Chapter 24 - Alexei
It was getting weird. Really fucking weird.
I thought having him would fix it. That once I had Marco, the obsession would ease up. That this hunger would finally settle once I’d taken him completely. That claiming him would shut up the part of me that wouldn’t stop thinking about him.
It hadn’t.
It was worse.
I couldn’t stop wanting him close. Couldn’t stop needing him near me. The hunger had never been just about fucking him. Not really. It was something else. Something I didn’t understand. And now that I’d touched him, held him, watched him fall apart under me… it had only gotten stronger. Darker.
I wanted him.
Constantly.
Not to break him. Not even to touch him, though that remained a persistent and irritating distraction.
I just wanted to be in the same space as him.
To watch him exist. To see the way his face changed when he was nervous versus when he was genuinely happy.
To hear him talk too much when his thoughts ran faster than his mouth could manage.
To observe the small, absurd rituals he had.
The way he always fixed his ribbon before speaking.
The way he pressed his thumb against his wrist when he was anxious.
The way his whole expression softened at the sight of strawberries.
These weren’t normal observations.
Normal people didn’t catalogue another person’s habits with the precision I applied to Marco.
Normal people didn’t feel physical discomfort at distance from someone.
Normal people didn’t find themselves dragging that someone to a beach at sunset simply because the thought of him going home and spending the evening without me was suddenly unbearable.
And yet here we were.
The beach was empty. The water was still, catching the last of the evening light in rippling gold. Marco sat beside me on a blanket I had brought, knees drawn up.
He looked peaceful.
That was a dangerous word to apply to how I felt about him, but it was the accurate one. When Marco was peaceful, when his shoulders were loose and his breathing was even and his eyes were soft instead of guarded, something in me went quiet too.
I pulled out the food I had brought.
It was wrapped carefully in a cloth napkin, packed in a small container.
I had made it that morning. Dimitri’s lessons had been adequate, at best. His instructions were clear enough, but his standards were clearly calibrated to Rei’s preferences rather than any objective quality, which made them unreliable as a teaching framework.
Still, I had followed them and produced this.
Marco looked at the container.
“Taste it,” I said.
He blinked, then reached for a piece of chicken with careful fingers. He took a small bite, chewed slowly.
“Is it shit?” I asked.
He shook his head quickly. “Um. A little bland. But it’s not bad.”
I stared at the container.
Bland.
Fuck me sideways.
Dimitri’s lessons were shit, then. Or my execution was shit. Or both. Possibly both. Possibly the entire endeavor was a waste of time and I had hauled myself out of bed at an unreasonable hour to produce food that was, in the most generous assessment possible, not bad.
I looked at Marco.
He must have seen something shift in my face.
I didn’t know what, exactly, since I had long ago trained my features into neutrality, but Marco had an irritating ability to read past the mask when I wasn’t actively maintaining it.
His eyes widened slightly and he immediately set the food down. “Where did you get this from?”
“I made it.”
“It’s good!” he said, voice pitching higher. “It’s really good. It’s the best, actually.”
He shook his hands frantically in front of himself, the gesture so earnest and so transparently desperate that I almost, almost found it amusing.
“It’s the best really,” he repeated, nodding too fast. “I mean it. Really. The best. Ten out of ten. I would eat it every day. Every meal. I’m not even kidding.”
“You’re lying,” I said flatly.
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
“Okay, I’m embellishing slightly, but—”
“Marco.”
He faltered, pressing his lips together and I exhaled slowly through my nose.
“No. I’ll improve. I’ll make sure I make you better food.”
“Why are you making me food?” he asked.
“So you won’t have to cook.”
Marco was no longer permitted to endanger his own hands. He didn’t need any of that. He only needed to eat.
He looked down at the food, then back at me, then out at the water. His throat moved as he swallowed. “You’re really sweet.”
The words landed strangely.
I had been called many things in my life, but never sweet.
I turned the word over in my mind like an unfamiliar object.
“I can’t be sweet.”
Marco looked at me, surprised.
“Sweet is someone nice. I can’t be nice. Niceness requires emotions, and I don’t have those.”
“Why do you think you don’t have emotions?”
The information was private. I had spent years keeping it sealed because it served no purpose to share it and because sharing it would invite questions I didn’t want to answer.
