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“I can’t!” Boris yelled desperately as Theo begged him just as desperately to get into the taxi. “I just can’t!”
Nevertheless, Theo persisted, imploring Boris to come to New York, rambling about how great it would be in a frantic attempt to convince him. Boris knew that Theo would be leaving that night, that there was nothing that could stop him. Knew that there was nothing important enough to keep him in Las Vegas, Boris included.
Theo continued, saying something about a large Russian community somewhere in New York; Boris didn’t hear him. He was pulled away into the depths of his own mind, where he tried to rationalize the situation.
The painting, he bitterly thought, cursing himself for stealing it. And for what? Simple, passing jealousy? The unshakeable fascination with what might as well have been Theo’s heart?
Can give back in secret, Boris thought. When he is sleeping. Or drunk and sleeping.
And by then, the decision had been made. Yes, Boris gave perfunctory thought to his father, money, housing—but all that could be figured out later. They were not even close to as important as the painting.
“Potter!” Boris burst out. “I will come—just one hour! Okay? To get ready,” he quickly said then dashed off down the dim street.
Theo sighed, knowing he would have to cajole and bribe the taxi driver into waiting. Of course, that was nothing compared to his utter jubilation and relief. There was a wide grin on his face when he handed over a fistful of bills.
+++
When Boris arrived at his dark house, chest heaving and throat ragged, he tore up the stairs to his room, headed straight for the package hidden inside his closet. The sight of the painting trapped and suffocated in newsprint…Boris winced, feeling more regret than ever.
If I was just a little more of a coward, Boris knew, I would never see Potter again. He would hate me, forever .
Pushing the ugly thought from his mind—no use in dwelling, now that such a fate had been avoided—Boris grabbed his largest duffle bag, shoved in all his clothes, and packed the painting within them. He grabbed the money and the cigarettes and the drugs that haphazardly lay around his room; he stole fistfuls of all three from his father. He checked an old digital clock, saw that 35 minutes had passed.
Boris ran back out the door and gave his house a final glance.
“Good riddance, fucker,” he muttered, hurling a brick through a window.
Hoping that his clothes, the little that he had, would be enough to protect the painting from being jostled around too much, Boris rushed back to Theo. What did it matter that the strap dug into his shoulder, that the bag painfully thump ed against his right hip with every step? Boris felt like his throat was ripping itself apart, like his lungs would either shrivel away to nothing or explode. Still, he ran back to Theo, praying for Theo to have stayed, to have thought that he was worth waiting and wasting precious time for.
And there he was upon the curb, tiny and scruffy and like an angel to Boris.
“Potter,” he choked out, breath labored. “You waited.”
“Of course I waited,” Theo said, handing Boris a bottle of water. (Boris took it gratefully, gulped it down like a dying man.) “How could I leave without you?”
And Theo asked the question like it had no answer, like it was impossible for him to ever leave Boris behind. This came as a shock to Boris, and he felt his chest swell with an inexplicable warmth that at once comforted and ached.
Boris vocalized none of this. To Theo, he took it all in stride, joking and confident and nonchalant as always.
“Yes, you could not survive without me, Potter!” Boris crowed, playfully shoving Theo into the road.
Boris carefully deposited his bag into the trunk of the taxi—it held precious cargo, after all.
“Now—time to go!” he announced, all but jumping into the taxi as Theo followed.
+++
What they had done should have been impossible. Should have been impossible for two teenage boys and a dog to bus their way across the country. Should have been impossible for all their contraband—cash, cheap liquor in tiny bottles, a priceless piece of stolen art, crumpled foil packets of crushed up pills, cigarettes—to have gone unnoticed.
And it should not have been so easy and so natural and so damned fun . It felt like the first time Theo had stolen from the supermarket, when the adrenaline from the crime and the dopamine from the camaraderie had reacted to create a new, exquisite thrill.
The warm, comforting, never-ending haze of Valium, Vicodin, and vodka was well-loved by Theo, yes. But this, the huddling in the back of all-night buses? The claiming of every new rest stop as a new kingdom to conquer? The shrinking of the world until there was only Theo, Boris, and Popchyk? This was different, this was genuine. The kind of bliss that didn’t need to be chemically engineered.
3:25 AM, the screen of Theo’s old iPod read, its harsh glow painting his face blue. With the exception of the driver, Theo and Boris were the only ones awake.
