Chapter 32 Lucas Gets What He Asked For
Lucas Gets What He Asked For
Armand gulped, knuckles white against the stall frame. It seemed hard for him to talk. “Everything’s fine. Don’t . . . don’t worry—”
“Don’t worry?” It came out harsher than I’d intended, but something was very, very wrong; my stomach curdled at seeing Armand like this, and he was still refusing to tell me what was going on. “Armand, I can tell you’re upset. Why won’t you talk to me?”
Armand remained maddeningly silent, but Jean-Michel responded. “You know how Armand is.” His voice was velvety cool, as collected as Armand was flustered. “He loves his little secrets.”
Armand rasped, “Shut. Up.”
Jean-Michel’s lips curled up. “Such a tease. He’ll let you touch everywhere but show you nothing.” His sharp blue eyes met mine. “Five years, and I can barely say I knew him.”
A flicker of static darted through my body. “Five years?”
Jean-Michel’s eyebrows pinched together.
“Oh dear. Another thing he never told you.” He peered down at Armand, who was hunching smaller by the second.
“Shame.” He buttoned his jacket before turning to me.
“I can see this is a private matter. I shall take my leave.” He swept to where I stood motionless at the doorway and paused.
“Congratulations, Lucas. You have a bright future ahead of you. I do hope you don’t squander it.
” He briefly glanced back at Armand before slipping out of the restroom.
The door thudded closed behind him, echoing in the silence.
Armand wasn’t looking at me.
“Babe.” I breathed, heart ratcheting in my chest as Armand let out a broken noise—as if I hadn’t spoken—and tore away from the stalls to brace himself against the sinks.
“Armand, please talk to me. What’s going on?
” I inched closer, unable to look away from Armand’s ashen face, the way his fingers trembled against the counter. “W . . . what did he mean five years?”
Armand was staring directly into the sink, his voice barely audible. “That—” He rattled an exhale, determined not to meet my eyes. “That’s how long we were . . . Jean and I were together.”
“Together? You mean like together together?” My mind raced, thinking back to meeting Jean-Michel (or just Jean, apparently) at the anniversary party, how he’d talked about spotting Armand’s potential, teaching Armand everything he knew. “I-I thought he was your teacher.”
Armand’s head fell to his chest, hiding his face.
He shook his head slowly. “He wasn’t my teacher.
He was . . .” His fingernails scraped against the edge of the sink.
“We did meet while I was at university, but he wasn’t a professor.
” All I could see were his shoulders tensing.
“He was my . . .” He trailed off again, hands flexing and unflexing as he struggled to find the word.
“Boyfriend?”
Armand let out a gravelly, bitter laugh. “No, definitely not that. I lived in his house, and he paid for my habits.” He jerked a hand through his disheveled hair. “He even helped with my schooling until I was expelled—”
“What?”
Armand finally lifted his head, only meeting my gaze through the mirror.
His eyes were bloodshot and wild. “Aye. The boy from Grimaldi Court made it to one of the best schools in London—in the world—and then massively fucked it. All right? I should’ve told you, I should have.
But I can’t change what happened. I was a junkie, I was a stripper, I was kept—” He flinched when I reached out to touch his arm.
Guilt and despair rolled off him in waves, and all I wanted was to hold him. But I gave him space, locking my hands together. “God, Armand,” I managed, throat tight. How did one even respond in a situation like this? “That’s . . . I’m so sorry.”
A small, solitary detail crept to the top of my scattered thoughts. “How old were you?” I asked carefully. “When you met him?”
“Eighteen,” Armand answered immediately. Then he screwed his eyes shut, pressing his lips together and slowly shaking his head. “Um. Nearly eighteen.”
My stomach plummeted to the floor. Oh shit.
Oh shit. “So, you were seventeen.” A teenager, my god he was a child when Jean, who was Mom’s age .
. . Nausea hit me so hard I nearly bent double.
“He’s a pedophile.” I barely choked out the word.
“I’ve been texting him, I’ve gone to lunch with him—” My vision blurred at the edges.
“This whole time I was hanging out with the man who groomed you?”
Armand tensed. “He didn’t groom me.”
“Didn’t— Armand, he definitely did. You . . . you were a kid.” I was hysterical. Surely this was what hysteria felt like. “Younger than Skyler when—”
A realization knocked the wind out of me.
The video.
Armand, dancing at a club, dressed like a schoolboy. Armand had said he hadn’t come up with the character. “Schoolboy Lolito. That was his idea, wasn’t it.”
The words had barely left my mouth when Armand turned completely around, his back shaking.
All the times I’d wondered what Armand wasn’t telling me—the tiptoeing his friends had done, avoiding something, something big—I’d never imagined anything like this. I’d never imagined that what was being concealed was abuse.
I took a ragged breath, easing my way around his hunched body, seeking his face. He was holding a hand over his mouth, skin shiny with sweat. “None—” I tried, then started again, “None of what happened, what Jean did to you, was your fault. You know that, right?”
Armand huffed incredulously, lowering his hand and actually rolling his eyes.
“Aye, can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that line.
It’s not my fault I did drugs and partied instead of finishing uni, and it’s definitely not my fault I kept going back to him.
He never forced me to do anything.” He wrapped both his arms around his middle.
“I was there, love, I remember it. I remember making those choices. Being weak. And I wasn’t a child by the end of it. I was well into my twenties.”
He’d have been something like twenty-two when their “relationship”—I hated even thinking of it as a consensual situation—ended. Five years. Longer than it usually takes to go through college.
