Archive of Our Own

Edgar Vargas was discomfited by the television repairman. Although the young man had the tools and the car to recommend him, he had the offensive cockiness of a know-it-all teenager. When Edgar answered the door, he boldly looked Edgar up and down as he identified himself—“Jimmy Euridge, Weldon’s TV”—and when he met Edgar’s eye again, he winked.

Tall and lean and messy, he was keen-eyed, dressed in company slacks and shirt. His black hair was slicked back a way that might have been deliberately disheveled. He looked a little strange, not psychotic by any means, yet Edgar was immediately wary of him, maybe because his boldness and cockiness seemed too familiar for a first meeting.

“You need service?” he asked, when Edgar hesitated in the doorway. It should have been an innocent question, but the suggestive undertone bled from it in a lingering, creepy insinuation.

To Edgar it seemed like a warning sign. But he had called Weldon TV, after all, and he could not turn Jimmy away without explanation. An explanation would probably lead to an argument, and he was not a confrontational person, so he let Jimmy in.

As Edgar escorted him along the wide, cool hallway to the living-room arch, he had the uneasy feeling that the company uniform and big smile were elements of a disguise. Jimmy had a keen animal watchfulness, a coiled tension, which further disquieted him with every step they took away from the front door.

Following much too closely, a hot presence never quite touching Edgar’s back, Jimmy Euridge said, “You’ve got a real nice house here, Mr. Vargas. I really like it.”

“Thank you,” he said stiffly, not bothering to correct the formal address as he usually would have.

“A guy could get comfortable in a place like this. Yeah, a guy could get real cozy.”

The house was of that style of architecture sometimes called Old Santa Barbara Spanish: two stories, cream colored stucco with a red tile roof, verandas, balconies, all softly rounded lines instead of squared-off corners. Lush red flowers climbed the north side of the structure, dripping bright blossoms. The place was beautiful.

Edgar resented it.

He had lived there since he was only ten years old, more than half of his twenty-seven now, and during all but the last two of those he had been under the dour thumb of Grandma Mathilde. His had not been a happy childhood or, to date, a happy life. Mathilde Vargas had died as she lived, haunting her musty home, grinding her grandson into an appropriate state of humility. But, in truth, the house was still oppressed by his grandmother—the memory of that hateful woman was formidable still, and stifling.

In the living room, putting his repair kit beside the set, Jimmy paused to look around. He was clearly surprised by the décor.

The flowered wallpaper was dark, funereal. The Persian carpet was singularly unattractive. The color scheme—grey, maroon, royal blue—was unenlivened by a few touches of century. The drapes looked as heavy as lead; age-yellowed sheers hung between the side panels, permitting only a mustard colored drizzle of sunlight to enter the room. None of it complemented the Spanish architecture; Mathilde had willfully imposed her ponderous bad taste upon the graceful house.

“Your wife decorate?” Jimmy asked.

“No. My grandmother,” Edgar said. He stood by the marble fireplace, almost as far as he could get without leaving the room. “This was her place. I… inherited it.”

“If I was you,” Jimmy said, “I’d heave all this shit out of here. Could be a nice room. Sorry, but this ain’t you. Might be alright for somebody’s spinster aunt… She was a widow, huh? Yeah, thought so. Might be alright for a dried up old bag, but definitely not for a fit young guy like you.”

Edgar wanted to criticize his impertinence, wanted to tell him to shut up and fix the television—and yet, it was hard to disagree with the sentiment. Besides, he had no experience with being so direct. With grandma Mathilde, it had served him better to talk his way out from under fire. Facing such things directly was like an execution.

Jimmy was smiling at him. The right corner of his mouth curled in a most unpleasant way. It was almost a smirk.

Edgar forced himself to say, “It suits me well enough.”

“For real?”

“Yes.”

Jimmy shrugged. “What’s the matter with the set?”

“The picture won’t stop rolling. And there’s static. Snow.”

Jimmy pulled the television away from the wall, switched it on, and studied the tumbling, static slashed images. He plugged in a small portable lamp and hooked it into the back of the set.

The grandfather clock in the hall marked the quarter hour with a single chime that reverberated hollowly through the house.

“You watch a lot of TV?” he asked, as he unscrewed the dust shield from the set.

“Not much,” Edgar said.

“I like those Spanish soaps. Big church murders, that stuff.”

“I never watch them.”

“Yeah? C’mon, I bet you do.” He laughed slyly. “Everybody watches ‘em eventually, they just don’t wanna admit it. Nothing more interesting than a bunch of backstabbing, scheming, lying… You know what I mean? Folks sit and watch it and click their tongues and say ‘oh, how nasty,’ but they really get off on it. That’s people for you.”

“I… I’ve got things to do in the kitchen,” Edgar said, nervously. “Call me when you’ve fixed the set.” He left the room and went down the hall through the swinging door into the kitchen.

His heart was going fast.

Grandma Mathilde had often said, “Boy, there are two kinds of people in the world—cats and mice. Cats go where they like and do what they want, take what they want. Mice, on the other hand, are naturally vulnerable, gentle, and timid, and they’re happiest when they keep their heads down and accept what life gives them. You, my dear, are a born mouse. Don’t fool yourself. A mouse might not have as colorful a life as a cat, but if it stays safely in its burrow and keeps to itself, it’ll live longer than a cat, and it’ll have a lot less turmoil in its life.”

Edgar had often considered pointing out that the life expectancy even of the safest mouse in the world was nothing like a cat’s, but that would not have done anything but started an argument he knew he could not win. It would not do to upset his elderly caretaker, as much his charge as he was hers.

Right now, a cat lurked in the living room, fixing the tv set, and Edgar was in the kitchen, gripped by mouselike fear. He was not actually in the middle of cooking anything, as he had told Jimmy. For a moment, he stood by the sink, one cold hand clasped in the other—for his hands always seemed to be cold—wondering what to do until the work was finished and Jimmy was gone. He decided to roll out biscuits. Old fashioned ones. That would keep him occupied and help him turn his mind from the memory of Jimmy’s suggestive winking.

He got out the bowls and mix from the cupboard, and he set to work. Soon his frayed nerves were soothed by the mundane activity.

Just as he finished laying out the last of the batch, Jimmy stepped into the kitchen and said, “You like to cook?”

Surprised, Edgar nearly dropped the empty metal mixing bowl with the spatula in it. Somehow, he managed to hold on to them and—with only a little clatter to betray his tension—put them into the sink to be washed. “Yes. I like to cook.”

“That’s sweet. I like a man who can keep a house. You sew, anything like that?”

“Just patching…”

“Even sweeter.”

“Is the TV fixed?”

“Almost.”

Edgar was ready to put the pan in the oven, but he did not want to carry the pan while Jimmy was watching him because he was afraid he would shake too much. Then Jimmy would realize he was nervous, and he would probably grow bolder. So Edgar left the full pan on the counter and tore open a new mix instead.

Jimmy came farther into the big kitchen, moving casually, very relaxed, looking around with a smile, but coming straight towards him. “Think I could get a glass of water?”

Edgar almost sighed with relief, eager to believe that a drink of cold water was all that had brought Jimmy here. “Of course,” he said. He took a glass from the cupboard, ran the cold water.

When he turned to hand it to Jimmy, he was standing close behind, having crept up with catlike quiet. Edgar gave an involuntary start. Water slopped out of the glass and splattered on the floor.

He said, “You—”

“Here,” Jimmy said, taking the glass from his hand.

“—startled me.”

“Me?” Jimmy said, fixing him with keen grey eyes. “Sure didn’t mean to. Sorry. I’m harmless, Mr. Vargas. Really I am. I just want a drink of water. You didn’t think I wanted something else, did you?”

He was so damned bold. Edgar couldn’t believe how bold he was, how smart-mouthed and aggressive. He wanted to slap the kid’s face, but he was afraid of what would happen after that. Slapping him—in any way acknowledging his double entendres or other offenses—seemed sure to encourage rather than deter him.

Jimmy stared at him with unsettling intensity, voraciously. His smile was that of a predator.

Edgar sensed that the best way to handle him was to pretend innocence and monumental thickheadedness, to ignore his nasty sexual innuendos as if he had not understood them. He must, in short, deal with him as a mouse might deal with any threat from which it was not able to flee. Pretend you do not see the cat, pretend it is not there, and perhaps the cat will seek more responsive prey elsewhere.

To break away from his demanding gaze, Edgar tore a couple paper towels from the dispenser by the sink and began to mop up the water he had spilled on the floor. But the moment he stooped before Jimmy, he realized he’d made a mistake, because Jimmy did not move out of his way but stood over him, loomed over him, while he pressed the towel to the floor. The situation was full of erotic symbolism. When he realized the submissiveness implied by his position at Jimmy’s feet, he popped up again and saw that the smile had broadened.

Flushed and flustered, Edgar threw the damp towels into the waste can under the sink.

Jimmy said, “Cooking, sewing… yeah, I do think that’s nice. Real nice. What other things do you like to do?”

“That’s it,” Edgar said. “I don’t have any unusual hobbies. I’m not a very interesting person. Low-key. Dull, even.”

Damning himself for not being able to order the bastard out of his house, Edgar slipped past him and went to the oven, ostensibly to check that it was finished preheating, but he was really just trying to retreat out of Jimmy’s reach.

Jimmy followed him, staying close. “When I pulled up out front, I saw lots of flowers. You do those?”

Staring at the oven dials, Edgar said, “Yes… I like gardening.”

“I’m into that,” Jimmy said, as if it mattered what he approved of. “Flowers… right kind of thing for a wife to take an interest in. Cooking, sewing, gardening—you’re just full of womanly talents. I bet you do everything, Mr. Vargas. I mean everything a woman should do. I bet you’re sweet in every department.”

If he touches me, Edgar thought, what do I do.

The walls of the old house were thick, and the neighbors were some distance away. No one would hear him shout or come to his rescue.

