Chapter Text
Louis dropped the car off at the Phoenix Hotel, where the band and road crew were staying, and grabbed a fresh shirt out of Lestat’s luggage. Although there was a little blood in the fur collar, Louis kept the overcoat.
It was a couple short blocks to the Great American Music Hall, and Louis encountered the line before he reached the venue. Security, running behind the posted schedule, had only just begun to check tickets and IDs. The line was abuzz with excitement. Concertgoers paid homage to every conceivable facet of the band’s aesthetic from leather to lace, velvet to military surplus, latex opera gloves to thrifted vintage. Many accessorized with stage blood and glassy nail polish. One woman carried a bouquet of roses. Above the sidewalk, the marquee at the center of the candy-apple red sign read THURS—THE VAMPIRE LESTAT—SOLD OUT. The sign’s border of fat white lightbulbs reminded Louis of a carnival, though he found the association more ominous than festive.
If Armand was around, he wasn’t making himself known. Louis did a loose scan for other vampires but found none in the immediate area. Their apparent absence was at best a thin comfort; the more likely possibility that he was out of practice detecting their presence struck an uneasy chord. As penance, Louis lingered across the street from the music hall for a while longer, keeping watch. It was an easy cover to fish one of Lestat’s cigarettes out of the coat pocket and take a smoke break while surveying the crowd.
Earlier today, many of these people had rushed to the box office or enlisted a friend as soon as they called the number on the flier. A pair of teenagers near the front of the line had been the first to arrive this morning—they’d camped out on the sidewalk for hours before the box office opened. Upon securing tickets, they’d waltzed off into the afternoon to go celebrate by piercing each other’s ears.
It was surreal to glimpse into these people’s lives, as he often did, and see Lestat woven into them. Louis watched the line for a good half hour before crossing the street and giving his name at the door.
While humble in size, the theater was a feast of embellishment. The ceiling was adorned with embossed flourishes and frescoes, and grand mirrors lined either side of the hall. Between the floor-to-ceiling pillars, a horseshoe balcony swelled out over the floor with finely carved inlets, offering those seated upstairs a clear view of the action. Stacks of speakers hung suspended from the ceiling by chains on either side of the stage. Awash with slowly drifting colored lights, the ornate interior took on a shifting, dappled quality, like the submarine splendor of a mermaid’s grotto in fairytale.
Everywhere Louis scanned—the bar, the stage, the bathroom—mortals clustered with palpable zeal. Their thoughts buzzed around the same locus: Lestat, Lestat, Lestat.
Louis made his way up the staircase to the balcony, opting for stage left closest to the stage.
He’d barely taken a seat when he was startled by what seemed to be a tap on the elbow, though there was no one close to him. Louis looked across to the opposite balcony and immediately picked out the unmistakable amber eyes staring back.
Louis had no sooner decided to walk over when Armand appeared beside him. Armand gave a small, roguish smile. The patina of his leather jacket reflected a soft glow, and his loose dark curls framed his face with effortless charm.
“Armand.”
“Louis. Exquisite as ever.”
Louis felt himself breaking into a familiar smile.
“How’ve you been?” he said, as much a greeting as a sincere question.
Armand’s expression telegraphed amusement, though not unkindly so.
“It’s a long story to tell. This decade has been a strange one—the eve of the Gregorian millennium. Do you feel it?”
“Not really,” Louis admitted. “Kind of blurs together after a while.”
By time they’d parted ways in the early eighties, Louis had retreated so far into and away from himself that the separation barely registered. In the years after, Louis watched himself travel up and down the Pacific Coast, steering his corporeal form from a distance, feeding it when it grew woozy, guiding it to shelter during the day, bathing so as not to draw unnecessary attention. His motive for enduring was opaque even to himself, yet it dragged him through five unremarkable years. He honestly didn’t remember much of it, except that no matter how devotedly he prayed or bargained or begged, Claudia did not visit him in dreams, and he encountered no divine sign that she was at peace, or in hell, or anything other than gone.
That’s quite the coat.
“It’s Lestat’s.”
“Our enfant terrible,” Armand sighed. “I won’t pretend to know what’s possessed him to do such a thing, yet here I am. Participating in the spectacle of it all.”
“Have you seen others?” Louis asked in a low voice.
“Not in the Tenderloin, no. A few around the bay, with more making their way.”
