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‘If you could be an animal, which would you be?’
Laurent scowls from where his head is propped on Damen’s chest. ‘An animal, Damen? Really?’
‘Just answer.’ Damen’s mind is too drunk on pleasure to come up with anything bordering on intellectual.
It was something they had started when they were at the threshold of dating — a litany of questions aimed at understanding each other better. As time had passed, it had become a ritual between them, and the questions had gradually shifted from emotional to entertaining to embarrassing.
Now, after four years of knowing each other, they still indulge in it. Only now, their post-coital daze — the mingling breaths and synchronised hearts — somehow dulls the edges of the fatuousness.
‘Cheetah!’ Laurent answers with certainty after a beat of thought.
‘A cheetah?’ Damen asks incredulously. ‘Why a cheetah? It’s not even the largest of the big cats.’
‘It’s not always about the size, you know.’
Damen smirks pointedly, earning himself a half-hearted smack on the chest.
‘Shut up!’ Laurent scolds. ‘It may not be the largest, but it certainly is the fastest.’
A figurative theory, then. Laurent does have a quick mind.
‘Alright. A cheetah it is, then. Your turn.’
Laurent’s face twists in thought for a second before he asks, ‘If you could travel in time, where would you go, and what would you do?’
It’s a heavy question for Damen’s already drowsy mind. So, purely out of instinct, he says, ‘I’d travel back in time. To... somewhere in history... where I’d be a king.’
‘Really?’ Laurent asks, amused. ‘And where would I be, then? In this history of yours?’
‘You’d be a king too. We’d be kings, you and I,’ Damen says, his mushy mind ignoring the logistics.
Laurent laughs aloud. ‘Tell me, my dear barbarian, which kingdom would be ruled by two kings?’
‘Ours!’ Damen says with conviction. There really isn’t any reason why it shouldn’t be a possibility.
‘What about us?’ Laurent asks softly, tracing lazy patterns on Damen’s chest. ‘Would I still be your lover?’
Damen smiles sleepily, the answer fluttering from his lips. ‘History or future, you’ll always be my lover, sweetheart.’
For a moment, Damen thinks Laurent is going to chide him for being sappy, but instead Laurent captures his lips, kissing him so sweetly that Damen’s mind plunges further into bliss.
A light smack on the shoulder pulls him out of it.
‘This doesn’t mean you’re getting out of doing the laundry,’ Laurent says, his words losing heat halfway through the sentence.
Damen laughs aloud. ‘As you wish, Your Majesty,’ he says, and closes his eyes.
_