Alexei gathered papers, and Marta took away the empty platter. Jeremy slid a glance across Luke.
“Do you want to talk before I go?” Luke asked.
Jeremy shrugged, but he led Luke up all those stairs and stood small in the center of his huge, wrecked room, frowning at the ceiling.
“I should have told her not to talk about your birth family,” Luke said. “I’m sorry about that.”
Jeremy tilted the tiniest bit closer. “It’s okay. Marta knew she wasn’t supposed to bring up…the stuff.”
“Don’t apologize for that. You didn’t say it.” Luke tried to brush it off, but it wouldn’t budge. “She shouldn’t be saying that to you, either. At least I get to leave.”
Jeremy went stiff again, huffing and glaring back up at the ceiling. They were fighting again; Jeremy was angry again. Luke wanted to fix this crossing before Jeremy’s true love swaggered up and ruined everything, before Jeremy’s eighteenth birthday and college and the rest of his life were stolen by the Kovrovs. But if he kept pissing Jeremy off so much with the trying, he was going to ruin it himself. The end closed in on two fronts, like an army that had split its forces. Luke, caught in the middle, was not likely to win, but he would find a way or he would go down fighting.
“Jeremy, come on.” Luke was begging, and he didn’t care.
“What?”
“Why are you so mad? I’m trying to help.”
“I don’t want this help.” He threw his hands out and pulled them back again, crossing his arms. “I thought I could deal with it, but I can’t. I hate people acting like I’m a puzzle.”
Luke drooped on the edge of the bed, elbows on his knees. “I don’t think you’re a puzzle. But I think we can solve this problem, which means making a theory and testing it, right?”
“No.” The stone wall broke, Jeremy’s expression melting in real fear. “No, I told you. Messing with the contract never works, and always hurts.”
“You have to try something.”
“I don’t have to do anything,” Jeremy said, his voice lowering. “Why would I torture myself like that?”
Luke bit back his first reply—how could you not? He couldn’t imagine the complacency.
Jeremy opened pleading hands. “I told you not to make a huge deal out of this. I have a great life, I have a family who loves me, I’m safe and I can get anything I need—”
“All right,” Luke snapped. “I get it. You have more nice stuff than anyone I know. I don’t see how that’s worth your freedom.”
Jeremy stepped back, taking a sharp breath.
Luke rubbed his face in his hands. “Jesus, I’m—I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. No, I think I did mean that. This is terrible.”
Jeremy threw his arms open. His face was a mask, rigid and blotchy. “Set me free, then.”
Luke couldn’t do anything except sit there. One easy answer: “I’m sorry. I am sorry.”
Jeremy dropped his arms, but not his mask. Luke patted the bed next to him. “Come sit with me. Help me understand.”
Jeremy sat, crossing his arms over his stomach. “This is my life, Luke. It can’t be a crisis every day.”
“All right. But you only just explained it to me. I might need to have a crisis today.”
“Oh.” The room shimmered with light bouncing off turning gears and trickling water, and a hundred small bells chimed when Jeremy sighed. “So, you’d be happier if I was sad?”
“No, of course not. No one said anything about being sad.” Luke was still sunk low over his knees, and he twisted until his face found the crook of Jeremy’s elbow. He put a kiss there, another on the curve at the back of Jeremy’s arm.
Goosebumps prickled over Jeremy’s skin. “What are you doing?”
“Sneaking up on you.” Luke slid a little higher. “See? You don’t even know where I am. You’re less angry at me, and you don’t know why.”
Jeremy exhaled a laugh. “I’m getting sleepy, very sleepy.”
“No, stay awake.” Luke sat up and pulled Jeremy closer to kiss that sharp spot on his shoulder that had been so tempting earlier. He whispered sugar into Jeremy’s ear until he turned his face and gave Luke a real kiss.
“That’s supposed to fix everything,” Jeremy said, pulling away. “No more curse, and no one trying to hurt us, and they all lived happily ever after.”
“I know.” Luke kissed him again and thought, happily ever after. Jeremy fit so nicely against Luke’s body, and even when they fought, they ended up making out, and Luke was happy with him, as long as they pretended there was no world outside. It wasn’t the same, though. It wasn’t enough.
