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If he’s being completely honest, there isn’t much in this world that can get a reaction out of Illya Kuryakin. There isn’t much he hasn’t seen, which, in his case, is the result of a difficult childhood, a turbulent young adulthood, a stint in the Russian Armed Forces, expatriation, and an intermittent string of one-night stands that fizzled into…nothing at all.
He was lucky to land this job, he knows that. The climate in America isn’t exactly receptive to towering Russian veterans who don’t smile often, he knows that, too. And it’s pretty clear that Rudi, the shifty-eyed proprietor of Uncle Rudi’s Bar, only tolerates his presence because he’s willing to look the other way from the shady dealings going on in the back room. He’s only been working here six months, but already he’s seen one surprise police raid, an innumerable amount of bar brawls, a darts-related mishap that resulted in the near loss of an eye, and a dog sitting at the bar.
Yet, the sight of a very small girl provoking a group of men to a drinking contest and then consuming her weight in alcohol makes his eyebrows shoot to his hairline.
Flushing red in her victory, the girl laughs loudly as she overturns her last shot glass with almost enough force to shatter it. The glass’s companions outnumber her opponent’s, who is slumped over in a liquor-sweating heap of flesh. While he has many friends, she doesn’t seem to have any, which Illya finds unusual. Most women cluster in ranks when they come in here, well-armed with watchful sentinels and pepper spray, and he can understand why. This one, though, seems confident on her own. Whether or not it’s fraudulent, he can’t tell.
There’s a fair amount of grumbling among the men, which prompts Illya to hover nearby, cleaning the same table for several minutes. Sometimes just his presence—all six feet and five inches of it—is enough to halt an incident before it even begins, but this time, he’s not necessary. There’s only teasing and the disgruntled exchange of money, all of which disappears into the girl’s handbag.
Illya retreats behind the bar again, resigned to his thoughts. He’s startled by the sound of hands slapping the counter, and turns to find the big drinker herself aiming a big, sloppy smile at him. His first thought is that he’s impressed she’s still standing. His second is that she’s very, very pretty.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” she says, slurring her words a little bit, “but could you call me a cab?”
Illya glances over her little head towards the group behind her, who seems to have moved on from their crushing defeat. “Your friends have no cell phones?”
She blinks, slow and sleepy, at his accent. “They’re not my friends,” she says, with a half-laugh that ends in a snort. It’s somehow both embarrassing and endearing at the same time. She plops down on a bar stool and plants her elbows on the counter. “I don’t even know them.”
He reaches for the pitcher of ice-water under the bar. “You have someone you want me to call for you?”
She considers this somewhat absently. She’s got long lashes and a sweet, round face. “No,” she says after a minute. “Just the cab, please.”
“Do you challenge strange men to drinking contests often?” he asks, amused.
She’s still smiling that unbound smile as she watches him reach for the well-used business card tacked to the bulletin board behind the bottles. “Oh, no,” she says lightly. “Not at all.” Then, ignoring the water he pushes at her: “What’s your name?”
“Illya.”
She closes her eyes, dangly earrings shivering against dark hair. “Ill- ya ,” she says, then laughs. “Are you impressed with me, Illya?” she asks.
He’s got the phone clamped between his shoulder and his cheek, the intermittent ringing on the other end loud in his ear, and against his own tendencies, he smiles at her. “Very,” he replies honestly.
--
When he gets home that night, sluggish on tired feet, he finds a hungry mouth waiting on his doorstep.
His little friend greets him with a mewling that’s equal parts complaint and welcome. As aware as he is that he may just be a mode of survival for her, he’s come to want the company of the little cat, though she’s torn most of his furniture to shreds and urinated on his clothes once or twice. He actually prefers the easy, happy attitude of dogs to the apparent arrogance of cats. He had a dog once, as a child. A cheerful Spaniel who licked his hands a lot and ate scraps under the table. Now, though, he finds himself walking down the pet aisle when he’s at the grocery store, buying cat food and feathered toys, and has taken to leaving bowls of water on the front stoop.
“Hello to you, too,” he says. Cat replies with a full, insistent meow this time. The second he opens the door, she darts inside, running ahead of him into the kitchen.
