AIMÉ
On the 14th of December, having completed his last exam of the year at twelve, Aimé had spent the majority of the day painting in his flat. All of the sofas and chairs had been pushed back against the very edges of the room, and he’d laid out his two folding tables that he used for Christmas fairs and shit like that in the middle, so that he had more spaces to put paintings.
He’d been painting mindlessly for the past few weeks, whenever he wasn’t revising, and his head still packed so full of half-memorised lines of philosophy text that he half-felt like there were words trickling out of his ears and staining his neck with black ink. Everything that was cured had an invoice attached, and Colm had offered to drive him around so that he didn’t have to hire couriers for the paintings going out in Dublin.
He’d had more orders than usual, although he hadn’t ended up setting up at any of the Christmas fairs or anything – on the 19th, he’d set up to sell small canvases at a booth at the witches’ Christmas Market, and in the meantime, it was the commissioned pieces.
Jean-Pierre had gotten onto him about starting more social media, but the stuff he already had was too much for him to keep on top of, really, although he liked the pressure that came on top of him at Christmas, where he had to paint or else.
At six o’clock, he got the text from Jean-Pierre that he was out of his last exam of the day (although he still had three more this week, and kept oscillating between not seeming stressed at all and looking ready to tear out both his own hair and Aimé’s as he poured over his textbooks), and he opened the windows to let in more air for the paintings to cure.
It occurred to him as he walked through the room, painting small symbols on his tabletops and wood surfaces, charging them with a flick of his wrist that was far smoother than it used to be, that it would never have occurred to him that there were enchantments to speed ventilation and airflow. It was obvious, sure, but he used to only think of his own enchantment in terms of off and on switches – make it hot, make it cold, lock it, unlock it.
He’d been reading a lot more books about enchantment recently, about more high level enchantment and the way it was applied and charged, where the work would be incredibly subtle and complex with only a few runes applied.
It didn’t even feel like a fan once all of his enchantments were charged, but more like he was stood in the middle of a current, feeling the shift of the air’s flow in the room around him.
It was drizzling as he cycled across town to the angels’ house, but as much as it was bitterly cold – his fingers were red and stiff where they gripped at the handlebars of his bike, although he managed to tear one hand away enough to give some cunt in a Mercedes the finger and tell him to go fuck himself when he bore into Aimé’s lane – it wasn’t too heavy, and most of the rain streaked down the back of his coat.
“I’m home!” he called as he stepped into the house, hanging up his coat and pulling his boots off. Hearing the familiar miaow from behind him, he left the door ajar for Peadar, and grinned when he heard Jean-Pierre call down from upstairs, “Coming!”
There was no answer from the other room, and he saw why as he stepped into the other room, seeing the silhouette of Colm out in the greenhouse.
“Oh, Peadar, what have you got for us?” said Jean-Pierre after his feet had come to the bottom of the stairs, and Aimé turned to look and felt himself go pale. Peadar, who had padded in through the doorway and was now sitting pretty with his head raised up, had a bird half his fucking size struggling slightly in his jaws. It was wine-brown and grey with a white breast that had been turned red.
“How kind of you, Peadar,” Jean-Pierre said as he reached down, and as Aimé watched, Peadar deposited the bird into Jean’s waiting hands, letting l’ange take it. “Aren’t you a good boy?”
“Jesus, Jean,” Aimé said, putting his hand over his mouth and looking with horror at the pigeon that still twitching in Jean-Pierre’s hands, its throat wet with red blood and one of its wings at a funny angle, looking broken. “The fuck is wrong with you, Peadar?”
Peadar looked up at him with his bloodied muzzle and his happy, stupid eyes, and chirruped a vague question, coming to wind his fat body around Aimé’s legs.
“There’s nothing wrong with him,” Jean-Pierre said chidingly to Aimé, walking past him and into the kitchen with the pigeon cupped in his hands. Peadar trailed after him, peering up at him to see what he was doing. “He’s a cat: cats catch birds.”
“Can you heal it?”
“It’s a pigeon, Aimé, with a broken wing and other bones broken, too – it would take some time for it to heal, and that’s assuming it caught no infection from Peadar’s bite.” For all he talked coldly, Jean-Pierre was holding the bird extremely gently, and the pigeon warbled as he held it over the sink.
Aimé swallowed. “But—"
The bird’s neck made a quiet crunch as Jean-Pierre deftly twisted its head, and Aimé closed his eyes, trying not to physically recoil. “I’m sorry,” Jean-Pierre said softly to him. “But it would be cruel to keep it alive, only to suffer as it healed.”
