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The vaha rocked on the steady swell beneath them, the stars close and brilliant overhead. Fitzroy’s palm curved gently over Cliopher’s face, thumb just brushing the edge of his earlobe with a touch that nearly tickled. His eyes were closer and more brilliant than the stars, as they spoke of their love for one another: a hearth hidden but burning bright, surrounded by pearls.
‘Do you ever—’ Fitzroy said, so quietly it was barely more than breath. ‘I mean, would you like—’
Cliopher made an interrogative sound, patient in his contentment.
Fitzroy leaned closer still, until his face blocked out the sky. He was warm all along Cliopher’s side, his heartbeat going fast where Cliopher held his hand. ‘Could I kiss you?’
Cliopher blinked at him, humming assent before he had given the words conscious thought. He could not imagine, in that moment, anything his fanoa might ask in such a careful, tremulous tone that he would refuse.
Fitzroy’s lips on his were careful too: a soft, deliberate brush. His fingers sank into Cliopher’s hair. He drew back just a little before leaning in again, more open and seeking.
Cliopher felt his body responding for him, answering the call Fitzroy’s was making: the pull and the gentleness of it, the longing after closeness, pressing away all the remaining space between them.
Belatedly, his mind arrived at the word kiss. He was kissing his Radiancy – his Fitzroy. His fanoa. That wasn’t—
He pulled back with a hard shiver, his skin catching on the wood of the deck.
Fitzroy had let him go instantly. He sat up and drew his knees to his chest, looking chagrined. ‘Sorry. I thought you—’
‘You thought that I…’ Cliopher heard his own voice and instantly hated it: court-offended and petulant, nothing he wanted to bring to this night with this man. ‘Fitzroy, I’m sorry. I misunderstood.’
‘And here I imagined I was being fairly unmistakable,’ Fitzroy said. He gave a toss of his head, gazing out at the ink-black sea. ‘I really must be out of practice.’
And of course he was right. The way that they had both spoken, lying side by side under the stars – the way that he had touched Cliopher’s face, looked up at him through his lashes…
Cliopher felt intensely, desperately foolish. He had sometimes felt that way before – Rhodin and Conju were always telling him when he’d missed the signs – but never when it had been so terribly important. When all the most secret dreams of his heart were on the line.
‘It just never occurred to me,’ he said weakly. ‘That you could want—sex. With me.’
His voice could not help rising on a question. He had sought to make himself an equal for Fitzroy, a worthy fanoa, but never…an object of desire. Not someone to be looked at the way Auri looked at El, fond and possessive and still hungry after so many centuries.
Fitzroy had turned back to him, his eyebrows shooting up. ‘I confess,’ he said, a little strangled, ‘that I hadn’t been thinking quite that far.’
His obvious confusion was just enough, to lift Cliopher away from the rushing vortex of his own reflections. Cliopher had been thinking of him as his Radiancy, untouchable and remote – as Fitzroy Angursell, who had composed dozens of songs about his legendary lovers and fathered a daughter by the Moon. But he was also Cliopher’s Fitzroy – so long beloved, the other half of his heart – and he had a problem for Cliopher to solve.
‘What, then?’ If Fitzroy had only been looking for safety and affection...
He seemed to shrink in on himself for a moment, before he swallowed hard and straightened his shoulders from their hunch. ‘Kip,’ he said. ‘I have been half in love with you from the day I met you. Rather more than half. And from some of the things you’ve said, about fanoa, it sounded like—Well. It seems I was wrong.’
Look , Cliopher told himself firmly, listen. His heart was hammering hard in his chest, with a mixture of terror and a hope he hardly dared to name. He thought of Fitzroy’s pulse, the way it had raced beneath Cliopher’s hold. It seemed unbearable not to be touching him: he reached for Fitzroy’s hand, where it was resting against an upraised knee, and held it tightly.
‘I love you,’ he said. It was a fact, a conviction, a ke’ea. He tried to put all of it into his voice, raw but steady.
Fitzroy looked up at him sidelong, eyes glittering. ‘But?’
‘But nothing. I bought a house, when we were in Gorjo City. I hoped that we could share it, with Ludvic and Rhodin and Conju. There are rooms you could have, if you wanted…’
Fitzroy tugged his hand away, not rough but decisive. Cliopher tried not to be hurt at it, or at the hint of court smoothness in his tone. ‘My dear, that’s—very kind of you. Your friendship is a great gift to me, and I hope to value it as it deserves. Someday.’
It was a refusal - an exquisitely polite one. Cliopher felt as though all the darkness of the ocean had gathered into a ball, sitting icy cold in the middle of his chest. He drew up his own knees and sank his head against them, letting out a single dry sob of heartbreak before he could hold it back.
After a moment, he could feel Fitzroy moving closer: a hovering warmth by his wrist, as though Fitzroy had nearly touched him there.
‘Kip,’ he said, very softly. ‘I need some time, I’m sorry. I can go back to how things were. Only I did just kiss you in the spray of starlight flung up by a sky whale, and you were horrified. And now we’re still on this blasted boat, on this beautiful fucking night, and there’s no escape unless I yield to the temptation to fling myself over the side, so forgive me if I seem a little—’ He broke off, with a sound too agonised to be a laugh.
