This was written in response to a minor challenge and a desire to see how well I could write something of the flesh without being gratuitious in the least. In warning to the more squeamish, here is what will happen: a man will kiss another man, and men will have distinctly un-nice thoughts about other men. In note to the more impatient who want to 'skip it a bit, brother' and go directly to the naughty bits, you can probably give all the dialogue a go and construct images in your head using the narrative paragraphs.
The boy and his teacher fought under the wooden beams that held up the high ceiling of the training hall. They fought for a long time and sometimes the boy would win the duel and more often the teacher would win, and, having knocked the boy down to the floor or across it, would stretch long and yawn like a cat while waiting for the boy to rise again. But neither were ever really hurt. At the end they bowed to each other and the teacher lit up a cigarette, falling long and lanky back into a heavy, languid indifference of slouching back and hunched shoulders, brown eyes dull through a haze of smoke.
"Didn't see the Grand Master anywhere?" the teacher asked.
The boy shrugged. "Off with his girlfriend," he said. "He said to tell you Baron Kuz was here."
"I thought I settled Kuz," the teacher said. "Did you hear the conversation they had?"
"A litle. They were talking and the Baron was asking Vicious-sama if he could please borrow someone belonging to Vicious-sama for a while and he would give many things to Vicious-sama that the Red Dragon needs, in return. The Baron was most polite and desperate and he whined like a hungry dog which is strange because mostly he looks like an angry wolf. He seems most terrified of Vicious-sama."
The teacher looked at the glowing end of his cigarette for a while. His hands were reddened from the fighting and he was careful not to hit or scratch them too hard on any surface; he rubbed the palms of his sore hands carefully on the seat of his trousers before he said, "Not terrified. He just wants something really badly. What did the Grand Master have to say to that?"
"Vicious-sama apologized most gracefully," the boy said. "Vicious-sama has wonderful manners but also a terrible way of looking at you while saying polite things. I think that is why the Baron left so soon afterwards."
"He did?"
"He is gone and Vicious-sama says he will not be back for the same reason."
"Good," the teacher said, and a lopsided smile gripped the end of his cigarette. "Hell of an ugly bastard to deal with, that one..."
Again the boy shrugged. Beneath a thin film of sweat his skin was a pale colour with a wash of gold in it, and it was smooth all over the high bones of his face and the lean muscle of torso and arms. He had been fighting without a shirt and he was barefoot with the long cuffs of his loose trousers rolled up to just below the knee; he picked up a boken from the rack on the wall and fell into a defensive stance, weight dropping low, the wooden sword seemingly stiff as the rigid stillness of his body. The teacher leaned against the wall and watched. The boy's hair was a soft, tousled mess on top of his head, gleaming dark where sweat slicked it and stuck it to the side of his face, and it formed a dark halo that burnt softly above his furrowed eyebrows.
In an eyeblink all stillness was gone and there was fluid motion everywhere you looked; in the supple spring of an ankle, the flick-flick of a wrist, the line of shoulder and neck and side-twisted head that traced a memorable outline so clearly in the air you expected him to continue forever, as though the trail of his movements must never catch up with him. But he was tired and the stop was sudden; a burst of energy, pressing the invisible opponent furiously into a corner, then the boken clapping against the planks and the boy collapsing without dignity or grace to the floor.
"For fuckssake, Lin," the teacher said. "Take a break."
The boy nodded his head very feebly. He was breathing long and hard and the sound of it was like a whispered prayer in a cathedral; in that place where all else was silent, it filled all the wide spaces and made a quiet place inside the listener. In his strength and his youth he was fully exhausted and he could not stop the air from exhaling in such great gasps from between his parted teeth, in and out of his lungs; he wanted to wipe the sweat misting his nose and tickling his lips, but he could not bring himself to lift a hand. The teacher puffed out from his cigarette, dropped it into an ashtray and ground the glowing tip to sullen ash before squatting down beside the boy's head to see how he was.
He grinned that lazy, Cheshire-cat grin he was famous for, and the boy smiled faintly in return, although he still breathed noisily through his mouth. The rise and fall of his ribs was in harmony with the wheeze-in and wheeze-out of breath, and when he closed his eyes the lashes of his eyes were long and dark upon sharp-edged cheek, only slightly padded now by childhood chubbiness. On his mouth the dip and bend of the upper lip was thin and pronounced, like a faraway picture of a flying bird, and the lower lip swelled below it in a soft and full and delicious curve of faded almost-pink, a coral-colour that grew stronger when his tongue drew moist across it in an innocent, ice-cream-licking sweep. There was still the sound of his breathing, an irregular and desperate campaign for fresh air, and the teacher found himself swallowing in a throat gone suddenly dry, mouth flooded with a ghost-dream of wonder that fled almost immediately as he scolded himself for the thought.
