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He lights a cigarette for the first time in years and tries to mimic the smokers. A simple breed of men, so easily satisfied by the promise of stale beer and a chance to get themselves off. Rude ungoverned eyes float over illustrations of naked boys behind the windows. They wonder if they can find someone as thin and pretty inside.
Veiled in the arms of night, the strange knowing that they cannot look at him, Armand watches. He is at home in the fog.
He watches their perverted thoughts – the naivety with which they view the sex workers, man or woman, nothing more than toys – and he watches the despair underneath. Angry, skeletal despair that they breath out into the night.
This one will be dead in 3 years; that one in a month. This one, with all his sores, will infect the next person he kisses. Many of them do not know they are sick at all. It’s metronomic, boring, to hear the same story flung over and over and over, but that seems to be the nature of this particular decade.
There is a boy, sat upright and drooling in the deepest bowels of the alleyway behind them, that the smokers will not look for.
Floating from porn theatre to gay bar to another porn theatre, Armand had followed him. Hole after hole after hole in the wall. Places the boy had sat, waiting to be noticed, to be desired. The men passed him by, didn’t even look at him, and the pain of it was enough to taste. Vinegar and oblivion on his tongue. How he had looked at Armand, saw the deep leopard purr of hunger there, and smiled. Drawn, as boys so often are, to horrors they cannot comprehend.
How Armand wants to rattle the boy by his shoulders. To press into his apple cheeks and eat his loneliness; such a beautiful, untouched loneliness. How it shows itself proudly on the boy’s skin, no mottled blemishes or lust purple bites, nothing but a smooth pale valley to fall into.
Armand drinks him up greedily through a clean hole in the neck. He dares not make any other marks.
You don’t understand the privilege you’ve been given, he tells the body when he’s done, and it lies silent and unmoved in the cold. He studies the arches and planes of its face, wondering what made it so invisible to the men outside. Perhaps it was the feint scarring of acne, an ugly side of youth that they don’t want to remember. Perhaps it was the shaven head, giving them nothing to grab onto.
The smokers will do far worse things to other children like this boy. There is syphilis and HIV and AIDs but they do not care. They knock into Armand’s shoulders and don’t apologize, stub out their cigarettes and walk into their holes. He is nothing more than a bronze statue buried in the concrete. He is old and they are young. He watches.
-
The apartment rings with longing. He should feel cradled by it, sounds of the two people he loves most together in such ecstasy, but whenever he looks at them there is nothing.
He walks into the bedroom and Daniel throws his head up, naked and wild and smiling, always smiling for him. He wants to take the boy’s cheeks in his hands and pinch them bloody. He wants to paint them smooth white and keep anyone else from ever touching him.
“Hi, boss,” the boy says, breathless, and then Louis is taking him by the wrists, pushing him into the linen. Blood-fat and snarling on top, a loud Southern assertion of power. His more subtle tactics, he always saves for Armand; not even caring to look as he speaks, kissing down the boy’s neck. “That was quick,” he notes with disinterest. Daniel moans under him.
“I wasn’t hungry,” Armand lies. Flipping idly through a magazine on the coffee table, eyes darting out every so often. On the bed, the two of them curled into each other like embryonic fern. Louis gleefully playing the strict father, striking Daniel on the cheek or the backside, holding him down and having his way. Don’t worry about him baby, he whispers in the boy’s ear, pushing a finger in his mouth. Daniel accepts it, always the ardent servant, the pliant lover.
Armand doesn’t understand it, this strange language that they’ve learned without him. Daniel letting the man squeeze his throat; so certain that they are just playing, that he is not in danger, laughing afterwards. Always giggling to each other in between moans and slaps and bites, some esoteric joke that he cannot understand the humour of. In these moments they slip away, into each other, and Armand is not needed for anything.
“You and I have an appointment at the Mellon tomorrow,” he speaks up, trying to keep his eyes on the paper. At some point he begins flicking through the TV channels, eventually settles for baseball.
You like it when Daddy holds you down, he hears, whispered within the cavernous sheets. He flinches, feels a strange kind of nausea rising. Channels flit by on the screen without him touching the remote; a Vietnam soldier with his legs blown off, a pair of women with bare midriffs kissing the camera, a man in a grey void discussing the Dow Jones.
You gonna give me what I want? Or do I need to take it? Sounds of a hand striking flesh, of high-pitched moaning. A magazine shakes, a fingernail scrapes on wood, Armand does not move.
