City Mouse

by Aleksandr Voinov

  * * * * *

  Malcolm did the unthinkable the next morning.

  He called his trainer before his session and blew him off. Josh was, predictably, all sympathy.

  “I told you, you blew me off one more time for some git—“

  “Stow it, Josh. My whole department’s in a tizzy. I haven’t been to sleep for a week.”

  “Your git Yank stick around for that? Or is that a convenient excuse for whimpering in your bed like a puling prat?”

  Malcolm looked over at Owen, who was curled up away from him, long arms tucked next to his chest. “He’s fast asleep, like all the smart people on a Saturday, Josh. And I’m going to be too in a minute. Enjoy your morning, on me, and I’ll see you next week.”

  “Wait—your whole department?” Josh’s voice sharpened. Yes, the man wasn’t stupid. He charged top rates to people from Malcolm’s neck of the woods, but if the whole works was going in a slump, he’d have to either lower his rates or lower his standards, and Malcolm knew both of those would stick in his craw.

  “Yes, Josh, the whole department. Half of us are on the chopping block by Christmas and we don’t know which half. So if I’m going to lose my job, I’d rather not lose my mind—I’ll need it to go looking.”

  During an investor call that week, the CEO of the bank announced that “because of adverse market conditions,” the overall European headcount would be reduced by 30-40% over the next 18 months. No word yet on equities trading, where Malcolm worked. Which, damn. Some of that might just be old guys fading—but there weren’t that many “old guys” in trading. The mood flipped from frantic to a weird mix of stressed-out and depressed. Like the stress—normally positive and pushing them all to work harder—had somehow turned nasty, like milk curdled from one moment to the next just before a thunderstorm.

  “Right. Go back to sleep. See if I care. I’m not taking it easier on you next week, so maybe a run or two wouldn’t fucking kill you before now and then.”

  “You’re a prince among twats, Josh. Night.”

  He hung up the phone, rolled over, and saw that Owen had woken up and rolled back toward him. “Thank you,” he said softly, and Malcolm nodded.

  “I . . . you know. He’s a cunt. If I’d wanted to wake up to that on a Saturday, I’d be straight.”

  Owen’s lips—fuller in sleep—quirked up at the corners. “Charming. C’mere.”

  Malcolm fought off a yawn. “Don’t know if I’m up to sex—“

  “A snuggle, Mal. We’ll have sex when we’re up for it.”

  Owen’s arm folded over his shoulders, and Malcolm wondered dismally when he’d be up for it. All this bloody work, and here he finally had someone worth taking care of, and no time to do it. He wondered when Owen would decide he’d had enough and just leave. One night, Malcolm would get home at some ungodly hour, and Owen would be gone. The thought made him shiver, even as he was enveloped in the warmth and the smell and the comfort that had made the last few weeks bearable, even at all.

  He had to make sure Owen was okay when that time came. Had to make sure Owen could take care of himself when he couldn’t stand it anymore and left.

  It was the last thing Malcolm could think of as he fell back asleep. It haunted him when they woke up and made love, Owen sliding into his body so slowly, so intimately, it turned the sex Malcolm usually thought of into something else entirely.

  Owen was on top, thrusting slowly, resting his shoulders on Malcolm’s thighs, and Malcolm couldn’t stop touching his chest, his face, thinking, “I’ve got to take care of him.”

  The fact that it was the other way around at the moment didn’t even ruffle the surface of his passion.

  * * * * *

  “Is this guy as good as you say?” Erich Gruber, the head of the IT department, was what Malcolm would have been if he’d stopped dieting, shaving, bathing on a regular basis, had no fashion sense, and devoted himself to cigars and porn. He was two inches shorter than Mal, fifty pounds heavier, had more stubble on his face than Malcolm had on his chest, and reeked of cheap cigarillos.

  It was also disconcerting to see a suit that cost what Owen probably made in two months in such a hideous broad pinstripe.

  “He’s better,” Malcolm said, suppressing a twinge of guilt. Not because Owen wasn’t better: Malcolm firmly believed that if Owen could make that little co-op thing run with any degree of efficiency whatsoever, he deserved a frickin’ medal in techno-wizardry. No, the guilt was from the basic premise of his visit to IT.

