Copyright © 2026 Nuno R.F.C.R. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher or author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles, reviews, and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by applicable copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, organizations, events, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), actual events, or real locales is entirely coincidental.
“Mercury”
The bass came through the wall before anything else did.
Through the tile and the partition and the door of the stall, a low four-count thud that he felt in the soles of his feet and the water of his body more than he heard, and Mark stood and finished and zipped and stood a moment longer in the small graffitied dark of the stall with his hand flat against the partition, feeling the music arrive through it. Then he flushed and slid the latch and came out.
The men’s room was low-lit and wet-bright, the mirrors fogged at their edges, the particular perfume of these rooms everywhere in the world: cologne and sweat and poppers and the sweet chemical bite of whatever they cleaned the floors with, none of it ever quite enough. There were four or five men at the long trough of the sink. Two were talking, fast and laughing, heads close, not looking at anything but each other. One was fixing his hair with the total absorption of the very young. And two were watching Mark.
He clocked them in the first quarter-second, before he had decided to: their position, their sightlines, the angle of their attention. They watched him in the mirror, which was the polite way, the deniable way, their eyes on his reflection while their faces stayed pointed at their own. Mark went to the sink between them and turned on the water and washed his hands and let himself be watched. He was good at being watched. It was, if he was honest, and he was rarely honest, but the club made him reckless, the bass loosened something, one of the few things he had ever been entirely good at. He lifted his eyes to the mirror and met theirs there, directly, the blue of his gaze going through the fog and deniability, and he did not smile, and he did not look away, and he let the two of them understand that he had seen them seeing him and that it cost him nothing.
One of them smiled. He was handsome, dark-haired, a little older, the kind of man who was used to that working.
And Mark smiled back, the reflex, the weapon, the thing his face did without consulting him, the warm quick disarming flash that had opened doors and softened rooms and bought him, over the years, a great deal of the safety he had needed and none of the safety he had wanted. He smiled back, and for half a second the man’s whole face opened in answer, certain now, already half-across the distance between them. And then Mark turned off the water, and shook his hands once, and walked out.
He felt the man’s surprise behind him like a small heat on his back, and he didn’t care, and he pushed through the door into the noise.
The floor hit him all at once.
It was a good club, by the island’s standards, which was to say it was a converted warehouse near the old harbor with a sound system somebody had spent real money on and a crowd that had come from everywhere and nowhere, tourists and locals and the beautiful drifting international young who washed up in places like this every summer like expensive debris. The lights were low and red and gold and they moved, swinging slow arcs across the heaving floor, catching here a raised arm, there the sweat on a bare shoulder, there a face thrown back in pleasure or laughter or both. The air was hot and close and full of bodies. The bass was enormous now, no longer something felt through a wall but the medium itself, the thing everyone was suspended in, and the floor was packed with men, men dancing with men, mostly, hands on waists and mouths at ears and hips finding the four-count and riding it, and the whole heaving mass of it moved together in the red-gold dark like a single animal breathing.
Mark stood at the edge of it and felt, for once, the rarest thing.
He felt unwatched. Or, not unwatched. He was being watched, he was always being watched, he had felt three separate gazes find him in the time it took to cross from the bathroom door to the rail. But here it didn’t mean anything. Here being looked at was the water everyone swam in, freely given and freely taken, no debt attached to it, no door that opened onto a corridor he’d have to walk down later. Here a look was just a look. He could not remember the last time a look had been just a look. He let himself stand in it, in the simple animal pleasure of being a beautiful young man in a dark room full of people who wanted nothing from him but the night, and he scanned the floor out of habit, his eyes moving across it the way they moved across everything, reading, cataloguing, and then his eyes stopped.
Julian was at the bar.
He was leaning back against it with his elbows hooked on the rail behind him and a drink loose in one hand, and he was talking to someone, a guy, young, very pretty, the open friendly prettiness of someone who had never once had to be afraid in a room, and Julian was laughing. Not the public laugh. The real one. The one that took his whole face, that he gave away without counting, that Mark had spent a lifetime collecting and could identify across any distance, in any light, through any amount of noise. The pretty guy had said something and Julian had laughed and tipped his head and said something back, and the pretty guy laughed too, and Mark stood at the edge of the floor and watched it and felt his chest do something complicated.
It wasn’t jealousy. That surprised him. He stood and waited for the jealousy to arrive, it would have been the reasonable thing, the expected thing, to feel the green spike of it watching Julian shine that openly at someone who was not him, and it didn’t come. What came instead was stranger and larger and harder to hold.
He had loved Julian in private for years. That was the whole shape of it. That was the only way he had ever been allowed to have it. He had loved him in the dark, in the inner room, in the painting on the wall that only existed when no one was looking, a love that had never once been out in the air, never been spoken, never been permitted to take up space in a lit room in front of other people. And here, now, was Julian in public. Julian shining. Julian at a bar in a loud bright room being charming and alive and visibly, gorgeously happy, and the thing Mark felt watching it was the vertigo of seeing, for the first time, the whole of a person he had only ever loved in pieces, in secret, in the safe airless dark. It was like loving a song you’d only ever heard through a wall and then walking into the room where it was playing. He had not known Julian had this in him, this ease, this brightness thrown out freely to a stranger, and the not-having-known struck him with a tenderness so sudden and so total that he had to look away from it for a second, down at the floor, and breathe.
