Eighty Days Amber Read Online Free PDF

caught my name from the badge that was pinned to my apron. ‘I won’t speak Russian to you, but I can keep you from being lonely, for an evening. I know what it’s like to be new in a city. And it is your birthday, after all.’
    I’d been told Americans were more forward than folk in other parts of the world, but Chey was my first sign of it. If a good-looking and pleasant man was going to ask me out to dinner then I would not turn him down without good reason. I accepted.
    We ate at Sushi Yasuda, on East 43rd Street, surrounded by bamboo walls and bamboo tables, as if we had stepped into a temple, a world away from the dreary rush of Times Square only a few blocks over. It was the first time I’d eaten raw fish. I wore his blouse, of course, and a simple black skirt with a pair of low kitten heels that I had once bought to attend job interviews. His attire matched mine in formality, which was a relief; just a simple but well-cut white shirt and a pair of jeans.
    Chey showed me how to mix wasabi into the soy sauce and I told him about my life growing up in the Ukraine. He told me about his own in return.
    His father had served in the army and, consequently, he’d grown up in military bases all over the world, which was where he had learned to speak a few words of Russian, aswell as a little German, some Spanish and fluent French and Italian.
    He now made a living trading jewellery as an amber merchant, which afforded him many opportunities to practise his Russian, speaking to the dealers in Kaliningrad. Both of his parents were dead, like mine. His father was killed, not in combat but in a bar fight when Chey was fifteen, and his mother had committed suicide shortly after.
    Chey had run away from the boys’ home in New Jersey that the State had planned to relocate him to until he came of age, and he’d begun working in a pawn shop. A knack for business and an appreciation as keen as a magpie’s for jewellery had led him to international trading in precious stones. Later he focused on amber.
    I asked him why he’d chosen fossils over other prettier, more popular and surely more valuable gems, like diamonds and rubies, and he told me that the first time he had seen a piece of amber that a Latvian woman had traded in his store when he was sixteen, he had felt as though he’d caught hold of a piece of the setting sun, its colour was so golden and its feel so smooth and silky. The piece had a tiny creature trapped inside, perhaps thousands of years old, and the young Chey had wondered how it felt to be cast inside a prison of light. So his love affair with the gem had begun.
    The way he told me the story of his life sounded somehow poetic to my ears, and colouring slightly at the thought, I recalled someone telling me once how poets had nicer (or was it longer?) cocks. I couldn’t deny that I was attracted to him. I felt drawn to him, the magnetism of his eyes, the square angle of his shoulders as he leaned forward and spoke to me with an almost confidential air. We sat in the booth and sometimes our knees touched or his fingersbrushed against my sleeve as I stretched my hand out to pick up the soy sauce or the water. This was a real man, complex, charismatic and, a small voice inside my head kept on reminding me, potentially dangerous, and I was orbiting around him like a moth to a flame.
    When he walked me to the street and paid a taxi driver to whisk me safely home so I didn’t need to suffer the discomfort of a late-night subway journey home to Brooklyn, I had waited for him to make his move, to lunge at me and take payment for the meal or his kindness in the way that I was used to men wanting a kiss or more in exchange for their gifts. But his hands didn’t stray across my buttocks and neither did his eyes drop below my own, searching to see what secrets I might have hidden under the blouse he had bought to replace the one his friend had intentionally ruined.
    Chey kissed me gently on the cheek, politely held