Romance. Yuri heads home to the cat after his date with Avi.
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.
Yuri doesn’t jog home, but he walks faster than he fucking should, kinda speed-walks and tries to minimise the impact on his back with each pound of his boot sole against the sidewalk, tries to make sure he keeps his back straight as he goes, but he just needs to be in his own fucking place, needs to be alone, needs to be—
He groans as he finally shuts the door behind him and stops for a second with his face pressed against the cool frosted glass of one of the panels in it, and he thinks about the ache between his legs, not actually rocking anything after his slightly achy walk home, but still a little bit sensitive.
He palms over his soft cock, exhales again and thinks about Avi’s body against his in the fucking booth at Bu’s. They’ve got pretty roomy booths there – they were at Bu’s for Misty’s birthday party, and he’d liked the place, appreciated the generosity of size even to the smaller booths and how much a guy like him could relax into them, how he could extend his legs a little whilst still keeping his back nice and straight and supported against the back.
Avi hadn’t made the space feel generous, though – he’d almost been in Yuri’s fucking lap, nuzzling against his neck and mouthing just under his ear, and fuck, yeah, it’s… It’s good, he thinks. If he’d had any doubts about this whole thing, about if this was just some passing fancy, an idea he didn’t actually wanna execute, they were fucking gone now.
He’d wanted to finger the kid right there over the table, or better than that, drag him outside and into the alleyway, shove his face into the dirty brick wall and fuck him hard and fast against it, maybe even brace him on top of something so he could get the feeling of hoisting him against a wall without putting too much strain on his back to do it.
He’s fucked a lot of women that way, over the years, but it’s different getting away with that out here than in some filthy hole in the middle of a neglected city block – Clyde might have a Cinemaplex and a fucking bowling alley, but that’s as close as they get to urban, and even the narrowest, dirtiest alleyways out this way might be used casually as shortcuts, are well-lit, with no shadows from tall skyscrapers and built-up layers of architecture to hide and obscure vision and direction.
This is a town, not a city, and it’s a pretty classy town, at that, with more street lights than security cameras, more dog-walkers than drug-dealers. There’s less anonymity out here, and it’s not like Yuri’s desire to fuck the kid between a set of dumpsters is actually about the publicity of it, the potential exhibition, ‘cause that shit has never been about performing for an audience – it’s about the fucking convenience of it, the desire rising to the surface and then instantly fucking gratified, the dirtiness only adding to how fucking hot it all is.
And adding to the fact that it’s casual, too – it’s easier to stay kinda distant from girls he’s with if they’re fucking in alleyways and grotty backrooms, or even in the back of his truck, rather than going back to their places or having them back to his, not that his apartment back home ever actually revealed that much about him.
A load of instruments, sure – Larissa had said it was a good idea, but she’d still groaned about him moving out to Clyde, ‘cause it meant she had to get a fucking storage locker instead – but not like, art, pictures. All of the personal stuff was at the firehouse, his favourite pictures of him and Larissa, David and the twins, his grandparents, were on the photo wall with everybody else’s.
Larissa had bought him some frames and shit, and when she’d helped him move, while he made dinner for them, she’d sat and pinned a bunch of them around a new mirror she’d bought for him that goes in the hall for him to check out outfits, and put some more from old albums in the frames, and hung them up on the wall.
She’d picked out other stuff that he’d always basically just left in the boxes – things he wanted, liked, had kind of been given or collected over the years but had always then just left in their boxes and never actually took out and put around the place, and not just random home crap, but even clothes.
He only ever added something to his regular rotation if he wore something out or tore it or some shit, never really bothered otherwise, and he’s nearly fifty fucking years old, has had time to accumulate gifts from guys and girls at the firehouse or from Larissa and the kids, even from cousins now and then, or Uncle Moyshe ‘til he died two years back.
Larissa hadn’t known what to do with it, when she’d actually come around to help him back up and move out – she’d started out kinda laughing about how many of her instruments she’d moved out of the place and into storage with Rose Hicks’ truck and seeing the piles of stuff, and then she’d helped him actually pack up, and she’d started out laughing and making a joke or two about how it was a little sad, how he sometimes acted like he was still at boarding school, like his own home wasn’t home but just somewhere he stored stuff over the summer.
