Chapter Text
“I need this one to live,” his lover says, “as a testament to our companionship.”
There’s a bulb that needs replacing somewhere in the apartment. A low, electric whine hums just audibly enough to be grating. Armand will need to fix it, before they sell.
“Of its endurance.”
Tilt of his head toward the voice. Steady words from ruined lips. Colt-like tremble of his companion’s walk, fingers trailing over the white chrome of the refrigerator as he steadies himself. Char of ash in their wake. Another mess.
“This boy, to live out the night.”
This boy. The boy is a sweat-soaked ragdoll in his arms. This boy is a void. This boy is Armand’s reward, after everything.
“Are you asking, Maître?” he hears himself say.
His lover is not asking. Armand holds his gaze. Shining, beautiful eyes amid the horror. Yes, he loves him. Armand is many things, but foremost among them he is a good lover. Trained his whole life to be. When someone asks, he has learned, if you love them, you don’t say no.
Armand stands up. The boy slumps into the table with a soft thump. His lover takes his place, ruined hands sliding over the boy’s back, ruined fingers cupping his soft cheeks. Armand passes to the kitchen. Past the ash on chrome. The whine is louder here, like it’s part of his skull. The hair on Armand’s neck stands up, and something makes him turn around.
The boy is staring at him with flat, unblinking eyes. “This isn’t how it happened,” he says.
—
The body is there in Sausalito. Sitting on the edge of the bed, head tipped down, chin smushed into its neck. Limbs folded like a collapsed marionette.
Louis sits next to it. The bed dips with his weight, and the body looks up. A shadow of blood trickles down past its ear. “Love,” Louis says, stretching his shoulders. “Why did we leave downtown, again?”
Some confusion is understandable, Armand thinks. The memories are still fresh, after all, as tender and pliable as Louis’ new skin. “You find it more peaceful here,” Armand says mildly, ignoring the way the body blinks long and sleepy at Louis. “You asked to get out of the city.”
Louis chews this over, then seems to accept it. The body is transfixed by the shiny skin of his throat. Armand winces at its attention. The stitches had been flawed there, skin pulled together too hastily in a jagged pucker. An inexcusable mistake on Armand’s part, though now only a minute blemish remains. Louis has not noticed. The body has.
Armand watches it reach out an unsteady hand, as if to stroke the seam.
“Hey,” Louis says, jumping up suddenly from the bed and striding over to Armand, still caught in the doorway. Behind him, the body’s hand drops back to its lap. Louis takes Armand’s palm between his own. “Why don’t you put on those nice PJs, huh? The set we left in the closet for special occasions.”
“What’s the occasion?” Armand asks.
Louis grins, eyebrows lifting. “That I missed you.”
“We’ve hardly parted, dear,” Armand reminds him lightly. “How could you miss me?”
Louis’s smile slips, just briefly. Armand holds his breath, does not exhale even when Louis shrugs and laughs. “I dunno, I just do. ‘Cause I love you, that’s why.”
“Yes,” Armand says. Only now can he breathe out.
He puts on the pajamas, luxury silk sliding like water against his skin, and buttons them low enough that his entire chest is exposed. Louis whistles low, slides his hand in the gap and drags it over the points of Armand’s nipples before tugging him into bed.
Armand does not look at the body, cross-legged and docile, as Louis maneuvers him under the sheets. He does not look at the body as Louis buries his face in Armand’s chest. He does not look at the body as Louis slides down between his legs.
But the body never looks away from him.
*
In New York, the body begins to speak.
“Y’know, I always thought I’d move here one day,” it says, smacking its lips and craning its neck up at the stretching skyline. “Total cliché, right? Move to the city and chase your dreams?”
Armand ignores this. He is standing on an empty street corner, exhaling clouds of smoke that mingle with the shimmer of falling snow. Louis is inside, speaking with the manager of a property they’re in talks to acquire. He’d offered for Armand to join, as always. Usually, Armand accepted. Tonight he had not.
“I think I could’ve made it big,” the body continues. “Like, you’ve heard of Watergate, right? That sort of thing. I would’ve been the next Bob Woodward.”
“You would’ve overdosed in an alley,” Armand corrects, waspish and sharp. He doesn’t look at the body directly, but it’s there in his peripheral vision no matter which direction he turns. “Your interviews were drivel. Meaningless. You would’ve never written anything that mattered.”
The body rolls its shoulders and grins, unoffended, merely pleased to have finally provoked Armand into speaking. “Yeah, maybe. But I guess we’ll never know.”
*
Their home in New York is dark. Brownstone on Franklin Street, few windows and heavy oak paneling. The building has a drowsy, somnolent quality, air thick with dust and stale drapery. Louis adjusts to their new accommodation by sleeping from before the dawn light breaks and well into the evening, like he’s trying to spend as few hours conscious as possible.
