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The little specks of dust dance in the air, glimmering golden in the spray of sunlight coming through the window. The dark wood of the room is swollen with heat, the thick walls of the pub not enough during these scorching summer days that feel more like a curse than a blessing.
The air is brimming with a mixture of scents, coffee and beer and sweat, and something sweet and tangy, making Aaron's head spin as he sits on the top of the bar, his thin legs swinging, his fingernails digging into the wood.
Wild thyme and honeysuckle, a woman said, placing a bouquet in his mother's hands, and Aaron could only see a curve of her smile, her face hidden by a wide brim of her hat, her dress flowing from her neck to her wrists, curling around her ankles.
"Is she a witch?" Aaron asks, watching through the window how the woman's lips move as if she were casting a spell.
"Don't be daft, love." his mother says, distracted and foreign when she ruffles his hair.
A bird lands in the lady's open palm, chirping as if in conversation, trusting and joyful like a heartbeat.
The sky is clear above Aaron as he tilts his head up, wishing for a shooting star.
The wall is hard against his back, the coldness of the bricks seeping through his clothes and skin and muscles, settling in his bones. His lungs burn with every breath, the February air crispy and merciless.
The glow from within casts golden patterns on the frozen ground, the music echoing in the deserted street. Everyone is inside, the villagers Aaron barely knows, celebrating a couple that Aaron doesn’t remember the names of, but who look way too young to promise each other forever.
Aaron doesn’t think that love exists.
His father doesn’t love him, and he doesn’t believe his mum when she tells him that she does. Love is just a silly idea, a fairytale that Aaron doesn’t fall for at twelve years old.
A crunch of someone’s footsteps cuts through the quiet buzz of the night, and Aaron’s muscles tense as he looks around, his heartbeat picking up, fluttering in between his ribs.
Aaron has never seen this person before. Not a boy, but he doesn’t look like an adult either, his face pale and his hair mussed on the top of his head as if wind-swept. He doesn’t seem real, as if made of frost and moonlight, and Aaron can’t look away, entranced, his fingers itching where he curls them in his pockets.
The stranger stops in front of the door, his lips parting around a breath that sounds like a prayer. He looks sick, ready to keel over, and Aaron wonders if he should do something, even though he isn’t sure if he would be strong enough to keep the man upright.
But Aaron doesn’t have to be the one who catches him, because the door opens and the stranger falls into the arms of a woman, her figure familiar, her dress flowing and engulfing the boy that is almost a man like a welcoming flower.
Aaron doesn’t think much about that wedding night during the next few years, when the village has become his home, when some strangers have become his friends, and stories have become truths.
He learns about Sarah Sugden, who talks to birds and hides burn marks under her long-sleeved shirts and floral dresses. He learns about the fire that charred her skin, and about a son who saved her and has been scarcely seen since then, and during long autumn evenings, the tales echo in between the quiet walls.
They say he is even more scarred than Sarah.
They say he caused the fire and is hiding now.
He didn’t come to Jack’s funeral.
They say he is sick.
He was at the wedding, wasn’t he?
Aaron thinks about a pale stranger, appearing like a fallen star.
“What’s the deal with your brother?” Adam asks one night, drunk on beer and curiosity, and Vic’s eyes are round and upset.
“The only thing that you should know is that I miss him very much.”
The flickering lights make Aaron’s eyes ache. The music pulses through him, his bones throbbing with its rhythm, almost making him forget about the itchy tightness of his skin, the reason he has found himself in here again, stepping down the narrow staircase into the dark abyss of the bar.
It’s a dance he’s way too familiar with, the one he taught himself since he figured out who he was. Still, there’s something uncomfortable, sometimes, something that feels almost wrong, as if he has been searching for someone and not yet able to find him, having to settle.
He doesn’t want to keep on settling. But if no one ever feels perfect, he chooses to accept everyone who feels just almost enough.
Aaron doesn’t see the colour of the stranger’s eyes when they look at each other from across the room, and suddenly, it becomes the only thing he wants to know.
The neon hanging above the shelves casts violet shadows on the man’s face, his skin pale and his face otherworldly, as if carved from fogs that linger in the Dales during early mornings.
The stranger cocks his head to the side in a small, bird-like gesture, and the glass slips from Aaron’s fingers.
He comes to Aaron quietly, handing him a napkin, brushing his pulse point with his thumb, and something inside Aaron cracks open, the edges sharp like the glass scattered on the tabletop.
The night is warm and filled with a scent of cherry blossoms, and Aaron feels hazy with it. He leans against the wall, looks up at the blinking stars, and knows what is going to happen before it does.
The stranger’s fingers are gentle on Aaron’s cheeks, delicate like feathers and warm like a pulse.
The stranger’s flat is quiet and half empty, and he keeps a window of his bedroom cracked open.
His lips are chapped and hot, and his eyes shimmer like a sea in the pale glow of the night lamp when he splays his hand on Aaron’s stomach as if he could take away every ugly moment etched into his skin.