When he looked back, the pretty guy had moved a step closer to Julian.
And there it was. Not jealousy, even now, but something woke up in Mark that he did not have a name for because he had never, in seven years, had occasion to feel it. He had never had anything that was his to defend. He had spent his whole life being the guest, the recipient, the one with no claim on anything, the one who learned to want nothing out loud because nothing out loud was ever going to be his. And now, across a crowded floor, leaning against a bar with his real laugh on his face, was the one thing in the world that was, that had said so, on a beach, in the moonlight, I love you too, and a pretty stranger was standing a step too close to it.
Mark put his glass down on the rail.
He crossed the floor.
He didn’t hurry. That was the first principle. He had learned it long ago, in harder rooms than this: you never hurried, hurry was a tell, hurry gave away that you wanted something. He moved through the dancing bodies with the loose grace that was three-quarters real and one-quarter performance, and he arrived at the bar at an angle, not between them but beside them, sliding into the conversation from the side the way he slid into everything, and he was smiling, and the smile was aimed not at Julian but at the pretty guy.
“There you are,” he said to Julian, warmly, easily, not looking at him. And then, to the stranger, hand already extended, the full wattage of him coming up like a house turning on all its lights at once: “Hi. I’m Mark.”
“Theo,” said the pretty guy, taking the hand, a little dazzled, Mark watched it happen, watched the dazzle land, the way it always landed when he chose to turn it on, and felt the old cold competence move under the warmth like a current under calm water.
“Theo.” Mark held the hand a beat longer than necessary, then released it. “God, I’m glad someone’s been keeping him company, he’s hopeless on his own, he just stands at bars looking tragic and European until someone takes pity.” He said it with such affection, such easy proprietary fondness, that it did three things at once, and Mark felt each of them click into place. It told Theo, without a single unkind word, that Mark and Julian arrived together and belonged to a shared and longer story. It relocated Julian, charmingly, from available to spoken for. And it turned the full beam of Mark’s attention onto Theo himself, which, Mark had read him in the first three seconds, the open hungry prettiness of him, a boy who lived on being noticed, was the one thing Theo wanted more than he wanted Julian.
It worked. Of course it did. Theo turned toward Mark like a plant toward a window.
And Mark spent ninety seconds being magnificent.
He asked Theo where he was from and listened to the answer as though it were the most interesting thing said all year. He found the thread in it, a city Mark had passed through once, a club there he happened to know, a name he happened to have, and he pulled the thread, lightly, and Theo bloomed under the pulling, and Julian, beside them, watched the whole performance unfold with his drink frozen halfway to his mouth and an expression on his face that was migrating, in real time, from confusion to comprehension to something that was three-quarters delight and one-quarter alarm. Mark caught it in his peripheral vision and didn’t acknowledge it. He kept his eyes on Theo. He was building Theo a little room of pure attention and watching Theo move into it, and when the room was fully built, when Theo was entirely his, glowing, leaning in, certain that the most interesting man in the club had selected him, Mark set him free.
“You should meet Andre,” Mark said, with sudden bright generosity, as though it had only just occurred to him, as though it were a gift. “He’s right over there by the booth, the one in the green, he’s been looking over here for ten minutes and he is exactly, and I mean exactly, your speed. Trust me. I have a gift for this.” He put a warm hand briefly on Theo’s shoulder, turning him, gently, by a few degrees, toward the booths and the imaginary Andre and the rest of his night. “Go. Don’t waste it standing here with us, we’re boring, we’re practically married.” A last flash of the smile, full and final and dismissing. “It was so good to meet you, Theo.”
And Theo, flattered, redirected, entirely convinced it had been his own idea, that he had been given something rather than removed from something, said it was good to meet Mark too, and grinned at Julian, and drifted off into the red-gold dark toward the booths to look for a man in green who didn’t exist.
There was a silence at the bar. Or as much silence as the floor allowed.
Mark finally turned and looked at Julian.
Julian was staring at him. The drink had not moved.
“What?” Mark said.
“That was…” Julian started, and stopped, and started again. “I don’t… what was that? Who are you?”
“I have no idea what you mean.”
“You just… ran a program on him. Start to finish. I watched it. He never had a chance. He’s over there right now looking for a green man who isn’t real.”
“Andre’s very real.”
“Andre is not real.”
“Andre is deeply real and I wish him and Theo every happiness.” Mark picked his own glass back up off the rail, unbothered, and drank, and the unbotheredness was itself a kind of swagger, a thing Julian had genuinely never seen him do. “You’re welcome, by the way.”
“For what? I was having a perfectly nice conversation.”
“You were being circled. Slowly. Like a wounded thing on a savanna.” Mark looked at him over the rim of the glass, and now the blue eyes had something in them that Julian had also never seen there, something amused and proprietary and openly, unashamedly territorial, a possessiveness Mark had spent years never once letting near the surface and was, tonight, in this room, where a look was just a look, letting Julian see in full. “I intervened. It’s what I do. I’m a giver.”
