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It’s the early morning—early enough that the sun has not yet risen and people have passed out from long nights. Early enough that Michael is painted blue and purple, while Lorenzo’s hands are sprouting red poppies.
It’s not necessarily a new palette when it comes to either of them, although time has passed since the last. There’s a nail dragging along Michael’s tongue as he stands in the middle of the hotel lobby, the several hanging crystal chandeliers and other over the top lights hurting his eyes and upsetting his brain. The light is so bothersome that Michael is contemplating on how he should pluck out his eyes.
Should he pluck them out with his bare hands, or with the dagger he has tucked inside his dress shoe? When it comes to the plucking of eyes, there are numerous methods.
Unfortunately, the contemplation is short-lived when the smell of smoke fills Michael’s sinuses, and he doesn’t have to look up to know that it’s Lorenzo, walking right over the line and into Michael’s personal space. He’s not surprised, considering the events of tonight. Even though the smoke is a mere smell, Michael can see that it is tinted red.
Michael does not want to deal with the leprechaun that is Lorenzo, who wears shining silver armour that has degraded to the point it looks gold, specked with spots of rust from the passage of time.
Michael wants to apologize—for some strange, peculiar reason.
Michael opens his mouth, the organ remaining hanged before Michael remembers whose son he is, his lips falling into a straight line, a mirror of the lines running traffic all over his body.
Michael will admit that he got off the handle tonight. Even though he can’t remember the events that have led to this moment, or what it is that he did, Michael knows that it was off the handle. He knows because the cuffs of Lorenzo’s white button up are specked with red. And the last Michael had checked, Lorenzo was no longer in the same line of work as him.
As if angels were singing a chorus, the lights surrounding them like a choir and decorating this shit stain of a grand hotel lobby, increase in luminosity, and no matter the number of strands that have fallen in front of Michael’s face, the light burns his pupils.
Michael doesn’t know how they got here. He doesn’t quite remember the events of this week alone, let alone today. Everything is blurring together, but through the fog Michael can see gold.
Headlights. Warnings. Fangs. All of it is gold—and blurry or blind, Michael will always see gold. Even if you plucked his sockets of their eyes, as he was contemplating earlier, Michael would still see gold.
There’s an unspoken desperation lingering in the air, the emotion dragging barbed wire along Michael’s skin and holding a plum against his lips, salty. It’s an emotion that has been building for much too long, and now it’s crashing down like a tidal wave.
Michael doesn’t know how they got here, but they’re here.
He and Lorenzo.
Here.
It has been he and Lorenzo for as long as Michael can remember. Michael can’t remember a week without the sight of gold, nor can he envision one.
Lorenzo stands before him, the outline of him glowing with the light of the chandelier behind him. He is simply standing before Michael, as he has for numerous years, as straight as Excalibur—as straight as the knife that has been staked in Michael’s heart since he was nine.
“Micha.” Lorenzo starts, his voice running deeper than the Grand Canyon. It’s his usual voice, but Michael feels like he’s stuck in a belly crawl all the same. “I would do anything for you. I’ve killed for you.”
Michael knows this. He knows this very well, because he commanded Lorenzo so. Michael knows this better than anyone else.
He wishes that he didn’t.
Michael rolls his eyes, a small hope that his head rolls off in suit crawling in his stomach. “What do you want, Lorenzo? I’m fucking exhausted.”
It’s not a lie. Michael is exhausted. He has been exhausted all his life.
He was developed inside of a womb threaded with exhaustion, then born into a world of exhaustion and brought up to be exhausted by Exhaustion itself, and now he works with exhaustion.
Michael is beyond exhausted.
His mind winds like a film as it thinks of all those nights, a crystallized glass full of whiskey gripped tight in his hand, tasting of every day that he has lived.
Bourbon of blood. Bourbon of mud. Bourbon of life.
Whiskey is nothing but an accumulation of every speck of dirt the earth has raised and then shed. Whiskey is nothing but a burning fire against the flesh. Whiskey is nothing against the exhaustion bubbling inside of Michael’s every atom. Whisky is nothing.
Michael is someone who cannot drink with one hand empty. In one hand there is gripped a glass, and in the other there is gripped a gun. Michael can’t remember the taste of whiskey, but he can remember the taste of metal against his tongue.
Michael does not want to be here, standing in front of Lorenzo, who is standing in front of him, a chloroform of desperation asphyxiating him.
Instead, he wants to be in his suite, with a gun that has finally been triggered. There is something comforting about the sound of fireworks.
