[Closed] [Mature] Dancing After Death

[Tom Cooke]

A Hotel by the River, Three Flowers

Early Evening on the 38th of Loshis, 2720

I
t was quiet this time of the evening. Not even their footsteps made much noise going up the stairs, though the boards creaked. Everything here was steady – solid – underfoot, all the same, as if reinforced; it felt to him like some of the places in lower Lionshead, or in the Cat’s Paw, where poor foundations meant the floor caving in during a bad year.

The first time he’d come to Dzah’tsig’s Rest, half a week ago in the evening, the water had been just up to the back steps; the Turga had been lapping tentatively over Tsuh’aqay, as if wondering whether or not it wanted to swallow it.

It had been as quiet as it was today, and the widow who owned the place, a dura named Uqasah pezre Tsiya, had been going over accounts in the kitchen, at a small table just past the great blue mural in the foyer. She hadn’t asked any questions; he hadn’t given any answers. There had been some muffled laughter through the walls when he’d gone up to see the room, and someone, somewhere, had been crying, though the walls and floors were thicker here than in buildings further from the river.

He’d tried to imagine the first floor drowned, water lapping up the stairs to the fins and mouths of the fish, the mural glimpsed through hazy water. It must’ve been underwater once – more than once, maybe – he found it strange to imagine, with the dry, polished wood of the banister underneath his fingertips, with the sturdy stairs underneath his feet.

Their room was not too far up. An abstract mosaic in green and red chased them down the dim corridor, framing windows that looked out over the Turga; a breeze came in, smelling of water.

The door he came to was painted a cheery bright blue, fresh enough to look thick and glossy. Some of the others they passed were painted red, green; some of them were chipping, some even fresher, with the numbers plain-carved.

He’d heard Aremu climbing behind him; he’d felt him close, quiet, seen the flash of his deep yellow amel’iwe at every turn. He’d turned to look once, on the second landing, though he hadn’t known what smile to offer. Es’tsusiqi seemed a year and a hundred miles away, and just seconds ago all at once: dappled sunlight and tangled branches and the gleaming shape of a dome above the treetops seemed burned into the backs of his eyelids, but he had trouble holding them, as if they were a dream.

He wanted to make a promise, still. We’ll come back, he wanted to say; I’ll think of something. The pieces were floating round his head, and he couldn’t think, and he didn’t think what Aremu needed was an empty promise. He could do better than that just now, whatever else would come.

He got the door open with a rattle of keys, leaving it open behind him for Aremu to shut. There was a small, high-set window in the room, a writing-desk underneath it. The furniture was well-kept, but one of the desk’s legs was cut short, propped up with several water-warped books. It was sparse otherwise, and dim now in the evening, with the bed and the side table casting long shadows.

He went to the oil lamp first; his tired eyes ached for the sight of Aremu and didn’t care for much else. He lit it, the smell of lantern oil and sulfur mingling with the potpourri of herbs and spices on the desk.

He sat on the edge of the bed, smoothing the crisp linens beside him. “On’apúsem,” he said, pronouncing the Mugrobi carefully; he still felt as if he bit off the syllables, Anaxi-rough. But he looked up at Aremu finally, and the smile bubbled up out of him anyway.

[Aremu Ediwo]

Early Evening, 38 Loshis, 2720
A Hotel by the Turga, Three Flowers

Light leaked in through the small, high window, casting long dim shadows through the room. Aremu came in behind Tom, and shut the door. He leaned back against the bright blue paint for a moment; the fingers of his left hand crept over the wood, feeling the faint bumps and lines in the paint, and what he thought must have been the door underneath, though it was well covered up.

Tom was bent already over the oil lamp; the flame caught the oil, and Aremu watched the light gleam dark over the other man, casting shadows and light up over his pale, freckled face, gleaming in the bright red of his hair. Tom went to the bed, and sat; even before he spoke, Aremu was already coming across the room, drawn towards him.

