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“You should be the one in white,” Bruno is saying. “Or Ann too, I don’t even mind that, but you, you, you, Guy.”
Bruno’s sleeve feels frictionless under Guy’s hand, as if he could slip away. As if it would be so easy to let him—to let him spin through the wedding party like a dervish and rip Guy’s world apart. For a moment, Guy—his heart in his throat—almost wants to. It could be over. All the dread, all the hope: it could stop here. Bruno’s suit is so dark it’s like an eclipse.
But he steers Bruno into the coat-check overflow.
It’s what he would do, he knows in the back of his mind, if he had a mistress who’d crashed the wedding and was making a scene. Mistress. It’s the nearest word he knows. None of the technical terms for what Bruno is to him, none of the words the police would use, like co-conspirator, seem to fit.
Of course, Bruno says they’re friends, but that word’s not meant to sound so breathless.
Bruno’s cheeks are rosy from all the champagne. He looks around the room with a confusion that is, to Guy’s distant horror, almost sweet. “Why are we here?”
So I can make you leave the only way I know how, Guy thinks.
“So we can be alone for a minute,” he says, and it doesn’t even feel like a lie. That’s the hell of it; that’s the hell he’s in. “Don’t you want to be?”
“Yes! Yes, of course I do. But to miss the speeches—”
“What could they say that would matter?” Guy says. There’s a hard mirth to his voice he scarcely recognizes. “They don’t even know me anymore.”
“I do,” Bruno says.
It’s what he will remember about this day, always, he knows it: not the scene in the church, with earnest, innocent Ann, who loves him so much better than he deserves. Only this.
Guy doesn’t let himself think. He leans forward and catches Bruno’s mouth with his. He can taste Scotch beneath the champagne, like primer under paint: how often had Bruno resorted to that flask of his before he’d come here? It’s not shamelessness after all, it’s Dutch courage. An immortal in a crown shouldn’t need to pour himself so many drinks. A demon shouldn’t either. He’s only Charlie.
Charlie. Guy mouths the name into Bruno’s mouth, where neither of them can hear it. Impossible to say it any louder. It’s too much, somehow. It’s too late.
Bruno doesn’t feel the same way, not when Guy moves on to his cheeks, his throat. “Oh, Guy. Guy, Guy, Guy.”
After a while, it’s only a sound. But like everything Bruno’s done, everything Bruno is, it’s a queasily spinning magnet—repels him, attracts him, repels him. He kisses Bruno more to make it stop.
Is this enough, or should he go further? Is that all that will convince Bruno to leave: a new awful secret tie to obscure the old? If Bruno is even ashamed of this, when he’s not of murder—but he asked for the murder, asked for it the way another man might have asked for a light. He didn’t ask for this. Not with words. This took Scotch and champagne and Guy.
He can—it’s a shock to realize it, and the magnet spins again—handle Bruno, this way.
Bruno’s made his name the words of this particular song, but Guy’s the one who called the tune, and Bruno knows it.
That’s good. He doesn’t know why, if he has so much goddamn control, he braces Bruno up against the door; he doesn’t know why he’s thinking of stopping anyone from coming in instead of making Bruno leave. But all the friction he couldn’t find earlier is here now, so sparks fly through him when his thumb runs over the clasp on Bruno’s belt. It’s all enough to hold on to. For the first time in months, he has a grip on all this. He does, so long as he has one on himself.
Out in the ballroom, someone is calling his name. A toast, a toast!
The next kiss is clumsier, and their teeth click together like their glasses on the train.