"When you're black and white there's no use hiding in a field of colours," his umber eyes so solemn, "Anthony T. Hincks."
But when Cillian looked at Oliver, he couldn't help but disagree, because to Cillian, Oliver was all the colours o...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
II OLIVER HAD CALLED TO check about his flowers.
"They're fine, Oliver. But you're free to come and see how they're doing for yourself." Oliver could hear what he thought was a smile at the end of Cillian's sentence. He thought perhaps it was smug.
He felt terrible about the way he left everything at Cillian's. He felt he might've inundated the boy; he worried he might be resented for it. "I only want to organise some things, get some of it out of your way."
"It doesn't bother me. I get off work at around five."
"So six then?"
"Six is fine."
"Then I'll see you at six."
The call ended shortly after that, and Oliver waited a moment before sliding his phone into the front pocket of his jeans. Now he found himself remaindered to his hotel room, where the furniture there was itself subjected to the same polymer-gloss cosmetic of displacement as the people usually spotted around it, where space was differently framed, where the denomination of volume was more suffocating than he ever remembered. He used to love hotels. He loved their never-ending corridors, their crunchy carpets. As a child he would ride the elevator up and down relentlessly, lost in a sort of phenomenological limbo, without space nor time. Until, finally, one of his parents would find him on one of the hotel's many floors; the doors would open and he would fling himself wide into their arms. That was the best part, the being found. The interesting thing about growing up is that man tends to forget with time what it feels to be lost, and he only realises that he has been lost all this time once he's found again. It's a sort of disorientation, a negation of the negation, such that the feeling of being lost manifests itself most potently only in the absence of itself.
He took the lift down, and it was here that time was warped, not lost. When the doors opened for him, he checked his watch (it was only two o'clock), and then he braved the weather outside in order to catch his bus.
LIGHT-BOY ENTERED THE other boy's apartment a few hours later, his cheeks still wet with mist. Strands of hair at his forehead had drawn up into delicate little curls that postured flush with the skin there. Inside, Madonna lilies boasted great white trumpets and a sweet, intoxicating fragrance; it seemed they only did that when the blonde-haired boy was around.
"Am I too early?" Oliver asked, already an apology awaiting in the wings of his voice. Cillian glanced down to see what it was Oliver had evidently taken notice of. He was still in his work uniform.
"You're just fine, Oliver. I had to run an errand after my shift, is all. You've arrived at a good time actually." Cillian walked over to his wardrobe and began to undress. "You can help me." He pulled his shirt over his head, keeping his back to the florist. Oliver didn't look away, though he knew he should; his curiosity was an animal, animals didn't have a word for sin. He watched Cillian's muscles stretch across his back, those fragile tendons, those bundles of tension unravelling like flayed flesh. The intimacy of gazing at someone while they are looking at something else, whether it is because they are aware that to look back at you would be too intense a declaration, or because they are deliberately allowing you to have this moment for yourself, is one of arguably greater closeness than the intimacy of eye contact, for it contains within it a sort of illicit confidentiality, a shared but unspoken conspiracy.
