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“Let me tell you a story about war. A man says to another man Can I tell you something? The other man says No. A man says to another man There is something I have to tell you. No, says the other man. No, you don’t." — Richard Siken, War of the Foxes (i)
Vomit was like blood in that it had to be conjured against the body's will, its presence outside the flesh almost always an indication that there was something wrong. It was horrible and intimate to touch and know that it had been inside his body, more inside than you or anyone else had ever been or ever would be without an instrument of violence or pain to aid in the exploration.
Not that it wasn't violent or painful already, but at least you were not the cause of it. This was a self-inflicted sick (you thought of the elderflower wine, the recording contracts, your hand invisible and not in nearly everything in his two decades on earth, half of which you had already laid claim to simply by being there). This was, you amended, not something you could have stopped (and how you had tried anyway the worse it got, knocking bottles from his hand and telling journalists to look in the other direction, redact their accounts, focus on your own bad behavior or Alex's instead of his. As if this was a kindness and not a very old reflex).
Still, you comforted yourself with this thought as you leant over the lip of some vague acquaintance’s bathtub, the porcelain cool against your forearms where you’d rolled your sleeves up. He sat on the edge of the tub next to you. There were other bathrooms in the house, obviously—gone were the days of cramming a hundred people into a squalid one-bed-one-bath flat where someone may or may not have actually been squatting—but knocks still came insistent at the door from other party attendees desperate for a piss. So you had made him redirect his vomit into the bathtub, both of your backs turned politely away from the toilet as some bloke hurried in to use it. Whoever it was groaned rather theatrically as he relieved himself, and you rolled your eyes.
“I’m going to turn the shower on now,” you told Graham. He grunted in response. The showerhead sputtered for a moment and then shot out a jet of water that reached Graham, who yelled in surprise at the sudden cold douse.
“What the—! Fucking Christ, Damon!” He shook himself like a dog. “It’s got on my jeans and everything, fucking hell, man…”
“Sorry,” you muttered as you watched the green stomach bile swirl down the drain. Better to be wet than covered in his own puke like some kind of junkie. You waited for the stranger to leave before screwing up your eyes and reaching for the globs of puke that had not been washed away by the shower, depositing them into the toilet. After washing your hands you crossed back to the other side of the bathroom to find Graham struggling to get himself out of his jeans, still half-seated on the bathtub’s edge.
“Here, let me…” He slumped in a vaguely vertical manner against the shower tiles as you helped him to his feet, undid his flies, and fixed your gaze determinedly just beyond him, pretending you didn’t hear his breath catch as you pulled his trousers down off his hips. He dug his fingers into your shoulder for balance—only for balance, you continued pretending—as he stepped out of the jeans.
“Are you gonna be sick again?” you asked him.
He shook his head. Even from your vantage point on the floor, him looming above you, he looked small and sort of comical stood there in only his jumper and underwear, the pale skin of his legs nearly luminescent in the overhead light of this strange bathroom. You squashed the urge to grab at him and sink your teeth into the meaty part of his inner thigh that was visible beneath the hem of his boxer shorts. It was futile anyway—you knew from experience that he couldn’t get hard when he was this drunk and you’d make a fool of yourself trying. Once a couple years ago you had held him in your mouth slightly too long after it became clear to both of you that he wasn’t going to be able to manage an erection, because you had liked it, far more than you would ever admit to yourself or to Graham, to be in that position prostrate on the hotel bed between his slack-muscled thighs and your tongue against the underside of his soft cock. Some private and heady and vaguely humiliating exchange between you not dissimilar to when you had first touched one another years before.
You dragged him through the party, again pretending that no one was looking, that no one recognized you, that Dave did not appear out of nowhere, as he liked to do, to ask what the hell was going on. In the first empty bedroom you came upon upstairs you rifled through the closet until you found a pair of trousers that looked like they would fit, instructing Graham to put them on. Based on the number of bedrooms and bathrooms and the seemingly endless supply of liquor that seemed to refresh itself by the minute on the generously-sized kitchen island, you felt it was safe to assume that whoever lived here would not miss a measly pair of jeans from their wardrobe. You hoped so, anyway, again pulling Graham back through various rooms until you arrived outside. “Sit,” you commanded him, pointing at a charming little bench installed in the far corner of the garden. He did. You joined him a moment later.
"Can I say something?" you asked after he had settled himself and lit the cigarette you'd passed him.
He squinted at you. Smoke trickled upwards out of his gently sloping nose. "Since when do you need permission?"
"I think I'm in love with you."
At first you thought he mightn't have heard you. He'd got that look on his face, his nose scrunched up and lip curled and mouth half-open in an expression that often conveyed irritation or boredom but was very occasionally just a hands-free attempt at adjusting his glasses.
"Don't," he said then, his voice barely above a whisper.
"What?"
"Don't talk rubbish." He turned toward you. “Damon.”
"It's not—"
"You're pissed."
"So're you!"
"Sod off."
"Fuck you." You busied yourself with a cigarette to distract from the way your eyes had suddenly begun to sting. You felt stupid in an adolescent way, emotionally coltish.
"This is not some bloody story, you realize."
"How do you mean?"
