10. Sierra
TEN
Sierra
If I had known I’d be spending all this time around Russians, I would have signed up for a Russian elective last semester. It’s too late to join any classes now, but the library has textbooks available.
Yuri looks at the books skeptically. “Can you actually learn a language with only books?”
I open the book to the first chapter and shrug. “Better than I can without a book.”
“I could teach you,” Yuri says. He slides his chair closer to mine and peers at the first chapter. “Oh, that’s the alphabet.”
Right, Russian uses Cyrillic, so I’m going to have to learn an entirely new script. At least the book includes romanizations next to the Cyrillic.
“How old were you when you started learning English?” I ask, pulling out a pen and paper so I can start practicing the letters. The book is focusing on five for now, which seems like a decent amount to start with.
Yuri makes a thoughtful sound. “I guess it was fifth grade? That’s when they taught it at school. I was mad and didn’t understand why English had to have a brand new alphabet. I still think it’s dumb that you pronounce the letter ‘Er’ as a P sound.”
“I wish I’d learned another language when I was younger,” I tell him, staring down at the letters on the page. “It would probably make learning this one easier.” I frown. “Maybe. The whole new alphabet would still be a thing.” I eye him curiously. “Do you know anything other than Russian and English?”
I realize I know so little about him, and that’s something I find myself wanting to rectify.
“Nah. I wasn’t that good at school. I wasn’t one of the smart kids.” Yuri takes the pen from my hand and draws the Cyrillic letters I’m trying to learn. They don’t look much neater than my version of them, but he wrote them a lot faster.
“You don’t have to be good in school to be smart,” I point out. “It’s a completely different skill set from real life.” I draw the first letter again, then repeat the sound it makes.
Yuri corrects me. “More of an ah .”
I glare at him. “Ah.”
He shakes his head. “No, you’re still…” He repeats the sound, and I can’t tell the difference between what he said and what I said. I decide that it’s good enough for now and move on to the next letters.
I think I’ve got the hang of it and I write out the first set of vocabulary. Of course, once I read those words out loud, Yuri corrects my pronunciation again.
“Yuri,” I say with irritation. “I’m going to have an accent, okay?”
Yuri frowns. “But it sounds wrong.”
I glare at him. “You and Kotya have accents in your English too. It’s fine. As long as people can understand me.”
“But I said I’d help you learn,” Yuri says stubbornly. “And I can’t help you memorize the letters or the words.”
I turn the page to where it has the first dialogue practice. The Cyrillic has Latin letters above it and a translation below to help newbies, so I painstakingly read, “ Hello. My name is Anya. Nice to meet you. ”
Yuri purses his lips like he wants to say something, then he leans in closer to read the next sentence, far faster than I could have managed. “ Hello. I am Mikhael. Nice to meet you too. ”
“Slow down,” I complain. “You need to sound things out. I can’t tell which word is which, and I’m trying to learn to read and speak at the same time.” Somehow.
This had seemed like a good idea in theory, but I’m getting the feeling it’s not going to go as smoothly as I’d hoped.
We keep going through the dialogue, reading and repeating, and both of us get increasingly frustrated as we go. It stings that I’m not instantly catching on like I do in the rest of my classes, and I wish I’d downloaded one of those language apps.
Maybe I should.
“Okay,” I say reluctantly when we finish the small dialogue. “Maybe we do need to go back to the alphabet… and the pronunciations.”
Yuri makes a discontented sound. “You’re doing fine.” He rakes his hand through his hair. I think he forgot how short it is now, because the movement is awkward. “When I was learning English, the teacher would make fun of my pronunciation.”
I glance at him. “That’s… stupid. What, did they expect you to get it instantly or something? I can’t even imagine what a teacher would think of my Russian pronunciation.” I smirk. “Seeing as how even you keep making this face every time I mispronounce something.”
“No. She made everybody repeat after her in a group, and then she singled me out and made me repeat it five times on my own. She said it was to ‘help’ me but the others in the class would snicker and laugh.” Yuri’s expression turns darker. “I didn’t even want to learn English. It was mandatory, though.”
“Languages were always optional for me,” I admit. “I never really had an interest in any of them.” I look down at the book, then nudge him in the side, wanting to see him smile. “But how can I eavesdrop on the three of you when I can’t understand what you’re saying? I don’t have a choice but to figure this out now.”
Yuri starts laughing. “You want to eavesdrop? Good luck. It took me two years in the US to feel confident in my English.”
“Yeah,” I say glumly. “That’s what I’m afraid of.” I resist the urge to close the book. “I don’t know why I expected this to be easier.” I take a deep breath, let it out, then stare down at the page again. “Okay. Let’s try this again. Gotta start those two years somewhere, right?”
