Gilles called again.
Daniel could not answer.
Lavelle disappeared, Daniel watched him go, and there was nothing he could say.
"Daniel?" Gilles called again, voice morning-rough, sharply edged with worry and pleading.
It was not yet dawn. The shadows in the loft were still deep as pools, the air heavy and granular with the dark. They might be in a mausoleum or cage as much as they were at home; everything was tarnished silver, clouded and dim.
Daniel carefully unbent his fingers from the elevator cage and returned to the bed. The curtains stirred against his legs and he waited another moment, watching Gilles roll onto his back and lift his head from the pillow. The pillow's wrinkles scored Gilles' face, criss-crossing his red eyes and bristly cheek, and he blinked back at Daniel, sleepy and confused.
Against the white sheets, his lean body was very dark, a tangle of cords that stirred and lifted as Gilles reached for him.
Daniel came up to the side of the bed, lips aching for a sour, lingering morning kiss, for routine that could supplant the strangeness and pain of the previous night.
"I'm going to take a bath," Daniel said, but Gilles caught his arm and pulled him down.
They rolled across the bed, Gilles' sleep-hot skin sliding against Daniel's, their legs interlacing and scissoring, and Gilles still clung to Daniel's arm.
"Just a bath --" He felt sticky, coated with the remnants of sex inside and out. He thought of the warm water pooling in the tub, pouring over his skin, with something like longing.
"Let me wash you," Gilles said and straddled Daniel, pinning his arms at his sides and covering him. He lowered his face, the stubble on his cheek rasping against Daniel, abrading and bringing up heat, sweat, and sorrow.
Gilles licked his chest, gnawed along his jaw, bit the knob of each shoulder, muttering and groaning as he moved.
This was cleansing with teeth and tongue, hard as an alleycat's, baptism interspersed with murmured questions and incantations, and Daniel quivered inside. Outside, he was still, feeling his skin as if from a great height, as if through Gilles' eyes, carved into being by the words that escaped Gilles' grinding jaw.
"Did he kiss you here?" Five fingers spread over Daniel's ribs and squeezed, reminded him of the structure of his flesh.
"Here?" Incisors scored his navel.
"Touch you here?" Jut of hipbone, curve of waist, and Gilles' fingers, gaze, words *everywhere*.
Gilles seemed to need to erase it all. Any remnant of what they had done, of Lavelle's presence in their bed -- every touch and kiss and heavy-lashed glance -- was to be scoured, erased, replaced. His attention was exact and fierce, not loving in any sense, whether from tenderness or the wrenching intentness Daniel had come to associate with Gilles.
Daniel held still, all too aware of the passion that coiled and waited inside Gilles, the glimpses of it in his eyes and portrayed in his tattoos. This was not sex, though Gilles' hard prick dragged along Daniel's thigh, and Daniel himself could hardly breathe for the tension and heat in his own groin. Sex, and love, and conversation: All those things had momentum, moved forward and upward, rushed toward a consummating, imploding point, then spread out, warm and slack and safe.
This baptism was unending and relentless, never varying its pace.
He wanted to accede to all of this. He would have acceded, lain back and begged for forgiveness, let Gilles enact another *scene* of punishment and retribution not all that different from the one with the whip and Mick's glowering face, but he was not at fault.
Neither of them was to blame for the previous night.
Daniel wasn't even entirely sure that it was such a blameworthy *event*, but, whether that was the case or not, he certainly wasn't the tempter, nor the sinner.
He had found Gilles with Lavelle. He had -- they would have --. Daniel's thoughts faltered and Daniel opened his mouth to protest.
Lifted his head from the pillow and caught Gilles' eye and they regarded each other, Gilles' face twisted and illegible, Daniel's mouth open, and suddenly he heard what Gilles was saying.
"Munda cor meum ac labia mea --" Rough, pleading words, matching the wet spikes of Gilles' lashes, heavy with tears. "Ita me tua grata miseratione dignare mundare --"
Daniel touched Gilles' cheek, rubbing at the tears with his thumb. "It's all --"
Gilles shook his head. "Lavabo inter innocentes manus meas. Ne perdas cum impiis, animam meam: et cum viris sanguinum vitam meam."
This was no longer baptism, and a far cry from simply washing. Daniel traced the curving line of Gilles' grimace, and all he could do was nod. This was plea, and confession, this was the only way Gilles knew to translate the weight and heat of sorrow into something he could speak.
