She's Like a Piece of Home

A couple weeks had passed with several visits to Quinn’s house. Cami would frequently invite him, as well as Alex and Molly, over to dinner. Raleigh would be there when he arrived. He would try to find a way to talk to her, any excuse to talk to her, but she was clever at avoiding him. But there were moments, brief little moments, where she would let him stand next to her in the kitchen. The moment he would start to speak, she would be gone.

Or his phone would ring. Valeriya again. Her calls remained frequent. He had returned to the States much earlier than he normally did. But he had to get away after the last breakup. This one had been different. He had initiated it. They went through the same cycle every summer. By the time he was ready to return stateside, she would back out on coming over with him. He would try to make it work from here, only to find out that she was cheating on him. He would return the favor, which would inevitably lead to the break up. The first time it happened, he was young. He had been so close to sleeping with the girl, but ridden with guilt he backed out. It was a week or so later that Valeriya confessed to cheating on him. Weepy and apologetic, he believed her. They stayed together that year, but by the end of that summer they were back in the same situation. And so the cycle continued. The longer it went on, the less guilty he felt about doing it. He suspected that she felt the same.

Why he went back every time he couldn’t fathom, but he always did. She’d charm him back in. His mother would pressure him to call her. She’s been to visit. She misses you. Valeriya would always insist that her ballet schedule prevented her from coming stateside to visit him, but there were breaks. He knew there were. He had tried to encourage her to apply for a work visa and talk with the ballet company in Pittsburgh. She would have been spectacular there. Their dancers were all beautiful, but she would have stolen the stage. She refused, so this year he ended it before it could go down the same path.

As he was approaching 30, he was becoming restless with the doomed relationship. He looked at his friends, all settling down. It wasn’t that he wanted to settle or even find someone else; he was just tired. Raleigh felt like that change of pace he was looking for.

He was busying himself making dinner, his back to the rest of the kitchen, when he heard a chair slide along the floor behind him.

“Any progress with Raleigh?” Molly asked him in Russian. He was relieved to speak in his native tongue. While his English had improved, it was tiring to speak constantly.

He shook head as he turned to face her. “I don’t get it.”

Molly took a deep breath as she leaned forward, resting her forearms on the countertop. “I know this might be a foreign concept to you, but sometimes you don’t get the girl.”

Luka grumbled as he turned back to the food simmering on the stove.

“Ugh, okay. Maybe you need to switch tactics? Don’t pay attention to her.”

“What?” He looked warily over his shoulder at her.

“Stop acknowledging her. If she wants you, believe me, she’ll come to you.”

“And if she doesn’t?” he asked, as he turned to face her and leaned against the counter.

There was a shrug before she answered. “Then you know that even you can’t win them all.”

Luka contemplated the thought for a minute. “Ignore her?”

“Yeah, give her a taste of her own medicine.” She switched back to English, as though to show she was serious. “And I don’t know… maybe after this, accept a ‘no’. It won’t kill you, you know?”

*
There were three photo albums strewn across her antique framed queen sized bed. She had dug them out of the storage room in the basement the day after she had seen Matthew at Paige’s house. It took her until now to work up the courage to open them up. She flipped through the pages slowly, her fingers tracing delicately over the pictures. So many memories. She was beaming in these photos.

This was Denver. This was when life was still perfect. Before her mother died. Before she no longer trusted her father. Before she fell for baseball prodigy, Devin Kolwood, at 16, only to have her heart broken a year later. Before she realized how the men on the team her father coached would watch her. And before she realized how a life on the road was, what she had grown to know, as the easiest way to infidelity. It simply became something she knew as true. Her father had done it. She had caught Devin, but in her naïve youthfulness forgiven him, only to have him dump her a few months later. And she knew from the way the married players would hit on her whenever her dad was nowhere around.

That was why she couldn’t bring herself to trust Luka, despite his ability to chip away at her carefully crafted walls.

Her eyes settled on a picture of her with Matt at the ice rink. It was his ninth birthday. It was the only reason she was in a pair of ice skates. She hated ice-skating. She was terrible at it. Tap shoes, ballet slippers, no problem. Ice skates? No. But she went every year, for those three years in Denver, for Matty. He was encouraging her in this picture. She could remember him trying to entice her off of the wall. He was holding her left hand and her right was lifted just every so slightly off the wall.

A drop of water fell onto the picture and she lifted a hand to her face, realizing it came from her. Denver was the last time she truly felt like she had a home. She sniffed and wiped at her eyes when a light knock came from the door.

“Hey,” Brooke said softly as she crossed the room. “Are you okay?”

“These are from Denver,” she offered quietly as Brooke sat down and peered across the bed. Her best friend of fifteen years inspected the pictures. She hadn’t told her too much about the places she had lived prior to Pittsburgh when they first moved here. Brooke had never pried. There was never much interest in what Raleigh did before Pittsburgh as they were entering their pre-teens. She glanced over at Brooke nervously and was glad to see she was smiling.

“Look at you! You’re so cute! Who’s that? He looks familiar.” A polished red nail was pointing to Matty.

“Matthew Hall.” Brooke’s head turned slowly and she gave Raleigh a curious stare.

“Wait. Matt Hall? The Matt Hall that plays for the Pens?” She nodded in response. “You were friends?” Another nod. “And you never thought to tell me this?”

“We lost touch after my mom died.” Brooke set the album down and turned, tucking her legs under her.

“Okay, I know I’ve never pushed you on this before, but I’d really like to know about before Pittsburgh. Want to order in?” Raleigh nodded and Brooke pulled out her cell phone to call their favorite Chinese restaurant.

Raleigh hesitantly revealed that she had been reacquainted with Matt at Paige’s and a look of hurt flashed in Brooke’s eyes. She should have told her sooner. She had never been one to hide anything from Brooke, but something about everything with Luka brought out her extreme secretive side. Brooke had been there through Devin and everything else, there was no reason not to tell her. Maybe it was the pressure from both her and Cami to give Luka a chance that was causing her to shell herself back up. She wasn’t sure. Either way, it felt good to open back up to her again.

“You know, Hall’s pretty cute, too,” Brooke teased playfully as she cracked her fortune cookie in half.

Raleigh snapped her open own cookie. “You should see his fiancé.”

“We write our own destiny. We become what we do,” Brooke read from the little slip of paper. She glanced up eagerly at Raleigh. “Your turn.”

Raleigh was frowning. She almost didn’t want to read it out loud. “A ship in the harbor is safe, but that’s not why ships were built.”

“Well…it sounds like your fortune cookie nailed it,” Brooke mused.

“Yeah,” she murmured as she put a piece of the cookie into her mouth. But I like the harbor better.