He could, although it was not easy. He figured Jeremy’s move was to kiss him, but Jeremy didn’t. He stood and waited, watching Jeremy’s color come back. He closed his eyes. When he opened them, Jeremy would be standing in front of him.
He counted to fifteen and listened to the rain.
When he opened his eyes, Jeremy was farther away, face turned to the window.
“Am I waiting for something?” Luke asked.
“I was going to do something cool,” Jeremy told the window. “But I’m still trying to decide if I’m going to kiss you or storm out.”
“Great.” Luke waited, looking at the back of Jeremy’s neck, long and too slender for the weight of his head. “I would vote for the kiss, if that’s still on the table. I’m not that interested in Sergei.”
Jeremy turned and rolled his eyes, but there was something yielding about him—his shoulders tilting, his face pulling back to Luke—that made Luke think he was ready to be soothed. Luke weighed his line and spoke carefully. “Let me stay. I’ll fight for you. Tell me that’s what you want, and that’s what I’ll do. But you better be ready for a soldier, because that’s what you’ll get.”
It worked. Jeremy moved away from the window and closed the distance between them, wrapping his arms around Luke’s waist. He was always taller in Luke’s arms than Luke remembered. He dropped his head on Luke’s chest, but he had to crook his neck at an odd angle to do it.
“We can figure this out,” Luke said. “I know we can.”
“I like you a lot. I wish I were normal, and we could. You know. Be normal.”
“Whatever. I’ve had bad experiences with normal. I like you, too.”
Jeremy sighed, heaving in Luke’s arms. “We should go. Sergei’s going to come back.” But he didn’t move, and Luke wasn’t going first.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Luke made it home, soaked through and miserable, and sneaked up the back stairs to his room so he wouldn’t have to see anyone. Unfortunately, Camille waited on his bed, nose in an enormous, dusty library book with a crooked old crone on the cover. “I started looking for curses in the Russian lore,” she said without preamble. “Have you ever read ‘The Frog Princess’? There’s different versions, but in some of them the curses are broken with feats of magic—”
That groaning sound was Luke. His knees hit the floor.
“Whoa!” Camille leaped up and touched his shoulder, her words silky-sweet. “Hey, it’s all right. No one told you this was trouble, for sure.”
He pushed her off, hauling out every cuss word he could think of. Sure, no one had told him. No one had told him anything. Jeremy had been stringing Luke, his non-true-love, along with half-answers, and—worse, to Luke—he hadn’t even given Luke a chance to try uncrossing him another way.
Love, Luke thought. Love love love. “Can you get Mom?”
Thirty minutes later, Yuri set a plate of potato dumplings on the table, and the Melnyk family had a summit on the subject of true love.
“Like eternal, preordained true love?” Camille asked. “That’s not a real thing.”
“What do you know about it?” Luke said. “But no, it didn’t say eternal or preordained in the contract. ‘True love’s first kiss.’”
She rested her temple on her fist. “Maybe love can be true. But that’s not real mojo. Disney made that up.”
Luke still thought so, too. But denial wouldn’t fix it. “There’s real mojo there. He for real can’t leave Sergei’s house. He for real can’t go to school, or, or be with whoever he wants.”
“Honey,” Helene said. “Are you saying you’re in love? Last month you couldn’t let go of the other little troublemaker.”
Luke had never felt this way about Max. That slow derailment was nothing compared to how fast he’d crashed into Jeremy. This was something different, but he didn’t know if that made it love.
A small voice whispered, If it were, he’d be free right now, and maybe here, and safe, with you, and he ignored it. He stuffed a dumpling in his mouth, but they waited for him to chew and swallow and reply.
“I don’t think it’s fair that I have to decide that now. And I don’t think it’s fair that he has to wait.”
“No, it doesn’t seem much like fair has anything to do with it,” Helene said. “But that doesn’t mean you have anything to do with it. I told you, Luke, that family—”
“Exactly. Exactly, ‘that family.’” Luke wrestled his voice down. “They stole him from his real parents. You want me to walk away from that?”
