33
ALASKA
We’re hitting the movies today. Something low-key: if we don’t feel each other up in the dark and demolish a jumbo tub of popcorn, then life’s a con.
I can already see us in the theater, the movie droning in the background—one of those romances that make you ugly-cry or laugh your ass off while hating yourself—and our hands exploring new continents.
Fortune favors the bold, and anyone who knows how to work a recliner.
Obviously Nat’s driving, because if she doesn’t, the car doesn’t move.
I’m riding shotgun with the window cracked, because I like the air on my face and, also, to see if we catch any sign of intelligent life outside the mansion.
In back, Vega and Mikel—full-on catalog couple by now.
They look at each other, giggle, touch hands like they haven’t spent months joined at the hip.
I look at them and fantasize about them getting married in a church with a priest in drag, then remember who they are and go, nah, they’ll get married in an escape room.
I never thought going to the movies could be a high-risk mission.
Tickets, exits, the crowd, the lights going out…
Ever since we moved into the mansion, everything comes with a protocol.
Even to go to the bathroom you have to sign a permission slip and wear a GPS in case you get lost between the tiles.
We’ve gone all this time with nothing happening—not a scare, not even a paparazzo, not a good juicy drama—and I swear sometimes it feels like we live with way too much paranoia and way too much money. Today we’ll see what happens.
Nat does her thing. I watch her check the rearview mirror every second, eyes pinned to the road, hands at ten and two, spine straight. She’s in secret-agent mode, but her mission is making sure we don’t break a single nail, because the dangers, if you ask me, are a work of fiction.
And of course, from the back, Vega’s voice—already spiraling about popcorn.
“Kettle corn or butter?”
“Half and half.”
If only they knew life isn’t as easy as picking popcorn. But whatever, let them have their drama while I play observer and, on the side, fantasize about Nat inviting me for a shot of vodka in the bathroom and, on the way, giving me a good fuck.
I crack up by myself because a flashback hits. The other night, after we fucked so hard my bones were filing for workers’ comp, with my chest pressed to hers—she smelled like good sweat and wanting—I dropped my bombshell. I’d been saving it.
“I have to tell you something,” I said, wearing my most serious face, my favorite—the one I used when I promised my sister I’d clean the bathroom and knew I was lying.
“Tell me,” Nat said, voice low, hot skin glued to mine, giving me chills and heat at the same time.
“We had a pact. Vega and I. One of those promises you make at twelve with a lollipop in your mouth, swearing eternal sisterhood and that you’re getting matching tattoos on your ass.
So, yeah, we’d get pregnant at the same time.
We didn’t think about the labor part back then, obviously—we were more into promising the impossible. ”
“Uh-huh.”
“So here’s what I’m thinking: tomorrow we go to a clinic and they inseminate me. You and me. I want to be a mom with you, Nat.” I put it out there like I meant it.
Silence. Not normal silence, no. The kind that smells like danger, the kind that makes you check whether the chair is about to rise up on its own and smack you upside the head. Then I felt her go rigid. Literal. Jaw muscle popping a hard angle, air on pause, the blood fleeing her face.
“Tomorrow…?” she stammered, her voice stuck in her throat.
“Or the day after—I’m not a calendar freak,” I tossed out, giving myself big flexible, tolerant vibes. I’ve got a master’s in winging it.
“Alaska, don’t play with this.”
“I’m not playing.”
I was playing. Obviously. In my head I was already cracking up, watching the whole scene.
Nat went all pale, opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again.
I watched her run a live inventory, calculating the damage: sperm bank, doctor’s appointments, Irina throwing an indignant fit, Julia trying to organize the double pregnancy, paperwork everywhere, diapers that cost more than my first paycheck, a stroller to do laps around the mansion, if I sleep here and you sleep there, if Svet baptizes the fetus in the middle of the living room with Russian vodka…
It was like watching a general without a map, poor thing, the world dropping on her head.
I pictured Nat trying to explain to her mother that she was about to be the grandmother of a baby that wasn’t hers, with a funeral face that wouldn’t look out of place at a mobster’s burial.
"If you really..." she started, in a voice I didn't recognize from her. "If you really want this, there are things we’d have to talk about. I... I don’t..." She ran out of verbs, poor thing.
