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He gazes down at me for a moment longer. Then he lets a soft, minty exhale pass between his lips before he turns and starts to walk down the hall. “Come on,” he calls back over his shoulder. “I’m sure the cafeteria will have some non-toxic swill you can imbibe.”
He takes long, confident strides and I have to jog to keep up. By the time we get to the cafeteria, I’m winded.
I choose the closest table and sink down into the uncomfortable gray chair. “I’ll get you something to drink,” he says, walking off before I can tell him what I’d like.
Sighing, I sit there, scratching at my cuticles, wondering what on earth I’m doing here.
I’m lost in thought when I hear a metallic plunk and look up to see him setting a can of lemon soda down on the table in front of me. My one weakness.
“Oh my God,” I breathe. “This is lemon soda. How did you… How did you know?”
He sits down in the chair opposite, looking as impassive as ever. “Lucky guess.”
Eerie,I think to myself.
“Thank you,” I say.
He responds to that with a tiny quirk of his brow. I realize that he’s not going to just supply me with information. I’m going to have to ask him what I want to know. Which is a little tricky, since what I want to know is everything.
“When was the last time you spoke to Adrian?” I ask, figuring I can start off easy and work my way up to the harder questions.
“A while ago,” he replies vaguely.
“A while as in months or a while as in years?”
“The former.”
I frown. “Adrian never mentioned meeting you.”
“We didn’t always get along.”
“Still…” I trail off into silence. Kolya wouldn’t be the first thing Adrian neglected to mention to me. I never really pushed him for certain answers. My thinking was that if I gave him space, he would eventually come to me.
I was trying to earn his trust, when it should have been the other way around. Not that he’d ever really needed to try to earn mine. I’d given it to him like a cheap prize at a carnival.
“To be fair, he didn’t get along with most people. At least in the last couple of years.”
Kolya doesn’t offer anything, so I sit there, nursing my lemon soda between both hands, watching the cold beads of condensation sweat onto my thighs.
“The Accident changed everything,” I say softly. “Did he tell you about what happened?”
“Yes.”
There’s a lot contained in that one little word, though it’s packed up tightly and locked. I look up, wondering what he’s thinking. It’s unnerving not having the faintest clue what’s going on in his head. Is he humoring me? Is he killing time? Is he just bored?
“I like to blame The Accident,” I say. “But the truth is, he was struggling long before then. He didn’t have any family… But then, you probably know that already. I was his whole family, and sometimes… Sometimes, I don’t think I was enough.”
When I look up, Kolya’s eyes are fixed on me. His blue irises look like ice, but they’re not what I would describe as cold. Just… neutral.
Maybe that’s why I feel like I can tell him these things: because I don’t think he’s going to judge me.
I don’t think he cares enough to judge me.
“He liked drinking.” My forehead wrinkles as I remember just how much. “At first, I barely even noticed. When we first started dating, it was just social drinking, you know? But then I realized that it didn’t matter if we went out or not—he needed to have a drink every day. He said it calmed his nerves. I never asked what he had to be so nervous about.”
It’s rude of me to blabber. But Kolya seems content to just sit there and listen.
“One drink a day turned into two. Two became three. Then the nightcap became the five o’clock drink and the five o’clock drink became the way he started his mornings. I came downstairs to make some breakfast one day and he was sitting at the kitchen table with a six pack of beer and a plate of eggs.” I stop short and take a deep breath. “I knew he had a problem long before I admitted it to myself.”
