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“Yeah,” I huff, plopping my arms and legs back down on the bed. “Yeah.”
“I mean, she’s really an amazing person, and Matty and Hunter, too, but I haven’t talked to him so much so I feel like I can’t really give an opinion on the guy, you know?” Elena pats my arm in what I think she means to be consoling, but it just isn’t, it isn’t.
“How the hell am I supposed to compete with her, huh? How the hell am I going to manage that?” I grunt, squeezing my eyes shut tight.
“Well, just like you’ve told me a hundred times before,” Elena says, exaggerating, we both know it, “we don’t compete with other women. We just don’t do it. Sera is amazing, yeah, she’s a great mom, and friend, and Katie loves her to death, hell, everyone loves her to death.”
“Not a lot of people love me,” I say, squeezing my eyes shut even tighter, watching the kaleidoscope of colors burst behind my closed eyelids, sniffing hard through my nose, taking the option to not cry, thanks, but we’ll see what we’re gonna get.
“You know that doesn’t matter, you know that. We don’t compare ourselves to other people, and what we can do for other people. Well, what we can do for other people only. You don’t exist to accommodate other people, you don’t exist solely to be there for other people, Sophie.”
I grunt, blinking my eyes open until my eyes get adjusted to seeing again in the brightness of my bedroom. “Remind me to put some money in the pot for your therapist. She always knows what to say, always.” I punch the air in front of me, shaking the bed.
“I’ll tell her, don’t you worry. But come on, you’re so awesome and amazing, and so cool, gah, can you even imagine Russia not liking you, wanting to be with you? You, Sophie? Really?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know. Like, he says stuff, but my brain’s always thinking about Sera, even if we talked while I was having my near death experience. I don’t know, the way he keeps looking at her, though. He has to still be in love with her, right?” Elena sighs, thwacking me with a pillow.
“Hey, I didn’t ask to get beat! What are you doing?!” I fight back, sitting upright, and grabbing the pillow away from her.
“What? Did you hear something different?”
“I want you to stop doubting yourself, stop comparing yourself to Sera. Sera’s married, she’s married. She’s not the kind of person to steal someone away.”
“It doesn’t matter if she steals him away if he’s already given a part of himself to her. That’s the point!” I wiggle in the bed like a little kid having a tantrum. Yeah, I’ve got doubts bigger than the rings of Saturn, but Elena’s not letting me mope.
“Hey, stop that. You’re being dumb. Why would he ask you to be his girlfriend if it was actually like that?”
I turn to frown at her. “Who told you that? Katie? I’ll kill her,” I snarl, lifting up a fist and vowing vengeance, then letting my arm flop back down ’cause I don’t have the energy.
I’ve never been this cut up over a guy in what feels like forever, and granted, I haven’t precisely been in this kind of situation before. I’m getting blindsided by my own stupid feelings.
I don’t know what made me look at him and go, yup, he’s the one I’m gonna like now until forevermore, but here I am, upset about it. “And he said that he wants me to be his girlfriend in front of the whole table, too. You think he was doing it in front of Sera to show he’s moving on or something?”
I get flicked in the forehead for my trouble, and I clamp a hand over the wound, like Elena’s gone and rattled my brain hard.
“You’re being stupid,” Elena repeats, back to the first-grade taunts. I mean, they work just as effectively, so it makes a lot of sense.
“I know I’m being stupid. You’re supposed to be my friend and tell me I’m not being stupid! That’s your job!”
Elena shakes her head, aims up another flick until I grab both of her hands and she finally relents. “My job is to tell you the truth, and I’m doing it. What a load of shit! Look, I don’t know the guy that well, I’ll admit it. But you talked to Sera, right?”
Of course she knows about that. Katie knows everything, and now Elena knows everything.
I nod miserably. “Yeah, I did. She basically just told me the same thing you did, but I’m paraphrasing it really heavily, and that’s the gist of it. She doesn’t believe that Russia ever loved her, that she was just convenient for him to latch his feelings onto, and like, yeah, I get that, I do. It’s easier to do that than take a chance on someone new, someone who could really hurt you than the person you’ve always got hanging around.”
