Archive of Our Own ^beta

It’s a Tuesday when Kaveh breaks up with Al-Haitham. Four forty-seven pm—he happens to catch the time on his way out the door. The significant thing about this is that it is so insignificant. Nothing happens on Tuesdays, at least not life-altering, groundshaking things like Kaveh breaking up with Al-Haitham.

Plenty of things happen on Tuesdays. Kaveh goes out and swings by the newspaper kiosk on his way back from work every week because so much nothing happens on Tuesdays that it’s more interesting to read about the murder case in Fontaine or the post-civil war unrest in Inazuma or the firefighter who rescued a cat from a tree, but even then all of those things happened on Monday or Sunday, and the paper is only now getting around to rolling out the story. He’s almost surprised that they haven’t made it to the headlines yet, in big, bold font, BREAKING: KAVEH BROKE UP WITH AL-HAITHAM IN THEIR KITCHEN, MORE TO COME LATER. Maybe the journalists aren’t always quick on the uptake.

Other things other than the daily news happen on Tuesdays, but Kaveh can’t really remember them right now. On Tuesdays, he drinks matcha in the morning instead of his usual coffee because he doesn’t need the extra caffeine boost. He comes home to find Al-Haitham there already even though he doesn’t get off of work until five and it is only three-thirty. He goes to sleep with Al-Haitham, which is nice, but so regular that there is nothing noteworthy about it.

Kaveh did not wake up this Tuesday morning and think, today I am going to break up with Al-Haitham. He didn’t even think of it on his way home from work, taking a paper from the kiosk on the corner, knowing Al-Haitham would already be there waiting.

It’s four fifty-one, and Kaveh was not informed this morning that in approximately nine hours he would be single and boyfriendless. He stands outside of the apartment complex and stares out to the street and blinks, and his eyes are drier than normal. A breeze flits through the pavement, dodging traffic, and when it hits his face, Kaveh realizes that his cheeks are wet.

It’s that weird in-between time from summer to autumn where it’s blisteringly hot in the morning and then weirdly chilly as soon as the sun hits the ground and runs. This time of the year usually requires an outfit change. Kaveh typically brings with him a coat for this very purpose so he cannot be caught unawares by the fleeting urges of the weather. His coat, made of cashmere and a half-birthday gift since Kaveh is sentimental and particular about times like that and really quite nice, is sitting folded over the kitchen chair, silent witness to Kaveh and Al-Haitham breaking apart onto the kitchen tile.

There’s this nebulous time between afternoon and evening when the two colors haven’t quite finished seeping into each other and Kaveh is caught between the uneven stripes and blood clottage. It’s not easy to put the time into a slot that fits, rounded at the edges and sharp in the teeth. It’s like Tuesday, just a little before or past the middle like a rope being pulled taut from both sides and never quite settling over the mark. Kaveh is unsettled. Kaveh feels like a Tuesday right now.

There are two types of compasses—the first being the stereotypical one that people tend to think of when they are reminded of the tools, the kind that point north and guide you home, endless and endless and endless. The second is the one that Kaveh is more familiar with, for drawing circles.

Arcs, if we’re being specific. There aren’t many places for circles in Kaveh’s line of work, but there are plenty of spaces for arcs, scattered across his blueprints and drawn out in sketches. He’s used to leaving things open, unfinished, instead of following through the circle, completing the orbit.

Some things are destined to come full circle. After all, it’s not as if Kaveh can stop interplanetary motion, celestial orbit, nor has he ever thought that he wanted to. He’s been beating the same horse dead for years, following Al-Haitham that entire time, circling the drain that is his body and mind. He always thought that if he were the compass, then Al-Haitham was the needlepoint, and he’d walk in circles for him for the rest of their life. Which doesn’t exactly factor out to Kaveh breaking up with Al-Haitham, except for the fact that it is Tuesday and it is Kaveh who has left Al-Haitham; it is Kaveh who has broken that circle.

One—

Kaveh likes circles, but only sometimes. He’s very particular about his circles. Al-Haitham is one of them.

Al-Haitham became one of Kaveh’s important things when they’d first met in their college library, arguing about something or the other. The stock market, or the actual correct amount of minutes in which you should boil an egg so that the yolk splits perfectly over a microwaved cup of instant ramen, or maybe even circles. That’s not what matters. What matters is that within that first day of meeting Al-Haitham, Kaveh feels something click into place, something that hadn’t existed before. Like tipping over into train tracks, but instead of meeting his untimely death and grisly end he’s set on route, a circular sort of path.

Two—

Kaveh is not accustomed to leaving things incomplete. He likes following through with plans and making good on his promises and making sure that forever means forever. He thought that Al-Haitham was forever. He still thinks that, actually. So it doesn’t make much sense to him that he’s here, freshly broken up with (or more accurately, breaker upper). As if they were a Jenga tower, tall and looming, and Kaveh had gone ahead and pulled a block from the bottom, the base, and pretended to be surprised when it all came toppling down.

Three—

Kaveh is afraid. And he thinks that sometimes fear is on par with a 7.9 magnitude earthquake.

Four—

Kaveh is in love with Al-Haitham. He’s pretty sure that’s a forever thing.

There are Christmas lights on the walls. It is July. Al-Haitham and Kaveh don’t celebrate Christmas.

“So,” Kaveh says, staring up at the ceiling where the plastic baubles hang, “were you in a festive mood or did you do that thing again where you skim through garage sales and felt obligated to buy something?”

“I never feel obligated,” Al-Haitham retorts, arms crossed, because of course he doesn’t. He’s Al-Haitham, and he declines to round up seventeen cents on his Panda Express order and donating it to children’s cancer research.

