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Lovro woke to the feeling of bleeding again.
Lovro was always bleeding.
Lovro’s pores wept secret, his tears cried treason, and confession bubbled up in his throat until he choked and allowed it to spill from the corners of his lips, pour from an agape mouth onto a floor, a bed, a person.
It was a regular occurrence, his waking in the middle of the night to grip at his throat, to make sure the gurgling subsided. In the morning his neck would be lined in irregular pinstripes where blackened nails dug too far, turning pale skin red. This particular morning was no different than the others. It was getting increasingly difficult to control it, the involuntary spasming of his chest like something was trying desperately to climb out of him, as he noticed the sun was beginning to creep in through the edges of lacy curtains and it was no longer a dead-of-the-night, whole-world’s-asleep event.
He heard the whisper first from beneath the floorboards. Then came the rustling, then the muffled giggles. They came in consecutive, chronological order each morning. With his waking earlier, he was catching new sounds – a curious hum, that was a recent development. He’d catch the act quicker and quicker. This day was the last; He had caught the beginning. The silence. That all-enveloping, apprehensive silence. It flooded his ears, making him afraid to move. He was too scared to open his mouth to yawn for fear of suffocating on the bitter quiet.
So the whisper was the start of it.
So the suction was the end of it.
Reluctantly, Lovro dragged himself out of bed on cue when he heard, ever so faintly, their lips meet and pull apart again. He dressed (he had slept bare-chested and in his underwear, the heat was unbearable) and opened the latch and lowered his head, preparing. Now he would be friendly, now he would be humorous. Now he would be Lovro.
Eva rolled over from her vulnerable position on top of Jakov with a groan. They had never gotten this far, he would have to be quicker next time. The dressing slowed him down too much. Jakov muttered a half-hearted complaint and propped himself up on his forearms, his oversized shirt very nearly slipping off his shoulder, revealing a collarbone likely more familiar to Lovro than Eva. Changing rooms, sleepovers, swimming – he could sculpt it from memory if prompted.
They braved the kitchen first, Lovro battling nausea earned from a night of drinking. The remedy for this was, of course, a terrible concoction of miscellaneous ingredients Eva swore up and down would cure his hangover. He downed it, staring at her through the corner of his eye as he felt the lumpy mixture glide down his throat. The way the corners of her eyes crinkled as she smiled in amusement at his disgust gnawed at him, generating a beating, throbbing guilt in Lovro’s core. She cooked him eggs.
Then it was the woods, then it was the lake. Day in, day out, together. They sat on the short dock listening to Jakov play guitar terribly. Lovro had taught him the previous summer to impress Sara, but had since forgotten himself. Recently, his body didn’t function how it was meant to. Watching Jakov’s fingers, he found he couldn’t mirror the movement. His fingers latched still, twitching to push but unable to pull through. He put his hands back in his lap to avoid drawing attention. The tendons in Jakov’s arm moved in harmony, his knuckles protruding then diving beneath his wrapped skin in a rhythmic synchronisation by the smooth rotation of his wrist, a tiny muscle in his forearm becoming visible only when extending his pinky to play the G chord.
Lovro’s jaw was aching. The reverberations of the lower strings of the guitar resonated in his molars, causing him to bite down on his cheek. He probably looked really fucking stupid right now.
It was a sort of homeostasis, this. An uninterrupted agreement they never had with Sara. Eva’s laugh relieved a tension held at eye level between the boys, and Lovro’s relieved the biting cold between the lovers. And the line was visible, the string between them. Lovro thought it was a golden thread spewing from each of their foreheads, just barely in sight. Lovro’s was always pulling towards, Eva’s away. Occasionally, though even thinking of the action made Lovro feel queasy, he’d consider reaching out to touch the thread, to play it like the string of a guitar or pull on it restlessly till Jakov acknowledged it.
Jakov smiled. Eva smiled. Lovro smiled.
The watercolour blue of Jakov’s eyes reflected the green of the lake which reflected the leaves of the trees which reflected the beams of the sun. It was cyclic. It was carnage.
He wouldn’t say he liked Jakov. He may have loved Jakov, but everyone loved Jakov. He had this way of making everyone feel welcome and no one feel wanted – which sounded like a negative, but it was a massively effective strategy to make girls fall hopelessly in love with him. He’d leave them satisfied, but still wanting more. It was greed, in Lovro’s eyes. An addictive kind of greed, like how some people just could not stop eating. It wasn’t the eating that was bad for them, it was the wanting more. So he wasn’t in love with Jakov, nor did he like him, but he did love him. What did that mean for them? He wasn’t sure anyone had ever really loved Jakov (remember, loved, not been in love) until he came along. That was a good cover. Jakov thought the symptoms of love were simply symptoms of Lovro.
But it was impossible to deny the love itself. It gripped him in the night, this selfish love, flashing distorted images of Jakov’s body naked and writhing, lit the amber tone of a movie you saw once and never heard of again. To anyone else, it could’ve been any man. It would’ve been easy enough to pass it off for going through a strange phase, to note the cause as internet exposure forcing queer ideas into his mind. But to Lovro, it was Jakov. It was distinctly Jakov based on the freckle above his nipple and the way the beads of water, as often appeared, rolling down the hills of his chest. Each hair trailing down his acres of abdomen to below Lovro’s line of sight was placed deliberately.
There was nothing to do but wait. He could be happy for Jakov and Eva, or he could wallow in undeserved self-pity. By the fifth day in the cabin he had accepted his new life of quiet watching. Initially, he had secretly been hoping Eva would have to leave three days in due to some emergency and leave the boys alone in the woods to their own devices for the remainder of the week. Then, in the mosquito-bitten buzzing of the dusk, he’d pull Jakov aside. From who they were hiding, he didn’t know. He’d tug softly at Jakov’s earlobe and, speaking into to the hook of his jaw, tell him, wanna know what I’m thinking? Then they’d away to bed without further instruction and fall into the rhythmic motions he denied Eva until morning came.
In the light of day, each would deny it more than the other. But Lovro wouldn’t care. Because he would’ve had him. Eva would never get a physical sensation, and his other girls would become mere tales to tell at parties, but Lovro would’ve had him at his most vulnerable with no one to tell. That was all he wanted, really. Something for himself.
Lovro’s eyes settled on Jakov’s lips, dropped open in song, and imagined how it would feel closed around his entire being.
Lovro’s eyes flickered open in faint recognition as the final notes sounded.
Lovro’s eyes fell closed.