Archive of Our Own

Exodus 2:2 — “So the woman conceived and bore a son. And when she saw that he was a beautiful child, she hid him for three months.”

The Long Game — "Ilya didn't think he believed in ghosts, but he clung to the idea that his mother's spirit was with him, somehow. He needed her to be."

Ilya’s mother comes and goes in bits and pieces.

He knows certain details for sure: blonde hair that smelled like yeasty bread; chewed-up fingernails sitting on even more chewed-up fingers, dry palms, wet eyes. A small nose and a big mouth, the skin around it bulged with needle-sized, spongy holes. She couldn’t eat spicy food because of them, but when she did, her nose ran, her lips swelled, and she stayed puckered for days. Her neck sweated a powdery damp she tried to bury under Elizabeth Taylor’s White Diamonds. Even now, Ilya can smell her whenever he walks into stores that sell both baby clothes and engagement rings. 

Ilya also knew that his mother had a habit of scratching around her shoulder because of a red patch of skin that resurfaced every winter. From time to time, it would bleed ferociously when she started peeling the skin back thoughtlessly, lost in random fits of restlessness and daydreaming. He “kissed it better” on those days. Her blood tasted salty, and her frown deepened when he wiped it away from his mouth.

“Oh God,” she wouldn’t look at him when she said this. She was speaking to someone else entirely, beyond any window in their house. “How did you allow me to have such a wonderful boy? What can I do to deserve him?”

He’d remember the knobby feel of her body when he embraced her, squirming like an emaciated animal as he’d kiss her temple, but obeying what the affection commanded—full surrender. His mother especially liked it when Ilya forced his arms around her, fought with her to touch her, as when he pried her stubborn hands away from her stomach so he could rest his head on her concave belly, which was always covered with a thick, cable-knit sweater. He took every slap, every scratch. 

“You love me now?” She would ask him, muttering as she pushed his hands away, beating at his chest, threshing, floundering like a marketplace fish, but grinning. “You love your Mama again?”

Of course he did. 

He knew she played this game with him because it proved that he wanted to be with her just as much as she wanted to be with him. He did it with her, too. A lot. Since he was a child, he would choose to sit in the furthest seat from her during dinner. Then, she could drag her body to him, carrying her plate and wine glass, letting the wooden legs of the chair scrape against the floor. She was unashamed at his father and Alexei’s groans of protest. She’d share chunks of her meal, spooning rice and soup into his mouth in front of everyone’s faces, wiping his chin with the back of her hand. 

Look at what I have.

Ilya would think this selfishly to himself whenever Alexei would stare in horror as their mother used her spit-swollen thumb to pluck his crumbs away and nibble on whatever she could manage, her motions quick to disguise it as casual. An ugly smugness took up Ilya’s face. Alexei was stuck with Papa, who would beat him with his hands and spoons and shoes, while he was with Mama, who would let him slouch and burp and make big, brilliant spit bubbles right there on the table. He felt as if he had a precious toy in his hands, something new and shiny. 

He would even think these words when he said goodnight to his father, kissing him on the cheek with his bruised, puckered lips, Mama’s blood still on them. He’d feel Papa flinch back in terror, the only time he’d see him so frightened.

Look at what she gave just to me. She loves me a lot. More than both of you combined. She told me so herself, so shove it.

But when Ilya tried to remember other things about her, it came from his Papa. Because of him, the only story ever spared about her came out in dumb mumbles at the end of some night—at a dinner party, maybe. Or the annual get-togethers with coaches and retired policemen. Or a child’s birthday. A wedding. Her funeral. His father would stand very still, eyes fixed on the floor, both hands wrapped around the needle-thin neck of a champagne glass Alexei had shoved into his grip as a prop for a photograph or two, something to make him look more sane, more alert. 

He’d begin:

“Irina always liked the shape of her baby son’s mouth.”

Papa would stand in a circle of men and whisper the story of his dead wife beneath his breath, convinced they were listening—that their conversations had stilled, that hands had paused midway to mouths, that cups hovered untouched out of respect for him. Ilya knew better. He was the only one listening.

Back then, he barely reached Papa’s chest. When he leaned in, his ear pressed level with his father’s heart, the sound of it thudding through wool and bone, steady and stubborn beneath the thick blazer. And though Ilya made it his private duty to keep his father’s illness from showing in public, he never stopped him when his mother’s name surfaced.

“Ilya’s mouth—the only part of him that ever looked like it could belong to Irina. The rest was all mine. But the boy’s lips… they were torn up, a constant sore split into the corner, oozing and ugly. The doctors said nothing could be done. Treatment would only make it worse. Maybe surgery when he was older. Someone had kissed him as a newborn, they said, so that was that—nothing to be done. The nanny’d smear olive oil over it before Ilya slept, sometimes honey, sometimes both. There he was, a baby in his crib, a thick layer of jelly slicked over the sores, like some fish or river leech latched onto him. Irina thought it was darling.”

His lips looked burnt to her. Yes… and his skin was so white that the red made him look like he was wearing lipstick. She always wore lipstick, too. I still hate women who wear that shit. She used to sneak into his room—she thought I didn’t know, but I know everything— she used the back of her wedding ring to scrape the jelly off of him, and scratch at the scab until it opened back up again, just so it could bleed, so she could bandage it back up. Ha! Stupid woman, she was crazy! 

She would hush him back to sleep with a song, watching the salty tears make him cry even more when they touched his lip! She breastfed him that way. She bottle-fed him that way. Such misery for my baby, my son. When Sofia would tell me his bedsheets weren’t soaked with piss, but something else… that his school uniform and gym shorts were soiled before he could go to class… They all blamed me for it, at first. Such misery for my son, such humiliation for me. He grew well, but his stomach is full of blood. The doctors told her to stop; they said the boy would be disfigured. But she didn’t, she never stopped bothering the baby unless you shook her, unless you hit her!—”

“Papa,” Ilya would say, just to make his father look at him—at all of him, the cloudy eyes clearing over. The champagne had turned warm in his grip. His hands trembled.

Ilya smiled, like always. “It is time to go home. Everyone has left. No one is here to listen.”

It was always true. They were the last to go—busboys plucking empty glasses, janitors mopping around their feet, their shadows the final smudges of dirt. And then the story stopped.

In the car, Papa fell quiet, his head resting against the cold window glass. He watched his son’s reflection there—mouth slightly open, no words left to give. He didn’t need them. Ilya knew what he was dwelling on. It showed in the way Papa tracked him—blinking, rubbing at his nose, coughing; in the way his gaze sharpened each time Ilya cleared his throat or licked his lips. It was all there, laid out, butchered into one body.

There he is, Papa probably thought, somewhere in the still-awake corner of his decaying mind. Ilya wondered if his father still had it in him to cry. If he did, he would have by now.

There’s her boy.

But what Papa didn’t know was that Ilya chose (at Mama’s request) to keep his bedroom door slightly open at night, leaving a space on the right side of his mattress, not closing his eyes until he heard the bed springs hiss and cold fingers tug on his lashes, teeth, and jaw. He would look up through fake-sleepy eyes and see his mother’s chapped lips curled up, one hand cradling her bare breast. He was too old to piss the bed by then, but he remembered crossing his legs, winding all the muscles in his body so tight that he felt TV static in his toes. The breath through her nose was always so warm and even—the sliver of hallway light that broke through his cracked door illuminating her blue eyes a brilliant, twitching yellow.

Other details he needs photos for. He needed evidence that she was shorter than him when his dreams told him otherwise—that she was some 10-foot giant who couldn’t fit on his bed after all, and that her feet would break through the floorboards while her gaunt spine would reach up to the ceiling. He’d dream that the tits that swung from her chest were actually the bodies of two dead birds, that her sharp nipples were their beaks. 

He’d dream that she had wings, that her feet were actually talons, and that is why she always wore close-toed shoes inside the house. He’d dream she never bathed. Or did she bathe too much—is that why she had that rash?

From time to time, he even needed confirmation that she had a tongue, a pink slab of meat that she hardly ever used unless to say his and Jesus’ name. He’s seen it used only once for something else in an old album his father kept packed away in his nightstand’s drawer. 

And there it was: wrapped in a smile on Ilya’s 9th birthday, barely poking through, sandwiched between square, white teeth and splintered gums, helping him blow out his candles, rose-colored and familiar.

NEW YEAR’S EVE.

BERLIN, GERMANY.

Ilya is on one tonight, Svetlana thought. Maybe everyone at the rave was, if you could even call it that. 

Ilya had been the one who chose the club to welcome the new year with—said he found it on Google Maps when he was high and zooming in on random cities at night, that he liked the way it was wedged between a McDonalds and a Curry 36, and if Svetlana didn’t come with him, he would perform seppuku and donate his carcass to a sex doll factory.

