“It is not.”
“Is so.”
“Is not.”
I sighed and put down the bag I was working on to glare at my brother. “Then why is every Barbie car pink?”
Nikolai stared at me like I’d lost my damn mind. “How do you know what color a Barbie car is?”
“Just shut the fuck up and do the damn job, okay?”
“Colors don’t have genders,” he muttered, but he slid the purse down from his shoulder to photograph it. But I caught him checking the line of it in the dark of the window first. Whatever he saw there, he filed it away and said nothing.
“Course they fucking do. Pink is for girls. Blue is for boys.”
“And what about the others, eh? The non-binary baes. The trans masc disasters. The—”
“Okay, I fucking get it!” I snapped. We stared at each other for a minute before I turned back to the work. A beat of tense silence passed before I finally answered. “Purple.”
“Pardon?”
“They can have purple. And green. And orange. And all the other fucking colors, ok? Fuck, man. I don’t know. Forget I said anything.”
“Purple, eh?” His camera clicked. “Purple is my favorite color.”
"Course it is," I muttered. “Fucking queer.”
“Says the man who shares a bed with another man every night.”
I looked up and made sure he met my eyes. “Don’t.”
“I’m just saying—”
“Niko, if you start talking shit, you’d better be ready to eat it. I will knock out your fucking teeth if you don’t shut the fuck up about that right fucking now.”
He lifted his hands in surrender. “Okay, okay.” A small beat of silence. “But it wasn’t like I was passing judgment. Only pointing out that we are cut from the same cloth, no? Papa would say it’s beneath a Laskin to throw stones in glass houses.”
“Who I sleep with is none of your fucking business. Or anybody else’s,” I said firmly.
“Of course. I agree.” He photographed another bag. “But if you ever want advice—”
“You’re getting real close to needing a fucking dentist, Niko.”
He put his head down and muttered. “Endodontist.”
“What?”
“Technically, I’d need an endodontist.”
I turned and drew back my fist, and he finally shut his fucking mouth.
He let me have a few minutes of quiet, which should have been my first warning.
"So," He photographed a bag without looking at it. "Thursday."
My hands didn't stop moving. "What about it?"
"You booked Henri for Thursday. Two fittings." He said the cutter's name the French way, drawing it out, because of course he knew Henri, because the one good tailor in this city was the one place every man in the organization eventually washed up. "Ten and ten-thirty. I saw the card on your counter."
