Page 4 of Cruel Demands

“Alcohol is less distracting than men,” I tell him with a wink, then throw back my shot. The vodka burns all the way down. I wince so hard one eye closes.

Petyr points at me, delighted. “Stop pretending. Get a mixed drink.”

I shake my head, eyes still squeezed tight. “I’m trying to assimilate. I don’t want to be one of those study-abroad students who only eats McDonald’s, wears jeans, and asks why nobody smiles at them. I’m trying to experience the culture.”

He waves one hairy hand at me. “You’re too stubborn for me anyway.”

“And what’s good about you?” I ask, holding back a smile.

I try not to flirt with Petyr, but he makes it too easy. He has been chasing me since the first week of my language immersion program, when I misread a café menu so badly I accidentally ordered plain hot water and a plate of pickled fish. He corrected my Russian, bought me a pastry out of pity, and has been acting like that made us fated ever since.

And he is nice.

Or maybe not nice exactly, but kind. Normal. Interested.

And I’m going home in a year. It’s better not to get entangled.

“You drink like a fish,” I say, “and you spend all your money on it.”

“Everyone drinks in Russia. You should be lucky to end up with a man who has the money to do so.” He taps his chest, mock-wounded. “Besides, lyubov moya, I can change for you.”

My love.

He says it with a coy smile, a cloying tone in his voice that makes my stomach twist, because I wonder how much of it is still a joke beneath the teasing.

“I want to make my own money,” I mutter, standing from the creaking stool. My dress catches on the plasticky fabric, and I tug it back down, trying to keep Petyr from catching a glimpse of my skin.

No such luck. His eyes dart down, then back up to mine.

I press my lips into a tight line, annoyed. His palms rotate upward in silent apology, like he didn’t mean to see what I accidentally showed him and like that matters.

Petyr’s right, though. He’s a good man. Boyfriend material by any reasonable standard. He’s funny. He’s interested. He helps me with pronunciation when my tongue refuses to cooperate. He knows which bars water down their vodka and which cafés are kind to foreign students trying not to look lost.

But I cannot get my parents out of my head.

Their restaurant is still open, technically, but every month it brings in less than it costs to keep the doors unlocked. My father keeps saying he needs to sell before it takes the house down with it, but no one wants to pay enough to clear the business debt. So he keeps opening every morning, paying the lease, paying employees, replacing equipment that breaks, and losing a little more money each week.

The mortgage is bleeding them dry on top of it.

I keep thinking about the panic in my mother’s voice when she thought I couldn’t hear her talking to my aunt over the phone, the way I was acutely aware she was just a little girl talking to her sister in that moment.

And here I am, standing in a bar in Moscow, spending rubles on alcohol and calling it cultural immersion. The guilt crawls up the back of my throat, sourer than the vodka.

It isn’t as though I’m destitute. My scholarship covers tuition, most of my housing, and enough of my living expenses that I can afford to go out sometimes if I’m careful. My parents aren’t paying for my drinks.

That almost makes it worse.

I reach for my coat hanging over the back of my stool.

Petyr catches my wrist, not hard, not digging, his fingers an O around my bone. “Taylor,” he says, softer now. “I am teasing.”

“I know.”

“Then why do you look sad?”

The question makes the guilt even more persistent, a lump forming in my throat that I have to clear away. I hate when people who don’t know me well accidentally see me clearly. I especially hate when they do it while drunk and smelling like vodka and cigarette smoke.

“I’m not sad,” I say.