The room was flooded more aggressively with orange light, and while Victor felt strongly opposed he knew better than to argue with his roommate. Reggie was bold, and while his actions were never quite appreciated, Victor had to admit that he was curious as well. Perhaps there could be some shadow of innocence, being as though he wasn't the one who opened the letter himself. He could blame it all on Reggie if there was noticeable damage.
"This is wrong," Victor complained, though he stayed still, frozen in the shock of it all.
"It's probably a work colleague, or some musty old professor at another college who recently died," Reggie suspected. "Don't get your hopes up, Victor. He's a calculus professor, how interesting could his life possibly be?"
"I suppose we're about to find out," Victor admitted, curling into a ball on the floor and wincing as his tailbone dug into the hardwood. Nevertheless he was not motivated enough to move, worried that any creak of the floors under his feet would disrupt his roommate as he began to read.
"Dear John," Reginald began, putting on a mockingly stuffy voice to mimic what he imagined a calculus professor would sound like, "I was not surprised to receive this letter again in my mailbox. The past four I have sent have been rejected, though I still have not been informed of your new address. Have you moved, and forgot to mention it? Have you died, and word had not yet gotten my way? Or have you finally given up on me, and continually send these letters back to the post office in rejection?"
"Already this feels personal," Victor admitted quickly, crippled by curiosity but equally afraid of the consequences of continuing. Professor Holmes seemed like a good man, but even good men snap when their privacy was invaded. Would he find out, with devastating consequences? "We shouldn't read any more."
"My leg is looking worse. The wound is turning purple underneath your stiches, and it hurts to the touch. I am going to the doctor in a couple of days, though I expect bad news. You always said I was at risk of infection, and I fear my body has finally given in. It has stopped fighting. If I count back the days, I believe my body and my heart have given up at the same time. The fight was lost when the first letter returned, and ever since then my determination withers. My will to fight against what was lost so many years before.
I would do nothing different, of course. I would not turn the clock back and stand some footsteps farther to my left, or to my right, there on that river bank. I do not blame the shooter; I do not hate the Germans. In fact I treasure the man who put a bullet in my leg, because he granted me the opportunity to meet you. John, I would do it all again. I would stand where I was; wait where I did, wait for the thing to rip through me. If only to then replay the aftermath, and feel..." Reggie's eyes widened, and he looked to Victor in amazement, his jaw nearly clattering to his chest in amazement. "And feel your body on top of mine once more!" The emphasis was added by the reader, as his disbelief couldn't be processed by the punctuation that was left on the page.
"That's enough!" Victor exclaimed, rising to his feet in stark denial but doing nothing to move forward, his entire body seizing with embarrassment and his entire mind trembling to hear what was left on the page.
"I should like to feel your breath on my neck again, your morphine needle in my arm, and your knife tearing open my trousers so as to push hard upon the wound. I could hardly feel pain that day, John...and if I were to see you again I would TEAR OPEN THE STICHES JUST TO FEEL IT AGAIN!"
"Reginald, what on earth are you reading! You're making this up!"
"Please, John, please let me know you're okay. Please let me know if you're alive. Respond to me, John. You're all I have left. I wouldn't want you to be just a memory, or just a concept." Reginald trembled with his enthusiasm, "Signed with fierce love, and worse longing...Sherlock Holmes."
"Burn it," Victor decided at last, leaping towards the bed and ripping the letter from Reginald's outstretched hands. Well of course he did nothing to destroy the letter, instead he held it closer to his eyes, squinting at the handwriting, trying to make sure it wasn't so joke placed into his bag by a pranking student trying to ruin the life of some poor crippled professor. "If we burn it we could say we never saw it, if we...oh God Reggie what the hell am I supposed to do now?"
"He's a raging homosexual!" Reginald announced, perhaps too loudly for the thickness of the walls. Victor could hardly swallow, he could hardly breathe. He read over the writing, attempting to find some deviations from what Reggie had read and what Professor Holmes had wrote some time ago. It was...it was verbatim. For once Reggie wasn't lying, he wasn't making things up. Oh god...oh god.
"I'll have to move away. I'll have to change my name, I'll have to be...be a sociology major in my next life."
"What the hell are you so afraid of?" Reggie teased, nearly doubling over with laughter as he held the envelope to his chest, messaging the love into his own shirt in the hopes that poor Professor Holmes would feel something of a pleasure from it.
