Chapter Text
It was a day in late August, sweltering like the last hurrah. Birds chirped and fluttered their wings as the glowing sun beat down on the ground.
Down the hill that led to the moor, Matt and Mello were sweating. Two little piggies roasting under the sun. Mello lay in the grass on his front, staring up at the runny clouds trickling between the branches and the leaves. Every time he moved, something unglued from his skin.
“It’s so hot,” Matt mumbled, peeling his shirt from his damp chest. He was sitting beside him, his goggles strung around his neck like a plastic orange medallion. “This is brutal.”
“Bloody heat wave,” Mello muttered in agreement.
Matt sighed. The smoke off of his cigarette sighed with him, tangling into the rotten air, playing with the children who screamed up the hill-top. They were alone behind the House, in a shady spot under an unfriendly group of big oak trees. It must have been the only cool spot in the whole of Hampshire.
“We only have a few days left of our break, and this is what we get,” Matt continued. “I hate England.”
English summers were unforgivingly humid. Matt handed his cigarette to Mello, perched between two thin fingers, and Mello took it from his hands. Their damp skin stuck with a second of prolonged contact, and parted.
Mello inhaled. The cigarette didn’t help. But the filter was damp where Matt had bitten it, the way that he always did. Spicy tobacco and nicotine lined his mouth with Matt’s spit coagulating in his gums, coated with golden ember.
“I don’t wanna go back to class,” Matt uttered.
If Mello agreed, it would have been a lie. The end of this summer marked the beginning of his schooling as an Elite. A prestigious opportunity that he had longed for since he set foot in the institution, since he’d seen letters like Y and Z try and fail.
Mello hummed, tonguing the filter. He blew out the smoke, pushing it out from his lungs, and handed the cigarette back over, where the tip smouldered like the ridges of a sandy mountaintop.
“Have you done all your EP’s?” Matt asked, taking the cigarette effortlessly. He was referring to his Elite Preparations.
Mello smiled, tilting his head to look at the boy. From underneath the glaring sun, peeking through the leaves, the curve of Matt’s jaw looked soft and damp. Mello could count every hair that coated his cheek. Peach fuzz, glowing the way angels’ hair glowed.
“I have, actually,” Mello said, gleaming. “And I’ve read all on my reading list these two weeks, too. Finished my last yesterday night.”
“What book is that?”
“Our Lady of the Flowers.”
“What’s that about?”
Matt blew a trail of smoke from his dry, pink lips. Skin flaked off of his bottom lip, dusted and cherished like a Darling secret. He chewed his lip now, a dog with a bone.
“’s about a man’s fantasies while he’s incarcerated,” Mello answered.
Matt’s pink tongue stuck out from his mouth cheekily, the underside veined and monstrous. “Sexual?”
“Yeah.”
“Let me read it, then.”
Mello shook his head. “I don’t think you’ll like it,” he responded honestly. “It’s not that sexy.”
Not for Matt, anyway. He didn’t like the same things Mello did.
Matt made a humming noise, and Mello shifted as the sun beat over his eyes. He closed them, feeling the sweat collect at the back of his neck, clinging to his skin.
“Well, y’know,” Matt continued, shifting around. The round o of his vowels, softened with a flat, faint North American accent from somewhere Mello had never been. “When you’re an Elite, that means we won’t have any time to hang out anymore.”
It stung, but Mello had prepared for it since they first met. “We’ll hang out,” Mello said.
Matt shuffled again. His sneakers rustled against the dry grass. “Like hell we will,” he responded. “You’ll be studying all day. Class until six. We don’t even have the same supper times.”
“You live beside me, don’t you?”
“Well, you’ll be all pissy. Like how you are before the term exams.” Matt groaned, a rough and angelic sound. “God, I hate you before your exams.”
“If you’d only accepted the invitation to be an Elite, then,” Mello chastised. “You were considered, after all.”
Matt huffed. “I don’t wanna be an Elite. It’s soul-sucking.”
Mello sighed, opening up his eyes. “Then I guess I’ve sold my soul, haven’t I?”
Matt chuckled dryly, leaving the comment open. They fell silent. Mello shifted, and his shirt shifted with him as he looked back to Matt’s curved, hunched back.
Ash rained down between the triangle of Matt’s denim-panted legs as he finished the cigarette. The crumpled butt fell soon after, dropping into the grass and disappearing beside the slope of sparse yellow dandelions, crushed and torn by heavy feet.
