you're too young & eager to love

And here, for your satisfaction, a Laith origin story of sorts.



“Love must be vaster than my smiles or touch,
For brave men died and empires rose and fell
For love: girls followed boys to foreign lands
And men have followed women into Hell.”
Neil Gaiman




His mother, Brielle, walks with a cane, a three foot walking stick of solid wood ending with a silver handle that curves into a hook. It’s an elegant design even though her walk is inelegant in her old age. A slow shuffle, her steps drag across the floor followed by the telltale thump of the cane. There’s a certain rhythm, a kind of cadence, to her gait, one Laith has become accustomed to and dislikes as much as he finds comforting. It’s the same paradoxical feeling he has to her entire presence. Maybe this is in part because of how Brielle likes to knock her cane against his legs, his ankles, the tops of his feet, when she finds him too close, which seems to be most of the time. Or how she’s recently created a habit of hitting her walls with the damned thing, beating out a wordless cry of his name to summon him in the middle of the night or the early hours of the morning. Her old hands may be twisted and gnarled with arthritis and her eyes milky with cataracts, but Laith knows that she still maintains all the bite of a venomous copperhead. She sits at the corner of the shop with a faded quilt over her knees and helps take orders from the few women and men who come with simple requests: a hemming of their shawls, a darning of their socks, a tailoring of their sleeves. When she is not in the shop, she sits by the fire in their single bedroom above the store, a cup of lukewarm tea trembling between her hands. But Laith knows: her lack of mobility has hardly weakened her wrath, and whenever she opens her mouth, it is to issue some complaint, some request, some reprimand.

He is a good son, he tells himself, when her cane collides with his ankle. It becomes his mantra. He reminds himself hourly, but especially when she complains, and Brielle is always complaining. His posture is one of her favorite subjects to rebuke. She critiques his hunched shoulders, how he hides his height, is uncomfortable with it. She disapproves of how he speaks, his reedy way of articulating, the Linemell twang of his consonants. Even sometimes his labored breathing is insufferable to her. He is a good son, he tells himself, passively accepting each criticism. Rather than defend himself or respond with some disapproval of her own habits, Laith chooses to remember when he was younger and how she would sit beside his bed on the many days he was sick and cool his fevered brow with a damp cloth. If she now laments spending her days and hours being catered to by her only son who is without a wife or child, then Laith wonders if she resented his youth when their roles were reversed.

“Laith?” she croaks, her eyes squinting through the dim room of their family alterations shop.

“Here, mother,” he responds, his voice tired and worn thin from the long hours of the day, from the monotony, from the plainness of his life that he’s scratched tooth and nail to have.

“What are you doing over there?”

“Balancing the books. Like every night.”

“Books and numbers. Numbers and books. That is all you do. When are you going to bring me a grandchild?”

“I need to find a wife first,” he murmurs, “and money to feed those mouths.”

“What was that? I can’t hear you when you mumble. No woman wants a mumbler.”

If she had been younger, he thinks she might have wrapped his knuckles with a ruler, the way the nuns had at his grade school. Instead, he swipes a hand back through his thinning air and stifles a sigh.

“Let me get you some more tea, mother,” he says, pushing back his chair and heading to warm the kettle over the stove. “Your cup must be cold.”

Laith sees his reflection, warped and distorted, in the shiny metal of the kettle. There seems to be new wrinkles around his eyes each day, and his brassy hair recedes further every month, creating a widow’s peak. His eyes are the only fine feature about him, their blueness the color of cornflower, but he’s never known eyes to warrant a woman overlooking poverty, poor health, and pitifulness.






Sometimes he walks at night, after he’s tucked his mother into bed for the evening. He slinks out of their house as quietly as a churchmouse, his ears pricked for the rough croak of his mother’s tremulous voice calling his name from above. He still feels a child beneath her roof and he imagines he always will until she dies, so even this small act of stretching his legs after a tiresome day feels a rebellion. He would not admit it, but he hopes more and more often that the day will come where she does not wake in the morning, her breath fetid from sleep, and cry his name. Her submission to silence would be a blessing, a freedom.

