Chapter Text
“Let this first be agreed: some beings are precisely that, ‘true beings’, both divine and supernatural.”
Michael Psellos, early 11th century (exact year unknown)
When Yusuf was a child, he was fascinated with the horizon. He would sit for hours at the water’s edge, on a rock or close enough to the shore for the gentle turquoise waves to lap over his feet, and stare out at the endless stretch of blue. He was captivated by the way it cascaded into the distance until finally it disappeared beyond the edge of the world.
“What is on the other side?” he would ask his mother.
“I do not know,” she would always answer, as she stirred in a pot or beat the sand from a rug and only paid part of her attention to him, “perhaps nothing.”
It could not be nothing. Yusuf could not imagine nothing, because it was nothing, so that could not be the answer. There must be something over there, just beyond where his eyes could see.
As he grew, his imagination grew with him, his wild mind weaving together images of stone buildings and strange animals and people he longed to meet. He loved his village, loved his family and his goat and his bed and his friends, but everyone here was just the same. They followed the same routines, prayed the same way, donned the same garments. Yusuf imagined people who looked different, smelled different, sounded different, and knew different things, things he wanted so badly to learn so that he, too, might cease to be just the same as everyone else.
He took to drawing. He was more skilled than the other children because rather than sketching out a tree or a temple from his memory, he drew from his imaginings. Their laws, his mother explained, forbade him to draw people or animals so Yusuf drew castles and monsters and ships bigger than mountains. He drew fantastical things that made his mother and father exchange a worried glance, sometimes, and tell him patiently that it was important to keep his feet on the ground and his head out of the clouds.
Yusuf could not fathom a more boring life. Clouds were beautiful, and if there was any way to get up to them, he would do it in a heartbeat.
* * *
When he was old enough he became a merchant like his father, taking his chance to discover what lies across that sea. His father travelled up and down the coast in a small vessel that would not have fared well in the open ocean during a storm, so Yusuf saved and bartered until he managed to secure a larger boat that could.
For ten years he travelled the entire border of the sea. He met the people he had only imagined, learned their languages and their cultures and their foods. He saw what lies to the North, across from his village: people with paler skin than his and different patterns of worship but they were still only people. They were not as different as he had imagined they would be.
* * *
It is ten years later on a warm, sunny day, when the invaders come. The sort of day where nothing like it should be able to happen. The world should not allow it, but it does. Hundreds of them pour over the city walls, in through holes they have blown into the stone, flooding the streets with chaos and blood and the piercing sounds of anguished screams.
He is in Jerusalem, far to the East of his home, where he has been before but this time has stayed longer than usual. He is terribly inept at keeping track of time but he thinks it has been some months that he has lodged at a small inn and traded inland instead of across the sea.
Yusuf has never held a sword before. He has never had any reason to, in all thirty-three of his years. He catches one that is tossed to him by a passing soldier and fumbles it, dropping it to the dirt at his feet. If there were time to be embarrassed, he would be, but there is not, so he scoops it up and rushes after the man, headlong into the throes of battle.
The Frank who charges at him has ghostly skin and translucent eyes; and they are wild, his eyes, like an animal, round and brimming with fire even though they are almost devoid of color. His lips curl into a snarl as he brandishes his own sword, shorter and straighter than the one in Yusuf’s hand, and he’s better with it, too. He moves with it like it is a part of him, an extension of his arm. Yusuf defends himself as best he can, with flailing motions and tripping uselessly over his own feet, his heart beating up into his throat and terror gripping his windpipe.
He manages, somehow, to swipe at the Frank’s belly with the tip of the sword in his shaking hands. The man cries out, grasping at his gut as blood spills over his fingers, and for half a second Yusuf breathes and believes he has won, until the Frank lunges toward him and the pain that tears through Yusuf’s gut is burning hot and previously unimaginable.
Clouds are beautiful, and if he could get up to them somehow he would do it in a heartbeat, he thinks, as he chokes on blood in his mouth and slips away.
* * *
When his eyes reopen, the world spins around him. The racket of the battle still rages, chaos and banging and shouting voices. Yusuf sits up, feeling urgently along his belly for a mortal wound that had been there only moments ago but now suddenly … is not.
