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He smiles at me and my insides flip and roll. “Yes, you have. Deep down, you’re a good girl, Piper.”
“Fine,” I admit. “I am. What about you?”
“Am I a good girl, you mean?” He bats his lashes at me, and I stifle a laugh.
“Are you as bad as you seem?”
I ask the question easily enough, but as it settles between us, layers of meaning pile on. His smile slips away and mine follows.
“I didn’t really have a choice. Someone had to take care of the house. It wasn’t going to be my mom.”
I see the path we’re heading towards. The dark trail of our shared traumas. Emotional vulnerability. Bonding. As quickly as possible, I take the fork in the road.
“Was it all bad?”
He looks up, surprised. “What? My childhood?”
“Yeah. What’s a good memory? I want to hear something happy.”
“You checked out the wrong book if you want happy stories,” he snorts.
“Come on, Timofey. There has to be a good time. Tell me about it.”
For a second, it looks like he might not answer. He pushes his food around his plate, his brow pinched together. Then he inhales. “There was one time.”
I lean forward to the edge of my seat. “Yeah?”
“It was after… Emily and I were living together in this youth hostel. It was an absolute piece of shit. Fly-by-night dump at its worst. The building was damn near abandoned and the owner accepted payment in whatever form they came in. Cash, coins, drugs, sexual favors—”
“I said ahappymemory,” I remind him. “So far, this sounds terrible.”
“Just wait. I’m getting to the good part.”
His blue eyes are alive with an excitement I haven’t seen in them… maybe ever. He looks ten years younger. I wave him on, and he slides back into the story.
“Emily and I were sharing a room. A bed, actually. It was a twin, so I let her have the mattress while I slept on the floor.”
It’s hard to imagine Timofey being the gentleman. Lying on the floor while a woman took the bed from him. It’s a testament to how much he cared about Emily that he did that.
Would he do the same for me?It shouldn’t matter, but the question burrows in my mind, taking up space and meaning. I want him to care about me that much.
“We stayed there for a while before the money ran low,” he continues. “I was just a kid, so finding work was a mess. Emily had it even worse. A young girl walking the streets and begging for money is only asking one thing in a lot of men’s minds.”
I wince. “Did she ever—”
“No,” he says quickly. “I worked hard to make sure it wasn’t necessary. But then we got behind, and the piece of shit who ran the hostel came knocking. He took one look at Emily and decided how we should repay our debts.”
“I hate to repeat myself, but this isn’t a happy memory, Timofey.”
He gestures for me to wait and keeps going. “Well, he propositioned Emily and told her she better be in his room by the end of the night or we’d be out on our asses.”
“What did you do?”
Timofey’s expression twists into dark amusement. “Well, I wasn’t quite as strapping as I am now, so I slipped into Emily’s sweater and stocking cap.”
I slap a hand over my mouth. “You didn’t.”
“Then I pulled the hat low and walked into the motherfucker’s room,” he chuckles.
