5
Over the weekend, Nick braved the bus system and went exploring.
He was good at maps. He had looked at one of London the night before, then again the next morning, studying it in bed on his dusty laptop, scrolling back and forth to figure out what was realistic for the day. He considered his options. Then he planned out a route.
He felt like the most obvious of tourists, his nose practically pressed up against the front of the bus, seated on the second level of a double-decker. But he was alone, and he would never see the people around him ever again, and he was mesmerized. For years he’d been studying British history, reading books set in London, devouring every bit of culture he could from his quiet Ann Arbor bedroom. The bustle of London around him now was all-consuming.
He drank it in. He scanned every storefront, took in every road name that was so very different from those back home. So many roundabouts. Cars zipping down the wrong side of the street. Everywhere he looked were people living their everyday, normal lives while he peered down from his perch and marveled at how tired and ordinary they seemed. And he was sitting there, bursting with barely contained joy.
What a strange mixture of new and old it all was. Glass skyscrapers rose over the dulled brick-and-mortar buildings that had managed to survive the Blitz. Stately homes bordered monstrosities Nick would have sneered at in Michigan but made his heart pitter-patter because they were here, in London. He knew it made no sense, but with every turn of the bus, every new corner and street, he felt his connection to the city strengthen, as if shooting out from his fingers, his toes, his every joint and bone. Bricks and pavement and anonymous faces all joined until Nick felt like he was allowed to breathe this air, was allowed to be here, here, for the next few months at least, and take in all it was willing to give him.
He hopped off the bus before he had planned to and let his legs take him wherever they wanted to go. He walked and walked and walked until he no longer knew where he was, and then he let CityMapper get him home, exhausted and hungry, but something else, too. He groped for what the feeling was, and was just a little shocked to discover it was happiness. Just there, pure and simple. He walked back to his dorm, and with every street he discovered, he wondered to himself what sort of history lay beneath it, as if he could scrape off the layers of stories one by one, like turning the pages of an illustrated book.
+
He was almost in his room when he got a text alert.
Hosting a brunch tomoz at 11, u should come!
Izzy. She’d texted over the address, as well. Nick frowned at his phone while fumbling with his keys, then continued to frown at it as he got through the door and toed off his shoes, feet and legs whining.
He hadn’t actually considered that they’d want to see him again. And this soon, too. Somehow, between the awkward introductions to the awkward drink getting to the more awkward good-byes, Nick had sort of expected the whole thing to go precisely nowhere.
Maybe they just hadn’t noticed. Maybe if he never saw them again, he would leave them with a more or less good impression of himself. Oh, that Nick—wasn’t so bad. Never came back, though. That’s a bit strange.
The thing was, he just didn’t get it. Why him? It confused him, this sudden attention. He’d had friends before, but they’d mostly been, well, awkward nerds, like him. As a kid with no language in Michigan, it was all he could do to make it home from school every day, and after that, he could never exile that kid from his mind. He might always be that kid.
He looked at his phone, checked the time. Sucked in his lower lip, worried at it.
I got invited to brunch by some people at their house, he texted his sister.
Are you asking for permission or a kick in the ass?
He laughed despite himself and texted back. Probably both.
Later, he made himself go to the kitchen to put together something resembling a dinner. The kitchen came with a weird little sandwich maker. Nick had picked up on the fact that this was a regular sort of appliance for England, but he still considered it to be a bit of a miracle. He made himself a cheese, bacon, and tomato toasted sandwich, going through the motions familiarly enough. His legs felt a bit like jelly from his massive exploration session.
He was still getting used to the little differences around him. The electric plugs were gigantic, for one. They were different from even the Russian ones, which his hands could still remember the feel of—the simple smooth round prongs, cool to the touch. The stove had a strange little compartment right under the cooktop where you could grill shit like bacon. The bacon itself was different—meatier, less fat on it. All of these differences he memorized like plans of attack. Maybe if he learned these things quicker, absorbed them, he would become just another Londoner, disappear into its corners, get taken in by its tide, no longer a stranger.