Shoes off, coat hung, keys in the bowl, radio on. He puts the kettle on the stove to boil. Cat emits one long wail from the spot under the counter where she knows he keeps her food, so he obeys and gives her an open can of wet food. He watches her eat, tiny jaws snapping delicately, as his tea steeps. She’s always been oddly clean for a stray cat, and this is not the first time he’s wondered if she actually belongs to someone. But, like many things, it’s none of his business.
Just as he’s drifting off into his dreams, a weight drops heavily onto his chest. He grumbles. Cat leans close to offer him her warm, fishy breath in some form of apology, then insistently pushes herself into the space of his armpit. There she’ll stay, curled into a tight, little ball, until he wakes up to find her having disappeared into the day like mist.
--
It’s a while before he sees the girl again. Several, uneventful cycles of long shifts and vomiting pass before the bell jingling on the door heralds her presence.
She comes to the bar and sits unceremoniously, and when she looks at him, he holds his breath for half a second. But she doesn’t seem to see him, though she asks for a drink. This girl is wildly different from the one he saw before, all flushed and loud. This one is quiet and reserved, staring into the bottom of her glass for a long time before she drinks it.
If she recognizes him, she doesn’t say so, and so he doesn’t say anything at all.
--
Another week passes by, and when he comes back from the bathroom, she’s seated at the bar again, staring at her phone. The bluish glow enhances the shadows under her eyes, the deep cut of her frown into her face. As he approaches, he sees that she hasn’t changed out of her work clothes, but rather pulled the top half of her jumpsuit from her torso and wrapped the grubby arms around her waist. He can’t help but glance, somewhat surreptitiously, at the small hollow of her throat, winged by a pretty pair of collarbones.
“Another?” he asks her, and she jumps.
"Yes, please,” she mutters, pushing her empty glass toward him. She turns the phone face-down onto the countertop.
“Is it your boss?” he says, and she raises her eyebrows. “Your problem. Or your boyfriend? Your family?”
“You ask a lot of questions,” she says, but the corner of her mouth lifts. She tilts her head. “It’s a long story.”
“I have time,” he says with a shrug.
She looks at him a little funnily then, and some recognition flickers in her eyes. “Have I hit on you before?” she asks.
Taken aback, he says, “No.”
The ghost of her original smile returns, a few fractions short of a grin with dangerously infectious properties. “Well,” she says. “There’s still time.” She holds out her hand. “I’m Gaby.”
--
It becomes something of a routine. On Friday nights, she’ll come by and occupy the same, old seat at the bar, complaining and sucking down vodka sodas.
He collects little facts about her over time, stores them away at the back of his mind. She’s a mechanic, and works at a garage a few blocks from here. She picks at grease under her fingernails as she tells him, lashes long and dark when she blinks. She’s an only child, and she didn’t have much of a father. She’s German, but she hasn’t been back home in a really long time. She doesn’t have many friends, but she likes it that way, or so she says. He thinks there’s something in the lines of her face that wants , but he’s not sure. He thinks about that face sometimes, in all its round youthfulness, in random, mundane moments like when he’s washing dishes or brushing his teeth. What would that face look like here? Sitting at his kitchen table happily, or emerging from his bathroom in a cloud of steam?
And those are just the things she tells him. The rest he picks up on, like the fidgeting she does when she talks—plucking at her frayed sweaters, tugging on a lock of hair, touching her nose—and the way she leans her cheek on her hand when she’s thinking.
He doesn’t even know her last name. But he’d like to.
--
He’s embarrassed to admit to himself that when she comes in accompanied by a man, his hopes fall a little bit.
“Hi, Illya,” she says cheerily, taking her usual seat. “This is Napoleon.”
The man, big and broad and utterly handsome, occupies the stool beside her and gives Illya a wide, crooked grin. “I’ve heard a lot about you,” he says, and there’s a not-so-imperceptible thump as Gaby hits him under the counter. The blow has no effect on the man’s countenance whatsoever.
Illya finds his blue-eyed stare slightly invasive, as though the man has x-ray vision. “The usual?” he asks her.