Mello could still smell the scent of smoke on his hair when it fell over his face. The scent of an afternoon with Matt, mixed with sweat and sun.
“I’m gonna need to find a girlfriend,” Matt said randomly. “Just so I can have someone else to hang out with. Y’think I can get with any girls here this year?”
Mello shrugged. He’d long since sanded down the edges of words like that. They no longer pricked — just prodded, like the blunt end of a knife.
“Sure,” Mello said airily. A dare, even. “You can if you try.”
Matt laughed. “Yeah…” he trailed off, and then took a breath. “Do you like any girls right now?”
Mello kept his head down when he answered, feeling a wave of warmth wash over him. “Not really.”
Matt paused. Birds trilled. Beside him, Mello heard the thick rip of something plucked from earth.
“What about boys?”
Mello shifted again, the sweat on his skin sinking into his bones. His nerves rattled as he breathed in slowly, out slowly. There’d been enough whispers in the walls of the House in the past few years, and it wasn’t something he divulged, nor wished to.
It was between him and God. God was unhappy enough about it already.
The heat ground on. Mello didn’t say anything.
“Well,” Matt mumbled, quickly. In the way he did when he sensed he said too much. “You’re good-looking. You’d get any girl you wanted.”
Mello exhaled a breath that he’d tried not to hold, humming noncommittally.
“Well, I’ve got Advanced Higher Maths with Bool in the fall,” Matt rambled. “A lot of the hottest girls are gonna be in that class.”
Mello looked up through his hair as the moment passed them by. Matt was picking at the bright yellow petals, showering them all over his sneakers.
Mello asked, “Like who?”
“Betty, Carmina, and Laurel.” Matt paused. “Well, and Julia. Fuckin’ A.”
“Don’t you like Julia?”
“Yeah, when she isn’t talking. But when she is,” Matt cleared his throat, pitching up his voice and putting on a worn English drawl, “Oh, sir, pick me! I’m the third best in maths but I have a stick up me arse!”
Mello snorted, pushing himself on his elbows. He wiped the sweat off his neck with the back of his hand, and touched the earth with his fingers. Soft and warm, baked by the muggy sun.
“She’s not all that bad,” he commented.
“Well, yeah. At least she’s got massive tits.”
Mello shook his head, huffing a laugh. “Perv.”
“It’s normal,” Matt responded, plucking a blade of grass. He rubbed his fingers clear of dandelion milk, and lined it between his thumbs like in prayer, opening a diamond-shaped slit between his hands. He pursed his lips, kissing his knuckles, and blew.
The grass blade whistled brokenly, puncturing the birds in the air like an arrow.
“Anyway, you’re gonna see Near every day for the next five years,” Matt said, ungluing his lips from his hands. He adjusted the grass blade, straightening it between his thumbs, and trilled again. The whistle was loud: fweeeeeep. “So you’ll be working together all the time, on projects or whatever.”
Matt put on another English accent, revelling in his impressions. “‘Well, Near’s not so bad, ackshually! I like him now, I do!’”
Mello rolled his eyes and scoffed, looking away. “Don’t remind me.”
“You’ll eat with Near for every meal,” Matt continued, whistling again. “You’re gonna feed him his cauliflower.”
“I will not.”
“You’re gonna end up becoming best friends.”
“We will not,” Mello repeated, glaring.
“You know what you’re like. You go from hating someone to saying they’re brilliant in, like, a week.” Matt cackled. “Skipping a grade, fast-tracking Elite. So bloody brilliant, that little sheep is.”
“Shut up, Matt.”
“In the Common Room,” Matt continued, shuddering with laughter, “I’m gonna find you next year after not seeing you for three months. Sitting by a dice tower. I’ll be, like, ‘Mello, hey, how’re you doing?’ And you’ll say—“
“Shut up!” Mello growled, pushing himself up. Matt shrunk as Mello tried to punch him, rolling away.
“You’ll be all,” Matt laughed, pitching up his voice as he stood up shakily, bracing himself to run, “’Oh, Near said he’ll teach me about dice towers. He’s so cool! Did you know—‘“
Mello cut Matt off with a fist. Matt dodged and escaped, leaving Mello to pull himself off of his scraped knees and barrel after him, running down the hill and into the grass.
“You’re so cool, Near!” Matt shouted gallantly, pumping his skinny arms and legs, white as bone under his army shorts. “Mello wants Near to—”
They galloped out of the oak tree’s shade, back into the muggy sun. The air was tight and choking as their sneakers shuffled over untrimmed grass, and Mello launched himself at Matt’s back, pulling him down.
