Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

“Parting is all we know of heaven, and all we need of hell.”

Letters, Delivered and Read

January 2nd, 1931

My Dearest Charles,

Upon reflection, I should’ve known I was headed for disaster when I met you, my darling. Well, my whole life, but mostly when I met you. My Bubbe had always told me a happy life was a simple life. And she was right.

I was never happier than when I living in our little cottage, your husband. We were tucked away from the rest of the world, without responsibilities or worries. However, away from the world is not the way to live. It’s impossible. The world is full of trouble. The world is full of downtrodden creatures like us, in need of help we can give them. And it isn’t our place to hide ourselves away from the trouble. No matter how happy we were.

I have come to understand the reasons why you behaved as you did. I have even come to understand better the age-old love poetry you loved to spout at me. When we had each other anything and everything seemed possible. Now I enjoy life half as much as I did when we were angry at each other and fighting, yet still together.

Yesterday’s letter startled me. Not hearing directly from you for so long created a shell around me wherein nothing could reach me. I feel moved for the first time in a long while. Below my discontent and anger, I missed you. That rose to the surface with your letter. I am overcome.

Part of me is still angry with you for sacrificing honesty in order to do what you thought would keep me safe. As mutants, unsure in this world, our lives are bound to be always filled with trials and danger.

That part of me, however, has never diminished the love I feel for you.

You brought me out of my loneliness. You told me I deserved more than anger and fighting for scraps. I want the same for you. I want more for you. I want everything for us, together. I want the world to not only wonder at our power, but to writhe in jealousy at the immensity of our love for each other. I want their recognition, their respect, because if the world were a sensible place it would have to be given.

I want people to say your name with the most romantic reverence because they must, given what I feel for you.

I want to hear people saying, “I wish anyone loved me as much as Max loved Charles.”

I still want equality. I want to say that I am a Jew, a homosexual, and a mutant—and say it without thinking what anyone else might say or do against me. I want the freedom not to fear for my loved ones. I have always known I shouldn’t have to feel shame for who I am. No one ever beat it out of me, no matter how hard the beatings. I don’t simply want these things; I demand them, for they are my right.

I want the same for all mutants.

I’m not one to regret—and don’t mistake me, Charles, there is much I don’t—but more than anything I regret our parting. I regret the mistakes we both made. I regret your lying to me. I experience more pain in your absence than any other pain I have felt.

If I were able to change the past, I might live my life very differently. I might end the hate towards me and all of my kind. I might take back the terrible things I did as a young man. I might give my mother more life than she had. I might give myself a life of ease. The fault in all that is those things gave me you.

And I would never change you. I would never exclude you, for good or ill. You have surpassed what good or ill I have now.

With this school you want to make, we have another opportunity before us. We can create a life for young mutants that we never had. We can make a place for mutants that humans must respect. But you can probably guess what excites me most, despite myself, is the second chance we have at our life.

I forgive you. I love you. I need you back with me.

Your beloved,
Max 

“Returns—suggests—convicts—enchants—Then—flings in Paradise”

The Summer of 1928

In my youth I was one of the millions of immigrant children of New York, unnoticed and disdained. As I aged into adulthood, I learned to hate the world I lived in and fight back at it in the only ways given to me. I became a criminal—a no good tough. I was the hood nice folks saw in a two dollar suit waiting with sharp smile and a lead pipe at the end of an alley. Burning down the world one matchstick at a time.

Then I met Charles Xavier.

Charles didn’t only change my life he transmogrified it. I didn’t find my ambition until him. I didn’t know motivation or love or myself until I met him. He came in like a whirlwind, like a blaze, and went out the same way.

The story of my life is the story of him, so that is where I begin.

It took no less than two meetings with Charles Xavier to know that I was stuck.

The first time I saw him was during Emma’s swank shindig at her beach house. Her exact role in Shaw’s employ was always obscure, purposefully I wouldn’t doubt. Her name and any buildings in her name usually served as a front for less legitimate business. Her name, and wealth, was seen as beyond reproach. It was perhaps predictable that I didn’t like her. I tolerated her because she was a mutant sister, but that was possibly the only thing we had in common. She was one of those rich people entombed in their own wealth. She had the audacity to call summering at her one of her family’s smaller homes slumming. Sometimes I hated them so much it was hard to breathe. I hated that I knew those people. People that could ignore their manicured gardens and chandeliers and servants-on-hand and trays and trays of food that would never be eaten, only to say it was the least of their offerings. But it came with the work.

Past the tables of roast lamb, roast fish, cold tomato soups, potatoes hollandaise, asparagus au gratin, tiny lily-white bread sandwiches, bright vegetable terrines, sculptured mounds made out of exotic fruits, and mountains of ice cream surrounded by ice—past the statued servants dressed like Turks guarding the shrubbery, past the blotto socialites swilling gin martinis, past the din of dozens of social climbers trying to reach them was the patio.

He was sitting there at the piano and I almost didn’t see him.

I think about that moment a lot. About what might have happened if my eyes kept skimming over the finery and the vulgarity and if they had never stopped until I got fed up and left.

But I did. I paused at the way he didn’t quite fit.

He was wearing a thin blue cotton jacket and worn Russian style shirt—the kind with no collar for a tie and tied at the side. Surely an homage to the recent fad of loving everything Slavic in design. His hair was dark brown, loose and un-pomaded on his head. And he was bearded.

He looked like a tramp. Or a Bolshevik.

My first instinct was to think he was a gatecrasher—and wonder how he hadn’t been thrown out on his ear yet—but he was playing the piano, undisturbed, with a pleased little grin on his face. Then I thought it would make much more sense for him to be kind of hanger-on to the privileged class, donning the apparel of the under classes. Making poverty fashionable. It was the usual extent to which the rich lent support to progress. When fashionable, at least.

But his eyes caught mine and I wished like hell that I could’ve looked away or moved on. But he looked at me with sober, prying eyes, a chilling flash of blue, and smiled.

It was the smile of someone who knew something.

I feared I might’ve frozen, staring at him for hours, if Emma hadn’t taken that moment to sidle up to me. It might’ve been convenient if finding me were ever at someone’s convenience. They found me because there was a must.

“Howdy, bagman,” she said, her face as blank as ever during these sorts of proceedings. “I knew I’d find you on the outskirts.”

She sparkled, as per usual. Diamonds around her neck and in her ears. Her hair was in waves to the side and that sweet, sad Clara Bow eye make up, though she was more vamp than Clara could ever be.

I pointed at the man at the piano, careful not to look directly at him again. “This new entertainment for the swells? Come, gaze upon the ivory-tickling Socialist. A dime a dance; two bits’ll get you The Internationale.”

She gave me that unimpressed look, but paused and moved in sharp, like she caught the scent of a fresh kill.

My guts tightened. I never liked the sensation of being measured up.

“That’s Charles. I’m surprised you’ve not met him. Absolutely everybody knows Charles. And he’s more of a conversation piece than a communist.” After a beat, she added, “Does he catch your eye?”

I turned my mind into the sharpest thing I could imagine. It probably didn’t stop her much, but I refused to make it easier for her.

“I was just wondering how your delicate sensibilities could tolerate any tarnishing of the décor.”

“Sugar, I wouldn’t have bothered with the party if I’d known what kind of décor would win you over.”

I clenched my fist to keep from saying or doing something stupid, but I could feel nails and table legs and the iron of the gate pulling in to me.

“I have a job to do.”

She smirked and motioned to garden gate, which Janos was already opening for me, having come at Emma’s silent beckon. It led through the garden to the private entrance of the house. In the cellar, Ludovitch and his payment were waiting for me.

“Then go do it,” she said.

I walked away determined not to look at the piano player again.

I didn’t succeed.

Janos led me to the wine cellar. There was a pantry of cold, dry good, but rows of green-dark glasses stacked high to the low ceiling. Ludovitch had a speakeasy that was enjoying a surge in popularity, which Shaw covered for booze and craps. He was twitchy when he saw me. It used to be that guys got twitchy when they were low on their cut, but it seemed like lately everyone was twitchy around me. My reputation had advanced somewhat. It kinda slayed me that those schmucks were afraid of me, when I never paid any mind to killing them. That was all Shaw’s decision. He had the grin of a snake oil salesman and less honest than a politician, but he handed out a few free drinks or a throw every once in a while and they thought he was a swell guy.

I pointed to the carpetbag at his feet. “All there?”

He nodded, trying badly not to eye the door too much. Janos was standing by it with a smirk.

“Pick it up and open it,” I said.

He looked confused, but scrambled for it, opening the mouth for me. I looked around at the stacks of money, picked up one and flipped through the corners for a quick count. It felt like the right amount, but I wasn’t a money guy. I pulled the bag from him and tucked it under my arm.

“We’ll be in touch.”

The man sputtered for a second. “That’s it? That’s all?”

“You get your coffin varnish on the 12th.”

“I thought you were gonna…”

“I’m not here to jaw with you.” I pointed a thumb at the door. “Dry up.”

“But what about the feds?”

That had me for a loss. I stopped. “What do you mean?”

“The… One of Beatty’s men was sayin’ there were agents from the federal government looking into bootlegging. Closin’ down clubs. Madden says in Hell’s Kitchen they’re getting pinched left and right—”

“I suggest you don’t listen to gossip, Mr. Ludovitch. As I said, we’ll be in touch. Now, scram.”

He hesitated for a moment, but finally left.

“Es eso cierto?” Janos said, hovering by the door.

I shrugged, pulling my cigarette case out of my breast pocket.

There was always talk about the federal government trying to shut down bootlegging rackets. Considering how many City officials we bribed on a weekly basis, I sincerely doubted anything would ever happen but a few minor busts every now and again. It wasn’t like anyone from Shaw’s crew was ever going to be arrested, or stay arrested. How do you keep a teleporter or a man who can create cyclones out of his hands in the tank? For my own part, I didn’t think any amount of iron bars could keep me locked up. There was even a small, itching desire lurking somewhere in the back of my mind to be arrested. Just so I could finally show the world what I would do to those cell doors. Just so I could finally be free of those constraints that didn’t mean anything to what I was.

I let Janos grub a cigarette. As I often did, not a little because Janos was good-looking. I wondered frequently if he knew I used these opportunities to watch the movement of his jaw and throat. Then again if he did notice, I doubt he’d say anything. The rest of Shaw’s team did little to question me as they’d seen me wield a few too many triggers and a few too many lead pipes with proficiency.

While normally I would be occupied noticing Janos—obsessively cataloging male features—I was drawn to thinking of the blue-eyed man at the piano. Charles, and the cheeky glint in his eyes. There was something dynamic about him that appealed to the cursed side of me. Janos may well have been better looking, something clear and fine like a Prince Charming, but he would never look at me like Emma’s piano player had.

I never wanted to trouble over a stranger’s eyes or smile, but it was all that I had. Charles’ face stayed with me long after those few moments I had seen him. I would reconstruct his face like a puzzle in my mind, assembling the right hues and shapes, the texture of his beard, the motion of his neck. The most important part was the intent in his eyes, which I admit to not getting right most of the time, colored in various shades of coldness and keenness.

It was not uncommon for me to have this lingering obsession with the faces and bodies of men I did not know. I wasn’t one of those queers who had no idea why their bodies betrayed them or had endless amounts of loathing for those attractions. I knew who I was. And the biggest problem I had with being a fag were the secrets I had to keep.

But Charles, whom everybody knew except me because I was a nobody, a nameless Jew with immigrant parents from the Lower East Side, haunted me for weeks. I might have forgotten him, or confused him with an endless blur of pale, beautiful faces in the endless crowds I moved through. However, fate knows my name. Almost of a need created from my own desires, I saw him again.

The second time was at The Caspartina, one of Shaw’s bigger clubs. The joint was filled with his retinue, but mostly their hangers-on and the men of competing business. I was there to “keep the peace,” meaning if things were to get out of hand I should break a few heads, waiting for Shaw to get back from a meeting.

I had to stop in my tracks seeing him at the piano on stage to check he wasn’t a delusion. He was dressed a little better this time in a worn gray waistcoat, a cornflower blue tie, and a dingy collar. His hair looked darker then, combed back with pomade. And his beard was trimmed down neat and more fashionable, exposing more of his youthful face.

As if feeling my gaze on him, he looked up surprised for a moment, and then grinned his knowing grin.

Whatever crisis might have occurred over the next hour or so would never have garnered my attention. It was like the world was a radio and all the sound had been turned down. I paced through the crowded room, trying to distract myself. Normally I’d work the room, trying to figure out what mood of the room and what hoods from other outfits were doing. But I couldn’t take my eyes off Charles. I watch his fingers glide across the keys, his private little smiles, the way he’d glance over the crowd.

The way he’d glance over me.

Finally he was replaced by a dark-skinned chanteuse I’d seen before, mostly at Shaw’s other clubs. I waited for him to return from the back, where performers did whatever they did after the shows. I had a nervous impulse to talk to him, but I didn’t know what to say. It was like a riot of electricity in my chest.