In front of him, the Frank stares with haunted eyes and parted lips. There is blood, still, on his tunic, but he is not dead either. Yusuf had been so sure he would be. And the blood stain is not getting bigger. It remains there on his clothes, but the bleeding has ceased. He spits some words at Yusuf; quick, tumbling ones, that Yusuf cannot understand. His racing heartbeat leaves him nauseous, head spinning, confusion wrapping around him like thick fog.
“What’s happening?” Yusuf demands. What sort of spell has this man put on him, to gut him like a fish and then remove the evidence of it as if it had never happened?
The man shakes his head, not understanding Yusuf in his own tongue. He bellows in rage, suddenly, and scrambles for his sword. Yusuf jumps and reaches for his own but the Frank gets to him first, driving his blade directly into Yusuf’s chest, cracking ribs, tearing muscle, choking him again as blood gathers into his throat and Yusuf falls over, convulsing excruciatingly until it stops.
When he wakes again, the Frank is gone.
* * *
The fighting has not stopped, when they flee the city together. It has lasted for days, and Yusuf has lost track of the number of times they have crossed paths again in the din of it and run each other through with their swords again and again, only to wake with blood on their clothes but no marks on their skin. He does not understand it. The man – Nicolò – speaks broken Greek, not as proficiently as Yusuf but well enough to rudimentarily understand each other, and they cannot seem to die. Nicolò does not understand it either (if he is to be believed, which Yusuf has not settled on affirmatively).
The city will fall, Yusuf knows it will. Its people were not prepared for an assault like this. He wants to strangle the pale invader until the life slips from him for doing this to them, but life would just come back into him the moment Yusuf removed his hands, so it’s no use.
They take their swords and a small amount of food they can steal and they walk, for a long, long time. They head in the direction of the morning sun, and they walk until their feet bleed and their legs crumple underneath them, and then they stop to sleep against a rock or under a canopy of trees, and then they repeat it.
Nicolò is quiet and sullen, and sometimes he looks at Yusuf like he wants to run a sword through him just one more time, just to make sure, and Yusuf feels very much the same in that regard, but they do not. They walk.
* * *
It is nine days and ten nights before they come across another human. Yusuf trades a few of his rings for enough money to buy them a tent, so they can avoid the cities. He thinks it would be difficult to explain, the two of them travelling together when they can only barely speak to each other and come from such different worlds. And he assumes he’d be as unsafe around Nicolò’s people as Nicolò would be around Yusuf’s, so they are better off alone.
“Why ask me … come with you?” Nicolò inquires one evening, as they’re sitting by the fire he built, roasting a rabbit they had caught in the afternoon. The words still tumble from his mouth in muddled, mispronounced Greek. Yusuf has been teaching him Arabic, and Nicolò has been pointing to and identifying objects in his own language, but in two short weeks they are barely any closer to proper conversation than they were the day they first killed each other.
“Because I was tired of dying, and tired of not dying,” Yusuf answers, poking at the glowing embers with a stick. “And I was tired of hurting you.”
Nicolò exhales loudly through his prominent nose and watches Yusuf closely with those large, haunting eyes. He’d thought them ugly, at first. Clear and cold and the color of death. Now he thinks they are more like the color of the sky in early morning, after a night of rain, or the color of the ocean when the sky is overcast.
Yusuf sighs as well and tips his head back to look up at the stars. “Why are we unable to die, Nicolò?”
“Not know.”
“Neither do I. But it is not something that … people would think we were inhuman, that we had been possessed by some sort of …”
“Demon,” Nicolò supplies, in his own language, and Yusuf nods. He knows that word. Nicolò has said it enough times.
“We had to leave.”
“Yes.”
“And I did not want to be alone,” Yusuf finishes. He looks at his unlikely companion. His face is familiar, now, being the only one Yusuf has looked upon for a stretch of time. It’s not as horrible as he had once thought, now that it is rarely twisted in anger. His eyes shine in the firelight, his cheeks reddened from the warmth and the smallest hint of a smile on his lips.