There’s a pub a few blocks away. It’s dark-lit and full of sweet-smelling smoke. It helps him forget, temporarily, the wretched bleakness of his life. The women there are available by the hour, and the men speak lewd jokes from tobacco-stained mouths while drinking cheap pints of pale ale. Laith does not seem out of place when he sits at the bar, his lengthy body folding in on itself. He tucks his face into his collar and his shoulders lift and curve until he feels hidden within the darkness, embraced by it.

He orders one pint, but he doesn’t talk to the others, although he listens to their easy banter with an almost ravenous envy. He chews on the inside of his thumb and inevitably leaves with a line of empty glasses left behind him on the counter. Besides the bartender, nobody really notices him, and even the bartender forgets his face once a new patron takes his seat.

Once or twice, he’s come home to the sound of Brielle’s cane knocking against the bedroom wall, and he wonders how long she’s been calling for him. If her confusion makes her continue or if it’s her stubborn willfulness.

He counts the thuds like they’re heartbeats. He counts until fifty, and then he ascends the stairs.






His father had been a designer with strong and skillful fingers. Before Linemell, he had run a successful shop in the neighboring rural town where their clients were simple people but frequent patrons and good-mannered. Brielle had been a modiste then too, and so his early childhood had consisted of happier days. His belly was fuller, his fevers less frequent, and it wasn’t long before both of his parents taught him the way of the needle and thread.

Laith developed a talent for the family business by his teenage years. He was fifteen when his father moved them to the city, hopeful of purchasing a shop near the bustling center of Linemell. He’d wanted to expand his business, appeal to a higher quality of customer, but city life chipped away at Laith’s father quicker than it did either him or his mother. His father got lost in his cups and in debt until one evening he simply did not return.

Brielle managed the business until her arthritis and failing eyesight took their toll. By then, she was less a dressmaker and more a seamstress. They never did acquire enough money to purchase one of the finer shops near Oxford; they spent their years in the damp muck of Linemell’s cheaper, impoverished streets. If his father had been destroyed by the city, then Laith was weakened by it. His lungs revolted against the stink of the factory smog and the unclean, unsavory citizens seemed to perpetuate his health problems, as though their germs were easily spread and attracted to him. He could still sew, mend, create, but the process became more and more daunting, and none of his designs ever flourished the way he thought they would.

He feels part of the architecture of Linemell by the time he reaches forty. His bones ache and his fingers throb from the prick of the needle; his eyes are strained from working the sewing machine for long hours at the time. He wants so much, but even that longing is starting to subside into a dull ache, a reminder of his failure rather than his opportunity, his hope.






Laith always takes the long way home from the pub, the streets winding through muddy paths that dirty his worn boots. On Wednesdays, he stops in front of an old Victorian. It’s out of place for this neighborhood, stretching back rather than across the property, and isolated from the derelict row houses and smaller apartment buildings. It has its own small plot of land tucked at the end of the street of mostly abandoned homes, but its wide covered porch sags from years of disrepair and neglect and the paint peels from the siding in discolored strips. It reminds him of the haunted houses he’s read in novels, but that isn’t why he stops in front of it.

There’s a lit window on the top floor, and he can see a silhouette behind it, usually around ten. Laith has no idea whom the silhouette belongs to, but the body is long and nubile and the hair falls over the shoulders in seemingly thick waves. The woman stands at the window for five minutes at most, backlit by what Laith imagines is a chandelier, and brushes her hair. Sometimes she hums, and Laith thinks he knows that song on the woman’s lips. It’s from his childhood, something his mother used to murmur to him, off-key and gentle, when he woke in the night from terrible dreams and needed soothing. He thinks of who she is, but it doesn’t really matter because he’s already fashioned her into reality; he’s given her shape, form, purpose. In his mind’s eye, she is blonde with blue eyes like his. She is pale-lipped, pink like the buds of Eden roses, and spends her days at Ravenstone, helping the faithful Sisters with their charity work. She smells of clean cotton and citrus, and her name is synonymous with the sky. When Laith wraps his bony fingers around the wrought iron of her front gate, he imagines wrapping them around her throat.

