“Misha, be honest with me. Do you think he’ll… do you think he’ll show up?” The words threatened to blow out my chest with how hard my heart was beating.
He moved foot to foot, the dance of someone whose socks were getting wet, and glanced at the airport again.
“Konstantinov has been through much worse. This is nothing.Theymight not even show up…” The cigarette remained unlit between his lips. “No… I’m not going to fuck with you. The Chechens will come. They’re pissed, and Sergei has been poking the southern bear. But Vitali is scrappy. Could probably demolish the whole building and still catch the bus. But you shouldn’t wait for him.”
“Can you get me two tickets for that flight?”
“Blyad, you really are an idiot. You’re going to wait?”
“I’m going to wait,” I said quietly, then nodded to confirm those were indeed the words that left my mouth. “I’m going to wait.”
And I did. Misha left in a taxi after our goodbyes, and I took the keys to the Lada and went to get some sleep in the backseat. If I dreamed, it was of the peeling upholstery on the ceiling. My head still throbbed, but the cold outweighed the pain, and eventually, whatever warmth I found in my coat put me to sleep.
I woke an hour and a half before the flight and dragged myself along the thin sheets of frost covering the sidewalks, my breath turning to icy crystals as soon as it passed my lips. Mama and Maxim would be gone already, but I could explain why I wasn’t there when we caught up.
We.
With two tickets stating‘Aeroflot’clutched in my hands, I waited inside among the rushing people. Families, couples, lone travelers—they all got pissed because I was in the way, but I wouldn’t leave the windows by the doorway.
“Please,” I mouthed. He could do anything, and I knew he would do everything to be there.
The sun was mid-rise and the sky still pale. Colors fell over the parking lot and the thick of the trees beyond it, glowing softly as they hit the frost. The year had gone while I wasn’t watching, and it transformed the longest winter of my life into a brand new season. One I hadn’t seen before, because I wouldn’t get to be in Kurov when it bloomed at the end of spring. Wherewould I be?
Who would I be?
My bitter defiance had gone the way of old Katya. I wasn’t fighting anymore. How I was raised and who I used to be split open like the buds of young leaves breaking through their winter sleep. Fighting to create something beautiful.
Not good, and probably not moral, because the things I had seen and the things I had done took me far away from those ideals. But beautiful didn’t need good. It needed love, and that’s what Vitali was to me—all the beauty and love I found in this gray world.
And that’s why he had to come.
Because I couldn’t stand it if he didn’t.
‘Ahead there was darkness, and there were lights,’ Bunin wrote on the duality of love. I wasn’t ready for the darkness, but each minute that brought me closer to that plane taking off seemed to dim the morning.
The headlights of a taxi turned out to be my lights.
Hope tightened my throat, crowding my heart as I watched the doors open and the tall figure in the wool coat get out.
“Kotik…”
The cough-like laugh rasped from my sore throat, and I crashed into him, his arms quickly wrapping around me.
“Kotik, why are you here? Why didn’t you already go?”
“I told you, I’m not leaving. Not without you.”
We stood like that, and I took in the cologne and the wet wool and the Marlboro cigarettes. I didn’t see his face, but knew that the stupid gesture—which in the grand scheme of things didn’t change anything—meant the world to the both of us.
‘…because I loved, and you loved me too…’ Chloé Dae sang with a static crackle from a newspaperkiosk by the baggage claim.
Never leaving. Not without each other.
Never alone.
45
Epilogue
