by Megan Hart
She had no home to get to, but he didn’t know that. The thought of driving again, even if it was only to the big-box store parking lot where she’d be able to park unmolested overnight, was enough to tighten her grip on the wheel again. Sleeping through this storm was going to be hard, too. Her hair was still wet, and she would have no place to dry it.
“Theresa,” Ilya said, the way he had in the diner. This time she looked at him. His expression was curious. More open and honest than she could ever recall seeing it. “I don’t want you to crash your car because you were good enough to bring me home. Again.”
She chuckled and shook her head. Lightning lit the car’s interior, bright as day, and she prayed hard for a moment to whatever greater power the universe provided that he didn’t look into the backseat and see her pillow and blankets, the deflated air mattress.
“C’mon in until the storm lets up.”
She nodded. Ilya counted to three, and they both got out, slamming the car doors and racing for the front door. They got there seconds ahead of another flash and crash, and Ilya pushed open the door so they could stumble into the entryway.
Theresa wasn’t surprised when he kissed her.
Somehow she seemed to have been expecting it. The looks. The touch. His reputation, if nothing else. She’d been waiting for Ilya to pull her into his arms, one of his hands flat between her shoulder blades so he could bend her as he captured her mouth the way he’d taken that spoon of tapioca pudding. Savoring, lingering, tasting.
Breathing hard, they both ended the kiss at the same time and moved a step apart from each other. Outside, the storm seemed to be moving away. The plink of water dripping off them onto the hardwood floor seemed very loud. Theresa put her fingertips to her lips.
“Don’t do this because you’re trying to get back at him. Or her,” she said quietly against her own touch. “This isn’t the same thing at all.”
“I’m not doing it to get back at either of them,” Ilya said. “Maybe just at you.”
She was the one who kissed him this time, pushing him back a step so that he bumped the newel post. Her hands anchored on his belt loops, her fingers hooking them for a moment, holding him still so she could explore his mouth with hers.
They didn’t break apart so abruptly this time. Softly, easily, ending with a brush of lip on lip, they parted. A moment or two after that, she let go of his belt loops so she could put another half step of distance between them.
“You want to talk to me all the time about how I don’t know you? Well, you have no idea who I am,” she said. “Not a single damned clue, especially if you think that kissing me will make me feel bad about convincing Alicia to sell. It won’t change my mind about you, either.”
“I’m sorry, Theresa.”
It was not what she wanted him to say, but the kicker of it was that he sounded sincere. Theresa nodded and shivered. Her clothes were soaked through. She went to the door and looked out through the door’s side windows.
“It’s still coming down really hard,” she said as though nothing had passed between them but the most casual of conversations.
She couldn’t decide if she was angry with him for the kiss or at herself for the one she’d given him. All she could be sure of was the lingering flavor of coffee and sweet jelly, and the memory of his heat against her. Behind her, she heard the shuffle of his feet on the bare wooden floor, and she tensed, waiting to see if he would touch her. Disappointed, a little, when he didn’t. Maybe only because it denied her the chance to refuse him.
“It’s a forty-minute drive back to Elisabethville,” Ilya said, naming the town he didn’t know she no longer lived in. “I can’t make you go out in that. Stay here tonight. You can have my bed.”
She turned to face him.
“I’ll be on the couch,” he said, seeing her expression. “Not like last time. You should have the bed.”
Snuggled beneath blankets that had covered him? Her head on the pillow that had cradled his? The sheets would smell of him. Sleeping in his bed without him in it beside her would be as intimate as those kisses they’d shared, yet would make her feel as distant as a stranger. She didn’t want to go out into the storm, not even to get her pajamas, but she most definitely did not want to sleep in Ilya’s bed alone.
“The couch is fine. I’ll need something dry to wear, though. And a hot shower first.” If she took one tonight, washed and combed her hair, she could braid it before she went to sleep. It would still be damp in the morning, but it would be tidy and professionally appropriate for the cold calls she’d planned to make.
