Work Text:
The neighbourhood park was small and pockmarked with wild flowers. In the distance, the spires of the cityscape marred the horizon. They lay under a eucalyptus tree on a quilted blanket among the remnants of their long ransacked picnic. Nile liked the cellophane sound the leaves made in the wind, the way sunlight filtered to the ground in warm fingertip caresses. She closed her eyes and flirted with sleep, and knew if she did Booker would keep the insects from loving up on her face.
She rolled on her side and watched him read. The way he sat hunched over his book, like it was contraband, told her the scene he was on was either tender or smutty. She smiled. Unable to resist the urge to touch him she picked blades of grass from his sweater.
Their whole day could be a song, and perhaps it had been, though she no longer recalled the melody or the lyrics.
Booker, overwhelmed by the prose or her gaze, set down the novel and looked at her. She tugged at his sleeve until he lay propped up facing her. The corners of his eyes had delicate etchings that deepened when he smiled. A memory came back to her of a different man. There were so many things Nile forgot that novel memories seemed a precious treasure. Sometimes she felt shackled in the present tense. She knew acutely that forever could not coexist with the past or the future, that it was a greedy, insatiable now. She moved through the panic by focusing on Booker, returning to him the way people are told to return to their breath.
"Did I ever tell you about James and I?" she said.
"James? Copley?" he asked, a surprised playfulness in his voice. "When was this?"
"Years ago," she said.
It was their private joke, a way for them to poke fun at how knocked out of time they both felt. And it was the truth. She had not thought of James in so long and had not seen him in even longer.
Booker inched forward.
"Tell me,” he said.
"I kissed him, you know." She grabbed his hand and weaved their fingers together. "He thought himself very old when I did. He didn't believe me but he was so beautiful then."
She could see him clearly now. James Copley, strong and robust, and then, as if overnight, his body softening toward the earth. His eighty-six year intimacy with the sun and gravity mapped out on his skin. She felt nearer to him than the guard in those early days. With Booker exiled and her family forbidden her, James seemed like her last link to the real world. She was not her best self with him, how could she be, in those muddled years of pain, when all her basic understanding of what it meant to be a person in the world became evanescent. She felt like an alien exiled to Earth, and James the human chosen to help her. For a while, she loved him best. He cried when she kissed him that first time, when he thought himself years past amorous desire. Between kisses, he kept saying, “Oh, old friend.”
She was lost in her thoughts when Booker spoke up.
"I kissed him too,” he said, and absently, drawn into his own reminiscing, “And much more.”
This revelation delighted Nile to no end.
"Of course you did. While in exile?"
"No, the Merrick days.” He answered her unspoken question. “I was a desperate man, he offered what I was desperate for.”
Booker had used this line before to explain how much he wanted to die in those days. But she could see now there was something else he yearned for. Their bodies really were alien in so many ways. While their minds simply forgot, as all human minds are wont to do, it was like their bodies had no memory at all. They ‘healed’ from simple caresses, and at times they ached desperately to be touched, to remember the pressure of that feeling.
“You and James,” she said, moving her hand to his cheek, “I wish I could watch.”
He chuckled and rolled her on top of him.
“You were never good at just watching, my love.”
He kissed her slow and tender before dragging her bottom lip between his teeth.
Somewhere out there in the infinite confusion of worlds, she imagined the two of them were spending forever with James.
That would be a perfect day. As this one was too.