by Heidi Belleau;Ally Blue;Kari Gregg;Peter Hansen;Laylah Hunter;Brien Michaels;Sam Schooler
David.
He must have mouthed the name, or said it without meaning to, because David peeled away from the house and made towards him like he had been invited. Tobias recoiled, and very nearly made a run for his door, but his damnable tendency towards charity pulled him up short.
“David,” he said stiffly. Not a remotely respectable greeting, but David wasn’t a respectable man.
“You remember me.” David’s face glowed. Or was that colour in his cheeks from the cold? Whatever the cause, there was a ruddy quality to them, and his voice was as warm as his expression.
Tobias drew back from him. “What are you doing here?” he asked without preamble. Because he didn’t dare say, “How could I forget you?”
David’s expressive face fell. He looked ashamed, biting his full bottom lip. “Hate to come begging, but I need your help. Can I come inside? It’s bloody freezing.” He rubbed his long, slim hands together in demonstration. No gloves.
“Absolutely not. You know you’re barred.”
“I’m not looking to put on the uniform, Tobias. I’m not a boy anymore.” His eyelids lowered, shading his brown eyes. “Neither are you, it seems.”
Tobias’s stomach twisted uncomfortably at David’s blatant sexuality. It had been some time since he’d been victim to it. “Doesn’t matter. You’re still barred, and you put me and my work here at risk by lurking around. What if someone recognises you? What if they start to say I’m selling something other than shoeshines out of this house?”
David’s already flushed face coloured further. “I didn’t think—”
“No. You never think, do you? Never have. And that’s why I’m in the house, and you’re on the street.” David always inspired this reaction in Tobias. This . . . this visceral need to tear into him when he found a soft spot. And, unfortunately for David, his soft spots were many. Many, and woefully obvious.
“Tobias.” David wasn’t quite pleading, but his voice held a measure of appeasement. “I only want to talk.”
“Well, I can’t be seen talking to you or your ilk. And even if I could, I wouldn’t want to. I have nothing to say to you, David. You betrayed this house. You betrayed my father.”
You betrayed me.
David’s eyes shone. “We’ll go somewhere else. Where people wouldn’t know you. Where they wouldn’t talk.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you.”
“Fine!” David ducked his head, his heave of breath visible as it materialised in the cold. “Fine,” he repeated, calmer. “Don’t.”
Tobias thought maybe that would be the last of it, but then David reached into one pocket of his filthy coat and produced a worn pub token.
“Here, then. Meet me here. Tonight.”
“I won’t,” Tobias insisted. But David grabbed him by the wrist and pried his hand open, then folded his fingers around the token. David’s hands were cool and soft, as soft as Tobias remembered them, as if they hadn’t aged a day.
Tobias wondered how his hands must feel to David.
And then he snarled, “Get away. And don’t let me catch you back here, or you’ll be sorry.”
David’s weak grip broke, and he stepped away, towards the street. Tobias turned his back to him. Let him say whatever he wanted—Tobias didn’t have to listen.
Once he was inside the house, he shut the door hard and quickly latched it up. Double-checked that it was secure.
Only then did he open his hand and stare down at the token he still held clutched there. He should have thrown it down into the gutters. If he had, it would be gone by now, and the temptation with it.
It was a dull bronze, the lettering eroded by the touch of hundreds of hands. GOOD FOR ONE DRINK, it said around the edges of the front. In the center was the pub name: the Red Cock. On the back was an address at the far end of Clark Street.
Tobias’s lip curled. Of course no one would talk, not at a place like that.
He hung his cloak back in its place and stuffed the token in his pocket before Nora or Georgia could see him carrying around such a thing.
To be frequenting a place of that repute . . . it proved that David was the same as he had been in their younger years. Nothing had changed.
No, that wasn’t quite true. Tobias had changed. He’d grown into an upstanding, respectable man. He’d made something of himself. He’d inherited his father’s work and continued it in good faith. His home and his conscience were both clean.
