Chapter 5: Chapter 5
Eric woke to the smell of cold duck and burnt-down candles.
The study had gone grey in the hours before dawn, the tall windows holding a watery light that did nothing to warm the stone. He was alone on the chaise by the fire, which had burned to ash and a single red coal. Sometime in the night someone had covered him with a wool throw, and it was not until he sat up and it slid from his shoulders that he understood the shape of the room: Andre's chair empty, the desk cleared, the two plates and the two glasses gone. His own shirt was folded on the arm of the chaise, cleaned, though he had not heard anyone come in to take it.
He sat there a while with the throw bunched in his lap. His body still held the night in small aches, the kind that surfaced when he moved, and his mouth tasted of salt and smoke. He touched the inside of his wrist where the leather cord sat and found it there, warm from his skin, and that small ordinary fact steadied him more than anything else in the room.
Then he looked at the desk.
Andre had bent him over that desk. Andre had finished inside him and held him there afterward, one hand spread flat between his shoulder blades, breathing hard against his neck, and for a long moment it had felt like the most honest thing that had happened between them in twelve years. Not a transaction. Not a punishment. Just the two of them, and the fire, and the word please written and rewritten on a piece of card.
The card was not on the table.
Eric got up and walked the study quietly, barefoot on the cold stone. He checked the desk, the sideboard, the shelf where Andre kept the decanters. No card. No note. He told himself the man had simply cleared the table. It was what anyone would do.
He went to the door that connected the study to Andre's private wing and put his hand on it, then his ear. Nothing. No sound of a shower, no voice on a phone, no pen on paper.
He stepped back and looked at his own reflection in the dark window glass. The grey light had come up enough that he could see himself: the scarred forearms, the cropped black hair standing every which way, the jaw he had clenched so many times it had learned the shape. And the face of a man who had spent the night sleeping alone on a chaise after the best thing that had ever happened to him, because the alternative had been to wake up next to a four-hundred-year-old murderer and find out whether the man was still there.
Maybe it had meant something only to him.
The thought arrived the way all his worst thoughts did, uninvited and already certain of itself. He turned it over, hunting for the flaw in it, and found instead every small piece of evidence stacked neatly against him. Andre had cleared the table. Andre had not woken him. Andre had not said a word after, not one, not when Eric had asked for the shower, not when he had come back in a different shirt and a fresh mouth and stood there in the doorway like a man waiting for an instruction that never came. Had he stood there long? He could not remember. He remembered the offer of crème brûlée, and the way Andre's eyes had gone flat and patient when he declined, and the way the room had felt suddenly too large for one small human body.
He found his keys and his wallet on the sideboard, placed in a neat row beside a glass of water that had gone flat. Beside them, folded twice, was a shirt of Andre's, black linen, sleeves long on Eric because Andre was taller. He picked it up and held it against his face and breathed in before he could stop himself. Soap. Cedar. Cold stone. It was the smell of the whole house, and of the man who owned it, and Eric stood there in the grey morning light and hated how much comfort it gave him.
Maybe he had read everything wrong. Maybe the study had been a housewarming. Maybe please had meant please come to dinner and nothing more, and the desk had been a favor granted because Eric had asked for one and Andre Mariano did not know how to say no to a body he had spent twelve years learning. Andre had said he wanted Eric to come willingly. Eric had come. Maybe that was the whole of it, the box Andre had been trying to tick for four years, and now the box was ticked and the man had gone back to his accounts and his empire and his very long life.
He dressed in his own shirt. He folded the black linen one and left it on the sideboard, where it had been, though his hands did not want to put it down.
There was a clock on the mantel. Ten past six. He had a room in the east wing, the same room they had given him when he first arrived as a boy, and he had never once slept a full night in it, and if he had left anything in the study it was worth collecting before the staff came.
He found his phone in the chaise cushions, dead. He did not have a charger in the study, so he did not plug it in. He stood in the middle of the rug and did a slow circle of the room, and then, because standing still was worse, he went out through the corridor door and into the rest of the house.
The halls were empty. That was the thing about the mansion that never changed. It was a great stone animal that breathed through its vents and kept its business to itself. The guards were at the perimeter, the staff were invisible, and the man who owned it could move through it without a sound, which meant every hall was a place he might round a corner, and every closed door was a door he might be behind. Eric walked past the library and past the long gallery with its paintings of dead men in black coats, and his own footsteps on the marble were the loudest thing in the world.
His room was exactly as he had left it. The bed made, the window cracked to let in the cold, the small wooden box on the dresser where he kept the leather cord's spare and a stone from the jungle river. He stood in the doorway with his hand on the frame, and the sight of it, the plainness of it, the fact that no one had been in to move a thing, made his chest ache all over again.
He shut the door. He locked it. He had not locked a door in this house since he was twenty, and his hands did it now without asking him, and he stood with his forehead against the wood and breathed.
Maybe the night had been a long good time. He had learned that phrase in the village. A good time, not a long time. The men at Rosa's bar said it about everything: a girl, a fight, a good year of rainfall. It meant that you had had it, and you had had it for as long as it lasted, and now you were expected to be reasonable about the ending.