“Well,” Kaveh says, and leaves it at that. “It’s July.”

“Congratulations on being able to read the calendar,” Al-Haitham says because he is Al-Haitham and he’s put up Christmas lights indoors for no apparent reason. “I figured that out a while ago. Like twenty years ago.”

“I don’t celebrate Christmas. You don’t celebrate Christmas. The other day, you asked me if Jesus Christ and God were actually the same person or if people were lying to you.”

“They were cheaper than nightlights,” Al-Haitham says as if that makes any sense, as if Kaveh has the cognitive ability to peer into his mind and figure out what thread of thought that Al-Haitham was following to make him say something like that. “Besides, we don’t have enough outlets in the hallway for that.”

“Nightlights.”

“Because you get up in the middle of the night every night to get a glass of water from the kitchen at three a.m.” Al-Haitham has moved on. He is now going through their shared mail stacked on the kitchen table. It is so domestic it makes Kaveh ache; the stupid fucking Christmas lights are making him have a crisis. “I assume you don’t turn on the lights to avoid waking me up, but last night you stubbed your toe you swore so loud the neighbors two doors down heard.”

“It hurt!” Kaveh says indignantly. Then, “Wait, did they tell you that?”

“These work instead.” Al-Haitham glances up at the Christmas lights. “And they’re cheaper than nightlights. Ergo, Christmas in July.”

Kaveh blinks and swallows around something appearing suddenly in his throat. There’s a fire burning so intensely in the pit of his stomach that it threatens to swallow everything, flames welling up his throat. Christmas in July. Strings of lights in the hallway so that Kaveh will never have to stub his toe at unhinged times in the morning again.

“I hate you,” Kaveh says, padding over to Al-Haitham and wrapping his arms around him from the back, settling his chin over his shoulder so he can look at the mail on the table. Their names are all jumbled up together, Kaveh’s and Al-Haitham’s mixed up so that they almost blend together. It’s only mail, but suddenly Kaveh wants to cry. They share an address.

“I hate you too,” Al-Haitham says with the same tinge of affection in his voice as if he had told Kaveh I love you too, and Kaveh hates him hates him loves him.

Kaveh stands in the alcohol section of the grocery store and considers buying a bottle of cheap wine to get drunk, but that’s too stereotypically melancholic for him. And getting wasted is a Friday thing, not a Tuesday thing.

Buying an entire frozen macaroni and cheese and eating it by himself would probably have the same effect with the added bonus of redirecting the damage from his liver to his arteries. Kaveh really, seriously contemplates it for a little bit before he realizes that he doesn’t have an oven to heat it up in. That oven is Al-Haitham’s, in an apartment that has both of their names written on the lease, but since Kaveh was the one to leave first, he conceded rights to the apartment. At least, that’s how it works in his head.

Kaveh gives up and exits the grocery store.

Outside, a smaller amount of time has passed than he thought. It’s less so afternoon than it is evening now, though it’s still an indecisive sort of mix. His phone tells him that exactly fourteen minutes have passed since he first left the apartment. Seven minutes to walk over, seven minutes to stand pensively in the alcohol aisle of the grocery store like a relapsing alcoholic about to make a terrible decision.

The sun is starting to make up its mind. It slips slowly down past the line of trees and the buildings in the distance, golden yellow egg yolk peeking through the cracks of industrial buildings and offices and apartment complexes and the cracked brick edge of the grocery store.

Kaveh looks at his phone again. One minute has passed. There is one message from Al-Haitham, and not for the first time, Kaveh thanks the update that doesn’t let him see the contents of the text without him first unlocking his phone. He turns it off. The screen goes black, and on it, there is the face of a man who has spent quite a good number of years walking clockwise circles who now does not know how to walk counterclockwise. If he walks backward, maybe he’ll trip on something. Stub his toe without Al-Haitham’s Christmas lights.

It does not occur to him to turn around.

He can’t go home and get his cashmere coat, and he can’t eat an entire macaroni and cheese in one sitting without an oven.

He ends up at this shitty little hole in the wall that serves Thai food and a mean mango sticky rice during the summer. The restaurant is one that he and Al-Haitham like to frequent for takeout, not dine-in, so they can enjoy each other’s company in the privacy of their own apartment. It’s a shame, really, that every little part of this city has been stained so irrevocably by Al-Haitham. Sumeru City is sprawling, endless, but still, Kaveh feels boxed in, four walls, the smell of Al-Haitham’s basic no-fuss shampoo drifting in the air.

It’s not the same; none of the staff recognize Kaveh, and neither does Kaveh recognize them. It was always Al-Haitham who would go pick up the food—he says that Kaveh gets too distracted talking to people and then by the time he makes his way back to the apartment, everything has already gone cold, but Kaveh knows it’s because he would rather stay home and Al-Haitham is willing to go out when he doesn’t want to.

Kaveh orders… something off of the menu. He would get mango sticky rice, except it’s not summer and he’s not with Al-Haitham and he’s grown too accustomed to sharing that an entire dish would probably be too much for him, anyway. Sickly sweet.

That’s the ugly thing about falling in love—you share so much of yourself; your mornings, your nights, your three am epiphanies and secret chocolate chip cookie recipes and space in your camera roll that by the time you have to pull back, you can’t separate from what is yours and what is theirs. What is Kaveh’s and what is Al-Haitham’s. Or you don’t know how to go about making the cut, jagged at the edges even with a steak knife. Either way, you’re stuck with the other still, even if you don’t want it, even if you do. Pieces of Al-Haitham in Kaveh’s digestive tract and stuck between his teeth.

