Chapter 19
After dessert, they ended up getting a slice of cake to take with them.
When they finally got to the car, the sun had barely set.
In an out of the way spot in the parking lot, Dmitrii didn’t have the same reservations about a display of affection.
Instead, he leaned over to kiss Tyler’s lips, pulling the other man to him.
As the windows fogged up, Tyler’s arm wrapped around Dmitrii’s waist and slipped in between the button-up shirt and the T-shirt. He desperately wanted to pull Dmitrii over onto his lap, but he hesitated.
“Is something wrong?” Dmitrii’s words were barely a whisper as he tried to catch his breath.
“I don’t want to rush.” As soon as the words were out of Tyler’s mouth, he wished he could take them back.
He saw Dmitrii’s eyes drop as he pulled back, ending up more in the passenger seat again. “I’m sorry. I just … you’re you.”
Tyler closed his eyes as he heard the confused words from Dmitrii. He had to try to explain. “I’ve had a crush on you, not like a crazy fan. I just don’t want to mislead you.”
Dmitrii interrupted the explanation. “Tyler, I don’t think you’ve misled me at all.
You think I’m …” for once, Dmitrii seemed to stop to search for a word.
Finally, he settled on the word “Hot.” He shrugged.
“It’s fine. I’m not expecting anything.” So much of the warmth that had been in Dmitrii’s voice was now gone.
That was not what Tyler had meant at all. He sat up straighter as he didn’t bother to hide his confusion. He saw how hurt Dmitrii looked and how the man was trying to put up walls. “Dmitrii, that is not what I meant. I meant I really care about you.”
The look of confusion only became stronger as Dmitrii looked at Tyler. “But you didn’t want …”
“I don’t want to make out in a car with you. I want to do what I can to make tonight really nice. This is a date, and I intend to make it a good one.” He caught his lower lip between his teeth for a moment before he dropped his voice to whisper, “If it ended up with making out back at your place …”
Tyler was positive he would never tire of seeing the flush on Dmitrii’s pale cheeks. The little smile was even better though. “So you want to come back to my place?”
“Well, considering my place has too many people living there and a really embarrassing set of pictures of me, yours would be much better.”
That got Dmitrii to laugh. “Oh, embarrassing pictures?”
“Very embarrassing. My mother has everyone’s school pictures lining the hallway upstairs. Anytime I had friends over, we’d just go to the basement and play video games because the four years of braces do not need to be viewed by everyone.”
“I bet you looked good with braces.” Dmitrii settled into the seat, pulling on his seatbelt as Tyler started up the car.
“Okay, maybe the braces weren’t that bad, but the year my sister tried to cut my hair was pretty bad.”
“Why did you let her do that?” Dmitrii was smiling more now that Tyler had reached out to hold his hand as they drove through old town Herndon on their way to loop around and return to the hotel.
“I don’t know. I think I thought she knew what she was doing?”
“She’s how many years younger than you?” Dmitrii was not going to let this one go.
“Five and a half.”
“Five and a half and you let her take scissors to your hair? I mean, I have bad hair, but I wouldn’t even let her cut my hair now at her age. How old was she when she did it?”
“Six.” Tyler knew his cheeks were flushing bright enough that it could even be seen in the car as they passed under streetlight after streetlight.
“You were eleven, and you didn’t have the sense not to let a six-year-old cut your hair?”
There wasn’t much Tyler could say to that. He shrugged a little as he answered, “She really wanted to.”
Dmitrii stopped his teasing, sitting up straighter as he looked over to Tyler. “That is so sweet. You didn’t want to hurt her feelings?” There was now a softness in his words that Tyler loved.
“It was just hair. If I had realized that school pictures were the next week, I never would have. My mom was so mad. She hauled me off to the place in the mall, middle of the day. I missed school for a haircut, and trust me, my mother does not like it when we miss school. It took three different people standing around trying to decide the best thing to do with it. I mean, not that there were a lot of options. They decided the only thing to do was to just razor it all really short. They trimmed it all to a quarter of an inch and then tried to smooth out the really rough spots. It was that bad. I had to go back a month later and get it buzzed again so that it would be even. Somehow, Grace had cut right down to the skin. I didn’t think you could actually cut skin with safety scissors.