He felt as if he were crumbling; he felt as if the smooth wooden cover of his face was coming away, piece by piece; the smile at his lips was left behind, but at all the rest of him – nose, mouth, forehead, eyes – the wood was collapsing, revealing strange patterns beneath which he did not know and could not name.

The words caught him by surprise; Aremu's breath caught too, and he came the last steps and sank into the bed next to Tom. His shoulders were tight, drawn up beneath the linen of his shirt; the straps of his prosthetic ached on his arm, ached across his torso. All of him, he thought, ached.

Aremu cried.

They weren’t deep, wrenching sobs; he didn’t dissolve or collapse into them, or lose himself in a frenzy of wailing. He hadn’t thought he would cry; he hadn’t meant to. It wasn’t as if, he thought, he chose it; it wasn’t as if he would have chosen it, if he’d been given a choice. It was a shuddering, first; it started in his stomach and lurched through him, and he was shaking, with Tom’s arms around him already.

There was a heat behind his eyes, then, and a terrible lump wedged into the center of his throat; he turned and pressed his face to Tom, and he felt it, in the moment, like a release. Something drained out of him, and he shook a little harder, and cried tears he hadn’t known were inside him into the other man’s shoulder.

It didn’t last long; he wasn’t sure he felt better for them, in the end. He wasn’t sure, either, why he wept. Some part of him hoped it wasn’t for Tsofo, and he didn’t think it was. He didn’t think, either, they were tears of disappointment, shed because he hadn’t been able to go in the observatory. Perhaps they were grief was for his own naivete, and the reminder of his loss of something like innocence; perhaps they was for his cowardice, for his turning away from the height which had, in the end, been too high.

His breath shuddered, and caught, and smoothed out. Aremu lay in the circle of Tom’s arms, still; his eyes closed, and his face rested on the other man’s bony shoulder. Tom’s arms were around him still, both of them, and he felt the shifting of their bodies together with each breath. I’m sorry, Aremu wanted to say; I didn’t mean to…

“Thank you,” he said, instead, quietly. He turned, shifting against Tom; he wrapped his arm around the other man, hand stroking his arm and whatever else he could reach. He pressed his lips to the soft bare skin of Tom’s neck, sniffling a little with his next breath.

If the mask had crumbled away, Aremu thought, tiredly, it was his own face beneath; lined as it felt in the moment, all his emotions on display in the set of his brow, his eyes, his lips. He half-wished he could see them, for it was more than he could manage, just then, to put names to all which he felt.

He knew, though, what was at the heart of it, of him: gratitude, Aremu thought, and love.

[Tom Cooke]

A Hotel by the River, Three Flowers

Early Evening on the 38th of Loshis, 2720

H
e wondered for a moment if it’d been the word – if he’d said it wrong – but he knew better. He’d seen it starting before that; in the lamplight Aremu’s smile looked glazed, his lips brittle and his eyes frightened, or else sad, or else… It seemed to change by the moment, unfurling like dye blooming through water, filling up his face, filling up the space in-between them as it closed.

He caught him in his arms when he sat, right off; there was nothing else to it. He didn’t say a damned thing else, because there was nothing to say, either. He wanted to curse all the same, running his hands over Aremu’s back, finding the muscles wound tighter than a twopenny watch even through the linen of his shirt. But there was nothing to do now but hold him as he shook, because there were tears pattering down on his amel’iwe, warm against his skin.

Aremu didn’t often cry. He didn’t know what he’d expected. To distract him, maybe; to lose the words awhile with a qalqa, or at least the heaviest of them.

He’d cried enough with him to know how he cried. He knew where it started, where it unfolded. He knew the invocation was the drawing-up of his shoulders, grown tighter and tighter and tighter, and the clenching in his belly he could feel even now, and the shaking that radiated out through him. The catch in his throat, tight and paralyzed, and then the tears. Aremu's left arm was around him, hand stroking his arm. He could feel the tense set of Aremu’s forehead against his shoulder.

Thank you, Aremu said, and that surprised him too. Not his gratitude; he smiled a wavering, confused smile. He ran his fingers over the short, tightly-curled hair on his scalp, burying his lips in it at his crown. “Thank you,” he whispered.

