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Armand flew me up into the Sacre-Cœur after hours. He floated us in through the bell tower, after which we descended many dark, cobwebbed steps. Wordlessly, I went straight for the heart of the basilica. Armand followed behind me, hands deep in the pockets of his long coat to conceal his anxious fidgeting. I had barely spoken to him since we left Lestat, except to tell him where I wanted to go.
We had gone to the apartment first.
I had needed to retrieve the sack of Claudia’s diaries with the yellow dress. I also collected from around the apartment her lipstick, her rings, her pillow (which I was glad suddenly that Armand had never used), her comb and hairbrush, her bows, ribbons and hair scarves, as well as a few items of her clothing and the books she loved and had recently touched. There weren’t many items. It was only what she’d left behind before moving outside the city and what she later brought in her travel bag when she and Madeleine came to visit.
Armand did not suggest I pack my own belongings. He did take his own valise with the magnolia tree clipping, and when he thought I wasn’t paying attention, he stuffed some of my clothes into it, too. Couldn’t let me get cold or uncomfortable, even though days before, he had been content to let me burn.
“I don’t want love, I want you.”
I stared at him, at his deliberately composed posture, at the way he pronounced the words so clearly and starkly that I couldn’t possibly have misunderstood him or blocked out these words, each one falling like a stone to settle heavily at the bottom of my consciousness, impossible to fish out.
He said it in response to something I said, mostly to myself, about trying to remember the prayer that would allow one to be filled with love and grace, and wondering whether it would work on me since, for the first time, I truly believed I had run out all the love or goodness or grace inside me that was supposed to be accessory to possessing a scrap of Holy Spirit. Whether it applied to vampires—whether vampires had souls or could possess the Holy Spirit. Could someone who took revenge— who had enjoyed a true and rageful bloodlust no matter how justified (enjoyment being evidenced by the empty quiet that replaced my rage and madness)— be taken back into a state of grace and love? Or had I finally committed the blasphemy, the unforgivable sin? I had been musing aloud, as I do; I had been trying to feel something, mark this moment with a memory I could hold onto (should I choose to live; I hadn’t decided yet) before I left this cursed city. I didn’t expect Armand to give an answer. If anyone, I expected Claudia to answer me.
I stared at him.
“Do with that what you will,” he continued, shrugging without shrugging in that way he had.
“I….” I stopped, head pounding like my brain had a heart of its own. Since I had failed to kill Lestat, I had felt this pounding.
“I am very serious, Louis.”
“What if I don’t want you?”
He sighed, as if he expected me to say that and was readying himself for an argument, another round of our arguments that substituted foreplay. However, when he spoke, his voice was mild with a tone meant to appeal to my sense of reason, like his voice always was when he was talking me down or trying to redirect my attention as if I were throwing a hysterical fit— when he was acting as my handler more than he maybe ever had been my lover. Somewhere, in the shadowy part of my consciousness— a place I knew I too often ignored— an uneasy warning chord rang, the message being that Armand would never, could never, see us as equals.
What does it matter, now? I thought, responding to it for the first time. Claudia is dead.
Armand said, “You don’t have to. But you can use me. It isn’t very smart to cast aside what is useful, is it? Besides, you told him that you and I would endure together. Did you say that just to make him angry? To make him chase after you or kill me so you won’t have to?”
“No,” I said.
He nodded. “You are not a weak person. You are a survivor. Let me aid your continued survival. I am keenly interested in your survival. You don’t have to love me, Louis.”
I felt calm and cold against him again after he said this. I would not let his words in. I couldn’t even teach myself how. Some biblical passages about forgiveness and slow wrath came to mind, but they sounded far away, echoing with hollow inconsequence. Claudia is dead.
“How do you think this is gonna go?” I asked him. “Things aren’t going back to how they were before. They can’t be. I lost…” I didn’t say her name. “She’s gone. Y’all killed her. You and your coven. And Lestat. Killed my fledgling, too. You think I’m going to forgive you just because you saved the life I didn’t care about in the first place? You think I don’t know you saved me out of selfishness? I bet you didn’t even think to save Claudia. You didn’t think for a second that if you were going to save anyone on my behalf, I would want you to save Claudia because you didn’t do it on my behalf. You were only thinking about yourself.”
