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He sees the ad on a smoke-filled, whiskey-infused evening.
He has the window open. He can hear the downstairs neighbors talking, the cadences of their voices just the right amount of distracting, just the right amount of not.
Junk mail lines the room. Colored coupons for laundry detergent, discounted lawnmowers, and buy-one-get-one-free cereal.
There’s too much traffic outside, as always. Screeching tires and honking horns give him a headache. He puts his cigarette out against the window ledge and reaches into his breast pocket for another.
He’s out.
There’s a corner shop just around the block from his apartment, convenient for midnight runs. The fluorescent lights are jarring after walking by himself in the dark.
Fresh pack in hand, he leans against the wall outside to light up.
A newspaper brushes against his heel. He looks down and recognizes the logo. Showing up over and over again in his mail, like a sign from the gods.
The gods laugh at him. He laughs with them.
----------
Later that night (or morning, he can’t tell the difference anymore), he wakes up in a cold sweat. The sheets stick to his skin and the smell of stale ash suddenly makes him taste vomit.
He can’t stand the feeling of his own skin.
He rolls over onto his back.
The night is dead. The laughter with it.
He roots around in his junk mail until he finds the ad again. It plays out like the beginning of a sick joke, except the humor is lost on him as his fingers dial the numbers, shakily. Desperately.
If there was anyone watching him, he thinks they would feel pity.
He gets the last two numbers wrong and has to dial again.
He’s almost in tears when he can finally hear the other line ringing.
----------
It’s mechanical, at first.
They charge by the minute, and he almost hangs up.
But he looks at the ad again.
For all your roleplay and fantasy needs, it promises.
And he needs a promise right now. Even if it’s an empty one. Even if he’s just another paying customer.
Then the operator connects him.
Ring. Ring. Ring.
“Hello?”
He doesn’t know how to answer, fingers frozen around the receiver. The voice comes as a shock to him, with how normal it sounds. Pleasant. Like a friendly face on the bus downtown. Like a stranger in the supermarket.
He’s aware he’s stopped breathing.
“Are you there?” Teasing, this time.
It causes a little flutter in his belly, because he can hear the smile.
“I - I just wanted to say hello,” he replies, trying it out.
“Well. Hello, then,” the voice says, still amused.
Achilles likes him. Wants the man to like him back.
“I hope you don’t mind,” he says. “I just … saw you on the bus the other day, and had to know who you were.”
He doesn’t know where this comes from. But the man on the line intercepts it immediately, sailing smoothly as he’s probably used to doing.
“It’s not that I mind. Maybe I was hoping a little, that you would get in touch.” A note of hesitancy, turning shy.
He isn’t like the others. He isn’t trying too hard. He knows his voice is beautiful, knows it’s enough to keep Achilles talking.
“And I’m Patroclus. If you were wondering.”
“I knew you had a name like that,” Achilles replies, finally relaxing. He winds the phone cord around his fingers, giddy.
“I’m Achilles.”
“I like it,” Patroclus decides. No smile this time, but a surety in his tone.
“I like so many things about you already.”
“I didn’t know you were paying attention,” Achilles frowns.
“I thought you looked uncomfortable in your suit. You seemed tired that day, on the bus. I smiled at you and thought I saw you smile back, but I was already turning away. We just about missed each other, didn’t we?"
“Does that mean you’re glad I called?”
“More than glad. Less than, because I don’t get to see you.”
“Of course you get to see me,” Achilles is quick to reassure. He wants so much for Patroclus to like him.
“You’ll get to see me all the time.”
“But you get off before me. And guess who has to ride all the way to the last stop, watching the seats empty out?”
“Don’t, then. The next time we see each other you’ll go with me.”
“I’d be too nervous,” Patroclus chuckles, light and airy.
“I wouldn’t know what to say to you then.”
“You needn’t say anything. I’ll wait for you at my stop. I won’t expect you to say anything at all.”
“Then I can’t wait. I want to see you again, Achilles.”
“We’ll see each other. I know we will.”
----------
The next time he dials, his entire body is awake with jitters. He’s been waiting for this the whole day.
“Guess who,” he grins, when Patroclus picks up.
“So soon? It’s only been an hour since we saw each other.”
“Who’s counting?”
Patroclus laughs, and Achilles laughs with him.
“You looked handsome today,” Patroclus says. “I like it when you wear the green tie. I can tell it’s your favorite.”
It makes Achilles smile.
