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His nerves were hard to reconcile with the adorable vision that greeted him at the door: Jay in baby-blue fleece pants with little snowflake patterns, the legs of which were just peeking out from under a truly massive orange down coat.

Alexei quirked a brow at the sight. “You’ve got your own unique style, did you know that?”

“Thank you,” Jay answered with full sincerity, clearly taking it as a compliment. “I like to be cozy.”

“You’re coziness personified, sweetheart.” The new term of endearment dropped from Alexei’s lips without his permission, but he couldn’t really regret it. Even if he’d started out meaning to tease, the beaming smile Jay gave him in return made him happy he’d said it. He stepped back from the door, beckoning in his guest. “Come in from the cold, kotyonok.”

“I will, thank you.” Jay stomped his boots first, clearly mindful of tracking snow into Alexei’s apartment. “It doesn’t bother me though. Just so you know. All temperature is more or less the same.”

Alexei nodded pointedly to the giant coat. “Well, you’re certainly dressed for it.”

“It’s to blend in,” Jay informed him, shrugging off his outerwear.

Alexei processed that information as he was handed the practically neon coat—one of the most hideous things he’d ever seen in his life—and tried his best to keep a straight face, but Jay’s focus was already 100 percent elsewhere.

The little vampire bounced onto his toes, doing a strange little skip / dance up to the ingredients on Alexei’s kitchen counter—there weren’t many in the recipe itself, but Alexei laid out all the toppings as well, to add some flair—and Jay’s enthusiasm for something as simple as making Russian pancakes had Alexei grinning like a fool.

He tried to school his face into something less ridiculous, rubbing at the back of his neck, his hair already tied up and out of the way. “I thought we’d just do each step together. I don’t have a written recipe or anything.”

Jay was turning the block of farmer’s cheese over in his hands like he’d never seen anything so fascinating in his life. “Who taught you again? Your mother?”

“No, my grandmother. She’d make them with me the few times we visited Russia, when I was a child.” Watching Jay—whose very presence imbued the small kitchen with such sweetness and warmth—Alexei felt compelled to share a truth he didn’t give often. “My mother was very…sad when I was growing up. She was kind but not always there, I guess you could say. And then she left when I was quite young. I don’t even know where she is now.”

His memories of her were at this point a blurry haze of scattered moments, filled with Russian endearments and a softness he hadn’t felt since.

Jay set the cheese down, immediately giving Alexei his full attention, his gray eyes empathetic. “That’s so sad. That’stoosad. I’m so sorry.”

Alexei cleared his suddenly dry throat, ready to shrug it off, but then another truth was just spilling out of him like poison. “I wouldn’t have stayed with my father either.”

“Your father the…mobster?” Jay asked hesitantly.

“My father the asshole,” Alexei said, with more harshness than he had intended. “He wasn’t kind, not like her. He raised my older brother and me with a real ‘heir and a spare’ mentality. Pitted us against each other, always let Ivan know he was replaceable and me know I was a backup. It was like he thought if we loved each other, supported each other, it would just make us…weak.”

Jay made a small sound of distress, and then suddenly he was in Alexei’s arms, a warm bundle of comfort, the distance between them gone in the blink of an eye.

Alexei was taken aback by the hug and not only because Jay moved so incredibly fast. Alexei wasn’t used to people who…comforted. Not since the last time he’d seen his grandmother, well before he’d even reached puberty.

But he wrapped his arms around Jay’s small frame anyway, grateful for the contact. There was a cynical part of him that worried he’d just used his own personal pseudotragedy to imbue closeness between the two of them. But wasn’t that just what normal bonding between two people looked like? For people who weren’t raised by cold Mafia men where everything was secrets and stoicism and pain?

“Would you like to talk about something less sad now?” Jay mumbled the question into Alexei’s sternum after a solid minute of silent hugging.

Alexei tightened his arms one last time before releasing Jay from his hold. “I would love to, kitten. Let me show you what we’re working with.”

It was an easy enough recipe, probably boring for most people, but Jay was an incredibly enthusiastic student. He hadn’t been lying about being good with direction. When told what to do, he followed each step with a perfectionism that was mildly alarming.

When relaxed and happy, he was also apparently a very chatty little thing.

He asked approximately a million questions for such a simple meal—about each and every ingredient, about the chemistry of the process itself—only half of which Alexei had the answers to. But Jay was never dismayed when Alexei told him he didn’t know something. The vampire would just beam at him anyway, saying, “Okay, we’ll look that up later.”

Alexei loved that “we.”He absolutely fucking adored that “we.”

He noticed other little things about Jay. Like how he seemed oddly…distressed when he made a mess with the excess flour. He seemed upset when he made any mess at all, actually, up until Alexei exaggerated his own clumsiness with the ingredients, telling him, “If you’re not making a little bit of a mess, you’re not doing it properly.”

Then Jay positivelyglowed, telling Alexei once again he was the “nicest human.”

Alexei almost felt like that could be true, with that little bundle of sunshine in his apartment, beaming at him at every opportunity. Alexei felt a new sort of contentment growing in him, one he had very little experience with, as Jay sat upon the counter, legs swinging, watching him flip the last of the remaining pancakes.

“I’m sorry your mother was sad and never taught you to make pancakes. But I’m very glad your grandmother did.”

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