“You’re…,” Julian said. “That’s… I’ve known you my whole life and I had no idea you were like this.”
“You knew.”
“I did not.”
“You knew a little.” Mark allowed himself the smile, the real one this time, the one with no program behind it. “You just liked me too much to look at it directly.”
Julian laughed, caught off guard, helpless, the real laugh, the one Mark had watched him give the stranger, except now it was turned full on Mark, all of it, the whole brightness aimed at last where Mark had spent years wanting it aimed, and Mark felt it hit him in the chest.
“Okay,” Julian said. He set his glass down on the bar with a small decisive click. “Come here.”
“Why?”
“Because you just scared off a perfectly nice boy from… where was he from…?”
“Rotterdam.”
“… from Rotterdam with surgical precision, in front of me, like it was nothing, and it was…” Julian was already reaching out, already closing his hand in the front of Mark’s shirt, the dark fabric bunching in his fist “… the single hottest thing I have ever seen a human being do, and you’re going to come dance with me right now, and that’s not a request.”
And he pulled.
Mark let himself be pulled. That was its own small miracle, and some cold accountant in the back of his head noted it even now, that he, who let himself be moved by no one, who yielded but was never moved, was being towed by the shirt into the heart of a crowded floor by a laughing boy and was doing nothing, nothing at all, to stop it. He let Julian pull him in among the bodies, into the red and the gold and the enormous four-count thud of the bass, into the heat and the press and the breathing animal of the crowd, and Julian turned and got both hands on him and pulled him close, and they began to move.
And then there was no accountant. There was no cold thing in the back of his head. There was no inner room, no painting on a wall, no corridor, no house on a cliff, no forecast, no weather he was waiting for, there was only this, only the bass and Julian’s hands and Julian’s hips finding the rhythm against his own, Julian’s face close and lit gold and open, openly his, openly wanting him in a room full of strangers who could see it and did not care, who were doing the same thing all around them, the whole floor a sea of it, desire with nothing to hide behind and nowhere it had to go but into the music. They danced. They danced badly and then well and then it stopped mattering which. Julian’s forehead came down against Mark’s, slick with sweat, both of them grinning like fools, and Mark put his hands at the small of Julian’s back and pulled him in until there was no space left, and they moved together, two young men in the absolute prime of it, all muscle and heat and laughter and want, and the lights swung their slow gold arcs across the floor and found them again and again, and people watched, people were watching, the way people watch a fire, drawn to the heat of two who have stopped pretending, and Mark, for the length of one song and the next, in the middle of a dark loud room on a small bright island, with the boy he loved laughing against his mouth, was free.
He didn’t think about anything else.
For once in his life, he didn’t think about anything else at all.
*
They poured out of the club somewhere past one, into a night that had gone soft and warm and quiet after the heat of the floor, and the street took them gently.
The district was thinning out. The bars along the old harbor were still open but emptier now, the music spilling out of them lower, the crowds reduced to knots of the committed and the lost. A man was closing the metal shutter of a shop with a long pole, the corrugated steel coming down in a slow rattling sheet. A scooter went by with two people on it and someone’s laughter trailing behind. Mark and Julian walked through it without any destination, shoulders bumping, drunk in the loose happy way that has more to do with the night than the alcohol, neither of them willing to be the one who said the word home.
They talked about nothing. It was the best conversation Mark had had in years. Julian did an impression of Theo from Rotterdam that was cruel and perfect and that made Mark laugh harder than he’d meant to, the laugh getting away from him, and Julian looked delighted with himself for having caused it. They argued about whether the fried thing they bought from the stand was good, it was not but they ate all of it, and about whether a particular star was a star or a planet. They didn’t talk about the morning. They didn’t talk about the chair on the floor, or the jet ordered for noon and quietly never mentioned again, or the word availing, or the room at the end of the corridor with its bed which would soon be dutifully slept in. The night had granted them a reprieve from all of it and they took the reprieve and asked it no questions.
The streets bent toward the water, the way all the streets on the island eventually did, and at some point the pavement gave out and became sand, and the lights of the district fell away behind them, and there was the beach.
It was empty. The tide was far out. The moon had come up over the water, not full but generous, laying its long broken road of light across the black sea, and the two of them walked out onto the cool sand away from everything and then, by some unspoken agreement, simply stopped, and folded down onto it, and lay back.
For a while neither of them said anything.
The sky was enormous. Out here past the lights it gave up its whole inventory, more stars than seemed reasonable, the dust of them thick across the middle, and the two of them lay on their backs and looked up at it and breathed, and the sea did its slow work at the distant waterline, and Mark felt Julian’s hand find his in the dark between them, fingers threading through, and hold.
The silence wasn’t empty. It was the fullest silence Mark knew. It was the one he’d written about to himself, almost, in the inner room, the particular silence of two people content to say nothing, except he had only ever imagined it, and here it was, real, the warm weight of Julian’s hand and the cool of the sand and the indifferent beauty of the sky, and Mark lay in it and let himself, for one more stretch of stolen time, simply have it.
Then Julian turned his head on the sand and looked at him, and Mark felt the look, and turned his head too, and they were very close, and Julian kissed him.
