"And then? You can't leave the story there."

"No, of course not. Have patience! He... well, now I don't remember."

"I knew you'd disappoint me."

Leaning against a crate, Fabian's tanned cheeks were flushed with a rich red colour, his eyes happily glazed over. Though he'd just uttered words that, under any other circumstance, would have wounded me forever, the expression of absolute bliss on his features served only to infect me with the same happiness.

"You can't fault me, it was ages ago." I leaned over to set the bottle in my hands down, but hiccuped and dropped it instead. We simultaneously shrieked in fear of the shattered mess that would no doubt expose our drunken folly, but the bottle only bounced with a dull sound and rolled under the crate. We shared a look of stunned awe, and then laughed long and loud over the now silly fear, pointing at our faces and holding our sides.

Laughter eventually subsided into a pained wheeze for myself and a breathless bliss for Fabian. Neither one of us had laughed in far too long a time, but the severity of our amusement was greatly affected by health. "It's not fair," I winced, gasping as my stomach contracted. "You're athletic, yes? What laughing fit could ever dispose of you?" He slid to the ground and spread his arms and legs out, a star of skin and shabby clothes.

"My heart aches when I laugh," he admitted slowly, still chuckling. "It's quite curious. I've never felt anything like it before."

I opened my mouth to reply, but another hiccup gave me the needed room to pause and consider my next question. It had been brewing on my mind with every drunken hour, but I lacked the words, or perhaps just the courage, to say them. "Mr. Moore," I slurred, trying to hold my head up. "Would you entertain me for a moment?" He lifted his own head from the cold, hard ground and gave me a woozy grin.

"What would you like to know?" There we went again, cackling together over the transparency of my question. Wasn't I always wondering about him, begging to know something of his life? It seemed I was not so different drunk as I was sober, a fact which surprised me to no end, knowing of course how my parents turned out once they had a bottle in them.

Halfway hanging from my chair for some time now, it was inevitable that I slip from its leathery grasp. I expected to feel the ground greet my brittle bones with a violence, but all I felt was warmth. Everlasting, maddening warmth. I found myself looking up into Fabian's flushed face and before I could contain it, I broke out into a smile.

"Have you ever fallen in love?"

He should have pulled away and frowned, rubbed at his brow and hunched his shoulders like he so often did when I bothered him about his life, but the alcohol had severely impacted his reactions. Instead, he smiled back and pulled me up, holding me in a swaying embrace so I wouldn't fall over again. "Hmm... no, I wouldn't say that."

"Then... something close?"

"I've told you before," he said with a brief pause, grip tightening in concentration, "there have been... people. People I've been, well, intimate with. No loves, though, my little lord." He began to hum, some tune that could have been sung at sea buzzing at the nape of my neck. To think of someone as beautiful as him, wild at heart and free from the restrictions of stiff-necked social regulations go without falling in love seemed a shame, a surprising shame indeed.

"I'm not a lord," I said without thinking, a response I always gave when he called me such." "Still... have you ever wondered what it was like?" Attempting to sit up on my own merit, I succeeded only in slipping through Fabian's arms.

Neither of us moved much once I was finished. My head was in his lap, and his hands busied themselves in my hair, incapable of being near me without trying to clean me up. He shifted so that the crate supported him, and then we lay like that for a long time without speaking. I could have fallen asleep in the soothing peace that he exuded, but I refused to waste the opportunity to be held by him.

"I don't deserve to wonder things like that."

"That hardly answers the question." The humming resumed, though his hands did stop running through my hair. I lamented the loss of his touch - every night for the last twenty-odd years was bitter and numb, struck with the icy blade of a cold house. In very nearly a month, I had become so spoiled by Fabian's effect on the very air that a moment without him or some direct action of his left me quaking helplessly against the return to that dreadful cold. I had never believed myself capable of loving heat, of being allowed to, and yet, there I was. Feeling like a spoiled lord indeed, I turned my head back and looked at him. He was the very image of every ruggedly handsome man in my books, the living example of a heroine's most beautiful dream. I made for a poor heroine, didn't deserve to wonder at him at all.

That had nothing to do with it, I thought painfully. I still do.

"Still do what?" I flinched and felt my cheeks burn so fiercely that my eyes teared up. Had I really spoken aloud? I began a fumbled excuse not to answer, but then he lowered his gaze and stared directly at me, the drunken haze now replaced with something searching. He squinted. "Still do what?" I could not answer him. My voice had been replaced with a grinding, halting crackle that formed no more words than the bottle at my feet. Never had I thought blushing could be so painful!

I made another noise and then Fabian sniffed the air. It wasn't the sort of sniff one does when they're irritated or annoyed, but a movement that matched the look he'd lowered my way. There was no response I could have had for the sudden action, so I looked at him blankly, too confused to be glad I had escaped having to repeat my damning thoughts.

