Chapter 15 Natalia
NATALIA
I watch him move around my kitchen like he owns it.
Johnny’s got the island covered in ingredients.
Tomatoes on the cutting board. Italian sausage thawing in the sink.
Spices pulled from the rack above the stove that I haven’t touched in two months of living here.
He’s commandeered all three of my pots, moving between them with a confidence that doesn’t match a man who can’t remember his own name.
His sleeves are shoved to his elbows, forearms flexing every time he reaches for something, and my brain keeps short-circuiting back to earlier. The grip of those arms when he pulled me under him. The way his hands felt when they stopped being polite.
I drag my eyes away before I embarrass myself. This is dinner Natalia, act like you’ve been somewhere.
“Do you actually know what you’re doing?” I ask from my stool at the island. “Because I don’t want to get my hopes up.”
He glances over his shoulder. “Honestly? No. I have no idea what I’m doing.” He turns back to the tomatoes and starts chopping, the knife moving fast, confident. “But I know how to do it. Does that make any sense?”
“Procedural memory.”
“Bless you.”
I scoff. He grins without turning around.
“It’s stored differently than regular memories,” I say.
“Episodic memory, the kind you lost, lives in your hippocampus. But skills you’ve repeated thousands of times get encoded in your cerebellum and basal ganglia.
Separate systems entirely. That’s why you can chop tomatoes like a line cook but you can’t remember where you’re from. ”
The knife pauses. Just a fraction of a second, his shoulders drawing tight, before he’s chopping again.
“Your hands are basically running on autopilot,” I say. “The rest of your brain just hasn’t caught up yet.”
He sets the knife down and turns around. Leans against the counter, arms folded, signature smirk firmly in place.
“What?” I say.
“You just dropped ‘basal ganglia’ into a conversation about cooking dinner.”
“It’s relevant information!”
You gave me a neuroscience lecture.” His smirk widens. “Over pasta sauce.”
“It was a brief neuroscience lecture. And you’re welcome.”
He laughs, and it lands somewhere south of appropriate, and I take a very deliberate sip of my water.
But then his smirk fades into something softer.
“Seriously, though.” He tilts his head. “Your coursework, the way you patched me up that first day, and now you’re dropping neuroscience over pasta.
What are you going to do with that degree, Nat? What’s the endgame?”
“Nothing really.” I shrug, aiming for casual, landing somewhere closer to defensive. “I just think it’s interesting and it’s something I do to pass the time.”
“Nat, that’s not passing the time. Passing the time is sudoku.” He shakes his head. “That’s kind of amazing.”
I pick at a chip in the countertop. No one’s ever been impressed by what’s between my ears before. My face goes hot at the unexpected praise.
“How long have you been doing this?” he asks.
“The coursework? About four months. But I’ve been interested since I was a kid.”
“Yeah? Why?”
The question is simple. Genuine. He turns back to the cutting board and keeps chopping while he waits for the answer, giving me space to talk without the pressure of his full attention on me. I don’t know if he does that on purpose. I think he might.
“My father had a doctor. Dr. Volkov. He patched up the men who came through our house. Gunshot wounds, broken bones, knife cuts. I wasn’t supposed to watch, but I was nine and small and good at being invisible.”
Johnny adds the garlic to the pan. The sizzle fills the kitchen, warm and sharp. He doesn’t interrupt.
“I used to hide outside the door and try to peek through the crack. I got caught eventually. I thought I was in huge trouble, but Dr. Volkov just looked at me for a long moment and told me to sit in the corner and keep my mouth shut.”
A small smile I can’t help. I trace the edge of my water glass with my thumb.
“So I did. And he’d talk through what he was doing while he worked. How to pack a wound. How to find internal bleeding. How to keep someone breathing when their body wanted to stop. I memorized every word.”
The pasta water hisses as Johnny adds the noodles. I’m talking more than I planned to. My fingers have stopped picking at the counter. I’m sitting up straighter.
“Looking back, I think I was just drawn to the one person in that house who was putting things back together instead of tearing them apart. And at some point I realized I wanted to be that, too.”
The silence after I trail off has a weight to it. Johnny’s watching me now, and I can feel how much of myself I just handed over.
I shake my head, clearing it. “Anyway. It doesn’t matter. It’s not like I’m going to med school.”
“Why not?”
I give him a look. “You know why not.”
“Yeah.” He holds my gaze. “And it’s bullshit.”
I open my mouth to argue and nothing comes out. Because he’s right.
It is bullshit.
I’ve spent my whole life dressing it up in the language of obligation and duty, telling myself this is just how things are, because the bare truth hurts too much to sit with: I want something, and I will never be allowed to have it.
The sausage sizzles as he adds it to the second pot. Steam curls toward the ceiling, pushing away the November chill.
“Okay, so what I’m hearing,” Johnny says, stirring the sauce with a wooden spoon, “is that you’ve been secretly studying medicine behind your family’s back for years, you can name parts of the brain I didn’t know existed, and you basically taught yourself triage by eavesdropping on a mob doctor when you were a small child. ”
“When you say it like that, it sounds...”
“Like you’re kind of a badass?” He tastes the sauce, adds something from a jar I didn’t know I owned. “Because that’s what it sounds like.”
“I was going to say nerdy.”
“Also that.” He points the spoon at me. “The two aren’t mutually exclusive.”
I laugh, shaking my head.
“Okay, you’re now officially the most interesting person I’ve ever met,” he says. “Which, granted, is a low bar given my current sample size.”
