Chapter Text
When he awakes, the apartment is deathly cold. Sterile morning light slants through the open window like divine accusation. It is ten o'clock. Viktor has overslept, and Jayce's lecture is in full swing without him.
He pushes himself out of bed with joint cracking force, aware only in passing of the seasick sway of head cold that has settled upon his body like fog over night. The clothes he pulls on are clean but wrinkled, and he leaves the apartment - empty stomach, no coffee fix - in such a bewildered state one might think he hadn't slept at all, let alone surrendered to Morpheus entirely. On the train, his reflection glares back at him through windows foggy and green as fish tanks. His face is creased with red lines, his hair mussed into even more of a bramble bush tangle than usual. Not only will he be late to Jayce’s talk, he will fall through the doors looking like a street urchin.
I was wrong . He thinks as the train pulls into the station. I was so wrong . He thinks as he scuttles through the academy halls. This is going to be the worst January of my life . He thinks as he pushes through the lecture hall doors and prays nobody bats an eye.
Thank God for Jayce’s anodyne way with words. Not a single soul turns at Viktor’s intrusion, too caught up in the intricacies of photon barriers, destructive interference, and the way the outrageously handsome guest lecturer moves his hands as though conducting a symphony. Viktor ambles down the aisle as quietly as he can manage with an armful of papers and a bronze capped cane. When he collapses into an empty seat and buries his head in his hands, the panic begins to fade, and the metronome of pain returns to its steady toc toc toc toc. It is as though every single pin in his vertebrae is tapping vindictive Morse code down the length of his spine. His left leg begins to tremble involuntarily. The student beside him scowls and leans away.
There are only ten minutes of the lecture remaining and he must grind his teeth to last it out without doubling over. It’s all worth it, though, when Jayce catches his eye and stumbles, just so, over his words. He clears his throat - excuse me - and starts his sentence again. Viktor rips a page out of his notebook and scrawls –
SYNONYMS FOR EXCUSE ME; sorry; im sorry; forgive me; pardon me; i beg your pardon; i beg beg beg beg beg i am BEGGING –
"I won't be taking any questions today," Jayce says as he begins to fold away his notes. "If I've, ah, piqued your interest, I'll be running workshops on campus for the next two weeks. I look forward to seeing you there."
Viktor is prepared for the worst. Resentment, disappointment, a dejected reprimanding or perhaps nothing at all. Viktor wouldn't blame him, but it would be easier, he thinks, to be cussed out and cursed at by Jayce Talis, than for him to simply pretend he never existed.
"Viktor," But Jayce doesn’t look resentful or disappointed as he approaches Viktor through the aisles. In fact, ever effulgent, he is smiling. "I’m glad you came."
He has traded out the starched formalities of white linen and cordovan brogues for cableknit and cotton, a more casual but no less compelling ensemble. Clothes hug his form like they adore him, the shoulder of his blazer broad and firm, the swell of his chest beneath the sweater like a snow capped peak. Viktor must remind himself not to ogle as he stands, legs buckling.
“Jayce,” He makes to receive Jayce’s outstretched hand, surprised when it is not a shake but an affectionate clasp of the shoulder that he is greeted with. “You’ll have to forgive me, I, uh…”
He rattles a half-hearted admission to sleeping in, so out of character for him: the man who barely sleeps at all most nights. Least not when he is wide awake in the smallest hours of the morning stringing himself out on the eidetic fantasy of a debauched prospective colleague on his knees. He, of course, does not say this part out loud, though the image flickers attractively every time he meets Jayce’s gaze.
“Please, there’s no need to apologise. Actually I’m, well, a little concerned...” He says gingerly. “Are you alright? You don’t look well.”
Viktor does not look well at the best of times: perpetually sallow, a sort of pale, sunken creature that exists faintly between the contours of its own skeleton. In the unrelenting light of the lecture hall he is sure his every grim detail must be cyanotype vivid. Rotten plum purple below the eyes, sour milk white in the cheeks. Perhaps the tide of sickness is turning him green at the edges, like a loaf of bread pocked with ergot. How Jayce could bear to look at him, he is uncertain.
"Ah, just…coming down with something. It’s nothing, really.” He sniffs as if to labour the point. “Serves me right for walking home in the rain I suppose.”
"You walked home in the rain?" Jayce blanches, his lips creasing into an unpleasant frown. "It was torrential last night, no wonder you're sick. You should be at home!"
