not afraid,” Billy said. He let Cody take his hit, got the joint back, filled his lungs again.
“Well, if you were afraid, you'd have no reason to be,” Cody said. “This is just love, Mr. Will. This is just what you nose around for every day of your life. It only means good things about you.”
“I think—” Billy said. “Listen, I should go.” He gave the joint back to Cody.
“So soon?”
“Yeah. Well, I could say something really ridiculous like I just remembered I was supposed to meet someone, but really—” He hoped to be loved for his honesty. He was a good and kindly boy who still knew the limits of what should be allowed. Cody, a sweet fatherly man, would love him for everything he decided not to do. The air was full of shade and unsteady light.
“Listen, really—” Billy said, and his voice sounded remote, as if it were coming from another boy who stood in another room. He watched Cody put the joint in the ashtray and move closer to him. He felt Cody's hand settle, gently, on his shoulders. There was the woody smell. There were the faint clickings. Billy wanted and didn't want.
“All's well, child,” Cody said. “Don't you worry. This is goodness here, every bit of it.”
Cody's hands moved down Billy's spine and then Billy was on the other side of something. Then something was happening and even if Billy pulled away and ran from the apartment it would still have happened. He was on the other side and with a terrible sense of relief he let Cody unbutton his shirt. He felt, briefly, as calm and entitled as a child being undressed for bed.
“Lovely,” Cody whispered. “You're a lovely boy and that's a fine thing, to be thin and pretty like you are.”
Billy let the word roll around in him. Pretty. He put his fingers on the top button of Cody's shirt and with a rush of exhilaration he opened it. There was a new patch of Cody's skin, brown, speckled with black hair. Billy could not believe he had permission to do this. Blood hammered in his skull and a part of him floated up and watched, exultant, terrified, as his hands moved down the buttons of Cody's shirt. Cody's shirt hung open. Billy could see the soft muscles of his chest, the furred mound of his stomach. Billy careened between squeamish desire and a hot, howling embarrassment.
“Come here,” Cody said. “Come over here.” He led Billy to a mattress covered with pillows, and there he took Billy's shirt off with steady, almost clinical certainty, as if he, Cody, was a doctor and the shirt was doing Billy some slow undetectable harm. “Now lie down,” Cody said.
“I—;”
“Shh.” Cody put a thick brown finger to his lips. Billy obeyed. All he had to do was not say no. Candlelight moved across the tapestries like a breeze. He felt Cody unlacing his shoes. Suddenly, Billy needed to speak. Suddenly he believed that if he didn't hear his own voice in the room he'd lose himself. He'd disappear into the nowhere that hovered around the edges of the world.
“Listen, Cody,” he said, and his voice was small in the dusky air. “I don't think I want to do this, I mean, I think I'd better go.”
“You don't want to go,” Cody said. “That's just your voice talking.”
Billy was filled with rage. He could have kicked Cody—Cody's intent, lined face was bent over the toe of his shoe—and jumped up screaming, 'Don't tell me what I want.'
He didn't move. His own rage rose hotly to the surface of his skin and then turned into something else, something unfamiliar. Anger and desire and fear were so intertwined in him he couldn't tell one from the other. He lay quietly under the combined weight of them as Cody, with a soft grunt of effort, took his boots off and set them on the floor. As Billy watched his boots being set aside like that he thought, quickly and not fearfully, of his own death.
“I—” he said, and he said no more than that. As urgently as he had needed to speak he now needed to be quiet, to slip in among the pillows and tapestries and the jar of peacock feathers that winked in the semi-dark. He joined the room and anything could happen to him. Everything was all right.
Tenderly, but with the same clinical sureness, Cody opened the buttons of Billy's pants and pulled them off. Billy