A Boy Who Came In from the Cold Ch. 11

He heard Ant sit up as he rummaged around for his bags and his guitar case and the other man sounded a little perplexed as he asked; "What are you doing?"

"What I should have done from the start," Rayne Wilde told him bitterly, and tumbled out into the corridor with his meagre belongings before his tears blinded him.

Ant caught his shoulders and tried to turn him around and Rayne pushed him away furiously.

"Leave me alone!" he yelped. "You fuckin' said it, didn't you? You're better off without me. You believe it. Everyone believes it, so it must be true! Now back off!"

"I 'don't' believe it," Ant said to him a little more forcefully.

"You think I'm a tart, and you're right!" Rayne caught his breath and looked down so that his hair screened his ashen face and hid his red-rimmed eyes. "I'm a dirty, cheap little slut! It's true! I'd have let him do it, but he was too much of a fuckin' coward to take me on in your bed! So tell me to fuck off! Slap me; tell me I'm cheap. Whatever you want! Do it!"

The murmur of conversation in the background told them both that they suddenly had an audience. Rayne held his ground, sniffing back the tears, feeling as if his legs would give in at any moment. Morphine, for sure! It was still in his system. He swayed dangerously and took a step back to lean against the wall before he dropped.

"I want to know why you're doing this?" Ant said quietly. "I want to understand. Do you imagine that I turned the Cap upside down looking for you the other day just to let you walk away from me? Do you think I sat with you for three fucking days just to keep his hands off you? I'm not an animal, Rayne. I have feelings, you know!"

The younger man shook his head slowly. He felt suddenly very hot and very unsteady. This was not good. Not good at all.

"I know you do," he answered almost inaudibly, because it was easier than arguing. He felt sick. "I know you have feelings. I know you're a decent person. I know it. I'm just... I'm 'not'!"

"Are you in love with 'him', is that it?" Ant wanted to know.

Rayne closed his eyes and shook his head again.

"That's not it."

"You want to be with him though?"

Ant was persistent and Rayne just wished he would drop the subject. All he wanted was to lie down and never get up again.

"No-o. I want you 'both' to leave me alone," he retorted through gritted teeth. His fingers were curled tightly around the handle of his bag and the strap of his guitar case. The nails dug into his palms and he squeezed harder, concentrating on the pain. It cleared his head a little. "Please," he implored quietly. "Please let this go. I'll leave. I'll pay you back. I'll do whatever you want, just let it go."

For a little while no one spoke or moved and he was on the verge of just turning and walking out, through the Day Room, off the boat, away. He wondered if anyone would actually bother to stop him, then wondered if it would matter to him if they didn't. Someone took hold of his arm then and steered him in the opposite direction. Rayne started to resist then realised that the person propelling him back through the boat, past the bedroom he had so recently vacated and into one he had never yet seen, up in the prow of the vessel, was Daniel Leland.

Leland waved aside the protests from Rayne and from Ant as he firmly guided the young man into his bedroom and pushed him towards the bed, closing the door behind him. He turned a key in the lock and folded his arms as Rayne stared at him in bewilderment.

"What...?"

"Shhh," the old man exhaled at once. "Not a word. I don't want to hear it. I'm going to talk and you're going to listen. Oh for goodness' sake, sit down before you fall down!"

Rayne let his knees buckle and was grateful when the comfortable king-size bed was near enough to catch him. His fingers dropped the bags he had been clutching to the thick, white rug underfoot. The whole room was decorated in white and varnished oak. The bed was diamond shaped and built right into the prow with long, snow-white curtained windows on either side. The cabinets built into the walls around him were all the same polished wood as the window ledges and the bedframe. Several sepia toned pictures of muscular, nude men hung on the otherwise unadorned walls. He blinked at them wearily, half aware that the subject was the same in each, an incredibly handsome and very well endowed blond. In more than one photo he was almost fully erect. Rayne took a deep breath; Patrick McNamara had serious competition after all.

"You like those, do you?" Leland asked, his tone mellowing slightly as he followed Rayne's eyes.

Rayne managed a weak smile and asked; "Is he one of your... performers?"

His host only laughed and shook his snowy mane for a moment.

"No, Rayne," he answered at last. "He's much closer to us than that. 'Much' closer!"

He walked to one of the cabinets then and removed his sarong, reaching for a long, black satin dressing gown that was hanging from the door there. As he did so, Rayne realised three things; firstly that he had never seen Leland laugh; secondly that he had never seen the man completely naked and third and finally that the man in the photographs was standing bare feet away from him. For a few moments, 'completely' bare!

"Jesus!" he exhaled, his jaw sagging at the brief flash of flesh before Daniel Leland pulled on his gown. "And I thought you had an inferiority complex!"

The old man looked back at him with a curious twinkle in his silver eyes.

"You did, did you? I hope you no longer believe so." He nodded towards the nearest of the prints. "They were taken when I was about twenty three years old. Of course these days they are considered quite tame but in those days it was rather scandalous to see a man naked, let alone... engorged."

