I couldn’t stop thinking about his inked hand on mine. About the moment my lips fluttered on his surprisingly smooth cheek. His nostrils flared, and something I couldn’t decipher zinged in his eyes. Whatever it was, he weighed his words carefully before he said them. “Yeah.” He looked around us, like someone was watching, tugging at his beard. “Sure. You want me to surprise you, or just do it now?”

I thought about it for a second, resuming our walk. We were in sync now.

“Surprise me.”

We reached the end of the promenade and waited for the light to turn green before we crossed it. His palm found mine, but he kept looking at the traffic light, like nothing was happening, all bored and indifferent.

“Okay?” he whispered under his breath.

“Okay.”

MY MOTHER’S DOORBELL WAS THE color of vomit.

Dirty, overused. Kind of like me. It gave me a strange sense of familiarity. People came. People went. Sonya Protsenko always stayed, her shoulder always ready for me to put my head on it. Her fridge always full with homemade potato dumplings and cabbage soup. There was comfort in that. In having a functioning mom. Not that shit between us was simple—I wasn’t the best son in the world.

I wasn’t the worst, either.

For instance, I always did as I was told, because I felt a sense of gratitude that she hadn’t scraped my ass out with a hanger, which I wouldn’t have blamed her for. Raped at eighteen by a Russian mafia vor, she’d fled the country with me when I was a few months short of three. Mom had attended college here. Graduated as a therapist. Found the time to come to my bullshit school stuff, and to buy me a surfboard, and to sit on the sand all by herself—because she didn’t know anyone and was much too shy to talk to people—and watch me compete.

So I’d always done the dishes. Taken out the trash. Helped the neighbors fix the roof. Kept my grades up and played the whole perfect-kid charade in front of her friends and colleagues.

But I had the bad gene in me. The one that craved power. I could feel it running through my veins, making my blood hotter. That’s where my being a not-so-good kid came into play. I didn’t rape or murder or do any of the nasty shit my piece of busted condom father had done, but I still stole.

And sold pot.

And fucked women who weren’t mine to fuck.

Loving my mom the way I did—unequivocally—reminded me that I was human. Intimacy scared the shit out of me, otherwise. That’s why I’d never gone bareback with anyone. Not even my ex-girlfriend. I didn’t mind missing out on some of the pleasure if it meant not giving them my all.

But let’s not talk about fucking and my mom in the same sentence. Point was, I had a good relationship with Mamul. I loved that we spoke Russian with each other. It put a wall between us and them. Gave us another layer of closeness other kids didn’t have with their parents. And I loved her take on English, because that was fun, too.

Like when she’d written endless letters to my teachers and principals when I’d gotten into trouble, she would always refer to me as “my sun”. “My sun didn’t do this.” “My sun didn’t say that.” She’d been right most of the time. I was scapegoated a lot for being the Russian, single-parent kid. Still, I would slap the letter onto the kitchen table with my palm and growl, “Mom, it’s s-o-n, not s-u-n,” and she would yell back, “I know exactly what I meant. You are my sun. Why do you think the words are so similar?”

I walked into her house, bringing the sand and saline scent of the ocean with me, wearing nothing but my surf shorts. Today, Jesse had started her job at Café Diem, and I had Gail guide her through it. I chose not to be there, because I knew I was already in too deep with the girl, especially considering I’d nearly jizzed my pants holding her hand. Yeah, spending more time with her than necessary was a hard pass for me. So, I’d gone surfing instead.

“Mamul,” I barked, heading into the kitchen. She was standing over the stove, boiling beets and talking on the phone in Russian. Loudly. Mom motioned for me to wait with her hand. She was talking to Aunt Luba about…oh, who the fuck knew? Probably gossip. My mom still went back to St. Petersburg whenever she could afford it. Everything was crazy expensive in Russia, and she would buy me the most useless shit, like coats that could protect you from an apocalypse, even though I lived in a place where people got hysterical when it started to drizzle.