Work Text:
I was on my hands and knees on the floor of Hobie’s shop – and it’s occurred to me that by now I should probably think of the shop as my own as well, but there’s something almost sacrilegious in that train of thought. I was no replacement for Welty and I never would be: just the thought of ‘Hobart & Decker’ adorning the shop window was enough to make my stomach turn, and there was probably something that could be said of that.
Regardless, I was on my hands and knees on the floor, reaching under an ornate, recently refurbished armchair in a desperate attempt to reach my keys. I’d dropped them following an abrupt knock on the shop door – a knock I was determined to ignore, considering we were a good two hours past closing time.
The knock sounded again, and I begrudgingly acknowledged that if I didn’t see who was there, there was a high chance Hobie would come upstairs and see for himself. He’d likely invite them inside, attending to their every whim because “closing time” wasn’t in the man’s vocabulary. He’d always seen turning someone away (like I was planning to do) as unbearably rude. ‘What if someone was having an antiques-related emergency in the dead of night, Theodore? Should we not make ourselves available to help?’
And though he’d never actually spoken those words to me, I could hear them in his voice. That realization made me smile, and I finally retrieved my keys, standing upright to answer the door.
The man on the other side was red-cheeked from the cold, the collar of his smart black coat turned up against the chill of mid-January New York City. He was anxious, shifting his weight between his feet, and his black hair was wild from the wind and heavy from the melted snowflakes caught in his curls.
I counted to ten, forcing myself to maintain my hard-earned rationality, before I opened the door. The shop’s bell rung ominously above my head.
“Potter! Long time, no see, no?” Boris asked, smiling at me and, good Lord, holding his arms out for a hug. I glared at him until he dropped them down to his sides once again, not looking the least bit dejected.
“What are you doing here?”
“I—”
“And if you say you were ‘just in the neighborhood,’ I’m going to hit you.” Boris pursed his lips, clearly rethinking how to rephrase that exact sentence in a way that wouldn’t get him punched, but he gave up after a few moments.
“I’m here to invite you on a trip! We can get out of the city, see the sights. An elopement, perhaps?”
I closed the door in his face, relocking it despite his loud and dramatic protests. I was vaguely aware that he wasn’t leaving, even as I walked to the cash register and started totaling the day’s profits – I could have gone upstairs and retired with a book, but rather I stayed in his direct line of sight, putting my headphones in so I wouldn’t have to hear his melodramatic monologuing about the cruelness of my heart and how, when he got frostbite, he’d be holding me personally responsible.
With Thom Yorke crooning in my ears as he was, it took me a little too long to realize when Boris wasn’t pounding on the door anymore. This fact unsettled me – he wasn’t the type to give up that easily – and I carefully removed one earbud to hear the dreaded sound of conversation downstairs.
“Mudak,” I hissed to myself, the swear word coming to the forefront of my mind despite how out of practice I was in the art of Russian cursing. Boris had a way of bringing it out in me. Once again, I took a breath to calm myself before trekking downstairs, trying not to sprint to Hobie’s rescue.
Boris looked almost smug when I reached the foot of the stairs, turning away from what looked like an intense conversation with an entertained Hobie.
“Green buzzer. I remember,” he said, placing a hand to his temple, and despite everything in me begging me to do so, I did not throttle him.
“What are you doing here?” I asked again, extremely self-conscious of Hobie’s presence, though he was doing his best to make himself look busy so as not to intrude on me and Boris’ domestic argument.
“Already told you! Am here to invite you on a trip, but the old poofter told me perhaps I don’t understand the meaning of ‘elopement’ like I thought I did.”
“Boris,” I snapped, looking at Hobie with a horrified expression. Hobie, for his part, only huffed out a small noise of amusement before walking past me to ascend the stairs. He placed a comforting hand on my shoulder.
“It’s quite alright, Theo. I’ll go upstairs to give the two of you some privacy,” he told me, waving kindly at Boris, who was only too eager to return the gesture. We stood in silence until Hobie shut the door to the downstairs area.