It’s only mango sticky rice, Kaveh tells himself. It’s only rice. It only means so much because you put so much damn meaning into it.

(It’s difficult because Al-Haitham means so much—)

Kaveh doesn’t really eat much, but he pays for it anyway and doesn’t bother taking the leftovers to go because he doesn’t know where to go, for some of the same reasons that he couldn’t buy an entire frozen macaroni and cheese from the grocery store earlier and reheat it all for himself.

Things That Kaveh Must Learn To Distinguish From Al-Haitham: A Cumulative List

• mornings
• nights
• sunsets on the top of their apartment roof
• the pot of basil on the balcony
• dappled sunlight through their blinds
• the pretentious coffee machine Al-Haitham bought that one time he was on an espresso kick
• mango sticky rice
• the oversized Kshahrewar sweater that Al-Haitham likes to wear sometimes
• any grocery list that includes dark brown sugar for undisclosed reasons
• circles
• weighted blankets
• magnet poetry
• matching coffee mugs
• Kaveh’s book on ancient Sumerian lore that Al-Haitham appropriated onto his side of the nightstand
• the entire fucking city
• Gojo Satoru body pillows
• Christmas lights
• July
• August
• September—

I’m really good at hide and seek, Kaveh had said earlier, a little too confidently. And. Well. Maybe he is a little bit good at it because they still haven’t been found but he can hear shrieking going on downstairs, so he assumes they’re safe for a little bit.

It’s only bad because he’s so close to Al-Haitham like this. They’re stuffed in a closet, which Kaveh recognizes is more than a little ironic, but that’s not the main issue. The real issue is that he’s stuck skin-to-skin with Al-Haitham, and it’s making him itchy, sort of. Not in the head lice way but in the I am pressed up against the love of my life in my best friend’s closet and if his hand moves the slightest bit up then I will be decidedly abnormal about the fact that his hand is on my thigh.

There are things you’re not supposed to say to the person you’ve only been dating for a few months, even if you have been friends/rivals/homoerotic adversaries for years. This is one of the circles that Kaveh doesn’t dare to break from. Kaveh thinks that if Al-Haitham tells him he wants to go back to being homoerotic adversaries instead of homoerotic adversaries who cuddle at night he’ll die, but also this is his fault for putting them in this situation.

Al-Haitham hasn’t said anything for a while. Neither has Kaveh. He can feel Al-Haitham’s breath against his ear, but thankfully that’s the only thing that moves in this godforsaken closet; the gentle brush of his hair instead of Al-Haitham’s too-warm hands.

“Is that a… body pillow?” Al-Haitham says eventually, looking somewhere to Kaveh’s right. Kaveh struggles to turn his head against the wall and pushes away the coats in his line of vision to squint in the corner.

“Oh,” Kaveh says because there really isn’t anything else he could say to finding out that his close friend Tighnari keeps a life-size body pillow of Gojo Satoru in his closet while guests are over. One, it’s a little stereotypical, that go-to anime guy, and two, he has that creepy blue-eye stare.

“Do you think they’ve forgotten about us,” Kaveh says over the sound of Dehya roaring somewhere downstairs, presumably having just been found. “Surely they can’t all be screaming that loud. Won’t they get complaints?”

“I wonder how Cyno feels about that,” Al-Haitham says, still on the body pillow. “Maybe they share him. They both have white hair. Maybe it’s a selfcest thing.”

Kaveh says, “I don’t want to think about the body pillow,” but now he can’t stop thinking about it. If it had eyes, it would be trained on him. “Can we get out of the closet yet?”

“I thought you already told our friends about us, Kaveh.”

“Christ.”

Kaveh does a little bit of maneuvering and squirming, but he doesn’t really want to leave. That’s the terrible thing about Al-Haitham. Kaveh never wants to separate from him, which isn’t really the best thing. It’s not healthy, probably. But maybe it’s that honeymoon phase. He’s sort of stuck between not wanting to ever take his eyes off of Al-Haitham’s stupid face and wanting to punch Al-Haitham right in his aforementioned stupid face.

Before he can make a decision, the door is wrenched right open and they’re met with Tighnari’s triumphant face.

“Hello, beautiful,” Kaveh says. “You come here often?”

“In front of the body pillow?” Al-Haitham says accusingly.

Tighnari blinks. “He’s shy. Don’t talk about him in front of him.”

“Did we win,” Kaveh says, clambering out of the closet and wiping out nonexistent wrinkles on his clothing to have something to do. A tiny, little, embarrassing part of him wants to be back in that cramped space alone with Al-Haitham and Tighnari’s clothes and Tighnari’s Gojo Satoru body pillow.

“There’s Cyno,” Tighnari says, and then he frowns. “Well. We found him, but he’s kind of stuck in the bottom of one of our kitchen cabinets. We’re trying olive oil to squeeze him out.”

“Ah,” Kaveh says knowingly, nodding. “All lubed up. I’m sure that’s not an unfamiliar sight for you.”

“I almost want to tell you to go back in the closet.”

“You should attend to your boyfriend, maybe,” Kaveh suggests. “Al-Haitham and I will… hm. Just go.”

“Right,” says Tighnari, and then he’s gone.

“Whose idea was it to play hide and seek again,” Al-Haitham says.

“If you got a body pillow, who would it be?” asks Kaveh, intent. “Because it would be really funny if it was someone like Hatsune Miku, but it’s probably someone really boring.”

“You,” Al-Haitham says, studying his fingernails. Maybe he realizes that if he were to say literally anyone else, Kaveh would lock himself into Tighnari’s bathroom and have a breakdown in the tub. Maybe he’s one hundred percent serious about it and would get one of those customized pillowcases at Kaveh’s request. Either way, Kaveh finds himself a little touched.