I’ll do something, Edgar thought. I’ll fight back.

But, in fact, he was not sure that he would fight, was not sure if he had what it took to fight. Even if he had ever learned how to throw a punch, Jimmy was as big as him and undoubtedly scrappier.

“Yeah, I bet you’re first rate in every department,” Jimmy repeated, leaning into it, delivering the line more provocatively than before.

Turning from the oven, Edgar forced a laugh. “My wife would be astonished to hear that. I’m not too bad at the boxed stuff, but I still haven’t learned how to make a pie, and my pot roast always turns out bone dry. My sewing’s alright, but it takes me forever to get it done.” He slipped past Jimmy and returned to the counter. He was amazed to hear himself chattering on as he fiddled with the box of dough mix. Desperation made him awfully forthcoming. “I’ve got a green thumb but I’m not much of a housekeeper, and if my wife didn’t help me with it—well, this place would be a disaster.”

He thought he sounded phony. He detected a note of strain in his voice that had to be evident. But the mention of his imaginary spouse had apparently given Jimmy second thoughts about pushing further. As Edgar measured out the required butter, Jimmy drank the water he had given him. He went to the sink and put the empty glass down near the dirty bowls and utensils. This time he did not press unnecessarily close.

“Better get back to work,” he said.

Edgar gave a calculatedly distracted smile, and nodded.

Jimmy crossed the kitchen and pushed open the swinging door, then stopped and said, “Your granny really liked dark places, huh? This kitchen could be nice if you brightened it up.”

Before Edgar could respond, he went out, letting the door swing shut behind him.

In spite of his unasked for opinion of the kitchen décor, Jimmy seemed to have pulled in the horns, and Edgar was pleased with himself. Using a few white lies about a nonexistent wife, delivered with admirable equanimity, he had handled it after all. That was not exactly the way a cat would have dealt with an aggressor, but it was not the timid behavior of a mouse either.

He looked around at the high-ceilinged kitchen and decided it was too dark. The walls were a muddy blue. The frosted overhead lights were opaque, shedding a drab, wintry glow. He considered repainting, having the lights replaced.

Merely to contemplate making major changes to Mathilde Vargas’s house was dizzying, exhilarating. Edgar had secretly redone his bedroom in installments small enough to be overlooked starting from the year he turned seventeen, but nothing else. Now, wondering if he could follow through with the extensive redecoration, he felt wildly daring and rebellious. If he could fend off Jimmy, maybe he could dredge up the steel to defy his dead grandmother.

His upbeat self congratulatory mood lasted just twenty minutes, which was long enough to put the next pan in the oven and wash some of the bowls and utensils. Then Jimmy returned to tell him that the tv set was repaired and to give him the bill. Though he had seemed subdued when he left the kitchen, he was as cocky as ever when he entered the second time. He looked Edgar up and down as if undressing him in his imagination, and when he met Edgar’s eye he gave him a challenging look.

Edgar thought the bill was too high, but he did not question it because it would only prolong their proximity. As he sat at the kitchen table to write the check, Jimmy pulled the now familiar trick of standing too close to him, trying to cow him with confidence and height. Even when Edgar stood and handed him the check, Jimmy contrived to take it in such a way that his hand touched Edgar’s hand suggestively.

All the way along the hall, Edgar was more than half convinced that Jimmy would suddenly put down his tool kit and attack him from behind. But he got to the door, and Jimmy stepped past him onto the veranda, and his racing heart began to slow to a more normal pace.

Jimmy hesitated just outside the door. “What’s your wife do? She must work, right?”

The question disconcerted Edgar. It was something they might have covered earlier, in the kitchen, when he first mentioned a wife, but now the curiosity seemed inappropriate.

Edgar could have said that it was none of his business, but he sensed that they were in a tense moment, that the pent up violence behind it could be triggered with minor effort. So he answered with another lie, one which was perhaps not a good choice.

“She’s a… policewoman.”

Jimmy raised his eyebrows. “Really.”

“That’s right.”

“Nice house for a cop.”

“Excuse me?”

“Didn’t know cops got paid so well.”

“Oh. But I told you—I inherited it from my grandmother.”

“Sure, of course. I remember now. You told me.”

He smiled. It was a smile that implied all sorts of other knowledge, much of which he had no right or business in knowing. It was a smile that dripped like water further and further down Edgar’s spine.

“Well,” Jimmy said, “good for you. A guy as sweet as you deserves a nice place.”

He flicked a mock salute at Edgar, eyes glittering, and went along the walk towards the street, where his white van sat parked at the curb.

Edgar closed the door and watched him through a clear segment of the leaded, stained glass oval window in the center of the door. He glanced back, saw Edgar, and waved. Edgar stepped away from the window, into the gloomy hallway, and watched the rest from a point that could not be seen.

Clearly, he hadn’t believed that. He knew the wife was a lie. Edgar shouldn’t have said he was married to an officer, it was too obviously contrived. He had only been thinking so hard about who would come for him, if he picked up the phone and dialed the emergency line. He should have said anything but a cop. He doubted any kind of wife would have given Jimmy more than a second’s pause, anyhow.

He did not feel normal until the van was out of sight.

Actually, even then, he did not feel normal.

Later, when the biscuits were cooled and wrapped, Edgar retreated to the bedroom at the southwest corner of the second floor.

When Mathilde Vargas had been alive, this had been Edgar’s sanctuary in spite of the lack of a lock on the door. Like every room in the house, it had been crammed with heavy furniture, as if the place served as a warehouse instead of a home. It had been dreary in all other details as well. Nevertheless, when Edgar had escaped one of his grandmother’s interminable sour lectures, he had retreated here, where he escaped into books and vivid daydreams.

Mathilde inevitably checked on her grandson without warning, creeping soundlessly along the hall, suddenly throwing open the unlockable door, entering with the hope of catching Edgar caught in some shameful pastime or forbidden practice. These intrusions had been commonplace throughout Edgar’s teen years and, though they dwindled in regularity after he came of age, they never did stop. No amount of illness daunted Mathilde.

If caught napping or daydreaming, Edgar was severely reprimanded and punished with onerous chores. It had always been much too frightening to try anything more illicit than that. God only knew what would have come of it. Mathilde had not condoned experimentation.

Books were permitted—if first given approval—because for one thing, books were educational. Besides, as Mathilde had often said, “A boy like you, with a weak constitution and no redeeming boyish qualities, will never have adventures like other boys do. Living through books is in most ways better than embarrassing us both out in the company of other children.”

Many times over the years, especially at night but even in the middle of the day, Edgar had been overcome with the feeling that the floor of the bedroom was going to collapse under all the furniture, and that he was going to crash down into the chamber below, where he would be crushed under his own queen sized bed. He had been in his twenties before he realized that the anxiety attacks had arisen not only from the overfurnished dark décor but from the domineering presence of his grandmother.

After his encounter with Jimmy Euridge, Edgar retreated as always to the bright and spare relief of his bedroom, slowly emptied of excess over the course of several tense years. He had been working on peeling the awful wallpaper off for several months, now that he could get away with doing so in the emptiness of the house. As he returned to the work, he thought of just how far Jimmy might have gone if he had not managed to maneuver the boy out of the house. Recently, he had wondered if Mathilde’s pessimistic view of the outside world and of other people was accurate at all; though hellfire was primarily what she had raised him on, he’d long had the nagging suspicion that it was a twisted vision of the world, even sick. But now he had encountered Jimmy, and he seemed to be ample proof that there was hellfire aplenty in the outside world.

But after a while, when half the section was gone, Edgar began to think that he had misinterpreted everything Jimmy had said and done. Surely he could not have been making sexual advances towards Edgar. Not him.

He was, after all, nothing special. Plain. Unimpressive. He knew this because despite Mathilde’s many faults, she had never been one to mince words. Edgar was the drab descendant of a drab woman, from a drab world, and not one who could expect to be held or hoped for or wanted. No woman could be expected to settle for someone like him, and men—well, likewise, he imagined. Why should any man risk their reputation for such a lackluster prize?

Although his personality was bizarre, Jimmy was at least a creature of the world. He could hope for better. It was ridiculous to assume he was interested in a boring thing like Edgar. If anything, maybe it had been wishful thinking.

Edgar put his head against the peeling wallpaper. It was over with now, in any case. There was no point in working himself up over it. As the afternoon waned, he escaped into his work.

From downstairs the chimes of the ancient grandfather clock rose punctually on the hour, half hour, and quarter hour, and as the day wore on the room grew brighter. The air seemed to shimmer. Beyond the south window a king palm stirred gently in the May breeze.

By four o’clock, he was at peace, humming as he worked. When the telephone rang, it startled him.

He put down the scraper and reached for the receiver. “Hello?”

“Funny,” a voice said.

“Excuse me?”

“They never heard of her.”

“I’m sorry,” Edgar said, “but I think you’ve got the wrong number.”

“It’s you, ain’t it, Mr. Vargas?”

He recognized the nasal pitch now. It was him. Jimmy.

For a moment, he could not speak.

“They never heard of her. I called up the force in town and asked to talk to officer Vargas, the lady, but they said they don’t got a lady cop named Vargas on the force. Weird, right?”

“What do you want?” Edgar said, shakily.

“I figure it’s a computer error,” Jimmy said, laughing. “Yeah, sure, some kinda computer error dropped your wife off the record. I think you better tell her soon as she gets home, Mr. Vargas. If she doesn’t get it straight, you’re gonna miss that paycheck.”

He hung up, and the sound of the dial tone made Edgar realize that he should have hung up first, should have slammed the handset down as soon as the police station was mentioned. He ought not to have dared encourage this even to the extent of listening on the phone.

He went through the house, checking all the windows and doors. They were securely locked.

When Edgar Vargas was in the kitchen making breakfast, the phone rang again.

“I know what you need,” Jimmy said. “I know just what you need.”

