Darius the Great Deserves Better

by Adib Khorram

  Landon kicked off his shoes and slotted them next to mine, then followed me into the living room.

  “Sorry it’s kind of a mess,” I said, even though I’d vacuumed over the weekend.

  “Don’t be.”

  I checked the fridge for a note or something.

  “Everything okay?”

  “My dad was supposed to be home.”

  I sent him a text to ask where he was.

  Landon had come over before, but Mom or Dad had always been home.

  The back of my neck prickled.

  I checked all the counters, and the table too, but there was no sign of where Dad had gone, just a pile of dishes in the sink. As soon as Landon saw them, he rolled up his sleeves and started washing them.

  “I can do those,” I said.

  “I like doing them.”

  “I’ll dry, then.”

  I stood next to Landon, taking plates and bowls and glasses and drying them with one of the blue-and-white tea towels Mom seemed to have an endless supply of.

  Our dishwasher had broken over the summer, and with Mom and Dad’s savings depleted from our trip to Iran, we hadn’t been able to replace it.

  Who knew Shirin Kellner’s tea towel collection would prove so useful?

  After I dried the last plate, Landon took the towel from me and wiped up the sink and counters and backsplash. He looked up at me. “You okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  What did you do when you were home alone with the guy you were seeing, and there were no more chores to do?

  I grabbed my messenger bag off the chair. “I guess I better put this away.”

  Landon followed me up the stairs. My pulse pounded against my eardrums.

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “Your face is all red.”

  “Oh.” I swallowed. “It’s just. Dad didn’t leave a note or anything. And we’ve never been alone like this before.”

  Landon sat on my bed. I hung my bag on the hook in my closet and turned to face him.

  “And I feel like maybe we should be kissing or something.”

  Landon laughed at that. “We don’t have to if you don’t want to. We can just talk.”

  “I like kissing you, though.”

  Landon smiled and bit his lip.

  “I like kissing you too.”

  He brought his hand up to my face, and then ran his fingers along the edges of my fade. I hadn’t had bare skin there in a long time, and it made me tingle all over.

  I really liked that.

  I also really liked how Landon was very slow and deliberate with his lips. He had the fullest lips I’d ever seen on a white guy.

  I didn’t like it as much when Landon put his other hand on my stomach, because I had to suck in my gut, and that made it a little harder to breathe and still keep up with the kissing.

  I did like how it felt when my tongue met his. How careful he was with it.

  But then I didn’t like it when Landon moved his hand lower, and his fingertips brushed the skin beneath my waistband.

  I couldn’t tell if he was doing it on purpose or not, but I didn’t know how to stop him. Especially since, like I said, I really did like the kissing part a great deal, and to say something I would have had to stop.

  And then, of course, I didn’t like it at all when Dad popped his head into my room.

  “Darius, can you come help me with Lal—oh.”

  Landon yelped as I accidentally bit down on his tongue. We sprang apart.

  I covered my lap with my hands.

  “Oh.” Dad’s face was at Red Alert. He looked down the hall. His eyes flicked back to my face and then away again. “Sorry.”

  My own face was at Red Alert too.

  “Your sister got sick at gymnastics. I had to pick her up early.”

  “Oh.” Normally Laleh had gymnastics classes on Tuesday evenings, and got a ride home with one of her friends’ parents.

  “Can you come downstairs? When you’re, ah, decent?”

  My face burned even hotter.

  Being caught making out by my father had deflated my indecency in zero point six eight seconds.

  “Yeah,” I croaked.

  Dad closed the door behind him.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. But I didn’t know you were a biter.”

  I tried to smile. But then, I don’t know why, I wanted to cry a little bit.

  I’d switched medications for my depression over the summer, and while I mostly liked the new prescription, and felt ten to twenty percent better on average, sometimes I got very overwhelmed and wanted to cry.

  “Hey. It’s okay.” Landon swiped a tear off my cheek.

  “I know.” I mean, obviously my parents already knew about Landon and me. They’d seen us kiss before.

  But not kiss kiss.

  “I know.” I took another breath. “I’m gonna help my dad. You wanna stay here?”

  “Nah, I’ll come help too.”

  “Thanks.”

  * * *

  One of the best things about Landon Edwards was how good he was in the kitchen.

  Not just doing dishes: He was an awesome cook too.

  While Dad took Laleh upstairs to get changed, I washed and peeled vegetables for Landon, who chopped them to make chicken noodle soup.

  “What’s this?” He pulled down an unlabeled mason jar of brown spice and unscrewed the lid.

  “Careful,” I said, but it was too late. Landon took a sniff, which led to a cascade sinus failure.

  “Bless you.”

  “Thanks. Whew.”

  “It’s my mom’s advieh.”

  “Advieh?”

  “Like a family spice mix. For Persian cooking.”

  “It’s different.”

  He shook out a handful and tossed it in with the onions and carrots, then got to work chopping celery.