He doesn’t know who this man is. They have been talking every day for a week and the game has yet to be broken up. He’s never gone this long before. He wonders how long they have left.
He doesn’t want it to end.
“What do you want for lunch tomorrow?” Patroclus asks. “I’ll drop it by your office.”
“I don’t want everyone else to be jealous.”
“Stop it!”
He snorts. “They say I don’t deserve you. I don’t deserve someone so perfect.”
“I’m not perfect,” Patroclus says, quietly. “You know that.”
“Liar. Liar, liar, liar.”
“You put me on a pedestal sometimes. You can deny it all you want.”
Achilles tilts his head to one side.
The little arguments. The slight tinge of hurt in Patroclus’s voice. It’s something special they have. It’s these little moments he waits so desperately for every day. The imperfection of it all.
It’s starting to get dangerous.
----------
Ring.
After the third, he picks up. As always.
“What are you doing up?” That knowing tone. Achilles would give anything to see his expression right now.
“Can’t sleep.”
He’s been staring at the ceiling for the better part of an hour, watching the cracks in the gypsum.
It’s a cool night, but he lets the breeze skim over him, lets goosebumps break out over his skin. Sometimes he likes feeling cold. It almost matches how he feels on the inside.
Blood come to a standstill, organs withering away. Maybe it’s all the smoking. Or maybe it’s a kind of sickness he’s always had, cured only in temporary intervals.
He’s been searching for highs ever since he was a kid. At first it was adrenaline. And then it was the lightheaded relaxation he gets from the nicotine. Now it’s something else.
He hears Patroclus’s voice in his head when he goes to sleep. When the mirrors in the bathroom steam up during a shower. When he crosses the road to get the paper from the newsagent’s.
He hears him, he knows him, he’s made him real.
He’s so real Achilles expects to see him every time he rounds the corner. He finds him in the faces of people passing by. He unlocks his apartment door, hoping - always hoping - there’s someone there waiting for him.
“There’s something…”
“What is it?” Talking low in his ear, as intimately as the night they had started it all.
“There’s something wrong with me,” Achilles admits.
A short silence. He can hear Patroclus shifting his weight on the mattress.
A part of him settles, to know they’re both lying in bed, both attuned to the other.
“Will you tell me what’s wrong?” Patroclus presses, gently.
“Do I talk in my sleep?” Achilles asks.
“Could you tell me what I say?”
He can hear Patroclus breathing. He loves every breath. Loves the sound of it, like it’s his own.
“Achilles -“
“I like it when you say my name. Sometimes I think I hear you calling me. But when I turn around, there’s nobody there.”
“But I’m here. Tell me what’s wrong.”
“What do I say in my sleep?” he asks again. He can hear himself begging.
“I’m talking to you, aren’t I? Even in my sleep.”
He knows it’s not a fair question to ask. Everything they’ve built so far, everything they have together. Guesswork. It’s all part of the fantasy.
But he’s asking Patroclus something he couldn’t possibly know. Couldn’t possibly answer. If he makes one up, Achilles will be able to tell it’s a lie. And that will be the end of it.
He doesn’t know how long he asks the question, again and again. Hours later, his eyes are crusted shut, his nose stuffy, his collar wet with tears.
Patroclus has stayed on the line with him, consoling, comforting. All he knows to do. He falls asleep that way.
----------
The next morning he phones the line to apologize.
Patroclus isn’t available, and the call transfers him to someone else.
He hangs up.
----------
It’s frighteningly stuffy in the city, even at the end of summer. He remembers vacation days as a kid, at the cape where they can hear waves crashing against rocks.
It must be peaceful. He wonders why he doesn’t go there anymore. Doesn’t everyone need a little peace in their life?
“And is that what you’re looking for?” Patroclus questions, when he has the courage to call again.
“To get away for a little while?”
“If it is, I don’t realize.” He takes a deep breath.
“But we could go away together. There’s a house my parents used to rent, when I was a kid. I remember counting seagulls on the pier. I remember … there’s so much I remember. Was it all real?”
“There would be new things to remember,” Patroclus adds. “You, me, and a holiday on the cape. Wouldn’t that be something?”
Achilles lets out a happy sigh, the pressure releasing in his chest.
“I want to know what your skin tastes like in the sun. I could find out then.”
“I would be yours from morning to evening. No obligations. No traffic. No city noises.”
“I’d like that.”
“You sound happy.”
