Kotik

Chapter 38 The Broken Pieces

The Broken Pieces

Tick.

Our upstairs neighbors thumped across their kitchen.

Tock.

The muffled click of metal on metal said they’d started coffee.

Tick.

Tock.

Tick. Tock.

I hadn’t moved from the kitchen table. The glass was swept up, but the floor needed mopping to remove the smallest pieces. I couldn’t do that, because mopping meant I had to stop staring at the woman’s pictures I spread out across the table.

Not a single one had him in it.

Tick.

I should make coffee…

Tock.

‘Misha, how long has Vitali known Katya?’

‘A bit longer. Longer than he knew Vera.’

Tick.

‘We just joked about some girl because he’s nuts, and it wouldn’t be the first time.’

Tock.

‘Pay attention to how many things about Vitali make no sense.’

He hadn’t been introduced to Mama yet when he called her by her name.

He didn’t need my phone number. My address.

I winced at the click-chuck of the key in the reinforced door, and every muscle in my body went rigid. Looking at him meant there would be a conversation, and that felt like jumping off the balcony. Maybe the roof. So I closed my eyes and listened for his footsteps.

They were unhurried. The keys clinked as he dropped them onto the entry table. Rubber soles thumped as he slipped off his shoes.

The steps resumed, then came to a halt. The temperature in the room dropped.

“Katya.”

I took a deep breath and opened my eyes. Dark shadows played under his own, sleepless and worn. His brows were furrowed, and attention set firmly on my collage.

“I see,” he said. “Where did you find those?”

“Does it matter?”

“Suppose not.”

“Who was Vera, Vitali?” I asked.

He took a few steps toward me and leaned on the table with straight-stiffened arms. “What do you mean?”

“Who was Vera?” I repeated, a bit taken aback at the audacity, and then thought in horror that this might not be Vera after all… it might just be a Vera.

“Who told you that name?”

I wasn’t going to snitch on Misha again, but also had nothing prepared for this scenario, so I remained silent. He didn’t like that.

“Who told you the name ‘Vera?’” he repeated, firmer this time. “Don’t lie to me, Katya.”

“You ask me not to lie to you and then won’t answer any of my questions!” I hissed because it was naive of me to think he would grovel. “Why should I?”

“I can guess. Only a matter of time. Like Goddamned everything.” He left me at the table and grabbed the electric kettle, creating the physical space between us that I’d already built. “She was my first try after… I came back.”

“Were you… together?”

“No.”

Tick-tock-tick-tock went the clock. Like a cartoon.

“Who was she? What happened to her?”

“She disappeared,” he said, rubbing his temples. “But it wasn’t my doing, because I know you’re thinking that—whoever told you does too, I am sure. We were never… together. I just didn’t know how to approach things. That’s what the photographs are. I’m broken, Katya. She saw that. And ran.”

It wasn’t a pained statement. Worse, he’d said it as a fact. ‘The snow is melting. The neighbors are getting ready for work. I’m broken.’

I shifted to stand, but he raised a hand.

“Stay there. You asked, so you listen.” He deeply exhaled, his fingers tapping against the counter.

“She saw the ugly first—the same ugly from the other night. But worse. Shortly after, she was on a dating site advertising Russian women to foreign men. I guess she thought there was no other way out. I was angry. At her, at myself, at the world. She met someone, and he took her out of the country—to Warsaw. Changed her name, that’s why she disappeared. That’s all.”

“What do you mean by ‘no other way out?’” I whispered. His finger stopped tapping. He hadn’t caught the words before I pointed them out. “What was she scared of, Vitali?” My chest cramped.

“Me,” he said quietly, thoughtfully. “She was scared of me.”

I shouldn’t have felt bad for him. I shouldn’t have felt jealous. But the human mind is both wonderful and flawed, and apparently mine more flawed than most.

“For how long did you know her?” I asked.

“A year.”

“And how long did she know you?”

The change in his expression was instant, and it gave me more answers than he ever could.

Panic, fury, and defeat all flashed across his face at once and died out like a smothered candle into the guarded, unreadable nothing that did not meet my eyes.

God forgive me, but I wanted to take him in my arms. But, two years, Misha said.

Two years he’d known me, and I couldn’t ignore that.

“What happened on the bus?” I asked. “What happened to the man on the bus when we first saw each other, Vitali?”

I expected denial, anger, even silence. But instead he said, “He touched what’s mine.”

“Yours. You supposedly didn’t know me,” I seethed.

“Supposedly,” he repeated, and rubbed his chin. “Interesting choice of words, Katya. You so badly want to get a reaction, what reaction do you want?”

“I want to know how long you’ve known me!”

“Stop.”

“How long…” I whispered.

Tap-tap-tap, his fingers resumed.

“You didn’t have to… we could have started out as friends…” I choked, the reality of it all coming at me at once. You can push down the thoughts when they’re someone else’s thoughts. But he was here, and he wasn’t looking at me. His silence admitted everything.

And then he blew up.

“Friends?” He whipped around so suddenly that the electric kettle went propelling into the wall, bounced, and toppled off the counter. It clattered against the floor, its contents spilling. “We were never going to be friends, Katya!”

I let out the breath held painfully in my chest and scooted the chair further back as he took a step toward me.

“From the moment I saw you, we were never going to be friends. We were going to fight, fuck, love, but never going to be friends.” Another step, his words accentuated with shaking hands turning to white fists.

