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The moon is full and jaundiced, fat behind a drift of cloud, the same yellow as the lemon floating in Oswald’s tea. He drinks multiple cups a day now, brewed golden from a hissing kettle, honey stirred with a tiny spoon. Edward has a collection of teaspoons. He lays them out on the bedspread one morning and explains to Oswald where each one came from. A flea market upstate, a thrift store on 32nd Street. Some are tarnished, bearing chew marks from the garbage disposal, used, antique. Others shine, which only makes them look cheap. Newness a vice. Most of them have little pictures inlaid in enamel on the topmost part of the handle: peacocks, Gotham historic sites, the Virgin Mary.
One has a penguin wearing a red bowtie on it, and Edward uses this one most frequently. Leaves it against the rim of the wide-mouthed 500-ml beaker he serves Oswald tea in, like a love letter, a riddle.
500-ml beakers are not meant to drink tea from. The glass is so thin it burns Oswald’s fingers, but still, he holds it.
—
The first time Edward brought tea to the bedside, Oswald let it go cold, convinced it was poisoned. That was back when he was still trying to run, when he’d mentally mapped out the number of steps from the bed to the door and could think about nothing besides limping across it and escaping the suffocating clutches Edward was holding him in.
He tried, but he never made it very far. He’d collapse, re-open the gunshot wound so Edward would have to stitch him up again, grinning like he was thrilled Oswald had prolonged his own recovery once more. If you want to get away, he said, iodine staining his fingers full-moon yellow. You should stop trying to get away.
That was before Oswald realized that Edward was going to hurt him, it was inevitable, but he wouldn’t use poison to do it. He’d use those suffocating clutches—he’d squeeze and squeeze until Oswald grew used to the pressure. Even reliant on it, unable to hold himself erect without the walls pressing in. And then, he would let him go. Oswald would crumple, fall. Or maybe he had already fallen. It was hard to tell.
—
When they met, Edward stood too close. He towered over Oswald, smiled in this utterly complacent way that felt like being mocked. Oswald made him back up. Even then, he knew he could not allow this man into his orbit. That something would happen—a detonation. Rabies. Heartbreak.
In grade school, Oswald was terrified of the other boys–—not just the cruel ones who taunted him for his limp, his looks, his softness, but the kind ones, too. He didn’t want to be left alone with them, he loathed when they stopped skirmishes in his defense or walked him to class while he dripped pink bloody snot in the hallways.
Once, an older boy (brown curls, white smile, Oswald still remembers the way his forearms were already roped in sinew as he approached the jaws of puberty) offered to help him up after he’d been tripped in the cafeteria. He snarled, lunged. Bit the boy’s fingers like a dog, so hard he felt the skin pop, tasted metal.
Oswald didn’t just resent being patronized. It was more that he feared what he would do, if not biting. There were men he still didn’t trust himself to stand close to. They might end up bitten, or they might end up something else.
—
They’re lying side by side now, that yellow moon spilling onto the floorboards. Edward’s long body takes up the space his teaspoon collection once did, his heels crossed as he sits propped against the pillows. They’re talking, because they do that now. Oswald’s given in. He drinks the tea, he doesn’t run. He lies in this man’s bed with him, inches apart, so close he can smell his toothpaste, his laundry detergent. Wose, his skin. The human smell beneath the products, indescribable beyond the notes of salt and oil and blood and danger.
They don’t always talk about murder. Edward is broadly and holistically curious, he mines for diamonds in Oswald’s history like he might find the secret to becoming a successful criminal in the shocked mouth of that curly-headed boy Oswald bit when he was eleven. He wants to know everything, and Oswald is running out of corridors to keep locked inside himself. Much to his horror, he finds it feels nice to be pillaged so attentively. To have someone digging around with purpose in his past, opening every door, peering inside, dusting the cobwebs, examining heirlooms and trinkets as if even half-forgotten junk could be valuable.
“I see what you’re doing,” Oswald says, pretending to be annoyed. Pretending is all he has left.
“I’m trying to get to know you,” Edward says, smile unshakable on his broad sloppy mouth, too pink, too many teeth. The bottom row is crooked, and Oswald hates that he knows this. “It’s what friends do.”
“You don’t want to be my friend,” Oswald tells him. “You want to study me. To become me.”
“I want to learn from you. I’m not so arrogant to think I can’t learn from a master of his craft,” Edward clarifies. “It’s not emulation, it’s respect.”
“No, you want to uncover a trick, some magic formula that Alice and Wonderlanded me to where I am today. But I am sorry to say my position was acquired solely through hard work. I was Fish Mooney’s umbrella boy. You know what I was doing when I overheard the information that allowed me to wager my way out?”