“Yes, please,” she says. “And a double Scotch for ’Poleon.”
The two of them sit in one of the booths instead of at the bar, and she smiles a lot when he talks. It’s the first time Illya’s seen her in the company of another person, and it’s nice. There are a lot of lonely people in bars, Illya included. He’s certainly spent enough time in this one to have seen them in all shapes and sizes, wearing masks and bad perfume to hide the plain truth that remained when the alcohol was gone. Even though Gaby and Napoleon seem like two, lonely people in the same booth more than they seem like friends, it’s better than sitting at the bar for three hours and watching him mix drinks.
And he wishes it were as simple as that. But it’s true that sometimes in the shower or just before he’s falling asleep he thinks of her, of the possibility of her, and...that’s it. He always stops there. There are few, good things that have lasted in his life, and never without insult or injury. He should have learned to be distrustful of prettiness by now, but it’s easier said than done.
“Hey, Red Peril.”
Illya starts and looks into Napoleon’s face. “What did you call me?”
The other man has the decency to look a little embarrassed. “Sorry, bad joke,” he says placatingly. “Can I get the same again?”
Illya acquiesces without acknowledging the apology, thinking something generally unkind to Americans.
Napoleon watches him do it, but he’s not grinning so much anymore. “Gaby likes you,” he says, unprompted.
Illya fumbles the ice scooper and some of the cubes shatter on the floor at his feet. He is regrettably unprepared for the full brightness of Napoleon’s face. “What?”
“Gaby,” Napoleon repeats. “She likes you.” There is a smugness in him that’s extremely frustrating. And punchable.
“Doesn’t she like you ?”
It’s Napoleon’s turn to blink in surprise, and then he lets out a small laugh. “Oh, she likes me alright, but I’m only good for paying rent and cleaning up her dishes.”
“You’re roommates?” Illya says, unable to hide his surprise.
Napoleon collects the fresh drinks easily in one hand, grin back in place. Maybe he’s where Gaby learned hers. “Yeah,” he says. “Ball’s in your court.”
In the booth behind him, Gaby looks suspicious, but she smiles when she meets Illya’s eyes.
--
Napoleon is a far more frequent figure at the bar after that, much to Illya’s displeasure.
At first, he comes in with Gaby only, glued to her side, with an ever-present, shit-eating grin and a quip for Illya. Later, he comes in alone, to meet lovely women of all types. From what Illya can tell, he doesn’t seem to have a particular preference, except for one tall, slender, blonde woman unlike all the rest.
She doesn’t glide in any more often than the others, but there is something telling about the way Napoleon laughs after she says something, the way they lean closely together when they talk quietly in the back booths. Illya is no fan of hers himself, because she looks at him with unseeing, cat-like eyes, and her drink orders are always commands. But he can acknowledge that there must be something strange and impressive about her indeed. The look Napoleon gives her as she flicks ash off a cigarette, standing outside in the cold with her thick furs drawn tightly around her neck, is enough to make that very clear.
He wants to ask Gaby about it, but they don’t feel like friends. He doesn’t know if you can be friends with someone if you always feel slightly uneasy and damp in their presence. Or if you provide them a service, which for him has now expanded just a little from pouring drinks to hearing about her day. He does know that Gaby and the blonde woman are never in the bar at the same time, which he suspects is by design. So, he doesn’t ask her.
Actually, the subject is nowhere near his list of talking points when she comes in late on another Friday night, alone.
“Do you ever want to kill Napoleon?” she asks loudly, as the door bangs shut behind her.
It’s snowing faintly outside, and her hair is wet where it sticks to her cheeks and pale throat. His eyes hitch and linger on these highly interesting areas before he answers. “All the time,” he says, and is rewarded by a grateful, if slightly stressed, smile from her. “What did he do now?”
The smile withers. “He brought that woman to the apartment.” There is a palpable amount of distaste in the words.
“The blonde woman?”
She blinks at him. “You’ve met her?"
He thinks about the fairly one-sided interactions he’s had with Blonde Woman. “Kind of.”
