“Look at that aggressive grille! We’re taking it, Natasha. Tomorrow we’re going to sign the papers. I’ve already arranged everything with the manager at the dealership. They specifically put the car on reserve for us!” Andrey slammed a thick stack of heavy glossy brochures onto the kitchen table.
The dense coated paper, rustling dryly, slid across the glass tabletop, brazenly covering her dinner plate. Natalia froze with a fork in her hand, slowly shifting her gaze from the glossy image of a huge black SUV to her husband’s face. Andrey was glowing with absolute, impenetrable self-satisfaction. He bounced lightly on his heels, his hands shoved into the pockets of his sweatpants, and his entire posture made it clear that the issue of buying the car had already been settled. He smelled strongly of the expensive cologne she herself had given him for his last birthday.
“Four-wheel drive, three-liter engine, leather interior, panoramic roof,” Andrey continued, completely failing to notice how his wife’s face was gradually turning into a hard, unreadable mask. “Enough of humiliating ourselves by driving around in your red powder compact. I feel diminished on the road. Everyone cuts me off. A real man should drive powerful, high-status machinery. The price is three and a half million. I’ll scrape together one and a half from old acquaintances, and we’ll cover the rest with a car loan.”
“We’ll cover it?” Natalia said slowly, with surgical precision, moving her fork to the very edge of the table. “And who, may I ask, will this celebration of unprecedented generosity and masculine vanity be registered under?”
“Well, obviously under your name, Natasha,” Andrey smirked patronizingly, sitting down opposite her and casually pulling the plate of sliced cheese toward himself as if he owned the place. “I don’t have official income right now. These banks run their stupid checks, demand income statements and proof of employment for the past year. But you have a stable official salary, a position as head of the logistics department, and a perfect credit history. They’ll approve two million for you in five minutes right through the mobile app, no unnecessary questions. I’ve already calculated everything carefully. The payment will be around fifty thousand a month. Not stressful for our budget at all.”
Natalia looked at the man with whom she had shared a living space for the past three years and felt a tight, hard spring of primal rage twisting inside her. He sat before her — thirty years old, healthy, utterly convinced of his own irresistibility, a male whose only real income over the past year consisted of rare, random earnings from reselling car rims. And now this man was seriously suggesting that she hang a multimillion-ruble burden around her own neck for the sake of a piece of black metal.
“So the plan is this,” Natalia said, crossing her arms over her chest, her tone so icy and sharp that the air in the kitchen seemed to cool instantly. “You borrow one and a half million from friends, money you have no idea how you’ll repay. I take out a bank loan of two million rubles in my own name at outrageous interest. I also pay for the insurance. Then you ceremoniously get behind the wheel of this tank, drive your backside around the city, collect camera fines, and I tear half my salary away every month and hand it over to the bank?”
“Oh, why do you immediately start whining?!” Andrey snapped irritably, waving a piece of cheese as his good-natured smile vanished at once, replaced by his usual aggressive arrogance. “We’re one family. We’re supposed to invest in shared assets! This car will sharply increase my status. I’ll be able to pull up properly to business meetings instead of hiding your girly hatchback around the corner from the business center! You’re always clamping down on money when it comes to normal, promising things. I’m a man. I need a foundation and resources to get started!”
At that moment, the spring inside Natalia snapped with a deafening crack, releasing all the rage that had built up over months. She lunged forward sharply, planting her fists hard against the glass table.
“A two-million loan on me?! So you can drive around in a jeep while I pay the interest?! Have you completely lost your conscience?! You don’t have a job or even an employment record! You want to drag me into a debt pit for the sake of your show-off nonsense?! I’d rather get divorced than sign a single piece of paper for you, you miserable freeloader!” the wife shouted at her husband, and each of her words struck him hard, sharp and merciless.
Andrey recoiled, instinctively pressing his back against the chair. He was used to petty domestic arguments, used to successfully manipulating her sense of duty, but he clearly had not expected such open, concentrated aggression.
“Watch your mouth!” he barked back, trying to regain control of the situation and deliberately lowering his voice into a rough bass. “What kind of freeloader am I to you?! I’m looking for normal, profitable opportunities. I’m not going to slave away for pennies in some stuffy office from nine to six like you! I’m planning a serious business, and a representative-class car is a working tool! You’re just narrow-minded. You think in the categories of your dull accounting and can’t see beyond your own nose!”
“Your only working tool is your outstanding ability to professionally wear out the sofa upholstery and methodically destroy the food from my fridge!” Natalia shot back, without lowering the intensity. “Two million for your toys?! Last month you couldn’t even be bothered to put gas in my car after taking it for the weekend under the excuse of urgent business. You brought it back with an empty tank, crumbs all over the interior, and a speeding fine from a bus lane camera! And now you stand here and demand that I buy you status with my own hard-earned money?”
