Natural Recovery: Part I

Romance. A retired paramedic pursues the painfully shy new library assistant.

15k, M/M, rated M for now but will be rated E in the next parts. Part I is 15k.

Yuri Jentis, retired from paramedicine with a back injury, teaches IT and other skills in a town community centre. When Abraham Smith joins the attached library as an assistant, a painfully shy young man recently off a long-term hospital stay, Yuri finds himself quite attracted to him – though not as attracted to him as Abraham is clearly attracted to Yuri.

Age gap romance (49/31), suicidality and mental health issues discussed throughout, particularly anxiety, some PTSD, past abuse, and some chronic pain and disability stuff. Very Jewish-heavy cast with lots of Jewish jokes, though I should note that Abraham doesn’t consider himself Jewish and is quite uncomfortable with religion in general, as will become clear.

Author’s Notes

Adapted from last month’s TweetFic, but this is gonna be a good bit longer and more fleshed out as a novella, as you can see from the “part one”, I’m having a lot of fun with this.

I was saying this week that I’ve been a little nervous of writing so many more Jewish characters recently, but I’ve recently started attending temple services more regularly and trying to enjoy more Jewish work in general, and it’s feeling very positive and good for me! I’m currently reading a book about the history of violins (Lev’s Violin by Helena Attlee) and then will be reading a history book about bundism (Revolutionary Yiddishland), but if fellow Jews have recs for favourite books about Jewish history in the diaspora, I would welcome these!

Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean is already on my list for obvious reasons, and I would particularly welcome Jewish history books about Jews under the Ottomans, as well as Christians under the Ottomans, particularly Greeks and Ottoman Greece, as those will be useful for the next longer serial I’m currently sketching out.

I’m playing with a few themes in this one, especially the lines between the hostility of institutions and the double-edged comfort that sometimes comes with having one’s freedom removed and replaced with structures, and I’ve been thinking about it basically constantly since I started work on this over a month ago, so I hope people enjoy!

Please remember to let me know what you think in the comments.

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Yuri was a paramedic for eighteen years until he strained his back a few years back, slipped two discs, tore some fucking ligaments, in general had a not-so-fucking-good time of it. He’d tried to go back, at first, after his first round of physio, but he just hadn’t been up to it any longer – the speed of it, the lifting, the rapid movement, all that shit, but just as much, just sitting in the fucking ambulance.

He has to be pretty fucking careful how he sits and for how long these days – has an adjustable desk and one of those fucking yoga balls and goes swimming. He does what he has to do to keep the muscles engaged but not too tight, he does his physio, he tries his best to stay relaxed.

He misses it, of fucking course he does, but he didn’t have it in him to join up training new paras or EMTs, or even to stick with the fucking fire service – because he misses it so much, he had to get out, had to pivot.

And so here he is at the Clyde Community Centre, downsized into a nice little cottage instead of his apartment in the city near the firehouse. He even has a garden, one he pays some shitfuck kid from down the street to keep nice for him: he’s downright domesticated.

No wife, no kids.

Never wanted kids, and he used to date and sleep around a little when he was working paramedicine, but not so much these days. He’s been thinking lately that maybe he should make more of an effort at it, meeting women – he’s not a bad-looking guy, he’s good at what he does, he’s good with people.

He’d only have to say the word at temple services, he knows, and the old ladies would be glad to play matchmaker. He feels bad, honestly: he’s heard some of them talking, knows that Mrs Bohr assumed he was a widower when he moved into town, and he never corrected her, never corrected any of them.

Yuri’s had a few hook-ups in the past year or so, but never around the neighbourhood, only when he’s gone back into the city, and he’s downloaded a dating app, but he’d gotten just thinking about what pictures to post on his profile, let alone what to write down in the biography, or even the cutesy little questions.

He’s never been all that comfortable talking about himself, standing out from the crowd – there’s a reason that he used to like the fire service so much, liked being part of a unit, and why he picked the job he does now, why he teaches information tech and basic research skills and helps connect people with local social programs, shit like that.

Yuri likes the work, gets to talk to people, gets to help people without sitting behind a desk all day, but he’s still part of a team and blended in with the other centre staff, with social workers and the community health nurses, with the librarians.

People out here aren’t the kind of freaks that throw themselves into burning buildings or jump off skyscrapers or dive into fucking harbours – they’re the everyday kooks, community-minded ones, less hectic about life, and honestly, Yuri kinda likes it.

Mr Laniado, who’s been a social worker for half his fucking life, has a bunch of cats at home and commissions art of them, and Yuri knows that the two of them are friends, because two weeks back after Misty Olsen’s birthday drinks, he confessed to Yuri that he drives around and sabotages the work of a local TNR group.

Yuri had never fucking heard about TNR programs until he’d first heard Laniado complain about them when he moved here, but it’s basically women who go around picking up cats off the street and neutering them so they can’t breed, but still letting them be wild, or something.

Mr Laniado doesn’t truck with that, or in general, letting cats roam outdoors: he swipes up as many cats off the street as he can and his daughter drives them all around the fucking state to get rehomed or humanely put down, so that they don’t get sick or hurt living on the street. He’s actually in a bunch of TNR Facebook groups so that he can get a sense of where colonies of outdoor cats are showing up.

Laniado had opened his confession with, “Listen, Yuriko, I am going to tell you something I do that is very illegal, don’t tell your rabbi or he will squeal on me to the good haham,” and before Yuri could stop him, he was drunkenly pouring the whole sordid story into Yuri’s ears, and he thinks kidnapping people’s cats is…

Well, it’s a weird hobby.

It’s fucking crazy, actually, but he doesn’t think it’s that much less crazy than the TNR girls. Yuri likes cats very much, always has, but he thinks there’s maybe a sane compromise between going around with a van, rounding up cats, neutering them, and then releasing them in droves, or trafficking them out-of-state after kidnapping them out from under the noses of the TNR people.

That’s the thing about the fire service: everybody wears their crazy on the sleeves of their turnouts. The people around here aren’t less crazy, per se, it’s just a different flavour of crazy, and you don’t know where it is until they let you see it.

A lot of the librarians dress Ms Frizzle-style, wear patterned dresses or skirt suits, wear cute little pins and brooches and shit that have their hobbies and shit made really obvious, and Estelle, one of the CH nurses, is tatted all over with astrological signs and constellations and planets, because she just fucking loves them that much.

None of them, as far as Yuri knows, kidnaps people’s cats, but who’s to say what they’ll confess to if they ever get drunk and feel like Yuri has his listening ears on?

“Oh, and Yuri,” Misty says brightly as Yuri remakes the pot of coffee after pouring himself a mug in their kitchenette, getting ready to teach a basic class on photography skills, “this is Abraham, he just joined us as a new assistant.”

Abraham does not make eye contact or say anything in response, just nods very briskly before hurrying out of the room, and when Yuri looks askance to Misty, she shakes out her green-dyed curls of perfect hair and awkwardly rubs the back of her neck.

“He’s… shy,” Misty says.

“I got that,” says Yuri.

The kid, Yuri gets the impression, is on the extreme end of the local kook scale, but it’s all tightly under wraps. He’s fucking intense, is what he is. Yuri keeps an eye on him whenever he’s in the library over the coming days, keeps a subtle watch over him – he’s as quiet as a fucking mouse, avoids eye contact with most everybody, very clearly struggles to speak unless asked a direct question, and even then, can’t cope with an open-ended one.

He likes the books, Yuri can see that. He knows the Dewey system forward and backwards, apparently has all the references fucking memorised already, and he holds every book like it’s a precious bird, cradles stacks on his hip the tender way some people would hold a toddler, runs his fingers over their spines, smiles sometimes when he opens the older ones that still have a stamp page in them.

Yuri notices him holding one of the old date stamps one evening – Margie had said he was welcome to take it, since they didn’t use them anymore, what with the new digital tracking system, had dug it out of the back of the drawer. As he walks out of the building, he’s running his thumb over the rubber wheels, ticking the numbers around and around, days, months, years.

“What’s his deal?” he asks Cheryl the following Monday over beignets. He never fucking had a beignet in his fucking life until he moved to this little town. “That new kid, Abraham.”

Cheryl looks up the paperwork she’d been scowling at on her tablet, resting the butt of her stylus against her lower lip. She studies Yuri’s face, narrowing her eyes a little, and asks, “Why? He doing okay?”

“Yeah, sure he is,” Yuri says. “He hasn’t been rude or anything – he just…” Yuri presses his lips together, and he wonders how to explain it, because over the past week, he’s been watching Abraham…

And Abraham has been watching him back.

Keenly, too.

“He stares a little, is all,” Yuri says. “But then I turn to talk to him and he almost runs away. He’s skittish – I don’t want to scare him.”

“He’s had a hard time,” Cheryl says, and then says more quietly, “he was at an in-patient facility a long time, but he’s out-patient now.” She glances around them, making sure no one is around to overhear them. “God knows when that kid was last, you know, in society. He’ll take time to warm up, I bet.”

“He in the assisted living place on Kent?” Yuri asks.

He’s met some of those kids, most of them young women, who live in this big house that helps them get into better routines and shit about diet and exercise, all of them anorexics or bulimics or with other eating disorders made worse by their schools or colleges or jobs.

Abraham doesn’t look like them, and Yuri hasn’t seen him hesitate about eating. He’s particular about his food, eats from his lunchbox in a very particular order, but not like he’s trying to avoid eating it.

