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Naim can’t stop staring at his lips.
He knows he shouldn’t be staring, obviously, much less at his lips. But it’s as though there’s some sort of electric pull there. He does his best to ignore it, shake the feeling away with the smoke clouding his head, but it’s nearly impossible.
The shingles are still warm from the day’s sun, holding onto the heat as though it were some important memory, tucked away in a cardboard box amongst a myriad of others. Naim lay back with his hands folded beneath his head, staring up at a sky which has just begun its slow surrender to night. The blue is deepening, darkening around its edges, and the first stars are blinking awake. Ryan sits beside him, his knees drawn up to his chest, a cigarette tucked between his fingers. The ember glows each time he inhales, a small, stubborn star of its own. The smoke curls upwards in thin, unraveling ribbons, dissolving into the dusk. Naim can smell the musk of it from where he’s resting. It smells sharp and dry, utterly familiar. It smells like Ryan.
“Do you ever notice,” Naim says, his voice soft, as though the sky itself might overhear, “how it feels quieter up here?”
Ryan glances over at him, a blond curl falling in front of his eyes. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know,” Naim shrugs. “Everything’s still there. Cars, people, whatever, all that stuff, y’know. But it’s like it doesn’t reach you the same way.”
Ryan nods after a moment. “Yeah, sure. It’s like being underwater. Or something.”
“Yeah, exactly.”
There’s a pause. Ryan takes another drag before leaning over slightly, offering the cigarette. Naim nods and takes it. Their fingers brush for a moment longer than necessary. It’s just long enough for something to zap through them, electric, before either of them can hold it still, catch it in a bottle and observe it, dissect it down to its DNA.
Naim inhales and coughs, laughing under his breath. “I’m still not used to that.”
“You say that every time,” Ryan says, smiling fondly. It’s that small little smirk he does, the one that Naim just can’t seem to get out of his head every time he has a moment alone. It would be gorgeous if the implications of it, and what it did to him, weren’t utterly terrifying.
“And every time it’s true,” Naim sighs. He’s come to accept it— he’ll never be quite as well-versed in smoking cigarettes as Ryan is.
The cigarette returns to Ryan now, completing its quiet circuit. The smoke threads between them, intertwining with Ryan’s curls. The image almost knocks Naim’s breath from his lungs.
For a while, neither of them speak. That’s how these nights usually go. The roof creaks faintly as it cools, and somewhere down the street, a dog barks once, twice, three times, then seemingly gives up. The world below them goes on. But up here, it feels as though they’ve slipped out of it entirely.
It’s Ryan who breaks the silence.
“That thing at church last week,” he says, staring at the horizon instead of down at Naim. “Did it bother you?”
Naim doesn’t answer right away. He’s scared of this question. He shifts slightly, propping himself up on his elbows now. He glances up at Ryan’s profile— the sharp line of his nose, the way his blond curls fall into his eyes. There’s a tension sitting quietly in his shoulders, something that Naim thinks, belatedly, has been dormant all day.
“The pastor?” Naim says finally.
“Yeah,” is accompanied with the delicate tapping of Ryan’s fingernails on the roof.
“I mean,” Naim says slowly. “He says a lot of things. It’s kinda his job.”
That earns him a stern look. “That’s not an answer.”
“I know.”
Ryan takes another drag, deeper this time. He holds it in as though he’s trying to trap it in his lungs, and when he exhales, the smoke comes out in rings, thicker around the edges.
“He said it like it was obvious,” Ryan says. If his voice weren’t so sharp, Naim finds that he could easily tell he’s disgruntled. His brow furrows and he licks angrily around his lips. “Like it was just a fact. Like saying the sky is blue or whatever.”
Naim watches lazily as the smoke drifts away and joins the clouds. “People say a lot of things like that, Ryan.”
Ryan hesitates. His fingers tighten slightly around the cigarette.
“This felt different. It just stuck, I guess.”
Naim tilts his head, studies him for a moment. “You’ve heard that kind of thing before.”
“Yes, but—” Ryan stops himself, frustrated. “I don’t know how to explain it, really.”
“You don’t have to explain it perfectly,” Naim shrugs. His fingers are itching for the smoke, and he makes a small grabbing motion. It goes unnoticed.
Ryan lets out a short breath, somewhere between a laugh and a sigh.
“It made me feel like I’d done something wrong,” he says. It trails off at the end, as though he’s searching for something else to add. As though the answer may be just out of reach.
Naim frowns slightly. “But you haven’t.”
There’s nothing wrong with us.
“I know that,” Ryan says, defensive. He softens in a mere second. “I mean, I think I know that.”
Naim sits up fully now, turning toward him. “You haven’t.”
Ryan doesn’t look at him. “I don’t think it’s that simple.”
“Why not?” Why can’t it be?
Ryan shakes his head, trying to dislodge something.
