by Anastasia Gracheva
+18. Contains erotic scenes
a social drama in which passion, sex, fantasies, travel, narcissism and love intertwine with the poison of jealousy, betrayal and passions. A story about how easy it is to cross the line…
This story is fictional, any coincidence with real people or events is coincidental (but not entirely…)
Table of Contents:
- Different Ties
- My Wife’s Friend
- The Encounter
- The Beginning
- Epilogue
Different Ties
André looked at the girl in the small white-flowered dress. Light curls scattered carelessly over her shoulders. A beach bag entirely covered in little stones sat on her work desk. As if she had just returned from the beach, and not been sitting at the computer since morning.
The girl’s shoulders were bare, and what André wanted most was to grip them tightly, easily overcoming any resistance, pressing that supple back with his own body…
The girl said something to a younger colleague, giving her the kindest and most radiant smile she was capable of, stood up quickly and crossed the room gracefully.
André was sure he had caught a glimpse of the edges of her underwear beneath the thin fabric. Noticing that some colleagues were laughing at his reaction to Antonella, he retreated with an independent air into the next office. There, waiting for his colleagues, he closed his eyes and imagined… What it would be like if they went to a café together that evening? How she would dress, how she would blush, or perhaps she would take the initiative herself. Mauro said she liked sex and was extremely sensitive. Before, André had been angry about their relationship, but now it even excited him. And probably because of that, slightly aggressive fantasies visited him more and more often. Sometimes they seemed ridiculous to him, sometimes he could barely restrain himself from touching her directly in the office.
“Has she bewitched you?” – Mauro’s baritone suddenly sounded right above André’s ear.
André smiled condescendingly, knowing Mauro’s completely non-jealous nature, and remarked:
“Why do you need her? You ruined everything: I met her first, and you have ten like her. And you still squeezed in between us!”
“What do you mean ten?” – Mauro suddenly became indignant. “Better think about your wife and son! I’m a free man. I do what I want. And if things go well with Antonella, maybe I’ll start a family.”
André smiled skeptically and left the office.
Every Saturday Antonella hurried to do the housework. She rushed like lightning from one bathroom to another, polishing mirrors. The nightstands and sinks had to be virginally clean, not to mention the bidet. Antonella was fastidious: a single cockroach spotted could ruin her appetite for half a day.
The white lace socks forgotten by her drunk mother from the previous night forced Antonella to pour a double dose of detergent on the walls of the silver shower cabin. Then the bathroom underwent an even more thorough inspection, which usually ended with the discovery of a man’s sock or tie, and sometimes a condom. Antonella’s mother was still very attractive and looked much younger than her age.
Slamming the door and blushing with indignation, Antonella went out onto the terrace. According to all the rules of the genre, she should have lit a cigarette, but Antonella did not smoke. In forty years of life she had never smoked a single cigarette. Although Antonella’s mother, her brothers, their wives and even the eldest nephew – all smoked and spat indifferently onto the polished balcony floor.
…And so Antonella stood on the terrace and gripped the back of the wicker chair tightly. Her eyes seemed blind, but at that moment her gaze captured memories.
Tall palm trees, with wide branches spread toward the sky, surrounded her. On the large balcony, white and mauve azaleas dropped petals onto the stone steps leading to the sandy beach. A tall Arab boy respectfully brought her a tray with breakfast. Behind him appeared Mauro. Tall and broad-shouldered, to Antonella he resembled all the famous actors combined. The sea shimmered in his eyes, two platinum rings winked at the sun with real diamonds. A restaurant on the coast had been booked for the evening. The one usually reserved for newlyweds. Antonella felt very young and light, carried by the desert winds like an azalea petal…
A noise came from the entrance. Returning from her walk, Antonella’s mother appeared on the terrace, cast a light glance at her daughter and elegantly lit a cigarette.
“Those little ponytails make you look much younger,” she noted in a slightly shrill voice. “If you put on sunglasses, you look like a teenage girl. The main thing is not to gain any more weight.”
“As if!” thought Antonella, mentally snorting at her mother’s back, and hurried to continue cleaning. However, five minutes later her mother approached again. More precisely, her ten-centimeter golden heels approached.
“Doing housework on Saturday? That way you’ll never get married.”
