They walked up the street together, the three of them.
The sky was iridescent with cold. Out to their right, a shelf of white steam from the industrial park and the last of the academic buildings giving way to retail space and a few scraggly houses where the undergrads lived. To the left, the botanical gardens, Bascom’s high hill.
Lionel hung back a little behind Sophie and Charles. They were talking about the rehearsal again. Sophie seemed kinder about it now. She listened to Charles with narrowed eyes.
“It could be good for me,” Charles said. “Like, really good.”
“Sure,” Sophie said. Their shoes scraped over the dry sidewalk. No trace of snow or ice here. The branches hanging over the sidewalk moved in the breeze from the cars.
“I’m not being a bitch. I really mean it.”
“Whatever, Sophie.”
“Tell me about the piece.”
“I really don’t feel like hearing you make fun of it,” he said quietly. “It’s embarrassing.”
“If you’re embarrassed, it’s not because I made fun of it—not that I did. I mean, I said nothing about it, Charlie.”
Charles grunted. Lionel felt a pang of sympathy for him. There were a million tiny ways to make someone feel bad about something that didn’t involve saying anything directly.
“Come on,” Sophie said. She pulled on Charles’s arm, but he wouldn’t budge. They were passing into downtown proper then. Instead of going directly across East Campus Mall, Sophie wanted them go through the archways at the liberal arts building. Into its slanted catacombs. She pulled Charles, and while he continued to resist her, he shifted his hips slightly, pointing himself in her direction. Lionel followed, wondering still why he had let Sophie convince him that it was a good idea that he go back to her place for dinner.
She had said to him, upon leaving the café, Don’t make it weird! It’ll be weird if you leave now. Charles had said nothing, had not looked at Lionel as they went down the stairs outside and into the snowy quad. Evening was rapidly closing in on them, and because Lionel didn’t want to make it weird, didn’t have anywhere else to be, he had walked with them without saying he’d follow them all the way. He had said yes only in action, reserving the right to change his mind and vanish while they were distracted.
The liberal arts building was a pyramid of nested concrete rectangles connected by an interior set of stairs rising at steep angles, as if meant to discourage a siege by unruly masses. It posed an accessibility nightmare. In the summer, students used the steep interior walls for ramps, leaping up on the railings with their skateboards and bikes. People roamed the outside layers, setting up picnics in the shade of the buildings while they watched swallows and gulls shoot from terrace to terrace.
Charles squared his shoulders to the wind that funneled down onto them. Sophie jumped up against the steep wall and walked it tightrope style, her arms out for balance, going a ways up until she had to turn back, stuttering down like a windup toy going over a patch of concrete. She darted between columns, her voice doubling, echoing, bounding back to them. Charles had hung back and Lionel caught up to him.
“Did you really have an okay morning?” Lionel asked.
Charles regarded him carefully, his curls hanging down to the bridge of his nose. Charles wore a black puffer coat, from which the sharp end of a feather poked out near the collar. Lionel felt an urge to pluck it out, but he knew that if he did there would only be another feather, and another. Once you started pulling, the whole coat came undone.
“It was all right,” Charles said. “I was late. Got chewed out a little.”
Lionel blushed—Charles had been late because of him, and he knew that. A flicker of a smile at the corner of his lips, and Lionel looked away, toward Sophie. She was visible between two stone pillars in the center of the courtyard. She was spinning in a slow circle.
“I feel bad about that,” Lionel said.
“Oh, yeah? What’re you going to do about it?”
“What do you mean?”
“You feel bad, don’t you? What are you going to do to make it up to me?” Charles puffed out his chest and looked at Lionel rather expectantly.
“What do you want?” Lionel asked.
“You tell me.”
They had fully caught up to Sophie then, but they were looking at each other, Lionel with a mildly horrified expression and Charles looking smug.
“Be nice, Charlie,” Sophie said. And Charles looked at her, slow, molten heat.
“I am nice. I’m the nicest fucking person in the world,” he said. “Aren’t I, Lionel?”
Lionel tried to shrug off his discomfort. “No. You’re not.”
Sophie let out an Ooh. Her mouth made a perfect, bright circle. “He got you.”
Charles reached through the cold air and grabbed him up by the scruff his neck. Lionel shivered at the coarseness of his fingers, their strength. And then Charles leaned down and bit his cheek hard. A flash of moisture, the heat of his teeth grinding against Lionel’s skin. The scrape of his stubble, a flick of his tongue. Lionel yelped.
