Page 28 of Overexposed

Chapter Eight

Auris

The next part of the story, I suppose, is what you have already suspected. Owain was not that much younger than I, two or three years I had guessed when I’d first seen him. I had been right. He’d been small due to malnutrition and had been fifteen back that day when I helped him escape the baker’s fist. That day I returned from Aswan, he’d been with us for a good six years, and I want to be clear that he was of age then, for certain, but also following today’s sensibilities.

I could tell you that, on that night I returned from Aswan, I noticed looks and lingering touches when he helped me into my bath. I would be lying. When you live in close quarters and don’t see much of anything else -- truer for him than me -- you cannot help fantasizing about what you see. I don’t even know whether he was all for men. There wasn’t really such a terminology as you are used to today, and certainly not in Tove’s house, who had lived among the Greeks.

In Greek culture, you could be attracted to a shining intellect as much as a shining behind or bust, if you take my meaning. Family was duty, but love was not, and that was just one ancient culture.

But I digress. I left your imagination in the bath, Owain helping me out of my warm traveling clothes, maybe testing the warmth of the water with his fingers. Nothing happened that night, you know. He smiled at me and said, “You must be so tired. I’ll have oats and honey ready for you when you wake.” That was it. The next morning, he fed me oats with honey and apple slices. It was my favorite at the time.

I am dancing around the topic. I don’t want you to be jealous. I couldn’t have known that you would ever exist when Owain and I shared our first kiss on the beach, the surf nipping at our toes. I cared for him, and I will tell you all about it. In all the ways that could ever matter, I care for you more than I did for him then.

Well. A day not long after that Aswan trip, Owain and I ended up taking a walk from the orchard to the beach. I couldn’t even tell you what we were talking about or why we decided to go there. The tide was coming in, and it could be rough, the ocean pushing against the land. There was a cave, and it added an eerie sound with every thrusting wave. It wasn’t exactly a pearly-sanded vacation beach.

I do remember what he said to me. He said, “When you stopped the baker from beating me black and blue, I thought you were a prince, truly.”

“I am no prince,” I said.

Owain reached for my lapel and drew me down to him. “How wrong you are, my prince,” he said, and we shared our first kiss.

In all honesty, I can say only that it was my first kiss. I did wonder, in retrospect, whether any of what we did and would end up doing was as new to Owain as it was to me.

That day, we got our shoes wet. We came back to the house, giggling, and my mother rolled her eyes, shooing us away from her workroom because childish giggles would ruin her potion. Tove caught us on the staircase, looked at our shoes, and sighed. He mumbled something in Greek that had to do with shoes and sheepskin, probably some idiom I didn’t know.

Yes, yes. He taught me Greek. Most of his papyri were in Greek, Aeolian Greek as it so happens. Arabic he taught me to a lesser degree, but he only used Arabic for mathematics, and so it was some time before I got conversant in the actual language.

With Owain, I learned what all the poets had been so obsessed about. It was much like a game, discovering what we could get our bodies to do, what would feel good, what would feel good only after a few tries. Owain was my first love only in that teenage sense where everything is heightened because your body and brain are still working to calibrate the proper settings for high and low. He slept in my bed most nights.

Of course, those things we did, they weren’t anything that we could have kept a secret, not from a vampire living under the same roof. You might wonder whether two boys exploring sexuality together would have raised an eyebrow, and if not with Tove, then with my mother.

Our sex was never an issue. Tove told me stories of the Sacred Band of Thebes. All those soldier couples, they were known by name at one time, and people told their stories, how they fought side by side, how they loved their chosen other. How some would end their life if their partner died on the field.

These tales, as much as the love between Achilles and Patroclus, was the fairy-tale fodder I was raised on, among other stories of gods and mortals, and my mother’s people still told tales of Loki, who was a man sometimes, then a woman, then pregnant, then mother-father to a new age of existence.

No, that we were two boys having sex bothered no one. What would have given cause for concern was what you barely registered: that he slept in my bed most nights.

Ah, I suppose that needs explaining. You will easily forget what was a clear reality between Owain and I. He was, despite all the kindness he received from Tove, my mother, and myself, a servant. He had a bed, and it was a clean bed set up near the kitchen where it was always warm, but nowhere near as grand as my room was.

Likewise, he wore clean clothes and shoes without holes in them, but everything I wore was softer and richer. He was not my equal. I didn’t think of him as beneath me, but I am not blind to the privilege I had enjoyed since the moment I’d been born. I had been taught rhetoric and languages, natural philosophy, and he barely knew enough of reading not to create chaos in my mother’s kitchen.

He must have thought he was Cinderella. He told me as much when he called me a prince. He never rejected me and never was anything but welcoming to my advances. He was living his own, personal fairy tale, and I think in his naïveté, he thought that it would be like that forever, that we would grow old together, walk to the beach, hand in hand, in the winter of our days and wait for the sea to take both of us into her final embrace.

Well. That was not to be. When Tove told me it was time, I did decide that I wanted the day with him, not that that made it different from most other days. But it was to be a holiday, with neither of us doing any work or studying anything, in my case.

I remember twilight, my bed smelling like sex, him lying next to me and looking into my eyes.

“What is so special about today?” Owain asked. He had a way of smiling that was… it had an innocence to it, and it told me he felt special for the simple fact that I had chosen him. It was a magical smile. It was a smile that ignored reality and lived just for this single moment.

“Tove will share his magic with me today,” I said. We hadn’t ever really talked about what Tove was. Owain had readily accepted it like he had accepted so many things, and that Tove never even raised his voice against him made Owain adore the vampire.

Still, his smile faltered. “What does that mean?” he asked, and I wondered how to explain it to him without mentioning that Tove was a vampire who needed to drink the blood of the living in order to survive.

I settled on, “You’ll see,” and wiped all further questions away with a few kisses.

When night fell, my mother shared her prophecy with me, the one you know about. Owain wasn’t there, so he didn’t know. It unsettled me, but obviously, it wasn’t going to stop me from becoming a vampire. I had been raised knowing that was what I was supposed to become. Tove had told me over and over that it was what I was supposed to become. All that to say, I had doubts. In those last moments when I went up the stairs to Tove’s room, I doubted.

And yet, despite my doubts, I took one step after the other. I took them slowly, but I never stopped. I might have even asked Tove to delay, for another year perhaps, or for five. That day, after I heard my mother’s prophecy, there were so many things that I could have changed about my life, but I didn’t. I never regretted that once, and it might tell you more about me than anyone else I’ve told you about.

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