(Warning: Chapter contains bullying, sexual abuse, and domestic violence)
Look, it's not even easy for me to be attracted to someone I know I'll never have. I have serious financial issues and crazy setbacks in relationships over the years.
My first relationship or "thing," as I prefer to call it was in high school. I was eighteen.
We were both young, closeted, awkward, confused, and ignorant. This was a bit foreign to us.
We were children, children navigating social norms. He bullied me sometimes in front of other kids, but invited me over to his parents' house to study and steal kisses from me. It wasn't all bad. I've been through worse being an orphan, struggling with the scholarship I fought so hard to get.
I kind of liked him. I liked the money his parents paid me for tutoring him, and the spare time we spent studying. He outed me embarrassingly when I refused to be "experimental" with him. I didn't feel like it. He became extremely mean, and I was struggling to catch my breath.
I went home crying in the rain that day.
I went to school the next day and noticed a video of me sucking him off had spread all over the school. This was without my knowledge It was angled as a POV; his face wasn't in it, not that anyone cared to verify the other person. I was laughed at, beaten, and humiliated. The video reached the teachers and school authorities, then eventually the parents.
The school was told to rusticate me. They withdrew the scholarship.
I did not graduate from high school.
I've learned over the years that someone being evil to you does not mean terrible things will happen to them too. It seems karma forgot or maybe I'm just a bearer of bad luck.
I was evicted from my dead parents' shackles of a house. The government wanted to demolish the store below it, and I was sent away with only a few clothes of mine that could fit in my black school bag.
I slept on the streets. I became a beggar. I stole from people's trash bins. I worked insane jobs. I found a roof over my head as a private cleaner. I slept in the kitchen.
When I cleaned and washed, at times, I had less time to wash my own body, so I did it quickly, careful not to make it seem like I was taking up space.
I saved obsessively. I ate leftovers every single day.
I turned twenty-one before I could afford this place in Lyublino.
That day, I bought myself a small meal and too much beer. I got drunk and shed hot thick tears.
When I turned twenty-one, I retook my exams to earn my diploma. My employment opportunities were better than three years earlier. I worked part-time at a dry cleaner's, as a minimart salesboy, a waiter, and a café worker. I worked weak, strong, sick, and healthy every single day.
The days were really really hard. The nights were extremely long and lonely.
I met Volkov during a dry cleaning shift. He was loud, demanding attention every time he came in. He always wore expensive garments never the same outfit twice,he brought expensive heavy loads of garments and coats for dry cleaning services He called me "sweet boy." I corrected him every time. He never stopped.
He tipped me generously. Too generously.
I should have known.
I grew familiar with him. He invited me out for drinks and later got me a job at a club and karaoke place. He made his intentions clear the second time he made me follow him out.
I don't like being judged, so I didn't think too deeply about my decision. I was a lonely, growing boy with raging hormones. I didn't mind.
Four months in, I noticed a pattern. He was extremely violent when drunk, too egotistical to apologize, and gave me silent treatment as punishment whenever I asked him uncomfortable questions.
He often came to my home injured sometimes seriously. My home learned the smell of his blood. He borrowed the month's rent I had set aside and refused to return it.
I started poking my nose into his affairs to quench the fire of my curiosity. That's when I found out he had two wives and five children. They didn't know about each other.
He was in a criminal gang. A con artist.
When I confronted him, he beat me senseless. That was the last time I saw him.
I later heard he committed murder and that his gang turned on him. They say he's serving life imprisonment.
I honestly could not care less about him.
The point is, I'm not even supposed to be attracted to someone with circumstances surrounding me and yet his voice still plays in my head.
What troubles me is not the violence, not even the hunger or the nights I counted my ceiling cracks like stars. It's the way attraction survived all of it. It was like a parasite. It was something stubborn and humiliating that refused to die even when everything else did.
I tell myself I should be repulsed by voices like his. Men who enter loudly, who claim space before asking permission, who smell like money or danger or both. Men who choose me because they know I am easy to corner, not because I am weak, but because I am tired. I know the patterns now. I can list them like symptoms. Excessive generosity. Nicknames that sound sweet but feel shrinking. Forms of violence are explained away as passion. Silence is used as punishment. I know all this, and still, my body reacts before my brain can intervene.
Sometimes it feels like my nervous system was trained in chaos. Like love, to me, only registers when it arrives carrying fear. Calm feels like suspicion. Kindness feels temporary. When someone is gentle, I wait for the hidden fee, the delayed invoice, what more of me they are about to take. When someone is cruel, my chest tightens in a way that feels familiar enough to mistake for desire.
There are nights I wake up convinced I hear his voice, Volkov's calling me the way he used to, casual and possessive, as if I belonged to a drawer he could open anytime. I sit up, heart racing, embarrassed by the fact that part of me still responds, not because I miss him. I don't, because my mind learned his voice during a season when survival depended on attention. When being wanted meant being fed. When being chosen meant being safe for one more night.
I think that's the part people don't understand when they say, "You're strong, you survived." Survival is not a clean victory. It leaves residue. It teaches your body lessons your morals never agreed to learn.
I try dating sometimes. Ordinary men. Soft-spoken ones. Students. Clerks. People who ask before touching and listen when I speak. They look at me with something like interest, sometimes even admiration, and I feel… nothing. Or worse, I feel restless. My mind wanders, scanning for danger like it's bored without it. I hate myself for that. I hate the quiet disappointment on their faces when they realize I am somewhere else, listening for a storm that isn't coming.
There are days I wonder if I am broken permanently, by too many early losses stacked on top of each other, my parents, my education, my safety, my dignity. Other days, I think maybe I'm just unfinished.
I've started to notice small rebellions in myself. They're not heroic, but they're mine. I lock my door even when I'm home alone. I don't answer messages that feel demanding. I leave rooms when voices get too loud. Sometimes I eat a full meal without apologizing to anyone, without rushing. Sometimes I let myself take up space, stand too long under the shower, breathe deeply in public, speak without rehearsing my words first.
And when his voice comes back, uninvited, I don't fight it anymore. I let it pass through like a bad song on the radio. I remind myself that memory is not consent. That attraction is not a moral failure. That my body did what it had to do to keep me alive, and now it is learning something else, slowly, clumsily.
I am not healed. I am not pure. I am not what I thought I'd be at this age. But I am here. Still capable of wanting. Still capable of choosing differently, even if my hands shake when I try.
Maybe one day, attraction won't sound like his voice anymore.
Maybe one day, it will sound like mine.