milliways_bar | (no subject)

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((OOM: Things improve.))

There is a rather stunned looking man standing in the doorway of Milliways. He hasn't seen the place for almost a year and a half and it's ... exactly as he remembered it to be, even if he spent quite a bit of time insisting to himself that it could have been some elaborate hallucination.

At any rate, more about him. His hair is trimmed, though somewhat touseled, and he appears to be wearing a khaki uniform and heavy overcoat of the same colour. The sleeves are rolled up and he is dirty.

Dusty is perhaps a more accurate term. The thick goggles are a hint at what he's just come from - his motor bike is parked just outside in the background.

He is blinking. "Well, this certainly isn't the motor shop."

It's hard to tell if he's really bothered by this. The grin on his face suggests that it is in fact a smaller blessing than a curse.

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"How unfortunate, with your overflowing wealth of charm." Sarcasm? Of course not.

He shakes his head, lighting his cigarette and taking a deep inhale. "Yes, much more satisfying ways. Motor biking, for example." War. Killing a Turk.

"Never much for women."

"And the sphincter of every straight man in the bar just tightened up in fear, Mr. Lawrence. Job well done on that."

(flick--)

"Yes, but never underestimate the affect of charm on a woman, especially when you mean it. It lowers their guard, softens them, makes them vulnerable. Allows you to get a little closer. Men are never like that. It takes more work. It's never worth the effort."

(click--)

Unless it was a transient or a drunk, someone spent out and physically weaker that he take with force alone and a single plunging stab of a surgical knife. That's when the effort was worthy, because it took hardly any at all.

(--snap.)

"Well, that's fortunate. I have little interest in straight men, Mr. Bateman."

He takes a slow drag of his cigarette, thinking. "Perhaps that's why I've never liked them much. I rather like to work for such things as intimacy. Loose trollops never appealed."

He shakes his head, watching Patrick curiously. His eyes are sharp while he listens to the flick-click-snap of the lighter.

"You have no idea what you are missing out on, Mr. Lawrence."

The sizzle, the burn, as the lit end of the cigar is crushed on the table and deposited into his pocket. He has no sense of inner dialog any longer, just speaks over the crushing march of the army that he can hear.

"The smell, the touch, the taste. There are delicate fingers and the back of a hand that curls into such loose, ineffectual fists. The pale underside of a wrist where the veins show up as dark rivers that you can follow with the tip of a blade or with the tip of your tongue. Follow to where the river meets the spreading sea."

"I find it far too alien. Too foreign for my liking, in an odd way. I rather like the feeling of an equally firm body, warm skin that's familiar in the most wonderful of ways...And I should point out that some men do have slender hands."

Especially when they are fourteen - still young and smooth and lean. Selim had been such a beautiful boy. There's a pang that shows in his features before he shrugs such things off, shaking his head.

"...And slender hips, and soft mouths." The edge of his lip curls over his gums, teeth bright white, are bared for a mocking flash. "For a second, Mr. Lawrence, you looked like you were missing something."

"I am so terrible with remembering to forget, sometimes."

He licks his lips. "And those, yes." No, he's not scowling at Patrick. Of course not.

"Forgetting what, Mr. Lawrence?"

(flick-click, flickclick)

He found it so easy to speak in a voice that dripped with emotion, with sincerity.

"Savoring the desperation of a memory. How pleasant it is to lie in a pile of sheets and blankets, stretching luxuriously and the admiring the way tendons and arteries writhed in his wrists, or the way his legs twist--twined in cotton--assume this or that angle."

He rolls his shoulders back, sliding out of his chair, pushing his sunglasses back onto the bridge of his nose with a push of his thumb. The lighter is palmed, pocketed.

"Many things, Mr. Bateman."

Repeating their names over and over is beginning to become trivial, but he'll do it as long as Patrick does it. He's stubborn like that.

His fingers curl against the tabletop, white knuckled against the top. He swallows thickly and then looks to Patrick, gaze hard. "Far too warm for cotton."

"Cotton is much softer on a bare back. Sand can scratch skin raw."

He smiles, a disturbingly boyish expression because his eyes are hidden. What if the expression brightened those eyes, all widened pupil, what if? He shrugs his shoulders, an unruffled, unbothered gesture of languid limbs.

"Rock 'n' roll," Patrick says, and he leaves.

Things never get easier.

He follows Patrick with his eyes until he's sure the man is gone, then orders a drink from the bar.

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