Work Text:
The wisps of his hair at his temples are grey now.
Every time I kiss them, I whisper, “What’s happened to us?”
Every time, he replies the same: “The clock is no one’s friend,” with a mournful smile, one that dips his mouth at the corners and makes me kiss them as well, one by one.
But I don’t agree with him.
The clock has ticked past us, around us, in spite of us. We’ve captured every one of those years, though. We’ve laughed and loved and fought and cried. We have done it all, and somehow, we’ve made it through. We have survived my mother’s slow decline from dementia and my hectic concert schedule and his throat cancer that left him breathless and hoarse. He still sports the tattoo from the radiation, one I got in solidarity on the same spot of my own throat when we celebrated his fifth year clear.
The clock gave us time to grow and to heal. It gave us the space to come back to each other, just at the moment that we were ready. It let us love again, to pick up where we’d left off as if nothing had changed, as if I were still the skinny boy who feared to talk, and he was still the scared man who, like me, had chosen to fall on his sword and die.
I put his tea on the table in front of him, rub my hands across his hunched shoulders. He’s been out here reading on the veranda for hours. “Have you worked it out yet?”
He’s taken to mysteries lately, old school Agatha Christie. Tonight, it’s Death on the Nile.
He relaxes, pushes into my touch, hums meditatively. “Not sure. Too many red herrings.”
I smile. “It’s always the first one.”
He cocks his head and tilts his head to fix an eye on me. “What do you mean?”
I angle down to him, kiss his cheek and circle my own against it before leaning back just enough to look him directly in the eye. “The first one Poirot sees is always the guilty party. Trust me.”
He gives me a slow smile. “That right, Detective Perlman?”
I wink at him. “Guaranteed.”
“And what if the first one is actually a couple?”
I lean forward, lick his neck and gnaw at it playfully. “Then, no matter what they say to others, they work as one in the dark.”
That gets me a throaty chuckle. “Do they?”
He draws me around until I sink into his lap, lay my head on his shoulder and inhale the remains of his aftershave. His hand comes up my back to massage my head. He still loves my hair, loves to feel it around his fingers and against his face. He loves that I keep it long, just for him.
Truthfully, though, I do it for me, for the moments when he grasps my head with both hands and I see his nostrils flare, when he looks into my eyes, one at a time, and kisses me like I’ve been away at war, as if we haven’t seen each other that morning, as if I didn’t meet him for lunch that day, as if our feet hadn’t just entwined in front of the fire in the den while we sipped pinot noir and discussed when the concrete company was supposed to come to fix the villa’s front columns.
When he lays the wet mop of it across his shoulder in the tub, when his legs hold me firmly and his arms clutch my chest like a life preserver.
When I swish my head between his thighs, and he groans before my lips and tongue can touch him.
“And what if they split up?” he murmurs “Then what?”
“It won’t matter,” I whisper to him. “Neither will ever love another for as long as they live.”
He kisses my forehead. “You sure about that?”
I lay my lips against his temple, fondle the soft grey hairs there. “I’m positive. The more they are permitted to change, the more they are permitted to stay as they always were.”
I feel him smile. “Like the river, I suppose.”
“Exactly like that.”
His arms tighten around me, and I feel his heart rhythm pulse in my chest. We sit there intertwined, listening to the crickets and counting the stars through a small hole in the trees while his tea slowly grows cold, untouched.