Chapter 3: The Landing
The wheels hit the tarmac with a shriek that Eric felt in his teeth, and then the engines wound down and the whole cabin seemed to exhale. Through the window he could see nothing but the sodium lamps, seven of them in a crooked line, each one vomiting its orange light onto the cracked concrete. Beyond that, the jungle. It did not so much surround the airstrip as wait beside it, black and breathing, thick with the smell of wet earth and something rotting sweetly.
The seatbelt light blinked off.
Eric did not move. He had spent the last three hours in the same position, spine pressed to the leather, hands flat on his thighs, watching Andre at the far end of the cabin with the fixed attention of a man watching a fire cross a field. Andre had not spoken again after the confession. He had simply sat down, crossed his legs, and read something on his phone with the mild boredom of a banker on a Tuesday, as if he had not just cracked the floor open under Eric's feet.
Now he stood. He shrugged into a jacket that cost more than the cantina's yearly take and looked down the aisle at Eric.
"We're here."
"I can see that," Eric said.
The stairs unfolded with a hydraulic hiss. Andre went down first, unhurried, and waited at the bottom, one hand extended, not for Eric's hand but for the small of his back. Eric knew better than to refuse. He stepped onto the metal treads, and the humid air hit him like a wet blanket across the face, so thick he could taste it, salt and gasoline and green things growing in the dark. Andre's palm settled against his lower back, cold even through the linen, steady as a brand.
The crew had gone very busy. Two of them wrestled the luggage cart toward the hangar with the enthusiasm of men who had suddenly remembered urgent business elsewhere. The pilot studied his clipboard. A woman in a headset kept her eyes on the far treeline as if she expected something to come out of it. Nobody looked at Eric. Nobody looked at the hand on his back. In this world, people learned early that the surest way to keep their tongues was to keep their eyes down.
Andre walked him across the tarmac at a pace that was almost tender, as if they had all the time in the world. The lights threw their shadows long and thin across the concrete, and Eric watched his own shadow stretch and break at the seams where the slabs had shifted.
"Where are we?" he asked.
"Outside Puerto Escondido. A private strip. It belongs to a man who owes me a considerable amount of money." Andre's voice carried no more weight than if he were discussing the weather. "We'll drive from here."
A black SUV waited at the edge of the lamplight, engine already running, exhaust curling white in the heavy air. The driver got out, opened the rear door, and stood with his hands folded, eyes on his shoes.
Andre let Eric climb in first.
The interior smelled of leather and cigarette smoke and the ghost of somebody's cologne. The windows were tinted so dark that the airstrip vanished the moment the door shut, leaving only the two of them in a soft amber dimness and the low hum of the engine. The driver pulled away. Gravel crunched under the tires, then gave way to the steady slap of asphalt.
For a while neither of them spoke. Eric watched faint shapes slide past the window, palms and fence posts and one lone dog that turned its head to watch the car pass. The road ran narrow and black between walls of vegetation.
"There's something I should tell you before we arrive," Andre said.
Eric's stomach tightened. The last time Andre had opened with that particular phrase, a man named Vasquez had been alive.
"About your cantina," Andre went on. "And the woman who runs it."
"Rosa."
"Yes. Rosa Quispe." Andre said the name the way he said all names, as though he had owned it for a long time. "I bought it. The cantina, the guesthouse, the room above the bar where you slept. The deed transferred four days ago. She thinks she sold it to a hospitality group out of Bogota. She got more than it was worth and she'll never know the difference."
Eric turned his head slowly. In the dim light Andre's profile was a cut of pale stone, the line of his jaw clean as a blade.
"You bought it."
"I did."
"Why."
"Because you would have worried about it." Andre's gaze stayed on the road. "You would have lain awake in my house calculating how long she could keep the lights on without you behind the bar, whether the roof needed patching before the rains, whether Mateo would find other work. You would have spent the rest of your life sending money you couldn't spare to a woman who never knew your real name. So I removed the problem. The cantina stays open. She keeps her job and her home and she answers to a management company that will never once ask her to change a thing. Matteo has been made assistant manager. He got a raise on Tuesday and spent half of it on a new pair of boots."
Eric's jaw worked. "You didn't ask me."
"No."
"You just went down there and bought it out from under her."
"I sent a man. I was busy looking for you." Andre finally turned to look at him, and there was no cruelty in it, which somehow made it worse. "You are angry."
"I'm not angry."
"You are. Your breathing changed." A faint smile touched the corner of his mouth. "I have listened to you breathe for twelve years, Eric. I know the sound of your anger better than I know my own."
"Then you know I'd rather you'd left them alone."
"I know you'd rather carry everything alone. It's one of your more exhausting qualities." Andre's hand found Eric's knee in the dark, light, unhurried, the cold of his fingers bleeding through the cotton. "They'll be fine. That's the whole of it. Nobody has been hurt. Nobody will be. I give you my word, and you know what my word costs."
Eric did know. He had watched Andre break men for smaller lies.
"It's not a threat," Andre said, reading him again, always reading him. "If it were a threat I wouldn't have told you at all. I would have let you find out in a letter six months from now, and by then you'd have been so grateful to me for something else that you wouldn't have minded. That's the way I'd have done it, years ago. I told you tonight because you asked me on the plane, in your way, whether you were still a possession or a person. A possession doesn't get told the truth about the things that hurt it."
