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Often, what Nigel says makes little sense to Adam. Loops of logic that tangle and wrap back in Moebius strips of rationality, creating Escher sketches of the mind that amount to only a reason that makes sense within its own context. Adam is fascinated by how his partner constructs these, seemingly without intent.
And he is startled when - braced for the irrational - Nigel speaks with a sudden and alarming sense.
“It isn’t right,” Nigel complains. He smears his hand across his mouth as if to wipe the taste away, drink upheld against the light. His eyes narrow into the red liquid, scattering scarlet across the ground. It’s rare enough that Nigel manages to get Adam out into the light of day. Rarer still when he wants to try it at all. Adam’s fork and knife still against his plate, segmenting out vegetables from his pasta with cheese sauce.
“Something wrong?” chirps the waitress, quick to attend to the notoriously noisy man with the neck tattoo, and his quiet but equally cantankerous partner.
“This isn’t good.”
“It isn’t -”
“It’s too fucking green. I don’t know what the fuck it is,” Nigel complains, though with relatively little aggravation considering the early morning hour and the knowledge that - regardless of how they’ve fucked it up - he still has booze in hand and Adam’s foot pressed against his leg. “What the fuck did you put in it?”
“It’s Bloody Mary, so -”
“I’ll fucking drink it,” he relents, forcing a smile even as his gaze takes in the length of the waitress before him. “Just tell them it’s not fucking right. Other people won’t be as fucking kind, you know?”
The girl leaves, stammering an apology and Adam watches as Nigel’s lips work, not considering an apology, those are rare, but perhaps a softening of his words somehow.
He returns to drinking his cocktail instead, brows furrowed and eyes distant before he turns them to Adam, obediently taking up the unwanted vegetables from his mac and cheese. They are quiet but it isn’t uncomfortable, just a fact. They had found this place entirely by accident, with good food and a long bar, cocktails even with brunch on weekends, and now it was theirs.
"Wish people would fucking do their jobs," Nigel mutters and Adam settles his other foot up into his lap with a wordless reassurance. With a crease in his brow, Adam watches as Nigel spears some of his asparagus and stuffs it in his mouth.
“What did you taste in it?”
“Fuck if I know.”
“But you tasted something,” Adam pushes, and Nigel snorts.
“It didn’t fucking taste right. I know how a Bloody Mary is supposed to taste, and that one was,” he pauses, struggling for the word. “Fucking green, Adam, I don’t know what it was.”
When the waitress returns, it’s with an apology. They’ve got a new bartender, she explains, and he added cilantro to the recipe. She sets a fresh glass before him and Nigel’s tension eases into a visible pleasure. He mutters a thanks before she departs again to tend the other tables, and he motions rather grandly to the drink.
“See? Fucking green.”
---
It happens again, days later, as they lay sprawled in their skivvies in front of the fan. The city has heated to an intolerable degree, and even their well-shaded apartment is sweltering in the humidity. Despite the smothering warmth, despite their sweat, Adam rests his head against Nigel’s chest, rubbing his cheek against the coarse curls of hair.
“Fucking miserable,” Nigel complains. “It’s fucking buzzing. Fuck this city.”
"What is?"
"Everything," Nigel mutters, bringing a hand to his face to rub his eyes until he sees stars and groans. "Just the whole damn place, and it is so hot that making a fucking drink wouldn't fucking work since it would fucking melt."
Adam turns to set his chin to Nigel’s chest instead, watching him. Something about the words rings familiar. Not for Adam himself but for several books he read a long time ago. He frowns, but is not upset, hums but is not impatient.
"Can't hear the traffic from up here," Adam reminds him, more a reassurance than a denial of what is felt.
“Thank fucking Christ for small favors,” snorts Nigel, lowering his arm from across his eyes to watch his little sparrow watching him in return. He runs a hand through Adam’s hair, pushing back the curls that have stuck damp to his brow, and trailing rough knuckles against his cheek.