He wasn’t the impressionable, temptable boy he’d once been—the boy David clearly still remembered him as. Perhaps the boy David still wanted him to be.
That was why he most certainly wasn’t going to be meeting David at the Red Cock.
And yet, despite his best intentions, Tobias found himself there.
He’d eaten supper with the boys and read to them from the Bible afterwards. He’d overseen them being tucked into their beds. He’d even gone to his own bed. Laid out his pyjamas and loosened his cravat.
Only to immediately tighten it again, put on his hat, gloves, and cloak, and then step outside to hail a cab.
Now he was here in this dingy, grimy establishment, having spent the token on a questionable-looking stout, and wishing he were in his bed. Wishing he were anywhere else.
The men here were working class, drunk and rowdy and pissing away the meagre pay that should have gone to keeping food in their children’s bellies. Men like these . . . without them, Tobias expected he wouldn’t have a house for boys in the first place, because they’d be at home with their fathers and mothers where they belonged. Not on the streets, begging and stealing, and their mothers down dark alleys with their skirts around their heads.
Tobias knew too well how a story like that ended: with a lawless little sinner of a boy like David, so sweet and innocent once, but betrayed by the world and transformed into something else, an unnameable thing that tempted every man around him to fall to darkness.
Abhorrent. Tainted. Taken from God’s arms and cast apart to be ruined by his desires.
But what of Tobias’s desires? He would be lying if he said they hadn’t played a part in bringing him here. Ruination—that was what David had always been for Tobias, ever since they were boys under the same roof: Tobias the philanthropist’s son, and David the poor urchin whose father could never be bothered to care for him more than he cared for drink.
David had tempted him then, too. To small mischief, to disobedience, to play and idleness when they should have been working or studying.
And then, later, to those headier secret places. The tree in the corner of the garden, with its dense foliage. The lavatory after midnight, in the pitch dark without even a candle. David’s bed, while the other boys snored and dreamt children’s dreams.
Now to this sticky, scarred table at the Red Cock.
When David arrived, he was in the same clothes he had been in earlier. He paused inside the door with an air of familiarity—even smiled at one man who looked his way. Tobias dropped his gaze immediately and concentrated on his own ungloved hands.
David found him anyway, of course. There was no drink in his hand. “You came,” he said softly, as warm as before. He sat across from Tobias and put his hands on the tabletop. They were curled slightly, his fingernails resting against the wood.
“I’m aware.” Tobias looked archly at David, who seemed paler here, his thin face clammy and his fair hair lank from the heat of so many bodies in a small space. The skin under his eyes was smudged. There were slight crow’s-feet at the corners of them as well, making him appear older than his nineteen years. “You said you wanted to talk. So talk.”
“I suppose I’ll come right out and say it, then.” David took a deep breath, slender shoulders lifting. “I’m sick, Tobias.”
Tobias’s heart seized against his will. He didn’t want to care about David’s health. He didn’t. It was none of his concern. “Sick,” he repeated, keeping his voice neutral. “Well, I’m not a doctor, David.”
“I kno
w that. And even if you were, it wouldn’t help, would it? They can’t cure what I’ve got.”
All manner of horrific scenarios offered themselves. Tobias pushed them away. “You’re certain of that?”
David’s expression twisted, became sympathetic, which was . . . Which was all wrong. David wasn’t supposed to be the one offering sympathy in this moment—Tobias was. He would be, if he could bring himself to.
“I’m certain.” David’s nails made noise on the table, and Tobias realised his hands were shaking. “It’s the French disease, Tobias. It doesn’t get better, not with the best doctors, and Lord knows I couldn’t afford those anyway.”
He deserves it. It’s the natural punishment for the life he chose.
Tobias believed that, but he didn’t feel disgust or triumph at David’s revelation. He just felt . . . sad. Terribly sad. And not that remote sense of pity he felt looking at a filthy boy on the street, or that righteous rage at the unfairness of the world he sometimes felt looking at London’s squalor, but something bone-deep and personal, as personal as his grief had been when his father had passed.
