Work Text:
The day Sophie dies, all you can think about is your parents’ reaction to the fact you’re crashing their car into a tree.
It’s funny, the way the brain can’t cope with catastrophe. It’s not your fault (your therapist tells you later), the human brain’s just wired that way. It latches onto the details it can understand—the crashed car, the angry parents—and entirely ignores everything else.
You needn’t have worried. When you wake up in the hospital, your parents are nothing if not relieved you’re alive. Sophie has been dead four hours. No one tells you that until the next day.
You don’t notice anything odd at first. It shouldn’t surprise you: Sophie’s death left a grief-shaped tar pit of absence in your life that swallowed everything whole, and it’s a small wonder you managed to think about anything else at all. You stay in the hospital until they release you, then you go home sorrow-stricken and phased. Your parents’ hugs are warm and worried. Emma’s hand is soft in yours. You don’t feel anything at all.
You first notice the flowers in the morning of the first night that you spend back in your bed. They are hard to miss: dark-crimson petals litter the floor of your bedroom. The air smells of roses. You rub your face with your hand. A dark red rose appears, fully formed and fresh, on your bed covers. You do not think of it. You close your eyes and will yourself back to sleep.
The flowers have not disappeared when you wake up for the second time. The sight of them makes you sick. You need to hide them, you think frantically. Before Emma or your parents come into your room and find out. When you kneel and try to gather all the petals, your traitorous left hand drops several new flowers onto the ground, round and red like clotted blood. You end up kicking all the petals into the bin, your hand carefully wrapped in an old t-shirt. When you’re done, everything smells of flowers and fear. You throw up in the toilet. A single rose appears on the tiled floor.
You hate that everything changes after the accident. After all, you’ve made it out. After all, everyone is so relieved. And what if your left hand produces petals unprompted? It’s still there, isn’t it? Not amputated, not lame. You should be thankful.
You’re lucky, the doctors tell you. You’re lucky you’re able to walk. You’re lucky we didn’t have to amputate the arm. You’re lucky you’re alive.
(How lucky, you think, swallowing down your words like bile, that you’re still breathing when she’s waxen and still and buried under the ground. How lucky you get to go on for decades upon decades in a world where her absence pulsates like phantom pain.)
You’re okay. You are fine. Things are going well. You take to wearing a thick, black compressive glove on your left hand. You tell people it’s because of the pain. They don’t question it. You learn to use your right hand, just in case. You barely have enough fine motor skills to hold a fork with it, but it’s fine. It’s all fine. It has to be.
Emma worries. Your parents, too. You tell them there’s no reason to. You’re fine. You’re alive, after all, aren’t you? You get out of bed every day. You get dressed. You go through all the motions of life like an automaton, with stilted movements and fog in your mind. It’s fine. It’s all fine. It’s all you can do anyway.
Crimson roses keep appearing every time you take off your glove, so you don’t. You sleep with it. You shower with it. You pretend that if you can manage to ignore it entirely, you’ll forget about it and everything will be normal again. You do not forget about it. Nothing is normal. When you look up the language of flowers on your phone, late one night, you read that dark crimson roses symbolise mourning. If you cry that night, no one is there to witness it.
You’re okay. You are fine. Things are going well. And so what if you feel violently ill every morning when you wake up because the realisation that you’re alive sits like spoiled milk or rotten fish at the bottom of your stomach? And so what if you feel a pull in your heart every time you stare at a busy road or every time you cross a bridge? It’s just the way your life is now. It’s fine. No one ever has to know.
Two years after the accident, you give up trying to get into art school. It’s your dream, Emma says when you tell her. You don’t tell her all your dreams are about smashed windshields and saving limp bodies from the crushed metallic carcasses of cars, now. You don’t tell her that art feels too personal, now. You don’t tell her that you’re so broken your own body has taken to producing tangible proof of your emotions if you let it. I’ve changed my mind, you tell her. If Emma knows there’s anything more to it, she doesn’t say so.
Engineering is the practical choice. You’re practically assured you’ll find work. You’re smart enough with numbers that it comes easy. You’re good enough at it that you earn the respect of your peers. You like it well enough that you can almost pretend you chose it. It’s fine. You don’t regret it. And if your hand has now taken to spreading purple hyacinths everywhere when you take off your thick glove to throw it in the wash? No one has to know.
You get well-versed in the language of flowers at some point along the way.