Armand does not sleep. Neither does the body.
For hours each day Armand drifts up and down the stairs and corridors, collating a dispassionate but thorough record of the house’s defects. The southward warp of the galley floorboards. The malignant groan of the staircase. The soft spongy carpet in the parlor that suggests an underlayer of rot.
These are not observations he shares with Louis. His companion’s happiness is a tenuous, carefully constructed thing. It would not do to darken their time together with such dull complaints. Better for Armand to simply take care of these things himself, yes. Peeling back the bent wooden planks. Extirpating the carpet. No trouble at all. Everything can be remade.
Through all of this, trailing a few feet behind him, there is always the body. On good days it sits passively while Armand works, unobtrusive as a shadow. Almost familiar. Almost warm, to feel it there, if Armand lets himself forget.
Today is not a good day.
Today Armand is squatting low on the top step, pressing on the gnarled wood in an attempt to isolate the epicenter of the groan, while the tapping of heeled boots above him makes this task increasingly impossible.
“What?” Armand finally snaps, not looking up.
“Oh, nothing,” the body says, boots knocking against each other as it leans back against the banister. “It’s just, I’ve been wondering. Why did I make you so jealous, when he’d had so many others before me?”
Armand presses his lips into a thin line and rises to his feet, glancing down into the foyer. Some extra planks from the kitchen remodel are resting by the door. He could add one to brace the side of the step, though it wouldn’t be the most elegant solution. If he could remove the top step entirely, though—replace it with a more perfect replica—yes, that would do nicely. It wouldn’t be difficult. Some oak stain, a saw and a sander. He starts down the stairs.
The body slides down the railing to keep pace, the movement boyish, juvenile, almost out of place. At the bottom, he turns toward Armand and looks up from under his eyelashes with exaggerated coyness. “Did you just think I was cuter than the rest?”
Armand curls his lip. “Far from it.”
“Ah, come on,” the boy says. He settles back on the base of the banister and arches his back, legs crossed and trousers rucked up to reveal a smooth stretch of ankle. The pose looks familiar.
A chill crawls slowly over Armand’s skin.
The pose is too familiar. Pulled from Armand’s own memories.
The boy’s smile has turned cruel and knowing. His hand trails lazily down toward his crotch, thumbing at the thick bulge behind his zipper. “I wouldn’t have minded being shared, you know.”
“Stop that,” Armand hisses.
The boy shrugs and hops down from the banister, blinking innocently. “Oh, don’t be mad,” he pouts, running his hands down the crisp linen of Armand’s starched shirt, fingers catching in the spaces behind the buttons. “Aren’t you happy at least one person still desires you?” Cool hands. Icy white skin. Armand turns away.
“You are not a person,” he says, “and Louis desires me more than you could imagine. I am—everything to him. Everything.”
“Yeah,” the boy drawls, following Armand with his hands, his lips, the wet press of his teeth. “Keep selling it.” Cold breath brushes the curve of Armand’s arching neck. Fingers twist knots into Armand’s hair to pull him close. Without thought, Armand’s mouth parts softly to admit the boy’s frigid tongue.
Blank moment of pressure and bodily response, and then Armand gasps away from it as if burned. The body doesn’t follow. The body doesn’t speak. The body hangs there in the air, still and silent as any dead thing, and its eyes are flat, unmoving black. Droning in Armand’s ears, now, like the whine of a decaying bulb, the discordant hum of insects. Is there a hive? Can’t be. It’s winter. It’s still winter. He staggers backward into the parlor, carpet sagging like a pulpy organ under his feet, texture so rancid and unexpected he nearly gags. Dim confusion, because he’d fixed it, he’d already fixed it. Torn out the rot to the bone and rolled over it anew. Hadn’t he fixed it? Stepping back further still, and he hasn’t seen the body move, but somehow it’s right in front of him no matter what, always the same precise distance. Glass-empty eyes, his own face reflected back.
Armand starts to run.
Back through the fetid carpet. Back up the groaning stairs. Bursting into the dark room where Louis sleeps, a still form tucked neatly in the side of the bed. Armand doesn’t look anywhere but at Louis as he pulls aside the covers, as he fits himself into Louis’ side and feels the bed’s warmth like deliverance.
Louis stirs a little at the disruption, eyes fluttering at the touch of Armand’s hands on his thighs, his soft cock, his elastic-hemmed waistband. “Hey,” he mumbles. “What’re you—oh, mmm, okay.” He pats clumsily at Armand’s back as Armand lowers himself down to drag his tongue across the thin skin of the shaft, circling over the head before letting the body rest heavy in his mouth. Louis groans, his hand slipping on the cool silk of Armand’s pajamas as he claws at Armand’s spine.