She should’ve let him. She could’ve just bought a doll.

Maybe he planned to act like a fool for months, anticipating it. Because the moment their plane landed, they were hugged and cheek-kissed by a young girl with blue rubber-banded braces, flat acne, and dime-sized pores. She said that her Vati prepared their private section with lots of salty snacks, sour gummy worms, and shots of Jägermeister, and that they didn’t have to worry about staying at the place too late because if they just went up two floors there should be a room prepared for them to sleep, shower, and eat in, condoms and underwear and pocket Bibles provided with no extra charge.

Ilya had grabbed the girl’s face and given her a fat kiss on her forehead.

“How’d you know her?” Svetlana asked in the car that was also pre-ordered for them—a Mercedes-Benz skinned in holographic purple. A sticker of a pink-haired anime girl clung to the side window, half-peeled.

Ilya was jabbing away on his phone’s keyboard, playing a game where his character had to jump over open fires and lakes, humming a song she didn’t know. 

He didn’t look up at her when answering back: “Fan mail. She said she liked my hair. Her daddy owns crumbs of real estate in hell and Dubai.” 

Svetlana watched his reflection in the glass. “She looked thirteen.”

His thumbs stopped. He locked the phone, the screen black with lotion-greasy fingerprints. He rubbed his temples, eyes closed.

“That’s how old Joan of Arc was when she said an angel spoke to her.”

The car hummed along, and Svetlana said nothing. The driver adjusted the rearview mirror—just slightly. If he understood Russian, she was sure he’d roll his eyes.

Ilya was shaking his feet the entire ride there, shivering with his teeth chattering. He wore a vegan leather jacket and a wife-beater with some ripped blue jeans. He must have borrowed his entire outfit from someone else, someone he slept with, probably—or stole it from multiple fucks, making some kind of weird Franken-uniform out of whoever gave him the best blowjobs and ear kisses. She clutched her own jacket tighter, suddenly annoyed.

The only thing that belonged to Ilya was his wet hair, which he ran under Svetlana’s water bottle at the airport because he claimed he once skimmed a New Yorker article (probably in a cartoon strip) that claimed it helped with migraines. It didn’t.

She still watched him try out different remedies: sticking his head out the window, letting his nose go red, cheeks ruddy with shards of half-frozen snowflakes piercing through his skin. Some wafers of snow as thick as seafoam flew into the car and into Svetlana’s hair. She watched it melt from the corners of her eyes, smelled smoke. When that didn’t work, when Ilya said he still felt like some cunt (like a parasite or God or the Elvis’ Christmas Album their driver blasted) was trying to “ruin my damn holiday,” he massaged his throat while humming the Canadian national anthem. The driver turned the radio up.

Ilya began tugging at his lips, his jaw, his eyelashes—violent little tics Svetlana had watched a million times before, mostly at family dinners where he liked none of the food but forced it down his throat because his father was watching, cheeks full of meat and potatoes. Then he started licking at his molars, wet and frantic, making squelching sounds that crawled straight up her spine and broke into goosebumps along her legs.

She didn’t say anything. She never did when Ilya got like this. If he were anybody else, Svetlana wouldn’t hesitate to ask if he’d broken into Alexei’s cookie jar, whether he’d sucked on fingertips coated in crushed Xannies and laced Moscow blow before they got on the plane. She’d seen her friends tweak out before, and she’d made jokes out of them—messing with their dilated pupils using her phone’s flashlight, or pretending there was a cop trailing them with a muscled K-9 barely held on its leash. She usually laughed at their spit-bubbled sputtering, at their silence or sacrilegious confessions. It was often the best part of her night.

But even though there was always a chance that Ilya would laugh along with her sooner or later, once he got warm and bed-ready, it was just as likely that he might never speak to her again. And Svetlana wasn’t willing to take that risk.

Instead, she just watched the way his throat worked, the way he hunched and winced with his head in his hands, thin red scratches spilling down from his sideburns where he’d worried at his skin too hard. He moved like a dog that really ought to be shot—miserable, mangy, unable to stop itself. The thought surprised a snort out of her. She bit her lip before it could escape fully, the smile already there, uninvited, as familiar as the sight of him tearing himself apart. 

Maybe she was on one, too.

“Do you want Tylenol, baby? Extra strength?” She asked.

Svetlana saw him flinch at the sound of her voice, as if he had forgotten she was even in the car with him. Dickhead. His eyes drag to meet hers. A minor blood vessel popped around where there should be more of that ornament-colored green; small, meat-red lightening bolts striking down the whites of his eyes.

She cringes, and right after, instinctively thinks: Hey. That’s kind of cute. Still, Ilya is quick to nod and makes no movement to hold out his hands—just opens his mouth, lips trembling. She shakes out two white pills from her purse and throws them into the damp, silver-capped hole. He swallows them dry, Adam’s apple fluttering like a beetle’s wings.

And when she half-expected him to go back to his wallowing, he started to play with her hair instead. Cold fingers dug into her ponytail so he could touch her scalp, massaging at the tender skin with blunt nails she saw him chew down earlier. It felt so damn good that Svetlana almost let out a wince. She gulped it down.

The question rubbed through her throat as she sighed into his touch: “Are you still in the mood to go?” 

Ilya pressed a thumb against the nape of her neck, kneading the thin skin. She could finally smell him, his breath, his hair—like the belly of a baby, powdered and clammy. She leaned closer to him, slowly, scared that if she made any sudden movement, Ilya would break from the trance that made him sticky-sweet and pliant, and that he would retreat, taking his touch with him. He has sneakers on, and his shoelaces tickle her ankle.

She repeats herself, softer, growing annoyed with the sound of her own voice. Ilya doesn’t answer again. He rests his head against the window, hand still stretched out to caress her, prod and poke at her.

He pinches her cheek and draws a lazy heart on her forehead. Tugs at her left earring. Drags down her top’s collar to give her clavicle a pinch. He pushes away the wool coat she had draped over her shoulders, dragging his palm into her black, lace-sewn slip, passing by her hardened nipples to press against her stomach, stiff and heavy. Svetlana had to look away from him, something abruptly prickling at her gut, as if she had just been socked with a punch rather than petted.

She goes into her dress and hauls Ilya’s hand out of it, shoving it back to him, yanking her coat over her half-bare chest. From the corner of her eye, she sees the rearview mirror flash and readjusts.

“Ilya, seriously, do you feel okay? We’ll go somewhere else instead if you don’t. I don’t really give a shit. Do I need to be worried about you?” She sounded hoarse now, their ETA reading five minutes. The car stopped at a red light, and it changed back to ten minutes. 

She fixed her eyes on anything but Ilya. Outside her window, a young boy and a man she presumed to be his father stood in an alleyway. The red-haired child stood guard as his even redder-haired father pissed, hiding his papa’s dick with stretched arms and leaf-sized hands, his body still too small to conceal the arched ribbon of gold that steamed against the glacial brick wall.

Although the backseat’s windows were tinted almost black, the child’s eyes met hers, squinting seethingly, and his small, extended hands turned into pistols as he shot imaginary bullets at her. The car started moving again before Svetlana could watch the father finish.

“Will we fuck tonight?” 

Ilya’s voice rang out like a new animal—an undiscovered rainforest bird with yellow eyes, pomegranate-seed teeth, and brilliant, ink-blue feathers. 

She looked at him; his face blurred, and the goosebumps returned.

“Why are you—”

“Because if we don’t fuck, how will I know the difference between you and my Mother with all these fucking questions you keep asking me?”

The car parks in front of an ugly shack. Rawboned men and women poured in and out from the entrance, ribs first and feet second. Svetlana didn’t know whether her body shook because of the sudden bass looping through her cracked window or if it was the blood in her arms that nudged her to raise her hand and strike Ilya across the face, nails first and palm second, four canyon-deep marks clawed into his skin. 

He lets out no noise.

She gets out of the car and goes inside alone.

It was hardly a club anyway.

Just a semi-grand, stripped bar: its tables and counters torn out to make room for an elevated stage. It could easily have once been a tacky rich man’s living room before it was hollowed from the inside. The floor was still black-and-white checkered, the grout a dirty gold, and the ceiling still held a lone chandelier and two fans, their copper wings shaped like autumn leaves.

