“Where are you going? I said you’re staying home.”
Dima stepped out of the kitchen into the narrow hallway and, getting ahead of Lera by two steps, planted his broad palm against the doorframe. His body completely blocked the way out. In the dim light of the single bulb, his figure seemed massive, motionless, like a post driven into the ground. From the kitchen came the acrid smell of onions burning in the pan, and that everyday, domestic smell made what was happening seem even more wild and absurd.
Lera slowly raised her eyes to him. Her gaze was calm, almost bored. She didn’t stop, just slowed her pace, coming almost right up to him. Her eyes slid from his face to his hand insolently blocking her path, then back to his. She stayed silent, giving him the chance to realize for himself how ridiculous his position was.
“I’m waiting for an answer,” he said with deliberate pressure. “Tanya can manage in her café without you. You’ve got a man, you should be with him.”
“Dima, are you out of your mind?” Her voice sounded even, without the slightest hint of fear or indignation. It was the tone of someone talking to an unreasonable child. “Did you forget whose apartment you’re in?”
He smirked, but the smirk came out crooked and unsure. Clearly, he’d expected a different reaction—tears, pleas, shouting. Not this cold, dissecting calm.
“That doesn’t matter. I’m your man, and I decide where you go and with whom. That’s me taking care of you, in case you don’t get it. I don’t want you wandering around at night God knows where.”
Lera took a tiny step back, creating a bit of distance. She was looking at him as if seeing him for the first time. Not the quiet, slightly lost guy she’d taken in six months ago when he was kicked out of his rented place, but someone completely different—strange, brazen and unpleasant.
“You’re not my man,” she said clearly, each word like a whip crack. “You’re a freeloader I let stay here out of pity while you ‘look for a job.’ You live on my territory, eat my food and sleep in my bed. And you will not be telling me what to do. Is that clear?”
His face turned crimson. The words hit dead center, right in the most vulnerable spot—his humiliating position, which he’d been so carefully trying to disguise under the role of the caring, dominant male. He clenched his fists.
“You’ll regret saying that…”
“No, Dima, it’s you who’ll regret it if you don’t move your hand,” she cut him off in the same icy tone. “One more word like that, and I’ll call my father. He’ll explain to you very quickly and very clearly who makes decisions here and whose apartment this is.”
The mention of her father worked. Dima knew her father—a man of few words, solidly built, with heavy hands and a direct gaze that didn’t tolerate objections. The threat was more than real. His posture immediately sagged. The hand that a second ago had seemed like a steel barrier slipped powerless from the frame. He stepped aside, pressing himself against the hallway wall. There was no rage in his eyes now, just a bewildered, spiteful resentment—the resentment of someone whose attempt to seize power had been cut short roughly and humiliatingly.
“You’d have called… I’d like to see that,” he muttered under his breath, looking away.
Lera didn’t deem it necessary to answer. She silently picked up her small handbag from the console, checked that her keys were in place and, without turning around, walked out the door. She knew this wasn’t the end. This was only a declaration of war. And now the enemy was living with her under the same roof, lying low until the next attack.
The week that followed that fight was quiet. But it wasn’t the quiet of peace; it was the quiet of a lull before a storm. The air in the apartment had thickened, grown dense and heavy, as if it could be scooped up with a spoon. They no longer spoke. They moved in different orbits within the sixty square meters of space, trying not to cross paths, like two celestial bodies whose collision would lead to an inevitable explosion. Any word could become a detonator.
Dima changed tactics. Open aggression was replaced by a viscous, silent pressure. He no longer tried to forbid her from going out. But when she came home, she would always find him sitting in the half-dark kitchen with a cup of cold tea. He didn’t look at her, but she could physically feel his gaze boring into her back while she took off her shoes in the hallway. He didn’t ask anything, but his silence was louder than any question. It screamed: “Where were you? With whom? I see everything. I know everything.”
He started leaving signs of his displeasure all over the apartment. An uncapped tube of toothpaste, a dirty cup on her desk, crumbs on the kitchen floor he demonstratively “didn’t notice.” Little stings, designed to get under her skin, to make her snap and be the one to start talking. But Lera didn’t snap. She silently cleaned up, fixed things, ignored him. She accepted the rules of this quiet war and played her game with cold, detached persistence. She knew he was waiting for a reaction, and she refused to give him that satisfaction.