Then she’d kinda realised, he thinks, how much stuff was in the extra guest room, the little storage one he never used, and in the closet there as well as the closet in his bedroom.
“I gave you this,” he remembers her saying, holding a stupid little bear in a paramedic uniform, and it was still in the box with the cellophane sealing so it couldn’t get musty or anything. “Yuri, I must’ve got this for you just after you joined up, I didn’t realise you’d kept it. Why didn’t you put it up somewhere?”
He’d shrugged her off, and then she’d opened a box of scented candles that he never used ‘cause he didn’t want to use them without a fucking occasion, and he never had any occasions; then she’d found the hanukkiah she’d insisted he take from Babka’s stuff, but that he never used ‘cause he was never home for Hanukkah, and was as paranoid about lit fires at home as you’d expect anybody who’d worked fire and rescue to be.
He’d gotten pretty into the Marie Kondo craze, but he’d had a tendency to get rid of gag gifts and random crap even before reading her book, t-shirts with joke phrases on he’d never wear, stupid fake trophies, that kind of stuff, and even the nice stuff he knew he was never gonna use – he regifted nice bottles of booze, for example, or donated stuff he knew wouldn’t fit.
But stuff he liked, or liked the idea of, he kept, he just didn’t… unpack them.
Or hang stuff up, or take stuff out of the wrapper. He’d talked about it a little with his therapist, and Larissa had helped him actually start to pull the band-aid off, or the numerous fucking band-aids, or whatever, and now, when he steps into the little cottage, because of her, her helping him, there’s like…
There’s stuff in here.
Sure, his guitar and his banjo and a few hand drums and mouth organs, all now up on shelves and shit nice and accessible but on display rather than being just piled up, but there’s a cute knit blanket from Babka as well, from fucking years ago, and a stupid little bust of Marx Gramma had bought him when he was a kid, little jokey paramedic signs and posters, and candles, and a nice set of glasses in different colours someone got him for a birthday maybe fifteen years ago.
He only ever had four plain white mugs in his old apartment, a generic set that had come with his coffee maker, and he’s donated all those now – now the various novelty mugs he’s been gifted over the years are hanging from the wall in the kitchen instead, ones with firemen or paramedics on, or communist shit, one that has two cartoon Dalmatians fucking, one with Charlie Brown.
It still feels kinda surreal, standing in the place, ‘cause it feels like someone’s home, filled with little personal things and stuff that has sentimental value, and his CD collection is in a nice rack that looks nice instead of just a neat pile next to the player.
It feels like someone’s home, but also, he lives here – ergo, it’s his home.
That still seems to be a contradiction in terms, but he’s working on it, and while it feels burning hot and too-vulnerable to think about, if he lets himself sit with it too long, it doesn’t feel completely bad.
He hears a mournful wail carry from the bathroom, and he grins to himself before heading down the corridor and into the bedroom, pushing the bathroom door open – Red is out like a shot, big fluffy tail up high as he weaves around Yuri’s legs, purring like a fucking maniac, and Yuri laughs and rubs his big fat cheeks.
He follows Yuri back into the bathroom and looks at him eagerly as Yuri pulls off his shirt and takes off his pants, dropping them into the laundry. When Yuri undoes his back brace and slides it off as well, Red runs over and sniffs it and rubs his face in the sweaty fabric, and Yuri laughs.
“You’re a little creep, you know that?” he asks, stepping out of his trunks and going back into the bathroom again – Red follows him in again, and Yuri laughs and says, “Okay, if that’s what you want…” and turns the shower on.
Red skids in his fucking hurry to get out of the bathroom and away from the splashing water over the tile and wetting his paws again, and Yuri laughs and kicks the door shut, stepping under the spray.
Once he’s done showering (and more importantly, jacking off with his face pressed against the tile, thinking about having Avi pinned under him and making him whimper), he walks out of the room with a towel on around his waist, dropping his laundry straight into the washer, a front-loader so he doesn’t have to crane or bend to get shit out or in, and picks up his phone and dials as he puts dinner out for Red.