He is achingly hard each time she turns away, each time her bedroom grows dark. He’s so hard that he can never wait until he gets home but instead, feverishly, frantically, he fists himself there in her front yard, his body pressed against her gate. It never takes long, just a few hard pulls and then he’s jerking into his palm, his fingers sticky with his own thin seed. He’s breathless by the end, flushed red from a mix of shame and desire and nerves.

These Wednesday nights have become the pinnacle of his weeks. They are what he longs for, what keeps him motivated throughout the tedious days. He always wants the woman to stay at her window longer than she does, and he thinks sometimes that she will notice him down below and be compelled to descend to the front door and open it wide for him, an invitation built on immediate mutual understanding. She would be nervous, cautious, but not distrustful. She would see him for what he is, and he would fall into her arms with all the eagerness of a hungry child.

When Laith creeps into his cold house and up the worn stairs, he smells of the sewery Linemell streets and inevitably feels sickly. His humiliation eats away at his dreams within the amount of time it takes to leave the old Victorian and climb the steps from the shop to his room, the makeshift ensuite off of his mother’s main room consisting of his cot, which takes up the majority of the space, while a thin blanket acts as poor curtain dividing his and Brielle’s territories. He feels foolish and sordid, and he’s always chilled and sore-boned on Thursday mornings. His mother is more cantankerous these mornings too, as though she has somehow found out his tawdry activities and is disappointed by his urges, his secrecy, his innate vileness, but she never speaks a word. She watches him without watching him, her milky eyes as sour-white as corpse-skin, and complains about the chill in the house while he swears to himself that next week will be different, next week he will not visit the Victorian and his siren will not stand at the window and sing.





Hadassa comes into his life on a mundane evening. He does not recognize her for the eclipse that she is on the first time he meets her, but he knows, immediately, that she is something new. She is not his mystery woman, the sky-named beauty of his imagination, yet she intrigues him. She smells of lilac and blackberries and is copper-skinned, her eyes too dark to really be brown but, somehow, full of molten warmth. When she steps into the shop, he is grateful his mother has retired early, but he cannot say why.

“Good evening,” he says, rising from behind the counter and straightening his tweed jacket.

“You are the tailor, yes? Hard to find.”

Laith lifts one of his thin eyebrows. He is not aware of ever needing to be found, not by anyone other than the locals within a three mile radius, and this woman with her expensive rings and regal bearing is not a local. “This is my shop, yes ma’am. How may I help?”

“I hear you’re quite the talent with a needle and take requests.”

“Um, yes, that is true...”

His confusion must be noticeable, but he tries to hide it. His designs have been criticized throughout Linemell, and no shop other than his own will use his ideas. He has made countless treasures though few others admire them as he does. They line his shop, but they do not sell. His customers arrive purely for the mending and more so due to his convenient location near the food markets or because of their relationship with his mother from when she had still been able to work. They do not come for his originals or for commissions because Linemell’s loftier society contains their own seamstresses and tailors and dressmakers in their gilded, brightly lit shops along the Oxford.

“My manservant recommended your shop just this week after he purchased one of your dinner jackets.”

“Ah,” he says, as though this explains everything when, in reality, he cannot remember selling a dinner jacket within the last six months. Perhaps, he thinks, the woman has confused his shop for another, but he does not correct her. If she is here, then she could presumably buy a piece, and he needs the money to pay off this month’s mortgage.

Laith steps around the counter slowly. He lifts his arm to gesture towards the center of the shop where he has displayed his most recent creations, but he hunches suddenly, racked with coughs that shake his entire chest. His left hand curls into a fist as the fire rages down his throat and his lungs scream for oxygen. He half turns from the woman and when the coughing finally subsides he is red-faced, his eyes tear-rimmed.

“My apologies,” he wheezes softly, still struggling for breath.