"I mean," he said as his tone tilted upward slightly in warning of one of his characteristic rambling rants. It was a means of thinking out loud that he had employed since your school days, everyone within earshot hopeful that he would arrive at some semicoherent point by the time he ran out of breath. "I mean that somewhere along the line you got it into your head that everything'd be better off as a character, or told as a story. Beginning, middle, end, bloody Aristotle. But that's not how it goes in real life. You can't actually live like that. It keeps going. There's no moral or message to be had in everything."
"Graham," you said, trying to sound stern, as if you had the upper hand in this conversation. "What the fuck are you on about? I know this isn't a story, this is our lives—you think I don't know that?"
"No," he said. "I don't."
"You don't think I don't know, or—"
"I think you don't know what you're talking about."
"I do, though."
"Do what?"
"Know what I'm talking about!" Your first instinct was to laugh, a disbelieving sort of snort from the back of your throat. God help you but you loved him, his sweet stumbling voice, the smell of smoke and sweat coming off his hunched frame, swaying almost imperceptibly on the bench as if caught in a breeze. God help you but you wanted him, his shaking hands, his spit in your mouth. "I know," you said, quieter.
"Then why would you say it?" He pulled at his hair, looped a thick dark strand around his finger. He’d gone back to staring into the darkness rather than at you. "Why would you say it. Damon." His voice was small, drawn taut around the familiar syllables of your name.
"Well, I've said it." You would later recognize this admission for the act of cruelty that it was. How foolish you were to think that saying it out loud would be any different from holding a lit match to the end of a fuse and then dropping it into Graham's lap. But there was a part of you that would still remain convinced that it had to be said anyway, that not saying it would have been cowardly. And that mattered more to you, though later it would still be difficult to figure out exactly why.
"D'you know the first time I saw you, in that stupid school play? I thought I'd got the wind knocked out of me. I thought you were the loveliest, most awful boy I'd ever seen."
You laughed again, though this time it sounded hollower. "And I'm supposed to be the storyteller? You're the one with a bloody martyr complex. Fucking Joan of Arc. You'd like that." You grimaced at the sound of your own voice but you couldn't stop the words now. "But you don't want anyone to love you 'cause it interferes with the image you've got of yourself as some—some person who’s totally incapable of being loved. You don't want anyone to care about you 'cause it reminds you that you're real. Well, I’m sorry I’ve ruined that for you."
As if you were the only one. Even now Alex looked at Graham in a manner that could only be described as gooey, so obvious it might have embarrassed you to catch sight of if it did not instead make you just this side of incandescent with with some other unnamable emotion. The difference between you and Alex was that he measured time by Graham and you did not simply because in your life there never was a time before Graham, or not a time that mattered much. The difference between you and Alex was that you were somehow still stuck scooping Graham’s vomit out of someone’s bathtub with your bare hands and somehow still grateful for the opportunity to care for him in this way.
Beside you Graham smoked the cigarette very slowly, like he was trying to avoid having to bum another one from you. "So what are we going to do?"
"I don't think there's anything to be done."
"Right." He pitched forward suddenly.
“Are you—?”
“No.”
“Alright.”
You sat quietly for a long time on opposite sides of the charming little bench. You thought back to your time together in Colchester, those last few weeks of summer spent sluggish with equal parts wine and lust in your bloodstream, how you'd lain in Graham's twin bed sweating together with the stereo turned up, playing The Jam at an unconscionable and, in retrospect, not particularly subtle volume. How large the world seemed then and also how incredibly small, the entire universe reduced to the points at which Graham's calloused fingertips touched the skin under your arms and at the back of your knees and the soft sweep of flesh where your leg met your arse. How he had cried the first time he was inside you, only a little bit and more from being overwhelmed than anything else, shaking bodily the way he did now when hungover. How you’d never felt closer and more far apart from one another than in that moment.
“Day?”
“Yes, Graham.” You were growing cold by this point. His cigarette had dwindled to nothing but a brief bit of paper which he fiddled with, restless. The grinding bassline of Beck’s new record spilled out of the party like tar leaking onto the lawn: Standing right here with a beer in my hand and my mouth is full of sand and I don't understand...
“I,” he began.
You didn’t want him to say anything if he felt like he had to say it, some reciprocal impulse that ultimately put the blame on you for bringing it up at all. You had been so worried about the possibility of hurting him that you had failed to consider that he was just as capable of doing the same to you, with just as little effort. “Don’t,” you said, an echo of his earlier plea.
“You started it.”
You turned. He offered you a small smile and, surprised, you bared your teeth in his direction. “Yeah, I suppose I did.”
“Thanks,” he murmured. “You know, for the…” He gestured at his lap, indicating the stranger’s jeans he now wore. He’d already affixed his wallet chain to the new pair—no one would know they weren’t the same trousers he arrived in. “For cleaning up my mess,” he concluded.
“Of course.”
“And thank you for, ah…”
You waited. After a moment he scooted over and pressed a closed-mouth kiss to the side of your face. His lips were cold. This close, you could smell the beer and vomit on his breath and still you did not flinch away, still you did not want him any less.
“Of course,” you said again. After that neither of you said anything at all, simply because there wasn't anything else to say.