Chapter 5
Charles was curled up by the bottom floor of his flat.
It shocked him for a moment: the look on his face was so controlled, but the vibes were so neurotic he wondered how Charles hadn’t whacked his door down with a baseball bat. They had this in common, the blank façade, but at this time Erik would concede that Charles was far more proficient. It may or may not have been related to the eyebrows.
“You said you’d call.”
Pouty and spoiled and wholly out of place after the events of the day. Erik peeled his coat off and put it around Charles’s shivering body.
“You could’ve waited inside if you were so adamant.”
“The point was to prove that I was adamant.”
“You’ve proven it, then. Now get in.”
Erik had his hand on the small of Charles’s back to guide him in. When a duo of junkies stumbled out of the lift, eyes rolled to the backs of their heads, Charles kissed him on the cheek. One of them glanced at him weirdly but the other in short jeans and dreadlocks formed a rock on sign with his hand and slapped his friend’s ass. Erik punched twenty-one and sighed.
“I have a very important case to deal with. I can’t have you around until after.”
“I’m around now, aren’t I?”
“Is this what Oxford does to people?”
“That might have been more of Cambridge, where I did my Ph.D. Sod them.”
Erik exhaled for a long, long time.
He took a shower to help with the wealthy-pedophile stench he’d picked up at Shaw’s. Charles was unusually well-behaved, but on second thought he’d always been fairly docile, polite even, save his incredible propensity for PDA. Back when they first met, a myriad of different girls were always getting out of his car, small or fat, cute or gorgeous, each one tickled him in some new way. He was notorious for it at the university though nobody quite minded the hallway kisses and pub dances, the crazy pictures he posted on Instagram where his daily flirtations were inscribed for time eternal.
A teenager at heart, and the charm of that shone through; Erik could see it when he was just sitting there on his floor, socks kicked off, some classic literature book on his lap. He had a weakness for the bookish types even though he could never sit through one himself. Or maybe it was because of it.
“You’re watching me.”
Erik blinked. “I suppose I wasn’t aware of that.”
He bent down to look into the tiny fridge that was far beyond use, the wires frayed with a suitable risk of electrocution. Charles had seen Erik during his better days and he appreciated that Charles hadn’t said a thing about his living conditions. But this hardly felt worse. It felt truer if anything.
Erik slammed the fridge door on his half-drank cans of red bull. There was a dubious slice of blue cheese that some client might’ve offered him a few years ago that had lost its maleficent odor. It rattled and convulsed, the last breaths of a dying man.
“I’m going out for dinner.”
Charles closed his book. “About time. I’m famished!”
The affair was a somber one in spite of the blinding yellow lanterns dangling above them. Chinese New Year would arrive early. The music booming from the stereo was chaotic, an amalgamation of cymbals and gongs that tore through any semblance of a quiet meal. Takeaway was in order; Charles was not (never, really). He made Erik sit through the noise in the way only he could.
The din of clanking utensils and waiters shrieking CAO FAN, LUO PUO GAO, words attached to vague images in his head, sunk in until it all plateaued, a dim background in Erik’s mind. Charles was slurping his noodles, his person enveloped in a sort of normalcy that skewed everything Erik had come to know him for. The professor who strut around in Calvin Klein boots and made people putty with his words and his red-mouthed smile, all of that grandeur, gone. Charles, the one in front of him, didn’t come with the titles and accolades. He lit up at the (probably unintentional) addition of a crouton in his noodle soup, eyes gleaming like a newborn pup’s.
In spite of himself, the memories accosted him. He let himself think it, the time Charles had pressed against him so that he could feel their hearts beating against each other’s, the forward nature of Charles’s expectation and the twigs crackling underfoot. A shockingly red cardinal swooping down a branch like a bloody gash; I know you’d be willing to try. So many years ago, the wrongness of it at the time and how it all trickled down to sallow recognition now. Nothing mattered after the two women in his life died. He could have gone three blocks down from his flat and picked up the sweet Norwegian girl—what was it, Katarina? Alannah?—and Mags would’ve been too dead to say a word of dissent.
Something hard and cold in Erik had thawed during their meal. Afterwards they began their considerably-colder walk back to his flat.
“So if you really think about it, the arguments in God Delusion are very much radical and while I shan’t reveal my opinion on the topic directly, it’s clear that the structure of his thoughts are not, for lack of a better phrase, enviably objective—“
“You were wanking next to me the other day.”