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The coffeehouse sits on the corner of Herman Row sandwiched between the offices of The Illustrated Port News on one side and a dead-end alleyway on the other. Across the street is a tobacconist, a baker, and a tripe seller. Further down is a woman’s boarding house. Further down still and you’ll find a tavern sitting on the very end of the Row, it and the coffeehouse playing the part of bookends contrasting each other in their placements. They each sit on their opposite end as if to say: here is the one where you might get a spot of drink and forget your worries and here is the other where you might look around for the liquor before realizing you’ve wandered into the wrong place entirely. If Herman Row isn’t the best neighborhood, then at least it isn’t the worst. The Illustrated Port News might publish what can only politely be called rubbish and more tawdry dealings may go on in that alleyway besides, but the reporters actually drink the coffee and the whores are happy to pay the penny to come in and sit for a time among themselves by the fire even if the most they ever order is the occasional hot chocolate that they share between them in slow, careful sips.
Patrick doesn’t mind the clientele. He doesn’t mind his neighbors. If he is aloof, if he is standoffish, if anyone has noticed that the conversations they have with him are more one-sided than not and the wood of the bartop is the least of the barriers between them, then no one has complained within his hearing.
Time enough has passed since he took ownership of the place. He has gone from a stranger in the neighborhood with an emphasis on the strange to a fixture who has been widely marked off as likely harmless and occasionally helpful. He keeps his hands off the whores and doesn’t rush them out when they sit at the corner table for hours when the weather is too ghastly outside for them to sell their wares. He doesn’t cause trouble. He knows when to look the other way. Patrick’s days as a surgeon are over, of course, long gone and longed for if also ill remembered, but he still holds enough of his oath and his skill. The tobacconist is still grateful to him for helping set his son’s leg to rights when the boy broke it all those months ago, still smiles at Patrick and shakes his hand every time they cross each other in the street, and it’s hardly any trouble to make the occasional poultice for those who need it, to mix the odd ointment or tincture. Small acts of kindness, these, and some not even that – some only a lack of cruelty which Patrick doesn’t think is inherently kind at all – but they are enough.
Patrick is not well known or well loved by his own design – he doesn’t allow himself to be known and one cannot love what they cannot know – but he is at least well accepted and there’s a quiet sense of belonging in that regardless. It is certainly far more than he had ever expected to find when he’d returned from India with a damaged leg of his own, his pockets heavy with the bloodsoaked price of his silence doing nothing to help the healing, even if it is not nearly as much as all that he once wished to have.
If Patrick is not happy with his lot, then he is content with it and contentment is a vast improvement over the screaming, bleeding wretch he used to be.
If that isn’t enough, well –
It’s no one’s business but his own.
*
Patrick’s flat above the coffeehouse is small, but serviceable. The bed is comfortable, the fire is warm, and the scent of coffee has seeped so deeply into the walls that at times Patrick thinks he could chip off a few splinters and boil them for a drink. He sometimes thinks, more amused than uncharitable, that most of his customers wouldn’t know the difference. Beyond the walls, there is the rest of it. There is something about the shiny gloss of the dark wood floors against his bare feet in the morning, cool enough to make him shiver, that makes this place feel less a rest stop, less a purgatory, and more something near enough to a home. There’s something about the sound of the newsboys hawking their papers outside his window, the laughter of the whores as they congregate before the start of their day, the noise of the Row coming alive around him that makes him almost look forward to a new day himself.
Patrick has a scar deforming his leg and a safe under his bed whose combination is the date he received it. There are only two things inside that safe: a bottle of laudanum he’s never opened and an emerald framed in a gold band.
