Chapter 22
CHARY
Surprisingly—or perhaps not, to the readers of the gossip rags, or to Lawrence Tulley—Chary himself had never been to Everard’s.
The bathhouse was four infamous stories of Neo-Romanesque plaster facade and stained-glass arch windows, with a vestibule entrance.
There was a tall, tin-roofed, cylindrical oriel window sticking straight up from the vestibule that was particularly phallic.
Chary assumed it was probably not original.
The sign was electrified for the night, the round, soot-dusted marquee bulbs spelling Everard’s Baths buzzing far over their heads.
To the left, an advertisement for Everard’s Lager billowed gently on its flagpole.
Temporarily relinquishing the lead, Laurie ducked his face into his hat against the green-glass glare of the entrance lamps and pulled the door open for Chary.
“They won’t recognize me, anyway,” Chary said as he passed.
Laurie’s response was a tight smirk. “Dunno if they recognize anyone, since the Ariston raids,” he said, “but as you’re paying…” He gestured, and Chary scurried forward.
Chary paid his dollar-twenty-five—and Laurie’s—and handed over his wristlet watch and wallet and received a dressing-room key. Discreetly, he watched to see if Laurie was recognized as he did the same; but the clerk was ignorant of him, too, or else a cardsharp.
From the lobby a set of wide marble stairs took them down to the main, two-story large plunge room. Just within an adjacent hall of dressing rooms, an attendant handed them robes and white cotton shorts.
It was a specific kind of custom that visited the Everard—middle- and upper-classes, white—and if Laurie wasn’t recognized, what he did do, before the attendants and everyone else, was draw into his suit and his own certain untouchable attitude ’til it all molded to him effortlessly.
Though there remained a telltale consideration of the attendant as more than wallpaper.
Chary wondered, as he turned the dressing-room latch, which was more difficult: to fit in as wealthy or as workingman—and then realized he knew himself. It was neither, both: they were equally difficult roles once one had slipped into the liminal.
Of course, for Laurie, they were roles. Eventually, Chary was going to have to choose. Perhaps sooner than later, if Tjofabier Raberding managed to make it publicly known that August was alive.
He considered the shorts. They were very short. He cinched them at his hips rather than the waist, left-shouldered the towel, and took a deep breath. What matter if you could see his ribs when he breathed?
Laurie was taking a longer deliberation of his own bathing clothes or lack of them; he wasn’t in the hall when Chary exited.
Chary folded his hands behind him. Then ahead of him. Then, feeling like a schoolboy, he put them back of him again and tried to fix his gaze ahead—on his wriggling toes—on the mosaic tile edging upon the floor—
There were two pair of feet beneath the door of the dressing room at the corner. Then a pair of knees, spectacularly hairy, sank down and folded. Chary buried a flaming cheek in the hollow of his clavicle.
“Fetching,” Laurie said, and Chary startled.
Thank goodness that since his accidental voyeurism, there was no redder shade for him to achieve.
Laurie wasn’t nude, but had opted for no shorts, only the provided towel, and it was not a generously sized towel.
It barely knotted at his hipbone. Chary could see the whole of his thigh, from the fading hair to the crease where he became softer and broader over his belly.
The tattoo he’d shown him upon first meeting. Could see everywhere else, too. Almost.
Laurie blew out a breath. “Big leagues, huh?”
Chary found the mosaic tile again, his own curling toes. “What?”
“Never mind. I forgot you don’t follow baseball. I’d say stop looking at me like that, because this towel won’t last a minute. But if not here… where else?”
Chary looked up in time to catch Laurie smile, and another man in a suit passed into the space between them with a nod. Chary returned the nod absently. “Right.” There would be a lot of looking at Laurie. He must have been used to it. “Sorry.”
Laurie sidled over, parallel, and leaned against the green-marble wainscoting. This facet of him had thankfully more towel. “Don’t apologize. This is pretty much your nightmare, yeah?” He crossed his arms and bent his shoulders and head Chary’s way, conspiratorial.
“Possibly.” Though it felt like it shouldn’t be. Even without the intent to have… relations… one didn’t go into a bathhouse without the general expectation of being touched, being bodily near others; he’d been priming himself for it over hours.
And there wasn’t much danger of anybody trying to touch him.
He had once tried the baths—not Everard’s—a little while back.
He’d kept awkwardly to the wall between two spittoons, watching men come and go.
