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Time always comes to a standstill when the front door of the 59th Street apartment closes. It's funny because Eiji can feel himself growing old anyway.
Eiji's youth is far from over, but weariness ossifies exponentially with time. Age is a whimsical thing, really. The aching in his bones is almost sentimental when he remembers those stretching summer evenings, the ones where he lay stagnant in a hospital bed and longed for the days when his heavy bones were hollow instead, and carried him across the wind.
Vaulting used to help him overcome his fears, until it became them. Now though, after he's scaled a wall with a rusty pipe, he's only afraid of one thing. The phantom pains in his body become nostalgic now that he has finally found himself. Found the missing pieces of his soul, and traded the half that lay dormant within him for so long.
He only fears losing what he's found.
He fears the bloodstains, dried on clothes and tacky on skin; he fears the cigarette smoke, redolent in the air and lingering in strands of blond hair. But he's also scared of the day that they fade, of the day when all his shirts are pure white, and he can no longer smell that deathly fragrance on his skin.
Where he grew up, childhood was picture diaries, beetle collections, bubble baths, running tracks. But for Ash, he supposes it was more like adulthood. Blood stains; cigarette smoke. Eiji wonders when that miasma of red and grey overpowered the smell of the sea; the feeling of sand between toes. He hates that Cape Cod is overrun by memories of gunpowder, newspaper clippings, unanswered letters and Irish whiskey. He wishes it were more like the summer of 1985; fish and chips, cherry cola, ugly t-shirts and stolen glances.
Memory can be temperamental that way. Capricious as the night when the bed adjacent to his own creaks and whines as the bedsheets rustle and the boy inside them screams.
It is only night when Ash is not awake. It is only day when Eiji sees his smile.
So until he hears the jingling of keys and turning of the door handle, Eiji is stuck in an overcast limbo. Where nothing moves but the languid countdown inside his head.
He takes photos, freezes moments in time. The camera, aimed through the gaps in the blinds, captures only people that Eiji believes do not deserve to be preserved beyond the grave. But this is not art, so he supposes that it doesn't really matter.
(But really, he wishes he could reserve his lenses for things worth keeping.)
(If someone told him he could only photograph one subject for the rest of his life, he’d decide in a heartbeat.)
Keys rattle in the lock. The cassette player that’s been rewinding this whole time finally switches to play. His youth begins again every time that door is opened.
“Welcome home.” He says. Green eyes crinkle at the edges and dawn breaks on a new day.
***
In the bathtub, one is lonely, two is a crowd. But New York City dwellers have never shied away from a little excitement, a bustling sardine-can of a city.
So there they sit, backs against porcelain, knees slotted together like bookmarks between pages, marking each other’s existence with touch alone. Bubbles overflow from the tub like a third guest, perhaps Eiji put in too much soap. Ash lectures him on the power of surfactants and scoops handfuls into his hair like a white pompadour, Eiji wonders if it will wash out the smell of tobacco. He wants to take a photo because Ash looks ridiculous and beautiful.
Eiji curves his index into his thumb, watches as the soapy water catches onto his skin and the iridescent hues wander aimlessly between his fingers. He purses his lips and gently pushes air through it, a singular transparent sphere floats in the space between them.
Without hesitation, Ash flicks a finger and pops it. Perhaps his cat-like instincts also apply to that mischievous propensity of his to meddle. Eiji loves it. That implish gleam in his eyes, like the green sea foam of his hometown shore never really left him. Like remnants of a childhood realised, carried with him to maturity.
Perhaps the parts that matter never really leave you either.
Eiji guesses that you don’t really get to pick and choose with these things, but there’s comfort in the fact that when he blows bubbles with his breath, he will smell detergent instead of tobacco. Soap will stain their skin instead of blood, Ash will rest his hand tentatively, gently on top of his and time will flow past like a wave in the bathtub.
