A Heart Beats At Night

Chapter 39

The seconds of silence stretched into an eternity as Otabek stared down at the phone clasped loosely in his hand. The screen flickered into blank darkness.

"Beshka?" Yuri was curled into a bundle of knees and elbows at the other end of the bed, and he stretched out a leg to put himself within touching distance. While Otabek wanted nothing more than to wrap himself around Yuri and forget the last five minutes, the thought of physical contact was a smothering, pressing weight. "Are you-"

"Zhibek doesn't have my phone number." His own voice sounded hoarse and distant; it was so tempting to slip into the dreamlike fog, but Otabek refused to run away again. "She- I don't-"

She'd called him before, after he left, and every time he'd held the phone in trembling fingers until it went to voicemail. It was already too hard to stay away.

Eventually, she stopped. Otabek told himself that she must have realized how much easier her life was without her crumpled shell of a brother, that whoever – or whatever – had come back from Sweden wasn't the same person, was in fact only a shoddy, cracked facsimile of a person-

"Beka," said Yuri, who was suddenly a lot closer. "Get the fuck out of your head, you're doing the thing again."

Yuri's eyes should be brimming with judgment, seeing firsthand how Otabek had destroyed everything he touched, everything he loved – after all, he'd called too, had given up on Otabek, of course Zhibek would do the same. They had to protect themselves from his shrapnel.

"- like this." The thread of Yuri's words found him again, leading Otabek out of the twisting cave of his thoughts. "Beka, breathing. Breathing is good for you, do it. More slowly than that."

"I-" He opened his mouth to apologize, but something in Yuri's face stopped him. "How long?"

"Only a few seconds," Yuri said softly. "You- your phone went off just now."

ZA: u rly want t talk? nothng is wrong?

The hesitation was nothing Otabek had seen in Zhibek before. His little sister had declared, at the age of ten, that once you decide to do something you should just do it, because otherwise it's like lying. While the years had refined her childhood logic (and, to some extent, her tact), she continued to spurn the wait and see strategy.

Which meant, he realized, that she wasn't sure she wanted to talk to him.

Everything is fine, he typed, then deleted it. Of course his family knew that everything hadn't been fine for a long time, no matter how hard he tried to convince himself otherwise.

OA: Yes, I want to talk to you. Not because something is wrong.

OA: I miss you. I'm sorry.

He glanced up at Yuri, who was studiously inspecting everything in the room except for Otabek's phone – not that he could have understood more than a couple words of the Shala Kazakh they were speaking, much less in Zhibek's carefree typing.

Otabek thought he understood why Yuri had broken so many cell phones. He waited for it to ring, and when it finally did, he almost threw it across the room in shock.

"Hey," he said hesitantly. "Zhibeshka?"

"Beka," she replied. "Tell me you're not in trouble."

"I'm not." He reached out blindly and put his hand on Yuri's shoulder, holding on to him like an anchor. "I promise."

"Okay." Zhibek didn't sound totally convinced. "Why now?"