Page 59 of Brutal Secrets

We stay like that for a moment, the air between us filled with ten years of missed opportunities, sleepless nights, and awkward dates that didn’t end in anything. I can hear the sound of his inhales and exhales and practically taste the mint of his kisses. He leans toward me, but a knock on the window stops him.

Vadim lowers the window, and Dex leans in. “Another forty minutes and we’ll stop for the night. There’s a place near here where we can break the journey.” He glances at Vadim’s stained shirt. “You good to drive?”

“I’m fine.” Vadim raises the window and turns to me with his hand out for the keys. I reach down and pass him a pack of Tylenol, but he just shakes his head. “I said I was fine.”

“Yeah, I’m sure you’re just peachy. But you’ll recover faster if you reduce the swelling.” I tip two tablets into my hand and pass them over with the bottle of water.

He watches me for a moment and then comes to a decision before reluctantly plucking the tablets from my palm. His throat moves as he swallows them, and I wish he was mine to touch.

He reaches toward me. “Keys,” he mutters.

“So, Polina?” I hold out the keys. “How did she die?”

He takes them from my hand, starting the car and looking more comfortable now that he has a task to accomplish. “I told you that?”

Laughing under my breath, I watch the dashboard. “I thought you remembered everything. You mentioned her.”

“I remember you. The important stuff.” He keeps his eyes on the road, switching on the wipers as a light rain dusts the windshield. “I don’t talk about Polina much.”

“I could tell it was painful. It’s why I didn’t ask more questions. So...” I let the unspoken question hang in the air between us.

“She overdosed. I found her body.”

“God, I’m so sorry.”

Dex’s brake lights glow red in the darkness ahead of us. There’s not much traffic on the road, and it’s so quiet that I can hear Vadim thinking.

“I couldn’t save her. She was the last person I ever loved.”

My mouth screws up like I’ve bitten into something sour. The astringent taste of Vadim admitting he loved another woman when he’s stayed out of my life is both acrid and sharp. I nod and wipe the condensation that has built on the window so I can look out into nothingness.

“I should have been able to do something. To pull her back. To make her feel again,” he says to the night as I keep my eyes fixed on the dark road ahead of us.

“How old were you?”

“I was nineteen. She was sixteen.” He sighs, like the memory hurts to speak.

“You were just a kid,” I say.

“Old enough to go to jail.”

“Not old enough to hold someone else’s pain for them. I’m not sure if anyone is ever old enough to do that.” I look over at Vadim, but he keeps his eyes fixed on the road, our headlights casting a narrow circle in front of us.

“How would you know? You’ve never lost anyone like that.”

I throw his words right back at him. “How would you know who I’ve lost? Life doesn’t stop when people die.”

“You know nothing about my life,” he bites out, blind to what I’ve been through. To my losses. To the pain of having grown up without my mother. To the way I picked myself up and kept going when my father and grandmother were killed in a car accident.

Why did I ever long for someone who is so shut down?

Turning my head back to the fogged glass, I draw a heart with my finger. I fill Nadia’s initials into the point at the bottom and scrawl mine above them.

K.M.S.

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N.S.

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