Making Promises (21 page)

“We cannot change the past,” he said, cursing his damned voice. It had been running riot all day, and it was time to get it under control.

“We can change the way you look at it!” she retorted. “You were young and desperate, and it was not your fault.”

“I said I’d take care of you—”

“Yes!” she snapped. “You were nine years old and promising me you would take care of me! You should have been playing in school, but instead you were dancing to support us both—”

“We both know that school was not as idyllic as it sounds,” he said, raw. Not where they had lived before the apartment and the food coupons that dancing had given them.

“I should have known you were hurt!”

“Mutti…”

“Don’t ‘Mutti’ me—we both know I should have. I should have seen the drugs before they ended your career…. I should have seen what you were doing for them before they ended your life….”

“Mutti!” He hated this conversation. He hated it—it was wrong. She had been so young—hell, when he’d been recruited for the ballet in the first place, she’d been scarcely as old as he was now.

“We will have this conversation,” she muttered, overriding his protests, “and we will have it my way, and we will have it before it can destroy you anymore for not having it. Why has it never occurred to you, my sweet boy, that I was as much to blame for Olek’s death as you were?”

“It was
not
your promise to make!” he shouted. “It was mine!
I
told him I would be back.
I
told him I would never leave him.
I
was the one who lied to him, who did not mention that my mother was trying to get us out of Russia for once and forever—”

“And I was the one who locked you in your room so you could see what the drugs were doing to you!” she shouted back. “I tied you to your bed so you could feel withdrawals, feel it, so you would know why we needed to leave so you could overcome it. I was the one who did not listen to you when you told me your friend was alone and sad. I was the one who did not let you out until it was too late. I am sick and I am dying, and why can you not give me some of the blame, Mikhail? It will sit more lightly on my shoulders when I am dead than it will on yours as you use it to poison your life!”

Mikhail’s hand was trembling as he used the heel of it to press against his eyes, but for some reason they would not stop blurring. “I told him I’d be back,” he said brokenly. He squeezed his eyes shut again and saw Olek, cold and blue, his flesh long since stiff in the tiny pallet of the back room they’d used to turn tricks and shoot up. The needle was still in his arm—he’d shot a week’s worth of stash in one go. Next to him had been the note Mikhail left in Cyrillic:
Gone home to give my mother the
rent. No worries. Back in an hour. Don’t shoot it all.

Yes, yes, the fucker had broken that promise and had shot it all, but damn it to fucking hell, Mikhail had broken his promises first.

In the silence between them, the microwave dinged that the food was warm, and he moved mechanically to go get it. He brought it back with a placemat and a fork and set it on the table in front of her, and she caught his hand and pulled him down to her, framing his wet face in her hands and kissing his cheek fiercely.

“I’m sorry your friend died back when you were a lost child,
mal’chik
, but I am not sorry it was not you. Of all the fucking awful things I did as a mother, seeing you grown is the one I will not regret.” Mikhail couldn’t look at her. He gave her cheek his own fierce kiss and straightened. He would not speak of Olek again. Poor Olek, who had shown him how to bend over and take it when the loneliness had gotten so bad, and how to shoot up when the pain did not leave the knee because he came back too early to dance on it, and how to turn tricks when they could no longer dance. He’d started life as a sweet boy with red hair and blue eyes and whose one true evil in life had been the same as the heroin that killed him. All of his efforts had been to stop Mikhail’s pain in the “now,” and he had not known how to stop it for the “later.” Well, now it was later, and Mikhail had to live through the pain, and he had done it by being alone, by not being in the position to let anybody down again.

Except his mother.

And now Shane.

“You are a wonderful mother,” he said roughly. “When you die, that should not be a weight that sits your shoulders, you understand?”

“And you are a good man. When I am dead, that should not be a thing you worry about, either,” she said thickly.

He nodded and made his way heavily to his back bedroom to take off his denim jacket. He took off the scarf as well, but not before he’d buried his nose in its softness for comfort. It still smelled like Shane—right down to the Chinese food and the coffee and the innocence.

He couldn’t help it. He held it to his face and breathed it in again and again and used it to blot his cheeks, in spite of how scratchy wool got when you did that. When he was done, he folded it carefully and put it on top of the box, where it sat neatly since it would not fit inside.

He might give it back to Shane when he came back the next week—

but only if Shane asked.

…the house is haunted and the ride gets rough…

“Tunnel of Love”—Bruce Springsteen

THEY sat side by side on the floor of the small apartment with their arms wrapped around their knees and watched
Up
. Shane had tried very hard not to cry like a woman in the first ten minutes, and he had caught Mikhail’s wry glance at him, complete with rolled eyes.

Shane had slugged him in the arm and ignored him after that, and they became completely immersed in the children’s movie. Mikhail’s mother lay stretched out on the couch behind them, just as captivated as they were.

Shane liked her very much—he was sorry she was sick; he would have liked to have known her for a long time.

Dinner had gone well—he’d made that chicken, mayonnaise, and cheese thing with the potato chips on top, and Ylena had been pleased at the gift if not the taste. There was no reason to inform her that the masterpiece had been completed with a maximum of fuss, a destroyed kitchen, and three phone calls to Benny to make sure he was doing it right.

“It’s chicken, mayonnaise, and cheese, Shane—add in some pimentos and some almonds, and how hard can it be?”