“What were you doing?” Edward asks. He’s rapt, incandescent. Eyes glistening, like this was what he was hungry for all along. Another one of Oswald’s attempts to turn him down only drawing him in further.
“I was giving her a foot rub. Down on my knees,” he says, lifting his chin in the pantomime of triumph. Edward has a way of doing that—mangling Oswald’s would-be mic drops by refusing to act the way a normal man would act.
“I see. And you think—”
“I think you are arrogant. Too arrogant to have what it takes to be a true fly on the wall. I had to demean myself, humiliate myself, suck up and grovel to the Fishes and Falcones and Maronis of the world. You think too highly of your intellect for that.”
A silence sits between them for a moment. Oswald uses it to sip his tea, studying Edward’s startled expression over the rim of the glass beaker, wondering why it feels like he never wins, even when he is winning.
“You know what, touché, Mr. Penguin,” Edward says, shaking his index finger as he rises from the bed and disappears. Oswald sips. The tea is sour in his mouth, too much lemon, now. He must let it cool past the point of ideal temperature to hold it without getting burnt.
—
The first shower he took at Edward’s apartment felt like being reborn. Or else, reverse born. Dying. Entering raw and screaming into a world where his mother was no longer alive. Grit and dried blood washed in trails down his arms and legs, clouding brown-black in the otherwise pristine tub.
When he stepped out, his skin was flushed red, steam lifted from his arms in wisps. He couldn’t see himself in the fogged mirror and was grateful for it. He wasn’t actually a new person, he only wished he could be.
Edward had left him a clean towel folded neatly on the closed toilet seat lid. He picked it up and tried to dry himself, but certain twists of his body resounded through him in ripples of pain. He winced, cried out, clutched at his shoulder. In seconds, Edward appeared, wrenching the bathroom door open so the steam billowed out with the suction. “What’s wrong? Did you tear the stitches? Did you—?”
“Get out!” Oswald snapped, clutching the towel to his front, shoving Edward away. “Can’t I get one second of privacy in—”
“This is my house, and you’re hurt,” Edward interrupted. Then he reached out, grabbed Oswald’s shoulder, grip biting beneath the black bullet hole. “You’re bleeding again.”
“You can play nurse all you want, just let me get my clothes back on,” he spat, wrenching away, flesh burning in the shape of Edward’s thumbprint. “You shouldn’t barge in on people when they’re naked. Even if they’re in your house.”
“Please, it’s nothing new,” Edward breezed as they fought over the towel. A pitiful tug of war, Oswald losing in seconds when his shoulder sang out in pain, limbs already weak from hot water. Plus, he was smaller than Edward in every way. He’d forget until they were toe to toe like this, then the realization would come rushing back into him, brine and rage like high tide. “Don’t forget, I’ve seen every part of you already,” Edward reminded him, carefully dabbing his back dry. “This is nothing.”
Oswald stood, dripping, defeated. He hadn’t forgotten.
—
Allowing his back to be towel-dried following a shower nudged up beside the tea and its special spoon. Two small losses, two ceded inches. Two indulgences Oswald attempted to resist but eventually caved to anyway.
He ground his teeth as he sipped the chamomile, he shut his eyes as Edward hummed, hands warm and spanning his scapulae, their skin separated by only a thin layer of damp terry cloth. But eventually, he even let go of the pretending. It was all he had, and then he had nothing. A simple equation, another loss. Dead mothers and puncture wounds.
—
Edward returns with a bottle of lotion. He moves two pillows to the foot of the bed and sits with his back against them before ceremoniously tugging the sheets off Oswald’s legs, which look sardine-slender and withered in the overlarge, borrowed PJ bottoms. “Well,” he says, patting his lap. “Heels here.”
Oswald stares at him, unable to compute what is happening. “Why?!” he snarls, drawing tight like a mollusk.
He gets an eye roll for that. “So I can rub your feet like you rubbed Fish Mooney’s. Or, not like that, exactly. I would never betray you. I’m motivated by other goals.”
Oswald’s face is hot, his tongue feels swollen and strange in the bracket of his jaw. He thinks of the droplets that collect on his spine, the ones he couldn’t reach without hurting himself several days ago but could probably reach now. He looks at the tea in his hands, staring down at the floating lemon like the yellow moon. “Motivated by what?” is all he can manage. He’s headed for another loss, another ceded inch, another indulgence, and he knows it. He is going to let Edward touch him, and then he is going to bite Edward’s hand. Or else, he is going to get bitten. He’s going to be squeezed until all his bones break. He is going to do the thing he’s been running from since he was a child.
