4
Dmitry
The hacking cough from the other side of the door had gotten worse.
I could hear it even over the elevated volume of the television show my father had fallen asleep watching, interspersed with the throaty snoring that accompanied it. Every day that passed in the cabin, his cough seemed to progress. And at night? We could all hear him as if he were in the room with us, irrespective of whether we were in the one next to him or sitting out on the back porch.
Now, two weeks on, I hung around just outside his door, listening to see if his cough was worsening enough to go and check on him, or steady enough to ignore, all while waiting for the sound of my wife’s feet across the cabin. It wasn’t the first time that I’d regretted taking them both to the safe house.
When Shura and I had reentered the room in which Manya waited with my father, there had been a strange tension between the two of them. It lingered in the air even through letting them know we were relocating, and through the entire transfer it had taken to get the three of us out of that house undetected.
It persisted even now. Shared meals were cold, with peculiar, stretched silences that neither of them supplied any explanation for, and something seemed to be wearing at Manya in a way that set my teeth on edge. It wasn’t just the circumstances that we were in—which was the excuse she had tried offering me at first. It was the way she vacillated between claiming everything was okay, then treating me with a kind of detached coldness.
It was why I had told her to go and change into her swimsuit after my father had retired back to his room following brunch that morning. It would be the first real moment just to ourselves we’d been afforded since arriving here, and something told me we needed it.
Russia felt like an entire world apart now, given how different our interactions had become since we were there.
“This is highly inappropriate,” Manya hissed from the doorway, surprising me with her sudden appearance. I hadn’t heard her approach, yet here she stood, a towel clutched around her torso and her eyes narrowed into black slits of accusation.
“Wearing a towel? Da, I know. I thought I told you to go change into your suit?” I fired back, biting back my grin and lifting my eyebrows in question. I pushed away from my father’s door and grabbed the towel slung over the back of the dining room chair as I headed outside, refusing to allow her to air the indignation she was practically swelling with.
“I’m not—Oh, did you even—Ugh! Of course, you did!” Her sentences tripped around one another as she followed behind me.
“Is there a problem with the towel?” I asked innocently, holding the door open for her to hurry through.
She glared back over her shoulder, taking short, jerky steps with the towel held tightly to her body. “Not the towel,” she bit out, almost tripping as my longer strides overtook her.
I led her past the back deck, and we took the small set of stairs down the side of the hill. You could see the lake stretching for as far as the eye could see from the cabin, the water shimmering under either sunlight or moonlight depending on the time of day. The shoreline itself was completely obscured by the hill though, a sharp overhang hiding it from view entirely. Its lush grass was only accessible from the path I was now leading her down.
“Nyet? Not the towel. What then, Tigrenok, is the problem?” I could hear her huffing and puffing in response behind me—both to my laissez-faire attitude and to what she was perceiving as a problem.
She reacted just as I had hoped though, throwing the towel off and gesturing at herself as if there were some great injustice to behold. All I could see was tanned flesh and red lace standing out so brilliantly against it that it reminded me of our first dinner together. The swimsuit honestly looked better on her than I had even imagined.
“This! Dmitry! And don’t you dare say this is a swimsuit! This is lace held together by flimsy string! I would have been more covered if I’d worn my bra and panties instead!” She pulled at the red elastic with one hand, her voice rising an octave.
The outrage suited her. It made her cheeks flush a pretty red and her dark eyes spark with that fire I appreciated so much, almost like it was warming me.
“The lace looks good on you though, da?” I took my own shirt off and tossed it away with her towel, coming up alongside where she stood with her back facing the lake. I ran my finger down the side of the strap that she had been snapping against her skin so pointedly. “Red suits you. . .”
Her face colored further, and her body leaned in towards me as if she meant to fit her face against mine. There was a large part of me that wanted to let her and to pull her to me and forget everything else.
It was the way she had been acting since leaving Russia that stopped me. Something had been bothering her, more than just the dangers of our situation, but she was refusing to talk to me about it. She went to step forward . . . and my hand went from rolling my knuckle down the seam of her bikini top to pushing flat against the center of her chest.
Her eyes widened comically, her body tilting back even as she began to hopelessly windmill her arms to regain balance. It wasn’t going to happen though, not with how closely she had been standing to the edge of the embankment.
She fell into the lake, splashing and screaming for a moment before her head disappearing beneath the clear blue water. I walked to the edge, lowering myself slowly through the steep drop from the edge of the grass to the serene lake. We were at one of the deeper points in the lake, a spot Shura and I had as children frequently tried to reach the bottom of, narrowly succeeding before needing to dart back up for air.
“I . . . cannot—pfff,” she coughed, her head barely breaking the water’s surface before she began splashing and hitting the water at me. “Pff, I cannot stand you. You are the actual worst,” she spluttered, before pushing her silvery hair back from her head and dipping it backwards in the water to rid it from the sides of her face.
My grin was too telling, and I knew it, but I couldn’t hold it back any more than I could the chuckle as her squinting eyes finally met mine once more.
I grabbed her wrist, pulling her bobbing form to me. I ran my thumb over that recently healed black ink on the soft skin underneath. “Nyet, you love me,” I reminded her, wrapping my arms loosely around her. My lips pushed into the corners of hers, and for a while we floated there next to the embankment together. “Maybe I do this on purpose, da?” I muttered eventually. “Maybe I try and make you so angry you talk.”
She rolled her eyes, but she didn’t pull back from where I held her to me. Instead, she rested her hands on my chest and cocked an eyebrow almost sarcastically in return. “Make me talk? About what?”
“Whatever has you all tangled up inside that impressive, pretty head of yours. Nyet, don’t make that face. Something is bothering you, and while in normal times I would let you stew until you were ready to discuss it, this is not normal.” My hand lifted to push a stray strand of wet hair that had adhered itself to her cheek back along with the rest.
My chest was tight. Discussing things as openly and frankly as this was still a difficult thing for me to do. It wasn’t familiar or comfortable, and yet I felt myself impelled to do it regardless.