I couldn’t be certain his returning looks meant anything. But I’d felt so sure, having gotten a similar look from other three-letter fellas. The knowing smile, a keen eye. I labored over how to go through the crowd, how to look for him with feigned nonchalance, and what to say to him. While I pondered, away from the spotlights, he was finding me.

A hand barely pressed on my shoulder before I turned, feeling for metal. But there was none. Just Charles’ blue-sky eyes glittering under the club’s lights. The band was playing something jazzy and alive, and people’s feet were hammering out a rhythm on the dance floor, but I was used to making out conversation over the din.

“…at Emma’s do last month?”

I panicked, suddenly hateful that I was frozen. I was behaving like some star struck bug-eyed Betty meeting Valentino. I nodded.

“You’re with the house?” He near-yelled.

I nodded again.

“Something tells me you’re not with the band.”

For the first time in a long time I was worried about how almost anyone could tell from looking I was a hired thug. Nobody who wasn’t needed a three-piece suit and a gat to run errands and guard closed doors.

But Charles smiled again. Close up it was even more intoxicating, soft and warm red, but a little sly.

He pointed to the bar and I followed wordlessly like a little duckling.

“Two whiskeys,” he said, commanding Alex’s attention faster than usual with the size of that night’s crowd.

“The good stuff,” I added, reasonably glad to know I could still talk.

“Thanks for that. It seems like every place has a different sort of code for procuring something that wasn’t made in someone’s bathtub.”

“You’re actually a limey,” I blurted. Now that we were over by the bar at the back of the house it was quieter and I could hear.

He smiled. “Pardon?”

I sighed. “It’s just… I thought I was imagining—I thought you looked English.”

His nose flared in a laugh. “Goodness, I’m not sure if I find a compliment in that.”

“Like a painting,” came rolling out of my mouth before I could stop. I almost walked out of the joint then and there. “I mean you look like someone in a painting I’ve seen. It was a… a limey painter.”

I looked swiftly out at the crowd of partygoers and hoped someone was starting a fight somewhere so I could take him out back and beat the crap out of him. No such luck. Alex returned with our drinks, so I had to look back at him. It was like he could see through me. Not ignoring me, like Emma did, but like he could see to the soul of me.

He took his drink in hand, fingers curling up to the rim. “It’s not the only thing people have thought I looked like.”

“What you look like?”

He nodded, taking a sip and cringing a little. It wasn’t Shaw’s back room, and production had been down due to increased heat from the cops, so it wasn’t his nicest hooch.

“A Socialist?”

That made him laugh. It was very nice sound.

“That too. Do you often get gentlemen telling you what you look like?”

I took a swig of my whiskey to hide any reaction. Taking a look around, no one seemed to be too close or lingering in any way.

“You mean other than a torpedo?” I said, not keeping the sneer out of my voice.

“You don’t look particularly thuggish to me. All the gangsters you see in the papers look rather mean and meager. And they all have squashed noses for some reason.”

I laughed, unable to help myself, but I could hear the edge of anxiety in it. I needed to know what this man was doing to me, or at least get away from him. He was so disarming, which was dangerous. There were far, far too many things I couldn’t let people see. I couldn’t afford to be disarmed.

“I don’t look like anything.”

Something switched in his face and the carriage of his shoulders, but it was difficult to identify. Charles gave me an oddly sympathetic look. “If you say so.”

His words made me feel like breaking glass. He was all but inviting me to some back room or a flophouse somewhere. And I was turning him away. I didn’t want to, but he was playing at Shaw’s club and Emma’s parties. Somehow he was in Shaw’s circle. I couldn’t. And it wasn’t like he could say anything about me when he was the one who opened the line of conversation.

Charles drank down the rest of his glass and banged it on the table with finality, and an alacrity that betrayed his soft-spoken limey accent.

“Listen, I’m going up to Harlem. Jimmy Johnson is playing at The Casino and I can’t possibly miss it. I’m meeting some people, but you’re welcome come along. In fact I insist.”

My chest tightened. I wanted to spend time with him, follow him anywhere. It’d been a long time since I felt that for anyone.

“I’ve got work to do here,” I said. It was true, but it felt like an excuse. It felt like I was already missing something.

Charles gave me a look of understanding he shouldn’t have had for just meeting me. He took out his billfold, but I waved him off.

“Nix that. It’s on me.”

“No, I couldn’t—“

“Call it solidarity,” I said, feeling the bitterness in my own mouth. I washed it down with the rest of my cheap whiskey.

He looked at me dubiously, but then put his wallet back in his pocket. “You know I never told you my name.”

“I know… Emma told me.”

“Ah, Emma,” he said with a peculiar, indulgent look, like one might cast a darling rambunctious child. A look incongruous with everything I knew about Emma. “If I tell you anyway, will you return the favor?”

I nodded because there was never going to be any other possibility.

“My name is Charles. Charles Xavier.”

Some crazy part of me burned to take him by the waist and pull him into my arms and say Max. Max Eisenhardt. Come run away with me. It was crazy, how he was already under my skin, an itch waiting to be scratched. But where could we possibly run when there was no place to go?

“Erik Lehnsherr.”

“Delighted,” he said with a smile that seemed like he was maybe telling the truth.

He held out his hand, but before I could even think about if I really wanted to touch him and let him go, he grabbed my hand firmly, sliding his free hand around the top of mine. He squeezed, holding his thumb over my wrist. He leaned in, and I was pulled into blue eyes that never should have seemed so shrewd in a face like his.

“I will see you again, Erik Lehnsherr.”

It felt near as much of a threat as a promise. It would’ve been a lie to say I didn’t want him to make good on it.

After he left, I absentmindedly stalked the shop, gave some dice-player the bum’s rush, and waited for Shaw. There was some business to be done, but I hadn’t known what for, or who, yet. So I was left to fill the wait with reminding myself of the reasons why it didn’t matter if Charles was queer—there was no point to trying to hunt him down. I couldn’t keep him for longer than the space it would take for a tumble. I could spend the night with him, leave, and then wait for the next night to come along with the next stranger. All he could be was a fond memory.

And what’s the use of a fond memory?

I took to the distraction of Shaw’s arrival readily.

He was swiftly followed by Emma hanging off the arm of Dick Beatty, something of a rival. They’d been in talks negotiation talks for their areas of overlap—which was basically everything when it came to gangsters. They both ran nightclubs, bootleggers, and gambling. Although, Beatty dabbled in dope and hookers forming a complete circle in crime. I found it distasteful myself, but whatever rottenness could penetrate the system was fine by me. While Emma distracted Dick in her particular way, leading him to one of the rooms in back, Shaw rounded on me with his usual startling, jovial smile.

He clapped me on the shoulder, leaning in close and casual. “We’re going to finish up in back. Give us fifteen. Then you’re going to take him for a ride.”

I held in a sigh, and looked straight ahead into the crowd because he was looking at me, waiting for a reaction. He knew my opinion, but that didn’t really matter. Murdering a neighborhood boss was likely to cause more than a little brouhaha. That didn’t change my job description any.

It just meant I was in for a busy few months while Beatty’s men either tried to maintain their racket or kill Shaw—that was if I didn’t get zotzed myself.

“No problem, boss.”

“Good man,” he said with another friendly clap.

I shook off the feeling and waited, just trying not to think. Not about how I’d kill Beatty, not about where I’d stuff him, not about what I’d do if the coppers came by. Not about how Shaw was going to get me killed one of these days. And certainly not about Charles Xavier and his invasive, understanding gaze.

By the time I came back from dumping the body—one of the usual places, a disused farm out of the city and a long drive—the joint was empty but for one of old man sweeping up in the main room. And Emma, waiting for me in Shaw’s office. The man himself was gone and I wasn’t about to inquire. The less time I spent with him the better.

“Pity Azazel couldn’t do this one,” she said, reclining from the divan. She snapped her fingers and made the sound air being displaced, or whatever she thought Azazel’s disappearing trick sounded like. “I love that. Lickety-split. You always take so long.”

“Do you know what he’s thinkin’?” I said angrily over the sink, washing off the blood that had gotten on my hands from dragging the body. “’Course you do. Would you mind telling me though? Seeing as how I’m gonna be the one to get gunned down by some hood.”

She snorted a feminine laugh over her ever-present martini glass.

Of course she wouldn’t actually tell me anything. I turned to leave, but she stopped me dead in my tracks.

“You talked to Charles earlier.”

I tensed, but didn’t show her my face. I didn’t know what her angle was but it couldn’t have been wholesome. Shaw knew what I could to with metal, of course—it was why he hired me. But as far as I could tell he didn’t know I was queer. I didn’t know what he’d even do if he did know. Emma, with her gifts, obviously knew, had alluded to it a few times. She’d never exposed me outright though.

I couldn’t say why. It wasn’t like we got along terribly well.

“I thought we agreed my affairs were my own, Frost.”

“I never made any promises, Max.”

The bronze doorknob crumpled under my hand. I ripped it out of the door completely and let it wait by my side, if I needed it for anything, as I turned around to face her.

“Don’t call me that.”

She shrugged and casually put a hand up in surrender. She put her drink down to examine the varnish on her nails. “It’s only that I thought you should know… he’s a cousin, cousin.”

The doorknob dropped to the floor.

“He’s a mutant,” I said, feeling the words on my tongue like a cloying liqueur.

She made a grunt of disgust and sighed. “Ugh, I hate that word. He’s like us, darling. He’s one of the homme nouveau.”

I just stood there, paralyzed. I felt dizzy with options. For the first time in my life it felt like the closed door I’d been living behind was opened.

It was terrifying.

Emma rose regally from the divan and moved to leave, but stopped before the doorway. In the entire time I’d known her she’d never leveled me with as honest a look as she had then. She looked wary and very slightly tender.

“I know him—about as well as I can, I suppose. Watch out for him.”

I’d been a sap to think she meant ‘protect him’ and not ‘protect yourself.’

“A good nation I will make live. This the nation above has said. They have given me the power to make over.”

A Quick-and-dirty History of the Unimportant Times

I was born Max Eisenhardt in the year 1900, a child of the new century, I’d been told.

I was later disappointed to find out that 1900 is in actuality the last year of the old century. Nineteen-aught-one was the first year of the subsequent epoch.

My life has been riddled with lies ever since.

One of those lies was that Jews were rich, hoarding wealth and taking work from decent Christians, setting up rackets, or worse. This was usually told to me as the reason why Jews were hated. But I grew up with my mother, my father, my Aunt Judith, and my Grandmother, who were all Jewish. We were also poor. Almost every person I knew growing up was poor and Jewish.

Everybody knew about Jews without money but it was almost all of us.

We lived in a tenement on Geranos Street in the Lower East Side and it was several years before I realized not everyone in the world lived that way. That was when my parents let Aunt Judith take me out into other parts of the city so I could help her hand out pamphlets. We always went on her day off and had two stacks: one for the United Hebrew Charities and one for the New York Women’s Trade Union League.

My mother or my father occasionally went to the rallies with Aunt Judith, but not usually. They had to get the same day off. My entire childhood the worst thing I thought could happen to a person was “getting sacked” because it seemed to be the only thing adults worried about. Every time you got sacked, you got paid less at your new job. Fewer and fewer places would hire you. You couldn’t pay your rent. And you moved in with other families, or, lived under tenement stairs in the cold waiting for the coppers to chase you out.

Both my aunt and Mama were fired a few times for various reasons. Getting arrested, mouthing off to the bosses, organizing, staying home to take care of me if I was sick. But by 1910 they were both working at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, where they walked home to the tenement seeing limestone mansions and high society women in tulle hats and dresses that cost more than their yearly salaries.

Bubbe took in alterations from home. Papa sold apples from a cart. I went to school most of the time, a lot more than most of the kids in my tenement—my parents took school more seriously than I did and thought I was bright—but when I didn’t go I helped out Papa or Bubbe.

Then there was the fire.

The Triangle Fire. It was in all the papers. No one stopped talking about it for months. Everyone said there was going to be riots. Everyone said there was going to be hell to pay. Everyone said there was going to be unions everywhere and no one would die like that anymore.

My mother and my aunt both died trapped inside the ninth floor. The doors were locked so the women couldn’t leave until they were checked for stealing the end of the day. While the supervisors in the offices above left through the roof escape, leaving the workers behind. The entire building was filled with cotton and linen shirt pieces.

Word spread faster than the smell of char.

Later on that night in the bustle of angry voices congregating on stoops questioning what was to be done, mourning good Jewish girls, commiserating on how no one up there, no one important, could give two shits about a bunch of dead immigrants, my father cried into my hair.

“It’s going to be alright, Max,” he said.

He was a liar too.

Weeks later there was a memorial parade, where it seemed like the whole of New York City was walking in black, in solidarity, in pain. It seemed like the whole of New York City was mourning my Mama and my Aunt Judith. I walked with a sea of people, more people than I’d ever seen, in a stupor, like my soul was dragging three feet behind my body. I was drowning in a flood of muffled sound and ash.

That whole time was a blur.

