abroad. Or more correctly, remained in their countries of origin.
When Alina drops back into her seat, Inej is enthusiastically telling the table about a feminist manifesto she had published while at Cornell, grabbing her phone to forward it to their recently revived group chat.
"No no no," says Tamar, reaching out to stop her, "Send it to my alumni email. Do not get me blocked off of WeChat."
"Have they tightened things up that much?"
"Probably due to the upcoming Party Congress. Our gardener even got a call from the precinct," she replies with a shrug. "Apparently he sent a message that a Xinhua op-ed was 'obfuscating nonsense' and got flagged. Had to write an official apology."
"Saints," says Mal, taking a drink.
"It also had to be three hundred words," Tolya cuts in, sliding casually in and out of Mandarin as he speaks. "And he was like 'How do I even write that much?' And the police officer had to show him how to write like 'my name is so-and-so, I am originally from X district in Y city in Z province' to, you know, pad it out."
"The actual apology was like one sentence at the end," says Tamar, leaning into the group. "I acknowledge my mistake."
"At least they didn't make him do it on notes app," Alina laughs.
"I've clearly been out of China for too long," says Kaz. "Was it like this when we were kids? Or did we just not notice?"
"Most places have a surveillance state, often just more targeted. Does your government's Prevent scheme ring any bells? Or the Patriot Act?" Alina needles him just a little bit. "Is your issue just that in this case it's happening to you?"
"Stop trying to devil's advocate me, Lina. You don't actually believe that."
"Yeah, I don't," she shrugs cheerfully.
"The actual question is whether you've entirely forgotten your Chinese," says Tolya. "Fully become the foreigner who says 'can you speak English' to random locals."
"Fuck you," says Kaz without heat.
“To be fair,” placates Mal, “Every time I come back the slang here gets more incomprehensible. Like what is Versailles literature supposed to mean."
“Alina’s lifestyle,” quips Jesper. “Have you seen her IG? It’s all ‘I’m so bored and lying on the ground in this luxury penthouse in Paris’ or ‘the existential despair when all of new season Bottega is ugly’.”
“Go die. I’m not taking any of you to fashion week next year.”
“Look, the rest of us humble proletarians have to work for a living.”
“Tamar and Tolya do a nothing job for their uncle!”
That same grandmother of theirs had gotten all her children cushy jobs at various state owned enterprises, and now the twins in turn were benefiting from the long chain of political corruption.
“We still have to show up during business hours, while you’re off riding balloons in the French Rivera.”
“That was Turkey,” she grumbles. “Besides I’m just surprised the lot of you haven’t been pulled up in a corruption sweep. Or is that why your grandmother was hiding out in Canada last year?”
“She likes Vancouver!” Tamar declares fiercely while at the same time Tolya says, “No charges have ever been levelled yet. Can’t say I expect the same for Toad Group.”
“I keep saying that to father,” Alina sighs. “He thinks he’s too big to fail. The Chinese Jeff Bezos and all that.”
“Even when Xi’s been putting pressure on the relatives of past Premiers who are investors?”
“Or Fan Bingbing? There’s also just absolutely no way they won’t be able to pull up some tax dodging charges at the bare minimum.”
“I stay out of the business end just so I can purely and cleanly say I have no idea about anything if they detain me for an extended stay at a ski chalet.” Alina also has back-up offshore accounts in Malta, the Maldives, and Switzerland just in case. “Do not make that judgemental face Inej, your parents were in the Panama Papers.”
Eventually after a few more rounds they stumble outside into the soft warmth of late summer, arms linked together in various combinations, fully in charity with the world. After flagging down a celadon green taxi, they pile slightly dangerously into the white cloth-covered back seat in a chaotic tumble of flailing limbs before everyone wedges in. Kaz takes the front and gives directions to the unfazed driver, who flings his cigarette out the window and slams down the empty car sign.