I take such good care of you, don’t I? Tell me, sweetheart, tell me I do. Tell me that I keep you safe, that you never wanna leave.
A soft, soothing voice in his ear. Familiar words, a familiar nose on his neck. Mio amore, mio musa. Amadeo turns to face it – there is nothing but a wall.
Do you love me, baby? Louis, it’s just Louis. Daniel brushing a hand down his back, saying yes, yes, yes, I do. The man in the chair is named Armand.
Armand is not reading his magazine anymore. Armand is standing over the writhing bodies on the bed, eyes boring into them like headlights. Snatching the tangled linen away like a disappointed mother. “Louis,” he says, and his voice trembles only slightly.
Louis rolls his eyes, throws a lazy swat his way. And Daniel, Daniel looks up at him like he’s a maestro or a saint or an angel. It’s so easy, in this slant of yellow light, to see himself there; half lidded calf eyes, deferential and alluring but never importunate, God forbid. So desperate for somebody’s permission, for a blessing, just to be.
A small part of Armand wants to cry. “Do you intend to keep playing until then?”
Louis flexes the muscles of his back; wide and masculine and strong, he is a beauty but not the kind of beauty that could have survived Armand’s life. He is tucking Daniel under his chin like the boy is a doll; he is the one in control. “If you’re not gonna join in the fun, there’s no reason for you to be here,” he all but spits.
Armand raises his head to the ceiling. Needful he may sometimes be, but never, never importunate. There’s a sound of distress, Daniel is pulling himself out from the man cradling him, palming for Armand’s hands. Glassy eyed, like he might cry.
“You don’t wanna watch, boss?”
Armand reaches for the boy’s cheek, smiles. Talks slowly, because a human is a child.
“Not tonight, my dear. Enjoy each other.”
-
He had started his restorations as a way to pass the minutes. When the paintings began to fill up their rooms like a hoarder’s fortress, they could not be ugly, he had decided. And so in this decade he sits every night, cross legged in the dark with a collection of surgery apparatus, pulling and stretching the paint until it is perfect. Amadeo reformed, an artist’s accomplice.
This is what he does now, a distraction from the sounds of love echoing through the apartment. He is not a creature of love and he must remind himself of what he is.
His latest investment now layed out on the carpet. No temperature control, no surgical lighting to preserve it; he meets the work as he knows it was made, in a stuffy room with a painter’s tyrannical fist and models, probably children, deathly afraid to move. Venus and Adonis, this one is titled, a composition from Titian’s workshop.
The man who sold it to him was an investment banker. He collected paintings of naked women to scorn his ex-wife. My girlfriend looks at them and thinks they’re all about my ex, he says, sipping on a martini in the Venetian heat. That I’m still waiting until she comes back. Armand’s peers into his mind and sees the woman’s face, barely nineteen and living in this man’s apartment, looking up at Venus and feeling alone. I have to get rid of them, the man says, or she’ll divorce me before I even get to ask to marry her.
Armand sits, pretty, and fakes a laugh.
Now the painting sits alone in the living room. Occasionally, it is present for a stranger’s final moments, wrapped in airtight tarp so their blood cannot touch it. But whenever he eats indulgently, forgets to turn the lights off, Armand sees the eyes peering through the covering with judgement.
Adonis looks to the forest – picturing the next boar he will string up, how he will cut the fat from muscle, how he will eat it and eat it and eat it. Three thoroughbred dogs bow by his feet, licking at scraps of bread and meat. And Venus, obstinate pig-headed Venus; her once pale skin mottled brown under brilliant photography lights. A ring of varnish cradling her, the binding of pigments and chemicals in an illusion of lust. Poison.
Armand lays out his tools, symmetric and polished, and he begins to work. Listens to the men he loves, as they scream in pleasure, topple over the edge together. He drags tempera across Venus’ face until she is pure white, over and over and over.
-
Daniel is like a dog when he sleeps, jerking his hands, soft squeaks chasing his dream-quarry. When Armand is finished with his work he can do nothing but observe – something in him that cannot bear to look away but cannot bear to touch.
Louis holds him with a cigarette in hand, sways him like a newborn. A look on him, tender and reverent, that Armand has seen for just one other person. There is a small, snarling creature inside of him that wants to tear the boy off, will Louis through any means to look at him like that.
Smoke hangs in a lazy halo, and Armand airs it out the window, waving his hands. Daniel could choke on it, he could get sick from it, that is the reason – humans are children and they need taking care of. The night air smells of clean water and iron, and he breathes it in as if he really needs to.
