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When Joe gets back, Nicky is on the sixth-floor landing, chatting in German with Sofia, their Hungarian neighbor from across the hall.
Sofia waves when she sees him coming up the stairs, then shifts to adjust the toddler sitting on her hip.
“Fröhlicher Ramadan, Joseph,” she says, and Joe lifts a brow, both because it still sounds a little odd to hear the greeting spoken in German and because he doesn’t think they’ve ever talked about this before.
Nicky pulls up a shoulder, looking a little guilty, as if he feels that he might have shared a secret that wasn’t his to tell.
“She brought us some strawberries,” he explains. “I told her I’d save them for tonight.”
“Vielen Dank,” Joe nods at her, feeling touched by the kind gesture to a degree that is almost unsettling. As always, he is momentarily tempted to tell her that both he and Nicky do speak a decent Hungarian, but with their current cover stories, German and English are just so much easier to explain.
He’s is saved from an ill-advised confession by a sudden loud crash inside her apartment, no doubt her six-year-old twin boys causing mayhem, and she mutters obscenities as she retreats into her hallway, leaving Nicky and Joe to be properly alone together for the first time all day.
Nicky reaches for his hand and links their fingers together, then tugs him into their own apartment and without really looking uses his foot to shut the door.
“How was the exhibit?” he asks, but lets himself be distracted when Joe hands him the small plastic bag before bending over to take off his shoes.
“Oh, lokum,” Nicky says happily when he sees what’s inside. “You know you didn’t need to buy anything, but I’m certainly glad that you did.”
He reaches for Joe’s hand again the moment he straightens, as if he is worried Joe will disappear into thin air if he doesn’t keep track of him.
“Come to the kitchen,” he points down the narrow hallway. “It’s all ready for you.”
Joe wrestles his phone from the back pocket of his jeans a little clumsily with his free hand.
“Sorry, fifteen more minutes,” he says apologetically after checking the screen.
Nicky rolls his eyes fondly. “I’m not the one who hasn’t eaten all day,” he says, and pulls him close right there in the corridor, the coat rack on the right side and their pile of sneakers on the left.
“Can I kiss you in the meantime?” he asks, sweetly hopeful, and Joe’s heart clenches when he looks at him.
“Just hold me for a minute,” he says quietly, and Nicky searches his face with inquiring eyes before he opens his arms and wordlessly complies with the request.
Joe asked for a minute, but the minute turns into two, and in the end, they just stand like this, arms wrapped around each other, until the sunset alarm goes off on his phone.
In the early afternoon, Joe had left the house to see an exhibition on Islamic miniature painting at the Pergamon, but he never actually made it there. The weather was sunny and warm, as it had been all week, and everyone who could was outside, enjoying the summer heat and the sunshine after a cold grey Berlin winter and a wet grey Berlin spring. Around him, the neighborhood felt busy and impossibly alive, and somehow he couldn’t bear the thought of spending the day in a museum, staring at the remnants of days he had lived through that had long passed.
Instead he ended up sitting on the low wall by the canal, watching the sun make its slow journey downward over the roofs of Berlin-Neukölln.
To his left, a group of Russian 20-somethings were passing around a bottle of hard liquor, feeding potato chips to their dog as they laughed and talked. Next to them, a couple in ripped t-shirts with anarchist logos was making out passionately, their bare feet on the old shabby blanket closely entwined.
On the other side, three Albanian girls in tight jeans and heels were flirting with a group of teenage boys blasting Turkish hip-hop from an ancient-looking boombox while bopping their heads along to the beat.
When the sun disappeared behind the buildings, the boys started to pack up their things. They waved goodbye at the girls, no doubt getting ready to head home to their families for the iftar, and Joe took that as his cue to leave as well. He still had more than an hour until sunset, so he slowly made his way back home through the streets, noticing how the month of Ramadan made itself known in subtle ways, from the long lines in front of the Turkish corner stores to old men in corduroy blazers carrying bags overflowing with vegetables and packaged sweets.
The Lebanese bakery didn’t look too busy when he peeked in through the front door, and on a whim, he stepped inside. Out of habit, he almost asked for the baklava, but imagining the taste made him miss Andy and Booker with fervent urgency, and he reached for a different box instead. The man behind the counter addressed him in polite German, but his smile became more welcoming when Joe responded in Arabic, and if he was confused by Joe’s unfamiliar intonation, he was kind enough not to say.
