“I had a friend once,” he said, ready to make his case.
Her eyes misted as though she intuitively understood he was speaking of her.
“She taught me that the fine print matters.” He looked into the depths of her eyes, trying to see what he should say. “So, yeah, I’d say it matters if you want this or not,nohchnaya babachka.”
A gasp pulled his gaze away from Sadie. The audible inhale from his babushka broke the moment.
“Vhat did you call her?” Babushka asked, eyes big with her fingers pressed against her pink-painted lips.
Roman had seen that look on her before. Generally, it was the look the preceded him getting dressed down. “Um…”
General Babushka marched toward him and smacked him upside the head.
“Ow.” Roman rubbed at the spot.
“Roman Dvornakov, why on earth would you call her that?” his mother asked, the words soaked in shock.
“It means butterfly. At night.” That was the translation. He may be rusty on his Russian, but he was confident here.
“Does it mean something else?” Sadie asked.
“It means that you’re my butterfly. Like the moths at the movie theater?”
She seemed to rack her brain. “The moths?”
“The moths you thought were butterflies,” he reminded her.
“It does not.” Babushka’s words were firm and her eyes flashed with anger. “You alvays vere bad vith the Russian vords. How could you call her this?”
Sadie’s eyebrows fell together. “It doesn’t mean nighttime butterfly?”
“Oh, it means nighttime butterfly, all right,” Jase said. “If you use the direct translation. But in reality, it means prostitute.”
Roman’s heart dropped. No, it did not.
Sadie gasped.
“That’s not true,” Roman said. Absolutely not. He wasn’t calling her a prostitute. His Russian might’ve been rusty—he stopped practicing around the time Dedushka died—but he knew enough to know this was abso-fucking-lutely not the case.
“You’ve been calling me a prostitute?” Sadie asked, the whites of her eyes growing with each word.
The entire family had gone silent sometime during their conversation. Everyone had moved their attention from Heather and her baby to his private conversation—emphasis on the word “private.”
Not that there was much privacy among his family. Usually, they tried to pretend they weren’t the invasive species called Dvornakov.
“I taught you better Russian than this. Your dedushka, he rolls over in his grave,” Babushka admonished, making him feel about two centimeters tall. “You disappoint me.”
Sadie was shaking.
Shit, he hoped he hadn’t made her cry with his inability to translate.
But this wasn’t that kind of shaking, Not the crying kind. “Are you laughing?” he asked, the numb from the shock melting out of his body as her chest racked with the apparent hilarity of his fuckup.
“You’ve been calling me a hooker this whole time?” She wiped a tear with the back of her hand.
“This is not funny.” Babushka’s tone was the same one she had used on him when he was a kid and had accidentally dyed her favorite Persian cat green with food coloring.
“It’s a little funny.” Heather held up her thumb and pointer finger, illustrating that little dash of funny.
