Natural Recovery: Part II

Romance. Avi goes for drinks with Yuri.

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.

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It’s raining quite heavily that Thursday morning, and before he gets dressed for the afternoon, before he gets showered, even, he quietly walks downstairs and opens the door and stands on the doorstep in his pyjama bottoms and a t-shirt, and he lets it just fall on his shoulders and his sweat-soaked hair.

He’d slept very poorly last night – at first, it had been nice, thinking about Yuri’s body on his in the bowling abbey, thinking about the strength of his hands and the sweetness of his smile, and he’d touched himself, orgasmed, cleaned up, fallen asleep… There’s always an unpleasant trade to be made between sleeping deeply and the immediate consequences.

Deep sleep leads to deeper dreaming, more intense dreams, and he wakes soaked to the skin with sweat and trembling, the scent of smoke and burning meat in his nose, screaming and shouting and sirens making his ears ache, too many hands on him.

It’s not pleasant, exactly, the cold drip of heavy raindrops sinking into his hair and against his scalp, dripping down his ears and neck, dampening his shirt and making it soak against his skin, but it’s a grounding sensation. Perversely, perhaps, there is also a joy in doing something he would not have been permitted to do… anywhere.

Before now, anyway.

Avi still finds it odd, surreal, almost. There are ten or twelve maisonettes in the row, each of them with their own gate and a mini yard out front with plastic grass, and shared garbage out back, and each apartment is two storeys, bedroom and bathroom upstairs, kitchen and a little lounge downstairs. It’s a lot of space to be given all his own, not to have to share with anybody – yes, he shares walls with the maisonettes either side, but his neighbours are really very quiet.

He knows he isn’t the only person on the row given the place on a basis of outpatient mental health treatment – the young woman on the end, she’s only twenty-one, and is a graduate of the ED centre across the street, recovering from anorexia. Most of his neighbours, however, are here on other bases – a few of his neighbours have intellectual disabilities or are adjusting to independence after significant periods of physical therapy. The man directly to his right is very severely autistic but always lived independently until recently, readjusting to life with additional support after an above-the-knee amputation of his left leg.

Still.

He’s been in hospitals for more of his life than he’s ever lived in houses or apartments, and even the non-clinical settings he’s lived in have primarily been group homes or part of blended therapies, and there has always been so much supervision, so many rules, so many questions, if he ever did anything a little odd or unusual.

Is standing on one’s own doorstep, barefoot, in the rain, against the rules of any facility he’s ever been in?

Not explicitly.

Being out of doors without permission or supervision, certainly, and rain or storm would always preclude being offered either, and some hospitals he’d been in had lacked open air access at all, only had enclosed or covered-over outdoor space. But even in the blended facilities, or previous outpatient places with supervisors and managers and “assistants”, even fellow patients, standing in the rain would be treated as a sign of obvious mental illness.

“You’re getting wet!”

“Aren’t you cold?”

“Are you okay?”

“Come on, Abraham, let’s get you inside.”

“We need to get you dry.”

Or worst of all, “Why are you out here?”

Does there need to be a reason for everything?

Can’t a man just experience something for the sake of it?

“Hey,” says a voice beside him, and he jumps, looking to his left, and he braces himself for the question, for the demand of him, for the accusation of instability or stupidity, or something, but he gets none of them.

Avi has forgotten her name – it ends in -i, he thinks, but he doesn’t actually remember what it is – and he doesn’t know her precise details, but she’s in long-term rehabilitation after addiction, he thinks, vaguely.

“You got a lighter? Mine’s a bust,” she says, gesturing with an unlit cigarette.

Avi wants to make a joke, wants to ask, “You don’t think it’s the rain?”, but his tongue is a corpse in the gravebed of his mouth, unmoving, and his head has dropped forward by two inches as though someone’s pulled him down by the chin.

Silently, he opens his door and reaches into the drawer of the hall table for his matches. He doesn’t even have a use for them, really – he doesn’t actually like candles, never has, and the stove has electric burners – but he had bought them on a whim simply because until now he would never have been permitted to own them.

Coming outside again, he leans over the railing separating their two little gardens, and she gratefully comes over, out from under the little umbrella she has over her smoking chair, and holds out the cigarette for him to light with a match. The flame endures despite the rain soaking its stem long enough for him to bring the cigarette to life, and she quickly hurries back to the relative dry of her seat.

