y the time they finished, he was smiling again. He had picked up his bowl after Aremu, drinking the rest of the broth gratefully. He wasn’t full enough to be in pain. He laughed softly and raised a hand to the lad behind, looking over his shoulder at turns as the dock became nothing but a gleam of lights on the water. In the humid night air, not unpleasant, he could feel sweat prickling at the small of his back, cooler than the breeze.
He remembered Aremu’s shudder, when he’d spoken; for a while – for the first alley they turned onto, and almost to Tsuh’aqay – he wasn’t sure what to say anymore. Perhaps he never had been. I see something, he’d said, with a ‘maybe’ thick and unwieldy in his mouth. What did he see?
I see you, he could’ve said, which was worse than a sweet nothing. I see you, dove, I see you and that’s all, now kiss me and let’s forget about it. He might have cursed under his breath. The alley walls played strange with the lapping of the Turga not too far ahead, making the sound bounce back and over itself, an etheric wash.
I don’t know what to say; let’s agree to disagree.
I see it, he’d said, and could no longer take the words back.
At Tsuh’aqay, Aremu drifted to the edge of his field and beyond, toward one of the lanterns swinging gently in the breeze. Tom stood at the end of the light, watching the back of his head and the bright strip of his amel’iwe, his right arm tucked in his pocket, feeling oddly helpless. He looked back over his shoulder and found himself looking at the chalked verse, though he could understand the Mugrobi no more now than he had on the way to the docks.
Aremu turned, then, and broke the silence himself. He came closer, joining him where the light began to blur into the dark. He felt the moment he met his field: he felt it, strange and soft at the edges of his nerves.
He felt the warm brush of a hand, unexpected, and his throat caught.
It’s all right, where we are, Aremu said, then: I don’t mean to push you.
“You’ve nothing to apologize for,” he said again. “This is important.” If he hadn’t known better, he’d’ve leaned up and kissed him right there; he wasn’t sure how Aremu would feel about it just now, and there were too many shadows to tell who might be watching, but he burned to do it.
Aremu’s back was to the lantern. His silhouetted face didn’t tell him much more than the back of his head had. He could see where the light prickled at the edges of Aremu’s hair, caught the curve of one ear; he remembered running his fingertips along it just an hour earlier, and almost shivered. He could see the slope of his cheekbone, and the tight muscle of a cheek. He could almost, almost, see his lips, but the shadows made strange shapes of them, and the gleam of his eyes was lost underneath his brow.
The hand that brushed his, though, he took. “I didn’t know you felt that way. That, I – never…” Or maybe I did, he bit back, or maybe it’s still too strange for me to understand.
He squeezed his hand once, and didn’t let go. He sidled up closer; he took a couple of winding steps down the path, away from one light and toward another, a pool spilling out on the stones not too distant. He eased them closer to the water, looking out over Aremu’s shoulder at the Turga, watching the dark spot of a boat at some distance.
What did he see?
“What will it mean, if I see it?” he asked, looking over and up. His voice was quiet and measured; his brow was furrowed, and there was a tiny frown on his face.