CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Ilya had been looking up restaurant equipment on his laptop. He’d been surprised to find that the search for interesting items he could use to decorate the diner was not much different from the time he’d spent looking up quirky items to sink in the quarry. It required vision, he thought as he scrolled through several pages of vintage diner booths and neon signs that could be had for surprisingly reasonable prices.
At the soft knock on his door frame, he slid the laptop to the side and sat up. “Hey. What’s up?”
It did not feel right for his heart to beat faster for a few seconds at the sight of Theresa’s smile, but that didn’t mean it felt . . . wrong. The waft of her fresh perfume sent a now-familiar tingle through him as she sat next to him on the bed. He stopped himself from leaning closer to sniff her. A flashing memory of her heat surrounding him sent a shiver through him. That had happened, he reminded himself sharply. But he didn’t have to be stupid about it.
“I brought these for you.” She handed him a small rectangular envelope. “And look what your mother gave me.”
He glanced at the green plastic box as he took the paper envelope. “What is it?”
“Babulya’s recipe box.”
He paused before opening the envelope. “Oh, yeah? Is that what that is? It’s been in the cupboard forever.”
“Oh my God, Ilya, if it was a snake, it would have bitten you,” Theresa said with the first two fingers on one hand curled, like fangs, as she imitated his grandmother. “Sss. Sss.”
He peeked inside the box, feeling nostalgic and melancholy at the sight of Babulya’s familiar handwriting. He flipped through the cards. Some of them were crisp and pristine white while others had been spattered with evidence of the cooking, bent and folded, the ink faded and in some places almost illegible. This was a treasure, for more reasons than its contents.
“Galina gave you this?”
“She said she wanted me to have it since we’re going to be using the recipes in the diner. And I’m glad to have them. I’m sure what I can do from memory isn’t always right.” Theresa scooted back a little on the bed so she could crisscross her legs. “But see what I brought you.”
He put the recipe box on his nightstand and opened the flap, pulling out a sheaf of pictures. It took him a few seconds to process what he was looking at, but once he did, all he could say was, “Wow. Where did you get these?”
“Alicia’s crawl space.”
He felt her moving closer to him to look over his shoulder at the pictures. He flipped through them slowly. “I remember this day. It was right before your dad and Galina got married.”
“Was it?” She leaned her chin on his shoulder.
Ilya relished the weight of her body on his as he turned just enough to show her more of the pictures. Positioned this way, her hair tickled his cheek. He could easily kiss her, he thought, wanting to.
It was the wanting that kept him from it, because once he kissed her, this moment would end. She’d pull away from him, or she wouldn’t, and both reactions were a problem. Besides, he told himself as he held up the photos so they could both look at them, he wasn’t totally ruled by his dick. Not completely.
Theresa reached over him to tap the picture in his hand. “That’s a good one of her. She was so beautiful.”
Someone had captured Jenni laughing, head tossed back and eyes closed. Her blonde hair had glittered in the sunshine, something hard to see in this time-faded snapshot, but he remembered. “Do you think that’s what I want to hear?”
“No. But she was, whether you want to hear it or not.”
Ilya put all the pictures back in the envelope and tried to hand them back to her, but Theresa shook her head. Again he tried, but she moved away from him and refused. “Here.”
“They’re yours,” she said. “You keep them. Or not. It’s up to you. I thought you might like to have them, that’s all. Alicia was going to toss them in the trash.”
He leaned to open the drawer of his nightstand and put them inside it. “Thanks.”
“Hey,” she said quietly, so he turned, “I’m sorry if they upset you.”
Had they? He couldn’t be sure. Even a few weeks ago, the sight of those pictures would’ve sent him seeking refuge in the bottle or the arms of a one-night stand. Something had started shifting inside him. Something that had to do with Theresa.
“I know you loved her,” Theresa continued. “I thought you’d like to see them.”
“She never believed in me,” Ilya said.
Theresa looked as though she meant to speak, then stopped herself. Tried again; stopped again. Instead of words, she spoke to him by taking his hand and linking their fingers together.
“It didn’t matter if it was a chemistry test or remembering to be on time or if I could be the guy she took to the dances and showed off to her friends. Jenni didn’t believe in me,” he repeated, really feeling it for the first time. Admitting it. He looked down at his hand, fingers curling around Theresa’s. “Alicia sure as hell never did. My mother. Feels like every woman in my life has no problem taking what she can get from me, but nobody has ever believed in me. Until you.”
He thought for sure she’d recoil or cut her gaze from his or find an excuse to get up and leave. Theresa did none of those things. She tightened her fingers in his and leaned against him again, her cheek pressed to his shoulder. She sat there in silence for a few moments until he gave in to the urge he could no longer deny and pressed his lips to her temple.