He’s like a song Aaron can’t get out of his head, a fruit that left him addicted, sweet and tangy, lingering on his tongue.
He goes back to the bar. Every week, every other day.
He learns that the stranger’s name is Robert, that he likes stars and old tales, and that he cooks in the middle of the night, barefoot and with his hair unruly like a field of barley.
He learns the patterns of freckles scattered all across Robert’s back and the constellations dusting his face.
He learns that Robert never allows Aaron to stay.
He’s always kind about it. Gentle. Offers Aaron a cup of sweet tea and a kiss on the mouth, and not any explanation.
Aaron wonders, every time the door closes behind him with a soft click, if Robert is already stripping the sheets, washing their sweat and whispers away as he’s waiting for someone else.
“Can I join you, love?”
Sarah Sugden smells like fresh bread and bluebells, and her dress makes a soft sound as she sits down by him, her smile kind as it peeks from under her hat.
She makes Aaron think of spring, her presence unmissable from the very first warm day, strolling the hills, picking up flowers, telling her secrets to the sky.
“Is everything alright?” she asks, as if she knows already.
A swallow lands on the windowsill, its song sweet and familiar.
Robert’s hand trembles when he brushes his knuckles along Aaron’s cheek.
The air is hot and sweet, heavy with a scent of jasmine growing outside of the window, the sheets damp and pale in the moonlight. Robert’s eyelashes flutter, the shadows dancing on his cheeks, and Aaron wants to trace them with his lips, wants to press a kiss to every line of Robert’s face.
More than anything, he wants to stay.
He closes his eyes.
When he opens them again, dawn is bleeding into the room, and silence rings in his ears.
It hurts more than it should, and Aaron doesn’t recognise his own heart.
The night is stifling, the heat clinging to their damp skin, and Robert is humming as he moves around the kitchen, his boxers dark against the pale expanse of his thighs that Aaron kissed mere moments ago.
“What are we doing?”
It has been two months. They don’t know each other’s surnames. Robert never answers a message until the darkness falls over the world and Aaron’s heart starts to bleed.
Robert has never promised him anything. But now, as he looks at Aaron across the dimly lit kitchen, he looks like he wishes he could.
“We’re friends.” he whispers, “Aren’t we?”
He can see the worry seeping through the eyes of his friends, clear in the set line of his mother’s lips.
“Talk to me.” she begs, and Aaron doesn’t know what to tell her, “Please, love, tell me what’s wrong.”
He chooses to walk away, because how to tell her that he finally believes that love exists, and he found it in between white sheets and in the eyes that he hasn’t seen in the light of a day.
The air feels clearer up on the hill, and Aaron can almost breathe freely.
A swallow circles above his head, its wail piercing as if its heart was breaking too.
Aaron’s skin is burning as Robert whimpers, arching off the bed, his body trembling, beautifully and how so painfully familiar around him, under him, a drug, a spell, a dream he is torn away from every damn time.
“I don’t think I can come back if I’ll have to leave again.” Aaron whispers into the crook of Robert’s neck as they lie tangled in the sheets, and Robert shudders against him, fingers digging into the small of Aaron’s back.
“I know.” is all he says, his lips warm and trembling against Aaron’s forehead, “I know.”
He kisses Aaron one last time by the door, his heartbeat thrumming under Aaron’s fingers, his eyes shimmering like broken stars.
Autumn doesn’t bring him comfort with its chilly mornings and sunny afternoons, with the damp nights and colourful leaves dancing in the raindrops.
Aaron doesn’t find it in whiskey and beer and woods and moors covered in heather, doesn’t taste it in the crispy apples Vic's trying to feed him, not the scent of late roses that clings to Sarah’s dress when she sits in front of him, the rain tapping the window with its cold fingers, a lonely traveller denied entry.
“I used to think you were a witch, you know.” Aaron mumbles, bourbon licking at his insides, tying his tongue, “Sorry.”
There’s sweetness in her smile, like honey-roasted walnuts Robert made for him that one night in June.
“Do you believe in magic?”
His heart aches, his eyes burn, and magic can’t exist in a world that hurts so much.
“Do you think love is magic or a curse?”
Her eyes fog with kindness and longing, the edges of a scar on her palm rough as she presses it to Aaron’s knuckles.
This year, Sarah hasn’t stopped coming with the sun. This year, she appears on gloomy evenings, her dresses and skirts and blouses and coats making a soft sound as she enters the pub before choosing a spot by a rain-stained window. She doesn’t speak to flowers or birds, but she speaks to Aaron.
It doesn’t fill the void. It doesn’t put his heart whole. But it does make it easier, sometimes, even if just for the briefest of moments.
It’s that kind of mid-November night when the air is carrying a promise of a frost, and the next morning will welcome them with white patterns painted on the window panes.
Somehow, Aaron knows before he looks up, crouching behind the bar, his forehead pressed to the wooden shelves, breathing around the pulsing in his chest.
Somehow, when the door to the pub squeaks open, the pain turns into liquid, into something warm and golden, golden like Robert’s hair when Sarah takes him in her arms once again, and Aaron thinks about cold air and pale moonlight.