Antonella tore her gaze from the tiles: long legs in thin black trousers, an elongated sweater in a beautiful shade of red, belted at the waist with a wide buckle with a golden clasp. Hair gathered, and – on display – heavy gold earrings pulling already too-long earlobes.
“And you, Mom, I see you’re expecting guests?” Antonella tried in vain to catch the gray gaze.
“Call me by my name, Roberta. ‘Mom’ is not fashionable.” Antonella’s mother gave an evil glance and added: “Yes. They should arrive for dinner. And in an hour the hairdresser is coming. You, by the way, if you go somewhere, buy me that chocolate drink I have in the morning.” The mother spoke quickly, clearly, and at the end of the sentence she preemptively moved away, not giving the interlocutor a chance to reply.
“Yes, Roberta,” said Antonella, now without objections.
My Wife’s Friend
Antonella walked down the stairs with a tomboyish stride. Buckets, rags, detergents and brushes remained behind her; she hurried to throw herself into the arms of the warm evening.
On Saturdays she dined with two friends at a Chinese restaurant “where for five euros you get first and second course.” Antonella tried to save money, and she liked Chinese cuisine.
Two hours remained until dinner, and, as usual, she visited her old acquaintance with whom they had worked at Mauro’s. Ten years ago.
Elena, as always, was dressed entirely in black, though that did not hide her full figure at all. The black synthetic sweater with a dark purple pattern was very stretched and emphasized the pallor of its owner.
“Hi, darling!” Antonella liked speaking in that low, mysterious voice, atypical for an Italian woman. “Empty sofa!? Where’s your hubby?” A predatory expression passed over Antonella’s face, like a magpie noticing a forgotten silver spoon on the table.
Elena once had a magpie, and the comparison involuntarily crossed her mind.
“They called him to work this morning. Either at work or on the sofa.” Elena waved her hand irritably and headed to the kitchen.
“Where did your grown son and his wife disappear to?” Antonella broke the silence.
“At sea, the sailors,” Elena tossed out carelessly. “Spending money.”
“Apparently they earn well.” The magpie reappeared behind Antonella’s shoulder.
“They don’t complain,” Elena replied dryly. “Look, they gave us a half-wall TV for the new house and a chandelier for the guest room.”
“Wait! They’ll give you a couple of grandchildren for that room too,” laughed Antonella. “And they’ll continue traveling by sea. Miracles!”
Here she became animated and, in a high shrill voice, began complaining again about her sister. That one had borrowed money from her and since then avoided meeting her. Even at the funeral of their aunt, who drowned in a shallow lake during fireworks, the sister had tried not to approach Antonella. The latter kept only observing her sister’s and niece’s clothes. The girl’s little dress was clearly Armani.
Suddenly Elena’s husband appeared in the hallway. And almost immediately dove onto the sofa, provoking sharp arrows of reproach from his wife. After a short but lively quarrel, Elena blushed, gave in and walked with quick little steps toward the bathroom.
“What a character,” whispered Antonella, looking penetratingly into the eyes of her friend’s husband.
“Yes… character,” mumbled Elena’s husband. “But in general she’s very good.”
“Of course!” nodded Antonella. “But where would she be without you and your job! She would never have seen such a house. And you work like a negro on a plantation, and she’s always dissatisfied,” Antonella flared up.
Elena’s husband muttered something embarrassed, got up from the sofa – an unusual thing for him on Saturday – and under the pretext of business fled to the garage. There, among the junk not yet unpacked after the move, he suddenly found the iron cage of the magpie that had flown away long ago. Something made him turn the rusty bars in his hands, frown, and five minutes later burst into surprised laughter.
Meanwhile Elena returned to the living room with the stride of a Roman gladiator. She seemed perfectly calm, only her eyes had taken on a vengeful look. The fact was that to dry the tears of indignation of a wife with twenty-five years of marriage, she had not gone to the bathroom, as Antonella had assumed, but to the small corridor adjacent to the living room. There, in an old chest of drawers, handkerchiefs were kept. Elena’s hearing was excellent, and her feelings were the most sincere.
“You know, I saw Mauro,” she remarked softly, suddenly leaning elegantly against a tall antique table.
Antonella froze for a moment, then sighed and began to tell quickly, catching her breath:
“Imagine, he suddenly started coming to lunch in our canteen. I had never seen him there before, and now every day!”