Faltering moment of dizziness. Silk pajamas sliding across his skin. But he’d had a linen shirt on, before, stiff and crisp and fresh from the cleaners that morning. He hadn’t taken it off. Can’t remember taking it off. Tiny shorts sit low on his waist, dipping below the bones of his hips. He hadn’t been wearing these downstairs. He hadn’t. Had he?
Louis is hardening in Armand’s mouth, filling his throat, and for the first time in centuries Armand thinks he might choke. Hadn’t the bed been warm all across. Wasn’t his pillow creased down the middle, flattened slightly from the weight of head. But Armand had been downstairs, before this. He had been. The groaning step. The wood. The body. The body. The body. Cold washes over the back of his neck, but then Louis comes, hot and thick down Armand’s throat like relief, and there’s no space to worry about anything else when he’s swallowing it down, when he’s cradling the velvet skin and breathing the scent of Louis’ warmth; this is what he’s good at, let him be good at it, let him.
Too soon, Louis is hauling him up until they’re nose to nose, foreheads tipped together. “Baby,” he murmurs, hazy and unfocused and smiling, and Armand smiles too, waiting for Louis to tell him how much he liked it, how good it was, that he loves Armand, that he loves him. Louis opens his mouth—those gentle, beautiful lips—and says, “Remind me, why’d we leave San Francisco again?”
Armand closes his eyes. Breathes out through his nose. “You missed the East Coast,” he says, as firmly as he can. “You wanted to come back.”
“Mmm,” Louis hums, and his eyes flutter back into sleep. Armand watches the artery pulse in his lip, the steady rhythm of his heart. And it’s fine. It’s all fine. His clothes don’t matter, this night doesn’t matter. Louis loves him. Everything else can be remade.
He repeats this to himself over and over until his mind calms. Then, slowly, he raises his eyes from Louis’ sleeping form.
The body is staring at him from its perch on the dresser, legs swinging, dark blood seeping unendingly from the wound on its neck. The cunning expression from earlier is gone, as completely as if it was never there to begin with. Its eyes are as blank as the mirror behind it.
Armand does not pass a comfortable night.
*
In the few hours each day that Louis is awake, he applies himself doggedly to the task of turning their modest wealth into a considerable fortune. Armand reads the reports of money entering and exiting their shared accounts with a vague but distant interest, the numbers on the pages meaningful only insofar as they increase Louis’ happiness.
He thinks they are. But it’s difficult for Armand to tell, these days.
They have desks around the brownstone, but Louis favors the one in his bedroom. Rich mahogany-grained wood, dark fountain pens heaped beside an electronic typewriter. Heavy mirror looming above it all that remains cloudy no matter how often Armand attempts to clean it.
When the sun sets, Louis slides almost instantaneously from his bed to the desk’s big leather chair, and so begins the hours of phone calls to international banks, real estate developers, brokers; the mechanisms of the house’s fax machines clacking for hours.
Whenever Armand attempts to speak with him, Louis holds up a finger and points to the receiver. One second. Armand will smile, incline his head. Not a problem. He’ll curve back around. Louis is always asleep by the time he does.
“Do you think he sleeps so much because he hates his life?” the body asks, as Armand ends his millionth lap around the townhouse in the galley. “Or because he hates you, specifically.”
Armand curls his fingers around the handle of a mop. He’d scrubbed the house the day before last, but the grime is relentless. Better to clean again. “Louis loves me,” he says.
The body honks out a guffaw. When Armand glares, it holds up its hands and says, “Sorry, sorry, but you’re how old and you still think those things are exclusive?”
Armand flashes his meanest, sharpest smile, fangs pushing out under his lips, and the body just sticks its tongue out in response. Against his better judgment, Armand almost laughs.
The body watches while Armand hefts the mop head in the sink, saturating the tendrils and wringing them out. The low tones of Louis’ voice filter down from upstairs as Armand begins to scrub.
“Sure makes a lot of phone calls,” the body remarks.
Filth, everywhere. Armand slaps the mop down again and again. Inconceivable how the floor could have sullied so quickly, and Armand’s mood darkens to match it. “My husband,” he says tightly, “is an important man.”
The body lifts its brows. “Oh, your husband, is he? When did you two stop by the altar?” As it speaks, it plucks a phone off the nearest receiver and tosses it idly between its hands. “Or is it more of a squatter’s rights, common-law type of deal.”
“Put that down,” Armand whispers sharply. “You’ll disturb his meeting.”
“You sure? Cause it sounds to me like he’s not even connected.”
The body dangles the phone lazily in front of him. Armand scoffs, then frowns as he hears the flat, unmistakable sound of the dial tone.