“Why aren’t they here? Why wait?”
“Frankly, I think a lot of them missed the memo about tonight’s show. The mode of announcement was very contemporary. I expect those in attendance at the Warfield will mostly be gawkers, young orphans of little importance. The rest will be waiting in the wings, so to speak.”
Louis crossed his arms and frowned. That the ax would fall in slow motion was hardly reassuring.
“Lestat may be reckless,” Armand said in a measured tone, “but he doesn’t have a death wish, as least not for as long as I’ve known him. In any case, he’s quite powerful.”
Armand surveyed the crowd below, which was now standing several layers deep by the stage.
“Besides,” Armand said offhandedly, “I expect you’ll be of at least as much interest as Lestat’s heretical pursuits.”
Louis’ pulse quickened.
“What the hell would they want with me?” Louis said, desperate to brush it off as nothing, as if this would make the aversion mutual. “I just live here.”
Armand smiled, lighting up a tender corner of Louis’ heart.
“There’s your answer, Louis. The cadences of humanity are an abstraction to most of us, but not to you. It’s a rare path.”
Louis scoffed. It was a bitter joke—whatever tenuous ties to humanity remained weren’t the byproduct of any great enlightenment or noble undertaking. The truth of it was that alienation was inevitable, and he harbored no desire to expedite the process.
“I’m sure lots of vampires live in cities, or among humans,” Louis said dismissively.
“Some, though none as thoroughly as you.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“I do,” Armand said fondly. “I’ve known many blood drinkers across the centuries, and I can say with some authority you’re singular among our kind.”
“Singular, huh?” Louis said, the words turning unexpectedly playful on his tongue. “And that’s your objective assessment?”
“Well,” Armand said, matching his undercurrent of puckish sweetness, “I’ll admit a little bias. I suppose I know you better than I know most people.”
“Could say the same about you.”
“It would be remiss of me not to take our being lovers into account.”
“Live-in lovers.”
“Again, a rare distinction.”
Louis smiled to himself. Whatever estrangement may have lingered from their parting was wholly eclipsed by the uncommon pleasure of talking with someone who knew him.
“Speaking of singular,” Louis said, “you’re the only man I’ve ever shopped for a couch with. Did you know that?”
“I do now.” That was a nice couch.
We’ve got good taste.
Armand’s simpering smile cracked into a grin, his teeth glittering in the gel-colored lights.
“What’s funny?” Louis said.
“Oh, just Lestat saying hello.”
“He said that just now?”
“Among other maledictions.”
Louis laced his fingers behind his back and stretched out his shoulders. It felt good—he was always so tense these days.
“Tell him if he does anything stupid tonight, I’ll never forgive him.”
“Don’t look to me to pass your schoolgirl notes,” Armand said, arching an eyebrow.
“Just this once. As a personal favor.”
Armand’s gaze swept over him, wordlessly and half-heartedly cursing Louis for subtly looking up through his lashes.
“Very well.”
Like a silent film sans title cards, Louis followed the general arc of Armand and Lestat's ensuing exchange through a series of nearly imperceptible micro-expressions that concluded with Armand rolling his eyes.
“I say this with love in my heart for both of you: you’re a saint for putting up with him,” Armand said. "I hope you know that."
“Honey, if you can hear this, simmer down.”
“He won’t hear you now. I hung up first, regardless of what he might tell you later.”
Louis laughed, so struck by the momentary levity it was almost painful.
“I won’t mention it,” Louis assured him. “Anyway, where’d you go after San Francisco?”
“All over. Mostly I’ve been traveling. In that vein, have you ever been to Miami?”
“No. Why?”
“Would you like to go?”
“What, right now?”
“Whenever you like.”
“Ask me again sometime.”
Armand turned to examine the ornamental molding along the edge of the ceiling. His eyes glowed twin topaz rings in the low light as this thoughts turned to the city.
“I’ve missed San Francisco,” Armand said softly. “It’s a strange occasion to be back, but I’m glad to be here.”
Louis had not necessarily planned to end his spell of wandering in San Francisco, but once re-immersed in its living streams, he found himself marveling at the way they flowed around his inconsequential presence. Ever the onlooker, and with the act of observation came an openness that was not possible elsewhere; it was the only thing that occasionally diluted the numbness. In the absence of clarity or larger purpose, the role of temporary witness was enough.
“It’s changed, you know.”
