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“Uh oh. Is she a fun drunk or a mean drunk?” I asked, now curious.
He sighed. “Neither. She’s a sappy drunk.”
“Ohhhh, that’s the worst kind. We’re going to have to learn her hard line,” I said.
“What’s that, solnishko?” Adrik asked, his hand lightly running up my back to the back of my neck, letting his fingers linger just on my hairline where he knew he could drive me crazy. It was innocent enough, but I wasn’t expecting it and I was suddenly hit with a warm tingle over my entire body. It took me a second to answer his question.
“It’s what Max used to call the number of drinks someone could have before they switched from fun drunk to high maintenance drunk. Hard line for a hard no, don’t serve them anymore drinks than this or you’re crossing the line into dangerous territory,” I said, still trying to keep my composure as Adrik kept his hand on the back of my neck. I caught his eye. He knew exactly what he was doing and he was clearly enjoying it.
Armando, thankfully unaware, laughed. “That’s very good information to have for the future. I’ll pay attention next time.”
“Was she drinking the same drink all night or did she switch it up?” I asked, moving so that I was leaning back against Adrik’s chest, hoping to make it more difficult for him to reach my neck.
“She kept the same drink for most of the night, but switched it up at the end of the night,” Armando said.
“She’s complicated. That makes the hard line more difficult to predict. You have to keep her on the same drink to get accurate numbers. Once she switches, the data goes out the window and you have to start over,” I said, grabbing Adrik’s arms and wrapping them around my waist, trying to safely trap him. Instead, he just discreetly slipped his hands under my shirt, tracing circles on my bare skin. I took a deep breath, trying to maintain control.
Armando laughed again. “Sephie, you always have the most valuable insight.”
I smiled at him and shrugged my shoulders. “It’s a gift.” I thought for a moment, then added, “You know she’s very insecure with herself, right? She’s a nice girl, but she’s worried no one likes her, which ironically makes people not like her. The more you can reassure her that she’s great and doesn’t need to compare herself to others, the less she’ll feel the need to drown her anxieties in alcohol.”
Armando looked stunned. “I had no idea. She has no reason to be insecure. She’s a beautiful woman. Why would she be insecure?”
“Eh, women are complicated. She has no reason to be insecure, but she doesn’t believe that. She’s trying to live up to an unrealistic ideal in her head, like most women. She needs to understand that you love her for the her she is right now. Not the her she thinks she needs to be,” I said.
He exhaled loudly. “You should seriously start charging for your services.”
Andrei said from the doorway, “That’s why she’s my relationship coach spider monkey.”
Once upstairs, I got to work on preparing enough food to feed our small army. Ivan and Andrei helped me while Adrik finished up a few things in his office. Armando had gone to check on Giana and promised to come up at least for a minute, with or without her.
“Viktor is going to be so happy when he gets back,” Andrei said, as he was washing a pan I needed to reuse. He turned to look at me, grinning. “He loves it when you cook. I mean, we all do, but he loves it loves it.”
I had to laugh. Ivan was sitting at the counter on the island. “Are we starting a bet pool for how long Armando and Giana are going to last, princess? I can go downstairs and get a white board.”
I exhaled loudly. “I mean. Yes. We should. But I also think Armando can save it. He’s clearly infatuated with her. He’s clearly been so since we were in Italy. I noticed the way he looked at her when she first came into his office that day of the meeting with the scummy lawyer. It wouldn’t surprise me if she wasn’t at all qualified for that job and he hired her anyway, just to be close to her. It doesn’t always happen, but sometimes someone else’s love is enough to break those dark thought patterns. The bigger question will be whether Armando is strong enough to pull her up or whether she’s going to pull him down.”
Adrik walked into the kitchen, asking, “Who’s pulling who?”
Ivan answered. “We were just discussing whether we should start a bet pool on how long Armando and Giana will stay together. Sephie thinks Armando might be able to save it. We can all see that he likely loves her. She said the bigger question is whether he’ll pull her up or she’ll pull him down.”
Adrik walked to me, standing behind me. He gently pulled me back against him as I was standing at the stove, waiting for a sauce to thicken. He moved my hair from my neck, kissing my cheek and lightly brushing my neck with his facial hair. I smiled, knowing he was still enjoying torturing me. He moved beside me, leaning against the counter, so he could look at Andrei and Ivan. “Armando is a strong man, but has always been unlucky with women. He’s been married at least twice, I think, and neither lasted very long. He had children with both of them, but it wasn’t enough to make it last.”
“Children are never the thing that will save a marriage,” Ivan said.
I picked the saucepan I was stirring off the stove and moved it to the center island. “Armando has a bit of a savior complex. I mean that in a good way, but it inevitably means he’s going to pick damaged people. He wants to fix them. He has to learn that not everyone wants to be saved.”
Andrei, done with the dishes, sat next to Ivan. “How did you get to be so accurate at reading people, spider monkey? Like every time you say something about someone, it’s always completely accurate and makes me feel dumb for not noticing it before.”
I smiled at him. “You shouldn’t feel dumb for not noticing these things, Bubba. I always thought I was a weirdo for doing so. You’re the normal one. Most people don’t notice these things.”
Ivan, now curious too, asked, “What were you like as a kid? Like did you drive your mom crazy just constantly diagnosing her?”
I laughed. “No. My mom is probably where I get this from. When I was little, she would teach piano lessons from the living room in our house. I was a quiet kid, so she would always keep me in the room so she could keep an eye on me while she taught. Sometimes I would play with whatever toy I had, but I would soon get bored with that, so I’d watch her interacting with her students. They would get frustrated because they couldn’t get the hang of something and she would always stop the lesson and talk to them about the rest of their life. She knew it was never about piano. It was always something else that was on their mind. Teachers are part psychologists, I think. I guess that’s why I notice the small details about people. It seems so obvious to me because I’ve been doing it for so long. As I got older, I would do my homework in the room that her students would wait in for their lesson. I started to be able to tell when something was off when they walked into the house. As they walked into the living room for their lesson, I would cough to let my mom know they needed to talk. Pretty sure most of her students just thought I was asthmatic or something. I coughed a lot,” I said, laughing.
Adrik crossed his arms across his chest. “Those students probably still have no idea how lucky they were to have your mom as a piano teacher.”
I smiled. “A few of them do. I occasionally run into her former students. They recognize my hair and ask if it’s me. The few I’ve run into told me how she changed their life for the better.”
