His body pressed against mine, the way he handled me, rough but tender, strong and powerful and more. His smell even drove me insane, which I’d never experienced before. Vince was someone unlike I’d ever seen before, a totally new type of someone. He was rough and hard, made my knees feel dizzy, my stomach knot in nerves.
And he was the father of my son. I knew it of course, but now he knew it too.
But I didn’t know what that meant. Vince wasn’t the fathering type, wasn’t the loving kind of man. He was hard and lived a hard life full of danger. He clearly didn’t want a kid, let alone a kid with some random Russian girl.
I was looking out the window, rocking Alexei in my arms, when I heard a knock at the door.
“Come in,” I called out.
The door slowly opened. “Hi,” Louisa said.
She looked disheveled, even more so than usual.
“Hi, Louisa.”
She took a step into my room. She looked almost like a frightened animal, ready to bolt at any second. “Can I ask you a favor?”
“Sure,” I said.
“I need you to help me translate something. You speak Russian, right?”
“A little bit,” I said, “but I’m rusty.”
“Good enough.”
She turned to leave.
“Wait,” I said. “I have to watch Alexei.”
She stopped and looked at me. “Right. The kid.”
“Want to hold him?”
“No,” she said simply.
I laughed. “Okay. Hold on. I’ll call Sonya.”
“Come to my room.”
She turned and left, shutting the door behind her.
What a strange girl. At least she was going to distract me from wondering what the hell was going on between Vince and me. I picked up the phone and called down to Sonya, and fortunately she was free.
Ten minutes later, I was standing outside Louisa’s door. I knocked, but I didn’t hear any response. I waited a few minutes, knocked a few more times, but heard nothing.
Finally, I tried the handle. The door was unlocked. I pushed it open.
Her living room was chaotic, covered in computer parts, stuff flung all over the place. She was hunched over a computer monitor in the corner of the room wearing enormous headphones. I walked over to her and tried to catch her attention.
Finally, I tossed a balled-up piece of paper at her, hitting her in the back. She nearly jumped out of her seat.
“Oh,” she said when she saw me. “I almost forgot about you.”
“What are you doing?” I asked her.
“Sit.” She nodded at a chair. I pulled it up and sat down next to her.
I couldn’t understand a word of what she was reading on her screen. It was just a black background with green text scrolling past endlessly. She somehow seemed to know what was going on, because every once in a while she would type out a flurry of letters and commands. Every few minutes she stopped the movement and pointed at a word. “What’s this?” she asked.
“Uh,” I said, “I think that’s the word for an albatross.”
“Big bird?”
“Yeah. Sea bird.”
She nodded and went back to the computer.
I didn’t think I’d ever seen someone with such concentration before. It was almost like I wasn’t there at all. She wasn’t distracted by me reading over her shoulder, and she really even hardly seemed to realize I was there at all.
Suddenly she stopped again and pointed. “This?”
“Duck,” I said.
“Duck? Quack quack?”
I nodded seriously. “Quack quack.”
She went back to the computer.
We went like that back and forth for a half hour. I was way too mesmerized by her to really ask what was happening. I got the sense that she was trying to decipher a message of some sort, and a lot of it was in Russian. There was a bunch of computer code, and I couldn’t understand a word of it.
Finally, she sat back in her chair. “Okay. Finished.”
“Finished what?”
She looked at me and suddenly seemed to realize that I had been watching that whole time.
“You don’t know what just happened?”
“No, not at all,” I said, laughing.
“Why didn’t you ask?”
“You looked too serious.”
She nodded. “I was serious.”
“Well, what was it?”
“Kaley, you just witnessed the first skirmish in the war.”
I cocked my head at her and then started laughing. I thought she was joking, but she didn’t smile.
“Okay, you’ll have to explain that.”
“Some Russians were trying to break into our computer systems. They went by weird nicknames. That was what you were translating for me.”
“Ah,” I said. “That makes sense. Those words were mostly slang.”