Russian Roulette: Flashbacks [male x male]

Ch. 6: What's twenty-five plus forty-eight?

Then

"Are you serious? Stallone, for sure."

"Piss off, Schwarzenegger!"

"What about Van Damme?"

"Lundgren was Master of the Universe. Just saying."

"Come on, we all know that when God said, 'Let there be light' Chuck Norris said, 'Say please'."

"Oh, we want to do Chuck Norris jokes?" Jace said with glee and cracked his knuckles. "Do you know why all mirrors shatter when Chuck Norris looks into them? Because even glass is not dumb enough to get between Chuck Norris and Chuck Norris."

"Please, no, don't get him started!"

Jace continued undeterred. "Did you know the quickest way to a man's heart is with Chuck Norris' fist?"

Loud groans followed.

The conversations flowed across the table where Cracker, Jace, Vlad, Malachai, Yelfim, and Phoenix sat.

It had not been planned at all.

Phoenix and Vlad had worked from three in the morning, videoconferencing with a company in Asia, and had decided to go to lunch before they would split up and head home for some much-needed sleep. They had put in their day's worth of work. They both had looked more dead than alive when they had left Phoenix's apartment and gone to the restaurant they usually ate at when having worked at Phoenix's. Having been too tired to walk, they had opted for the lazy solution, so Phoenix had driven them in his new car, though it was not that far away.

They had barely gotten a table, when the other guys had tumbled through the door, apparently wasting a few hours before some meeting with Gareth.

Nobody had asked, Malachai and Cracker had simply pushed some tables up to the one where Vlad and Phoenix had sat and joined them.

It had taken some getting used to, but over the six months since he had moved into his apartment and finally gotten into a work routine, and found a socializing balance with Gareth's men, Phoenix had slowly gotten to know people and felt more as part of the group. It had helped immensely that his Russian lessons had progressed smoothly, and he was fairly fluent in basic conversation, though he was still lost when they talked fast or used big words, and the written...

Yeah, fuck that shit.

It was annoying.

He would get the hang of it, honestly, what could they expect after only six months of lessons? Russian was systemized, vodka-induced gibberish. He had learned other languages, still, shit took time.

It was not like he had an eidetic memory and only needed to see or hear things once for it to be forever stored in his head. Depending on the subject, he came fairly close, but he felt it was desire based. If it was something he wanted to learn or needed to remember, it would be easier for him to recall in his mind, like everything business related. Passwords, rules, laws, and such trivialities, those stuck with him.

With everything else, it still took some time for him to have full clarity of the knowledge to recall the information without mistakes. Things he did not care about, like cooking or gossip, he would have a massive blank spot in his mind about whenever he tried to remember anything about it.

The same went for social interactions, even if he wanted to learn that desperately. It had taken him years to learn some basics, and there he still lived on the few things he had pounded into himself to remember. Each social encounter was a battle, and he often felt his knowledge was lacking, no matter how hard he tried to memorize the proper etiquette.