I tapped on the Russian word for ‘Sun’ on the Duolingo app, feeling pathetic.

I worked an eleven-hour shift today - and this is how I was choosing to spend what was left of my evening. Learning basic sentences that were never going to give me the ability to understand the words that Andrei whispered into his phone on his recent lunch breaks.

Not unless he was passionately saying things like ‘I eat Borscht’ and ‘The apple is on the table’, anyways.

I turned around in my bed to stare at the collection of fake plants that lined my bedroom window. Last summer it got so hot that the metal air conditioning unit right outside managed to melt some of their leaves. I only chose them over real plants to avoid them wilting from neglect, and yet I still managed to screw that up somehow.

I sat up and made my way over to the bathroom sink, abandoning my phone on the bed.

‘Enough self pity.’ I told the reflection in the mirror. She was a mess - hair pointing out in every direction, eyes puffy from lack of sleep. I hadn’t even been dumped, but still I felt the intense urge to dye my brown hair some absurd color.

‘All this because Andrei started dating some girl?’

I splashed water on my face, brushed my hair, and braided it at my sides to keep it from getting even messier. Then I grabbed my coat and pulled on my boots.

I needed some fresh air.

It was drizzling as I walked aimlessly down the dimly-lit street. I had other things to worry about, I reminded myself. My career, for one.

I loved Pinevale and my job, but I still needed to think about the future. I wanted a nice home someday, with a big backyard and a wooden deck. Somewhere close to a good school that I could send my future children to.

The time that I’ve been spending studying Russian on my phone should’ve been spent updating my resume.

I needed to show Mr. Miller that he could trust me to manage the Catalyst project myself. ‘Maybe I need to attack things from the William angle,’ I thought. ‘If I manage to get the man off his back, maybe he’ll start valuing my opinions over Andrei’s.’

“Partos!”

I froze. ‘Are you kidding me?!’ I thought to myself as Andrei appeared from around the corner.

His labradoodle was pulling on his leash, trying to chase after a stray cat. He hadn’t noticed me yet, busy commanding him to ‘Sidet’ - to sit. Recognizing the Russian word was my only victory, and it was a short-lived one.

“Jen?”

He looked at me from under the cover of his hood, as surprised as I was.

“I think the universe hates me,”

I murmured the words just loud enough for him to hear. He glared at me, but allowed Partos to wander over to sniff my boots. I crouched down to pet him.

“Good evening to you too, little guy. I know your life isn’t easy, stuck with this man as your owner,”

“Very mature,”

I kept ruffling Partos’s hair, pretending I didn’t hear him. “If he bothers you too much, ignoring him always seems to do the trick,”

“Of course that would be your advice. You’re great at that, aren’t you?”

For a second I thought I detected a note of hurt in his voice, but when I raised my eyes, he was wearing his usual mask of disinterest.

“What does that mean?”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

He opened his mouth to answer, but then his eyes fell on my braids. Various emotions flashed behind his eyes.

“What are you, twelve?”

He looked almost scandalized. Like I was standing before him wearing a Christmas sweater in July.

“Excuse me?”

“Are you pretending to be Sassa or something? What woman in her twenties wears her hair in braids?”

I felt my cheeks flush. “No, why would I do that? I just didn’t want my hair to get tangled if the wind picked up again,”

Andrei looked unconvinced, but more than that - he looked flustered. I don’t understand men.

“Well, you look ridiculous,”

I gave him a withering look, trying to not let the words affect me.

“What’s your problem?”

“Currently? You. You’re in my way,”

He gestured to the stretch of sidewalk behind me.

“I’m in your way? You can move too, you know!”

“Fine! I will then,”

“Whatever - do what you want!”

His shoulder bumped into mine as he went by, and I watched him stomp away, seething.

Xxx

“What's gotten into you two? I thought you were finally starting to get along,” Nelle said, watching Gavak try to pry a chicken wing from between Sassa’s fingers.

