Chapter Four #3
face changed—lost its mask, the faint trace of readiness to hide
pain or sorrow, flushed up and contorted like that of any other
healthy young man about to shoot to climax—and Laurie let go and
pounded at him. Sasha closed a crushing grip around the tops of
both his arms and hung on, writhing up, loosing a short, desperate
cry at every thrust. Wet heat burst on Laurie’s belly, in the tight
place where they were locked together. He braced, the beginnings of
the seizure almost too much, almost making him afraid. He didn’t
recall coming with the girl. But this…this he would remember until he
died.
“Christ,” he rasped out, shuddering,
aware of the rush of his semen between Sasha’s thighs as the tip of
the iceberg. The rest of him—from prickling scalp to curling,
scrabbling toes—was caught up in the firestorm, incandescent,
lost.
* *
*
He
thought he must still be glowing faintly in the dark. He lay,
beached and wrung out, at Sasha’s side, listening to their
breathing slowly lose its ragged edge, unable to think or to move.
Yes, he must be luminescent, shining. Sasha too. If he opened his
eyes, blinked the tears from them, he would see Sasha, bright as an
angel in an old tale, in the bed beside him.
“I…I should go now.”
Laurie
snapped back to his senses. He looked and saw poor Sasha was not
shining at all—that his lights had gone out, and he was up on one
elbow, ready to get out of the bed and leave, as if…
“No!” Laurie whispered, reaching for him. “For God’s sake,
please don’t tell me you thought that was…”
“Business?” Sasha finished for him, smiling weakly. “You think
my punters try to stop me leaving? The last one kicked me out of
his car. It’s almost a pity, because”—he paused, voice catching—“I
wouldn’t have minded enjoying my work for once.”
“Oh, Sasha.” There were tears in Sasha’s eyes. Somehow the
sight of them shocked Laurie to the core. “Hang on a minute.” He
scrambled out of the bed and gestured to Sasha that he should stand
too, just long enough for Laurie to turn back the duvet and the
wool blanket that covered it. “There. Get back in.” When Sasha
hesitated, he gave him a little encouraging shove, stripped out of
his jeans, and followed him, burrowing down with him into the
warmth. Their limbs laced together, Sasha, after a moment’s stiff
awkwardness, grasping at him fiercely. “Stay with me,” Laurie
whispered into his hair. “Just for tonight. Stay.”
* *
*
Morning
found them locked together still. Laurie breached the surface of
his dreams with a deep inhalation; they had been hot and sweet, and
his cock was hard, crushed to Sasha’s thigh. “Oh,” he rasped, as
Sasha woke too and turned smiling to look at him.
“Sorry.”
“Mm,” Sasha commented, rolling to face him. He’d divested
himself of the dressing gown during the night.
For a
long minute, the joy of being skin-to-skin with him overwhelmed
Laurie, and he could only cling to him, blindly pressing kisses to
his throat.
But
Sasha ran shuddering hands down his arms, down his sides, and
suddenly Laurie wanted more. Much more, as if in his few hours of
sleep he’d grown up, vaulted barricades out of shy, awkward
boyhood… An instinct rose in him, opened darkly like a rose. He
turned his back to Sasha’s gentle pushing, rolled to face the
wall.
“Laurie, no. Not that.”
Sasha
had gone still. His grip on Laurie’s shoulder, on the hand he’d
flung back to him, was bruising, damp with distress.
“Why?” Laurie softly demanded, already half-aware the question
was stupid.
“You must know. I’m not sure I’m clean. There’s a doctor who
comes around the homeless people sometimes, tests for things, but
I…I haven’t wanted to find out. Do you understand?”
“Yes.” Laurie did, with painful clarity. He wriggled back over
and pulled Sasha into his arms. “Listen to me. You can’t live like
this. Maybe you don’t have to, even if you’re illegal. Why did you
leave Romania?”
Sasha
moaned. He tried to escape Laurie’s grip, then subsided into it,
letting go a ragged breath. “It doesn’t matter. Doesn’t make any
difference.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“My father was a political activist. Not much of one; he just
wrote poetry. Made the mistake of trying to get it published abroad
so that people would know what Ceausescu was doing in Romania, to
people like him—gypsies, intellectuals, anyone who disagreed with
the regime.”
He
paused, and Laurie lay watching him, arousal and compassion
competing for space in his mind. With an effort he dismissed both
in order to think about history, or the little he knew of it.
Nikolai Ceausescu—that had been the mid-eighties, hadn’t it? When
the Romanian people had risen up and overthrown their Communist
dictator in a bloody coup. “What happened to him? You’re only my
age, aren’t you? You couldn’t have been born.”
