Serenity (Inevitable #5)(23)

She'd been working as a waitress at a neighborhood café, struggling with both the unfamiliar work and her limited command of the French language, when she'd met Enzo Fonseca for the first time. He had been in town with his group for a series of performances, and they stopped in at the café for a late lunch. The attraction between them had been both instantaneous and explosive, and would be the first of many such encounters between them over the next three decades.

Sasha couldn't recall a time when her parents had actually lived together for more than a few weeks at a time, until one of them stormed out of whatever city they happened to be residing in at the moment in a fit of anger. As her father was fond of saying, he and Katya loved as fiercely as they fought, and at times it was difficult to draw a line between love and hate where they were concerned.

They had never married, of course, even though Enzo had proposed multiple times once Katya had fallen pregnant and given birth to Sasha. Katya had remarked scathingly many times over the years that the two best decisions she'd ever made in her life had been to leave Russia and to remain single. And neither parent, it seemed, was capable of remaining faithful to the other during the times they were apart. Though they had both been discreet when Sasha was around, she'd been well aware from an early age that her parents each had lovers. And because she'd never really known the stability of a normal, two-parent household, or had a real house to call a home, Sasha had never considered the whole situation to be even the least bit odd.

She had lived the life of a gypsy from infancy, especially after her mother took a job with a ballroom dance company based out of New York City. Sasha would spend part of the year in Paris living with her Aunt Polina and her husband Maxim, another few months in Sao Paolo with Enzo's family, and time in New York with Katya, as well as traveling with each parent during their dance and band tours. She attended schools in three different cities, often during the same calendar year, and had to make the switch between French, Portuguese, and English each time. No place ever truly felt like home, and she learned quickly not to get too attached to a particular place or person, or to accumulate too many belongings because she would more than likely have to leave some of them behind. 

Sasha had always been a quiet, placid child, a stark contrast to her explosive, intense parents, and in some ways she had acted as a calming influence on the two of them. She'd gone along with their wishes, never complaining when she was uprooted yet again, or when she spent weeks on the road with one or the other on a tour.

But all of that changed when she turned fifteen, and had quite firmly set her foot down about the nomadic existence that had been forced on her. Katya and Enzo had been startled when their obedient child had spoken up for herself for the first time, but neither had argued the point for too long when she'd calmly announced that she was going to live with her aunt Linda in northern California full time. And while her mother had grudgingly accepted her decision, Sasha sensed that Katya had never really forgiven her for it.

Knowing that a phone call from her mother meant twenty minutes minimum of lots of drama and heavy sighs, Sasha wisely waited until she arrived home before returning the call. She'd made the mistake once or twice of taking Katya's calls on the bus, and cringed as she recalled the odd looks directed her way from other passengers as her mother's very loud voice chattering away in rapid Russian had carried over the phone.

The house was quiet as Sasha let herself in, and she assumed her other roommates were either out or closeted up in their rooms. Chad and Julio, who owned the house, were almost certainly out somewhere on this sunny summer day. They had a wide circle of friends, both gay and straight, and were constantly being invited to picnics, brunches, parties, and other social doings. They also did their fair share of hosting parties here at the house, and Sasha wasn't in the least fazed to arrive home to find forty or fifty people milling about with cocktails in hand and music blaring from the sound system.

Her other two roommates were Elliott, a nerdy computer programmer whose bedroom was a semi-shrine to all things Star Wars, and Sadie, who was working on her PhD in Genetics while moonlighting as an exotic dancer to help pay the bills. It was, for sure, a rather odd household, but everyone got along extremely well, and Sasha was more than content with her somewhat unorthodox living arrangements.

She made a comfortable enough living now, between teaching yoga and doing massage, that she could have afforded to live alone, albeit in a tiny studio apartment given how high rents were going for these days in San Francisco. But Sasha had never lived alone in her entire life, had always been surrounded by people - often strangers - and wasn't at all sure that she'd like having her own place.