by L. J. Greene
It’s a goddamn sundae.
Leo likes to push my wheelchair for me around the ship now, and talk to me in a low, soothing voice as though he’s a hired nurse. He won’t let me walk too far on my own, not yet. Not yet, sweetheart, you’re still weak; not yet, lover, it’ll take too much out of you.
“Give me the paper,” I say, when I can’t take any more sweet cream.
He slaps down his napkin, stands without a word, and gathers up the dirty dishes and silverware to stack them on the trolley. He arranges and rearranges until I roll myself back from the table. While we’re in the suite I stay in my wheelchair. It makes it easier to get around, and my back aches when I try to stand for too long. He looks around at the sound, and he’s cheerful again.
“I have a surprise for you.”
“Do you?” I say, feigning a lack of interest. I don’t want to get my hopes up that I’ll be allowed bourbon tonight.
“I wanted to wait until we reached Southport, but…Shall we take a turn on the deck?”
It’s not a suggestion. He wheels me to the elevator and takes me down to the first-class deck. It’s quiet; most of the folks are in at dinner, and anyway, it’s chilly at nights. The cold Atlantic is bare and black under a sliver of the moon. Leo is right behind me, his hand on my shoulder, but I’m lonely and bleak as the ocean.
The chair jerks as he kicks on the brake. “I took your cane down,” he says. “Or I can help y—”
I stand and swing around, gripping the back of the chair, and grab the cane from his hand. Once I have my balance back I hobble forward to the railing and look over. “Desolate and empty is the sea,” I say under my breath.
“I like to see you by moonlight,” Leo says, and I catch a scent of his cigarette. He’s leaning his elbows on the rail.
“There’s no moon,” I say stubbornly.
He stretches, and wanders back to the chair, where he rummages in the satchel he likes to keep on the back of it. The satchel that holds all my accoutrements, the artifacts of an invalid: pills, towels, a change of underclothes. Handkerchiefs, scores of them, and some of them still embroidered with RC. “Yes, it’s a little dark tonight, but I think you’ll still be able to see this—” He’s holding out an envelope for me. A large, foolscap-sized envelope, but it makes me start shaking nonetheless.
On the front of it he’s scribbled my name.
I can’t take it from him, so we stand there until he loses patience.
“It’s your surprise, lover. Let me show you.” He rips it open for me and holds it so I can see the contents: not linen, not this time, but papers.
I take it then, as a frigid wind starts up and turns my ears to ice. I lean my cane against the rail so I can pull out the papers and look at them. Typed pages, smudged here and there and, as the breeze curls around on itself, I swear I could smell a faint note of singed wool clinging to them.
“It’s my novel,” I say. It’s not; not quite. It’s one chapter of it. But it’s the best chapter, the last chapter.
“Yes, sweetheart,” he replies, grinning like he’s proud of himself. “I told you, didn’t I? I told you there was something left of it, and here it is.”
I stare at it in my hands, clutching and crumpling like it might bring the words back to life somehow. Make the story sing again. It’s no use. The thing’s dead as a doornail. Dead as I should be.
I lean over the railing again and let the pages flutter from my fingers, weaving and ducking on the wind, until they disappear in the black. I can see one or two ghostly shapes cling to the bow before they peel off in the spray and vanish.
Chapter 51
Leo comes close and grips my branded shoulder hard. It healed long ago but he squeezes hard enough to make it hurt all over again and I can’t stop a cry of pain. He spins me round and grabs a handful of my shirtfront, twisting my collar enough to make me worry about getting enough air. My cane clatters to the deck, the sterling silver knob cracking painfully against my ankle.
“Now, why would you go and do a thing like that?” he hisses.
I clutch at his hand. “I can’t breathe, goddammit,” I choke, and I’m taken back to the first night I saw his act drop, when he had me by the neck over a dresser in the guest room of the mansion, mad that I’d disrupted his carefully-laid plans.