“Tchaikovsky?” Boris asked, his accent stronger on his next words. “You listen to him?”
"Yes?” Theo answered, a question itself. (He was a tiny bit miffed that Boris had even asked. Of course he listened to Tchaikovsky.) “I don’t even know how to say this—there’s something about Tchaikovsky that’s so, I dunno, raw? Like, the emotion in all his pieces, it doesn’t fuckin’ matter if you have no clue how it’s supposed to feel. You just feel it anyway,” he finished, voice slightly slurred to due to lack of sleep. “My mom really liked him.”
(Later on, years later, Theo would realize he had come close to describing Boris. The sheer depth of feeling in Tchaikovsky’s music was enough to transcend personal experience; Boris would never verbalize his emotions, no, but he didn’t need to. Not when they were all so clear from his body, the tone of his voice, the raging mix of love, lust, anger, sorrow, fear, repression, denial, regret, fear, hope, and love and love and love painted upon his face.)
“You are right,” Boris simply said, letting his head fall back onto the seat. His hand brushed over Theo’s to raise the volume; his fingers lingered, as if caught in a debate with their own selves, before pulling away.
The rich, majestic swells of the music, uninhibited by the poor digital quality, washed over Theo and Boris, gently lulling them to sweet oblivion.
+++
It was the silence that woke Theo—the iPod must have died. Next to him, Boris slept, quiet and calm. His chest rose and fell with a steady cadence, his face unburdened by a cynical mask. Long eyelashes came close to brushing his high cheekbones, but they were not the reason Theo’s gaze was drawn to Boris’s eyes.
Purple and swollen, Boris’s left eye was impossible to miss; Theo could almost see it throb. He knew Boris too well to expect that he would be willing to talk about it any more than “My dad’s an asshole;” he knew Boris too well to expect that the incident wouldn’t manifest in the form of nightmares and drunk ramblings.
And yet, Boris was pretty. In the back of his mind, Theo knew that this comment carried heavy significance. But he ignored it, filed it away as a problem for another day. He had plenty of more immediate problems and absolutely no intentions of ruining his respite with an identity crisis. So, Theo simply looked and was content to do so.
+++
When they arrived in New York, Theo and Boris spent the entire day on the move. While they had somehow managed the bus trip, they knew that there was no way they would be able to book a hotel room of any kind to plan or rest in. So, when Theo started to head straight to Hobie’s, Boris made no objections.
After fighting to stay awake on the subway and ignoring the screaming soles of their feet on the pavement, Theo and Boris arrived at Hobart and Blackwell’s. Just as he had that fateful day, clutching the ring, Theo pressed the doorbell and anxiously waited. Hobie opened the door, took one look at the pair—dark circles, bulging bags, a dog , swaying on their feet—and decided that questions would have to wait. He waved them inside, gently but firmly directed them to take hot showers upstairs; while waiting, Hobie heated up two bowls of soup and dug up sweaters and shorts the boys could sleep in. After the soup had been eaten and the clothes donned, Hobie said,
“I might not know what happened or why it looks like you ran away, but I trust you”—this was directed at Theo—“and you,”—to Boris—“must be important to Theo. Stay as long as you need.”
With that, he sent the boys upstairs to the guest bedroom. Too dazed and relieved to question Hobie, Theo and Boris collapsed onto the bed and turned the bedside lamps off. They lay side by side, facing each other, just as they had in Vegas.
At first, it seemed as though Boris was merely stretching his arm out, but he moved to brush his fingertips over the line of Theo’s profile instead. He stayed like that for a moment, frozen, as if he were having an argument with himself. Clearly, one side prevailed, as Boris pulled Theo towards him and kissed him. Surprised, Theo’s body tensed at first but soon relaxed; he didn’t quite return the kiss but in no way rejected it.
In that liminal space of time—the silence after they parted but before the fear and regret set in—Theo said,
“You’re the prettiest person I’ve kissed.”
“Am the only one you’ve kissed,” Boris replied, a hint of laughter on his lips. “You think I am pretty?”
“Yeah.”
Boris laughed for real this time—quiet and brief, but real.
“Then you are blind. Go to sleep, Potter.”
And so he did, and so did Boris, and so did all of their uncertainties and fears—not gone forever but, for a moment, quiet.