“He must’ve just finished,” Armand says after a moment, right as Louis’ voice picks back up again from upstairs. They both look at the phone. The tone continues.
Something cold slides down Armand’s spine. The mop slips a little in his hands.
“Uh ohhhh,” the body singsongs under its breath. “What are you gonna do?”
“It’s nothing,” Armand says. “I’ll just—go check on him.”
He leans the mop carefully against the wall. Distasteful to leave the job unfinished, but unavoidable. Foreign unsteadiness to his legs as he passes over the wooden boards. He’d done a poor job on the remodel, he thinks. Overcorrected. The floor slants slightly toward the north.
At the mouth of the kitchen, he stops. Turns his head. On the desk by the wall, routed into the auxiliary telephone line, a fax machine is methodically disgorging pages. It has been doing so all evening. It had been doing so the evening before, and the evening before that. Armand has never once spared it a second glance. It takes all of his focus to keep his hands from trembling as he picks up a warm sheet from the tray.
Creamy white paper. Stark black ink. One sentence, typed over and over. this isn’t how it happened. this isn’t how it happened. this isn’t how it happened. this isn’t how it happened. this isn’t how it happened. this isn’t how it happened. this isn’t how it happened. this isn’t how it
Armand drops the paper.
Warping, non-Newtonian feeling as he climbs toward the bedroom, as if moving slower the faster he pushes his legs. The voice comes louder from under the crack in the door, words still indistinct. Chime of laughter that doesn’t sound like anything he’s ever heard from Louis.
Carefully, Armand cracks open the door.
Louis sits at his desk, shoulders just visible over the back of the leather chair. Armand cannot see the direction of his eyes, but his head is tipped upward toward the fogged mirror. The phone sits on its receiver beside him.
“Dear,” Armand says, trying to keep his voice steady, “who were you talking to?”
Louis doesn’t react at first. For a horrible, irrational moment, Armand is consumed by the certainty that he’s dead, somehow, in a way that shouldn’t even be possible. Drained not only of blood but of all animating force. Inert body tipped back like a puppet on a string. Then Louis’ chair lets out a horrible groan as it begins to spin.
The air in the room collapses. Fear seeps into Armand’s chest with the dirty slickness of oil. The chair is still turning. It has been turning for far too long. Dread is a solid object in the river and the linear flow of time is corrupting around it, the moment stretching and pulling like taffy, the instant before revelation protracting in a sickening delay. Armand can’t breathe.
At once, the chair stops spinning. Louis says, “That broker in Leningrad. You know I call him every Tuesday.”
And it’s just Louis’ normal face, his normal voice. A little tired, maybe, creases under his eyes. Sallow tint to his skin that says he hasn’t been feeding well, but for Louis, that’s to be expected. The phone is slightly askew on the receiver, like it could’ve been only just replaced. Nothing amiss. Nothing to worry about. Armand starts to let his muscles relax, foolish with relief, when he catches movement in the mirror and his heart seizes in his throat.
Whirling, he can hear the high, choked-off gasp expelling from his own lungs. But there’s nothing. No one. Just the carpet and dresser and emerald-hued housecoat thrown over the back of the closet door, unmoving in the stale, stolid air.
When he turns back, Louis is rubbing a tired hand against his neck and looking at Armand strangely. “Something the matter?”
“I thought…” Armand starts, then catches himself. “It’s nothing.”
What he’d thought he’d seen cannot be shared with Louis. What he’d thought he’d seen was the fluttering skirt of a yellow dress.
Louis is still rubbing absently at his neck. His nail drags over the now-invisible line where Armand had stitched the grafts of Louis’ melted skin back together. Armand opens his mouth, then closes it. The nail scrapes down his skin again, and again, and again. Angry raised line in its wake.
“What’s that look?” Louis demands, narrowing his eyes at Armand. His voice sharpens. “What, you got a problem with who I do business with?”
Thick, turgid drops of blood begin to bead from his throat. Louis gives no indication of noticing them.
“No,” Armand says, and he thinks he sounds admirably calm, considering. “I only worry that you’re putting yourself under undue stress. I want you to be—happy.”
Louis stares at him for a moment longer, and then his gaze softens. “I’m sorry,” he says. His thumb scratches into the open flap of his skin. Wet pop of suction. Pearlescent glimpse of trachea. Tender, thoughtful expression on Louis’ face as he says, “I’m not trying to shut you out. I’m just trying to build us a future, you know? Something nobody can take away.”
Armand watches the blood paint a line from Louis’ thumb to wrist. “I know.” He tries for a smile, and his love returns it.
Louis’ hands finally fall from his neck to rifle through the stack of papers on the desk. “Hey,” he says, skimming the pages, “just let me file these notes, and then let’s go to bed, alright?”
