JEAN-PIERRE

Aimé had sent in the work he’d missed and so had Jean-Pierre, and Halloween night saw Aimé sitting obediently in the living room as Jean-Pierre kept a loose grip on his chin, applying more make-up to his face. When Aimé had said he wanted to be a dead nobleman, fresh from the executioner’s block, Jean-Pierre had given him a foul look, but Aimé had only kissed his hands until Jean-Pierre had assented.

“How do I look?” Aimé asked, and Jean-Pierre smiled, continuing to brush grey over Aimé’s cheekbones, making them appear hollowed.

“Almost dead,” Jean-Pierre said. “Do you think this is funny?”

“I do,” Aimé said. “And if you didn’t, you wouldn’t have jumped to do my make-up.”

“Perhaps I just wanted to shave your beard,” Jean-Pierre murmured, and tilted Aimé’s head the other way, powdering the other side.

Aimé had sat very obediently before, letting Jean-Pierre wet the bristles of his beard with thick shaving foam, and he had shivered as he’d watched Jean-Pierre sharpen the blade of Manolis’ old straight razor. It had been difficult indeed for him not to squirm and shiver as Jean-Pierre had slowly dragged the blade over his skin, taking every dark, curling hair away.

Aimé looked odd, with no stubble on his cheeks – he did not seem younger, merely strangely unfinished, and the scars at the edges of his jawline were more visible without his facial hair to obfuscate them.

Jean-Pierre preferred him with a beard, but there had been something very deeply erotic about sitting in Aimé’s lap with a blade against his skin, and although Aimé had come very quickly when they’d tumbled afterward into bed, he’d spent some forty minutes kneeling between Jean-Pierre’s thighs before they had returned to the vanity table so that Jean-Pierre could start applying his make-up.

He had created dark shadows underneath Aimé’s eyes, making them appear hollowed and dry, and he had overlaid a pale, grey gauntness over Aimé’s face, a few bloody cracks showing around his mouth.

“You have fake blood?” Aimé asked.

“Do you want any?” Jean-Pierre asked, picking up his powder and tray and tapping his brush against it. “I thought to depict you as a corpse reanimated, as though the axe had come down upon your neck but had been stopped by your spine.” He reached up, cupping the side of Aimé’s throat and pressing his thumb down on the spot where he felt the wound would stop. “I would give your throat the appearance of being split on this side, and messy with greying gore, like so much cooling meat. If you want for something fresher, I would need to use a different palette.”

Aimé was staring at him, his blue lips parted, and then he said, “Uh… No, Jean, you, uh. You do that. That sounds good.”

“I am glad it pleases you,” Jean-Pierre murmured, and turned his attention to Aimé’s jaw, painting a bruise on the underside of his chin, as though he had been shoved very hard against the executioner’s block.

“It feels nice,” Aimé said quietly. “The brushes. Your hands.”

“It does, doesn’t it?” Jean-Pierre asked. “Asmodeus taught me.”

“… Seriously?”

“He does his own stage make-up,” Jean-Pierre murmured, setting the brush aside and picking up some sculpting clay, beginning to warm it between his hands. It felt plasticky between his palms, and he opened his hands so that Aimé could touch his fingers to it, interested.

Aimé’s phone began to buzz again in the corner of the room – it had been ringing all weekend.

“Your mother again?” Jean-Pierre asked.

“Yeah,” Aimé said. “Probably.”

“I looked her up,” Jean-Pierre said, because it was true, although he knew very well that he was making it sound like he’d only looked her up very recently. “Margaret Bebhin. Not an incredibly French name, but she is the daughter of the grandmother you lived with in Montauban, no?”

“My grandparents got divorced in the seventies,” Aimé murmured. “After they divorced, my granda just didn’t have anything worth keeping him in France, I guess, so he came back here. My mother grew up in Montauban, but when she was… I don’t know, a teenager, like fifteen, sixteen? She insisted on coming to Dublin. She wanted to go to some boarding school in Paris, and my granda was happy to pay for it, but my grandmother kept saying no.”

“Is it so surprising a young woman would want to go north from Montauban?” Jean-Pierre asked as he worked. “Il n’y a pas de vie au-delà du périph,” he added, and Aimé gave him a sour look.