If it’s like this, Eiji doesn’t mind that his skin will wrinkle and his eyes grow tired. Because he can grab at Ash’s hand, caress his fingers and feel the skin grow pruney alongside his, bring it to his lips and taste the soap bubbles on his tongue.
When Eiji is faced with a scene like this, it feels like his teenage sentimentality will never truly leave him. Because he feels the reciprocal of his soul in the vibrations of Ash’s laughter, in the unseen tenderness of Ash’s hesitant touch. The way his fingers hover above Eiji’s bare skin as if asking for permission, and the unabated joy that emanates from his shy smile when it is granted.
For all his supposed coldness, Eiji has never known such warmth.
What other man has pressed such featherlight kisses to his dimpled smile, traced the lines of his arms and rested his head between his collarbones? Eiji doesn’t want to know the answer, because there is only one that he wants.
***
Eiji had a dream once, where he picked a card, any card, from a stack that sat neatly in front of him. He remembers how he held it up to his face, inspected it quizzically, and how it promptly disappeared in a cloud of smoke. He doesn’t remember what was on the card, though.
What a useless sortilege.
Eiji has always been the opposite of clairvoyant, only ever wielding the power of hindsight, as he looks back on the past and realises, Oh. How his heart aches.
But now, as he weaves his fingers through Ash’s hair and towels it dry, the image of an upturned card flashes across his mind and he’s struck with a sense of midnight deja vu. He looks to his side at the mirror, and sees Ash’s profile superimposed on a tarot, crepuscular green eyes and incandescent yellow hair. The Star facing upwards.
Filled with a strange, once-in-a-lifetime prescience, his heart aches all the same.
He runs his fingers through the hair above Ash’s nape, picking out any stubborn knots.
“Don’t be too rough, Japanese klutz.” He can feel the mirth radiating from Ash’s voice, gentle yet coy.
“Don’t be a baby, sensitive American.” Is his own petulant response. They both dissolve into laughter. God, they are children.
Eiji’s callowness has never been considered a virtue, becoming the man of the house before he was ever really a man means that underneath the shell of an athlete, a photographer, a gang leader’s accomplice, he is still just a boy. As blue as the spring and as naive as the buds, only just beginning to bloom into full fledged flowers.
He’s almost twenty and his heart is still ten, watching his baby sister chase after him on her little legs; running into the ocean with his clothes on as his first act of defiance; discreetly trying to tear off the shrink wrap of a Shounen Sunday without getting caught.
He’s supposed to be past that.
But with Ash, who teases him for being an old man but treats him like a childhood playmate, time has never really been linear.
With Ash, who is eighteen but was never really eight, time is written in cursive with a heart drawn above the ‘i’.
It doesn’t tick mechanically, it dances on the offbeat. Like someone grabbed the hand of the metronome, swinging it from side to side to their own arbitrary rhythm; took the clock by the hour hand and waltzed with it all night, twirled it over Greenwich and dipped it across date lines.
Youth is but a feeling, and with his hands in Ash’s hair and the smell of soap on his skin, he feels all too much.
He’s standing on an Izumo beach, the odour of his father’s ashtray fading into the distance, the same scene that once filled him with profound isolation is now a boundless landscape, fit for exploration, childish wonder. He imagines Ash by his side, and the way that they are limitless together.
Ash turns his head from underneath Eiji's hands, and looks at him with that sea-glass gaze. As piercing as it is transparent. He sees the vulnerability, the comfort, the question of forever. He sees it all and—
God, he can't lose this.
He can't lose the citrusy scent of shampoo between his fingers, the cigarette smoke lingering on the discarded denim jacket, the blood spattered red high tops.
He leans down and buries his nose in damp hair, lips grazing the crown of Ash's head. He wants to laugh, he wants to cry. He wants to commit every fibre of feeling to memory. But moments like this float away as quickly as soap bubbles, as slowly as cigarette smoke.
He doesn’t want to think of this as a fleeting romance, but he knows that ultimately it’s not really up to him.
Quietly though, he thinks of this as forever.