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“How old are you?” Dmitri asked as they pulled out onto the road. Panic gripped him for a second, and he eyed the turn-off to Will’s ranch in case he needed to turn around.
Felix gave him an easy grin though. “Almost twenty. My birthday’s in March. Why? You writing my biography?”
“It’s not a ridiculous question. You look young.”
Felix burst into a fit of laughter. “You thinkIlook young? I had a momentary panic attack when you stared up at me, but I could tell you were legal.”
Legal. What a fucking word for it, but it wasn’t like Felix was wrong. “I’m legal.”
Felix reached over and laid his hand on Dmitri’s, and Dmitri didn’t pull away though he wanted to. He wanted more, but he wasn’t ready, and he wasn’t quite sure how to be.
He’d never been like normal kids—the few friends he had made in high school talking about how often they fapped to whatever free porn their parents couldn’t track on their laptops and whichever girl of the week had given it up.
He was pretty sure those stories were fake, but the porn was easy to come by.
And Dmitri had liked it. He liked watchingthe gay shit, as his friends called it. He liked watching big burly men get rammed up the ass with dildos and cocks and sometimes fists. He liked the softer stuff too. He really liked when one guy held the other and kissed him as he fucked him and made his eyes go starry and soft.
His friends would mock him for the romance, but they’d probably also mock him because try as he might, Dmitri had never been able to get it up for porn. Or for anything. He got it up in the morning sometimes when his dick was hard, and he managed to come a couple of times, but he just didn’t think about it unless he was wondering what the fuck was wrong with him.
He’d asked about being asexual once when he was younger, but Owen had just laughed at him and told him that only kids who were traumatized from being touched against their will were asexual, and the rest of it was a conspiracy to desexualize gay men to make homosexuality safe. It sounded like a load of bullshit, but Dmitri was uneducated and never really trusted his own logic.
Asexual fit, though—sometimes. And sometimes it didn’t make sense at all. He liked the idea of sex, but not the practice of it. And God, more than anything in the world, he wanted someone to love him. But he wasn’t quite sure where it all fit together, and it made him feel cracked in places, with large pieces missing that would always prevent him from being a whole.
Asexual just felt like another burden. He was already Sisyphus with his fucking boulder of expectations that would never reach the top of the hill, and he didn’t want to add another layer. He was exhausted.
Dmitri realized that he’d been silent almost the entire drive, so he cleared his throat as he noticed the sign for his turn off coming up in five miles. “Do, uh…you go to school?”
Felix grinned at him. “Yes. I’m going into my junior year at UCLA. My dad wants me to apply to Stanford after I graduate, but I want to take a gap year.”
“Law school?” Dmitri asked.
Felix chuckled. “Yeah. Family business and all that. My parents run a firm together, but my mom doesn’t do much anymore.”
Dmitri wasn’t sure if Felix was trying to get him to ask why, but he didn’t want to know. He had too much of his own life occupying his own head, and it’s not like Felix was staying. “What do you want to do?”
Felix blew out a puff of air. “Spend time somewhere that’s not a stuffy lecture hall. Vacation somewhere that’s not some random city in the middle of Georgia that…” He stopped, and Dmitri knew why, but he wasn’t going to call him out on it. “You live here, don’t you?”
Dmitri shrugged. “Yes.”
“I’m a dick.”
It was probably true, but he wasn’t qualified to make that judgment just yet. “My uncle owns the salon in this place called the Augustin House. I thought about going to work for him, but I’m not good at any of the beauty stuff, and his secretary will probably be there forever, so I have to find something else.”
He could feel Felix staring at him. “So, no college?”
He could probably get a scholarship if he wanted to—something that would give him cash for being a minority, or for being adopted, or for having parents that had gone to prison. But it felt wrong because he didn’t have the merits to earn a place at a University. He’d been held back twice and his GPA had been only just high enough to graduate, and it wasn’t like he had big shoes to fill like a family law firm.
“It’s not really on the agenda.”
The car went silent again, and he was partly glad for it. He wondered if Felix regretted this trip and wanted to bail, but he stuck close to Dmitri’s side as he popped into the Lotus Garden and snatched the to-go menu from the stand. They were ushered up to the cash register, and he felt Felix press up against his back, peering over his shoulder at the printed words.
“Do they have shu-mai?”
Dmitri couldn’t find his words, so he just tapped his finger on the appetizers.
“Two orders, and some char siu bao. And shrimp fried rice.” He chuckled right against the back of Dmitri’s ear. “I’m a growing boy.”
Dmitri knew there was a double entendre in there, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to read into it. He waited for Felix to step back, then he offered up a wad of his birthday money to pay, and it stung a little that Felix just let him even though he probably had a savings account bigger than the city’s yearly budget. But his birthday money was for him to spend however he wanted—Sonia had insisted as she clasped his hand and looked at him through her thick glasses that made her eyes look twice as large as they normally were.
