noir

Three o’clock in the morning on a Sunday. The candles have burnt down to waxy little puddles, their great white stalactites hanging off the tables. The photographs hang by their ends, held up by clothespins in the dark room, slowly developing. I stare the hands of a grandfather clock and we share an empty, vacillating boredom. My bow tie is undone, a stark black against the stiff white of my shirt. Brown paper bags hide the abomination that is prohibition whiskey smuggled from a local drugstore. I’m waiting for someone and he hasn’t made it because he’s–

– dead, killing someone, in prison, making love to someone else in his sheets or in their sheets or somewhere else, stealing jewels, overstaying a dinner party, drinking someone else’s alcohol, breaking in a gift horse, being painted in the nude, painting a nude portrait, complimenting his model, undressing his model, dressing his model, being kept hostage, keeping someone hostage, travelling, on a ship, by train, via car, or safe at home, fast asleep having forgotten this engagement–

From one of my photographs of him, Oh Sehun smiles down at me, master sleuth, beguiling thief of my wayward mind and muse of my heart.

I think of him in his indigo silk pajamas, rubbing the sleep away from his eyes, standing at the door to his bedroom, the innocent seducer. The way he smiles at me from across the bar, dressed in a dark suit, so rich it might be velvet, a drink away from a kiss in the back alley. A short drive away from an illustrious fuck in a motel room, on a bed where countless others must have had liaisons much more disappointing than ours. The way he whispers my name hard and fast in my ear, through shallow breaths, body arching off the sheets and further into my arms.

“My father,” he tells me, in the unspoken, presumed confidence of post-coital blabberings, as he traces my shoulder blades with his wicked, soft mouth and tickles my belly with his wandering, pale fingers, “He would kill you if he ever found out that the heir to his vast empire of organized crime was philandering with a no-good private investigator.”

The next morning, sharp at seven, a sobbing woman tries to knock down the door to my office. A lot of times it was about a drinking problem. A gambling son. An adulterous husband. Private eyes, no matter how experienced only get so far with the kinds of cases we get. Life would only be as interesting as my clientele. Besides the rare glimpses into some interestingly thought out frauds, the rest were the usual meat and potatoes. So very dull, but I have expenses and that is why I accept. Her first payment is a generous few hundred dollars. Thank heavens for the rich and their costly troubles.

I set her up with the landlady next door and tell her to make arrangements through her maid to skip town in case she’s next. Then I get down to business.

First, I make a phone call. And, as it turns out, that's all I have to do.

“Have you tried these?” Sehun asks me, licking some chocolate off his fingers. “They’re little cups of peanut butter covered in chocolate. Ingenious, really. Delicious, too. If I had a lifetime’s supply of these, I would need nothing else.”

He's sitting in my chair, feet propped on my desk, precariously close to my jar of tediously pickled blood samples. If I said anything, I knew he’d knock it over on purpose so I move it across the table, as far away from him, as subtly as possible. He wipes his hands on the front of his jacket. A very expensive looking jacket. “So. You need an appointment with father.

“I’m not going to ask you for that.” I shift uncomfortably, acutely aware of the straps of my suspenders cutting into my shoulders. Of my worn shoes and the general air of mustiness in my office.

“How noble.” Sehun gets to his feet, straightening the waistcoat of his three-piece pinstripe suit. He’s wearing the hat he won over a poker game and his obnoxiously skinny tie; such a sight for sore eyes. The whole lot probably cost more than I made in a year.

“You really are a terrible detective, though. Isn’t it obvious? The man owes me. I was so glad to hear his stupid wife had come to you instead of the police. Makes this whole mess a lot easier to clean up.”

I stare at him. “You have her husband.”

“He made a mistake. No one else gets away with trying to screw me.” Sehun shrugs, moving closer, brand new shoes practically squeaking against the wooden floor. Spoilt rotten, he kisses me, tasting sweet as the confectionary he’d made short work of. His sticky fingers wind in my hair and his left hand slips into my pocket to drop a small note.

“So sorry about last night,” he whispers against my mouth, smiling almost shyly. “I’ll make it up to you.”

He leaves me, standing in the middle of my office, dumbstruck. A few seconds later, he’s back, sticking his head around the door, grinning sheepishly. “I’ll send someone to get rid of the woman for you. We’ve got an expert.”

I walk back upstairs, slowly, now that I’m out of work again. Fix myself a breakfast of eggs and black coffee. Then as I chew, I play the song that was playing in the room where Sehun first spoke to me, asking, “Do you think it’s strange that sometimes, when I get tired of this music, I go to motel rooms, press my ear to the wall and listen to the sounds of the lovers next door?”


