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December 1994
He thought it was a joke, at first. Some cruel prank, postage paid by one of the many cranky enemies he’d made for himself over the years. It was an occupational hazard that followed him across professions—Florence had called it an attitude problem, he’d scoffed and called her dramatic, and they’d call things even over three games and shitty coffee. At least, he thought they had.
Bittersweet memories aside, what it came down to was that someone with a grudge against Mr. Frederick Trumper of Apartment 103B, 83rd St, New York, New York had gone to great lengths to forge a Christmas card from Anatoly Sergievsky (or, to quote the card: Anatoly, Svetlana, and two unfamiliar names Freddie assumed belonged to their children). Freddie could almost take it as a compliment that someone disliked him enough to waste good stamp money, if not for the more worrying implication that his home address was significantly less secret than he’d assumed.
But Freddie couldn’t bring himself to throw away the card that had come sandwiched between utility bills, postmarked from London.
He slid it out of the envelope one more time and frowned at the slanted writing spelling his name. The crisp nicety Freddie recalled of Anatoly filled a few lines with polite inquiries after his health and the weather, followed by a concise handful of complimentary sentences about London. There was a marked lack of mention of Florence, and Freddie wasn’t sure whether the twisting in his gut was relief, derision, or something in between.
What his eyes kept drifting back to, however, was the sentence scrawled at the very bottom of the card, in a slightly different shade of black. Smeary at the loops and ends, as though it’d been added in hastily, just before being sealed away into the envelope.
I’m playing New York next fall.
Freddie’s thumb smoothed along the edge of the card and paused at the slightly smudged tail connecting Anatoly’s l to the period. A hard angle lifted the corner of his mouth, just a few degrees shy of a scoff.
It wasn’t like the Soviet—or ex-Soviet, Russian, whatever he was calling himself these days—to scribble something in like this. Sergievsky always played with a careful, mediated precision, when he wasn’t licking yogurt lids like goddamn Yogi Bear. This kind of impetuous fire belonged to Freddie, flicking captured pieces over and refusing to lift his sunglasses until he called check.
So what did it mean? Sure, Freddie hadn’t been trusted with big name coverage for the 1993 Interzonal, but he was still running the chess circuit—he knew Anatoly had qualified for Worlds next year. He’d had to put up with the office screaming about a new Alekhine for weeks, blathering on and on about Anatoly’s latest country swap (Don’t get too excited now, third time’s the charm, Freddie had quipped with a sharp grin, and been irrationally annoyed when no one else laughed).
What kind of game was Sergievsky trying to pull? Freddie stared down at the card in his hand and tried to dissect the ineffable mess working through his chest. With a huff that didn’t feel half as satisfying as he’d thought it would, he tossed the card back down and stalked off for a walk.
He’d throw it out tomorrow, he assured himself, more and more certain of it with every thump of his heels on the pavement.
September 1995
“How’d you get my address?”
Anatoly looked down at his coffee and smiled, though it was a touch too smug to properly achieve the obviously desired effect of politeness.
“I’m glad you came.”
“That doesn’t an—stop trying to distract me with your spoon, yes, I saw that you ordered a parfait, you yogurt-slurping chump.” Freddie sat unceremoniously, falling unconsciously into the wide-legged hunch he always played in.
It felt right, natural even—here he was, across a table from Sergievsky, and it didn’t really matter that they were in a disgustingly overpriced coffee shop playing jazz piano covers of Madonna, because this was the most comfortable Freddie had felt since he’d met Anatoly at Wat Pho six years ago. A startling revelation to say the least, but Freddie was more preoccupied with studying his opponent—if he could just figure out Sergievsky’s lines, see what kind of play he meant to pull, he’d turn the table with tempo to spare.
Anatoly’s spoon paused just before clinking against his glass again, and he lowered it with an expression that Freddie, had he not known better, would have called sheepish.
“So did your state-sanctioned second get a Christmas card too? The big scary cocktail guy,” Freddie said, partially to keep himself from feeling so goddamned comfortable and partially because the matter of Sergievsky’s former handler had been itching in the corner of his mind since he’d agreed to this meeting weeks ago.
Anatoly’s brows knit briefly—he always looked mildly concerned about something, but at that moment he looked as though he’d just been presented with utterly devastating news—before he shook his head.