“Sure. Of course.”
She followed him upstairs, where all the doors in the hallway were closed except for the one to the bathroom. She took the oversize sweatpants and T-shirt he was lending her and let herself linger in the shower, using up their hot water far beyond what seemed polite. With the almost-scalding spray beating down on her shoulders, she could close her eyes and pretend everything was going to be all right.
It wasn’t going to be, she thought when the water started to go lukewarm and she got out, drying herself with a towel embroidered with daisies that she swore she remembered from when she’d lived there as a girl. Nothing was going to be okay, not for a long time, anyway, and some of that wasn’t her fault, but some of it was.
She came out of the bathroom wearing Ilya’s clothes, her hair clean and braided so that it hung down over one shoulder. The rain still pounded the roof, but no light flashed through the windows at either end of the hall, and she heard no more thunder. She knocked softly at Ilya’s bedroom door, opening it at the sound of his voice.
“I changed the sheets,” he said. “You really should take the bed.”
“I can’t do that, Ilya.”
He shook his head. “No, really. I feel like shit, making you sleep on the couch—”
“It’s fine. I really don’t mind.”
“The bed’s big enough for two.” The offer might’ve sounded lecherous. Maybe was meant to be. He only sounded hesitant.
She could tell him that the lumpy couch was better than an air mattress in the backseat of her car. That she’d showered here not because of the chilly rain but because the other option would’ve been pits-and-privates in the bathroom of the discount store in the morning, early enough so that nobody would walk in on her. That she had enough money in her bank account to make the minimum payment on her outstanding loan and monthly bills, but nothing beyond that, and she chose to keep making those loan payments because every time she did, it chipped away a tiny bit at the seemingly insurmountable problem of getting her credit score above three hundred. She could have told him that almost everything she owned was in her car or a storage unit that was about to go up for auction if she couldn’t manage the back payments on it by next month. She could tell him this wouldn’t have been the first time she’d let a guy take her to bed simply so she’d have a place to spend the night.
At nearly two in the morning and wearing his clothes, Theresa didn’t have it in her to be honest.
“I don’t think it’s a very good idea,” Theresa said. “Do you?”
“I’m not known for my good ideas.” An unmistakable heat flared in Ilya’s gaze.
No hesitation this time. Definitely an invitation. One he’d no doubt made to countless other women who’d taken him up on it. Theresa was not about to share his bed. Especially not after that burning pair of kisses at the front door. How could she? What would she do? Screw him with his mother down the hall, his brother on the floor above them? In the house where they’d once lived as brother and sister? Theresa had made a lot of dumb choices in her life, but she was not going to make this one, no matter how tempted she was to explore the heat that had become so palpable between them.
“I really have to be up early.” That was the truth.
“Okay, then. Good night, I guess.” He sat on the edge of the bed. He waited until she got to the doorway before he said in a low voice, “Theresa.”
She half turned. “Hmm?”
“Why did you come and get me?”
“Because you asked me to,” she said. “Why was I the one you called?”
Ilya smiled. “Because I knew you’d come.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Then
“Wake up, girl. C’mon.”
Theresa fended off the tugging hands and grabbed at her comforter. She tried to burrow back into the pillows. It had to be a nightmare, but no, again the blankets were yanked away, and her father’s hands were shoving. Pulling.
“Get up—now. Pack your shit. We have to go.”
Theresa, bleary-eyed, sat and gathered the blankets to her chest. “What’s—”
“She’s kicking us out.” Her father was hollow-eyed, hair sticking up all over the place. He stank of nervous sweat, and his gaze darted around the room without settling too long on any one place. He paced, grabbing things and throwing them in a giant black plastic garbage bag.
If she didn’t get out of bed and stop him, he was going to ruin her stuff. He’d done it before. Lots of times. “Dad, stop, I’ll get it.”