You learn that peonies mean shame. You know that hyacinths mean sorrow and begging for forgiveness. You know marigolds speak of grief. One night, when your fist connects with the plaster of the wall hard enough to leave a dent, you cover the ground in petunias. You don’t even need to look it up to know they symbolise anger. You crush them underfoot like it changes anything at all.
You take off your glove the night after you finish your master’s degree, alone and drunk in your student flat. Crimson petals spread everywhere immediately. You slam your fist on the table.
“Stop it!” you scream. “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!”
White and purple flowers scatter across the blood-dark sea of red. You do not stop screaming. The flowers do not stop appearing. You put your head in your hands and sob after that. You fall asleep eventually. The flowers spread all around you like a cancer.
(You’ll look them up in the morning, when you’ll wake up with every surface in your flat covered entirely in layers of petals, thick and heavy like dirt or dust. Anemone. Symbol of being forsaken. The air will smell like a funeral. You will not feel anything at all.)
You find a job. You move away. Nothing changes. You’re not disappointed: you didn’t expect anything to change. Why would you have? You have accepted your fate. There’s nothing else you can do, after all.
You sit alone in your living room. You make yourself a sad little dinner. You don’t talk to anyone. You ignore the messages your friends send you. They stop talking to you eventually. It’s better that way, you think. It’s better that you don’t have to keep lying to them. You try to tell yourself the feeling inside your chest is freedom or relief.
(The next time you take off your glove, the world explodes white with carnations. Common flowers for funerals, your mind supplies. Loss, grief, deep sadness. You throw them all out of the window in a blind rage.)
You go to work. You come home. You go to sleep. You go to work. You repeat.
In the slivers of space between those actions, you wonder how the barrel of a gun would taste upon your tongue, and you calculate the probability that you would die if you jumped off the roof. You don’t act on those thoughts, of course. You wouldn’t. You’re doing fine, after all. (You do not own a gun, and the fall cannot guarantee your demise.)
So, you go to work, and you come home, and you go to sleep. And it could go on forever, or until you found a gun or bought some pills or buried yourself inside a grave and let the weight of the cool, dark soil draw all the breath from your lungs. It could go on forever, but it doesn’t because, one night, something unexpected happens.
You’ve taken your glove off to wash it, and you’re sitting aimlessly in the middle of a pool of crimson and white and purple, trying not to think about anything at all and failing miserably. That’s when you notice it: dark purple flowers arranged in towering clusters. You’ve never seen this one before. You google it, half out of boredom and half out of the morbid desire to find out what new thing is wrong with you. The results baffle you: monkshood. Danger. You look around you. You’re alone in your flat. The lightbulb above your head emits the same dim, white light it always has. Your furniture is sparse and cheap and doesn’t look murderous in the least. Then, before you can scoff at your skin and ridicule it for getting everything wrong, you hear something move just outside your door.
“Let’s go see what this is about, yeah?” you tell the pile of flowers on the low table.
When you crack the door open, there is nothing in the hallway. You open it entirely, something heavy and viscous inside your chest, something that feels strangely like disappointment. That’s when you notice the door that leads to the roof is open. You smile, a dangerous, carnivorous thing of a smile: you’ve always wanted to go on the roof after all. You don’t take your keys. You don’t think about anything at all. (Danger, the flowers falling to your feet warn you. Danger, your heart sings like a war song.)
Your feet lead you up the stairs. On every step blooms: monkshood, forsythia, gladiolus. You do not pay them any mind. When the cold night sky welcomes you, it is bright and vast and so beautiful you almost forget why you are here in the first place, but then something moves, and your heart thrums with reckless anticipation once more.
There is a man standing at the very edge of the roof, looking down. You walk to him. He doesn’t notice you.
“Don’t,” you tell him, as you stop a few steps away from him. He turns his head towards you. Your breath catches in your throat. It’s not that he’s the most beautiful man you’ve ever seen (but he is—oh god, he is) and it’s not even that he’s a split second away from ending his life the way you’ve so often dreamt you could end yours—it’s that looking into his face is like looking in the mirror. You know the look in his eyes by heart, you’ve so often seen your reflection wear the same. Empty and desperate, like life has hollowed him out entirely and left nothing but a brittle shell in place of the person he used to be. Everything about him lodges itself inside your heart like a dagger.
“I’ve calculated the odds,” you add. “They’re not in your favour. There’s a good chance you wouldn’t die. You’d almost certainly break both legs. Perhaps your spine. If that’s what you’re going for.”
The silence stretches, breathless and fragile. At your feet, jasmine blooms white and fragrant under the night sky. Then: the man laughs. It surprises you, that laugh. It is warm and bitter all at once, the way black coffee is. It startles you awake.
