The Lion Tamer

Chapter XIX

in which Remus and Emil go to the cinema

content warning: NSFW/sexual content

Emil doesn't know about my plan of learning to appreciate the magic of friendship, however. He's mostly busy with his own things: his sisters, his job, finding that relative of his mum, finding a therapist for Lidia, learning the sheet music for the Gaston song. Due to the "village fiddler plan", he spends more and more time with Richard, discussing his vision for the play. Richard does apologize after every conversation they have, and I still grapple with the urge to strangle him, more because of the apologies and less because of my jealousy, but I'm getting used to that too. I have my own things: a hospital performance scheduled for the beginning of December, where we're still trying to find a mobile IKEA ship for Hook, dance practice, Terry's tutoring, school... And sometimes I help Emil with his own things, helping out around his sisters, lending him my laptop so he can do better Internet searches, watching him learning the sheet music. I like to think of us as a team; he's there when I feel sad and lonely and tired of all my responsibilities and I'm there for him too if he needs me.

I see Zula and Lidia too, every other day at the daycare. Zula gets cast in the hospital performance of Peter Pan as a lost boy and she revels in having a wooden sword and a kick at me in the final scene of my defeat as Hook. Lidia still pretends to be aloof and indifferent to our theatre antics, but sometimes I catch her watching her sister over the rim of her book. She keeps that book so close to her face it's alarming. Her choice of poison nowadays is historical fiction with a touch of homoerotic tension. There's one I borrow from her underhand, about a prince and the president of the United States. It's marketed as the historical fiction book of the decade, a romance for the ages, and I read it in bits and pieces at night to better make sense of the romance of my ordinary little life.

Because Emil and I don't stop kissing. As he gets closer and closer to Richard, he insists he has a better chance of being kissed by him, so he needs the practice now more than ever. I go along with it because kissing him hurts less than not kissing him and I'm only but a man with my tangled-up needs and wants, and lack of willpower. We ditch P.E. more often than not and hide in the little storage room to make out or read the brochures Emil got about therapists for children or look for Emil's relative. The upside-down kiss happens here, hidden behind all the gym equipment.

We sit in a crown of papers on the floor, brochures, how-to guides, sheet music, and drafts of my essay on Frankenstein are scattered around us. Dust particles dance in the fair, hazy sunlight that pours through the dirty windows, and in the soft, comfortable silence Emil snorts himself awake. I haven't noticed he's been falling asleep.

'Are you okay?'

'Yeah...' He rubs his face. Blinking, he rolls over to my laptop. 'Yeah, I just had a bad night.'

'Thinking?'

'Always.'

'Why don't you lie down?' I check my phone. 'We still have twenty minutes until school lets out, you could take a nap.'

'Can I use you as a pillow?'

'Careful, Basinsky, in the end, you'll become respectful,' I tease because I distinctly remember a time when he simply took his place in my lap.

He rests his head on my calves crossed over one another, so my thighs are a crown around his head. He squints up at me, smiling.

'Would you rather if I mugged you first?'

He balances my laptop on his stomach, screen tilted, scrolling through Facebook. He's pretty sure his mum had a sister, he's told me, and he's trying to search by his mother's maiden name, but there are so many people with the name 'Kowalska'. Wikipedia says it's the second most common Polish surname. He tries to cross-reference things with the school his mother went to, the city they lived in when he was born, and physical similarities in pictures, but it's a monstrous job. In one tab he's scrolling through the endless list of candidates, while in another, he has a scanned picture of his mother—a tiny, ginger, bird-like woman with a blinding, proud smile and Emil's eyes. In the picture, there's Emil and baby Lidia with her. Emil looks like he's trying to hide in her, but in his eyes there's iron. He's gathered his mother's skirt in his balled-up fist like he never wanted to let her go. You can't call him cute because he doesn't look shy. He looks like he'd murder you if you even look at his mother the wrong way.