All By Design: A Nikolai Lantsov Series

Chapter Four: stars by the pocketful

This chapter's song:  snow on the beach

You hate to say it, but Nikolai Lantsov might be starting to win you over. Saints, that wasn't supposed to happen, but it is. How dreadful it is to make up your mind in favor of thoroughly despising someone and then being unable to commit to it. You've never had problems with holding grudges before, but somehow you can't quite manage it with him.

Maybe it's the forced proximity. Yes, that must be it. If it weren't for the fact that you have to be around Nikolai all the time, you wouldn't have to like him quite so much. If you could just go about your days without seeing his real smile, the one he only lets you see when there's absolutely no one around, you would be fine. It's a shame, then, that you're not fine. Not remotely close.

Of all the lies you've ever told, that might be the least believable. The truth itself is simple, although altogether terrible to admit. To say it simply, Nikolai Lantsov has gotten past your walls because that's what he does best. It's not because of a script or a ruse or some other sort of cunning mechanism, it's because he's Nikolai, and that's enough.

That isn't to say that you haven't done your best to put up a fight. Five weeks you've managed to hold him back. You're at the halfway point now, and instead of being able to gloat in triumph over the fact that you're still just as sharp a thorn in his side as always, you have to admit that you've stopped trying to make him bleed quite as much as before.

No, your weapons are down. If there's one thing to be proud of, it's that this didn't happen of your own accord. You don't think you would have dared to befriend Nikolai if he hadn't extended the olive branch first. You don't know for certain what he learned to make him see you as something other than an obstacle, but he's stopped being competitive for at least a week now.

The newfound peace between the two of you isn't awkward, either. If you and Nikolai had met under more favorable circumstances, a world in which he wasn't his parents' last hope at a legacy and you weren't whatever Aleksander's profiteering made of you, perhaps you could have been friends from the start. You would have seen him across a crowded room and that would have been that. Names exchanged, smiles lit like a fuse. It would have been gloriously simple.

That's a dream for another day, though, a story for another couple of people who get to live their lives without the weight of millions of eyes watching their every step. For what it's worth, you're not sure that you would change a thing. In the end, you've got Nikolai, and surely any means justify that.

If Zoya, Tolya, and Tamar notice that anything has changed in the dynamics of their pet project, they don't say a word. Maybe it's because they're afraid to jinx the two of you, like this peace is so delicate that a stray word will send both you and Nikolai spiraling back to the days of hating each other with a burning passion, but you don't think it could ever get that bad again.

The two of you are good now, that's all. Nikolai understands what it's like to have the whole world watching you, doing nothing but waiting for you to slip up. You've lived through your own share of years when it felt like the media were so obtrusive that you could hardly breathe without choking on the cameras. There might be no one else in the world who could speak to half the things you've seen, but Nikolai knows. Saints, he knows.

Maybe you just like having someone on your side. You've had Zoya all this time, and anybody with sense knows that's like having a dozen of anyone else, but she wasn't exactly the prime material for handling emotional baggage. You're not quite at the point of trauma dumping on Nikolai either, but that's just because you don't have to say it. One look his way and he gets it. Your smile becomes just a shade forced and he picks up on a thousand cues. It's like the two of you are connected telepathically on the subject of how to act in public. That's because you've spent enough years in the spotlight to know the only possible ways to survive it.