“All cities do. In any case, you’re still here.” In the area, Armand added politely.
“And in life,” Louis said, giving a wry smile—it was what Armand had meant anyway. “Undead life, whatever this is. Least for now.”
Louis' persistent thoughts of death had never been secret between them. In the decades they shared, sometimes his wish to die was groundwater; other times it emerged as a vernal pool or a spring. Whichever form it took, its presence had never frightened Armand, who regarded him now with an open demeanor devoid of judgement or alarm.
“Will you be at the show tomorrow?” Louis asked.
“Of course. I wouldn’t miss it.”
An uncomplicated gratitude rippled out inside Louis.
“I’ll see you there,” Louis said. I’m glad you came tonight.
Armand studied him with a careful, thorough gaze that Louis knew well. It was so intertwined with Armand’s love that Louis wondered if they weren’t one in the same, or if such a distinction even mattered.
“We needn’t be strangers, if you don’t want to be,” Armand said softly. “You and I are alike—we’re not truly solitary creatures. Not all of our kind seek out companionship.”
“Probably save themselves a load of heartache.”
“Perhaps.”
The houselights wavered and then dimmed, prompting a ripple of taut, joyful chatter throughout the theater.
“Until tomorrow, then,” Armand said, stepping forward to kiss Louis on either cheek. Armand's breath was silky and hot against his face.
Louis felt the soft press of lips against his own, and as suddenly as he’d arrived, Armand disappeared back into the audience.
The door to the left of the stage cracked opened. Someone on the floor let out the initial ecstatic shriek that quickly roused the crowd to cheers as the band filed onto the stage. Larry and Cookie sported matching plum lipstick, and Alex had painted a long silver gash over his right eye. The crowd pressed forward, angling for the clearest view, and intermittently shouted their excitement as the band readied their instruments. Louis could feel Lestat behind the door, and when he slipped out to join the band on the dark stage, the room swelled with adoring noise.
Even in the darkened theater, Lestat’s silhouette inspired a wave of devotion and heartbeats that pummeled like hail. He wore a simple ensemble of white dress shirt unbuttoned halfway, black trousers, and black cowboy boots. The bloody shirt stained with Louis’ tears was looped was through the side of his belt. Lestat stepped up to the microphone and exchanged a nod with Cookie.
She stoked the synthesizer to life, bringing it to low, undulating drone. As she added a slow dirge of keyboard bells, Larry joined the noise, letting an electric chord echo out into pure sound. He hit a foot pedal and released another chord into the theater. Alex lightly brushed the cymbal, and Lestat gripped the microphone with both hands, nodding along to the wave of sound. The brew thickened, vibrating the floor of the balcony.
All at once, the tempest ceased.
The crisp sound of drumsticks counted out four, and a sweeping guitar line managed to keep an edge of its hypnotic drone even as it wove into a warm melody. The lights washed the stage in pink and gold, and the room surged, recognizing the song. After the guitar line repeated, Lestat began to sing in a low voice.
Louis shivered through the entire first song, his body flush with nerves that bordered on panic. He heard himself swallow but could barely hear the music. The output of the speakers was felt rather than heard; the sound waves rippled across his face and reverberated deep in his core, leaving his cells no option to be still even if he could have willed himself to stop shaking. The four figures on the stage looked like dolls. One of them looked like Lestat, rendered in uncanny detail from the ever-present flyaway hairs to the little scar at the edge of his mouth.
Something that felt like a heavy blanket draped around Louis’ trembling frame. His hands shot to his shoulders to touch it, but there was only the coat. The ghostly weight wrapped tighter around him, yet somehow the gentleness of its intent was unambiguous. Louis incrementally allowed the strange relief it offered—whatever it was, it provided enough of a buffer for Louis to actually see beyond the tunnel of the stage as he looked around for its source. A subtle glimmer of warmth reached out from across the balcony, and with the recognition came a balm of gratitude. Louis didn’t need to look more closely to know who had sent the soothing spell his way.
The cauldron of the crowd was screaming again, and Louis realized the song had ended and another was beginning. The synth conjured a rough loop that seemed to decay with each repetition, and the drums and guitar chords slammed simultaneously to create a unrelenting rhythm. Under the warmth of Armand’s blanket, Louis’ surroundings came back into focus. The amplified sound was punishingly loud; the stage lights sometimes flashed directly in his eyes; the room was already muggy with sweat. Nothing out of the ordinary. No immediate cause for alarm.