“Wow,” he says. “That’s kind of romantic.”

“You have terrible standards,” Al-Haitham says bluntly.

Kaveh shrugs, but Al-Haitham just gets him, you know? It’s kind of a lot. He loves him in all of his Kaveh body pillow-obsessive ways. Is he ever going to find someone as weird as Al-Haitham again? Maybe he’s worth holding on to, at least for a little while. “For what it’s worth, I would get one of you, too.”

“While I am greatly enjoying this conversation,” Al-Haitham says, “I want a picture of Cyno smothered in olive oil and stuck in a cabinet.”

See? Al-Haitham just gets Kaveh.

Destiny is fucking stupid, Kaveh decides, kicking rocks on the sidewalk. And fate. Because at some point in his life, Kaveh thought that he was destined to live the rest of his life with Al-Haitham. (Some point of his life being: this morning, every second since he has admitted his own feelings for Al-Haitham, last Saturday when he opened a custom website for body pillows in early preparations for Al-Haitham’s birthday and closed the tab out of shame.)

But it’s stupid because clearly, things didn’t work out the way Kaveh predicted. Fuck that, too, fate and fortune cookies and prophecy. None of the cookies he cracked open in their Chinese takeout ever told him this. Who knew that one morning he would wake up with a fear crawling in his throat so devastating that he would take the most precious thing in his life and break it apart with his own hands?

He stares at the sun, this golden, roiling circle of fire, and he thinks that people take the fact that it rises and sets every day for granted. He sure had. He’d watched the sun rise and set an inordinate amount of times with Al-Haitham and assumed that every sunset and sunrise from then on would be with him.

Which only goes to show that not all scientific experiments prove true because what if you go 2647 days watching the sunrise, and you assume that the next day it will so there’s no need to wake up before it tips over the horizon to make sure it does, but that 2648th day, the one day you sleep in, it doesn’t ascend over the sky? What then? What if you stay up all night for the next five days, waiting and waiting and waiting, and on that sixth day when you assume it’s safe, it doesn’t rise again?

Then that’s probably just fate fucking with you. And it’s not as if Kaveh has been tracking the number of sunrises he’s spent with Al-Haitham—believe it or not, he’s not that obsessive. It’s only an approximation. It sounds about right or something. Because even if it was impossible, Kaveh had imagined every sunrise with Al-Haitham, so there was no point wasting precious brain capacity in counting an uncountable number when he could be cataloging the feather of every single eyelash on Al-Haitham’s face. His eyelashes are so unfairly long.

And if Kaveh cannot even trust this truth, this assumption that he had taken for scientific law, that he and Al-Haitham would be in love forever and ever and ever, then can he even believe in gravitational orbit? Circles are meant to spin, like wheels, like train tracks, but now Kaveh is listless, broken away from his tether, and he does not know where to go.

The sun will set soon, but it still won’t be too late for Kaveh to be out on the streets because it’s still that undefined time between summer and autumn. If he stays out here, against this city bench facing the park, maybe he can watch the sun make its travels to have peace that he can, too, move on.

“You’re so fucking melodramatic,” Dehya says, tossing down her cards with a huff. “It’s not like you’re going to die. I found these wedged between the mattress and the wall at the last hotel I stayed at and snatched them because they’re pretty.”

“Ew,” Kaveh says, withdrawing his fingers from the tarot cards as if that could reverse the damage. “You don’t know what the previous owners did with them. Or where they put their hands.”

Dehya shrugs. “They were free. They were probably doing divinations and realized that it’s utter bullshit, so they shoved it somewhere and forgot about it. Which you should do.”

“A lot of people put stock into them, so clearly there must be some scrap of truth to it.”

“And a lot of people believe that Teyvat is flat, Kaveh,” Dehya says drily, “so I’d say that your logic is about on par with a conspiracy theorist.”

“Look at it!” Kaveh says indignantly, gesturing down at his cards. He’d pulled three random ones from the pile—none of them are particularly experienced with tarot cards or divinations, but Kaveh figured he would do it for the fun of it, not expecting to be met with dread sinking to the pit of his stomach.

“Oh boy,” Dehya says skeptically. “The lovers. Doesn’t that bode well for you and Al-Haitham? Unless you’re scared of the stability of your union.”

That does make something inside of Kaveh twinge a little, but he doesn’t mention it. “It’s reversed,” he says pointedly. “Even I know that’s not a good thing. Look, I just did a search on my phone and it says we’re doomed.” He shoves his phone into Dehya’s face.

Dehya blinks and pushes his hand away, the look on her face the usual kind she puts on when she thinks Kaveh is being particularly stupid. “Kaveh, you’re an idiot,” she says kindly. “How many years has it been since you two have met? Are you going to let some glorified slips of paper cause uncertainty in your relationship? Besides, the other two cards are perfectly fine. Not upside down or whatever.”

“Reversed, you mean,” Kaveh grumbles. He knows Dehya is right, but it’s just—he already deals with enough self-doubt as it is, and pulling this card out of the many others only further pushed the point. He scrutinizes the remaining two, one of a man dangling from one leg by a cross and the other of some circle of sorts.

“My phone is telling me that this one represents sacrifice,” Kaveh reads off his phone, finger pointed to the first card. “Sacrifice…” Dehya isn’t paying attention, scrolling through some online store on her phone. From Kaveh’s view, he can see her paused between two different shades of blush.

“Wheel of Fortune.” Kaveh eyes the remaining card, now with distaste. He can recognize the circle now as a wheel, each of the four corners of the card accompanied by its own symbols. “Have I ever told you how much I hate the word fate?”

