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Richard finally saw Alec cry on the night that they crashed a Campion family party. It had been six weeks since Alec had returned from Tremontaine House to Richard’s two rooms in Riverside, and the young man had finally begun telling Richard about the family he’d left behind on the Hill. Apparently he didn’t like any of them, and Richard was puzzled as to why he wanted to attend one of their parties at all.
The occasion was the birth of Alec’s newest nephew, the son of his sister Janine, who was evidently married to a “plodding, fatuous jackass.” Janine and her husband lived in a small town some distance from the city, but they had come up to the Hill upon the insistence of Alec’s mother, Lady Margaret (“that tiresome shrew”). When Richard asked Alec if his grandmother, the Duchess Tremontaine, was going to be there, his only answer was to laugh harshly.
Richard’s first impression of the gathering was that it was like any nobles’ party, with musicians playing the latest compositions, and a table spread with marzipan sculptures in the shape of tiny fruits. Alec, meanwhile, was busy getting drunk and firing the first salvos of what was to degenerate into an ugly fight. He started out by referring to his new nephew as “it.” Then he referred to his sister as “it.” Then he strongly insinuated that the newborn’s paternal grandmother was an inexpensive prostitute. By the time he started lecturing upon the supposed mental defects passed down through the father’s line, Alec’s mother came through the crowd, clad in a great rustling gown of saffron silk, and stood smiling sweetly at his elbow. Alec turned to her with his feral smile.
Richard was aware that they were both about to go for their weapons—words, in their case, and affects, and manners. He himself had no idea how to fight in that way, and could only stand and watch. He thought that this might be what it felt like to be Alec, when Richard got into a swordfight in Riverside.
“David, dearest, how are you enjoying the party?” Lady Margaret cooed.
“More than I can express, Mother,” Alec said smoothly. “It’s been weeks since I talked to anyone but the worst sorts of thieves and whores. It’s such a relief to be here, back among the better sort.”
“Oh, I’m so glad to hear that,” said Lady Margaret. If she noticed or cared what Alec had just implied about her guests, Richard couldn’t tell. “Your talents are wasted down around that type of person. I thought the same about that dreadful University . . . but then of course, you aren’t going there anymore, are you?”
Richard’s eyes shifted to Alec. His disgrace at the hands of the chancellors was a tender spot for the young man. But Alec parried, disengaged, moved back to guard. “No, Mother. I’m a full-time idler these days. Grandmama finds it much more becoming. It’s actually quite embarrassing—she spoke of making me duke when she dies. Of course she won’t really. If you and Father didn’t inherit, there would be talk.”
“Your Grandmama is such a darling eccentric,” drawled Lady Margaret.
Richard got the sense that these early sorties were for the crowd. A certain type of swordsman did that sort of thing, too—the ones known for their panache. Richard had never believed in panache, but he knew better than to assume that a showman couldn’t be deadly. Vaguely, he felt as if he should be holding Alec’s coat.
“Have you had a look at the baby?” Alec asked.
“Yes—isn’t he a dear?”
Alec’s answer was a pained grimace. At his mother’s shocked look, he peered down into his wine glass, dipped a forefinger, and rubbed it against his thumb. For all the world as if he'd been making faces about the wine, he asked, “Does this wine have a gritty feel to you, Mother?”
“Gritty . . .?” she asked. Richard thought he had put her off-balance.
“Gritty. A bit too . . . oakish,” he said.
“Well if it does, we can certainly get you something else,” said Lady Margaret.
“Oh, no, don’t trouble yourself.” Alec took another sip, and this time didn’t make a face. “Hm,” he said. “Must just be me.”
“Well, I certainly wouldn’t want you to drink anything ‘gritty,’” Lady Margaret said. When she repeated the word “gritty,” Richard realized that Alec had bothered her somehow. He had made her give ground.
“Oh, no,” Alec said, gazing absently out over the crowd. “It’s charming.”
Lady Margaret’s mouth formed a firm line. “David, just what made you come this evening? We’ve barely seen you in four years, and now all of a sudden you ‘drop in.’” Richard sensed that this was a euphemism for “crash the party.” “Obviously you didn’t come for the wine.”