“Thanks, Abe!” she says, and Avi smiles and nods in her vague direction, not able to look up to her eyes, and then he pads inside and stands on the doormat for a minute, dripping down onto it before he goes to the shower to wash himself off and get dressed.

His shift at the library doesn’t begin until eight-forty-five, and so after eating a modest breakfast of cheese and crackers and ham – he actually dislikes both the texture and the taste, but purchases it now and then out of the same absurd stubbornness that has him standing in the rain or purchasing matches – he sits and reads for a few hours.

He’s always been a natural early riser, even in winter, and it’s so often been a problem – demands he stay in his room, demands he stay in his bed, demands he stay lying down and continue to “try” to sleep. He never minded being asked if it was to avoid his disturbing somebody else, when he was sleeping with roommates or lights in the hall might disturb somebody else’s sleep, but it’s another thing, when it’s just a rule for the sake of there being a rule, a lack of…

It’s all very well considering it a lack of trust, but it was always so much more than that. A lack of trust in a stranger doesn’t sting so much – a lack of having humanity extended to him? That’s a different thing. It does sting.

He arrives at the library at eight-thirty, but the doors are already open, and he nods to Mr Brand, who heads security for the community centre, including the library, who bids him a cheerful, “Morning, Abraham,” even though Abraham doesn’t look him in the eyes or come too close to him.

He turns on the switches for the public computer terminals and the central desk, setting his stack of returns to one side, before he heads upstairs to set his coat and umbrella aside and tap his ID card on the clock-in machine.

After logging his returns and putting them on the rolling unit to reshelve, he nods to Ada and Misty as they make their way in.

“You gonna go to across the street to Blue Jay’s?” Ada asks.

“I can,” Avi says quietly. “Green tea and oat milk latte?”

“You’re my saviour, Abraham,” Misty says, and Avi smiles as he pushes himself up and out of his seat and fetches his umbrella again, foregoing the coat – it’s really not that cold.

Yuri is already in line ahead of him when Avi walks in, and he turns to look at Avi and smiles. Avi has always liked tall men, and Yuri is just over six feet. He has dark blond hair which is paling to a silvery-gold, and dark blue eyes, and he’s really very muscular and toned, even though Avi has heard him making modest comments about how he can’t lift or bolster his strength in the way he used to.

“Gut morgn,” he says. “Vi geht es?”

Avi smiles at him, not able to look him in the eyes after catching their gaze a moment, so he looks at the line of Yuri’s neck, muscular and toned, sticking out from the round collar of his very handsomely fitted dark blue polo shirt, which Avi cannot help but notice is scattered over with ginger and white hairs. He met their little feline friend again on his walk over, perhaps.

“Ayngemidt,” he says, and Yuri’s eyes widen, looking panicked for a moment, which makes Avi laugh and pat his forearm. “I am tired, a little, bad dreams, but that is all.”

“Morning, sweetheart,” says Georgie. “You here for the girls’ orders, yeah? Oat milk latte, green tea with cinnamon, two black coffees, and a macchiato – and Yuri here already got your milkshake. You want any pastries too?”

Avi shakes his head, and Georgie nods and taps the order into the register before letting him step forward to pay.

“You wanna go get a drink later?” Yuri asks, and Avi hesitates, glancing up at him nervously, but Yuri stays easy and smooth as he takes his own coffee and holds it against his chest, then passes Avi his milkshake, which he puts in the pocket of his cardigan. “Nowhere rowdy, just a quiet drink somewhere no one’ll bother us.”

“Okay,” Avi says.

Yuri holds the umbrella over their heads as they walk across the street, Avi holding the cup holder with both hands so that he can’t stumble or spill any of them.

“You met the cat again?” he asks, and Yuri glances at him in surprise, then down at his chest. He laughs a little, and it’s a nice smile, his eyes rolling downward, his chin tucking in slightly. “They make rollers, sticky ones, to pick up lint and fibres. They work for cat hair, also, I expect. You met him in the rain?”

“No,” Yuri admits, and then rubs the back of his neck with the bottom edge of his coffee cup. “I, uh… I took him home last night.”

Avi blinks at him, surprised. “The… the cat? You just took him home?”

“Mr Laniado rescues cats, that’s like, his whole thing. He came and met me with a carrier and a grab bag of stuff, he’s gonna bring him into a vet today to get checked out while I’m working. I’ll run home and check on him before we go out.”

