19. Yuri
NINETEEN
Yuri
I watch Sierra reading her textbook and occasionally typing something into her laptop. She looks completely at home here in the campus coffee shop, with other students working at neighboring tables.
My fingers itch to be doing something. It was bad enough that I had to wait outside of her classroom while she took the classes. Almost everybody who passed me turned to stare, like they’ve never seen a guy in leather or with tattoos before. I can’t be the only person who dresses like this in all of New Bristol U.
I know I’m not, because across the room, a woman with several piercings—ears, nose, eyebrows—is sipping on a coffee and reading a book.
Maybe the real problem is that I never went to university myself. I didn’t even finish regular school. All this shit would be hard enough for me to parse in Russian, never mind English.
I tap my foot against the floor, glaring at Sierra’s textbook. There have to be better places for us to wait for her next class to start. Better shit for us to be doing.
“Say you’re bored without saying you’re bored,” Sierra drawls, and her foot finds mine and pushes it to the floor. “Seriously, Yuri, you should’ve just let Nikolai bring me.”
“It was my turn,” I say. I push back against her foot. “And he’s working on something else right now.”
“Okay. Just, um…” She winces slightly, pulling her foot back. “My ex is in my next class. So… I wanted to give you a heads up. He probably won’t even look twice at me, though!” she says with false cheer.
The man who had cheated on her. I wasn’t good enough for her, but she dated somebody who would use her and discard her.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Sierra says, lowering her voice when she sees the way my expression changes into something murderous. “I know you think I’m a whore who spreads her legs for anyone, but it wasn’t… It wasn’t like that. All right? And right now, I’m kinda drowning in men who want to fuck me, and I don’t want to add any more to that equation. So I don’t get what the problem is.”
“Nothing is the problem,” I answer curtly. It isn’t even about her ex—although I will definitely break his fingers if I come across him. I get up and point to the counter. “I’m getting a coffee. Do you want another one?”
“Yes, please,” she says warily. I can feel her watching me as I get up from the table and stalk toward the counter, but when I glance in her direction, she looks back down at the laptop like I hadn’t just caught her staring.
As I wait for the coffees, I look around the room and feel that itch again.
I’d never done well at school. Hell, I usually felt stupid because I didn’t understand and the teachers covered the material so fast. It had been a blessing to get out of classes when I did.
Kotya was the only one who believed I was smart. He got me thinking up schemes and coming up with new ways for us to make money or extort people.
The people here would probably consider me stupid too.
I grab the coffees and glance at Sierra.
Maybe she thinks I’m dumb. Maybe that’s why she was willing to flirt for a few seconds but didn’t try to stand up for me against her family.
I walk back to the table and set the coffee down in front of her, scowling.
“Maybe you’re pregnant already,” I say quietly.
Her eyes snap back to mine, going a little wide. “Don’t talk about that,” she hisses. “Especially not here. Fuck.”
“Why not?” I sit down across from her. “You wouldn’t be the first woman to have a baby in college.”
“We are not talking about that here,” Sierra says. Her cheeks flush red, and I’m not sure if it’s from anger or embarrassment.
“I thought about it a lot.” I keep my voice cruel, although it’s the truth. “How I wanted to share you with Kotya. How you’d marry him, and the three of us would make you ours. I thought you were adventurous .”
“So do you want me to be a whore or not?” she snarls at me, barely keeping her voice low now. “Do you want me to be pristine and proper, only adventurous for you, or do you want me to be enough of a slut to where I’d just easily spread my legs for three men at a time?”
“There are only three men who should matter,” I hiss back.
Unfortunately, our spat has attracted attention. Several people are staring at us, and while I don’t care about what they think, I also don’t want to get kicked out. Or worse, for somebody to try to intervene to “save” Sierra.
I lean back and say, “Whatever.”
“Whatever?” she snaps. “Wow. Real mature, Yuri.” She glances around us too, though, and her jaw sets hard as she realizes people are paying attention to us. “Anyway, just keep your nose out of it. I can handle myself.”
Of course, that leaves me bored and jittery again. After about five minutes of silence, I ask, “Were you already studying here back then, too? Two years ago?”
She stops typing to look back at me, looking cautious when I speak again. “Yes,” she says. “This is my last year before I get my bachelor’s in comp sci. I was just…” She takes a sip of her coffee, ob viously stalling, but I let her. “I spent a lot of time at home the first year. But I didn’t go there much after…”
“After your father died?” I venture.
Her smile is tight, brittle, as she shakes her head. “No, actually. He’s only been dead for… for a few months. I spend — spent — a lot of time with my mom after he died.” She pauses. “But I stopped going there for a while because Pa caught me trying to text you,” she says in a rush. “He scared the shit out of me.”
I frown at her, unsure if I heard her correctly. “What? You never contacted me. I didn’t give you my number.”
Sierra offers me a slight smirk. “You weren’t as hard to track down as you thought you might be.” Her expression turns bleak, though, as she shakes her head. “I know you think I like… had something to do with Pa or Sean fucking you over, but I didn’t. I meant what I said the first day you got back from jail. They weren’t supposed to do anything to you as long as I didn’t try to contact you again.”
I dig my fingers into the table.
“I didn’t think you had anything to do with it,” I growl. “You just liked flirting with danger and letting everybody else deal with the consequences.”
She scowls. “That wasn’t how it was supposed to be, all right? I liked you. You were intriguing, and sexy, and I wanted to find out more about you. Maybe I was flirting with disaster, but I thought I could get away with at least texting you.”