A grand staircase splits the space into two halves—one half with the manorexic music lovers, the second with the dirtbags swapping painkillers with their orange tongues, digging into their scalps with their coke fingernails, and only scooping out dandruff. Svetlana stands on the borderline of both halves, clutching the banister, pressing it against her stomach as the lights flash on and off. The staircase led up to another floor with a balcony overlooking the lower tier, a single couch piled with untouched bottles and snack packets acting as some kind of medieval throne, like an Ilya shrine. That must’ve been the “private section,” because of course it was. Empty, guarded only by two tall men in tight leather pants and sunglasses, constantly glancing over their shoulders, waiting for their king.

They’d be called faggy losers back home. But they’re probably happier than she is right now. 

Svetlana thought of the little girl whose papa owned the place—whether she might be somewhere here now, watching everyone smear dog shit and fentanyl sweat across the floor where she’d once torn open Christmas presents, where the staircase railing might’ve doubled as a slide. What a shame. What a shitty papa. 

As more people leaked in through the cracks of the place, the room took on the stench of a hospital: alcohol-wiped tools and blood-swollen plastic bags. In each corner, pooled pockets of black shadow the kitsch disco lights couldn’t reach, while the cold, foul odor of sulfur and gasoline radiated like a freezer-burned Elephant’s Foot. Only the glitter of tiny spoons and lighters warned her what the smell came from. Svetlana wanted to ask Ilya if he smelled it too—if he liked it, or if it made him want to hurl the way it did her—but he was nowhere to be found.

It was already an hour past midnight, the new year settling in without a neon countdown, without fireworks, without kisses or toasts. Instead, a janky remix of some Bollywood sample looped endlessly, heavy clicks and drum hits butchering a female voice into unintelligible moans ( the DJ was probably just playing porn), glass taps skittering between beats, oontz oontz melodies agitating against the thin, metallic walls. People jumped in sync, stiff and delayed, like glitching NPCs. For the first time in her life, she felt homesick.

She also feels hands against her ass throughout the night, some nervously shaking, thick and sweaty, while others are aggressive, thin, and pinching. She doesn’t speak German, but she knows what they’re asking from her, what they expect her to do—it’s the same everywhere, anyway. She doesn’t dare turn around for any of them, scared that if she does, she wouldn’t see human faces and instead see slaughtered boar heads, leaking pink juice or pus. Whenever Svetlana was drunk, everyone looked like that to her. Everyone except Ilya, of course. 

It tastes sweet in the back of her mouth when she tries to conjure up his face, fill in the details, mole and all.

When she was still a kid, she imagined Ilya to always be where the bad guys were, like a warrior archangel who had a bajillion eyes and could single out the hypocrites, the phonies, and the assholes, liquefying them into puddles of guts and piss with just a few blinks. And Svetlana just wanted to hold his hand as he did it, at every lame gala, birthday celebration, or dinner party, guiding him from person to person, having him spit curses and give death glares to confirm their horribleness to her.

Fuck and pig and bitch always sounded better, muttered from his lips. More exciting. Svetlana never needed to bring any reasoning behind her hatred; Ilya had enough reasons for them both.

And no one was spared—everyone was revolting and deserving of death besides them.

Svetlana used to believe that the worst thing in the world would be grown-ups thinking she wasn’t being taught well at home, and that they’d blame her poor parents for not spanking her with wooden spoons or making her kneel on long-grain rice as they had done for their fresh White offspring. But after being friends with Ilya and being in his private club that only had room for their teeny-tiny bodies, her biggest fear now was that he would use his tongue against her one day, that she would be on the same boat as the spider-webbed cunts and bloated bastards that they hated—and then Ilya would be raptured alone, somewhere sunny and wet, leaving Svetlana behind in the cold, with the right-wing Bible-thumpers and Redditors.

He once told her that she had the same eyes as his mother, said that it was the highest compliment he could’ve given anyone–

Ugh. Fuck it. And fuck him. The asshole needed some meds, big red, blue, and yellow pills.

She downs something that’s handed to her by one of the Dancing Fat Hands, blue and bubbly like bathroom cleaner. Tastes like it too. But it helps sharpen the image of Ilya in her head to the point where she can touch it, count his pores, and twirl his hair.

Svetlana almost believes she’s hallucinating when she hears him through the moaning music–but there he was again, screaming through the bass-injected strains of sound:

“Piss on them!”

She looked up and–there he was, standing, laughing, on the top of the balcony, which was suddenly full to the brim of people, the flooring even bending slightly at a curve with their weight.

With Ilya, five, young peroxide-blonde girls spit on men that stand below his private section’s balcony, skinny fingers wrapped around the oily, graffiti-covered railing, aiming for their lit cigarettes yet only managing to get thick globs of saliva and whateverthefuck into their hair or the napes of their necks. The men look back and curse at them: Bitches! Whores! Dykes! But the girls just giggle and quickly run to hide behind Ilya on his sofa-throne, their hands grabbing his arms, covering their faces with his shoulders and air-dried hair.

“Rauchen in Innenräumen ist verboten, ihr Schwuchteln!” One of them shrieked with giggles, crawling onto Ilya’s lap so she could wave to the guys below. She sticks up her middle finger. Ilya’s hand wraps around it, giving it a kiss before making her put it down, face dimpling with an ear-to-ear smirk. Svetlana’s stomach twists.

“Ich werde euch alle verbrennen, ihr Huren!” A man yells back, all sweaty bodies around him stopping to stare at a neck vein that bulges out of his reddened skin. It was as thick as an earthworm, the strobing lights making it seem to writhe and dance.

“Probieren wir es doch mal aus, vielleicht gefällt es uns ja!”

From where Svetlana was standing, dark shadows swallowed Ilya’s face, though she could still hear his drunk voice hushing the ladies, a cackle stuck in his throat, probably wearing a Cheshire grin—his first one of the year. Shhh! Not yet, do not laugh yet. When the music began to pick up tempo, laser-beam lights bounced off the walls, flashes of blue and green glaring against Ilya’s face, one eye exposed. Svetlana watched it twitch before it went dark again. He looked stupidly possessed, his hair glued to his face with sweat, his shoelaces untied—but so did everyone here, and Svetlana came to the realization that she looked like the only adult in the room.

A hand grabs Svetlana’s shoulder and yells something to her over the sound of porn and cackles.

“I don’t know what you’re saying,” She dumbly yells back in English when all she hears is German slurring.

She looks back, eyes feeling bleached and white-hot when tearing themselves from Ilya. A tall guy with a Trotsky haircut and multiple cold sores reaching down his Cupid’s bow is chuckling over her body. He squeezes her shoulder and shouts in the best English he can muster:

“Your boyfriend is retarded! He is sexy! I love him! I love him!” 

Then, from the corner of her eye, the spat-on men tried to climb the stairs, but the two leather-panted guys Svetlana had seen earlier yanked them back before they could even grab the railing, shoving them down to the cement-dirt floor. Blood gushed from their noses in erratic spurts; half-lit cigarette butts scorching their good clothes. Their limp bodies were left there—too heavy for the skinny-fairy-dudes to pick up and haul out—and a drag path of scarlet and marigold sludge snaked from beneath their pants, snotty spit still tangled in their hair like chewing gum. Svetlana had half a mind to kick them, just to check for breath. One of them twitched, fingers clawing at his ass like he was trying to dig out his tailbone, a thin whine leaking from him. The girls were whooping and shrieking again. Svetlana catches a glimpse of a tooth on the ground, and some drunk woman steps on it, stumbling her way to the bathroom, kicking the yellow trophy deep into Ilya’s side of the shadows.

Ilya’s silhouette looks down at the mess—it shrugs— or does it loll? Svetlana can’t see. What she does notice is Ilya’s finger pointing out to the balcony again, commanding the girls to get back into positions in pure Russian, but they obey quickly as if they knew exactly what he was asking of them. 

His voice bellows again, still in Russian: Gentle, this time. Be gentle, angels. Terrible aim. You are embarrassing me. I did not coach you like this. Pwa-thoo! Pwa-thoo!

Svetlana wishes she could shoot him, or that a sniper was somewhere on the dance floor with her and could do it instead.

She doesn’t realize she’s almost at the stairs, two steps below her—she hardly feels herself in her body at all, everything floaty, weightless, saturated with bloodlust. Svetlana just wants to feel Ilya’s head in her hands, wants to crush it. He’s in full light now, swaying side to side, hands in his pockets, staring at the mob on the dance floor who no longer notice him, moving on so fast in exactly the way she knows bruises his ego.

Svetlana watches his eyes skim the crowd, a frown puckering his lips. Then—finally—they lock on her. They hold there, stupid and suspended: his brows furrowed, her lips pursed, twelve steps of crappy vape air separating them. And then, all at once, wildly cartoonish, Ilya’s face splits open into a smile too big for his body, teeth and all.

