Chapter 12 #2
Uncle Borya’s office is in downtown Moscow, a twenty-minute walk across the river from Red Square.
Sasha takes the metro in on an early September afternoon and spends most of the trip texting Alina, who’d woken him up that morning with a list of tasks for him to do while she was at work.
Yes, he put the sheets on Kirill’s mattress, yes, he made space for him in the medicine cabinet, and yes, he picked up the sour cream from the store, Jesus.
He wonders if he’s reading too much into the fact that Kirill still hasn’t responded to his most recent text—Is the closet enough or do you need the dresser too haha—but Kirill was over at some Instagram model’s apartment last night, and Sasha assumes his phone ended up in silent mode on her bedroom floor. It probably doesn’t mean anything.
Still, he’s glad to see Kirill waiting for him at the entrance to the bank, the BMW gleaming in a nearby parking spot.
Sasha can’t quite make out his expression—he’s wearing the kind of sunglasses that throw your own reflection back at you—but he nods when Sasha asks if he’s ready, and he follows him into the bank like they’re walking into a meet, shoulders squared and spine straight.
Uncle Borya welcomes them cheerfully into his office, shaking hands with Kirill and grinning at the box of biscuits Sasha holds out to him.
“Lina knows me too well,” he says, grey eyes sparkling.
“Not so good for this, eh?” He pats his stomach, then sets the box on the desk and motions for them to sit down.
At first, the conversation revolves around Rio; Uncle Borya hadn’t pushed when Sasha shrugged and said “It was fine,” but he plies Kirill with questions about the Olympic Village, the Brazilian food, and, of course, the local women.
Eventually, though, the subject turns to Kirill’s prize money, and Uncle Borya banishes Sasha to the hallway.
“All right, Kirill and I have business to discuss, go call your mother and tell her I said thank you for the biscuits.”
Sasha sends her a text instead, then settles on a bench and opens WhatsApp.
He doesn’t have any new messages from Danny, since it’s four in the morning in California, but he scrolls through the more recent ones, I miss you and Can I call you?
? interspersed with pictures of Buddy and Luna, a sunset, and a taco.
There’s also a long list of cities and dates, everywhere Danny’s going to be for the next two months as the American gymnasts do a “Tour of Champions” across the country.
It sounds like a nightmare to Sasha, being stuck on a tour bus with your teammates for days on end, trotting out at night to perform bullshit gymnastics under flashing lights; he was wincing even before Danny told him about the glow-in-the-dark unitards.
But he keeps those thoughts to himself, because Danny’s clearly looking forward to the tour.
He’s been using Instagram’s new story feature to count down the days—One more week, whos coming to see us?
?—and it’s the first time since they returned from Rio that he’s sounded excited about…
well, anything, really, but especially gymnastics.
Sasha gets it. He didn’t have a great Olympic experience, either, but Danny’s was even worse—which is why, when he’s reminiscing on a phone call about the McDonald’s tent and the only thing Danny says is “Yeah,” followed by, “Do you like tacos?”, Sasha shuts up and lets him change the subject.
So now they’re both pretending the Olympics never happened, which is just fine.
He sends Danny a good morning text, followed by a picture he’d taken earlier of a dog on the metro, its small head poking out of someone’s bag.
A terrier, maybe, although he wouldn’t put a wager on it.
He’s gotten marginally better at identifying dogs, thanks to Danny talking about them all the time, but he’s still only ninety percent sure that Buddy and Luna are golden retrievers.
Which is something he should definitely know by now.
He’s reading an article on the differences between golden retrievers and Labrador retrievers—and not in fact convinced that there are any—when Uncle Borya and Kirill walk out of the office.
They’re shaking hands, Uncle Borya telling Kirill he’ll be in touch, so it seems like everything went well; but Kirill doesn’t say much on their way out of the bank, just a vague comment about getting the paperwork sorted.
“Where’d you park?” he asks once they’re outside, only to look taken aback when Sasha reminds him he came in on the train. “Oh. Okay. Uh, I’ll give you a ride.”
Sasha frowns, because no shit? Kirill always drives, would insist on it even before he got the BMW, and Sasha doesn’t care either way, so he just chips in for gas once in a while and lets Kirill deal with Moscow traffic.
It’s why he hadn’t bothered with his car today, since he’d known Kirill would be coming back to the apartment.
