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Dmitri laughed. “That depends. How good is Aksel at amputating frozen toes? And don’t talk about his arm, I know he didn’t do that himself.”
“He probably would have tried if he’d been old enough,” Roman said with a faint, soft grin. “But don’t worry, he’d send us both to a good specialist. It’s not that cold, though. You just need to adapt.”
Dmitri hated that word—adapt. He hated all the ways it had been used against him. Adapt to the sea of white kids with two functional parents in his elementary school. Adapt to his mother leaving, and his useless addict father who never got up before six p.m.. Adapt to having no one except two aunts who were too overwhelmed to deal with him, and an uncle whose quiet resentment at being saddled with a kid was never all that quiet.
Adapt to being gay, but not being able to get it up for men.
Adapt to being asexual and being interested in the idea of sex but no desire to actually get himself off.
Adapt to losing the only person he ever wanted to love because it was never going to work anyway.
He’d take the frozen lake over any of those things. “Are things easier for your—whatever your relationship is having been in love with Aksel since you were kids?”
Roman snorted. “No. But Aksel’s…he’s not the usual case. He’s always been both easy and impossible to love all at the same time. I just never knew any different.”
Dmitri picked at a few of the wood splinters, dropping bigger pieces into the water and watching them float around their toes. “But I mean, you never had to date.”
“I dated a little,” Roman said with a quiet sigh. “We haven’t always decided on a path forward for us.”
“Do you ever think you’ll end up with someone who isn’t him?”
Roman chuckled and shook his head. “Sometimes I can be a little slow, but I’ve always known better than that. Every person who came along in the years he and I weren’t together was just…a placeholder.” He gave Dmitri a careful look. “But there might be someone else we’re interested in.”
Dmitri frowned, but it suddenly dawned on him in a way he hadn’t expected. A third figure who was around a lot and looked at both Roman and Aksel the way they looked at each other. “Knox.”
Roman rolled his eyes and breathed out a long sigh. “I figured we were being obvious. We haven’t really talked about it, but it feels like…maybe the one thing that was always missing between Aksel and me was him.”
“Is he interested?”
Roman took one leg out of the water, using his hands to help heave it back onto the dock and tuck it under him. He turned to face Dmitri and rested his back against the railing. “I think so. But I also think you’re deflecting from your own problems.”
Dmitri grimaced, but he couldn’t deny it. “I think I’ve been in love with him for almost as long as I’ve known him, but it’s not going to work.”
“Raphael,” Roman said.
Dmitri felt his heart plummet into the icy waters at his feet. “Fuck. AmIthat obvious?”
“No.” Roman’s smile was more cautious this time. “But I knew it was more than just being bored baking cupcakes that sent you to my office. And I recognized the way you look at him.”
Dmitri dragged a hand down his face and groaned. “It’s absurd. You know? Like, I want to fall out of love so I can be just happy for him instead of happy for him and feeling like someone’s carving me in half, but I don’t know how.”
The smile on Roman’s face turned a little sad, and he glanced across the lake. “I’m not the man to ask that question, Dmitri. I wish I was, but I never knew how to let go. Even at my damn worst, I’ve loved Aksel an unhealthy amount. If he left for whatever reason, I’d let him go, but I would never move on.”
Thinking about Roman not being with Aksel was like trying to unravel physics, and Dmitri got tired after only a moment of it. “So, you’re saying there’s no hope?”
“I’m saying you need to get out while you still can, if there really isn’t a way for you two to be together. Does he know?”
Dmitri scoffed. “God, no. He’d probably do something stupid because he felt sorry for me. Some dumbass kid in love with him.”
Roman reached out and gently touched his wrist. “You’re not some dumbass kid, and he’d never insult you that way.”
“So then he’d tell me the truth, right to my face,” Dmitri groaned and let his head thud back against the post. “And that somehow feels worse.”
“Love is bullshit, and I say that as a man who has more than he’ll ever deserve. I wish I had an easy answer for you.”
Dmitri let out a small sigh and threw more bits of wood into the lake. He was pretty sure he had a splinter, but he was grateful for that small, stinging pain because he wanted to feel things physically, not just the soul-deep ache he couldn’t touch. “I wasn’t looking for an easy answer. I’m just trying not to think of Raphael dating someone else.”
“How about dinner then?”
