Give Me That Body (Oneshots)

Laurent (1930) - Let Them Look

"I did something bad," Mini said, coming into the room and sitting next to me on the couch. He swept his hands along the couch's satiny fabric. Its little pink primroses. His hand continued its sweep, as always intrigues me about him, following the sensation curiously, down the couch's curved wooden leg.

"What did you do?" I asked.

"I'll tell you if you stop looking at me like that."

"What look?"

He pushed his top lip up with his fingers into a little pinched expression. "Like an irritated goose. Like a contemptuous goose. I don't even have muscles that can do that."

"What did you do?"

"Stop looking at me like that."

I battered him with the flat of my hands and he laughed, shrieking like a little boy. I laid my head against his soft cream-colored sweater, the side of my nose against his hard black buttons. His buttons looked like shiny bird eyes. I sat up again.

"What are you doing?" he asked me, lying over the couch's arm, still laughing a little.

"I'm looking at photographs."

"Oh good," he said, a rascal. He sat close to me. "Who is this?"

"This is Leis," I said, and showed him the photo, cupped in my hand.

"Where is he? In New York?"

"He is here but he is south of here, in North or South Carolina."

"I can't really tell but I think I could eat him with a spoon. Like a flan," he said. "I don't know if you know this but that boy is naked."

"I know it."

"I'm joking. Are you playing with me? There's no need to take me seriously," he said.

"I am not playing," I told him, because his little pink lips were near my ear.

"Why do you have a photo like this?"

"Because he is naked for me."

"What are you doing this for? What about us?" he asked me, angry for only a moment.

I only smiled with all of my teeth.

"I'm going to roll you out like a dough. Won't you even ask about the bad thing I did?"

He had come to my apartment three months before, for the first time since he had left me four hundred years before. He had come looking modern, and tailored, with his deeply red hair cut short, with his pretty lavender eyes afire. "I'll have you look at me," he had demanded, "I'll have you look," he said, "look and look." For four hundred years he had been too ashamed to come. Too ashamed to have left so abruptly, for wanting to leave.

I had been sitting in my kitchen, knowing what he did not know, that my other were asleep in the next room. My old master. Knowing what he did not know, that my other and I had been so at odds for so long that I could not go out for fear of exposing my vulnerabilities, for fear of bawling like a little girl at the slightest provocation. Not a state in which to cavort, to be seen. 

"Will you not speak?" he had said, exasperated.

"I know what you've done," I told him, upset that it was he that had come and not any others.

"What part?" he had asked, and I had laughed nervously.

He stood there in his slacks and his black derby shoes, in my kitchen, in my sixth floor walk up, in air I could hardly breathe.

"I have heard that you have gone wild. That you are a wild man, and I cannot have that. I am," I had said, unable to find the breath to speak. The littlest upset and I fought tears. That he had murdered his parents after he had left me. That he had hacked them apart with an ax. That he had been wild to me as well, as I had given him first blood, intent on ripping me apart. I clutched my neck with my palms, feeling savage teeth there.

The way that he was looking at me, his entire expression had changed. The way that he was looking at me was with delicate confusion, which is the kind that means compassion.

"Stop that," I'd told him. "Don't look at me like that. I've a sword still, and a man still. You've nothing."

"Ouais, je n'ai rien," Yeah I have nothing, he said. "So take me. It will be nothing to you. Even take me to the sword."

"I shall not."

"Then to the man. You are a man? I have much to say to you," he said.

I went because of his expression and nothing else. 

I knew nothing of him, really, except for the intimacy of creation, the intimacy of blood, the intimacy of the body ecstatic. He had been by me only a month or so near 1500, before he had abandoned us for other things. I quickly discovered that indeed he was a rascal, but that whatever wildness there had been in him had passed itself, and that he had sought me only to tell me off, and had no idea what to do with me now that he'd caught me. I liked that though he was a feminine creature, inside of himself he had no idea of it. He had the charm of a very small dog declaring itself the leader of the entire world. He had a place in New York, a very small place, but it was nearer the edge of the city, and so the air was better on that side.

What I left behind I left behind. I found myself unfettered, or had thought so, until my mail had begun to come hand-delivered by secret fingers. For I have never been truly away from Leechtin since I begged him to take me to New York in 1922. But he kept far away, to himself. It was enough distance to feel unobserved.

"There's nothing special about you but the way your hair looks," I said to him, crossing my arms over my chest. He meekly tried to uncross them but could not.

"Yeah and I had no idea you'd turn out to be such a macaroni prick," he said, swatting my crossed arms. "Kiss my neck."

"I'm not attracted to you."

"Kiss my neck," he said, enunciating in English.

"I don't want to."

He wiggled his ears at me and got up to open the window. The sound of the city below came inside.

"Let that man in. He's getting impatient," I said.

"You really do ruin everything. I got him for you. You smelled him?"

"I'm not going to yield and tell you that you're bad," I said.

"You are the worst kind of sadist. At least acknowledge my looks more generally."

"Grow taller."

We are better friends than lovers. Really, did he have eyes for anyone but the boy he had always loved? The boy who I would meet in twenty more years and get on with like a house on fire. Matteo, who was living father south than my Leis, already deeply involved with his beautiful drug, heroin. I already knew about this boy, who Mini had taken from bed after having his way with the ax. They had been childhood friends. In 1930, Mini had not yet confessed his love to Matteo, such that it was. He had been pining for all of those years. Really he is just like a very small dog.

The man that Mini had promised liquor and sex came into the apartment with his hat in his hands. He had a dark look, in his eyes and in his mouth. He had a beaky nose and a day's growth of beard. Indeed he was very tall, and I cocked my head.

I stood up to my full height, slowly, letting him look at me. Always give them time to look. They want to look. They will be distracted until you let them look. If you are unusual, let them look at your heels, at your stockings. Let them look at your slip and at your neck. Let them think about how your hair will feel in their fist. I rolled my shoulders back. 

"What's your name?" he asked me.

"Laurent," I said.

"Your English is OK?"

"It's OK. And you, your name is?"

"Peter."

Here is what I like about what I am. Listening? 

I can do whatever I want. If I want to go to bed with him, I do it. If when he is murmuring to me I pull his hair and make him feel my teeth, I do it. 

I do it.