“My invested interest in genuinely implementing the advice you give me! You called out my arrogance, and I’m responding to it, taking it to heart.” Edward says. He reaches out, then tries to grab Oswald’s foot and drag it towards him. Oswald kicks at him, recoils toward the headboard.
“I wasn’t suggesting you literally—”
“I know you weren’t. But! I happen to give incredible foot rubs,” Edward insists, undeterred. “And I rarely am presented with opportunities to demonstrate this skill.”
Oswald coughs, but it comes out of his dry, terrified mouth sounding like a cat hawking up a hairball. “You’re not actually taking my comment about your arrogance to heart. I didn’t rub Fish’s feet because I was good at it, I did it because she told me to, and you have to do what people tell you to do in order to lie low long enough that they forget you’re there! Then you exploit their trust. It’s not about the foot rubbing, it’s about—about…”
Edward looks at him with black eyes. Wide, helpless. “About what?”
He’s the sort of arrogant that can’t be remedied, the sort of arrogant that will come back and bite him in the ass one day. The lesson is: shut up, listen. But it’s undermined entirely when Oswald cautiously extends his legs, puts his feet where Edward told him to, in part to see if he can. If he can survive so many losses, so many inches, so many indulgences without getting sick. “Fine,” he grumbles, giving up.
The smile is back, full force like a bomb, burning magnesium. Edward slicks his hands with a few pumps of the lotion, then he makes contact, and the world burns down.
—
Oswald tried to bite him. He told him he was standing to close. He did everything right, but Edward refused to listen. He was deaf, he kept creeping closer, he crawled into the bed, he dug into his wound, he made him tea, he dried his back, he put his hands in the same place his mother put hers, once. He told him men like them were better off abstaining from love and then proceeded to love Oswald like he had never been loved before. It wasn’t fair.
He squeezed, and squeezed, and squeezed. He blistered through the too-thin glass. When Oswald pulled away, his fingers wept lymph, and the skin came away from more skin, leaving a hole.
—
Edward is incredible at foot rubs, or maybe foot rubs are just incredible. Oswald wouldn’t know, this is the first time anyone has ever touched him like this. In this intimate place, often sore from limping, shuffling, shoes not meant to fit how they fit him. Edward stretches his achilles, he tugs each toe. He digs his thumbs into the meat at the ball, works the muscles that spiderweb out from his ankle, tracing them from attachment point to attachment point. Oswald knows because Edward keeps explaining what he’d doing—naming muscles, tendons, bones. “You know a lot about anatomy,” Oswald says at some point, just for something to say. Anything to interrupt the chatter about his flesh, his insides, his pain, its map.
“I’ve examined a lot of dead bodies,” Edward says easily. Then, “Did you know you have unusual bone structure?”
“My profile?” Oswald asks, two steps behind, stupid with pleasure and weakness. “My mother always told me it was refined. The boys in school had other things to say.”
Edward laughs, squeezes, kneads. “No, I meant your very high arches. Likely because of your limp—the external rotation from the knee turns your stride outward, so you walk along this edge,” he explains, drawing a lotion-slick index finger down the outer line of Oswald’s foot. “It’s called supination. Most people’s stride is slightly pronated, which means they walk on this side.” He slides his thumb from arch to big toe. It feels marvelous, no single thing should feel so good. Oswald says nothing, only shudders, disintegrates. “For the record, I agree with your mother. It’s a refined profile. Stately. And yes, I suppose, also unusual but, still, handsome.”
“Compared to all the dead bodies you’ve examined?” Oswald says. He tries to snarl, to snap, to defend, but he’s already lost and lost and lost. His face colors, and Edward notices it, frowning.
“I’ve embarrassed you,” he observes. His hands have made their way up his calf, now, under the hem of the PJ bottoms. The tents his knuckles pitch in the pilling, worn-thin fabric are obscene.
“I’m not embarrassed,” he snaps. “It’s just—no one but my mother has ever called me handsome. And I miss her.”
Edward knows he’s lying, Oswald can see it on his face. He’s puzzling him out, turning over his soil to dig for truffles. Another diamond to mine, another room to open so that light can throw shafts between moth-eaten curtains. Another dead body to examine. “Never? All that money, I’d imagine you have women throwing themselves at you. Calling you all sorts of things whether they meant it or not.”
Oswald snorts. “Oh, sure. I meant never by anyone who ever counted.”
