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There I was, a year after it all happened, back on Boris’s couch in his little apartment with the lights off and the TV on. December twenty-third, grey and gloomy, cigarette smoke and Christmas lights.
It felt strange to be back, and memories of what had happened prior to my last time coming here were threatening to show themselves. When I looked to my right, though, Boris was there, sitting a foot away with his wounded arm now long healed. He waved his hand around while he talked at the contestants on Blokken. Wouldn’t he make sure nothing bad happened?
He noticed me looking and glanced over for a second. “What?” he said.
“Nothing. Just… glad to see you.”
He reached out his leg to kick me lightly in the shin. “It’s been too long, Potter.”
I was quiet as a commercial break started to play. He was right. It had been too long– one entire, exhausting year without him.
[“Still the dark rings, Potter,” he’d said after throwing his arms around me at Antwerpen-Centraal when I came in from Marseilles, raising his hand to gently press with one finger underneath my left eye.
“I’ve been kind of living in airports for the past year. It’s not really conducive to a good sleep schedule,” I’d explained to him.]
I got up to refill my coffee mug even though it was really too late at night for it. While I was in the kitchen, Boris spoke, raising his voice so it would carry. “So, what’s happening with Snowflake? Engaged, not engaged?”
I hadn’t even seen Kitsey in person since maybe October, I realized, now that I thought about it. As far as I knew, she was still very happily seeing Tom. I sat back down on the couch and shrugged. “I don’t know. We might as well not be. We haven’t really seen each other lately.”
“Ah! So you’re done with her,” Boris said expertly.
“More like she doesn’t give a shit about what I do. Which is fine with me, actually.”
“And Little Red? You went to London?”
“Not yet. Listen, neither of them really want anything to do with me. Women in general don’t, at the moment.”
“Both of us bachelors! Ha! Never would have thought,” he said gleefully.
Boris’s divorce with Astrid had happened earlier in the year and had apparently caused neither of them any significant heartbreak. I was prepared for several days of listening to him talk about women constantly, not knowing at the time that I was incorrect in that prediction. I rolled my eyes and told him to just watch the show.
The next morning, Christmas Eve, was bright and cold and busy outside. Boris took me around the city to show me what I didn’t see last time, which was basically everything. Bicycles were parked everywhere and the sound of a lone fiddle drifted from some street corner. He ordered coffee for me in his heavily accented but serviceable Dutch, though it seemed like most of the locals knew English as well.
The brightness and neatness of the inner city, the rows of buildings like pop-up book panels and The Cathedral of Our Lady towering above them, were a marked contrast to Boris in his all-black attire and general messiness. At the Grote Markt, which was decked out for Christmas with a tree and ice skating rink and market, he pointed to the guildhalls with his cigarette. He explained how some of the building facades were original, but that some were relatively new: reconstructions from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries based on paintings of the square as it had originally looked.
I followed him through the market stalls and past the fountain with its tall statue covered in verdigris. The many flags that hung outside the city hall flapped in the cold wind. The city was very distinctly European and felt somewhat unfamiliar to me and my New Yorker sensibilities. I let Boris lead me wherever he wanted to go, show me the things he wanted to show me.
It occurred to me then that Boris was always who I turned to in new situations or times when I felt out of my depth; not just in Amsterdam last year or in my first endeavors in shoplifting as a teenager, but in times when he wasn’t even there with me. Choosing college courses, reading material, and secondhand records and CDs; learning how to chat up strangers; deciding to keep the same style of glasses all my life– whatever I felt Boris would tell me to do, I did.
I guess that made me sound a little pathetic, but having part of my worldview and personality be influenced by him had never bothered me. I could be influenced by him in that way and it be the least of my worries; enough of my own decisions were plenty pathetic without Boris ever being involved.
I looked at him and noted that he was in a good mood today, his eyes bright and reflecting the cloudless blue sky overhead. He took me to a cafe and ordered one of his typical Boris meals, mostly consisting of sausage and potato, and told me in vague terms about his “work” recently, claiming that all was well and that the reward money had made life much easier for him. I chose to believe him and didn’t press further.
“And what about you, Potter?” he said, leaning toward me across the table.
“What about me?”
“Your life! Always when I message you, you’re in this city or that, never at the old man’s store. You’ve been going around getting all this furniture, like some kind of scavenger hunt!”
“I mean, it kind of is.”
“Are you almost done?” he asked, downing the rest of his beer.
“Pretty much. There’re a few pieces left; one in Seattle and one in Toronto.”
“It does not agree with you, does it? All this travel. I can tell.” He spoke with so much authority about my life and how he believed I thought and felt.
