Daniel slept on the middle of the chaise, cheek pillowed on a book about the Spanish conquest of the Incas, hand curled around the plate of uneaten melon.
He woke slowly, blinking at the brightness he expected but did not find. Gilles crouched next to the chaise, face shadowed, wild hair tipped with silvery light from the window, his palm curved over Daniel's hip. Difficult to pick out his gaze in the shadows, so Daniel shifted forward, tipping the plate nearly over the edge.
"Are you all right?" He whispered because it was dark, because his mouth was dry. Because Gilles remained so still. Because fear and unquiet from Mick's visit caught like barbs and brambles in his skin, pierced his thoughts.
"Quickly dreaming away the time?" Gilles whispered as well, pulling Daniel the rest of the way toward him. Sleepheavy and relieved, Daniel slung his arms around Gilles' neck and, murmuring a faint protest as he kissed Daniel's throat, Gilles pulled him up. Daniel did not know where Gilles hid such strength, how he concealed it in his lean body.
"Not really," he said, clinging with arms and legs as Gilles carried him, not to the bed but over to the narrow iron stairs up to roof. "No dreams."
On the roof, he found the sky stained with lemon and silver clouds, the air close and hot, damp with the day's effort, as Gilles knelt and deposited him on the quilted mat. Sleep clung to Daniel, clogging his throat and slowing his thoughts even more than usual, and everything was heavy as waterlogged paper as Gilles removed Daniel's shirt and then his own before drawing him back between his legs. Gilles breathed rapidly from the climb and Daniel twisted a little, palming the sweat from his chest and rubbing his cheek against Gilles' shoulder. He smelled of exhaust-fumes and exertion, sour bitter things, and Daniel kissed off the beads of sweat from the center of his collarbone.
"You should dream," Gilles told him, ticking two fingers up the length of Daniel's spine, knocking each vertebra, pausing, then moving upward. "Sleep should kill those pretty eyes, and give as soft attachment to your senses as infants', empty of all thought."
"I do. Sometimes."
Gilles pressed his lips to Daniel's forehead, kissing a spiral down to the bridge of his nose. "I do wonder what goes on in here. In this head of yours."
"Lots," Daniel said. Sleep and worry wound thickly through him despite Gilles' embrace. "And nothing."
"Daniel -" Palm on his cheek, Gilles turned Daniel's head and in the shadows, his eyes moved searchingly. "You fear? Your fear will prove a giddy world."
Daniel inhaled the warm night air before speaking. "Your -" He meant to say your friend, but however well Mick and Gilles were acquainted, Daniel did not think the word was appropriate. "Mick came up in the elevator."
"You didn't let him in?" Gilles did not move, but his hand pressed more firmly against Daniel's cheek and his voice went low and careful.
"No. He was angry."
Smiling briefly, humorlessly, Gilles nodded. "Mick is -" He frowned, deepening each line in his face, like ink-strokes still wet and glistening. "Troublesome."
"Rough," Daniel said.
"Yes. A fleshed soldier," Gilles said, "rough and hard of heart, quick to anger."
"Dangerous?"
"Absolutely. And yet you stared him down."
"Did I?" He thought Mick had retreated because of Gilles' authority. Like the men at the club, he moved away because of something Gilles said or might do; he had, Daniel thought, respected Gilles, not Daniel himself.
Such a situation made sense, after all; Daniel was a slip, a scrap, little more than a wisp while Gilles was solid, hot and real.
Gilles stroked one finger over Daniel's cheek, coming to rest in the corner of his mouth. Only then did Daniel understand that he was frowning. When he looked at Gilles, he saw a gentle smile, almost vague, blurring his features and softening his eyes. "You did indeed. You really have no idea what you're capable of, do you?"
Ideas were no better, often even less reliable, than perceptions. "No," Daniel said. "What do you think I'm capable of?"
Gilles pushed one hand through Daniel's hair, pressed the other over his heart, and spoke with his lips against Daniel's throat. "Not for me to say, dearheart."
