valuation

It's over, then. The gloves and contact lenses stored away for some other time, just in case. Louis had held Armand's hand in front of Daniel Molloy and said the love of my life. Nothing in his boy's mind beyond the moment, no flash of further recognition; Armand feels relief at that, or ought to.

Louis is lying beside him, his back turned, his mind racing ahead. How he's going to tell the story. Always the story. Armand wants him back. The love of my life. He plays it in his mind over and over again, like a bell.

And another bell, dissonant: Daniel's words. They ring, and ring.

"What's my whore number, than?"

It works. Louis startles, his eyes turning back to Armand, his mind contracting back into the room from all the many rooms of the past it had been wandering. "What?" he splutters.

"Our boy. He knows his whore number. I wish to know mine."

Louis rolls over, blinking like the light is too bright. "Well. I think his point is that everyone gets to set their own, Armand."

Daniel. Sweet, innocent Daniel, still taking on the world with his sense of righteousness and his bare forehead fifty years later. Armand doesn't do provocation quite as well as Daniel does, but he can do a good impression of it, especially when the real thing is fresh in his mind. "A charming notion," he says, "but you and I know better. You're familiar with the flesh trade, my love. What's my price?"

Louis can see the provocation, Armand can feel it in him, but that doesn't mean it's entirely ineffective. He narrows his eyes, annoyance in his voice when he says, "I was familiar with the flesh trade in turn of the century New Orleans, yes."

"All right, my price in turn of the century New Orleans." And it had started just as a thing to say, a way to get Louis back in the room with him, but now Armand can start to see the wheels turning, recollections of business too complicated or unsavoury or just too uninteresting to mention to Daniel, and he wants to know.

In all of his memories, the ones that stuck around, Armand is sold for the price of himself. His body for his image, flesh for pigment, reality for fantasy. Art is both priceless and worthless, signifying nothing and everything. But Louis, Louis puts a price on art. He'd done it with every piece on the walls of the penthouse, and every piece that had bought the place in the first place. The idea that he can do it to Armand, too, feels warm and comforting. Unassailable. Safe.

Louis pushes himself upright, angled towards Armand. The confusion and annoyance lingers for a moment more and then it slides away and is replaced by that little head tilt, the cocky hardening of his eyes and mouth, that means he's agreed. So that's how you want to play it tonight, he hardly needs to say, because the answer is yes, yes, please.

"Well," he says slowly, eyes trailing up and down Armand deliberately, "it's a bit of an unusual appraisal. Not an everyday sort of item, for the time and place. Unfamiliarity can lead to undervaluation. A back-alley crib, twenty-five cents a suck, minus your rent, and you have to hook them in from the street yourself. It's a possibility."

It doesn't matter that he's never done it, never been that whore; even at the brothel he hadn't had to stand on the street, enticing his own clients. It hits Armand like a punch to the gut anyway, because he could have been. He'd known, every time he stood in front of the studio door of some new painter, that he did have a choice. He could walk away from it all, the art, the palazzo, the other boys, the blood kiss and the terror and promise of what could one day come. He could find himself a little room with a mattress on the floor and do his work in filth and poverty instead. And every time, he'd chosen to knock and enter.

Louis' thumb and forefinger, gripping him by the chin, forcing their eyes together. "But then," he says softly, "you don't bring a Stradivarius for appraisal at a pawn shop. You bring it to someone who knows what they're looking at." He tilts Armand's head side-to-side, then pushes on the hinges of his jaw. Armand shows him his mouth. Then Louis turns up his wrist to inspect his palms, bends his knee to see the sole of one foot. No sores, no telltale rash.

"Well, Arun," he says finally, "I don't do business with boys myself, but I know the good houses who do, and you'll be a credit to any of them. The john pays fifteen, twenty if you've got a lineup, and you'll take thirty per cent. Clean linens after each customer, dinner before the house opens, liquor free if you prove you can be moderate with it, a good madam who deals quickly with trouble. You should be taking home twenty dollars a night, if you're sweet and work hard."

Twenty dollars a night. Armand has a vague recollection of twenty American dollars being able to buy something, back when he was keeping the books at the theatre and Louis was keeping the books in Storyville.

Louis looks amused, the mask slipping a little for a moment. "Should be a bit over six hundred, today. A decent six figures a year."

A good madam. A decent living. You take your cut and that's it, you don't owe anything else to anyone. It doesn't sound so bad. Perhaps Daniel was right: it's good to have a number. To know what you'll take, and also what you won't.

"Thank you, Mr. du Lac," he says. "That's very kind of you." Louis does one of those upwards nods, acknowledgment of something very small and delicate in front of him, but-- Armand feels something else, when he lowers his eyes shyly. The turn of the century sophisticate in front of him loves to do favours, to use his influence, to prove that he can pull the people around him out of the muck at the same time as he enriches himself. But he has his own shyness, too, which the vampire spilling his life story to the journalist slumbering in the other room has lost. Or perhaps just hidden.