“Shut the fuck up,” he said. “The périphérique wasn’t even there until two centuries after your pretty face hit the ground. Pure notions.”

“Notions, is it?” Jean-Pierre repeated, raising his eyebrows, and he tilted Aimé’s head back slightly to get a better view of his neck to model his clay on. “We do not have notions in France.”

“Not in la province,” Aimé said. “But in Paris, notions abound.”

Jean-Pierre laughed.

“So your mother came to Ireland,” Jean-Pierre murmured, beginning to paint the prosthetic now he’d moulded it into place – he’d shaved Aimé’s neck to make the process easier – so that he could pack more clay over top and make the gore look more three-dimensional once he was done. “And became a corporate lawyer.”

“That’s how she met my dad,” Aimé murmured, although his nose was wrinkling as he said it – the modelling clay no doubt felt strange upon his skin. “She stopped working to have me, and then never went back to work. Don’t know why she bothered – I barely ever saw her when I was a kid, just got bounced between childminders, and then I went to boarding school.”

It was amusing, in its way. Aimé sounded bitter about many things, but he didn’t sound particularly bitter about this – he said it very casually, with a slight shrug of his shoulders, the motion a small one in order that he not jar Jean-Pierre’s hands as he worked with the brush.

The phone, which had ceased to vibrate, began to buzz again.

“Evidently,” Jean-Pierre murmured, “she wants to see you now.”

“No,” Aimé murmured. “She wants to cry down the phone ‘til I feel guilty enough to do what my dad says.”

“And what is it that Monsieur Deverell decrees?” Jean-Pierre asked. “Your grades are very good, you are drinking less, we have been boxing a few times – you are healthier…”

“He doesn’t care about any of that,” Aimé murmured. “He wanted me to have a careerist’s degree – he couldn’t give a shit about what grades I get in Philosophy. He wants me to marry some girl and get her pregnant so he can start investing his time in a grandchild instead of his fuck-up son.”

“He said this to you?”

“Not in so many words,” Aimé muttered, his eyes closed. He was completely relaxed under Jean-Pierre’s attentions, his throat bared, and Jean-Pierre couldn’t resist the urge to delicately trace over the column of his throat, watching Aimé’s Adam’s apple bob under his touch. “From an economical perspective, we have something called sunk cost. It’s the idea of money that you’ve invested, for good or for bad, that you can’t now recoup. Some people, after they make a bad investment, keep putting money into it – in their heads, they justify it as, you know, they’ve already put a lot of money into it, so they have to put more money into it to make it succeed again. That’s the sunk cost fallacy – throwing good money after bad.”

Jean-Pierre reached for another piece of modelling clay, and as Aimé experimentally leaned forward, moving his neck slowly from side to side to make sure he wasn’t dislodging the half-finished wound on the side of his neck, he met Jean’s gaze.

“My dad’s sensible with his money,” Aimé said. “He sees that I’ve been a bad investment, but I’m the only route to a better opportunity, unless he ditches my mother and fucks someone new, and he doesn’t want to do that. Magical inheritance law in Ireland is based way too much in fae custom – it’s weighted toward the eldest child, so if he had another kid, he’d have to kill me, and the optics would be bad for business.

“So, logical conclusion, wait for me to have a grandkid, wait for me to kill myself or have me declared unfit or, probably, because I’m not interested in being anyone’s dad, just take the grandkid in himself when I inevitably get divorced or go on a bender. Luc gets a new heir, Maggie keeps her husband, and I’m allowed to drink myself to death. Everybody’s happy.”

It was said so simply, so shrewdly, that Jean-Pierre had to take a moment to really digest it, to take it in.

Deverell had been asking around about Jean-Pierre, in recent weeks – Jean-Pierre knew this, because when people asked questions about him, the ripples tended to reach him. One had to keep an eye on things like this.

He was frustrated, Jean-Pierre expected – there was no doubt an awareness, much as Deverell wished there were not, that Jean-Pierre was not a flighty young thing that might be paid off to leave Deverell’s only son be, and he was in a somewhat unique position, in that the man could not threaten him whatsoever.

He would not kill Monsieur Deverell, of course – it would be rude.

That kill was Aimé’s, if he wanted it.

“You’re smiling,” Aimé said, looking amused. “I tell you my dad wants me dead like he’s tossing away bad stock, and you’re smiling.”