“It’s been two years since I heard from you. Two years,” I snapped, walking forward to... I’m not even sure. I was caught between anger and the sweet, all-encompassing relief of seeing Boris standing in front of me, pale and a little too angular but alive nonetheless. I didn’t know whether I should hit him or… well.
Fortunately, Boris made the decision for me, placing a firm hand on the back of my neck and drawing our foreheads together. For a moment, we simply stood there in a beautiful, blissful silence, our breaths mingling as he stroked his thumb across my skin, dipping down below the collar of my shirt once or twice. My breath stuttered.
“Missed you, Potter. Every day,” he whispered.
“I’m so fucking angry at you,” I replied in the same low, reverent tone.
“And I was angry at you! How do you think I felt, after you left in Antwerp? Leaving me behind like, what, the another woman?”
“The… the other woman?” I suggested, and Boris nodded enthusiastically, pulling back but not releasing me. He held my upper arms firmly like he was afraid I’d try to escape. “Boris, I’d have to have someone else here in New York for that analogy to work.”
“But you did! You had your blonde, and your antiques. You had a life here that you needed, so you left.” Subconsciously – possibly even unconsciously – my hands drifted up to hold his hips. He was thinner than I remembered.
“You’re the one who didn’t answer my calls or texts for two fucking years,” I said.
“Has it really been two years?” He asked innocently, and I rolled my eyes so hard that it nearly hurt.
“You’re not fifteen anymore. Falling out of touch and then catapulting yourself back into my life with your… your tornado energy isn’t cute anymore. It never was.” I watched him mouth the phrase ‘tornado energy’ to himself, weighing it on his tongue. I forced myself to look away from his mouth.
“You thought I was cute?” He said, smirking obnoxiously.
“Shut up,” I snapped, pushing him away and walking back upstairs, not doubting for a second that he’d follow behind me. Hobie, God bless him, had made himself scarce. We didn’t run into him during the trek to my bedroom, for which I was grateful. I knew he wouldn’t ask, obviously, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to explain why Boris and I couldn’t continue this conversation in the living room or the showroom downstairs or anywhere more public.
“Oh, so this is your bedroom,” Boris said, walking around and touching absolutely everything on my shelves and my dresser while I hung my suit jacket up in the closet. I hummed a noise of agreement – I wasn’t completely listening, but I didn’t need to be. I knew what he was going to say and exactly how he’d say it. There probably would’ve been at least one inappropriate joke about my teenage masturbatory habits, but I didn’t let him get that far.
“Why are you back now?” I asked.
“Again, to take you on a trip.”
“What trip?”
“I don’t know! We can figure it out. Can be spontaneous! It will be so fun,” he told me, peeling off his jacket and kicking off his boots before he jumped onto my bed, lying out spread-eagled so that both his head and his feet hung off the sides of the mattress. I stared at the sharpness of his jaw, the graceful curve of his throat.
“Boris…” I said hesitantly. “What happened?”
I could see a flash of pain behind his eyes, one that he very quickly masked with a wry smile. He lifted his head to look at me and I could see the joke he was going to make fade from his lips before he could even say it. His smile slowly vanished. Whatever had happened, it was something dreadful enough that even Boris couldn’t joke about it.
“Astrid – my wife,” he told me like I wouldn’t remember, like I hadn’t been obsessing over his married life since he’d first told me about it. “She left me. Newly divorced, two months now!” He said the words like they were a victory, but I could tell the sentence weighed heavily upon him.
“I’m sorry, Boris,” I said, sitting on the edge of my bed as I pulled off my shoes. “What happened?”
“Well, after Amsterdam, I decided to stop using.”
“Seriously?!”
“Yes, seriously. Thought I should give it one try, see what it was like.”
“Give what a try? Sobriety?”
“Yes, but also fatherhood. I stopped using and once I could eat food again without… well, you know, I went to Stockholm. Got to know the twins and the little one, spent all my time teaching them about music and how to flip pancakes the right way and other things fathers do on television. My own father… he did not even try. Was not made for it, you know this. I needed to try, and I could not try when I was shooting heroin.”