"I couldn't miss your lecture - "
"Oh, come on, it's just a stupid talk. I've done it a hundred times before." Jayce laughs but it is a hollow sound. Viktor prickles at him calling his own lecture stupid - a notion as ludicrous as it is assuredly incorrect. "...did you really drag yourself up here in such a state just for me?"
Shrugging, Viktor leans into his cane. His joints feel as though they are grinding into each other, like blunt pistons in a machine that has worked itself into the wrong shape. But if he were to lean the other way he would be caught in Jayce's orbit. He thinks of black holes. Vortexes, entrances, orifices.
“I told you. You piqued my interest.”
“That’s hardly worth getting sick.”
"I'm always sick." He watches Jayce's sweet little frown fall further still, and feels a sort of awful satisfaction. "I was born sick. I am perpetually sick and I will be 'til the day I die at the ripe age of forty."
"Don’t say that. Why would you say that?"
A doctor had told Viktor just a few weeks before his thirtieth birthday that he would be a very lucky man to live another ten years; he has long since grown numb to his impending asystole. For all intents and purposes, he is spending this remaining decade splayed open on the operating table - and it’s an open theatre! Everyone gets a chance to stick their hands inside the cavity before they turn off the life support. The blood drying beneath your fingernails may well be the only trace he leaves behind. Smear him on a petri dish, breed new cultures of bacteria in the vestibule of his body, taxidermise him and put him up for display in the curiosity museum. Anything to mean something.
"Remind me, what is that fringe-theory cult-classic of mine called again?” He smirks, “Don't act like you haven't heard this before."
The pseudo-narrative of Origin of Sickness returns constantly to the point that Viktor is not long for this earth. Critics couldn't decide if it was perversely melancholic, a self-serving bemoaning of his cosmic misfortune, a desperate plea for attention from the general healthy populus, or simply, quietly profound. Viktor had never considered it anything but an objective truth. Is it a comfort? That Jayce is already so intimately familiar with Viktor's mortality? Or should that scare him. Very little scares Viktor anymore. When he wrote of apopsis, he thought of his own cells cannibalising themselves. When he waxed poetic on the perfect fallibility of quantum zeno effect, he imagined himself dying alone in his bed. At least these days he has company, and whilst many cat owners fear that their pets will eat their corpses in the event of sudden death, Viktor is fairly certain Rio would find no nutritional value in the desiccated husk of his body.
"Okay, you got me there." Jayce thumbs awkwardly at the books he holds to his chest. That same swollen journal, stained and torn with time and love. A dogeared textbook, bristling with page tags and paperclips. A small, pink pamphlet, sun bleached fish-belly-pale, delicate beneath the splay of Jayce's big, big hands. "I actually, uh...this is a bit embarrassing but..."
"I'm not going to sign it, if that's what you're going to ask."
"Don't tell me you really think so little of me? Just when I thought we were getting along." Jayce takes the copy of Origin of Sickness in hand, unmistakable with its bold Arial and incomprehensible imagery. When it was reprinted in late 1989 - the second edition came with extended rumination on the nature of autoimmune disorders, but demanded censorship lest it be occluded from popular discussion, speaking with blunted teeth on the lingering shadow of AIDs - the printing house had jokingly suggested that he kick up a lawsuit with Gary Talpas. Viktor found it amusing that the photocopied x-ray of his own rib cage that comprised the cover really was so very similar to distorted turbine blades. "No, Viktor, I don’t. I don't. I just...I wanted to prove something, I guess?"
A brief, shallow sickness unrelated to the head cold roils in Viktor's gut. An insidious suggestion that Jayce pities him, that whatever it is he is trying to prove is completely unrelated to him, but a misguided attempt to make Viktor feel better about being an abject pariah in the scientific community. He imagines a twin set of scenarios: One, Jayce reveals that his copy of Origin of Sickness is obsessively annotated, back to front, with postils that he has been dying to discuss with Viktor for years, and now he finally can. Two, this notation is of an equally obsessive but less than charitable nature, Jayce has been only partially honest in his admiration, and now he will reveal his true reservations about Viktor’s strange and radicalised scientific beliefs. Option one borders on erotic. Option two, however unlikely, makes Viktor wish he’d never crawled out of bed that morning.
“Prove what?”
