remember, lovers never lose

“When I took the check, what did you tell him?” Paul asks.

“I don’t follow you, Pablo.”

Julian’s hand is threading idly through his hair, the backs of his fingers brushing Paul’s face at the thinnest skin of his temple. They don’t have to hurry now, when they’re alone together — there are three brass locks on the apartment unit door, bright from use against the tobacco-colored wood varnish. Every day Julian carries in some new plant sprawling out of its battered brass pot, or drags in some new piece of furniture off the curb. Every day there are more yellowed water marks in the ceiling plaster and really the two of them should be disgustingly happy. Sometimes, they are.

There in bed, Paul takes his hand, and for a moment he is dreadfully aware of how easy it would be to bend those fingers back, to twist the bones of his narrow wrist until something sprang dislocated.

“When you told your dad about me, what did you say?"

“He didn’t ask for many details," Julian says. “Wouldn’t want to know the sordid specifics or it might turn him queer. I told him that we talked, that you weren’t too proud and that you’d take the money. I told him the whole thing had been kind of a pose and it had gotten out of hand. He told me it’s good I’m finally growing out of it. Like a stutter, or a bad haircut.”

They’d agreed that the only sensible thing would be to take the money and run. Driven by pragmatism and not principle – only now it seems like one of those things that Julian had proposed by making it sound like Paul’s own idea, making it into Paul’s own thought. At first: take the check and burn it, show the old bastard how much his money was really worth, how pathetic it was to try and buy them off like a speeding ticket. Just a grinning starched fraud, standing there fishing for a ball-point pen and acting like he didn’t know how to spell Paul’s last name – too Jewish. Then it was maybe I forced you to come with me, they didn’t give me any other choice, except if anyone was manifestly willing to bring the law down on the both of them to bring Julian back it would be those two. They’re perfectly matched. Julian is better off without them.

“And he really believed that?”

“Well, you cashed the check, didn’t you?” It’s clear the line of questioning has gotten under Julian’s skin — he rolls over and sits up, and the silhouette line from his shoulder to his hip becomes a bumpy landscape of angles.

The check didn’t take them to Montreal. They’ve made it as far as the Midwest, and once the giggly thrill of insurrection wore off it’s clear Julian hates the money. He’s gotten a job — he smiles and hustles down at Seven Corners Hardware while Paul scrubs the linocut ink from the brayers in the big industrial sink down at the socialist print collective and gets paid in quarters. Julian’s never really even thought about being poor, and every shift at work he must look to the customers like exactly what he is — a fresh scrubbed rich kid on college break.

Paul traces the angles of his shoulder, where the flat of his inner arm meets his side. “When your mother said that about your incident in school – what was she talking about?”

“It’s really not that interesting, and I really don’t want to talk about it now.”

There had been something familiar in Mrs. Fromme’s voice – using the word like her son might have done, choosing the right word to hurt. Honestly, Paul, you’re so emotional, only it was twisted around and bent backward to cut Julian instead. It was like she didn’t know him at all. She’d done everything a nice well-bred woman could have done for her own child and still she hadn’t recognized him, hadn’t understood him any more than Mr. Fromme had understood what Paul really wanted.

He’s stolen him away now – Paul knows in his bones that the rupture between the Frommes is now permanent, that breaking his own word to them even extracted under duress is the one sin Julian’s parents won’t tidy away for him.

“We weren’t talking about it when it happened. What the fuck does that mean?”

“I swear, you’re like a broken record. She’s just a bitch, that’s all, and I don’t have to pretend to care about her now.” Julian rubs at the back of his neck with exaggerated indifference, there at the top knob of his spine. His hair is getting longer now, and it suits him.

Paul’s jaw goes tight watching him. The very thing he can’t ask, the thing that makes him sick now to think of it, and he scarcely hold it back from spilling out now: Who were the boys that came before me? Did you make them feel as special as I do? Would you burn everything down if it were them and not me?

The sullen silence fits between them like another person in the bed.

Paul takes him in his hands and draws him down — between his legs, against his chest. He wants Julian to look him in the eyes.

When the kiss breaks, Paul breathes against his mouth: “We can still kill them, you know.”

“I’m not going back there. I really do love you, Pablo. You’re the only person I’ve ever met who’s been honest about what he wants.”

Julian moves against him, rucking up the bedsheets around them — his hips snap in close, and his breathing has that incipient tug of strain in it, like the sound of desperation. There’s Vaseline now instead of spit, and they have all the time together they could ever need.

Paul gives a long exhale, and lets him in, lets his legs sprawl out in butterfly folds. They fit together. “Make me feel it,” Paul says. “That’s what I want.”