He waves, yanking the railing until it chatters and clanks, metal noise nearly beating out the glitching synthesizers. The girls around him take notice too and look down, copying Ilya by waving at her, smiling, and beckoning Svetlana to come up and join their harem.

Her heart flurries—and she understands it then, why she decided to come here with him, why she puts up with his shit, all the spit and rituals. Ilya excited her to no end, and he was the only one left on this earth who could. But then she sees an arm snaking around Ilya’s waist, squeezing him until his ass is pressed against some sparkly dress, tucking him in nice and tight, away from her. Lips press to his neck, a tongue licks up his sweaty temple.

Svetlana turns away and goes back down the stairs.

She hears her name being yelled, almost announced, a couple of times, and ignores it as she takes up some Dude On The Dance Floor’s 2-in-1 offer of free drinking and grinding. She feels something fat and swollen against her back and cowers, hoping it’s just a beer-and-lemonade ballooned stomach. She obliges when a cold shot glass presses her lips, drinking down whatever cinnamon-rum concoction scalds her throat.

“Svetlana!”

It’s a girl's voice. Teenaged and puberty-crisp, ending with a tee-hee. Svetlana looks up, and Ilya is already pointing to her, whispering to one of his Avril Lavigne-esque concubines about what he needs to declare.

Another shout echoed when the music was reaching its climax, in badly pronounced Russian:

“Are you mad at Ilya?”

Svetlana ignores it again, swallowing back bile as serrated stubble scrapes her cheek, rancid booze and batter-fried appetizers breathing down her chin. He says something about her smoothness, about how good it felt to have her under him, but it all barely registers—like noise from another planet, another timeline.

“He says he is sorry, baby!”

God, man. Svetlana shoves at the man’s body and tips her head back up, waiting for the light to hit her and Ilya just right so she can mouth an exaggerated ‘fuck you!’ toward the balcony.

His smile drops. Ilya clutches his heart, grabbing a fistful of his shirt, eyes blown wide, then collapses backward onto the couch like a bullet-assaulted corpse, tongue out from the side, legs spread.

Good, she thinks. Stay dead. Stay right where I can see you.

She hates how relief gums to her stomach instantaneously when Ilya’s body is sitting still now, polite and proper, how much easier it was to breathe, to drink, and dance. Now, he’s just watching, his fingers plucking at the pleather fabric, ripping new holes and plugging old ones with crumpled snack wrappers and bottle caps. Most of the young girls he was hanging with seemed to have gotten bored with the silent treatment he gave them as he quickly retired from being their cheerleading coach and slipped into his default role as a deadbeat dance partner—lazily bobbing his head, shrugging his shoulders, mimicking the beat with inaccurate finger taps on their heads.

Only one of the girls remained, sitting on the very edge of the couch with her shoes in her hands, just watching Ilya gnaw on a gummy worm, her eyes photocopying his entire face. The girl mirrors the way Ilya chews, the way he swallows and licks the sour off his lips, dazed, her manicured toes curling. She probably doesn’t even realize she’s doing it, and Svetlana doesn’t blame her. She was once like that, too, and maybe she still is.

But Ilya was just Svetlana’s again.

She danced harder, letting people grab at her, not caring who, what, or where. The music started to sound beautiful, like some sort of extraterrestrial gospel. She kissed them back wherever they kissed her—her hair, her forehead, her teeth. Pieces of her hair clung to her cheeks, her makeup spread across so many faces that it looked like they were walking around with bits of her flesh slung over their mouths. Everything felt good, everybody felt amazing.

But she stops all at once when she feels her phone buzzing. She doesn’t need to double-check to see who it was:

— Boooooooring.

She glances back. Ilya is off the couch, halfway down the stairs. He makes a jerking-off motion, then throws a thumbs-down when their eyes meet. Her phone vibrates—again. And again. And again.

— Are you mad at me?

— Are you mad at me? 

— Are you mad at me?

Svetlana shuts it off and closes her eyes, all of a sudden feeling reallyreallyfucking dizzy. A few people shoulder check her as she stumbles for a grip on some kind of wall, and she feels her left heel start to wiggle back and forth like a child’s tooth. Her ass hits the floor. The rave moves on without her. Svetlana manages to pry open her eyes, which were mascaraed shut, and looks in front of her, somehow determined that Ilya would appear like magic, holding out his hand with his body covered in polished chainmail and sabatons. She imagined golden light and bright-white angel wings, a great big horn to be blown while every cunt in the room is lit up in a dazzling, orange-red fire.

But she sees nothing except her own blistered feet.

She only moves when her phone buzzes again:

— I'm upstairs

— Lets fuck

— :D

“Are you mad at me?”

It’s the first thing Ilya asks her, or repeats. The room prepared for them was surprisingly neat. The carpet was so plush it felt like walking on an animal’s back, her dirty shoes sinking into its underbelly. The covers were white and crisp, wafting a strawberry-fresh aerosol scent that Ilya immediately ruined as he landed stomach-first on the mattress, clothes still dirty.

Only the walls were littered with religious icons: Tiny White Jesus on the cross above the bed, magazine-ripped Hindu gods lining the bathroom’s doorframe, a Pride-rainbow Star of David over the dresser. Rammstein and Justin Bieber mini-posters were attached to the bed frame with Blu-Tack.

And maybe feeling paranoid from the weird crap she drank earlier, Svetlana unexpectedly had this fear maul into her– that if they were both murdered in their sleep tonight (maybe by the bloodied men Ilya had been spitting on earlier, or by the guys she promised to blow) they would be sent to separate heavens and hells, their souls claimed by different angels and devils. So she sat closer to him, under the same God.

Her weight dipped the mattress further, and she felt something fuzzy squeak beneath her. She pulled out a small stuffy—a pink bear with beady black eyes—and handed it to Ilya, who hummed and took it happily, snuggling into its fur.

This must have been the little girl’s room, once.

“Hey,” Ilya mumbles through the plushie, his lips pressing against her back so she can feel the shape of every word. “So… are you? Mad at me, I mean.”

She kicked off her heels, and one of them really did break when it smacked against the wall, a small splash of blood matching the ink smudges someone had written and crossed off there—boy names: Felix. Walter. Daniel.

“Why were you spitting?” Svetlana finally asks him while she’s taking her bra off, surprising herself with how clear she sounded. She’s still looking at her feet on the floor, kind of impressed by how ugly they looked against the fresh-cleaned carpet, with vacuum marks so deep they felt like waves. 

Ilya took the bra from her, nudging the plushie away. He pulled it over his face, the cups covering his eyes like sunglasses, a man pretending to rest. His arms slipped around her chest, his hands cold on her tits. He tucked his nose into one of the dimples of her back and stayed there, breathing her in. 

“They were smoking indoors. One of the girls, the taller one—Alisa—told me that there was a ‘No Smoking’ sign nailed right outside. Those big bold letters—did you see it? You probably did. Even a dog could read it. I could read it. You know, we all have to follow the rules when we’re in another country, it’s basic manners.”

“People were literally shooting needles inside, Ilya.”

“You can’t really spit on needles, though. Won’t do much.”

She turns her head around, finally glaring at him.

“You shouldn’t spit on anything. That was disgusting. You should’ve had your ass beat.”

He looked up, puppy-dog eyes with his cheek pressed against her waist. The room twinkles because of it; it had to, she saw it happen.

“But why be angry with the man who loves you enough to keep your lungs pretty and pink?” He lifted his head and gave her thigh a quick peck, right where her stockings hung in ripped strips. “Is that why you’re upset? Because of some saliva? I won’t do it ever again if you don’t like it. It wasn’t even my idea. They just needed the confidence. I only aim to please.”

She wonders if he knows that this is the first real conversation they've had in 48 hours, where they have answers longer than grunts and shrugs, without him needing to put a blanket over his face or fingers down his throat. He looks at her, she looks back and sees half a person. How long has he been like this? Who else got to see it before she did? 

“They did seem to like you,” she muttered, pinching his earlobe when he wriggled his head onto her lap. Then— “What did you do with them?”

He licks his lips, shrugs. “Nothing.” It wasn’t the answer she wanted, and it wasn’t the truth. When she takes back her fingers, he captures her hand, keeping it close to him. “But hey, you should've come up and talked to them yourself. They were more your type. Wiggly. One of them couldn't stop going on and on about how pretty you are–Oh mein Gott, ihre Augen, oh mein Gott, ihre Haare!”

“I didn’t think I had much in common with German elementary school students. I already got my period and learned how babies are made.”

“You don’t need to have anything in common for some girl-on-girl action.”

“I’m good.”

Ilya blows a raspberry. He replies in broken English: “Different folks, different strokes.”

