Unlimited. Darina Grotto
her happiness had no limits.
‘Good evening, young man,’ Olga Vladimirovna answered for greetings. Her voice was dry, stern and powerful. All the doctors usually had the same. The woman pretended easy to smile and be glade of that party. But the demon gloated as he clearly saw Olga Vladimirovna dislike him at all. He liked the beginning of the evening.
‘This is Kharon, mum.’ Vic introduced her young man.
The girl, being so blinded by unknown love, didn’t see that her mother’s amiability and smile had nothing to do with reality. She didn’t feel that real hostility from Olga Vladimirovna.
‘Kharon?’ she asked in a mentor voice. ‘What an unusual name.’
‘I was called different. Kharon is the name I gave to myself.’
‘How did your parents call you?’
The man gave the woman a playful look, dropped his head and slyly looked at Vic from under his eyebrows.
‘Parents?’ he grinned. ‘If I want everyone to know my name, I got from my… parents, I wouldn’t have used different one.’
Olga Vladimirovna took a sigh, making her displeasure public. Victoria still noticed nothing but only the demon’s magnificent face. He hypnotized her, extinguishing her mind neuron by neuron.
‘Shall we go?’ Vic took his hand.
There was a serviced table in the kitchen: snacks, salads and a bottle of wine.
The man sat to the table, Olga Vladimirovna was nearby. Her green eyes were scrutinizing the face in front of her. She was looking intently at the couple. The mother understood very fast what was going on in that relation in fact.
‘How did you meet?’ she asked, put the salad to the guest, saw her daughter holding his hand.
‘Four months ago, I was in metro. I saw a girl read intently something in her notebook…’
The demon retold word-for-word the story he had told before to Vasilisa. Vic listened to the fairy tale with pleasure but the same could hardly be said about her mother.
She liked the young man less and less. Unfriendliness was getting worse and worse. She did want to say to her daughter: “Break up with him, Vic, and run. Just run, without looking back.’
‘Do you have any intensions to my daughter?’ suddenly Olga Vladimirovna asked.
‘What do you mean intensions?’ Kharon asked in all innocence.
The woman’s face fell, her eyes filled with suspicion and indignation. At that moment she couldn’t hide her disappointment. Kharon had fun instead, as he enjoyed the woman’s evil thinking.
‘How do you see your future with my daughter?’ Olga Vladimirovna asked after she had counted to ten and took a sigh.
‘Very colourfully. Absolutely. Overpoweringly. Epochally. Pushy. Eccentrically. Extravagantly. Sometimes freakishly. Exotically. A little paranormally.’
‘We love each other, mum.’ Vic told in flurry of words, after she had noticed her parent to be agonizing and even irritating. ‘We wanna live together that’s why we’re here now.’
‘Live together…’ Olga Vladimirovna lowered her eyes. ‘Ok then Kharon, tell me about yourself: where you work, live, what your parents do. I want to know everything about you.’
‘I don’t have parents. They died. A long ago. I’m an orphan. I live in the centre of Moscow.’
‘Renting?’ the mother asked in surprise.
‘I am’
‘So, you have no your own place to live, right?’
‘Mum!’
‘A second please, Vic.’
‘I do but in another country. My own home is very far from here. It’s a diabolic distance, Olga Vladimirovna. It hurts me to remember about it.’
The woman was looking at the incubus like at an odious grub worm. She insanely wanted to smash it not to let be the bane of her daughter’s life. But she was enervated to lift her leg to kill the maggot, creeping up to her girl.
‘Well Kharon, do you work? Where? Victoria has told me nothing about you.’
‘Oh, I work for well-known company, but I’m forbidden to speak about it. If you worry about my affluence,’ Kharon clarified, having screwed up his eyes, after he had read the woman’s mind, ‘you shouldn’t then as I am enough financially backed not to let Victoria be in a downtrodden.’
‘We’re gonna be ok.’ Victoria tried to convince her mum.
‘I like to believe…’
Olga Vladimirovna silently saw her daughter looking at the cocky man, putting him on a high pedestal. Vic had never looked at anyone before. Her eyes had never shone like this before. Love for that man, whom Olga Vladimirovna didn’t like at all, was struggled out of her eyes.
The woman spoke with Kharon through clenched teeth after she had finally found something obnoxious and unpleasant of him. She was sure that the man of such face, such money, such body and speech couldn’t be a good man whom her daughter needed. She noticed his exaggerated and caddish self-confidence, mischievous countenance, lofty mien… “Big-headed asshole” was what Vic’s mother thought. All the evening she was waiting for him to leave finally.
Victoria was in the well hall, embracing with the man of her dreams. She didn’t want to let him go.
‘Let’s do it tomorrow?’ she asked.
‘What?’
‘Move to your place.’
‘Yeah, about “move to my place”… I didn’t hear you have such a desire. I was in your mind but there was nothing. Do you hide it from me? How?’
‘Hide?’ Victoria frowned. ‘The whole evening I’ve been thinking that we’ll go to you tomorrow… whispering to you to say my mum about it but you seemed not to have heard me and it’s not about the move.’
The demon frowned, put his warm hands on her temples and closed his eyes. He easily came into her mind to look for her thoughts. There were many halls and greyness. It was like drizzling eternally, that covered visibility, occulting with its monotonous whisper every rustle and move. Kharon was running through the halls, seeking for anything, any sound or letter. Fortunately for him, he found. He deafly heard a vacuum whisper of invisible lips, asking for kiss…
‘I can hear them.’ Kharon said quietly, having pressed the girl’s temples stronger. ‘I can hear. They’re asking for kiss. Asking for tearing off the clothes and examining the perfect body with my lips by inches. They’re asking: “I wanna go with you…now” Take you? Now?’
Kharon opened his eyes and studied the girl. There were tears in her eyes, they were begging him to do it now.
‘Go get ready for move. I’ll be waiting for you here.’ Kharon nodded towards the door and smiled.
Vitoria kissed the man and ran back to the flat to pack things she would need at first.
‘What’re you doing?’ Olga Vladimirovna was staying in the doorway, having grossed her arms on her chest.
‘Packing my stuff.’
‘Where?’
‘To Kharon. Where else.’
‘I don’t wanna you go to him. I don’t like him. Are you listening to me, Vic?’
‘Mum!’ Victoria got frozen for a moment. ‘We’ve discussed everything already.’
‘Do you hear me?’ Olga Vladimirovna raised voice. ‘I don’t want you to go to him.’
‘Is there anybody who’s gonna accept the things that I want?’ Vic turned back to her beg, putting her laptop and cosmetic case into it.
‘This is a bad idea, Vic. Absolutely bad.’
‘Why?