He stands up and kisses Armand on the forehead, the brush of his lips cool and dry. In his hands, Armand can see the pages he’d been reading. All of them are blank.
Sweating, tilting feeling beginning to overtake him. Something trickles down his scalp. Perspiration, maybe, or blood from Louis’ neck. Louis draws back, and Armand can hear his footsteps recede into the hallway.
The body sidles up to Armand once he's alone, tapping the side of its jaw thoughtfully. “So which one of you is losing it?”
Yellow in the mirror again, blurred at the corner of his eye. Armand won’t look. He won’t. “Neither,” he says. Draws his palms to his face and presses the heels into his eyes. “It’s merely this house.” Yes. As he says it, he knows it to be true. Not them, but this house. This wretched house, this house, this house, this house—
Hands pull Armand’s palms gently from his eyes, then Louis is looking at him with careful concern. “Baby. Something wrong with the house?”
His throat is clean. Untarnished skin taut over the jut of his Adam’s apple. No blood. No mess. Armand stares at it for a long moment and breathes in deep. “I was thinking,” he says slowly, “that it might be a little antique for our tastes.”
To his surprise, Louis nods, expression thoughtful. He takes Armand’s wrist to lead him into bed. “If I’m honest, New York’s been wearing me out, too.” He smooths out the pillows with automatic gestures, his eyes somewhere faraway. “The cold here. All this damn snow. I’m thinking, why did we leave San Francisco again?”
Armand makes a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob. How many times, how many ways. “You wanted to chase your dreams in the city. You had aspirations of making it big.”
From somewhere beside them, the body’s shoulders rise in silent laughter.
“Yeah,” Louis says, distractedly. “Yeah, I guess.” For the first time, he sounds less than convinced.
“If the snow bothers you, we can go elsewhere. Somewhere new,” Armand says, too quickly. He forces himself to take another slow breath. Pull it together.
“Mmm.” Louis drags his lips down Armand’s neck, hands sliding up Armand’s back, kneading into the knots of his shoulders. “Maybe.”
Armand kisses him softly and doesn’t believe him. They will stay here, in this brownstone, this townhouse-shaped shadow, for the rest of their immortal lives. Forever answering the same question. Forever cleaning the same filth.
*
Armand is wrong. He has never been so happy to be wrong.
“Listen,” Louis tells him, making a rare appearance downstairs in the parlor. “I’m sorry I didn’t check with you ahead of time, but this deal came up quick and I had to act fast.”
Armand blinks, masking his apprehension behind a small, encouraging smile. By the time Louis finishes outlining the deal he’d gotten— an undeveloped island off the coast of Miami, contracts with construction companies to build a resort, a luxury mall, plans for a decadent nightlife and profits projected to amplify their earnings by millions—Armand has nothing to mask. His joy is pure and unfeigned as he takes Louis by the sides of his face and kisses him.
“You’re really happy about this?” Louis asks as they break apart, eyebrows dipping with uncertainty.
“Elated,” Armand corrects. “Ecstatic. It’s going to be spectacular.” Maybe he’s overdoing it, but he can’t care, because they’re getting out of this damnable house, they’re starting over. Louis is laughing delightedly at Armand’s enthusiasm, more alive than Armand’s seen him in years, nose bumping into Armand’s cheek as he returns his kisses, and Armand is laughing too, so happy he could burst.
The island is as beautiful as a dream. Rugged surf and harsh dunes and scrubby grasses, all of its wildness wrestled into submission by the indomitable force of construction. Their villa is the first building to be completed. Nestled in the heart of the island, it thrusts upward from the sand in sleek modern lines, curved pillars, specially treated glass; everything white and clean, apogee of this new decade’s tastes and sensibilities. Armand loves it. Louis loves it. Louis seems to love everything about their new life, for that matter—the clamor of cranes and forklifts that crashes all through the night, the team of project managers that report to him with daily updates, the investors and franchise owners sailing in from the mainland to pitch their restaurants and shops. The blunt power Louis holds over them with a single yes or no.
“Like Storyville,” Louis says, balcony breeze ruffling his hair. He pulls Armand into his side as they watch the night workers roll lakes of tar down the nascent streets. “Like Storyville, but so much better.” He squeezes Armand’s hand, eyes bright and smile wide. “Because it’s ours.”
On this island, Louis’ love for him is beyond doubt. Armand is grateful enough for this that it’s easy to dismiss the edge of mania in Louis’ voice.
Armand squeezes back. They’re happy. That’s all that matters.
After lingering for a few more moments in the moonlight, Armand excuses himself back through the glass doors that lead into their bedroom. He takes off his sandals and leaves them on the mat, and then stops dead in his tracks as he looks up.