Two slow inhales. Hold. Two slow exhales. The old discipline, the one he had taught himself under this roof as a boy, sitting on the floor of the linen closet with his hand over his mouth so no one would hear him. He could feel the sting starting behind his eyes, that hot blurry pressure that meant the lid was about to come off, and he pressed the heels of his palms in and told it no. Not here. Not in this house. He would not give any of them the sound of it. He would not give Andre the story of it, even secondhand, even from a maid who had seen him with his eyes red at breakfast.
He let the sting pass. It always passed if he let it. It left a headache instead, a tight band across his forehead, and he took that, because a headache was something a man could carry.
He crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed, and then he got up again because sitting was worse, and went into the bathroom and ran the water until steam filled the room.
He stood in the shower with his hand flat on the tiles and let it come down on the back of his neck. The sting of the heat was good. It made his skin honest. He turned his face up into it and stood there until his breath slowed, and the night began to come back to him in pieces, which was what he had been avoiding.
Andre at the table, moving a fork eleven millimeters and pretending not that he had not spent an hour on it. Andre's face when Eric had asked why please. The way he had said the word willingly, as if it were a stone he had been carrying in his mouth for four years and had finally decided to set down. The kiss at the door. The way Andre had held the back of his head when he knelt, not guiding him, not forcing, just holding, the way you hold something you intend to keep. The desk, the fire, the flat of his palm between Eric's shoulders.
He soaped his arms and his chest and his belly and his thighs and did not linger anywhere, because lingering was a way of rehearsing, and he did not want to rehearse. He wanted to be clean. He wanted to be a man who showered and dressed and went down to breakfast and read the shipping reports and asked after the eastern manifests, because that was who he had been for four years in the jungle, roughly, and twelve years before that in this house, and he was not going to let one night make him into someone else.
When he got out his hands were steady.
He dried his hair with the towel and looked at himself in the mirror, at the scars on his forearms, the small ones like fishbones, the long one near the left wrist from the night of the Vasquez business. He touched the long one. He had stitched it himself. Andre had watched.
He put on clean trousers and a grey shirt from his own drawer, and the leather cord, and then he sat on the bed and picked up the dead phone and turned it over in his hands and thought about what he would say.
Because there was a version of the morning in which he went to Andre's study door and knocked and asked the man what last night had been, and the thought of it made his stomach turn with a small, specific fear. What if Andre said it had been a favor. What if Andre said it had been an old debt settled. What if Andre looked at him with that still, patient face and said Eric, you may go, and Eric would have to walk out of the room and find something to do with the rest of his life.
Better to not ask. Better to let it be a good time. If it had been a long time for Andre too, then Andre would find him. He had found him in the jungle. He had found him across a continent, in a village with one road and no name on the map. The man could track him by scent. If the study had meant anything, Andre would come to him, and if it had not, then Eric would rather live the rest of his life not knowing than hear it said out loud in that voice.
He stood up. He put the phone in his pocket. He opened the door of his room and stepped into the hall, and the mansion was quiet, and he walked the long corridor toward the dining room with his hands loose at his sides and his face composed, and every step he took he was waiting, listening, for the sound of stone on stone, of a door opening somewhere in the house, of a man who could move without a sound deciding to let Eric hear him coming.
Nothing came. He reached the dining room and the table was set for two, and no one was in the room.
He took his place. He sat alone with his coffee and the morning papers and the cold sun on his hands, and he ate nothing, and he waited, and the hall stayed quiet, and the chair opposite him stayed empty, and the sting came back behind his eyes and he breathed it down and did not let it fall.
He sat there with his coffee going cold and the light moving sideways across the table, and he ran the numbers in his head the way he ran shipping manifests, the way he had taught himself to run anything that frightened him. Two places set. One chair empty. If the man wanted to see him, the man had four hundred years of habit at finding exactly what he wanted, and no door in this house could stop him from being in a room he had decided to be in.
Which meant the empty chair was an answer, and Eric had spent forty minutes staring at it.
He knew himself. That was the thing he had learned in the jungle, sitting nights at the end of Rosa's bar with a rag and a glass, watching men get drunk and honest and stupid. He knew he could take any small thing and turn it over until it cut him. One sleepless morning on a chaise and he had already built the whole house of it: please was nothing, the desk was nothing, twelve years were a debt with the debt paid. Another hour in this chair and he would have the funeral arranged.
So he stopped. He set the cup down, left the papers folded, and walked out of the dining room with his coffee still warm and his stomach sour, and when he got to the corridor he did not turn toward his room or the study or the front doors. He took the back stairs and went down and out through the service door into the cold morning, and he stood in the courtyard with his breath fogging and looked at the gravel square, and then he started to run.
The courtyard of the compound was a wide flat of packed gravel and old flagstone, walled on three sides by hedges cut so low they were furniture, and on the fourth by the long grey flank of the house with its blind windows. Eric had run it as a boy. He had run it the night he arrived, sixteen years old, alone, with a dead father's debt strapped to his back, and he had run it for hours with the guards watching from the gallery and saying nothing, because in this house nobody stopped a possession from exhausting itself. He did not love it. But he knew its length by the ache in his calves.
Four circuits was a mile. He set the count in his head like a metronome and let his feet take it.
The first lap hurt and he was glad. His lungs, his shins, the small leftover soreness in his hips from the desk, all of it awake and complaining. The cold air came in sharp off the stone and went into his chest and burned there, and he pushed into it. The second lap the metronome clicked over and his thoughts tried to come, so he added a count to the breaths, in for three steps, out for three, and the metronome held them off. The third lap he lost it for a while. He came back to himself somewhere around the start of the fifth with his shirt stuck to his spine and his mouth tasting of copper, and realized he had not thought about the empty chair in a full circuit.
