Chapter 9 #2
He didn't ask open questions, just binaries. Simple questions.
"Bath or shower?"
He held up two hands, like he was offering physical objects instead of words. Bath on the left. Shower on the right. Simple. Contained. A decision I could make with a gesture instead of language.
I pointed at the first.
"Good. This way."
He moved slowly through the apartment, checking that I was following, never getting more than a few feet ahead.
The bathroom was at the end of another hallway—all white tile and glass and more of those high windows that seemed to be everywhere, but with frosted panes that softened the light into something bearable.
"The hoodie—" He held up something dark and oversized. "—or the soft grey shirt?" A pale, worn thing that looked like it had been washed a hundred times.
I touched the shirt.
"That's my favorite too." A small smile. "It's older than you are, probably. My grandmother gave it to me."
The information landed somewhere soft. I couldn't respond to it, couldn't ask the follow-up questions that hovered in my brain, but I filed it away for later. Something personal. Something real.
"Coloring or a movie? After."
The choice confused me for a moment. Then he pulled something from behind his back—a coloring book. Not the cheap drugstore kind, but something nicer. Mandalas and nature scenes, intricate patterns that would require focus and time.
I didn't question why he had one.
My hand drifted toward it automatically, the part of my brain that had been screaming for something to do finally finding a target. He nodded, set it aside on the bathroom counter.
"After your bath. That's for after."
Then he was running the water.
I stood in the doorway and watched his hands move. Testing the temperature, adjusting the taps, waiting, testing again. The motion was practiced. Careful. Like he'd done this before, or at least thought about doing it enough that he knew exactly how it should go.
He added something from a bottle on the shelf. Lavender. The scent rose with the steam, soft and clean and familiar.
"Can you sit?"
He gestured to the closed toilet lid, and I sat. My legs were shaking. I hadn't noticed until I stopped moving.
"I'm going to braid your hair," he said. "So it doesn't get wet. Is that okay?"
A nod.
His fingers were gentle. Competent. He gathered my hair at the nape of my neck and began to work, the movements sure and unhurried. I felt the soft pull against my scalp, the whisper of strands being separated and woven together.
I wanted to ask how he'd learned. Wanted to know if there was a sister, a mother, a previous lover who'd taught him this skill. The questions pressed against my locked throat, but they couldn't escape.
He tied off the braid with something soft—an elastic, probably, though I couldn't see it. Then he pressed his palm briefly against the back of my head, a touch so light it might have been imaginary.
"There. All done."
He handed me the soft grey shirt. The fabric was soft as a whisper.
"I'll be outside," he said. "Take as long as you need."
He left.
I stood in the bathroom with steam curling around me and his grandmother's shirt in my hands, and I almost called him back.
Almost.
The word caught in my throat—not because I couldn't say it, but because I wasn't sure what I was asking for. I wanted him to stay. Wanted him to help me undress, wanted to stop being alone with my overwhelmed brain and my too-thin skin and the enormity of everything that had happened.
But I also needed this. The solitude. The silence. The sanctuary of a bathroom with a locked door and water hot enough to dissolve the tension I'd been carrying for days.
I let him go.
The bath was perfect.
I slid into it slowly, letting the heat seep into my bones. The lavender rose around me, soft and clean. The water was exactly the right temperature—warm enough to be soothing, not so hot that it overwhelmed.
He'd tested it three times. I'd watched him test it three times, adjusting, checking, making sure it was right before he let me anywhere near it.
The tears came somewhere around the third minute.
Quiet tears. Not the wracking sobs of last night, not the desperate crying of someone in crisis. These were different. Softer. The release of a body that had finally found safety and was letting go of everything it had been holding.
I cried for a while. Let the tears run down my face and mix with the bathwater. Let myself be small and overwhelmed and not okay, because I was alone and the door was locked and no one was watching.
When I emerged, wrapped in a towel, skin pink and pruned and finally warm all the way through, he was waiting.
Not in the bathroom—he'd respected that boundary, stayed outside like he'd promised. But he was there in the hallway, sitting on the floor with his back against the wall, the coloring book and a tin of colored pencils arranged in front of him like sacred objects.