Helene returned his gaze without flickering. “Honey, the more you try to convince me you have to stay in this because those people are so evil, the more I hear I need to get you out because they could hurt my baby boy.”
“I believe in true love,” Yuri said abruptly. Helene pulled a face, wry and affectionate.
“I think, even though our first kiss was at that show,” he said, “true love’s first kiss was the one on the bridge. Right? The bridge?”
Helene’s face went soft.
“Nah,” Camille said. “You two don’t kiss.”
Yuri raised his eyebrows and swung an arm around Helene’s shoulders, and then he swooped over her. All Luke and Camille could see was the back of Yuri’s head, but Camille screamed anyway.
Finally, Helene deployed an elbow to get Yuri away. “Listen, we’ve been together for twenty years. By now, I’d say it’s love. That’s different.”
“Is it different?” Luke asked. “Or is it just later? How do you know?”
Camille scoffed. “Well, one difference is they didn’t need their families to push them together with some fake job routine.”
Luke wanted nothing to do with that line of thought. He shook it off like a fly. He had chosen. He and Jeremy had chosen, together. Some outside force had decided against them, and that was his enemy.
“Well,” Yuri said, but rather than elaborating, he nudged Helene and gave her a significant look.
“What? Am I missing something?” She looked between Yuri’s knowing face and Luke and Camille’s blank ones.
Yuri grimaced and pointed at Luke. “Don’t get a big head. But. That boy has been in love with you since he was a tiny little thing.”
Luke ran hot and cold. In love?
“How do you know?” Helene exclaimed.
“It was obvious,” Yuri said. “He hid behind Sergei a lot but he was always gazing at our Luke.”
“Gazing?” Helene looked at Luke with way too much confusion to be flattering.
Yuri nodded. “But then he’d look away if Luke ever looked at him. You probably didn’t notice because you never look at Sergei.”
“Well, that’s true.”
“Sergei stopped bringing him around for a while, when you”—Yuri pointed at Luke—“started noticing boys, too. I always figured Sergei was trying to stop it from happening. But here we are.” It sounded like Yuri thought here was a pit of quicksand.
It checked out to Luke—Jeremy remembered more from when they were kids. His sweet shyness, his sliding eyes. He must have had some idea about Luke, some fantasy or hope, that Luke wasn’t living up to. Luke tasted acid, sick—he was over here falling in love, and Jeremy was getting to know Luke better and falling out of it. “I can’t handle this.”
He knew right away it was wrong. Yuri’s face turned thunderous. “You shouldn’t have done it, then.”
Camille sucked her teeth.
Luke said, “I didn’t mean…I didn’t mean it like that.”
“I hope not. Who taught you to jump between your young men like this? I don’t want to hear you failed to treat him with respect.”
Luke wanted to protest—he wasn’t jumping anywhere; he was being so respectful his body was driving him to distraction—but his jaw wouldn’t work.
Yuri took a breath that heaved his shoulders. “What does the young man say?”
“Huh?”
“Your young man. He asked for this production? It makes him an
gry like this?”
“Of course he—” Luke stopped. Angry? Maybe sad. “He lied to me.”
“Lied to you, or kept his business to himself?” Yuri emphasized the last part.
“It would have been my business if some wild mojo happened!”
Camille snorted. “I bet not. You would have broken that curse with your fool mouth and said, ‘Hmm, standard.’” She nudged Luke, and he pushed back. “Also, in case you forgot, some wild mojo didn’t happen.”
That sliced him so hard he had to pull away. They were all staring. “What he said was, it wasn’t a big deal, and I shouldn’t do anything dramatic.”
Yuri put his elbows on the table and his head in his hands, and said, “Lukonya,” like somebody was torturing him and that was the code word to start begging for death.
“Does he know you told us?” Helene asked.
Luke answered sideways. “I’m going to tell him.”
Helene shut her eyes, too. Luke wasn’t sure how everything had gone so wrong. “I don’t understand. What am I supposed to do?”
Yuri tapped his points out on the table. “The right person is the person who brings out your best. It isn’t, do you like him, is he good enough—it is, are you happy? Are you doing what’s right? I think you are a young man of honor, and I think you need to decide how much compromise you can live with.”