“I don’t know how you can fucking do that,” Aimé muttered. “Just— just kill something.”
“Death isn’t always the worst thing,” Jean-Pierre said, running the tap and washing his hands, rubbing cream-coloured soap into the red staining his fingers, so that pink water fell into the basin. “It is crueller at times to let a creature live than to let it die. Pigeons are hardy birds, but they only live three or four years, as a rule, and the shock might have killed it even if its injuries didn’t. Of the birds to select, though, Peadar has brought us a wood pigeon, which is far better than a feral one.”
“Better?” Aimé repeated, unable to tear his eyes away from the bird as it rested, dead, on a dry plate beside the sink.
“Of course,” Jean-Pierre said. “Much cleaner than the feral pigeons, and they don’t carry nearly so many diseases – although I expect it wasn’t so wily to young Peadar creeping up on it as a feral pigeon might have been.”
Aimé turned to look at Peadar, big and fat and purring contentedly on the arm of the chair: when Jean-Pierre loosely took him by the scruff of his neck he complained with a low mrow of noise, but he didn’t try and twist free too violently as Jean-Pierre daubed the blood from around his mouth.
“I’m sorry it upsets you,” Jean-Pierre said, and Aimé glanced up at his face, at the serious expression l’ange was wearing. “Predators kill, Aimé. It is in their nature.”
“You’re a predator,” said Aimé. “Right?”
“I don’t know,” Jean-Pierre said, letting Peadar go, and he held his hand palm out as an apology: Peadar peered at him for a moment, but then forgave him, putting his head into Jean-Pierre’s hand and purring loudly. “I didn’t kill a man until some years after Jules died, you know. I don’t remember the riot precisely, but I was working as a doctor, and a gendarme went to beat a young man in with the butt of his rifle. It was a heavy carabine, and the boy must only have been fourteen at the eldest – he was stealing a sack of grain in the chaos. I didn’t even think about it, at the time – I broke his neck as I broke that pigeon’s, wrenched his head to the side until I heard the bones crack.”
Aimé watched Jean-Pierre’s face, which was lost in thought as he leaned against the arm of the chair, encouraging Peadar up and into his lap and cuddling the cat against his chest. Peadar was visibly delighted, shoving his forehead up against Jean-Pierre’s chin, although he was leaving orange hair all over his blouse.
“They were lonely years I spent in Paris,” Jean-Pierre said softly. “We had lived through the financial crisis, la guerre des farines, but it got worse not better the older Jules became, the more time passed. Twelve years, I think, I lived in Paris, I served as a doctor, a surgeon, and they knew me as widower, though I had had no wife, and I looked so young. I travelled, at times, with Asmodeus, here and there, and when came the uprising, I lingered. We tore everything down, we built everything anew, and…”
He sighed.
“I ran away, in the end. I killed people – I healed more. I set wounds, and I fed the people I could, and I learned to speak where others were speaking – and they listened to me because I’m beautiful, but that didn’t matter, because they listened. The first time they put me before a firing squad.
“I left, I went back to medical school, and I practised medicine for a time, not surgery anymore, but… I was caught, and it was mundies, they thought I had squirreled away from the execution due me. They caught me in Arras, imprisoned me, and I was to be guillotined, but Asmodeus came for me and said I had had time enough in France, that it was time to do good elsewhere. The 18th century had given way to the 19th by the time I met Colm.”
“You hadn’t met him before that?” Aimé asked.
“No,” Jean murmured. “And when I met him, I thought he was prick.”
Aimé laughed, reaching out and running his knuckles down Peadar’s back, pressing into the thickness of his fur. “You hated him?”
“No, no, but… But I was softer then, and he was harder. I had killed people, soldiers, but I was still nervous of it, and I would only ever kill in defence of others, not in defence of myself – Colm hated that. Every time someone lunged for me and I pushed away my attacker but did not put them down, he would shout for ages afterward. He would be incensed. But I had my troubles with him, also – he thought he understood the world because he took in everybody’s feelings, but it never occurred to him that there were feelings even he was not privy to, that there were notions his empathy did not extend to. And I thought he was too violent.”
“You thought he was too violent?” Aimé asked, and Jean-Pierre smiled ruefully. When Aimé put one of his feet up on the arm beside Jean, Jean cupped his ankle in one gentle hand, the one not supporting Peadar against his chest. His thumb stroked an idle pattern against Aimé through his trousers.