“No,” he said slowly, scraping his spoon against the side of his glass, “not if you’re talking about Molokov. And he hasn’t been sanctioned to me, or anyone else, by any state since ninety-one.” Anatoly’s eyes darted up to meet Freddie’s, a wan smile flickering at the corner of his mouth. “I did write on the inside of the card, you know. Or did you just read the last part?”
Freddie waved away the question with a dismissive flick of his hand. “The Sergievsky I know would never compromise his airtight tournament headspace for some casual chit chat with an old…”
Freddie wanted to say “rival”, but the word didn’t quite fit in his mouth. Neither did “friend”, but Anatoly’s eyebrows were already rising up in that way that made Freddie feel like a kid about to get scolded, so he finished lamely, “Friend.”
The slightly too smug smile landed on Anatoly’s lips again. “We’re old now, Trumper,” he said over the rim of his cup. “Maybe I’m going out of my brain.”
“Don’t give me that bullshit,” Freddie scowled. “You ran circles around Kamsky and Adams in the qualifiers, you know exactly what you’re doing. What...why are you laughing?”
Anatoly’s teeth broke through and the smug smile turned into a full grin. Freddie paused in repeating his increasingly irate demand to blink at Anatoly.
“Let’s have a friendly game,” Anatoly said, already clearing a space on the too-small table.
“Do you ever answer people’s questions?” Freddie asked, exasperation biting uselessly at Anatoly’s grin.
Anatoly’s only response was to gather the last of his yogurt parfait on the edge of his spoon and lick it clean.
Anatoly took the first game, Freddie ordered a black coffee just before he called checkmate on the second, and together they proceeded to wring out victories over the other until Freddie, three wins deep with nearly twice as many empty coffee cups lined up precariously next to his captured pieces, surveyed the board with a careful, only slightly out-of-practice eye.
Not quite in the endgame yet, but only a few moves away unless one of them did something very brilliant or very stupid. Board tipped in his own favor, but Anatoly’s development was solid—he’d nabbed one of Freddie’s bishops earlier with a clever corner—and Freddie was keeping a vigilant eye on the pawn inching towards his home rank.
The waitress approached, looking balefully at them and the chess mat crowding out the rest of the table’s contents, and collected the mass of glassware from their wobbly ledging on the edge. “Anything else for you gentlemen?” she asked, not bothering with the pretense of flipping her notepad open.
Anatoly glanced up with a tight shake of his head, minimally softened by the hurried “no, thank you” that followed, and Freddie saw an opening.
His hand twitched from its spot on his thigh but something held Freddie back (he could practically hear Florence’s incredulous “oh?”). His mind raced through the game, laying out lines and analyzing Anatoly’s potential moves.
It would do it; rook to B7 and the game would be his in three moves. Even if he didn’t take this opening, there was another line he could play, exchanging his knight to corner Anatoly’s king at the third rank. Freddie could practically taste the crisp syllables of a check, but still his hand lingered over his leg.
“Draw.”
The word tasted strange on Freddie’s tongue, jelly-like and stained with rarity. Anatoly blinked at him owlishly.
“Are you offering or...ordering?”
Freddie rolled his eyes and motioned to the waitress across the counter for another coffee. “Offering.”
Anatoly looked back at the table, raising a hand to lean on as he bent over the board and studied the squares. Freddie took the time to examine him in turn, refreshing in his memory the slanted crease between Anatoly’s eyebrows and the network of fine lines that shifted when he flexed his fingers in consternation.
“I don’t understand,” Anatoly said. He paused and Freddie knew they were both remembering the same moment in a cloistered nook outside Wat Pho, the last time Anatoly had said those exact words.
“I don’t understand,” Anatoly repeated, and now he was staring at him in a beseeching sort of way that made Freddie acutely aware of just how small the table between them was—easy to flip, to cross, to shove, and Freddie had absolutely no earthly idea which one would quell the shivering current raging through his blood.
Anatoly’s eyes flicked back to the board, allowing Freddie a moment of respite from his direct gaze. His brow knit and he cleared his throat. “Your rook. And even if I give myself an escape square here,” his hand hovered over the board, tapping the air above their pieces, “you could still—”
“Yeah, the knight, I know,” Freddie interrupted, waving his hand at Anatoly and leaning back in his chair. “I’m offering, Sergievsky. Don’t try to understand, just accept the damn draw.”
