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This Is Not A Love Song
‘What’s wrong.’ It is a statement, not a question. He sits back on his heels, eyes dark and unreadable. ‘What is it.’ He is not concerned, but curt. He doesn’t sound very interested in my answer – but then he never does, nowadays.
‘Nothing.’ I lean in to kiss him, but he pulls back.
‘You flinched,’ he says flatly.
‘I didn’t.’
‘You did.’ Automatically he pats where his breast pocket would be, searching for cigarettes, forgetting his nakedness. ‘Look, Vash. If you don’t want to,’ he says, leaning over and sweeping aside the clutter on the bedside table, picking up the crumpled cardboard packet, ‘we don’t have to.’
‘It’s not that.’
‘Well, what is it, then?’ he responds evenly, tapping a cigarette out against the palm of his hand, putting it in his mouth, leaving it unlit. ‘You flinched when I touched you. You did it yesterday too. With a woman that usually means no. What am I supposed to think?’
‘I didn’t—’
‘You have to admit,’ he says around the cigarette, poker-faced, with no trace of feeling, ‘that the logical explanation is that you can’t stand me any more.’
‘That’s not—’
‘Fair enough, Vash,’ he goes on, talking over me as if I haven’t spoken. ‘Fair enough if you’ve realised you don’t like me. God knows I could understand that. But there’s no need for melodramatics, all right? You can say it to my face. I can take it.'
‘I wasn’t—’ I stammer. ‘I don’t not like you— how can you—’
‘Forget it,’ he says curtly, looking round. ‘Damn it… Where’s my lighter?’
‘I don’t know.’
He looks at me, eyebrows raised in something like pity. ‘I was talking to myself,’ he says with deliberate slowness. ‘Why don’t you get dressed and we’ll play cards. Or something. Christ, I need a drink.’
I feel myself flush, miseably. He only has to use that tone, that patronising, I-know-you’re-a-bit-slow voice, and instantly I feel such a child. He can always make me feel like this, if he chooses. It’s ironic: chronologically he’s years younger than me, but what do numbers matter when he’s aeons wiser? He may not know everything, but he seems to know everything that matters.
‘Don’t look like you’ve just been kicked,’ he says, a shade more gently, glancing at me as he cups his hand round his cigarette and tips his lighter (in his jacket pocket, incidentally, exactly where he left it) to its end. ‘It’s me that should look like that.’ His eyes are so dark the pupils seem swallowed by the irises. It’s like he’s weighed down by what he knows. He’s so preoccupied nowadays, so sad and heavy-eyed with lack of sleep. Every time he hoists his cross it seems to weigh more, and his shoulders sag under its weight. I feel for him – so much – but he won’t tell me anything: what the matter is, how I could help. Anything. All I know is that he’s miserable.
I am a selfish person. And a coward. And ungrateful. The least I can do for him, as his friend, even, is this.
He makes to get up. I reach out and catch his arm by the crook of the elbow.
‘What?’ he says tiredly. ‘I’m not in the mood for games.’
‘Neither am
He turns, slowly, to fix me with that black stare. ‘Look at you,’ he says. ‘You’re practically cringing just thinking about it, aren’t you? What makes you think I want you like this?’ He gets up, grabs all his clothes together. ‘Christ, Vash,’ he spits. ‘Jesus Christ. All these times, instead of enduring it, you could have just said you had a fucking headache.’
With that he turns and stalks into the tiny bathroom, slamming the flimsy door behind him.
I kneel in the middle of the bed, frozen in place by a tiny click. He’s locked it. We never lock it.
‘Wolfwood,’ I say into the leftover silence. ‘Nicholas. Nick.’ I feel like I’m paring him down, shortening his name by stages, degrees of familiarity. I realise suddenly that I never even asked him if he minded me calling him Nick.
Still the door remains stubbornly closed.
‘You’re not killing yourself in there, are you?’ I call, then instinctively almost clap my hand over my mouth. It sounded lighthearted and funny in my head, but out in the open it’s terrifying. A cold fist clenches in my chest. ‘Nick,’ I say, suddenly frightened, getting off the bed, going to the door. ‘Nick, please.’
What was it he said to me just then? There’s no need for melodramatics. Melodramatics. That was it. The cruel shot goes home for the second time. Slowly I take my fist from where it is poised to hammer against it, press my back against the smooth wood and let myself slide down to the floor. If I sit here I can pretend it’s me who’s keeping him in. I lean my head back and imagine him, on the other side, sitting exactly like this. My dark mirror image. How’s that for melodramatic, Nicholas?
‘Wolfwood.’ I try again, softly. Silence.
Him in there. Me out here.
Stalemate.
I close my eyes. I’m so tired. We fight all the time now, about nothing, and it tires me out. I can barely believe it now, but it wasn’t always like this. It didn’t used to be like this. In the beginning it was beautiful. In the beginning there was friendship, and an understanding.
Everything was wonderful when there was no sex.