He looks up through his lashes. "But may I ask, sir," he says, "why you don't do business with boys?" It feels thrilling coming out of his mouth. Do business with, not trade in. Partners, not property.

Louis shrugs casually, a deliberate affectation. "I got enough to deal with, keeping me and my girls squared up with the law."

It's a lie; or rather, not nearly the whole truth. The shy boy looking for decent work knows it, and the five hundred year old vampire knows it, and Armand is someone halfway in between the two when he stares directly into Louis' eyes, defiant, and says, "I didn't take you for a coward, sir. Isn't yours the house with the no whites allowed sign right there on the door? And you're too afraid of the law to give your customers the option of a few pretty boys?"

Louis hadn't told him that story; not in Paris, and certainly not afterwards. He'd heard it for the first time at the same time as Daniel did. How could it have come up, been spoken aloud between them, been broached even in the mind, when it's the story of how Claudia was made?

Louis stares at him, Armand's Louis, trying to figure out what game he's playing. Armand just waits, innocent, as if he hadn't just lobbed an insult that should get him slapped. His maker had loved that, the backtalk, the insolence provoking an anger so unexpected that it had the two of them dissolving in giggles together. Louis is simpler in his tastes. But Armand thinks he can draw him out anyway.

"You're a bold little thing," Louis says finally. "You got theories of your own, then?"

"I think," says Armand, and he reaches out to cup Louis' jaw, even bolder, "that it's not the law you're afraid of. You're afraid of having a working boy in your house, taking customers, available to any man who wanders in. Available to you."

And now Louis does slap him, a hard sting on the cheek, and Armand tries to smother his triumphant smile as quickly as possible. He's not sure if Louis sees it. He looks genuinely pissed-off, and that is how Armand knows that he's found something real, something new, something Louis has never given him and didn't even know he had to give.

Armand has had cause to feel shame about many things, but desiring and being desired by men has never been one of them. By the time he came to understand that sex can be desire and pleasure instead of mere blind rage and pain, it seemed obvious that both men and women should desire him. He is beautiful, and people desire beautiful things, and, at least in the house of his master, to fulfil a desire, to act in accordance with one's nature, was good.

Louis is so young. It has not been a long time at all, since he made his last Confession.

"It's all right," says Armand, and shuffles in closer. He's been eating every day, keeping his body warm and lifelike for Daniel's eyes, and now he can feel the heat pooling between them as his shoulder touches Louis'. "There's nothing wrong with it, sir. It's as natural as anything else. You would not call your clients deviant for desiring your girls instead of the nice wives they have at home, surely? It is the same, to desire me."

Louis swallows. His lips move as if he's going to say something, but thinks better of it. He is nearly trembling with rage, but there's want inside the rage. All this time, and Armand had thought he was the only one handing over his past to be taken care of, to be seen and handled and re-shaped and then placed back on the shelf for the next time. But the whole time, the man who calles him Arun had needed re-shaping of his own. And this, Armand can provide.

"Let me show you," he whispers. "Please, you've been so kind to me..."

Louis flinches and Armand sees it right away, the misstep: he will not be the pimp demanding favours, the dealer getting high off his own supply. "For full price, if you please," Armand corrects. "And since I have no madam yet, surely I get to keep it all. The full twenty dollars."

Louis relaxes at that, his eyes crinkling. "Said that was if you've got a lineup..."

Like an actor trying to gesture to his scene partner out of view of the audience, Armand lets his eyes flick briefly to the doorway, through which lies the sleeping Daniel, who has been trying to prevent his eyes from lingering on the servant Rashid for the entire past week. Don't I?

"Please, sir," he says again.

"All right," says Louis, and his hands are shaky when he reaches out to skim over Armand's waist. "All right, full price. You'll have to earn it, though, need to teach me--" he can't quite get the rest of the sentence out, like he would either break down into laughter or tears if he had to claim this kind of innocence out loud.

"Of course," says Armand soothingly, stripping off his shirt with the kind of unselfconscious ceremony that comes of being entirely aware of being watched. "It's like that with most men, sweet good men like you, who have been told it's wrong. Just trust me."

Armand naked, Louis still clothed. Calculated to make him feel like he's in charge. Armand lies back onto the pillows. "You can touch me anywhere you want," he says, a command.

Louis repositions, sitting on his knees beside Armand's torso, then reaches down and skims hands down his sides. He brushes fingers over his nipples, presses his palm against the minute pocket of fat on Armand's belly. Armand is half-hard, and on some level Louis knows the things that would get him all the way there, but on a more present level he doesn't, and Armand isn't going to ask for them. Louis' hands hesitate at the crease of his thighs, and he repeats, "Anywhere you want."

Louis cups his scrotum. He runs his fingers up his shaft and pulls back his foreskin, a scant piece of evidence about a childhood he cannot remember that nevertheless does not carry enough information to form an interpretation. Perhaps it means only that he had been sold too young.

"I did have a man suck me, once," Louis admits, a little breathlessly, caressing Armand's thighs.

"And did you enjoy it?"

"Well. Sure. Mouth's a mouth, isn't it?"