I hardly knew what to say. Apparently, my leaving Boris behind in Antwerp had a greater impact than I’d known. But even as I thought this, a voice in my mind (that was either Pippa or perhaps even Andy) urged me to be less self-centered. This was not about me. Regardless of the fact that I’d more than likely set this chain of events into motion, this was ultimately not about me.
“What happened?”
“I was bad at it.” Boris made a low, thoughtful noise in his throat, waving a hand above his face. “Well, not bad, but not good. It was hard. And destroyed things with Astrid, my wife.”
“I know who Astrid is.”
“Just checking! We… well, you know this, but we had… arrangement? You can call it that. We both saw other people. When I was living with her, this was not possible for either of us. Too much explaining, and with the children involved? Pah! Carrying on two affairs under one roof is messy, messy business, Potter, though I’m sure you know that.”
I nodded sympathetically, though I couldn’t quite glean whether he was referring to my emotional affair with Pippa or my more physical affair with him.
“So what happened?” I asked, placing a hand on his sock-clad ankle. I’d hoped the touch would ground him, but he shook me off after a moment, scrambling into a sitting position and resting his chin on his knees. Even sober, Boris moved with the spontaneity and the unpredictability of a user. Even though he was clean, his body retained the quirks he’d developed during obsessive heroin usage, and they looked so odd, so out of place is his soberness. I wondered if I had the same quirks: could people tell I’d used just by looking at me?
Staring at the angularity, the utter hollowness of Boris’ face, I knew the answer was probably yes.
“Well, she loved someone, and I cannot fault her for that. We have all loved people when it would be ultimately better for us not to, you know?” I did know. I watched him shift back and forth, trying to get more comfortable while still hugging his knees to his chest. “And because she loved him, and because I insisted on being ‘around,’ she had to make very tough decision.”
“You speak of her like you spoke of Kotku,” I observed. “Like, with a weird sort of sympathy. Didn’t she wrong you? Why are you empathizing with her?”
“Be-cause,” Boris said dramatically, splaying himself out on the bed once again. “It was my fault, I changed up the… status quo, is it called?”
“Yeah.”
“We had an arrangement and I threw it all away, threw everything away because I needed to not be my father, and what do I learn? I learn that I am my father! And now I do not even have a family to show for it! Has been a rather emotional two years, Potter.”
“Sounds like it,” I said sincerely, trying to think of something to say that would be more comforting than that. Apparently, my mere commiseration was enough. Boris lolled his over to look at me, the dark circles under his eyes appearing even darker in the dim light of my bedroom. Our eyes met for a mere moment before he turned to face the ceiling again, covering his face with his hands.
Now that his grim tale was over, Boris seemed a little more willing to accept the comfort I so desperately wanted to offer him. The anger in me from earlier – that subtle rage that left a dull, coppery taste in my mouth because how dare he vanish like that? – was finally dispelling and I was left feeling exhausted and empty in its absence. I reached for Boris once more, holding his ankle in my hand. I pulled his sock down slightly and ran my thumb across the downy hair on his skin.
“If you could go anywhere, where would it be?” I asked him after a moment.
“Hm?” He dragged his hands away from his face, eyeing me warily.
“If we were to run away right now, elope somewhere—” And if my voice cracked on the word ‘elope,’ Boris was gracious enough not to mention it to me. “If we were to leave, where would you want to go? Russia or Ukraine? Or somewhere like Italy or Paris?”
“Well, certainly Amsterdam is out of the question,” Boris said after a pause.
“Well, certainly,” I echoed.
“Russia or Ukraine? Not likely. You would not like it there,” he continued thoughtfully, slightly raising the arm closest to me in what was a clear invitation, though he didn’t even spare me a glance. I hesitated for a beat, but eventually, inevitably, found myself moving closer to him. The smell of him was hot and sour, a slightly unwashed odor that made me nostalgic for the worst days of my life because at least back then, Boris was a constant.
“Why wouldn’t I like it there?”