“I don’t know. It’s fine; it just has to be done.”
“And what will you do after?”
I didn’t have an answer for that. I hadn’t really thought about it because the concept of the future itself barely even existed to me then. I guess I was doing the thing that people always talked about— “living in the moment”— but in reality I felt little to no emotion ninety-nine percent of the time and couldn’t envision what I was supposed to be doing with my life after I got everything straightened out.
“I don’t know.”
“Well. The offer always stands. Come work for me; time of your life, guaranteed! I live here most of time now— less traveling, less stress.”
“Thanks, but no thanks, Boris.”
He shrugged. “If you change your mind, tell me.”
As we walked along the Scheldt, he pulled me into a used bookstore, one with industrial-looking metal shelving units and hundreds of books crammed in every corner and spilling out of the shop into bins out front. Most of the books were in Dutch, a smaller portion in French or English, but he found an errant copy of Frankenstein in Polish and bought it for me with the belief that I could start to learn the language simply by reading, since I already knew the book very well.
In the evening, after most of the city’s businesses had closed early for the holiday, I followed Boris into a bar where, judging by his enthusiastic exchange with the bartender upon entering, he was a regular. It was dimly illuminated with golden light and had a few unassuming tinsel garlands pinned up on the paneled walls. Most of the clientele seemed to be locals rather than tourists like me.
As we sat in the corner drinking our beers, I looked at Boris and felt that ache in my chest. It was the realest-feeling thing I’d experienced in a long time. Here he was: my friend, my best friend, the person who knew me better than anyone on the planet and for whom I’d do just about anything. I’d never told him, had I?
He stood and went to the bar, coming back with two clear shots and insisting that we drink to, in his words, “Happy times together, Christmas joy, and beautiful things!”
When he made another trip to the bar a little later, I watched as he chatted with an older man sitting there, Boris smiling his big smile and gesturing with his hands as he spoke.
“Seeing his son tomorrow for Christmas after years apart, he told me!” Boris said as he sat back down. “They’d had a falling-out, but all good now, I think!”
“You know him?”
“Nyah, just asked about his holidays.”
It would never have occurred to me to do that; to inquire after a stranger’s life with genuine interest, to smile upon hearing of the good happening to them.
I was feeling buzzed by this point, and I heard myself ask him, a little nonsensically, “It’s all… good, to you, isn’t it?”
He tilted his head to the side. “What is?”
“The world, I guess.”
“Well, yeah, I suppose. There’s always good if you look for it. I believe so, anyway. The world is beautiful in a lot of ways– the ‘Planet of Earth,’ you know?”
The old phrase from his younger years made me smile a bit. “Doesn’t it ever get you down?”
“How could it not, sometimes? It does everybody,” he said. “No way around it. But most of time, no. Because, even when things are bad— and I won’t sit here and tell you that things do not get bad sometimes, because they do— there is always something else going to happen next, yeah? ‘This too shall pass,’ and all of that. It’s life.”
He took a sip of his drink, regarding me seriously through his dark eyelashes, and continued. “I think you, Potter, you worry so much about what is going to happen, thinking the worst, when it could always be something better, something good. You never know. Right?”
I nodded, though I wondered if I would or could ever see things in that way.
Like he could hear my thoughts, he said, “I know you don’t really see it like that.” He knocked his foot against mine under the table. “But maybe you could try it.”
We walked through the quiet streets back to his apartment about an hour later. The sun had long set, and the darkness settling in the spaces between the streetlamps made it feel like we were in a world just our own. We were drunk, not falling-over, but to a degree that was embarrassing at our ages. It was too much fun to stumble through the streets with Boris, the Christmas lights everywhere blurring in my periphery as I watched him talk at me in Ukrainian and laugh at his own jokes.
In the elevator up to his apartment, I tried to hold it together, but burst out laughing when Boris missed the button three times and hit the wrong floor. He tried to shush me but ended up in his own fit of laughter, shoving me into the elevator wall playfully. I took the keys from him when we were outside his flat, since he was leaning down close to the doorknob but was still unable to aim well enough to fit the key in the lock.
Once we were inside the dark apartment, I managed to get my shoes off before Boris was clutching my sleeve in his hand and dragging me over to his bedroom. I was too tired to balk as he took my glasses off my face and pulled me down onto the bed, and I wanted to be close to him anyway. In my state, it didn’t seem like there was any reason to argue against that feeling.
I knew what he was going to do: sling his arm over me, tuck his face into the back of my neck, exhale like he’d never been so comfortable in his life. Nothing more, nothing less. After all these years, he did exactly this like it was second nature.
