16. Isla
ISLA
Two days without anyone tailing us, watching us, or delivering bad news over a folder of documents had done something strange to the apartment. It had started to feel less like a place I was hiding and more like a place I actually lived.
I had stopped counting the days by threats and started counting them by ordinary things instead, laundry done, groceries bought, an actual grocery list stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet shaped like a lemon that I did not remember buying.
It felt dangerous in a completely different way than everything else about this arrangement did.
That was the only explanation I had for standing in Nikolai's kitchen at seven that evening, hands on my hips, informing him that tonight he was going to learn how to make my mother's dumplings whether he wanted to or not.
"I do not need to learn how to make dumplings."
"Everyone needs to know how to make dumplings. It is basically a human right." I was already pulling flour down from the cabinet, ignoring the look on his face that suggested he had negotiated with more reasonable people at gunpoint.
"Sit down. Watch. Then you're doing it yourself."
"I would prefer to watch indefinitely."
"Not an option."
He sat, arms crossed, the picture of a man humoring someone he found ridiculous and endearing in equal measure, and watched me work the dough into something that actually resembled dough instead of paste.
I talked him through the filling, the folding, the little pleat my mother had drilled into me since I was seven, and for exactly four minutes he looked like he might actually get away with only watching.
"You have been very quiet for someone who claims to have no interest in this," I said, catching him studying my hands like he was cataloguing a technique instead of watching dinner get made.
"I am simply making sure I understand the sequence before I am asked to participate."
"That is called paying attention. It still counts as interest."
Then I handed him the rolling pin.
He held it the way a man holds a weapon he has been handed unexpectedly and does not entirely trust, turning it once in his grip like it might have a safety catch he was missing.
"It is a rolling pin, Nikolai. Not a threat."
"I am aware of what it is."
"Then use it like one."
He rolled the dough with the exact same controlled, economical motion he used on everything else in his life, which turned out to be precisely the wrong energy for pastry. The dough tore. He looked at the tear like it had personally betrayed him.
"It is not supposed to do that."
"No. It is not."
"Then why did it?"
"Because you're handling it like you're defusing something. Dough doesn't need that much respect. It just needs a light hand."
I reached over to adjust his grip, and flour puffed up between us in a small, indignant cloud.
He glared at the dough like it had insulted his mother personally, adjusted his grip exactly the way I had shown him, and finally produced a circle of dough thin enough to actually work with. He handled the small triumph with the same solemn care he probably gave to far more dangerous victories.
His first dumpling came apart the second it hit the boiling water, filling billowing out into the pot like a tiny, edible crime scene.
His second one fared no better. By the third, there was flour on the counter, flour on the floor, flour somehow on the ceiling in a pattern I did not want to investigate too closely, and one entirely intact dumpling that I suspected I had actually made myself while he was distracted glaring at his own hands.
"This is a disaster," he said, surveying the wreckage of my mother's kitchen legacy with the same flat calm he probably used to survey actual disasters.
"It's not that bad."
"There is flour in my hair."
"There's flour everywhere. It's practically a theme now."
He set the rolling pin down with the deliberate care of a man retiring from a war he had lost decisively, and something shifted in his expression, a decision arriving somewhere behind his eyes that I did not fully clock until he was already moving toward the refrigerator.
"If dumplings are a human right, I assume you will not object to a demonstration of an actual skill."
"Excuse me?"
He did not answer. He simply started pulling ingredients from the refrigerator with the unhurried confidence of a man who had done this exact thing a thousand times before, beets and cabbage and a cut of beef I had not even known we owned, lining them up along the counter like he was preparing for surgery instead of soup.
He rolled his sleeves without a second thought, no hesitation at all in a gesture that would have been unthinkable from him two weeks earlier, and picked up the knife like it was simply another tool instead of a small act of trust.
"You cook?"
"My grandmother did. I learned by standing in her kitchen and being told to stay out of the way, which apparently absorbed more than I realized at the time."
"You never mentioned a grandmother."
"You never asked." He was already chopping, fast and precise, none of the earlier hesitation anywhere in his hands now that the tool in question was a knife instead of a rolling pin.
"She made this every week of my childhood that I can remember. I have not made it since I left home."
"Why not?"
"Nobody worth making it for." He said it simply, without any apparent weight behind it, the way a man states a fact he stopped finding sad a long time ago.
"Borscht is not something you make for yourself alone in an apartment. It defeats the purpose."
I watched him work, and it was almost unbearable how good he was at it, the beets going in at exactly the right moment, the broth building in color and depth while my own disaster still steamed accusingly on the stove behind him. He did not measure anything. He did not need to.