Both are self-recriminations, sins he keeps locked away. Out of sight, yes, but never out of mind. It is impossible to wake up without thinking of that date and without thinking of kneeling down before the bed, pulling out the safe, and turning the lock the proper way. One turn, two turns, three. It would be so easy. If this isn’t the first thing he thinks of in the morning, if the newsboys calling or the whores laughing catch his attention first, then it’s never lower on the list than the third. Patrick remembers the rush of laudanum in his veins as well as he remembers the warm spray of blood on his face, how he still longs for the one as a man dying of thirst craves even saltwater and how he is still so stained by the other it feels as though he’d never managed to scrub his skin entirely clean. He remembers the weight of the ring in his palm as well as he remembers the weight of the payment he’d taken to forget it and the bloody mess that had left it in his possession had never happened, how once upon a time he thought the latter would make a difference. Lose your position, lose your career, lose everything you had but your heartbeat and it would all be worth it as long as you got a bit for your trouble. A balm to soothe the wound, to make up for the disgrace.
Yet when all was said and done, when Patrick got his bit and then some, there was no mercy in it. Patrick has long since realized that. There are some hurts that cannot be soothed by any amount of coin or conciliation. It was not a mercy that Corbyn agreed to pay him off. That was no kindness. For Corbyn, Patrick’s silence had come cheap and Patrick isn’t so sure that he isn’t the one who’d paid for it himself in the end.
Still, he hasn’t opened the safe yet. He hasn’t opened the bottle. He has managed up ‘til now to get out of bed without sinking to his knees and giving in to temptation, to make himself look more respectable than perhaps the Row would care for and fix himself breakfast and go downstairs to this place he’d spent a portion of his blood money on and open it for the day. He welcomes his customers with a nod and occasionally something verging on a smile. He takes their penny of admittance. He listens as the reporters argue over how to make some scandal sound all the more outrageous and as the whores gossip over some man or another they’d all had the displeasure of servicing and rarely when someone wanders in and asks for an ale, Patrick directs them to the tavern at the other end of the Row and they leave with no trouble at all.
And he feels almost, nearly at home or at least as close to a home as he’s sure he’s ever like to have.
*
The day Patrick meets Henry Drax sets the mood from the start.
He wakes to the sound of the downpour outside. Not reporters arguing, no women laughing, no newsboy desperate enough to go out in this even if his papers wouldn’t be soaked before he could attempt to shout the headline above the rain. Desolate is the word that comes to mind when Patrick pulls himself up to peer out the window above his bed. Desolate and deserted, wet and grey, utterly devoid of any sign of life. There had been times in India where he had longed for this kind of weather, absence making his heart grow fonder for even things he once couldn’t wait to be rid of, and then he’d experienced his first monsoon and never wanted to see a drop of rain again. Since his return, the things he has longed for are far more complicated and less easy to define than anything having to do with when and how the clouds choose to weep. He takes the rain now with nothing more or less than ambivalence.
The fire is still going in his room that morning. He’s hardly freezing, but there’s nip enough in the air that he can feel it in his nose. The thought of laying back down, pulling the covers over his head and spending the day abed is an attractive one, and certainly there’s no business to be lost if he does. Patrick doubts he’ll have any customers today. If there’s anyone out there who hasn’t found some bolthole or another to stay dry in then surely it’s only because they’ve been swept away, food for whatever fish call the Thames their home.
Still, idle hands. Never an affliction Patrick has suffered well. Thoughts of staying abed are attractive until they aren’t, until they itch beneath his skin like festering boils, and he casts them aside before they can burst on their own.
He gets out of bed with a bitten back sigh, prepares for the day and goes downstairs to get the fire going. He unlocks the door, though a quick peer out of it shows no more likely prospects than the look out the window did. The fire warms the room gradually and for a time, Patrick is left to his solitude. He sits behind the bar and writes in his journal. When his own thoughts run out before his ink does, he turns to the thoughts of others. Another benefit of having a paper right next door and its workers as regular clientele: he never lacks for options. The reporters are always leaving copies of this paper and that pamphlet or some publication or another behind. Their tastes run the gamut, genuine news to religious tracts to penny dreadfuls to poetry, and if not all of it is to Patrick’s taste then it is at least to his interest. His curiosity, if not his agreement; his amusement, if not his respect.