I wanted everything to stop moving. I wanted to sit down and have someone explain to me why my mother was not coming back. I wanted to know why I was awake in a slow slog as people hurried around me to do other things. I wanted to know why I slept in clouds of billowing skirts and embers floating to the ground.

I wanted to know why the men who locked my family in a burning building got to go on living and working in the same city I had to inhabit. I wanted to know why there were no riots, no hell to pay. No punishment. I wanted to know where the wrath of God had gone.

Anger, not just air, filled my lungs from then on out.

I came to learn that everything was stacked against me. The world was designed to hate and buck against everything I was. I was the poor offspring of poor Jewish immigrants. And as I got older, my strange affinities started to grow, deepening my disadvantage.

The allure of metal became more and more as the new skyscrapers exploded around me. I could see them without eyes. I reached out to them as I became increasingly familiar with every sprawling corner of Manhattan. It set itself apart from mere fascination. Any yob could look up at the skyline and point, knowing they were seeing something monumental. I could feel the might of the dawning new world in my bones. I could pull metal to me, bend it to my will, and use my mind to change and temper it. In my mind I was Hephaestus, yet I couldn’t say a word because of the whispers of new men and their uncanny, inhuman mutations very unlike the freaks of the past.

Just as I knew without being told my affinity with metal was an aberration, I knew my feelings for other boys were forbidden as well. Sodomites, sissies, fairies, faggots, rent boys, queens. They were all figures of contempt and pity and mockery. My fear of this, my longing to be something else was actually quite short-lived.

Why bother when everything else about me was beyond the pale?

I made a fairly simple presumption from an early age that if the wider world was going to treat me with nothing but scorn, I was going to return it, not accept it.

After Mama and Aunt Judith died, getting work was a necessity. I got a job at a newsies as they were always looking for lads with energy they didn’t have to pay well. Even with my pittance we couldn’t afford our apartment and had to rent a room from the Schneidermann’s apartment, a family with six children in the building across from ours. Bubbe and I shared a bed until I was thirteen. Then I shared with Papa until he died from drink when I was fourteen.

After that I shared a bed with other borders the Schneidermanns would take in from time to time. Single young men, usually, who just moved to the country or lost a job or whose mama had too many other babies for them to live at home.

Then I stopped going to school altogether. The only education I received that was any kind of formal was from books. I may have been a thug, but I couldn’t forget how my Mother always told me to get an education. Besides, reading was one of the few things that gave me pleasure.

I started doing other work for the newsagent, like delivering packets of cash to policemen, beating up other newsboys so they couldn’t distribute, and, once or twice, setting fire to competitors’ newsstands. But mostly delivery, anything from bribes to dope. My boss got me into fencing stolen rings and necklaces to some of the Lower East Side jewelers because I spoke Yiddish. I was useful enough that I was taught how to drive so I could do work in other parts of town.

By the time I was sixteen, I knew how to run from the flatfoots and deflect bullets with my ability. I knew where to hide swag. I knew how to skim scratch without getting greedy enough to get caught. Suddenly I had a reputation. For being quiet, for being evasive, and for being good in a fight when being quiet and evasive failed.

I was a tough and everyone knew it.

I got an apartment for just my Grandmother and me. It didn’t freeze in the winter and she had her own bedroom, separate from the small sitting room. I never told her what I did, about anything, but she knew. More than just gossip, she must have known I wasn’t even a part of the world. A criminal, a reprobate, a foreigner to the people around me. She told me every day that I was going to go to jail for breaking the law, but she did it while she kissed me good-bye and wished me luck.

So maybe she was as apart from the world as I was.

I lived like that until I was twenty, fencing a small volume of stolen goods for my boss, beating up whoever needed it, and being dependable enough for a decent income without drawing more attention than the crooks around me. I easily avoided the Great War. I was too young for conscription. Even though boys my age or younger were volunteering in ridiculous fits of patriotism, or being shanghaied by their parents and block wardens, my boss kept papers on hand for me proving I was under twenty-one. And bribed War Office officials who insisted I wasn’t. It was the only part of my life as a bad man my Bubbe had encouraged. She told me if I went off to war she would die of heartbreak.

My Grandmother died in 1920 anyway. She was old and sick, and hadn’t even bothered to tell me how long she’d been feeling ill. Being poor her whole life had taken the fight out of her. I wanted to rage against something, but there was no one to face because it hadn’t been one thing that had made her older than she really was.

It was then I realized it wasn’t individual incidents that had killed my family, but a huge wall of forces people like me were never meant to overcome. A huge wall that had been built a long time before me or my parents, or my grandparents, had ever been born.

I wasn’t a communist, or even a Socialist like Aunt Judith, but their words spoke to me from the past like an echo. Things needed to change; things needed to decay. And I wanted to be part of the rot that took that wall down.

I just didn’t know that change would come with prohibition.

Suddenly there was a more crime to be had and every two-bit thug was trying to start a racket bootlegging booze. Including my boss.

So when I was heading to my distributor’s warehouse on February 10th, 1921, I walked into a bloodbath.

The warehouse was littered with a half a dozen dead bodies. Three men in suits I’d never seen before remained standing. Two of them were carrying Tommy guns. The man without a gun was wearing a fancy brown and burgundy suit and a smug face, smoking a cigar. He straightened his mustache, like I’d knocked into him on the thoroughfare.

“Waste him,” he said dispassionately.

With all the force I could muster, with my whole being, I pushed. I’d deflected bullets before, but never from a Thompson, never from two. I could barely see the fire through the rain of metal. It felt almost like being pelted by hail. It felt like the push and pull of metal was a part of my body, an extension of my arms and legs, more than it ever had been before.

When the bullets stopped, I started breathing again. I could feel my hands shaking, but I’d caught them by surprise. I ripped the guns out of their hands, sending them skidding to the floor, left with what I was going to do to cover my tracks.

But there was a soft chuckle as the man with the mustache started clapping. “Excellent,” he barked.

That was how I started working for Sebastian Shaw.

I did more or less the same thing for Shaw for the next several years, with the addition of adding murder and body disposal to my repertoire. Shaw was like me, in a way. He said those whispers about new men were true. He called us mutants and said we were different than humans. He said that one day we’d create a separate society, above and apart from the people who wanted us to blend into the shadows.

Shaw was a criminal and a gangster, but he was in the business of collecting extraordinary people. He called it appropriation of our rightful property.

I didn’t disagree.

Shaw was an untrustworthy bastard, but he gave me my start. He believed in a new era as well as I did, if not more so. An era where mutants would gain control and run things. An era where the old divisions of race and class and religion would be unwelcome. But it would take a lot of work—a lot of wheeling and dealing—first. In an effort to both escape attention from the police and start anew, he was the one who suggested I go by a professional name.

“You’re more than a small-time Jewish tough, m’boy,” he said.

That was how I became Erik Lehnsherr.

That was how life stayed until Charles.

I’m not being remiss; I know I haven’t mentioned my dalliances with men. Of course, I had them. I had them as a boy with other boarders in the Schneiderman’s spare bed. And it shouldn’t surprise that over a decade of being a crook and a thug gave me incredibly detailed knowledge of Manhattan’s seediest corners. I knew where to go when I wanted a throw. But I don’t mention them. Hesitant, passing encounters in the dark with shame-faced men who wanted more but couldn’t or didn’t know how to voice such want. Hypocritical men who would obey the desire of their cocks, but not the desires of their hearts to ask for more than contempt, pity, and mockery.

I don’t condemn them. I was the same way before Charles. But that’s entirely the point. B.C. Before Charles, who saved me, who changed me. To talk about them in detail would be to admit they even stood on the same ground as Charles, which is patently untrue. Perhaps I’m being maudlin, but there was never any other who affected me more, good or bad.

It was with Charles I became a different man.

“Permit me voyage, love, into your hands”

The Summer and Fall of 1928

After I killed Dick Beatty, there was a short-lived turf war.

All of our disputes were relatively short-lived. The majority of Shaw’s crew had always been mutant. I’d known men to die under Shaw’s command, but the humans barely stood a chance. Certainly how Shaw managed to steadily amass territory and schemes over the past few years rarely went unspoken. More often than not the whispering of Shaw’s men being devils or vicious freaks of nature usually did some of our jobs for us.

During the end of that summer, I was busy. Dodging police, disposing of bodies, stowing cash and dope and booze, and turning Beatty’s network of pimps, runners, and bagmen into our network of pimps, runners, and bagmen. It was a lot of work, even if I could disarm an entire room of hoodlums and wield a lead pipe at the same time. The days I wasn’t being Shaw’s strong-arm in July and August were filled with hiding out, waiting for a messages. Or waiting to drop whatever I was doing whenever Azazel popped in.

Or at least that’s what I should have been doing.

I had adopted a peculiar form of hiding out in the early evenings that included finding out what clubs Charles was booked for, going there in the nicer of my two good suits, and squirreling away in the back of the joint to watch him play. I never approached him, and I never saw him look directly at me, but after the first few times the barkeep would find me and give me a glass of brown on the house.

I felt like a wind-up toy doing the same tricks over and over again.

“You’re not going to too much trouble trying to find me, are you?”

My gun loosened from its holster under my arm. Sneaking up on me in a loud speakeasy was one thing; getting the drop on me in an empty alley was just embarrassing.

I’d left the building after his set. Sometimes he stayed at whatever joint he was playing at to dance and drink with the swells. Emma was right. It seemed like everybody knew him. Everywhere he went there was always some little group of people happy to see him.

I looked him over close up. His beard was still short, but fuller. And his hair was unkempt again, soft and almost russet under the light of the distant neon lights. His eyes looked less keen than usual. He was dressed more like he was going to a union rally than tickling the ivories, his dark linen jacket looked loose on his shoulders.

I shrugged and lit my cigarette, like I’d been trying to do in the first place.

“Who says I’m looking for you?”

“Well, you can’t be here for the music. I know I’m not that accomplished a pianist. And I would imagine someone looking for a good time would look happier than you do.”

I glared at him, but I was met only with a cheery grin.

“Emma told me,” he said. “You’re one of us.”

He nodded plainly, without comment, like I was asking if he had two hands with ten fingers. Even when I had joined Shaw’s crew, surrounded by people like me for the first time, none of them had been eager to confirm what they were. They’d looked wary about me for weeks before showing off what they could do. Charles’ lack of alarm was almost audacious.

“What can you do?” I asked, looking him over again. He didn’t seem to have anything physically different about him. Then again, Emma could turn into a big shiny rock, so what did I know.

“What can you do?” He said, playfully.

I sighed. “I’ve met other mutants, you know. The suspense isn’t killing me,” I lied. But I pulled a handful of coins out my pocket anyway.

It was my oldest parlor trick. I tossed them in the air, but caught them mid-air, and swirled them around in a little constellation until they all piled neatly back into my hand. Charles clapped, delighted. His amusement was a refreshing, honest little look on his face. I felt a niggling impulse to do something bigger, something more extraordinary so he’d keep that face for longer. But his smile slowly slid off.

“I know, by the by.”

“You know what?”

“Know you’ve met other mutants. Obviously, but besides Emma. You work with them.”

A sudden small flare of panic rose in my chest. Did he work for Shaw in any other context than entertainment? Despite his shabby clothes, his familiarity with the swells and the way he spoke made him too chichi to be a hired gun or a bootlegger. And he certainly looked too soft and cordial to be a hood. I knew some outfits sometimes hired clever, strange little men for peculiar jobs that required more than a chopper, but we’d all been too busy with Beatty’s men for a new scheme.

I didn’t want him to be some kind of conman or part of Shaw’s crew. Desperately didn’t want it. I didn’t want him to be bad like me. I was a hypocrite, but that was the way I needed it. I wouldn’t have been able to look him in the face again if he were.

“I know because that’s what I can do.”

Then there was a gentle, swaying sensation in my head. I could recognize the feeling immediately because Emma had done it to me a dozen times, though her feeling in my head was much sharper, much firmer. Charles was a mind reader. It was an odd sort of relief to feel.

He grinned rather smugly as he spotted the recognition on my face.

I’m a telepath, like Emma. Well, not too much like Emma. I don’t have her other astounding ability, but I can read minds and converse like this. Leave a few impressions, as she can.

Charles’ voice in my mind was even more warm and honeyed than when it was in my ear. But as smooth as it felt, I couldn’t help but think of all the terrible, forbidden things I’d done and recoil. I didn’t want Charles to see that.

“I won’t push in. I swear.”

I frowned. “How can you not? You already know I don’t want you to look.”

He shook his head. “There’s a difference between your intimate thoughts—memories, concerns, ideas and what have you—and how you feel. Feelings are more impressions than actual pictures, do you know what I mean?”

“Sure, it’s just… A man has secrets.”

“I understand. You barely know me.”

I wasn’t very happy with that. Generally, I thought that we mutants should feel free in using our gifts with one another. Telepathy shouldn’t have been different, but it was. It was more than the criminality of my secrets. For some reason, I wanted very strongly to keep them from Charles. I wanted to show him that I could be better than I really was.