For now, he would make his toasted sandwiches and drink his tea, consider going to Izzy’s brunch, and pretend like he was just any normal person who could speak to others without worrying about them discovering his true awkward, uncertain self.
You should go, Kol’ka. And you should tell me all about it. <3
Nick wasn’t sure he’d know where to start.
He shuffled back to his room with his plate and cup and settled in to watch Persuasion.
+
“Yay! You made it!” Izzy exclaimed while Natali bodily ushered Nick through the door and toward what he assumed to be the living room. He had stood at their door for a good five minutes before ringing the bell, sweating through his nerves. He’d fretted over whether or not to bring anything—he had decided on yes. He’d brought some muffins—and then he’d fretted over whether or not this was the right house at all. It was a narrow brick building in a row of narrow brick buildings, slightly dilapidated but somehow comfortable with it. It wasn’t directly on campus, and that was strange, realizing he was in his first actual English house. Or flat. Not for the first time, he felt like a kid in the presence of adults who’d started figuring out their own lives. Moving in together. Paying rent. Paying bills. He was like a ten-year-old peeking through their windows.
“Nick’s here!” Natali announced. “Get him a drink, I’ve got to get back to the hob.”
Izzy had already disappeared down the hall, so Nick was left to wave hello to all assembled on his own. They turned out to be everyone from the other night and then some. Nick swallowed as he scanned the room.
“Bloody mary?” Steph asked, hopping up from her perch on the couch arm. Nick agreed readily enough, giving her a hopeful smile. “Back in a tic,” she told him and waved him over, presumably to take her place on the abandoned spot of the couch.
“Good to see you again, Mate,” Alex said in between what looked to be two separate conversations with three separate people. He patted the couch arm again. Apparently it was a popular spot. “Glad you made it. Izzy makes a gorgeous fry-up.”
“Cool.” Nick wondered what a fry-up entailed as he perched awkwardly next to him. Steph had made it look easy. He’d rather have sat on the floor. Was that impolite? “How are you?”
“I’m good, mate. Here, let me introduce you.” Alex turned to the girls he’d been talking to. “These are Natali’s baby dykes.”
“Oi!” The nearest one glowered. She had blue hair. “We’ve got names. And, like, personalities of our own and shit.”
“Although I do like the sound of being Natali’s baby dyke.” This girl had short, almost military-style hair, which made her pixie face look even more fairylike. Nick found her absolutely adorable.
“See, that’s my point,” Alex told them in a reasonable tone of voice. “If I were a cute lesbian, Natali’s side is where I’d want to be all the time.” The pixie shrugged, smiling. “Anyway, this is Beth.” The blue hair. “This is Chloe.” The pixie. “This guy here is Niall.” He pointed to a dark-haired boy who was busy slurping a bloody mary from a straw. “And that’s his mate Lance.” Lance had a mop of crazy brown hair that probably hadn’t seen a brush since the third grade or thereabouts and a bit of a dreamy expression on his face. Nick nodded at them, settling himself a lit more firmly on the couch arm. It felt weird to be allowed to sit on it. His mom had always yelled at him and Zoyka for doing it; it was practically taboo. Nick allowed himself to enjoy his own private rebellion.
“And you remember Dex,” Alex continued right as Dex walked through the door. Nick’s pulse sped up despite himself. He really wanted that bloody mary now. Instead, he gave Dex a bit of a nervous wave, and Dex tipped his chin at him in acknowledgement. He looked different from the other night. For one, much less grumpy. He also looked pretty sleep-tousled, even though Nick would have been hard-pressed to say in what way, exactly. He just looked relaxed.
Dex yawned and stretched, and Nick’s gaze zeroed in on where his T-shirt rode up and revealed a neat belly button surrounded by shadowy abs. Dex’s hips peeked out from above his basketball shorts. Nick looked away. He could never understand how some people were made. He was so awkward, with skinny limbs and ribs under unremarkable, pasty skin covered in too many birthmarks. Dex’s body looked effortless, like the air shifted around it specifically to accommodate all that it contained. Maybe it was a touch of grace. Grace had always made Nick feel nervous and out of place.
“Hiya,” Dex said. “D’you want a drink?”