“You wanna watch a movie tonight, big guy?” Yuri asks – Red is torn between devouring what’s in the bowl and pushing his big shoulders up and into Yuri’s hand.
When the ringing stops, Yuri goes, “Hey, how’s the biggest loser on the east coast?”
“Don’t know, little brother, you’d have to tell me,” Larissa says effortlessly.
After a second, Yuri says, “Hey.”
Larissa laughs at him – it fucking sucks, having a sister who works with high schoolers, it makes her fast as fuck with the banter, always runs rings around him even when he tries to catch her out – and Yuri shakes his head, pulling a soda out of the fridge and uncapping it in the wall-mounted bottlecap that a big dyke of a firewoman, Lexie, had made him in, fuck, maybe ’05?
She died in ’08, he thinks, that nasty fucking demolition fire, and it was one of the things he’d felt guiltiest about not using, thinking about her making it in her fucking wood shop for him, thinking about how shy she’d been, almost, handing it over, saying not to make fun out of her for giving him a homemade gift.
He smiles at it, taking a swig from the bottle.
“What’s new?” he asks. “Kids okay?”
“Oh, more than okay,” Larissa mutters, groaning before it sounds like she drops down onto the couch. “Lizzie placed second in her last tournament, which is great, she’s been training a lot and her times have been getting a lot better. The team’s new coach has been riding her pretty hard, and she’s been responding well to it, she really likes her – me, I think the woman is crazy, but I think crazy is good for sports.
“Eve is doing good as well, she’s really into, um… No, I’m not even gonna try to say it, but it’s an anime, a new one, or new to her, I don’t know. She’s been working on a cosplay for this big convention in the summer, and it looks crazy fucking good, she’s like, reinforced this foam and painted it, and it looks like real armour, it’s shiny and everything.”
“And David?”
There’s a pause for a second, and Yuri automatically looks toward the phone, turning away from the dishwasher, toward the phone, even though it’s just a phone, even though he can’t actually see her.
Larissa sighs, and then says, “I know that it’s my fault.”
Yuri quirks an eyebrow. “Yeah?”
“Any instrument they want, so long as they practice, right?” she says – same rule Gramma had had, and Yuri smiles. “Well. He’s been listening to my music, right, and he’s twelve, so you’d think he’d be getting fucking rebellious, you’d think he’d be going for something cool – I don’t know, I think Eve has made him too confident being a weirdo.”
Yuri laughs.
“He’s been studying a lot of music, recently, a lot of different stuff, he makes these cool playlists that go between different genres but share influences or beats or just vibes, and that’s cool – and he’s been getting really into a lot of historical stuff, right? Started out with jazz, and I didn’t mind that at all, I took him to some clubs in Manhattan and everything. And then he got into Hindustani classical music.”
“Hindustani?” Yuri repeats, pulling some ham and cheese out of the fridge. “So, what, he’s been playing a sitar, a sarangi?”
“Nope, no, he did try out a sarangi at a local centre, and then he was looking at sitars, and I’d actually heard him talking a lot about veenas while he was cultivating his playlists, and I’d even seen him looking at pictures of them on his computer, and he was keeping up his practice with his guitar and the piano, but then he moved on from Hindustani music and came closer to home – got Grandpa’s klezmer records out of the back of the closet.”
Yuri feels his eyebrows raise, feels his mouth drop open as he spreads butter on his bread, laughing a little. “You’re fucking kidding me,” he says.
“The fucking clarinet, Yuri,” Larissa says. “The fuck have I done in this life, in any life, to deserve that?”
Yuri laughs even louder, and leans to bonk heads with Red before putting ham and cheese on the bread, squeezing it down before dropping it onto the griddle to sizzle a little.
“Does he have the breath control for it? I thought he just played the piano and strings, like me.”
“Well,” Larissa says, “I taught them all tones on recorders and whistles, and he’s never had one of his own, but he’s tried Lizzie’s bassoon out, and he’s actually tried out bagpipes a few times at festivals and shit, you know how bagpipers are always trying to recruit new blood. For a kid who’s mostly played string instruments his whole life, he’s not nearly as bad as you’d think, but fuck me, Yuri, it’s a clarinet. It’s so… piercing. When he plays a wrong note, you fucking feel it.”
