Page 103 of By Any Means

“Yes.”

“However,” Laurie said, with a dramatic pause, “those aren’t what you are to me.”

“No?”

“My love,” Laurie said patiently, “there’s nothing worse than to have to let down the one you love.”

Chary inhaled. “What?”

“That’s what I was too coward to say. Did you have it right?”

Laurie’s thumb pushed open Chary’s slack, stunned jaw, to make his mouth drop open just a very little, so as to draw forth secrets. Truths. Hopes.

“Yes,” Chary said. “But only in my most fantastic dreams.”

Laurie laughed. It was kind and soft and a little shaky.

“You can’t love me,” Chary protested. “We’re…”

Opposites. You don’t know the truth about me. You think I’m someone else.

“…hardly acquainted,” he tried.

“Too bad. Too late. Don’t care.” Laurie’s thumb moved back and forth, his eyes wide and intent upon it. “I have fallen in love with you, Chary Wright. There’s nothing I want more than to give you everything I possibly can. That I can’t give you this… it’s not fair,” he growled, “because I desperately want to give you the world and you to love me back for it.”

I would anyway, Chary thought. In fact, I’m afraid I do. Very much so.

He didn’t say it. Laurie didn’t really give him a chance, anyway. He leaned up and kissed him: open-mouthed, sweet, scared. Chary returned it, and they fell into each other, stumbling, as uncoordinated as they’d ever been together—neither was willing to yield his want, even with nothing to fight for but to be closer, with nowhere to go. They hit the cellar wall with a thud, Laurie’s shoulders solid up against the plaster.

August was right. He must tell him. He must. Laurie couldn’t love him and not know who he was; otherwise he’d be loving someone else. Someone who didn’t exist.

Chary was obliged to extricate himself, leave Laurie panting into his neck.

“You can’t love me,” he said. He felt again like weeping but wouldn’t; without the anger prodding it, his sorrow was toothless.

“Says who?”

“You did. In March.”

Laurie scoffed. “That was an excuse. Thin as newsprint.”

“But it was correct. We’re opposites. We have no business being together. I have no business letting you love me. It is fundamentally inequal.”

“No,” Laurie said slowly, “no longer. I didn’t see it at first, but you’re different⁠—”

“No,” Chary interrupted. “I’m not.” He took a deep breath. “I have to be honest now. I am precisely one of those privileged men you despise. I always have been.”

“But I knew⁠—”

“I’ve never known anything different. Not at any point. Ask me how long my own brother was on the streets, selling his body, before I found him.”

“What? How is that⁠—”

“The whole tapestry. Every thread, Laurie. Twenty-one years.”

Laurie’s eyes met his, startled.

“Twenty years?” he said. “He can’t be old enough…” He inhaled. A pause. “He killed… August Wright.”