To see Aristide so unsure of himself was more frightening than mortars or freezing or border control. It was more painful to see him like this than it had been to see him in full glamour, rouged and vicious, imperiously putting the prison guards into their place. His lips moved, abortive, and then he abruptly looked away. “I don’t know what my cue’s supposed to be.”

At which point Cyril realized he had never needed one before. Aristide had always been assured of Cyril’s desire. Of everyone’s desire. He had wanted his lovers desperate, begging, at his mercy, and Cyril had obliged him on all counts.

Perhaps he didn’t know how to ask, when something hadn’t been offered already. Perhaps his pride made him afraid to. But any less prideful and he wouldn’t be Ari.

If Cyril wanted this, then he would have to make the first move. Which meant he was faced with a decision: Did he want this? Now?

It wasn’t as though he’d kept it down, in Liso. Put people in mortal peril and what else did they do but rut? That was different, though; mechanical.

Which made him think of Lillian’s first embrace, the instinct he’d quashed that said to block a strike and flip her on her back. The surge of adrenaline when anything moved at the edge of his line of sight. All his reactions were compromised by the memory of violence.

But he remembered, too—and vividly—the scratch of wool against his wrists, bound with his own necktie, one end a leash in Ari’s fist. The ease there was in letting him lead, and the power there as well: He did not do as he was told because he had to, but because he chose to. A welcome change, in those days. And enough now, maybe, to keep him from remembering the jungle, and everything that he had done there. That had been done to him.

He raised his hand to the top button of his shirt, feeling the thickness of the looped thread, the raised edges of the horn.

“It can’t be how it was,” he said. “Not … not now, anyway. You can’t hit me.”

Aristide nodded, once, worried lines crimping the corners of his eyes.

The button slid stiffly out of its hole, and Cyril felt cool air on his throat. “I’m not the man I used to be, Aristide.”

“Darling, you never were. Neither was I.” Ari came to sit on the bed. The tortured springs objected. With a weighted elegance that spoke less of caution than of reverence, he lifted his hands to Cyril’s second button. “Here. May I?”

And Cyril, breathless, let him.

It was nothing like it had been. It was … not better, or worse. It moved slowly, like a puzzle, or a game of chess.