"How am I supposed to look him in the eyes again? How am I to take anything he says seriously now that I know...now that I know he gets off on the stitches in his leg?"
"Everyone's got their own perversions, Victor. Doesn't make him a criminal."
"It makes him damn strange!" Victor growled. "Oh my God, and I'm supposed to sit in the same room as him? What if he...what if..."
"Victor, this isn't bad for you at all. This is good, this is...this is leverage." Reggie lunged closer, grabbing his roommate by the shoulder and bringing his face closer in the lamp light, his pupils dilated and his mind foggy with excitement and marijuana. "You won't have to lift a finger for the rest of the semester. He'll do your tests for you, do your homework for you, pass you with flying colors, hell, he'll graduate you early and name you president."
"You're saying blackmail?" Victor insisted, paralyzed with the suggestion.
"I'm saying...I'm saying that this is illegal," Reggie agreed. "What we just read was illegal."
"It might not have been, I mean, you might have read it out of context. Anything you say sounds sexual, he might have meant something entirely different."
"Everything I say?" Reggie blinked.
"I mean, look. Feel your body on top of mine. That could mean...that could mean maybe he likes to cuddle. It doesn't mean it's a romantic thing."
"And what about the want to get his trousers cut open with a knife?"
"A medical necessity."
"And the obsession with the pain, to make this poor John fellow sew him up again? Come on now, Victor...he's crazy."
"He's obviously not...not well."
"Why would he even send this in the mail, if he knew they were getting rejected? Do you think he gets some pleasure in that, too? Do you think as he writes them he's..."
"Reginald, I don't want to hear your theories. For God's sake he's eighty years old and he's my professor."
"Professors are humans to!"
"I wish to GOD that they weren't!" Victor let the letter fall to the bed, curling himself into a defeated ball and feeling tears well up in his eyes. Just when he thought he had something down, just when he thought he was about to get it all right. This just had to happen, didn't it? A professor who cared about his success, one who would take the time to help...and now Victor couldn't get within fifteen feet of the man without thinking about his sexual habits, his perversions, his past.
"I think I'm going to throw up," Victor admitted horribly. "I honestly think..." the boy jumped from the bed in a mad panic, throwing open the window like a man possessed and sticking his head out towards the ground, making it just in time before his stomach loosed itself, his mouth opening in raw panic and letting the remains of his half-digested dinner drip down the bricks and into the landscaping some three stories below.
"We probably could've handled this much better if we were sober," Reggie predicted, sighing to himself as he leaned back upon the bed, watching as Victor coughed and spit the last of his nervous breakdown.
"What if he notices it's gone from his desk?" Victor whispered, half to his roommate and half to the dark trees below. "What if he realizes it's gone!"
"Then he'll know immediately it was you," Reggie shrugged. Victor clutched the windowsill, his stomach releasing again if only to produce clumps of mucus, the remnants of a now empty stomach which could still hardly handle itself. The panic of it all was nearly killing him.
"I'm kidding, Victor. He's first suspect himself of misplacing it. Then he'll think the housekeepers took it, or threw it out by accident. The only way he'll ever know it was you is if you tell him, or if you change."
"If I change?" Victor whispered, finally spitting up what he believed to be the last of his sudden sickness and grabbing for a tissue from the box on his bedside table, wiping his mouth and carelessly letting that flutter out the window to join the rest of his vomit.
"If you give it away. He'll suspect you if you show any signs that you think differently of him. If you want to hide that you know anything, you'll have to keep your mouth shut. But more importantly, Victor...you have to keep to your established habits."
"You're saying...you're saying I should still go to him for homework help?"
"If you suddenly stop caring about homework within the same time frame he lost his erotic letter, he'll suspect a connection. But if you treat him the same,"
"Don't call it erotic, for God's sake!" Victor wailed, grabbing at his cheeks and returning to his spot on Reginald's bed, happy for the excuse to be close to him.
"Well it is! It is. But like I was saying, you have to treat him the same. No blushing. No giggling. No avoiding eye contact. If you can do that, it's like this never happened. You'll have some insight into his personal life, but that's all anyone has to know. That's all that has to become of it. He'll think it ended up in the trash, he'll be worried but not too badly, and he'll never know that you know. And thus there will be no consequences."
