by Jenny Lee
Alexia’s father had passed away three years ago, but even when he was alive they never had much of a relationship. Alexia’s mother had primary custody of him and his older brother, Kiril, after they divorced. Entire years would go by without seeing his father, who moved to Thailand when Alexia was only seven. (Rumor had it his father had no choice but to leave the States because of legal trouble, but Alexia never cared enough to find out the real story.) It was Kiril who continually demanded they be allowed to see their father and eventually their mother gave in. She agreed to let the boys go to Thailand for three weeks over the summer with a well-paid nanny, who reported back to their controlling mother.
Vronsky had few memories of his early visits. He remembered discovering Bangkok arcades and spending nearly all his time and money there. But soon his brother introduced him to something that drove video games out of his mind. The first time he witnessed Kiril’s sexual exploits, Vronsky had run terrified from the doorway. The second time he stood watching until his brother noticed him and yelled at him to leave. The third time he refused to leave until his brother got out of bed and forcibly removed him. And the last time he stayed and watched for a long time, his brother unaware of his presence. Alexia had been in Kiril’s closet, rifling through his brother’s pockets looking for cash for tickets to the latest Fast and Furious movie. His own weekly allowance had been spent and his father was nowhere to be found. Alexia had hit the jackpot finding ten dollars in American money and was about to leave when he heard his brother’s footsteps.
Panicking, Alexia crouched in the closet and pulled the door partially closed. Kiril entered the room with a girl close behind him. Alexia watched his brother pick up the girl as if she weighed practically nothing, place her on the bed, and immediately begin taking off her clothes. His brother then started stripping down, but the girl put her hand on his chest to stop him. She set a new pace by slowly unbuttoning his brother’s Oxford shirt one button at a time.
Eventually, the girl spotted Alexia watching from the closet, but instead of telling his brother, she just smiled and put a finger to her lips to let him know his secret was safe with her. Alexia put his own finger to his lips to show her he understood. It was in that moment that he recognized the naked girl before him wasn’t one of the young servants in the household but was one of his father’s girlfriends. This incestuous infidelity blew the young boy’s mind.
Alexia was of course mesmerized by everything he saw and spent the next hour watching his brother and this older woman engage in all sorts of sexual acts. It was this experience that caused Alexia to lose interest in playing video games, as he realized girls were far more interesting. He, too, wanted to feel what he saw in his brother’s face that day: total ecstasy and rapture.
He lost his own virginity at thirteen, but not in Thailand. He was in New York and came home to find his brother back from college, throwing a party while their mother was at Canyon Ranch. Their mother always spent two months at a spa after she got divorced. Kiril told him their mother was like a snake and needed to shed her old married skin to reveal pretty, new scales that she’d use to trap her next husband. Kiril and their mother fought often, always posturing and trying to prove who was toughest. This type of aggression was never Alexia’s way, mainly because their mother always babied him, which he much preferred over her yelling at him.
His brother wouldn’t let him hang out with his friends, so Alexia went to go to bed. When he arrived in his bedroom he found a pile of coats covering the bed. In a rage, he started throwing all the coats of his brother’s guests on the floor, but soon realized someone was asleep underneath the pile. She was a beautiful redhead with a smattering of freckles on her nose and cheeks, who more than likely was too tipsy to figure out which of the teddy bear coats belonged to her and gave up. Alexia grabbed a blanket and a pillow and fell asleep on the floor. Sometime before dawn, he woke up and the girl was on top of him kissing his neck and telling him he was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen, as she slid off her thong and dropped it playfully on the carpet.
After that night his fate was sealed. He decided he was a guy who would never settle down. He loved the way beautiful girls made him feel, and he loved making them feel incredible, too. He loved the flirting, the dancing, the kissing, the cuddling, and was even happy to sleep over after sex, which he knew most other guys detested. To him, women were so much better than men. They smelled better, they dressed better, and they were so soft to the touch.