“I wanted you, and I wanted you until you became mine—a part of me—and God willed that it was before we ever spoke. But that’s my reality—it’s how it has to be—that’s how long it takes.

That’s how long it takes ME, Katya. Because.

I’m. Broken. Because not everyone’s home—” his finger rattled against his temple “—up here, Katya!”

I rapidly shook my head, trying to rid it of all the thoughts cluttering my vision.

“I gave you, and I’ll continue to give you all the time in the world, on your terms, for whatever you want. But could you say you would have done the same for me? Be honest with yourself. Would you have had the patience? For years?”

“Yes…”

“No. You wouldn’t have,” he spat, stopping just short of touching me.

His jaw shifted with tightly coiled emotion.

“You cried when you tried to kiss me and I flinched. Blamed yourself—like it was your fault, when it was all me. And what was I supposed to do? What would you have had me do, knowing what you know now? Fuck sake. It took six months and look what still happened!” He swept a hand toward the hallway leading to the bedroom.

“Do you realize that is what control looks like for me?”

His chest heaved, and my own trembled with tears I couldn’t allow.

“We were never going to be friends, Katya,” he said, quieter.

“Because I can’t be friends with you. I can’t fucking be friends with you—because I am who I am—and there is something deeply wrong with me—but it didn’t stop me from being in love with you from the second I saw you.

From knowing that I’ll be in love with you until my last day on Earth.

Deeply, world-shatteringly in love with you. You want to know how long? Do you?”

For a split second, I faced a choice. He was right there, face flushed and muscles shaking. His eyes dared me, pleaded with me, loved and hated me all at once. And I already knew that I had made the choice before, and I would continue to make the same choice for the rest of my life.

“No.”

I chose him.

Like I had done again and again since I met him. After that first missed date. After Elit. After the secrets. After Clipboard.

After what happened that night.

I chose him.

The intensity did not fade, but his muscles lost some of the tension. He searched for the trick behind the word.

“I wanted to give you the person you’d want. One you deserve. And it wasn’t me,” he said, the fire dying down. “I’m willing to be the person you need, I’m willing to do whatever I have to, to have you. Are you leaving?”

He had the human look of shattered glass.

“I already told you, I’m not leaving,” I whispered, “and I wish you would stop asking me that.”

Before me was a man, his soul open to the world, and all the hidden colors of his heart exposed—but mostly red—and bleeding all the beauty and ugliness a person could hold. He was right—very broken, but ticking along. Moving my life forward one second at a time.

“You’re not leaving..?” he repeated hoarsely. “Why aren’t you leaving…”

I reached a hand out, but it took him another step until we could touch.

“You sleep with a guy twice, and he starts swearing in every other sentence,” I said, rubbing my thumb over his cold knuckles. He gave me a weak, forced grin. “They kept telling me sex changes everything.”

“I’m sorry… for swearing, Kotik,” he said. “I won’t ever swear in front of you again.”

I nodded. There was no room for relief in that conversation, yet nothing would ever be worse than the unknown, so finding out about Vitali did not feel like the end of the world.

It was just… a different world. One where broken things got left behind.

They existed with different rules that didn’t quite fit, no matter how hard they tried.

Looking at those sad, sad eyes, I could see the boy who was broken before he had a chance. A boy building electronics out of trash. Afraid to love a stray cat—and then forced to love too hard. A lonely way to live, and no way to die.

I won’t pretend that I fully understood him at that time, because I didn’t.

But I saw his heart. I’ve always seen his heart.

And over the years that followed, I never once regretted that moment.

Sitting in that kitchen with Vitali Konstantinov and telling him that I accept him, all of him, remains the best decision of my life.

Even though I never became Mrs. Konstantinova.

“Katya,” he said, cradling my face as he knelt beside me.

“If I could remake myself just to be with you, I would. And God knows I am trying. I know I’ll never be good enough, but I can promise you that I’ll never stop trying.

I’ll give you everything, and if you want more—I’ll find a way to give you more.

Be mine, because if you don’t want it, it doesn’t count. ”

His forehead rested against my own, anchored in place and fully enveloped by him. I swallowed the hiccups between my ugly tears, barely aware that I’d let them spill.

“You’re enough,” I managed through the sobs. “Vitali, you’re already enough.”

“Katya,” he whispered, breath mingling with mine in the space closing between us. The kiss was soft, and heartbreaking, and so raw and loyal and everything that I needed at that ugly moment.

The same ugly moment I was sitting with my elbow propped up on a table with a large stack of his almost-ex’s photographs that I found while trying to saw myself off a leather leash with a piece of a broken mirror. ‘Vera and Vitali’ sounded stupid anyway, the names didn’t go together at all…

No music played, but it felt like it should. Instead, there were the upstairs thumps of people getting ready for their days and the soft whine of a poorly insulated kitchen window. And us. That wet, hot point between us that forgave everything we had said and done.

When our lips parted, he wrapped his arms around me in that tight, awkward way one does when they’re kneeling beside you.

“Kotik,” he said. “We found Elena.”

His tone didn’t need further words. My tears never had a chance to dry. I fell asleep in his arms three hours later, just past eight o’clock, exhausted with my face red-raw.

Vitali paid for her funeral four days later. I didn’t even have to ask.