He knows what he's supposed to do, has memorized every step of it. He thinks he's gotten it down to a science, but then there's Florence watching him wounded as he boards the plane back to Moscow.
It seems like such a simple thing. He wonders what he'd done wrong this time.
Because with Svetlana, he's pretty sure that it was the chess. And the kids, probably. He should never have agreed to having them - but she'd wanted them so badly, and the sex had been phenomenal, and all in all he didn't mind toiling away the hours in bed when he was younger, excited and sweaty and laughing.
They'd been young, and supposedly, young love was the shortest-lived.
So it made sense. (Right?)
And besides, he's pretty sure he never loved Svetlana anyways, because love from what he's heard is some powerful, all-consuming thing and he's never felt like that about her. He's never wanted to write poems about her eyelashes or plant his kisses along the column of her neck in the hopes that they'll stay there forever, and he's never felt gooey and desperate and wonderful just being near her.
His marriage had been a mistake. And love, well, love sounded like something he really wanted to experience - if not with Svetlana, then anyone else.
There were plenty of other fish in the sea.
So he went about trying to catch some of them, and catch them he did. There had been a dark-eyed woman in Madrid, once, and a brown-skinned beauty when he'd visited Berlin, and thousands of beautiful, powerful women, with supple skin and long legs wrapped around his waist and it had been fantastic, they'd all been fantastic.
And there had been Florence, too, who thought so similarly to him, and some part of him had been determined to make her into The One, capital letters and all.
A year had passed. They cohabited. They had sex (a lot of it.) Sometimes she cried and he held her and his heart twinged a little at the thought that somewhere, Freddie Trumper was doing the same, and his wife and both of his children and he'd done this to all of these people and he didn't know how the hell to fix it, and still he had nothing to show for it.
Sometimes he thought that maybe they were all just making it up. Living in a fairy tale. And then he'd see a couple entwined with their eyes so dark and their smiles so subtle, arms around each other like they wanted to meld together into one person, one beating heart. And he believed them.
Love, he began to realize, was just not something that he was equipped to feel.
Maybe he should stop pretending.
So then there was Svetlana, again, and yeah, Florence would probably hate him. Hundreds of women would probably hate him for everything he'd whispered in their ears, hoping desperately that this would be the one, or the next, or the next.
But he had a family to take care of, and maybe he didn't love Svetlana but he loved her, sort of, and the children too, and he was going to stop chasing someone else's fairytale.
He was a big boy. He had to grow up sometime.