The crowd at Elevator is thick under the red lights and they're pulled apart quickly: the twins sidling to the bar, Kaz commandeering a booth, Inej unashamedly elbowing to the front of the bathroom line, and Jesper positioning himself within eyeshot of the DJ. She laces her fingers with Mal's and it's like old times; she remembers many nights like this from when they ran wild through the city as teenagers. It was only at university that Alina realised how much Mal's comforting bulk at her side had also been a silent shield from the groping touches of strangers.
She supposes that, despite everything, her cynical heart had believed in the concept of best friends forever. So it had been somewhat of a shock when she had to face the fact that they had drifted. During the last eight years, she had become a distant satellite — like the moon — orbiting him, observing him, and pulled in by his tides, but no longer part of him in the same way.
“You can’t expect men to maintain their close friendships with you forever if you don't date them,” her mother had chided, neither sympathetic nor helpful. “When it comes to women, men only have space for wives."
She wonders if that's strictly true, but she does know to gauge the state of Mal's romantic relationships by how promptly he replies to her texts and how well she knows his recent interests. Lately she hears from him once a week, had only just today learned he was now an enthusiastic hiker — "I know, I know, I'm becoming a walking Bay Area stereotype" — and exchanges polite instagram story messages with his girlfriend, the spelling of whose name she has to look up every time.
But then the accumulated shots from their bar pregame sink into her body and she stops worrying, stops thinking about anything except for the arc of her arms and legs as she dances to the pulse of house music. She kisses all of her friends on their — beautiful, delightful, wonderful — faces, buys an entirely unnecessary round of shots at the bar, and at one point clambers bodily onto the bathroom counter to fix her makeup.
Finally the atmosphere gets overwhelming and she pulls herself outside to catch her breath, luxuriating in the feel of the cool night air on her overheated skin. Mal is standing on the curb, a lit cigarette dangling from his fingers, and she leans into the curl of smoke around him. They stand for a moment in the companionable silence of old friends, accompanied by the honk of distant cars and chatter of pedestrians.
“Have you thought about it?” he asks. About moving to the US.
“I don’t know."
"You are an American citizen," he presses. "Maybe a change of location will help. Plus, it would be nice to be closer to you."
"Will help what?" She's sobered up enough that she can feel it when her heart starts pounding frantically.
“You’re sinking again Lina," he says gently.
She can’t look at his face, she’s sure she would hate whatever she sees in it, hate it enough to tell him cruel things she does and doesn’t mean.
"I'm fine," she says instead. "I can't even think of something to want that I don't own already."
Then she thinks that she could stand to have more alcohol so she goes inside.
Alina does not remember the trip back to the hotel, just the feeling of collapsing onto a freshly laundered duvet. She wakes up at seven, cradled in Inej's arms, thirsty and strangely alert. She knows from experience the hangover will come vengefully if she goes back to sleep so she pads to the minibar and inhales an entire glass bottle of water before easing herself into last night's discarded outfit. Feeling her earlobes, she notices an earring missing, but thankfully finds it resting next to the sink in the white marble tiled bathroom. She is slightly loath to leave the heated flooring and sneaks a longing glance at the bath, but time is of the essence if she wants to beat back the worst of last night with food. Stepping into her mules, she makes a swift dash down to the first floor breakfast room, giving the maitre d' her card when she forgets what rooms the others are booked in.
She’s balancing a strategically assembled buffet breakfast back to her table when she sees the man from the beach flipping idly between the day’s editions of several international papers while drinking coffee. It was the flash of morning sunlight glinting off the face of his familiar gold watch — the watch she still dreamed of occasionally — that tipped her off to his presence. Unlike then, his dark hair is slicked back and he's wearing an impeccable black suit, although his general air of implacable self-possession is as she remembered. She sets her bone china plate down a little too hard on his table and seats herself.
"You," she says accusingly.
"Hello Alina.” The man is unperturbed and even has the gall to take a sip of his black coffee.
"I— How do you know my name?"
"All of your parents are quite well known, if you aren't aware," he replies drily.
