Page 24 of Lay It Bare

Rei

Lisa sat on the counter by the stove as Rei stirred rice in a thick liquid. Congee. There were bits of fruit in this one—chopped up bits of stewed apple. It was a step in the right direction of getting normal nutrition back into Lisa. Rei lost himself in the work.

Beside him, Lisa shifted and squeezed his crossed arms against his chest. “You’re really not afraid of Sevastyan, are you?”

Rei shook his head and reached for the salt.

“Why not?”

Rei paused, tilting his head as if listening to a voice beyond himself. Then he measured out a little of the salt into his palm and added it to the congee. “The one who’s going to fail me is me, not him.”

That didn’t satisfy Lisa. “He enslaved you.”

The statement was so far from the truth, but also so completely anathema to explain. “If I wanted out, I could leave.”

Lisa’s brows drew together. “The Merchari would never let you. You’re an inner sanctum slave. You’ve seen their faces.”

Rei grabbed a spoon to taste test the congee. “It’s still a choice. My choice. If I wanted to leave, they couldn’t keep me. Not this long. I can always choose to leave.”

Lisa’s leg twitched. “They’d find you.”

Rei went to the cabinet and grabbed two bowls. “No, they couldn’t. There’d be nothing left to find.” He set the bowls on the stove beside the pot and met Lisa’s eyes.

Lisa stared back. “Do you think he loves you?”

Rei turned away to hide his face and busied himself with ladling congee into the bowls, not meeting Lisa’s eyes. “He’d be a fool to love a slave.”

“Alexi says he loves me,” Lisa countered.

Rei laughed. He picked up both bowls, motioned Lisa to follow him out to the living room, and climbed into the couch. With his back to the cushioned arm, he settled himself down with his foot up on the cushions and handed Lisa the second bowl. He waited, pointedly, until Lisa settled facing him, his back against the opposite arm of the sofa. “Alexi loves us both the way a child loves a doll. Or an artist loves their painting.”

“You think he actually does—love us at all.” Lisa cradled his bowl in front of him, almost like a shield and studied Rei’s face. And this time, with Sevastyan off the table of conversation, Rei could meet Lisa’s eyes without concern.

“It’s not pure love.” Rei searched for the right words. “It’s not the love of one human to another.” He ran his spoon through the congee, cooling it, buying time to explain what he understood. “He’s not capable of pure love, not anymore. Everything he has now, I think he compares it to something he had once. Everything else, even you and me, for him, we’re beautiful art imitating life. I trust that we’re precious to him. But we’re not real.”

“So he slowly breaks even the things he finds precious.”

Rei grimaced and sipped white milky rice broth from the spoon. “Humans regularly break the things they think they hold precious. Alexi knows this. That’s why he recreates what he finds beautiful over and over again. It’s not just because he wants more of it. He’s afraid of being without when one instance of it breaks.”

Lisa dropped his eyes to his bowl. “I hate that I love him.”

“He took you out of the kennels.”

Lisa’s hands tightened around the bowl and the spoon. “But he didn’t give me back my humanity.”

“You’re always human. They can’t take that.” Lisa raised his eyes. Rei gazed back. “You are human, always. I was human when they left me chained to a burning bed. You were human when they locked you in with the dogs. That’s why they locked you in with the dogs. It was your humanity they wanted to cage and observe. Otherwise they would have caged another dog. What they call human out there”—Rei waved towards the window and the city beyond—“that’s a fraction of what a human can be, what humanity can be bent and broken into, or lifted up to. Everything . . .” He heaved a sigh and looked away. “Everything we’ve ever ascribed to gods or beasts is ultimately us.”

Lisa blinked. Rei waved him at his food when it appeared that his thoughts were spinning in place and his bowl forgotten.

Lisa lifted the bowl to his mouth and slurped from the edge. As he swallowed, he seemed to find his words. “So when I snarl like a dog and forget to be ashamed of not having clothes, and don’t give a fuck about saying good morning . . .”

“Still inherently human,” Rei said. “Calling someone a devil or an animal is pushing away something we’re afraid to be connected to. If we make it not human, then it can’t touch us because we’re essentially different. Except that we are not.”

“I don’t want to ‘human’ the way the Merchari makes me be a human, then.” Lisa punctuated his words with his spoon against the bottom of the bowl.

Rei dropped his eyes so Lisa wouldn’t catch the way he was looking at him with grief. The appearance of carrying pity for the other slave would only push Lisa towards anger. There was no use in it. Even if grief was different than pity, Lisa wouldn’t recognize the difference.

Sevastyan