Svetlana was willing to drop it, and more than willing to keep Ilya in her lap, let him open his mouth for a kiss. He looked pretty enough tonight, even though there was something off in the way he was blinking, one eye at a time. It was like an insect—a tick, a spider, an ant, a bee—was wriggling under his skin, taking control of all his bodily nerves. Svetlana wanted to pluck it out, squish it between her fingers and thumb, see what color its guts would be. Taste it.

But Ilya couldn’t help speaking again.

“You would’ve liked them. They were good. So much tongue you’d never believe they had any teeth.”

The urge to kill him returns like a knife. Svetlana could do it right now, and no one in the country would even care to look until the snow melted. She knows for a fact that his family wouldn’t. They probably could guess the password to the little bank-wiring app on his phone.

She grabs him by the hair, peeling him off her, pretending that the stir in her stomach was from the liquor and not Ilya’s wincing. She stumbles when she stands up.

“Heyyyy, I thought we were gonna—”

“I don’t care what you do,” she has to fight for her bra back from under him. “Go back downstairs and make a new STD if that’s what you want. Maybe your girlfriends can present it for show-and-tell. It’ll get them an A plus for kindergarten. The makeup on your face is only pretty in the dark, anyway.”

“Ouch. You are being mean today,” he hums, whistling when the bra snaps out of his hand, causing her to lose her balance, her back hitting the wall. “You’ve lost your mind. I think you’ve forgotten that jealousy doesn’t suit you; it suits me.”

Svetlana works fast. She peels the heel off her broken shoe and hurls it at Ilya, not bothering to check whether it hits (of course, it doesn’t). She shoves her foot back in and fumbles with the strap, forcing it into place despite the wet squelch of her red-damp toes rubbing together. It probably hurts like hell, but everything hurts in such a distant, paralyzed way that she barely registers it at all.

“You’re seriously leaving me? With one shoe missing?” Ilya snorts at her. Half his body dangles off the bed, upside down, his shirt sliding up as blood rushes to his head and turns his face pink. “You keep saying I’ll catch some horrible disease, but the second you step outside, I’ll be wheeling you all over Moscow. I’ll keep your amputated toes on ice like leftovers. It’ll be a whole thing.”

“Eat shit,” she says back, hissing at how her knees give out when she tries walking. Whatever. She’ll just have to crawl.

Now Ilya is the one getting up, already catching her ankle and turning it this way and that, inspecting it like it’s made of bendy plastic straws, shrugging off how Svetlana hisses and cries out, the sound coming from deep in her chest. He unbuckles the shoe again. A thin, spit-like bridge of blood stretches from her Achilles and drops to the carpet, thick and quiet, like a baby’s drool.

They both stare at it speechless—Svetlana, mortified; Ilya, mouth open in a dopey little circle that keeps growing and growing, reaching his eyes, the ends of his brows. Ilya was the first to move, just muttering what sounds like a curse, then a strangled c’mere. He lifts her foot to his mouth, pressing a kiss right into the gash.

Svetlana goes to scream again, tries to jerk herself away, but the arms holding her up lose their strength. She ends up on her back on the carpet, and Ilya keeps cleaning her up, lapping up all the red to the point where she can see the edges of fresh, strawberry-milk pink skin.

“You’re such a—” Her throat is air-dried, all the spit in her mouth probably trapped in her ears. She can’t hear anything except her own chest rabbiting. “Freak.”

If Ilya was on one before, it’s finally showing. He’s still holding her leg, letting her wounded ankle rest on his shoulder. His grin is gone, but a streak of blood is splotched at the corner of his mouth, like some Joker smile little kids would have their mother paint on them for Halloween.

He looked drugged, like he was actually getting high off sucking her, and he’s breathing heavily, hugging her skin close, rubbing it against his cheek—she feels the stubble. He runs a hand through his hair, and from where Svetlana is lying, the light makes it look like he really has a halo. She wants to grab it, to put it on her own head–she still can’t fucking move.

“I was just kidding around with you, about them,” He nods at her, big hand settling down on her stomach. “You know this. You know I was.”

She can’t speak for a minute, letting the time go by while she’s looking in awe at how golden Ilya suddenly is, as if her blood actually rejuvenated him—or something. Whoa, she thinks. She might’ve even said it out loud. She finds a millimeter of wetness under her tongue, barely there but there. She swallows it to speak to him, breathing out:

“Yeah? Your kidding was kind of deflating my boner. Sorry.”

“You can still bring it over here, soft cock is better than no cock, yes?”

Before she can answer, he slings her over his shoulder, dropping her onto the center of the bed. He’s on top in an instant, face pressed against her stomach, throat brushing her belly button. Svetlana freezes, caught between shock and disbelief—the speed, the immediate weightlessness, the strange warmth returning to her numb hands, the ache in her ankle vanished. Her eyes latch onto the popcorn ceiling, each peppered dot perfectly vivid, mouth parted. Instinctively, she threads her fingers through his hair, rubbing the scalp to confirm that the man holding her is real.

“Let’s just make a baby tonight,” he says, voice low. “That’d make you feel better, wouldn’t it?”

Her fingers stop moving. 

“Do you think that you’d die if you were serious for once in your life?” She asks.

“But I am this time,” Ilya mumbles, almost whining. “I really want a son.”

“A son?” she huffs, a laugh hovering at the edge of sound. She tugs at his hair, forcing him to lift his head, chin resting on her chest, eyes on hers. “Why not a daughter?”

He seizes her hands in one firm grip, pressing them down to his lips. He kisses her fingertips, teeth grazing the coral polish of her overgrown nails. He picked the color weeks ago, the dumbest name on the salon wall, just so she’d say it out loud: A Good Man-darin is Hard to Find. It matches nothing she wears, but she hasn’t changed it—and she doesn’t plan to.

“No, no… come on. Only a son,” he mutters, voice low but taut, eyes twitching, just a little too wild. “One who looks just like me. Same nose, same lips, same moles. Same smell. The only way you’d know he’s not me… would be his eyes—your eyes.”

“You have a little too much pride in your dick, don’t you?” she mutters, her body going slightly cold as Ilya—suddenly, all at once—laughs. It’s the first sober laugh she’s heard all night. His hands leave hers, diving to swallow her ass, kneading fistfuls of flesh as he buries his face into her belly again, rocking against her liquor-filled gut from left to right. The vibrations of his chuckle pulse through her, making it feel as if something is really moving inside her.

“My dick, my dick, my dick,” He chants, his mouth stretching so wide against her that she could feel each new crack form on his lips. “My dick only wants to be inside you these days.”

Svetlana blinks, hardening her abs as a way to signal she wants him off her. He doesn’t budge. Stuck like glue. 

“You lie.” She says.

“I lie,” Ilya agrees quickly, perfectly enduring her hard slap that she beats at the center of his back, as he expected it. “But I have to find pussy elsewhere if you’re pregnant. I don’t want to hurt my junior. He might come out all janky. The nurses will scream when they see he has dents all over his head like ahhh! Ahhhh!”

Svetlana shoves him harder this time, fists banging against his chest, almost sending him off the bed—if Ilya hadn’t gripped her waist tighter to stay balanced. She gasps at how Ilya pinched her ribs, nose burning from the sting, but before she can recover, he’s on top, straddling her fully, all his weight pressing into her pelvis. Her wrists are pinned beneath him, his legs wrapped around hers, locking them in place so there’s no chance of escape. The ends of his blonde hair stick to her clammy forehead, his chest heavy against hers.

A wave of nausea slams into her, hot acid bubbling in her throat. When she tries to heave, he raps a hand over her mouth. She bites down on his palm hard enough to draw blood, but he doesn’t wince, doesn’t even blink. Every movement she makes is met with that squeeze, that pressure—his elbow pressing against her throat, weight shifting, legs wringing hers, trapping her completely. She wheezes through her nose, shoves again, trembles, but the hold never loosens.

“Why do you keep wanting to hurt me? Huh? Why?” He chastises, his eyes flicker up at the wooden cross. He clicks his tongue. “Jesus is watching, so you'd better tell the truth now.”

She goes to hit him again—Ilya doesn’t budge. He’s only holding her hands down with his thumbs now, and she can feel his nails grinding against her veins. She can’t even hide her stupid wince this time, like the way a newborn catches its breath before resuming with its crying. They’ve play-fought many times before, but this is the first time Svetlana feels like she’s losing, feels her ears go red with hot blood, her nose burning, almost leaking. Ilya pretends to be unaware of it all, his head lowered and tilted, genuinely waiting for her answer.

