Lachesis

By Miriam Heddy

 

"Hear the word of Lachesis, the daughter of Necessity. Mortal souls, behold a new cycle of life and mortality. Your genius will not be allotted to you, but you choose your genius; and let him who draws the first lot have the first choice, and the life which he chooses shall be his destiny."

—The Republic by Plato Book X.

 

"When they reach manhood they are lovers of youth, and are not naturally inclined to marry or beget children, if at all, they do so only in obedience to the law; but they are satisfied if they may be allowed to live with one another unwedded; and such a nature is prone to love and ready to return love, always embracing that which is akin to him. And when one of them meets with his other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and would not be out of the other's sight, as I may say, even for a moment: these are the people who pass their whole lives together; yet they could not explain what they desire of one another."

—Plato's Symposium.

 

 

 

"And so we come at last to the closet."

 

Larry waved his hand and Charlie looked at it, seeing… a closet.

 

"Nice," Charlie nodded, searching for something to say. "It's very… rectangular, isn't it."

 

"Yes, though that is not, actually, what's most interesting about it, though perhaps there's a symbolic point somewhere to make in the resemblance of most closets to coffins."

 

"Um—"

 

"There's a story in this closet, Charles. No—" Larry held up a hand, "Anticipating, here, your objection that there's probably a story in most closets, which is certainly true. And I don't suppose mine to be particularly original."

 

Larry waited, standing beside the closet as if he expected it to start talking, but it didn't, and Charlie continued to study it, seeing nothing particularly extraordinary in it, either in its shape or dimension (which actually was a good deal taller and deeper than the standard coffin).

 

"Hold that thought."

 

Charlie ducked out into the hall and looked into the other bedroom, and eyeballed it, which, while less than precise, was enough to tell him that the height of both closets, while tall enough that he couldn't easily put things on the upper shelves, were also in keeping with the high ceilings and similar enough in both rooms as to suggest that no remodeling was done on either. So, not that he thought Larry had, but it seemed unlikely that Larry could have buried anyone in the closet.

 

He returned and shrugged.

 

And Larry opened the closet door with a small flourish, pulling a chain above and turning on the bare lightbulb. The closet was nearly empty. A suit, still wrapped in dry cleaner plastic, was hanging up on the rod, and there was a row of boxes neatly lined up on the top shelf. "I keep waiting for that particular suit to come back in style, but I'm afraid it never will. And I have far too many sneakers for two feet that rarely seem to do nearly enough walking nowadays. Neither of those things, by the way, have any relevance to the story."

 

Charlie nodded, ignoring the boxes, the suit (which was too ugly to have ever been in style to begin with), and the bid for sympathy, focusing instead on the interior of the closet. "Animal, vegetable, or mineral?"

 

"What? Oh. Animal. Definitely animal."

 

"Um… you have mice?"

 

Larry shook his head, wrinkling his nose with apparent distaste. "I have mice?"

 

"Just a guess."

 

"And you see evidence for this?" Larry's voice went high and Charlie laughed.

 

"A wild guess, completely unsubstantiated."

 

"Oh, well then good, because mice would be… a very bad thing. Animal in the less literal sense, then, though of course you might say that, this being my house, and me being human, and humans being animals—"

 

"Is this a long story?" Charlie interrupted, checking his watch. "Because I do have to teach in four and a half hours and I'm already familiar with phylogenetic taxonomy."

 

"Patience, Charles. You did ask, after all."

 

"I asked about your closets? Because I think I'd remember that."

 

"You asked me how long I—how did you put it? How long had I harbored illicit thoughts about you."

 

Charlie stopped tugging on the closet rod, which was thick enough to probably hold his weight should he decide to try a pull up, which he wouldn't, because it might actually be embarrassing. "I never said illicit."

 

"Illegitimate? Illegal? No, it wasn't that, unless you were anticipating the answer, incorrectly I might add. I was sure you said 'ill' something. Ill-advised—now that, I'll grant you."

 

"I'm pretty sure I didn't," Charlie argued, not that it mattered. He had started knocking on the walls, stepping inside and listening. They made an ordinary wood noise, hollow where he expected and duller where the closet wall butted up against the outer wall of the house. Not that he was looking for bodies, but maybe a secret passage?

 

And then he saw it—a patched spot slightly lower than his shoulder. It was the only notable feature in what seemed to be a pretty ordinary closet. "This—you patched a hole."

 

"Hmm. And a pretty amateurish job of it, all things considered. I followed the directions, but the patching compound completely refused to stick to the metal screen, which I discovered was due to ambient humidity and not, strictly speaking, my own inability to handle a trowel. In any case, I made that hole, Charles, and I repaired it."

 

"Um. Okay. Good for you?"

 

"It was, actually, and thank you for that unnecessary sarcasm. It was very cathartic, in fact. Now ask me how I made that hole."

 

"Okay. How did you make that hole, Larry?" It really was at moments like this that it helped to really love the person you were with. But sometimes, it didn't quite help enough.

 

"I punched the wall. Right there. I put a hole right through the plaster with my fist. And there's a hole just like it in an apartment in New Jersey, made for much the same reason, as a matter of fact."

 

Larry sounded oddly proud of that, and Charlie watched as he flexed the fingers of his right hand and rubbed at his knuckles with his left, as if remembering the pain.

 

"I—wait—I remember that. You had a bandage on your hand once. And one of those—"

 

"A splint. I broke my finger the first time. The second time, well, I'm afraid I learned from only one of my mistakes, or perhaps it was dumb luck that the only thing broken was my pride the second time. In any case, there's some disagreement in the professional bare-knuckle pugilist community about the proper placement of the thumb, and I'm inclined to believe that it's a matter best left to the professionals to sort out amongst themselves. I'm surprised you remember it, actually. It was quite a long time ago."