But the boy, who did not daydream, opened his eyes and looked back at his teacher. He was used to only two expressions on his teacher's face - one of blank, bored indifference, and another of mildly amused good humour - so to see now something that was not amused nor blank made him concerned. There had never been that kind of thoughtful and somehow slightly worried twitch in his teacher's eyebrows before.
"Are you all right, Spike-san?" he asked. "What are you thinking about?"
"Girls," his teacher replied. "Or rather the absence of them in my life, and the goodness and badness of it."
"Don't worry, dai guo," the boy said. "We will always be your friends and the girls will always come back to you. Why would they not want to?"
For a brief moment, as the boy closed his eyes again, the man put out his hand, fingers stretching longingly just above the boy's smooth face and reaching with a kind of thoughtless hunger as though to touch the soft curve of the boy's cherub-lips; then the moment passed, and he withdrew his hand, feeling it shake as he held it tight with his other hand.
"Maybe you should not want to just sleep with the girls, Spike-san," the boy said, still with his eyes shut, but now with a small smile to his mouth.
"Maybe he shouldn't," said another voice from the doorway. "But he always will. There's a certain, desperate urgency about sex that drives you when you think you've controlled every nerve in your body. You'll learn that when you're there."
They both turned, the boy scrambling almost guiltily upright. There he was in the doorway; the man with white hair, his appeal a haunting thing made of pale skin and hair and the slender curves of gaunt and pronounced bone. Behind him the girl followed, a bored look in her blue eyes, her arm curled warm around his, making him appear that much less stiff.
"Now you've gone and blown the whole mystery for him," the teacher said, but not unkindly. He stood, and it seemed that a fresh breeze lit up his face when he looked at the boy. "I told you, you don't know how to raise children right."
"Then it is a good thing I am not raising him, eh? How old is he now?"
"Fifteen. Sixteen. What do you say, Lin?"
"I don't know," the boy said. "I don't know when I was born."
"He's old enough," the white man said. His face held a quality like that of a statue chiselled carefully from marble, perfectly honed and filled with some meaning. "Don't say you haven't taught him anything he really needs to know, yet."
"You can do that," the teacher told the white man, and they lifted their heads slightly almost at exactly the same angle, a matching glint appearing in both their eyes. The teacher grinned and stepped backward, touching his strangely tousled hair as though to remove an imaginary hat.
"Baron Kuz dropped by today," the white man said.
"Did you say hi for me?"
"He wasn't here for you."
"You didn't give him what he was here for?"
The white man looked at the teacher with a sliding motion of his long, narrow eyes, their pupils almost colourless in their houses of slits, and with his thin and aristocratic-cut mouth he said, "No. When have I ever given away anything you've given to me?"
The teacher returned his gaze, and they were both silent for a moment; then almost at the same time each turned to the person behind them, and the teacher said to the boy, "Go walk with Miss Julia for a while," while the white man said to his lady, "Take the boy for a little walk," and when they looked at each other again, and saw that over each other's shoulder the boy and the lady were silently obeying, the teacher stuck his tongue out, and the white man rolled his eyes and made a grimace.
"I didn't give him to you," the teacher said. "But thanks anyway."
"Stubborn bastard," the white man said. "Would you rather have fought it out with Kuz and lost and watched him take the boy? You know Kuz."
"I'll wipe him someday."
"I'm glad you didn't say you'd wipe him if he touched the boy," the white man said. "You must understand that revenge, however bloody and beautiful it might be, does not prevent a most dreaded thing from happening. I am very happy you have finally understood that."
"Someday that's going to come back to bite you on the ass," the teacher said candidly. He flicked a cigarette from his pocket and offered it to the white man, who took it and leaned forward, the thin white fag gripped between his teeth, for the teacher to light. After a slow drag on it, the white man said, "So you didn't really give the boy to me, after all?"
"Fuck no," the teacher said. "As if he's mine to give."
"But Kuz thinks the boy belongs to me."
"Kuz is dead scared of you. He's not dead scared of me. You know that. Why are you being such a pisshead about this? I owe you big, I know that already."
"I don't want you to owe me big," the white man said. "I'd rather take the boy."
