6. Katya #2
I swallow and file that information away. He likes control. He's precise about it, unapologetic about it. Most men would have deflected that question or softened the answer. He wasn't kidding when he said he's honest.
"What made you come to New York?" I ask, because I want to understand him, want to know what moves a man like this from one country to another. "Have you been in the States long?"
His accent is much more pronounced than mine, and he speaks with more formality, which makes me think he was educated in Russia, unlike me. I also suspect he grew up with wealth. My grandparents had it, and I recognize the same lilt in Artem's voice.
"Work, primarily." He sets his glass down with care.
"There were opportunities here that didn't exist elsewhere.
And—" He pauses, and for a moment something shifts in his expression, something that looks almost like grief before it's carefully smoothed away.
"Moscow has difficult memories for me now. It was time for a change."
There's grief in the way he says it, something carefully contained, and I recognize that particular kind of loss, the kind that lives just beneath the surface of everything. I don't push. Some things aren't ready to be spoken yet.
We all have our secrets.
"When were you last back in Russia?"
I exhale as I try to hold off the memories. "I haven't been in over a decade," I tell him. "I barely remember it, honestly. We left when I was young, after my father passed away."
"We?"
"My mother and I."
"And does she live in the city?"
I take a large gulp of my seltzer. "No, both my parents have passed." The words come out clean, practical, the way I've learned to say them. "My mother from cancer, almost ten years ago."
He doesn't offer further condolences, which I appreciate more than I can say. I don't like to talk about my parents. There's a lot of pain there, and if I start picking at that scab?—
"Why did your mother leave Russia? Was she American?"
I snort. "No, though she would have loved that.
She and my father were both Russian. He passed when I was young, and she was still vibrant and beautiful.
" I take another drink of the seltzer, allowing the carbonation and bitterness to settle on my tongue.
"My mother remarried, and she sent me to boarding school.
" A pause, brief and controlled. "She needed a fresh start. "
Away from my father's family. Away from the complications that came with his name, his world, the things I didn't understand until I was much older. But also away from her, so she could pretend?—
I don't say any of that.
"Paris was actually wonderful, in the end," I say, and I mean it, even if the path there wasn't. "I found ballet, or ballet found me, and everything else became secondary.
When I was fifteen, I auditioned for a summer program in New York, and then it was scholarships and auditions and before I knew it, this was home. "
He nods, as though he understands more than I've said.
"Do you miss it? Russia? France?"
I think about this honestly. "I miss the idea of them," I say finally. "The version I've constructed in my memory, which is probably not accurate. I miss hearing Russian spoken naturally. I miss—" I laugh softly. "I miss feeling like I know where I come from."
"You come from here now," he says simply. "Home is where you build it."
There's a certainty in his voice.
"Is that what you're doing?" I ask. "Building a home here?"
He looks at me for a long moment, his ice-blue eyes unreadable in the low light. "Perhaps," he says, his eyes holding mine. "Only time will tell."
The food arrives before I can decide what to do with that, and the conversation shifts into easier territory—books, places we've both been, the challenge of learning to love American coffee when Russian coffee is so much better.
He makes me laugh, genuinely laugh, at a story about his first week in New York, and by the time the dessert menus arrive, I've stopped reminding myself that this is just dinner between friends.
It feels like something else.
Not a date exactly, because he has been impeccably well-behaved throughout the whole evening—no lingering looks that cross into territory I'd have to address, no accidental touches, no pressure of any kind.
He has treated me like someone worth talking to, someone worth listening to, someone worth the effort of choosing a quiet corner table and asking real questions.
I'm not used to that.
Dinner is over in what feels like a blink, and Artem and I are back in the car driving to my building.
Artem walks me to the door, and I'm aware of a specific kind of disappointment, the feeling of a good evening ending before you're ready for it to.
"I had a lovely time." I turn on the stoop to face him. From this angle, he's very tall above me, the November sky dark behind him, his breath misting slightly in the cold air.
"As did I." He looks at me with that steady, unreadable attention. "Thank you for agreeing to come."
"Thank you for the dinner." I hesitate. "And the flowers."
Something shifts at the corner of his mouth. "I'll send more."
"Please don't," I say, even though part of me very much wants him to. "Mrs. Soap nearly had a stroke."
He actually smiles at that, a real one, and I tuck the sight of it away somewhere private to examine later.
"Goodnight, Katya," he says, inclining his head in that courtly way that feels borrowed from another century.
"Goodnight, Artem."
He waits on the pavement until I'm inside, until the door closes between us, and I stand in the dim lobby of my building with my back against the door and my heart behaving in ways that are entirely inconsistent with a friendly dinner between two people who barely know each other.
He didn't touch me once.
Not once, through the whole evening.
Nothing.
And I hate how disappointed I feel about that.
Lacey is going to be insufferable about this.
I don't even care.