These Violent Delights

by Micah Nemerever

“It wasn’t nothing, it just had to be done—Julian, please stop—”

  “—and I had to see you like that,” said Julian, “this poor beautiful boy who can be so sweet and gentle when he can bring himself to trust me, who wants to save the world because he feels all the ways it hurts, he feels everything—and you felt it, you felt everything he felt and you loved it.”

  Don’t say that, Paul tried to say, don’t say that, neither of us wants it to be true. But all that would come out was the word Don’t, too soft and wavering to be intelligible.

  As he watched Paul’s eyes, Julian’s face flooded with pity. It did nothing to soften the revulsion.

  “You loved it.” He said each word with ruthless precision. “It’s the happiest I’ve ever seen you.”

  What Paul wanted, impossibly, was to comfort him—and he despised himself because he couldn’t tell whether he wanted to ease Julian’s pain or just spare himself from knowing he’d caused it.

  “Please—Julian, please look at me. It had to be done.”

  Julian drew a sharp breath and slid to the floor. When Paul approached, Julian met his eyes with such raw hatred and fierce, senseless love that Paul wished the shame could kill him.

  “It had to,” Paul said hopelessly. “He was an example, it had to be done, he said he didn’t even think it was strange to be ordered to kill little fucking kids, he would’ve done anything they told him to do—and there have to be consequences sometimes, there have to be, or they’ll never learn.”

  It should have given Julian some comfort, because it was the only thing that gave Paul any. But nothing changed. He looked at Paul as if he’d never seen him clearly before.

  “You’re so certain,” he said distantly. “Incomplete evidence, inferences clearly rooted in bias—not your best work. And here I was, doing everything I could to help you stay certain, because I thought I’d finally found a way to love you and have you even notice I was doing it.”

  Julian suddenly grinned, as if to keep himself from crying.

  “How sick is that?” he said. “I’m just as much of a monster as you are.”

  It would have been easy to walk out—to wander for an hour or two, get some fresh air and clear his head, and then come back expecting Julian to stitch both of them back together. But he didn’t deserve to reap the benefits of cowardice. He was supposed to be brave now, or free, or a real man, or whatever the fantasy had been. The least he could do was look directly at what he’d done.

  Paul sat alongside Julian on the kitchen floor. There was a long moment that they didn’t touch, or even look at each other. Paul could feel them staring at the same patch of wall, the scar of the glass in the yellow paint. When Paul breached the distance he expected Julian to recoil, but he didn’t. Paul had barely touched his arm when Julian collapsed against him. He lay with his head on Paul’s lap, hardly making a sound but for the scattered rhythm of his breathing.

  Paul’s heart was somewhere far outside him. He remembered the things Julian had once done to bear him through his own grief, and he mimicked them one by one, a mechanical performance of kindness for this boy he barely knew. He held Julian close and stroked his hair, and he didn’t dare speak. It’s all right, Julian had always told him. You’re all right. I like looking after you. But there was nothing Paul could say now that stood any chance of coming true.

  The sun set. Long shadows and stripes of ember-orange sunlight swung across the floor and then faded; at some point the phone rang, probably Paul’s family looking for him, but neither of them got up to answer it.

  He could feel Julian forcing himself back under control, summoning the will to move. Paul watched him sit up and push himself to his feet, but it felt impossible that his own body might follow.

  Julian didn’t look at him. He tapped out a cigarette, lit it, and sat propped on his elbows at the kitchen table. His shirt hung close against the depressions beneath his shoulder blades and the sharp profile of his seventh vertebra. Paul had a keen, agonizing memory of the taste and texture of Julian’s skin—the path from rib cage to scapula, up the rhythmic line of his spine. The soft firm incline between shoulder and neck, where the lightest touch from Paul’s lips could bring his every defense crashing down.

  Paul settled on the kitchen floor beside him and let his arm drape along the length of Julian’s thigh. Julian looked down at him, face barely visible in the dim light. He set down his cigarette and threaded his fingers through Paul’s hair.

