It was a while before Paul could speak. He remembered the paperback in his jacket pocket and removed it carefully, trying in vain to smooth the tattered cover. He could feel the years of Julian’s fingerprints beneath his own. It was a long moment before he forced himself to offer it back. When Julian took it, he held it gingerly with the tips of his fingers, then suddenly rolled it tight until the pages touched the spine.
“You’re free now. I just helped you escape.”
When he tried to wheel the bicycle back from its berth, Julian dropped the book and grabbed the handlebars. He was trying to look bored and exasperated, and when he spoke again he nearly sounded it. He certainly wasn’t afraid. Everything about him said so except for the tightness of his grasp.
“I’m sorry, all right?” said Julian. “For god’s sake, I should have known you were going to do this, every possible excuse to hate yourself and you take it. If you’d just calm down and listen to me—”
The apology was too spiteful not to be sincere, and Paul was no less pitiful for deciding not to believe it. He wanted nothing less than a plea for mercy, a promise to need him and keep on needing. He wrenched away the handlebars and swung the bicycle around. Julian’s hands hung in the air for a moment in the place where they’d been, as if he didn’t know what to do with them now. This time there was no pretending not to recognize Julian’s alarm, and Paul took no comfort in how quickly he pulled himself back under control.
“You didn’t want to ‘manage me,’” said Paul blankly. “So don’t.”
When he left, Julian didn’t try to stop him. He stood under the soft haze of sumac leaves, arms folded around himself, as if he were waiting for Paul to change his mind and turn back.
The world became a blur again; Paul’s bicycle wheels barely seemed to touch the ground. The ride home was a blank space in his memory that he would never be able to fill in. He didn’t remember pausing at intersections or slowing pace as he descended a hill. Somehow he was home safe, and he must have spoken to his family without worrying them, because then the others were downstairs, busy and unconcerned, and he was alone up in his room. He had no words left in his head, no ideas. He barely thought about Julian at all. All he could think about was throwing himself against a wall, over and over, until he’d smashed himself into shards so fine that the void inside him could finally slip free.
9.
Paul didn’t hear Julian’s arrival through his headphones, but he felt it. The record had ended, but Paul was lying very still on his bed, listening to the rustling circle of dust and static. It took him a long time to sit up, and longer still to open his eyes and switch off the record player. He examined his reflection in the mirror on the back of his bedroom door and tried to purge himself of any sign of emotion—when it didn’t happen quickly enough, he struck himself across the face, then again, harder. The nervous energy faded into a brisk, stinging calm. He paused at the top of the stairs. He had the idea that he ought to brace himself, but he didn’t need to. When he heard the sound of Julian’s voice the pain was breathtaking, and Paul accepted it because he knew it was exactly what he deserved.
“ . . . my mother, but that’s not an excuse. She got under my skin, she always does, I should be used to it by now . . .”
“I’m sure he understands, sweetheart.” Paul could almost hear his mother wringing her hands. “Do you still like that blackberry tea?”
“Mrs. Fleischer, that’s very kind, but it really isn’t necessary—”
As Paul emerged from the stairwell, Laurie darted past on her way to put the kettle on. The cat ambled after her, tail held high. Audrey was lingering in the living-room doorway in her work clothes, wearing one boot and dangling the other from her right hand. She noticed Paul before the others did, and she gave him a shrewd, scrutinizing look.
When Julian looked up to meet Paul’s eyes, there was a split second of quiet. Then Paul’s mother turned to follow Julian’s gaze, and the moment was over before Paul could understand it.
“I’m so glad I caught you.” Julian gave him a cautious, apologetic smile, allowing it to linger long enough for Paul’s mother to glance back and see it. “I feel awful, I didn’t mean to sound so snappish, my nerves are just—god, you don’t hate me, do you?”