Good. That was what he had come out here for. He did not want to think. Thinking was a needle, and he had been threading it for hours.
But the mind goes where the body goes. His feet found their rhythm and his thoughts found the rhythm underneath, and the rhythm said come willingly, come willingly, and would not stop saying it. He counted harder. Eight. Nine. He counted laps in Spanish, then in the numbers he had invented for himself as a boy, silly sounds he would never say out loud, anything to fill the space where words wanted to grow. Ten. Eleven. The gravel gave under his heel at the same point every lap, a soft patch by the hedge, and it felt like a hand releasing him each time he passed over it.
By mile three his thighs were burning clean and his mind had gone blessedly flat, one long grey sheet with nothing written on it. He had found the place he used to find under the roof of this house on the nights the man was away: the still place, the obedient place, where he could stand any amount of waiting and be fine. It had kept him alive. It had kept him from running for twelve years, which was the same thing, mostly.
He did not want to be in that place this morning. But it was the only place he had.
He finished the fourth mile on the far side of the courtyard and slowed to a walk and then to nothing, standing with his hands on his knees and his head down, hauling air. The fog off his skin was heavy now, steam off a wet animal. His grey shirt was a rag. His hair was flat to his forehead. He straightened up and tilted his head back and looked at the sky, which was the flat tin color of every morning in this part of the world, and he felt, for a moment, clean.
So much for the shower. Four miles had undone it and then some. He would have to go up and wash again, or spend the day smelling of effort, and he laughed at himself once, short and humorless, because he had stood under the hot water that morning for a long time trying to wash off the night, and he had ended up on the chaise instead, and now he had finally gotten rid of the night the only way that ever worked, which was to sweat it out of his skin.
He wiped his face on his sleeve and walked back inside.
The service corridor was cold and smelled of soap and stone. He went up the back stairs two at a time, slow at the top because his legs were done, and along the corridor past the closed doors to his own, and the mansion stayed quiet behind him the whole way, no staff, no guards, the great stone animal breathing through its vents and minding its own.
He unlocked his door.
He had locked it. He remembered locking it, standing with his forehead on the wood and his hands doing it without asking him. The key turned under his thumb the way it had turned that morning, and the door swung in, and he stepped through, and he froze.
Andre was in his room.
He stood with his back to the door, in front of the window, the cracked one Eric had left open for the cold. The grey light came through the glass and laid itself along the line of the man's shoulders, and his hands were loose at his sides, and he was looking out at the courtyard, at the wet flagstones where Eric had been running circles for the last forty minutes. Black coat. No tie. The collar of his shirt open, one button, showing the pale column of his throat and the faint blue tracing of veins under the skin, the way he looked when he was in his own house and did not expect to be looked at.
Eric's first thought, absurd and instant, was: he watched me. The window faced the courtyard. The man had been standing there with the light on his shoulders, and he could see the whole square, and Eric had been down there with his heart in his throat and his head empty, running laps like a boy.
His second thought was that the door had been locked.
He shut it behind him. He did not know why he did that. His hand did it, and the latch went home, and now they were in the room.
His breath was still coming hard from the run. He could hear it. He stood there just inside the door with his chest going up and down and the sweat cooling on him and his shirt sticking to his ribs, and he looked at the back of the man's head and tried to read it, and there was nothing to read. Four hundred years of nothing to read.
He had rehearsed a hundred first sentences at the dining table and thrown all of them away. What came out was nothing like any of them.
"Andre, what are you." His voice came out wrong, raw, with the run still in it, and he made himself stop and start again, quieter. "Are you okay. Are you hurt."
Andre did not turn. His head tilted a fraction, an ear toward the sound of Eric's breathing, and he stayed where he was with his hands loose and the light on him.
"You are bleeding," Andre said.
Eric looked down at himself. There was a raw line across his forearm where he had scraped it on the hedge going past the soft patch, a thin wet red stripe among the old white ones, and he had not noticed it, and it was nothing, and the man behind the glass had seen it across the width of a courtyard.
"It's a scratch."
"You went out the service door at seven minutes past seven and you ran the square sixteen times." Andre's voice was even, and low, and it did not carry. "You favor the left leg when you turn at the north wall. You have been favoring it since the second lap. Is it the hip."
Eric's breath was still coming. He put his hand flat against the door behind him and felt the wood grain under his palm and made himself take a slow one, in, hold, out.
"You had the door locked," he said.
"I did not use the door."
"I know you didn't use the door." He heard the edge come into his own voice and did not take it back. "I know what you do. I've watched you do it. I'm asking what you're doing in my room."
Then Andre turned.
It took a long time, the turn. He came around from the window slowly, the light going off the back of him and onto the front, and Eric saw his face for the first time all morning, and his stomach dropped, because he had braced himself for the still face, the patient face, the one that had said crème brûlée and gone flat and waited him out of the room. That was not the face he got.
Andre looked tired. There was no other word for it and no other house in the world where the word would apply to him. His eyes were green and flat and did not hold any warmth at all, which was normal, but the lines around them were deeper than they had been at dinner, and there was something in the set of his jaw that Eric had seen exactly once before, on the night of the Vasquez business, when a man had come to the compound with a knife in his sleeve and a plan for Eric, and Andre had made the entire east wing quiet for two days afterward.