For telling me, he wanted to say, for letting me do this, for taking me at my word and not apologizing, for speaking at all; for seeing me, even when I didn’t want to be seen –

He tilted his head, eyelids fluttering shut, his throat catching at the brush of lips and breath at his neck. A little warm chill crept over him in leiraflesh. It shouldn’t’ve surprised him, but it did, every time. He blinked, fishing his soul back to himself wherever it’d flown, when Aremu sniffed and sniffed again.

“Let me – here,” he said, reaching to draw away the other man’s amel’iwe with careful hands. “May I? Again,” he said, brushing his fingers over the harness’ buckle through his shirt; he didn’t make to take off either, but instead sat back a little, drawing his legs up onto the bed cross-legged. He studied Aremu’s face, lit from one side by the lamplight. “You’re so tense…”

There was a line at the edge of Aremu’s lips where they were twisted faintly with something like – he couldn’t put a name to it. He reached up with his free hand, brushing the pad of his thumb over it; he traced a tear-track up the fine sharp bone of his cheekbone, to his forehead, running his thumb over the lines of his brow. A mask was a little like a harness: a face had muscles you could strain, too.

He couldn’t read these lines by touch, not in Estuan words; he could see the lamplight reflected in Aremu’s dark eyes, and a little spot of pale and red – himself, he thought – he didn’t dwell on it, settling his palm on Aremu’s cheek.

[Aremu Ediwo]

Early Evening, 38 Loshis, 2720
A Hotel by the Turga, Three Flowers

Aremu’s breath came uneven and ragged still. His eyes closed again, and he felt Tom’s hand soft on the fabric of his amel’iwe, drawing it from around his shoulders. It wasn’t the sort of hard breathing that came with running or swimming or fighting, but he felt as if he had been exercising all the same, pressing to the extreme some other unused muscles, and aching with their soreness.

He didn’t know what to make of such thoughts; they sat uneasy on him, felt strange and at odds with how he knew the world to be.

May I? Tom asked.

Of course, Aremu wanted to say; anything you want.

It was a moment before he understood what Tom was asking, felt the brush of his fingers and realized they were not over skin, but the buckle of his harness between his shirt. Again, Tom had said.

“Yes,” Aremu said, quietly, a little uneven still. The other man’s hand crept up; Tom’s thumb traced up a long line of his cheek, and though he could see it, Aremu could imagine it tear-damp still. He felt something like shame; he swallowed, his gaze lowering, and felt Tom’s hand settle into stillness against his cheek.

They sat there like that, a little while. Aremu was settling himself, still, coming down from something he couldn’t name. He had wept before Tom before; he had thrown up, tears streaming down in his face, in the other man’s study, in a moment that still made him burn with shame. Before that, in the midst of mangroves, red dzum’ulusa blossoms all around and blood dripping down his arm, Aremu knew, he had wept from guilt and grief, tears that had burned as hot as anger.

He couldn’t have said why this time was different, or perhaps he could have. He wasn’t, Aremu thought, uneasily, angry, except perhaps a little with himself. He wasn’t hurt; nothing had happened, he insisted to himself, such that he should cry so. He didn’t know, quite, what to make of it, not the least because it had soothed something in him, and he thought perhaps it shouldn’t have.

He didn’t know; there was nothing of that sort of judgment in Tom. There had been nothing of it in his arms, his lips; there was nothing of it now in the way the other man’s hands found the buttons on his shirt. Aremu reached down, one-handed, to help; between them, they shrugged it off. His eyelids flickered at the release of the first strap, the one over his chest, and Aremu half-stifled a groan, shuddering with the release of it.

The lines were dug deep into his skin today, he thought, deeper than usual, left over from the weight of the climb. There was a numbness to it, and a strange sort of tingling which swept through his skin when the strap came loose, like feeling coming back into it. The next strap, and then the next, and Aremu propped the prosthetic against his leg, arm bent sideways, so that as Tom reached the elbow, and the wrist, it wouldn’t fall.