“Thinking about it makes me happy,” Achilles acknowledges. “Thinking about what your laugh sounds like against the ocean, about what you’ll say to me when we tumble into the sand. Sand in your shoes - in your hair -“ He grins. “In your ears.”
“You can bury me in the sand, the way we do when we’re kids. I’ll pretend that I’m sleeping. And when you’ve gotten everything just right, I’ll sit up, sand flying everywhere. I’ll wipe it from your eyes, so it doesn’t sting. Wouldn’t you like that?”
“What if you get sand in your mouth when you kiss me?” Achilles asks.
Patroclus considers it.
“A small sacrifice, don’t you think? I’d kiss sand off your lips anyway. You’ll tell me I’m ridiculous, but you secretly like it.”
“I like a lot of things you do. None of them are a secret.”
“Really?” Going mischievous.
“Then you don’t mind me saying certain things out loud?”
Achilles snorts.
“What sorts of things shouldn’t be said out loud?”
“At least not in polite company.”
He chortles. “I can’t imagine. Can’t imagine you going off the rails.”
But he can. He can. He already knows how low Patroclus’s voice can go, what he sounds like when he’s out of breath - all of it right in his ear, traveling into the race of his pulse.
“Wait and see,” Patroclus tells him.
----------
Sometimes he can see Patroclus’s outline if he squeezes his eyes shut enough. Like the moment between being barely awake and losing himself.
He pictures the other man’s hands running over him. The calluses on his palms, the softness of his fingertips.
He hears him calling his name, over and over, but it’s not like the other times. It’s marked with desperation, with the knowledge that Achilles is all he has. With possession, that Achilles is all his.
Sometimes he thinks Patroclus is the only thing keeping him from flying away.
“Achilles?” Patroclus asks. “Do you touch yourself when you think of me?”
The question should catch him off guard, but it doesn’t.
“Mm.”
“And what do I tell you, when you’re touching yourself?”
“How good it feels,” he answers. “How much you want me.”
“And it works? Just as good as the real thing?”
He smiles. “Are you getting jealous of a version of yourself?”
“Apparently this Patroclus knows everything you like. This Patroclus lives in your head, at your most intimate moments. How could I compare?”
“Unless you want to be this Patroclus. I could throw the other one out.”
A tsk-ing noise. “So cruel.”
“Do you?”
The sound of his amusement.
“You know I do.”
----------
He’s fresh out of the shower, letting the towel loosen around his waist as he collapses onto the bed, not caring that the sheets are drenched.
“It’s like having you in the rain,” Patroclus says. “I press my lips to your skin and catch each drop of water.”
He can feel him doing that, even then. The shape of a warm mouth, a wet tongue gliding, learning the taste of him.
“If I can have you in the sun, you can have me in the rain,” he sighs. “Isn’t that only fair?”
“Thinking about our holiday again?” Patroclus hums.
The weight of him, next to Achilles on the bed. The weight of his voice encompasses all that is him.
“How can I not think about it?” Achilles questions. “I had you all to myself right then.”
“And you have me all to yourself right now,” Patroclus reminds him.
“Lie back.”
He does, arching his back because he hears Patroclus right there with him, and it sends a shooting pain right into his stomach.
“Forehead,” Patroclus tells him, and he imagines a kiss there, a small comfort.
“Under your ear.” The brush of teeth, biting at his earlobe.
“The dip of your throat, right here.”
Patroclus knows all the places that make him tick, knows the ones that scream for safety, for desire, for fulfillment. He knows all the names of Achilles’s own soul, like a child connecting dots on a piece of paper.
“Don’t stop,” he gasps out. “Don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t stop.”
He can fall asleep to Patroclus’s voice, like the wind on his face and the coming of winter. He’s warm and cold and warm again. It makes him feel alive.
----------
The clock strikes seven. It’s a broken clock, and he’s sure it has the wrong time. But he lives out of time, and the streetlights outside are smoke-yellow. The downstairs neighbors are playing a record.
It’s slow and lazy. It makes him drag his feet, the window wide open so he can watch the clouds turn lavender.
“Hear it?” he asks, tipping the phone towards the open window so Patroclus can catch the melody. The other man hums along.
Achilles closes his eyes and smiles.
“Don’t step on my feet,” Patroclus tells him.
“I’m not.”
“Now where did you learn to dance like this?”
“Oh, you’d be surprised.”
He hears Patroclus’s laugh, mellow as the ending notes.
