Run! Do Not Look Back!

Chapter 3

Wanting someone I can't have is nothing new for me.

I just never wanted it this badly, this fast, from one man who looked at me for a few hours. So that night, after I poured the whiskey down the sink, I lay on my bed in Lyublino, listening to the radiator tick without giving any heat, and asked myself the question I've asked since I was eighteen.

Why does my body always run toward the wrong people?

I know where I learned it.

He was my first. I don't say his name anymore. We were in our last year of school, both closeted, both scared, both pretending we weren't. He had money. I had a scholarship and a black bag with a broken zipper.

In the hallway, he shoved me into lockers and called me names, loud enough for people to hear. After school, he texted me to Come over. Study. His parents paid me to tutor him, and I needed every coin. His mother left tea and sliced bread on the kitchen table without looking at me. His father nodded at me once, like I was staff.

In his room, behind a closed door, the boy who'd shoved me that morning would lean in, kiss me,touch me. Fast. Like he was stealing.

It wasn't all bad. That's the part nobody understands. There were afternoons he laughed at my jokes. There were afternoons he fell asleep on my shoulder over a chemistry book. I told myself that was the real him, and the hallway was the act.

Then one day, he wanted more, and I said no.

I remember the exact color of his face as it changed. First surprise. Then something flat and cold. He said I was boring, that I was nothing, that I was lucky anyone touched me at all. I walked home in the rain without my umbrella. I don't remember crying, but my face was wet when I got in.

The next morning, I walked into school and every phone in the hallway lit up.

Someone had made a video. I didn't know it existed. I won't describe it. It was filmed so that his face wasn't in it, and nobody wondered who the other person was. They didn't have to. Mine was the face everyone knew.

I stood in the middle of the hallway and heard it, from the phones, from the stairs. Laughter. The word they used. A boy I didn't know shoved me so hard my head hit the wall. Behind the gym, three of them took turns, and the metallic taste of pennies were engraved into my memory for a week.

By Friday, the video had reached the teachers. By Monday, the parents. I sat in the principal's office and listened to a woman in a gray cardigan say the school's standards had been compromised. They rusticated me. They canceled my scholarship in a letter that was only four lines long.

I didn't graduate.

He never got punished. Someone told me later he'd been sent to a "better school." Karma, I've learned, forgot my address.

By then, the house I grew up in was already half a ruin. The burned side was boarded up. The rest of it leaned. One morning, two men in orange vests stood outside with a clipboard. The city was demolishing the store beneath our house for a road, and the whole building had to go with it. The notice had my dead father's name on it. I signed where they pointed.

I left with the black bag and the clothes that fit in it.

I slept in train stations until the guards moved me. Then in a stairwell. Then in a doorway beside a bakery, because the wall was warm from the ovens. I ate what other people threw out. I got so thin my belt had to have new holes poked in it with a nail.

When I finally found a job as a private cleaner, I slept on the kitchen floor of the house I scrubbed. I washed in minutes, in the basement sink, so quickly so I didn't take up much of the family's water that will gain their attention. I saved every coin in a sock. I ate leftovers every single day.

I turned twenty-one before I could afford my studio in Lyublino. That night, I bought a small meal and had too much beer, sat on the floor of my own room, and cried so hard I threw up. Then I got up, rinsed my mouth, and signed up to retake my exams.

I worked at a dry cleaner's, a minimart, a café. Sick or well, I never missed a shift. The days were hard. The nights were worse, because they were quiet.

That's where Volkov found me.

He came in loud. Always. The door banged, his voice filled the shop before he reached the counter, and he dropped his bags of coats on the counter like a man dropping a body.

"Sweet boy," he'd say.

"Maksim."

"Sweet boy."

I corrected him every single time. He never stopped.

He wore a different expensive coat every week. He tipped me far too much. I should have known what that meant. Instead I took it for kindness, because nobody had been kind to me in years without handing me the invoice later.

