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He etches words into your bones and presses smiles to your lips and you are jealous of his gift of verse if only because you can’t express to him in any of the languages at your command just how much he means to you. You try to capture it in neatly drawn lines of pencil and ink instead, and when that fails, you turn to the words that others have written before you, but then he leaves a couplet of his own devising written on the palm of your hand and you are undone. Dry-erase roses climb the trellis of your shower’s tiles and in your spidery script you leave him reciprocation in the language of science, which is, after all, the language you really know best. He charts the heavenly bodies with equations and extrapolations and those times, you get to be the one with the words, putting your research skills to work and finding him the stories that the peoples of the Earth have given to the stars since the beginning of time. The apartment you share is less organized with him in it but infinitely more wondrous: he cultivates your walls into a secret garden of constellations and anatomy diagrams, teaches you the childish joy of brushes on walls, of glitter on fingers and acrylic-bright kisses. And there are real flowers in the windowboxes you built him for his birthday, with neatly written labels on toothpicks giving the scientific name for each blossom because you went through a botany phase and he loves the rhythm of the Latin words. You teach him Latin, sometimes, when you both have time to spare, and he responds by reading you Greek poetry. The fact that he learned Greek on his own just so he could read Sappho makes you laugh with delight.
On weekends the pair of you attend free classes at the library, on everything from art in ancient Italy to contemporary Chinese literature, because even though you’re in medical school and he’s working on a PhD, you both remain insatiable learners. Your flat has more books than space, and both of you are constantly on the run from various libraries out for your blood and a small fortune in late fees. He confesses to you once that he is still in possession of an e.e. cummings book from the library in his primary school. You laugh and kiss the guilty look from his face.
The roof of your building is easily accessible with the fire escape, and you keep him and his telescope company from late night to early morning. You don’t mean to fall asleep, but you wake with your head in his lap, dawn light on your face, and his fingers in your hair.
Finals week has a tendency to reduce him to frustrated tears. You buy him chocolates and rub his back while rambling on about the history of chocolates and the different ways they are made. He tells you in a whisper that when exams are over he wants to make homemade fudge, and you brush the tears from under his eyelashes and agree.
The fudge is fantastic, nothing ends up on fire, and you think he’s really getting the hang of this baking thing.
You’re in bed with him at night and the anatomically correct skeletal diagram painted on the far wall in glow-in-the-dark paint should be creepy, but it somehow manages to be charming to you as you kiss every inch of his body and he kisses every inch of yours. You remember how he bestows kisses so liberally among your friends, but for the longest time, withheld his kisses from you, and you didn’t understand until later that it was because kissing you meant something more than friendship to him. You didn’t realize it until Courfeyrac literally made a sign marked with both of your names and a sprig of mistletoe: he’d hung it over the door to the back room of Musichetta’s cafe, and you’d never seen Jehan go quite as red as he did then. Your heart had sunk all the way to your ankles but then his red face was pressed to yours, and you’d kissed him back so fiercely that the violets in his hair all got shaken loose, and a moment later your glasses fell with a clatter among the petals. Since then, the two of you have more than made up for lost time, but you can never get enough of him, and it makes you inexpressibly happy that he never seems to get enough of you.
You tell him you love him with Latin and French and English and diagrams of the cardiovascular system, and he tells you he loves you with Greek and sonnets and equations that are actually supernovae, and you are sure that nothing else in the world could ever be better than this.