The wrist strap was always the tightest; today was no different. It had chafed, a little; the skin beneath was red, though not raw in the way it had been, years ago, when he’d first started wearing the prosthetic. Aremu took the fake hand in his left, and rose, drawing it away from them to set on small writing desk.

He came back; he smiled, at Tom. He was moving more easily, now; he could feel it in himself, although he couldn’t have said what weight he had shed which let him do so. He sat beside Tom once more; his hand crept down, curling over the other man’s knee, his thumb stroking softly along the inside of it.

“I love you,” Aremu said, quietly, into the space between them. He was frowning, and there was some part of him which thought he shouldn’t, as he said such words: but they were heavy, weighty things, and he meant them in all their weight, in their sorrow as well as their joy. He leaned in, brushing his lips over Tom’s, and bent his head to the other man’s skin, tracing a path all his own over him.

[Tom Cooke]

A Hotel by the River, Three Flowers

Early Evening on the 38th of Loshis, 2720

D
oes it help you? he wanted to ask, in the end. The traces of tears had long dried from Aremu’s cheeks; he hadn’t meant to wipe them away, not as such, but he’d caught them with his fingers in stroking his cheek. The remnants were there in the redness of his eyes, the depths of the shadows underneath them, and even in the tired steadiness of his breath.

He didn’t think Aremu liked crying much. He supposed most men didn’t; he supposed most men didn’t cry much, and saw it for shameful and childish when they did. But he liked it, some funny, selfish little part of him did: he liked it most of all when he found his breath again and his chest ached, but he felt like he’d exhaled a dozen ghosts, or woken up from a bad dream.

Did it help you? he couldn’t bring himself to ask. He hoped it had, strange or not for a man to think so. He thought it had.

There was a catch, a shudder, a groan Aremu swallowed when one of the buckles came loose underneath his fingers.

It was almost a familiar sound; maybe he should’ve been aroused – but he found his brow furrowing instead, and he wanted to swear under his breath with a tender sort of irritation. The straps dug into his skin at the edges, and when they came away they left even deeper lines.

He moved to another buckle, and he didn’t let his fingertips linger, though he could already feel the muscles solid as rock underneath his warm skin. There were places where the leather had chafed too, this time. It was strong leather, he thought absently as he started to draw the straps off him with careful hands; it’d borne him well, same as Aremu. But he thought of him putting his weight on Aremu’s prosthetic, and the straps biting into his skin, and he wondered.

He was surprised and strangely grateful when Aremu let him unbuckle it at the wrist. He glanced over the scar that wound down the forearm, raised and winding, still fresh: the lamplight cast wavering shadows over it as they drew the straps away. A mark crossed it like an x. He didn’t look at the wrist, but he could see a little chafing in the corner of his eye.

Aremu was careful as ever with the prosthetic. He rose to put all of it on the writing-desk, his shadow whispering out long on the walls, his slim, well-muscled body a map of shadows and scars and lines.

He was smiling when he came back, and Tom smiled too. He couldn’t banish the furrow in his brow; he didn’t still, when Aremu came and settled beside him stroked his knee.

Aremu was frowning when he said it, frowning with all those familiar tense muscles in his brow, in his cheeks, all those familiar tense lines around his lips. “I love you, too,” he said when those lips caught his, like the echoing of an espial.

Then Aremu’s lips moved down, along his jaw, along his neck, above the fold of his amel’iwe. He felt terribly serious, and then all at once he laughed with the tickling of his breath. It was a soft, husky laugh; Aremu’s thumb was stroking the inside of his knee through the linen, and it was familiarly distracting.

More than anything, he felt suddenly strange, thinking back over the day, over what they’d said; in spite of every layer he wore, he felt oddly unclothed.

“Dove,” he started, then murmured with mock irritation, “I told myself I’d do something about those back muscles. You know I can…” Turn around, he wanted to say, let me – I need to see it to work out the knots, he wanted to tease, but found his eyes shut, his lips buried in Aremu’s hair instead.