“Because it’s not just about me,” he says. “It’s like— it’s everything. The way people look at you, the way they talk about it. Like it’s dirty. Or broken.”
Naim finds himself quiet. He watches Ryan’s hands. They move as he speaks, restless and unsure where to settle. The cigarette’s flicker lays dormant through it all.
“Do you think that?” Ryan asks suddenly. It catches Naim off guard. His mind is spiralling. He wishes that the answer was so simple.
“Do I think what?”
“That it’s wrong.”
Naim’s first instinct is to answer quickly, say no without hesitation. But there’s something in Ryan’s voice that stops him. It’s a kind of fragile tension, a thread being pulled too tight.
“I don’t know,” he says honestly.
Ryan finally looks at him then, dark eyes searching. Naim can’t tell what they’re searching for exactly, but he wonders— hopes, more like— that his gaze flickers down towards his own lips. Then the awkwardness is mutual.
“That isn’t all that reassuring,” he says.
“I know.” Naim runs a hand through his short hair. “I’ve just never really thought about it that much.”
“Wow,” Ryan sighs. “That must be nice.”
“It’s not like that,” Naim says quickly, trying as best he can to backtrack. “I mean— I just never had a reason to, I guess.”
Ryan lets out a quiet, humorles laugh. “Yeah.”
Naim reaches for the cigarette again, more for something to do rather than anything else. He takes a slow drag, trying in vain to steady himself. It’s all too apparent why he’s feeling unsteady in the first place. He thinks that if his heart were beating any faster, this entire roof would collapse.
“Why did it hit you so hard?” Naim asks after a while. “What the pastor said, I mean.”
Ryan’s jaw tightens almost imperceptibly. “It just did.”
“Hey, now. That’s not really an answer either.”
Ryan looks away, out toward the darkening sky.
“Well,” he sighs. “Maybe I’m just sensitive.”
Naim’s heart skips. He almost reaches out to put a hand on Ryan’s knee, but stops himself. “You’re not.”
“You don’t know that,” comes the reply. “You’ve been here, what, a month?”
Two and a half months. But Naim chooses to ignore that part.
“I do,” he says. “You’re a lot of things, Ryan, but you’re not that.”
Ryan huffs. “Wow, thanks.”
“You know what I mean.”
Ryan just sniffles and inhales on the cigarette. Naim watches as his chest rises and falls. A thought crosses his mind suddenly, something that’s too vulgar to ignore. It lights a spark. He wants to touch him, and the feeling is far too strong to ignore now. Naim finds that he’s practically dying to touch him, any inch of him. His fingers tingle with it, and he digs them into the dappled texture of the shingles. The cigarette has burned down to its last third now, the ember glowing brighter, the smoke drawing thinner.
Naim hesitates, swallows, then: “You got really defensive, though. When he said it.”
Ryan’s shoulders tense. “Did I?”
“Yeah. You were arguing with him after, remember?”
“He was being an asshole,” Ryan shrugs. “I guess I just had enough of it that day.”
Naim watches him carefully. Ryan reaches up, scratches at the bridge of his nose. It's a nervous tick he does.
“Maybe it was something else,” Naim says.
Ryan doesn’t respond. He’s too busy looking down at a couple riding their bikes around in circles on the street below. The girl’s hair is flying in the wind and the boy is yelling something at her, but they can't hear it from all the way up here.
“Ryan,” Naim says, a little more gently, “why did it bother you so much?”
Ryan’s silence stretches long enough that it almost becomes an answer in itself. The sky has darkened fully now, the biking couple long gone down the street. The stars are brighter and the air has cooled, but the warmth of the roof is still pressing up through their clothes. Naim swallows. His heart spins wildly in his chest and something shifts there, terrifying yet utterly inevitable. Through the closed window he can hear the movie they left playing, the soft glow from inside Ryan’s bedroom serving as some of their only light, save for the stars and flickering streetlights down below. A car honking a few roads away numbs his mind as white noise while he takes in a breath. He folds himself upwards, resting his chest on his knees. He runs his fingers along the gutters. They’re small, but they’re one of the only things protecting him from falling.
Falling.
Jumping?
In the back of his mind, some dark, decrepit, scary place, Naim doesn’t think it would be so bad. He supposes it wouldn’t be great, of course, what with eventually hitting the pavement below. But the idea of soaring through the air, the wind catching in his one–size–too–big sweater? The idea of it all just stopping? That was appealing.
But Ryan wouldn’t be there, wherever he went, so Naim shoves those thoughts down even farther. He supposes that's something protecting him from falling as well. No point in harping on it now.
“Did it bother you because you’re gay?” he asks.
Ryan doesn’t move, and for a moment, Naim wonders, petrified, if he’s gone too far, said something he can’t take back. Ryan lets out a slow breath after a while, and nods.