Daniel could not remember - he had never known - this was strange: Gilles resisting an opportunity to speak, judge, evaluate and describe. He placed his own hand on the back of Gilles' neck and touched his cheek to Gilles' own.
"When I dream," Daniel whispered, "sometimes I see you. I think about you, too."
He felt Gilles' smile stretch and curve against his own skin, then a hot flick of Gilles' tongue over his upper lip. "Strange news that I've not yet dreamed of."
Daniel twisted until he knelt between Gilles' legs, resting his hands on the sides of Gilles' neck. Off the traffic below, bright shadows, neon and flaming, swept over Gilles' face, flattening him, then carving unknowable depths. Sleepwarm, heavylimbed, Daniel thought this might be a living dream, kissing Gilles and pressing him back, and down, blanketing him with his thin, restless body and roving palms.
Gilles held him loosely, and his words came as lightly as the slow wind, barely audible over the noise of the nightswathed city. "You show a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed."
"Nonsense -" Daniel kissed the thorns on the rose protruding from the inked heart on Gilles' chest, sliding his teeth over the black skin, then diagonally over the nipple there in the center. Gilles' chin tipped up to the sky as he moaned, gripped Daniel's waist, thrust once, and the noise and motion were nearly helpless, subvocal and involuntary.
"Sometimes I think about kissing you. For hours. Tasting you, feeling you against me. Tasting all the different places, tasting myself and you."
Gilles worked his lips soundlessly before he said, "Is that so?"
"That's so." Daniel thought perhaps he could slip into Gilles that way, open lips on secret pores, spill out through his capillaries all the questions and, branching, match them up with the answers awaiting him inside.
Mysteries, like cells, split and multiply, grow in exponential leaps, and Daniel felt them gather under his skin, both light and dark, sparks and shadows, desperately tangled. Darkly bright, they were bright in dark directed, and Daniel pressed closer, in, and down, trapping himself like a bird in lime-twigs within Gilles' arms.
*
Hot days, warm nights, the ceiling fans spun lazily and the city held its breath under a low cloud of pollution and fear. Gilles did not often leave the loft, even less often the building itself.
He showed Daniel movies in the evenings; when the curtains were lowered, the entire space was thrown into silken darkness, pierced only by a long cone of silver light from the whirring projector.
Daniel sat in the tub to watch, Gilles behind him, spooning cool water over their bodies as the pictures flickered and faded over the screen. Cinema and sweat, droplets and shadows, the slosh of water and hum of gears. On the screen, women in white dresses danced with men in tails, and biplanes dipped in the sky while more women danced on the wings, and everyone sang out their emotions as naturally as people in the streets of Verona Beach.
Gilles hummed along, but Daniel leaned forward, arms looped around his knees, eager for more information.
Bright shadows, brighter lights, all sliding over his own hand when he held it up before the screen, painting him.
*
One morning, Daniel found the schoolboy's costume laid out for him and he wore it as he studied on the roof. Murmuring sutras to himself, checking his accuracy, he floated a little in the haze of concentration until a resounding crash from within the loft shook the awning and killed his mindfulness. He crept downstairs and stopped halfway, crouching. Dangerous, he heard Gilles say in his memory, the low thrum of his voice prickling the back of Daniel's throat. Gilles and two men - one was Mick, the other a stranger, even taller - were busy unloading wooden crates from the elevator.
"Company," Mick said, dropping the box he was carrying and jerking his head toward Daniel. "Might want to watch that."
Gilles straightened up and smiled at Daniel; it was as if he hadn't heard a thing Mick had said. His smile tugged at Daniel, made him rise and descend the rest of the stairs, and if he played with the cuffs of his shirt and kept his gaze unfocused and downcast, at least he could move.
"Interrupting," Daniel said. "I thought -"
"Never interrupting," Gilles murmured, so low that Daniel doubted either of the men could hear. "Your very goodness and your company overpay all I can do."
Daniel chanced a quick look at Mick and the other man, but they seemed absorbed in stacking the crates. "I'm finished for the morning, so I -" He was not sure if he should mention the errands he ran for Gilles, so he just lifted the knapsack and met Gilles' eyes.