“No, but I can imagine.” Dehya turns her phone off and lets the screen go black, turning back to Kaveh puzzling over the cards with a sigh. “It’s impressive the lengths you go to in order to turn every stroke of luck into a misfortune. Have you ever heard of catastrophizing? Or self-sabotage?”

Kaveh would protest that he’s not here to be psychoanalyzed, but he’s the one with divination cards spread out in front of him, so he keeps his mouth shut. Part of the reason why the concept of fate irked Kaveh so much was because of the implication that nothing Kaveh had was truly his; that everything had been put in front of him on purpose. Like the apartment leased under two names with the window facing the horizon, and his degree in architecture, and Al-Haitham. Everything Kaveh has, he owes to himself, not to luck.

“I’m not catastrophizing,” Kaveh mutters. “I’m exploring all of the possibilities.”

“That’s what an overthinker would say,” Dehya says knowingly. She reaches out and stacks the cards back up, the lovers and the sacrifice and the wheel of fortune getting lost in the deck once again. “Stop looking at these and tell me what would best match my skin tone.”

Kaveh tears his eyes away from the deck and goes back to Dehya, where she’s holding her phone up by her face. “The second one,” he says, but he’s not really thinking about it, his mind spinning away to tarot cards and divinations and the heavy weight of a rope around his ankle, tugging him down.

One of Al-Haitham’s coworkers gave him a set of magnetic poetry for his birthday, the kind that’s meant to be put up against a fridge and forgotten about. It’s funny because from what Kaveh hears from Al-Haitham, none of his coworkers really get him—nobody does, really, not unless they’re Kaveh—but they’d tried anyway, giving him a miscellaneous collection of gift cards to Starbucks, which he’d never use because Al-Haitham is the type to be really pretentious about his coffee, one of those really cheap handheld vacuums as if Kaveh isn’t the one to do all the cleaning in their apartment, and a set of magnetic poetry.

Everything else gets shoved in the back of a closet or tucked into a kitchen drawer, but the magnets stay. It’s full of words like fever and eternity and poison. There are no curse words, which Al-Haitham laments. He says that language is always changing, and the modern vernacular is important, and since the average adult swears more in a day than they’re more likely to say ferocious, it’s a shame that the set excludes it.

It’s a good thing, then, that the set also comes with various present participles and ending letters and also individual copies of the entire alphabet, so Al-Haitham can spell out fuck and goddamn and Kaveh in aching, misshapen lines.

At first, Kaveh doesn’t think Al-Haitham to be the type to take to it, but now he likes to spend his mornings watching Al-Haitham’s back as he pauses by the fridge, one hand holding a coffee mug, the other rearranging words. None of his lines are particularly romantic—it’s not like Al-Haitham to be sentimental, but they are charged with a certain tension that Kaveh has a difficult time identifying. Kaveh’s discipline has more to do with math than it does language, but he can sense the layers to Al-Haitham’s words, all the things that he wouldn’t say out loud but might write into the subtext of bright white magnets.

Sometimes he will leave Kaveh notes on the fridge, things like coffee later or wait for me. On Kaveh’s birthday, the expanse of the canvas is cleared except for the words celebrating you, and Al-Haitham bakes him a funny little crooked cake with a single candle stuck through the middle. That day, Kaveh wonders for how many more years Al-Haitham will celebrate him.

There’s this one time that Al-Haitham stands at the fridge for a while, scrutinizing the words. Off to the corner, there is a small line, only a few words, which is odd, since Al-Haitham usually puts most of the things he writes in the middle of the fridge because he knows Kaveh likes to go and read it once he’s finished.

Al-Haitham leaves for a second—off to get his reading glasses or something—and Kaveh stands from their dining table to go look at what he’s written, quickly before the other could come back.

You make me wild, it reads.

Kaveh takes a breath and has to heavily sit back down, the wind knocked out of his lungs. Al-Haitham doesn’t say things like that, really, just as a general rule. They’re not—like that. He hardly even usually addresses Kaveh in his magnet poetry, so it feels raw, in a sense, stripped bare to the empty bones of devotion. As if he wasn’t supposed to see it, obscene in its sincerity. Al-Haitham comes back, glasses now perched on his nose, and methodically takes apart the line in the corner, unaware that Kaveh had read it before its destruction.

Kaveh thinks that he and Al-Haitham are like magnets, like poetry. They could separate from each other if they want to, but they prefer to stay within sticking distance, not glued, but firmly attached.

Tighnari likes to say that Kaveh is emotionally repressed, which isn’t fair because Kaveh certainly feels a wide range of emotions all of the time. Is it emotional repression to cry into a glass of wine over the scorned bride’s best friend in that one Jollibee wedding commercial, Tighnari? Maybe Kaveh just really likes fried chicken.

Tighnari says yes, yes it is emotional repression because clearly there’s something deeper going on here than chicken of all things that Kaveh is resonating with, like the idea of being unable to let go of someone to such an extent that you will watch them seek happiness with someone else entirely, but if Kaveh wanted to be psychoanalyzed then he would just go to Dehya and her tarot cards.

Tighnari is also very confused as to why Kaveh is on his doorstep, asking if he has granulated sugar.

“Zucchinis,” Kaveh says in explanation, holding up his limp grocery store plastic bag of two whole zucchinis as an offering. “Sugar?”

Tighnari makes way for Kaveh to kick off his shoes and walk in, so he does, grateful to escape the bleeding canvas of the sky, the first sunset in a long while that he has seen without Al-Haitham. He walks through the hallway to the kitchen in a house that is so obviously throbbing with Cyno’s presence; the pictures on the walls, Tighnari’s tote bag on one stair banister and Cyno’s work bag hanging over the other, a book on simple jokes to please sitting on the shelf. It makes him wonder how his apartment looks from the unfamiliar eye. If it is as easy to see all the ways their lives intertwine just from how they live as it is here.

