Chapter 14
Chapter
Fourteen
Natasha
Control is a muscle. And like any muscle, it responds to stress by tightening.
It’s basic physiology. I have verified it empirically across thirty-five years of field research conducted entirely on myself.
Viktor Astrovsky's shadow has reached into my life via three gossip industry newsletters, one trade press sidebar connecting a photographed gala dance to the name Astrovsky, and a text from Brandy that said only: the internet has opinions. Call me. I’m yet to call him.
Instead, I’ve worked fourteen-hour days, slept four hours a night, reinstated the rigidly portioned meal schedule I had allowed to soften by approximately twelve percent over the past three weeks, and scheduled my entire life in fifteen-minute blocks so airtight that the emptiness physically cannot locate an entry point.
This is the correct response. I am certain of this.
My body disagrees.
The nausea has graduated from a morning inconvenience to an all-day presence that arrives on its own schedule without consulting mine.
My usual lunch—portioned chicken and rice, the same combination I have eaten every weekday for four years— now produces a revolt so immediate and comprehensive that I have taken to eating crackers at my desk and calling it functional.
I fell asleep in my office chair yesterday at three-fifteen PM and woke forty minutes later with a contract proposal imprinted on my left cheek.
I am losing the physical argument with my own pregnancy in a way that is both biologically predictable and personally offensive.
The care packages started arriving ten days ago.
The first appeared at my building's front desk without announcement: a glass container of black beans and rice, warm through the bag, with a note in Rosa's handwriting that said: eat the rice, it helps, mija.
The second arrived two days later—ginger cookies, wrapped in parchment.
The third brought soup — the Cuban chicken variety that smells like someone's grandmother decided love should have a physical form and this was the most efficient vehicle for it.
Then the texts started. Rosa, directly, because she has apparently decided that Victoria's intermediary function is now redundant and she prefers the direct line.
Ginger tea before you get up. Put the kettle on before your feet hit the floor. Trust me.
I made the ginger tea. The nausea arrived twenty minutes later instead of immediately, which represents a meaningful improvement in my morning timeline.
I texted back: it helped.
Rosa replied: I know, mija. Now eat something real. Not the crackers.
‘I don't have anything real.’
‘You have eggs? Everyone has eggs. Heat the pan low and don't rush them. And Natasha?’
‘Yes?’
‘You don't have to be fine. You just have to eat.’
I sat with that text for longer than I will admit. Then I heated the pan low and made the eggs and ate them standing at the kitchen counter and did not measure the portion.
I have been eating the care packages in the evenings at my kitchen island, alone, not measuring portions or cross-referencing against my nutritional schedule, simply eating what someone else made and sent without asking anything in return.
Luna Rodriguez materializes in my orbit on a Thursday afternoon when Victoria invites us both to lunch and then cancels at the last minute, citing a sudden meeting, which I am seventy percent certain was engineered.
Luna is industry press, sharp and warm and carrying the self-possession of a woman who has navigated single motherhood and a career in a surveillance-heavy industry and emerged with her spine intact.
We eat lunch without Victoria. Luna does not ask about the gossip, which I appreciate.
She talks about Zara, her eleven-year-old, with the matter-of-fact tenderness of someone who has earned the right to it.
"I did it alone for years," she says, over pasta she is eating with unselfconscious enjoyment.
"By necessity. The father was not present in any way that counted.
" She twirls her fork. "I used to tell myself it was better that way.
Full control. No negotiation required. No one else's system interfering with mine. "
"Was it?" I ask.
She looks at me directly. "No. It was just what I had.
" She sets her fork down. "I grieved the control later, when Zara was old enough that I could see what she was missing. Her father’s presence.
The person who would have looked at her and seen someone to be known, not just managed.
" She picks up her fork again. "There is a difference between raising a child and raising a child alone.
The first one you can do beautifully. The second one costs something that doesn't show up on any schedule. "
I look at my water glass.
"If you have someone willing to show up," she says, without pivot, "let them. Doing it alone is survivable. It's not preferable. I say this as someone who had no alternative and who would trade the control for the company every single time if I could run the scenario again."
She does not wait for me to respond. She refills her own water glass and changes the subject to the Sterling-Kane anniversary coverage. I eat my lunch and carry what she said in the pocket of my jacket for the rest of the afternoon.
Nik arrives at my apartment at seven PM on a Friday after what his single text described as: Viktor made contact with two of my board members. Coming over unless you tell me not to.
He has been in Chicago long enough to have taken an apartment - a fact I registered without commenting on, because commenting on it would have required acknowledging what it means.
He looks, when I open the door, like a man carrying the exhaustion of managing the fallout of a parent who wields his money like a personal weather system. The coat. The pushed-back hair. The jaw with the edge it gets when he is running controlled rather than actually settled.
I am furious.
Not at him, which would be tidier. At Viktor, at the gossip, at the three industry newsletters and the trade press sidebar and my body's complete and ongoing refusal to cooperate with the schedule I designed for it.
At the nausea and the crackers and the office chair.At the way Viktor's voice on Nik's phone two weeks ago managed to intrude on the most genuinely present I have felt in years.
The targeted violation of something using exactly the mechanism both our fathers specialized in: taking what is growing and calling it a liability.
I close the apartment door and I push Nik against it. I need him. More than I can describe.
He makes a sound of genuine surprise as his back meets the wall.
Then my mouth is on his and he responds immediately, his hands finding my hips.
I kiss him hard - with the frustration and the fury and the want that have been running simultaneously in my chest for a week.
He takes all of it without flinching, his hands gripping my waist and pulling me flush against him, solid and warm and entirely present.
"Natasha," he murmurs into my mouth.
"Don't," I say. It’s not a rejection, but a direction. Don't make it careful yet.
