Page 6 of Stars
All his life, the answer had always been yes.
Sergey…
Mark stared, but it wasn’t the menacing stare from earlier or even the piercing stare of his commander. Over the rims of Mark’s sunglasses, Sasha saw concern... and a degree of fondness. “How are you? Now?”
How did he answer that? Sasha flicked his hay into the enclosure and leaned back, holding onto the railing as he arched his back and stared at the sky. If only there were stars out. Blue skies never did anything for him. The sun was too bright, the sky too naked. He was too exposed, and exposure made his soul shrivel, made his skin crawl. He was a creature of darkness, of the night, when he could slip out and explore his secret hunger in Moscow’s dark and seedy gay clubs. Or a creature of the Arctic beneath the pollution haze, when he was just hormones and bones and wide eyes searching for a dream.
He’d been drawn to the isolation. To the void. To the near-absolute-zero of space, the bleak, hard edge of an unforgiving silence. He’d yearned for a place as punishing and extreme as his soul, a black, aching emptiness.
Everything he was came from the stars.
Until Sergey.
He’d forgotten that the sun was also a star, and instead of a diamond-hard frigidity, the sun broiled the solar system in heat. It washed everything in light and warmth and a radiation that went right through, down to the bones and beyond. Sergey was like that, too. Sergey was his sun, the brightest, hottest star in his universe, and had set his life on fire.
HemissedSergey. He missed him more than he’d ever thought it was possible to miss another person. He’d never had anyone to miss, so he’d never feared saying goodbye, moving on to another mission, another base. This was supposed to be the same. Just another mission in just another place. He’d see Sergey every six weeks, and they’d talk on the phone as they had planned. But damn it, it wasn’t the same. His soul fractured every time he left Sergey’s side.
He was hungry for space, and he was equally hungry for Sergey. If someone said to him,You can only have one, he didn’t have a clue which he’d choose. He loved Sergey like he loved the stars. Sergey’s soul was wound with his, streaked with moonlight and made of atoms from the beginning of time. He’d carried Sergey’s soul home in his heart.
Granted, he’d been as high as the International Space Station on muscimol when he’d had those visions, but the visceral emotion of the experience had never left him.
He knew what he’d endured to be with Sergey. What they sacrificed—and kept sacrificing.
His happiness was charted in parabolic six-week intervals. The peaks, with Sergey. Going home, tumbling into bed with him for at least two days. Finally rising and beginning the endless pretense that he was a Russian hero merely visiting the Kremlin and his friend, the president. The scripted outings. The media interviews, carefully controlled by the Kremlin and Oleg Ostrovsky, the new Russian media magnate. And every night their return together: electrons colliding, comets crashing, orbits terminating against each other in perfect synchronicity. It would take him a few days to recalibrate to Moscow time, and invariably he’d be up in the middle of the night while Sergey slept naked, strewn across their bed belly down, cheek pressed against the pillow and one hand reaching for Sasha as the neon glow of Moscow filtered through the windows.
Sasha found new constellations on Sergey’s chest, traced discoveries of stars in his sparse gray chest hair, fingered paragraphs of devotions over his alabaster skin. Sergey sometimes woke and snuggled close, pressing his face against Sasha’s hip or thigh until morning, when they’d come together in a whole different way. Happiness was his private world with Sergey, the sliver of life they’d carved for themselves.
Happiness was also here, at least in parts. NASA had treated him well. His training had stretched him—made him a better man, a better pilot, turned him into an almost astronaut. He’d made friends. And last night he’d seen Dan, as happy as any man he’d ever met. An astronaut. A gay man. In love with his life and with his partner.
Going home to his empty one-bedroom apartment and talking over the phone to Sergey, six thousand miles away, as he brushed his teeth and readied for bed, hadn’t compared to Dan Hillerman’s ecstatic joy. Sasha had lain awake for hours, aching. Wanting.
He’d always thought somehow, some way, he’d have to choose. That he couldn’t have Sergey and the stars. He couldn’t go to space and love a man. Someday, it would all tumble down. “Oh, we were so mistaken,” someone at NASA would say. Mark, maybe. Or Dr. Worrell, his flight surgeon. “We didn’t know you were that way. No, you cannot be an astronaut.”
Dan Hillerman was, though. Dan, with his thousand-watt smile, his sandy hair, holding his partner’s hand. In one searing, electrical moment, Dan became the embodiment of every yearning Sasha had ever hidden away.
But how could he ever have Dan’s life? He was born and bred Russian, bleeding sacrifice and nationalism. And Sergey was… the president of Russia. Sasha couldn’t have fallen for a more impractical man. It was the Reichenbach curse: falling for someone hopelessly, hilariously complicated, someone so impossible it would never—or should never—happen. Urban Dictionary had penned that definition after Jack Spiers-Reichenbach’s presidency crashed and burned.
There weren’t any glorious futures of rainbow spaceships and packed bars of grinning friends welcoming Sasha home from a successful mission with Sergey at his side. There were quiet mornings and nights full of thrusts and sighs, constellations of freckles and shivering goosebumps, a million hours of video calls, kisses every night that went from screen to screen, and a permanent, eternal ache at the bottom of his heart.
He was Russian. He would never have it all. This was closer than he’d ever expected, was already more than he’d ever hoped for from his life.
He had Sergey’s love. Commander Mark Keating, an astronaut he looked up to, admired, thought he was a decent man. And Mark wanted him to ride right-hand on a future mission.
“I’m happy,” he said, nodding. Happier than he’d ever been in his life, by far. “It’s harder in Russia. It’s a little easier here. But—” He shrugged.
“I’m glad it’s easier here.” Mark seemed to mull something over, chew words in his mind. “Look, I meant what I said earlier. About how much I care about everyone. NASA, the astronauts, everyone. They’re part of my family. I love every single astronaut here. You included, okay?” Mark pulled his sunglasses down and stared at Sasha. His dark hair flickered in the wind.
So quintessentially American. Mark lived out loud in red, white, and blue. He was as vibrant as Sasha was foreboding. How were they friends? “You’d protect me like you protected Dan?”
“Hell yes I would. Gladly.” Mark said. “I was pissed ’cause I didn’t understand it. I couldn’t square the Sasha I knew and the behavior from last night. I was worried about Dan. And then I got mad, ’cause I didn’t want to admit that I’d befriended an asshole.”
“Good thing I’m not an asshole.”
“Nah, you just like assholes.” Mark winked. “Guess you’re disproving that whole ‘You are what you eat’ thing, huh?”
Sasha burned as if the full force of the sun had turned on him, skewering him to the ground.
Mark chuckled and held out a hand. “Come on. Let me buy you lunch.”
