Sweet Devil [BL]

Chapter 27. Freedom

The mature and responsible Misha put aside his grievances, and for almost an hour, he played house with little Vanessa. He poured invisible tea into an empty cup and listened to the nonsense the girl spouted. She talked about their inexistent children and how cute they were. They also had a dog named Pudding. Later on, the dog became a cat, but it was still named Pudding.

Misha almost lost his temper a few times, especially when Vanessa called him "wife" to attract his attention. Whenever he heard that nickname, which she said in an affectionate tone, he felt like throwing the tea set across the room. Thankfully, Misha always regained his calm just in time and refrained from breaking the toy into thousands of pieces.

Well, if he was honest, playing house with Vanessa was much better than keeping the old lady company. Once the thought crossed his mind, Misha became oddly obedient. Still, it was torture.

When Vanessa proposed to play together, Misha thought he could take the opportunity to ask her if she had a few pranks up her sleeves. Unlike Dereck, an honest boy at heart, she had always been mischievous and thus should be able to come up with one or two interesting ideas. However, he couldn't find the right time to ask. That girl was talking non-stop, and it was hard to interject.

As an adult, Vanessa understood that she couldn't monopolize the conversation, but this was a foreign concept for the child that she currently was. Hence, she was a chatterbox without an off-button. She clearly had inherited her great-grandmother's bad habit....

An hour went fast, and Alexy came to tell them that time was up. Misha heaved a sigh of relief while Vanessa made a pout, cutely pursing her lips. She still wanted to play! But that man wasn't like her father and didn't waver despite her teary eyes. Instead, his face became icier.

In the end, Vanessa could only accept her fate and tidy up, putting back the tea set into the box. She dragged her feet out of the playground, glancing back at the door every two seconds until they reached the elevator.

Soon after they went back to the room, Vanessa and her father had to leave. They had to drive quite a long distance, and the man worked the very next day. Thus, they couldn't stay for long.

At first, Misha wanted to ask Vanessa for her contact information. However, they lived far away from each other, and the present technology wasn't convenient to keep in touch; the phone bill to make a call between the two countries cost an arm and a leg. There was no way his father would allow him to use the phone only to call an unknown little girl who lived in the USA. To top it all, for Vanessa, he was only a playmate she met at the hospital, a kid like any other kid, and she'd soon forget him.

"It was nice to meet you!" Vanessa giggled. "Bye-bye!"

"Bye-bye," Misha waved at the girl. And as he watched her small back disappear into the corridor, he silently added, 'See you in fourteen years.'

After her eighteen birthday, Vanessa would be back in Canada. Her father was born in Toronto, and that was also where he had met Vanessa's mother. However, Dean went to America for his job after his wife's death. Later on, he decided to live there for the rest of his life. The rest of his family also followed him, and some already lived in the area of Buffalo.

Even though Vanessa loved her life in America, she never felt at home, always thinking of her mother's homeland. So, the moment she was of legal age, she left to study in Canada, where she also struggled to find a job and met the father of her daughter.

That was all Misha knew about his friend's past. Even if Vanessa talked a lot, she was still secretive about her private life. She loved to brag about her daughter, but Misha knew nothing of the child's father. Well, he also never asked. Misha wasn't the kind to dig up skeletons. If Vanessa didn't talk about something, he wouldn't delve deeper into the matter.