"Tuum cor," Daniel said softly, "et tua labia --"
"Et praesta, ut in me non remaneat scelerum macula, quem pura et sancta refecerunt Sacramenta --" Gilles said.
Daniel knew the Latin, the English, and he echoed it silently back to Gilles with dry lips and aching skin: *and grant that no trace of sin be found in me, whom these pure and holy mysteries have renewed*.
Something shifted, lightly as the curtains, between them. Gilles' tears soaked his cheeks and caught in the rough hairs of his beard, while Daniel reached for him, wound around him.
The apology showed Daniel something he had never understood. Never at the monastery, never once in these weeks with Gilles: Prayer was plea, pure and rough and shaking with need, whatever the language and to whomever it was spoken.
Clinging to Daniel, Gilles curled around him, his face buried in Daniel's neck.
"Our secret," Gilles whispered against Daniel's throat. "No one need know."
It was question and statement both. Drawing his fingers through Gilles' hair, Daniel nodded. The darkly-twining, two-headed figure of Theo and Inez condensed in the shadows by the corner of the bed, reminding him that nothing was secret.
"Yes," he told Gilles, squeezing shut his eyes. "Just ours."
The curtains lifted and fell in the breeze from the fans as the room slowly brightened and their bodies melted fractionally, gluing together with sweat and tears.
Dawn came and Gilles slept.
Another shift would come, Daniel was sure of it.
He nearly felt the change tremoring unseen, just outside of his vision, lying in wait. Something large and coiled as a beast, tiger or wolf or basilisk, with sharp hidden teeth and ferocious power of movement. But he could not *see* it, could only expect it, and he shivered through uncertain dreams and less certain thoughts as Gilles clung to him.
*
Daniel climbed up the narrow stairwell and let himself out onto the roof. After talking to Gilles, after having bathed and eaten, he was more confused and disturbed than ever. Gilles had risen, eaten half a roll, and kissed him before setting off on some errand too important to trust to anyone else.
Daniel paced the length of the roof, willing the air to carry away his clatter of his thoughts.
The detritus of the party littered the roof. Shattered wine glasses, lengths of bright paper, the satin lapels of a dinner jacket and spilled jet bangles from someone's dress. The red velvet cushions that had softened the benches were askew or completely thrown to the ground amid broken glass and dropped food crowded with insects.
What he saw now was a withering, hurried along by the morning wind, of an interstitial zone, the passing of a carnival, leaving only greasy paper and overturned glasses in its wake.
He settled out of the way of the wind next to the lean-to under which he usually studied. On a velvet cushion, incongruously lush and vibrant against the silvered morning, and looked out over the city. His back to the sea, its slowly-crawling noise constantly in his ears, he watched the city.
It was vast and irregular, a collage of sharp angles and intense colors, glinting water towers and rough stucco walls, red metal roofs and swinging traffic lights. From this height, it seemed to creep with concealed life, souls the size of fireflies glittering and hoping. He saw it all anew, huge and incomprehensible, remote and untouchable.
He knew absolutely nothing.
The thought came to him, and it was not a shock. Nothing violent occurred as it arrived and settled in and immediately became familiar. It was only the muted whisper of a curtain lifting in the breeze through an open window, of a page peeling back in a book.
Gilles spoke of what he knew as if it were property. What you know, his words suggested, is your source of value. Knowledge was itself an economy, full of double-dealing and speculation and blackmarket hoarding.
The extent of what Daniel knew was a single image -- Theo and Inez by the bed -- and that was worse than useless. That was sickening and guilt-inducing, and he wished he could forget it.
He knew, and possessed, nothing; all he had was what Gilles gave him.
*
But Gilles acted as if the apologetic baptism were the end of the story. He seemed, in the next several days, to treat Daniel as he always had. For his part, Daniel acceded to the charade as he could not have done to the blame.
More than anything else, he was relieved. He sat in Gilles' lap, kissed him gratefully, donned his softer-than-silk clothing and slept sprawled on top of him at night. He danced with Gilles at the jewel-box nightclub that had burst into existence up the back stairs from an old pool hall, ate with him at the loft or in the stucco-encrusted French restaurant around the corner, fetched him coffee from Alfredo's cart in the mornings and handed him scalpels, tweezers, or hex-books while Gilles worked at his large table.