[Aremu Ediwo]

Early Evening, 38 Loshis, 2720
A Hotel by the Turga, Three Flowers

Later,” Aremu promised, his hand stroking the inside of Tom’s neck. His lips crept along the edge of the other man’s jaw, down beneath the line of it and pressed against the soft skin of his neck. His hand came up, and stroked over Tom’s chest, following a path he knew the other man wouldn’t mind, careful of all the places Tom didn’t like him to touch.

The moment blurred with other hotel rooms, recent and long ago, and other, stranger places; it came distinct again, clear, like the focusing of a lens, and Aremu knew he was nowhere but here. When his eyes opened, he could see the lines of Tom’s body through the white cloth, could feel the brush of Tom’s hand – Tom’s, and no one else’s – against his back, and he didn’t try to look away.

He came back up; he kissed Tom’s lips again, and Tom kissed his. A strand of Tom’s hair brushed his cheeks; in the dim light, with his eyes half-closed, Aremu could see made out the faint haze of freckles against the other man’s skin, the sharp slope of his cheekbones and the clean shaved line of his chin. He broke away, again, turning his lips to other duties.

He shifted; he came off the bed, and sank to his knees before Tom.

Let me do this, Aremu wanted to say; I need to do this. Tom’s eyes had closed, and the other man’s breath came unsteadily. Aremu’s hand found what he needed, and he felt Tom jerk beneath him; he leaned forward, running his tongue over his lips.

Let me make up for the tears, Aremu wanted to say; let me make up for the promise I broke, or else more than one, and all the risks I needed you to take. Perhaps he did say it, though not aloud, or at least not with words. Perhaps he said something else; perhaps he spoke of love, because just then he wasn’t sure how to tell it apart from need, or why he should have to.

He didn’t know whether love meant he shouldn’t have to be sorry for his inadequacies, or whether it made it impossible not to be, or whether it was the second that led to the first. He didn’t know; he wasn’t sure he could understand, and he knew that no understanding of his could ever reach truth. He wanted not to think of it; he wanted to lose himself here, instead, searching for something much more tangible than truth or meaning.

He knew the other man well, by now; he knew what Tom liked, and it hadn’t changed very much, for all else that had. By now he knew how to find it, here; by now he was confident what he heard, what he felt, what he saw.

Later, Aremu promised; let me do this. Just let me do this, he wanted to say, as if what passed between them here could span the gaps between them, laid bare today and so many times before. Let me make it up to you, he wanted to say, all that I didn’t know, all that I didn’t see, all that I didn’t say, all that I didn’t do.

It was easy to hand himself over to the doing and to let go of thought; he knew the path, here, and he clung to it, and traced it. It was a winding one; he climbed with joy in the doing, every motion of his hand and all the rest of him deliberate, and never rushed. It was easy to set a pattern out, and follow it, and listen for the shifting beneath him, the sounds and motions which told him he went the right way, and easy, too, to let that be all he had space for.

Later, Aremu promised; all the rest can come later. Just let me do this, Tom, please.

[Tom Cooke]

A Hotel by the River, Three Flowers

Early Evening on the 38th of Loshis, 2720

A
remu’s hand was warm through the thin fabric of his shirt. His amel’iwe had slipped away, shifted aside by Aremu’s jaw as he worked his way down; he felt long, deft fingers tracing over familiar paths, rippling the fabric of his shirt, finding the hem of his trousers. He shifted on the edge of the bed automatically – comfortable, familiar – parted his legs, let out a long low sigh at the brush of fingers on his skin finally.

Later, he’d said… “Later,” he murmured unevenly, still not sold on the idea. He traced one hand over Aremu’s shoulder, brushing his thumb over the track the leather’d left, the tight, tired muscle.

His other hand was braced against the bed, and when Aremu’s fingers crept lower, his own curled into the mattress.

Aremu went slow, and that was familiar too. Funny to think now of that night on the Eqe Aqawe – gone now, though that was almost too strange to think about, standing in mid-air on boards that’d been blasted to nothing over the Tincta – like standing on a dream, he thought, and that made his head spin. But funny to think, to imagine how little they’d known of each other then – just flesh, just boards and silverfish scales and a rope ladder swinging in the breeze – lost things, he thought again, the Eqe Aqawe and the flesh that Aremu had touched then, both of them ghosts…

He’d never had to ask Aremu to hold off so the release was sweeter, and Aremu’d never had to ask him: maybe they’d both known, even on the docks.