It hurts to talk, so she seethes out a lie:

“Because you’re being a dickhead. And if anyone heard what you’re saying—if this gets back to your father, to Alexei—”

Ilya is kissing her now, without any warning or look, just intertwining their fingers together, unintentionally making her gasp in his mouth from the relief of being released from his death grip. He uses that chance to taste her deeper, dragging his sour-candy-swollen tongue across the bottom row of her teeth. She tastes his spit, and it's all gelatin and sugar, no bitter sting of alcohol hidden even on his lips. Then what the hell was he on? When he’s close to pulling away, the weight of his chest lifting, Svetlana brings her fingers against the back of his neck, pulling him back in, trying to taste more of him, to find what she’s looking for. When she finds nothing, Ilya really does get up, putting one knee between her legs and the other steady on her thigh. He’s panting now, too, lips wet and red against his ivory-toothed smile.

“You are just getting me horny,” he tells her. He makes a show of shimmying out of his wife-beater, half-assed, like a lazy stripper, groaning as it clings to the dampness of his chest. Svetlana’s eyes trace the curve of his nipples, pink and hard. The lower half of his stomach is stubbly, with tiny golden grains of hair growing back from months of shaving for games. A lump rises in her throat when she wonders what he looks like, holding a razor to his skin—if he ever nicked himself. “You say ‘dickhead’ like a real American.”

There's a noise from outside their door, like a dead body falling against the weak wood, hitting the ground, a couple of giggles following. Svetlana recoils, instinctively trying to stand up straight, but Ilya is in her mouth again, sucking on her bottom lip, catching the spit that dribbles down, drinking that salty water that beads above her Cupid’s bow. He has his hand on the base of her neck, thrusting her face harder against his, until they were tooth-to-tooth. When they separate, Svetlana feels like she has been stabbed.

“No one is here, moya polovinka,” Ilya insisted, voice doubled like there were two of him speaking at once. He presses his forehead against hers. “Not my father, or Alexei, or the fat cunts you’ve been humping. It’s just you,”

He pushes her lightly, the way you would a pet. She lands flat on her back again, and Ilya dips his head, tasting the space between her tits. Svetlana’s body glitter clings to his candy-pink tongue, twinkling and opalescent under the yellow light. Her eyes lock onto it, mesmerized, like she’s watching tiny stars sparkle. Ilya lets her watch, lets her scratch at his tongue, little grains of glitter sliding under her fingernails, for a long, deliberate minute before he swallows it all.

“And me,” he mutters, hooking a finger through Svetlana’s tights, tugging them harshly until a thousand new rips split through the fabric. He doesn’t take them off, just slides his hand through one of the new gashes he made himself, only satisfied with his own violation. His knuckles press against her thong, and he keeps his hand in a tight fist, circling against her cunt and–shit–Svetlana thinks she might just push–

“And our son.” Ilya finishes.

Svetlana sighs, putting her hands over her face. A vein in her forehead that she never knew was there before throbs and throbs.

“Stop, Ilya,” she says. “Now, or else I’ll kick your balls in.”

He obliges quicker than she expects. He pulls his hand out from whatever is left of her stockings, knuckles flashing wet before he licks them off in a second. She can still smell herself on his fingers. He raises both of his hands in surrender.

“Now what?” He asks, exasperated.

“I don’t want to play whatever this game is. It’s only fun for you.”

“All games are only fun for me; we both know this.” His eyes are flickering across all corners of her face, looking for the joke in them. When there is none, he sniggers on his own, forced and stiff. “It is not that you don’t want to play, it is that you don’t know how.”

She doesn't know whether it was because he was high on something and she was drunk on whatever, or because where Ilya had pinched her still burned and throbbed—but Svetlana felt like she was going to cry.

“Alright then.” She says, mouth set in a tight line. “I don’t know what you’re asking from me. I don’t know what I’m doing here with you. It's taking too long for you to start making any sense. Simple.”

“Simple,” he mocks quickly, finally crawling off her, collapsing back onto his side of the bed. Svetlana misses the weight of him immediately. He pops the silver button on his blue jeans, lets the zipper fall so his hard dick can breathe, arms flung dramatically over his face in mock aggravation—and then, again in English: “You are such a spoil-sport. Party pooper. The wettest blanket.”

Svetlana lies there, unmoving, legs still spread, an Ilya-shaped gap between them. She tunes out the jumble of phrases he misremembers or misuses. What she can’t ignore is the ache in her ankles and pinky toes; swollen, blistered, one wrong step away from bleeding again. Ilya is disappointed in her. That much is certain. He must be picturing his other girls now, the ones who listen closely, who respond correctly even when he speaks in a different language. She wonders how other women—or men—are with Ilya in bed. Whether they know how to look at him without feeling repulsive by comparison, without that oily humiliation greasing their hands as they nod along at his jokes, at his random confessions. With every second that passes, with Ilya still unentertained by her, Svetlana feels herself rotting deeper into the comforter as he floats farther and farther away, distant enough that she has to fake a flinch to remind him she’s still here.

And now–she wants it again. Wants Ilya’s attention back on her, immediately. Sweat beads at her hairline, along her eyebrows, and on her upper lip. Her nose is running. The room feels damp, wasp-nest-grey and dangerous. She turns her head, neck stiff, stuttering. Ilya’s eyes are closed. Tentatively, she reaches out, brushing his lashes with her fingertips. When he lets her, it becomes easier to breathe.

“If we were really to make a baby, is this what you would use him for? Some stupid sex game?” She asks.

“Well, we haven’t quite reached the sex part yet.”

“You know what I mean. Don’t act stupid.”

Ilya’s shoulders shrug.

“It doesn’t have to be sex between us. You can watch.”

“Don’t be disgusti–”

Ilya’s eyes snap open unexpectedly. Svetlana’s fingertip grazes the whites. He doesn’t even flinch.

“Don’t call me that. I’m not that. I’m just talking to you. And I’m being serious.” He tells her.

He sounded so serious that Svetlana felt like snorting this time, but she knew if she did, she’d end up sobbing instead. She used to bawl as a child for way less – no dessert after dinner, not enough time on the playground swing set. Fuck, her head hurt. Ilya just isn’t quitting.

She could only croak: “You’d be a terrible father.”

“Sure, but fathers don’t count. They’re the money pigs you have to shovel with rice and potatoes to keep alive. Only the mother matters. Everyone seems to know that but you.” Ilya turns his head and grins. “Probably because your father is so great, eh?”

Svetlana sees herself shrug in the reflection of Ilya’s dilated pupils. It’s trippy, like a tiny version of her is trapped in the black depths, a bottomless cell barred by rings of blue and green. She doesn’t know whether she wants to pluck herself free—or have Ilya close his eyes again, making sure she can’t escape.

“Probably,” Svetlana replies.

Ilya stands up straighter, his back pressed against the bed’s headrest. He claps his hands together, loud and dry. “Okay,” he clears his throat. “What would you use him for, then? Our son–let’s call him Ilya the Great. The Savior of Berlin. Whatever. I want to know.”

Svetlana doesn’t know why her mind goes to the image of the father and child she saw earlier in the alleyway–the father pissing and the child shielding his mess–his dick and his balls–with his little body. She wonders if something that came out of her, slimy with her and Ilya’s DNA, would ever protect her so ferociously, if it would even know how. She almost confesses it, but instead, she wants to impress Ilya—wants him back on her.

“What else would you use a kid for? I’d just love him. That’s all.” She says.

He frowns.

Wrong answer? Apparently, she also says that out loud, because Ilya is nodding like a madman.

“Worst answer.” He crawls closer, one knee sliding between her legs, both fists planted on either side of her as he tilts his head slightly upward. She feels his breath against her chin. “Love is a given with women. It’s genetic. If you’re the mama, you must do more.”

She tries to scoff, waiting for Ilya to ha-ha in her face first, to drop another drawn-out, “Just kiddingggg.” But it never comes. Nervousness creeps in, prickling like talking to her grandfather with dementia—reminding him that cars already run on electricity, that the images on television are trapped behind a million tiny pixels. And she feels Ilya slipping further away, somewhere that no longer needs her, somewhere she doesn’t even exist. She gives him another second to regain some sort of sanity, and when he doesn’t, she talks.

“Like what, you pig? Mothers give birth, give milk. If I already give love, then there’s nothing left to give.”

Ilya shakes his head. “Mine did. She gave me more.”

What did she give you? The thought stays buried, swallowed dry before it can reach her tongue. She knows Ilya is waiting for her to say it, tongue shifting under his cheek, nails digging into his palms until his knuckles whiten. But no, Svetlana doesn’t want to do this with him, not now, she isn’t prepared, and she doesn’t know when she will be. Time stretches; she isn’t sure how long he waits, breath stuttering in white-hot anticipation. She doesn’t let him have it for much longer.