The car turned onto a wider road and the sodium lights fell away behind them. Eric stared out at the dark and tried to find the shape of his own feelings. There was anger, sure, but under it something looser, warmer, something that embarrassed him. Rosa had a raise for Matteo. The roof would get patched. The thing he had built in that town, the small fragile life he had cobbled together under a false name, had been quietly placed in a glass case by the man who had bought him at twenty. It should have felt like another collar. Instead it felt like somebody had noticed, finally, what he had been holding up on his own.
"I hate that you did it," he said at last.
"Yes."
"And I'm not going to thank you."
"I didn't ask you to." Andre's thumb moved once against his knee, and then the hand withdrew, and the two of them sat apart in the dark while the jungle rolled past, and Eric found that he missed the cold.
The drive took the better part of an hour. The road climbed for a while, switchbacks cut into the hillside, and once they passed through a village where the only light was a single bulb over a closed shrine and a dog that barked them the whole way out. Then the pavement ended and the gravel began, and they came to the wall.
Eric had not forgotten the wall. It ran the length of the estate, three meters of black iron set into white stone, and it was topped with spikes that looked decorative until you saw how sharp they were and how recently they had been filed. The gates were wrought iron the height of two men, with the Mariano crest worked into them, a serpent and a closed hand. Two men came out of the gatehouse to look through the driver's window, and one of them saluted without meaning it and waved them through, and Eric caught the look the man gave the back of the car before he turned away. There it was. Not hatred. Hunger. The look of a man who wanted, more than anything, to be inside the car instead of outside it.
They climbed a long drive between rows of trees Eric remembered and had never learned the name of. And then the house.
It rose out of the dark the way it had always risen, as if it had been there before the jungle and would be there after: white stucco gone dove-grey in the moonlight, deep verandas, arched windows with iron grilles, four wings thrown out in a cross so that from above, someone had once told him, it looked like a bird pinned to the earth. There were lights on in the east wing and none in the rest. The fountain in the courtyard stood dry, as it always had. The place had never been built to be lovely. It had been built to be a holdfast, and standing at the bottom of the steps, with the smell of the jungle pressing at his back, Eric remembered the exact feeling the house had always given him: that he was inside the safest place in the world and that the safest place in the world had been designed by a man who had never once needed to be rescued.
"We're home," Andre said, and got out of the car.
The driver carried Eric's single bag inside. Andre walked ahead of him down the long hall, past the oil paintings of people who had died before the invention of the camera, and stopped at the second door on the left.
"Your room. There is room service, if you want it. The kitchen keeps hours for you. No one will come in without knocking." Andre's hand paused on the doorframe. "We dine at seven these days. You're not required."
"Since when are you not required?"
Andre looked at him for a moment, that flat green stare that gave back nothing, and then he did the thing he had done so often and did so badly, which was smile. "Since tonight, apparently. Sleep. There's a phone in every room. My study is down the corridor to the right. Not that one."
He left. Eric heard his footsteps fade down the tile, and somewhere far off a door closed, and the house settled into its enormous silence.
The room had not changed. That was the first thing. His room had stayed exactly as he had left it four years ago, mattress and bed linens the same grey, and the same smell, cedar and dust and the faint ghost of the soap they stocked in the bathrooms. His books were still on the shelf, spine-out in the order he'd left them. The photo of his mother was still on the nightstand, and the cracked glass in the frame had not been replaced, as though replacing it would have been a kind of lie. He stood in the middle of the floor with his bag in his hand and felt the house close around him like a hand. He hadn't been homesick for this. He had been homesick for something, in the cantina, in the jungle, in the awful dead quiet of the nights when he counted cars on the road and listened for a step on the stair, but it had not been this room.
Then he opened a drawer and found the shirts he had left, washed and folded, and under them, still in its place, a strip of paper with his own handwriting on it, a tally he had kept for two months when he was twenty-three and counting days. He put the paper down. His hands were not entirely steady.
He showered. The water ran hot and endless, one of the few luxuries the house had never rationed, and he stood under it until the mirror fogged over completely and the jungle left his skin. When he came out, wrapped in a towel, there was a knock at the door.
"Come in."
The door opened just enough for a man's arm, in the grey jacket of the house staff, to extend a folded note on a silver tray, and then the door closed again, and the footsteps retreated. Eric took the note. The paper was heavy and cream-colored, the same stock Andre used for everything, and there was no seal on it, no crest. Just the handwriting, black ink, narrow and clean and slanted as though written in a hurry by a man who never hurried.
Meet me at 6:30pm sharp, my private study for dinner. Please. Dress comfortable.
Eric read it twice. He turned it over. Empty on the back.
He sat down on the edge of the bed, still damp, towel around his waist, the note in his hand, and looked at the clock on the nightstand. It was nearly two in the morning. He had nearly seventeen hours.
Please. He had known Andre Mariano for twelve years and had seen him handle men and money and death with the same unhurried contempt, and in all that time he could count on one hand the number of times he had heard Andre ask for anything without arranging the world so that the answer could only be yes. He had never, not once, heard him write the word please.
Eric lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling and listened to the house. Somewhere far off a clock ticked. Somewhere else, water moved in a pipe. And under all of it, the jungle, pressing against the walls of the compound with its millions of small mouths, patient as anything that has ever waited to take a thing back.
He folded the note once and slipped it under the photo of his mother, and he did not sleep for a long time.
He did not sleep for a long time, and when he did it was the shallow half-sleep of a man who has learned to keep one ear open, and the sun came up through the iron slats of the shutters and printed thin gold stripes across the ceiling, and he woke with the note still under his mother's photograph and the taste of the airplane in his mouth.
