Romance. Avi, restless, goes for a walk on Friday and runs into 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.
Avi gets through a stack of three books on Friday afternoon.
Usually, once the sun sets, he lingers inside, but he’s antsy after spending all day indoors, and it’s a fine evening, unseasonably warm for March. He’s lived in Clyde several months now, and every Friday evening he normally hides indoors, because he doesn’t want anybody to wish him a good Shabbos, because he won’t say it back, and he doesn’t want anybody to judge him for not going to temple services, even though there are plenty of people in this town that aren’t Jewish, and even among the Jews, there are plenty who aren’t religious, or don’t attend synagogue services, or don’t believe in God.
He walks without particular destination, up and down the streets around the community centre, looks out over the tennis courts and a field where some children are playing soccer, although he hangs back further from the fence and makes sure it doesn’t look as though his gaze is looking in their direction.
They look to him like younger teenagers, round about fourteen or fifteen, and he doesn’t feel at home with teenagers at all, never wants them to interact with him or, fucking forbid, having to interact with them.
Younger children don’t deter him quite so much, but the older ones unsettle him and make him feel on edge, the ones that are old enough to be canny and circumspect in their observations, but still insulated enough from society’s consequences to be overly blunt with their commentary.
“Ah, a young man walking,” says Mr Laniado, and Avi looks in the older man’s direction, automatically removing his hands from his pockets and standing up a little straighter, although his gaze drops away from his face. He likes Mr Laniado’s face – it is lined with age and leathery and handsomely brown, and he has white hair that is stubbornly holding onto its black pigment around his ears and through his eyebrows, and he needs reading glasses, but they are more often balanced on his head or hanging from one ear or his shirt or his belt loops or held loosely in his hands.
Mr Laniado is a Spaniard by birth, but he came to America when he was still a boy. Avi enjoys his accent and his manner of speaking very much, effortlessly poetic and influenced by Ladino and Catalan and Provençal – he’s extremely well-read, and he often comments on what Avi is reading when he sees him, had picked out a few books for him when he had seen that Avi was looking at books on domestic cats. His interests largely seem to lie in the direction of natural history and geography, although he often comments on history or philosophy if he sees Avi reading them.
He doesn’t ask questions of Avi, generally. He just chatters in the easy, companionable way many older people do, confident in the things that he loves and the things that he knows, which are numerous. He is a very hands-on man, seems to have been active the whole of his life, was a carpenter by trade as his father was before him, and he likes to fix things, and he fixes many things in the library and the community centre, but also for different synagogues, and other places besides.
“Hello, Avi,” says Yuri.
The two of them are seated together on a bench beneath a willow tree, and Avi feels his tongue twitch in the base of his mouth before he manages to say, albeit very quietly, “Hello.”
Mr Laniado’s eyebrows jump up toward his receded hairline, and he beams very widely, wrinkles showing in his face, about his eyes, his neck, his mouth. He would pass quite easily for sixty, Avi thinks, although he is aware that Mr Laniado’s family fled to America from Italy after the turn of the fascist regime against the Jews, that he is older than he looks.
“Have you enjoyed your day off, boy?” Mr Laniado asks.
Avi nods.
“Read much, yes?”
Avi smiles and nods again.
“Know enough about cats to get on with mine yet?” Yuri asks, and Avi smiles a little wider, shifting on his feet and feeling his cheeks darken.
Mr Laniado says, “Ah, yes, I helped him make this selection. He has not been familiar with cats before, yes? He likes to study his opponent.”
“I hope my cat is not gonna be his opponent,” Yuri says, and Mr Laniado chuckles.
“A man never knows,” he says mildly. “The feline mind is a capricious one. They are like women in this way.”
Avi clucks his tongue at the old man and raises his finger toward him, which makes Laniado dismiss him with some vague, wordless utterances, gesturing with one calloused hand, but he is smiling, and seems to take the pleasure some old people do in being scolded.
“Where are you walking to?” Mr Laniado asks, and Avi chews on the inside of his lip, waiting for the older man to scold him, or perhaps to suggest for him to join him for synagogue services at one temple or another.
Avi shrugs.
“You wanna bowl?” Yuri asks, and Avi feels his lips part, considering it – he likes the idea initially, but he doesn’t have the energy, he doesn’t think, was restless enough to leave the house, but doesn’t think he’s up for the noise and clatter of pins and music and chatter. “How about a movie?”
