The water is getting cold. I can feel my heart thumping at the base of my throat as I hold the blade to my sole. The only reason I haven’t done it is that I can’t stop thinking about footprints. This is a nice guesthouse; I don’t want to bleed on their floor. I picture the print my foot will leave, wet toes and wet heel, with a bloody arch. Milos’s arches are so high that when he leaves wet footprints on my bathroom floor there is nothing connecting the heel and the ball. Just another thing I found fascinating about him and his body.
I need this. I know it’s wrong but I need it.
My phone rings, startling me. I jump and the blade slips, falling through the water onto my foot below. It’s so sharp I hardly feel it, but then I see the blood spiraling out from a cut on my instep.
I immediately feel foolish. Getting used to pain, I said to him. Does not compute, and yet here I am.
The phone stops ringing and I breathe again. I know it’s him, but I can’t pick up right now, not after a night of turning everything over and over in my head. Every thing he ever said to me, right from the beginning. “I’m very discreet,” he said, after that first crazy fumble. How many men has he said that to?
I didn’t look up his site. There was no point. I only had to look at his face to know it was true. And everything else made sense, too. I thought he was fearless, the way he loved me, the way he threw himself into my arms and my bed and urged me to do as I pleased with him. That’s what hurts me so badly that I want the outside to bleed, too: the ugly suspicion that I was just expanding his professional repertoire.
The bleeding has stopped. My foot has a blurry, rust-colored halo that dissolves and disperses when I wiggle my toes. Getting used to pain. It gives me an idea, a better one than this. There are other – less shameful - forms of self-mortification.
I get out and get dressed.
This is a small town, one of those dots on a map that might once have been the whole world to a bunch of English pilgrims. There’s a Laundromat, a down-at-heel antique store and a petrol station flying a faded Gadsden flag. I have no idea which state I’m even in and I squint at passing cars to catch a glimpse of the plates. Two Vermonts, one New York and a preponderance of Live Frees or Dies.
The trees are in full blossom, blowsy with clouds of pink and white. The world seems bursting with life and all its attendant chaos and I know I’m never going to be able to taste spring air without the clean tang of it giving way to the taste of his mouth, his skin. My phone keeps ringing, but I let it. It’s my way of punishing him. And myself.
I find what I’m looking for, a little shop just off the main street.
My first instinct is to turn back. Chicken out. After all, this looks like one of those tired white towns where people pop painkillers like M&Ms and make all the attendant poor decisions that go along with that. What if this is the town’s one stop shop for hepatitis C or worse?
But I don’t get that out. In the window are several prominently displayed certificates stating that Georgia Nyhuis has passed blood-borne disease safety protocols and others. The universe clearly means for me to make this mistake. Just one, so I can regret it later.
Georgia Nyhuis has pastel-colored hair in shades of blue, pink and violet. She has a diamante ring through her septum, a sacred heart in her cleavage and her left arm is a busy sleeve full of little people and strange instruments that look as though they’ve escaped from a Hieronymus Bosch panel. She looks at me like she knows I’m a virgin.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I would have printed out what I want, but I don’t have access to a printer right now.” I scribble on the back of one of her business cards and hand it to her.
“Nah, it’s cool,” she says, taking it from me. “It’s better if I do the stencil anyway. You get some people just print it off and don’t even get the kerning right.”
“The…?” My phone starts to ring again.
“Kerning. The space between the letters. You’d be surprised how easy it is to screw up a script tattoo.”
“I wouldn’t. I’m an English teacher. Some of the spelling errors that come across my desk…”
She frowns. “You gonna get that?”
“It’s fine. Any particular font you’d suggest?”
The phone stops ringing. “I guess I’d say don’t go with the really loopy ones, because that fine-line shit doesn’t age well unless you do it big. And don’t ask for Comic Sans, because I won’t do it.” She takes a book of typefaces from under the counter and opens it for me.
I’d laugh if I remembered how. “Is that one of your hard and fast rules?”
