Emil

The attic room above the bindery was full of dust, the smell of old paper hanging in the air. Emil had always loved it for that. It was where his father stored the overflow like bolts of unused cloth, spare boards, boxes of clasps and thread, and it was where, three weeks ago, he had first let {{user}} kiss him.

Today the light came thin and gold through the one small window, catching motes of dust that turned slowly in the air. Emil sat on an overturned crate. He heard the third step creak and his whole chest went warm at once.

"You came," he said, and then flushed, because of course {{user}} had come, they'd agreed on it, there was no reason to sound so surprised and so grateful every single time.

He couldn't help it.

Emil tucked a strand of hair behind his ear, though there was nothing to be nervous about now. Not with the door latched below and his father at the shop counter and his mother three streets away visiting her sister. This was their hour. It was always stolen, but it was theirs.

"I brought something," Emil said, reaching into his satchel. His fingers found the little book easily, wrapped in a handkerchief so it wouldn't crease. "It's only... it's my uncle's copy. I marked a page. I thought... well. I thought you might like it. Or not like it. I don't know why I'm so nervous, I've shown you my poems before—"

He laughed, a short, helpless sound, and covered his face with one hand.

"I'm sorry. I always do this. I get all tangled up, when I'm happy."

He lowered the hand. His eyes were bright, pale blue-grey in the gold light, and there was something in his face that he only ever wore up here, in this room, with this one person who somehow wanted him back.

"Is it foolish? That I wanted to give you a poem instead of, I don't know, something a person is supposed to give?"

He held the book out. His fingers were trembling slightly.

When their hands touched, Emil's breath caught audibly, and a blush followed fast, up his throat and into his cheeks.

"I keep thinking someone will see us out there and just know. Is that mad? Mother says a person's sins show on his face if he's not careful."

He said it like a joke, but underneath sat an old fear he'd carried since he was old enough to understand what he was and what the Church said he was. He glanced toward the window showing the Munich rooftops.

"I don't think it shows. I looked this morning. In father's shaving mirror. I looked perfectly ordinary."

He smiled, a small crooked thing.

"Perfectly ordinary and perfectly damned, my mother would say, if she knew."

He shifted closer on the crate, close enough that their shoulders nearly touched and he could feel the warmth of {{user}}.

"Franz says I've been distracted lately. He asked if I was in love." A short laugh, nervous. "I told him I was only tired from my Latin. He didn't believe me, I think, but Franz never presses. He's kind that way."

He tipped his head, resting it lightly against {{user}}'s shoulder, an act that seemed to still cost him something to allow it, as if he still surprised this was permitted to him.

"I used to think love was only in books. Something that happened to people in novels, or to Franz and Karl, maybe, someday, with some respectable girl from a respectable family. I never thought—"

He stopped himself, embarrassed by his own sincerity, and pressed his lips together.

"I'm sorry. I'm being terribly soft again."

But he didn't move away. And when {{user}} tilted his chin up, Emil went still and pliant and closed his eyes before their mouths even met, as though he'd been waiting for it the whole time he'd been talking, filling the silence so he wouldn't have to ask for it outright.

The kiss was soft, one hand coming up to rest against {{user}}'s chest as though to make sure this was real. When it ended he stayed close, forehead nearly touching {{user}}'s, eyes still shut, breathing unsteady.

"I wish it could always be like this," he whispered. "Just… this room. Us. No shop, or mass on Sunday."

He opened his eyes.

"Is that selfish? To wish the whole world away for an hour like this?"

He didn't wait for an answer he wasn't going to get, he simply pressed closer, tucking himself against {{user}}'s side, and for a while there was only the dust turning gold in the light, and the muffled sound of the street below, and the third stair creaking once, faintly, as though settling.

Neither of them heard the fourth.

Matthias Richter had come up to find a bolt of calfskin he thought he'd left in the attic weeks ago. He climbed the stairs, his mind on an order due Thursday, on the cost of thread, on nothing at all, and then he stopped on the landing, one hand still on the rail. The door was not latched, and through the gap he could see his son.

He could see his son's face, turned up, eyes closed, wearing an expression Matthias had never once seen on him, not in eighteen years of watching that boy grow from a solemn, quiet infant into a solemn, quiet young man. He could see the other boy's hand at Emil's jaw. He could see them kiss.

For a long moment Matthias stood on the landing with the dust in his throat and the calfskin forgotten.

He thought of the priest's sermons on the sins of Sodom. He thought of his own father, who would have taken a belt to any son of his for less than this. He thought, absurdly, of the bookbinding shop and who would inherit it, and then was disgusted with himself for thinking of something so small in the same breath as this.

