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“Yes.”

He forces his eyes up, stubborn. “Yes,” he repeats, firmer. “Don’t look at me like that. It was convenient. You were hard. I was whatever. It doesn’t change anything.”

I reach out and fix his tie. I slide the knot back into place and smooth it flat against the shirt I wrinkled on purpose. My knuckles rest for a second at that pretty throat.

“Convenient,” I say, mild.

His mouth opens to argue, but I tap the finished knot once, lightly, and step back just enough to let him breathe.

“All right, princeling. It’s just sex.”

I pick his phone up off the table. Dimitri’s name is still sitting there, unanswered. I turn the screen toward him so he can see it, then set it in his palm.

“Then you won’t mind if I walk you back out there looking like that.”

He glances down at himself, at the rumpled shirt and his flushed mouth.

“Give me a minute.”

I smile.

“Take two. I’ll wait.”

Ilya

I made a mistake.

I left the flowers in my room. Some of them started to wither over the last few days, the color going papery, but the smell stayed. It got stronger somehow, or maybe I got more sensitive to it.

There was something about the scent that calmed me down, even when I couldn’t explain why. Besides raspberries, it was the only thing that seemed to quiet my head lately. Alya saw them too when she came into my room. I told her they were from some girl at school, which sounded like complete bullshit even to me. Judging by the look she gave me, she thought so too.

I was trying to decide where to put them. That was the problem. There are too many of them to just live around. There’s no arrangement that works. I moved a vase to the windowsill. Then I moved it back. I considered the hallway and couldn’t do that either, because then people would see, so they stayed in my room looking like a shrine withering in place. Some of them were scattered across the floor, and I had to be very careful when I walked inside so I wouldn’t step on them.

And then my brother decided for me.

He steps inside and stops just past the threshold to look around. “What’s this? Fairy land?” He touches one of the flowers on the desk.

I have the impulse to cross the room and rip his head off at the floor. I don’t. I’ve trained that out of myself, mostly. I channel it into a glare instead and stay sitting where I am.

“Who are they from?”

I give him an easy shrug. “My admirers. What can I say? I’m very in demand.”

He watches me for a beat too long, doing the arithmetic.

Then he steps further into the room and steps on them. Not by accident. He’s never been clumsy. He puts his heel down and rolls his weight through the middle of a stem, and I hear it snap.

I stand up and grab him by the throat, then shove him into the wall. His eyes go wide, which is a face I have never seen on him before, and I’d like to remember it.

I haven’t done this in years, but he stepped on something that wasn’t his.

“Even I have limits. Don’t cross them.”

He looks at me, and then his hand comes up, catches my wrist, the one he ruins religiously, and shoves me off him. Not hard. He doesn’t need to be hard to make me let go, because the touch on that wrist is a language he installed in me when I was small, and it still works.

I step back.

He smooths his tie without looking down at it and tucks himself back into order.