CHAPTER 9
Isaac
Two days later
“Ror…n…ta,” I say, trying to pronounce the funny letters on the front of the book Julia is reading in the green room. We’re waiting to be interviewed on TV about my bid for fire chief, and how the two of us met.
Julia’s eyes move from the page to meet mine. She flips over the book so the cover is facing her, and then moves her eyes down to it. She starts laughing.
“How did you pronounce it?” She starts laughing.
“Rornta?”
She laughs even harder at my second attempt. “It’s in Cyrillic. It’s Lolita.”
“Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov?”
“There’s only one Lolita,” she says. “I’ve probably read it at least ten times.
“In Cyrillic?”
“Always. It’s my mother tongue, and Nabokov’s too. There are certain words which just don’t translate. It has so much feeling in Russian.”
“But don’t you speak Ukrainian?”
“That too, and it’s kind of similar, but my mother tongue is Russian. Kiev is split, and Ukraine is in general. The Western part will get angry with you if you speak to them in Russian. The eastern part speaks almost entirely in Russian.”
“Because of what happened a few years ago?”
“Way before that. What boiled over has been there for years. It just came to a head unfortunately, and it’s one of the reasons I wanted to get out while I could.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. I escape in my books so I barely even noticed the war raging around me.”
“You’re joking?”
“No. When I’m reading I’m lost in my own little world.”
I nod my head.
“Do you read?”
“Actually I do. We have a lot of down time at the station. Some guys play video games. Some guys watch movies and TV. I read.”
“Really? What do you read?”
“A lot of things, but my favorite are the short stories of Anton Chekov.”
“A great author.”
“Incredible. I also read Gogol, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy.”
“All Russians.”
“Maybe I have a fascination with them. From Russia with Love is one of my favorite movies, and it introduced me to the book and a world of reading.”
“Wow. It’s usually the other way around I thought.”
“It is, but I guess I do things a little differently.”
“I would say so,” she says.
I smile knowing how different everything we’ve already been through has already been, and in such a short amount of time too. It was just two days ago that we spent the entire night having incredible, hot, sweaty sex even though the aircon was on full blast in our room. Our bodies fit together like the last puzzle piece does to the puzzle you’ve been working on for days, or in this case a lifetime.
“You’re up,” the head that is suddenly sticking inside the room says.
“Here goes nothing,” I say, and we stand up and make our way to the live interview room.
Over the next fifteen minutes we’re asked questions from both the hosts of the show and callers. I was expecting a lot of calls about my candidacy, but it’s anything but. People are calling in asking about our relationship. They’re mostly women callers, and I watch as Julia fields the questions with ease. She answers with passion and enthusiasm, spinning the tail more and more romantically as she goes.
The two anchors of the show are women and I watch as Julia holds them spellbound with her words. I could only imagine if she wasn’t here. I would fumble through this and probably give stoic one-word answers. She’s really a game changer when it comes to dealing with the public.
We finish up the interview, and check the latest online polls. I’ve shot up seven percent since just before the interview began. Julia is worth her weight in gold, or should I say my wait for her. Where has she been all this time?
“Thank you,” I say as I offer her a high five.
“A high five? Is that any way to treat your fiancée?” she jokes…I think.
I lean in and give her a kiss on the cheek, then I open the car door for her and we drive off.
“Feel like an ice cream?” I ask as we sit at a stoplight.
“If they have chocolate, they have my heart,” she says.
I like that she’s colorful and full of life, from her clothing to her words. I picked out the red dress to get attention, but I didn’t even know red was her favorite color, and one she wore often.
My stoic ways combined with her outgoing personality are quite the opposites, but somehow they come together to balance each other out perfectly. If anything I feel more talkative and energetic when I’m around her. I’ve always had a lot of energy and I work out a lot, but there’s something about her that pumps me up more than any amount of caffeine or exercise ever could.
“I know just the place,” I say, as I shift into fifth gear.
I look forward at the road ahead, trying to will us to the ice cream shop even quicker.
Out of nowhere I feel her hand come to rest on top of mine. I turn and look at her, and think what this really means.
I may be driving, and I’m in control…or that’s just the way it seems. We’re doing this together, and she’s letting me lead, but deep down I’m starting to wonder who’s really driving this relationship forward. But it’s not a relationship…I don’t think.
But I’ve never had a relationship that felt like this. If it’s better than any relationship that I’ve ever had, but it’s not a relationship, then what is it?
It looks like a duck. It walks like a duck. It quacks like a duck. And I’m still telling myself it’s not a duck.
I can’t keep fooling myself, because my brain can’t accept my attempts to trick it much longer.