Paperwork and meetings just somehow didn’t provide the same release. Nor would he turn to drugs like his brother had. So that only left one thing: sex. In the past, he would have welcomed a road trip and the availability of women who only cared about who he was and didn’t mind letting him use them as stress relief.
But in this case, he couldn’t see himself employing that option on this next trip. First of all, he was the team owner now, no longer a player. And even if he had been in the position to pick up groupies, the thought of sleeping with one made him feel dead inside, even more numb than killing those Russians.
It was hard for him to admit this to himself, especially after what he’d seen on the porch of Ruth’s House, but he didn’t want any other woman. Not like he wanted Samantha.
And now she was pregnant. With his child. Unhappily so, he’d reminded himself the following day. Then he’d had to keep on reminding himself, over and over again, during the morning practice and the meetings he took that afternoon. But those harsh reminders hadn’t been enough to stop him from telling Isaac to cancel the rest of his meetings at five and leaving early for home.
He cursed himself all the way to the house. It was like the compulsion he kept having to check on Pavel every night before he went to bed, even though he knew the boy was fine, knew the threat of the Russians had been eliminated. Knowing Sam was pregnant with his baby made him want to be close to her. Physically close. And as foolish as he felt about the whole thing, he kept his foot firmly on the gas pedal, driving faster than he should to get to her.
When he arrived home, he followed the sounds of laughter to the kitchen, and what he found there stopped his heart.
Samantha sitting next to Pavel at the island counter. Their heads both bent over a textbook, Samantha’s arm resting across Pavel’s shoulders. They looked like… a mother and son. A real mother and son. The easy way they laughed together, not even a total stranger happening upon them would have doubted how close they were or known they weren’t family in every sense of the word.
Nikolai was not prepared for the ache of longing that hit him upon seeing Samantha like this. An ache followed by a piercing wish for her to stand up and come around the island to greet him. Like a wife. Like someone who was happy he was home.
And in that moment, he regretted, truly regretted what he’d said to her when he visited Ruth’s House the day before. Da, he’d had every right to ask the question, especially after the scene he’d witnessed between her and Marco. He’d still been angry about that when she told him the news, his mind reeling with the revelation that she hadn’t broken up with the cop. And he hadn’t been able to get past it. The sight of them together. The idea of Samantha letting the cop touch her. Maybe more.
At the time, he’d felt completely justified in lashing out. Had, in fact, been aiming to hurt her with his accusation.
But now, he felt like an idiot. Seeing her like this with Pavel, all he wanted was for her to be same way with him. A memory of Alexei’s parents came to him then. The way they would sometimes kiss, soft on the lips, if Alexei’s father had been away for a long time. The way his aunt’s eyes had glowed with tenderness when she looked across the room at his uncle.
He wanted Samantha to look at him that way.
He did not get his wish. Back Up came trotting over to get petted, alerting the boy and Samantha to Nikolai’s presence in the doorway. Upon seeing him there, Samantha’s smile went away, as if a dark storm cloud had suddenly rolled in on her perfect picnic with Pavel.
Pavel immediately stopped laughing, too. But at least he said, “Hi, Uncle. You’re home early.”
Pavel’s tone was pleased and Nikolai wished it wasn’t so hard for him to look directly at the boy. But he couldn’t make himself do that often. Even with the much darker skin and the hair texture difference, his nephew looked too much like Fedya at that age. For Nikolai, it was like looking directly into a sun made of memories. Impossible to do without feeling like your eyes were burning.
So instead of looking at Pavel, he bent down and patted Back Up, who immediately flipped over on her back. Samantha’s dog was the worst kind of manipulator, he was discovering. Give her even the smallest of strokes and she took you for a belly rub.
“Why were you laughing?” he asked Samantha and Pavel, as he rubbed his hand across Back Up’s pink belly. The question came out harsher than he meant it to.
But there was a smile in Pavel’s voice when he answered, “Because Mama is really bad at math. I didn’t want to do my homework and Mama told me she’d do my homework for me, but I keep on having to correct it and put in the right answers.”
“Luckily we’re using pencil,” Samantha said. Her voice had a different kind of smile in it.
“Luckily,” Pavel agreed, cracking up again. “You’re so bad at math!”
“And you’re getting so good at it.”
Nikolai stood there, rubbing Back Up’s belly longer than necessary, awkward as a moose at a deer party. Obviously Pavel had no idea Sam was only pretending to be bad at math, and he could barely fathom such a scenario in his own past. Growing up, his mother had only to threaten to tell his father he wasn’t doing something he was supposed to do, and Nikolai would do it. Right away.
But apparently Pavel had to be tricked into doing what he was supposed to do. It made him feel… he didn’t know. Sometimes it felt like Pavel was a duty, something to be managed until he reached his majority. And sometimes… sometimes it felt like he was a conduit to memories Nikolai didn’t want to have—memories he’d done a good job suppressing until the little boy had shown up in his life.
“Would you like some dinner?” Sam asked, her tone gracious but automatic. He got the feeling she would have offered anyone passing through the kitchen something to eat, even a servant.