“That’ll teach you,” Charles said.
Lionel pressed his palm to his cheek. Charles’s saliva was drying quickly. The heat of the bite pulsed, each beat a warning that if Charles had wanted to, he could have torn him apart. Sophie pulled at Lionel’s arm, trying to get a look at the red bruise blooming on his cheek.
“Charlie, Jesus, what are you doing?” Sophie brushed Lionel’s hand away and leaned close. Her breath, its cigarette smoke, was close on him. He breathed deeply. “That’s going to leave a mark.”
“It’s okay,” Lionel said. “It’s fine.”
“Stupid shit,” Sophie said, smiling.
“Stupid shit,” Lionel repeated. Sophie took up Lionel’s hand and leaned against him. Charles drifted away from them, rolling his eyes. Occasionally, Lionel caught him giving them glances, a look of concern and mild annoyance on his face. There were moments when, coming closer, he felt Charles’s knuckles graze his, and Lionel instinctively clenched his hand into a fist.
Sophie’s apartment was small. Mismatched furniture, a tiny television in the living room, and some small white shelves that she had packed with records, DVDs, and books. The floors were covered with ugly beige carpeting speckled with stains. A radiator along the wall put out a great head of steamy air.
Charles stretched out on the couch, and Lionel knelt near one of the shelves. Sophie said she was hungry and put on some water for pasta. There was nothing of special interest on the shelf: paperbacks, some old French workbooks, a large-print edition of a John Grisham book, and three novels by Virginia Woolf.
“Are these yours?” Lionel asked.
“No—they belong to my roommate,” Sophie said from the kitchen archway. Lionel looked back at Charles.
“Not me,” Charles said. “She has a roommate. Miriam.”
“You not much of a reader?” Lionel asked him.
“Yes.”
“What?”
Charles sat up at this and sighed like it wasn’t the first time his reading habits had been litigated. He crossed his legs on the couch and twisted his neck from side to side. “I read mystery novels.” Mystery novels! Sophie cleared her throat pointedly, and Lionel tried to banish the image of Charles reading Agatha Christie, but the image, once conjured, refused to be dispelled. Not because he thought Charles was dumb or that mystery novels were bad but because it was such incongruous thought: Charles curled up in the corner of a library, the hulk of him, enraptured by descriptions of the weather and interiors.
“God, you two are so fucking pretentious. There are good mystery novels.”
“I didn’t say anything,” Lionel said. “I’m not judging you.”
“Oh, sure.”
“No one is judging you, Charlie,” Sophie said. She was now stirring a pot of red sauce in the doorway. Her hair was messy from the steam and the snow, her face splotchy. She stirred the pot briskly. “Mmm.” Lionel could smell the tomatoes. The sauce didn’t smell store-bought—it smelled musky and bitter, almost like vinegar. There was also the scent of spices in the air: turmeric, some paprika, something else, something nutty.
“Did you make that?”
“I did,” Sophie said, grinning. “For the potluck last night and I had extra. I stewed the tomatoes and added a bunch of spices and stuff. No meat.”
“It smells so good,” he said. The sauce had a rich texture as she turned it over and over itself, stirring quickly so that a skin didn’t form. The pot itself was battered and gray, probably lifted from some thrift shop or Salvation Army.
“You’re welcome to have some!”
“I’d love to,” he said.
Each of them had a bowl of the pasta and Sophie’s tomato sauce. Lionel didn’t remember seeing any at the potluck last night, but then there’d been so many options, and he hadn’t been especially hungry. He ate slowly, chewing through the whole-wheat noodles and sucking the sauce from them discreetly. He enjoyed the heat of the food, the way its flavor settled beneath the pain of his tongue burning. Chewing also made his cheek sting, and he found himself faintly aroused by the discomfort, thinking each time his jaws shifted of how Charles had bitten him.
Charles sucked down the food so fast that Lionel doubted he even tasted it. Sophie also ate quickly, but neatly. She had a small piece of fish on the side, but she hadn’t offered him any. Lionel put his head down and tried to focus on the act of eating. Lifting his fork to his mouth and getting the food inside. Chewing it. Swallowing. Looking pleased and complacent. Content.