How ashamed of myself I was, stuttering like a fool, when he finally stopped and brightened up! A face usually so pleasing to look at was now the subject of a mortification so deep I swore I had to be dreaming it. Surely, no person could live through the misery of that beautiful man smiling and saying, as though it wasn't the most wretched thing in the world, "Ah, I understand." Being understood is no crime, nor should it have been, but considering the wince my heart made with every thought of Fabian Moore, with every rolling wave of his intoxicating woodland smell, with every glance of his perfect golden eyes, this understanding was my damnation.

"You... you don't understand anything!" I pushed myself away from him and reached for my chair, tears suddenly filling and freeing themselves from my eyes. "What do you know about me, or what I'm thinking?" If it could be called tripping without having walked, I tripped at once over the wheel of my chair. I couldn't see through my irksome tears, but I wanted to run away from the cellar as quickly as I could, to run back to the damp corner of the house that I belonged in.

Of course, I couldn't make it out of the cellar myself, and even if I was able, I was still extremely intoxicated. Anyone would have known what I'd been up to, and it would have been just my luck that my mother descended her prison in the attic. Fabian, being as caring as he ever was, was there helping me into the chair so quickly that he may as well have picked me up from the floor. I marvelled at how fast he moved, but my marvel turned to shame when we faced one another once more.

"I must be a terrible drunk," I mumbled, not wanting to meet his gaze or even be heard. "Laughing like a dog one minute, only to cry these ugly tears the next."

"I happen to like dogs," came his smiling response. Even upset, it was impossible not to feel my breathing suffer at the sight of him! "Come, Evan, let us away into the night. Even terrible drunks need their rest." He stood up, swayed extraordinarily to the left, and shook himself. "I myself have never had the pleasure of drinking wine before tonight, so I beg you excuse my ungainly walk. Turn forward, I'll push. Perhaps once you've sobered up, you'll not be so embarrassed to admit aloud what we both know. God knows, I'd hate for you to have wine as an excuse for finally telling me what you're thinking."

I never had the chance to interrupt and stop him from talking. His brief monologue was punctuated by the ascent up the cellar steps, which required far more concentration than either of us had any access to, and then he pushed me through the house to the stairs. We both gave them one good look before mutually agreeing that such a climb would be reckless and stupid under our current condition, so he pushed me outside to his makeshift house. Tucked away once more in the wooden shack that so closely resembled the innards of a tree, I fell into a heavy slumber on his bedding and knew no more of the great shame of having one's feelings discovered.

If Fabian went to sleep, he didn't look it. Waking up, I found myself encased in a soft darkness, and having forgotten the circumstances that led to me sleeping there, wondered aloud if I had died.

"You are in the greenhouse," he said to my rhetoric query, "safe and sound. Don't move your head so quickly." His warning was a second too late; I swivelled to look towards his voice and was rewarded with a splitting pain in my head.

"What... happened?"

"You've been sleeping off an unholy amount of wine. You don't drink much, do you?" I groaned instead of answering and threw the blanket he'd covered me in over my head. Never before had I experienced such pain! My parents' addiction to the migraine-inducing substance only increased my confusion for their abuse of it. Who would ever want to subject themselves to the crippling horror that I felt now, like a door or something equally heavy had fallen on me with all of the force it could muster.

The blanket pulled back and Fabian's amused face appeared. He wore a smirk, but it was touched with the gentleness I had come to know and care deeply for. "In your defense, people don't usually drink the entire bottle." I scowled up at him.

"You drank two of them! Why isn't your head falling off?" Wincing at my own idiocy for yelling, I shrunk back under the covers.

"I couldn't say." A weight pressed down on my shoulder - gently, but enough to convey that he wanted to talk about something more. "You are going to have get up soon. Your brother and sister are on their way."

"How do you know?" I remained hidden, too pained to feel the usual thrill of being touched by Fabian.

"...I can smell them." This was curious enough to finally pull me up, even if my sitting did leave me face-to-face with the ever-strange Fabian. He blushed and looked away. "Don't ask me about it, please."

"You can't just say something like that," I whispered in a demanding tone, "and not explain yourself! Come, what did you mean?"

"We don't have time to go over my uncultured ways, Evan. If you're in your bed, then perhaps your headache won't be seen as something suspicious."

Neither one of us moved. I felt a pull somewhere in my stomach looking at him, and then the sudden desire to confess. Just what did I want to confess? I couldn't even say, so wild and unorganised were my thoughts on the matter. I was, however, passionately curious. Any opportunity to learn was a chance I had to take, but it wasn't just learning about the vague realm of practical education. Maths and geography lessons once taught by the long-gone tutor we Hase children had were quickly forgotten in the absence of a secondary teacher. No, it was people I was so desperate to thieve my knowledge from. Fabian was, in my limited experience, the only person that possessed a drop of information worth knowing about, so I made a decision that I regretted almost at once. I offered him an exchange.

