by Megan Hart
She was quiet after that. They reached the smooth, flat area and the rocky outcrop a few minutes after that. It hadn’t changed. The moon glinted off the water that rippled in a faint breeze. Her toe caught a rock, which leaped across the ledge and through the air to the water beyond. She waited for the sound of it hitting. Ilya had moved on ahead of her to stand at the edge.
“Funny how it never freaked me out how high this was, back then,” he said quietly. “We’d jump off it like it was nothing.”
“That’s what you do when you’re young. You jump without thinking. When you get older, you start to be afraid of breaking something.” Theresa stood beside him, looking down into the water. It was going to be cold, she thought. And there was no way she was jumping from here.
“The rope’s gone.” He jerked a thumb back toward the closest tree. “But you can still get down the path there to the water. If you don’t want to jump from the ledge, I mean.”
She looked at him. “Do you want to?”
“It’s dangerous,” Ilya said.
“Yes.” She waited for him to continue and, when he didn’t, added, “but we’ve come all this way.”
“That doesn’t mean we can’t change our minds.”
She thought about the truth of that for a few seconds before she answered. “Are you saying this because you’re afraid I’m going to laugh at your junk?”
“Because I’m . . . damn, woman. Again with the jabs about what I’ve got going on in my jeans. If you’re not careful, I’m going to start thinking you’re dying to find out.”
She laughed at that. “Dream on.”
Staring her down, Ilya stripped off his shirt and let it fall to the ground. She wanted to look away but refused to give him the satisfaction. His gaze stabbing hers, he undid the button of his jeans and pushed them over his hips to stand in front of her in a pair of tight red briefs.
“What?” Ilya said, throwing out his hands and giving her a head wag. “What, you can’t handle it?”
Without a word, Theresa unzipped the hoodie to reveal the thin tank top she’d been wearing as pajamas. The night air was much warmer than it had been for months, but nevertheless her nipples peaked against the soft fabric. Ilya was no longer snaring her gaze; he was checking out the front of her shirt. More warmth flooded her, even as gooseflesh rose along her arms and the fine hairs at the back of her neck. She hooked her thumbs into the waistband of her pajama bottoms, then slipped them over her thighs and stepped out of them to stand, clad in only the tiny lace panties she’d been wearing when he texted her.
“Are we doing this?” she asked him. “Or are we just talking about it?”
Ilya looked toward the water. The moon at this point had risen high enough so that their shadows stretched out long and dark in front of them. It cast a shimmer on the rippling waters below.
“If we’re doing it, we’re doing it together.”
“Deal.” Theresa moved to the edge and held out her hand for him to take. He did, standing beside her with his fingers squeezing hers. Together, they peered over the edge.
She did not want to jump.
She could think of at least a hundred things she’d rather do than leap off this ledge and plunge herself into the frigid quarry waters. Yet here she was, and she was the one who’d urged him to do it. The same way she’d convinced him to sell the quarry to begin with, then had led him toward buying the diner. She wasn’t going to back out now.
“Are you scared, Theresa?”
“Yes.”
“You never liked to jump,” Ilya said. “You always went down the hill.”
She straightened, lifting her chin. “So tonight’ll be a first.”
“Your first time,” Ilya said with a lilt in his voice, laughter that faded into a smile. “I’m honored.”
“Let’s go,” Theresa said. Before she lost her nerve.
They put their toes over the edge, looking down.
“One,” Ilya said. “Two . . .”
“Three!” They both cried at the same time, leaping together.
Hurtling through the air, Theresa was convinced she’d made the wrong choice. She would bounce off the rocks, break her bones. She would drown and die here in the same spot Jenni had so many years ago, but this would not be an accident. She’d done this to herself, her own bad decisions . . .
Somehow, she hadn’t let go of Ilya’s hand. When they hit the water, Theresa tried to scream, but nothing came out beyond a startled squawk. She’d forgotten to hold her nose, and grabbed for it at the last second as the water engulfed her and everything went dark. She’d closed her eyes but opened them as she kicked, frantic to get herself to the surface. Panicking a little.
