Chapter Thirty-Seven
So, This Is Love
We meet Luke’s other two roommates, Star and Dmitry, later that night for dinner at a fancy seafood restaurant called Hav & Mar a few blocks from the apartment.
According to Rei, it’s one of Luke’s favorites, so they’d taken the liberty of making reservations as a surprise for his return, much to Luke’s delight.
Luke stares at the menu with a twinge of remorse.
Knowing his woes about money, I grab his hand and pull him closer, whispering that he should order whatever he wants and that it’s on me.
I can tell he wants to shut me down immediately, almost like a knee-jerk response, but I insist until he flushes pink and returns to the menu.
The slight smile on his lips and the way he physically relaxes with that worry out of the way is reward enough.
While we drink and wait for the food to arrive, I get to know everyone and learn how they all met.
Rei is twenty-eight, the youngest of the group.
They’re a New Yorker, through and through, and their parents still live in Brooklyn.
Bob and Cindy, as Rei affectionately calls them, are incredibly supportive and never had an issue after Rei came out as non-binary and genderfluid at fourteen.
In fact, they embraced it so quickly that Rei felt scammed out of a proper coming-out experience.
“I put together a whole PowerPoint presentation with my research on the subject to help them understand what I was going through, but they didn’t even let me get to it!
” Rei exclaims exasperatedly, though with obvious warmth.
“They weren’t even the least bit confused and just immediately accepted it like, ‘That’s my them!
’ It was fucking hilarious. But that’s Bob and Cindy for ya. ”
Everyone immediately jumps in with more heartwarming stories of Rei’s parents, and I get the sense that they’ve all been embraced under their supportive wings.
Luke confirms that they’ve gotten together for almost every major holiday and even taken a few vacations together, which is a pleasure most of this group hasn’t been afforded by their own families in a long time.
Star especially thinks of them as her adoptive parents.
She’s a thirty-six-year-old transwoman from the deepest heart of the Mississippi bible-belt, who left home at sixteen for obvious reasons.
She’s been no-contact with most of her family for the last twenty years.
However, she still talks with her brother occasionally—he’s the only one who accepted her transition and stopped calling her by her deadname, though he’ll only call her when there’s no one around to hear him.
She’s accepted it for what it is and is at least glad he makes the effort to connect with her.
Yet her story isn’t all bad. She’d found her way to NYC and made friends with others in the queer community who took her in and helped her get settled.
The way she explains it sounds almost romantic, even though I know she likely struggled a lot with it at the time.
And this, she says, is when she found her unexpected calling in art restoration.
After slowly putting herself through college with grants and scholarships, and working seven days a week at a little diner, she found work with a local, independent, but well-known, art conservationist. She’s been cleaning and retouching old paintings, repairing priceless porcelain vases, and helping her boss when he’s asked to consult on very famous pieces in art museums and private collections all around the world ever since. She’s loved every minute of it.
Not too shockingly, she and Rei met in art school, and they’ve been best friends for as long as they’ve known each other.
Together, they met Luke through a mutual friend at a New Year’s party eight years ago, falling madly in love with him after only five minutes of conversation.
They describe their first meeting as a daring rescue, like Luke was being held captive and they had valiantly liberated him.
Luke clarifies that he’d just caught his boyfriend doing coke and having sex with a twink from Jersey in the bathroom, so he was in desperate need of escape.
Since he’d been living with the guy, he needed a place to go, and Rei and Star jumped at the opportunity to bring him home.
Then there’s Dmitry, the only one among the group who has nothing to do with the arts.
Instead, he took the path to becoming a real estate agent and is slowly growing his business from the ground up.
He’s a first-generation American, born in Russia, but raised by immigrant parents who fled the Soviet Union near the end of the Cold War when he was a baby.
New York City is the only home he’s ever known.
But at seventeen, after his devout Eastern Orthodox parents discovered that he was gay, they kicked him out of the house when he refused to repent and give up his ‘homosexual behaviors.’ He was effectively homeless for a few years after that, couch surfing whenever possible and living in shelters, working two, sometimes three, jobs until he’d saved up enough money to find a stable place of his own.