“He fought people in bars, in pubs, in the street,” Jean-Pierre said. “He had a short temper – not like mine, it wasn’t so explosive, but it was… He was so protective of me, of Asmodeus, of himself. If someone said the wrong thing, that was one thing, but so often he threw the first punch at only the wrong thought. It is not that he was a stereotype – it was different, culturally, one could go to blows over an insult, but Colm responded to the insults people had not given voice to yet.”
Aimé tried to imagine that, a Colm who got angry, genuinely angry, instead of just grumpy and mildly irritable, who hit you for real instead of just cuffing you gently. It was difficult to envisage – but then, so was the idea of a Jean-Pierre scared to hurt you.
“People would see us, a Frenchman frightened to fight back even when someone went to punch him, and an Irishman who would fight you if you so much as glanced at him. We were cartoons to some people – Manolis used to say so, used to laugh. Manolis would think the most vicious things just to see the way it made Colm bristle, but I think that helped him measure himself – and with Manolis, I had to be vicious, I learned to be. Not just against him, but in the Revolution, against the Turks. And even after we left, after Manolis died and we moved onward, it was often together, Colm and I. We evened out, between Greece, Haiti, Vietnam. We mellowed each other, I think. Before that, neither of us had known companionship that would not soon leave us. It was not that we were joined at the hip – Colm and I through the years have spent years at a time away from each other, even before my imprisonment, but we were bound together, linked, even when we were apart.”
Jean-Pierre inhaled, like he hadn’t meant to say so much at once, and Aimé leaned forward, pulled Jean-Pierre toward him, so that their noses brushed against each other.
“You look like you guys Fall whole, already grown up,” Aimé murmured. “But you don’t, do you? You don’t have to be children to still need growth.”
“The man you will be in thirty years is not the man you are now,” Jean-Pierre replied. “We angels are not so special in that regard.”
The door opened, and Colm stepped inside, his boots left in the porch.
“Peadar brought us a gift, Colm,” said Jean-Pierre.
“Peadar?” Colm repeated, uncomprehending, but then he saw where Aimé was pointing, and hummed, taking the pigeon up from where it was laid on the plate and testing its weight in his palm. He didn’t hold it like Jean-Pierre had, tenderly even after it was dead: he held it like he held other ingredients, bounced it in his palm, passed it between his hands. “Well, tell him thanks. This is good.”
“How are you going to cook it?” Aimé asked. He tried to imagine it, but he’d never eaten pigeon before – did it just look like a little chicken, once it was done?
“I’ll roast it,” Colm said. “I’ll show you how, if you want – I’ll tie it up, roast it on some veg.”
Aimé swallowed, feeling a kind of uncertainty gather in the back of his throat, but he nodded his head. He was surprised by how willing he felt to try it, to learn, to taste a bird the fucking cat had dragged in.
“You want me to show you how to pluck it?” Colm asked, and Aimé put his hand over his mouth, turning his head to the side. He wasn’t as squeamish as he expected to be, but the thought of pulling feathers out of the dead bird did make him abruptly nauseous, and Jean-Pierre rubbed the back and the side of his neck.
“Colm,” Jean-Pierre said.
“Sorry, sorry,” Colm said, putting the bird down. “I’ll do the prep, Aimé, don’t worry about it.” To his credit, when Aimé looked at him, he looked genuinely apologetic, and Aimé picked Peadar up, holding the big beast against his chest.
He’d never really known how to pick a cat up before meeting Peadar, but he’d observed Colm and Jean and De picking him up enough to have a handle on it: he supported his fluffy arse in the crook of his elbow and rested his thumb against Peadar’s chest, holding him steady under the armpit.
Peadar vibrated with his purrs, held in Aimé’s arms, and – although he specifically kissed him high enough to avoid the blood that lingered on his chin – Aimé brushed his lips against the top of the cat’s head.
“No more birds,” he told Peadar sternly.
Peadar looked at him with blank, uncomprehending eyes, and purred even louder.
“How the fuck does he even catch them?” he asked. “I’ve never even seen him run.”
“Some secrets aren’t for the likes of us,” said Colm mildly.
“Did the Agarwals’ cat catch it first?” Jean-Pierre asked, glancing to Colm, and Aimé felt his mouth drop open.
“Yeah,” Colm said, grinning. “It seems from his side of things like Snowman dropped it while he was walking along the fence and Peadar snatched it up. I expect he came over here so Snowman couldn’t take it back.”
