color me in gold (lips like petals on my throat)

preludio.

"It seems like every time I sit down to write about our bodies, I spin us something holy: our moans turned scripture, our mouths flooded with communion wine. I want to take you by the hips and build our gospel."

— SACRILEGE REDUX by Ashe Vernon

*

The first time Brett sees the letters, he thinks they're for a prank.

It's a hot Friday evening, and he's taken advantage of Eddy's night out with his friends by cleaning through their apartment. It's not exactly a balanced act, their house chores, but they've agreed on how to make things work for their shared living space. Brett cleans and cooks; Eddy takes out the trash and makes them coffee and drives them anywhere they need to go. The arrangement works just fine.

And maybe he takes extreme pleasure from stripping down to his boxers to combat the Brisbane heat wave, but that's neither here nor there. Eddy doesn't need to know. He'll never let Brett live it down.

Pushing back the damp strands of hair clinging to his forehead, Brett locks his fingers together and stretches his arms high above his head, rocks back and forth on his heels as he groans. He's finished with his room and the hallway. Eddy's room is next on the list, then.

Cleaning his own room's like second nature to him, achievable with his brain in the clouds and his body on autopilot. His friend's area, however, is another thing. They're both fond of messy spaces, sure, but the other man's a stickler for knowing exactly where his items are, no matter where they're buried or stuck behind or clumped up into groups. And that's fine, that's all good, but it makes for a more demanding chore.

Still, he's gotten this far; might as well finish the job before Eddy gets back. Might even be a nice surprise for his best friend to come home to, not that he cares all that much about the bright smile Eddy gets when he's surprised—no, really.

Brett hums the Tchaikovsky violin concerto under his breath as he wrangles the vacuum cleaner into submission, sticking the hose behind the cabinets and under the bed. Beware all dust mites, and despair, he thinks.

He's distracted by the phantom music in his head, and he isn't really looking where he's pointing the nozzle of the vacuum cleaner, exactly, and so when the roar of air splutters, it takes him a few seconds to realize it.

"The fuck?" Brett pulls back the hose to examine it—and stares. There's a piece of paper stuck to the nozzle. A music sheet? No, Eddy's too worshipful of his music sheets to leave them lying around, so. Plucking it free, he blinks the dust motes from his eyes and peers down at the first few lines.

If people ask me what keeps me up at night, what I think about before the first few notes of a concerto or the stillness after the applause, what haunts me through my every waking moment and every restless daydream, I'd tell them of you.

What?

Brett turns the paper around, front to back to front again like he's maybe missed something, some stray line of text that explains—whatever the hell this is.

It says Eddy right there at the bottom of the letter, the name penned with his best friend's signature scrawl.

And wait just a minute, scrounging around under the bed again—Jesus, there's pages and pages more just like it. All of them letters, all of them with Eddy's name written out on the bottom. What the fuck.