* * *
Months pass before they speak of it again.
Months of learning each other’s languages enough to converse freely in them. Months of staying in one spot for weeks and then a stretch of weeks where they move every day, exploring new cities and fighting off bandits and teaching each other their own names for the constellations in the night sky.
It takes months, but Nicolò becomes more than his reluctant travelling companion. The man becomes his friend. Yusuf finds himself excited when he finds walnuts at a market because they are Nicolò’s favorite. He finds it comfortable, instead of awkward but necessary, when they sleep with their backs and legs touching on colder nights. He finds the foreign way Nicolò shapes words on his tongue pleasing to listen to, like music, rather than irritating.
Nicolò is still quiet, but it is a thoughtful sort of quiet, now, instead of angry or brooding. He gets lost in his mind and Yusuf watches him and wonders what he thinks of and wishes he were permitted to know. When he speaks, Yusuf hangs on his words, as captivated by his voice as he is horrified by the life Nicolò has led, full of so much hatred and shame and fear.
It is a crisp night in autumn, when Nicolò sits on the ground next to him outside their tent and, from nowhere, softly says, “I never wanted to kill anybody.”
Yusuf regards him with a frown and swallows carefully. They are not strangers anymore so he moves in closer and briefly lets his hand settle on his friend’s shoulder, squeezing with his fingers before he lets the touch fall away. The woods around them are still and quiet and they seem a safe place for confessing.
“Neither did I,” he says. “I was not given much choice.”
Nicolò’s exhale is unsteady and when Yusuf sneaks a glance at him, his eyes shine in the bright silver light from the full moon. “I answered the call because that land belongs to God and it had been stolen. He needed us to retrieve it. If we could have done that without spilling a single drop of blood I would have been happy.”
Yusuf clenches his jaw for a moment, biting back the retort that threatens to escape. He does not want to fight, to yell, to say things he will regret. He will not deny that he’s angry, still, about that day. He also will not deny that he knows so little about why it came to pass in the first place. It was just blood and noise and mayhem, and they left far before the dust had settled.
“Is that what they told you?” he asks in a low voice. “That we stole from you?”
“Yes.”
“I have never stolen anything. I did not deserve to die for what someone else might have done. And Jerusalem is sacred to my people, too. You are not entitled to just take it from people who have never done anything to you.”
Nicolò shakes his head slowly. “I did not know what it would be like. I did not know there were men like you, Yusuf.”
Yusuf asks incredulously, “did you think it was a land filled with monsters?”
“It’s what they told us. You have to understand,” Nicolò says, a pleading edge to his voice although he still refuses to look up from his hands clasped tightly together against his leg.
“Who told you?”
“I don’t know. Men who know what they’re talking about.”
“And what gives them that authority? Your God?”
Nicolò sniffs and listlessly shrugs one shoulder. For a moment, they sit in silence. Anger curls hot and insistent in Yusuf’s gut, but not anger at Nicolò. He had let go of that months ago because he found it served no purpose. They were stuck together, for the foreseeable future, maybe for the rest of time, and it did not help to have hatred in his heart.
It was a lesson learned by accidental extension from Nicolò. Yusuf’s surprised it took this much time for the man to bring all this back up, because the guilt that has been written all over his expressive face every time Yusuf has mentioned his home or his family has been impossible to ignore.
Although, Yusuf realizes just this second with a pang of his own guilt, Nicolò does not know that the city he laid siege to was not Yusuf’s home. He is unaware that Yusuf’s family still lives on the other side of the sea, that they are likely still alive and wondering if their son will ever return. He has never mentioned that. He wonders if he’d done so on purpose. If he had taken some small, cruel satisfaction in letting Nicolò draw incorrect conclusions about the fate of Yusuf’s mother and father and brothers.
Finally, Nicolò says, “I will not ask you to accept my apology. I understand that I do not deserve that, but I still want you to know that I’m sorry.”
Yusuf nods. He’s not sure either, whether he accepts it. He might have to sit with it for a while before he decides.
