Page 43 of Vasily the Nail

I spend the day stewing on it as we move around each other in the cramped apartment. I swear Vasily is following me. No matter where I go, whether it’s the kitchen or the bedroom or the living room or the porch— and that’s it because there’s literally nowhere else to go— he’s next to me ten minutes later, silent and dopey-eyed, sitting just close enough that whenever I shift, we brush against each other.

It’s suffocating.

We go out for lunch at a sub shop around the corner, and Vasily’s so stoned he can barely speak his order, but the employee knows what he likes. We take another walk in the park afterward, and I try to have a casual conversation with him but only get monosyllabic answers. It takes a while for me to realize he’s using his fake accent, and I’m too perturbed to say anything. I walk in silence, and we only do two laps around the park before I head back to the apartment.

“You are upset,zvyozdochka,”he finally says as the sun is going down on the day and we’ve settled next to each other on the couch so I can get some work done. With everything going on, I’d all but forgotten that audition, and I haven’t studied the lines at all. I’m attempting to mouth them in a silent rehearsal, but I’m not retaining anything. “Can I help?”

“No!” I snap at him, but then I feel bad because he has no idea I’ve been working up a mad at him, so I moderate it to, “It’s just running lines for that audition.”

“Mmmm, no, I guess not.” He pulls his phone out and fires off a message. My phone dings a second later, and he says, “That’s Kseniya’s number. Call her tomorrow. She’ll help. She’s very theatrical.”

I can’t help but laugh. Yeah, I can definitely see that. And the fact that just a couple words from him have me laughing again gives me the encouragement to say, “You, umm, take a lot of drugs, Vasily.”

Immediately he frowns and leans away from me.

I shouldn’t have said anything.

But I need to.

“I’m not judging you or anything.”

“If you weren’t judging me,” he says, his tone surprisingly crisp when he was little more than pudding a moment ago, “you wouldn’t be talking about it.”

“I just want to understand,” I tell him. “It’s not like you’re partying, you know. We did nothing all day. Did you really need to do drugs just to do nothing all day?”

He crosses his arms over his chest and narrows his vision on the TV in front of us, currently off. “You don’t understand.”

I know I shouldn’t match his energy, but I can’t help it. “Yeah, that’s literally what I just said. I don’t understand. Help me understand.”

“It’s none of your business.”

“I’m stuck here another week. So yeah, it kind of is!”

“And then you’ll be gone forever. So actually, it isn’t.”

His words hurt. I stare at him as he stubbornly looks away. I study his profile, the wrinkles in his pale brow, the tick in his jaw, on down to the white of his knuckles.

“Well then, what does it hurt anything if you tell me?” I say more softly. “I’ll have that knowledge for the next week, and then I’ll be gone forever and you can forget you ever told me. I’ll just be gone.”

His jaw isn’t just ticking. As I speak, it begins to move in a more pronounced manner. He’s grinding his teeth. But that’s what drug addicts do.

After an impossibly long silence in which Vasily makes it painfully clear he’s not going to open up, I add. “Kseniya told me about, or I guessdidn’ttell me but mentioned Brooke. Do the drugs have—?”

Vasily grabs my phone and throws it against the wall. “You know what, forget that number. She’s not welcome here.” Before I can chew him out about the phone or talk reason into him about Kseniya, he storms out of the apartment. I don’t see him for the rest of the night.

Vasily

I’m five milesaway from my apartment before I realize I didn’t bring my wallet, my phone, or even my coat. It’s hovering at freezing temperatures, but adrenaline has me going.

I just want two nice weeks. That’s it, that’s all I want. I want to go home to a bed being warmed by a soft, sweet-smelling girl who will let me curl up with her. I want to wake up to a pretty face and a casual discussion about our plans for the day. I want to cook for someone and be cooked for, and I want to walk around a park and point out squirrels without being mocked for finding joy in squirrels. That’s it.

That’s all I want.

I don’t want to explain myself. I don’t want to be judged because the only thing that keeps the voices at bay is shutting down half my brain.

Five miles crosses a line, but I’m deliberate in crossing that line. If I’m going to be judged, I may as well do what I want to do, and I know I can’t buy what I want on my own turf. Artyom has banned that. He lets me have my pot and my coke, my rainbow pill bottles, but that’s about it.

This is cartel territory. Our relationship with them is always borderline, but Hector was mostly pleased with how I handled his cousin’s death, even if he wasn’t wanting a lecture from me. He was grieving, I get it, but his cousin should never have been prostituting herself out, at least not without protection.

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