I’m not even handsome, Edgar wanted to say, I’m nothing. If you want men, you could do better. What do you want with me?

“Do you know what you need?” Jimmy asked.

Finding his voice at last, Edgar said, “Go away.”

“I know what you need. You might not know, but I do!”

This time Edgar hung up first, slamming the handset down so hard that it must have hurt to hear.

Later, at ten thirty, the phone rang again. Putting his book aside, he stared anxiously at the telephone, which stood on the night stand. He let it ring ten times. Fifteen. Twenty. The strident sound of the bell filled the room, echoed off the walls, until each ring seemed to drill into his skull.

Eventually he realized that if he did not pick up the receiver Jimmy would know he was here and was too intimidated to pick up, which would probably please him. Edgar had avoided confrontation for more than a decade thus far, but he saw that at this point cleverly talking himself from under the problem would not do. He would have to put his foot down.

He lifted the receiver on the twenty first ring.

Jimmy said, “I can’t stop thinking about you.”

Edgar’s voice died in his throat.

Jimmy said, “I’ve never seen eyes like yours. You make brown look warm. Sexy eyes. You should take off your glasses for me, Edgar Vargas.”

Edgar was speechless.

“That librarian-teacher thing makes me so hot. You’re real sexy, Edgar Vargas. I just wanna unwrap you. You’re all tense, all wound up. I know what you need, and I’m gonna give it to you.”

The receiver fell into its cradle with a dull twang. This was no good. Why was he listening to this vileness? He couldn’t be enjoying it.

Jimmy called again at ten minutes past nine.

Edgar snatched up the receiver on the first ring, fiercely determined to tell him off and make him leave this alone. But for some reason he clenched up again and was unable to speak.

In a terribly intimate tone of voice, Jimmy said, “You miss me, babe? You wish I’d come to you, be a man for you?”

Edgar hung up.

What’s wrong with me, he wondered. Why can’t I tell him to go away and stop bothering me?

Edgar watched the silent receiver on its antique hook. It did not ring again. He wondered how far this could go. How far would Jimmy take it? There were several things Edgar could do to prevent this from going any farther. He could cancel his landline. He could purchase a gun, which he did not know how to operate. He could call the police, finally, after all this talking around it.

Edgar did none of those things. Instead, in the dark of that terrible house, he felt his hand creep up over his thigh. He breathed hard. He looked up at the unseen ceiling. He undid his jeans with his shaking hand.

Edgar Vargas dreamed of a tongue skating over teeth, the dark pink softness and the maiming edges, and he shuddered into the dark.

All morning, the phone was silent. It seemed to Edgar that he had no idea how he had passed every other morning for the last several years in such silence. All he could do was watch the thing, heart tripping hard against his chest, forgetting for moments at a time to draw breath into his butterfly lungs. It was only sometime past noon, after becoming absorbed in a much-needed round of dusting on the second floor, that he finally began to unwind.

Perhaps that was all there was of it. He was simply not entertaining enough to be worth more than a day of fixation. He stopped in the middle of a room, cluttered with hideous and unnecessary furniture, and felt something twist bitterly in his chest. It was all this darkness, he was sure—all this dust and funerary quiet. For a moment he stood perfectly still in the doorway, fingers burning in a fist around the broom, and then he was at the window, wrenching it open.

The winch fought him—the paint in the edges of the glass fought him—and then with a single gunshot crack, the panels of the window swung out into a glowing sunlit updraft. Hot wind blew his hair back from his forehead, but the dusty mauve curtains could not even be moved by the breeze. He ripped the curtains from the rods and threw them into the yard, heaving and sweating with exertion.

He stopped short of throwing the ponderous old chest of drawers out as well, but it was a near thing.

As he was slicing bread in the kitchen, getting ready for dinner, the phone rang again. Edgar froze, every flush and flick of his body waiting for the next rattling brrrng. Why now, when he’d only just—when he’d thought it was over at last, why now?

Clutching the long bread knife in one hand, Edgar reached out and took the phone. He knew from the moment the first little breath came through that it was Jimmy.

“I’ve been thinking about you all day,” came the purring intimation, low and hot. “About your pretty face, all screwed up and pink, those pretty eyes of yours.”

What gives you the right, Edgar thought, half-hysterical.

“I was at this client’s house,” Jimmy said, “—you got me so hot and bothered I had to rub you out of me, mmm, all over that nice silk robe she had on her bed. You like that baby, how hot you get me?”

“—I don’t,” Edgar said, stumbling over the unexpected words, “I don’t understand. Why are you doing this?”

Jimmy made a noise low in his throat, like the question itself made him want to do something intimate and terrible. “I told you baby,” he said, “I can’t get you out of my head. You’re the sexiest little thing I’ve ever seen.”

“I’m not sexy,” Edgar said, frustrated. “I’m not pretty. I’m nothing. If you want to laugh at me, you should just have done with it already.”

There was a pause. “Laugh at you?” Jimmy said. “Babe—I wanna eat you. I wanna lick the sweat off your throat. I wanna give it to you till your pretty pink pussy is screaming for mercy.”

Edgar choked, clutching the receiver with both hands.

“I have to—I have to go,” he said, and slammed the thing down into the cradle.

It was late, almost eleven, and Edgar had fretted for much too long about whether or not to change out of his day clothes. Finally the call had come just as he had been folding his pants into the hamper, catching him in a moment of sheer mortification between undressing and dressing. “You ever had a man eat you out?” Jimmy said, as soon as Edgar had picked up the line.

“N-o?” Edgar said, unsure precisely what that meant but thinking helplessly of Jimmy’s dark pink tongue, the filthy wet flesh. His nightshirt was crushed in his other hand, a strange object he had no idea anymore what to do with.

“I’ll show you what it’s all about,” Jimmy said, with the little sound him licking his teeth. “I’ll get you so wet—push you open and tonguefuck you until you beg me to give it to you. You want me to do that, baby? You want me to make you beg for it?”

Edgar sank his teeth into the soft place between his thumb and forefinger, barely keeping himself together.

“You’re gonna beg for it,” Jimmy said. “Sooner or later, you’re gonna beg me to come for you. I could see it the second you opened that door, little red riding hood all ready to give it up for the big bad wolf. I’m gonna be that wolf for you. I’m gonna eat you right up.”

If Jimmy would stop talking about eating him, Edgar would have a much easier time ending this conversation just like all the others before it.

“You’re lucky it was me who opened that door,” Jimmy carried on, “cause I’m gonna take care of you now. If some other man walked through that door, he’d have eaten you up in one bite. One tender little mouthful.” There was a soft popping sound, lips smacking. Edgar shuddered at the sound, not quite believing it.

“You still there?” Jimmy asked.

There was a lazy interest, a certainty that Edgar was still listening. Belatedly, Edgar realized how loud his breathing almost certainly was, past the bite in his knuckle.

“I know you’re shy,” Jimmy said. “It’s alright. You don’t gotta be shy, not with me.”

“I’m not,” Edgar tried to say, but he wasn’t sure why he was arguing this. Mouselike modesty warred with sulking pride.

“Virgins are always quiet,” Jimmy said, like it was a reassurance, “right until you put your cock in ‘em. Then all that squirmy good stuff comes pouring right out. I know just how you need it, hard and heavy, so deep you can feel it in your throat.”

Edgar’s hand popped out of his mouth, closing automatically around his own neck.

A rough edge to his voice now, a raw breathlessness, Jimmy said, “Do you want me to pop your cherry, Edgar Vargas?”

In a miserable fit of arousal and horror, Edgar threw the receiver down on the counter and left it there, buzzing into deaf silence, where it sat for half an hour. He did not care about the telephone bill. He only cared that he would not hear that hellish ringing again for just a little while longer.

Only after he was clothed again, his heart quieted and the coal fire in his stomach banked, did he dare lift the receiver again to his ear. Only the irritable buzz of a disconnected line remained. Finally, gathering himself up again, Edgar went and checked each of the windows and doors before retreating to bed. 

When Edgar was young, there had been a gardener and a maid that came by to keep up the old house, and every once in a while, Mathilde’s solicitor dropped in to speak with her. And then as the years went by, when Mathilde’s pride couldn’t bear for anyone to see her in her weakened state, one by one they had all gone. By the time he was fifteen, Edgar had seen to everything inside and outside the house, and taken calls from Mr. Rosario where necessary.

He had never really minded the tending the old house required. Even an ugly and oppressive place like this could bear to love him at times, when it was blooming with life and clean again. Before he had come to live with his grandmother, he had been known as a sensitive and retiring child, more likely to play house with the girls on the playground than engage in rough and tumble pastimes with boys his own age.

It wasn’t the work that he minded, it was the grim disapproval—his grandmother’s pinched expression at the sight of him, her blunt and cutting commentary each time he succeeded in the very tasks he had been assigned. Edgar had resented her perhaps as much as she had resented him. Someone had to do the work. She might at least have taken some pleasure in the fact that the only person fit to do it had done it well.

But of course, the only thing that would have made Mathilde happy would have been a grandson who hadn’t been ruined from infancy by disrespectful and unprincipled parents.

Edgar was tapping the canister of comet against the porcelain of the sink, a little harder than strictly necessary, when the dread ring of the telephone filled the kitchen. It seemed as if nowhere was safe from that insidious voice calling through the line, singing out for him.

Edgar picked up the phone. He wasn’t sure when he’d given up saying hello into the line.

“You know what I’d like to do with you?” Jimmy said, breathy and quiet, as if he were in danger of being overheard.

The house seemed to lean around him with anticipation. Where was Jimmy right now? What was he doing? How did Edgar fit into the mechanism of his living? Edgar tucked the phone into the crook of his neck and looked out through the window at the empty street, trying to imagine a Jimmy who existed outside of these spectral visitations.

“I’d like to get you all worked up,” Jimmy said, “get you all hot and heavy, and then I’d run my tongue up the inside of your thigh, like ice cream—”

There was a faint sound in the background of the call, like glass breaking.

