Page 61 of Psycho
Still, the thought of losing Lucas was something August couldn’t quantify. “I would never forget you. And I certainly wouldn’t become indifferent. I’ve spent just a few days with you and the thought of not seeing you every day is… It makes it hard to breathe.” August swallowed hard, squeezing Lucas tighter. “You can’t leave.”
Lucas gave a heavy sigh, and then his lips were brushing the top of his head. “I’m not leaving.”
“Ever,” August said bluntly.
Another kiss landed on his head. “I’m right here.”
Silence stretched between them for a long time before Lucas asked, “Did you really learn Russian in a week?”
“I learned to speak it in a week. Mastering writing it and speaking it conversationally took me almost a month.”
There was another long pause before Lucas pressed, “Why Russian?”
August shrugged. “When I was nine, I became obsessed with Tolstoy. I wanted to read his works in his native tongue.”
“You wanted to read Tolstoy at nine?” Lucas said, voice filled with wonder.
“I had already read Tolstoy. I wanted to read it again, in Russian.”
Lucas snorted. “Wait? Didn’t Tolstoy write in English?”
August smiled at that, tipping his head slightly to look up to where Lucas reclined on his pillow. It was so nice talking with somebody who cared about these things. “Yes. Tolstoy was a polyglot like me. He spoke English, French, and German, in addition to Russian. But he could read in a dozen other languages. I just fixated on this idea that I should read his books in Russian. I get hung up on these thoughts sometimes, and I can’t let them go until I’ve done it. So…Russian.”
“Is that why you have a degree in Russian Literature?”
August smiled. “No. I have a degree in Russian Literature because my father said I needed to look more well-rounded. To look like I had interests outside of the hard sciences.”
Lucas snickered this time. “So, you thought you’d just minor in Russian literature. You couldn’t just take, like, a film class or something?”
August shrugged, putting Lucas’s hand back onto his head, hoping he would get the message. “I spoke Russian. It seemed easy enough.”
His lids fluttered as Lucas’s fingers once more began to comb through his hair.
“Did you really get inducted into MENSA when you were six?”
August hesitated before saying, “No.”
Lucas’s fingers paused. “No?”
August sighed. “No. I was four. My father told people I was six.”
Lucas’s fingers slowed. “Why? Wouldn’t that have been more impressive at four?”
“It’s a long, convoluted story, most of which isn’t mine to tell.”
Lucas’s fingers went back to scraping over August’s scalp. “I have time. Tell me what you can?”
August only hesitated for a moment. “My father is like me in a lot of ways. He came from an…unstable home environment. Only, when they learned he was gifted, they brought in tutors to homeschool him, locked him away from his friends and siblings so he wasn’t distracted from his studies, used him to impress their rich friends. He was attending college in Scotland when they died. He was fourteen.”
Lucas curled in closer. “What does that have to do with your age?”
“Thomas had his doctorate before he was old enough to drink. He was obsessed with psychology, like you. When he met a woman doing groundbreaking research on sociopaths, he wanted to test her theories, wanted to know if there was a way to…fix people like me. But he knew, to do that, he’d have to have total control over our environment like she had, and no review board was going to give approval of a study like that. And he didn’t want us to feel like we were growing up as actual science projects. He wanted us to feel…supported, to have the affection he never got.”
“Makes sense,” Lucas said, though his tone was hesitant, like it didn’t entirely make sense.
“As you can imagine, no adoption agency was going to hand a bunch of damaged children to a man who was barely more than a child himself. So, he went about it through slightly shadier means. His money bought him access to people who had an interest in his research and who also weren’t fond of committee oversight. Kids disappear from the system all the time. My father helped us reappear without questions.”
“So, how old are you, really?”