"You're ready?" Gilles asked.
Daniel looked between him and Mick, back again, and nodded. Gilles brushed his fingertips over Daniel's forehead before handing him an envelope, which Daniel stowed in the bag.
"My Hermes," Gilles said, tying the locket with a picture of the blonde virgin around Daniel's neck, tucking it under his collar. Charm and luck, a warm piece of metal which Gilles believed could watch over, if not protect, Daniel from danger. "Swift and fleet, fly."
"Him? You're sending your fucktoy?" Mick rose from his crouch and leaned against the pile of crates, toying with a length of twine. He sounded faintly bored.
Wincing at the obscenity, Gilles raked up Daniel's hair and kissed his forehead. Warm mouth, momentarily so insistent that Daniel almost swayed. Without turning, he said, "I suppose I could send *you*. Shame about your sun allergy."
"What makes you think you can trust him?"
Daniel touched the lump the locket made under his collar and swallowed. It was a question he had asked himself many times, but could not seem to speak aloud to Gilles. He should not trust Gilles; they had agreed on that since the first night. Yet he was trusted with secrets, packages, errands, and regrets. Sometimes he had the sense that he could ask Gilles anything, if only he could find the words.
Sweet powders, Gilles had said when Daniel asked what was in the packages, Mockeries of unquiet slumbers. Health and fair time of day; joy and good wishes. Why, Daniel asked, what should these powders be used for? Gilles stroked his back and said, with something dull and resigned in his voice, so full of shapes is fancy, it alone is high fantastical. That is, Daniel understood him to mean, dreams and illusions were available for the taking, for the right price, if one needed it enough, could give enough in return.
"Faith, my friend," Gilles said.
Mick grabbed his crotch and his tongue flickered over his lower lip slowly as he looked Daniel up and down. "That's what you're calling faith these days? Next you'll be telling me it's true love."
Inhaling sharply, striding quickly forward, Gilles struck Mick, open-handed, bone on bone. Mick remained still, and Daniel thought that he had been waiting for the blow -- he inclined slightly toward Gilles while his hands curled at his sides.
The red print of Gilles' palm glowed hot on his white cheek. Coals in snow, fire before the sails.
"You don't know anything," Gilles said, voice thin as sheetmetal and just as sharp.
"I know a lot," Mick said. "I know plenty. Just don't believe any of it."
"Faith believes," Gilles said, drawing Daniel back and guiding him to the elevator, "hope and love pray. But without faith the two last cannot exist."
Mick snorted, then spat on the floor. "You don't know anything about love, old man."
"Where there is love, there of necessity will there be faith and hope."
"More a fool than I thought, then."
"Daniel -" Gilles turned to him, and Daniel saw his hand tremble like a sick bird for a moment. "Enjoy your walk. I'll see you after lunch?"
Nodding, Daniel stepped into the elevator. The grille's latticework framed Mick and Gilles, facing each other again, silent and stationary, as the cage began to descend.
His walks took him throughout the city, from the outskirts of Scaliger Heights across the palm-lined avenues of Borsari. The buses' routes, vivid tubes of orange and cerulean on the maps, were arteries of and for experience, leading him forth, depositing him at street markets, before rows of pink and lemoncurd stucco townhouses, massive marble banks fronted by wide, empty plazas.
On these errands, he was an extension of Gilles; doubled, his eyes and senses still his own, but his hand and movement Gilles' now.
Daniel slid the envelope into the gap between two bricks at the entrance to an alley, brushed off his hands, and started back toward the bus stop. He had to cross a small square, which had been empty when he arrived. Now, however, it was early afternoon, the sun was high and hot, and the square was full of children.
They sat in messy rows before a small red tent and a man juggling butcher knives. One caught the sun as it rose, flashing, and Daniel stopped, staring, as it transformed into a small flame. The children shouted and clapped and the man continued to juggle.