It was his. He was the one who cooked it over their little campfire. He was the one who forgot to remove the feathers and only realized after it started smoking. He was the one who burned himself transferring it into a wooden plate. It was his chicken.

“You eat more than the rest of us put together, Gavak! And besides, who’s fault is it that we only had enough money for one chicken?” Sassa spat, struggling to keep up.

She didn’t know her own strength. How can someone so tiny think she was capable of beating him at anything physical? If he wasn’t such a gentleman, he would have her pinned to the ground by now.

“Guys, guys, I’ll give up my own portion, ok? No need to fight over something so trivial,”

Daisy’s offer went ignored, forcing Nelle to butt in.

“If you guys don’t sit down this instant I will make sure that you both eat your next meal through a straw.”

If the sentence wasn’t horrifying enough, the dragonborn’s tone was completely even. She wasn’t making a threat - she was stating a fact.

They both stopped their tug of war, and Gavak begrudgingly allowed the witch to keep her wing - though all the seasonings must’ve rubbed off by now. He took a bit of pleasure in that.

Sassa, he concluded - must have had some form of split personality. One week she was nice to him and the next she made all of his clothes smell like rotten eggs with that spell he couldn’t pronounce. Prestidigi-something.

He tried to get her back, but none of his pranks worked on her. She could always sense that something was wrong.

“This isn’t over,” She said, biting into her prize.

He felt the overwhelming urge to wrap his fingers around her braids and pull.

Xxx

I tried to ignore the sound of feminine laughter that filtered through Andrei’s phone. He was talking to the blond again. The fact that I couldn’t understand a word made things infinitely worse.

I aggressively threw my empty takeout cup into the bin under my desk, then kicked it a little further from my feet. The metallic noise of it skidding across the wooden floors rang through the studio.

I glanced at Andrei. No reaction. I started tapping a fast rhythm with my fingers on the desk.

“Do you mind?” He asked, annoyed.

“Sorry, am I interrupting your super-important call? You know, the one you’re having during work hours, that’s loud enough for everyone else to hear?”

“Yes, actually.”

The bastard had no shame. I looked around, hoping to spot William peering at us from a corner like a nosy neighbor, but he must’ve been on break.

“You’re impossible, you know that? How did you even pass the job interview?”

Andrei said something in Russian before ending the call and fixing me with the full force of his irritated glare. I recognized one of the words he said - I learned it this morning.

He just called the blond his ‘sun’. I felt a tightening in my throat.

“You’ve been dating for what, a week now? You already have gross nicknames for eachother?”

He looked surprised. “What’s it to you? Girls like that sort of thing,”

“No we don’t,”

That was, of course - a big fat lie. I loved cheesy nicknames, and hearing this one from between Andrei’s lips made me want to cry.

“Wait, how did you know what I was saying?”

‘Crap’. I wrecked my brain for a logical explanation. When no good ones manifested, I settled for a bad one and hoped for the best.

“I met some girl at a party a few days ago and we hung out for a bit. She’s Russian too. You’re not the only Russian in town, you know,”

Andrei raised an eyebrow. “You. At a party? What’s her name?”

“Irina,”

“Irina what?”

“Ivanovich,”

He burst into laughter, and so did Nikita, who I hadn’t realized had been listening to our conversation from his desk all this time. My cheeks felt like they were on fire.

“Or, or maybe I heard it wrong. I think that’s what she said, but the music was really loud,”

“Did she have a friend called Svetlana Svetlanovna?” Nikita asked, looking like he was on the verge of tears.

Unexpectedly, Andrei gave him a warning look. He was actually feeling bad for me. I wanted the floor to open up and swallow me whole.

“Ok, fine. I downloaded Duolingo.” I confessed.

“Why?”

“Because learning languages is fun. Why do you care?”

“I don’t. Just seemed like an strange time to be learning Russian,”

“I wasn’t aware there are strange times to learn a language.”

Andrei looked anything but convinced. His mood, however, seemed much improved. He was wearing his usual trademark smirk again. I wanted to strangle him.