 

"You kept dropping your chalk. I was, um, fifteen? Fall term."

 

"Yes, you were fifteen and going on either forty or ten, depending on what day it was and who one asked at the time."

 

"You said you'd slammed your hand in your car door. You punched your closet?"

 

"That year, and since then, and very likely long before that, I said a great many things that weren't true, and quite a few things that were. At the time, I'm not sure I could have identified the lies I told others, much less the ones I told myself, though I sometimes thought I knew."

 

Larry sighed, and Charlie took Larry's hand and held it up between them, remembering, or trying to, back when he was fifteen and Larry was thirty-nine. The math came easily, but it was still sometimes hard to imagine—the subjective difference between their ages magnifying the further back he went, though he didn't spend much time thinking about it now.

 

His memory was frustrating, a collection of associations, the strangeness of life without Don there every day, and weekend visits from Dad, and daily phone calls asking him if everything was okay, without Dad ever coming out and saying why it wouldn't be, and then asking him to put Mom on, and listening to their strangely coded conversations he never could figure out. Don called less frequently, maybe because neither of them knew what to say if they weren't right there, arguing about something. But that year… that year he mostly remembered his mom, a scarf on her head or a headband, something always holding her hair back from her face, saying she trusted him, and yes he could go to any party he was invited to, not that he was invited to any, but he'd appreciated the thought, because she trusted him and hovered over him anyway.

 

His memory of Larry was less vivid—less vivid even than the problem Charlie had been working on at the time, the black bound notebook with his notations scrawled in a way that was entirely disorganized in ways he couldn't imagine living with today. It wasn't that he didn't remember Larry, but that he had a hard time not seeing Larry as he was now, except in brief surprising flashes, the sudden strangeness of an old photograph, Larry with a little more hair, fewer lines on his face, but still Larry. He remembered the first time he met him, thinking he looked too young to be a professor, and telling Mom that and how she laughed and said, "I don't think you should tell him that." And he did remember Larry's hand with that blue splint taped to his fingers, and the strong, sharp angle of his thumb to his palm. Very square hands, always moving, and that day—no, that day wasn't important, but the day before, he'd been staring out the window, and Larry had put his hand under Charlie's chin and lifted his chin up and he'd looked at Larry and—

 

"I thought… wait—I was right?"

 

"That entirely depends." Larry sighed, frowning deeply, now and pulling his hand away from Charlie's and cupping his own face with it, crossing his other arm over his chest to lean his elbow on. "At the time, I'd rather hoped you didn't think."

 

Charlie nodded, remembering how the notebook had blurred out of focus as he wrote, because he was tired. He'd stayed up all night the night before, working, unable to stop because he'd been this close to something that turned out to be still miles away and several years beyond him, though he didn't know it at the time. And he remembered going into Larry's office at Princeton to work, because it was quieter somehow than anywhere else, even the library, and certainly the apartment, because Mom tried to be quiet but her trying was unaccountably loud. And Mom asked questions; Larry didn't; he would answer questions if Charlie had them, but otherwise left him alone, and his quiet was quiet, deep and unbroken and peaceful. But that day, they'd actually been talking, because Charlie had asked him something about—

 

"Einstein. We were talking about the nature of genius," Larry said quietly, filling in that blank, and he could see it.

 

Because he'd been going over Einstein's work, trying to get inside his head, to make sense of that way of thinking, even where Einstein was wrong, to try to get into that space when Einstein still thought he was right—following each of his dead ends from beginning to end, and Larry had been saying something about something from Plato's Republic, which he'd read that semester, and didn't entirely understand, and which seemed to have nothing at all to do with Einstein, which was frustrating, but very Larry, even then.

 

"Your genius will not be allotted to you, but you choose your genius; and let him who draws the first lot have the first choice, and the life which he chooses shall be his destiny." Larry had said that right before he'd touched him, and Charlie had heard it, but hadn't really noticed hearing it, because then he was looking at Larry, Larry's fingers brushing his chin, turning him away from the window, and—

 

"You were going to kiss me."

 

Charlie opened his eyes, surprised at the light in the bedroom, surprised to find he was standing in the closet and not back in Larry's office again, that his palm was still flat on the patched wall, where it was rough and chalky and dusty, where Larry had broken something and repaired it, the damage leaving traces, a soft space and raw edges.

 

"You were going to kiss me," he repeated, and Larry shook his head.

 

"No, at least I hope I wasn't. I—well, the thing I tell myself is that we both now know I didn't, and in the end, that is the important thing."

 

"Why didn't you?" Charlie asked, and Larry blinked several times in a row.

 

"Now that should be obvious, Charles. 'Virtue is free, and as a man honors or dishonors her he will have more or less of her; the responsibility is with the chooser.'"

 

"Which is another way of saying—"

 

"You were fifteen, Charlie. No, the thing that bothers me to this day—and that punching a hole in the wall did not at all help explain, not that I imagined it would, though pain does bring with it a certain undeniable clarity—is why I wanted to in the first place."

 

"Um… because I was cute?" Charlie offered, not expecting Larry's expression—a mix of horror and amusement.

 

"Actually, no, and I say this in all honesty, but… as I remember it, that was the year you developed the saddest, patchiest excuse for a beard on your chin matched by a profoundly unattractive, underdeveloped mustache, one that you absolutely refused to shave off, for reasons of your own, likely having to do with the novelty of it, and—"

 

"And you wanted to kiss me anyway," Charlie concluded, before Larry could get around to a full explication of his hideous, fifteen-year-old self.

 

"For just a few seconds, I suppose I could argue temporary insanity, because yes, I think I did. Consider it. Briefly. You had this habit of…." Larry trailed off and looked at the floor, and Charlie reached out and used his fingers to lift Larry's chin, forcing Larry to meet his eyes.

