Chapter 11 Tikh
Iwake at six to a smell that does not belong in Atlanta.
Roux, first. Dark roux. Patient. An hour old already, which means he got up at five.
Which means he did not sleep much. Which means today is the day he has been building toward with the subtlety of a parade.
Under the roux, coffee. Under the coffee, something older.
Cast iron heating. A particular mineral warmth that I know from one kitchen in the world.
That kitchen is an ocean and half a continent from this apartment.
I lie still for one minute and let it work on me. Then I get up. The Cup arrived last night and is standing in our living room wearing a bath towel like a prizefighter. The man in my kitchen has been waiting for me to wake up since five.
Bastian is at the stove with his hair tied back and Bug on his shoulders like a stole. He is stirring with a wooden spoon I do not own. On the stove, next to my tray and my grinder and my white coffee mugs, there is a pot. I have never seen it before.
It is enormous. It is black. It has the finish cast iron only gets from decades, the surface gone satin, the sides carrying small scars like a defenseman. It is the kind of object museums put behind glass and call folk art, and he is cooking in it like it’s an everyday pot.
“You’re staring,” he says, without turning around.
“I am assessing.” I come closer. The gumbo is deep brown, andouille and chicken, the trinity gone soft, filé standing by in its seven-dollar jar. He is making it the whole way. No mercy. I look at the pot again. “Bastian. What is this?”
“Breakfast, eventually.”
“I mean the pot.”
He turns around then. Bug rides the turn like a sailor. I watch the volume drain out of him. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it means the ground is about to move.
“That’s my grandmother’s gumbo pot,” he says. “My mère’s mama. She fed the whole street out of it every Friday for forty years. My mère kept it in the cabinet under the window ever since. Nobody cooks out of it but her. You don’t ask for it.” He wipes his hands on the towel. “I asked for it.”
“That is why you went to Louisiana?”
“That’s why.”
I look at the pot. Seasoned by two generations of hands, carried here on an airplane. Heating on my stove between my kettle and my mugs like it has always been there.
“You should not have taken this from your family,” I say, because someone has to say the reasonable thing, and it is always me.
“I didn’t take it from my family.” He says it easily. “It’s still in the family. That’s the point. It stays here, Tishka. It’s yours now. Ours. My mère said to tell you her mama fed the whole bayou out of it and never once asked anything of anybody.”
I look at the pot for a long time.
When the schedule went around in June, every man on this team wrote down a homecoming.
I wrote down my own address, the same as Avi, except it did not mean what it meant for Avi.
It meant: there is nowhere to take it. He watched me be good with that fact for a month.
And then he flew to Louisiana and asked his mother for the pot.
“Tikhon.” His voice is careful now. “Say something, cher.”
“You put a seatbelt on it,” I say, because I have seen Sadie’s phone. “In the airplane.”
“She’s family.”
“You are ridiculous.”
“I’m extremely ridiculous. Come here.”
The gumbo cooks all morning, the way it is supposed to.
We eat the first bowls at noon, right next to the Cup and the keeper.
Mishka watches from the bookshelf with the expression of a tsar reviewing troops.
It is absurd. It is the best thing I have ever eaten.
“The roux is better than March,” I tell him.
He puts his hand over his heart like I have knighted him. In the vocabulary of this kitchen, I have.
His mother calls on speakerphone while the second bowls go around. She talks to Bastian for one minute and to me for twenty.
“Did the roux go to pecans?” she asks me. Not him. Me.
“Just past. He held it there.”
“Did he scorch my onions?” Her accent is thick, but I understand her. Just as I have learned to understand Baz when he leans into it too.
“He did not. I watched.”
“Good. Somebody has to.” She pauses. “Tikhon. The pot. How does it look on your stove?”
“It looks like it has always been there.”
“Bon,” she says. Then she wants to know when we are coming down. Both of us. Together. She says both of us as if it is something she decided a while ago. She does not say anything enormous. That is what makes it enormous.
My own mother has known about him since May. I told her on a Sunday call with my heart in my ears. She was quiet for eleven seconds. Then she asked three questions. His name. His age. Whether he can cook. Now she ends every call the same way. Say hello to Bastian. She has never met him. Mothers.
I don’t tell her everything, all the details.
I will not, for a long time. Maybe ever.
This is a weight I have carried so long it has stopped being luggage and become posture.
But she knows the shape of my life now, and she blesses it in her own dialect.
Hello to Bastian. Today, in this kitchen that smells like his grandmother’s, the ocean between my two homes feels less like a wall and more like a distance.
Distances can be crossed. This is a meaningful upgrade.
The sea-glass jar goes on the windowsill in the afternoon.
He puts it there with ceremony. He adjusts it twice.
He tells me its full biography. The counting of colors.
The old house. The aunt who absorbed it.
Our windowsill now holds one jar of Louisiana beach glass.
At six, the light comes through it and throws small green and blue coins across my floor.
Bug loses her mind about them. I stand in my kitchen watching a cat hunt light, and something in my chest that has been braced for years lets go.
After the keeper leaves with the Cup, the pot is washed later that night with no soap and dried on the flame, the way the instructions came to us. He leans in the doorway of the bedroom with his hair loose and says, “So. Day one of two. How’s it rating so far, on the record?”
“Come here and I will tell you.”
He comes here. I take his wrist and feel the pulse in it go up, the way it has gone up for me since a kitchen counter in January. I walk him backward to the bed. The day was his gift to me. This is mine to him, and I intend to give it thoroughly.
“Clothes off,” I tell him. “Slowly. I want to watch.”
He talks while he strips, because he is Baz, a running commentary on my bossiness, the thread count, the cats’ whereabouts, the historical significance of the day.
I let him run. I fold my own clothes onto the chair while he talks, because watching me be unhurried does more to him than any hand could.