Did you see me then? he wondered. A mirror, he thought; even then, he hadn’t wanted to be seen, or to see, and he hadn’t been ready for either.

Was he ready for it tonight? The thought jolted through him. All of this was familiar, easy. If he shut his eyes, he could lose himself in the memories; he often did. Aremu was careful not to remind him of the things he wasn’t. It was easy to pretend to be that man again, with his eyes shut as they often were.

A firm motion of Aremu’s hand dragged him back to Vita, and he grunted a soft laugh in his throat. His field was thick around both of them, shivering bastly wild.

He shifted, the springs creaking. His hip ached; he remembered, now – with a strange little flutter in his stomach – Aremu’s thumb gently stroking the joint. A smile twitched at his lip, then faltered.

... afraid that talking about it would make you uncomfortable... I like the way you blush –

May I? He ran a fingertip over the little mark one buckle had left above Aremu's shoulderblade, feeling a strange ache.

“Dove,” he breathed, his hand sliding under Aremu’s chin, fingertips creeping up to cup his cheek. “Dove,” he murmured, eyes fluttering open, and tilted his head up slightly, “come – come up here, I want to...”

I don’t want this to be familiar; I don’t want it to be comfortable. I want you to touch the places I asked you not to touch with my hands, the places I didn’t think you’d want. I want to show you all those loving words you said underneath that tree didn’t go in one ear and out the other.

His heart hammered in his throat. “Help me take off my clothes.” He ran his thumb over the edge of Aremu’s lip. “I’m afraid, but I want to be – I want to be bare in front of you,” he said softly, as evenly as he could.

Go slow, be gentle, he got the strangest urge to say, maiden-shy; he didn’t have a sheaf of hair to hide his blush behind, this time. It made him almost want to laugh, and a wry smile tugged at his lips.

[Aremu Ediwo]

Early Evening, 38 Loshis, 2720
A Hotel by the Turga, Three Flowers

Aremu felt Tom shifting beneath him, settling into comfortable familiarity, his legs coming apart. He settled into place; he sighed. He groaned, and the noise rippled through Aremu, and he grinned, just a little, feeling an easing of the tension in him. He knew if he looked up, Tom’s eyes would be closed; they usually were, now.

He didn’t know, exactly, what the other man pictured – if he pictured anything. He didn’t know why Tom liked to close his eyes, now. He could guess. It might’ve been easy to slip into wondering, to let himself worry about the wrist tucked out of sight beneath the edge of the bed, but Aremu knew better; he’d known better, he thought, ruefully, even before today, even before all that Tom had told him, all that he should have known.

Tom shifted; his hand came down, fingers tracing along the upper edge of Aremu’s back. Aremu waited, expecting Tom’s hand to tangle in his hair, expecting to feel the other man relax beneath him again. It wasn’t a still sort of waiting, but it was waiting all the same, a loose, easy sort of readiness.

Dove, Tom said. His hand crept down, under Aremu’s chin, up to his cheek. Aremu shifted back onto his heels, looking up at the other man, his hand moving smoothly even as he ran his tongue over his lips. Tom’s finger followed the path of his tongue, slowly; Aremu shifted, and came up, sitting on the bed next to Tom, his hand sliding loose from where it had held tight.

He wasn’t sure whether he was smiling; Tom did, suddenly, and Aremu found he was as well. He kissed the other man, softly.

There’s no need for that warred with thank you, warred with yes, please. They were kissing again, tangled up in it, Aremu propped up on his right wrist, letting it be hidden in the blankets; his left hand, he thought, not for the first time, all his frustration familiar and familiarly bitter, wasn’t enough. His fingers wandered down, held on just long enough, and then drew away.