His hands fisted the damp fabric of Matt’s shirt as they hit the earth in a mess of limbs and growls, rolling deeper into tickling blades of green and white.
Matt was still laughing as his face hit the dirt, his back rumbling against Mello’s legs. “You know I’m right,” Matt teased, squirming underneath him. “Near, please—“
Mello slapped his hand over Matt’s mouth, holding in his words with a muffled shout. Matt’s hot breath tangled against the sweat with his palm, condensing into droplets of Matt’s air, and Matt squirmed harder, trying to get out of Mello’s grip with more sounds of dissent.
Mello’s fingertips were white, pushing into Matt’s soft cheeks, brushing up against his freckles like Mello could rub them off if he tried. Matt kicked as Mello held his knees tight on the earth, feeling Matt struggling underneath him, wriggling against his belly like a trapped prey.
Matt’s neck was hot and sweaty, sparkling in the bright sun.
Mello’s palm felt warm and wet. He recoiled, looking down at his shining, glistening palm, slick with Matt’s saliva. The shock weakened him and Matt pulled out from underneath him, rustling on the grass, his white ankle-socks dirtying against the loose earth.
“I’ll fucking kill you,” Mello growled. He wiped his face aggressively, smearing the remnant’s of Matt’s saliva and his sweat on his cheek. “I’ll kill you, you dickhead!”
Matt was already up the hill as Mello ran after him, past the slope and back into the House’s playgrounds, where everybody could see them if they looked. They shuffled through the soccer field and emerged onto the track, in plain sight of the Common Room windows.
Matt was losing steam when Mello grabbed him again by the back of his collar, yanking him back and shoving him onto the tarmac.
Matt hit the ground face-up with a muffled thump, goggles clattering around. Mello tackled him, trapping him under his weight.
Matt was panting, red in the face, sweat beading down his warm forehead and mottling his hair dark brown. His chest heaved under his thin striped shirt, two small nipples rising and falling, peeking shyly underneath the cotton.
Mello pushed him down by the shoulders, squashing him with his weight. Leaning closer, he could smell the sweat and the smoke from Matt’s hair, and the comforting, soft scent of Matt’s skin. The dribble of his spit, coating his lower lip from excitement.
“Stop!” Matt wriggled, squeezing his eyes shut as he opened his mouth big and red and wide. His arms were trapped under Mello’s hands, pushing against him. “Let me go!”
“I’m going to fucking murder you,” Mello gritted, shoving his warm shoulders down harder, pressing his hips down tighter against Matt’s lower legs. Matt gasped, a punchy sound of air hitting the back of his throat, and he squeezed his eyes shut suddenly, wrinkling his nose.
Mello felt it belatedly, warmth between his legs, just as Matt’s eyes flew open again, terror cascading down his features like falling sand.
The moment sloshed around them like dirty water. Matt’s spit was shining, his eyes going blank. Mello let go first, out of mercy or fear he wasn’t sure, and he rolled away and tumbled onto the heated tarmac.
He glanced back and saw that Matt had hurriedly sat himself up, hunching over himself.
Mello breathed heavily against the track, smelling the plasticky smell under his cheeks, too hot to lie on, but he couldn’t peel himself away from it. His heart was hammering. He closed his eyes, swallowing his spit loudly.
Side by side, he listened as Matt’s breaths scissored loudly with his, just slightly off-rhythm. Mello opened his eyes again to stare sideways to the sideways House, big and bricky ahead of him. He turned to the sky, the sun was dipping near the horizon, brimming over the fuzzy grass blades.
He’d felt Matt’s...
“Let’s get back,” tumbled like pebbles from Matt’s panting breaths, interrupting his thoughts. “Supper’s soon.”
Mello nodded, pushing himself off the tarmac to sit, the soft spongy earth underneath his palms. He wiped his cheek, rough and patterned after the grains of the track, embedded in his face like he’d been branded.
Matt hoisted himself up beside Mello with a boyish huh, dusting off his army shorts, stained greener from the grass. In one swift motion, he yanked his shirt over his head, revealing skin so bright that Mello had to close his eyes for a moment before forcing them back open.
Matt had gotten wider since he’d last seen his skin — wiry, bony shoulders, and shoulder blades that budded like unformed wings. Taut and so blissfully unaware. He would have never taken his shirt off in front of Mello if he’d known.