“Nah, he has a little maisonette, his own place,” Cheryl says. “It’s on the same block, though, that row of little houses is right across the street from the ED unit. He lives alone, he’s independent, just… Well. You’ve seen him. I hear he’s a good kid. He just needs to accustom to the space.”

“What was he in-patient for?”

Cheryl looks at him flatly. “Come on, Yuri, you know I shouldn’t have fucking told you anything I already have,” she says, and Yuri clucks his tongue, leaning back in his seat.

“A few years, you said?”

“Yuri. Be serious.”

“Fine, fine.”

“Maybe he likes the look of you because you seem familiar,” Cheryl suggests. “You know, getting used to living in the world when he’s been in institutions his whole life. You might well cut a familiar silhouette.”

“I wish I could be offended by that, but you’re probably right,” Yuri murmurs, rubbing his palm over his stubble.

Cheryl smiles at him. She’s been a social worker for a long time, and her wife is a nurse admin – it makes Yuri nervous when he’s with both of them sometimes, because it’s like they can both look right through him, see right to his bones and the secret things written on them, the things he doesn’t even know are there. They’re good people, kind people, but it’s excruciating, sometimes, to be seen like that.

The pace around here allows for that kind of stuff, he thinks, for seeing people and then really sitting with it, and he still isn’t quite used to it, although it’s not altogether bad. It’s not so different to when you step out into a sunny day after a while of it being cold and overcast, and the warmth of the sun almost stings as it settles on your skin.

“See how he goes,” Cheryl advises quietly. “I don’t know him much better than you, but from what I do know, I can see why he’d like you.”

Yuri nods, and tears off a piece of his beignet to eat.

* * *

He’s called Abraham, but it seems like such a big name for such a small guy.

He’s not short, actually, Yuri realises when he properly looks at him – he’s average height, on the leaner side but not actually that thin. He makes himself small: he dresses in wool and formal shirts and pants that are a little too big for him, and he keeps his hands to himself, his head down, his shoulders hunched, keeping himself folded inwards at almost all times.

He has beautiful waves of thick dark hair, not glossy but a very dark, true black, with a few tiny highlights of silver and paler brown hairs when you look close, and his ears are on the smaller side. Even kept fairly short, not letting his hair come down past his jaw, the combination of big hair and little ears makes his head look even smaller on his body, even if he wasn’t always staring at the floor and hunching his shoulders down.

He does like Yuri – Yuri grows more certain of that as the days pass.

Whenever he’s down on the library floor and not in one of the conference rooms, when he’s teaching a computer class or taking a group of people through the reference system, helping the genealogy club or teaching info skills or the Dewey system, or even when he helps kids use older machines like the microfiche, he often feels Abraham watching him.

At first, it’s from behind shelves and furniture, while he’s in the process of shelving books or fetching pulls and requests. They don’t put him behind any of the desks: he handles the books themselves and paperwork, uses the badge machine to make pins for the kids’ clubs, anything that will let him work without having to interact with patrons directly.

He scuttles quickly away if it looks like someone is about to ask him a question or try to talk to him, ducks into the stacks or goes through staff-only doors, seems to have a sixth sense for when a patron has a need for something and quickly evaporates from sight.

That’s part of why Yuri is so certain the kid likes him – he braves potential patron interaction to stay close by, in the outer reaches of Yuri’s orbit. He’ll duck down a corridor of shelves only to turn back and retrace his steps on the other side of them, out of a patron’s sight, rather than actually making himself scarce, or he’ll stand very still and feign not to hear the “Excuse me,” until Yuri or another of the librarians gets whoever it is instead.

It’s maybe two months after the kid has started working there that Yuri is finishing up an older people’s computers skills class that Abraham apparently decides it’s been long enough and actually makes real contact.

Up to now, Yuri’s basically let the kid just adjust to him like Mr Laniado says you should with new cats, and he’s been aware of Abraham lingering nearby today, watching Yuri talk, sometimes smiling in a private, nervous way as he laughs with and teases the old timers.

He walks over as the class is finishing, and Yuri can see the nervous glances Abraham casts Yuri’s students as they shuffle past, dipping between them to ensure he doesn’t brush shoulders with any of them, still not making eye contact with any of the old folks, and not Yuri either.

He’s been holding the same book for what must have been ten or fifteen minutes, the last of the stack he’d had to re-shelve, but he’s put it in its place now, and he stands right beside Yuri to begin tidying away people’s coffee cups and water bottles. He’s right in Yuri’s space, close enough to touch, closer to Yuri than he ever gets to the patrons or even the other librarians, and even as he keeps his gaze down, he cleans up and piles things for the recycling, putting the clean handouts in a separate pile so they can be reused.

“Hi, Abraham,” Yuri says softly, as he logs out of his computer terminal, the standing desk settled at the end of the two rows of seated PC terminals.

Abraham, keeping his face forward, nods firmly in acknowledgement.

Yuri still doesn’t actually know what his voice sounds like just yet, has only seen him talk from across the room with some of the librarians, monosyllabic and quick and his voice so quiet it doesn’t carry at all.

Still, the first few times Yuri greeted him outside of the kitchenette, he never even acknowledged it, would just flee straight past him. He’s graduated, week-by-week, to staying nearby for a second after Yuri says hi, and then to a nod, and now, in this moment, to a flicker of his eyes up to Yuri’s, and the tiniest little smile.

He’s clean-shaven, obsessively so, although Yuri knows he’s naturally got a decent growth of beard – his cheeks always darken by late afternoon, shadowed by stubble.

“Thanks for the hand,” Yuri says. “You having a good day?”

Abraham doesn’t answer verbally, keeping his head low, but he smiles as he transfers his stack of bottles and cups into a nearby recycling pin, followed by the handouts soiled with coffee rings or too dog-eared or marked with folds, then straightens out the ones he’s deemed acceptable for reuse with other patrons.

He’s put in a new folder system for handouts in the backroom, everything neatly labelled in pull-out drawer trays with a description and reference number, and he’s been re-editing all the local files for handouts, posters, shit like that, with reference numbers that are on a master list he’s made the desktop background on all the office PCs.

It’s very neat work, very clean – all his document titles follow a similar format, and his handwriting is printed so square and legible you could be forgiven for thinking it was somehow a computer font as well.

Then again, it would be perfect – he has marks on the back of his left hand, old scars from being beaten, Yuri would guess.

“We should get a coffee some time, or a beer,” Yuri says after Abraham straightens out the stack of pages in his hands for the fourth time, lingering. “Chat.”

He’s half-smiling as he says it, making sure he sounds easy and casual even as he teases, and when Abraham nervously flickers another glance up at Yuri’s face, Yuri winks at him.

Abraham laughs. It’s a faint sound, almost a giggle, his cheeks darkening a duskier colour. His eyes dart away from Yuri’s, then, his head tips further forward with his chin almost touching his chest, his face hidden by his hair. Shy, but not offended – self-aware, maybe, not self-loathing, Yuri hopes.

“Don’t work too hard,” Yuri calls after him as he picks up his papers and quickly walks off.

Abraham doesn’t look back, of course, but Yuri still grins after him.

* * *

The Tuesday after this, Yuri says, “Here.”

Abraham is sitting at a table facing the wall in the library kitchenette, collating some kind of data on his laptop, and he initially flinches when he feels Yuri approaching him, body squeezing in on itself in his chair like a bug’s bracing itself for attack.

When he sees it’s Yuri, though, he unfurls a little, smiles faintly up at him, then looks owlishly at Yuri’s offering: a strawberry milkshake from the hipstery gay-owned coffee shop across the street.

“I didn’t actually know if you even drank coffee or tea,” Yuri explains. “Thought this would be safer.”

Abraham’s hand twitches on the padded wrist-rests he always lays out before he starts work at any keyboard, and he glances up at Yuri’s face, as if to ascertain if this is a real offer or not, once, then twice. Yuri patiently waits, holding the bottle out to him, still, and finally, Abraham takes it.

In a voice like trees rustling in the breeze, faint and breathless, he whispers, “Thank you.”

“Do you drink coffee?” Yuri asks.

Smiling and looking at Yuri’s chest instead of meeting his eyes, shyly holding the milkshake against his breast, he shakes his head.

“Tea?”

Another shake.

“Booze?”

The tiny smile widens, and Abraham shakes his head again.

“I don’t drink either,” Yuri admits.

Abraham’s expression seems curious, although he keeps his eyes down, and when a few seconds passed and he hasn’t actually loaned voice to the question, Yuri answers it anyway.

“Alcohol messes with my meds,” he says. “The ones for my back already do battle with my anxiety meds. No need to add any extra depressants in. I was never a big drinker anyway.”

Abraham slowly smiles again, a very tiny crescent of a movement of his lips, a new moon, and he slowly nods his head.

“I, uh,” Yuri says, and wavers, not sure what to say now, not sure how to keep the conversation going, but also not wanting to push his luck and make the kid feel trapped or stuck in it. “I’ll see you.”

“Yes,” Abraham whispers.

Yuri feels kind of odd, looking down at him, feels the urge to reach out and touch the other man, to touch his shoulders or try to shake his hand, or something. It’s a strange urge, unexpected, but very strong.

The kid’s hair, loosely curled and bouncy, looks soft.

… That’s a weird thought to have.

“Well,” Yuri says, and actually stumbles in his haste to get out and stop embarrassing himself, knocking into a table, and he hurries out of the room and downstairs to get to his class.

Abraham does drink the milkshake, though, albeit very slowly.