“Again, Louis, I’m…I can only offer my deepest contrition. It wasn’t premeditated. I only knew suddenly I couldn’t bear to watch you burn. It took all my strength. I wouldn’t have been able to save both of you. I could not prevent it.”
“Hm.” I considered again whether it would be less tedious to try and kill him now rather than continue trying to convince him not to follow me wherever I wandered, like a shadow—sometimes at my side, sometimes at my back, and sometimes pooled underfoot, but always there. He was determined to take on these self-appointed, mostly symbolic, and characteristically masochistic efforts to try and “make it up to me.” I knew his self-preservation instinct was unparalleled, and he might retaliate and kill me first if I actually tried to end him. Or he might do something worse. Masochist though he was, he was ancient and strong, and above anything else, he wanted to live.
Then again, he might have let me kill him. Sometimes, the way he looked at me, I knew he might let me.
“You hate me,” he accused in a way that was at once petulant and humoring—as if it were something I should have gotten past in the 48 hours since I decided to let him survive the massacre of his coven.
“I don’t feel much of anything about you, Armand, to be honest.”
He looked down, and his voice changed again, getting soft and timorous—almost childlike. A calculated show of heartbreak, surely.
He said, “You say that because you know it would hurt me to not be in your heart or in your thoughts.”
I could have laughed at him if I could just remember how to laugh.
“Here’s what’s going to happen.” He looked up again, eyes focusing on mine. “I’m leaving France. I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t want to be asked where I’m going or when we’re going to stop. If you’re coming, you don’t interfere and you don’t stop me.”
“Of course, Maître.”
“I’m not your fucking Maître,” I said, a crackle of anger bright as a solar flare ripping through me. “I never was. You do what you want, when you want to. You don’t get to call me that until you prove it’s real. You been lying to me. I don’t care about your reasons. Your lies took everything I’ll ever care about away from me. You have only one more time to do that, Armand. One more.”
“If I took everything, why do you still choose to live?”
And as if someone had shut a door and the force of wind had blown out what hadn’t been the sun inside me, but a candle, my anger was snuffed out. “I don’t know if I do. That’s the other thing. I haven’t decided yet.”
“I want to keep you alive.”
I shook my head. My temples throbbed. My bones felt leaden. I needed to crawl into the earth and sleep. “You don’t get to decide that.”
“I’ve decided to keep loving you. To follow you. You’ve wiped out my coven. I accept your judgment on their lives, but I cannot accept your judgment on the worth of your own. I need you to live, Louis.”
“I don’t give a fuck about what you need, Armand. You could die tomorrow, and I wouldn’t feel a thing.”
It was cruel, but it was vintage du Lac, saying true things in the cruelest way possible when feeling powerless. I didn’t feel powerless, though. I felt nothing. I must make plain that nothing had filled my body in place of the rage and madness that had previously animated my body with a strength and cunning unlike any I’d been capable of before.
I would never feel anything again. Not anger, not joy, not peace. I lived because they did not succeed in killing me, and my body, traitor to my mind’s desire, refused to die.
“I know that’s how you feel right now,” Armand persisted with patronizing heroism, all the suffering of a martyred saint on his angelic face, “and I accept that, but I’m choosing to hold out for the Louis who loves me.
“All my love just died. All my love just died.”
“You still love Lestat.”
My lips tightened in reflex with the shadow of what would have been annoyance, if I could feel anything, at the name, at the accusation. “No.”
“I saw how you looked at him. You chose to spare him.”
“I knew he was telling the truth. I wouldn’t have succeeded in killing him.”
“You spared him out of love.”
I shrugged. “If it makes you feel safer to think that, go ahead.” The lingering love inside me that Armand’s voice, his face, our memories, kept alive in spite of everything he’d done, urged me to impress upon him how unfettered and unpredictable I was now, even to myself. Whatever might come out of the alien wilderness of me, he needed to avoid it. But I had no energy to plead with him. Even delivering cruel words didn’t have the same live-wire, thrilling effect because I did not have to anticipate any retaliation from my lover (who was doing his best to convey shame and penitence, if such things were truly accessible to him). I hoped my placidity didn’t deceive him.