Lestat began to sing in a style that was more akin to chanting, and the audience knew every word by heart, even when he switched to French. When the guitar and drums finally peeled apart into their separate lines, Lestat removed the mic from its stand and wound the cord around his forearm. He stretched into a side lunge, and his shoulders shifted like a panther’s beneath the fabric of his shirt. Lestat’s eyes slowly swept the room as he sang, and as his gaze passed Louis, he subtly licked one of his fangs. The people closest to the stage were locked in an awed devotion that bordered on trance. Meanwhile, the middle of the room started to shift and stew, eventually breaking into a pit. Lestat threw himself into the vocal performance with technical prowess and wild abandon in equal measure.
After the song ended, Lestat addressed the crowd directly.
“Hello,” he said, pushing his hair behind his ears. The mass of bodies on the floor cried out their greeting in reply. “Thank you for welcoming us into your beautiful city. I am, and we are, the Vampire Lestat.”
Without looking up at the balcony, Lestat strolled over to stage left, just below where Louis was seated.
“This is a new song,” Lestat announced. “A valentine.”
In contrast to the thunderstorm just before, this tune was unfashionably sweet, layered with intricate passages that bloomed like a humid summer garden under a full moon. If it ever saw a studio release, reviewers who tossed out labels like baroque pop in an attempt to dissect the band’s sound would no doubt be validated. Lestat sang the lilting verses with burning sincerity. It was a loving cypher to which Louis alone held the key, but it nevertheless lit up the room.
Lestat took his role of champion seriously. Throughout the set, he found subtle ways to convey through coded gesture and well-timed lyrics that every triumphant feat on stage was for Louis. When the band received a particularly ardent response to their big hit—the one that had been on Buzz Bin—Lestat sent a glowing glance up to the balcony as though he were merely a conduit for the adoration, laying the applause at Louis’ feet.
I love you, baby, Louis mouthed as Lestat spun toward stage right.
By the time the band played their encore, it was abundantly clear that despite their splashy rise in the scene, the Vampire Lestat had the musicianship and stage presence to merit the attention. Every song in their compact catalog translated well live and—crucially—left the tantalizing impression that they were just getting started.
When the houselights came on, the crowd milled around in a dreamy daze. Louis could feel the collective warmth as hundreds of fresh experiences lingered at the threshold of memory. A red-haired woman at the front scored the setlist, and she held the paper delicately against her chest as she waited for the floor to clear. A line formed for the bathroom. Louis gleaned the minds of those backstage; Lestat would likely be delayed in the aftermath of the show. Louis merged into the slow procession heading down the stairs and made his way out into the night. Despite the thick crowd of smokers out front—a collage of clove, menthol, tobacco, pot—the cool press of the marine layer was a welcome refreshment.
Louis was too restless to linger, so he started walking in the general direction of Golden Gate Park. He didn’t have a particular spot in mind or a clear picture of what he’d do once he arrived, but it was something to aim at. In the small business districts, several of the shop windows were decorated with paper pumpkins and garlands of bats. A few even had vampires, pale grey things with pointed ears and capes. In a couple months, they’d all be replaced with sleds and snowmen and other imported emblems of winter. The last time it snowed in San Francisco was ’76. He and Armand went up to Twin Peaks to go lie in it before it turned to slush. They’d raced each other home just before dawn with wet jeans and wild laughter. Another lifetime, now as distant as all the others. One day, this night would join them.
The further west Louis walked, the denser the fog layer became, erasing the background world and imbuing his surroundings with a chilled immediacy. He entered Golden Gate Park without fanfare. Being immersed in the park’s vast network of groves, fields, and gardens usually soothed Louis, but tonight he watched himself pass through the landscape, barely feeling the path beneath him. With a calm clarity, Louis realized he was heading to the coast.
Unlike most of the other local coves or beaches that faced the bay, Ocean Beach bordered the open Pacific. Its conditions were reliably harsh, especially at night. After crossing the sea wall, Louis walked along the sandy expanse for about half a mile before sitting down out of the tide’s reach. He slid off his shoes and socks. The moon was almost full, but what light it reflected was swallowed by fog.