  While Landon cooked, I set the table and watched him work. He had become so comfortable in our kitchen, it was like he lived there. He had this soft smile, and he hummed as he pulled apart leftover chicken breast to add it to the pot.

  As Landon worked, Dad came down the stairs, his ears red.

  “Hey, boys,” he said. He leaned down to kiss my forehead. “Wow. Your hair looks great.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Hey, Stephen,” Landon said.

  “Sorry for surprising you.”

  “It’s all good.” Landon rummaged through the spice cabinet and pulled out the bag of bay leaves sitting in the back.

  I didn’t know how he could be so cool about everything.

  I couldn’t meet Dad’s eyes.

  “Is Laleh okay?”

  “I hope it’s not strep again. Be sure to wash your hands plenty.”

  “Okay.”

  “And thanks for making soup, Landon. It smells good.”

  “Sure thing.”

  Laleh eventually made her way downstairs in her green pajamas and poured herself into her seat at the kitchen table.

  I kissed her head. “Hey, Laleh.”

  She made the kind of dramatic groan I usually associated with adults who hadn’t had their coffee in the morning.

  Sometimes it was hard to tell if my sister was nine or thirty-nine.

  “Sorry you’re not feeling well.”

  “Thanks,” she said. Her voice was hoarse and throaty.

  “Landon’s making soup for you.”

  “Yum,” she said, but with none of her usual manic enthusiasm for Landon’s cooking.

  By eight o’clock, the soup was done, and Mom was finally home from work. She and Dad had been working a lot more hours since our trip to Iran.

  Mom looked so tired, it was hard t
o decide who needed soup more, her or Laleh. But as soon as she tasted it, she smiled.

  “This is good, Landon,” she said. “You made it in an hour?”

  “Yeah. Well, you had good chicken for it.”

  Like I said, Landon was a great cook. I think that’s the main reason he won Mom over.

  It’s not like Shirin Kellner was mad or upset when I told her I was gay.

  And it’s not like she was weird about me and Landon hanging out.

  But sometimes there was this tension between us, some perturbation in the gravity of our orbits, that I couldn’t figure out.

  At least Landon could cook.

  Every Persian mother wants her son to marry someone who can cook.

  To be clear, I was not considering marriage, to Landon or anyone else. But cooking skills are an absolute requirement in prospective partners as far as Iranian parents are concerned.

  “Landon found your advieh,” I said.

  “It’s Mamou’s recipe. My mother,” she said to Landon. “She used to mix it up in a big mortar and pestle.”

  “I miss Mamou,” Laleh said between slurps of noodle. “I wish we could go see her again.”

  The table got kind of quiet.

  I think we all wished that.

  The thing is, we only went to Iran last spring because Babou—my grandfather—had a brain tumor. He was dying. And Mom wanted us to meet him before it was too late.

  “I wish we could go again too,” Mom said at last.

  She turned back to me and ran her finger along the edge of my fade, where it met the long curls up top.

  “I can’t believe you finally got a haircut.”

  THE GRAND NAGUS

  I was finishing up my homework when Dad knocked on my open door frame.

  “You got a minute?”

  “Sure.”

  He closed the door behind him and sat on my bed.

  “So.” He rubbed his palms on his knees. “I know we’ve talked some about dating. And sex. And consent. But I figured we had better revisit.”

  My face burned.

  “Dad.”

  “I know it’s awkward. But it’s important, Darius.”

  I spun my desk chair around and hunched over with my elbows on my knees.

  “But, I mean.” I swallowed. “Nothing’s changed since the last time we talked.”

  That was over the summer, right after Landon and I had our first onion-tinged kiss.

  We’d had talks before that too. Like when I was eight, and about to have a baby sister, and asked where babies came from. And again, after Sex Ed in middle school.

  The worst was when I was thirteen and woke up with sticky sheets.

  It was the most painfully awkward conversation in me and Dad’s catalogue of painfully awkward conversations, and before our trip to Iran that was pretty much all our conversations.

  To be honest, even after Iran—after there were no more walls between us—talking about sex was still awkward.

  Dad cleared his throat. “Landon didn’t have his hand under your pants when I walked in?”

  “No,” I said.

  And then I said, “I mean, he hadn’t gotten very far.”

  And then I said, “And I don’t really know if I want to do that kind of stuff yet.”

  Dad nodded. “Okay. You know it’s healthy and normal if you do. And healthy and normal if you don’t. Right?”

  I nodded and stared at my feet.

  Dad let out a slow breath. “Did you tell him?”

  I shook my head. “We were kissing.”

  “Okay.” He stared out my window for a second. The curtains were open, and dusk was settling over the neighborhood like a blanket. “First, it’s okay to hit pause on kissing so you can communicate. Relationships, or even just casual, you know, whatevers, need communication. And second, if you don’t know what to say, you can use your hands to guide his. So if you don’t want them . . . uh . . . in your pants, you can gently guide him to somewhere better, like your back or your knee or whatever.”

  “Okay.”

  Dad gave me a shaky grin.