  “He’s a Yank, you say.”

  “Yes. Very American. Been here almost six weeks.”

  “All his papers in order?”

  “Visa, everything.” Malcolm had cleared out a couple of drawers for Owen two weeks before. He’d seen Owen stash his passport and his visa in his sock drawer of all places, and had been assailed by panic. His passport was in his sock drawer. Not a safe, not some consulate or something. He could just . . . just pack his duffel and walk out with the same aplomb with which he’d walked into Malcolm’s life. All he had keeping him here was his promise to those fringe lunatics at his job, and some sort of romantic connection with Malcolm.

  And for the life of him, after the last couple weeks, Malcolm couldn’t imagine how strong that could be.

  He’d fallen asleep in the middle of kissing. Kissing. As a prelude to the first sex they would have had since Sunday night previous.

  Yeah, sure, Malcolm had blown off Josh, and they’d spent the day in bed before going off to dinner, but that hadn’t come close to easing some of Malcolm’s panic.

  The entire reason Owen had followed him home in the first place had been because Malcolm had promised him a good time.

  How good a time could it have been, lately, with Malcolm’s whole department freaking out, and Malcolm home on the weekends and exhausted then?

  This—this was an elegant solution. If Owen worked here, he wouldn’t miss Malcolm quite so much. He wouldn’t be home enough to do his own laundry and chat up the maid. (Malcolm was semi-hysterical about the maid, actually. Owen knew her, knew who her family was—God, they’d be publishing wedding banns next.) And Owen would earn enough money to not be naked when he finally left Malcolm, because Malcolm couldn’t seem to hold onto his precious job.

  “Good,” Erich said, leaning back in his rolling chair and pulling some documents from a filing cabinet. He put them in a manila folder, scrawled, “job app” on the tag, and handed the folder to Malcolm. “He can find all of this online, but we need the paper copy too. Have him fill out the online, then walk in the paper copy and give me a handshake. You’d better not be too generous about his skills, Kavanagh. We need someone who knows his systems backwards and forwards, not some script kiddie who relies on plug-and-play.”

  “Got it. Thanks, mate—“

  “Word of warning—if the higher-ups start cutting Operations and IT, it’ll be last in, first out.”

  Malcolm winced. Well, bugger. There it was.

  “Well, thank you,” Malcolm told him sourly, backing out of the man’s little hole of an office like a toadying subject. Humiliating, yes, but it was worth it. Getting Owen out of Brixton would always be worth it.

  Week 6: Armageddon It

  “Hullo, Mum,” Owen said over the phone. They hadn’t talked much on Saturday, because he and Malcolm had been spending some precious time together, but Monday? While he was working? Oh yes, that was still fair game.

  “How’re you doing, sweetheart? Mal still working those brutal hours?” How very like his mother to call him “Mal” even when they hadn’t met on the phone. If Owen hadn’t been holding grimly onto his own sense of intimacy with the man, it would have made him fond. As it was, at the moment it was just irritating.

  “Yeah,” he muttered. “They’re not getting any better.”

  “Well, that’s too bad. You do know what you’re heading for, right?” His mother sounded concerned, and Owen pulled himself out of his fucking computer to pay full attention
to her. It was hard—Owen loved his job, but today it was all sorts of cheesecake slices of hell.

  Wendy was at Owen practically non-stop—everything was crashing or glitching or shorting or coming apart at the seams, and Owen actually had a cramp in his side from running up and down the bloody stairs, before he realized that the massage parlor on the second floor—the one place to not call him in the course of the day—had installed a whole new independent server, and had not contacted the rest of the co-op, and had not detached their network from the rest of the building’s.

  The combination of creaky, aching, decrepit old technology and spiffy, spanking, shiny new stuff was like the marriage of an eighty-five year old man to a thirty-year old sexual dynamo with a size D rack and a poontang on speed dial: no matter how much technological Viagra he popped, eventually that poor old man was going to have trouble getting it up.

