Taylor
By the time the third round of shots hits the table two days later, I have learned that hope makes me reckless.
“I’m an intern,” I remind her.
“I said what I said.” She drinks her shot in one slow, measured swallow that makes me cringe for her.
I got the internship. Not just the interview.
Not a vague promise that someone would call.
An actual paid internship with the Office of the Governor of Moscow Oblast, beginning tomorrow morning at nine.
So naturally, in true Russian fashion, I am celebrating by getting drunk the night before my first day.
I’m twenty. It will be fine. That’s what Petyr keeps telling me, anyway.
“Maybe you learn state secrets, steal them, and retire to Monaco,” he says optimistically. He leans across the small round table, grinning. “I would visit you.”
“You wouldn’t be invited.”
His hand flies to his chest. “After everything we have been through?”
Anya groans. “Not the pity pastry again. He will never let it go.”
I laugh, and for a moment, the sound feels too light to belong to me.
The bar is louder than usual tonight, packed shoulder to shoulder with people hiding from the cold and pretending burning liquor is the same thing as warmth.
Music pulses from speakers somewhere behind the bar, not quite loud enough to drown conversation but loud enough to make every voice lean closer.
Smoke clings to the coats gathered near the door.
The air smells like vodka, perfume, fried potatoes, and wet wool.
It feels as though all of Moscow is celebrating with me.
I got the internship. I’m going to work in a government office, doing intern things. Filing. Copying. Preparing packets. Carrying folders from one important person to another while all of them forget my name. I do not care.
I will be using Russian somewhere outside a classroom. I will see how the government functions from inside one of its own buildings, even if my contribution is keeping the copier stocked with paper.
I will have something concrete to show for this year. My mother cried when I told her. She tried to hide it. Of course she did. She did the mom thing where her voice became too bright and she said, Oh, baby, that’s wonderful. We’re so proud of you.
Then she went quiet long enough for me to hear something else underneath.
Not relief that I would be sending money home.
The internship probably will not pay enough for that anyway.
Relief that this trip is becoming what we all promised ourselves it would be.
An education. An opportunity. A beginning.
Not an expensive vacation taken while my father’s restaurant dies by inches back home.
So yes. Hope is making me reckless.
Petyr slides another shot toward me. “To you,” he says, his eyes fixed on mine.
“To Taylor,” Anya calls, holding up her glass and slamming her other hand against the table.
“To me,” I murmur, staring down into the still liquor.
“You want cranberry juice, schoolgirl?” Petyr asks quietly. When I look up, he’s still watching me, his eyes gentle.
I shake my head and throw back the shot. The vodka hits harder this time. My chest burns. My eyes water. I set the glass down with more force than necessary and fight the expression trying to climb across my face.
Petyr points at me with a half smile. “You still hate it.”
“I respect it.”
“You fear it.”
I shake my head. “That’s where you’re wrong. I traveled all the way to Russia from Wyoming and got a government internship by myself. I’m not afraid of anything.”
Petyr snorts.
I point at him. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“No. Say it.”
He leans back, raising both hands. “You need fear. The only people announcing they are afraid of nothing are either lying or stupid.”
“Stupid?” I kick him lightly beneath the table. “Fine. I’m not not afraid of anything. I’m on a ledge. Taking a leap of faith.”
“You are jumping from a ledge?” Anya asks shrilly.
“Maybe it doesn’t translate.” I snicker. “Whatever. I have a government internship. I’m becoming respectable.”
“In that dress?”
I look down. The dress is not not respectable. Okay, so it is not especially respectable either. It is black and short enough that sitting requires strategy, but I am wearing a long-sleeved shirt underneath it. And tights. That counts for something. “What’s wrong with my dress?”
“You are taking ‘freeze your butt off’ to another level.”
“Great. So I’ll be assless, jumping from a cliff, and hungover at my first day of work. This metaphor is going beautifully.”
Petyr laughs, but his gaze drops to my legs beneath the table.
It is not a long or particularly crude look, but it bothers me.
It’s Petyr. My friend. Or at least, he is supposed to be.
Maybe I’m tired of being looked at like a possibility when I’m barely keeping my own life from spilling out of my hands.
I shift my knees together and reach for the small bowl of pickles in the middle of the table.
Petyr notices. His expression falls slightly. “Taylor—”
“I’m fine.”
“I did not mean—”
“I know,” I cut him off.
Anya smacks his shoulder and switches into faster Russian, her words spilling out too quickly for me to follow. Petyr answers just as rapidly. I catch perhaps every third word. American. Stubborn. Beautiful. Possibly nettle.
“What did he say?” I ask.
Anya’s smile turns wicked. “He said you are a cultural challenge.”
“I did not say challenge,” Petyr protests.
“What did you say?”
He hesitates.
I narrow my eyes. “Petyr.”
He mutters the word again.
Anya begins laughing harder.
“What?”
“He called you a conquest.”
I point a pickle at him. “Absolutely not.”
“It does not translate exactly.”
“It translates enough.”
“I meant a linguistic conquest.”
“That is worse.”
He grins, entirely unrepentant. “You see? Already you are learning.”
I should stay irritated. Instead, the vodka softens the edges of everything, and Petyr is smiling at me like I am the most entertaining problem he has ever encountered. Anya is laughing into one hand. Someone at the bar begins singing along badly to the music.
For once, my phone is not buzzing with another problem from home. For once, I am not sitting in my tiny bedroom wondering whether coming here was selfish. For once, I feel twenty. Not a daughter measuring every experience against what it will cost her parents.
