Artur let out a sigh. “What would it harm,” he asked, “if you were to care for this boy?”
Grace was so surprised he actually looked at Artur’s face, and found the gray eyes fastened on Grace’s reaction.
“I’m not easy to love,” he said, thinking wistfully about saying outrageous things and hearing Hunter’s dry chuckle. Amusing. Just like he’d tried to dismiss Hunter as being. Grace was… amusing.
“Bullshit,” Artur replied succinctly, and Grace’s brain did a panicked end run for the stern task master he’d grown up with.
“I’m… uhm…. Dance Ma—”
“Dylan Li,” Artur said, his voice a cross between exasperation and affection, “you are so easy to love. I have loved you like my own since you first walked into my conservatory, dancing like an angel prince. But I’m not… demonstrative, and your parents are worse than useless.”
Grace gasped. Nobody—not even Josh—had ever criticized his parents.
“This surprises you?” Artur demanded. “They left you on your own to raise yourself! If it hadn’t been for Joshua and his family, you might have died or thrown away your beautiful talent or—or been lost from us forever. Nobody with your brightness does that if their parents didn’t inflict a wound almost too great to bear.”
Dylan swallowed hard against the knot in his throat. “I… I am stronger than I look,” he said, but it was too late. In one Lyft ride after an extraordinary day, one of the few people he trusted had taken his emotional Kevlar overcoat and shredded it like thin silk.
“That is a lie,” Artur said kindly. “You look completely self-sufficient. Only those of us who love you best know that your heart is very, very fragile. So tell me, will this young man of yours treat your heart well?”
Dylan wiped one eye self-consciously with his palm and hated that the other one spilled over.
“We went shopping for Julia and Molly,” he said. “We finished early and brought their things back to the hotel.” Dylan had expected sex then. He hadn’t done anything overt, simply followed Hunter into the command central room to hang the dresses up and deposit the bags, but when they’d left the room—including Stirling, who was simultaneously monitoring coms and engaging in bloody cyberwarfare and who seemed quite happy to be by himself—Dylan had started to go left, toward his room, and Hunter had snagged his hand and taken him right, back toward the elevators and down.
Dylan hadn’t said anything, and then they were back on the street, the sharp tang of the air off the marina blowing against their skin, when Hunter had said, “Not yet.”
“Not what yet?”
“Not sex yet. Grace, I swear to you, we will have sex, and it will be spectacular.”
“Then why aren’t we having it now?” he complained. Hunter’s hand, rough and strong on his, tightened. All morning long, Hunter had been more than a warm body, a promise of muscle and stubble and a hard cock in Grace’s needy hole. He’d been kindness and laughter and a refusal to take Grace’s squirrely brain at face value.
He’d treated Grace like a grown-up, asking his opinion, disagreeing sometimes, and getting excited when, between the two of them, they made a new, better idea. That scarf, yes—that color, no. The pop of red, a little blue—see? No—this one! Purple instead of red. Yes. Perfect!
They’d watched the floatplanes coming and going from the water, and after Hunter told him which types were cargo and which were passenger planes, and what Alaska was like in the summer and the beauty of this part of the world, Grace told Hunter about the aerodynamic theory that made floatplanes take off and pontoons a thing.
Hunter had confessed to knowing that—he apparently had his pilot’s license—but he’d looked at Grace, a bemused expression in his gray eyes, and allowed his lean mouth to slant into a smile.
“What?” Grace had demanded, suddenly self-conscious.
“You could be anything,” Hunter said in awe. “Theoretical mathematics, English professor, dancer, thief. That’s amazing. I had a football scholarship and an ROTC teacher and just enough smarts to get into special forces. I wasn’t ever going to be anything but muscle. You are really amazing, do you know that?”
Grace hadn’t been able to answer him, not really. But before he’d turned away, he’d mumbled, “You’re not just muscle,” and then he’d practically run to a kiosk that sold ice cream because it was easier than looking at the awe in Hunter’s eyes.
Really, sex would have been so much easier, right? Grace wanted to have it, to get it out of the way so he didn’t have to deal with that expression of awe, that expectation that Grace would do something, be something, other than his fidgety, flighty self.
And Hunter knew it. He maintained his pull on Grace’s hand, tugging him out to explore the city some more. They wandered the rainbow district, with its iconic presentation of flags, and dodged into a few shops, including one that featured everything from exotic scents to bondage gear.
Grace had fled from that last one—not his scene—and Hunter had followed at a more leisurely pace, saying, “You know, I think someone should tie you down once in a while. You’d probably enjoy it!”
Grace’s groin had begun to ache almost instantly, but he hadn’t said anything about sex again. Not after that.
Not when Hunter seemed to know him in ways he didn’t know himself.
And apparently Artur sensed this. “Was it awful? Not jumping straight into bed with someone so you could run away after?”
“Dance Master!” Grace squeaked. Augh! Who liked to talk about sex with their elders? It was mortifying.
“If you didn’t want me to intrude, you shouldn’t have cut such a swath through every dance troupe to enter the state,” Artur replied blandly. “I caught you with your first boy, Dylan, or have you forgotten?”
“That wasn’t my first!” Grace retorted, memories of being a highly precocious fourteen-year-old caught on his knees in a changing tent backstage with a fifteen-year-old dancer whose girlfriend was right outside.
Artur looked at him, eyebrows raised, as it slowly dawned on Grace that he wasn’t helping his case.
“Wasn’t my tenth either,” Grace mumbled.
“It shouldn’t have been any of them,” Artur said, voice soft. “You were never ready to have lovers, Grace. You were scratching an itch, hoping that when the scratch was over, the hole in your heart left by your parents wouldn’t hurt anymore. You never, not once, gave any boy a chance to fill that hole with something other than his sex.”
Gah! Grace used his palm again, hating this car ride, hating the rain that had started falling as he and Hunter had rushed back to the hotel so Grace could change, and especially hating the fact that his heart felt as flayed and raw as his feet.
“Once,” he admitted thickly.
Artur made as if to spit, and then looked around the small Lyft car as though remembering where he was.
“Mudak! Gandon!” he swore, and Grace’s eyebrows lifted. He spoke very little Russian, but he had a feeling no one would find those two words on Duolingo anytime soon.
“I thought I loved him,” Grace mumbled.