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Nicolò wondered if a man’s body had ever been as thoroughly or as wonderfully studied as his. For years and years, no matter the time or circumstance, it seemed as if Yusuf never took his eyes off him.
Even now, as they came down from their high and began to bask in each other’s presence, Nicolò knew that when he was done taking deep, satisfied breaths, Yusuf would be watching from the moment he opened his eyes. Nicolò practically glowed with this knowledge, and as his eyelids fluttered open, he smiled when he was proven right.
Yusuf was a vision. Sweat glistened on his dark forehead, some of his lovely curls sticking to his skin like wet moss on a rained field, and the rise and falls of his chest were just as deep as Nicolò's own. Around them, lamplight flickered just bright enough to illuminate their naked forms, limbs twisted together in lethargy. But even now, while obviously sated, Yusuf looked at Nicolò with all the intensity of a burning sun.
Even though he knew the answer, Nicolò leaned his head on one hand and made their sign that indicated a question with the other, a lazy forefinger tapping the side of his head.
Yusuf made their sign for ‘surveying’, then waved his hand up and down Nicolò’s naked body. Nicolò laughed and shoved at Yusuf’s shoulder, which sent Yusuf chuckling in turn. A deep, rich sound that always stirred something deep in his chest. The thought skirted his mind every so often, how deeply unfair it was that Yusuf would never know how lovely his own voice was.
Nicolò let it pass and disappear into the night. He highly doubted Yusuf would tolerate such a thought. Yusuf al-Kaysani was many things, but to be pitied was not one of them.
Yusuf kept looking at him like he looked at calligraphed scrolls and hand-crafted glass and everything else that he found beautiful, so Nicolò leaned up to kiss him again. He licked the salt off the other man’s lips then rested his head on the inner curl of his shoulder.
Nicolò could bask like this for hours, bodies intertwined, lost to the rest of the world, to the rest of time. Yusuf, bless him, was making effort to be still for the sake of the man he was in bed with, but Nicolò he could practically see Yusuf’s fingers itching to take up the charcoal from the nightstand.
The first time, he had patiently waited for Nicolò to fall asleep, but as he stirred in the night, Nicolò caught him with stained fingers and a look of such fervent concentration like he had never seen on another man’s face, all directed on him. He still conjured up the memory of that look as a beacon in his darkest of days.
Nicolò reached over and grabbed Yusuf’s pad and charcoal for him, which earned him a wide grin and another kiss, long and deep. When they broke, Nicolò rolled his eyes fondly and shoved the materials to his chest, which gave Yusuf the opportunity to wrap the crook of his arm around his neck, trapping the paper between them as Yusuf littered him with even more kisses for good measure.
Finally, Yusuf released him and Nicolò slid further down the bed, head resting near Yusuf’s hip, a hand on his chest, his fingers running through his dark strands there. The gentle scratches of charcoal on paper were already becoming familiar to his ears, an artist’s dedication to his work in the dead of night. He would stop sometime before the lamps got too low and Nicolò drifted off to sleep, and Yusuf would extinguish the light and pull his lover so close neither of them would know where one began and the other ended. And they would sleep, Yusuf’s back to the wall and Nicolò facing the door with a dagger hidden securely in the frame of their bed. They would sleep as they had for years now, a silent promise Nicolò had no intention of breaking this or any other night.
Nicolò’s lips turned softly upwards as the rest of the evening unfolded in his mind. He stroked the hair at his fingertips and relished in the slight quiver he got as a response.
Fingers lightly tapped the side of his head, encouraging Nicolò to look up. Yusuf made his sign for ‘beautiful’, his stunning dark eyes filled with so many rich emotions that Nicolò didn't know where to begin to decipher them. Though such declarations were somewhat predictable at this point, they never failed to make his heart flutter like a bird’s wings in his chest. That this man who cherished beauty almost as much as he worshiped God could look at him and still give him that name, beautiful – it was an honor Nicolò never could’ve imagined to be bestowed on him, and it took his breath away every time.
Nicolò was about to mimic the gesture, no doubt mirroring’s Yusuf’s dewy-eyed expression, when he paused, struck by a thought: that gesture was inadequate to encapsulate all that Yusuf was to him. It wasn’t enough to call him beautiful or wise or brave again and again, though he was all those things multiplied.
No, it wasn’t enough.
A feeling spurred him to sit up, his skin and bones suddenly alight with energy. His eyes wandered over every inch of the other man bathed in the lamplight, with his crinkled brow and curious eyes and his quick hands, and the truth washed over him with all the power of a wave that rearranged every grain of sand it touched.
He loved Yusuf.
And he didn’t have the first idea how to tell him.
They had no gesture for what Nicolò needed to say. This had happened before, countless times, but this was the first time the urge to express his inner thoughts were so desperate, he felt like he might choke on it.
Nicolò knew the words for love in many forms now: in Persian, in Arabic, in the dozens of poems that Yusuf eagerly showed him as Nicolò learned the alphabet of these other languages and they worked to translate them into his mother tongue. After years of practice, he could now write of love in his language or in Yusuf’s, if he so wished it. But Nicolò was not an architect of words in the way Yusuf was, and even knowing eternity lay before him, he knew that he never would be.