It was for this very reason that he was so desperately unhappy to be sent off to an all-boys boarding school in Maryland for high school (his father and brother had both graduated from the esteemed school). He missed the company of women. He missed fancy rich girls, the ones who shopped and gossiped. The ones who loved tea parties and Broadway shows. The ones who had little dogs they dressed up in sparkling crystal collars. The ones who spent hours and hours—and hundreds of dollars—in salons debating their hair and nail colors.
He barely made it to the Christmas holiday his first year at Georgetown Preparatory. When he arrived home for vacation and saw his mother, he wept in her arms and begged her not to send him back to that horrible, wretched place, and she didn’t. Instead she allowed him to go abroad and become a ski bum for the rest of the year. It was because of this and his late birthday that he was now a repeat sophomore at Collegiate. He knew some people called him a mama’s boy, but he didn’t care. Being back in Manhattan and living with a full-time nanny was worth it.
This was why Vronsky was feeling so out of sorts when it came to Anna. Yes, she was gorgeous and beautifully dressed, but there were hundreds of such girls in the city—he had a constant rotation of at least three such girls at any given moment. There was something special about Anna. Why else was he so taken with her after only meeting her once?
After he dropped the homeless man’s dog at the dog walker’s apartment, he’d headed over to Steven’s house, hoping he could see Anna for just a moment more. It was Steven who answered the door and told him Anna was otherwise engaged with saving his ass from the wrath of his angry girlfriend. Having no other choice, Vronsky small-talked with Steven and waited. It figured that she finally appeared right as he was leaving, but Anna was worth the wait. By God, he would wait ten thousand hours to spend ten seconds with her.
Suddenly he remembered that Beatrice, his favorite cousin, was a classmate of Anna’s in Greenwich. He stopped in his tracks, not caring that the wind was picking up and the icy snow was pelting him in the face, and texted Bea, who was a big party girl and often spent her nights in the city crashing at the SoHo apartment of her older stepbrother. Bubbles appeared, followed by a text telling him to come to her favorite hangout in the Village. She was with two hot models who were just his type. Giddy with anticipation, he wasted no time hailing a cab. His cousin would surely be able to give him what he ravenously desired: inside info on the winsome creature known as Anna K.
XV
Vronsky entered the Beatrice Inn to find his cousin sitting on the bar, her Jimmy Choo thigh-high boots dangling, and her head thrown back in abandon. Behind her an extremely tall hipster bartender poured their most expensive tequila into her mouth straight from the bottle. His cousin Bea had always been one of the most popular girls in Greenwich and by the end of freshman year she had secured her queen bee status and quickly set her sights on Manhattan.
Vronsky knew the key to her success wasn’t that she came from one of Greenwich’s oldest families, her surprisingly natural good looks, or her piles of family money—that was half the kids in Greenwich. What Beatrice had was information. No teenager can keep a secret and Bea was happy to be the one others confessed to. Beatrice never judged and how could she? For Bea had seen it all, heard more, and probably done worse herself. Her senior yearbook quote would surely read, “If you don’t have something nice to say about someone … then come find me at lunch.”
As promised, she was currently hanging out with two teen models, Daler and Rowney. T
hey weren’t old enough to drive but were both six feet tall and weighed a combined 202 pounds. Both girls walked runways in fashion shows all over the globe and were in the city for Fashion Week. If Vronsky had had the pleasure of their introduction two days ago things would have gone differently. But tonight he barely gave either one a second glance.
“Bea, I need to talk to you.” Vronsky dutifully drank the shot of rye the bartender handed him. “Outside,” he said in a low voice, “alone.”
Beatrice peered out at her cousin through her mink eyelash extensions and nodded. Even though Bea was clearly wasted, she perked up like a shark at the promise of a bloody good story.
Minutes later the two of them were outside, their backs pressed to the wall, blowing cigarette smoke into the swirling snow. Bea listened to Vronsky’s tale of first seeing Anna at Grand Central, Steven’s infidelity, which had brought his sister into the city, and finally Vronsky’s current state of mind.
Beatrice flicked her butt into the street, pulled out her vape pen, and took a long drag. She turned to face her handsome young cousin, reaching out to brush some snow from his blond locks in an almost motherly way. “Weird, not at all what I was expecting,” she said with a wicked grin. “I can’t believe you never met Anna K. before tonight.”