“You’ve come here to tell me about the odds of my suicide?” he asks. He doesn’t move. The wind caresses his hair and wraps itself around his torso. He’s not wearing anything but a light jumper and an open leather jacket: he’s not dressed for the cold night air. You swallow around the lump in your throat.
“I’ve come up here because I heard noise on the roof. I’m telling you the odds of your suicide because I thought you might want them.” It is not a lie, not really. The air smells of jasmine and hyacinth.
“I’ll take my chances, but thanks for the tip,” the stranger says, stepping closer to the ledge.
You should go back inside, you know. You should call the police. You should put your fucking glove back on your hand and shove all your feelings back into your chest. Nothing this man does is your business. There is nothing you can do here that will amount to anything at all.
“My girlfriend died because of me,” you say anyway, the words rippling through the still night air like bullets. “I’d rather not have a second death on my conscience if it’s all the same to you.”
You bring your hand to your mouth immediately. You’ve never said it aloud to anyone. Not your family, not your friends, not even your therapist. They’d all been so insistent Sophie’s death had nothing to do with you. They’d all been so certain you hadn’t done anything wrong. You didn’t want to disappoint them. The bright blooms of bittersweet are soft against the skin of your lips and fall to the ground in a shower of purple petals.
“How do you stay alive?” the stranger asks, his voice scratched thin and sandpaper rough. “How do you keep living?” The words are a plea on his lips. You wish you had an answer for him.
“I don’t know,” you say. “I don’t know how to do it either.” Bittersweet litters the ground.
The stranger runs his hand through his hair, his intense gaze the colour of clouds or ashes fixed on you. You want to grab him. You want to hold him. You want to let the warmth of you seep into his skin. He looks away.
“My sister died because of me,” he says. “House fire. I was too much of a coward to go back inside to save her. She died alone and terrified. She was sixteen. I’ll never forgive myself.”
I understand, you want to tell him. I know the exact shape of the grief that lives in your lungs, I know the exact shape of the darkness that spreads at the bottom of your chest and corrupts everything it touches. Tell me: in how many of your dreams do you manage to save her? Tell me: in how many of your dreams do you watch her die? Tell me. I wouldn’t judge you if you did. Tell me. Then, perhaps I could tell you too.
You walk up to him and sit down next to him. Your feet are dangling several metres above the ground. You don’t look up at him.
“I don’t know how to forgive myself,” you say. “And everyone thinks I’ve grieved. Everyone thinks I’ve healed. I don’t know how to do that either.”
Under your fingers, gladiolus grow, their orange blooms pale in the moonlight. You do not look at them either. The man sits next to you.
“They want me to grieve so bad. They want me to forget. They want me to go on. They want me to pretend her absence doesn’t crack my ribcage open every single second I’m awake. Some days, I don’t know if they want this for my benefit or theirs.”
The man’s voice is smoke, acrid and burning and earthy all at once. You breathe it in. His words settle behind your ribs, in the place your heart was, back when it was still beating and whole. You swallow, tears forming heavy behind your eyelids. You haven’t cried in years. You haven’t allowed yourself the right. You bite your lip.
“It’s terrible, isn’t it? The loneliness. It’s like there’s a wall between you and everyone else. They all want you to get better so bad, and you can’t fail them, but you don’t know how to exist in the new reality of everything. So you don’t tell them until you’re staring down a ledge and thinking about ending it all, and you don’t tell them that either. I think that’s the hardest part.”
The man exhales, something deep and shaky and thoroughly pained. He lies down on the cold cement ground, his feet still dangling off the side of the building. You lie down in turn. The stars shine bright and cold above you. Under your head, roses and carnations and marigolds spread a fragrant pillow.
“I loved her so much. She wrote poems. She published them in her school newspaper under the pen name Maelle. She won the regional fencing championship in her category. She was going to grow up and be such a wonderful person, and now she’s not going to grow up at all, and I don’t know how I can stay alive in a world where she isn’t.”
“You remember her,” you say. “You’ll always remember her. And somewhere along the way, it’ll have to be enough. Somewhere along the way, you’ll have to find a way to carry her with you so her memory gets to grow old. With you.”
The words taste bitter as willowbark in your mouth, but they ease the pain in your heart, you realise. Your cheeks are wet. Your lips are blood-bitten and raw. You stare at the sky. The man next to you doesn’t answer. The fragrance of orange blossom fills the air.