Above the smooth white dresser, as heavy and out of place as a stain on the wall, looms the mirror from their New York bedroom. Armand’s breath lodges in his throat like a solid mass. He stands there frozen until the door slides open to admit Louis, who hums cheerily, oblivious to Armand’s reaction.
“Love,” Armand says. “What is—that—doing here?”
Finally, Louis follows Armand’s gaze, and he shrugs. “It was a nice piece. Felt wrong to leave it behind, so I had it shipped down.”
“Do you not think it’s out of place?” Armand asks, trying to keep the note of rising hysteria from his voice.
“I dunno, maybe that’s why I like it,” Louis says. “Old world in the new, just like us.”
Armand can’t come up with a plausible enough reason to disagree.
The mirror stays.
*
“This place rules,” the body says. “Fucking pissed I can’t sample all the goods, man. Being dead blows.”
The body’s hair has grown out into a shaggy mullet. It wears short denim cutoffs and a tropical shirt, dark hair curling out on its chest. The last rays of sun are slipping below the horizon, but the beach is still crowded with people, and the body stares out at them hungrily. Armand watches its eyes glue to a young dark-haired woman, thick hips and ample breasts barely covered by a deep orange swimming costume, and he turns away with a sneer.
“Most of those goods wouldn’t have touched you with a ten foot pole, if you were alive.”
“Wow. First you don’t let me live, and now you won’t even let me even fantasize? You’re cruel, Armand. Cruel.” The body picks up a handful of sand and flings it at Armand, but the breeze carries it back before it can find its target. “Fuck.”
Armand’s lips twitch. He’s still watching the dark-haired woman. Succulent veins snaking through her plump frame, sweetness of her blood conflicting with the bitter dread at the edges of her mind. Something back home that she doesn’t want to face. Thinking to herself that she wishes she could stay here on the island and never leave, never go home again. Well. Armand could grant her that.
He’s on the verge of rising when the body speaks again. “You know,” it says. “If you wanted to do something nice for me—for once in your life—you could fuck her.”
Armand stops. “What?”
“I think I could feel it, if it were you doing it.” The body’s tongue swipes over its lips, hand palming itself through its shorts. “Come on. I know you want to.”
“I do not,” Armand says automatically, though that’s not strictly true. But the woman’s beauty is immaterial. “My companion is Louis. I share my body with him alone.”
The body rolls its eyes. “Yeah, okay, if you want to get all Catholic about it. But then maybe you should ask why he’s not doing the same thing.”
Armand pauses. “Meaning what.”
The body’s eyebrows shoot up. “Don’t tell me you don’t know.”
Armand crosses his arms. “If you’re suspecting that he’s—”
“Man, you were there in the seventies. Just because he was too depressed to get out of bed in New York, you thought he’d changed?”
Armand is silent.
The body continues, “You know what they call Miami? Cocaine capital of the world. You think all his new energy came from being around your sparkling personality? You think the nights you can’t find him he’s really holding all those ‘emergency staff meetings’? No, man. Wake up. He’s fucked fifty percent of the guest list, and the only reason it’s not a hundred is because half of them have cunts.”
“I know what you’re doing,” Armand says. “Goad me all you wish. I’m still not going to fuck her for you.”
The body holds his gaze for a moment longer, and then flops back into the sand with a groan. “You’re no fun.”
“Yes, well. Too bad you have no other friends.”
“Neither do you, jackass,” the body mumbles. “Anyway, I was telling the truth.” Armand gives it a look, and it amends, “Mostly. It’s probably more like a quarter of the guest list. Guy’s got some standards.”
Armand smiles thinly and turns back out to the surf, casting his eyes out over the crowd. He’s not entirely surprised by the body’s implications. He probably knew it all along, if he’d let himself think about it. But he hadn’t. And he won’t, after he leaves this beach. At the end of the day, Louis still comes home to his bed. That’s what matters most.
The crowd has only thinned out marginally. Armand lost sight of the dark-haired woman, which is probably for the best. He glances through the remainders for another option. A group of tanned young women, but they seem to be on a bachelorette trip; too noticeable if one were to disappear. The man standing by himself in the surf could be promising. Pale skin, long brown hair pulled back in a knot, silhouette of his back lean and strong. Armand is about to dip into his mind when the man turns. His eyes lock directly onto Armand’s. Slowly, he raises his arms, as if in greeting.
His arms end in two blunt stumps.
Armand squeezes his eyes shut, breathing shallowly. He doesn’t open them again for an hour, regardless of the body’s ribbing, and when he does, the beach has mostly emptied out, and the man is gone.
*
Armand stirs awake with a frown. The sheets rustle against his sweat-damp skin. He had been dreaming peacefully, he thinks, though the details are too foggy to remember. He wants to return to it, but when he tries to sink back into the feeling, he realizes what had disturbed him.
