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The snow in New York never really settles—it suspends. Hangs in the air as though indecisive if it wants to fall or not, flakes drifting sideways between the wash of orange streetlights and the dark blue sky. It was late winter, the season always reminded me of my mother, mostly because she was always cold. I remember she used to tighten her scarf and tuck one hand into her pocket as her other held mine.
I was walking out of the bar after the bartender started asking too much. I just wanted the only thing that kept me stable enough, the white powder that I would usually inhale after a stressful time, or when I needed to blow off steam, but I had Kitsey for that. I walked up the stairs I didn't really recognise. Mostly because the cold gnawed at me, and I wanted warmth of any kind—which is why I was picking up pace.
The bar door opened behind me, I didn't bother looking back. It was probably some drunk patron stumbling home. Their boots thumped up the concrete stairs as they stopped in the snow on the pavement.
“Potter!”
I froze mid stride. I hadn't heard that nickname in years, no one called me that. No one anywhere would dare. I twisted around, eyes wide behind my glasses—red nosed and red eared thanks to the cold. Stood a couple feet away was a man dressed in all black, hair curly and cheekbones sharp. His eyes were wide and mouth hung slightly agape, the bags under his eyes were light but not invisible. He was tan, only slightly. His black coat hung below his knees.
It took me a minute to piece it together, his accent was still there—Ukranian, but a little softer at the edges, as though run through years of life lived by drinking and doing drugs.
“Boris?” I called out, eyebrows raised high I thought they might recede into my hair.
The man–Boris–grinned. “Potter! It is you!” He took a few steps towards me, a huge smile plastered on his face as the snow crunched under his boots. He paused a couple centimetres away from me—he was a little too close. His breath smelled of vodka, the drink we used to pound back constantly as kids.
I could barely get a word out; his simple act of speaking felt like dragging sound through water. It was Boris. My Boris, the Boris I spent my teenagehood with, the Boris who held me at night when my nightmares got unbearable.
Boris Pavlikovsky.
But not mine—never mine, not really, not in any version of reality. Not in any world where I could look at another man with that aching mixture of longing and fear without immediately recoiling from myself as bile piled up in my throat. I had a life—carefully constructed, curated and hollow, but recognisably a life. A job built by years of working with antiques, a relationship built on sex and expectation that I should keep looking forward and never look back.
And yet Boris was looking at me with the biggest smile on his face, lights shining in his eyes as if he had found a long lost pet. Perhaps he had—I always followed him like a disciple, even into taking drugs.
I hadn't come here with anyone, nor was I planning to stay. But Boris had other plans, the black sleeve of his apparently expensive coat covering a thin but muscular arm looped under my own. With the biggest shit eating grin he dragged me back to the bar, talking about how I looked like an older Harry Potter. All I could focus on was how he looked at me, with that spark, with that pressure of something unnamed—I couldn't suppress my small smile as the door opened when the music and warmth came flooding in.
Boris shooed the other man he was sitting with away as he sat me on my ass, before sitting on the opposite side. “You look…”. He started, giving me the up-down with his eyes and slightly biting his lip. “Different, but also same. I did not expect—well, I did not know what to expect..”
I swallowed, throat tight. “I didn't expect to see you either, you aged like wine.” My attempt at a joke was horrible, though what I caught onto is that his English still wasn't as good as mine—despite travelling to New York often as he said.
“That makes two of us,” He chuckled with a small, uneven laugh. “I come here sometimes. Cheap drinks. Good noise. Good fuck with ladies.” He lifted his glass, nodding as though in toast to that.
We talked—or rather, he talked and I responded awkwardly. Choosing each word as though it might detonate. He talked about the cities he had passed through, the jobs he had, the temporary friendships and one night stands—I felt something ugly and sour curl in my chest. He spoke with easy candor, though there was weariness behind it, a half-buried exhaustion visible only if one knew where to look.
When our conversation fell silent for a moment, his gaze drifted over me once more—slow, almost reverent. Lustful. He watched as though he was reacquainting himself with the lines of a drawing he had once memorized. There was a glint in his eyes, again, he bit his lip before murmuring the soft words of: “You really are here, Potter.”
I felt an old, familiar ache low in my chest.
But my peace never lasted. Even here—inside a crowded room surrounded by strangers laughing and clinking glasses—the memory of her brown hair hovered at the edges of my vision. She never left me, not truly; My mother lingered like a phantom perched on my shoulder, and with her, The Goldfinch.
Boris’ presence did nothing to quiet the ghost of that ever longing guilt. If anything, seeing him again made its image sharper, more vivid. It was though he could still sense it somewhere inside me—the trembling wings, the strain of captivity, the yearning for escape.
My mother's voice flickered through my mind then, her breath soft and understanding, Theo, sweetheart, spoken with the tenderness of mornings when she smoothed my hair to the side before school. Her voice was inseparable to that painting—that day, that explosion. That horrible mishap that seemed to be all my fault. If only I hadn't been caught—bound to it with a threat that had shaped my entire life.
My mind wandered again as I stared at the slavic man in front of me, taking in his sharp features as my breath slightly hitched.
Boris spoke loudly, making exaggerated hand gestures while telling me a story about a near-arrest in Prague with his associates—I felt another memory rise, intrusive and vivid.