“Yeah,” he says eventually, his voice seaweed-strangled and wet. “I remember her. I’ll have to find a way to make it be enough.”
“It’s all we can do,” you whisper to the stars above. The skin of your face is streaked with salt. Your chest is filled with ash. Marigolds bloom all around your head.
“I’m Verso,” the man says.
“Gustave,” you answer.
“I…” the man—Verso—hesitates. “I’d come again tomorrow. If I knew you were going to be here.”
“I’d be here if you came.”
You don’t need to think about it to know it’s not a lie. You lie on your bed of blooms and stare at the sky. Neither of you speaks for the rest of the night, and you part ways in silence at dawn.
You find him again on the roof the next evening. You don’t know how long he’s been waiting there for you. You don’t ask. You haven’t slept. The world blurs like watercolour around the edges of your vision. You do not care. Somehow, being with this man was the first time you’ve felt like you could breathe in years. You’d do anything to experience that feeling again.
“Hi,” he says. He’s sitting on the ledge. You sit next to him. You don’t say anything more. He doesn’t either. Your gloved fingers grip the hard metal lip of the roof. The air doesn’t smell of anything but ozone and exhaust fumes.
“I miss her,” you say as the sun sets fire to the sky. “She’s been dead longer than I knew her, but I still miss her like a pulled-out tooth.”
Verso exhales next to you. The sunset is bathing him in hues of red and gold. He’s beautiful and untouchable, his presence by your side the only thing saving you from the unspeakable grief that you have been breathing instead of oxygen ever since you crashed a car and lost a life.
“Do you think we’ll ever stop missing them?” he asks.
No, you want to say. My bones and my lungs have grown over the love I held for her until it became a part of me. How do you stop loving someone? It spread to my bloodstream, that love. I’d need to bleed out entirely to expunge it.
Yes, you want to say. We’ll never forget them, but we can build a life where their presence is a warm weight behind our ribs and not a stone around our necks. We can build a future where their memory feels more like a smile and less like a stab wound.
“I don’t know,” you say. “I don’t know.”
Silence settles like silt at the bottom of a pond. You feel sadder than you’ve ever been. It feels peaceful, somehow.
“Tell me about her,” Verso asks as the night wraps the both of you in a blanket of ink and ashes. And so: you do.
You tell him about her beautiful laugh and about her imperious voice. You tell him about the fact she was more of a hailstorm than a person most days, about the way she felt like the first days of April, unapologetically bright and full of promise but with ice lingering behind every bloom. You tell him about the way she first kissed you, half a dare, half a challenge, in the middle of the pavement in a rainstorm. You tell him about the way you kissed back, about the way the earth swallowed both of you up when you did, about the way you found yourselves shivering and wet, laughing uncontrollably in the wake of it. You tell him about her softness, too, about the parts that were meant only for you. You tell him about the way she grew gentle when it was just the two of you, about the way she loved with her entire being, about the way it felt like swallowing the sun to be with her sometimes. You talk, and talk, and talk, and he listens, until you have drained the marshland of your heart, and you fall silent.
“Thank you,” he says. Silence is soft as a cloud between you for an instant.
“You know, sometimes, I wonder if age is measured in the people we miss,” he adds, his voice whisper-light and pain-brittle. He doesn’t elaborate. You do not either. That night, you sleep better than you ever have.
You don’t stop meeting him. He doesn’t stop waiting for you on the roof. Neither of you talks about it, but you just know you’ll find each other again, like you know objects in a fall eventually find the ground.
Those precious instants become the sun your entire life revolves around. You go to work, and you come home, and you sit on the roof, now. Your entire life unfolds in the parentheses of dusk. Verso’s presence is the only thing that you can think of as you go through the motions of talking to clients, trying to meet deadlines, and wrangling projects into submission. Every part of your day becomes a grey half-life, a silent wait for the instant he’ll breathe colours back into the sepia world of your life.
Sometimes, you talk about death. Sometimes, you talk about his sister. Sometimes, you talk about Sophie. Sometimes, you don’t talk about anything important at all. It doesn’t matter. Every word from his mouth is honey in your heart. You learn he used to be an artist before his sister died. You learn he plays the piano and hasn’t left his room in the daytime for two years. Some nights, you think the hole that’s lived in your chest for all your adult life has the exact shape of him. You don’t tell him. Instead, you tell him about the engineering degree and about the way your life turned to expensive china: too ugly to be loved and too precious to be thrown out. Sometimes, you let yourself think he knows anyway.
