You’re overtired. It makes you emotional.
God, Sacha was bored with that mantra, despite the fact that it was truer today than it had been since he’d stepped into the same broken lift as Jonah Gray.
Eventually, the storm in Sacha’s brain passed, muted enough by medication for him to ignore it and get on with his work. Another late night loomed ahead of him. After four hours of straight coding and all the bullshit snags that came with it, he finally opened his emails. Most were pertinent to the current project that was teetering on the edge of disaster. One was from his cousin letting him know Sacha’s father was unlikely to be alive by the end of the year.
Sacha deleted the email without reply, numbness creeping into the irritation he carried with him ninety percent of the time, unless he was with Jonah. Nausea returned. He pushed it down. Sacha reached for his phone and opened the message thread he had with Jonah. They hadn’t spoken since the exchange about Christmas, a conversation that Sacha had seemed to observe from afar, watching his fingers tap out messages he didn’t recognise as coming from his own brain.
The notion of accompanying Jonah to his family home for Christmas was preposterous, and yet…Sacha would go if Jonah wanted him to.
I wish he was here now.
The errant through caught Sacha off guard. He’d grown used to the yearning in his belly that deepened after every sexual encounter they shared, but the ache in his chest was new.
I don’t just want to fuck him. I want to—
Sacha’s phone buzzed.
JG: Are you awake?
Sacha typed an answer without thinking.
Sacha: Yes. Are you?
JG: It would be hard to send you this message if I wasn’t.
He had a point, but Sacha’s brain wasn’t working as well as it usually did. Fatigue and drug fog had seen to that.
Sacha: Okay. I will ask why you are awake instead. It is late.
JC: It’s early, actually. I just got up.
Sacha blinked and checked the time. Sure enough, it was four-thirty in the morning—an hour before he usually rose on a regular work day—and he’d missed his window to go to bed.
Sacha: Maybe it is late for me.
JC: You say strange things.
Sacha: I am okay with that.
JC: I thought you might be. Do you want to get breakfast?
Sacha: With you?
JC: No. In general.
Sacha: I think perhaps you are being sarcastic now.
JC: Maybe. Regardless, I’ll be at Rosa’s in half an hour if you change your mind.
Sacha: I never made up my mind.
Jonah fell silent. Sacha thought about leaving it alone and crashing for the few hours he could spare before he was due at the office, but his scratchy eyes were nothing on the churn in his gut at the thought of missing out on alone time with Jonah.
You won’t be alone. It’s a café on a busy street, even at this hour.
Sacha took a shower and got dressed all the same, and he was out of the door with ten minutes to spare.
The breakfast café was a five-minute walk from the loft apartment he called home. Sacha expected to arrive first, but Jonah was already there, seated in a window booth with two coffees in front of him.
“You are presumptuous, Jonah Gray,” Sacha grumbled by way of greeting, and slid into the seat opposite.
Jonah glanced up from his phone. A half smile warming his lovely face. “You like coffee, food, and me, perhaps in that order. Why wouldn’t you come?”
“The order of my preference should concern you. I could take my coffee and leave.”
“You’re forgetting the food. At least wait until it gets here.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re hungry.”
“How do you know?”
“I listen, Ivanov.”
Sacha settled into his seat and claimed his coffee. “I should not like it when you call me by my father’s name.”
“No? Why’s that? I can stop if it truly offends you.”
“It does not. That is my point.”
“Okay…” Jonah sipped his coffee, eying Sacha over his cup. “Where does the possibility that it might come from? You don’t like your dad?”
“I don’t care enough about my father to dislike him.”
“Why not?”
“He is a bitter old drunk.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Why? It is not you.”
“I meant I’m sorry your relationship with your father is like that. I don’t speak to my dad much, but I love him. I respect him. And I’m confident the feeling is mutual. I can’t imagine not having that in my life.”
“Well, I have never had it, so your experience seems bizarre to me.”
“That’s sad.”
“It is true. There is no need to be sentimental about it.”
“Here we go.” Jonah rolled his eyes. “Do you repeat that narrative about everything?”
“What narrative?”
“That you don’t care.”
“I do not care about my father. You are pushing your own emotions onto me.”
Jonah snorted. “If only. But I didn’t just mean your dad. I meant everything. Why do you pretend you’re this unfeeling, emotionless android? I know you’re not.”
“How do you know that?”
“A mixture of instinct and evidence.”
Sacha shook his head slightly, as much to clear it as in disagreement. He had not prepared for such a convoluted conversation. “Your instincts are misguided, and your evidence is based on what? The short time you’ve known me compared to the lifetime I’ve known myself?”
“You help people,” Jonah countered. “I’ve seen you.”
“Perhaps for my own gain. Nothing is ever truly altruistic, no?”
A server came to the table with plates of poached eggs, crisp bacon, tomatoes, and fresh avocado. On the side was rye bread almost dark enough to be Russian. Sacha smiled and lost control of his leg as it hooked Jonah’s under the table, entwining their ankles. “It is like you know what I need before I do,” he said softly.
Jonah slid cutlery across the table. “Or maybe I’m greedy enough to eat yours if you don’t want it.”
“Greedy? You? No.” Sacha closed his fingers around his knife and fork, using the cool metal to ground himself, to tie him down to the world when the simple contact of Jonah’s leg against his was enough to send him spinning out of orbit. “You listen, Jonah Gray, even when others do not speak.”
Jonah let it go. They ate in the companionable silence Sacha enjoyed so much when he wasn’t in the mood to talk. The food was good, just the right balance of naughty and nourishing. It is a parallel. Of your friendship with him. You want to fuck him, but you want this too—to eat with him while he stares at you and tries to figure you out.
Sacha swallowed the last bite of his breakfast and pursed his lips. The idea of Jonah ever figuring him out was laughable. Sacha had a one-forty IQ and twenty-eight years of trying, and he was still no closer to understanding the contradictory nature of his brain.
“You are a cold man,” a girlfriend had once told him. “You take intimacy to make yourself feel good, but give me nothing in return.”
Sacha had given up on relationships after that, and had never regretted it. Walking away from affection was easy. At least, it had been until now.