Daniel leaned against the trunk of a palm tree, its ratty bark digging into his arm, watching as raptly as the children. Fire spun, five flaming balls speeding up until the man seemed to be turning a single fiery wheel. Daniel blinked, shaded his eyes, and the wheel slowed and paled, becoming a metal hoop that the man palmed in one hand and sent rolling through the crowd.
Squealing and yelling, the children clapped hard and the performer bowed deeply.
Daniel recognized him: Gilles' friend, from the club. His dancing partner. Abel.
Out here in the daylight, commanding attention and delight from the children, he looked just the same: Slimhipped and willowy, a shock of dark shining hair and large, amused eyes.
He moved behind a table and shook out a large white sheet. On the third flap, the sheet dissolved into white petals, floating over the crowd's heads. One caught on Daniel's hand, damp and soft; when he sniffed it, it smelled faintly of roses.
Two blue books, fat and tall, slapped together, became a tiny tornado, whirling over the table, spinning out into steam and air.
This was magic out in the open, control and transformation exercised for play and entertainment. Yellow parakeets, chirping loudly, burst into confetti, which poured over Abel's hands and filled a glass bowl with blue water. Nothing remained static; everything shifted and shimmered, like Gilles' movies on the screen, like the tattoos on his body, his voice in Daniel's ear. Mysteries spun into gold, concealing more secrets, bursting into fireworks and cascades of green and scarlet sparks.
Daniel could not stop smiling. Illusions wreathing together, drawing laughter from the children and smelling like roses. He thought that Abel noticed him - several flashes of black eyes, twists to the lips - but there were other bystanders, other adults mesmerized by the show.
A sheet of white paper crumbled to gray ash, spilling over the table into scuttling scarabs, shiny blackgreen shells. The play continued to shift, and Abel *did* watch him now, one eyebrow cocked upward, as he poured red wine into a pitcher, trapping the writhing flame it became with his hand, and shook the pitcher until its walls ran with blood.
Three graybrown eggs, larger than lightbulbs, cracked and birthed fierce dragons of blue smoke, breathing yellow fire.
Sick, his smile twisted to a grimace, Daniel's mouth ached and his stomach roiled.
This was for his benefit, he was sure, revulsion shaking through him, thick and bilious. He wanted to turn, to run for the bus, but when Abel lifted his face and smiled at the crowd, requesting an assistant from the audience, Daniel moved forward.
He could not say why, but the air was hot and Abel smiled, and Daniel moved.
"And now for the scrying portion of our entertainment," Abel announced. He poured clear water into a shallow square pan and lifted the pan on its side. The water clung to the bottom and did not spill. "Give me your hand, boy -"
Pinching Daniel's wrist as if it were a distasteful piece of garbage, Abel pressed Daniel's palm against the water. It felt cool and wet, like water, but resisted the pressure; his hand floated on the surface as the sunlight caught and bounced around him. Abel dropped Daniel's hand and it fell to the table. In the center of his palmprint, the water darkened, thickened, sketched out Gilles' kneeling figure.
Head bowed, hands steepled to his chin, Gilles prayed.
"A faithful one, eh?" Abel told the crowd and it murmured back, demanding more. He laughed, loud and long, gongs hit too fast, the sound ricocheting against Daniel's head. "Now, now. Just watch."
A length of shadowed water broke away, coiled and then whipped across Gilles' curved back, again and again, and the expression on Gilles' face - mouth open, eyes closed - was ecstatic. Daniel had seen that face, above him, in the mirror, descending over him, and he shuddered in sympathy.
Gilles leaned forward, lengthening and exposing his back, and the position begged for more blows, harsher, faster.
If you live after the flesh, Gilles had told him when Daniel fingered the redpurple stripes of bruises on his back, you shall die, but if through the spirit you mortify the deeds of the flesh, you shall live.
One of those remarks of Gilles' that sounded impenetrable, a snake swallowing its own tail, and still Daniel knew it could not be entirely true.
"Stop it -" Daniel whispered now, choking on the breath in his throat, peering at Abel. He wavered and clouded just as much as the image in the tray, distant and hazy. "Make it stop."