He’s in his arms. There’s a soft cheek pressed against his. And that humming, deep within a strong chest, leaning against his back.
It’s a precious moment for him.
“I’ve always wanted someone like you,” he admits.
He thinks Patroclus might not have an answer this time.
“What a thing to say,” the man replies. “You have no idea what a thing like that can do to me.”
“I know you when you’re a little surprised. When you’re a little sad. Even when you’re a little happy. Suppose I know you when you’re a little in love, too?”
“Suppose you do.”
“Then this is what it sounds like when you’re that way?”
There’s a short silence.
“Does it scare you?”
Achilles stops in his movements.
“You could never.”
“It scares me.”
His fingers tighten around the receiver. Knees buckling.
“Don’t let it,” he says.
More silence. He’s begging again. It’s turning into a prayer.
Don’t let it end. Please don’t let it end. He’ll die if it ends.
“Patroclus?”
A soft sigh, and the tension releases from his shoulders.
“Achilles. Darling.”
“I won’t scare you anymore. I promise.”
Just please don’t let it end. His prayer is answered for tonight. He sways on his feet, and Patroclus sways with him.
----------
“Forehead. Nose. Cheeks.”
He laughs, their usual greeting for each other. All the places Patroclus would kiss him.
He wakes up in the morning thinking about him.
“Do you know what I did today?”
“What did you do?”
He pauses to remember. His trip down to the shops. It plays out like a dream, but he can see the shopping bags in the corner of his room and knows it really happened.
There was a green tie in the shop window that afternoon. It made him stop in the middle of the crowded street, causing irritated pedestrians to flock around him. But he stayed there until the shop lot was deserted. Staring at his reflection in the glass, the green tie at his neck where the mannequin should have been.
“And I saw you right there, in the window. Standing right next to me.”
“What could I have been doing there?” Patroclus asks, amused.
“I don’t know,” Achilles replies. “I see you sometimes. At odd moments throughout the day. And then I forget to ask you about it later.”
He roots around for his pack of cigarettes, but it’s gone. He can’t remember where he put it.
The green tie is hanging off the edge of his bed, all crumpled up where he clung to it in those hours when the line wouldn’t connect him to Patroclus.
“Tell me again how we met,” he asks. Tell me, tell me, tell me.
The way he used to ask his mother for a bedtime story. A sort of reassurance, to get him through the night before the next day.
“On the bus. You would get off before me. And I would spend the ride home wondering how I would ever get you to notice me,” Patroclus chants, a well-known song and dance.
“Is it like that even now? Can I make you go weak in the knees?”
“Every time you look at me,” Patroclus replies, softly.
Achilles sets the phone down for a little while, and looks around his room. The place is a mess. Pitch dark because the lights don’t work anymore. All he has to live on is rising and setting sun.
It’s what the world looks like without Patroclus, he thinks. And he would rather starve himself on a dream than face it. He closes his eyes and holds the phone to his ear again.
Tell me, tell me, tell me.
----------
When he eats, he can hear the clink of his fork against the plate. A singular sound, sharp in his ear. Too sharp. Too echoey.
He sets his fork down.
He wonders if it’s loud enough to be heard by the neighbors downstairs. He can hear them sometimes, the cheery goings-on of the dinners they have.
It’s the only time he slams his window shut. And then presses his ear to it, as though he could catch the remnants of them and make it his own.
“Patroclus,” he mutters to himself.
Patroclus. Achilles.
Achilles. Patroclus.
He could be any Patroclus. The Patroclus on the bus, on the train, in the yellow taxi with droplets on the windshield. He could be Patroclus at the supermarket, picking up a bruised apple.
He could roam the streets at night, hands in his pockets, hiding his face to avoid the drunks in the alleyways, the homeless on the corners, the drug addicts begging for cash under fire escapes.
They would meet in a cheap motel. Payment upfront, room for an hour.
They would meet in a honeymoon suite, sheets covered in rose petals.
They would meet on the staircase of a home, snow swept in on the threshold, greeting each other with windblown cheeks.
It doesn’t matter which Patroclus it is. He’ll be Achilles for all of them.
------------------
They play a game on the telephone called Favorite Things.
“The smell of coffee in the morning,” Patroclus chimes in, breathing shallowly as though he’s just gotten in from a run.
“Mm …” Achilles dithers, eyes swiveling around the room. He doesn’t know why he bothers. He hasn’t thought about things he likes for the longest time. When he was a kid, perhaps.