Alec looked down at her, his beautiful, angular face cold, his eyes hard. “I came to see my darling mother, of course,” he said.
Lady Margaret’s own eyes—green as her son’s—went stony. “I see,” she said. “Nothing about embarrassing the family by traipsing up here out of the slums with a hired killer on your arm?” she asked.
Richard saw the anger in Alec’s face and realized she’d cut him. “It certainly wouldn’t be the first time I was embarrassing,” he said. “David won’t do as he’s told. David won’t come when he’s bid. David has the bad taste to be a human being instead of a show horse, being put through his paces for the spectators. I suppose you’d rather I was a twitterhead of a girl, ready to be bullied into marriage to the first fool you can find who has the connections to get Father out of debt.”
Lady Margaret made an outraged noise, drew back, and slapped him. The casual conversation all around them stopped, and a few people moved back. Had they been in Riverside, Richard would have stepped up and said, “My fight,” but he knew he couldn’t do that here. He didn’t know the rules of engagement for this kind of battle, and all he could do was watch.
Alec’s hands balled into fists, and at first Richard was sure he was going to hit his mother. He refrained, though, either from some vestigial scrap of filial respect or due to his total lack of fighting experience. Instead, he glared at her with his glittering green eyes and said in a low voice, “I may be an embarrassment, Mother, but you will always be the woman who produced an embarrassment. The tutors who quit, the dismissals from school, all the mothers who wouldn’t let me speak to their daughters. Even my failure at the University—all of that comes back to lie at your feet. I am your worst nightmare, and you brought me on yourself.”
A crimson flush had arisen from the clear, white flesh of Lady Margaret’s throat, and it crept upward to stain her face. She drew breath as if to fling equally-hate-filled words back at her son, but then she stopped. She seemed to pull back and center herself, like a swordsman returning to balance after repelling a ferocious attack. The tundras of the north could not have been colder than her eyes. “Branford, Grigsby,” she called out to two footmen. “See that Lord David gets back to . . . wherever it is he goes.” Then she turned her back and walked into the crowd.
The footmen, both the same height as Alec and much broader through the shoulders, came forward, holding out their gloved hands as if they would take hold of him. Here, Richard could help. He stepped between them and Alec, moving his right arm slightly, as if he were toying with the idea of going for his blade. “I wouldn’t,” he told them. “It isn’t safe.” They drew back, and Alec was able to walk to the door unmolested.
As they exited, Alec turned around. Knowing what was coming, Richard’s hand was in like a flash, grabbing his lover’s forearm before he could plunge his fist through one of the small windows that lined the side of the door. “Alec, don’t,” he said. He put his arm around the young man’s shoulders and held him a moment. “Let’s just go home.”
Alec was breathing hard; his face was a blotchy red where his mother had hit him. “You don’t understand, Richard,” he said, “you don’t know what these people are.”
“You’re right. I don’t know. I can’t know—I’ve never lived on the Hill. But you don’t have to deal with them anymore.” Alec was glaring at the closed door as if he could ignite it with his rage alone. When he showed no signs of moving, Richard squeezed him gently. “Come on, let’s go.”
At last Alec turned around and allowed Richard to guide him through the neat little square with its clean-lined townhouses, and out into the main thoroughfare. They walked in silence. Richard wasn’t sure whether Alec had had the effect on his mother that he’d wanted, but he could tell she had delivered him a severe wound. He tried to mentally prepare himself for what would be coming next. A wounded Alec was a vicious Alec, and he would probably turn on Richard in the absence of any other target.
As they crossed the bridge to Riverside, however, Alec said quietly, “Teach me how to cry, Richard.”
The unusual request made Richard look up at him. Tears sounded like a better response to being hurt than starting fights or taking drugs, but Richard didn’t know how to fulfill Alec’s request. “I don’t know how to teach you,” he said. “It’s just something that you do.”
“It’s not something that I do,” he said sadly. “I gave it up a long, long time ago, and now I can’t.”
“Why did you give it up?” Richard asked.
Alec shrugged. “If you cry at school, they mock you, and then they beat you. And if you scream at them to stop it, they just beat you harder. It didn’t seem worth it.”
Richard nodded. Alec didn’t talk much about his childhood, but Richard was aware that it hadn’t been happy. “Crying isn’t fun,” he pointed out. “You might have had your reasons for giving it up.”