A line through Edward’s brow, like he’s not certain why he counts. Something about this conversation has him faltering, his rowboat caught in a wake, but still, he keeps touching Oswald. Thumbing into his calf, his ankle. Smoothing up the curve of his apparently abnormally high arch, trying to find answers, always. “Anyhow—you don’t need looks, you have power. And intelligence. Not that women seem to care much for that, in my experience. A highly undervalued trait by the fairer sex.” A crooked, conspiratorial smile, then. Like he’s letting Oswald in on a joke. Like they’re already in on the same joke.
Then it hits Oswald. Why he hasn’t been able to win, why he can’t predict Edward, why he can’t seem to catch him off guard, why he’s the one constantly, pitifully paddling. It’s because Edward, for all his prodding and pillaging—he doesn’t know this one thing Oswald thought everyone knew. “Lucky for me,” he says, eyes locked in, heart in his throat. “I have no interest in the fairer sex.”
It takes a moment to sink in. Oswald watches the slow infection—a detonation, rabies, heartbreak. Edward’s fingers flex on his shin, then lift for a moment, before descending to twitch. “Oh? Oh. Wait. Are you—?”
“Gay,” Oswald confirms, nodding and grinning. “You claim you’re so clever, I thought you knew.”
They stare at each other across the bed, Oswald’s feet still propped in Edward’s lap, which is newly taut, bunched.
Oswald waits for the confession to change everything. His unplanned escape—if you want to get away, you have to stop trying to get away. But instead, the tension passes, and Edward shakes his head, replaces his smile, continues touching him like he won’t be blown up, he won’t get rabies. Like no one’s heart will get broken.
—
They continue to talk, this time, about murder. Eventually Ed stops massaging Oswald. The pressure gives way to a strange tenderness, he strokes in an idle, distracted way now, moving his leg hair against the grain and back. Then—his hand hikes up higher. From calf to knee, then just above. He pauses like he’s asking a question.
Their eyes lock, and Oswald’s blood speeds. “What are you doing?”
Edward leans forward, hand sliding higher. The friction burns, bruises. Lotion slicks the pathway, invisible under the flannel. “Listening,” he says, quietly. “To your lesson. That sometimes, to get somewhere in life, you have to do a little—” his mouth splits into a grin, and he barks out a little laugh, head cocked. “Sucking up. I hear you. You think I’m not taking notes, but I am.”
Then he lowers his head, presses his open mouth to Oswald’s unusually high arch.
Fire and water, repelling but necessary opposites. Oswald endures one second of that searing wet heat before kicking. The flat top of his foot (the dorsum, it’s called, things he learned only moments ago with Edward’s thumbs tracing his bones and his mouth running running running) connects with bone and flesh. Blood sprays from somewhere, hot and sudden. Edward’s sent backward with the force of impact, nearly toppling off the bed, but his hands are caught up in Oswald’s pants and the tangle keeps him teetering on the edge. Oswald curses, makes fists in his shirtfront and hauls him back to find blood pouring down his face, a black slug from nose to lips. “Shit, sorry, sorry, I didn’t—I mean, I meant to, but I didn’t…” he says, though it’s Edward’s own fault he ended up here. Oswald tried to show him, but he refused to heed his warnings.
“Well, I certainly read that situation incorrectly,” Edward says, voice thick and nasal as he drools red onto his quilt. Oswald flings himself out of bed, nearly slips on his lotiony feet, then limps to the bathroom for toilet paper. When he returns, he holds the wad awkwardly under Edward’s nose, unused to being the nurse, the caretaker. His hands shake, and he realizes he could have run, just now. He could have left Edward clutching his face, scrambled down the stairs and out into the street and never returned.
Instead, he’s here, Edward’s blood hot in his hands, sticky on his fingers. “It wasn’t a proposition,” he explains. “I was only stating a fact.” I want you, but not like that. I want you to want it. It can’t be a favor. It can’t be a gambit.
“Noted,” Ed says, coughing a spray of blood. It’s in his teeth, perforating his smile. “What a relief.”
His nose stops bleeding eventually, with his head tilted back and his throat a sharp lovely line that Oswald imagines ripping out with his teeth. He holds the bloody toilet paper to his face, and his hands shine in the light from the lotion and again and again, Oswald wishes he could kill him. It’s the second best thing to running, which he knows he won’t do. With the pretending gone, there’s only the rabies. The teeth. Snapped fingers, broken skin. The reminder that Edward never should have stood so close.
Edward’s gaze falls on Oswald’s 500-ml beaker a quarter full with cold tea, bitter lemon. “Let me refill that for you,” he says, putting the kettle back on the stove. A reset button, honey stirred in with a penguin spoon.
Oswald thinks of screaming, of running, of stabbing, of biting. He sits back on the bed and puts his feet up. They’re not sore anymore, and the absence of pain is startling. Newness a vice. “Thank you,” he says instead.