“It’s not you,” I said with my cigarette between my lips, trying to look casual. “We’re mutants. We’re bound together by what we are. I’d just as soon not get you involved in… Well, you know what Shaw’s about. You seem like a decent bird.”

He looked down chastened, the good humor of his posture quickly deflating a bit. I could’ve sworn there was a bit of red to his cheeks, but I thought it away as probably having a flask on his person. A hand went through his hair as he toed the gritty pavement. It only occurred to me then that he was small in stature. He wasn’t very short, but he wasn’t tall either. And his shoulders and arms had the spareness of youth, which I hadn’t even thought to wonder about. He’d been so confident.

Thankfully, he interrupted the uneasy silence.

“Have a drink with me. Or coffee. I want to talk to you.” The corner of his mouth tugged up into a cordial half-smile. “Please.”

I rubbed the back of my neck. I wanted to. I was carrying a mighty big torch for this man. I wanted to indulge in every sin with him. But his circle ran around Emma’s. A one-night fling would be one thing if I never ran into him again. But that seemed less and less likely. There was more than one type of danger in trying to keep him around.

“I can’t. I shouldn’t be out on the town.”

Charles switched gears visibly and excitedly and said, “Are you on the lam?”

I rolled my eyes.

“Come to my apartment, then. No one would should be looking for you in Greenwich Village.”

“Do you always invite bad men you don’t know back to your place?”

“Usually only on major holidays, but I make exceptions for disreputable queers who follow me around Manhattan.”

I pinched off the end of my cigarette and put it back in its case, fighting off a tense feeling in my neck.

“You’re too cheeky for your own good, I think.”

“You wouldn’t be the first to think so, old boy.”

“Fine. You’ve twisted my arm.”

He smiled with indulgent red lips, half a laugh hiding behind them. “Ducky.”

We took a taxicab over to the Village, with Charles filling the air with friendly chatter the whole while. He was talking about Mexico for some reason. I wasn’t paying too much attention to the words, and I suppose it didn’t really matter, as Charles’ demeanor was instantly more distant and formal with the driver present. But I couldn’t concentrate for the knots in my stomach. I felt like I did the first time I fooled around with a man, back when I was still learning what covert meanings there were to certain words and a certain way a man might look at you.

Charles’ apartment was mostly shabby, but quite big and certainly nicer than what I’d grown up in. The living area was open and clearly used. Two small couches next to the radio, chairs scattered all over the place, a small table still littered with teacups and ashtrays, a drinks cabinet, and books stacked up against the wall in the spare places. The dining room wasn’t technically a separate room, but half-hid by gauzy blue and green curtains with an angular beaded design running down the sides. There was enough space to see at least eight chairs at the table. The walls seemed to be overhung with paintings, alternately full of raucous shapes and bulky human figures bustling against one another. And right in front of all that was a small, scuffed space of floor cleared of all furniture but a large Sonora record player. The doors on the cabinet beneath it were swung open to display the many record books, with even more stacked on the floor.

“So what do you think?” Charles asked, casting a sweeping arm upward.

An old fashioned chandelier from the ‘90s hung overhead like a centerpiece, dirty bronze and a permanent layer of schmutz obscuring the molding and twelve red and amber colored lighted glass cups.

Even I could tell if one were to put a little work into the place it could’ve been the height of class. It was purposefully louche, not terribly effectively hiding its affluent past.

A little like Charles.

“It’s swell.”

“I’ll go start some coffee. Have a seat and help yourself to a bottle. There’s some clean cups in the cabinet.”

From inside the kitchen, Charles’ voice still came through the walls, muffled and distracted. My heart wouldn’t stop racing. I wasn’t unfamiliar with illicit meetings with men, but I was forever unable to stop obsessing over small details that didn’t matter. My fondness for those men could fluctuate, but the scenes remained achingly clear every time. Almost clouding my head for the details. Of the rooms we met in, the words they said, the details of their physiognomy. And I could feel the image of Charles’ apartment being etched into my mind. Yet I still felt blurry, as if it weren’t happening at all.

I poured myself whatever was in the taller decanter for my nerves. I nearly gagged. It was pretty rotten. Hit me like a train.

“Are you hungry? I can make some sandwiches,” he said popping out of the kitchen to put on a record. He wildly turned the crank on the side of cabinet and set the needle down with a loud hiss. A moment later the air was filled with some up-tempo big band melody.

“Uh, no,” I said clearing my throat. “That’s alright.”

Charles laughed and pointed to the booze. “Apologies. That’s my sister’s experiment in bathtub gin. It’s awful stuff, God bless her.”

There was an awkward moment where Charles walked over and I stood up, hoping to go in for a kiss to get this started, but he didn’t notice and seated himself opposite me. I sat down uncomfortably.

“Are you alright, Erik?”

“I’m swell.”

“You know I’ve been wondering about you.”

Somehow I didn’t think he thought about me the same way I’d thought about him. Almost nightly, trying to recreate the exact arc of his lower lip in my mind. Living not for work or even indulging my own pleasures, but the fruitless hope of attaining this stranger one day. I was never anyone’s matching obsession, so I doubted his ponderation was anything other than passing.

“What about?”

Charles smiled knowingly, sympathetically. He was swiftly developing a huge repertoire of smiles. It made me uneasy.

“I’ve been concerned. A bit.”

That made me scoff. “Your concern might be a little misdirected, old boy.”

“I’ve no doubt you’re very capable when it comes to protecting Mr. Shaw’s interests. I was merely worried how someone—I’m going to be awfully forward. I was curious, I suppose, but more worried how someone in your lifestyle finds… company.”

“Company.”

“Romantic company. As it were.”

“Romantic company.”

Charles’ face scrunched up in embarrassment. “This isn’t coming out right. I don’t mean to be a Nosy Parker. I’m—I wanted to let you know there are places for people like us to find company.”

I didn’t know whether to laugh or back out of the room. “I’ve been to baths before, Charles.”

Charles’ cheeks tinged pink a little. It was obvious he was trying to hold it back by succumbing to a self-reproving smile. “I thought it likely. I meant for us as homme nouveau, as mutants.”

It was so quiet I could hear the thumping of my own heart.

I didn’t even want to consider what Charles was talking about. Groups of people who were both mutant and queer. More than myself. But then, that’s why I was so excited for Charles. Why the idea, the potential of Charles had refused to leave Erik’s mind.

“Oh dear.” Charles’ face was suddenly bleak. “I’m afraid I’ve given you the wrong impression.”

Something in my chest tightened. I immediately tried to stay calm and unaffected, but it only my heart thump harder, spreading warmth into my face and limbs.

“I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

I held up my hand for him to stop talking. The terrible part was that Charles looked and sounded genuinely apologetic.

“It’s fine.”

“No. I didn’t want you to think—Let me get the coffee and we’ll talk.”

As soon as the kitchen door swung behind him, I took a swig of his awful moonshine and got up to leave. It made sense that Charles wouldn’t be similarly interested. He was sweet and knew about what I did for a living. He had people; mutants like himself to rely on. Getting wrapped up with a card like me was nothing but dangerous and pointless.

Before I got to the door, however, there was a firm grip on my arm.

“Erik, I wish you wouldn’t go.”

I paused, unable to look away from his eyes. It was almost like a curse, how much I noticed them, bright and hopeful. Everything was broadcast from his eyes. I felt like one of those travelers of myth, being caught by the beauty of a siren, destined to be dashed on the rocks waiting for the siren’s love.

“I’ve made a fool of myself.”

Charles let out a delicate sigh, quite incommensurate with his artfully unkempt look. I had to restrain myself from imagining what kind of queers—queer mutants no less—were given the privilege of being his romantic company.

“No, it’s my fault. I think I led you on. I’m used to being—You’re different from most men I meet.”

“I’m dangerous, I know. It’s not like I know any other queers. I’m not the sort you keep around.”

Charles frowned. “No. No, that’s not it. I wouldn’t want to give the impression…” He sighed, but then with an almost sudden, surprising quickness braced a warm hand on my shoulder and reached up to kiss the side of my cheek.

I didn’t feel much more than a soft brush of his whiskers, but it burned pleasantly on my skin.

“I wish you would stay for conversation. I wasn’t lying when I said I wanted to talk to you. Your mind is very… Let’s just say, I see potential in having a friend. It isn’t often I feel that. So I know I’m not being selfless, but I want you to know, you shouldn’t have to be alone either. It’s terrible to think you’re alone. I’d never forgive myself if I didn’t show you it can be different.”

I wasn’t sure if anyone else had said that I would have listened. But Charles had all the means to know who and what I was. Had done so and even surprised me with it. But he knew and wasn’t afraid of me. He knew me with a sight and wanted to know more.

And coming out of those eyes, how could I refuse?

It continued on like that for some weeks, into the better part of August, with Charles determinedly befriending me, alternately saying how important it was to have companions of a like and in diversity, and winning me over with his affable good manners and charming smiles. I didn’t think Charles fully understood the affect he had on people. He handled and glad-handed them all, perhaps not equally, but easily and with verve. It was never as though the amount of people, or what they might do or think, ever seemed to trouble him in the slightest.

He was incapable of seeing solitude as a virtue and put me on a course of meeting his peers and companions. Traditionally, I only knew people who I might one day be expected to kill. Being at Charles and Raven’s apartment was a new and worry-making development in that respect.

The first time I had returned to Charles apartment at his request, I had assumed that Charles and I would be alone. But I stepped into a cloud of laughter and chatter emanating from a group of five people at the dining table.

Before I could even doff my hat, a mutant girl jumped out of her seat and ran over to me, shaking my hand emphatically. She had yellow eyes and dark blue skin with raised alligator scales down her arms. Her sleek red-orange hair was cut into a Louise Brooks, pageboy bob. She seemed to be dressed like an occultist in a full length black frock, that sloped off her shoulders, covered in glittering yellow suns and stars, cinched around the waist with a long braided belt.

She was stunning and baffling all at once.

Her other scaled hand covered Erik’s in their handshake.

“You must be Erik! I’m so excited to finally meet you. Charles told me you can move metal around. That’s fantastic! We don’t have a telekinetic in our little group. Well, we did, but he moved some place boring.”

Charles gently tugged my coat from my shoulders and took my hat, passing me an indulgent smile. “Howard’s doing quite well in Cincinnati.”

She hadn’t introduced herself, but I knew enough from Charles brief mentions that it was obviously Raven.

Raven rolled her eyes. “Anyway, it’s just us corpses and Charles. Poor Charles is never going to find another telepath at this rate. I mean, there’s Emma, but putting them in the same room is like cats and dogs. Or watching two murderers who are far too dignified to stab each other trying to kill each other with insults instead. But your thing is sort of brainy isn’t it. Well, you’re not a corpse anyway.”

I paused. “Corpse?”

Raven turned to the table of others, whom I also presumed to be mutants considering Raven’s state of exposure and the other girl at the table with flittering, iridescent dragonfly wings, and a ripple of laughter coursed through them. A human looking young man with brown hair and glasses blushed.

Charles shook his head. “Hank and I were trying to delineate the types of mutations a few months ago. We decided to call mutations, like yours and mine, where the brain’s chemistry sways different wavelengths of energy mutations of the anima.”

Raven made a clawing gesture with her hands and made very, very convincing feline growl. “Animals.”

“And those physical mutations that affect the body mutations of the corpus,” Charles finished.

Raven slit her throat with her thumb. “Corpses.”

“It isn’t really that funny.”

“Who uses Latin anymore?” Raven said, like it was a great pain to even consider.

“A great many people including—“

Raven stuck out her tongue. “Killjoy. Anyway, we’re playing Ouija, contacting the spirits of other corpses. Wanna join?”

I didn’t really know what to say. The other mutants I worked with didn’t play games. Suddenly a gathering like this with Emma and Azazel and Janos playing Ouija or Backgammon in their bathrobes popped in my head. I nearly laughed. Part of me wanted to sit around them and see their mutations in action, but that seemed rather daunting. Especially if they were all like Raven.

I cleared my throat. “I think chess is more my speed.”

Raven looked at me like I’d personally let her down and cast her eyes to the ceiling. “Great. I might as well scram. You’re never gonna shake him now.”

She beat a path back to the table, while Charles looked slightly predatory.

He grinned. “She’s right, you know. I’m always hunting for another chess partner.”

I looked over to the table nervously, where conversation had already struck up again and Charles and I were forgotten to the appeal of their drinks and hokum. I hooked a thumb in their direction.

“Should we? I’m not sure how to talk to ghosts.”

Charles rolled his eyes much like Raven had. I couldn’t say there was much a family resemblance, but their attitudes seemed similar, if not pushed in different directions.

“I’d much rather challenge you to a game. I’ll admit it’s not what I had in mind this evening, but I’m unlikely to let go of it now, if that’s alright with you.”

“That sounds perfect.”