As if reading my mind (sometimes I forgot he could do it and so probably knew my true intent despite my cold words), he said:
“I’m going to protect you, Louis. From yourself.”
I sighed. “I don’t need that. I don’t want that. You’re wasting your time. Your life. If that’s what you wanna do, I don’t care enough to stop you, but you don’t know what it is to live free. To do what you want. Why don’t you just go and give that a try? Why don’t you just leave me alone?”
His face lit with a strange smile, something not quite sad as would be appropriate, but sharp with victory. “And you just said you don’t care about my life.”
“I don’t. I’d kill you as soon as I’d try to trust you again. It doesn’t matter to me because I’m a dead man.”
“Why don’t you teach me, then?” he said. And finally, this was enough to electrify me with a feeling undampened by the emptiness: surprise.
“What?”
“Why don’t you teach me what I should do? I don’t know where to start. I’m centuries removed from my mortal life that I don’t know anymore how to make time pass, especially with no coven to run, no laws to enforce. I don’t know who I am or who I could have been. My vampirism has no human axis on which it turns.
“But you are the most human vampire, Louis. It’s why I know that your heart is bleeding. Maybe teach me what you know, for once. I have been your mentor more than I’ve let you be mine, it’s true. I have a hard time ceding control. But I love you, Louis. And I would follow you. I would learn from you. It might give you something to do before you die, if you must. Show me how to live. Show me what you would do, where you would go if you had never been free before.”
“You know how to do all that, you just need to do it. You just don’t want to be alone.”
“I don’t,” he admitted. “And neither do you.”
“All I want is to be alone.”
“I don’t believe you, but that’s neither here nor there, Louis. I intend to follow you. You said I could. And in the meanwhile, I want to learn to see things through your eyes, and maybe you could teach me to see things through mine. Teach me how to be myself. Help me, as you say, ‘find myself.’ You did it first. It’s my turn, now, don’t you think? You said, once, that you would show me. I am at a loss, Louis. Without you, I am at a loss.”
I stared at him, not knowing what to say, where this could be coming from, why he wouldn’t just let me go.
He looked down a little meekly. “Perhaps it’s too late for me to want to learn from you now about the merits of mortal pleasures.”
“No,” I said at last. “No, it’s not.”
Was it love that made me say this? Was it pity for Armand? I remembered, as I never could truly forget, that he couldn’t help but be this way. A man with the heart of a child—a child who was repeatedly beaten into the shapes his masters saw fit; was violated, mind and body, until he molted and was reborn too many times to say he had a true face; was deprived of unpolluted comfort and affection until he could neither give it nor accept it. A boy who had been given more power than he could handle without it eating him alive and its stomach acids corroding his soul beyond recognition, beyond grace. A child who, I believed, sometimes ran up to the windows of his eyes and waved at me before, in a blink, shyly darting out of view. My Arun.
The slightest crack appeared on the surface of my heart. Maybe it had always been there. Maybe it appeared only when I remembered my promise to the child who was forever encased inside the monster that was called Armand.
“I’m so…” I started, then stopped myself. He waited watchfully, patiently. “I don’t know if this feeling will ever go away, Armand.” I dug my fist into the feeling, which was beneath my sternum, somewhere around my heart or my stomach— I couldn’t tell which. His eyes focused on where I pressed, as if he were a doctor and I his patient, and as if he could peel back my flesh with his eyes to see the ailment of my organs. Sometimes I thought he probably could. “This…hollow, yawning ache. You should know that.”
His eyes returned to mine. “If it never does, I will still be at your side, Louis.”
“Why?”
“Did you not hear me, before, my love?” I twitched my brow in question, then I remembered him saying, simply and constantly, that he loved me. He read the recognition on my face or maybe from my mind. And I do, he spoke into my mind. Let me at least love you.
I huffed a little humorously. “Okay.” The words hadn’t touched me. They probably never would.
But he smiled at me with his eyes, undeterred by my vacillating ambivalence, and echoed, “Okay.”
