“I think it’s a bit naive to feel anything is forever in this world,” I said. “The state of humanity is an awful thing. It wasn’t like this when my mama and papa were growing up. Not like this when they met. And, with everything so different, why should it be ‘forever?’ Things keep getting worse. People die.”
“It is not that I don’t appreciate philosophy,” he said, “but you know that’s not what I’m talking about.”
I rolled my lip between my teeth. “Nothing is forever.”
Maybe Elena had the right idea about it all.
He tapped the steering wheel impatiently, searching for context. “What idea did Elena have?”
Oh crap I said it out loud.
“Oh.” My brows furrowed, and I tried to recall the words and not just the gist of it. Regrettably, I’d already opened my mouth, and I wasn’t a good enough of a liar to cover it up. “Elena said that as long as you call them lovers, you can wear whatever you want.”
Hehmm’d. The worst possible person to sit on the other end of this conversationhmm’d.
The skinny, bare trees already disappeared, the landscape around us becoming vast white fields crowned by the city’s horizon. Getting late.
“Is that what this is to you? Am I your lover?”
“That sounds so terrible,” I said, and rubbed my horribly irritated eyes. The heaters were pointed directly at me after a day going blind in the snowfields. “No—you’re not. Not like Elena. I don’t want you thinking that I’m just… you know.”
“Using me for money.”
“Right.”
“I’d give it to you.”
I tilted my head, and our eyes met, becauseof coursehe had to be looking at me. “What?”
“I’d give it to you. If you were with me for the money, I’d give it all to you. What does it matter?”
“Because then it’s not love.”
“You said‘forever,’ you didn’t saylove—and‘lover’in this context is a client. Do you want forever or do you want love?”
I hesitated because the thought was stupid and too romantic to fit into a whole sentence. So instead, I made it fit into a word.
“Both.”
“Ah. What if I gave you that, then?”
I laughed and rested my cheek against the crook of my arm. “No one can guarantee forever.”
“Recent events lead me to believe I’ll never die.”
Jokes, and yet a note in his voice made it hard to look at him, so I kept staring out the window.
“I’ll give it all to you, Kotik,” he said, shrugging, as if telling me to order anything on the menu at a fast food restaurant. “I’ll give you money, love, and forever. But you have an attitude, and it makes it hard for you to accept gifts. So we have to work on that first. You are lucky I am a patient man.”
I laughed again, but it was just my buffer from his words. My blood was still hot, and it was hard to remember all the thingsof which I needed to be wary. But Vitali was all of them, wasn’t he? Precisely because it was so easy to forget myself when I was with him. He made things… easy.
“I’m serious,” he said.
“Right.”
“Why don’t you think I’m being serious?”
I sighed. “Because, Vitali. This,” I waved a hand uncertainly, “all this, it’s not real life.”