Boris sighed, grabbing me by my shoulder and pulling me down so that my face was resting on the right side of his chest. He wrapped his arm around me and stroked up and down my sleeve with his fingernails. It tickled, but I didn’t move away from him. Instead, I rested my hand over his heart, tracing his ribs through the fabric of his shirt and relishing in the warmth, the utter corporeality of him.
“Is hard to explain. You are too soft for Russia, all these big dreams of death and dying in your head, you know? We are a philosophical people, yes, but there is a time for reflection and a time for… what word am I looking for?”
“Repression?”
“No, Potter. Efficiency. That is the one.” Boris paused, weighing his next words carefully. “You would like the Hermitage in St. Petersburg very much, however. Is so large and on the nights it is open late? Very empty and peaceful. If I took you to Hermitage, I could never get you to leave.”
I huffed out a laugh, throwing one leg over his thighs so I could hold him a little closer, a little tighter. He dug his fingers in my back as if he’d had the same idea. Last time we’d lain like this together, he’d had three or four inches on me. It was so easy to lose myself in his warmth, the utter security of him when I was shorter, folded in his arms. I buried my face in the hollow of his shoulder and realized that while I’d never expected to feel that same security again, I’d found it nonetheless.
“Maybe one day, Russia. Maybe one day, back to Amsterdam, even. Did you know your little bird is back on display now? In Rijksmuseum?”
“Yeah, I think I read that somewhere,” I said softly. In truth, as soon as I saw my painting referred to in an article, I stopped reading. Years had gone by and the pain of losing it was still white-hot, raw inside my chest. Well, it was most of the time. With Boris holding me like he was, it was hard to think of anything outside of him, him, him.
“Did you love Astrid?” I asked.
“Well, of course,” Boris replied. “But not too much.”
“Not too much.” And wasn’t that an odd disclaimer? He said it like it was a reassurance, which it was. He said it like it was meant to soothe me, which it did. He loved his wife, he loved the children (that may not even be his own), but he didn’t love them too much.
But what was loving “too much?” I couldn’t even imagine that romantic-comedy, middle school type of love, where your entire world is narrowed down to the pinprick of another person’s essence. You remember things about them, tiny things they themselves don’t even remember. It’s sitting in complete, unbroken silence for hours or days at a time because the two of you can have full conversations with your eyes. It’s agony, sweet and beautiful and all-encompassing. A pain you never want to be free from. If this was “loving too much,” I was caught between jealousy and relief that I’d never felt anything like that.
Boris knit his hand in the hair at the nape of my neck, tugging softly.
The two of us lay sideways on my queen-sized bed, on top of the covers in our street clothes. We could turn and lay properly on the mattress, stripped down to our underwear (orevenfurther) under the covers, exchanging touches and gasps and sighs and secrets in the dark. We could play house, and I could wake up early the next morning to make him breakfast.
But this was not us.
“Want to go smoke on the fire escape?” I asked him, and he nodded after a moment. I could feel his chin ruffle my hair.
“Cigarettes? Or weed?” He asked.
“Either. Hell, both.”
“Okay.” He pushed me off of him, and I sat on the edge of the bed to watch him pull his boots back on. Obsessive-compulsively, he ran his hands through his hair over and over – another junkie tick – to avoid having to meet my eyes directly. I didn’t make it easy on him, staying seated until he was forced to look at me.
“Potter?” He asked. He was nervous, and if his nails weren’t gnawed down to the quick, I knew he’d be chewing them.
“I know there was never any real trip. But… one day, maybe?” I said softly. Before my eyes, he transformed. His gaze lost some of its sad dimness and he straightened his back, gesturing to me with a flourish reminiscent of a dashing bachelor in a period-piece.
“Of course. One day, maybe.”
With that, he offered me a hand, holding the other one behind his back in a very formal way. I looked from his hand to his face to his hand again, shrugging to no one in particular before I reached out and accepted his invitation. He pulled me to my feet – none-too-gently – and tucked me into his side like I was a lady-in-waiting, someone who needed to be escorted and protected, and the notion made me laugh aloud. I laughed harder than I had in quite some time as he led me around the room briskly, one hand clutching my own and the other wrapped around my back to hold my elbow. Between the near six inches I had on him paired with the way I was slipping around in my socks, we made an utterly ridiculous sight.
