A PhD student. A virgin. Apolitical. Not for long.
There is a woman. She is very attractive. Everybody wants to have sex with her. The crops are rotting.
He has twenty-one days before signing. He has every reason to change the world — and every reason not to.
A world where the oldest hunger is the desire for power — fought with the power of desire.
I have always been drawn to … Not in the casual way that men are supposed to be — glancing, appreciating, moving on. In the way that a person is drawn to a source of light. If I see a woman with a generous figure, regardless of her face, regardless of her age, it is physically difficult for me to look away. Not because I’m rude. Because something in me reads that shape as information — essential, encrypted, urgent. A painting, a photograph, a woman crossing the street in a summer dress — I stare the way a cryptographer stares at a cipher, certain that meaning is there, certain that if I look long enough I’ll understand something fundamental about the architecture of desire.
* * *
She rises in a single motion and embraces me — tightly, completely, as if we are the last two people on a sinking ship. Her face goes into my shoulder. She is still crying.
“What’s wrong?”
She pulls back and looks at me. Something shifts in her expression. She begins: “You are not— ”
I don’t let her finish. I take her face in both hands and kiss her.
She is shocked by it — the audacity, the timing, her face still wet with tears. I hold on long enough for her surprise to do its work, then let her go. She opens her mouth again: “You are really not— ”
I kiss her again. This time the shock has already been spent, and she doesn’t have a new supply of it. The kiss lasts longer. She doesn’t return it, but she doesn’t fight it either. I release her only when I genuinely need to breathe.
“Would you like something to eat?” she asks. “Are you hungry?”
“Yes,” I say. “Thank you.”
I’m not hungry. They have fed me at the Kremlin. But I need her hands occupied with ordinary things — the cutting board, the refrigerator, the satisfying clatter of plates — so that she won’t have leisure to finish her sentence.
I have been dreading exactly this moment.
* * *
Everything we study is either about sex, illustrated by sex, or accompanied by sex. Studying Russian numbers, for example, requires me to count aloud — every repetition — while engaged with the tall blonde, while the others participate enthusiastically in both the counting and the process. I lost the rhythm once, on the number eleven (odinatsat’, which is a genuinely difficult sound), and had to raise my mask for a moment to catch my breath. I hope no one noticed.
* * *
Is it Janna? If not, is it a free woman, or an inmate? Would there be a difference in performance? If she is an inmate, can I figure out how to send a message to my friends? What message? Hi, how are you?
I begin the kiss. Her mouth is soft and skilled. The script wants intensity; we provide it.
In the middle of the kiss she breathes a syllable into my mouth — il. It could be Gil. It could be ill. It could be eeel, a passion breath shaped by the tongue. I cannot tell.
I keep kissing. The director will want full commitment.
Thriller, dark romance, witchcraft — built from mathematics, philosophy, the Bible, Kabbalah, and Greek myth. As smart as it is hot. A genre of its own.
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