“Ayup. I don’t ink drunk people, I won’t do Nazi shit and I won’t do Comic Sans.”
The phone starts to ring again. I’m annoying her, I can tell. “Excuse me,” I say, and walk to the door. I could take it outside and let it ring, but it’s Milos, again. What am I going to do? Let him rack up the missed calls forever? Sooner or later he’s going to stop calling, and then the real punishment will begin.
So I answer.
“Yeah?”
“Tom?”
“Yeah. What is it?”
Milos exhales loudly and angrily down the phone. “You know what it is. Jesus, where the fuck are you?”
Is he even sorry? “I’m…somewhere. New Hampshire, I think.”
“What the hell are you doing in New Hampshire?”
Living free or dying? Is that what you’re supposed to do in New Hampshire? “I needed to think,” I say. “Clear my head.”
“Good,” he says. “Great. Good luck with that. Thanks for telling us while we’re all back here having a fucking laugh riot worrying about your ass.”
I’ve been so unkind, taking off like this. Making everyone suffer. “Are you okay?” I ask, in a pathetic attempt to mitigate my guilt.
“I don’t know,” says Milos. “I’m bruised up pretty bad. And I want you.” He’s said those words to me so many times, but only once before in this tone, one so imperative that the first thing that pops into my head is the foreshortened finger of Kitchener, poking out of that old recruitment poster. He’s still very much a child, in the sense that he won’t be denied.
There are so many things I want to say. I love you for so many reasons and I hate you for making me hurt this way. I’m ashamed of my own reaction to your secrets, but how dare you keep them in the first place.
Instead what comes out is heavily edited. “We need to talk, don’t we?”
“Yep. We really do.”
“When were you going to tell me, Milos?”
He sighs, sniffs. I can hear crockery rattling in the background, voices. Good, he’s in public. Maybe he won’t fly off the handle so quickly. “I don’t know,” he says. “Is there ever a good time to tell your boyfriend something like that?”
“Oh. So it was a timing thing. Good to know.”
Another sharp sniff. I wish I could be kinder about this, but I don’t seem to have it in me. All I can think of is him exposing himself in front of strangers, cheapening the fearlessness that I fell in love with.
“Tell me where you are,” he says. “I need to see you.”
No. Not a chance. He’s not driving up here with that busted taillight. “I’m not ready for that right now.”
Milos hisses like a kettle. “Ready for what? Jesus, Tom – so I crammed a couple of things up my ass on a webcam. Get over it. Why is everyone acting like I’m the whoriest whore who ever whored?”
There are the sounds of a brief scuffle and then I hear another voice – Otter’s. “Give me that…Tom?”
“Yeah. Hi. What are you doing there?”
Milos and Otter. I hadn’t even introduced them to one another yet, but now they’re talking and worrying about me together. God, I’ve really done a number on people I claim to love.
“Never mind me,” he says. “How are you doing? What are you doing in New Hampshire?”
“I just…I just wanted to get away. Clear my head. I’m sorry – I didn’t mean to wor
ry anyone. I wasn’t thinking.”
“It’s okay,” he says, with more patience than I’ve ever deserved. “Everything is going to be fine. All I want you to do right now is take your time and check in, okay? Can you do that? When we call, just pick up and talk. Tell us what’s going on with you.”
“Yeah. I can do that.”
“Good. Great. That’s all we need right now, Tom.”
The tears roll down my cheeks, cooling in the light spring breeze. It’s kindness that kills in these moments.
*
“People like us don’t get happy endings,” he says. “We just get what we deserve.”
He’s wearing nothing but his tattoos, his thick, circumcised cock in his hand as he approaches the end of the bed. His eyes are black, his mouth red and full as he runs a tongue over his full lower lip. I can smell him before anything else, that rich, fleshy smell of pubes and pre-come, mingled with the rank sweat of desire.
“Suck it,” he says, and I fall on him eagerly, lapping and slurping, one hand on his hip and the other cradling his soft, heavy balls. He wants me so much. “Make it wet.”