Slow, and certain, with Julian’s hand coming up to the side of Mark’s face, turning into him fully on the sand, and Mark kissed him back and felt the whole night gather into it, the whole impossible day, and the kiss went deep and stayed there, and the sea came in and went out, and when they finally parted they stayed close, foreheads together, breathing the same small pocket of warm air.
“Hi,” Julian said softly.
“Hi.”
They lay back again, but turned toward each other now, Julian’s head on Mark’s outstretched arm, one of Julian’s legs thrown over Mark’s, the easy tangle of it. Julian traced something idle on Mark’s chest with one finger. The reprieve held. And Mark, lying there with the boy warm against him and the stars going on overhead, made the mistake, though he would not have called it that, not then, not with Julian’s finger drawing slow shapes on his sternum, of letting himself feel, for a moment, safe.
“Can I ask you something?” Julian said. His voice had changed, very slightly. Gone a little careful.
“Mm.”
“And you can tell me to shut up.”
“That never worked.”
Julian’s finger went still on his chest. “Where’s your family?”
And there it was. The reprieve ended. Mark felt it end, felt the night change temperature though nothing in the air had moved, felt the cold thing in the back of his head, gone all evening, gone on the dance floor, gone in the silence, wake up and sit up and begin, quietly, to pay attention.
“You know where my family is,” he said.
“I don’t, though. That’s the thing.” Julian propped himself up on one elbow so he could see Mark’s face, and his own face in the moonlight was not pushing, not prying, just open, just wanting to understand. “Your dad used to be everywhere. He was at everything. The Hartfords’ thing, the gala, the… he was at my parents’ anniversary, I have a photo of him doing something embarrassing with a champagne tower. And then… what, a year and a half ago? Ten months? He just. Stopped. Your whole family just sort of… evaporated out of everything. Nobody talks about it. My mother gets a look when their name comes up and changes the subject, and you never say anything, and I never asked, because… I don’t know. You never seemed to want me to.”
Mark looked up at the stars.
This was the thing about Julian that Mark had spent seven years both loving and dreading: he was not stupid. People saw the goldenness and the ease and the unscarred openness and assumed there was nothing underneath it, and they were wrong, and they always underestimated him, and Mark never had. Julian noticed things. He had noticed this. He had been carrying this question, apparently, for a year and a half, holding it, waiting for the right night to set it down, and now the night had come and he had set it down and it lay there in the sand between them.
“There’s not much to tell,” Mark said. The old reflex. The deflection. He heard how thin it was even as he said it.
“Mark.”
“My father had a run of bad years. That’s all. It happens to people.” He kept his eyes on the sky. It was easier to say to the sky. “Everything was the surface, you know? Everything was the next dinner, the right table, being seen at the right things with the right people. And it works until it doesn’t…” he stopped. He had been about to say something true and he pulled back from it, the way you pull your hand back from a stove. “It stopped working. Things just got… complicated. And my dad doesn’t do anything he can’t do perfectly, so he just… stopped doing it. All of it.” A beat. “Including, mostly, me.”
Julian was very still beside him.
“What do you mean?” he said quietly.
Mark was quiet for a moment. The sea came in. Went out.
“It means I was the shit,” he said finally, “while things were good. I was the… there’s a version of a son you have when everything’s going well. The one you bring places. The one who’s good at the things, who looks right in the photo.” His voice was very even, very controlled, the control itself the evidence of the cost. “I was good at that. I was so good at that. I made it so easy for them. And then things got hard, and it turned out that was… that was the whole arrangement, actually. That was the entire basis. I was useful when I was a reflection and when there was nothing left to…” He stopped again. Swallowed. “They didn’t throw me out or anything. They just sort of. Stopped seeing me. I just… was in the house and nobody… there were whole days. Whole days, Jules, where the only…”
He shut it off.
He shut it off hard, mid-sentence, the way a man closes a door he’s realized is open onto a room he never lets anyone into, and Julian saw him do it, saw the shutter come down, and had the wisdom, Mark would love him for this later, would love him for it in a way that made the loving unbearable, not to push his foot into the gap.
“Yeah,” Mark said. Lightly. Trying for lightly. Not making it. “You got me drunk and walked me onto a beach. That’s a tactic. I’m filing a complaint.”
“Mark.”
“It’s fine. It’s…” He turned his head and looked at Julian, finally, and made himself smile, and the smile was the saddest thing he had, the one with the brightness held above the rim by surface tension alone. “It’s the most boring story in the world, honestly. Rich family stops being rich. Happens every day. There’s nothing in it you need.”
But Julian was not smiling.
Julian was looking at him with an expression Mark could not survive being looked at with for very long, not pity, Julian was too smart for pity, but something worse, something more like recognition, like a person finally seeing the actual dimensions of a thing they’d only glimpsed the edge of, and then Julian moved, came up over him, and kissed him. Hard. Once. And pulled back just far enough to speak against his mouth.
“I’ll take care of you now,” Julian said.
He said it simply, the way he said everything, with the total uncomplicated conviction of a person who had never in his life made a promise he didn’t have the means to keep, who did not yet know that there were promises the world did not let you keep no matter what you had. ‘I’ll take care of you now’. As though it were a thing he could simply decide. As though he could stand between Mark and all of it, the neglect and the loneliness and the whole coldness of being loved only for your usefulness, and simply stop it. Take over. Take care of him.