The other half of the bed is empty. Louis is gone.
Armand sits up immediately, mind jumping to every worst case scenario. But he’s soothed a moment later when he realizes Louis is still in the room, standing only a few feet away.
A chill runs over him. Louis is standing in front of the mirror. His back is to Armand. His body is a solid, unmoving line.
“Dear?” Armand calls. No response. He gets out of bed. “Louis?”
Louis gives no indication of having heard him. He’s staring straight into the mirror as if transfixed. His lips move soundlessly. No, not soundlessly. One phrase, repeated over and over under his breath, a drone that sounds like it's being channeled from somewhere outside of him. This isn’t how it—
“Louis,” Armand says, more forcefully, taking him by the shoulders. Louis’ body is as stiff and immobile as a concrete block. It takes all of Armand’s strength to wrestle him from the mirror, and still Louis doesn’t acknowledge Armand, eyes as blank as a sleepwalker. Is that what this is? He drags Louis into bed as if moving furniture. Pushes his eyelids shut when they don’t close on their own.
Armand does not expect to fall back asleep. He expects he may never sleep again, when it comes to it. But then it’s evening before he knows it, moonlight casting down through the open curtains, and Louis is rummaging through the closet like nothing is out of the ordinary. Is anything out of the ordinary? Louis had been in bed with him, and then he hadn’t been. Armand had been dreaming, and then he hadn’t been. But the distinction between those states is starting to feel unsteady.
“Love?” Armand asks. “Did you—sleep well?”
Louis turns. His sclera are tinged red, his jaw a clamp from which it seems to take great effort to prize out words. “Like the dead,” he says.
*
The night is clear. Streetlamps fill in whatever the moonlight fails to reach, casting the shopfronts in warm yellows and shadows. A busker strums gentle chords on a guitar, breeze carrying sweet music wherever it touches. Armand sits on the terrace of their most expensive bar and lets it all wash over him.
“I don’t know why you’re so surprised,” the body says, slumping down in its chair and picking at its fingernails. “You had to have known a different geography wouldn’t change anything. Like, I followed you from Cali to the Big Apple, didn’t I?”
“Unfortunately,” Armand says, and the body mimes taking a blow to the heart. Armand ignores this typical display of theatrics and watches the people ambling down the street. It’s approaching off season and the crowds are sparse, but that doesn’t stop Armand from combing every face with the meticulous eye of a pathologist. He’s never again seen the man with no hands, but he’s never stopped looking.
“You ever think you should just rip the bandaid off and tell him?” the body asks. “Louis, I mean.”
“Funny.” There’s a pretty South Asian boy lingering by a darkened store front. Mid-twenties, large doe eyes, tumbling black curls. Something a little desperate in his coquettishness. A perfect victim, except Armand can sense that he’s waiting for someone. Cleaner to find a meal that no one would miss.
“No, I’m serious,” the body says, sitting up in his chair. “Get everything out in the open, and maybe then you can stop spinning out like a goddamn gothic heroine.”
“Don’t be naïve,” Armand snaps. “Louis’ injuries are not the kind to be covered by superficial bandaids. His pain is internal. His wounds are deep. I have worked so tirelessly to heal him, and even still he remains delicate, fragile. To disturb any of those wounds now would be to risk fatal hemorrhage.” He looks the body dead in the eyes, lets his voice fill with all the venom available to him. “And that is not something I will ever allow.”
The body lifts its brows. “Oh-kay.”
Armand turns back to the front of the balcony. He stares at the people below for about three seconds before whipping back around. “What?” he demands. “Why do you make that face?”
“I’m just saying,” the body says, “that it might not always be up to you, when this stuff starts to bubble up.”
“It will not bubble up.”
“Yeah, okay.”
“It won’t,” Armand insists, and the body throws up its hands in surrender.
“Hey man, whatever you say.”
Seething, Armand turns back to stare down at the street. The options are lackluster. Botoxed-women in brightly colored dresses, hair teased up like tropical birds, chemical fragrance of their hairspray overshadowing even the aroma of their blood. A few shirtless men whose abdominal definition gives them an unappealing, dehydrated look; Armand knows from experience that their blood would only taste of urea. And the boy from earlier, leaning against the dark window and fiddling with the cuffs of his shirt. He looks up, now, face breaking out in a smile, and Armand knows he’s caught sight of whoever he’s waiting for. A moment later, Armand has, too.
The boy was waiting for Louis.
The night air heats by ten degrees. Armand sits forward, bracing his hands on his knees. Louis slings an arm around the boy’s shoulders, warm and familiar, and the boy melts into his touch. How could he not? Louis’ white Armani jacket, his tapered Levi’s, everything about him the perfect blend of luxury and quasi-attainable elegance, impossibly enticing. Louis puts the flat of his hand on the boy’s back and guides him into the storefront.