“I am not smiling at your misfortune,” Jean-Pierre said. “Merely— Well, when I met you, Aimé, I thought you would be rather stupid, and lacking in self-awareness. You continue to surprise me.”

Aimé started to laugh, clutching at his belly as he leaned back in his chair. He had been laughing like that a lot, recently – it was a wonderful laugh, hoarse and throaty and coming from very deep within him – and every time he heard it, Jean-Pierre thought he would burst. In this instance, however, he had to rush to pick up a tissue and tear it two, putting it to the corners of Aimé’s eyes before he could smudge his maquillage.

“Ange,” Aimé said softly when he’d finally stopped, although he was breathing a little heavily, and from the way he was absently stroking his stomach, Jean-Pierre guessed his diaphragm was somewhat sore.

“Yes, mon cœur?”

“You…” Aimé opened his mouth, and then he closed it again, giving a small shake of his head. “People like me don’t deserve people like you.”

Jean-Pierre pressed his lips together, looking at Aimé with affection. “I call you stupid, and you tell me you love me?”

“That isn’t what I said,” Aimé said. “That isn’t what you said either, actually.”

Jean-Pierre kissed him, though Aimé’s lips tasted of powder, and felt Aimé smile against his mouth.

*     *     *

AIMÉ

No one at the party that Aimé had seen, so far, was taller than Asmodeus, which was sort of a relief, but also a bit of a disappointment. 6’3” was a more than respectable height, but he was not greeted with the giants he had almost expected.

By the time they’d arrived, a little after nine-thirty, the party had already been in full swing, and Aimé was fascinated – they’d had to drive about an hour outside of the city to get here, and Colm had absently said it was a relatively new restaurant that they’d booked out for the purpose, but it looked like no restaurant Aimé had ever seen.

The four storeys of the building were tiered in the way that Aimé had seen some holiday villas tiered before, forming a kind of gigantic staircase with tables and chairs on each of the floors, except for the one at the top, which was exclusively a dance floor, although people were dancing everywhere.

He had felt the ward circle as they’d stepped over the threshold into the restaurant proper, not just because of the shift in magical fields, but because of the sheer difference in temperature – it had been twelve degrees with a cold wind when they’d stepped out of the car, but despite this party being in the open air, it was warm, dry, and balmy, and not the sort of night he’d hope for even in August.

Long tables had been laid out with all kinds of food on small platters, and Aimé felt almost like a mundie as he looked around – Jean-Pierre had let his wings out as soon as he’d gotten out of the car, and he’d shown Aimé how he made the slats in his blouse and matador’s jacket, how he insulted the gap so that they didn’t rub the base of his wing as he moved, but Aimé could see that he wasn’t the only one. There were other winged angels, and there were fae, too, with different kinds of wings, wings that looked like they were made of stained glass, like a dragonfly’s, or wings like a butterfly’s, and of the winged people he saw, not all of them had wings sprouting from behind their shoulders – some of them had wings on their feet or sprouting from their heads.

He’d never been that much around the magical community, not really – not like this, where everyone mingled and drank and laughed. He’d only ever been to refined, delicate parties, where all the real drunkenness was behind closed doors – fundraisers, shit like that, and most of those had been before he was old enough to be considered an embarrassment.

This, this was…

Revelry.

As soon as they came into the central crowd, Jean-Pierre saw a woman he apparently knew, who was dressed as Jeanne d’Arc, because they both let out loud shouts and then grabbed hold of each other, kissing each other’s cheeks, before walking off in the direction of the table laden down with fruits.

“He’ll do that a lot,” Colm said. “But he probably won’t fuck anyone else without asking you to watch.”

Aimé opened his mouth. Closed it. “Are you being serious?”

“Pretty serious,” Colm said.

Aimé tried very, very hard not to think about it. Colm was studying his face, apparently because he knew exactly how hard Aimé was trying not to, and when Aimé finally broke, let himself think about one of the men here fucking Jean in front of him – perhaps the guy next to him dressed as a viking who was stacked and covered in tattoos, or two vampires in sexy nurse’s uniforms laughing into the same wine glass – a burst of heat ran through him, and he shifted slightly on his feet.

“You two are disgusting,” Colm said.

