The Pieces Of Us (The Firebird Trilogy Book 3)

by Jennifer Loring

  “And ‘partner’ sounds like we run a law firm together.” Hannah, smirking, slurped iced tea through a straw.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t use English at all. What about ledi and dzhentl′men?”

  “Doesn’t sound all that different from English. ‘Lady’ and ‘gentleman’?”

  Alex chuckled. “Exactly.”

  “I like it. So…”

  “So.” He fingered the chain around his neck. She would want this for you. Anya will come around. “I guess we’re officially a power couple.”

  Hannah blotted her lips, then grabbed his chin and kissed him. “I know it’s been hard for you to get to this point. Thank you for letting me be here with you.”

  “Thank you for sticking around.” He kissed her burger-flavored fingers.

  “This calls for a celebration. In my kitchen, maybe.” She inched her free hand a little higher up his thigh, sending a thrill straight to his cock. No medication was quite like a woman’s touch.

  “I think you’re right. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Anya

  The loudspeaker above the door in her Economics class crackled. “Anya Volynsky, please report to the conference room immediately.”

  Aside from a childish “ooh” or two—you’d think people would be over that shit as seniors in high school, but no—a scandalous hush fell over the classroom as she collected her books and exited into the hall. Her mind performed an impressive array of contortions to convince her it wasn’t what she feared, but rising panic inundated any other explanation.

  Lucas was already there. He was sitting opposite Principal Knost at an oval table, gnawing on his thumbnail, his gaze glued to the table. The principal glared at him like a juror already persuaded of the defendant’s guilt.

  In another chair, at one end of the table, was Dad. Anya’s leaden stomach dropped to the center of the Earth.

  The principal gestured to one of the chairs on Lucas’s side. “Have a seat, Anya. One of your peers suggested there might be an inappropriate relationship between you and Mr. Donovan, so we wanted to get your side of things.”

  “Was it Noah Sinclair? Because he’s obsessed with me and—”

  “We need to keep that information confidential in order to prevent retaliation.” Principal Knost folded her hands on her desk, her forehead creased and her lips compressed. “Now sit. Please.”

  Anya tossed her bag at the base of the chair and slumped into it. “If it’s just to get our side, why is my father here?”

  “The student in question said you and Mr. Donovan were witnessed kissing. I’m sure you understand such behavior is forbidden, and as a result requires disciplinary action for both student and employee.”

  Dad was doing that noisy breathing thing through his nose. With his stubbly chin held high and his eyes bordering on protuberant, nothing about this bode well.

  “Mr. Donovan, please tell us if you have had contact of a romantic nature with Miss Volynsky.”

  “Is it necessary to question me in front of her father?”

  “Please answer the question, Mr. Donovan.” Principal Knost’s eyebrows were never going to unknit themselves at this rate. She’d thinned her mouth to the point that her coral lipstick had feathered into the creases above her upper lip. Her stiff up-do added ten years to her appearance.

  “I…” He cleared his throat. “I kissed her on several occasions.”

  “Where did this occur?”

  He sank deeper into his chair. “At my house, at her house, at a club, and at the prom.”

  Dad was an apoplectic red, his hands balled so tightly in his lap his fingers might have fused into permanent fists. His silence, however, remained the worst harbinger of his wrath.

  “Despite having read and signed off on the employee handbook, which expressly forbids you to have a student in your home, to go to their home, and most importantly to engage in physical contact beyond the constraints of your job as an athletic trainer.”

  Lucas looked at nothing and no one in particular. “Yes, ma’am.”

  The principal swiveled toward Anya. “Is that correct?”

  “Yes,” she mumbled.

  “Mr. Donovan, are you attracted to Miss Volynsky?”

  He gaped at Principal Knost. His mouth worked until he croaked, “Yes.” Then he sagged back in the chair and muttered, “That’s obviously why I kissed her.”

