Work Text:
Late 2015
In the bed, they lie on their sides, facing each other. Roger strokes Rafa’s cheekbone with the backs of his knuckles. Behind Roger, floor to ceiling glass windows reveal a city skyline that glows buttery yellow against an inky sky. Rafa doesn’t know what city they are in. It doesn’t matter. It stopped mattering a long time ago. A lot of things stopped mattering a long time ago. Like the fact that Roger is a husband and a doting father of four perfect children. Like the fact that Rafa is still, to this day, using Mery to hide from the media in order to hide himself from the world. He knows that she hopes for things that he cannot give her, and he still takes the coward’s way out by allowing their arrangement to continue.
Roger’s knuckles continue stroking Rafa’s cheek, over and over again. Words don’t come. There is nothing left to say that has not already been said. No fight to have that has not already been had. On one stroke, Roger extends a slender finger and it loosens a lock of Rafa’s hair from where it was tucked behind his ear. Roger then uses his whole hand—his large, heavy hand—to stroke all of Rafa’s hair back again, tucking it behind his ear again. Repeats the pattern. It’s so calming, so soothing. Rafa can’t stop staring into Roger’s eyes. Roger can’t stop staring back at him.
It has been twelve years since Rafa first met Roger. Eleven years since they first played each other. Eleven since they first kissed. Since they first touched and then first fell into a bed like this. Back then, the beds weren’t this nice. Now, Roger only gets the best. Rafa, too. But no matter what the thread counts on the bedsheets are, no matter how thin the hair on their head grows, no matter how many lies they’ve told and how many times they have hurt the people around them and hurt each other—
“You are so beautiful, Rafa. So beautiful.”
—there is always a reason to return to one another.
Rafa shifts his face just enough to kiss the protruding bone of Roger’s wrist. When he looks back into Roger’s eyes, he knows that Roger understands what he wants.
“Yeah, okay. Close your eyes. Listen to my voice.”
Rafa complies easily. Roger’s voice is his favorite sound in the whole world. The sound of the sea crashing against the shore of his hometown’s beaches is second. The crowd’s roar when he wins Roland Garros is third.
“Hmm, where should we go today?” Roger muses aloud. His fingers still don’t stop their ministrations against Rafa’s face. Rafa feels so safe here. Here, none of their daily worries exist, even if only for a few hours. Here, they are perfect.
“Okay. Today, we’re in Switzerland. We’re in the mountains. The alps.”
Rafa smiles, and Roger’s fingers trace the curve of it.
“It’s springtime, but the mountains are still chilly. I know you don’t like the cold, Raf, but I’ve made sure you’re prepared. Gotten you all the cold weather stuff and hiking boots. Wasn’t easy to find your size, you know? Even got the insole for the boots so your foot won’t hurt. Anyways, we’re going hiking today, because I want to show you something that I saw a few months ago.”
They’ve been doing this since Roger had his second set of twins. Just closing their eyes and imagining different futures of time spent together. Their fictional selves are vague entities, but they’ve been puzzling them out together, on nights like these.
“We hike for a couple of hours. We cross streams by hopping across stones. There are wild berry bushes. I tell you what’s safe to eat and what’s not. Your mouth gets stained red and I kiss it. But I still urge us along. The hike is not easy. We have to take off our top layers. I can see the sweat on your neck—” Roger’s fingers trail down. His thumb brushes over Rafa’s Adam’s apple.
“But it’s nice. It’s quiet on the trail. Birds are chirping. There’s rabbits and squirrels sometimes.”
“I don’t like squirrels.”
Roger laughs quietly. “What? Why?”
“Their claws are sharp. One time one scratched me when I was having a picnic. It wanted my fries.”
Roger laughs harder. His body shakes with it. He leans in and kisses Rafa’s forehead. When he does so, Rafa’s face gets pressed against Roger’s neck. Rafa breathes him in. Slow and long and deep.
“Roger, where are you taking me?” There is no petulance in Rafa’s voice. Only endless patience and curiosity.
“You’ll see. We keep climbing. We’re almost there. The clouds have parted, and the sun’s out now. I know you like the sunshine. I can tell instantly how much more you’re enjoying now that it’s sunny. You tilt your face up towards it, and your eyes glow.”
All of the embarrassment attached to engaging in this adult make-believe has faded. Rafa can imagine what Roger’s narrating so clearly now. It’s real, he’s there in the Swiss Alps. They are leagues away, miles above everything that keeps them apart here on the ground.
“The end of the trail is dangerous because it’s so steep. As we climb it, we are already worried about how we’ll manage to get back down. But we forget all of that when we break over the last bit of elevation.”