Over the next few weeks, however, I did get to know Charles and Raven’s friends. The ones at the table seemed to be regulars in the Xavier siblings’ apartment: Armando Munoz, a poet whose mutation was the ability to adapt to survive any harmful stimuli, earning him the nickname of Darwin; a bohemian songstress with wings who called herself Angel; Hank McCoy, a scientist of Charles’ acquaintance whose preternatural speed and strength he desperately tried to hide; and Sean, a young Irish trumpet player who often played with either Angel or Charles, and who could shatter panes of glass with his voice when he wasn’t playing. There were others, mostly human, who weren’t as regular as the others. There was a human woman named Moira who visited Charles, and never went off with Raven and her friends, with annoying regularity.

Charles was particularly invested in provoking all these young mutants into playing with their abilities, trying new things.

He informed Sean that with the proper wing-like attachment he could use the power of his voice to push against the ground and, in effect, fly. And he theorized that Darwin might me able to do things as extreme as grow another limb, should one be cut off from him.

And Charles became dogged about his insistence that the real key to exerting my ability was in executing its fine details.

“What’s the trick to throwing cars and steel beams about?” Charles said one late evening, or rather, one very early morning, with a flask in his hand.

I’d gone to see him after putting the fear of God into one of Beatty’s old lieutenants who wasn’t adjusting to Shaw’s regime, keeping a prostitute on the side as his mistress. Together they were kicking back about half of what they were earning. My orders had been to beat up the skirt and break the hood’s leg, but I couldn’t bring myself to beat up a woman. After I left the man’s face looking like a pound of hamburger, I only warned her against the dangers of cheating Shaw.

I’d gone to find Charles, knowing he could charm away my tension. There was some kind of party happening at Charles’ apartment, as usual, but this seemed to involve the whole floor of his apartment, as most of the hallways were filled with flappers and hipsters drinking and walking through people’s apartment doors. Without explaining a word, Charles herded me out to the small balcony attached to his bedroom, handed me a glass of brown, toasted me, “Tchin tchin.”

I frowned. “It took me some time to be able to move a steel girder.”

“But now you can. You can feel all the buildings going up. You’ve told me. And you can rip guns from people and bring down structures. But can you,” Charles paused to thrust his flask, a short wide stainless steel thing with geometric, rectangular etchings on the front, “Can you flatten out the incising on my flask and remake it? Without ruining the whole thing, mind.”

I took it from him tentatively, feeling the weight of the liquor inside slosh from side to side. The etchings were fine and appeared to come off as one line intersecting up and down to create the image of a series of towering buildings. The idea of recreating the design was dizzying for the design alone, not even taking into account making an indent in the metal that fine and intricate. My work was typically blunt work.

I held my hand out to feel the pull of the flask, but instead the larger things called to me. The steel bars holding up the balcony, the copper and lead pipes running through the buildings into a vast network below the streets, and the steel bones of the buildings themselves. The delicate thinness of the flask in my hand felt like it would melt against the weight of the other metals.

“I can’t do it,” I said, handing it back to Charles.

But he didn’t take it. “You didn’t even try.”

“There’s too much,” I motioned out to the City, knowing Charles would understand. “Interference.”

Charles didn’t look impressed. “There are a few hundred thousand people in this borough alone, yet I can still pick your head or Raven’s or Mrs. Lorello’s down the street out of all the others. Real skill comes in being a scalpel, not a claymore.”

I might have felt denigrated if it weren’t for the earnest, encouraging look to Charles’ face, like there was nothing he’d rather be doing than pushing me to using my ability.

I redoubled my concentration on the flask, this time ignoring the big steel and lead like one might ignore a room full of conversation in order to speak to one person. The flask was made of steel and aluminum and chromium pounded thin and stretched with heat and chemicals. I could feel its hollow inside and the fine lines engraved into it, the tiny lines of pressure where space was made. Yet the whole thing was so soft, too much effort and it would compress or blow apart. I could feel it all and wondered if I tugged, just slightly, as though I were simply pulling a thread, if the engraving would come clean.

I opened my eyes to the sound of Charles chuckling. He clapped a hand on my shoulder, sliding his palm there a few times before falling back.

“Good work, my friend.”

The front of the flask was smooth, not machine polished like it had been, but free of the lines etched into it. It was imperfect and warped slightly around where the engraving edges had been. Still, it wasn’t a crumpled ball and that was more than what I was expecting.

I couldn’t help myself from laughing, feeling unusually proud of myself for wielding something that had no heft to it.

Charles was smiling at me fondly, his hand coming up again to stroke my arm. He seemed to notice that and pulled it back. After a moment, he said, “Now all you have to do is put it back the way it was.”

We both laughed and made jokes about the resulting mess would resemble and drifted into other conversation.

Before I left, Charles tucked the flask into the inside pocket of my jacket. “I’m serious about finishing this project. I expect to find this again with some new inscription on it.”

I shook my head at him. “One of these days I’m going to set you to a task, or while you’re busy teaching all of us, your talents are going to go to waste. You need to exercise your ability just as much, Charles.”

For a very brief moment, a grim look flashed over his face. I almost doubted I had seen it, but it had been there, crestfallen and gloomy. But Charles’ usual smile returned swiftly like the doubt had never been there.

“Perhaps you’re right.”

But his voice and eyes were empty.

I wanted to ask him what was wrong. I wanted to bring back the familiar brightness in his eyes, but he was my friend and only my friend. There was an invisible bubble of distance between us I was constantly coming up against. It would have been too much to push. Anyway, there were other people still milling to and from his apartment.

Like Emma had said earlier that summer, Charles was one of those people who knew everyone and whom everybody knew. I supposed that was due to some amount of position. He didn’t talk about his family, but was easy to identify as coming from wealth. A few people could be overheard talking about the Xavier estate and wondering if they were those Xaviers. Charles knew all the little hidden things that rich people identified each other by and I had learned with confusion from Emma—what silverware was appropriate, what was done on vacations, what names were important. It was effortless to him, like his telepathy. But those were all things I knew from observation. If he, unlike the rest of Emma’s set and the upwardly mobile party-goers he frequented with, was not going to snidely inquire about my youth, I was going to afford him the same courtesy.

There were always people in Charles and Raven’s apartment, even on the nights they claimed they weren’t throwing a party. There was a seemingly endless rotation of faces that smoked in between alternating sips of hooch and tea, groped in the kitchen, and danced maniacally, scuffing up the ten foot of dance floor in the parlor.

“Don’t you have downstairs neighbors,” I scowled over a particularly ruthless move Charles made on the board one evening.

There were perhaps forty people milling through the increasingly tiny apartment. Charles and I were wedged in a corner opposite the drinks cabinet, so at least people weren’t elbowing us every time they refilled a glass.

Charles grinned serenely and pointed to a three flappers and a college-bound looking goof, surely belonging to one of them. “They’re over there.”

“Of course.”

It had been a few months now of knowing Charles, but having him as a routine in my life had only felt like days. Coming to his apartment after a shift at one of Shaw’s clubs, or on days I wasn’t needed to be the muscle in Shaw’s meetings— an increasingly frequent occurrence— had swiftly become normal. To the point where Charles and Raven’s group of regulars greeted me by name, inquired after my opinions on mutant awareness and the idea of asking for mutant representation in politics, and asked if I needed any reefer or dope.

Mutant awareness was a keen topic of discussion under the Xavier roof. In a way it reminded me of household discussions about Socialism with my mother and father and Aunt Judith. Darwin and Charles usually sided together, both advocating for caution in any theoretical situation where mutants would publicly play a role in society. I found allies amongst Raven and Angel, typically, when I proposed the idea of mutant sovereignty and self-governance. That was where Charles and I fundamentally disagreed. He saw cooperation and cohabitation with humans not only as beneficial, but essential.

“It isn’t even feasible, Erik. There are too few of us,” Charles would say.

“You don’t even know how many of us there are. You said yourself there could be hundreds of thousands of us. Everyone knows about us, more or less. We’re just an unspoken, barely tolerated truth, like queers. If we made ourselves known, we’d have strength in those numbers.”

Charles looked closed off, like there was something he wanted to say. He shook his head. “You’re assuming that all mutants would agree to the same thing. To leave their homes and families in order to start this separatist state you speak of. It’s not so simple.”

“It would be if they could see that the only true family a mutant has is with other mutants.”

Charles’ replies to that were never satisfying. He would never out right deny or confirm my idea. He’d look only vaguely concerned, but pat my arm or shoulder and change the subject.

We had conversations about the like, arguing over everything from Ezra Pound to the Pullman Porter strike, as summer shifted into fall. Though that changed little about the madhouse that was the apartment of the Xavier siblings.

I hated the din. I hated the constant chatter, particularly when it was directed at me. But there were colored people, mutants, women in hotsie totsie outfits, men wearing revue-style suits in garish colors, and bohemians. Of course, there were the humans there, who seemed to be meandering gatecrashers or more likely people looking for another free source of booze, as there seemed to be no gate to crash at the Xavier house. It was more like a temporary salon for those in need of alcohol. In short, seeing mutants being able to freely be themselves was a thing that actually tended to please me, despite the presence of humans. So the masses were something I could adjust to with as much grace as I could muster.

And it lessened the hardship, when a great deal of this time was spent talking with Charles about mutants, politics, art, and anything else we fancied.

However having humans who had always been exposed to the rumors of mutants, and humans who even knew some personally, was different than being around big crowds of humans.

Raven sauntered over through the partygoers and crashed into Charles’ laugh with a huff.

“Like little boring old men that sit in the park. I swear, Lehnsherr you’ve entirely domesticated our Charles. It’s sad, really,” Raven said, strategically sticking feathers into her headband.

She was in her preferred human guise—a pinked-skinned blonde figure, athletic, but a little more voluptuous than was strictly vogue. But she looked like any rich human girl you might find at a party or on a tennis court.

“You know, if I had my say, you’d be yourself at all times,” I said in lieu of greeting.

Her face fell a little, but she shrugged. “There are too many humans.”

Charles patted her hip. “I promise we’ll have one of our mutants-only soirees soon.” Casting a pointed look at me, he added, “And it’s not as though you’re not being yourself. You simply look different.”

“Yes, but she shouldn’t have to look different for anyone’s benefit.”

“I would rather think that this is for Raven’s benefit. People might react badly.”

“So you admit that humans can’t be trusted in the face of—“

“I didn’t say that. And honestly, I wish you would stop defining us as different groups so much. It’s more—“

Raven let out a loud, aggravated sigh and collapsed dramatically against Charles, leaning her head on his neck and shoulder. Charles laughed.

“Alright, alright, we’ll stop.”

Raven tugged at the collar of Charles’ sweater, but looked at me. “Anyone would mistake you for old married couple, honestly. Well, maybe if we could get one of you in a dress. Charles, what color do you think Erik would look good in? Maybe green. He has got that nice auburn hair.”

“Raven,” Charles said with a mildly disgruntled sigh. “Can I help you with anything?”

She smiled at me wolfishly. “Everything’s Jake. And you two newlyweds can do what you like. A bunch of us are headed downtown. I don’t suppose you want to go out and see some actual nightlife.”

For a moment I thought Charles was going to ask me along. Part of why I continually came to Charles’ was so I didn’t have to go to Shaw’s clubs, or be seen by Shaw’s competitors. So I could have a life that resembled something other than my own. But Charles shook his head.

“I think we’re fine where we are. Aren’t we, Erik?”

I had to quell an impulse to say no. Things weren’t fine—the world over or, really, between Charles and I. I wanted to say that nothing was really fine when we had to hide all the damn time. But I couldn’t say that. All I could do was nod, take a drink, and keep my thoughts to myself.

Though not all of our gatherings were so perfectly sedate and serene.

The one occasion I did try cocaine—which everyone found odd that I hadn’t considering an aspect of my job entailed procuring dealers and money from dealers—was late August on a humid, disquieting night of boredom in the City. Shaw had made himself scarce for a few days after taking a cop names Smith upstate. I hadn’t been told the details, but considering Shaw did it himself, it was probably a big deal. Emma had been left managing The Caspartina. She brought in her own help and basically told me to go blow. It had left me feeling anxious and wired for a few days.

The experiment with the cocaine didn’t end well. I never remembered much of it, but I did remember being very adamant that Raven and Angel’s idea of going to a burlesque house was brilliant. I remembered feeling like I was going very fast. I remembered being on a rooftop at some point with Sean, watching his shouts send flocks of pigeons flying in the distance.

And I remembered coming back to Charles’ apartment to see Charles a shock of bare skin bent over in front of Armando. There was so much skin, and wet, heavy breaths. I can’t recall how long it took to register they were fucking, but it couldn’t have been more than a second. One simple image branded in my mind. Charles’ head snapped up and the whites of his eyes burned in the darkness.

It felt like a sudden drop into a frozen lake, unsure of how I walked or if I could walk. I spent the better part of my taxi ride home feeling like I was going to have a heart attack, until I ground the brakes to the wheel with my ability, struggled out against the driver’s voice and walked home. I felt like I was being chased by the ghosted image whenever I closed my eyes. I woke up the next morning feeling sick and weak, and rather having the memory erased from me, with the image of Darwin fucking Charles seared into my brain.