“But he’s practising?”
“Good God, is he practising. I never thought I’d want my child not to practise an instrument, but if he told me tomorrow he was giving up music tomorrow and taking up meth, a part of me would think about supporting his new passion.”
“Are they all out right now?”
“Yeah, Pete’s taken them paintballing, or maybe it’s not paintball, maybe it’s laser tag? There’s guns and a lot of running.”
“Your knee still bad?”
“It’s okay, it’s healing up pretty good, I just can’t be bothered. How’s the back?”
“Annoying,” Yuri says, flipping his grilled cheese and nudging Red’s face away from the pan as he eagerly sniffs the air. “I got a cat.”
“A cat?”
“Uh huh.”
“That old Catalan guy wore you down, huh?”
Yuri laughs, picking Red up and cradling him in his arms as he purrs and kneads at Yuri’s bare chest, bringing him over to the phone – he’s careful about bending forward, even though he’s pretty light, so that Larissa can hear him purring, and he hears her make an “Awww,” noise before he puts Red down on the centre counter again.
“No, I, uh, I saw him the other night, Mr Laniado actually took him in for his check-up today and he’s basically in good health except for being so fucking skinny. I think maybe somebody dumped him out this way, or he’s a runaway, he was pretty dirty. He’s a really sweet guy, he’s a lovebug.”
“That’s cute, I like the idea of you with a cat,” Larissa says. “You used to love the neighbours’ cats at Grandpa and Gramma’s, you remember, those big barn cats?”
“Not really.”
“Well, they liked you back, a lot,” Larissa says. Not without a hint of jealousy, she adds, “They didn’t give a shit about me.” And Yuri grins, pulling out a plate. “Work good?”
“Yeah,” he says. “All the kids are out, Pete too?”
Larissa hesitates, and then says, suspiciously, “Ye-es…?”
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure. You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m okay,” Yuri says. “Uh… When I was a kid. Before I started acting out, before Grandpa died. Did you ever think I might be, um… Well, not gay, but you know, like, maybe bisexual?”
Larissa is silent on the other end of the phone, and Yuri chews on his lower lip to keep from trying to change the subject and reverse course, or just babble to fill the silence.
“You were still pretty young by the time Grandpa died,” Larissa says. “I think that… I think you were always a little more comfortable with girls than with other boys, but given the house we were in, I don’t think that was that unusual. I think the harder Dad tried to push you into like, being a man, and being a man means this and this and that, you pushed back on it, and I think it made you like… I don’t know, kind of weirdly feminist?
“You used to play with my dolls because he told you you couldn’t, and I remember this one time when we were at the beach, you made me take the blue pool float, and you took the pink one, ‘cause you said girls can do whatever they want. It was really cute, ‘cause you were only, I don’t know, maybe like, six, seven? And you kinda stopped, and went, “Um, unless you want the pink one?” and I said no, you could take it. You remember that?”
“Not really,” Yuri says softly. He doesn’t remember a lot of their childhood, and she knows that – he feels bad, sometimes, for asking, but she remembers it better, and she’s said she never minds talking about it.
“Anyway, I don’t think I ever thought it meant you liked boys, or would like boys, but it always lined up when you got into the occasional fight at school about how the other boys were talking about girls – when you actually started dating, and a lot of the girls you liked either looked like lesbians or were like, butch and big and muscular, I guess that lined up a lot for me. I don’t think I was ever, you know, surprised that you weren’t into men, and I can’t claim to be any authority – you’d have to ask Evie – but I don’t think that’s unbisexual of you.”
“And Moyshe was always your favourite uncle.”
“Moyshe was always the most left-wing,” Yuri retorts immediately, although the comment makes him pang – Larissa is naturally pretty confident and pretty good in crowds, is good at remembering details about everybody, staying cheerful.
Yuri is good with crowds, with people, when he can flirt – his therapist had clocked it pretty early on, and asked pretty directly about it, the way he flirts, teases, shows vulnerability but in a winking, nudging, joking way, which is all about feigning emotional vulnerability without actually engaging in honest intimacy and connection, keeping everything surface-level, or whatever.
