Մարիամի գիշերային հրամանը

I didn’t plan to fall in love with my best friend’s mother. That would be insane. I planned to finish my engineering degree, get a job at the hydro plant, and marry someone my mother picked from the village registry. Someone with good teeth and a quiet temperament. Someone who wouldn’t ask questions.

But Mariam didn’t ask questions. She gave orders.

The first time she kissed me, I was seventeen and fixing her kitchen faucet. David, her son, was at football practice. Her husband was in Dubai for six months. She stood behind me while I worked under the sink, and I felt her hand on the back of my neck before I felt anything else. Her fingers smelled like garlic and dish soap.

“Don’t move,” she said.

I didn’t move. I couldn’t. I was a boy who still said yes sir to his father. She was thirty-four with a mole above her lip and a laugh that sounded like breaking glass. She pulled my head back by the hair and bit my bottom lip hard enough to draw blood. Then she let go and walked back to the stove.

“Finish the pipe,” she said. “Then wash your hands. Then come to the bedroom.”

I finished the pipe. I washed my hands. I went to the bedroom.

That was six years ago.

Now I’m twenty-three and she still owns me. Not in the way people think. Not with threats or blackmail or any of the dirty tricks you see in movies. She owns me because she looked at me once like I was the only real thing in her life, and I’ve been starving for that look ever since.

David doesn’t know. He calls me his brother. We drink beer on his porch and watch the sunset stain the lake red, and he tells me about the girl at the pharmacy who smiles too much. I nod and laugh and think about his mother’s thighs wrapped around my head.

It’s sick. I know it’s sick. But knowing something and stopping it are two different countries, and I don’t have a passport for the second one.

Tonight, Mariam called me.

I was in my apartment, eating rice and beans from a tin pot, when my phone buzzed. Her name on the screen made my chest tighten. She never texts. She calls. Always calls. Because she wants to hear my voice, she says. Because she wants to know if I’m alone.

“Hovhannes,” she said. No hello. No how are you. Just my name, stretched out like taffy.

“Yes.”

“David is going to Yerevan tomorrow. He’s interviewing for that job at the bank.”

“I know.”

“His flight leaves at six in the morning. He’ll be asleep by nine tonight.”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t need to. She knew what she was asking. She always knew.

“I want you to come,” she said. “I want you to come after he’s asleep. I want you to stand in the garden until I open the back door. I want you to be quiet. I want you to be patient. And I want you to do exactly what I tell you.”

My hand was shaking. It always shakes when she talks like this. I put the fork down and pressed my palm flat against the table.

“What if someone sees me?”

“No one will see you. The neighbors are old. They sleep by eight. The street dogs know you. They won’t bark.”

“And David?”

“David sleeps like the dead. You know this. He once slept through a thunderstorm that split the walnut tree in half.”

She was right. David could sleep through the apocalypse. I’d seen him nap on a bus full of screaming children. But still. The risk. The stupid, electric risk of it.

“I’ll be there,” I said.

“Good boy.”

She hung up. She always hangs up first. She never says goodbye. She says it’s because goodbyes are for endings, and we haven’t ended yet.

I looked at the rice and beans. Cold now. I scraped them into the trash and washed the pot. Then I showered. Shaved. Put on the black shirt she bought me last year for my birthday. The one that buttons up the front. She likes that shirt. She likes unbuttoning it slowly, one button at a time, while I stand still and let her.

The walk to their house takes fifteen minutes. I took twenty. I wanted to arrive exactly when she wanted me. Not early. Not late. Mariam hates waiting. She says waiting gives people time to think, and thinking ruins everything.

Their street was dark. The old neighbors, the Petrosyans, had their lights off by eight thirty. The dogs, three stray mutts that sleep under the abandoned bus, watched me pass but didn’t move. They knew me. I’d fed them bones from Mariam’s table.

The house was a two-story Soviet build with a rusted iron gate and a grapevine that covered the entire back wall. Mariam’s bedroom was on the ground floor, facing the garden. David’s room was upstairs, facing the street. She’d planned it that way. She’d told me once, drunk on homemade mulberry wine, that she chose the house because of the layout. Because of the separate floors. Because of the back door that didn’t creak.

I slipped through the gate. The garden was overgrown. Mint and dill and wild tomatoes growing everywhere, tangled together, smelling green and sharp. I stood by the pomegranate tree and waited.

