Page 20 of Nikolay

I wore it anyway, cropped just enough to show a sliver of stomach every time I reached overhead, soft from prior washings and smelling faintly of Parker’s laundry detergent beneath the cleaner cedar scent of the packing box. I had on leggings and no shoes, my hair piled on top of my head in a knot already sliding loose. It was the least polished I ever looked in this house, which maybe was why I liked it so much. Nobody was meant to see me like this. This was mine, too.

I unwrapped an early edition of Steinbeck and ran my thumb over the worn cloth of the spine. Next came Ellison, dense with underlining from some previous life of mine when I had still believed every insight needed to be documented, or it might evaporate. Then Faulkner, because apparently I enjoyed being punished by genius and syntax in equal measure. Several of the books were early printings, not valuable in the auction-house sense maybe, but valuable to me in the ferocious little way attachment makes things precious. Cracked spines. Penciled marginalia. The shape of old thought preserved in graphite and impatience.

I sorted them by instinct. Southern literature near Russian novels because despair recognizes its own cousins. Women’s gothic fiction beside contemporary dark romances because obsession changed costume but not appetite. Theory on the lower shelves where it could behave itself. Poetry near the chair by the window for late-night emergencies of the soul.

Every time I slid one into place, the room shifted another inch toward me.

That was the part nobody told you about leaving home for somewhere impossible. It wasn’t only the big changes that mattered. It was these tiny domestic acts of self-assertion. Putting your own mug in someone else’s kitchen. Leaving your shampoo in the shower. Rearranging shelves in a room not built with you in mind and making it answer differently after.

I sat back on my heels and looked around at the spread of it all.

Parker’s shirts lay in bright, soft heaps beside towers of books. Linen paper drifted across the rug like pale leaves. A stalker romance with a creased cover leaned against a Norton anthology thick enough to kill a man. The contrast delighted me. It also felt honest. A person could contain multitudes and still want a morally bankrupt fictional man to pin somebody to a wall while discussing her reading habits.

Especially, perhaps, if she had spent three weeks avoiding a real one.

I opened another box and found more treasures laid in careful rows. A slender paperback with my old notes from grad school. A hardback with an inscription from a professor who’d once told me I had one of the sharpest instincts in the department. I had forgotten that until I saw his handwriting. Forgotten, too, how much it had once mattered to be seen for my mind before the world narrowed down to survival and service and family expectations.

My throat went tight on me for no good reason except that books did that sometimes. They remembered versions of you that had gone quiet.

I reached for the next stack, smiling despite myself when a glossy romance slid free from between two classics as if Parker had hidden it there for effect.

“Subtle,” I muttered to the empty room.

The room, full of my scattered life, did not disagree.

I had just picked up one of my worst-behaved paperbacks—a stalker romance with a hero any real woman ought to file charges against and every fictional woman secretly wanted watching from the shadows—when somebody knocked on my door. I didn’t even glance up.

“Come in,” I called. “If that’s you, Lucia, I swear Parker packed enough books to start a second library.”

The door opened.

Silence followed.

Not Lucia’s silence either. Hers had purpose in it, an economy that still felt human. This silence arrived heavier. Male. Controlled. The kind that entered a room already expecting to dislike what it found.

I looked up.

Nikolay filled the doorway so completely for a second the hall behind him seemed to narrow around his shoulders. He had on dark trousers and a fitted button-down in some deep earth tone that made his skin look warmer and his size somehow more offensive. Everything about him was orderly—hair neat, beard trimmed, posture exact. He stood there like a carved judgment dropped into the middle of my happy mess, all six-foot-whatever of him set against open boxes, linen paper, romance novels, and me on the floor in a cropped t-shirt.

His gaze moved first to the shelves I had half-emptied, then to the spread of books around me, then finally to me.

Whatever he saw settled visibly into disapproval.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

He asked it like a man demanding an explanation for vandalism.

I looked back down at the book in my hands and folded the page I’d been checking before answering. If he wanted a fight, he was going to have to work for it.

“I’m adding my books to the collection in my room,” I said.

I let the word my sit there nice and deliberate between us. Not shouted. Not sharpened. Just placed.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw his jaw set. Good.

I turned the paperback over, checking whether Parker had marked anything for me inside the cover, and felt his attention drag lower. The pause that followed was tiny, but I knew a judgmental man’s pause when I heard one.

So I looked up just in time to catch the faint roll of his eyes.