by Myles, Eden
“And how long have you been seeing Simon?” Mr. Karenina asked, his voice so cold I thought I could hear it crack like a piece of arctic ice.
“Not long. A couple weeks.” And then I added in a rush, “But we haven’t done anything. I haven’t slept with him at all…”
“But you want to.”
I was silent a long moment. The truth was, I didn’t know what I wanted.
No, that wasn’t entirely true. I knew what I wanted—I wanted a partner, a family—but I also knew that was something Mr. Karenina couldn’t give me.
“No,” I answered after a long, uncomfortable silence. “It’s not like that. I mean, that’s not all of it. I just don’t want to be alone anymore.”
Finally, Mr. Karenina turned to look at me. His face, and his eyes behind his dark glasses, were unreadable. “You agreed to cut any romantic ties you have with anyone else when you decided to became my courtier,” he said. “You agreed to obey me, Daniel. You know the rules, yet it’s painfully obvious you have no real desire to please your gentleman.”
“But that isn’t fair!” I suddenly cried. “You can’t expect me to be alone for the rest of my life just to please you!”
He stared at me long and hard. And when he finally spoke, his voice was a low, insinuating hiss. “And how, exactly, are you alone, Daniel?”
“How, exactly, are we together?” I retorted. I knew it was wrong to break the rules, but I also knew he had no right to make such demands on my life. “I’m your courtier, but do you love me?” I asked him. “Or am I just a hole to fuck whenever you feel the itch?”
He watched me in stoic silence, not even blinking in response to my question.
I swallowed against the knot of tears in my throat. Sheri had been right all along about him. I should have been more careful. “If you don’t love me, then you’re my employer, not my boyfriend, not my lover, and you have no right to dictate to me how to live my life.”
The silence ticked away between us, and Mr. Karenina stared down sightlessly at the floor. “You said you loved me,” he said after some time.
I felt a surge of anger. I wanted to hurt him as much as he was hurting me. “You paid me to say that.” Yet the moment the words were out of my mouth I regretted them.
He stiffened as if I had struck him, then raised his chin a little in that dignified way he had. I waited for him to say something, to tell me that wasn’t so, that he truly did love me, but he said instead, “You broke our agreement.”
The anger, the fear, just broke over me. “You have no idea how alone I am!” I nearly sobbed. “You don’t know what it’s like!”
“Yes, because, quite obviously, I’ve lived a privileged life. I’ve never lost anyone,” he answered, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “I’ve never known loneliness in my entire life.”
I knew I was going to cry. “I want to go home.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “I think that would be a good idea.”
We sat in silence for the next ten minutes, until the driver pulled up to the campus parking lot. Then Mr. Karenina reached for my throat. I had a bad moment when I almost panicked. But he grabbed the pendant around my neck and wrenched it off. “Get out,” he said.
And I did.
* * *
On Saturday night, I got a knock on my dorm door. I pulled myself from my bed and let Sheri in. She was dressed for a rave in one of her sparkly micro dresses and heels, but she took one long look at my bathrobe-clad self, the Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Fudge Brownie ice cream I was eating, and the movie I was watching on cable, Titanic, and said, “Oh Christ, what happened?”
I stuck the spoon in my mouth and said, “I cheated on Mr. Karenina with Simon, I fucked up my relationship with my gentleman, and I’m going home next weekend to get my ass handed to me by my dad. In that order.”
She looked at me good and hard, sighed, and then said, “I’ll be right back.”
Twenty minutes later she returned, dressed in pajamas and a robe, armed with Chinese takeout, a bottle of cheap red wine, and more Ben & Jerry’s. We climbed into my bed together, pulled the covers around ourselves, started pigging out, and generally feeling sorry for ourselves.
“So what are you going to do about Simon?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I said around the ice cream in my mouth.
“What are you going to do about Mr. Karenina?”
“Nothing.”
“Your dad?”
“Nothing.”
She gave me a doleful look. “You’re just going to lay down and die?”
“Yes, I’m going to lay down and die,” I agreed. “In fact, I might even throw myself a funeral in the process. And take out an obituary, while I’m at it.”
