Chapter 26 - Alexei
So there had been an upgrade.
Clingy no longer cut it.
I was, at this stage, straight-up down bad.
Two weeks since I had crawled through his window, and I hadn’t gone a single night without doing it again.
Sometimes I entered with the need to bury myself in him, but more often than not, I climbed through to find him waiting, or sleeping, or pretending to sleep, and what I wanted most urgently was not to fuck him but simply to hold him.
To be held by him in return, though I would never have said that aloud.
It was rattling me.
I was neither stupid nor a coward. I could recognize that I felt something. The problem was taxonomy. I had spent my entire life in a vocabulary of negative spaces. The absence was what defined me.
So when something began to grow in the hollow where nothing should have been able to take root, I didn’t know what to call it.
It wasn’t obsession.
Not anymore.
Obsession was cold.
This was warmer.
More dangerous.
More permanent.
Was it care?
The word felt clumsy in my mouth. Care implied softness I didn’t trust myself to perform.
Was it love?
I barely knew what the word meant outside of clinical definitions and cynical deconstructions.
And yet.
When I looked at Marco, I wanted impossible things.
I wanted to preserve him. I wanted to cage every cruel thing the universe had ever fashioned before it could learn the shape of his name. I wanted to unmake every wound carved into him and bury the hands that had held the knife.
His smile felt like an endangered species, something too fragile to survive in a world that devoured beautiful things. Every time it appeared, I found myself wanting to lock it away.
I wanted to kill anyone who hurt him.
Slowly and quickly. Both. Simultaneously.
I wanted to put myself between him and harm the way the earth puts itself between the core and the cold of space.
This wasn’t romantic.
Not in any way poets would recognize.
It was visceral. I wanted to carve his name into my bones so that if anyone ever found my corpse, they would know who had owned me completely.
That was what frightened me.
I had been raised to consume. To control. To bend the world into shapes that served my family’s interests and my own satisfaction. And now I found myself wanting to be consumed.
I didn’t know what that made me.
I didn’t know what that made us.
All I knew was that I could no longer go a day without seeing him. Without hearing his voice. Without confirming that he still existed in the world, still breathed, still carried that impossible brightness that had cracked open the void in me with no regard for whether I wanted to be cracked.
I looked at him now.
We were near his house, on a small hill I had discovered during one of my nocturnal observations. The city was distant enough that the light pollution softened, and the stars above us burned with a clarity I rarely found in places I usually inhabited.
Marco was looking at the stars.
He sat with his knees drawn up, arms wrapped around them. The moonlight turned his olive skin silver at the edges, made his lashes cast shadows against his cheeks, pulled soft highlights from the wild disorder of his hair.
He looked so beautiful I could barely breathe.
I had seen him frightened and shattered and naked and undone.
I had seen him furious, shy, laughing, crying, asleep, awake, wanting, pulling away.
Every version of him was burned into me now with the permanence of scar tissue.
And still, still, every time I looked at him, I found something new.
Some angle of light I hadn’t noticed. Some expression that rearranged the architecture of my chest.
God.
I would never get over how pretty he was.
He was looking at the stars, pointing out something low on the horizon, saying something about his hope star that I barely heard because I was too busy memorizing the shape of his profile against the dark.
I didn’t look at the stars.
I was looking at him.
And I understood something.
Maybe I did love him.
Not in a normal way. I wasn’t capable of normal ways.
What I felt for Marco was too complex for the simple vocabulary other people used, too full of contradictions.
I wanted to protect him and I wanted to ruin him.
I wanted to see him smile and I wanted to be the only reason he ever did.
I wanted to hand him the world and I wanted to keep him locked somewhere only I could reach.
There was no word for what I felt.
No word I knew. No word anyone had taught me.
But it was there, burning in the void like a star that refused to be extinguished, and maybe I needed to voice it in some way, to let him know.
“Marco.” My voice came out rougher than I intended.
He turned.
His hazel eyes caught the starlight and held it, turning luminous and unreadable. He looked at me with that expression he sometimes had when he was trying to understand something about me.
“Yes?”
I opened my mouth.