She broke the water with a gasp that became a delighted shout. “Yeah-h-h-h!”
Beside her, Ilya surfaced. He sprayed a long blast of water and kicked to end up on his back, arms spread. “Nice.”
Theresa treaded water, pushing the hair out of her face. Her teeth started to chatter, chipping her laughter into tiny shards like crushed ice. She splashed at him. He splashed back.
“We didn’t bring any towels,” Theresa said.
There was no question of them lingering in the water. In the hottest days of August, the temperature would’ve been barely tolerable for a long period of time. In late April, even after a mild winter, the water was already turning her toes numb. She struck out for the shore, finding her rhythm after a moment or so. It had been a long time since she’d gone swimming.
They made it up the hill to the ledge, where she grabbed up her hoodie and slipped into it with a grateful sigh. Her pj bottoms next, though the fabric clung to her wet legs and made it hard to get them on without a struggle.
Ilya was having similar problems with his jeans, but finally they managed to get dressed. He sat with his legs over the edge, and after a minute, Theresa joined him. Hip to hip, shoulder to shoulder. She was far from dry, but her teeth had stopped chattering.
“I haven’t done that in a long time,” Ilya said after a while. He shrugged, not looking at her. “I’ve been in this water thousands of times since . . . then. But never from here. Never off the ledge like this. I’ve come out here so many times, but I was never able to do it.”
The hitch in his breath alarmed her. When he bowed his head, shoulders hunched, and let out a long, low sigh, she did the first thing she thought of—she put her arm around his shoulders. Ilya pressed his face against her shoulder.
“I loved her so much, Theresa.”
Her throat closed, hot tears sparking the backs of her eyes. She blinked them away fiercely and half turned to press her lips to his wet hair. “I know you did. She was easy to love.”
He laughed hoarsely. “No. She was fucking hard to love, Theresa. Nobody else seemed to think that. Only me. And by the time I figured out that it didn’t have to be so hard, it was too late.”
Theresa stroked a hand over his hand and the back of his neck. She let her hand settle between his shoulder blades. His shirt was damp, but the heat from his body came through it. She listened to the sound of him breathing.
“I thought for a while that it was my fault. That she’d done it, you know, on purpose. To herself. Because of me.”
“Ilya . . .”
He shook his head, sitting up but not moving away. He swiped at his face angrily, perhaps ashamed of the tears that glittered on his cheeks in the moon’s fierce white glow. “I thought I’d done something to her to make her hate her life so much that she wanted to end it.”
Theresa had never heard even a rumor that Jenni had committed suicide. “I always thought it was an accident. Nobody ever said otherwise.”
“That’s what they determined. That she was high and drunk and she came out here.” He slapped at the stone beneath them. “Here, right here, and she fell. She broke her neck, did you know that? She didn’t drown. They found drugs and booze in her blood, but I guess they can tell if you’re already dead before you hit the water.”
; “If her neck broke and she didn’t drown,” Theresa said carefully, “then at least she didn’t feel anything.”
Ilya barked out a humorless, harsh laugh. “She didn’t feel anything, anyway. She was doped up and shithammered drunk. She was stupid. And it killed her.”
“It wasn’t your fault, Ilya.”
He looked at her. “It will always feel like my fault. No matter what. Because I loved her, and she needed me, and I didn’t see whatever was going on with her. I failed her, and she died.”
Theresa didn’t know what to say to that. There could be no convincing him he was wrong, because she wasn’t totally sure he was. Jenni had needed someone, and Ilya had not been able to figure out what to do for her. Theresa didn’t think that meant he needed to take the blame for her death, but she knew better than most how it felt to bear the burden of guilt for someone else’s problems. Especially about addiction.