“Yeah? Why? What’s there?”
“You walk ahead of me as you take it in. An enormous, open field, the ground full of flowers of all colors and shapes, all in bloom. Daisies, lily of the valleys, fuchsias, foxgloves, hyacinths. A proper natural meadow. And at the end of it, an alpine lake, nestled between peaks. It’s glittering in the sunlight. Its surface looks like diamonds.”
“Beautiful.”
Roger kisses his cheek. “I found this place a long time ago, on a hike. It wasn’t on the maps. I just wandered on my own one day and I found it. I’ve wanted to show it to you for so long.”
Rafa hums. The fantasy becomes all-encompassing. He closes his eyes and fades away from their big city hotel bed. Roger’s voice gently guides him through this made-up world, but Rafa’s not really hearing the words anymore. Those words, too, have faded, and Rafa finds himself immersed in the Swiss Alps, standing in the meadow.
In the fantasy, he trots ahead and takes in the majesty laid out before him. This silent, secluded alpine meadow, with its blues and greens, is completely different from his home island, whose bustling beaches are dotted with clamoring crowds from dawn until dusk, when rose gold sunset paints the shores. Here, there is nothing between him and that glittering water. No crowds, no cameras.
Something possesses Rafa then. He drops his heavy hiking pack, sheds his sweater, and begins to stride forward with purpose. Light footsteps behind him indicate that Roger is following closely. But Rafa doesn’t look back. He is transfixed on reaching the lake. It’s far, but not impossibly so. On his way there, bees buzz between flowers. Tiny rodents, marmots or voles, pop in and out of their burrows. In his peripheral vision, a large, dark shadow darts behind trees. Rafa wonders if it could be a bear. But he feels no fear now.
He runs without pain to the edge of the lake. Its surface is still glittering in the sunlight. Without thinking, Rafa cups his hands together and plunges them into the water. He brings them to his lips and drinks. The water is cold, sweet and crisp. He drinks a second handful, then a third. A fourth and a fifth.
With his thirst now quenched, Rafa stands still for a moment. He gazes upwards to where the split peaks scrape the blue sky. It is so incredibly still here. Rafa could fade into the scene, become part of a painting. Stay forever, unchanging, eternally looking at something beautiful, with the one he loves just out of reach behind him but here together with him, nonetheless.
“Rafa?” Roger’s voice is soft, but clear. His words materialize back into Rafa’s consciousness, though the fantasy is not yet broken. “Turn around. Look at me.”
Rafa tears his eyes away from the mountains where they scrape the sky. He finds Roger kneeling on one knee in a bed of pink flowers, his jeans growing damp from their dew. Butterflies flutter around behind him. For a moment, Rafa wonders if Roger’s fallen from pain. But then Roger reaches into his pocket and pulls out a little box.
Roger’s words ring clear again. “I open the box. What do you see?”
Rafa looks, and he sees a ring. Burnished silver, like that of a sword, made for a warrior.
Suddenly, it’s too much. The fantasy is broken. The Swiss alps fade away, and Rafa opens his eyes. He is back in a hotel room bed, with Roger and floor to ceiling glass windows and the skyline of city lights.
“Roger,” Rafa whispers.
“I ask you if you will marry me,” is Roger’s reply. When Rafa takes too long to reply, Roger opens his eyes again, too. His hand begins rustling between them, underneath the covers, as if searching for something. “Would you? Rafa, would you ever marry me?”
It is, Rafa thinks, an objectively cruel question for Roger to ask him. Roger got married to someone else long ago. And yet, the indignance that the question should create does not come. Because there is nothing left to say that has not already been said. No fight to have that has not already been had. There is only this, now, these imagined shared futures that briefly become their reality until something makes them dissolve at the seams.
“I would. You must know this, Rogelio.” Rafa curls his fingers in Roger’s hair. “In a heartbeat, I would.”
Roger holds his gaze. He stops rustling around in the sheets; he’s found what he’s been looking for. When Roger takes Rafa’s hand in his own, cool metal slides onto Rafa’s ring finger. Neither of them move. They hardly breathe. But then Roger takes Rafa’s hand out from under the blankets and holds it up to allow Rafa to examine it. The only light that illuminates it is the light from the city skyline, filtered through the window. That light is enough to reveal that Rafa had imagined the ring all wrong. It is not the burnished, harsh silver of a warrior’s sword seen in his version of their fantasy. Instead, the ring glows softly in the dim light of a distant skyline, like eyes lit by the sun, or a beach bathed in sunset. A sweet rose gold.