“When I saw what we had done to your city ... it turned my stomach.” Nicolò sniffs again and wipes at his nose with the back of his hand. Yusuf longs, suddenly, to take that hand and hold it. “All this time I have wanted to believe that the men I knew who campaigned for it, that they had simply been taken in, too, by someone else. That they did not intend for it to be like this. But maybe you are right, maybe they did know. Maybe I was the only one foolish enough to believe there was something holy in it. Maybe all the rest of them were lying.”
Yusuf admits, “these things are never so simple.”
Nicolò looks at him, then, with tears in his bright eyes. He repeats, “I’m sorry, Yusuf. For what happened to your home. For the part I played in it. For letting men who seek power put hatred into my heart. For the others who died by my sword.”
Yusuf cannot keep himself from reaching out and curling his fingers around Nicolò’s forearm. The man inhales sharply as if the touch has burned him, but when Yusuf does not let go, his eyes focus on Yusuf’s fingers and his lips press together. His own hand lifts, fingertips brushing along the back of Yusuf’s palm and then his hand covers Yusuf’s. His skin is so warm.
“I do not believe,” Yusuf says slowly, “that you are to blame for the things you did not know. We can only know … what we know. And I believe that you are sorry.”
Nicolò nods. Yusuf does not say that he forgives him. Not yet. That fact hangs in the air between them, unspoken, but Nicolò still squeezes his hand.
* * *
Yusuf knows, from the weather more than anything else, that it is close to a year before he realizes he is in love with Nicolò.
It does not happen all at once.
It happens in sleeping with their backs touching turning into sleeping with Nicolò’s back pressed against Yusuf’s front, and Yusuf’s arm securely around his middle, keeping him close.
It happens in the first time he makes Nicolò laugh – really laugh, not a small chuckle or a polite smile but a laugh that makes him toss his head back and shout with it, eyes sparkling and shoulders shaking. The man is so careful with his emotions, as if he believes every uncontrolled burst of them is a sign of personal failure, and Yusuf delights in those rare moments becoming more common.
It happens in watching Nicolò kindly share some bread with a small, tragically thin girl in Gaza, because she is starving, and he is too but he will not die from it like she could.
It happens in the first time Nicolò dies in front of him in a long while, in a stupid accident, getting his foot stuck between two rocks in a riverbed where they bathe and drowning before Yusuf can get to him. He drags Nicolò’s bare, lifeless body back to the shore, touching his wet skin with trembling hands and shouting at him, come back to me, breathe damn you, do not dare leave me alone, and slumping back in relief that crashes over him like a wave when Nicolò gasps himself back to life, coughing river water from his lungs.
It happens in long days baking in the sun as they walk, it happens in starlit nights as Nicolò listens to Yusuf’s stories with an enchanted expression on his handsome face.
It happens in Yusuf deciding he no longer cares about their laws as his mother explained them, because Nicolò has a face that must be drawn. After he happens upon some pressed linen at a market, he instructs Nicolò to pose for him and, for the first time, he sketches a human face, capturing as best he can Nicolò’s strong nose and magical eyes and soft mouth.
It happens in realizing he has come to expect Nicolò to be there against him when he wakes in the morning and the distress that fills him once when Nicolò is not; even when it turns out he had laid there next to Yusuf until his bladder would no longer allow it and was there looking back at Yusuf with concern and confusion when Yusuf had burst from the tent in search of him, ready to tear the world to pieces if he had been harmed or lost or taken away.
It happens slowly and quietly, and by the time Yusuf notices, he thinks he must have been in love for a long, long time.
* * *
They are staying, for once, in a comfortable room above a tavern in Rome, when Yusuf realizes Nicolò returns his feelings.
He emerges from the private bath, skin still damp and warm from the water, dressed but not all the way; his chest is bare and he catches Nicolò looking. He looks away as soon as he notices Yusuf watching him, his cheeks turning furiously red and fumbling to pretend he was cleaning his sword all along instead of taking in Yusuf’s half-naked form, but Yusuf saw it. He knows what it looks like, because he is sure he looks much the same way, when they have found a pleasant spot to bathe and he is given the opportunity to gaze upon Nicolò’s creamy skin and impossibly broad shoulders and the gentle slope of his stomach and wish that he were allowed to touch it.