He can’t do that at family events – everybody knows him too well, knows too much, think of him still as an angry kid, pick him apart, ask him too many questions, and even without flirting, they never just leave it at a joke. Anybody else, he can make a little joke about why he doesn’t have a long-term girlfriend, why he doesn’t have kids, why he doesn’t do this thing or that thing, why he doesn’t dye his hair, why he doesn’t read more, why he goes to such a liberal temple, why, why, why.
The extended family don’t take jokes as a stopping measure. If they even laugh instead of just clucking their tongues or tutting, they just ask again right after.
Moyshe was never like that – and the old man was actually confident, too, didn’t just play at it like Yuri does, would ask questions right back, rude ones, would get in fights – verbal ones – and because he’d always win, everybody would just avoid him or kinda back down, even his Great Aunt Esther, who he always thinks of as Great Aunt, not Aunt, even though her and Moyshe were brother and sister.
Yuri hums, chewing on a bite of his sandwich and gently keeping Red back from taking any of it, although he’s mostly just trying to be close to Yuri’s body rather than actually swiping his food.
“Dare I ask why you’re asking?”
“I’m seeing somebody.”
“Yeah? Is she like… trans?”
“Not a she,” Yuri says. “He’s called Avi. Abraham. He’s a new assistant at the library.”
“Huh,” Larissa says, like something’s suddenly making sense, and with his mouth full, he demands, “What?”
“Nothing, nothing,” she says, “just, you know. This whole thing you’re doing, leaving your shell behind and being a real boy or whatever.”
“I think you’re mixing your metaphors,” Yuri mutters.
“Makes sense that you’re letting yourself be attracted to men, if you repressed it before.”
“That’s the thing, I don’t feel like I was repressing anything,” Yuri says, holding his plate sandwich and his soda under his elbow as he takes up the phone and walks over to the TV, adjusting his cushion so it’ll support his back as he sits back in his recliner – Red is in his lap before his fucking plate is, and he laughs a little, setting everything on the side table before flicking the television on and muting it before he goes back to eating, holding the plate below the sandwich and over Red so that he doesn’t get crumbs in his fur. “I don’t feel like, ashamed, I was always totally cool with guys fucking each other, I was always comfortable with queer guys at the firehouse, same as the lesbians, I’d hang out with them. Burt Bowles had a male stripper at his party maybe ten years back, and he insisted I should get a lap dance as the only straight guy at the party, see how the other half lives. I didn’t feel anything – I mean, he was good at it, we were flirting, you know how I flirt with anybody, but I wasn’t attracted to him.”
Red purrs loudly, a little chirrup through it, as Yuri puts his empty plate aside, and he wipes off his hand before idly stroking up and down through the fluffy carpet of fur on his side, snapping a picture to text into the chat with Larissa, although he knows she won’t look at it until later.
“Is this guy more effeminate? Like, if you like muscly chicks, maybe—”
“He’s muscular too,” Yuri says, sliding his hand down Red’s body and feeling his tail run through Yuri’s fingers as he drools on Yuri’s knee – he’ll probably put on some actual pants before he presses play on a movie, but he’s glad he’s wearing a towel right now. It’s not that much, and the vet had said to Mr Laniado it wasn’t a worrying amount – and said that once he’d had time to settle in, he might drool a little less, ‘cause he’s just overexcited at the moment – but he’s lived a life so far only ever getting drool on him at work, and he doesn’t need it at home. “Lean, not stacked or anything, and he’s smaller than me, but he’s not feminine. Pretty, for a man, but he doesn’t look like a girl.”
“Hm,” Larissa says. “Does there have to be a reason?”
“No, I guess not,” Yuri says, stroking under Red’s chin and watching the complete happiness on the cat’s face, the slackness of his jaw, his eyes closed, his whiskers relaxed. “When I talked to Marissa this week – my therapist—”
“Oh, I remember your therapist’s name,” Larissa says dryly. “Crazy that you picked—”
“I didn’t pick her because her name rhymes with yours, and if you should blame anybody, it’s Mom for spelling it like that. The Ukrainian version is pronounced differently, anyway.”
“Uh huh.”
“Anyway, she said that for some people it’s fluid, it’s individual, and because I’m changing other patterns in my life, it’s not that surprising that I’d learn new things about myself. I just don’t like the idea that I have been repressing being into dudes for so long and not even fucking noticed.”