"This is unfair," I said. "You made me look like I don't know how to cook in my own kitchen."
"You taught me a skill I did not have an hour ago. I am simply returning the favor with one I have had for twenty years."
He tasted the broth off a wooden spoon, adjusted something with a pinch of salt I could not identify, and handed the spoon to me without asking first. "Tell me if it needs anything."
It did not need anything. It needed nothing at all, and I told him so, and something in his face eased in a way that had nothing to do with the soup.
We ate standing at the counter because neither of us had bothered to sit down properly, my disaster dumplings floating sadly in their pot beside his borscht, and somehow the whole ruined kitchen felt more like a home than any of the tidy meals we had eaten in it before.
"Your dumplings are objectively terrible," he said, tasting one anyway.
"They have character."
"They have structural failure."
"That's what I said. Character."
He laughed, short and surprised, like the sound had caught even him off guard, and I found myself grinning back at him with flour still dusted across my knuckles and absolutely no intention of cleaning it up anytime soon.
That was when he reached over and brushed his thumb along my cheekbone, slow, like he had not entirely decided to do it before his hand was already moving.
"You have flour," he said, quiet, "here."
"Do I?"
"You did. Not anymore."
Neither of us moved. His thumb stayed where it was a beat longer than the flour required, tracing the edge of my cheekbone like he was memorizing the shape of it, and I felt my own breath go shallow and stupid in a way that had nothing to do with cooking.
"Nikolai."
"Isla."
We were close enough now that I could count the individual flecks of gray at his temple, close enough that the kitchen and the ruined dumplings and the two exhausting weeks behind us all narrowed down to exactly the width of the space between his mouth and mine.
His hand slid from my cheek to the curve of my jaw, careful, like he still expected me to pull back even now, and I did not pull back, I leaned in, and for one suspended second the entire apartment held its breath along with both of us.
I could feel the warmth of his breath now instead of just imagining it, and every practical thought I owned had gone quiet in favor of exactly one very unhelpful, very insistent one.
The door opened without a knock.
"I brought wine, because I refuse to believe either of you has anything decent in this apartment, and also because Renee deserves rewarding herself for being an excellent friend."
Renee stopped dead in the doorway, a bottle of red dangling from one hand, her mouth falling open at exactly the tableau we made, flour-dusted and inches apart and clearly interrupted in the middle of something neither of us had gotten to finish.
Nikolai's hand dropped from my jaw with the speed of a man caught somewhere he had never expected to be caught, and I stepped back so fast I nearly put my elbow in the borscht.
"Oh," Renee said, delighted in a way that promised nothing good for the rest of my evening. "Oh, this is exactly what I hoped I'd walk in on."
"You could have knocked," I said, aware of exactly how useless the complaint was.
"I have a key. You gave me a key. Knocking felt redundant."
She set the wine down on the one clean patch of counter remaining and surveyed the flour-coated wreckage of the kitchen with open delight. "Also it looks like I missed an entire war in here."
"We were making dumplings."
"You were making something." Her eyes flicked between us, cataloguing the flour on my cheek, the borscht steaming untouched, the careful two feet of distance Nikolai and I had put between ourselves in the last four seconds.
"Dumplings. Sure. We'll call it dumplings."
Nikolai, to his credit, did not attempt to deny anything or explain himself, which I had come to understand was its own kind of honesty from him.
He simply picked up a dish towel and began, with great dignity, to clean flour off the counter as though nothing at all had almost happened three feet away.
I busied myself wiping down a counter that was arguably cleaner than the one he had chosen, mostly to have somewhere to put my hands and my eyes that was not directly on either of them.
"I actually like this version of you," Renee said to him, pouring herself a generous glass of the wine she had brought without waiting to be offered any.
"Domestic. Flour-covered. Visibly regretting my timing."
"I am not regretting anything," Nikolai said, which was such an obvious lie that even I laughed.
"Sure you're not." Renee raised her glass toward him in something between a toast and a taunt.
"I'm going to need the full story eventually, you know. All of it. The version with details."
"There is no story," I said.
"There is absolutely a story. I watched half of it happen from that doorway." She took a long, satisfied sip, clearly settling in for the night now that she had witnessed exactly what she came for.
"I'm just deciding how long to make you sweat before I ask for it properly."
I looked at Nikolai, who had moved on to scrubbing a spot on the counter that had been clean for several minutes now, a faint flush still visible along the back of his neck that I would have bet anything he did not know was showing.
"Oh, I am SO sorry," Renee said, not sorry at all.
"Actually, no. Keep going. Pretend I'm not here."