Work Text:
- IMPULSE
When a waitress approached serving him a glass filled with a deep red garnet colour, Mairon merely laughed. “From the Sir sitting in the corner, over there”, she looked over Him slightly nodding the head, “He said he is enraptured”. The Sir nodded at him while making eyes contact from distance. A combination of respect and disarmament that did strike Mairon from within. Before leaving, the waitress placed next to the glass on the table a paper notes with a phone number written with an edgy calligraphy. A cellular phone, apparently.
It was around closing time, in the bar there were few people left: he, his drunk ex with a couple of common friends, a little group of people laughing a little too loud and the all dressed in black Sir with his shiny piercing eyes. The Sir was quite famous in some ambientes and beyond, and Mairon knew who he was. Considered as the most vicious man in his hometown and beyond, the man is an artist and lives in a very isolated area, which make him far more interesting than his friends and acquaintances average. He always has a ´gloomy´ atmosphere all around him, dark, depressing and desolate.
Mairon nodded back before taking a taste. The first sip washed broadly across the palate like a flood of sweet, fresh fruit and the viscous mouthfeel kept the flavours lingering. It caused a little and uncontrolled ‘mmm’ escaping from his throat. Then, aromas of red cherries and raspberries infused with mocha and spice. The hints of baking spice and some oak kept the fruit flavours fresh and lively on the tongue.
It takes two days after their initial meeting before Mairon gives up the game of wills he plays basically with himself, and texts the Sir for a real date back to the same bar where they met.
- PULSE
Generally, Mairon tires of going out on dates. The worst thing has always been worrying about food being caked on his mouth or stuck in his teeth. Too many awkward moments, strained and contrite conversation with partners intimidated by his smugness or in awe from his beauty. Once the alcohol has taken over his partner, the rest of the evening usually goes through agonizing hours of hitting on him, complete with several needless questions about his life until that moment. Yet, that circumstance is none of this.
Melkor is staring. Filled with doubt, clouded by uncertainty.
He doesn’t really know how to enter his world. Neither how to approach him, so astounding and breath taking. Attractive and apparently significant. Uncommon.
It was many years before that he completely lost interest into human beings, when he used to meet people. This brought him to end up abominating the human race in toto: same nonsense over and over again, tired games of imminent apathy: a world that has nothing in common with his internal one caused him to isolate, eventually. He was so sure that everyone was this much irrelevant to him that, when he saw him for the first time as he walked through that bar’s door, Melkor felt as if the profound knowledge of the world he had suddenly broke into a thousand pieces. His own soul seemed about to fall apart, hit with a terribly blinding light.
At first, Mairon wonders if he has ever shared a so long silence with anyone, known or unknown. The man’s demeanour is almost creepy. A very dark aura is the most evident part of the vibe of his presence. He is staring like his mind and his eyes are analysing him intently.
Mairon doesn’t know how to escape it, that’s assuming he really wants to make it out of there. No matter how much of a getaway attempt he would set out, there is something inside holding him there glued to his eyes. Not even he should feel comfortable being observed and started on, knowing that the man is actually studying him: usually, the inquisitive gaze observing reality is his own, which his dates have to undergo; it is like a game to him: a way to explore critical thinking skills and the logic behind their thoughts. It is present yet not expressed, active yet absent: that man can transverse the planes of his existence with a single glance. And, as strange as it may seem, Mairon feels at home, his mind at ease and his body comfortable.
Despite his observable imperturbability, Melkor feels restless.
No, rather excited. He hasn’t been so thrilled since on his eighteenth birthday, when he left home to live on his own. Now he is thirty-seven. He is mesmerized. Feverishly afraid. More, emboldened:
“Melkor”, he states, his tone of voice naturally low and calm, which helps abate the prickly arrogance that he knows tends to roll out of his strong aura. Probably, he thinks, his lips might have a shade too purple than the normal and his cheeks lightly dashed in a flushed pink; but the latter is not a wine effect.
Well, it took only one hour and three glasses of wine to reach that point. Not that bad.
Melkor feels comfortable in every field of life, except for one. When it comes to the unknown empire of feelings, he doesn't handle them…well. He gets shy and confused. This generally results in a strange conflict of haughtiness coupled with alienation, usually fucking everything up with wrong attitudes and words, for there is nothing more detestable than to look vulnerable to him.