The woman’s eyes appraise him swiftly, curiously. “Are you dying?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“This city seems perpetually overrun with sickness. So many are dying, it seems. Are you one of them?”

He flusters, an embarrassed, girlish pink rising to his already flushed cheeks. “I hope not, ma’am.” It’s a feeble attempt at humor because the words come out half-gasped, caught in another insufferable cough. Laith presses his handkerchief to his mouth and turns his head away from her once more.

“There are no medicines?” the woman asks, unphased. Her eyes are not unkind but they’re dark as the night and the focus of them on him makes his already overheated body prickle in sweat. He tugs at his collar, fumbling with the top button to loosen the stiff material.

“I’m afraid there is no money for such luxuries. Our shop and clientele are modest.”

She makes a soft tittering noise, like a mother hen clucking, then turns away from him to appraise the figurine displayed in the middle of the shop. Her steps ring against the scuffed pine floorboards, and Laith admires the pool of her dress against the ground as she walks, how the fabric gives her an ethereal illusion of floating rather than walking. He hasn’t quite seen a similar fashion in Linemell, though he thinks this is because it’s an older, although no less elegant, style. Something pre-industrial, which the woman has paired with a more contemporary corset, the satin bindings narrowing her already slim waist and accentuating the curves of her breast and the pearl-studded black lace decolletage. She’s a little daring then, out after dusk, unaccompanied in the drearier, more dangerous parts of the city and dressed as though to attend a night on the Theater District.

“I hope I am not too forward, but your dress is … beautiful.” It is, but he wishes he had found a better word, a more eloquent way of expressing his admiration.

She ignores the compliment, and the silence makes Laith shift his weight from foot to foot. He hunches a little more in his awkwardness, then remembers his mother’s admonishments and forces himself to straighten. He keeps his hands at his side, refusing to fidget, and another cough rattles down his chest.

“Do you feel more deeply?”

“I’m sorry?”

She smiles across at him, those eyes flicking from his pallid face to the mannequin. She runs her fingers across the skirt he has only just finished the night before, and he stills the urge to ask her to stop. He has to clamp down on the words, keep them locked in his mouth, as her fingertips trace the gold stitching running the length of the garment’s waist. “Because of your health. You must feel so deeply knowing your time may be limited.”

“I—” he swallows dryly and clutches the dirty handkerchief in his fist. He feels quite speechless. “I don’t know, ma’am. I haven’t—I haven’t thought much about it.”

The woman lifts her eyes to him again. She looks through him, and he feels something in his heart stiffen with fright. The look she gives him is the look he has received throughout his life: a look that levels him, that reduces him to the bare bones of his being, that recognizes his pitiful existence for what it is, a look that knows his lies. He cannot hold her gaze. He drops his eyes to his own boots, the ends of them muddied from his earlier midday walk to the pub.

“This is lovely,” she says after a moment, and he has to remember that she’s commenting on the skirt.

“Thank you.”

“You’ve done the waist to cinch like a corset. It will flatter almost any figure, and the lace embellishments are quite detailed. How much?”

“Forty quid, ma’am,” he says without hesitation.

She looks at him again and chuckles. It’s a warm, honey-like sound, although it confuses him. He blushes again. “If—if that is too expensive—”

“Hardly. I’d say the opposite. With a price like that, no wonder you describe your shop as modest. Ask for more.”

Laith clears his throat, fingers the handkerchief again, and wills himself to meet her gaze evenly. “Eighty quid, ma’am. I misspoke before.”

“Acceptable. I’ll have my man pick it up tomorrow if you would wrap it and have it ready. He’ll provide you the payment.”

“Certainly.”

She nods at him, once, curtly, the way businessmen nod at one another, then sweeps past him and the figurine and the rows and shelves of clothing within the shop to the door. Her steps are light, confident, purposeful.

“Ma’am?” he interjects when she reaches the door, the bell above already jingling as she opens it. “A name for the order?”

“Hadassa,” she says simply. There is no last name. He is somehow not surprised.