” He pointedly left out the fact that it had been the children’s haircut place at the mall, so he had been sitting in front of a TV playing a show with a purple dinosaur while this was all happening.
“She did it with little kid’s scissors … oh wow.” Dmitrii was smiling as he said that though. “It’s still very sweet. I am not saying that was smart, but it was very sweet.”
“Do you have brothers or sisters?”
“No, it’s just me, I think.” The quick exhale after the last part of that sentence made it clear he hadn’t intended on saying that.
“You think?”
“I don’t really know my dad. I haven’t seen him in ages, so he could have a family or something. Growing up, it was just me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s fine.” Dmitrii shrugged a little. “I grew up with my mother and grandmother. It was fine. I got recognized at a pretty early age for skating, so we moved to St. Petersburg on a scholarship and I was able to train there. It’s a very beautiful city.”
“I’ve never been there.”
“It’s amazing. So many buildings are really old, and the historic areas are places where tourists and people who live in the city go. It’s right on the water with rivers and canals going through the city.”
“That sounds really pretty.”
“It is. When I start a program at university, I want to study history.”
“So you’re smart, talented, and handsome?” Tyler smiled as they turned off onto a less developed road and took the back way to cut over to the road the hotel was on.
“I don’t know about that, but I really like that you think I am?” There was half a second’s pause before Dmitrii continued, “And I think you’re really kind and sweet. I think you’re really skilled and especially very good at kissing.”
“And cute?” Tyler almost asked it as a joke.
“Oh, are you looking for more compliments?” Dmitrii’s smile had returned. As Tyler pulled up at the hotel, Dmitrii let his head roll to the side a little. “So you want to know if you are cute?”
“Well …” Tyler quickly got out of the car to keep up with Dmitrii as the other man was walking into the hotel, a small package from the diner in his hands.
As they were walking past the front desk, the girl there called out, “Mr. Lebedahhski?” It was close enough to his name that Dmitrii turned. “You’ve got a package.”
The precious teasing and flirting faded as he walked over to take the international mail from her. “Thank you.”
Even though Dmitrii didn’t seem to notice, Tyler very much noticed the little flirty smile the girl gave Dmitrii. He tried to hide how that affected him. It wasn’t as if Dmitrii had been flirting with her or even noticed.
Once they were in the room, Dmitrii turned to him and Tyler asked, “What’s wrong?”
Dmitri didn’t really answer. Instead, he sighed softly.
“Yes, I think you’re cute. I think your eyes are so pretty, and I was going to say something really flirty about your shoulders once we were here but …
” He waved the envelope in the air slightly.
“I need to look at this first. They’ll know when it was delivered, and they’ll know how long it took me to get back to them.
” Dmitrii carried the envelope over to the bed where he opened it up and pulled out about twenty pages that were all typed in Russian.
“Why didn’t they email it?” Tyler sat down on the bed, looking at the papers he couldn’t read.
“Because they’re all a bunch of old, paranoid people.
” He was reading through the papers as quickly as he could.
“I just need to send them an email now. I mean, no one is there. It’s like three in the morning there, but they’ll see the timestamp.
They just want me to submit written updates from Dr. Audry and Coach Troskel.
It’s not that bad. They want to know how I think it’s going. ”
Tyler moved to sit behind Dmitrii, letting his arms wrap around him from behind as he pressed his head against the back of Dmitrii’s shoulder.
“I’m sorry this ruined the date night.” How Dmitrii’s mood had soured from the package had been obvious.
Tyler had just wanted to take Dmitrii’s mind off of the pressures he was under for one night.
It wasn’t much, but he had wanted to show him he was so much more than just his skating.
“This is so not your fault. Everything you did was perfect.” The longing in Dmitrii’s voice made the compliment so much sadder than seemed possible.
“But I wanted…”
Tyler trailed off as Dmitrii twisted around to press a finger to Tyler’s lips.
“Shhh. This is not your fault. I promise. I will jump through these hoops as fast as I can so that I can go back to kissing you.” A soft press of the lips was all that Dmitrii did before he turned back to the paperwork, still reading it through as he leaned back into Tyler before sighing, “Can you grab my laptop for me? This is going to be a little more than I want to type on the phone keyboard.”
“Of course.” He knew right where the laptop bag was on the little coffee table in the other room.