He looked up when the door opened. Those warm brown eyes, soft with something that looked like relief.
"Better?"
I nodded. The word came easier this time, even if it didn't quite make it out of my mouth.
"Get dressed," he said gently. "Then we'll color."
T he coloring helped.
It always helped—had since I was a child, since my grandmother had handed me my first box of crayons and taught me that sometimes the best thing you could do for an overwhelmed brain was give it something simple to focus on.
The repetition. The precision. The satisfaction of watching color fill white space, staying inside the lines, making something orderly out of chaos.
I'd put on his grandmother's shirt. It hung past my thighs, soft against my still-damp skin, smelling faintly of laundry detergent and age.
We sat on his living room floor with the coffee table between us.
The coloring book lay open to a mandala—intricate circles within circles, patterns that demanded attention without requiring thought.
I'd chosen a blue pencil first, then green, working my way around the outer ring with careful, deliberate strokes.
Maks sat across from me.
He wasn't coloring. Wasn't doing anything, really—just watching. Being there. Present without pressure. His eyes followed my hands as they moved across the page, but there was nothing demanding in his attention. No expectation. No impatience.
He was just there.
Ghost had relocated to the space between us, his long body forming a bridge across the carpet. His head rested on his paws, eyes half-closed in the particular contentment of a dog who'd been fed and walked and was now basking in the presence of his two favorite people.
Still a traitor. But a comfortable one.
The words started coming back somewhere around the third color change.
Small ones first. Fragments. The kind of language that required almost no processing, just the basic acknowledgment of existence.
"Thank you."
My voice came out rough. Unused. But the words made it out, which was more than I'd managed in the kitchen.
Maks looked up. His expression didn't change—no surprise, no relief, just that same patient attention he'd been giving me since I'd walked out of the bathroom.
"For the bath. The—" I gestured vaguely at the coloring book, the pencils, the whole careful architecture of care he'd constructed around my breakdown. “All of it."
"You don't need to thank me."
"I do, though." The pencil kept moving, blue giving way to purple along the mandala's inner ring. "I'm sorry I couldn't talk. In the kitchen. I know it must have been—"
"Auralia."
He said my name quietly. Not a correction, exactly. More like a redirection.
"You never have to apologize for that."
The words landed somewhere deep. I kept coloring, watching my hand move, not trusting myself to look at him.
"I know how your brain works, Ptichka. I've known for months."
He was the only person who knew, really—not just the autism, but the Little underneath it.
The part of me that needed this, that craved structure and care and someone to tell me I was doing okay.
I'd told him everything. Late nights and early mornings, typed confessions in the dark, the whole messy truth of who I was laid out across five months of careful conversation.
And he'd never once made me feel broken for any of it.
"Last night," I started.
The words caught. I set down the purple pencil, picked up red, tried to find the shape of what I was trying to say.
"When you touched my face."
He went very still.
"When you let go."
The sentence hung between us, incomplete. I could hear Ghost breathing. Could hear the distant hum of traffic from the street below, muffled by expensive windows and thirty stories of air. Could hear my own heart beating, too fast, too loud.
"I didn't want you to let go."
The admission came out barely above a whisper. I still wasn't looking at him—couldn't look at him, couldn't handle whatever I might find in his expression. My hand had stopped moving on the mandala, the red pencil suspended above an unfinished section.
"I know it was the right thing," I continued. The words were coming faster now, tumbling out before I could second-guess them. "I know you were giving me space, giving me choice. And I needed that. I did. But—"
I finally looked up.
His eyes were dark. Intense. Burning with something that looked like hunger barely leashed.
"But part of me wanted you to kiss me anyway. Part of me wanted you to just—take. To not ask, to not wait, to just—"
I couldn't finish the sentence.
The silence stretched between us, heavy with everything I wasn't quite saying.
The question was there, building in my chest, pressing against my ribs.
The thing I'd been circling since I woke up, since I buried my face in his sweater and breathed him in, since I watched him braid my hair with gentle, competent fingers and wondered what it would feel like to let him take care of me forever.