Page 62 of 10 Days to Surrender

He tucks a lock of hair behind my ear. His hands shake. “Ariel…”

“Let’s just say,That happened,and then move on as if it didn’t.” I step back, hugging myself. The cold rushes in where his heat had been. “It’s better that way, I think.”

He watches me climb the stairs, each step heavier than the last. He makes no move to follow.

In the kitchen, Jasmine pretends to be extremely occupied with sorting groceries. Kosti whistles off-key as he takes another trip to the car to retrieve the rest. I beeline for the bedroom. Lock the door. Slump against it.

My lips still tingle. His taste lingers—coffee and guilt and want. Down the hall, the shower kicks on. I imagine him under the spray, one fist braced against the tile and the other wrapped around himself, water sluicing over the wounds we’ve given each other as he does what I should’ve done: burned away the lust before it got out of control.

The journal waits under my pillow. I pick up my pen and add to it.

Pros of Letting Sasha Ozerov Back Into My Life:

Kissing him feels like home, even when it shouldn’t.

When the floorboards creak hours later, I pretend to be asleep. Sasha’s shadow pauses at the foot of my bed. Then he turns and retreats back into the hallway.

I can tell by his footsteps, though: He doesn’t go far.

24

ARIEL

The Moka pot is growling at me. I’m inclined to growl back.

After… whatever the hell we’re calling last night, I woke up in the foulest mood known to womankind. My back is hurting like I never went to the hot springs in the first place, my head feels like a donkey kicked it in two, and I barely slept at all, tossing and turning between dreams of Sasha and a rooster I’m really learning to despise.

All of which means, of course, that Jasmine and Kosti come thumping downstairs singing fuckingshowtunes.

“Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred miiinuuuuutes…”they wail. They’re somehow in perfect unison and yet wildly off-key at the same time. It’s honestly kind of impressive.

They stop when they see me eyeing the Moka pot with my back steadfastly turned to Sasha. For his part, Sasha shows the exact same amount of interest in talking to me. He’s been pushing a pile of scrambled eggs around his plate since the minute I camedownstairs. Both of us are perfectly happy to ignore the hickey blooming on my collarbone.

I see Kosti and Jas look at each other. Jas speaks first. “… Everything alright down here, love?”

“Oh, we’re doing fuckinggrand,” I mutter. “For fuck’s sake, why won’t this fucking coffee boil? My God. I’m being divinely punished.”

“Right. Grand. Well… open the hatch! It’s medicine time.” Jas, still humming, reaches above me to the cabinet where we’ve been keeping the prenatal vitamins. She plucks down the orange bottle containing my blood pressure meds, unscrews the top, and starts counting pills out into my upturned palm. “One… Two… Ope. Well, that’s not so grand.”

Sasha looks up, brow furrowed. “We’re out?”

Jasmine shakes the empty pill bottle. “Lock, stock, and barrel.”

“Fuck,” he says.

“Fuck,” I say.

“Road trip!” chirps Jasmine.

That immediately sets off a massive storm of arguing and cross-talking. The four of us keep raising our voices until we’re all shouting over each other. The Moka pot keeps growling louder and louder, too, like it doesn’t want to be left out.

“—supposed to refill them?—”

“—not my fucking job to babysit?—”

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