“What did you want me to say, Colm?” Aimé asked, tilting his head to one side and looking at the other man. He put on a faux-dramatic voice, clutching at his heart, “Oh, no, how could Jean sleep with someone else, what about his chastity pledge?”

“You’re not meant to find it hot.”

“You don’t fuck anybody, you don’t get to decide what’s hot,” Aimé said, and Colm scoffed, tangling a hand in Aimé’s hair and ruffling it hard, making Aimé laugh and shove him hard in the side.

“We should box sometime this week,” Colm said as they moved through the crowd, toward the bar. “You’re off, right?”

“Yeah, I’d be up for it,” Aimé said. “Do you prefer to fight bare knuckle?”

“I do,” Colm said, “but I can pick up gloves if you want. You and Jean fight with gloves?”

“We’re kind of half and half at the moment,” Aimé said, tugging down the ruffle of the blouse Jean-Pierre had given him – the clothes were surprisingly comfortable, although they were old, and Colm had even mocked up a fake axe head that stuck out of the – frankly, frighteningly realistic – wound Jean-Pierre had painted on the side of his neck.

Colm had put on a fake halo and a pair of cheap, children’s angel wings that looked ridiculously small on his broad shoulders, and called it a day – according to Jean-Pierre, this was the costume he wore every Halloween.

“I don’t know,” Aimé said. “I know it’s actually more dangerous with the gloves on, but it feels like I could do more damage without them.”

“To yourself, maybe,” Colm said. “We can try it both ways – I’m okay with gloves, but they’re two different sports, you know yourself. You want to drink wine the Greek way or the French way?”

They were standing a little ways away from the bar, and Aimé stopped stock still, looking around to grasp what Colm meant. “What?”

“Well, I can go up to the bar and order you a glass of red, but you’ll have to look at the wine list to see what you want,” Colm said, “or you can wait here while I get my pint, and we can go upstairs and you can drink from a kylix, you know, the big shallow bowl you have to tilt carefully to drink from? That’s different wine, it’s the fortified stuff done the traditional way, but it’s watered down, and I’ll taste it first to make sure it doesn’t kill you.”

“You know when you put it like that, it’s not comforting.”

“I’m not comforting,” Colm said, shrugging his shoulders. “I’m being honest.”

“I’ll try it the Greek way,” Aimé said after a second’s thought, and Colm laughed at him, shoving him in the head again.

He almost wished he’d brought his paint and canvases with him – he knew it’d be weird, to come to a party and paint everybody, but there were so many different people here, so many bright colours in their outfits, the colour of everybody’s skin, their hair, their jewellery, so many different shapes in people’s bodies and clothes, so many little things being acted out – people pouring wine, playing games, dancing.

He liked to paint things that were in motion, people in motion – he hadn’t even really drunk anything yet, because Colm had advised the drinks would be “strong and free, like a Republic,” and then laughed at his own joke, but he was in a good mood.

Maybe that had something to do with the fact that, not quite accidentally, he’d dropped his phone in the dish water when his mother called for the twenty-ninth time while he was washing last night’s casserole dish, and decided he’d get a new one.

Colm had slapped him upside the head for this, and put the phone in rice to dry out.

“Just throw out the SIM, you rich cunt,” he’d said. “If you want a new phone, we’ll give this one to someone who needs it.”

He’d tossed the SIM on the fire.

“You could probably make a lot of money painting at a party like this, you know,” Colm said as he came back from the bar with a tankard in his hand, and the two of them began to walk toward the stairs. It was crowded, but because it was such a big venue, there wasn’t the usual crush of people Aimé expected at a party. “All these people’d fucking love some guy to paint them – remind them of the old times.”

“You don’t think I’m rich enough?” Aimé asked.

“That’s your daddy’s money,” Colm said. “More of your own couldn’t hurt you.”

It was difficult to read Colm’s face, with him saying that. His expression was stout, his lips pressed together, and he was looking forward as he moved up the stairs instead of looking at Aimé.

“What are you gonna say next?” Aimé asked, so quietly that someone else wouldn’t be able to hear him over the music, but that didn’t really matter with Colm. “That I should come stay with you? That I should pack up all my stuff in my apartment, get out while I still can?”