“That’s all you have to say?” he said with impatience. “What do I need to know?”
“That all depends. Do you just want to fuck her? Or is this a more serious malady?” Beatrice was nothing if not direct.
Normally he would have laughed at his cousin’s crudeness, but he found himself unable to smile. “I’m afraid the malady could be serious.”
She pulled the lapels of her fur jacket up and shivered. “Let’s go back in, get drunk, and figure it out.”
Vronsky exhaled and watched his breath waft up into the snowy night.
Inside, Beatrice dismissed her two model sidekicks for the night. They went all sulky, pointy elbows and pouty lips, until Bea handed over a baggie of party favors. While the waitstaff cleaned up around them, Bea and Vronsky sat down in a leather booth and talked.
Bea told her cousin that she and Anna were friendly from years of attending the same school and social functions, but they weren’t close. “Such a waste,” his cousin mumbled. “She’s probably the most beautiful girl in Greenwich, but she never capitalized on what she could do with it.” She paused here and stared at Vronsky.
“Present company excluded,” he added, paying the flattery toll so Bea would continue.
Beatrice laughed brightly at his compliment. Vronsky was such a tasty-looking morsel, and more than once in a drunken horny stupor, she had thought about reaching over to check out his goods, but kept herself in check because as much as she lived for shock value, even she knew that getting busted for fooling around with family would be hard to recover from. Though she had heard from many sources that he was quite skilled in the boudoir, which is why she proudly started the rumor that his nickname “the Count” referred to the number of girls he had slept with.
“The problem is her snorendous and ridicu-perfect boyfriend.” She explained that before Alexander left for college, he made sure Anna still ran with his friends, who were in a different crowd than the one Bea ran with. She made Anna sound like the adorable mascot of a few uptight seniors at Greenwich Academy. “Those uppity Episcopalians aren’t as evil as the Midwest mega-church psychos, but are almost as clique-y. Her boyfriend’s half-sister Eleanor ran with a prudish rat pack of so called ‘good girls’ with iron chastity belts and matching headbands. My theory is Eleanor is secretly in love with the Greenwich OG and wishes she had the guts to go all Cersei Lannister with him.”
Vronsky wrinkled his brow but stayed silent. Nobody understood the intricate politics of Greenwich and Manhattan teen society better than his cousin, but like any teenager she was prone to hyperbole at times. Beatrice fed on the shock of others.
“You know, Anna does the whole horse thing and equestrian girls are always so serious. I blame the boots … though the crop I could get down with.”
Vronsky listened to Beatrice’s convoluted theory about how girls needed a love of high heels to become comfortable with their sexual place in the world, and young girls who wore riding boots daily were sexually repressed late bloomers. His cousin’s theory made no sense, but after a few more drinks he slowly started to understand what she was getting at.
There were only three social circles that had power in Greenwich: fun society girls who partied, which Beatrice herself led; a group she called the Three Cs for their obsession with church, charities, and college admissions, which was Anna’s boyfriend’s cohort. “And lastly…” Bea hiccupped, frowning. “I can’t remember the third, but there are three.”
“The third group are the rich boarding school kids who come back for holidays and the summer,” Vronsky added helpfully. He already knew about the three circles, having heard Bea pontificate about this before. Social politics was her favorite thing to discuss when stoned, and Vronsky had spent many such evenings with his hard-partying cousin.
“Yes, yes, very good,” Bea said, finding Vronsky’s impatience funnier as the minutes passed. “Anna is a fascinating case because she’s always floated freely between all three circles, never pledging allegiance to any one group. I’ve always found her to be a mysterious bird. She’s well liked but kind of a loner who spends all her time with horses and giant dogs. At school she usually reads through lunch. Books! Not her phone, even.” Bea hiccupped again.
Vronsky pushed a glass of ice water toward Beatrice, a not-so-subtle hint.
