“Lymph nodes?”
“Thank you. It’s in his liver, too. He’s smoked since he was a boy, and Russian cigarettes were very dangerous then. Toxic. So…” He glanced up again. “Please, come here, sit down beside me?”
Ben did as he was asked. So far, he hadn’t heard any actual bad news, but he loved Nikolas enough not to let this thought show. “So, he has, he says, only a few months.” He tipped his head to one side, regarding Ben. It was a heart-breaking gesture, and Ben suddenly felt some sympathy for Gregory who’d lost this and would never have it again. On that sense of his own good fortune, he cupped Nikolas behind the neck and pulled him closer, their foreheads resting together.
“I’m sorry.”
Nikolas nodded then pulled back slightly. “He’s very bitter, I think. Not resigned at all to his fate.” He shrugged. “It didn’t help, therefore, when he saw my picture in the paper and realised I’d decided my own fate. And then to see me again at the restaurant with…everything I have now. Very bitter.”
“This is the part I’m not going to like, isn’t it?”
Nikolas pouted a little. “He wants to return to Russia and die with dignity there at a time he chooses.”
“And?”
“He doesn’t want to die friendless and alone.”
“He wants you to go to Russia with him?”
“Yes. Now we’ve come to it. He wants me to travel with him to Russia and stay there until?To ensure he dies when and in the way he’d want.”
Ben was silent for a moment then confessed quietly, “I can arrange for that to happen here. Today…tomorrow. He’ll die quickly and quietly.”
Nikolas put a hand down to his leg, rubbing it unconsciously, and Ben reckoned it must have actually been hurting him, for his thoughts seemed far away. “I wouldn’t like that.”
Ben made to rise, but Nikolas caught at his arm and drew him back. “I’ve been thinking a great deal about this, Benjamin. Will you hear me out?” Not giving him time to refuse, he continued, “You want a new me. You don’t want me to be Aleksey, even though all of this seems to pull me back to him. Well, don’t you think this is therightthing to do? Don’t you see what I’m trying to say? People like us…” He clenched his jaw and glanced at Ben, seeing his incomprehension. He tried again. “You and me, we won’t have families, children, people with us at the end. We’ll be always alone except for others like us—if we’re lucky.”
“Jesus, Nik, what the fuck?”
“He’s alone, Ben. He’s old and alone, and I don’t want to be like him one day.” He rose quickly with a wince when he put weight on his leg so suddenly. “Would you do this thing for me one day if I askedyou? A few months, that’s all. Isn’t it the right thing to do? You tell me? I’m trying to be this new man you want me to be! I need your help to be him.” There was a catch in his voice. “I’m sorry.” He abruptly left the room, and Ben heard him slam something in the bedroom. Ben remembered Nikolas once telling him, “You take emotionally and you don’t give back.”He didn’t much like himself at that moment.
He rose and went into the bedroom. Nikolas was standing at the floor-to-ceiling window, staring out at the view of the park. Ben went up to him and enfolded him in his arms, pressing his face into the blond hair he loved so much. “Will you promise me one thing?”
Nikolas didn’t respond, so Ben just continued anyway. “Promise me you’ll come back, and promise me you won’t sleep with him. Or with anyone, I guess. And that means what everyone means by that, yeah? Sleep, as in fuck, or anything to do with fucking—which includes kissing. Anywhere. And don’t start smoking again. And make sure you eat?”
Nikolas chuckled. “That’s a great deal more than one thing, but I’d promise you anything you want, Ben. Take advantage of this moment.”
Ben held him off. “The most important is that you come back.”
Nikolas nodded. “I can’t live without a heart. Of course I’ll come back.”
They kissed, a slow tease of teeth and lips and tongues until everything was hard and aching and ready. Undressing seemed to take forever and was incredibly erotic in the bright light of day where all that need was evident. They kissed as they lay upon the bed, slow now, taking their time so nothing was forgotten or done in so much haste it wasn’t important and special. It was like a first time should be. Ben wondered, as he carefully eased Nikolas open, whether this was the destination he’d always been working toward with this man, their first time.
They took turns with each other, moving around the bed in a slow dance of warm skin, hard muscle, and soft, silky hair which snagged fingers and caught their spill and tangled to make them laugh. The afternoon passed as they dozed—in each other, on each other—and then woke again to start again, bodies becoming sensitised, then sore, but still they needed to feel skin rubbing, teeth biting, tongues licking, and always one part or other of their bodies joined.
They were disturbed at last not by Ben’s hunger, although this had been somewhat on his mind for the final few hours, but by a tentative scratch at the door and a whine. Ben chuckled. “He wants in.”
“I’d say he wants out.”
“You take him.”
“And whose dog is he?”
“Yours?”
Nikolas mumbled something in Danish then began to stir reluctantly. “Ours. Come, we’ll walk him together.”
Ben felt a twist in his gut at the effort Nikolas was making. They threw on clothes and went down together in the elevator. If one of his friends saw him dishevelled and clearly well fucked, then they did. He couldn’t care anymore. If Nikolas was trying so hard to find the real man under all his layers of disguise, then so would he.