“I’ve always wanted a pink Cadillac. So if my father ever finds out about you, I’d buy one. Junmyeon, his right-hand man and the barkeep, Kyungsoo– do you remember him? They said they’d warn me if he found out.”

Sehun makes up for his unexplained absence to me with a nonsensical picnic basket. He tells me he’s been working on a crossword puzzle while Kyungsoo was trying to do the previous night’s accounts. He’s brought me a cigar, and although it’s not Cuban, it’s a luxury. He kisses my hands and presses our thighs close together as we share ham and jam sandwiches.

“Then I’d give you a list to read. I have a list of things I’d never tell you–”

“Like what?” I interrupt.

Sehun bites his lower lip. “I don’t like how you look in grey.”

“Oh.”

“White snakeskin seats.” When I look at him, confused, Sehun clarifies, “In the car. Custom made, of course. I know a guy. And we’d drive to the pier. Watch the sun set over the bridge. Glorious skyline from the west. We could break open a bottle of champagne. Kiss in the dying light, until our last breaths. It’s called carbon monoxide poisoning. Perfect and painless. It would be like falling asleep.”

I toy with his hat – it’s a really soft cream today, still pale enough to be a sharp contrast against my skin. “How would you get white snakeskin? Bleach?”

“No, there are rare albinos. Colorless down to their irises. Really quite beautiful.”

We share a moment of companionable silence and then I spoil it. “Do you really think you want to die with me?”

“I don’t want you to die alone.”


How Come You Do Me Like You Do (1924)


The barman, a handsome, full-lipped man, rolls his eyes at us when Sehun rests his elbow against the countertop and tells me to play him.

“And if you lose?” I ask, already captivated.

Sehun glances at the barman and then looks at me, lips curving upwards in a smirk. “Surprise me.”

Now the barman is staring at me, also intrigued and struggling to hide it. “And if I lose?”

“I’ll surprise you.” Sehun winks at the barman. “What do you think Kyungsoo? Am I going to lose?”

The barman snatches away our half-empty glasses. “If you’re not going to drink, get the hell out of here.”

I lose. Turns out I'm not a very good liar. Sehun sends me home alone, not one second of warmth or comfort. No goodbye kiss in the shadows beneath the awning, no hand sliding down the waistband of my trousers, not even a smile. No, quite the opposite. He has me thrown out. Smarting from the humiliation and the skin torn off my palms, I walk.

The next evening, Sehun storms into my office, locks the door behind us and presses a knife against my throat.

“Don’t.” He shoves a hand down the front of my pants, eyes glittering in the dark. “Say a word.”

He jerks me off, both of us still fully dressed and I don’t dare to take a breath, edge of steel against the tender chords of my throat. Sehun kisses me, knife still between us, metal biting the shallowest of cuts into my flesh. The heat of his palm around my cock, stroking downwards, is almost painful.

“When I first saw you,” he turns away to press his mouth to my throat and I can smell his perfume and the tobacco he’s been smoking, “it was all about how beautiful you were. I couldn’t stop looking and I just wanted to say something interesting.”

“Sehun,” I try to speak, but there’s the knife and the fact that I’m quite close to an orgasm. Instead, I run my hands up his arms until I have a firm grip on his shoulders.

“If you’re going to walk away at the first sign of trouble,” Sehun whispers, breath hot against my collar, “then let this be the last time.”

One more stroke, his thumb rough against the head and I soil my pants, hot and sticky, sharing every laborious breath with Sehun and he relents, finally, knife slipping from his hands. When I kiss him, he kisses back, the softest plunder, tasting like bitter oranges. And he nods, sweaty, hangdog and boneless, when I say, “You want a lot.”

"I know you don't love me." Sehun trembles as he sinks into me. "But you've got to understand that I need more than just romance."


When in the summer, I begin to learn the alphabet along the hollow of his spine, where the sweat collects in little puddles, like rainwater in forgotten cups, Sehun is still young – nineteen. Over the course of three nights, I find that the arch of his back is a language of its own, so dreadfully beautiful, and once I put my lips to skin, it is seared in my memory. And now that things have changed, taken a turn for the definite, a spiraling track winding inwards, a self-destructive circle – the pin scratching out a forgettable tune, vinyl burning, melting and the song comes to an end and with it, so does the dance – I find that what I miss the most is the sight of him, shirtless in the pale dawn, lighting a cigarette by the window as the dewdrops crawled down the glass.

The fifth time we meet, there has been a death in the vicinity of the bubbles that are our lives and we are too tired to make love or conversation. Through the thin walls we listen to the sound of lovers in other rooms undressing each other. The door is wide open and I know that he’s mine.