Leon knew their meeting was not an accident. However it had come about, it seemed to him a natural consequence of his own thoughts that day. The boy glared at him in what looked like anger, but Leon was certain Roman had come here now because he wanted them to meet this way.

“I’m sorry,” Roman said, his voice lilting falsely. “I didn’t know you were here. I didn’t think anybody would be here.”

Leon looked at him. If Roman had turned and gone away, the lie might have been accepted by both, however much each knew it was a lie. But Roman paused and paused until it looked like staying. Only then, too late, he turned to go. When he had taken four steps, Leon said, “It’s all right. You can stay. Stay. Please.”

Roman did not pretend not to hear, but he did not look back at Leon when he turned and walked to the bank a few feet away from the reclining man, then squatted as he had seen Leon do earlier, then fell back abruptly and laughed.

Disturbed, Leon laughed an echo of Roman’s laugh. Even when it is not honest, laughter can make a bad moment easier. Theirs now made it possible for them to look quickly behind its cover, and to look away blank-faced, having seen more than they could admit. Leon closed his eyes and made a play of relaxing his body. He stretched his legs and spread his toes, arched his chest, showing his body in tension on the pretext of relaxing it.

Even then, Roman might have left, but he did not. Leon might have turned over on his belly and stopped it, but he did not. When he opened his eyes a quivering slit, he saw that Roman had moved nearer. Closing them again, he hardly breathed. Presently, he felt the boy’s hand touch the side of his chest. He breathed again; the hand crept to the navel and paused there, one finger gently exploring, as if reaching back for the secret of Leon’s own birth. Leon felt his dick harden. He did not will it, but sex thinks without the brain. He felt the boy’s lips kissing his dick. Narcissus had found his image and was gladly lost.

9

Sarah looked up from the ledger as she closed it and handed it back to Roscoe Elk. “The accounting is accurate, all quite in order,” she said. Taking the ledger, he nodded. “However, there is one thing not accounted for in the ledger.”

Lips firming, he frowned patiently.

“The man Pojo,” she said. To give him a moment to adjust to her turning the conversation, a matter of manners she had not yet learned to put aside, she added what they both knew, “A shortening of the nickname ‘Poor Joe,’ I understand, given to him when he was a boy.”

“Yes?” he said gruffly, refusing her delicate pace.

“You had him beaten.”