Don't think I was a victim. I was sixteen. I wanted everything I felt I had coming to me. The money was not for the sex. It was for my silence. I could have said no at any time, and it would have stopped. One might argue that I wasn't old enough to understand what it meant, and that therefore I could be taken advantage of. That I was lonely and didn't know any other life but being manipulated. Maybe. But that's not as fun.

Things went crazy after Miou died. There was a lot of rushing around. Miou still had a social security number and friends. There were a lot of loose ends, and in the night, a baby crying far off in the direction of the main house. I never went up there. It only confirmed to me that being in the presence of others led to a broken neck, so I slept in my own bed and kept my things neat. A Bentley? To comfort him after the death of his friend. Diamonds? They were for Bell, and he's given them to the boy, no matter. Sometimes Dasius came at night, when Bell was passed out, and called up to my window to be let in. 

I'd open my window, "No go away. You're disgusting. You're a pervert."

"Don't pretend to be pure," he'd hiss, looking around in the dark. "I know that you like it."

"I'm faking it for the money."

"You're driving me crazy."

"Go away. You're illegal. Unnatural."

"Please let me entertain you," he'd say.

"Ew."

But I thought he was handsome. He has those heavy-lidded eyes, and that sad, drowsy look. When he has been kissing, his lips flush red, and when he has been sucking, they look very abused. Sometimes when I kissed him he would push me back gently by the chin and look away, and close his eyes to take a breath. He smelled lightly of pomade, and sometimes he dabbed a little cologne behind his ears. I found that he had no natural smell of his own. He was non-threatening. The money and goods kept a distance between us, that this was buy and sell and not personal, not intimate. But sometimes I caught him looking at me with a funny pride on his face, and I couldn't read it. 

And then once, about a month after the first time, while he drew his nose up my heated stomach, he said, "Tell me about your day."

"They're talking about putting me in school," I said. "They want to get rid of me."

"You don't want to go to school?" he asked, tucking my legs together and kissing my forehead.

"I'm too stupid to go to school. I don't want to learn. Who cares about it?"

"Have you not been to school?" 

"No. So what?"

He adjusted himself on my bed and sat up a bit. "Could have you at the school in town. You would still be near home. You would commute."

I took his arm and kissed the crook of his elbow.

"Don't kiss," he said, quietly.

"Why?"

"Don't kiss. My arm," he said.

"Why?"

"Don't do that, you brat."

"What are you getting me for my birthday?" I asked him, pulling him down towards me. 

"If I tell you it won't be a surprise."

I had no idea who he was. It did not even occur to me that he had anything to do with Laurent, or Bell, or me. That he had money, we all had a little money. I didn't know anything about anything, and my ignorance made me bold. He was very cagey, and said a lot without saying anything. Sometimes when he was talking to me he would begin to run out of breath, and then he would just stare at me as if he were staring at the face of God, with his mouth open. 

It was Dasius who pulled Bell out of bed on my seventeenth birthday and helped him get sober. I wasn't supposed to see it, but I crept up the stairs at the sound of Bell moaning and crying out. I watched from the doorway as Dasius pulled out a narrow length of plastic tube, a short knife, and a rubber strip. Using these, he bled my Bell into a plain white basin. Dasius murmured to him in French I couldn't understand beyond, "New York, Texas, cher, ma pauvre," dear, poor thing. It made my stomach clench up like a fist when he pressed his own blood to Bellamy's lips, but Bell didn't resist, and while he drank Dasius stroked his hair. 

Later that day, a tailor showed up to take my measurements, but I sent him away. Dasius came directly to see why I had done this. He came and stood by me on the pool deck, tapping his fist against his thigh. 

"What did you say to Bell?" I asked.

He answered me honestly. "I told him that if he destroyed his liver, he would still be alive to suffer. If he stops drinking, he will be allowed to go back to Texas."

"I don't want to do anything with you anymore," I told him.

He didn't say anything, sat down on the deck chair beside mine.

"What do you do like, you have a lot of boys? You get off on this sort of thing?"

"Don't pretend to be worldly," he said softly. "You're not."

"That's not a denial."

"No. I don't have a lot of boys," he said. "Qu'est ce qu'il me disait, ce galopin."

"What?"

"You must go to school."

I crossed my arms and turned my head away from him. Summer had firmly passed by then, and the mornings were cold, but I didn't want him to see that I was uncomfortable. "Who decides these things anyway? I have to go to school. Bell gets to go back south. We bury Miou at the treeline."

Out of the corner of my eye I saw him look up in surprise. 

"What?" I asked.

"Who? It's me."

I popped my lips in derision.

"I'm serious. Did you not know that?"

"At what point was I supposed to know? When you were blowing me or when you were begging for it?"

"Le morveux. I have never done this before," he said, measured. "Is it normal to take such abuse without response? Will you not even look at me?"

"Do you like me or something?" I asked him, taking off my sunglasses and looking at him.

He was looking startled again. 

"What?" I asked.

"Marcellus."

"What."