“We need to discuss the selection for tomorrow. They are expecting us to present a minimum of three individual pieces.”
Louis sighs, slumping into the bed linen as if he wishes it would swallow him whole. Unamused, rolling his eyes, bored, so bored when he speaks.
“Whoever it is we are meeting; I’ll kill him now and be done with it. Whatever painting or sculpture or priceless artefact you want, I’ll steal it for you. I despise this performance you’ve trapped me in. ”
The window comes down like a guillotine. Armand’s nails, filed to tiger claws, scratch into the sill, and the sound is like a scream. No, he thinks to himself, do not be importunate. Never, never, never. Let him take what he wants.
And these thoughts, they capture Louis’ attention; the cigarette leaves his mouth, the arm around Daniel slackens. Armand cannot help but revel in the victory; for this moment, however fleeting, he will be loved in the way he is meant to be.
“You’re torturing yourself,” Louis says, and there is the hint of a command on his lips, petering out with the smoke. Do you need him, little boy? Does Maître need to be here?
It fills him up, the weight of Louis’ full attention. A coveted thing made even more beautiful by its rarity, a diamond on velvet. And when Armand is looked at with this attention, up and down in the same way every dealer and bawd has ever looked, he is whole. He remembers, flimsily, a voice telling him he is too old to be vain, that he must stop admiring himself in the mirror. He cannot remember if it is the voice of his mother or his Master.
“It is simple transaction, my love – a means to an end. The humans I entrap you with are insignificant. Paper floating in the wind.”
Louis makes a noise of disgust. It reverberates throughout the halls, the tightly wound rooms, the yellow walls. Daniel stirs and for a moment they freeze. He falls quickly back into his dream.
“They are predators,” Louis says. “I see how their eyes linger on supple parts of a canvas; how they ogle us, our pretend smiles, behind the frame. The Frick guy from last month imagined you pressed up against him in a bathroom stall. Weren’t you paying attention?”
Folding hands behind his back, Armand is composed. He is a wiry, scared little creature and he has been taught how to tamper his impulse for crying. Focus on the sounds, mio amore – insects drifting on the wing, trees spiralling with wind, people laughing and coughing out into the night. Listen to them and you will not cry.
“I went to his house and drained him dry the very same night. Did you know?”
Focus on the touch – the sliver of your palm that is tender, how it reacts to different surfaces. That’s it, feel the linen of the bed, coated with their sweat. Is it good, my love?
“He was sick. He wouldn’t have lived another year.”
Focus on the colours, mio amore; Louis’ eyes, burning oceans. Vicious and cruel, not made to be looked at by creatures like you.
“His last thoughts were of all the pleasures he had denied himself in life. For a moment, you flitted by, smiling with that look you know people like. He pictured himself taking what he wanted, and in his last moments on earth he was satisfied by you.”
Focus on your memories. What brings you comfort, mio musa? Think of it, in these moments. Climbing into the bath, telling Daniel to sit on his lap. Washing his hair, slowly, like he sees men do for their women in adult films. When Daniel asks if he could call him Daddy, Armand pushes down the nausea and says yes, smiles. After the pleasure comes, stronger than anything he can remember, he goes up to the roof and vomits black tar.
“Does knowing that make you happy? Does it give you what you want?”
Armand feels it passing through him like an oil spill, this performance that he has mastered so artfully. Sink gratefully to the floor, bow his head. Yes Maître, thank you Maître, it is what I want. There is the sensation of falling, falling like water into a jug. There is an ash-coloured face, a marble bust, staring down at him in the darkness. The face promises that their next conversation will not be in this tomb, that Armand will be saved from this place.
But he flits his eyes and the face is gone. Armand is in a grubby two-bedroom apartment in New York and there is Daniel sleeping right in front of him. His chin wet with drool, sighing and twitching, the hint of a smile always coming and going. He sees Daniel and he forgets, because he is a boy and he is young, so young.
Louis looks too, with a fondness he cannot pretend. When he speaks, it is soft. “He’s not listening to us.” He places a hand over the boy’s forehead, caressing him as if it will somehow prove his claim. “He’s dreaming.”
Slowly, Armand reaches for Louis’ protective hand; places his own atop, revels in the shared coldness for a moment. These are knuckles he could feel out blind, fingers that he could discern just by taste. Along the veins are splotches of dark hair that grew when Louis was still a living man – uneven, as if he never quite got to finish forming.