As we so often had, we took a walk around Paris. We didn’t speak to one another as we wandered the streets of Paris. We were saying goodbye to the city, silently. We stopped in the Place de la Concorde and I stared up at the Luxor Obelisk as the cars and carriages circled us. I thought to myself, with a melancholy attempt at indifference, how much the French had taken, both from the world and myself…how it swallowed what didn’t belong to it and froze it in beauty but held it outside of its proper place and time, presumably forever if it could get away with it. Would I ever truly leave Paris?
Let’s go to Egypt, I said. I might have said it out loud, but I didn’t truly know I’d said it until Armand answered, his eternal amusement at me present as ever, “Egypt? Very well. Of course.”
So we went.
We went many places after that. The ports of Europe and North Africa. We avoided eastern and northern Europe. Too many bad memories. I decided at last that I couldn’t avoid it, and maybe I missed it, so we went to America. Armand had never been. We did not stop in New Orleans or, indeed, anywhere in the South. I didn’t know whether it was because I didn’t want to do that to Armand or if it was because I didn’t want to do it to myself. Instead, we stayed where our boat dropped us, in New York.
Skyscrapers. He loved those. His fascination with the buildings and people of America endeared me to him all over again, every time his politely world-weary Bambi eyes would light with surprise and excitement. There were tall structures in Paris, but not so many and not for as pedestrian a purpose as for offices.
We didn’t talk much in all this time between traveling from Paris to settle in New York. Just told each other, “Look,” or made observations to one another, asked each other who we wanted to eat or how and where we should hunt. Later, we could argue without feeling it sorely, or we’d find ourselves in familiar territory, having maudlin philosophical arguments that evolved into sex. We had a lot of sex after we settled in New York.
Sex with Armand was always intense and complicated, and afterward, I’d have the feeling that he’d reached inside my mouth, pushed his long arm down my throat, and retrieved some soggy, grotesque foreign mass that I’d been unconsciously holding onto, relieving me in some indescribable way.
It lulled me into a deep sense of peace—not a peace that meant all was well, but a peace that felt like I had done all I could—had struggled against the spider’s web and now must wait in my silk cocoon and listen to the spider gently rubbing its forelegs, singing at frequencies I couldn’t hear about how delightsome my blood would taste and how nice it was that it wasn’t alone anymore in its splendid web.
Armand would hold me through the day after we’d made love as I lay on his chest, sedated temporarily from the restless, thunderous throbbing that, if he weren’t holding me, may have moved me to the curtained windows before twilight to tease the sun. Once, Armand caught me doing this. He was displeased.
If he didn’t hold me through the day, and if I weren’t contemplating teasing the sun, I would lay in my coffin and weep—loudly, if Armand were off on a day hunt.
So Armand held me, even though sometimes, quietly, I remembered with sound and color what happened, and I could scarcely stand his touch—those soft, aristocratic hands, his warm, sweet smell, his slow, powerful heartbeat. I was a rabbit in the arms of a lion, letting him lick my fur clean and into its proper place, letting him breathe me in and fantasize to himself about the terrible things he hasn’t done to me, and how good and worthy of a lion he must be to be above his instincts.
Then I’d start trembling, and he’d soothe me with susurrus sounds, stroking my hair and pressing his lips to my forehead.
I didn’t sleep well for many years.
Things were bad in the United States for colored people in the ‘50s. I tried not to care. Human affairs and all. We vampires should stay to ourselves anyway, was Armand’s refrain, but I could tell it annoyed him, too, especially when it wouldn’t be prudent to kill or mindfuck the people whose jobs and pleasures it was to deny us access to certain nightclubs, bars, and theaters, or when we’d encounter transplants from the South who expected us to step into the street if they were walking our way on the sidewalk. I was almost glad that he finally understood why I was built the way I was. Of course, he had experienced abuse because of his race in Europe, but America was a whole other beast that didn’t pretend that its bloodlust was strictly about class.
Sometimes, we listened together to the radio as it played, and he wouldn’t pretend not to be.