Imagine if we’d never done it that strange, surreal first time. Imagine if we’d never gone into that bar, drunk quite that much between us, taken a room together because it was cheaper… But it’s completely pointless to speculate. It’s done. And we’re never going back. We can’t.
I was really shy, the first time. Isn’t that a quaint image, with me sitting here naked and not even thinking about it? No, that first time I didn’t want to show myself to him. I thought he would have expectations, you see. He liked beautiful things. Beautiful girls, smooth-skinned as downy petals. I was not beautiful. When the mirror got steamed up while I was taking showers I never wiped it clear: all I would see of myself was a pale pink blur with a mop of yellow on top. Me in abstract. It was better that way. I was not beautiful and I said this to him, confided in him, told him what he would see, but he was undressing me even as I told it, hardly listening, murmuring vague comforting things on breath sweet with alcohol about how he wouldn’t if I didn’t want to.
I didn’t want to, very much. I liked kissing just fine. I liked his hands in my hair or on my face and I liked exploring the warm wetness of the unknown territory that was his mouth. I found out what pink tasted like. I liked making him so excited, too, but, typically, I never thought of the consequences of my light teasing pressure here, my hand brushing down there. With my brother it had never been like this. We had lain for hours together, clothed, mouths and minds locked together in a ravenous melded kiss that threatened to devour him or me or both of us with its power. Never once had either of us become aroused. Not in that way. We could control it. My brother had been the master of control.
My priest asked me to confess. He asked me, gently, drunkenly, whether I’d ever been with anyone. For simplicity’s and for shame’s sake I said no. If I wanted to keep lying to myself – and whichever Gods there were knew that I did; that was the only reason I’d been functioning anywhere near normally for the past however many years, by playing elaborate games of pretend – I could say that it was partially true. After all, I had never been with a human before. He had. Many times. Once upon a time they had been with him. ‘Know what I mean?’ he said, with an unsober wink and an odd little laugh that ended on the knife-edge of a sob. No, I didn’t know. I didn’t understand. I nodded and smiled, hesitantly, as he laughed, even more raucously.
He knew how to be gentle with virgins, he said, warm breath like transubstantiated vodka against my mouth as he kissed me, sloppily, and pushed me back on to the small rickety bed. It creaked under my weight. He had been one himself, once.
It was always going to be different for me. For us. But it was different than I thought it would be. It didn’t hurt like I thought it would, but when he touched me he was still by no means as gentle as my brother. He was drunk, sure, and clumsy with it, but there was a desperation there, too, which made the whole experience much more huge and significant in the fug of liquor that was my mind. There was a need. His fingers inside me did not flutter for my pleasure but pushed and pushed, forcing me ready, forcing me ready for him.
Even then, even while it was so uncomfortable and almost frighteningly rough (grow some backbone, maybe, but my brother had always been so gentle, so literally on my wavelength, and this was alien to me) I made up my mind to like it because I liked him so much. It was nothing like rape. And, to be fair, it did get better.
It was very quiet, though. We were both very quiet. Over the sound of our heavy breathing and the rhythmic squeak of bedsprings and the wet sounds I could hear a radio playing, very softly, coming from one of the apartments across from our third-floor window in our run-down hotel. A woman’s voice, clear and low and sweet, though I could not make out the words. It sounded like a different language, I thought, as I lay there on my back with my legs hoisted high on his shoulders. It was like a religious rite. This goes here and that goes there, and the music plays on in the background.
After it was over and he had come, I was sore. I lay on my stomach so he wouldn’t see my face (though he was passed out drunk or exhausted or both anyway and it didn’t matter), pressing the ache in me down into the mattress even as my cheeks and chin began to smart. His unshaven jaw had left my face and neck raw. I drifted a bit, I think, even dozed a little. Eventually the ache lessened, made less because I had stopped concentrating on it. It was the absence of it, that dull pain, which, oddly, brought me fully awake. I was sweaty: behind my knees and between my thighs it felt wet. I sat up, carefully, nudged his sprawled legs aside, and put my feet on the floor. I would dry off before I tried to sleep, I decided, though I did not feel in the least bit sleepy. The moons’ light beckoned, reaching slim silver fingers across the rough wood floor, almost touching my bare feet. I stood up and went to the window.
It was very late, or early, and the music had long since been turned off. Staring into the darkness, at the wall of black which was the facing building, I tried to guess which of the dark squares had been the window from which the ghostly woman had broadcast her lullaby. Staring into that nothingness like a void, like the black of space, I thought about a lot of things. I can’t remember them now. They seemed profound at the time. Maybe they were. Or maybe I was just still drunk.
It must have been at two or three o’ clock, when the too-early desert dawn was beginning to spread its pale blue wash over the horizon, that I realised how long I had been standing there motionless at the open window, and how cold I was. Once I had realised it and acknowledged it I could not stop shivering, convulsively, as if I were having a fit. My feet and hands were numb. I went back to bed and peeled back the covers, this time, managed to get him under them, unwieldy and unconscious, dead to the world. I was about to climb in my side when I saw the little dark spots on the pale sheet. I touched them, and they were dry, but when I brought my fingers to my nose I could smell that unmistakeable dark iron tang.