Camille started laughing. “Sure. Is that all?”
Luke’s nerves spilled over in a laugh, too, she grabbed his arm, and they sat together and lost it as Helene shook her head and Yuri got up and walked away.
“You should probably tell him you told us all his business. And maybe you could mention”—Camille wiped tears of laughter off her face—“I’d love to see how a crossing that unbreakable works.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Luke brought dumplings to the next summit, too.
“Yum!” Marta whisked the container away to warm them up.
Alexei was there, at Sergei’s house. Jeremy lurked behind his elbow. He was barely dressed, still wearing his sleep clothes, including a Sergei-like white muscle tank that showed the sharp lines of his collarbone and shoulders. Luke almost forgot why they were there—but unless they figured this out, Jeremy wasn’t his to look at that way.
Jeremy had dressed enough to pull on his green cap, angled and pulled low over his face, and the one eye it revealed was hidden behind Alexei.
Camille propped herself in front of Luke the same way, obscuring his view with her hair. She smelled soapy and herbal, like SheaMoisture and home, and cultivated her ferocity like a model, hand on her hip.
Alexei smiled with genuine, crinkling eyes. “Come in and look at our secrets.”
Sergei’s dining room held three of the biggest pieces of furniture Luke had ever seen—a gleaming redwood table, a matching sideboard covered with plants and knick-knacks, and a looming cabinet full of enough plates to serve an army—under a high ceiling. Afternoon sunlight fell in warped squares through the window on one of the narrower walls, but it only made the rest of the room gloomier.
There were two folders on the table, Jeremy - 1, which Luke pushed to Camille so she could look at the contract, and another labeled Jeremy - 3. Luke started flipping through that. It was documentation of attempts to break or work around the crossing, and Luke had to admit it was thorough: fire, blood, water, herbs. All the notes ended with variations on the same nasty theme: he screamed, he passed out, it hurt him. Nothing happened.
Alexei sat down across from them, elbows on the table, and Jeremy slumped next to him.
“I have to ask,” Luke said. “What’s in Jeremy - 2?”
“Adoption papers and copies of my homeschool letters.” Jeremy spoke through a clenched jaw. “Do you need to see my dental records, too?”
This was a new voice, flat and horrible. Wait—
Camille was already done. “You didn’t tell me it said ‘only.’” She looked up at Alexei. “This is all in the original, the ‘only’ and the ‘first’?”
Alexei laughed mirthlessly and nodded. “The little witch is good.”
“Sure,” Camille replied. “Good enough to see it’s impossible.”
“What?” Luke asked. “Tell me.”
“‘The contract is void only when.’ Don’t you see? It’s a, what do you call it, to get rid of the pressure?” Camille snatched her fingers in front of her face, taking the word out of the air. “A release valve. It’s not meant to be a way out. It’s just meant to close off any other way out.” She paused. “I still don’t think this true love thing is real mojo.”
“How?” Luke asked. “It’s in the contract, and the contract is real.”
Camille waved that away. “I could make you sign a contract that said you’d do the dishes every day until you got me a micro-elephant. But you’d be doing the dishes for a long time.”
Jeremy twisted his cap around and pulled it down so it covered his face completely. Luke weighed the two ideas, trying to figure out which he hated worse: Jeremy stuck in this house forever, or Jeremy breaking the curse on somebody else’s mouth.
It didn’t matter, because Luke wasn’t going to allow either of those things to happen. He was going to find another way to fix this first. The attempts they’d already documented were more thorough than he’d expected, and it was a setback, but he’d find plan goddamn C.
Alexei put his hands on the table and spoke with the finality of a grown-up intervening. “We cannot prove a negative. The only way we’ll ever know if true love is the answer is if one day, a kiss works. So there’s no reason to discuss it as a hypothetical. All the young prince can do is follow his heart in these matters.”
Muffled inside the cap, Jeremy said, “Can you not with the prince thing right now?” Red splotches colored his neck, and Luke would have thought this whole business had been a bad idea, except he started to think of a question. This question had some weight to it, a sense of dawning. A sense of binding. “What is up with all those generations of daughters?”