“But what?” Elena asks, fingers still ready for a forehead flick.
“I didn’t say anything,” I sigh, folding my hands over my stomach, wriggling my toes, staring up at the ceiling, waiting for the answers to appear up there, give me some guidance, like that compass I inked on Russia’s skin.
Tell me where to go, what to do, but the vegvisir doesn’t work like that apparently.
“Yeah, but you’re thinking it, I can tell.”
I huff out a laugh, but it sounds exhausted, even to me. “I don’t want to be anyone’s replacement. I don’t deserve that.”
“No. No, you don’t.”
“But I also don’t know what I don’t know,” I say carefully, the weakest part of me wanting to have dinner at Russia’s place tomorrow evening. What if he’s the special I’ve been waiting for?
“True,” she says, and I want to smack her for agreeing, for not being the voice of reason. “So what are you going to do now?”
“I think I’m going to go over for dinner tomorrow, see what Russia has to offer.”
“Is that a sex joke? Did you just make a sex joke?”
I groan. “No, I didn’t. Relax, relax. I’m just gonna go have dinner and see, and then I think I’ll know.”
“Know what?”
“If he’s worth my time. If there’s a veritable shrine to Sera Delos in his condo, then I’ll have my answer.”
“I don’t think it works like that, but you do what you have to do, yeah?”
I nod. “Yeah. Yeah,” I stress the word, trying to convince everybody in the room that I have my shit together.
Spoiler alert: no one has their shit together, no one, at least not a hundred percent of the time. It’s called being a human being, a stressed-out meat ball carrying around a brain that likes to malfunction more often than not.
***
I TRIED—AND FAILED—TO not think about dinner with Russia the entire time I was working. There were brief moments of respite, sure, working on tattoos, losing myself in my work, times when I was drawing out ideas and sketches for new tattoos, too.
But in the lulls between, cleaning down my station and my workspace, I would let my mind drift as the work got repetitive, my hands moving on autopilot over the flow of shading, my brain flitted over to what it would be like, having dinner with a man I find attractive, a man who finds me attractive, and leaving all the baggage out of it.
I’m no one’s placeholder, but I still have to see, I have to know, need to hear it from Russia, and no one else.
With a final check of my reflection in the women’s bathroom at the shop, and one final adjustment to my hair so it falls long and wavy down to my ribs, pulling it back over one ear to show the already-fast-growing undercut (or it just feels that way whenever I freshen it up), and a touch up of my lipstick, I leave the shop after winter-proofing myself, pulling on the giant hood of my coat over my head to not get any hat hair for the six block walk over to Russia’s place.
The days are getting longer now, the sun dipping down just past a quarter to six in the evening and you can already start to smell the wet spring just lurking around the corner, waiting for the dying winter winds (and wet snow) to cease and desist.
It’s pretty dark by the time I make it to Russia’s at five past seven. I get buzzed up after finding him on the panel, and taking the elevator up to the eleventh floor, doing a shoddy two-step all the while, like I’ve got to go pee or something, which I don’t.
I knock on his entrance door to his unit (number 1111) and nearly take a step back when he opens the door looking harried, his blue eyes too big for his face, his eyebrows lifting up towards the ceiling and his face screwed up in worry, a deprecating laugh falling off his lips.
It’s the smell, though, the stench of burned meat that makes me take a step back.
Russia ushers me in with a sheepish smile, his head bowed low as if I’m some kind of queen passing by one of her knights and he doesn’t get the chance to look at me.
It’s loud in Russia’s home, the hood over the stove on an all-time high, and the patio door’s been opened to let the cool night air in along with some snow swirlies that I swear weren’t there by the time I made it inside the building.
It stinks in here like charred meat, and Russia’s hopping on one foot trying to bag the ruined food and toss it outright, glancing at me when he’s done, hands on his hips.