  “Okay,” said Julian. “Let’s talk.”

  The pragmatic coldness still hadn’t left him, even if Paul could see now how much effort it took. Paul might be paralyzed by fear and grief and indecision, but Julian put the most ruthless part of himself to work. Somehow, despite everything, Julian had found something like a plan. “Let’s talk” meant that Julian would talk, so Paul shut his eyes and listened.

  “Near as I can tell, we don’t have much to worry about from them. You and the stolen sedative, even their seeing me on the sidewalk—it’s nothing but a couple of nasty coincidences, as far as they can prove. They aren’t going to find anything in the car—no, they really aren’t, we talked it to death, I know we did that part properly. They don’t have anything they can put in an acetate envelope and show to a jury as Exhibit A, and they never will.”

  Paul opened his eyes. Julian gazed toward the window; he picked up his cigarette again and relit it left-handed.

  “So their case is D.O.A.,” said Julian. “They’re going to need a confession, which means they have to get us to turn on each other. A day, maybe two, so they have the chance to search all the cars—but eventually they’re going to get fed up and bring us in. So you’re going to have to trust me a little while longer, Pablo, or all of this is going to fall apart.”

  Paul stopped waiting for him to make eye contact. He rested his head on Julian’s waist; there was something maddening about the way their bodies felt against each other, like two jigsaw pieces that almost fit.

  “So what do we do?”

  “The boring thing,” said Julian. There was a bleak smile in his voice. “What Henry would advise us to do, god help us, with all the force of his 1-L wisdom.” The muscles in his torso shifted as he moved to tap his cigarette in the ashtray. “We invoke our fucking Miranda rights and let the lawyers sort it out. It still isn’t a guarantee, but it’s the best avenue we have. And then it’s over, one way or the other.”

  It was humiliating and sensible and absolutely unfussy. He knew it was the best option, and he hated it.

  Julian let his hand slip free. His fingertips grazed the back of Paul’s neck, and then he withdrew his touch.

  “I need to know what’s going to happen after it’s over.”

  It was the cruelest thing Paul could have said, and he didn’t trust himself enough to decide whether it was on purpose. He endured the silence as long as he could, then looked up at Julian’s face.

  “What do you want to happen, Pablo?” said Julian. All the vibrant energy had left him.

  Paul couldn’t answer the question. There were too many answers. I want to go far away, start over, pretend we can wake up from this. To stop hurting you, and to hurt you so badly the scars will never fade. Never to see you again. Never to see anything but you.

  “I believe you now,” he said. “I believe you, I trust you, I don’t need you to prove anything to me anymore. I just wanted this to last forever, I was missing part of myself my whole life until I met you—I just wanted you to feel the same way, I wanted to feel like something you couldn’t replace—I couldn’t go back, I’d die without you, I just wanted to be worthy of you—”

  Julian turned in his seat and pulled Paul up by his collar to kiss him.

  They barely reached the bed. Neither of them expected it would ever happen again—there was no playfulness left, no attempt at grace. They were as clumsy as the first time and as ravenously tender. Too-eager teeth brushed skin, bruises echoed after fingerprints. But there was no cruelty left. It had always
been easier to hurt Julian than to endure his sincerity—the gentleness in his voice, the way he would collapse into a kiss. Paul made himself endure it now. He let Julian push him back against the mattress, welcomed his weight on top of him, even as he forced himself to feel how little Julian was really in control, and how clear it was that he never had been.

  They drew it out as long as they could. Even when it was over, they pretended it wasn’t. They held each other close, ungainly and barely moving, air shivering in their lungs like water. Then Julian pulled back and rolled to the side to lie next to him. Paul’s hips ached, and there was the gnawing pressure of a sob inside his chest, but when he tried to release it he couldn’t.

  “I hate you so much.” He could barely hear his own voice, but he knew Julian could. It wasn’t true except in its intensity, but that was enough. Julian was tense as if he were holding back a shudder. He nodded, just slightly, but he didn’t speak.

  10.