The waitress arrived, cast a cursory glance at them staring at each other over the board, and set down a steaming cup of coffee. Freddie dumped in two packets of sugar and took a gulp without stirring, pulling a face at the barely-cut astringency.
Anatoly’s brow creased again. “Do you even like black coffee?”
“No. Quit wasting time and shake my hand.”
“It’s still in your lap. If you don’t like it, why did you drink seven cups?”
To give myself something to blame. Freddie tapped his fingers on his knee and made himself look into Anatoly’s eyes when he answered instead, “Do you like yogurt, Sergievsky?”
Anatoly hesitated, then extended his hand over the table. Freddie grinned and shook it firmly—
“...I do, actually. Strawberry flavor.”
Freddie laughed before he could stop himself. Anatoly watched him reset the pieces; just before Freddie replaced the black king, he spoke:
“You should come for the holidays.”
Freddie nearly knocked over the entire row. “What?”
“For New Year’s,” Anatoly insisted, nudging the black queen back into place with a precise finger. “I make good coffee. Better than this, I’d say. And Svetlana makes the best medovik—it’s a honey cake, you’d enjoy it.” His polite eyes took on a sparkle that flipped Freddie’s stomach. “Old friend.”
“...I’ll think about it.”
December 1995
London was colder than Freddie remembered, and the swirling sensation in his stomach wasn’t helping. What was he doing here? Why oh why had he gone and done this to himself?
He’d asked himself variations on this question through the entire process of buying a plane ticket, packing a suitcase, and the interim hours walking, sitting, and generally fixating on what had led him to take Anatoly up on his invitation. And here he was, still furiously demanding why under his breath, on the Sergievsky doorstep.
“Better be some damn good honey cake,” he muttered to himself just as the door swung open. Svetlana looked much the same as he remembered her—a bit stouter, a little more lined around the eyes, perhaps, but the six years since Bangkok hadn’t touched the quiet polish of her posture or the pride clenched like a fist at the base of her spine.
Freddie swallowed a comment about defection being good for the skin, apparently, and smiled with as many teeth showing as possible to hide the jitter in his clenched jaw.
Svetlana’s face shifted into a matching smile (he really couldn’t tell if she was thoroughly amused, unimpressed, or offended) and she stepped aside to let him in. “I was told you were promised medovik.”
Sitting across from Anatoly and Svetlana wasn’t as painfully awkward as Freddie had feared. Svetlana was a frighteningly adroit host, supplying everyone with icy shot glasses of vodka and aggressively hawking the table’s impressive array of breads, salads, and pickles so tart Freddie’s nose prickled between cheers. Her surprisingly dry sense of humor, after Freddie recovered from the volley of shots required to teach him to properly toast in Russian and satisfy Anatoly and Svetlana’s vehement correction of his pronunciation (much to their children’s delight), had much the same effect as the alcohol; by the time the clock in the living room rolled around eleven, the general spirit was as high in the color in Freddie’s cheeks.
Somewhere between Freddie’s first sampling of buttered roe on bread and his third slice of honey cake (“I’ll admit it, Sergievsky, I would maybe absolutely give up sex for this”), Svetlana disappeared into the kitchen, leaving him alone with Anatoly and Anatoly’s children.
Anatoly told a joke and Freddie laughed so hard he bent over the side of his chair, jaw aching with glee; twenty seconds after the punchline left Anatoly’s lips, Freddie all but forgot it, but the feeling of laughter stayed in his chest, relaxing the tension behind his neck and shoulder blades.
It should have scared him how easy this felt, how much better this felt than anything he would have been doing otherwise—and if Freddie was honest with himself, he knew exactly where he would have been: five hours behind in some bar, getting louder and louder to drown out the inevitable quiet that would come when he made his way back to an empty apartment. If he were a drop more sober or a lot more drunk, Freddie would have bolted out the door and run from the precipice yawning before him in the Sergievsky’s living room—but he was balanced over the sword’s edge, just like he’d been in the coffee shop three months previous, and now Anatoly was reaching out for him with that goddamned concern gleaming soft in his eyes—
Freddie shoved himself upright and cast around for a distraction; his eyes landed on Anatoly’s children, who were playing a game involving a pile of knitting needles and looks of intense concentration. The daughter was in the middle of extracting one of the needles from the pile with another, carefully maneuvering it out of the pile. She’d nearly gotten it out when her brother clapped loudly and jumped forward; her hand jerked and the needle clattered back down, shifting the pile. She smacked her laughing brother, muttering something in irritated Russian; Anatoly looked over and said in a tone suggestive of an effort at discipline, “Vanya, behave.”