This was normal, as far as Daniel could tell. This was how they lived here.
The city lay beneath lemony storm-clouds and the palm trees shook out shadows as he passed; men danced in the streets and girls shouted at each other from open windows. Glimpsed from every window, the sea curled like ripped green paper. When Daniel knelt before his altar each morning, Gilles would ruffle his hair and tease him about false idols; later, as Daniel studied or, simply, read, Gilles lobbed spitballs at him and turned quickly away.
The balls bloomed into dry paper flowers in his palm, covered with Gilles' small, Gothic script, packed with endearments.
He could ask for anything. He knew that now, knew that whatever it was that had happened with Lavelle had been because *he* asked for it. There was power there, in the way Gilles looked at him sidewise, how he traced the back of Daniel's neck with his finger whenever he passed, how he would set aside his wine at dinner and open his mouth but say nothing, just *look* at Daniel.
In the bath one night, Daniel knelt before Gilles, tracing the vine of one bleeding rose that coiled over Gilles' shoulder with a soapy finger.
"How did you get so many?" he asked. "So many tattoos."
Old ones, small and gone blurry with age, Gilles received on the street, with his small gang. The plain Egyptian-style eyes, the angular cuneiform that named masters and hierarchies.
Larger, brighter ones, he said as he shaved Daniel -- Daniel lying on his back, legs hooked over the sides of the tub, with Gilles kneeling and pulling taut the ticklish, oversensitive skin on Daniel's testicles with his right hand while he whisked the straight razor with his left and made Daniel gasp and grit his teeth against moving -- those tattoos he received in prison. He stood Daniel up, tottering and brimming with heat, to dry him thoroughly with a wide white towel, and showed the first prison tattoo on the outside of his left hand, curving script that read *Ave Maria, Ecce Homo* over his knuckles.
"There was a brilliant young man there," he said, wrapping and folding the towel around Daniel's waist. "All his needles were modified from biros and bird feathers. Later, I learned to do it myself."
Gilles smelled like incense and soap when he sat on the couch and drew Daniel into his lap. Daniel kissed the soft lobe of his ear, then whispered, "I want one."
"You do not."
"I do. Want you to draw on me, make me something new."
Gilles' fingers clawed at the towel, then slipped inside to grip Daniel's thigh. His eyes closed before he spoke. "Mark this beautiful skin?" he asked, sliding his hand farther upward, running his thumb over the shorn, yearning skin of Daniel's balls. "No."
"We mark all the time," Daniel said, smiling as he pushed against Gilles' hand and Gilles opened his eyes. "Bruises, bites."
Gilles smiled back. "Yes. We do, but --"
"May I?" Daniel asked, and his throat burned, closing up, when he heard himself. He really could ask for anything, and that was too much, responsibility and power and more things he didn't know how to name. "I --"
Gilles pulled him close, nuzzling his ear and laughing lightly while his free hand sketched the air over Daniel's belly. "There. How's that?"
Daniel looked down and saw -- a gargoyle. No, an imp, a tiny little monster with bulbous eyes and curling claws, drawn in heavy black outline, blinking up at him. At a murmur from Gilles, it hunched, then sprang forward, running up Daniel's chest and down his arm, leaving behind tiny ink tracks that tickled and pricked.
It leapt onto Daniel's hip, going invisible in the air, thickening back when it landed, and ducked under the towel, exploring his crotch and making him laugh helplessly.
Gilles bit the curve of Daniel's ear and snapped his fingers, bringing the imp back to Daniel's chest, where it nosed around one nipple and nuzzled it with its blunt, chilly snout. Daniel couldn't stop laughing.
The laughter at its antics felt rich, intoxicating as wine had never been. Daniel's eyes watered and his chest tightened.
"A real one," Daniel said when he caught his breath from laughing. "You know what I meant."
The imp squatted in the center of his chest now and winked at him.
"That's real," Gilles said. "Look, he likes you."
The imp lowered his head and made as if to kiss Daniel's breastbone. His mouth left behind spidery, trailing letters that spelled out *AMOR*.
Daniel choked on another round of laughter, his head falling back against the arm of the couch as Gilles chased the imp with his fingers, tickling and maddening Daniel's skin until he writhed and gasped. He clutched at Gilles' head when Gilles bent to lick up the letters of *AMOR* and tugged open the towel to close his fist around Daniel's cock.