The turning point came on Thursday. Lera needed to pick up an order from an online store, and in the morning she had deliberately withdrawn cash from her card—two crisp, large bills—which she put into a separate little pocket in her wallet. In the evening, getting ready to go out, she opened her bag. The wallet was in its usual place. She unzipped it and looked into that exact pocket. It was empty.
Lera froze. She didn’t start frantically checking every compartment, didn’t shake the contents of her bag out onto the bed. She just stared at the empty slit in the lining. There was no panic in her head, no surprise. Only a dull, icy emptiness and final understanding. He had crossed the line. The last one. This wasn’t just some stupid power play anymore. This was theft. Petty, degrading, like spitting in someone’s face.
She slowly closed the wallet, put it back in her bag and walked out of the bedroom. Dima was sitting on the sofa in the living room, watching some idiotic TV show with exaggerated interest. He didn’t even turn his head when she came in, but his whole body was taut with expectation. He knew she’d discovered the loss. He was waiting.
Lera silently sat down in the armchair opposite. She looked at his profile, at the smug crease by his mouth, at the way he pretended to be absorbed in what was happening on the screen. And in that moment all the pity she had ever felt for him evaporated without a trace. Only pure, cold contempt remained. She no longer saw a lost man in front of her, but a small parasite who, having latched on, had decided he had the right not only to live at her expense, but also to help himself to her things.
She took her phone out of her pocket. Her fingers weren’t shaking. She unlocked the screen and found the right number in her contacts. She hadn’t called yet, just looked at the name on the display. This was her last line of defense, her final argument, the one she hadn’t wanted to use. But he’d left her no choice.
He was the first who couldn’t take it. The silence she created just by sitting in that armchair pressed on him harder than any shouting. He ostentatiously turned up the volume with the remote, but the canned laughter from the TV only underlined how unnatural the moment was. He shot her a sidelong, irritated look.
“What, on your phone again? Can’t you just relax for once?”
Lera slowly tore her gaze away from her screen and looked straight at him. Her face was absolutely unreadable, like a poker player who’s just been dealt a winning hand.
“There’s money missing from my wallet,” she said evenly, without a questioning intonation. It wasn’t a question. It was a statement. “Two large bills that I put there this morning.”
His face twitched for a second, but he quickly pulled himself together, arranging a mix of surprise and mild disdain on his features. He went on the offensive, choosing what seemed to him the best tactic—attack.
“So what? Why are you telling me this?” he said with swagger. “You’re always stuffing money into different places and then forgetting. Check the pockets of your coat. Or look on the console. What’s it got to do with me?”
He spoke confidently, even brazenly, looking her straight in the eyes. He tried to crush her with his gaze, to make her doubt herself. But Lera didn’t look away. She kept watching him calmly, with a slight, barely noticeable squint, as if studying an especially unpleasant specimen under a microscope.
“They’re not in my coat. And not on the console either,” her voice remained just as colorless. “They were in my wallet. And now they’re not. And apart from the two of us, there’s been no one in this apartment.”
“Oh, that’s what this is!” he exclaimed theatrically, throwing up his hands and raising his voice. “You’re trying to say I took them? Have you lost your mind? You think I’m a thief? Maybe you should stop hanging out in cafés with that Tanya of yours all the time? Then your money would stay where it belongs and you wouldn’t have anyone to suspect!”
That was his mistake. His last and fatal one. He didn’t just deny the obvious; he once again tried to tell her how to live and what to spend her money on. At that moment, something in her gaze went out for good. The last spark of doubt, the last trace of the past. Now she saw him with total clarity.
“And who do you think you are, throwing your weight around here, Dima? You asked to stay at my place until your job and housing situation got sorted out! If I decide I need it, my dad will come over and throw you out of here himself!”
Her words hung in the air. It was a direct, undisguised ultimatum. All his fake confidence began to crack like thin ice. But he still couldn’t believe she was serious. His mind refused to accept that his position was that shaky. And he did what all fools do on the edge of a precipice—he took another step forward, smirking.