“I know,” Alec said, “but I feel like I’m dying. I want to kill somebody. I’d start a fight to watch you kill somebody, only the calm feeling that comes afterward wears off. You can’t kill people all night, can you, Richard?”
“No, I can’t.” Richard considered his options, and decided that teaching Alec how to cry was the best one available. “I’ll do the best I can to help you,” he said.
When they got home, Richard sat down on the chaise longue and held his hand out for Alec to join him. He thought maybe if he tried treating Alec as if he were already crying, it would be like giving him permission to start. As soon as Alec sat, Richard took him in his arms and started stroking his long brown hair. “I know it hurts,” he said softly.
Alec clung tightly to him and buried his face in Richard’s shoulder. Richard could feel the tension throughout his body. He tried thinking of the things his mother used to say to him when he cried as a child. “Sometimes everything is horrible and there’s nothing anyone can do to fix it. But I’m going to stay right here with you, so you don’t have to feel bad alone.” Alec was quiet for a long time, pressing his body so close against Richard’s that Richard could feel his heartbeat. He showed no sign of the hitching breath of tears, however.
“What are you thinking about?” Richard asked at last.
Alec shifted slightly and said, “Nothing. Anything. I don’t know.”
“Don’t distract yourself,” Richard said. “Just sit right here with me and feel what you’re feeling. I’ll protect you from it.”
“I don’t want to feel what I’m feeling,” Alec said.
“I know. We’re going to get the pain out and over with. But you have to look it in the eye first.”
“How?” Alec asked quietly.
Richard thought about that, and had an idea. “We’ll practice by taking it in little pieces. You don’t distract yourself from what you’re feeling while I count to ten, and after that you can think about anything you want.”
Alec seemed to consider that for a moment, and then said, “All right.”
Richard started counting slowly. Before long, Alec was reacting as if he were in physical pain, unable to hold still or get comfortable. He clutched Richard hard, as if his lover were the only thing that kept him from falling into searing flame.
By the time Richard reached ten, Alec’s breathing had changed. It wasn’t the shuddering breath of tears, it was the harsh breath of fury, but at least it was something. “I hate them,” Alec said between clenched teeth.
“They hurt you. They shouldn’t have,” Richard said.
“What do you know about what they shouldn’t have done?” Alec snapped, but Richard could hear a crack in his voice at the end.
“That’s it. You’re getting it.”
“Fuck ‘getting it!’” Alec said. “I don’t like this. I don’t want to do this anymore.” He tried to push Richard away.
Richard kept his hold on him. “Come on. One more time. You clear your mind while I count to ten.”
Richard made it to five before Alec was really fighting him. Richard held his wrists to keep him from bolting and said, “You’re so close. Stay with it, Alec. Stay right here with me.”
“Leave me alone! Just leave me alone!” Alec started wrenching against Richard’s hold so violently that Richard became afraid he was going to hurt him, and so he let go. Alec obviously wasn’t expecting that, because he jerked away with all his strength. It unbalanced him, and he fell back against the wooden frame of the chaise, hitting his head with an audible crack.
For a moment neither of them moved. Richard was preparing himself to absorb a ferocious attack that he felt he deserved, now that Alec was hurt. Alec huddled at the end of the chaise, his hands to his head, and his long hair obscuring his face.
Richard was about to apologize when something wrenched a long, anguished wail from Alec. It was like the cry of a child who’s been abandoned in the dark, and hearing it in a man’s voice made the hairs on the back of Richard’s neck stand on end.
“Alec,” he said softly, and reached out to him. Alec slapped his hand away. When the wail had been torn out of him, there was a brief moment of eerie silence, and Richard wondered whether that would be all. But Alec gasped, and cried out again, this time with sobs wracking him.
As Alec continued to cry out loud, there came the sound of feet on the stairs outside, and then someone started hammering on the door.
“Not now!” Richard shouted. He reached out to Alec again, trying to coax him to come close. The young man turned his face against the fabric of the chaise, and kept sobbing.
“What is going on in there?” came Marie’s voice from the other side of the door.
“It’s nothing,” Richard lied. Meanwhile, Alec wept like one of the damned.
