On the third day in his house, Laurent let me into his room and shut the door. He was wearing gold silk brocade to the floor, with a cloth of gold tassel at the waist, and nothing at all underneath. He had left his hair wild, unbrushed. In the low light of the room, he seemed painted in gold leaf, and young. It smelled of myrrh. I pressed my back against the door, where I had been an hour. The green wallpaper seemed black.
He stopped pacing and regarded me, as if noticing me there for the first time.
"Believe me, darling, he didn't mean what he said," I whispered.
He paused and parted his pretty pink lips, and closed them again, guttered the air a moment in his throat before breathing it out.
"I have so wanted to see you," I said.
"I know it. I have your letter," he reproached me, very softly. "I got it some years ago."
"It? I sent you many letters."
"Only one," he whispered, blowing the breath away. His hands went to his hair, parting it and brushing the curls with his fingers. "Oh help me, I am coming apart. It is almost like he is here."
"I am here." I moved from the door to touch him, to take him in my arms, because he seemed lost, but he recoiled from me.
"Oh, don't touch me," he said.
I took his wrist and folded him against my body, to which he struggled, and cried out. "I love you," I pleaded. "Do not struggle."
"Oh, don't talk to me of love," he said, crying tearlessly, like a fox, "I have seen the way you love. I won't be your paramour. I told you that before. I only want to talk to you, and that is only why I have let you in. Oh, I don't want your love at all."
His curls pressed against my lips, and I kissed them. He was trying to slip down, to get out of my grasp, and I thrust my knee between his thighs so that he could not slide out.
"Goddamn you, let go of me," he hissed darkly. "I have no desire to hurt you, but it is less than I can say of you. What you have done. Would I parade a lover in front of you and ask for your touch? I would never. Did I make a promise? Et vous? Je refuse de subir ce traitement." And you? I refuse to suffer this treatment. "Vous m'entendez?" Do you hear me? "Now let go of me, for the love of God."
I let go of him and he stumbled away. "I am not a stranger. Please don't speak to me like this."
"Oh but you are very strange. You seem sweet still, and yet you lie as if it were nothing at all. Did you tell him everything about me? How did you speak about me, that he thinks he can talk to me as if I were pressed beneath his foot? I will not suffer it. You will do what you have come to do, and I will let you leave without a touch. Hear that? I will not touch a hair on his head, and I do that for you, and that is all that I will do. And now I have said what I will say, and I don't want to talk to you."
"I didn't tell him anything about you. He didn't know about you. He doesn't know anything."
"Do you think that it impresses me?" he asked, picking up a candle by the window and blowing it out. He waved the rising smoke away with his hand, and the darkness was nearly total. "It does not. You cannot impress me. You are an insect. You are a blood-sucking flea, and I could pinch you between my fingers, but I won't. You are a parasite sucking on my good grace."
"It is too dark," I whispered.
"Are you afraid of it? Is that why you needed him? To hold your hand in the dark?"
"You are cruel," I said.
"You let me kiss you and welcome you back, and let me tell you that I wanted you for a lover, and no others, and do you think it makes me feel good to hear that it's me who is the cruel one? I don't like what your idea of love is. It's too human. I don't like this intensity. I don't want to be one above all others. I want your presence and that is all, but under your gaze I am just a whore whose body you can use, and him the one you sleep beside, and I will have none of it. I have been made into a whore before beside you, and I won't go back to it." He was invisible in the dark, but I heard him disrobe, and the fabric fall to the floor.
"Laurent."
"I spent many years forgetting how you made me feel. You are making me twenty years old and sick. You are making me a slave again, and afraid. I am afraid of your gaze and what I become under it. I want to sleep. I want you to do what you came to do, and I want you to leave, and I don't want to see you again, or your letters. Do not come over here. Stay over there."
I climbed his bed and found him in its sheets, naked and curled up. Beneath me, his skin felt cool and smooth. "I can't see you."
"What have I told you? Please get out of my bed," he whispered, tense. "Don't touch me the way you touched me in the past, which is so gentle. Don't touch me at all."