“So.” Tighnari watches Kaveh figure his way out through his kitchen, pulling out bowls and spoons and a whisk. “Are you okay, Kaveh? Are you having another episode?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kaveh says, grating zucchini. “The way you’re phrasing that is very rude.”

“Alright,” Tighnari says over the loud noise of vegetables being shredded. “Do I need to break out a bottle of wine?”

“No, because I’m fine,” Kaveh says determinedly. As if saying it enough times will make it true, as if it’ll undo the words he said to Al-Haitham a few hours before and left broken on the floor between them.

Tighnari watches him silently from then on, mixing together flour and cocoa powder and shredded zucchini. They’re motions that Kaveh is used to. Scooping and measuring and folding; half a small bag of chocolate chips plus a little more; double the amount of vanilla extract that the recipe calls for. A pinch of salt.

“Christ,” Tighnari says, jumping up from his silent position by the sink. “Don’t cry into the batter.”

Things That Were Not On Today’s Bingo Card: A Numbered List

1. Getting over his fear of public service workers
2. Anything, really. What even happens on Tuesdays?
3. Breaking up with Al-Haitham on a fuckass Tuesday
4. Ordering his own $500 espresso machine because now that Kaveh has broken up with Al-Haitham he will need his own
5. Crying into chocolate zucchini bread batter in Tighnari’s house over the fact that he has broken up with Al-Haitham

Bingo.

“Oh my god,” Kaveh says mournfully, staring into the bowl. “I ruin everything, all by myself.”

“Okay,” Tighnari says. “Okay.” He takes Kaveh by the wrists and brings him to the sink to wash his hands, and then he jumps up to put the kettle on the stove for tea. “Let’s talk about this.”

He forces Kaveh to sit down in one of the kitchen table chairs and sits opposite of him, still holding him by the wrists. His touch is comforting, warm. Steady against Kaveh’s pulse points.

Tighnari glances at a clock on the wall. “It’s nine pm on a Tuesday, and you showed up to bake in my kitchen instead of your own. Normally this would not be an issue, but we are both gainfully employed, and my bedtime is in an hour. Where’s Al-Haitham?”

“It doesn’t feel like a Tuesday,” Kaveh says, dropping his face against his arm. “Things don’t happen on Tuesdays.” He keeps saying that. “And Al-Haitham is—”

Embarrassingly enough, just saying his name is enough to make him choke up a little again, and he squeezes his eyes tight so that he doesn’t have to look up and see Tighnari through blurred vision.

“So this is about him,” Tighnari says slowly. “I see.”

Kaveh drags his head back up and stares at the half-mixed bowl of batter on the counter. His fingernails are digging into his palms enough to leave little half-moon indents, and under his thumb, the skin is breaking. “Al-Haitham fundamentally disagrees with zucchini bread. Especially the chocolate kind. He says that it’s misleading, and it doesn’t even have that much zucchini in it, and it makes it worse because it has as much chocolate in it as it does vegetables which makes it categorically wrong. And that bread isn’t the right term for it, since it’s more like a cake. So he thinks it should be called zucchini cake.”

Tighnari is staring at Kaveh. “And—”

“But you can’t!” Kaveh says, a little hysterically and probably a little too loud. “You can’t just call it one thing because you think it should fit under one stringent definition when really there’s multiple definitions that it falls under. That’s not how it works, not when the rest of the world agrees on one thing. So it’s zucchini bread. Zucchini cake sounds stupid. Is he incapable of appreciating aesthetics?”

“I’m concerned,” Tighnari says. He does look concerned.

“You should be,” Kaveh says, self-righteous. “Zucchini cake is ridiculous.”

“I meant I was concerned for you, not the state of baked goods.”

“Oh.” Kaveh deflates a little. Then he sits up again. “But you agree that it’s wrong, right? Al-Haitham never did. He’s so stubborn.” Kaveh bites his lip. “But he eats it every time I make it, even though he disagrees with it as a concept.”

His voice breaks halfway through the last sentence, so he stares up at Tighnari’s ceiling in the faint hope that it’ll suck the tears back into his eyes. He’s crying over chocolate zucchini bread when he should be back with Al-Haitham in his apartment getting ready for bed, even though he’ll end up awake at three a.m. wandering down the hallway to get a glass of water.

Tighnari puts a hand on Kaveh’s shoulder. “Kaveh—”

The kettle goes off, high and whistling, so Tighnari hustles to take it off the stove. He comes back with a teapot. “Did he do something?” Tighnari says when he’s sat back down. “Say something?”

“Well.” Kaveh makes a face. “No. Kind of. Not really. Not in the way you think. Nothing bad.”

“Then…” Tighnari says, trailing off. He makes a sort of gesture with his hands to encourage Kaveh to keep talking, so he does.

“He’s just so… good,” Kaveh says honestly, quietly. He stares at the pattern of the tablecloth instead of looking up at Al-Haitham. “In all of the ways you wouldn’t expect. Like the way he got blinds for the bedroom because he knows I like to sleep in on the weekends even though he prefers waking up with the sun. And the time he spent three weeks trying to learn latte art for me so we could stop throwing away money at the nearest coffee shop. And the Christmas lights. Chocolate zucchini bread. He hates banana bread, too, for the same reasons as zucchini bread, but we keep letting our bananas get really brown so we always end up making some, and he’ll eat it.”

