Plotless short. Germain and Beau make small talk.
Beau was sitting in the little dining room of Toothsome Delights, resting in a chair. He was dressed in a pair of borrowed pyjamas, the silk resting pleasant on his skin — he liked the texture, but he hadn’t bought any of his own to wear at home, and Germain always loaned him a pair when he came to the brothel to employ his services in grooming his wings.
He was wrapped very tightly in a duvet, a thick eiderdown that Germain always got out of one of the closets for him to use, because he got cold, and he liked the weight of it.
It was his routine to come on the first Sunday of each month, late in the evening, and Germain would bite him, leave him blissed out and insensible with his vampire’s venom, and touch his wings.
Groom them. Fix them.
He ought come more often than once a month, really — he did try to work on them a little himself, comb through the places where his feathers were clumping together or any of them were bent, set them to rights. He had never been good at looking after them, had always been oversensitive, even before —
“I won’t let you go until you finish that, you know,” said Germain, and Beau looked back to the plate in front of him. There was no butter on the toast, because Beau couldn’t well-digest dairy, but some sort of substitute, made with a nut or something like it. Beau had never asked.
It tasted nice.
“How will you hold me here if I don’t?” asked Beau. He was still hazy from Germain’s venom, although he’d slept the night through, and he was finding it difficult to concentrate, to focus on anything specific. “Will you make a citizens’ arrest?”
Germain, who was idly taking pieces of crispy bacon from his own plate — Beau couldn’t eat bacon, it made him sick — looked at Beau for a moment, then frowned.
“I suppose I’d have to tie you up,” said Germain at length, “and perhaps keep you in Mr Burlac’s office.”
Beau picked up his toast, and took a bite.
“You know I wouldn’t,” said Germain as Beau kept chewing, then swallowed. “Keep you hostage, I mean. If I did, I’d basically be giving you extra service for free. A lot of men in the world who pay a pretty penny to be tied up by men as beautiful as me, you know.”
Beau took this in, taking another bite of toast. The sound of his own chewing sounded very loud in his own ears, and for a little while the world narrowed down only to the nutty taste of the butter substitute and the sound of the toast’s crust crunching between his teeth.
“Are you beautiful?” he asked.
Germain scowled. “I’m going to choose to believe,” he said coldly, “that you don’t know how nasty you’re being.”
Beau smiled to himself, and continued to eat.
He liked Germain. He liked the brothel. He liked that when he came in, no one greeted him by name or tried to talk to him, including Mr Burlac, who was the brothel’s proprietor — if he had to wait downstairs for Germain, Ariadne, the receptionist, would silently hand him a heavy blanket, and everyone else would leave him alone.
Beau had been in brothels before, ordinarily ones that had only one vampire worker, but most of the workers here were vampires — there were two humans, half a dozen vampires not including Mr Burlac, and another angel.
The other angel made Beau uncertain. He often walked around with his wings out, and he had very beautiful wings, smaller than Beau’s were — everything about him was smaller than Beau was. He was short and slightly plump, with round cheeks and cut-short straight blond hair, and his feathers were a pale yellow colour, too wan to be called gold.
Germain had offered to invite him in to help him groom Beau’s wings before, which Beau had refused.
He liked for things to be simple, for him to walk in, be bitten, and come to some hours later with all of the ache massaged out of his shoulders and his wings all clean and groomed, and no one touching him anymore than that except perhaps for Germain stroking his hair a little.
He’d washed Beau’s hair, this morning, when Beau had taken a bath, and that had been nice. Beau didn’t like to be touched on most of his body, because it overwhelmed him too much, made him feel like all of his skin was alight with a burning sensation, too powerful, too overwhelming, but Germain stroking his hair felt nice — Germain firmly massaging his scalp with shampoo felt even better.
“Do you want me to make small talk?” asked Beau dispassionately.
“Not especially,” said Germain, “but I assume you’re asking because you want me to.”
Beau shrugged.