And Mark, who knew, who knew exactly how little Julian understood about what taking care of Mark would actually require, who knew what was already being asked of him and by whom and at what hour and in what currency, who carried the real arrangement inside him like a stone he could never set down even here, even now, even with this, Mark felt the words land on him like a benediction he had no right to and could not refuse, and his eyes did the thing, the liquid thing, the brightness rising, and he caught Julian’s face in both his hands and held it, hard, an inch from his own.
“No,” he said. His voice was rough. “No. We’ll take care of each other.” A breath. He stopped. Steadied. “Each other. Okay?”
“Okay,” Julian whispered.
“Say it.”
“Each other,” Julian said. “I promise.”
And Mark pulled him down and kissed him so that he would not have to say anything else, so that his face would have something to do other than betray him, and the two of them sank back down into the sand and the dark and the warm tangle of each other, and overhead the enormous indifferent sky went on turning, and the sea came in, and went out, and the night, for a little while longer, held.
*
The trouble started at the gate.
The villa sat behind a long low wall of stone, and the gate in it was the kind of gate that worked by a code and a quiet electric motor, and the code was not a problem, Julian knew the code, except that the gate, when it opened, gave a soft mechanical chime, a discreet two-note announcement that some thoughtful engineer had designed to be reassuring and that now, at half past two in the morning, with both their parents theoretically asleep somewhere in the dark house beyond, sounded to Julian’s drink-loosened ears like a fire alarm.
“No,” Julian whispered, slapping his hand over the keypad as though he could muffle it after the fact. “No, no, it’ll… it does the thing, it does the chime…”
“So we don’t use the gate,” Mark said reasonably.
“How do we not use the gate, the gate is the way in…”
“We climb.”
Julian looked at the wall. Then at Mark. Then at the wall. “It’s a whole wall.”
“It’s a low wall. It’s the lowest wall I’ve ever seen. My grandmother could climb that wall.”
“Your grandmother is…”
“My grandmother is a metaphor, Julian, get on the wall.”
What followed was not graceful. The wall was indeed low, chest-high, perhaps, and on any ordinary night either of them could have been over it in a clean second, the way they’d both gone over a hundred walls and fences as boys. But they were not ordinary tonight. They were warm and loose and full of fried food and the dregs of the club and each other, and their bodies had entered the specific state of confident incompetence in which the brain issues crisp athletic instructions and the limbs respond as though receiving them by post, a day late, in a foreign language.
Julian went first, because it was his wall, and made it to the top of it on his stomach and then stuck there, draped over the stone like something washed up, laughing too hard to proceed, and Mark stood below him hissing ‘go, go, you have to actually go’ and trying to push him over by the nearest available surface, which was Julian’s backside, which only made Julian laugh harder, the laugh coming out of him in helpless leaking gusts that he was fighting to keep quiet and entirely failing to.
“Stop… stop pushing me there, that’s not… that doesn’t help…”
“It’s the only… there’s nothing else to push…”
“There’s so much else to push! There’s a whole…” Julian got a knee up, lost it, slid back down the inside of the wall in a controlled collapse and landed in the flowerbed on the other side with a soft crunch of someone’s carefully tended something. “… oh no. Oh no, I think I killed a plant. Mark. Mark, I killed one of Mom’s plants.”
“Is it dead?”
“It’s extremely dead. It’s so dead. I landed completely on it.”
“Then it’s already done, there’s nothing more to be done for it, leave it, come on…”
Mark came over the wall the way Julian hadn’t, one hand on the top, a clean hooking vault that would have been genuinely impressive if he’d quite stuck the landing, which he did not, the drink finding him at the last instant so that he came down half a beat off and stumbled two large undignified steps and fetched up against Julian, who caught him, and the two of them stood there in the ruined flowerbed in the dark holding each other up and shaking with the effort of not laughing out loud, which is the very hardest kind of not laughing there is.
“Jesus,” Julian whispered, gasping. “You ran a program on a man from Rotterdam and you can’t get over a wall?”
“Different skill sets.”
“I’m putting it on your headstone. ‘Mark Ellison. Socially Lethal. Could Not Climb’.”
“Shut up and walk.”
They made it across the garden in a series of exaggerated tiptoes, freezing theatrically at every sound, a sprinkler ticking, a night bird, the pool filter’s low hum, clutching at each other every time, two grown men reduced to the physical comedy of teenagers sneaking in, and it was, Mark thought, even as he lived it, one of the happiest stretches of his life, this idiotic crossing of a dark lawn, and he wanted it to take an hour, he wanted the garden to be a mile wide.
They got inside through the side door off the kitchen, which Julian knew did not chime, and stood for a moment in the enormous dark hush of the lower floor, the great glass volume of the house holding the night inside it, the moonlight lying in long pale rectangles across the stone. They went up the stairs slowly, on the sides of their feet, and at the top of the stairs they stopped, in the middle of the upstairs corridor, and listened.
Nothing.
From the far wing, from behind the door of the master suite, nothing at all. No light beneath it. No sound. The bed unmade, the room empty. The cars had not come back.