"Only he can," Abel said. "I just show what's happening."
Gilles' head tipped back, his mouth still open and his eyes squeezed closed, and Daniel could almost hear the singing groan breaking from his lips, the sound that reverberated against his bones, set them shaking like tuning forks. He did hear Abel laugh, low and careful.
Gilles was no longer praying, no longer being punished. Boys and men passed by him, through his arms, blond and darkhaired, tall and slim, young and old, and he kissed them all, whispered to them all, as his face smoothed and paled and he was younger, youngest, kissing a younger Abel and whispering urgently into his ear.
"Or, of course, what has happened," Abel continued. "And what will, surely, happen again soon."
Behind Daniel, the crowd was quiet; perhaps it had dispersed. The show was for him, about him, and, in the strangest, most unsettling way, he *was* the show, Abel now the audience. Feeling his backbone want to bow and melt, Daniel pushed his fists against his thighs and forced himself to look at Abel.
"He's a good man," Daniel said. Abel rolled his eyes and smiled. "He's -" Daniel did not know what Gilles was, whether just a single word could possibly *say* it; surely it was multiple, impossible to express, but he still tried. "He believes in -"
"That's his great tragedy," Abel said, laughing. "Or his foolishness. Defrocked and excommunicated, booted out, and yet he still believes. Pathetic, really."
Pathos, Daniel thought. An appeal to the audience's emotion, rather than character or reason. The description did not suit Gilles; if anything, he played far more with one's character and mind than emotions. Anything Daniel felt for him was, surely, Daniel's own doing.
"He watches you, doesn't he?" Abel pushed back a dark lock of hair. His smile curved at the corners of his mouth, insincere and slippery. "Can't take his eyes off you."
At the club, in the bath, throughout the day, Gilles did watch him. Daniel did not wish to deny it. "Yes."
And I watch back. All the time. He kept that truth silent, even from Gilles.
"You know what happens to mirrors and toys, don't you? They break. Get thrown away."
So many questions, none of them actually requiring Daniel's response. "They change," Daniel said. "Everything - changes."
"Is that so?"
Words like Gilles', reaching and twisting, pushing the uncertainty back at Daniel, the question whipping as sharply as the leather across Gilles' back.
Abel reached out and Daniel pulled in on himself, certain he was about to be touched. Grabbed and hexed, but, laughing, Abel pressed his fingertip against the surface of the enchanted water. Gilles' face turned to follow the swirling patterns drawn by Abel's finger, until the waves reached him and he started to whirl, cloud, and smear away.
Daniel released his breath, thinking of the smack of Gilles' hand against Mick's face, the sweaty grip of Gilles' legs pinning him to the floor, the empty intensity of his stare across the dancefloor.
The water stilled. Ink streamed over the surface, forming welts and whips and screams of pain and a snarling, bestial face. Distantly, he heard Abel laughing.
Daniel tore away, running faster than he thought possible, the air breaking like ice against his face, the necktie streaming over his shoulder, then into his mouth, and his feet pounded the grass of the plaza, then the marble sidewalk, and he kept running in no direction he had ever seen, hoping that the world was in fact round, that wherever he headed, he would eventually loop back to Gilles.
Everything inside him, seams of bone and threads of capillaries, the knot of his guts and backs of his knees, and he might have torn apart, certainly dived into the sea that encroached on three sides of the city, but.
Tires yelped and peeled. A honk sounded like a fogwarning.
A white hand grabbed him.
Everything spun, curb-street-yelling driver-blue sky-green tree, whirling, and his chest heaved, pain and fear rattling through him like drunken dancers. Soon, eventually, his heart beating fast in his face and the soles of his feet, he managed to see clearly.
White face, wide green eyes beneath ink-precise brows. Beautiful face, a holy of beauty and a kind smile.
"Daniel?" Sister Inez spoke so softly he could barely hear her over his breathing. "Daniel, where have you been? We've been so worried about you, Father Theophorus especially."