He was looking at the scrape on Eric's forearm. He was looking at Eric's wet shirt and his hair and the hand braced on the door, and he was not moving, and Eric understood, all at once, with the awful clarity of four miles of empty mind, that the man had been standing at that window for a long time. Long enough for the room to go grey around him.
"You left," Andre said. "The study."
"I went to my room."
"You went to your room," Andre repeated, and something in the flatness of it was worse than shouting. "You dressed in your own shirt. You left mine folded on the sideboard. You did not take the phone. You did not come to the door of the study, you did not come to mine, you sat at my table for two hours in an empty room and ate nothing, and then you went out into the cold and ran sixteen laps of my courtyard with a scrape on your arm that you did not stop for. I have been in this room since half past six."
Eric's hand stayed against the door. He had not locked it again behind him, but he had closed it, and his back was to it, and there was nowhere in this room to go.
"You watched me," he said.
"Yes."
"For how long."
"Since the eighth lap."
Eric laughed. It came out ugly, with no air behind it, and he pressed the back of his wrist to his mouth and looked away at the wall, at the small wooden box on his dresser, at the stone from the jungle river sitting on the lid of it.
"Eight laps," he said. "That's two miles. You stood at my window for two miles and watched me run."
"Yes."
"Why."
Andre did not answer that. He took one step forward off the window and stopped, and his hands came up and then went back down to his sides, and Eric, who had spent twelve years learning every gesture the man did not make, saw the aborted motion for what it was. Andre Mariano had been about to reach for him. Andre Mariano, who finished his sentences, who moved the salad fork eleven millimeters because he could not move the whole table, who had not said the word beloved in four hundred years, had been about to reach for him and had not.
There was a silence. The radiator ticked. Somewhere far off in the house a door shut, and neither of them looked.
"You asked me a question at the table," Andre said finally. "Four years ago. You asked me why I never sent for you, in all that time, when I knew where you were."
"I remember."
"I gave you an answer. I told you I feared what you made me feel." He paused. The light was on his face now, and Eric could see the small movement in his throat as he swallowed, which was the most ordinary human thing he had ever seen the man do. "It was not the entire answer. Last night I told you I wanted you to come willingly, and you came, and I cleared the table and I let you sleep on the chaise because I did not know what you would want to see when you woke up, and then I took the note off the table and put it in the fire, and I came down here at half past six to stand in your room and wait for you to come back from a breakfast you were not eating, so that I could ask you a question, and I have been standing here since, and I still do not know how to ask it."
Eric's chest hurt. It was not the running anymore.
"Ask it,Please" he said in a whisper.
Andre did not ask it right away.
He stood there with the window at his back and the grey light on his shoulders, and for a long moment Eric thought the man had changed his mind, that four hundred years of never asking had finally won. Then Andre's jaw moved, the small muscle at the hinge of it, and he said, "Will you stay."
That was all. Three words, dropped into the quiet room like a coin into still water.
Eric stared at him. "Stay where."
"Here. In this house. In my life." Andre's hands stayed loose at his sides. "Not as the boy your father sold. Not as my shadow, or my lieutenant, or the man who signs the eastern manifests in my name because I do not have a hand steady enough to sign them myself. I am asking you to stay because you want to be here, and if the answer is no, I will have a plane brought to the north field this morning and a passport in your hands by noon, and you will never see my face again."
Eric's breath stopped in his chest. He heard it stop. The radiator ticked somewhere in the wall, and his legs, which had been holding him up fine a minute ago, went suddenly unsteady under him, and he put his shoulder to the door frame and kept it there.
"You're joking."
"I have a great many things wrong with me," Andre said. "A sense of humor is not among them."
"You let me sleep on a chaise. You cleared the table and you let me wake up alone and you let me sit at your table for two hours with a cold cup of coffee and no one across from me." His voice came out rough, and he did not try to smooth it. "And now you're standing in my room telling me I can leave. Which is it."
Andre was quiet. The light shifted on the wall as a cloud crossed it, and something in his expression moved with the light and did not come back to the same place.
"Both," he said. "You are not wrong about either of them."
"Explain it to me."
"I woke at five and you were asleep on the chaise with your face turned away from me and the throw pulled up to your chin, and I lay beside you for an hour trying to work out what your face would do when you woke up and found me there." Andre's voice was even, and low, and it did not sound like a confession. It sounded like a man reading a ledger aloud. "I could not decide whether you would be glad or whether you would look at me the way you used to look at the door of a room you were told to wait in. I did not have the stomach to find out. So I got up and I cleared the table and I took the note off it and put it in the fire, and I went to the window in the corridor, where you could not see me, and I watched you wake up."
Eric's hand was flat on the door. "You watched me wake up."
"Yes."
"And then."
"And then you sat there with the throw in your lap for eleven minutes. And then you got up and you walked the room and you looked for the note, and I watched you not find it, and I watched your face when you did not find it." Andre stopped. He looked away from Eric for the first time, out the window at the wet flagstones. "And then you took off my shirt and folded it and put it back on the sideboard, and I understood that whatever I had meant last night, you had decided in the night that it had meant nothing, and I could not open the door and tell you otherwise without standing in front of you as a man who had watched his bedmate dress through a keyhole. So I did not. I let you go."