“Do the dishes, Charlie,” Sophie said after they were done. She took both her bowl and Lionel’s, and she handed them to Charles, who didn’t even blink. He took the bowls to the kitchen and turned on the faucet. Sophie stretched and drummed her hands against her stomach. “I’m full.”
“That was great,” he said.
“Thanks.”
“Where’s your roommate?”
“Oh, who knows? She’s probably in a lab somewhere. She studies chemistry.”
“Cool,” Lionel said. “Chemistry is intense.”
“She’s intense,” Sophie said. “Way intense.”
“Is that bad?”
“No, she’s great. I like her a lot, but . . . well.”
“I think I get that,” Lionel said. He wondered if this was how people saw him. Intense. Way intense. If they said things like I like him a lot, but . . . well. The pause hanging off like something heavy with meaning.
Was it weird that he was here, that he’d accepted her invitation to come along? He was never really sure when people were being polite or when they were actually being nice. Since his time at the hospital, his life had become a series of outstretched hands, gently guiding, so it was hard, even now, to tell when someone wanted him to come along or when they didn’t. Why should she have wanted him there? Surely, she and Charles had better things to do, things to do with their naked bodies. He saw, in his mind, the flash of Charles’s bare skin, the intimidating solidity of his chest, the broadness of his shoulders, that expanse of dense, coarse follicles on his chest and stomach. And Sophie, smooth, faultless, a surface as pristine as milk.
“What’s on your mind, Lionel?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” she said. She pressed the tip of her toe against his shoulder, pressed it hard against him. He was bigger than she was, but she was stronger. She had better control of her body and, by extension, his body. She stretched her leg and he shifted back away from her. “Don’t lie to me.”
“Who’s lying?”
“What are you thinking?” She was lying flat on her back, her leg supported by Lionel. He wrapped his hand around her ankle and slid his thumb along the underside of her foot. Her skin was warm, and her feet were hard and callused, bruised. Their muscles bulged, full of thick ligaments and tendons. Grotesque, but beautiful, too. The perfect swirl of a shell, the geometry of a rock formation, the gooey symmetry of the early embryo. He pressed his thumb against her high arch and she sighed.
“Nothing,” he said. “I’m not thinking.”
“Good,” she said. “Don’t.”
She arched slightly on the couch and then sank down. There was something loose, kind of sandy, sticking to her feet. Powder and dust maybe. It came away on Lionel’s hands, but he cupped her toes and then the balls of her feet, gripping more tightly near the ankles. She sighed at his touch and he felt momentarily powerful, as if he had evoked some feeling in her, pleasure or comfort, and then embarrassment. He could see himself in the game she was playing. He dropped her foot but it stayed perfectly level, taunting him. He tried to brush it away, but he couldn’t make it move.
“I don’t like being played with,” he said.
“Who’s playing who?” she asked without opening her eyes.
“I’m not playing with anyone.”
Sophie left the couch and knelt in front of Lionel. They weren’t in direct eye contact, but she was looking at him. He found it hard to meet her gaze. He could feel her breath on his cheeks, on his lips. She reached just past his shoulder and then cupped his head tenderly. She rested a hand on his lap, not near his dick, but on his thigh.
“You could have gone home,” she said. “But you came here.”
The nutty scent of the sauce, the smell of the day on her tongue. Lionel blinked.
“You told me to come,” he said.
“But who told you to listen?”
Lionel flushed. He wanted to withdraw from her but didn’t. It was another of those moments when he had a clear choice but chose not to act. She came closer to him then, until she was kneeling on his folded legs. Her weight felt good against him. She stroked the back of his neck, and his hands tingled, as with the feather sticking out of Charles’s coat. It was like a premonition of an act. A presentiment of what he might do.
“Why are you doing this?” he asked.
“Isn’t it what you want?”
“No,” he said, but his mouth was dry. Her lips were on his, her tongue parting, sinking. She kissed him again on the corner of his mouth, and then on his cheek. She bit his lip, and the sharpness was a jolt.
“Are you a good boy, Lionel?”
“No.” He tried to lean away from her. She swayed. She didn’t need him to stay upright. She withdrew as if she’d made up her mind about him. And she climbed back onto the sofa.
“I think you’re right about that,” she said. She shrugged, sighed. “I don’t think you’re good at all.”
The words crackled in the dim apartment like blue static. He saw them flare to life and then vanish.
Charles returned, his wrists still soapy from the dishes. He leaned over the back of the couch, looking down at them.
