Daniel usually walked everywhere; his soles loved the roll from pavement to sand and back again.
He knew the city at a strolling pace, slow and detailed: Torn corners of handbills stapled to telephone poles, slants of sun over faded, blistered stucco walls, half-moons of sweat gleaming on smiling cheeks. Gilles, however, was a driver.
He led Daniel to a parking lot and opened the passenger door to a handsome convertible, its hood occupying half its length. Brilliant white paint except for the crimson on the doors and the upholstery, and Daniel thought, for a moment, of his own clothes. But his undershirt was nearly ivory, almost primrose under the arms and around the neck, and if his trousers had ever been that perfectly red, it was well before they passed into his hands.
Gilles touched Daniel's elbow. "It's all right," he said. "You can get in."
He had been hesitating and didn't even know it.
"Thanks," he said, and waited for Gilles to slide into the driver's seat. Daniel fit easily in the car; Gilles had to slouch and fold himself, part his legs in order to steer. "Pretty car."
"Austin-Healey 3000," Gilles said as he pulled out onto Bacon Boulevard. "Mark Two, but it runs more smoothly than Mark One."
Sometimes, Daniel simply nodded. He rarely understood what people said, but they liked it because it seemed as if he were agreeing. He'd never had to do that in New Drepung, but then again, he had known everyone there, known almost beforehand exactly what would come out of their mouths. Here, there were questions and replies, the words to which he despaired of learning.
Past sunset, and the streets were just as busy as ever, nearly as bright. The wind broke over Daniel's face like the scum of ice on the river in the mornings. When he started to shiver, Gilles put his arm around Daniel's shoulders and pulled him in, steering with one finger looped around the wheel.
Everything was so much more frantic when seen from a car; people's movements and the streaks of neon off the signs were sharp, fragmented, stuttering, like the choreography in shadow-puppet plays. All the colors were sharper, too, shade and hue flattened by speed, until Daniel's vision was full of streaming banners, snapping in the wind.
He was still breathless long after they parked, as they rode up in a creaking iron-cage elevator to Gilles' apartment. The building was blocky and imposing from the street, acid-yellow stucco with tall windows narrow like goat's eyes, but inside, as they stepped off the elevator, it was massively empty and dark. Daniel knew the ceiling was far above him, but could not judge just how far, and his boots echoed on the uneven floor.
"My home of love," Gilles said from somewhere behind Daniel, and then the space sprang out from darkness as he switched on a light, "if I have ranged, like him that travels, I return again."
Daniel stood in the center of a room that must have stretched from one side of the building to another. The walls were lined with bookcases, three times as tall as he, and the floor was bare asphalt in some spots, broad-planked in others. Furniture crouched like sleeping beasts, settees and chairs, tables and, in the corner between two windows, a bed wider than any he had ever seen.
In the middle of this room, large enough to hold a world, Daniel was tiny. A mote, light and easily overlooked. He felt smaller than he ever had. Smaller than the day his mother's unmarried sister left him at the foot of the access road to the monastery with a bologna sandwich and a sweater in case it got cold.
"Yours as well," Gilles said, much closer now, nearly whispering. The hairs on Daniel's nape quivered under his breath. "If you like."
"Why?"
He thought it was a simple question. Gilles folded his arms over Daniel's chest and pulled him back, resting his chin on the crown of Daniel's skull. He didn't answer.
Daniel closed his eyes against the light and the size of the room. Gilles' embrace was snug, his breathing slow and regular. He didn't know what a home of love was, nor a home, plain and simple. Navigating this city, the life he attempted to follow here, took extreme effort, sent nausea plunging through his gut and vertigo yanking at his spine. It had been the same in the monastery; things were either too large or too small, and he veered and stumbled most of the time. Home was where people dwelled, slept, loved, ate, and relaxed; he thought he liked the idea.
The room he rented by the week on Sycorax came with a narrow mattress stained black and purple and a yellow shade over the window. Occasionally, when he meditated while sitting on the floor, he felt cosmoses flooding his skin, stars bursting into life, wheeling through variable constellations, then dimming, flickering out into tense, cold rocks. Neither was comfortable, nor right.
Daniel cleared his throat and tried again. "Why did you talk to me?"
Gilles guided him to a sofa, soft and yielding as spring clover under him, and sat beside him. "Looked like you could use a friend," Gilles said. "Or at least a few square meals."
"True," Daniel said. "Both things."
*
Gilles fed him, good and simple food, hot soup and soft rolls, sliced beef and mounds of green beans. Daniel ate carefully, his eyes on Gilles the entire time. The man picked at his food but drank his wine methodically, glass after glass. Silhouetted against one tall window, his tanned face glowed a little, pale afterimage of the wine against crystal; behind him, the sky was dark as new mud, streaked with pink clouds and rising blue smoke from a bonfire on the beach.