He spent the day the way he had spent his first days in the cantina, drifting through rooms that were not his, learning them again. The house was quiet in the way a museum is quiet, not empty but attended. A woman came at noon with a tray he had not ordered, fruit cut into a fan, coffee in a silver pot, a folded paper napkin that had been pressed with a crest. He ate standing at the window. Below, beyond the wall, the trees went on for a mile and then gave way to the fold of the hills, and somewhere out there was a road, and somewhere on the road was a town, and in the town was a cantina with a roof that would get patched by a man he had never met. He told himself he was not thinking about it. He thought about it until four o'clock.
At five he showered again and stood in front of the wardrobe, and the wardrobe did to him what it had always done, which was nothing, because everything in it fit and everything in it was the right weight for the weather, and not one piece of it had ever been chosen by him. He pulled on a plain grey shirt, soft as an old joke, and dark trousers, and he did not look at himself in the mirror for longer than it took to button the collar, and he was still early, and he hated that he was early, and he sat on the edge of the bed with his hands on his knees and waited out the last hour like a man waiting to be called before a judge.
Down the corridor, past the turn to the right, in the room he had never once been invited into for anything but business, Andre Mariano was losing his mind.
He would have denied it, if anyone had been left alive to ask. He had denied worse things about himself and had the denials believed, because he built his denials out of evidence and men will believe evidence over their own eyes, given the chance. But there was no one in the study to ask, and so the denial had no work to do, and so it sat there in the room with him like a third chair at the table, empty and obvious.
The study was the oldest inhabited room in the house. The rest of the building had been raised and lowered and remade around it across the better part of two centuries, wings added and taken away, roofs replaced twice, the plumbing of course, the wiring, the whole tedious business of keeping a house alive in a century that insisted on it. But the study had not changed, because Andre did not permit it to change, and a room that is forbidden to change will slowly fill with the sediment of a very long life. Shelves of books in six languages, most of them first editions, some of them the only existing copies. A map on the wall from the sixteen hundreds, hand-drawn, the coastlines wrong in a way he found restful. A globe whose makers had all been dust for three hundred years. A desk of black wood, from a tree that no longer grew anywhere on earth. And the fire, which he lit himself and which no one else had been permitted to touch in a hundred and forty years.
He had been in this room since half past four.
There was a man who had served him for two hundred and thirty of those years and who had, over that span, witnessed Andre do things to other men that would have broken a lesser witness, and this man had come at five with the wine and had found his master standing at the table, moving a salad fork eleven millimeters to the left.
"Sir," the man had said. He did not remark on the fork. He had served two hundred and thirty years.
"Is the Vouvray right," Andre had said. "For the duck."
"It is the same wine you have served with the duck since I was a young man, sir."
"That was not my question."
"It is the right wine."
Andre had looked at the man for a moment, and the man had looked back, and neither of them had said the obvious thing, which was that Andre Mariano did not stand in his own study fussing over cutlery, and that they both knew why he was doing it, and that two hundred and thirty years is a long time to keep a secret and that this particular secret had never been successfully kept from anyone who spent an hour in the room with him.
The man had gone. The food would come at six and twenty, covered, kept warm by a ring of candles that Andre had also inspected. There was a second bottle in the cool box, because he had found, in his fussing, that he did not trust one bottle to be enough, which was absurd, because the wine was a case of twelve and the twelve had been waiting in the cellar since 1974, and there was no scenario in which one bottle of Vouvray was insufficient for two people and a duck.
He looked at the table one more time.
Two settings. Two glasses, both crystal, both hand-blown, both the same height to the millimeter. The plates were warm and would need to be rewarmed and he knew that and he had instructed that they be rewarmed and he did not care because he was going to check them anyway. Salad fork outside, dessert fork above the plate, the way it had been done in Paris in a century that no longer existed and in a house that no longer stood. He had set it himself, which was a thing he had not done since the year the telephone was invented and which he had found, tonight, that he had not forgotten how to do.
He ran a hand through his hair.
It was black, still, and it would be black for another century at least, and it fell the way it had always fallen, and there was nothing wrong with it, and he ran his hand through it again.
He stood there with his hand in his hair and looked at the room.
Four hundred years old. Four hundred and three, if you counted the first handful of them, which he had stopped counting because a boy who farms a hard field in a cold country and is turned by a thing in the dark at eighteen does not think of those years as his.
He had gold in the walls of a dozen cities. He had men who would kill for him and men who already had and men who had not yet been approached and men whose descendants would one day owe him money. He had walked into rooms where presidents sat and walked out of them with what he came for. He had not been afraid of anything for longer than he cared to remember, and then, three weeks ago, he had opened a manifest out of a shipping office in this jungle town and seen the loop of an E that was not quite an E and had known, in the space of half a heartbeat, that the person who had written it was alive, and that the person who had written it was his, and that he had spent four years lying very carefully to himself about both of those facts.
He had not been afraid of anything. And then he had sat in this chair with a two-dollar manifest in his hand, and his hands had shaken.
His hands had shaken.
He had been a thing that drank the life out of other things for four centuries, and a photocopied shipping manifest had made him shake like a man with a fever, and he had sat in this room and looked at his own hands, these hands, and had heard himself laugh out loud, alone, in the dark, at the sheer indignity of it.
And now he was standing next to the table with his hand in his hair, and he did it again, and he caught himself doing it, and he stopped, and then he looked at the table one more time, and he laughed.