  It was up to Owen to institute an amicable technological divorce, since nobody else in the building was going to be able to trade in their dirty old men for the computer version of Malcolm in top form.

  And that, and that only, had distracted Owen from his rather grim thoughts—not just about the relationship, but about the timing.

  Owen groaned. And how could he have forgotten? “Week six,” he said glumly. Yeah. Shit. Week six.

  “It’s coming up.”

  “It’s here,” he snapped, thinking about Malcolm asleep on his chest when they should have been having ass-reaming, cock-screaming sex. But he wasn’t ready to call it quits yet, and he needed to be careful about freaking out his mother. He tried to lighten the moment. “God—that almost feels superstitious,” he said, not wanting to jinx things.

  “Well, you know it’s true.”

  “Yeah . . . yeah.” She was right—and not just for him. Week six of pretty much every year in high school, he’d had a blowout or a break-up with his teacher or his girlfriend or even his mother, and by week seven or eight, he would have made up, and things would be back to even keel. By the time he’d gotten to college, he’d started noticing that his peers had done the same thing. Week six—it was like a human curse.

  “So, you know the deal, right? We talked about this all the time, Owen. Honey, it’s not going to change just because you think you’re a grown-up.”

  “I am a grown-up.” Of course, just protesting that made him sound about twelve years old.

  “Right, grown-up. What’s the first thing you do?”

  God. New Age hippie bullshit that had always . . . well, stood him in good stead, actually.

  “Diagnose your stressors,” she finished for him when he didn’t respond.

  “Work,” he said, giving in because it was his mother and she always won.

  “His or yours?”

  “Oh fucking Christ, his.”

  Owen had to wonder if Malcolm still thought all that was worth it. The penthouse was nice, the grocery deliveries—everything was taken care of; cleaning, laundry. But Owen remembered doing these things with his mother, and they hadn’t been all that bad. They’d been time together, and that had been nice. Maybe having all the little jobs that made up daily life taken care of wasn’t worth the cost of not being there when they were.

  But try telling Malcolm that? Oi! Malcolm threw a fit if Owen so much as washed his own underwear.

  But why would you want to do that yourself? There’s a service.

  But why wait for the service, Mal? The laundromat is just downstairs.

  Oh, here, let me just call the pick-up, they’ll be here in an hour. Everybody needs a job to do in this economy.

  And mentioning picking up for the maid just made Malcolm psychotic—which, in turn, made Owen want to bang his head against a power dryer.

  “He just doesn’t get it. I don’t want all this fancy shit—and even worse, he keeps trying to push me into his whole . . . financial thing. My job’s not good enough for him, right? So he’s like, ‘You know, why don’t I look into my company?’ and I’m like, ‘Gag.’”

  His mom made a warning sound. “Honey, I hope you said more than just ‘Gag.’ He’s not a teenager.”

  Owen remembered their rather adventurous exploit in Cambridge, and Malcolm’s almost terrified clutching of his things—his apartment, his suits, his vanity—to keep himself from being whoever, or whatever, he’d loathed as a kid.

  “He’s not really an adult either,” Owen said, “but I’ll try to remember to use my words.” And not my dick, apparently. Because teaching Malcolm with sex didn’t seem to be teaching him anything but an addiction to sex.

  “Seriously—so you know it’s his job and money. Congratulations, you’ve reached heterosexual middle age. Aren’t you proud?”

  Owen sat up next to the tower he’d been working on and laughed. “You’re hilarious, Mom. You should do stand-up.”

  “Thank you, thank you, I’ll be here the rest of my life. But seriously, you know what I’ve always told you,” she said kindly.

  Owen closed his eyes and recited, “Don’t make decisions when you’re stressed, and take a breath before you say something to make sure it’s worth it.”

  “That’s my boy.” She laughed warmly, and Owen sighed.

  “God, I miss you. I really want you to meet him.”

  Her warmth, her humor—Owen wouldn’t be Owen without her. “He sounds like a right bastard.”

  “Yeah, but I love him.”

  “I hope so, since you’re staying a zillion miles from home to be with him.”