"Will your friend be here?" Daniel asked when Gilles finished a story about two men from the city, and how one of them regained his love for a woman only after knowing her when disguised as a boy.
"I've many friends."
"He's tall, with dark hair." Daniel sipped the wine Gilles had poured for him at the beginning of the meal. Warm as sunlight, it filled his mouth and seemed to rise like mist through his nose into his skull. "You dance with him."
Gilles smiled and, rising, grasped Daniel's wrist, pulling him to his feet. "Are you worried?"
"No. Curious."
"Abel comes and goes," Gilles said, leading Daniel toward the bed. "Much like his name, both ephemeron and victim. Names have powers of their own."
Daniel closed his eyes as Gilles knelt before him on the floor, tugging the shirt over Daniel's head and running his palms down his sides.
He knew Sanskrit, English, the Tibetan of the southern regions, Latin, and some Hindi. Gilles was correct; the names for things - jivatu, vita, life; jaladhi, mare, sea - changed the things as you spoke, read, thought about them. The names made different sounds, created new ideas that were never the same from one tongue to another. The things in the world shifted and stayed in motion when he realized that, that life and the sea and everything else were inconstant and incommensurable. Never to be captured, never at rest.
He lay back on the bed, running his hands up Gilles' arms, pulling him forward until Gilles straddled his hips. He unbuttoned Gilles' shirt and slid his hands over whispering hair and warm skin, squinting a little to make out the marks and runes inked over Gilles' chest. Thorns, crosses, names of saints and martyrs: His skin was a reliquary, memorial to an alien faith.
Daniel's palms tingled and his mouth was dry, sour from the wine, until Gilles kissed him, murmuring into his mouth.
*
Daniel knew about pleasure; before he left, Tim shared his bed with him, and before that, the young monks had communal quarters.
And he knew there are many ways in which one might explain pleasure. As a series of electrical impulses along twining, blooming nerves, delicate as threads of saffron or silk, which then floods the brain with chemicals. As friction, skin brushing skin, communication as deliberate and complex as bees' dances and rising smoke signals. As, above all, a dream, nonsensical and ricepaper-thin as anything else one experiences, but - like Verona Beach itself - more attractive than other dreams. Preferable, if one has the choice, to nightmares and sweaty terrors.
Until he came here, however, Daniel had never guessed that pleasure could, let alone would, be taken from pain.
People exulted in pain here. They sought out torture's relics and representations, kissed them, clasped the pain to their breasts and sang through tears and screams. He wanted to know why.
Gilles bent over Daniel, one hand on his chest, the other stroking his hair. The heavy silver crucifix on the chain around his neck dangled over Daniel's throat, tickling and scratching. A dead man, a corpse nailed to wood, moving against his skin. Gilles asked, "Do you know - what this is? What we're doing?"
He knew what sex was; the monastery was remote, but not puritanical. Besides, Daniel had read many magazines; all sorts of things turn up in the trash. He nodded. "Yes."
Gilles settled back on his heels, both hands on Daniel's bare chest now, nearly big enough to span it. "And do you want to?"
For a moment, Daniel thought of one of the senior monks, examining him on recitation, asking if Daniel truly thought that memorization could substitute adequately for understanding. Daniel blinked now as he did then, uncertain if Gilles' question was a riddle, a test, or merely sincerely curious.
Gilles touched Daniel's face, eyelid, temple, top of his ear. Touch coaxed out the reply.
"Yes and no," Daniel said. He reached up and hooked his finger around the crucifix. Half as long as his pinky and intricately detailed, glinting in the dark of the room; an agonized face, trails of blood picked out in metal. It was warm from Gilles' skin.
"And why is that?"
"Feels good, so yes." Daniel craned his neck, kissing the warm silver chain, then the side of Gilles' neck, never releasing the dead man. "Don't trust you, so no."
"Precisely," Gilles said. He smiled like a snake sunning itself, lips curving slowly. "You have a sharp mind for someone so quiet, you know. It's gone to waste among those pagans."
Daniel opened his mouth to speak - not a pagan, not in any pejorative sense, and he was quite sure Gilles meant it pejoratively - but Gilles pressed his finger over Daniel's lips.
"I believe you'll learn, the more time you spend in civilization," Gilles continued, "that pleasure and distrust are twinned. Conjoined, inseparable as form and cause in any ghost."
That's where he was, then: Civilization, and Daniel was invited to know it. Learn it, both surface and depth, skimming fingertips and warm dark mouth.
