Making Promises (13 page)

“Mikhail….”

“No. You were possessive. You do not say mean things like that unless you think a hook-up is a lover, or a boyfriend or…or….” Or a promise. “I do not feel any of those things for you, and you will only be hurt if we keep doing this.”

Fuck. The look on Brett’s face was enough to confirm that line of reasoning. Damn. This was why it was important not to get attached, not to make promises. Even if you didn’t make promises, people relied on you, and you let them down. Mikhail sighed and looked away.

“I have hurt you. It was not….” Fuck. “It was not intended.” 68

Brett wiped his cheek on his shoulder, trying to be manly and unaffected. His pointed ear came off, and he tried a sloppy laugh to prove that Mikhail was wrong, he was all fine and good.

Mikhail sighed and moved forward, pulling the ear point gently out of Brett’s hair and working the glue out of the long, coarse strands. Brett smelled like sweat and earth and a little like patchouli. These smells did not move him.

“I’ve seen you bend over behind a tent between sets, take it in the ass, and then show up at my van at the end of close,” Brett muttered, his voice muffled. His narrow, Puck-ish face was dirty with dust and makeup, and the tears he’d pretended not to shed were cutting tracks through the brown and leaving pale skin in their wake. “I’ve never seen you look at anyone the way you looked at that guy today.”

“He started it,” Mikhail muttered, feeling unreasonably like he might—just possibly might—owe this man a little honesty for kicking him out of bed for good.

“Yeah, Ice-Man, how’s that?” The sad thing was, the epithet wasn’t bitter. They’d been calling him Ice-Man since the incident Brett had just mentioned. It had been his first day working the circuit, and he’d been giddy and excited—and horny. It had been the beginning of his reputation of a man who would be fucked by anything with a prick and who would never look back.

“He looked at me,” Mikhail said reluctantly, hating the dichotomy,

“as if I were a god.” Silly, deluded man.

“Yeah?” Brett muttered, looking sideways at him like Mikhail would reach out a quick, hard foot and kick his orphaned puppy or something.

“What’s that like?”

“I’ll let you know when the madness of it has faded,” Mikhail said heavily. Then, feeling foolish because it seemed to mean something to him after all, he seized Brett’s hand and gave it a gallant farewell kiss on the knuckles. “We have been good friends, have we not?”

“We’ve been fuck buddies, apparently,” Brett said bitterly, but he didn’t jerk his hand away either.

“That too. Without the fucking, I would still like the buddy?” He thought about Shane, who would laugh when he said this because it was Making Promises

cleverly worded. Most people thought it was simply his accent getting in the way.

Brett sighed and pulled his hand reluctantly away. “Whatever, man.

If you still want some when you get your sanity back, you know where I’ll be.”

“A generous offer,” Mikhail said, meaning it, “but unnecessary.

Have a good night.”

He sat in silence for what must have been an hour, in the stillness of his music and the purple diamond sky. He contemplated going to bed. He contemplated jerking off. And then a part of him lost its mind. It’s the only way he could explain finding his cell phone in his hand or the way his heart beat when a man’s voice answered.

“I am being fucked silly by ten man-gods. Don’t you wish you were here?”

Shane’s low chuckle in his ear was… magic. Hot chocolate with cinnamon and whipped cream and caramel on the coldest day of the year.

“Nope. If you’re being fucked silly, I want to be the only one in the room.”

“You could have been.” His irritation flooded back, and he couldn’t help his disgusted sniff. “Stupid, foolish man.”

“Yup.”

“What are you doing?” He was honestly curious. Something about Shane’s voice suggested a darkened room.

“Watching
Kung Fu Panda
in the dark.”

“I love that movie!” He couldn’t keep the delight out of his voice.

Children’s movies fascinated him. He had been in dance since he was very small, and there had been no time for movies. In the rehab clinic in New York, their only entertainment had been paperback books in a language he did not yet speak and shelves upon shelves of movies he had never seen.