He lets up on my collar, smoothes down my shirt, and takes me by the waist instead. Sounds almost hurt when he says quietly, “I rescued that for you, and then you go and throw it overboard like it’s nothing.”
I open my mouth to tell him it is nothing, always has been nothing, but the way he’s staring at me makes me hesitate. Speculative. His eyes slide sideways and look down at the sea, and his hands tighten on me. All of a sudden I feel top-heavy, like I might overbalance and take a tumble down into all that black water.
It’d be a quick death with the ocean bashing me around the underside of the ship, barnacles flaying the skin from my bones. Not much chance of fishing me out alive. There’s one benefit that a sea passage has over air travel, and if there’s one thing I do know, it’s that this jolly holiday is about tying up loose ends.
My mouth goes dry and I say hoarsely, “I never asked you to rescue anything. But thanks, I guess. And I’m sorry.”
His hands don’t relax. He pushes me back against the rail before he leans forward to kiss me, a press of his lips on mine. They don’t land square, and he gives a quick lick at the corner of my mouth like he wants to eat me all up. “I’m only trying to be kind to you,” he breathes.
“Let’s…let’s go back up.”
“Go back up?”
I nod.
He kisses me again, nuzzling at my ear. “You haven’t let me kiss you like this for a long time.”
“That’s why I want to go back up,” I tell him. My heart drums ever-faster.
“You’re sure?” Leo asks.
I nod again, more emphatically. “It’s been so long, I…we should try.”
He smiles, and I think about Alice, and what she said that night she and Betts did their damndest to fill my head with doubt. He looks at me and smiles, and he looks at you and smiles, and he looks at Reggie and smiles. And it’s all the same smile.
Shakespeare knew it, too: one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.
I give my best imitation of a smile now.
“Alright,” Leo says warmly. “Let’s get you back in your chair.” He holds me close as I limp back over, hitching me up like I’d fall without him. I think I would, though. When a man lives day to day with no certainties in his life, the very ground he walks becomes unstable and dangerous. “Why, you’re shivering,” he says, after he arranges me back in the wheelchair. “I’m sorry, dear heart; I should have brought your blanket down with us. But I’ll warm you soon enough when we get back to the room.”
He leans over to plant a lascivious kiss on me, the kind that would get us both thrown overboard if anyone were to see, but the deck is still deserted. I really don’t know how Leo has restrained himself this long.
It’s been three months since what he keeps calling “the accident”. I was a month in the hospital, and another two recuperating at the mansion before we flew to New York to board the Queen Mary. Cresswickham’s will provided above and beyond even Leo’s wildest dreams: he got the mansion in Bel-Air, along with all the furnishings therein, even the antiques that rightfully belonged back in Holford Hall. It was topped off with a cash sum that made me suck my breath in when I heard the figure, with a monthly allowance from the capital. I wondered at his desperation to keep Leo with him. He spent half his fortune to do it, in the end.
Alice got the other half, of course, predicated on various codicils and clauses about her marriage. I didn’t listen, because I was overcome with a strange pity for the dead man.
“Cresswickham sure did right by you in the end,” I’d said to him the other night in the New York hotel as we waited for our ship to come in.
“He was good for something, after all,” he agreed a
bsent-mindedly.
That was the same night I asked him why Alice wasn’t rotting in jail back in LA. Or the ground, for that matter.
We were sitting in bed. He was reading Faulkner, and I’d been thinking again, trying to make sense of it all. Alice had admitted everything, Leo had told me, after I passed out. Reggie’s death was on her; she’d strung the line across the stairs without much concern about who tripped over it first. It might have been Leo or me, after all, but she did try to make him stay downstairs with me.
“And of course, she knew you’d drunk whiskey, so you’d be out of it.”
I wasn’t much impressed by this small precaution. “Should’ve shot them both, Betts and Alice,” I said again. “Cleaner that way.”
“My, but you’ve become bloodthirsty,” he said vaguely, and kept reading.
“My world view’s changed,” I told him. “Tell me again why you didn’t?”
