“How long?” Mikhail asked, looking at him in surprise.

  Shane shrugged. “A year and a half, but who’s keeping score?”

  Mikhail’s eyes practically bulged out. “Oh God. A year and a half? I hope you’ve been relieving yourself, or you’ll kill me!”

  Shane turned to him, laughing—hard. Mikhail just watched him, his head thrown back, his teeth glinting a little in the pale soda light above the parking lot, and wondered how such a generous man had ended up buying him dinner. Oh God—he wanted this man to come back. He wanted to laugh with him some more, talk with him some more. He was funny and had good stories and would risk irritating his date to put a poor cat out of its misery, and he kept his promises.

  His mouth went suddenly dry. “I’m sorry,” he said suddenly. “I… I should make you stay away. I… you would be very happy with the teacher woman. I could find you someone else—my boss is Russian, she would make you a very good wife….”

  Shane stopped laughing, and his exasperation came back, but this time, instead of saying anything, he grabbed Mikhail by the front of the jacket and hauled him in for a kiss.

  Mikhail shut up and opened his mouth. Mmmmm… so good… so very good. Shane’s lips were firm, and his tongue tasted like coffee and caramel. One hand was still clutching Mikhail’s jacket, but the other was cupping the back of Mikhail’s skull, holding his head in place so he could adjust the angle of the kiss and plunder some more. Mikhail whimpered and clutched at Shane’s shoulders. They were broad and solid, and Mikhail inched his hands under the bomber jacket so he could feel Shane’s warmth seeping through a yellow shirt. Mikhail wanted closer than that. He fumbled with the buttons on the shirt and pulled back, indignant.

  “You have a T-shirt on!” He had not pulled back that far, and Shane’s face was only inches away—just far enough in the darkness to see his lips curve up in a faint smile.

  “Shut up and keep kissing me,” he commanded, and Mikhail was helpless. He was fumbling again at the shirt when Shane caught him by surprise and simply pushed his hands up Mikhail’s stomach and under his own dress shirt, and they were warm and sensual, and they touched his tender skin with appreciation. Mikhail gasped, heard Shane chuckle, and then Shane’s big hands were circling, rubbing the bare skin of his back, sliding down the back of Mikhail’s jeans, and Mikhail groaned and tilted his head back.

  Shane kissed his chin and then his throat and then the skin on the side of his neck, still warmed by the brown wool scarf. Mikhail turned his head a little, and Shane kissed his way up to his ear, his tongue coming out to play with the little stud he wore, and then he was breathing harshly into the hollow.

  “Mikhail?”

  “Da?”

  “I’m not fucking you in the parking lot in front of your mother’s apartment.” His voice was unsteady, panting, breathless—and unbelievably firm.

  “I hate you very much a lot.” To emphasize this, Mikhail grabbed one of Shane’s hands and brought it to the front of his own jeans and then arched his aching cock against Shane’s palm. Shane squeezed his hand, and Mikhail knew he was watching Mikhail's expression. He let go and shut his eyes, throwing his head back against the car seat, then stayed there for a minute until his breathing evened out.

  “I’m not so happy with myself at the moment,” he acknowledged, and Mikhail blew out a breath.

  “Next week?” he asked uncertainly, and Shane opened his eyes and looked at Mikhail sideways, which did terrible things to a pulse that was thundering as it was.

  “You can count on it. I’ll bring dinner. What do you want me to cook?”

  Mikhail stared back at him with stunned eyes and shook his head with a shrug. “I have no idea. I’ll tell Mutti—she will be pleased to have company who is not church people, telling her to repent.”

  Shane reached out a hand, his head still tilted back, and cupped Mikhail’s cheek then rubbed his swollen mouth with a rough thumb. “I promise to behave for your mother, Mikhail—I’ll try not to be too weird for her.”

