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The town doesn't have a name so much as something stamped onto a road sign somewhere back near the highway that Naim's already forgotten, blink and you'll miss it, and maybe he did blink, because when he looks up from his phone there's nothing behind them but flat dry country and a sky gone the colour of a fresh bruise.
Everything out here is grey, tinted with hues of sun, the gum trees catching the last licks of light, don't so much stand as they loiter, pale and peeling, and the dirt on the roadside is the kind of red that looks as if it's been rusting like age-old metal. He watches it all slide by the window at sixty clicks an hour and feels nothing about it, which feels, in its own way, like the most honest response he's had to anything in weeks.
"You're quiet," his mum says. She's got both hands on the wheel even though the road's dead straight and dead empty, fingers tapping on the wheel nonsensically.
“Not much to talk about,” Naim says. And she grips the wheel tighter.
“Excited for school?”
He doesn't answer that. There isn't an answer that isn't going to turn into a fight, and he's so, so tired of fights. Instead, he watches a hawk lift off some roadkill up ahead, wings melding into the sky. He’s not really watching any of this. Because there's a pane of glass between him and the world these days, thick and warping, and everything gets to him already completely flattened out.
"You'll start Monday," his mum says hurriedly, like she's tearing a plaster off. Says it to the steering wheel instead of through not-so-subtle glances at him. "I know it's soon, but its better than sitting around the house moping, yeah?"
"I wasn't gonna mope," Naim says, which is a lie they both let sit there in the space between them in the car, since pointing it out would take more energy than either of them has right now.
The town, when they finally reach it, has a servo with one bowser and a hand-painted sign, a pub with its verandah sagging like an old dog's spine, and a short strip of shops. Everything's got that sun-bleached, salt-worn look, timber gone silver, tin roofs rusted to the colour of dried blood. It's pretty, he supposes, like how maybe a photograph of a car crash can be pretty if you squint. He doesn’t pay much mind to it, not when he curls himself out of the car and slams the door behind him.
The house is smaller than the one they left, which he doesn’t care for much. His room's got a single bed, a built-in wardrobe with a door that doesn't shut right, catches on its hinge, and a window that looks out onto a paddock gone gold-brown with dead grass and, past that, more nothing, all the way out to a line of hills cocooning him in. He stares at them for a while, feels it pressing against the panes of glass.
He's halfway through shoving t-shirts into a drawer that sticks on its runners when his mum knocks on the doorframe, even though the door's wide open, always been the type to act like he’s an animal, some thing that’ll just eventually skitter off.
He’d recognise what’s wrapped in her arms in a heartbeat. Feels his own heart lurch at the sight of stickers half-peeled from its lid, tracing them down to his name in his handwriting from when he was twelve.
"Oh," he says, and it comes out louder than he means it to. "I thought I left that in storage."
"I brought it," she says, setting his guitar down gingerly against the wardrobe. "It just didn't feel right, leaving it behind."
"Right."
She's still standing there, and Naim knows what she wants to say before she says it.
"You know Pastor runs the youth band up at the church here," she says, carefully. “It might be a good way to meet people and settle in."
"Mum."
"I'm just saying. You used to love it. You and your dad—"
"I know what me and Dad used to do," Naim groans, sharp enough that she flinches, just slightly, just at the corner of her mouth. He feels bad about it, guilt that filters in like water through cotton wool. "Sorry. I just… you know I don't really play anymore. You know that."
"I know," she says. "I just think it might do you good, is all. It doesn't have to be church. Just… something to do.”
He doesn't say anything to that. There's nothing to say that wouldn't be cruel or wouldn't be a lie, and he's got no appetite for either right now. She looks at him a moment longer, and when he doesn't give her anything, she just nods distantly and leaves the room.
Naim listens to her footsteps recede down the hall. Then he flops back onto the bed still made in the linen it came with, ceiling fan turning lazy circles above him, and doesn't look at the guitar case. Doesn't need to look at it to feel it there, waiting.
‘Yesterday, through today, then tomorrow.’
The walk to school the next morning is longer than it needs to be, mostly because he takes a wrong turn twice and refuses, out of some obscure teenage pride, to check the map on his phone a third time. The town wakes up around him in pieces, and he stumbles over a tin-can left lying on the sidewalk, hoping no-one saw it. When he finally makes that last turn and reaches the school, it immediately smells rotten, same smell as fruit gone soft on the ground, or stale chips left in their crumpled packet.
He finds his way to homeroom more by luck than his appalling navigational skills, and when he steps inside, twenty-odd faces turn to look at him. Shit. Naim doesn't particularly love being looked at, so he quietly ushers in and takes the first free seat he finds, middle of the room angling back.
It isn't a bad day, as first days go. It isn't really that great either. He sits through classes that blur together. Everything feeling like he's underwater himself, or like the whole day is happening on the other side of that pane of glass he can't seem to get out from behind. It's fine, he supposes. He'd expected fine. Fine was the ceiling of what he'd let himself hope for.
But there's a sickly feeling threaded through the whole day like a wire under his skin, the sense, difficult to place and impossible to shake, that someone’s just short of watching him. The hills out past the paddocks are turned his way.
‘Walked in, you were singing.’
It's near the end of the day, in that dead hour between last bell and buses, that he hears a voice.