“I said we’re buying the car!” Andrey slammed his palm down on the glossy brochure, trying to crush her with his authority and physical advantage. “I won’t let you keep me on a short leash because of your pathetic income! I’m a man, and I make the strategic decisions in this house!”
Natalia slowly straightened. There was not a single ounce of doubt or fear in her eyes, only the hard, cold calculation of a person who had finally realized the full scale of the catastrophe called “living together with a parasite.”
“Natasha, just listen first. Don’t be so rash,” Andrey suddenly changed tactics, realizing that brute pressure had failed. He leaned back in his chair, casually crossed one leg over the other, and put on the condescending smile of a seasoned businessman. “I’m not an idiot. I calculated everything down to the last kopeck. I’m not just taking this car to drive around for fun. It’s a smart, targeted investment in the future. I’ll work in the elite segment. VIP taxi, understand? I’ll drive top managers and businessmen to airports and important meetings. I’ve already checked the aggregator requirements. The average fare for one ride there is more than you make in a week in your precious logistics. I’ll wear a strict suit and open doors for clients. I’ll pay off this loan in six months at most, and I’ll bring decent money into our family budget on top of that.”
Natalia silently looked at him. There was not a drop of belief in her gaze, only rapidly growing, cold, merciless contempt. She slowly reached toward the center of the table and gathered the neatly arranged glossy brochures with photos of shining SUVs into one pile.
“VIP taxi, then?” she hissed through her teeth. Her fingers dug forcefully into the thick coated paper. “Planning to drive top managers around? Did you forget how exactly one year ago you borrowed three hundred thousand from my mother for your super-profitable mobile upholstery dry-cleaning business?”
“That was completely different! The market dipped, competitors crushed everything with dumping prices, I’m not responsible for macroeconomic factors,” Andrey tried to interrupt her, but Natalia did not even blink.
With a sharp motion full of primal fury, she tore the thick advertising brochure in half. The heavy paper gave way with a loud, nasty ripping sound, destroying the image of the perfect leather interior.
“His market dipped!” Natalia’s voice gained momentum, turning into a hard metallic clang that struck the eardrums. “Your expensive washing vacuum and giant canisters of professional chemicals are still rotting on our balcony, buried under old tires! You went on exactly two jobs, ruined someone’s expensive white sofa, got chewed out by the furious apartment owner, and then declared that such dirty work was beneath your level of development! Who paid my mother back? I did! With my quarterly bonuses and overtime!”
She folded the torn halves together and, with frightening methodical precision, tore them again, turning her husband’s dream into useless pieces of trash. Andrey jerked forward, instinctively trying to snatch the expensive catalogs from her hands, but Natalia flung the scraps straight into his face. Pieces of glossy paper scattered across the kitchen, drifting onto the floor, the stove, and clinging to his home T-shirt.
“Hey! Are you even normal?! These are dealership documents. They cost money!” Andrey squealed, swatting away the paper rain flying at him. His face was covered in ugly red blotches from burning humiliation.
“And six months ago?” Natalia continued advancing, planting her fists hard on the tabletop and looming over her husband. “Your brilliant startup reselling exclusive sneakers from China? You begged one hundred and fifty thousand from me to buy the first experimental batch. You promised that in a month we’d be rolling in money and opening our own trendy showroom downtown. And where is that showroom, businessman? Two huge cardboard boxes of crookedly stitched fakes that stink of cheap glue are lying in the storage room! Even schoolkids in the yard refused to buy them for pennies! I’m still paying off that consumer loan, denying myself decent clothes!”
“I was finding myself! Business always involves huge risks!” Andrey raised his voice, gripping the edges of the chair with trembling fingers. “You can’t hit the jackpot without trying different niches! You’re just a limited coward clinging with a death grip to your miserable office stability! If you had supported me properly, energetically and financially, we would have been living on a completely different level long ago!”
“You’re not looking for yourself. You’re looking for free sponsors who will pay for your comfortable existence!” Natalia cut him off, sweeping the remaining brochures from the table and mercilessly destroying them as well. Another batch of torn glossy paper struck Andrey sharply in the chest. “I’d rather go to prison for tax evasion than take out a multimillion-ruble loan in my name for an unemployed dreamer! Your vows aren’t worth even the torn paper now lying under your feet! You’re not capable of paying a car loan. You’ve never even paid for the internet in this apartment once in your life!”
Andrey jumped up from his chair, breathing heavily. His nostrils flared predatorily; he clenched and unclenched his fists, feverishly searching for words that could break through the impenetrable wall of her cold, reinforced-concrete correctness.
“You’re just jealous of my large-scale goals!” he spat, aggressively pointing a finger at his wife. “It benefits you to artificially keep me in the role of a dependent so you can assert yourself against me! I’m a man. I have enormous managerial potential, and you’re methodically clipping my wings with your petty female nagging! Any adequate bank would give me that money with their eyes closed if not for their stupid automated scoring systems!”
