The Story of the Vampire, L (Completed | Featured )

Dasius, Part 8 - What I Command

We stayed there for some time, in our house in Boston. In the end, Marcellus refused to go back home to either California or to Texas. He told me, pressed against my warming body, pressed against my back, "I want this house."

I told him, "Yes and so you will have it, but first you must go home." His fingers dragged against my sternum and I could not keep my eyes from rolling back into my head.

"I'm squared away. I can buy new things," he told me, with a little disdain. 

I had noticed, with some trepidation, how his eyes struggled to focus on small things. I wondered if anyone had ever bothered to test his vision. I wanted to take him to see the doctors that I knew, and those doctors were in Los Angeles. "Would you object to a short stay in Los Angeles?"

"In a hotel room? No thank you. Buy me an apartment there too if you want me to go."

Did I want to say, "We don't have the money to live quite that extravagantly?" That it had already been a hard battle to take money away from others so that he could have the house here in Boston? That our finances were a delicate dance and that in order to do as he asked I would have to carve deeply into our investment capitol? I had already one person who I was willing to do such things for. I was not certain in any capacity that our coffers could support two. "So please us both," I murmured.

For the first time, watching him pack up his little suitcase and busy himself in his room, I felt a little disdain. I thought, what will he do to us, if I cannot say no to him? If I worry over something like money, feel uneasiness, can I be so certain of him? Of myself? And over the afternoon, my disquiet deepened sufficiently enough to trouble me. After some time, I went away to my office, I'm afraid without saying good bye to him. I felt struck with the most extraordinary sadness, so suddenly struck with uncertainty, and could not think of a place to rest in that house. At my office, I sat in a chair and looked for Nicky, but he had gone elsewhere some few nights past, leaving me with, "Be wary. I love you and your nose, take care. I love you and your buttons, take care." What he went to do, I do not know.

I thought of myself, not for the first time, as a younger man and in love. Oh I had so been in love, those first few years. Oh how like this was not like that at all. You see that I did worship him, my Laurent, in those earlier times. Still, I felt great regard for his head, and well enough to attract me to him. Even, sometimes, lying beside him in bed I felt the deepest thrill of pleasure quite in tune with those early feelings. Surely, what I feel now, and felt then in Boston is tempered with that deeper love of belonging, and of origin, but I did feel that old thrill occasionally. I did feel a wish to be swept up by him and to be seen by him. 

I told myself, he will creep into your life quite wrongly if you call him now, though I knew he waited to hear from me. There is no love like ours where the other party feels nothing. Of course I knew that he loved me even when he said that he didn't and that he couldn't. I thought of his little lips and tortured myself. I thought of his cologne, of its sugar, and tortured myself. I thought of him coming in and saying, "So let us relieve our body of our little sin, and put him by," and saying, "Yes," and him to whisper to me, "Dove."

I thought of Laurent's hands untucking my shirt, and of them upon my body, and how in my younger days his touch would draw from my lips earnest prayers to God, and how the touch of his own lips could make me forget Him or feel Him in me wholly. I trembled to think of it, there in Boston. I shivered for things as they had been.

But even then, so much had changed from our lives before. In France, we had lived as one body. In America, so often distance separated us. If living beside me, he would grow restless for the world, and feel as if I tethered him to a place. This I did not mean to do, but he had his own struggle. I could only be balm to homesickness, and he so often denied that he felt so in those years. I keenly ached for him. So quickly I had been swept into a romance that I could not be sure I truly wanted, but whose battles had been fought already, and won. To hear the boy say he loved me, it did not tremble me the same. I felt afraid of what I did not know. I sat by myself awhile, and sad.