Vegas. Winter, well, whatever winter was in Vegas. The swings behind the deserted houses with sand reclaiming them
We had been drinking from a bottle Boris had stolen from his father, something harsh to burn down the throat when gulped back but warm enough to convince us the world was not as bad. The light had dipped low, molten and stained everything in that oily tone. I remember the way Boris sat on the swing beside mine, leaning back slightly as his dark tangled hair caught the last of the sun until he looked haloed.
“Looks like it is on fire.” He murmured, tilting his head towards the sky.
He steadied my swing with a firm hand on the chain, moving to get up. He stood in front of me, staying down with those big eyes of his. It was dangerously intimate, despite neither wanting to admit it.
Then he leaned down towards me, his breath warm with alcohol and aftertaste of ecstasy. His lips brushed mine as though he was asking a question rather than actually kissing me. When the kiss deepened, my heart lurched so violently I almost felt it in my throat. I remember the taste of his saliva and the scent of cigarettes, the way his hands trembled as he cupped my face and the way mine firmly wrapped around and locked on the small of his back.
We never spoke of it again after that. Silence became our refuge, our mutual denial. A shield against the terrifying possibility of truth that we, in fact, weren't normal friends. Even now, the memory tightened around my ribs like a torture device.
Back in the bar, the noise swelled up around me, but Boris’ attention felt like a heat lamp trained to stay on my skin. He asked question after question—about New York, about my job, about the painting and about my sex life—and each answer left me more and more exposed.
At one point, his hand brushed mine as he reached for his shot of vodka, the contact sending a shiver up my hand. I had spent years trying not to think about him, trying not to imagine that under me, it wasn't Kitsey who I was having sex with—that it was him, raking his fingers down my back and panting my name into my dimly lit room, begging for me to give him what he wanted.
“I need some air,” I muttered quickly, pushing my stool back. Boris’ expression flickered with concern, but he didn't stop me. He watched with a kind of startled intensity—as though unsure whether I was stepping outside or stepping out of his life again.
Cold air knifed into my damaged lungs as soon as I stepped out. The snow slowly falling in small specks, catching the yellow glow of streetlamps like ash. I walked without purpose, my breath fogging in the air as my thoughts churned in my head. I didn't hear the door open behind me, nor did I hear his boots pounding against the sidewalk, but what I did hear was him.
“Potter!”
The sound of my old nickname—his name for me—hit like a brick wall. I stopped involuntarily, shoulders tensed. His footsteps stopped, and I knew he was only a few centimetres away from me.
“Wait,” He called, more urgently this time.
When his hand closed around my arm, the grip was firm but not forceful; it felt like an echo of the times he was my anchor, my person to lean on. I turned.
Boris stood before me, breath forming in clouds in the cold, hair a little wild from the winter and cheeks flushed with a mixture of icy air and something much more emotional, much more raw. He scanned my face with an expression that blurred between relief and hurt.
“Why you always run away?” He asked, voice low and a tad rough with emotion. “You see me. You remember. So why try and flee?”
If only, god if only he knew that remembering him was not a choice I had ever been permitted.
“I wasn't fleeing.” I said, though it sounded unconvincing even to my own ears. His laugh was quiet, disbelieving. “You always were shit liar, Potter.”
Snowflakes landed on his lashes, melting into tiny droplets. He stepped closer to me but didn't crowd, as though aware of the very fragile, trembling space between us.
“I missed you,” Boris spoke, the words barely more than a breath. Then, softer; “Really, really much.”
The words sent a crack through my perfected composure. “Boris…” I whispered, but no sentence followed after that. He waited patiently, hopefully and unbearably open
There were a dozen truths I wanted to give him, confessions that had lodged inside me for years like shards of glass. But my life—my nitpicked, perfectly made life—loomed behind me, full of expectations I had never dared to question deeply.
“I should go home,” I eventually said. The hurt in his eyes—quick and unguarded—flashed before he could mask it. “Da. Yes,” Boris murmured. “Of course, I understand.”
He released my arm, but not after lingering for more than necessary. But he didn't step back.
“Just… please, Potter.” He added. “Don't disappear again.” As if I had ever been the one who truly vanished. Snow drifted between us as we stood in front of the bar. “I'm not going anywhere.” I said, unsure even of myself.
Something in his expression shifted then, something cautious but bright, a rekindled spark of hope neither of us had dared to touch or dig up for years.
At that moment I knew, the memory of our kiss that we shared at the playground under the flickering desert sunset passed through both of our heads, tying us together once more.
And then Boris smiled—crooked and tentative and devastatingly familiar. It was then I couldn't hold it, I stepped forward, looking down at the man I had loved for almost half of my life.
I cupped his face in my hands and brought him close and here—under the yellow and faint streetlights of Christmas in New York, in front of a bar that deals drugs—my life didn't feel like a joke, or a mishap. It finally felt correct as my hands landed on his waist, lips pushing against his. For once, even if it wouldn't last, the painting of the Goldfinch and my mother's final look momentarily drowned in my head as I pressed my forehead against Boris’.
And yes, maybe good can come from bad. Even if it is temporary.