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Almost as softly as he had sung, Aleksey murmured, “I am still me, Ben.” As if he sensed Ben was about to remonstrate with this, he pulled his hand out from caressing Ben’s spine and laid the palm gently over his lips for a brief moment before returning it to Ben’s warm back. “No, let me say this and then it is said and done, and you can do with it what you will. I’m still me, Ben. Yes, we buried them.Youburied them, and you have given me new life with your name, and by that I am Aleksey Rider-Mikkelsen a new man, but also…” He pursed his lips, staring thoughtfully out into the dark of the night, and added, “I am still Nikolas. I do not want you to…” He seemed unable to finish his thought, and his brows lowered as he appeared to puzzle over this failure.
“Miss you?”
Aleksey’s head snapped up and with a pleased nod he agreed, “Yes. That is exactly it. Miss me. I’m still here, only…”
“Calling yourself by another name?”
“Are you getting cheeky, Benjamin Rider-Mikkelsen?” He shook him lightly in admonishment as they drifted back into the firelight.
Ben laughed and turned them, relishing the power in his body as he always did, the matched strength of the man in his arms. They slid naturally cheek to cheek again. He was getting very used to this dancing thing and wondered how he had lived without this for all these years.
“Still just you, N—” He’d almost slipped.
Aleksey started slow circles on Ben’s back with his hand. “You can call me Nikolas, Ben. If you want. When we’re together. Like this.”
Ben nodded but whispered hesitantly, “I want you to be a new man and the same man. I want you to have it all.”
Aleksey laughed softly. “I do. I have you.”
Ben turned his lips against the warm ear, faltering but then finding quiet strength. “I want your life full of love, Nik.”
He sensed a slight hesitation before he heard a soft question, “Do you remember when I told you, when we were in the mine, that I thought my life had always been full of love?”
Ben closed his eyes to the pain of this memory. “You were so wrong, but I couldn’t tell you, not then, not as you were. I knew it, but I didn’t know what to do with that knowledge, how to explain it to you.”
Aleksey nodded, warm cheek to warm cheek. “Everything I did, all the energy I ploughed into my childhood was to make them all love me back. When they wouldn’t, all the mischief I created was to make them at least notice me. I was just a child, Ben, yet I confused love with attention, and that created a pattern in my life that was hard to change.”
Ben hesitated for a moment. “Couldn’t, maybe? Couldn’t love? Stefan told me once that he thought your mother was ill. I don’t think you should blame her. I blamed my mother for leaving me, and I was wrong. Your mother was damaged. It wasn’t that she didn’t love you. Maybe she just didn’t know how to show it.”
Aleksey withdrew into his own thoughts for a long while. All Ben could hear was the soft music and the ever increasing sound of rain on glass. He felt drunk on love and on the feel of the body moving in his arms. When Aleksey finally spoke, Ben had to strain to hear him over the cacophony from the roof. “You know that I think I stole something from my twin, when we were in the womb: that I had more than my half of that split. Maybe I took from my mother, too. She gave her body to create me, but I demanded too much and left her broken,diminished. No,min skat, it’s true.” He kissed Ben lightly as if thanking him for the small protest he’d made at such a terrible thought. “I was right in a way, what I told you—lovewasalways there, but it was all from me, sent out into a hard universe that gave none back.”
Ben returned the kiss, enfolding him tightly.
“I can’t change the past for you, but I’ve changed your future. You will always be surrounded by people who love you as much as you love them.”
He pulled them back, faces resting side by side, as once more the music played new notes and different ways to express these complex emotions.
The man who was still Nikolas in every way that counted for Ben pulled their foreheads together, cupping his hands to the sides of Ben’s head.
Ben ran his fingers up through the thick blond hair from Aleksey Rider-Mikkelsen’s neckline, entwining them with the strands, tugging lightly and tipping him for a kiss. Before he allowed himself to be taken so, Aleksey sighed. “Can I tell you something without you blowing up, Ben?
At the expression on Ben’s face, he laughed openly. “Don’t ever change,lyubimyy. Do I have your permission to continue?”
“You have a very warped impression of our relationship sometimes,Aleksey, do you know that? Yes, please do speak.”
“You tell me that nothing I ever do will stop you loving me.” He cast his gaze down for a moment. “Well, here’s the thing: I never believed you.”
Ben held him off, but before he could remonstrate with this, Aleksey quickly continued, “Not ever, despite what we’ve been through all these years. I lied every time when I said I did, because I knew, of course—what I’d done.”
Ben’s heart rate ratcheted up, and he interjected with some vehemence, “I told you—I don’t want to know. What another man did doesn’t matter to me. We buried him today, and what he did was buried with him. Don’t talk about it.”
“No, I mean…” He shook him lightly again, frowning, apparently trying to find words that needed to be said, perhaps hearing once more that sharp, acidic slash of metal to rope, and then he simply admitted, “I believe you now. Your love has made up for all the others, Ben. That’s why I’m a new man. I have been reborn today by the perfect confidence I have in your love for me. Ibelieveit. Who could not be a perfect man when he is the one Benjamin Rider-Mikkelsen loves?”
Ben smiled and glanced down at their joined hands, knowing without being told that Aleksey would be studying his dark eyelashes fanned on his cheeks. “Perfectman?”
He was kissed again, a swift, amused brush of lip to lip.
“Ack, even perfect men must be allowed the occasional white lie.”
