Page 3 of Brooklyn Bratva

I saw how hard he worked. He had this drive in him that I’d never seen in anyone else before, like he wasn’t going to let anything stand in his way of getting where he wanted to be. His was the face I saw when I read about any romantic hero in one of my books, but I knew he’d do the job far better than any of them ever did.

I might not have understood a word of what he said, but I loved the gravelly, grumble of his voice when he spoke Russian to my father. He didn’t have to raise his voice for me to hear the authority in his tone. I used to stay up late, listening to them in the living room, talking and drinking, knowing that he’d never see me as anything other than the kid that I was, wishing that one day he’d look at me and know I was meant to be his.

I loved reading Eugene Onegin. I saw myself as Tatyana, the shy, passionate girl who fell for the suave gentleman from St. Petersburg, only to find herself ignored by him and spurned. One day, he’d realize his mistake and he would come to me. I ignored the fact that Ivan was nothing like a preening dandy, and I had never even tried to tell him how I felt, in a letter or otherwise – thank God, or I’d never have lived the humiliation down. Of course, I dreamed that we’d end up with the happy ending that the two characters in my book never got. I always hated Pushkin for that.

Sure, he could make his social commentary, but could he cut his characters a break once he was done? I always thought it was desperately tragic that they never got to be together.

I’d grown up a lot in the past seven years. This year I graduated college with a minor in Russian Literature and all I needed to apply for medical school. But for all that, I hadn’t managed to shake my obsession.

I thought college would force me to move on, but I barely let anything distract me from my studies. And then I saw a placement come up helping out in a health clinic right in Brighton Beach a few days a week. And that stupid little voice in my head told me it had to be fate.

It would be perfect to give me the experience I needed for the next step in my education. Dad agreed.

Before I knew it, he’d sorted it out so I could stay with Ivan’s mother, which was more than I could have hoped for. Not only would it be a great experience to act as her home help, picking up groceries and looking out for her overnight and on the weekends, but it gave me the excuse I needed to get close to Ivan again.

Obsessed or not, more than anything I needed to find out once and for all whether he’d ever see me as anything more than his best friend’s kid.

Somewhere in those teenage years, he’d managed to ruin me for all other men, without ever laying a finger on me. God, I wished he’d so much as ruffled my hair. But it never happened. Why would it? He was a good man, and I was his friend’s teenage daughter. I probably wouldn’t have been so starry eyed over him now if he’d ever done what I’d wanted him to, but he had barely noticed me. I couldn’t go on with this fantasy if that was all it was.

I wasn’t a teenager anymore though. Twenty-two was an adult through and through and no one could argue with that. Not even him.

So now I needed to make him see I was all woman, or let my fantasy life with Ivan go. I’d wind up on my own with a hundred cats because no one else was quite right unless I did something. I’d barely even let a boy kiss me because some stupid part of me wanted Ivan to have my first everything.

How could the fumblings of a teenager compare with the way I knew Ivan could touch me? I didn’t want some mistake of a first time. I wanted a man I trusted. A man who knew what he was doing. But the truth was, I didn’t want him for just one night. My head was filled with images of how perfect our life could be together. I thought about what our children would look like, and wrote my name out over and over on blank pages in my class notes, practicing my signature with his surname.

If he didn’t want me, I didn’t have a plan for what came next. Maybe I’d be able to find another Russian closer to my age who made my heart pound the way Ivan did. But I doubted it.

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