Page 83 of By the Pint

I got it. I understood what he was asking for. And I didn’t hate him for it. But it didn’t change anything.

I’d wanted this since my memory began. Couldn’t remember a time I didn’t want it. Needed it. I was thirty-nine. Already half-way, or more, through my life.

“So, you would care for me when I’m old and broken? When I’m a shadow of what I am now?” A shadow of what I could be. “You’d be fine to love me”—the word, crafted from razor blades, tore open my throat as it left my lips—“and then what? Mourn me for how long? How long would it take for you to get over me, find someone new, live a thousand more lifetimes without me?”

He guided my chin back and gazed into my eyes. “I’d rather have fifty years with you than five weeks, if that’s what you mean.”

“But Dima, I’m thirty-nine already. Already a veteran in my sport. Maybe I live to eighty, maybe longer, but I will … deteriorate. And look at you. You’ll stay perfect. Look at this face. It’s already almost two whole decades younger than mine. I can’t … can’t do it … growing old is …”

A weakness.

I finished the sentence in my head. Unsure if Dima heard it.

Everything I’d ever done since childhood, every goal I’d ever had, has been to improve myself in some way. Get better. Get smarter. Get faster. Get stronger. Build more muscle. Defeat more competitors. Be the best. Have more magazine covers. More social media followers. More news stories, more coverage. Live forever.

If I let myself succumb to weakness, to old age, I would no longer feel like myself. How could I love myself? How could I expect anyone else to love me? Especially a person as wonderful as Dima. As endlessly optimistic as Dima. As gorgeous. As considerate. As funny. As infuriatingly infuriating.

Dima huffed out an affected sigh, like I’d done a terrible job of protecting my thoughts.

An ache, a literal, physical ache, formed in the centre of my chest. Like someone had taken one of Dima’s sewing needles and pressed it through muscle and cartilage and bone until the eye had disappeared into my flesh. I rubbed at the pain absently.

I was beginning to feel like everything inside my brain had been turned upside down. Shaken about. Beginning to doubt everything I thought I knew. Everything I thought I wanted.

But as much as I tried, I couldn’t deny two things. I tightened my mind-bag before thinking them.

One, I was falling in love with Dima Black. No way to get around that. I suspected anyone who spent longer than a few days with him would feel the same. He was … perfect. He was perfect. In every possible way. And I couldn’t refute he made me feel things I never knew I was capable of feeling.

But two — and this was a fucking big one — forty, fifty more years of life was not enough for me. It was simplynot enough. Fifty years with Dima sounded great. Amazing, wonderful, but …

“I can’t. I …”

I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t give everything up. For one man. Not when I was this close. And I couldn’t tell him I was falling in love with him either. That would be cruel.

“You’re right. I am selfish,” I said. “I want you, like so fucking much, and I want to keep you, and have you wait on me hand and foot, while I’m a grumpy, miserable, old man. But … I want immortality more. I’ve wanted it longer.”

He laughed then, hollow and humourless, and nodded his acceptance. Instead of making me feel better, it was like a crowbar taken to the gaps in my chest. “I think you’re ready. You’ve studied hard. You know how to block your thoughts. Not as well as Killian and me, but we’ve had six hundred years of practice. You know enough to protect yourself from hackers, and who even knows if you’ll retain the muscle memory once you’ve been turned,” Dima said, adding a little more load to the metal pole cleaving my heart in two.

He was ready to end our time together.

I was not. But I’d taken so much from him already. I felt like a criminal. Like I’d stolen his heart. Even if he held part of mine in exchange.

“If you still want tutelage, then perhaps you ought to ask your master. I don’t think I can bear to …” He never finished his sentence.

I nodded. Unsure what else to do or say.

“I will call Killian tomorrow night. You can have it. Everything you set out to get. All of my thoughts and memories. My business secrets.” He said the last part as though he was imagining air quotes around it. “I’ll let you into my mind.”

“Oh,” I said, having depleted all other words. The needle in my chest buried itself deeper.

“But tonight, I want you.” Dima threaded his fingers into my hair once again. His gaze bounced between my lips and eyes. “I want to be entirely selfish. One last time.” He closed the gap between our mouths, stopping just short of kissing me, and lowered his voice to a whisper. “If that’s okay with you?”

And for the first time since stepping inside the elevator with him, I didn’t let myself think, I simply kissed Dima back.

27.

Casey

“No offence, Wayne, we … need a little privacy,” Dima said as he rolled up the darkened screen between the back of the car and the driver’s cab. He turned to me. “Are you sure you don’t want to stay for the end of the game?”

---