Page 3 of Shaman

What is love? Is it something you feel? Or is it something you possess? Something you can give to someone, like a gift. Something they can give to you. Does the distinction matter?

Ian stared at what he’d written a moment, then slammed his journal shut in disgust.

Two weeks ago, an overpriced therapist – of the variety who promised the utmost discretion, and charged through the nose for it – had told him that journaling about his “complex feelings” could help him “separate his impulses” into helpful and unhelpful categories. If he could understand his anger, she’d said, then he could begin to work toward controlling it more effectively. She’d tried to prescribe an anti-anxiety medication, and that was when he’d stood and walked out of the session. She was a quack anyway, and he’d only gone to see her because Alec had asked him to over and over. But putting a recovered addict on pills was the last strike against her, so he’d left.

To be fair, she hadn’t known he was an addict.

Or a hooker.

Or a slave chained up in a monstrous woman’s basement.

She didn’t know he was a crime boss, either, and she didn’t need to know. She wasn’t going to be his doctor.

But then he’d arrived home, and Alec had been on the sofa in those hideous old sweatpants he loved, and comfy socks, glasses crooked on his nose, looking hopeful as a puppy. “How’d it go?” he’d asked, and Ian had crumpled. And lied to him.

“She gave me some exercises,” he’d said, evasive, shrugging, looking away, because seeing him like that, at-home and sleepy and lovely, had hurt too much. “We’ll see.”

He hadn’t planned to actually journal. Fuck that woman and her journaling.

But that night, when it was dark and quiet, Alec had rolled toward him, reaching for him through the cool sheets that separated them. “I’m glad you’re getting help,” he’d whispered. His hand had curled around Ian’s wrist, their first touch in weeks, and Ian had shaken him off. Slipped out of bed.

Alec had made a small, hurt noise in the back of his throat, but rolled back over and said nothing.

They’d had their arguments about this before. They’d moved beyond that, into the flickering glances and pregnant silences.

It was only a matter of time before those gave way to Alec’s bags sitting at the door, his face drawn with disappointment when he said he couldn’t stay anymore.

Good, he shouldn’t stay.

Oh God, what if he left?

Ian had walked barefoot to the kitchen, heart pounding, stomach churning, afraid he might be sick in the sink. They hadn’t been anything close to intimate in months. No kisses, no lingering touches. No off-color jokes. Nothing but work, reading in bed instead of playing, watching television on opposite ends of the couch.

Three nights before, Ian had gone to the closet to change and found the bathroom door half-open, steam billowing beyond. Alec had stood in the glass-walled shower, head bowed beneath the spray, one arm braced on the tile, his other hand around his cock. He’d been crying, ugly ragged sobs not quite covered by the pounding of the jets, and he’d been moaning – chasing a badly-needed pleasure that Ian wouldn’t give him.

That night he’d slipped from bed, he’d stood with his hands braced on the cold marble of the counter, and he’d known that if he didn’t do something, Alec was as good as lost to him. So he’d found an empty, leather-bound sketchpad in the drawer of his drawing table, and he’d started his first journal entry. One line had turned to two, to three, to ten. And suddenly he was writing every night, long rambling entries that sounded almost like poetry, the kind filled with thorns and ravens and roiling London rain clouds.

And now he was even more lost than he had been. It had started with a man putting a gun to Alec’s head, and he guessed it would end in an awful mess of sexless nights and kissless mornings, and wallowing in a rage so profound he was afraid to speak of it for fear it would come boiling out of him like black smoke and blot out the sun.

He tapped his pen against the cover of the journal.What is love?he’d written, like a bloody teen pop star. Pathetic.

Footfalls sounded in the doorway, and he glanced up to find Alec in the doorway. He was dressed for autumn in New York in an Armani suit that Ian had bought him, his thick, black wool coat, a Burberry scarf threaded under the lapels. He’d had a haircut yesterday, clipped short on the sides and just long enough to curl softly against his forehead on top, clean and gleaming. He wore that careful expression that did little to hide his deep hurt. “The car’s here,” he said. “Are you ready?”

Ian slid the journal back into the drawer, stood, and pulled his coat off the back of the chair. “Yes, let’s go.”

~*~

They didn’t speak in the car. At the airport. Bruce drove the Jag right up beside the Cessna that would take them to JFK and handed it off to a valet. The three of them boarded, Bruce handling all the baggage, and all throughout they were silent.

Onboard the jet, Alec took the seat across from Ian. The flight attendant brought them champagne, offered food they both declined.

Ian stared out the window.Talk to him, that nagging mental voice said.Talk, you idiot. And there were so many things he should have said. Chieflysorry. But also,I’m so scared. But his tongue felt too heavy in his mouth, and he ground his molars together instead.

Something unknowingly fragile had broken inside him the day Badger Enright ordered a man to press a gun to Alec’s temple in the funeral home parking lot. Carla was dead, business was booming. Ian was a respected and feared figure in the underworld not just of Knoxville – as charming as he found the place – but in the entire country. He was an elegant and sophisticated gay man with gangsters kneeling at his feet, and he’d never had to work to find company in bed. Things with Kev had been…difficult, yes. But he was over that now. And Alec had proved a wonderful diversion…

But that was just it. Alecwasn’t justa diversion. He’d known that for a while, but the day with the gun had proved it in a terrifying way. He cared about Alec. Deeply. And the things a man cared about could be taken away. And all the money, and bodyguards, and threats and influence in the world couldn’t keep those things safe, not when you were a lowlife gangster who sold drugs and twisted thugs’ arms and didn’t deserve to be alive in general.

Alec would be ten times better off without him.

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