Flaws: Vedmykiv

[12] The Stuff that Makes Me Blush

THE SOUND OF water running on the dishes was oddly soothing. It was so soothing it was sexy. Like the rhythmic movements of her hips as they swayed from side to side, following along the rock and roll tunes and the melody of her Ukrainian life. It was as romantic as we could get, and after months of sharing the space, I had learned to see beauty in almost anything. Oxana did the dishes, and I learned to count my blessings.

"I hate it when you're not available to me," she said. Her messy hair was undone. She wore a pair of my boxer shorts, no socks, and I could swear she had been munching on stale crackers again. "You should always be around when I want you. Which is always," she continued. "I think of it this way. I'm holding this pot under the faucet, and it's taking forever and a day to fill. I want you here. I'm not interesting or smart or funny. I'm just waiting. And I don't want you to be any of those things either. I just want you to be. With me. Isn't that exactly how this should be?"

I was caught in the glow of her speech, her confession, her love declaration. It came out of nowhere, and she meant it, just like love was supposed to be, just like she should have meant everything to me: Raw and with honest emotion. She turned the faucet off and spun around to look at me. "I want every part of you. But the real stuff, not what happens in my head. I want us to be genuine and awkward as shit. That's where it's at."

"I imagined for so long what it would be to hold you. I know I apologized in advance for all the hugging and kissing and hand-holding I thought I would be doing to you. I'm usually smarter than that." I paused for a moment, unsure where I was going, but I was smiling at her tenderly, caught by surprise, smiling in the same soothing way water washed up the dirty dishes and splashed on her lap. I was a reptile, a chameleon. I can adapt.

She looked down at her bare feet on the dirty kitchen floor and smiled to herself. When she looked up, she was beaming.

"I suppose I am still a fool for you," I added. I guess I meant it.

"You say all the stuff that makes me blush." She placed the pot on the stove. When she spoke again, she said, "If I make it back to America with you, you'll never get rid of me."

"If that's what's at stake, I gotta try harder to convince you to stick around," I responded, almost instinctively, as if I knew where I was going. Or what I wanted.

"If I make it to America, it means I can't live without you, which means I'll stab you in the chest before I let you go. I already told you."

There she was, the woman I met online. I laughed and nodded, perhaps still with a stupid grin on my face. "I'm obsessed with you!" I shouted as I went to the toilet.

According to Igor, the high-ranking official who stood out in the strip club as much as a raisin in an oatmeal bowl was bad news, terrible bad news. We had scouted the club several times, and Igor seemed to have some inside connections that he didn't allow me to pry about. Besides the press of time—we couldn't know for sure when the Russian military man would flee back to the motherland—we were in a really good place. In the days to follow, Igor mapped out whatever intel he could find about the colonel's schedule. We had world-changing news worthy of the front page, bunkering down at a strip club in Donetsk where we were already part of the clique, and the phone number of an exotic dancer willing to help. Maybe. Maybe, baby. Everything was going according to plan, his plan. Igor's plan. I was terrified of his plan. But I was more afraid of letting my life go to waste without trying, without trying something that was almost beyond my reach.

The colonel liked to take his breaks in the afternoons: lunch with a side of glitter and herpes. Most of the time, as we waited at the bar, he was in some back office or traveling with a heavily armed convoy. I didn't know what his relationship with the separatists was, but without a doubt, his presence in Donetsk meant more than fighting. It couldn't be avoided. I couldn't avoid it. And the strip club wasn't as tight as a one-bedroom flat in the Ukrainian cold cement block of my life. Igor didn't know what it could mean for the Russian killing machine to see an American kid so close to him, let alone in a besieged city he was besieging. At least, that's what it looked like. Just like we looked like traders. Everybody already assumed it. Foreign commodity traders were not uncommon. Igor could be one of the many ambitious small-time poachers who goes straight to the wolf's den to feed. Maybe he was. I could only hope they thought I was just as hungry for quick cash.