That was some whiplash from the other night. Nick licked his lips before saying, “Steph is on it. Thanks, though.”
Dex nodded. He found a spot on the floor by the TV set and seemingly forgot Nick was even there. Nick’s heart rate lowered. He gathered his courage and applied himself to the social obligation of conversation.
“So, you’re the American boy! Natali had mentioned you,” Chloe the Pixie said, clearly abandoning whatever conversation they’d all been having before Nick’s arrival.
Nick’s neck prickled. “I guess that’s me,” he smiled.
“Mi … nnesota? Is that a state?” she asked.
Nick laughed. “That is a state. I’m from Michigan, though.”
“Oh,” she grinned. “Soz, I guess. You lot have got too many fucking states.”
“This is true.” Like Steph, she seemed to put him at ease. It was easy to look at her smile and not attempt to search for whatever judgments might be lying beneath.
“Ask him for his full name,” Alex said. “It’s wicked. He’s Russian.”
“Ohhh, are you?” Chloe’s eyes all but lit up.
Nick nodded just as Steph walked through the door with what was presumably his drink. He’d once seen his mom order a bloody mary on an airplane. She barely drank, only a glass of wine for toasts on special occasions. The look he had given her made her laugh, and she’d said, I’ve wanted to try this ever since seeing it in a movie. Don’t look at me like that. I can be unpredictable. She hadn’t let him try it, though. He’d been fourteen.
Now he took his legal drink with thanks and looked into its tomatoy depths. “It’s Nikolay, actually.”
“Not Nicholas?”
He shook his head, finally taking a sip. He’d been expecting the vodka, but the pepper swiftly traveling up his sinuses was a surprise. He coughed like the amateur he was.
“Izzy makes them strong.” Steph grinned. She sat comfortably next to Dex. “So how come you never changed your name? I’ve met a few people who have.”
Nick’s mom had. She’d officially become Katherine when their citizenship came through, the last traces of Ekaterina Markovna, of his father’s Katen’ka, left for the family to mull over. But Nick had refused. He bit his lip and attempted to line up a way of explaining that didn’t sound precious and pretentious. “It’s the last thing that I got to keep, I guess. Besides my last name. It was what I’d been called my whole life, so why should I change it at seventeen, you know?” That was when they’d gotten their citizenships.
When he looked back up, even Lance was watching him. Nick shrugged to take the weight off their scrutiny.
“That totally makes sense,” Chloe said. “I dunno that I’d want to change it.”
“My mom wanted me to,” Nick went on without meaning to. “Like, you know. People don’t really know how to pronounce it always.” And it’s like a mark, foreign. “It’s a constant thing in school and stuff, too, I guess, but…” He shrugged again, took a cautious sip of his drink. “It’s me, so.”
Chloe reached out and slapped Nick’s knee. “I like you. We’re keeping you.”
Nick hid his face in his glass.
+
A fry-up was basically a gigantic brunch made up of things Nick hadn’t really considered to be part of brunch before. His plate was loaded with eggs, beans, cooked mushrooms, buttered toast, and fried tomatoes. He was fairly certain he’d never actually had cooked tomatoes that weren’t pasta-sauce-based. He balanced it all on one knee and ate slowly, careful to take bites when no one could watch him.
The bloody mary had been pretty strong, and when he’d gone into the kitchen, prodded by Chloe at his back, Izzy had taken one look at Nick’s nearly drained glass and said, “Want another?”
Nick had said, “Not yet.”
Still, the food and drink had calmed him. Now he lounged safely on the floor, propped up by the couch and someone’s feet. He was fairly certain they were Chloe’s. The room was overcrowded, filled with chatter. Sunlight spilled over the walls and the lucky few who had managed to crowd around a small dining table: Natali, Izzy, Dex. Nick wondered if those who lived in the flat got the table dibs.
“Ugh, I can’t believe it’s our final year,” someone said.
“I can’t believe I’ve got to go to lectures so fucking early.” This was crazy-haired Lance. “Bloody fascists.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
Nick giggled at Natali’s eye roll. Lance, when Nick looked at him, seemed unaffected. He shrugged, a bit of egg on a fork frozen halfway to his mouth, and said, “I call it as I see it.”
