*

You wake up in the middle of the night – my long-time friend, my other half. You wake in the middle of the night because something has broken the rhythm of your sleep: a distant howl, maybe, a call for some closeness that you too can feel, a sudden thirst. Somebody walks by in the corridor and their approach takes you out of the dream, takes you by surprise when you’re still unable to defend yourself. Now you’re afraid that something is coming and that you cannot stop it and this fear plunges you underwater, where you cannot breathe. But the steps continue beyond your door, and you’re safe again. You could try and sleep some more– you feel the temptation of being lulled back into that sweet nothingness where you don’t have to question your desires and where the memory and fantasies of the boy you once were blend together. But something of the dream’s horniness has stayed with you, and it keeps you awake – a vibration in your body, a distinct arousal; a desire to move the sheets. You wish to come back to that state of youthful bliss, but it’s too late, your mind is slowly finding its way back to you. It now catches up on what your body already knew: that warmth close to you. Something of the dream’s infinite possibilities has stuck with you and you start remembering your dream, green glass shards of a story that first disgusts, then excites you. Memories of the evening that was and the fantasies you have kept inside of you so long, no one to confide them to. Somebody residing inside of you shivers: it was all supposed to be innocent; that was the unspoken rule and only prerequisite of the game. And now the girl you love is sleeping next to you and the man you are carefully befriending is on the other side of the bed. He’s sleeping, too, but a bit further away, an elegant gesture of respect for the closeness you share with her that makes you grateful he ever mustered the courage to speak with you. Now wine’s aftertaste rises up your throat – foul, but warm. You must’ve drunk until you could fall asleep like children do, piling up on each other. And in sleep you must’ve scattered across the bed, as if afraid of what proximity can arouse. But something childlike has stayed in your desire for touch – for a way to heighten the tension, to see where it leads. H, no matter how much you wish for it, you are not a child anymore. It’s a weird night, half sunken already, and it’s impossible to breathe properly through the heat; it’s been a weird month, a weird year. So much unsaid, so much you forgot, so much you pretended to. So many things you promised yourself and others that you’d do that have shifted, slowly but solidly, to the back of your mind. What’s there to tell at the end of it? A few decisions you told yourself you were a part of, a few restless nights where the words choked you up. Above everything, hovering amidst the fog, the snow-white horizon of your oblivion.

So tonight you move closer to him. You know his un-bearded face, and this is the most intimacy that you can conceive of. To look at somebody’s face and go, Ah, I know this one. You remember him, even – a precious gift in this gray mist you have woken up in, where everything is disconnected from everything else. The softest of clichés, amnesia. You are the man you are (are you a man, H?), and that’s it. Did you forget because I forgot you for so long? Is it all my fault, writing you back into this? Throughout the years, I have not been kind to you. And I will not be tonight. But I will let you have this before. Not because I am kind but because I need you to.

Stretching carefully, you look at Berno, still asleep in his childlike, restful sleep. How old must he be – how much younger did he wish he were before, running after you and after her. Then another image shakes you with the suddenness of its impact: his body, sweaty and friendly, dancing with yours. You had forgotten about this. The memory flashes insistently before your eyes and you don’t know what to do with it. How could he get so close, how could you let him. Where was she? You move closer to him, until you can feel his breath on you, sweeter (a small miracle) than yours, its cleanliness making him younger. The picture of you two dancing hand in hand, your shirts unbuttoned and flapping around, sweeps over your heart, and sits there like a feather. You look at his face, up close now. How peacefully he sleeps. Why can’t you sleep like this? You don’t want to kiss him. The jump terrifies you. Is this a sentence or a feeling? You cannot tell which came first, imposed itself on the other. But something pure inside of you rips and tears already just by thinking about the word, imagining the first steps to it, the mechanical actions of your body following its desire. You need, for the life of you, to get closer. Even if it means -

You slide into his arms, as quietly as you can. It is not easy. You need to find the right strength – decidedly enough to not give him any choice, but soft and gingerly enough for him to let you, to not wake up. And his arms accept you like an older brother – even though he’s younger than you and it’s too late to slip into your brother’s arms without shame and without consequence. You’re stuck in a land you don’t understand; on a field somewhere outside of these windows of thick and colorful glass somebody is winning and everyone else is dying in a war nobody but her decided to fight. But here and now he’s taking you in his arms. And he holds you nice still. Then the most miraculous thing happens: quietly, his lips kiss your forehead. It feels clean. You do not, you cannot know if he is aware of what he’s doing. If he’s awake or if his body has just reacted to a proximity, whoever might have provoked it. Blankness overwrites your mind: a pure feeling, indescribable, explodes in your chest. It brings you back, body and all, back when you were young and everything that could have happened had not happened yet. Who is this boy you do not know anymore. But now you are made aware of a small truth, how long you have been waiting– not for this, but to get at this: the steps, where everything is still possible and you can still go back. But also how long it took for the desire to be born, then given shape. Now you know. You know this part of yourself as you never have, and you can call it yours. Something came back for you tonight; I left it there for you. And you would let him do that and anything to you. You do not have fear anymore.

