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With a loud, drawn out groan, Fighter spreads himself flat against the coffee table, pushing the hoard of textbooks and note pages to the opposite end where they dwindle off the edge and threaten to fall. Eyes gone fuzzy, he rests his cheek against his open English book to look towards the culprit of his pain.
He loves Tutor, truly; he’s a damn good boyfriend and an even better teacher. But sometimes he thinks he embraces his nickname a bit too well; or maybe he just enjoys seeing him suffer. The one-sided smirk pushing up his left cheek is pretty telling.
“Come on, P’Fight,” he says, amusement clear in his voice. “You’ve finished more than half. The rest shouldn’t be so hard, right?”
“Easy for you to say,” he says, jerking his chin in the direction of the poetry book in Tutor’s hand. The cover had barely been creased when he’d sent Fighter off to do his assignment. But now, the first half of the pages have been folded over, evidence enough of his superior English skills. “It feels like my brain stopped working.”
“Aw, poor baby,” Tutor coos. His hand finds his hair, fingers scratching against his scalp. If grammar rules and proper sentence structure hasn’t sent him to sleep, this certainly will. The lines between awake and not blur with each scrape of his bangs, and if not for Tutor’s voice, he’d have been dead to the world.
“Before you came,” he reads, book propped up in his other hand, “things were as they should be: the sky was the dead-end of sight, the road was just a road, wine merely wine.”
Turning his head to get a better look at him, he watches the way the pale pink of his lips forms each word, each syllable articulate and smooth. Fighter knows he’s talented – having once mistook it for arrogance – but there’s something about him utilizing those talents in the solitude of his apartment, just the two of them apart from the rest of the world, that makes him feel special.
He continues, “Now everything is like my heart, a color at the edge of blood: the grey of your absence, the color of poison, of thorns. The gold when we meet, the season ablaze, the yellow of autumn; the red of flowers, of flames. And the black when you cover the earth with the coal of dead fires.”
“What is that?” Fighter asks when he pauses between stanzas.
“Before You Came, by Faiz Ahmed Faiz. It was in Urdu before it was translated into English. It’s about how a dull, ordinary life can be completely changed when you meet the right person. It can be so much more beautiful than you ever thought it could be.”
He’s looking at Fighter with his almost unfathomably large eyes, the right side of his mouth tipping up to match the other in a fond smile. Hand sliding from the top of his head to his cheek, he strokes a thumb across his cheekbone, nail tickling his bottom lashes. His words linger in the room, engulfing Fighter in a love that he thinks that poet must have written about.
Returning his smile, he says, “I didn’t take you for such a romantic,” as he climbs onto the couch beside him. Stretching himself out across the cushions, he pillows his head in Tutor’s lap, wiggling a bit to get comfortable. “Keep going; I want to hear the rest.”
“I think you just want an excuse to get out of studying,” Tutor counters. Regardless, he doesn’t put down his book, and he continues stroking his hair.
“Of course not. I’m still technically studying English, aren’t I? Just audibly instead of visually.” He rolls over onto his back, staring up at him with a pleased growth to his grin. “Besides, I remember everything you say, unlike anything I read from that textbook.”
Tutor shakes his head, rolls his eyes, but he reads on. When he finishes, he flips the page to the next poem, then the one after that. Fighter is completely enraptured, feeling warm as he curls closer into Tutor’s abdomen. Learning English isn’t too bad, he thinks, so long as he can learn it through Tutor and all of his pretty poets.