Armand takes this hand he loves and pulls it away, away from the boy, until it is back within the confines of the sheets. A place that he knows. But suddenly the hand holds its own sentience – it slides back up, towards the boy’s forehead, territory that is so familiar and so alien, and cups his cheeks. He is warm, Armand thinks.
It never stops feeling strange, to have a creature this hot in their room, touching every glacial object, scrubbing away 40-year-old dust. Monochromatic photos of Paris, of Cairo, rifled through with greed. Of Claudia staring at the camera, the boy’s fingerprints burning over her cheeks. Now, whenever Armand makes love to him, he will catch a flash of yellow in the corner, black stitching on a neck, a high cruel laugh.
This is her doing. This is the punishment she’s chosen for him. Reformed from the ash into a hungry Lady Lazarus, roaming whatever planes she must to destroy him completely. Severed his heart and given it consciousness, let it crawl out from his under ribs and mutate into a juvenile, giddy child. Always under the lights of predator eyes, of perverted modern age creatures who will prod him and prick him and squish him under their feet.
Like a mother, Armand is cursed to know that something will happen, Daniel will overdose, Daniel will get infected, Daniel will die, and he will have to go on.
Louis smiles, a genuine smile with teeth, so oblivious to these realities. “See,” he says in a whisper, offering the boy up, letting Armand hold him like he's a puppy or a cat. “He’s dreaming.”
Armand has never denied something offered to him – so takes the boy, sits on the bed and cradles him. There are flecks of irritated stubble coming through on his cheeks – time for a shave, he thinks. And then he looks into the boy’s mind and there are oceans, oceans as far as the eye can see.
(You’re like a muse, his Master says, carding his ringed fingers through wet black hair. The water is warm, and Amadeo thinks his skin is burning. A bronze Venus. Look at your eyes – pools to drown in love. He scrubs the Venice air from each layer of skin, corneum, lucidum, spinosum, and then any specks of Delhi still crawling underneath. His hands are firm on Amadeo’s skin, and so Amadeo burns.
One day, he says, I will take you to see the statues in person. All of the Gods.)
Sailing, with his father. A pair of hands guiding him to steer the helm, catching him when he slips on the deck, lifting him into the air and holding him as he swims.
(A boy comes to live in the quarters opposing him. He doesn’t know his own age, and Amadeo calculates it by the rule of the new British king. Quindici, he tells the boy. But you must tell men that it is lower, preserve your value.
Soon the boy is sitting in Master’s lap, eating biscuits from his fingers, and Amadeo watches.)
A stray dog playing with him on the beach. The animal is much bigger than him and still she treats him gently, lets him touch her face. He cleans sand from under her eyes, and they take her home. She’s his first love, and he tries his first pill the night after she is put down.
(He never gets to see any statues. Only the approximations that Master makes through him. Later, watching Claudia’s head roll across the stage, he thinks that she could be the Venus de Milo, if only he was more deliberate with his cuts.)
The hand juts away, fast as a bite. Silence stretches on, with nothing but the boy’s rattling breath to break it. Armand is quiet when he finally speaks, looking down tamely in the way he was taught to do. “You shouldn’t take advantage of his desperation.” Fiddling with the hem of his shirt – he would have been beaten for doing that, once. “That boy would do anything to please you.”
There is quiet, and then there is laughter. Louis laughs and laughs and it is so intentionally cruel, a high Southern kick that makes him seem like those cowboy actors on old films. Snatches the boy back into his arms, careful and slow but still with the territorial glare that all men have. Armand lets him.
“Is that what it’s all about for you? You immolate him because he is too much like you, and then you tell me to feel ashamed for kissing the charred corpse. Daniel is Arun is Amadeo is Armand, and they all deserve to be thrown into a pit, even though they are innocent. Is that right?”
Not true, no, it’s not true, you can’t believe that. Armand stands up, cries it – except he can’t, the words won’t leave his mouth. He is me but he is not. He deserves everything, he deserves the world, I would give it to him. I look at him and for the first time I feel hatred for the man who made me. I look at him and I feel hatred for myself, for all of the things I’ve taken from you, Louis.
“I can be the tyrant,” Louis continues, looking like he wants to spit on Armand’s face. His fingers hold Daniel’s jaw, clinging as if it is his only anchor to reality. “I’ve been him, my whole life. Isn’t that what you want?”
Armand remains at the window, looks out into the black. He does not rear his teeth, he does not growl. He is a blank surface, an empty statue. His body remembers how to pose.