 

"What habit did I have?"

 

"Nothing. It was nothing you did. You did nothing whatsoever to provoke—to entice—or to seduce. And frankly, it nauseates me even to use those words at all. What happened—or didn't happen—had nothing at all to do with you, I want you to be clear on that point. And in telling you this today, I want to make it clear that I'm not—that I will understand if this changes the way that you see me and our relationship."

 

"Larry—come on. It's not—"

 

"Charles, again, this is not the place for you to offer comfort. I'm not making excuses, but perhaps it is important to note that you were an inordinately tactile person, Charles, even then."

 

"I touched you?"

 

"Yes. Well, yes, I suppose, yes. You did. Literally, figuratively, yes, there was that, and… perhaps that played into it, though again, I blame only myself. Though many of your peers—well, not in terms of age but in your classes alongside you—well, they could barely make eye contact with anyone, much less faculty, as a rule, and still can't, whereas you had quite the opposite, though equally disturbing, problem. You offered eye contact, far too much of it for most people's comfort, my own included, apparently."

 

Charlie must have looked a bit confused at that, because Larry smiled softly at him and closed his own eyes, as if it helped him remember, or maybe it was just easier that way.

 

"You stared at people when they were talking, and sometimes when they weren't. At me, though I suppose you stared at everyone just about equally. I spent most of our first term together convinced I'd left off some crucial piece of clothing before coming to lectures, before I realized that nobody else in those same classes seemed to even notice I was at the front of the lecture hall, while you tracked me with an almost single-minded intensity that was really quite… off-putting, at first, though I suppose I should've been flattered. Of course, I wasn't at all delusional enough to think it meant anything other than absent-mindedness on your part, combined with a tendency toward alternating moments of intense focus and vague drifting that, by the way, continue to haunt me when I think of you behind the wheel of a—"

 

"I wish you'd kissed me that day," Charlie broke in, sensing that Larry was about to move away from the part of the story that still interested him.

 

"I would never have forgiven myself if I had. I probably wouldn't have forgiven you, either, by the way. I haven't even forgiven myself for having thought about it. It was not at all my best moment. No, not at all my best."

 

"Did you want to do anything else? That day?"

 

"Charles, if I had, would we really be having this conversation? No, most definitely not."

 

There was an awkward silence, then, and Charlie wasn't sure if it was worth pressing it, because he sensed that, though the lie hung there between them alongside that plastic-wrapped suit, both of them knew it was a lie, so it was also a kind of truth.

 

And at last, Larry nodded to himself and leaned against the closet door.

 

"I don't remember what happened next," Charlie admitted. There was that moment, Larry's hand on his face, and then….

 

"Nothing happened, as I think I said." And perhaps Charlie looked skeptical, because Larry added, "Honestly, we talked about Einstein for awhile longer, or rather, you complained some more about him, and I didn't have the heart to argue, though I damned well should have, because you were wrong, and then it was time for your next class."

 

"And…"

 

"And for a few hours, after you left, I thought of nothing beyond how I would get through teaching the rest of my classes. And then I went home, had a drink—no, a few drinks, to be honest—and a shower during which I seriously considered leaving the profession of teaching altogether and perhaps joining the clergy, though at that point, I was perhaps already too corrupted by skepticism to make the necessary transition. In any case, while I was getting dressed, I did myself injury, which brought me some measure of relief, alongside the distraction of needing immediate medical attention."

 

"So did you… did you think about me when you were—alone? Showering?" Charlie didn't doubt Larry's version of events, and that nothing had happened, though he wondered now if he should tell Larry that he'd actually skipped his next class that day and went home. Mom knew his schedule and asked if he was feeling sick, and he'd lied and said class was cancelled, and then he'd holed up in his room, which his mom thankfully stayed out of, and he thought about Larry. With hand lotion and Kleenex.

"Charles, that's—honestly, that's—no. Of course not. No. I did not—use you that way."

 

No, he decided. Larry probably did not want to know that he'd used Larry "that way."

 

Larry looked like he was going to crawl right out of his skin and break something again. He'd tucked his head down between his shoulders and was folding up on himself like a crumpled piece of origami paper, and Charlie suddenly longed to draw him out, suddenly ridiculously turned on by the certainty that it wasn't all just in his head, and that Larry had really wanted him.

 

Because he'd filed the whole thing away at the time as yet another misread social cue, and, over time, had forgotten about it. And though he'd known he was getting better at it everyday, he still sometimes got people very wrong, though never with any serious repercussions. Though he'd actually never had as much trouble with Larry as he had with some people. So he should have suspected. Maybe he did suspect. Maybe that's why he was still here, this many years later. Maybe it all came down to not misreading that moment—and maybe it was like the problem he began that year but couldn't solve until he'd learned enough to move through to the next steps. His intuitive leaps could only ever take him so far. He had to show his work.

 

Larry taught him that. He was very physical—not tactile, because he'd never touched him, but—demonstrative. He gestured with his hands, with his mouth and eyes. The psychologist Mom had hired for him in grade school had explained that that was probably why it was easier to pick up cues from some people and not others. The thing was, when he was fifteen, nobody actually wanted him for anything more than help with their math and physics homework, and he had tried to pay attention to the subtleties, on the off chance that someone did show some interest in him sexually, which would have been really a wonderful thing, however unlikely.

 

Larry, it turned out, wasn't all that subtle, but he'd still almost missed it.