“Daniel…”
“Don’t make me feel better. I don’t want to feel better,” I told her as I tried to focus on the movie and on my ice cream. “I want to wallow in my self-pity, guilt and remorse. And possibly more chocolate.”
“Jesus, Daniel,” Sheri said, rolling her eyes. “You’re such a girl.”
We watched the movie in silence for a while, then Sheri said, “Can I ask you one question?”
“Yes, but only one.”
“Do you love Mr. Karenina?”
I picked over the chocolate chunks in my ice cream. “Yes,” I answered. I didn’t even have to think about it. I loved him. Given a choice, I would spend the rest of my life with him, either as his partner or just as his courtier.
“Then why did you cheat with Simon?”
“That’s two questions.”
“Daniel…”
“He doesn’t love me,” I said. I sounded bitter even to me. “You’re right. I’m his rent boy, Sheri. An on-call prostitute. That’s all I am. That’s all I’ll ever be. And there’s no future in that.”
“He called you that. He called you his rent boy.”
I squirmed under the covers. “Not exactly.”
“Okay. Another question. Did you ask him to go with you to your sister’s wedding?”
“No.”
“Is he still talking about it?”
“He always talks about that.”
Sheri gave me a hard look. “So let me get this straight…you cheated on him because you believe he doesn’t love you, but he’s constantly after you about the wedding—which, by the way, you won’t invite him to as your date because you’re ashamed of looking queer in front of your family.”
I set my empty carton of ice cream aside and said, “I’d like that second pint now.”
Sheri jumped out of bed, picked it up, and threw it at me. “Jesus Christ on a pogo stick, you are the stupidest smart guy I have ever seen, Daniel Collins! How do you men survive, being so fucking stubborn all the time?” She grabbed her Chinese takeout and stalked out of my dorm, slamming the door hard enough to rattle the pictures on the wall.
* * *
I spent a miserable night thinking about what Sheri had said. The two pints of ice cream hadn’t helped my belly much either. I finally resorted to taking a sleeping pill. So on Sunday morning, when my cell rang, I found myself groggy and disoriented. I dug my way out of the covers and looked at the number, couldn’t see it through my bleary eyes, and answered it anyway.
I figured it was my mom or Chloe, calling to tell me some last-minute detail about the wedding.
It wasn’t. It was Kate. And she was livid.
“Daniel, where the hell are you?” she shouted at me, which made me sit bolt upright in bed and immediately washed the sleep from my brain.
“Kate?”
“Yesterday was Saturday. You were supposed to walk the house for Da! Why didn’t you walk the house?”
I didn’t know how to tell her that her dad had fired me—or broken up with me, or whatever. But I also didn’t like the angry sound of her voice. I pushed the covers away and moved to sit on the edge of the bed. “Kate, what’s happened?”
Kate sighed. “Maria moved one of the statues in the music conservatory after dustin
g it and Da tripped over it and fell down. Why weren’t you here to warn him about that?”
My heart immediately started knocking in my chest much too hard. “Is he okay?”
“No, he hurt his knee, and now he’s cantankerous and insufferable! I made him go to bed. But I’m really cross with you, Daniel! I pay you to look after him!”
“I know,” I said. I started reaching for my clothes. “I’m sorry. I’ll be right over.”
* * *
The last place I wanted to be this morning was getting off that bus in the West Village. I stood in front of the gates of Mr. Karenina’s estate for a moment, trying to get my breathing under some kind of control, then I passed the keycard he had given me over the scanner of the gate call box and heard the familiar pinging noise of the gate unlocking. I pushed through it, locked it behind me, and started trudging up the stone path to the pavilion like a guy going to his execution.
I let myself into the house and found Maria sitting at the kitchen counter, crying her eyes out into a paper napkin. She looked up at me and said, “He fire me now. I just know it!”
I pulled the French doors closed behind me and said, “He’s not going to fire you, Maria.” Actually, I had no idea what Mr. Karenina was planning to do with Maria.
Maria sprang up and turned to me. “My grandchildren…they live in Guerrero and they depend on this money! You talk to him, Daniel?”