“Nights upon nights where you didn’t sleep. Propped up on a stool, sometimes in the lap of a man old enough to be your father, sometimes with shackles around your wrists. Disgusting, revolting things you told me, and I listened. God, why did you tell me?”
Because blood calls for blood. Cruelty happens for the sake of cruelty, the high of it. Armand cannot be alone in his suffering.
“Waiting for the paint to dry, He put you on your knees just because He could. Flaccid, not even interested in you, so rarely ever interested. And whenever someone else came along, a boy younger than you, maybe a eunuch who had softer skin and a woman’s voice – you became a jealous little animal.”
They are shaking, the both of them. Louis struggling not to laugh and not to sob, Armand realising what his body has forgotten. There is a fog seeping into the room, and he does not know if it is real. At the centre of it is Daniel’s face, pale.
“What else did you tell me? Going down to the beggar’s market in the middle of the night; should you take the poison in a phial or a bag? Should you put it in his drink or his food? And when He found out, after the boy was already dead, you whined and crawled and begged at his feet for forgiveness and he forgave you, because that’s what He liked about you. But God, how you sickened him.”
Armand bites into his tongue. There it is, the knowledge that they all try so desperately to hide, the thing that sits between them like jagged glass. Claudia’s face is there, and then it is not. You are a cruel creature, Armand. It is said and it is not.
“Didn’t I become that man for you, Arun? You turned me into him, and now you resent me for it.”
Banks of fog, the fog that makes you stumble, hands straight out in front of you. A glare that obscures everything, who he is, what he is, where he is. There is only Daniel’s face, pale, pale, pale.
“You crying now? Suddenly can’t remember how to speak? Go on, I know how you love to hear yourself talk. You could never stand being the understudy.”
He is going to scream. It is ready on his tongue, waiting to break past its porcelain cage, and he is eager to let it do so. Let it explode like molten lava. But there is a sound.
There is a sound, and it is so violent that it cuts through all of the misery. A wet and heavy rasp of agony, like a fawn run over on old country tarmac. The two of them go rigid, darting their eyes across the plains of the room, anticipating some great thunderous climax. When realisation finally dawns, it does so unremarkably.
It’s the boy, Louis. The boy can’t breathe. You’re choking him, Louis. You’re choking him, you’re choking him.
There has always been purpose to the thickly insulated walls of the apartment; measures to keep anything from hearing them. Keep the humans oblivious to night-creature’s death dramas, a voice says. They manifest in grief-stricken howls from both prey and predator.
This is what Armand hears now – a howl of grief, Louis’ lion scream as he throws himself off the boy, looking at his own hands as if they are bloody knives, disgusted. Armand worries, secretly, that somehow the outside world has heard this scream, it’s delicate pitches and swinging tones. He worries because it is a sound he wants to keep all for himself.
There is silence, true silence for the first time in 27 years, and they are alone in the thick black dark. The boy does not make any sound once the hands are off. He is still, a rag doll, and there are no squeaks or twitches to show that he is dreaming, no movements behind the eyes. Bleeding crescents along his neck, a purple splotch spreading like paint. Louis calls his name and there is nothing.
“He’s not breathing.”
Louis says it, and he is somewhere far far away, a rooftop in New Orleans. Watching it happen, pliant on his knees. Then he says it again, and then again after that, each time with the slow weight of understanding blackening in his eyes. “He’s not breathing. He’s not breathing. He’s not breathing.”
Suddenly he is a man possessed. He moves like a naked marionette doll, every shift of bone preordained, purposeful. Swinging his legs over and beginning his rhythmic compressions. A cruel invention, CPR, made only for the purpose of giving people a sliver of hope against death. Pum, pum, pum, goes flesh on flesh. Daniel’s heartbeat is slowing down.
“Come on, baby, come on.” Louis slams into Daniel’s chest and the ribs are going to break, Armand thinks. They will take months to fully heal, and even then there will be small phantom pains to remind him, pains that will stay with him when he is old and grey. Snap, snap, Armand hears them slowly going. He watches. Daniel’s heartbeat is slowing down.
“Come on come on come on.”
Without trying, he sees through Louis’ eyes, drifts through the folds of his brain. Kerosine in the air. Terracotta domes. His daughter’s coffin, too small for him to sleep in without curling his legs. Her little painted freckles, like strawberries. Her laugh, her eyes, the colour of a sunrise. You and me. You and me.
His lover cries and it spills onto the boy’s cheeks. Little rubies crystallising into freckles. “Come on, sweetheart,” he wails at the body, and it remains still. Armand watches.