“I don’t know.” Jayce flicks through the pamphlet, letting the muscle memory of softened pages and bent staples guide his eye. It falls open on a paragraph so dense the pages look like static. Viktor can see various sentences underscored faintly in pencil. His offbeat heart settles a little. “I’m still trying to figure that out.”
"I could help you." Viktor says eventually, softer than he expected. "Figure it out.”
Jayce glances up.
“Yeah?”
“Though,” He skates his fingertips across the buckling spine of Jayce’s journal, allowing himself the brief simulacrum of body-to-body contact, before slipping it from his grasp. “I believe we have some catching up to do, first.”
“Hey…!” To his credit, Jayce tries to sound offended, but he is glowing as Viktor begins leafing through pages.
“You called your talk stupid .” Viktor says, settling on a double-page spread of hand-drawn diagrams, exquisitely executed in their detail and precision, so utterly incomprehensible upon first glance that he is almost certain this must be some esoteric concept borne of Jayce’s own imagination. “I’d rather decide that for myself, if you wouldn’t mind.”
“Well,” Jayce looks at his wrist and laughs when he finds he is not wearing a watch. “Take a walk with me?”
Against his better judgement, and the hot wire of pain coiling through his left side, Viktor accepts the offer to join Jayce wandering campus.
On any other day, with any other man, he would have sooner locked himself in his office and bled the gas heater than subject himself to an aimless ramble of hallways he has seen a thousand times before. He has so much work to do, afterall, rotting at his desk would likely be a wiser use of his time. But the light seems to hit the windows differently with Jayce, and time, of which it never feels like he has all too much, moves like honey. He recounts his lecture in the manner of an astrologist connecting stars, taking a pair of shears to the existing pathways, cutting them clean away and drawing up new constellations to light the night sky in a way that is bigger, brighter, better than it ever had been before.
For a while it is all molecular, until the excitement melts away and Viktor finds himself slowing to a halt with every familiar turn of the hall that Jayce stumbles upon.
“I remember tripping and breaking my nose here.” As they descend the stairwell. “I used to hide in that storage closet in between classes.” As they round the corner. “A professor told me I was too smart for my own good in there.” As they meander between doorways.
It is all much more melancholy than Viktor would have expected; a lot of days spent reading and writing for hours on end, completely alone. Throwing himself into the library and staying there ‘til the lights shut off and he was ordered sternly to beat it to the dorms. Gazing into the middle distance, longing for something larger, indescribable to the point that it would drive him to tears. The Jayce he would have imagined - a dashing, popular model-student, playboy ingenue with a heart of gold, adored by peers and faculty alike - seems like a gauche caricature in comparison to the reality he recalls. Perhaps it makes sense, Jayce has all the makings of a regular coxcomb, but seems altogether too sweet to pull off the act.
“You mentioned yesterday that you were a very troubled young man,” Jayce stops before a set of bay windows that look out upon the gloomy courtyard, slick and black as licorice in the rain. “I was too, in a way.”
“Lonely.” Viktor nods, familiar with the feeling.
“It’s strange being back here. There’s so much to be grateful for and yet…I can’t help but remember how sad I was back then.”
“Well…you said it yourself. Most geniuses are.” Viktor is not fond of the word genius: bland, lacking nuance, watered down by flagrant mis-and-overuse by more Procrustean intellectuals. But if anyone in the world is a genius, it certainly must be Jayce. “I don’t think you need me to tell you just how brilliant your work is, Jayce.”
Outside, the rain is letting up, weak sunbeams cut through silver birch limbs and bounce off of the puddles like will-o-wisps. Perhaps it is just this shift in the light that makes Jayce’s expression seem suddenly different, sombre and lucid.
“Can I tell you something?” He asks, although he does not turn to look at Viktor. “I really wanted to impress you today.”
Viktor so wishes he could take Jayce’s face in his hands, study that delicate chiaroscuro head on, like the old masters must have done when they first saw David’s doe eyes. Instead, he allows Jayce to keep staring morosely upon the puddles and paving stones.
“It’s pathetic but…I was crushed when I didn’t see you this morning. I thought - I don’t know - I thought maybe I came off too strong yesterday? That I drove you away by being an obsessive freak? I have a habit of doing that.” He closes his eyes and sighs. “When something piques my interest …I can’t stop thinking about it.”
There is a clarity in Jayce’s eyes when he finally breaks from the glass and meets Viktor’s gaze, as though the rain has bathed him clean and suddenly he is looking upon the world soaking wet and reborn. Like a baby animal sliced from within the amniotic sack: fresh and afraid.
