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When the door closed behind him, Ian sank to the ground and leaned against the wall. Ian hated him and he loved him, but right now, he hated him more.
3
ALEK
The next morning, Alek got out of bed, sniffed the various discarded tumblers at the end table until he found the one that was vodka, emptied what was left, and wiped the back of his hand over his mouth. Then he went out into the long, dark hallway without bothering to dress.
The bottle green carpet runner beneath his feet was clean, the tall baseboards stripped down to the original hemlock wood. The peeling layers of wallpaper from every era, little snapshots of time like the rings of a tree, removed and replaced with blood-red flock wallpaper.
Ian had insisted on restoring the living quarters on the upper floor of the Victorian before they moved in. He was far too responsible to allow either of them to be exposed to an errant trace of lead or asbestos. Other more crumbling parts of the house were cordoned off with thick plastic sheeting and tape.
He pushed open Ian’s door. Inside, his room was immaculate, the bed linen depressingly wrinkleless. No personal effects on the surfaces to indicate someone lived there.
The room smelled so intensely like Ian that Alek went to thebed, pulled the covers back, and climbed inside. He buried his face in Ian’s pillow and breathed in, his cock immediately hardening, so Pavlovianly conditioned to Ian that the olfactory ghost of him was stimulus enough. He debated thrusting into his hand, but he hadn’t been able to come since they broke up.
He dragged himself from the bed, leaving the linen askew, and crossed to the dresser. Inside the top drawer, Ian’s boxers were folded into thirds and placed vertically in one neat row like the spines of books on a shelf. Alek took each boxer out, shook them free of their folds, and then shoved them all back inside the drawer in a tangled heap. Leaving the drawer open, he returned to the hallway.
He walked downstairs and out the front door, still naked, his feet bare. It’s not like there was anyone around for miles, anyway. He shivered under the shade of the trees that had reclaimed every inch of land not built over.
Inside the detached garage, Alek snatched a screwdriver from his desk and marched back towards the house. Fog gray paint peeled from the siding. An ancient wisteria climbed and twisted gnarled trunk-like vines to the top of the three-story turret. All that remained of the attached greenhouse was a skeleton of rusted wrought iron.
By all appearances, the mansion was too broken to be fixed—and potentially haunted—but to Alek, it was home, and the only ghosts that haunted it were his own. They were supposed to renovate and resell the Victorian. That was their business model, what they’d been doing all along the northernmost coast of California for the last three years, but Alek would die before he left the Victorian. Or Ian.
He slammed the front door. A cloud of dust showered from the frame. Without Ian, the Victorian was too quiet. He could almost hear each speck of dust landing like a snowflake on his sleeve.
Back in the parlor, he lifted the piano lid, and spent the next hour removing the blasted mute rail. Each minute that passed left him more and more impressed with Ian for coming up with such an effective method of retaliation and simultaneously irate for vandalizing the piano in the process.
The piano had come with the house. Music was the only thing he brought from his childhood, and the abandoned piano had seemed more magic than coincidence when he’d discovered it, almost as if it had been waiting for a worthy suitor, like it had existed long before the mansion was built, a lone piano surrounded by trees until walls had caged it in.
Finally, he pulled the mute rail free and dropped it on the rug with a clatter. Ian could clean up the mess later.
He lowered the piano lid carefully, slid onto the bench, straightened his spine, and began to play. Each note rang with years of history suspended in time, and when he closed his eyes and inhaled, he could almost believe he and Ian were still together. That nothing had ever gone wrong between them.
Alek excelled at nearly everything he put even the smallest effort into, but his one weakness was understanding other people. He wasn’t a sociopath. Empathy was a muscle that had atrophied under disuse. Ian was the only person Alek cared to understand at all, and he didn’t understand why Ian came in his pants last night. Maybe the weeks of sleep deprivation via loud sex, piano, and edging were taking a toll. Were his tactics bordering on the wrong side of torture? That wouldn’t do. Alek didn’t get off on Ian’s pain, psychological or otherwise.
The plan he’d forged before the dust of Ian’s rejection settled was a complete failure. He’d expected Ian to surrender the first night he brought someone else home, and when Ian hadn’t, he couldn’t think beyond the pain. Why hadn’t Ian fought for him?
Now Alek was three weeks into this wretched stalemate, and the only thing he’d accomplished was making Ian hate him.Hate sex with Ian would be fun if the knowledge that Ian hated him didn’t hurt so much.
Why wouldn’t Ian just marry him? Alek knew better than most how meaningless a legal document could be, but a marriage license meant more to him than the foreign birth certificates and passports hidden in the safe in their garage. At least if they were married, it wouldn’t be so easy for Ian to leave. Alek needed Ian to promise, to vow, to swear his fealty. He finished the sonata with a slam of his hands on the keys.
He spent the rest of the day hand-sanding the gouges that scuffed the exterior of a 19th-century trunk he bought off of eBay for five hundred dollars. It looked worthless to the untrained eye, but he knew from the detail on the handles it’d sell for at least six grand. He hadn’t cracked the lock yet. He liked to draw out the anticipation because once he knew what was inside, he usually lost any interest in restoring it.
Night fell and Ian still hadn’t returned, or called, or texted. Alek wasn’t going to make the first move. Not because he needed to keep the upper hand, though he would prefer to, but because he didn’t think he’d be able to survive it if he reached out and Ian didn’t reach back.
He climbed to the third floor of the turret, cranked open the oversized casement window, and sat on the sill. A gust of wind tore through the trees. The sweet musk of flowering wisteria bloomed in the air, carrying with it flashes of memory—the sound of river rocks knocking against each other, the rough scrape of a piano bench over parquet floors, the warmth of his uncle’s arm against his shoulder, initials carved into the side of a piano, ash over keys that cut like broken glass beneath his fingers.
Ian hated when Alek perched there, said he was going to break his neck, but that window sill on the front edge of the turret was the only place Alek could be free of the forest, theonly place he could see the sky, be sure the horizon was still where it was supposed to be. Ian hated the wisteria too, the insatiable way it grew out of control and threatened to lift the roof up and pull the house down to rubble if he turned his back on it. Alek admired its perseverance.
Beneath the light of the nearly full moon, the coastal redwood trees stretched uninterrupted for miles. Alek’s eyes caught on a flash of white, something that moved at the edge of the forest. He squinted and spotted the tip of a fox’s tail. The fox looked at him and then turned and faded into the near-black understory.
The forest swayed as another gust of wind whistled through the trees. The hushed roar reminded him of the sound of Ian’s steady breathing when he pressed his ear against his chest. If he could live inside that sound forever, he would.
An owl hooted. He pulled out his phone and opened the app that showed Ian’s location. He was at his mother’s home, which might work in Alek’s favor. Ian’s mother loved Alek. Sometimes when she hugged him, tears stung unshed.
Alek marked each hour that passed without Ian’s return with more vodka while he gave the piano all of his anger and regret until he felt nothing. Then he staggered to Ian’s room, stripped his clothes, and climbed under the duvet.
Tomorrow he would talk to Ian. He would apologize and rescind his demand, tell Ian he’d have him, marriage or no, and Ian would say yes. Wouldn’t he?