He’s still nursing it two hours later when Yuri waves goodbye for the day.

* * *

Yuri used to run a lot.

Most of his childhood and then his teens he spent in fucking military schools and outdoor camps before he joined the fire service, and even when he pivoted to paramedicine, he kept up jogging, even alongside his lifting routine, wrestling, climbing, driving dirtbikes, paintball.

Now?

No running, no jogging.

He goes on hikes, gentle ones without too much climbing. He swims regularly. He does yoga and pilates. It’s fucking annoying, sometimes: he feels like he’s a finely-honed machine, still, when he’s walking around with his back brace on, still feels fit and hearty, feels like he’s in the fucking prime of his life, but he knows that as soon as he pushes himself just a little too far, it’ll hurt bad.

Could be worse, sure, life could be a lot worse. He likes his new place, he likes how much people have welcomed in, he likes his job: he mostly doesn’t want to kill himself these days. He finds satisfaction where he can, reaches out for peace, for joy, for curiosity, for beauty, for pleasure, even excitement.

His body can’t take what it used to, but he’s not dead yet.

Gotta practise gratitude.

Some days the frustration burns and bubbles under his skin, though, and he can’t pick up a fire shift or go for a long hard run or push himself too hard in the gym or go do the sort of adrenaline junkie shit he used to love, not like he coulda done, once upon a time.

He goes for a walk.

It is not remotely the same fucking thing.

Abraham isn’t working today, and Yuri vaguely thinks of how close by he lives, but obviously doesn’t actually walk toward the kid’s street – he doesn’t even know what house it is, and just because he feels itchy and understimulated is no excuse to go knocking on the kid’s door. They don’t know each other like that, after all.

Yuri walks in the park near to the community centre, where they have those outdoor exercise things, easy fresh air gym stuff – little pedals attached to benches and lifting tables and that kinda thing.

To his surprise and sudden delight, Abraham is in the park too, dressed in pale blue sweats that cover him from ankle to collar to wrist, and Yuri comes to a stop and watches his perfect fucking form, doing push-ups with a book laid out beneath him on the asphalt. Every six or so reps, he turns the page.

Yuri’s mouth is dry, looking at him.

At first, there’s just jealousy, wishing he could still indulge himself in a bunch of push-ups like this, but underneath, there’s a lot more emotion than that.

Abraham normally fucking drapes himself in layers of clothing – always wears a tie and collared shirt under a vest and cardigan if not an actual suit jacket, always wears loose slacks, never in anything tight, never wears denim. He always wears sneakers, at least, instead of dress shoes, but it’s normally mostly very formal, very armoured.

Dressed like this, even with so much of his skin covered, he seems almost naked in comparison to his uniform at work.

His silver-streaked dark hair is a sweaty mop around his head, and Yuri’s eyes zero in on the bare hints of skin where he can see that sweat glisten and shine: the back of the kid’s neck, the small of his back, the backs of his hands. He can see the shift and movement of the kid’s shoulders under the sweatshirt, the same muscular shift of his tight little ass, his muscular thighs, his calves.

Yuri’s always liked female bodybuilders and muscular types, doesn’t usually look so much at other men except to check their form, but this kid, this is…

Abraham feels him staring, glances up from his book, and his expression of blank concentration disappears, replaced with a sweet expression of real pleasure, looking Yuri’s way, and he smiles, shows his very white but slightly crooked teeth.

“Hi,” says Yuri. His voice comes out a little hoarse.

Abraham tilts his head a little, still looking smilingly up at him. He has long eyelashes for a boy – like his hair, some of them are turning white. It’s not premature grey, either, and under the sunshine Yuri sees that the hairs he’d always thought were turning silver or grey are actually white, stark white, without pigment.

He’s… pretty.

For a man.

Abraham holds out his water bottle.

He’s holding up his straight body in a plank, the elbow bent. Yuri thinks for a second of putting his booted foot on the kid’s back and making him do the push-up with extra resistance, and he feels his heart beat just a little bit faster, feels a surprising wave of arousal streak through him.

“Thanks,” he says, leaning to take the bottle, swigging from it. This is Abraham’s water bottle: he’s not just tasting water, but a little of Abraham’s saliva, maybe sweat from his lips. This is an indirect kiss, in a way.

Jesus.

He needs to get laid.

“Vitiligo?” he asks, gesturing to Abraham’s face. “My dad had that.”

Abraham shakes his head, then slides to the side and stretches like a cat, arching his back. Yuri greedily watches the tension in his body, the way it loosens and relaxes before he sits cross-legged on the asphalt.

Yuri sits slowly down on the bench nearest to him, and Abraham smiles up at him, then laughs and turns his head away, fiddling with his sleeves, then his collar, before mopping his sweated brow.

“It’s okay,” Yuri says softly. “You’re not meant to look put together when you’re working out.”

Abraham smiles down at his hands as he folds them into his lap, and like this, Yuri seated on the bench and Abraham on the floor, Yuri can see his handsome face, the shape of his jaw and his well-turned eyebrows, the strength of his nose, the line of his cheekbones. He can also see a tantalising shadow of flesh at the collar of the kid’s sweatshirt, see moisture sliding down the cords of his throat and into the hollow at his collarbone.

“You settling in okay?” he asks, and Abraham nods.

“You like the job?”

Another nod.

Yuri sets the bottle down on the asphalt beside his boot. “Whatcha reading?”

Abraham marks his page with a bookmark from the library, then shows Yuri the cover: something about space, by Stephen Hawking. It looks… dense.

“You like space?”

A shrug.

“Just like to read, huh?”

A nod.

Abraham seems so fucking relaxed here in the open air, and Yuri almost feels addicted to it, wishes he could drink the idea of it like he sipped at Abraham’s water, the looseness of the kid’s body, how fucking relaxed he seems compared to usual, how uncoiled, unspooled.

Fuck, is this how bisexuality hits you?

All at once, like a freight train, at nearly fifty?

You give up the ambulance sirens and the fires and accidents, all the adrenaline shit, and start wanting to fuck boys as much as girls? You never so much as jack off to a male model in your life, and then you meet one shy kid and you want to pin him down right here and fuck him hard and rough into the asphalt, gentle exercise be damned?

“You making friends?” Yuri asks, and Abraham actually laughs, albeit softly. “Hey,” Yuri says. “I’m serious.”

Abraham shrugs, smiling still, but the smile fades when Yuri adds, “Cheryl mentioned your, um, your background to me. Sorry, not judging. I grew up in boarding schools and camps, and even when I was a paramedic, I was always in dormitories and shit, you know, always in with loads of other people? I never had to work to make friends, to socialise with people, ‘cause they were just right next to me. I felt like I was going crazy when I retired, at first. Felt so quiet, actually being alone – it’s nice, of course, the solitude, the personal space, when it always used to come at such a premium. Just, you know, there’s a balance.”

“Yessir,” Abraham says.

Fuck.

Yuri likes that, he really does. He likes to be called sir, sure, but he likes the indulgent and dismissive way Abraham says it, like he’s just saying it dutifully to get Yuri off his back, to stroke his ego enough to get rid of him.

“Sorry,” Yuri says, rubbing the back of his neck. “The last thing you want on your day off is to get lectured by an old bastard like me.”

Abraham softly laughs. After a pause, he adds quietly, “I don’t mind it.”

His voice is soft, but not whispered anymore. It’s a beautiful voice, has a musical quality, is rich, like a stringed instrument. Out of doors like this, with no background noise of quiet talk or keyboard tapping like he normally hears in the library, he can really hear it.

“Cheryl didn’t give me your life story or anything,” he says. “She was just making sure I wasn’t giving you a hard time, I think.”

Abraham slowly nods.

“Your, uh, your accent,” Yuri says, and he sees the slight straighten of Abraham’s back, his gaze on the floor. “You’re Jewish?”

“Not anymore,” Abraham says.

Yuri almost laughs, but something stops him. His tone is gently joking as he says, “We don’t exactly get to retire.”

“I am not anything.”

“No?”

“No,” Abraham says firmly. No smile now, very serious, looking at Yuri’s knees, and then suddenly he’s looking at Yuri, looking him in the face, and Yuri feels the breath punched out of him. Abraham has light brown eyes, big and shiny in the sun. “No,” he repeats.

“My bad,” Yuri says, and feels a twinge of loss as Abraham looks away. “I just like how it sounds, that’s all, the Yiddish accent. My grandparents had it, a little, well, more Ukrainian. Yiddish your first language?”

“Mm.”

He’s curious, of course he fucking is, but he doesn’t push it.

“My Yiddish is pretty bad,” Yuri says. “I always try, but I sound so American, and not cool and smooth like I’m one of the breezy Brooklyn Jews, either, just clumsy. I’m better in English, smoother. Pretty suave, actually – the ladies think so, anyway.”

Abraham is smiling again at the floor. 

“I’m just, uh, on my break,” Yuri says. “Needed to get out of there, wanted some sun, some fresh air. Didn’t meant to disturb you.”

“You are not.”

How old is he? Thirty, maybe, at the oldest?

He’s not that small, but Yuri could eclipse him, if he wanted. The kid is fiddling with his lower lip with his thumb – would he gag on Yuri’s fingers, if Yuri slid them over his tongue, made him choke on them?

It’s not as good as a run would be, no, but the thought has his blood pumping, and it feels good, even if he is a pathetic old man, flirting with some kid who probably just finds him comforting, familiar, like Cheryl had said. You get used to the solidity of institutions, after all, even when you want to get the fuck out of them. People like them end up seeking each other out, sometimes, or that’s what Yuri’s therapist says.

