"'Alas, that love, whose view is muffled still,
Should, without eyes, see pathways to his will!
Where shall we dine? O me! What fray was here?
Yet tell me not, for I have heard it all.
Here's much to do with hate, but more with love:
Why, then, O brawling love! O loving hate!
O anything, of nothing first create!
O heavy lightness! serious vanity!
Mis-shapen chaos of well-seeming forms!
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!
Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!
This love feel I, that feel no love in this.
Dost thou not laugh?'"
I looked away from the book I was holding and turned my head to the man leaning against my side. "Are you listening?" I asked.
He made no response. He had made no noise for the past three pages. He merely continued to sit beside me, leaning his upper body against my side with my left arm wrapped around his waist. I was about to turn to the book again when I noticed that he was playing with a corner of the sheet covering the both of us. It was a nervous gesture, and he was almost never nervous.
"Were you listening at all?" I asked.
He just closed his eyes without a word. Sad, the word came to my mind.
"You're the one who wants me to read this to you." Shit. It came out wrong. The words were harsher than I intended, but he didn't seem to notice.
"Just keep on reading," he finally said after a short moment of silence.
I set the book down without marking the place. I doubt I would return to reading it this night. "Please tell me what's wrong."
"Nothin'."
"Vin...." I warned.
He sighed, leaning his head back. Our eyes met. Something was so terribly wrong that I could feel my heart lurch. "I... I like the sound of your voice," he said. "It doesn't matter what the words are."
There was, somehow, a double meaning in that.
The sad part was that I couldn't decipher its meaning. Either of them. I knew it was there, but I couldn't understand. That in itself was troubling.
"Do you want to go?" I asked.
That was the wrong thing to say. Vin just looked sadder. He turned his head away. He placed his hand over mine, but the touch was wrong. "No. I don't ever want to go. I like being with you."
That came out wrong too, I could tell. He meant it though, there was no doubt about that, but that statement, too, had a double meaning that I couldn't grasp.
I hugged him closer to myself, hoping to close the sudden distance between us. Vin's grip on my hand tightened, as if he was trying to do the same thing I was.
"You ever think 'bout talkin'?" he said.
"Talk? About what?" I asked.
"Just talkin'. We don't really say anything anymore." The comment rocked me, but I didn't understand why. "Don't you notice it?"
"Yes," I whispered.
Vin shrugged. "It doesn't matter."
I shook my head. "Yes it does!"
He shifted in my arms, turning so that he could face me, but still keeping the physical contact. "We don't talk," he said again. "But talking isn't what we're aimin' for anyway."
I frowned.
"That's never the point of this whole thing anyway. It was just fucking," he stated bluntly. I started to open my mouth to protest, but he placed a hand on my mouth, cutting off whatever words I had to say. "Don't argue with me, Ezra. You know so. It's what we agreed on in the beginning."
I pulled his hand away from my mouth so that I could speak. "In the beginning, Vin. We're not in the beginning anymore."
"But we're not goin' anywhere, are we?" Vin's word cut me deeper than any knife could have. How could a simple night like this go so wrong? Or maybe it had been building up to this. It was somehow destined to happen. I knew what Vin and I had agreed on, that nothing went further than this bed, but agreements had a tendency to be broken.
"How long 'fore the others find out?" Vin pressed on. "How long we gonna pretend that nothin' is happenin' 'tween us? I know we agreed. I know we both agreed that it was one time, but I can't help the second, you can't help the third."
I closed my eyes as I remembered the desire in Vin's eyes the very next day we had... I didn't know what to call it. Sex? Fucking? Or did we make love? Whatever it was, we had done it again, and again. It was wordless agreements, frantic tuggings of clothing, tumbles onto the bed, and wakings in each other's arms. All wordless. A glance sometimes though. A sly look, a knowing smile, a barely perceptable wink. It wasn't supposed to happen outside the bedroom, but it leaked out, it tainted the rest of our life. Tainted... was this thing we shared dirty? I didn't know.
"But the only thing this is, is sex," Vin said with a sense of finality.
"We do other stuff," I argued. "I read to you. We both like that."
He smiled weakly, as if trying to find some happiness despite the sadness that clung to every inch of our bodies. "I love it when you read to me."
Silence.
"Do you want more?" I asked.
That was the question, wasn't it? The ultimate question.
"Vin?" I questioned.
The sparkle in his blue eyes was awashed with unshed tears. Was that the wrong thing to ask? It was an inevitable question, wasn't it?
The sadness tore at me relentlessly until it became an actual physical ache. It was a dull, throbbing ache, the kind that you could imagine away if you put your mind to it, but you would know it was there. You would always know. It was the kind of pain that would never go away. I felt it, but it was heavier still in Vin.