  Mikhail captured the hand and closed his eyes. “You are not weird,” he whispered, and then he grabbed his food from under the seat and got out of the car before he could say anything else embarrassing. When he got to his stairs and up the door, he heard the car start up, and he turned around and waved with an unsteady hand. Shane’s hand appeared out the window and waved back, and Mikhail started up the stairs again. It wasn’t until he got to the top of the stairs that he realized he still had the scarf around his neck.

  The front door of his apartment opened into the kitchen, and he went straight to the shelves for the dishes.

  “You are late, mal’chik. I was worried.”

  Yes. She would worry. “I’m sorry, Mutti,” he called, putting the cool food into a bowl and setting it into the microwave to warm. “A friend came and took me to eat. I brought you some.” He walked into the living room and gave his mother the expected kiss on the cheek.

  “A friend, yes? What did you bring me?”

  He smiled and turned on the way to his room. “Panda Express,” he told her proudly, and was pleased at the way she lit up.

  “Oh, it is a very good friend—did he give you that scarf?”

  Mikhail grimaced. “He lent it to me—it was a gift for him, he could scarcely gift it back to me, now could he?”

  Ylena nodded, her expression catlike. “I suppose not. And yet he buys you food and lets you wear his scarf and maybe buys you coffee, if I smell right?”

  Mikhail’s slight grin betrayed a lot of things, but then, he could never hide anything from his mother. “Da. But he is not for me.” He turned to go.

  “Wait—why not?”

  Mikhail’s expression grew sober, and his lovely, light mood fell with it. “He keeps his promises, Mama, and we both know I do not.”

  He tried to go then, but he was not fast enough. Her eyes grew bright and she said, “You need to forgive yourself, mal’chik.”

  “Mutti….”

  “Nyet!” And she so rarely spoke angrily that he had to stop and walk deliberately back to her to have this out.

  “We cannot change the past,” he said, cursing his damned voice. It had been running riot all day, and it was time to get it under control.

  “We can change the way you look at it!” she retorted. “You were young and desperate, and it was not your fault.”

  “I said I’d take care of you—”

  “Yes!” she snapped. “You were nine years old and promising me you would take care of me! You should have been playing in school, but instead you were dancing to support us both—”

  “We both know that school was not as idyllic as it sounds,” he said, raw. Not where they had lived before the apartment and the food coupons that dancing had given them.

  “I should have known you were hurt!”

  “Mutti…”

  “Don’t ‘Mutti’ me—we both know I should have. I should have seen the drugs before they ended your career…. I should have seen what you were doing for them before they ended your life….”

  “Mutti!” He hated this conversation. He hated it—it was wrong. She had been so young—hell, when he’d been recruited for the ballet in the first place, she’d been scarcely as old as he was now.

  “We will have this conversation,” she muttered, overriding his protests, “and we will have it my way, and we will have it before it can destroy you anymore for not having it. Why has it never occurred to you, my sweet boy, that I was as much to blame for Olek’s death as you were?”

  “It was not your promise to make!” he shouted. “It was mine! I told him I would be back. I told him I would never leave him. I was the one who lied to him, who did not mention that my mother was trying to get us out of Russia for once and forever—”

  “And I was the one who locked you in your room so you could see what the drugs were doing to you!” she shouted back. “I tied you to your bed so you could feel withdrawals, feel it, so you would know why we needed to leave so you could overcome it. I was the one who did not listen to you when you told me your friend was alone and sad. I was the one who did not let you out until it was too late. I am sick and I am dying, and why can you not give me some of the blame, Mikhail? It will sit more lightly on my shoulders when I am dead than it will on yours as you use it to poison your life!”

  Mikhail’s hand was trembling as he used the heel of it to press against his eyes, but for some reason they would not stop blurring. “I told him I’d be back,” he said brokenly. He squeezed his eyes shut again and saw Olek, cold and blue, his flesh long since stiff in the tiny pallet of the back room they’d used to turn tricks and shoot up. The needle was still in his arm—he’d shot a week’s worth of stash in one go. Next to him had been the note Mikhail left in Cyrillic: Gone home to give my mother the rent. No worries. Back in an hour. Don’t shoot it all.