“Shit,” Jimmy said. “Duty calls, babe. Think of me.”

And this time it was Edgar who was left holding a dead line, unbalanced and half-hard against the counter.

The awful claw footed display case was the first thing to go. Edgar did not even remove the china figurines from inside the glass, taking instead a grim satisfaction at every clink and crack of a breaking angel wing as he dragged and pushed the whole apparatus out the front door and into the yard, at which point he slammed his whole shoulder against the side and toppled it to the grass. It went down with a riot of shattering porcelain, its wooden back popping against the unforgiving ground.

For a moment Edgar only stood over it, panting, and then he turned and went back into the house. His loathing of these rooms and their endless antique clutter only seemed to have grown to the point of nausea since he dared to tear down those curtains. All at once it was as if he could not live here any longer without absolutely suffocating. He’d woken up in the middle of the night, sweating with the weight of the whole overfull building, half-convinced of that teenage nightmare—the cracking floorboards, the yawning mouth of the earth below him, a sinkhole ready to crush his world into a marble-sized singularity.

The next thing to go was the uncomfortable loveseat, understuffed and creaky. He left that on the lawn beside the crumpled curtains and went back in for the coffee table covered in fragile knick-knacks, and then the armchair he was ever forbidden to touch, and then the chest of drawers overflowing with a redundant and frankly ridiculous number of bibles—trembling with exertion, he dragged them one after the other out into the grass.

They must have been worth some money, he thought. If she was so protective of them, they must have been expensive. The alternative was too much for him to bear—that they were worthless and still they had tormented him for most of his life.

Edgar kept at it until the heat of the day gave way to a heavy cloud cover, the very most distant edges of the horizon purple and heavy over the city. At last, truly exhausted, Edgar paused in the tangled pile and wiped sweat from his brow. Although he was tired, he knew he would not be able to go back into that darkness without feeling the torturous urge to empty it further.

His hand closed over the arm of the loveseat, its pale green upholstery glowing in the sunshine that flashed and faded. He lowered himself carefully into its stern embrace, and then he kicked off his shoes on the lawn. Just a moment. He’d rest a moment, and then he’d be able to finish.

The wind against his face faded into the dull relief of sleep, leaving him deaf to the world.

In his kaleidoscopic dreams—windowpanes and the yellow plastic of the telephone receiver, the tender dissolution of a haunting—a slow ache took hold of him. It twisted each disjointed image, just the flash of figments, of pale fingers passing over denim, a strange room. Muted urgency pushed him from shard to shard, something that welled up and bled between the edges.

He dreamed that someone was touching him, their roaming hands a fragmented passage over his body, as the projection of the world around him whirled from scene to scene. He was gripped with an agony that had nothing to do with pain.

The restless tangle of his dreams broke all at once, at a rough sound that he couldn’t place in the confused moment of waking. He pushed himself up, rubbing hard at his eye as the world came into blurry fullness around him. There was a blur of white motion reflected in the windows.

Overhead, the sky had grown treacherously dark, blurry above him. As Edgar fumbled for his glasses, it dawned on him that he had never taken them off himself. They should still be on his nose. Eventually he found them in the grass, folded and discarded, just as the atmosphere cracked with distant thunder. Edgar pushed them back onto his nose and squinted up at the bruised sky, palm shading his eyes from the lone splatter of a single rain drop. As he sat up, his shirt slid back down his stomach.

He felt strange—a step removed from earth, a ghost in a twilight zone—and then he noticed that tucked into his elbow, where nothing should have been, was an umbrella. He held it for a moment, uncomprehending, certain that he didn’t recognize it. Where could—

His heart jumped, deafening the rumble above him. He stayed like that, barely daring to breathe, until the rain began to fall around him. Then he leapt up and ran for the gardening shed, under the silky black bloom of the umbrella, to find a tarp for all this furniture.

He was expecting the next call. Almost before the phone could ring, he’d wrenched it up and pinned it against his ear.

“You were at my house,” he accused. Through the walls, he could hear the sound of rain coming down.

“Mm. You looked so sweet laid out like that,” Jimmy replied, with the reverent enthusiasm of a lover. “All soft and ready for me. You’re gonna taste so nice when I get my teeth in you.”

“I was sleeping!” Edgar said. “You can’t just touch people when they’re sleeping!”

“Why not?” Jimmy said, brightly. “The way you were making those little sounds, I knew you wanted me to do it. You gave right in, the second I got my hand between your legs, you opened right up for me.”

Edgar hunched into himself, a hand sliding over his hip. “That’s assault,” he said. “I could have a restraining order issued.”

“Or you could invite me in,” Jimmy purred. “You could leave that door unlocked and let me come up to you—let me come into you, show you how a man does it.”

Outside, the purple sky was thick with the flare of heat lightning.

“I’ll be so good to you,” Jimmy said, “I’ll peel you open and fill you up until you can’t remember being anything but mine, all mine, until you’re begging me to stop—”

Edgar’s fingers dug into his jeans and the scant flesh beneath. He had exhausted his store of protestations.

“Tell me you wanna be mine,” Jimmy said. “Tell me you’re mine, baby, tell me you want it.”

Edgar bit his lip and said nothing.

Low and close, as if he were clutching the receiver to his mouth, Jimmy said, “Tell me you want me as bad as I want you.”

Thunder rattled the house, the very dishes in the cabinets, and the power flickered all around him. For a moment there was black, a perfect silence, and then the lights kicked back on with the hum of the refrigerator. Edgar clutched the dead receiver, lip still caught between his teeth, until the dial tone kicked in.

The low rumble of thunder farther away came through to him, in the empty house, in the silent neighborhood. Edgar set his finger down in the cradle of the telephone, to stop the dial tone, and then did not move for several minutes in a morbid half-hope that it would ring again. But the house was as still as the grave.

For the sake of forgetting the carbonation that seemed to be moving through his veins instead of blood, of forgetting anything and everything to do with his precarious situation, Edgar took out the yellow pages and called up a second hand furniture dealer.

For the next several minutes, Edgar conversed with the man on the other end of the line, who was quite excited at the prospect of coming into possession of what might turn out to be genuine antiques. Edgar’s conscience twinged at the realization that he’d left so many pieces out in the rain, but otherwise, felt quite satisfied with the outcome of the call. It wasn’t until he’d hung up again that he remembered he ought to have been more nervous—jittery, even—about speaking to a stranger with so little preparation.

He stared at the yellow pages, only half seeing them, as he played the conversation back over in his mind. Where was his anxiety? Where were his apologies? Had he really negotiated with that man?

Only a week ago, he’d been almost too overcome to finish dialing the number of the television repair company.

The next day, the furniture people came to pick up the items—several of them, friendly but disinterested, nothing like Jimmy. They came and went from their sizable truck, dubiously eyeing the tarp and the grass until Edgar had no choice but to retreat into the house, cowed by their professional disapproval. He stood at the window for a long time as they worked, watching them like a silent pantomime play. When the phone rang, it was almost with relief that he answered it. The room around him was black. The square of the window glowed with the green of the lawn.

Receiver against his ear, Edgar curled his fingers in the cord while Jimmy whispered filthy nothings into his ear.

 “Do you think about me?”

 “Do you think about me when you touch yourself?”

 “I know you touch yourself, Edgar Vargas, it’s written all over you. Anybody looking at you knows it. They can all see it on you just like I can, every hot little fingerprint—” 

Edgar could drive. He had learned to drive when he was twenty-one, haltingly and with mortal terror, for the sole sake of taking Mathilde to her doctors’ appointments. However, he had never been any good at it, and in fact he preferred to walk to whatever he could manage.

He went out very little, even now that theoretically he… could.

It had been his grandmother’s habit to have groceries delivered to the house, bringing her overall contact with the outside world down to the absolute minimum, and while in later years there were many things that she needed which could not be delivered to doorstep, she had kept on with the grocer. In order to prove something—to whom was irrelevant, but it may well have been the smirking ghost of Mathilde Vargas—Edgar took himself into town to pick up necessities.

There was a drug store a block away from a park that Edgar had passed countless times but never dared visit. As he passed it again, fingers clutching the wheel, he began to wonder why he had never done so. It was probably full of flowers and dogs, which were both things he enjoyed being in proximity to. The highlight of his week was always when one of his neighbors happened to walk their dog past his garden and he could steal a moment or two with someone else’s pet. It was also probably full of strangers, though, which he less enjoyed proximity to.

Well. Lately Edgar had torn out furniture, made phone calls without panicking, slept in his yard, and done at least one thing in Mathilde’s house that no doubt had her banging her fists against the roof of her coffin. Even as the inevitable memory made him squirm in his seat, he couldn’t deny he found a strange sort of pride in it. Maybe he would visit soon.

In the drug store, Edgar filled the basket on his arm with odds and ends that he couldn’t find in his usual grocery. There was a supermarket further into town, but the one time he’d tried to go in there he’d been overwhelmed by the high ceilings, the bustle of people, and the confusing aisles. So he stuck to the smaller stores and pieced together what he needed.

He was at the counter, making out a check, when he felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle. He froze, just as a hand reached past him pulled back the plastic edge of his bagged purchases.

“Well whadda we got here?” the voice of countless insidious calls murmured into his ear. Without the familiar softening of static and telephone lines, the pure wickedness of it almost knocked Edgar’s feet out from beneath him.

The clerk behind the register gave the whole scene an uncertain grimace and plucked the check out of Edgar's hands before retreating into the safety of the stockroom. At Edgar’s back, the whole length of Jimmy was a hot almost-presence, only barely brushing a shoulder as he reached past into the bag.

"Whatcha got in there?" Jimmy said. "Something dirty?"

Edgar snatched the bags to his chest and spun, his back hitting the edge of the counter. This turned out to have been a bad idea, for the space between them was less than he had imagined, and now the only thing standing between the two of them were a couple of white plastic bags.