He went slowly; he didn’t know any other way to go. He’d taken Tom’s amel’iwe off, already, and he drew the other man’s shirt off after it, revealing pale skin, sharp bones, a thin chest speckled with freckles, a narrow waist and the edge of Tom’s hips, just barely left visible. He went slowly; he kissed what he found, and made something like a game of it – the playfulness, he thought, they’d had once, when Tom had never closed his eyes – as if he could try to kiss every one of the other man’s freckles. He hovered, over each one, giving Tom time to draw him away, and then leaned in with a brush of his lips; he hovered, over each one, and traced the map of them like constellations, painting shapes in them.

Aremu came away, in time; he settled his hand at Tom’s hips, and drew down the last of the other man’s clothing, leaving it aside on the floor. He’d seen Tom, this way – more than once, by now, in the lamplight and the moonlight, in the dark. He hadn’t looked, all the same; he’d thought not to draw attention to the other man’s discomfort, to the strangeness Tom found in his own shape. He’d thought – perhaps it didn’t matter, Aremu thought now, how he’d justified it to himself.

He drew back; he stood, before Tom, and looked at him – looked, from the red hair streaked gray and white, down over slender arms and elegant, long-fingered hands, down over the slope of his chest, his waist, down along all the rest. Aremu had thought to kneel again, to go back to it, and he wasn’t sure at first what had stopped him. Perhaps it was the strangeness of pretending it was all the same when it had changed; perhaps it was something he saw on Tom’s face, in his eyes.

“What now?” Aremu asked, quietly. He came closer, again; his hand reached out, and settled on Tom’s, and he smiled, looking at the other man.

[Tom Cooke]

A Hotel by the River, Three Flowers

Early Evening on the 38th of Loshis, 2720

S
ome part of him had thought Aremu would protest; he’d paused there a moment as if to say something, and then caught him in another kiss, this one deep and lingering. He hadn’t been smiling when he’d come up from the floor, but he was now, and Tom could feel it against his lips. He could feel his hand wandering, too – just enough, and no further – leaving him again wanting more, comfortably strained.

And then he was drawing his shirt off, deft with his left hand. He tried to remember the last time Aremu had taken his clothes off; it hadn’t been like this, little by little, as if the undressing were a pleasure, woven in like a ritual. He smiled, feeling unsteady ground beneath his feet.

He laughed.

What on Vita, he almost asked, are you doing? A tickle of warm breath where his hems met his skin, a brush of lips; a pause, and then another a little further up, and then another at his ribs.

The ground was more and more unsteady by the moment, and more so because he couldn’t figure it out, and more so because he liked it; he liked it a damned lot more than he should’ve. More than seemed right. This was a more focused kind of attention; it wasn’t just any pattern the other man was following. He blinked down at Aremu, baffled. He watched him this time, pausing for the space of a breath and then pressing another kiss to his skin. He watched him trace up and over, and find another –

A gasp shuddered through him; it was almost like a laugh, except he felt a funny kind of burning behind his eyes. Don’t, he thought, you fucking ridiculous man, don’t cry, don’t…

He didn’t think Aremu had noticed, because he was still finding more freckles to kiss – his – strange to claim them; strange to claim anything about this. He held Aremu, running his hands over his back, through his hair, kissing his scalp as if terrified all of it would dissipate like a dream if he didn’t hold him close. Aremu’s breath tickled his skin again, and he laughed again, soft in Aremu’s hair.

The last of it came off gentle, Aremu’s hand at his hip, all that white fabric and his underthings a tangle on the floor; when he stood back, he was conscious of the other man’s eyes on him.

Aching hunger fought the leiraflesh that crept over his skin, the fleeting but sour taste of fear, fear that if Aremu looked too long, he’d see what he saw in the mirror, he’d uncover some awful truth and turn away with disgust. Worse, Tom thought, he’d see it, but he’d feel obligated to… Worse, he…

Aremu was smiling when he sat back beside him, pressing his hand; his dark eyes were warm as they glanced over him again.

