Where do I begin? I came back to my room in the hotel here in Melbourne, Australia. I closed the door and quite frankly I had to pour myself a drink. This was the first time I had seen any of the other girls since we parted company in Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv now seems a lifetime ago. It's not really right for me to gossip. I'm exercising every ounce of discipline I have in my body not to blab. My hunch is that each girl will want to reveal their pleasures and their disappointments in their own time. As for me, well I'm single again. It's a long story. After the tour ended, I went back and spent some time in London. Pip had warned me that if I went to St. Petersburg I might be exposed to certain truths that could possibly have an effect on how I felt about my relationship with the Russian. I refused to listen to her one bit and for a while there I guess you could say we had a falling out. I basically told her to stop meddling and stirring up trouble where there wasn't any and she exploded and said I was an ungrateful friend and to go fuck myself. If I'm honest about where I was at the time, I really and truly believed that she was so destroyed by her father's death that she still couldn't accept that he was dead and couldn't possibly want anybody else's happiness. So I went. Yes of course the romance was as good as it had been before in some ways, but The Russian was asking me, no- interrogating me, gently interrogating me. But he was definitely fishing for answers about Pip's whereabouts, where she had been everyday on tour, her relationship with the British spook and of course questions about her dad. Finally I confronted him and of all things, I laughed.
I looked him straight in the eye and said, "So you've been shagging my brains out just to get information on Pip and her dad?"
He responded, "Jesus, Santa, it isn't like that but…"
And I said, "but what?"
"But it's my job," he said.
There was silence and then he said something like, "I know I owe you an explanation but I can't really talk about what it is I do."
I picked up my bag and said, "Don't be such a fucking idiot. I know what you do. That's obvious right now. You're one of those guys that works for those kinds of people."
He said, "But I'm crazy about you."
And I looked at him, I really looked at him and as sexy, dark, and beautiful as a Russian man can be, I was over him in that moment.
I didn't even look back at him when I said, "There's no way that I could have an orgasm with a deceitful man. Proshyai."