The imp faded as Gilles ignored it and gave all his attention to Daniel, and Daniel did not notice its disappearance until well after he'd jack-knifed in Gilles' arms and come in his hand, panting for breath around Gilles' thrusting tongue.
"Just like that," Gilles murmured against Daniel's cheek, smearing his sticky hand up Daniel's chest. "So red, my boy. So beautiful."
Sex slid in and out of being; maybe it was always happening. Every glance and brush of bodies, every word and sigh, was another step in flirtation. Daniel could be patient; he *was* patient. When he had the strength, he stood and led Gilles to the bed. Opened the sheets and pressed Gilles onto his back before climbing on top of him, kneeling there, holding Gilles' hands on his waist.
He was patient, but he doubted that he knew how to speak, what to say. Gilles was fiercely beautiful, lying there, his broad chest rising and falling, the tattoos writhing and the planes of his muscles shifting.
If he could just be a body, a slip of skin knotted with pleasure, it would all be so much easier. Gilles could touch him, Daniel could feel it, and there would be no thought, no doubt.
No love, either.
Loosening his hand from Daniel's, Gilles raised it and traced the swell of Daniel's lower lip. "Scared?"
"No," Daniel said. "I -- No, not scared."
"At the church," Gilles said. "You were frightened."
Daniel blinked, kissing Gilles' finger before it dropped away. "Yes. I suppose -- Yes, I was."
"Why?"
"I was wrong," Daniel said. "I thought -- I thought you were taking me back. Leaving me there."
"And if I had, which I would not, what then?"
"I don't want to go back." The certainty that Gilles was taking him back, abandoning him at St. Athanasius, had overtaken Daniel. He felt it again now, or a shadow of that certainty, souring into fear, and he swallowed hard against it.
Perhaps doubt was preferable to certainty.
Gilles' mouth curved and he cocked his head, damp hair whispering against the pillow. This was his patient, amused expression, the one he often wore, the one Daniel inspired, though he didn't know how or why. "So you would leave again."
When Gilles said it like that, so plainly and almost *lightly*, it sounded terribly simple. Daniel had left once, walked out of the church without looking at Father Theo's narrow, hunched back, and he had never gone back. "Yes, I would."
"Well, then. It's the same now. No one can force you stay here, you know."
Daniel squinted; Gilles had slipped from the simple to the absurd. "I *want* to stay here."
Gilles smiled, his hand lifting to rub at his chin, and he let out a long, soft breath. "I'm glad to hear that."
"You doubted?"
"I always doubt," Gilles said and cupped Daniel's cheek. "You may have noticed."
Nodding, Daniel sucked in a breath. When he spoke again, the words surprised him. "I'm sorry about Lavelle."
Gilles' eyes squeezed closed and he shook his head a little. "Are you? Do you regret it?"
If Daniel said yes, Gilles might be reassured, even delighted. But he was squinting at Daniel, hand on his face, and he had already asked, already questioned Daniel's apology. He had already made it a potential, provisional lie.
"I regret hurting you," Daniel said slowly and Gilles closed his eyes. "But, no. Not the rest of it."
They were silent then, Gilles pulling Daniel closer and resting cheek against the top of Daniel's head. The silence might have worried Daniel; perhaps it should have worried him. Words deserting Gilles was akin to fish fleeing a river. Daniel felt no worry, however. He listened to the whisper of Gilles' breath, the brush of Gilles' skin under his cheek, the beat of the fan over their heads, and let that be enough.
Maybe Gilles already knew how quiet love could be. Outside of bruises and harsh cries, away from spangling strobe lights and deep shadows, just here, quiet and soft-edged. Maybe he did, because Gilles knew more, and more deeply, about more things than Daniel had ever seen. Maybe -- anything was possible -- but Daniel doubted that he did.
He doubted because, later, when the room had brightened and he tipped back his head, Gilles was looking down at him. His cheeks, Daniel saw clearly, were wet and his eyes stained red.
"Don't, please --"
Gilles swiped the back of his hand over his face. "Sentimental old fool, you see."
"I did it, didn't I? By -- kissing him. Wanting him."
