Karina

She helped me with my dress as I fumbled to remove it, her impatient hands pulling it over my head, sliding into my bra, and grasping at my breasts.

After pulling off my bra and panties, I dragged her to the couch and pushed her onto it, then pounced atop her to continue the writhing procession of kissing, touching, and moaning.

“I want you to cum for me, Victoria,” I muttered. Words I’ve said so many times, but this time I meant it.

We rolled off the couch in our hasty lovemaking onto the soft rug going beyond the reach of the camera’s view. I didn’t mind. It had already captured what it needed to.

Victoria tried to climb back onto the couch, but I pulled her back to the rug.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“Nowhere, I guess,” she laughed.

“That’s right. You’re staying here with me.”

I kissed her. I looked into her eyes and saw in them not the gas-fire rage of a firebrand senator that had put a spell on this country but a deep blue ocean of a woman who quivered with an urge for love.

I crossed my legs between hers, pressing my wet vulva against hers. We sat propped onto our elbows to rub against each other.

I could not keep my eyes off her while we ground our pussies together. The whirlpool pull of her desperate eyes was too strong to avoid. Her uninhibited and eager yearning for my body, my touch, and the pleasure I provided made me feel safe to yearn for the same from her. It was a feeling I had all but forgotten, but now, as we lay on the rug of her penthouse suite, our bodies colliding rhythmically, I felt I could shed my past, my identity. I could become, if only fleetingly, a woman completely surrendered to the throes of passionate love.

That was only my punch-drunk ecstasy talking, of course. Only my carnal fervor. I knew full well that when this was done – once Victoria made me explode with pleasure, and when I made her explode – reality would wash away the dream like heavy rain. After the sex, I would button myself up quietly while Victoria contemplated her beautiful refractory, then I would demurely collect the money and depart her penthouse for the corner of 9th and L, where I would deliver the purse containing the camera and the microphone that recorded our intimate night, to a man in a car. The next time I meet Victoria Strickland, our meeting will not be so pleasant. A cold, blank abyss of betrayal would replace the passion I see now in her eyes.

But for now, my legs were entwined with hers. She was not the junior senator from Montana, and I was not a spy disguised as an escort. We were lovers sparking ecstasy with each wet collision of our bodies. That and nothing else.

Sweat dripping down my brow stung my eyes. My body shook. So did hers.

“Oh Karina, yes! Make me cum!” she moaned through gritted teeth.

“Only if you make me cum with you,” I breathed, giving her a ravening grin.

She reached a hand up to caress my face. I leaned my face into the soft palm and felt heaven there.

Our thrusts became stilted. Labored. Tremors took me. Victoria saw this, and determination filled her eyes. She ground her pussy into me harder and harder, and I did my best not to waver, despite the repeated powerful waves threatening to knock me to the ground. But eventually, the waves became too powerful. I collapsed, exhausted, on the floor. Victoria held tightly onto one of my legs as a brace while she continued grinding her pussy into mine.

“Oh fuck!” she screamed, arching her back like a she-wolf howling at the moon. “Oh fuck!” she squealed.

Then it happened. To both of us at the same time. Into the sea of ecstasy we went. Deep, deep into that joyous sea.

When I emerged, I found Victoria clutching my raised leg as if for dear life, her body twitching in tense jolts. When she finally relaxed, she crumpled into a writhing, breathless form beside me and crawled into my arms, kissing me tenderly. I held her quietly.

The only sounds that punctuated the tender aftermath were the muffled thrumming of the midnight traffic. It sounded almost like the wash of waves over a beach. Waves on a beach in the Aegean Sea. And Victoria’s warmth was like the kiss of the Aegean sun and the sweat on her neck, like the taste of sea salt. At that moment, she was everything I ever longed for. She was the long-lost lover that my soul sorely sought.

Just when I was on the cusp of nodding off, the heavy rain of reality began to patter against my dream world, washing it away like watercolors down the drain and bringing me back into the fold of my dark existence.

Remembering that I had a purse to deliver to a man waiting in a car on 9th and L, I stood, stirring Victoria awake from her hazy half-sleep. She smiled and watched me from the rug like a lazy cat as I dressed.