He would watch me as tears tracked down my face as Billie Holiday crooned about Strange Fruit or when I read in the paper about yet another gruesome lynching, and when my silent tears broke into weeping, he would stand and press my face into his abdomen, nearly smothering me.
“Calm now, Louis. You’re safe. What have I said? I’m here to protect you. You don’t have to fear. You are strong now. The past is over now.”
“You…” I’d protest and try to lift my head, to raise my burning eyes to his, but he held me fast even as I began to struggle, shoving his hips, then clawing at his back, but he was like a wall. “You! You did this.”
“How could I have done this, Louis?”
Claudia is dead. Claudia is dead.
“I couldn’t prevent it, Louis. I could not prevent it.”
“I hate it here. I hate you.”
“No, you don’t.”
When I’d calmed, he’d take the newspaper and tuck it away somewhere to burn later, or he’d turn off the radio, and then he’d start preparing me for coffin, ignoring my protests that I wasn’t tired. Usually, I was too distraught or exhausted to stop him from putting me to rest, but sometimes I’d bolt out of our apartment and walk the streets until dawn, pretending I didn’t feel him watching as I stalked someone only to let them go.
“Louis, dear…” he said, one day as we smoked on a bench. Our bench.
“Hm?”
“We should make a game.” His French accent was shifting in favor of English inflections. I wondered why he didn’t try for American ones, but then I didn’t have to wonder.
“A game? What sort of game?”
“A game where we hunt and share our victims.”
“How come? Less blood if we always share.”
“Not necessarily. I don’t need the blood as often, but I do miss the hunt. And I miss seeing you feast, if you don’t mind my saying so. You’re so beautiful with that gleam in your eye.”
“That’s the game? You and me trapping some unfortunate so you can watch me gorge on his blood?”
“And. I want to help you with your art capitalist games. I think you’re good at it, and I want to see how you see.”
“Mm.”
“I won’t get bored.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You were thinking it. And I will eventually understand if you explain it to me, Louis.”
“First of all, get up out of my head,” I chuckled.
“I want to do things together.”
“We do things together.”
“Not enough. I want to be a partner in your business schemes. I want to support you.”
“You do,” I said, sidling a little closer to him. “You do.”
“You don’t even feel that is true.”
“I do. You’re bad at reading me. I know you love and support me. I appreciate it.”
Appreciate it, I privately scolded myself. Like he was my bellhop. Like he offered me a light. I knew my tone wasn’t convincing either, but I couldn’t figure out how to change it.
“And I want to have fun together.”
He was looking at me.
I stared at his long, lean legs.
“I don’t know how to have fun anymore,” I offered in weak protest. “That was always other people’s strong suit anyway.”
“I can help you relearn.”
“Well, I’m not saying no. I miss having fun with you, too. It’s been a while, hasn’t it, love?”
I’m sure he could tell, though my voice was soft and I was trying my best to express warmth to my attentive, loving Arun, that my words had a scooped-out quality to them. Yet, he didn’t comment on it, only moved closer to me and wound his forearm around mine and interlocked our fingers between our bodies. Almost hidden, but anyone looking hard enough could tell. Well, Armand could probably make them forget. I didn’t care if we were seen. Armand’s presence was a comfort to me, whether I wanted it to be or not… whether the warning chord reminding me of his patronizing, benevolent power rang within me or not.
“Tell me about the paintings in our apartment on Tenth Avenue,” Armand requested softly. Finally, I looked up into his wide, sunset eyes and couldn’t help but agree to play hide and seek with Arun, who sat lonely and bored in the window of his pupil.
“Alright. Which piece?”
“I don’t understand any of them. You know I don’t have your eye,” he pretended to pout, almost petulant.
I smiled, and it almost warmed my soul. “Well…. Shall we go there, so I can explain them to you?”
He nodded and lay his cheek on my shoulder. “Yes, thank you, Louis.” I pressed a kiss upon the crown of his head and breathed in the sweet blood and amber smell of the roots of his raven-black hair.
“You makin’ the mortals ignore us?”
“Yes,” he said, softly.
“Don’t tire yourself out.”
“I needed your affection for a moment.”
“Well, you got it.”
“Do you think you can love me again, Louis?”