You don’t stop meeting him. Days turn into weeks turn into months, and still, he waits for you on the roof. It is inevitable: the same way all rivers eventually lead to the sea, the same way the clouds will eventually become rain, you will always find him. It doesn’t scare you as much as it should.
One night, you find him in the middle of a storm. He’s drenched to the bone, and still he’s waiting for you as he always does. Wind pulls at your head, and raindrops sting against your cheeks. It didn’t stop you from going out to meet him either.
“Come inside?” you ask, your voice carried away by the wind like a leaf. He hesitates. Thunder splits the sky in two. When he nods, you think lightning might have hit in the middle of your chest, cleaving your heart apart.
You find yourselves wet and cold in the middle of your flat that night. You fetch him a towel. He refuses the offer of dry clothes to change into. You don’t change out of your wet clothes either. You end up sitting on the floor out of fear the rainwater would entirely ruin your cheap sofa.
“Can I ask you a question?” he asks, tucked away like a secret in the space between the bookshelf and the door. You nod. The sight of him in your space is heady like mead. You’d tell him anything he wants to know.
“There were flowers. The first time we met. It was you, wasn’t it?”
You press your right fingers to your left hand. The fabric is smooth and cool. You swallow.
“Yeah,” you say. “It started after the accident. It’s the reason why I wear the glove.”
He doesn’t answer immediately. You want to pick up the words off the floor and swallow them again like a handful of wasps.
“I…” he starts. “Yeah. I’ve heard it can happen. I’m sorry it happened to you, for what it’s worth.”
“I learned how to live with it,” you say. I’ve learned how to live around it, you mean, I’ve learned how to entomb myself within it. The words sting your airways and close up your throat. You don’t know how to spit them out. He doesn’t say anything for a long while.
He doesn’t pick up the topic again. Instead, when he speaks again, he tells you of his family and of how it felt growing up in a house where perfection was the only acceptable currency to buy love. As he presses the back of his head into the wall, you catalogue the beautiful profile of him against the familiar backdrop of your life: the expanse of the forehead, the line of the nose, the column of the neck. He is the gilded statue of the patron saint of pain, and what are you? A chipped mug or a plywood shelf. Something mundane and worthless. You could never hope for him to fit in here, but still, your greedy heart sinks its teeth into the reality of him. Still, you want to take him apart with your hungry hands for as long as he lets you.
He doesn’t come back into your flat the next day. You cannot forget the sight of him in your living room. It is all you can think about. It haunts you, the way you want him here. It is not enough, you realise—the crumbs of presence he gives you in the space between light and dark. It cannot be enough when he is the only thing that makes you feel alive. The thought settles behind your ribs like a stone, and you hate it immediately. You bite down on it like a bullet and swallow it down like lead. You’ll let it poison your bloodstream if that’s what it takes to never say it out loud.
When you take your gloves off, jonquils spill out, yellow and fragrant. You put it on again immediately. Still, the evidence of your desire litters the floor of your kitchen. You do your best not to think about it.
You don’t stop meeting him. You couldn’t keep away if you tried. You’re careful about it, you cut out all the parts of you that howl like wolves, and you shove them down in the bottomless well of want in the pit of your stomach. You cultivate artful distance between your hands as you sit on the ledge; you fabricate barriers between your hearts, too. You swallow down all the words that are all the wrong shape and all the wrong size until your mouth turns into a triage centre. It’s okay. You’d rather not give him the whole of you than lose him entirely.
This is why it takes you by surprise when he kisses you. Later, you’ll think about it in the dead of night, in a desperate attempt to make sense of it, and wonder if you were perhaps so wrapped up in containing yourself that you didn’t notice the way he was spilling out of himself all the while. Perhaps you should have seen it coming, but you don’t, and it goes like this:
You’re talking about something inconsequential, laying out the stupid request of a client and explaining all the reasons why it’s entirely impossible. The sky is cloud-darkened and heavy above your heads, and the air smells like the promise of summer. When you feel his warm fingers on your arm, pulling you towards him, all your words die in your throat. His lips are on yours before you can string a coherent thought together.
Kissing Verso is burning and drowning all at once, and you forget your name in favour of learning the shape of his mouth and the warmth of his breath. You drink the mead of him from the cup of his lips until the world blurs and disappears around you, and there is nothing left but this: his skin, and the solid contact of his body against yours, and the sound of his moans blending into yours. And you want it, and you want him, and—you have never wanted so much in your entire life, but most of all, you want him to want this, to want you, to need you, and… fuck, it cleaves you in half that need, it guts you like a fish and it leaves you out to dry, and you cannot say any part of it without tearing you heart from the vault of your ribs, so you don’t say anything at all. So you kiss him, and you kiss him, and you kiss him, like the sea kisses the shore or like the tides kiss the moon.