“So, I screwed up,” he admits, blinking at me, shoulders hunching in like he thinks I’m going to verbally whip him for messing up dinner. Yeah, right.
“Okay,” I say, nodding, unzipping my coat, knowing that the wonderful perfume is going to permeate into my clothing sooner rather than later, but it doesn’t really matter. There’s laundry detergent for a reason.
“That’s okay,” I reassure when Russia looks completely forlorn over the idea of ruining dinner.
“I just really wanted to make you supper, and I screwed it up.” He looks so adorably crestfallen that it makes my heart twist.
Now is not the time to be freaking out over how cute we find him, right?
“It’s fine. Really, really fine.”
“But you’re starving. I know you don’t eat regularly,” he says, referencing all the times he’s caught me eating meager snacks when he’s come in for a session, and I know I have complained more than once about how hungry I get.
“And I was going to have everything ready, and I know how to cook, I just...wasn’t paying attention and I lost track of time.”
I shrug, not trying to make him feel worse. I am hungry, sure, but it’s not like I can’t stave it off until we order something delicious, and it takes its time getting here.
“We can order something. There’s this thing...on our phones?” I lift up my phone and point to it, as if I’m trying to teach a late Boomer how to use the internet.
He smiles at me, shaking his head. “Yeah, yeah. We all know home-cooked meals are better.”
I shrug again. “You want a pizza, or were you stuck on steak and roasted potatoes?” I ask, pulling up my favorite food-ordering app.
“Hey, no, no, no. Let me,” he says, and when I look up from the tantalizing menu options displayed on my phone, Russia’s frantically patting at his jeans: front pockets, ass pockets, then glancing around like a puppy confronted with too many toys and is having a vicious bout of executive dysfunction before Russia hops over to the dining room table and snatches his phone up.
“Do you want pizza or something else?”
We settle on an all-dressed pizza with green olives on top, a topping he never considered before and which I assure him that he’ll never eat pizza the same way again.
“It’ll ruin you for all other pizzas,” I say, taking a seat at the dining room table, letting Russia pour me a glass of white wine. I don’t know much about wine, and if he’s trying to impress me with the bottle, it’s a lost cause. I ignore the hot prickle in my chest, wondering if Sera would know, if she would appreciate it.
Russia smiles at me though, his eyes soft and warm, and I feel myself unhunching, unfurling, like a flower searching out the sun.
“This was not how I envisioned the night going,” he says on a half-sigh, grabbing his own glass and pouring himself some wine. “I had it all planned out.”
I flush under his gaze, twisting the stem of the wine glass between my fingers. “Yeah? Bet you were going to be a real Romeo, too.”
Russia shakes his head. “Well, for one, I wasn’t going to ruin dinner. I was late coming back from that bakery we went to yesterday—”
“Zachary,” I supply, remembering our server, Chloe, and the awestruck look she gave him, which I mean, she’s allowed to do, of course.
Stop going green with envy. He’s not completely yours yet...or is he?
Russia nods. “Yeah, and I had a hell of a time finding parking, and then trying to get my crutches under control. The shop owner, well, Chloe’s the granddaughter of the shop owner I learned, the woman we met yesterday.” He points her out in the air, like she’s right here with us, trying to jog my memory.
“And she even helped bring out the dessert I got from the shop, because I couldn’t carry it safely to the car. We should keep going there, everything I’ve tried so far is amazing.” He nods at me, like he didn’t just lay down his cards where there is a future that I’m a part of.
Huh.
Huh.
I clear my throat, rapping my knuckles against the table in a one-two rhythm that lets everyone in the room know that I am definitely not calm, cool and collected.
“If it’s anything like that dessert we had yesterday I’m going to be the size of the moon before the end of the year.”
Russia shrugs. “Sounds like it’ll be worth it.”
“So I want to ask you something,” I say, not having planned any of this, but we’re not eating, and we’re not watching TV, and we’re definitely not kissing so now is as good a time as any.