He is in the process of being reluctantly entertained by yesterday’s society pages when the door opening startles him from the endeavor. It is a sudden slamming, one Patrick doesn’t know how much blame to assign the loudness of to the wind and the torrent or to the large figure coming through the door, bringing some of that torrent in with it. The door is shut with relatively less commotion than it was opened and in the moment of sudden silence between the soaking figure closing it and turning around, a frisson of something like unease licks its way up Patrick’s spine.
It’s the size of Henry Drax that strikes him at first and the size of him that will strike Patrick every time after, though he hardly knows the latter at the time. At first glimpse, it’s just the obvious thing. He’s tall and broad and hulking in a way that’s no less obvious even from across the room, even from behind. It’s worse from behind, if anything, the dark of his hair and long coat making him look more bear than man. But then the figure turns and he has a face, indeed. Not a kind one, certainly. And as he makes his way to the bar, the closing distance only makes his size more apparent – that and the dark brow and eyes like a hound’s and a turn of his lips as he looks back at Patrick that’s not quite a smile. It’s the way he moves that strikes Patrick then, the way he carries himself, this somehow more unnerving than his size. He’s soft-footed for his bulk, his steps measured, swaying, his shoulders set in a manner that strikes Patrick as inexplicably wrong, though he cannot describe even to himself why he feels so, only that there is something to that gait that seems more animal than man.
The stool creaks as he lowers himself into it, dripping on floor and bartop both with little concern. Patrick sets the newspaper aside carefully and catches the man glance at it. The man’s lips twitch when he sees what Patrick is reading, the detailed illustration of one woman gasping with offense behind a fan as another insults her that’s obvious even if the man can’t read the small print upside down or can’t read at all.
When the man looks back up at Patrick, there’s something like amusement in his eyes mixed with the sharpness.
“Rum, please,” the man says. The gentle growl of his voice is not what Patrick had expected though what he had expected, he knows not.
“No rum,” Patrick replies immediately. His own tone takes on the conciliatory, calm edge he has learned to use with customers asking for alcohol on automatic. It is not, Patrick has noted to himself before, dissimilar to the tone he’d once used when examining patients, asking them whether this place hurt or that. “This is a coffeehouse. I serve no alcohol here.”
The man’s dark brow raises a fraction at that. His smile twists, head tilts. “And you’ve none tucked away for yourself that you’d not mind sharing with a man trying to warm himself from the cold?”
Patrick thinks of the laudanum then. Tucked away as it is. He tries very quickly to think of anything else.
“I don’t drink,” he says.
“Ah.” The smile twists a bit. More amused, more mocking. “Well, I must have been blinded by the rain indeed to find myself in a temperance house instead of a tavern.”
Patrick feels a twinge of his own amusement at the assumption, but only a twinge. Were he not so ill used to being asked after, if he had not learned to get his back up at his history and particularities being inquired about as a cat may get its back up to a stranger crouching in front of it, beckoning it with soft words and bits of fish, he might have actually laughed. Before India, he may have even explained the joke.
“I serve no religion here, either,” is all Patrick says now. “It’s only a personal preference. If you take a left when you leave here, there’s a tavern at the end of the Row. I’ll judge you none if you’d prefer their offerings to mine.”
“I thank you for the directions,” the man says with what sounds like genuine appreciation – and for a second, Patrick thinks that will be that.
But a beat passes, then two, and the man has made no sign of leaving for either of them. A third and a fourth and still, he sits there as content as can be, watching Patrick with that curious, animal gaze.
“Coffee, then?” Patrick asks, even as that unease he felt before presses its sandpaper tongue down a bit harder to his spine and savors the taste of him.
“Oh, may as well,” the man agrees easily. “A cup of whatever you’re drinking will do me fine.”
Patrick nods and goes about it. Those curious eyes don’t waver once as he gets a cup, pours out some of the brew he’d thought would be only for himself, and places it in front of the man who picks it up with a nod. The man gives it half a sip before making a wince Patrick is sure is affected.
“Well,” the man says as he puts the cup down. “It burns the tongue well enough. I’ll give you that.”
“It didn’t seem like the right kind of weather to try serving it on ice,” Patrick replies.