“Dammit, it’s my house, I’m coming in,” Marie said, and wrenched open the door. She stood there with her frizzled hair and threadbare whore’s finery, glancing around the room as if looking for blood spatter. Richard tried not to remember that she had her reasons.
Finding nothing amiss, she turned to Richard and demanded, “What’s wrong with him?”
“He got in a fight,” Richard said, trying to say whatever it would take to answer her questions so she’d go away.
“A fight? Him? What—with one of the bravos at Rosalie’s?”
“Yes.” It was easier than explaining the truth.
“Well, you’d better watch him more carefully next time,” Marie said. “I thought I’d come up here and find that one of you had killed the other.”
“I’m sorry, Marie. I’m taking care of it,” Richard said.
“You do that. I don’t want him scaring off my clients,” she said.
“He won’t. I promise.”
“Does he need stitches or anything like that?” Marie asked.
“No—really, Marie, I have it.”
“All right,” she said grudgingly. “You see that he quiets down.”
“I will.” Then, to Richard’s relief, she went away.
Alec was still crying fiercely, although he was no longer wailing. Richard moved closer to him and laid a gentle hand on his shoulder. Alec shrugged it off, but with less violence than he’d refused Richard’s earlier touch. “She’s gone, Alec. It’s just you and me,” Richard said softly. Alec didn’t respond. After a few moments, Richard asked, “Do you want me to hold you?” The young man shook his head. Richard tried again: “Do you want me just to sit with you?” Alec nodded. “All right. I can do that. I’m going to stay right here.”
Alec huddled against the back of the chaise until his sobbing made his voice grow hoarse. Eventually there were gaps of quiet between his cries, and he began to calm down. At last he uncurled, and looked at Richard with anguished eyes. Richard couldn’t help giving him a bittersweet smile and gently hooking some of his loose hair behind his ear. Leave it to Alec to look beautiful even when he cried. The fair skin of his cheeks was flushed, and the tears put the shine of cut emeralds into his eyes.
“Come here,” Richard said, holding his arms out. This time Alec went to him.
“That was horrible,” Alec said, speaking into Richard’s shoulder. “I remember why I gave it up now. I’m never doing that again.”
“You don’t have to,” Richard assured him, “but it can’t be worse than when Delight makes you nervous.”
“Yes it can. Yes, it was,” Alec insisted.
Richard didn’t argue with him. Personally, he would have preferred a lover who cried occasionally to one who abused drugs when he was upset, but he wasn’t going to debate the point with Alec now. He rocked the young man, who seemed to take comfort in it.
After Alec’s tears stopped and Richard got him a glass of brandy, Richard said, “Alec can I ask you something?”
Alec raised his head as if against a heavy yoke and gazed at him. He looked exhausted. “All right,” he said.
“Why did you want to visit your family in the first place? It’s obvious that you don’t like them.”
That got a bitter laugh. “Why? I’ll tell you why. Because now they don’t control me. They’ve had their hooks in me my entire life, first my parents, and then my grandmother when I went away to university. But in Riverside, I have my own life. I wanted to prove to them that they couldn’t hurt me anymore. Well. You saw how well that went.”
Richard nodded, and reached out to take Alec’s long-fingered hand. He didn’t have hateful relatives, but he could imagine what it must feel like for Alec to be detested by the people who’d raised him. He supposed that was the sort of thing that hurt forever, whether you had your own life or not.
Alec leaned back against the chaise and closed his eyes. “I was a terrible child, you know,” he said conversationally.
“No you weren’t,” was Richard’s automatic response.
“Yes I was. You didn’t know me then. I used to bite.”
“Lots of little children bite.”
“Not like I did. And I kept it up until after I wasn’t little,” Alec said. “But as bad as I was, they made me worse. I didn’t have to grow up to be the way that I am.”
“I love the way that you are,” Richard said.
Alec gave him a fond smile. “What do you know? You spend all your time in Rosalie’s. You have no taste in people.”
“I never said I did.”
They sat quietly like that for a while, until at last Alec said, “Richard? Thank you. Thank you for staying with me.”
“Well, it’s only because I live here,” Richard teased him. Then Alec’s catlike green eyes opened, and he leaned over to give him a brandy-flavored kiss.