Institutions make for predictability.

The institutionalised end up predictable too.

“Thanks for the water, Abraham,” Yuri says. He wants to say something else, but nothing comes to mind, nothing that would be smooth or natural. He thinks maybe Abraham wants to say something too, but he’s too shy, too nervous, is still tugging at his lip with his thumb and forefinger.

Just as Yuri gets to his feet, the kid says, “Avi.”

Whispers it.

“What?”

But no, Yuri does hear him, and his head feels like it’s fucking spinning. Abraham is holding his book again now, against his chest like a shield, his cheeks very dark.

“Avi,” Yuri repeats. “Not Abraham?”

Avi shrugs.

“Avi to your friends,” Yuri suggests.

Dark cheeks, downcast eyes, a wider smile.

A nod.

Yuri feels pretty fucking good, walking back to the community centre, and it sticks with him, the good mood – he keeps thinking about the kid, about Avi, his body, his smile, even more than he already has been, because Avi doesn’t mind Yuri. He likes Yuri.

Yuri thinks about it, about Avi under him, on top of him, about Avi—

Yeah.

His therapist that evening is less dismissive of the idea than Yuri would have expected, doesn’t agree that it’s some insane midlife crisis shit or hallucinated desire. She just flatly points out that Abraham is an attractive young man who seems uniquely interested in Yuri – of course it would stroke his ego, and more than that, of course they feel connected.

Yuri often walks around during their sessions, just to keep his back from getting too stiff, but now he’s pacing back and forth in front of her as Marissa sits back in her chair, idly turning it from side to side with her foot casually rested on the corner of the coffee table.

“But it’s not like I can take advantage of him,” Yuri says.

“Isn’t he an out-patient?” Marissa asks. “A grown man? You’re on pretty strong meds yourself, you’re in therapy, and you’ve made two suicide attempts in the past on top of the average suicidality kind of inherent to the risk-seeking in fire and rescue. Sure, you’re older than him, but it sounds like you guys are similar to each other. He’s shy – you’re shy.”

“I’m not shy,” Yuri says automatically, and Marissa just raises her eyebrows at him, which makes him look away from her.

It’s not like he needs his therapist’s permission to do shit, but sometimes what he wants is the opposite, he wants to be told not to do something he wants, and the retort she has is always to make him think about what he wants and why, and why he automatically resists wanting things, why he thinks he should be banned from pursuing whatever it is.

It’s fucked up, being healthy and independent.

Yuri liked being crazy better, he thinks. It was a lot less work.

* * *

Avi has a milkshake when Yuri comes into the library the next morning; he holds out a cup of coffee for Yuri, which Yuri takes with a smile and a quiet thank you. Avi’s fingers brush Yuri’s, and then he flushes and walks away.

Yuri watches him go, smiling a little. He’s wearing those loose grey slacks and a dark green cardigan, but Yuri knows how muscular his ass is underneath all that wool now, imagines it as Avi walks away from him.

He gets his courage up as he supervises the first aid class, gives some pointers, and then approaches Avi before he heads back to his own office.

“Let’s do something after work,” he suggests. “Drinks?”

Avi hesitates.

“No? Not coffee either,” Yuri says, thinking out loud. “Maybe we could, uh, we could do something together, uh… Bowling?”

Avi’s lips part, and he glances up at Yuri’s face, looks down again. He’s taken two steps closer and he’s leaning in, as well, into Yuri’s space, so that Yuri’s chin is almost tickled by his cloud of dark hair. He smells good. Faintly floral.

“Bowling?” he repeats.

“Sure.”

Avi chews on his lip, shifting on his feet, swaying just a little back and forward, a candle flame dancing on its wick.

“You don’t like bowling?” Yuri asks, and he wonders if he sounds as desperate as he sounds, as pathetic as he is.

“I’ve never been,” Avi whispers.

“Oh,” Yuri says. “Well, that isn’t right. Let me take you – I’ll teach you. We’ll have fun.”

Avi slowly nods, then turns his head toward Yuri’s body and touches Yuri’s arm.

He does it shyly, nervously, of course. His hand whips out fast like he has to force himself to do it, and his fingers just barely brush Yuri’s bare forearm, but his fingertips are warm, and then Avi draws his hand back just as quickly, puts it firmly down at his side.

“Yeah?” Yuri asks.

Avi nods decisively.

* * *

Yuri feels like a kid again, like he’s younger, anyway, waiting for Avi to pack up his stuff and sign out of the library. He leans back against the wall near the automatic doors, patrons slowly milling out like departing ghosts, and Mr Laniado stands with him, idly tossing a screwdriver into the air and catching it every few seconds.

He’s normally finished by three with the part-time shift he does once a week, but they need to take some of the displays down on the second floor to clean, and he always helps out with that, always after hours with no patrons to get in the way.

When the kid comes down already wearing his coat, the librarians watch him, and Mr Laniado watches too.

Yuri kind of expects everyone to start fucking glaring, expect everybody to be pissed at him or nervous on Abraham’s behalf, to think that Yuri’s a fucking dirtbag preying on the kid, but the ladies all shoot smiles his way and wave as Avi comes toward him very quickly, his head down.

“Ah, el padre kerido,” Mr Laniado says warmly. “Hello, Abraham. You have fun with Yuri, hm? You must let him win a game – his ego will be wounded if you do not.”

Avi says nothing – as Ada calls after them, “Have fun, boys!” – and heads out of the doors, and Yuri waves back at her and Mr Laniado both before he follows back after them. He can’t help but think the smiles are somehow false, are fake, but why the fuck would they be?

They get the bus to the bowling alley, just a few stops: Avi sits and Yuri stays standing next to him, and they don’t talk until they get off and walk across the big parking lot that serves the bowling alley and the movie theatre.

“Can you drive?” Yuri asks.

Avi shakes his head.

“You wanna learn?”

Avi furrows his brow, twists his mouth, shakes his head again. Yuri laughs.

“Fair enough,” he murmurs. “I learned pretty early on, I was still a kid, but I try to avoid it now, if I can. Get trains and buses.”

“It’s bad for your back?” Avi asks the floor. “Sitting in the driver’s seat?”

“You got it,” Yuri says.

He feels a certain kind of way, that Avi notices it, that he lends voice to it so easily, when Yuri doesn’t talk about it too much at work, and now and then fiddles with the hem of his t-shirts, making sure that his brace isn’t showing too obviously under the fabric, although at least he doesn’t have to wear the fucking Jewett anymore.

When they initially walk into the bowling alley, Avi freezes and blinks a few times as he adjusts to the sheer sound of it – the noises of pins dropping, balls rolling down their lanes, people laughing and talking and cheering, noises from the arcade, but once he adjusts he manages to relax his body a little, and then he walks forward.

“Two games for two,” Yuri says at the desk. “Twelve for me. What shoe size are you, kid?”

Avi blinks, standing at Yuri’s elbow, his messenger bag clutched in against his chest, his body tight and curled extra small – and slightly toward Yuri’s body – as if to retreat from the new environment. “Why?”

“Bowling shoes.”

“No,” Avi says immediately, then winces. “Do I have to?” he asks more quietly.

“Nah,” Yuri says – he and the attendant both lean to glance at Avi’s sneakers at the same time, and Avi bows his head lower to avoid making eye contact. “No, your shoes’ll be okay.”

“You and your dad have a good time,” the attendant says brightly to Avi after giving them the fourth lane.

Avi’s face makes a funny expression as Yuri feels like crawling into the earth – his hand is already brushing against the kid’s lower back as they move forward, and he feels guilty for how much he enjoys the touch and the softness of the wool under his fingers, enjoys guiding him like this, pseudo-chivalrous, all horny underneath.

Avi sits on the opposite bench, still hugging his bag against his breast, and watches as Yuri changes his combat boots for bowling shoes.

“Why?” he asks. There’s a little strain in his features, like it’s hard to force himself to ask

“Less damage to the lane, less friction from the sole grip,” Yuri explains. “You want your feet to move nice and smooth over the lane, helps you bowl smoothly, cleanly. You’ll be okay in sneakers like that, they’re light-weight and there’s not too much grip on the sole – bowling shoes would be a little better, would give you more motion at the ankle, but if you like bowling, we can always get you some of your own. Is that it, not wanting to touch communal shoes?”

Avi doesn’t answer.

Yuri leans slowly forward to get a look at his face, and he sees Avi’s lips shifting silently, his eyes staring forward, his eyes rolling to meet Yuri’s for a moment before rolling back away.

Then, he shrugs.

Yuri wonders if it’s that he doesn’t know, or if he doesn’t know how to answer.

“We put our names in the system, like this,” Yuri says once his shoes are on, and Avi leans forward to watch him punch in their names. “You get two goes per frame, per square – unless you bowl and hit all the pins down your first bowl, that’s a strike. Do it in two, that’s a spare. There’s ten pins, and the machine will clear away any knocked-over pins between your two bowls.”

Avi watches as Yuri picks up a ball and bowls – he’s been bowling a lot more, the past five or so years, than the rest of his fucking life put together. Sometimes, he comes and bowls on his own, just for the satisfaction of throwing something and making a big fucking crash.

He bowls a spare, annoyingly, knocks down nine pins before he knocks the last one down.

Avi stands in place and stares at the balls for ages, then glances down the row at other people bowling, brow furrowed, his expression concentrated. Picking up the blue eleven Yuri had bowled with, he immediately grunts in surprise.