“But you still hear it,” Adam asks, nuzzling lightly into the touch.
“The cars? No,” Nigel says. His lips part to say more but he stops himself, pushing them together into a thin line instead. Adam seeks Nigel’s fingers and finds his thumb, catching it lightly between his teeth. “It’s just the fucking air.”
“Buzzing.”
“Don’t you fucking feel it?” Nigel asks, but regret draws in his brow as soon as he does. They connect sometimes in their understanding - in truth more often than Nigel ever would have fucking wagered at the start of this - but he snorts now, again, to dismiss the idea. “Forget I said anything. Go to fucking sleep, darling. I’ll wake you up when the sun goes down.”
Adam just hums and doesn’t pry. He’s too tired anyway. Maybe the air is buzzing, maybe it's something else. It doesn’t matter, because despite being annoyed, Nigel isn’t hurting or upset, despite being prickly, he is just as tired as Adam is.
Adam nuzzles Nigel over and over with a smile until he settles, and in the evening they take a long cool shower before falling into bed.
Nothing's changed. It doesn't matter if the air was buzzing.
---
Adam finds that sometimes Nigel can be pulled entirely from whatever task occupies him with a smell. Nothing unusual, not a harsh or nasty smell, sometimes not even one that Adam can sense, but one that perks Nigel up like a whistle does a dog. Sometimes the smell is pleasant and Nigel sinks calmly back into his work. But other times it seems to trouble him, making him fuss and shift, swear and light up a cigarette to drown it out.
Sometimes it isn't tobacco.
Usually this happens when Adam is uneasy.
Correlation isn't causation but it's peculiar regardless, and Adam moves to sit in Nigel’s lap when he tries to reach for his lighter next time, watching him expectantly. Without pause, Nigel sets the lighter back to the desk with a click and plucks the hand-rolled cigarette - its smell heady and resinous before he’s even lit it - free from his lips to lay alongside the lighter. Both arms secure around Adam’s skinny waist and Nigel leans back in his chair, dragging Adam against him. His little sparrow is light and fine-boned, pale as porcelain and just as fragile, belying the brilliant mind beneath.
Lithe fingers push Nigel’s reading glasses higher on his nose, and the older man chases Adam’s touch to press kisses to his fingertips. They spread over his mouth and across his jaw, down to rest over the tattoo on his neck.
“What’s the matter, angel? You’ve been pacing.”
“Have I?”
“It’s making me fucking dizzy.”
“You were going to smoke marijuana,” Adam notes, and Nigel tucks a sheepish grin against his sparrow’s graceful throat. He sucks a soft kiss there, and another, just beneath his ear, breath whispering shivers through the younger man when it passes across his ear.
“Got in the way of that, didn’t you, darling.”
“Why?”
“Because you hate the smell of it?”
Adam blinks, and sinks his fingers up through Nigel’s hair, forcing him back enough that they can see each other’s faces. “Not that,” he clarifies. “Why were you going to smoke?”
“Fucking tense in here,” Nigel reasons. “Fill the air with something else. What are you so fucking nervous about, baby? There’s still four fucking days until I’ve got to be in fucking Quezon.”
Adam blinks at him, brows gently drawing in, in thought or concern or both. His mind works quicker, running the catalogue of his collective reading until he finds something that fits into symptoms and a situation like this.
"I wasn't pacing," he murmurs, stroking Nigel’s hair. "And I hate when you go away but I haven't shown any physical signs of tension or displeasure, not today. But you know."
Nigel turns his head against Adam’s hand, a rough nuzzle to mask the tension that lines his face. He considers the cigarette just beyond Adam on the desk, but yields when Adam turns Nigel’s face towards his own. It is Nigel who avoids Adam’s gaze this time, rather than the other way around, and it is Nigel who finally ends it entirely when his eyes slip closed and he tucks a kiss against Adam’s silk-smooth palm.
“Forget it,” he says. “Just imagining things. I know how you get.”