I try to cling to my anger, but it deflates in the face of what she says. I give her the smallest smile and ask, “Yeah? What would your text have said?”
To my surprise, Sierra smiles. “Oh, god, I don’t even know. I spent like fifteen minutes trying to figure out what to say. I mean, I knew you’d be paranoid that I had your number, and I didn’t want you to freak out. But I was curious about you. You intrigued me.” Her expression turns dark, though, and she snaps in a voice so low I almost don’t catch the words, “But that was before you and your friends showed your true colors.”
I ignore that part, focusing just on the idea of her texting me. “I would have texted back. I was going to invite you on a bike ride.” I laugh, remembering our ride. “Guess I did that part already.”
“You didn’t really invite me,” she says dryly. “But I liked the motorcycle.” Her expression changes when she looks at me, but I can’t read it. “We could’ve had something, Yuri.”
“We can still have something,” I point out. I look at her seriously. “But the three of us are a package deal. I wouldn’t… I can’t… not without Kotya.”
“Are you…” She nibbles on her lip for a moment. “You know. Together?”
I shrug, but I glance around us. I’m not ashamed of anything I do, but I don’t particularly need random college students to know all about my business either. The place has emptied a little though, and the other people still in the cafe are busy with their own conversations.
“I don’t know,” I answer truthfully. “If Kotya says he doesn’t want to fuck around anymore, I’d respect that. But I’ve never imagined a life without him.”
“What about Nikolai?” she asks. “I’m not stupid. He’s been weird since you got back.”
“I don’t know.” I rip my napkin into little shreds while I think about what to say. “Kotya likes Nikolai. But it used to be just the two of us, before we came to America.”
“So what was your big plan, Yuri? Take me home, spring your boyfriends on me, and by the way, you want a baby, too?” Her voice isn’t angry, but more… resigned.
“No.” I laugh. “I was going to see if Kotya wanted to negotiate with your dad for you in exchange for an alliance. Kotya would have shared with me.”
“I’m not sure if that’s better or worse,” Sierra mutters. She shakes her head. “I always wanted to be a part of the business. I know it’s… unethical and all, but I didn’t want to be left out. I’d have been pissed to be used as a bargaining tool like that.” She pauses, considering. “Maybe. Maybe if we’d met in a different way, maybe if things hadn’t gone the way they have, I would’ve agreed. Now?” She shrugs. “Guess I don’t have a choice, do I? ”
I point to her laptop. “Kotya is letting you help now, isn’t he? And you’re here, doing your school things. Kotya is good at seeing people’s skills. He doesn’t look down on them just because of where they grew up or how they look or…”
Or that I was just some orphan kid aged out of the system with nowhere to go.
“Or?” she prompts almost gently, and to my surprise, she reaches out and touches the top of my hand.
I turn my hand so I can twine my fingers with hers. “He believed in me. Nobody else did. Or does. He saved me. He’s a great man.”
Sierra sighs, but she doesn’t pull away. “You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t see him the same way,” she says. “Yuri, he and Nikolai really hurt me. Badly. Physically, mentally… god, I am so fucked up that I’m starting to think—” She shakes her head. “He’s not a great man. He’s a man who will do what’s best for himself, fuck the consequences.” Despite the words, her voice stays quiet, almost soft.
“That’s everybody,” I answer. “The world is out to get you. It doesn’t care who you are. If you aren’t one of the ones in power, you get trampled over, discarded, forgotten. Kotya is just making sure that the people he cares about are taken care of.”
I half expect her to instantly argue with me, but when she only gives a thoughtful hum, I remember she was born into gang life. She might not have been brought into the fold, not really, but her father certainly hadn’t hesitated to get me out of the picture to protect his dear, sweet, innocent Sierra.
We fall silent for a moment, but she finally says, “Is that what it was like for you? Getting fucked over, until you found Konstantin?”
I don’t want to tell her this, but I want her to hate Kotya even less. I want to make her see what I do.
“Yeah,” I say, not looking at her. “I grew up in an orphanage in Moscow. When I was sixteen, they told me to figure life out for myself. You can figure out how well I did with that.” I ball up the shredded remains of the napkin, annoyed that the memory still hurts.
“And here we are,” she says slowly. “Completely different backgrounds, but now our lives are… entwined, I guess.” She squeezes my hand, though the look on her face isn’t exactly a happy one. “I want to know more about you. You know so much about me, but you’re a mystery — you, and Nikolai, and Konstantin. If I’m going to be part of your… family?” She makes it sound like a question even though she should know by now that it’s a fact. “I want to know those things.”
“Well, I’m not going to spill the rest of my life story here,” I say, drawing my hand back. “It’s time for your class, isn’t it?” I check my phone, even though I don’t remember when, exactly, her next class is.
“Not yet,” Sierra says. “But we can head that way. Just…” She grimaces. “If we run into dickwad, leave him alone, all right?”
“I’m not agreeing to that,” I say menacingly. “If he approaches you, he will learn how many fingers he doesn’t truly need.”
She scowls at me. “He doesn’t deserve to be mangled.” She says the words, but there’s something in them, something I can’t read, that makes me think she might not be telling the truth.
She packs her laptop and textbook away, taking another sip of her coffee.
“All right. Let’s go.”
I get up and wrap an arm around her shoulders. “If he is lucky, he’s skipping his class today.”
“Yeah,” she agrees. “Let’s hope.”
Beating up her ex-boyfriend sounds like something that would lighten the mood, but unfortunately I’m not so lucky.
I just get to spend the next hour lurking outside the classroom, wondering if I would have enjoyed a life where I was the one attending these classes.
Probably not.