“I couldn’t stop thinking about you.”
It is uncertain which of them moves first. Neither elegant nor painless; they knock knees, bump foreheads, grapple clumsily at each other’s clothes until they find purchase in the friction of seams. Viktor’s cane clatters to the ground as his back strikes the wall with blunt, brilliant cruelty, but when Jayce’s mouth finds him it is a sweet shot of morphine to the limbic system.
Jayce tastes like coffee cut with toothpaste. Smells like sandalwood and the bite of sweat prickling excitedly beneath his collar. He babbles quiet, indiscernible vowels as Viktor pushes his mouth open wider wider wider, tongues verging on undiscovered speleology. The brazen wet mess of it all is almost enough to black out the rest of the world, if only for a moment, but Viktor’s legs are trembling as though being hacked with a bonesaw, and the two of them are turning each other inside out in broad, public daylight.
“Move.” Viktor dare not sunder from the electric heat of Jayce’s lips, but pushes him forward with surprising force, kicking his cane along with them. Lip-locked, they lurch into the blessedly vacant single-stall bathroom across the threshold, parting only to ensure the door is locked before collapsing against each other once more.
It is not ideal. The stall walls rattle. The porcelain moulds their limbs into uncomfortable angles. At times it is unclear if the frantic burn in Viktor’s brain is a sensual fire of the loins or the chemical citrus fumes wafting from the disintegrating urinal cake below. The tile is slippery, his knees buckle. If this is how it ends, with barely a minute’s worth of imbibing Jayce Talis before the world turns sideways and he cracks his head open on the floor, it would have been worth it. But without a moment's hesitation Jayce’s firm arms gather him up, take the weight and hold him steady. Viktor remains not only upright but so presently situated against Jayce’s body he can feel every contour of him throbbing with life - including the hard curve of unspent lust pressed insistently against his hip.
“Is this…” Jayce sighs into Viktor’s mouth, but the sentence disappears, sliding into the back of his throat, swallowed up greedily and spat back out in a barrage of teeth and tongue.
“What?” Viktor weaves his fingers into the neatly waxed hair on Jayce’s crown, tugging him down so that their foreheads meet.
“Are we…doesn’t matter.” He dives back in without protest, dropping his head further still to Viktor’s shoulder where he begins to mouth desperately at the ropey chords of his neck.
Jayce moves with candour, responds to every touch like he is experiencing it for the first time. It drives Viktor near ravenous to think that very may well be the case, that he is the first man to broach Jayce’s body like this. When Jayce’s tongue carves a quivering path around the jut of his Adam’s apple, Viktor simply can’t take it a moment longer. He makes deft work of their belt buckles, their trousers falling about their thighs.
“Tell me to stop.” He says sternly, tugging at Jayce’s underwear until the head of his penis emerges from beneath the fabric, a glistering, deep shade of maroon.
“Oh my God.” Jayce whines. He stares at his own cock as if he has never seen the thing before: wine-dark and wet in Viktor’s fist, emerging from a cropped thatch of dark hair that creeps deliciously up to the soft ripple of his abdomen.
“Tell me to stop.” Viktor says again, following the swell of a vein with his thumb until that ripe plum of glans weeps over his fingers.
“Please don’t.”
That’s all Viktor needs to hear, and he is yanking himself free and lining himself up alongside Jayce in the spit shined cradle of his palm. Jayce is slightly thicker, Viktor is slightly longer, they curve in opposite directions and yet they slide together with such lush ease, Viktor could almost convince himself he really did crack his head open and die, and this - against all the odds - is that Christian heaven he’d been told he’d never see.
With eyes black as pitch and his mouth hanging beautifully agape, Jayce cums remarkably quickly. Viktor follows in suit, robbed of his usual stamina by the sight and sound of Jayce writhing like a caged animal. The firestorm of pounding blood halts to an almost immediate silence, and Viktor is suddenly returned to the pale uncertainty of whether any of this is real. The semen drying on his hand could be his own, could be a stranger’s. It seems inconceivable that he and Jayce Talis fucked his fist in blind, furious tandem and yet here this shining oblation of a man wheezes in his arms.
“I’m not a…” His voice breaks the torpor. “I didn’t think I was gay.”
Viktor cannot help but laugh.
“You might not be.” He slumps against the wall where Jayce still holds him fast, a surprisingly tender hand cupped around the sparing meat of his thigh. “But that’s a conversation for another time.”
