It’s Just the Liquor Talking

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…

Intoxication

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.”