“I was trying to get Lionel to tell me what he’s thinking,” Sophie said. “But he won’t.”
“What are you thinking?” Charles asked.
Lionel stood up and cleared his throat. He wanted to be anywhere but there. They were both watching him very closely, so much so that their eyes felt like a single organ through which every one of his actions, no matter how small, was being categorized and stored away.
“I should go,” he said.
“Why?” Sophie asked. “It’s cold out.”
“It’s fine.”
“You’ll freeze,” Charles said.
“It’s okay. I don’t mind.”
“You don’t mind freezing?” Charles asked with a bewildered smile. “Are you crazy? Sit down, Lionel.”
“I should be going,” he said.
“Sit down, Lionel,” Charles said again, firmer this time. Something in Lionel responded to that firmness, used it as a guide as he let himself settle back on the floor. Charles smiled at him and came around the couch. He sat next to Lionel and put his arm across Lionel’s shoulders. He drew him closer, inspecting the bruise.
Lionel was awash in Charles’s body heat, in the proximity of his touch. He felt he’d come undone under the insistent stroking of Charles’s finger back and forth across the bruise on his cheek, back and forth across that place that had been marked with a promise of violence. Lionel tried to get away from Charles’s hand, but he couldn’t. Charles gripped the back of his neck tightly. Lionel thought of Sophie. Looked to her. Casually, she lay on her side, watching them.
“Why are you always trying to get away? You don’t like me anymore?”
“I’m not,” Lionel said.
“Maybe it’s because you bit him,” Sophie said.
“Oh? I’m sorry,” Charles murmured, and there was a soft, brushing kiss against Lionel’s neck. He shivered from both the softness of the touch and the breath, the closeness of it.
“It’s all right.”
“Look at him, poor little fawn, shivering,” Sophie said. She left the sofa again. It gave a whine of protest, the springs shifting. She knelt near them both, close enough that Lionel could feel her, would have brushed against her if he moved. He held still. “Are you cold, Lionel? Do you need a blanket?”
Lionel tried to hold himself still, but a tremor spread from the tips of his fingers back up to his wrist, to his arm, to his shoulder. He could feel something vibrate in his lower lip, the side of his face a slow-motion spasm. He tried to be still. To be easy. To be good. But they had hemmed him in. He had nowhere to go. He looked from Charles to Sophie and back, and then to the bookcase, which seemed so comically small compared to all the things it had to hold.
Charles kissed his neck again, and Lionel shivered. He hated the simple, easy mechanism of it. How obvious.
“What about last night, huh? You didn’t mind me biting you then.”
“I don’t mind,” Lionel said. “I don’t mind it.”
Charles flicked his tongue against Lionel’s ear.
“God,” he said under his breath. “Please.”
“How polite,” Sophie said dryly. She was close again, but she was leaning against Charles’s back, her arms wrapped around him. “So well behaved.”
Lionel saw Charles look back at her, the cut of his eyes. Then he pulled his arm from Lionel and reached back to grip both of Sophie’s ankles.
“Okay, that’s enough,” Charles said.
Sophie ruffled Charles’s hair, and then pulled her feet free of him. She hummed to herself as she went down the hall. When they were alone, just him and Charles, Lionel tried to catch his breath.
“Why is she doing this?” Lionel asked.
“Doing what?”
“You know what. You’re as bad as she is.” Lionel heard his voice shake.
“She doesn’t care, Lionel. She doesn’t care at all.”
“I know. That’s what she said.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know,” Lionel said. “I don’t know. I feel weird.”
Charles gave him a look that was not lacking sympathy but was a little impatient. He leaned in and pressed their mouths together. He cupped Lionel’s jaw and kissed deeper, more thoroughly, and Lionel relaxed under the steady gentleness of it. He thought of Sophie. He closed his eyes.
“It’s okay,” Charles said. “It’s all right.”
“What about Sophie?”
“Don’t overthink it. This can be whatever you want it to be.”
“I don’t know what I want it to be,” Lionel said. Charles kissed him again and then pulled away.
“Okay,” Charles said. He stood up. “Okay.”
Sophie came back. She was wearing pajamas and her face was newly washed. Lionel and Charles were not speaking to each other. He had come up against the thing that felt most frustrating about this—the inability to articulate simply what he felt or what he wanted. She sat between them—lay down between them, really, her head on Charles’s lap and her feet across Lionel’s knees. She stretched. She smelled like limes.