 “Probably a smaller ball for you, a lighter one, until you’re more used to it,” Yuri suggests. “Bigger, heavier balls like this are easier to control, but you need more propulsion, obviously. Try the six pounder, that green one. Your fingers fit okay in the holes, they’re not too small for you?”

Avi stumbles trying to send it down the lane, and the ball lands with a thunk on the lane before it drops straight into the gutter.

He looks fucking dismayed, watching it slowly track down the drain, and Yuri stands up again, picking up another six.

“Don’t worry,” he says, “that’s why I got us two games. Hold the ball like this, okay? Cradle it, step forward, bend the knee like this and slide her forwards, you want the bowling motion to go through the ball, less like you’re tossing it.”

Avi stands there, ramrod straight with his hands at his sides, and looks wantingly two lanes over, to where a little girl is bowling with the gutter guards up, and using one of those frames to bowl the ball.

“We’re not there yet,” Yuri tells him gently, and then impulsively, fucking hornily, adds, “Let me help you,” and before he can convince himself out of it, he frames Avi’s body with his own.

Avi feels smaller than him but solid, and Yuri can feel the warmth radiating from him, feel how strong all that muscle in, how toned he is under all his layers. He pushes his back eagerly into Yuri’s chest, his fingers automatically gripping the arm Yuri bands around his middle, and any hesitation Yuri would have had, any anxiety he had about putting his body on Avi’s, is gone in an instant.

Avi’s breath is hitching, his body trembling just a little, and Yuri can’t fucking resist it, how he’s in so close like this, holding the kid against him – in public, no less, people on every side of them.

He inhales, and on the exhale murmurs, “You smell good,” right into Avi’s ear, his nose pressed into the kid’s hair. It is soft.

Avi releases a tense noise, an acknowledgement and almost a groan, but not a word.

“Here,” Yuri says softly, and guides Avi’s hands.

It feels good, having his body wrapped around somebody else’s after he doesn’t know how long, feels good to mould Avi’s form and to guide his scarred hands, which are not far off Yuri’s in breadth, even though they’re a little skinnier. “Against the chest, yeah, pull it back, bend your knee as you step forward with the other foot, that’s right, that’s good. We follow that motion through, and it’s a singular line, okay? The ball leaves our hand, but it doesn’t change angle, we set its trajectory and…”

His lips are at Avi’s neck, leaning over him, breathing over his skin, as the ball slides forward. It’s a bit slow and meandering, not enough punch in the bowl – he’s distracted, after all – but it does knock over seven pins, missing the three on the left corner, and Avi laughs breathlessly like he can’t believe it.

“Good job, kid,” Yuri rasps in his ear, and Avi reaches back and grips at his middle, keeping Yuri pressed against him. If he feels the fabric of Yuri’s support brace under the grey t-shirt, holding him above the hip like this, he doesn’t make it obvious.

“Will you help me again?” he requests, his voice soft and sweet.

Yuri wonders if Avi would let him fuck him right outside, shove the kid up against the wall behind the dumpsters and fuck inside him, wonders if he’s be very loud or very quiet, wonders what those eyes would look like under street lights.

“Sure,” Yuri says, swallowing down the saliva in his mouth. “How does the ball feel? You want a lighter one, a heavier one, or the same?”

“The six is okay.”

“Okay.”

He watches Yuri like a fucking hawk when Yuri bowls a strike on his next round, studying Yuri’s form, his posture, and as he picks up the ball, Yuri can see him replaying it in his head, see the slight bend of his knees, the shift of one foot behind the other, practising it, envisioning it.

He feels relaxed and warm as Yuri encapsulates him again – no strike, and he doesn’t manage the spare either, but he does knock down six the first bowl, then manages to knock down the other three.

Through each swing, Yuri can feel the resistance of Avi’s body, feel the younger man pushing back against him, not to shove Yuri off, but so that he can feel every shift of his teacher’s body as Yuri leads him through.

When Avi bowls solo again, his first ball goes wide, only knocking down one pin before it hits the gutter, but Yuri gets to see him squint, doesn’t say anything, just watches him as he picks up another ball, bowls, and this time knocks down five.

“Good job,” Yuri says.

The kid smiles like sunshine.

He gets better at it the more they play, but more importantly, like when he was doing push-ups in the park, as he concentrates on the game and focuses more on that than anything or anybody else, he gets less self-conscious. His body relaxes more, unfurls out from itself and loosens – he smiles more easily, speaks a little louder, laughs more, moves more freely.

It’s fucking beautiful, is what it is – even if Yuri didn’t have a burgeoning desire to fuck him, even if he wasn’t finding himself attracted to him as a man and surprising himself with the attractive elements of him as a man, the hard lines of his jaw and the way his stubble shows on his face, the slightly different angles and planes of his body to a woman…

It’s beautiful because it’s wonderful, because he’s seeing him slowly emerge from his shell, open himself up to potential vulnerability. That vulnerability, that openness, is an exquisite thing to be trusted with, to be offered, even more so because it’s not just about Yuri himself, but about the game Yuri’s gotten him into.

Yuri can’t throw himself into bowling like he used to throw himself into climbing a wall or wrestling, has to do a few stretches between frames and make sure he’s keeping his back nice and straight as he bends his knees, has to remain aware of his body rather than relaxing himself into the strain of it, but…

But it’s still really nice, seeing that Avi can do it. Enjoy it. Enjoy his body, enjoy what it can do.

“You want a drink?” Yuri asks most of the way into their first game. “No booze, I know. A Coke, a Sprite, maybe?”

“Sprite, please,” Avi says, and Yuri enjoys how loud his voice is, how he’s speaking a little louder to talk over the noise the way anybody else would, and how he doesn’t seem too aware that he’s doing it, and as Yuri taps the order in on the screen, he adds, “Thank you,” and touches Yuri’s hand.

Yuri doesn’t know why he’s doing it at first, thinks the kid is just touching his hand to get his attention over the noise and maybe to ask for something else, something to eat, but to his surprise Avi slides his thumb in against Yuri’s palm and presses down on the centre of it, then tugs him closer to where Avi is sitting forward on the bench.

Avi’s eyelashes are fluttering a little as he keeps his eyes forward, not actually bringing them up to Yuri’s face – unable to raise his eyes, he tugs Yuri downward, to his height.

He’s really pretty strong.

Yuri looks into his eyes, laughs softly as Avi averts his own, still smiling, and then leans forward to capture Yuri’s lips in a kiss. He wears a chapstick, Yuri’s seen him applying it, and now he tastes the aloe vera in it, feels how smooth Avi’s lips are, feels his slightly smoother cheek contrast with Yuri’s artfully sculpted stubble, which is meant to look casual and like he doesn’t think about it, but that he actually grooms pretty fucking religiously.

“Huh,” Yuri murmurs against Avi’s lips. Up close like this, nose to nose, he can see the white streaking through his eyelashes, see the parts of his hair that lack pigment, and a few white hairs touching through the corners of his eyebrows as well, although they’re not nearly as obvious as the parts of the hair on his hair missing pigment. “You know, I never kissed a boy before.”

“Fair trade,” Avi says, and when Yuri looks at him askance, tilting his head, he softly laughs. “For— for bowling. My first time bowling.”

“Right,” Yuri says, slowly leaning back. Avi still has hold of his hand, is swinging it back and forth, and then reluctantly lets it go as he straightens fully, keeping his feet flat on the ground and bending backward a little bit.

“It’s,” Avi says, addressing Yuri’s midsection, his lips parting. “Was that, was that okay?”

“Oh, God, yeah,” Yuri says. “Doesn’t hurt me any to bend over now and then – and Jesus, kid, the things I want to do to you…”

Avi laughs in a fluttery, breathless way, turns his head to the side, blinks a few times and then abruptly retracts in on himself, a turtle returning to the familiar safety of its shell – he doesn’t want to talk to the girl bringing their drinks over and is nervous about talking to her, so Yuri turns and smiles at her whilst keeping Avi behind him, running his card and giving her a decent tip.

They play out their two games, and afterwards they walk together, aimlessly, down the streets and through the park. It’s still light out, and Yuri keeps his hand on Avi’s shoulder, keeping him close, as he points out different birds – some finches, some sparrows.

“Here, head up, that’s it, if you look to the right and through to the end of that big branch, the one shaped like a gimmel on its side,” Yuri says, and he enjoys the brightness of Avi’s smile, the way his jaw relaxes as he grins.

“Wow,” he says.

“Scarlet tanager,” Yuri says. “I don’t think I ever noticed one before I moved out here – I never spent much time in parks when I lived in the Bronx unless someone had gotten knocked down or something, and the ambulance sirens tend to send nearby birds wailing off.”

Avi touches his own arm, watching the bird in fascination as he shifts on the branch and then disappears further up and into the tree, hidden by the leaves. Rubbing at his shoulder, he says, “Isn’t it strange? That their bodies should be so red, so bright, and their wings so black?”

“I saw an indigo bunting a little while back, the females are mostly brown and with kind of like, subtle purple-brown feathers on their breasts – it’s almost like, pale lilac highlighting their brown beaks and some of their feathers, right? But this one was a male, and they’re always fucking great, they’re basically bright blue, look like somebody dipped them in food colouring or something, but this one was mid-moult, so it was just all these blue feathers here and here and here,” Yuri taps and nudges over Avi’s breast, making him laugh and squirm a little, “under and over the brown.”