It came out of him low and short and without any warmth, the laugh of a man who has just watched himself do something stupid in a shop window and has recognized his own face.
What are you doing.
He said it out loud. He said it in the language of the field he had been born in, which he had not spoken aloud in a hundred years, because it was the only language he had in which he could not lie to himself.
What are you doing.
The table was set. The wine was right. The forks were right. The candles were right. The man who had served him for two hundred and thirty years was bringing a duck he did not need to bring because Andre did not eat, not the way they did, and would only sit across from Eric and watch him eat, the way he had watched him eat for twelve years, and he had bought a cantina he did not want and a room above a bar he would never set foot in, and a pair of boots for a boy in a jungle town he had never met and never would, because he had done the arithmetic four nights ago and had understood, with a clarity that had annoyed him at the time and frightened him since, that the way to make Eric Vance stay was not to hurt him and not to hold him and not to chain him to a wall in a room that had no windows, all of which would have worked once, all of which he had done to other people, all of which would, he now understood, break the one thing in four hundred years that had never broken.
And so instead he had bought a cantina, and set a table, and written a note with a word in it he had not written to a living soul since he had still been alive.
Please.
He looked at the note again, the twin of the one he had sent, his own copy, on the desk under the lamp, one line in his hand: Meet me at 6:30pm sharp, my private study for dinner. Please. Dress comfortable.
Please.
He had written it standing at the desk at half past one in the morning, because he had come home from the airstrip with the cold of Eric's back still printed on his palm and had found that he could not sit still, and he had written the note and folded it and then unfolded it and added the please, and then he had told the man to carry it up, and then he had told him not to, and then he had told him to again.
What do you actually want out of this dinner.
He did not know.
That was the thing. That was the whole soft rotten center of it. He had spent four hundred years wanting things and then arranging the world until the things were his. That was all he had ever been, in the end, a patient hunger with a bank account. And tonight he was going to sit across a table from a man he could have taken with two fingers and he did not know, he genuinely did not know, whether he wanted Eric to come through that door and thank him, or curse him, or spit in his face, or sit down and eat the duck and say nothing at all, or look at him the way he had looked at him on the plane when Andre had finally, after twelve years, said out loud the thing he had carried up every flight and down every staircase, the thing he had said in this very room to a boy of twenty-one with his shirt open and his throat bared and his whole life in Andre's hands.
You remember, don't you.
He had asked that. Out loud. On a plane. To a man he had bought.
Four hundred years and he had never once needed the answer to a question to keep breathing until that moment, and he had asked it and then he had stood up and stepped back and given Eric his space like a gentleman, like a fool, like a man who had decided that if he did not step back he would do something else instead, something with his hands, and the flight was eighteen hours long and they had both of them sat in that cabin afterward, in silence, for three of those hours with the wound still open between them, and Andre had read his phone and tried to look like a man to whom this sort of thing did not happen.
It happened. It was happening. It was happening now, in this room, while he stood next to his own dinner table and ran his hand through his own hair again.
He laughed again, once, and this time it had a little of the old music in it, the cold music, and he pulled his hand out of his hair and smoothed it back and looked at himself in the dark glass of the window, and the window gave him back a shape, most of a shape, a tall pale thing in a dark suit standing in front of a fire with a set table behind it, and the shape was not a man who lost composure, and the shape did not know that the thing looking at it was terrified.
Four seconds after six.
He sat down, finally, in the chair that faced the door, and folded his hands on the table, and made himself be still, because stillness was the one thing he had that had never failed him, the one discipline that four hundred years had never been able to take. He made his face empty. He made his hands quiet. He put his back to the fire and let the light work on the pale plane of him and did not think about the note, or the please, or the four years they had both spent lying, or the fact that he had, this afternoon, in a fit of something he refused to name, gone up to Eric's room while Eric was downstairs and stood in the doorway for a full minute and looked at the photograph on the nightstand and the broken glass in the frame and had not been able to make himself go in.
Two minutes past the time.
Andre Mariano had never in four hundred years been kept waiting by anything less than an emperor, and he found, sitting there with his hands folded and his face empty and the fire breathing at his back, that he did not mind. He did not mind at all. He wanted Eric to take his time. He wanted the moment before the door opened to last an hour, a day, a week, because in this moment nothing had happened yet, which meant that in this moment nothing had yet gone wrong, and he understood, with the flat clarity of the ancient and the damned, that he was afraid.
At six thirty one, the corridor outside began to give up the sound of a step.
Andre's hands, folded on the table, went very still.
And then the knock came, two knuckles, unhurried, and through the black wood of the door, in the low amber hush of his own study, with the fire and this house and four hundred years of careful, immortal silence around him, he heard Eric Vance's voice.
"You said comfortable," Eric said. "So if this is wrong, it's your fault. The note said comfortable."
He had heard it, and the hearing did something to him that he did not let show, which was the whole of his discipline and the whole of his life. He stood in the doorway for one moment with his face empty and took the sight of Eric in, head to foot, unhurried as a man reading a page he had waited twelve years to turn.
The shirt was black and fitted and cost more than a decent watch, which Eric either knew or did not. The trousers were linen, the color of a morning sky seen through a curtain, and they broke soft over bare ankles and tan sandals. He had changed five times. Andre could read that off him like a manifest: the faint rise where the shirt had been tugged and retucked at the shoulder, the crease across the trousers from sitting and standing and sitting again on the edge of a bed, the trace of a different soap on his forearms from the shower he had taken an hour ago and then felt he had to take again. Five times. He had stood in that wardrobe and done battle with himself over sandals.