Paul thought there was something off about Julian’s body language, until he realized suddenly that the persona he wore could barely conceal what he was feeling. The fear and sadness and shattering exhaustion were all real and starkly visible. But if Julian couldn’t hide his feelings, at least he could weaponize them. Of course he would allow Paul’s mother to see past the surface. She was sweet to him and he liked her, and both sides of that fondness could be useful to him now.
Paul couldn’t guess what Julian had told his mother, but it didn’t really matter. She had so many things she was already pretending not to notice that Julian’s flimsy self-defense would barely register. When she looked between them again, echoing Julian’s wary smile, Paul knew she had already decided the answer for him.
“I don’t think you snapped,” Paul heard himself say. “You just seemed tired of everything. I don’t blame you.”
He wanted the truth to make Julian falter, but if it did, he didn’t let it show. Paul felt Audrey glance toward him again, but he refused to acknowledge her.
“Honey, I wish you’d sit down.” Paul didn’t immediately realize his mother wasn’t speaking to him, and it took even longer for Julian to reach the same understanding. “You must be freezing, it’s too cold for just a jacket—is the electric blanket still in the hall closet, Audrey?”
Audrey refused to take the hint. “Probably,” she said, raising her foot and tugging on her second boot.
His mother flew into a frenzy of affection. She installed Julian on the couch and flitted into the kitchen for a tray of tea and cookies, which Julian insisted (from beneath the inevitable electric blanket) that he didn’t need. Paul couldn’t hang back without drawing his mother’s attention, so he sat beside Julian and fidgeted with his cuffs, gazing blankly at the faded sunflower-print curtains in the front window.
Audrey plucked her coat straight by its lapels. She caught Paul’s eye and nodded toward the front door, as if to offer him a chance to escape, but he just stared at her until she gave up and left on her own.
As soon as she’d gone, Julian leaned forward to force Paul to meet his eyes. Up close the ring of lavender around his eyelids looked darker, flushed with blood; the chill had scraped some color back into his cheeks and the rough chapped line of his lower lip. His fragility was frightening, and Paul knew without a doubt that Julian wouldn’t let him see it unless he thought it would get him something he wanted.
“We’re going for a drive soon,” said Julian in an undertone. “You’re going to listen to what I tell you this time. The other conversation is closed, and you’re going to leave it that way. You’re right—I really don’t feel like managing you.”
Paul gazed back at him, almost through him. He didn’t register the words themselves so much as the steady authority in Julian’s voice—how unconvincing it was, though it sounded the same as it always had. He had no chance to answer even if he’d had anything to say. Paul’s mother returned, and Laurie drifted to the doorway after her to covertly examine them.
The closeness between them was overwhelming, all the more because Paul wasn’t sure how long he would still be allowed to feel it. He drifted in and out of the conversation as he lost himself in the restless warmth of Julian’s body alongside his.
Piece by reluctant piece, Julian told Paul’s mother a story Paul himself hadn’t been allowed to hear. There were details Julian hid from her—he skirted around the reason his parents had tried to tighten their grasp, so deftly that Paul’s mother didn’t seem to notice the elision. But everything else felt true, or nearly. Julian was tired and unmoored and overwhelmed, everything Paul’s mother would expect him to be. There was so much arithmetic he had never been taught how to do, so many costs of getting by
that he’d never known to anticipate, and he didn’t know where to start when it came to learning them. At least he had some padding in savings now, thanks to Henry—“Poor Henry,” Julian said, and seemed to mean it, because the phone call from their mother had been to announce that he’d been caught. Julian would be all right, he claimed. That was the part Paul least believed. He wasn’t sure how much his mother believed it, either.
At one point Paul’s mother cut into the explanation midsentence; it was the only time she interrupted him.
“What’s your mother’s name?” she asked, with a familiar piercing frankness that had lain dormant for so long Paul had nearly forgotten she was capable of it.
Julian paused. He couldn’t seem to make sense of the question, and it took a moment for him to decide that it didn’t matter.
“Delphine.”
“Delphine,” she echoed. She contemplated the name without elaborating, but Paul could see her making an enemy of it, this lone elusive trace of a woman she would never meet.