"You have no idea of the risk." He saw me not getting it. Sometimes he still gives me that startled look, which means I've said something so dumbfoundingly stupid it takes his breath away. I can't help it. "Are you really doing your best to understand?" he asked.

"Yes. What?"

"Yes I like you," he said, enunciating.

"OK, I don't like you though," I said.

His eyebrows pinched together. "All right."

"When are you sending Bellamy back home? Why don't you send him back to Montreal?"

"Montreal is too far."

"You know what's too far? Keeping Bellamy as a pet. He's not going to do what you want. Let him tell you what he wants to do. How can he even begin to think about things like love if you keep him caged up? You're not looking for love. You want Stockholm Syndrome. Quit doing things for us, Dasius, if that is your real name. What?"

He was looking at me again, lips tight.

"What?" I asked, arms crossed.

"What else?" 

"Are you mad at me?"

"No. What else?"

"I didn't want clothes for my birthday, so I sent your tailor away."

"What did you want?" he asked.

"I don't know. Maybe I've never been to New York. Maybe I want to travel."

He sighed and sat back. He rolled his suit jacket off his shoulders, slowly. There was a pin stuck in his collar, a little gold crab.

"I'm not impressed by you. Don't speak French to me anymore," I said. Sometimes in bed, while I was falling asleep, he would purr French poems in my ear. 

"Sometimes I don't know what else to say."

"You're such a loser. You don't know how to get next to me, so you just give me stuff. It feels weird now. Creep. How old are you anyway?"

"Why does it feel weird?"

"Because I sort of like you a little bit, even though you're a loser. And it's not because of the stuff or anything. OK?"

"What is it about?" he asked.

In the future, I would come to understand that about some things, not financial things or book things, Dasius was completely innocent and inexperienced. Whenever he doesn't know something socially, it makes him into a shy, awkward teenager again, learning for the first time. He had never been in a situation where he was interested in a boy who didn't hate or fear him. But I didn't know that then. I thought of him as someone much older and wiser than me, not least because that's what he wants other people to think. I thought when he asked me questions about how things should be, he was mocking me. I know now that he genuinely didn't know and was looking to me for direction. I suppose he liked me for the same reason I liked him, but that understanding has come after many years. 

At that time, I said, "Because I don't have to be afraid of you. I know you won't hurt me, so I can be myself." 

"You don't have to be afraid of me," he said, gently.

"I know. I just said that. You're so lame."

"I'm sorry."

"What, do you want to cuddle now? Go away."

"I want to take you to New York. Your Bell is going away with Laurent to Europe awhile, and I will take you north if you want to go."

A stiff breeze had picked up, and I felt ornery. I think it's because I felt vulnerable. "So you only helped Bell get sober for him? Did you think about us at all?"

He didn't say anything, looking at me.

"Be honest," I told him.

"Marcellus, it has been a long time since I have been allowed to think for myself. I have been living an easy life of doing as I am told. But I would not have done it if I didn't think Bellamy would benefit from being sober."

"Who told you to sleep with me?" I asked, quietly.

"No one. I wanted you. I want you."

"Why?"

"Because you make me forget my English with a kiss, with a look," he bit his lip briefly, thinking. "You are interesting. You tell me how you feel about things, about your day. I like it. I like you. When I am with you, I am only with you. It is like there are no other," he paused, "obligations. I have no stress. I have few goals, with you. You are difficult, but it is simple, the way I feel."

"We'll go to New York this evening? This evening?" I asked. "You'll take me?"

"Not this evening. Soon."

"Don't say stuff like that to me, ok?" I said. 

"Like what?" he asked, straightening a ring on his left hand and rising.

"That you like me, like. It's weird. It's embarrassing."

"You are difficult," he said, leaning over to kiss me on the mouth, "but it is simple."

I meant to rejoin him with an insult, but he is a great and practiced kisser. He takes his time to do it right, as he does with most things. Even after a month of messing around, I hadn't seen much of his skin. I slipped my hand up his sleeve to pinch him, to touch him, and he bit me gently on my bottom lip. "Teeth," I noted.

"I will come for you next week. Don't pack a bag until Bell is gone. They will be thinking I'm taking you to see schools up North, and it won't do for anyone to see you packing inappropriately."

"Come to my room," I said to him, pulling him down by the lapels.

"Do you want me?"

"Just shut up and go with me," I said.

"It's impossible now. I will come next week."

He left me with a few bills and a kiss on the forehead. We had barely any discretion at all. I'm not sure how we got away with it for so long. For me, at that age, it was something of a love story, or at least an exploration of what life had to offer. For him, a horror. He never let on about his demons, and I was too young to appreciate that he had an inner life that would always be something of a mystery to me. He hid his affection for me from Laurent for good reason, not only for my safety, but also because for him, if Laurent didn't know about it, it wasn't quite real. And a fantasy is simple. In fantasy, everything is allowed, and anything is possible. For him, as repressed as he was, the fantasy was too appealing to resist, especially as he had picked an object that did not belong to him, in an act whose consequences he could not completely imagine. In a fantasy, he did not have to worry about what might happen.