Freddie didn’t miss the resentment that slid over Anatoly’s son’s face before disappearing into laughter as his sister whispered something to him. He wondered, with a pang in his chest that he decided to blame on the alcohol, what it would have been like to have a sibling. Probably a better companion than chess books at drowning out the fighting and the noises, Freddie figured, maybe less so at fueling him for the lonely decades after.
“Have you taught them to play?” he asked suddenly, mostly unaware of the words leaving his mouth until he registered Anatoly’s look of surprise.
“I...no,” Anatoly answered, and his face seemed to Freddie more flushed than it had been seconds before. Anatoly swallowed and cast his eyes downwards, searching the table before selecting a deviled egg. He raised it to his lips but didn’t bite, staring at the beet-red yolk as though it might hold the answer to whatever question was running through his mind.
“I don’t know if I should,” he told the egg. His eyes flickered up to Freddie’s, holding his gaze firmly despite the unbearable liquid uncertainty of his own. “I learned when I was young. How old were you?”
Freddie sucked a sticky crumb of medovik off the edge of his teeth before answering, “Young.” He tried not to think too hard about it before he said, “But we didn’t turn out so bad.”
Anatoly raised an eyebrow at him and took a large bite of deviled egg. He glanced at his children again as he chewed and Freddie saw his shoulders relax, ever so slightly.
“Say,” Freddie said casually, slouching over his knees as Anatoly popped the rest of the deviled egg in his mouth, “didn’t you say you made better coffee than that place in New York? I could go for a cup.”
Anatoly’s eyes widened.
“Old friend,” Freddie added. Anatoly’s hand flew to his mouth as he coughed and swallowed past a burst of laughter, his shoulders shaking as his efforts led only to a rattling snort.
Freddie sat back in his chair and grinned in satisfaction.
It was well past midnight and the flutes of champagne Svetlana had produced for toasting when Ivan and Marina’s nodding heads were noticed. Svetlana rounded them up with the same efficient motions she’d used to clear the empty dishes off the table, but before she could herd them to bed, Anatoly stood, holding out a hand to stop her.
“Let me,” he said, an almost nervous smile spreading over his face.
Svetlana’s eyebrows inched towards her hairline, but she nodded and sat in Anatoly’s vacated seat to watch him awkwardly shepherd their children down the hall.
Freddie found himself once again searching the wall behind Svetlana for something to fill the silence—but how to bridge the gap between their two worlds? With her husband it was a matter of black and white, with history and theory and his own sword to fall back on, but with Svetlana Freddie was lost, fumbling through the space between them like a man trying to swim through air.
His eyes landed on the bookshelf beside the couch and scanned the spines, skimming over the unfamiliar, boxy shapes of Cyrillic and the English titles scattered among them. There were chess books (as expected), two dictionaries (one Oxford English, one Russian-English), and an impressive collection of cloth-bound hardbacks all bearing the same sequence of Cyrillic letters on their worn spines.
He nodded at them and Svetlana turned to look; her face softened for a moment before something cautious came into her face. “Do you like to read?”
“Not really,” Freddie answered before thinking.
Svetlana covered her disappointment well, only an unreadable crease forming between her brows (somehow nigh on identical to Anatoly’s, but completely distinct even to Freddie’s anxious eyes) before she pressed her fingertip to a few crumbs on the table and considered them carefully.
“The chess books are Anatoly’s,” she said, as though it were not obvious, and wiped her hand on a napkin. “I have always liked literature. And after...”
Svetlana paused, eyes darting up to Freddie’s as her lips pursed, choosing her next words carefully. “After emigrating, I have found reading a good alternative to thinking. I spend my time with Nabokov instead of my worries. Much less dangerous.”
Her eyes slid to the hallway Anatoly had disappeared through before returning to Freddie, who tried to look as understanding and uncumbrous as possible. Half a dozen poorly composed jokes rose to his tongue like worms after heavy rain, but something kept him quiet, tugging the words back in his throat.
Svetlana’s lips twitched before she hid her smile and elaborated, “We are very alike, this author and I. He arrived in America as a man without a nation. He and his wife struggled to keep their son comfortable after fleeing their homeland...and he mourned having to abandon his mother tongue for a second-rate handling of English.”