Avi feels himself smile, feels his lips pulled up a little at their edges, and he nods his head, and Yuri pushes himself to his feet and turns to shake Mr Laniado’s hand, then waves him off, and Avi follows after Yuri down the path, turning to wave at Mr Laniado as he goes.
The old man waves back, smiling, and Avi falls into step beside Yuri as they walk onward.
“You wanna go to the movie theatre?” Yuri asks. “They’re showing Pretty Woman as this week’s classic flick.”
“What is it about?”
“Julia Roberts is a prostitute and Richard Gere hires her to pretend to be his girlfriend, gives her a bunch of money, spoils her, dotes on her. Falls in love with her. It’s cute.”
“It’s popular?”
Yuri glances at him, one hand resting just inside his pocket, thumb through the loop of his belt, and then he shifts his shoulders into a slight shrug and says, in the tone of somebody making an admission, “It won’t be as packed as one of the new releases, but there’ll be a bunch of other people in the theatre.”
“I’d rather watch it at home with you,” Avi says, and Yuri smiles and passes his arm around Avi’s shoulder, pulling him against Yuri’s side, and Avi sighs as he feels Yuri’s head lean down, feels Yuri’s lips pass over his head, kissing his crown, before loosening his grip, his arm dropping to curl around Avi’s middle instead of his shoulders, his fingers splaying possessively over Avi’s waist.
It feels good, when Yuri holds him like this – Avi enjoys it when Yuri touches him to reposition him, to guide him physically one way or the other, likes it when Yuri grips him by the neck or sets his hand on Avi’s lower back to nudge him forward, but that’s different, that guidance.
Avi is moving with Yuri pushing him where to go, whereas this is being pulled against him, so that he’s moving as an extension of him.
“The woman at the bowling alley,” Avi murmurs. “She thought you were my father.”
“The girl at Bu’s, too,” Yuri says quietly, his tone bashful and his voice low. “When I ordered our drinks, she asked if you were maybe visiting from college.”
“I wonder what she thought afterwards,” Avi murmurs, feeling his own cheeks warm, his lips parting. “Perhaps that we were close.”
Yuri laughs, and he squeezes Avi’s side: they stop just before they go off the park path and Yuri crowds him up against a fence post and kisses him, licks his way into Avi’s mouth and grips him by the hips, and it’s a rough kiss, possessive and a little rough and biting, and Avi is suddenly hot all over, sweating and wanting and hard in his slacks.
“You don’t wear jeans?” Yuri asks when they finally break apart, and Avi is embarrassed for a second because when their mouths separate a string of saliva hangs between their lips, but then Yuri leans back and in the dying evening light and the paler street lamp glow he sees the saliva shining on Yuri’s chin and that feels… “It wouldn’t show so obviously,” Yuri says dryly, superior but also gentle, the same voice he’d had teaching Avi to bowl – paternal, on some level, maybe.
Avi’s dick is hard, and he bites back a breathless noise as Yuri slides his palm over the bulge between his legs, making him fidget and gasp in a noise.
“You can see it all through these,” he murmurs, smirking down at Avi, eyes flittering. “Jeans’d hide it a little.”
“I’ve never had jeans,” Avi whispers, and Yuri’s smirk becomes more of a smile, and he taps Avi’s cheek before gripping his hand and pulling Avi with him, and Avi half-jogs to keep up with his loping stride.
Yuri has a small house – it’s at the end of a row with its own square yard, which has lemon and kumquat trees and a little apple tree, and some blueberry bushes and strawberry plants, and a table with a parasol and some chairs outside. Inside is even better – Yuri has big comfortable reclining chair and a very soft and generous sofa, and shelves of DVDs ordered by title and CDs ordered by artist in dedicated shelves.
As Yuri walks into the kitchen, cooing and talking quietly to Red as he gets a bowl of food out for him, Avi strokes his fingers over a crocheted blanket over the back of a chair, and he stares up at the framed photographs on the wall – photos of Yuri with a woman who looks like him, also tall and blond and with a square, freckled nose; photos of Yuri in firefighting gear and far more of him in a paramedic uniform, with other firefighters and paramedics, with children, with other people who Avi thinks may be relatives.