Lorenzo inhales deeply, the hairs on his chest rising from where the top of his shirt has been unbuttoned, like seaweed in a bay. Then he exhales, and the seaweed disappears beneath the waterline, and Michael’s sight returns to the hairs on Lorenzo’s chin. From the reflection of light shining down on them like bone saws, he can see red.
“You almost died today.”
Michael wants to pull the crystals hanging above them and stab them inside of Lorenzo, because he has stated the obvious twice now when Michael should be in his suite, bleeding. He doesn’t want to deal with the obvious right now. He wants to rest.
“For fuck’s sake, Lorenzo, get to the point.”
“I’ve been thinking about you.” Lorenzo admits out of the blue, the cuff of his sleeve rubbing against his chin, turning more red. “Every time I’m away from you, living, I think about you being there.”
Michael’s face twists and suddenly he wants Lorenzo to go back to stating the obvious.
Whatever Lorenzo is going on about now is not something Michael wants to hear. It is not something Michael wants to hear because it is not something he knows. He’d rather deal with a tidal wave than a tsunami.
“I don’t know what to do when you’re not there. Because all I can think about is you being out there and getting hurt.”
Lorenzo laughs, but it’s a cruel sound. Michael is sure if you gave a saguaro vocal chords, it would sound just as Lorenzo does now.
Michael diverts his gaze to the pillar leftwards of Lorenzo, muttering under his breath: „Nicht schon wieder diese Scheiße...”
“Yes, this shit again, Michel.” Lorenzo sighs and drags a finger through his goatee, a habit he has indulged in with or without facial hair. “You never listen to me.”
Michael tastes metal dancing foxtrot along his taste buds, his tongue instinctively swirling inside of his mouth as he thinks of how tired he is, and of how much he does not want to be dealing with Lorenzo. There are pros and cons to having your own personal knight.
There was a time in their youth when the only dark under their fingernails was dirt. Michael cannot remember the last time his hands had been stained with nature. But he can remember the exact date and time when he was buried within the dirt. If Michael’s very life had hands, they would be permanently stained with the substance.
The rising of memories sets a ticking bomb in Michael’s head, his fingers pressing into the base between his index and thumb to ease the tension.
“Then stop wasting your breath.”
The distance between them decreases as Lorenzo moves in closer, exhaling heavy from his nose like a bull, the desperation in the air tightening around Michael’s neck.
It feels like Michael is the bull and Lorenzo the picador, his gaze slicing through skin and stabbing muscles like a lance. The expression Lorenzo is wearing forms a ball in Michael’s throat.
This is not the way this is meant to go.
Lorenzo should be walking off in frustration at Michael’s persistence. He should be pissed off to the point he resorts to hitting Michael to get his words through his thick skull.
This scene should be going as it tends to go, Lorenzo giving up and Michael continuing on, exhausted. Instead, Lorenzo is stepping closer, and grabbing Michael by the shoulders.
“I want you to live. Is that too much to ask for?” Lorenzo says lowly, as if he’s trying to talk the Earth’s core into sentience. Michael wishes he had a gun on him—to shoot himself or Lorenzo, he doesn’t know.
He diverts his gaze to Lorenzo’s chest, watching the seaweed in the bay of his sternum rise and fall over the waterline, the current appearing tilted. Michael is so exhausted.
“We’re children. We’re still growing.” Lorenzo says, a whisper, “I want to grow with you.”
“We’ve been grown for years.” Michael says, simultaneously swallowing around the nails prickling at the walls of his throat, the words guttural. “It’s too late for any of that.”
Lorenzo’s grip on his shoulders tighten momentarily along with his gaze, his thumbs gliding across Michael’s clavicle bones.
“If I could get out, so can you. Leave the organization and come live with me, OK?”
Michael lifts his gaze with a scowl. “You know I can’t.” Michael grits out, the shards of the chandeliers reflecting in his Pacific eyes. “It’s not as easy as leaving.”
Lorenzo turns his head away from Michael like he’s an open flame, his teeth gnawing at his bottom lip. His grip on Michael’s shoulders tighten once again before his fingers smooth over the blades like an airplane’s silhouette across fields.
Lorenzo’s eyes follow the patterns of the tiles as his fingers move, avoiding the sight of his reflection on the waxen marble.
“We can run away.”
Michael sighs, his whole body moving with the motion and becoming air. Lorenzo doesn’t stop.
“I would leave everything behind for you. I would destroy everything I’ve built up till this point for you.” Lorenzo turns his gaze from the ground to the sky, their eyes locked. “I don’t mind being on ground zero, as long as it’s with you. OK?”