“No. He was sent to the Pitesti prison in 1984. He was Roma,
but he’d had his own house north of Bucharest, where there was a
big gypsy community. He and my mother gave lessons in their living
room, the only education most kids there got. They were doing all
right, but when he was released after the revolution, he
was…different. Broken. He didn’t really care for anything
anymore—or he couldn’t. The state had stripped what assets he had,
and…he and my mother went to live in the mahala in Sofia, the Roma ghetto.
Conditions there were terrible. Still are. I think becoming
pregnant with me was the last straw for my mother. She waited until
I was born, and then she left me with him and came
home.”
“To England?” Laurie asked it softly, leaning on one elbow,
running a hand over Sasha’s hair. His eyes were wide and distant,
and he had told his story as if it belonged to someone else. “Did
you try to trace her? I don’t know how the law works, but if you’ve
got someone here, a close relative who could vouch for
you…”
“I thought of it. I haven’t had the chance. I only got here a
couple of months ago.” He smiled faintly and shivered, tugging at
the duvet. Reflexively Laurie moved closer, covering him. “Somebody
told me the winters were warmer here, you know.”
“You need shelter. I…I’d help you find your mother, you know.
There’re ways, using the Internet. What about your father? Is he
still alive?”
“No. He died a long time ago. Look, Laurie—”
“Then you’ve been surviving by yourself in the—what did you
call it, the mahala? The ghetto? You might be a refugee. You could
apply—”
“Laurie. Why are you living like a refugee, here in your own
home?”
Laurie
caught his breath. He felt as if he’d missed a gear on his mother’s
little Mini Cooper and stalled her out. He stared down at Sasha,
who was back in the moment with him now, intense, eyes fixed
unblinkingly on his. “We weren’t talking about… What do you
mean?”
“This great big house. Why are you hiding in one of its
attics?”
“I’m not. It’s just my room.”
“Okay. How old are you?”
“Nineteen. Why…”
“Because you’re terrified of your father, and you’ve got
everything you need to walk away and make a life of your own.
Education, money… Why don’t you?”
Laurie
shifted uncomfortably. He wasn’t sure how he had ended up in the
spotlight, and he felt oddly trapped there, as if Sasha’s questions
were more valid than his own. He didn’t know why and fought a brief
rush of irritation. What could Sasha possibly understand, about the
task of self-extraction from the honeypot, the web of family
wealth?
“I don’t really have either,” he said. “He gives me…pocket
money, for God’s sake. And I’m home for the winter to study because
I stuffed up my first-year exams. He’s paying for my tutor.” Put so
plainly as that, his reasons sounded so inadequate that Laurie felt
a deep flush of shame rising up in him—then remembered, almost with
relief, that he had other motives. They were none of Sasha’s
business, but the quiet, dark gaze on his was not judgmental, only
waiting. “He’s a bastard,” Laurie said quietly after a moment. “I’m
afraid he’ll hurt Clara, and my mother too. I try to be around as
much as I can.”
“But when term starts, you’ll go back to college and leave
them. The only real way to help them would be to find your own
life, your own place, and give them somewhere to go. Wouldn’t
it?”
Laurie
swallowed. “Jesus, Sasha. You don’t know what you’re asking. I’m
not…I’m not like you. I can’t do anything.”
“What are you studying?”
“Maths and politics. With the old man’s connections, I might
get a seat in the Houses of Parliament or go into law, but…” He
trailed off. To his bewilderment, Sasha was beaming at him. Laurie
could feel repressed laughter trembling in the muscles of Sasha’s
chest and stomach. “What?”
“I thought you must be at… What’s the big drama school called
here? RADA?”
“The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art,” Laurie confirmed dryly. It
was where, when he was eighteen, he had hoped, prayed and even
dared to assume he would be. But that was before his subject choice
for A levels had had to be made and he had run up against Sir
William, who had turned out to have assumptions of his
own.
“No wonder you don’t think you can do anything. Laurie, if I
had half your gift, I’d be doing street plays, finding any way I
could of crawling onto a stage every chance I got.” He lifted a
hand and rubbed the backs of his fingers up and down Laurie’s
cheek.
Something in the gesture made Laurie want to burst into
tears.
“Forgive my saying this. We’ve just met. But you don’t seem to
me to be…much of a maths-and-politics person.”
“I’m not.” Laurie wanted to shout it, to smack his fists
against the wall to make his point, but he had learned to tread too
warily through the mine-loaded no-man’s-land that stretched between
his father’s ambitions and his own. His voice remained flat and
quiet. “But it’s not as simple as that.”
“No, I’m sure it’s not. I’m sure…each of our lives, our
circumstances, looks far simpler from the outside. Listen to me,