“You realise I felt what you were feeling, talking with Jean earlier,” Colm said, his lip curling slightly. “You can’t just brush it off like you were being dramatic. You’re pretty certain your da would kill you – what, you think I shouldn’t give a shit?”

“Jean doesn’t.”

“Yes, he does,” Colm muttered. “He isn’t worried about it because he knows how hard it’d be for your da to get at you when you’re between the three of us, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t care.”

“My dad doesn’t want to kill me, I’m pretty sure, if it helps,” Aimé said. “He just wouldn’t care that much if I died – so long as I did certain things first.”

“How the fuck does that not bother you?”

“It bothers me.”

“Uh uh,” Colm said. “I know what it feels like when something freaks you out, and I know what it feels like when you’re repressing something, too – you’re not repressing shit. You say, straight-up, hey, my dad wants me dead, and it’s like it doesn’t even matter to you.”

Aimé shrugged his shoulders. It wasn’t something that bothered him – it wasn’t something that had ever bothered him. He’d used to think it might be okay, if he just ticked the right boxes, so he could go back to Montauban, eventually, and now… It was different, now. “Colm, for a pretty long time, I wanted me dead too.”

Colm sucked his teeth, made a sharp sound. “The kylices are over here,” he said. “I’ll show you how.”

*     *     *

JEAN-PIERRE

“Jean-Pierre,” Doros said when he saw him, and Jean-Pierre lifted his head up as he embraced his brother, letting Doros cup his jaw in his hands to kiss him on each cheek, his hands a pleasant warmth where they slid to hold his neck, and at the same time, Jean-Pierre rested one of his palms against Doros’ own throat, the other reaching out to tug a feather bent awry out of his primaries. “Ouch,” Doros murmured against his lips, and Jean-Pierre giggled, inhaling and taking in the familiar scent of Doros – the frankincense scent of his wing oil and the dry dirt fragrance of his feathers, mingled in with the natural addition of olive oil.

“Hello, brother,” Jean-Pierre said softly, and when they hugged, Jean-Pierre brought his wings in, let Doros’ own wings – darker than his own, a heavier, heartier gold – engulf him in their soft heat.

“I am glad you joined us,” Doros said. “I am told you have brought your new lover.”

“He is a painter,” Jean-Pierre said.

“He is ugly,” Doros said, drawing back and tracing his fingers over the side of Jean-Pierre’s jaw. “Aetos says he looks as though his sculptor lost grip on his clay.”

“Aetos should know better than most that a handsome appearance is nothing to an ugly soul,” Jean-Pierre said. “Or he would, if he only had one.”

Doros laughed, tugging on Jean-Pierre’s ear lobe, but it wasn’t hard enough to be a real scold, and Jean-Pierre wrapped one arm around his brother’s waist, pulling him close again, that they were cheek to cheek. They swayed idly to the music, and after a moment, Doros said, “I did invite Pádraic Mac Giolla Chríost, you know, and sent a separate invitation for his daughter. He always ignores me, but I don’t see why she should, too.”

“Colm says Pádraic has never cared for mummery,” Jean-Pierre said, resting his chin on Doros’ shoulder: Doros’ thick curls tickled the back of his neck, where his own hair was drawn into a bun, but he didn’t mind it. “And Bedelia, I couldn’t say – she seems to me to have a great many friends, but I don’t know any of them. Mundies, I expect.”

“Hmph,” Doros said disapprovingly, but said nothing else about it. His fingers were tracing small, pleasant lines up the lower half of Jean-Pierre’s spine, and it was very nice. “Will you join us for the orgy?”

“Perhaps,” Jean-Pierre said. “I don’t know what Aimé will want.”

Doros laughed: it was an airy sound, softly superior, and Jean-Pierre basked under it. “He’s hardly any better than a mundie. Does it matter?”

“Oh, yes,” Jean-Pierre said. “I should like him to watch.”

“As though he could look away.”

Jean-Pierre chuckled, and he danced for a longer while with his brother, played his fingers through Doros’ feathers and felt him shiver. It was nice, from time to time, to spend time with angels he didn’t know so well – Doros was typically apart from many other angels, so bound up as he was with the Hellenists, but they were still brothers, after all.

“Join us for the orgy,” Doros murmured in Jean-Pierre’s ear, his teeth dragging over the shell of them: it was Jean-Pierre’s turn to shiver now, and he squeezed Doros’ hips.