There’s a pause. The sound of waves crashing. Michael can feel the barbed wire slicing into his skin.
Then Lorenzo laughs, a cruel sound that slices the tsunami that Michael has named Desperatio into bite size waves.
“But you won’t. You just won’t fucking let go of this shit life.”
Lorenzo’s laugh grows smaller, and smaller, and smaller, until it is nothing but a clawing at the back of his nicotine kissed throat.
His hands around Michael’s shoulders loosen and wander down his arms, Lorenzo’s touch featherlike along the crumpled sleeves as he speaks in Italian.
"Non capisco, dolcezza. Semplicemente non capisco.”
The words are but a wisp of wind flowing from Lorenzo’s lips. Michael’s wrists are limp as Lorenzo’s touch wanders, his thumbs circling around the protruding joints. Michael does not eat nearly enough as he should.
Neither of them bother to speak anymore. Michael can feel his skin line with mountains when Lorenzo begins to swipe his thumb across the backs of his hands, calloused skin against calloused skin. The sensation makes Michael cringe.
He imagines they’re back in their youth, with softer and cleaner hands, and their faces split in half with a solar system of suns in the centre. He imagines the eyesore lights above them as multiple distant suns. He imagines an escape route out of the grave his mother threw him in before he even became of age.
“I don’t understand why you won’t just come with me.” Lorenzo speaks up, his right hand brushing along Michael’s ring finger. “I hate seeing you becoming your mother.”
The tsunami takes Michael under, and suddenly he’s drowning, and as one tends to do with the instinct of survival, he takes Lorenzo down with him.
One moment they’re standing in the middle of the hotel lobby, and the next they’re not.
Michael has shoved Lorenzo against the pillar he was eyeing earlier, its body slender like the barrel of a shotgun holding the entire building together, one shot away from sending it crumbling.
There is no shot. Their bodies did not collide with the trigger.
A long time ago, as long as yesteryear, there was a time when Michael was determined to break the cycle. A time when Michael was determined to be anything but his mother—even the leaning tower of Pisa, one nature’s kiss away from tumbling down.
There was a time Michael wanted to get out. There has never been a time when Michael didn’t want to get out.
But there’s something terrifying about living. There is something terrifying about not getting bloody for a job or not ending up bound in some random basement annually. There is something terrifying about loving the sun. There is something terrifying about the light.
Michael remembers growing up hating the star of the solar system of his residence. Michael remembers carrying a parasol every time he went outside. Michael remembers avoiding the sun like his mother’s gaze.
There is something terrifying. Michael is terrified. He is not meant to be terrified. He is meant to evoke terror, not feel it clawing across his ribs like a child dragging a stick across a spear fence.
Michael wants to hit Lorenzo except he doesn’t want to hit him at all.
Michael’s mother wants to hit Lorenzo, the want sizzling under his skin as hot as the lightbulbs surrounding them.
There is something inevitable about a son becoming like their father, but there is something pitiful about a son choosing to become like their mother.
Throughout his life, Michael has not ever had much variety when it came to choices. You either sit at the dinner table to eat or don’t eat at all. You either obey your mother or get locked away in the punishment room for a month. You either live or you die.
He thought—he truly thought he was choosing to live this entire time, but with every choice Michael has made in his life, it was to die.
Whatever this is before him is not a life. He has not been living at all.
How is he supposed to learn that? Michael doesn’t think he ever could; not when he has been killed so many times over, by hands of sons and mothers alike.
It’s hard to look Lorenzo in the eyes. His gaze is too soft, like rays of sun filtering through tree leaves, burning Michael’s retinas. If only he had a parasol.
Lorenzo's hands are round the base of Michael’s neck now, delicate as a dove’s wing, and Michael’s hands are tight around the fabric of his partially open shirt. Michael can see the seaweed clear as day thanks to the terrible lighting colouring it white like the afternoon sun.
They stay stagnant for moments.
Michael is breathing heavy due to the running through memories, and Lorenzo is breathing calmly like the pull of tides against shores. He brushes his thumbs on the underside of Michael’s jawline.
“It’s you and me versus the world.” Lorenzo whispers the familiar phrase, the words dripping honey down his chin and to his Adam’s apple. It is a phrase they coined lifetimes ago.
Time is still. It feels as if the earth itself is holding its breath, all the elements of the universe taut in its core, enough to bring it to sentience. Michael stares at Lorenzo, who is staring at Michael staring at him.