After a period where his breathing evened out, I thought he’d fallen asleep. But then he spoke into the darkness, his voice muffled by my coat but close enough to my ear that I could understand him.
“You still keep a journal,” he stated.
“...Yeah?”
“I saw it earlier in your bag,” he said. “I never asked you about this. What do you write about?”
“Mm… just everything, kind of.”
“Why?”
“To not forget stuff, I guess?” Was that why I wrote? I wasn’t even sure.
“Do you still have the one from Vegas? Really beat up, even then, I remember.”
“Yeah, I have it.”
Silence, then: “Did you ever write about me?”
I paused. Oh my, did I write about Boris. When working on my manuscript, I had sifted through endless pages of rambling about Boris, and if what ended up in the final product seemed like a lot, it was nothing compared to his presence in my journals.
Every single one of those notebooks held more about him than I’d ever realized I’d written, ranging from my early thoughts on the interesting black-haired boy with whom I’d started hanging out to, later, pathetic late-night scribbles about missing a nameless “him,” lamenting that it had been years and I’d probably never see him again. When you added it up, there was possibly (possibly) as much of Boris as there was Pippa in all of my journals combined, which was admittedly shocking to realize.
“I did,” I said quietly. “I do,” I added, because it was true, still.
I could hear his breath catch for just a split second, a quickening halfway through his inhale. He was quiet for a long while this time, and I was drowsy and drunk and half-asleep with his arm over me when he asked, “Are you going to go after Little Red?”
It had been a year since he had used his unique brand of Boris logic to put the idea in my mind that I could have a chance with Pippa, but I still hadn’t gone to London. Actually considering the awkward logistics of it, and also picturing the exact disappointed expression that would cross Pippa’s face when she realized that I wasn’t just there for a friendly visit, made me wonder if it was really such a good idea after all.
Knocking on her door and winning her over was diverting to think about as a concept, but only that, and it was losing its fun by the day. In the back of my mind, I think I knew from the start that I was never actually going to say “fuck it” and go to London and chase after Pippa. I knew she wouldn’t want that. After her letter, I had even found myself thinking of her less over the past several months. A lot less.
So, I told Boris the truth, though I didn’t understand why he’d be asking about this. “I don’t think so, no.”
“Good.”
“What do you mean, ‘good?’ You basically told me to go.”
“Yes, well, I changed my mind. Be friends with her, fine, but— don’t go after her.”
“Why are you saying this? What does it matter to you?”
He hummed quietly, pulling me closer to him. “Think about it, Potter,” he murmured, like it was obvious.
I thought about it, though my mind was addled. Was Boris implying what I thought he was? It seemed like, in telling me not to go after Pippa, he was trying to make something known to me in a roundabout way. He knew that I didn’t love Kitsey. Did he think that Pippa was the only barrier standing between me and him and something… more? Something beyond what we already had with each other? That wasn’t it, right?
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Yes, you do.”
He was so warm and familiar, the weight of his arm over me grounding and comforting. I guess I did understand, though it was hard to admit to myself.
But I was unguarded from the alcohol. I said, “Okay. Yeah, okay.”
I felt that I was agreeing to something that lived in unmapped territory for me and Boris, but I thought: why would I say no to that? I realized, finally, that I wanted to go there. I did.
He exhaled and I felt it against my neck. “‘Night.”
“Goodnight.”
I woke up in the early morning with a headache, like I expected, my face pressed into Boris’s shoulder. He was still asleep, lying on his back with his head tilted down towards me. We were wearing our coats, and he still had on his shoes. I moved away from him and grabbed my glasses from where they lay, miraculously still intact, on the bed. I looked around his bedroom. I’d only ever slept in his guest room here, and it had been too dark to see in here when we stumbled in last night.
I was taken back to Vegas as I saw that Boris had made up his bedroom in quite a similar manner to his room back then, albeit much less distressingly squalid. Where the walls of the rest of his flat were mostly bare and the rooms were generally free of decoration, the surfaces and walls here were covered in yards of multicolored printed fabric. A teetering stack of books sat by the door. A faint glow was cast over the room as the sun came through the red and purple fabric hanging in front of the windows.
I looked at Boris, his sleeping face content and calm, and all at once I remembered our drowsy, drunken conversation last night.
Shit. I felt a wave of anxiety hit me. What had I agreed to, really? Would Boris even remember what had been said? Simultaneously, I hoped he did, and I didn’t.
Like he could sense that I was awake, he stirred.
“Up, Potter?” he mumbled.
“Yeah.”
“Hungover?”
“A little.”