Daniel had never been able to look Sister Inez in the eye. She was taller than he, slim and strong beneath her ashen dress, her skin as fair as the white linen around her neck and hair as dark as the small cape on her shoulders. She was a Daughter of Wisdom, native to Verona Beach and originally named Lily, a bosom friend of St. Athanasius's young priest Theophorus and wholly intimidating.
After his run, Daniel could not move on his own; he could have been one of Abel's puppets, dangling there, jerky and graceless. So he let the good sister lead him to her linenwhite car and answered her worried questions while she drove him speedily home.
"You're in school, then?"
His head tipped back against the seat, Daniel fingered his tie, then the locket's chain biting into his neck. He could not lie, but he did not answer, either.
"We were arranging for you to go to school," she said, weaving the car expertly among the nearly-static traffic on Mantuan Road, taking the safety lane and sidewalks for her own. "You have so much to learn, about Our Blessed Savior, his saints and martyrs. His plans for you -"
In profile, Sister Inez's face seemed at once both more severe and more beautiful, ivory fluted and shaped like skin, but less warm, more lovely.
To be known, Daniel heard Gilles saying while laughing and deferring Daniel's questions about where they would dance that night, what sights they might see, shortens my made intent.
He repeated the address several times for Sister Inez and although she complied, drawing the car up before Gilles' massive warehouse, she held Daniel's shoulder and would not let him leave.
"You're not consorting with him?" she asked. Her voice slid like eels in a bucket, fast and dark and certain, and Daniel looked at her. Green, then gray, storms in her eyes while her face remained still and her fingers dug into his shoulder. "Daniel."
Daniel twisted away, wrenching open the door, but Inez caught his hand before he was all the way out of reach.
"He's dangerous, child."
"I know you think that." Sunlight glazed the windows, made them both bright and blind, when Daniel looked over his shoulder. Blinking the green and white afterimages away, he levelled his gaze back on the nun. She had only ever been kind to him, speaking loudly and slowly as if he were both hard of hearing and slow of mind, smiling gently, giving him a pink plastic string of beads and lavishly illustrated version of her holy book. "Dangerous, because your church expelled him."
She smiled then, and it was neither gentle nor slow, but knowing and rapid. "He was expelled because he is dangerous. Logic, Daniel, works in a single direction, like sunbeams."
Her grip on his hand tightened; looking down, Daniel realized how thin her wrist was, as thin as his own, but he was a snapped twig to her fierce strength. "Because," Daniel said, thoughts clearing like water trickles over a fogged pane of glass, "he sinned."
This time, Inez did not smile, but her eyes both widened and darkened as she released Daniel's hand. "Because he got caught."
The bones of his hand ached and throbbed numbly as Inez gunned the motor and her car pulled away as smoothly as a swan through water.
The elevator did not respond when he pressed the button, but Daniel was early in returning, so he climbed the stairs. Dark and musty in the stairwell, nearly as narrow as his booth at the club or the circle of Gilles' arms, but through the skylight above, the light fell and twisted in a single complex braid.
She was wrong, Daniel thought as he climbed, light moved as both mote and wave, grit and tide, and as such it moved everywhere, both irresistible and inexorable. It passed through water but bounced off stone; it shot and resounded, spread and filigreed.
A howl snapped through his thoughts and Daniel stopped on the landing to the fourth floor. Part animal, a cow in labor with breached twins, and part decisively human, full of memory and pleas, and he pushed through the door toward the sound.
At the end of the hall, from behind a black door nearly as wide as the elevator, another scream came. Closer now, Daniel could unthread soul from sound, person from pain, and it was Gilles. Gilles, screaming in his veins, through Daniel's own throat, and he pushed the door open onto a nightmare.
Because this was ecstasy, the room as dark as the bottom of the sea, only Gilles' bare flesh glimmering faintly and the crack of the whip from Mick's hands.
Scream, whip, silence. Then cruelty measured in words: "You are corrupt in God's eyes," Mick said, "pleasing yourself, and eager to please in the eyes of men and boys."
Whip-snake-scream. A scream that sounded like yes.