“My mother singing Doris Day on Sunday afternoons.” The only time he ever understood her, he thinks.
“Oh?” Patroclus sounds out. “I don’t remember that one.”
“An oldie,” Achilles replies. It takes him a while to root around for the words, but he’ll always know the lyrics. Always.
“When I was just a little girl -” he snorts, Patroclus chuckles with him.
“I asked my mother, what will I be?
Will I be pretty? Will I be rich?
Here’s what she said to me.”
The chorus brings back those Sunday afternoons like nothing else. All of a sudden he can hear the crowds coming home from mass, their hats and gloves a colorful parade down the street. And his mother in the house, the open windows letting in a breeze; blowing through her long, long hair.
“When I grew up and fell in love
I asked my sweetheart, what lies ahead?
Will we have rainbows
Day after day - .”
He tries for the next line, but his voice cracks. He backtracks a little.
“When I grew up and fell in love -”
He can’t finish it. His palms are sweaty over the plastic receiver.
“Sweetheart,” Patroclus says, a brush of gentle words.
“No. I want you to hear the rest of it.”
“It’s okay.”
“It’s not okay, it’s not. It’s a song about us, you understand?”
There’s a small, sad laugh on the other end.
“I know it is. You sing it beautifully.”
“Then why don’t you want to hear the rest of it?”
Silence.
He counts the pounding of his heart.
One two three.
“Achilles, sweetheart.”
His vision is blurring. He blinks once, twice, three times. Tries hard to make out Patroclus’s outline in the haze.
“She was wrong about everything,” he chokes out, holding the receiver so tight it hurts his hand. “I grew up and fell in love. I have a green tie and a holiday at the cape and someone who knows my favorite things. I have I have I have.”
“You have,” Patroclus whispers back, and suddenly he can hear a soft thud, a phone being set down for a second.
It only lasts for a second.
“Don’t we have everything we want?” he gets out, mouthing it rather than saying it.
Patroclus’s voice is thick when he replies.
“Of course we do, darling.”
He has to pull the receiver away from his lips so Patroclus won’t hear him.
“I always wanted someone like you,” he says again, when he can get his voice to work.
“I always wanted you. Just you.”
A few more minutes, where he keeps his eyes closed, savoring the feel of Patroclus on the other end.
“We can’t do this anymore, can we?”
It slips out as easy as sunlight through the cracks in the glass.
Patroclus taking a breath.
“No, we can’t.”
He can hear the smile in his voice, soft and beautiful and contorted.
He wants. He wants so badly.
“Patroclus.”
“What is it, Achilles?”
“Love me just a little while longer.”
Just a little while.
“... Okay.”
Just a little while. The rest of it falls into place.
----------------------------------------------------------------
He thinks about the plastic stars on the ceiling when he was a boy. Glow-in-the-dark. A childhood fantasy of the night sky, telling him there is freedom even in confined spaces.
There are barren walls, and peeling wallpaper.
There are cracked linoleum floors and unraveling carpets.
But up ahead where the phosphorescent stars twinkle, there is the semblance of a world that waits for him.
He would grow up and draw it in the cup of his hand. Bring it to his lips, the way a person can taste honey after sticking their hand into the hive. He doesn’t know about other people. But he could always sustain himself on a promise.
He cuts out ads from the paper and lines them up on his floor.
Promise. After promise. After promise.
When the neighbors downstairs play music again, he opens the window just an inch and presses his ear against the ledge. Listening to music from another room.
There comes an evening when he finds it in him to get on the bus again. The flashing number at the bus stop makes him lose focus, then regain it.
He likes the speckled rainbow paint on the bus floor, and the clink of coins through the payment slot.
Even the harsh lights are familiar in their welcome, the railing under his fingertips, and the way he has to keep his balance every time the bus makes a turn.
And the expected ding, when someone pulls the yellow line to get the bus to stop for them.
It’s the last stop of the day.
He watches the street name light up at the front of the bus, hears the doors swivel open.
And someone weaving through the other passengers. Raindrops on his jacket, where it had been drizzling outside when he came in.
He watches the passenger make his way to the front of the bus. Their eyes meet in one unhurried beat. He sees the man’s gaze flicker down, a small smile. And he’s gone.
Achilles looks down at himself.
He’s wearing his green tie. It’s his favorite, after all.
The doors close again and the bus takes off. He grips the railing to keep himself steady.
He finds him in everyone. Lingering in his thoughts, like music from another room. All the way home.