“We can watch Russian TV shows,” Yuri says, more excited now. “And I will give you some Russian music.”
I groan and shake my head. “I definitely won’t be able to understand music, Yuri. It’s hard enough to catch all the words when they’re singing in English.”
“Okay, I will tell you how much I want to fuck you in Russian.” Yuri leans in and whispers something against my ear in Russian, and even though I don’t understand him, I blush anyway.
“Why is it that everything not in English sounds sexy?” I ask. “You could’ve told me that an apple is red in Russian and I’d still be thinking it sounded hot.”
“That’s good, because I said, ‘Nice to meet you. I am from Saint Petersburg,’” Yuri says with amusement.
“You did not,” I say, dismayed. “We just went over that! And I know you didn’t say Saint Petersburg.” I run my finger along the line of text on the book where it says “nice to meet you.”
This really is going to be harder than I expected it to be.
“I can hack into a bank,” I whine. “But I can’t say or understand ‘nice to meet you’ in Russian.”
“I didn’t say Saint Petersburg. I said Sankt Peterburg, ” Yuri says, and he pronounces the vowels so differently it’s no wonder I didn’t catch it the first time.
“Also, should you be saying that you can—” he says a few words in Russian, “in public? Somebody might overhear.”
I groan. “No one’s paying attention,” I say, gesturing around the little cubicle we’re in. “They’re all too busy cramming for final exams. Which is probably what I should be doing.”
Yuri leans in closer. He answers in Russian, and my heart is racing faster—until I pay attention to what he’s saying. “ My name is Yuri. I am from Russia .”
Well, I guess I can understand one sentence. Two, to be precise.
It’s a start.
“ My name is Sierra ,” I say. “ I am from …” I try to pronounce the letters for the USA, but the look he gives me tells me I didn’t do it successfully. “Wonderland,” I finish dryly in English.
“You could say New Bristol,” Yuri suggests. His fingers tap on the lesson’s vocabulary list. “ Zaya means ‘little rabbit.’ In case Nikolai didn’t tell you. So now you know more words.”
I nod. “I can add that to my growing arsenal of Russian words. Okay. Hit me with something more interesting,” I tell him earnestly.
Yuri pretends to think. Hmm. What about…” He sounds out a word. “To fuck.” He winks at me. If you want to say, ‘please fuck me,’ you’d say—” and he says the words slowly.
With a quiet laugh, I say, “Should I be saying that in public? Won’t someone overhear?”
“You said nobody was listening!” he argues back, smiling widely.
“Okay, repeat it,” I say.
He does, and I say the words as painstakingly as I can. He makes me repeat them until my pronunciation apparently satisfies him, and we go back to the book.
This is going to be a long, long two years—assuming I can learn it even that fast without being completely immersed in it.
When true exasperation sets in, I finally close the book. “I’m not used to being downright bad at learning things,” I tell him. It sounds arrogant, and maybe it is, but I’ve always been a quick study. Even with tech, the understanding has come fairly easily. I offer a rueful smile. “I don’t think I like it.”
“You learned two sentences,” Yuri points out. “I don’t think that counts as bad after what, forty minutes of practicing?”
I eye him, unable to tell whether he’s being serious. “Are you making fun of me?”
“Why would I be making fun of you?” Yuri asks, “You’ve barely started. You have to practice the letters too. It took me a long time to memorize the English alphabet and I still sometimes mess the letters up at first glance.”
I relax into my seat. “You have to have all sorts of practical skills, though. You know motorcycles, right?”
And he knows how to murder people. I wonder how old he had been when he’d had to kill someone for the first time, but this doesn’t feel like the time or place to indulge my curiosity.
My thoughts darken.
I want to ask Kyran how old he’d been, too. Did my father take him out specifically to kill somebody? Would my father have told me to murder a man, if I’d been born male? Would I have been able to do it?
“I know bikes,” Yuri agrees. “And how to make you squirm.” He smiles and leans in to kiss my cheek.
I turn my head at the last second so his kiss brushes my lips instead, but before I can start to tease him right back, a throat clearing catches my attention.
Fuck. One of the librarians must’ve come this way to?—
My thoughts cut off as I see James standing in front of us.
“Oh, hey, Sierra,” he says, like he hadn’t interrupted anything. “I thought that was you.”
He looks Yuri up and down, not looking like he’s too impressed by what he sees.
“New boyfriend?” I can practically hear the sneer in his voice.
“One of them,” I tell him as deadpan as possible. “I guess after you, one man isn’t enough for me.”
James stares at me, like he can’t decide if my obvious sarcasm is an insult or not.