“Good for you then, right? Just look at you. You turned out so great that we even named our son after you.” She says, placing a hand on his jaw, thumb brushing away a stray eyelash from his cheek—curled, mascaraed, and it was probably hers.

Svetlana can see his heart break—physically see it. Ilya’s eyes glisten, his nose flares, the corners of his lips tremble. He pulls back, almost recoiling. His brows knit, cheeks flushing so red she half-believes she must have slapped him without realizing it. He feels impossibly far from her now, his skin gone paper‑pale.

But then Ilya laughs again. He wraps his arms around himself, scratching at the skin above his collarbone, pinching, worrying it. Svetlana laughs with him, right in his face. They’re both forcing it, their eyes almost popping out of their sockets, faces flushing with funny-hot blood. They’re both maniacs. She’s relieved—so relieved—that he stops whatever he was about to start. Relief lifts her, lightens her body until she feels like she could fly if she jumped from the window, with Ilya flying right behind her. Maybe he was relieved, too.

And, in the middle of his fit, Ilya hangs his neck, puts his head into his hands, hiding his face while his shoulders still move. He speaks through the gaps of his fingers, ten different tones of voice reaching her:

“Would you ever touch our son the way you touch me?”

Svetlana's ready to cry. 

“God, you’re being a real bitch tonight.” She pulls at her hair, wishing it were ropes of her brain instead—something she could keep unraveling until she turned into a husk that Ilya could play his fucked up game of house with.

“No, you are.” He comes back to her, holding her hand, pressing it flat against his chest, right over where his heart would be. It’s like touching an alien; his flesh contradicts itself—sweaty yet ice-cold. “It’s an easy answer. I am the Papa, so I am supposed to be loved more. You’d only touch my cock, not his—”

“Jesus Christ, Ilya, just shut up!” Svetlana screams, feeling her face contort into something ugly and mangled. Something bangs against the door again, but this time she doesn’t cower. She only lets out a drenched, strangled sound that tears from her chest, hot with tears and stomach acid. When she swallows it back, her body rejects the taste, starting to shake, and then she knows that she’s sobbing for real.

Ilya looks at her with wide eyes, the way a little boy might look at his first dead animal; half-horrified, half-fighting the urge to poke her with a stick, to see if she’s faking it, or whether there’s a little breath left in her. His hand rests on her shoulder, squeezing gently as he bows his head, searching her face for tears as proof. When he sees she means it, he pulls her into a hug, and she sinks so deeply into his skin that she feels bone.

Svetlana’s almost in his lap this time, but he doesn’t quite let her go all the way, keeping her at a distance so only their upper bodies swallow each other while their lower halves stay apart, cold and numb with pins and needles. They probably look ridiculous like this, and she wishes someone would break in and take a photo—post it online so everyone could see how Ilya Rozanov comforts women, how gross it really is, how they should all just leave him alone for only Svetlana to handle. She accidentally smiles into his skin, hoping he doesn’t feel her do it.

“Are you really crying?” Ilya asks her when she already pulled away, minutes too late. He presses a salty finger against her tear ducts, and it burns so good. “Don’t cry.”

Something stirs in her when she looks at him a few seconds longer. He’s panicked, his leg shaking, eyebrows still lifted and knotted, her ankle blood-crusted and crystallized at the corner of his mouth. He looks perfect again, like this is the version of Ilya Svetlana will remember on her deathbed. She gives in—completely. Screw it. She’s in his lap fully now, straddling him, kissing him, taking back her spit, her blood, unable to stop herself, not giving him a second to breathe. She pulls away for a split second, cups his face between her hands, and squeezes:

“Or what? I’ll wake our fucking baby up?” 

Slowly, bit by bit, Ilya smiles until it fully overtakes him. His cock twitched and hardened underneath her.

“Yessss,” he stifles a giggle—Svetlana can tell. He folds himself into her neck, attacking her with a thousand kisses at once, growling, tickling her until she’s laughing so hard it turns into another scream. “You must be quiet,” he whispers. “Or else the baby will wake up. He’ll think I’m bullying his mama.”

He gives her a look that asks, Are you finally playing along? Are you finally playing with me? She hates it. Hates him. Hates the way she’s half-happy anyway, jittering with relief at being on his side again—at keeping another one of his secrets, at understanding the rules of something no one else would ever be able to decipher. So she nods, accepting his offer.

“But you are,” Svetlana mumbles. “You are bullying me.”

He’s taking his cock out of his jeans now, clumsy hands fumbling through the pocket of his boxers, through his zipper. He wraps a hand around his length, and all Svetlana can do is goggle at how much it’s leaking, how red the tip is, how much of a mess he’s making on some little girl’s covers. “No, no, I am kind,” Ilya tells her, practically whining. He’s jerking himself off, getting himself harder, the noises sloppy, wet, and rhythmless. He uses his nails to prick at his dick’s veins, and Svetlana sees them pulse at his own words:

“I’m a good father. The best.”

When she says nothing, he edges closer, almost pleading, desperate and shaking, like Svetlana could change her mind at any second, rewrite the script, or throw it away entirely. He takes his hands off himself and presses his cock against her stomach, rutting against the vodka bulge, fucking at her bellybutton, making a mess on her hipbones. She shudders at how his dick was practically scorching against her, twitching when it makes contact with her colder skin, dribbling another ribbon of precum on her–it streams down her happy train in one perfect line. She can hear Ilya’s heavy breathing beat at the shell of her ear while he rests his head on her shoulder, hands around her waist so he can get more friction in, something to grind on.

“Say it back to me,” he begs, his voice shooting up so sharp it startles them both. They jerk into each other, bones knocking, and Ilya lets out a sound that’s almost a moan. “C’mon,” he says, breathless. “Be sweet to me.”

“Fuck,” she felt like a dog was mounted on her. “You—you’re a good dad, Ilya,” Svetlana says again, trips over it, forces it out. Make him happy, make him glad. He’s breaking right there, right in front of her. Then he just lets go, and she drops back into the nest of pillows, the space between them too big.

Above her, Ilya is grabbing at his chest, almost pinching his nipples, head thrown back, while his cock is just lying against her scruffed knee. Svetlana didn't dare to touch it–it looked like something that belonged inside of him–an important organ that kept his heart beating, his shiny lungs expanding and contracting. She only rocks her leg a little, feels how the cock sticks to her, how it shines wet under the light. Ilya is watching her watch it, through half-lidded eyes and open lips, as all the veins in his forehead jolt like wet telephone wires. He makes no command to her, but she really wants to kiss it now, wants it to feel her teeth, her gums.

So Svetlana leans in, her own cunt sounding frothy and slick-wet beneath her, and pokes out her tongue, licking up the slit, lips pressing to where the head creases. She swallows what she tastes: all of the salt, the thickness. She hears a sound that goes pop, and it's from her mouth, from her letting go of the head, a single, spider-web thread of drool still connecting her and Ilya’s dick as he spills all over her, his entire body convulsing, pushing out no no no’s. 

And then–

“Mama,” Ilya’s voice breaks, eyes shut tight.

Svetlana stops cold. Ilya is still coming, but he has his dick in his fist now, stripping it off of her, and she can hear it, that dry-wet. He’s hiding his cock with both of his hands, chin tucked to his chest, while he can barely hold the jizz between his fingers. He’s cursing and apologizing right after, shrinking deeper into himself after he does, like he’s waiting for a slap on his cheek, on the back of his head. Fuck, I’m sorry. Shit, I didn’t mean to—

His eyes are wet when he sheepishly meets her, blonde lashes clumped. She can see up his nose, a red peak too thick to drip.

“Can I show you?” Ilya asks. If he’s trying to smile, he fails; his mouth splits like a wound. His eyes keep skittering over her—begging, again. “Can I show you how she loved me—What she gave to me?”

In this blurry moment, Svetlana would have done anything he asked her to. He looked like an alien who knew how the world was going to end and begin again. She understood why there was an entire Bible story where a man was willing to sacrifice his most precious son simply because he was asked to by God, the dagger in his hand, his boy strapped to the altar. She wouldn’t have even cared if God replaced her son with an animal or not, just happy to do His bidding, to do Ilya’s bidding. To be chosen.

Svetlana nods at him, but it feels less like a nod and more like a seizure, her head shaking and shaking.

“You can,” she tells him. “Show me, please. I want to see.”

She doesn’t know whether Ilya’s face darkens or lightens, but something shifts, erases, and disappears. He’s squirming with her, cum still not dried on his skin or the sheets. But he’s back on the carpet, standing so tall she’s not sure how he even fit in the room to begin with.

“Yeah… okay… fuck,” he utters under his breath, eyes on her, body stretching longer and longer as he paces back and forth, then stops, then paces again. “I can’t—do it like this. Not like this.”