Boris paused, and I thought he might be about to bring up what he’d said last night— what I’d said— and, if he did, I wondered whether he’d dismiss it or acknowledge it.
Instead, he just said, “Happy Christmas.”
I suddenly and surprisingly felt… disappointment. I wanted him to bring it up. Was I supposed to feel that way?
“Yeah, you too,” I replied. “Merry Christmas.”
He got up and made his way out of the room. I took my coat off and found him in the kitchen by the coffee maker. He handed me a mug and went to look out the window at the street below.
“No one’s out,” he said. “Empty streets. Will pick up later in the morning, though.”
“Boris–” I started, stepping towards him, unsure of what I was even going to say. I just felt that I needed to talk to him. He cut me off, though, turning from the window and brushing past me.
“Your Christmas gift, Potter! Wait here.”
He disappeared into his bedroom and came back with an envelope, which he handed to me. Setting my coffee mug on the counter, I opened the unglued flap of the envelope.
Inside it was a small printed photo, semi-gloss, about two by three inches. It had clearly been cut out of a larger page, quite sloppily.
“Oh my god.”
It was me and him, a lifetime ago, sitting together in our biology classroom at the high school. It wasn’t just us; several other classmates of ours were in the frame, but we were there in the foreground. I couldn’t remember exactly what we had been doing that day in class, but everyone was paired up, Boris and I at one table, and we all had microscopes in front of us.
Some of the other students were looking at the camera, but Boris and I were looking at each other. We were laughing at something, paying no attention to whoever from the yearbook club had been standing at the front of the room (we had probably declared them a nuisance to the school ecosystem, or something along those lines).
We were so young. Incredibly young. Disheveled, burned-out, so utterly absorbed in what the other had to say to the point that the rest of the world was tuned out to us. That was how we were, and the photo showed it.
I’d never liked seeing myself in photos and this one was no different, but the fact stood that this was, to my knowledge, the only photo of Boris and I together– ever. Neither of us had had mobile phones with cameras in Vegas, and there had been no occasion or reason for us to seek out a camera to use. Other than this photo (which I had forgotten was ever taken), I could not remember the two of us ever having been in front of a camera together at any other point.
“This is from the yearbook?” Unsurprisingly, neither of us had bought one that year.
I looked up at him, and he smiled a little sheepishly. “Yes. They had one sitting in the library, like to see before you buy, you know, and I brought scissors and hid behind a bookshelf to cut that photo out. I thought I had lost it a long time ago, but then, a few months ago, I opened up my copy of The Brothers Karamazov– I’ve always kept the same one since forever, lugged it around– I opened it for first time in a long time, and this picture was stuck in the pages. Like a miracle or something, yes?”
“Yeah.”
I wasn’t going to get emotional about this. I wasn’t. (Crying later in the bathroom, which I did, didn’t count.) I took out my wallet and slid the photo inside, taking a wavering breath. “Thank you, Boris. Really.”
I gave him his gift— comparatively, nothing special (vintage silver cigarette case, Polish-made)— and we decided that we’d be spending the day watching Christmas movies on the couch, big surprise.
We walked the surrounding blocks around his apartment in the afternoon, smoking and listening to the carillon bells ringing out from the cathedral. After a while I was able to put our conversation from last night to the back of my mind, to ignore how nervous it was making me. It had been ambiguous enough that we could act like it never happened.
I ended up falling asleep on the couch in the evening and woke up shortly before midnight, slightly dazed, with a quilt over me that hadn’t been there before. Boris was moving around the flat with purpose, pulling on his coat and shoes.
I rubbed my eyes and sat up. “Where are you going?”
He waved his hand vaguely. “Just a meeting. Nothing to worry about.”
“Okay. If I say, ‘but it’s Christmas Day,’ would that mean anything?”
He looked at me with humorous pity, his eyebrows raised. “I’ll be back in a few hours, tops.”
“Be careful.”
I sat up and waited on the couch with a book from the stack on the floor of his room. I eventually started to drift off again, I think, but startled awake to the sound of the apartment door opening and falling shut.
From where I was, I could see Boris walk rapidly into the kitchen and turn on the overhead light. I heard him turn on the sink and then rummage in one of the cabinets for a moment. When he cursed loudly, I got up to check on him.
He stood at the sink with a wet hand towel pressed to his cheek and an open bottle of vodka on the counter.
The electronic clock on the oven read two-thirty AM. I stifled a yawn. “God, what happened?”
He briefly moved the bloody towel to show me a pretty nasty spot on his cheekbone that was already starting to bruise. It looked like he’d been punched and the attacker had been wearing a ring.
