“See,” Steven squeezed my shoulder, “you’re grinning.”
“Am I? Sorry.”
“Don’t be. Sasha seems great, and he’s hot.” I glared, and Steven chuckled. “Well, he is, but don’t worry, I’m not ready to jump back in the market just yet.” His grin faded again, and the crease returned.
It sucked that my brother and I were going through such completely different mornings.
“So, do you have any questions for me?” he asked. “About dating a man?”
I smirked at him. “Are you trying to offer me sex advice, big brother?”
“Sure, why not? If I suddenly wanted to have sex with a woman, I’d be so nervous, I’d have to ask Damey what to do.”
“Damey? Why not me?”
“Are you kidding? The kid’s got game. You don’t.”
I moved to cuff him alongside the head, but he ducked out of my reach. “Jackass. Fine, what is this sage advice you want to give me?”
“That’s easy. Use lube. Lots of it.”
“Fuck you. I got work to do. Catch ya later.”
Steven gave me a one-armed bro-hug. “Tell Sasha I’m sorry about last night. And seriously, if you need anything, don’t hesitate to ask.”
“Will do.”
A couple of hours later, I was leaving the jobsite of one of my paying prospects when I got a call from Sasha asking for a recommendation for a cheap locksmith. Hell, he didn’t need to pay anyone. I could swap out a lock. I swung my truck into a Home Depot, bought new hardware, and headed to meet Sasha at his mother’s house.
When I pulled my truck into the driveway, there were several black garbage bags piled on the front porch alongside a cardboard box. I peeked in. Short stack of Tarantino DVDs, some opened mail in Jerry’s name, a black bong. Well, Sasha was being thorough in his house cleaning.
I let myself in the front door. Last time we were here, I’d been too nervous to really look the place over. In the light of day, I saw it was a nice-sized ranch home. Perfect for a family, if it hadn’t been trashed by its latest occupants. Nice neighborhood, a block from the elementary school. In fact, with some cleaning and paint, the house could fetch good money if Sasha’s mom decided to sell it. I quickly put that thought out of my head. Sasha probably wanted the house to stay in the family.
I followed the sound of rummaging to a bedroom halfway down the hall. The lavender curtains and girly quilt on the bed let me know this was his mother’s room. Interesting that she hadn’t taken over the master after her father died. Sasha stood by the dresser, where he dumped a drawer of dingy tighty-whities into a bag. Out with them tumbled a strip of condoms, a roach clip, and a handful of photos that I knew better than to examine too closely. His expression was pissed off and maybe a little scared.
“What are you doing here by yourself? What if that sleazeball and his gun-toting friend come back?”
Sasha glared at no one in particular. “He’ll be lying low for a few days, at least. You should’ve seen the damage he did to my mom. Her face looks like an eggplant. He probably assumes there’s a warrant out on him now.”
“And is there?”
He shook his head in disgust. “She won’t give his name to the cops. She’s claiming an unknown attacker.”
“But he needs to be jailed!”
“It’s no use. She won’t turn him in. No telling what he has on her. All I care about is that he never steps foot in this house again.”
“You want me to take his things to the dump?”
“No,” he sighed. “I’d love to get rid of it all, but I don’t want to give him an excuse to cause trouble for us. He’ll see it stacked on the porch when he crawls out of whatever hole he’s hiding in.”
“Okay.” I itched to touch him. To offer some sort of comfort. But at that moment, Sasha seemed like he’d bite anyone who got too close. Maybe I should give him space. “I’m gonna fix the locks. Once this place is secure, we’ll both feel better.”
Sasha grunted and moved toward the bedside table, sweeping things into the trash bag.
I spared him one last glance, then walked to my truck to get my toolbox. A few minutes later, I set to switching out the locks on the front door. I’d bought a new dead bolt assembly that was keyed to match the lock on the new knob.
I tended to do my best thinking while working. My mind wandered, and it was easy to slip into daydreams while my hands were busy performing tasks they’d done a million times. Most days, I liked this quiet time in my head. Now, not so much.