Avi felt rather rebellious this morning standing on his own doorstep early in the morning with no one to see him but his neighbour – he really can’t imagine picking a cat up off the street and simply carrying it home. His instinct, as he imagines it, is that one should ask permission before doing such a thing, but whose permission would one ask, a straying cat with no home, no collar?

“You will keep him?” Avi asks, liking the idea – he wishes to meet the cat again, likes the idea of touching his soft fur again, hearing his purr.

“He didn’t have a microchip, which is how they track ownership of cats without collars,” Yuri says, showing that peculiar talent he has for giving Avi information about the world he doesn’t already have, “it’s just a tiny little chip that goes in the back of the neck, they do it for all kinds of animals, for dogs, rabbits, ferrets.”

“Ferrets,” Avi repeats, wrinkling his nose as he imagines a mustelid kept in one’s home, using a litterbox like a cat, perhaps, or being walked out of doors on a leash?

“So the vet will check him over, make sure he’s okay. He looked dirty to me, like he wasn’t used to being outside, and his paws were maybe a little irritated – that can happen when a cat has an allergy to something, or, um, if they stand in something that’s an irritant, a fertiliser or a poison, or bleach, anything like that. And he was skinny, too, looked like he’d lost a lot of weight.”

Avi hadn’t seen any of that, hadn’t noticed anything that Yuri is saying, and he tries to remember, but all that comes to mind is how eager the cat had been to be petted and stroked and touched, how it had rolled on the floor and rubbed against their legs and hands, how it had purred so loudly, and how it had been so happy it had drooled.

“Oh,” he says. “But he will be alright?”

“Oh, yeah, I think so,” Yuri says. “The main thing we need to do is get his balls snipped off – no unwanted kittens, but mostly unneutered cats’ll spray in the house to mark their territory, piss on the walls and shit.”

“I’ve shared rooms with men like that,” Avi says mildly. “None of them were ever castrated.”

Yuri laughs, patting him on the back and putting the closed umbrella under Avi’s elbow for him, then veers off with a cheerful, “See you later, kid,” and heads down the corridor into the centre proper as Avi goes back up to the staff room to hand out their drinks.

He likes the strawberry milkshake – it’s a little too sweet for his taste, but he likes it very much, the habit of it. He likes having an order at the coffee shop the way that everybody else does, a part of him to be recognised and remembered beyond such shallow things as his face and appearance, a silent mark on the world at large.

And Yuri had first gotten it for him, and sentimentally, he rather likes that.

He knows that some people he’s been admitted alongside in one facility, other long-term or near-to-permanent patients, get into the habit of keeping little things, tchotchkes and mementos – ticket stubs and paper slips are less common than they used to be, but those, pamphlets, Polaroid photographs. Cheap things that aren’t valuable enough to be stolen by another patient or a member of staff, or too expensive to replace with little money of one’s own and no relatives interested in spending money to indulge a mental patient, are easy to keep hold of, and paper and plastic bits of garbage, so long as they aren’t deemed choking hazards or potential cutting implements, are nice for some people to keep in a box or tack to their wall or keep in a scrapbook.

He’s never gone in for that sort of thing, would feel silly keeping the plastic cap of Yuri’s gifted milkshakes, doesn’t feel that sort of attachment, he doesn’t think, to physical reminders.

They can always be taken away from you, even if they worthless to anybody but you, always be thrown away accidentally or on purpose, always lost or misplaced or damaged, or even withheld as some form of punishment by someone desiring power over you, in need of a cudgel to ensure your obedience.

It’s no longer wholly true of his life now, no, not now that he’s finally living independently, living in a place of his own, and hopefully bound to continue doing such things, to adjust to life outside hospitals and psychiatric facilities, but if he wants to relish the freedom of owning things and enjoying the privilege and liberty of personal possessions, he thinks he would rather indulge in nice things instead of bits of trash.

“You okay, honey?” Ada asks as he hands over the coffees, and Avi nods his head.

With that, he stows his umbrella and picks up the key for the return chute, and goes about his work.

* * *

“I suppose you’re too young to remember to remember cassette tapes,” Ada says later that day, and Avi glances up at her from over his lunch. It’s raining again outside, although it’s slowed to little more than a drizzle, not nearly as miserable as it was this morning.