Nicolò was stunned silent the first time he saw Yusuf write on a piece of parchment. Not only for the fact that he could – he was such an idiot back then, assuming that the deaf man was addled because of his affliction, and he often wished he could go back and throttle his younger self for this and a myriad of other ideas that he’d been proven wrong about since he killed Yusuf for the first time – but at the attention and detail that Yusuf emanated when he worked. It was evident in the flick of his wrist and the concentration in his eyes, by how smoothly and effortlessly he painted the ink onto the paper.
As months passed and Yusuf slipped easily into the scholastic cultures they found in their travels, it became evident that this man wasn’t just smart - he was the smartest man Nicolò had ever met. Not because he knew all the world’s secrets, but because he’d never stopped striving to learn them. More than that, he was always eager to. If there was a collection of books somewhere in a town, that was where Yusuf went first, sometimes even before eating. He would spend hours pouring over scrolls and translations, leaving Nicolò to his own devices that he wasn’t ready to admit yet was just aching loneliness.
The first show of trust Yusuf made towards Nicolò – other than when he first threw down his sword and reached out his hand – was when instead of leaving Nicolò to lounge at the inn, he dragged him along on his academic endeavors. That was when they clumsily first tried to match their languages, first with the written word and later with gestures. Yusuf sought out help where he could from other scholars, and the way his eyes lit up as they traded notes one sunny afternoon in Damascus made Nicolò’s chest feel constricted, something light and bright and wonderful threatening to burst free.
It only got worse as Yusuf shared those looks with him: over a campfire with newly acquired scrolls splayed around their tent, over food in an inn as they repeated words with various decrees of amused inflections, over a lit candle as Nicolò managed to write a full sentence in Arabic for the first time. Yusuf would look at him with tolerance, then grudging respect, then a glowing pride that threatened to make Nicolò’s knees buckle.
Nicolò was an educated man, but Yusuf’s mind was something else. It was a well with no bottom, a bird with the sky’s limit. Nicolò relished whatever parts of his incalculable mind Yusuf chose to share with him.
The first time Yusuf had shown him his poetry, he had apologized that he could not recite it for him. It was the first time he’d ever seen Yusuf something close to shy, avoiding his eyes to look just about anywhere else. He wrote what was called a waṣf, a descriptive kind of poetry amongst his people, before finally leaving Nicolò in peace to read it himself. It was a recounting of his childhood homeland, though such a simple description could not do it justice. A bittersweet yearning and absolute adoration for the place was evident in every sentence.
When he went to find Yusuf again, he was crying. Not because the words triggered a nostalgia for his own home, but for the pure depth of feeling Yusuf had in him. And he had chosen to share something that precious with him, a man he had every right to never forgive for his past crimes against his home.
When they kissed for the first time, Nicolò delicately held onto the paper in his hand, determined to keep it whole and safe, as he forever would the man who wrote it.
And so, it passed like this for years. They traveled and they fought and they fell into bed with one another every night, and Nicolò was more than content.
But that night, he was seized with such a desperate urge, he turned deathly still under the weight of it.
Yusuf noticed his stillness and paused his in efforts to look Nicolò over, concerned. He lifted his hand to his cheek, darkened finger pads feather-light on his scruff. Nicolò closed his eyes at the touch.
“Nicolò?” he ventured, worried enough to speak, and Nicolò was struck dumb by his name on Yusuf’s lips. It wasn’t correct, not the way Yusuf said it, but he still loved the way it sounded coming from him, with a lisp at the start before he skirted over the consonants. It was all Yusuf, attempting the impossible for his sake, Nicolò loved it. Nicolò loved him.
But they had no gesture that meant ‘love’. Putting their physical language together over the years meant they had purposefully left the word untouched in their signed vocabulary, skirting over the word like schoolchildren when they reached that part in a poem to translate. There was a difference between translating a word between existent languages and adding a word to the language the two of them were building together. There was an intimacy to it; no other human in the world would know what those movements meant, only each other.
Nicolò never brought it up because Yusuf never did, which now seemed like a poor excuse. He was cowardly in his thoughts; did Yusuf avoid the word because he thought it would make Nicolò uncomfortable? Or did he not think the word was applicable to their… situation? His heart stuttered at the very idea, but he couldn’t let himself wallow, not until he knew for sure.
It took all his restraint not to grab Yusuf’s pad and write the words in every language Yusuf taught him. But no, he would not do that to Yusuf’s work, and more to the point, Yusuf deserved better than such a hasty declaration. He deserved all the words there were in the world, even though Nicolò knew he was inadequate to the task of gifting them.
But he had no other option. His pathetic excuse for poetry was his best chance to let his heart be known.
“Nicolò,” Yusuf said again, voice cracking with fear, and hearing it was like an arrow to the heart. Nicolò forced his whirling mind to still. Worrying Yusuf was the last thing he wanted to accomplish, so he forced himself to sigh out the tension in his shoulders, then kissed the palm of Yusuf’s wonderous hand and laid back down.
