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She doesn’t.
“Katerina.”
She lets out a soft sigh. “If I look at you, then that makes everything real and I’m not ready for it to be real yet, okay?”
“But if I leave without you looking at me, then how can you be sure it was ever real in the first place?” I counter.
That gets her to open her eyes. My pulse races as my gaze meets soft brown ones.
“I don’t want you to leave,” she tells me quietly.
Her words are like a searing bolt to my chest, one that can’t be ignored. Before I can rethink my actions I’m climbing off my bed.
“Tell you what? What if I asked Mikayla to go pick Nate up from school? The both of them can hang out for a while.”
Katerina sits up at that and I see relief in her expression but also some confusion.
“So you’re not leaving?” she questions.
I make sure to look her in the eye as I pull on my boxer briefs. “I told you. I’m done running away, princess. This is here and now. We can’t keep living in the past.”
She still looks doubtful but I have every intention of proving myself to her. After making the call in which my sister was all too happy to oblige, I’m climbing back into bed beside her. We sit in silence for a couple of seconds, her backs resting against the headboard.
This is hard. There’s no denying that. We have so much to unpack, so many things we need to figure out. I remember reading or seeing something somewhere, in a book, a movie where one of the characters asked the other how they could work on removing their armor. The reply was simple, adequate, just three simple words. One at a time.
And I relate so much to that in this moment. Because if there are two people who have been living with armor our whole lives. It’s me and Katerina. Her much more than me. She lives with so much of it, I’m not sure it would be possible to take it all off. But I plan to help her.
“Answer me this, princess,” I start. She looks sideways at me. “What do you wish for the most in the world? Tell me three of your greatest heart desires.”
That makes her smile. It’s a soft, warm smile, “Since when are you a genie, Alexander?”
“Just tell me,” I prompt.
“Alright,” she says, “But three things don’t even begin to cover all that I want if I’m being honest.”
“Too bad, I asked for three,” I state. She looks at me imploringly and I find myself caving. “Okay fine. Five things?”
She nods, happy with my amendment. She sits up straighter before beginning to speak.
“One of the things I want is mostly superficial. But I want to go to Paris. My sister and I used to take bi annual trips to Paris when we were teenagers. We would go shopping in Rue Saint Honore. And after visiting as many luxury stores as we could, we’d go and eat at the most spectacular places. There’s a particular restaurant called Le Meurice Alain Ducasse. The food there is impeccable. I loved going there with Sophia but as we grew up, there were less and less chances to travel because of school, college, work, and eventually we just stopped going. She probably doesn’t even remember.”
I reach for her hand in slight awe because while I’ve never heard the story before, I believe with all my heart that those trips with her sister were probably her happiest. The only times when she was able to completely be free.
“Thinking about the trip leads me to something else I want and wish for with my whole entire heart,” Katerina says, “I want my sister to forgive me. Sophia’s my best friend and her absence in my life feels like I’ve lost a limb. I just want my sister back.”
Her eyes are a little glassy as she says that.
“She’ll come back, princess,” I say offering quiet reassurance. “What else do you wish for?”
The next one must be pretty hard because it takes her a while before she’s able to voice it.
“I want Nate to call me mom,” she says, her voice low. “Maybe it makes me selfish. I mean I haven’t been back in his life for too long and these things take time. But I really do want with all my heart to hear it. Even if it’s just once.”
My heart tugs at that. I shift closer to her on the bed, placing my arm around her shoulders and drawing her closer to my chest.
“It’s not selfish to want that, Katerina. It’s human. He’ll call you mom eventually. He just needs a little more time, princess. And I promise you’ll hear it as many times as you want. Maybe you’ll even grow sick of it.”
“I would never.”
