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ChapterEleven
The foodin my mouth loses all sweetness.
His parents are dead?
I picture a little Art, orphaned, and a knot forms in my throat. “I’m so, so sorry.”
He gives me a tight smile. “It’s okay.”
No. It’s not. I reach out and cover his large hand with mine. “May I ask what happened?”
He lifts one broad shoulder in a shrug. “It was a bus accident. I learned the details from news articles when I was older. The driver lost control on an icy road, and the bus hit a truck, killing my parents along with several other passengers.”
I squeeze his hand. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it. It was long ago.”
I bite my lip. “So… were you raised by some relatives?”
“The government, actually,” he says as I pull my hand back. He sounds casual now, as if all of this is truly old news. “My grandparents had passed away by then, and my parents didn’t have other close relatives. Nor did they have a lot of friends in Moscow, since they’d only recently moved there.”
Pictures of rundown, overcrowded orphanages depicted in movies flit through my mind. My face must reflect the horror I’m feeling because he smiles faintly and says, “It wasn’t like what you’re thinking. My detdom was actually nice. At least it was for me. Ballet is very popular in Russia, and I showed talent at a young age. My teachers took pride in my career and made sure I was well cared for.” He tips his head to the side, studying me. “What about you? What is your family situation? You mentioned sisters, as in plural?”
I want to probe more, but I don’t want to upset him, and besides, we’re still in quid-pro-quo mode.
“My sister situation is as plural as it gets.” I brace myself. “There are eight of us.”
His reaction is typical, a flabbergasted expression that seems to say, “Why didn’t someone tell your parents ‘enough is enough’ around girl number five?”
“We fall into two groups,” I continue before he can pepper me with questions. “Two identical twins and six identical sextuplets. I’m part of the latter group—or litter, as some of us call it.”
The follow-up reaction is also typical. Now he’s trying to imagine an army of me and finds the idea terrifying. However, there’s also a wistfulness to his expression that I’ve never encountered during this conversation before.
“Sextuplets,” he mutters. “How?”
“It’s a long story.”
“How about you give me the jizz of it?”
My eyes nearly pop out of my skull. Am I so horny that I crave his jizz, or did he actually say that? “What?”
He frowns. “I just want the jizz of the story.”
Yep. I nearly fall back from hysterical laughter. When I recover, I say, “Are you sure you don’t mean the gist of the story?”
He pulls out his phone, taps at the screen a few times, and grins ruefully. “I guess my English is still far from perfect. I did mean ‘gist.’”
I try not to giggle. “Okay. Well, the twins came first, and jizz might’ve been involved in making them. Then our parents wanted a boy, but the natural method wasn’t working.” The part I skip is the detail my parents usually go into when talking about the Kama Sutra-like things they tried to make that baby boy. “Eventually, they underwent a fertility treatment—again, jizz was involved—and my littermates and I were the result. The Universe has a sense of irony.”
Instead of laughing, he’s regarding me with a difficult-to-read expression. “It must be nice to be part of such a big family,” he says, and there’s that hint of wistfulness again.
My chest tightens. I’m such an idiot. Here he is, telling me he’s all alone in the world, and I go and basically brag about my gaggle of sisters.
I try to make it better. “Growing up surrounded by so many girls isn’t as fun as it sounds.”
“I could see that,” he says. “Though we didn’t share blood, some of the boys at the detdom were like brothers to me, and there were more than eight of us.”
Huh. Do we have more in common than it seems?
