CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
WE BOTH HAVE STRANGE EYES. Maybe one day you could paint us together instead of plants.
James stroked through the waters, the millpond tranquil and blissful.
A pair of swans took flight over the waters.
A starling landed on a magnificent elm, transporting Elliott back to that fateful moment in spring.
A fleet of thrushes soared over their heads.
Nature gently eased them forward into beauty, summer afternoon after summer afternoon, charting them through the bloom of botanical trees–the maples, birches, and pines.
The cold-cut sandwiches, the iced beers, the cassettes of George Michael were sprawled on the high prairie grass around Elliott.
James had introduced Elliott to George Michael.
Elliott had never listened to his work outside of Wham!
before. Elliott hummed as he kept his eyes on his cold-press linseed oil painting of James and himself ahead of him on the canvas.
Maybe one day you could paint us together instead of plants.
James stroked to the edge of the water, his water dripping all over Elliott’s arrangement full of charcoal, graphites, and oils. Sweat smeared his broad chest. Perspiration slicked his pure-white hair back.
A lock of it fell between his golden eyes.
“Are you going to come in with me or stare at me all afternoon?” James quirked his mouth. “I’m breathtaking to gaze at, but surely there’s a better use of your time?”
Elliott never missed a call to adventure. “Catch me if you can then.”
James was doused with pond water as Elliott leapt into the still current, swimming in a blur of movement. Immediately, Elliott felt alive, fifteen again.
Elliott was a swift swimmer, he was already grasping the rocks and flowers on the other side, sprinting through the trees. However, he realized James had improved his speed.
James’s robust, impellent dive severed through the water petals. Elliott no longer outran him with ease. His face fell. Elliott sprinted through the pastoral nature, propelling himself as deftly as he could over silverberry bushes and buttonbush thickets.
He was faster than Elliott.
He pinned Elliott beneath him.
“What is my prize for catching you?” His silken hair was drenched, pelting pond water onto Elliott’s cheeks like a drumfire of rain. Elliott felt a powerful set of hands grasp his thighs and drag him closer to him. James smirked wider.
Elliott’s ears suffused with color, knowing the upperclassman had no interest in any other prize and reward. “What do you have in mind?”
James leaned in and kissed his heated ear.
“I want to know what my little artist sounds like when I’m inside of him.” He teased, entertained by his pinkening, “I want to taste my little artist in the labyrinths, in the private libraries, in the gardens, on the balconies. Is twenty hundred kisses such a trouble?”
Elliott normally responded, Pay them at they leisure, one by one.
“Rematch?” Elliott sprinted for his pride.
James grinned at him as they climbed through the overgrowth, competing for who could clamber over first. They invented challenge after challenge.
Elliott shoved him to the dry earth to get ahead, James wrangled himself from the thorns.
A cloud of fireflies surrounded Elliott’s nest of hair as he gained the edge, leaping over the brushwood first, taking the lead.
On the third rematch, James blocked him from the hedges of the Nixon Forest, winning by a millisecond.
They wrestled in the fourth rematch, each trying to wrest the other in victory, laughing.
Afterward, exhausted, Elliott panted. “You trained?”
“A rower needs to be agile.” James fought for breath. “I mimicked the way you run.”
Replication had always been James’s finest skill.
The obsidian gates were only a meter away on the edges of the overgrown entrance of the forest.
Elliott wrung his clothes dry, his clothes dragged through the underbrush. Pebbles scraped his back. Bark was stuck to his cheek. Elliott’s sodden tie was twisted over his shoulder, his buttoned shirt was loosened, his belt was waterlogged with lilies. His oxfords were submerged in sludge.
The pair looked like mud men.
Even soaking wet, James pressed against him until there was no inch of space left between them behind an elm. He slid his hand through Elliott’s hair to bring his mouth close.
“Elliott…? Elliott Archway?” A voice questioned behind them.
All at once, the illusion was broken. There was a stark reminder that at any time they could be caught.
A young man stood on the other side of the obsidian gates that encircled AEscwulf College.
The men moved apart from each other. “Did you get into a mud fight?”
Elliott couldn’t possibly explain. “Sorry, I was just messing around.”
Had they been seen? James wondered in a flash of thoughts.
How much of it had he witnessed? Everything?
That wasn’t likely, given the mammoth breadth of the elms, and the fact that their lips hadn’t quite touched, but the thoughts bolted through James’s mind in rapid succession. How could he be so careless outside?
“Do you have the course notes for Perrineau’s lecture?” The student asked. “I’m stuck with him for the Romantics.”
“Yeah. Let me get it for you.” Elliott left to retrieve his backpack.
The young man crossed his eyes briefly over James, and James knew in that single glance that the young man recognized him.
He was a freshman cabal pledge. James recognized him as well.
James smiled at him. His gloriously handsome face reconstructed into pure charm as they pretended not to know each other and shook hands. “James Wilde.”
“Archie Murdock. You were with a…” Archie tilted his head and for a moment, James thought he was about to question why he was caught behind the elm with a man. Instead, Archie shook his head in disappointment as he left after he received the notes. “A liberal?”