He spreads broad hands over Adam’s ribs and leans up to kiss him, lips twitching displeasure when Adam leans away.
“I’m just being fucking stupid, baby. I won’t smoke that in the house, okay? Not while you’re here, I promise.”
Adam frowns more but he is not angry, he looks almost excited, a quiet simmering of something beneath the surface.
"You're not stupid," Adam tells him, enough conviction for the two of them, if Nigel doesn’t want to believe it himself. "This isn't stupid, or instinct, it's something else, it's -" Adam licks his lip and smiles gently. "This isn't the first time you've had an olfactory sense override another is it?"
"Olfucking what?"
"Smell," Adam clarifies.
Nigel’s discomfort is writ obvious across his features, mouth pursed narrow, gaze thinned beneath a weighted brow. He tries to scoop his hands beneath Adam’s thighs to lift him but his little sparrow sits suddenly heavier, hands against Nigel’s shoulders to keep him in place. It’s only then that Nigel’s lip curls across his teeth, just a flicker of aggravation before he settles grudgingly again.
“What are you asking me, baby? In fucking English.”
“Right now,” Adam asks, blinking bright blue as Nigel watches the kid. “What do you smell?”
“You, being a fucking nuisance.”
“But what does it smell like?”
“Adam, piss off -”
“Tell me,” he whispers, pushing his brow against Nigel’s as if to hold him in place there too.
“Hot. I don’t know. Like fucking - like fucking cinnamon, something spiced. Fucking - nutmeg, Adam, let me fucking go,” snarls Nigel, and Adam can feel Nigel’s heart race beneath his hand.
"Please don't be angry," Adam tells him softly. He can feel how tense Nigel is, how he has immediately fallen to fight or flight and can't decide which will hurt Adam less so he can do that instead of the other. "Please, I'm not trying to hurt you, I just want to understand -"
"How can you understand when I can't fucking understand, Adam? Huh?"
Adam strokes his face and relents when Nigel jerks away from it. His brows now furrow not in anger but in genuine human panic, terrified that Adam will push just a little further, find out something and go. Leave. Or make Nigel leave, after everything.
After everything it would be fucking olfactory hallucinations.
"Nigel," Adam coos quietly, tilting his head. "Do you know what synesthesia is?"
There is silence for a moment, neither breathing, before Nigel curses loudly and shakes his head, helpless.
"Fucking STD? I don’t fucking know."
Adam laughs then, bright, delighted, and holds Nigel’s face between his hands.
"No, no, Nigel, it isn't sexually transmitted. It is a phenomenon, not a disease. It is incredibly special."
“Fuck off.”
Adam kisses Nigel, letting their lips settle slowly together. With each heartbeat, Nigel’s terror eases, uncertainty still unsteadying him. He searches Adam’s face when their mouths slowly part.
“Synesthesia,” says Adam, “is when stimulation of one cognitive pathway also creates an involuntary response in another pathway. So your senses tangle, two - more - trigger all at the same time. Words have taste, colors match certain days of the week. You hear sounds, but that sound has a feeling. You taste flavors, but you can also see those flavors.”
“I don’t see them,” Nigel argues. “I don’t fucking hallucinate.”
“No, you sense them, though. Your drink tasted green, and seeing my tension has a smell to it,” he says. “Can I ask you something?”
It’s such a sweet request, so gentle and genuine - if not still a little fucking annoying - that Nigel nods, lowering his hands to splay over Adam’s thighs.
“What color is the number three?”
“Fucking blue,” Nigel answers, without hesitation.
Until Adam’s eyes brighten again, until his smile spreads in wonder, until Nigel remembers every teacher who called him stupid and every peer or partner or imbecile with whom he’s worked needed him to describe something and the words came out wrong. He knew they were wrong then, from the choked-back laughter and baffled looks. He knows they’re wrong now, and Nigel feels his expression darken, his body weighing heavier, and shakes his head.