“Your managerial potential ends exactly where the need begins to get up at seven in the morning and go to a real job,” Natalia said, enunciating each word. “Your large-scale ambitions are fed by the groceries I personally drag home from the supermarket after a twelve-hour workday. Your strategic business decisions are made while lying on the sofa that I bought with my salary. You are an absolute zero. An empty space wrapped in a pretty package made of my money. If you so much as stutter one more time about cars, loans, or your genius plans, you will fly out of this apartment to your mother that very second — with that upholstery-cleaning vacuum tucked under your arm!”
Andrey stood in the middle of the kitchen, sprinkled with scraps of his torn-up dream cars, his face twisted with powerless rage. His perfect, carefully thought-out plan had collapsed, mercilessly crushed by harsh facts. In that second, he hated her with his entire soul for exposing his worthlessness so easily and cynically, rubbing his nose in his own failures. He could not find a single worthy argument, and the realization of his own pathetic position made him literally shake.
“You’re just an unstable, completely impossible woman who doesn’t know how to value a purposeful man beside her!” Andrey sharply and aggressively pulled his expensive smartphone from the pocket of his sweatpants. His fingers nervously tapped across the screen, searching for the right contact in his phone book. “Since you don’t understand normal, logical arguments, since you flatly refuse to invest in our future grand success, we’re going to talk in a completely different way now. I won’t allow you to wipe your feet on me without consequences and devalue my carefully designed business strategies!”
He pressed the call button, demonstratively tapped the speaker icon, and tossed the phone onto the glass table covered with glossy scraps of car brochures. The device gave several long rings before the call was answered. Andrey leaned both hands on the back of the chair, his whole demeanor showing the superiority of a man who had called in heavy artillery to suppress a mutiny on the ship.
“Hello, Mom?” he said loudly, with obvious theatrical anguish in his voice, looking straight into his wife’s eyes. “Can you imagine what she’s doing here?! I found the perfect, one-hundred-percent way to rise up, to open a prestigious line in elite VIP transportation, and she’s refusing to sign some lousy bank papers! She refuses to take out a loan for the car! And she’s insulting me with the worst words, calling me a dependent and a kept man!”
“Andryusha, my son, what on earth is going on in your home?” Galina Nikolaevna, Andrey’s mother, immediately poured out her outraged, creaky voice from the smartphone speaker. “Natalia, are you out of your mind? Is that how you speak to your lawful husband, you shameless woman? A man is the unconditional leader of the family. His large-scale ideas must be supported from every side, directed properly, not slapped down at the first useful initiative! He is trying for your future, losing sleep at night, building global plans!”
Natalia slowly placed both hands on the edge of the table, looming over the glowing phone screen. A terrifying, absolutely cold and predatory smile appeared on her face — the smile of a person who had just been handed the perfect target for destruction. All the exhaustion that had accumulated over years of marriage was right now transforming into pure, concentrated verbal acid.
“For our future, Galina Nikolaevna?” Natalia said, hammering out every syllable, her voice harder than steel. “Your genius son makes plans exclusively for the uninterrupted transfer of my personally earned money into his bottomless childish wants. He is seriously demanding that I hang an enormous two-million-ruble debt around my neck at wild interest so he can drive his lazy backside around in an expensive leather seat and soothe his cheap boyish complexes in front of former classmates!”
“A man vitally needs high status!” her mother-in-law shrieked from the speaker, instantly rising into a piercing pitch. “Without an expensive, presentable car, no serious investor will even speak to him! You are legally married. You must have one shared pot! Take out that loan immediately if your husband asks you to! A woman is obligated to believe in her chosen man and provide him with reliable financial backing!”
“My only obligation in this house is to provide for myself,” Natalia cut her off sharply, paying no attention to Andrey twitching nearby, clearly not expecting such powerful resistance. “And your beloved son, Galina Nikolaevna, is a thirty-year-old overgrown drone. And that is entirely the result of your upbringing. All his life you pampered him, protected him from even the smallest amount of physical labor, and told him every day that he was born exclusively for great accomplishments. As a result, you raised an absolutely useless, infantile creature who can’t even pay for the electricity he uses in this apartment, let alone earn himself the piece of meat he is currently chewing so diligently!”
Natalia did not give her mother-in-law a single chance to insert even a sound, methodically hammering in every word like a rusty nail into the lid of their family idyll’s coffin.
“You molded him into a peacock, absolutely convinced that the whole world must fall at his feet before his genius ideas, ideas backed by nothing except primitive arrogance! So take your adored treasure back to your own square meters! Let him give presentations there, draw graphs, and take out loans against your pension for the sake of his cheap boyish showing off!”
