Lilia made chicken paprikash, served over egg noodles with a genteel sprinkling of parsley. She herself ate sparingly, while her eyes patrolled up and down the table, making sure everyone else was well-fed.
“This is delicious,” Jav said, not just being polite.
“Do have more,” Lilia said, passing the platter. Her chambray shirt was now dotted with paprika and grease spots. Jav’s eyes snuck under half-lowered lids to Lilia’s one rolled up sleeve, looking, unsuccessfully, for tattooed numbers. She caught his eyes and smiled curiously. Slightly ashamed, he took another helping of noodles with the last scrape of gravy. Lilia beamed at him before taking the cleaned platter to the kitchen.
As Rory and Stef sparred and joked, Jav tried to dissect their bond. It was affectionate, but not physical. They caressed each other with wit and laughter.
“Pony,” she said often, the word both endearment and title. Something about her sleek white hair and the proud lift of her neck was equine, Jav thought. He could envision wings spreading on either side of her shoulders, crackling white and majestic, encircling the table and all those seated there.
To be accepted into the White Mare’s herd was to be offered a lifetime of protection, he thought. The Mare would rarely touch you out of love. Her own Pony rarely felt the caress of her feathers. But she’d kill for you with one thunderclap stroke of her mighty wings.
After the meal, Lilia brought two candlesticks to the table. Everyone stood. Lilia put a napkin on her head and lit each wick. She apologized in advance for her terrible Hebrew.
“No one here knows the difference, dear,” Rory said quietly.
“So with this blessing,” Lilia said, addressing Jav, “you must make the circles with the hands, like this.”
She recited the words while above the flames, her hands pulled the air inward, toward her breast. “Now you cover eyes.” Her fingertips lined up along her eyebrows, her palms cupped. “And pray for something you want very much.”
All eyes closed. A moment of reverent, hallowed silence crept around the table like a ribbon, gently drawing tight.
“Now open eyes.” Lilia’s hands lowered. “And welcome Sabbath. Shabbat shalom.”
“Shabbat shalom,” they replied. Rory’s hand reached to fold around Lilia’s fingers. At the same time, Jav felt a pressing, electric energy tickle the small of his back, then Stef’s hand touched him, his palm wide and warm.
As the men readied to leave, Rory handed her son a Tupperware with a cut-up roasted chicken. “To pick at over the weekend.”
“Oh, wait,” Lilia said, heading back to the kitchen. “Pony, I got you some apples. And the nice Russian rye you like. With the little seeds.”
“With the little seeds,” Rory and Stef mouthed together, eyebrows high in their identically-shaped foreheads. Rory reached up and screwed her fingertip into Stef’s dimple. It was a gesture Jav had seen Val Lark do to Alex a hundred times. It filled him with both bittersweet memory and a warm hope.
“Do come again,” Lilia said.
Jav smiled. “I will.”
“I must,” Stef said.
“Don’t be fresh,” Rory said.
The apartment door clicked shut behind them. Now Jav stood at a crossroads. He could go down the stairs. Or go home.
Arms laden with chicken, bread and apples, Stef asked, “You want to come down?”
The decision flickered like a candle flame, then held still.
“Okay,” Jav said.
Stef tilted his head toward the stairwell. “After you. It’s dark, be careful. Just feel for the light switch at the bottom.”
Jav went down, his heart thick with each footstep. The stairwell grew dimmer. He stopped, a hand on each rail, and he looked up over his shoulder.
Standing one tread up, backlit by the upstairs hall, Stef loomed mighty and mythic. Though his arms cradled things tight to his chest, his shoulders spread out like the broad wings of a Pegasus. A Rohirrim. A centaur drawing back the bowstring and taking aim.
“Say pony in Spanish,” he said.
“Pony in Spanish.” Jav closed his eyes just as Stef’s mouth touched his.
Stef held his leftovers. Jav held the handrails. The kiss was tilted and off-center. Slightly awkward. And so utterly perfect, Jav wished for an instant that the entire rest of his life could be here in the darkened stairwell. No touching, no nakedness, nothing but his head leaning back and twisting up into Stef’s mouth. Tongue and teeth and the lingering taste of Sabbath. If he dared free his hands, he’d make circles with them, pulling the air inward toward his heart. Praying for what he wanted. Then he’d cover his eyes and welcome it all within.
Come inside, Rohirrim, man of the Mark. Shabbat Shalom.
The kiss leaned on Jav. Hard. Harder. Then all at once, too hard.
“Oh crap,” Stef said. “Dude, look out.”
“Shit,” Jav cried. Laughter filled the stairwell as both men teetered off balance and stumbled down two more steps. Each barely managed to get a shoulder into the wall and slide down to sit. A rolling cascade of thumps as the net bag of apples broke apart and the Tupperware box went end over end.
“No neck breaking on the first date,” Jav said.
