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Interlude

Tatiana: Flirting

Mama was having one of those days when she was nearly a corpse. She’d woken tired and barely eaten any breakfast. We girls took turns attending her as she lounged on a couch with Joy curled up at her feet. She dozed off while reading. I pulled the blanket up over her shoulder and left Maria to keep an eye on her should she wake.

I glanced at the clock. Olga was supposed to come help out but she was almost half an hour late. I crept past Alexei’s room. Anastasia was reading to him. Papa had closed the door to his study, but I heard another male voice as I passed. He was probably in another meeting and I didn’t want to interrupt, just to check if Olga was in there without checking the other rooms first.

I entered the hallway leading to the room we girls shared. The door to our room was ajar, allowing light to fall onto one of the threadbare rugs covering the wood floor. A man of medium height and build was leaning into our room. The soldiers were not supposed to be up here and I couldn’t imagine what had brought them.

As I approached, I realized that it was Sergei Chekov. Dirt and oil darkened his blond hair to an almost-brown where his cap usually sat. He had his hands shoved in his pockets as he mumbled something into the room.

I heard the scrape of a chair and the echo of lowered voices.

Chekov moved back into the hallway, allowing me to pass.

Inside, Olga was standing next to Anton Dostovalov. I recognized him, too, as one of the red soldiers. He had been raised on a farm. Just a few years older than Olga, he was a big man with a rumbling voice to match.

Olga’s cheeks were bright red. She was standing against her bed, by the curtain that she’d hung at its foot in order to partition it from the rest of the room. The buttons down the front of her white shirt were lined up wrong as if she’d missed a hole. It hadn’t been that way when I’d seen her earlier.

“Is everything all right?” I asked.

She cast me a quick glance, not quite meeting my eyes. “Yes, fine. Anton was just helping me look for something.”

I knew it was lie from the way she said it, from the way neither of them would look at me, from the way Anton shuffled out of the room, and from the disapproving look on Chekov’s face.

We stood in the awkward silence for a moment.

“You might want to re-button your blouse before you go down to see Mama,” I said.

Her cheeks flared once again. Her hands shook as she fumbled with the buttons.

I should have been angry or disappointed, but I wasn’t. These were normal things, things that young men and women our age did. We should have been going to dances and parties, meeting eligible young men, stealing kisses and looks, gossiping about them to compare notes on who made the best jokes, who was the best dancer, who was the most charming.

Papa would take such behavior with stoicism. Mama, I wasn’t sure. The last thing she needed was another burden to bear.

Olga straightened her skirt as she turned for the door and stepped past me.

I grabbed her elbow, pulling her back gently.

She looked at me over her shoulder.

“Was it worth it?” I asked.

The look in her eyes said that it was. That she’d do it again.

And I couldn’t blame her.


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Framed