"It is not that I want you as a paramour," I said, running my fingers over his skin delicately. "Oh God, what is this on your body? What are these wounds? Laurent, what has happened?" Beneath my fingers on his belly there were rough, raw wounds that I could not see. They were like bites but they were not uniform, and I found more on the supple flesh of his inner thighs, and he had gone silent.
"Please," he whispered, so like a child that it startled me. "Please don't touch me there."
I sat back at that, and hugged my arms around myself, uncertain.
He continued in his child's voice, and I shivered. "I don't want you here. It's not safe here. You are looking so beautiful. I thought, when I saw you in the cafe, oh, he is looking even more handsome than he was. Oh, I thought, he has come back for me, and I could not think of anything to say at all. I thought, he is so perfect. In the alley, when you kissed me, you kissed me so hard. You kissed me and it felt like you wanted to eat me, and it frightened me. I thought, let me leave him alone, because I do not know what he has become. But then I see you with your lover, and it seems that you are the same as you ever were, and sweet, and kind, and considerate. I see that you are still thoughtful, and sensitive," and he let out a startled gasp as I turned him and parted his thighs, continued to speak, strangled, "When Julian came here with your missive, from the inn, he brought it straight to me. I asked him, where are you calling from, Julian? And he said, from that blond and his young man. You have shot an arrow into me, sharper than any you have ever loosed before. I will never recover. I only want you to go away and to be safe. Leave me alone. Don't touch me the way you touch him. Please, or I am lost. Leave me my dignity at least. Don't pollute me anymore. Take him away. Please leave me alone. Don't touch me with your lips. Stop," he whispered, trying to push my head away. "Stop."
I pressed my nose to the side of his knee and drew it down the line of his thigh, and he quivered, tears in his voice. "You took something from me," I whispered.
"Oh God, your warm breath against my skin," he said, tremoring.
"I think only of you," I whispered.
"Liar," he said, lifting his hips so that I could slide my hands beneath him. "Do not bite me at the thigh. It will bleed and bleed," whispering. "Leave me with a little strength, so that I can fight you."
"How should you be punished for calling me 'flea'?"
"Drink my blood and swallow it, like fleas do. Parasite," he said, and turned abruptly, crawling away over the sheets. I caught him around the waist and pulled him back, and bit him behind the neck, through the muscle of the shoulder blade, which made him scream a real scream of pain, which thrilled me. I let go of him and pulled him upright against my body, hands across his neck and stomach.
"Are you all right?" I whispered.
"Don't ask me that," he whispered back. "If I weren't I could throw you away in an instant. As if I couldn't," then, more softly, "Tell me that you don't do this with him."
I shook my head, no no never.
"Tell me," he said, even more softly, "that this is not the only reason you want me."
"Non. Je vous ai manque." No, I missed you.
"Tell me that you love me."
"Il n'y a pas d'amour pour putes sales."
"Jesus Christ," he whispered. "Don't bite me with that mouth. Tell me that you love me."
"What are these wounds on your body?"
He turned his head, but I had him fast.
"I love you," I told him.
"They do not concern you. Do not trouble your pretty head. I will keep you safe," he said, dismissing it.
"I like your robe. Your dressing gown. You look like Salome at the feast," I said, and it made him press against me, pleased like a cat, and I drummed his chest with my fingers, which made him laugh.
"And now lie down," he said, "purring kitten, and I will stroke you with the lash the way you deserve, for how your other has hurt my feelings."
He always played as if he were all right. He was not good at hiding from me, but I could not read his mind. I have always been naive, and silly, and stupid. I am being honest. Quinny accuses me of being those things. I have tried not to be. He is right to abuse me. Do you see that? I have deserved every punch and slap and cut. It is me who has been lustful and greedy for affection. If I walked to Lourdes a thousand time it would make no dent on my sinfulness. And afterward, lips wet with blood and wicked flesh bruised from the touch of teeth, I went to Darkling like a child, and he did not say anything to me at all, but wept, and tried to dig his own eyes out, and screamed.
He cried out not to touch him, but I had to restrain him so that he wouldn't blind himself. In the morning, in the light, it looked as if he had been attacked by the long claws of crows.