Dirty Grovel: Chapter 16

“Please?”

Jesse’s eyebrows hitch in the middle as she turns her sternest glare on me yet. “No!”

“Pretty please?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Pretty please with a cherry on top?”

She rolls her eyes, but I can see her lips twitch upwards in a hint of a smile. “You’ve been spending too much time with my five-year-old.”

I lace my hands together in prayer formation and give her the biggest puppy dog eyes in the world, which I did in fact learn from her five-year-old.

“Aw, come on, Jesse. I’m bored out of my mind cooped up in this huge house with nothing to do. Let me help you clean it at the very least.”

She’s wavering. I can tell.

We’re close to victory.

Jesse chews at the inside of her cheek. “If Oleg finds out…”

“How is he gonna find out?” I ask slyly. “I’m certainly not going to tell him. Are you going to tell him?”

She sighs. “You’re a guest in this house. I can’t make you clean.”

“You’re not making me do anything. I’m offering!”

“Still—”

“I will stick to you like white on rice, singing God Save the Queen in the worst British accent you’ve ever heard, until you buckle and let me help.”

“Jesus,” Jesse caves with a horrified shudder. “Fine. You can help. I’m tackling the west wing today.”

“Ooh, I thought that was off-limits?”

“Huh?” Jesse twists around.

I smile. “Sorry… that was a Beauty & the Beast reference. It’s because— You know what, never mind. Let me not embarrass myself any further.”

“Have it your way, crazy,” she says with a weary exhale. She gestures for me to follow her to the staircase. We make our way up to the third floor of the mansion and then turn down a corridor I’ve never explored before.

“I thought these rooms were empty…?”

“They are, for the most part,” Jesse explains. “Except for the picture room.”

“The what?”

She stops outside a blue door with a bronze handle and pushes it open. “See for yourself.”

I walk in—and my jaw drops.

It’s exactly as Jesse described: a picture room. There’s nothing in it, except for dark wooden floorboards, a gorgeous Persian carpet, and bow windows that let in an endless supply of Caribbean sunlight.

But it’s not about what’s in the room.

It’s about what’s on the walls.

Every single surface is covered in framed pictures. Some big, some small. Some staged, others candid.

It’s the art gallery of someone who wants more, more, more.

“Whoa,” I exclaim. “This is…”

“I know.” Jesse nods, giving me a knowing smile. “It’s something, isn’t it?”

“So this is why there are no framed photographs around the house. They’re all hiding out in here.” I shake my head. “This is kinda…”

“Crazy? Weird? Eccentric?”

I hold up my hands in self-defense. “Your words, not mine.”

She grins and gives me a teasing elbow. “This was Oksana’s project,” she says. “She started it about ten years ago. We got to capacity about five years ago, but that didn’t stop her from adding even more.”

“But why? What’s the point of all this?”

Jesse pulls out a hidden ladder and sets it carefully against the wall. “At first, it was about getting it all out of sight. For the longest time, she didn’t want to see any of these pictures. I remember watching my parents take down all the pictures in the house after… after the accident.”

I do a double-take. “Wait—your parents?”

“Did I not mention that? Cleaning up after the Pavlovs is a family business. My mama and papa were the original caretakers of this estate.” She looks to the window, but her eyes are hazy, like she’s remembering something else entirely. “This was my playground growing up.”

“So that means you knew Oleg when he was young.”

Jesse nods. “And his sister, Oriana. I’d like to think we were friends. But that’s probably overstating things.”

She points upwards to a gorgeous profile shot of Oriana. She’s the female version of Oleg. Dark hair, golden eyes, pale skin. But her features are softer, more delicate. Even when she’s not smiling, her eyes are light and creased at the edges.

The next frame over captures both siblings side-by-side. They must have been seventeen or eighteen, faces still dewy like teenagers but lankier, bored, smirking like they knew a secret no one else did.

Oleg is wearing blue trunks and a wide smile, his abs bared for the camera as he drapes an arm around Oriana’s shoulders.

She’s wearing a white linen dress and a broad smile that matches her brother’s. Her hand is clutching his wrist with a yacht as their backdrop.

It’s so picture-perfect that it barely looks real.

“I took that picture,” Jesse says. “The first time I ever went sailing with them. It was Oriana’s idea to invite me. She was kind like that.”

“When was…?” I can’t even finish the question.

Jesse understands what I’m really asking her, though.

“This was two months before the accident.” She swallows, her eyes dropping, “It was hard to process, knowing that she was gone. Oriana was one of those people who had everything. She had the brains, the beauty, the wealth. But you didn’t hate her for it because she was just so nice.” Jesse smiles sadly. “I had a huge crush on both of them, if I’m being honest. With Oriana, I just wanted to emulate her, be just like her. And with Oleg—” My gaze trails back to the yacht picture of Oleg and Oriana. “Well, look at him. I was sixteen and smitten. It was impossible not to be in love with him.”

