They Belong Only to Themselves (Platypus Press Shorts Book 3) Read online

  They Belong

  Only to Themselves

  Brandon Taylor

  _______________________

  PLATYPUS PRESS, England

  Contents

  They Belong Only to Themselves

  About the Author

  About Platypus Press

  Colophon

  They Belong

  Only to Themselves

  THEY MET AT A POTLUCK hosted by a mutual friend. There had not been enough chairs, and so the two of them had been forced to sit along the wall while the others sat around the table, laughing and telling stories. When it got to be too difficult to keep asking the people at the table to repeat what had just been said or to explain the joke or reference, Charles and Lionel settled for each other. Lionel was trying to be a vegetarian at the time, and so he had taken a lot of the baked asparagus, some brown rice and a side of kale salad topped with bits of pepper and honey-glazed lemon. Charles had some fish and couscous that the host had made. Lionel was trying to be in love with the host, a tall, dark boy with bright brown eyes and a quick smile. There was something so gentle about Lionel then, something ready to be loved, ready to be needed. Charles was in a relationship with another of the guests, a girl named Sophie, who was petite and blonde and pretty.

  Charles squinted at Lionel’s food.

  “That’s queer food,” he said. “Really queer food.”

  “I’m vegetarian,” Lionel said, thinking also that he was queer, but he didn’t think that part warranted an explanation.

  “So you don’t like meat or—”

  “Meat is fine,” Lionel said, giving the pale, beautiful slices of fish on Charles’s plate a long gaze. “I just don’t want to eat it.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, you know—” Lionel said. He thought of the video he had seen of the cows in cages and the chickens being shot with long, terrifying needles. He thought of the long tanks that fish farms used to grow their stock, how a fish could be born longing for the sea or for a river and never see it. He thought of the cruelty of the commercial food industry, all those animals kept in tiny spaces, made to produce or else taken apart for meat, shipped all over the country in dark, cold trucks or trains, how they were born to die. He thought, with some guilt, of the sweet ecstasy of hamburgers or steak, how sublime a piece of perfectly prepared meat could be, of the deliciousness of it, the happiness it brought. He was still learning how not to want what he wanted, still perfecting the transmutation of guilt into pleasure.

  “Oh sure,” Charles said. He cut some of the fish and slid it into the mound of couscous. “Sure, I get it.” He popped the fish into his mouth and chewed, smiling with his eyes, which were dark and rimmed with thick lashes. His mouth was full and bright red, he had an olive complexion and his hair was curly.

  Lionel didn’t know what to say to that, so he chewed on the end of a stalk of asparagus. His gaze swept down Charles’s long legs to his gray socks and back. He was well-dressed but seemed comfortable in his clothes in a way that Lionel never did. The asparagus was bitter, but the butter and the garlic had taken some of the unpleasantness out of the flavor. He savored it. The conversation at the table was in a lull, and he caught Sophie looking down at them. Charles raised his foot and pressed the tip of his toes into the back of her calf, and she smiled. Lionel tried to imagine what she might have looked like as a girl, but he found it hard. There was no girlish roundness to her face. She was lean and hard-lined, like a blade that had been sharpened to its keenest edge. He tried to think of what she did. Their introductions had been brief and shallow. Was she some sort of artist? Or a teacher, maybe? He tried to remember, and furrowed his brow just as her gaze shifted to him. There was a look at first of surprise at finding a stranger seeming to frown at you, and then a look of distant amusement. She turned back to the table just as they all broke out into laughter.

  “So what do you do?” Charles asked, his voice suddenly too close and too warm against Lionel’s neck. He jumped a little, which made Charles draw nearer to him, as if something in him reflexively sought out weakness in others. He had his fork hanging from his mouth, and a look of genuine curiosity, but there in his eyes, Lionel could see it, the edge of something else, something teasing, perhaps gently malicious.

  “I’m an exam proctor,” Lionel said evenly.

  “A what?”

  “I proctor college entrance exams.”

  “Why?” Charles asked, the matter beyond him. It was a fair question, and Lionel wasn’t exactly ashamed of what he did. It was a job he did not for money but for the steadiness of having employment. His parents paid the miniscule rent for the tiny studio he had on the edge of town. They paid for his gas and his car and his food. The job was so he had a reason to get up in the morning, to push himself from this day to the next. It had been a difficult year. It had been hard to get to this place. He was not ashamed of what he did, but he found it difficult to explain without making other people uneasy or nervous around him—how to say it: I tried to kill myself. I was in a hospital for a long time trying to get well. I am not well. But they were on the floor and so were not in the company of other people exactly. He might be able to say some small part of it. Charles made him want to try.

  “Oh, you know…” Lionel began, sliding his fork around on his plate. Heat bloomed against the back of his neck. His collar felt close. His heart was going fast and hard. “I just sort of fell into it.”

  “How do you fall into that sort of job?” Charles pressed the back of his head against the wall. “I mean, how do you end up proctoring exams? Is that all you do?”

  There had been a time, yes, when Lionel did more than proctor exams. There had been a time when he didn’t spend his hours preparing to drive to the campus and sit in brightly lit rooms to hand out test papers. But that time belonged to before. It was hazy, beyond him, out there somewhere, fluttering like a gray slip of paper out of his grasp.

