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Jay has a drawer full of Polaroid photos, and he dumps it out onto the pristine whiteness of his duvet, gleefully overturning it so the photos whisper over each other against the rich fabric. Andrew leans in, almost greedy, over eager, fingers reaching blindly into the pile, dead boys crisp and bloodless or putrid and seeping, a few live ones mixed in the bunch, their pallor purposeful, their mouths sulky, although Jay usually photographs the live ones with the expensive-looking lenses in the parlor.
“Do you tell them to do this?” Andrew asks, holding the white edge of one photo, a pale profile and the graceful arc of a clavicle, the pink hint of a nipple at the very corner of the frame. There are six silver studs marking the lobe of the ear, and the boy is frowning moodily.
“Do what?” Jay replies, dragging his eyes away from the evidence of the destruction he had wrought.
“Look as though their mum has refused to buy them a sweet. All of them, with the face on.”
Jay looks blankly at the photo, at the scatter of living boys in the rest of the pile. “They think it’s sexy. I never tell them otherwise.”
“Don’t want to offend your prey?”
“Those boys aren’t prey.” Andrew knows now about Jay’s rule against killing locals, and he nods politely although he doesn’t truly understand. Surely the sort of boy who hangs about in bars in New Orleans is not so different from his London counterpart. Surely neither has such attentive friends that he could not slip away with an eccentric photographer before they knew it. But Andrew is learning Jay’s rules. It is only one of the intimate aspects of their courtship.
Andrew drops the photograph back into the pile and picks up another one. At first he cannot even tell what he’s looking at, pale skin starting to mottle, trailing partly flayed flesh like Christmas tinsel. Then he realizes it’s a boy’s slim, muscular thigh, freed from the notch of the pelvis with infinite precision and care. The kneecap has been removed as well, levered apart from its tendons to display the stark white of the joint. The meticulous cuts are beautiful, both art and craft, and Andrew holds the photo nearly at the end of his nose, peering at every detail through Doctor Waring’s gold-rimmed spectacles.
“Sometimes I like to see how they work,” Jay explains. “I wanted him to watch me do that, but the blood loss killed him before I could clamp off the artery.”
Andrew tsks, impressed with Jay’s creative cruelty if not his forethought. The femoral artery could flush the blood from a body in a matter of seconds; surely Jay knows that. Andrew has seen the evidence of his careful drainage. But he is young yet, and surely his care has taken time to learn. Andrew knows precisely how his own skills have improved through the years, the experiments he has conducted to learn the boundaries of his boys’ bodies.
“You like them to suffer very much, don’t you?” Andrew asks, with clinical detachment. He looks at the sharp half-moons one of Jay’s victims had dug into his own palms, in fear or pain, the curve of blood beneath the ragged fingernails.
“It’s something they do well,” Jay replies. He is looking at the photos as a whole, staring at the sum of his handiwork, the scale of the destruction he has brought. He tilts his head like a cat observing prey, long hair falling across his face. “You don’t like them to suffer?”
“Oh, certainly sometimes. Sometimes suffering is what they want, and I am the Eternal Host after all, seeking to please my guests.” He draws a delicate flourish in the air with the picture in his hand. “But sometimes they simply want to give in, and pain only cheapens their surrender. They don’t need it. They’re already getting everything they thought they wanted when they put on their pancake makeup and faux death shrouds, and I enjoy being the creature of their fantasies, as well as their nightmares.”
Jay looks pensive for a moment, as though giving his boys what they wanted from their deaths had never occurred to him as a practice. Andrew knows they are raw material for him, both literally and figuratively, that their bodies are only interesting to Jay as objects in his control. In this, perhaps, their interests overlap but do not match, but surely even the most loving couples have their points of disagreement.
And Andrew does love him, he is coming to realize, in a dangerous, heartsick way he has never loved another living person. He looks at all the photographs, so many beautiful dead boys, such careful cuts, and falls more deeply into Jay’s sway.
“I like to look at them,” Jay says, as though there had been no prior conversation. He picks up one photograph, then another, laying them before Andrew as though he’s dealing cards, a dry slap as each one comes down on the duvet. They are a series, a headless corpse with its torso split by a careful Y, the intestines bubbling out of the cut and looping across the floor around the body, a halo above the pale stump of its neck, an intricate series of back-and-forths like those of the labyrinth he’d seen in a cathedral on a school trip to France. Each photo shows a wider view of Jay’s handiwork, the smooth pink intestine uncoiled with such care, such meticulous intention, the pattern studded with other organs – the plump kidneys, the darker splay of the liver – and Andrew can imagine Jay’s fine, fragile hands freeing the organs from the unresisting flesh. Jay must have worked at this tableau for a long time, never expecting anyone else to share in it.