Yuri is a little damp from it – he’d gone for a walk on his lunchbreak, and now he’s sitting in the library kitchenette with them and sorting out some security update on the library server. He’d explained about it a little to Avi when he’d come in, but it’s a little over his head – he’s really very comfortable with a local computer and its drives and systems, but that’s really because they’re just a digital version of filing cabinets and physical document systems, put to disc.

Computer networks are a rather different thing.

“I’m thirty-one,” Avi says, and Ada stares at him, blinking a few times behind the amber horn-rim of her spectacles.

“Oh,” she says. “Really?”

Yuri stifles a laugh to the side, and Avi glances at him, feeling himself smile a little as he looks down at his container of pasta, his cheeks warming a little. Someone else, a more confident and put-together person, perhaps they would make some retort in his direction or make a rude hand gesture toward him, and perhaps if they were alone together, Avi would do that, but he doesn’t do that in front of Ada, doesn’t think he could.

There’s something about Yuri, about the way he moves, the way he stands and shifts on his feet, his patience with his students, his easy smiles… Avi knows there’s shyness underneath, recognises a reflection of his own traits in the other man, but it isn’t just that, it’s that he’s shy but seems to manage it better than Avi.

Yuri, despite any inward weaknesses he may have, be working on or working through, radiates a firm sense of being rooted, a man made up of stable foundations, and Avi enjoys being close to him, feeling he can lean into it, rely on it.

Yuri is predictable, and Avi can rely on that – Yuri is predictable because Avi has a sense, he thinks, of how he works inside.

Other people are…

They don’t feel like that, as much.

He knows that they’re not a threat to him, on one level, and more importantly, knows that unlike an unpredictable roommate or fellow patient, that if he says the wrong thing or makes the wrong gesture in front of her, Ada isn’t going to scream in his face, or quietly exit the room to slit her wrists open, or bursts into tears, or piss in Avi’s bed.

It would be silly to think that she would, that she could – most people don’t worry about acquaintances doing things like that in response to casual or inconsequential actions on one’s part. Avi has not needed these things explained to him, and has never voiced them to a therapist, because he is aware that they are irrational.

“Sorry,” Ada says. “You don’t, you don’t look…”

“How old did you think I was?” Avi asks softly.

“I don’t know,” she says, and laughs a little. “Younger. You look so young – those big eyes of yours.”

“They aren’t so big,” Avi says softly, to his bowl instead of to Ada directly. “I just have a big head.”

Ada laughs, and it’s a nice thing – she has a sort of chortle, always purses her lips into an O when she laughs and her cheeks go a little redder under the blush she wears – but he still has to stop himself from flinching at the noise, restrain himself from looking at her nervously or uncertainly, or looking around to make sure she’s really laughing at something he’s said, and not someone making shapes behind him.

He knows he does look young, even with the white through his hair. People can see that it’s not premature grey – it’s too brightly white, too depleted of pigment, to be age, and anyway, people don’t go grey halfway through one’s eyebrow, or one’s eyelash. When it started showing white like that, when he was thirteen or fourteen, he used to wear knitted hats to try to hide it, even indoors, or would huddle down in one of the hooded sweatshirts with the strings removed so that he couldn’t strangle himself with them.

Nurses used to tell him it would go away, with time, and treatment, and eventually they’d given up saying that.

“Well, you’re so good with computers, as well,” Ada says, which Avi isn’t, really. He has just learned, with practice and discipline, to look up instructions – in books, or asking them from people nearby, or searching them on the internet, where possible or applicable.

He’d never had internet access at home, as a boy, only at school, and he remembers the first time they tried to put him in a blended facility, he’d been… What, sixteen? Trembling like a leaf and stammering whenever anybody tried to speak with him in the group home, him and three other Jewish boys who’d been beaten or raped or traumatised in some other way, and the man in charge of the home had been really very patient with him, had insisted he didn’t need to go to temple services or speak with the rabbi like the other boys, if he couldn’t handle it, if he didn’t want to.

(Avi privately believes he was simply worried about Avi being a risk for setting the temple aflame, but Mr Eddies had never said that aloud, and had always taken a lot of care to say how much trust he had in Avi.)

He’d never had unfettered access to computers or to the internet before that group home, and Mr Eddies and his therapist at the time, he doesn’t remember her name, Ella? Both of them had said he should be more independent, should look things up – they wanted him to look at things online, he thinks in retrospect, because they didn’t know how to speak with a young man about being a homosexual, but vaguely supported him in it, and wanted him to learn about it from other gay people online.

