i'll show you mine

“Margo, you had a bad day.” It wasn’t a question. Margo crossed the distance between them, got on her tiptoes, and pressed a quick kiss to his cheek, the closest part of him she could reach without asking him to stop what he was doing.

“That obvious?”

“Sit,” he said.

Margo took her usual spot at the kitchen island, one elbow propped against the cool stone surface. The house was warm despite the open windows. This place never really cooled. Even at dusk the air carried a lingering heat that settled into the walls and furniture and skin alike. And, in a way, that felt like home, like Houston.

She looked at the two glasses in front of him, the cutting board with two limes, and then the bottle that sat beside it. “This,” she said, waving a hand loosely at all of it, “is new.”

Sergei didn’t respond to that, because he was already sliding a glass toward her.

The drink was pale green, ice clinking softly against the sides. It smelled sharp and bright and slightly dangerous. Margo took a cautious sip.

“A colleague gave me a bottle of cachaça,” he offered by way of explanation, careful with the pronunciation.

“Do I know this colleague?”

“Luis. From the modelling team. I helped him with an equation he had been stuck on.”

“How long had he been stuck on it?”

“Three weeks.”

“And you?” Margo asked, even though she could guess the approximate answer.

Something flickered at the corner of his mouth. “An afternoon.”

Margo picked up her glass again. “He got off cheap with one bottle.”

Sergei smirked and refilled her glass, the drink disappearing surprisingly quickly. Margo didn’t entirely notice it happening—they were talking, and then her glass was empty. Sergei was halfway through making another round, by which point Margo had developed several complaints about her day.

They began to leak out of her in fragments: Three separate departments had wanted answers she did not have. Someone had submitted the wrong set of calculations to the wrong team. Twice. By four in the afternoon, she’d found herself mediating an argument between a Brazilian and an Argentinian engineer who were ostensibly discussing telemetry and yet had somehow arrived at a personal dispute about soccer futebol dating back six years.

“I think,” she remarked, after a long sip and an even longer sigh, “I need something stronger than this. Move.”

Before Sergei could respond, she was already standing.

“Что?”

“Move.” She nudged him aside and took over the counter space.

“Margo—” He narrowed his eyes. “It’s Wednesday.”

“And this,” she announced, pretending not to hear him, “is where your Brazilian assimilation ends.” She took the cachaça from his hands and got a bottle of vodka from the fridge instead.

Sergei only stared. “I thought you disliked vodka.”

He was right, but she wouldn’t give him that. “I figured,” she said instead, “if I was going to spend the rest of my life in the Soviet Union, I should probably learn how to drink vodka without looking like I was being poisoned.”

“Did it work?” he prodded, grinning now.

“Somewhat.” She set the bottle of Roskoff between them. “I no longer make a face.”

They switched roles without further discussion.

Her version of the drink was stronger. Neither of them caught the exact moment it tipped from a single weekday wind-down into something more indulgent; Sergei continuing to make adjustments with the vodka “for balance” while Margo continued sampling what balance now apparently meant.

When she realized how much she had actually had, it was already too late to correct course in any meaningful way.

She just watched as Sergei leaned back against the counter as if he had suddenly decided the kitchen was an acceptable place to philosophize, and began, with great seriousness, to explain the “proper hierarchy” of vodka.

His cheeks were redder than they had been an hour ago. His accent had gotten thicker too—each glass adding a little more of it back. If anything, it made her want to keep him talking.

He went on about how some were for celebration (Stolichnaya), some for endurance (Moskovskaya), and some, he said, with a faintly offended look, were for “people who do not respect grain” (Russkaya). How it was meant to be accompanied by food – boiled potatoes, salted herring, pickles, sauerkraut, rye bread, bacon, ham – because after every glass you were expected to eat something, and just as importantly, to do it in company.

Otherwise, he said, you were just an alcoholic.

He gestured with the glass as though lecturing an absent committee, and Margo watched him through the slow warmth building in her chest, thinking distantly that she had seen him brief generals with less intensity than this.

She stopped following his explanation somewhere around sortirovka and continuous column distillation. His voice became part of the background she instinctively associated with being at home.

“I like coming home to you.” It slipped out before she could measure it properly, and it was probably the alcohol that made saying it feel so easy, so unguarded. Or maybe it was just the accumulation of nights like this, of months like this spent with him.

The words hung in the air a fraction longer, and Sergei blinked once, slowly.

“That was the vodka talking,” Margo added quickly, a flush creeping up her cheeks as she avoided his eyes.

“Maybe,” he conceded, setting his drink on the counter. He came around the island to where she was sitting and pressed a kiss to her forehead.

“Definitely.”

He shook his head, smiling all the while. “нет.”

“No?”

“That is you, Margo,” he stated. “Vodka only makes it louder.”