The back door opened.

She didn’t call out. She just stood in the doorway, backlit by the dim light from the kitchen. She wore a thin robe, white, tied loosely at the waist. Her hair was down. She never wears it down during the day. She always pulls it into a tight bun, the way respectable women do, the way mothers do. But at night, she lets it fall. Black and thick and long enough to touch her hips.

I walked toward her. My boots were quiet on the dirt. The mint crushed under my feet and released its smell into the air.

When I reached the door, she stepped back and let me in. The kitchen was clean. Dishes drying on the rack. A half-empty glass of wine on the counter. The clock above the stove ticked loud in the silence.

“David?” I whispered.

“Asleep.” She closed the door and locked it. “He was tired. He went to bed at eight thirty. He won’t wake up until his alarm at five.”

She turned to face me. Her eyes were dark. Not brown. Dark. Like the bottom of a well.

“You’re nervous,” she said.

“I’m always nervous.”

“Good. Nervous means you’re paying attention.”

She stepped closer. She smelled like soap and wine and something else. Something I’ve never been able to name. Something that lives in her skin and only comes out at night.

“Take off your shoes,” she said.

I bent down and unlaced my boots. She watched me. She always watches me. She says she likes the way I move. Like a man who’s learned to be quiet, she says. Like a man who knows how to listen.

When I stood up, she was right in front of me. Close enough that I could feel the heat from her body. Close enough that I could see the small scar above her eyebrow, the one she got when she fell off a bicycle at twelve.

“I missed you,” she said.

“You saw me yesterday.”

“Yesterday was a long time ago.”

She reached up and touched my face. Her hand was cool. Her fingers traced my jaw, my cheekbone, the corner of my mouth. I closed my eyes. I always close my eyes when she touches me. It’s the only time I feel like I’m not thinking. Like I’m just a body. Just a beating heart and two hands and a mouth that wants to say things it shouldn’t.

“Open your eyes,” she said.

I opened them.

“I want you to go to the bedroom,” she said. “I want you to sit on the bed. I want you to wait.”

“For what?”

She smiled. That smile. The one that splits her face like a wound. The one that makes me forget every reason I have to walk out that door.

“For me,” she said. “I’m going to finish my wine. I’m going to turn off the kitchen light. And then I’m going to come find you.”

She touched my chest, right over my heart.

“And when I do,” she said, “you’re going to remember why you keep coming back.”

She turned and walked to the counter. Picked up her wine glass. Took a sip.

I stood there for a second. Then another.

“The bedroom,” she said without looking at me. “Now.”

I went.

The bedroom was the same as always. The heavy wooden bed. The lace curtains. The icon of the Virgin Mary above the door, watching everything. The closet door half open, her clothes hanging inside. A blue dress. A gray sweater. The red scarf she wore to David’s graduation.

I sat on the edge of the bed. The mattress dipped under my weight. The sheets smelled like her. Like lavender and salt and that thing I can’t name.

I heard the kitchen light click off. I heard her footsteps in the hallway. Slow. Deliberate. The sound of a woman who knows exactly what she’s doing and exactly how long it will take.

The bedroom door opened.

She stood in the doorway. The robe was untied now. Hanging open. The light from the hallway cut a thin line across her body.

“Lie down,” she said.

I lay back on the bed. The ceiling above me was cracked. I’d stared at that crack a hundred times. I knew its shape. A river. A lightning bolt. A vein.

She walked to the bed. She didn’t hurry. She never hurries. She climbed over me, knees on either side of my hips, and looked down.

“You’re shaking,” she said.

“I know.”

“Good.”

She leaned down and pressed her lips to my throat. Soft. Barely there. A promise more than a kiss.

“Tonight,” she whispered against my skin, “I’m going to teach you something new.”

Her hand moved down my chest. Found the first button of my shirt.

“And tomorrow,” she said, “you’re going to forget everything I taught you. So I can teach it to you again.”

She undid the button. Then the next. Her fingers were slow. Deliberate. The clock ticked. The house settled. Somewhere upstairs, David turned over in his sleep.

And I lay there, caught between the woman above me and the friend above us both, knowing I was exactly where she wanted me.

Exactly where I always end up.

Waiting.