(do you have a) favorite bar

“We’re going,” Hickey says. He is rucking up Hal’s undershirt to survey the extent of the damage before the car door has a chance to click shut. The work is direct and neat — a single wound, stigmatic, in the fattest place of Hal’s side. By now it is bleeding freely, spoiling the waistband of Hal’s nice tight trousers. Hickey fumbles the damage out with his fingertips, tracing the shape left by the knife’s blade.

It’s a sign of trust that Hal doesn’t ask him how bad it is, how badly he is hurt. The time for a surreptitious feel has never been better. Hickey probes the wet depth of it with a fingertip, and Hal’s body lets him in.

People say you can’t even feel it at first, that a stab wound is indistinguishable from a blow. There’s no knob of guts protruding out of the opening, only a slit of wet meat. Hickey furrows his forehead and tries to gauge how far down it goes. The blood on Hickey’s hands is is body-hot, and the interior of the wound is slick like the inside of a lip, even slightly ropy — textured with veins or muscle-fibers, like some other secret surface. Curiosity inspires him. Hickey wiggles his fingertip back and forth in the wound.

At the best of times Hal has a way of filling spaces; he has a knack for drawing all the energy in an enclosed space onto himself as if he is the central player in his own drama, the allegorical focus of some Hogarthian pictorial. It is one of the things Hickey loves best about him, because they share it in common. Here, bleeding, Hal is diminishing. If Hickey only worries open the natural seam of him, he will come apart altogether.

The driver’s seat is set too far back. Hal grunts, shifting his legs against him.

“What do you think you’re doing down there?”

“Applying pressure,” Hickey says. This doesn’t seem to engender confidence.

Hickey presses his face into Hal’s shoulder and gathers a handful of white tee shirt to press against the wound site. Hal is sweating from the pain, or perhaps from the drugs, and the smell of his deodorant pierces through the smell of sweat and blood. He leans forward, clutching Hickey’s hand against his side as he taps on the center console. He has big insolent hands, the sort of hands that would once have been marked out for hacking up Frenchmen with swords, but more lately employed for swinging a tennis racket, or fingering people in the backs of cabs.

“Actually, driver, can you take us to the nearest A&E, please? It’s sort of important, actually, thanks.”

Hal has a way of making ostensible social niceties sound ragingly impolite. At least he’s not bubbling at the mouth or spraying arterial blood all over the interior of the cab. It could have gone into a lung, or the assailant could have stuck it in and had a nice stir around in his guts. If the man had been any taller he could have gotten Hal across the face, another disarming pink mark for his collection. Hickey would have managed it anyway; he’d have knocked him down. The list of places in London where both of them are welcome is growing shorter and shorter every day now.

“Going to have to tell your father you got stabbed on my watch.”

“No, you won’t. You won’t tell him anything. He’ll have you arrested and jailed and you’ll never see me again.”

“He’ll say you brought it on yourself. You were talking too much. Other people don’t share your sense of humor.”

It’s the way he sounds as much as what he says, the sound of centuries of accrued arrogance and contempt rolling around in his salacious pink mouth like a marble. You can’t make your jokes at the expense of service staff all your life without someone taking exception to it. A lifetime of accrued grievances, all folded in on themselves into a diamond of hate. Tonight had been a long time coming, but Hal hadn’t known that. To Hal, it had happened quickly, but to anyone with eyes to see, it might as well have been slow motion. Cornelius had watched, smoking.

“You sound as if you’ve been waiting for me to get knifed, just so you can stick your grubby little fingers inside me.”

Hal’s face has lost its color, apart from the strawberry blotch of a scar. There’s a strain in his voice that is privately thrilling. It must hurt after all, after the initial shock, or else he’s frightened. It won’t do a bit of good either way, being frightened. Hickey nudges in closer to him across the upholstered seat, hooking his foot around Hal’s bare ankle. He’d thought he might feel Hal’s pulse in the wound, but now he feels it everywhere — where their skin touches, where it doesn’t, throbbing through cloth like an electric tremble.

“You don’t feel cold all over, do you?” Hickey asks.

“No — sort of hot. God, I think I’m going to be sick, could you put the window down?”

Hickey assures the driver that Hal won’t really be sick, that he’s not really bleeding that much, but to hurry. The night air is colder than it had been on the street, whistling through the gash of open window to cut through the smell of blood. Turning back Hickey sees he has left three scarlet fingerprints down Hal’s exposed belly.

“I could have intervened, but I didn’t think you’d have wanted me to. Part of you wanted it, you know.”

Hickey nuzzles into him, protective, but lest the sage truth of his statement be lost, he twists his fingers into the sodden cotton and presses it into the gash. In the backseat he is thinking of the smell of institutional floor polish, nights in the city, long walks home alongside the old waterways. Hal hooks his thumb under the webbing of Hickey’s palm and squeezes.