“I will consider it,” Jean-Pierre murmured, and brushed their lips together before he stepped away, and went in search of Aimé.

*     *     *

AIMÉ

They’d been at the party for a few hours now, but without his phone and without any clocks, it was difficult to tell precisely how long, and honestly, precision wasn’t exactly high on his list of interest right now.

Colm had been introducing him to people left right and centre – when Colm had taught him how to drink from the kylix, a wide, shallow bowl that you had to tip very carefully to keep from spilling any wine, people had started making conversation with Colm, in Greek and in Irish, and when Colm had insisted on English for Aimé’s benefit, they’d talked to him too.

There were a lot of people at this party – almost all of the other humans apart from Aimé were Hellenists, and even dressed in Halloween costumes, a lot of them had visible tattoos and pendants and rings that showed the gods they worshiped.

A lot of them had Hermes’ winged shoes tattooed on them, or his name, or some other symbol of Hermes – he supposed it made sense, really.

They hadn’t been talking about anything in particular – a nymph with leaves growing out of her hair had told him all the grapes that had gone into the wine, and she’d opened Mr Zagre’s – the vintner, and one of the originals, at that – website on her tablet and showed him which of his wines they were drinking.

She’d also tried to reach into breeches, but he’d managed to stop her, and before she’d gotten too offended, Colm had whisked him off.

Aimé was pleasantly drunk, and he felt as though the room were rocking beneath his feet as he moved, but his actual body felt almost entirely steady: he walked easily, enjoyed the shift and swell of the ground beneath him, as he and Colm ducked into a little vanity room – it wasn’t actually a bathroom, but a small room between bathrooms, with a couch and a set of mirrors so that people could top up their make-up, Aimé supposed.

Or, you know.

For this.

He watched as Colm cut the powder more finely using the razorblade he apparently carried around in his pocket – Colm had had a good deal more to drink that Aimé had, even taking into account that Aimé had been drinking fortified wine, but his hand still moved preternaturally fast as he chopped.

“You do this often?” Aimé asked.

“Not so often,” Colm said: he wasn’t any slower to move, but it seemed to Aimé his accent was even thicker than usual, or maybe it was just that Aimé was drunk. Either way, Aimé could hear the thick Kerryman’s brogue more than he ever had before, the musical lilt heavy in Colm’s voice. “From time to time. You go first.”

The first inhale was a sudden, sharp lightning strike to the brain: Aimé had been feeling slow and contented, but now he felt buzzed, and although it was numbed by the drink, there was an electric thrill running through his veins as he patted his own cheeks, falling back on one of the couches.

Colm laughed at him, taking a bump himself.

“I know how to make this, you know,” Colm said. “Heroin, too.”

“You telling me you have another secret grow house full of coca plants and poppies?” Aimé asked, not entirely disbelieving it, and Colm grinned at him.

“No,” he said. “But I could. Another?”

“Fuck yeah,” Aimé said.

He didn’t know when Jean-Pierre walked in, only that Jean-Pierre had, and when Aimé turned and noticed him, he jumped about three feet into the air, and so did Colm, the both of them bouncing back onto the couches.

“Jean,” Aimé said hurriedly, feeling like he’d been caught out by the headteacher – except that this time around, he actually cared about being caught, and he stood hurriedly to his feet to face him. “Fuck, uh, we were just…”

Jean-Pierre grabbed him by his blood-stained cravat and pulled him closer, and Aimé went obediently with it as Jean-Pierre touched his cheeks, taking up one of his wrists and pressing his thumb against the point of Aimé’s pulse. It felt good, Jean-Pierre’s hands sliding over his skin, and Aimé wasn’t exactly proud of himself, but it was surprisingly hot when Jean-Pierre forced his jaws open and, lacking a tongue depressor, pressed two of his fingers onto Aimé’s tongue. What he did turn out to just carry around in his pocket was a little pocket torch, and he took Aimé by the chin and shone the light in and out of his eyes, testing the dilation of his pupils.

“Does it seriously turn you on when my brother gives you a fucking medical exam?”

“You should see how I react when he checks my prostate,” Aimé said, and Colm let out a disgusted sound.

“I can see your erection from here,” he said.