But it was never gay people he ended up looking at, or reading about.

A few weeks ago, Yuri had noticed his flip-phone, and teased him about being a Luddite in that gentle, non-accusative way he has, and when Yuri had said he didn’t have an internet connection at home, his eyes had lit up.

“I can help you set it up,” he’d said, and Avi had felt warm, and considered, and he’d been simultaneously excited by and very frightened at the prospect of having Yuri inside his maisonette, a big man in a small space, helping set it up, but he’d had to be very firm.

“Best not,” he’d interrupted him before he could go on. Very quietly, then, he’d added, “No internet in private. I’d only hurt myself with it.”

Yuri had looked at him, stricken, and then squeezed his shoulder, and said no more about it.

Ada is saying, “Well, DVDs now, they have that little title screen and you know what you’re in for, and it’s so much easier, isn’t it? Did you used to go to Blockbuster?”

Avi did, actually. He vaguely recalls the blue signage and all the shelves, remembers trailing after Yoni and Adara and Libbi, and trying to understand what they wanted to watch and why they wanted to watch it, what they’d actually pick. He remembers never having a sense of the rules at that age and trying to learn them by osmosis, trying to understand the differences between what his older siblings thought and wanted and believed and enjoyed and disliked, and what they actually expressed to their parents, how they actually acted, because he always, always doing it wrong, always a disappointment, and they never seemed burdened in the same way.

He would be behind them, would follow them, study them, but he’d never get the opportunity to shadow Natan in the same way. Natan would always hang back with their father, above wanting to pick out a film, or maybe just letting the kids have it, a privilege he was abstaining from, as the eldest.

Avi doesn’t remember any of the films he ever looked at. It’s a blur of cassette boxes and too-tall shelves and bright lights, saturated colours on all sides, blue beneath him, yellows and reds around him, and so many titles, so many faces peering at him from cassette boxes or posters or displays.

He has a very keen recollection of the ritual, though, the process.

Studying as Yoni and the girls looked at films, trying to make sense of what they were picking and why, how they talked about the movies, and how they always used English in the Blockbuster, always, he would try to learn the correct procedure, and then he would slowly veer off to the films for younger children, and he would try to pick one himself.

It was always a theoretical exercise – once or twice, his father had even quietly tried to approach him and specifically ask for a choice of his – because he was too nervous of making an incorrect choice to actually proffer his selection, and then Natan would come and study Avi the way that Avi had studied the others, and he would hate the sensation of feeling watched, judged, but he’d be in trouble with Natan, or Papa would ask what was wrong, if he went and stood with his father, so he’d just stand there and pretend to be thinking about a choice and feel Natan’s eyes on him and want to be sick or to cry and do neither.

“Avi?” Ada says, and Avi slowly blinks, then picks up his bottle of water and sips at it.

“Sorry,” he says softly. “I was just trying to remember – I was quite young. But yes.”

“Did you ever bring home the wrong movie?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, years ago…”

Avi tries to concentrate as she tells her story, thinking it was some animated film for children and it was actually some sort of film with scary aliens or something, and her youngest had nightmares. He is smiling in the right places, he thinks, and making appropriate noises of concern and distaste, but he isn’t certain.

“Yuri loves that sort of thing,” Ada says eventually, gesturing to Yuri and clucking her tongue in his direction, shaking her head. “All those spooky scary things.”

“I’m a connoisseur,” Yuri says, and Ada laughs in a very warm and fond way.

Everyone is fond of Yuri. Avi understands that, at least.

“I don’t know that a man should be a connoisseur of, of ghoulies and devils and things. Or massacres!”

Yuri laughs, and his eyes crinkle handsomely when he smiles, and lines pull at the corners of his mouth – he has a naturally upturned mouth, one that always seems like it’s smiling even when his lips are at rest, but when he smiles properly or laughs, there are more wonderful lines pulling at his face like the pucker of a pulled sheet, and dimples at the corners of his mouth.

“Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a classic, Ada,” Yuri says. “It still defines slashers as a genre fifty years later. You watch that movie and really pay attention to the dissonance and use of music in the soundtrack, you’ll never stop noticing it elsewhere, same as Psycho.”

“Well, Psycho is just a bit silly,” Ada says, sniffing. “It’s not actually, you know, gory.”