Eric's throat was tight. He made himself breathe, in through the nose, out through the mouth, the old count. "You stood in the corridor and watched me put my shirt back on and leave."
"I did."
"For how long."
"Until you went down to breakfast. And then I came in here and I sat on this bed, which is your bed, and I waited for you to come back up."
"That was an hour and a half."
"I know how long it was."
Eric pushed off the door frame and crossed the room. He did not plan it. His body did it, the way his hands had locked the door that morning. He crossed the rug and Andre did not move and Eric stopped a foot in front of him with his chest going and the scrape on his forearm stinging and his breath still tasting of copper, and he looked up at the man who had owned him for twelve years and had never once, not once in all that time, said a single sentence that had not been calculated three moves ahead.
"Why the hell didn't you just knock on my door."
"Because I did not know how to ask."
"You said it just now. Will you stay. It's four words."
"It took me four hours to say them," Andre said. "I have been standing in this room since half past six composing them. I had fourteen versions. The first one was an order. The second one was a threat. The third one was money. By the ninth I had gotten as far as the word stay, and I sat down on your bed and did not get back up for twenty minutes, and I am telling you this because you asked me to ask it, and because I have spent four hundred years never giving anyone a straight answer and it has cost me everything I have ever wanted except the one thing I am not willing to lose."
The room was very quiet. Eric could hear his own breath, and the tick of the radiator, and under both of them the low ambient hum of the house, the great stone animal breathing through its vents.
"What was in the note," he said.
"Please."
"I know what was in the note. You told me at the table, remember. You said you wrote please and took it out and put it back." Eric's voice cracked, thin and sharp, and he did not care. "What were the other words. What did the whole note say."
Andre looked at him. The green of his eyes had gone dark and flat, and there was no warmth in them, and Eric, who had learned this man's moods the way a sailor learns weather, understood that the flatness was not indifference. It was the flatness of a man holding a door shut from the inside.
"Eric."
"What did it say."
"It said, Please come to dinner. It said, I have arranged this table eleven millimeters off center and I will move it again before you arrive if you are late, and I will not sit down until you do. It said, I do not know how to say what I want to say to you, so I am writing please on a card and hoping you understand that I have never asked anyone for anything in four hundred years, and that I am asking you."
Eric stood there with his hands at his sides and his heart going and his eyes burning.
"You burned it."
"I did."
"Why."
"Because I woke up next to you and I did not know if you would read it as a plea or as an accounting entry," Andre said. "And I would rather you never read it at all than read it and decide it was a debt being settled."
The sting came up hot behind Eric's eyes, that old pressure that meant the lid was coming off, and he pressed the heel of his hand against his brow and turned half away and breathed. In for four, hold for four, out for four. The discipline. The linen closet. The floor of a room in this house where he had taught himself not to cry.
Andre did not move toward him. He stood where he was with his hands loose and did not reach out, and that, somehow, undid Eric more than touching would have. The man had been about to reach for him when he came through the door and had stopped himself. He was doing it again now. Four hundred years of taking what he wanted from the world, and he was standing in a bedroom with his hands at his sides because he did not know whether Eric wanted to be taken.
Eric's eyes came up wet and angry.
"You watched me run," he said.
"I did."
"Two miles."
"Sixteen laps. Three miles and change, by the length of the square." Andre's mouth did something that was not quite a smile. "The guards on the north gallery came to attention when you started. They thought you were running from something. I told them to stand down."
"You told them to stand down."
"I told them the man of the house was exercising and they were not to draw attention to it."
Eric laughed. It came out wet and broken and he let it. "You watched me do laps like a rat on a wheel and you told your men to mind their business."
"Yes."
"Do you know what I was doing out there."
"I have a theory."
"Tell me your theory."
Andre looked at him for a long moment. "You were running the way you run when the only thing you can do with a feeling is move it through your legs until it is too tired to get back up," he said. "I have watched you do it since you were twenty years old. You ran this square the night you arrived. You ran it the morning after your father's debt came due. You ran it the night Vasquez tried to sell you to the Caetano family and I brought you back through the west gate with your shirt in pieces. You have never once in twelve years run for pleasure. You run to put something down."
Eric's hand was still on his brow. He let it fall.
"Yeah," he said. "That was the theory."
"Was I close."
"You were close."
Andre took a step toward him. One step, and stopped, and Eric saw the aborted motion again, the hands that came up and went back down, and he understood, all at once, that this was the whole of it. This was the four hundred years. The man who owned a continent's worth of darkness could not cross a bedroom floor.
"Last night," Eric said. "At the desk. Was that real."
Andre's face did not change and the room did not change and the light did not change, and yet something in the air between them tightened like a wire taking weight.
"I have bedded a great many people in four hundred years," Andre said. "I have never once finished inside someone I did not intend to keep. I did not intend to keep you last night, Eric. I have kept you for twelve years. Last night I stopped pretending that keeping you was a matter of accounting."
Eric's eyes burned. He blinked and it did not help.
"You could have said that."
"I did not have the words."
"You have a hundred thousand words. You run an empire with them."
"I have a hundred thousand words for the men in the shipping yards and the men in the east wing and the men who owe me their houses," Andre said. "I have never had the words for you. I do not know why. I suspect it is because you are the only person I have ever met who could leave."