With his sunglasses off and in a location that feels closer to his natural habitat, he seems more real and less like a vacation hallucination. On the beach he had seemed ageless, here she gauges by the slight lines around his dark eyes that he’s likely in his late thirties or early forties.
“My father is C-list at best.”
Her biological father was a Daily Mail pap walk mainstay and well connected in the industry not due to a robust career, but because he was quite literally fun at parties. A state of affairs made possible by the fact that he barely saw his many children, both acknowledged and unacknowledged.
“And your stepfather is one of the wealthiest men in China,” he says, unperturbed.
“So you knew who I was all along?”
"Unlike you, I try not to be intimate with people I don't know.”
She flushes, the feeling travelling up her throat and to her cheeks. “I wouldn’t say reading my name in a work-up about my stepfather counts as knowing me.”
“Oh but we have been introduced,” he says with a strange lidded half smile. “Twice.”
They have? She thinks she would remember someone like him, but she meets many beautiful people — naturally born or cosmetically created — all the time. With his stubbled cheeks and chin divot, he’s a little rougher than the sleek idols of the Chinese entertainment circles or the tanned grecian statues of Hollywood, but she likes that he can still move the muscles in his forehead.
“Well,” she says lamely, “I’m afraid I don’t remember.”
“That was always very clear,” he replies smoothly.
Before she can respond, a waiter comes to their table, partly for service — Alina requests a coffee and orange juice — and partly to ensure that the party girl isn't intruding on the man who looks between business meetings. "Should I deliver them to your original table?" He asks meaningfully, mouth careful around the English words.
"Oh, I ran into my old friend here," she says, gesturing at the man whose name she doesn't even know. "Just catching up. We've known each other for ages — like six months? A year? Two years?"
At this the man laughs, but his remain eyes cold. "Two years."
"That long, huh."
She's contemplating how to delicately proposition him — book a suite last minute and slide him the number maybe? She's certainly not bringing him back to her French Quarter apartment — when a wisp of a young man in an overlarge suit that seems all the more rumpled when contrasted with the fastidiousness of her stranger's tailoring marches up to the table and begins speaking in a fast staccato of Russian. Eventually, the man sighs in exasperation and languidly gets up.
"I shall see you next time, Alina," he says with a strange certainty as he leaves.
That intolerable man. But then she realises his room number had been written in ballpoint on a hotel placard reserving the table. Well now, she thinks, snapping a photo of it before tucking into her breakfast.
"Room service," she chirps, knocking on the door several hours later.
"Do not disturb is—" the man begins to say as he swings the door open, but for the first time in their either long or short acquaintance he looks dumbfounded when he sees her. His suit jacket and tie are off, but otherwise he looks as polished as he did that morning despite the late hour. "Alina?"
"Hello," she says pushing past him into the suite and toeing off her shoes to flop onto neatly onto his bed. The sheets at the Waldorf are rather nice, a much better situation than the last time they had met, she thinks contemplatively while rolling a bit.
"Why? How did you—?"
"I'm very smart," she says, voice muffled. "And I'm here to fuck of course."
She raises her head expectantly to look at him in time to watch a series of hard to interpret emotions travel across his normally opaque face.
"Unless you don't want me?" she asks coyly.
His expression hardens into pure fury and she shivers a little at the sight of it. He shoves her back down hard onto the bedspread; the hand she had so wanted is pressing down on the back of her neck, but not gently like the last time. The other lifts the hem of her dress — a square-necked lacy puff-sleeved number that both provided easy access and signalled 'I'm baby' — without preamble. The lace tears a little, but she doesn't mind, likes it actually. Anyway, it was a two hundred yuan impulse purchase on Taobao. She wouldn't have cared if it was more expensive either, it's just that she had never met a man yet who didn't prefer it, or a parade of others like it, to her racks of tasteful designer clothing.
He doesn't bother to pull down her underwear, just slides it to the side to shove his fingers in roughly, but only pumps his hand a few times. Faster than she expects, there's a click of a belt. She's slick from anticipation and his manhandling, but not wet enough for when he begins to ease his cock into her with splitting pressure. Her face is pressed down into the pillow so her protests come out as strangled noises. He lets up on her enough for her to gasp, "Hurts!"