Crouched there on the beach, Louis recalled that last time he’d set foot in the ocean was late spring. Rodeo Beach. He’d waded in up to his calves. While he was there, he’d considered taking a handful of the coarse, multicolored sand back to his apartment but stopped himself. His apartment was already accumulating too many sentimental trinkets: dozens of free bookmarks from booksellers on both sides of the bay, a hawk feather he found at Mount Davidson, a Canadian quarter he accidentally received as change at Cliff’s Variety, back issues of multiple magazine subscriptions, an empty matchbook from the New Eagle Creek Saloon. Things other hands would have to clear out when someone eventually noticed he was gone.
*
When Louis sensed Lestat coming up behind him, he didn’t turn to look. Lestat stood beside him for a moment—the polished leather of his boots gleaming against the sand—as though waiting for Louis to rise. When he didn’t, Lestat sat down next to him.
“Hello,” Lestat said affectionately.
“Hello.”
Lestat didn’t ask what Louis thought of the show, though Louis suspected he was itching to hear his impression. Lestat waited a beat, then said lightly, “It took me some time to find you. Not many people saw you on your way here.”
Louis filled his palm with sand.
“I just… wanted some air.”
“Of course,” Lestat said. Louis recognized his tone: the warm, nonchalant voice intended to lure Louis out of his introspection while being subtle about it, though Lestat was never subtle.
“I guessed you might have gone to the botanical garden,” Lestat continued, “since you mentioned it yesterday, but when I heard your heartbeat beyond the park…” His voice took on a velvety sheen, “I knew I’d find you here.”
Louis automatically returned his kiss, then dug for a fresh handful of sand.
“I just needed a walk is all,” he repeated.
Predictably, there were no bonfires at the beach tonight. Louis doubted there was anyone cruising the windmills at the edge of the park, unless it was people who got off on the being out in the wind and cold. Traffic up and down the Great Highway was sparse and local; without the contrast of city lights, the night’s eerie, occlusive marine layer was of little interest to most tourists.
“Ah,” Lestat said. He reached into his jacket and produced the bloody shirt, folded tightly until it was the size of a stained envelope. “As promised, your token’s safe return.”
Louis looked at it, and a sad half-smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. Lestat’s eyes were so bright, so earnest. Louis accepted the parceled fabric; it weighted next to nothing. Louis took a deep breath through his nose and looked out over the water.
“What about next time,” he said, “and the time after that?”
“I will always return to you, Louis.”
Louis shook his head. Lestat’s words, though predictable, were both the angry spark and the fan.
“See,” Louis said, “that’s just like you.”
“Well, I am quite resilient.”
“I mean making promises you can’t fucking keep,” Louis hissed. “So don’t go telling me you’re gonna come out on top for all eternity, and it’s you and me contra mundum, and we’re gonna grow old together or whatever bullshit. I don’t wanna hear it, least of all from you.”
To his credit, Lestat remained quiet.
Good, Louis thought bitterly. It was windy. This beach was always fucking windy. Later, Lestat would cry and moan about detangling his hair. Good. The waves, cloaked in fog, crashed in steady rhythm against the shore.
“As you said,” Lestat said after couple minutes, “I can’t promise you those things. Or rather I can, but to do so would be cruel.”
“You can be cruel,” Louis said softly.
“I can.”
The silence roamed between them slow and wary, like a pregnant animal.
“You got a cigarette?” Louis said.
Louis wordlessly accepted the cigarette without looking at Lestat, though he couldn’t help but see Lestat’s glassy thumbnail on the lighter held to his face. Lestat moved in to cup the flame, but Louis swatted his hand away and did it himself. After a few seconds, it finally ignited.
“We could barely manage thirty years,” Louis said. "Couldn’t even keep—” He dug his toes into the sand, making shallow roots, as if they would fortify him, “—couldn’t even keep her alive,” he finished, swallowing half the words before they left his throat.
The cigarette didn’t taste like anything, but the smoke was hot in his lungs. With any luck, it’d burn him out from the inside.
“If I could trade places with her,” Louis said quietly, “I’d do it in a heartbeat.”
Louis had repeated this to himself more times than he could count, and there was a perverted sense of fulfillment in finally saying it aloud to Lestat. It was a dimension of grief reserved for Louis alone, into which Lestat could not follow even if he wanted to. And though he could not follow, Louis made sure he would witness it.
After a moment, Lestat asked in a low voice, “Do you ever imagine yourself dying?”
