Content: Arthur/TMWTPF, Domestic violence

The afternoon air is heavy and sweltering and the sun cuts a rectangle of white onto the cool kitchen floor. Arthur is curled on the linoleum with his bare back pressed against the naked chest of the man with the painted face. The desperate way they're wrapped around each other makes them look more like two men in a snowstorm than two men in a heatwave.

"Tell me about someone else you've loved," says the man with the painted face. His voice is only slightly thicker than the summer heat and it melts into the hum of the fan coming from Arthur's mother's room. It's an abrupt question - a snare that catches something fleeting in Arthur's mind that he hasn't thought about in years. For a moment he considers saying nothing. A bead of sweat drips down his forehead and he wipes it away with the heel of his hand.

"When I was fifteen or so there was a kid at school... A boy. I liked girls too, but I only ever loved this one boy." He shifts, trying to find a position where his bones aren't grinding into the floor, and the man with the painted face shifts with him. "We lived in a different apartment complex back then, and one summer I was walking down the hall and I saw him sitting beside a door. Inside I could hear two people fighting. He was waiting for it to be over so he could go back inside."

When he was young he thought that fighting was something all adults did when they were alone. That they all screamed and threatened and broke things. And when they got tired of fighting each other they'd find a kid to fight because fighting a kid was easier. When adults fought it was a good idea to hide and an even better idea to leave.

"He looked so small sitting there alone. At school he had a lot of friends but at home he was just as alone as I was. So I took his hand and walked with him back to my apartment."

He doesn't talk about the understanding between them when he’d put his finger to his lips before unlocking the door. He doesn't talk about the state of the apartment - the holes in the wall, the garbage on the floor, the way every ugly trinket and picture frame had been cracked and broken and glued back together. He’d watched the boy run his fingers over a deep tear in the wallpaper and it was like he was touching his own scars.

"We laid in my bed and I held him. It was the first time I'd seen a boy besides me cry. And then, for some reason, he kissed me. All summer it was like that. He wouldn't let me touch him much but I let him touch me as much as he wanted."

Arthur remembers the pleasant buzz in his head when he’d laid pliant and let himself be handled. It was rough and fumbling and all he had to do was move his mouth when he was kissed or his hand when it was put somewhere. The room was a dark cocoon of summer heat and his mind was even warmer. It was so simple to turn his brain off and float in the haze inside himself, feeling himself be touched and listening to his own breathing.

"Did he love you back?" The question pulls Arthur out of a deep pit, back onto the sticky linoleum floor with the sun at his back and the fan droning in a distant room.

"No," Arthur admits. "I think he was just lonely. When the summer ended he pretended not to know me. I tried everything to get him to talk to me again. I put notes in his locker, I followed him home... I did a lot of things. He ended up punching me in the face and telling me to fuck off." A harsh cackle tears out of his throat and he wraps his hand around his neck, trying to squeeze the laughter back inside himself. The man with the painted face puts his palm over Arthur's heaving chest, over his racing heart, and Arthur sucks in a few breaths of humid air and is quiet again.

"Do you wish he'd loved you?"

Arthur stares at the patterned linoleum - cream-white hexagons slotted together in neat little rows. He wonders where he'd be now, two decades later, if he'd been loved at fifteen. "It doesn't matter," he says.