“My dad could never get his act together,” she said after a moment. “He’s been an addict for a long time. He couldn’t ever quite commit to one thing. Sometimes it was alcohol. Most often it was pills, though not always the same ones. He’d take whatever he could get.”
Ilya looked at her. “For how long? Back then, too?”
“I’m sure. Definitely before he met your mom. It was better when they got together, believe it or not.”
Ilya shook his head. “That might be the first time my mother was ever a good influence on anyone.”
“I don’t know if she was a good influence.” Theresa gave a rueful laugh. “But they were better together, at least until things ended up going so bad.”
He nudged against her. “You know, I was never that nice to you. Back then.”
“You were okay.” She nudged him back.
“It wasn’t because I didn’t like you. I mean . . . I didn’t think anything about you. Back then.”
Theresa laughed. “You weren’t supposed to, I guess. I was just some kid that came in and kicked Niko out of his room.”
“He got the attic. That was way better.” Ilya looked at her. “He still has it, now that I think about it. The bastard.”
“Not for much longer.” She paused, thinking about whether to tell him about what Alicia had shared with her about moving in with Niko. It wasn’t her news to share, and it had already been a tiny bit of a shitshow night.
Ilya shrugged. “He’s going to move in with Alicia. I guess that means she’ll sell the house. Where does that leave you?”
Theresa shrugged, relieved she hadn’t been the one to spill the beans. “I’ll be okay. She said it’ll be months before she’s ready to even put the house on the market, and they plan to travel a bit in the meantime. That’ll give me enough time to work on some things. She’s not pulling the rug out from under me or anything like that.”
“I want to be happy for them,” Ilya said.
She pursed her lips. “I’m sure you do.”
“He’s my brother. I mean, he’s the only one I have.”
She thought about this for a second. “Yes.”
“I’m not trying to be a dick about it,” Ilya said sincerely, twisting to face her. “Galina seems to think we should all become one big happy family again, including you, apparently. But I don’t think of you as my sister.”
There didn’t seem to be a good answer to that. He was looking at her like he thought she might be insulted, but there wasn’t anything to be offended by. There might’ve been a hot second or so years ago when she’d viewed him as her brother, but that time had come and gone.
They sat in silence, both of them swinging their feet and looking out across the water. She was grateful for his warmth against her. The night was cooling as the moon moved across the sky and moved on toward morning. She could no longer hold back a yawn.
“I want to buy the diner,” Ilya said. “I want you to help me run it. Will you, Theresa?”
Maybe it was the lateness of the hour, her brain fuzzy with the desire for sleep, but she turned to him with a smile. “Yes. Okay. Fine. Let’s do it.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Then
There was shouting going on, muffled behind his mother’s bedroom door. Galina and Barry had been going at it, on and off, every day since the funeral. Ilya didn’t care what was going on with them; he didn’t care if they were breaking down or angry or grieving or in the depths of despair or anything else.
His whole world went dark, and nothing else mattered.
Still, the constant rise and fall of their angry voices drifting through the wall between their two bedrooms made it hard to sleep, and that was all he wanted. To sink into oblivion. He would get drunk again, if the thought of taking even a single sip of booze didn’t make his throat convulse and sour spittle fill his mouth. He wouldn’t be able to drink a sip without puking at the reminder of how hungover he’d been. Not enough to get a buzz, much less hammered the way he wanted.
That left sleep, and he couldn’t find it. He put the pillow over his head, crushing it against his ears, but that didn’t help. Tossing and turning, sweating as though he had a fever, Ilya clutched at his head and considered gouging his thumbs into his ears. He pressed them against his closed eyes instead, seeing the bursts and pinwheels of color.
Another rolling rumble of furious noise drifted toward him, and he swung his legs out of bed to get up. In the kitchen, he got a glass and opened the fridge, but nothing inside appealed to him, so he settled for a glass of tepid water from the faucet. It turned his stomach. At the sound of footfalls behind him, he put the glass on the counter and rested both his hands on it. Shoulders hunching. If it was Barry, Ilya would fucking punch him right in the throat. If it was his mother . . .