“They’re not home,” Julian breathed.
“No.”
“They’re still out. At the… Mom’s dinner. They’re still at the dinner.” Julian’s face, in the dark, was doing something delighted and conspiratorial and faintly criminal. “We have the whole upstairs. Nobody’s home. We could…”
“We’re not going to.”
“We could just…”
“Jules.”
“We could just sleep… we wouldn’t even…”
“We absolutely would,” Mark said. “We have never once just slept. Not one time in three days. You’re a liar and you know you’re a liar.”
Julian grinned, unrepentant. “Okay, but…”
“And your mother,” Mark said, and here he caught Julian’s wrist, gently, the laughter going quieter in him, “bought us this whole night. And the deal… was that we’d be good, and we’d be careful, and they’d come home and the bed at the end of the corridor would be slept in and nobody would have anything to say.” He turned Julian’s wrist over in his hand, his thumb against the pulse of it. “The least we can do is not get caught.”
It was true, and it was also, Mark knew this, in the cold ledger he kept even now, not the whole truth. The whole truth was that he could not have explained, that he did not let himself fully think, how badly he needed there to be no incident tonight, how the part of him that read the Aldrich was standing very straight and very still in the dark and counting the hours until the cars came back. But Julian heard only the first part, the true and lovely first part, and his face went soft.
“You’re right,” he said. “I hate that you’re right. You’re always right and it’s deeply unattractive.”
“It’s my most attractive quality.”
“It is not…” Julian started, and then they were swaying toward each other again anyway, drawn back in, the resolution dissolving, foreheads nearly touching, both of them grinning, both of them losing it, and for a long teetering moment they hung there on the very edge of throwing the whole sensible plan away, and then, by some shared last reserve of sense, they didn’t. They pulled back. They stepped apart. It cost them visible effort, a comic wrench, like two magnets pried off each other, and they stood a careful arm’s length apart in the dark corridor breathing and smiling stupidly at one another.
“Fine. Goodnight,” Julian whispered.
“Goodnight.”
“This is so stupid.”
“Goodnight, Jules.”
And Julian went, backward at first, walking backward down the corridor toward his room with his eyes on Mark and a grin on his face, then turning, finally, reaching his door, putting his hand on it.
“Hey,” Mark said.
It came out of him before he’d decided to say it. Julian stopped, his hand on the door, and looked back down the dark corridor.
Mark stood there. The whole night was in his chest, the floor, the bass, Julian’s laugh turned full on him at last, the sand, the stars, ‘I’ll take care of you, we’ll take care of each other’, the idiot wall, the dead plant, all of it, the best night of his careful guarded life, and underneath it, very far underneath, the cold thing counting hours. And he looked down the corridor at Julian standing in the moonlight with his hand on his door, golden, rumpled, his, and the words came up out of all of it, quiet, helpless, true.
“I love you,” Mark whispered.
And Julian smiled.
It was the smile. The one his mother had named on the beach without his knowing it had ever been named, the one that took his whole face and gave it away, reflexive and total and entirely without armor, the smile that Catherine had looked at and said ‘you’d ruin yourself and call it the best thing you ever did’. Julian gave Mark that smile, down the length of the dark corridor, in answer, the way you give someone a thing that costs you nothing because you have so much of it, and then, not saying it back, not needing to, the smile having said all of it, he turned, opened his door, went into his room, and closed it softly behind him.
The corridor was quiet.
Mark stood in it alone for a moment, with the smile still printed on the inside of his eyes. Then he went to his own room, the room at the end, the guest room, the one with the bed now correctly slept in, and opened the door and went in and closed it.
He undressed in the dark. Shirt off, dropped over the chair. Trousers. Down to his shorts. He stood for a second in the moonlight from the balcony doors, and then he crossed to the bed and let himself fall onto it, face-up, arms out, the mattress catching him, and he lay there and breathed and felt the whole good night settle over him like a sheet.
His eyes wandered the dark room. The unfamiliar ceiling. The wardrobe. The little writing desk no one wrote at. And the painting on the wall opposite the bed, the one Julian would not stop mocking, a murky amateur oil of a single fish, gray-brown, goggle-eyed, suspended in a gray-brown nothing, painted by someone with no gift and hung by someone with no interest, the kind of thing that ends up in the room you put the guest you’re not really thinking about.
Mark looked at the fish. The fish looked at Mark.
“Yeah,” he said softly, to the fish, to the room, to himself. “Me too.”
And he almost smiled at it, at the joke, at the smallness of it, at the perfect ugly honesty of the pairing, the unwanted painting and the boy in the unwanted room, and the almost-smile was the last thing his face did before the night and the drink and the long impossible day finally took him, and his eyes closed, and his breathing slowed, and Mark Ellison, who never slept deep, slept.
For a while.
*
Mark’s eyes opened.
He came back all at once, his eyes open in the dark and his whole body already listening before his mind had named what it was listening for. He lay still. The room was dark. The moonlight had moved across the floor while he slept and lay now in a different place than it had. Something had woken him.
A sound. Out there. Below.