“Wow,” Avi murmurs again.

“They’re colourful to attract mates, and obviously when they’re bright and obvious, they can, uh, their plumage is clearly healthy from a distance, and other birds can recognise them – either get closer, the females interested in breeding, or stay away, the males not wanting to fight. They eat lots of fruits and nuts and shit, um, so you know about melanins, that’s the same stuff that makes human skin darker or lighter. Then some pigments in their feathers are made from, um, carotenoids, they get those from fruits and shit, bright reds, yellows.”

“Is that what makes them seem so shiny?” Avi asks. His voice is quiet and breathlessly rich with awe, and Yuri craves to kiss that tone out of his mouth, to taste it. “Some of the birds, the big pigeons, and, I don’t know their names, but they shimmer in the light, like the surface of clean water.”

“Glantsik, er…” Yuri supplies, and then, feeling his cheeks burning a little ‘cause he knows his accent is shit, ‘cause he knows he’s not good at it, “Di lakfarben.”

Avi smiles up at him, leaning his back further into Yuri’s hand. “Yo,” he agrees, slowly nodding his head. “Very good.”

“Iridescence,” Yuri says, feeling fucking stupid, the back of his neck feeling hot as well, a little sweat under his shirt. “The way the light, um, bounces off and refracts off the feathers, the shininess.”

“I wonder if they wish they were iridescent,” Avi murmurs, stopping for a moment and leaning into Yuri’s chest, and Yuri follows his gaze to a very, very fat gray squirrel sitting on the corner of the path, and Yuri laughs.

“I don’t think these fucks give a shit what they look like,” he says. “They just care about where their next meal is coming from. You know, they always make these stores of nuts and stuff, but they always forget where they put ‘em.”

“They’re born library patrons,” Avi snipes dryly, and Yuri grins and points past the squirrel to a shift of movement down a drain pipe, a rat scurrying down it before disappearing into a hole in the fence.

When they’re on a little green stretch just outside of the park proper, Yuri sees a burst of orange on the fence.

Avi’s quiet, but he’s enjoying this, Yuri thinks, and Yuri doesn’t feel bad about wanting to make it last longer, about wanting to enjoy Avi’s shoulder under his palm – Yuri knows what it must look like, the age difference between them, Yuri’s hand lingering on his body like this. Possessive, sure, but a guiding hand, too, like they are father and son.

No one’s ever mistaken him and a younger woman for father and daughter, although he’s never especially gone for the young-looking ones, but it does make him feel… Feel some kind of fucking way, anyway.

“What are you doing?” Avi demands, all loss and urgency, as Yuri reluctantly pulls away from him and drops into a crouch.

“Here, pussy cat,” he says as he laughs, then makes a few kissy noises, and the orange burst of motion on the fence abruptly goes stiff and straight, and then fucking streaks toward them. This guy is on the fat side, too, a big shaggy tom cat with fat balls and even fatter cheeks.

Avi actually drops back a step or two as the cat reaches them, and when Yuri glances back at him, he sees Avi’s eyes are wide, his lips slightly apart, and he doesn’t look like he knows what to fucking do as Yuri roughly pets the cat’s cheeks.

This guy is new around the neighbourhood, Yuri’s never seen him before, but he’s definitely fully grown, or his cheeks wouldn’t be so fucking big and broad like this, flat like a pancake pan.

Yuri wonders vaguely how he survived so long out here without getting swiped up and into someone’s house or neutered – if he’s this eager for pets, he can’t be that trap-savvy. He must be new in town, Yuri thinks, maybe hitched a ride on somebody’s truck or even roamed out this way from one of the bigger towns.

Or somebody just fucking dropped him here ‘cause they didn’t want him.

As Yuri keeps on scratching under his shaggy throat and chin, he slides a hand down his side, and feels to his chagrin that this big boy is not actually as fat as he looks, that he’s probably lost a bit of weight. He’s dirty, too, some black and grey streaks around the paler fur of his paws and shoulders, like he’s not used to being outdoors.

“What if he bites?” Avi asks, distracting Yuri from his cursory examination of the guy.

“You ever been bitten by a cat?”

“No.”

“You ever pet one before?”

Avi shakes his head, and Yuri’s chest pangs – pangs ‘cause he’s sad for the cat, and sad for Avi too.

“He won’t bite,” Yuri promises him, voice more quiet now, and he smiles as the tom flops onto his back and bares his chest. Yuri doesn’t rub his belly but keeps scratching under his neck, thumbing at his dirty chin, even as the tomcat pats one of his back rabbit legs against Yuri’s knee.

Very quietly, voice full of want, Avi asks, “Is he soft?”

“He is,” Yuri says. “Why don’t you come and feel?”

Avi’s throat shifts as he swallows, and Yuri can see his five o’clock shadow in the evening gold, darkening his jaw and cheeks, as he slowly sinks to his knees on the path beside him, and the tomcat immediately lunges toward a second stranger, jumping up onto to flop on his side again with his head against Avi’s knee.

His yellow eyes are wide and his little pupils are focused up on Avi’s face, and he touches his paws against Yuri’s calf, and he’s got such big fucking dirty paws, tufty, and Avi stares down at him, his jaw dropped.

“Oh,” he says, his hands up in line with his shoulders, right up and away from the cat as if he doesn’t want to touch him by accident, but he’s staring down at the big attention whore chirruping and loudly purring and demanding more pets, pets that Yuri gives him when Avi doesn’t oblige, scratching the top of his big fucking head.

“Why does he trust us?” Avi asks. “What if we were to hurt him?”

“I called him over,” Yuri points out, although the question makes him a little sad, hearing how fucking genuine the question sounds, how surprised, even a little worried. “A lot of outdoor cats are more nervous, skittish, especially feral ones – some are just attention whores like this one. We might give him food or just pets and fuss like this. As far as he sees it, we’re probably worth the risk.”

He doesn’t say that from what little he knows, the cat looks like a stray, looks like he hasn’t been out this way for too long, even before he looks back at Avi’s face and sees that his eyes are brimming with tears.

“Oh, shit, kid, I’m sorry,” Yuri says, but Avi isn’t listening as he puts his hand down, and he makes a bitten back noise as the tom eagerly butts his cheek into Avi’s fingers, his whiskers twitching, his chest rumbling with a purr. He’s drooling a little, but that only makes Avi laugh through his tears.

When they get up to go, the cat follows them for a street or two, but then gets distracted by something and rushes off, and they walk all the way back to Kent Avenue instead of getting a bus back, just ‘cause Yuri wants to stick with him.

Avi wipes his eyes, sniffles a little still, and Yuri feels like fucking wrapping him up in a blanket, cradling him, being as gentle with him as he fucking knows how to be.

“I’m, um, I’m here,” Avi says, and Yuri lingers at the gate as Avi passes through it. There’s a row of the little maisonettes, all with a shared yard with fake grass – no wonder the kid works out in the park instead of here. He can’t garden himself, but there’s a reason he pays a kid to do that shit for him rather than having plastic shit instead.

“Yeah,” Yuri says, and he slowly closes the gate between them, but keeps his hand on the railing.

Avi smiles, leaning forward, and Yuri bends to kiss him. They kiss deeper than they had earlier, and he sighs at the sensation of Avi’s tongue against his, at the wet sound their mouths make against one another. He’s more confident like this, kissing, than he is talking, Yuri thinks, is certain about the movements of his mouth and tongue, and he enjoys it, too, his body going loose and easy and melting forward, his hands touching over Yuri’s, their fingers brushing against each other’s over the railing.

“Fuck,” Yuri whispers as they break apart, and he feels sick about it, ruining his own rhythm, feels bad for asking, but he has to, for his own fucking peace of mind. “You’re not a virgin.”

Eyebrows raising, Avi actually laughs on the other side of the gate. “No,” he murmurs.

“I’m not, uh… I just wanna make sure I’m not pushing this too hard,” Yuri whispers.

“No,” Avi murmurs. “Not too hard at all.”

“I bet I sound condescending,” Yuri mutters, rubbing the back of his neck. “I’m not judging you, I swear, I’m not trying to make guesses at your… but you know, I know the deal, if you’ve been in a, in psych places, until now…” He hates how it probably sounds, squeezes his eyes shut and feels his hands fluttering and twitching, but when he risks a look at Avi, the kid doesn’t look pissed or anything.

“They can take away sharp things and choking hazards,” Avi says to Yuri’s neck, playing with the collar of his shirt as Yuri slowly comes closer again. “Control food, internet, outside contact. Try as they might, even a very sternly run psychiatric hospital can’t control sex. They can’t actually take our bodies away.”

Yuri slowly inhales. “Sorry,” he says.

“I needed to be there,” Avi mutters. “In— Well, I’ve been in a few places, but the hospital I was last in, the one I was in for longest, I needed to be there. It was not nice, it was not pleasant, but I wouldn’t be alive at all, had I not been there.”

“I’m sorry,” Yuri says again.

“It is alright,” Avi repeats. He’s smiling and swaying slowly on his feet. “You’re really being quiet gentlemanly about this.”

“I’m not a gentleman,” Yuri says. “Never fucked a man before, but I keep thinking about splitting you open, making you scream.”

Avi’s laugh dies off and fades to nothing, his mouth still open, but his eyes are wide, his pupils dilated under the streetlamp that feels like a fucking spotlight over their heads.

“And yet,” he says faintly, touching the side of his own neck, “I am on this side of my gate, and you are on that one.”

“Berries grow sweeter on the vine,” Yuri says. “It’ll be worth the wait.”