“You know you don’t gotta buy supplies for me,” Jimmy said, “I got my own condoms. Love the enthusiasm, though.”

“I didn’t,” Edgar said, feeling a box of Band-Aids crushing under the pressure of his arms.

“No?” Jimmy said. “Then why’re you hiding it like that?”

In Edgar’s mind, somehow, Jimmy still wore the innocuous uniform of the television repair company. It occurred to him only now, belatedly, that the young man in front of him was not at all a match for the keen but messy workman who had dominated his imagination for days and days.

“That’s none of your business,” he managed, even as his systems were reeling.

The man in front of him was dressed in a vest that glinted with rivets and bolts, his torn black jeans tucked into calf-boots, the thin fabric of his black shirt emblazoned with a set of sharp white teeth. The hands that curled over the edge of the counter on either side of Edgar were gloved in fishnet. Every fold and hem of his ensemble was either aggressively torn or worn down to inviting softness. His crooked features glowed with dark outlining, almost pretty in their own strange fashion.

Edgar stuttered as Jimmy reached into his arms and drew out the bags.

Although Edgar knew from the odd journey, usually into the bookstore, that there were people in the world who dressed in unusual ways, his full impression of Jimmy was of something decidedly otherworldly. A chthonic trickster god, a shadow being, a jack in service of some midsummer king; at last, the ill-fitting disguise of the daylight stripped back.

“Lemme get those for you,” Jimmy said, his grin widening under the obvious attention.

“No,” Edgar said, after the bags were fully out of his grip, “wait-”

Jimmy had already started off towards the exit, bags over his shoulder, leaving Edgar no choice but to catch up with him. As they exited the store, Edgar’s eye immediately caught on the pack of grim looking boys at the far edge of the parking lot, several of them eying Edgar in return. They flicked ash into the scrub. For a moment, Edgar could think of nothing but their superior numbers and sneering lips.

His pulse jerked at something half fear, half fantasy, as the lot of them pulled heavy drags from their black cigarettes.

Jimmy immediately picked out Edgar’s car, crossing the lot to lean his hip easily against the trunk while Edgar fumbled with the keys. He was aware that he should not unlock the car with Jimmy in such proximity, but he didn’t see that he had any other real choice. His fingers shook as he shot nervous look after nervous look at the disaffected youth across the blacktop.

Jimmy made a curious noise, following his gaze, and then he grinned. “Aw,” he said, “don’t worry about them. They’re just jealous I’ve got a cute thing like you all to myself.”

Edgar doubted that very much, for several pressing reasons. But true or not, Edgar was starting to wonder if Jimmy actually meant it, when he said unbelievable things like that.

“Can I have those back?” he said, gesturing weakly to the bags.

Jimmy obliged, offering them with two hooked fingers. As Edgar bent to place the bags in the back seat, he was well aware of Jimmy watching his every movement with hungry eyes. For a moment, the interior of the car blocked his view. And then as he pulled back again, the full voltage of Jimmy’s ravenous gaze poured over him again.

“Damn,” Jimmy said, delighted and reverent, “you’re even prettier than I remembered.”

Edgar cast a glance over his shoulder at the little crowd, almost dizzy with the force of the compliment. Here in the open world, too unfamiliar to be imagination, in sight and maybe earshot of so many intimidating strangers—Edgar’s vision seemed to waver, as he struggled to believe that this was really happening.

“Man. The things I’d do to you if I had the time,” Jimmy said, with a complicated series of expressions that conveyed both regret and continued consideration.

“What are you doing here?” Edgar asked. The door was open behind him, and yet so far Jimmy had made no move to push him down into it or anything of the kind. It disoriented him, the vividness of the scene playing out in his head—a body crawling over his, pinning him to the leather upholstery.

“On our way to a show,” Jimmy said, jerking his thumb at the road. “Just stopped to grab some booze. Ain’t that serendipitous? You and me, here at the same time? That’s pure destiny.”

“It’s something,” Edgar replied.

“It’s like fate wants us to be together,” Jimmy carried on, ignoring Edgar. “Like you were meant for me.”

“You’ve said that before,” Edgar said, eyes narrowing. “But you don’t know anything about me.”

Jimmy grinned, almost bouncing with excitement. “Sure I do!” he said. “You already told me all kinds of things about yourself! Some of it was even true! I know plenty about you, Edgar Vargas.”

“Well I don’t know anything about you,” Edgar countered desperately.

Jimmy paused, head cocked in almost canine confusion. “Huh,” he said, after a moment.

Edgar straightened up, pleased and surprised to have made his point so well. And then Jimmy was pulling aside his vest and unsheathing a knife that could not be mistaken for anything but a dagger. Edgar froze, even the breath in his lungs frosting closed, as Jimmy flipped it in his hand. The blade flashed. When he caught it, he caught it by the blade. His nimble fingers remained uncut.

“I make knives,” he said. “I do all the tempering and quenching myself, when I can get my hands on the leaf spring or whatever. There’s no money in it, but I like making stuff. Got the TV job ‘cause a guy I know used to let me fuck around with the wiring in the shit he was fencing.”

Edgar did not know what to make of this moment. It occurred to him quite belatedly that he was being offered the knife in question, the handle glinting in the evening between them. Because it seemed rude to turn it down, Edgar very gingerly closed his fingers around the metal and held it up to the grey sky. It looked almost like a period piece, too sleek to be gothic but too medieval to be utilitarian.

“You made all of this?” he said, noting a series of shallow notches in the hilt.

“Sure,” Jimmy said. “Piece of cake. I mean, when I got somewhere to live, anyhow. Right now I’m couch surfing with Chuey and he doesn’t give a fuck what I do.” He gestured vaguely towards the pack of young men.

“It’s incredible,” Edgar said, and meant it. He couldn’t imagine how many hours it must have taken to shape that much unwilling metal. The care it must require, the attention to detail. When he looked up from the curve of the blade, he found Jimmy looking at him with another one of those indecipherable expressions. His eyes glittered.

Edgar offered it back, and didn’t even worry about the fact that he was re-arming Jimmy until the knife was fully sheathed inside the vest again.

“So now you know something about me!” Jimmy said, tapping the top of the hilt until it disappeared into its pocket.

“Oh,” Edgar said. “Um.”

Down the parking lot, one of the other men cupped a hand around his mouth and shouted, “Wrap it up, Romeo!”

Edgar looked down, examining their shoes in excruciating detail. Even now the treacherous itch at the back of his mind was admiring the way the jeans were tucked into those boots, almost military but not quite, the strangely masculine effect of the silhouette. It was not any more comforting a thought than the dawning awareness that Jimmy’s friends knew precisely what kind of interest Jimmy had in him.

“Hey, look at me.”

Edgar did not. Edgar kept his eyes on his own shoes, which were a marginally safer target.

There was the flash of pale skin, and then Jimmy had caught him by the chin with one curled finger. He pressed up until Edgar had no choice but to lift his face. There was a hot jolt of something in Edgar’s stomach, as Jimmy rested the pad of his thumb on Edgar’s bottom lip.

“I’ll ditch these fucks in a heartbeat,” Jimmy promised him, in an intimate undertone. “Give me the word and I’ll take you home.”

“It’s my car,” Edgar said dumbly.

“Ehhhhh,” Jimmy said. “Semantics. Easier to give you a handy if you’re driving anyways.”

Edgar felt his skin almost boil over with a flush that Jimmy should not have been able to see, and yet somehow seemed to be immediately, gleefully, aware of. The thumb against his lip weighed down a little harder.

“No—no thank you?” Edgar said. The thumb shifted slightly with each syllable.

"Don’t be like that. Wouldn't you like me to take you off somewhere dark and cozy? Bend you over and fill you up?" Jimmy said. "Somewhere I can make you scream. Doesn't that sound nice?"

Edgar made a pathetic little choking sound as his lungs imploded. They are in the CVS parking lot! He cannot be doing this routine right now!

"Christ I love your face," Jimmy said, tipping Edgar's head a fraction of an angle to the side. "I can't wait to see what it looks like when I'm popping your cherry."

Edgar was fairly sure he was going to die, under all this attention. He considered denying that he was a virgin once and for all, just to stop this from getting any more graphic, but the depressing voice at the back of his head reminded him that he was hardly desirable enough to have warranted that kind of attention. It was only Jimmy—if in fact his infatuation was genuine—who was either too blind or too fucking crazy to notice.

"I don't understand you," Edgar sighed, at last, giving in to the gentle grip. 

"What's to understand?" Jimmy said, brightly. "If I see something I want, I go for it."

"That's not how the world works," Edgar said. "Just because you want something—just because you think you'd enjoy something—" he pulled himself free, wound up now. "It doesn't matter what you want, you have to learn to be grateful for what you have. You have to be satisfied."

Jimmy frowned at him, the freckled skin over his nose wrinkling. "You mean settle.”

“I mean be reasonable!” Edgar said. “Not whatever the hell it is you’re doing, following a stranger around, calling at all hours like a villain in a slasher movie, talking about my eyes!”

“But I love your eyes,” Jimmy argued, without a moment’s pause. “Why shouldn’t I say so? They’re beautiful. You’re beautiful, babe. I want you. I want you every way, every black little part of you, I wanna grab your peach and take a bite of it.”

Want, want want want—Edgar was submerged in the tide of it; in that moment it seemed that Jimmy was nothing but so many rags held together by the sticky pull of want, no more human than the midsummer shadow. Jimmy reached out again, taking Edgar’s hand between his own, rocking forward on his toes like a lovesick teenager.

“You’re like a damsel in a tower,” he said, “a princess in a dungeon! You’ve been shivering all alone in the dark, waiting for me, and now I’m here.”

Edgar looked down at their hands. “Are you a knight?” he asked, a flash of skepticism bleeding into his voice.