“I know the feeling,” I mumble to myself. I drag my eyes back up to her. “What was he like back then?”

Jesse bites her lip. She’s quiet for a while as she thinks.

“Different,” she says at last. “More… open. He smiled a lot more. Laughed loudly. Teased constantly. You could tell he was enjoying life. Now, it feels more like he… endures it.”

I turn away so she doesn’t see my eyes fill with tears I refuse to shed.

Blinking them back, I meander down the wall, drinking in all the family pictures, all the singular little moments that made up Oleg’s life.

It feels like I’m stealing pieces of him he never wanted to share.

I don’t feel guilty, though.

I need this.

Because there’s a piece of him growing inside of me now. I didn’t steal that, did I?

So if it helps me to look at all this so I can make sense of the man who’s changed my life forever, then I’m gonna do it.

Sue me, Oleg.

“We didn’t see him for more than a year after the boat accident,” Jesse continues. “Even when he did finally come back, I think it was just to hide out. He stayed holed up in his room the whole time. It was either there or out on the water, far away from everyone.”

“Did you try to talk to him?”

“I didn’t dare,” Jesse says with a shudder at the mere thought. “He was unapproachable. When he looked at me, it felt like he was looking through me. And that was on a good day. Being near him was… difficult, I’ll say. It was like being next to a black hole. Like someone had stolen away all his joy. I suppose, in a way, Oriana and Elise were his joy, and without them, he had nothing left to smile about.”

I stop in front of a photograph of Oleg. Just Oleg, framed against the backdrop of the ocean.

It’s a candid. He’s looking out at the water, his face free of scars.

He looks like Oleg.

But he doesn’t feel like Oleg.

I hate what he had to endure to receive his scars—but despite the pain, the heartbreak, the agony, I don’t wish that he didn’t have them.

Because they made him.

If you showed me this face—unblemished, unbothered—alongside the damaged face of the man I fell for, I’d pick the second one every single time. That’s the face of a man who has been through tragedy and survived it.

Under all that pain, there’s hope.

Under the beast that he claims he is, there’s a man who loves and dreams.

It’s hard to understand how beautiful something can be until you see all the things that made it that way.

“You okay, Sutton?” Jesse asks from the window.

I choke down the shivers in my voice. “Fine,” I mumble. “Never been better.”

I hear her footsteps as she shuffles up behind me. “You’ve made a difference, you know,” Jesse says. She pretends she doesn’t see my tears. “To Oleg. It’s a subtle change, but it’s there. He’s more open than he used to be. I don’t know how to describe it. I guess he seems more… human.”

“You’re just saying that.”

She shakes her head. “I’m not; trust me. I’ve been around him a lot over the years. This is the first trip where I’ve seen that light in his eyes again. Sometimes, he looks at you the way he used to look at Elise.”

That sends a ripple down my spine. I’ve been trying not to look for her in the frames, yet all the while, hoping I’ll see her somewhere.

“How were they together?”

“They knew each other for a long time. First, Elise was just Oriana’s friend. Then she was his friend, too. They grew into each other, you know? In some ways, it was inevitable.”

I bite down my jealousy. “So it was true love then?”

Jesse chews on her bottom lip thoughtfully as she walks to the adjacent wall and gestures for me to follow her.

“They were so young. Who knows if it was true love? Whatever it was, though, her death made sure it would stay that way.”

She plucks a small frame from the wall and opens the back.

“This is Elise,” she says, pulling out a picture that’s been stowed away at the back of the frame.

I take the photograph with shaky hands and look down at the woman whose shoes I can never fill.

She’s blonde, too. A little smaller than me. A little shorter. But her eyes are a warm, luminescent brown and her smile is punctured by the deepest dimples I’ve ever seen. She’s frozen forever in all her eighteen-year-old glory.

“She’s gorgeous.”

“She was as sweet as they come,” Jesse says. “She always included me, just like Oriana did.”

“Why isn’t her picture up here with the others?”

“Oleg’s request.” She shrugs. “I think it’s a little too painful for him to look at.”

I want to be gracious about this. I want to be mature.

But my heart drops into my stomach. If Oleg still has trouble looking at Elise’s pictures, it probably means he still loves her.

Of course, he still loves her, you idiot. Why else would he choose a contract marriage over a real relationship?

But it does beg one question…

“Jesse?”

“Hm?”

“You mentioned that you saw a difference in Oleg with me in his life.” I feel self-conscious even asking the question, but I know it’s going to bother me for weeks if I don’t ask. “What’s the difference that you see?”

She smiles. “Like he has something to live for again.”