Her eyes widened, voice growing more serious as she added, “You mustn’t mistake me, I do not compare my accent, my...struggle with his prose. But I think I understand Vladimir Vladimirovich. And his wife, Vera. I see myself in her very strongly.”
Svetlana glanced at Freddie and smiled forcefully, very quickly and very brightly, as her cheeks colored slightly. “Nabokov composed chess problems, you see, when he was not writing or catching butterflies. But I must be boring you.”
Freddie shook his head, his mouth dry. He felt a little bit as though he were floating, rising halfway above his own shoulders and looking down on his own body, watching his fingers flex restlessly. “And what about Anatoly?” he heard himself ask.
Svetlana’s eyebrows rose a fraction of an inch before she composed her face into a polite expression of fondness. “The chess books are his,” she said again, and her face wavered in a way that made Freddie deeply sorry he had asked before she added, “But he has read The Defense.”
Freddie’s fingers itched in the unbearable seconds of silence that followed Svetlana’s statement; he seized the pitcher on the table and refilled both their shot glasses with such vigor that a few drops sloshed over onto the table. Svetlana stared at him, lips parting at his urgency.
“Sorry,” Freddie muttered, before hoisting his glass up and shoving in her direction. “Za vaz!”
“Za vas,” Svetlana echoed—corrected, Freddie realized as the vodka burnt down his throat. She tipped her glass back and now he could see the edges of her smiling hostess mask wearing down, just a little. He wondered, not for the first time, whose idea it had been to invite him.
The glass was cool against the hot skin of his palm—without thinking, Freddie rolled it against his cheek, blinking against the sharp wave of alcohol that rose from the lip. He opened his eyes to find Svetlana looking at him pensively.
“I would like to tell you something.”
“Sure, fire away.”
And before Freddie had time to cringe and hope his slang was palatable enough, Svetlana tugged the shot glass from his hand, refilled both their glasses, and spoke, accent curling around her vowels like a cat.
“He—Vladimir Vladimirovich—Nabokov—taught at university after they came to the United States. Wellesley College. I read about one of his classes in a magazine once. On his desk in the classroom, he kept a yellow vase with blue flowers.”
Svetlana’s eyes darted up from her hands, cutting through Freddie’s unspoken, whirling thoughts.
“Vase,” she repeated, elongating the “ah” and buzzing the “z” hard. “And he asked his students what it was. They said, ‘Yellow-blue vase’. Would you like to guess what he told them then?”
Svetlana’s sharp, glistening eyes read the barely-hidden declination in Freddie’s silence. Her lips curved up, her stare piercing through his skull as she said softly, “Yellow-blue vase is almost ‘I love you’ in Russian, and it is probably the most important phrase I will ever teach you. That is what he said, Mr. Trumper.”
She lifted her glass—Freddie mirrored her nearly on instinct—and clinked it against his, splashing a bit more vodka onto the pickles below. “Za vas,” Svetlana toasted once more with a strange sort of smile, adding a fluid string of Russian after. Her throat convulsed neatly and the empty glass glittered like ice when she set it back down amongst the plates of medovik and dishes with names Freddie had forgotten.
“Za vas,” Freddie echoed, and the confusion milling in his brain proved itself an absolutely shit buffer against the vodka's smooth fire. When the burn in his throat eased enough for him to speak without coughing, he asked, “What does that mean, anyway? I know you said cheers, but whatever you said after, what was that?”
Svetlana’s smile reached her eyes. “Well wishes for health and wealth in the new year. I imagine it isn’t so different from a traditional American toast.” While Freddie tried to think of what, exactly, in his opinion would constitute a traditional American toast, Svetlana cut another slice of medovik and passed it to him.
“Eat it. I saw you looking.” Her smile took on that strange, unreadable lacquer again, and Freddie felt an unquenchable question rise up in his chest. He opened his mouth—
“Our children are safely asleep in bed,” Anatoly announced as he re-entered the room, looking slightly more disheveled and frazzled than one would expect from tucking one’s children into bed. Svetlana’s smile stretched into a laugh and she slid to the other side of the loveseat as Anatoly repossessed his seat.
“I had faith in you,” she told Anatoly. The smile he offered her was almost relieved—Freddie observed the exchange with a dizzy twist in his stomach, and bit his tongue to stop an inapt comment from slipping out.