Yusuf does not mention it. He’s not sure how he would, even though it has flowers blooming in his heart to imagine Nicolò thinking of him in that way. It makes him want to touch even more, makes him want to press Nicolò over on their bedrolls and press their lips together, whisper gently to him all the beautiful things he has always deserved to hear about himself, slide his hands down into secret places where no one but a man’s wife is meant to touch.
He wants it all. He hasn’t the slightest idea how to ask for it, and Nicolò was a priest in his former life, not all that long ago, and Yusuf yearns for so many things that are all so hopelessly complicated. He finishes dressing in silence and climbs into the bed, and he drifts off into an uneasy sleep before Nicolò joins him.
* * *
It is another three months before it resurfaces. They are back in their tent, somewhere in the South of the peninsula. When Yusuf passes his friend a cube of cheese, their fingers brush and Nicolò startles so much that he drops it and it lands in his lap.
In another time and place, if they were different men, they could pretend there’s no meaning in it. That it was nothing more than an accident. Nicolò could laugh at himself, call himself clumsy, and scoop it back up off the fabric of his tunic. But they are not different men, and so the tension crackles like lightning between them instead. When their eyes meet, Yusuf feels it. As if there is an invisible length of twine between them, one that shortens as they blink at each other, pulling them involuntarily closer together.
Yusuf cannot be sure, when he thinks back on it later, whether either of them really leaned in closer. He might have just thought of it, imagined it, hoped for it, while they sat motionless with widened eyes and parted lips. He does know Nicolò breaks the string first, swearing softly under his breath and standing up, walking a few steps away as he pushes his hair back off his face.
“Nico,” Yusuf murmurs, calling after him with the nickname he chose for his friend, his companion, the man he loves in that hauntingly forbidden way – like the desire to touch a red-hot coal just to see what it would feel like, even though it is obvious.
“Yusuf, I …” Nicolò croaks, his voice high and weak, laced with emotion. Yusuf wishes he would turn around so he could see his face. At the same time he wishes the opposite, because any sadness on that beautiful face might have him bursting into tears.
“I would never …” Yusuf begins, but he lets the rest of the sentence die in his lungs, because he’s not sure what he wants to say, or what he should be saying, or what would make Nicolò smile again.
He stands, stepping forward, tentatively holding out a hand but dropping it well before he reaches his friend. He will not touch without permission, not now. Not when Nicolò is upset. Not when Yusuf knows that there are things Nicolò does not talk about. Things he maybe is not able to talk about, now or maybe ever.
“I’m sorry,” Yusuf whispers, unsure of exactly what he is apologizing for but feeling as if he should, nonetheless.
Nicolò turns abruptly and there are tears running down his cheeks. Yusuf feels something inside himself shatter like a clay bowl being tossed carelessly from a second-storey window.
“Are we lying to each other?” Nicolò asks, shaking his head helplessly as his eyes brim over with more tears. “Pretending? How long can that last?”
“Nico, I do not … I’m not asking for …” Again the words fade away, disintegrate like dry sand on a summer breeze. He has never been the type to become tongue-tied. Nicolò has called into question everything Yusuf thought he knew about himself.
“I do not know, what it is like where you come from,” Nicolò says, with a sniff and with words ground out from between clenched molars, “but where I come from, it’s … I cannot. It would not be allowed.”
“Who says?” Yusuf challenges, as a deep ache settles in the center of his chest.
Nicolò does not answer. He does not need to; Yusuf had not asked because he truly did not know the answer, he knows it without it being said out loud. He asked because he wanted to hear Nicolò say it.
He’s unable to resist. He steps forward, and when Nicolò does not flinch away he tenderly strokes the tears off his flushed cheeks, only for them to be replaced with fresh ones. It pains him so deeply to see his companion so upset, suffering pouring off him in waves. Hair falls across Nicolò’s forehead as he lowers his gaze, ashamed of his emotion. Yusuf brushes that back as well, the strands silky under his fingers and so unlike his own. He’s never touched Nicolò’s hair, he realizes, until this moment.
