Page 9 of Wayward

“Maks?”

“It killed me to know that you allowed your situation to impact Nara. You knew she was there, and you knew she’d never leave you.”

“I—”

“You did. You knew. And you would have never forgiven yourself if something happened that couldn’t be undone, but the blowjobs you were giving? I don’t give a crap about that.”

Vanya was quiet for a moment and then slowly, like my words had just sunk into his brain, looked up at me. “What?”

“If you’re gay, be gay. If you’re bi or whatever else, I couldn’t care less because it has zero to do with me. What I do care about is that suddenly you’re dragging innocent people into the dangerous end of the pool with you. It used to be we’d just have to deal with the fallout, with finding you passed out in some hotel room somewhere, but now I’m getting calls from your sister, and she’s following you around to try and keep you safe, and—” I noticed then that Vanya was staring at me like I’d grown another head, and the thought came fast that my cousin wasn’t taking me, or the situation we found themselves in, seriously. “Are you listening to me?”

“I am.”

“Because it doesn’t look like you’re listening or that you give a shit.”

“I do. I really do, I swear to God,” he urged plaintively, sounding serious and truthful, trying to get me to hear him. “I wanna change.”

“Then fix yourself, Vanya,” I stressed, wishing I could simply will my cousin into submission or shake him hard enough and long enough to imbue him with some common sense. I mean, think about it: I’m the one getting shot at. I’m the one people try and kill, not you, so if I outlive you, how utterly ridiculous is that going to be?”

Vanya nodded as though in a trance.

“Why the hell are you looking at me like that?” I yelled, close to tearing his head off, so sick of the festering weakness in him, I could puke.

“I just… In the room with Burian and the others, you made it sound like…”

“What? What did I make it sound like?”

“You made it sound like you cared that I’m gay!” he shouted back, leaping up and pacing the room before rounding on me. “You made it sound like you gave a shit about that, but you never have before so—”

“No,” I said flatly, staring holes through him. “I don’t care.”

“Then what the fuck was all that?” He was almost in tears and had to suck in his breath to beat back the deluge, and I saw it then, how hard he was fighting to keep himself together.

“That was about Burian Petrov’s father.” I took a breath, calming quickly, and Vanya followed my lead, taking a breath and sinking down into the chair across from me, a large coffee table separating us. “I’ve met the man, and along with being a racist and misogynist, he’s a homophobic prick as well.”

Vanya remained quiet, just staring at me.

“You know as well as I do that in our family—in the business our family’s in—there’s a specific definition of a man.”

“Yes,” he agreed quietly.

All my life I’d been told by my father and uncles and all their friends not to be soft, that kindness was weakness, that men didn’t stand or sit or speak in certain ways, and it all translated to the same thing, to the same warning: don’t be gay. There was a way men were supposed to be, supposed to act, and it was not gentle, not forgiving, only black and white, life and death. Anything less than stoicism created a liability they couldn’t allow.

“It’s horrible,” I told Vanya. “I hear them say the same things to their grandchildren that they said to me and you and Pasha when we were young.”

Vanya was hugging himself, his eyes filling with tears.

“So I know what to say to put the fear of God into Burian about his father because my father—and yours—are the same.”

“Yes,” Vanya agreed, wiping at his eyes before they overflowed. “But at least ours aren’t violent.”

I clenched my jaw and looked away, and Vanya shivered beside me.

“Did your father beat—”

“I’m not going to discuss my father with you,” I assured him, which I knew answered the question regardless. He hadn’t hit me in front of my mother, not ever, and never on the face. Anything she could see, he wouldn’t do. Her wrath was not to be taken lightly. And I could have told. I could’ve lifted my shirt, shown her the bruises, but I wasn’t stupid. It was his world; we were all just living in it. He would’ve never let her leave and take me and my siblings; that could never be allowed to happen. So instead, I received her hugs and kisses and his fists. It had been, at the time, a reasonable arrangement.

“Maks, I didn’t mean to—”