Andre had set a table with silver from a house that had burned down in 1812.
"Come in," he said.
Eric came in.
He walked the length of the study in the slow way of a man who had learned the sound of this floor under his own feet years ago, and Andre watched him cross it, watched him pass the shelves of first editions without a glance, watched him stop in front of the table and stand there, and then stand there some more, and go very still.
Two settings. Two glasses. Candles instead of the overhead lights, low and orange. A silver wine cooler on its stand, beaded with cold. The duck under its cover, still breathing the last of the heat. The chairs pulled to face each other across a table that Andre had instructed be narrowed by a hand's width, which he had then lain awake about, and had not narrowed back.
Eric looked at it.
He saw it. Andre saw him see it. Two men in a room, one ancient and one not, both of them looking at the same two forks and one candle's worth of light, and neither of them saying the word that was sitting on the table between the crystal, which was the word dinner was too weak for.
So Eric, because he had never once in his life been able to let a moment lie down and be what it was, laughed once, short and dry, and said, "The table looks amazing. Like one of those fancy movies." He pulled the chair out himself. "You know, the kind with subtitles and nobody eats the food."
The candle flame leaned.
Andre did not laugh. He did not smile. He did not give Eric back the little shrug of a man accepting a joke. He just looked at him, the way he had looked at him on the plane, and the look lasted one heartbeat too long and had no floor under it, and Eric, dropping into his chair, felt his own face go hot at the cheekbones because he had just said a stupid thing in a room that had been arranged, he was beginning to understand, with the terrible care of a man who did not do things carelessly.
He did not know. He did not know that for the last hour and a half, in this room, the most dangerous creature either of them would ever meet had moved a salad fork eleven millimeters and then moved it back, had written and unwritten a please, had stood in this doorway, put a hand on this doorframe, and decided not to come into Eric's room because he could not explain to himself why he wanted to. He did not know that his small stupid joke had landed on the cold floor of a four hundred year old heart and had been taken, before it was even a joke, as a kindness.
He only knew that when he said the movie line, something in the pale man across from him had closed, very quietly, like a door at the end of a long corridor.
"Forget it," Eric said. "That was dumb."
"It was not."
"It was."
"It was not." Andre reached for the wine, unhurried. "You have never liked to let a room be quiet around you. When you were twenty you used to talk to the walls." He tipped the bottle, and the wine went into Eric's glass, and then into his own, and he set the bottle back into the cooler with a kiss of glass on ice. "I used to wonder whether you knew you did it."
"I knew."
"You did it when you were afraid."
Eric picked up the glass and drank, mostly to have something to do with his hands, and then began, belatedly, to be aware of how much he had drunk, and set it down.
"I'm not afraid," he said.
"No." Andre watched him. "You are not. That is new."
They ate. Eric ate; Andre did not, not the way it counted, which was to say he carved a slice of the duck, set it on his tongue, and let it sit there with the patience of a man tasting for a memory rather than a flavor, and then drank and put the fork down. He asked about the flight, and about the road, and about whether the room had been to Eric's taste, and he asked all of it in the flat, unhurried murmur of a man conducting a routine, and none of it was routine, and both of them knew it, and neither of them said so. Eric answered in the same register. The duck was perfect. It was the duck Andre always ordered, from the kitchen Andre kept, so of course it was perfect. The wine was cold and good, and the second glass went down easier than the first, and somewhere around the middle of Eric's plate the silence between the two of them stopped being a thing that needed to be filled, and instead became the thing they were both sitting in, warm as a bath.
Eric noticed it and hated how much he liked it.
He set his knife and fork down. "Why the please."
Andre had been looking at the fire. He turned his head.
"In the note," Eric said. "You wrote please. I've known you twelve years. You don't put please in things. You put a date and a time and a place and the person shows up." He wiped his mouth with the heavy linen and folded the napkin and laid it over the wreck of his plate. "So. Why."
The fire popped. Andre regarded him for a while, and the light moved on the long planed cheekbones, and he did something Eric had seen him do maybe a handful of times, which was look down.
"Because I did not want to put a date and a time and a place," Andre said. "I did the date and the time and the place because I did not know how to do anything else. And then I looked at it and I understood that if I sent you nothing but an order, you would come, and you would hate me for it, and you would count that as one more night of a very long ledger. So I wrote the word. I did not want you to come the way you come to the rest of your life." He picked up his glass and did not drink from it. "I wanted you to come the way you came through that door."
Eric sat with that.
"I didn't do it on purpose," he said finally, mostly to keep his own voice a known quantity in the room.
"No. Which is why it meant something."
"Don't."
"Don't what."
"Don't do that." Eric pushed his chair back, the legs scraping the old floor; he did not get up. He sat wrong in the chair, leaning, elbows on his knees, the black shirt pulling across his shoulders. "Don't read into the way I walk in a door and turn it into a compliment. I don't want to be your project. I don't want to be the thing that finally taught you manners."
"You are not my project."
"Then what am I."
Andre set his glass down. He stood. He came around the table, and it took no time at all, the way it never did with him, one moment he was across the room and the next he was close enough that Eric could feel the cold coming off him like the open door of a cellar, and he stopped there, standing over him, looking down.