Chapter Thirty
Jeremy didn’t know what the old Kovrov had intended to do with Maeve’s firstborn son, or whether there had been more people like him or what they had done with their lives, but Ivan Kovrov hadn’t had any use for a stranger’s infant. When the curse plopped into his lap in the form of a glowing baby boy, he did what he could to void the contract, break the spell, and free himself and the child. But there was only one way out—true love’s first kiss, the rotten fairy tale of Jeremy’s uncountable bedtimes—and that path was unsure and lengthy. Sometime during Jeremy’s first year, his parents, whoever they were, asked Ivan for the one gift he could give them.
They asked to forget.
Ivan was a man of honor in his own way. Somehow—not through Alexei, who might have undone it later—he wiped them all clean. Sergei and Alexei had searched when they grew up, but there was a break in Jeremy’s genealogy, and no way to trace back to his family and torment them with the fact of himself. His birth certificate said Kovrov, along with everything else in his life, and it said Brooklyn but that might have been a lie.
Luke’s disgust was for Jeremy’s strict boundaries and brothers, but what tortured Jeremy was the empty spaces, the losses so old he’d forgotten them. All the things he didn’t know.
His birth parents had given him his first name, but he didn’t know whether they meant to say he was exalted or he wept. He didn’t know their last name or whether he had any brothers or sisters. He didn’t know his family medical history, and sometimes he worried about it to agonize himself.
He hoarded a stack of college brochures under his bed, and Sergei and Marta never brought them up, but he didn’t know if it was a secret. He liked the idea of going to school in California, but mostly because he liked the way the word California sounded in pop songs, and he didn’t know if that was a good reason. Anyway, he didn’t know if he would ever be able to leave home.
And when Luke and Camille left the house, he didn’t know how he felt. A few minutes in Luke’s arms had left his mind hectic and his body aching. He flopped face-down on his bed and let himself drift in the solid feeling of Luke’s stomach against his own, the heat of Luke’s breath against his neck, the springy-soft texture of Luke’s hair. Everything about Luke’s body made him aware of his own, made him want specific, impossible things.
It was probably best that before he could get too much momentum under that train of thought, the babies appeared in the attic. They had been taught to knock but didn’t understand, or care about, the rules, so they tapped on the door even as they opened it and started to sneak in.
Vanya hung at the threshold but Seryozhka got down and crawled in, subtle as a hand grenade. Jeremy stayed still until Seryozhka got close, then flew up, roaring, and hurled him in the air.
Seryozhka screamed in panicked joy as Vanya ran in, shouting, too. Jeremy threw Seryozhka onto the bed. Vanya was getting too big, so Jeremy wrestled him up, dragging. Once he had a squirming, howling pile of nephews, he flopped himself on top of them.
Holding onto the side of his bed with one hand, he licked a finger of the other and stuck it in the nearest ear. The victim shrieked.
“Mercy!” cried Seryozhka.
“Anyone else?” Jeremy asked placidly.
“Mercy!” echoed Vanya.
He rolled off of them and waited while they attacked
. Seryozhka threw himself across Jeremy’s belly. Vanya tried to tickle him but ended up tickling Seryozhka instead, making him kick. Tenderly, Jeremy let his mind touch on the idea of one of these little boys growing up to take Sergei’s place in his life.
Vanya sat up on his knees and caught Jeremy’s eye. “Papa and Uncle ’exei are fighting about you.”
Everything crumbled. “All right. Everyone off. Up, out, now.” Jeremy nudged and cajoled them into the hall, following the small thunder of their feet on the stairs. He went after, padding lightly, until Sergei’s low voice and Alexei’s projecting one were clear from the living room. He sat on the landing above, wrapping his arms around his knees.
“Whatever he wants—” Sergei’s voice dropped. “—these ideas in his head.”
“I don’t know why you think love and what he wants are these two different things,” Alexei said. “Just because you’re miserable—”
“I love my life,” Sergei said. “That’s the point.”
“That he should end up like you?”
“Better than like you.”