But Ilya walks towards a wall, hesitates, and then slams the light switch with his knuckles. Darkness swallows everything and, at once, Svetlana can’t remember what was where, what even existed. The mattress springs hiss beneath her, a vinegary scent of candy and smoke clinging to the air. She knows he’s in front of her again, but the room became lopsided, or possibly–she has. A thin, milky line of light spills in from the window—snow? Street lights? The moon? She doesn’t know. The room beats—music thumping from downstairs, her own heartbeat, his heartbeat, pounding and overlapping until she can’t tell where she ends and where Ilya begins. 

His hands find her again, one on each knee, still damp and warm from his orgasm. She braces for the familiar pressure, but Ilya does something else entirely—draws her legs together, crosses them. He lowers his head into the space he’s made. She knows he isn’t facing her when she doesn’t feel his warm breath on her belly, only his pounding temple, like an infant’s soft spot, beating against her thigh.

“Ask me if I’m awake,” he whispers. He takes her hand and places her fingertips over his eyelids. “Check if I am, too.”

Svetlana obliges, because, really, there is no choice. If she turns back now, Ilya might burst into flames.

“Ilya,” her voice is even quieter than his—she doesn’t know why, only that it suddenly feels necessary, that they both need to be very, very quiet. “Are you awake?”

Ilya doesn’t respond, doesn’t even nod. He's as quiet as he was in the car earlier. She caresses his face, thumbs resting over his eyes, waiting for the small betrayals of alertness—the twitch, the quick, slimy shifts beneath the thin skin. But there’s really nothing. Ilya’s breathing eventually evens out, settles into a rhythm she can count. Svetlana thinks he must have truly fallen asleep—that the day finally wore him out and he decided to reward her with his silence, his unconsciousness. But then Ilya speaks again, a little buzzing:

“Put your hands down my pants,” Ilya says. “Trace your fingers around my dick through my underwear and squeeze it as hard as you can—use your nails. I won’t say anything if it hurts. I won’t care if it does. You can pretend I’m sleeping again, or that I’m dead, whatever helps you do it. But please–just do it.”

Svetlana doesn’t need him to finish, because her hand is already sliding down his stomach, feeling each ab muscle jump and recoil beneath her touch as she goes. She doesn’t pretend that Ilya is sleeping, or that he’s dead—only imagines him so awake that his eyes never blink, fixed on her alone. Her heart hammers so loudly it feels humiliating, but she shoves her hand through the zipper of his jeans anyway, the metal teeth tearing at her arm hair, ripping a few clean out. Her palm forces its way through Ilya’s underwear, skin dragging, clinging—and Ilya isn’t hard.

She breathes, “Like this?” She does dig her nails in, pulling at his underwear band so she can nip at his cock’s base. It doesn’t move—dead, just as Ilya wants her to imagine him. Svetlana tugs at him again, harder, her nose burning. “Ilya, like this?”

“Y-yeah,” he nods, his head turning in her lap to face her. Svetlana can imagine his face in the dark—the wet eyes, the purple-green veins splitting his face in two. With only the exception of his dick, Ilya’s entire body spasmed like he was possessed, his breathing becoming so shaky that she’d think he was seizing if he didn’t moan again: “Shit, yeah. Just like that.”

Then Ilya gets his own hand and reaches towards Svetlana’s tits, grabbing the one that’s hovering closest over his head. Once he lines himself up just right, he retreats his hands, tucking them underneath himself, only stretching his lips to her nipple. He first kisses it through his teeth, caging his tongue behind those pearly-white bars. Ilya gets her nipple so wet that it really feels like Svetlana is actually leaking something from there, the spit going cold and then warm again as Ilya keeps making out with the dark rosebud, pinching it between his dry lips, letting it roll through the skin cracks. It sounds like a frothy pussy when Ilya really starts using his tongue, opening his mouth so wide that he’s even swallowing the meat of her breast, hollowing his cheeks, pressing his face so deep into her that his nose hits her collarbone.

Ilya’s moaning and his hips rut against the air, strings of I’msorryI’msorryI’msorry muted through Svetlana’s skin, his breathing too much like a dog’s for his words to convey anything. He’s taking her in so deep like he was actually starving for it, the inside of his mouth feeling like it was draining all the cum and drool it’s taken over the years. She feels her own cunt throb, and she’d normally put her fingers to it, give herself some friction, but all Svetlana can see is Ilya’s feet hanging over the bed, and how he’s struggling to bend his legs to make himself seem smaller, fit more in her lap. And then she remembers – Ilya is showing her what his Mother gave to him, what they’d done together.

“Oh God,” Svetlana says, not knowing whether she’s actually calling for Him to take Ilya off of her or make the retching itch in her throat dissipate. Ilya is so young in her arms, still womb-warm, his eyes blind and scalp aching with cradle-capped brain pulp. He’s melting like cream, sticking to her with all of his sweat, salivating and dissolving. “Oh, Jesus.”

He puts her hand back to his soft cock, and this time she wraps around it all on her own, squeezing tightly to hear him cry, to hear him tap out first. But his dick still lies so soft in her grasp that she feels like she’s shaking a kid’s hand. Ilya is rocking his hips all on his own, making her stroke him up and down, the skin sticking to her palm, making such a dry noise that she’d hear from her own father, itching at his razor-burnt jaw, rubbing until it bleeds. 

Svetlana heaves; she can’t hold it back anymore. A car passes the window, its headlights flooding the entire room with a brilliant white, the kind she’s only seen Ilya skate on before. Or maybe it’s a real angel floating by. Or the eyes of God watching them. Or the men Ilya had been spitting on, sweeping a flashlight back and forth, hungry for revenge. Or the girls he’d been with, giggling behind pale-toothed smiles shining so bright, ready to take Ilya back from her. The light bleaches and blurs everything around them, their bodies glowing neon, the bed beneath them like a cloud. It’s as if they’re really floating through heaven, and Svetlana takes her hand off his cock and instead hugs his body fully, the way a real mother would hold her son. She looks up at the ceiling, pretending it’s the sky, hoping someone is looking down and agreeing that they are just kids after all. Pure and untouched. Please, she says to the ether, her voice echoing through her head. Please.

To her surprise, Ilya was hugging her back, and his skin was sweating from every pore, leaking salt, preserving his half-turned smile, those sugar-pink gums that poke fight through the light’s beams. The light goes out with a hum when he talks again, his voice lifted, thrilled:

“Are you always watching me? Even when I fuck women? Men? Are you always there?”

She doesn’t say a thing.

“Svetlana,” he says her name like he’s himself again, back in his older body—his voice deeper now, Adam’s apple dropped and settled into place. She can make out the soft outline of his face, his eyes half-open, his cheek pressed into her chest until his lips pucker. His breathing stays even. There he is, Svetlana thinks. There’s my Ilya. “It’s okay,” he says gently. “Just answer.”

She nods.

“I want to be,” Svetlana says back to him, knowing he’s not looking for her honesty but someone else’s instead. But she’s still truthful. She confesses: “I don’t know why, but I do. I want to be there all the time.”

Ilya’s body twitches again, his back lifting from Svetlana’s for a brief, suspended moment, as if caught in extraterrestrial ecstasy—jerking in the air before he dissolves back between her legs, still shuddering. His mouth hangs in a loose O against her. Something glitters in the pitch dark; she knows it comes from Ilya’s cheeks. His wet lashes flutter like a caterpillar against her skin, inching up and up and up until they reach her jaw, until he presses a dry kiss into the hollow of her neck.

“It’s over,” he tells her, his voice drenched, as if he’s speaking from underwater, sinking deeper and deeper. “It’s done now.”

And when Ilya goes heavy and limp, like a puppet sewn from leather, stuffed with rubber mulch and rice grains to keep it from floating again, Svetlana knows he’s fallen asleep for real this time. Noise seeps back into the room; music, laughter, drunk German words slick with spit. She sits there doing nothing for a long while, staring into the large rectangle of pure black across the room as it stares back at her. It’s like watching a black hole open, every breath pulled out of her, her thoughts bending—her blood, her eye jelly. She wonders if Ilya saw the same black hole when he was a kid, alone with his mother—if he leaned into it, hoping it would swallow him and spit him out into another timeline where his door stayed locked, where his pajama pants had a million buttons and bolts, his lips pursed and sealed with a zipper. She imagines her younger self on the other side of the darkness, on her knees, hands clasped and praying, waiting for Ilya to take her with him.

But Svetlana holds Ilya closer, suffocatingly, not willing to let him go. She leans back—

And then she feels the wetness.

Ilya has pissed the bed.