Eventually I look out the window and notice the park. For the second time. “Hey, are we driving around the block?!”
Art’s face doesn’t reveal anything, but a smirk creeps across his lips. “What makes you think that?”
“Art. I don’t have all night. I have to get Ava from the neighbor’s place.”
“Ava?”
“Yeah, my daughter. Ava.”
“Right.”
He breathes out through his nose, a crease forming between his brows.
“Your daughter. Ava.” He repeats it back to me, slowly, his eyes searing on mine. “If you have a daughter, why were you trying to get drunk tonight?”
I huff and fold my arms across my chest. “Don’t you dare judge me.”
“I’m not judging you. I just know that it’s not like you.”
“You don’t know me anymore,” I spit at him, but he’s right.
No one here knows why I hate drinking alcohol. Except Art.
I feel a rush of shame. He knows why, which means he knows that tonight I broke one of my rules. And it led to me losing control and slapping him in the face.
“I want to make sure you’re okay.” His voice is softer now and I know if I turned towards him I would crawl into his arms.
“The hospital management put a mark against my permanentrecord today,” I admit.
I find myself spilling the whole saga.
When I’m done, there’s a look on his face that I can’t place.
Determination, maybe.
“You don’t deserve that, Nina.”
When the driver pulls up outside my apartment building, he helps me out, walking me into the lobby of the apartment building, where the doorman greets me with a friendly wave.
Only when I’m home, Ava curled in my arms as I carry her to bed, does it hit me that I never told him where I lived.
6
ARTYOM
“My daughter.”
I wonder if Nina felt the nuclear explosion those words caused for me, obliterating every other thought. Who the fuck is the father?
I was her first.
I wanted to be her only.
But it looks like I’m too late for that.
Nina stared at me as though I’d grown two heads when she answered the question, her soft brown eyes wide at my surprise. As if it was blindingly obvious that she had a child.
It changes nothing about my intentions towards her. Purity is vastly overvalued, even if I do hate the fact that Nina has been with another man.
