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into his palm.
Another rule broken
.
    They are doing it now. Anthony is amazed at how much better it feels this way. Without the latex barrier, flesh slides against flesh. For the first time he understands what it was that the older man who infected him had been after: this sensation. This.
    As for Christopher, in his stoned state he imagines that his friend is a god hoveringover him. Anthony is Apollo laboring in the sky. His voice is distant thunder. Steadily Anthony fucks him, then without warning grits his teeth; deep inside Christopher feels warm wet pulses. He imagines low tide on the Pacific. Waves receding. In the remnant tide pools, hermit crabs with their cargo of dead shells, anemones suctioned to the rocks, spiny mouths that close around his touch.
    It’s done. Okay, he thinks. This is what I wanted. And he reaches to embrace Anthony.
    But Anthony pulls away. He pulls away, stumbles to the window, opens it. Leans out, not speaking.
    Christopher sits up in the bed.
What’s wrong?
he wants to ask—and doesn’t dare. He knows the answer.
    For some reason a strange memory assails Anthony. When he was a child, on the last day of every school year all the kids in his class wrote their names and addresses on cards that they attached to helium balloons. Their teacher then led them outside in a kind of procession, the balloons trailing behind, above her, a leashed bouquet, and when they were all assembled on the playground, she cut the strings. The balloons rose up, masses that separated, as the children, cheering the onslaught of summer, rushed out the open gates to parents, school buses. Only Anthony hesitated. He wanted to wait until he could no longer distinguish his own balloon from the others. He wanted to wait until every last one had disappeared into a dot on the horizon, and the sky was empty again, like a blank page.
    Few of the balloons ever made it more than a couple of miles. Instead, for weeks afterward, he’d keep finding shreds of them twisted around the branches of neighborhoodtrees when he went on bike rides.
    Outside the window tonight the moon is bright, not quite full. Rounder than a balloon. Pearl gray. Behind him Christopher puts his hand on Anthony’s shoulders.
    â€œDon’t worry,” he says. “It’s what I wanted. More than anything.” Kissing his neck.
    But Anthony, at the window, is too busy calculating to listen. Six weeks for seroconversion, then the blood test, then a few more days for the results. Oh, the wait! They will wait the way girls wait to see if they are pregnant.
    â€œOf course, it might not take.”
    Don’t let it take
, Anthony prays to his great-grandmother’s Goddess.
    â€œSo just to play it safe, we’ll do it every night.”
    Silence.
    â€œO.K.?”
    â€œO.K.”
    â€œTo play it safe.”
    â€œYes.”
    Anthony closes the window on the moon.
A Hotel Flirtation
    1889. A big hotel on the Côte d’Azur. String quartets, a promenade, parasols. Also a busy network of back hallways in which servants and staff played out their own dramas. No bathrooms, though. In 1889 plumbing was rare, even in the most elegant French hotels. The rich, like the poor, used chamber pots.
    When the tutor arrived that afternoon—dragged hither at the behest of his difficult yet enchanting charge—he gave his room a minute and thorough once-over. First he strippedthe sheets off the bed and examined the mattress, in the center of which was a largish pink stain. Then he noticed a perfect circle of carpet near the plant stand which, unlike the rest, had not been leached of color by the sun. He should leave well enough alone, he told himself, it was always better to leave well enough alone—yet even as he spoke these words to himself, he was lifting the plant stand to reveal the expected discolorations, stiff to the touch. What had produced them? Various unsavory possibilities sprang to his mind, so that he