  Owen grunted and stood, holding the cell phone up to his ear. “No nagging. We made a deal.”

  They had, too—and for the most part, his mother had lived up to it. He’d listen to her advice thoughtfully, and she would only give it in limited amounts.

  “Yes, dear, I know. But take care. I read your horoscope, you know, and it says you’re coming to a crucial time.”

  Owen’s mind went a little blank, like it always did when she went from New Age wisdom to batshit crazy holistic crap. “Thank you, Mom. That’s good to know.”

  “Seriously—and you haven’t given me Malcolm’s birthday yet, but I’ll bet he’s the moody Gemini that’s going to offer you a wildly divergent path.”

  “I’ll ask him, Mom. I’ll give you his birthday next time.” Fuck. Wasn’t his birthday in June? November? God, that was something Owen should have been asking him.

  “Just make sure there is a next time. I would really like to keep believing that love at first sight isn’t a myth.”

  Owen had to laugh at that—well, at most things his mother said. “Not exactly at first sight . . .”

  “Okay, love after a seemingly meaningless weekend of wild sex. How’s that?”

  “Really uncomfortable coming from my mother. But I’ve got to go, Mom—”

  “What happened to Mum? I liked Mum.”

  Oh geeze. Owen felt his eyes sting. “I love you, Mum. Call back next week, okay?”

  “Love you too, sweetie.”

  And she rang off.

  Owen was left with a lump in his throat and the wish that he could have talked to her for a little longer without losing his dignity as an adult, because it was week six, and she was right—the stress was starting to show. The truth was, Malcolm might be the one who would trigger relationship Armageddon, but Owen couldn’t say he hadn’t seen it coming. When Malcolm had fallen asleep in the middle of his best kiss, Owen had seriously wondered if maybe he himself wasn’t going to be the one who instigated relationship Armageddon after all.

  But later. When Malcolm wasn’t lying bonelessly, limp and exhausted, in Owen’s arms.

  Even Mal would admit that knowing your lover trusted you enough to do that was really sort of sweet.

  Sweet, but troubling. Especially so soon in the relationship.

  “Owen.” Wendy’s voice interrupted Owen from his less-than-happy thoughts, and he sighed and pushed up, herding all of the components into a little metallic puddle on the floor.

  “Do you really need
me?” he asked, preparing to go downstairs anyway.

  “It’s something of an emergency.” Wendy’s voice, always a little high-pitched, sounded especially shrill when it echoed up that stairwell.

  “Oh Jesus.” Owen ran down the stairs—it seemed to be the umpteenth time today. “Is there any possible way you could tell everybody to chill the fuck out until I get this disentangled? It’s going to take a week to fix all the bugs this goddamned server started.” He actually looked forward to the challenge, if only everyone would leave him alone and let him work.

  “Yeah, I know, Owen. It’s just, your boyfriend—the wanker with the glare?—he’s outside, stalking around like a big cat.”

  “Malcolm?” Malcolm who had fallen asleep on him before sex two nights ago because of work? He was here in the middle of the day?

  She blew against her fringe. “Same guy. Still acts like he’s got a stick up his arse—can’t you cure that?”

  Owen’s lips twitched. Well, he’d actually been putting one there on a regular basis. “I do my best,” he said soberly. “Tell everyone I’m taking ten, and I’ll come back and fix the world afterward, ’kay?”

  He got outside and smiled, glad to see Mal, even if the timing was fucked raw and bleeding.

  “Oh my God! Was there a wrinkle in the fabric of time?” he asked, swinging outside the slowly closing glass door. “Some sort of disturbance in the Force? You mean, it’s before midnight and you’re not at work?”

  Malcolm turned around and squinted at him. “Hilarious. Didn’t know this was an episode of The IT Crowd.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m busy trying to work miracles right now. C’mere.” Owen reached out, grabbed his hand, and pulled Malcolm toward him before Malcolm realized what he was doing. There was some resistance in his body at first, but as they stood, close enough for the plackets of their trousers to rub together, Malcolm’s spine relaxed beneath his hand.