Release(31)

“It wasn’t you who killed me,” the Queen says.

“Oh, Katie.” Sarah begins to cry, wincing at how the tears sting her injured eyes. “I should never have got you into this. It’s my fault. It’s my stupid fault.”

“You were my home,” the Queen says, remembering the fact of it, trying, struggling to remember the feeling that had been attached to it. “You were my best friend.”

“You were mine, Katie,” Sarah says, weeping now, then she says again, “I should never have got you into this.”

The question rises in the Queen, in the spirit, twisting around the braid the two of them make together, this new third being their combination has created, the question rises and rises until it must be spoken, until it absolutely must–

“Are you to blame?” the Queen asks Sarah, and she genuinely doesn’t know.

But she will kill whoever is there to take it.





Here. Now. Again. The whole reason for the two o’clock visit in the first place. Well, not the whole reason, but the opportunities and locations were still more infrequent than most people would think, so they took them when they found them.

And it was different with Linus in so many ways.

There were their respective heights, to start – it couldn’t be ignored, so they didn’t – but it was much more easily managed than Angela’s questions would ever make it seem. “How do you keep from hitting your head? Doesn’t he just fall off sometimes?”

“You went out with Chester Wallace,” Adam would reply. “He’s almost three feet taller than you.”

“Yeah,” Angela said, “but I just looked at it as a kind of obstacle course. You jump over some parts, you duck under others, then you climb the rope at the end and everyone gets a Diet Coke.”

“What are you smiling at?” Linus whispered to him now, smiling a little himself.

“Nothing, just … what a picture we must make.”

“No pictures. Not ever.”

“I don’t want a picture–”

“Because those things never go away. We’re going to have a president one day and she’s going to be called Hayden and she’s going to have a sun tattooed on the back of her neck and she would be the best president we’ve ever had ever except on day four of her term, someone finds those pictures she took after a peace rally with that nice beardy activist who said he didn’t believe in mementos but that taking pictures ‘got him in the mood’ and he’d totally erase them later because he respected her too much.”

And here was another difference. “How do you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Concentrate on two things at once.”

Linus stretched forward awkwardly to kiss him on the lips. “I’m only concentrating on one thing, Adam.”

Compared with Enzo, sex with Linus was a whole other world. Enzo wasn’t a talker. Linus really, really was, and it turned out Adam quite liked it. The vibe was completely different, too. With Enzo, there were moments of what Adam could only describe as desperation. They had to do it, they had to get each other’s clothes off, Enzo had to get inside Adam (the few times Adam had topped Enzo, there had been no had to about it, just lengthy negotiations and a process so clinical Adam hadn’t even ended up enjoying it which, looking back, may have been Enzo’s plan all along).

But with Linus, there was always a smile. Always. Like a kiss was something enjoyably secret. Like a hand on Adam’s bottom was an almost old-fashioned advance (just like the word “bottom”). Like Linus was enlisting Adam in the funnest, funniest thing two people could do together.

It had never been funny with Enzo. Enzo was pushy, rough, assertive in a way that Adam (or Linus) never dared. He never would have stopped to ask if Adam was comfortable, never did, just assumed that Adam would get used to it, assumed Adam liked it that way. Sometimes Adam did. But sometimes it wasn’t fun at all. Sometimes the pain never stopped and Adam would close his eyes, waiting for Enzo to finish, waiting for that grunt and gasp that Enzo always did, before he collapsed around Adam’s neck, panting into his collarbone. Then he’d withdraw, two fingers holding the condom in place, which he then snapped off, threw into the bin by his bed and lay down to wait for Adam to finish himself.

Was that fair? Not Enzo’s behaviour, but Adam’s memory of it. Was it accurate? Was it hindsight rearranging things to make Adam more of the victim? He genuinely didn’t know. But when he jerked off at home, he still hated himself for picturing Enzo more often than Linus.

“You’re gone again,” Linus whispered. “I need you here.”

“Why are you whispering? We’re alone in the house, aren’t we?”

“Yeah, but…” Linus pushed gently but deeply. Adam breathed again. “Doesn’t this feel like our own little world? Our own place, just the two of us, separate not only from other people, but from existence altogether?” He pushed again. “Like time has stopped. Like it’s stopped and…”

“…and? God, that feels good.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Adam,” Linus said, just Adam’s name, putting his face into Adam’s chest, nosing around the few blond hairs that sprouted there. He kissed the space between Adam’s nipples, inhaling deeply, smelling Adam’s skin. Most of Linus’s upper body was between Adam’s rucked-up thighs, Adam’s ankles crossed against Linus’s back. Adam lowered one foot until it came up against the ridge of Linus’s butt, which – as previously mentioned – was a thing of almost punishing beauty. And something Linus shared much more democratically than Enzo ever had. Not that that was the one thing they always had to do. There were plenty of other things. Plenty. Linus was also a lot less single-minded in what he liked than Enzo ever was.