Ruined By My Brother's Best Friend novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Third Door
On her brother's graduation night Hollie gets into his best friend's dark flat, kisses him twice, and Lev kisses her back, until his phone lights up with his father's photo of them and an order to be on the 9:10 to Moscow.
"Are you lost, love?"
The guard by the lifts didn't get up. He just looked at me.
It was one in the morning, and I was in a borrowed black dress in the lobby of Sokolov House.
"No," I said. "Thirty-first floor. He's expecting me."
He wasn't.
The guard looked me over from my heels to my hair, slowly.
Then he picked up his phone and typed something with his thumb.
"Stay there. Don't move."
I stayed there.
I was supposed to be in the back room of the Anchor in Deptford, at my brother's graduation party.
Freddie had been standing on a chair when I left, singing with his tie around his head.
Lev had left an hour before me.
He hadn't said goodbye to anyone.
Then Freddie had raised his pint and shouted, "To Lev! Moscow's problem now!"
That was how I found out.
He was flying home in the morning.
Maybe for good.
I had spent three years at the same table as Lev Sokolov, every Sunday, passing him the gravy.
I had said maybe forty words to him in all that time.
Kirsty had grabbed my face in the pub toilets with both hands.
"Tell him tonight, Hol. Or you'll be forty and still wondering."
So here I was.
The guard's phone buzzed.
He read it, and his expression shifted.
"Go on up," he said, and looked away from me, like I'd stopped being his business.
The lift was all mirrors.
A girl with flushed cheeks and a scarf in her hair rode up thirty-one floors beside me, looking terrified.
I took the scarf out.
The corridor upstairs was silent and carpeted.
His was the third door.
I knocked once, softly.
Nothing.
I knocked again, and my knuckles barely made a sound.
I should have gone home then.
Instead I tried the handle.
It turned.
The door swung inward onto pure dark, and I stepped through before it could close on me.
There were no lights on at all.
Moonlight came through a wall of glass and lay across the floor in long grey stripes.
I could see the edge of a sofa. A low table. A suitcase standing by the door.
"What are you doing here?"
His voice came out of the dark on my left.
Low and flat. English vowels, with Russian underneath them like cold water under ice.
I had listened for that voice in kitchens and pubs and crowded rooms for three years.
It had never once been aimed at me.
"You can't talk?" he said.
I couldn't. I never could, around him.
Then a lamp clicked on.
Lev stood by the kitchen counter in a black T-shirt and black jeans, barefoot.
His hair was a mess.
He looked exhausted. It only made his face sharper.
His blue eyes found me and stayed.
I took a step back without meaning to.
"Why are you here, Hollie?"
He'd never said my name before.
Not once. Not even to pass the gravy.
"Congratulations," I said to the floor. "On your degree. I'm happy for you."
"You came across London at one in the morning to tell me that."
"Yes."
"Freddie knows you're here?"
"No."
His jaw went tight.
"Go home."
"Why did you leave the party?"
"Go home, Hollie."
"Are you really going to Moscow?"
Something moved behind his eyes and shut again.
"Yes. At nine. Now leave."
I had a whole speech.
I'd practised it in the lift.
It was gone.
So I walked across his floor in Kirsty's heels until there was nothing between us but a foot of moonlight.
He didn't step back.
I went up on my toes and kissed him.
It was clumsy. My nose bumped his. His mouth stayed still under mine.
I pulled back fast.
He was staring at me.
He dragged a hand down his face.
"Hollie." His voice had gone rough. "Go home. Please."
He'd never said please to me either.
I could have left with that.
I kissed him again instead.
This time he made a sound against my mouth, low.
His hand came up into my hair.
And he kissed me back.
Not gently.
He walked me backwards until the cold glass hit my shoulders and the whole city was behind me.
His mouth opened mine. He tasted of whisky and toothpaste.
His other hand found my waist and pulled me flat against him.
I could feel every hard line of him through the thin dress.
I could feel exactly how much he wanted this.
My hands went under his T-shirt on their own.
His skin was hot. His stomach jumped under my palms.
"Three years," he said against my jaw. "Three years I've kept my hands off you."
"Nobody asked you to."
He laughed once, breathless, into my neck.
Then he kissed the spot under my ear and my knees nearly went.
He lifted me like I weighed nothing.
My back slid up the glass, and I wrapped my legs around his hips.
The strap of my dress fell off my shoulder.
He looked at my bare shoulder for a long second.
Then he put his mouth on it.
"Tell me you want this," he said.
"I want this."
"Hollie."
"I said no."
He kissed me so hard my head knocked the window.
Behind him, on the kitchen counter, his phone lit up.
Then it buzzed.
Then it buzzed again.
He ignored it. His thumb was tracing the edge of my dress where it lay against my ribs.
It buzzed a third time, long and insistent.
He swore in Russian and set me down.
I stood against the glass with my dress half off and my lipstick on his mouth.
He picked up the phone.
I watched his face go white.
"Lev?"
He didn't answer.
I went and stood next to him and looked at the screen.
There were two photos.
The first was me in the lobby downstairs, looking up at the guard. The time stamp said 01:04.
The second was me against his window, with my legs around him.
It had been taken from above. From inside this room.
Under them was a message from a contact saved as Otets.
I knew that word from three years of Sundays. It meant father.
"Freddie's sister. 1:04 a.m. Be on the 9:10 to Moscow, or Freddie sees the rest."
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