“You bastard,” said Aimé, as seriously as he could, and Jean-Pierre laughed. “Why are you laughing? He’s taking credit for another man’s labour – he’s literally a fat cat, Jean!” He broke into laughter after managing to get this out, and the three of them all laughed for a moment.
“For once, I shall forgive a capitalist,” said Jean-Pierre indulgently, scratching Peadar’s ears. “But only because he has such handsome whiskers.”
Peadar fidgeted, demanding to be put down, and after Aimé set him on the floor, he went to wind around Colm’s ankles, looking up hopefully at him for food.
“Snowman Agarwal catch a lot of birds?”
“Lots of them,” Jean-Pierre said. “She belongs to their youngest daughter, Sushmita. Many complaints about her in the neighbourhood group online – rumour has it she made off with someone’s pet hamster.”
“Opened the cage and everything,” added Colm as he put a little tuna onto a dish for Peadar, and Aimé snorted.
* * *
AIMÉ
It was early in the evening, and it was incredibly warm in the kitchen. Aimé was stood at the chopping board, and he was watching very closely as Colm demonstrated how he held a knife, chopping vegetables quickly.
Jean-Pierre was asleep on the sofa under a blanket – Peadar had laid with him for a while, but had long-since toddled off home, and earlier Aimé had had to sit and withstand it as the two of them had an impassioned argument about what Christmas decorations they were going to buy.
Colm had initially said they weren’t going to have a tree, and that he hated the idea of Christmas trees, and then had revealed that he had already arranged to buy a live tree, and that when they were not using it, he would plant it on his land. They had then gotten into an impassioned argument about appropriate colour schemes – red and green versus red and gold – and when he had asked Aimé to weigh in, Aimé had gotten up to let the cat out.
It had been a relief, when Jean had nodded off and Colm had told Aimé to start cooking with him.
“You’ll be better off learning this directly from De once he’s home,” Colm said. “I learned from him, and he’s better at it than I am. He’s done proper culinary shit.”
“This is pretty culinary,” said Aimé, who had been trying to chop vegetables for a while before Colm had kept barking at him to get his thumbs out of the way of the knife, and then made Aimé watch what he was doing as he chopped them himself. Colm had washed the pigeon and stuffed it with herbs, but apparently they’d be roasting the vegetables on their own before they put the pigeon on top, because it barely took any time at all to roast. “What does it taste like?”
“The bird? Pigeon’s pretty gamey. I like it, but it’s a strong flavour.”
Colm’s phone started to ring on the counter, blasting out some folk song in Irish Aimé had never heard before, and Colm wiped off his hands, picking it up to answer. Woken up by Colm’s ringtone, Jean sleepily rose his head from where he’d been napping beside the fire, blinking confusedly at them.
Aimé expected the usual blunt, “Colm anseo,” but instead, Colm said, surprisingly warmly, “Haigh, a thaisce, an bhfuil gach ui—” A little of the colour drained out of his face, and suddenly he was speaking far more quickly, so quickly that Aimé could barely make out the individual words as Colm swept his apron off and jogged up the stairs.
“The fuck’s that about?” Aimé asked, and Jean-Pierre pushed himself off the sofa, rubbing at one of his eyes and stifling a yawn against his wrist.
“That’s Heidemarie’s ringtone. Some sort of emergency, I expect.”
“You don’t seem worried,” Aimé said.
Jean-Pierre shrugged his shoulders. “Last she called she had sprained her wrist, and was calling to say she wouldn’t be texting for a while. He acted as though she were on her deathbed.”
He picked up Colm’s knife and went back to chopping the vegetables Colm had been working on, and Aimé returned to his own work in silence, until they had a tray full of parsnips, carrots, pumpkin, asparagus, and potato to set into the big dish to cook.
For all he didn’t eat meat, it was plain Jean-Pierre knew how to season the vegetables, because he sprinkled the salt and the spices over the vegetables with ease, and drizzled garlic oil over them too.
He nodded to Aimé to set the dish into the oven, and when Colm came back downstairs, he was speaking in English again: “Yeah, whenever you can, lad. Sure, sure, that’s grand, tonight’s grand. Yeah, I’ll pack a bag. Go raibh maith agat.”
“Pack a bag?” Jean-Pierre repeated coldly, and Aimé glanced at him, surprised by how angry he looked.
“I need to go to Berlin,” Colm said. “That was Charlie, he’s gonna book a flight for me.”
“So you will not be with us for Christmas, then?” Jean-Pierre asked. “You said you would go to her in the new year.”