Yuri laughs, and Avi gets to his feet and makes to wash up his lunch container to avoid being drawn into a conversation about films he has and hasn’t seen. He doesn’t expect Yuri not to notice it, and of course, he does.

He’s honestly more nervous about being in a bar, but Yuri had been telling the truth when he’d implied it was a casual and unhurried place. It’s warm and lit in reds and oranges and has palm trees and tropical birds decorating its walls even though they couldn’t be further from Malibu, and when they settle in a booth together, Yuri pulls Avi right against him on the leather bench, and that’s—

It’s very nice.

Yuri had ordered him a virgin something-or-other, and Avi childishly likes the bright colours of it and the way the grenadine contrasts with the orange juice, yellow deepening to orange, and there’s a little parasol and a straw with a plastic monkey clinging to it and a slice of orange on the side.

“Not a fan of horror films, huh?” Yuri asks, and Avi shifts his knee closer to him, half resting it against Yuri’s thigh, his body twisted into Yuri’s. The other man is warm and solid and muscular, and it’s really, really nice.

“Everyone at the library knows that I’m part of an out-patient program,” Avi says, stirring his drink with the cocktail stirrer and listening to the soft clink of ice against glass. “Most of them have assumed I was likely in an intensive program, but they still naturally assume it could only have been one or two years. I’ve been in and out of in-patient facilities since I was ten, and since I was fourteen, I’ve been in professional care more than anywhere else. How many slasher films do you think they play on movie night in your average psychiatric institution?”

“I don’t know,” Yuri says blandly, with a little shrug of his shoulders. He doesn’t flinch at what Avi’s said, which Avi hadn’t expected him to, but it’s still nice to have it confirmed. “Could be a kinda fucked-up take on representation.”

Avi laughs.

“Would you like to watch any horror movies? I have a pretty big collection of DVDs.”

“I don’t think so,” Avi says, slowly shaking his head, more to enjoy nuzzling his cheek against Yuri’s neck – Yuri’s hand is on his lower back and rubbing easy circles there, his fingers slid up under his shirt and playing with the waistband of Avi’s slacks.

“Too many triggers, I guess,” Yuri says. “I can always scout them out ahead of time.”

“Scoping out the asylums, the suicides, the delusions, the flames and the arson, perhaps,” Avi says quietly. “But in all honesty, I don’t think I could handle the stress of a genuinely violent sort of film. I used to sweat watching Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure.”

“Scared of bikes?”

Avi laughs. “Terrified,” he murmurs. “Can’t even ride one. I do like the idea of watching more films, though, easing my way into the sort of cinema they show in the outside world. My family would never allow for television channels, but we had a video player and then a DVD player later on, I think.” It’s hazy, and he’s comfortable enough, his cheek on Yuri’s breast, that he says, “They might have thrown me out by the time they got the DVD player.”

Yuri is quiet for a minute or two, his chin slowly shifting back and forth through Avi’s hair, and it feels nice.

“I was a bad kid,” he says, and Avi exhales slowly. “Just lazy, at first – I didn’t like school, had too much energy, couldn’t sit still, and I didn’t wanna do my homework, didn’t wanna do the reading. My dad beat the shit out of me at home, so I started beating the shit out of other boys. Then I had a bastard of a math teacher, real fucking asshole, and I graduated from hitting other students, which was already frowned upon, and hit him, too – broke his nose. Got me shipped right off to military school.”

“I thought so,” Avi murmurs. “From what I gather overhearing local gossip, not to mention that absurd sticker on your laptop, you’re a raging communist, but you have a military bearing about you. Have you noticed you always stand with your hands behind your back like that? I thought it was to support your injury, at first, and then Lena made a joke about An Officer and A Gentleman.”

Yuri chuckles, and then, abruptly, demands, “Wait, what’s wrong with my sticker?”

“You might have scribbled over his face with Sharpie, but it’s very clear from his silhouette that Stalin is on it.”

“Well, I liked the sticker, I liked Marx and Engels and Lenin and even Mao being lined up like that—”

“You are aware of Stalin’s crimes against the Jewish people?”

“Yeah,” Yuri says. “That’s why I crossed him out.”

“Mao didn’t exactly treat his Jews well after he was finished making use of them either.”

“Yeah, but he didn’t support pogroms.”

