An Unseen Attraction (Sins of the Cities, #1)

by K.J. Charles

Look me in the eyes, boy! had been a constant refrain at school, but they said the eyes were the windows to the soul, and Clem didn’t feel comfortable peering into people’s windows.

Mr. Green shouldn’t be working so late. He’d hurt his eyes doing that in the gaslight, his brown-green eyes the colour of spring woodland pierced by sunlight under the thick glass of his wire-rimmed spectacles. Clem didn’t object to looking into Mr. Green’s eyes at all.

It wasn’t Clem’s favourite thing about him, but only because of the stiff competition.

“I’ve lived in lodging houses for ten years,” said Mr. Green. “If making one feel homely isn’t a skill, it’s a rare and precious gift.”

Londoners took a perverse pride in the “particulars” of yellow, blinding fog; Clem had been raised in the countryside, where you could breathe.

Clem watched his face. It was easier to concentrate on his words that way, and also, it meant he was watching Mr. Green’s face. That was not a hardship.

Mr. Green waited as Clem looked around, silent unless asked something, letting Clem look at his own pace, and as he took it in he began to understand. It was a shop of dead things, undeniably, but of life too, in all its variety, preserved with respect, presented for admiration or for consideration.

“Each man to his own taste,” Mr. Green observed. “But, speaking for myself, I’d call that an abomination.”

Fortunately, it would be easier to get round the Cape of Good Hope in a dinghy than to get round Polly, who made up for Clem’s good nature with an eye so chilly it could keep Rowley’s raw materials preserved for weeks.

He had made a careful, patient study of his landlord over the months of their acquaintance, but Clem was not a man you could read like a book, or if you could, the book was in an unfamiliar typeface, with no page numbers.

Ordinary birds are beautiful too, he’d said, and Rowley could only nod.

As if the world needed more people like all the people it already had.

“So will you come?” “I’d love to.” Clem’s smile broke out, and the sodden brown garden seemed a little more springlike.

“Most people,” Clem said carefully, “most people think that I shouldn’t make a fuss.” “Most people think that nobody should make a fuss until it’s their own comfort at stake, at which point they will bring the roof down shrieking about it.”

“My friends said I should tell you that I’m very bad at taking hints. They thought I should be sure to let you know that.”

“It’s not you,” Clem said. “I just…forgot to breathe. Don’t laugh.” “Forgot to breathe?” “Don’t. It’s hard to get everything right at once. I’m not very good at that. Please don’t laugh.”

Rowley had never been kissed like this in his life. It felt as though Clem was learning his mouth, applying that dogged determination to get it right, agonisingly slow. It crossed Rowley’s mind that every part of lovemaking with Clem might be this slow, every inch of skin needing to be thoroughly explored and committed to memory. It might take weeks of patient waiting, and blood rushed to his groin so hard at that realisation that his knees almost buckled.

“I wish I had your fingers,” Clem said on a breath. “As your own?” Rowley asked. “Or”—he gave a bright glance up—“for your benefit? Because you are absolutely welcome to the latter.” Clem wasn’t quite sure what that meant for a second, and then all became clear. “Oh!”

“And…perhaps a cup of tea, afterward? That’s a hint, to be clear. I’m rather hoping for more than tea.” “Yes, I thought you probably were,” Clem said. “Don’t worry. I’ll make sure I have biscuits.” Rowley opened his mouth, caught Clem’s eye, and went off into such a fit of laughter that he almost dropped the canary.

“But if they did, if you had lenses to make things come into focus—that’s it, isn’t it?” Rowley went on. “Something’s out of focus. It’s not you any more or less than my eyes are me. And just as without my spectacles everything is blurred, for you it’s…?” “Loud,” Clem said. “Confusing.”

Clem ran a hand over the length and Rowley—no other word for it—squealed. “Oh, I’m sorry,” Clem said, grinning. “Was that unhelpful?” Rowley mumbled something incoherent.

“Oh God,” Rowley managed at last. “Oh God. That. You.” “You looked wonderful,” Clem told him. “I felt wonderful. Don’t ever wish you had anyone else’s hands again in your life.”

“Probably drunk in a ditch,” Polly said. “Or dead in one.” “Yes, but what do I do about that if he is?” Clem demanded. “At that point there’s not a lot of remedy,” Rowley put in. “Why should you have to do anything? You’re to give him accommodation, not be his keeper, isn’t that right?”

So he asked every landlord, landlady, and potboy he came across if they’d seen Mr. Lugtrout, who turned out to be known by the soubriquet “Parson Gin.”

Rowley was absurdly aware of Clem’s elbow crooked around his own biceps, and the prospect of an hour together heated his blood against the icy chill. Just kissing, he thought, unless Clem very much wanted more, just an intimate hour together, just letting the tentative, glorious new reality settle into its right place like feathers on a skin.

Clem could stand up for himself when he had to, he wasn’t a doormat, but arguments were too fast and loud and confusing, and the counterarguments never seemed apparent until he thought about it later, and then he felt stupid for failing to make them at the time.