“Hey.” It was Theresa.
Ilya turned. “What.”
“I can’t sleep, either.”
“They should shut the hell up.”
Theresa moved toward him hesitantly. “They’ve been fighting for days. They’re not going to stop just because we can’t sleep.”
“We have school in the morning,” he hissed after a second, the horror of this truth twisting his mouth and making him spit the words. His fists clenched. How could he go to school tomorrow or any day after that? How could he do anything for the rest of his life?
Jenni was dead.
She was going to be dead forever. He could do nothing about it. It would never change. How could school matter? How could anything?
“I just want to sleep,” he said. “I want to sleep and not wake up. Okay? That’s all I want right now. I just want to sleep.”
His voice broke, and he turned away to hide the fact that he was about to break down in tears like a baby. Behind him, he heard Theresa leaving the kitchen. He considered gripping his glass hard enough to break, or tossing it into the sink to watch it shatter. Instead, he left it carefully on the counter, knowing it would make his mother lose her mind to find it there instead of the dishwasher.
Upstairs, the sound of the argument had faded, at least until he got back into bed. Then it started again, a rolling rise and fall of shouting and weeping. So far there’d been no sounds of anything breaking, no crack of flesh on flesh. If Barry hit Galina, Ilya would have to consider defending her. He wouldn’t put it past her to take a crack at Barry, though, and then what?
“Ugh,” he muttered. “Just shut up. Shut up, shut up, shut the hell up—”
“Ilya?” Theresa rapped on his door frame. “Can I come in?”
He gestured. She moved forward, holding out her hand, her fingers clenched around something. She turned her palm up and showed him the small oblong pill. She offered it to him.
“What’s that?” Ilya asked suspiciously.
Theresa lifted her chin. “It will help you sleep.”
“Yeah, but what is it?” He didn’t take it.
“I don’t know,” Theresa said. “I got it from my dad’s . . . drawer. But I know it’ll help you sleep.”
He sat. “Did you take any?”
“No. I’ll be okay. You should have it. At least you’ll be able to sleep.” She offered it again, though she hadn’t moved any closer.
Ilya had done his share of drinking and smoking a little weed now and then, but he’d never gotten into pills. You could get seriously messed up with pills, like long-term shit. “Nah. I’m good.”
“Are you sure?” Theresa closed her fingers around the pill in her hand.
“You shouldn’t be stealing your dad’s meds,” he said, aware that he sounded snotty about it. It wasn’t like he even really cared.
She laughed. “He won’t notice. Trust me.”
“Thanks,” Ilya said. “But no thanks. I don’t want to get messed up in any of that. You shouldn’t, either.”
He wasn’t sure why this made her look so stricken, why her eyes glistened with tears and she swallowed hard against an obvious lump in her throat. Her voice was cracked and shaky when she answered. “No. I’m not. I don’t want to be. I didn’t mean that you should be. I just wanted to help.”
Ilya settled onto his pillow with his hands folded on his chest, staring at the ceiling. The noise from his mother’s room had gone silent, finally. “Thanks.”
“It’ll be okay,” Theresa whispered.
He didn’t look at her. “No, I don’t think so. Just leave me alone.”
And, after a few seconds of silence, she did.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Theresa’s father didn’t look good. Pasty. Circles under his eyes. He’d lost weight. Still, his gaze was clear, and he met hers unflinchingly as she took the seat across from him at the coffee-shop table. She hadn’t hugged him when she came in.
“It’s good to see you, Ter.”
Her father was the only one who’d ever called her that, and she’d never liked it much. Theresa flashed back to how different it had felt when Babulya had called her Titi, an endearment, a nickname born of affection and not simply a truncating of her name for the sake of convenience. She’d never told her dad not to call her that, though, so it was her own fault that he still did.
“Thanks for coming,” she said.