On the biggest wall in the living room are instruments on dedicated stands: a guitar, a ukelele, a banjo, a violin, some harmonicas of different sizes and colours. Beneath all these is a standing piano, and Avi approaches it and strokes his fingers over the varnished maple wood, then picks up the casement and eases it back.
Resting on the stand are some slightly wrinkled pages of music – a waltz for a wedding, some hand-written notes in the margins adjusting the pace here and there – and Avi stuntedly plays the first few bars, clumsy and out of practice.
When he’d made his transition to day-release, he’d moved to a facility that didn’t have a piano anymore – it was a much more open place, didn’t have much by way of shared resources and didn’t anticipate patients to be spending much time together – and in the intervening years, when transitioning again to outpatient treatment and then to coming here, he hasn’t had access to a piano.
He hadn’t really thought about it, until this moment, but it occurs to him that he could probably buy an electric keyboard for himself, the sort one can play with headphones in, so he doesn’t wake his neighbours if he’s awake at night.
“Do you like music very much?” he asks as Yuri comes into the room and leans against the sofa to turn on the TV, having taken a DVD for Pretty Woman off its shelf, amongst other P films.
“My Gramma was a music teacher,” Yuri says, “and now my sister teaches music as well, so we both grew up playing a lot of different instruments and with a lot of exposure to different styles, different genres. I don’t really play the piano myself, but that one was going cheap the same month I moved into the place, so I picked it up for Lar and her kids to play if they visit, mostly. I mainly play the banjo and the guitar when left to my own devices. You play?”
“A little,” Avi murmurs. “Pianos in long-term facilities, if they have them, are often a little battered and out-of-tune, but because I’m such a big reader, I’ve had many therapists push me toward playing with the idea that it’s a somewhat less solitary activity. I had lessons as a teenager in reading music and playing, but I haven’t touched a piano in some time.”
This piano, a hundred-and-something years old and so well-varnished, with nary a scar on its body, with all its keys not just in-tact but kept so perfectly clean and in-tune, is a beautiful thing, seeming so well-weathered and yet well-loved. He wonders, vaguely, how many people had owned it before Yuri had.
“You’re welcome to play mine whenever you feel like,” Yuri says casually, not looking around at Avi as he puts the DVD on to play. “We can jam together, if you like.”
“Jam,” Avi repeats, smiling at the keys before slowly closing the casement. “That would be nice.”
Yuri leans back on the sofa and extends his leg, resting it on a stool, and Avi slides onto the sofa beside him and curls his body into Yuri’s, feeling the warmth of his muscle, his solidity, and he slides his hand down between Yuri’s legs, grips the muscle of his thigh, then squeezes his prick, disappointed to find it soft in his shorts.
“I, uh, I need to take something,” Yuri says quietly, seeming embarrassed. “To, um…”
“That’s okay,” Avi says.
His mouth feels a little dry as he thinks about it, about holding Yuri’s cock in his mouth and it only getting a little of the way hard – it’s selfish, perhaps, as an idea, the idea of being able to play with Yuri’s prick at length without it getting hard enough to have to address it immediately, without the same sense of urgency or expectation.
“That turn you on, huh?” Yuri asks, something sly in his face as Avi looks at his face, his eyebrows raised, his lips shifted into an easy smile. He still seems a little bit embarrassed, a little bashful, but it’s warring with the fact that he likes it, likes Avi’s enthusiasm, his interest. “What is it, huh? The power over an old bastard like me, not able to get hard on command, or the ability to, uh, to take your time?”
Avi swallows, and Yuri laughs and kisses him, kind of gently, and then when Avi tugs Yuri’s hand between Avi’s own legs, to feel where Avi is hard, Yuri grips him by the scruff of his neck, fingers tangled in Avi’s hair, and tugs his head back.
Neck bared, Avi breathes in through his parted teeth, and Yuri laughs quietly and says, “Let’s watch the movie, huh, kid?”
Avi looks to the screen, looks back to Yuri, and his hand on the older man’s thigh, says, “I could suck you.”
“Yes, you could,” Yuri agrees, loosening his grip on Avi’s hair. “After the movie and some food. Yeah?”
Avi groans, frustrated, and Yuri laughs again, stroking the back of his neck, massaging it with his thumb, and then pulls Avi against him, and it does feel good, the intimacy, the physicality, just being close to another man and in actual private as the film begins to play, but he wants it, wants Yuri’s cock inside him, wants Yuri’s fingers pressed between his legs, wrapped around his cock, wants Yuri on top of him, wants Yuri beneath him, wants him.