These aren’t bad things, and Kaveh knows it. They’re just overwhelming things, in really quiet ways, in the kind of ways that Kaveh knows Tighnari wouldn’t understand because he’s never had to stay in the cramped space that is Kaveh’s mind. He just wonders when Al-Haitham is going to get enough of it, is all. When he’ll get tired of eating banana bread every other week.

“I think you need to talk to Al-Haitham about this,” Tighnari says eventually as if he can see the gears spinning in circles and circles in Kaveh’s mind. While he might not understand all of the lengths he goes to, he’s always been an empathetic friend. “How long does it take for the bread to bake?”

“Um,” Kaveh says, shaken out of his thoughts. “An hour.”

“Why don’t we bake it, and when it’s done, you go home to him and fix it before it’s already broken?”

“Okay,” Kaveh says, slumping back into his seat and letting Tighnari take care of lining a bread tin with parchment paper. “I broke up with him, though.”

That makes Tighnari freeze, and all Kaveh can think is that he’s lucky that he said that before Tighnari opened the oven or else he would have given himself a third-degree burn. “You what,” Tighnari says.

“I broke up with him,” Kaveh says, quieter. “That’s, like, a Friday thing, not a Tuesday event. It’s been years. Al-Haitham didn’t even protest when I said it, he just had this look on his face.”

“Because it’s Al-Haitham.” Tighnari shuts the oven door. “He would go along with anything if he thought it’s what is best for you or if you asked for it. You know this.”

“But this isn’t anything,” Kaveh protests. “This is everything.”

“It’s Al-Haitham,” Tighnari says again. He fixes Kaveh with a look. “You don’t really think that you’re not everything to him too, right? I know you don’t. If he thought that you wanted it, then he would accept it, even if it made him unhappy.”

This isn’t making Kaveh feel any better; it’s making it worse, actually. He knows Tighnari is right. He knows he was wrong, and that neither he nor Al-Haitham are better off for it. He knows he should go home as soon as he can, even though his eyes are red from crying, and he should take it back before his words have been out there for too long, before it’s too late to retract his statement.

And all of sudden Kaveh doesn’t want to be here anymore, he wants to be back walking the street to their apartment, the one lit by the lowly buzzing street lights at night, with the sidewalk that’s just cracked enough for you to have to watch every tenth step, and he wants to fumble for his keys outside the doorstep for long enough that Al-Haitham will take pity on him and open the door himself so that the first thing Kaveh sees that he associates most directly with home is his face. And he wants to throw himself into Al-Haitham’s arms and tell him that he’s sorry, that he didn’t mean it, that he probably won’t ever mean it, as terrifying and final as it seems, and that for as long as Al-Haitham wants Kaveh, he will have him. He wants it so badly his teeth ache with it, and the tea isn’t enough to drown it out, even though Tighnari had steeped it very nicely.

The chocolate zucchini bread can’t be baked fast enough.

By the time Kaveh is half-walking, half-jogging down the street back to Al-Haitham, it’s already a little past eleven. The sun has set now, finally content, and the night blankets the sky with twinkling stars as if someone had taken a paintbrush and flicked it back with their thumb all above them. The bread is still warm in his hands, almost overly so; he’d almost forgotten it in his haste before Tighnari pushed it into his arms with a smile and a bid of good luck.

And now he’s a little scared. Even though an hour ago he’d been anxious to be in this very spot right now. 

Kaveh rifles through his pockets with one hand, searching for his key, but the first thing to come up is his phone. When it blinks on, there’s still that singular unread text from Al-Haitham, as well as a couple of emails and missed scam calls. He puts it away and finally, finally pulls out his keys, fitting them into the slot with barely noticeably shaking hands.

The door swings open, and five seconds later, there is Al-Haitham.

There is a compass inside of Kaveh—the mathematical kind—and it pins him down by the chest and makes sure that he doesn’t wander very far from the center of his circle, from home. And he hadn’t recognized it before, but now that he’s seen Al-Haitham again, part of Kaveh relaxes at the sight, the rope pulling back a little.

The compass runs in circles, tracing the same, sure path countless times. Kaveh can’t imagine ever thinking that he should have broken course, now.

“Al-Haitham,” he says, breathless.

“Kaveh,” Al-Haitham says back, a little delayed. He looks as if he hadn’t been expecting Kaveh back. As if he didn’t believe that the compass in Kaveh’s chest would have brought him back here time and time again, without fail.

Kaveh kicks off his shoes as fast as he can, placing the bread on the nearest surface as he brushes by, and then shuts the door before stopping a few steps away from Al-Haitham. He doesn’t know how to proceed. There’s never been this palpable kind of silence between them before, and Kaveh needn’t forget that he was the one who put it there.

Al-Haitham’s gaze flicks from Kaveh to the bread behind him for a moment, and Kaveh latches onto that to start the conversation.

“I made. Um. Chocolate zucchini bread,” Kaveh says. Whatever Al-Haitham had been thinking he would say, it clearly wasn’t that because his forehead creases a little in the way it does when someone says something out of line with his expectations or when Kaveh kisses him just beneath his jawline.

“At Tighnari’s,” Kaveh continues lamely. “Because after I—you know, said the thing, I didn’t really know what to do. So I returned to what I’m used to, which happens to be chocolate zucchini bread. Because I’ll never get sick of it, no matter how many times I make it. Things like that are important, you know? Like… bread. Or that one really old Asian lady at the hairdressers that you like to cut your hair. And that one book on Old Romantic language that you like.”

Al-Haitham is staring at him with this indescribable sort of look on his face. Kaveh doesn’t know where he’s going with this.