He put down the book with as much flair as if I’d interrupted the signing of the Declaration of Independence. “I told you. I made a deal with her. She left. The ambulance came, and off we went to hospital. And frankly, I didn’t fancy dealing with one extra corpse on top of everything else.”
“And the police? Didn’t they ask any awkward questions about Betts, not to mention me bleeding out on the carpet from a gunshot wound?”
He took up his book again. “Money talks, my dear. The LAPD are hardly averse to having their palms greased. Betts was a very convenient—what is that term you Americans use? Ah, yes. He was a convenient fall guy.”
It was a simple explanation, but I wondered whether it had really been that easy. Yet there we were, free and clear, although soon after Leo started agitating about a cruise. Why not take the Queen Mary, he suggested, and go from England across the channel to Paris, make our way to Rome and the Vatican?
“Why the Vatican, of all places?” I asked.
“I’d like to see the Basilica. Be blessed by the Pope.”
“You’re C of E now,” I said. “Remember?”
He said nothing at my jibe, but he managed to make me regret it. He has a variety of new ways to punish me now. No newspaper that day, and no bourbon either.
But I managed to bribe the maid who came to change the sheets while Leo was in the shower, and got hold of a paper, wondering what had happened to give him itchy feet again so soon.
It was no big deal, only garnered a small corner mention, but it had promise of being a bigger story: a burned-up corpse had been found in the wilderness east of the city. No formal identification had been made yet, but I knew well and good who it was. Freddie King had turned up like a bad penny.
I’d taken King’s corpse out there because I knew it was the Walker Boys’ preferred graveyard, but it still raised the hair on the back of my neck. At the end of the article there was something that gave me further pause:
Police could not say if the murder is connected to recent findings of six males found buried in the same area. Those victims also remain unidentified. Their images are reproduced here in case any member of the public—
I grabbed at page so hard I nearly ripped it. There were six hand-drawn portraits underneath the story, but two in particular gave me a sick thrill of recognition.
Michael and Gabriel.
I made sure the maid took the paper with her that day when she left.
Chapter 52
We go back to our cabin and I let Leo undress me, lay me in the bed, caress me. It’s been a long time since I’ve touched him like this. He’s less wiry than I remember, like having money of his own has filled him out some. He’s got muscles where he didn’t have before.
I wonder again how he’s managed without it. Some nights he sleeps in my bed, but I’ve never once caught him taking his pleasure alone when I wake in the middle of the night and know, from his breathing, that he’s awake too. Never heard him in the bathroom. He’s never made a move on me, either, but I know him. I still know him. The man was not made to live like a monk, and that makes me think he must have taken lovers somehow, despite the fact that he’s been by my side day and night. Attentive as a nursemaid.
He’s as responsive as I remember, leaning in to my body as soon as he can, but then pausing to readjust so he doesn’t crush me. “You’ll tell me if you’re uncomfortable,” he murmurs, kissing across my chest. The brand Cresswickham left on me healed up more than I expected it to. It’s mostly gone, except for a few puckered areas where my skin’s seized up on itself. I can even look at it most days without thinking about where it came from.
I can’t look as Leo moves further down. That jagged scar where they ripped me open to save my life—it horrifies me, scares me to see it, pink still and shiny in a way skin shouldn’t be, falsely cheerful. But the way Leo tongues at it, you’d think it sends him.
“Don’t,” I whisper, and push at his shoulder. He glances up at me, his hair falling forward on his brow.
“Does it hurt?”
“It’s ugly.”
“It’s the furthest thing from ugly. It’s what saved your life.” He traces his tongue along it again. It snakes across my abdomen like a barbed smile, then takes a violent downward twist and races towards my privates. The bullet took a stroll around my insides, ricocheting off bones, before it nicked my kidney on the way out. I have a small knot of scar tissue on my back, but nothing like the intricate cicatrices exploding out from the bullet hole crater on my belly, like a second nightmarish navel. The webs of scalpel marks and stitches make me feel like Frankenstein’s monster.
