From Lukov with Love

by Mariana Zapata

  “She used to let me borrow her clothes before she grew eight inches and left me behind. But she can’t pick me up like you do.”

  His laugh was soft as he agreed. “You’ve got a point, Meatball. I’m easier to look at though.”

  I couldn’t help the snort that I instantly regretted. “You’re so annoying.”

  “You keep saying that.”

  I smiled against his shoulder and heard a huff of air that told me he was more than likely doing the same exact thing. “You don’t have to stay, you know.”

  “I know. Your mom said your sister or brothers could come check on your grumpy ass until she gets back,” he let me know.

  I made a face. “She calls Tali throwing saltine crackers and Gatorade into my room taking care of me. I’d rather be by myself.”

  “No Gatorade and no saltine crackers. That’s the last thing you need,” he said. “Sugar and pointless carbs won’t do anything.”

  Leave it to Ivan to judge every ounce of nutrition that went into my mouth.

  “Now I definitely can’t leave you, if that’s what will happen if I do,” he whispered.

  I snickered.

  “I don’t mind staying a little while longer, but I need to go home later, at least for an hour.”

  Somewhere in the back of my mind, I registered that he had to leave to go do something. Just like he had when he’d babysat Jessie and Benny with me, and just like when he’d eaten dinner at my mom’s. But I didn’t focus or question what and why he had to leave. I was too tired.

  “You can go now if you want.”

  “No, it’s only five, Meatball,” he replied. “I’ve got hours. It’s fine.”

  “I’m sure you have better things to do.”

  The arm over my shoulder went down, and Ivan’s hand went to my shoulder, cupping it before going up and down my upper arm, one stroke up, one stroke down. “Be quiet and go back to sleep, all right?”

  Sleep? It sounded wonderful. Just fucking awesome.

  Without arguing, I closed my eyes, and asked with an exhale after I got a whiff of the light cologne he wore every day without fail, “Do you do this for all your partners? Or just the ones you’re stuck with for a year?”

  Beneath my cheek, his body tensed and stayed tense even as he answered. “Stop running your mouth and go back to sleep, would you?”

  I moved my palm just enough so that it lay directly over the flat, solid slabs called his abs. I’d seen them a hundred times in glimpses here and there when he’d take off his sweater, or reach up to stretch or scratch his stomach… but I hadn’t touched them. Not once in more than brushes. But they were just as hard as they looked.

  “You really don’t have to stay,” I repeated myself again as exhaustion weighed heavy on my eyes, trying to give him an opening.

  He sighed, and I sensed him shaking his head. “Nobody else is going to take as good of care of you as I will.” He had a point, didn’t he? The faster I got better, the better it would be for him. For both of us.

  If that was disappointment in my belly, I ignored it. It didn’t matter. He was here now, doing what nobody else would want to do.

  “Before you fall asleep again, where’s your remote?” he asked.

  Reaching behind me blindly, I grabbed the remote off the other nightstand and then dropped it on his stomach.

  And I passed the fuck out.

  Something warm touched my mouth later, and I’d swear I heard, “Drink it, baby,” whispered to me.

  And I drank it all. Whatever the hell it was.

  I woke up at one point, sensing my head on something hard, and peeked my eyes open enough to find that I had my head on a lap, my arm thrown over kneecaps. The television was on softly, and the comforter I’d crawled under had been kicked down to the bottom of the bed.

  I was sweating. Hot. But somehow I managed to fall back asleep.

  “Jasmine,” a familiar voice whispered into my ear, stroking my hair and then arm. “I need to go home.”

  I felt like shit. All I could do was mutter, “Okay.”

  Ivan’s familiar hand stroked my hair, my arm, my wrist, lingering there. “Your cell is right next to you. Your mom said someone would come check on you. Call me if you need anything though, all right?”

  “Uh-huh,” was all I managed to get out before his fingers, or his hand, left my wrist.