He put his hand on the back of Eric's chair and leaned. The cold fingers grazed the nape of Eric's neck, and Eric went still in a way that had nothing to do with fear, and everything in him that had spent four years learning to live without this made one low noise of protest that never reached his mouth.
"You are the only thing I have ever kept," Andre said, very quietly, "that did not want to be kept, and stayed anyway. That is not a project. Projects end."
"And what do I do."
"You eat my dinner. You wear my clothes and complain about them. You put my own shipping manifests in order in your own hand so that you could sit an hour in a room with me every month without either of us having to say why." His thumb moved, once, at the hinge of Eric's neck, the barest pressure, and Eric felt his own pulse come up against it. "You came tonight. You were early. You changed your clothes five times."
"I changed four."
"Five."
Eric laughed, and it came out wrong, cracked at the edges, and he turned his face up, and Andre was right there, looking down at him out of the firelight, and there was something in the flat green of those eyes that Eric had spent twelve years teaching himself not to see because there was no way to see it and keep the walls up.
"You said I could do with the confession what I like," Eric said.
"I did."
"Then go sit down."
Andre did not move. For a moment that was not long enough, and longer than four years, neither of them moved at all.
And then Eric reached up, and closed his fist in the fine front of Andre's shirt, and pulled him down and kissed him.
It was not gentle, though Eric had meant it to be. Andre came down on him the way weather comes down on a field, and the first contact was cold and then not cold at all, and Eric made a sound into it that he would have denied under oath. Andre's mouth was hard and unhurried and it opened over his with the same terrible patience he brought to everything, taking the kiss apart a piece at a time, tasting him, learning him again the way he learned a room he meant to own. Eric's hand stayed fisted in the front of that fine shirt and his other hand came up without any permission from him and found the back of Andre's neck, where the skin was cool and smooth as the underside of a stone that had never seen the sun, and his fingers spread there and held.
He felt the cold all along the length of him, the nearness of it, the sheer animal wrongness of touching something that had no heartbeat to answer his own. It did not matter. It had never once mattered. His body had made its peace with the cold years ago, on a couch in this same house at the age of twenty-one, with the fire going and his own blood running down his throat.
Andre's hand moved from the back of the chair to Eric's jaw, tilted his head, and deepened the kiss, and Eric let him, opened for him, and there was a moment, brief and bright and stupid, where he forgot where he was and how he had gotten there and every reason he had ever written down.
Then he remembered.
He broke it himself, which took a strength he did not know he still had, one hand flat on Andre's chest, pushing, and his mouth coming away slick and his breath ragged and his whole face burning. He turned his head aside and put more distance into it, the chair creaking, his palm still against that chest, feeling nothing under it, no rise and fall, no pulse, just the stillness of a body that had stopped needing to prove it was alive four centuries ago.
"Sorry," he said. His voice came out gravel. He cleared his throat and tried it again. "Sorry. That was stupid. That was impulsive, and I don't know why I did it."
He did not look at him. He looked at the fire, at the duck going cold on the plate, at the second bottle in the cooler, at anything at all that was not the man standing over him with his mouth still carrying the taste of him.
Andre did not step back. He stayed where he was, close enough that the cold reached Eric's skin through the open collar of his shirt, and when he spoke his voice was low and even and entirely without mercy.
"Yes you do," he said. "You know exactly why you did it. The same way I can no longer pretend why I spent two hours making sure the plate settings were perfect."
Eric's head came around at that.
Two hours.
He looked past Andre, at the table, at the two forks laid just so and the crystal and the candle that had burned to a stub, and he tried to put that picture next to the Andre Mariano he had carried in his head for twelve years, the one who ordered men killed over breakfast and read market reports in the same hand he signed extraditions with, and the two pictures would not sit together. They refused. One of them was a lie he had chosen to believe, and he could feel it going soft and useless in his hands.
"You set the table," he said slowly.
"I did."
"You set my side too."
"I set both sides." Andre's pale mouth moved, not quite a smile, and his eyes had gone the deep gold-green the fire made of them, and there was no warmth in it, there was never any warmth in it, but there was something else, something Eric had spent twelve years refusing to name. "I moved a salad fork eleven millimeters to the left and then I moved it back. I stood at that table and ran my hand through my hair like a fool, and I wrote you a note and took the word please out of it and then put it back in. Twice. So if you want to stand there and tell me that you kissed me for no reason, understand that I have spent the last two hours being honest with myself in a way I have not been honest in a hundred years, and I am not going to let you have the lie."
Eric's jaw tightened. He stood up out of the chair, which brought them close, chest to chest, and he did not step back, and the heat coming off his own body was a ridiculous thing next to the cold of the other man.
"Fine," he said. "You want the truth."
"Always."
"I kissed you because I have wanted to since the plane," Eric said. "Because you sat across from me and told me I was load-bearing and looked at me like I was the last drink of water on earth, and because I have spent two months in a jungle telling myself I ran away from you, and I never ran from you, I ran toward the only thing I knew how to do without you standing over my shoulder, and it was a lie, all of it, the name, the bar, the roof I was always worried about. It was a place to put my hands so they wouldn't reach for you." He was breathing hard. "There. Does that answer it."
"Yes," Andre said.
"Good."
And then Andre kissed him again, and this time there was no coming back out of it.
Andre kissed him like a man who had spent four hundred years learning exactly which pressures make a body give, and none of it was cruel. His mouth came over Eric's slow and thorough, cold at first and then warming from Eric's own heat, and his tongue slid against Eric's lower lip and then inside, unhurried, tasting the wine and the duck and the salt of him. He kissed the way he did everything, with the terrible patient authority of a creature who had never in his long life been told no and had stopped expecting to be.