“Shit. Who did that?” I asked.
Boris shrugged slightly. “No one. Just had to take care of some things– it got a little, mm, lively. Don’t worry, I got some good hits in!”
I rolled my eyes. “Let me.” Without thinking about it, I took the towel from Boris. He leaned against the counter and just looked at me as I cleaned up the wound as best as I could. I avoided meeting his eyes.
I was relieved to see that it wasn’t so bad once the blood was cleaned off, and he wouldn’t need stitches. I went to his bathroom to find the first aid kit I knew he kept for situations like this. I waved away the vodka bottle, which he was trying to give me, and found an antiseptic cleaner in the kit instead.
Seeing him like this, cleaning up his bruised and bloody face, was bringing up memories of a night long ago. It was maybe one of the worst of my life, even just having been a mere onlooker.
Lurid haze of Xandra’s perfume, his blood on both our clothes, unshed tears and then chlorine in his eyes. Dread, defiance, defeat.
“Are you okay?” I asked cautiously, wondering if Boris was having the same thoughts. He was pale. His expression seemed normal enough, but his hands were shaking.
He winced at the sting as I dabbed at his wound with the cleaner. “Yes. It’s not that bad.”
“I know,” I said. “Are you okay, Boris?”
He shifted his gaze away and just nodded wordlessly. I found a small bandage and affixed it to his face with some medical tape. We looked at each other for a moment.
“Thank you, Potter,” he said quietly, and then, unexpectedly, he reached out his shaky hands and embraced me loosely around my waist.
I let him pull me a little closer and I hugged him back tentatively. It didn’t last long, just a moment of his forehead resting down on my shoulder and our arms wrapped around each other lightly.
I pulled back and went to the sink to wash my hands. “Go sleep,” I told him. “You’ve been out all night.”
He nodded and took a swig of the vodka before closing the bottle. I was about to start cleaning up when Boris took the bloodied towel from my hands and dropped it in the sink, then closed his fingers around my wrist lightly. I looked up at him.
His voice was quiet. “Stay with me?”
“Boris…”
His expression was so earnest, so hesitant, as he said, “I sleep better with you there.”
God. I felt like the breath had been knocked out of my lungs.
And so I slept in his bed again that night, drifting off with his arms around me. The truth was that I also found it comfortable— probably too comfortable— to fall asleep to the sound of his breathing and his presence right there next to me. Nothing happened beyond him embracing me, sometimes resting his head against my shoulder, and it didn’t mean anything. It was just a habit we’d fallen into long ago, and it was what we were used to.
Even so, my instinct was to worry about the implications of this arrangement, to feel as though I’d die if anyone found out. I felt the return of that familiar nagging sense that I should be keeping a friendly distance, should be thinking of Kitsey or Pippa, and if not them, women in general, or at least the idea of them. Sharing a bed with Boris, sleeping next to him, no matter how chaste, shouldn’t be happening– right? I told myself not to be stupid, that no one would find out, and fuck anyone who’d care anyway. It didn’t mean anything.
It started snowing the next morning. This apparently was an ordeal for the city. All the transportation was delayed, and the roads were blocked with slow-moving traffic.
Midmorning, Boris went to smoke in the small courtyard of his apartment building, so I followed him out there and had a cigarette. We stood side-by-side on the uneven stone pavers and watched the small, icy snowflakes fall through the clouds of smoke that we exhaled.
Someone had left a newspaper on the garden table in the corner of the courtyard, and I walked over to glance at the headlines in Dutch and see how much I could understand. I was trying to discern what the politician pictured on the front page had done to get there when I felt something impossibly cold land on my neck and slide down my back.
“Shit!” I whirled around, and Boris was standing there behind me, laughing and wiping snow off of his hands onto his jacket.
“Fuck you,” I laughed, and scraped together enough snow from the meager accumulation on the table to press together into a lump.
He dodged away from me and hid behind a pillar, shielding himself from the snowball when I threw it. I made another sad little snowball and cornered him against the brick wall of the apartment building, both of us stumbling and laughing like we were young again, our cigarettes forgotten and trodden underfoot.
I reached him and managed to put the snow in the collar of his shirt. He cursed at me and cackled, trying to claw and bat my hand away where I held the snow against his neck in vengeance for what he’d done to me.
And then, all at once, something was different. I froze when I felt the shift, though I couldn’t have explained what it meant.
My hand was against his neck and the melted snow dripped from it. I was aware of his hand still on top of mine, and I could feel his pulse and the rise and fall of his shoulders as he caught his breath from laughing. We weren’t laughing anymore.