The man laughs. His grin comes with a flash of teeth and Patrick’s lick of unease turns into more of a bite.
“Doesn’t seem like the weather for trying anything to me,” the man says. His grin dims into a quirk of lips, but his piercing focus doesn’t wane a bit. It lasts for what feels like an eternity before the man finally holds out a hand. “Henry Drax. Pleasure to make your acquaintance.”
“Patrick Sumner.”
The introduction comes easy but it takes a moment before Patrick reaches his own hand across and allows Henry Drax’s massive paw to engulf it. Drax’s grip is hot and firm, but not the painful squeeze Patrick is half expecting.
A shiver goes up Patrick’s wrist, a startling tingle beneath the skin that travels all the way up to his shoulder. Three seconds pass, then five, then ten, and it occurs to Patrick that he can’t remember the last time he touched someone else for so long. There are brushes of fingers here and there – customers whose skin has touched his own during the exchange of drinks and coin – but nothing lingering. Nothing lasting. Twenty seconds – and Patrick suddenly realizes that he and Drax have been holding hands far too long for propriety. Heat flushes over Patrick’s face and his stomach twists. He clears his throat and pulls his hand away and for a moment – just a split second – Henry Drax’s grip seems to tighten –
But then Patrick’s hands are busying themselves with picking up a cloth and wiping out the inside of a cup that’s already perfectly clean so soon after that he tells himself he only imagined it.
The quirk of Drax’s lips tilt higher, but it’s soon hidden by him taking another sip of his coffee.
For a time after, everything is perfectly normal if only Patrick doesn’t count the frisson of unease tingling up and down his spine that hasn’t let up at all since Henry Drax walked through the door. Later, of course, Patrick will know better. Later, Patrick will replay the memories. He’ll analyze every intonation of Drax’s words and every slight movement of his lips, the glint in his eyes and how they followed Patrick like an animal stalking its prey. Later, Patrick will tell himself he had no way of knowing what would happen – and then later still, he’ll tell himself he did know. That he must have. That even if he didn’t predict the particulars, he’s no newborn babe still wet behind the ears who hasn’t a clue what it means when a thing like Henry Drax walks into your home and looks at you the way Drax has been looking at Patrick since he came through the door.
Later.
For a time, however, there’s nothing but idle small talk. Chat about the weather, about the neighborhood, about Drax himself. Drax’s dry and disturbingly suggestive descriptions on the nature of whaling are combined with his all too probing questions about Patrick, how long Patrick has ran the coffeehouse and what he did before and whether he has a wife upstairs, perhaps a child. Patrick answers the easy questions but the rest – Patrick sidesteps, deflects, turns them back on Drax himself in a way that he thinks is surreptitious only until he notices the way Drax smiles at him like they’re in on something together.
“I’m surprised,” Drax remarks eventually. “A man like you not having a wife. Your own money, your own morals, easy as you are on the eyes – it’s enough to make a man like me wonder why no one’s decided to keep you yet.”
Drax’s eyes burn into Patrick as he says it, more of an animal glint in them than ever, and his fingers circle around the rim of his near empty cup, around and around and around in a slow, too gentle track.
There’s no threat in Drax’s voice. No intimidation in his countenance or gestures, nothing about him to suggest that he could cause Patrick any harm besides the size of him and the look in his eyes. Still, Patrick’s pulse picks up as though he’s had a gun pointed at his head regardless.
“Some people aren’t for keeping,” Patrick replies, the self-deprecating undertone in his voice as affected as it is true.
“Ah.” Drax sucks his teeth and the glint in his eyes becomes nearly playful. “That’s not up to the one being kept to decide, is it?”
The question takes Patrick aback. He doesn’t know how to answer it.
It strikes him a heartbeat later as Drax drains the last of his coffee and stands from his seat that it wasn’t a real question at all.
“I’m much obliged for your hospitality,” Drax says, so pleasantly that there’s no reason – none at all – for the dread that creeps up Patrick’s throat at the tone.
“You’re welcome to come back any time,” Patrick replies carefully.