Matt spun around, like he’d heard his name being called, and then heard a little bit too much. A chill ran down Mello’s spine, staring back at Matt, scared for a moment that he’d accidentally said something aloud.
But Matt was only holding out a hand, his shirt rolled into a ball by his hip. Acting like nothing had been amiss.
“C’mon.”
Mello took Matt’s wet, rough palm, glancing down to his trousers one last time. But his shorts were loose and his belly was too bright, and Mello couldn’t see anything as Matt pulled him back up to his feet. Too bad.
“You gonna wash my shirt again?” Matt asked, handing his striped shirt over, wiping his face.
Mello looked back over, brushing away his hair from his face, sticking to his sweat. His bangs were all but gone now, sticking up like antennae. He could tell from the way their shadows painted themselves on the tarmac behind them.
“Yeah, I will,” Mello said, flattening his bangs out as he took the shirt. He held it to himself and grabbed his shoes, slipping them off and turning them over.
Underneath his bare feet, the ground was warm and dusty. Rocks fell, raining onto the grass below, rejoining the earth from its sojourn away under Mello’s soles.
“We’re gonna have to shower soon or else Roger'll smell cigarettes at supper.” Matt sighed, stretching. A small dust of chest hairs curled between his two pink nipples. Mello never noticed them there before. “I need a cold fuckin’ shower.”
Mello emptied his other shoe. “You can go first, then.”
Matt blinked, crossing his arms. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Mello elected to keep his shoes off, pinching them in his hand as they walked from the grass back to the House.
In the evening, clouds gathered in the absence of sun. Night only got hotter, humid and sticky without proper air conditioning. Each room was fitted with a fan; Mello’s was small and feeble, and the window offered no solace.
Something shifted today. Something Mello couldn’t name. He rolled it around on his tongue, seeking guidance.
At lights-out, Mello sat on his tiny bed, re-reading Our Lady of the Flowers underneath the torch. The clock ticked on mournfully behind him, loud only at night.
The fuzzy black print shivered like ants under the flickering light as the fan’s wind blew against it slovenly, and Mello could only fan himself with his measly hand as he read the sacred passage that he’d underlined with a fountain pen, marked with a dog-eared page.
For God–as the Jesuits have said–chooses a myriad of ways to enter into souls: the golden powder, a swan, a bull, a dove, and countless others.
For Mello, it was a boy, young and unaware, named Matt.
It had taken years to realize that loving Matt was not a sin. Not selfishly, like he was too stubborn to let go of his temptations. And not without years of reflecting, in the House’s chapel and in the darkness of his room while he prayed.
Mello had been cursed with a love for boys since he could remember. In Ettal, behind the abbey, he’d kissed a young redheaded boy. Seeing Matt at the House at first felt like a cruel joke, back when he was young and afraid.
But God worked in ways that Mello couldn’t fully understand. All that Mello knew was that in the heat of the summer sun, underneath the oak tree, Mello felt, like he had countless times before in his young life, a beautiful burning of his chest, caged like Jesus’ Sacred Heart.
Matt was God’s Love. God’s gift.
In exchange, Melo’s vocation was to spread God’s love and justice when he became L. If Matt served as temptation to his path, then Mello would never succumb.
If the days leading to the rigid, five-year program were the only days he had left with Matt, then he wanted all of them to be as blissful and sweet as the last.
Mello closed his book as the fan worked quietly, turning off the torch. He tucked the paperback underneath his bed, inside a cardboard box of all the other books he’d read that had narrated his story in swathes of the past.
Wilde, Beckford, even Foucault. Mello knew he was not alone. But in the tight walls of the House, where ears lined every corner, he knew that he had to keep to himself.
He fell back onto the soft mattress, listening to the sound of crickets out of his opened window, chirping peacefully away in the dense forest behind the House. It was quiet. One of his last summer nights.
The only people in the hallways were the evening caretakers, making sure that everybody was where they were supposed to be. His door was locked, and it was too late for any more nightly intrusions.
Mello folded his blankets over his naked lower half, even with the heat. His bed smelled like Matt.
Under his pillow he kept Matt’s shirt, and he reached under, revealing a clandestine secret in thin blue stripes. The shirt was damp after an evening of sweating. Grassy and flecked with smudges of dirt.
Mello would wash it in the morning, and blame the humidity that it didn’t dry.
This shirt was Matt. The Matt that existed in his mind, in small glances and secret stolen secrets. Draping the shirt over his head, casing him in pure darkness, surrounding him completely.