In the end, he’d been ignored for what turned out to be only minutes on his watch but had felt like hours on his pride.
A very small sample size, admittedly, and he had never asserted himself in any way otherwise, but…
“I don’t have a brother,” Laurie went on quietly, “but I wouldn’t want to find my sisters in the thick of it, personally.” He nodded left, to the dressing-room knees.
“Oh, Lord,” Chary said, in relief. “No.”
He’d been so inside his self-centered head that it hadn’t even occurred how they might find August there. In what specific context. And could that be—? He mentally recoiled. “No,” he said again. “So, you do have sisters?”
“Mhm. Three of them. We’ll think it through, then. Closed-door trysts he could’ve already had. Been having. Yeah?”
Chary stared. “How do you know everything?” he asked, somewhat defeatedly.
“Part of it has to do with having eyes.” Laurie winked. “So… no use bustin’ doors to massage rooms.”
Chary nodded, then shuddered. “I hope not.”
Laurie grinned. Then came a sudden, soft, but unmistakable groan from the corner; Laurie’s grin slid a bit, and his eyes widened.
“More about your brother,” he said, clearing his throat, “before this towel really does embarrass me.”
He turned into the main room, the one that had a swimming pool and plaster frescoes.
Chary followed. It was louder there, echoing, and would’ve been brighter from a distant skylight if it hadn’t been midnight.
The cooling room was filled with all kinds of white men: some lying in nearly flat lounge chairs, some sitting on benches; some leaning against silver railings, some swimming, waving their arms forth and back in the aquamarine water, holding on to rope loops with an arm.
Over to the left, there was the hot room, partially divided from the plunge by a stunning amount of plate glass.
“Chatty, isn’t he, your brother?” Laurie said over his shoulder. “Friendly?”
“What?”
“I’ll be friendly,” offered one man, straightening from his lean into Laurie’s path. He was mustached, fairly young, and totally nude beneath a loose shirt. “Or his brother.”
Laurie laughed. “Maybe later, friend,” he said easily, sidestepping; the man shrugged away. “My instincts tell me the Russian plunge,” he said, to Chary. “He’s here for the social half of it, at long last. I don’t see him here; do you?”
Chary glanced back to find he couldn’t tell even which man had made Laurie his offer. All of them looked vaguely the same, mustached, bearded, groomed; nor, he thought meanly, were they any of them striking enough to be worth a minute of Laurie’s attention.
For shame, he reprimanded himself. And where would such shallow estimation place you?
No August present, either, though, nor Raberding. “No. Let’s try the cold plunge, yes. He has a fondness for them. There is one?”
“By the needle showers.” Laurie pointed.
Laurie was stopped and propositioned twice more before they reached the other end of the pool.
Part of it seemed to be their direct beeline, backward to the usual flow and out of place amidst the boneless relaxation, part of it Laurie’s general beauty, part of it…
something else. Laurie seemed to realize what it was all at once. He halted.
“We don’t look claimed,” he muttered, sounding irritated. “Invested. Neither of us.”
Claimed? “Would that matter?”
“Dunno for sure, but I’d like to stop drawing glances.”
“I don’t think that will be possible,” Chary said carefully. Was there no mirror in your dressing room? You’re wearing only a towel, and those thighs—
Laurie cursed. “I’ve been stupid. Not thinking. Can’t work a damned room. But of course we’re dry—tense—don’t look like we’re running off to fuck, even. Y’know what I mean?”
“We don’t?”
“No. Only look around. They ask where Victorian decency went; well, for sure I can’t see any. Everyone’s exposed as Adam.”
This seemed like a rather judgmental, un-Laurie-like thing to say. For a moment, Chary felt the old fear, that Laurie was a vice-society man, very undercover, hired by Raberding to expose him—vice men were known to partake, so to speak—
“We look,” Laurie said, with a wry twist of his lips, “like normals.”
Chary suddenly understood. No wonder they were getting stopped every three feet. His fears were every other man’s fears. Laurie didn’t look like a man after a soak in a bathhouse, he looked like a man after a man, and in the worst way.
“Perhaps you look—”
“If Raberding’s goons are around, we’ll stand out like sore thumbs.” Laurie turned his way. “Can I touch you?” he asked, eyes bright and blazing.
Chary lost his breath and the capability of his tongue to one swoop of his gut.
Did he mean it? Probably not. But—touch like… what? Like a man was being touched right there, in the hot room, just through the glass?