Making Promises (23 page)

was awkward—but he wanted to feel as much of Mikhail’s body as he could

“Ahhh… why be… be….” Shane had started stroking him again, and it sounded as though his brain shorted out for a moment. “Dammit! I’m going to… I’m going to come and….”

Shane kept stroking, burying his nose in Mikhail’s neck, stroking the tender flesh of his throat, and memorizing every ridge, every vein of Mikhail’s cock as it burgeoned against his hand, growing slick with pre-come. “Then come,” Shane whispered in his ear, and Mikhail whimpered again. Bending his head, Mikhail captured Shane’s thumb in his mouth and suckled hard as he pushed against the hand on his cock, and Shane heard the groan—felt it, as it started in Mikhail’s groin and traveled up through his chest and against Shane’s other palm—that signaled a quick and dirty orgasm, right there in the hallway.

Mikhail spurted against his fist, spattering on the front of his jeans and against the inside of his shirt. Shane stroked harder, using the lubrication, grunting in satisfaction as Mikhail spurted again and again and again.

Finally he was done, and Shane buttoned up his fly with shaking fingers. He stood there, arms wrapped around Mikhail’s chest, rubbing his cheek against that pale, corkscrew hair. For all its springy curl, it was surprisingly soft.

“That was….” Mikhail was still panting. “That was very nice. But why did you not let me…?”

“Go down on me in public?” Shane asked, panting too. His balls felt positively blue with pressure, and he wasn’t sure he could walk. Mikhail leaned his head back against Shane’s shoulder, and Shane closed his eyes.

It was a trusting gesture—so, so worth it.

“Yes.”

“Because that would have been it,” Shane murmured, sure of this as he was of nothing else. Mikhail took one of his own hands from the wall and used it to lift Shane’s damp hand to his mouth. As they spoke he sucked one finger after another until they were all clean, and Shane wondered if he’d have to turn in his man-card if he came in his pants right then.

“That would have been what?” Mikhail asked, after pulling Shane’s index finger out of his mouth and moving to the webbing between it and Shane’s thumb.

“That would have been the end. Next week you would have found a reason to blow me off, and you would have stopped returning my calls. I would be in the ‘done that’ category. You could tell yourself you’d done that, and it wouldn’t work, and that was the end.” Mikhail sighed against Shane’s palm, which had been thoroughly licked clean, and then he placed a delicate, tender kiss there. His head fell forward, and he turned in Shane’s embrace, leaning his cheek against Shane’s chest and rubbing against his shirt in the space of his open jacket.

“How do you know that? I hadn’t even put it into words.” Shane kissed the top of his head, laughing a little, although it wasn’t funny in the least. “Mickey, you’ve got a sense of honor in you. You figure you put out for me and you’ve paid me in full for any attention I gave you. It’s not that hard to figure out.”

Mikhail was quiet. His arms crept around Shane’s waist, and he tucked himself into Shane’s arms with the rightness of a kitten curling up in a sock basket.

“So how do I pay you back for this?” he asked eventually, and Shane had no choice but to smile. It felt like a victory of sorts.

“Hang with me until you can’t stand my company anymore. I’ll get on your nerves eventually—you can ditch me then.” The noise Mikhail made sounded like a laugh but wasn’t one, either.

“You make it very hard for me to ditch you when you make it necessary for me to defend you from yourself.”

“Right backatcha, Mickey. Right backatcha.”

I’m begging you to beg me…

“I Want You To Want Me”—Cheap Trick

“ANOTHER Wednesday night, Mikhail?” Anna sat at the desk behind the partition doing accounts as Mikhail took off his jacket and Shane’s scarf and prepared for his classes. It was an easy time of year—everything was skill-building. After Christmas would come the hard part, where the students received the new choreography for the big recital in the spring.

“Da,” Mikhail muttered, looking down. He was once again wearing his clubbing clothes—this time it was a pair of blue-gray plaid pants and a black shirt. He had nothing else for a date, and, well, it felt nice to dress up for a handsome man.

“He is a nice man?” Anna asked, looking at him gently, and Mikhail sat down on the chair across from the desk and made a business of putting on his soft-soled leather shoes. “Mikhail?” she prompted, and he looked at her and tried not to blush.

“He is the best man. I am waiting for him to see how badly I can fuck up his life so I can wear jeans on Wednesdays again.”

“This is what? The sixth time you’ve worn your good clothes to work? You will need a sweater next week. It is November.” Mikhail blushed. It was true—he had been cold on his walk to work under his thin denim jacket. But he didn’t have many good clothes and certainly nothing new. All his money had been going into his fund for his Making Promises

mother’s cruise. He shivered—it would be time to count that soon, and he was so very afraid there would not be enough.

“Yes,” he muttered. “It is a record. Call the news, they will send a truck, and I will do the camera man behind it, and then the streak will be over.”

Anna was looking at him as though he were insane, and he reflected sourly that Shane might actually think that was funny. Except he wouldn’t say such a thing to Shane anymore because it was intolerable that Shane would think he had something like that coming.

Mikhail sighed and looked back at Anna. “He is a very nice man—

he should be dating a very nice person, and he has chosen me instead. I do not know how to live up to that.”

“Be nice back.” Anna shrugged. She was older than Shane by ten years or so, but since children didn’t seem to be an issue, Mikhail thought this would not bother him. She was plainly pretty, with permed curly hair—most of her beauty came from her enormous vitality and the laugh lines around her eyes. The children adored her, although she took shit from none of them—not even the adorable pudgy little three-year-old redhead who had the rest of the world wrapped around her plump finger.

Shane should be dating her, Mikhail thought wretchedly, but then he remembered that she smoked. His mother had quit two years before, when the cancer had been diagnosed, and only recently had the smell gotten out of his clothes.

