Page 23 of True North

Misha slouched down in his chair and frowned at his plate. He wasn’t, actually.

Between all the sleep and the regular, delicious meals, he was beginning to feel mostly human again, or at least more human than bear. As the lingering fog of his months in the woods dissipated, he was ready to start doing more than napping on the couch all the time. But what he had in mind was maybe fishing off the dock or seeing if JT had any good video games. He did want to work on his English, but not with a strange person.

He didn’t feel like he could back out, though. JT clearly thought it was a good idea and had made all the arrangements already, and Misha didn’t have a good reason to resist, especially after he had put the idea in JT’s head in the first place. He had made his own bed, and now he was going to have to lie in it and learn how to conjugate verbs.

“What’s wrong?” JT’s phone asked.

Misha shook his head. He didn’t want to admit that he was only being sulky. He shoveled another bite of omelet into his mouth and glanced up. JT was smiling at him. Misha returned the expression, his mouth full of food. He was out of sorts, but that wasn’t JT’s fault, and JT looked so warm and sweet when he smiled that Misha found it impossible to resist smiling back.

He was in so much trouble.

He should probably stop sleeping with JT every night. Waking up to JT’s rumpled bedhead wasn’t helping matters any. Or the time a few days ago when he had woken up in the middle of the night with JT—fast asleep—curled up behind him, hands folded together and pressed against Misha’s back. Not quite spooning, but more physical contact than Misha had expected or knew how to deal with. He knew it didn’t mean anything; JT had been asleep and hadn’t woken when Misha carefully shifted away. JT probably didn’t even know it had happened.

Misha had gone to sleep with his back toward JT every night since, hoping JT might do it again. If he had, Misha had slept through it.

“The tutor will be here in the afternoon at two o’clock,” JT’s phone said. “I will be home by then.”

Misha nodded and cut off another bite of omelet. Melted cheese oozed out onto his plate, mingling with the onions and mushrooms JT had sautéed together as filling. He felt hungry enough to eat two omelets, but he didn’t want to seem greedy.

JT peered at him. “Okay?”

Misha forced a smile. “Okay.”

JT left the house not long after breakfast, as he often did. When he was gone, Misha went out into the woods to be a bear for a while and clear his thoughts. The trees were still damp after a thunderstorm the night before, although the sun was up now and would soon burn off the remaining wetness. Misha nosed his way through the underbrush and felt rain and dew cling to his pelt. The wet green scent of the forest soothed him as it always did, and before long, he turned back to the house to shower and dress before JT came home. He meant to show that he was willing to at least try to become a person again. If JT wanted him to work with a tutor, he would give it his best shot. He didn’t want JT to kick him out. He liked smiling at JT across the kitchen table every morning.

He was so determined to seem biddable that he even unloaded the dishwasher and wiped down the kitchen counters, a tedious chore that seemed pointless, as JT would only wipe them down again after dinner. Why do it more than once a day? But JT was bizarrely clean and couldn’t abide a single crumb on the counters. Bizarrely because he wasn’t tidy; the house was full of random drifts of clutter on top of every flat surface, and JT’s walk-in closet had a pile of clothes on the floor, stuff he had worn once that wasn’t dirty enough to wash but apparently not clean enough to put back in the drawers. Misha had found him cleaning the toilet the other day, down on his knees with a rag and a pair of rubber gloves, even though he definitely had a cleaning lady, and yet JT seemed to have kept every single piece of junk mail he’d ever received. What a strange guy.

When the counters were done, Misha figured he might as well clean the sink while he was at it, and then the cooktop, which had a few splatters of grease after the morning’s omelet production; and then he got kind of carried away and cleaned all the windows in the kitchen and dusted the baseboards. He didn’t particularly enjoy cleaning, but his mom had made sure he at least knewhow, and there was something satisfying about working with his hands that let him turn off his brain for a while. It was a good distraction from his anxiety about meeting his tutor.

By the time JT got home, shortly after noon, Misha had finished in the kitchen and moved on to the hall bathroom and then the living room, where he was tidying and dusting the bookshelves. He was mostly illiterate in English, but he could at least read the alphabet enough to determine that JT hadn’t arranged his books in any logical manner, so it didn’t matter if Misha disrupted the haphazard vertical stacks. He didn’t stop what he was doing when he heard the mudroom door open, and JT found him there on his knees as he removed every book from the lowest shelf so he could wipe it down and throw out the old receipts and bits of scrap paper that were stuffed between books.

JT asked something that Misha didn’t catch, but he sounded amused. Misha turned his head to look, and JT’s expression matched his tone: a warm smile tucked into the corners of his mouth.

“You live like a disorganized animal,” Misha said in Russian, gesturing to the plastic trash bag on the floor full of empty gum wrappers and dead plant leaves. “And I should know.”

JT narrowed his eyes and pulled out his phone. “Do you want to translate this for me?”

Misha absolutely did not. He offered JT his most charming smile and stuffed another receipt into the bag.

“I’m going to cook lunch,” JT’s phone said. “Do you want pasta or stir-fry?”

“Pasta,” Misha said at once. JT had made fresh pesto over the weekend and there was still some in the fridge in a glass container. Misha was hoping JT would use the rest of it for lunch. The only thing better than pesto was caviar, and Misha had only had caviar a few times, when his family received some as a New Year’s gift from one or another of his father’s wealthy associates.

JT shrugged. “Okay. Help me chop it.”

Misha made his silent request for pesto by setting the container out on the counter along with the peas and asparagus, and JT shook his head and smiled and acquiesced. They went out onto the deck to eat; the weather was glorious, warm and dry, and the sky was so blue and clear that it looked like a flat bedsheet or a painted canvas. A loon swam by on the lake with two small babies perched on its back. JT and Misha didn’t talk as they ate, although they both had their phones. Misha was used to sharing peaceable silences with JT by now and didn’t find it disconcerting or awkward at all. It was nice to sit quietly together and look at the lake and feel the warm breeze stir his hair.

But at last, JT put his fork down and took his phone from his pocket. “Let me tell you about your tutor.”

Misha didn’t want to know, because he was still in denial, but he nodded anyway and tried not to look sullen.

“Her name is Sveta. She comes from Belarus. She teaches Russian at a college here. I have not met her in person yet, but I found her picture on the college website, and she looks as if she is already over sixty.”

“Grandmother,” Misha said.

JT grinned. “Maybe. She sounded very nice on the phone.”

What did that have to do with anything? Were grandmothers universally nice? Misha was behaving like a sullen child. He poked at his pesto-drenched penne. “Okay.”