Where do you think you’re going? I told you, you’re staying home.”
Dima stepped out of the kitchen into the narrow hallway and, getting two steps ahead of Lera, planted his broad palm against the doorjamb. His body completely blocked the way out. In the dim light of the single bulb his figure looked massive, motionless, like a post driven into the ground. From the kitchen came the acrid smell of onions burning in the pan, and that ordinary, household smell made what was happening seem even wilder and more 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 brazenly barring her way, then back to his. She kept silent, giving him a chance to assess for himself just how foolish his position was.
“I’m waiting for an answer,” he said with emphasis. “Tanya can manage just fine 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 a small, unreasonable child. “Did you forget whose apartment you’re in?”
He smirked, but the smirk came out crooked and unsure. Clearly, he had expected a different reaction—tears, pleading, 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, if you don’t get it. I don’t want you traipsing around at night who knows where.”
Lera took a tiny step back, creating some distance. She looked 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’d been kicked out of his rented place, but someone completely different—brazen, unpleasant, a stranger.
“You are not my man,” she said, enunciating each word like the crack of a whip. “You’re a freeloader I let stay here out of pity while you look for a job. You live on my territory, you eat my food, and you sleep in my bed. And you are not going to tell me what to do. Do you understand me?”
His face turned purple. Her words struck right at the sorest spot—his humiliating situation, which he had been trying so hard to disguise behind the role of a caring, dominant male. His hands clenched into fists.
“You’ll regret saying that…”
“No, Dima, you’ll be the one regretting it if you don’t move your hand,” she cut him off in the same icy tone. “One more word in that vein and I’ll call my father. He’ll explain to you very quickly and very clearly who’s in charge 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 tolerated no backtalk. The threat was more than real. His stance immediately sagged. The hand that a second ago had seemed like a steel barrier slipped limply from the doorframe. He stepped aside, pressing himself against the hallway wall. There was no rage in his eyes now, only a bewildered, bitter resentment—the resentment of someone whose attempt to seize power had been cut short harshly and humiliatingly.
“You should’ve called… I’d like to have seen that,” he muttered under his breath, looking away.
Lera didn’t bother to answer. She silently took her small purse from the little table, checked that her keys were inside, and, without looking back, walked out the door. She knew this wasn’t the end. This was only a declaration of war. And now the enemy lived under the same roof with her, lying low until the next attack.
The week that followed this blowup was quiet. But it wasn’t the quiet of peace, it was the lull before a storm. The air in the apartment thickened, became dense and heavy, as if you could scoop it up with a spoon. They no longer spoke. They moved along different orbits within sixty square meters, 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 thick, silent pressure. He no longer tried to forbid her from going out. But whenever she came home, she would inevitably 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 drilling 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 traces of his displeasure all over the apartment. An uncapped tube of toothpaste, a dirty mug on her desk, crumbs on the kitchen floor that he ostentatiously “didn’t notice.” These were little jabs meant to get under her skin, make her snap, force her to start the conversation first. But Lera didn’t snap. She quietly cleaned up, fixed things, ignored them. 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 showdown came on Thursday. Lera needed to pick up an order from an online store, and that morning she had withdrawn cash from her card on purpose—two large, crisp bills that she put into a separate little pocket in her wallet. In the evening, as she was getting ready to go out, she opened her bag. The wallet was in its place. She unzipped it and looked into that very pocket. It was empty.
Lera froze. She didn’t start frantically checking every compartment, didn’t dump the contents of the bag out onto the bed. She just stared at the empty strip of fabric. 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 was no longer just foolish self-assertion. This was theft. Petty, humiliating, like a spit in the face.
She slowly fastened the wallet, put it back in her bag, and walked out of the bedroom. Dima was sitting on the couch 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 tense with anticipation. He knew she had discovered the loss. He was waiting.
Lera silently sat down in the armchair opposite him. She studied his profile, the smug fold at the corner of his mouth, 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. All that was left was pure, cold contempt. She no longer saw a lost man in front of her, but a petty parasite who, having latched on, had decided he had the right not only to live at her expense but also to dispose of her belongings.
She took her phone out of her pocket. Her fingers didn’t tremble. She unlocked the screen and found the number she needed in her contacts. She hadn’t called yet; she was just looking at the name on the display. This was her last line of defense, her final argument, one she hadn’t wanted to use. But he had left her no choice.
He was the first to crack. The silence she had created with her mute presence in the armchair weighed on him more heavily than any scream. He ostentatiously turned up the volume with the remote, but the canned laughter from the TV only underscored how unnatural the moment was. He shot her a sideways, irritated look.
“What, glued to your phone again? Can’t you just relax for once?”
Lera slowly lifted her eyes from her phone screen and looked straight at him. Her face was completely unreadable, like a poker player holding a winning hand.