  “Yeah, that’s about it,” he said, and pressed his fork flat on the plate. His appetite had shrunk down to a tiny, bright heat in the pit of his stomach. He could feel it there, but it seemed so small, impossibly small. He felt he’d never be hungry again.

  “Are you pulling my leg?

  “Excuse me,” Lionel said as he got up from the floor. “I have to use the restroom.”

  “Hey,” Charles called, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean anything by it.”

  “Excuse me,” Lionel repeated. He made his way down the narrow hall, first door on his left, he was told. He went into the small, yellow bathroom and sat on the toilet lid. He pressed his palms to his eyes. There was a roaring silence in his ears, as if he’d cupped two seashells to the sides of his head. He could hear them in the other room, laughing and talking, the sounds of their conversation pleasant and indistinct. He felt as if his heart were twisting around in an open space in his chest. It seemed to him that if he focused, he could feel every fiber of muscle twitching, twisting, hitching around and around like a rubber band being wound. He went to the sink and turned on the water. He leaned to splash it up on his face. His large, pale hands fluttered beneath the stream of clear water, and he stared into the black drain. The water brought some relief from the tension inside. He wet the back of his neck and tried to breathe evenly. In and out, in and out, letting the air settle deep inside of him before he expelled it and drew more air in.

  There was a short, hard rap on the door.

  “Yes?” Lionel said. No answer. “Yes, just a second.” He ran more water into the palms of his hand and splashed it across his face.

  When he opened the door, he h
ad to look up a little. Charles stood in front of him. Because they had been sitting for so long, he had forgotten that Charles was tall, well over six-feet, with an imposing physical presence.

  “Sorry,” Lionel said. He made to make room for Charles to go by him, but Charles raised his hands to stop Lionel.

  “I’m sorry about before. I run my mouth too much sometimes,” he said. His voice was firm, but soft. “I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, it’s okay,” Lionel said. He was suddenly aware that the water he had splashed on his face made it seem like he had been crying, and this made him feel more embarrassed, ashamed. “It’s okay, really.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. I’m okay,” Lionel said. “Do you need to use the bathroom?” Lionel raised his brows, trying to hide his shame with hospitality.

  “No,” Charles said. “I came to check on you.”

  “Oh,” Lionel said.

  They stood there awkwardly for a few moments. Charles was large, not exactly muscular, just extremely tall and broad, filled in. He gave the impression of solidity and substance. Next to him—next to many people, these days especially—Lionel felt irregularly shaded. He lapsed into fiddling with the buttons of his cardigan, his eyes pointed down. He could hear Charles breathing, though hear was not quite right. It was more that he could feel the air shifting when Charles breathed, could feel the way the world changed shape to suit his body when it moved. He knew that if he looked up, Charles would be looking at him. The hallway was lit by a slender beam of light from the bathroom door, held ajar beside them, and the soft yellow light at the other end of the hall, where the others were still talking.

  “We should probably go back,” Lionel said, looking up. Charles was not looking at him, but had turned just a little and was looking at a picture hung on the wall over Lionel’s shoulder. It was a picture of their mutual friend as a child on a tricycle, head thrown back in wild laughter. Charles turned to him when he spoke, smiled, and lifted his thumb to brush away the water from Lionel’s eyelashes. The gesture was impossibly tender. His hand was warm as it brushed so closely to Lionel’s skin.

  “Okay,” Charles said. “Let’s go.”

  Lionel took his plate to the kitchen and helped himself to more asparagus, though he hadn’t finished his last helping. On a red platter there was more fish. Cod that had been baked and seasoned with lime and various herbs. He tried not to think of where the fish had come from, if it had been born in a tank at a fish farm or if it had been pulled out of a rushing river. Did cod live in the river? Or a bay? Or a lake? He tried not to think of where the fish had lived before it had been turned into their food. Even things raised in captivity deserved a private life, no matter how narrowly drawn, a time when they belonged only to themselves. It made him sad to think of the fish on the platter. But it also made him sad to think of all the times he had caught fish with his grandfather at their lakehouse. To clean a fish, you drove a nail through its head to keep it still on the board, and you severed its body. You slid your knife along its belly to pour out its guts and blood. Then the bones come out into a bucket that you dump in the woods for the coyotes and wild dogs. Scales in a glittering white froth as they come away from the body, dragging your knife back and forth to leave the skin shimmering, metallic. He had learned to clean fish one summer after another, each year a little better, until he was as good as he was going to get, as good as a grown man. But those years belonged to another life, a life of eating meat. He put some of the rice onto his plate and took it back to the dining room.

  He slid down the wall, set his plate on his knees, and began to eat. Charles had taken a seat at the table, and Sophie was on his lap. They were eating from the same plate. Lionel felt a little relieved that he didn’t have to keep making small talk with Charles. Occasionally, he felt the weight of someone’s eyes on him, but when he looked up, he found that no one was really looking at him.