  A day, maybe two. Waiting, blindfolded, for the firing squad to load their rifles. Word drifted back from the friendly prosecutors, in their living rooms full of sweatered screaming children or their in-laws’ condominiums in Florida—precise and confident reassurances they were in no position to give. His grandparents threw themselves into their righteous fury; it left them no space for fear.

  Paul’s mother told him over and over that she wasn’t worried, either. One night she burned a snarl of spaghetti to the bottom of the pot, and the next morning withdrew at the last minute from her New Year’s Eve plans, but she wasn’t worried. She didn’t tell Audrey and Laurie why the garage records had been raided—“investigative overreach,” she quoted one of the lawyers, and by some absentminded oversight she failed to mention Paul’s part in the drama at all. But she wasn’t worried, not at all. It was a rough patch, but a mercifully surreal one. They would all look back on it with bewilderment, and one day they would laugh.

  There was no sparing them, even by letting his bicycle drift into traffic. The police would never relent—they would still want Julian, and all the remnants of evidence they thought Paul could still give them. They would come tearing into a house in mourning, and once and for all they would destroy his family’s memory of the obedient son they’d never had.

  In the final days of his life, Paul’s father had been as kind as he ever was. He told each of the children in turn how proud he was, and leaned down at breakfast every morning to kiss the crowns of their heads. The night before it happened, he pushed the kitchen table to the side of the room so he could tease Paul’s mother into dancing with him. He was happier than he’d been in weeks, and it was such a pleasure to endure his affection and deliberately inept jokes that no one questioned where the change had come from. They should have seen it for what it was, but they hadn’t. They still didn’t, now that Paul found himself compelled to do the same.

  Relentlessly, he made himself useful. He washed all the windows and laundered the curtains and cleaned the neglected flue so they could have a fire in the hearth on New Year’s Eve; when his mother abandoned her plans, he hurried out before the butcher closed to pick up a parcel of lamb. If he kept busy, Audrey couldn’t ask why he looked so miserable, and he wouldn’t have to feel his mother watching from the corner of her eye and wondering the same thing. He was helpful and kind, in the bashful, self-effacing way they expected of him. It wouldn’t read as an apology until it was too late.

  Paul turned in early on New Year’s Eve, but he didn’t sleep. He knew what morning would bring, even if he had no rational way of knowing. For hours he watched the ceiling and listened. Audrey had long since left for her party, but he could hear the television humming below as Laurie and his mother watched the special on ABC. Now and then there was a stray firework, until at midnight they erupted like a Russian symphony—then scattershot quiet, and the others coming upstairs for bed, and the rustle of the house settling.

  After days out of contact, he didn’t know what Julian was doing. It was like waking up to his own pinched, unfeeling arm draped over his body.

  When he got up for a glass of water, he found his mother awake. It was nearly two. She was sitting up with one of her historical novels, yellow light angling past her half-open door. He tried to creep by unseen, but she looked up at him and smiled.

  “Hey, little bug,” she said. “Can’t sleep?”

  He shrugged. His mother set her book aside and hooked her reading glasses in the collar of her nightgown. He didn’t argue when she beckoned him inside. He told himself it was an undertow of compliance that pulled him in, because even that was less damning than admitting he wasn’t quite through being a child.

  He couldn’t remember the last time he’d touched his parents’ bed—it was years ago, long before his father died. He couldn’t meet his mother’s eyes, but she didn’t appear to expect it of him. When he sat at the edge of the bed, she put a soft, bracing hand on his shoulder. The air in her room held a faint musk of woodsmoke from the fireplace below. Paul knew his black-and-white baby portrait hung by the door, but without his glasses he couldn’t see it.

  “You’ve been so down the last few days.” Her worry always carried an edge of gentle accusation. “You’re not letting that silliness at the garage get to you, right?”

  He couldn’t answer. He didn’t know anymore what might happen if he tried. He imagined the irresistible compulsion to tell her everything, how he would twist her love for him past its breaking point.