I did my best not to look at her, or if I did, I tried to remember who she was, what she stood for, and what she meant for my mission. Her desperate desire for love? Only a weakness to be exploited. And I had exploited it utterly. Soon, she will be an agent. My agent. Soon, she will realize that I had corrupted her to my cause. That I am not a lover but a nightmare.

As I buttoned the last button on my coat and grabbed my purse off the coat rack, Victoria finally stood. She put on a robe, then grabbed a white envelope from the fireplace mantle and held it out for me to take. She cleared her throat and said, “I hope it’s enough.”

I took it and stuffed it into my coat without looking.

“I trust that it is,” I replied.

She gave me a tepid smile.

“I had a wonderful time,” she said. “Thank you, Karina.”

“So did I,” I replied, hating myself for meaning it and hating that it didn’t matter.

“Hey, Karina?”

I turned back to her.

“Yes, Victoria?”

Her hands clung together nervously in front of her. She held her breath. The city lights reflected the pitiful hopefulness in her eyes. Her eyes were so beautiful.

“Um. If you could be anywhere in the world right now, where would it be?” She asked after a long hesitation.

I laughed.

“What an odd question.”

Her face reddened. “Yes, I suppose it is.”

Feeling obliged to give her an answer, I gave her one that felt true, if nothing else.

“On an island in Greece called Naxos,” I replied.

She smiled. “That’s nice.”

“Was that really the question you were going to ask?”

She hesitated. Chuckled embarrassingly and replied, “No.”

“Ask me what you wanted to ask.”

She huffed. Crossed her arms and coyly, she said,

“I wanted to ask you to spend the rest of the night with me.”

I needed to leave. It was too hot in that room, and I started choking up. And my eyes. Something in the air was making them water. And my heart. I could hear it breaking.

I shook my head and gave her a weak, pitying smile.

“Sorry, Victoria. But that is a bad idea. You and I know I cannot be seen walking out of this hotel in the morning.”

I opened the door and turned to leave but paused with my hand still on the doorknob. I looked back at Victoria again. The light from the hallway spilled across her pale semi-naked body. Her face, just in the shadows, had that desperate look of loneliness that reminded me of how lonely I was and how, tonight, just for one night, I did not feel lonely.

I went to her, kissed her deeply, and gazed into her eyes without saying another word, pretending we were lovers for a moment longer. Then I left.

The night was biting. A puff of white condensation escaped my mouth as I exhaled the frigid air on Pennsylvania Avenue. The midnight mist was thick and shimmered silver from the ghostly light of the street lamps. The chill cut straight to my bone, so I cinched my coat tightly around my body.

I had to meet my minder in front of a tobacco shop on the corner of 9th and L.

D.C. is a hauntingly beautiful city at night. The stillness gave the streets and the buildings an ancient grandeur, like Rome before the fall, or at least, an imagination of Rome, which I once learned in school was the conceit of the architects of this city. In the misty shadows thrived the demons that threatened the city’s fall. I had long learned not to be afraid of those demons. After all, I was one.

I stepped out of the lamplight to better conceal myself from any tails. I doubted there would be any, but being mindful of the risks was always better.

Before long, I was on the corner where I would meet him. His car was parked in front of the tobacco shop as he said it would be. A black Mercedes S-Class that screamed foreign diplomat. For two reasons, seeing the car always made me cringe. One, because of the attention it drew in a city full of spies, and two, I never enjoyed meeting the man it belonged to.

I waited at the corner and lit a cigarette. I smoked to give myself time to scan for any last-minute signs of a tail. But mostly, I smoked to postpone the meeting.

Victoria entered my thoughts as I smoked. I tried to shake her image loose, but it wasn’t easy. I couldn't help but revel in the soothing warmth of her. Her allure extended far beyond her physical beauty; it wasn't just the warm crinkles around her eyes, her perfect breasts, or the nirvana between her thighs. It was her willingness to share a precious part of herself with me, inviting me into her secret garden and sharing it only with me.

When the cigarette went out, my heart darkened. I couldn’t stall any longer. The purse needed to be handed over. I flicked the cigarette onto the ground and stamped it harshly, trying my best to put it in my mind that Victoria was an awful person - that her secret garden was merely a figment of my desperate imagination.

I walked to the car, opened the passenger door, and slid in.

I could only see his silhouette, but his musky cologne clarified the image of his heavy-browed face that I knew all too well.