  After dinner, even though it had started to snow, everyone went out into the backyard. Someone had brought a joint, and so they lit up and began to pass it around. They stood on the porch, leaned on the railing and stared out into the night. Bloated snowflakes drifted down, occasionally whirling by in a messy splatter of wet across the air.

  It wasn’t cold. The temperature held steady. Lionel sat on the floor and kept his back to the wall. He reached a hand out and caught some snow on his fingertips. The delicacy of it made him want to cry. The host squatted down next to him, and they bumped shoulders affectionately. He smelled like wine and pot, sweet and musky and a little sour. He was not attractive, but Lionel had been trying to be in love with him, with somebody, for a long time, and when the host leaned in to kiss him, he felt that it was time to let himself be loved back, that maybe it was enough to be loved even if he couldn’t love back. The kiss was brief, but it left a tingling warmth on Lionel’s lips, and everyone else ooh’ed and ah’ed at them, hooting.

  The host wrapped an arm around Lionel and Lionel rested his head against the host’s shoulder. They had come this far at least twice before, brushing up against the edge of something, teasing one another with this possibility. The host’s teeth were straight and hard and white—they had probably been very expensive. He had a great body because he worked out relentlessly and aggressively catalogued every calorie, but despite this, his body was not as impressive as Charles’s, who carried himself with so much ease that Lionel had a difficult time imagining him straining at all. But the host carried strain in every movement. There was something strenuous about him, about the way he moved through the world, and Lionel knew that if he resisted him, he’d be torn apart.

  The host brushed a kiss against Lionel’s cheek and stroked Lionel’s shoulder.

  “Do you want to stay over tonight?” The host asked, by which Lionel knew he meant do you want to fuck? But he asked it loud enough for others to hear but quiet enough to suggest that there was some seriousness to it. Lionel looked out at their faces and he wondered what they would do if he said yes.

  “Hmm,” he said instead, humming as if in thought. He knew what he would do. He knew that he would not stay because he could not yet bear the thought of sleeping with someone, and worse still was the idea that other people might know about it. But, so close to the host, his face pressing so near, and the smell of smoke in his hair, Lionel felt that he could, quite easily, say yes and let himself be pulled under.

  Charles was sitting on a stool and Sophie leaned down against his back. She had her arms wrapped around his neck, and she was watching Lionel. She was not quite smiling at him. No, not that. But there was warmth beneath her expression. In the blue light that hung over the porch, she glowed. Why was she watching him? Why was she staring at him? Charles was stroking her arm with his finger, and he seemed pleasantly content to be doing so. They were a well-matched pair, the sort of couple that knows it is well-tuned and suited. They could go on forever that way, Lionel thought, forever and ever.

  Sophie kissed the top of Charles’s head and pulled away from him. She came over to Lionel and sat down, drawing her dress across her legs as she crossed them. There was an elegance to the way she moved, as if she could do whatever she wanted with her body. She had a purple jacket on over her shoulders, and a green hat that someone had knit for her. She was very proud of it and had passed it around upon her arrival.

  “Hi,” Sophie said.

  “Hi,” Lionel said.

  “I’m sorry we didn’t get to chat during dinner.”

  “Me too.”

  “It seemed like you and Charlie were getting along,” she said, and she propped her chin on her hand. Charlie.

  “Yeah,” Lionel said. “We had a good time.”

  “He said you proctor exams?” Her expression became one of curiosity, not malicious or malignant, but brightly curious, the way you pretend to be about the lives of people you meet at parties if you’re the sort of person who is liked by other people.

  “Yeah—for the university, just a few days a week
.” Lionel tried to smile, but there was so much tension in his face, and the host who was still holding him near was starting to make him feel closed in.

  “That’s so cool.” Sophie tucked some hair behind her ear and nodded to accentuate her point. The others had begun to talk around them, and the host withdrew his arm and slid away. Lionel wrapped his arms around his knees.

  “I don’t know about cool,” he said, laughing. “But it’s something.”

  “It’s important to have something,” she said. Lionel was struck by that statement, so near to the truth, so close to the heart of things. She had said it without recognition exactly, but something like knowing passed beneath her voice and hit Lionel right in his chest.

  “It’s important to have something,” he repeated back to her dumbly, but he smiled, and she smiled. It felt as if she had tricked him into liking her more, like she had divined his moods and found the one thing that he had most needed to hear said to him. She reached out and settled a hand on his knee.

  “My something is dance,” she said. “I’ve been dancing since I was five, and it’s just the thing I need to be okay. I get it.”

  “Oh, that’s amazing. That’s incredible,” he found himself saying. Because it was. Dance was not at all like proctoring exams. Dance was art. Dance was movement. Dance was life. He could see it now, all over her. The leanness, the tautness of her body, the way she moved without expending effort at all. Of course she was a dancer. She blushed and shrugged.

  “That’s kind of you,” she said. “Actually, Charlie is also a dancer.”

  “Is he?” Lionel asked, though he knew it to be true before he even said the words. His eyes went to Charles.

  “Yes. That’s where we met.”

  “How long have you been together?”

  “Maybe eight months, something like that? I’m bad at this.” Her laugh was low and rhythmic. She crinkled her eyes and shook her head a little. Lionel was still looking at Charles over her shoulder, and Charles was looking at him.