Last night with Sasha had felt so right. We’d slept together, yeah, but it had seemed like more than that. We’d shared something beyond just a quick jerk-off together. I didn’t know what it was exactly, but it had been completely unexpected. Today though . . . Well, I didn’t regret it. Not like I’d feared I would, waking up with another dude drooling on my pillow. Christ, thinking of waking up to Sasha so peaceful in the soft dawn light had made my chest swell all over again. My brain kept roiling between excitement and apprehension and something like dread, but dread in the most wonderful sense of the word.
Now, I wasn’t sure what to do going forward. Since my divorce, I’d perfected the polite-distance thing designed to let women know I appreciated spending time with them but was not in the market for anything more. As long as they knew the score up front, no one got hurt. But with Sasha, hell . . . last night had been different. It had been as natural as coming home after a long trip.
And isn’t that just a load of poetic bullshit.
Admitting to myself that I was bisexual was weird, but it felt right. After all, why should a person’s biology matter if you cared about them? And Sasha was so easy to care for. No, the surprising thing was that I was out on this porch screwing in a dead bolt and contemplating my feelings for another person at all. What the fuck was wrong with me?
I wrapped up the front locks and headed to the back door to start on those locks when I spotted Sasha standing in the backyard smoking a cigarette and staring at a tree. I set my toolbox on the stoop and went to stand beside him.
“Nice tree. It’s very . . . tall.”
Sasha cut a glance at me and exhaled a cloud of smoke. “That’s deep.”
I took his slight grin as encouragement. “Yeah. Leafy. And big.”
“Shut up.” He stamped out his smoke and reached for me. I curled my arms around him, and he rested his head in the crook of my neck. It was oddly comfortable hugging a person my same height. I buried my nose in his curls and inhaled my new favorite scent.
“I had to get out of there for a while. The negative energy is overwhelming.”
Ah, the psychic thing. I’d sort of forgotten about that. Honestly, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. If it were anyone else, I’d think they were blowing smoke up my ass, but Sasha didn’t seem to be messing around.
When I was a kid, I used to watch TV shows like In Search Of with Leonard Nimoy and Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, and I would be transfixed by the idea of aliens and Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster. I’d known these creatures didn’t exist, but I’d wanted them to be real so bad. I’d dreamed of one day flying in the Bermuda Triangle or joining the CIA Stargate Project. Steven, a pragmatist even at age ten, had scoffed and teased me, but I hadn’t cared. So maybe there was part of me that was predisposed to believe Sasha. He’d given me plenty of evidence of his abilities. I believed Sasha wouldn’t lie to me. And hell, I’d known there was something different from the start.
“What’s it feel like? Does it hurt?”
He pulled away and dropped down on his ass under the tree, facing the house. “Not really. Or maybe a little. I don’t know. It’s hard to explain.”
I sat down in the grass next to him. Needed to know more. To understand. To get an explanation. “I’m listening.”
Sasha lit another cigarette and took a deep drag. “I don’t want to talk about it right now, okay? It’s hard.”
My brain buzzed with questions, but he’d been through a shitty day and l
ooked like a wire about to snap. I counted to ten and forced myself not to badger him.
After about four hundred years, Sasha ground out his cigarette and sighed. “Guess I better get back to work. I think I’ve got most of Jerry’s stuff bagged up, but I need to do a complete search of the house for drugs. You don’t have to stick around if you don’t want to. I know you have a shit-ton of work to do at your place. Sorry I bailed on work today.”
“No worries,” I said, accepting his hand to pull me to my feet. “You got your own crap to deal with. I can stick around a while longer. Help you search or whatever.”
We carried the rest of Jerry’s things out to the front porch. Then Sasha’s face took on a determined expression. His eyes didn’t close, just got a far-off gaze to them, as if he were listening to a voice only he could hear. Could he hear voices? I wanted to ask, but knew better than to interrupt. Still, when he set off to the kitchen, I followed, curious.
Sasha held his palm out toward the cabinets, scanning. His arm swung to a small pantry cabinet, where he opened the door and studied the shelves carefully. After a moment, his hand landed on an old coffee can. He popped off the lid and dumped the contents on the table, and out tumbled a small baggie of weed, a soot-blackened pipe, and an empty packet of Zig-Zag rolling papers.