Armand laughs, and he could check Louis mind to see if it's a deliberate setup, but if it is it's a good one, so he'll let him have it. He sits up. "I can assure you," he says, pushing Louis down and unbuckling his belt, "a mouth is not just a mouth."

A blowjob serves a dual purpose; you can do most anything while a man is distracted by it, including reaching over for the lube and fingering it into your own hole. It can even, Armand knows very well, get you out of anything that was supposed to follow: build it up, make it seem like you're just getting ready, and if he happens to orgasm too soon to get it into any other holes, well, that's not your fault. He's never particularly enjoyed the taste of human seminal emissions, but with some men a literal bad taste in the mouth is better than a figurative one.

Not with this one, though. This sweet shameridden brothel-keeper tastes clean, and pats Armand's hair like he's holding himself back from grabbing it. His moans are quiet but not entirely suppressed.

He pulls off before Louis can get close from it, not wanting to risk a premature ending, and pools more lube in his hand to coat his cock with. Louis is gasping, chasing the loss of Armand's tongue with his hips. When it becomes clear he's not getting it back, he grins ruefully. "I defer to your expertise," he says, "on mouths."

Armand says, "Do you want me on my back, or my hands and knees? Some men prefer--"

Louis is already up, pushing on his shoulders, arranging pillows for him. "No, no," he says, "wanna see your face, baby, come on, 'mnot that much of a coward."

Armand feels warm and light as he settles back. He spreads his thighs, pulls his knees up. "Not a coward at all," he says, "Come on, just push it in, nice and slow. Nothing to it."

Louis has one hand braced above Armand's shoulder, the other on his own cock. Their faces seem very close, suddenly, and Armand cannot tell if that's because they are, or if he's simply gotten used to seeing him across the room, from behind blurry brown contact lenses.

Louis hesitates. "Does it hurt you?"

"A little, at first," Armand says. "Then it feels nice, with a kind man." Louis still has a crease in his forehead, so he smooths a fingertip across it and adds, "Besides, that's what the twenty dollars are for."

Louis' head drops down suddenly, and all Armand can see is the top of his head and his shaking shoulders, and it takes him a moment of panic before he realizes Louis is laughing.

"You're something else, you know that, Armand?" he says.

Armand lies still and tries not to laugh, because Louis can get control of himself more easily than he can, but it's a tough struggle. "I've been told I'm a specialty item," he manages.

And then Louis is pushing in, and nobody is laughing any more, because it does hurt at first, always, and then it feels way, way better than just nice when he's all the way in and just holds himself there, curled over, his breath hot on Armand's shoulder, pressed together as close as they can get.

Armand runs a hand over his back, keeping him there. "Yeah," he breathes. "That's good. That's right, that's how bodies were meant to fit together, you feel it?" If the words are not quite his own, they've been with him long enough that they might as well be.

Louis nods. "Yeah," he whispers. "I feel it."

"Move in me, go on."

Louis does. He's gentle, and then he forgets to be gentle and is rough in a way that is very slightly different from all of the ways he's usually rough with Armand on purpose. Armand knows his tells, no matter what they're doing, so the only surprise he feels is when Louis comes and there are no fangs at his neck. Like he'd simply forgotten to do it. Like he is too absorbed by the reality of two bodies colliding in the most human of ways to think of anything else.

Louis rolls off him, panting, just like all men do. Armand can no longer remember whether Louis usually does it like that, too. His face is so sweet. Armand rolls onto his side, just wanting to look at him.

Louis glances back at him, down. "You didn't-- let me--"

"It's all right," says Armand, but Louis is already reaching for his cock.

Armand thinks he might be just as stunned as Louis is when Armand's hand darts out, grabs Louis by the wrist before he gets there. "No," he says.

The word lingers in the air like a gunshot. No. An astounding thing to say.

Armand turns the next ones over in his mind. Tries to taste them. He's still not sure of their flavour by the time he lets them out: "That wasn't part of the sale."

They're so close now. Armand watches Louis' face as, very slowly, it is taken over by a smile. "Well," he says, "it's your uncomfortable boner."

"It is," says Armand. Mine. Mine. Mine to sell or keep or do nothing with at all.

In a moment, he thinks, he will ask Louis to bite him, and he will bite back. Blood for blood for blood for blood. But in just a moment. Not right now.

Armand asks Louis to choose his clothes, for his first day at the interview table. He undoes one more button than he was probably meant to.

It isn't until he sits down in the dining room that he feels the slight crinkle in his back pocket. It's a challenge to slip his hand in to get it without Daniel noticing, but he does it when Daniel gets on a roll, too caught up in his own endearingly clever meanness, and glances at it under the table: a crisp new American twenty-dollar bill.

It is all too easy to smile at Daniel, trade barbs with him.

"Disregard," he says, and pockets it again.

Notes

The financial and practical details referenced here are mostly taken from Nell Kimball: Her Life as an American Madam, by Herself, a memoir written by a prostitute-turned-madam who owned brothels in San Francisco and New Orleans of this era.