Leo follows the path of the scar until he’s nosing around in my balls, soaking me with his spit. He lifts my sack to get underneath it as well. I worry I might not be clean enough for this. It’s still an effort for me to use the bathroom on my own, but it’s better than the abject humiliation I suffered for in the hospital and at the mansion. Leo insisted on helping me, wiping me down and then cleansing me thoroughly with wet cloths.
That all stopped one ugly day when I shattered the vase on my nightstand waving my arms around, screaming at him to stay the hell away from me, floundering around in my own filth in the bed. I’m not proud of that day, but at least it stopped his nursing act, even if he pointedly had the mattress replaced. And for two days after my room was filled with fragrant lilies, heady and miasmic, until Leo was satisfied that the underlying stench was gone.
He still insists on bathing me twice a week. He has a mistrust of the hygiene provided by showers, no matter how long I stay in them, or how often I take them. They’re easier for me than getting in and out of a bath. But at the mansion, Leo would help me patiently up that grand staircase and gets me into the huge copper bathtub in Cresswickham’s room—Leo’s room, now—to clean out every crevice of my body with assiduous, soaped-up fingers. Once or twice he’s suggested even more: “We could get you squeaky clean inside and out, lover. It can be quite stimulating, I’m told.”
“You’re not sticking a pipe in me and filling me up like a water balloon,” I growled at him, but I could see by his agreeable smile that he figured he’d wear me down eventually.
He probably will. I don’t know why it’s such an obsession for him, but it is. Maybe he doesn’t like the taste of me as much, post-catastrophe; maybe I’ve turned bitter on his palate.
Doesn’t seem to bother him now as he hikes up my thighs and spreads them wider. “Alright?” he asks. “Comfortable?” He breathes a muggy breath over my flaccid prick, shuffles down further south, and I feel his shuddery sigh over my hole.
“I’m comfy,” I say shortly. “Listen—you know what the doctors said—I won’t be able to…”
“Oh, doctors,” he says airily. “What do they know? And anyway, it doesn’t mean we can’t still have some fun. I know you like this—” He starts to feast on me, rapacious and obscene, and lewd noises fill the cabin. I can’t help myself sobbing out in pleasure, although it’s no use. The sensation is as titillating as it ever was, but I stay obstinately limp. Even when Leo gets his
fingers on me, worming their way in, caressing me from the inside out and making me mewl—even then, nothing happens. I’m droopy as a dying flower.
His tongue is persistent, vibrating with his chuckles as I spread myself wider for him. I want it. I want it, hoping madly it’ll affect me like it should; if not now, then one day. Some day. He pries me open with his thumbs, makes me gape for him. I can feel it. I’m opening up, my body willing to just about split itself in two for him. I’ve taken a branding and a bullet. What else wouldn’t I take for him?
“You’re divine,” he murmurs, like he can hear my thoughts. I stifle a snort, but he hears it anyway. “Yes you are, sweetheart. Divine.”
If the man wants to worship at such a filthy church, I don’t see much point stopping him. I couldn’t, anyway. He has me just where he wants me, and bent double on myself to boot. Besides, I don’t want him to stop. Whenever he takes his mouth off me I think about all the ways my broken body’s not responding.
“Go on, then,” I tell him, and he obliges. His tongue is hot and hard, lancing into me in a smooth rhythm while he rocks me against his face. Even in my deepest boozy stupor this would have roused me, surely, but not now. I lie back and take it, let him gorge on me as he will. Once I’ve relaxed to his liking, he wipes his face down with a handkerchief. He moves to kiss at my sagging prick, and for a moment I think his tentative approach is because he’s worried how I’ll react, but he doesn’t even glance up at me.
He’s busy gazing starry-eyed at my languishing cock. “Divine,” he breathes at it, and lays soft wet kisses up and down its length, nosing it around like a cat playing with a half-dead mouse. His hand quests into my ass until I whine and press down on it for more, but he removes it instead. He cleans it on another of his inexhaustible supply of handkerchiefs.