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His arm on his body, draped like a robe across his chest. He traces a single line — one fingertip is all it takes — from the vulnerable hollow in the centre of his inner elbow down, along his forearm, parting the hairs and drawing in to follow the knuckles to the very end of his middle finger.
Up again. Up, to the inner sanctum of his elbow, again. Up, to the bicep and over the lip of cotton and to the shoulder and split pieces of his clavicle, up, to the soft skin of his throat and up again to the jaw, the thin lips, the lines and lines and lines, crop circles, marking his face with the careful cut of time. He traces the laughs, the smiles beside his eyes. The furrows burrowed in the slate of his forehead. He sketches runes into it — beloved, and, meri saans, and lover and mon cœur and rouhi and mera behboob and jaaneman, and his secret favourite—
“Daniel. You are so beautiful like this.”
A low laugh, strained, a bit breathless. “I can never tell when you're kidding.”
“You can. In spite of your avid truthseeking, you are more than content to believe your own fabrications. You simply won't trust me on this. Why?”
Up on the elbow. “Old”—a finger—“young.” The same finger, pointed upside-down and lazily like a leopard's flicking tail. “Wrinkled as strip of beef jerky”—finger—“not.” Pointed again, like an accusation. “I'm supposed to believe you?”
“Modesty doesn't suit you, Daniel.”
“You think I'm not serious.”
“How can you be? Do you see yourself? Here.” One finger, tucked under the chin and angling his face towards the moon, hung high like a pale new fruit. A holy breed of apple.
Every set of lovers think they reinvent the feeling, that the chemicals and chemistry fizz in a way wholly unique to them. He watches the light slant over his features, sink into his eyes because it doesn't want to escape him, either, and he knows — whatever they believe — the two of them, here, have cut something down from the very heavens to be had by them alone. No moon has dressed a man like it dresses him, no night-song has cried as it does tonight. No bed has ever contained such a core body of heat, or of warmth, because there is a distinction, isn't there? Heat can be forced, but warmth is mutual. Heat burns out of the sand where the sun bakes it, but the warmth only blooms between the sole and the grain.
They don't keep mirrors — what does he have to look at himself for? — but the chrome backing on his hairbrush is reflective, and it bounces his features back to him.
“I'm seeing.”
“No, you are looking. Why don't you see?”
He sets the brush down between them. The cold handle has left a burn on his palm. The chill shocks him. He is too accustomed to warmth, now.
“Your skin is a testament to your life, a weave of experience. It—”
“Feels sorta loose.”
“It doesn't lie. If you have dug it deep with smiles, it knows. If you've sorrowed it with your misery, it shows. Your skin never learns how to deceive, it is an unprejudiced tally of every monumental moment, and I can read it.”
“You think you've got anything to regret? I'll bet you do, but not this.”
“I could have looked like you.”
Sometimes, he doesn't care for the geyser of ill-humour that spurts out of every thought. Oh, wit, they call it, but no one likes an all-season jester. You could give it the old college try. Didn't work out for MJ, but you're made of thicker stuff. Or, That's the colorism talking, babe, don't let it get to you.
But he spreads his hands across his face like a veil, fans his fingers over his cheeks and sets his thumbs under his eyes. “This is not the human experience,” he says, instead.
“Ageing is an inescapable facet of human existence. Death contextualises life. It makes you desperate, and messy, a riot of vitality and a font of necessary carelessness. Every moment must be measured against the end.”
“I’ve known you to be desperate and messy.”
A look from between his fingers. Four shining orange eyes.
“That sounds to me like the average unlife of a vampire. It's only an inconsistency of scale.” He paused. “Mayflies only live a day. They're born, they eat, they fuck, they die. One day. Don't you think that's unfair?”
“It was what was ordained to them. One day is all the life they know. What would a mayfly do with eighty years?”
“Eat and fuck some more.”
He hums in agreement.
“If you weren't a vampire, we'd never have met.”
With a single nail, he drags the neck of his t-shirt down and over his shoulder until the cotton squeaks in protest, and frees his face from the frame of his hands — the most gentle frame his likeness has ever been enfolded in — to kiss the newly-naked skin.