We were standing very close together. His back was against the wall. His cheeks were red from the cold, making him look a little like he did when he was drunk, but his eyes were alert, staring into mine.
He felt it, too. I could tell from the look on his face, the fact that he was quiet. He wasn’t pushing me away.
Why wasn’t I stepping back?
He looked at me like he was waiting for something, like he was scared, but there was something else, too.
It was that look I’d seen so many times from him— that soft, affectionate, sad one that seemed to only cross his face when he cast his eyes on me. When I was being stubborn but he found it endearing, when I ventured to tell him something about myself that no one else knew, when he’d let himself into my room in Vegas and I’d be asleep in the middle of the afternoon on a school day; those were the times when he’d look at me like that. I’d never let myself think about that look for too long, but it was starting to break down every barrier I’d put up between us.
His dark, glittering eyes studied mine. Objectively, Boris was good-looking— beautiful, even, with a magnetic field of his own. I knew this. But it was more than that for me, more than his prettiness that made me weak in the knees.
I felt myself drawing closer to him, slowly and fearfully. He didn’t pull away. Ever so slightly, his chin lifted, like he was daring me to do something.
Before it even registered that I was doing it, I closed my cold, wet hand around his tightly. He shivered. I had the sudden, overwhelming urge to bring his hand to my mouth, so I did, holding his knuckles against my lips for just a moment as he watched me with wide eyes.
I dropped his hand quickly, embarrassed at my impulsive thoughtlessness and terrified at the tenderness apparent on his face. I stepped back and away, my breathing turned rapid. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t stand there under his gaze like that.
Boris exhaled and slumped back against the wall, his expression unreadable as he stared across the courtyard.
“Have another smoke, Potter,” he said quietly, reaching into his pockets and handing me a cigarette and his lighter.
I leaned against the wall next to him, a space left between us that felt intentional, cavernous. Why were we doing this? Why, when we were now sleeping in the same bed, could we not let anything show in the daylight?
“Fucking hate the snow,” he muttered.
I watched the smoke from our cigarettes rise and mingle together, my fingers growing numb.
I think maybe you thought it was something else.
Don’t go after her.
I just needed an answer. I needed to hear, in his words, that he was drunk and nonsensical when he told me not to go after Pippa, and that it didn’t mean what I thought it meant. I wouldn’t be able to move on otherwise.
After a few minutes, Boris stubbed out his cigarette and put his hands in his pockets.
“Let’s go inside,” he said. “I will have to take you to hospital from being out here in this cold.”
He started to walk past me, but I grabbed his sleeve and he stopped. I took a deep breath. “Boris, I—“
He turned to face me, a questioning, almost defiant look on his face. I let go of his sleeve. “What?” he asked.
I faltered. I didn’t know how to approach this, didn’t even know where to start. “I just— I guess I’m just confused.”
He just looked at me. Our exhalations were visible as white clouds in the cold air. My cigarette, forgotten in my hand, had burned down to ash and I discarded it on the ground.
“About what?” he said, finally.
“The other night, what you said about— about Pippa,” I forced out.
His eyes darted shiftily around the courtyard. “Potter, I don’t know…”
I struggled to form the words for what I needed to convey to him. What came out was, “I gave you an answer. Didn’t I?”
At that, he swallowed and ran his hands through his hair, looking a little taken aback. “You were drunk.”
“Not that drunk. Were you? If I misread it, if you were just out of it and rambling, I get it—”
He turned his gaze back to me, looking me in the eye sharply. “I didn’t say that.”
“So did I misunderstand it?”
“...No.”
My breath caught. I couldn’t help it. “So which one is it? Because last year, you basically told me that I imagined everything. I ‘thought it was something else,’ right?”
He winced. “I… should not have said that.”
That was all I needed to hear, wasn’t it? And yet, why didn’t I believe him?
“Why did you, then?” I retorted. “Why did you say that?”
“I don’t know– I didn’t mean it! Just easier to deal with, I guess!”
“Was it? Because it wasn’t easier for me! That really sucked!”
“I didn’t think you cared!” I thought his voice broke when he said this, just a little, and it was painful to hear.
“Obviously, I care! Fuck, Boris!” I cared more than I ever thought I did. I was starting to pace now, back and forth in front of him where he stood.
Why was I turning this into a confrontation? It was like I couldn’t accept that we were on the same side. Weren’t we?
“Look, I need you to just– tell me. Explain it to me, because I need to know where we stand.” My voice was shaking.
“Stand with what?”
“You know what!”
“Okay, okay,” he said as he stepped forward, looking worried, and grabbed both of my forearms to keep me from pacing. “Listen to me.” I stopped and looked at him.