He lets out a sigh and stretches his back. You feel his body breathing on you – growing against it, specifically because of the closeness, the claustrophobia. Suddenly you notice: his dick is trying to find a way out, specifically because there is none, as desperate as you are. You don’t feel yours, and hope that he doesn’t either. You do not want to bother, to break the magic. Because if it shatters, you will have to deal with the sound and its aftermath. With her, the one you have tied your heart to. The one person reining you in. Would she be pleased with this? You are scared to admit that, deep down, you have no way of telling. There’s an unpredictability about her that frightens you to death, so you keep her close and you tell her you love her so that when the string snaps, it hurts less. It helps that you truly do. Now that you’re in the arms of another man, a man not unlike you, you finally feel how weathered the space in your heart where your emotions grow is, how worn out the fibers in your heart’s muscles have grown because of the years you don’t remember and all of the few you do. You’ve never been able to really read yourself, but this - this you don’t know how to explain. A warm orange sun has taken over this space in your chest and it is expanding. It blinds you, similar but different from the sun you feel at your crotch level – darker, bluer and silent. The one does not cancel out the other. They don’t intermingle. That’s as much as you can tell. When you try to focus on either of them, your inner sight fails to hold it still. If you were able to, maybe something about yourself, the way you work, would be revealed to you and meaning would kick into place. But the longer you focus, the muddier the image gets. You’re cradled back and forth between this sight inside of you and the reality of his breath on your neck, the sweat forming under his hands on your skin, his dick pressing into your stomach and yours (suddenly palpable, there) fighting through your underwear. Here and now, in this twilight, no future and no past exist, just the space between what you feel and what you want to feel, the time between now and what you need to happen next, which never does. Berno is touching your lower back; you don’t have a shirt on, he does.

H, he says. And you want to die.

He whispers your name again, more softly, slower. He enjoys it without shame, so much more than I can, as he purposefully stumbles upon every syllable, enjoying its length. As he does, you feel the edges of your skin fade, give in to his touch.

He raises his head to you: sleepiness wearing his eyelids down, the lightest of smiles upon his somber face. How it has changed now, how young he looks. Is it possible you were friends before? Before the fall, before you forgot? If you speak, it will break again. You cannot afford for it to break. You smile at him, touch his sides. How simple this feels - how good.

If you looked closely, my friend, you’d notice that inside of him everything is spinning. He’s trying so desperately to get a hold of himself – to stop the vertigo. The nausea, too. Desire choked in blood-tainted lungs. But you don’t know about this, the lengths that he might go, how long he’s been prowling. And I will not tell you – not to disperse magic, to break the moment.

But if I were to tell you this, old friend - if I were to tell you that what he feels is hunger, would you turn away? Did you know, did you gather from your sunken years that if you push desire into a corner it heightens, becomes a compulsion? Would you be scared of it? Would you run? I don’t know. That’s why I have to ask. And I hope you will forgive me for it.

You’re in this room in which you are her permanent guest, the queen of this castle and this foggy land, she who is still asleep, you think, you don’t dare turn around. You’re here and your mind is rent by two questions, two desires unfulfilled: how to kiss him? How to get her to kiss him? Kissing him would be the most consequential of actions. But how to kiss him when you’re not kissing her, when you’re not holding her, when she’s not there. Then, this easily, the dam breaks and you think of the unthinkable, and you shiver and you blush like a boy. Her kissing him fills your guts with a lead liquid. Every kiss you imagine her giving him with your mind, in that space between his forehead and your lips, is a kiss you are not given, is a hand that pushes you down, towards the water. A pat on the head; sit down. He’s there, in front of you. He dares caress your cheek. He’s your friend, still, nothing more than your friend. Deep down, underneath this desire, a sharp-edged voice tells you that this isn’t how it works. Deeper, where words lose their efficacy, you know it doesn’t matter at all.

He looks down at the swordfight below, a stalemate. You are reminded of your body, its murky reality.

What do we do with this?, he whispers – and then smiles, giggles like a child. How can he not be afraid?

