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I hung up, muted my phone, and hid it under the bed. Sophia was determined; she would call again. Multiple times. And if I didn’t see the phone light up, I wouldn’t be tempted to open it.
Staring at the ceiling, a single tear trickled down my cheek.I won’t waste any more tears on him.Viktor had come when I needed him most. He’d shaken my world. I’d known all along that it was a bad idea to fake date him, but I’d been desperate enough to squash every sane protest. It had been...wonderful. A dream. Until I’d woken up to reality.
The fact that my family hadn’t been tactful or kind in the days after the Caribbean wedding was an additional fact. But it was easy to ignore them back in Manhattan and buckle down at my job. I more than met my quotas at work and exceeded them. I worked out, I ate well, but there was nothing else for me here.Heartbroken. That’d been what Mr. Avery had called it when he caught me staring out the window in the aftermath of my late menstrual cycle. Laughing it off, I’d tried extra hard to school my features into normalcy.
I wasn’t in love. That would be too movie perfect. But there had been something with Viktor that was more than a casual fling. Was it worth making a stand for, though? I scrubbed at my face, mad at myself for the stupid tears. “I ought to go to the Pacific and give that Russian a piece of my mind.”
As if another being was puppeteering my body, I found myself reaching under my bed and pulling my phone back out. Sophia had called me five times and sent over a dozen messages—mostly emojis, then something long in Russian. There were also a ton of short texts full of profanity in both languages. Ignoring all that, my possessed fingers tapped into a private photo gallery I’d been tempted to delete.
The majority were of Sophia and her brother over the course of the last seven years. There were a few sent by the little devil when she’d caught us doing something funny. The one where there was a handful of French fries that the great bear and I were fighting over at the sports bar was embarrassing—and secretly one of my favorites. But it was the two at the end of the slideshow that drew my focus.
One was of Viktor and I, formally dressed up at Sophia’s MIT graduation. There was a stiffness in our postures. We were standing close, neither of us giving into the pull between us. I could remember it like a living, breathing thing. It was as if we’d wanted to act the natural couple but didn’t dare get close enough...until the waterfall.
The second, the picture I’d snapped of us, told a different story. Gone was the calculative, controlled man who never really let himself go; instead, there was the happy bad boy, cheek pressed against a beaming woman. Me. That was me. I’d never been happier than those few short days.
“Dammit to hell,” I wheezed, once against rubbing my hand across my chest.
I couldn’t go after him. I didn’t have a claim on him, and I wasn’t in love. I knew that with absolute certainty. But my petite spitfire of a roommate had hit the nail on the head—there wassomethingthere with Viktor. It was more than familiarity, and it certainly wasn’t friendship the way we bickered and teased and pushed each other’s buttons.
What do I get by staying away?My lawyer mind analyzed the question, but before I could answer, I was shooting out of bed and going to my office. Grabbing a clean legal pad, I scarred the middle with a slanted, hurried line. At the top of the left side, I wrote:Pros. And on the top of the right side, I wrote:Cons. Scrawled across the top margin, I wrote:Ask Viktor to be my boyfriend. If I was going to consider this, it wouldn’t be on a whim.
The pros list got things like best sex ever, stands up for himself and me, kind and thoughtful, and smoking hot bod. The cons list said it was safe to keep a country between us, I had a good thing going for me here (not that I wanted to stay, but it was the shape my life had taken), and other reasons like arrogant prick, possible biker or criminal, and tease. Those all got crossed off, but the fact that he said he was done and couldn’t be my fake date again, that was circled again and again.
He said it had to end.What did that mean? Unless I asked him, unless I was open and honest, I wouldn’t know.Would knowing suck more than this bleak limbo?I laughed roughly.
At the very bottom, I made space to write on both sides:Something made S call. If I don’t go, can I stand to lose him?
That sentence I stared at. Maybe Sophia’s midnight blitzkrieg call had been induced by too much booze, or maybe there was something more to it?
My stomach rumbled, and I realized it had been well over an hour since I’d been staring at the paper. I pulled up my phone and swiped away the notifications from Sophia, which had thankfully stopped forty minutes ago. Google had a coin flipper, and I typed it into the search.
“Heads, I go after him. Tails, I let him go.” My declaration set, I flipped.
Tails.
My heart sank to my stomach. No...just no.
I stared at the backside of the digital coin.Well, now I confirmed how I really feel.Having something taken away makes you realize what you really want. And I wanted to try again with Viktor.
“That settles it. I’m going!” I blew out a long breath, the tightness in my chest finally easing. I pulled up the picture of us at the waterfall and propped it on the desk in front of me. I might regret it. There might be more pain in the future if things didn’t work out. But if I didn’t try, I would spend my whole life regretting not knowing.
It’s all your fault, Viktor. You wanted me to soar. Well, ready or not, here I come.
