Chapter Four

Jake stood by the park lamp post, two steaming cups on the bench by his side. He was looking at the sunset that had erupted in all shades of purples and pinks above the treetops.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" I asked, stopping by his side.

He smiled and turned to me, coming back from the world of his thoughts.

"Hi," he said and then hugged me.

Just like that, as though we were friends who hadn't seen each other for a long, long time. I froze, lifting my hands feebly. He smelled of citrus and my body leaned in, while my brain short-circuited.

"Hi," I murmured.

He released me as though nothing had happened and stretched out a cup for me.

"Decaf," he said. But when he noticed my expression he laughed. "Okay?"

"Okay," I said, and it was.

I took a sip of my decaf latte and our eyes met again, for a silent moment. It kept happening: me drowning in his steady gaze.

"Brian told me you're studying Computer Science," Jake said as we started walking. "Do you enjoy it?"

"Honestly, that was my dad's doing. He was that old-school developer who started when everything was nulls and ones, and he stayed on top of evolving technology. He always said that the future lies within computers, and I should do computer studies," I said, looking down at the pavement, putting one leg in front of another, and trying to mask the pain which always bled in my chest when I talked about him. "He said that with the right degree I would always find a well-paying job."

I felt Jake looking at me, but I could not turn my head to his side, not yet. I swallowed hard.

"But you don't really like it?" he asked tentatively.

"Not really. I only went there because I was my father's girl, I listened to everything he said. And even though he kept saying how a career is important for a woman, he never really converted his knowledge into a steady income. I was always good with books. I liked hiding in the worlds literature could create, but I followed his suggestions and here I am."

"What major would you choose if you had a choice now?" he asked.

"It's easy, English or Comparative Literature," I said and finally looked at him. "But they provide a very limited selection of jobs afterward. And with the digital world around us, my current major can supply me with not just a massive range of choices in terms of what I want to do, but also in terms of where I want to do it."

"Do you mean working from anywhere?"

"Exactly. I won't romanticize the popular images painted by the media, a freelancer sitting in a bikini under a palm tree with a laptop and surfboard by her side, no. I don't really believe in it. But the freedom of working from any place in the world, just having a laptop is one of the most crucial points for me."

"Do you want to travel?" he guessed.

"Yeah, another mainstream goal."

The shadows of the evening played around us in the trees, but the path we were taking was brightly lit. Jake listened to me, and I was immensely grateful that he didn't ask the question that was there from the first moment I started talking. The answer to that question had torn my life in two.

"Have you traveled a lot?" I asked.

He smiled and ran his hand through his curly hair. And I honestly tried not to follow his moving fingers.

"Alice was always a fan of Eastern Europe." He smiled. "All the money she ever earned, starting with mowing lawns, walking neighbors' dogs, she always said she was saving for a trip. Of course, she persuaded me to come with her. Actually, I didn't need strong persuasion, I always wondered how different nations lived, and Eastern Europe was as good a place to start as any."

"Where did you go?" I asked.

"The longest we spent in Ukraine, but we also visited Poland, Moldova, Hungary, Slovakia," he said, bending his fingers. "On her twentieth birthday, we finally went on the trip she had always dreamed about."

"And what did your parents say?" I asked.

"They encouraged us to go. As they had us pretty late in life they were avid travelers before, so yes, I think it runs in the blood. The only condition for us to go was not to pause our education, so we spent one summer there, hopping from hostel to Airbnb to couch surfing."

"How was it? How did you even speak there?" I asked.

"Because of Alice's fascination with that region?—"

"That's really unexpected," I interrupted.

"That's Alice. She is what she is," he said, a warmth slipping into his words. "She started learning Ukrainian at age fifteen. So by the time we went, she spoke it pretty well, and it helped a lot. I mean tremendously. If in the big cities, you could find young people who spoke English, but in the smaller towns and everything in between it was impossible. She also tried really hard to mimic their accents. Overall, we got by."

"What was the most fascinating thing you saw there?" I asked.

"I think it was the people. They're different, they hide their smiles and hearts deep, but when you reach it, it blooms on their face. They are harder on the edges, many people struggle in places far from the cities. We went there to see different things, and Alice got what she wanted, a share of museums. You probably heard how she is fascinated by still art, architecture, food, and language. And I watched people, and that was the most captivating for me."

Jake was looking straight ahead, his mind lost in faraway places.

"So that's why I understand the need to travel," he said quietly.

I nodded. We walked in silence for a few minutes.

"Would you like to go back there? To live there?" I asked.

He shook his head, the curls falling to his eyes.

"To live there? No. To go back? Only to one place, maybe. What do you know about Kyiv?" he asked.

I searched my mind.

"Not much," I said.

He pulled his phone out of his pocket and scrolled through the gallery. And as we stood in the light of a park lamp, Jake took me to a place I had almost never heard of, showing the golden domes of churches, the long nine-story houses that looked like boxes with glued-on balconies that created an unusual kind of charm, people laughing, bridges, the wide river with green shores, Alice with a flower wreath in her silky hair. In those photos, I met the capital of a country so very far away. And it was beautiful.