Not a loud sound. A door perhaps, the soft click of a latch somewhere on the lower floor, the kind of sound a person makes when they are trying not to make one. He lay and waited to hear if it would repeat. It didn’t. But he was awake now, fully, the cold attentive part of him standing up in the dark, and he knew, the way he had known there would be a car on the night Catherine slammed the door that was not a slam, he knew that the sound meant something, and he knew, with a sinking certainty he did not examine, more or less what.
He got up.
He crossed to the balcony doors, soundless, and stood just inside them in the dark where he could not be seen from below, and he looked down into the garden.
There was someone on the pool path.
A figure, moving without hurry along the pale curve of the path that ran past the dark mirror of the pool, down toward the far end of the property where the showers were, where the low separate structure sat that Mark had passed a hundred times and never once entered. The figure moved like someone who knew the way in the dark. It didn’t look back at the house. It reached the end of the path and the deeper dark down there took it, and a moment later, faint, there came the suggestion of a light going on somewhere low, behind glass, diffused.
Mark stood at the balcony doors and watched the place where the figure had gone and didn’t move for a long time.
Then he turned and walked back into the room, and stood at the foot of the bed.
He stood at the foot of the bed where he had been, ten minutes ago, the happiest he had ever been, with Julian’s smile still printed behind his eyes and the salt of the beach still on his skin and ‘we’ll take care of each other’ still warm in his mouth, and he felt all of it begin, quietly, to drain out of him and be replaced by something else, something that had been waiting underneath the whole good night with the patience of a tide. His face, in the dark, did something terrible and small. He stood very still. His hands were loose at his sides and then they were not loose, and then they were loose again. He looked at the rumpled bed and the moonlight and the closed door of the room beyond which Julian slept a deep untroubled sleep.
Then he felt sick.
But it didn’t last long. It never did. That was the worst thing about him, the thing he despised most and depended on most: that he was so good at this, that the struggle, however real, always lost, that some trained and ancient part of him would always, in the end, do the thing that had to be done.
He moved.
There was a silk robe on the back of the door, short, dark, a thing that had been in the room when he arrived, and he took it down and pulled it on over his bare skin. It was not made for covering. It fell open at the chest and stopped high on the thigh and lay over him like water, like something poured, hiding nothing it was nominally there to hide, and Mark belted it loosely and didn’t look at himself, because he knew already, without looking, exactly how he looked in it.
He opened his door.
He went down the corridor the way they had come up it an hour before, on the sides of his feet, soundless, except that there was no laughing now, no swaying, no hand at his wrist, no boy walking backward smiling at him in the dark. He went alone, and he went quietly, and he went past Julian’s closed door without slowing, without letting himself slow, because slowing was a thing he could not afford. Down the stairs. Across the great dark glass volume of the lower floor. Out through the side door off the kitchen, the one that did not chime.
The night took him.
It was cooler now, the deep middle of it, and the garden was loud with the small machinery of the dark, the sprinklers’ tick, the night insects, the pool filter’s endless low murmur, and Mark walked through it along the pale path with the silk lying open over his body and the cool air finding his skin, past the black mirror of the pool with the moon broken on it, past the showers standing empty and dripping faintly, down to the far end of the property and the low separate structure he had never entered.
The steam annex.
Light came from inside it, low and gold, diffused through glass gone opaque with condensation. And steam, he could see it now, close up, the way the glass wept with it, the way it breathed faintly from the seam at the top of the door.
The door was not locked.
He stood in front of it for one second. Two. The cold counting part of him had gone very quiet now, its work nearly done. It had gotten him here, which was all it had ever needed to do.
He put his hand on the door and opened it slowly and stood in the threshold.
The heat came out at him first, wet and total, and the steam, billowing into the cooler air of the doorway, and for a moment he could see almost nothing, only the gold light scattered through the white of it, the room a blur of warmth and vapor. Then the steam shifted, the way steam does, in slow rolling sheets, and the room began to give itself up to him in pieces.
A bench, low and tiled, along the far wall.
A shoulder. Bare, broad, pale gold, the muscle of it easy and settled.
A forearm, resting along the bench, and a hand at the end of it, and in the hand, held loosely, the long dark shape of a cigar, its end a small steady coal in the mist, a thread of smoke climbing up off it to join the steam.
A chest. Bare. A towel, white, low at the waist, the only thing the man was wearing.
And then the steam pulled back another sheet and gave Mark the whole of him, and it was Victor.
Victor Aldrich undressed, Victor Aldrich without the armor of his clothes, the suits and the linen and the watches and the whole carapace of expense that he wore the way other men wore skin. Without it he was, and Mark, even now, even here, with the dread sitting in him like swallowed stone, could not stop himself from registering it, because it was the central fact of the room and there was no looking at anything else, he was magnificent. He was fourty-some years old and he was built like something that had never once doubted itself, broad and powerful and easy in the heat, the body of a man who had been beautiful his whole life and had never had to think about it, who had simply always been the most physically commanding thing in every room he entered and had organized his entire understanding of the world around that fact. The steam beaded on his chest and ran down it. His hair, going silver at the temples, was damp and pushed back. His face, lit from below by the coal of the cigar, was the face Mark had spent seven years reading, except that here, in the heat, stripped of everything, it had given up the careful public composure and wore something else entirely, something idle and certain and waiting, and the sight of it, the sheer unmistakable preview of it, struck Mark with a horror that had nothing to do with the man and everything to do with the boy asleep in the house behind him: ‘this is what Julian will become’. This.