Gilles touched him as if he already knew which spots would make Daniel whimper, which would bring up goosebumps and which would arch his back and close his teeth around Gilles' tongue.
The crucifix bit into his palm as he squeezed it, wrapping his legs around Gilles' waist, pulling him in and down and closer. That was the first pain, insignificant and fleeting, and Daniel squeezed again, recreated the red flare beneath his skin as Gilles moved over him, opening his trousers, skimming them down Daniel's legs.
Naked, Daniel lay on his back, forgetting questions and curiosity in favor of the heat communicating from Gilles' touch and voice into his skin, marking him like ink, making him twist and answer back. He sounded to his own ears like a wounded animal, eager for another blow, whenever Gilles scraped his teeth over Daniel's nipple or slid his palm down the underside of his cock.
He was skin, eager and open, splayed open, gulping air.
Gilles told him he was a good boy. Daniel didn't know what good was. Words meant nothing, but the sensations, whether dream or electricity, *were* good. Urgent, piling on one another, slipping, begging for more. Heat stretching out in long, whipcord-thin streamers, tangling and growing, in his chest and between his legs and then.
Then, when Gilles poured warm oil on him, on his cock and over the secret skin behind, then worked a finger up inside Daniel's body, the heat sped all the way through him. Up the center of his spine, fire sluicing fast and sure until stars burst and wheeled in his skull, blinding him. Daniel folded into a V, holding his knees against his chest, panting against the light and heat breaking around, within, him.
"More, more -" he chanted. "More, now -"
Gilles' voice hoarse and amused: "Desire's not so imaginary, is it?"
Daniel shook and bore down, hips rocking. "More."
"Hungry, hungry boy." Gilles' laughter was fuel, more oil, shaking Daniel from the inside out, gold suns on red skies. "You'll get more. You'll get everything."
SarvaaH, omnia, all.
All skin, spread and channelled, afire and devouring, and Daniel craned up, clutching at Gilles' shoulders, shifting forward until he could touch in return. Cyclic and reciprocal, this was who he was at the moment, touch and touched, palm wrapped around Gilles' prick, mouth on his chest, body speared on his moving, tunnelling fingers.
Gilles pulled him up into his lap, placing Daniel's arms around his neck and thrusting his hips until his prick pushed inside, and this was pain and heat, electricity and cosmological creation, comets and bonfires.
Daniel closed his lips around the crucifix, sucking it deep until it scraped the back of his mouth, and Gilles moaned. Pulled at Daniel's hair so the cross moved in and out of his mouth and Gilles could watch.
Moaning and cursing, Gilles pushed harder, faster, his voice ever-louder. "Take the body, fucking *take* it -"
Death sounded like pleasure, drumbeats and swansongs, and Daniel twisted around the iconized pain on his tongue and the fiery, plunging pleasure between his legs, rocking between the two, taking them deeper as he stared at the wild darkness radiant in Gilles' eyes.
Skin, heat, pain: These were the elements, Daniel learned, as Gilles shuddered and pushed upward and mauled him with blunt teeth and clever fingers, of pleasure. They were unimaginable without experience, inconceivable then, but now, now he was learning as he flamed out, shot across the night wilderness deep in Gilles' face, and this knowledge was true.
Nothing but skin and pleasure. Easily pinched and gleefully tortured, but just as delightedly touched and stroked, and Daniel shook against the pillows, within Gilles' arms, whispering and gasping.
"Maiden blood," Gilles whispered. He raised his hand, palm streaked with the blood that beat out like gongs from the midst of Daniel's pleasure, then wiped him tenderly clean. Holding Daniel close, Gilles kissed his forehead, reverently, as Daniel had seen mourners kissing caskets, worshippers kissing the dead man's bloody feet, young women in black lace kissing beads that were made not from sandalwood but pressed roses. "Virtuous and holy, chosen from above. By inspiration of celestial grace, to work exceeding miracles on earth."
Daniel was empty now, hollow and aching, and Gilles' voice rasped like wool over him. Words black and buzzing, wasps consorting with gnats, filling him like smoke, then dispersing.
His mouth felt scraped, full of pulp and meat, wine and song, so when he spoke, it was hoarsely and hesitantly. "That was -? That was civilized?"
Gilles kissed his forehead again, and then once more. Ritual and choreography, but Daniel didn't feel like a relic, couldn't be an icon. "What do you think?"
"Yes," Daniel said. Answered all the questions at once. "Home, and good."
Gilles stroked back his sweaty hair and pulled a soft quilt over them, lying down on his back with Daniel curled against him. "Smart boy."
"Still don't trust you."
"*Brilliant* boy, then."