Eric's whole body answered before his mind could catch up. He made a sound into Andre's mouth, a low wrecked thing that started somewhere in his chest and came out through his nose, and his hands, which had been hanging uselessly at his sides, came up and closed on the lapels of that jacket and hauled him closer, and Andre let himself be hauled. The cold of him bled through Eric's shirt, through his skin, sat down somewhere under his ribs, and Eric did not care, could not care, tilted his head and gave Andre better angle and let him have it.
The kiss went on longer than any kiss had a right to. Andre's tongue rolled against his, slow and deep, and every time Eric tried to take it faster Andre slowed him down, took the rhythm back, the way a man takes back a leash without ever tightening it. Eric's fingers found the back of his neck again, the cool smooth skin there, and he held on. He heard himself groan again, a wet sound, and this time he could not pretend it was anything other than what it was.
Then Andre broke it.
He pulled away first, and he did it clean, one hand still braced on the back of Eric's chair and the other falling away from Eric's jaw, and he stood over him with his mouth faintly reddened and his chest not moving and his hair, Eric noticed with a small shock of pleasure, no longer entirely in place. A strand of it had come loose across his forehead. His collar had gone crooked where Eric had tugged on it.
Inside his own skull, Andre looked at the both of them and had to stop himself from laughing. Four hundred and three years old. A thing that had walked out of the plague and the guillotine and two world wars without so much as adjusting its tie, and he had just come up out of a single kiss with his collar wrong and his breath, his breath, coming a half note off. He had not needed to breathe in a century. The reflex had come back on its own, the way a drowned man's chest will still heave, and it had come back because of a boy in a black shirt with the taste of Vouvray on his tongue.
Eric stood there with his chest going hard, dragging air, and Andre watched that, watched the rise and fall of it, and filed it away with everything else he had ever filed away about this particular body.
"I have crème brûlée for dessert," Andre said. His voice came out even, or near enough. "The kitchen makes it the way you liked it. I do not want it to get cold."
Eric stared at him. A laugh tried to come up and he caught it in his throat and it came out wrong, half a cough, and he shook his head and said, flat as a stone dropped in water, "Fuck that crème brûlée."
It was not a phrase Eric used. He swore, sure, he was a bartender in a jungle town, he had said worse things to worse men, but he did not use the word like that, casually, as punctuation, the way Andre's men did. He did not reach for it. It reached for him, and it got there because he had no other words left in him that were big enough for what was going on under his ribs.
Andre's eyes changed. The green went a little gold at the center, the way it did when the fire moved, and his mouth did something that was not a smile and was not quite an expression Eric had ever catalogued in twelve years of cataloguing him.
"Eric," he said. "This is not like last time."
"No."
"It is not. Last time you were twenty-one and you did not know what you were doing and neither did I, and I have spent twelve years telling myself that what happened in this room was a kindness and lying to myself about it." He took one step closer, and the cold came with him, and Eric did not give ground. "Because now that I know for sure that."
He stopped.
Eric waited. One second, two. The fire popped.
"That what," he said.
Andre did not answer him. He stood there with his mouth half open and the sentence sitting behind his teeth and he could not get it out. Say it, something in the back of his skull said, in the language of the field, the one he could not lie in. Say it to him. You have his mouth on your mouth and his hands on your coat and there is no arrangement, no ledger, no fork moved eleven millimeters, there is nothing between you and this man but the truth, and the truth is that he is your beloved, the single thing in four centuries that came to you of its own accord and did not leave, and you know it and you have known it for years and you are standing here like a boy in a doorway with the word stuck in your throat.
He did not say it.
You are afraid, the voice said. You are four hundred years old and you are afraid of a word.
He looked at Eric's face, at the brown eyes, at the wet of his mouth, at the scars on his forearms, and he made himself settle. The word would keep. The word had kept for four years; it would keep another hour. What he could not afford to do, what he had understood somewhere on the flight and had not been able to stop understanding since, was to be gentle when gentleness was not what this room was for.
"I do not want to be too rough," Andre said instead. It was a compromise and a poor one and he knew it the moment it was out of his mouth.
Eric heard the sentence and heard, under it, the thing Andre had not said, and something in his face shifted, went younger and harder at once, the way a man's face does when he decides to stop protecting himself from a thing he has decided he wants.
"I don't want you to be gentle," Eric said. His voice had dropped low and it was not entirely steady, and he pushed the words out anyway, one at a time, like coins off a ledge. "I want you to do me like you did the pool boy. Three years ago. The day one of your men stole from you and you found out in the morning."
Andre's gaze did not move off him. He said nothing.
"I saw it," Eric said. "I wasn't trying to see it. I came up to your study for your signature on the eastern manifest, the Tuesday one, and the door was cracked, and I put my hand on it to knock and I stopped. I stopped because I heard him. And I stayed." He swallowed. His throat worked. "You had him on his front on the study floor and his face was pushed into the rug and you were behind him holding the back of his neck and you drove into him over and over and you didn't stop and he kept making these sounds and you said his name once, low, like you were bored, and I stood in that hall for I don't know how long and I did not knock." He looked at Andre. "I have thought about that door more times than I want to admit to you or anybody."
"There is a lie in the middle of that story," Andre said quietly.
"I know," Eric said.