Your fingers find your way to his shirt, tugging at it in your desperate desire for more—more skin, more warmth, more contact. You need the man like you need to breathe. He catches your wrist.
“Don’t,” he pants against your lips. “Let me take care of you, okay? Let me touch you tonight.”
You want to protest, you want to tell him you think you might drown if he doesn’t let you learn the contact of his skin upon yours, but his fingers are on your chest, clawing and caressing all at once, and his leg is between yours and—oh, you can’t breathe, you can’t breathe, you want him so much. So you don’t say anything at all. So you let him touch you in all the ways he wants to, so you give yourself to him entirely, heart and soul and body burning up in a sacrificial pyre, and you kiss him, and you kiss him, and you kiss him like the flames kiss the trees. Like the avalanche kisses the ground below.
When he wraps his fingers around you, you find the only word your mouth can hold is his name, so you say it, and you say it, and you say it until it fills the sky with the confessions of love you cannot yet utter. “Gustave,” he whispers back. “Oh, god, Gustave…” And you forget how to think of anything at all but him, his warm hand on you, your name staining his lips like blackberry juice, and the pleasure building, white-hot and blinding at the bottom of your chest.
Your orgasm erupts from you, violent and destructive, the lava of it razing all the careful barriers you’ve spent so long erecting in your mind. There is nothing in the wake of it but rubble where walls used to stand, and a terrible warmth inside your chest that you suspect might demand to be called love. You plant kisses like sparks against Verso’s throat as he holds you through it, whispering his name like a prayer or a binding spell. I love you, you tell him with every kiss. I love you, I love you, I love you.
“Stay,” you beg, as you drown in the ocean of every emotion you haven’t allowed yourself to feel since you were eighteen and holding the steering wheel of a swerving car. “Stay.” (I love you)
Verso freezes. You know immediately it was the wrong thing to say. His body grows rigid against yours. When you try to hold on to him, he moves away.
“I shouldn’t have…” he says, voice clipped. “It’s not like that. It can’t mean anything.”
He stands up, leaving you ruined on the floor. Your chest fills with ash, and ash, and ash. Layers and layers of it, covering everything in a heavy coat of grey. You do not understand.
“I’m sorry,” he tells you. Every vowel sounds hard and grey like granite.
You do not get up after he leaves. You do not remember how to use your limbs. Instead, you lie on the cold cement and stare at the clouded sky. There is a pulsating hole behind your ribs, where your heart used to be. The air smells like a funeral for spring.
He will not come back, you know. It shouldn’t surprise you. After all, you are an ancient Aztec sacrifice, and he is the cruel sun god. What good are you to him when he’s ripped out your heart and burned it down, and you have nothing else to give?
(I love you)
You stop meeting him. You don’t go back to the roof. You don’t think he would be waiting there even if you did.
You stay at home. You swallow down your pain. You still your mind. It’s okay. It’s fine. You knew this would happen if you’re honest. It was inevitable. You’re broken and bruised, a too-ripe plum or a rotting peach. No one could ever want you, you know, not after they’d seen the whole of you. You’ll find a way to go on. After all, it’s what you always do.
You do not think of jumping off the roof. You do not think of the way a gun barrel would feel cold and hard against the enamel of your teeth. You do not think about your blood leaving your veins in an endless river of red. You do not think of anything at all. You are fine. You go to work. You come home. You go to bed. This is all there is to life, after all. Your only mistake was thinking it could ever be anything else.
Some nights, you take off your glove to wash it. Those nights, yellow fills all the rooms you’re in. You hate it. You long for the days of crimson-red and purple. You long for the funeral-white of carnations. Sometimes, you wonder how much it would hurt to cut your arm clean off. You think it might be less painful than this. Still, your endless desire fills every room, bile-yellow and terrible. You drown in it entirely.
How long is it until you hear the knock on your front door? You cannot say. In the wake of Verso leaving you, time steadfastly refuses to mean anything at all. You think it might be days. Weeks or years perhaps. You do not know for sure. You’re too busy living out entire lifetimes of pain in every breath. You reach for the door handle with numb hands and a screaming mind. You do not think anything of it.
“Gustave,” Verso says, standing crucified in the cold neon light of the hallway. The sight of him fills you with ash and violence.