Avi can feel Yuri getting tense, and he suddenly recalls the last time he got into a conversation about the merits of communism with someone, going from what he felt was idle chatter about political theory over lunch to abrupt fury and a flurry of antisemitic slurs roared into his face, and he leans forward and turns his head, but Yuri is just grinning at him.

“You know,” he says, “the same girl I got that commie line-up from, she’s got a sticker twice as big of Marx and Engels making out. I felt kinda weird getting it when I’m not gay, but if we keep this up, I can get away with it, right?”

Avi stares at him, and then says, “Making out? With their… beards just…?” He gestures vaguely to his own face, and Yuri purses his lips together and nods at him very seriously.

“Tangled up. Almost as hot as the communist theory.”

Avi huffs out a laugh, and he drinks some of the virgin sunrise through the straw, tasting the absurd sweetness of it. He wonders how many sweet things he’ll drink because Yuri suggests them, recommends them – will he gain more of a taste for them? He likes the idea of that.

Yuri’s hand is still sliding up and down his back, his thumb running down the lower part of Avi’s spine.

“Are, um… Did you always know you were gay?” Yuri asks.

Avi doesn’t feel a need to flinch away from him like he ordinarily would, asked such a direct question, because he can see the anxiety in it – Yuri isn’t asking for the reason people ordinarily would, out of some perverse curiosity or a desire to understand the extent of Avi’s homosexual identity, but because he’s anxious about some form of appropriation.

Avi is rather glad he’s always been almost wholly spared of the creep of social media into most people’s lives, because he’s listened to a lot of people younger than him talk about a version of queer theory that seems near wholly divorced from the theory he’s read in paperback.

He gets the sense that Yuri hasn’t been exposed much to either branch of the philosophy.

“I always knew that I was not… correct, that I lacked something other boys had, something that people knew I was without and felt awkward about acknowledging,” Avi says softly. “In secular spaces, I understand such a thing might be dismissed as a view of Jewish boys as effeminate or weak-willed, but I attended a Jewish elementary school.”

His therapists have always put something of a painful emphasis on the complexity and desperate gentleness needed in divulging one’s history of sexual abuse, because it is somehow so revelatory of one’s soul and inner suffering.

Avi doesn’t know that it has much to do with his soul one way or the other, whether he believes in the thing or not, but what he does know about a history of having been sexually abused is that it can rather easily turn off a sexual partner, particularly one so keen to be chivalrous as Yuri is.

Is it dishonesty, if he withholds it?

“Then,” he says slowly, not strategically, just not knowing exactly how to phrase it, “some bad things happened to me. Traumatic things – or, continued trauma. We need not discuss the specifics, but I did not have the… I lacked capacity to consider my identity, or to whom I might be attracted, in the way other growing young men might, until later. I probably reckoned with homosexuality as a part of my humanity, a definition of my desires for men – and a lack of equivalent desire for women – when I was fifteen or sixteen.”

Yuri slowly nods.

Avi is actually rather glad he can’t see his face in this moment, that he can’t make himself nervous, analysing Yuri’s facial expression too closely, but he still feels himself sigh softly when Yuri’s chin stops shifting through his hair and nudges downward so that he can press a kiss to the crown of Avi’s head.

“Your father hit you too?” Yuri asks.

“He did, yes, although he was never a man of uncontrolled temper – it was always somewhat ritualised, which in many ways made it more frightening, I think, that there was always clear forewarning, and thus anticipation. Yours was more out of anger?”

“Anger or booze,” Yuri says. “He never made big bucks but insisted my mom stay home with me and Larissa and didn’t want her to go back to work even when we started going to school, wanted her to be a homemaker, you know? Which was okay, when her parents were alive, and they helped out with money. Once they died, it was different, and he couldn’t float the house on just his own income anymore, but he couldn’t deal with that.”

“Funny, that homosexuality is so often inferred to mean a weakness,” Avi murmurs. “Baldwin speaks on it at length in one work or other – there is an inherent risk, a danger, to the sexuality as passes between men, strength entangled with dominance, with a need for supremacy.”

“I never read Baldwin,” Yuri admits, sounding really rather tortured about it, and Avi reaches back for the hand that’s been fiddling with his back, entangling his fingers with Yuri’s and pulling his arm around Avi’s middle. He can feel Yuri’s heat, feel his heart beating.

“Well, you already know I’ve never seen Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” Avi murmurs. “I suppose I can forgive you ignorance of a few classics if you’ll forgive mine.”

