Chapter 154

Beau held on all the tighter, letting his head rest on Jeanne-Marie’s broad back. “Shhh….” Beau whispered, moving in close enough so that their two bodies became one. He gently rubbed his hands over Jeanne-Marie’s firm chest and flat stomach.

Jeanne-Marie switched off the water, letting a bowl clatter to the sink. Slowly, he allowed himself to relax in Beau’s embrace. “I dare not turn around,” he whispered.

“Why not?”

“I don’t want this moment to end.” Jeanne-Marie let out a long, quivering breath, like a sigh. “It’s been so long since anyone has touched me.”

Beau hugged him tighter. “You can turn around.”

“No. No.”

Beau understood. He let go of Jeanne-Marie for long enough to cross to the opposite wall, where the light switch was. He turned off the light and the room was plunged into darkness, lit dimly by a silvery opalescence from the moon, which had risen as they ate.

He came back to him in the dark and when he reached Jeanne-Marie, who was still standing, turned away and clutching the counter, Beau reached up and ever so gently turned him so he was facing Beau.

Lightly, Beau reached up and touched Jeanne-Marie’s face in the darkness, letting his hand glide gently but surely across the topography of smooth scars. They were not repulsive or disgusting.

They were beautiful. Because they were Jeanne-Marie.

When Beau had first seen Jeanne-Marie’s face, he had to be honest with himself and admit he could never imagine he would do what he did next. But it was easy. He stood on tiptoe and planted a feathery, light kiss upon the other man’s lips.

“Don’t,” Jeanne-Marie said, his words coming out a strangled sob.

So Beau, knowing Jeanne-Marie meant the opposite of what he had said, kissed him again, more deeply this time. And Jeanne-Marie responded—passionately, as though he were a man dying of thirst in a desert. Their tongues fused, their lips latched on to the others’, their eyes shut tightly in pleasure. Their bodies were locked together as if there were some sort of desperation to fuse into one being.

Beau could feel Jeanne-Marie trembling in his arms, shaking so hard he had to hold on tight to keep him in place. The touch, the kiss, must have had a powerful effect on the man—something perhaps Jeanne-Marie imagined he would never have again.

Beau at last, deep in a kiss, opened his eyes. He had to look, had to see the man who was causing all sorts of feelings—arousal, fear, lust, and a growing affection—to arise within him.

What he saw was a horror, but at the same time, he could tolerate it. Jeanne-Marie’s mouth was warm; his lips and tongue felt the same as any other man’s. And the deep valleys and ridges of the scars upon his face, here in the dark, could be perceived by Beau’s artist eyes as a pattern. If he removed himself from what his logical mind told him to feel, which was dismay at the damage that had been wrought, he could see Jeanne-Marie’s face as interesting. And if he allowed the tiny stirrings of love he was beginning to feel for the man to come even more alive with their kiss and passionate embrace, he could also see the unique oddness of his face as something beautiful, something to be treasured because it was a face unlike anyone else’s, save Jeanne-Marie’s.

At last, one of them had to pull away. And it was not Beau. All at once, Jeanne-Marie disengaged his lips, dropped his arms, and stepped back from Beau. He turned slightly, hiding his face. He spoke to the air in front of him. “This is wrong. You don’t want to do this. You couldn’t. I’m a monster.”

“Not to me.” Beau placed what he hoped was a comforting hand on Jeanne-Marie’s back. “You’re my good Samaritan; the one who stopped when no one else did. Maybe I could have died in that alley.” Beau buried his face in Jeanne-Marie’s broad back.

The memory of what had happened to him back in Seattle returned not in bits and pieces, but all at once. Keeping his arms tight around Jeanne-Marie, he saw it all in his mind’s eye—the drizzly day, the shortcut through the alley to get to the pho place, his attackers, in their thug clothes, edging near him in the dark. He remembered how he knew, with a sense living on the streets attuned to danger, that they meant him harm.

He recalled the taunts, the words hurled as a kind of cruel foreplay to the physical pain and abuse they would level—they had called him faggot, pussy boy. He remembered turning and seeing their faces, the hunger alive in their eyes to witness him hurting. He saw one of them bring out a sock, knotted at the top, and looking heavy. It must have been filled with pennies. One blow to his head, a wave of nausea and dizziness, and then there was no more to remember, because his mind delivered him from the blows and kicks that must have surely followed.