“Huh. You’re like a drug-sniffing dog. Think you can help me find my lost truck keys?”
Sasha smirked, and I mentally patted myself on the back for lightening his mood.
For the next ten minutes, I followed Sasha around the house in complete fascination as whatever inner voice he heard led him around. A few times, I saw him pull toward the closed door to what I assumed was the master bedroom at the end of the hall, but each time he’d snap alert and turn in another direction.
“My zayde helped build this house,” Sasha explained as we searched. “He came here from the Soviet Union in the early seventies. His first job was with a construction company doing grunt work.” He gave me a slight grin. “Kind of like I do for you.”
“Wasn’t it hard for him to get out the U.S.S.R. during the cold war?”
“It wasn’t as hard for Jews. He knew some people in Israel, and it was much easier to emigrate there.”
“How long did he stay in Israel?”
“Not long. His goal always was to go to the United States. Zayde was always proud of his Jewish heritage, but like a lot of people born shortly after World War II, he never really developed the faith. His parents were young, and both barely made it out of the camps alive. They latched on to each other because they had no family left. I met them once. When I was six, Zayde took me back with him for a visit.”
“Wow, and you remember them?”
“I remember the plane better. Zayde warned me on the way over not to say anything about the numbers tattooed on their arms. So of course, I spent the whole time trying to peek up their sleeves to get a glimpse.”
I wasn’t sure what to say about that. I’d never known anyone affected by the Holocaust, let alone a close family member.
“They gone now? Your great-grandparents?”
“Yeah. They died a long time ago.” He opened the linen closet and pried up a loose floor board and withdrew a dingy baggie with two white rocks. “So yeah, Zayde worked on a lot of the houses in this neighborhood, and when they were built, he bought this one. Not long after that, he took the janitor job at the high school, and the rest is history.”
Once Sasha had finished scouring the other rooms on the main floor, and had done a cursory scan of the basement, we examined the haul on the kitchen table. I didn’t know much about drug paraphernalia, never having been a user myself.
“What’s this?” I asked, picking up something the size and shape of a smartphone, but wasn’t.
“A scale. For weighing purchases.” Sasha opened a half-empty vodka bottle and began pouring it down the drain.
I set the scale down beside a pill cutter. “Your mom does pills too?”
“She’ll do anything she can get her hands on. Mostly weed and meth, because they’re cheap. Pills are more expensive, but I’m sure she manages to score them now and then.” He turned to place the empty bottle on the table and noticed where my eyes were focused. “Actually, I think that pill cutter belonged to my zayde, but well, I was drawn to it, so I assume someone’s been using it.”
“What should we do with this stuff? Can it go in the garbage?”
He snatched up the baggie of weed and dumped it in the sink, where he ran it down the disposal. “I don’t want to put it in the trash here. I’ll bag it up and toss it in a dumpster somewhere. We should break the pipes though, so no one can stumble across them and use them again.”
We took the two glass pipes out to the back patio. I stepped on them with my work boots, and Sasha scooped the glass up with a dustpan.
“Can I ask you a question?” I asked.
“Of course.”
“Why did you avoid the room at the end of the hall?”
His grin faded. “I need to get in there. I’m just procrastinating.”
“Was it your zayde’s room?” I asked, testing the Yiddish term on my tongue.
He nodded. “Yeah, but that’s not the problem. Not really.”
I waited for him to continue, but he didn’t. I couldn’t help it. I pressed. “Is it because his personal items are still in there?”
He blew a curl off his face. “No, most of his clothes are in boxes in the basement. Let’s just say there are things my mother’s done in that room for drugs that no son should have to stomach. I tried to go in this morning, and had to turn right back around. The house keeps pulling me back there, but I just can’t.”
I was dying to ask him how the house was pulling him, but he was already walking away to empty the dustpan.
“You want me to do it? Search that back room? I think I know what I’m looking for.”
