Making Promises (25 page)

“She used all my drug money to pay the hospital bill.” Mikhail laughed without humor. “She also used all the rent money—I had two days to make the rent. She didn’t want me to go—I think at that point
she
would have gone out in my place, but….” He found he couldn’t look at Shane for this part.

Shane dropped another kiss on the top of his head and simply listened, and that is what allowed him to continue.

“I had someone waiting for me. We worked together, you see—he taught me how to shoot up and how to have sex and how to survive. He had the wallet of the fucker who beat me. We would score, and I could give Mutti the rent—it was a good plan.”

And again, that curious, waiting silence. Mikhail gave in completely—he leaned his cheek against Shane’s chest and let his words take them where they would.

“What happened to the plan, Mickey?”

“Olek wasn’t there,” Mikhail said simply. “I was still buzzing from the painkillers in the hospital—I did not need to fix. I left the drugs where we kept our stash and left a note that said I would be back, and I went home. But….” Oh God. “I had shoved my mother into a wall, you see.

And yelled at her for trying to care for me. She’s a strong woman, my mother. When I got home, she had two of our neighbors hiding behind the door—they tied me to the bed for two days, so I could feel—
really feel
—

what the drugs were doing to me.”

“Oh my God!” Shane sounded surprised—shocked, surprised, and a little bit pleased.

Mikhail was startled enough to look up and into his eyes, and all he saw was interest in his life and compassion and kindness. Shane blushed at his scrutiny and mumbled, “You weren’t shitting about her being a strong woman, Mickey—that’s a ballsy thing to do, you know?” Mikhail smiled into his eyes a little. “Yes. Cowardice has never been a failing of Ylena’s. And she knew—she knew why I’d become addicted, and she knew I was only trying to pay my way after the dance money was gone. She was like you—she did not judge. But she could not let me do what I was doing, either. After two days, when I was sweating and screaming and begging, she gave me a small dose, just enough to take the edge off, and asked me to look at myself.” He blushed now furiously. He could remember the stink of his sweat, the smell of his vomit. He’d shit himself during the worst of that, and he could remember that too.

“It was not pretty,” he muttered weakly, avoiding Shane’s eyes.

Shane took his chin in firm fingers. “I’ve seen withdrawals, Mickey.

They’re horrible. I understand, okay?”

“Yes, but I am vain enough that I would like you not to think of me that way, yes?” he snapped, tired of being naked.

“No question,” Shane reassured him, and Mikhail went on.

“So Mutti, she talks to me, while I am there in my filth, and she asks me if this is how I want to live and how soon I want to die, and the angels must have had her voice that day because I actually listened. She had been squirreling away money—and damn, she was smart because she didn’t tell me where it was—but we had passports and visas and plane tickets, and she’d had a cousin in Brighton who made the arrangements for rehab. All we had to do was get me to survive for two weeks.” Shane’s arms shivered around him, and Mikhail apologized. “I’m sorry—this is not a pretty story. I will… we can leave now.” And he tried to draw away, tried to pretend this moment wasn’t extraordinary. Shane wouldn’t let him.

“Finish the story, Mikhail. You’re letting me hold you—it’s all good.”

Mikhail blinked hard. “Of course it’s all good. I’m a junkie-whore—

what a catch I am!”

“Shut up.” It was the first time he’d ever heard Shane sound truly irritated at him. Suddenly Mikhail was being maneuvered again, and Shane flopped, not so bonelessly, onto the big chair with Mikhail splayed against him. They were eye to eye, Mikhail sprawled on his chest, feeling firsthand the depth and power of that mighty body.

Mikhail carefully traced Shane’s lean mouth under his fingertips.

“You are very handsome,” he murmured. “You could have anyone—

literally anyone. Why me?”

Shane’s smile twisted a little. “You’re talking like kittens and yarn again, Mickey—find the end of the yarn and knit me a story. How did your buddy take the news you were leaving?”

An answer without an answer—a code of sorts. He felt more at home in the working of Shane’s language than he did in his mother tongue or his adopted language. It gave him the strength to finish.

“He took it very well,” Mikhail said, trying for nonchalance. “He had no choice—he was dead.”

Shane grunted as though he’d expected this and had just been poised to take the hit. “How’d it happen?”

Mikhail shrugged. He liked this color Shane was wearing—it was a deep red. He’d been looking at it enough, he should know the thread count by now. “I broke my promise to come back; he broke his promise to not shoot all the drugs. He’d been dead for three days—I don’t know. Maybe he thought I was not coming back. Maybe he got bored. All I know was that he was dead with a needle in his arm, and Mutti was pulling me out of our little shack in the back of a tenement, and in the middle of that she managed to find the last envelopes of heroin to keep me from losing my mind in the next two weeks. And… and here I am. I am alive. I am happy.

And Mutti….”

What was wrong with the world that Mikhail, for all his self-sufficiency, could not finish that sentence? What he said next surprised him as much as anything that night.

“Oh God, Shane. What if I don’t have enough money?” This fear had been riding him since June, when the doctors determined that the cancer was terminal. “She found out she was dying, and she said ‘Oh Christ, boy. Do I really have to die in winter?’ And I… I would do anything, you understand? I said, ‘Stop complaining, old woman. If you promise to live through another Christmas, I’ll take you someplace warm, just to stop your bitching.’”

Shane’s chest shook under him, and Mikhail met his eyes and was reassured by the warmth there. “It was a good promise,” Shane told him simply. “I have faith you can keep it.”

Mikhail sighed and stood up, tired, suddenly, of baring his soul. “It is more than I have,
lubime
.”