"You fell, yes," Gilles said. "Slightly, just a fractional descent, but you fell nonetheless."
The air tasted sour, briney, as Daniel opened his mouth.
"But this --" Gilles indicated his wet cheeks, then touched the tip of Daniel's nose. "All this, this was my doing. You fell in my mind, nowhere else. You remain -- you --"
In the dark of the room, the air was blue and shadowy as steel, and they spoke quietly. There was no one to overhear them, Daniel knew that, no one but the two of them, and that was why they lowered their voices.
Gilles grinned, or smirked, or grimaced, when Daniel caught his eye, but the expression loosened and lifted while they regarded each other, until both were smiling.
"Give me grace to eschew doing anything more that I should rue," Gilles whispered hoarsely.
"Yes," Daniel said.
Gilles ran his thumb over Daniel's brow, then each eyelid in turn. "When our tears testify our ruth, we need not rue, or of them be ashamed."
His own eyes were wet -- because he had fallen, because he possessed far more than he wanted or needed, because Gilles, pained, frightened him -- and Daniel could only nod.
"Yes," he said again, and that was enough.
*
The library was hushed, even quieter than St. Athanasius's. The church creaked in the wind off the sea and its stained-glass rattled and jangled within its sills. But the library was true quiet, the hush of paper and held breaths; this, Daniel imagined, was what it had once been like within Gilles' mind.
Four rows of wide, low tables filled the room, their polished surfaces studded with reading lamps that cast sharp, white light in precise lozenges. All around the room, books rose three stories high, silent and still on their shelves.
Daniel was here to deliver a tiny velvet satchel, half the size of his own palm, to someone named Rosie Berg. He wore his light gray suit and a white shirt. While Gilles said that Daniel could never hope to blend in, being a luna moth among creeping caterpillars, Daniel thought he might as well try. He carried a leather-bound notebook and box of pencils.
Having asked for Miss Berg, he loitered at the mahogany reference desk, admiring the library. He preferred Gilles', where light fell across the shelves and burned the spines into vibrant colors, but this was an interesting space nonetheless. Communal, the scholars sharing tables, but intensely private all the same. No one looked directly at anyone else; every glance was a footnote, sidewise and small.
Miss Berg was Joan's friend, the redhead from the party. Here in the library, humbled by the soaring books, she seemed much smaller. More delicate, wrapped in a gray dress, her hair tied decorously on the nape of her neck, her smile when she saw him wide but thin.
She greeted him warmly, clasping his hand in both her own, leading him to the last chair at the last table in the corner. She treated him like one of the scholars.
"Would you like to see some of our books?" she asked.
Daniel nodded as he hung his jacket over the back of the chair. Gilles' clients frequently received deliveries at work; he had eaten lunches, browsed imported scarves, ridden on the tourist paddleboats around the bay, all while waiting for a chance to pass over his delivery.
"Take a seat," she said. "Let me show you, and we can...exchange our treasures."
The delivery he carried for her rested in the false bottom of his pencil tin. Glancing around, noting how the other researchers conducted themselves, he imitated them as best he could. He opened his notebook, unlatched the tin, rolled up his sleeves, and studied the pages of his notebook where notes would have been if he were a scholar.
Miss Berg returned with a small armful for him, containing a large folio, several smaller books, and a roll of parchment on top.
"Enjoy," she whispered and smiled as he slid the delivery over to the side of the table with his pencil, then tipped it to the floor. She bent to retrieve it, the light catching her hair in long licks of flame, then straightened, stowing it in her pocket and hurrying back to the desk.
Daniel opened the smallest book, a worn, soft-cornered thing barely larger than his own hand. The type was heavy and closely-packed, the date of printing late in the eighteenth century, and the illustrations dark engravings of monstrous dreams and screaming human faces. Frightened, he turned to the next, taller and slimmer volume. Its pages were onionskin, fine and half-transparent, and the margins on each embraced the narrow columns of poetry and prayer.
How Miss Berg had chosen these books, he couldn't work out. There were visions, prayers, accounts of sea voyages and cemetery registers. Perhaps they had been chosen for their age, perhaps for their beauty. He paged through the biggest volume, skimming the entries in a captain's journal, then returned to the smaller book of poetry and prayer. He realized, opening it to the end, that this was a bound copy of several pamphlets, printed at different times, accounts of witches and leviathans intermingling with the prayers.