“What, you think this is a moral thing?”
“How do I know if it is a moral thing if I don’t know why I’ve changed?”
“I don’t think it’s a big deal,” Larissa says bluntly. “I don’t think it matters – I think you’re overthinking it.”
“Me, overthinking something?” Yuri asks. “But I’m normally so fucking normal, Lar.”
She sniggers, and then says, “You could have David come stay with you this weekend. Distract you.”
“With his fucking clarinet? No, you keep him for now, I’ll listen when he’s better.”
“I told him you’re better at playing most klezmer than I am.”
“That’s fine, that’s probably true,” Yuri says, although most of what he ever plays in his spare time is random stuff – on his days off, if he didn’t have anything else to do, anywhere else to go, he’d amuse himself playing folk songs, mostly, more country than klezmer, but he only ever played that stuff in front of people at weddings, backed up Larissa and the kids or played so other people could sing. At the firehouse, he’d play guitar, and most people didn’t even realise he played anything else. “He knows that anyway, I think, when he first started playing the violin, I remember I was talking to him about how the violin changed over time, like how it developed from the viola, but his classes were obviously mostly just focusing on like, the difference between plucking strings versus bowing. I was showing him and the girls videos of like, fiddles versus different violins, and the different sound people aim for with classical violin versus klezmer or country. In retrospect, I think he always liked the idea of instruments moaning and crying like they do in klezmer music, makes sense he’d go for the clarinet.”
“Oh, so it’s you I should bill for my suffering.”
“It’s God,” Yuri says blandly, “but I guess I share a part in it.”
Larissa laughs, then says, “Okay, I have to go work on this thing for the marching band. You’re okay about this, right?”
“Yeah, sure, I’m okay,” Yuri says. “Like I said, I’m not like, panicking, I’m not mad. I’m really fucking into it, to be honest, I like this guy a lot, just… I don’t know. He’s younger than me.”
“Yeah? How young?”
“Thirty-something.”
Larissa whistles. “He moves out of the city and starts robbing cradles.”
“Yeah, okay, Miss Boytoy Gave Me A Geriatric Pregnancy.”
“Okay, I’m hanging up on you now, fuck youuuuu,” Larissa sing-songs down the phone at him, and he laughs as he hangs up and eases Red out of his lap – the guy flops sleepily to the side on the seat, still on the towel as Yuri grabs some sweats to wear instead.
It’s only a difference of a little under three years between him and Larissa, but it feels like a lot longer, sometimes, maybe because she grew up sooner than him, collected herself better than he did – Hell, there’s a bigger gap between the twins and David than him and her. Elizabeth and Eve are seventeen, and David still has his Bar Mitzvah ahead of him, thanks to Pete, who Yuri genuinely does like, and can’t be that much younger than Avi.
Sitting back in his chair and watching as Red abruptly gets up and zooms across the carpet, batting around a rolled-up receipt from the coffee shop – Yuri doesn’t want to buy him any toys ‘til he knows for sure he gets to keep him – he smiles, then glances to his phone, and sighs.
He respects it, sure he does, Avi not wanting a smart phone, wanting to limit his own internet access, but it would be nice if he could send the kid a text right now, ask for pictures.
He could call him, sure, but that seems—
That’s a lot, he thinks.
His phone is on his knee as he swipes through movies, and when he makes his pick, he sends the text just kinda idly, and also, not idly at all – Yuri has never been one for actual conversation over text, prefers it to be face-to-face or over call where he can.
YURI: watching pee wees big adventure w big red. whatcha reading?
He feels a little nervous about it, like he’s being fucking weird, sending the kid a text just to fucking chat when less than two hours ago they were necking like teenagers with a pair of virgin cocktails in front of them.
Fifteen minutes later, he gets a text back.
AVI: I might not be reading. I might be doing anything.
YURI: oh yeah?
AVI: I am reading.
Yuri laughs.
AVI: The Behaviour of the Domestic Cat.
YURI: pageturner?
AVI: I’m studying up. 🙂
Yuri smiles down at his phone, wishes the kid a good night, and settles in.
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