“I’ll be back before Christmas,” Colm said, moving past Aimé and Jean-Pierre in the kitchen to rifle through the kitchen drawer for a passport. “I just need to go back to her right now.”
“Why, what’s wrong?” Aimé asked.
“Her fucking kids,” Colm muttered. “Her daughter and his husband live in this fucking nice house, with an apartment they used to rent out to tourists. They got her to give them her fucking house back in ’03, said it was better for her to live close by, and then they rented it out for a while before selling it off. So now, Heidemarie has nowhere to go and they’re threatening to put her in a fucking home. Where are the fucking passports—”
“Next drawer up,” Aimé said when Jean-Pierre didn’t say anything, and Colm dragged open the next drawer, sweeping through Asmodeus’ neatly organised rows of passports and pulling out the right one. “Can they do that?”
“Her vision’s a little bad, it’s starting to go,” Colm muttered. “And her arthritis is pretty advanced, but she’s sharp as a fucking tack – her short term memory’s a little gone, but she hasn’t dementia, there’s no reason she should be institutionalised.”
“Perhaps if she were more pleasant to live with, they would not be so keen to send her elsewhere,” said Jean-Pierre.
It happened so quickly Aimé couldn’t have stopped it if he’d tried. He remembered it, afterward, as one extremely fast moment, all blurs of motion: Colm launched himself across the kitchen, and Aimé didn’t see his fist connect, but he heard Jean-Pierre’s cry of pain and the loud crack of his nose, and he saw the flash of light in Jean-Pierre’s eyes as he leaned heavily against the kitchen counter, blood dribbling through and over his fingers as he held his hand against his face.
Time slowed down for a few moments, as Aimé looked between Colm, his hands clenched at his sides, his shoulders drawn up, his chest rising and falling as he breathed in through his nose, his teeth gritted, and Jean-Pierre, whose eyes were alive with a sort of feral thirst for blood Aimé had been on the receiving end of.
Maybe it was his familiarity with the latter that let him grab Jean-Pierre’s wrist before he could launch himself at Colm with the kitchen knife that had found its way into his hand.
He fisted his hand in the front of Colm’s jumper and shoved him back to keep him from trying to grab at his brother, and Jean-Pierre he grabbed as hard as he dared by the hair, twisting his head back to keep him at too awkward an angle to lunge with the knife.
They were both talking rapidly and fighting against Aimé’s grip as he tried to keep them forced apart, Jean in French and Colm in Irish, and Aimé was shouting powerlessly over them, not that it made any difference.
“Calm down, calm down, fucking put the knife down, Jean, Colm, Jesus fuck, would you both—”
“Is this a bad time?” asked a smooth, sultry voice from the doorway, and both angels went abruptly quiet, turning to look at their brother.
Aimé had never been so grateful to see Asmodeus in all his life.
Leaving his trunk beside the door, Asmodeus walked easily forward, and he put pressure on the centre of Jean-Pierre’s palm: the knife clattered to the floor, and Asmodeus wrapped one arm around Jean-Pierre’s chest, pulling him back from Aimé and to the edge of the kitchen.
Aimé let Colm go with a shuddered exhalation of relief, and Colm shouldered past Aimé, didn’t even bother to say a word to De as stalked out of the kitchen and ran back up the stairs.
Aimé stood there, breathing heavily for a few moments and feeling his heart pound in his chest, and watched De turn Jean-Pierre around to look at him. Asmodeus was still in his jacket, his scarf still around his neck and his shoes still on, but he put on his reading glasses to look at Jean-Pierre’s face.
“Pinch then pain,” he warned as he put his hand on Jean-Pierre’s face, loosely gripping his nose, and Jean-Pierre didn’t pull away, but gripped Asmodeus’ wrists as Asmodeus cracked his nose back into place.
“He punched me—”
“Shht,” Asmodeus hissed, a whispered hushing noise so sharp that it made Jean flinch and go quiet, and De held up one finger, wet with Jean-Pierre’s blood as his green gaze bored into Jean’s. “Did you deserve it?”
“No, I—”
“Did he?” Asmodeus asked, turning to look at Aimé. “He said something cruel?”
“I guess,” Aimé mumbled.
“About Heidemarie?”
“Yeah.”
“Wash your face,” Asmodeus ordered Jean-Pierre crisply. “Now. Ah!” He grabbed Jean-Pierre by the back of the collar like a recalcitrant cat, and shoved him back into the kitchen where he’d been going toward the stairs. “Where I can see you, if you would, Jean.” Turning to Aimé as he wiped his own hands clean, he asked, “Alright?”