Just twenty. Twenty and warm and tipsy and alive.
A server approaches, her blond hair falling over one shoulder as she leans down to place a drink in front of me. “From the gentleman,” she says in English, then nods toward the back of the bar.
Anya and Petyr fall silent.
I look up. A man sits alone in a booth near the rear wall. He looks completely wrong for this place.
Everyone else is wearing sweaters, cheap coats, university sweatshirts, or shirts chosen because they can survive having vodka spilled on them.
He is dressed in a black suit that looks tailored rather than purchased, with a black shirt underneath it and a watch that catches the low light when he raises his glass.
He is too formal. Too still. Too fully constructed for a room filled with students still deciding who they are.
Silver threads through the dark hair at his temples. He is not old, exactly, but he is older than the men around him. Older than Petyr. Older than anyone I have ever seriously considered wanting.
Every other man in the room looks as though he is still being sketched. This one has already been carved. Carved from something dark and expensive. No. Forged. He nods toward me. His mouth twitches, drawing my attention to the scar cutting diagonally through the dark hair along his jaw.
Only then do I look down at the drink. It is not a shot. Something amber fills a heavy glass, a curl of citrus resting against the rim. One thick, circular piece of ice sits in the center instead of the cloudy little cubes served with everything else.
It looks expensive. Adult. Not a drink poured from a plastic bottle in a student apartment. Not something you force down your throat to prove you can.
My stomach draws tight as his gaze moves over my face, pauses briefly at my mouth, and returns to my eyes with deliberate calm. Heat rises along my neck. He is not merely looking at me. He is studying me. As though he has been watching for longer than I realized. Maybe all night.
I should look away. I don’t. I can’t. His face is handsome, but not in an easy way. Not like Petyr’s. There is nothing open or inviting about it. He looks severe. Controlled. Beautiful in a way that makes the word feel too soft.
Hard.
I blush at my own thought and reach for the glass.
“No,” Petyr says.
I turn toward him. “No?”
“No.”
The word is sharp enough to lift my eyebrows. His jaw is tight. The playful flush across his cheeks has darkened into something less charming.
“Petyr,” Anya warns.
He ignores her. “You should not accept that.”
“Why?”
“Because men like him only send drinks when they want something.”
I look back at the stranger. He is still watching, his eyes steady, although now he has raised his own drink to his lips.
I wrap my fingers around the glass. “Maybe I want something too.”
Petyr’s hand closes around my wrist. Harder than before.
It doesn’t hurt, but there’s nothing playful about it.
My gaze drops to his fingers. Then I look up at his face.
Something closes inside me. A small door.
The one that shuts whenever a man reminds me that nice does not always mean safe.
That wanting can sour quickly when it is denied.
Anya leans forward. “Petyr. Go smoke.”
He releases me as though burned. “I don’t smoke.”
“Then go start.”
He looks from her to me, then across the room at the stranger. The stranger’s expression has not changed. Still, I have the eerie feeling he understood everything that just happened.
Petyr stands abruptly. His chair screeches across the floor, and he snatches his coat from the back hard enough to make the chair rock on two legs. Then he stalks toward the door.
Anya exhales. “He is drunk.”
“I know.”
“He likes you.”
“I know that too.”
“He is not bad.”
I stare at the drink in my hand.
Petyr is right that I shouldn’t accept the drink, even if I hate the way he said it. Men who send drinks want something. Men who sit alone in dark booths wearing suits that probably cost more than my rent definitely want something.
And I have rules while I’m here. Things to keep me focused.
No McDonald’s. No mixed drinks. And no boys.
My wrist doesn’t hurt, but I flex my fingers anyway. Across the room, the stranger remains in his booth, watching me with a calm that makes my pulse jump.
Anya follows my gaze. “What do you think he is doing here? He is too stuffy for this place,” she says.
I laugh softly. “Stuffy?” I look at the stranger again. He tilts his glass slightly. An invitation.
Anya mutters in my ear conspiratorially, “Look at him. Everyone else is drinking cheap vodka, and he looks ready to attend a funeral for a president.”
“Maybe he came to the wrong bar.” I raise my glass in response. His eyes warm.
“And then decided to drink alone anyway? No, it was no mistake.”
Her voice sounds like background noise to me, the stranger’s eye contact all I can focus on as I take a sip. The drink is strong enough to tighten my throat, but it is smoother than the vodka. Warmer. Stranger.
I glance toward the door where Petyr disappeared. I should wait for him to return. I should smooth everything over. I should let the safe, nice boy who bought me a pity pastry believe he has not lost some contest I never entered him in.
Except I am beginning to understand that safe and nice are not necessarily the same thing. I did not come to Russia to manage Petyr’s feelings. I did not come here to become a smaller, more cautious version of myself. I came because I wanted to discover who I am when no one around me already knows.
And tonight, I have an internship. Hope. A badly chosen number of vodka shots. And a stranger with silver in his hair and a scar beside his mouth is looking at me as though I am not a problem to solve, but a question worth answering. I stand.
Anya catches my hand. “Text me if you leave.”
“I’m not leaving.”
“Taylor.”
“I’m not.”
She studies my face, then releases me with a sigh. “You are lying badly.”
I turn back and bend close enough to whisper, “I’m celebrating.”
“That is worse.”
I grin because she’s right, and because I’m already moving away from the table.
The rule is no boys.
What I am walking toward is a man.