Of course, Charles sought me out.

He knocked quietly in the late morning, nearly noon. The heat in my apartment was already sweltering, and I hadn’t even opened the curtains. I let Charles in, wordlessly, not even bothering to take his coat, and he sat down on the sofa where my grandmother used to sit. The sitting room was so bare and unused since she died. The davenport was nearly dusty.

He opened his mouth to speak, made a small sound, but didn’t actually commit to any words, ensconcing us in the pursuing silence. I could dimly hear the removed din of people and motorcars beyond the windows, but Charles and I were miles away from anyone or anything. It felt like the walls of my apartment were closing in. I had to feel for the pipes in the walls to remind myself where the boundaries of my room where. I had to remind myself that Charles was really there, and what I’d seen was not some hallucination.

Finally, Charles seemed to get enough air in his chest to speak.

“I’m sorry. I mean, I should apologize be—“

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, holding back a disgusting taste in my throat.

“No, I never meant for you to see that. I certainly never wanted to run you off. I—“

“It was the dope. You can fuck who you like.”

Charles cringed. “I just thought you should know that, well, I was embarrassed. I didn’t plan for you to see that. It’s just casual between Armando and I, anyway.”

“Of course it’s meaningless. When has fucking ever been anything but?”

Even to my own ears, my voice was raw and emotional. There was a torrent of things in my chest, words I wanted to say, but couldn’t do it. Part of it was that I didn’t want to beg for something Charles wouldn’t give me. Another part of me was unsure it was even Charles that inspired it. Perhaps Charles was just the first person with whom I saw even the potential for bonding, to share a bit of what my parents had. So from my very first thoughts I wanted it to happen, assumed it would.

That certainly didn’t mean Charles wanted the same thing. Obviously he didn’t. He was content to fuck Darwin, even though they were friends. There was nothing for me to be jealous of because there was nothing for me to have.

I was so desperate to keep him out of my head at that moment, virtually screaming it as though Frost were trying to dig into me. I could see Charles squirm from it. It was the first time I realized that perhaps Charles might not know exactly what I, or even he wanted.

“I just wanted to apologize,” Charles said, quietly, looking down as nervous and uncomfortably as I’d ever seen him look. He was even biting the inside of his cheek.

I nodded but didn’t speak, not trusting my voice to sound resolute or impervious to his affections, or lack of affections.

He cleared his throat after another wretched silence. “I also wanted to tell you… I should’ve told you days ago. I have to leave for England.”

My first thought was that he meant permanently. In an instant I imagined those past three months being wiped clean from me. Everything I’d known about Charles and come to love wouldn’t matter. He would be nothing but a brief interlude, a dismissed infatuation. The thought sunk into me like a dead weight. I was already beginning to ache from his absence. I was already beginning to think of how I could compensate for the loss, of how I could convince him to stay.

Yet, part of me at least, wanted him to leave. Part of me wanted him pulled out of my life, leaving a brief, inexplicable phenomena in his place. A little notched gap in my skin, like a poorly healed over bullet wound. As long as he was still there, that wound would always be pulled open and flow over and over again, a painful reminder that I was still alive.

Charles continued on, unaware of the spasmodic beating of my heart. “I don’t know when I’ll be back. I hope it’s only a few weeks, but I don’t…”

I looked up at Charles. Somehow it had escaped me so far. He looked tired and young, with red-rimmed eyes and a sleep-worn dishevelment to his beard and hair and undone collar. There was no manner of expressive grin hiding behind his lips. There was worry in his eyes. And it struck me for the first time that, for all I’d thought I knew of him, I had no real conception of this creature.

In spite of that, I still wanted him. No, it made me want him more to know he was not an inanimate, coy acme of my imagining, but a complex being still outside my reckoning.

“Is something wrong?” I said tentatively.

He pressed his lips together in a wan smile and shook his head. The sad, agitated look in his eyes did not leave. “I’ve got to help my mother… She’s got herself into a difficult situation with a man looking for her money… Always a trouble for widows, of her sort.”

Against a strong desire not to, I said, “Do you need help?”

For some reason, that only made Charles look worse. He covered his face with his hand, but before he could I saw tears start to trail from his eyes. Of course, he cried beautifully. Even with the facial hair, just on the border of unkempt, he was a beautiful man. That alone stung. He shook his head vehemently and spoke with a wet nasal wheeze.

“Oh no, I couldn’t. I couldn’t possibly accept your help. I don’t deserve…” He paused for a second and in a hurried whisper muttered, “I’m so sorry” like he never intended for it to be heard.

His name spilled from my lips without any thought. I wanted so badly to do something. No one else forced such compassion or want from me. But as his shoulders came down, burdened with the weight of something he would not show me, I wanted to take him against me and sweep away his trouble with my hands.

I wanted to, but I held back, letting my hand hover above his shoulder for a moment before grabbing my own knee to keep from reaching out again.

“I fear I should not have come,” Charles muttered, but then quickly wiped his face with the back of his hand and shook his head. “It’s nothing. It’s nothing I haven’t had to do for my mother before. I only wanted to—I don’t know how long I’ll be gone. May I write to you while I’m away?”

I nodded cautiously.

Before this neither Xavier sibling had mentioned much about their family. I knew Raven was adopted, some kind of childhood friend of Charles’. I knew that any passing mention of Charles’ mother was in reference to her traveling abroad more or less permanently, and that she was prone to drink. The topic of Charles’ mother prior to this had made him neither unduly nostalgic nor sorrowful. Just terse and silent. So I suspected Charles’ burst of emotion over this had another hidden meaning behind it. Perhaps tied to the other pockets of information about Charles Xavier I did not possess.

“Good,” Charles said, forcibly pulling up a mask of brightness. “It’s possible I’ll be traveling. It will be difficult to get a hold of me if you want to respond, so I’ll give you the address to my family estate. They’ll forward the letters to me. It will save you on postage, too.”

I suddenly wondered how much of his famed affability was genuine. It pierced my own chest to be suspicious of Charles, but there was so much to be answered for. The longer I knew him, the further away answers had become.

“There’s something you’re not telling me.”

I couldn’t keep it in any longer, but it wasn’t as though that was a shock to either of us. Charles didn’t look offended or startled, but more of the same—anxious and melancholy. He had probably even known that I knew there was something missing, something jarring. Nor did I expect him to break down in confession what he was keeping from me. I only knew I had to say it.

Charles looked away and stood up. “I should go.”

I made no effort to stop him. But he paused before he reached the door. Charles spoke hesitantly.

“You mean a great deal to me, Erik. I’ve never been as close to anyone as I’ve been to you. There is very much I wish I could tell you, but I can’t. There are… It’s difficult.”

An unexpected, or perhaps not unexpected, but only dormant, torrent of anger burned low in my throat. “You’re speaking to a murderer, Charles. You know everything about me. Damn your difficulties.”

Charles turned in slightly, eyes bright and full of unshed tears, and cleared his throat. “Please, stop in on Raven occasionally, or she’ll try to come find you.”

I couldn’t tell if Charles left before I could respond, or he left because I didn’t respond. Time and sound became one static thing, seeming to drift beyond me. And I don’t remember moving until Azazel came to fetch me for work.

“My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends
It gives a lovely light!”

A Selection of Letters

September 23rd, 1928

Dear E—,

I hate the way we parted. It has been nearly a month since I left. I’ve already been gone longer than I hoped. I think I have started a dozen letters to you in that time and thrown them all in the bin. Part of me wanted to let it go and pretend I haven’t been so horrible, but I woke up this morning with a fire inside me. I felt like I had opened my eyes for the first time. Setting things right with you seemed the only important thing in the world.

The bother is I don’t know how to mend myself, or how to fix what we have.

Raven often tells me how I’m the dimmest smart person she knows. I laugh it off, but I suspect she’s right on the money. I suffer from a peculiar kind of myopia. Rather than the standard old saying, I regularly fail to see the trees for the forest. While becoming absolutely convinced I needed you in my life, I failed to tell you that. I failed to tell you your opinions and your friendship have meant the world to me.

With that particular way I see the world, it is sometimes difficult for me to be resolute and keep myself apart from a body’s privacy the way I should. I learned from a young age to respect that but I often fail. In the back and forth of firming that resolve, I am prone to forgetting I know things other people don’t.

In regards to my relationship with you, I forget that you don’t know how special you are. I should have told you how much you mean to me, of my fondness for you. Yet even that means nothing if I don’t confess certain things to you.

Before I left, you said I was not being honest with you about everything. That is, of course, entirely correct. There are certain secrets I hold that aren’t properly mine to tell. Moreover, it has always been difficult for me to be open with people. I think honesty comes naturally to you. I think that is why it hurts you so to hide certain things about yourself. That is what makes you beautiful, such a spectacular, startling example of humanity. That is what makes your mind so engrossing and engaging.

If this is my offering of peace, my attempt to apologize to you, imperfect though it is as I cannot see you or leave this place to be with you, I want to tell you a story. There are other stories I would rather tell you, but would only hazard to do so in person.

When I was a boy, I was both spoiled and ignored, as it sometimes goes with the children of wealthy parents. Most of my supervision was provided by my nanny, or what staff was unfortunate enough to have attracted my attention that day. Sometimes I clamored so for attention I would throw things or have a screaming tantrum, and my nanny would shut me away in my room for most of the day. On my sixth birthday, my mother organized a party. My father’s colleagues, people of note, and their children were there. I was to be a good child and perform my little floundering version of ‘The Glow-Worm’ on the piano for my mother’s guests. But I happened to be dead set against it. I had been wanting give my mother a recital for weeks leading up to the party, but she hadn’t the time.

When my mother trotted me out in font of her company, and I stamped my little foot in refusal, she politely took me out of the room for a scolding. It was the only time my mother ever struck me. Normally that was a task left for my father. She slapped me hard across the face and said: “You must never forget that you have to earn people’s attention. You will always have to sing for your supper in one way for another.”

I have never forgotten that lesson.

I don’t think this is an excuse for treating you badly, but it might help explain. There is so much I want to share with you, but I fear losing you dearly. Given the choice to have you as a friend or to bungle things up with intimacy, I chose the best way I knew to keep you, if at a distance.

I wish I could say this to your face, but I’m not strong like that. It is easier, sometimes, to admit things on paper.

I hope you can forgive me. And I hope you know that I will always be a friend to you, whenever you need me, even if you can’t find it in yourself to look at me.

Love,
CX

October 5th, 1928

My Dear C—,

Reading your letter gave me heart. I did visit Raven like you asked. We were both worried about you, because as of the writing of this letter she had received only one missive and only one phone conversation from you. Five weeks is a long time to be overseas without knowledge of your well being.

I cannot pretend that knowing your affection is returned makes me feel anything other than alive. But neither can I pretend that I loathe this use of initials and coded speech. Of course it isn’t you that angers me, but the world that establishes this mode of behavior. You know of it. You’ve condemned it with me. For so long I thought that I had only the passion of hate inside me, but you have shown me I can also have the passion of love.

How do I exist with both in this world? How can I keep this love and hate at the same time without burning up from the both of them?

Sometimes I wish there were only you and me in the world.

As for your concern over bungling things up with intimacy, it always struck me as the wiser notion, though it taunts me. Abandoning you for any reason is not something I can fathom. So in all reality, intimacy doesn’t matter, I suppose. I would love you with or without it. And this is isn’t a world that is kind to the intimacy of the sort you and I have in us.

I’d have you as you are, no matter what. I would only ask of you to tell me the truth. If we can only share intimacy between our minds that is what I’ll have without regret. We’ll love each other like the ancients did in your stories, purely and without the degradation of touch.

Only do it. If you wish to be honest with me, be honest with me. There’s nothing you can give me freely I will reject.

Yours,
E—

November 20th, 1928

My Darling E—,

I received your last letter later than I should have, I expect. I’m glad to hear that Raven is staying out of trouble.

I think a sort of newsletter is a fantastic idea. Of course we will fight about distribution, but I would love to contribute what little work I did on genetic research to the effort. I can deliver you a list of contacts who will be helpful enough to send their studies as well. In the mean time, Hank will be of service in that regard. I think that’s a marvelous idea to help reach people and give them idea of the science behind this new stage of human evolution.

I have only ever put a little thought into it, but there was always an inkling in my mind to start a school for people like us to receive special training. We have all shared stories of our youths before, and I think you would agree that the idea of a school for young, gifted people is categorically useful.

I can’t write for long today. I must be going in just a few minutes. I simply needed to get this letter in the post before the week’s end because I think an awareness newsletter is fabulous. I’m certain you will do it more than admirably and I’m willing to help in anyway necessary, both financially and with content.

With love,
CX

December 9th, 1928

My Dearest C—,

Your absence is becoming interminable. You’ve been gone for over two months now. How much money has your mother lost? You’ve said almost nothing of what’s happening there. Are you still in England? Are you with family? Do you need help? Raven is starting to worry. Rather she’s starting to worry in a way that now she admits she is worried. I think your vast crew of friends have even begun to notice you’re gone.

