Whenever I would come around, Javie would make a little whistling sound, a little smile, of recognition. It was a little scream of intense joy, translated into a gasp of air. He had dark blond hair as a baby, which would darken as he grew older. I liked to hold him and smell his head. He hated to be tickled and I loved to make him mad. If I kissed him, he forgave me. Yuki had been an itinerant accountant when living, subsisting mostly on savings between tax seasons. Javie had been an accidental Valentine's baby, conceived on a date between two lonely parties, neither of whom had been interested in more than a blind date on a lonely day of the year. The mother had given Yuki the baby when it was born, around American Thanksgiving time, and had left without fanfare. When Yuki's savings ran out, about two months after I met him, he and the baby moved into my warm garret. He had made good on his promise, and hadn't so much as raised a hand to me. After getting to know him, I realized that violence was not in his nature. I thought that things were that simple, that a person might get to know a man going through what we were. For both of us, a love affair meant staying human. Javie and our schedules kept us in what felt a normal orbit. For me, it was the most normal I had ever felt, which seems strange to me now. To think that at the moment blood came into my life, I was having the most quotidian days I have ever lived.
It wasn't as if there wasn't blood for us. Yuki and I would see the baby safely asleep, and Javie slept hard, and slip out together. He showed me the underground fetish clubs he had been frequenting while living, where he had encountered vampires before, and where he had met his end in an accident. Now, he flipped the script, and I went along. It wasn't really my thing, but blood was my thing, and there it was easy to get. It was not required of me to dress in any particular way or behave as not myself, and I discovered that as edgy or out of the norm I had ever felt while living, I had been leading an incredibly vanilla life. I found myself learning quite a lot about desire, and sex, as an outsider, and it often disgusted me. Yuki, too, often seemed outside of his element. More than once, walking home together down foggy avenues, he confided in me that it had all seemed much more exciting when it had the ability to arouse him. Now, it felt repetitive and false. So matters of the flesh were easy for us, too, and it made us lazy, if not happy. I had not yet discovered that a chief pleasure for me is killing people. I had never done it then. I thought I had everything I wanted. But I felt unsatisfied.
So Javie was my greatest joy, playing with him, looking after him. When he began to crawl, he would often make his way underneath my bed in the small apartment, and I would go under there too to get him. Sometimes when Yuki came home he would find us asleep together under the bed, breathing deeply. Yuki was often away, doing this that or the other thing, and he was not tender by nature, which I am. I to this day have no idea what Yuki did with his time, but I suspect that he had an office somewhere, paid for with my Amex card, and that he often slept there or had little affairs of blood. I didn't feel jealous over it, because it benefited me. I spent my days looking after Javie. I most enjoyed walking with him in his stroller, and sitting with him in the park. He was a happy child. I don't know if I would have stayed with Yuki if it hadn't been for Javie. I think that we became accustomed to each other, however, and being with him fulfilled most of my needs.
We shared a love of literature, and of the city. Things between us were generally passionate, with little of the comfortable sharing of space that I had witnessed between my guardians as a child. Yuki said that he needed to be close to me in order to sleep, in order to feel safe enough, but during the day overtures of affection annoyed him. I don't think that he wanted a romantic relationship with me in daylight. I don't think that he was interested in men, or had remained too close to his living ideals to see me as anything other than a man. Things were different in the dark, or when he was low. In those times, he couldn't get enough of me, and it was like it had been the night I met him. We argued a lot. He would get angry if I cried. If I cried, the baby would cry, and Yuki would grow distant. I never thought about how his life had been stolen from him, then. He had not been in any way prepared to deal with losing everything. For Yuki, in his mind, he was dead because the future he had imagined had died, and sometimes he felt like a corpse. I didn't understand it. I had always known, in some sense, what faced me. I never felt like the walking dead. Sometimes he would freak out completely and begin crying that his body was cold, and he would shake, and say, "Hail Mary full of grace", and take me by the upper arms, look me in the eyes. "Talk to me," he would beg, petrified, "and tell me how things are now. Remind me of what our life is, that we have a life." He had been a Catholic schoolboy like me, and I said prayers with him. We lived like that two years, uninterrupted and completely out of contact with anyone.
I loved to wake up to Yuki scratching my back, because I always sleep on my belly. I woke one evening, pleasantly, to gentle scratching, to fingernails dragging from shoulderblades to the divots of my hips. I opened my eyes lazily and turned my head, and Yuki was sitting up next to me. Seeing my eyes, he proffered a piece of paper.