He’s waited long enough.
“Sweeter on the vine,” Yuri murmurs in his ear, banding his arm around Avi’s middle and holding his arm down, gripping the other hand to pull both of his hands away from his own prick or Yuri’s, and Avi groans again, but slowly relaxes back against Yuri.
And annoyingly, the film is good, good enough to grip his interest, enough that he really can set his desire for sex aside, for a little while, to focus on food instead when they eat some pasta, and on Red as he comes to settle on the sofa beside them, purring and “making biscuits” on the fabric, kneading at Yuri’s thigh, dozing beside them.
“Has he been spraying?” Avi asks after they wash up.
Yuri doesn’t have a dishwasher, and Avi feels a little relief – he’s barely used the dishwasher in the maisonette, even though he’s read several articles online about the efficacy of dishwashers versus handwashing them, but something about them still unsettles him, and he prefers to know the dish is being cleaned under his hands, to be able to see the process.
“No, actually, he’s been pretty good,” Yuri says, glancing over at Red, who is fast asleep on the arm of the sofa, his head and front paws hanging limply down. “He doesn’t bury his own shits, just leaves them steaming in the box, and he drinks pretty messily, gets his whole fucking face wet. And he’s needy – you’ve seen that he’s needy.”
“Yeah,” Avi murmurs, but he’s actually quite liked it, tonight, Red curling up against their side, Red purring, demanding pets and attention, butting his big head against their knees, their hands, their sides.
“He’s gonna scream outside the bedroom tonight if we lock him out,” Yuri says, drying off a plate and setting it on a rack in the cupboard. “You know that, right?”
“It’s alright,” Avi murmurs, feeling himself smile. “We can just sleep until you take him to the vet tomorrow.”
“You don’t mind hanging out with him while I’m at shul?”
“Why would I mind such a thing?” Avi asks, raising his eyebrows, and when he folds a dish towel over its rack, Yuri grips him by the hand and pulls him through to the hall, pushing Avi ahead of him and into the bedroom.
There is, Yuri had said with a vague gesture upward, a master bedroom and bath upstairs, and a guest bedroom besides, but those are for his family when they come to visit. Avi has noticed he’s economic about using the stairs at work, in the community centre, just as he has poked his head into Yuri’s office once or twice and seen him standing at his desk or sitting on a yoga ball to keep his muscles engaged.
Yuri’s bedroom is… sleek.
It’s not so cosy as the living room, although it’s by no means an unpleasant space: dark blue wallpaper and a laminate floor, a dark steel bedframe with a tall black leather headboard, dark grey sheets, dark grey pillows. There are pale grey blinds pulled down over the windows to soften the light coming in from outside, tints on the glass of the sconce lights, and all the furniture is black – a black dresser, an adjustable desk, another yoga ball, this one black where the one at work is green.
“Larissa says it’s depressing,” Yuri says, watching Avi look at the room, rubbing the back of his neck and looking awkward. “My, uh, my sister, but I, um… I don’t know. I got used to sleeping in booths and bunks all my life, and being used to the light, light walls, cheap furniture. I like black and grey. It looks— I think it looks expensive.”
“It does,” Avi agrees softly, touching his fingers against the steel rungs at the foot of the bed – the bar is high enough to brace oneself on, if one were to kneel and lean forward, to grip at it.
He doesn’t think he’s ever given much thought to a bedroom looking like anything at all, wanting to sleep in a particular room. Perhaps it’s a weakness of him, a gap in his imagination, that he does not try to conceive of an especial appearance or personality to the place he sleeps in – a bedroom, to him, is much of a muchness with a bathroom or a kitchen, he thinks, a place for the practicality of the matter, for sleeping and for sex, rather than for anything aesthetic.
Yuri’s mouth is on the side of his neck, and Avi sighs and leans back into his body as Yuri undoes Avi’s pants, and Avi shivers and grabs Yuri’s hand, stopping it in its place.
“You don’t wanna?” Yuri asks quietly against the lower part of his ear.
“I do,” Avi murmurs. “Can we— Is it alright if we… in the dark?”
“Sure,” Yuri says immediately, and Avi knows Yuri better, really, to expect it of him, but he still anticipates a probing question or leading statement, and neither comes.
