Her Rustanov Bully: the (possibly romantic?) tale of how I pucked around and found out
Her Rustanov Bully: Chapter 26

Yom clenched his jaw at his cousin Pavel’s message as he made his way across campus from morning practice to the only class he shared with Lydia. Even though Pavel was well out of his parents’ house and currently one of the starting defensemen for his father’s team, the Indiana Polar, he’d taken time out of his busy schedule to text Yom. Ostensibly to thank Yom for providing his family with a new dog—not to replace, but to supplement their departed Back Up in their hearts.

However, Pavel’s thank you had fast turned into a string of prying questions about Lydia. And this last one hit with a load of judgment.

Yom texted back an answer anyway, also in Russian.

He then defended himself with…

Pavel’s answer came back irritatingly fast.

Chyort, had Cheslav really told every single member of the American-based side of their family that he used to call her that?

Yom left Pavel on Read rather than admit that his cousin was probably correct about his actions increasing the already formidable amount of awkwardness between him and Lydia. Also, what else could he say? There wasn’t an easy way to explain why he was doing this. His new plan barely made sense to himself.

So instead, he dropped his phone into his pocket and picked up his pace, only to slow when he spotted Lydia waiting outside the front entrance of the building for their seminar class.

He’d had morning practice, and Lydia’s first class wasn’t until 10, so Rina had driven her to school. He’d expected her to wait inside, but there she was, hunched over against the winter wind in her yellow swing coat, with her hands stuffed in her pockets. Yom did not believe in hobbies, but if he painted, he would have called her portrait “Freezing Cold Library Girl in Bright Yellow Coat.”

“Hi!” She greeted him with a cute little wave of her gloved hand when he stopped in front of her.

“Why are you out here waiting for me?” Yom snapped, unable to keep the irritation out of his voice.

Her face fell. “Oh, Rina said it was okay to wait out here for you. Did I accidentally break a rule by trying not to break the rule about you walking me to my first class of the day?”

“No, once again, there is a misunderstanding between us,” Yom informed her, realizing she’d mistaken the reason for his severe tone. “You are cold. I am not wanting that.”

“Oh.” She visibly relaxed with a little laugh. “You’re right. I probably should have waited inside the doors.”

She tucked her arm through his and burrowed her face into his jacket sleeve as they turned to walk up the building’s concrete stairs. “Or at least kept that scarf you loaned me. It was so nice and toasty.”

Yom found himself relaxing, too, as they walked up the stone stairs into the old—but warm—building. Also, making a note to himself to give her back the scarf she’d left hanging in the entrance hallway.

The speech he gave yesterday must have worked. There were murmurs when they entered hand in hand, but no one said anything under their breath to Lydia, like the last time they were in this classroom together.

Lydia, for her part, happily participated in another discussion about Dawn by Octavia Butler, having clearly done the reading for today’s seminar. And he successfully managed not to openly stare at her lit-up face as she shared her thoughts on awakening in a remade world, which served both as an escape from a racist hierarchy and as a new form of eugenic discrimination for the Black main character.

Okay, he successfully managed not to get caught staring at her.

So it felt to Yom like a win even before Professor Quinn called out to Lydia right as she dismissed the class. “Ms. Carrington, a moment, please.”

Lydia grimaced. “Oh no, I forgot about her needing to approve whether I was allowed to stay in her seminar.”

“I’ll wait for you in the hall,” he answered, unperturbed. “Then we will go to eat lunch together.”

She nodded wordlessly before walking away to have another discussion with Professor Quinn, with the tight shoulders of someone facing a firing squad.

Yom wasn’t surprised, though, when she emerged from the seminar room a few minutes later with a wide grin.

“She just wanted to apologize for calling on me last week and promised that it wouldn’t happen again now that she knew about my accommodations.”