"What's this?" I asked, sitting up.
"Never mind it for a moment, you look delicious," he told me, and kissed me on the lips, so I knew it was evening. His lips were warm against mine, and so when he tried to press his tongue against my teeth, I bit it, which made him scream and laugh. "Good God, you're still bold," he said, laughing and rolling over.
I squeezed his hip and found the letter with my hand. It was typed up on plain A4, folded twice with no address written. As I unfolded it, the baby began to stir, and Yuki got up to tend to him.
"Tell me what it's about," Yuki said. "I didn't read it. It says 'Dear Jackie'. I respect you, even if you are always saying that I don't." Javie said something then, I don't recall what, and Yuki said to him, "That's right. I'm your 'papa', not him. That's right," conspiratorially, laughing.
"He needs a bath. Why don't you bring up some warm water and I'll wash your hair, too?" I said. We didn't have hot running water in the apartment, or a washroom.
"Sure." The baby had him by the face, hand on either cheek, and I watched them make silly faces at each other. The letter didn't interest me half so much.
I let the letter sit on the table while Yuki brought the water up. Javie always slept after a bath, clean and warm. It gave me no end of pleasure to think, "I washed that baby, look at it," and Yuki liked it when I washed his hair, massaging his scalp with my fingers. By the time I rinsed Yuki's hair, the water had grown cold, but he didn't seem to mind, humming and happy. After all of that, which was enough work for an evening, he had all but forgotten the letter, so that when I picked it up, he was doubly interested. He said, "Read it aloud?"
"Dear Jackie," I read, holding the paper near my face in the neardark, and translating from English so that Yuki could understand. "How are you living? I have been asked to write to you by some of the others, though I would that they would write themselves. It troubles me and I am cautious, because I know that you don't want to see us. I told them that I wouldn't bother you until you chose to contact us, if you ever would, but they insisted. For me, these years, it has been enough to know that you are alive. Dasius told me he is receiving your Amex bill regularly, so if no one has stolen it, you are still living all right, and that is well for me."
"Who is it?" Yuki asked, going through the fridge for baby food an older Polish lady downstairs insisted on making for us. She would bring it in a box every Sunday, and "shoo" us if we protested, which was the polite thing to do. Javie, at two and two months, was getting a little old for liquid food, but he liked it.
"It's my father," I said.
"Really?" he asked, ah bon? "You still talk to your father?"
"It's different," I whispered. "Do you want to hear more?"
"Ah sure," o bien sur, "I do. Is it positive? Would I like him?"
I sat at our little kitchen table and watched Yukito's back a moment, in his black button up shirt. When I didn't say anything, he turned his head and raised his eyebrows. "I love you," I said, quietly.
"I love you, too," he said. "Is it that bad?"
I read on. "Lately," I read, "there is some news about Paris that troubles me. Your Leis is there now, in Paris, and he says that Laurent is much afraid for you. I protested that I did not want to know details of your life, because you haven't shared them with me, but I'm told that you have a baby. I want to know its name. Will you tell me? But that is not the matter. Jackie, Laurent is saying that someone has found out about your baby who shouldn't know, and that he wants to kill it. I must be frank with you that you must come back to America. Now. If you go to Orly, there are tickets there under Dasius's name. He has had passports made. Everything is ready for you to fly. I'm desperate. Laurent cannot protect you. You must come home. He says that Nicky has gone mad, and will not be satisfied until he kills you all. I have never met this person, and I do not know, to be honest with you, if it is that he cannot be controlled or if for some reason it has been decided that you should die. How can we know this? Only, please come home. Please come home. My baby, I would not write if it wasn't true. You'll stay with me for the time being. If you won't, some other arrangement may be made. I love you, please heed me. Ellis Q. March."
"Jesus," Yuki whispered. He had come to stand by me while I read. "But they're people. Don't you think we can handle them?"
"They're not people," I said.
"Do you think we can wait until morning? It will be difficult to find a cab."
"Where did you get this letter?" I asked.
"I'll call the cab company. Pack a bag for Javie."
At the honk of the cab's horn, we went down. Except for cloth diapers and baby food, we took nothing with us. As if sensing danger, Javie did not make a sound, his face pressed against my shirt.
Downstairs, on the landing, we passed a small child with long brown hair, sucking on his fingers. As we passed, he watched us silently.