Chapter 22 #2
Alek sat the way a king sits, but he sat.
Rhea climbed into the chair beside him. Her eyes flicked to the leather patch over his bad eye, then away.
She set the tip of the pastel to his temple on the opposite side, careful, deliberate, and drew a single small black star.
Nowhere near the patch. She patted his other cheek once, gentle.
"You look cool," Rhea said.
"Thank you," Alek said. His voice was lower than usual.
"He's going to keep it on forever," Lily whispered to me behind her hand. "I know that face. He is keeping it."
Ivan was last, because Ivan was always last in any situation involving fun. He sat with the air of a man volunteering for surgery. Rhea chewed her lip. She picked up the pink pastel. Ivan saw the pink pastel.
"No," Ivan said.
"Yes," Rhea said.
She painted a tiny pink flower on his cheekbone. Five petals. Yellow center. The smallest, most masculine, least Ivan thing on the face of the earth. Mikhail had to turn away so he would not die laughing. He failed. He died laughing into his own elbow.
Jade had her phone up already. She lifted it.
"Smile," Jade ordered.
Mikhail made a face like he was being stabbed.
Ivan glared into the lens hard enough to crack the glass.
Alek looked at his sister-in-law the way a man looks at someone holding a loaded weapon when he has not yet decided what to do about it.
Daniil, with his small red heart and his glittery pink hat, was the only one fully smiling, and he was smiling like a man at his own wedding.
The shutter clicked.
"I had not realized," Daniil said, deadpan, glancing around at his brothers, "my brothers do not like fun."
"This is not the fun I like," Mikhail shot back. "The fun I like has whiskey in it. And no pink."
"Games," Lily announced, clapping her hands.
She produced a Pin the Tail on the Donkey poster, a roll of blindfolds, and a piece of paper she informed us was the trivia round.
Sienna produced a packet of balloons and announced the relay.
The dining room became a chaos zone in which four grown men with face paint and party hats were ordered into competition by their wives.
Pin the Tail went first. Mikhail volunteered. Sienna blindfolded him with enthusiasm. He turned three times, walked confidently the wrong direction, and stuck the tail on a wall sconce.
"I won," Mikhail announced, blindfold still on.
"You lost," Ivan said flatly.
"I won at a different game," Mikhail said.
Ivan went next, because Jade pushed him into it. He grumbled through the blindfold and the spin. He walked four steps. He stuck the tail on. He took the blindfold off. The tail was, somehow, exactly where it was supposed to be.
The room went silent.
"How," Mikhail said, staring.
"I do not know," Ivan said, looking at his own work like it had insulted him.
"He has not even tried to play," Sienna said to Jade, "and he won."
"He is incapable of losing," Jade said proudly. "It is a flaw. I am working on it in therapy. His, not mine."
Trivia was Lily's invention. The wives knew absurd things. Daniil's favorite bread. Mikhail's first car. Ivan's least favorite vegetable. Which ballet Lily performed when Alek first saw her dance.
Alek, who had not visibly engaged in any of it, answered the last question without lifting his eyes from his coffee.
"Swan Lake," Alek said. "Second cast. Third row, second seat from the aisle. You wore a pale blue ribbon in your hair that night."
Lily went very pink.
"Show off," Sienna murmured.
"He cheats by paying attention," Mikhail complained. "It is unfair. It is also illegal in three states."
Mikhail then proceeded to lose at trivia about his own wife. He got Sienna's favorite drink wrong twice. He guessed her birthday off by a week.
"Are you sure you are married to me?" Sienna asked.
"Extremely sure," Mikhail said. "I'm just bad at memorizing things. I peaked at your phone number."
"Mm," Sienna said.
"I love you," Mikhail tried.
"Mm," Sienna said again.
Daniil quietly cleaned up at the balloon relay.
He moved like a man who had been timed at things his whole life, sat on the balloons faster than the rest of them with an economy that was almost graceful.
By the end he was up two rounds, Ivan was wheezing, and Mikhail had a flat balloon stuck to his hat.
We collapsed at the table laughing, slightly out of breath, hats sideways. Rhea had paint on her own nose from where she had wiped her cheek. Beom-Beom had been awarded a tiny pastel heart on his chest, matching Daniil's.
The candles got lit. A row of them along the cake, the small flames throwing warm light up onto Daniil's face. They softened the scar at his temple and made him look young in a way he rarely did.
"Make a wish," Rhea ordered.
He looked at her. He looked at me. He blew them out in one slow breath. He did not say his wish out loud.
We ate. The ramen was rich and steaming, and Sienna spooned soft eggs into everyone's bowls with the efficiency of a woman who had fed grown men before.
The cake got cut into big uneven slices.
The brothers argued about who got the corner piece.
Mikhail won by stealing it and running. Rhea presented her secret card to Daniil with both hands and a serious face, and inside, in careful crayon, she had drawn the six of us holding hands in a line, Beom-Beom at one end.
Daniil read it twice. He folded it gently.
He tucked it into his shirt pocket over his heart.
The noise softened into warm chatter. Lily was leaning into Alek's shoulder. Jade was feeding Ivan a piece of cake off her own fork. Sienna was wiping a spot of buttercream off Mikhail's tiger stripe.
Under the table, I found Daniil's hand. I squeezed it. He turned his head and looked at me, hat slightly crooked, the small red heart still on his cheekbone.
"Happy birthday," I whispered. "I love you."
He stilled. His face did the same thing it had done in the doorway, that quiet undoing. Then he leaned across the corner of the table and kissed me. Not deep. Just real. The kind of kiss that lands.
"I love you too," he said. Low. Sure. No hedging in it anywhere.
I forgot how to breathe for a second.
Across the table, Mikhail dropped his fork with theatrical force.
"Oh come ON," Mikhail groaned.
"At the table," Ivan said flatly. "Really. With cake present."
"You are making the rest of us look poorly," Alek said in his mildest voice.
Daniil did not look away from me. He was smiling now, slow.
"As if you are not this sweet to your women," he said. "If you are not, then I pity them."
The wives lost it. Lily laughed so hard she had to lean fully into Alek's shoulder.
Jade slapped the table hard enough to rattle the forks.
Sienna pointed at her husband and said, "He has a point, sweetheart.
" Mikhail groaned with his entire body and slid halfway down his chair.
Ivan, deadpan, said, "I am extremely sweet.
In private. Where it is private. Where there are no witnesses and no cake. "
Jade reached over without warning and kissed his pink-flowered cheek.
"Confirmed," Jade said.
He turned the color of his hat.
I sat there in the warm lamp light with Daniil's hand still in mine across a table of cake crumbs and crooked party hats, and let myself look at all of them.
Four men who had walked in carrying meeting weight, now wearing pastel cones and child-painted faces, soft at the edges.
A little girl with paint on her nose holding a stuffed bear with a matching paint heart.
The man I had just told I loved, and who had said it back, sitting next to me with his birthday card pressed against his chest. I had watched him come back from being gone.
I had watched him sit still for a child with a pink pastel.
I was going to remember this day for the rest of my life.