“Shut up.”
“No, I mean it.” He turns back to the stove, and his voice drops. “You grew up in hell and you taught yourself to heal people. That tells me everything I need to know about you.”
My hands go still on the counter. His words hit me in a place I wasn’t expecting.
The place where I store the version of myself I’m not allowed to be.
The one who finishes her degree and works in a hospital and has a life she built with her own hands instead of one that was built around her—like a box she’s supposed to stay in until someone opens the lid.
I blink hard. My vision swims for a second before I get it under control.
He plates the pasta in silence. Penne drowning in a red sauce that smells better than anything that’s come out of this kitchen since I’ve been here. He slides my plate across the island and takes the stool next to mine, near enough that his arm presses warm against mine.
The contact sends a flush up my neck. Yesterday that would’ve been a nice moment. Today my body has a whole new filing system for what his skin against mine means, and every nerve ending is pulling from the updated records.
I focus on my plate like it’s a lifeline and dig in.
“This is incredible,” I say after the first bite. The sausage is perfectly browned and the sauce is rich, a little spicy, layered in a way that suggests real technique buried in whatever part of his brain is running the show. “You could’ve been a chef.”
“Or a line cook who got fired a lot.” He spears a noodle on his fork. “I feel like I had authority issues.”
“Shocking.”
“I wish we had spaghetti.” He frowns. “A red sauce like this deserves a long noodle.”
“Penne was the right call. You get sauce inside the tube and outside. Every bite is loaded.”
“Agree to disagree.” He shakes his head. “I can’t remember much, but I know this sauce deserved spaghetti. That’s where I’m at as a person right now.”
I laugh, and he grins back, and it’s so easy that I keep going.
Most of this week we’ve talked around the edges, kept things light and easy. Even after I told him about my family, we’ve kept our other conversations pretty surface level.
But something’s shifted between us today, and I find myself going deeper without my usual guardrails. He asks questions, and I actually answer them.
So I tell him about Anna. The good parts. The ones I carry with me like a blanket I refuse to let go of.
Falling asleep on the couch with my head in her lap while she watched terrible soap operas.
The time she tried to teach me to cook pelmeni and I set off the smoke alarm three times in twenty minutes.
Her hands over mine on the rolling pin, guiding me through it, patient when nobody else in my life ever was.
I trail off. The warmth turns bittersweet, the way it always does when I talk about Anna for too long.
“She sounds incredible,” Johnny says.
“She is.” Present tense. Always present tense, even though she wouldn’t remember half of what I just told him.
He bumps his knee against mine and takes another bite.
I could live in this cozy normalcy. Ten days ago this would have felt surreal. Now it just feels like mine. And that’s so much worse, because I know what’s coming.
The thought dims everything. Two months and I’m on a plane, and this becomes something I used to have.
Johnny must catch it. Whatever crosses my face, he reads it the way he reads everything about me. Too well, too fast.
“Hey.” He nudges my knee again. “Where’d you go?”
“Nowhere.” I take another bite. Force a smile.
“Don’t do that.” He says it gently, but he doesn’t let it go. “You’ve been doing that all night. You light up and then you shut it off, like you’re not allowed to enjoy it for too long.”
The bite I’m chewing turns to cement in my mouth. Because he’s not wrong. He just described my entire life in two sentences and doesn’t even know it.
His expression hardens. Whatever he sees on my face right now, it pisses him off. Not at me.
“When my memory comes back, I’m getting you out. Away from your family. Whatever it takes.”
I stare at him. My throat is doing something inconvenient and my eyes are threatening to follow.
“Johnny, you can’t just...”
“Already decided.” He shrugs. “We can argue about it later. Eat your food.”
My whole life I’ve wanted things I’ll never be allowed to have. In the dark, by myself, with my textbooks and my online courses and my quiet, useless dreams. Johnny’s promise just made the list.
I eat my food. The pasta is so good I almost forget to be sad about it.
We finish, and I reach for the plates but he waves me off, carrying them to the sink. He snaps on the rubber gloves I keep under the sink to protect his knuckles—bright pink, because that’s all the dollar store had—and somehow still looks like he belongs on a billboard. Life is unfair.
I watch his back while he works. The shift of muscle under his shirt.
My fingers remember the topography of that back.
The ridge of scar tissue near his left shoulder blade, the dip of his spine, the way his muscles tensed under my hands when I pulled him closer.
I press my palms flat against my thighs and keep them there.
He dries the last plate, puts it in the cabinet, and turns around.
“Movie?”
We end up on the couch with something neither of us chose on purpose. Ten minutes in, Johnny points at the screen.
“There’s no way that explosion is survivable. He just walked out of a fireball in a leather jacket. That’s not how fire works.”
“You couldn’t pick yourself out of a lineup but you’re an expert on combustion?”
“Some things are just common sense, Princess.”
I roll my eyes at the new nickname and tuck my feet under me, leaning into his side.
His arm settles around my shoulders, and his thumb traces an absent line along my collarbone.
Earlier, his mouth followed that same path.
The memory blooms hot under my skin, and I have to focus very hard on the terrible movie to keep my breathing even.
He laughs at something on screen, and I feel it through his chest before I hear it. Deep and easy, rumbling through me where my cheek rests against his shoulder. I shut my eyes and let myself have this moment.
I press closer and he pulls me tighter and I memorize all of it. The warmth. The weight of his arm. The smell of tomato sauce and soap on his skin. The way he holds me like we have all the time in the world.
He doesn’t know we don’t.