“Good,” he said, taking her much smaller hand into his bare one. Winters in the Tverskoy District, the fashionable Moscow neighborhood where he’d grown up before his parents’ break up and his prompt shipping off to boarding school, made Minnesota winters feel like a spring breeze.

She scrunched her forehead. “Did you put her up to apologizing to me?”

“Nyet,” he answered immediately—and truthfully.

“Oh,” she said. But then her hand tightened inside his. “Wait, did Rina?”

“You are maybe getting to know me too well,” he admitted with a wry smile, rubbing his free hand over the back of his head.

She laughed—only to abruptly cut off with, “Don’t do that again. I can advocate for myself.”

Yet she didn’t, he silently noted.

“I’m serious. I don’t want you fighting my battles for me.”

Too late. She had no idea just how far he’d already gone to protect her under his new plan.

Yom asked her about where she wanted to eat lunch.

Thankfully, she accepted the change of subject. “Well, it’s Tater Tot Tuesday at the food court….”

To the student center they went, and as it so happened, her friends Trish and Merry were already there, sitting at a booth right near the main buffet.

Yom narrowed his eyes when they beckoned Lydia and him over in a way that made him suspect pre-planning, at least on her friends’ part.

But he allowed it.

The one called Merry mostly stayed quiet, but Lydia’s best friend, Trish, began grilling him before he’d even had his first bite of the anemic broccoli the line workers had placed behind a plaque with the dubious label of Seasonal Vegetables.

“So explain to me how I’m supposed to sleep well at night, knowing my best friend is being forced to keep company with the self-admitted bully who did nothing but make her life miserable ever since he got his fragile ego hurt in Berlin.”

“Trish, c’mon, you promised to be good,” Lydia said, confirming Yom’s suspicions about the pre-planning.

“I am being good—a good friend,” Trish shot back. “I’m not going to let him get away with treating you like trash. I don’t care how much you think you owe him for helping you save one dog.”

Lydia opened her mouth, but Yom spoke up before she could. “You have my word I will not hurt your friend again in this manner.”

“Right, you’re just planning to control her within an inch of her life,” Trish said, folding her arms over her nearly empty container of the repulsive tater tot casserole that Minnesotans called hotdish. “I mean, having a security detail follow and escort her everywhere—that’s, like, Psychological Manipulation 101.”

This time, instead of chastising her friend, Lydia shifted uncomfortably in the seat next to him in a way that let him know she didn’t necessarily disagree.

Yom found himself clenching his jaw again. “Perhaps you know of my relative, Layla Rustanov?”

Trish tilted her head. “The vice president’s oldest daughter? Yeah, of course I do. Everyone does.”

“Are you aware that whenever she dates someone, that person must also have security detail? Even before she is becoming well-known? This is perhaps secret, but members of families at certain level of wealth and notoriety require around-the-clock protection. Lydia is my guest. Therefore, she must be protected as well.”

Trish’s indignant expression took on a hint of frustration.

Yom could tell Lydia had most likely told her everything about his terms and conditions—despite being against the first item on the Anything List. So, Lydia’s best friend had a dilemma on her hands: argue him down with information she shouldn’t have or let it go.

Making Yom respect her even more, the best friend chose the latter. But she warned him, “I plan to join you for lunch every day, just to make sure she’s continuing to thrive in your care.”

“Me, too,” Merry promised before popping another tater tot from her own bowl of the vile hotdish into her mouth.

“Guys, I’m not a pet,” Lydia reminded them with an indignant shake of her pretty head.

“Are you sure about that?” Trish asked, shooting Yom a defiant glare.

“Da, she can be sure,” Yom answered flatly before Lydia could. “We Rustanovs treat our pets very differently than I am treating Lydia. You can ask any of them, including my Aunt Sirena, who is starting off as pet for my Uncle Bair.”

A tense, confused silence full of blinks and exchanged looks between the girls followed Yom’s reply.

Then Merry said, “I guess this is as good a time as any to announce that I’m definitely pregnant.”