I wet my lips, distantly wondering if my voice sounded as small to him as it did to me. “You could’ve told me that. All of it. Why didn’t you?”
Armand’s face crumpled. “I was afraid you wouldn’t want me anymore,” he whispered.
I barked a shocked laugh. “Wouldn’t want you?
Armand, oh my god.” I wanted to stay here, in the bubble of sympathy and understanding for what Armand had gone through, but my gorge was rising, everything snowballing into something ugly and terrifying.
How was I still so naive, such a bad judge of character, how could I not have seen what Jean was?
“You let me go out to lunch with him and talk about my art and— Oh my god, the only reason this exhibition is happening is because a creepy pedophile liked my photos.”
“He’s not the only reason this is happening,” Armand insisted, though I could barely hear him. “He had one little connection. That’s how he works—he makes you think all the good things about you are his and all you have left are the parts that are shit.”
“Exactly!” Flashes filled my mind with every time I’d mentioned Jean—every time Armand had had an opportunity to intervene but had chosen not to.
“You didn’t want to spare me that? You didn’t want to warn me?
” Don’t cry, Barclay, don’t you dare cry.
I curled my arms around my chest. I had to know, I needed him to tell me.
“Do you . . .” I struggled to inhale. “Do you care about me at all?”
The blood drained from Armand’s face. The question hung in the air as Armand stared, mouth dropped open, chest rising and falling rapidly as he struggled for words.
“I— Well, I thought you knew I’m arse over— What I mean to say is—” He took a stuttering breath and licked his lips, looking up at me with wide and terrified eyes. “I’m in love with you.”
My breath caught in my throat. My head buzzed with a thundering dirge of not like this, not like this. A million miles away, my mind informed me that his words had meaning, and I should respond. Instead, the only words I could access were, “Are you? Really?”
Armand pulled the knuckles he’d been biting from his mouth. “W-what do you mean? O-of course I am.”
My mouth was on autopilot, my hands ice-cold. Bitterness flooded my throat. “The way you choose to show that is by letting me socialize with a fucking pedophile for a month without saying a word—”
“He is not,” Armand growled, eyes narrowing, “a pedophile.”
“Why are you defending him? You were a child, and it wasn't your fault, but you can't keep something like that bottled up. It’ll eat you alive. You need to talk to someone about it—”
“I do talk to people about it,” he snapped, voice crisper than I’d ever heard it. “Every week, actually.”
I was going to throw up. “But not me, right? I’m not worth telling.”
We stared at each other for seconds, minutes, years. Then Armand inclined his head and swallowed. “Okay, you wanna talk? Let’s talk. What happened last night?”
Blood pounded in my ears. “I— What do you mean?” We’re not talking about this, we are not talking about this . . .
“The cake, love.” Armand’s eyes softened. “The purging. The living off of celery sticks and counting carbs, and needing to ‘deserve’ to eat.”
Purging? No, that wasn’t right. That was one time, an extenuating circumstance brought on by anxiety and bad decisions.
I’d been slacking and not eating well because of the stress, but I was handling it.
Armand was staring expectantly, like he was uncovering a long-kept secret, like he’d stripped me naked.
I pressed my back against the sink and crossed my arms. “What are you talking about? I’m conscientious about what I eat. What’s wrong with that?”
Armand ran a hand through his already massively disheveled hair.
“Half my friends are dancers, love, and I know this isn’t the time or the place, but I—I’m starting to think I’m not going to get another chance.
” He breathed shakily. “You have an eating disorder, Lucas. It’s not so different from what I deal with.
There’s the same kind of meetings and rehab. You need help.”
“No—” I shook my head, skin prickling. “I don’t have an eating disorder. I’m trying to take care of myself and stay healthy. Maybe I overdo it sometimes, but—”
“Lucas.” Armand’s voice was pleading.
“I have my dad’s genetics to worry about! I can’t eat like it doesn’t matter! I have to think about these things, but it’s not a problem—”
“Lucas.” His voice had gone impossibly softer.
“I . . . It’s not a problem.” My mouth went dry, and the back of my throat ached, still sore from coughing up bile. “I’ve got it under control.”
Armand’s eyes welled with tears. “I know, love. Control is the problem.”
Ugliness was clawing its way to the surface, but it was a distraction, an exaggeration. I had to ground myself here, in the bathroom, and we were not talking about this. “Don’t change the subject,” I finally said. “This is about you lying to me.”
A sniffle, then Armand was crying. “Yes. I lied to you.”
It was taking everything in me not to burst into tears too, or to pull him into a hug, or drop to my knees and beg for this conversation to have never happened. But—
“He’ll let you touch everywhere but show you nothing.” Darren, telling me he couldn’t be what I wanted him to be, that I’d never really seen him at all: “I’m trying to become somebody and you’re holding me back.”
Five. Years.
I took a deep breath and turned to the sink, splashing my face with water and patting down wayward strands of hair. From somewhere outside my body, I met his eyes through the mirror and said, “Maybe we need to slow down.” There was no heat to it, no energy left to spare.
He swallowed. Then nodded.
I couldn’t cry—I wouldn’t. Outside this bathroom were dozens of people I’d have to smile at and mingle with for the rest of the night.
My body was screaming to shut down, to fall apart at the seams, but I had to hold off a bit longer.
I adjusted my tie, steeled myself, and turned to face Armand.
“You don’t have to hang around if you don’t want.
I’ll stay with my mom tonight at her hotel. We can talk about this later.”
Armand’s nod, like the rest of him, was shaky.
If I stayed here another second I’d crumble to pieces. So, I soldiered back to the party, where my guests waited.