Paul would have expected his mother to divest Julian of every other detail, but she was careful. She pressed just lightly enough to draw out the generalities, chipping away at her own worry until she was satisfied that Julian wasn’t in any immediate danger. Paul remembered this was how she had dealt with his father’s quiet dark moods years ago, offering meals and distractions and letting the most painful parts of the truth go unspoken. If Paul hadn’t known better, he’d think she couldn’t detect the worst of it at all. She let Julian pretend to be unhurt and unafraid. She monitored his progress through the cookies and chided him if he stopped eating, and whenever he evaded a question she let it lie for a while before finding another way to ask it. Paul had forgotten she was capable of moving so deftly when she needed to.
By the time his cup was empty, Julian decided he’d put her at ease. She let him believe it.
“Is it okay if we go for a drive?” The deference in his voice was the first flash of artifice he’d shown all afternoon. “I’ll have him home for dinner, I promise.”
“You’ll both be home for dinner,” she said, and Julian started when she leaned forward to squeeze his arm. “It’s a standing invitation, it always is. Today I insist.”
She forced Julian into an overcoat before they left—one that had belonged to Paul’s father, gray wool, poison-sweet with naphthalene and pipe tobacco. As they were driving away Julian shrugged it off. He rolled down the window and lit a cigarette. It was his old brand, richer-smelling and more expensive. Paul didn’t dare ask where he was getting the money.
“I was worried she’d keep us there too late.” Julian leaned back in his seat and rested his fingertips on the chrome frame of the side mirror. “But this should work out perfectly.”
Beneath his languid posture Julian was still so uneasy that Paul could hardly bear to look at him. He yearned for Julian to claim his authority again, even if it was unconvincing. But Julian was still human and volatile and impossible to predict.
“I’m supposed to listen.” Paul could just barely hear himself over the whip of the wind past the windows. “So say what you need to say.”
“Hm?” Julian took the cigarette between his two forefingers and brought his hand back to the steering wheel. There was a trace of a tremor in his hands—when he looked toward Paul he broke into a strange grin, edgy and feral, as if he were afraid of what might happen if he stopped smiling. “Oh, I don’t have a speech or anything,” he said breezily. “You never like those. You’re such a goddamn scientist, you always need empirical evidence.”
“Evidence of what?” Paul asked before he could stop himself, and Julian burst into such sudden wild laughter that Paul shrank back in his seat.
“Anyway, I got you a present.” Julian took a long, shaky pull from the cigarette. “It’s not terribly portable, at least not yet. But I think you’ll like it.”
There at last was the authoritative confidence, every note false and flat. For an agonizing moment Paul couldn’t imagine why he’d ever been taken in by the performance—it was so obviously a lie, pretentious and childish and transparent.
“Julian, I’m not angry at you.” It wasn’t quite true, but it should have been. “It isn’t about what you do or don’t give me, it’s about everything I take, I don’t need you to give me anything else when I know I don’t even des—”
“If you say the word ‘deserve’ one more time I’m driving us off a bridge.” He gave another brittle laugh. “God, you’re so boring when you get your feelings hurt and decide they have to stay hurt . . .”
Paul didn’t dare protest. He restlessly tugged his sleeves over his hands. Julian, unconcerned, leaned forward and switched on the radio.
“You’re going to love it, Pablo,” he said. “Please just trust me. This is something I want to give you.”
He turned the radio up too high for Paul to answer without shouting. They wended through the familiar spaghetti junction of residential streets north of the colleges, not speaking. Once they had passed through Bloomfield, Paul had only a dim idea where they were—north, far north, enough to have traded the muddy metallic scent of one river for another. Julian turned down the radio and idled the car in a crumbling asphalt lot next to a playground. He was watching one of the houses across the street. It was shabby and brown and nondescript, with a scuffed armada of old cars parked in the gravel drive.
“It shouldn’t be too much longer.” Julian lifted his cuff to check his watch. “I don’t see his car, but this is about when he gets home.”