 

"I would have kissed you," he said now, sure of it, even though then, when he still thought it was his overactive imagination, he'd been a little freaked. He knew it—knew he'd have done it, if Larry had kissed him then, not because he was desperate (though he had been in ways that were singular to adolescence, and that he sometimes missed for their insane urgency) but because he sometimes had stared at Larry on purpose, and thought about him when he was alone. Not exclusively. And not to the point where he couldn't talk to him the next day, or where he felt weird about it, or no weirder than he felt about everyone, all the time. He probably spent that whole year alternately turned on and deeply confused. And even when he did turn pink and stammer, it wasn't as if people took any notice anyway. Even in the rarified atmosphere of Princeton, he was a geek of the first order. He didn't actually come to feel at home until he and Larry were both at CalSci, and thankfully, by then, the daily erections were under control.

 

There were definitely advantages to being on the outside, observing, though. Sometimes, in the middle of working on equations, he'd go out to the athletic field and watch the guys who were always playing pick-up Frisbee, imagining what they'd look like naked. One upperclassman in particular was six feet tall and had long legs and arms, tanned and smoothly muscled. He looked like an actor. Charlie liked to watch them play, but often got caught up tracking the movement of the Frisbee itself, the arc it traced, the motion of the wind under the lip of it as it affected the spin. The lift force, drag force, rolling moment, pitching moment, and spindown didn't take long to calculate, though, and then he'd be back to watching for the strip of brown skin that showed when the guy's shirt lifted up as he caught the disk.

 

Actually, surprisingly, according to the books at the library, he had a perfectly normal, perfectly frustrating sex life for a fifteen-year-old, though the books had been sort of vague about the whole looking at men part of things. The one book Mom had in the house on sex—the one that Dad couldn't even look at—was filled with diagrams and information about reproduction. He'd studied that at length long before he was old enough to go to the library and read well enough to use the card catalog and find the better, harder books, which turned out to have fewer pictures. At thirteen, he'd been pretty sure from his copious reading that the gay thing should be a secret, at least until he figured out if it was permanent or a byproduct of stress, like the nervous tic he'd developed for two months after arriving at college, which had really made him so much more popular and beddable, he was sure.

 

But the gay thing didn't really go away, though, after a few years of near-constant exposure to Larry, what might've been a crush turned into something else, and he just filed sex with Larry away as something incredibly unlikely, statistically improbable, and not really worth taking out and thinking about. And he wasn't, at the time, entirely averse to the idea of girls. Which wasn't the same thing as being excited by them, but he was, at the time, keeping an open mind.

But Larry was a special case. He was brilliant, passionate about science, and something unexpected—something none of his tutors had been—Larry was fun. He liked video games (and perhaps liked was too mild a word for what turned out to be an obsession). And he liked to go on hikes in Marquand Park and sometimes took Charlie along, because he insisted it wasn't good to spend all your time indoors studying (though they did spend all his time outdoors studying, so the point was probably lost on him at the time). They used to park Larry's car in a lot on "Lover's Lane," right by the park, and he'd always wanted to say something about that, but never did, because he couldn't think of something casually clever to say that didn't sound idiotic.

 

He wasn't really very good at keeping secrets back then. But if he could have been sure of that moment when he thought maybe Larry was going to—when Larry was thinking about it… the way Larry had looked at him, open and overwhelmed….

 

"I would have said yes."

 

"You don't know what you would have done, and it's largely irrelevant because you were under the age of consent."

 

"I could consent."

 

"Not legally, no. Not that that's entirely the point."

 

"But I could have. I could do differential equations in my head."

 

"Which is in no way comparable and thus a very poor analogy, and you know that, and why are we arguing about this now?"

 

"I don't know that, and even if I did, it's not wrong to think about, Larry. It's just—it's the past, and it's sort of… hot."

 

"It's pedophilia, is what it is, and it's not—"

 

"I was fifteen, not five, Larry. I jacked off in bed every night."

 

"And I was your teach—every night? No—you should definitely not be telling me this."

 

"Sometimes more than once," Charlie offered, taunting him, a bit annoyed now, though he wasn't sure at what. "You could have taught me… things."

 

"Charles, please. I did teach you things. I did my job, and you—"

 

"I was your job?"

 

"And now you're purposefully misinterpreting to cast me in the worst possible light. And as I'm really not comfortable with the direction this conversation is taking, I think we should consider the matter closed. I'm entirely sorry I opened this closet. And beyond that, I just don't know what to say to you. You were so insistent with the question last night, that I thought it was time to… confess, I suppose. Though this was not quite the reaction I expected, under the circumstances."

 

"Maybe you just don't know me as well as you think you do."

 

"Maybe I don't, in which case I suppose we're even," Larry conceded, looking tired and worn, and Charlie felt a little guilty, but only a little. For all that Larry insisted on humanity being messy, he liked his stories to be surprisingly neat, which they usually weren't, and which Charlie took no small amount of pleasure in pointing out to him.

 

"Logically, you can't confess to something you didn't do, and I can't absolve you of something I wanted you to do, so yes, we're even."

 

"Logical, yet not helpful. The symmetry of your sentences belies the asymmetry of the crime."

 

"What crime? No—wait, don't tell me you believe in thought crimes, because I refuse to even go there." Charlie looked at his watch, seeing that they still had a few hours before he had to leave and teach and be Professor Charles Edward Eppes again. Right at the moment, that guy seemed pretty far away—like he was the fantasy, the future, and not entirely relevant, or at least not the same person who had wanted Larry then and wanted him now. Were they the same person? Was Larry the same Larry?

These were the kinds of questions Larry asked, and he didn't even know how to begin to answer them.

 

"It—look, it was a fantasy, then, right? Make believe. Fantasies help us learn, right? It was a… a thought experiment, entirely without repercussions in the here and now, or even in the then, except in what it can teach us."

 

"There are always repercussions, Charles. I do believe there are always repercussions to any sort of knowledge."

 

"So let's find out what they are. Play with me, Larry."

