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“Then I guess I’ll have to come up with some weird nickname for you so you don’t get embarrassed.”
“If it’s that important, you can call me Mishka.”
“That’s basically your name,” I said, making a face.
He gave a little shrug, a sheepish expression creeping across his face. “But it means…more. It means you’re close to me, close enough to use a name like that.”
“Mishka.” I furrowed my brow, not sure how I felt about the change. “Ok, so what am I supposed to yell when you’re in trouble?”
“Like my full name?”
I nodded.
He laughed again and raised both brows. “Are you ready?”
“Oh God. Maybe not…”
“Mikhail Vladimirovich Chernyshevsky.”
“Yeah, that one might take a while to get right. I’ll stick with Misha. Or Mishka.”
He nodded and slipped his hand into mine. “Probably wise.”
“How many languages do you speak, anyway?” I asked as we resumed walking, leaning against him for warmth and a sudden need to be close to him. “Earlier you said something about ‘all the languages.’”
He blew out a breath and stared out over the horizon. “I don’t know. Fluently?”
“Yeah, we’ll start there.”
“Four?” He blinked, making a face. “I think four. Some of the Slavic languages have some overlap, so I can manage in a couple other ones but I don’t think that would be considered ‘fluent.’ I’ve probably lost most of it by now, though. ‘Use it or lose it’ as they say.”
“Did you learn all of that in the military?”
“Mhmm.” He nodded but a muscle in the side of his jaw twitched, which might as well have been waving a red flag at me. I pushed a little more, trying to see why he clammed up when he was normally chattier.
“And those places you took the pictures? You spoke those languages?”
“Most of them, yes.”
“You sure moved around a lot.”
“There was a lot of work to do.”
“I know the US has bases in other countries, but I didn’t realize Russia did. I thought all of that went away with the Soviet Union.”
“Oh, there’s the hot chocolate you were talking about.”
I wasn’t fooled by the fact he conveniently changed the topic, but I wasn’t going to keep pushing either. This was supposed to be a date, not an interrogation.
Hot drinks in hand, we continued wandering the zoo, making our way in and out of the various exhibits and animal houses and watching the light displays as they danced and flickered to various Christmas songs. We stopped and watched a sculptor at work, carving out a polar bear from a massive block of ice to go along with the penguin he’d already done. At one point, Santa wandered through, waving to all the little kids and posing for pictures.
It felt… normal. Or what I imagined normal was supposed to be. Just walking around, holding hands, talking like an actual couple.
It didn’t last.
The second that bubble of optimism started to get too big, my inner critic was quick to burst it, pointing out all of the ways Misha and I would never work, reminding me that whatever happiness I felt was an illusion because it was never meant to be. I tried to hang on to the contentment but it may as well have been a snowflake, melting to nothing in my hand. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t silence the doubt, the sickly feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop.
We were in the middle of the light maze when Misha noticed something was off. He backed me into a corner, away from the other people wandering through the walls of glittering lights, and lowered his face next to mine.