Oh God. I looked at Maria’s grief-stricken eyes and all I could do was nod. “I’ll talk to him.”
Maria hugged me and started crying all over my shirt, then she started kissing my cheeks and telling me what a good boy I was. After that humiliating experience, I picked up my notebook and pen and started walking the house.
It had only been a week but she had made a mess of it! After I marked down all the hazards, I made my way upstairs, deliberately avoiding Mr. Karenina’s bedroom. My plan of action, such as it was, was to mark down all the hazards I found and leave them on the kitchen table for Kate to find. I had no intention of going into her father’s room.
But then I started worrying about Maria. Would he really fire her?
The worry ate a great big hole of guilt right through me until I couldn’t stand it anymore, until I finally summoned up enough courage to approach Mr. Karenina’s room. I stood in front of the huge, oaken double doors and breathed slowly in and out, in and out. I had to force myself to lift my hand and tap at the wood.
“Come,” said Kate.
I let myself in and found her sitting at her dad’s bedside. They were looking at a photo album together. Or rather, she was, and talking about the pictures. But when she saw me, she blanked her face, stood up and turned to glare at me. I had a feeling she knew about our fight, how I had hurt her father. “Daniel. What are you doing here?”
“I finished walking the house,” I said in a small, lilting voice. “I have some hazards I’d like you to look at.”
She considered me a long moment before tucking the photo album under her arm and walking over to take my notebook. While she looked over the list, I said, “Do you mind if I speak to your dad alone for a moment?”
She glanced over at Mr. Karenina. He was dressed in a long silken dressing gown and lying propped up against a mound of pillows, a laptop in his lap, paying me no attention at all. “Da?”
The keyboard he was working over was a little larger than the standard laptop’s, and I realized his was outfitted with a refreshable Braille display keyboard, something I’d read about online. He stopped touch-typing but did not grace me with his attention.
“Da?” she said again.
I stepped forward. “It’s important,” I told Mr. Karenina. “It’s about Maria.”
He finally acknowledged me, but he said to Kate, “Give us a few moments alone, Solnyshko.”
Kate gave me a dubious look, as if she didn’t trust me to act responsibly in her father’s presence, but started for the door. I waited until she was gone before I turned to face Mr. Karenina.
“Well?” he said in a less than friendly manner.
I looked him over and told my heart to stop pounding so hard against my chest, fearful he could hear it. “Maria’s afraid you’ll fire her.”
“Is she? She should be.”
“But you can’t,” I said, taking a step toward the bed. “Her family is depending on the money she sends home to Mexico.”
He looked at me steadily with those dark, solemn eyes. “She doesn’t listen, Daniel. As her employer, I expect her to follow my instructions.”
I felt a surge of unreasonable anger. “She made a mistake! Haven’t you ever made a mistake in your life?”
“Yes,” he answered softly, bearing his teeth in a bitter smile. “I’ve made a few recently.”
I closed my eyes. I took a deep, rattling breath and let it out to keep from running from the room like a frightened child. “Mr. Karenina…Alexei…you can’t do this to her.”
“You’re an awful big champion of a woman who doesn’t like you, Daniel.”
“That doesn’t matter! You can’t fire her. It isn’t fair!”
“This is my house!” he shouted at me so I flinched. I had never heard him shout before. I decided it wasn’t a sound I wanted to hear often. “I can do whatever I want here, Daniel!”
I felt the awful burn of tears. I shook my head. “You know what? Fuck you, and fuck all this. I’m done.” As my tears began to fall, I turned away. I wouldn’t cry, not in front of him, eyes or no eyes.
I had almost reached the door when Mr. Karenina called me back. “Wait, Daniel,” he said in a softer tone of voice.
I stopped, my hand on the doorknob, but I didn’t turn around.
“Does this mean so much to you?”
