"My sister was a ballerina."
Eames looked up from his beer to see that Arthur had materialized beside him, silent as a dream. The haze around him made it hard to see, but he thought, maybe, that Arthur was crying. "Wuh…er, all right." Eames tried to reach out and pat Arthur's shoulder, but missed and ended up resting his hand, which was suddenly too heavy to hold up, on the small of Arthur's back. If Eames had been sober, if Arthur hadn't been doing his best to hide the tears, neither of them would have let it stay there. It would have been too intimate, too public, too much like something deeper than a good simple fuck. But tonight, in the haze and the tears and the confusion, it was okay.
Arthur didn't even seem to notice. His voice, normally so strong and calm, was shaking almost as badly as his hands were. "She was beautiful, you know? Taller than me, and skinny and just…everything about her was graceful and fragile and perfect. She could glide around like the," his voice hitched and lurched, "like the ground was made of glass."
At last the past tense punched through Eames's muggy consciousness, and he shifted toward Arthur, leaning in to whisper. "What happened, darling?"
Arthur whispered back, the whole sordid story: starving and drinking and pills and bruises, and the final performance, and her broken body at the bottom of a ten-story building. Eames didn't lean away, didn't remove his hand, didn't speak. Just let Arthur get it out, cry it all away.
When they left the bar, Eames called a cab and Arthur stayed the night. For once, Eames didn't fall into bed, then flee immediately after Arthur fell asleep. Instead, he was simply there, warm and alive and receptive, letting Arthur take as much as he needed. Through night terrors and crying fits and the sheer shaking pain of it all, Eames never let Arthur go: a hand on his back, an arm around his shoulders, a cheek on his cheek. When the funeral was too much, Arthur collapsed into Eames's side. When what would have been her twenty-third birthday came around, Eames handled Arthur's liquor intake, monitored the subtle hints of his emotions, held him until the crying stopped. Somehow, after that terrible first night, they never seemed to stop touching.