“Well, don’t look at it, then,” Aimé replied, and Jean-Pierre giggled, stroking his fingers down Aimé’s chest, and then pulled Aimé down to kiss him. Aimé wasn’t exactly going to complain – he’d expected a lecture, expected Jean-Pierre to tell him off for getting high, so a kiss wasn’t so bad at all.

Jean-Pierre pulled back from him, fluttering his eyelashes a moment as he leaned in closer, sliding his hand over Aimé’s arse and squeezing.

“May I try?” he asked softly, almost shyly.

Aimé stared up at him, surprised. “You want to try?” he repeated. Jean-Pierre gave a little nod of his head. “How much do we give you? Colm?”

“I know what he can take,” Colm said, and took his razor blade in hand: the dose for Jean-Pierre looked to Aimé to be a little less than half of what he and Colm had snorted apiece, and Aimé didn’t doubt, with how quick Colm was around a razorblade, with how easily he worked it out, that he could tell by eye what he was looking at within an eighth of a gram. “You never tried it before.”

“You think I won’t like it?” Jean-Pierre asked, looking at his brother askance, and Colm laughed.

“No, I think you’ll like it,” he said, and held the mirror of the compact out for Aimé to take. He held the mirror up for Jean, and Colm slapped him upside the head. “Christ’s sake, Aimé, he can’t fucking snort it, you’ve seen how easy he bruises – you want to see your boyfriend with a nosebleed? Into his gums.”

In a surprisingly good Kerry accent, a startling diversion from his usual one, Jean-Pierre looked Aimé in the face, and said, “Yeah, Aimé. Don’t you know shite?”

Aimé sniggered, ran his finger through the powder on the mirror.

“You know,” Jean-Pierre said pleasantly, “cocaine taken orally can cause mouth sores because of its acidity.”

Aimé stared at him.

Jean-Pierre opened his mouth wider, invitingly pulling up one of his lips.

“You are such a freak,” Aimé said.

Jean-Pierre’s cheeks turned pink, and he leaned into Aimé’s fingers.

As he gently dragged his finger up underneath Jean-Pierre’s lip, he could see the growing flush in Jean-Pierre’s face, could see the way his eyes dilated – not like Aimé’s, lopsided, but even and beautiful and perfect on both sides, and when Jean-Pierre sucked on Aimé’s fingers, sliding a finger to hook against the waistband of Aimé’s breeches, Aimé let out a low grunt.

“I’m going to fucking kill myself,” said Colm.

“It’s a free country, I won’t stop you,” Aimé replied, and swept his finger through more of the coke.

Jean-Pierre was a handful at the best of times: Jean-Pierre coked up was more than, and he barely seemed to hear Colm as he started rapidly undoing the fastenings of Aimé’s trousers, shoving him back onto the couch.

“Fuck,” Aimé hissed against Jean-Pierre’s neck as Jean-Pierre unfastened his own breeches.

“Okay, I’m going now,” said Colm. “Thanks for the coke, Colm, it was so good of you to cut it for me, Colm, why don’t you—”

“Are you going to stay for the orgy?” Jean-Pierre asked as he wrapped his hand around Aimé’s cock, making it impossible to concentrate enough on questioning the word “orgy” to actually voice the thought outside.

“No, but I can eat a late dinner while you whore yourself out like usual,” Colm said. “Will Aimé be joining me, or—?”

“No,” Jean-Pierre murmured, meeting Aimé’s gaze at the same time as he twisted his wrist, and Aimé let out a shuddered, sharp noise as he ruched up Jean-Pierre’s stupid matador’s shirt, sliding his hands over his belly. “Aimé’s going to come with me. Aren’t you, Aimé?”

“Before you, I hope,” Aimé said, and Jean-Pierre laughed, kissing him bruisingly, wonderfully hard.

Colm’s sound of disgust was a very distant distraction.

*     *     *

There was something funny about it.

It wasn’t that everyone else was naked – plenty of people, like Aimé, still had their costumes on, albeit in varying states of completion, and some of them, just like Aimé, were reclining on sofas or lying back, watching the action, so to speak, although most of them were paired off.

No one was sitting like Aimé, solitary and slouched back with one arm loosely over the back of his chair, sipping wine and watching their boyfriend get double-teamed by one of his brothers and an actual Greek god.