The next time Laith sees her, she is standing outside of his shop and wearing the skirt she bought. She has cinched it over an olive colored finely stitched lace blouse that, in turn, is layered beneath the same corset he had first seen her wear. The outfit enhances the hourglass nature of her figure, how her waist pulls in and then rounds into her shapely hips, and he finds himself leering before he coughs into his fist and staggers to the door.

He has been at the pub since dusk and now it is well past store hours. He is drunk, which is not as uncommon an occurrence for him as it once was.

“Mr. Tailor,” she says by way of greeting. If she is offended or even aware of his intoxicated state, she does not show it.

“How d’you do, ma’am?” Laith tilts his head. He can smell the ale on his own breath and he winces. “If you’ll give me a moment, I can open the shop. I was—”

“No matter,” she interrupts. “I was hoping you might walk with me.”

“Me?” he asks and immediately regrets it. A more confident man would have accepted the invitation immediately.

“You. I wanted to show you something, and then perhaps you could share an ale with me and regale me with your day.”

Inside, Laith knows his mother is waiting. He has been despondent lately as his cough has worsened, and he has been neglecting his duties. The tailoring. The new designs. His mother’s midday meals. Just yesterday, he had refused to help her out of the bath, and she had taken sick after he had left her in the cooling water for three hours. Then, tonight, he had emptied what little they’d had from the cash register and taken it to the pub. The guilt has nagged him as much as his apathy. He is conflicted, and now he has a choice: he can walk with this woman, this new patron, or he can step back into his old life.

He chooses to walk, and the minute she puts her hand inside of his elbow, he feels more sober. His back straightens some, as does his walking.

“You seem troubled,” she says as she leads the way through the streets. She chooses an unhurried pace and Laith is distracted by the feel of her body against his. She does not radiate warmth, but she seems solid in ways he is not. “I doubt, like many artists, that you can make your finest creations when troubled.”

Laith sighs. “You flatter me. Linemell finds my designs wanting, to say the least.” The ale has loosened his tongue, and he does not mind it.

“Genius is rarely appreciated in its own time.”

“Another flattery. I am hardly a genius, ma’am.”

“Hadassa,” she corrects.

“Hadassa,” he consents. Her name slips like oil off his tongue.

They walk for some time. The conversation waxes and wanes, but Hadassa does not seem overly concerned with filling the silences with idle chatter. Laith is aware of the eyes on them as they venture through the streets, of how men appraise her and then him. He is aware, too, of the chill of her arm in his, how she guides him gently. Her command of him feels like a relief—as if, finally, there is someone who can usher him toward his future. It’s a fanciful thought, he admits, but the feeling resounds inside of him when they come to a stop and he realizes that they have walked all the way to Oxford.

She has brought him to the fashion district, to the gilded shops that have so long eluded him.

“You belong here,” she tells him, her mouth close to his ear. “Here, in the heart of the city, where you can create freely and fully.”

Laith’s smile is bashful. He chews on the side of his thumb and takes in the length of the street. It’s a romantic area, the road lined with pin oaks, small lights strung within the branches, while torches dot the sidewalks and create an amber glow for the strolling couples that stop to windowshop.

“You’re a quiet man; you don’t need attention or accolades, but you want it, and you deserve it.” Hadassa says, gripping his inner arm more tightly when a cough shudders through him. “You have to take what you want in this life when we are given so few opportunities to succeed.”

“I know,” he says. He agrees with her, but it is not the sentiment that troubles him. It is, rather, the knowing of life’s futility, of how difficult it is to succeed.

“You have not been lucky in life, I think, my friend.”

“No,” he says, thinking she has read his mind.

She squeezes his arm kindly. “I was not always fortunate, and yet here I stand.”

They stand on the street corner, looking, for some time. The path is here, Laith thinks, so close and easily followed.






Laith loves Hadassa’s grin and the coppery flecks in her night eyes and her black-black hair. He loves the hint of an accent in her voice, the soft shape of certain syllables, most prominent in her r’s and vowels. He loves that she does not ask about his mother, ever, but she always asks about what he would create from certain materials (owl feathers once and blush-colored satin another time), and that her focus is always on him whenever they are together.