Soon there is Louis’ arm split open, blood pouring out in a fountain, beautifully red. None of it passes the boy’s mouth, it merely sits on the lips and festers. Drink up, please, drink it all up for me, he says. Armand watches.
Now Louis has nearly emptied himself and the boy is still not breathing. It is only now that he turns to Armand, snarling. Do something. You useless fucking spadone, do something, save him. If you don’t save him you’re dead to me.
Does he speak these things, or does he thrust them directly into Armand’s mind? This stays unknown.
Armand has cut himself open may times – no longer notices the pain, if there is any. He thinks he might be numb to it. Slowly he lets blood fall, just a few drops from his throat vein to the boy’s lips, and it is like bathwater. Grimy and tainted, he thinks, not fit for consumption. Then Louis grabs him by the wrist and forces him down onto the boy, skin to skin. Feed him, feel him all of you.
There is noise again. Daniel gagging on the blood, spitting it up like its oil. Plumes reaching up toward the ceiling, black and viscous, slipping down the lines of his face. Louis flipping him into his stomach and patting his back furiously, red marks on top of red marks. Soon the boy is heaving nothing but dry air, lying like a discarded toy.
“Hey, baby. That’s it. That’s it,” Louis coos, rubbing his back.
The boy stares. Daniel’s eyes are blue, Armand knows this intimately, but in the dimness here they look brown. Watery and young and confused, they are looking at him, and there are so many words in them; what happened, why does it hurt, what happened, please tell me, I need you. Daniel is trying to speak these things, to crawl over because Armand is where thinks he is safe, but he can’t.
Louis wraps around him like another layer of skin. “We have a bit of a scare,” he murmurs into the boy’s hair, voice delicate. “You’re ok. You’re safe.” He starts to rock him again. The boy’s eyes are glazed over, pearlescent.
“What happened,” he eventually squirms out, and he is in pain. Four of his ribs are broken, he can barely sit up by himself, and still Armand feels no instinct to go to him, to hold him or stroke his skin or whisper sweet nothings. If he touches the boy, he will burn. Yes, there is something very broken in you, amore.
“A kill got out of control.” An even voice, devoid of emotion. Louis lies like a hunter; strategically, only for those he loves. An animal ripping out innocent meat so its children can eat, letting its face stay bloody.
“He put his hands on you. But he’s gone, now. I made him suffer.” He strokes the boy’s hair.
Oh, Daniel wheezes back, and already he is thinking about how it could be his fault, that he must have done something wrong. “Do you wanna sit up,” Louis asks, and the boy nods his head. Slowly they rise, both filthy and red eyed and dizzy. Daniel making tiny mewling noises, not wanting to let go.
“I will run him a bath,” Armand says, and they both look at him as if he is Echo the nymph, bewildered by the notion that he can speak at all. Floating by himself to the ensuite, his nails dig into flesh and he bleeds. When the water flows, he wants desperately to scrub himself raw until he is flayed muscle and sinew, until he burns. He restrains himself, remembers how to pose.
Blood weeps along the porcelain; a poisonous mix, he is making for this boy. Louis is carrying him into the room, holding him like a bride. He slides into the bath and becomes a part of it, his body broken and liquid smooth. Louis follows, tucking him between the cradle of his long powerful legs. Pressing the boy into the planes of his stomach, right where the womb would be. Brushes sweat and blood and grime from the boy’s cheeks. Slowly, the tears start.
Armand thinks this might be it – this is where the boy finally breaks. Dissolves into the steaming acid, become nothing but bubbles in Louis’ hands. The image of Claudia comes to him again; singing ash in an empty room, burning until it is nothing.
“I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry, sweetheart,” Louis whispers, like a mantra. “I’m so so so sorry.” Peppers kisses along his skin, his eyelids, and Daniel accepts them without second thought. Still sobbing.
Armand looks to the floor. Ceramic tiles, difficult to remove stains from. They will stay with that orange bloody tinge for years, perhaps forever. Perhaps nothing can truly absolve them of what has touched them.
When he finally looks up, Daniel is staring at him. He is looking with his molten eyes and there is nothing but adoration. Armand knows, bone deep, that the bruises on his neck will fade but the adoration will not.
Soon the boy begins suckling at Louis’ neck, rubbing himself against the taller man’s body and moving the water in a steady rhythm – not for any sexual gratification, he is long past needing that tonight. No, it is all simply for the novelty of closeness. Clinging to something warm in a vast ocean of oblivion.
Armand watches.