Gaby snorts, and she manages to make the noise sound bitter and sarcastic. Illya reaches for the bottle that might as well bear her name at this point, but she shakes her head.
“Just a club soda tonight,” she says, peeling off her coat. “I have to open the garage in…” She glances at her watch, grimaces. “Six hours.”
It’s already well-after midnight, and he raises his eyebrows as he fulfills her request. “Why are you here, then?”
She frowns, a quick, little downturn of her mouth that causes her lower lip to protrude just a bit. “I can’t come visit you?”
If he ever blushed, he might do so now. Even so, he ducks his head to retrieve the rag he dropped, unable to formulate a natural response. “Of course you can,” he tells her after a moment.
She’s cleaner than usual, grease absent from their usual spots on her forehead (where she must swipe her sleeves throughout the day) and nose (which he’s seen her touch absentmindedly while she talks). The observation makes him feel self-conscious in his day-old shirt and unshaven jaw.
“Well,” she says, with that wry, little smile. “Maybe one of these days I can pour you a drink for a change.”
He feels very warm when he replies, “I would like that.”
--
He has a few dreams about her—silly, sad, pathetic dreams that he wishes he could forget upon waking like so many others. But they linger in their soft sweetness, like the smell of her hair (he imagines) or the touch of her hand (he imagines).
In them, he follows her down a stretched path, watching her traipsing through grass barefoot, and the faster he follows, the farther she appears, until she’s only a speck on the horizon. In another, she sits at his kitchen table in one of his t-shirts, peering bleary-eyed at a laptop and tapping her foot to some music playing from somewhere distant… And they never evolve into anything more.
He wonders if he’s really as lonely as his landlady seems to think. The only reason he’s been able to avoid the elderly woman, her aggressive invitations for hot chocolate, and her many nieces is his late hours. That way, he’s able to tiptoe past her door and make it, with relief, into his apartment. Cat, seemingly aware of the need for silence, typically waits to nag him until the door is closed.
Tonight, Cat eyes him through the slits of his laundry basket, having paused in her attempts to cover each of his clean shirts with cat hair in order to assess whether or not he’s a threat to the activity. He looks back at her, sighs, and opens his book again.
“You’re lucky, you’re cute, you know,” he says to her.
Cat, her claws tangled in one of his sweaters, yawns pointedly. She will later offer him an apology in the form of head-butts and purring, and, as always, he’ll accept it.
--
It’s another week or so before Gaby turns up again, suddenly and while his back is turned. He comes back in from taking out the trash to find her waiting like a friendly apparition, wearing her hair down and a top that exposes her pretty, tan shoulders. He never thought shoulders could be pretty before, but there is very little about her that is unpretty.
Except perhaps her right pinky toe, which had been reduced to a nub about five years ago thanks to a clumsy fellow grease monkey at the garage. (He knows this because about three weeks previously, after partaking in another drinking game, she took off her shoe and put her foot up on the bar to show him rather gleefully.)
“Hello again,” she says. She lifts her empty glass, and he fills it. It’s a comfortable, fluid exchange, unlike the others he’s had since he moved here. “Happy to see me?”
“Always,” he replies cheerfully.
“Do I look nice?” she asks.
“Always,” he replies, somewhat less cheerfully.
She leans her elbows on the bar, looks up at him from under dark lashes. Her earrings have little musical notes on them. “Do you see that man? In the back?”
He looks, and immediately sees him: a man more similar to Napoleon than anyone else who had ever stepped into the place. Not in clothing, since this man was unironically wearing a leather jacket that was both too new and too expensive to be taken seriously, and not exactly in countenance either, since he is sporting a boxy mustache. But he has the same lofty air about his mouth and posture, the same imperious look in his eyes. Illya finds the similarity very disturbing. Not quite as disturbing as the way the man watches Gaby’s back or their conversation. It’s not lewd, but the smirking interest there irks him.
“I see him,” he says.
“I’m on a date,” she tells him in a low voice, like it’s a secret. “His name is Alex. I met him at the garage.” She hasn’t sipped the fresh drink yet, and Illya is inclined to think she isn’t in a hurry to get back.