He tossed the half-full bag onto the floor in front of her. “We have an hour.”
“Or what? What happens in an hour?” She was already bending to scoop up the bag and put it on the bed, then pulled her suitcase from beneath it. This was probably the reason why she’d never put it in the basement along with everyone else’s. Maybe she’d always known, somehow, that she’d need it like this. Suddenly, in the middle of the night.
“She said she’ll call the cops.” Her father ran both hands through his hair. “Let’s go.”
“Why is she going to call the cops?” Theresa put the empty suitcase next to the garbage bag but turned to face him. She wanted to ask him what would make his still-new wife threaten him with the police. What had he stolen from Galina that would make her toss them both out like this? Money? Or something to sell for money? Galina was not the sort of woman to allow it, not even once. “What did you do to her?”
It was the wrong question. He whirled to face her, fists clenching. “Just pack your shit, Theresa. Whatever isn’t packed in forty minutes, you leave behind.”
There was no way she’d be able to fit everything in this room inside the single suitcase, not even if she used the garbage bag, too. She’d lived here for a little more than six months, and in that time, Galina had been generous to her. She claimed it was because she’d always wanted a daughter to spoil. A pretty bedspread and curtains, a shaggy throw rug, posters for Theresa’s bedroom wall like the ones Alicia and Jenni had across the street. Thinking of Jenni now made Theresa frown, the older girl’s death still raw, and a nightmare all its own.
Were these things important enough to her to take along? Was she even allowed? Theresa thought, her brain no longer fuzzy with sleep. Or would Galina accuse her of stealing them? Theresa focused. Pinpointing what, exactly, she needed to take and what she would have to leave behind. Her father had left the room, thank God, because his pacing and hovering were distracting.
She folded clothes quickly, pulling out what she’d need most from the drawers of the dresser that had been in this room when she moved in. Underwear. Socks. If she had to wear the same jeans for weeks at a time before they could get to the Laundromat, clean panties and socks made it easier. She pulled out a dark-green, short-skirted dress. Galina had taken her shopping to buy Theresa “pretty things.” The things her father had never known she’d want or need.
She would not cry.
The dress went in the suitcase, even though it took up too much room. T-shirts, jeans. The sweaters and pajamas she shoved into the garbage bag, careful not to stuff it so full that it would tear.
It took her thirty minutes to pack up everything she could possibly fit. The suitcase. A backpack. Her gym bag. The plastic trash bag. Her entire life in these four bags.
The sun was still an hour or so from rising when she hauled her suitcase out to her dad’s car. When she went back into the house to get the rest, Babulya was sitting in the kitchen. Theresa had been heading for the back stairs but stopped at the sight of the old woman in her head scarf, her gnarled hands resting on the table in front of her. Babulya had packed up a paper plate of cookies wrapped in plastic.
She would not cry, Theresa thought.
“These are for you. And take the sandwiches from the refrigerator. You’ll be hungry. Maybe not now,” Babulya said in her thick Russian accent. “But later.”
Faintly from the living room came the sound of muffled shouting. A skid of furniture legs on the wooden floor. Babulya didn’t look in the direction. Her gaze was steady on Theresa’s face.
“I don’t know what happened,” Theresa whispered.
Babulya shook her head. “Is Galina. Is your father. Not you.”
“But I still have to go with him. She’s kicking us both out, not just him.”
“Theresa!” Her father shouted and was hushed at once by Galina’s lower, but no less angry, voice.
Babulya opened her arms, and Theresa went to her. In the old woman’s embrace, she closed her eyes and thought of how it felt to be, even for just a little while, safe. Part of a family.
“Is not you,” Babulya repeated, and kissed Theresa’s cheek. “Never worry that it was you.”
In the end, it made no difference. Whatever her father had done, Theresa also had to pay the price for it. They were out of the Stern’s house before sunrise, their belongings tossed into the back of her father’s beat-up Volvo, and in a rattrap motel in the next town by breakfast time. Whatever had gone down between him and Galina, he wouldn’t talk about it to Theresa.