I did feel bad, but only a little, okay? The scene was pure art. I held it for thirty seconds, maybe forty. I turned blue trying not to laugh; even my diaphragm hurt. My neurons were clapping, yelling, 'bravo, bravo.' And then I blew up. I couldn’t hold it anymore.
"I was kidding, bear!" I doubled over, laughter gushing out. "Look at your face!" I swatted her arm, gentle, because she was stiff as a board.
She covered her eyes with her forearm, took a deep breath, called me an idiot—homicidal affection, obviously—and pulled me into her. Then she made me swear on the most sacred whatever that I’d never do that to her again, and I nodded with my best good-girl face, the one not even my shadow believes.
But deep down... deep down I surprised myself.
Because even if she wasn’t going to accept it that easily, I had the crystal-clear sense that if I’d meant it—if I really told her I wanted that with her—I could have talked her into it.
Not in a day, not in a month—she’s tougher than reinforced concrete—but she would have caved.
And that thought gave me this weird peace, like having the key to a secret door, a superpower.
Confirmation: Nat is in love with me. I could talk her into anything.
Into dressing up as Elmo to go grocery shopping or adopting a cat named Danger. Anything.
Anything except telling Irina about us. There, no key works.
No map, no compass, no magic wand. I hit a wall and turn animal, a rabid dog that wants to bite the wall.
It still pisses me off, okay? It pisses me off as we pass the M-30 and Nat flips the turn signal; it pisses me off while Vega hums under her breath some dumb jingle from a tampon commercial and Mikel rattles off movie showtimes.
It pisses me off and at the same time I melt when Nat finds my wrist with two fingers at the light and gives me that you're-here tap.
"Traffic’s light today," Nat says, professional and gorgeous.
"Because everyone’s at home bingeing shows like normal people," I tell her.
"Or at the movies," Mikel adds—poor thing—with that innocent face of his. In my head, Mikel is the kind who gets lost in the theater and ends up watching an animated movie in Korean.
"Going to the movies is a moderate risk," Nat says. "Darkness, multiple exits, crowds... You do everything I say, understood?"
If she only knew...
"Oh, please," I tell her. "We haven’t had a single scare in four months. Your security thing is a kink at this point."
She doesn’t rise to it. I look at her and think it’s impossible—this woman has a contract with the devil—because not a blink, not the tiniest stress wrinkle. I’m sure if I told her I’d hooked up with the gardener, she’d go "uh-huh" and keep driving.
"Safety’s like a seat belt," she says. "Annoying until it saves you."
"What a mug-quote, Lieutenant." I wink at her. "And I picture you with a fake mustache, a Guardia Civil uniform, and a cap that looks awful on you, same 'I’m in charge here' face."
Vega leans between the seats, bun a little crooked and that look of a pregnant woman whose baby is already ordering pineapple pizza.
"Can we get nachos?" she asks.
"We can buy out the whole theater," Mikel says, believer in magical economics, in money growing on trees—because his mom hands it to him, obviously.
I go back to the night of the joke and that whipcrack of fear on Nat’s face. It pisses me off that she won’t say it. And it gets me that in everything else she feels like mine: in bed, in the hallway, in the silences, in her place full of Star Wars figurines she never takes out of the plastic.
"What are you thinking about?" Nat whispers without looking at me; she has a dirty-thought detector wired into her brain.
"That if I like the movie today, it’ll be a miracle," I tell her. "And that the twin-mom role looks good on you. I’m sure if we had a baby you’d teach them to speak Russian before they could walk—and to steal candy without anyone noticing."
"Don’t tempt me," she answers, and there it is, the spark that lights me up. And I stop thinking about babies and picture her as the mistress of ceremonies with a plush whip and me the most diligent student, begging for more and more until I’m out of breath and out of pride.
We pull into the parking garage. The car behind us parks head-in.
The bodyguards get out first, synchronized.
Paranoia, but at the same time I appreciate the automatic move where Nat holds me back for a second, her hand across my stomach before she opens my door.
That mix is me: I complain and I like it.
Welcome to contradiction: the one that ties you up and lets you go, loves you and ignores you, takes care of you and drives you insane.
I see myself on a magazine cover with a headline that reads: The brashest Popova and her forbidden love with the bodyguard.
"Plan: theater three, row eight, aisle clear," Nat ticks off.