“Man, that would’ve been hard to explain.”
From over their heads, Rory called down, “Pony, are you all right? What was that?”
“Cockroach,” Stef said over his shoulder. “Big one. Close your door.”
Still laughing, Jav put his forehead on Stef’s bent knee and exhaled a long breath. “Jesus.”
“Come on,” Stef said. “Come inside.”
The last time a door closed behind Jav and another man, they immediately flung each other up against the walls, tearing at their clothes, snarling and grabbing at each other like two rabid dogs. He half-expected the same now, but Stef put the food away in his fridge, popped a couple beers for them and turned on the TV.
“Wander around, feel free,” he said, clearing papers and a laptop off the couch. “Mi casa es su casa. Pardon my French.”
Jav’s eyes moved back and forth over the stuffed bookshelves. “You speak any Spanish?”
“I speak White New Yorker Spanish. Clichés and curses with a really bad accent.”
One short wall of the living room had been made into a studio, with shelves of supplies and a heavy square table lined with jars of pens, pencils and brushes.
“How much time do you have for your own artwork?” Jav said.
“Not a lot. If I can sit there and make something once a week, it’s a good week.” Stef glanced at his watch. “I’m going to be a complete nerd and confess it’s time for Planet Earth on BBC. I don’t watch much TV but I’m kind of obsessed with this show.”
“Put it on, I love that shit.”
“Everyone should have David Attenborough narrate their life for an hour.”
Jav used the bathroom, resisting the urge to peek in the medicine cabinet and behind the shower curtain. He took a few shy steps into the bedroom, lit pale gold from a single lamp on the bedside table. Pillows stacked against one side of the headboard, the covers a little dented and wrinkled, as if a nap were taken recently. Client Privilege lying open and face-down on the grey comforter.
I’m in his bed.
Smiling, Jav looked at a string of prayer flags tacked wall-to-wall in one corner of the room. Beneath it was a low table spread with a red sari. A round cushion before it. The top neatly and ritualistically arranged. A semi-circle of tiny statues around a single candle. Sticks of incense in a jar. A bell. A small, shallow bowl filled with loose change. A coil of ebony beads and a hunk of quartz crystal.
“Snooping in my underwear drawer?” Stef called.
“Just flipping the mattress,” Jav said, touching the big-bellied, laughing Buddha. He dug in his pocket and put the loose change he found there in the little bowl. Then went out into the living room.
He kicked off his shoes and stretched out along the short end of the L-shaped couch. Stef sat at the other end, socked feet on the coffee table. The episode was on the Great Plains, the opening segment showing the grazers inhabiting the Tibetan plateau.
“Wild ass,” Attenborough said in his gravelly tones, and both men cracked up.
“Only he could make wild ass sound dignified,” Stef said.
“Can you imagine the outtakes on this one?” Jav said.
“Bet it was one take,” Stef said. “Straight-faced. David’s the man.”
“What’s with the fortune cookies?” Jav asked, pointing to a wooden bowl full of them on the coffee table.
“Place I order out from always puts twenty of them in the bag,” Stef said. “I don’t even like them that much, but they’re okay if I’m out of Mallomars and desperately jonesing.”
He leaned and took a handful, tossing three cookies into Jav’s lap. “Here. Keep two fortunes, chuck one.” He cracked a cookie open and read aloud, “‘If you have something worth fighting for, then fight for it.’”
Jav broke open his. “‘You cannot love life until you live the life you love.’”
Stef cracked and read another. “‘You have a flair for adding fanciful dimension to a story.’ Wait, I think this is yours.”
Jav gaze snagged on Stef’s smile a moment. He looked down and read, “‘A pleasant experience is ahead: don’t pass it by.’”
Their eyes caught again and held. Stef swallowed and looked away, reading: “‘The smart thing to do is to begin trusting your intuitions.’”
Jav took a deep breath, breaking open his last cookie. “‘Back away from individuals who are impulsive.’”
A long staring moment.
“Are you by nature impulsive?” Jav asked.
Stef nodded.
Jav crumpled the third fortune up and tossed it. “I’m done backing away.”
Stef studied his three slips of paper a moment before selecting one and crumpling it. “Fuck it, this story doesn’t need any fanciful dimension.”
Like liquid he slid off the couch and started crawling toward Jav. A strange dichotomy of power in his body and vulnerability in his face. He climbed up and knelt over Jav’s outstretched legs, his strong quads enclosing Jav tight. He took Jav’s wrists and stretched his arms out along the couch cushions, opening his chest and his heart. He held Jav there, pinned a moment. Then Stef’s hands glided back along Jav’s forearms, elbows, biceps, shoulders. Back to his head, tilting it up. Thumbs running along Jav’s cheekbones, then his eyebrows. Then one across Jav’s bottom lip.