  She rubbed his shoulder. He could hear her preparing for the next question, summoning her nerve.

  “Did something happen with Julian?”

  He’d had time to brace for it; it shouldn’t have landed as hard as it did. “Nothing.” He barely opened his mouth as he spoke. “It was my fault. Just a stupid fight.”

  “Oh honey, I’m sorry,” she said, and left it at that. It occurred to him that she might once have been relieved, eager to push Julian out of their lives and declare the problem solved. But the only thing he could detect in her voice was a wary, deliberate sympathy—not quite what it aspired to be, but still far from anything he would have expected.

  They sat in silence for a long while. His mother let go of his arm and opened her book, but the pages never turned, so he knew she wasn’t reading. Paul stared at his hands and drummed his fingernails against his water glass.

  When he got up to leave, she caught his hand just long enough to squeeze it. “You can always talk to me,” she said gently. “About anything, okay? We all love you no matter what.”

  He only met her eyes for a moment, because that was all he could bear. It would have been easier to hurt her before, when he still saw her as a wound that never seemed likely to close. But he saw a human being now—kindly crow’s-feet eyes, buckling paper skin on the backs of her hands, flesh and bone. He hated her, hopelessly, for refusing to deserve this.

  He remembered hurrying back to his room, but he didn’t remember going to sleep. Without any time passing it was morning, almost too late. His sheets clung, damp with sweat as if he’d slept off a fever. From the kitchen below he heard the toaster pop, then the hiss of something in the frying pan. His heartbeat was frantic. He had very little time.

  The only thing left under his control was the project’s aesthetic dignity, and Paul attended to it with all the care of washing a corpse. He put himself meticulously to rights, because he owed it to the day to be presentable. He ran the shower autoclave-hot, scrubbed his nailbeds red, even combed a bit of pomade into his wet hair to make the curls look less unkempt. He dressed with great care, as if he’d been told he had to make a good first impression. He remembered the police station being cold, so under his corduroy suit he wore a blue roll-neck sweater that Julian had always liked. He didn’t have any polish for his good shoes, and wasn’t sure they were even the kind that ought to be polished, but he still tried to buff down the white creases of stress in the veneer. At all costs, he had to remain calm and self-contained. He mustn’t do anything to embarrass himself
.

  The knock sent a shock of quiet through the house. Paul took one last look to make sure his bookshelves were neat and ordered. Then he plucked his bedspread straight at the corners, folded his hands, and sat down to wait.

  The front door opened and did not close. The men’s voices were calm, businesslike; when his mother made a quiet sound of protest the men politely softened their tone, but they did not reassure her. A dutiful pause. Then the clatter of many footsteps up the staircase.

  There was no knock before Paul’s bedroom door swung open. Several men stood outside, but only Benton entered. He paused in the doorway with his hands on his hips, and for the first time Paul caught sight of the holster at his side. When Paul met his eyes Benton smiled, a grim and knowing funeral smile. His overcoat was dusted with snow.

  “I’d tell you why we’re here,” Benton said, “but I think you already know.”

  Paul looked back at him, blank-faced, and did not speak.

  “We’d like to make this as easy for everyone as possible,” said Benton, slowly and calmly as if he were reasoning with a child. “Your father deserves for all of us to handle this respectfully, I think you’ll agree with me on that. We can do this quietly. No handcuffs, for your mother’s sake—and it gives the neighbors a little less to talk about. You have a choice to make, Paul. You’re a smart young man. I think you’ll make the right one.”

  Paul couldn’t remember holding his breath, but it shook when he exhaled. He looked around his room and imagined distantly how it would look to these strangers—the Leonard Baskin reproduction above his bed, the favorite specimens in their shadowboxes, the dark curtains printed with galaxies and stars. He wondered what state they would leave it in. He wondered if he would ever be back to see it.

  “Could you please ask them to be careful with the specimen drawers?” The urgency of the question caught him so off guard that he couldn’t stop himself from asking. “They’re delicate, they shouldn’t be pawed through, and the drawers need to be opened gently.”