On the evening he specified, Dasius told me he would come down to the house to put passports and itinerary in Laurent's hand, and walk Bell from the upstairs room to the black Mercedes that would be pulled up by the front walk. I wasn't sure it would happen. He insisted it would.

I worried about Bell. I didn't want him to like Laurent. I think Laurent knew that. Of course he knew that. I don't think he hated me for it, but it made that sort of feeling possible. He knew that if I could, we wouldn't ever see him again. But I was seventeen, and naive. I didn't really know anything about their relationship except for what I could see. I saw Laurent as an outsider, but I know now that of course to Bell he never was that. For Bell, for twenty years, Laurent had been the man in his life, and from his perspective their conflict had always been intimate. I saw the trip to Europe as coercion. He never said as much to me, but I came to understand that for Bell returning to Laurent's side was like going home. I couldn't understand then what he had gone through, and what Laurent meant to him. I was just mad.

I also was not interested in being treated like a dog that had shit on the floor. Which is how it felt to me when Laurent came through the door that evening and directed me to get lost. 

"This is where I live. Stick it up your ass," I said, holding my ground in my favorite cracked leather recliner. It had grown proper cold out, and it'd taken me a bit to get a good fire going in our little fireplace. 

"What did you say to me, bastard?" he hissed.

"Laurent, assez," Bell said, entering the room from the kitchen, palms out. Enough.

I turned my head away because I had embarrassed Bell, and he was already looking tired. I didn't think it was fair, for Laurent to look rested and made up, and for Bell to look like he'd been walking through hell. But I couldn't resist. "You're the bastard," I said, looking down at my lap.

"Tu doit retourner a la pute qui t'a accouche, salope!"  Go back to the whore who birthed you, bitch.

"Ca suffit, il a seulement dix-sept ans. Vous serez ruine l'ambiance," Bell urged, quietly. That's enough, he's only seventeen. You'll ruin the mood.

When I looked up Bell's eyes were soft, as always. "I'm sorry," I whispered.

"That's all right, little peach. If you need anything, I have left you the number to call. But I hear you are travelling to look at schools in the North. Isn't that exciting?" Bell said, trying to smile.

I looked away from his hand stroking Laurent's back, from L's face, his eyes shut. Did I have a deathwish? 

"Your Bell is talking to you," Laurent hissed, and I heard the sound of Bell thumping him gently. 

"Va te faire mettre." Go fuck yourself. I only had an ear for insults.

I am certain that if Bell wasn't there, I would have died then, because Laurent went deadly silent at those words. 

"Marcellus," Bell said in his sternest tone, after an excruciating minute of silence, "you will be punished when I get home. Do you understand?"

He was saving my life and I didn't know it. 

"Yes," I said, petulantly. I thought myself completely in the right. Even though Laurent had killed Miou, and I knew it, I had always thought myself better than Miou in youthful arrogance, and it didn't cross my mind that it could happen to me. I didn't know about Laurent's whip-crack temper, and the violence that could come from it.  I didn't know that vampires like him use violence to establish dominance, and that I had entered a challenge I no more knew about than could win. Vampires are creatures of blood and are not meant to live like wolves, pressed together where only one may snap at the necks of others. I didn't know that Laurent was that one. I would not know it until it was too late to back from the fight. At that age, I had everything to lose, and I had pushed Bell into defending me at a vulnerable time.

A tense hour or so passed before Dasius showed up, where I refused to move from my seat on childish principle, and Bell kept Laurent upstairs. It was then that Dasius walked Bell down the stairs, and directed Laurent to the car, without a word to me. I childishly thought that Dasius was very good at pretending I didn't exist, and it fed my sense of upset. Bell came to kiss the top of my head, and to hold my hand a bit before going. 

"I know that I haven't done enough for you. That's why you feel like you have to defend yourself," he said, patting my hand. "It's my fault."

"You don't have to act like my mother," I said.

"Maybe not that," he assured me, "but you are my son. When I come back, we'll talk more. Don't worry about me. If you want to talk to me, call me."

"You don't want me. You want me to go away to school."

"No, I don't. I want you to be settled, and if that means you don't go, then I promise you we'll talk about it."

"I'm too stupid to go to school," I told him, unable to stay unemotional.

"Take some time to think about it," he whispered, patting my hand. 

I wanted to rest my head against his back. He'd only just gotten a little better. "Don't leave me," I begged him.

"Be careful what you say," he said, and kissed my forehead.

He left me then to myself, and I listened to the commotion outside of them getting going and the car engine revving to hurry them up. I ducked my head as I heard the front door close, preparing for it to be Laurent come back to give me a blow, but when I looked up it was to worse. Dasius stood in the hallway quietly, looking for me, hat in his hands. Even from that distance I could see that he had been viciously slapped across the cheek. He turned his head toward me and I could see the darkening in shape of index and middle fingers beneath his eye. At his cheekbone, there was a small cut, made by the impact of a ring band.