Svetlana’s wrist was loose when she picked up the champagne bottle and swilled it. “Still a bit left.” She raised her eyebrows at them, then uncorked the bottle and poured it out into the three shot glasses left on the table.
“Sveta, we have flutes,” Anatoly started mildly, his forehead creasing in a way adjacent to the one that Freddie knew so well.
“I washed them already, Tolya.” Svetlana flapped a hand at Anatoly and raised her glass. “Why don’t we have an American toast this time? Freddie?”
Freddie swallowed the first expletive that came to mind, then the several that followed, as two pairs of eyes turned to him expectantly.
“Uh, here’s to the new one. Cheers.”
Anatoly’s and Svetlana’s voices echoed Freddie’s as the last of the champagne fizzed away. Somewhere out in the street, fireworks echoed and Freddie suddenly thought of the very American tradition of kissing at the stroke of midnight.
Anatoly set his emptied glass back down, his lean loose and too fast, the total opposite of the way he placed pieces down on the board—so strange, to see such a familiar motion performed in such an unfamiliar way—and smiled. The sight sizzled in Freddie’s stomach like vodka. Svetlana stared through a half-emptied dish of pickled beets, no one kissed anyone, and Freddie stopped himself from saying something before his foot found his mouth.
December 1999
Turns out the dawn of a new century didn’t do anything to warm up London in December. Freddie pulled his coat tighter around himself and adjusted the bulky package tucked under his arm before rapping on the door.
He wasn’t left waiting long before the door swung open to reveal Florence, a careful smile on her face. Freddie nodded at her and discarded attempts at any greetings more complex than “hello” in favor of hurrying inside to the warmth of the Sergievskys’s foyer.
Florence stepped aside to let him in, promptly shutting the door to the cold behind him. She stuck around long enough to watch him shrug off a few layers before disappearing deeper into the house, and Freddie didn’t protest. They’d reconciled (if you could call a wary lack of absence reconciliation) a few years back, with a mutually understood and upheld distance—couldn’t hurt or get hurt if you were too far away to reach, after all.
Freddie picked up his gift from the floor and headed into the kitchen to seek out Anatoly and the warm, sugary scent floating from somewhere in the house.
Svetlana greeted him in the kitchen, cheeks aglow with spirit(s). Her hug jostled the wrapped box under Freddie’s arm and he hurried to right it, tucking it more securely into his side.
“A little house gift,” he said in response to her questioning look. Further explanation (not excuse, not excuse) stuck in his throat, thickening with uncertainty—Svetlana’s eyes dropped to the box, and when they met Freddie’s gaze again, there was something in her gaze that connected with the pulse in his throat.
“Anatoly is in the living room,” she said.
Freddie blinked. “Oh, uh, okay. I—”
“In the living room,” Svetlana repeated, and now she was definitely smiling at some joke that Freddie wasn’t in on. She turned him around and all but shooed him out, flapping her hands insistently at his back so that the warm smell of toasted sugar and cream wafted out in front of him like a carrot before a horse.
He passed Florence and her bemused smile on the way into the living room as she entered the kitchen, melding comfortably into its golden saturation despite her thin, sharp edges. Freddie’s heart was in his throat and then thick in his tongue as he walked up to where Anatoly was surveying the table with the quiet pleasure of a child looking over sweets.
“I got you something.”
The words came out abrupt and almost abrasive, but Anatoly just beamed as though Freddie’s voice were honey and milk. The little gleam of surprise in his eyes was sweet on Freddie’s tongue as he cleared his throat and fished the box out from under his arm—God, this was not how he’d imagined this going—to offer.
Anatoly’s hands were large and warm, and oddly dry—this is all Freddie had time to think when their hands brushed on the edges of the box before his brain shorted out and he blurted, “Happy new year.”
Anatoly grinned—he has to know, Jesus Christ, Trumper, he’s toying with you, he’s gotta be—and his large, warm, dry hands slid away from Freddie’s. He shoved them in his pockets to hide the shake in his knuckles and nodded, clearing his throat.
“Should I open it now?” Anatoly’s question was polite, and his eyes held Freddie’s with a kind of genuine anticipation that made Freddie’s head spin. For all the inexplicable ease Anatoly’s presence gave him, the man's proximity at the moment was doing the exact opposite.
“Yeah, if you want,” Freddie said with a shrug that he hoped seemed casual.