I know what he wants, because I want it, too. I slather him in my spit and he combs his fingers through my hair, glancing down at me from under the shade of his dark eyelashes. He shudders and thrusts gently into my mouth, his breath hitching in a way that reminds me thrillingly of the first time he scrambled over me and eagerly impaled himself. He orders me to my feet and I turn, the weight of my cock tugging at the skin of my groin as I bend over the bed.
“Please,” I say, humping thin air in my sheer desperation to get off. “Please, please...”
He spreads my cheeks with his hands. I hear him spit and I feel wetness slide down, slicking my arsehole. No ceremony, no condom. He pushes in, bareback, stretching me wide. I moan loudly as he starts to fuck me open with short strokes, my balls and my aching hard cock jiggling between my open thighs. It’s so, so good and that’s how I know it can’t be real, because it feels like every wet dream I’ve ever had about being bent over and fucked by Milos.
“You got what you wanted,” he says, and pushes my face down into the bed. The texture of the sheets feels strange against my cheek, and then I see that the bed is covered in money - dollars, pounds, euros. I open my mouth to cry out but he pushes me down again and I get a mouthful of currency. “You got what you paid for,” he says. Oh God. I’m coming, but it’s no longer a good time. My body is awake enough for me to feel through the veil of sleep, to feel the heat of it dribbling over my thigh and to feel the muscles inside me twitching against nothing.
I wake up sore and sticky, my cracked rib throbbing. I have an impressive bruise across my chest from the seatbelt and the nurse who patched me up said I’m lucky the airbag didn’t leave me with a panda pair of black eyes. At least I stained my own sheets this time; I sneaked back like a criminal in the dead of night, already making a mental inventory of the wreckage I was going to have to clean up once I got home. Return the hire car, take my own to the garage, assuming it’s not a total write off. Insurance claims. Check in with Dr. Rayner and the Dean. God, it’s probably all over the school by now.
And Simon. What do I even begin to do about him? Do I attempt to talk to him, or just cut straight to Nicky’s suggestion of a restraining order?
Basic adulting, I said. That’s all it is. Except there’s nothing basic about it.
I take the hire car onto campus, unsure if mine will even start and mindful of the scandal probably attending its smashed rear-end. The first few people I see are a couple of students, a boy and a girl, both clutching Starbucks cups and engaged in a noisy argument across the roof of their car, as if whatever it was they were fighting over was so important they couldn’t find time to get fully out of the vehicle. They don’t even glance at me.
As I enter the building I run into Kate Colver. She narrows her lips and gives me a polite, neutral nod, which is bad. Very bad. I return the nod and hurry for Steven Rayner’s office, feeling as though I’m running a gauntlet.
Steven’s office door is closed. I knock and wait, catapulted back in time some fifteen years to the times when I was standing outside the headmaster’s office, waiting to be chewed out for smoking or - on one unpleasantly memorable occasion - writing homoerotic poetry in the margins of my English book.
“Come in.”
He’s busy, but that’s the fun of being the boss. “Shit,” he says. “It’s you. Wait a moment. I just need to tell these guys I’m running late. Take a seat.”
“That sounds ominous; you’re clearing your schedule for me.”
He fires off a quick text and perches on the edge of the desk. A long sigh. “How are you doing, Tom?” he says, in a paternal tone that breathes disappointment.
“I’m...I’ve been better.”
“Yeah,” says Steve. “This is...um...”
“...a mess. Yes.”
“It’s not optimal, no.”
“Optimal?” Milos is not optimal. My living, breathing, brawling lover is ‘not optimal’. “Really? Are we really going to use some piece of bloodless boardroom newspeak to discuss this?” Steve is taken aback and I don’t blame him. I’m similarly appalled at my own inability to stop digging when I’m already in a hole. “I was fucking a student, okay? If ‘fuck’ was good enough for DH Lawrence I think it’s good enough for the English Department, don’t you?”