Back in the street, Joe just stood for a moment, feeling trapped in place all of a sudden by the impossible weight of time. Then someone bumped into him from behind, jolting him out of his inertia, and he let the energy of the people bustling around him carry him home, allowing himself to imagine, if only for a moment, that he really was part of them.
It is this fleeting sense of belonging that keeps drawing him back to the practice of fasting during the month of Ramadan. It has been ages since he set foot inside a mosque, and the last time he did, it certainly wasn’t to pray. But taking part in Ramadan is a way for him to connect, not only to his own people, but to the whole of humanity.
He and the other immortals, they drift along for so much of their lives, watching from the outside as the world changes, intervening on occasion as they see fit, like a ragtag group of dei ex machina. Joe knows how it feels to get shot, stabbed, strangled, and skewered, knows what it feels like to step on a landmine and lose a limb, but he has practically forgotten what it’s like to experience extended harmless, mundane kinds of pain. He used to have headaches he now barely remembers, and after a long day of traveling, his feet and his back would be sore. Now their bodies heal too quickly to notice any of that, protecting them from minor bruises, from papercuts, from the regular cold.
But his body is still capable of feeling hunger, it still can feel thirst, and Joe cherishes the hollow ache in his empty stomach, the numb dryness in his throat, because they assure him that in some ways he is still a person, that in some ways he is still simply a man – that he hasn’t become a vengeful god looking down at mortals with dispassionate contempt.
One minute after sunset, Nicky finally pulls him into the kitchen to offer him the glass of water he always tries to have ready for him: plain tap water, room temperature, sometimes with a slice of lemon for the taste. It is amazing how much one can say with a glass of water, and Joe hears it all, loud and clear.
Gratefully, he reaches for the water, but apparently Nicky has other plans tonight. He wraps a hand around the back of Joe’s head and lifts the glass to his lips with the other, encouraging him to take a sip. Joe thinks about protesting, about telling Nicky that he’s not a child, but there’s something in Nicky’s eyes that makes him swallow the words and allow Nicky to take care of him.
The water feels amazing in his parched throat after going without all day, and with every gulp, it is as if some of the lingering tension in his neck and shoulders is rinsed out by the clear water and swept away. Eventually Nicky removes the glass, only to replace it immediately with his lips. It’s a quick peck, barely there and fleeting, but the sensation makes Joe realize just how thirsty he was for that feeling as well.
“Come,” Nicky finally says, once again taking his hand. “We are eating outside today.”
Their apartment comes with a tiny balcony, attached to the kitchen and facing the inner courtyard, and that’s where Nicky steers him now, gently pushing him from behind with his hands on Joe’s hips.
In the open glass door, Joe pauses abruptly, staring down at the display. Nicky has been in charge of dinner this month, because fasting is difficult enough without having to think about preparing food. But so far it’s always been a simple dinner, a bowl of pasta and a salad, or Vietnamese take-out from around the corner, depending on what Nicky was up to during the day.
What Nicky has prepared for tonight, though, looks more like an actual feast: Spread out on the blanket from their living room are plates of shammi kebabs and spiced almond rice, köfte and falafel from the Turkish place on the ground floor, mixed antipasti, sauf the sausage, from Nicky’s favorite Italian market, and the ridiculously expensive German crackers from the supermarket just off their subway stop.
“You do realize that Eid al-Fitr is not until July?” Joe says slowly, taking in the pillows arranged around the blanket, the lit citronella candles, and the string of cheap Christmas lights Nicky must have borrowed from a neighbor to provide additional light.
“I know,” Nicky shrugs, “just felt like doing something different tonight.” His tone is easy, his posture casual, but his gaze is hovering somewhere near Joe’s collarbone, which means Nicky noticed that something is up with him but doesn’t want to come right out and say.
He disappears back into the kitchen and comes back with the lokum and Sofia’s strawberries, then sits down on one side of the blanket and gestures at the free pillow opposite from him.
Joe hesitates for a moment, then motions for Nicky to scoot backward in his seat. When Nicky obeys, slightly puzzled, Joe slides into the diamond-shaped space between his legs, leaning back carefully against Nicky’s chest.
“Okay?” he asks, feeling self-conscious and a little needy, but Nicky simply wraps an arm around his waist and kisses the back of his neck.