Shane took his offered hand and walked out of the cubicle to find his shoes. He put them on while standing, seemingly as eager as Mikhail to get out of the dance studio for the rest of the night.

They walked into the darkness, the last of the fluorescent lighting dying as the door closed behind them, and Shane threw a possessive arm around Mikhail’s shoulders. Mikhail thought longingly that he could get used to that sort of attention, especially when they stopped at Shane’s car and Shane carefully arranged the scarf so that it was tucked under Mikhail’s chin and knotted for warmth. He didn’t say a word about the fact that it was his own scarf, and yet he must have noticed.

But that comfort didn’t stop Mikhail from lying at Shane’s next carefully worded question.

“Mickey?”

“Da?”

“What does ‘loobeemee’ mean?”

Mikhail could actually taste the fog he sucked into his lungs in a terrible gasp.

“Where did you hear that?” he asked, putting his hands on Shane’s biceps to steady himself. He felt his own pulse speed up under the skin of his palms.

“From you—twice, actually.” Shane was keeping his voice casual, but the man was not a fool. He was listening very carefully for this answer.

“Twice?” Oh God. His voice was shaking again. Damn this man.

Damn this man and damn his kindness and damn his blowjobs and damn the fact that he wasn’t stupid and knew an endearment when he heard one, whether or not Mikhail was ready for him to hear it.

“Yes, twice. Once when you were….” The air around Mikhail grew suddenly warmer, and he had to smile. Shane really was innocent. “You know… uhm, excited. And once just a minute ago, when we were on our way out. So, uhm, what does it mean?”

Mikhail swallowed hard and lied. “My friend,” he said. “It means

‘my friend’.”

“Mm-hmm. I’ll remember that.” The voice was carefully neutral, and Mikhail found himself studying that button on Shane’s shirt again.

Shane bent and brushed a kiss over his lips then, and Mikhail responded with more force than he thought he had in him. When they were done tasting and tangling and were breathing fiercely into the foggy night again, Shane drew back and opened Mikhail’s door, and then got in himself to start the car.

Mikhail wondered if there was a penalty of sorts for lover’s lies—

especially of the variety he’d just told. Should a star fall from heaven for such a thing? If it did, Mikhail hoped rather fervently that it would crash on his head and leave Shane the hell alone. The poor man loved him—

didn’t he have enough problems as it was?

“So, uhm, Mickey?” Shane said as they were driving to the apartment. “How is it you don’t know how much money you have?

Doesn’t the bank give you a statement?”

Mikhail blushed in the darkness of the car. “I’m a Russian peasant, cop. Do you really think I keep my money in a bank?” Puzzled silence. “So where do you keep it?”

And this truth was easy to tell. “Where all Russian peasants keep their money. In their sock drawers.”

Shane was still laughing heartily when they pulled into the complex and parked.

…let love give what it gives…

“Worlds Apart”—Bruce Springsteen

SHANE had always sucked at lying—he really hoped he could manage it this time. His hand shook a little as he raised it to Mikhail’s apartment door to knock, and he waited patiently for it to open. He knew Ylena would be home—he had asked her during the last date night—and he also knew she was moving slowly these days.

He looked around as he waited, the grayness of the foggy day making the light tan walls of the apartment building look a little brighter than they probably did in the sun. It wasn’t a bad place, he thought critically—but it didn’t have six acres or a passel of dogs, either. He’d been returning home after date night with a deeper and deeper conviction that going home alone was wrong.

He should be going home with Mikhail. It was just as right as anything he’d ever known. He’d lived with girlfriends before, and that had been nice, until his weirdness got to them or their cheating or bitching got to him—he knew about sharing space with people. He knew when it would last for a week and would barely entail an extra toothbrush, and he knew when it would suck a year and a half out of his life that he could never get back. (Okay, that had happened once—she had been the girl who had cheated on him from the get-go. His only excuse had been that he had been barely out of the academy and she’d been able to suck a golf ball through a garden hose. He just hadn’t realized how much she’d practiced when he was out of the house.) Brandon had rarely come to his apartment, 150

but Shane had spent a lot of time at Brandon’s. Brandon’s had been nicer, the bed and the television had been bigger, and Brandon had better beer.

Brandon had also not had anything special or private in his home, like shelves upon shelves of books or concert posters painfully collected from the third grade or, now, fuzzy, psychotic quadrupeds that thought they were human and counted as family.

The doorknob turned, interrupting his thought, and Ylena looked out.

She smiled, apparently pleased to see him, and he relaxed. He could do this. It was important.

“Hiya, Ylena—I’m sorry to bother you in the daytime….”

“Not at all, Shane.” She backed up and let him into the apartment.

The outside might have looked a little brighter in the fog, but the inside looked a little more drab in the light coming in through the sliding glass door at the balcony. There were framed prints on the walls—poor quality but lovingly chosen—and crocheted afghans on the couch and the chairs.

But the carpeting was old, and the paint was peeling in the creases, as was the linoleum. The neighborhood was not too bad, but the complex had seen better days.

Still, it was a damned sight better than the high-class pit Shane had left in L.A.

“I’m sorry you are missing Mikhail—he is at work, you know.”

“Yeah—I brought him lunch.” It was true—and it was all part of his carefully constructed plan. Mikhail had been happy to see him—and a little embarrassed—and had seemed genuinely sorry that he had a room full of preschoolers and was unable to stop and eat with him. “And since I was in the neighborhood, I brought you some too!” She smiled a little, but he could tell that no food was good food at this point in her illness. Still, she seemed to appreciate the effort. “Well, by all means, I shall eat it,” she said graciously. “Would you like to keep me company?”