“I killed Dara,” Noam insisted, head spinning and heat prickling against his eyelids. “I killed my dad because I never got him out of that neighborhood. I made my—I made my mother kill herself, because I ... I ...”
Lehrer grasped his shoulder, and Noam couldn’t finish. His throat was too swollen to speak. He let Lehrer draw him into the apartment, flicking on lamplights as they went. In the narrow hall past Lehrer’s front door, it felt like someone had struck a match and consumed all the oxygen in the air. Noam couldn’t breathe. And Lehrer didn’t say anything, just let Noam go, justlookedat him. Looked at him until Noam couldn’t stand it anymore, dizzy from staring into those creepy fucking eyes.
Finally, Noam managed to choke out the words. “I hate myself.”
“I know,” Lehrer said quietly. “I hate myself sometimes too.”
For a moment all Noam could hear was his own heartbeat. Lehrer’s gaze hadn’t fluctuated—didn’t, even when Noam took a step forward and put his hands on Lehrer’s face, pulled himself up onto the balls of his feet, and kissed him.
Second sin.
They’d had sex that night, and Noam woke up in Lehrer’s bed the next morning with the sheets tangled around his legs and Lehrer already in the kitchen making breakfast. Noam had tried to apologize to him, awkward in sock feet while Lehrer cracked an egg over the frying pan.
“It’s fine,” Lehrer said. “Let it go.”
So what other choice did Noam have? He tried to let it go. He took a shower in Lehrer’s bathroom, standing on Lehrer’s stone-tile floor, used Lehrer’s pine-scented shampoo. Got dressed in the same clothes he’d worn the previous night. Lehrer walked him to the door, and they both stood there, uncomfortable silence stretching out until at last Noam couldn’t resist filling it.
“Okay,” he said. “Bye.”
Only Lehrer didn’t say anything, just nodded, and Noam still didn’t leave. Couldn’t.
He took a half step forward and stopped.
It was Lehrer who closed the rest of the distance between them, Lehrer whose hands found Noam’s hips and pushed him back against the shut door, Lehrer’s body hot and firm where it pressed against his.
And it only occurred to Noam later that Lehrer wasn’t drunk the first time, or the second. And he hadn’t hesitated.
It was a little weird, but at the time it’d been reassuring in its own way. Especially in those intervening weeks, when Lehrer barely acknowledged what had happened. They still had their lessons every day, but Lehrer scarcely seemed to glance twice at him. Lehrer’s apparent disinterest threw Noam’s own desire into sharper relief: every time Lehrer had touched him—their fingers grazing when Lehrer handed him a book, the paternalistic pressure of Lehrer’s hand on Noam’s shoulder when he introduced him to another politician—Noam had tallied up the contact in a sort of mental reckoning. Those touches were suddenly imbued with meaning:He wants me, he wants me not.
So when Lehrer’s restraint finally broke, three weeks later, Noam didn’t hesitate. He threw himself into the affair with all he had.
Third sin.
After Faraday—after all Noam’s memories had come rushing back, blood welling to fill the wound—Noam had wondered if Dara had craved Lehrer’s affection the same way Noam had. As if Lehrer was the most intoxicating drug in the world and everyone else just addicts scrambling for another fix. And every time Lehrer pulled away, you wanted him more, and more, until you would happily strip your dignity down to the bone if it meant Lehrer wanted you back.
Now look where we are,Noam thought as they both got dressed for the Keatses’ gala—in the same room, wordless, the only sound that of rustling cloth and the spritz of aftershave.
But whatever other lies Lehrer might have told, his grief was real.
The two of them built this hell together, and together they were damned to it.
CHAPTERFOUR
DARA
They’d bought the suit secondhand in west Durham, untailored and sewed from cheap cotton, but it fit surprisingly well. Well enough, at least, that the man in charge of checking invitations didn’t give him the once-over the old Dara would have given someone walking up to a high-society gala in anything short of bespoke.
Then again, the invitation was averygood fake.
So good a fake, in fact, that it wasn’t a fake at all. Lehrer really should have done a better job sniffing out Sacha loyalists in his new administration. Not that beingGrayson Heath, Minister Holloway’s nephew, was going to get him very far at a party full of people who’d known him since he was a terrifyingly telepathic four-year-old.
Dara smiled at the invitation checker all the same and let the footman take his coat.
The last time he’d visited the Keatses’ home, he’d been thirteen. Their daughter, Eleanor, took him up to her bedroom and tried to kiss him against the floral wallpaper. He’d spent the rest of the evening avoiding her and reading trashy novels in the toilet while pretending to have food poisoning.
Eleanor wouldn’t be here, of course. She’d been a year older, and last he heard, she’d graduated Level II and promptly married the Norwegian ambassador to avoid military service. She lived in Oslo now.
He didn’t miss Eleanor, but he missed a lot more than he’d have thought about being thirteen. For one, the ability to go hide in a bathroom.
