March 23rd, 2008
Like most American boys, I had my first taste of alcohol while I was still in high school. My dad gave me a half-glass of wine with dinner. It wasn’t particularly good (I later learned that I just don’t like his taste in wine, but I get ahead of myself), so I shrugged it off and went back to my room. I looked at my bed for a moment, fell over into it, and woke up fourteen hours later.
So… yeah. I’m pretty sensitive to alcohol. I didn’t touch it again for another three and a half years.
Again, like many American boys, I had my second drink (and the first one I actually enjoyed) with my girlfriend. Her name was Jacqueline, my tiny little half-French girl. One way or another she had a little flask of her father’s cognac, some French white wine distilled into its purest essence and aged, longer than both of us put together, until the barrels stained it dark, rich amber. We were sitting in a park when she offered it to me, in one of those shady, private clearings, sealed away from the world, just the two of us watching the light dapple against our skin and clothes, talking about nothing in particular. It was stronger than wine by a long shot, and I felt it at the first swallow, felt myself relax, felt myself go mellow, placid and vulnerable, but it felt right in a way that my father’s wine did not. It was warm and spicy, smooth and sweetly addictive, a small, refined pleasure that slipped inside before I could notice, melting down my throat and coiling its vapors up into the root of my brain, leaving fingerprints across my soul.
Something – well, it didn’t quite click; it really just slid gently and effortlessly into place…
January 23rd, 2008
Collaborative fiction by Jacqueline du Treilly and Adrian Mailenna
| Dear Diary,
I want him to use me.
That sounds weird, doesn’t it? I don’t understand.
Sometimes, late at night, I wake up in his arms, and if I try to move, he pulls me back. He’s stronger than he lets on, and he holds me tight, closer, possessively. I feel helpless in his grip. His breath turns hard, and he nuzzles the back of my jaw. It makes me whine, and I feel him stiffen, by reflex twitching his hips against my rear. Maybe I’m still dreaming, but I think I hear him almost snarl.
It’s okay. In a minute he relaxes, and he’s the same sweet, cuddly boy I’ve always known, babbling love-notes in his sleep.
I never see that part of him, so different from when he’s awake. He has a cat’s dignity. He wears it like armor and never lets anyone in, I think not even himself. Even in bed with me, he talks and acts just like he writes, everything gentle and refined, carefully styled just so.
I love him for it. It’s beautiful. He treats me like his princess.
But there’s this other part of him. It’s a little scary, actually, like the jungle that never leaves the cat. He probably doesn’t even know it’s there. I wonder what he would think?
He loves his princess, and she loves him. But right then, when he takes her captive and she can almost feel his teeth…
. . .
More than anything, she wants to be his whore.
-J!
|
Late at night, sometimes, you whimper. I think it wakes me every time.
It scares me just a little; I know right away that something’s wrong. You’re as close to me as a prayer. Even without touching you I could recite you, could trace by memory every inch of you between my lips and upon your tongue, in my arms and against my hands. Even without listening, I know every sound you make, and this isn’t a noise you make in pleasure, even when it’s edged in pain. You’re scared, but I don’t know what you’re dreaming, only that I reach out to touch you and find you always frightfully cold, shivering even on the warmest summer nights.
I slip a little closer, just to hold you, and you burrow quickly into my arms. You feel so tiny there, even smaller than I know you are, fragile like you’ve never been before. You feel like a kitten, almost, warming as you relax and settle against me, nearly purring as I trace my fingers down your naked spine. Two kisses leave you calm again, one beneath the your hairline, another pressed between your eyes.
The rhythm of your breath grows steady; the moonlight whispers across your skin. I watch you for a moment and squeeze you closer, joining you in your dreams. One thought leaves me nervous, though… it’s a nervous shiver of my own. Maybe, somehow, I’m to blame.
Sometimes, in your frightened whimper, I think I hear my name.
|
January 16th, 2008
Introduction: I’m not very good at poetry. It isn’t my medium; meter and rhyme don’t come naturally to me. Even more than my other writing, poetry feels like something given to me rather than something I create; at best I’m a transcriptionist for something lurking in my dreams. Even then I’m not very good at it, but it’s a profoundly moving experience, something magical and almost divine.
In the evening of Halloween 2004, I broke three months of writer’s block. I can tell you this day exactly because I spent the day with a girl named Teri, and for the next two months I gave her credit for every word that came. It was beautiful; I woke up almost every day with something new, something wonderful, some new and interesting turn of phrase to consider. The best part was the poetry, dozens of pages every week, scrawled in that fuzzy half-awareness between slumber and first light.
I believed it was all from her, and I wanted very badly to know her better.
Ultimately that didn’t work out. We haven’t spoken in years.
She is not the girl I dreamed, and I am not a kind of boy she understands. I burned most of it, trying to find a suitable goodbye to my fantasy. Some of it survived on my old website, but for quite a while I wasn’t sure if I should move it here. I’m proud of it, in my own small way, but it’s also a little badge of shame; it’s a testament of delusion as much as any skill.
Ultimately I think it’s better to be truthful.
January 6th, 2008
On this night, I'll hold you close,
Just
Like
This.
Kiss your cheek and breathe your scent,
Then taste the girl that Heaven sent,
Just Like This.
November 17th, 2007
N.B. The copy of this story in Envy, the YaoiCon 2006 anthology, contains a number of misprints and editorial errors. I am very sorry for the inconvenience.
Yellow-throated songbirds pecked at the bars of their tiny, gold-wire cage, blinded and too fat to fly, searching in vain for the trays of millet and grapes, oats and figs that someone had taken away that morning. A soft mewling startled them, but they soon forgot it, oblivious to the sleek, golden-skinned cat-prince watching them. Tybalt licked his teeth contemplatively, sprawling in the Roman couch beside the cage. He flicked open the top and plucked out the fattest, laughing quietly at its futile squirming. It amused him for a moment, but soon he grew bored again, and he thrust it, head first, into a glass of brandy.
It didn’t take long. The bird drowned in minutes, its struggles against his hand growing weaker and weaker until they stopped altogether.
“That’s cruel, Tybalt, even for you.” Tybalt’s guest, a gentle sylph of a boy, just barely a man, tried to look away, but the beautiful tragedy entranced him, somehow, and he could not.
“Well, I miss her, and their suffering eases my own.” He plucked the bird’s feathers deliberately, one at a time, tossing them back into the cage. “You wouldn’t deny me that, would you, Methyst?”
Methyst buried his face in his hands, running his fingers back through his short, dirty-blonde hair. “Still her, even now… Tybalt… It’s been seven hundred and fifty years.”
“Seven hundred and forty-nine, two hundred eighty-seven days.”
“Even still.”