Russia nods. “All right. I just got incredibly nervous,” he says, giving me a shaky grin, laying his hands flat out on the table, like I might just start hooking him up to a polygraph of all things.
I bite at my lip, watching his eyes catch the movement, making my belly swoop and tumble and do some impressive acrobatics.
“Is this our first date?” I ask, wanting to be sure, circling around the central issue. I’m not going to flat out ask if he’s still in love with Sera, not yet. I can still walk away at any given moment. I can make a run for it, move cities, fly to the moon, the usual.
“Yes.”
I nod, slapping my hand against the table. “Good.”
“Good?” Russia tilts his head, bringing a hand up to cradle his head, looking at me like I’m the most important person in the room.
Huh. Huh.
Well, this is no good for my heart, all of this attention from him. Definitely not good at all.
I nod again, surer of myself this time.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” I ask, my voice dipping down into a whisper. I’m usually loud, but here and now, facing Russia, I’m careful and quiet.
“Like what?” he asks, just as carefully.
I swallow hard, glancing away from those blue-blue eyes. I clear my throat, rearrange myself on the seat. Anything to distract myself from the fact that Russia’s looking at me like I’m the special one.
“Was yesterday a pre-date?” I force myself to ask instead. I force myself to lift my head, to be brave in a way I’ve never had to be before and look at him. I take one last fleeting glance at our hands on the surface of the table – mine tattooed, and Russia’s looking clean and pure.
I think about how Sera looks nothing at all like me.
I think about it all.
I watch as Russia mulls this over, then finally nods. “Yes, it was. It’s important to me that you like my friends. They make up a big part of my life.”
I nod along. “Yeah, it totally sucks if you guys can’t hang out together without there being this massive friction between personalities. No one’s saying you have to pledge allegiance to them and promise to save them during a...zombie apocalypse, or hell, the end of the world as we know it, but you also kind of have to not be that person who drinks the only water available if they’re on fire.”
Russia blinks at me then bursts out into laughter. It’s a good laugh too, enough to make me grin back at him.
I made him grin, not Sera, me!
Notice how you’re the only one bringing up Sera here?
“Yeah, that’s true. So, tell me, what was your favorite thing that you did today?” I frown at him, not understanding the question. He flushes and stammers. “I just want to hear about your day, how it was.”
Russia waits for me, looking genuinely excited about hearing all about it.
My heart trembles in my chest, and I can feel myself slipping from like into something a whole lot like love. Oh, I’m not there yet, but I can see myself getting there, day by day by day.
“Oh, well, uh, I finished up a really beautiful tattoo today. I had a client who had a...I’m bad with the medical terms, but this young kid, a freshly minted eighteen-year-old, had to have a portion of his thigh excised—cancer. And he’s been through like a million medical procedures, and he had the world’s dreamiest smile,” I say, placing my head on my hand, anchoring my elbow to the table, still fiddling with my wine glass, not daring to take more than a few sips.
“And he came in with his parents, and they all talked about what tattoo he was gonna get.”
“What was it?” Russia asks, voice whisper-soft, sitting there, riveted to my story.
I pull in one last deep breath, ignoring the heat in my chest, the way my heart beats faster.
“We decided on a mechano-cyborg type of artwork, and I was really nervous, since it’s not my forte. And with scar tissue, it’s tricky, not to mention every single person is different. The shop has had clients with no scarring at all come back when their bodies started to reject the ink, it’s just...a person-to-person thing.
“But this kid, Liam, he was so good throughout all of the sessions, and his parents were always with him, which I found to be incredibly sweet—just there to support him, his dad holding his hand when the kid had to practically pulverize it for the pain.”
“Your job...it can be quite emotionally taxing.”
I like that Russia realizes that, that he’s starting to understand. Not a lot of people really do, or at least, that’s been my experience.
“Of course it can. I mean, with Alex, I felt so weird and awful doing that tattoo, like I was tempting fate by stamping the potato’s feet into his skin.”