“And such pretty manners you have.”
Drax’s smile widens and he begins to walk – not away, not towards the door, but around the bar. His movements are slow, careful, each heavy step audible in the empty room. Patrick watches Drax’s approach with a ramrod straight back, a fluttering pulse and a complete lack of surprise. A warning sounds out in his mind. It’s as loud as any alarm, any siren, any gunfire. It screams at him to get out, to get away, but Patrick doesn’t move. Where would he go even if he could? He remains rooted in place and only watches as the distance between he and Drax gradually erodes away until Drax is behind the bar himself, close enough to Patrick that Patrick can feel the heat of Drax’s body seeping into his own skin.
A sense of terrible inevitability sinks in his gut like a stone.
The safe upstairs flashes through Patrick’s mind, as sudden and intrusive as ever. The laudanum. The emerald. Longing comes instinctively and logic comes after. Easy bribes, either of them are. Easy payments to offer Drax in exchange for him sparing Patrick’s life or at least killing him quickly.
Patrick’s mouth doesn’t open, however. He doesn’t offer Drax a thing. Not a goddamn thing to save himself.
“It only makes a man more curious,” Drax goes on. “You being so easily caught for something that thinks it’s not worth being kept.”
Patrick swallows hard and a beat passes –
“And now you’re looking at me like you’re standing at the gallows, lad,” Drax comments, his tone almost playful.
“Am I not?” Patrick breathes out.
It’s almost dizzying now, how quickly his heart beats.
Drax stares at Patrick for a moment, then a laugh tears out of him: a loud and booming noise that reverberates through Patrick’s chest like a sudden shock. Drax’s hand reaches out and Patrick’s breath catches in his throat –
The brush of Drax’s knuckles against his cheek is as gentle a scalpel grazing across his skin.
“Well, now.” Drax clicks his tongue and his lips stretch, his grin broader than ever. “Let’s see how your manners have held up by the time I’m through, shall we?”
He doesn’t give Patrick the opportunity to respond before he rears his hand back and slaps Patrick viciously across the face.
*
Later, later, later – Patrick thinks about it later. After he’s gathered the remains of his clothing, after he’s managed to limp to the door to lock back up, after he’s dragged himself back up the stairs and collapsed in bed. Patrick stares up at the ceiling and replays it all in his mind. His cheek throbs as he recalls his first sight of Henry Drax. The bruises forming at his hips sting in time to every echo of Drax’s words before Drax took him and the bites on his throat pulse with heat to every word Drax growled or grunted in his ear during the act. Patrick shifts in bed and can’t stop the groan that spills from his mouth at the ache in his ass any more than he can stop his shiver at the slick drip of Drax’s spend leaking out of him. The pace of Patrick’s thoughts is detached – clinical – as he considers what will have to be done after he gets out of bed. The clothing will have to be thrown out. The bites disinfected. A hot bath, an enema –
The laudanum would help, Patrick considers briefly. Far more briefly than he expected he might.
He pushes the consideration aside and shuts his eyes. He raises a hand to drag it across his face but it ends up just resting there, covering his own eyes. He begins replaying it all again from the start. Speaking to Drax. Being hit by Drax. Pulled up by him by the hair and shoved face first over the bartop. His shirt pushed up so Drax could trail his mouth along Patrick’s spine, his trousers ripped down.
The way Drax had laughed breathily in Patrick’s ear as he groped Patrick’s ass and rutted his hard cock against the swell of flesh. “Still pretty, lad,” he’d said and Patrick knew that Drax was referring as much to his face and body as he was the fact that Patrick had yet to do anything to fight back.
No matter how Drax’s hands dragged over him and his fingers scratched and pinched, no matter how his mouth sucked and bit at every expanse of flesh he could find. Not even when Drax spat on Patrick, the only lubrication he bothered with before his cock pressed forward and he penetrated Patrick right there over the bartop. Patrick’s mind runs over that more than anything. Not fighting. Not at all. His entire body had been filled with resignation that nothing Henry Drax did to him could possibly matter because in the end, of course, Drax would kill him and with that resignation came a remarkable sense of peace.