  “I’ll be here in the morning,” he said, something warm and damp touching my forehead so lightly and quickly, I thought I might have imagined it.

  “Thanks,” I whispered in my one moment of clarity, my throat parched.

  “I left you water on both nightstands. Drink up.”

  Something else touched my forehead, and I sighed an, “Okay, Vanya.” Then, I rolled over and went back to sleep.

  Chapter 15

  It was the poke to my forehead that woke me up. The “wakey, wakey,” that came after it that got me to open my eyes and squint up at the finger hovering over my face. But it was the dryness coming from my throat and the dull pain from my head that had me shoving down the sheet I had pulled up to my neck. I had no clue where my comforter had gone.

  Sitting with his butt halfway on the bed, with his hand above my face, was a clean, fresh-looking Ivan in a blue T-shirt that made his eyes look as if he had on colored contacts.

  “What do you want?” I moaned, shuffling up the bed until my shoulder blades rested on the headboard.

  He ignored my borderline rude words and smiled. “Get dressed. You need a shower and you need to get out of this room for a while.”

  I watched him the entire time I yawned, wincing at the soreness coming from my throat, and then reached over for the nearly empty glass of water that had been sitting on my nightstand since Ivan had left it there last night. Sipping what was left of the room-temperature water, I blinked at him and asked, “And that’s why you had to wake me up? To tell me to shower?”

  “And get you out of the house.”

  But I didn’t want to leave the house. Much less my bed. And especially not to shower.

  His fingertip came at my face so fast I didn’t get a chance to move out of the way before he poked me on the forehead. “Get moving. Lacey isn’t exactly patient.”

  “Who’s Lacey?”

  “You’ll meet her in a minute. Hurry up. I’ll get you another glass of water in the meantime.” Ivan stood up and made a face. “Brush your teeth too.”

  For a second, I thought about blowing out a long breath of air just for his comment, but didn’t have the energy… and he’d been nice to me for the most part. He’d at least gone totally out of his way since the day before.

  I could keep my sick breath to myself this once, even though he was being an ass.

  But the question remained… who the hell was Lacey and why did I have to meet her? Especially when I was sick. Just as I was about to open my mouth and argue with him, my head gave a throb to remind me my body was making up with this one virus, all the months and possibly years that had passed since the last time I’d been ill.

  My whole body said, “fuck you,” as I flipped the sheet to the side and swung my legs over the edge. I wasn’t new to aches and pains, but there was a certain kind of hell that being sick put your body through. Everything from my eyeballs down to my toes ached and seemed to creak just from those movements, and I only barely held back a groan as I slowly stood up.

  Ivan let out a “huh,” maybe seeing my face or sensing the stiffness in my movement, but he didn’t say anything else.

  Just that was exhausting. “I don’t feel like doing anything.”

  “I’m not going to make you do anything,” Ivan returned. “I already said that you need to rest.”

  I eyeballed the jeans he had on. “Then… where are we going?”

  His facial features didn’t give anything away. “Nowhere bad.”

  I blinked.

  “Do you trust—” He made a face. “Never mind. Just get dressed.”

  It said how tired and
crappy I felt that I didn’t argue or ask any more questions. I dragged my feet toward my dresser and pulled out underwear and a bra, becoming even more tired after that. Casting a side-look at Ivan, I found him still sitting on my bed… watching me. I sighed, and he raised his eyebrows again.

  “I’ll be back in ten,” I basically whined, shuffling toward my door.

  “Holler if you need me.” There was a pause and then, “I’ve already seen you almost naked twice. It’s no big deal.”

  I would have choked if I had the energy, but I didn’t. I would have given him the finger too, but that didn’t happen either. All I managed to do was grab my bathrobe from the hook behind the door. I headed, huffing and puffing, to bathroom across the hall that I used to share with Ruby back when she had lived here. It took me longer than normal to shower, and it was only because my legs felt so damn prickly that I forced myself to shave. I didn’t have the energy to put lotion on or anything. I just barely managed to pull on my underwear and my most comfortable bra.