Then there is movement. Michael doesn’t know whether Lorenzo or he moved first because the two of them began moving at once, in sync. They’ve been in sync their entire lives. Because it’s them. It’s always been just them. He and Lorenzo. Lorenzo and he.
There’s nothing but the taste of salted nicotine and ichor filling Michael’s mouth, an ocean of deity remains flooding his system and turning his vessels iridescent.
Lorenzo tastes the same as he remembers, even though there is no initial taste test to remember. Lorenzo tastes like the whiskey Michael only ever takes a sip of.
No, that’s wrong.
Lorenzo tastes like metal and ammunition. He tastes like a gun that has been set down. He tastes like mercy.
There’s a deep urge to pull the seaweed from its bay, an urge Michael understands as his mother trying to gain control. There’s a deep urge to push Lorenzo against the pillar further enough that it pulls the trigger.
The urge is buried. Michael does not choose to die this time. He keeps his fists clenched around Lorenzo’s crumpled shirt, which is not a shirt but instead the froth of a wave, and he stumbles back, only to stumble forward because of Lorenzo’s clasp on his face.
They remain like that, stumbling north and south and up and down and left and right, like they did the first time they danced together. As if they are the cosmos themselves, the collision of Andromeda-Milky Way billions of years early.
Michael does want to live. He wants to. But he doesn’t know how to—cannot even imagine learning enough before giving up and returning back to his roots. He wants to live, but where does one even begin to?
Lorenzo’s mumbling something against his lips as they dance tango all over the hotel lobby. He’s mumbling an object pronoun over and over again: “Me, me, me.”
And it’s when Lorenzo has Michael up against a pillar that he can hear and feel what he’s saying, their lips a mere centimetre apart and their heartbeats in sync.
“Start with me.” Lorenzo husks because he’s out of breath. “Start to live with me.”
It isn’t a surprise that Lorenzo saw right through Michael’s forehead and skull and membrane, all the way into the broken webs of his frontal lobe, latching onto his spiralling thoughts and pecking them till anxious-free.
Their lips are still a mere centimetre apart and Michael’s back is beginning to ache from the events of today. And also from the annoyance of Lorenzo suddenly pausing the scene.
“Whatever.” Michael mutters, his bottom lip catching on Lorenzo’s top lip. “Just fucking kiss me.”
He doesn’t wait for Lorenzo to resume the act, because Michael gave him the opportunity earlier and his body is aching with want, the desperation in the air possessing his movements.
It isn’t pretty, whatever this is between them. It never has been pretty.
Lorenzo and Michael met each other through ugly circumstances, and continued to meet each other through ugly circumstances, and then at some point the circumstances turned into pretty and ugly meeting in the middle.
Instead of the remains of deities, Lorenzo now tastes like sunflower seeds and bees and clovers, streams of honey melting down Michael’s throat and morphing him into a beehive.
The pace is softer than before, slower and not all over the place, their feet remaining still and their mouths moving until they can’t anymore.
The universe warps and bends when they break apart to catch their breaths. Michael has no clue what the fuck he’s doing. He doesn’t bother to dwell on it.
Lorenzo’s thumbs are brushing over the apples of Michael’s cheeks that are painted with roses, a new red. It feels like the lobby is breathing heavy with them.
“Let the sun kiss your skin. We can get sunkissed together, OK?” Lorenzo whispers, his skin-split thumb circling around the corner of Michael’s lower lip. Michael tsks and Lorenzo can feel molecules of saliva hit his skin.
“You and your fucking poetry.” Michael mutters, his arms squeezing around Lorenzo’s shoulders. The feeling of their breaths tangling like it has limbs sends a hot flash down Michael’s spine.
There’s no verbal response, but the smile spread across Lorenzo’s face that holds the centre of the solar system is a response in itself, Michael’s eyes rolling at the sight. He lets go of Lorenzo. Well, in one way, at least.
Then he closes his eyes, not because he’s sick of the sight of Lorenzo or even because of the awful lobby lighting, but because he is making a decision.
As Michael decides, Lorenzo walks. His dress shoes are tapping against the marble like skipping stones, wandering off to the exit or the elevator or the stairwell, Michael cannot tell.
“Are you going to come?” Says Lorenzo’s voice, sounding distant and light-years away, as it has always sounded ever since Lorenzo got out.
Now is the time to decide what to do about the distance.
Michael inhales, and with all the lights around them, it feels like he is breathing in the essence of suns. And then he exhales, opening his eyes to the sight of Lorenzo. To the sight of the only thing he has ever had. To the best choice he has chosen.
And he walks forward.