“Mama and me made the noodles ourselves with your pasta machine!” Pavel told him, with great excitement in his voice. Like making noodles from scratch was the most exciting activity in the universe.
“Da, I will have spaghetti,” he said quickly. Happy for the change of subject.
The careful smile fell off Samantha’s face when he went over to the restaurant grade sink to wash his hands. And out of the corner of his eye, he noticed her hesitate before she went over to a cabinet, grabbed a bowl, and started filling it with pasta.
He sat down at the counter and watched her ladle meat sauce on top of the noodles before she came back over and set the bowl in front of him with a flat, “Here you go.”
“Thank you,” he answered, not knowing exactly why he’d agreed to eat a second dinner, even as he twirled the noodles around his fork.
Sam sat back down and said, “If we’d known you were coming, we wouldn’t have eaten.”
“It is okay,” he answered, taking a bite of the spaghetti. It was good. Really good. Somehow better than what he was used to because it was plain and homemade. Not perfectly spiced to his exact specifications, like the meals Isaac delivered to his office.
He could feel Pavel and Samantha’s eyes on him as he ate, as if a monster had entered their midst. And he had the feeling the quiet, filled with nothing but the sound of him eating the homemade spaghetti would have gone on forever if Pavel hadn’t chosen that moment to ask, “When you were kids, did you have birthday parties?”
“Are you asking me or your uncle?” Samantha asked him.
Pavel became very interested in the problems on his math worksheet as he answered, “Both of you, I guess.”
Samantha cleared her throat. “My mom made me a cake every year, and sometimes she took me out to dinner someplace like McDonald’s and she’d get me a Happy Meal,” she answered. “But no, never like a full on birthday party. How about you, Nikolai?” she asked. “Does Russia do the whole kids birthday party thing?”
“Da, we have these things, but I did not growing up,” he answered.
“Why not?” she asked, looking at him directly for the first time since he’d arrived home.
; He thought about the true answer, which was because at the end of the day, he was a bastard with a generally depressed mother and a father who wouldn’t have shown up to a birthday party for him even if one had been thrown. And then he answered, “It is silly custom.”
Pavel’s cheeks reddened. “Yeah, you’re right, Uncle. Birthday parties are kind of stupid. I don’t know if I even want to go to the one Mateo invited me to.”
A reasonable conclusion on the boy’s part, Nikolai thought, but for some reason Samantha threw Nikolai a murderous look before saying to Pavel, “Birthday parties aren’t so bad. We throw them for our kids at the shelter all the time and they’re always a lot of fun. Maybe you should go to one and see how you like it.”
But Pavel quickly glanced up at Nikolai and answered, “No, that’s okay.”
And so the matter was settled. Or at least Nikolai thought it was. A soft knock sounded on his study door a couple of hours later.
“Come in,” he said, looking up from the work he’d brought home with him.
Sam stuck her head in. “Hey, got time to talk?” she asked.
Her voice was friendly and calm, like that scene in the kitchen hadn’t been awkward at all. He frowned. He was beginning to suspect friendly and calm was Samantha’s default for when she was anything but.
Nonetheless he took off his reading glasses and indicated she should sit down, which she did, looking around his study, a more somber affair than the rest of the house with dark wood paneling and a statesman like desk, so big, it had necessitated the interior designer and his crew break it down into pieces before rebuilding it inside the room.
“Wow,” she said. “This is… maybe fifty times bigger than my office at Ruth’s House. Sweet!”
A compliment, Nikolai realized after mulling her words over for a few moments. “Thank you,” he said.
“So,” she said, folding her hands on her lap. “How’s it going? Everything good with the job?”
“Da, it is fine,” he answered, knowing how Americans enjoyed their small talk. He awkwardly added, “I have much paperwork.”
“Paperwork is the worst, right? I always say I enjoy everything about my job, except the paperwork. It’s a real beast.”
“Da, it is beast,” he agreed, his voice stilted.
Why was it so hard to talk to this woman? He’d never had any problems talking with women before her. But everything about Samantha unsettled him, made him feel like he was once again the unacknowledged bastard of Sergei Rustanov. Not even good enough to warrant his parent’s marriage.
“I came in here to talk about Pavel…” Samantha introduced the new subject like it was a delicate object, one she carefully set down on the desk between them. “He really admires you. He’s very proud to have a hockey star for an uncle.”
Having no idea how to answer that, Nikolai remained quiet and let her finish.
“I think that’s a nice change of pace for him, because he’s been embarrassed by his living situations for so long, feeling like there was something he had to hide. And now he can be proud of where he’s living and who he’s living with. In many ways, it’s a dream come true for him.”
None of these emotional truths ever would have occurred to Nikolai, but he said, “Yes, if I were Pavel, I would think so, too.”
“And how about you? How do you think it’s going with Pavel?”
“How do I think it’s going with Pavel,” he repeated, not quite understanding her meaning.
She talked slowly, like the ESL tutor he’d been given when he first joined the Polar. “Do you like how your relationship is progressing?”
He thought about this question. “It progresses fine,” he answered. “Pavel is clean and fed and back in school. As you said, now he is very proud of his home and his family.”