  “I wanted him to,” Anya piped up. Easier to repress her smirk if she was talking. None of it had been in her head after all. “He wasn’t taking advantage of me, or—”

  “The motivations and circumstances aren’t relevant,” Principal Knost said. “Mr. Donovan, we regrettably have one course of action available to us, and that is to dismiss you immediately. A security guard will escort you to your office so you can get your things. You are not to set foot on school grounds again, for any reason. Is that clear?”

  Lucas did not respond as he rose from his chair, though he shrugged off the guard who tried to put a hand on his shoulder. The door closed behind him. No goodbye, but now they didn’t need one. They were free to do as they pleased. She’d text him when this was all over. Maybe they’d even go on a real date.

  “As for you, Miss Volynsky, I’m proposing a five-day suspension.” The principal pushed a written notification across the table. “We won’t mark this against her academic record, as it’s unrelated to her performance, but we need to send a message, Mr. Volynsky. This is a serious matter.” She looked down her nose at both of them. “I could—and should—revoke her status as probable salutatorian.”

  Dad’s voice exploded out of him like steam from a rocket launch. “What? She’s never been in trouble. Eto pizdets!”

  Oh, God. Here came the Russian curses.

  “She’s eighteen years old and two months from graduating! What message do you think you’re sending?” He jabbed a finger at her. “This is your fault for hiring him in the first place! Weren’t you a teenager once? Did you honestly think not one of these girls would fall for a boy fresh out of college?”

  “Dad.” Anya yanked his arm. She’d have to be the rational one, now that Principal Knost had shrunk back from her mountainous, enraged father. “Let’s just go.”

  “You’re lucky I don’t sue you!” He blew through the conference room and flung open the door with enough strength that Anya checked as she followed him out to ensure the knob wasn’t embedded in the wall.

  Hannah was standing a few feet away, scrolling through something on her phone. Anya’s muscles tensed. Her pulse raced with her father’s inherited fury.

  “What the hell is she doing here? She’s not family.”

  The source of his wrath properly re-identified, Dad loomed over Anya and thrust one of those long fingers into her face like a blade. “Don’t you dare disrespect her when you’ve already embarrassed me like this!”

  “It’s always about you! Now you bring her into our personal business—”

  “Give me your car keys.”

  “What?”

  Red-faced, he gritted his teeth. The veins in his neck throbbed. One at his left temple palpitated as if with a life of its own. “Give me your car keys. I don’t trust you to drive yourself home.” He held out his hand. “Now.”

  Fighting tears, she hunted through her bag and slapped them into his palm.

  “I’ll drive the Mercedes home. You’ll ride in the BMW with Hannah.”

  She loathed the way he spoke her name. Breathy, elongated syllables with his European inflection—Haaah-naaah, savoring them like umami.

  “And you, little girl”—their noses almost touching, he fixed his blazing green glare on her—“will fucking apologize. Do you understand me?”

  The tears spilled over, but they did not sway him.

  “Now go.” Dad stalked away, fingers clamped around her keys, his spine rigid.

  Anya shielded her eyes with her hand. Her shoulders shook, though she held in the sound of her sobs
.

  “Hey, Anya…”

  She shoved past Hannah and marched to the doors. As soon as Hannah unlocked the car, Anya climbed in, buckled up, and angled her body toward the door.

  Hannah started the ignition. “You know, when I was your age,” she began, and offered the annoying chuckle of an older person about to launch into an irrelevant story from a dissimilar era.

  “Don’t try to be my friend. We’re not friends.”

  She let out a soft, beaten sigh as she backed out of the lot. “I’m not trying to replace your mother, Anya.”

  “Bullshit. He promised me. He promised he wasn’t looking for a girlfriend, and then you…” Anya laid her cheek on the window’s warm glass. The sense of betrayal scorched her veins like acid. God, Lucas was right. It all came back to Dad in the end. To her inconsolable need for the man who had died with Mom.

  “I care about your father very much, and you can’t demand he be alone when you’re moving hundreds of miles away in a few months. That’s not fair. He would do anything for you, but you can’t ask that of him.”