She looked at him then. “I know you’re going to make the diner a success, Ilya.”
He wanted more from her than that. When he kissed her, lips parted, the sweet press of her tongue on his made him think that maybe Theresa wanted it, too. When he slid a hand up her back to cup her neck beneath the fall of her hair, though, she turned her face. She didn’t pull away, but she murmured his name like either a warning or a plea; he couldn’t be sure.
So he kissed her again, waiting for her to break it first. Neither of them did until, breathing hard, they eased apart to look into each other’s eyes. She cupped his face with one hand, gaze searching his.
“This is crazy,” she said. He was uncomfortably hard and tried to shift a little on the bed to ease the pressure of his erection against his jeans, but all that did was draw her attention to the bulge there. Theresa laughed. “Oh.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Oh.”
“What is this?” she asked him.
Ilya hadn’t spent a lot of his life honing honesty, but now all he felt he could say was the truth. “I don’t know. Making a mistake?”
“Feels like that, doesn’t it?”
It felt exactly the opposite of that to him, but he wasn’t going to be the one to say so, not if she was having second thoughts. “We signed papers, Theresa.”
She leaned to offer her mouth to him again, a simple, brushing kiss that lasted barely a second. “Is that what we’re really talking about?”
“You tell me.”
She sat back then, and he wished he’d said something else, if only so that she would kiss him again instead of putting distance between them. She gathered the thickness of her hair and pulled it on top of her head, securing it with an elastic band she pulled off her wrist in that magical way women did things. She used her thumb to wipe the corner of her mouth, her gaze contemplative.
“We had sex in the kitchen. You can’t unring a bell, Ilya. We did that, and it changed things.”
He knew that, but still frowned at her words. “Does it have to?”
“It almost always does,” she said.
“You told me you . . .” He coughed lightly. “You slept with guys so you could have a place to stay.”
“Or sometimes because I wanted to,” she said, a little sharply. “It wasn’t like I did it with guys I didn’t like.”
“No. No, I didn’t mean that. I didn’t do it with women I didn’t like, either,” Ilya said. “I mean, I always liked them at the time.”
“I need to know that I can trust you, that’s all,” she said. “Sex is one thing. I think we both agree we’re pretty good at that.”
“Think how much better we’ll get with practice,” he said, rewarded by her laugh.
Theresa shook her head. “I believe you can do this. The diner. This thing with me, whatever it is now, whatever it might become. But I need to believe that you think you can do it, Ilya. And you’ve told me over and over again how you can’t ever seem to make things work. Business, relationships, whatever it is. So it’s not enough for me to believe that you can make any of this work. You need to believe it, too, and I need to trust that you do. I need to trust you.”
“And you don’t think you can?”
She shrugged. “With a business? Sure. I’ve already faced bad credit and debt and financial ruin. But with my heart . . . I don’t know about that. I’m not quite as willing to risk that for someone who doesn’t believe he’s capable of keeping it safe.”
Irritated because she’d hit close to home, he pulled away from her. “What are you saying? You need a commitment? You need me to—what?—sign a contract saying that I’ll be faithful or that I’ll marry you within a year or something like that?”
“Oh my God, no,” she retorted, expression twisting. “Absolutely not.”
“What, then? What do you want me to do?” he demanded.
“If it was that easy to figure it out,” she shot back, “we’d be doing it already.”
When Ilya looked back on his life, there weren’t many moments he felt proud of. Most of them had been related to Go Deep; even if it had never been as financially successful as he’d wished, there’d been some damned fine things about it. He stood in front of another chance, now, to do something good with his life. To make something work.
It wasn’t just the diner.
“I like you,” Ilya said. “You’re smart and we laugh together, and you have your shit together in a way I admire and envy and doubt I could ever live up to. You always did, even back then. The rest of us were running around like idiots, but you had yourself together.”
Theresa was silent for a second or so. “That’s what you see when you look at me?”
He shrugged, moving closer to her again. “Yes.”
“I am the last person to have her shit together, Ilya.”
“That’s not what I see.” He pushed a stray tendril of her hair over her shoulder. He didn’t kiss her, even though he wanted to. He looked at her instead. Into her eyes. Seeing her. Really trying to see her. “You’re beautiful.”
Theresa gave her head the tiniest shake. Tears glinted but didn’t fall. “I’m not asking you to promise me that it’s all going to end up sunshine and flowers, Ilya. Nobody can know that. But I can’t do . . . this . . . with you if I don’t believe you think you’re capable of it. That’s all.”
“I want to be,” he said in a low voice. “Can that be good enough?”
She linked her fingers in his, letting their hands sit quietly together on his thigh. When she leaned to put her face against his shoulder again, the soft brush of her sweet-smelling hair tickled his face. He closed his eyes, breathing her in.
She shook her head again. “I don’t know.”