"You can take it," he says, before adding in a mockery of her earlier words, "Unless you don't want me?"
She does. Damn him. Some of that must show on her face because when he pushes her back down, his hand on her neck is firm, but pinning instead of digging.
"It was just like this wasn't it?" he asks, spreading her legs open wider with his still trouser-clad knees.
Alina imagines herself back on that beach. How often in the weeks since had she wished that he would have pressed her down on the back of that orgasm and stuck his cock in just like this. She clenches a little around his girth thinking about it and he laughs. And despite the taut angry lines of his body above her, the hand he slides underneath her to thumb her clit is surprisingly gentle. He speaks filthy things to her as he works against her — about how he had imagined fucking her there on the beach as well, of sliding into her wantonly dangling swimsuit bottom, not caring if they were seen, even if there was a crowd. By the time he's fully in her, she's grinding against the heel of his hand, frantic, her mind on that shore in Sanya.
Just as he gets into a rhythm that causes her to arch, he pulls out of her all of a sudden. "Stay down!" he snarls when she rises up halfway, a complaint on her tongue.
Her head obediently back down on the pillow, Alina can't exactly see what he's doing, but presently realises he's fumbling through her discarded handbag. He produces her cellphone and puts it in front of her face to unlock it.
"What are you—"
"Shut up," he says.
He slides back into her a little too hard and she scrabbles against the sheets at the force of it, but after some cursing and shifting he's fully rooted in her again, his trousers brushing against her thighs. His hand is no longer pressing down on her neck so she turns her head to look back at him. For a moment, all she notices is how incongruous her patterned phone case looks in his large knuckled hands, but that thought is quickly chased from her head as she realises he's filming them. Her mind short circuits a tiny bit as she imagines what he sees through the phone pointed where they are joined; the wet slide of his cock into her body, her little white dress rucked up and underwear still only pushed to the side. She could put a stop to it, but instead she stays down, trembling.
It doesn't take much for her to find her rhythm against him again, but she is surprised to hear herself gasping for breath and begging. Knows it will be recorded, but can't stop herself. She comes to the thought of his dark and angry eyes riveted to her, to the wet sound of their joining. As she clenches around him, he speeds up as well, tossing aside her cellphone to pull her bodily into his thrusts.
After he pulls away from her, she feels a familiar wetness slide down her leg; feels him push it back into her before moving her underwear back in place. Alina is faintly glad for the wonders of modern copper birth control, protecting her from her fallible flesh. She collapses into the bed as he walks to the bathroom. The excitement of the assignation gone, she is seized by the exhaustion brought by only sleeping a few hours the night before. Just a few seconds, she thinks, letting her eyelids droop.
It ended up being a few hours. Alina wakes in the dead of night and, pushing away the man's arm from where it is wrapped around her, hurriedly darts for the toilet, where she realises someone — she assumes her stranger — had thoughtfully cleaned her up before tucking her in. He's awake by the time she returns, half illuminated by the light from the bathroom, watching her with slitted eyes. Looking away from him, suddenly shy under his scrutiny, she notices both her shoes and her bag have been neatly placed on an armchair. He sighs, a gentle resigned sound, when she grabs them and gives him a jaunty little salute.
"I've booked a room here as well, you see, otherwise I couldn’t have gotten up the elevator. But I should probably still make a some use of it," she says to him, surprising herself with this need to explain her behaviour.
"Go," he says, flinging an arm over his eyes.
Later, while settled into her penthouse suite bed and too full of energy to sleep, she is about to aimlessly scroll the internet on her phone, but remembers the video. What a strange man, she thinks while pulling it up and pressing play, to not record it for himself.
For a piece of pornography, it's not particularly well lit and the video jostles with his thrusts before turning entirely black when he drops the camera to grab her hips as he came. Still, she watches it twice. Only after the second time does she realise she forgot to ask the man for his name.