“I’m not judging. I’m the opposite of judging, Natasha. I’ve been trying to get Dima to hook up with you since day one.”
“Hook up?” I echo, not sure I like the sound of that.
“Sorry. Did that offend you?” Nikolai winces as he tries to sit up more.
I help him lean forward and adjust the pillows behind his shoulders. I hate how frail he seems.
“May I ask you a question?” Without waiting for an answer, I ask it. “Why can’t Dima have a relationship?”
Nikolai shakes his head slowly. He’s still pale, and his face needs a shave. “Is that what he said?”
“Stop turning my questions into questions.”
“What exactly did he say?”
“He said, I can’t be in a relationship. I don’t want to lead you on.”
“Blyad.'” Nikolai grunts and scrubs a hand across his face. “Then I suspect… he made a promise to a dead girl. And my brother doesn’t break his promises.”
I stare at him in horror. A dead girl. The ring he wears on his finger. Why had it never occurred to me that he wears it as a remembrance?
“Who was she?”
Nikolai shakes his head. “It was so long ago.”
I don’t know why I want to burst into tears-whether it’s for me or for him. I resist the urge.
“Natasha…” Nikolai’s blue gaze-so identical to Dima’s-rests on my face, and he sees what I’m trying to hide. He reaches out and takes my hand. “At some point, the pain of resisting you will become greater than the pain of betraying his ghost. I hope… I just hope you can forgive him for the mess he’s making in the meantime.”
I blink rapidly, the patchwork of bandages covering my heart loosening and peeling back. It’s not Dima asking for forgiveness but Nikolai on his behalf. It’s his twin admitting that Dima’s treated me unfairly.
It soothes the pain, but it doesn’t give me hope.
Now I understand, at least, what Dima’s hangup is. But I don’t want to make him break a promise to a dead girl. I no longer want to play temptress.
Not with what’s at stake for him. His loyalty. His love.
It’s not fair to either of us to continue with this craziness.
I remove my fingers from Nikolai’s grasp and turn away. “Of course, I forgive him,” I say as my heart liquifies and leaks out of my chest.
I forgive everything.
And I need to move on.
DIMA
I spend the morning solving Natasha’s student loan problem. My first instinct is to simply erase the digital existence of any such loan. But even though I’m one hundred percent sure of myself and my ability to never get caught, I know Natasha would not like the idea of having stolen her education.
So I transfer money from my savings to pay off her student loans-about forty thousand in all.
Next, I hack her email to find every place she applied to school to study naturopathy and then cross-check all the schools with a list of the best. Even though it’s summer and the application deadlines for this fall were nine months ago, I put together her application materials and start the process of hacking into the application files of the best schools around. I’m not sure how exactly to make it happen, but I hope I might submit the applications in a way that makes them seem like they’ve been there all along, then maybe send a few with choice emails from important Deans at the school or something to check on their status.
I have to make this perfect. She needs to not only get into all these schools but to get scholarships, too, because I doubt she’ll take another loan out. It’s not an impossible task. Her grades are good. Mostly A’s, a few B’s. I go into her undergraduate transcript and change the B’s to A’s. Her MCAT score is good.
I find the essay she wrote last time. It was decent. A little plain. I send it off to Lucy, Ravil’s wife. Lucy is a brilliant attorney with top-notch writing skills. She might be able to retool the essay into something spectacular. That’s my hope, anyway. I send her my ideas for it-that it opens with a story about attending births with her mother and the miracles she saw and tie together that natural act with the body’s natural healing, or something like that. I don’t know-I can’t write in English past a sixth-grade level, but I’m sure Lucy can make it brilliant.
When I finish, I cancel every debit and credit card Alex has just to fuck with him.
He’s tried calling Natasha about a dozen times, and every time he does, I come back to my workstation to mess with him some more. His latest text says, I really did enjoy our time together–I wasn’t faking that.
As much as that makes me want to kill him in a hundred messy ways, it’s definitive proof that Natasha had no idea he was playing her. Something I can show Ravil if he questions her loyalty.
NATASHA CORNERS me in the office in the afternoon. The rain that’s been pouring down all morning just abated to a sprinkle. “May I have my phone back?”
She’s in the same ridiculous fishing shirt and my boxer shorts, somehow managing to make the outfit look both chaste and pornographic at the same time.
“No.”
She lets out a surprised puff of air. “Why not?”
“I haven’t sorted things out yet with your boyfriend.” I’m being a dick. A total baby.
She said she hasn’t had sex with him. She told me she wore the dress for me, not him, and she’d brought him to force my hand. I shouldn’t still feel threatened by this guy.
Maybe it’s the fact that I can’t claim Natasha as my own that makes me crazy possessive of her. Knowing she’s fair game-or will be the moment we leave this cabin and she returns to her life-makes me want to commit murder.