“Nah babe,” Jimmy said, “I’m the dragon.” A darkness crept across the sky; the cherry tip of a cigarette glowed and faded across the parking lot. “I’m a monster,” Jimmy said, glittering like so much shattered glass, “but I’m your monster now.”

Edgar swallowed thickly, spellbound by the way that Jimmy’s white skin glowed in the evening, terribly aware of his delicate hands, the hot pressure of them.

“Come on!” the stranger from before shouted. “You’re holding up the show, you bitch!”

With one freed hand, Jimmy lifted his middle finger. “You sure you don’t want me to go home with you?” he asked. At no point in this exchange had he looked away from Edgar’s face.

“I’m… sure,” Edgar said.

“Alright. Next time,” Jimmy said, visibly reluctant. His hand slipped free of Edgar’s as he stepped away. “You’ll come around. I know you will.”

Edgar watched him go, his long stride taking him across the pavement like a shadow moving over the earth, to the crowd that opened up just slightly to accept him. When he reached them, just as they seemed on the verge of pulling him in and swallowing him once and for all, he turned—put his hand on his friend’s shoulder as he twisted back—and called over his shoulder: “See you in my dreams!”

Flushed and flustered, Edgar ducked into his car and sat behind the wheel for several minutes, just trying to breathe. The leather creaked under his grip. It wasn’t until he righted himself again, ready to turn the key over, that he began to regret not watching Jimmy go. For some reason, the loss of that sight made him unhappy in a way he could not begin to unravel.

Edgar did not finish his shopping trip that night. Instead he waited another day, until the fresh daylight had wiped some of the twilight lure from his bones, which still remembered the pressure of Jimmy’s hands against his. It didn’t take Edgar long to find that he had been followed. At the grocer’s, as he turned over a soft-skinned nectarine in his hand, he looked out through the front window and found Jimmy lingering at a shop across the street.

He was a single languid figure in the flaking curl of an iron doorway, his skin stark against the black-painted brick. There was no way he should have been able to see Edgar through the window. The tint of the glass—the angle of the sun—the distance across the road—he shouldn’t have, and yet, when Edgar froze there, he ran his tongue over his teeth and winked.

By the time Edgar had finished with the register—too distracted to stumble awkwardly over his small talk, the way he usually did—the doorway was empty.

“You’ll come around,” Jimmy said, again, when Edgar took the call at last, pausing in the middle of his wallpaper project to pull the receiver from the cradle. The walls were almost completely bare now, and yet Edgar wasn’t satisfied with the progress. It no longer felt like enough to simply have his own room the way he liked it, a hollowed out space in so much hostile territory.

“Will I,” he said, just to be contrary.

Jimmy let out a little bright shock of laughter. “You will,” he said, with absolute certainty. “I know you want me. I’ve just got to convince you to admit it.”

“You know you could have picked an easier target,” Edgar said, settling his bare shoulder against the wall.

“Oh, I didn’t pick you,” Jimmy replied. “I told you, you’re meant for me. And I’m meant for you! No matter how bad they might wanna, nobody will ever make you feel as good as I’ll make you feel. Nobody can love you like I can, Edgar Vargas, nobody.”

“I don’t think you have a lot of competition,” Edgar said. His heart was beating fast at just the thought of what Jimmy might mean by that, but his voice was steady enough that it surprised even him.

Jimmy made a little tongue-clicking noise. “They don’t know what they’re missing out on,” he said. “Anyone in the world would kill to have a piece of you, princess. If they’re not fighting yet, it’s ‘cause they ain’t seen you like I have.”

“Don’t call me princess,” Edgar mumbled.

“Whatever you want, babe,” Jimmy said easily.

Despairing of himself truly, Edgar let it go. The fact that he actively disliked one petname made it mortifyingly apparent that he didn’t mind the others, and never really had.

“Whatever you want,” Jimmy said, leaning into it now, as if warming up to the topic. “Even the stuff you’re afraid to ask for. I’ll take care of you. I’ll give you everything I got to give.”

In the evening, in the open floor of his bedroom, Edgar wrapped his arms around himself and eyed the telephone on the bedside. All evening something had been growing in him, every phone in the house glowing like a hot coal as he passed it by, an itch like a craving under his skin. It would crawl up inside of him the moment he lost focus on a task—at the sink he had paused with a medallion of carrot resting against his lip, staring out into the darkness, thinking of Jimmy’s voice.

When it finally rang, Edgar stumbled over himself to reach the bedside table. He caught himself with a palm on the mattress, stalling out the very moment his fingers touched the metal. It was an old fashioned model, the spin dial and the forked cradle, prongs cold against his fingertips. He swallowed. He lifted the receiver.

“Hello,” he whispered.

“You’re not in bed yet, are you?” Jimmy asked.

Edgar looked at his bed, the corner turned down neatly to wait for him. “No,” he said, barely audible.

“What are you wearing?”

Edgar looked down himself, at his nightshirt and bare thighs, trying not to think of the underwear he’d taken off and folded away while craving this very moment.

“Come on,” Jimmy wheeled, “you don’t gotta be shy with me, baby. Pretty soon I’m gonna know every inch of you, inside and out—the way you taste when you come, every little twitch your pussy makes, I’m gonna know you like nobody’s ever known you, touch you like nobody’s ever touched you.”

Edgar sank down onto the mattress, a jolt of something like heat lightning cracking through his belly.

“You want me to do it, don’t you?” Jimmy said, cajoling. “Pop off every one of your pretty petals one by one, that’s what you want, you want me to be the one who takes you.”

With a hand over his mouth, Edgar tried to keep his breathing steady. His pulse was moving under his skin like a spasm, unpredictable and dangerous.

“If you were here with me,” Jimmy breathed, “I’d strip you down piece by piece. I bet you look so sweet all naked and shivering, waiting for me—I wanna see the goosebumps down your arms, I wanna taste how hard your heart is pumping—”

Can he hear it? Edgar wondered, with a horrified fascination that would not release him. Can he hear this?

“Are you up there in that bedroom?” Jimmy said. “I got a look at it while you were in the kitchen, I could get used to a big four-poster like that.  You ever spread out on that thing and pretend somebody’s holding you down, baby? You ever spread your legs and wish someone would come see how willing you are, how bad you want it?”

Slowly, Edgar’s thighs split over the bedspread. Just the sight of his parted knees made his breath shake.

“I wish I could be in the shadows of that room,” Jimmy said, almost wistful, “watching you. Every time you ever ran your hand down your stomach, wondering if someone would know, I wish I’d been there to see it. If I was with you now, I’d grab you by the thighs and pull you open—spread you wide open, wide as you can go—so you can finger yourself—”

Edgar’s vision flickered beneath his eyelids, every inch of him tensing and twisting, as a sound that was barely more than a breath disappeared into his cupped palm.

On the other end of the line, there was a sharp intake of breath. “Oh my god, baby, is that you?” Jimmy’s voice nearly trembled with excitement. “Do you like that? Do I get you hard?”

Edgar dug his nails into his cheek, fighting another mortifying sound.

“Take your hand off your mouth, baby,” Jimmy said, “let me hear you.”

It could only be a sign that Edgar had utterly lost his mind, that even before he could think otherwise, he was drawing his hand away from his face. Like a compass inevitably pulled to true north, his hand drifted down until it came to rest at the hem of his shirt.

“When you’re a couple fingers deep in yourself,” Jimmy said, talking fast now, “I’m gonna push mine in too—your hand and mine, inside of you, so full you can’t even think—it’s just gonna be my hand and your hand, everything you want, everything you can’t give yourself.”

“Nnnn,” Edgar groaned, cheek caught between his teeth as he resisted the urge to slide his hand beneath his shirt.

“Yes, baby, just like that,” Jimmy said. “Are you touching yourself?”

“…No,” Edgar said, wretchedly.

“Don’t be like that,” Jimmy urged him. “Come on, get a hand around it. Feel the way your fingers squeeze you. Where’s your thumb? Stroke with your thumb. Oh, there it is. You feel that? That’s me baby, I’m holding you so tight, I’m touching you right now—”

Edgar tasted blood, toes and ankles twitching against the frame of the bed, cock heavy in his hand. Every inch of the wanton flesh lit up like a string of lights at the barest touch.

“That’s it,” Jimmy said. “There you go…”

There was a breathless pitch to his voice, as if—oh god, could he be—

“That’s so good, you’re so good for me,” Jimmy told him, “you’re so hot in my hand—”

Phone clutched to his cheek, Edgar collapsed back onto the bedspread.

Jimmy was whispering in his ear at a ragged pace, his voice growing rougher with each little hiccupping breath from Edgar’s side of the line. If only knew what Jimmy was doing, if only he could know for sure. A ragged “Ahh!” choked out of Edgar’s throat, as he twisted away from the sight of what he was doing.

“Oh, yes, make that sound again, come on come on—” Jimmy nearly snarled. “Fuck, I knew you were the one for me. I saw those eyes and—”

Edgar heard none of the rest, because the receiver slipped out of his hand and hit the bedspread. He fumbled for it, wronghanded, and finally got it back up to his ear just as Jimmy was saying:

“—Almost didn’t believe it, it’s been days and you hardly said a word, I was starting to think I was wrong about you—”

“Are you getting off on this?” Edgar said, his voice hoarse, fingers dragging over sensitive flesh.

“Yeah, babe,” Jimmy said, “you bet I am. This is the nicest thing I ever heard.”

Edgar twitched, curling in onto himself, overwhelmed with the answer he hadn’t dared hope for.

"Just you wait, soon it’s gonna be like this every night—you’re in good hands with me—"

As the sweet, coaxing murmur tangled up around him, Edgar whimpered under his attention. Although he was alone in the room, he could not help but watch the black window with a ruinous longing.