But Marco was looking at me the way he always looked at me, like he actually wanted to know, not to use it against me, but simply to understand.
“Because I was diagnosed.”
Marco’s eyes widened slightly.
“What I mean,” I continued, “is that I’ve been diagnosed. With certain conditions. By professionals. When I was younger.”
“With what?” he asked quietly.
I exhaled through my nose and looked out at the water for a moment before answering.
“Antisocial personality disorder. Sociopathic traits. Emotional detachment. Difficulty forming genuine connections. They threw around a few other labels when I was younger, but that’s the main list. I don’t feel things the way most people do. I never have.”
Marco tilted his head slightly, unfazed. Like I had just told him the weather instead of listing the reasons I was fundamentally broken.
“I don’t think you don’t have emotions,” he said.
I let out a short, humorless breath. “I don’t though.
I can’t even feel connections the way normal people do.
My parents died when I was thirteen. Most kids would’ve been devastated.
Cried for weeks. I didn’t particularly feel anything.
I remember sitting in the hospital and thinking about what that meant for the family name.
For the inheritance. For me. Not about them. ”
“I don’t know what your relationship with your parents was like, but you do feel things for people.”
“I don’t.”
“You do.”
“I don’t, Marco.”
He held my gaze with that stubborn certainty that he sometimes had.
“I think you love and care for Ilya and Dimitri,” he said.
I nearly laughed from the sheer absurdity of the statement.
The idea that I, the person I had been informed I was at age ten and re-informed of every year since, could love anyone was so fundamentally incompatible with my understanding of myself that I didn’t know how to process it as a serious suggestion.
“No. They’re duty to me.”
“Duty,” Marco repeated, like he was tasting the word.
“Yes.”
He tilted his head the other way, thinking, and then said, “When you grabbed Ilya that one time, I saw real regret flash through your eyes. You felt bad for doing it. I saw it. It was only for a second, but it was there. You let go of him faster than you grabbed him.”
I opened my mouth but he continued.
“And every time Dimitri calls you because he needs something,” Marco went on, “you go out of your way to get it done. Even when you could say no.”
“That’s familial obligation.”
“I think if something happened to Ilya or Dimitri, you’d be really sad.”
I had never thought about it that way.
I had never thought about it at all, in fact.
Ilya and Dimitri had always existed in a specific category in my mind.
Extensions of myself, in a way. Parts of the structure I had been born into and navigated with the same efficiency I applied to everything.
They were there because they had always been there.
I didn’t examine what that meant. I didn’t examine what I would feel if they weren’t there.
But now Marco had asked, indirectly, and I was forced to consider it.
If something happened to Ilya.
If I never heard his ridiculous laugh again. If I never watched him collapse in theatrical horror over a spider. If his particular brand of cheerful chaos vanished from the world and left a silence where he used to be.
If something happened to Dimitri.
If his voice never came through my phone again. If I never again stood beside him in a ring, watching him grin, believing against all evidence that one day he would put me on my back.
I didn’t think I would feel nothing.
I had always considered them extensions of me.
But extensions don’t leave holes when removed.
And Ilya and Dimitri, if removed, would leave holes.
I didn’t speak because I didn’t know what to say.
Marco had, in approximately two minutes, dismantled a framework I had carried since childhood.
He had seen things I hadn’t known were visible.
I was speechless.
I didn’t like being speechless.
But I couldn’t seem to find my way back to language.
Marco leaned in. “You’re sweet,” he said again.
And then he pressed his lips to my cheek.
I melted.
There was no other word for it.
The tension I carried in my jaw, in my shoulders, in the permanent stillness I maintained behind my eyes - all of it loosened at once, dissolving under the warmth of his mouth against my skin. My breath left me slowly. My hands, which had been resting at my sides, went slack against the blanket.
Marco pulled back.
He looked at me nervously, as if he had only just realized what he had done.
“Sorry,” he whispered. “Was that—? I shouldn’t have—”
“Don’t apologize,” I said.
I still couldn’t look at him. If I looked at him right now, I didn’t know what my face would do. I didn’t trust it.
Marco settled back beside me as the sun sank lower.
And I sat there, undone by a kiss on the cheek from a boy who believed I had emotions, and didn’t know whether to be terrified or grateful that he might be right.
***