There is something in him, Mairon thinks, if you have a strong inner equilibrium. Or if you are into a sharp looking face, glacial eyes, haughty smirks and long silences to withstand. Which it turns out he very much is, having faced them over the last hour; especially after three glasses of the same red wine (fortunately, he decided to walk and not take the car that night). It is almost touching the way the man, Melkor, tries to hide his nervousness while he sits on the chair with a stoic façade.
Mairon sets his glass down on the table and crosses his arms both hands out staring directly and intensely at him, the question mark over his face has to be huge:
“Mairon”, he replies.
Melkor is overpowered.
His voice sounds divine to his ears. A bit grave, yet breathy — sort of how a deep red wine might sound if it had a voice. He hides how flustered his tone made him by putting his own wineglass down, a basic movement to find again his exterior composure. He strives to suppress a frantic smile, wild with emotion, which could undermine the whole evening in a matter of seconds.
“Starting with the basics,”, Melkor speaks as if following up on their another-world-and-era meeting, “the first and most obvious characteristic of this wine is what we perceive from the outside. In this case,”, his eyes wander looking at his nose, insisting on his eyes, drinking in his lips and cooing over his hair, “the bright and youthful colours”.
His weird behaviour.
Mairon feels fascinated and intrigued, looked and admired with such deep devotion, but still perturbed: Melkor’s eyes are exerting a powerful attraction and he should not feel that comfortable on a weird stranger studying him so carefully.
“The second characteristic are tannins: they’re the source of the drying sensation in the mouth, akin to black tea. It gives structure like a skeleton, and ‘ageability’, smooth and well-integrated”. Mairon’s hands are well-shaped and elegant. He hopes this might match other aspects of his interesting anatomy.
At that point Mairon feels disquiet.
He doesn’t know how to actually react. It was too obvious that Melkor didn´t talk about the wine anymore, or even from the very beginning, because the main argument was him, for the wine is a tribute to his handsomeness.
“The last characteristic of red wine is the acidity.”, Melkor tries to maintain an unemotional tone despite the fervid excitement thrumming through him, “It serves as a preservative as well as gives freshness and structure back. When tasting red wine, the acidity is perceived as the tart and sour attributes which balance against tannins components”.
Mairon tilts his head on the side. The personality of Melkor has to actually be very interesting if he has the luxury of keep a man such like him hanging from his lips with a wine lecture. He is indeed a man filled with darkness and contempt for many things, obviously obsessed with a sort of attraction to perfectionism, but lost in a chaotical understanding of it. Mairon’s lips curve and a slight smile appears on his face.
“All this said,”, Melkor stops and wonders if this is the happiest moment of his life. He breathes in deeply, exhaling with a trembling chest, and hopes that it goes unnoticed, “None of these matters except for… you. What you feel while drinking it is what really builds the experience of it up. More often than not, in a picturesque setting, at a momentous affair, when you sip a wine and feel good, it’s a wine assessment and mood mashup. Allow yourself to be amazed more often”.
It sounded not like a pledge. It had not the shape of a promise. Rather a statement of fact.
No one has ever properly understood him, Mairon sorely bites his lower lip; and he has never fully understood anyone, for no one really understands anyone else. But with him, he ponders, things could just resonate differently. Despite all the thoughts racing in his mind, Mairon wipes all of them out and leans back pleasantly enjoying the silence between them once again, a sort of nice place, just an interlude that lasts the space of an ending bottle of wine.
Melkor pays the bill. Mairon nods his thanks to him favoring the theme of the evening.
Melkor cues him to offer his hand by extending his, well prepared to convert that extension into a quick flourish of his reverence, avoiding any embarrassment of standing there miserably with his hand out waiting for a thing never to come. Without thinking about it too much, Mairon extends his hand too, and Melkor takes it into his.
“I am overwhelmed”, he whispers and bends over the hand in a courtly manner, just a little, so that he can still look into the fire of his eyes.
There Melkor perceives what has been hidden until now: Mairon’s rare perfume, the sweetest intoxication of the most compelling spell. And yet, it strays well beyond the bounds of conventional notes.
Melkor makes the motions of a kiss over the back of his hand. Only the motion, he doesn’t dare to touch his skin with the lips, for admiration and respect, too precious he is to be abused and offended like that.
It is in his own person that Melkor learnt to spot the primitive duality of the self, of the two natures that contend in the field of his consciousness. Even if he could rightly be said to be either, only because he is essentially both.
Yes, Melkor will devotedly deal with spending the night sleepless to recollect the most naked possibility of such a miracle, wondering how elusive his skin tastes like. No mesmerizing perfume has ever tortured him more than his. He will turn the thought of him over in his mind with pleasure, an angel and one hell of a lover.