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gleaming with outrage, and began taunting my masculinity; cajoling and angering me to the point that I nearly turned him over and gave him some of the same sadism that I knew he had sparked from others.
    But instead, after a deep breath and after realizing that all I could offer to assuage his pain was my own arms, I put my hands on his small soft shoulders and looked him straight in the eye. “Not like this, Bruce. You’re welcome here, but not like this,” I told him, my thumbs rubbing the soft curves on his neck.
    A visible sadness crept out from behind all that anger, but only for a moment.
    His lip trembled then firmed. He stepped into my embrace and tucked himself under my arms, propelling us back into my bed with a chuckle.
    I covered him with small kisses, held him like crystal still warm in my hands, and tried to teach him all the tenderness that Robert had taught me. After a time, he became soft with anticipation, malleable with the delicious warmth I gave him, and drowsy with the fragrance of affection. But it wasn’t to last. Even though he came back regularly after that night, I knew that he had delved too deep into the utter and absolute loneliness within himself. He wouldn’t take even a drop of the vulnerability he’d opened himself up to with me. I had witnessed his self loathing, the unbearable self-hatred he carried, and I knew about the deep yearning he thought himself unentitled to.
    I ran my hands over the small curves of his body and looked at him in the pearly din of the security lighting outside my door. He had his chin tucked into my chest and his arms curled up around my neck. Watching him sleep like that you would never have known how unpopular he was with the staff and other wards. He was too much trouble, brought too much heat, and never allowed words to be caught in his throat. His gaze was so intense that twice already he’d had his nose busted by someone who had flared under its pressure.
    He stirred when I wiped at the tears of useless empathy filling me and overflowing. I kissed his forehead and pressed him to me as he looked up at me with a light innocent expression of perplexion. His hand moved with only a slight hesitation and touched a tear on my cheek.
    “Why?” he asked in a confidential whisper, rubbing the liquid of my tears between his fingers before putting them lightly on the tip of his tongue.
    “Because you won’t,” I told him.
    He held my eyes for a long moment, and then looked away, his own eyes suddenly glassy and unseeing, before he nodded.
    On the last night that he came to me, I realized that he had not touched one soul since he’d been at Sanctuary. His body had, but he himself had not once felt the warmth of another’s compassion, not even from me. I tried to put this out of my mind, but when he started to cry, I knew that he had realized it too.
    It was a sad smile that surfaced when I asked him what was wrong. He only shook his head as if it didn’t matter, a violent shudder sweeping through him before he got up and left.
    When I awoke the next morning he had already set his plans in motion. Long used to the taste of his own shit, Bruce had just taken one of the judiciously dispensed conically shaped paper cups and filled it with his own feces as bait for the animosity of one of the orderlies that we called Sergeant Grish. Orderlies had no rank of course, just as we wards had no numbers. We were wards, they were orderlies. But he was Sgt. Grish; a big dark haired man who found the little bit of Sioux in Bruce reason enough for this ex-marine to harbor a grudge.
    But it also seemed to me that every time that Sgt Grish stepped on the floor, Bruce would run from whatever cubbyhole he had secured himself in and provoked the man until even Grish tired of beating him. But beat him he would. Even when, after a while, it was no longer for the fun of it, but simply necessary to maintain his authority.
    Today was no exception. One look at Bruce’s small rapturous