“Perfetto,” he murmurs. “Much better this way.”
Joe wants to enjoy the closeness a little while longer, but his stomach chooses this moment to make itself known. He leans forward to reach the bowl of olives and capers, only to be stopped by Nicky’s arm.
“Let me,” Nicky says gently, and takes his time to pick an olive that meets his approval, deep green and fleshy and sticky with olive oil and herbs. Holding it between two fingers, he runs it gently against Joe’s lips, and when Joe willingly opens his mouth for him, Nicky slides the olive onto his tongue, his fingers lingering briefly before he allows Joe to close his jaw.
The intensity of the sour-sharp-savory flavor is almost overwhelming, and Joe catches himself making an involuntary sound at the taste.
“Good?” Nicky asks quietly against his neck, his voice fond and obviously pleased.
“More,” Joe nods, and Nicky complies, feeds him a caper, a bite of falafel, a piece of meat, letting his fingers linger more often than not on Joe’s lips and inside his mouth, humming happily when Joe flicks his tongue against the pads of his fingers and licks trails of olive oil off his skin.
Eventually, Joe has to declare defeat and lets himself fall against Nicky’s chest with a sigh.
“I need a break,” he says, and Nicky wipes his hand on a napkin before wrapping his other arm around Joe as well.
“Can you tell me what’s going on in your head?” Nicky finally asks, sounding uncharacteristically hesitant and a little concerned.
“I don’t mean to pry, but I have been watching you think.”
It’s entirely dark now, and the courtyard has quieted down. But it’s far from completely silent: on the other side of the yard, someone is watching a soccer game with their window wide open, and the Polish couple from the first floor is having a shouting match next to the trashcans until the grumpy old lady with the poodle yells at them to shut up.
“We almost fit in here,” Joe says softly. “It’s tempting to believe we could stay.”
Nicky leans his forehead against Joe’s hair but doesn’t answer, and when Joe turns his head to glance back at him, Nicky is looking at him with a profound sadness that Joe knows is mostly for his sake.
“You know I would do whatever it takes,” Nicky says quietly, “if it was in my power to give that to you.”
He curves one hand around the side of Joe’s face, his touch barely noticeable through the layer of facial hair, and Joe rubs his cheek more firmly against Nicky’s palm as if to reassure himself that it’s really there.
“I’ll get over it,” he says, a little self-consciously, and with only a hint of bitterness. “It’s just been a while since we stayed in a place where the neighbors like us enough to give us things.”
“Speaking of,” Nicky says, and Joe knows him well enough to understand that it’s not a distraction when he reaches for the strawberries, just a moment of respite.
Nicky picks the largest fruit on top of the pile, offering Joe the first bite. The strawberry is not fully ripe yet, picked just a tad too soon, and any other day Joe might be disappointed at the lack of juicy sweetness, but after the opulent dinner, the fresh tartness feels just right.
He responds by feeding one of the lokum to Nicky, and doesn’t remove his fingers until Nicky has licked all the powdered sugar off his hand. Then he shifts around in his seat to kiss Nicky, who readily opens his mouth for him, and on their tongues, the tartness of the strawberry and the sugary sweetness of the lokum meld together in perfectly balanced harmony.
They make out lazily, their wet sticky mouths sliding against each other, Nicky’s hands tangling in his hair. The arousal that lay dormant during the hours of fasting is now making itself known, and he deepens the kiss as he quickly feels himself growing hard.
And Nicky knows without having to ask, because Nicky knows him, and already a talented hand sneaks down between their bodies to open the buttons on his pants.
There is no room. They are tangled together, cramped into the narrow space between the building and the outer wall of the balcony, trying not to knock over the falafel plate as they shift and awkwardly refold their legs.
Even without the food in their way, they don’t usually do this out here: One Sunday morning shortly after moving in, they had tried to have sex outdoors, secure in their assumption that the solid barrier was shielding them from view – until Nicky had pushed himself up and come eye to eye with two small identical faces staring curiously at him over the railing of the neighboring balcony.
Sofia and her husband had laughed for days whenever they ran into one of them on the stairs, and Joe was glad they could see the humor in the situation, but from then on they had still made it a habit to move things inside, even if it meant that sometimes they wound up fucking on the kitchen floor a mere two feet away from the open door.