“Yes, but…” She reset, putting on another one of her bright smiles. “I’m happy that you came home early. Really happy. And I want to apologize for not giving you positive feedback on that action earlier. I wish I had responded better, I was just so surprised to see you come in. And I wish I had known you were coming home earlier so we could’ve all eaten dinner together.”
Nikolai had to work hard to keep his face expressionless, to not let her see the pathetic soar of emotions her words sent off inside his chest. She was happy he’d come home early. Her vision about how she should have responded to it was nearly the same as his wish. Them all eating dinner together, like the happy families he’d only ever visited, but had never been a part of. The knowledge that she, too, wanted this, made the hot ache inside his chest gentle into a quiet warmth.
“It is okay,” he told her. “You did not know I would come home early. I should have told you.”
She leaned forward. “Is coming home earlier something you might be able to pull off more often?”
His heart nearly stopped beating. She wanted him to come home earlier more often.
“Da,” he answered, wondering if he was in the middle of some kind of dream, if he shouldn’t pinch himself to make sure. “I can come home earlier. Not on game nights or when I am on road with team, but other times, I can come home earlier and work here.”
Her face lit up. “Really? Because if that’s the case, maybe we could push dinner back an hour and you know… establish a family dinner routine with Pavel?”
A family routine. It was as if she knew his secret wants without having been told. And this time he couldn’t keep the smile off his face as he answered, “Da, Da. That is good idea. I will come home early and eat family dinner.”
She clapped her hands together, her genuine smile making him feel like he’d just won a trophy. She was beautiful when she was angry, but in that moment, he realized she was even more so when she was pleased.
“Okay, cool! Then I think we have a potentially good dynamic on our hands.”
He had no idea what she meant by that, but he agreed, “Cool.”
“And in the interest of your family dynamic, could you explain a little more about what’s made you so anti-birthday party?” she asked
He froze, not liking that the subject had come back around to his past. Not liking it at all.
“It is silly custom.”
“Yes, birthdays along with love,” she said, her tone dry. “And you don’t think that’s a hard stance to take on things? Maybe something you might want to reconsider now that you’ve been given custody of an eight-year-old?”
A bad feeling began to boil inside his chest. “You are counselor,” he realized out loud.
“Not my official title,” she answered carefully. “But yes, it’s one of the roles I serve at Ruth’s House.”
He gave her a heavy frown. “I did not ask for your counseling, but you have come here to shrink my head. Like I am hurt woman. Like I am child, same as Pavel.”
She went still in a way that let him know that this was exactly why she’d come in. Not because she’d been truly happy about him coming home from work, but because she’d had an agenda.
“I…” she stopped, took a deep breath, before quietly saying, “I don’t want to argue with you.”
“No, you want to be counselor to me,” Nikolai said, growing angrier by the second. “You think I am—how you say—traumatized. Like Pavel. Damaged.”
She shook her head, her lips setting in a defensive line. “Those aren’t the terms I would use for you or Pavel, but do I think you should maybe talk to somebody? Yes. You literally drove straight from the police station to get Pavel, but now you’re barely interacting with him. And the few interactions you’ve had with him always seem to end up with him feeling ashamed. Like when you told him men don’t cry, and tonight with the birthday party stuff.”
“How did I shame him?” Nikolai demanded. “All I said was—”
“All you said was that birthday parties are a silly custom.”
“They are silly customs,” Nikolai said, his voice full of icy derision. “You Americans and your sentimental, unnecessary customs.”
&nb
sp; “Pavel’s American, too,” she reminded him. “And his birthday is in three months. Three months prior is around the time when regular kids start asking about what’s going to happen for their birthday.”
Nikolai hadn’t realized that and his surprise must have shown, because Samantha shook her head at him like she was dealing with the world’s biggest idiot.
“Pavel never asks for anything. Ever,” she said quietly. “But maybe he’s starting to trust that he’s in a stable environment now, because he was obviously using Mateo’s party to introduce the idea of having a birthday party of his own tonight. Until you made him feel like it was shameful for him, a little boy, to ask for something nearly every other little boy his age in America is getting. So yeah, fine, go ahead and think birthday parties are silly. But I don’t care what you say, Pavel deserves a party. Deserves it more than most after what he’s been through. And if you don’t throw him one, I will.”
That proclaimed, she stood up and slammed out of his office. Leaving Nikolai behind to feel like the opposite of a man on the verge of establishing a family. Despite the addition of a child to his household, and the eminent arrival of another one inside Samantha’s womb, that dream seemed even farther away than it had before Pavel and Samantha had come to live with him.
21
THE next morning, Sam woke up, did a short yoga routine with Pavel before they walked Back Up around the block, and ate breakfast. A breakfast she soon regretted when she had to run out of the room to throw up. After that, she barely managed to get Pavel into the car with his security guard, Dirk, before she had to go lie down for a little bit, sweating from the exertion of her usual morning routine, though it was in the low thirties outside.
So far being pregnant with Nikolai Rustanov’s baby had caused her nothing but literal headaches with bouts of throwing up in-between. And by the time she got to work, and fished two Tylenol out of the Ruth’s House first aid kit, she was wondering how she was going to get through the next few weeks, much less eight more months.
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