Yuri swivels his chair around to better face James, and I can see when he tenses up. “You’re the cheater?”
“The one and only,” I confirm.
James bristles. “Hey, it was a mistake, and I said I was sorry.”
“There were two ‘mistakes,’ and those are the ones I know about,” I tell Yuri.
I’m sure one of my friends would be able to tell me for sure, but it’s not like I’ve had time to text and meet up with any of them. A pang of loneliness runs through me. I may be constantly surrounded by people, but I miss hanging out with people who aren’t part of the world I grew up in.
“What do you want me to say, Sierra?” James demands. “I tried to apologize, but you wouldn’t answer the phone or respond to my messages. Then you vanished. Twice.”
I stare hard at him. I can’t tell him that I’d been kidnapped by the Russian mafia or that I’d been shot, and even if I could…
I don’t need to make excuses to him.
The fact that he seems to think I do pisses me off.
“Did you want something?” I ask abruptly, unable to keep dwelling on what’s happened over the past few months.
James has the audacity to look wounded. “I miss you.”
Yuri bursts out laughing. “The next thing he will say is, ‘ None of the others are like you .’ It is what my friends always did to get their girlfriends back.”
The pathetic thing is that it might’ve worked if I’d had access to my phone right after the breakup. He might’ve been able to sweep me off my feet again despite the moments of clarity I’d had while eating too much ice cream and watching shitty movies.
Can I really say it’s much better with Konstantin, Nikolai, and Yuri? It’s not like we had the most auspicious start either.
“I’m not—” James throws his hands in the air. “Forget it. There’s no use talking to you when you’re with one of them.”
“You don’t talk to her at all,” Yuri says with a nasty grin. “Or you will learn what it means to piss off a Russian man. We aren’t soft like you Americans.”
James squares his shoulders, trying to look intimidating, but even though he’s got some muscle on him, it comes from the gym—not from actual violence. “She’ll figure out that you’re a loser before long and come back to me,” he says with so much certainty that I wonder how many women do believe it.
But he’s shown his true colors before, and he’s showing them again now.
“Just fuck off,” I tell him.
He casts one more sour look at Yuri before turning on his heel and stalking off. I watch him go in silence, bracing myself for when Yuri inevitably asks why I was with someone like him.
“Did he start with presents?” Yuri asks instead.
I tense, staring down at the textbook in front of me. “Compliments,” I say bitterly. “Then yeah, little presents. Things he said reminded him of me. Then we started dating, and that… didn’t happen anymore unless we had a fight.”
Yuri taps his fingers on the desk. “One of my friends at the orphanage. He always bragged he could get any girl to date him. He said to do things like that.”
“Yeah?” I say, my voice going flat. “Did you ever try it?”
“Once,” Yuri admits. “But it was too much trouble. I didn’t want to date every girl. Only the ones who liked things I did, or who wanted to go on motorcycle rides with me.” He laughs. “Or, later, the ones who liked having fun with me and Kotya at the same time.”
“How old were you when you two started fucking women together?” I ask. I’m putting bits and pieces together about his relationship with Konstantin, but I still don’t have all the parts.
Yuri shrugs. “I dunno. Probably a year or so after I met him. It happened by accident. I walked in on him and the woman, and somehow instead of telling me to go away, he asked if I wanted to join. The woman was very eager about it too, although she kept calling me diminutives.” He shakes his head ruefully. “I guess to her, I really must have seemed very young.” He must notice my confusion, because he clarifies, “Like Sierrochka. Yurochka. It is like calling Thomas ‘Tommy.’”
I study him. “Well, to be fair, you were pretty young, weren’t you?” I nudge his side. “I wasn’t really allowed to date. I didn’t really even try to sneak around until I moved out. My father made it pretty clear that he’d screw over anyone I tried…” I trail off, realizing Yuri knew that all too well. I clear my throat. “Well. You know. He was too distracted by the time I started dating James to really pay much attention to what I was doing on campus.”
Yuri scowls, and I tense, remembering his extreme anger when he’d gotten out of jail a few short months ago.
“ Distracted . Well, I’m not sorry about what happened to him.” Yuri sighs. “You have class soon, right? I’ll escort you.”
Of course he’s not sorry, and I wouldn’t really expect him to be.
But for all of Pa’s flaws, he’d been my father, and he’d deserved more than to be a victim of Silvano fucking Cresci’s machinations.
I get up and gather my books. “Yeah. Let’s go.” It’s my turn to kiss his cheek, and I lead him to the nearby computer lab. “Try not to get into trouble, yeah? I’d hate to have to be the one to spank you over the bathroom counter.”