“I do not know your God, Nicolò, but I cannot imagine he would want you to be unloved.”
“What does your God say?”
“I am not sure I care, anymore.”
“No?”
“There is nothing in our sacred texts about men whose limbs grow back after they have been sawed off, who can come back from being drowned or sliced open or crushed,” Yusuf tells him, voicing aloud thoughts he has been grappling with for months. He stopped praying months ago, as well. He wonders if Nicolò noticed. “So perhaps I think … if my religion cannot even conceive of us, it hardly gets to dictate what we are allowed to feel for each other.”
“Do you love me?”
“Yes,” Yusuf whispers, and feels unburdened in the admission. He’s carried it for so many days. “I will try to stop, if you wish me to.”
Nicolò shakes his head, and Yusuf moves to pull away from him with a painful throb in his heart, but then Nicolò clutches at his tunic. “No, I am not saying no, I mean I … do not wish you to stop.”
Yusuf breathes through his nose and moves back in closer. Nicolò’s hands do not relax in his garment, as if he thinks Yusuf might disappear if he lets go. “Then why are you so miserable?” he asks, cupping Nicolò’s face in his palm.
Nicolò leans into his touch and closes his eyes. “I am afraid.”
“Of me? After all this time?”
“Not of you. Of what it would mean, if I gave in. I have not … Yusuf, I have never – ”
“I know,” Yusuf says quickly. He steps in an inch further, feeling the heat from Nicolò all the way down his body. “Sweet man, of course I know you haven’t.”
“We were not supposed to, men like me, who gave their lives to the service of God. It is not … it’s sinful.” He spits the word, like he hates it. As if it had been pressed into him like a brand, as if perhaps he had been a shy, sensitive child and Christian hellfire had been folded into his heart instead of love and understanding.
It makes Yusuf’s stomach churn in fury, to imagine it.
He is not immune to it. He, too, was raised with knowledge of how things should be and of course this is not it, but he cannot imagine caring about all that, anymore. Not now. Not when they were so clearly destined to find each other, not when they might be the only two like them in the entire world and might spend the rest of eternity just the two of them. What could the laws of mortal men possibly matter when they are no longer among them?
He slides his hands down from Nicolò’s cheeks and around his shoulders, drawing him into an embrace. Nicolò positively shudders against him, his own arms wrapping tight around Yusuf’s back. He clings like he has never been held before, never been touched in a way that was gentle and loving instead of punitive. Yusuf realizes, with another twist of anger in his gut, that it’s possible he has not.
“I am not asking for anything from you,” he assures softly. “I only want you, however much or little you are willing to allow me.”
“What if I wanted everything?” Nicolò asks, his voice breathless, “but the thought of having it frightens me so much I cannot think properly?”
Yusuf swallows over a swell of emotions and closes his eyes. He turns his nose into Nicolò’s hair and inhales him. “I do not know your God,” he says again, “and I do not think I know mine very well, either. But I know we were brought together for a reason. I know I belong at your side. And I know that … this, too, can be sacred.”
Nicolò shivers again and his nose finds Yusuf’s neck and tucks into it. It feels, suddenly, less of a comforting fraternal embrace and instead far more intimate. He can feel Nicolò, Yusuf realizes, against his hip. Just barely, only the beginnings of arousal, but it is there. He prays Nicolò is not internally punishing himself for it, because it thrills Yusuf down to his bones, to think of this man desiring him.
“The love between a man and his wife is sacred, is it not?” he asks.
Nicolò nods. He licks his lips, and the movement has the tip of his tongue brushing just briefly at the skin beneath Yusuf’s beard. “It is,” he agrees.
Yusuf moves one hand, sliding it down Nicolò’s back to rest at the base of his spine. He presses forward, wordlessly telling Nicolò it is alright to be closer, if he wishes to be, and Nicolò gasps as their hips tilt into each other.
He realizes, with a dizziness in his head, that they have yet to even kiss properly. Yusuf drags his lips along Nicolò’s temple, needing to be sure before they do. “If you …”
He pauses, unable to speak for a moment because Nicolò’s fingers have reached up to tangle in his hair.