“Very kind,” Yuri says, sarcastic and snide.

“How is your new cat? You went home to check on him, yes?”

“Yeah, that’s why I said I was only up for one drink,” Yuri admits, and he sounds regretful now, even as he leans past Avi to look at his watch. “I’m gonna call him Red.”

“Communism again. I’m sensing a theme.”

“You’re not a communist?”

“I have no political ambitions beyond a reluctant duty to vote democrat, and certainly no intentions toward revolution.”

“Do I look like a revolutionary?”

“No, thankfully. I don’t know that I’d find you so attractive with excessive facial hair.”

He turns to look around at Yuri, which is more than worth leaning away from the other man’s embrace, because Yuri blushes. It’s quite wonderful, actually, seeing that pink on his face, seeing his lips part, seeing his eyes flit away from Avi’s face. He clears his throat, rubbing the back of his neck before returning it to Avi’s, stroking between his shoulders even as he looks the other way.

“I feel bad leaving him all alone, poor guy.” He says, hurrying to speak. “Vet’s given him a clean bill of health and his first shots, and we need to do some flea and worm treatment – he actually doesn’t look like he has any fleas, which is fucking great news, but the treatment is standard when you take in a street cat, better safe than sorry, especially with worms. He’s getting snipped Saturday afternoon, so I’ll drop him off at lunch time, after temple services, then pick him up in the afternoon.”

“Do you have any other plans for Saturday?” Avi asks. They’d given him Fridays and Saturdays off automatically, and had made such a thing of it that he hadn’t bothered to argue or explain – Yuri works Fridays, but as well as his Saturdays, he takes off Tuesdays, and Avi would like that, he thinks, having Tuesdays off.

He looks really rather sweet, and it’s a sweetness that Avi could easily develop a taste for, until he asks, “You wanna come to Beth-El with me?”

Mm, not exactly the sour taste Avi usually looks for.

“No,” he says bluntly. “I’ve had my share of religion for a lifetime, but I’d rather like to have sex with you. Will you be too distracted whilst Red is at the vet’s, or will that be alright?”

The blush is back, and deepening, but Yuri isn’t looking away this time: he’s staring at Avi’s mouth.

“I could, uh, that, yeah, I won’t, I won’t be too, um, dis…” He trails off, and Avi should make fun of him, really, should tease him, but instead, he kisses the other man, and enjoys Yuri’s calm and collected skill, not too overzealous with the tongue, although there’s a certain fierceness in the movement of his lips – it’s like he can’t even begin to kiss Avi without automatically starting to force him backwards, to dominate Avi’s body with his own.

Avi is comfortably secure in his desire for men: no matter what the philosophers might say, he enjoys that domination, craves it, and there’s nothing unmasculine, he doesn’t think, about the pursuit of pleasure.

“You’ve never been with a man before, I take it. Unless you’ve indulged yourself with the sort of boys who don’t kiss on the mouth?”

“They never take cheque,” Yuri says in a tone of mild complaint, and Avi laughs. “No, but, uh… seriously, no, I never did. I never really looked at guys before, but, uh, me coming out of the city was… Well, a different pace of life. I’m trying to look at things differently.”

“Men too?”

“Just you, so far,” Yuri says, and then chews on his lip. “Is that okay?”

“I’m a dangerous maniac, but a year removed from a psychiatric institution,” Avi says. “It’s perhaps for the best that I don’t see you eyeing other men.”

Yuri laughs, and then pulls Avi closer by the hips, squeezing him around his middle. “You can’t make me horny by hamming up the crazy, you know. I’ve got two decades of instinct telling me who’s the violent type and you, my handsome young friend, are not it.”

“Perhaps not physical violence,” Avi says. “But with a little time to build up my confidence, I could glare daggers.”

Yuri kisses him again, and then murmurs against his mouth, “You taste like fucking syrup.”

“You bought it for me,” Avi points out. “Something sharp and sour for me to taste next time, perhaps?”

Yuri waggles his eyebrows, opens his mouth, and stops when Avi puts his finger on his lower lip. “Berries may grow sweeter on the vine, Yuri, but there is such a thing as low-hanging fruit.”

Yuri grins at him. It’s a curiously boyish expression for such a naturally rugged man.

“Sorry,” he says insincerely, and pulls Avi into another kiss.