“Me too,” Shane said, his voice soft. He probably really was in the dark. Mikhail, who did not consider himself an imaginative man, suddenly pictured Shane wearing an old T-shirt (green—it should be green) and a pair of sleep shorts, stretched out on a hotel bed in the dark. It was a comforting picture—Mikhail decided that was the man he was talking to as he sat on his camp stool under the stars.

“Yeah,” that warm, dry voice said in Mikhail’s ear, “I sort of identify with that damned panda, you know?”

“You are not fat.” Stupid man. He was big, warm, and solid. Mikhail had enough of whip-thin dancers, lean, hungry poets, or cold, substantial men who denied who they were.

“I’m not you,” Shane said, and his admiration was so honest and frank that Mikhail found himself humbled. Irritating man.

“Yes, well,” he sniffed, “who could be?”

Shane’s low rumble of laughter in his ear was comforting. It said that somehow Shane heard what he was thinking as opposed to the spew of arrogance that came out of his mouth.

“So what’s your favorite?” Shane asked, and Mikhail had to pull himself back into the moment.

“My favorite what?”

“Your favorite movie?”

Mikhail was stumped. “No one has ever asked me… it is like music.

I love it all, not just one kind.”

“That’s sort of depressing from my end,” Shane said thoughtfully.

“Are you sure you can’t think of a favorite?”

Mikhail couldn’t think of why that would depress him, so he turned the question about instead. “You think of one, and I’ll see.”

“
WALL•E
,” Shane said with satisfaction. “Hands down, that little robot ’bout broke my heart.”

Mikhail found himself laughing in spite of himself. “How very appropriate.” And it was. WALL•E—the hapless knight in rusted armor.

Except WALL•E had eventually been
very
important to the object of his affection, hadn’t he?

“So what’s your favorite?” Shane asked with some insistence, and Mikhail sighed because he suddenly knew exactly which cartoon was his favorite. He shouldn’t say—it was almost too personal.

“
Lilo and Stitch
,” he said facetiously.

“
Lilo and Stitch
?” It was clear Shane was waiting for an explanation.

“‘For such a small person’,” Mikhail quoted, “‘you have an unusual level of badness in you.’”

Shane laughed obligingly and then said, “Now tell me your real favorite.”

Mikhail flushed. “No,” he rasped, unable to suddenly brush off the question, to give another facetious answer.

“I’ve asked a personal question.”

“Da…
shit
!”
Because his phone just beeped—the battery was low.

“Battery?”

“Da, I mean yes. And I need to make another call tonight.” Shit.

He… he had been enjoying the conversation. “Well, I must go, stupid cop.

It was a good day.”

“I’ll see you later….”

“Nyet… I mean I doubt it. I shall….”

“I don’t make promises I can’t keep.”

“Goodbye.” Mikhail couldn’t say all he wanted to say, so he figured it would just be better to end the conversation entirely. His phone snicked shut, and he sat for a moment and started to shiver. Cold. He’d put on his shirt—maybe it was time to go in his tent while he was letting his phone rest up before his call.

The tent itself had a foam pad and a flashlight, a sleeping bag, and a pillow. The much laundered, all-cotton clothes worn at the Faire tended to shake out well in the morning. Mikhail took off his jerkin and his pants and rustled up some underwear from his knapsack (in case, well, whatever called him out of his tent in the middle of the night.) The shivers were still there. Common sense told him that it was still seventy degrees outside, but he wanted the comfort of his sleeping bag, so he sought it.

When he was situated, he pulled out the phone again and dialed. The voice on the other end was old and female, hoarse and ragged and much, much beloved.

“Hello,
malenkiy mal’chik
… was your day good?” Ah, Mutti—she’d started learning English the second they stepped off the plane, but endearments and greetings were hard to kick. Besides, as she frequently told him, he’d never stop being her little boy.

“Hello, Mutts,” he said quietly. Something about speaking in a tent—it made him quiet. “How was your day?”

“It was good. The girl came, she hooked up my medication. I feel better.” Mutti always said she felt better—but she was dying. How much better could she feel?

