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The lights of the carousel wheel across his glorious face, painting him ephemerally in gold then shadows then gold again. He stands there with a funnel cake in his one good hand, frowning, disgruntled.

It’s an eternity before he sighs, “You want real.”

Slowly, I nod. “Yeah. I want real.”

“Fine.” He jerks his chin toward the end of the pier, where the Ferris wheel turns its whimsical circles over the water. “Ride with me. We can play your game again. Fact for fact. Does that work, Ms. Gallagher?”

The moniker from his lips is sexier than it has any right to be.

My mouth is cottoned as I nod. We don’t say another word to each other while we wait in line. As I try to recover from having turned into a confrontational nutjob, I suspect Leonid is grappling for his new bearings. I’m not one for metaphors, but it feels like one when the gondola sways as we climb in.

The octopus stuffie gets wedged between us like a chaperone. The attendant locks the bar, and the wheel lifts us up over the noise, over the soldiers, over all of it.

That’s what it takes to make him admit, “I don’t think about it. I want you to know it isn’t something I do on purpose. I’ve just always had a role to play, and I’m good at playing it. I can be what I’m needed to be.”

“With your family, you mean?”

“Sure.” I can feel his shoulder shrug against mine. I try not to look at him, if it’ll make him more comfortable. “But not just with them.”

“Why?”

“I’m a bridge.”

“Do you like being a bridge?”

“Sometimes, yeah.”

“And the other times?”

“I don’t know,” he admits. “I don’t leave myself a lot of time to think about it.”

“That, I understand.”

“A coping mechanism you got out of therapy?” he jokes.

“A coping mechanism therapy couldn’t wrestle out of my hands,” I correct. But he still makes me laugh—makes the sad, lonely girl making the trek to the college psychologist who’d cried so many tears over feeling unloved and unchosen and unseen feel so far away. I press my face into his arm, nose bending against the swell of hard muscle.

Leonid’s lips tickle my hairline. “Tell me a story. And I’ll tell you one.”

He asks with such tenderness. This time, I don’t question it.

I know it’s real.

As real as the story I tell him about my mother once reading my diary, and my knowing she’s doing it and penning ridiculous stories to scandalize her until she confronted me about it. In doing so, she’d given herself up. I still bring it up now, from time to time, when I wanted to win an argument with her. And about the two summers in Pune with my mother, how it had been monsoon season, and about my grandmother’s house with the tamarind tree in the courtyard. As real as the story he shares back, about a scar Valentin has on his arm from when an eight-year-old Leo bit him for not including him in his and Trifon’s games. About how his interest in Slavic myths comes from a book his mother gave him a long time ago and how it became an obsession the whole family found funny. So, he had made it funnier. He’d turned it into a bit—one that had inspired the dogs’ names. How he’d taken the dogs as puppies from someone he’d shot in the head for being a cheat and a liar with an affinity for kiddie porn and kicking dogs.

We come from different planets. That’s just the fact of it. His has bullets and brigadiers and an endless war of wills and pawns. Mine has lesson plans and a shitty Civic and biryani in Tupperware. A week ago, the distance between those worlds felt like the Mariana Trench, and I was the unlit critter at the bottom of it.

But the wheel holds us at the top a moment longer, the city glittering its indifferent glitter, his knee warm against mine, his deep, brash laugh still hanging in the air between us.

And it doesn’t feel like distance at all.

It just feels like details.

I could be thirteen all over again, back before nothing really hurt with any staying power. And the prettiness of twinkling lights and the warmth in my chest was all I ever needed.

Chapter 17 - Leonid

There are people for whom happiness is a carrot they chase. That’s never been me. I hadn’t spent a day of my fucking life contemplating my philosophical feelings about the notion of happiness until Meera Gallagher challenged me. And now, I can’t stop noticing it.