Eric stood there and let that land. He thought about the chaise and the empty chair and the cold coffee and the two miles of running, and he thought about the man standing at a window in the corridor watching him wake up, cataloguing the eleven minutes, and he thought, with a clarity that felt like being hit in the chest, that Andre Mariano had spent the morning terrified.
He crossed the last foot between them.
He put his hand flat on Andre's chest and felt the slow impossible beat under the black wool, and Andre did not move, and Eric could feel the man's whole body go still under his palm the way a held breath goes still.
"You're shaking," Eric said.
"I am aware."
"I've never seen you shake."
"You have never had your hand on my chest before," Andre said. "The last time you were in this room you were sixteen years old and I was standing at the door telling you where to put your suitcase, and you looked at me like a man who had been sold to a wolf, and I have thought about that face every day for twelve years."
Eric was crying. He did not notice it start. Two lines down his face, warm and then cold, and he did not press his palm into them this time, he did not stop them, and that fact alone would have been worth the whole morning. He had not cried in this house since he was seventeen. He had made a rule.
Andre's hand came up and stopped, and this time Eric caught it and put it on his own face.
That was the sentence Eric had not known how to say. That was the entire morning, said in one thing he did with his body. He took the man's hand, the hand that had signed the deed to Rosa's cantina and burned the note and killed men in this house without raising his voice, and he laid it against his own wet cheek and held it there.
Andre made a sound.
It was not a word and it was not quite a breath. It was the sound a man makes when he has been holding something shut for a long time and it comes open, and Eric heard it and felt his knees go weak, and the next thing he knew his back was against the wall of his own bedroom with his hands in Andre's collar and Andre's mouth on his, and the kiss was nothing like the study.
The study had been the man leading. The study had been a long slow choreography of forks and napkins and the word please and the flat of a palm between his shoulder blades. This was not that. This was two men who had each spent the morning building a tomb for the same thing, finding out that the tomb was empty.
Andre's hands went to Eric's face and held it, both of them, and his mouth moved down along Eric's jaw to the hinge of it and then to his throat, and he said something against the skin there that Eric did not catch, something low and old and in a language Eric did not know, and Eric tipped his head back against the wall and let the stone take the weight of him and said, "Say it again."
"I said, in a language that has no more than two hundred living speakers, that I would like to spend a very long time doing this to you."
"Good. Do it."
Andre pulled back. His eyes were not flat anymore. The green of them had come up the way the sky comes up, and his pale throat moved as he swallowed, and there were faint blue veins under the skin there that Eric could see because he was close enough to count them.
"Tell me what you want," Andre said. "Not what you think I want. Tell me."
"I want you to stop being careful with me."
"I have never been careful with you."
"You've been careful with me every day of my life," Eric said, and his voice broke on it, and he did not care. "You gave me a room and a job and a shirt off your back and you never once told me you wanted me in a way I could hear. I have spent twelve years reading the way you do not look at me and the way you move the salad fork and the way you sleep in a chair on the nights I have a fever, and I am tired of reading. Stop making me read. Tell me."
Andre's hands came off his face, and came to the collar of his own black coat, and he took the coat off and folded it over the back of the chair by the dresser, and then he stood in his shirt with the collar open and looked at Eric from across the small room, and this time there was no aborted motion, no hand that came up and went back down.
"What I want," he said, "is to take you apart on this bed for the rest of the morning, and then to lie beside you in it with the door unlocked, and then to feed you, because you have eaten nothing since last night, and then to do it all again after dark, and to keep doing it for as long as you let me, and to have you say my name when you come. That is what I want. I want it in a way I did not know a man of my age could still want anything."
Eric's breath went out of him in a rush.
"You could have led with that," he said.
"I have had a long morning."
Eric laughed. It came up from his stomach and hurt his ribs, and then it turned into something else in his throat and he was moving across the room and taking the man's face in both hands the way he had been good enough to learn, and he kissed him, and Andre kissed him back, and the bed was right there and they went over onto it together.
Andre got his shirt off him first, the grey one, wet with sweat, and then pulled his own over his head and Eric, on his back on the mattress, took the whole of him in for the second time in twelve years. He had seen the man without a shirt once before, in a hospital room in the capital, when Andre had a bullet in his shoulder and refused the surgeon and lay in the bed pale as the sheets with his chest bare, and the guards had stood outside the door and Eric had stood inside it and stitched the wound himself. He had looked then. He had not been allowed to.
He looked now.
He looked now, and it was not the hospital bed and it was not the stitched shoulder and it was not the pale patient body under fluorescent light. It was the man in his own room, in his own house, with the door he had not used standing closed behind him, and he was built like something that had been made a very long time ago by people who cared about the shape of a thing. The muscle lay over him in long flat planes, the chest broad and the belly hard under the skin, and the skin itself was the pale of old marble with the blue tracery of veins running under it like the veins in a river stone. The faint scars of four centuries crossed him here and there, thin white lines the width of a hair, and Eric, who had spent twelve years learning to read the man's moods, could read his body the same way now: an old cut under the ribs, a starburst at the shoulder, one long seam down the flank that no surgeon of this century had closed.
He put his hands on the man's chest.
Andre went still under his palms. Not tense. Still, the way he had gone still in the corridor. Eric felt the heart under his hand beat once, slow and deep, and then again, and the interval between the beats was longer than any living heart should allow, and it was the strangest comfort he had ever been given, that slow impossible rhythm, like a clock in a house where no one lived.