 

It was a sudden decision, and as he said it, he was sure it was the right one. Probably. Larry had all but convinced himself that even thinking about it was bad, and had led to a ruinous end, which was ridiculous as here they were, same timeline, nothing broken but Larry's finger, and even that had healed in a few weeks. No visible scars, and as far as he was concerned, no invisible ones either.

 

"I—"

 

"Play with me," Charlie repeated, and Larry blinked at him, as if trying to decide if Charlie was serious (he was), if that was an order (it was, probably, depending on whether Larry took it that way), and if Larry could (and that remained to be seen, but Charlie really hoped so).

 

"I'm afraid I'm not familiar with this game of yours," Larry protested, but it was just the softest voice—curious and not angry, and definitely willing.

 

Charlie nodded. "Think of it as a kind of virtual reality."

 

Larry rubbed at his face. "Ahead of my time, Charles. Is that anything like vector graphics?"

 

"Yes, Larry. Only with graphic sex instead of graphic monsters. We should do this in your office, now."

 

He took Larry's hand, noticing that Larry had actually made a joke, instead of arguing with him, which meant things were okay, or at least marginally okay. Larry did not joke when he was really, truly upset. Actually, Charlie had never seen him really, truly upset, though now that he knew that a really, truly upset Larry was prone to punching walls, he realized he had no real interest in provoking him.

 

He led Larry down the stairs and into the office, and he looked around, trying to remember details, the little things that mattered. He'd been sitting behind Larry's desk that day, the way he often did (and actually, only now did that strike him as strange. None of his own students ever presumed to sit behind his desk—not even Amita).

 

Larry had been sitting on the corner of his desk, turned toward him slightly, his feet up on the chair he kept for students—other students. Larry's books were lying open on the small sofa he had back then. He still had a small sofa in this office, at home, but the one in his office at school had been tan and vinyl and slippery, and made a cracking sound when you sat on it. There was a rip in the vinyl covered with a piece of black electrical tape, and Larry often picked at it while he was thinking, peeling it away and then smoothing it back down again. The one Larry had now was upholstered in a brown, soft, floral fabric that blended in with everything else in the room, tasteful and comfortable.

Charlie sat behind Larry's desk, opening a book up in front of him, and gestured for Larry to sit on the edge of the desk. The radio was playing softly, set to the jazz station Larry liked, and Charlie noticed they were in the middle of a fundraiser and turned it off, reminding himself to contribute later.

 

Larry sat down on the edge of the desk, which was a bit taller than his old office desk. There was no chair in front of it, so his feet didn't touch the floor and he kicked the desk with the heels of his shoes, tapping out a measured, nervous beat.

"Tell me about Einstein."

 

"I really don't even remember what we were—"

 

"Just talk, Professor. You know how to do that."

 

"I would be insulted—"

 

"Except that it's true. Einstein?"

 

"Einstein was… I don't see how this is—"

 

"Einstein's work is overrated. He was entirely derivative of Preston and Bain, and clearly plagiarized De Pretto's equation. There's even some suggestion his own wife was an un-credited contributor to his work.[i]"

 

"Now that's not at all fair, Charles. Only in hindsight can we so easily—and wrongly, I should add—dismiss the work of...." And easy as that, Larry was talking, lecturing, arguing with himself about the nature of scientific work as a necessarily collaborative effort as weighed against the cultural definition of individual genius. And the Plato actually made some sense this time, as much as Charlie was following him.

 

Charlie nodded, smiling to himself but not Larry, because Larry, when properly provoked, had no trouble at all expounding, at length. It was just a matter of warming him up and joining in every once in a while.

 

Charlie listened to Larry but let Larry's words fade into the background, focusing again on the memory, on the black notebook, and the sound of the cars rushing by outside the window of Larry's office, far enough away he couldn’t see them but he could hear them, and he let his mind wander as he had then, thinking about the sound of Larry's voice, how it was soothing, warm, a little silly sometimes, but also comforting, pleasant, especially the way his voice took on a certain urgency when he was excited, leaning over the desk wearing that soft wide-waled brown corduroy jacket with the patches on the elbows that were actually worn down from Larry leaning on his elbows and thinking. And his hands, on his face even then, and the squareness of his hands, the way he held the chalk, the way he understood things—could see things that Charlie could see, not quite as Charlie saw them, but as nobody else he'd ever met had ever seen them.

 

Something had clicked between them right away—it was like they had a common language despite the disciplinary difference. Even Mom had noticed it—and had looked oddly at Larry sometimes before smiling at them both, and inviting Larry to dinner, maybe because Charlie never brought home anyone else—never really talked about anyone else unless they were involved in a group project that semester, and even then, it was always awkward, with great, deadly silences that made Charlie wish he was somewhere else.

 

Being fifteen, sixteen, seventeen—he had been awkward all through school, but he never felt strange with Larry. He felt good, confident, scared sometimes—worrying, at first, that maybe he wasn't quite the genius everyone thought he was, and that he would let Larry down. But Larry never seemed to care when he got things wrong, and after a while, he realized that Larry wasn't waiting for him to fail. Or if he was, he was waiting for it so he could explain something about the failure.

 

With Larry nearby, he felt things, sometimes, without naming them or wanting to.

 

And Larry's hand was under his chin, those soft fingers slightly calloused from the arcade, tipping his chin up, so he was looking at Larry instead of out the window.

 

He saw it this time, Larry's eyes widening as they looked at each other—the strangely startled look on Larry's face, his pupils wide and black. They were both breathing loudly, and Charlie gripped the edge of the desk, leaning in just slightly, and Larry leaned down just slightly and then Charlie closed his eyes, not sure if he'd closed his eyes then, and wondering, if he hadn't, if that would have done it, because now, Larry's mouth was on his, just the softest, lightest touch, barely a kiss, tentative the way Larry never was—not his Larry, anyway. His mouth was soft, though, and sweetly familiar.