Patrick tries not to feel like something has been taken away from him that in the end Drax had simply pressed a wet, lingering kiss to the side of his throat. He tries not to feel disappointed.
He fails completely.
*
Patrick doesn’t contact the authorities. He wonders briefly at the fact that Drax hadn’t warned or threatened him from doing so, but there was no need regardless. He has Drax’s name. He has his description. He has mind enough to know the best way of going about getting anything resembling justice would be to make up a story about a robbery, a simple beating, to say nothing at all of the particulars of the assault.
Patrick might not be a surgeon any longer, but he’s treated enough boys throughout the years. Soldiers whose manhood came more from war than age, the type with youthful faces, slim bodies and dispositions too sweet for violence whose fathers never warned them how men make do when there are no women around to entertain them or that a pretty face on a boy could be just as dangerous as the most innocent sort of beauty on a girl. No matter how obvious their injuries or weepy they allowed themselves to be when it was just Patrick in the room, getting the truth out of them was always like pulling teeth. Even the ones willing to be honest with the man treating their hurts tended to clam up once it came time to bring their grievances to anyone who had the power to see the matter settled.
Patrick’s injuries are mild by comparison to anything he treated on those boys’ bodies and he has as much use for weeping as he does justice. Drax isn’t the worst thing Patrick has experienced. He’s not the worst of what has happened to Patrick and hardly the worst of what Patrick has done. He’s just another dark thing in a long line of shadows: another India, another satchel of blood money, another vial of laudanum, another emerald, another monstrosity to be tucked away in a metal box behind a flimsy lock and for Patrick to think about taking out every morning until whatever shred of self preservation left in him keeps him from giving in to his worst impulses.
It’s irrelevant, what happened to him. Meaningless in the grand scheme of the world and no more important in the small thing of Patrick’s own life.
Patrick will never see the likes of Henry Drax again besides.
*
It’s raining again, though not so much to keep the clientele away. A small group of damp reporters have taken up a table in one corner while a pair of women who still have a tired look about them despite the multiple cups of coffee they’ve imbibed since coming in have claimed a table in the corner opposite. Their voices are soft, occasional bursts of laughter breaking through the low din. It’s pleasant enough background noise, content and unobtrusive. All the customers are regulars, none of them the sort to cause trouble, and so Patrick has no qualms about stepping into the back for a moment. He puts the dirty cups off to the side for later washing, grabs a few things he’s running low on behind the bar, and makes vague plans about what to have for lunch.
He’s away for a minute, maybe two. It’s hardly anything, but it’s long enough that when he comes back out that pleasant background noise has faded into a tense, eerie quiet. Patrick notices the lack of sound before he notices the hulking figure sitting at the bar and then, his eyes caught on Henry Drax, suddenly the quiet makes sense.
“Now, there you are,” Drax greets Patrick as soon as he comes out. “Patrick Sumner. A right sight for sore eyes.”
Drax is grinning that same grin he’d had months ago. The one he’d given Patrick before he struck him across the face, bent him over the same bar between them now, and had his way with him. Drax is unchanged. He’s less drenched, but just as large. Just as intimidating. That look in his eyes, his posture. It’s funny in a way how enough time has passed that Patrick has began to believe that his mind was exaggerating, but now he finds that it hadn’t at all. Drax is just as much of a creature as Patrick’s memories have said and he still seems more animal than man, as though some beast has escaped the local circus and wandered its way back into Patrick’s domain, nose caught on a familiar scent.
One look at him and Patrick’s heart ratchets in his chest; his pulse pounds, his throat tightens. Something coils its way through his body that’s as much sick anticipation as it is dread. It’s peripheral how he notices the rest of the room and how Drax’s presence has affected more than just the sound. The pair of women are gone, only their cups left on the table evidence of their existence, and the reporters in the other corner are barely attempting to hide the glances they keep shooting over to Patrick and Drax.