"You can breathe," Eric said. "It feels like you forgot how."
"I am occupied."
"Doing what."
"Not frightening you."
Eric laughed low in his throat and ran his hands out along the man's ribs and up over his shoulders and down his arms, feeling the size of him, the pale weight of him, and Andre let himself be held open like that and did not move, did not take, did not steer, and Eric understood that he was being given the room to do what he liked, which was a thing no one in this house had ever given him.
So he did what he liked.
He pulled Andre down onto the bed by the back of the neck and kissed him, and the kiss was slow this time, the two of them learning the shape of each other's mouths after a night and a morning of not saying anything, and Andre's hand came to the side of Eric's face and stayed there, thumb along the cheekbone, and the other hand stayed flat on the mattress, holding his weight off, the way you brace yourself over something you do not want to crush. Eric took the wrist of that hand and moved it onto his own hip, and then lower, until it was on the top of his thigh, and he said, against the man's mouth, "I'm not glass," and Andre made that sound again, the one from the study door, and his fingers closed on the muscle of Eric's thigh and pulled him up the bed.
After that it went quick and then slow and then quick again, the way it goes when two people have wanted the same thing for a very long time and are no longer willing to pretend they have not. Andre got him out of his trousers and Eric got Andre out of his, and then they were skin to skin and Andre's mouth was at his throat and his pale thigh came between Eric's legs and pressed up, and Eric, flat on his back with his hands in the man's dark hair, let his hips rock into it and heard himself make a sound he had not made in twelve years.
Andre's mouth dragged down the tendon of his neck and then further, across the collarbone, and then down his chest, and the teeth were there and Eric felt them, small and sharp and careful, dragging, not breaking the skin. Andre's tongue found his nipple and closed over it, and the pressure went straight down through Eric's belly, and the hand that had been on his thigh slid up and took hold of him, palm wet with his own sweat and the slick already gathering at the head, and worked him with a slow, knowing grip that made Eric arch off the mattress and say the man's name.
Andre stopped and looked up at him.
"Say it again," he said, and his voice was almost gone, unused, low in a register Eric had never heard from him.
"Say what."
"My name."
Eric looked down the length of his own body at the man's face between his chest and his belly, and the green eyes had come all the way up now, no flatness left in them at all, and there was something in them that Eric had never seen there before and had no name for, and he gave him what he had asked for.
"Andre."
The man's breath came out hard against Eric's skin. He sat up over him and turned Eric onto his side with one hand on his hip, unhurried, and reached past him to the small drawer in the nightstand, and Eric, who had not put anything in that drawer in twelve years, heard the sound of a glass bottle being taken out, and turned his face into the pillow so the man could not see the whole of his expression.
"You keep it in my room," he said into the pillow.
"I keep it in every room," Andre said. "I have for years."
Eric did not answer that. There was no answer to that.
Andre's hand came back between his legs, slick and cold, and two fingers pressed into him slow while the other hand lay flat on his hip, holding him steady, and Eric pushed back into it and shut his eyes and let the whole morning go out of him. It did not hurt. The night had taken care of that. It was the same as the desk and it was nothing like the desk. At the desk there had been the fire and the flat of a palm between his shoulders and the feeling of a debt being paid down. Here there was only the slow spread of the fingers and the hard thigh behind him and the man's mouth at the back of his neck, saying something low and old and unreadable, and Eric, turned on his side with his cheek on the pillow, took the man's wrist and pulled the fingers out of himself and said, "Now. Just now."
Andre did it slow.
He came into him from behind, one long press that made Eric's breath go to pieces in his chest, and then stopped all the way in, and stayed there, both hands flat on Eric's hip and the side of his ribs, breathing hard against his shoulder blade. Eric, who had been taken a great many times by this man and had spent a great many nights not naming what it was, lay there with the man buried in him and felt something he had never once felt in this house, which was that he was the one with his hands on the wheel. Andre was waiting for him. Four hundred years old and turning beneath him like a ship at anchor, and he was waiting for Eric to say go.
"Go," Eric said, and Andre went.
It was long and it was good and it did not have an end to it that seemed like an ending. Andre moved in him slow and then deeper, his hand coming around front to take Eric again, and Eric pushed back to meet him and heard the sounds the two of them were making and did not care if the whole east wing heard it. His own hand went to the man's forearm where it lay across his flank, and he could feel the pale skin under his palm and the slow heart and the strength held in the whole length of the body behind him, and he thought, with a clarity that was almost painful in the middle of it, this is the man who found me across a continent, and I am the thing he is careful with.
Andre's mouth came to his shoulder and then to the side of his neck, and Eric felt the teeth there again, dragging, and this time they caught on the skin just enough to raise a line of heat, not enough to break it, and Andre went still inside him.
"Do not," Andre said, and it was not for Eric.
Eric turned his head on the pillow, so the man's mouth was at the base of his throat and his own lips were close to his ear. He was close, close enough that his own body had begun to tighten toward the edge, and he could feel the man pulsing inside him, held at the very edge of himself, breathing in short hard bursts against his skin, and the words came out of him because they had been there all morning and for a good long while before that, sitting in the bottom of him the way the stone sat on the lid of the wooden box on his dresser, patient and heavy and never once said.