“Yusuf,” Nicolò whispers, his breath warm on Yusuf’s neck.
“If you were to allow yourself this,” Yusuf continues, a rasp in his voice and a needy throb in his groin, “allow yourself to be touched and held, allow me to worship you. Do you not think that could be divine, too?”
Fingers squeeze in the hair at the nape of his neck. “Why would you want that?” Nicolò argues, sad again. “I am not … anything.”
“No,” Yusuf agrees, “you are not anything. You are everything. Beautiful. Kind. Passionate. A bit annoying, at times,” he adds, as a joke, and Nicolò does laugh.
It is a nervous laugh. It is not the loud, free, sparkling kind Yusuf is used to, but it is a laugh, nonetheless.
He finally leans back, just far enough to see Nicolò’s eyes. The tears on his cheeks have dried, and his eyes shine in the firelight, but no new ones appear. Yusuf holds his jaw again, thumb brushing along a sharp cheekbone.
“I am in love with you,” he says plainly. “I have been for months. Perhaps even longer than that, perhaps I loved you before we ever set eyes on each other. It’s alright if you do not return it. I am happy enough to be your friend. But that is what’s in my heart.”
Nicolò’s eyes drop to his lips and then move back up. His forehead still twists in a frown – frightened and unsure – but when he speaks his voice is level. “I am in love with you, too.”
Yusuf sighs, relief descending along his spine like warm water. “May I kiss you?” he asks, and rather than answer, Nicolò tips forward and presses his lips against Yusuf’s eagerly. It warms Yusuf more than the fire, feels brighter than the sun, softer than gentle rain, more magical than starlight.
Nicolò whimpers quietly into their kiss and his lips part, making it deeper on pure instinct, if he is being truthful about a lack of practice. It sends additional shivers down Yusuf’s spine and he tentatively puts his tongue out to taste, to lick at the inside of Nicolò’s upper lip. Nicolò shakes against him and is beautifully breathless when their lips fall apart, blinking with heavy lips up at Yusuf, eyes shining and the seafoam green nearly eclipsed by black.
“Come,” Yusuf whispers, taking Nicolò’s hand and leading him back toward the fire. He sits and pulls Nicolò down with him.
Nicolò lifts his hand, letting it float between them for a moment, and then his fingers twitch and he drops it and looks away. Yusuf reaches for it, twines their fingers together and lifts it, pressing Nicolò’s knuckles into the center of his own chest. Nicolò’s lips press in together but his fingers brush, hesitant as they are, along the fabric of Yusuf’s tunic.
“Would you like to see?” Yusuf asks, wondering. “For me to remove it?”
“It is not something I haven’t seen,” Nicolò replies. They have bathed near one another so many times.
“No, that is true. But perhaps it is different, like this.”
Nicolò’s will not meet his eyes but he nods. Yusuf reaches behind himself to pull his tunic over his head. When his chest is bare, Nicolò hesitates again but Yusuf can see the desire so plainly in his eyes and he basks in the way that feels as he encourages Nicolò to touch again.
“It’s alright,” he promises. Nicolò nods and explores, fingertips sliding lightly along Yusuf’s chest, through the hair that covers it, over a nipple, to his stomach that rises and falls rapidly as he breathes. It is such a simple touch, innocent and tentative, but it thrills him.
“I … do you want …?” Nicolò inquires, looking hesitantly into Yusuf’s eyes.
“If you do,” Yusuf tells him. “Only if you do.”
Nicolò quickly sheds his own tunic, revealing his pale skin, his wide shoulders, his tantalizing waist. Yusuf wants to devour him, but he only looks, because he has not been given permission for anything else.
“You are a feast, Nicolò,” Yusuf says, smiling to himself when his companion drops his gaze and laughs, embarrassed.
“Let me guess, and you are a starving man?”
“Absolutely famished,” Yusuf jokes, wanting that lovely laugh again and delighting when he gets it. It is a heavenly melody in his ears.