“Is that why I was turned? So five hundred years later I could love you?”
He takes an unstable breath through his teeth. “Fate's a fool's redressed coincidence.”
“Only to the non-believer.”
“You think we were meant to be?”
“I fail to see it any other way.”
“That would mean, if we’d never met, we’d be living two tragedies.”
“You don't like the idea. Never one to give up the reins of your fate.”
“Seems to me I gave them up pretty easily to you.”
“I fear I may have snatched them.”
“Don't snatch away my agency.”
A lull. He bites the flesh of his thigh, small white teeth sinking in like the mindless sundering of a daisy's stem. His back meets the bed and when his knee is forced down until his breath tickles the skin he licks at the beaded blood. The stretch is delicious.
“There would be…”
“Go on.”
“Overspill. One lifetime wouldn't be enough for me.”
“Where would we have met? Divisadero Street?”
“C'mon, be more imaginative, Armand. It'd be a coffeeshop for sure.”
His hand is curled loosely, possessively, around his foot. An anklet of fingers and earth-toned skin. His laugh induces the sensitive surface of his sole to quiver.
“Honestly?”
“Nah. A museum. We’d be in college— no, no, we’d be kids, young, dumb fucking kids who wouldn't know what hit us.”
He digs the nails of his other hand into his shoulder. He has made a matrix of their bodies, the contact spare but keeping the other up. Or down. “So you could have me for longer?”
“Yeah.” He inclines his neck to kiss his slim wrist. “You would have dragged your mother there and I would have dragged mine. And I’d've seen you in front of one of the dinosaur displays, a buzzing boy who made the fossils look even more dead. My whole life would have screeched to a stop. It'd have to set itself on new tracks — how could it be the same when I'd just seen you? — and I'd go on, the whole of our lives, thinking this was the only way it could've been. Not knowing better.”
He searches his face, the long nose and clean lines. Does he think age would save him? That a spatter of crow's feet and some greys would turn him magically unappealing? It wouldn't be a comfort to him, but he knows he'd be irresistible even in old bones and a sack of sagging skin. He'd have a pursed rosebud mouth and maybe faded eyes but they wouldn't lack focus, no, and he'd be able to reel him in with only a glance like he'd done in 1973, an unequal force that was a millisecond's movement for one and left the other in the imploded wreckage of his life. A goddamn mess.
Does he think age would save him from desire? When he tells him, and shows him, and teaches him that, yeah, he may look the way he does, but that doesn't stop him from wanting him? He can't say that. Sorry, honey, you'd be fucked even if you outgrew the Botticelli babe mien.
He pulls him down and clutches the back of his head. He collapses into him. “And nothing would have happened.”
“Because you were there.” Into the cove behind his ear.
Laughable, maybe, the idea that one, even if they'd passed the same number of years, could beat back the dark things the other couldn't. But this is a reality stitched from stupid hope, so, sue him, he's going to believe he could have made it better.
“Yeah. I’d be a scrawny kid, but I wouldn't let anything happen to you.”
“And in return? What would I be?”
He would tell him, C’mon, contribute, but they are dreaming with their eyes open, and he has trusted him to render the tale and not screw it up. He is responsible for their joint fantasy.
“It wouldn't be transactional. Honey, where’d be the need? But, I guess… you’d be my drug, wouldn't you? Probably just as ruinous.”
“Would it be good?”
“So good. We'd define each other. Not death. You'd be the measure I marked my life against. Here, the day I met Armand. And all the rest of it.”
He is silent for a long, long while.
He waits with his fingers tangled in his hair for him to put the pieces together, word the conclusion.
“I suppose, then, that is what we have now. Without an end, you will be my marker.”
“Yeah. That's right.” Is it good enough? he wants to ask, feels like he's been asking everyone his whole life. Am I? Like this?
He feels his slow smile against his neck. “It's not so bad. Impossible to regret, isn't it?”
He turns his head to bury his face in his coiled, shadow-spun hair. Hopes he can pass the blood on his cheek as a remnant from his knee. “Impossible to believe.”