The words were there. Jumbled. Too many of them. Not enough. I had never been good at this. At speaking.
But Marco deserved more than assumptions.
He deserved more than silence.
He deserved the thing itself, the closest I could come to honesty.
“Alexei?” His voice was concerned.
I stepped closer. “I have something to tell you.”
I took a breath.
“I don’t really know how,” I began, the words tumbling out now, unstoppable.
“I’m not good at this. I know I’m not articulating properly.
I’ve never felt in my life and I can’t recognize emotions most of the time, but looking at you, there are things I can see so clearly.
My heart does this weird thing. It hurts and it races and it feels too full and I don’t know what to do with that except want to be near you, want to protect you, want to be whatever you need me to be… ”
I was rambling.
I never rambled.
But the words kept coming, spilling out of me. “I think I lov—”
I didn’t finish.
Because Marco went up on his toes and pressed his hand over my mouth.
“Don’t,” he whispered.
His eyes were wet. His hand was trembling against my lips.
“Don’t say it.”
I stared at him. The word died in my throat, strangled by his fingers, by his tears, by the terrible conflict I saw in his face. I furrowed my eyebrows.
He was still holding his hand over my mouth, trembling. Then he took a step back. His arm fell to his side, and his tears, which had been gathering at the edges of his eyes, held back by some terrible effort of will, finally broke free. They spilled down his cheeks.
“Just…” He swallowed hard and tried again. “Don’t say it. I… I can’t do this.”
Then he ran.
He moved so fast I was caught in a freeze, my body refusing to process what my eyes were seeing.
One moment he was there, crying, his hand still warm where it had pressed against my lips.
The next he was gone, a small dark shape flying down the hill, his ribbon slipping loose from his curls and his bare feet barely making sound against the dry grass.
I stood alone on the hill with half a word still dying in my throat.
Then I ran after him.
The sky split open.
Rain came down, soaking through my shirt in seconds.
It turned the ground treacherous. I could see Marco ahead of me, still running, his smaller frame cutting through the downpour.
His outline blurred at the edges, becoming less a person and more a suggestion of one, a ghost I was desperately trying not to lose.
“Marco!”
He reached his house ahead of me. He threw himself at the door, fumbled with the handle, and slipped inside.
I arrived two seconds later.
The door shut in my face.
I stood on his front step, rain streaming down my face, my hair plastered to my skull, my chest heaving. The wood was old and worn beneath my palm. I could feel the vibration of him on the other side. He was right there. Close enough to touch if the world would only permit it.
“Marco,” I said.
No response.
“Open the door.”
Nothing.
I pressed my hand flat against the wood.
“Is…” The word came out barely formed. I had to force the rest through a throat that felt like it had been filled with broken glass. “Is being loved by me such a tragedy?”
“No. But loving me is.”
How could he say that?
“Marco,” my voice broke. “Talk to me. Let me in. Don’t make me break this door. I don’t want to use force all the time. But I will break it if you try to shut me out.”
The rain hammered against my shoulders, against the earth.
“I’m sick.”
I stopped breathing.
My heart lunged inside my chest. I felt a convulsion that made my vision spark at the edges. Sick. The word landed like a stone in still water, sending ripples outward through everything I thought I knew.
For one stupid second, I wanted to ask if he had a cold.
A fever.
Something temporary and trivial and easily fixed.
But I was thrown backward, violently, to that night in Italy.
The small boy under the lemon tree with a hospital needle hidden in his pocket. The bruise at his elbow. The way his breathing had seemed labored even sitting still. My body is bad sometimes. The words he had spoken years ago or five minutes ago - I could no longer tell the difference.
My hand against the door began to shake.
I never trembled.
Not when I was thirteen and a doctor diagnosed me as inhuman. Not when I watched my parents’ coffins lower into frozen earth. Not when I killed my first man or my twentieth or my fiftieth. My hands had always been steady.
Now I trembled.
My chest rose and fell too fast, suddenly unable to find enough air. I pressed my forehead against the door and waited for my voice to return, for my body to remember who I was.
“Open the door.” My voice was so fragile.
So vulnerable.