 

But Larry then would have been tentative, nervous, maybe stopping it as soon as it started, and so Charlie brought his arm up and put his hand on the back of Larry's neck, drawing him closer, standing up slightly as he did so until they were both leaning over the desk, kissing, still so softly.

 

"Tell me we shouldn't do this," he prompted, pulling away just slightly.

 

"Not optimal."

 

"You're my teacher. It's a breach of professional ethics."

 

"Into the breach."

 

"Larry, focus. This is wrong."

 

"Yes Charles. This is wrong. I could lose my job over this. Though with tenure, I might—no, I'd most certainly lose my job. Not to mention your—your—"

 

"My mother," Charlie said, because it was okay, even a little amusing, to think about her then, realizing that she had to suspect, maybe not Larry, but maybe him, because of the way he talked about Larry. She'd asked him once if he noticed any girls at school, and he pretended he didn't know what she meant, but she'd just looked… knowing. She knew things, sometimes, and he was never sure how she knew, but it was usually okay that she did.

 

"This—this game is very good."

 

"But it's wrong, right?" Charlie countered, though it was good. It was very, very good. It always was. Larry's hands were moving over his back, down his shoulders and gripping his biceps, and they were still kissing, as if that was all they'd ever do, as if that was always enough.

 

"Wrong, right, hmm," Larry said, kissing his neck, just below his jaw, down at the edge of his collar. "I will be punished for this, almost certainly punished."

 

"You're my favorite teacher, Professor Fleinhardt," Charlie said, pleased at Larry's low moan in response. "If I'd met you in middle school, I might have gone into physics instead of applied mathematics."

 

"If I'd met you in middle school, Charles, I would have killed myself," Larry answered, sounding strangely sincere, though not stopping the downward progress of those kisses, or the now more insistent roaming of his hands over Charlie's body, unbuttoning his shirt and sliding under the edge of his t-shirt. Charlie noticed he hadn't touched his hair at all, which Larry usually did, and then realized—it used to be very short, because he couldn't stand the way it frizzed up, and it had looked girly the one time he'd put his mom's hairspray on it.

 

"I've never done this with a man before," Charlie whispered, putting his hand on Larry's erection, very lightly, as if he'd never touched one before—as if he'd never touched Larry before. "Is this okay?"

 

"You—oh—that's—please. Yes. No—Charles, please."

 

"I want you to touch me."

 

"I—"

 

"Like this. Show me what I'm supposed to do. Teach me."

 

"If there is a hell, Charles, why does it not surprise me that you know the way?"

 

"Sometimes, when you're reading, I watch you when I'm supposed to be doing my homework."

 

"I—homework? Charles, I—I—I keep—I kept thinking—I really should be better at instituting boundaries. I've—I'd mentored others—none quite like you, of course—this never happened before. It really—it really is entirely without precedent. Anomalous."

 

"I can spell that now." And so many things were different, but so many other things hadn't changed at all. Larry still made him feel good, safe, challenged, scared, and free.

 

"In my defense, it really is—of course I can't blame you, because you have no idea the effect of those eyes. Not that I ever think about—not in sexual terms, no. It's not sexual. It's—"

 

"It's okay if it is. Teaching is a libidinous act."

 

"It shouldn't—it shouldn't be. I should have found a way to stop this." Larry was breathless, brilliant, finally reaching up tentatively and touching his hair, as if surprised at its length, his fingers tangling in it and pulling a little.

 

"You waited. You did stop it. You did everything exactly right," Charles reassured him, because Larry's hands were trembling a little, and not in a good way.

 

"I wasn't waiting, Charles. Really, I really, I wasn't waiting. Because that sounds very… the way you say that sounds almost predatory, and that is very much not my intent. I wasn't—and if I was, I don't know at all how I can apologize to you." And Larry's voice was trembling a little too. Charlie wondered if he'd made a mistake, but still trusted his instincts and his gut said this was necessary. Hiding wasn't really all that productive, even if it sometimes seemed that way.

 

"Maybe I was waiting," he said, not because it would help, but because Larry had fallen silent, his hands stilling against Charlie's head, not leaving him but no longer frantic with need.

 

"For all I knew, you were interested in girls. Most people are, not that I can blame them at all. Women. Or even boys, boys your own age, but certainly not, and even if you were, that was no guarantee you'd be interested in—"

 

"You sell yourself short." Charlie leaned in and kissed the hollow of Larry's throat, at his pulse, tasting sweat and the bitterness of aftershave. "I stole your aftershave once."

 

"You—I am short. And why would you—?"

 

"Senior year. I put it on when I… thought about you."

 

"Oh, Charles, that's—you didn't really."

 

"I did, actually. It was…intense." And it was good to finally tell someone—to tell Larry. He'd never done anything remotely like that before, and he hadn't planned on it, but Larry had invited several students to his place, and Charlie had gone to the bathroom and looked in the medicine cabinet, and there it was, and he just took it, feeling ridiculous and hot and telling himself he didn't know why he took it, except right then, he knew why—knew exactly what he wanted to do with it. "I had to stop because I kept getting distracted when you came in smelling like—well, like sex, and talking about string theory, and it was—"

 

"This is all very confusing."

 

"Tell me about it. Now show me what you wanted to do to me when I was fifteen."

 

"I didn't—Charles—As I've said—"

 

"Right, right. Then show me what you wanted to do to me when I was twenty. Not that you were waiting," he added, thinking about how that wasn't all that long ago, actually, and by then, he actually started thinking he had a chance with Larry, though by then it hardly mattered.

 

"Oh—well that's—when you were twenty? I wanted—Ah."