"If I tell you what I was thinking, down in the cellar, will you tell me why you can smell my siblings from however far away they are?" His reaction was unexpected, to say the least. A great convulsion passed through his chest, leaving behind a splash of gooseflesh on his arms. He lowered his head, honey-red hair falling free from his loosened tie and covering him in a shroud of sorrow. Can you not see, then, why I regretted the decision? My own suffering I could take, could handle as well as my body had prepared me for in the last two decades, but to impose misery on Fabian? Fabian, who bathed me and changed my clothes out for ones he'd cleaned himself, who harvested berries from the garden and wrapped me in heated blankets. Fabian, who got drunk with me and held my head in his lap, who brushed my hair back.

I began to cry again, looking for all the world like a spoiled little child. Great heaving sobs wracked my body and my head threatened to cleave itself clean in two, but I didn't care. I couldn't contain the distress I'd caused, no matter how unwittingly, because I was seemingly incapable of being grateful with what I had and shutting my mouth.

Proving yet again that he was a far better person than I, he pulled me into his chest and held me tightly, one hand smoothing my hair and the other rubbing small circles in my back. There was a hesitancy in his movements, but he still whispered in my ear and consoled me through the wreck of emotions that poured forth. "Don't cry, little lord, don't cry. There's no reason to be upset."

"I just can't shut up," I sobbed, my voice coming out like the scraping of branches underfoot. "You've made yourself clear, and I just can't stop asking stupid questions." Overcome with myself, I threw my arms around him like a child and wailed with renewed vigour when I realised I had begun to soak his shirt.

He let me expend my regrets into his chest for a while, never stopping his rhythmic caresses. I suspected he grew tired once his hand slipped from my head to my neck, but he continued running his hands over my skin, murmuring comforts when my cries turned to choked and soft whimpers. Eventually, I did stop. I don't know how long he sat with me and consoled me, but the slowed time had changed something in me that I had never experienced before. It is embarrassing, of course, to admit this, especially in a document I hope to leave behind when I die, but I want to tell the truth. The truth is often inconsistent and uncomfortable, but I feel it makes the short story of my short life take on some meaning that otherwise, would have been lost in another case of my family's predicably tragic history.

This new change, I burn to admit, was an erection. Despite the strange, fevered dreams I'd begun having, I had not made the connection that not all of my body needed the confinement of a wheelchair. With legs as good as useless, why did I suspect that the rest of me worked at all? The movement of my clothes, betraying things that they were, surprised me almost as little as it seemed to surprise Fabian.

His hand slowed and then he moved his face so that he could look me straight in the eye.

"I'm so sorry," I tried to say, but my voice broke with every word. How desperately I wanted to correct it, if only to put on the veil on composure, as though this was a silly accident, an unfortunate circumstance well beyond my control. To a sense, it was all of those things, but I should never have let him hold me, or returned the embrace feeling the way that I did about him. He cut me off by placing a finger on my lips.

"How many times must I tell you: there is nothing to be sorry for."

"But -" I barely mumbled, before he shushed me.

"Nothing, Evan. You think I don't know our bodies, that this is some foreign thing to me?" I blushed as he gestured down. No, I wanted to tell him. It's me that doesn't know. He read the look on my face and rolled his eyes, the most unrefined thing I'd seen him do in his month at the house. The sight of it filled my stomach with more strange feelings, and I hastened to jerk the blanket between us before I could react in any more telling ways.

He stood up and smoothed his shirt down. "I will answer your questions," he said after a pause, a grim look in his eye that did little to comfort me, "but not today. I must be leaving soon, and will be gone for six days. When I return, come find me."

"Won't you be here?" I knew better than to question why he would be leaving us, leaving me, at such an important time, and he filled the room with his smile upon noticing my restraint.

"I... I will try." He leaned over then and picked me up, tucking me into his arms as though I weighed no more than the blanket. "Now then. Let's get you upstairs, and then you can think about all of the things you'd like to know where you're warm."

I couldn't say what made me want to die more between Fabian Moore knowing his touch had given my body its excuse to finally knock on the door of manhood, and being carried into the house and up the stairs. Even when he laid me down, wrapping blankets around me and warming rags for my head, I felt like the most infantile creation to have ever been born. What right did I have to feel these new adult sensations when I had to be swaddled and cooed over? Fabian didn't necessarily do any cooing, but he stopped no small amount of times in his fussing about the room to caress my face or suddenly lean over me, gazing wordlessly into what felt like my soul. Each time he did this, he produced a whimper from the burning circle of sheets where I lay. I tried at first to contain the uncontrollable noises, but he drew very close on one occasion, after rekindling the fireplace, almost close enough to kiss. Possessed with a fear for which I have no words, I turned away and squeezed my eyes shut, and when I had opened them again, he was humming at the window (recently repaired by his hand), as though he'd been there all along.

When Piers and Petra eventually returned, he left the room to tend to their walking clothes and the hot drinks they would assuredly want, and I was finally given the space to cry into the pillows from the pain that resonated from my disappointed groin.