“Lance here believes that unless you’re a hardcore, like, Marxist Communist, you’re a fascist. This, by the way, means most of us,” Alex said. “Just so you know, Nick. This is who you’re aligning yourself with here. Getting up on time for lecture? Injustice to the cause.”
Nick laughed and tipped his head against the couch, watching Lance, who shrugged again. “So, you think Communism is the way to go?” Nick asked.
“Yeah, man, I’m dead serious. Power to the people, you know?” He made a sort of fist-in-the-air gesture. “I mean, have you seen what’s been going on lately?”
Nick had, but he just couldn’t take him seriously. Response after response chased each other in his mind, but he didn’t think he could reasonably get away with any of them, so he kept his mouth shut. How much power did Lance think people under Communism had, exactly? Had he ever lived outside the UK? When Nick glanced away from Lance, his gaze caught Dex’s, and for a fraction of a second Dex’s lips twitched and his eyes crinkled at the corners, zeroed in on Nick’s. A dimple appeared on one cheek. And then, just like that, he was back to neutral, and Nick was looking away, his stomach clenching around the food and the bloody mary. Was he drunk? He didn’t think so. But maybe. Did he want another drink?
One of Natali’s baby lesbians solved that problem for him by going around and taking everyone’s glasses for refills. Natali and Izzy both graciously offered to help her out, and Nick took the opportunity to find the bathroom.
He probably was slightly buzzed, because he petted the cold tap, then the hot, then frowned at himself for being weird and caught his own gaze in the mirror. He didn’t look like he was completely out of it. He turned his head this way and that, touching a spot on his jaw he’d missed shaving this morning. He definitely needed a haircut. He was starting to look like pictures of his father from the seventies. The curls were out of control.
When he finally came out of the bathroom, he caught sight of Izzy and Dex in the kitchen and froze, unable to look away.
They looked so close. Intimate, really. Dex had his arms wrapped around Izzy from behind, and he was murmuring something to her Nick couldn’t hear. Izzy laughed. Then Nick watched as she leaned back and planted a quick kiss on Dex’s cheek. Nick ducked his head and quickly moved the hell away. He shouldn’t have seen that.
More and more, he was beginning to think Dex’s instant dislike of him was Izzy-related. It twisted Nick’s stomach into knots to think it, because he had it all wrong, Dex had it all wrong, Nick wouldn’t … he wasn’t. He wasn’t interested.
His spot by the couch was waiting for him, and as soon as he plopped down, Chloe the Pixie presented him with another bloody mary, which he took gratefully.
“Anyway, who’s up for it?” Jonny asked.
Nick took an ill-advised giant gulp of his drink, and it burned on the way down. Maybe he was a bit drunk. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve, hoping no one had noticed.
“What about you, Nick, are you in?”
Nick twisted around to look at Alex, which brought on another warm flush, because Alex was just ridiculously good-looking. Staring at him was like staring at the sun. It was probably safer to look through sunglasses, dim his shine a little.
“Uh, sorry—in for what?”
“Oh, nineties night, there’s a thing on at a club in Shoreditch. Next weekend. You in?”
He said weekend with an emphasis on end, and Nick got a little stuck playing it on a loop in his head. His accent sounded nice. Then the question caught up with him. Wait.
“Oh, uh…” Say yes, said a voice in his head. It sounded like Zoyka. Say yes, they’re waiting! That sounded more like his own voice. Nick blinked. “Um, s-sure? That sounds…” Was it going to be expensive? He’d been skimping on a lot of things to make sure he didn’t run out of money before the semester’s end. A club night sounded expensive.
Also insane.
Him, at a club? With, like, music and people and presumably dancing? International night had been enough. No, fuck it, he wasn’t going. He wasn’t going, and he’d invent some sort of an excuse.
“Brilliant!” Alex grinned, showing all white teeth, staring down at him.
Nick’s heart sank. Oh God.
