“Tomorrow, malysh. I can’t wait to see you.”
“I’m looking forward to not having to cook.”
“Stubborn. Just admit it.”
“???”
“That you can’t wait to see me.”
“Can’t wait to see all that delicious food on my plate.”
“If you’re going to insist on being naughty, there will be no dessert.”
“You keep talking about dessert. It had better be good.”
“The best. Always. Everything for you.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Misha.”
“Good night.”
Oh, all the things I could read into a simple heart emoji.
* * *
“Mommy’s using the bathroom right now!” I called as one of my children tried to take the door off the hinges by throwing their full body weight against it.
“What are you doing?” Ah. It was Fern.
“Getting ready!” I said over the fan, which was doing absolutely nothing to clear the steam from the mirror. How could I be so hopeless? I should’ve cleared the mirror with my hairdryer when I still had it out, but I’d already put it away — a necessity in a small bathroom and around small children. A towel might speed the process, but it was currently wrapped around me just in case one of my little gremlins somehow managed to jimmy the lock on the door.
“I want to see!”
“You do not want to see,” I muttered, dragging a razor up my shin. Because this was ridiculous. What was I doing? I was trying to rid myself of all of the body hair I had accumulated over these past few years because I’d been too busy to do anything about it — or go anywhere that required anything dressier than jeans or my chef’s uniform.
“What?”
“Mommy needs just a few minutes by herself to finish up in here,” I said.
“What?”
“Mommy doesn’t want to perpetuate stereotypes of femininity to her three-year-old,” I tried. Ha — see? Something from a university-level women’s studies intro course had stuck with me over these past few years.
“What?”
“Count to one hundred and then you can come in,” I said — an unfair proposition because Fern couldn’t count to one hundred yet.
She gave it the old college try, though, getting on her hands and knees and squishing her lips under the crack beneath the door and projecting her count into the bathroom as loudly as she could.
A particularly boisterous “five” made me jump and nick my knee. Stupid. I was so stupid. I could’ve just borrowed some trousers or a long skirt from my mom and been done with it. Why was it suddenly so important to me to look good?
I didn’t have to ask myself. I already knew the answer.
It was Mikhail.
Four years had passed since we’d last seen each other, and everything had changed in the meantime. But what hadn’t changed, apparently, were my feelings for him.
He was, if possible, even more handsome than before. And yet there was something about him that required explanation. Where he had been and what he’d been doing for the last four years, for starters. He’d said things had happened to him that I didn’t understand. Maybe this was the event where he was going to come clean with both me and my brother.