When We Were Young

Thirty-nine:

Thirty-nine:

"Why does the pot have holes in it?" Aleksander asked.

Alina looked at him incredulously. "Please tell me that you're joking."

"I am NOT joking. I grew up with a personal chef. I was so close to our local pizza delivery guy, one year at Christmas, I got him a present."

Alina shook her head. "There is no way you should be in such good shape."

"Sex and exercise, sweetheart. What does the bowl with holes in it do?"

"It's a STRAINER," she said.

Aleksander frowned. "A strainer?"

"What does it do?"

"You put the pasta in the strainer, and it drains the water."

"But I thought pasta needed the water."

Alina looked at him warily. "I do not mean this to sound mean at all----but get out of my kitchen." She wagged the spoon that she had been using to stir the pasta at him. Aleksander backed away, and smirked.

"It belongs to the FRAT. I'M THE FRAT. I'VE GOT TO GUARD IT ALINA. How dare you kick me out of my own kitchen?"

"I'm worried you are one of those people that burns water."

"Is that possible?"

"OUT."

"This is so very domestic. We're very cute, aren't we?" he said waggling his eyebrows.

Alina sighed and went back to focusing on the task she had at hand. Aleksander smirked at her, and then he went out of the kitchen and took up residence at the kitchen counter with his laptop. He had music playing, and Alina hummed along to it. He watched her quietly as he worked and found that he liked watching her.

His phone vibrated as he was doing some homework. A text from a number that he didn't know came through.

"Everything okay?" Alina asked.

Aleksander looked up from his phone. "Yeah, it's just Nikolai. Harvest Weekends are kind of messy events."

"From what I gathered," Alina said, "do you think it was mean, making Genya go alone with Zoya?"

Aleksander snorted. "Probably." He glanced down at his phone again. There were pictures of him and Alina, driving back and forth to the store that afternoon, and then the two of them in his room that looked like they were in his room alone earlier. The figures were very shadowy, and no one could tell who they were, but he knew.

This wasn't in the job description.

Aleksander winced.

"I should feel bad, but I figured that we wouldn't get a chance to be alone like this again, you know?" Alina said. "Mal's been so weird about me for years...and the thing is, he didn't used to be like this. The weekend before he got adopted, he disappeared, and then he came back and suddenly it was like everyone was the enemy."

He glanced from his phone where the pictures of them were, back to her. "Yeah. Hey how long is this going to take?"

"About twenty minutes," Alina said.

"I'm going to go for a jog, huh? Stay out of your way, work up an appetite."

"Okay," she said, "don't be too long. I'll text you when it's done."

"Right. Okay." He pocked his phone, grabbed his sweatshirt, and then crossed the kitchen to kiss her before he went outside. He made his way around the neighborhood trying to find the angles that the pictures were taken from. He wanted to find something, anything to give him a hint of who the text sender was.

As the sun started to set, he got a text from Alina.

Dinners ready.

He texted back that he was on his way, and he made the short trek home, trying to ignore the gnawing feeling in his gut that something was wrong.