He saw me looking and smiled, winked, "Ta gueule."

"What happened?" I asked, sinking lower in my chair.

"Do you know what it is, 'Ta gueule'?" he asked me, coming closer.

"No."

"Your damnable mouth," he said, chuckling.

"I thought it meant 'shut up'."

"It does mean that. What did you do to him?"

I opened my mouth to say that I hadn't done anything, but began to cry instead. His smile went away.

"Chut, chut," he cooed, coming to me, the firelight warming his skin so quickly that when he touched my face his hand was warm.

"Don't comfort me," I said, trying to sound cool. 

"What do you want me to do?" he asked, on his knees, lower than me. I didn't notice his passive behaviors until much later. I don't think he was very aware of them.

"Take off your shirt," I said.

He didn't protest and I thought it meant he was treating me like an adult. People doing what you want, that's what being grown up is, I thought. He rose and made to move toward my room, unbuttoning his shirt. I reached for his wrist before he could get very far and he let me pull him down onto the chair with me. He shrugged his white shirt off his shoulders and I pressed my cheek against his bare shoulderblade, pushing him awkwardly against the chair's arm.

He didn't say anything except a quiet, "Chiot," affectionately, which I know now means "puppy". A runt taken from its mother too early. I would have protested then, but resting my face against him felt so good I didn't bother to ask questions.

"I want to tell you something," he said, gently. Maybe he sensed that my heartrate had slowed, and that I had grown calm. In any case, he chose the right moment, when my eyes had half-closed. "I arranged for New York but I think there is too much commotion there for us. That's what I thought. I thought, let's go to Boston first. If it is good there, then we can move on. I think a quieter place."

"I don't want to stay in a hotel," I said, not thinking, as usual. "I want an oven. I want to bake." I don't know why I said oven. I mostly ate Pop-Tarts and cup noodles.

"Of course and I know," he said, though I don't know how he could have known. "So I rented a flat for a month. That's where we'll stay, just you and me. We'll stay there."

"OK," I mumbled.

I made him go into my room then and he let me feel him up. I learned a lot about his body and how it worked. It's the best emotional currency I've ever spent. I learned that in pleasure, he looks vulnerable, which makes him look much younger, which is sort of creepy. I learned that he often says he wants roughness, when he really means tenderness. He asks for a stern hand, because a gentle one is unbearably good to him. I learned that he could not feel pleasure in all the ways that I could, but that there were other things to be done that brought tears to his eyes. I found that one of the most sensitive areas of his body was the warm inside of his mouth. I found that one of his favorite things to do is absolutely kiss endlessly. Unfortunately, as a seventeen year old boy, I was unable to do that for long. Though to our mutual benefit, he was quite generous about it. 

On the many connections to Boston, he had made certain that we sat apart. I was mad at him about it and I think he liked that. He spent most of the time working, and had very little notion of how much a human person needs to eat and sleep. This resulted in a very big fight, when he acted very dismissive of my overtired desire for a real dinner once we finally reached Boston. 

Of course, that flat we stayed in is this flat. I slept in what is now his surgery room. Have you seen it? Where I slept is now where he keeps his tall bookshelf of antique medical encyclopedias, and in the center of the room, a steel table full of holes. But in 1980, it was a cozy room with a bed covered in a crocheted wool blanket. I locked the door on him and after the first twelve hours of sulking, he broke that lock. It's still broken. It's a little hard for me to think that the place where we furiously made up on the carpet is where he spends most of his time dissecting corpses and torturing young vampires now. On the place where I pressed my back, there is a drain on the floor.

I baked bread and roasts in the oven where he now keeps pieces drying. In the cupboard where I kept my cereal and Pop-Tarts, there are needles and pipettes. In the refrigerator, blood and brains. I live in a charnel house. If I do not constantly air it out, it smells like rotting flesh. 

I still remember what we were doing when we heard a knock at our door. I was sitting on Dasius's lap, David, really, which he had told me I could call him. We had been there three weeks. He had told me that he had put in a bid to buy the apartment for me. We were watching Johnny Carson. 

"At this hour?" he wondered.

"Maybe the television is too loud?"

I shifted so that he could get up and get the door, and was on my knees to turn down the volume when I heard him say desperately, trying to sound calm which froze the blood in my veins, "Marcellus, go to your room, lock the door."

There was struggle, sounds of violence. I hid under my bed like a child while someone struggled with the lock, I heard, "Do what you want to me, do what you want to me," and somebody sobbing, I covered my ears, and very soon, after it had been quiet for too long, I found myself alone among the silent rooms. 

When I emerged, there was only the test pattern's tone from the television, and everywhere, there was blood on the floor. 

I would come to understand that Laurent had found us out through an associate, and that for the first time in his life between them, Dasius had won a fight. There, on the kitchen floor, a knife, and nearby, two perfect blue eyes.