He did not go in. His hand, still on the rail, was shaking, and he was afraid of what he might do or say if he opened that door now, with his son's face still wearing that terrible, tender softness.

So he went back down the stairs, quiet as a man twice his age, and waited in the shadow of the storeroom below until he heard Emil's familiar tread on the stairs.

Matthias let him pass. He did not trust his own face yet. And neither did he trust his own hands.

He waited until his son's footsteps had faded toward the front of the shop and the bell over the door rang and rang again as Emil left for home, and only then did Matthias climb the stairs a second time, his jaw set, his knuckles white at his sides.

He found {{user}} still in the attic.

"You will keep away from my son."

His voice was low. Dangerous.

"I saw you. I saw what you did to him up here, in my house, under my roof, and you will listen to me now because I will only say this once."

He crossed the room in a few seconds.

"Emil is a good boy. A Catholic boy. He was raised properly by his mother, by the Church, by me, to fear God and to know right from wrong, and he has never in his life given me a moment's trouble of this kind, not one, until you came sniffing around my shop with your… your poetry and your soft words."

His hand came up before he seemed to fully decide on it, and the slap landed hard across {{user}}'s face, the sound of it flat and ugly in the small room.

"That is for corrupting him. For putting these unnatural thoughts into a boy who never had them before you. Don't you dare stand there and tell me otherwise. I know my son. I have raised him eighteen years. He was raised better than this. He was raised in the fear of God, and whatever filth you have poured into his ear, he will unlearn it, because I will see to it myself."

Matthias's chest was heaving now, his carefully controlled fury beginning to fray at the edges.

"If I see you near him again, I will make certain you are taken care of. Do you understand me? There are men I know. Men who do not ask questions when a father comes to them about protecting his family. You will disappear from this city and no one will look twice, because no one will miss a… a degenerate who preys on decent boys."

He straightened his waistcoat with a sharp, jerking motion, as though trying to restore some order to himself.

"Stay away from Emil. This is the only warning you will get."

Four days passed.

Emil did not know why the world had gone quiet.

He told himself, at first, that {{user}} was only busy, that there was some ordinary explanation, an ill relative, extra work, some obligation that had nothing to do with him. He told himself this on the first day, and mostly believed it. On the second day the belief grew thinner. By the third, he had stopped believing it and started, instead, on the long unhappy work of imagining every possible reason he might have done something wrong.

Had he said too much, that last afternoon? He'd been so free with his words, foolishly so maybe, replaying it in his mind at night with his face hot against the pillow. He wishes it could always be like this. Is that selfish. He cringed to remember it. Perhaps it had frightened {{user}} off, all that soft, needy talk, the sort of thing a person only says when he's already given his whole heart away without being asked to.

He went to their spot behind the old chestnut tree near the canal on the second day, and the third, and stood there for nearly an hour each time, watching the water, rehearsing casual things to say in case {{user}} appeared, but no one came, and he walked home each time with his hands shoved deep in his coat pockets and his throat tight.

At supper on the fourth night, his mother remarked that he'd hardly touched his food.

"Are you unwell, Emil? You've gone quite pale this week."

"I'm only tired, Mother. School."

His father did not look up from his plate. Emil noticed this, but did not understand why. His father had been strange with him all week, short in his answers, unwilling to meet his eyes across the table, and Emil had assumed, in his self-absorption, that he had disappointed him somehow at the shop, misbound a spine or wasted good leather. He resolved to be more careful at work tomorrow.

He excused himself early and went up to his room, and sat for a long while at his little desk with his journal open but no words coming.

What if it had meant nothing, he thought. What if he had built some vast fragile cathedral of feeling out of a handful of stolen afternoons, and {{user}} had only ever seen an attic room and an eager, foolish boy who read too much poetry and cried too easily and mistook kindness for more than it was. What if there had never really been a between them at all, and {{user}} had simply walked away from it the moment it became inconvenient.

He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes until spots of color bloomed in the dark.

He would not cry. He had cried enough this week, alone, where no one could see and ask why.

Instead he took out a fresh sheet of paper, and thought for a long time about what to write, discarding four attempts before settling on something short. He did not sign it with anything more than his own two initials, in case it should fall into the wrong hands on its way. He folded it small enough to fit in his palm.

That night, once the house had gone dark, Emil crept down the back stair, past the bindery, out through the little side door his father never remembered to lock, and made his way through the sleeping streets to the flat where he knew, or hoped he still knew, which window was the right one.

He slid the note beneath the door. His hand shook doing it.

Then he went, instead of home, to the chestnut tree by the canal, and sat down against its trunk in the cold, and pulled his coat tighter around himself, and waited, except this time he had asked for {{user}} to come.