Iridescent

Chapter 15

Stasia

I opened my eyes to see Nikolai asleep in the chair in the corner of my room (that was more for looks than comfort)—his eye lashes fluttering under the movement of his mind. The moonlight streamed in from the window and I realized that I had been sleeping for a couple of hours now. When Nikolai carried me in earlier, as soon as my head found the softness of my pillow, I had surrendered to the serenity of sleep and darkness once again.

For a brief moment, I wondered where Meredith was. The thought went away as quick as it came. Right when my mind started retracing our previous conversation and kiss, his eyes broke from their quiet slumber and he was stretching out, getting up to move to my bedside.

"Why did you kiss me?" I didn't hesitate. The droopy smile that curved along his tired face faltered for a moment and I felt the bed shift under his weight as he leaned away.

He tried to change the topic and looked towards the door, "Do you want something to eat? Maybe we should get you something. I'm sure you are hungry."

"Answer my question, Nikolai."

From the look on his face, he definitely didn't want to.

"I don't really have a concise 'because', Stasia," His voice was soft.

My words were simple. "So, it was thoughtless."

"No," he shook his head, "You know it wasn't thoughtless."

I blinked at him, wondering what on earth was going through his head. His eyes were conflicted—a storm of sadness and hurt, and the sliver of anger that I had come to know more often than most. "You better not love me," I warned.

"I—" he closed his eyes and rubbed his fingers across them for a moment and there was a tick in my chest that was unfamiliar. I ignored it. When he looked at me again, he said, "I have feelings for you—that's all I know. That's all I can make sense of, right here and right now. Maybe I do love you, maybe I can love you—what is so bad about that?"

I furrowed my eyebrows, "You don't love me. Love is not just thrown out there with another sentence in desperation to keep me." A rolling anger started to build in my chest as I continued, "It's not a maybe—it's something you mean. Something you know when you say it—you know when you feel it. There's no possible way that you can love me."

Never would I admit a syllable out loud, but it scared me that he could. Love was so fickle—I watched it with my parents. There was nothing stable in the romance—it falls, it rises, it forgets. There was no perpetuality in it. Soon enough, forgetting could harden Nikolai's helpless veins and leave me to sit here in the serenity of my lonesome.

"Do you ever stop?" He asked me.

"What?"

"Do you every stop pushing away the possibilities of people?"

Only on Sundays.

Clinging to silence was the only thing saving me from sounding like a hell-bent cynic. He couldn't understand what fed the tightness in my chest. People change. Love changes—marriage is permanent. It suffocates more times than most. He was expecting me to jump into his arms like a damsel—to trust the situation that could ruin me.

This situation wasn't simple for me—I don't know why everyone was acting like it was.

"What are you thinking?" He asked me and I let my eyes wonder downward. I tried to entertain my mind by tracing the path of threads and beads that ornamented the blanket draped over me. I trapped my frustrations and let myself wonder amidst the damned uniformity of the world and who though it was acceptable to find beauty in patterns—screw expectation. Even in the pattern on a blanket swirled and pointed in the same directions over and over again. Succumbing to the same cycle.