What did it mean that he was taking me there?
This felt intimate, and I thought that intimate with him meant he’d kiss me, possibly more, but this was his living space, and he hadn’t even hesitated when he’d said it. Did he even live alone?
Was he tidy?
Was I going to find out something I didn’t want to know yet?
I gulped and gazed out the window as we crossed the bridge. The river wasn’t completely frozen over at this time of the year, but the ice banks were already crawling toward the currents. Everything seemed so gray. TheBrezhnevkabuildings—the twelve-floor concrete apartment complexes—crowded together and created a backdrop to a city that wouldn’t see vibrancy until the spring. It would be better once we passed all the living districts and arrived at the city center. There, the neoclassical architecture inspired a sense of civic pride that could almost fool someone into thinking the rest of Kurov was kept up after Communism fell.
A shame, they’d destroyed a handful of the older imperial buildings to erect tall, metal and glass modern giants full of stores and offices. People protested this at the time, but they had bigger problems and not enough money to be asked their opinion.
He pulled onto a side street crowded with parked cars, mostly newer Volgas, with an old green Moskovich sitting among them like the kid not invited to the birthday party who showed up anyway. Parking wasn’t difficult to find, but I saw no nice buildings around us and the thought balled up in my chest that perhaps Vitali couldn’t afford the dates he’d been taking me on. It was not unusual for men to woo a girl withpresents, yet live with their babushkas. The champagne from two weeks ago sickened my stomach.
I shouldn’t be having those feelings, as it wasn’t about money. I made up whole scenarios in my head where Vitali was some foreign (apparently New Zealand) prince, and he’d done nothing to dissuade them but that didn’t make them true or justified. I was ready for the illusion to shatter because I was miserable and everyone else was too, and I didn’t want to have these thoughts because they were too pretty for my overall bad mood.
“There is no elevator, unfortunately,” he told me as his metal key squealed in the door at the bottom of the stairs. “This used to be an administration building before they moved the politicians over to the other side of town. They didn’t invest a whole lot into renovations. I can leave the keys if you want to wait in the car. I’ll be quick.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. I’d gotten this far, and Ineededto see where he lived now.
“It’s on the third floor.”
The stairwell was like any other stairwell, but cracked plaster greeted us in place of concrete, a remnant of a pre-Stalin era. The graffiti was a bit classier because I didn’t see anything anatomically correct on the walls. Just gang tags, proclamations of love and break-ups.
His steel door had a keypad instead of a keyhole, and he typed in the code in my plain view. I didn’t catch it because I was busy bracing myself for whatever lay on the other side.
It was—
Ordinary.
No expensive, modern furniture or electronics. No Venetian plaster on the walls. Just neat, unfaded wallpaper, a seat to takeoff your shoes, and a plain sconce letting off yellowed light.
“Would you like something to drink?” He startled me. “There is an electric kettle in the kitchen. I can get you tea to warm up.”
“Oh, no, thank you. I’ll wait for the cafe,” I said, looking around curiously as the high of my overactive imagination wore off.
He walked ahead to show me to the living room, where I took off my scarf. It hardly differed from my own, with the wall-length veneer bookcase sharing the space with a light brown couch. On it were three red throw pillows, crushed and strewn about.
He even had the white lace curtains, which were outdated enough to have been my babushka’s.
“I’ll be quick,” he reassured me again, and this time I heard the note of shaken confidence in his voice. Had my expression embarrassed him?Oh God…
I didn’t sit down as he disappeared behind his bedroom door. Instead, I stared at it with my heart doing backflips.
Someone else’s legs were moving me forward when I took my next step. Someone else’s hand rested on the door, waited a few seconds, then eased it open. Strange, there were two keylocks. One of them was on the outside…
But I’d already moved past and into his bedroom.
His very ordinary bedroom.
The low bed with the floral-pattern comforter was made, neat and tidy, just like the rest of his home. The pull-chain lamp and a completely out-of-place expensive watch were the only things on his otherwise bare nightstand. The drawers were veneer too; the exact same kind Mama had in her room.
There was no door on the bathroom, but it was at an anglewhere I couldn’t see inside unless I took five or six steps forward. It was still possible to leave. It wasn’t too late to go to the kitchen and fill his electric kettle and scald myself on tea I didn’t deserve for being a privacy-invading snoop.
But it was.
I held my breath and took a couple of steps.
The faucet whined and water turned on.