“Good evening, my dear Karina.”

“Good evening, Ivan Petrovich.”

He put his hand on my lap, as he always did. I felt his sneering grin and the pleasure in his eyes as they perused my body.

“So, it is done.”

“Yes.”

I handed over the purse. An act that felt like a betrayal.

He unzipped the purse, stole the SD card from the camera body within, stuffed it into a pocket crudely, and tossed it back to me.

"Superb execution, Karina,” he drawled. “But you were taking such a long, sweet time. I was beginning to worry that you had been turned ‘rozovaya’ by the senator.”

A swell of irritation warmed my cheeks from his crude use of the word ‘pink’ as the slang for lesbian. I fixed my gaze on a point in the distance, replying curtly, "I'm heading out, Petrovich. Good night."

I opened the passenger door, but he grabbed my shoulder before I could step out.

“Shut the door,” he ordered.

Slowly and begrudgingly, I shut it.

“I have something to show you. Something you might enjoy.”

There was a proud glint in his black eyes.

He reached into the back seat and produced a DSLR camera attached to a long telephoto lens, making my heart sink into my gut.

“I’ve been a naughty boy,” he sang, jiggling the camera. He flicked it on. The LCD came on, and he tilted the display so I could see what he meant.

I recognized the images immediately as he clicked through them. Several close-ups of me and Victoria kissing passionately against the window. Then of us on the rug of her penthouse. Naked. Fucking. Mouths opened in moans of ecstasy.

He must have positioned himself in the hotel across the street to capture those photos after he dropped me off.

“You didn’t tell me you were going to do this,” I snapped. I should have known he would have. Having a backup plan is vital to effective espionage. Still, it felt like a gross violation of my trust.

Ivan chuckled gleefully, then scowled and snarled at me. “I don’t have to tell you a damn thing, Karinka. I am your boss. You work for me. You tell me things. You do things for me. Don’t you ever forget that!”

Then his scowl softened back into a smile as he flicked his camera off. He set the camera aside, then shuffled in his seat, bringing a hand down to rest at the top of his pants.

“Speaking of which, you affected your boss greatly with your lewd acts, so, Karinka, now there is another thing I need you to do for me.”

I knew what was coming next, but that didn’t stop me from being repulsed.

He unbuckled his belt, then, with a curt zip, his hardened cock sprang out.

An ugly naked thing it was. An unshapely thing with which I was much too familiar. I closed my eyes and fished for an image to bring me solace, as I always did in these moments. The image that came to me immediately was Victoria. The ocean in her eyes. The warmth of her lips.

But the image vanished from my mind as if the shame of my betrayal would ever deign to allow me to consider her my port in the storm.

I opened my eyes and stared at the throbbing aspect of my lot.

Ivan put a hand over my head, pushing it down towards his cock. “Come, Karina. You know what to do.”

That’s when it occurred to me. He was right. I did know what to do. I knew exactly what I must do. In a holster taped beneath his seat was a PSS-2 pistol chambered with an SP-16 7.62mm noiseless round, with six more rounds in the magazine. With the thickened bullet-proof glass, even someone standing next to the driver-side door would not hear the discharge. Nor see the muzzle flash. After Victoria’s colors and warmth filled my world, I could not allow the cold darkness back in.

I’ve killed better men for less.

I zipped his pants shut to give him some dignity in death. I don’t know if I believed in such a code, but I still lived by it. The pistol I left in his right hand. His forehead I left lying atop the steering wheel. The bullet entrance wound was a neat hole beneath his jaw from which blood trickled out and down his neck. There was no exit wound. The bullet remained lodged in his head. The pistol was specially designed to make assassinations clean and quiet. I had to leave my coat in the car, as some of his blood had gotten onto it. It would most certainly become evidence of a homicide. That did not concern me. It would not be easy for the Americans to find me.

I left the car when I was sure there was no one to watch me leave it and discarded the SD cards into the gutter. Initially, I planned to take the metro from Mt. Vernon Square to Union Station, then the first train leaving D.C. But something stopped me. Something that felt like unfinished business. Like a hole in my heart that needed filling; otherwise, that hole would keep growing. Five years earlier, I left a similar hole in my heart to grow. That hole was a woman named Sofiya. And it consumed me. The hole now was Victoria. I needed to see her again, and I had time. Ivan’s body would likely not be found until the morning when the tow truck takes his car. It would take another day for them to sort out the mess and realize what had transpired. They were slow like that.