Loss.
“Why are you telling me this?” he asked. “What could I possibly do?”
“For me? Nothing.” David shifted in place, putting weight into the brace of his elbows on the table. “I’m here for my brother. I’d been working at a place—a brothel, a molly house—” He stared hard into Tobias’s eyes, as if daring him to jump to his feet and storm away. “To keep him in a bluecoat school, but I can’t work there anymore because of . . .” He gestured at himself with a faint pinch at one side of his mouth.
So even they don’t want him.
“I’m still doing a job here and there, you know, on the streets and out of this place. Enough to keep my brother in his coat, but once I get sicker . . . once I start to look sicker, I know it will dry up.” David ran a hand back through his hair. “Or maybe I’ll be arrested and thrown into a lock hospital, and then what will I do?”
Tobias curled his lip in a snarl. “You should have thought of that before you turned to such filthy trade. You could have made an honest living, David! You were making an honest living, working for my father.” He was drawing attention with his voice raised as it was, so he hunched forward, keeping his derision between them. “You could have gone on to learn a trade, or join the military. You could have a house now, and a wife, and children, and your brother would want for nothing. But you didn’t do any of those things, did you? And now you think I’m going to take responsibility for your bad decisions and your laziness? That I’m going to lift this punishment from your shoulders?”
David’s expression grew gradually more stricken as Tobias found his footing, and by the time Tobias paused to draw breath, David’s eyes were wet and his hands were trembling hard. “Punishment,” he echoed, barely audible over the chatter from the pub’s other patrons. “Tobias, I could never—” He shook his head. “I could never have done those things, don’t you see? I never had the opportunities, the . . . the freedom, I-I—”
“You what?” Tobias pounced on the stuttering pause. “What do you want, David?”
“Nothing from you! Absolutely nothing. I’m sorry I even came to you.” David was breathing hard, wide-eyed and pushing back off the table to get as far from Tobias as he could without standing. Tobias wasn’t sure he was strong enough to, just then; his face was ashen, beaded with sweat. “I must have a rosy memory. The press must be lying when they sing the praises of your charity and your giving Christian spirit. Whoever—whoever you were to me as a boy, you’re an awful man, Tobias Sinnet.”
“Don’t say my name in this place,” Tobias hissed.
“Tobias Sinnet!” David shouted, rising shakily to his feet. He wheezed with the effort. “Tobias Sinnet, philanthropist! Tobias Sinnet of the Shoe-Black Society! Tobias Sinnet here in the Red Cock with a mary-ann!”
“Be quiet.” Tobias rose as well. He grabbed David’s arm, yanking to silence him, then immediately released it, wary of what these people would think of him for touching a self-proclaimed fairy.
David didn’t reply. He stood there a moment, staring at his sleeve where they’d touched, as if his coat had been set aflame. And then he shook out his shoulders and lifted his chin proudly. “Good evening, Tobias,” he said, voice cold and contemptuous. He turned on his heel and stormed for the door.
He didn’t make it the whole way, however. A man sitting at the bar caught him by the elbow and listed very close. To an outsider, he probably just looked like a sloppy drunk, but Tobias could see how his thumb stroked the inside of David’s arm, the way his nose brushed the skin of David’s cheek as he whispered.
David underwent a liquid transformation, all the stiff anger washing out of his body and leaving something lascivious and sensuous in its wake. His hips canted. He smiled and leaned into the touch on his arm. And then he gave the man a wink, slipped from his grip, and strode out the door.
The man at the bar chugged the last of his lager, slammed the glass down, and sauntered after him.
Tobias sat alone at his table, burning like someone had stoked a hellfire in his gut.
Christian spirit, indeed.
Alcohol soothed the raw sear of their encounter. Tobias drank until he forgot the name of the pub, and when he remembered, it made him laugh until he was nearly sick.