  Yes, yes, the fucker had broken that promise and had shot it all, but damn it to fucking hell, Mikhail had broken his promises first.

  In the silence between them, the microwave dinged that the food was warm, and he moved mechanically to go get it. He brought it back with a placemat and a fork and set it on the table in front of her, and she caught his hand and pulled him down to her, framing his wet face in her hands and kissing his cheek fiercely.

  “I’m sorry your friend died back when you were a lost child, mal’chik, but I am not sorry it was not you. Of all the fucking awful things I did as a mother, seeing you grown is the one I will not regret.”

  Mikhail couldn’t look at her. He gave her cheek his own fierce kiss and straightened. He would not speak of Olek again. Poor Olek, who had shown him how to bend over and take it when the loneliness had gotten so bad, and how to shoot up when the pain did not leave the knee because he came back too early to dance on it, and how to turn tricks when they could no longer dance. He’d started life as a sweet boy with red hair and blue eyes and whose one true evil in life had been the same as the heroin that killed him. All of his efforts had been to stop Mikhail’s pain in the “now,” and he had not known how to stop it for the “later.” Well, now it was later, and Mikhail had to live through the pain, and he had done it by being alone, by not being in the position to let anybody down again.

  Except his mother.

  And now Shane.

  “You are a wonderful mother,” he said roughly. “When you die, that should not be a weight that sits your shoulders, you understand?”

  “And you are a good man. When I am dead, that should not be a thing you worry about, either,” she said thickly.

  He nodded and made his way heavily to his back bedroom to take off his denim jacket. He took off the scarf as well, but not before he’d buried his nose in its softness for comfort. It still smelled like Shane—right down to the Chinese food and the coffee and the innocence.

  He couldn’t help it. He held it to his face and breathed it in again and again and used it to blot his cheeks, in spite of how scratchy wool got when you did that. When he was done, he folded it carefully and put it on top of the box, where it sat neatly since it would not fit inside.

  He might give it back to Shane when he came back the next week—but only if Shane asked.

  Chapter 8

  …the house is haunted and the ride gets rough…

  “Tunnel of Love”—Bruce Springsteen

  THEY sat side by side on the floor of the small apartment with their arms wrapped around their knees and watched Up. Shane had tried very hard not to cry like a woman in the first ten minutes, and he had caught Mikhail’s wry glance at him, complete with rolled eyes.

  Shane had slugged him in the arm and ignored him after that, and they became completely immersed in the children’s movie. Mikhail’s mother lay stretched out on the couch behind them, just as captivated as they were.

  Shane liked her very much—he was sorry she was sick; he would have liked to have known her for a long time.

  Dinner had gone well—he’d made that chicken, mayonnaise, and cheese thing with the potato chips on top, and Ylena had been pleased at the gift if not the taste. There was no reason to inform her that the masterpiece had been completed with a maximum of fuss, a destroyed kitchen, and three phone calls to Benny to make sure he was doing it right.

  “It’s chicken, mayonnaise, and cheese, Shane—add in some pimentos and some almonds, and how hard can it be?”

  “I don’t know!” Shane had wailed, looking at the mess the frozen chicken thighs had made as they boiled over on his stove. “But I seem to be finding every damned thing to do wrong that is possible to do wrong.”

  He opened one of the bags of potato chips he’d bought for the project and started munching on it glumly. Deacon had dragged him and Jon an extra mile that morning, and he was starving.

  “Look,” Benny was saying, “clean up the shit on the stove, because if the water boils away and there’s more fat than water, it’ll catch fire.”

  “SHIT!” Because the warning came a little late, and Benny spent some minutes being entertained on the other end of the line as he took a pot lid and beat the fire out.

  When he was done and she’d walked him through the rest of the process, she’d said, “Okay, Shane, give. Who is this for?”

  Shane was drinking a beer by then—something he rarely did, actually—and eating more potato chips, but he still wasn’t relaxed and happy enough to answer that question.

  “I’m not telling,” he said, knowing it sounded petulant and not being able to change that.