This late, though, the neighbors’ children are sleeping soundly, and the darkness of the summer night is sheltering them. And so Joe lets himself fall back against the house wall, his legs wide open, and Nicky slides a hand into his briefs and looks into his eyes while he brings him to a slow, agonizingly sweet release.
Nicky kisses him softly through his climax, his fingers still gently sliding down his cock, but when Joe reaches out to return the favor, Nicky shakes his head and shifts to sit down next to him against the wall.
“Later,” he says, once again linking their hands together, forgetting or not caring that his own palm is still sticky with come. “This one was meant for you.”
For a while, they sit in silence, and listen to the sports commentator announce the winner of the soccer game.
“You remember the first time we made love?” Nicky suddenly says, and Joe sits up a little straighter, not entirely certain where this conversation is going to lead.
“On the battlefield?” he asks doubtfully, a little confused at Nicky’s choice of words, and Nicky laughs quietly, his shoulder vibrating against Joe’s.
“Not quite,” he says. “That was us rutting to work off frustration since killing each other didn’t seem to work.”
Joe looks at him from the side, trying to understand what Nicky is hinting at. It’s not as if they’ve never talked about their early days – in fact, over the centuries, there have been many weeks when they did that and little else. But the question of how has become less urgent after so much time, and their memories are blurred by the centuries and the perpetual variations their stories undergo each time they are retold.
“The cave,” he finally guesses, and Nicky smiles, obviously pleased that Joe got it right.
“The cave,” he agrees. “You went to check the snare and got caught in a rainstorm, and I was a little nervous you might not make it back. And then you walked in, thoroughly soaked and with a drenched dead hare in your hand. You took off your tunic and put it up next to the fire to let it dry, and then you turned around to smile at me …” he trails off and clears his throat. “And I found myself wishing, inanely, that we could stay in that cave forever, just you and me.”
Joe stares at him, feeling far too many things at the same time.
“We would have been bored out of our minds within days,” is what he finally settles for, and Nicky grins, a little self-deprecatingly.
“Yes, well, I didn’t have a good sense yet of what it would be like to live for centuries,” he says lightly, pressing his shoulder more tightly against Joe’s. “Most people around me didn’t live to see thirty-five.”
“Is it actually possible to imagine that you never told me about this,” Joe says slowly, “or did I simply forget?”
“I’m not sure anymore,” Nicky admits. “In the beginning, it was simply too terrifying a thought to share. I was still worried that you might turn out to be a demon sent by God to test my faith. And then … perhaps we spoke about it and both forgot, or we had other things to worry about?” He pulls up his shoulders. “I hadn’t thought about it in centuries, but today I was standing in line at the supermarket, and suddenly it came back to me.”
“It might have been useful to know at the time,” Joe says, feeling helpless and overwhelmed at Nicky’s simple admission and not entirely sure why. “I still expected to wake up one day and find you gone without a trace.”
“I’ve never been good at saying these things,” Nicky confesses, and his eyes shine impossibly bright in the dark. “I don’t think I ever tell you enough. But you need to know that you are my home. You make me feel like I belong.”
He lifts their joint hands to his mouth and gently kisses Joe’s knuckles, one by one.
“Do you want me to look into buying the apartment?” he asks. “Would it help if you knew that we own this place?”
Joe swallows thickly and shakes his head. “There is no point,” he says quietly, “we would not be able to come back. But we’ll have the memory. And you and me, and this here tonight – that will be enough.”
He leans in and kisses Nicky softly. “So much more than enough.”
They sit for a long time, sharing each other’s space, simply looking into the night. Joe tilts his head back and looks for the North Star, traces Ursa Minor with his eyes, moves his gaze northward until he finds the W-shaped constellation called Cassiopeia, a long familiar sight.
The week after Eid, they will leave this place for good, to meet up with Booker and Andy in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
And fifteen years from now, Sofia and her husband will still regale their guests and embarrass their children with the story of how the boys had caught the gay couple next door having sex that one day.
In fifty, sixty, seventy years, they will come back to Berlin for a job and perhaps find it unrecognizable, this building long torn down and replaced by something new.
But Nicky will still be at his side, and when they sit together to tip back their faces at night, they will see the same stars that were in the sky a thousand years ago, looking down at him and Nicky when they first met before the gates of Jerusalem.