Chapter 34
The first thing Sasha notices about Danny’s friends is that they’re extremely tall.
Okay, maybe not extremely—but most of them tower over him and even Danny, who’s practically a giant among gymnasts at “five-six, baby” (as he’d once described himself, pretending to puff out his chest).
Sasha isn’t used to thinking of Danny as short, and seeing him barely come up to some of his friends’ chins is an actual mindfuck.
While Danny’s hugging everyone, Sasha hangs back, nervously examining the group.
At least the girls are different enough—a tanned brunette, an athletic-looking redhead, and an Amazonian blonde—but the two guys behind them both have brown hair and basically interchangeable faces, so there’s zero chance he’s ever going to be able to tell them apart.
“Hey, guys, this is…” Danny turns, gesturing Sasha forward, and then stops with a sudden frown. “Wait, where’s Patty?”
“He’s trying to take a selfie with a seagull—”
“YO, DANNY!”
Danny spins around, but not before Sasha sees his entire face lighting up. “Oh, no way—PATTY!”
Sasha follows his gaze several yards down the beach and sees someone—presumably Patty—wearing the exact same speedo as Danny, raising his fists at the sky as he leans back and roars, “THIS… IS… SPARTA!”
“Are they seriously still doing this?” one of the girls mutters.
Danny lets out what could only be described as a war cry, startling half the beachgoers around them; then he’s gone, kicking up sand onto Sasha’s shins as he sprints towards Patty and tackles him to the ground.
“FOR SPARTA!!!”
They start wrestling, a tangle of bare limbs and speedos, all over each other in a way that Sasha will never, ever, get to be with Danny in public.
Instead, he just stands there and watches, feeling resentful—and embarrassed about feeling resentful—while Patty pulls Danny into a headlock, his thigh practically wedged in Danny’s crotch.
“Oh my God,” the brunette huffs. “They’re, like, so gay sometimes.”
Sasha freezes at the word “gay,” his pulse skittering as he tries to figure out what she meant by that. If Danny’s friends suspect—
“Jess!” The redhead elbows her, casting a pointed glance at the blonde girl.
“What?” Jess protests, even though she’s looking at the blonde, too. “I didn’t mean it in a bad way, Em, I just meant, like, literally, you’d think they were boyfriends!”
The blonde raises her eyebrows, letting an awkward pause hover before she replies, “I think the word you’re looking for is ‘homoerotic.’” Then she extends a hand to Sasha, who wants nothing more than to crawl away from this entire conversation.
“Homo what?” Jess whispers to the redhead.
“Hi, Sasha, I’m Emily,” the blonde says, ignoring Jess. “That’s Mal”—the redhead waves—“and Jess is the one with no filter. Oh, and that’s Scott, Mal’s boyfriend, and CJ.”
Sasha gets a “Hey” and a head nod from both of the guys and pretty much immediately forgets which one is which.
“Uh. Hello. It is nice to meet you.” He shakes Emily’s hand, hoping it isn’t obvious that he’s glancing over her shoulder at Danny, who needs to come back right fucking now so Sasha doesn’t have to talk to all these people on his own.
“So, you’re from Russia?” Jess’s eyes flick up and down his abs. “That’s, like, so cool.”
Danny must have heard Sasha’s silent screaming, because he finally untangles himself from Patty and jogs back to the group, cheeks flushed and hair disheveled. “Hey! Sorry. Sasha, this is—”
“We already did all that,” Emily tells him, and Danny winces a little when he notices Sasha’s expression.
“Oh. Um, sorry,” he apologizes again, more to Sasha than Emily. “But, uh, hey, this is Patty—”
“Yo, Sasha!” Patty bounces over, clapping Danny’s shoulder and grinning at Sasha like he’s king of the beach: shaggy hair the color of driftwood, a white shell necklace gleaming against his suntanned skin. “Welcome to the OC, bitch!”
Sasha’s jaw tightens. He doesn’t know what “the OC” is, but he’s pretty sure Patty just called him a bitch for no reason, and he’s not going to fucking respond to that.
“Oh, he’s not—sorry, that’s a quote from The OC,” Danny explains quickly, as if that’s supposed to mean anything to Sasha. He can’t help wondering if the quote part is even true, or if Danny just made that up to excuse his friend’s behavior.
“Patty, that hasn’t been funny since, like, elementary school,” Jess says, lifting her sunglasses so she can roll her eyes at Patty. “Please grow up.”
Patty winks at her. “Ladies first, Jess.”
Jess starts adjusting her bikini strings like she’s over the conversation, her cheeks suddenly as pink as her swimsuit, and Patty’s grin widens.
“So, what’s it like in Russia?” he asks Sasha a few minutes later when they’re setting up camp, everyone laying out their towels in a loose circle.