“Don’t you dare tell me it doesn’t matter or I’ll…I’ll fill your room with comical rat mounts.” Clem spluttered with unexpected laughter. “You’ll what?” “I’m not very good at threats. You might tell me what happened, so I don’t have to think up something more elaborate.”

The pace ebbed, to something no less hungry but deeper, like the slow thump of a great animal’s heartbeat.

Clem didn’t ask for anything. He was rapidly developing a taste for making Rowley hard and then making him wait, and because he was Clem, he applied himself to it to the exclusion of all else. Rowley was almost sobbing, from frustration and the breath-stopping pleasure of having Clem play as he chose with him, by the time the Flying Starlings emerged.

“I am on my own ground!” Rowley shouted. He could imagine what he looked like, with firelight dancing off his spectacles and scalpels shining in his hand. “ ’I am surrounded by the trophies of my art, and my tools is very handy.’ ” He jabbed with the scraping blade as the arsonist made a movement, and amazingly, gloriously, the man recoiled. “ ’I like my art, and I know how to exercise my art,’ and I will stuff you and mount you and put you in a case, you fucking bastard!”

“Thank you,” Rowley managed. “And for—God, for everything. For saving my life. I thought I was going to die. I really thought—and you came, and you were wonderful.” His voice cracked. “I had to play rugby at school for years.” Clem took Rowley’s shirt from his tense hands. “Imagine that coming in useful, after all this time. I hated it, but the games master said he’d teach me to tackle if he died in the attempt.” “I should write and thank him.” “You can’t. He died.” Rowley choked. “Really?” Clem grinned. “No, you idiot.”

He’d learned, after a while, to be ever-cheerful, helpful, pliable, and uncomplaining, a good sport who could take a joke, or ten, or fifty, at his expense, because the alternative to humiliating misery had been humiliating misery with violence.

“I hope I won’t offend you if I say your father sounds like a heap of shit,” Rowley said. “And I say that as a man whose father hanged for murder.”

It was so intimate, it stopped Clem’s breath. To be together, to hold each other, to have his arm draped over Rowley’s hip and Rowley’s quiet intensity by his side.

He lived with it, as he lived with a number of things he didn’t like, because there was no alternative. But there was something about the way Rowley’s eyes had widened and his mouth had tensed. Clem wasn’t marvellous at reading faces, but he could tell anger when he saw it. Anger on his behalf, anger over things Clem couldn’t be angry about because he couldn’t take the risk. He’d spent his life carefully not looking into an abyss of rage like the pit of hellfire he’d so often been told awaited pagans, because if he ever really looked, he feared he might be angry forever.

Clem hunched over to bring his face close, spoke low. “So if I told you, I’d like you to suck me, and not touch you till I’d done…would you like that?” “Mmm.” “Only, it sounds awfully like me telling you what to do, and you just having to take it. I feel as though I’d be using you for my own pleasure, and not doing anything about you, and you’d have to wait for ages.” “Mmm.” That came out rather high-pitched. “Oh, well,” Clem said, straightening up. “Life is hard.”

He lay, gasping and exhausted, and felt Clem press a kiss on his hip. “Was that good?” “I think the doctors are right,” Rowley rasped. “It does drain your vital energies.”

“I don’t give a monkey’s nuts who’s the heir to a sodding earldom. I’m not a sideshow to your family melodrama. And if that’s the important part of this to you, I don’t even know what to say.”

“Gosh,” Clem said, for lack of anything else to contribute.

“I suppose he regretted it quickly. I’ve no personal experience, but I can’t imagine that a wedding night with a devout virgin was entertaining for anyone.” “God.”

“You’re trying to kill me,” Rowley said. “I knew you were angry and now you’re trying to kill me. Oh Jesus.”

“God. What are you doing? I mean, please do it, but what is it?”

‘What matter to me if their star is a world? Mine has opened its soul to me; therefore I love it.’

The ginger biscuits were not long in coming, and Clem was pleased to see their restorative effect. He wasn’t sure what Polly put into them, and nor was anyone else; there were women up and down Wilderness Row formally Not Speaking to her because she refused to give out the recipe.

Have the last biscuit.” “That’s yours. I’ve had two already.” “And you can have the third one,” Clem said. “That’s how much I love you, Rowley Green.” “Greater love hath no man than he share the last ginger biscuit.” Rowley took it, broke it in half, and offered one part to Clem. “I love you too, but I’m only human.”

“All this hurting people,” Rowley said. “Well, do what comes naturally, I say. Why don’t you fuck off before I skin you out through the mouth?”

“Will you stay with me? Tonight, I mean.” “I’ll stay as long as you want me,” Rowley said. “However long that is. There’s nowhere else in the world I want to be while you want me to be here.” “That might be a very long time,” Clem said. “If you leave it up to me, it might not be far from always.” “Well, you know me.” Rowley looked up at him with the faintest shadow of a smile. “I like to wait.”

But at least he was alone with Rowley. At least Rowley could hold him and tell him he was safe, and wonderful, and beloved. It was all they had against the darkness, and maybe it was enough.

In fact, when he thought about it, the client he loathed most at any given time was whichever one was sitting in front of him.

Lazarus gave a kind and patient smile that belonged on his face much as a spider belonged on an iced cake.