"Would you," Eric said. "Would you ever drink from me."
Andre froze.
Not slowed, not stilled the way a man goes still in a corridor. Froze, the whole length of him, and the breath in his chest stopped as completely as if it had never needed air in the first place, and every place his skin touched Eric's went one degree colder, and the silence in the room thickened until Eric could hear the radiator ticking in the wall and, outside, faint and far, one of the small grey birds that lived in the hedge along the north wall.
For a long moment the man did not move and did not breathe and did not answer. His hand had stopped on Eric's front. His mouth was still set against the base of his throat, and the sharp small points of his teeth rested there, up against the thin skin over the artery, and Eric could feel the pulse in his own neck beating into them, one beat, two beats, three.
Then Andre pulled out of him.
He did it carefully and slowly, the way a man does a thing he has decided on, and he came up off the bed and stood with his back to it, and his hands were at his sides and closed, and the black trousers were still half down his hips and he did not seem to know or care, and he stood in the grey light of the window with his chest bare and did not look at Eric at all.
"That," he said, and stopped.
Eric lay on his side on the bed with the whole length of him aching and unfinished and his own breath still loud in the quiet room. The sting had come back up behind his eyes and this time it was not for the morning. He pushed himself up on one elbow.
"What," he said. "You can drink off a stranger in a hotel in the capital and you can't answer a question from me."
Andre turned his head. His eyes had gone from the green of new leaves to something darker at the edges, and there was a faint flush of color high on his cheekbones that ought not to have been there in a body as pale as his, and Eric, who had spent twelve years watching this man, did not know this face at all.
"You do not know what you have asked."
"I know exactly what I asked. I asked it in English. It's four words of English and you heard them fine the first time."
"You do not know what you have asked," Andre said again, and his voice was still low, still careful, still that ledger-reading evenness, and that was what decided it for Eric, that evenness. He had spent twelve years learning what the man's evenness hid. It hid everything. It hid the bullet in the shoulder and the note in the fire and the four hours he had stood in a bedroom composing three words.
"Then tell me," Eric said. He sat up the rest of the way, swung his legs off the bed, and stood, naked, on the cold floor, facing him. "You said last night you never give a straight answer and it has cost you everything. So give me one. What have I asked. Say it out loud."
Andre looked at him. His chest was bare and the grey light lay along the ridges of him, and he was not composed, not the way he was composed in the study with the forks and the napkins. There was color high on his cheekbones and his hands were closed at his sides and one of them, the left, was not quite steady.
"You have asked me to drink from you."
"I know that. I was there when I asked."
"You have asked me to open you," Andre said, "take your blood into my body, and hold you while I do it, and there is a difference between that and the drinking that happens in a hotel room in the capital, and you do not know what the difference is, and I am the only one in this house who does."
"Then explain it to me."
"Sit down."
"I don't want to sit down."
"Eric."
"Don't do that. Don't say my name in that voice and think it does the work for you." Eric crossed his arms over his bare chest and stood his ground, and the cold of the floor came up through his feet and steadied him, which was the first useful thing the floor had done all morning. "Four words, Andre. What is the difference."
Andre was quiet for a while. When he spoke he did not sound like a man reading a ledger anymore. He sounded like a man doing sums he did not want the answer to.
"When I feed, I take blood and nothing else," he said. "A stranger in a hotel, a man at a table in the east wing who owes me money, a woman in a doorway in the city who does not remember my face afterward. I take the blood and I close the wound and I walk away. It is a meal. It feeds a hunger that is only a hunger. It leaves nothing behind in either of us. This is why I have fed off strangers for four hundred years and off almost no one I keep."
"And me."
"Feeding from someone you hold is not a meal," Andre said. "It is a door. You do not drink from someone once and then never again, not when the blood is the blood of a person you want. The first taste sets. After that the body knows the other body. Mine would know yours the way it knows your handwriting. It would find you on the far side of an ocean, not by scent and a ledger, but by the blood itself, the way a river knows the sea. And yours would know mine. You have been in my house for twelve years and I have never once put my mouth to your throat and opened it, not on your twenty-first birthday, not the night Vasquez cut you, not any night since, and the reason is not restraint, Eric. It is that I have never been certain you would survive being wanted the way I want you, and I have not been willing to be the man who finds out."
Eric stood there with his arms crossed and his heart going hard and even.
"That's the whole truth," he said.
"That is the whole truth."
"You left something out."
"What."
"You said your body would know mine. You said nothing about the part where it hurts you to want."
For the first time since he had come into the room, Andre's face did something it had not done: it lost its composure entirely, for maybe half a second, and came back not quite to where it had been.
"You are not wrong," he said.
"Say the rest of it."
"The rest of it is that I have not fed from anyone I loved since Antonia, and that was two hundred and eleven years ago, and she is dead, and I killed the man who killed her, and I have not opened a person I held close since, and I do not know what it would do to me to have your blood in my mouth and my hands on you at the same time." He stopped. He was looking at Eric's throat, not his eyes, and it took him a beat to bring his gaze back up. "That is the whole of the answer. There is nothing under it."
"Then do it."
"Eric."
"I know what I want, Andre."
Andre looked at him for a long moment and said nothing at all. The composure came back slowly, the way water closes over a dropped stone, and Eric watched it happen and refused to let it stand.
Chapter excerpt truncated at the edge.