“Yeah,” Aimé said. “They didn’t hurt me – they were too busy trying to fucking kill each other.”
“They do that from time to time,” Asmodeus said, as though Jean-Pierre weren’t right next to them. “They do forgive each other. Don’t you, Jean?”
“Mm,” Jean-Pierre hummed, and went back to lie beside the fire, wrapping himself in his blanket and facing the sofa instead of them.
“You always come home to a welcome like this?” Aimé asked, and Asmodeus sighed, smiling distantly as he unwound his scarf from around his neck and slipped out of his coat, both of which Aimé took.
“Not as often as I feel like I sometimes remember, when I’m away from them,” Asmodeus said, “but far more often than I really would like.”
As Aimé hung up Asmodeus’ coat and his scarf, he looked at Asmodeus as he crouched down beside Jean-Pierre on the sofa, reaching to cup Jean-Pierre’s cheek.
“… not fair,” he caught Jean-Pierre say in a fierce whisper. “He said he was going to be here with us—”
“You should count yourself lucky, not needing to rely on Colm as Heidemarie must at her age,” Asmodeus told him, his voice resolute. “You think she likes having to call on her father like this?”
Aimé took hold of Asmodeus’ trunk, carrying it up the stairs and shouldering open Asmodeus’ bedroom door, lifting it up and setting it on top of the ottoman. When he went up the second flight of stairs, lingering in Colm’s doorway, he watched Colm rush back and forth, tossing stuff into his suitcase.
“Can I help?” Aimé asked.
“Don’t need you,” Colm said sharply.
“You wanna talk about it?”
“No.”
“Uh, what do you need done in the yard and on the allotment, while you’re gone?”
Colm froze for a second, and then glanced away from his suitcase, met Aimé’s gaze, and after a few seconds’ hesitation, he stoutly nodded his head. “I’ll send you a list,” he said, and went back to packing.
Aimé didn’t say anything, didn’t push any further.
He just stood there, until Colm said, “I knew it would go this way eventually. As soon as Angela said she should transfer the ownership to their name, I knew this would happen. I said, Heidi, let them rent it out, live them, but it doesn’t need to be in their name, you can keep the deeds, but Angela and her cunt husband, Elias, they kept going on about taxes and shit.”
“Those are your grandkids,” Aimé reminded him.
“Fuck ‘em,” Colm said. “I like Gunther – I liked Dietmar and Henning better, but I like Gunther. Angela, she’s… She’s got this bad fucking habit of logicking her way out of the inconvenience of other people’s feelings. Who does that remind you of?”
“He doesn’t use logic,” said Aimé, and Colm huffed out a derisive sound. “What are you going to do? Argue with her kids?”
“I’m gonna go, see how she is, talk to her properly. See what she wants. De can help me buy a house in Berlin for her, but she, she shouldn’t live alone, she needs the help. Jean makes it out like she’s some kind of arsehole, but she fucking isn’t – she’s got a dark sense of humour, but it isn’t nasty, isn’t insulting. She just needs help to get around.”
“She’s lucky,” Aimé said lowly. “She still has you to look out for her.”
“Fuck off with your feelings, I don’t need them right now,” Colm said. “Thanks, Aimé, really, but I need—”
“It’s okay,” Aimé said. “Text me the list.”
An hour later, when Aimé was lying back in an armchair, Jean-Pierre resting on his lap, Colm came downstairs to put the pigeon in the oven. His flight wasn’t going until past midnight.
“I’m sorry,” Jean-Pierre said.
He did not look up to say it – in fact, he didn’t even raise his head from Aimé’s chest, so that the sound came out muffled and thick.
“Me too,” was the gruff response.
Aimé glanced to Asmodeus, who had settled into the other chair, and was reading his newspaper that made Aimé’s brain hurt.
Relying on the fact that Colm couldn’t see his hands from his position, and that Jean-Pierre’s face was shoved into Aimé’s chest, Asmodeus signed, Better than usual.
Serious?
Yes.
“Is that dove?” Asmodeus asked.
Colm laughed. It was a slightly forced levity, but that he bothered to force it, Aimé thought, was a good sign.
“Why don’t you tell him, Jean?” Colm asked.
“Peadar brought us a sign of his affections,” Jean-Pierre said. His voice was quiet, muted, but it warmed as he went on.
When Asmodeus laughed, his brothers laughed with him, and Aimé laughed too.