Danny’s the only person with a chair, and Sasha’s made sure to unroll his towel right next to it—which unfortunately means he’s also close to Patty, who’s claimed the spot on Danny’s other side.
“Do you get to drink vodka, like, all the time?”
Sasha stares at him, then realizes he’s actually serious.
“Yes, all the time,” he says flatly. “Breakfast, lunch, dinner.”
The sarcasm sails right over Patty’s head, landing somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. “Dude, that’s sick. I should move to Russia.”
Danny coughs. “Uh, Patty, he’s joking—”
“Oh my God, Patrick, you’re, like, totally stereotyping him,” Jess cuts in from across the circle, where she and the other girls are clustered. The smile she flashes at Sasha is almost blindingly white. “Just ignore him. So is this, like, your first time at a beach?”
Sasha looks at Danny, wondering if it’s too soon to ask if they can leave, only for Danny to say earnestly, “Of course he’s been to a beach, Jess. There were, like, so many in Brazil.”
“Yeah, Jessica, don’t stereotype him…”
Maybe Sasha should have had vodka for breakfast after all, because he’s far too sober to be surrounded by this many people—Danny included—who genuinely seem to believe that Russia doesn’t have beaches.
He knows geography isn’t Americans’ strong suit, but for fuck’s sake, Sochi hosted the Olympics three years ago.
(Well, it was the Winter Olympics, but still. The Black Sea was right there.)
“Wait, so Sasha, you were at the Olympics, too, right?” Patty’s voice blares into his thoughts like an annoyingly loud commercial. “That’s awesome, bro. Did you win any medals?”
I’m not your fucking bro, Sasha almost snaps at Patty, but two things hold him back.
First: he hasn’t quite figured out how to say “fucking” in English.
Second: Danny’s watching him, blue eyes wide and worried.
Which makes Sasha feel like an asshole, because it’s barely been ten minutes and he’s not even trying to like Danny’s friends.
Not wanting to let Danny down, he takes a deep breath before answering Patty. “No. I was alternate. I did not compete.”
“But he’s gonna,” Danny jumps in. “Next time. He’s, like, so good, Patty. Look at this vault—”
“Oh, yeah, you showed me that,” Patty says after Danny passes over his phone. He watches the video anyway, though—it’s the Blanik Sasha did at the European Championships—and when it’s over, he nods appreciatively at Sasha. “Crazy, dude. Was that a perfect ten?”
There are so many things wrong with that question—starting with the fact that Sasha had taken a small hop on the landing, so it should have been obvious that the vault wasn’t perfect—but Danny groans before he can reply.
“Patty, we don’t do perfect tens anymore, I told you.
The ten’s the execution, and then there’s the difficulty. The E score and the D score.”
“Oh, right.” Patty clearly doesn’t have a clue what Danny’s talking about. “You got a big D, Danny?”
“Yeah, the biggest D.”
“In your dreams, dude.”
“Your mom’s dreams, dude.”
Danny and Patty smirk at each other, and Sasha can’t shake the feeling that he’s on the other side of a concrete wall, trying to listen in.
He thought he knew Danny’s English, thought he’d learned his speech patterns by heart; but now that Danny’s with Patty, it’s like he’s speaking in a completely different dialect, one that Sasha doesn’t understand at all.
This feeling only intensifies as Danny’s friends start chatting about their summers.
It’s too many conversations at once—the girls’ and the guys’ and sometimes the whole group’s, everyone reminiscing about Patty’s “beer Olympics” before splintering off again, the girls back to their gossip, Scott and DJ or whoever going on about their grills, Patty telling Danny a long-winded story about his family’s camping trip—and Sasha can’t keep up.
He tries to participate, tries to think of things to say; but as soon as he comes up with a translation, Danny’s friends have already moved on to another subject.
When he finally manages to ask Patty what kind of dog he has, no one even hears him except Danny—and while Danny quickly gets Patty’s attention, Sasha’s too embarrassed to try again after that.
At least the others aren’t totally ignoring him.
Emily, the tall blonde, asks if he’s ever been to Saint Petersburg, and they chat about a trip she took there a couple years ago; Patty and Jess seem to be competing against each other for the “dumbest question about Russia” award (“Do you have seasons there? Like fall?”); and Danny keeps leaning over to explain backstories, inside jokes, and pop culture references, like he’s Sasha’s personal search engine.
Sasha appreciates their efforts, but after about an hour of this, his brain feels like his arm muscles after a parallel bars conditioning circuit, pushed to the absolute limits of his endurance. So as soon as Danny finishes telling him what the Harlem Shake is, Sasha asks where the bathrooms are.
Danny points out a blurry building in the distance. “I can go with you, if you want.”