No. Mikhail could not give Shane away to someone who smoked.

There had to be someone else out there who was better for him than Mikhail. Besides—Mikhail was pretty sure she was a lesbian, and that was one too many switches thrown to make that current flow.

“Be nice back,” Mikhail repeated now. “Of course. Why didn’t I think of that? Now all of my problems are solved.” Anna rolled her eyes at his sarcasm, and shrugged back at him. “The least you could do is see him more than once a week!” Mikhail looked at her in horror, and she shook her head.

“Look,
lubime
—it is not my place to butt in, but you’ve been teaching here for seven years. You walked into my studio and just begged to watch, because American school was so painful and you missed dance so badly. You made no promises, but you showed up, and then you swept 136

the floor, just so you could dance on it. And then I saw you dance, and I made you teach, because something of that
must
be given to the world.

You have never been late, you have never been absent, and you have never, not once, given me a reason to distrust you. Why should you be any worse at love than you are at work? If you care about this man even the least little bit as much as you care about dancing, what harm is seeing him more than once a week really going to do?”

I would have to meet his family. I would have to see his home. I
would have to picture that maybe, they could belong to me too. I would
have to sleep in his bed and imagine myself in his life. I would have to see
the hole in my soul that would be left if he finally decides I am too much
trouble and finds someone who is not broken.

“The damage cannot be measured in words,” he told her, and she laughed as though it were a joke.

Still, when the dance was over and the children had filed out—the last one, Lily, running back to give him a hug that completely enchanted him—he did not try to stop the lifting of his heart when he spotted the familiar black car in the parking lot. Shane was leaning on the trunk, and Mikhail gestured excitedly for him to come into the studio. He did, walking through the door with that shy smile he often had that said he wanted to kiss Mikhail but he wasn’t sure if Mikhail would accept it.

Mikhail was so glad to see him that he stood on his toes and touched lips to the big man as soon as the door was shut behind them.

“So, Mickey—what’s up?” Shane said, his cheeks coloring in a pleased fashion after the kiss was over. Mikhail took a risk, feathered a touch across Shane’s high cheekbone and down his jaw line. He really was a handsome man—his face was more a square than a rectangle, but his eyes had a way of lighting up and tilting at the corners that made him quite beautiful if you knew how to look.

“Take off your shoes,” Mikhail ordered. “I want to show you something.” He was trying not to be nervous.

He moved to the back of the room where the stereo was and pulled the iPod out of the jack and reprogrammed the mix.

He had a special one just for Shane, put together from listening to his stereo on rides home and trips to the market or to a restaurant to get takeout, and mostly from knowing the man himself. He knew what would Making Promises

make Shane move. But Shane moved before Mikhail was ready—

suddenly he was at Mikhail’s back, holding his hips with familiar hands and looking over his shoulder.

“Ooh—I like that one,” he said as Mikhail scrolled through the list.

Mikhail looked at the Springsteen title and shook his head. “Not for the first one. We’ll do that one second.”

There was a bemused pause. “Okay… what are we doing?” Mikhail turned around, closing his eyes at the warmth radiating from that broad chest. They had kissed often—long and passionately—and he knew the feel of Shane’s bare chest under his palms. The man had no vanity; he did not wax or pluck or shave. His chest was unapologetically hairy, and Mikhail loved it. The hair was not coarse under his palms, and sometimes, after their dates, he would go to sleep imagining laying his head on Shane’s bare shoulder and simply stroking that heavily muscled, silk-haired chest like a child would stroke a stuffed animal for comfort.

Even as he closed his eyes and spanned his hands across Shane’s pecs through his shirt, Mikhail knew this was not the time.

He opened his eyes and peered impishly at Shane. “We’re dancing.” He was not surprised when his big cop took a horrified step back.

“No,” he said miserably. “Mickey—I’m not good at this. I can run pretty fast, and I’m pretty strong, but I’m not pretty when I move. Not like you—

”

“Bullshit!” Mikhail smiled as he said it to take away the sting. “I see you—you dance. You pound on the steering wheel, you nod your head in time. It is all dancing. I’m sure you dance at home, right?” Shane blushed, and Mikhail had the sudden thought that he’d give much of his soul to see Shane, alone and unselfconscious, dancing his heart out in a room full of adoring dogs.

“It’s safe there,” he said, and for the first time Mikhail saw uncertainty in those warm brown eyes. He was afraid of being foolish, even—perhaps especially—in front of Mikhail.

Mikhail was honored beyond words. He tried a smile, but he did not know what it looked like. “It is safe here,” he said softly, and although Shane smiled gratefully into the pause afterwards, he was still shaking his head “no” when Mikhail pressed play and turned up the volume.

The opening notes of Cheap Trick thundered through the little dance room.
I waaannnt you to want me. I neeeeeeeed you to need me. I’d
looooovvvvve you to love me. I’m begging you to beg me….

Mikhail smiled gamely and held out his hand. The look Shane gave him was miserable and limpid with trust, and Mikhail swore he wouldn’t let him down, not in this.

“Here—move your feet like this.” He did a simple jazz square, and Shane followed. Mikhail did it again, and Shane followed again. “And now move to the music!”

Shane tried it that way as well. Mikhail turned to face him, executing his move in reverse, and held out his hands. They met palms and laced fingers, swinging their arms at the elbows just like teenagers at a fifties sock-hop, and then Mikhail swung out on one hand and did a spin under Shane’s arm, coming back laughing to hold Shane’s hips so they could swing their bodies together. Shane’s uncertainty was being hammered out of him with each beat—this was Shane’s music, his blood absolutely had to thunder in time to it. He had no choice—Mikhail knew this, because it was true of him too. Shane might not think of himself as a dancer, but their hearts both beat to music, of that Mikhail had no doubt.