He had asked Jay his greatest fear on the night they met, and Jay had said with such vehemence, “Loneliness.” Andrew can practically feel his loneliness in the photographs, the echoing solitude of his pristine house and his ghastly slave quarters, the games he plays to pass the time, ever alone. Andrew runs his fingers along the edges of the photos. “You are truly an artist.”
&&
“I want to watch you,” Andrew says, eyes on Jay’s hands and his steak knife, the blood seeping from the cut he has just made in his filet, white china spattered pink.
“Isn’t that what you’re doing now?” Jay says cockily. His pale hair is tied back at the nape of his neck, and his grey cashmere sweater is impeccably smooth. He looks so respectable in a dining room full of old moneyed couples, women in pearls and balding men in dark, conservatively cut suits.
“No, Jay, I mean I want to watch you kill someone.” He says it at normal volume, daring the rest of the room to hear him. Being temporarily dead has given him an exquisite new sense of recklessness.
Jay’s eyes flash with what would be fear in a less subtle creature. “There’s no one here worth killing,” Jay says in a lower voice, and goes back to sawing through his steak, each slice halved and then quartered, until his plate is covered with even cubes of meat awash in blood. “Did you want a bite?”
Andrew laughs, surprised. His own dinner languishes, and his dick presses roughly in his trousers. He lets Jay feed him a forkful of delightfully rare steak, amused at the scandalized faces of the restaurant’s other guests. They have no idea what has come into their midst, how much worse it is than simple queerness.
He puts his hand over Jay’s on the table, catching the eye of a particularly lemon-faced old woman and smiling tartly. “I would help,” Andrew says, turning Jay’s hand palm up and stroking the knife callus at the base of his thumb, feeling out the long bones of his fingers. “We could do it together.” The very thought arouses him almost painfully, and Jay doesn’t respond for a moment.
Andrew thinks of their first heady night together, the body in the slave quarters he had savaged with every implement at his disposal, the way it had felt to dig his fingernails into chilled, malleable flesh. They could find a boy, kill him, and play with the remains of him for weeks, leave some choice bits in the freezer for a memento, like a piece of wedding cake. He imparts this fantasy to Jay in an undertone, wheedling a little, although he can’t tell if Jay’s being reluctant or simply coy. Andrew remembers the quiet torture of the community dances his parents had packed him off to as a teenager, the last time he’d asked someone for a date whom he didn’t intend to kill afterward.
“I think I’d like that,” Jay says finally.
Andrew toasts him with the peppery red wine Jay had ordered in drawling French. “To a most promising partnership.”
&&
Jay’s cock is halfway down Andrew’s throat when Jay asks, “How will we find a boy?”
Andrew hums thoughtfully around his length before pulling off, savoring the cloying taste of Jay on the back of his tongue. “I should think your hunting grounds would be big enough for us both.”
Jay touches his cheek, oddly tender. “Of course, but I want him to be perfect. For us.”
“Romantic,” says Andrew with a perverse little smile. “If I could find you out of the thousands of bars in New Orleans, darling, I think we’ll be all right.”
“I hope so.”
He looks at the pale sprawl of Jay’s limbs against the bed, the dark golden mat of his pubic hair, the ruddy lift of his hard cock. He’s so lovely, and in spite of the understanding they share, the blood-deep sympathy, sometimes Andrew still thinks how beautiful he would be with his throat slit.
He takes Jay into his mouth again, sucking him to orgasm in a matter of moments. Jay’s face goes hazy and slack as he comes, and Andrew wonders if Jay is thinking the same thing about him, imagining the blast of Andrew’s blood from a severed artery, the final shudders of his dying body, if that is what sends him over the edge.
Andrew smiles around a mouthful of come. He could hardly ask for anything more. He glances at the Polaroid camera, laid carelessly on the nightstand. “You haven’t taken my picture yet.”
Jay looks puzzled, graceful fingers tracing the shape of Andrew’s mouth. “Of course not. You stayed on your own.”