remu wasn’t long. He watched him take the two cups; he could see it even with his back turned, the way he deftly tucked one under his arm with his hand, the way he took the other. The trail of his amel’iwe rippled; his right arm hadn’t moved.
He took the cup curiously, catching a whiff of something citrus-sweet and floral. He’d wondered – but it was sharbat, and he smiled warmly at Aremu, taking a sip. It eased the ache in his stomach, though he was no less hungry to hear the other man speak. He’d kept him waiting again, he thought, and when Aremu began, it was all the more sweet for it.
He listened; he didn’t look away, not at the smell of grilling meat, not at the laughter and the drums. He watched Aremu’s face intently. Sometimes, Tom’s eyes widened; sometimes, his eyebrow twitched, or his lip pulled in something that was almost a wistful smile.
In the end, Aremu took another sip of sharbat, and he smiled a little. He smiled back, taking a sip of his own. I don’t know what you must think of it, he offered, his dark eyes lingering.
His smile softened. He thought about it, sucking a tooth, looking down for a few moments into his cup.
I think it sounds like you, he thought, every bit of it, and I – mung, soppy chroveshit was all that wanted to come out of his mouth first, and he’d’ve meant every bit of it.
Strange, silent rooftop meetings, blazing over rooftops in Dejai, scrambling up pipeworks, through empty windows or crumbling cracks in walls. You finished even the first time, he thought, sick or not; you kept up. He tried to imagine Aremu leading them, feeling out the cracks and corners of these streets like an engine, fitting them together and finding ways around.
It wasn’t the thought of contorted, broken limbs, or even, in the spaces between Aremu’s words, the implication of worse; that – the thought of the lads making this choice, wordless, ‘til the wells in them ran dry – that he understood. It was the thought of missing jumps that sent a chill skittering its legs down his spine. Of falling through the empty dark air, twisting, nothing to grab onto. He dreamt of falling sometimes; he realized, with a soft smile, Aremu knew that, and he remembered when they’d spoken of it.
We talked more than I give us our dues for, he thought, even the way we were back then. He looked over at Aremu, still smiling.
“It sounds like what fighting was for me, as a lad,” he said after a moment. “No – no,” he said, shaking his head, “not just like it. It doesn’t sound quite like anything I’ve ever done.”
The drumbeats picked up. A woman in green had broken off to dance by herself, lit flickering warm by the bonfire; a ring of onlookers was clapping rhythmically, and she was grinning, white teeth flashing. She missed a step and stumbled and dissolved into laughter. She did a shot when a lad brought one for her, coughing and laughing and clapping, and let herself be pulled back into the rest of the dancing.
He was grinning when he looked back over at Aremu, all the long, sloping angles of the imbala’s face limned orange and red and gold. “But the… moving,” he said, and forgot himself a little more, the voice he spoke with, the face Aremu was looking at. “The way you’re nothing but the moving, and for a time, everything makes sense. You don’t need to speak of it; the moving’s – the moving’s like a tongue. An old, old tongue.”
He breathed in deep; he couldn’t seem to stop looking at Aremu, couldn’t seem to get enough of imagining it. He wasn’t quite grinning, not anymore, and he felt soft and sharp all at once. The reflected light glinted orange in Aremu’s eyes.
“The pain, even, all those cuts and bruises and broken bones. Broken noses.” His smile slanted mischievous. I know where you got some of those scars, he thought, remembering how he’d wondered so, the first night they’d ever been together.
We spoke of reflections, once, in men’s eyes; we spoke of a man losing himself and finding himself, too. We don’t ever speak of those times. He’d stuck his foot in his mouth in the tsug grove, once – it was hard to even think about that – he could still feel the reverb of Aremu’s what were you thinking, and it ached.
But he shifted, now, looking at him, and his smile came easy. His sharbat was cool and sweating with the condensation, dripping on the packed earth and on his hand; the taste in his mouth was sweet. “Letting off that steam,” he said. “I think I’d’ve said you were losing yourself in the running, once – I don’t know. Were you finding yourself, you think?”