“All the time. I know how I’d do it, too. I’d just sit out here til sunrise, then let the ocean take me.”
“This beach in particular?”
“Sure.”
It wasn’t a bad spot, now that he thought about it. Ocean Beach faced west. He could look out at the horizon all he wanted, right up until his eyes turned to ash, without having to watch the sunrise.
“I’d miss you terribly,” Lestat said.
“You got along without me before. You’ll be all right.”
Lestat shifted beside him, digging into the ground as though the words were buried beneath a few simple handfuls of sand.
“I missed you before we met, Louis,” Lestat said softly. “Before I ever saw you, before I even set foot in New Orleans.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Louis said, more exhausted than anything else.
“Some part of me anticipated you and felt your absence. And then when I met you, I knew it only could have been you. The way you missed our daughter—loved her—before she was born.”
Louis’ chest lurched, as though the ribbons wound taut around his heart had been suddenly clipped by phantom shears.
‘Nosferatu the Vampire,’ Louis read aloud from the newspaper. ‘Inspired by Dracula… a thrilling mystery masterpiece….’ This is what you have your heart set on?
Yes! Claudia cried. It says it’s a symphony of horror!
Our darling has an appetite for the macabre, Lestat said approvingly.
Must’ve got that from you, Louis said, casting him a sidelong glance.
You talk about me like I’m your baby or somethin’, Claudia grumbled, lounging comfortably between them on the couch, warm and impatient.
That’s cause you are our baby, Louis said. Even when you’re nine hundred years old, you’ll still be our baby.
He dipped in to kiss her cheek. Claudia rolled her eyes but allowed it.
“Louis?”
Lestat’s hand was on his knee. Louis glanced at him, startled to see his searching blue eyes, and snuffed out the cigarette in the sand before standing up and shedding the coat. He pulled off his borrowed shirt, letting it drop on top of the coat, and undid his belt.
“I’m goin’ in,” Louis explained, unbuttoning his fly and pulling his pants and underwear off in a single motion. “You can come or not.”
Lestat leapt up and began to peel off his clothes. Louis waited until he was mostly undressed to start walking toward the water.
For someone who saw the ocean almost every night—any of the city’s hills offered a decent view—Louis so often forgot its true intensity until his body was actually touching seawater. The tide rushed up around his bare feet in a frigid and humbling shock. The spray coated his bare skin, enveloping him in a mist that was equal parts ripe, crisp, and tangy with decay. Every inch of flesh he offered the ocean stung as soon as it was submerged.
“It’s frightfully cold,” Lestat commented.
Louis glanced back at him; Lestat had barely waded in past his ankles.
“People die out here sometimes,” Louis replied, steadily making his way further out. The icy brine bit at his thighs. “They get swept out. Drown. Freeze. Doesn’t stop the surfers though.”
Louis inhaled sharply as a wave surged around his waist and splashed up onto his chest. It was forceful enough to push him back onto his heels, and it was excruciatingly cold. Behind him, Lestat cursed as the water unexpectedly swelled to his scrotum.
“Do you swim in the ocean often?” Lestat called, his voice tight but resolutely devoid of complaint.
“No,” Louis called back, “but I should.”
Contact with the sand beneath him became tenuous. Pushing off as best he could, Louis began to paddle out toward the waves. He angled his body to reach further forward with each stroke, relishing the way his whole being was involved in the simple mechanical process of propelling himself against the current. Lestat was off to the left, a little behind Louis, and what Lestat’s swimming lacked in form he made up for with sheer strength.
“Maybe we could make it all the way to the Farallon Islands,” Louis called.
“If that’s where you’re leading us,” Lestat replied.
Louis wasn’t leading them anywhere. His immediate motive for paddling forward was to feel his muscles burn. His strokes carried him out faster and faster, then suspiciously fast. Louis stopped paddling and eased into a stationary tread, and still he was carried forward. Louis shivered. He’d seen enough beach hazard signs in his time to recognize this as a rip current. There was something humbling about being swept out to sea not on purpose or by accident but simply because he was there.
Louis rotated his body to look back at Lestat, who was steadily growing smaller.
“Why aren’t you swimming?” Lestat called, confusion and growing alarm plain on his face.
Don’t need to, Louis thought. A lot of rip currents extended just past the surf break, but others went further. Which kind he was caught in presently wasn’t for him to know.