  “Jesus, Perkins, what are you, five?”

  “It’s not that,” he muttered, still unable to put a finger on it. “It’s just… Benny, I’m not sure this will work out, you know? I don’t want to…. You guys are good enough to take me into your home… not random strangers who might not come back.”

  Benny sighed, and in spite of the fact that he was pretty sure his latest batch of casserole might not suck, he could feel the moment weighing heavier than it had.

  “The thing is,” the girl on the line said with a great deal of thoughtfulness, “who exactly do you think is going to pick you up if this doesn’t work out? It would help if we met the guy, you know?”

  Shane grinned and tried to make things a little lighter. “Who says it’s a guy?”

  Benny laughed. “The girl who lives with two gay men, that’s who. Guys don’t cook to impress girls—not often, anyway. But I’m pretty sure Crick learned to cook just especially to take care of Deacon.”

  Shane had to concede that was true.

  “Just please,” Benny said anxiously, “please tell us if something goes wrong. If he breaks your heart. Deacon almost killed himself grieving when Crick left—we just need some warning if we’re going to have to scrape you off the floor, okay?”

  Shane couldn’t answer that. He just kept thinking about the empty apartment he’d come home to after his real, physical heart had actually stopped on the surgery table. The knowledge that he had a group of people who wanted to be there if he broke his figurative heart made him humble.

  “I promise,” he told her gruffly, and then he’d asked her if Deacon would want a dog for Christmas, and if he bought the yarn, could she please, please, pretty please make him another wool scarf in blue.

  And so far so good. It helped that he arrived not only with the casserole but also with the book Mikhail had eyed for his mother the week before—at least in Ylena’s eyes.

  Mikhail had glared at him as he’d pulled the book out of the back of the car. Shane had given him a ride home and at Mikhail’s glare, he’d given a very cheesy impression of a smile.

  “Beware of geeks bearing gifts?” he tried lamely, and that had startled the glare right off the little dancer’s face.

  “I was just thinking that you are very sly as well as stubborn,” Mikhail replied sweetly. “I shall have to remember that when trying to convince you to go away.”

  The man had been edgy since Shane had picked him up, and Shane was pretty sure that this was the part of the dance where Mikhail was going to try to bolt and run. He’d been waiting for it—he wasn’t even surprised that it had come so soon.

  “Of course you’re going to try to make me go away,” Shane sighed, hefting the casserole and the book and shutting his door with his hip. “Where’s the fun in courting someone without the constant, terrifying fear of rejection?”

  He turned to walk up the stairs then, and Mikhail was suddenly right next to him. “You are just going to leave your car here without setting the alarm? In this neighborhood?”

  Shane shrugged. “It’s not like I’m going to be here all night. Besides, my hands are full.” It wasn’t necessarily true—he wasn’t that clumsy, but Mikhail was already reaching for the keys in his pocket, and Shane liked the excuse of getting that close. It was funny, too, that as Mikhail reached into his jeans and pulled out the clicker, he didn’t seem to realize how intimate or familiar the gesture was until the alarm was set and he had to put the keys back in Shane’s pocket.

  Mikhail froze, his hand right above Shane’s pocket, his chest rubbing up against Shane’s arm. His eyes were wide and surprised, and his pouty little mouth was drawn up into almost a comic O. Shane smiled gently at him and waited patiently for him to recover himself and put the keys back in the pocket of his jeans. For a moment, the air was so still between them that they both could hear the jangling of the keys in Mikhail’s shaking hand, and Shane was a little disappointed but not surprised when they were dropped roughly into his jacket pocket instead.

  “It’s just a pocket, Mickey,” Shane said mildly, and Mikhail turned without looking at him.

  “I’m not afraid of you.”

  “Of course you’re not.”

  “Stupid, insufferable man.” Mikhail led the way up the stairs, and Shane followed, their feet echoing on the concrete steps in the corridor.

  “I’m the devil.”

  “I’ll fuck six men between now and next Wednesday.”