Alexei’s head snapped up, and his eyes narrowed. He wasn’t giving away much, but that face rarely gave away anything at all.
Marta returned with the dumplings on a platter. “Why does that matter?”
Jeremy lifted his cap long enough to cut a hard glance at Luke and eat a dumpling in one bite.
Even though Jeremy was hidden, Luke spoke to him. “You came after three, four generations of all girls. What are the odds of that? Especially if there were multiple sisters having multiple daughters? It has to mean something.”
Camille got it. “That is mojo.”
Luke tapped the table. “Tell me the spell.”
“A protection? She signed the contract and wished she’d only have daughters, and there was enough energy to make it work for a few generations.” Camille smiled. “Or, she turned it around. She lit a candle and promised she wouldn’t have a son until he would weigh on this family like a curse. That’s what I would do.”
Luke nodded—that was definitely what Camille would do. “Whatever she did put a tripwire on the contract, and then before Jeremy was born, someone did something—”
Camille’s eyes widened, and she pressed her lips tightly together. Luke stopped talking. That was a good theory, plausible and workable—but it was a delicate thing to sit in a room full of Kovrovs and ponder what they might have done to set that tripwire off.
“Jeremy isn’t a curse,” Marta said neatly.
Alexei stayed silent and thoughtful. Luke closed his eyes, feeling for new bindings around them, but Alexei was a blank page.
Jeremy pulled the cap off his face and dropped it on the table. “The Kovrovs seem fine to me.”
“Did you talk about the gay thing?” Marta asked cheerfully, glancing at Alexei. His expression charred. Jeremy’s body stayed where he was, but the rest of him left: his eyes lost focus and went blank.
“No,” Alexei said. “We’re not going to discuss it.”
“You know we’re
not saying we have a problem with it, but if the contract…” Marta trailed off.
Luke’s body went cold so fast he felt dizzy. Camille put a hand over his. “Why do you think being gay matters?”
Marta smiled, like Camille had gotten on her side. “The contract is more than a century old. I’m just saying we should acknowledge the possibility it’s not going to recognize a boy as Jeremy’s true love. Or, you know, maybe a black person.”
Camille’s hand twitched once and pressed firmly over Luke’s. “What, exactly—you’re saying that Jeremy’s really in love with a white girl and he slipped and fell on Luke?”
Something like a smile flickered around Alexei’s eyes. “Long fall.”
“Look, if that’s what it is, we’re not doing him any favors by being PC.” Marta slumped back, her energy draining away.
They sat in awkward silence. Jeremy’s face was terrible and dead, and Luke couldn’t think of anything to say. Finally, Camille broke in again. “I was wondering if there are any other contracts like this. Old ones, or whatever, anything to compare it to.”
Alexei shook his head. “If there were, they’ve been lost.”
“Hm.” Camille tapped the paper. “I’m working on this theory that maybe, since it isn’t real magic, it’s something she asked for. If she wasn’t a witch, but she heard it in a story or something.”
Alexei rolled his shoulders. “You’re still trying to discredit it. I get the impulse, I do, but I don’t see how that’s productive. Assume we were to grant you that, hypothetically, there’s no out for true love—what would you do then?”
Camille blinked at the paper. “Do you know if anyone in your birth family was a magician?”
“Camille—” Luke started, but Jeremy was already returning to himself, shaking off. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
“Then we’re done,” Alexei said promptly, as if they couldn’t be trusted not to press, or maybe as if he was waiting to get the conversation over with. That was the key: Alexei was a liar, and he had a secret, but they’d lost it when Marta got them off track. There was no way to bring it up with Alexei there, though, and all Luke wanted to do was hide. He felt weak and sick for letting Camille defend him, but even as the conversation slipped away, he couldn’t find a wall to put up. This was the idea he hated worst. He’d rather have heard Jeremy say, You’re not what I wanted, than talk about whether some ancient piece of paper had a problem with brown boys.
The Uncrossing Page 16