He hesitated. He almost wasn’t sure what to say. He blinked, his breath catching. He felt strangely, vividly awake. The air the high narrow window whisked in was beginning to smell like night, and the sweat drying on his skin, traced with lips and fingers, made him want to shiver.

This, at least, was a sort of tree to climb – then he felt like he was seizing at something in his head, some idea taking root. It sent a surge of excitement through him, and suddenly everything burned hotter.

“Kiss me again like that, dove,” he said, his voice rougher than he’d expected it to be. “I want to…” His own hand was at Aremu’s hip, his fingers underneath the hem of his trousers, as slow as he knew he liked; he leaned forward and kissed him again, his hand moving lower, at once a question and a tease.

“It reminds me how you kissed my scars.” I didn’t know you, he almost said – what, liked them? That’s obvious, he thought; you haven’t had your godsdamned eyes open to see.

He laughed hoarsely, pressing a kiss to Aremu’s shoulder, tracing the line of a scar and the edge of a muscle on Aremu’s lower back with the fingertips of his free hand.

[Aremu Ediwo]

Early Evening, 38 Loshis, 2720
A Hotel by the Turga, Three Flowers

Aremu’s eyelids fluttered; he groaned aloud at the brush of Tom’s hand, all of him straining, brief and involuntary. He kissed Tom back, deep and intent; his tongue traced the other man’s lips, searching, tasting. Tom was laughing; it wasn’t, Aremu thought, as if he hadn’t laughed since, during. It felt different, all the same, somewhat easier or else lighter, as light as the brush of Tom’s fingertips over him, that careful, teasing touch he liked so well.

“I like finding the patterns of them,” Aremu said, no less hoarse than the other man; he grinned, or maybe it was closer to a smirk. He lost it a moment later in another gasp; he bent his head back to Tom and began, diligent once more. The freckles were easy to see against the other man’s pale skin, even in the warmth of the oil light, the trickles of cool evening light which pooled in through the window.

His hand joined his mouth in the search; it was a journey with no destination. Aremu thought he could spend a night – a day – a week – a month – a year – trying to chart the other man’s freckles, staring at them all night long and searching for their constellations. He tried to tell Tom, once, but the other man was busy, and busily made sure Aremu lost track of his thoughts, and the words trailed off into nothingness, and a renewed effort.

“Like this,” Aremu gasped, in time, when he'd explored and explored again. “Tom – let me – ” his hand came down, wrapping around the other man’s hip, holding tight; he shifted, moving between them, moving what was between them. “I’ve wanted to…” he caught himself, though not quite in time; his eyelashes fluttered, his voice trailing off into a harsh rasp.

Let me try it, Aremu wanted to say, to beg; he was on the cusp of it, on the cusp of reaching beyond what they’d been. Let us try it. Your eyes are open, Aremu wanted to say; can’t you see I want you?

“Like this,” Aremu said again, half-panting, the longing ache of it not nearly enough to cut into the tension which ran all through him, the bone-deep excitement he felt in the midst of it. He guided; he guided, because he never wanted to force. He had not dared even to do that; he had been afraid, he thought, of anything which remind Tom of the differences.

Perhaps he still was; Aremu thought, grimly, just how little he knew, just how little he understood. Even having seen into the other man’s mind, he thought, he knew so little. Something which had been knotted in him eased, loosened, just a little, a long held ache released. I don’t know, he wanted to say; I don’t know, Tom, all that you are –

But he thought he’d done Tom a disservice with his fear; he thought he’d done the both of them a disserve with his fear. He kissed the other man, deep and longing, shaping them with his hand and the curve of his body, finding a new pattern for them to fit into: one for the two of them, Aremu tried to say with his kisses, with all of him, as they were now.

Please, he said; he didn’t know if he groaned it out aloud on his breath, or if it held somewhere inside him, seeping silent through all his pores. He thought he felt it in the air all around them, somewhere intangible in the midst of Tom’s field, in all the wild fluctuations of it against his skin. He didn’t mind them; he couldn’t, not when they were Tom’s and Tom was his. Please, Aremu thought, or else said, looking in to the other man’s open eyes, all of him yearning.