He talked about it on the phone to his soon-to-be ex-wife, though. Muttered conversations while Theresa lingered in the bathroom so she didn’t have to come out and pretend she wasn’t overhearing. Her father had done some shady things in the past, but whatever he’d gotten into this time must have been worse than anything. This was something he wasn’t going to get out from under; that was evident as three weeks passed before they moved from the motel into an equally crappy apartment close to the hospital where he had not yet, miraculously, lost his job.
Theresa never asked him again what he did to Galina to make her throw them out.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Alicia had only been home for a couple of days, but it seemed like a million years had passed since the last time she’d stood in the farmer’s market in Thailand, eating mangoes and sticky rice. A bagel with cream cheese and a large French vanilla latte weren’t quite the same, but that didn’t make it bad.
The travel had been fantastic, beyond her wildest dreams, but the money from the sale of the dive shop wasn’t going to last forever. If she was going to travel again, she’d need to go sooner rather than later, because soon enough she was going to have to start thinking about getting a job.
She sipped the hot drink and set it on the table, shrugging out of her jacket as she juggled her purse and laptop. She’d come to the coffee shop because sitting at home was becoming tedious and suffocating. She figured she’d start researching job possibilities, and maybe another trip, too.
She and Nikolai hadn’t talked about what would happen if she wanted to leave again. Mostly, they hadn’t talked about what they were doing with each other. She’d come home early to get back to him. He’d told her he missed her. They’d spent every night together since then. She’d caught him looking at her. A lot. Well, she guessed she was looking at him, too. Both of them had carefully sidestepped any discussion of their relationship beyond the here and now.
“Hey, Alicia. You’re home! How was the trip?”
She looked up to give Theresa a warm smile. She moved her bag off the opposite chair so Theresa could take it. “Amazing. Life changing. Have a seat. What’re you up to?”
“Getting ready to use the Wi-Fi, get some work done.” Theresa held up her computer bag. “I don’t want to bother you.”
“No bother.” Alicia looked around
the coffee shop, which was now full enough that there weren’t any open chairs other than the one she’d offered. “We can agree not to talk to each other, how’s that?”
Theresa laughed and slung her bag over the back of the chair. “No way. I want to hear all about your adventures. I saw the pictures on Connex. It looked fantastic.”
“It was.” Alicia moved her computer so Theresa had room to put hers on the table. Her plate and mug, too. The table was barely big enough for everything. “I’ll eat fast, then you can have room for a plate.”
“Not grabbing anything, don’t worry.” Theresa sat. “So, tell me about everything.”
They talked for half an hour as Alicia ate her bagel and finished up her coffee. She hit the trip’s highlights. The food. The views. The bugs.
Theresa shuddered. “No, thanks.”
“Yeah, you think the wolf spiders around here are bad . . .” Alicia grimaced. “Let’s just say there are some things I can never unsee.”
“Sounds like an amazing trip.” Theresa smiled.
“I’m going up to grab a coffee refill. You want something?”
“Oh . . . yeah, I guess I should have something if I’m going to be here for a while. Pay my rent, so to speak.” Theresa dug in her pocket for a crumpled dollar bill and a handful of nickels and dimes. “Can you grab me a plain bottomless cup?”
“I got it.” Alicia waved away Theresa’s protest. “C’mon, it’s a buck fifty, I think I can spare it.”
Theresa nodded, her eyes widening for a few seconds as her lips pressed together.
Alicia thought something seemed off about her, though she couldn’t quite put her finger on what it might be.
By the time Alicia brought back the drinks, Theresa had cleared away the empty bagel plate and set out her laptop. She’d brought an extension cord, of all things, to plug into the outlet closest to them, and she’d plugged both her phone and her computer into it.
“You’re prepared,” Alicia remarked.