“So?” he asks five minutes later, when Kirill still hasn’t said anything, his fingers tapping restlessly on the steering wheel. “How’d it go?”
He’s not trying to be nosy—he doesn’t care about the details of Kirill’s finances, as long as his money’s safe from Irina—but something feels off, even though it shouldn’t.
“It was fine. Good.” Kirill stares straight ahead, either at the road or not at Sasha. “He said… well, he said I shouldn’t be spending so much. But he was nice about it. And then he gave me some suggestions…”
Sasha’s heard most of Uncle Borya’s advice before—stocks versus bonds, rubles versus dollars—but he thinks Kirill’s trying to process it all by talking it through, so he listens and nods, and sometimes says, “Yeah, that’s what my mom does”; which seems to help, judging by the quick looks Kirill darts at him, the relief he hears in each “Oh, yeah?”
Halfway home, Sasha asks, “So, can you get an apartment?”
There’s a pause, just long enough that Sasha wonders if Kirill forgot to mention it to Uncle Borya. “Yeah, I can afford it,” Kirill says after a moment, and then he leans over, fiddling with the BMW’s stereo. “Guess who emailed me yesterday. Vadim fucking Petrovich.”
“Really?” Sasha wrinkles his nose at the mention of the Olympic committee member. “Why?”
“Well, remember when we were at the Kremlin and he saw us filming, and I had to tell him about the vlog? And then he got weirdly interested in it?”
“Yeah.” As soon as it became clear that they weren’t in trouble, Sasha had extricated himself from the conversation; he wasn’t in the mood to stand there and smile as if he didn’t know exactly what Vadim thought of him, just because Sasha has an Armenian last name and Vadim has an Armenian ex-wife.
Armyashka, he’d called her in those leaked texts. Monkey. Bitch. Sasha hasn’t forgotten.
“Well, now he wants to have some bullshit meeting about my ‘platform’ and how we can ‘optimize’ it. As if that asshole knows anything about YouTube.” Kirill gives a contemptuous snort. “Can you believe that? I haven’t even responded. Fuck him.”
Sasha has to bite back a smile. It’s not exactly hard to piss Kirill off, but he can’t help feeling…
honored, maybe? He remembers how excited Kirill had been when Vadim first started singling him out—praising his performances in person, steering him towards Ministry contacts at all those government events—and now he wants nothing to do with Vadim, can’t even talk about him without grinding his teeth.
“Kirill. You can’t just ignore him.”
“Yeah, I know,” Kirill grumbles. “But still. Fuck him.”
Sasha does smile then, because yeah, he kind of agrees.
It’s an easy ride after that, the sun warm on their faces, music playing, Kirill alternating between rapping along and cursing at other drivers.
Sasha texts his mother when they’re almost home, finding an older message from her about leaving work early to go to the grocery store—she’s making solyanka tonight, Kirill’s favorite.
“Did you see my text?” he asks, reminded when he sees Kirill’s name just below Danny’s in his conversation list, the last timestamp still from the night before. “About the closet?”
“Yeah.”
It’s the silence afterwards that makes Sasha look up, and it’s the tension in Kirill’s jaw that makes him turn around, noticing for the first time that the backseat is empty.
“Where’s your stuff?”
Even before Kirill doesn’t answer, he knows there’s nothing in the trunk, either.
“Kirill, what the fuck?” he asks, his voice rising, Kirill still not speaking, still not looking at him.
“You said you were going to stay with us. Until you—” The silence gets worse, somehow, and Sasha suddenly realizes what else Kirill hasn’t been telling him, feels like an idiot for not figuring it out sooner.
“You’re not getting an apartment, are you. ”
Kirill takes his time navigating through a left turn, pulling into the alley behind Sasha’s building. “It’s not worth it,” he finally mumbles, and Sasha doesn’t know who he’s angrier with: Irina for always getting the last word, even when she isn’t there, or Kirill for letting her.
“Not worth it?” he echoes, fury and disbelief coloring every syllable. “Your father’s fucking beating you up, and your mother doesn’t do shit—”
“Don’t talk about my mother,” Kirill says, so quietly it doesn’t register at first, Sasha’s mouth dropping a second or two later.
“Are you joking? She’s just as bad as—”
“Sasha, shut the fuck up,” Kirill snaps, and then he swerves into a parking space, slamming the brakes so hard that Sasha has to throw his hands against the dashboard.