You’re fifteen again. Nothing bad has happened to you but a deep dark cloud of sadness follows you everywhere you go. You’re just playing with a friend in the dark and nothing bad can come of it. It’s midnight and nobody can find you. Your parents are asleep in the other room, separate but adjacent. Everything is under control. You’d feel the door opening, the steps walking towards you, and have enough time to slip it back in, pretend to be asleep. Nothing bad can happen. You can make a mess and clean it up afterwards, like you always do when you’re on your own. That’s the worst that can happen. You’ll be careful, you’ll let yourself go, but just a bit, and when the morning comes your life won’t have changed, you will not have reason to be afraid. You just have to not talk about this with anyone. But as he looks at you, playfully and mischievously, you know he’ll keep the secret. There would be nothing to talk about, nothing to repair. His own breath depends on it, too. There is no going back now, but you’re not afraid. You will not be afraid unless somebody opens the door.

You’re not thirty anymore. You’re a boy and you can jerk this guy off, your friend you’d like to kiss, and not have to worry about discomfort, where to come. You’re at ease because he’s like you and he likes you and he’ll forgive you anything. You don’t risk getting carried away, tonight, forgetting and misplacing it.

You move your dick a bit, poke him with it to let him know that you’re in on the joke. But you like it, and he likes it too, you can tell by the tightness of his lips as he smiles and tries to conceal it. He takes his shirt off, reveals the skin; there is no battle. It’s not about that anymore. You’ve both won. She’s lost, you think at once, and she comes back to your mind. The biggest betrayal was this, forgetting about her, going back to a time where she wasn’t there. You’re older again, old still, and you shiver when his dick touches yours. He’s so much hairier than you, you notice just now, just not on the face. You didn’t know this: you have never seen him without his shirt. He’s always been secretive about his body: never stayed in the locker room with you after sparring, never changed there, never had a shower in the stall next to you. You were waiting for those moments, even if you couldn’t tell anyone, and you hated yourself for it. You look at his body, revealed to you in all of its beauty (you don’t have another word for it), and you think you’re opposites. You wonder what it would be like to push his body against yours, his face against your own: to feel his chest hair on your naked skin, your beard on his itchy chin, still irritated by a razor used uncaringly. Pushing the skin into each other. You stop your fantasy when you imagine the bodies giving into each other, becoming liquid.

What is he thinking of? If his mind were conceiving of the crime, would you be able to tell? Would I tell you?

His beardless face smiles at you and pushes a finger from his lips to yours – laughing. Don’t make a noise. Don’t wake her up. Don’t wake up. You’re boys again. Don’t break it. Don’t you dare break it.

Then he moves a hand over your chest. His fingers caress it, surprised by its smoothness. You notice just now his nails, painted black, and you’re horrified. Her nails. Her nails.

His fingertips scrape the fabric of your underwear, the humid top of it. You are disgusted but you can’t help it. You’re an adult and you’re trapped. You still want it. You want the touch of his hands. She’s all over your mind and you still want it.

Why doesn’t he stop? Why did you move towards him in the first place? Why do you want the things you want?

She’s all around you. But you can’t stop your own hands from reaching towards his body, the hair on his chest, the sweat that lingers there. Something still innocent, despite everything, in this desire to touch. Boys playing. The bodies react to each other, to the smell of sweat, to what it hints at. There’s nothing more to it. You promise.

Dark red nails travel from your neck to your chest to your stomach, almost touching his fingers, and you freeze. He stops and she doesn’t. One of her fingers reaches across to one of his. Caresses it briefly, as slowly as she can, imposing the rhythm.

She must’ve traveled from your imagination to right here, from the space where she lay, asleep, to your little play date, without a sound, a warning noise. Did your mother ever find you like this? Your body chills. Her face leans over your shoulder and does not look at you. She looks focused; she’s trying to learn the rules; she wants to play by them. If she speaks a single word, you will retreat somewhere deep inside of you and never come out again. She will have lost you. But she knows. She’s always known.

Her hand grabs your dick firmly. How many times has she done this for you, the one who does not know how to ask. Now as always you shiver, disgusted by your body’s reaction, by your body. Her other hand, crossing your chest, reaches to your stomach, the pale hair growing there, and walks back and forth on its line. It is not a caress, she still hasn’t looked at you. It feels surgical, as if she were testing the reaction.

Then her hand travels from your dick to his.

It quivers under her touch and you want to kill him so bad. But it’s a moment; you realize you never could. She looks at him. He looks back at her hand, taken aback by a new kind of pleasure. He raises his head to meet your eyes before hers. He smiles with fear, a tint of pain in it; he must really want it. And he wants both of you. He’s not asking for your permission to have sex with your girlfriend. He’s asking to let her in on the secret, in on the game. You feel hopeless in the way only kids or older men can. You don’t know how old you are anymore. But you still have a chance; despite it all, you still have a chance, and it’s not the best but it’s what you’ve got. So you look at him and you let out an electric sigh and you whimper and smile. He smiles back at you. She can play too. As long as she only uses her hands. As long as you’re all very, very careful.