He had lost something.
"You're beautiful, you know that?" he said, choosing not to answer my question.
"So are you, Vin. You're always beautiful." I smiled as I tucked a lock of his curly brown hair behind his ear. He smiled back, a smile that bit as hard as it was sweet. He stared at me, with a strange curiosity and an even stranger expectation.
What was it that he had lost?
"You said that we don't talk anymore. Do you want to talk?" I asked.
Vin shook his head. "Words... are yours," he said, almost cryptically.
"Mine?"
"Words are yours. They're always yours."
"What about you?"
Vin shrugged. His gaze drifted from my eyes. "Silence," he replied.
I furrowed my brows. Something wrong, something wrong. "What do you mean?"
"Words... are sounds. Sounds are yours. So silence is mine."
"Vin...," I pleaded, desperate to understand him.
Vin just shook his head. He started to pull away from me. "I should go. Chris said he'll come by my place in the morning. Can't have him see me scurryin' out of your room and back to mine."
"To hell with Chris," I said.
Vin turned sharply around, clearly surprised at my words. "What?"
"This is about you and me, Vin. Don't leave. Not now."
"I always leave 'fore mornin', Ezra. It's what we agreed on."
"We've broken agreements before."
"You want me to stay?" Vin peered at me with his sapphire blue eyes. They were so bright, so clear that I believed that he could see straight to my soul if he wanted to.
I nodded.
"It's midnight already," he said.
"Everyone's asleep," I added.
Vin suddenly smiled brightly. "Not Buck."
I gave him a smile of my own. "Probably not."
He was avoiding the subject, and I didn't even know what subject we were talking about.
Vin slid back beneath the covers, leaning back against the headboard like I was. His gaze was frozen on some spot. "Ezra?" he asked.
"Mmmm?" I answered.
"Let's not do this anymore."
Vin's words were so abrupt that it took me awhile to absorb them. "What?" I said, stunned.
"It's not really workin' out is it? I mean, it was supposed to be a one-shot deal, but we just went ahead and did it more than once. I mean... What I'm tryin' to say is that... nothin' good is gonna come outta this, so let's just cut it off now, 'fore... before anything bad happens."
"Like what?"
"Like Chris finds out and he shoots the both of us."
"He won't find out, Vin."
"Yeah? How would you know? Maybe he knows already and he's just waitin' for a good day to hang the both of us."
I knew that this wasn't what Vin was really trying to say. It was something so wrong... and I didn't know or understand. It was so out of my grasp, and I wished that I knew, so I could put a stop to this.
"Goddammit Vin! Why can't you just tell me what's really wrong instead of playing this strange game with me?"
"I don't play games, Ezra. That's yours."
"What is with this 'yours' and 'mine'? You're not making any sense!"
"That's it! You don't understand, and I don't know how to make you understand. You're the one with the words, and I have no idea how to explain all these things to you, because words are yours. Not mine. I wish... I wish I could make you understand, but there's no point to it."
"Understand what?"
"There's nothing to understand, because there's nothing. Nothing between us. Nothing holding us together. There's absolutely nothing. I don't know why I'm in bed with you. I don't know why you would want to sleep with me. We're completely different people, Ezra. And there's nothing."
"But you want something."
"It's yours. It's mine. It's not ours."
And I understood. Something more, that intangible something more that did, didn't, had, hadn't, never existed. Never?
"It doesn't have to be that way."
"It's the way it is," Vin said.
He had lost something.
Me.
There was more. And then there was nothing more.
"'This love feel I, that feel no love in this... Dost thou not laugh?'" Vin whispered.
He was listening afterall.
Vin leaned towards me and gave me the most delicate kiss I had ever tasted. Not of passion, not of desire, but of tenderness.
Tenderness, that was what it was all about. Even if there was nothing else. Nothing else at all. Even with no soul-deep trust, no wild passion, no public gestures of affection. A gentle, ever so gentle tenderness... that was enough to know love. To have the soft, breeze-like touch upon your cheek originating from the same hand that could pull a trigger without pause; to see the passionate warmth within the eyes that were once so cold; to have the undeniable knowledge that, yeah, he would take a bullet for you any day of the week, forever willing to take the pain away and to whisper delicately and sincerely into your ear, "It will be all right."
That was love.
It warmed the coldness, lit the darkness, and caressed you in the wake of sadness.
Love.
With that kiss, he told me everything. Everything that was, and couldn't be.
Vin slid out of bed, and dressed. Without looking back, he opened the door, and left.
The End
Companion story: Unbidden