“Did you eat?”

“Da—she warmed the food in the refrigerator after she gave me a bath.”

“Is that part of the service now?” The insurance was through his mother’s work—she had been a nurse in Russia and had earned the degree again in America. The insurance was good, but they were Mutti’s details, not his.

“I do not think so—but she is a very nice girl. She is single—maybe you should meet?”

Mikhail’s smile, had he known it, was bitter. “No, Mutti, I do not think so. We should run away together, yes, and then where would you be when you need a nurse?”

“When I’m gone, perhaps,” his mother said, as though this answer satisfied her very much.

“When you are gone, I shall be too broken-hearted to care,” he replied, making his voice light and frivolous when, with the surprising exception of much of what he’d said to Shane, this was one of the most serious truths he uttered in a day.

“Phfaw!” his mother laughed. “When I am gone, you shall be partying on my grave, Mikhail Vasilyovitch, and I know this because I have put it in my will.”

“You contrary old woman, you probably have, too!” Mikhail had to laugh—there was no choice. His mother… oh God. His mother. She had uprooted her life to put him in dance academy, and when he’d been injured, he’d addicted himself to make that gamble pay off. She’d taken his trick money and given him clean condoms and clean needles, and the whole time she had been squirreling away cash under her mattress for their visas and plane tickets so that when he needed her—had
truly
needed to get away from Saint Petersburg or die—she had been there.

She’d pumped him full of enough heroin to keep him high for three days. It had been a gamble. He could still remember the shaking of her hands on the needle and the band around his arm and the way she’d done the math on paper instead of in her head so she could check the figures Making Promises

three times and make sure she was not setting him up for an overdose instead of saving his life.

But she had done it. She had cracked wry, shrewish jokes the entire time.
We’re in a plane,
lubime
—if you look down from your high, maybe
you can see us down below.
You need to relieve yourself,
mal’chik
? Try
hard not to piss away too much of that heroin, you’re going to need it
before I get you to the clinic. Stop ogling the pretty men,
mal’chik
—what,
you think you are still on the streets?

So yes, Ylena Vasilyovna Bayul, who had given him her father’s name when his father had not stepped up, probably had the strength and grit to put such a clause in her will, insisting that Mikhail dance upon her grave. Knowing Ylena, she would have specified the music and the choreographer as well.

“To Tchaikovsky, of course,” his mother said now with mock dignity, making him smile again.

“
March Slav
or
Nutcracker Suite
?” he asked dubiously.

“Go with the crowd pleasers,
lubime—1812 Overture
, of course.”

“Ayee! Mama—could you at least pick something that is
supposed
to be danced to?” The thought of choreographing to
1812
made his head hurt.

“Nyet,” Ylena said imperiously. “For all our time together, I want my overture, and I insist upon you dancing like an angel. Don’t even think of letting me down,
lubime
, or I shall be a very obnoxious ghost.”

“So noted.” His phone beeped at him and he sighed. “My phone is dying, Mama—I will be home tomorrow, late. My people will drop me off as usual.” Mikhail did not drive. In New York they had not needed to, and in California, it had given him perverse satisfaction to milk the shitty public transportation for all it was not worth. Self-sufficiency—it was his motto, creed, and faith.

“Be safe, Mikhail Vasilyovitch—dance beautifully. I know you will.”

“For you, Mama, I will dance like angel, yes?” Always, for his mother, he would dance his best. A sudden image in his mind: the look in Shane Perkins’s eyes that morning as he had begun to dance as Oberon.

I’m not you
. Yes, well, thank God for that. Perhaps, tomorrow, Mikhail would dance for that look in warm brown eyes too.

“You are my angel,
lubime.
My bones hurt—it is getting cold here at night.” Perhaps the high sixties. For a woman who had lived her life in a frigid place with soul-stopping snows, Ylena had immediately taken to Northern California’s temperate winters. Of course, the cancer didn’t help.

“I promise, Mutti—we shall have Christmas in the sun. It will warm your bones and seep into your icy heart.”