Page 69 of By Any Means

Chary didn’t respond. Against the clatter of steel and iron, facing away, he thought maybe he could bluff that he simply hadn’t heard. The train whistle blew, distant and stuttering, and Laurie accepted his silence, accepted his unwillingness as easily as he did any other thing.

“Rest,” Laurie murmured. “We’ll be there soon.”

22

CHARY

Surprisingly—or perhaps not, to the readers of the gossip rags, or to Lawrence Tulley—Chary himself had never been to Everard’s.

The bathhouse was four infamous stories of Neo-Romanesque plaster facade and stained-glass arch windows, with a vestibule entrance. There was a tall, tin-roofed, cylindrical oriel window sticking straight up from the vestibule that was particularly phallic. Chary assumed it was probably not original. The sign was electrified for the night, the round, soot-dusted marquee bulbs spelling Everard’s Baths buzzing far over their heads. To the left, an advertisement for Everard’s Lager billowed gently on its flagpole.

Temporarily relinquishing the lead, Laurie ducked his face into his hat against the green-glass glare of the entrance lamps and pulled the door open for Chary.

“They won’t recognize me, anyway,” Chary said as he passed.

Laurie’s response was a tight smirk. “Dunno if they recognize anyone, since the Ariston raids,” he said, “but as you’re paying…” He gestured, and Chary scurried forward.

Chary paid his dollar-twenty-five—and Laurie’s—and handed over his wristlet watch and wallet and received a dressing-room key. Discreetly, he watched to see if Laurie was recognized as he did the same; but the clerk was ignorant of him, too, or else a cardsharp.

From the lobby a set of wide marble stairs took them down to the main, two-story large plunge room. Just within an adjacent hall of dressing rooms, an attendant handed them robes and white cotton shorts.

It was a specific kind of custom that visited the Everard—middle- and upper-classes, white—and if Laurie wasn’t recognized, what he did do, before the attendants and everyone else, was draw into his suit and his own certain untouchable attitude ’til it all molded to him effortlessly. Though there remained a telltale consideration of the attendant as more than wallpaper.

Chary wondered, as he turned the dressing-room latch, which was more difficult: to fit in as wealthy or as workingman—and then realized he knew himself. It was neither, both: they were equally difficult roles once one had slipped into the liminal.

Of course, for Laurie, they were roles. Eventually, Chary was going to have to choose. Perhaps sooner than later, if Tjofabier Raberding managed to make it publicly known that August was alive.

He considered the shorts. They were very short. He cinched them at his hips rather than the waist, left-shouldered the towel, and took a deep breath. What matter if you could see his ribs when he breathed?

Laurie was taking a longer deliberation of his own bathing clothes or lack of them; he wasn’t in the hall when Chary exited.

Chary folded his hands behind him. Then ahead of him. Then, feeling like a schoolboy, he put them back of him again and tried to fix his gaze ahead—on his wriggling toes—on the mosaic tile edging upon the floor⁠—

There were two pair of feet beneath the door of the dressing room at the corner. Then a pair of knees, spectacularly hairy, sank down and folded. Chary buried a flaming cheek in the hollow of his clavicle.

“Fetching,” Laurie said, and Chary startled.

Thank goodness that since his accidental voyeurism, there was no redder shade for him to achieve.

Laurie wasn’t nude, but had opted for no shorts, only the provided towel, and it was not a generously sized towel. It barely knotted at his hipbone. Chary could see the whole of his thigh, from the fading hair to the crease where he became softer and broader over his belly. The tattoo he’d shown him upon first meeting. Could see everywhere else, too. Almost.

Laurie blew out a breath. “Big leagues, huh?”

Chary found the mosaic tile again, his own curling toes. “What?”

“Never mind. I forgot you don’t follow baseball. I’d say stop looking at me like that, because this towel won’t last a minute. But if not here… where else?”

Chary looked up in time to catch Laurie smile, and another man in a suit passed into the space between them with a nod. Chary returned the nod absently. “Right.” There would be a lot of looking at Laurie. He must have been used to it. “Sorry.”

Laurie sidled over, parallel, and leaned against the green-marble wainscoting. This facet of him had thankfully more towel. “Don’t apologize. This is pretty much your nightmare, yeah?” He crossed his arms and bent his shoulders and head Chary’s way, conspiratorial.

“Possibly.” Though it felt like it shouldn’t be. Even without the intent to have… relations… one didn’t go into a bathhouse without the general expectation of being touched, being bodily near others; he’d been priming himself for it over hours.

And there wasn’t much danger of anybody trying to touch him. He had once tried the baths—not Everard’s—a little while back. He’d kept awkwardly to the wall between two spittoons, watching men come and go. In the end, he’d been ignored for what turned out to be only minutes on his watch but had felt like hours on his pride. A very small sample size, admittedly, and he had never asserted himself in any way otherwise, but…

“I don’t have a brother,” Laurie went on quietly, “but I wouldn’t want to find my sisters in the thick of it, personally.” He nodded left, to the dressing-room knees.

“Oh, Lord,” Chary said, in relief. “No.”