“Tease,” Avi murmurs, stroking down his chest, and every trace of his fingers feels like fucking wildfire, and then he breaks away from Yuri and walks inside, and Yuri watches after him until the door closes.

He gets a chicken wrap and slowly walks back the way the two of them had come, and when he sees the big tom again, he realises that he was kind of fucking hoping for this.

Before the first cluck of his tongue was even finished, the big ginger tom was rushing toward him like he’d been waiting for this too, eagerly walking around and around his legs, his dirty ginger-white tail up straight in the air. He’s almost stumbling over his paws in his eagerness to press his big body against Yuri’s, and when Yuri sits down on a bench the boy jumps into his lap and rubs his cheeks against Yuri’s belly, wriggling in his lap.

He’s too distracted to take a shred of breaded chicken from Yuri’s fingers, but after Yuri patiently held it out for him long enough, he suddenly noticed it and sniffed it and took it from Yuri’s fingers, then followed his pink, freckled nose to the rest of the chicken and cheese as Yuri empties it out of the bottom of the wrap.

Mr Laniado picks up the phone in less than two rings, and his voice is urgent and sharp as he asks, “Yuriko? Are you okay, boy, what is wrong!?”

It’s funny, being called a boy at forty-nine years old, even if Mr Laniado is so much older. Yuri feels bad about scaring him, ‘cause Mr Laniado has his number mostly from a few months ago when he’d had Yuri help him and his daughter do a big fucking cat food shop after the old man had sprained two of his fingers and couldn’t carry shit around as easily.

(Yuri is pretty sure it was actually just because he hoped Yuri would ask Palomba out, and maybe at another time in his life, he would have done. She’s pretty cool, has her hair dyed, has a bunch of piercings through her ears, but when she isn’t rescuing cats, she quadbikes, and she does archery, and…

Yuri would only be fucking jealous of her, or would want to pull her to stay home with him, and that wouldn’t be fair, even if she wasn’t out of his league.)

“Nothing’s wrong, Mr Laniado, I’m sorry to call out of the blue, uh… I’m by the kid’s playground in Lizbet Dane Park. There’s this cat, I saw him earlier and he’s in my lap right now, he’s dirty, he looks like he’s lost a bunch of weight, I’m feeding him some chicken—”

“Give me ten minutes,” Mr Laniado says. “I come.”

* * *

There are other local Sephardi Jews, but Mr Laniado’s late wife was, in his words, “A beautiful and very powerful Brooklyn yidene,” which is why he does sometimes come to the same shul Yuri does, but that doesn’t stop him from occasionally complaining about Ashkenazi traditions, and as they cross the threshold into Yuri’s place, even as he presses a kiss to his fingers and brushes the mezuzah on the door, he is grumbling about how the scroll inside is probably in various ways flawed and incorrect.

Mrs Laniado had apparently had command over many other things, but Mr Laniado was always in charge of their home, including the mezuzahs they bought, and as Yuri closes the window fully and turns to smile at him fondly, the old man grumbles and grumbles and grumbles about it, about Ashkenazi “fussiness” about kabbalah.

“The window is closed,” Yuri interrupts him, trying not to be too rude about it, but Mr Laniado doesn’t seem to mind.

He’s a little old man with a long jowly face and earlobes that seem like they’re trying to sneak down to his shoulders, and he has very thin eyebrows and age spots scattered over his forehead and cheeks, over his hands – as well as a few cat scratches here and there, but none from their new friend.

He’d started to yowl when they’d zipped the carrier over his head, scrambling around inside, but he’d gone quiet again when they’d gotten in the car, and it’s only after another minute that he begins to burble little complaints.

“You want him upstairs?” Mr Laniado asks.

“Nah, nah, we’ll keep him in my ensuite, the only stuff upstairs is a guest room for my sister and her kids and some storage. The one upstairs is bigger, but I don’t go up there much.”

“I couldn’t sleep on the ground floor like this,” Mr Laniado says, wrinkling his nose, and Yuri smiles as he leads the way into the bathroom and lets Mr Laniado past him.

This, the old man approves of, of the whole wet room with just some raised storage and the toilet apart from the big flat tiled floor, and he sits down on top of the toilet lid.

Yuri braces himself for their quarry to suddenly speed around the place, to try to find his way out, but landing on the tile and seeing that he is still in the presence of both Yuri and the nice old man who just fed him half a wet tube treat, the cat apparently loses any latent urge to panic and just sits placidly on his behind, then eagerly rushes over as Yuri starts to unpack the crate of stuff Mr Laniado had brought over for him.

“He knows bowls and canned food,” Mr Laniado murmurs disapprovingly as Yuri shakes out a can into one of the little plastic dishes.

The tomcat makes some eager “nom nom” noises as he eagerly chows down – Yuri hadn’t given him that much chicken, and a can of food is obviously better than half a wet treat.

“You think somebody dumped him out here?” Yuri asks as he shakes out the bag of litter into the temporary tray – it’s only a small one, Yuri’ll need to get a nice big deep one for this guy, he thinks.

Mr Laniado had already checked him for a microchip and hadn’t found one, and on the drive over, he’d posted a picture of him on some local cat groups he knows to see if people recognise him. Yuri had been kind of surprised by that, given how he seems to be feuding with half of these cat people, but he had just shrugged and said, “If someone I do not trust says he is a local cat, they have been trying to trap and release him, something stupid like this, I will say I already lost him.”

Yuri laughs, running cold water into a bowl and setting it down on the other side of the room – litterbox, food bowl, water dish at three corners of the room, and then the crate in the fourth corner, where Yuri packs in a sweater and a t-shirt from the laundry bin and tucks it in for him to sleep on.

Having licked his plate clean, the tom sits back on his haunches and begins to groom his face – his paws look a little roughed up to Yuri, not bleeding, but…

“You will keep him?” Mr Laniado asks, interrupting Yuri’s unpleasantly vivid image of this poor cat, made to be a housecat, wandering the streets and looking for somebody to take him in, wandering through dirt and motor oil, not getting why his paws are red and achy, not knowing why he got tossed out. “He might be from some Haredi family, maybe from Monsey or something – they won’t neuter an animal themselves, only get one who has already been neutered. They might have raised him from a kitten, but then he began to spray, or father kittens or fight other cats, to be a nuisance.”

Yuri slowly nods his head, although now he’s just thinking of some little Orthodox kid loving their cat to pieces after begging and begging for one and crying their eyes out after their dad takes the thing off and abandons it somewhere because they can’t get it neutered and he doesn’t know what else to do with it.

“Yeah, if, um, if he doesn’t belong to anybody else, sure I’ll keep him,” Yuri says. “We should get his balls off ASAP, right?”

“Oh, yes, definitely,” Mr Laniado says. “I will take him to a vet tomorrow and get him checked out, get him scheduled for to neuter him – if someone does lay claim to the animal, oh no, oopsy-daisy, I thought I was doing what was best.” He’s sarcastic as Hell as he says it, raising his hands, and Yuri laughs and then looks down at the tom as he comes back to Yuri and stands on his feet, rubbing against his calves and looking up at him so fucking calmly, so fucking…

He’s so goddamn trusting, just happy to be with people, happy to be fed. He’s purring and drooling a little bit with how eagerly he purrs, and Yuri slowly sits down on the floor and lifts the guy into his arms, and fuck, the guy is rumbling like a fucking engine and his big fat head falls like a weight onto Yuri’s chest, his forehead shoving up under Yuri’s chin.

“If someone else says he is theirs, maybe I lie, I say he’s already gone anyway,” Mr Laniado suggests, smiling a little at how the bastard they’ve just kidnapped off the street is melting in Yuri’s arms and drooling on his shirt. “You keep him.”

“I don’t want to steal some kid’s cat, Mr Laniado, he might have just gotten confused after somebody moved house or wandered off. We don’t know that somebody meant to abandon him just yet.”

“You have a lot of faith in human beings,” Laniado says, clucking his tongue. “Perhaps this is admirable, but when it comes to how they treat their cats, a man should not have this faith.”

“Oh, yeah? Which reb said that?”

“The sages were busy, they were writing down about leprosy and grains and clothing and other things,” Mr Laniado says dismissively. “If they had had time, they would have written down about how people cannot be trusted with cats, in part because they are stupid, even if they are not mean-spirited.”

Yuri gently cradles the cat from underneath, and he lets himself be held like a fucking baby, putting his filthy paws up against the underside of Yuri’s throat and gently kneading on the flesh, dragging at his stubble – his claws are a little too long and it hurts a little, but it’s still pretty fucking cute.

“I’m sorry again,” Yuri says. “For, for calling you without warning, I didn’t… I never picked up a cat like that before.”

“Always call me,” Mr Laniado says seriously. “Anything you want, you call me. This is the point of retired old people, yes? Between the retiring from our jobs and the dying, we enjoy life, yes, but part of enjoying life is being useful, I like to be useful, or I would not do the things I do, the part-time maintenance work, the cats. Old men like me, we enjoy a crisis very much – which this is not. But if you decided you wished to make an attempt upon your life, and you wished for comfort, I would come for this too.”

Yuri blinks a few times, taking that in, and Mr Laniado seems to realise what he’s said, and he leans back a little where he’s seated on top of the toilet, his elbows rested on his knees, his shoes settled into the comfortable moccasins he presumably wears at home, ‘cause most of the time when Yuri sees him, he still wears his big work boots out of habit.