“You left,” you hiss, jabbing a sharp finger at the centre of his chest. “You left. Don’t. Don’t you dare come here now. Don’t you dare make me deal with the sight of you on top of everything else.”
You cannot stand his presence here, soft and sad like he didn’t rip your heart out with his blood-stained hands (with his love-stained lips). You want to turn your skin inside out. You want to slowly break every single one of your bones. You want to punch him, or to kiss him, or to throw yourself out a window.
“Gustave,” he says again, and his gaze on you is a tidal wave (submerging you, overpowering you, drowning you)
Then: his hands are tugging at the bottom of his shirt.
Then: he is pulling his shirt over his head.
Then: he is standing half-naked in your hallway.
His torso is an ocean of cuts and bruises. You forget how to breathe. Every wound you can see forms a pain-penned sentence on his skin.
“Funny thing,” he says, spitting the words onto the linoleum floor. “You’re not the only one whose body betrayed them in the wake of grief. My skin started calling out my lies after Alicia’s death. I’ve never told anyone before. Not until now. Not until you.”
You swallow around the lump in your throat. You blink. Your heart fissures in your chest. Your ribs fracture. I can think of nothing but you, a fresh cut on his shoulder says. I want you more than I can say, a bruise spells on his waist. I wish I could stay, silver scars lament around his biceps. And littered everywhere on his skin: your name, in a thousand different writings and a thousand different wounds. Gustave. Gustave. Gustave.
“Verso…” You manage because what else can you say? (I love you. I love you. I love you. Don’t leave me)
You pull him inside, and the firework of your palm against his bare skin explodes inside your chest.
“I’m running out of space on my skin to lie to myself about you. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I thought I could run. It’s what I’ve always done. But I can’t. I can’t, so here I am. And—merde, what I mean is: I am yours, if you’ll have me. I am yours, for however long you’ll have me. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I have nothing to give you but my broken heart and a body that turns into a wound. Still, they are yours. Please—have them. Have me. Please.”
He’s haemorrhaging the words like slit wrists or a punctured artery. The floor is slippery with his confessions, and you can’t move out of the fear you might fall and break your spine. In your chest, your heart is swollen and hot like an abscess.
“Fuck, Verso…” you repeat, as you stare into his face. The fingers of your right hand find the hem of your glove. “Of course, I want you. How could I not? You’re everything, and I’m—I’m yours. I’m yours. I’ve never been anything else.”
You pull down the glove, staring into his face. He stares back, transfixed and more beautiful than anyone has ever been. The glove falls to the floor, a dark shadow in a sea of yellow that immediately covers the floor. You reach your hand to him, palm turned upward in an offering. From your skin, primroses spill, the buttery softness of their petals bright in the dim light of your flat.
“Primroses,” you say, the words falling to the floor and coiling around his ankle like snakes. “Tell me, do you know the language of flowers at all? Because I’ve had to learn over the years.”
Verso shakes his head. His coal-bright eyes burn dark holes into the skin of your face, and you never want to be uncharred again.
“I cannot live without you, that’s what primroses say,” you bite down the words, tearing the throat of them apart viciously with your teeth. “And do you want to know when they started appearing? Because I’m sure you can guess.”
“I’m sorry,” Verso says again. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” The words are prayers on his lips (beads on the rosary of regret). You grab him by the waist and pull him flush against you.
“When you left me on that roof,” you hiss against his lips. “That’s when they started appearing. I took off my glove, and thought my skin would be screaming about anger or grief, but all it did was remind me I couldn’t live without you.”
“I can’t live without you either,” Verso exhales, the words coming out like a punch to the throat. “Fuck, Gustave, I’ve tried and I can’t.”
That is when you finally kiss him. It is biting and violent, the kiss, all fiery passion and desperate desire. He kisses back with the same intensity, tugging at your t-shirt and pulling you close. You want him like you’ve never wanted anything else in your life. You need him, that’s the truth of it. You need him, and you think he might need you back, and the thought of it makes every single part of you combust.
Around you, the world explodes in blooms: geraniums and red chrysanthemums and forget-me-nots mixing their paint-splatter hues with the yellow of jonquils and primroses. Against your lips, Verso inhales the sharp fragrance of your love with every whimper, and you want to brand the moment onto your brain with a red-hot iron.
“I want you,” he begs against your lips, the words pleasure-drenched and fragile, “Please. Gustave. I want you.”
“I’ve never wanted anyone else like I want you,” you answer against his lips, the confession bright as a flame and more freeing than anything. “I have wanted you for longer than you know.”
