He opened the door wide, nodding his head for her to go in ahead of him.
She didn’t know what she was expecting when she walked in, a bachelor’s pad maybe, or a barren space that looked like it wasn’t lived in, but as she looked around, she remembered that his sister was an interior designer, and it was clear that she had used her skills on his place.
The floors were a dark hardwood, his walls painted a soft gray. Floor-to-ceiling windows on one side of the room were shielded by dark gray drapes, though they were parted just enough that she could see the beach through them. A large sectional divided the living room and the open concept kitchen.
His place, though decorated with just about everything a person could want, looked inviting rather than cold, like a store room display.
“I have to make a phone call,” Kaz said. “Look around if you want, but not too deep.”
Violet raised a brow at his words. “What, scared I might find all your secrets, skeletons, and fears hidden in your dresser drawers?”
Kaz didn’t even blink. “Exactly that.”
“Closets are open, then?”
“Only a stupid man hides skeletons in the closet. Everyone always looks there first.”
Violet laughed as Kaz pulled his phone out and made a beeline for the hallway opposite to the large living room. She milled around, noting that while the place was decorated and beautiful, there weren’t many pictures to give insight to the personal life of Kaz or his family. In the kitchen, she found a haphazard stack of mail piled in the middle of the table, and smiled to herself.
Apparently, she wasn’t the only one who just let her mail fall wherever it dropped.
After another couple of minutes without Kaz coming back, she decided to go in search of him. Down the hallway he had disappeared earlier, she found several doors. All of which were closed but for one. Standing in the doorway, she realized it was his bedroom.
Unlike the living room, his bedroom actually looked like someone regularly used it. His bed was left unmade, the sheets in disarray as though he hadn’t been able to get comfortable in them—she briefly wondered whether he slept without clothes on. Twin nightstands, and a bookcase along another wall made up the last of the furniture in the room.
The muffled, one-sided conversation coming from behind the closed door directly across from the bedroom made her pause, and stopped her from entering Kaz’s bedroom any more than she already had.
“Hey,” she heard Kaz say. And then just as quickly, “Just wanted to check up on you, Rus.”
Guilt flooded Violet almost instantly. The anger was quick to follow. She didn’t want to believe that Amelia had told Franco a bunch of lies about what really happened that night at the club, but it seemed that was just what her friend had done.
And in the process, a man who had only tried to help them had gotten hurt.
So yeah, that pissed Violet off.
“Good, brat,” she heard Kaz say. “No, I told you I was going home … Shit, do you want me to call you from my house phone? Hang up and I’ll do that. We can play that game if you want to, Ruslan.”
At that point, Violet decided to leave Kaz to his private conversation with his brother. She didn’t feel right spying on him like that, after all. He had already told her to look around. Wasn’t that enough?
As she stepped further into the bedroom, flicking on the lights as she passed the switch on the wall, her nervousness returned. She knew better than to be here—knew this was ten shades of stupid, and getting worse by the second.
Violet had worked particularly hard to make her father feel at least slightly more comfortable with trusting her again. She hadn’t intended to disobey him, not like she currently was, but something in the back of her mind wouldn’t let her drop Kaz. While her father made every effort to act as if the Russians didn’t matter in their world, it seemed like fate had entirely different plans what with the way it kept throwing Kaz back into her path.
Or rather, the way he kept putting himself there.
She was starting to think she didn't mind.
Even if it was wrong.
And maybe Violet knew that if she really wanted to follow the rules set out for her, and please her father in the process, she should have told Kaz to leave hours earlier, when he showed up at her place. She shouldn’t have indulged his argument, or let him touch her or kiss her. She definitely shouldn't have let him take her into Brooklyn, never mind Little Odessa.
Each time she didn’t say “no” to something, she broke the rules a little more with something else. She pushed those boundaries a little further.
She was saying “fuck you” a little louder.
But what was she really doing wrong?
Violet was just a woman. Kaz was just a man.
She didn’t really understand why their last names had to factor into it at all.
A peek of gray marble caught Violet’s eye as she passed the unmade bed. A door, only slightly open, made her curious. What was it that he had said about closets?