Anatoly’s lips turned up at the corners—the worry dissolved for a brief moment from between his eyes—and he tugged at the wrapping paper, sliding a finger carefully under the tape.
Freddie rolled his eyes as the swirling sensation in his gut slowed a single, amused hair. “Oh, for God’s sake, Sergievsky, just rip it.”
“No,” Anatoly protested, “I’ve nearly got it, shush—” A Russian word that Freddie needed no translation for exploded from Anatoly’s lips as the box teetered out of his hand and fell—
They dove for it at the same time, and the panic flaring in Freddie’s system calmed at the feeling of the box solid and secure in his hands, only to burst back tenfold at the realization that Anatoly’s hands were cupping his around the box. Freddie snatched his hands back and the box thudded softly against Anatoly's palms, an echo of the pounding in Freddie's chest.
Clearing his throat had never before felt like such a feat. “Just rip the paper.”
Anatoly chuckled sheepishly and delicately unpeeled the last fold of the wrapping paper. He drew out the vase and held it up, admiring the play of light off the glossy yellow glaze.
“It’s beautiful. Thank you, Freddie.”
“There’s blue on the sides too,” Freddie heard himself say. “Blue on yellow, it’s a nice combination. Yellow blue. It’s a vase.”
Anatoly’s eyes met his, crinkled with—amusement? Appreciation? Understanding?
Freddie couldn’t tell, and he couldn’t quite bring himself to repeat the phrase in an affected British accent. Instead, he cleared his throat and wiped his sweaty palms subtly on his trousers. Wasn’t his fault he pronounced things the normal way, anyways.
“Alright, I paid the toll, where’s the medovik?”
Anatoly laughed, and Freddie couldn’t stop himself from studying the way his worry lines melted into joy. The sense of happiness that welled up in his own chest was tied to relief, but edged with anxiety until Anatoly quipped, “You’re lucky I know you so well, or I’d never be able to get past that pronunciation.”
Freddie’s grin relaxed into reality before he knew it, his eyes glittering under the waxy overhead light. “If every Russian word requires seven straight vodkas to pronounce properly, I’m surprised any of you can understand each other.”
Anatoly only lifted his glass and toasted as Freddie turned back to the kitchen for a sweetness that didn’t make his palms clammy.
Svetlana and Florence’s conversation quieted as he entered; Freddie balked, blinking at where they leaned against the counter talking. Svetlana broke the silence before it became tension, sliding over a plate with a slice of medovik already on it, and nodded at the forks in a cup on the counter.
“I will go check on the children outside,” she said to no one in particular, and swept out the door in a blur of perfume and meaningful smiles. Florence looked at Freddie with some unspoken thought behind her curved lips before following Svetlana, her eyes soft.
Freddie dug his fork into the medovik and watched it crumble on his plate. It took nearly half the slice before his stomach settled into determination strong enough to reenter the living room, plate of half-consumed cake clutched tightly in one hand.
A small, crisp smile pulled at the corners of his mouth when he saw that Anatoly had placed the yellow-blue vase on their mantle.
Svetlana and Florence whirled back in, cheeks aglow, and Freddie’s heart stuttered when Svetlana's sharp gaze landed directly on the vase before returning to him with a knowing grin. She slipped past him into the kitchen and emerged shortly with a tray of flutes balanced on one hand and a bottle of champagne in the other; almost numbly, he accepted a pat on the shoulder and the bubbling glass she pressed into his hand before watching her distribute the rest of the champagne and take a seat next to Florence, leaving the one at Anatoly’s side open.
The sound of children screaming in laughter on the street came dimly through the walls, followed by fireworks popping and sparklers sizzling. Freddie swallowed and glanced at the clock, the skin on his back prickling.
The minute hand hit 11:58 just as his thighs hit the seat beside Anatoly’s: 2 minutes in blitz were enough to win a game, promote a pawn, or sweep everything off the table and let it scatter. The café in Manhattan flashed before Freddie's eyes, with its overcrowded table under a haze of black coffee and strawberry yogurt parfaits. The seconds ticked by; his hand wavered, then outstretched fingers struck the side of his thigh with a degree of decisiveness Freddie usually reserved for hitting the clock on a checkmate.
Freddie turned to Anatoly’s smiling eyes and warm hands as he raised his glass to toast. The champagne didn’t taste like a kiss, but as the century rolled around the corner, it was close enough to a promise.