“Are you really serious about this?” he says.
“Let’s say I am,” I tell him. “I haven’t really done anything for myself since Tally was born. Or even since I got pregnant, really,” I say.
“Look, I know you think I have all this time to do my own thing, but when I’m not here, I’m in teaching hell, trying to get students who don’t care about science at all not to drop out of my class or leave me RateMyProfessor reviews saying that I’m ‘boring and dense,’ and sucking up to my bosses so I can get tenure and a decent chance at a normal salary. I’m not just trying to screw you over here.”
“I didn’t say that. I know it’s not all fun and games when you leave the house. But I would actually like leaving for a few hours every day to do some work. And auditions don’t count,” I say.
“That’s because you actually like your work.”
“Some of it.”
“I wish I got to do some of the things I liked more.”
“Like what?”
He’s quiet for a minute. “Like,” he says, “I haven’t gone fishing in a million years.”
“Fishing?” I say. “Fishing? You haven’t fished since my dad died.”
“I haven’t really wanted to.”
“You do realize it’s not the same thing?” I say.
“Yes, I know fishing is not my passion. I don’t know where I’m going with this, I’m so fucking tired, Natasha.”
“Me too.”
“You know I love you,” he says. “I’m not the bad guy.”
“You’ve said that a number of times.”
“Which makes it true, obviously.”
“Is that how that works?”
“Mm-hm.”
He gives me a long, tender kiss, but after a moment we both stop to crack up because we can hear Sharik behind us, sucking his little cat-dick, which doesn’t sound all that different from Tally sucking her pacifier.
“Sharik! Foo!” I say, swatting him and pulling him out of his seated position until he meows and walks into the kitchen, defeated. “Bad boy,” I say, though I know it’s pointless.
Yuri laughs again. “I think he’s on to something.”
“Is that so?” I say, and this time, when I kiss him, it becomes very apparent very quickly that we were going to fuck for the second or third time since my baby girl came into the world, that soon, there would be something much more welcome between my legs.
“Come here, you,” Yuri says, reaching for my dirty shirt.
“Always.”
“This,” he says, “is our real date night.”
He takes off my shirt and unsnaps my stupid nursing bra, and I’m anxious about having my new mom tits out like that, but he doesn’t seem to mind. I unbutton his workshirt and pretty soon his pants are off, too, and we’re down to our underwear and I feel almost, almost shy. I take off my bra and try to ignore how heavy my tits are, and run a hand across his chest while he strokes my hair.
It feels exciting, unfamiliar, to fuck again, since we didn’t exactly fuck all the time when I was pregnant, except during these crazy bursts of horniness I would get. But now, feeling him inside me, reliable and warm and not so different from before, I remember the early days when we couldn’t stop fucking, and am also relieved to confirm that apparently I’m not a complete cave down there. When we’re done, I rest on him for a while and even briefly drift off and I wake up to him stroking my hair. I check my phone to see my #Datenight post from a few days ago had racked up a shit ton of likes, too, more than the one about my second audition, but I can’t say I’m surprised.
“I miss you,” Yuri says, and I kiss him.
“I miss you too,” I say. “I’m sorry I’ve been so out of it.”
“What are you sorry for? I’m sorry for you. You should do whatever you want to do, Natashka,” he says.
“I’m just—I’m not ready to give up yet. My mom wanted to sing when she was young, but then she just became an accountant. I don’t want to die wishing I had really given it everything I had.”
He stops stroking my hair and turns to me. “Why didn’t you tell me that before?”
“I don’t know,” I say. I don’t even know why I’m telling him now. I hate talking about my mom. “It was kind of a family secret, I guess.”
“Well, we’re family,” he says, and then he gives me another kiss. He can tell I don’t have anything else to say on the subject and I love him for it.
“I just don’t want to clean up hairballs for a living,” I say, and this cracks him up.
“I didn’t say you had to, darling. I was just making a suggestion. Haplessly.”
“Okay,” I say. “All right.”
I even consider going for round two, which would be ambitious after a bunch of nothing, months of it, but then Talia stirs, and for once, I don’t mind going into the room to pick her up in my arms and guide her to my breast.
It’s crazy, how much she looks like Yuri. Stephanie told me it goes back to the cavemen, that babies are born looking like their dads as proof of paternity, so they keep going out into the bush to kill meat for the family instead of abandoning ship. Well, there’s no doubt here—the square jaw, the horizontal brows and big blue eyes and protruding ears, it was like she came straight from him, like I had nothing at all to do with the reproductive process. I, however, look like my mother, but not as pretty, though she seemed determined to hide her beauty. When Talia was born, I kept straining to find myself in her face, coming up empty.
My daughter’s blue eyes are getting bigger every day, or maybe her big ears are just getting smaller, whatever it is, she’s starting to look just a bit more human, and I’m even pretty sure two tiny tufts of hair are getting ready to sprout on the back of her head. After I nurse her, she doesn’t settle right away, and I don’t mind that either. I take her into the living room, and onto the balcony, and though the streetlights shine down on her almost-bald little head, she does get back to where she needs to be, her sweet little eyes closing as she lets go completely, and for about one delicious minute of my life, I feel like I know exactly what I’m doing.
I lower a sleeping Tally into her crib and climb into bed next to Yuri, but I can’t turn my mind off. I stay up all night sweating and shivering, those damn postpartum hormones raging through my body as I remember how good it felt to fuck my husband, but then it gets all mixed up with Stas, who returns to the apartment at some point, with spending all that time with him arguing about art and how he stood up for me doing my play while Yuri thought it was a waste of time. And then I think more about my grandmother’s damn story, of how she obviously had a thing for my uncle Bogdan over my grandfather, but she was with my grandpa because he was a good guy, because he liked books and didn’t rebel against his family. Was that what I did—sign up to spend the rest of my life with a guy who thought all I was good for was walking dogs just to avoid throwing wine bottles against the wall once in a while?
Who could say my grandmother did the right thing? When I was a kid, I didn’t understand who the random men were who came to the sea with us; I thought they were cousins, and only when I was maybe eleven did Baba tell me that it was best I didn’t mention uncle this or that to my grandfather, when I understood what was happening when she told me to “explore the beach” on my own one evening. Though the men visited less often as she got older, the last one I remember was the summer after Mama died, when Baba had the nerve to invite one of them over even though it was supposed to be the summer of grieving and Papa was sleeping in the next room. That was the only time I addressed it, waiting up for her at the kitchen table like my mother had done for me: “Do you have to right now?” I had asked, trying to look strong, to keep my face free of Mama-related tears. She gave me a long, resigned shrug and said, “People die, the heart wanders, life goes on,” and marched toward her room, filling the cottage with her snores almost instantly while I stayed up, furious with her and missing Mama hard.