Natalia jabbed the smartphone screen hard with her finger, ruthlessly cutting off the call. The screen went dark, severing Galina Nikolaevna from further participation in her son’s fate. The air in the kitchen became so dense and dry that it was physically hard to breathe. Scraps of torn glossy SUVs still lay scattered across the floor, a visible symbol of destroyed illusions and ruined plans.
“Have you completely lost your mind?!” Andrey growled, lunging forward and planting his fists predatorily on the glass tabletop. His face twisted with fury as he tried to crush his wife with his mass, looming over her with his entire large frame. “Who the hell are you to lecture my mother?! I don’t need anything from you or from your apartment at all! I’ll achieve everything myself, without your pathetic handouts! I’ll find real investors. I’ll rise so high that you’ll come crawling back to me on your knees, begging me to let you back into my successful life!”
Natalia did not flinch. She did not step back even a millimeter. Her face bore an expression of absolute, concentrated superiority — that of a predator who had finally cornered its prey and was now enjoying its helplessness.
“You don’t need anything?” Her voice dropped into an even, steel whisper that sliced through the room sharper than a surgical scalpel. “Perfect. Absolutely perfect. I’m holding you to your word, independent businessman. Since you don’t need anything from me, we will right now, without moving from this spot, conduct a full inventory of your imaginary independence. Take off the watch.”
“What?” Andrey blinked rapidly, thrown off by her unshakable reaction. All his fighting spirit had crashed into a reinforced-concrete wall of complete indifference.
“The watch,” Natalia briefly indicated his left wrist with her eyes, where a massive chronograph from a well-known Swiss brand gleamed dully. “The very same watch for two hundred and fifty thousand rubles that I bought you for your anniversary. You whined for a week back then that you were ashamed to show up to important meetings with potential partners wearing cheap stamped metal on your wrist. Take it off immediately. You’re our proud male, achieving everything on your own. You don’t need other people’s things.”
“This was my personal gift! My property!” Andrey instinctively jerked back, covering his wrist with his right hand. In his widened pupils splashed genuine, pitiful panic at the realization that his most valuable status symbol was being taken from him right now.
“Gifts are given to beloved men and reliable partners,” Natalia said mercilessly, taking a step toward him and forcing him to press his lower back against the kitchen cabinets. “And you are an unprofitable commercial project that has finally gone bankrupt and is subject to immediate liquidation. Take off the watch and put it on the table. Next to it, place the keys to my apartment. Right now. No unnecessary talking.”
“You have no right…” Andrey tried to hiss, but his voice cracked treacherously, stripping the phrase of even the slightest hint of threat.
“I have every right to dispose of my personal property,” she interrupted, staring hard and unblinking straight into his darting eyes. “And now listen to my ultimatum, great schemer. Your comfortable full-board life officially ends this very second. No more hot two-course dinners, no more paid sports-channel subscriptions, no more soft sofas at my expense. You have exactly two possible scenarios.”
Natalia paused briefly, allowing the meaning of her words to sink deep into her husband’s mind.
“Option one: right now, in your stretched-out sweatpants and perfumed T-shirt, you step out into the stairwell. I turn the lock twice, and you go sleep on the cold bench by the entrance, where you can spend the night building your global strategies for conquering the premium transportation market.”
She swept her eyes over his tense, hunched figure.
“Option two: it is now just after nine in the evening. You go into the hallway, put on your old sneakers, go downstairs, and start looking for real work. Not mythical investments, not fashionable startups, but the hardest, dirtiest physical labor. Unloading trucks at a vegetable depot, mixing icy concrete at a night construction site, washing tiles in a twenty-four-hour supermarket — I absolutely do not care where you find a use for your hands. Tomorrow by seven in the morning, you must be standing in this very spot and place five thousand rubles in cash on this glass table. That will be your one-time payment for the right to enter my bathroom, eat a piece of my bread, and sleep on my sofa until noon. If you don’t bring real money, you stay outside forever.”
Andrey breathed heavily and unevenly. He stared, trapped, at the woman he had considered, just half an hour earlier, a convenient and unfailing resource for satisfying his needs. His mother-in-law had been cut off from the broadcast. The expensive brochures of dream cars lay on the floor in pathetic scraps. In Natalia’s eyes, there was not a drop of pity, not a shadow of doubt — only cold, merciless calculation and the readiness to go all the way.
His fingers trembled. He slowly lowered his gaze to his wrist, unfastened the metal clasp, and pulled off the heavy chronograph. The metal made a dry, unpleasant sound as it touched the glass tabletop. Then Andrey put his hand into the pocket of his sweatpants, took out a set of keys, and placed them next to the watch. At that moment, all his fake swagger, all his staged alpha-male confidence finally crumbled away, leaving behind only the pitiful shell of a grown man who had lost on every front.
Andrey turned around and, without raising his eyes, trudged heavily toward the dark hallway…
