A prominent jaw curved gracefully and the strength of his neck showed in the twining cords of the muscle that shaped his entire body; from what I could feel he had strong arms, bold thighs that pressed into mine as I clung to his wide chest.
“No, they call me Grim. As in Reaper, pleasure to meet you, I’ve been waiting on you.”
He replies with what sounds like humor in his voice, but his face shows no emotion. He swings my body upright, steadying me on my feet. His hands, that are the size of my face, rest on the sides of my arms as he looks down at me curiously.
“Do I need to take you to a hospital? What are you doing wandering into traffic?”
I shake my head, taking a breath, trying to get the world to stop spinning. I can’t believe I nearly died. I nearly died and all I can comprehend is that my savior is ungodly tall, like a giant.
I still don’t reply, just staring at his eyes which seem to have me in trance of some sort. There hasn’t been a moment in my life quite like this one. Boys had never been a priority for me, possibly because I never found interest in anyone.
School and music was my entire life. Even though Emerson attempted to get me to live life on the wild side, I was focused on my future. Boys were not a part of the equation. Especially boys my age.
But this one, this boy, well he wasn’t a boy, he was a man. A grown man with eyes that were candidly observant, heavenly, godly, yet there was a heaviness about him. This mysterious, metaphysical vibe he gave off. There was more to him than just looking like Jesus and saving girls in the street.
And my inquisitive nature wanted to dissect every inch of him.
“Earth to Blueberry, what’s forty-seven times twenty-one? Can you list the noble gases? Answer anything besides what color are my eyes?”
Embarrassment creeps up the back of my neck, efficiently snapping me out of my trance and sending me flying back into reality.
I step back from his warm grip, clearing my throat with a gentle cough. I see my headphones on the ground and I swipe them up, placing them around my neck once again.
“Nine hundred eighty-seven,” I say easily, I brush my hair behind my ears.
“Helium, Neon, Argon, Krypton, Xenon, Radon, and Oganesson. In that order, I can also tell you their atomic symbol, number, and weight if you want.”
The first time any emotion passes on his face and it’s a little bit of shock. Which I’m more than used to by now. When you’re a child prodigy you get used to people being in shock. I wasn’t like, graduate high school at ten smart, but I did skip a grade, and I’d already been accepted to Juilliard despite not applying. I was smart in just about everything, but I was a genius when it came to music.
I rock back and forth on my heels nervously. The weight of his presence is like a cloak of sexual tension. My fingertips are still buzzing from touching him. Maybe I did hit my head, because this wasn’t normal for me.
“Did you bump your head and turn into Alex Trebek or were you always smart?”
I laugh softly, trying not to blush. He has to be at least twenty, maybe a little older. And I can detect a hint of an accent. It’s European, bold, with heavy rolling Rs. Maybe Bulgarian?
“I’ve always been smart. I’m fine, no bumps or bruises, all my limbs work, see?” I kick my feet forward and wave with my arm. A small grin, the smallest I’ve ever seen hits his lips, and my heart beats a little faster.
“Thank you for, uh, saving my life, I guess. That sounds like such an insignificant thank you, do you like buttons?”
He raises an eyebrow, giving me a skeptical look as if I asked if he wanted to see my boobs. It’s just a button. I roll my eyes, smiling a little. I shrug my violin case off my back, laying it on the sidewalk, and popping it open. The inside is lined with different buttons and pins. I have a thing for collecting them.
I search my vast collection, finding the one I want to gift. I unpin it, close my violin case, and put it back on my shoulder.
“Here, it’s my thank you.”
I reach the button out for him to grab, which he takes reluctantly. He inspects the pin, a smirk tugging at his vacant face. A bubbly feeling flutters my stomach, like freshly popped champagne, and suddenly I feel like I would do anything to see him smile.
“So a thank you seems insignificant, but an ‘I Love Chemistry’ button is a worthy trade for saving your life?”
Amusement twinkles in his eyes. He’s laughing at me without actually laughing. Great, he finds me amusing. Every young girl with a crush on an older guy knows that when they find you amusing it’s game over. They don’t find us hot or alluring. They think we’re cute.
Like a fucking chipmunk.
“I’ll have you know my favorite teacher gave that button to me.”
He stares at the button for a moment longer, before shoving it into his pocket. When his hand comes back out, I notice tattoos peeking out from underneath his long sleeve and the paint on his knuckle and the top of his hand.
The graffiti.
I whip my head to face the brick wall covered in the colorful mural. The fallen angel, the children, and the war. It’s beautifully done, abstract without being too farfetched, using the correct color contrast. It’s beautiful.
“I want my button back!” I shout suddenly.
“That’s not how this works. I can’t exactly take back saving your life, now can I?” His left eyebrow arches perfectly.
“Saving my life doesn’t count if you’re the reason I tripped in the first place!” I argue.
I’m joking, of course, but he doesn’t know that. So instead of finding me amusing, he now finds me clinically insane.
“I think we should get you checked out by a doctor, сумасшедшая вещь,” he suggests.
Ah, Russian. I can’t tell you what he said to me, but I can break down the language enough to know what he said was definitely Russian.
I wave him off, smiling, “I’m fine.” I point toward the mural. “I was talking about the painting, you did it, right? That’s why I tripped, I was staring at it.”
His face tells me he wants to deny it, and he’s about to, until I gesture to his painted knuckles with a bored expression. He doesn’t even bother lying.
He looks over at his work, critiquing it without even using words. I do the same thing when I listen to myself play.
Perfectionist.
“It’s—” I stop trying to find the written word in my imaginary catalog in my brain.
I look at the man with his missing wings, his back bloody and ripped as he holds himself in front of the small children so they don’t see the war going on behind him.
“Toska.”
“What is?”
“The painting, it’s toska.”
I look back at him, seeing him stare at me with a tender curiosity, almost like, who the fuck are you? His pink tongue licks his bottom lips as he furrows his eyebrows.
“What do you know about toska? You speak Russian?”
I shake my head back and forth, I wish. However, I did have a thing for words.
“No, but Vladimir Nabokov said that no single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. That’s what your painting represents. It renders all the shades of toska.”