 

"What did you want? To suck me off? To fuck me? Why didn't you at least kiss me then?"

 

Larry slid off the desk suddenly, breaking away from him. "Charles, I think this has gone far enough."

 

Charlie slammed his hand on the top of the desk, and Larry jumped a little, his eyes widening. "Why?" Charlie demanded, rubbing at his palm where it was stinging. "I could consent. Legally. Why not twenty. Twenty-one? I could drink, which I think means I could fuck."

 

Larry laughed, a tight, nervous sound. "I'm not at all sure I could at that point. Guilt has no statute of limitations, apparently."

 

Charlie blinked, taken by surprise at that. And then he grinned, because Larry, too, seemed to suddenly think that was funny.

 

"But I was cute then."

 

"Oh, without a doubt," Larry agreed, a small smile playing at the corners of his mouth and then taking over.

 

Charlie loved it when Larry smiled. It transformed him. "You were too."

 

Larry was still smiling, but now it was the shy smile he reserved for compliments that had no place in his universe. "I've never aspired to 'cute,' and yet I've somehow never managed to end up anywhere else. And for a man my age, I'd say that was somewhat tragic."

 

"Nothing about you is tragic, except maybe that suit upstairs, which was never, ever in style, by the way."

 

And Larry laughed, but just as suddenly went serious again. "Charles, you have no idea. That suit—I feel strongly that I should defend that suit. That suit and I lived in that closet—for most of my adult life, actually—and it was a very small space until you made me want to knock a very big hole in it, despite the very real risk to life and limb—well, thumb, anyway."

 

And there it was, finally. "I didn't realize that you—"

 

"No—you wouldn't have."

 

Charlie considered that for a moment. It wasn't as if he didn't know Larry had a life before he entered it. Objectively speaking, he'd seen Larry's c.v. It was just that it was hard to imagine the life that went with those publications. Larry didn't really talk about it, and he realized that he never really asked, which was probably a little selfish of him.

 

"So before you met me, you hadn't, um—Did you—?"

 

"Did I…?"

 

"Sleep with other men," Charlie said, feeling a little stupid when Larry laughed, a short dismayed sound with very little humor in it.

 

"Sleep with? No, I don’t suppose I slept with any of them. But if you're asking about my sexual history, I—I didn't seem particularly virginal to you, did I? No, don't answer that, please. I'd like to keep some semblance of my dignity intact."

 

"I'm just trying to understand," he protested, and Larry held up a hand, making a dismissive gesture. "My closet was a garage," Charlie said, finally, and Larry nodded.

 

"Yes, I imagine you do understand. And there's a bumper sticker in there somewhere, I think." Larry smiled, rubbing at the side of his face, at his temples.

 

"So… I came along—"

 

"And made me grow up, yes, and face some very hard truths about myself. And how is that for bitter irony? Well, not that I have regrets. We live the life we draw for ourselves. Though I sometimes wish… I suppose on some level, I do almost wish I had kissed you that day. Even though it would have been wrong, and horrible, and impossible, and never-mind the Wrath of an Almighty God—your parents alone would have killed me, and with just cause, I might add."

 

"In some other universe, you did kiss me, and it turned out just fine."

 

"Now why doesn't that make me feel any better? You don't, by any chance, work for Hallmark, do you? Because that was a bit cloying."

 

"I think I know what will make you feel better."

 

"Do you really?"

 

But Charlie was already moving toward him, pushing him back onto the small sofa and climbing on top of him, straddling his lap. "No games. No closets. Just dirty sex between two consenting adults."

 

"Hmm. Yes. That actually might be just the thing to clear the conscience." And Larry nodded, licking his lower lip and unzipping Charlie's jeans with a small sigh, shifting himself down a bit.

 

Charlie stopped Larry there and kissed him again, and Larry was pliant, easy, leaning forward enough so that Charlie could remove his button-down shirt, stripping him down to the bare skin he'd only imagined for so very long. Larry didn't actually work out very intensely anymore, though when he first met him, Larry was, oddly enough, following a regimen of push-ups and sit-ups, which had sort of surprised him the first time he arrived early for a student conference to find Larry on the floor of his office, perspiring in his undershirt and khakis. Nowadays, Larry's efforts in that area seemed to come in fits and starts, usually starting up in spring, though he always did take regular walks, weather permitting. Charlie didn't bother trying to reassure him, but more often than not ended up getting carried along in Larry's temporary interest in exercise for however long it lasted. Charlie could pretty much go along with anything that involved Larry needing a shower.

 

The second time they'd had sex, it had been in the shower, because Larry had answered the door in his white bathrobe, and Charlie had walked him back upstairs and they'd both gotten in again, despite Larry's protests that he was pruning up. They hadn't gotten much farther than mutual, soapy hand-jobs, and that turned out to be just fine.

 

"No—you definitely, definitely seemed to know what you were doing, that first time," Charlie admitted. Charlie was finding it hard to think, but also wanted to keep talking, to hold off what was otherwise going to be a very fast orgasm.

 

"There's knowing and there's knowing." Larry spoke softly. "I've never really known quite what to do with you. You were—and remain—exceptional."

 

And Larry seemed to sense how close he was and put both his hands on Charlie's hips, holding him steady, ignoring, for the moment, that they were both erect. Prolonging it sometimes made it better.

 

"I'd rather be ordinary."

 

"I don't believe that for a minute, and I think you recognize there's no need to be humble in present company. You are who you are."

 

Charlie considered that. "If I were ordinary, I never would have met you."

 

"Hmm. Are we still playing, 'What if?' Because I have an answer to that, actually."

 

"No—sorry. I promised no more games."

 

"No, Charles, that's a perfectly valid question—and one I've asked myself on occasion. And I suspect the answer is that if you were someone else, I would be as well."