His young guest put a hand to his mouth to hide the smile. He felt awkward around Leland, conscious that he was not the old filmmaker's favourite person in the world right now, and he did not want to do anything that would encourage Daniel to throw him physically into the Mediterranean.

"You were a porn model?" he asked instead.

"I was a professional artist and I modelled to make a little extra money. A client requested these pictures and paid me handsomely and I began to understand that there was a rich living to be made by providing such images," Leland came to the bed and sat down beside him, looking solemnly at Rayne. "You are impossibly unhappy here, aren't you?"

The question wrong footed him and Rayne opened his mouth twice to give a flippant response before he said; "I've messed up, haven't I?"

A nod greeted this acknowledgement. Daniel sighed gravely.

"You have caused me more trouble than all of my other actors put together," he remarked. "I tolerate you because Ant is taken with you, even though I disapprove of his relationship with you. Also..." he added, almost as an afterthought; "...because you 'are' incredibly pretty."

A tanned weathered hand cupped Rayne's cheek and caressed it with a touch like old parchment. He did nothing more, just stroked the boy's face and gazed searchingly into his wide green eyes. Rayne sat like a statue, hardly daring to breathe, let alone move. This was beyond unexpected, it was almost insane. Daniel Leland had to be nearly eighty!

"Wh... what do you want?" he whispered at last, still paralysed by that steady look and careful touch.

"Not what you think," Leland said almost at once.

"What do I think?" Rayne was still staring at him like a kitten transfixed by a cobra.

Daniel Leland sat back and drew his hand away with a knowing smile. He shook his head gravely.

"What would I have to offer to make you do what you 'think' I want to do with you?" he laughed softly and humourlessly. "I don't make bargains with the Devil's kin. I want only two things of you, Rayne Wilde. I want to get this thrice damned movie made before McNamara starts to bill me for wasting his time, and when it's in the can I want you gone from here. I want you to leave Anthony alone. I'll give you enough money to take you back to London or to any city in Europe in comfort. What you do once you get there is up to you, so long as you don't go looking for him and you don't hurt him again." He took a long, purposeful breath and exhaled slowly. "Do you understand?"

Rayne just blinked at him. After a moment he swallowed again.

"You're trying to buy me off?"

"No," Leland corrected. "I'm offering you a small incentive to do the right thing. Believe me, if you don't accept my offer then I can find infinitely less expensive ways to get rid of you."

"I don't get it," Rayne whispered, shaking his head. "I know I'm not exactly Miss Perfect but why the fuck would you care? Do you think he'll be happy if I disappear?"

"Anthony and I go back a long way," the older man replied more firmly. "He is, in some respects, like a son to me. And I take his welfare seriously. I think that you are not good for him, Rayne."

His young companion let out a short, whistling breath. For a moment he was simply stunned. He had been told a good many things that franked his low sense of self-esteem in the past but no one had ever given him money to just fuck off out of someone's life. At first he was not sure if he was angry or just so shocked that he wanted to laugh.

"What happens if I won't do it?" he perversely wanted to know.

"The Mediterranean is a big enough sea to support one more food source," Daniel Leland said, perfectly straight faced. "I've heard there are even sharks this far north in the summer."

"You wouldn't dare!" Rayne was halfway to his feet when that lean, tanned hand caught him in a grip like a fighter's.

"How determined are you to find out?" Silver grey eyes outstared him and he wrestled free, staggering back from the bed in genuine astonishment now.

"You're a fuckin' lunatic!"

"And you're a fucked up little drug addict. I won't put up with you messing my friends around, Rayne Wilde. You can get clean or you can get lost. I don't care which." Leland narrowed his eyes seriously. "The latter choice would be a waste, I confess, but I will not pander to you if you decide against the former. Looks are everything in this business and yours won't last if you persist with this way of life."

Rayne swallowed hard, blinking back the hot, tingling threat of tears again. He backed up as far as the wall then let himself sink down it until he was sitting on the floor with his forehead against his knees. The flood came then and he could not stop it, even though he told himself that Leland would not be impressed. He was quite right about that.

The old man let him cry himself out and only when he was panting and retching quietly with his head in his arms, did he rise and catch hold of Rayne's hands, pulling him to his feet and steering him back to the bed. Daniel gently tumbled him onto the duvet and fetched a soft, pale throw, which he wrapped around the boy.

"I don't want to know what that was for," he said gravely at last. "If you want me to feel sorry for you, then you're out of luck. Pull yourself together. I don't expect to see rings around your eyes in the morning. If you look less than one hundred percent for the cameras I'll find someone else to play your part. Pretty boys are ten a penny down here in the summer, Rayne Wilde."

"Why don't you just find someone else?" Rayne croaked as he felt the old man rise and heard him head back towards the door.

For a little while there was just a contemplative silence, then Daniel Leland murmured; "A very good question, that."

The door shushed open and clicked shut, and he was gone. Rayne sank back onto the bed and put both hands over his face with a little groan of dismay.

END OF PART ELEVEN