Les Noyades

11: Aperotos Eros

Rightly had Rumi suspected that the talk would not be finished by the time he returned, even when he descended the final hill when the sun had long deserted the sky— all was much the same as he had left it, with only the dull muted colours of dark to change the mood.

"Ah, Rumi. Sédar has generously offered us the stay of his house tonight," Declan told him with a smile.

Seeing how Yves was poring over the man's work under the swollen light of a torch with such evident fascination, Rumi could not stand the idea of remaining at the house. Both frustrated and then in turn despaired at his unwarranted feelings, he followed dutifully up the stairs behind Sédar when he came to a small, priest-hole size of a rabbit-room that held still better space than his own at Doha. It was cold, but it was close enough that he hardly felt it. With a lack of attire it was he pulled off everything but the shirt he had worn that day and then before it.

He folded himself up on the rickety, spring-spiked mattress that creaked out protestations at his movements, and drew up over himself the thin duvet and heavy woollen blanket, which did little enough to warm him from the biting cold. The frigid tremors of his muscles induced him into an uneasy sleep swollen with uncomfortable half-dreams-half-nightmares from which he feared he would never awaken.

Several hours later neither his mind nor his body could take the unbearable horrors presented to him and he catapulted upright in bed with a muffled cry of terror. The chill had seeped into his bones and every part of him ached with it. He recognised that he had been lifted from pained sleep by more than cold fingers— the door had been opened. Such was the depth of the darkness around him that he only sensed this; did he remember, through the miasma of fitful sleep, that creaking of unoiled hinges? Or was it fiction merely that he felt now a weight pressing down on the bed? He reached forward a hand and it touched gently at a warm skin of soft material. It might have terrified him were he not so cold that it was welcome.

"Yves," he whispered.

"Did I wake you?" Yves replied quietly, shifting forwards to place a hand onto Rumi's knee. "I didn't mean to. Or maybe I did. I'm not sure... But I'm glad you're awake."

In such a tired state as he was, Rumi forgot to be afraid of this imposition. His nerves were frozen out. He smiled in relief only.

"It's freezing in here, are you not cold?" Yves asked as he darted his hand about until it found Rumi's and held it tight to his chest. "So cold."

Rumi lay back on the bed and pulled Yves with him, only the woollen blanket and duvet then to separate them, but nothing beyond that— no paralysing fear of intimate knowledge of one another, no great shame on either behalf, no watching father. Sensing this, Rumi boldly moved to lie across Yves' chest and, at last, their lips were brought together in the ghost of a kiss. Yves sighed and hooked a hand at the back of Rumi's head to bring him in for a kiss that communicated every hesitation he was overcoming in one fell motion. They draped over each other as if magnetised, mouths and tongue and lips conjoined, and legs rubbing together, and chest heaving against chest.

"Will you put it in?" Rumi asked, insolent in his sleep-deprived ability to be blunt and crude.

"It's not that easy, baby," Yves told him with a quiet laugh. "It would hurt you now."

"I don't mind."

"Shh. You sleep for me, okay?"

Rumi opened his mouth to protest, but Yves began to stroke his hair with an impossibly tender hand, and when Rumi curled up into his warmth he felt the familiar pull of sleep tugging down his eyelids like blinds.

"I want to touch you," he mumbled as his limbs went limp.

"You just sleep," Yves murmured gently. And then, so quietly Rumi thought he might be back asleep and dreaming again, although this time under the greatest comfort imaginable, Yves began to sing softly to him.

"Bonne nuit, cher trésor,
Ferme tes yeux et dors.
Laisse sa tête, s'envoler,
Au creux de ton oreiller..."

And then Rumi was asleep beyond the soothing words and would remember no more of it.