“What got up your asses?” she asked.
“Nothing,” Lionel said.
“That’s your favorite word, isn’t it? Nothing.”
“I should go,” he said. It was not especially late. A few minutes after eight. But he had a longish trip home, and the thought of the cold air on his face and all around him was comforting.
“Why?” she asked, though she was yawning. Charles said nothing. He scrolled on his phone. “Charlie? Do you have something to say about this?”
“No,” Charles said. “If he wants to go, he can go.”
“It’s freezing outside,” Sophie said.
“It’s okay.”
“He can’t walk. Tell him to stay. Use your common sense, Lionel.” Sophie turned to him. She smiled. Her eyes were warm, caring. It was a kindhearted gesture. But then, beneath it, he sensed something else. Not meanness. But something prickly and alive.
“I can, it’s okay.”
“I’ll drive him,” Charles said. “I’ll drive him if he wants to go.”
“No, that’s not necessary. He’s staying,” she said. Lionel twisted his scarf in his hands. Charles had looked up and was making direct eye contact with Sophie. They were exchanging some form of information. But Lionel wanted to go. He felt it necessary to leave. Sophie’s head turned very slowly to Lionel. “What are you afraid of, Lionel?”
“Nothing. I just want to go home,” he said.
“We have been nice to you. I let you fuck Charlie, didn’t I? What’s there to be so afraid of?”
Lionel felt a chill race up his spine. Sophie sat up fully then. She put her feet on the floor, but then crossed her legs elegantly. She tilted her head to the side, rested her chin on her hand.
“Do you think I’ll eat you?” She snapped her teeth playfully at him.
“Sophie, leave him alone,” Charles said. “You can see he’s about to piss his pants.”
“Don’t make fun of me,” Lionel said.
“Yeah, Charlie, don’t make fun of him.” She was still smiling when she said it. “You know the problem with you and also you,” she said, gesturing to each of them in turn, “is that you’re both selfish.”
Charles stood up. He reached behind Lionel for his coat. As he was putting it on, Sophie lay back down and closed her eyes.
“I made you a nice dinner, didn’t I?”
“It was great,” Lionel said.
“When are you going to thank me for the rest of it?” she asked, and Lionel frowned. Charles was kneeling to put on his boots. He shook his head.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“For letting you have Charlie. When are you going to thank me for that?” she asked, and Lionel flushed. His mouth went dry. And he looked to Charles and then back to Sophie. He felt ill. Charles stood up, awkwardly. He winced. Lionel thought of his knee.
“That seems,” Lionel started to say, “I don’t know, Sophie. That seems. Bad.”
Charles put on his hat and pulled the door open.
“You don’t have to,” Lionel said.
“Jesus Christ. Nobody’s going to make you suck their dick. I can drive you,” Charles said. He nudged Lionel toward the door, and Sophie called after them.
“Lionel, your manners,” she said.
He was right about the air being comforting. There was so much cold black air that he could scarcely imagine a time when it wasn’t this way, when winter wasn’t this deep. He inhaled. Charles was stomping out ahead of him.
“I’m sorry,” Lionel said. “You really don’t have to drive me.”
Charles stopped and turned. He wet his lips, though they dried immediately in the cold. “I don’t get you,” he said. “I don’t get you.”
“What’s to get?”
Charles stared at him in open amazement, and Lionel felt a little rush of pride.
“Right,” he said. Back to stomping in the cold. He could be so childish. Lionel jogged a little bit to catch up to him. He playfully bumped their shoulders together.
“Come on,” Lionel said.
“Come on,” Charles mocked, but he was thawing.
They were tracing the route back to campus, which meant that Lionel could see the mountain of warm air over the trees. It hadn’t moved despite having earlier given the impression of moving toward them. Or perhaps this was a second mountain, a second wave of warm air pushed up out of the silos in the distance.
“Why do you keep looking over there?” Charles asked. “What’s over there?”
“Oh, I like the way the warm air looks,” Lionel said. “Like a mountain.”