“Are you having fun?” he asks, because they’re friends and friends are supposed to ask.
“Yes,” she replies.
He likes to think himself something of a stoic, in the more contemporary sense, and therefore is confident that she won’t know this one little word (which he’s so often thought of her saying) is a disappointment to him. “That’s good,” he says, a little lamely.
She frowns, somehow displeased by this answer. “The problem is,” she says slowly, “is that I’ve had more fun in the last minute over here than in an hour over there.”
He doesn’t quite know what to say to this startling confession, which makes him feel victorious and warm in the cheeks at the same time. Gaby waits, gives an exasperated little sigh. “Hopeless,” she mutters, then she tips her head back and drains her glass. She taps the side of it with her fingernail, but when he reaches for it she pulls it out of reach with a shake of her head. “Answer a question for me first.”
“Okay.” He’s made confused and jittery by the brief brush of her fingers against his.
“Are you closing tonight?” There’s a slight flush in her cheeks that suggests that Alex guy might have poured her a couple of drinks already. Her smile has hazy borders that bring it closer to that first night he saw her, a few months ago.
“No,” he says, and he thinks back to what Napoleon said. Gaby likes you . “I’m off at one.”
She surrenders her glass. “Good to know. Water, please.” He grants her wish, as always. She holds the fresh glass to her chest and inclines her head to indicate her waiting companion. “Don’t worry,” she says, funny little smile still in play. “I’ll get rid of him by then. I prefer you anyways.”
He’s glad to see her turn her back, in order that he might hide a raised heartbeat and silly, wild smile. And she’s there by the door in a worn, wool coat at one on the dot, waiting for him. He feels off-kilter approaching her, watching her tuck odd hairs behind her ears.
“How did he take it?” he asks her.
“Like a guy who has a motorcycle to get home to,” she replies, and he doesn’t know what she means. She tilts her head, mouth turned up at one corner. Waiting for…what?
“Do you need me to call you a cab?” he asks after a beat. He’s not sure what to do with his hands.
She peers through the gritty window panes. “Do you live so far away?” she asks in return, and smiles at his expression. “I was hoping I could pour you that drink.”
--
The sight of her in his apartment, padding around in mismatched socks, throws everything into a glaring, sharp focus that reveals everything flawed about the previously inoffensive space. The linoleum in the kitchen and bathroom is yellowed and cracked. There is a thin layer of fur on Cat’s favorite resting places. Everything is old and cheap and rough, and he can’t help but think how it looks, how he looks in his own habitat.
But if she sees these things, she doesn’t say. She drags her fingers over the counters and examines, briefly, an old photograph on the wall with a curious eye. She touches the spines of his books with delicate fingertips, mouthing the titles to herself silently, and at last, reaches his bedroom door, which she pushes open with a lithe and slender foot so she might peer into its darkness. He wishes he vacuumed today.
She turns toward the sound of him fumbling two glasses in his suddenly awkward hands, as though they’ve forgotten their skills and dexterity in her warm presence. She blinks at him in a sign of some confusion.
“You said you wanted to pour me a drink,” he says.
She laughs. It’s a small, tinkling sound. “No drink,” she says, drawing a little closer. Her hand goes to the collar of her sweater, the first shiny button, and she smiles. She undoes it with a quick flick of her fingers, and then the next two in quick succession. “I just said that so you’d let me up here.”
Her hand is small and warm on the back of his neck, and when she goes to kiss him she stands on her toes.
--
Some things he takes notes on:
Her hair is as soft as it looks. The skin at the hollow of her throat is sensitive, as is a certain spot below her belly button. She laughs, sometimes, when kissed. She likes the lights off, because “it’s better to feel blindly.” She looks exceedingly good in an oversized t-shirt, but even better out of it.
And she likes cats.
--
“Finally,” says Napoleon, zeroing in on their entwined hands.
Gaby releases Illya’s fingers and gives him a withering look.
“What?” Napoleon says, plopping down beside her. He presses a kiss to her cheek. “I thought you’d be pretending to spend your money on vodka sodas forever.”
Gaby shoots a scowl at him. “Eat shit.”