"Julia?"
"Julia is always mine. But since you say the boy is also mine, I wouldn't mind having him."
"Christ," the teacher said.
"Let's not bring the gods into this," the white man said. "You don't believe in them, anyway. You'd rather believe in something that you could touch and hold and rely solidly upon. So do I, Spike; so do I."
He raised his voice, let his command ring out across the wide room with a softness and a calmness that made it all the more impossible to ignore:
"Come here, Lin."
The lady stayed by the window where she had been standing, but the boy, turning around with a start, began to trot over. As the white man pulled on his cigarette, the teacher looked hard and long at him. The teacher was not smiling any more and there was a tenseness in his forehead.
"Careful," the teacher said. "He's willing to do anything for you."
"He loves you," the white man replied. "He listens to me, but he'd die for you. And he is far from being the only one. But you think love is something to be made in bed, to be whispered sweetly and then to run far away from when you endure too much of one person's love for too long. You don't want Kuz to hurt him but you don't think you love him, because you'll never think of love without connecting it to something as base as fucking." And the white man grinned, a terrible thing to see in a face where the skin was as white as the teeth. "Or maybe you want to fuck him after all, and you don't want to think that you do. Where's the point in denying yourself something that you could have, Spike? Why care what other people might think?"
The boy was upon them now, the bright green of his eyes sharp against the muted gold of his skin. The white man stepped close to him, caught his dark hair in a white hand like the naked claw of a frail and beautiful bird, pulled it backwards, not unkindly, so that the boy's smooth face looked up into his own pale eyes; and he said, in a guttural street-slang that had not been spoken in this city for years, "Wu ch' guo t'ng xin mu gao, han ts'or jian m'ker."
Then his head was bent and his thin neck arched to one side and his pale hair made a curtain of ripples, hanging over his cheek and brushing the boy's face. The boy's eyes stared green and wide before the white man bent his head over to the other side, blocking out the teacher's view of the boy's face. For a moment it seemed a curious reversal of roles, a white statue warm and alive beside a golden human body empty of movement; then the white man's head moved again and the teacher saw the boy's eyes had shut, that his mouth was pressing back upon the white man's lips in a cautious and delicate motion that reminded the teacher of the boy's boken-dance; that for all the white man's furious energy, the boy's hand came up to lie on the pale cheek with a nervous gentleness as though afraid to break the porcelain substance of the white man. Down the boy's naked back the white hands raked a red path, and they did not stop where the waistband of his loose trousers began, sitting low and loose on narrow hips. In the white man's hair the boy's fingers tightened with the sudden striking panic of a cornered snake, and the teacher heard the whistle of air, sucked quickly and sharply between his teeth.
He walked away. He saw the lady looking behind him as he walked towards the door and he could not read the expression on her face; she felt nothing of sympathy or horror or excitement that he could see. He tried to pour all his attention into a detailed study of her, and found that she was very beautiful, that she would not let him read her emotions off her face. But she belonged to the white man, forever; he could not change that.
"Spike," the white man said. The teacher looked back, his head jerking quickly around; he saw that the boy stood once again at attention, as he had been standing when the white man first entered the room. The white man walked to the teacher, laid a hand on the teacher's shoulder and leant close to speak; the teacher smelt the salt of the boy's sweat on him and an unfamiliar whiff in his breath. "It is not good manners to steal something, even for a moment. I apologize. But you will never appreciate what you have if you are not threatened with the thought that you might lose it. Shall we all have dinner tonight?"
"Sure," the teacher said.
He watched the white man leave, his lady walking with her arm through his, as though nothing have ever happened. Behind him he felt the boy's bright eyes on his back, and he turned. His mouth was dry and he did not have anything to say.
"Do you want to continue training, Spike-san?" the boy asked.
"I think maybe this is a good place to stop," the teacher said. "You ever heard that tongue he was speaking in, Lin?"
"It is street-slang," the boy said, "but very old. I did not understand what he said."
"Nothing powerful," the teacher said. "It's something like, 'I drink the best wine I can find today, that it might not sour tomorrow'. The Romans said it better. Carpe diem. Live for the moment. Something like that. It's quite a good theory to live by if you're not living for long, I guess."
"It is a good philosophy," the boy said. "All tomorrows are uncertain."
The teacher looked at the boy, at the flush spread pink across his cheeks, the faint bruising darkening his soft mouth, the red nail-marks left like a glowing signature across his chest.
"Go take a shower," he said. "It's good manners to be on time for dinner."