“You stinkstar!” she snapped. “If I didn’t adore you, I’d tell you to fuck off. Of all the girls for you to fall for, does it have to be Anna? Her boyfriend is no small obstacle. Even though he’s away, he still holds a lot of influence and the entire town thinks he walks on water. My dad once called him ‘the pride of Greenwich.’ This isn’t an Asian fetish thing, is it, dear cousin?”
Normally, Vronsky would have laughed off his cousin’s ridiculous comment, but tonight he wasn’t in the mood for her crass sense of humor. She saw his lips tighten and she placed her hand on his arm. “Sorry, that was gauche. I only said it because you do have a pattern. Your first sexual experience was watching Kiril and that Thai girl. And you have had more than your fair share of hotties from the Far East.…”
“Dammit, Bea, I’m not here to discuss the psychology behind my sex life! I’m here because I, I…” He stammered, realizing he hadn’t eaten very much and was now drunk himself. He gulped down his glass of water and wiped his mouth. “I’m here because I think I’m in love with her and I don’t know what to do about it,” he said, hanging his head, not in shame, but in relief. Honesty was difficult, but it was also exhilarating to say what had been on his mind for the entire taxi ride downtown. Vronsky knew without a doubt he had never been in love until he saw Anna K. step off the train a few hours earlier.
Beatrice reached across the table and grabbed her cousin’s hands. “It’s gonna be okay, V. I’ve got your back. I’ll help you, I promise.” She downed the rest of her scotch and looked Vronsky straight in the eyes. “Now, do you have a little snow-white for me? I need a bump so we can keep drinking.”
XVI
Anna woke up the next morning momentarily confused by her surroundings. She sat up in bed, grabbed her phone off her nightstand, and gaped at the time. As a dog owner, sleeping past ten was never an option. She couldn’t remember the last time she had slept this late.
She walked into the kitchen and found Marta, the housekeeper, baking cinnamon rolls. They exchanged pleasantries, and Anna made herself a double shot of Nespresso and went to see if her brother was awake. Steven’s door was closed and she should have knocked, but it hadn’t occurred to her. She entered the room and stopped immediately when she realized her brother wasn’t alone in bed. Lolly, half naked, was straddling Steven, her blond hair falling down her back, the two of them making out like the world was ending.
She averted her eyes and backed out of the bedroom in shock, quickly closing the door. She stood in the hallway, dumbfounded, and tried to blink away the visual of Lolly riding her brother. She wasn’t sure how she felt about the spectacle she’d just witnessed but had no time to decide because Marta was waving at her down the hall. The doorman had just called. Lolly’s little sister, Kimmie, was on her way up. Anna headed to the door breathlessly, thankful for the distraction.
Kimmie stepped off the elevator looking down at her phone and ran straight into Anna, who was standing in the outside hall waiting. “Oh my god, I’m so sorry!” she exclaimed, instantly annoyed at herself for being like the people she despised, the ones who roamed the city’s sidewalks, staring at their phones like iZombies.
“Were you waiting for me, or the elevator?” Kimmie asked, truly confused.
Anna smiled warmly at the adorable blond sophomore. “You must be Kimmie. I’m Anna, Steven’s sister.” Anna gave Kimmie a quick hug and ushered her into the apartment.
Of course, Kimmie knew who Anna was, though they had only met in passing once or twice before. “It’s so good to finally meet you,” Kimmie said, trying to take off her Moncler snow boots and feeling unbearably self-conscious about the SoulCycle sweats she had lazily thrown on. Kimmie wished she had chosen her outfit more wisely, knowing there was a possibility she would run into Steven’s sister, who Dustin had said was coming into town the night before. Kimmie knew she was beautiful in her own right, but in the presence of Anna she felt totally basic.
Soon the two girls were seated in the dining room, Anna drinking a second Nespresso while Kimmie picked at a chocolate croissant, waiting for the housekeeper to bring her a hot chocolate. As soon as Kimmie sat down, Anna had leaned forward and told her in a hushed tone what she had seen only seconds before Kimmie arrived. Not knowing how close the two sisters were, she chose her words carefully. “They were so busy kissing I don’t think they saw me,” she said. “Thank god!” she added with a small chuckle.