“What mountain?” Charles asked. The mountains of Tennessee. Math camp, yes, the sound of rain striking the tin of the outhouses. The perfect, succulent light of late summer in the cabins, riddled with dust motes. Running between the trees. Rain, so much rain. Their papers covered in scrawl, their handwriting silly, messy. The trim beards of the counselors. Their warm hands steering Lionel, age five, a scraped knee on the gravel path, down to the canoes, where they were forbidden to go. Ben Tovelson, nineteen, bearish, kind, green, winking eyes, showing Lionel how to write his name in the dust with piss. The damp wet of his mouth on Lionel, down there. No. Another way. Another memory. The vacations he had taken with his parents. The damp, chuffing sounds of their arguments trailing into throaty moans when they thought he was asleep. The soft rustle of the nylon sleeping bag. The cold enamel of the cups. The crack of the branches in the fire. Their car striking ruts in the road as they drove up the trail and then back out. The slow slope of the green hills, the vastness of the pine forest, the terrible distance, so far up, high above everything and everyone. That memory condensed, intensified—the rushing, clear air, the water, the call of animals, the emptiness of the perfect darkness that descends on a mountain where few people are living.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Some mountain.”
Charles reached for his hand. Lionel pivoted away. They passed again through the liberal arts building. Their steps echoed. Charles had parked near the campus. Lionel wished that he were as carefree as Sophie. He wished that he was the sort of person to run up the steep wall and wait to be drawn back down. He wished that he could manage some careless, easy gesture. But he was not. And Charles had noticed that he was avoiding contact. There was a distance between them. A quiet that grew bigger as they walked on.
In the car, Lionel rolled down the window. Charles looked at him.
“Are you nuts?”
As they pulled out of the parking lot and into the street, Lionel closed his eyes. The cold air against his face seemed to open, leaving a cavity that was warm and hollow, deeper down in the flow of air. He pressed his face into it as if into a clear stream, and he could feel the cold rushing out and away, sliding past him. He opened his eyes, and the night was a gray smear of other lights, yellow and red and white, all of them blending until they were indistinct. He couldn’t breathe. He was drowning.
He could feel the churning up of something, the movement of memory. His grandmother and his grandfather had lived on that mountain, far away from everyone and everything. They kept animals, chickens and goats, sometimes a cow. Back then, Lionel had eaten meat and thought nothing of it. Back then, his grandfather had given him big bowls of venison or fish that they had trapped and killed and cleaned themselves. His grandfather had not been tall or stocky. He had been a tracing of a man, his skin deep and black. His grandfather had taught him how to kill in the most humane way—with the straightest, cleanest line, the purest shot. There had been days deep in the ashy frost of fall when Lionel had stood with his hands deep in the cavity of a deer, had felt its body cooling, its blood thickening. He could remember how grainy blood felt after a while, and, in a more imperfect way, the gradual sense one got of the whole network of vessels and veins and arteries that kept a thing alive. When he lined up everything that he had learned on that mountain in Tennessee from his grandfather, who had smelled of sweat and tobacco, who had chased him with skin of deer and rabbits, making their fur dance, and from Ben Tovelson in the green woods—when Lionel lined all that up and peered down through it, he could see, with horrible clarity, just how he’d been able to lift the blade in the narrow room a year before.
They drove on. The cold, bright world whipped by the window.
“Lionel?” Charles asked. Lionel could barely hear him over the howl of the wind. He dipped his head back into the window. Charles was looking at him the way people did when they glimpsed the wildness in him, that part of him which was still not yet tamed, beaten back into shape. Lionel tried to smile. His eyes were teary and wet.
“I’m okay,” he said. “I’m okay.”
Charles put his hand on the back of Lionel’s neck. He was driving without looking at the street. His eyes were on Lionel. His hand made reassuring shapes against his skin.
“Hang in there,” he said. His eyes went back to the street, to the cars that were out in front of them. Lionel leaned into Charles’s touch. He wanted to tell Charles about the mountain but couldn’t make himself yet.
“I’m hanging in,” he said. Maybe it was enough to want to tell Charles about the mountain. His life had become a series of small eruptions, minor escalations.
Charles slid this thumb against the nape of Lionel’s neck, and Lionel sighed. He stretched out in the seat next to Charles, turned back to the open window. The air, which very well could have been from a mountain all those years ago, was working something strange over him and the moment itself, reordering some necessary filaments inside him. He was on the verge of speaking, saying it, finally, as he had said some of it to Sophie in the café before Charles arrived, some edge of the truth, some bit of what had happened to him. He turned to Charles and opened his mouth, but his voice was snatched away on the wind. Charles turned to him, smiled.
“What did you say, Lionel?”