“I said wrong things then, that morning when you found out about your painting,” he began. “When I said that you thought it was something else– I thought that was what you wanted to hear from me, thought it was so big shameful thing from your past that I needed to dispel. I probably said it in an especially bad way, making it sound like it was all you and all in your head. Remember also, I was kind of high out of my mind that morning.”
I almost laughed, incredulous, unable to believe what I was hearing.
He continued. “And I wish I never gave you advice last year to go after Little Red. I just wanted to see you happy– I always have, above all– but then I realized that it hurt me, in a very selfish way, to think that you would find that with someone else.”
“Someone else, other than…”
And there it was again— that look. “My God, Potter, yes. Is it not clear that I love you?” he said with affection and exasperation. “I never stopped loving you, Theo. Never, do you understand?”
He’d barely finished his sentence before I kissed him. I reached up to take his face in my hands, avoiding his bandage, and pressed my mouth hard to his. He made a small, surprised sound in his throat and kissed me back happily, winding his arms around my waist.
His lips were cold, as were mine, but his mouth was warm when he opened it and ran his tongue along my bottom lip. I parted my lips and let him lean into me as he deepened the kiss and made me start to utterly lose myself.
It was silent in the courtyard, but my thoughts were blaring. What was incoherently running through my head in that moment was something like: Borisborisborisboris my whole life I’ve needed you and now you know and now you’re here.
Boris’s hands were running all over me, mine were in his hair, and it still wasn’t enough. I couldn’t get enough of him. I felt myself walking him backwards until I had him pressed against the brick wall on which we had been leaning just a few minutes ago.
He pulled back a small fraction. “Theo—“ he started, and was interrupted by me leaning in to kiss him again insistantly. All rational thought had left my mind.
He leaned back again, holding my face, smiling amusedly. “Let’s go inside, yes?”
It registered with me then that my fingers were fully numb and we were both shaking from the cold. He had flecks of snow in his dark hair. I nodded and let him take my hand, a rare gesture from Boris that recalled Vegas memories of being dragged along behind him while we ran from chain store security guards, and of the time that same year when he came down with the flu and I sat by his bed while he was aching with fever.
I leaned against him in the elevator and he wrapped his arms around me, closing his eyes and pressing our foreheads together for a moment. He kissed me again, and it only took the remaining seconds left before the elevator doors opened for us to be grasping at each other again in something like desperation.
Once he managed to unlock the apartment door with shaking hands, we stumbled in like we had on Christmas Eve, though my fingers were now tangled in his hair and he was kissing my neck. We ended up collapsing onto the couch, Boris tugging me down with him. He pulled my glasses off my face, and the rest followed as we grabbed at each other’s clothes.
I’d never felt anything like it. None of the drugs could compare to what was happening to me right then. It was so good and so right that my routinely scheduled identity crisis spiral didn’t even play out in my head. None of that mattered anymore; this was it. Boris was it— full-stop, end of story.
Afterwards, as we were still catching our breaths, our hands still clutching at each other, I realized that I’d never actually said it back.
“Boris.”
“Hm?” He ran his fingers through my hair.
“I love you.”
It was very easy to say to him, and I hated how stupid I’d been for never telling him before. He pulled me closer to him, a difficult feat seeing as we were already crammed together on the couch, and buried his face into my hair. He was so warm. I didn’t want to ever get up.
I didn’t want to leave him, ever.
It was a sudden thought, but one that was a long time coming. But I’d have to leave, wouldn’t I, because my flight was tomorrow afternoon. I’d been quietly dreading my departure since the moment I got off the train here a few days ago. I didn’t want to go. As I lay there with him, his warm skin against mine, I could feel myself pretty quickly coming to a solution that I felt was the right one.
For the rest of the day, we weren’t exactly shy around each other, but there was an air of nervousness to Boris that I’d catch just a glimpse of every once in a while.
We were trying to get used to this new thing that we’d allowed ourselves. He grabbed my hand like it was the most novel thing in the world to him, the most interesting. He dragged me behind a shelf in a store and kissed me, laughing when my face turned red but I leaned in for more.
But it all felt so normal otherwise. Wandering around the city with him, talking about the people we passed, letting his long rambling speeches lull me into a comforted state. When we passed the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, he asked if I thought I’d ever go back inside a large-scale museum and I told him I don’t know, maybe someday; he said he’d take me to one if I ever wanted to try it.