By the time I put him on his back on our bed, he is hard against his stomach and the commentary has developed gaps.
I start at his throat. My hand around it, light, thumb on his pulse. He presses up into the hold. He always presses up into the hold. That is the consent, ours, older than any conversation, and I tighten my grip to exactly the pressure that makes his eyes lose focus.
“Tikh.”
“Quiet.” I say it low, next to his ear. “Today I did the listening. Tonight you do it. Here is the schedule.”
His whole body goes still under my hand. He loves a schedule. He has never once followed one, but he loves knowing it exists.
“First,” I tell him, in the voice I use for line changes, “I am going to suck your cock until you forget the English word for please. You will not come. You will want to. You will beg. The answer will be no.” His breath goes ragged against my palm.
“Second. My fingers, with the lube, until you are open and swearing at me and pushing back on my hand like it insulted your family. Third. I am going to fuck you on your back in our bed, slow, until you beg again, and then exactly as hard as you beg for, for as long as I decide. Fourth. You will come with my hand on your throat and my name in your mouth, and I will tell you which name when we get there.” I let go of his throat. Sit back. Look at him. “Questions?”
His cock jumps against his stomach at nothing. At words. I have not touched it, and I tell him so, because accuracy matters.
“One question,” he says, hoarse. “Can the schedule start now?”
Item one. I go down on him without preamble, all the way, and he shouts something in French that no priest in Louisiana would recognize, and his hand flies to my hair and grips hard, and I let him have that.
He needs one thing to hold. I am the thing.
I suck him slow and deep and merciless, his cock heavy on my tongue, salt and clean skin and the sounds pouring out of him getting less like language by the minute.
When his thighs start to shake and his hips start to chase, I pull off him with deliberate slowness and he says please four times in a row.
“There it is,” I tell him. “You remembered the English after all.”
“I hate the schedule.”
“You love the schedule.”
“I love the schedule,” he agrees, wrecked, and pulls me up into a kiss that tastes like himself.
Item two. The lube is in the drawer. I slick my fingers and open him up the way I do everything, patiently and to specification, one finger and then two, curling until I find the spot that makes his back come off the bed, and then avoiding it, and then finding it again, until he is swearing at me in two languages and grinding down onto my hand with zero shame and total honesty.
“Tikhon. Cher. More.”
“When I decide.”
“You are a war criminal.”
“You are begging beautifully. Continue.” Bastian Fontenot has never once been embarrassed about wanting. It is the bravest thing about him. I add a third finger and tell him how he looks, in detail, in the precise voice, because nothing takes this man apart faster than hearing exactly what I see.
“Tikh.” He has stopped using his radio voice. This one is raw and low and only mine. “Tishka, cher, please, item three, I am begging you, this is me begging now.”
“I know what you need.” I slick myself with the lube, line up, and hold his jaw so he is looking at me. “Say it anyway.”
“Fuck me. Please. Yours. Whatever order you want the words in.”
That order is acceptable.
I push into him slowly, one long unhurried press, all the way, and hold there, seated deep. “Good?” I ask, because at this point I ask every time.
“Move. Please. Tishka. Move.”
I hold there one second longer, seated deep, his body hot and tight around my cock and his mouth open on a sound with no consonants in it.
And I watch it happen. The thing I will never say out loud in English, because English is for the team and the cameras.
All the tracks. All the tabs. The five lanes of him, the pinball architecture, the beautiful loud machine that runs this man day and night, and it goes quiet around me one system at a time.
His eyes come back to mine and stay. Nothing left running but his breath and his heartbeat, which I can feel from the inside.
Item three. I fuck him the way the day deserves.
Slow first, long deep strokes that drag a groan out of him on every push, until he begs, and he begs beautifully, filthy and specific and grinning while he does it.
Then hard, my hand back at his throat, his heels in my back, his cock sliding slick between our stomachs, the headboard of the bed he moved into keeping time against the wall.
He is loud. He is always loud. And under the loud, he starts murmuring the Russian, the little fragments he has been stealing from me all year, words I say to the cats when I think no one is listening.
Kotik. Ya zdes. Wrong contexts. Terrible grammar.
It takes me apart every single time, my language coming back to me out of his mouth, filthy and homesick and mine, and my rhythm stops being controlled.
“Tishka.” He gets his hand in my hair. “Tishka, look at me, I’m…”
“Item four,” I manage, and tighten my hand on his throat, and give him the name. “Come for me, Tian.”
He comes between us on the second stroke, untouched, his whole body pulling tight around my cock, and the sight of him, wrecked and grinning and mine, in our bed, takes me over the edge half a breath behind him.
I come inside him. Tian, and then Tian again, in the voice I use for nothing else on this earth.
“Ya zdes,” I tell him, after, still inside him. I’m here. He does not need the translation. He learned this one from the cats. The little traitor. He smiles against my skin, and I hold his jaw and tell him he is good, he is so good.
In the dark, before I move, I tell him the thing I have been holding.
“My mother says hello to you.”
He goes still under my hands. All of him. Even the loud parts.
“She says it at the end of every call. Say hello to Bastian.” I hold his jaw so he cannot look away.
Bastian Fontenot, who has a bit for everything, has nothing. His eyes are wet. He says, very quietly, “Hello back.”
I will make sure it is delivered.
After, I get a washcloth. He lets me take care of him. He has learned to let me. He lies in our bed with his hair everywhere, both cats staging a border dispute at our feet.
They gave every man a day to take the Cup home.
He heard that and understood the assignment differently than anyone. He knew I did not have an address. So he did not take me home. He took home, and he moved it, piece by piece, into the tenth floor of a building in Atlanta. Pot and jar and gumbo.
Home is not a place I lost. It is a thing he cooks in now. It stays. It is mine.