Victor’s eyes lifted from the middle distance and found him in the doorway.
And he was not surprised.
That was the thing.
That was the thing that told the whole story to anyone who had eyes to read it, that closed the last gap and confirmed the worst arithmetic, that Victor’s eyes found Mark standing in the threshold in the silk that hid nothing, at three in the morning, in the secret room at the end of the dark garden, and there was no surprise in them at all. There was no ‘what are you doing here’ in the eyes, whatever his mouth was about to say. The eyes had been expecting him. The eyes had, perhaps, summoned him, the small sound, the door, the figure on the path that did not look back, all of it laid down like a trail for a thing that could be relied upon to follow. Victor looked at Mark in his doorway and his face did not change and he drew on the cigar, unhurried, and let the smoke go, and watched Mark through it with an indifference so complete, so settled, that it was its own kind of obscenity.
“What?” Victor said.
It was not a question. The voice was not the breakfast voice. This voice was lower and looser and entirely private, a voice no one at any table had ever heard, and there was something crude in it, something stripped, the diction of a man who has dismissed all the help and locked all the doors and does not, here, in the wet gold heat, intend to perform civilization for anyone.
“I…” Mark’s own voice came out wrong. Small. He hated it. “I heard you. Come down. I saw you, from the…” He stopped. He looked around the steam room, at the bench, the gold light, the weeping glass, anywhere but at the man, and the looking-around was the tell, the stalling, the boy buying a second he did not have. “I thought maybe you wanted to talk,” he said. “Or… something.”
Victor chuckled.
It was dry, genuinely amused, and worse than any cruelty, because it was so relaxed. He leaned back where he sat, his bare back coming to rest against the tiled wall, the towel shifting at his waist, the cigar loose in his hand, and he looked at Mark in the doorway the way a man looks at something he already owns and is in no hurry about.
“Talk,” Victor repeated. He let the word sit, turning it over, finding it funny. His eyes moved off Mark’s face. “You’re good at a great many things, Mark. I’ll give you that. You’re one of the most genuinely gifted young men I’ve ever had under my roof. But talking…” the eyes were traveling now, down, openly, over the open silk and the bare chest and the long bare thigh, taking inventory, appraising, the way you appraise a thing you are about to use. “… talking has never been where your talents are.”
There it was.
The truth.
The look across the breakfast table, the heat in it, the thing Julian had seen and failed to read and Mark had pretended not to recognize, had never been disdain. The contempt, the policing, the cold paternal fury about guest rooms and appearances and the family name, all of it had been the surface, the gilding, the public coin of it.
Underneath it had been this.
Lust.
This exact look, this proprietary heat, aimed across a table full of family, and Mark had sat there and taken it and called it weather and gone out to the boat and let the wind strip his face, and it had been this the whole time, this room, this towel, this voice, this thing that he came down to in the dark when the house was asleep and answered to and could not refuse, because the refusing had stopped being possible six months ago, in another room, on another night, when a more desperate version of himself had walked in needing something and walked out owing it.
Victor pressed the coal of the cigar down against the tiled bench. It died with a small wet hiss in the steam.
Then he reached down, without hurry, and took the corner of the towel at his waist, and peeled it slowly off.
Mark didn’t look away. He had never been allowed to. He stood in the threshold with the heat rolling out over him and the steam settling on his skin and he watched it happen, his face very still, the cold trained part of him already stepping forward to take the controls, already doing what it always did, going somewhere else, going up to the inner room where the painting hung so that the body left in the doorway could do what the body had to do.
“Close the door,” Victor said. The voice was quiet now. It didn’t need to be anything else. “And bring that perfect little ass in here.”
And Mark, in the doorway, in the silk that hid nothing, with the boy he loved asleep in the house behind him and the smile still somewhere printed behind his eyes, turned his head, once, and looked back.
At the house.
It stood up the dark slope of the garden, pale and enormous and quiet, all its glass black, holding its sleeping people inside it, Julian in his room, dreaming whatever the untroubled dreamed. Catherine, returned now, behind her door, with whatever truth she carried. The whole gilded weight of the family he had spent his life on the outside of, wanting in, and had finally, in three impossible days, found a way inside of, through the one door that had ever been truly open to him, the gold and laughing door of a boy who loved him, and Mark looked back at all of it across the dark garden, and his eyes, in the gold light spilling from the room behind him, were bright.
Bright the way they had been on the bed, hours and a whole lifetime ago, when Julian had asked him what was wrong and he had said ‘nothing’, and Julian had been too happy to press. Bright with the liquid thing held above the rim by surface tension alone. Not falling. He didn’t let it fall. He had never once let it fall.
Then he turned back.
He stepped over the threshold, into the heat and the gold and the steam, and reached behind him, and pulled the door of the steam room slowly shut.
And the garden was empty.
And the house slept on.
And the last thread of light narrowed and narrowed in the closing seam of the door and then was gone.
(To be continued…)
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