Your friend Moira found me the other day. She cornered me outside the club, desperate to get inside your apartment for some cigarette case she left there. I was going to make her wait, but she made such a big to-do about it that I relented. It’s a good thing I did. Later there was some trouble. I can’t go into the details here, but they covered it in a few of the papers. It’s getting to look like the hammer is coming down. I might be doing my work for the “awareness newsletter” from a cell if I’m not careful.

Please write soon if you need help. Better still, give me a ring. I long to hear your voice. I’m at the apartment most days, if only to make sure Raven doesn’t let the place get ransacked when she dashes out to some nightclub at the last minute. But you know I can’t be there all the time. So for Raven’s sake, you should return as soon as you can. There are others here who would appreciate your attentions more.

It would be nice to play another game of chess with you before the year is out.

Yours faithfully,
E—

“Never saw the sun shining so bright. Never saw things going so right. Noticing the days hurrying by, when you’re in love, my how they fly.”

The New Year,1929

Charles returned on December 27th, 1928. He looked rather tired and pale, enveloped in gray woolen coat that was too large for him. His beard was fuller than ever, untrimmed and coppery. He was a fur hat away from looking the full Marxist. But he had his portable chess set tucked under his arm, still cold snowflakes dusted across his hair and shoulders, and a bright blue-sky shine to his eyes.

“It’s a few days before the new year. I hope that means we have time for a game.”

That was one of the happiest moments of my life, forever stitched in the fabric of my mind. Warmth flooded my body. I embraced him like one might a long lost friend. In my more panicked minutes of his absence, I was beginning to suspect he would never come back, that he’d simply run away from me and found some lover in Europe who gave him what I couldn’t. It was startling to think that I had only met Charles a half a year before, for all the space he’d taken up in my life. It was just as startling then to imagine my life before and without him.

Despite the nagging feeling of wanting to have a true romance with him, and the hurt that had entered my heart before he left, I was overjoyed to see him.

It was nearly midnight when Charles arrived. He said he’d “kept an ear out” for me as he took a taxi over, to see if I was working at The Caspartina, or over at Shaw’s office. Once again, I wondered how he knew where Shaw’s office was, but it could have been as simple as getting a paycheck for one of his gigs, or reading the man’s mind. We played a long, leisurely game well into the night. I caught him up on what was going on with my proposed idea for a newspaper for mutants, an idea taken straight from the Yiddish papers of my youth. I told him of the times I spent with Raven and Angel, of talking to Sean and Hank about their abilities, of how I convinced Alex to come to our get-togethers to know other mutants who weren’t only criminals.

When I asked what had happened with Charles’ mother, he waved it off. “He took the money I gave him and she went off to Paris again. I’d rather not talk about it.”

I couldn’t fathom how or why that had taken months to work out, but I didn’t press. Not prying was a cornerstone of our relationship, and there had been a bit of anger to Charles’ voice when he said it, offended at the very words coming out of his mouth. Part of the reason was selfish as well. I did want him to be more honest, like he’d said in his letters, but I was far too pleased he was back to risk the chance that he’d leave.

We fell asleep for a few hours on the couch, with our shoulders resting together. Charles woke me up, closer to noon than morning, demanding to make us breakfast.

After a shower and a shave, for me, Charles scooped some slightly rubbery eggs onto my plate. They weren’t terrible or terribly good, but I was still delighted. The last time anyone had cooked for me was before my Bubbe died.

“I think I’ve finally mastered these,” he said happily, almost to himself, when he turned off the cooker.

Charles and Raven could barely take care of themselves in some ways. Neither of them could launder or iron, so all their clothes were sent out for cleaning. They had a woman come in to clean. But Charles had a particular fondness for trying to cook. He was perpetually surprised by his own ability to not burn simple dishes.

“One day you’ll be a grown up,” I said cheekily.

He wrinkled his nose in distaste and gave me some toast and cup of coffee.

Out of nowhere Charles cleared his throat and said, “Anyway, I wanted to take you to the Webster for New Year’s Eve. Have you been to Webster Hall?”

I paused. Many people knew about Webster Hall, and I was sure I knew what Charles was hinting at. He’d heard of the drag balls, even seen the flyers at certain establishments for their revels, the massive parties where all the City’s faggots and fairies pranced around nude and took opium and fucked in the hallways. Obviously, everything I’d heard was gossip. I didn’t believe for a minute there was a cornucopia of Roman-style debauchery happening every weekend on 11th Street. But the types of queers that might be there had always made me nervous. Married old men, venerable City aristocrats, who looked like walruses fondling effete, pretty little boys in order to escape their wives for a few hours.

Charles had a style that was definitely romantic, and in clothing alternating between collegiate sweaters and more commonplace ware, but his mannerisms were only slightly fey. I had chalked that up to his upbringing in England. He wasn’t a very obvious queer.

“I hadn’t thought you’d go to things like that.”

A cheeky grin passed over Charles’ face as he looked up from his cup of orange juice. The blue of his glass glinted like his eyes. “When have you known me to turn down a party?”

“No, not that. The… the dressing up like women nonsense.”

Charles snorted. “You don’t have to go in drag. It isn’t a big thing anyway. Charlie Chaplin does it and makes a thousand dollars a picture. I don’t see why we can’t.”

“Wait—Chaplin is a queer?”

Charles laughed. It was such pleasant sound I forgot for a moment we were about to disagree about something. “No. Well, not that I—How could I possibly know? I just meant it’s just a bit of fun. It’s a masquerade.”

“It’s not to behave like women? It’s not just Ethels?”

“While it doesn’t surprise me at all that you’ve never been to a drag ball, I can’t believe you don’t even—Never mind. Wearing a frock isn’t mandatory. It’s the New Year’s Eve ball. Yes, it is supposed to be fanciful, but you can wear whatever you’d like.” He added over his glass, quietly, as though he was hoping I wouldn’t hear him properly, “But I think the opportunity to meet other sympathetic people will be nice for you. I just don’t want to imagine you skulking about some dreadful bath that’s knee-deep in diseases when there’s so much more out there.”

“I don’t skulk anywhere,” I said, recoiling from the coffee. He and Raven both made their coffee particularly strong. Sometimes I wondered how they didn’t kill themselves.

He continued, “This is a new age in the world. Modernization and education will bring so much understanding. Soon, queers won’t have to hide in seedy city corners. Neither will mutants. We’ll all be able to approach each other as equals.”

I snorted. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

Charles frowned indulgently in that way that clearly implied he thought he was right and I was being ridiculous. I was somewhat relieved to know that despite Charles’ months of being gone, some things didn’t change.

“Will you think about it, though?”

Charles’ parties and friends were one thing, where I could largely ignore people if he wanted, because Charles kept people from knowing exactly what I did for a living. But what Charles wanted was for me to find a trick. Well, not a trick, but a boy to keep around. A man to meet with on certain evenings away from the places we both lived.

A man to distract me from him, so we could have these long nights of chess and conversation together in relative peace.

“We’ll just have to get you some nice glad rags,” Charles said, barreling through my silence.

“I have a nice suit.”

Charles made of his scrunched up, rabbitty faces.

“I have a suit.”

“I’m sure it’s perfectly serviceable for most things. But this is a little ritzy.”

“I thought I could wear whatever I want.”

“You can. There are all kinds of costume you can wear. As long as it’s high hat.”

“Charles.”

“It’s a ball! It’s New Year’s Eve! I promise it will be the absolute limit. You’ll have a fantastic time. I shall take you to get fitted for a tux, even. And you can wear a mask. No one will have ever seen you unless you want it.”

I shook my head, knowing this would only end badly, but unable to turn Charles down. And Charles could tell. He was positively beaming.

“You won’t regret it.”

“I’m certain I will.”

After a moment of silence, I couldn’t suppress my curiosity any longer.

“Will you be wearing one of Raven’s frocks, then?”

Charles laughed. “No, I was going to spiff up, obviously, but I didn’t plan on going the full drag. Besides, I don’t think Raven’s quite forgiven me from the last time I wore one her gowns.”

I gaped at him. It was hard to visualize. I kept imagining him in one of Raven’s glittering spinners and couldn’t get past the beard.

“Charles!”

“What? We’re about the same size.”

“That’s not what I have a hard time believing.”

“I assure you I looked ravishing. Though, it was black and might have made me look a little too pale.”

“Of course, you’re so fair,” I spat, which only caused Charles to laugh.

“So you’ll come?”

I took up my cigarette from the ashtray and mocked his jaunty tone from earlier. “When have I ever been able to resist a party?”

In the days before the ball, I was inexplicably nervous. It made me feel like a fretting girl from a storybook, which was not a way I had ever longed to feel. I thought about reneging several times, but I dutifully went to Charles’ tailor and got fitted anyway. I obviously didn’t tell Shaw my plans, but I did tell Emma that I would be out of town.

Emma eyed me suspiciously when I stopped by the office of The Caspartina. I could feel her psychic clutches encircling me. I took a cue from one of Charles’ suggestions and thought of something irrelevant and strange to put her off. I focused on the image of Raven and Angel doing the Charleston in front of the record player, Raven swinging around so wildly the heel of her shoe kicked the front door off its hinges.

Emma frowned with a mixture of disinterest and curiosity. “I wouldn’t have thought she was your style. Is this who you’re leaving us for?”

“I’m not leaving anywhere. I’m taking a personal absence. I’ve earned it.”

After a moment, she nodded. “You can keep your secrets. And Xavier can keep his.”

I tried to not let the words bother me, but they settled poorly in my stomach. I only reminded myself that Charles was allowed his secrets. He wasn’t perfect, like I would often falsely remember him to be. But Charles had only just returned.

I was determined to keep Emma’s cryptic words from spoiling things for me.

Early in the day on New Year’s Eve, I’d stopped at the little nameless tailor where I’d gotten fitted for a tux. However when I attempted to pay for my suit, the owner told me the bill had already been paid. Of course it was Charles, but the only note on the inside said Enjoy yourself attached with a pin to the black mask I was to wear with my tux. The mask was very basic, covering the eyes and nose, but for light sweep of dark, iridescent green on the left side of the mask that matched the color of my cummerbund and bowtie. The pointed edges at the temples and nose made it look rather sharp and forbidding. To add to the masquerade look, there was also a very dark, old-fashioned opera cape with the suit. The outer part was black, but inside shimmered dark green and blue when it moved, like iridescent beetle wings.

I stood outside the Hall for a moment, watching other people come in through a back alley, with a light snow spotting the black sky, and almost turned around. Charles had told me he would meet me at Webster Hall—because he had to go uptown to pick up Raven and Angel and he was so sorry, darling, he really was, but he’d be there precisely at ten, he promised— and so I agreed to wait there for him.

The ballroom felt massive, definitely larger than it was in reality.

There was a huge dance floor in front of a stage large enough for an orchestra. There was a full band in, including some who were joining in the revelry—cellists and trombone players who were clearly men dressed in the same flowing, frivolous style as flappers. There was a line of a dozen men as sequined chorus girls, draped in feather boas, moving around the room. The waiters and waitresses were all in drag, carrying large round trays above their heads covered in champagne glasses. There were sheiks and shebas and geishas with broad shoulders and Egyptian kings and French aristocrats and people made to look like birds and cats. It was patently and markedly weird, but also a relief. It felt welcoming.

There were men dancing with each other—not only a man in a tuxedo with what looked like a woman, but pairs in drag, and pairs in regular clothes, twirling around each other and holding hands. There were women slumped over each other, putting their lips together and breathing each other’s cigarettes. There were queers holding each and kissing in the middle of the dance floor. No one batted an eye. No one was hiding in the corners, or looking over their shoulders. No one looked nervous or hesitant.

It felt, a little, like my chest had been opened up with a crowbar. My heart was pounding loud enough for me to hear.

I had no idea what Charles would be wearing. There were perhaps upward of two hundred people there. Almost all of whom were dressed in drag or garish costume, full tilt, as though it were the last New Year’s Day the world would ever see.

Thankfully, though, I only had to wait about fifteen minutes past ten, while too many people laid their hands down my arms as they passed to and from the bar, before Charles’ politely inquiring mind pressed against mine.

I hope we’re not too late

I thought back at him, Just late enough

There was a feeling of happiness and excitement, and then Charles asking for and retrieving my location at the bar.

I saw Raven first. She was in her natural form, blue scales and red orange hair, and wearing a loose leopard spotted frock that was draped over her, with a miniature toy dagger strapped to her arm. Her friend Angel was wearing a white Grecian gown, with her real wings visible and fluttering opalescent behind her shoulder. Raven waved to me, took Angel’s hand and scampered off to a group of people standing around a pyramid of martini glasses.

That left Charles.

He was wearing something simple, as promised. A regular tuxedo, much like the one I was wearing, except his jacket and waistcoat were gray, rather than black, with soft gray spats. In his breast pocket was a blue silk handkerchief. He was wearing blue and gray wings, but, unlike Angel’s, his were fake and unmoving. And his feathery mask had a distinctly owlish look to it, with peaked, ruffled ears and a beak covering his nose. Even at a distance, I could see his eyes through the holes in the mask, bringing up the colors of his outfit.

