'I'd love to see 'em ... sometime.' He shrugged, as though when was of no consequence, though both of them had known two minutes before, when he'd mentioned his jeans, that Will would be helping him out of them tonight.
As they made their way back to the house Will wondered if perhaps he'd made a mistake. Drew kept up a virtually unbroken monologue, none of it particularly enlightening, about his job selling advertising space at the Chronicle, about the unwanted attentions of Al, and the adventures of his ineptly neutered cat. A few yards from the door, however, he stopped in midflow and said: 'I'm running off at the mouth, aren't I? Sorry. I'm just nervous I guess.'
'If it's any comfort,' Will said, 'so am L'
'Really?' Drew sounded doubtful.
'I haven't had sex with anyone in eight or nine months.'
'Jeez,' Drew said, plainly relieved. 'Well we can just take it real slowly.'
They were at the front door. 'That's good,' Will said, letting them in, 'slowly's good.'
In the old days sex with Drew had been quite a show; a lot of posing and boasting and wrestling around. Tonight it was mellow. Nothing acrobatic; nothing risky. Little in fact, beyond the simple pleasure of lying naked together in Will's big bed with the pallid light from the street washing over their bodies, holding and being held. The greed for sensuality Will would once have felt in this situation, the need to exhaustively explore every sensation, seemed very remote. Yes, it was still there; another night, perhaps, another body - one he didn't remember in its finest hour - and perhaps he'd be just as possessed as he'd been in the past. But for tonight, gentle pleasures and modest satisfactions. There was just one moment, as they were undressing, and Drew first saw the scars on Will's body, when the liaison threatened to become something a little headier.
'Oh my, oh my,' Drew said, his voice breathy with admiration. 'Can I touch them?'
'If you really want to.'
Drew did so; not with his fingers but with his lips, tracing the shiny path the bear's claws had left on Will's chest and belly. He went down on his knees in the process, and pressing his face against Will's lower abdomen, said: 'I could stay down here all night.' He'd slipped his hands behind his back; plainly he was quite ready to have them tied there if it took Will's fancy. Will ran his fingers through the man's hair, halftempted to play the game. Bind him up; have him kissing scars and calling him sir. But he decided against it.
'Another night,' he said, and pulling Drew up and into his arms, escorted him to bed.
iii
He woke to the sound of rain, pattering on the skylight overhead. It was still dark. He glanced at his watch - it was four-fifteen - then over to Drew, who was lying on his back, snoring slightly. Will wasn't sure what had woken him, but now he was conscious he decided to get up and empty his bladder. But as he eased out of bed he caught, or thought he caught, a motion in the shadows across the room. He froze. Had somebody broken into the house? Was that what had woken him? He studied the darkness, looking and listening for further signs of an intruder; but now there was nothing. The shadows were empty. He looked back at his bedmate. Drew was wearing a tiny smile in his sleep, and was rubbing his bare belly gently, back and forth. Will watched him for a moment, curiously enraptured. Of all the unlikely people to have broken his sexual fast with, he thought; Drew the muscle-boy, softened by time.
The rain got suddenly heavier, beating a tattoo on the roof. It stirred him to get up and go to the bathroom, a route he could have covered in his sleep. Out through the bedroom door, then first left onto the cold tile; three paces forward, turn to the right and he could piss in certain knowledge his aim was true. He drained his bladder contentedly, then headed back to the bedroom, thinking as he went how good it would feel to slip his arms around Drew.
Then, two paces from the door, he again glimpsed a motion from the corner of his eye. This time he was quick enough to catch sight of the intruder's shadow, as the man made his escape down the stairs.
'Hey-' he said, and followed, thinking as he did so that there was something suspiciously playful about what was happening. For some reason he didn't feel in the least threatened by the presence of this trespasser; it was as though he knew already there was no harm here. As he reached the bottom of the stairs, and pursued the shadow back down the hallway towards the file-room he realized why: he was dreaming. And what more certain proof of that than the sight awaiting him when he entered the room? There, casually leaning on the windowsill twenty feet from him and silhouetted against the raining glass, was Lord Fox.
'You're naked,' the creature remarked.
'So are you,' Will observed.
'It's different for animals. We're more comfortable in our skins.' He cocked his head. 'The scars suit you.'
'So I've been told.'
'By the fellow in your bed?'
'Yep.'
'You can't have him hanging around, you realize that? Not the way things are going. You'll have to get rid of him.'
'This is a ridiculous conversation,' Will said, turning to go. 'I'm heading back to bed.' He was already there, of course, and asleep, but even in dream form he didn't want to linger down here chatting with the fox. The animal belonged to another part of his psyche; a part he'd begun to put at a healthier distance tonight, with Drew's compliance.
'Wait a moment,' said the fox. 'Just take a look at this.'
There was a crisp enthusiasm in the animal's words that made Will glance back. There was more light in the room than there'd been moments before, its source not shed from streetlamps outside, but from the photographs, his poor consumptives, which were still scattered on the floor where he'd tossed them. Leaving his place at the window Lord Fox stepped between the pictures, coming into the middle of the room. By the strange luminescence the photographs were giving off, Will could see a voluptuous smile upon the animal's face.
'These are worth a moment's study, don't you think?' the fox said.
Will looked. The light that emanated from the photographs was uncertain, and for good reason. The bright, blurred forms in the pictures were moving: fluttering, flickering, as though they were being consumed by a slow fire. And in their throes, Will recognized them. A skinned lion, hanging from a tree. A pitiful tent of elephant hide, hanging in rotted scraps over one of the poles of its bones. A tribe of lunatic baboons beating each other's children to death with rocks. Pictures of the corrupted world, no longer fixed and remote, but thrashing and twitching and blazing out into his room.
'Don't you wish they looked like this when people saw them?' the fox said. 'Wouldn't it change the world if they could see the horror this way?'
Will glanced up at the fox. 'No,' he said, 'it wouldn't change a thing.'
'Even this,' the animal said, staring down at a picture that lay between them. It was darker than the others, and at first he couldn't make out the subject.
'What is it?'
'You tell me,' the fox said.
Will went down on his haunches and looked at the picture more closely. There was motion in this one too: a deluge of flickering light falling on a form sitting at the centre of the picture.
'Patrick?' he murmured.
'Could be,' the fox replied. It was Patrick for sure. He was slumped in his chair beside his window, except that somehow the roof had been stripped off his house and the rain was pouring in, running down over his head and body, glistening on his forehead and his nose and his lips, which were drawn back a little, so that his teeth showed. He was dead, Will knew. Dead in the rain. And the more the deluge beat upon him the more his flesh bruised and swelled. Will wanted to look away. This wasn't an ape, this wasn't a lion, it was Patrick, his beloved Patrick. But he'd trained his eyes too well. They kept looking, like the good witnesses they were, while Patrick's face smeared beneath the assault of the rain, all trace of who or even what he'd been steadily erased.