Pinned between Aetos, who was a strangely plain, average-looking guy with combed-back dirty blond hair and stubble on his cheeks, and Doros, another winged angel with dark curls, pink lips, and heavily lidded eyes, Jean-Pierre was arching his back, moaning from low in his throat. Doros obviously knew how to touch his wings, because with Jean almost in his lap, he was doing things to Jean-Pierre’s back that made Jean-Pierre writhe, and in front of him, Aetos was sucking livid marks against his neck, his shoulders, his chest.

When a hand slid over Aimé’s shoulder, down his back, he initially thought it was a waiter offering to bring him more wine, and when he turned his head and was met with the tits of the nymph from earlier, he felt his eyebrows raise in surprise.

“You don’t seem busy,” she said sultrily, glancing meaningfully toward the sea of writhing bodies all around them, which Aimé admittedly hadn’t been paying all that much attention to.

“I—”

“Don’t fucking touch him,” Jean-Pierre said sharply, all thoughts of pleasure apparently abandoned for a moment, and when Aetos tried to shut up with a kiss, Jean-Pierre shoved him back by the throat, his grip tight enough that he actually made him choke. The thought made Aimé inwardly flinch – trying to strangle a god didn’t normally go down well, from what he knew – but Aetos looked more surprised than offended.

Jean-Pierre had a snarl twisting his pretty face as he added, “Hands off.” It was a good job he was caught between Doros and Aetos, or he’d probably actually lunge for the poor woman.

The nymph retracted her hand.

“Sorry, sweetheart,” Aimé said. “I need to be actively spectating here.”

The nymph did not look at Aimé when she said, shifting on her feet, “I could use my mouth.” She was looking at Jean-Pierre, worrying one of her plump lips under her teeth – she was asking permission, and Aimé exhaled, surprised by the new heat it sent thrilling through him.

“Go away,” said Jean-Pierre petulantly, like a spoilt brat – it had never occurred to Aimé that someone could be so bratty while impaled on two cocks at once, but if anyone could, he supposed it was Jean-Pierre.

The nymph muttered under her breath as she walked away, flowers blooming through the floorboards where she passed.

“Bring your chair closer,” Jean-Pierre ordered, and Aimé got to his feet, putting his wine glass down on the seat.

Doros looked amused, and Aetos now looked somewhere between baffled and fascinated by this – admittedly strange – exchange, and the two of them watched Aimé with interest as he came closer, until Aimé reached out and slid his fingers under Jean’s, pulling his hand from around Aetos’ throat. Jean-Pierre’s grip was tight, but he let go of Aetos’ neck when Aimé’s hand brushed toward his wrist, fingering over the point of his pulse in a delicate little tickle.

Jean-Pierre’s furious moue faded as Aimé leaned in toward him, almost brushing their mouths together: he was close enough that he could feel Aetos’ breath against his skin as well as Jean’s.

“Now, Jean,” Aimé said in a sweet, delicate voice, trying his best to soothe the metaphorical ruffled feathers even as he stroked down some literal ones with his free hand. “Don’t strangle anybody. It’s not Mr Talaria’s fault that girl came up to me again, is it?”

Jean-Pierre’s sour expression came right back, and he looked abruptly, dangerously furious, so that Aimé shivered.

“Again?” he repeated sharply.

Well. No one could say he hadn’t tried.

“I’m gonna bring my chair closer,” Aimé said as he stepped away, and flipped his chair around this time, leaning on the back of it: this tacit assurance that no one would be sliding into his lap while Jean-Pierre was otherwise occupied – which was insane, because one nymph with low standards and a shared interest in wine did not a threat make – seemed to be enough for Jean-Pierre, though, because he relaxed once again between Aetos and Doros both.

“He knows how to handle you, doesn’t he?” Doros murmured in Jean-Pierre’s ear, and then pressed down on Jean’s belly as they started to move their hips again, and Aetos dragged Jean-Pierre into a kiss before he could pull away.

Aimé really, really wished he could paint this – fuck painting it, he wished he could video it and play it on loop on Colm’s movie projector.

“Yes,” Jean-Pierre moaned, hissing the sibilant “s”, and when he spread out his wings, a few feathers dropped to the floor.

Aimé grinned as he watched the angel come.