Disappointed, Armand sits back, but then a light flicks on from behind the window, illuminating the bodies twisting together. Louis has the boy’s back pressed to his front, raking his hands down the boy’s chest to tear away his shirt.
The body leans in close to Armand asks, “Would it be easier, you think, if it were always blonds?”
“Quiet,” Armand says. His eyes don’t leave the window. “I’m not jealous.”
The body laughs. “Right.” But then it seems to catch how Armand’s eyes have gone dark, fangs lengthening, body tensing as his hand snakes down his own chest in a perfect mirror to the tableau below. “Oh, you’re not kidding. You’re turned on by this, are you?”
“Mmm.” The shirt is fully off, now, and Louis trails his fingertips over the boy’s wing-like collarbones, his smooth chest, his soft stomach. The boy’s neck is arching, jugular pulsing, and Louis leans in close, mouth teasing dangerously over the throat before pulling away. This will not be a quick drain, no. Louis wants to enjoy himself.
Armand is hard in his trousers. He unbuttons them steadily, eyes only tearing from the scene when the body’s cold hand skims his shaft. “No,” he says, pushing it away, but the hand comes right back undeterred.
“Come on,” the body says. “Let me be his hands.”
“No,” Armand says again, but as he speaks, Louis drags his thumb over the boy’s long, curving cock, the boy’s mouth falling open in a moan, and when the body curls its fingers over the head of Armand’s, he doesn’t push it away.
Cool touch. Warm, humid breeze. Hair clinging to the back of his neck. Breath rising and falling like the tides. The muscles shifting in Louis’ beautiful shoulders, the stark architecture of his ribs. Armand’s hips lifting to fit against the body’s hands. Soft sighs from parted mouths. As above, so below.
Louis is sliding his fingers between the boy’s legs. Armand takes the body’s hand and guides it to follow suit. Blunt pressure of its bitten down nails. Easing himself open as the boy down below writhes.
When Louis pushes into the boy, Armand pushes the body roughly to the concrete slab of the balcony floor and slides on top to ride. Rocks on the body’s erect tissue while he grips the iron bars of the railing. “Fuck,” the body is panting. “Fuck.” But Armand barely hears it. Louis is driving his hips into the boy again and again and Armand is thrusting himself down onto the body’s cock, and then he’s watching Louis shudder in that achingly familiar way he knows means climax. But Armand’s not there, not yet. He keeps watching.
Louis pulls out, gathers the boy in his arms. Strokes a gentle finger down his cheek, the curve of his nose. Such lovely brown skin. Such beautiful black curls. Louis’ finger taps lightly on the boy's jugular, and Armand knows what comes next, the bloodlust, the devouring, the rollicking shame. Louis bends down. His hands cradle the side of the boy’s jaw. The boy sighs, dreamy and sweet, and Armand rocks forward.
Without ever unsheathing his fangs, Louis slams the boy’s head into the concrete floor.
Armand chokes out a breath. Louis slams the boy’s head again and again. The skull craters. The neck swings like elastic. The street music fractures, guitar splitting into the discordant strings of a violin, high and piercing and frantic. Organ matter spurts from the boy’s crumpled head as Armand comes hot and fast over the body’s chest.
“Wow,” the body says, sliding its fingers in the mess, then twisting around to take in the scene. “Do you hate yourself that much?”
Armand breathes rapidly. The boy’s limp form slumps from Louis’ lap. He closes his eyes, replaying the moment of the act. How many times had he longed for this? Thrown the cruelest words he’d known how to say, achingly close to that provoking that purest expression of passion, only for Louis to turn his violence on himself. San Francisco was the worst of it; culmination of Armand’s failure to readjust his expectations, failure to admit that he could take as many axes to the door as he liked, and Louis would only find some way to lodge them in his own neck. Yes. San Francisco had been a mistake, a grave one, but Armand had learned from it. He knew how to take care of Louis, now. He knew what he couldn’t hope to wish from him.
Couldn’t hope for, until now.
He traces his thumbs over the tendons in his neck. The ridges of his skull. Imagines Louis’ hands, their breadth, their strength. The exquisite tear of each tendon and ligament. The final kiss of bone to concrete.
Louis returns to their room in the hour before daybreak, hands scrubbed clean, glistening, sea and salt clinging to his skin. “Thank you,” Armand says, as soon as he sees him.
“For what?” Louis sighs. “Could you be straight with me for once in your life?”
But Armand only smiles, pulls him in close. If Louis doesn’t want to talk about it, it’s no matter. Armand knows what a gift Louis has given him. He guides Louis’ fingers to fit around his neck as he kisses him.
Yes, Armand knows.