“You’re not his father,” Alexei said.
That wouldn’t slow Sergei down. “You’re not his friend.”
The pause was dense. Alexei’s voice was commanding when he spoke again. “We’ve all let this dating thing go to our heads. Me more than anyone, I admit it. We might as well let him have whatever freedom he can.”
Jeremy’s ears rang, blocking their conversation until Sergei started to roar. “Enlighten me. Tell me what it’s like to be responsible for the kid, Alexei, tell me all about it.”
This conversation wasn’t going to go anywhere productive. Jeremy crept back to his room and checked the mirror behind his closet door.
His clothes were all wrong—he changed into his olive shorts, which always made Sergei frown and Alexei laugh because they were really too tight, and a lemon-yellow shirt that made him feel like nothing too bad could happen. It would also annoy Sergei, which was good. Jeremy was annoyed right back. He slipped on his bright blue Vans. He left his Mets cap on his dresser—even he could admit that the shoes and the shirt and the cap might be too much together—but he stuck a pair of white plastic wayfarers in his collar.
His hair was a mess, but after a shake it lay flat. He observed himself, this bright strange pixie he and nature had made. Did he look pretty? Was it bad if he did? If Luke thought he did? All he could see was how he’d stitched himself together.
Jeremy didn’t know if he was going to fall in love with Luke, but he didn’t think he was going to find true love dwelling on Luke all the time, either, if they called it off. He didn’t know how his curse worked or what love meant, and neither did Alexei or Luke or anyone else, in spite of all the theories they loved to spew. He didn’t know who it would be, or when or why or if. Most of the time, he thought he didn’t know anything at all.
Before he left his room, Jeremy knelt by his window and prayed—a proper one, not the quick shots he usually relied on. He asked in English for wisdom, for guidance, for peace, and switched to his halting Russian to call, as he always did, on the intercession of Saint Sergius.
By the time Jeremy made it downstairs, Alexei was leaving. He stayed long enough to laugh at Jeremy’s outfit and give him a hug. “Damn the torpedoes.”
“Full speed ahead.”
“Kid!” Sergei said, after Alexei was gone. “Let’s go for a ride.”
Jeremy’s traitorous heart thrilled. When he’d been a kid, before Vanya was born, they would both get tetchy at noon, and Sergei had taken him for a drive every afternoon.
“I guess,” Jeremy said.
“You want to put on some real pants first?”
“Sure.” Jeremy pulled his sunglasses out of his collar and flicked them open. “As soon as you put on a shirt.”
Sergei guffawed. He tossed Jeremy a protection bag as they walked to the car. Jeremy inspected it for clues—but it was just a bag, one of the ones he’d made with Luke. The magic worked either way, but there was something nice about knowing he and Luke had made it together.
They took Sergei’s black ’81 Corvette, such a convincing Batmobile that tourists took pictures of it and children ran up to touch it with smudgy hands. Sergei put on a classic-rock station, something they could agree on, and drove around Manhattan and toward New Jersey. This wasn’t just a drive, but Jeremy didn’t ask. Sergei would tell him if he needed to know.
Jeremy didn’t bring up his own problems, either. The Corvette was loud, its engine and the radio giving them an excuse to not talk. He gazed out the window and sang along when he knew the songs. Though the day was brilliantly sunny, riotous with blue and gold, Jeremy’s sunglasses and the Corvette’s tinted windows kept it dark. This was Jeremy’s New York, dim and fast-moving and distant behind a pane of glass. He knew that was a bad thing, but he didn’t know how to change it.
They drove to a gas station not far past the bridge into Jersey and swapped the Corvette for a navy-blue Honda. Sergei untucked the keys from the wheel well like he knew where they would be, but he still didn’t say anything. This car was quieter inside, all the unsaid things much louder.
As they continued down the highways, Jeremy’s protection bag warmed in his hand. “You got that bag?” Sergei asked, scanning the sides of the road.
“Yep.” Jeremy hugged it to his chest and thought about Luke’s careful fingers sorting delicate flakes of soap.