“Boris,” I said, gasping around laughter.
“I missed this laugh,” he mused, eyes shining like all the grief of our tragic pasts had evaporated suddenly.
“You’re the only person who can make me laugh like that,” I told him truthfully. And then he kissed me, clawing into the skin of my jaw with one hand and fisting the fabric of my shirt in the other. It was chaotic and desperate, like if he didn’t touch me now he’d never get to do it again. With my eyes closed, I couldn’t tell for certain what he was doing, but I could easily imagine him standing on his toes to reach my mouth. The thought struck me as so titillating in its wrongness, but it was indubitably right at the same time.
“Christ,” I groaned, grappling with his shirt because suddenly touching his bare skin had become my one and only priority.
“What? Are you angry because I come into your life with my ‘tornado energy’ and fuck you better than anyone ever has?” He whispered into my collarbone. “So good that you can’t forget, you can’t get past it. Can you fuck anyone else, anymore?”
“Don’t be a dick,” I snapped at him, letting out a soft gasp when he bit down on the delicate skin of my clavicle. He sucked harshly, pulling away and laving a few kitten licks over the red bruise I knew he’d left behind.
“Am not being a dick, Potter. Is the same for me,” he said softly. The weight of his words confirmed my gut feeling that this was the biggest secret he’d ever told me. He leaned up again, slowly with his eyes half-lidded, and pressed a kiss to the love bite he’d left on my neck.
“Do not be angry with me,” he said, and something in his voice suggested that I should be precisely that.
“What now?”
“I have to leave,” he told me, looking up at me through his lashes in a deadly serious way. He reminded me of Lauren Bacall in that moment, so sultry and beautiful that no sane man could ever be mad at him. There was an easy, sexy way about Boris that I suspected only I could see. He was certainly well-versed in using this particular weapon against me.
“What the fuck?” I said, wrapping my arms more tightly around him, as if it were really within my mortal power to keep him anywhere he’d decided to leave. With millions of desperate thoughts whirling through my mind, the only one I could really grasp concretely was that I was Humphrey Bogart in this fucked up analogy.
“I… I need to get back to my hotel. Myriam is waiting for me. I’m here on business, you know,” he told me, though I very decidedly didn’t know that.
“Okay,” I breathed, lingering close to him for as long as I reasonably could, though it didn’t matter anymore. The moment was broken. With a heaviness in my heart that I couldn’t explain, I stepped back from him and sat heavily on the edge of my bed, feeling stupid and childish in my sock-feet as he stood fully dressed before me. He pulled his coat back on, staring at a spot on the wall directly over my head.
“What if I’d said yes?” I asked all of a sudden.
“Hm?”
“What if when you’d knocked, I’d said yes, let’s go on a trip. Let’s leave right now, tonight. What would you have done then?”
Boris walked towards me, kicking my feet apart so he could stand in the V of my legs and force me to look up at him. He cupped my chin in his hands intimately, brushing his fingers through my hair. The whimsy in him had vanished, leaving him as sad and as heavy as he’d been when he first arrived.
“Potter, I know you. I knew you wouldn’t say yes. Just had to see you,” he said, his voice unbearably fond, a gentle whisper in the quiet of my bedroom.
I struggled to think of something to say, but there was nothing else that needed saying. Pressing a soft, tender kiss to my forehead, Boris left without another word, closing the door of my bedroom softly behind himself. I sat on my bed – a paragon of agonizing self-pity – until I was sure he was long gone. Then I climbed onto the fire escape alone, smoking the rest of my weed interspersed with the occasional cigarette.
The dulling effects of the marijuana paired with the adrenaline of nicotine left me in a stasis; a place between sleep and wakefulness where I was aware I was hurting, but I didn’t have to think too much about it. I pressed the love bite on my neck with the pad of my thumb, content to remain in a state of arrested development until the sun rose once again, bathing New York in the sad, empty glow of morning.