“Potato?”
I wave a finger at him, nearly knocking the glass over. “All babies are potatoes until they start sprouting hair. It’s just the way it is.”
“What if they come out with hair?”
I blink at him, rearing back in horror. “They can do that? That’s so freaky,” I shiver. “I’ve never seen one with a full head of hair. Like tiny wisps, yeah, but not like mine.” I place my hands around my head pointing to the volume of the waves.
Conversation goes even easier after that, me showing off a lot of my artwork on my work-related Instagram account, Russia asking me a ton of questions about shading and colors, and just seeming as interested as can be about my work, about what I can do.
It’s nice, really nice.
He ends up loving the pizza with green olives (because he’s not a monster), and as the night winds down and we end up watching Rocky IV of all things, Russia judging Dolph Lundgren’s accent (the guy’s Swedish after all), I end up learning some Russian words, too.
“Dobriy vyecher,” I fumble with the syllables, trying to move my tongue around them.
“Good,” he says, and I sit up straighter at the praise.
“Any more I should know?” I ask, turned toward him, the knee I’ve hiked up onto the cushion pressing into his thigh, his arms sprawled along the back of the couch, his bad foot spread out in front of him.
Russia grins, and my belly swoops at the sight of it.
“I don’t know, I’m blanking. What do you want to know?” He tilts his head to the side, playful, flirtatious, and honestly, this might be one of the best first dates I’ve ever had.
I ignore the flush in my cheeks, ignore it. “What would you call me in Russian, when you want to be sweet to me?” My heart gives a painful squeeze in my chest, but I still want to know, whatever he says.
Russia glances at me, his blue-blue eyes darkening, something flickering behind them. He licks at his lips, and I follow the movement with my eyes, entranced. He hums while he’s thinking and I just sit there, heart beating too hard, too fast, waiting, waiting, waiting.
I hold my breath.
“I used to like zvezda moya a lot, but I don’t think you’re my star. Stars are so very far away, and I would like to keep you close, if that’s what you want, too.”
I smile at him, trying to make a joke out of it. I’m so bad at this whole thing. I have to make a joke out of it or I’m going to expire.
“If you’re asking me if I’m a cuddler and would win gold at the Cuddling World Championships for Canada, then yes is the answer.” I notch my chin high, waiting for him to digest that information.
I’ve noticed that most of the guys I’ve dated aren’t against cuddling, they’re against asking for it, of needing it when really, it’s kinda the best thing in the world.
Russia grins at me again, holding out a hand for me. I place my tattooed hand in his, watching the way he holds onto me like I’m precious.
His blue eyes bore into mine. “I could call you zolotse moya, which could mean something like my gold, or golden one.” He lifts his other hand slowly, running it along my golden hair.
“I like that one,” I confess on a whisper, leaning in closer to him, trying to catch what he says next. “Any others?”
He purses his lips, turning away to look at the screen while I study his profile instead, and damn, it’s a nice profile. “Krasavitsa for beautiful, but that’s overused in my opinion. Then there’s meelaya for darling.”
“I want that one, the one you just said.” I shiver, and I’m sure he can feel it. “I’ve never been anyone’s darling before.”
“You don’t want to hear any more?” he asks, turning towards me now, his face even closer than it was before, and I can’t seem to catch my breath.
His eyes are a pure blue, no flecks of gold or green in them, just a pure blue that entrances me as much as it terrifies me.
I let out a slow breath and move closer to him.
I want this, I want this so bad. Why can’t I let myself have it?
“Oomnitsa would suit you well, too, my clever one.” Russia’s eyes flutter when I move even closer. I lean close to press a kiss to his cheek, and I move my hand to his other cheek as if for balance, but I really just wanted to feel his beard.
So yeah, that term of endearment works on me, too.
“Anything else?” I ask, pulling away, waiting for Russia to focus on me, and only me.
I hold my breath, waiting.
Waiting.
