“Oh, I can.”
“No, you mustn’t! He’ll ruin me!”
“Blackmail?”
“Don’t,” Titus whispered. “Please don’t ask.”
Nico took his hands, clasping them in his own. “Tell me, mon ami. I will help you, I swear I will, but I must know the situation.”
“It’s—he wants—we were—” His eyes were darting, flicking round the room. “Uh, he, we, it’s not—”
This wasn’t getting them anywhere. Titus was in a devil of a state, and he probably didn’t want to admit to having fucked Morris. Nico wouldn’t either.
Desperate times. He reached up for Titus’s face with both hands, stood on tiptoes, and kissed him.
It wasn’t ideal. He hadn’t asked, and Titus was distressed, and as his lips met Titus’s and found them cold and tense, Nico had a fraction of a second to wonder if he’d just made everything a hundred times worse.
Then Titus made a noise in his throat. His mouth softened, loosened, and Nico pressed a touch harder, and this time Titus kissed him back.
Nico had his face cupped in his hands. He pulled Titus down towards him, and Titus moaned in his mouth and clutched his shoulders, and then they were kissing, frantically locked with tongues and lips and hunger and aching need, Titus clinging on to Nico, Nico arching up to meet him.
But they had things to do, so Nico pulled back, just a fraction, not letting go. They were both breathing hard.
“Mon ami,” he said. “Mon ami, mon coeur, I beg you, let me make that enflure go away. Your lover, yes?”
Titus twitched, as though trying to jerk away. Nico held on, and after a tense second Titus slumped, resting his forehead against Nico’s. “Yes. Lover, landlord. I ended it when I couldn’t bear any more. He was furious. He raised my rent—”
“Cafard de merde.”
“And now he wants to be together again, which—which—I offered him five hundred pounds to go away and he said no. He said it was miserly and contemptible and I have to treat him as he deserves.”
“Oh, let us do that by all means,” Nico said. “What is his threat?”
“He says he’ll lodge a complaint against me. Sodomy,” Titus said in a whisper.
“Has he letters?”
“No. I never wrote anything.”
“Then he can only accuse. That would endanger himself as much as you.”
“He won’t care,” Titus said with dreary certainty. “When he gets angry enough, he breaks things, and he won’t care if it gets him into trouble too. Or he will later, but then it will be my fault for pushing him to it. And itismy fault because he’s been writing to me and I’ve been ignoring the letters, so he’s been stewing and getting angrier and now he needs to bebegged and placated and praised into a better mood and he wants money and he wants to be in my life again and Ican’t—”
“And will not,” Nico said over his rising, accelerating voice. “Stop. I will deal with this.”
“There’s nothing you can do!” Titus said desperately. “You don’t understand. He’s worked himself into such a rage, and if I tell him no, he’ll do something awful. He simply can’t control himself when he’s like this. I’ve seen it.”
So had Nico. “He broke things in anger?”
“All the time.”
“His own things? Things he cared for?”
“Yes, he—” Titus stopped. “Well, mostly mine, now you mention it. He slashed a painting with a knife, but it was one I had given him. And tore up a book, but again… No. No, he didn’t break his own things.”
“You astonish me. Go back in, mon coeur. Tell him enough is enough. You have parted ways already, you do not choose to continue his acquaintance, and you ask him to take his leave with grace.”
“But he won’t!”