“Is that what you thought, when I called you?” Yuri asks.

“Sorry,” Mr Laniado says. “I, uh… When you moved to Rockland County, you know, when you joined Beth-El, we talked about you, and we talked about you over at Temple Aaron also. You know old people – we talk, we talk. We listen. We talk some more. We have our daughters search online, maybe.”

Yuri feels almost like fucking crying, he’s fucking embarrassed, and he eases the cat out of his arms. He settles down in Yuri’s lap and purrs, and he’s so fucking happy – happy and relaxed enough, too, that Yuri feels like it’s time to pick up some of the wipes from the shelf under the sink.

As comfortable as he apparently is with any kind of handling, the tomcat purrs even louder as Yuri starts to wipe off the muck and grime staining the underside of his face and his belly, although when Yuri starts trying to do the same on his legs – not even his paws, yet – he grumbles and scrambles up and curls against Mr Laniado’s legs before noticing the crate and eagerly hopping inside.

Yuri holds the dirty wipe limply in his hand, looking at the black and brown staining it, and a little red, although he’s pretty sure that’s just from clay dirt, not from blood.

“What does it say about me online?” he asks.

“Oh, that you are a hero, mostly,” Mr Laniado says casually. “Your paramedicine service was what came up, mostly, the, it was a car accident, yes, that aggravated your back? A video of you teaching CPR. Nothing about your, ah, personal things. When you came here, some of the women at Beth-El, they talked to me because they thought you were also a widower, yes? And you let them think this.”

Yuri bows his head.

“It is not shameful,” Laniado says, chuckling. He’s watching the tomcat happily make biscuits on Yuri’s sweatshirt, his orange and white fluff – whiter, now that Yuri’s cleaned it off a bit – overflowing out of the edges of the crate. “They assumed; you let them. This is not a lie, and it is not a poorly-intended deception. It is not cruel, or withholding. Merely… private, yes? You are a private man. But a hurting man, I think, also. They assumed because you have the air of a widower, the spirit of one.”

Yuri chews on his lower lip, leaning back against the sink cabinet. “I never had any serious girlfriends,” he murmured. “Never even tried – I loved my job, that was it for me, and it was easy to let myself do it, when I saw a lot of people having issues with wives and families, doing both at once. I didn’t mind being married to… married to it, I guess. I tried to kill myself seriously, I think, twice, when I was still a teenager, I was a pretty fucked-up kid, and apart from that I was getting in fights and doing dumb, risky shit, you know. Motorbikes, climbing buildings or… When I first took a basic med skills class, just CPR and splinting an arm, it was like something clicked for me. I got funnelled towards fire service ‘cause I was pretty strong, but I pivoted to paramedicine pretty quick.”

“I tried to suicide,” Mr Laniado says, and Yuri stares at him in surprise. “After Hanna died, I was a man at sea. I was not just morose, I was without purpose – I had loved her so entirely, so wholly, for sixty years, since we were children and her father hated me. Where was I to put all that love, hm? Palomba will not be stifled – she is an independent thing, fiercely so, always roaming, and we had no other children. I took a lot of Hanna’s pills, I emptied the medical cabinet, and then I sat on our porch, and I drank, and within a minute, a stray cat wandered over. I think I had seen him before – Hanna did put out some food for the strays here and there, always watched very carefully to make sure it was actually cats eating it, you know, and not a racoon or possum or something.” His elbows on his knees, Mr Laniado settles his jowly chin onto the backs of his hands, and he watches the tomcat settled down in the crate with just his eyes peeking out, eyelids slowly closing. He’s still purring a little, and there’s drool all down his fucking mouth. “He was a very sad creature. Black, but with white showing underneath, and so skinny you could see the muscle over his bones. An abscess in his mouth, a badly infected tooth, and it was swelling into his eye, and he had cuts and bites on his body and his tail drooped a little at the end… And he crawled into my lap, Yuriko. Slowly approached me and clambered up the lawn chair, although it looked as if it hurt him to do so, and he sat in my lap and he purred, sickly, wet, and I was already feeling very, very tired and sick myself, woozy, but I had to do something, hm? How could I care for this creature if I died beneath him? I would just get him to a vet, and then I could kill myself after.

“So I brought him inside, and I vomited very thoroughly, and drank a lot of water with the, the stupid black, you know, the charcoal. And when I was fairly certain I was not imminently dying, I took him to the vet. I called him Charlie – he was a very sweet cat, only lived a few months after that. It was a cancer, in his mouth, the abscess, but he lived very happily with me, and I had him euthanised before the cancer could torture him, as it tortured my Hanna. He died still able to eat and play and enjoy himself – in a little pain, perhaps, but spared agony. And by this time, I… Well. I had begun to feed other cats, more seriously than before, and I knew them, and I had rehomed some. I still missed my wife, but I had more creatures to pour my love into – without drowning my very patient daughter.”

After a second, he says, “You will not tell her this. She does not know.”

“Nah,” Yuri promises. “No, I won’t… I won’t tell her. I did think about it, you know, I, um, I’ve been in therapy for a few years, I was fucking glad I had already been working on it before I got hurt, ‘cause if I hadn’t already been unpacking my like, my commitment stuff and my feelings about, you know, marriages and romance, I think I would have been… been a lot worse. That’s actually why I came out here, though, instead of still living in the same neighbourhood in the Bronx, not trying to run away from my friends, but from the job, and all the stuff that made me wanna do the job, and all the shit I did to keep my body busy when I couldn’t pick up a shift, adrenaline junkie shit. I didn’t want to want to kill myself, that’s why I thought… You know, Clyde, it’s a different pace of life here. And people appreciate it, they enjoy it, and I could… I wanted to learn to enjoy it too.”

“I am very glad you came to us,” Mr Laniado says. “We are each retirees, yes? But still, to be useful, it is part of how we love others. Service to others, it is a very deep love.”

Yuri slowly nods his head.

“But there are other loves, good loves,” the old man murmurs. “Me, I am so old, but you are still young. You had a nice time with Abraham?”

“Took him bowling,” Yuri says.

“Ah, yes, I remember,” Mr Laniado says, and smiles. “He enjoyed this?”

“He did, he was… he was nervous at first, he’d never been bowling before, but he got really into it, there’s some natural talent there, definitely.”

“Such a shy boy,” Mr Laniado murmurs, “but less so with you, I think. I hear he was in hospital for a very long time.”

“I think so.”

“Hospitals are such hard places to live,” Mr Laniado says, his eyes misty and grey as he stares into the middle distance. “It is one thing, to preserve life by fighting off death, but preservation, it is not the same as living. One cannot fully live behind hospital walls, especially for a long stay. It is a hard thing, when healing requires it. The days pass, the months, even, and one is not in the world and feeling it changing, the colours, the air, the scents. It is not a natural environment, and humans are animals who live in nature. Even in the city, there is nature, but in hospitals? Not so.”

Yuri’s spent most of his life bringing people into hospitals, but he’d be the first to say he’s never liked spending time in them – he fucking hated when he was in recovery after his back surgery, hated how white and bright everything was, hated the constant smell of the antiseptic, hated how artificial everything had to be to keep him, to keep everything, clean.

He does get what the old man is saying, but he doesn’t want to voice the thought, doesn’t exactly want to compare his stupid back injury to his wife’s battle with cancer.

“I bet I woulda liked her,” Yuri says. “Your wife.”

“Oh, yes, more than me,” Mr Laniado says immediately. “She was a very big woman – she brimmed over like a full cup. And I do not just mean her breasts!” Yuri chokes on a laugh. “Very loud, very opinionated, and always right, also. Fierce, she was, very fierce. It is why Palomba is how she is now – she learned from the very best. I see so much of Hanna in her face, how she walks and moves, but most of all how she fights, argues, her, her dedication. To justice, you know?”

“I know,” Yuri says. “My mom’s dad was a steelworker, and his wife – not my grandma, technically, she was his second wife, but we called her Gramma – was a nurse, and they were both fucking big on union stuff, me and my sister learned all the union hymns when we were kids. Palomba and I were talking about it, ‘cause she had that Carsie Blanton album in the car.”

“Ah, yes,” Laniado says softly. “It is perhaps a mercy she is disinterested in children of her own – they would have not sang about wheels on the bus, but solidarity forever, in kamf, and so on.”

Yuri laughs, and he eases himself slowly off the floor. “You’re sure it’s okay for you to take him tomorrow?”

“Of course,” Mr Laniado says. “Give me a spare key and I will come and take him to the vet, I will pay—”

“No, no, you don’t have to—”

“Shush, shush, what else is my money for? No grandchildren, remember! I will take him, I will get him checked out while you work, make an appointment for his snip snip, turn this beautiful young boy into a castrato, make his singing prettier, hm? What will you call him?”

“I don’t know,” Yuri murmurs, and then says, impulsively, thinking about enjoying the CD in Palomba’s car, “Red.”

“Of course,” Mr Laniado deadpans, but he’s smiling, and he shakes Yuri’s hand before he heads off.

Red starts to wail when Yuri shuts the bathroom door, and he knows he shouldn’t, knows the little prick will probably spray all around his bedroom and that he probably has fleas, but he just sounds so fucking sad, and Yuri’s back can’t take sleeping on the floor, so he opens the ensuite door so that he has the run of the bedroom as well as the bathroom.

Big Red sleeps on Yuri’s pillow, nearly wrapped around his fucking head with his paw stuck in Yuri’s face, and Yuri sleeps terribly, and doesn’t mind at all.