Illya raises his eyebrows. “Pretending?”
Napoleon looks at Gaby’s reddening face, then at Illya’s eyebrows.
“Oh,” he says.
“What?” Illya says.
“Stop,” Gaby says.
Napoleon turns towards him gleefully. “Rudi is Gaby’s uncle. She could drink for free here if she wanted.” He gives her a one-armed hug as she flushes more deeply, and she elbows him sharply.
“You are awful at secrets,” she says, in a tone of deep betrayal.
In further proof that negative emotions only strengthen Napoleon’s positive ones, he grins wide. “I made it through three months this time,” he chastises.
Gaby makes sheepish eye contact with a bewildered Illya and shrugs. “I didn’t want you to know I’m related to a sociopath.”
He considers this briefly before replying, “You have a good point.”
--
After he turns out the last group of regular customers, turns out the lights, and locks up the bar, his walk to his apartment feels a little different. It’s still damp and cold, with the beginnings of frost creeping in at the edges of everything like growing mold, but he doesn’t feel heavy anymore. It’s around two in the morning, that fuzzy time between the night before and the morning after , and everything’s quiet. He even finds the front stoop empty.
He climbs up the steps to his apartment and unlocks the door. He’s greeted by the smell of sizzling eggs and the sound of the crackly radio in the kitchen, some lonely host prattling on about cooking this and political that . He kicks off his shoes and places them carefully next to a pair of worn-in yellow sneakers, which are dwarfed by his own. He hangs his coat over a bright orange parka, into which he could perhaps fit one arm. He throws his keys in a ceramic bowl, which had been clumsily painted at the mall a week before.
“Don’t look at me like that,” says a voice from the kitchen. “You’ve eaten your breakfast, stop trying to poach mine.” The only answer is an insistent, mewling noise that Illya, by now, knows all too well.
When he rounds the corner, he sees her, standing with one hand holding a spatula and the other on her hip, hair bunched up on top of her head, sleep shorts rucked up to reveal the edge of bulldog-print underwear.
“Eggs can kill you, you know,” Gaby informs Cat.
Cat replies in the negative, and Gaby sighs, finally acquiescing by dropping a bit of undercooked yolk on the floor. Cat throws herself upon it in an enthusiastic show of unnecessary predation.
“Oh, hello,” Gaby says, catching sight of him at last.
“Can eggs really kill cats?” he asks in amusement.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she says, waving the spatula. “I’m trying to see if she’s as highly evolved as she acts.” She turns around to find Cat on the counter, dangerously close to the pan, and swats her. “Away, beast!”
Cat yowls at what she clearly thinks is an excessive use of force and an unfair epithet before leaping off the counter in a huff. It’s a facade. Illya is fully aware of the fact that within minutes she will be seated at Gaby’s feet adoringly, purring and weaving between her ankles in search of affection. (In an unsurprising betrayal, she has come to prefer Gaby over Illya.)
“Animal abuse,” accuses Illya, snagging the weapon from her.
“Shut up and eat up,” replies Gaby, pushing a plate at him. But she leans up for a kiss before she disappears into the bathroom for a shower. As per their routine, developed over the last two months, she will pop out in a cloud of steam in exactly ten minutes and crawl into his bed with towel-wrapped hair. Some ten more minutes after that, he will settle in beside her and press his cheek to her warm, clean skin until she permits him into the small circle of her arms. They’ll remain that way until the alarm clock goes off at six. It’s a good routine.
Ever loyal to Gaby and no longer offended, Cat plops down in front of the bathroom door to await her return. Feeling similarly, Illya collects his fair share of food, flicks the radio to classical music, and turns Gaby’s computer toward him to read what she’s reading. A Christmas Carol . He snorts, recalling a not-so-distant argument about the merits of various Dickensian pieces. He’s still highly in favor of Great Expectations, and Gaby’s still insistent about not giving two shits about anything unrelated to Christmas.
He puts a forkful of food into his mouth. She left the shells in the eggs, but he eats them anyway. He’s not exactly experienced in egg-making or romance, but he’s pretty sure these are the kinds of sacrifices you make for love.