“Another piece of toast?”
Beau nodded, and he watched Germain’s hips sway in his silk robe as he went to put another slice of bread in the toaster. He liked the way the fabric moved in the light when Germain moved, liked how the black silk caught the light.
“I’ve never asked what you do,” said Germain.
“No,” Beau agreed.
“… I’m asking now,” said Germain pointedly.
“I’m a porter,” said Beau.
“In a hotel?”
“Yeah.”
“The Bayett Inn?”
“Yeah.”
“The owner of the Bayett is an angel,” said Germain. “Angela Moscona.”
“Yeah,” said Beau, and ate the last piece of his toast.
“You don’t like other angels?” asked Germain.
“I don’t know,” said Beau.
“Had bad experiences with other angels?”
“I suppose.”
“You’re from London?”
“Yeah.”
“How old are you?”
“Seventy-four.”
“Do you have a birthday?”
“On my ID. Third of October.”
“Is that the day you Fell?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You don’t remember Falling?”
“I fell into the Thames. Drowned, a few times, until a boat picked me out, and they took me to the hospital, and they mixed up my medical notes because my wings had folded away. They thought I was dead, so they used a defibrillator.”
Germain picked up the toast as it came out of the toaster, and Beau watched the way he buttered the bread with the nutty not-butter. His expression was quietly concentrated.
“Is that why your skin is so sensitive?”
“I don’t know,” said Beau. “I only ever remember it being this sensitive, but I can’t imagine being electrocuted helped me either way.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s hard for you to be touched,” said Germain. “Because it is necessary for you to be touched more than you like to be. Because I’m afraid your toast is slightly burned.”
“I don’t mind,” said Beau.
“To which part?”
Beau held out his plate, and Germain gave him the second piece of toast.
“What did you do in London?” asked Germain.
“I was a porter,” said Beau.
“In a hotel?”
Beau shook his head. “In a hospital. I worked for a long time as an assistant in a university, and then in a library. The university department I worked for closed down, and then they wanted more qualified librarians. And they wanted to pay for me to be qualified, but I didn’t… I’m not very good at that. Classes. Too many people.”
“Wasn’t it busy in the hospital?” asked Germain.
“Yes,” said Beau. “But I worked in the morgue.”
“You’ve lived a very funny life,” said Germain. “University, library, hospital morgue, hotel.”
“Have you done this your whole life?” asked Beau.
“Mostly,” said Germain. “I went to university, I read theology. I never wanted to be a priest — I think it was more that I wanted to be the opposite. Are you a Christian?”
“No,” said Beau. “Not anymore.”
“Is there something else you’d like to talk about?” asked Germain deliberately, quietly. He was like this, in the aftermath of grooming Beau’s wings, when Beau was still fuzzy from the venom — he asked questions, nudged Beau to ask about things.
He called it aftercare.
“Do you know the angel?” asked Beau. “The sex worker?”
“Bird? Of course. We work closely together, he and I. Have you been introduced?”
“No.”
“Would you like to be?”
“No.”
“Does he frighten you?”
Beau blinked. “No,” he said. “But I’ve seen him. He’s popular.”
“Yes.”
“He has a lot of sex.”
“We are sex workers, Beau.”
Beau nodded, pressing his lips together.
Germain’s voice was gentle, smooth, when he asked, “Do you not like sex?”
“It hurts me,” said Beau. “Being touched.”
“Would you like for it not to?” asked Germain, and Beau shuddered without wanting to, meaning to. He felt a little ill, and he put down his toast half-eaten before he shook his head.
“Can’t be fixed,” he said. “People have tried before.”
Beau wondered what Germain saw when he looked at him. He wondered if Germain could read his mind the way that it seemed, if Germain could skim the thoughts off the top of his head.
“Eat the rest of that, would you?” asked Germain.
Obediently, Beau picked his toast back up, and swallowed it down.
“Good,” murmured Germain, and began to talk about the weather.
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