A voice I didn’t recognize emerging from my own body.
I heard him shift on the other side, then the lock clicked.
The door opened inward. There was no one home, so it was only the two of us.
Marco stood in the gap, backlit by the dark hallway behind him. His face was wet, rain and tears indistinguishable now, streaming down his cheeks and dripping from his chin.
Our eyes met.
“I love you.”
I stepped across the threshold and said it again because once wasn’t enough, because I needed him to hear it in every language I possessed, every register, every possible iteration until there was no doubt left in either of us.
“Ti amo.”
I took another step closer.
He stepped back.
I kept moving forward, into the hallway, dripping rainwater onto the worn floorboards, my hair hanging in my eyes, my hands open at my sides because I didn’t trust them not to grab him, not to hold him too hard, not to beg with my body what my words could not adequately convey.
“Ya tebya lyublyu.”
Marco’s back hit the wall.
He had nowhere left to go.
His tears were streaming faster now, his whole body shaking with the effort of holding himself together. He shook his head slowly, the motion barely perceptible, and whispered, “Please… don’t…”
“Don’t step away from me,” I said. “Don’t push me away. I’ll beg you if you want me to. I’ll get on my knees right here in your hallway. I’ll beg, Marco. I’ll do whatever you need. Just don’t—” My throat closed.
I reached him.
My hands came up to frame his face, my thumbs brushing the tracks of his tears, my fingers sliding into his curls. His skin was burning hot beneath my palms, or maybe my hands were just that cold from the rain.
He closed his eyes. “I’m dying, Alexei.”
I shook my head immediately.
“No.”
I lowered my forehead to his, needing the contact. “No. You’re not.”
His breath stuttered. I could feel it against my mouth.
“My heart is…” He swallowed hard, and the next words came broken. “Bad.”
Something inside me recoiled.
Not because I hadn’t known.
Because I had.
That was the unbearable part.
I had known.
And I had done what I did best when faced with something intolerable: I had built a wall around the knowledge and pretended it wasn’t there.
I pressed closer to him instead, my hands sliding from his face to the back of his neck, holding him like I could keep his head above water through touch alone.
“I’ll take care of your heart,” I whispered.
My own voice shook.
That, more than anything, might have terrified me if I had room for self-reflection just then. But there was no room. There was only Marco. Marco in front of me, crying, telling me that his heart was failing him.
“I won’t let anything happen to it,” It was a promise.
Impossible, irrational, arrogant, yes. All of those things. I knew that even as I said it. I knew I was making vows against biology, against time, against whatever cruel thing had built a fault line into his body.
I kissed his forehead.
Then I pulled him against my chest.
He folded into me and I wrapped both arms around him. My hand slid up and down his back in strokes while his tears soaked through my shirt.
He cried softly.
I had been a fool.
The first moment I saw him again some part of me had known. Not consciously, perhaps but the memory of that night in Italy had never fully left my body.
The possibility of his illness had stayed with me from the beginning.
But he looked healthy and I allowed myself the cowardice of denial.
Because I had been afraid of what I would feel if I went looking and found what I already suspected.
So I told myself his dizziness meant he hadn’t eaten. It was enough that I could tell myself the hand pressed to his chest was anxiety, not pain. Enough that I could believe the child in Italy had simply grown out of whatever had once made him sick.
I had seen the signs at the edge of my vision every time.
I had simply chosen not to center them.
And now here he was, crying in my arms, and I could not forgive myself for the luxury of that refusal.
I tucked his head under my chin and listened to his breathing.
Whatever was wrong with his heart, whatever was trying to kill him, I wouldn’t allow it.
He was mine. He’d been mine since I was ten years old.
No one will take him from me. Not his illness.
Not death. Not the fucking universe itself.
I’d burn every hospital to the ground and rebuild it if that’s what it took.
I’d drag specialists from every corner of the world and make them fix what was broken inside him.
I’d hold him like this every night until his heart learned how to beat the way it was supposed to.
Marco made a soft sound against my chest and clutched the back of my shirt with both hands, fingers bunching the wet fabric like he was afraid I might let go.
I never would.