In a blur of arms and frothy water, Lestat caught up to him. He gripped Louis’ forearm and scanned his face intensely, as though it held an urgent message written a language just barely too far removed from one he understood.
“It’s all right,” Louis said dreamily, brushing his stiff fingers against Lestat’s bicep.
With strange delight, Louis found his fingers were too numb to grip properly. Lestat, who retained his dexterity, folded Louis’ fingers into his own. Lestat’s hands were big, always so big. Hands that had cradled him when he was new. Hands that held him now in the dark. Louis couldn’t feel much in the way of touch, but the pressure was surprisingly comforting.
The current continued to carry them out. With the fog, it was difficult to gauge where they were in relation to land.
“How far does it…?”
Lestat’s question faded on his lips as Louis shook his head. Louis didn’t know, and it didn’t matter. Knowing wouldn’t change anything. It didn’t change the tenderness in his chest that swelled when he looked at Lestat. Love like a hearth, like morning dew, like a warm hand on his stomach.
“We gotta swim parallel,” Louis mumbled.
“Parallel to what?”
“Shore. To get out of the current.”
With Louis’ reassurance, Lestat reluctantly let go, mirroring the way Louis positioned his body perpendicular to the tide. Whether they were facing north or south was moot. Louis began to paddle as he imagined a mortal man might, incrementally moving forward as he continued to be swept sideways. As the current’s force dissipated, their efforts gained more traction. Surrounded by fog and immersed in the hypnotic, amniotic rock of the water, it took Louis a minute to realize the tide was behind them.
Out of respect for the ocean, Louis was set on swimming back to shore in the same fashion they’d paddled out, and Lestat followed his example. The vast water didn’t acknowledge Louis’ offering—like any swimmers blessed with a tenuous window of good luck, the sea did not block their path, nor did it temper its cyclical churn to aid their journey.
The transition from floating to standing was a heavy one. Louis found his cold limbs clumsy as the two of them trudged onto the beach. The exhaustion was amplified on land, as though something in his body recognized this was a safe place to collapse and regroup. The urge to rest pulsed inside Louis but he pushed on, silently accepting Lestat’s arm as they made their way down the beach.
When they finally came back to the spot from which they started, they found their shirts and socks had blown away, tumbled somewhere down the shoreline where neither of them were interested in going. The tear-stained token was caught on a piece of driftwood. Louis watched its sleeve flap alongside matted seaweed in the wind and felt nothing. Not so long ago, the fabric had laid against Lestat’s living body as he held Louis in the car. Without Lestat, it was just a piece of cloth.
Louis recalled the texture of shirt against his cheek and magnified the memory of its heat. The center of the tangled mass ignited. Flame spread to engulf the shirt, and its ashes sailed over the sea wall, free as the spirit of the newly dead.
Louis bent down and picked up the overcoat, which was hefty enough to stay exactly where he’d left it. He shook the sand out of its folds and put it on, deriving more pleasure than he cared to admit from the silky lining against his bare skin.
Lestat regarded him with a soft, loving smile. Despite being stark naked in the elements, he assumed an easy posture, his arms comfortably at his sides, his shoulders squared but relaxed. Lestat’s body was beaded with seawater, and sand stuck to his feet and shins. His expression was as content as if they were curled up together on the couch. Louis’ heart bloomed. He suspected eternity was finite, or at least hoped it would be, but for whatever eternity turned out to mean, he and Lestat would belong to each other for all of it.
“As I said earlier,” Lestat said, gesturing to the coat, “it suits you. You should wear fur more often.”
“It’s a little dressy for around town.”
“If you need an occasion to dress up, I’ll gladly give you one.”
Lestat reached for Louis’ hand and kissed the back of his palm, then pulled him in closer.
“Just one?” Louis said.
Lestat’s smile kindled into a warm, handsome grin.
“Every sunset,” Lestat vowed, “for as long as you’ll have me, and thereafter.”
I want you for a long time.
Lestat carefully touched Louis’ face, tracing and retracing what was now legible there.
“I love you so, Louis,” Lestat murmured.
Louis nuzzled into the warmth of his hand. It smelled like the ocean.
“I liked the new song tonight,” Louis said.
“Did you?” Lestat’s face lit up with delight. “I wrote it for you.”
“I know. I could tell.” Louis leaned forward to kiss the cold tip of Lestat’s nose. “You wanna go home?”