Page 100 of The Villains of Winter

James leaned in and kissed his heated ear.

“I want to know what my little artist sounds like when I’m inside of him.” He teased, entertained by his pinkening, “I want to taste my little artist in the labyrinths, in the private libraries, in the gardens, on the balconies. Is twenty hundred kisses such a trouble?”

Elliott normally responded, Pay them at they leisure, one by one.

“Rematch?” Elliott sprinted for his pride. James grinned at him as they climbed through the overgrowth, competing for who could clamber over first. They invented challenge after challenge. Elliott shoved him to the dry earth to get ahead, James wrangled himself from the thorns. A cloud of fireflies surrounded Elliott’s nest of hair as he gained the edge, leaping over the brushwood first, taking the lead. On the third rematch, James blocked him from the hedges of the Nixon Forest, winning by a millisecond. They wrestled in the fourth rematch, each trying to wrest the other in victory, laughing. Afterward, exhausted, Elliott panted. “You trained?”

“A rower needs to be agile.” James fought for breath. “I mimicked the way you run.”

Replication had always been James’s finest skill.

The obsidian gates were only a meter away on the edges of the overgrown entrance of the forest.

Elliott wrung his clothes dry, his clothes dragged through the underbrush. Pebbles scraped his back. Bark was stuck to his cheek. Elliott’s sodden tie was twisted over his shoulder, his buttoned shirt was loosened, his belt was waterlogged with lilies. His oxfords were submerged in sludge.

The pair looked like mud men.

Even soaking wet, James pressed against him until there was no inch of space left between them behind an elm. He slid his hand through Elliott’s hair to bring his mouth close.

“Elliott…? Elliott Archway?” A voice questioned behind them. All at once, the illusion was broken. There was a stark reminder that at any time they could be caught. A young man stood on the other side of the obsidian gates that encircled Æscwulf College. The men moved apart from each other. “Did you get into a mud fight?”

Elliott couldn’t possibly explain. “Sorry, I was just messing around.”

Had they been seen? James wondered in a flash of thoughts. How much of it had he witnessed? Everything? That wasn’t likely, given the mammoth breadth of the elms, and the fact that their lips hadn’t quite touched, but the thoughts bolted through James’s mind in rapid succession. How could he be so careless outside?

“Do you have the course notes for Perrineau’s lecture?” The student asked. “I’m stuck with him for the Romantics.”

“Yeah. Let me get it for you.” Elliott left to retrieve his backpack.

The young man crossed his eyes briefly over James, and James knew in that single glance that the young man recognized him. He was a freshman cabal pledge. James recognized him as well. James smiled at him. His gloriously handsome face reconstructed into pure charm as they pretended not to know each other and shook hands. “James Wilde.”

“Archie Murdock. You were with a…” Archie tilted his head and for a moment, James thought he was about to question why he was caught behind the elm with a man. Instead, Archie shook his head in disappointment as he left after he received the notes. “A liberal?”

They dried themselves in Winterthur Residence Hall. The Common Room was resplendent in exquisite Romanesque busts and finely sculpted Grecian statues, the grandeur of Æscwulf College impenetrable in magnificence, even in the humid summertime. Elliott rinsed his shirt in the sink. James toweled his hair with the lush, monogrammed WRH kitchenette cloth. The vaulted ceilings were gilded with paintings, curls of slow-burning tobacco drifted in the air as always, swelling from Cuban tobacco leaves in the adjacent parlors. Where James once stood in solitude in the dark of winter on his own in the New Year, the world was brightened before him.

There were meters of fresh snow everywhere six months earlier. In July, summer had commenced softly, leisurely.

On the vinyls, the strings of the majestic orchestra coalesced with the high sopranos and dreamy altos, choiring their summer performance that sweetly swirled through the sunlit airs. Summer in Æscwulf College was the only time everything felt bearable.

Elliott dried his ears at the sink after James.

“Have you given any thought to Governor Hollins of Michigan?” Elliott asked conversationally, trying his hand at the civic discussions James had with his fellow aides, and James hesitated. He hated very few things with Elliott, talking about politics was one of them. They differed widely in their politics.

The polemarch of Connecticut was a republican strategist, Caine Murdock. His son Archie was right. Elliott was a liberal. More than that, Elliott was a liberal apologist. He espoused liberal apologia without critical thought.

Elliott wholeheartedly, naively, believed in the current liberal leadership.

James was staunchly socialist. Congressman Pittman was as uncompromisingly socialist as he was and together, they resolutely believed in a socialist government. Governor Hollis did not. At most, Governor Hollis believed if a capitalist economy had to exist, then it must be within livable perimeters. Well regulated. Fairly distributed.

However, James believed capitalism must be eradicated in its entirety. Capitalism could not coexist with humanity. Capitalism was parasitic and exploitative by its nature.

James was at war with liberals by day, and he was embattled with conservatives at night, and what Elliott didn’t know where many of them were fucking each other and drinking cocktails right after they fucked the country.

The invented rivalry of liberals and conservatives was America’s grandest performance. All of it was propagandized—gender, race, socioeconomic class, sexuality. Liberals would sign bills that harmed the very communities they claimed to advocate for all in the name of bipartisanship and bridging the aisle when in fact, the economic detriment was in the best interest of their political sponsors who profited from inflation prices and economic exploitation.

Meanwhile, conservatives weaponized social issues to provoke citizens into mass fear and anger, manipulating their base with impunity, which then allowed for liberals to seem heroic for their strongly worded letters of dissent that weakly progressed very little. The conservative citizens bonded over their rage and fear, strengthening their base in a united front. It was mass organization. In the next era, more culture war talking points would then emerge for conservatives to raise the stakes with fresh controversy, recruiting new fellowship. Rinse. Repeat.

National tragedy. New social war. Old rules.