The Soldier - S.R. Jones Page 0,17

down. This belongs in the good column, right? So what if Tim doesn’t give me butterflies? He’s kind and caring and steady. I need steady after the crazy that is my life. If he asks me, I’ll say yes because I know it’s the right thing to do. The adult thing.

He likes reading like me, although very different things. I love the classics, whereas he enjoys reading sports biographies. I like musicals, sweeping historic sagas, and war films. He enjoys superhero films and anime. My favorite food is Italian, and his is Thai. I’ve always wanted to go to Russia, China, and Vietnam. India and Nepal. To visit different cultures and meet different people. Tim likes holidaying here in the UK. He doesn’t like the heat, but he also doesn’t like the cold. Says the UK climate is perfect.

I want a dog, but he likes his goldfish.

Yes, we have our differences, but he cares for me, and he’s kind. My mum used to say that kindness was the most underrated of human qualities, and I tend to agree. My grandmother says it too, and I bet it’s where Mum got it from.

Still, there’s a part of me, a tiny, hidden away part that longs for adventure and something … more. I love reading the grand Russian novels. In some ways, I long for the romance, but also the tragedy of Anna Karenina, or to live through the history depicted in War and Peace. There’s a wildness to me, and I stamp it down ruthlessly because that very wildness became a sickness in my mother, and that’s my biggest fear. The temptation is always there, though, a tiny niggling voice telling me to live. To go right to the edge of life and truly feel.

There’s a terror in that, though. Mum felt, deeply. She lived right up at that edge. When some might shed a tear at a sad film, Mum would sob. When some danced self-consciously, Mum threw her arms to the heavens and spun around until dizzy and giddy. She was beautiful, and she burned too bright. I’m scared of burning at all.

A safe life is a good life. No one really wants to live through seismic history. What was it my great gran used to say about living through the war?

“It wasn’t like the films, Cassie,” she’d say when I begged her to tell me stories as a child. “It was mundane and yet terrible. A boring, endless horror. Every day waiting to see if you’d be bombed. Hearing about deaths of those you loved. There was no glamor, not really. We only recall the glamor in the retelling.”

So I tell myself to grow up. To accept my small life and be happy with it because the alternative could be so much worse.

And yet … I still get these crazy romantic ideas sometimes. Flights of fancy about traveling to far flung lands or living through great history.

I start as a figure comes into focus through the cloudy, wet glass.

Konstantin.

What a name! He could be a character from one of my grand novels. He’s not. He’s a customer here at the coffee shop. A regular. He comes in most days during the week, and each time my stupid, naïve little heart beats double time.

The first moment I saw him, I felt it, the wildness within me stirring, clawing to be free.

I crave the moments he comes, but I also dread them.

I dread them because the way he makes me feel with one look, a sideways glance, or a flash of a smile is so much more than how my boyfriend makes me feel with his deep declarations of love, his kindness, and his care.

My traitorous soul yearns for a man I barely know, above my lovely, thoughtful boyfriend. A man who probably isn't very nice.

Konstantin is dangerous. I understand this despite not knowing much about him.

The way he carries himself tells you that he’s not a man to be trifled with. He has more magnetism in his little finger than most people have in their whole being. He’s somehow regal as if he's a monarch and everyone else mere minions, but he's rough too, and it's a fascinating juxtaposition.

The first time I saw him, I had been cleaning tables, and he’d come in for a coffee. I’d noticed him straightaway. Who wouldn’t? The man is well over six feet tall and powerfully built. He’s the epitome of tall, dark, and handsome but with an edge of danger and threat.

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