When it fades away, Nicolò shifts as if he is uncomfortable and Yusuf, eyes innocently drawn to the movement, looks away again the moment he notices the bulge below Nicolò’s waist. He has not been told he’s allowed to look upon that, and he feels guilty for it, even if it was an accident.
“I feel …” Nicolò whispers, sounding unhappy about it, or perhaps simply confused, “I am not sure.”
Yusuf moves in closer so that he can take Nicolò’s flushed cheek in his hand and guide his gaze back to meet it. Damn his church, Yusuf thinks angrily, for doing this to this man. For teaching him that something so ordinary is something to be so ashamed of.
“I know,” he says softly, while Nicolò’s eyes plead with him to make it alright. “I feel, too. I long for so many things, when I look at you.”
Nicolò exhales slowly and nods.
“But not tonight,” Yusuf adds. “We have time. We have so much time.”
“Not tonight,” Nicolò agrees, visibly relieved, and Yusuf’s heart simply aches for him. For all the darkness that was bred into him, for all the ways this man’s heart has been broken. He vows to himself that he will stitch up every tear in him, even if it takes a lifetime. It seems they might have been given multiple lifetimes together, so he will work as long as he must.
He lays down on his side, asking with his eyes for Nicolò to join him and the man does, facing Yusuf but not quite touching. They can feel each other’s heat without touch, and Yusuf finds that just as nice.
“What is it you want?” Nicolò asks.
“You,” Yusuf answers. He is not sure what Nicolò knows, of life, of love, of sex, and this is not the moment to teach him. “Just you. Here with me, for as long as you are willing. This condition that we have, be it a gift or a curse, I do not know how long it will last. Maybe it is forever. Maybe it’s longer than either of us can fathom. But I want to spend that time with you.”
“And … the rest?” Nicolò does not elaborate, but Yusuf knows to what he refers, from the nervous waver in his voice.
“I want that, as well. I want to know you, all of you. I dream of it, I imagine it every time you smile at me. But I will not demand it. It is yours to give, if you want to. Not mine to take.”
Nicolò nods again and then his brow furrows once more and his eyes close.
“Nico,” Yusuf breathes.
The man shakes his head, curling further in on himself, face turned to the ground and away from Yusuf. Things are always so heavy in his mind. It has not escaped Yusuf’s notice. Storm clouds seem ever present, coloring every thought turning in Nicolò’s head. Yusuf moves in minutely closer, still not touching but close enough that he could, if Nicolò asked. He knows it’s what Nicolò wants, even if he’s warring against it inside himself for the moment. He needs Nicolò to ask.
“Anything you would like,” he says softly. “Say it and it’s yours.”
“Why are you so good to me?” Nicolò asks with a sniff.
“Because you are worthy of it. You are worthy of someone being gentle with you. I will work as long as it takes to make you believe it.”
It’s another moment, before he is brave enough, and when he does his voice quivers. “Could you … when you hold me, I feel … safe.”
“I will keep you safe, as I know you will do for me,” Yusuf promises. “Turn over.”
Nicolò obeys, rolling to his other side. Yusuf inches in the remaining distance between them, sliding his arms and one leg around Nicolò’s body. Nicolò shudders, as he has often this evening, but leans back into Yusuf, pressing the lines of their bodies together. Yusuf is slightly taller and Nicolò slightly stockier, but they align perfectly. They were made, it seems, to fit together this way.
“This is how it feels?” Nicolò wonders in a soft murmur. “To be loved?”
Yusuf presses a kiss to the nape of Nicolò’s neck and nuzzles into his hairline. “Yes,” he whispers back. “Do you like it?”
“I am not sure I can live without it, now. Now that I know. Please do not make me. I am sorry if that’s selfish.”
“It is not selfish if I feel the same way.” Yusuf presses his palm flat to the center of Nicolò’s chest, feeling the heartbeat under the bare skin. Nicolò’s hand curls around his wrist, holding on. “I promise you will never be alone. I would not go somewhere that I could not bring you with me.”
“No, nor would I. I would not want to.” Nicolò is still for a moment and then his head turns, and his lips find Yusuf’s in another kiss.
* * *