The frame and look and overall feel were undoubtedly him, but I was struck agog because the reliable trim of almost gingery scruff was gone from his face. Even with the mask obscuring the top half of his face, I could see the delicate slope of his jaw line more clearly. Why he was always bearded made a great deal of sense now. He could easily be mistaken for a boy of seventeen or eighteen.

“You look…” I stopped my mouth so I didn’t say anything stupid, but it didn’t quite work. “… like an owl.”

Charles grinned and leaned next to me on the bar. “That was the theme, being a wise old owl.”

“That’s a little premature. On both counts.”

That made Charles throw his head back in laughter.

“Did you meet anyone interesting while you were waiting?”

I had forgotten that was his goal from this. Of course, I hadn’t told Charles that I had no interest in talking to any other men. It was dangerous for me. It was dangerous for them. Amongst the myriad ways I was peculiar to the world at large, I also didn’t really enjoy the company of other people very much. The exceptions were few and far between. Charles, being not only one of those exceptions but a mind reader besides, should’ve known that.

I shrugged, feeling the weight of the cape with the slight movement. Charles reached up and adjusted the clasp that rested at the top of my chest. “Not so much.”

Charles shook his head, but didn’t sound too upset. “You haven’t even spoken to anyone, have you?”

“What does one do at these things, anyway?” I said, hoping Charles would go along with me in ignoring the whole issue.

“Well, primarily, we drink.”

With a brassy quirk of his lips, Charles put his fingers to his temple, silently and rather dramatically indicating he was about to use his power. In moments a bartender dressed in a large black and white Gibson dress and a huge feathery hat like a turn of the century grand dame delivered us two slight glasses filled with green liquid.

Sensing my doubt, Charles said, “Absinthe.”

I knew what it was. I even knew that wasn’t like the tooth-rotting stuff our grandfathers would have drunk, or the embalming fluid most bootleggers concocted. I was simply unsure of what would happen. But when Charles picked up his glass, winked, and said, “Cheers, darling,” I followed suit, not to be outmanned. I drank it down like Charles, and felt it hit the bottom of my stomach with a palpable thud. It had a strong burn, stronger than bad whiskey, but probably not as bad as Raven’s bathtub gin. I quickly felt light on my feet, unsteady, and slightly giddy.

Charles took me around the room, introducing me to people who seemed to either leer at or ignore me. There were other mutants there, half-exposed in the party atmosphere. There were regular people in the know, but most of them probably would have been fooled into thinking specimens of beauty like Angel or Raven were just wearing particularly good costumes. I tried to engage in conversation, really, but Charles’ vast network of acquaintances were boring. I mostly wound up engaged in intimate tête-à-têtes with Charles.

Whenever I asked someone, “Well, don’t you think queers should be able to announce themselves into a room and have their own spouses, just like everyone else?” they only seemed to look green and back away.

It seemed this Hall that was bold enough to house men dancing with men while dressed in drag, which would hold up traffic anywhere else, was not bold enough to house my inquiries.

Then Charles would answer with something like, “Of course I do, but it’s not as though you can just force that kind of change on people. It needs to be done in increments, for everyone’s safety.”

“You don’t think humans should be subject to the same rules we are,” I would respond.

“Now that’s not it at all. I just don’t think it’s wise to expose ourselves, as it were, to people who don’t know anything about the differences that make us the way were are, especially when they might be violent about it.”

“Their behavior is their responsibility, not ours.”

“Yes, but the repercussions for their behavior will always be ours.”

“So mutants should just wait quietly for humans to accept us. And homosexuals should live as we do. At best with the one we want to be with, but secretly and in suspicion of everyone else, or alone, or, at worst, in a complete lie while pretending to be normal.”

Charles would frown and avoid me by saying something, “Well, I’m not a full homosexual anyway. I’m only a homosexual half the time. I don’t have the proper insight into how things should be done.”

And I would say, “You never make any sense, Charles,” with an inkling of suspicion that was how he wanted to leave every argument—half-finished and undone.

We wondered the ballroom like that, drifting from group to group after we had scared away each last one. We eventually made such a circle around the room that we collided with Raven and her group. I recognized Angel, of course, on her arm, weaving her fingertips over the bared scales on Raven’s shoulder. There were a few others whose faces made a light impression in my memory. And Armando. He was dressed as an ancient Roman in a toga, with a golden laurel on his head. Ovid, he said, and was about to do some sort of recitation much to the delight in Charles’ enraptured eyes, before I dragged Charles away.

“What? What’s wrong?”

My heart was pounding. My fingers curled tightly around Charles’ arm as I pulled him closer to me. Perhaps it was the booze and the absinthe, perhaps it was the heated swarm of people and the din, but I felt dizzy and Charles was the perfect size. His shoulders fit right under my arm and his face would settle into the side of my neck, I knew it would if he would only let me touch him.

I pulled him to me, petting my hands over his shoulders.

“I want… I want to dance.”

“What?”

“I want to dance with you.”

I pointed out the dressed and cross-dressed gaggle on the dance floor, avoiding the people drinking in the corners of the room and the divans of lounging dope smokers. There were plenty of them and it didn’t look too ridiculous.

Charles laughed. “Alright.”

The first two songs were pleasant enough. I got to move around and clear my head a little. The music was cheerful and brassy. Charles laughed when I took a misstep on the Charleston, but dancing was hardly my forte. Like most of the other dance floor practitioners we simply spun and flailed with a modicum of rhythm involved. Charles was better at the new dances than I was. I told him that if we were waltzing I would put him to shame. He laughed, resting his head on my shoulder for support.

Then the swinging tempo of the brass ceased. A lone low trumpet sounded and a gentle melody started.

The moment of awkward hesitation I suffered, and thought would suffer for eternity, was thankfully zotzed by Charles. I expected to be led off the dance floor, where we would resume drinking and arguing, but he held up his right hand for the taking.

After a moment’s silence, he pushed out a hip. “Well, hurry up. Or I’m going to lead.”

I put my hand around Charles’ and our bodies snapped up together like two magnets. It was seamless. We curved toward each other. My right hand slid over his hip, flaring out just barely past his waist. I could feel the potential of his body there, where his muscles would dip and curve if I move my hand southerly or easterly. His hand was a bit smaller in mine—the palm almost as wide, but with shorter, dexterous fingers. I had known that, of course, but feeling it was an entirely different event.

For his part, Charles’ shoulders fit just inside the space of mine, just under me. His hand roamed up the sharp arch of my shoulder blade, between my suit jacket and the cape, like a heater. A firm pressure without any prying. It felt more like he was leading me than the reverse.

I suppose the song started out with us close, but apart in a near brushing state. The abridgment of that space was inexorable. There was no dancing anymore. There was only the feel of Charles against my chest, his hair under my nose, and even the starchy press of his mask against my jaw. My hand curled around his waist. Some fleeting sensation of awareness bleated in the back of my mind, telling me I would have to stop. Telling me the end would come, as always. I wanted to destroy that part of me. In that moment, I wanted only that moment. To disappear into the abandon and Charles’ arms. Then the only space between them became measurable only by the distances seen my microscopes and the breath passing between them.

The slow music faded and changed into something else that kicked up a cheer. People started gyrating and lindy hopping in my periphery, but I couldn’t let go of Charles. Much more miraculously, Charles leaned away from me to look me in the eye.

Can we go back to your apartment? his voice whispered and curled inside my mind.

I couldn’t dare ask to know if he was sure.

Thanks to his gift for obscuring anyone’s mind, we traveled invisible and in each other’s arms to my apartment. The taxi driver saw us, with my arm around Charles’ shoulders and lifting up his mask to see his face clearly and pressing down the curled strands of hair next to his ears, as no more offensive than any man and woman sitting close together, or no one at all. It was wonderful. For the first time in my life I felt un-judged, but it was only because no one could see my face. Without the consolation of Charles nestled against my side, I might have blazed against the injustice.

I never remembered any excitement or preamble to our first lovemaking. If anything, I was nervous. I was afraid of living in a dream of my own making, and then waking up to a cold and empty bed. There was no rush and urgency in an effort to avoid being found out. There was no immediate need to leave the scene of the crime.

We huddled close in the low dark of my apartment. There was only the light from outside my windows and my Bubbe’s old crystal lamp in the living room. Yet I could see every smooth curve and facet of his face, every eyelash. With his beard finally scraped from his face it was embarrassing how youthful he looked. I knew him to be three years younger than me, but he looked like a far too precious age to be with someone like me. Somehow, inconceivable to how I’d always seen people, he looked far too young and ageless all in one fell swoop. As though the tender slope of his jaw, the impish curve of his mouth could have been found at every point in time and always as fresh as it was on his face at that moment.

The word ‘angelic’ resonated, with all its true intent, in me for the first time. I shuddered at the sight of him.

Charles unhooked and shed clothes from me in the bedroom, laying kisses on me as he went. It startled me and made my whole trunk clench in some strange fear, more than anticipation.

His skin glowed warm from the flittering spots of light. His eyes glowed always, always seen and always calling out to me. Within him was cheek and charm and love and brightness. He was intelligent and sweet. He was one of my own, a new man, touching me and plying me on my own bed.

It startled me.

“Charles,” I said, feeling his hair sift through my fingers. “Don’t… I won’t be able to leave you. I can’t have you…”

Charles leaned into me, set his hands running over me, over my shoulders and back. His forehead pressed against mine. “I don’t want to leave you, Erik. I don’t ever want to leave you. I’m never going to let you go.”

I couldn’t remember everything, in all of our touching. We latched on to each other with always searching hands and mouths. It felt like melting, like a few moments of drowning in the ocean as a child, before hitting the sandy floor and pushing back up to the air.

Charles was the oxygen and the ocean.

Without clothes, Charles looked shamefully young. He typically wore thick sweaters and jackets that, though not large even then, made him seem bigger. He had a slight build, very fair skin touched with freckles, and not a great deal of body hair. Though nothing about him was gawky or ill-fitting. He didn’t have long arms or skinny legs, in fact he had round pale thighs that look as inviting as any embrace. Charles had a body of slim muscles touched with a layer of baby fat. There was a small line of brown hairs in the middle of chest, and a sparse patch framing his pale cock. He wasn’t too slender, but he looked about the right size that I might carry him about comfortably if I chose.

And I wanted to. It was a playful thing I imagined husbands did with their wives and suddenly it was the strongest desire thumping through my chest.

I hefted him from the cold floor onto my bed, wanting to indulge in his laughter and his spirit. I flattened myself over him so as much of my skin as possible would touch his skin. His fingers trailed down my spine until he grabbed a hold of my buttocks, squeezing each side and pulling my hips even further against him.

Evidently Charles caught my surprise, because he laughed and mouthed a mark at my neck. He spoke with an extra squeeze. “I told you I wouldn’t let you go.”

Our lovemaking was only enraptured rutting against each other like inexperienced boys—our hands wet with lotion and laughing at every touch. But it was true lovemaking like I had never had before, filled with joy and honesty. It filled my mind with a thousand little flashes of Charles’ eyes, his breath against my cheek, and his nose brushing against mine. It filled my mind and blocked out every horrible sight and degradation, and every taste of ash that had ever filled my mouth.

When I woke, I woke to my legs tangled between Charles’ under a quilt. Charles was shivering. The sound of the radio from the other room was drifting in. He stuck his cold toes under my ankle, catapulting me into a vibrantly awake state. He was tucked against my side, squeezing my ribs for all he was worth.

“You’re awfully thin,” he muttered into my underarm, his hands grasping around my middle, searching for skin to pinch.

“You’re awfully cold.”

“I dashed out to turn on the radio. You’ve got to turn up your radiator.”

“Why didn’t you do that while you were up?”

“Why would I fiddle around with a radiator when I could curl up next to you?”

I laughed and had to bury my nose into his hair, and hug his shoulders as tightly as I could, just to make sure it was really him, not some dream. But he was a real weight and really Charles at my side, under my covers.

“This is… You’re not going to disappear, are you?”

Charles stilled for a moment, and then kissed a bit of my shoulder. “I’m done pretending we should’ve been doing anything other than this.”

For a long moment, there was just silence. All the silence there could be, with the sound of people milling and cars chugging along already building up a wall of noise outside the apartment. All I could hear was the blissful sound of Charles’ breathing near the side of my face, and the rustle of his hair whenever he shifted, with the radio chiming in the background.

Without thinking, my mouth opened and I said, “I’m happy that you’re here. I’m happy. Thank you.”

A feeling came off of Charles that was obviously more than the simple language of his body. He was giving me something with his ability—something delicate and huge at the same time. Something stronger and more articulate than words, but indescribable. A warm, content feeling that nestled into my bones like it was Charles, himself, distilled.

Then he hummed with the radio and half whispered, half sung, “Blue days, all of them gone… Nothing but blue skies, from now on.”