There was nothing to laugh about, and Tobias couldn’t bring himself to care. He paid his tab and wandered out onto Clark Street, stumbling occasionally over an uneven cobblestone. He tried not to look into the alleys between the buildings or into dark corners, afraid he would see David there, bent over a crate or spread out on his back, bathing in his sick pleasure like it would save him.
Nothing would save him now. It was . . . The illness was just. It was justice. It was right, for him be suffering for his sins. When Tobias’s father had found out what David was actually polishing when he left for his day’s work, he’d banished David from the house, and Tobias had turned his back on him as well. After all, David had had a good job with Tobias’s father. He’d made enough to care for his ailing mother and to support his household even after his own father had abandoned it. He’d had the opportunities he so vehemently denied being given.
Who was David to sit there and tell Tobias that he’d never had the chance to make something decent of himself? He was still young, young enough to be taken in as an apprentice at a tradesman’s shop and trained to take up the mantle of a craft. He had the time.
. . . No. No, he didn’t, not anymore.
Tobias took an abrupt turn when he saw the steeple of an unfamiliar church. It was well past dark, perhaps close to midnight, and the grounds were deserted. The doors, however, were unlocked, and Tobias fumbled his way inside, the smell of incense and burning candles inviting him.
He would pray for David. There was nothing else to be done. David was already condemned, and Tobias knew that his prayers wouldn’t save him, but the way David had said that word, Christian, like Tobias was the furthest thing from it . . . There was only one answer to that, and that was to do the most Christian thing he could think of.
So Tobias would pray.
For David’s health, for his brother’s welfare, for both their souls. David’s especially, although Tobias had to wonder if prayer spent there was just as wasted as praying for an incurable disease to vanish overnight.
At the head of the church, the altar stood stoic, cast in shadows from the racks of candles set before it and the red glow from the tabernacle. Tobias took a lighting stick from the side of one rack and lit three candles with a wavering hand: one for himself, one for David, and one for David’s brother.
Somehow he had never expected David to have a sibling. David kept discussions of his family close to himself, and though town talk had told Tobias about David’s drunk of a father and about his mother’s profession and waning health, it hadn’t mentioned a brother. Maybe the boy had been shielded, to an extent, from the sins of his famil
y. Brought up by an aunt or uncle and then sent away to school.
Kept innocent, in other words. As innocent as David once was.
Tobias went to a pew close to the altar and genuflected before entering. Bound Bibles and sheaves of devotional hymns were cluttered on the long wooden shelf built into the pew, and he selected a Bible, opening it at random and fingering the thin, delicate paper. He’d read the Bible as a boy, of course, and the one his father had given him on his eighteenth birthday sat in its place at his bedside. And then there was the treasured house Bible, the one he read to the boys every night after their supper. This one was creased from the touch of many people, and the ink was smudged.
He gently lifted the dog-eared corner of the page and stared down at it. The words were swimming—swimming in stout. Attempting to read it made his head spin, so he closed it and placed it on the pew beside him, as though it were a dear friend come to sit with him in his time of grief.
Was he grieving? Was this grief? Allowing himself to get drunk in a place like the Red Cock? Allowing himself to watch as David had . . . had . . .
Had seduced that man.
Tobias ground his teeth and put his hands together, desperately wishing he had a rosary. Something tangible to focus on. He exhaled hard and recoiled at smelling the beer on his breath.
Thou hidden source of calm repose, he thought, focusing on the hymn. Thou all-sufficient love divine . . .
David hadn’t even looked back at him.
. . . my help and refuge from my foes . . .
What did men pay to do to him? Have him swallow their cock? Have him take it inside him? What would that man in the bar do with him?
. . . secure I am if thou art mine.
As youths, he and David had clumsily explored, trying to work out how two bodies could fit together. Their explorations had been little more than awkward reaches, grasping at things they could not possibly have understood, as young as they were. At thirteen and fifteen, they’d groped each other. Compared. Crowded each other against walls and rubbed close, seeking that sizzling friction.