+
It wasn’t like the door was barred, but Nick felt it impolite to leave before helping with cleanup, and nobody was getting up to actually start doing it. The crowd dispersed a bit. Lance and Niall left, so did Beth, the blue-haired baby lesbian. There was enough room for Nick to curl up on one side of the couch with his feet up, which he did happily, because he’d finished that second drink. No one was asking him any questions, so he was content enough just to listen.
Alex and Jonny were arguing about something so deeply sciencey, Nick couldn’t have followed the conversation stone-cold sober. Steph and Chloe were making plans for a library date, it sounded like. Dex and Izzy were lounging against the wall, simply listening, just like Nick. Every now and then, Dex piped up to correct something so incomprehensible to Nick, he wondered if it was even in English.
“Nick, so you’re studying history, right?” Izzy asked, and Nick took a little bit to wake up from his food and drink coma before the anxiety set in. He nodded. “Ohh, what sort?”
“British history, actually.”
“Oh, cool! Is that why you came here?”
Why did it feel so strange to admit to this to actual British people? It wasn’t like they were really going to start throwing rotten vegetables his way. Probably. “Yeah. I mean, I’ve always been really interested in it, and I read a ton of British lit when I was a kid, so it just sort of became a thing, I guess.”
“Cool.”
Dex was watching Nick, and Nick watched him back, unable to figure out what was behind the look. It wasn’t hostile—maybe because Izzy was currently safely next to him—but it wasn’t all open and normal like everyone else. Dex was probably judging him for being a stupid American with pretensions toward becoming a British historian. Maybe he would throw rotten vegetables at Nick if it were socially acceptable.
Well, fuck him. Nick wasn’t good at much, but he was good at school.
“Yeah, I guess I got it from my mom. The interest in British lit, I mean.”
“Is she a historian, too?”
“Nah, she’s a chemist.” He liked that she said too. “But she has a lot of hobbies.” They were a family of nerds.
Later, Natali got up decisively and said, “All right, babes. This has been ace, but I’ve got to read for lecture and you all need to clear out.”
Nick was immediately shooting up off the couch to help clean up, only a little wobbly on his feet.
Natali loaded his arms up with plates. “I’ll be right behind you, just bung those in the sink for now.”
Nick followed her orders, careful to step around the doorway and not suffer a repeat of the one and only time he’d bussed tables at a country club. He’d been holding a full tray of dirty dishes, about to swing through the kitchen door, when someone swung through on the other side. He hadn’t been asked back once the mess was cleared.
He looked around the kitchen. It was small but nice, sunny. All the cabinets were white, like an Ikea showroom, and it took him way too long to find the fridge. It was covered in the same stuff the cabinets were made of. Weird.
Natali found him with his arms half buried in soapsuds, zoning out on washing dishes.
“Oh, bless you, you can leave those, you know,” she said, but didn’t attempt to stop him. Natali leaned a hip against the counter right next to him and watched him work, dish towel at the ready. “Dex usually does this part, so he’ll be happy.”
Oh.
“He and Iz have got this whole brunch thing down to a science, it’s wild,” Natali went on, inadvertently stepping right into a line of questioning Nick was feeling reckless enough to start up.
“Have they been together long?” He handed her a plate, unable to meet her eyes.
“What, Dex and Izzy?” Natali froze with the plate in her hand. “Oh, Christ, no.”
Nick looked up at her, startled.
“One of them’s way too queer for the other one,” Natali said as she dried.
Oh. Izzy was—
Natali rolled her eyes. “Dex, babe. Queer as a daisy.” She watched him take this in. “What? You didn’t realize?”
Nick slowly shook his head. Maybe he was too drunk for washing dishes—he hadn’t picked that one plate back up in what felt like years. Logically, it had probably been seconds.
“You’re adorable.” Drying dishes and smiling at him, Natali was so much less intimidating than her appearance had first suggested. Nick dared to meet her gaze. “They’re best friends is all. I mean, who knows, if Dex was straight, they’d probably be married by now.” Nick caught an edge in her voice, something raspy and sharp.
Why was Dex acting like such a weirdo toward him, if not for Izzy? What the fuck had Nick done to deserve it?