Whether it was the engraving a square-faced priest yelling in the midst of an angry crowd, a gibbet rising in the background, or the line of poetry about *fair hearths wait for me, if only I cleave to him*, or the combination of spectacle and meditation, Daniel knew that Gilles should have this book.
He glanced around the room. Miss Berg was at the desk, her back turned, and the other scholars were bent over their work, oblivious to everything around them. He could take it.
Gilles' own library was full of books with the marks of other libraries, from Paris and Rome to Calcutta and Kyoto. He would only smile when Daniel asked about the marks, then murmur something about desire being nine-tenths of possession, and possession nine-tenths of the law.
Law, property, desire: The problem resolved itself in Daniel's mind and he closed the book. The decision was two-fold; Gilles should not simply have the book, but Daniel should give it to him. He had nothing to give Gilles besides himself, and there must be something in the way of repayment.
He was a scholar here; that is, he pretended to be one, so he was. They stole from each other constantly, citing or failing to identify their sources. Whether they did or not, they lifted entire passages and reworked them, made something new out of material not their own. Like Gilles bent over *his* table, sifting out ground bezoars, like the monks at their scrolls, like each body at the tables here: they all borrowed, memorized, transformed.
He slid the book into his notebook, then closed his tin of pencils and packed his bag. Breathless, anxiety lying taut and warm over him as he rose, Daniel shouldered on his coat, swung the bag onto his shoulder, and left at a carefully hurried pace, waving goodbye to Miss Berg and tapping his wrist as if to apologize for not having time to talk.
Gilles was not in the loft when Daniel arrived home. He did not come home for several hours, during which Daniel had the time -- too much time -- to doubt what he'd done, whether Gilles would want the book, whether anyone had seen him take it.
Then Gilles *was* home, stepping out of the elevator, smiling, and Daniel ran into his arms.
"Slow down," Gilles said, laughing, as Daniel took his hand and pulled him to the dining table. "I didn't expect you back so soon."
"Close your eyes --" Daniel settled on Gilles' lap and drew the bag toward him across the table. He hadn't dared open his bag while he'd been alone; superstitious, maybe, but he worried that if he *saw* it again before Gilles did, it would crumble to dust and blow away. But it was there, snug in the notebook, waiting. "Hold out your hand."
Gilles started to say something, but then shrugged and obediently extended his hand. When Daniel placed the book in his palm, Gilles' eyes flew open.
"What's this now?"
Anxiety and pleasure felt perfectly similar just then, hot and tight and full of wild, constrained hope. "For you," Daniel said. "A present --"
Gilles bent over the book, opening it with thumb and forefinger, and Daniel could feel him holding his breath, his jaw tightening as he paged through it. He went back and forth, skipping several pages, then moving back, tracing the borders on the engravings and forming the words of prayers with his lips.
Daniel held his own breath.
"I ought to be very cross with you," Gilles said at last. He looked up, squinting slightly at Daniel. "I ought to lecture you about stealing. Perhaps even raise my voice."
Daniel saw how Gilles held the book -- tenderly, almost cradling it, fingers spread to support its leaves. "But you can't."
"No --" Gilles smiled broadly. "No, I can't. Thank you."
Exhaling with more than relief, Daniel kissed Gilles' temple. "You're welcome."
"My recompense is thanks, that's all," Gilles said, encircling Daniel in his arms and kissing the side of his neck. "Yet my good will is great, though the gift small."
Outside, an ambulance hooted its long, sorrowing shriek and Daniel shivered, wondering who was hurt, what tragedy had passed unseen below him.
"No repayment," he started to say, then shifted to lean back against Gilles' forearm. He tilted his head, taking in Gilles' handsome face, the pucker of thought over his nose and creases fanning out from his eyes. Payment, gifts, knowledge: He understood for a moment, felt resolution tremble like water-magic, and held his breath until faith settled through him. "Tell me everything."
"The less you know about me," Gilles said, "the safer you remain."
"Safe from what?" Daniel asked, then realized that Gilles had not said he was safe, only, simply, safer. Comparative, and thus relative.
Gilles circled his hand. "Enemies and danger, of course. You think, what? There are eyes on you for you? For your beauty?"
"No."
"Because you're mine."