  I slipped on my robe and was just about to tie the sash on it when my arms gave up. I just held it together at my waist as I dragged myself back to my room, asking myself one more time: Who the hell was Lacey? And, where the hell were we going?

  I had barely made it two steps into the room… barely seen Ivan sitting on the edge of my bed directly besides my nightstand… barely caught on to the fact that the top drawer of it was open… barely caught on to the fact he was holding white sheets of paper that he shouldn’t have seen and shouldn’t have known existed, when Ivan’s head snapped up and I saw, I saw, his face was a color it shouldn’t have been.

  And then he lost it.

  “What the hell is this?” he asked, shaking the papers in his hand, angrily, so angry, so fast, I really felt bad.

  Only for a second. But it still happened.

  The breath I hadn’t realized I’d blown out of my lungs, came back in me before I managed to hiss out, “What the hell are you doing looking through my things?”

  It was a sign of how angry he was that he didn’t immediately have a comeback for me.

  It was my fault. I knew he was nosey. I knew he was nosey because I was nosey. But damn it! Those papers had been in there safely for years.

  Ivan ignored my question, crushing the sheets in his hand so tightly, they formed partial balls. “Who… who…?” he stuttered, another sign of how furious he was. Ivan never stuttered. Never faltered. And even his neck was going red.

  He gave the papers another shake. “Who did this?”

  I swallowed.

  “Who sent this shit to you?”

  “Ivan—”

  He shook his head, the hand holding the papers dropping until his fist bumped against his thigh, his head cocked to the side in anger. In so much anger, I could almost taste it. “Don’t ‘Ivan’ me. Where did these come from?”

  Shit.

  Shit, shit, shit.

  I didn’t even think I could try and play stupid and act like the notes I’d had hidden in my drawer were a joke—because my mom wouldn’t look through my things, we were past that stage in my life. I knew Ivan too well. I knew he wouldn’t drop this crap until I explained every detail.

  And I couldn’t say that I blamed him.

  If I’d found pictures of naked men with his face taped to the bodies, with hearts glued to them, with arrows pointed at his genitals, connected to words like YUM and YES, I might laugh for a minute… and then worry like hell.

  God, god, god, goddammit.

  “Jasmine.” He started to get revved up all over again, the red on his face and neck climbing to the tips of his ears. Good lord, I’d never seen him so pissed. I didn’t even think he was capable of being so mad unless he was on the ice and something had gone wrong during a competition.

  I held back my sigh, seriously regretting that I’d taken my hiding places for granted and hadn’t shoved them into my underwear drawer… or somewhere else that was harder to find. I’d throw them away, but I wasn’t an idiot, if anything ever happened, I needed proof.

  Waving my hands, palms down, I tried to tell him in my softest voice, which probably wasn’t as soft as it needed to be, “Calm down.”

  Yeah, that was the worst thing to do. He shook the fucking papers again. “Don’t tell me to calm down!”

  Oh fuck me.

  “You have a fucking stalker, Jasmine!” he yelled again, making me thankful that my mom and Ben were gone.

  I winced, trying to think of what to say and coming up with, “He hasn’t threatened me….”

  Ivan tipped his head back and made a noise I wasn’t really sure what it was called. A growl? “What the fuck?”

  I finally snapped. “Don’t fucking yell at me!”

  If looks could kill, I would have been dead, for real. “I’m going to yell at you when you’ve been getting things like this! Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Oh. My. God. I wasn’t in the mood for this shit. Not ever and definitely not then. “I haven’t told you because it’s none of your business!”

  “You’re my business! So this is my business!”

  “No, it’s not!”

  “Yes, it is!”

  “No, it isn’t! This has been happening since before we paired up.”

  And, I’d fucked up. I’d fucked up like I always did while speaking before thinking. For letting my mouth run away from me as far as it could.