They dried themselves in Winterthur Residence Hall.
The Common Room was resplendent in exquisite Romanesque busts and finely sculpted Grecian statues, the grandeur of AEscwulf College impenetrable in magnificence, even in the humid summertime.
Elliott rinsed his shirt in the sink. James toweled his hair with the lush, monogrammed WRH kitchenette cloth.
The vaulted ceilings were gilded with paintings, curls of slow-burning tobacco drifted in the air as always, swelling from Cuban tobacco leaves in the adjacent parlors.
Where James once stood in solitude in the dark of winter on his own in the New Year, the world was brightened before him.
There were meters of fresh snow everywhere six months earlier. In July, summer had commenced softly, leisurely.
On the vinyls, the strings of the majestic orchestra coalesced with the high sopranos and dreamy altos, choiring their summer performance that sweetly swirled through the sunlit airs. Summer in AEscwulf College was the only time everything felt bearable.
Elliott dried his ears at the sink after James.
“Have you given any thought to Governor Hollins of Michigan?” Elliott asked conversationally, trying his hand at the civic discussions James had with his fellow aides, and James hesitated.
He hated very few things with Elliott, talking about politics was one of them. They differed widely in their politics.
The polemarch of Connecticut was a republican strategist, Caine Murdock. His son Archie was right. Elliott was a liberal. More than that, Elliott was a liberal apologist. He espoused liberal apologia without critical thought.
Elliott wholeheartedly, naively, believed in the current liberal leadership.
James was staunchly socialist. Congressman Pittman was as uncompromisingly socialist as he was and together, they resolutely believed in a socialist government.
Governor Hollis did not. At most, Governor Hollis believed if a capitalist economy had to exist, then it must be within livable perimeters. Well regulated. Fairly distributed.
However, James believed capitalism must be eradicated in its entirety. Capitalism could not coexist with humanity. Capitalism was parasitic and exploitative by its nature.
James was at war with liberals by day, and he was embattled with conservatives at night, and what Elliott didn’t know where many of them were fucking each other and drinking cocktails right after they fucked the country.
The invented rivalry of liberals and conservatives was America’s grandest performance.
All of it was propagandized—gender, race, socioeconomic class, sexuality.
Liberals would sign bills that harmed the very communities they claimed to advocate for all in the name of bipartisanship and bridging the aisle when in fact, the economic detriment was in the best interest of their political sponsors who profited from inflation prices and economic exploitation.
Meanwhile, conservatives weaponized social issues to provoke citizens into mass fear and anger, manipulating their base with impunity, which then allowed for liberals to seem heroic for their strongly worded letters of dissent that weakly progressed very little.
The conservative citizens bonded over their rage and fear, strengthening their base in a united front.
It was mass organization. In the next era, more culture war talking points would then emerge for conservatives to raise the stakes with fresh controversy, recruiting new fellowship. Rinse. Repeat.
National tragedy. New social war. Old rules.
It was the highest circus of them all.
Statues and portraits were erected in their honor, airports were named after them, schools admitted their legacy children, libraries were donated, international acclaim was given unto them. After all, if one must debase themselves on the altar of lies, let it be for power.
That was how James was raised.
His greatest performance with Elliott was that he was normal as anyone else, another upperclassmen in college. Elliott couldn’t handle anything different.
“Yeah. I might work with him in the future.” James pointed to the canvas. “What’s that?”
Elliott grinned, turning it over. “It’s us. Do you like it?”
Like wasn’t worthy enough for the pure mirth that rose within James. There were times James didn’t even remember he existed, until Elliott walked into a room, filling it with warmth.
There were moments he would forget his own name, until Elliott spoke it to him.
James performed around everyone, except him. His peers believed he was playing the acclaimed roles of Claudius or Alexikakos, but in truth, he was eternally playing the role of James Wilde.
The role of James Wilde was the young politician on the rise who was exactly like one of them; a regular college student with a rush of popularity.
By impossible magic, Elliott captured that experience between them. What it felt like to be seen. James always felt like Jamie with Elliott.
“You could’ve left me behind in Arkansas and lived a new life. You didn’t, and that means a hell of a lot to me.” Elliott beamed. “I thought I’d draw us together.”
In Elliott’s mind, Elliott was right.
James could’ve let Elliott go. He could’ve released him to the Montclair wolves, then married someone interesting, someone he’d always liked, all without a retreating glance to his past. Heather T?n had been on James’s mind since he was a freshman, she was only a year older than him, and she was exactly as ambitious as him.
Even though she had no government incumbents in her lineage, she was exceptionally attractive; fiery dark eyes and steel grit.
James could’ve welcomed children with her, waltzed in the kitchen with her on Saturday nights, taken over the country with her on Mondays, and one brilliant night in November, they would’ve celebrated his election to senatorship without a thought about the College.
However, James’s mind knew the reality of the matter.
He would have Elliott or nothing else.
Elliott belonged to him. Elliott’s soul belonged to him. Elliott’s heart belonged to him.
James would always protect what belonged to him. He smiled.
“There is no me that exists without you, Elliott Archway.”