He’d said it so abruptly that I struggled for a moment to find my tongue. At last, I huffed with amusement and admitted out loud for the first time since Madeleine had done it for me, “I do love you.”
He lifted his head to stare at me with that inscrutable gaze he got when he wasn’t expecting something. “Really?”
I almost laughed. “Yeah.”
“But then….” He pressed his lips together and lay his cheek on my shoulder again. After a moment, he whispered, “Thank you.” I squeezed his hand. He pulled my hand into his coat pocket.
“If I didn’t love you some way, one of us would definitely be dead by now.”
“You told me not to find myself at the coven after curfew. Would you have done it after that if you didn’t tell Lestat you and I would endure forever?”
“That wasn’t just for saving my life. And I don’t care what I told Lestat. Not really. What he don’t know can still piss him off.”
“Then what was it for?”
“For being yourself, always fretting over me. Maybe it was your voice in my head. Maybe you made me falter with your little mind games. I don’t know. But I got a habit for men who can’t do me right.”
“I try to be the man you need, Louis.”
“I don’t need anything. You keep me going whether I want to or not. That’s enough.”
“Is that resentment I detect?”
“A little bit. Death’s chariot keeps tempting me to go for a ride, and you keep shooing him away.”
“Don’t joke like that,” he said sternly. “You know I can’t bear the idea.”
You’re just afraid of being alone, I thought, but kept it to myself.
“I won’t leave you,” I told Arun.
His small lips, like a baby bird’s beak, I always thought, quirked at the corners, and his wide, believing eyes took on that warmer, toastier hue as he took in a sharp, excited breath and placed his soft, coveting hands on either side of my face. The word I read in his momentarily unguarded mind was simple and greedy. Mine. And then he was kissing me voraciously while pretending not to be voracious—desperate, quick, open-mouthed pecks as he arched his spine to mold against my body, offering himself to me as if I could gather him up and swallow him whole. I did the next best thing, which was to kiss him back and clench my fist in the hair above his nape. He gasped ecstatically into my mouth, inhaling my breath before I’d expelled it.
“I love you,” he moaned, and for once, I didn’t suspect even for a second that he was performing as he did it. It was too broken, too hoarse, too rushed a sound. “I worship you. You won’t leave me? Never, Maître?”
My heart broke for him. “Never, Arun.”
He sobbed, and he moved like he wanted to go into my embrace, but I held him tautly at a distance by his hair, studying his face, as it fascinated me so, whenever he actually was out of control of himself. I needed to learn the look of it, the sound of it. This was the first time we’d used our terms of trust since before.
“I’ve disappointed you,” he whispered.
“It’s…” I started, then stopped. Lying was forbidden in these moments. “I understand,” I said instead.
“You’ll never forgive me, but I’ll try to make it up to you.”
“I’ll let you. You don’t need my forgiveness for me to love you, though. Okay?”
He whimpered and nodded stiffly. Finally, I released him, and he flung his arms around my neck and kissed my face. “Maître, Maître, Maître, thank you. I love you.”
“I love you, too. Sweet boy. My Arun.”
“Yours, please,” he hiccuped.
“Okay.”
“I missed you,” Arun whispered.
“You never lost me.”
“I did. You were somewhere I couldn’t reach. On the shelf. And no matter how high were the ladders I found to stand on, I couldn’t reach you.”
“Is that right?”
“Never do that again.”
“Don’t get snippy with me. You were out of line. Way the hell out of line.”
He let out a little sulky whine, so I rubbed his back to comfort the child inside.
“You can’t expect me to be what you need all the time if you can’t control yourself—if you’re not talking to me when it matters and letting me have a say in how we do things. You fucked up. But I’ll try if you try. If we’re in this, it’s as you said: we gotta do it together.”
He nodded and clung tighter to me. The feel of him in my arms really did put me in mind of a long-limbed child, and I couldn’t help but feel tenderly toward him in spite of it all.
“Brat,” I reprimanded him with more affection than irritation. “What am I gonna do with you?”
“You can whip me,” he suggested matter-of-factly, a little breathily. “You’re handy with a cane, now. I’d take it nightly, and never complain—”
“No,” I said firmly, as of yet unwilling to use the language of our sexual games for genuine punishments.