He got roped into joining this gang about five years ago after Luke surreptitiously asked to tour an apartment that Dmitry’s agency had listed in the Upper West Side, despite it being a few too many zeros outside his tax bracket.
Apparently, touring ridiculously expensive homes is a regular pastime for Luke, his shameless defense being that it brings him joy to see how the other half lives.
In this case, Dmitry had been given the grunt work of showing it for a colleague who was vacationing in the Maldives, though he would get none of the commission for his efforts if it sold.
Not that it mattered since he’d clocked Luke immediately as someone who would not be making an offer anytime soon.
But, he adds with a humorous glint in his eye, he’d fallen madly in love with Luke the moment he saw him, too, admitting he’d flirted with him quite openly.
“Wait, so you two…?” I ask, looking between them curiously. Dmitry shoots Luke an undecipherable look, and Luke goes pink around the ears.
“We may have debauched the poor, unsuspecting millionaire’s home once or twice during the tour,” Luke says with a sheepish grin that grows more wicked by the second until both he and Dmitry start laughing at the shared memory.
“Puh-lease,” Dmitry wheezes, breaking the word into two syllables. “That man probably had wilder sex parties in that apartment than what we did. Did you see the fresco in the downstairs bathroom?”
“Oh my god, yes! Just a straight-up orgy right there on the wall for everyone to see!”
“Still one of the highlights of my career.” Dmitry laughs, giving Luke a little wink.
I get a very clear picture of the two of them together, naked and blissed out in the middle of a fancy high-rise apartment, and it lights a tiny spark of jealousy in my gut.
This part of Luke’s history wasn’t disclosed when he told me all about his roommates, but now that I find I’m sitting at the table with one of his exes (is that what he’d call him?), it’s a little awkward.
Still, my morbid curiosity gets the better of me, and I can’t help but ask, “So, how long were you two together?”
“Like dating?” Dmitry asks with an unexpected look of horror that brings me up short. “Oh, no, honey, we never dated. We hooked up a few times here and there, but we knew right off the bat that we’d be a disastrous couple. His dramatic ass is way too high maintenance for my taste.”
“Says the man with a thirty-minute skincare routine.” Luke interjects, arching a brow at Dmitry accusatorily.
“Okay, well, not all of us were born with the literal face and skin of a Greek God, Apollo,” Dmitry tuts. “The rest of us basic bitches have to put in a lot of effort to look this good.”
I burst out laughing at the quip, finding it ironic that Dmitry chose to compare my boyfriend to the very same god I compared him to a month ago.
Luke shoots me a commiserating smile, and I know he’s thinking the same thing.
Then he turns and gives Dmitry a meaningful, almost sultry look, really laying the charm on thick.
“It must be tough basking in such glory.”
“Well, anyway,” Dmitry continues with a roll of his eyes, though there’s a noticeable blush on his cheeks.
“As I was saying, we got to talking after all that sexy business, when Luke mentioned the group was looking for another roommate to help lower some costs, and my lease was expiring in a month. Next thing you know….”
“He wandered in like a stray kitten, and we adopted him,” Rei adds cheerfully.
Dmitry turns and gives them a flabbergasted grin before shaking his head. “Excuse me. I think you mean I’ve adopted you. Honestly, I don’t know how you all managed to keep the lights on as long as you did without me. I’ve never seen so many adults who didn’t know how to balance a checkbook.”
This devolves into a loud but happy argument, the four of them bickering back and forth jovially about who saved whose ass, and it’s immediately apparent that this is their love speak.
Given how bright and cheerful they become as they poke and prod one another, it’s easy to see how deeply connected they are.
So much affection is infused in their teasing that it’s almost nauseating to be on the outside witnessing it in action.
But it fills my chest with a warm glow all the same, knowing that, without question, this is Luke’s family.
These are the people he calls home, the ones he trusts implicitly to have his back, and it’s easy to imagine the four of them coming together in a time of crisis to tackle a hardship.
Seeing how at ease Luke is in their company only adds to that feeling.