Page 45 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

"If you flip it now, I will not be responsible for what I say next."

"Big talk from a man who once told me he'd burn down a building for me, and that felt like less of a threat than this."

"That building deserved it. This pancake does not deserve premature flipping."

I flipped it. It came apart slightly at one edge, a perfectly reasonable, mostly cosmetic casualty, and Dmitri looked at the wreckage with the wounded expression of a man watching a carefully laid plan fall apart in real time, and I laughed so hard I had to put the spatula down.

"You've seen actual violence," I said, wiping my eyes. "Real violence. And this, a slightly torn pancake, is what finally breaks you."

"This was preventable."

"Everything's preventable in hindsight. That's the whole problem with hindsight."

He didn't answer that, not with words, just reached over and stole a bite directly off the pan before it had even made it to a plate, and swore under his breath, completely unbothered by having been right, mostly because it turned out the pancake was, despite everything, delicious.

We ate on the dock as the light went orange and then pink and then a deep unbothered blue, plates balanced on our knees, my feet tucked under me against the evening cool, and for a while neither of us said anything at all, which should have felt strange and instead felt like the first settled silence either of us had shared in longer than I could remember.

"I keep waiting for my phone to go off," I admitted eventually. "Not because I need it to. Just because that's what usually happens. Something always needs handling."

"I keep waiting for mine too." He turned his glass in a slow circle, an old habit I'd noticed before, mostly when he was choosing his next words with more care than usual. "I don't think I've had a day like this since before I inherited any of it. Not one where nothing was expected of me by anyone."

"Not even one?"

"There was always a call to make. A problem that couldn't wait. I told myself for years that was simply what the life required, and maybe it was. But I don't remember choosing to let a single day just be a day, not once, until right now."

"Same," I said, quieter than I meant to. "I build entire systems so nothing can ever catch me off guard, color coded, backed up, triple checked, and somewhere in there I forgot how to just sit still and not be managing anything. This is possibly the least productive day I've had in three years, and it might be my favorite one."

"It's mine too."

"We should be embarrassed about how good we are at doing absolutely nothing."

"I'm not embarrassed. I'm terrified. Those feel similar right now."

The swim was my idea, mostly because the water looked unbearably inviting and I had, historically, never resisted a bad idea that came dressed as a good one. I was in before I'd fully thought it through, gasping at the cold, and Dmitri followed a moment later with none of my dramatics, cutting into the water like a man who'd done this exact thing a hundred times before, alone, in silence, and was only now finding out how much better it was with someone else in it.

"This was your idea," he said, treading water an arm's length away, hair dark and slicked back, looking younger somehow, unguarded in a way the lake seemed to be pulling out of him one layer at a time. "I want that on record."

"Noted. Blame accepted in advance."

"It's freezing."

"It's refreshing. There's a difference, and honestly the fact that you don't see it concerns me a little for the future of this relationship."

"You've used that line already today."

"I have an excellent line and I intend to run it into the ground."

He laughed, and the sound of it out here, with no walls to hold it in, no meeting to return to after, did something to my chest that I felt all the way down. I swam closer without entirely deciding to, and he met me the rest of the way, one arm coming around my waist under the water, pulling me in against him, both of us treading in lazy circles just to stay afloat, foreheads nearly touching.

"Hi," I said, a little breathless, a little ridiculous.

"Hi."

"This is a very inefficient way to have a conversation."

"I've stopped caring about efficiency for the day."

"Careful. That sounds suspiciously like growth."