“What did you get them?”
“Candles. My mum loves them. And some honey for my dad. He’s obsessed with bees at the moment. He has his own hives at their summer lodge.”
“I dropped a honey jar once,” Sacha said. “In my grandmother’s house, on her favourite carpet. She told my mother I was a devil child.”
“What did your mother say?”
“That I was an angel and my father’s mother was too full of hate to see it.”
“That’s a strong statement.”
Sacha smiled. “I am no angel now, and I wasn’t then, but the rest of it was true. My father’s family are hateful people. I have told you this before, no?”
“A little. I think. I might’ve been drunk.”
“I was drunk on Friday,” Sacha said. “I did not mean to upset you.”
“You didn’t.”
“Are you a liar, Jonah Gray?”
Jonah spared Sacha a sideways glance. “No. I was drunk too. I overreacted. After all, what’s a bathroom hook-up between non-friends, eh?”
“You take me too seriously.”
“Which part?”
“I don’t know. All of me?”
Jonah shook his head. “I can’t take you anyway whatsoever. You’re a terrible communicator.”
“I am sorry.”
“Don’t be. You are who you are. Maybe it’s me that’s the problem. You were always clear that you wanted an NSA arrangement. I pushed you for more.”
Sacha stopped walking, computing the soulless Grindr phrase: NSA: no strings attached. “No, you did not. I said we could be friends who had sex with each other, and I thought we could, but I am not good at letting people into my life. It…” Sacha waved his hand, searching for the English words. “It scares me, maybe? I don’t know. After my mother died, the people I was forced to be around were not nice people. I learned fast that it was better to be alone. I think I like being alone.”
“You think?”
“Sometimes. And then there is you, Jonah Gray. You make me think strange things.”
“Like what?”
“Like sharing your bed is what I want too, but I am scared to want it. It is a…contradiction, no? To everything I believe myself to be.”
“What’s wrong with contradiction?”
“If I knew the answer to that, this conversation would not happen.”
Jonah frowned. “That makes no sense.”
Sacha knew that. But it seemed no matter what he thought he knew, something different fell out of his mouth every time he was near Jonah. His sense of self altered to become a man who chased affection and friendship, all the while desperate for the high of the headiest sexual encounters he’d ever had.
They reached Sacha’s building. His heart invited Jonah in to spend what was left of the weekend together, in Sacha’s bed, on his couch, pressed up against his kitchen counters. He bought beer. Made dinner from the handful of ingredients he had in his cupboards. Watched films. Ate together, fucked together, slept together. But his head said no, a blunt refusal with no rhyme or reason, and he’d pushed Jonah away too much for him to fill the void Sacha’s reticence left behind.
Sacha fished in his pocket for his keys. Jonah propped his shoulder on the wall, watching him.
“Can I ask you something?” he said suddenly.
Sacha nodded. “Of course.”
“How did your mum die?”
“That is what you want to ask me?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
Sacha let go of his keys and moved away from the door. Jonah followed, until they were in the alleyway beside his building that led to the bin yard.
He’d had worse conversations in far nicer places. “My mother died in a car accident. It was icy. She came off the road on a Saturday afternoon and hit a tree.”
“How old were you?”
“Nine.”
“So you remember her, then?”
“Yes.”
“And you don’t like your dad?”
“No.”
Jonah nodded slowly, like a man connecting dots Sacha couldn’t see.
Stop. Please. But the words didn’t solidify. They stayed inside, unsaid, like everything else.
Jonah straightened and moved his shopping bags from one hand to the other. He rummaged in one, and came up with a tiny, Christmas-patterned gift bag. “I got this for you. I don’t know why, unless you want to call it a non-friendship bracelet. Or you can re-gift it to someone you actually like—”
“I do like you. That is—”
“Shh.” Jonah silenced Sacha with a soft finger to his lips. “I saw it and thought of you. I don’t care what you do with it or why. I’ll see you tomorrow, at work, okay?”
Sacha opened his mouth, but Jonah left without waiting for an answer, ducking out of the alley and striding away, his auburn hair a beacon among the city crowds. Sacha drifted a few steps behind him, watching him disappear until he remembered the bag in his hand.
He took it inside and left his shoes and coat on the floor of the hallway, trashing the efforts he’d made to tidy the place up. On the couch, he set the bag on the coffee table and stared at it. Jonah had called it a non-friendship bracelet, but to Sacha, though he hadn’t even set eyes on it yet, it seemed like a live landmine. As if the moment he saw it, everything would irrevocably change.
“I don’t care what you do with it or why.”
Jonah was no liar, but Sacha didn’t believe him.
He didn’t even want to.
With a shaky hand, he reached for the bag and opened it. Inside, he found a leather bracelet. It was charcoal grey, and a tiny silver charm in the shape of a yolka was woven into the simple braid.
Sacha held it up to the light, twisting it this way and that. The silver charm caught the light of the midday sun, like everything else he’d come across today had seemed to do. It was no match for Jonah’s copper hair, but it enchanted Sacha all the same.
He’d never worn a bracelet. He stretched out his right arm and tied the leather around his wrist with his left hand and his teeth. The dark leather looked good against his skin.
It felt even better.
16
Jonah stared at the palm-sized ornament on his desk. The green glass had caught the winter sun, casting refractions on the dark carpet and fabric blinds, enchanting anyone and everyone who’d graced his office that day. But as beautiful as it was, it was the accompanying note that had enraptured Jonah more.
Jonah Gray. We will talk soon, I promise x
No signature, but Jonah didn’t need one. Even without his full name spelled out, he recognised Sacha’s spiky scrawl even though he’d never seen it before—it matched his personality. The delicate Christmas tree decoration? Not so much.
Or maybe it did, and Jonah didn’t know Sacha Ivanov half as well as he’d thought.
You don’t know him at all. The realist prancing on his shoulder was hard to ignore. Jonah dug deep for counterarguments, but all he could come up with was that Sacha liked to eat and be bossy about orgasms.
He wasn’t bossy on Friday night.