She tells him that she loves the dramatic, lean length of his body and his long eyelashes. She says she loves the way he desires, his hunger for more, his inability to be satisfied, and, of course, she admires his talent—the way the world looked more beautiful when he was able to dress the people in it—but Laith no longer cares about a shop on Oxford or rallying the world to his designer’s vision. He cares about dressing her, and she models for him frequently, standing as still as a holy statue as he drapes fabric across her and measures and cuts and pins. His sketchbook becomes full of her body, her face. The work in the shop goes untouched, incomplete, and the customers dwindle into nothingness, but he doesn’t care. He’s stopped wasting himself on hemming trousers and fixing buttons and mending tears. He forgets to eat, and his already thin frame sharpens until his bones in his face battle against his thin skin. There is something almost skeletal to him now, and this makes his lungs worsen, but it doesn’t matter.

Laith can’t even hear his mother’s cane anymore. He doesn’t think to miss it.

Brielle dies in her bed. He does not notice for three days.

He tells Hadassa after purchasing a pine coffin and making the funeral arrangements. In response, she tells him that he is finally a man now. He grabs the fingers of her right hand then and plays with them, weaving his own fingers between them.

He could marry her, he thinks. He knows this. He’s never felt such a way about anyone before but he feels it for her. He thinks he’s known it since the day he was born, although this can’t possibly be right, but the illogic of it all does not lessen the intensity of his feelings. Laith is ready to give her all of him, anything he has, anything he can give. He wants to dedicate his life to her.

He will, but first he gives her his death.










“Do you still want her?”

“No,” he lies looking up at the old Victorian window with his new sight. He can see the cracks in the splintered pane now. He can smell the mildew on the siding as it grows, creeping higher and higher like moss. He can smell her, too, his dream woman hidden behind a pane of glass. She is not cotton and citrus but birch and apple. She is the only fresh thing inside of the house. Her pulse hits him then like a siren’s song and he feels that old ache from his mortal days, feels his hunger and his longing and his shame. He is hard again and he turns away from the gate.

Hadassa grins at him through the darkness. “Why are you ashamed? It is a natural desire.”

She places her hand on the back of his neck, its coolness soothing against his skin, and winds herself in front of him. She is a few inches shorter than him and must roll onto the narrow tips of her leather boots to press her mouth against his jugular. She drags her fangs across the vein, and Laith shudders.

“There is no degradation you cannot enjoy now,” she tells him, kissing the dip of his collarbone, running her hands across his shoulders, pushing her hips against him until his back rattles the gate.

Above them, the woman’s light goes out. They are in darkness on a street as raw as a razor’s edge, and for the first time Laith does not feel afraid. He feels a starving pit inside, a carnivorous gaping mouth, longing for satiation. And Hadassa’s arms are naked, long and soft and circling him. She smells of blood and flowers and fruit on the vine. He cannot think beyond her, beyond his hunger.

“Lift me up,” she whispers. “I will make it better.”

“I can’t,” he says, his hands at her waist.

“You can,” she laughs. “You do not know your strength yet, blood of my blood.”

He trusts her, and so he digs his fingers into her sides and lifts her. It is easy. She is, somehow, a manageable weight; she wraps her legs around his waist and his hands drop to the backs of her thighs as he braces against the gate.

Hadassa seems impossibly young beneath the wet moon. Her hair is dark and free, floating around her sharp cheeks and devious eyes, and Laith buries his face into her neck. She must reach between them to free his cock, and she must guide him into her, her booted heels digging into his back and the searing heat of her engulfing him, making him buck. He has had sex less than ten times in his life, and this is only his second time with her. He’s a shivering pup between her legs. He wants to whisper poetry against her skin and devote his life to her. He wants to stay inside of her until the sun turns them to ash.

When she sinks her teeth into his neck, she simultaneously tilts her throat to him, and he bites. They are a circle, one mouth connecting the other, the blood at their lips thick and virile and tasting of union.