Victoria found me at her door like a cat wanting in from the cold.

“Karina, what’s going on? Where’s your coat?”

“I lost it. Can I come in?”

“Yeah, sure.”

She stepped aside to let me through the half-ajar door; her face knotted in confusion.

I slipped in, shut the door quietly, and stood facing her, inches from her.

In the darkened room, I kissed her and held that kiss long, and she held me, and when I let my kiss go, she gazed lovingly into my eyes and, with her loving gaze, made my heart whole.

“What on earth is going on, Karina?”

“Nothing,” I said, smiling, an immense feeling of freedom washing over me. “I wanted to spend the night with you.”

“I thought we agreed that was a bad idea.”

“It is. But if you’ll have me, I’d like to entertain a bad idea. Just for one night.”

♫ Another day, another dollar, daylight comes, I’m on my way ♫♪

That Wynn Stewart song my grandpa used to sing had been so ingrained in my head that the lyrics had become a sort of mantra of mine. Every day I woke up, I’d hear Papa’s voice, singing to me like he used to when he bounced me on his lap on his favorite porch chair. The words used to remind me of the good ol’ days. Now they were nothing more than words to get me through the day.

I sang those words to myself now, as I do every day, walking up the steps of the senate building and through the marbled halls that echoed with the clop of my heels.

Dave, my Chief of Staff, intercepted me on my way to the office. He handed me notes and ran me through the plan of the day as he matched my pace—prayer breakfast at seven-thirty. An intelligence briefing at nine, followed by a meet and greet with concerned citizens of Montana at ten. After lunch, another senate committee meeting, then a meeting with an ambassador from God knows where. Then dinner, then a segment on Fox News, where I really made the butter. Like most days on the hill, I likely won’t be home until midnight. I don’t usually mind the grueling hours. I was a ranch girl, after all. But lately, the job has started to wear on me. Ever since Karina. Ever since her kiss. Ever since seeing her mesmerizing green eyes. And feeling her skin against mine.

Thinking about Karina made my heart flutter like a schoolgirl in love. Sure, she was an escort. But she was also everything that made me realize I had existed too long in a world I didn’t belong to, and now, she was gone without a trace. For a while, I considered hiring another. But I didn’t have the heart. Who could measure up to Karina?

I went through the arduous motions. Another day, another dollar. Prayer breakfast with the other senators. Intelligence briefing. Coffee with Montanans. Lunch. Committee meeting. Then the meeting with the ambassador. As it turned out, it was the ambassador from Greece on a mission to persuade me to approve the next package of US funding for the Souda Bay Naval Base, which I had long decried publicly as wasteful spending. The truth was that the navy base constituted mere pennies on the dollar, but it served as a rather useful lightning rod for my campaign.

I was polite but as stout as an oak in my stance on the matter (not that I truly gave a shit anymore).

“Thank you, Ambassador, for stopping by. It is always a pleasure. Let’s chat again soon,” I said, standing and offering a hand and a smile.

The ambassador stood, smiled in kind, and clasped his hands over mine after his fruitless effort at persuasion. “The pleasure is mine, senator. You know, you should very much consider visiting Greece someday. You would truly fall in love with the food and, of course, the people there.”

“Of course, Ambassador. It's at the top of my list. I am desperate to try the, the moo... um…”

“The moussaka?”

“That’s right. The moussaka.”

He smiled tepidly. Then his face turned a shade of red and twisted into an uncomfortable look, making me wonder if I offended him by forgetting the word moussaka. He cleared his throat.

“There is another matter, senator...”

He glanced over his shoulder to ensure his aides and mine were out of earshot before pulling something out of his inner suit pocket—a small, crinkled photograph.

“I was asked to deliver this to you by a... mutual acquaintance, let’s say.”

He handed me the photo.

“I trust you will remain discreet,” he said, then stuck out a nervous hand for a shake.

Unsure of what he meant by that, yet knowing not to prod any further, I shook his hand, and he left hastily.

Only after he was gone did I look at the photograph, letting out a gasp and letting it fall to the floor.

I stared at the photo where it lay. I stared at it like some sort of priceless biblical artifact that had somehow come into my possession.