He started to shake his head but then gave a reluctant groan. “Okay, yeah. Maybe if you can just get any obvious paraphernalia out of there, I’ll work on getting the rest of it tomorrow. Pretty much everything has to go.”
“I got this.” I rubbed his shoulder, snatched a garbage bag out of the box on the counter, and headed to the back of the house. For the hundredth time today, I cursed Sasha’s mom. She didn’t deserve such a good son.
I paused at the door. That night when Jerry’s buddy had come stumbling out with the gun, I’d been pretty sure he’d come out of this room. There better not be a sex swing or anything in there. I squared my shoulders and turned the knob.
No sex swing. That might have been amusing. No, what I found was infinitely sadder. The room smelled of stale sweat, unwashed sheets, and a hint of burnt shower curtain. Low light filtering in from the closed blinds cast a sickly yellow glow over the air. The bed took up most of the side wall, and the half-exposed mattress was stained with god knows what, but my eye was immediately drawn to a low coffee table on the far side of the room. Someone had shoved the dressers into a corner to make room for it. Scattered around were misshapen and stained couch cushions, presumably where people would sit at the table. And on top were the remnants of some sort of a party: cheap lighters, an overflowing ashtray, burnt scraps of aluminum foil, and a single residue-clouded pipe. Didn’t see any drugs, but I did spot a few empty snack-sized Ziploc baggies discarded on the floor. Couldn’t blame Sasha for not wanting to come in here. I wasn’t psychic, and even I could feel the despair hanging like a cloud.
Garbage bag in hand, I picked up the ashtray and dumped the mound of cigarette butts in the bag, then thought better of it and dropped the whole tray in. Sasha was right. It all had to go. The sweet and sour scent of what I assumed to be meth coated everything, making me wish I had gloves on. I considered running out to my truck for a pair, but just wanted to get this over with.
When the tabletop was clear, I tossed the cushions onto the bed and picked up the floor. The carpet was rank. Not only did it stink, but there was a hardened spot near the bathroo
m door that looked like a puker hadn’t quite made it to the toilet.
I swallowed the lump in my throat and stepped into the bathroom. It had probably been a nice room once upon a time. It had been remodeled in recent years with a stylishly tiled shower/tub combo and matching fixtures with brushed-nickel hardware. Unfortunately, it was filthier than a bus station men’s room during a janitorial strike. Grime had turned the white porcelain to gray, and the soles of my shoes stuck to the floor tiles. The wastebasket was overflowing, so I tipped the contents in my trash bag. On to the medicine cabinet. I’d figured anything of street value would be long gone, and I was right. A couple of cruddy tooth brushes, a jar of Vicks VapoRub that looked as old as I was, and a rusty can of Barbasol. I was about to shut the door, when I spotted some stuff tucked behind a container of cotton swabs. A burnt spoon, a frayed shoe lace, and a plastic syringe.
Remembering what Sasha had said about junkies getting into garbage, I stomped on the syringe to break it before tossing it in the bag. The spoon caught my interest though. It was small, a baby spoon, with etched Hebrew script along the handle and a Star of David on the end. The metal was badly tarnished, indicating it was something nicer than stainless steel. It didn’t feel right to throw it out.
Spoon in hand, I returned to the bedroom and did another search, checking behind furniture and in the heat register. The dresser drawers were mostly cleaned out. The top of one was littered with unopened bills. I picked up the top one addressed to Sasha’s grandfather and stamped with a red PAST DUE on the envelope. What happens to a person’s bills when they died? Presumably a responsible beneficiary would pay them off, but nothing I’d seen of Sasha’s mom yet evidenced any sort of integrity.
What would happen to my debt if I couldn’t repay? My mouth went dry. Truthfully, I hadn’t given serious thought to the consequences when I’d originally taken it out. I’d told myself failure wasn’t an option, so it wasn’t worth worrying about. Part of me wanted to believe Frank wasn’t that bad. This wasn’t The Sopranos. I’d figured intimidation was a game all loan sharks played to make sure you remembered who was the boss. After all, physically harming me wouldn’t get his money back any faster.
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