This Matt belonged to him, tickling his bare shoulders, stiff and hazy against his face.
Mello inhaled, pulling Matt’s smoke and skin into his nostrils, into his lungs, into his bloodstream and pumped through his heart.
His nightly ritual. His skin was already prickling. He was growing hard under the itchy blankets.
In the dark, Mello saw Matt, warm like he was earlier in the afternoon.
Underneath him on the tarmac, skin shining with sweat, face pink and splotchy over the familiar roadmap of his freckles. The one on the side of his nose, bigger than the rest of them like a squashed bug that never could get away. Matt had his eyes closed. His pink, bitten, scabby mouth.
The hard mound underneath Mello’s tailbone, shivering with delight and terror.
Mello’s hand moved under the blankets, taking hold of himself. Past the short, prickly hairs that he’d let grow out, he wrapped his fingers around the base. He was warm and sticky already.
The film reel stretched over his mind’s eye was bright like the day. He was sitting on Matt, straddling his hips on the track field. Matt’s hardness was under him, and he felt it as he rocked into his fist.
Matt was gasping, rough and boyish. Peach fuzz, shining in the sunlight as he turned his head to the side. He was naked. The light dust of merlot hair on Matt’s chest, standing proud and lonely, waiting for somebody to notice them between two pert, pink nipples.
Mello inhaled, fisting under the bedsheets, listening to the rustling of the fabric and the quiet thrum of his heart. Matt’s scent wrapped around him like a robe, fitting against his skin carefully. The heat under the shirt made his face sweat. He thought to the way their breaths chased one another on the tarmac.
The sound of he and Matt breathing, slightly out of unison.
Mello stroked faster. His bed groaned. A sweet nougat of nectarine leaked inside of his hips, funnelling into his groin. The curve of Matt’s neck, skin so thin and pale that his veins could be read underneath them. Green and blue. His sweat was salty, and ashy with the cigarette smoke. Matt’s saliva was warm and wet. All over Mello’s hand.
Mello snaked his hand underneath Matt’s shirt and kissed his palm. They were kissing one another now. Tongue to tongue. Matt’s pink, wide tongue, sloppy and wet. Mello was straining underneath the sheets, and the honey in his groin was painful. He let out a small grunt by accident. He took it back and put it in Matt’s mouth, letting him swallow it.
Against the tarmac, under the spoiling sun. Matt was groaning, hissing, his eyes closed tight, wrinkling his nose and his squashed-bug freckle with it. No more bugs.
Mello’s hardness was sweating, too, slick and loud in the night. His hair was growing wet on his forehead. He remembered his favourite memory, when they were younger.
At a camping trip in Sopley, Matt took down his denim jeans behind a bush. Nobody was around them. The sun was shining bright, glimmering over the lake in the corner of his eye. Matt’s pants were dropped to his feet, pooling around his ankles.
He wasn’t hard then, like he was this afternoon. But Mello saw the curve of his penis, darker than Mello had expected, like a log held between his legs.
He was big. Big enough that Mello needed to look away, or else he was afraid that everybody would find out.
Mello’s hand sped up underneath the fabric, the mattress loud enough to be worrisome. His toes curled. His legs were growing weak, and he licked his palm again, catching whatever was left of Matt’s saliva. He was out of breath. He couldn’t stop now.
Matt’s scent, cigarette smoke and grass. Matt’s hardness, under his loose cargo shorts, freed from the waistband, standing proud against his slender stomach; his coin-slot belly button on his thin, rickety navel. Matt, with the sweet pants and the rough gasp that Mello had heard today. Replaying it over and over again. Gasp. Repeat. Gasp. Repeat. Gasp. Gasp. Gasp.
The sweet, harsh feeling rocked through his hips, down his spine. Mello let out a shuddering exhale against Matt’s shirt as he came under the blanket, the bed falling quiet underneath.
The clock ticked on as he felt it drip like a sundae made of lava instead of cream, down his hands and smearing against his legs. He’d wash it tomorrow with Matt’s shirt, too.
Mello sighed, kicking his blankets away from his body and lifting the shirt from his head, tossing it aside.
The air was musty in his room. Mello pulled his right hand from his hips and held it in front of his face, staring at it curiously. His fingers were spread apart, come strung between his knuckles like a spider’s web.
Mello licked his hand, holding the taste of his fluid in his mouth. Like keeping the host resting on his tongue, he dared not swallow.
He closed his eyes, and thought about the milk from the stem of the dandelion, spread thin between Matt’s fingers.