"I'm not --"
Gilles raised his hand and cupped Daniel's cheek. "You and I know that. But the imaginations of others -- those are paltry, impoverished things."
"So they think --" Daniel thought now of Abel's show, the gaudy succession of bodies in Gilles' arms, where the interest and momentum lay in the *succession* rather than in the individuals. "I'm the latest toy. They still think that."
"Yes. And, further, that I'll heave into tantrum if my toy's snatched from me."
Daniel was silent. Gilles leaned forward, hand sliding around the back of Daniel's neck, thumb rubbing at the hollow over his windpipe. It was threat and promise, and Daniel held still.
"My precious metaphor," he said. "An alien soul, transferred to me, all undeserving. Capable of transformation and great magic, ludicrous were you not so simple. So beautiful. They see you -- pretty, lovely boy -- and me -- decadent old wolf -- and they only know the literal."
"They don't like me?" Daniel squeezed his eyes shut at the question's absurdity, the plaintiveness crawling through his voice, but Gilles laughed and kissed his forehead.
"Exactly," Gilles said, smiling widely. "You're not real to them. Nor, I suppose, am I."
"But all your friends -- the party --"
"There was no love there. Fear, and a temporary suspension of great dislike."
The roof, the morning after the party: a zone of vanished joy, deserted clamor.
"Joan loves you," Daniel said. "I do."
"You do, yes." Gilles held Daniel's face in both hands, nodding once before kissing him. "More blessed I."
"And, maybe, Mick?"
"Mick is loyal," Gilles said. "That's a very different matter."
Before Daniel could reply, Gilles hooked his arm around Daniel's waist and rose to his feet, letting Daniel slide down his body until his sock-clad feet hit the floor. Gilles took a long, thirsty swallow from his wine, squeezed Daniel's shoulder, and pushed him toward the elevator.
"Two," he said, and handed Daniel the key to the locked floor.
The elevator shook and complained downward and Daniel felt slippery, lighter than paper, clinging to Gilles' hand as he hadn't since they first met.
The heavy door swung open into a vast room. It appeared to occupy the entire second floor and it dazzled Daniel's eyes. Everywhere, there was glass: two levels of long, narrow water tables, folded like intestines into the space. Everything was made of glass -- the tables, the tubing that snaked below and along the tables, and through it all, water in motion, glinting and spinning against the glass.
In each table, blood-red flowers with night-black centers floated, their dark roots reaching into water. The roots were wispy, moving with invisible currents. Seen from below, as Daniel blinked and squinted at the glittering array, it seemed as if the flowing water condensed upward, darkening into root-tendrils, then stalks, and finally bursting into bloody blooms.
In the far corner, a bulky figure shuffled slowly, testing taps and tightening the seals on the pipes.
"Mick --" Gilles called and the figure straightened up and moved toward them.
He was dressed like an astronaut, like a beekeeper, like someone visiting an alien and dangerous place. The costume slowed him down, emphasized his thick frame and heavy tread.
Gilles dipped his finger in the nearest tray and held it out for Daniel to taste. Sweet water, honey and allspice and something...*else*, and Daniel sucked at it eagerly until Gilles pulled away as Mick joined them.
"Holy water," Gilles said. "Delicious to *you*, but worse than venom for Mick here."
Doffing the helmet, Mick scowled as he nodded. "Superstition and bullshit, that's all."
Gilles made as if to flick the water at Mick, and Mick ducked, cursing, before turning away.
"Dreams, born of flowers," Gilles told Daniel, sweeping his arm around the room. "*This* is my all, or nearly so. Nearly --" His hand dropped onto the back of Daniel's neck. "And now you know."
Daniel was sure he did not yet *know*, but he saw. The water shone and pushed upward into poppies, into trembling bloodstains that would be plucked, their seeds bled out, for Gilles' spells and potions.
"You offer water and blood," Daniel said, leaning against Gilles' side, snaking his arm around Gilles' waist.
Gilles palmed the back of Daniel's skull, nails scratching lightly at his scalp, and bent to drop a kiss on the crown. "Tomorrow, this weekend, we'll go to Arden. Stroll the grounds, see the zoo. Would you like that?"
He could be anything, alien and transformative, and Daniel breathed in the poppies' sweetness, the water's spicy mysteries, before going up on tiptoe to kiss Gilles' cheek.
"Anything," he promised. "Give you anything."
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