He grinned, took the other half off the plate, and bit into it himself. His eyes rolled back, and he made a vaguely sexual noise, like he was getting off on a damn sandwich. Then he clapped me on the shoulder.
"Now you know what you're missing," he said around a mouthful. "Both of you."
He took the good sandwich and went back to the couch.
I carried the plate down the hall, feeling like a man bringing a steak knife to a gunfight. It didn't help. It looked like what it was. Cheap food made by a man who'd grown up on cheap food.
"Brought you this," I said, and set it on the nightstand. "It's not as good as Nikolai's. He made some French thing in a pan. I didn't bring you that one because he ate it." I heard how that sounded. "Long story. Just eat the one you've got."
Fin pushed himself up against the headboard and looked at the plate. Then he went still in a different way than he'd been still all week.
"Bologna and Kraft," he said.
"I know. I'll get you something better tomorrow, I just—"
"No, this is perfect." He picked the sandwich up like it was something precious. "My da ate this. Exactly this. Every Sunday after the shop closed, sat at the bench with the leather still out, bologna and the orange cheese and too much mustard, and my maw gave him hell for the smell." His thumb pressed into the bread. "He'd give me the corner. Said the corner was the best bit. I never knew if he believed that or just wanted me to have it."
He took a bite and closed his eyes, letting his head fall back against the headboard.
"Okay, you don't have to pretend it's good," I said.
He shook his head. "It's not. It's a Kraft single and cold bologna and too much mustard. It's not good." He opened his eyes, and they were glassy. "But it's just right." His eyes met mine. "Tell yer brother his French sandwich can get fucked."
I laughed and sat down beside him. "I'll make sure to tell him."
He finished the sandwich and set the plate aside. "Where've ye been sleeping?"
"Guest room."
He went still again. The guest room had been his before. Down the hall, the door he used to shut against me, the bed he'd slept in alone when he still thought he could keep me at arm's length.
"That's a shite bed," he said.
"It's fine."
"It's no fine; it's got a spring that comes up through the middle. I know because I slept in it." He moved over to the far side of the mattress. "Ye can sleep here. If ye want."
I stared at him and tried to think of one good reason to say no. Nikolai was in the next room. He'd know, and he'd never let me live it down.
Fuck that guy.
I toed my boots off and lay down on top of the covers beside him, close enough that the heat came off him, careful of the bandaged hand resting between us. "You want to watch a showor something? We can binge that soap opera Nikolai's watching and spoil the ending for him."
Finally, his face broke into a smile. "I like the way ye think, Aleksi Laskin," he said before grabbing the remote and turning on the TV.
He slept in thebed with me that night and every night after.
I stopped counting the days somewhere in there. They ran together the way they do when you've nowhere to be, with a body busy mending itself. A week passed. Then, more than a week. The light through the blinds got a little longer each morning, the bandage got a little smaller each time Warrick came round to change it, and I stopped going looking for the finger that wasn't there quite so often. The stump still throbbed in time with my pulse. It probably always would. But it had quieted from a scream to a grumble, and a man can live alongside a grumble.
Aleksi and Nikolai fought. Christ, did they fight! Over the dishes, over the thermostat, over whose turn it was to deal with the DoorDash, over things that had happened thirty years ago in two different countries. Twice it came to fists. Once I came out of the bedroom to the pair of them rolling about on the floor like a couple of weans, Nikolai with a split lip and Aleksi with his shirt torn at the collar, both of them swearing in three languages. I'd braced for blood, for the day it turned into something a vorcouldn't take back. It never did. Every time, an hour later, there they'd be on the couch with a beer apiece, watching Nikolai's soaps, Aleksi pretending he didn't care how it ended. So I reckoned that was just how the Laskin brothers loved each other, through the knuckles and out the other side.
And it wasn't only the brothers. Nikolai had made the mistake, once that I saw and likely more that I didn't, of trying to cook in Irina's kitchen.
I came out one morning to the two of them squared off over the stove. Nikolai had a pan going, a knob of butter in it and some soft French cheese unwrapped on the counter, and Irina stood between him and the hob with her wooden spoon held across her body like a woman barring a door. He said something in French, bright and reasonable, gesturing at the pan. She answered in a long, flat run of Russian, not loud, and pointed the spoon at the cheese, then at the bin, in case the spoon hadn't been clear enough on its own.
"It is the same egg, babushka," Nikolai said, switching to English for my benefit, the snake. "I am only showing it some respect."
Irina didn't speak English and didn't need to. She looked at the butter going brown in his pan, then at his face, and made a sound in her throat that consigned the whole of French cooking to the bin alongside the cheese. She moved his pan off the heat with the spoon, one firm shove, the way ye'd move something dead. Then she cracked an egg into her own pan, hard, no butter swimming in it, and stood guard over it with the spoon while it set.