Only when his gaze meets hers she turns towards you. Her eyes are sharp and terrifying as those of a nocturnal animal and you feel at home in this fear. It’s still her. She’s not mad at you, she’s not angry you started without her. She doesn’t break contact, but her face shivers for a second, all of her face, just a second, and in that second you see her crumble and rebuild herself. She’s lost too. Didn’t she drink as much as you did – maybe more?

Did she want this?

Do you want to die, H?

Then why do you feel like this?

She kisses you on the forehead; you do not react. She pushes you to the side, but politely, to reach towards him. You can feel the wetness of their tongues, hear the saliva being exchanged. It sounds lurid and vulgar and you are ashamed that you’re not closing your eyes or looking away. This is not the game you wanted to play. Why do girls always have to ruin good honest fun?

Why do you feel like you want to die?

She kisses him with strength, voracity. He accepts her and he’s good at it: he holds her face, looks deeply into her eyes, gives back the same hunger. As he kisses her, you think that you want to die. You’ve always been pale with her, felt transparent.

You did this many times. Why does it feel like you never did this? Why does it feel like it never was enough?

You’re on your own for this, my boy. But stay with me. I’ll stay with you.

I’m not enough, S, aren’t I?

You know this is not about that.

Then what is this about?

Hunger - and warmth - I think.

How does it feel?

You know how it feels.

But I want to know how it feels for you. To be you. And to be with her.

Like I don’t want the morning to come.

I never felt like that.

I’m not the one to tell you why, my friend.

I was never enough for her. For J or her or anyone else.

Why do you do this to yourself? I want you too, can’t you see? Why don’t you ask me the basic question - how does it feel like to be with you?

This is not fun anymore. It hasn’t been fun for so, so long. I thought I could come home to this but I’m tired of falling back. Can you just be done with it?

I will do this if you want me to.

I can’t stand this anymore. Please. Just be done with it.

My friend -

So -

He kisses you on the neck. His tongue massages the skin like a kind instrument, preparing it. Then he bites. Deep, deep into it, almost to the bone.

How do I tell of this? Do I start with the pain? Pain is a horrible feeling. It is the most basic truth and yet you forget it all the time. I have never forgotten but I can’t tell of this pain, because it is unimaginable and cruel and still beautiful, because it’s him and because you asked him to. It’s his mouth, his bones, his teeth sinking into your skin. Should you say thank you? But if this hurts as much as I think it does, as much as it should, why don’t you move away? Why don’t you slap him? Why don’t you bite back?

Why don’t you come back to yourself? Does it hurt that much to be there?

He stops for a second; he licks all around the wound, collects the blood with his tongue. I wonder what it tastes like when it comes from that deep. He kissed you there already, before. Was he thinking of this all along? He bites again. Your nails, moving on their own, scratch his back, anchor themselves into his neck. But he doesn’t stop.

You turn your head and you find her watching and she does nothing and that’s how you know she’s been hurt, too.

He lays you down on the bed to get easier access to it and you don’t stop him. You don’t scream. You make your lips bleed by biting into them but you don’t scream. You’re going to break your teeth by grinding them so hard, H. If you start screaming he will stop for a second and you will lose your conviction and you will have to come back. And then other mornings will come. He bites into the jugular and you almost give in, but you push against your teeth, you push them so strongly against each other that the front breaks with a loud snap. And this pain is so intense, like a viscous river, like lightning reaching through your teeth, that it overshadows the other, as he bites his way up your neck, tearing little pieces of your flesh away, spitting it out. But it’s just for a moment, then the pain slides into the other pain, becomes the same sharp unbelievable hurt.

He bites into the bone, chips it with his teeth. Now you would scream, but you can’t anymore. You let out a long murmur, the scream trying to come out, repressed by the blood in your mouth, the pieces of teeth, the exposed nerves, the tongue you have broken off with the last snapping of your mouth.

You pray that he’ll be quick. You told yourself you wanted to be there for it. You wanted for relief to wash gently over you. Now you just want it to end.

Eventually, as the pain becomes your mind, he plucks one eye out of you and, the world half-shadowed, you watch as he bites, eyes closed, into it. He pushes a hand against your mouth. Was he evil all along? Did you make him so by asking him to do it?

The scream comes out, muffled and insufficient. How do you long for it to be quiet for once.

As you die, nothing comes back; you just hope you’ll be good, next time around.