“You shouldn’t be here, love.” he hears Sarah whisper into Robert’s shoulder, “It’s so late, you-”
He kisses her cheek and says something that makes her expression turn soft like a watercolour painting, and looks at Aaron as if she wanted to wish him the courage of stars.
Robert looks pale and beautiful, and his lips tremble as if in pleading.
Aaron takes his hand and takes him upstairs, where he peels Robert’s drenched clothes off and kisses every tear and every raindrop away.
“I’m going to tell you a story.”
And Aaron, with his ear pressed against Robert’s heart, listens.
Robert tells him about old laws born in the moors of Yorkshire, about spirits and magic and curses, about forgotten songs and hidden creatures.
He tells him about a night years ago, about flames licking the sky and painting it orange. About a boy desperate to do good, about one soul saved, and an act of bravery so unexpected that the imbalance of his choice had to be somehow contained.
He tells him about a boy who was ready to sacrifice his life for his mother.
She wasn’t supposed to live. Someone had to pay the price.
And, in the end, he did. Torn in half, a son of the ground, cursed to spend half of his life sentenced to the sky.
Robert wakes him up with a kiss pressed to Aaron’s lips and a hand wrapping around his, tugging him out of the bed, guiding him through the night until there’s nothing but them and the sky and the trees whispering of forgotten dreams.
“I’ll see you later.” Robert breathes out, slipping out of Aaron’s grip.
The first purple string of dawn etches the horizon, and Robert is gone.
A swallow cheeps over Aaron’s head.
“He needs to leave for the winter.” Vic whispers, her fingers clenched as she quietly counts the seconds left till dusk, “If he doesn’t, if he stays too long or comes back too early, he gets so horribly sick, he might not-”
“He’ll go, love.” Sarah says, full of love and heartache, “He’ll go when he says his goodbyes.”
Robert slips into his room late at night, carrying a scent of his mother’s perfume and Vic’s rhubarb cake, and he tastes like salt and roses.
“I’ll wait.” Aaron whispers into the curve of his hip, Robert’s fingers treading through his hair, “I’ll wait for you.”
“I can’t offer you anything worth waiting for.”
Aaron closes his eyes, dizzy with the heat and softness, and the way his heartbeat thrums in his chest, tender in its vulnerability.
“I just want you.”
Robert handles him so gently, his hands on Aaron’s shoulder, pulling him against his chest, his skin warm in the coolness of the room seeping through the open window.
“The only time I can offer you are warm nights until autumn forces me away every year.” Robert whispers into his hair like a prayer, “The only home I could give you would be half-empty, and the only family I could try to create would never be complete. I can’t promise you anything.”
Moonlight bleeds into the room like sorrow oozing from where their hearts used to be.
“Lie to me then.”
I love you.
I love you too. Don’t wait for me.
I love you.
I love you.
Aaron closes his eyes. Feels a flutter of a feather against his lips.
He doesn’t look, and he lets himself grow cold.
Some truths are fixed deeper than the roots of old oak trees, clearer than creeks running through deserted valleys.
Swallows come back every spring.
Aaron’s heart doesn’t belong solely to him anymore.
His will is carved in stone.
The light coming through the window dances in golden dots on the floor, filtered through the knitted curtain swaying in the afternoon breeze. The air is saturated with a dizzying mix of scents, the spice of fresh paint, the zestiness of Vic’s lemon cake, the sweet freshness of sweet pea and lavender Sarah has brought earlier, her smile lingering like warm fingers on his cheek.
Aaron opens the kitchen door, lets the balmy air of a late August evening in as he sits on the threshold that he was carried through a month ago, the walls naked and soaking in his laughter.
The village spreads below him, bathed in the orange glow of the setting sun, a nd Aaron closes his eyes.
The first summer, Robert didn’t come back, stubborn in his choices, stupid in his selflessness.
The second summer, he walked into the pub and all Aaron had to do was touch him to have him for a couple of fleeting months.
The third summer, Robert told him to be happy again, his guilt making his limbs tremble, his face pale under the stars and his sorrow a wet patch under Aaron’s fingertips.
The fourth summer, Aaron tried. He traded the woods and moors of Yorkshire for stretches of golden sand and easy touches that felt wrong on his sun-scorched skin.
The fifth summer, he splayed Robert on the grassy hilltop and, with the stars as their witnesses, he whispered I’d rather have you only for a heartbeat than not have you at all.
The sixth summer, he sits on the threshold of a cottage nestled between the ground and the sky, the sun peppering his face with its long-awaited goodbye kisses.
The wind whispers, carrying a warm scent of pines like an offering.
A flutter of wings, a soft sound of footsteps muffled by the thick carpet of weeds. A brush of a bare elbow against his.
“Good evening, mister Dingle.”
Aaron will never know the exact colour of his eyes.
But Aaron knows his heart, loyal like spring, beautiful like a song.
And here he is, with him.
Here he is.