"You did not stay to watch a man be disciplined."
"No," Eric said. "I stayed because I wanted to know what it looked like when you stopped holding yourself back."
And something in the great pale stillness of him let go. Not all of it. Andre Mariano did not let go of all of it; he had not let go of all of it since the sixteenth century. But he let go of enough. The empty face he had worn all evening, the one he had built at four thirty and had been holding ever since like a shield made of furniture, came down off him between one breath and the next, and what was under it was not cold and was not patient and was not anything Eric had ever been permitted to see before, and it looked at him the way the pool boy had looked at the rug.
"On your knees," Andre said. "By the fire."
Eric went. He went fast and he went willingly and neither of them acknowledged it. The stone of the surround was warm from an evening of fire and it bit into his shins through the linen and he did not care. Andre came to stand in front of him and Eric, from the floor, looked up the length of him, tall and dark and lit gold on one side, and Andre undid his belt with two fingers and a thumb and the sound of it in the quiet room was obscene.
His cock was hard through the black wool and he freed it into his own hand, long and pale as the rest of him, and Eric's mouth went dry and then wet and he leaned up on his knees without being told. Andre let him get most of the way and then caught him by the hair, not hard, and held him there with the head of his cock an inch from Eric's lips, breathing through his nose, watching.
"Ask me for it," Andre said.
"Fuck you," Eric said.
"Ask me for it," Andre said again, exactly the same, no heat in it at all, and the cold patience of it went through Eric like a wire.
"Put it in my mouth," Eric said, low and filthy, and Andre did.
He pushed past Eric's lips in one unhurried stroke and Eric took him, opened his throat around him the way his body had learned to open in this house when he was twenty, and Andre made the first sound Eric had ever heard him make in a room that was not designed to be heard. A breath, low, deep in the chest, and then he was moving, one hand still tangled in Eric's hair, driving in and out with the same steadiness he did everything. Eric's eyes watered and he kept them open and Andre looked down at him the whole time with the gold burning low in the green, and did not hurry, and did not stop, and Eric, on his knees on the stone of a study floor in a house he had once run from, felt the last of his four years of careful distance come apart in his hands.
"You have no idea," Andre said, above him, near the end, "how long I have wanted to look down and see this."
Eric, mouth full, said nothing to that, but his hands came up and closed on the backs of Andre's thighs and pulled him in until there was no more space to give.
He did not finish in Eric's mouth. That was deliberate; Eric could feel the tension of it, the way the cold hands tightened and then released, the way Andre pulled him off with a wet sound and hauled him up off the stone by the arm, all in one motion, as if the decision had been made a hundred years ago and only awaited tonight.
"Turn around," Andre said. "Hands on the desk."
Eric turned around. His cock was hard and leaking and he could feel his own heart in his throat and he walked to that black wood desk and put his palms flat on it and stood there with his back to the man, listening. Behind him, drawer open, drawer shut. The tear of a foil and the small sound of Andre doing something he had never in twelve years once had to do before, because whatever assorted immortality ran through him did not extend to the practicalities, and the thought landed in Eric sideways and almost made him laugh, that four hundred years of empire still came down to a strip of foil and a little bottle of slick.
"Last chance," Andre said.
"Don't insult me," Eric said.
The cold of his fingers came onto Eric's hips first, and then his cockhead pressed against him, and Eric stopped breathing. Andre pushed in slow, and it hurt, and it kept hurting, and Eric pushed his forehead down onto the desk and let it, hands flat on the wood, teeth set, and behind him Andre went in and in and did not stop until his hips were flat against Eric's ass and every last measure of him was inside, and then he stayed there, breathing, breathing, a man taking his time for reasons that had nothing to do with cruelty, and he bent over Eric's back and put his mouth against the place where neck met shoulder and stayed there a long moment without biting.
"It is you," Andre said, very low, into his skin. "It was always going to be you."
And then he fucked him.
He was not gentle, and Eric had asked him not to be, and he gave it to him the way Eric had seen him give it to the pool boy, hard and steady and without apology, one hand on Eric's hip and the other flat between his shoulder blades pressing him down onto the desk, and the desk took it, the old black wood that had stood in this room for two hundred years took the rhythm of it and let itself be moved, and Eric stopped trying to be quiet somewhere around the first forty seconds in and made noise instead, one long low sound after another, a man losing a fight with himself and deciding to lose it. The fire spat. The candles tipped shadows across the walls. His own cock, ignored, hung heavy and slick between the desk and his belly, and every thrust slid the wood grain a little against the underside of it and it was almost enough and not nearly enough and he said so, out loud, in words, and Andre heard him and reached under him and closed his cold hand around him and stroked him in time with the rhythm of his hips, and that was all it took.
Eric came over the desk and the sound he made was something he did not recognize as his own voice. Andre did not stop. He drove into him through it, past it, and Eric shook all over with the over-sensitivity of it and did not tell him to stop, and Andre took another long moment of it, leaning over him, breathing against the back of his neck, and then he went still, all at once, and his fingers tightened on Eric's hip and the whole long line of him pulled taut, and he finished inside him with no sound at all except one low exhalation, the way a man lets out air he has been holding for a very long time.
Neither of them moved for a while.
The fire settled. Somewhere out in the corridor, a clock struck the hour, and Eric counted it without meaning to, seven strokes, ordinary and alien at once, a housekeeping sound in a house that had just had something happen in it that four hundred years had not managed to arrange until now.
Chapter excerpt truncated at the edge.