When Stef kissed him, Jav dug his fingers into the cushions. His toes curled up tight inside his socks. When a small sigh, almost a moan but not quite, tumbled out of Stef’s chest, Jav melted back soft as his body rose up hard and wanting.
From the start, the rhythm of their kiss matched. The instinctive turn of a head, a lean in, a slight pull back and then a press from a different angle.
“God,” Stef said against Jav’s mouth. The tip of his tongue brushed Jav’s bottom lip, then his teeth closed around it, biting gently. Jav let go of the couch then, slid his hands into Stef’s hair and held his head, pulling his mouth in. Nothing should’ve been sexy about kissing a guy after drinking beer and eating fortune cookies. But it was. Insanely sexy. Crazy delicious.
Jav touched his tongue to Stef’s. Opened his mouth a little more. His teeth wanted in on the action now, wanted the roll of Stef’s lip between them, to feel the give of that softness. His mouth wanted more, mad and thirsty for this hot, shaking excitement. This heady, thick connection coiling his chest and belly, filling his lap with blood and craving.
Stef’s hands glided along Jav’s throat, palms pressing to Jav’s chest and shoulders. They curled around Jav’s T-shirt, drawing it up over his head. Popping free from the neckband, Jav reached for Stef’s shirt, hungry for skin. Skin on skin. To put all their inked designs together and find a story.
“Hold still.” Mouth watering, Jav ran his fingertips down Stef’s sternum. The hair lay short and tight against his chest. It funneled into a thin line, skirting his belly button and dipping beneath the waistband of his jeans. Jav unbuttoned them and ran his hands up Stef’s stomach again. He touched the horse head tattooed on Stef’s left pectoral. His nipple was pierced with a ring, making the horse look like an old-fashioned hitching post. Jav put his tongue to the hoop, then drew it gently into his mouth.
God, who am I? he thought, unable to remember when he felt more himself.
Stef pulled air in with a sharp hiss and his head fell back. The weight across Jav’s thighs shifted, then Stef’s hand slid between his legs, finding the pole of his erection. Stroking it, kneading it in rhythm with his kiss which was up around Jav’s mouth again.
“Glad I trusted my intuition,” Stef said, holding still with his forehead pressed to Jav’s.
“I’m kind of loving my life right now.”
Stef popped the button on Jav’s jeans and unzipped them.
“Fuck,” Jav whispered, exhaling as Stef’s hand closed around his cock. He eased it up and out and free, a thumb running beneath the ridge. Silver rings gliding on skin.
“Last time this happened, I was seventeen,” Jav whispered.
“I feel seventeen,” Stef said, breathing hard against Jav’s neck.
Jav let go long enough to push his jeans down a little more, giving Stef room. They kissed, hard and open-mouthed, the sigh of one ricocheting off the tongue of the other and rebounding back.
“You good?” Stef said.
“Yeah,” Jav said. “I just need to ask you something.”
“What?”
“You sure you’re not married?”
Stef’s smile unfolded across Jav’s mouth. “No,” he said, his hand opening and closing around Jav’s erection.
“No one who’s going to text or call or break the shed door down?”
“Nobody.” Now Stef let go and straightened up, reaching in his pockets. “Here. My phone’s muted. Wallet. Keys.” He tossed everything toward the far end of the couch. “No means of escape. No distractions.”
“Your watch,” Jav said.
Holding Jav’s eyes, Stef unbuckled the strap and tossed it with the rest of his effects. Then his elbows sank on either side of Jav’s head. His kiss went deep and his weight rocked down on Jav’s erection.
“Lean on me more,” Jav said. Freedom coursed in his veins. Permission hot on his tongue. He wasn’t a thief or an accessory to adultery. Tonight was a gift. His for the taking.
Or leaving.
I could leave. This isn’t a job. This is for me.
For a wild second, he thought about testing the theory. But Stef’s weight soon crushed all thoughts to dust. His mouth was soft and lush, a rough-edged sweetness like a burned marshmallow. His hand slid like a bespoke dream, stroking and squeezing as if he’d been born to do nothing else.
“Feel good?” he said.
“So good.”
His teeth grazed Jav’s bottom lip. “Telling you… Past few weeks, I’ve been out of my mind wondering how you’d feel in my hand.”
It was rising up on Jav, fast and furious. “Yeah?” he whispered.
“Wondering what you look like when you come.”
In Jav’s transfixed eyes, Stef blurred into two, then back into one. “What else?”
“What kind of noise you make.”
Jav’s hips bucked up hard, fingers digging into the couch cushions and trying to hold on. “Fuck, Stef…”
“God, I hope so,” Stef said. “Someday.”
“You’re making me come.” Then Jav was there. Arching, grabbing and exploding as Stef worked him into a frenzy. Hoarse words in Jav’s ear pushing him over the edge.
“Come here. Come for me. I’m dying to see…”