Elena remained silent, completely untouched by the drama of the moment.
“Every day!” Antonella wouldn’t calm down. “He walks past me, looks at me and passes in silence. In short, two days ago I couldn’t stand it, wrote him a note and attached it to the windshield of his car. I wrote that he should stop coming here and bothering me! And he keeps coming every day, only now he doesn’t come near me anymore. But I still see him. What a rare idiot!”
Antonella stood in the middle of the room and looked ahead with blind eyes. Her hands trembled as if tearing an invisible note to pieces. Elena could no longer look at her and hide the irritation that had suddenly overcome her. The vengeful sparks in her eyes faded.
“Yes, of course, he’s quite a type,” Elena remarked gloomily. “Try not to pay attention.”
The Encounter
Antonella was driving gently. The evening streets shone with streetlamps like in a seaside resort, immersed in the green of tall magnolias. Modena was, after all, a so-so town. There was a large industrial zone and clandestine Chinese factories, but the center in beauty was not inferior to the historic center of the more famous Bologna.
Right at the entrance to the restaurant Antonella got lost looking at a huge bunch of bright purple glass grapes overhanging the street, and passed five centimeters exactly from a Mercedes coming in the opposite direction. Antonella’s heart and lungs seemed to twist and press against her back from a cold wave. She straightened up sharply and stopped on the shoulder with half-closed eyes…
Elena had undoubtedly been right: Mauro was a splendid man. And besides, he preferred beautiful and expensive things, for example the Mercedes he had just passed in. Next to him Antonella managed to notice a mass of snow-white curls – the woman’s face was bowed.
The Beginning
Antonella remembered how she shivered from the cold waves of the Red Sea. In April it was quite cold, and the desert winds sometimes forced her to run toward the heated pool. Mauro teased her: “Get used to it! I’m thinking of opening a diving club here. So seven-eight months a year we’ll live here. What do you say? Do you like this little apartment or should we buy one closer to the salt lake, where there are fewer tourists?”
Antonella smiled and didn’t know what to answer. She didn’t like the Egyptians, she was afraid of the water, she had no friends there. Besides, at home they might think she had stayed in Egypt with some “local Bedouin,” and not with the handsome Mauro!
After a few days, early in the morning, Antonella’s new cell phone rang. Right at the moment when she had just opened the canopy protecting the sleepers from the sun, to go take a shower. Antonella was a bit fastidious about water in Egypt, but the bathroom, which looked like a cave, was too beautiful and, besides the shower, tempted with its saltwater jacuzzi tub.
So, at the moment when Antonella woke up and felt like at least a baroness in a luxury suite, suddenly the neighbor of her mother called. In Neapolitan dialect she barely managed to explain to Antonella that “even in Naples neighbors behave decently,” unlike Antonella’s mother, who every evening organizes revelries with fights or heart attacks of one of the guests. Here, showing incredible tactics for Neapolitan standards, the neighbor made a pause that implied the numerous relationships of the mother with men of different ages, professions and education, of which Antonella was already aware. Carabinieri and relatives evidently did not care about the described disorder, so the neighbor had called Antonella.
“It’s nothing,” Mauro reassured her. “We’ll take care of her and bring her here to us.”
“As if!” Antonella immediately flared up. “There are still my brothers and my sister. I’ve already suffered enough with her. And besides, Mom has always drunk. It’s incurable!.. I’ll send her to a clinic for the maximum possible time, and then we’ll see… And even if she stops drinking, she won’t come to the desert to the Bedouins. You’ve never seen my mother: all in gold and dressed as if for a reception with the president of the republic.”
Mauro sighed wearily and lit a cigarette. For some reason Antonella remembered his face that day. Sad and alien.
From that day Mauro suddenly abandoned the idea of the diving club and moving with Antonella to the shore of the Red Sea. However, he still bought a small apartment and flew there often, leaving Antonella alone to breathe the mists of the Modenese autumn.
“Of course, why would he want the daughter of an alcoholic!” – Sometimes Antonella hated her family and her life so much that she spent weeks in a bad mood, limiting her existence to work and watching soap operas until late at night, trying not to exchange even a word with her mother.
