Page 17 of Stars

Sasha chewed on his lip on Sergey’s phone’s screen, the metal case propped up against a tissue box and his valet on the counter. Sasha looked terrified, his eyes wide and his face as pale as the moon, cheekbones sharpened to knives.

Sergey exhaled slowly. “How?”

Sasha’s cheeks ballooned out, and then there was a torrent of words, Russian tumbling from him at Mach 3. Sergey managed the gist. A welcome-home party, another astronaut friend of Mark’s back from the Lunar Gateway, NASA’s spitball-sized space station orbiting the moon. That astronaut and his boyfriend. Their misinterpretation of Sasha’s reaction to them.

He could fill in the blanks himself. Sasha’s emotional brick wall crashing into his panic. Meeting a gay astronaut must have been the equivalent of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs cratering into Sasha’s psyche.

Sasha stumbled through Mark and Dan taking him out for drinks and his bitten-off confession of a partner in Russia. “We’ve been together longer than Dan and Jerry,” Sasha finished, breathless.

Sergey closed his eyes. He rubbed his forehead with his fingers. If it had been up to him, he and Sasha would have been more open long ago. But Sasha had insisted on secrecy. On privacy. On never, ever letting anyone know.

And now this.

“Are you okay?” Sergey asked. He’d worried over the years that Sasha’s eventual outing—by choice or not—would lead to a cataclysmic unhinging of Sasha’s control, some core part of his soul fracturing.

Sasha nodded, too quickly. His eyes were still bright, his face still pale. “Dan said I had nothing to worry about. Mark, too. If anyone at NASA finds out, they’ll keep it secret.” One corner of his mouth twitched up. “Even from you. From my government.”

Sergey managed a grin.

“They…” Sasha’s voice trailed off. “They wanted to know if you were coming to Family Day.”

Family Day. He and Sasha had been talking about it for months, ever since NASA had dropped the event on the calendar. Sasha’s graduation, an invitation for family and loved ones to see what their astronauts had trained for, where two years of their lives were lived.Govno, he wanted to go, wanted Sasha to lead him around Johnson Space Center by the hand, wanted Sasha to point out where he’d spent every moment of his days, the backdrops to the stories he had spun for Sergey nightly for two years.

Could the president of Russia walk hand in hand with Russia’s most eligible cosmonaut?

They’d decided that Sergey would make a secret official trip. He would simply surprise NASA, and the US, with his arrival. The president of Russia supporting a Russian astronaut. They wouldn’t get to be together, and he would have to play the part of Sasha’s boss instead of his lover, but he would be able to go.

However…

“What did you say about your partner in Russia?”

“Not much. Nothing identifiable. Nothing risky.”

An idea formed, a grain of sand tumbling in his thoughts. Gathering steam, wrapping thoughts around itself, pulling from his FSB days with Ilya, testing his plan against his own attempts to shred it apart. “Then I could be anyone.”

Sasha frowned.

“I don’t have to attend as the president—”

“You’re a public figure. People will recognize you, Seryozha.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve altered my appearance or changed my name. I do have a history in this kind of thing.” Sergey gave Sasha a pointed stare over the video feed. “The FSB has more than one trick up its sleeve.”

He watched Sasha’s jaw clench hard as he looked away, staring at the far wall of his bedroom. A dark pulse of something drilled through his chest. He hated that he didn’t know what that bedroom looked like. Distance seemed to pull on him, separating them even further. He swallowed. “Do you want me to come?” he asked softly. “Do you want me to be there?”

“Of course I do,” Sasha answered immediately. His big blue eyes, brimming with sadness, found Sergey’s. Melancholy leached through the screen. “But how? I won’t risk anything happening to you. If someone found out, and if that got back to Russia—”

“Those are big ifs, and I can do something about them. Mitigate them. And you said NASA treats Family Day as a private event? No press, no public?”

“People talk—”

“In the two years you’ve been at NASA, you had no idea that other astronaut was gay, no? No one made him a political symbol or put him in the news. NASA won’t with you, either. Your friends have reassured you of this, yes?”

Reluctantly, Sasha nodded. He sighed, squeezed his eyes shut. “I can’t let anything happen to you. Can’t let anyone find out. It would ruin you—”

“I want, more than anything in the world, to be there with you.”

Sasha opened his eyes. He nodded, a hopefully miserable twist to his face. It was a uniquely Sasha expression that was the closest to a pout Sergey had ever seen on his lover. As if Sasha didn’t know how to be optimistic—he tried, but he could only imagine everything that could go wrong.