  Anya jerked up and pivoted toward her. She spat out the words, heavy and hot in her chest, like bullets. “You didn’t earn the right to tell me what I can and can’t do just because you’re fucking my father.”

  Hannah’s face drained of color, a canvas left out in the rain. She made a pained noise in her throat but said nothing else on the short drive.

  At the house, Hannah turned the keys over to Dad as Anya stormed up the front steps. He still had her keys, or she’d have gladly gone to her room. Hannah would tell him everything. How long did it have to simmer before he decided, after eighteen years, he’d found justification to hit her? First Lucas, then the ring, now this. Everyone had a threshold, his elevated to artificial heights by medication.

  They exchanged goodbyes and chaste cheek kisses. Dad joined Anya on the stoop and unlocked the door. Inside, he removed his shoes and started making tea as if she weren’t there. She closed the door, hung up her backpack, and kicked off her shoes.

  “Dad—”

  “We didn’t raise you like this. She would be so heartbroken and ashamed of the way you’ve been acting.” Grease-paint darkness smudged the skin under his eyes. “You don’t know what she went through when we were kids just to see me. And what she went through each time her father found out where she’d been.”

  The fight, the insistence she was an adult now and didn’t have to obey him, disavowed and deserted her. Mom hadn’t talked about Grandpa much and made vague allusions to his being not a terribly nice person. He’d been a cop for a long time, but Anya knew little else. He died before she was born.

  “So don’t act like you’re some martyr, Anya. You have no idea what love is. You have sacrificed nothing.” Dad flicked out his tongue to wipe away the specks of spittle ejected with the vehemence of his words. “Now go to your room. I don’t want to look at you right now.”

  “What did he do to her? Dad, please—”

  “Go to your room.” His voice teetered on the edge of shattering. “And stay there until I come for you.”

  She dashed up the stairs. She hoped he wouldn’t come, that he would leave her there to disintegrate in her bed the way Mom had. Maybe then, he’d love her half as much. In the interim, as she discovered when she tried to text Lucas, Dad had gone into their account and blocked outgoing calls and messaging from her number. No doubt he’d locked down any incoming contact too. House arrest for the next week, with a man who couldn’t stand the sight of her.

  When the door creaked open, it was close to six pm. She had several final papers to write and nothing else to do until she returned to school, but her compromised ability to think straight left her sulking on her bed and staring at the Jamie Benn poster on the opposite wall. Dad, silent, sat next to her. Then he gathered her into his arms and with stuttering breaths pressed his lips to the top of her head.

  “He hit her,” he murmured, “and did terrible things to her, and I couldn’t do anything to stop it. All I could do was love her, and it was all she asked of me. So I did. I love her to this day, and not one goes by that I don’t wish she were still here.”

  Terrible things. She guessed easily enough what it meant. Anya whimpered and melted into him. Pain seemed the way her parents knew how to experience life, except in their fierce capability for love. Almost in defiance of that pain.

  “But she can’t be, and I like Hannah a lot. I’m not asking for your permission, Anya—I don’t need it. But I am asking for your blessing. I’m asking you to be happy that I won’t be alone anymore.”

  She snuggled against him like the little girl she’d never again be. Mom had found safety in him, and no wonder. “I thought…Sometimes I think you don’t love me anymore. I mean, I know you do, but not…” What am I even trying to say?

  A small, strangled sound crawled out from between his lips. “What?”

  “You do, Dad, I know. I just…” She shook her head. “I’m sorry. Forget it.”

  “I would do so many things differently since the day we lost her, if I could. Whatever I had to do to stop you from feeling that way. I’m sorry I let you down, baby girl.” His voice cracked. So did she.

  “Don’t apologize to me. I don’t deserve it. I’ve been stupid and selfish and—”

  “Nyet.” Dad sniffed and offered a quiet laugh. “Maybe a little. No different from most kids your age. But you’ve had a lot to deal with. I put a lot on you. And I am sorry.” He hugged her. “Now.” Hands on his thighs, he pushed off from the bed. “That doesn’t mean you aren’t still in deep shit over this Lucas fiasco, and for what you said to Hannah.”

