He made dinner with soft hands and sometimes the knife slipped.
He didn't have to touch it, any of it, but Oliver had liked him to. Oliver had never wanted to be reminded of mothers -- their busy stirring spoons and flour speckled hair. Oliver's mother had never held an egg and she beat it from ten steps back.
Marcus had met her once, when they came round for Christmas supper, and her cheeks were lined with smile strain and she didn't mean it. She had asked for help with the dishes and he had started towards the sink, but she wanted his wand. She wanted him to leave, too, and never come back, but what she said was,
"You are so good for each other it's marvelous how happy and the flat you've taken we must visit but we've been awfully--"
and really, truly, he thought she didn't want his stink on her plates and forks. And the scrubbing was a bit sad and frantic, honestly, with her fingers shaky on a glass of vodka that was slip, slipping over the edge and drizzling onto the carpet.
**
When the knife slipped it left little pricks of red and slits into his skin the size of a zeldic beetle, and Marcus wiped his palms across his forehead like the sweat was water.
He left a print on the wall, by accident (just getting so tired), and had to rub it out with a wash cloth because a wand would be simple, easy, and he'd done enough erasing. Too much.
He'd packed up the pictures, all of them, one by one, after staring a while. There were too many of them, cramped up and bunching against each other, and he told himself that they would have come down anyway, regardless, to make room for new ones.
That's how things went: he sat on his couch, and did too much with his hands, and he told himself things and he sometimes believed them.
His elbows were tired and ached like the weather -- damp, creaking, and cloudy.
In the mirror, before Oliver's knock, his face was flushed with melted red smears, smelling like fear, and he knew he looked like a victim.
**
Oliver smelled sharp, sweet, like the taste of mint on the tip of your tongue, and Marcus drank too much.
He drank and remembered a different dinner when both living room windows had been propped open to let out the heat, and it was hot still -- enough that their backs had squeaked and stuck like glue against the table top, and the hand on his cock was slick in that really good way but fumbled.
His throat was raw from it, drunk from it like the rest of him, and his belly stung pointedly.
Marcus said something about how nice, nice, and they could catch up, and remembered the clumsy, desperate scrape of Oliver's nails at the small of his back, Oliver with his tie crooked and his mouth soft. Marcus' wrong perfect teeth clacked against the bottom of his glass and he said to himself, "bottom's up," and said to Oliver, "I decided to hate you, but then it didn't work out," and then blinked because Oliver was gone to the toilet and Marcus hadn't said anything.
He might have tried, but it was hard yet when he talked and he might never get used to it, the way his jaw hung. Being fixed.
**
Beautiful.
"You're so," Oliver would say, and Marcus knew what he meant but he hadn't known Oliver was lying.
**
Oliver's father was better at becoming accustomed, and his uncle bellowed hello back when they paused, quick, at the old family house for tea, and it had made Marcus smile even though it hurt to. It made Oliver kiss him slow and lewd, beside the vegetable garden out back, until his aunt called for them.
Oliver rucked up his shirt and bit fiercely into his jaw, didn't come when they called, and pushed and pushed, and they answered too late and everyone, everyone knew what they had been doing.
At the time, it hadn't seemed desperate.
**
At the time Marcus had shivered like a hunting dog run ragged, like the thick, strung meat of a mutt that that giant of a groundskeeper kept, the one in the cottage, and bit out half-words.
"Baby," he said. "oh."
Before Oliver had looked like the sky had caved in and he hurt see it (didn't work out it didn't work out), Marcus didn't know better, and didn't drink as much, and wasn't as perfect, and there were secret, private, foolish names that made Marcus feel like he owned him.
**
There had been curtains in their bedroom that they drew in the evening, to let in the moonlight, and Marcus passed the potatoes over, and said things he shouldn't, but he had cooked dinner and felt he was owed it. Marcus could picture the moon along the edge of Oliver's neck and he kissed it.
He slipped, and it tasted like blood.