Page 57 of The House of the Red Balconies

“I know.” Hylas’s smile was wide and sunny. He wasn’t acting as if he felt anything but straightforwardly happy.

“I haven’t had a friend become a lover before,” Zo remarked lightly. “I didn’t know what I was missing.” He looked over his shoulder toward the tea tray, which was too far for him to reach. “Pass me the buns?”

Hylas untwined himself from Zo and sat up to grab the basket of buns and offer it. Zo selected one of Elpis’s new flourless creations.

“What makes someone your lover?” Hylas asked.

Separated now, they didn’t re-entwine themselves, though Zo wanted to. Hylas sat with his legs drawn up and his arms wrapped around his shins. Zo decided looking at him like this was a good consolation for not feeling his warmth. There were freckles on his elbows as well as his knees; Zo wasn’t sure whether he’d noticed that before.

“I suppose … if both of us want to keep sleeping together, then we’re lovers.”

Hylas nodded. “That makes sense.” He looked at the grass for a moment, thoughtful. “I had no idea that it would feel so … so much. So overwhelming. I thought … you’ll laugh, but I really thought I was doing this mostly for you, because it was something you wanted.”

Zo didn’t laugh. “It was. It is. I’m glad you could tell. That’s more than I could do—I didn’t think you even thought of me that way.”

“I didn’t, at first. Ridiculous, isn’t it? You’re so lovely. It’s not that I didn’t notice. You must remember how I was when I first saw you—I could barely form words. But I’d buried my desires for so long, I didn’t even recognize what I felt.”

“My poor Hylas,” Zo murmured, reaching out to stroke his cheek.

They took turns going to the men’s bath, for the sake of discretion—no one saw either of them, so they needn’t have bothered—and then sat on the divan in Zo’s room until mid-morning, talking and laughing, touching and not touching, able to admit now how little they wanted to be apart. When Hylas finally got up to go, it was only because he felt guilty for taking up too much of Zo’s time. He did not plan on even trying to do any work that day.

“Thanks for sitting with me for so long,” Zo said, smiling up at him. “I’m a bit on edge, when I think about how many people might know who I am now.”

“Oh, my prince!” Hylas dropped back down onto the divan and gathered Zo up in an awkward hug which Zo managed to smooth out, with a wriggle, into a comfortable embrace. “Do you want me to stay longer with you? I can stay if you want.”

“No, I’m being irrational. You should go do things. I’ll be here when you get back.”

So he left, wandered around the market for a bit, bought some of the spiced nuts that Zo liked and a new writing tablet for himself, then went to the government office and spent a couple of hours staring out the window and rearranging things on his desk.

He felt like a man carrying around some secret knowledge, the location of buried treasure or the answer to an unsolved mystery of the universe. He’d lain with the most beautiful man on the island twice in two days. He knew what a man’s seed tasted like—or at least what Zo’s tasted like, because Zo had told him that different men tasted subtly different, and the thought that he, Hylas, had a lover who knew such things was unspeakably exhilarating. He knew what he wanted Zo to do to him, and soon he would work up the courage to ask, though he would make it clear that it could wait until Zo felt up to it, because he had an inkling that Zo’s part might be strenuous. (He wanted to feel like a fortress taken by the enemy, like a scabbard with a sword very firmly rammed into it. He would come up with a less ridiculous way of expressing it.)

He was happy. He knew that his happiness couldn’t last, but happiness never did, any more than pain. The only thing to do was the cherish it while you could.

CHAPTER 18

“If the governor goes, will you go with him?”

Hylas jolted out of his thoughts and stared at the man beside his desk. Dorios, the clerk. And Hylas could have sworn that was the first thing he had said; he was not so far gone in his reverie about Zo that he had missed a whole conversation.

“If the governor goes?” he repeated.

“Have you not heard the rumour, then? Oh, I thought you would have, being the governor’s man. They’re saying he’s going to be recalled to Pheme.”

“Who’s saying that?” Hylas managed not to simply repeat “Recalled to Pheme?” like an idiot.

Dorios gestured around the office and listed some names. “Everyone I’ve talked to this morning. I don’t know who started the rumour, but it’s certainly spreading. So would you go with him, or … You’d be useful here, you know—I mean, quite apart from the aqueduct, which, it’s a shame about that, but … ”

He let the sentence hang unfinished. Hylas looked around the office and noticed that a number of people were surreptitiously paying attention to their conversation. Dorios wasn’t the only one who was interested in his answer. It was flattering, alarming, and not entirely unexpected.

“If Loukianos is recalled to Pheme,” he said slowly, “I will stay and see if his successor has any better luck with the aqueduct.”

“Good man!” said Dorios heartily.

Hylas left the office soon after that, as much to get away from everyone who was apparently interested in his future plans as anything. But he did also want to corner Loukianos and find out what was going on. His situation with the governor was such that he didn’t really have much to fear from being blunt. The man had flirted with him, propositioned him, thrown up on him, and didn’t pay him a salary. Perhaps it was only to be expected that he would be prepared to leave the island without telling Hylas.

Given the warm weather and the fact that he was possibly about to lose the governorship—and should probably have been doing something about that—Hylas expected to find Loukianos in his garden. He was right. He was shown to the couches in the grotto, and after a few minutes, Loukianos came strolling up in work clothes with dirt in his hair, pulling off leather gardening gloves.

“Hylas! What can I do for you?”