“Are you free? This evening?” Jayce stares at Viktor as if he were one of his quantum equations, a tangle of infinite outcomes asking to be solved. “I want to buy you a drink.”
They pat themselves clean with toilet tissue and hand soap. Jayce collects Viktor’s cane from the ground and Viktor takes it with a polite smile. Jayce books a taxi for two, 5PM sharp.
In the back of a beetle black cab, crawling through the wet metropolitan traffic at the pace of molasses, Viktor wreaks havoc in the darkened footwells. While Jayce makes idle small talk - reading, writing, arithmetic - Viktor watches his face contort sweetly at the lingering brushes of their shins, the knocking of their knees. Lesson plans and lecture schedules. Library books and London life. Viktor plants his foot firmly between Jayce’s. His leg burns with the effort but his chest bursts with the thrill of it, and Jayce, ever valiant, keeps up the chatter, his grin strained, maddening.
By the time they are ushered out into the cheek slapping cold of the winter blue streets, Viktor has learned more about Jayce than any lover had revealed to him in years’ worth of illicit affairs. He enjoys tender poetry - Frank O’Hara, Audre Lorde, Langston Hughes - and gentle music - Chet Baker, Lou Reed, Chavela Vargas. He grew up to a working class family, finding his beginnings in blacksmithing, blooming into engineering, falling hard, fast, and forever for physics, classic and quantum alike. He is softly spoken, charming, funny, constantly fussing with errant locks of flyaway hair as if he doesn’t know he’s the most gorgeous creature in the city. God what am I doing to him , Viktor thinks as they fall into step with the evening crowd, what am I doing to this dear sweet boy.
“I’m staying with some family friends uptown,” he explains, turning the collar of his peacoat against his chin. The rain has abated, but the chill remains, and Viktor can feel the damp settling between his own layers. “Whereabouts do you…?”
“Zaun.” Viktor cuts the question clean. “The Entresol burrough.”
“That’s downtown, isn’t it?”
“Far downtown, yes.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever been.”
The bar Jayce guides them into is typical sybaritic uptown affair, the kind of place Viktor would not give a second look were it not for the taste of his company. Slick mahogany tabletops, ox-blood walls, well-dressed waitstaff with fresh haircuts and patent leather shoes. In the front, couples lean languorously over their spaghetti and wine, lost in each other’s eyes or perhaps trying to count the exact number of karats hanging around each other’s necks. Beyond the tinkle of cutlery, the bar buzzes with low conversation, hunched shoulders, well-to-do laughter. There are booths, dim, smoky, and private. Jayce graciously offers Viktor a seat tucked into the back, gazing voyeuristically out onto the sea of fake teeth and real crystal.
“What’s your poison?” He asks, making for the bar.
“Anything stiff.”
They toast twin Old Fashioneds, more ice and orange peel than liquor, offensively small for what Viktor saw Jayce slide across the countertop for them, but strong and spicy and like liquid courage down the gullet.
“This place is a little…” he searches the lacquer walls for the right words, anything that isn’t up its own ass . “Out of my price range.”
“Good thing I’m buying, then.”
“Hm,” Viktor snorts. The only charity he has ever accepted is in the form of expensive drinks from handsome men. It isn’t pity, afterall, when sex levels the playing field. “What’s next? Candlelit dinner?”
Suddenly timid, Jayce takes a bolstering sip of his drink. Viktor watches his throat flex thick and glossy as a ruminant’s flank.
“Listen, I should really tell you. I don’t know how to put this but - “
“Married?”
It’s not like he couldn’t have seen it coming. No ring, of course, but Viktor had known plenty of men to slip off their wedding bands in his company. There were generations upon generations of reputably adoring husbands who insisted that affairs of a homosexual nature were barely definable as sex, let alone a violation of matrimonial law. Why should wives worry about the business of men, after all? There were stoves to clean and offspring to rear. Viktor would grimace and bear it, astounded that he had managed to curse his mattress with company more parasitic than the bedbugs. Perhaps Jayce, at the very least, would be a regretful adulterer, sparing the world one more misogynistic closet case.
“Married?” Jayce balks. “No, oh heavens, no. Well, I almost was. Didn’t work out.”
“Why not?” Invasive, perhaps, but it felt more polite than saying thank God for that .