“I don’t know!” Shane had wailed, looking at the mess the frozen chicken thighs had made as they boiled over on his stove. “But I seem to be finding every damned thing to do wrong that is possible to do wrong.” Making Promises

He opened one of the bags of potato chips he’d bought for the project and started munching on it glumly. Deacon had dragged him and Jon an extra mile that morning, and he was starving.

“Look,” Benny was saying, “clean up the shit on the stove, because if the water boils away and there’s more fat than water, it’ll catch fire.”

“SHIT!” Because the warning came a little late, and Benny spent some minutes being entertained on the other end of the line as he took a pot lid and beat the fire out.

When he was done and she’d walked him through the rest of the process, she’d said, “Okay, Shane, give. Who is this for?” Shane was drinking a beer by then—something he rarely did, actually—and eating more potato chips, but he still wasn’t relaxed and happy enough to answer that question.

“I’m not telling,” he said, knowing it sounded petulant and not being able to change that.

“Jesus, Perkins, what are you, five?”

“It’s not that,” he muttered, still unable to put a finger on it. “It’s just… Benny, I’m not sure this will work out, you know? I don’t want to…. You guys are good enough to take me into your home… not random strangers who might not come back.”

Benny sighed, and in spite of the fact that he was pretty sure his latest batch of casserole might not suck, he could feel the moment weighing heavier than it had.

“The thing is,” the girl on the line said with a great deal of thoughtfulness, “who exactly do you think is going to pick you up if this doesn’t work out? It would help if we met the guy, you know?” Shane grinned and tried to make things a little lighter. “Who says it’s a guy?”

Benny laughed. “The girl who lives with two gay men, that’s who.

Guys don’t cook to impress girls—not often, anyway. But I’m pretty sure Crick learned to cook just especially to take care of Deacon.” Shane had to concede that was true.

“Just please,” Benny said anxiously, “please tell us if something goes wrong. If he breaks your heart. Deacon almost killed himself 124

grieving when Crick left—we just need some warning if we’re going to have to scrape you off the floor, okay?”

Shane couldn’t answer that. He just kept thinking about the empty apartment he’d come home to after his real, physical heart had actually stopped on the surgery table. The knowledge that he had a group of people who wanted to be there if he broke his figurative heart made him humble.

“I promise,” he told her gruffly, and then he’d asked her if Deacon would want a dog for Christmas, and if he bought the yarn, could she please, please, pretty please make him another wool scarf in blue.

And so far so good. It helped that he arrived not only with the casserole but also with the book Mikhail had eyed for his mother the week before—at least in Ylena’s eyes.

Mikhail had glared at him as he’d pulled the book out of the back of the car. Shane had given him a ride home and at Mikhail’s glare, he’d given a very cheesy impression of a smile.

“Beware of geeks bearing gifts?” he tried lamely, and that had startled the glare right off the little dancer’s face.

“I was just thinking that you are very sly as well as stubborn,” Mikhail replied sweetly. “I shall have to remember that when trying to convince you to go away.”

The man had been edgy since Shane had picked him up, and Shane was pretty sure that this was the part of the dance where Mikhail was going to try to bolt and run. He’d been waiting for it—he wasn’t even surprised that it had come so soon.

“Of course you’re going to try to make me go away,” Shane sighed, hefting the casserole and the book and shutting his door with his hip.

“Where’s the fun in courting someone without the constant, terrifying fear of rejection?”

He turned to walk up the stairs then, and Mikhail was suddenly right next to him. “You are just going to leave your car here without setting the alarm? In this neighborhood?”

Shane shrugged. “It’s not like I’m going to be here all night. Besides, my hands are full.” It wasn’t necessarily true—he wasn’t
that
clumsy, but Mikhail was already reaching for the keys in his pocket, and Shane liked the excuse of getting that close. It was funny, too, that as Mikhail reached into his jeans and pulled out the clicker, he didn’t seem to realize how Making Promises

intimate or familiar the gesture was until the alarm was set and he had to put the keys back in Shane’s pocket.

Mikhail froze, his hand right above Shane’s pocket, his chest rubbing up against Shane’s arm. His eyes were wide and surprised, and his pouty little mouth was drawn up into almost a comic O. Shane smiled gently at him and waited patiently for him to recover himself and put the keys back in the pocket of his jeans. For a moment, the air was so still between them that they both could hear the jangling of the keys in Mikhail’s shaking hand, and Shane was a little disappointed but not surprised when they were dropped roughly into his jacket pocket instead.

“It’s just a pocket, Mickey,” Shane said mildly, and Mikhail turned without looking at him.

“I’m not afraid of you.”

“Of course you’re not.”

“Stupid, insufferable man.” Mikhail led the way up the stairs, and Shane followed, their feet echoing on the concrete steps in the corridor.

“I’m the devil.”

“I’ll fuck six men between now and next Wednesday.”

“Well, I had an old girlfriend who did that too.” Shane sighed. It would be funnier if it hadn’t been true.

Mikhail turned to him, appalled. “How could she! How could anyone! You are not a man someone cheats on!”

Shane just looked at him, holding enough casserole to feed the Bayuls for a week and a book on Cozumel as Mikhail stood in front of the yellow apartment door and defended his honor. It took Mikhail a minute, but his cheeks turned red soon enough, and he looked down, his ice-gray eyes picking out the scuffs on the bomber jacket where Angel Marie had planted her paws right before Shane closed the gate.