“Yeah,” he says, and it’s quiet, hardly anything more than a whisper, but it lands like something solid, a rock at the bottom of a lake. Or a body onto the pavement.
Naim’s heart stutters again. It’s an earthquake throughout his entire body.
“Yeah?” he echoes.
Ryan nods, but he still refuses to look at him. Naim finds that he doesn’t quite know what to say. It is, after a moment, when Ryan finally turns. There’s something in his eyes— fear, maybe. Or hope, or perhaps even both, all tangled together so tightly they’re impossible to separate.
“You aren’t going to freak out, are you?” Ryan asks.
Naim lets out a breath. He wishes it had come with smoke.
“No,” he says. “I’m not gonna freak out.”
“Okay.”
A pause, where only a cricket chirps.
“Should I?”
The answer is immediate, a sharp: “No.”
Naim juts out his bottom lip. “Okay. Then I won’t.”
He looks down at his hands and swallows a confession on his tongue. His knuckles have practically gone white, but he can’t quite pinpoint why. Perhaps he’s already dead. When his head turns, tears prickling at the ends of his eyes, he knows that he is, most likely, suffocating on the ripped–off wings of dead butterflies.
“You ever like someone?” he asks, and Ryan goes still.
“Yeah, sure,” he says.
There’s a glimmer of hope in the dead bunch of butterflies.
“Anyone I know?”
Ryan laughs softly, but there’s not even a trace of humour in it.
“Yes,” he says. “You know him pretty well.”
The air between them feels suddenly very, very thin. Naim struggles to even think of pulling in a breath. His mind races, trying to make sense of something that feels just a step out of reach. The cigarette has burned down to the filter, and Ryan flicks it off the roof, watching the tiny spark fall and disappear into the dark. It lands somewhere on the driveway pavement down below and extinguishes.
“Can I try something?” he asks.
Naim blinks. “What?”
Ryan shifts closer, shrugging lamely. “It’s dumb, but don’t overthink it.”
He doesn’t seem very keen on waiting for a reply, instead reaching into his pocket and pulling out another cigarette. When he lights it, the flame briefly illuminates his face. His eyes, his mouth, his cheek, his jaw. It’s the most beautiful thing Naim has ever seen, and he’s in the presence of the stars. Ryan takes a drag, his glossy eyes never leaving Naim’s own.
“Come here,” he says softly, hardly opening his mouth.
Naim hesitates for only a moment before leaning closer. The ghosts of his fingers dance, touch, touch, touch, but he keeps his focus on the way Ryan exhales. But instead of letting the smoke drift away, he leans in, hand coming up to gingerly rest on Naim’s chin. It’s a small tug, but his mouth drops open anyways, and for a split second, everything in him goes still. The smoke fills his mouth and it smells more like Ryan than like smoke, if that’s even possible, but perhaps now, they're one in the same. Ryan’s lips are there too, soft and uncertain. White hot suns flash across Naim’s vision, tying his breath and his legs into knots, the thread of two souls infinitely intertwined. He swears he sees a glimpse of heaven through it all.
Naim inhales instinctively, the smoke and the moment both rushing into him at once, and when Ryan pulls back, it’s slow, almost like he’s afraid of breaking the entire world apart. Naim can see the misty wave that covers his eyes.
“There you go,” Ryan praises, his hand dropping from Naim’s chin. And then his eyes are moving too, down, down, down to his lips.
“Stop staring,” Naim says, because his mind can’t conjure anything else.
“Can you blame me?”
Naim’s stomach drops so quickly he feels as though he might fall over from the weight of it all. Ryan’s hand hasn’t left him, instead travelled down to wrap around his arm. A myriad of goosebumps rise up along Naim’s skin. It’s dangerous, he thinks, but he goes still. Ryan’s eyes drop again, and he still doesn’t let go. Naim feels him everywhere, yet it’s still not enough. He hopes, for his own sake, that the higher power can’t see through the curtain of stars. He pulls Ryan in, and the latter practically falls into it. Every sense of restraint melts, plummets into pure need and desperation.
They crash back in the middle and Ryan half climbs on top of where Naim is resting, knees straddling his side. His free hand slides to the back of Naim’s neck, cradling him up, up, up, into the kiss, as though he just can’t get him close enough. Naim, through stuttered breaths, drags his nails down Ryan’s arm. In the back of his mind he hopes Ryan gets stuck under his fingernails, a special place where he can keep him forever, even if only a little part of him, not even enough to see or smell or taste or touch. But just knowing it’s there would be enough.
Ryan, gorgeous, dashing, stunning, beautiful Ryan kisses him as though he’s a man starving in the woods. As though he’s been starving for weeks, months, years, decades, even, and Naim only answers by feeding him more, more, more.
Ryan still clutches the cigarette between two fingers, so Naim takes it as they break apart, holding it to his lips and inhaling. He’s covered in smoke and the scent of him.