As they crossed a river, it got worse—the bag pulsed hotly, like a heartbeat, and nausea rose in the back of Jeremy’s throat. “You’re okay,” Sergei said quickly, though Jeremy hadn’t said anything.
Sergei pulled over to the side of the road next to a stretch of scrubby grass and a line of trees. “You want to stay in here?”
A challenge. Jeremy got out of the car. Together, they walked toward the bad feeling. Under the tree line, shadows fell too thick to be natural, and Jeremy’s nausea churned. He squeezed the bag and breathed through his nose.
Crouching, Sergei pulled a knife out of his back pocket and flipped the blade open. He touched it lightly under his thumb, and pressed the tiny drop of blood to the ground.
They waited. Cars on the highway roared at their backs, but there were no forest sounds from the trees. Sergei’s face crumpled in effort, muscles standing out at the sides of his neck.
Jeremy’s nausea sank as the ground rumbled, and a suitcase-size rock burrowed up from the earth like a mole. It bounced oddly—the balloon of the binding Sergei had built around it. Thunks echoed deeper into the trees where more rocks popped up, the Malcolms’ border crumbling as Sergei’s power broke through.
Sergei stood, not quite suppressing a smile. “I’m no Alexei, but I’ve got a few tricks.”
“That was awesome.” Jeremy followed him back to the car, and they pulled back onto the highway unimpeded. They didn’t go much farther—Sergei parked in the lot of a Spanish restaurant in Moonachie and stayed in the car, watching through the windshield.
“Being a Kovrov,” Sergei said sonorously, and Jeremy thought, Oh, no, “is a privilege, but it is also a responsibility.”
Jeremy said, “I know,” but only because that was his line. He wasn’t sure he was a Kovrov. Even if he was, it wasn’t a privilege for him like it was for Sergei and Alexei and Sergei’s babies, and it was a different responsibility.
“Do you know? Speak, kid.”
“Am I a Kovrov?”
Sergei didn’t miss a beat. “I’ve spent about seventeen years of blood and sweat to say so.”
Jeremy glared at him, then remembered that he was wearing sunglasses and sighed.
“When I was your age, I was potty training you. Think about that.”
Jeremy pulled down his sunglasses so Sergei could see his next glare. “You mean a nanny was.”
Sergei grunted amiably, which was like a laugh, for Sergei. “I helped more than Alexei did.”
They watched the parking lot, light, routine traffic. Jeremy wondered w
hat they were looking for, but he didn’t ask, so maybe he was a Kovrov after all.
Jeremy asked a bunch of other questions instead. “What if it’s my problem and doesn’t have anything to do with him? What if my true love isn’t him, but I have to learn something from him? What if you are the biggest asshole in the whole world? Have you considered any of that?”
“What if he’s just some shitty kid who likes attention, and you’re the only one talking about love?”
Behind his glasses, Jeremy shut his eyes. “Why do you say things like that?”
“Someone has to.”
Jeremy was sure no one did. It wasn’t like it hadn’t occurred to him that Luke didn’t love him the same way Jeremy did. But maybe with time—maybe with space. And maybe Jeremy was allowed to have something he wanted, even if it wasn’t exactly the right, perfect thing, like anybody else. “Is it because he’s a boy? Really.”
“Guys and girls are different about sex.” Sergei put his hands on opposite sides of the steering wheel as if he was showing where the teams were. “They just are. So if you decide you’re chasing boys—”
“Because no guy in the history of the world has ever gotten his heart broken by a girl. It’s actually impossible to like a girl more than she likes you.” That wasn’t right. There was so much wrong with what Sergei was saying, it was hard to pin down which part was bothering him. He tried again: “I bet my real family wouldn’t care that I’m gay.”
A chill came off Sergei like he’d opened a freezer. Jeremy stopped, too—that was too much. He’d taken it too far.
Sergei shook his head. “I’m letting it go. I will let it go. But I think your curse is exactly the opposite of an excuse to run around with anybody who catches your eye. I think you should hold out for the one. I’m going to tell my boys the same thing when they get as big as you, okay?” He scowled into Jeremy’s face, expression unusual and strained.
The Uncrossing Page 17
