Chapter Ten #3
A first glance revealed gauze at the top of the kit as well as tape and a wad of cotton. Damir grabbed all of it. He turned to leave the bathroom, thought it over, and grabbed the whole kit.
In the kitchen, Kilian awkwardly mopped up the blood on the countertop with his left hand, his right still elevated and the blood running down in rivulets.
“What are you doing?” Damir snarled. He snatched Kilian’s hand and inspected the damage. It needed cleaning again.
“Stop pulling me around,” Kilian said, but he let himself be maneuvered back to the sink.
“Stop making it worse,” Damir told him.
“It’s a cut, Damir. I’ll be fine.”
“If you can’t play because I made you chop salad—”
“I offered, and I can play. All I need is a bandage.”
“Let me be the judge of that.”
He turned Kilian’s hand over in his and inspected the cut under the stream of running water. With the blood washed away, he could see Kilian was right; the cut was deep but narrow. The bleeding would stop, and Kilian probably wouldn’t notice it on the ice.
“Let me do it properly,” he demanded nonetheless. “It needs to be sterile. Hockey gloves are disgusting.”
Kilian said nothing, but he let Damir dry his hand with a fresh towel. Damir then laid a sterile cotton wad carefully on the wound and began wrapping the gauze around Kilian’s finger and then his hand to hold it in place.
Once, when Damir was very young, he traveled to Kazan with his parents.
His grandfather had died, and his grandmother had gotten old.
His mother decided to move her to their apartment block in Moscow in case she needed help, and when she refused, the whole family came to drag her back with them.
Damir had never been so far south before, and he’d never lived in a house with its own garden like his grandparents had.
There was a birdhouse in the garden. His grandmother had bought it at the hardware store when she started living alone. “So I have some joy in my day,” she said long-sufferingly. “Joy my daughter means to take away by trapping me in Moscow.”
Damir had wandered outside to the birdhouse, uninterested in yet another round of the same argument.
The bird that had been sitting there nibbling at birdseed was nothing much, a common European swallow, but it had been so focused on its food it didn’t care when Damir ran a finger down its feathered back.
Kilian’s hand felt the same under his touch, delicate and fragile but at the same time whole and strong.
“Damir,” Kilian said.
The gauze was fully wrapped. Kilian’s hand was still in his.
“Yes.” Damir met those eyes with his own. “That’s how I want you to say my name.”
Kilian drew in a deep, shocky breath. Nothing in the world could have stopped Damir kissing him then, nothing at all but the loud clatter of Ketchup’s door opening and his call of “Yo, is dinner ready yet?”
They sprang apart. Kilian returned to the cutting board and Damir to his half-finished chebureki.
“Twenty minutes,” Damir told Ketchup when he appeared in the doorway.
“Ugh, I’m starving. I’m telling you, pasta would have been way faster.”
“If speed is so important to you, you’re welcome to do your own cooking.”
Ketchup held his hands up. “Just kidding! I’m sure this will be delicious, and—hey, bro, what happened to your hand?”
He settled into the bar stool across from Kilian as Kilian retold the events of the last five minutes.
He left out all the parts where Damir behaved unhinged, making the story both short and very boring, but Ketchup stayed anyway, chatting with Kilian until Damir dished up steaming hot chebureki and fresh salad.
By rights, it should have been a comfortable, enjoyable evening with his roommates in which they praised Damir for his culinary skills and Damir pretended not to be pleased.
He spent the entirety of dinner wishing Ketchup would go away and play computer games so Damir could be alone with Kilian.
In the ordinary scheme of events, he would have been thrilled when Ketchup offered to put away the dishes (for Ketchup’s personal development, not because he did anything approaching a good job).
Today, it only prolonged the time it took for Ketchup to go back to his room.
Unfortunately, when he did, Kilian followed closely after, yawning.
Damir was left alone in the spotless kitchen, glaring at his own shadowy reflection in the glass door of the in-wall oven.
He set the remaining two chebureki in a plastic container and slid them into the fridge for leftovers.
Ketchup would probably steal them tomorrow.
On consideration, Damir stuck the container in the crisper.
Ketchup never looked in there. Kilian had liked the chebureki enough to have licked crumbs from his fingers.
That image ran on a loop in the disgusting part of Damir’s id dedicated to the softcore porn film he’d make of Kilian if he had any artistic talent.
Maybe Damir could subtly direct him to the leftovers before Ketchup found them.
He closed the fridge, then opened it again and put the container where it belonged on the leftover shelf.
Since when was he this insane?
His phone buzzed on the counter, for once a welcome distraction.