Paul watched him stub out his cigarette and switch off the engine. Julian rested his fingertips on the lower lip of the steering wheel and took up a silent piano concerto against the wheel’s leather seam. Paul couldn’t bear his nervousness, so he looked away, toward the house’s rusting chain-link fence and sagging front steps.
“Aren’t you going to ask?”
“I’m afraid to.”
“Don’t be,” said Julian with a smile. “It’s right up your alley.”
A pea-green sedan had appeared at the corner. It pulled to a halt in the driveway, headlights flicking dark.
“There he is,” said Julian, but Paul hardly heard him. The driver stepped out of the car, burdened with a bookbag and a sack of groceries. It only took Paul a moment to recognize him.
“Oh,” he heard himself say. He couldn’t tell how much he understood when he started to speak, but by the time the word had finished forming in his mouth, he knew.
Brady was in a sour mood; it was clear even from a distance. He kicked the car door shut and set his bags on the hood, then stalked across the uneven lawn to move the trash bin back from the curb.
“You mentioned him as a joke a while back.” Julian’s voice was quiet and merciless. “But he’d be perfect. He’s already all but confessed that if Milgram asked nicely he wouldn’t think twice. Banality of evil wrapped up with a bow. And petty,” he added with sudden vehemence. “God, that’s what always made me loathe him, the way he wound you up on purpose and then acted smug when you got angry . . .”
Paul watched Brady’s hands heave the strap of his bookbag back over his head. Six months ago he’d found those hands fascinating—the unrefined broad-fingered masculinity that he knew his own hands would never grow into. But he thought now of an older memory. General chemistry, first semester, Brady serving as the student assistant. The incongruous delicacy of those same hands as he demonstrated, with fine well-practiced movements, how to use a burette.
“We might find a way to electrocute him. Ramp the shocks up bit by bit, just like the experiment,” Julian said. Paul could feel Julian watching him, ardently, eagerly, but he was too transfixed to meet his eyes. “I know it’s kind of involved, I know you like it more practical—but the symmetry of it . . .”
Brady propped the grocery bag on his hip while he pulled the front door closed behind him. Paul stared even after he was out of sight, at the dim flickering porch light and the brass house number ringed by tarn
ish. When Paul forced himself to look away, he saw a patch of dying sunlight break between the tree branches and fall across Julian’s face. As if for the first time, Paul noticed the slim golden ridge of hazel at the inner edge of his irises.
“You haven’t said anything. Don’t you like it?”
He didn’t know how to answer. It would be unforgivable to do something so trivial as to like the coolness in his chest. There was something almost sexual about it, the unbearable tension and the fearful desire for the moment it would snap.
“Wait.” He only saw the flaw after he spoke; it took a moment longer for the disappointment to catch up with him. “It can’t be him.”
Julian looked as if all he could see in Paul’s face was spite. “What?”
“I’m sorry.” Paul knew he was right, and he hated himself for it. “I’m sorry, but it can’t be him.”
“Why not?” Julian looked toward the closed front door. Beyond the threshold Brady would be putting away bean cans and chiding his roommates for not bringing the trash can back from the curb—forever oblivious to his own maddening, undeserved luck. “You hated him, I remember how much you hated him—”
“That’s why.” Paul tucked his arms around himself to keep his hands from shaking. “You remember I hate him, and so will everyone else in that class. That’s motive. Motive gets people caught. It can’t be him.”
“For Christ’s sake!” There was something painfully uncalculated and desperate about Julian’s frustration. “Why bother doing it if there isn’t a motive?”
“There can’t be a detectable connection to us, it’s too dangerous, it’s safest for us if he’s a stranger—”
“So we would have to just pick up some random person off the street and hope we lucked into someone who’s actually worth killing? Great, you’re right, that’s a much better plan.”
That had been calculated, which was a relief. Paul didn’t even try to fight the expected response. He looked away and drew back.
These Violent Delights Page 24