  As hard as it was to have conversations like this, he never made it seem like he didn’t want to do it.

  “Have you ever talked to Landon about his past relationships?”

  “A little,” I said.

  “Did you talk about how intimate they were?”

  That made me feel a little sick to my stomach.

  “Some,” I said.

  Landon told me he’d done more with girls than with guys. That he had his first kiss in sixth grade.

  Sometimes I wished I’d started dating sooner. Maybe then I would’ve had some practice at all this.

  Maybe then I would’ve known what to do and what to say.

  Dad ran his hand through his hair.

  “Does it make you nervous, that Landon’s more experienced?”

  “No. Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “I know this isn’t fun to talk about with your dad,” he said. “But I want you to be healthy and safe and happy. Okay?”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Good. Okay. Good.” He took a deep breath. “Next time, just tell him you’d like things to go a little slower. Let him know you enjoy, uh, kissing and stuff, and you want to wait for the rest.”

  “All right.”

  Dad patted his legs and stood up. He kissed me on top of my head and then rubbed the back of it. “I forgot you had skin back there,” he said.

  “Ears too. I look like the Grand Nagus.”

  Dad snorted. The Grand Nagus was the leader of the Ferengi, this alien race with huge ears and an obsession with profit.

  “You’re perfect just the way you are,” Dad said.

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  “Now finish up your homework so we can watch some Deep Space Nine.”

  * * *

  Most mornings I went for a run before my shower.

  I don’t know that I actually liked running.

  It wasn’t so bad when we ran at practice, and the guys were there, and we could shout and laugh and egg each other on. But there was something about being all alone with my thoughts, in the rosy morning light, that made me kind of sad.

  Still, I wanted to improve my speed.

  And, if I’m being completely honest, I hoped it would help me lose weight, so maybe I could look more like the rest of the guys on the team, who were pretty much all lean and long-limbed and flat-stomached.

  Maybe then I wouldn’t have to suck in my stomach when Landon touched me.

  The house was quiet when I got home. Mom’s car was already gone, Laleh was still in bed, and Dad’s door was closed.

  It was weird, taking a shower with so much less hair. Way quicker. When I was dry, I rubbed in some of the curl cream Mikaela had recommended.

  My hair looked nice. Really nice.

  I got dressed and sat at my computer to call Sohrab.

  It rang and rang—well, it made that weird doot-doot-doot music—and then:

  “Hello, Darioush!”

  I heard Sohrab’s heavily compressed voice before I saw his face, which emerged from the Pixelated Black Void.

  “Hey.”

  Sohrab Rezaei was my best friend in the whole world.

  I hated that he lived half a world away.

  Iran was eleven and a half hours ahead of Portland (I still didn’t get the point and purpose of a half-hour time difference), so it was evening in Yazd.

  “Are you eating dinner? Can you talk?”

  “I can talk. Dinner is not ready yet. We’re having ash-e reshteh.”

  Ash-e reshteh is Persian noodle soup.

  “Oh good. We had soup last night. Laleh was sick.”

  “Is she okay?”

  “
I think so. She’s going to the doctor today.”

  “Good.” Sohrab studied me for a second. “Eh! You cut your hairs!”

  I grinned.

  “Do you like it?”

  “It looks good, Darioush. Very stylish.”

  My cheeks burned.

  “How does Landon like it?”

  * * *

  Sohrab was the first person I told about Landon.

  Actually, Sohrab was the first person I told I was gay.

  It was super scary, even though I knew he would be cool with it.

  (I hoped he would be cool with it.)

  But he said, “Thank you for telling me, Darioush. Have you told your mom? Your dad?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Are you scared?”

  “No. Maybe. I don’t know.”

  We talked for a while, about how I wanted to tell people, and who I wanted to tell, but then I think Sohrab realized it was making me nervous, because he switched topics to Babou’s latest appointment.

  “The doctors think it’s time for him to be on . . . what do you call it? Hospice?”

  “Oh.”

  I don’t know why that made me want to cry. I knew Babou wasn’t going to get better.

  But I guess there was a little part of me hoping for a miracle.

  “I’m sorry, Darioush.”

  “It’s okay.”

  It wasn’t okay, and Sohrab knew it. But we didn’t have to say it out loud.

  We talked about other stuff after that: about the weather in Yazd; about the fortunes of Team Melli; about the latest argument he’d had with Ali-Reza and Hossein, the boys he played soccer/Iranian football with in Yazd; about school, and his uncle’s store, and his mom’s cooking.

  Right before we hung up, Sohrab looked at me. And he said, “I’m glad you told me, Darioush. I will always be your friend.”

  * * *

  I told Sohrab about Landon taking me for my haircut, and about visiting Rose City after, and how Dad had walked in on us making out.

  When I told him I accidentally bit Landon’s tongue, he laughed so hard he had to wipe tears away from his eyes, and that made me laugh too.

  And I told him about having another Awkward Talk with Stephen Kellner.

  Sohrab and I told each other everything.