“There’s money missing from my wallet,” she said evenly, with no questioning lilt. It wasn’t a question. It was a statement. “Two large bills that I put there this morning.”
His face twitched for a split 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 he thought was the best tactic—attack.
“So what? You telling me this for? You’re always shoving money somewhere and then forgetting about it. Check the pockets of your jacket. Or look on the nightstand. What’s it got to do with me?”
He spoke confidently, even brazenly, looking her straight in the eye. He tried to bear down on her with his stare, to make her doubt herself. But Lera didn’t look away. She kept watching him calmly, with a slight, barely noticeable squint, as if examining a particularly unpleasant specimen under a microscope.
“They’re not in the jacket. Or on the nightstand either,” her voice stayed just as colorless. “They were in the wallet. And now they’re not. And apart from the two of us, there’s been no one else in this apartment.”
“Oh, that’s what this is about!” he exclaimed theatrically, throwing up his hands and raising his voice. “So you’re trying to say I took them? Have you lost your mind? You think I’m a thief? Maybe if you stopped hanging around cafés with your precious Tanya, your money would stop going missing and you wouldn’t have anyone to suspect!”
That was his miscalculation. The last and fatal one. He wasn’t just denying the obvious; he was once again trying to tell her how to live and what to spend her own money on. In that moment something in her gaze went out for good—the last spark of doubt, the last trace of what had been. Now she saw him with absolute clarity.
“And who exactly do you think you are to start throwing your weight around here, Dima? You asked to stay with me until you got your job and housing sorted out! And if I feel like 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 feigned 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 standing on the edge of a precipice—he took another step forward, smirking.
“So, you calling your daddy now?” he forced out, trying to save face.
Lera looked at the phone in her hand, then back at him. Her lips curved in a barely noticeable, cold smile.
“Yes,” she replied calmly and lifted the phone to her ear.
She pressed call. Dima watched her, and the smirk slowly slid from his face, replaced by confusion. There were a few rings on the line, then a man’s voice.
“Hi, Dad. Can you come over?” She paused briefly, looking straight into the frozen Dima’s eyes. “I need help taking out the trash. Very heavy trash.”
She ended the call and set the phone down on the armrest of the chair. The living room fell silent. Even the TV seemed to have gone quiet. Dima stared at her, unable to squeeze out 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 couch several times, paced around the room, then sat back down. All his put-on self-confidence had evaporated, leaving behind a clammy, 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. There’s no need to drag…”
She didn’t even turn her head. Her eyes were fixed on the dark phone screen resting on her knee. She just sat there and waited. Her calm was more terrifying 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 but an object that needed to be removed from her space.
“Lera, I’m begging you!” there was a pleading note in his voice now. “This is stupid! Over some money… I’ll pay it back, do you hear me?”
She slowly raised her eyes to him. There was no anger there, no hurt. Only cold, weary revulsion.
“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 sat back down on the couch, 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 lightly, as if an unbearable weight had just been lifted from her shoulders.
Her father was standing on the threshold. A big, silent man in a plain dark jacket. He didn’t say hello. His heavy gaze slid over his daughter, lingered for a fraction of a second, then moved deeper into the room, unerringly finding its target. He didn’t ask any questions. The code phrase about “heavy trash” had been perfectly clear to him without further explanation.
Without a word, he stepped over the threshold and into the apartment. His movements were economical and precise, like those of a man used to physical work. Dima instinctively pressed himself into the back of the couch, trying to make himself smaller, less noticeable. But it was useless. Lera’s father walked straight up to him.
“Get your things together,” his voice was low and even, without the slightest trace of emotion.
“I… I will, just…” Dima stammered, trying to get up, but his legs wouldn’t obey him.
Her father didn’t wait. With no visible effort he grabbed Dima by the hood of his sweatshirt and yanked him up off the couch in one motion. Dima dangled in his grip like a rag doll. There was no swing, no punch, no struggle. There was only simple, inevitable physical superiority. Just as silently, her father dragged him toward the door. Dima’s legs tangled; he could barely keep them moving along the floor.
Lera stood by the wall, watching the scene with the same detached expression. She didn’t say a word.
Her father shoved him out onto the landing and let go. Dima staggered, barely keeping his feet. Then her father went back down the hall, grabbed Dima’s backpack that was standing by the wall, and, without looking, hurled it out after him. The backpack hit the opposite wall with a dull thud and fell to the floor.
The door slammed shut. The lock clicked.
Lera didn’t even turn around. She heard the sound of hurried, stumbling footsteps fading down the stairs. Her father walked silently into the kitchen, turned on the tap, and washed his hands. Then he came back into the hallway. He looked at his daughter. There was no word of comfort, no pity, no questions in their eyes. Only complete, absolute understanding.
“That’s that,” he said. It was not a question but a statement of fact.
“Yes,” Lera answered softly. “Thanks, Dad.”
He just gave a short nod and left. The apartment belonged only to her again…