His hand caressed my neck, and my earlobe was between his teeth before he whispered. “...You can have me however you want. Whenever you think of the matinee. You could even open me up with a knife and….”
I turned my head away, a flashbang of anger lighting up long-dormant dark sides of me, but I tried to speak levelly because I knew he didn’t understand how someone wouldn’t want to fuck him hard, mean, and dirty without tenderness or collaboration. He would never understand this. He thought it was every man’s secret desire to spill into a puppet who could cry and plead but not fight him off.
“I don’t need bargaining. Like I said: you won’t make up for it. No use in trying like that. You’re making me think you don’t understand.”
“No, I do,” he said, quickly, clinging yet tighter. “Forgive me, Maître.”
“I just meant… you’re a little bundle of trouble when you wanna be, aren’t you?”
“I didn’t mean to be. I felt cornered, so I was cowardly. I know I betrayed you. Please, just punish me so we don’t have to speak of it again.”
“That’s not how this works. Not this time.”
“Then what? What do I have to do?”
“I already told you. You already said it. We gotta work together.” I pushed him back by his shoulders so I could look him in the eyes, though I still soothed him with gentle squeezes. “You gotta stop being a controlling little brat and tell me if you got a problem. Don’t wait till it’s out of your hands. Like I said before, you do that again, we’re done. How’m I supposed to be your lover or your Maître or your anything if you don’t give me the foundational respect that comes with that? Hm?”
“I understand. I was immature,” he said, staring at my mouth because he couldn’t meet my eyes. “Centuries of coven-life stunted me in some ways. I’m learning to trust, Louis. I am. I’ll show you if you give me the chance.”
“Good. Then I will.”
“I know I’ve ruined everything.”
“Yeah. But now we’re building something new, I guess, so it doesn’t have to matter all the time.”
“So you’re never going to punish me?” he asked with an undercurrent of indignation. He took violent offense at the notion. He’d waited all this time, and in his framework of wrongdoing, if a painful or tedious punishment wasn’t appropriate, death or banishment would have to do, but I was offering neither. He’d been patient and humble, and yet here I was, comforting and talking to Arun again, and there I was, sharing a home and memories with and offering companionship to Armand as if I never intended to address his sins.
“This is your punishment, Armand," I informed him gently. I caressed his cheek and raked his hair back from his high, noble forehead. “You will burn in guilt and witness me suffering, knowing you are the cause. I will have good days and bad days. And you will love me, and I’ll love you, but I’ll always remember, and you will never replace the family I had in Claudia. And I know, Arun, that you will resent that most of all. But it’s true. No matter how I love you, you effectively slew your sister, and I will never forget. And neither will you.”
“I could not prevent it,” he whispered.
“No, Arun.”
“I couldn’t,” he said, eyes reddening with tears. I waited until the first one slid down his cheek before I said slowly:
“I hear you. But I don’t care. Claudia is dead. You were coven leader. You were her keeper. My keeper. You failed. You will not fail again, hm?”
He stared at me as though in shock, trembling very slightly as if from the cold he couldn’t feel.
“Will you?” I asked patiently.
His mouth twitched with an emotion too quick to name. Disdain? Joy? Satisfaction? Pain?
“I will not fail you again. I will be your keeper, Maître.”
“Vow it.”
“I vow to prioritize your interests over mine. Until my death or as long as you will let me.”
“Hm. You taking this seriously?” He gave a solemn nod. “Alright then. That’s that. We’re formally proceeding. You happy, Arun?”
“What kind of question is that, Maître?”
“The kind you say yes to, because I’m doing this for you. You don’t like your gift?”
“I do,” he said quickly. “Does it mean you’ll never abandon me or order me to leave you?”
“So long as you never betray me again.”
“I will hang myself for a hundred years if I do.”
“No need. I’ll take your head off.”
He grinned suddenly, and it terrified me, but then he was kissing me, and it felt right. The thrum of excitement he felt reverberated through me, becoming my own. I was happy to talk to him about the paintings I’d collected. I was happy to bring him closer.