This time, there was no silence.

“Oh my God, Merry,” Lydia said, immediately reaching across the table for her hands.

Meanwhile, Trish transformed from a lawyer in an American criminal justice show into a somewhat softer battle general.

“Tell us what you need from us right now,” she insisted, slipping an arm around Merry’s shoulders. “How can we support you in this difficult moment?”

For the rest of lunch, Yom was let off the hook while Lydia and Trish focused all their attention on making plans for the next steps with their friend, who was already mostly sure she would keep the pregnancy.

Then came Strategic Management and his old nemesis, Statistics. Those classes were followed by a particularly brutal practice. The Yolks’ coach was still punishing him for missing last Friday’s game with extended end-to-end sprints after all the other players were allowed to leave the ice.

By the time he returned to the lake house that night, all Yom wanted to do was shove some food into his mouth and fall into bed.

But he stopped short when he found Lydia in the kitchen with Rina and her grandmother, who was under strict instructions to leave his home before 7 p.m.

It was 7:15, but Pesya, the old lady he’d hired to do all his cleaning and cooking, was bidding Lydia to be “careful, careful” in the Judeo-Russian she sometimes spoke as she gently removed a pan from the oven.

Pesya’s face blanched when she saw Yom standing in the open front room.

“Oh, I am sorry. I know I am supposed to be leaving before seven pm,” she told him in Russian. “But your girlfriend asked me to teach her to make golubtsi, one of your favorite dishes, and I thought to myself, yes, this is knowledge you would want her to have. Make for good wife.”

Yom’s chest tightened, and his expression must have looked pained to Lydia.

“I don’t know what you’re saying. I hope it’s not that I’ve completely messed this dish up,” she said, looking down at Rina’s tiny grandmother.

“No, you did it perfectly,” Pesya assured her with a pat on her shoulder.

Then Rina said, “C’mon, Baba, let’s get you home.”

Ten minutes and a hasty kitchen island setup later, Yom discovered that Pesya hadn’t just been being polite.

“This is delicious,” he told her after the first bite.

“Really?” Lydia’s whole face lit up. “I mean, it doesn’t even go a little bit of the way toward thanking you for that awesome study haven you made—or had commissioned….”

Confusion flitted over Lydia’s pretty face before she said, “It doesn’t matter. It’s just so great. I’m, like, all caught up with my schoolwork on a Tuesday in February. Which is crazy because usually I’m not caught up on anything until, like, a couple of minutes before it’s due.”

Her smile was thank you enough. But Yom knew it was still necessary to keep these softer thoughts to himself.

“It is a perfect meal for after practice,” he told her instead. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” she answered, tucking into the meal herself. “Oh, wow, you’re right. These cabbage rolls are delicious!”

They ate in comfortable, not-awkward-at-all silence. And Yom was wondering whether he should send a somewhat-smug text to Pavel informing him of this when Lydia asked, “So how’s Statistics going?”

Yom shrugged.

“Unlike this year’s USCA Hockey Championship, I do not think I will come out victor in this case,” he confessed. “But do not worry, Rina is preparing to take final test for me so that I am able to graduate.”

“Oh, I’m not worried about you passing that class at all,” Lydia assured him with a gentle smile.

“Good,” he began to say.

“Because I’m going to help you study!” Lydia pulled a creased and heavily annotated Statistics textbook out of nowhere. “I decided to do Trish a solid and ask her crush to swing by my place to pick this up while her grandma was teaching me how to make these cabbage rolls.”

She plopped it down on the table. “In the words of the Imperial Chinese Army, ‘Mister, I’ll make a man capable of passing Statistics out of you.’”

The decidedly non-Disney-loving Yom suspected three things at this point:

1. These were not words actually attributed to the Imperial Chinese Army.

2. He would not be heading straight upstairs to sleep.

3. This would not be the last surprise Lydia had in store for him over the weeks to come.