There’s concern on some of their faces and Patrick’s gut squirms with discomfort over it. It’s unneeded, their worry. Unneeded and unwanted and certainly of no use against a man like Drax if any of them has the bright idea of getting up and intervening.
“Mr. Drax,” Patrick greets. He hesitates before he crosses the distance, only stopping once the wooden bar touches his stomach and he’s put his palms on the bartop.
Drax looks up at him as though he’s amused.
“I didn’t expect to see you again,” Patrick goes on.
It’s a weak statement. Paltry at describing the fact that Patrick has spent the last few months half-wondering if Henry Drax had been a figment of his imagination, that after the aches left his body and the bruises faded away it became difficult to think of Drax as something real – an actual, flesh and blood human being who had entered Patrick’s life and left it just as easily after having its fill and not some creature from the depths of his nightmares manifested into the light of day.
The amusement in Drax’s expression only grows, almost as though he can read Patrick’s thoughts
“You told me I was welcome any time,” Drax says. “And we parted on such pleasant terms, you and I. A man can only assume that such an invitation still stands after he’s spent the last months away at sea...but if that’s not the case –“
“No.” The word is out of Patrick’s mouth before he can stop it. Before he can think better of it. His pulse picks up, the vein in his neck throbbing away with the hard beat of it. “You’re perfectly welcome. Would you like the same as last time?”
It’s a macabre question. Patrick knows that. Macabre and deranged and –
But Drax barks out a delighted laugh and his grin takes on a flash of teeth.
“I could do without the coffee,” Drax replies, that delight shining through his tone. He makes a show, then, of turning to look over his shoulder to flash a smile at the reporters sitting in the corner.
They are all, each of them, more pale in the face than they were before when Drax turns back to face Patrick.
“But I suppose you could do without an audience,” Drax goes on, “and you’ve been agreeable enough that I don’t mind doing you a favor, so go ahead and pour me a cup, if you please.”
So Patrick does. He pours Henry Drax a cup of coffee and listens with an attentive ear as Drax begins telling him about his latest voyage as though Patrick really is just an old friend he’s reacquainting himself with. Eventually, when no voices are raised and nothing worse occurs, the reporters in the corner stop paying them as much attention. Eventually, more customers come in and though nearly each and every one of them eyes Drax as though he’s an ill mannered dog whose teeth they need to be wary of snapping in their direction, it never becomes anything more than that. It helps them, Patrick assumes, that Drax’s attention hardly leaves Patrick himself. His eyes flit away now and again to sweep across the room, but predominantly they’re on Patrick, staring him down with that animal glint as though Patrick is some prey Drax has routed back to its den.
Patrick knows this won’t just end at looking, though. His heart is a wrenching, aching thing in his chest and his mind is careful to not think back on the particulars of the last time he saw Henry Drax, but there’s anticipation buzzing beneath Patrick’s flesh just as strong as his sense of dread and it’s impossible to block it off entirely.
It would be so easy to leave. To just walk out the door, to go upstairs and go out the window. To not allow this to continue.
Still.
Henry Drax isn’t the worst thing that has ever happened to Patrick. It was true months ago and it’s true now. Drax is far from the worst – but he’s close enough.
There’s something relieving about that, something that almost feels deserved.
It’s the only justification Patrick has for staying, for why when all the customers finally leave and it’s only him and Drax left, all Patrick does is go up to the door and lock it. It’s the reason why when Drax’s chair creaks as he stands up from it and his footsteps slowly approach Patrick from behind, Patrick’s heart skips and his breathing hitches, but he doesn’t move. He inhales deeply, exhales slowly, and keeps breathing as he rests his forehead against the door, and when Drax is right behind him – when his hands clutch Patrick at the waist and drag up the length of his body, the tension seeps out of Patrick like wax melting down the length of a candle.
“Still so well behaved,” Drax says, his breath a hot shiver right in Patrick’s ear. His cock, a hard bulge right at Patrick’s ass. “It almost takes the fun out of it.”
“Apologies,” Patrick chokes out, but he doesn’t mean it any more than Drax does.