  Ivan’s face literally went tomato red. So red, I was genuinely worried for his health. “I’m going to kill you,” his voice dropped instantly. He stared at me, bug eyed. “I’m going to fucking kill you.”

  I couldn’t even make a joke about it. “Just fucking stop, all right? I’m not in the mood.”

  Ivan shook his head and raised his fist, dropping the papers onto my perfectly made bed. “I don’t give a single fuck right now that you’re not in the mood, Jasmine,” he stated, and before I could argue some more, he said in a tone I’d never heard from him, “How long has this been happening?”

  I rolled my eyes and shrugged, so angry with myself for being so dumb. I knew better. I knew better. I should have planned for the worst, especially with this unrelenting, stubborn asshole. “Three years,” I mumbled, so mad I could barely talk over the ache in my throat.

  He closed those blue eyes and opened his mouth, shaking his head in the process. “Three years,” he repeated the words roughly. “How many of these have you gotten?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  One ice blue eye opened and aimed itself right at me. “Too bad. How many of these have you gotten?”

  I groaned, grunted, and tipped my own head back once more in frustration. There was no escaping it. Was there? Shit. “I don’t know—” he started to cut me off, but I didn’t let him. “No, seriously. I don’t know. When I first started getting them, I threw the first few in the trash. My best guess is… twenty? Maybe?” More like thirty, but I sure as fuck wasn’t going to admit that.

  He was breathing so hard I almost didn’t want to look at him, but I wasn’t a little bitch. Especially not in this situation. “Does your family know?” he asked in a creepy, calm voice.

  Could I have lied? No. This fucker knew my tells too well. “About a few of the ones in the past,” I gritted out.

  “What does that mean?” he demanded, still watching me with that one eye.

  “They stopped coming in when I deleted my social media pages,” I explained, wishing I didn’t and wasn’t. “They know about a few of the ones I got before that.”

  The other blue eye snapped open, and Ivan stared at me. “Are you still getting them?”

  I moved my gaze away from him as I shrugged, so damn mad. “I don’t know. I don’t open my mail anymore.”

  I didn’t. I didn’t want to get distracted. I didn’t want to overthink my situation.

  So, I had decided to play the ignorant game. But I didn’t admit that to him.

  I also wasn’t going to bring up the comments an
d private messages I had gotten.

  The thought had barely occurred to me when Ivan’s jaw went tight and he asked, “What about your Picturegram and Facebook? Have you gotten anything on there?”

  Fuck me.

  My face must have said everything because he dropped his head back and rolled it from side to side, breathing loudly the whole time.

  “It’s not—”

  “Where’s your phone?”

  I blinked. “Why?”

  “I want to see what you’ve been sent.”

  “It’s none of your—”

  It was his turn to blink at me after tilting his head forward. “Don’t finish that sentence,” he told me, slowly. “Let me see your phone. If there’s nothing bad, it shouldn’t be a big deal.”

  I hated it when he made a good point.

  “Let me see it,” Ivan repeated, using a tone of voice I hadn’t heard from him before.

  Damn it. There was no question he wasn’t about to let this shit go. Ugh. “It’s on the other nightstand,” I muttered, pissed off at myself. “Let me see your phone then too.” I don’t know why the hell that sentence came out of my mouth, but it had.

  He slid me another killing look before standing up, tossing his phone at me, and then crawling over my bed. “I already unlocked it,” he let me know, angrily.

  I shot him the same facial expression back, even though he couldn’t see it. “My password is—”

  “I know your password. I’ve seen you put it in,” he muttered as his hand snatched my phone from the other nightstand.

  “Fucking stalker.”

  He gave me another “I’m going to kill you” face but kept his mouth shut as he sat on the edge of my bed once more and started poking around on the screen.

  Even though I was holding his phone in my hands, I watched him instead. Lines appeared on his forehead twice, his left hand went to the back of his head and stayed there. Then he started breathing hard.