Page 13 of Marrying the Pakhan

Him: I’ll pick you up at seven. Wear something you’d actually wear, not something you think a judge would approve of. This needs to look real, not rehearsed.

The restaurant he picks the next night has actual tablecloths and a menu that doesn’t list prices next to the entrees, and I spend the first ten minutes sitting straight-backed across from him like I’m interviewing for a job I’m not sure I want.

“You can relax,” Viktor says, watching me over the top of his glass. “Nobody’s grading this.”

“I’m aware.”

“You’re sitting like you’re aware. I need you to look like you forgot.”

I let my shoulders drop, just slightly, and he almost smiles, causing my stomach to tighten in a way I choose to blame on the wine instead of him.

“Tell me something true,” he says. “Not for the judge. For me.”

“Like what?”

“Anything. Where you grew up. Your sister. Whatever you feel like giving me.”

So I do, in pieces, more than I mean to. I tell him about Mia, about the two of us splitting a bedroom until I was fourteen, and about the year she taught me to drive in an empty parking lot because our mother refused. He listens like he’s actually listening, not just waiting for his turn, and somewhere between the appetizer and the entrée I forget I’m supposed to be performing anything at all.

“She sounds like she was a good sister,” he says, when I finally stop talking long enough to notice I’ve been talking for ten straight minutes.

“She was the better one, honestly. Braver. Louder. I was always the one hanging back.”

“Doesn’t match what I saw two nights ago.” He says it plainly, no weight behind it, and somehow that makes it land harder than if he’d meant it as a line. “You walked into my club and proposed marriage to a stranger. That’s not someone who hangs back.”

“That was desperation, not bravery.”

“Sometimes those look identical from the outside.”

I don’t have a good answer for that, so I take a sip of wine instead and let the silence sit for a second, comfortable in a way I didn’t expect from a dinner that was supposed to be a performance.

“What about you?” I ask eventually. “Fair’s fair.”

“I grew up around men who didn’t talk about their feelings and a mother who talked about everyone else’s instead.” His jaw tightens, just barely, there and gone before I can name it. “That’s the polite version.”

“And the honest version?”

“Ask me again after we’ve known each other longer than four days.”

It’s not really an answer, but the way he says it makes me let it go instead of pushing, and the rest of dinner passes easier than I expect, actual conversation instead of two strangers rehearsing lines for a courtroom neither of us wants to be in.

He asks about Ginger, real questions: what she likes, what makes her laugh, and I catch myself watching his face while I answer, trying to work out whether he’s asking because Denise told me to make this look real or because he actually wants to know.

I don’t reach a conclusion by the time the check comes.

By the time he drops me off at home, the porch light’s the only thing on, and he walks me to the door instead of just idling at the curb, which I notice but don’t mention.

“Thank you,” I say, keys already in hand. “For tonight. For all of it.”

“You don’t have to thank me every time.”

“I know. I’m going to anyway.”

He’s closer than I realize, close enough that I have to tilt my head up slightly, and neither of us moves for a second that stretches out longer than it should.

Then he kisses me.

It’s not gentle or polite, nothing like I’d have guessed from a man who spent an entire dinner watching me like he was cataloging every word I said.