 

Charlie smiled and kissed Larry's cheek, which was still smooth, though his own was already shadowed. "But we'd both be right here, wearing jumpsuits and goatees, right?"

 

"Well, actually, no. And again, you've sidestepped my point, which was that if you're seriously presuming the possibility of alternate universes, I suspect we'd both be elsewhere. It's unlikely that events in multiple universes would conspire to such a neat congruence as to leave us both here, together."

 

"Wearing jumpsuits."

 

And Larry laughed. "Most likely naked, because I refuse to admit to the possibility that I might be convinced to wear a jumpsuit in any universe, for any reason."

"Four legs, four arms, two heads, two penises, and one soul in a jumpsuit. You can't argue with Plato, Larry, especially after you voluntarily wore that suit upstairs."

 

"Now you don't really believe in that Destiny nonsense, Charles, nor do I, as a matter of fact, and that suit upstairs was very much in fashion when you were still in diapers, so I don't expect you'd remember it, though I suppose that also makes it very unlikely I could squeeze into it at this point, so—"

 

"So you're resigned to a life of nudity in all universes. I can get behind that, actually."

 

Larry sighed and Charlie laughed, patting his belly with a great deal of empathy and no small amount of lust. Neither one of them would look very good squeezed into a jumpsuit, though he personally thought Larry looked very good naked. It was all a matter of perspective.

 

"I like nudity," Charlie offered, stroking a hand over Larry's chest and letting his nails drag in small arcs tracing the outline of Larry's pectorals. Larry tipped his head back into the sofa and closed his eyes, and for a moment, the room was silent except for the small sounds of pleasure Larry made as Larry let go of him and Charlie could move in and use his hands and mouth, no longer indulging in the fantasy of the past, and very much satisfied with the present, with the flush that suffused Larry's face and neck as Charlie teased him, using his hand finally to unzip Larry, climbing off of him finally so he could get into a more comfortable position to draw Larry into his mouth. Larry's hips slid forward on the sofa, and Charlie grabbed hold of Larry's hand, bringing it down again to his own cock. And they found a rhythm. Larry always took a bit longer to get fully hard, and Charlie liked to bring him there with his tongue and fist. Charlie needed far less stimulation, but he liked it best when he could make Larry come like this, with Larry touching him, his measured strokes becoming irregular as he started to focus on Charlie's mouth and nothing else. He slid one hand under Larry's ass, cupping it and squeezing a little, and Larry inhaled suddenly, held very still, then sighed.

 

When Larry came, he always moaned just a little, biting his lower lip as if he was holding back. Once, Charlie had pulled off just before Larry got there, and kissed him, hard, and when he pulled back to breathe, Larry turned his head and came, uttering such a shocking string of profanity that Charlie had actually blushed.

 

This time, he waited until Larry squeezed his hand, and then Charlie pulled off and didn't move, barely breathing. Larry had been reading about multiple orgasms and positing a relationship to time dilation, and though Charlie was skeptical on both counts, it was intensely fascinating watching Larry try to come back from the edge each time.

 

Larry took a few shallow breaths and Charlie fought the urge to touch him, especially as Larry still had a hand on Charlie's cock and Charlie knew he wasn't far from coming himself. And then Larry nodded, and Charlie took him into his mouth again, and when Larry arched his hips and went still, Charlie felt Larry squeeze his hand again and ignored it, wanting to pull Larry over the edge now.

 

And Larry moaned, but continued to thrust, finally spilling into his mouth and Charlie pushed his cock into Larry's fist and then put his own hand over Larry's and then he was coming, too, the impression of a closed circuit so strong he was momentarily sure he could taste his own come.

 

"Two halves of one soul." He thought he only thought it, but then Larry laughed.

 

"Not quite, and, as much as I'll admit that this is more fun than masturbation, I very much resent the implication that without you I'm somehow incomplete."

 

Charlie forced himself to sit up on the floor, leaning his head on Larry's knee, still trying to catch his breath.

 

"Mr. 'The human spirit is immeasurable,' is complaining about my addition now?"

 

Larry was grinning, still flushed and sweating, enjoying the game now much as he always did. Even before they had sex, they had this. And it was very satisfying, if somewhat disturbing, that adding sex hadn't actually changed the equation.

 

"No, I'm complaining about your literal interpretation of allegory. Admittedly literature was never your strong suit, Charles, but to have turned the Platonic love story on its head—"

 

"You mean heads—because I count two here—"

 

"—into a perverse image of the beast with two backs…You never even read your classics, did you?"

 

"Do the Cliff's Notes count? Because I think there was a Star Trek Marathon on that week."

 

"That's it! A goatee!" Larry said suddenly, his eyes widening and his voice going up into the high registers. "Well now that explains your evil influence upon me as nothing else ever has." And with a self-satisfied giggle, and before Charlie could protest, Larry closed his eyes, his breath suddenly coming very evenly as he dropped off into sleep.

 

Charlie watched the rise and fall of his chest, amused and a little aroused at the casually sexy picture Larry made, chest bare and spattered with drying come, legs splayed open, his penis stirring slightly with some promise of another orgasm. He pulled himself up onto the sofa and leaned his head on Larry's shoulder, then laughed, as he suddenly realized that at this point, he had spent so little time without Larry, that the question of his own completeness remained very much in the same hypothetical realm as Larry's multiple universes with their multiple orgasms.

And as testing Larry's two soul theory required spending significant time apart, they would just have to agree to disagree.

 

The End.

 

 

Feed the Muse: miriam.heddy@comcast.net

 

Thanks to Kate, whose reading reassured me that we really want permission for the joy. And to the folks at SlashByTheNumb3rs, who helped me see some of why that permission is hard to come by.