Do you like this, he says.
His thrusts shove me forward onto my elbows. It’s all a mess of sweat and skin. Nowhere to go. His fingers will leave bruises on my hips like a chain of dark roses.
I don’t know what he wants me to say.
Do you like this?
I tell him no. The hands of strangers smudge the memories of Isidore that once gleamed upon my skin.
Laughing, he drags me against him. His fingernails leave bloody trails down my chest. A hard hand encloses my cock.
But you want it, he says.
I shake my head. My hair clings to my neck, heavy, damp and itchy.
He frigs me while he fucks me. He makes me gasp for him and cry out.
Then he makes me spend.
Consciousness came back to Micha in jagged pieces. Slowly, in the darkness behind his eyes, he taught himself to recognise anew the borders between dreams and reality, past and present, memories and nightmares.
He felt weak beyond reckoning, to say nothing of ill, but the worst of the pain had departed with the phantasmagoria of delirium and the torments of opium withdrawal. There was a familiar haze in his mind, a softness to the world. He tried to remember what had happened or where he was, but he found only fragments. A night that could have been any other night. Smoke. Shadows. And a name. Thomas?
Slowly, he became aware of a voice. The voice seemed familiar to him, but that was impossible.
Words washed over him.
“‘But the sun itself, however beneficent, generally, was less kind to Coketown than hard frost, and rarely looked intently into any of its closer regions without engendering more death than life. So does the eye of Heaven itself become an evil eye, when incapable or sordid hands are interposed between it and the things it looks upon to bless.’”
He pushed open his eyes and was immediately dazzled.
The voice stopped abruptly. And then there was a cool hand on his. Micha tried to shake it off, but he was unable to move. He opened his mouth, but all that came out was a dry croak. Immediately a glass of water was brought to his lips. The first few droplets were cool as diamonds and tasted sweeter than anything he could ever have imagined. He jerked forward, eager for more, and choked almost immediately. The hand steadied him, and a second gathered the water as it trickled from his mouth.
“Careful.” The strange-familiar voice had a peculiar, pleasing timbre to it, the cut-glass vowels of privilege softened by calm, careful rhythms. It was as unexpectedly lovely as the water.
“Don’t,” Micha rasped. “Don’t touch me.”
There was a swift, clumsy withdrawal. “I’m terribly sorry. But you should drink, if you can.”
“I can do it.”
With an effort that was as much will as physical strength, he tried to enfold his fingers around the glass. His nails were ragged and rimmed with dirt, his hands inelegant and wasted by illness, a wretched reflection of the white, long-fingered, and gentlemanlyhand that supported the other side of the glass. Micha hardly dared contemplate what had happened to the rest of him. Without his looks, he had no profession, and with no profession he had no money, and without money, there would be no opium. And without opium, his world was nothing. He was nothing.
He tugged impatiently away from the stranger who had tried to help him, taking sole possession of the glass, though his perspiring fingertips smeared the clear surface. His whole arm began shaking. He fastened his spare hand over his forearm to steady himself, raising the glass inch by inch towards his mouth. The surface of the water seemed to shine from a great distance, and he could have wept for wanting it. It was almost within reach when his fingers betrayed him. The glass slid from his grip, and there was nothing he could do to catch it. Water soaked the bedsheets.
“Fuck.”
There was a sharp intake of breath from beside him. And Micha looked up, furious and mortified, only to careen headlong into the forgiving gaze of the deepest eyes he had ever seen. A shudder ran through him, for, across the breadth of human weakness, he could not abide kindness.
The man caught the empty glass before it rolled off the bed and refilled it from a nearby ewer. “Please, permit me to help you. There is no shame in frailty.”
Micha tried to laugh, but the air just scraped harshly across his vocal cords until he began to cough instead. And then he had no choice but to accept the water that was held to his lips. He clamped a pathetically feeble hand about the stranger’s wrist, exerting what little control he could. The man seemed perfectly willing to be guided, his slight movements as smooth as a quiet stream beneath Micha’s fitful directions. Under his palm, Micha could feel flowing heat and the steady throb of a pulse, pristine skin and slender bones. If he had possessed the strength, he would have left his thumbprints behind like footsteps upon fresh snow, anything to ruin the serenity of such uncomprehending, careless beauty.
But the effort of trying to drink, then drinking, had apparently exhausted him. He fell back against the pillows, his eyes closing of their own volition. His last conscious thought, which was really little more than a blurred sensation, was of an endless, unchanging warmth beneath his hand.
73
There is a pale shadow of Isidore in this youth. In his golden hair and his apple green eyes, rose leaf lips and sun-touched skin. But he is not Isidore. He is uncertain. Rapt, he undresses me, touches my well-touched skin. His breath is warm, his tongue is light. He is the explorer of a land with no secrets left. He says he wants to watch my face. I try to give him a performance of pleasure but, as he sinks into me, his eyes look through me to some private paradise I have long since forgotten how to find. He squanders care on me as though I am precious. Afterwards, he asks, was it all right, was he pleasing, did I like him. I tell him, get the fuck away from me. Before he sees me weep.
