We have our whole lives. “Are you excited?”
“I’m assuming you wore your best underthings for me, and I’m quite keen to see them.”
“Well, joke’s on you,” I say as I slide off him, “because I’m not wearing any.”
I do not attempt to undress overtop of him again—I peel myself away and step out of my trousers. He watches me, eyes tracing the lines of my chest, my shoulders, my stomach, and then dropping lower. His thumb swipes the corner of his mouth.
It all goes far more as I pictured it when I climb back over him, hook my fingers in the waistband of his trousers and slide them off him, his hips following me. And with every new inch of his skin that comes into view, all I can think is Oh God oh God oh God this is actually going to happen oh my God how have I never noticed that his hipbones do that V thing oh my God he wants me. There’s other physical evidence for it, but the look on his face is enough.
I wish I could travel backward in time and tell Monty of two years ago, lying on the lawn of his father’s house with a bruised rib cage, realizing he was falling in love with the only person who gave him a reason to live, that someday he’d be here. It would be years of drinking too 47
much, falling asleep calculating how much arsenic he’d have to take to make certain the job was done, letting himself be groped by strangers in the backrooms of bars.
Maybe I’d go even further back than that—to Monty at twelve. That masturbating little bastard could have used a good buoying up, a promise to carry in his pocket that it wouldn’t always be loneliness and hard hits and worrying he was catching some venereal disease from a girl he’d just met. Someday, you little twat, it’s going to be more than that. The way we start doesn’t have to be where we end up.
Percy lets out a soft whine when I touch the inside of his thigh, first with just the tips of my fingers, then an exploratory palm. His back arches as I move upward, muscles tightening beneath me. My mouth goes suddenly dry, and my heart feels like it’s beating so hard he can probably feel it in my kneecaps. His legs twist around my hips, one hand digging into my back as he pulls himself up to meet me, the other strangling the bedsheets like they’re a mooring line.
I remember suddenly the preparations I had made without Felicity’s help for the night previous, and pause, fumbling for the drawer of the end table. “Hold on.”
“Why?” he says, and it comes out a little petulant and a little nervous, and the combination of those two makes me lightheaded.
“I’ve got a liniment.”
As I lean over him, he slaps my stomach lightly. “You are very prepared.”
“Well, yes, it was going to be a big night, if you remember—there were figs.” I snatch the bottle from the drawer, then coat my hands until they’re slick and smell fragrant. It takes me three tries before I get the bottle upright on the table again, and when I crawl back over top of him, my hands soapy, I pause. He’s looking at me—just looking—so hungry and anxious and bright and mine. What sort of stroke of miraculous luck brought me here? Brought me him?
48
I reach out before I can stop myself and push his hair behind his ears, then lean down for a kiss. When our lips meet, I swear I feel my ribs strain from how full I am with loving him.
But when I move downward again, Percy flinches, one hand flying to his face. “Hold on, wait, I’ve got something in my eye.”
“What?”
“Something’s in my eye.”
“Like dust?”
“No like . . . burning. I think it’s whatever you’ve got on your hands.”
“Dammit, I shouldn’t have—”
“It’s fine—”
“Here, let me see. Stop rubbing it so I can—”
He wicks his hand away from his eye just as I lean in, and elbows me in the side of the face, hard enough that I’m knocked sideways. I try to grab the bedpost but my hands are so slippery that I slide right off and fall all the way to the floor, my head connecting painfully with the corner of the drawer I left open. The bottle of oil falls off the edge and shatters into a soupy, amber pool.
“Oh God, I’m so sorry! Are you all right?” Percy’s got one eye open but blinking frantically, hand extended, trying to reach out for me.
“I’m fine.” I touch the back of my head and it comes back damp and red. “No, wait, I’m bleeding.”
“You’re bleeding?”
“It’s fine!”
“It’s clearly not if you’re bleeding!”
49
I can feel a trickle down the back of my neck and I clap my hand against it, like I can force the blood to stay inside me if I just press tight enough. “It’s fine.” My wrist is wet, and I look just as a drizzle of blood courses down my arm and into the crook of my elbow. “God, this is really bleeding.” My head swims, and when I try to steady myself, I put my hand straight into the oily puddle of liniment, and I crash backward onto the ground.
Percy tries to come to my aid, but with one eye closed, he misjudges where he places his foot and steps right on me and I screech and he slips and then suddenly the bedroom door bangs open and there’s Scipio, and I scream and Percy screams and Scipio lets out a horrified gurgle and then Felicity appears behind him in the doorway, claps her hands over her eyes, tries to run with her hands still covered, and slips in one of the dripping puddles we left on the stairs. She crashes to the floor, her hands still valiantly clapped over her eyes.
Which rather ruins it all.
For the second time in a month, Felicity stitches my head closed.
It is remarkable how much calmer she was under the threat of my actual death than she is in the face of having accidentally walked in on my attempted deflowering of Percy. Or perhaps she’s just being more enthusiastic about her stabbing than before as revenge for me being careless and forcing her to see what I’m fairly certain was more than a sliver of my naked backside.
When she’s finished, she deposits me on the stoop of the house—my weak-and-wounded
excuse once again trotted out as everyone else cleans up the somehow fantastic mess we made—
with instructions to keep my head between my knees, a compress over my stitches, and to lie flat if I start to feel dizzy again. She’s still red as an overripe beet when she leaves me.
50
After a while, Scipio comes and sits down beside me, and then it’s my turn to blush. I can’t even look at him. Before he can say anything, I blurt out, “I’m sorry.”
“What for?”
“That you . . . saw that. And that we were . . .” I try to meet his eyes but lose my nerve at the last minute and duck back to staring at my feet. “In my defense, we were left unsupervised.”
I don’t know what I’m expecting from him, but it’s not the casual shrug he offers. “When you spend months on the sea with only men, you’re no stranger to sodomy. Believe me. You’ve not shocked me. And you’ve also not surprised me.” His eyes flick to my face. “If you thought I was ignorant since we met you three, you may need to reexamine your concept of appropriate physical fondness between friends.”