"Reggie, I could hardly keep from blushing in anatomy class, how am I supposed to look this man in the eyes again and not immediately think of his...how did he phrase it?" Victor raised the letter once more. "Of his fierce love and worse longing..." Victor shook his head in catastrophe, liking his plan of escaping the country much better than whatever genius plans Reggie was considering.
"Or perhaps you can start your next meeting by getting on equal footing. Start with...with good afternoon professor. I just wanted you to know that I've peed my bed twice since I've been in college, I smoke weed on the weekends, and I'm incredibly aroused by..." Reggie blinked. "Well, fill in the blank Victor. What's embarrassing about your sexual habits?"
"That's a terrible idea, and less of his business than it is yours!"
"Well if you're distraught with what you know, make him the same way. Then you can follow up with, oh by the way, I know you want a man to tear open your leg and lick inside the wound."
"REGINALD!"
"I'm just...I'm just using context clues!" Reggie laughed, though for his comments he received a rather vicious smack from the closest weapon Victor could find available. It was Reggie's pillow, a relatively harmless weapon, and the boy was lucky for it. The strength Victor put behind the swing would have been enough to draw blood had there been anything more harmful than a bundle of feathers.
"I think I'll just drop the class," Victor decided at last. "My father would understand if I explained it to him, and since it's a prerequisite I suppose I can just change my major to something that doesn't need calculus. Well, that's actually a good thing! I'll be an English major like you!"
"If you tell your father he'll call the police."
"It's not...well it's not as illegal as it used to be. They won't arrest the man."
"Not for the crimes of being weird, but they might if they suspected any foul play with that letter. What if they think he put it in your backpack on purpose? What if they think he'll get pleasure knowing that you read it? What if...wait, what if that's true?"
"I have never hated you more."
"Preying on students like that is a capital offense. I mean, you're what, nineteen? So you're an adult, but still...there's a power difference there."
"Fine, fine, I won't tell my father. I don't want Professor Holmes fired over something like this. Or arrested. He's a good man, he doesn't deserve that."
"Not so good a man, it would seem. He's got a naughty side."
"Reginald, I might have to murder you with this pillow next. Can you please, please stop making this worse?"
"Like I said, if I was sober I think I'd handle this a lot better," Reggie merely chuckled, as if he could hardly tell what was a joke and what was serious.
"Well then we won't discuss it the rest of the night. Not until we've slept it off, and we've got clear heads to think about what we'll do."
"What you'll do, dear friend. This isn't my problem at all."
"Fine, yes. What I'll do."
"Sounds like a fair arrangement," Reggie agreed. Victor looked back to the letter on the bed, detesting the familiarity with the handwriting, the thing seemingly written by the same pen that had been used to coach him along with his math exam.
"Can you please put it away? In the envelope, and hide it somewhere. I don't want to touch it, nor do I want to see it until I'm in the right head space."
"Fair enough," Reggie agreed, shoving the letter a bit roughly into the envelope.
"Be careful not to crease it!" Victor exclaimed, wincing to see the marks of misuse erupt along the folds.
"Go to bed, Victor. Sleep it off," Reggie suggested, holding the letter in one hand and clapping his roommate on the shoulder with the other. He let his hand linger there, linger just a moment longer than he otherwise would've, his fingers digging slightly into Victor's shoulder blade and messaging it for just a moment of good measure. It did nothing to calm Victor's brain, nor his heart. Though even if Reggie would have wanted something from the night, Victor could hardly hope to oblige. His mouth tasted like vomit and his stomach had turned to worms, and he feared that even a kiss that he had been wanting for so long would be turned to something horrible, with an unfamiliar pair of lips only reminding him of his professor's letter. He could hardly separate his own feelings of love with that of pure and outrageous disgust. He couldn't handle this on a mind that was lost high in the sky. He couldn't handle this without going through years of therapy, though it would seem he ought to start by sobering up.
Sliding off the bed, Victor wandered towards his side of the room, wondering if it might be beneficial to brush his teeth before cuddling under his blankets. In the end he decided against it, worried to see anyone he knew in the hallway and immediately admitting to what he had seen. He felt that even if he didn't put it into words he would reveal it in his face, in his eyes, in his horror. It was better to hide himself for the time being, until his blood and chemicals corrected themselves to a digestible level. Until he could look at the world and see the best in it, until he could rearrange his memories piece by piece and see the same man, not a dark, horrible stain sitting in a desk chair, old and broken, old and miserable...old and excitable. Old and loving. Old and longing. Oh god, oh god...