Everything catches fire in earnest after that, as you pull Verso towards your bedroom, leaving a botanical trail in your wake (jonquils, and orange blossoms, and chrysanthemums, and an entire sea of red roses) Verso against you is incandescent and frantic as he kisses your lips, and your throat, and your shoulder and—you want him, god you want him, and you can barely believe that he wants you back, but he does, and it turns you into a forest fire, the thought, bright and warm and all-consuming. Your remaining clothing drops to the floor in a flurry of red, fragrant petals.
It is a sacred experience, the contact of Verso’s body against yours. You want to take the moment, to stretch time around it, to make sure it never ends. You explore every centimetre of warm skin, every wound, every instance of your name with soft fingers and reverent lips. Under your palms, Verso is pliant and eager, and it ruins you, the reckless abandon with which he gives himself to you. It drives you entirely mad and fills you with a burning sort of desire, until nothing exists but your hands and his beautiful, warm, perfect body.
“I want to savour you,” you whisper against the skin of his hipbone as he arches his back. “Let me take you apart.”
“Gustave…” Your name has never sounded better in anyone’s mouth.
You take him apart with your fingers and your mouth, spilling petals and love confessions on the warm expanses of his skin as he holds onto you like he’d drown without the raft of your body to keep him afloat. And you love him, this man who ran away, this man who came back, this man who promised to stay. You love him despite your best judgement and despite how hard you know it’ll be still to keep him there, to hold his heart in your hands, to let him hold yours too.
I love you, you whisper with every kiss. I love you. I love you.
I’m not leaving, he answers with every breath and every moan. I’m not leaving.
And you believe him because the wounds on his skin and the flowers at your fingertips spell out all the things you can’t yet say. And it is beautiful, in this instant, the way you find yourselves, two men who could not remember how to live but cannot remember how to stop loving each other. And it is enough—for now, it is enough. It is all you could ask for. After all, you love, and you are loved, and it is all that matters.
You do not stop touching him. He does not stop touching you, kissing and caressing and stroking every part of you with reverent fingers and trembling lips. And it is—everything. Everything you have ever wanted, everything you have ever dreamed of, everything that you thought you could never have. It’s pleasure, and it’s pain, and most of all it is love—love, love, love so bright it is blinding and so intense it cannot let itself be ignored or called by any other name.
You both come almost at the same time, staring into each other’s eyes and with each other’s name on your lips. “I love you,” you exhale as pleasure blooms inside you like waterlilies. “I love you,” he tells you, and every word is frayed at the edges with the raw truth of it.
(Inside your chest, your heart is a cathedral bell, ringing a euphoric Angelus for your love and his trust)
Later, much later, when you’ll have settled into this life of honesty, when you’ll have got used to loving someone more than you thought it to be possible, you’ll think back on that night and that knock on your door and everything that came after. You’ll be happy then, warm in the arms of the man you’ll still want more than anything, and you’ll think of all the ways it could have gone wrong. He’ll laugh when you tell him, and he’ll kiss you softly.
“It didn’t,” he’ll remind you. “It couldn’t have. Because we were the people we are. We were always going to find a way to make it work.”
“We were so broken,” you’ll say. “We didn’t know how to love.”
“We knew how to love,” he’ll whisper against your neck, letting his now almost entirely grey hair tickle your nose softly. “Sometimes, I think it’s the only thing we knew how to do. I would have gone to the end of the world for you. Learning how to stay alive was nothing I wasn’t prepared to do for you.”
And he’ll be right, of course, because you’ll both have put in so much work to build this love. You’ll remember all the difficult moments, all the bits where things didn’t fall into place, where you had to talk it out, or to go to therapy, or to learn how to stay honest even when the truth was hard and hurt. You’ll remember the tears and the fights and all the messy feelings, but most of all, you’ll remember it was all worth it because you’ll have this. A life, beautiful and imperfect and shaped exactly like the two of you.
And you’ll look at the walls, your artworks in their sleek walnut frames, and his PhD in physics printed on this cream paper and sitting in an aluminium frame. And you’ll think, perhaps age is measured in the number of people you’ve been allowed to love, and you’ll feel so unbearably thankful that you’ve been allowed to love him for as long as you have. And you’ll hope that you’ll be allowed more still—more years together, more happiness, more love.
You’ll laugh softly then, and you’ll kiss him, the well-practised motion of two men who fit together effortlessly because they grew into people together despite everything, like dandelions in the crack of the marble of a grave.