“It’s a long story…I didn’t know who I was yet. She knew exactly who she was.” For a moment, Jayce’s gaze grows watery, unfocused. He takes another drink. “It’s why I loved her but, uh, why I had to leave, too.”
“Did it work? Have you figured out who you are?”
“I’m starting to.” The momentary fog lifts and Jayce, bright eyed once more, leans across the table with an impish grin. “Would you rather I were married? From what I can tell you seem to like a little risk with your reward.”
“Ha! Years ago, maybe.” Has it been years since the last? He can’t recall. “I thought it best to avoid scandal if I intended to become a professor.”
Perhaps that is why , he thinks as he watches the ice cubes dilute his drink to impotence, I am not yet a professor.
“Really? No workplace affairs? Favours from students?”
“I’m a degenerate, not a felon.” He laughs in earnest this time. “Not that they haven’t tried.”
There had been a few intrepid attempts over the years; waifish baby fags who would suck the first authoritative cock they could sniff out in any institution, staunchly “heterosexual” boys willing to put aside their qualms with queerness in return for an A and a postgrad reference, knock-kneed girls who kept the standards low and self-esteem lower. Viktor turned them all away at the door, of course, told them to find someone with more time on their hands and less to lose. If he wanted to feel soul crushing guilt over who he shared a bed with he would simply lock himself in a telephone booth and dial up an ex. Or find another married man.
“There’s this third year…botany student. Incredible girl, really, she’ll make waves someday, if only she stops chasing after men who have nothing to offer her.” The explicit being homosexuals , the implicit being most of them .
“They used to accuse me of that sort of thing all the time.” Jayce says. He is flipping idly through the drinks menu, surveying their meagre selection of overpriced beer as his Old Fashioned sweats in the halogen. “Spread rumours about me offering, y’know, favours to my profs in return for good grades.”
A hilarious rumour, he elaborates, when the truth of the matter was that Jayce was a prodigal student and a chronic virgin. For those four long intramural years of study, he remained as untouched as a fairytale maiden, turning down every proffered date, avoiding parties and fundraisers and bar crawls. It was his stalwart dedication to being a square that made him Heimerdinger’s prized student.
“I even considered taking the role of assistant myself when I graduated. Glad I didn’t, though.”
“Ah, yes, where would that have found us? Locked up in an office and the gulag respectively. What a pathetic fate that would be for the both of us, hm?”
“Right. How’d Heimer find you anyway? I mean I have to congratulate him on his taste.”
“I had a scholarship in St Petersburg - Leningrad, that is, at the time - my professor was a colleague of his. My thesis was a precursor to Origin of Sickness …I suppose it made its way to him through the grapevine, as you say.” It’s funny, really, for all he likes to bitch and moan about Heimerdinger and his bumbling ways, he still holds a fondness for the old man. “And here I am.”
“Guess he just had to have you, huh?”
“You’d know.”
Jayce’s boyish charm is bested only by his boyish flustering, a cheeky grin stuttering into the notes of a nervous laugh. He throws back a good half of his drink, leaving a slither of bourbon to glimmer on his upper lip.
“...I never finished earlier, ah, pardon the phrasing, but…I had something to tell you. And I can assure you I am not married.”
“Right.” Any shadow of doubt that may have haunted Viktor’s skull just a few hours prior has been well and truly snuffed out by the bathroom fluorescents that had illuminated Jayce’s mouth curving into a perfect little O . The feeling of his body pumping against his own. The sound of pleasure eeking out of his windpipe like a souped up car. Perhaps aided by the buzzing warmth of liquor lining his gut, Viktor cannot find a single thing to worry about and simply waits for Jayce to find his words.
“Right. See, the thing is…” He downs the remainder of his drink, signals to a passing waiter for another two. “I don’t know what I’m doing? I certainly don’t know why I asked you out for a drink. I don’t…I don’t…”
“You don’t know what you want. That’s okay.” Viktor watches a trickle of condensation slide down the glass. Thinks of tears, sweat, other bodily fluids. “ I know what I want.”
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“Truth be told, Jayce? I would tell you, but I don’t want to scare you.”
“Ha.” Jayce says, humourlessly, as two Old Fashioneds are placed on the table between them. There seems to be even less alcohol in them. “I’m not scared of the fact that I might be, well…” He pulls his drink close to his chest as he leans into Viktor’s space, his breath warm, his eyes shining. “A bit of a queer .”
“Hm. That is not quite what I meant.”