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Ankle crossed over knee, Conrad's leg makes a hollow perch to cradle a great wooden bowl, red-smooth, half-empty of grapes still on their clutch. His ankle is bare under the khaki crease of his trousers, one canvas shoe tipped drunkenly sideways on the stone flooring of Mee-maw's summer house.

The grapes are a glowing red in the high Queensland sun, and once carried indoors Worth sees them go dull and purple like arterial blood. Worth drops the grapes into the bowl.

Conrad glances up with green eyes. "Those aren't washed."

"They ain't dirty." Worth pulls on his cigarette - but it is only a toothpick. Cinnamon-flavored, like his Papan used to chew once Mee-maw had gone on the oxygen tank. Worth looks down in the bowl to double-check the grapes, finding the bowl empty except for the handful he'd just dropped in, and a snake curled 'round the pile - still and dead. Worth flinches back despite the milky film of the snake's eyes - sometimes they molted and kept still and looked dead until you stepped too close and got a bad bite from a scared animal.

Conrad looks down in the bowl, then aims a crooked grin Worth's way. "It doesn't bother me," he reassures, all English poise in a pastel polo with its collar turned up. "You're the one who's bothered." His hands are in the bowl, had been in the bowl the whole time, peeling grapes.

"That's a useless thing ta do -" Worth gripes, because he himself had used the metaphor but he'd never actually seen anyone peel grapes.

"If I bite the skin, it'll be bitter." Conrad narrows his eyes. Green eyes, light, more yellow than blue. The irises ringed in brown.

"Ya got nice eyes," Worth mutters, hand drifting to the back pocket of his jeans - cargo jeans, stained in plaster and paint. Fitting too tight, because that was the kind of thing charlies his age wore around when they were remodeling houses for out-of-school scratchum.

"I know," Conrad casts his eyes back down to the bowl, "You like red."

Worth cocks a hip out, lip lifting in a sneer of a grin, tapping ash from his toothpick.

Conrad holds a grape up, flicks it at Worth. It rolls across the gray stone of that open-walled sitting-room, leaving dark skitter-marks that spread, soak in, disappear in the hot dry of the air. "That one is too small."

"Don't knock it 'till you've tried it," Worth shoots back, defensive.

"It doesn't bother me," Conrad reiterates, eyebrows up as if this were a thing that were obvious.

"Hey," the voice is soft and familiar and Worth's heart jumps. "I let the dog back inside. Hope that was okay." Hanna stands there in board shorts and sunburn, wiping the seawater from his face.

"I tol' ya, NO GHOSTS" Worth rages, striding forward, pressing at Hanna's measly upper arms to get him out of the house that had plenty of ghosts to spare. "Yer insultin' my professional fuckin' opinion here, kid, and I don't want you around here when I got comp'ny, 's fuckin' rude -" Because who knew, with Conrad there, with the house empty, maybe something could happen.

Worth gets Hanna into the livingroom with its soft white carpet and overstuffed couches and the woman who turns her head is perched on a reading chair with her long legs tan and willowy crossed one over the other at the ankle. "Lucy." She smirks, and the man who sits up from the couch missing his shirt is the man she had fucked, the man Worth had held in such high and worshipful regard, summer-brown eyes under a fall of thick black hair with just that twist of gray in it but no - no she'd never done as much with Lamont, because Lamont never taught piano.

And now ah, yes, everything made sense, because Mee-maw didn't like to cook for so many people, so Conrad was helping out with the grapes while the granbabies all sat around like fat ungrateful birdie chickies. "Go help Mee-maw in the kitchen," Worth snaps, steering Hanna around. "I'mma give Connie a hand -"

"Is Connie your girlfriend, lil' Blue? Lil' Blue Babaloo?" The woman sings, curious, earnest, high cheekbones and high forehead and beautiful, kind, twin-sister playfulness. She'd never met Conrad, no, so maybe she wasn't being a smart-ass about his gender.

Worth slumps, feeling about two feet tall. "He doesn't like me." Proper English, because this wasn't back-alley America and he'd be liable to get a smack for any cheek. And he turns a shoulder on that room, craning his head to regard the open-air of the sitting room. "Isn't that right - ?" but the room is empty, bowl of grapes toppled, wet rolling curly-q patterns on drying flagstones.

Worth can't find the snake, kicks the bowl over, curses. It's sunny as fuck outside. He curses more, louder, calling out to the only person he actually wanted to be there, besides Papan and Mee-maw. "Conrad, you fuck -" catching up short, because he can't curse in this house; he can only panic and heave and run around, long legs covering useless distance, heel skidding as he rounds corners, stone and wood and thick lush carpet. He traces the house over and over, feverish, leaping from one room to the next, finding nobody. They'd all gone.

Terrified to inspect the porch off the sitting room, to find the yellow-toothed grin of the dog that had gone dry and dead from a day's worth of neglect. Hanna had let the dog in, though, so it was going to be fine this time. Worth breathed a little easier. Right. Hanna was there. It was going to be just fine. Hanna knew... a lot, so much more. So much more than anyone Worth had ever met, knew so many more useful and interesting and mysterious things. Medical school hadn't been very interesting, but what about hell? All the places mortal men were not made to wander? The difference between science and magic was...?

Conrad wasn't in Worth's room, in the room he'd had in America when he was a teenager - all rebellious metal band posters from overseas and a much-abused office corner - but that didn't stop Worth from getting off, from fucking the mattress, from stuffing a pillow down his front between his stomach and the sheets and rutting into the crease pretending it was an ass, pretending it was a cold ass, flipping the pillow over once it got too warm, grunting quietly into the bedding as he heaves and sweats and gnaws against the inside of his cheek in frustration and

wakes to that old familiar feeling of not close enough yet to come, scrambling in the dark, gut and balls cramping up badly enough he gags on the next breath in. This isn't pain, this is nausea and discomfort. No, pain Worth could handle. Pain he liked. But this build-up, the rank stink of anxious sweat and the sudden clamp of a body sabotaging its own release - all of this he could do without.

Doc Worth finds himself in the bathroom, wondering how Conrad had gotten in last time, if he hadn't been invited. What were the rules on that? If it was a place of business, the residency law didn't cover? That would make some amount of sense, as Doc Worth had heard many a case of hotel/motel stalkings, killings, mysterious disappearances. He calms himself under the straight-razor, erection flagging as the metal bites and saws and slips against his arm - the blade is too sharp and it's not painful enough, really, not until the body can register the cuts and send up the inflammation of tissue and Worth can wrap himself up in sterile gauze and stagger back to bed to fall into the woozy embrace of a dopamine rush from a pounding, pulsing, thudding pain - that what envelops the base of his thumb all the way to the hill of his shoulder.

He turns once in his sleep and accidentally crushes his torn-up arm beneath him, the orgasm waking him from another feverish half-dream with the familiar sharp spike of sensation. Because what was pain, even? The same nerves that told his brain if he was touching a hot stove also told his brain if he was touching a cold palm. It was all psychological, in the end, the difference between good sensation and bad.

Doc Worth did not fall asleep the rest of the night, and descended the stairs to answer the ringing bell of his clinic door looking hungover and haggard and haunted and

bled.