Steven exhales a long breath and rubs the skin above his thick, salt-and-pepper eyebrows. “You were fucking a student,” he says. “Who is apparently also a gay hustler.”
“There we go. There’s candor.”
“Tom...”
“Sorry.”
He sighs again. “Please tell me you never paid him?”
“How dare you? Of course not. We didn’t have that kind of relationship.”
“Well, good,” says Steven, with an edge of asperity. “I guess that’s something.”
“He’s very young, Steven. Go easy on him.”
He sits down behind the desk. “Yeah. We’ve got counselors on the case. Don’t worry.”
I think of Kate and that cold un-Kate-like look she just gave me. God, she probably thinks I’m some skeevy sexual predator enticing young men into my office with blunts and WH Auden. And there’s no other way to slice this; even if Milos did practically seduce me, I’m still the one who should be old enough to know better.
“Listen...” Steven starts to say, but I’m not in the mood to hear it. The mealy-mouthed departmental bullshit. The apologies with buts tacked onto the end. Let’s just get this thing over with.
“Way ahead of you,” I say, shaking my head. “I think it would be better if I handed in my notice.”
He visibly relaxes, his shoulders sinking as he lets out a held breath. “Wow,” he says. “Wow. Thank you.”
“No, it’s okay–”
“–no, it’s not. It’s not okay at all. For what it’s worth, I feel fucking horrible about all this. You’ve been through hell in the past couple of years and if anyone is entitled to make a mistake it’s you.” A mistake. He’s a mistake now, where before he was not optimal. But he’s neither of those things. He’s Milos. My Milos. “There’s a lot of compassion out there for you, Tom.”
“And for him?” I won’t cry. I told myself I wouldn’t all the way over here.
“Oh God, don’t worry about that right now. How’s Simon?”
I can’t unpack that sentence without tears or screaming, so I just answer the question. “I don’t know. I haven’t got that far yet. They’ve got him in...in a psych ward. Had to keep him in hospital anyway; I’m told he got a concussion when he crashed the car.”
“I’m so sorry, Tom. After everything you guys have been through...”
Yes, after everything we went through together. That happy rainbow ending that we had coming to us, after we’d beat the bogeyman and emerged stronger for it. We were supposed to be unbreakable - tempered - because that’s how the story goes.
And I know what I want out of this ending.
I cross the campus to the Performing Arts building. My heart is already beating too hard at the prospect of seeing him again. Perhaps he’s not even here. Perhaps I’ll stick my head around the door of the dance studio and find nothing but the baffled gazes of a bunch of random Montagues and Capulets limbering up for the day’s rehearsals, and then I’ll be spared. Up to a point.
I hear music as I approach. Prokofiev – I recognize it now. A lively, mischievous tune, heavy on the woodwind. Milos would know if it was allegro molto or presto or whatever; he has highbrow taste in music. “It’s harder to appreciate hamburger if you’ve been raised eating nothing but filet,” he once said, switching off the radio with extreme prejudice. I loved his capacity to surprise me.
He’s alone. He doesn’t hear me come in, and he doesn’t even see me, because he’s dancing.
This is the thing I was afraid to see, because I feared he’d steal my heart forever. And I was right. Oh God, I was right. He’s all in black, whirling and leaping, spinning in mid air with his arms held tight to his chest. He moves like gravity was something he’d heard of once, but wasn’t impressed and decided to pass on the whole business, the same way cats do when they spring up from stiff legs without warning. When he leaps he manages to stay up there long enough to beat his feet together in mid-air, then he comes down again and spins across the floor in a series of wide pirouettes, coming to a short stop in a mocking bow before he’s off again.
This isn’t Milos. This is Tybalt, an impossibly graceful yet thoroughly macho brawler, a snarling furnace of a young man for whom family is everything and dishonor means murder.
He stops. His back is to me, but I can see the sweat streaming off his bare arms, for all he’s made it look easy. He switches off the music and then turns, catching my eye.
These Violent Delights Page 18
