Page 135 of Cruel Demands

I stare at him. The seller is now calling to someone at the next table. A man appears with two more boxes. “Mikhail,” I groan.

“You said you liked it.”

“I said I liked one thing.”

“You spent ten minutes looking at the others. You liked them also.”

I grab his sleeve. “I was browsing. You can’t buy an entire stall because I said one pin was cute.”

He looks down at my hand. I release him immediately.

“Clearly I can,” he says with a glint in his eyes.

I lower my voice. “You’re embarrassing me.”

“Well, stop arguing loudly in public about it, and no one will know.”

I narrow my eyes at him. He’s enjoying this. “You think you’re funny,” I say.

“Sometimes.”

“You’re not.”

“What do they say? Humor is subjective.”

The seller hands me the fox pin personally and tells me something that I don’t understand, a Russian colloquialism. “What did she say? I don’t know that one.”

Mikhail’s gaze shifts to the pin. “She said it suits you.”

“God, does a saleswoman ever stop?” I thank her in Russian, but she just beams at me, not moving. “What does she want?”

Mikhail sighs and takes the fox from me and pins it to my coat.

She says in English, “You like?”

For one absurd moment, I feel like I could cry.

But immediately afterward, the absurdity of it hits me, and I turn and stifle a laugh into Mikhail’s chest. He pets the back of my head and tells her in Russian that I like it so much I am crying with joy and thanks her.

When she leaves, he hisses to me, “You are mean.”

I pull away and flatten my hair down and pat my face, saying, “Sorry, sorry. I don’t know what came over me.” But I immediately break into a fit of giggles again.

He envelops me again, laughing with me about it, and he whispers into my ear, “I love you. Thank you for letting me spoil you.”

I don’t know what to say. When we pull back, his thumb is on my chin, and his brown eyes are absent the usual tight calculation.

“Fine,” I relent, “But if you are insisting on doing this to me, you have to wear your…wares.” I dig through one of the boxes Mikhail has apparently just purchased and find a brass pin shaped like a cluster of grapes. I hold it against his coat. “This one is you.”

“Why?”

“What a question. It’s about the vibes, Mikhail.”

He gives me a look but lets me pin it to him. I keep digging, and he points to a tray of cheap rings buried beneath a pile of tangled necklaces. He chooses one for me that is fake gold with a giant emerald gem, and I pick one for him that is crusted with fake rubies all around it.

“This is hideous,” I tell him as he slides it onto my ring finger like a joke.

“It has personality.”