“It isn’t,” he insists. “That doesn’t make fucking sense. I must have seen a blue number three when I was fucking little.”
“Maybe, but synesthesia is not related to memory, it is part of you,” Adam tells him, stroking soft fingers over his face. “You could have seen a blue number three but it doesn’t relate at all to the fact that you see it as blue now.”
“I don’t see it as blue.”
“They don’t have to cancel each other out, Nigel,” Adam tells him gently. When he kisses him again it is with a soft sigh and warm lips, entirely adoring. Adam cannot lie, not to anyone but especially not to Nigel. He cannot lie, and he does not now, not when he grins so wide his eyes narrow with it, not when he tells Nigel that he is amazing.
Amazing, not a monster, not a freak, not insane.
Fucking amazing.
Nigel watches as Adam adjusts, dragging a leg across his lap to straddle him and press closer. He doesn’t grab or even guide, but simply lets his hands come to rest against Adam’s skinny hips before sliding them to the small of his back. He accepts the scattered kisses and gentle fingers against his face with a rising smile, and nuzzles alongside Adam’s nose when their lips pass close enough to touch.
“In school,” he murmurs, “my grades were shit. Fucking bad student, you know. Slow. I remember in maths class, trying to sort out numbers by how far away they were. One is close. A hundred is fucking far. Combining them moves them.”
Nigel wrinkles his nose, and manages a dire laugh.
“That was the first time someone looked at me like I was stupid. It happens now, sometimes, when I try to fucking describe something,” he says, his voice unusually soft. “The good thing now is that I can fucking hit them when they laugh about it.”
Adam makes a little noise and settles with his nose soft against the join of Nigel’s neck and shoulder.
“At school, I would be teased for trying to explain how numbers worked to the teacher. She didn’t like it when I would interrupt to explain that there were easier ways to teach than what she was doing, that there were rules and equations that could simplify everything.” Adam sighs. “They put me into a different class, for maths and for science, because I couldn’t work without the rules that made sense and they refused to teach those rules until I was older.”
Adam kisses soft against Nigel’s neck and wonders what it would have been like had they met at school, both outcast for their minds, both exceptional in them.
Both so lonely.
“When I’m not upset,” Adam mumbles. “Do I smell nice?”
Nigel rests his cheek against Adam’s own and lets his eyes close. He stops these flights of fancy, this fucking whimsy - childish shit - when it starts, most times, when he can. He numbs the tangle of senses with booze and drugs. But here, like this, with Adam so delicate and small against him, his little sparrow pressed close, it feels safe.
He draws in a long breath, tilting to nuzzle into Adam’s hair, and sighing slow.
“Măceş,” he says. “It’s, ah - fuck. A rose, but not the big fuckers in the garden. Wild roses, pink or white. They hide deep in the briars and grow all over the fucking country. You have to pick past the thorns to get to them, to get close enough to smell them. It’s very faint, not the kind of flower that makes you dizzy to breathe it in.”
Adam makes a little sound, and Nigel eases it away with broad hands against his back.
“It’s worth the brambles,” Nigel murmurs. “I think of them whenever you’re close to me.”
Adam makes another sound and turns his face against Nigel properly, bringing his hands up and over his shoulders to hold him close. He clings, for a while, like a small child, like he’s scared or upset, but he’s not, that smell isn’t there on him, and he isn’t tense. He’s warm. He is very, very warm.
“I smell like home?” Adam asks him quietly.
Nigel’s brow creases, but his smile widens, just a little.
“Aren’t you?”
Adam laughs, smiling even as Nigel kisses the sound from him, tastes it against his mouth and lets it reverberate through him. He doesn’t know why this came up today, he doesn’t know why this is the way it is at all. But he should have known that if anyone in the world could hear his nonsense and make something reasonable out of it - not just that, something beautiful - that it would be Adam. They both stumble over their words, they both communicate in ways no one else can quite understand.
No one but the other, who hears them clearly.
No one but the other, who knows meanings even without words to clutter them.