“I went to that Thai place.” Kaveh fidgets with his fingers, his gaze drifting off to the side. “The one we always get takeout from. Habit, I guess, even though we both know I don’t like going there myself. I don’t know why I expected that anything would change even if the world had tilted on its axis, the way it did. Or like the zucchinis! I didn’t know what I was doing, and I barely remember actually going to the store again, but I came out with vegetables so I just went to Tighnari’s.”

“Kaveh,” Al-Haitham interrupts. “Is your zucchini… thing… a metaphor?”

“Yes!” Kaveh says, lifting up a little. Leave it to Al-Haitham to understand what he was trying to say when he didn’t even understand it himself. “It is! Because when I’m lost or afraid or anxious or whatever, I return back to… you, is what I’m trying to say. I guess. And I had to have been really, really stupid to ever think that I could go without you.”

Al-Haitham just stares at him again, not saying anything, but there’s this faint downturn at the corner of his lips that Kaveh realizes means that he doesn’t know how to proceed either. That both of them are in uncharted territory, working off a key and a measurement system that neither of them is fluent in. “But why?” he says, and it’s then that Kaveh realizes that Al-Haitham must have been as unsettled and scared and confused as Kaveh was for these past few hours. That he really is Kaveh’s junior, at the end of it, and he doesn’t know any more about being an adult than Kaveh does. They’re both just skating by, together.

“Oh,” Kaveh says, small again. Frail. He swallows. “It’s because everything you do terrifies me, Al-Haitham, because even if you’re not saying it, I can feel how much you love me. And it’s scary. It’s consuming. And nothing is ever endless, right? Humans have their limits. I thought that maybe… you had a—threshold, of sorts. And it scared me to think that sooner or later, you would reach it. It’s difficult being loved, Al-Haitham. Nobody talks about how terrible it is to be loved, sometimes.”

Al-Haitham blinks rapidly, one, two, three.

“And,” Kaveh continues before he can scare himself out of it, “it’s equally as daunting to be a lover because there’s this endless gap, and I don’t know how long you’ll be there to catch me. Love is so difficult. All of these years, and I haven’t yet figured out how to grapple it. I love you so much it scares me. I don’t know what to do with it.”

“Love? You think I’ve got that figured out?” Al-Haitham’s mouth is trembling. Faintly, Kaveh thinks back to mornings watching Al-Haitham by the fridge, taking apart and putting back together small declarations of love as if trying on different shoes, experimenting and experimenting and experimenting. He thinks of stringing Christmas lights in the hallways to protect Kaveh when Al-Haitham isn’t awake to do it for him. “I’m clueless, Kaveh. But I always thought that we would figure it out together.”

“Oh,” Kaveh says, and then he feels a tear drip down his face. And then another, and another, and another. Wordlessly, as if there were no question that he wouldn’t do it, Al-Haitham breaches the distance between them and gently wipes them away with his fingers. Kaveh closes his eyes, not knowing what to do with there being so much of Al-Haitham all at once. “Yes. Together. That sounds good. I think that sometimes I just feel so alone, and it’s difficult to remember that I’m not. And I won’t always be able to remember.”

“I’ll wait,” Al-Haitham says, and it’s all he says, but it suddenly makes the onslaught of tears so much worse, so much so that Kaveh cannot control it any longer, hanging his head down so Al-Haitham can’t see him anymore.

“I’m sorry,” he says, his voice terrible, around gulps of air. “I’ll never get tired of you. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—I shouldn’t have done that to you. I don’t want to break up if that wasn’t abundantly clear.”

“I know,” Al-Haitham says instead of empty, placating things like it’s fine, because it’s not fine, and they both know it. But they’ll talk about that later. They’ll work through it later. Together, since Kaveh has now been enlightened that’s an alternative to consider: that they can circle these train tracks and not be alone throughout it. “I understand.”

And, god. What more could Kaveh really ask for?

“What is this,” Al-Haitham says. The door is open. He is staring down at the doormat. Just a minute ago, someone had knocked on the door, but neither of them was expecting mail.

Kaveh joins him by his side and frowns down at it. “A package? I thought you said you didn’t order anything.”

“I didn’t,” Al-Haitham says, but he hauls it inside anyway. It’s heavy, from the sound of it. And inside is—

“Okay,” says Al-Haitham, “I don’t understand why there is a second espresso machine delivered to our door if we already own one. That is in the kitchen within my line of sight.”

“Oh.” Kaveh presses his lips together and looks to the ceiling. “I might have ordered that. A few days ago.”

“I thought you said you weren’t expecting a package.”

“I wasn’t expecting it!” Kaveh protests. “I forgot I did it. Honestly. Look, we can just return it. We probably should. It was a hefty price tag.”

Al-Haitham looks at Kaveh as if he thinks he is crazy, which is entirely unwarranted. “How do you order an espresso machine by accident? Were you drunk?”

“I was just thinking that since we were broken up I needed to make my own coffee,” Kaveh says defensively. “But obviously that’s not an issue anymore.”

“Glad to see where your priorities lie,” Al-Haitham grumbles, but there’s a little uptick to the side of his mouth, so Kaveh knows it’s all okay.

Kaveh has this theory that nothing important ever happens on Tuesdays—and he has an entire lifetime of mundane, boring Tuesdays to back this hypothesis up. There’s only one instance that edges the line on betraying this speculation; but even on that day, everything that was broken is neatly fixed before the clock strikes midnight, so clearly his conjecture still rings true.

Which is not to say that nothing happens on Tuesdays, just that it’s nothing of note. Plenty of things happen on Tuesdays—Kaveh goes by the newspaper kiosk on the corner to pick up the daily edition, he indulges in matcha instead of the usual coffee in the morning, and he loves, loves, loves Al-Haitham.