“So you’re calling your daddy?” he sneered, trying to save face.
Lera glanced at the phone in her hand, then back at him. A barely noticeable, cold smile touched her lips.
“Yes,” she answered calmly and put the phone to her ear.
She pressed “call.” Dima watched her, the smirk slowly sliding off his face, giving way to confusion. There were a few rings in the receiver, then a male voice.
“Hi, Dad. Can you come over?” she said, after a short pause, looking straight into Dima’s frozen eyes. “I need help taking out some trash. Very heavy trash.”
She ended the call and set the phone on the armrest of the chair. The living room fell silent. Even the TV seemed to go quiet. Dima stared at her, unable to utter a word. He understood. He understood everything. But it was already too late.
The time it took her father to get there stretched into a thick, wavering eternity. It was no more than half an hour, but for Dima every minute lasted an hour. He got up from the sofa several times, paced the room, then sat back down. All his showy self-confidence had evaporated, leaving behind a sticky, cold fear. He tried to talk to Lera, to start a conversation that might fix everything, rewind the tape.
“Lera, listen…” he began, taking a step toward her. “I lost my temper. Let’s talk like adults. No need to drag—”
She didn’t even turn her head. Her eyes were fixed on the dark phone screen lying on her knee. She just sat and waited. Her calm was more frightening than any hysterics. It was absolute. It meant the decision had been made, the sentence passed, and there would be no appeal. To her, he was no longer a person, just an object that needed to be removed from her space.
“Lera, I’m begging you!” there were pleading notes in his voice now. “This is stupid! Over some money… I’ll pay you back, you hear me?”
She slowly raised her eyes to him. There was no anger there, no hurt. Only cold, tired disgust.
“It’s not about the money, Dima. It’s about you.”
And she turned away again. He realized the wall between them had become impenetrable. He sank back onto the sofa, clutching his head in his hands. He still couldn’t believe this was really happening. It felt like a bad dream, a ridiculous farce.
The sharp, short ring of the doorbell sounded like a gunshot. It made Dima flinch with his whole body. Lera, on the contrary, rose smoothly and unhurriedly from the armchair and went to open the door. She moved easily, as if some unbearable weight had just been lifted from her shoulders.
Her father was standing on the threshold. A big, silent man in a simple dark jacket. He didn’t say hello. His heavy gaze slid over his daughter, lingered for a fraction of a second, and then moved deeper into the room, unerringly finding its target. He didn’t ask any questions. The code phrase about “heavy trash” was all the explanation he needed.
Without a word, he stepped into the apartment, taking the threshold in a wide stride. His movements were economical and precise, like a man used to physical work. Dima instinctively pressed himself into the back of the sofa, trying to make himself smaller, less noticeable. It was useless. Lera’s father walked straight up to him.
“Get your things,” his voice was low and steady, without a hint of emotion.
“I… I will, just… now…” Dima stammered, trying to stand up, but his legs wouldn’t obey him.
Her father didn’t wait. Without any visible effort, he grabbed Dima by the collar of his hoodie and hauled him up off the sofa in one sharp motion. Dima dangled in his grip like a rag doll. There was no backswing, no blow, no struggle. Just simple, undeniable physical superiority. Just as silently, her father dragged him toward the door. Dima’s legs tangled; he barely managed to keep up.
Lera stood against the wall, watching the scene with the same detached expression. She didn’t say a word.
Her father shoved Dima out onto the landing and let go. Dima staggered, barely staying on his feet. Then her father went back into the hallway, grabbed Dima’s backpack that was standing by the wall and, without looking, hurled it after him. The backpack thumped dully against the opposite wall and fell to the floor.
The door slammed shut. The lock clicked.
Lera didn’t even turn around. She could hear the sound of hurried, stumbling footsteps retreating down the stairs. Her father silently went into the kitchen, turned on the tap and washed his hands. Then he came back into the hallway. He looked at his daughter. In their gazes there were no words of comfort, no pity, no questions. Only full, absolute understanding.
“That’s it,” he said. It was not a question, but a statement.
“Yes,” Lera answered quietly. “Thanks, Dad.”
He just gave a short nod and left. The apartment belonged only to her again…