“Come for me,” Jimmy urged him, “go ahead, baby, you can trust me. Nobody will ever love you like I do—”

Edgar gasped at the slip of his fingers-

“—I’ll be your first—your last—your only—”

In a wild panic, struck to the core and overwhelmed and overwrought, Edgar blindly slammed the receiver down over the cradle. For a moment the empty room rang with the metallic echo of the protesting machine, and then there were only Edgar’s harsh breaths, grating in the dark.

In the rattling silence, Edgar curled onto his side and came hard across his thighs, lips trembling with mute arousal. When the cum was cool against his skin, tactile and itching and real in this terribly unreal moment, he went to ever window in the house, and methodically fixed the latches. For a moment he stood in the window of the ground floor, hands on either side of the curtains, and imagined himself from the road: a figure in a box of light, half-dressed, with pale slick glinting on his thighs.

“You son of a bitch,” Jimmy breathed, the electronics making a hazy thrum out of something that was anger or lust or both, something that ground against the line. “You selfish, awful son of a gorgeous bitch, I can’t believe you hung up on me.”

Edgar leaned back against the bedroom wall and passed a damp hand-towel over his skin, feeling dreamily unfettered from everything but Jimmy’s tinny voice and the rough-soft touch of cloth.

“I wanted to hear it,” Jimmy whined, the edge in his voice definitely taking a turn for pure lust. “You were so close—I could hear it in your voice, I could almost smell it.”

Edgar paused, fingers buried in the cool cotton, and said, “If you had been at the window afterward, you could have seen the consequences.”

In a small voice—startlingly small—Jimmy said, “What?”

“I should have never let you in this house,” Edgar said. “I think you really have eaten me alive.”

In the hot daylight, humid with the promise of more rain yet, Edgar pulled the curtains of each window open room by room and pried the panes until they opened.

The monsoon air poured through the house, stirring the stale smell of a place often dusted but little lived in. The graveyard had gracefully accepted its last on levy Edgar Vargas two years ago, opening up its neatly kept chambers for Grandma Mathilde, but not once since the day that Edgar calmly dialed 911 to report the events of the morning had the house felt truly empty of her presence. Now, in the petrichor sun wash, the ambient outside world pouring over him, for the first time Edgar felt nothing in the house but his own lonesome presence.

Stone and ichor, the hot smell of rain. He walked the halls, seeing them as a stranger would, taking them apart item by item.

The little used television sat in the living room, tucked unobtrusively into the alcove so as not to offend the sensibility of respectable people. On a whim, he clicked the dial, watching the perfect image burst to life. No static. No snow. For a moment he considered it, and then he bent down and began to switch through the channels. Perhaps there was a Spanish soap opera playing somewhere.

The language would come back to him, he expected. And if it didn’t, well, then he would imagine a better story for all of them.

The night air breathed like a living thing, sinking and sighing with the graceful old house.

Edgar murmured in his sleep, twisting his fingers in the edge of the pillowcase as the shadowy dream of some stalking monstrosity broke over him. He tried to bring his knees together, in a half-conscious attempt to stave off the ache between his legs, and met something firm and solid instead.

His eyes drifted open for a moment, taking in the shape of one darkness against another—the white flash of eyes—pale skin cut into slats by the moonlit blinds. Hadn’t he been dreaming of…?

The body between his open thighs pressed in close, its touch rubbing long slow circles over Edgar’s abdomen. “Shhh,” it said, in the voice that lately haunted all dreams of this kind. “Give in to it, pretty thing, let me have you.”

Jimmy, oh, it was Jimmy after all—the nightmare fantasy, sweet and poisonous, as erotic and terrifying as the creeping legs of a spider. In the blue night, indistinguishable from the chamber of the fading dream, he was crouched over Edgar, touching him everywhere that cried out to be touched.

Edgar lifted his arms blindly, pulling the weight against him. His hands followed the curve of shoulder and neck, taking the jaw into his grip, and drew Jimmy down into a slow, lingering kiss. His lips moved over Jimmy’s, artless but unhurried, as Jimmy stiffened and froze against him.

“Mmm,” Edgar moaned, rolling his hips until something brushed the torturous pressure building there. He ground up against it, chills of delight passing over his shoulders. “Jimmy…”

He could feel it in his palms as Jimmy made a low and wounded noise in his throat, all of him tensing above Edgar. And then all at once his mouth was moving against Edgar’s, messy and urgent, as Edgar parted his lips and allowed him inside. His whole body surged into kiss after kiss, each of them deeper than the last. Edgar let his hands fall back against the pillow, warm with the simmer of arousal moving through him. His hips worked against Jimmy’s body—it was all he knew how to do, and he couldn’t bear to stop.

“Fuck,” Jimmy said, a wet breath against his lips, “you’re a showstopper.”

Edgar shivered in the darkness. He wanted more, to chase that shameless pleasure into oblivion, to be laid bare. He arched into Jimmy’s roaming hands with a small pleading sound.

Jimmy dragged one palm down until it met the hilt of Edgar’s cock, swollen against their thighs. “You want it?” he said. “Tell me you want it, babe.”

“—I want it,” Edgar said, “please, please, I want it.”

The fingertips against his flesh tightened. “Oh,” Jimmy said, “fuck me, Christ.”

Edgar bucked up into his grip, urgent and badly in need. “Please,” he said again.

Jimmy’s fist closed around the hardness, his skinny fingers a merciless flurry. He bore down against Edgar with his whole body as he stroked, tongue caught between his teeth. Edgar’s thighs tensed and jumped with each pull.

“You’re a work of art,” Jimmy told him, closing a palm over his jittery thigh. “I can’t believe a thing like you exists.”

Pleased and flush with desire, Edgar pushed up into him again. This was better than leaning into the phone, questioning every move he made, cold and alone in the empty room. Jimmy bent down and licked a hot stripe up the tender line of his throat, nuzzling into his jaw.

“That’s the stuff,” he said, as Edgar cried out under him. “Yeah, that’s right, I got you. You like that?”

Edgar rolled his head to the side, slumping into the pillows. “I like you,” he answered.

With Jimmy’s face buried in his neck, Edgar could feel the way he jumped at that. Suddenly he had pulled back, his hands moving in a rush, pushing Edgar over. The silk of the sheets shocked with the touch of cold. There was an irresistible, lean strength in him as he coaxed and manhandled Edgar onto his stomach, shoving him into the position he was after. He took Edgar’s legs in his hands and forced them apart, so wide that a soft ache started in his hips.

“God,” Jimmy said, “you’re everything, I can’t believe—”

Jimmy spread his palms against the small of Edgar’s back and pushed down, pressing him into the mattress. Edgar shivered again, keenly aware of Jimmy’s presence as the exposed skin of his back met the night air.

“I’m gonna make you my wife,” Jimmy was muttering, his hungry hands stroking everything they could find, “be mine, be just mine, baby, please, I’ll take such good care of you.”

Edgar bit his knuckle, his face half pressed to the pillow. “Are you—” he said. “Are you going to… take my…”

He didn’t really want to say virtue, because that wasn’t quite right, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to say the other thing either. His stomach flared with heat. He’d never much thought of himself in those terms until he’d heard Jimmy’s insidious flirtation pouring through the line.

“Yes!” Jimmy said, squeezing Edgar’s flesh with the eagerness of the answer, “I’ll take your virginity and then you’ll be mine, I’ll make you mine, that’s what we’ll do.”

Edgar groaned into his hand, distantly aware that this was madness but completely unable to protest. He could feel the hot pressure of Jimmy curling over him, cock hard against the cleft of his ass, palms sinking into the sheets as he caught the back of Edgar’s neck in his crooked teeth. Edgar moaned, pressed tight to the bed, tensing.

Jimmy bit down into the nape of his neck, one hand skating along the underside of his body to reclaim its hold on the needy, dripping cock. He was pressed up against Edgar so tightly; the edge of his jeans was pushed down around his thighs, where it cut into Edgar’s skin. His bite left hot bruises up the side of Edgar’s neck.

“This,” he panted, into the delicate shell of Edgar’s ear, “’s gonna bring us closer than—anybody—anything—”

The aimless grind of his cock against Edgar’s bare skin was almost too tactile, too real, and Edgar curled his toes as he held still for Jimmy’s ministrations.

With one last nip at Edgar’s ear, Jimmy climbed off of him. As he went, he gave a squeeze to Edgar’s ass, saying, “Don’t move an inch, baby. You’re perfect.”

It was strange and cold, in his absence, with a chill that made Edgar want desperately to touch himself. He felt as if he was back in the dream, laid out and naked, waiting for the beast to discover his heat glowing in the darkness. His fingers throbbed with how tight he had wound them in the sheets.

There was a muffled rustling, something clicking open, and then as he turned his head, the sight of Jimmy tucking a case back underneath Edgar’s desk. When he caught Edgar looking, he grinned and flicked his hand open, flashing something silver between his fingers like a magician revealing his card.

“Told you I’d bring my own supplies,” he said.

Edgar buried his face, waiting breathlessly as Jimmy came back down to him, a voracious presence at his back. Nothing about this was familiar to him; every new touch shorted his breath. Edgar melted into the strange indulgence of the fingers working him open, a little painful but also sweet—with Jimmy over him and inside him, he felt kept and cradled, possessed and cared for, enclosed by Jimmy’s want.

“Just a little more,” Jimmy hummed into his neck, fingers curling inside of him. “Then you’ll be ready for me.”

It was strange, and yet—the very idea that he was being managed like this, made to suit Jimmy’s purposes, satisfy his needs—each twist of knuckles turned him over like the rev of an engine. At last, though, Jimmy slipped free of him. Edgar tensed at the loss, uncertain of what to expect after.

Against Edgar’s sore entrance, there was a blunt little flush of pressure. Jimmy’s fingers ghosted over his skin, the nails of his left hand slightly sharper and more dangerous than his right.

“You gotta let me in,” he whispered, as Edgar flinched away from the touch. “You gotta trust me, babe.”

