Sevastyan eased even closer to me. “When you get excited, your cheeks flush pink, and your eyes become even brighter against that flame-red hair.” He reached forward to twine a lock around his finger. “Your colors call to me.”
A breath escaped me. Seeing him like this, I told myself that life-altering sex, admiring looks, and earnest compliments could tide me over.
Until what?
Until he saw me as a partner, a confidante.
He drew back. “Again, I speak too freely with you.” Now color shaded his cheekbones. “Whenever I’m around you, I say more than I mean to.”
“Then we should spend more time together.” I let him lead me by the hand to another gallery room.
“Or less,” he said, even as he appeared displeased by that prospect.
“Would it be so bad for me to know more about you?”
“I don’t think you would like what I revealed.”
Was that the reason for all his secrecy? He didn’t want to scare me off? That didn’t bode well.
As I perused another exhibit, I remembered my first semester at UNL. Jess and I were just becoming friends, and she’d been dating a “promising” new guy. Yet one night he’d told her with a mysterious air, “I don’t think you’d like me if you really got to know me.”
Much to his dismay, she’d kicked his ass to the curb. To me, she’d explained, “When a man tells you something like that, honey, you better take him at his word.”
Jess and I had made each other a promise: when men talked about themselves negatively—“I’m no good for you,” “I have trouble committing,” “I’m not going to settle down anytime soon”—we would listen to them.
Sevastyan had told me he wasn’t a good guy. I’d thought he meant because he was a hit man. So what was he hiding from me?
“Perhaps I would tell you more about myself,” he said, “if I were more certain of you.”
The finish line was still between us, a glaring line of chalk. “Then we’re right back in the same catch-22. I find it difficult to throw all-in when I know so little about you. You give me a crumb of information only every few days. At the rate we’re going, by the time I’m ready to sign on, twenty years will have passed.”
Speaking of time . . . We’d drifted to stand in front of the great d’Orsay clock window. Between the roman numerals, I could gaze out and see the misty Seine below, the lights of the Louvre and the Tuileries Garden.
Faced with this view, my current friction with Sevastyan faded, giving way to memories of my father, the Clockmaker. When the minute hand ground forward, I had to stem my tears. “How are you doing, Sevastyan?” I didn’t have to be more specific.
His face was granite under pressure. “I grieve, as you do. I think about him a lot.”
I took Sevastyan’s hand in mine. “Thoughts of him come all the time, sparked by so many different things.” Tonight, I’d reflected on his letter, on his hopes for me. Earlier this week, I’d seen white tigers on a street-side billboard, and my mind had snapped right back to laughing with him. “Will you tell me a story about him?”
Sevastyan was opening his mouth—doubtless to decline.
“Just one,” I hastily said. “Pozhaluista.” Please.
Looking like he was about to speak in front of thousands, he cleared his throat. “When I’d been with him for a few months, he took me to a summit meeting. Another vor’s son said something about Paxán that I took as an insult. I got into it with the older boy—which meant the two of us were sentenced to fight in the middle of a packed warehouse. ‘You’re too smart to be taking blows to the head,’ Paxán told me as he walked me through the crowd.” Sevastyan frowned. “He was always telling me that I was smart. So I told him I would ‘fight smart.’ ”
I could imagine this exchange so vividly: Paxán shepherding him through a throng of mafiya, tough Sevastyan with his chin jutted—even as he soaked up the attention from Paxán. Because no one had given it to him before?
“As I headed toward the makeshift ring, men were yelling all around us, placing bets. I was just fourteen, and it was . . . a lot to handle.” Understatement. “Paxán looked so concerned that I’d get hurt. I told him he shouldn’t worry about me.”
“What did he say?”
“He sighed and told me, ‘Best get used to it, Son.’ The first time he’d called me Son. Something clicked in my head, and I finally accepted that I would have a home with him, that it was permanent.”
Had he been worried for months that he would have to return to the streets? To leave a place like Berezka? Oh, Sevastyan.
“After that, I was determined to make him proud, to win.”
“And you did?”
“It took three men to haul me off my unconscious opponent.”
At fourteen. “Paxán let you continue fighting after that?”
“I convinced him I’d do it for no reason at all—or for money and respect. He had no choice but to agree.”
“You didn’t go to school?”
“I was learning from him,” Sevastyan said matter-of-factly. He didn’t have a chip on his shoulder about schooling; no surprise, Filip had lied. It was clear Sevastyan was confident in his intelligence and learning. It was also clear Paxán had nurtured that confidence.
“Each week, he bought me books. Mathematics, economic theory, philosophy, great Russian literature. And history,” he said. “He never told me I had to read them, but the reward was discussing the books with him, usually while he tinkered with those damned clocks.”
Sevastyan’s unmistakable affection made my eyes water anew. “Thank you for telling me that story.” He’d opened up to me about something! Every time he showed me these glimpses of himself, I fell a little bit more in love with him.
He raised his brows. “I think that’s the most I’ve ever spoken.”
I couldn’t tell if he was kidding or not.
At that moment, the clouds parted for us, revealing the moon. Its light spilled down over the river and illuminated the numbers of this clock, making them glow.
The full moon. Had it been a month since Sevastyan had taken me to Russia? Since he’d first kissed me?
I wondered if he realized this. It seemed that everything he did was by design. Might Sevastyan be a closet romantic? In a casual tone, I said, “This is an anniversary of sorts for us.”