He wanted to take me to dinner. He wanted to run with me down the wooden escalators to the Sint-Annatunnel when it was deserted and creepy and beautiful at night. He wanted to stay out late until we were giddy with laughter and then pull me into his apartment and down onto his bed, make me pant and grab at his hair. I knew that in his mind was the ever-present thought that this was our last night.
When I woke up in the late morning, I was alone in his bed. Boris wasn’t in the flat when I got up and checked. For my sanity, he made a habit of telling me before leaving, and he hadn’t this time. I texted him, then found my glasses and got dressed.
I waited a little while longer, messing around on my phone, but he still hadn’t responded. I checked the courtyard. He wasn’t there. I took a wild guess and walked down the block to the bar he frequented.
Sure enough, Boris was there, hunched over the bar in his black coat and day drinking like it was his routine (it was). I walked over and silently sat in the seat next to him.
After a few minutes I turned to him. “So?”
He looked at me, his chin resting on his hands. “‘So’ what?” he asked.
“You didn’t tell me you were going out. It’s fine. I was just kind of worried.”
“I just needed a minute. Didn’t sleep great— you know you talk in your sleep, Potter? I swear you were talking about Popchyk, I think telling me he needed to get his hair cut. It’s cute, but my god— four in the morning, chattering away.”
“I can go.”
“No. Don’t go.” He reached out to the hand I had resting on the bar and held it, running his thumb back and forth across my skin.
“Okay.”
I eyed the bartender and the single other customer in the room, but forced myself to not drop Boris’s hand. I wondered how long the instinct to pull away from him in public would remain. I didn’t want to feel that way, but it was hard not to when it was so ingrained in me.
Peering closer, I realized that his eyes were a little red. I squeezed his hand and said, “Let’s walk, Boris.”
He downed the rest of his drink and stared down into his empty glass. I stood and pulled him up. “Come on.”
Boris spoke briefly to the bartender and followed me out the door and into the brightness of the day. The streets were busy, so we walked down to the river and leaned against a concrete barrier in front of the water, our elbows touching.
“Are you okay?” I asked him, looking down at the greyish-blue water lapping against the wall.
He was quiet for a minute, leaning with his forearms on the wall, his hair and the hem of his coat catching the wind. Then he said, “I’m not used to it.”
“Used to what?”
“Being afraid like this,” he replied, and it hurt when he said it. “I’m scared. It is not normal for me. Is this what you feel like all of the time?”
“Probably not far off.”
“You’re the only thing— person— who has ever made me afraid like this.”
“Well. Shit. I’m sorry.”
He leaned into me. “No. Thank you, because you are who I care about, and where would I be without you? I think about you every day— maybe you don’t believe that, I don’t know, but it’s true; every single day of my whole life since I met you, I’ve thought about you. Worrying about you, feeling ashamed that I’ve hurt you so many times, just wishing I could see you– it makes me feel crazy, like it’s going to kill me, and that is scary for me. But you are worth being scared, Theo.”
I looked out at the buildings across the water and the wind turbines in the distance and tried to take in what he’d said. It was quite staggering to be told by an individual so utterly unsubscribed from the concept of fear itself that, to them, I was “worth being scared.” Like a declaration of “rotten luck” from my dad, who was so unwaveringly devoted to fortune and chance as the driving forces of everything, it felt important.
I understood why Boris was scared. For whatever reason, like clockwork, love tended to slip through his fingers after only a short while with the person. I didn’t want him to feel that fear anymore.
“You have me, Boris. Always. I swear,” I said, and I meant it.
His eyes were hopeful and sad and glassy with tears when he looked at me. “Yes?”
“Yeah.”
He ran his hand up and down my coat sleeve. “I will miss you. Do you really have to go today?”
“I’ve already canceled my flight,” I admitted. I’d done it early that morning. “I hope that’s okay. I have a little time before the last of my furniture trips and just wanted… to be here.”
He smiled and it quickly turned into a grin. “Thank god.” He threw his arms around me, then pulled back and took my face in his hands.
“After your scavenger hunt is over, come live with me,” he said with conviction. “You don’t even have to work with me, you can go sell old things or get boring office job or just sit around all day, whatever you want— just stay with me. Please.”
“You really want me to?”
He leaned in and kissed me, and I didn’t even care that there could be onlookers.
“Okay,” I told him. “I’ll come back. I’ll stay.”
He embraced me again. “Will you bring Popchyk?”
“Of course.”
Every time I looked at him, the color, the feeling that I had missed for so long was beginning to come back into my life, little by little. I was doing something right. However long it had taken to get here, this moment was how it happened that things started going right for me: this quickly.
The golden light was coming through, making clearer the corporeality of life and of myself, and I can say now that it has only gotten better. We love each other; all is well.