  “I kind of figured.” Her cheeks flamed. She primed herself for a lecture, but Dad was sniggering.

  “You clearly inherited my mouth. I don’t know how I feel about that yet. It’s gotten me into plenty of trouble for sure.” He cocked his head toward the door and held out his hand. “Come downstairs. I went to a cooking class last weekend. I think you’ll like what I made for dinner.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Anya

  Someone was unlocking the security door to Lucas’s building as Anya walked from the curb where she’d parked. She sped up, calling, “Can you hold the door? I forgot my key,” and the tenant was kind enough to oblige. She couldn’t wait to see Lucas’s face. Her limbs twitched with an energy she hoped she’d soon be discharging on her back.

  She had walked in on her parents a couple of times, when the heat of passion had led to absentmindedness and their door left unlocked. So it went with an only child; sometimes you just forgot they were around. A certain prurience, a desire to know what about her father’s movements beneath the sheets created that gaping, blissed-out expression on her mother’s face, had supplemented the sense of wrongness. What inspired Mom’s impatience to have Dad grunting and humping on top of her—this being long before Anya understood that many people, Mom above all, considered her father one of the most attractive men in the world. Before she knew their love story and what they had endured to enjoy those moments together in the first place. They did not take kindly, therefore, to coitus interruptus. Anya was tired of coitus being denied to her in the first place.

  She climbed the metal staircase instead of waiting for the elevator, though Dad had warned her not to use stairwells alone because he’d read something about women being attacked in them, and pranced down the hall to Lucas’s apartment. After a few light raps on the door, she scuffed her shoe against the Pergo and waited. Subdued footsteps, socks on the hardwood floor. The TV muted. The door opened with no small degree of hesitancy.

  “Can I help you? If you’re selling something, I don’t have the money right now.”

  Anya gaped at the auburn-haired woman standing in the doorway wearing jeans, layered T-shirts, and pink-and-purple striped socks. Older than Lucas, but not by much. That was fast. Tears seared her eyes as though she’d been staring into the sun. “Um…I was looking for Lucas, but I guess—�
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  “Sure you got the right apartment? There’s no Lucas here. I sure as hell don’t have time for a Lucas, or any other man.” The woman laughed, but when Anya failed to respond in kind, she tilted her head. “You okay? You look like your dog ran away.”

  He had no way to tell me. It’s not like he could’ve shown up at the house without Dad kicking his ass to the other side of Buffalo. Probably blocked his email address too. Anya bit her lip harder to contain a mounting sob and emitted a weird, stammering fpfpfp. “I’m fine. Thank you. Sorry to bother you.”

  The woman studied her with empathetic brown eyes, her mouth screwed downward. “No worries. Have a good one.”

  Anya stared at the red door, at the unit number belonging to Lucas. If she meant something to him, he’d have risked Dad’s wrath the way Mom had risked her father’s for Dad. Sacrificed. Given Dad an opportunity to see his story rebooted for a new generation with his daughter as the star, and how fitting. But Lucas had slipped away with tragic simplicity. Left her to clasp a wish with broken fingers. If she didn’t know what love was, neither did he.

  And she didn’t care to anymore.

  ***

  Alex

  Taking a cue from Stephanie, Alex used dinner at Anya’s favorite restaurant as an excuse to observe the interaction between her and Hannah. He had neglected to inform his moping daughter until the host seated them on the shaded patio, away from the indoor noise, that Hannah would be joining them. That wasn’t what bothered her though. He knew her too well, was too intertwined with sadness himself. There were many kinds, for many reasons; this was not the acute pain of her mother’s absence often striking both of them without warning, but a soul-deep longing only first love engendered. He was even more intimate with that.

  Khristos, what will it take for her to get over him?