Edgar let out a shaky breath and eased himself into Jimmy’s power. As the head of Jimmy’s cock pushed into him, inch by demanding inch, he keened into the pillow.

“Oh, mmm,” Jimmy said, breathless with pleasure. “Yessss. I’ve been thinking about this all day, I saw your window open and I knew what you were telling me. I knew you were ready for me.”

Edgar breathed hard as Jimmy moved inside of him, stretching him open in a way that fingers simply had not accomplished. When his hips broke flush against Edgar’s backside, Jimmy let out a sharp triumphant noise.

Every nerve in Edgar’s body was a chaos of conflicting signals, discomfort slipping into hot desire each time he remembered what he was doing, who he was with. He wanted to retreat into the bliss of Jimmy’s hand, but it was absent now.

“How do I—” Edgar started, “how do I make it feel good?”

Jimmy paused, fingers on Edgar’s back curling into themselves. “It’s not good for you, baby?”

“I don’t… I don’t know,” Edgar said, “it’s almost… it’s almost what I…”

Jimmy made a shushing noise, soothing his fingers down Edgar’s spine. He shifted inside of Edgar, drawing out little by little, a sensation that shot through Edgar’s body with all the satisfaction of hands working sore muscles. “You’re mine now,” he said, palm sliding down Edgar’s side and slithering across his belly, the soft vulnerable place below the ribcage. “So I’m gonna take care of you, alright?”

His hand closed over Edgar’s shaft: a tight pressure, an ecstasy in the shape of his fingertips. Edgar moaned in relief.

“You’re my baby,” Jimmy murmured, “you’re my girl, you’re mine now.”

Edgar trembled under the unrelenting fullness, the miserable paradise of Jimmy’s fingers and cock, hips aching as his knees slid a little more apart on the sheets.

“How’s that?”

“Good,” Edgar said, choking on a breath as Jimmy drove back into him with one hard slam of hips.

“Yeah?” Jimmy said. “That’s what you want, huh, you want me to be sweet to you?”

Even as he said it, he surged into Edgar with a force that knocked the breath out of him. The stroke of his fingers was gentle, but his thrusting hips were pitiless, breaking across Edgar with the ferocious cruelty of a storm.

“I’ll be so sweet,” Jimmy said, “so sweet when I’m tearing up your pussy.”

Planting his elbow in the sheet, Jimmy closed down over him again, his t-shirt rough against the small of Edgar’s back.

“I’m gonna come to you like this every night,” he purred into Edgar’s neck, “just like this. Just thinking about you waiting up for me, ready to take it again, thirsty for it—” he broke off into a cracked moan, laying his cheek against Edgar’s shoulder. His hips stuttered, as if he couldn’t bring himself to pull out after all, pushing himself in as deep as he could go.

“Please,” Edgar said, brokenly, not even certain what he was asking for.

“That’s right,” Jimmy said, “beg for it, you’re so good when you’re begging.”

At that last little push it was as if something had cracked open inside of Edgar, and all his desperation poured out of him in incoherent pleading, wet and hoarse and bottomless.

In his feral delight, Jimmy pulled Edgar hard against him. His hand clutched Edgar’s chest, pinning them together, for a few tight little thrusts resting his whole weight on the body beneath him. The heaviness—the pressure—Edgar was dizzy with it. His chest creaked beautifully, as Jimmy trapped him under his fervent adoration.

“Louder,” Jimmy said, against his skin, and Edgar obeyed, arching into the body against his, all his jumbled words becoming weak, senseless noises as Jimmy coaxed him into shameless abandon.

“I’m,” Jimmy panted, “Oh, god—damn—”

When he started losing his rhythm on Edgar’s cock, it took Edgar a moment to realize that it was because Jimmy was growing dangerously close to spilling his climax. All of his thrusting reached a fever pitch, savagely punishing.

“Yess,” Jimmy hissed, nails biting into Edgar’s thighs. “Hold on, hold on, I gotta—just let me—”

Edgar whimpered. After all this, he was not ready for it to be over yet. He fumbled underneath himself, catching hold of the neglected flesh, tugging frantically.

Jimmy jerked against him, bearing down, and the sound that spilled out of his throat was more a snarl than a moan.

“There,” he said, with another shallow thrust. His tight grip on Edgar’s thighs loosened, and then he was cupping Edgar’s chest in one hand, the jut of his pelvis with the other, easing them back until Edgar was sitting in his lap, still fully impaled on him.

The darkness spun. Edgar’s legs were split over Jimmy’s lap, his cock jutting heavily between them as Jimmy trailed his fingers over it.

“There we go,” Jimmy said, this time more sweetly. “Now you’re mine forever, forever and ever.”

He touched Edgar’s length with gentle fingers, his face buried in the nape of Edgar’s neck, as he squeezed the spare flesh of his chest. He caught a nipple between two fingers and tugged on it, rolling it mercilessly. Edgar shuddered in his embrace.

Jimmy’s lips moved against his neck in a murmur of encouragement, all of it reverent and filthy. The thickness of the pre-cum dripping from the slit, the curve of the shaft, the color of his arousal—Jimmy was smitten with all of it, endlessly vocal.

“Mm, look at this,” he said, rolling foreskin over the head of Edgar’s cock, holding the trembling ribcage. “Look at how sensitive you are. I can feel your heartbeat in here, isn’t that crazy?”

Edgar scratched at his thighs helplessly. Inside of his body, he could feel the slowly softening thickness of Jimmy. His head was light with flattery.

“Now, you’re not gonna keep it all to yourself this time, are you?” Jimmy said, “You’re gonna let me hear you come, right?”

Edgar made a weak sound, conceding to Jimmy’s hunger.

“That’s right,” Jimmy said, his voice darkening with satisfaction. “You don’t have any secrets from me. I'm your man now. I want every slutty part of you, every bad desire, every little black spot on your soul—show me what you’re hiding in there—” his fingers twisted, “—open it up—” his wrist jerked, “—give it all to me.”

Edgar came with a sob, every sound in his head whited out for a moment, leaving only the hot pulse of his nerves at last submitting. He shuddered at the coo of appreciation in his ear, as soft as feathers in the night, while Jimmy’s relentless fingers coaxed the last shock of pleasure from him.

Jimmy’s free arm came up to wrap tight around Edgar’s ribs, squeezing him close. “Perfect,” he breathed, nuzzling the blade of a shoulder. “Perfect perfect perfect, I’m so lucky it was me who found you, baby, I wouldn’t trust any other man to do this right. I’m gonna be the only one who ever touches you again, I promise."

Edgar tilted his head aside, letting Jimmy press absent kisses into his shoulder. He eyed the pillows. Exhaustion was catching up with him all at once, his lids growing heavier by the moment. With one unsteady hand against the bed, Edgar pulled himself off of Jimmy’s lap—a strange little thrill shooting through him as the fully soft cock slipped from his body—and slumped into the sheets. He caught Jimmy by the collar of his shirt and pulled him down after, into the waiting nest of overturned pillows.

Despite everything that he had understood about good and respectable behavior, despite all his catastrophizing, the only thing Edgar felt as he reeled Jimmy in against him was satisfaction. His mind was blissfully quiet.

Jimmy was stiff in his arms, an invisible resistance, no longer lit by the slatted moonlight. Edgar nudged a knee between Jimmy’s legs, cuddling him closer, and after an uncertain moment the boy relaxed.

The blue darkness faded seamlessly into a dream of peaked black roofs, their iron gables pointing towards the greening copper sun.

Once upon a time, Edgar had been an uneasy sleeper. This was back in the days before he began to secretly hollow out his oppressive bedroom, back when fits of terror would wake him at any hour of the night with clawing fingers. Long past the worst of those days, now, Edgar was an easier sleeper but still an early riser.

Edgar woke to sunshine, uncomfortably warm beneath its insistent golden downpour. Against his chest there was the fragile pressure of another person’s ribs; an arm was hooked over his side, holding him close. For a moment Edgar only squinted up at the window, trying to figure out what time it was.

When he shifted, trying to turn over to get a look at the clock, the arm around him reflexively tightened. There was a tiny distressed noise against his neck.

After a moment of holding his breath, Jimmy slumped back into him and made no more sound. Edgar ran his fingers over the soft undercut absently. He had half thought that this whole thing might dissolve in the morning, gone like a fever sweated out of his bloodstream. It seemed, however, that this was not the case.

When the heat and restless energy grew too much to bear, Edgar gently extricated and went to make himself presentable for the day. Just as he was coming back through the doorway, a towel patting at his freshly shaven chin, he was confronted with the sight of Jimmy sitting up in bed, his shoulders hunched as he uneasily surveyed the room. For someone who had done so much to be here, in this place, in the bright May morning he seemed awfully wary, as if he distrusted the whole graceful kingdom. Graveyard fey are lost in the daylight; shadows blink up at the incurious sun.

Edgar paused in the doorway. Jimmy’s shifting eyes jumped to him as he leaned against the doorframe, considering. The jeans Jimmy had slept in were still open at the fly, a trail of dark hair just barely visible in its V.

“Baby,” Jimmy breathed. “There you are.”

The relief and awe—the sway forward, as if he could not help but try to bring himself closer—for all Edgar’s doubts, there was no mistaking the fact that even now Jimmy still was consumed with wanting. When Jimmy said that no one else would ever love him like this, Edgar had thought it was a tacit agreement that he was essentially unlovable. Watching the light dawn on Jimmy’s face now, besotted and dangerously honest, it occurred to Edgar that this was not at all what Jimmy had meant.

He folded the towel in his hands, gently tucking it into the crook of his elbow. Noon-day demon, midsummer shade—a stranger, at least, but one that Edgar wanted all the more for having touched his strangeness.

“I don’t know what you are,” he said, at last, resting his head against the frame. “But if you’re not busy today, do you think you could help me move some furniture?”

Jimmy was still, expressionless except for the slow blink of his eyes, and then his wicked lips split open in a grin.