Cliopher raised his head, unable not to respond to his friend’s obvious misery. ‘I wasn’t horrified.’ He forced himself to think back to that moment, to Fitzroy’s hand on his face and Fitzroy’s mouth on his. It had felt – natural. Easy. An extension of how close they had been, the hushed confessions between them. It was only when he’d started thinking, putting words to it…
He could try to explain. He would have to explain, if they were to have any hope of getting through this: to Fitzroy and to himself, too, for he had found it too wholly unimaginable to ever face it head on before. It was another dark tunnel leading away into the depths of him: not perilous, not truly frightening, but so much simpler to step around.
But that was not what mattered now. He did not believe that Fitzroy was struggling with arousal – that he was merely disappointed that they had not found physical release together. No, he looked – devastated, as though he had been asking for something else entirely, and had it refused. As devastated as Cliopher felt, when his mention of the house had met with a rebuff.
‘Fitzroy,’ he said – as gently, as lovingly as he could. ‘Would you tell me what you wanted?’
‘It doesn’t matter what I wanted. We can just—’
Cliopher reached over and took his hand again. Everything felt easier, with that human contact between them. ‘It matters to me. Tell me.’
Fitzroy ducked his head, his black-and-silver hair falling forward. ‘I talked to El and the others, about what fanoa meant – what it had meant to Vou’a and Ani. I wanted that, with you. Not just…’ He gave a single flash of an upward glance. ‘Oh, they were certainly very impressive, Auri and El, but what I wanted was – to kiss you. Hold you. To be with you, now and forever; to make coffee and raise islands for you; to be your beloved and have you be mine. The…other half of my shell.’
‘The outrigger to my keel,’ Cliopher whispered back, wholly breathless. ‘My match, my equal. My fanoa.’ He drew up Fitzroy’s face with his free hand, curving it across his cheek where the tears were washing away the last traces of starlight. He knew he must be crying too, but it felt…free. Cleansing. ‘Oh you are, you are.’
They tipped forward, foreheads resting together and their hands intertwined. Cliopher felt that his soul must be singing louder than the stars – than all the thundering birds of the sky.
At last he sat back and laughed a little, at himself, in tremulous joy. ‘It was just—the kissing surprised me. It usually does.’
‘We don’t have to do that,’ said Fitzroy immediately. His expression was open and eager, almost boyish, as he looked down at their linked hands. ‘Kip, dearest, I don’t need to make love to you to love you. I couldn’t touch you at all for a thousand years, and I loved you for every single day of them.’
‘But you can touch me now,’ Cliopher said. Even as his heart surged with Fitzroy’s words, he could not help hurting at the reminder of that painful, careful distance. ‘I like it when you touch me.’
They both froze at the vehemence with which he said it, and Cliopher felt a furious blush rise in his cheeks. He would have been grateful for the darkness, except that he had nothing to hide.
‘Like this?’ Fitzroy asked after a moment, squeezing his fingers. Cliopher nodded, and watched as he lifted them up, brushing his lips against the knuckles. ‘Or this?’
Cliopher sucked in a breath, his eyes sliding shut before he forced them open again. He wanted to keep looking at Fitzroy: Fitzroy, who had turned his hand over and was rubbing his thumb against the palm softly, and then firm as a promise. He had always been the most beautiful thing Cliopher had seen – resplendent on his throne, or rising naked out of the sea at Navikiani, or now, with his nails bare and new calluses on his fingers. Most beautiful now, so near and his.
‘Fitzroy,’ he said. Their eyes met, warm and certain as tovo striking tanaea.
When Cliopher leaned forward to kiss him, Fitzroy made a small noise that was almost wounded. His lips parted and then he was motionless, trembling, as Cliopher found his way into the kiss.
Cliopher wanted to tell him that it was all right. It was all right: this touch, this tenderness, the way that Fitzroy’s breaths mingled with his and Fitzroy’s skin was soft beneath his hands. And desire was there too, glowing steady as a coal or a flame pearl at the bottom of the sea. He did not need to dive for it now, but it was there. It would not drown him.
Some timeless while later, they eased down to lie once more upon the deck, even closer than they had been before. Fitzroy was clinging a little, so tentative that it pulled at Cliopher’s heart. Cliopher was not inclined to let him go unless the vaha badly needed adjusting, which it didn’t. They were on course.
‘I thought,’ Fitzroy said at last, dreamily, ‘that kissing would be the same as asking the question. It usually is, in the stories. But perhaps it’s just…kissing.’
‘Mm,’ said Cliopher. He was purely and shiningly happy, secure with it at last: his island ahead of him, a tale out of legend to tell, his fanoa held safe in his arms. The crashing wave had not broken them; they were going home together. ‘It is very nice, though.’
Fitzroy’s laughter was perilously close to a giggle, as it rippled against Cliopher’s throat. Cliopher let him laugh, feeling his delight and echoing it, until it faded to stillness – merging with the deep thrum of the current and the song of the stars, before the coming jubilation of the dawn.