“Yes,” I told him, blinking away the tears. “Yes, it does.” I took a deep, shuddering breath. “I’m sorry I fucked things up the way I did. I’m sorry I broke our agreement. I’m sorry you’re so angry with me. But the truth of the matter is, I’m not sorry about Simon. He’s a nice guy, the kind of guy I’ve been waiting for. The kind of guy I could settle down with…if and when he ever comes to grips with himself. And I’m not ashamed, Mr. Karenina, because this is what I want out of my life. I want what you had with Elizabeth. I want a partner and a family someday, and I think maybe he can give me those things. If you think I’m wrong in wanting that, then there’s nothing more to be said here.” I turned to face him. “But I’m going to ask you not to take your anger out on Maria. She had nothing to do with any of this.”
I stopped speaking and just stood there, watching him, waiting. Had I gotten through to him?
He seemed to consider my words. Finally, he said, “Come here, Daniel.”
He didn’t look like he was prepared to eat me, so I took a few tentative steps toward him. He reached out and took my hand and pulled me down so I was sitting beside him on the bed. It was then that I realized he’d tucked one of my old shirts under the covers with him. He’d dislodged it when he sat up to take my hand. I didn’t say anything about it, though. I knew how important Mr. Karenina’s pride was to him. I was a little surprised when he embraced me and rested his head on my shoulder. He didn’t do anything, just held me like that, his face buried in the side of my neck. He sighed against me, breathing me in.
“I’m an old man, Daniel,” he said at last, and he sounded tired and so very fragile. “I forget what young men want.”
“You’re not so old,” I told him.
He didn’t immediately answer me. It took me a moment to realize he was sobbing softly against my shoulder, but he was trying to be dignified even in that. “In the last two years of Elizabeth’s life, we traveled all over the world, Daniel, made something of an adventure of it. We tried everything, every imaginable cure. We did everything we could. But she still died. She died and there was nothing I could do about it but watch.”
“I’m sorry,” I told him as I felt my heart break for him. I wrapped my arms around him and slid my hand up so I was cuppi
ng the back of his head. I held him but didn’t say anything for some time.
“I love how silent you can be,” he told me after a while. He leaned back and swiped at his damp cheeks. “People underestimate silence. But I love how you don’t offer long, rambling explanations for things that can’t be explained.”
“I only talk too much when I’m nervous around a guy, you know that,” I told him with a small smile. “And then the more nervous I get, the more I talk, and the bigger fool I make of myself until he tells me to shut up.”
“Do you talk too much in front of Simon?” he asked.
I thought about that. “No. Only you.” I couldn’t stand it anymore. I couldn’t stand this pain, this constant wanting. I leaned down, seized his face in my hands, and kissed him roughly, hungrily. I tasted his tears. I sighed and pushed my tongue into his mouth and our tongues entwined and slid wet and hot over each other’s. We made out for a little while, sighing into each other’s mouths until we were both breathless.
“I’m not fired, then?” I asked.
“You’re not fired,” he told me as he kissed me, nipping at my lower lip. “But we may need to make another arrangement.”
“How do you mean?”
“Do you love me, Daniel?”
“I love you,” I told him truthfully.
“Will you be with me? Will you go anywhere with me?”
“Anywhere,” I told him as I slid my hands under his dressing gown, along the hard, familiar planes of his pecs and abs, then lower down, until I’d reached the edge of his pajama bottoms. “Where are we going?”
“My daughter has a house in Martha’s Vineyard. She’s been at me for years to move there to be closer to her, and she’s been insufferable about it…”
“Funny, she says the same thing about you.” I seized his cock and balls through his pants as I kissed him hard. My aggression surprised him, but at the same time, I could feel him stiffening in response to my rough, bold handling of him. “And yes,” I said, fondling him, “I’ll go with you.”
“You’ll be giving up New York.”
“I’m graduating this year,” I told him. “And if I have to start my own business online, I will. I love you. I’ll do anything to be with you, Alexei.” I reached up and pulled his dressing gown open and flicked my tongue over his exposed nipples, biting and sucking the hard, raised nubs until he trembled for me and ran his hands down the sides of my body. I pushed myself up on my knees so he could run his hands down my spine and over my ass. I licked and sucked my way down his belly to his groin while he ripped at my clothes. I pulled at his pajamas, sliding them down his hips and lowered my head to kiss at the soft dark fur at his groin. I breathed in his sweetly familiar male scent, so hungry for his taste, his touch, that I could barely control myself.