The rain beat on the windshield in thick streams of water. The weak maple near the house seemed unlikely to survive that storm. Having made sure that the garage was already occupied by her mother’s and sister’s cars, Antonella parked with difficulty in the parking lot and hurried home.
In the entrance there were several extra pairs of shoes, confirming the presence of the sister with the child and also an unknown male guest. Noticing an unusual silence for ten in the evening, Antonella passed indifferently into the kitchen and, undressing, prepared a chamomile infusion. Then she began examining the bracelet of Mauro’s new flame again. Of course, the bracelet had been bought in Egypt.
“And only there you understand what fate is!” – Mauro used to say.
“Of course, it’s fate that sent that immigrant who found the bracelet,” – Antonella’s thoughts were quick but heavy, like raindrops beating on the window. – “Now we have a second chance. Mauro won’t refuse to meet me, and that’s the key point, then we’ll see…”
Suddenly a sharp scream rose from below. Covering the rain and wind, it made Antonella jump in surprise and spill the cup. Her car alarm had gone off.
“That’s all we needed! Last year in the parking lot someone destroyed and set fire to several cars!” Grabbing an umbrella, Antonella rushed out terrified and ready to confront a pyromaniac who had been terrorizing the province for a while.
“The parking lot is poorly lit, the car was parked badly. The bumper isn’t even dented,” explained the taxi driver in a tired and didactic tone.
“Why did you enter my parking space?!” Antonella almost shouted, trying in vain to open the umbrella. “Where am I supposed to find money for the repair?”
“Where to find money I don’t know. Does ‘insurance’ mean anything to you?..” the taxi driver continued monotonously. “The parking lot is condominium, it’s not only yours, Signora. The client without an umbrella asked to get closer. And your umbrella doesn’t open, so go home, to your husband and children. I would go back to mine too, but here – work. The profession, so to speak…”
Antonella slowly climbed the stairs, dragging the heavy umbrella along the steps. Like a knight after a lost battle. Suddenly from above a coarse voice rang out:
“Here, and you scolded me, called me clumsy. I knew I had left it at home!”
Antonella – step by step – approached her apartment. In the door frame a tall man was embracing Antonella’s half-naked mother.
Suddenly he turned, and Antonella saw… that the sea still shimmered in his eyes.
“Ah! The little one is back!” shouted the mother in a drunken voice, shaking her curly head. “Mauro, let me introduce you to my daughter, Antonella—” She made a theatrical gesture with her hand toward Antonella, and she saw real blue scarabs fixed on the gold. And Mauro’s sincerely bewildered gaze.
And then from somewhere far away someone shouted with her own voice:
“Give it back to me!”
And immediately in response a female scream rose to the sky and fell in a wild lament, drowning out all the sounds of the Universe…
Epilogue
…Serena was crying quietly, wiping tears from her red and full cheeks with a paper handkerchief.
Michela was sitting at the table, awkwardly leaning on her elbows and clasping her hands tightly. Serena sighed convulsively:
“Daddy absolutely doesn’t want to hire a lawyer for Antonella and yelled at me… Now all my savings will go, and I don’t know if I’ll find a lawyer who will take this case.”
“Your father is right.” Michela straightened elegantly. “And you’re crazy. I just don’t understand you.” She suddenly switched to shouting: “She killed her mother! She shoved that umbrella right into her eye with such force!”
“It was an accident,” Serena whimpered plaintively.
“Maybe.” Michela caught her breath and added in a low but firm voice, leaning over the table: “And besides, you often argued with her at work. Now, when I think about it, I tremble…”
Michela nervously tapped her heels on the glass floor. On the other side of the aquarium a silver crucian stared at her. It opened its mouth impotently, trying to say something – against nature, which for some reason had created it mute.
“The lawyer is a good man, a childhood friend.” Mauro was smoking, watching from afar the funeral procession in the small cemetery of Campogalliano.
“What will you do now?” André furrowed his brow so much that the skin was literally furrowed by a crease, and now hardly anyone would take him for a student. He showed all his years.
“I’m going to Peru for a month. There the connection will be spotty at times; for work it’s better to sort everything out in the next two weeks. Have you decided yet who we should put in your department?”
André was silent.
Mauro turned to him: the friend’s face expressed nothing.
“Decided,” André answered calmly and headed toward the cemetery exit. In silence. Without saying goodbye.