Yuri steps away and turns off the lights, so that they’re mostly in the dark except for very scant light that peeks in through the blind, and then he’s kissing Avi on the mouth this time, kissing him as he eases off Avi’s pants, although Avi catches his hands again before Yuri can move to take off his shirt for him, only lets him ease the cardigan off his shoulders but keeps the shirt underneath on and buttoned up to the base of his throat.
It’s not as urgent as Avi wants it to be, even though he does try to hurry it along, a little – when his hands delve too fast, too greedy, under Yuri’s shirt and into his jeans, Yuri laughs at him and teases, says, “Okay, okay, calm down, sweetheart, we can take our time.”
Between kisses, Yuri tugs Avi toward the bed, and leans back against the headboard with Avi sitting in front of him, between Yuri’s spread legs and pinned between the hard muscle of his thighs.
He’s almost entirely soft, only a little bit of the way to hardness, and yet Avi knows that Yuri wants him, that he craves the closeness of Avi’s body to his just as Avi craves Yuri’s – he’s pulling Avi in close, Avi’s chest against his breast, hands splaying over his body, stroking over his thighs, his chest, his sides, over his shirt.
His fingers stumble, pausing, in their movements, when they slide over the inner parts of Avi’s thighs, where the deeper cuts are, three attempts on his left femoral, and two on the right. They’re each of them too deep and mottled to be dismissed as mere self-harm scars, and it’s unfortunate but automatic, Avi thinks, how Yuri’s fingers trace those lines and then go to Avi’s wrists. His thumbs slide up beneath the cuffs of his shirt sleeves, tracing the criss-crossing scars.
“How many times have you tried to, uh,” Yuri starts to ask, and Avi exhales, blowing air out through his lips. “Sorry,” he says. “Sorry, fuck, you don’t have to, you don’t have to—”
“No, it’s okay,” Avi murmurs. “I’ve lost count, precisely, but it’s in the multiple dozens. Not a hundred, yet, I don’t think.”
“Shit,” Yuri whispers. He must feel bad about what he’s said, about the energy he’s brought into the bedroom with them, because rather hurriedly, he adds, “I’ve only ever tried twice. I feel kinda like an amateur.”
Avi laughs, laughs hard, and Yuri laughs as well – loud enough, alas, to wake Red in the other room, because just as they’re beginning to ease off, relaxing into each other and laughing more quietly, easing off into quiet together, Avi hears Red yowl plaintively in the corridor, hears his claws at the door, and then under the door, as though to rip it open.
“So much for playing with you a little before bed,” Yuri mutters. “Let me do his litterbox – in the top drawer of the dresser, there’s Ts and shorts, if you want to wear something to bed, or there’s some PJs in the bottom drawers, they’ve got dumb shit on them, though. I think there’s some long-sleeved PJs, but they’ve got, uh, they’ve got Thing on them, from the Fantastic Four, and Magneto.”
“Do you like comic books?”
“I’ve read some,” Yuri says. “Wouldn’t say I’m a comic book nerd, necessarily, but I enjoyed them as a kid, I watch some of the movies. I try and keep up enough to talk with my niece, Evie, she’s a real fucking nerd, does conventions and stuff.”
“Comic book conventions?”
“Yeah, and anime.”
“I would like to go to one of those,” Avi says impulsively, and he feels the surprise in Yuri’s posture as he goes to the door to let the cat in, even before he says, “Really?”
“I’ve heard people talk about them,” Avi murmurs. “They always sound… chaotic. Interesting.”
As he finds a set of these pyjamas – they are long-sleeved and full-length in their trousers, but made of a very breathable cotton, and while he feels a little absurd in them, not because of the orange golem-like man printed on the breast but because they’re so overlarge, he likes to have so much of his skin covered, in close physicality with Yuri, in his bed.
Yuri has a spare toothbrush for him to borrow, and lying in bed beside him, Yuri’s fingers tangled with Avi’s, Red establishes himself to purr loudly between them, and Avi is unused to it, to a cat being so close and so incredibly loud – but he is also very soft, and very happy, and at peace, and that peace is quite contagious.
In Yuri’s bed, in Yuri’s pyjamas, on Yuri’s cool grey sheets, with Yuri’s cat pressed up against him, Avi sleeps very, very well.
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