Yusuf peered down at him, obviously unconvinced, but Nicolò gestured for Yusuf to lie down with him, and that was all he needed set his work aside and extinguish the lights before wrapping around Nicolò like a well-worn blanket in winter. He did not shiver when Yusuf kissed the back of his neck, instead pulling him in closer by the arm to kiss his fingers, charcoal and all. The act helped settle his heart, knowing well enough that Yusuf would never sleep if he felt Nicolò’s heart beating out of his chest.
In the stillness of the night, Nicolò was tempted to say the words aloud to alleviate some of his own desperation, knowing Yusuf would be oblivious to them. But that would be like trying to catch water with a net. If the words weren’t for Yusuf, then what was the point of saying them?
Tomorrow, he decided, Yusuf’s breathing already evening out behind him. They had to leave late the next morning; their dreams of those two other women meant they had to keep moving north, and their inclination to eat meant they had to find jobs further on. It would be tight, making it to the store to get paper sometime between fajr and packing to leave – he wouldn’t use Yusuf’s art parchment, even if he might forgive him in this one instance - and he doubted the words would be particularly beautiful without the time to compose it, but Nicolò would have to make do.
Sure in his resolve, Nicolò finally settled. Tonight would be the last night Yusuf didn’t know the depths of his love for him. He swore it.
If God had a sense of humor, Nicolò wasn’t sure he cared for it.
As the rain poured from the sky, he stood in it like the fool he was, his head raised to the heavens, a broken bag in one hand and a soggy, ink-running mess of destroyed paper in the other.
The sky cleared by the time Nicolò made it back to the inn, because of course it did, so Yusuf let out a hardy laugh when he saw the pathetically sopping man at his doorstep. Even in his sour mood, Nicolò couldn’t help but smile at the sound of it.
Yusuf graciously patched the leather pack back together as Nicolò changed out of his wet things, his ruined poem still wadded up in one of the sleeves. He should have tossed it before they left, but Nicolò felt just a tad sorry for himself, so he let himself keep it for a little bit longer, if only as proof to God that he tried. Not that it helped his situation any, of course.
Their days traveling was hardly filled with talk, but Nicolò had a pretty good idea that Yusuf knew this kind of silence was different. He tried his best to keep his morose mood in check for Yusuf’s sake, smiling at the winks he gave across the distance of their horses, but the smiles didn’t linger as long as they normally would. This was more than just an ill-fitting mood. His heart was heavy.
They traveled on the main road until the sun began to set, at which point they branched out to a more discreet trail and eventually set up camp for nightfall. They went to their specified tasks, though Yusuf seemed loath to take his eyes off him, and not in the sensual way of the previous night. He hadn’t breached the topic all day, but now that they’d stopped, Yusuf was sure to ask. And Nicolò didn’t know what to say without coming across as a complete idiot.
As he unloaded their supplies, he looked back at Yusuf, the most wonderful man he had ever known, and he sighed. Yusuf could write poetry with grains of sand if the roles were reversed, yet Nicolò had failed this most basic task, and he had no idea when he would have another chance. He broke his oath. Another night had come, and Yusuf still didn’t know.
That wasn’t acceptable. Kicking himself out of his self-pitying stupor, he marched over to where Yusuf prepared the fire and sat himself down in front of him, as purposeful as suiting up for a fight. Yusuf looked surprised, recognizing this rigor, but when Nicolò offered his hand, Yusuf took it immediately.
He took a deep breath. Then, clumsy, for it seemed that was all he knew how to do anything off of a battlefield, he used his free hand to gesture to himself. Then, he placed his palm flat on his chest, right where his heart lay, before reaching out and placing the edges of his fingertips on Yusuf’s chest.
It wasn’t like the gestures Yusuf had made for them, smooth and concise and beautiful. It was clumsy, and ugly, and confusing to boot, but Nicolò didn’t know how to express this any other way. It didn’t matter how much of a buffoon he looked like, not anymore. He just needed Yusuf to know.
As he repeated the series of motions, Yusuf’s confusion faded from his eyes and something else slowly dawned in them.
Nicolò paused; he’d never seen that expression of Yusuf’s face before, and it seemed to make the very air between them turn still. His smile was a delicate, wonderful thing, a flower in bloom, and his eyes had never looked as soft as they stared into his own. He had never seen Yusuf look so vulnerable, or so strong. Nicolò wanted to collapse under the weight of such sheer emotion, but he still sat frozen under his gaze.
Slowly but purposefully, Yusuf cupped Nicolò’s cheek, his other hand still intertwined.
Then, Yusuf whispered in almost perfect Genoese:
“I love you, too.”
Nicolò surged to wrap his arms around Yusuf, and neither of them let go until the fire was nothing but smoldering embers.
In time, they would learn every iteration of the words “I love you” in every sign language invented. Because Yusuf never stopped being the smartest person Nicolò knew, and Nicolò never stopped trying to make his heart known to Yusuf. But even a thousand years later, every once in awhile, one of them would cover their heart with their hand, then point the other’s way.