"You foul what you touch, you rot with your desire. An upright, just, and true-disposing God?"
Whip and no scream, just shattered breath and blood black as ink on Gilles' back. Daniel watched and the heat snaking through him was both sick and aroused. Fearful and intrigued. Gilles was helpless, pained and bound, and Daniel's mouth could half-taste the sour bruises as his hand could already heft the whip.
"How can we thank God that you, carnal cur, prey on the issue of our mothers' bodies? You make us pew-fellow with others' moans."
Whip, silence. Bruise and tears thick with salt, in Daniel's mouth and on Gilles' cheeks.
"Where is your God?"
Across the battered expanse of Gilles' ivory back, Mick grinned at Daniel, tipping up his chin and licking the corner of his mouth.
"You fuck him -"
Gilles turned an agonized face and brimming eyes on Daniel, and Daniel found the floor rising to meet his knees. He crawled forward, ducking the hiss of the whip, reaching for Gilles.
"- and yet it is evil to use amiss that which is good."
Gilles was naked and bloody, ecstatic and pleading for cessation, and Daniel reached him, wrapping his arms around the clammy, heaving chest.
"Leave," Daniel told Mick. "Go away."
The whip dropped as Daniel kissed Gilles.
Blood, tears, sea-currents and hissing pain, Daniel tasted it all, fingers trailing in blood, gathering Gilles close, sucking him inside, eating his cries.
Make an onement. It was, at times, command and order which Daniel obeyed and bent toward; other times, a question, curving at him like wings, inviting him closer; still others a line tossed against the water, a torch swirling against the sky, his to accept if he wished.
But this, now, this onement: Daniel kissed and twisted over, around, Gilles, sucking the salt off his face and pinching the flowering bruises on his back. Bloodfilled skin, pooling and heating Daniel's own, sliding him closer.
Kisses, and caresses that made Gilles shudder and whimper, fingers in torn flesh and pleas melting into recrimination, and soon their hips moved together, surf and scum and flotsam, crashing. Gilles cried out again, his shoulders straining and bowing against his bonds.
Opening his pants, tugging himself out red and hard, Daniel closed his hands over the ropes and pushed against Gilles, found him harder and more desperate, slick with salt.
They rocked together as Daniel bit off Gilles' moans, swallowing them, swabbing out more with tongue, lips, teeth, until Gilles bent back at the waist and Daniel dragged his mouth down his throat and the sound emptied into the black as ink dissolves paper, as the pulses of Gilles' orgasm hotly spattered Daniel's belly.
Falling forward, Gilles latched his lips into the center of Daniel's shirt, the fabric ripping in his teeth, and Daniel thrust-rubbed-screamed as his spine spun like razor wire, blowing sparks and shredding him fast, until the heat exploded between his legs and Gilles lapped madly at his bared skin.
Gilles' eyes were red and wet as he gazed at Daniel, ecstasy shimmering through the tracks of tears and twists of pain.
The room went cold as Daniel shook apart.
"Sorry, so sorry -" he choked, grief battling sorrow, blinding and dazing him. "Sorry, oh, Gilles, I'm -"
Black under his lids, shame slithered downward into his stomach, curling and flicking its serpentine tail, baring its fangs.
"Ssshhh," Gilles whispered. "Dearheart, hush -"
Air like kelp, strangling him. "Sorry -"
"Sshhhh," Gilles said. "Look at me."
Neither command nor demand, but a request, and Daniel blinked the smears from his eyes. "Gilles -"
Gilles kissed his chest with closed lips, slid lower, licked clean Daniel's belly, and the sensation shivered through Daniel like secrets and promises. "You, sweetest boy, are most able to discern pure affection from unholy desire," Gilles promised and kissed upward, over the torn shirt, to the locket tangled up with the tie. His eyes were stormtossed leaves and falls of rain as he smiled, despite and because of the pain, and kissed Daniel's skin once more. "Where my treasure is -" He kissed the locket. "- there will my heart be also."
Daniel closed his eyes and saw Gilles all the better for it.
Things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.