He took me out for drinks. Then he found me a job at a club with a karaoke room in the back. The first time he followed me into the storeroom, his intentions were so plain I couldn't pretend. I was twenty-two. I was lonely. I let him.

Four months in, I noticed the pattern. He was violent when he drank. He never apologized. When I asked questions he didn't like, he gave me silence, days of it, until I apologized for asking.

One night, a little after two, someone knocked on my door. Three bangs! A man who thought it was his own damn door.

I opened it. Volkov stood in the hallway with his coat hanging off one shoulder and his hand pressed to his ribs. His shirt was dark and wet.

"Sweet boy," he said, and smiled, and swayed.

I got him onto my bed. I boiled water on the stove and tore up a clean towel. The cut along his side was deep but clean. He watched me through half-closed eyes.

"Whose blood is it?" I asked, because there was far too much for a cut that size.

"Not all mine."

I didn't ask again.

He slept. I sat on the floor with my back against the wall and counted the ceiling cracks like stars. At dawn, I scrubbed the floorboards on my knees with cold water and laundry soap, but the smell stayed in the grain. My apartment learned the smell of his blood that night. It never forgot.

When he woke, he went through my kitchen like it was his. He found the envelope I kept behind the tea tin, the month's rent in small bills.

"I'll bring it back Friday," he said.

He didn't. When I asked, he went silent. Two days. Three. Until I said I was sorry.

I should have left. I knew it. I stayed, because staying was familiar, and because every few days he showed up with a bottle of wine or food or a warm hand on the back of my neck, and my body took it as proof that I mattered.

So I started digging. Nothing clever. A wallet photo he forgot on my table. A phone that rang at strange hours. A name that wasn't mine.

Two wives. Five children. None of them knew about each other, or about me. He ran with a criminal crew. A con man, a liar by trade, and I was only the room he rented cheap.

When I confronted him, he beat me until I couldn't see.

I never saw him again. Later, I heard he killed someone and his own people turned on him. They say he's serving life.

I honestly couldn't care less.

What bothers me isn't the violence. It isn't the hunger or the cold or the nights I spent counting cracks.

It's that wanting to survive all of it. Like a stubborn weed in a sidewalk crack. Embarrassing. Alive.

I know the pattern now. I could list it for you like symptoms, Too much generosity. Nicknames that sound sweet and feel small. Violence explained away. Silence used as punishment. I know all of it. And my body still leans toward it before my brain can step in.

When someone is gentle with me, I wait for the bill. When someone is cruel, my chest tightens in a way that feels so familiar I almost mistake it for desire.

Some nights, I wake up sure I hear Volkov calling me, casual, possessive, like I'm a drawer he can open whenever he wants. My heart pounds and my hands sweat, and I hate it. Not because I miss him. I don't. It's because my body learned his voice in a season when being wanted meant being fed. When being chosen meant being safe for one more night.

People say, "You're so strong. You survived." They don't understand survival leaves a residue. It teaches your body lessons your mind never agreed to.

I try dating. Soft-spoken students. Clerks. Men who ask before they touch and listen when I speak. Some look at me with something like admiration, and I feel nothing, or worse, I feel restless, scanning the room for danger like I'm bored without it. And I hate the quiet disappointment on their faces when they see I'm somewhere else, waiting for a storm that isn't coming.

Some days, I think I'm broken for good. Other days, I think I'm only unfinished.

I've started noticing small rebellions in myself. Nothing heroic, but they're mine. I lock my door even when I'm home. Sometimes I stand too long under the shower, or breathe deep on the metro, or say a sentence without rehearsing it first.

When Volkov's voice comes back now, I don't fight it. I let it pass through like a bad song on the radio. I tell myself that memory isn't consent. That wanting isn't a moral failure. That my body did what it had to do to keep me alive, and now it's learning something new, slowly, clumsily.

I'm not healed. I'm not who I thought I'd be at this age.

But I'm still here. Still able to want. Still able to choose differently, even when my hands shake.

Maybe one day, wanting won't sound like his voice anymore.

Maybe one day, it will sound like mine.