The timing is so unexpected that it almost makes me laugh. Almost.
I lift my hands in surrender, a corner of my mouth twitching. “Relax. I wasn’t planning on seducing you while you’re actively having a crisis.”
She blinks. Then huffs a weak laugh despite herself. “I mean it,” she adds, still guarded.
“So do I,” I say easily. “I’m many things. Predatory in this scenario is not one of them.”
Her shoulders loosen a fraction.
I grab a blanket from the chair and toss it onto the bed beside her.
“Ground rules,” I add lightly. “No crying on my pillows. And I get the floor.”
She snorts. Actually snorts. It’s quiet, but it counts.
She studies me for a second, “You can’t sleep on the floor. When I know they’re in bed, I’ll leave.”
“Rest first.”
She stands, “My coat is wet,” shrugs it off. “It’s freezing in here.”
I head over to my closet and grab her a sweatshirt, and head back to hand it to her.
She holds it in her hands and looks at it, eyes stalling on my name, the number 21. “Me wearing your number better not be part of?—”
“Gospodi,” I grumble as I snatch it out of her hand, scrunch the material up, and put it over her head, sputtering, “Tsarina.” I groan as I turn to give her privacy to fully put it on, or maybe give myself a moment to pull my shit together. “Ya v zadnitse.”
“Ya ponimayu.”I understand.
I go still. Slowly, I turn my head toward her. She’s sitting on the edge of my bed, wrapping herself in the blanket, eyes lifted to me like she hasn’t just kicked a hole through one of my walls.
“You know Russian?” I ask.
Careful now. Neutral. Like I’m not already recalculating everything. She hesitates, then answers in Russian again, softer this time. “Nemnogo.”A little.
I stare at her.
Not because she knows the language. Plenty of people do. That’s not the point.
It’s that she knew what I meant. That she didn’t translate it in her head first. That she answered instinctively, like the words already lived somewhere inside her.
I huff a quiet laugh before I can stop myself and shake my head. “Of course you do,” I mutter. “Figures.”
She doesn’t smile. Just watches me, steady, like she’s waiting to see if this changes anything.
It does. I don’t know how yet. I just felt the ground shift again.
And suddenly, I’m very aware that the woman sitting in my room, wearing my numbers, wrapped in my blanket, breaking quietly in my space, understands more than she’s letting on. Which means I’m in deeper than I thought.
Ya v zadnitsedoesn’t even begin to cover it.
She moves to one side of my bed, puts a pillow in the middle, and says, “Don’t breach the wall, and if you sleep naked, you don’t tonight.”
Fuck it, I think as I step inside my closet, strip down, and pull on the thin pair of Yale-blue sleep pants from my college years, soft from overuse and too many washes, the fabric worn down enough to drape instead of hide, doing me no favors when I move and head to my bed.
“What temperature do you guys keep it at in here?”
“Fifteen.” I say sliding in, careful not to breach her wall.
