The silence in response to my question went on a beat too long. When I turned my head to study Cormac’s expression, he grinned. “Are you asking me if I get off on pain and humiliation?”
“You could get off on inflicting it rather than receiving it.”
He looked thoughtful. “That’s true.” He moved on to the next exhibit, this one an Egyptian God with its customary head of an animal, doing a sit-up of all things.
“Well?” I said as I joined him.
He pointed at the automaton. “I always wondered how Anubis had such fantastic abs. Their exercise regime just isn’t discussed enough.” I wandered away, forcing Cormac to follow me this time. “No,” he said after we reunited. “I’m not into BDSM. I cry if I get a paper cut. I dread to think how I’d be if someone whipped me.”
“Are you more of an electricity to the testicles kind of guy?”
The pained expression on Cormac’s face was answer enough. “I think they just crawled so far back into my body that I’m now a girl.”
I laughed at the image he’d conjured up. “We’ll have to change your name. I’ll call you Camille from now on.”
Cormac tipped his head to the side to consider it. “I like it.” He stopped in front of a pair of clapping hands. “I agree with one of his quotes, though.”
“’In order to know virtue, we must first acquaint ourselves with vice?’” I suggested.
“Ha! Not that one.”
“’We are no guiltier in following the primitive impulses that govern us than is the Nile for her floods or the sea for her waves?’”
Cormac shot me a strange look. “You know an awful lot of quotes of his to say you didn’t even know he used to live here.”
“Go on, then. What quote?”
“’Either kill me or take me as I am, because I’ll be damned if I ever change.’”
“I’m beginning to see why Cillian has such an issue with you, if that’s the attitude you take.”
“You think that’s wrong?”
I was still contemplating my answer by the time we’d left the museum, crossed Paris, and were seated at a table in Le Wagon Bleu, Cormac seeming less interested in the food's quality than he was in experiencing a meal in the 1920s Orient Express carriage. I had to admit that the cherrywood paneling added a certain ambience to proceedings, but I wasn’t sure about the luggage rack above my head. Cormac hadn’t said a word when I’d ordered water compared to his large glass of red wine.
“Everyone has to have points in their life at which they change,” I mused.
“Why?”
“Because… if we didn’t, we’d be stuck acting like children.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing. Children have a lot going for them.”
“Like what?”
“They’re carefree. They seize the moment. They don’t give a damn what people think.”
“They laugh at fart jokes,” I added.
Cormac popped a fry into his mouth and chewed slowly. “I know plenty of adults who laugh at fart jokes.”
“I bet you do. I bet you see one looking back at you in the mirror every night.”
Cormac’s answer was to throw a fry at me. I caught it before it hit me and ate it. He braced his elbows on the table and sat forward. “Why have you got such a bee in your bonnet about me saying I refuse to change?”
“Bee in my bonnet?”
“Having a problem with it. Being preoccupied by it.”