He understands. He walks me backward, his mouth on my jaw, my neck, finding the place below my ear he always finds. My hands go to his shirt, pulling it from his waistband, my palms flat against the warm skin of his stomach. I feel his breath change.
He lowers me to the bed and kneels between my knees.
He lifts his gaze to at me with the focused attention that does something immediate to my composure.
He takes his time pulling my skirt up - his palms moving up the outside of my thighs slowly, no rush in him, the unhurried deliberateness that I have stopped finding maddening and started finding essential - and then his hands slide around to the backs of my thighs and his mouth traces the inside of my knee.
Then higher.
The soft inner thigh, his breath warm against my skin.
I grip the bedsheet with both hands and my head drops back.
I don’t think about Viktor or the board members or the fifteen-minute schedule blocks.
I think about nothing at all, which is the rarest thing my nervous system has produced in three weeks.
His mouth is at the crease of my inner thigh. His fingers curl into the waistband of my underwear, pulling it down slowly, and I lift my hips to help and I can feel him smile against my skin, which should not be as devastating as it is.
"Kolya." His name comes out already fractured.
"Tell me," he says, against my thigh.
"I need?—"
His phone rings.
The sound intrudes on the moment, the ringtone cutting across the charged air of the room. He ignores it. I feel his breath against my skin, the effort of ignoring.
It rings again.
I know without looking at his face that he knows whose name is on the screen.
The quality of stillness that moves through him is the same stillness from the kitchen island two weeks ago - the compressed containment of thirty-six years of conditioning running up against something he has decided to override.
He lifts his head. His eyes are dark and frustrated and entirely present.
"He reaches everywhere," I say.
"Yes," he says. "He does."
I pull my skirt back down. He sits beside me. We lie back on the bedspread with our clothes largely intact and the frustration settling into something flatter and more complicated, the way acute feeling metabolizes into the chronic variety when you do not have the room to discharge it.
"He called two of your board members," I say.
"To communicate that my judgment is currently compromised by personal entanglement." He stares at the ceiling. "His framing, not mine."
"He's not entirely wrong about the entanglement."
"No," Nik says. "He's completely wrong about the compromised judgment. The entanglement is the first clear-headed decision I've made in thirteen years." He turns his head to look at me. "We need to build something he cannot reach."
"Viktor reaches everywhere."
"He reaches the things that are exposed," he says. "We stop being exposed." He says it not as a plan but as a commitment. A plan has steps. A commitment has a direction. Right now the direction is enough.
We talk for two hours in the low light of my bedroom, building the architecture of a shared space that is not a performance for anyone watching.
Not public until we choose public. Not a target until we choose to be one.
The construction of something that belongs to us rather than to the collision of our families.
My phone lights on the nightstand. A Paris number.
It's Katya. I've heard what Viktor is doing. I'm sorry he's reaching into your life. He does this - he takes what is most alive and tries to make it a liability. Don't let him. That's all.
I look at the text for a moment. Then I show it to Nik.
He reads it. He is quiet for a beat. Then: "She means it."
"I know," I say.
I type: I know what he does. Thank you for saying it anyway.
Three seconds. Then a single response: He doesn't win this one.
I set the phone down.
He stays the night. Not for the reason he stayed the previous time.
For presence - the simple fact of another warm body in the room, his hand resting on my stomach after we have both run out of words and the cats have redistributed themselves across the available sleep surfaces with their usual sovereign confidence.
I fall asleep faster than I have in three weeks.
In the morning I wake to the smell of something cooking.
I have never previously been able to construct that sentence from the materials of my own life.
Nik is in my kitchen in yesterday's shirt with a pan going and herbs on the cutting board. Billie is winding around his ankles with the devoted focus she usually reserves exclusively for me, and I find this, in the current circumstances, appropriate rather than competitive.
He makes eggs. A proper production: herbs, good butter, low heat, patience. His mother's method, he tells me - the two things she believed applied to both cooking and most other worthwhile endeavors. He plates it with sliced tomatoes and bread and sets it in front of me at the kitchen island.
I eat the whole thing.
Not because I measured the portions and they aligned with my schedule.
Because someone made it with his mother's method and my body wants it, simply and completely, and I am finding - incrementally and with some resistance - that my body's simple and complete wants are not the enemy I spent thirty-five years treating them as.
He watches me eat.
"Your mother taught you that method?" I ask.
"Every Sunday morning when Viktor traveled," he says with a small nostalgic smile. "She made eggs and played the radio and we ate standing at the counter because she said that sitting down at the table made it feel like waiting for something."
I look at the plate. "What were you waiting for?"
"Viktor to come home," he says simply. "She made standing at the counter feel like freedom instead."
“I can imagine,” I find myself saying. “She sounds like a dream, Nik.”
I eat the last bite of eggs.
Later, at my desk, I reach for my pre-measured lunch container at twelve-thirty on schedule. Same chicken and rice. Same portioned quantity. Same time. Four years of the same lunch.
I shut it close.
I go to the refrigerator and take out the risotto Nik made last night from ingredients I did not know I had, left in a covered container with a note that says only: reheat low and slow. Don't rush it.
I eat the risotto at twelve-thirty-seven. Seven minutes off schedule. Unmeasured. Made by someone else. Completely unplanned.
The shift is tectonic. I do not register its full magnitude until I am putting the empty container in the bag to return, and I realize my hands are steady and the nausea has not arrived and I am, in the simple and unglamorous and revolutionary sense of the word, fed.
I sit at my desk for a moment.
I reach for my phone and text Rosa: the ginger tea works. Thank you.
She replies in forty seconds: I know, mija. Eat the rice.
I text back: I had risotto.
Three seconds. Then: even better.