Specks of blood, just where I had been lying.
I felt ashamed as if I had wet the bed; I felt like a naive girl whose virginity had been taken. And then I hardened myself, told me to get it together, to get some backbone: at least it added to the authenticity of my virgin claim. Get it together. Get some backbone. I said to myself, unconsciously, all the things that he said.
It did not occur to me that it might be his fault I had bled.
He woke a few minutes later, oddly enough, when I was on the very edge of sleep. He rolled on top and began to kiss me. I came round beautifully, thinking of the taste of pink, pressed into the mattress by his warm weight, with his tongue in my mouth. Sleep had sobered him somewhat, though not completely; he hushed me, serious, looking entirely lovable, and I leaned up to kiss him, opening my sleepy mouth against his.
‘Vash,’ he murmured, nibbling my ear, his voice doing sexy things to me as it caressed my name. I felt him harden against my thigh. ‘Baby. Mmm…’ He nuzzled my neck. ‘Open your legs…’
I froze.
‘Come on,’ he entreated me, more urgently now, licking my neck. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘It’s just – I’m a bit –’ I flushed, hating myself for the feebleness of it.
‘What?’ He pulled back.
‘I’m a bit – sore,’ I said lamely.
He sat up, angrily, fuzziness gone. ‘Why the hell didn’t you tell me I hurt you?’ he asked in a furious undertone.
‘You didn’t,’ I whispered hurriedly, aware of the thinness of the walls. ‘Not really. I mean—’
And then he looked down and saw the blood.
‘I obviously did,’ he said tightly, ‘if I made you bleed.’
‘That? That’s nothing, look, it’s hardly—’
He turned his back, violently. Suddenly he sobbed: a dry, angry gasp. I sat, cross-legged, staring at his back, stunned.
‘Wolfwood?’ I said tentatively, and reached out to put my hand on his hunched shoulder. ‘It’s – it’s okay. Really. It doesn’t hurt. Really.'
Eventually I got it out of him. He began to tell me, in a low monotone, like a bee’s drone. It was masochistic: I knew he was telling me to punish himself. When the telling of it got too much, though, when the talking became too laboured to go on, he seemed to snap, something seemed to just go and he pushed me back down on the bed and forced his mouth down on mine.
The springs of the bed creaked rhythmically, louder than before in the pre-dawn silence, and in between the brutal searing flashes of pleasure I thought briefly of the girls next door, again of the thinness of the walls, and then he reached for me and I heard my own strangled gasps of pleasure melt into a juddering moan and he, catching my lower lip in his teeth, a painful biting kiss, drove hard. The headboard, bumping against the wall with a muted bang.
When he kissed me afterwards, trembling, his tears ran into my mouth.
‘Oh, God, Vash,’ he sobbed into my neck, ‘I’m sorry, Vash, God I’m so sorry.’
Sobbing the name of his god – or the God, I should say, though to me that seemed narrowly arrogant, capitalising it, as if there was no possibility of any other god ever – and entangling that name with mine. Appealing to us, his God and me, on what seemed like equal footing. Though I couldn’t speak for God, of course, I did not see what could be done. There was nothing I could do but hold him in my arms and let him have this small thing of me, assure him that I was all right, though I ached like knives. He pressed his palms into his eyes, held them there for a minute, and then he resumed his narrative as if nothing had happened. Such horrible things trailed behind him in the wake of his past. Silent accusatory ghosts with heavy dragging chains, holding him back as he fought to be free of them. He struggled on. As I did. As we all did. The empathy I felt for him in that moment is indescribable.
Later that long, long night – it would have been properly morning by then, four or five o’clock, because there was a grey-gold light making everything look wan and sick – I woke. I didn’t know I’d fallen asleep until then. I found him praying, kneeling by the bed, hands clasped, head bent, shoulders hunched, awkward as an atheist. He was muttering something.
‘Ave Maria,’ he said, fast, under his breath. ‘Ave Maria, gratia – gratia plena – ora pro – pro nobis – fuck –’
He pressed his forehead hard against his clasped hands, cursed through his teeth. I sat up and opened my mouth, but of course I didn’t know what came next. He must have sensed me because he raised his head and looked me square in the face.
‘It won’t come,’ he said hopelessly. ‘I used to know it, Vash. I used to know it off by heart, and now it won’t come.’
I had thought him telling me about everything – about his foster father, about what he had done and been forced to do as a child, a teenager, a young man – would be cathartic. How wrong could I be? It was as if a wound had been ripped open, words torn from his dark intricate tapestry like thread from tight stitches. I should never have asked. Finally managing to persuade him back into bed for the few hours of rest we had left before Meryl came hammering on the door and there he lay on his back beside me, unaware of the cliché: frowning, muttering, having his bad dreams, when before he had been the soundest sleeper I had ever met. We live and speak and die in cliché. Even I love you is a cliché, though we had not said it. I didn’t know how true it was for us. ‘Let me in, Nick.’ I rest my forehead against the door. ‘Please.’
I still don’t.
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