Day 7
Vasily raves about my ravioli and has a good laugh at the effort Camilla made in getting the phone to me when I tell him it’s her recipe and then have to confess how I was able to get it from her. He texts himself with it so he can get the number and tells me to keep it powered up so he can text or call me when he wants.
I kiss him when he tells me he’ll let me go to my audition on Monday. It’s nothing more than a peck on the lips, and I blush hotly from it like I haven’t literally had his penis in my mouth, but it’s a different sort of thing. I’ve never understood how my friends can have casual sex with people that they’ve just met, but that kiss helps explain it.
I was blindfolded the first time I had sex with Vasily. He didn’t kiss me in the gym until it was all over. There’s a level of intimacy we haven’t experienced yet.
I don’t know that we ever will. I don’t know how Vasily truly feels about me. He considers this temporary, after all. This could be what all new relationships feel like whether you expect them to last two weeks or forever. If my plan works, I don’t know if I’ll be able to build a real relationship with him or if it’ll always be blindfolds and sex from behind where we can’t make eye contact.
That bashful peck on his lips that pinks his cheeks up, too, might be it for us.
It doesn’t help any that he’s home the next morning, but not mentally. When he wakes up, he does his usual morning routine of shaving off the side of a nondescript white pill and using a straw to inhale it before lying back down for a few minutes. He’s slower to get up this time, though, his coffee already cooling by the time he joins me in the kitchen, and instead of a morning cigarette, he smokes a joint with it. After those first few days here, Vasily’s finally been home more since we made that video, but is he really?
If Vasily gets me pregnant, I’ll be a mom at twenty. I’m not going to have the money I was raised to expect from my husband, so I’ll have to decide if Vasily makes enough that I can stay at home with the kid or if I’ll need a job, too.
I have no skills. My dream has always been to work at a local theater, and that’s hardly more than a volunteer job. I’ll love every second of it, and it’s something that a wealthy husband would support because it’ll make him look good, but I can’t imagine I’d make a living in that field.
If Vasily can’t be relied on because he’s high all the time, if his brother gets tired of his antics or there’s a shift in power, where will that leave us?
I spend the day stewing on it as we move around each other in the cramped apartment. I swear Vasily is following me. No matter where I go, whether it’s the kitchen or the bedroom or the living room or the porch— and that’s it because there’s literally nowhere else to go— he’s next to me ten minutes later, silent and dopey-eyed, sitting just close enough that whenever I shift, we brush against each other.
It’s suffocating.
We go out for lunch at a sub shop around the corner, and Vasily’s so stoned he can barely speak his order, but the employee knows what he likes. We take another walk in the park afterward, and I try to have a casual conversation with him but only get monosyllabic answers. It takes a while for me to realize he’s using his fake accent, and I’m too perturbed to say anything. I walk in silence, and we only do two laps around the park before I head back to the apartment.
“You are upset, zvyozdochka,” he finally says as the sun is going down on the day and we’ve settled next to each other on the couch so I can get some work done. With everything going on, I’d all but forgotten that audition, and I haven’t studied the lines at all. I’m attempting to mouth them in a silent rehearsal, but I’m not retaining anything. “Can I help?”
“No!” I snap at him, but then I feel bad because he has no idea I’ve been working up a mad at him, so I moderate it to, “It’s just running lines for that audition.”
“Mmmm, no, I guess not.” He pulls his phone out and fires off a message. My phone dings a second later, and he says, “That’s Kseniya’s number. Call her tomorrow. She’ll help. She’s very theatrical.”
I can’t help but laugh. Yeah, I can definitely see that. And the fact that just a couple words from him have me laughing again gives me the encouragement to say, “You, umm, take a lot of drugs, Vasily.”
Immediately he frowns and leans away from me.
I shouldn’t have said anything.
But I need to.
“I’m not judging you or anything.”
“If you weren’t judging me,” he says, his tone surprisingly crisp when he was little more than pudding a moment ago, “you wouldn’t be talking about it.”
“I just want to understand,” I tell him. “It’s not like you’re partying, you know. We did nothing all day. Did you really need to do drugs just to do nothing all day?”
He crosses his arms over his chest and narrows his vision on the TV in front of us, currently off. “You don’t understand.”
I know I shouldn’t match his energy, but I can’t help it. “Yeah, that’s literally what I just said. I don’t understand. Help me understand.”
“It’s none of your business.”
“I’m stuck here another week. So yeah, it kind of is!”
“And then you’ll be gone forever. So actually, it isn’t.”
His words hurt. I stare at him as he stubbornly looks away. I study his profile, the wrinkles in his pale brow, the tick in his jaw, on down to the white of his knuckles.
“Well then, what does it hurt anything if you tell me?” I say more softly. “I’ll have that knowledge for the next week, and then I’ll be gone forever and you can forget you ever told me. I’ll just be gone.”
His jaw isn’t just ticking. As I speak, it begins to move in a more pronounced manner. He’s grinding his teeth. But that’s what drug addicts do.
After an impossibly long silence in which Vasily makes it painfully clear he’s not going to open up, I add. “Kseniya told me about, or I guess didn’t tell me but mentioned Brooke. Do the drugs have—?”
Vasily grabs my phone and throws it against the wall. “You know what, forget that number. She’s not welcome here.” Before I can chew him out about the phone or talk reason into him about Kseniya, he storms out of the apartment. I don’t see him for the rest of the night.