He's cutting behind the gym block because he’s found it's the shortest way to the front gate towards his home, and he's got no interest in another lap of corridors full of strangers, and the sound stops him mid-step, a note that tugged him around his wrist and drew him to a stop.
Someone's singing.
It's coming from behind the equipment shed, and its a bit rough around the edges, a voice cracking open on the high notes. It's not a song Naim can recognise, might not even be a real song, might be something half-improvised, refracting off the corrugated tin roof where the light comes through in dusty amber shafts. But it doesn't matter what it is. It bleeds straight through him, reaching through his chest, putting its hand flat against the thing in him that stopped beating months ago.
He doesn't remember deciding to walk toward it. But he feels his feet quiet on the dry grass, heart going fast in a way it hasn't since—
There's a boy sitting on an upturned crate with his back against the shed wall, guitar-less, hands doing nothing but keeping time against his knee, head tipped back so his throat's exposed to the sky like he's offering something up to it. Blonde hair gone brassy in the afternoon light, with his eyes closed. Naim doesn’t particularly know why he focuses on that part. The blonde-haired boy finishes the line he's on, and lets the last note hang there, unresolved, before he opens his eyes and finds Naim standing at the corner of the shed like he's been caught doing something utterly illicit.
"Oh," the boy says, not embarrassed so much as amused, like he'd expected some weirdo to be watching him sing. "I didn't hear you there."
"Sorry," Naim says, and means it, and doesn't move. "I wasn’t... I was just walking past."
"Sure you were." A grin, "I'm Ryan.”
"Naim."
"You're the new one." Small towns keep better records than any office ever could. "You looked like you saw a ghost just then."
"Didn't expect anyone to be back here," Naim says, which isn't quite an answer to what Ryan actually meant, but it's the truest thing he's got. He can still feel it in his sternum, that sound, ringing on after the fact the way a struck bell keeps ringing even once you've clapped your hand to it.
Ryan studies him a second with his head tilted, then nods toward the crate beside him like it's the most natural invitation in the world. "You play anything?"
"Guitar," Naim says, and it surprises him. Tumbling out of his own mouth past his lips, because he hasn't claimed that in months, hasn't let himself. "Why?"
"Because I sing and we're missing a guitarist and that—" Ryan jerks a thumb back toward the shed, toward another guy Naim hadn’t noticed. "—is Hunter, and if you'd heard him on the kit instead of just me tapping my knee like an idiot you'd understand why we're desperate."
‘Pretty boy, scared of rain.’
He doesn't meet them again until the Thursday, in music, of all the mundane, predictable places for it to happen, fluorescent lights and a room full of ancient keyboards, half of which are missing entire keys.
He knows him on sight before anyone says the name, just because of the blonde hair. He's talking to someone by the door when Naim walks, and its easy to miss if you weren't looking for it, but Naim is very much looking for it, where Ryan's eyes track over to him and stay there longer than a stranger's eyes have need to.
Naim spends most of the lesson not looking at the boy two rows over, which takes considerably more effort than not-looking usually does.
It's Ryan who crosses the room when the bell goes, weaving between abandoned keyboards, tracing his fingers along the keys.
“So you play," he says, placing his hands in his pockets, head tilted like he's sizing Naim up.
"A bit," Naim says, which is a lie of understatement, the same reflexive shrinking he's been doing about everything lately.
Naim swallows before he blurts out, “I heard you singing," because there's no reason dodging the fact he was watching him for a while that doesn't sound worse than just laying down a damn compliment. "It was… good. Really... good, actually."
"Yeah?" Ryan's smile reaches all the way up into his eyes, and it falls somewhere under Naim’s ribs, right next to where the singing had landed two days before, like the two things are somehow the same thing. "We really are looking for a guitarist, and no-one in this desolate town has ever bothered to learn how to play.“ He picks a the skin of his lip with his teeth. “You free after school? so we can see if it's any good, with all three of us together?"
"Yeah," Naim hears himself say, too fast, betraying more want than he means to show., so he clears his throat awkwardly. “Yeah, I could do that."
"I had a hunch about you," Ryan says, looking him over. Naim goes very still and very warm under that look, some old machinery he'd thought rusted shut creaking back into motion, something he’d tucked away for a long, long time. He doesn't know what to call it.
"How'd you know I played guitar?” Naim asks.
Ryan shrugs, and he’s already turning to go, tossing the answer back over his shoulder. ” You've got the hands for it. "
He's gone before Naim can work out whether that's a joke or not. And for the first time since they crossed into this town, the grey doesn't feel quite so… so.... because there's a seam of colour in it now, gold-brown like dead grass in afternoon light.
‘I pray the race is worth the fight’
Hunter's garage smells like two-stroke oil and old carpet, drum kit set up in the corner with duct tape holding one of the cymbal stands together, a single bar heater doing absolutely nothing against the evening cold coming in under the roller door. Naim gets there just after five with his guitar case slung over one shoulder, feeling stupidly nervous in a way that has nothing to do with the music and everything to do with the two boys already there, sitting close on an overturned esky, deep in some conversation that stops dead the second he walks in.
"There he is," Ryan cheers.
Hunter doesn't look up from adjusting his hi-hat. "Hey."
Something's going on between the two of them, has been going on before Naim arrived and probably before Naim existed to this town. It reminds him of two magnets that can't decide if they're attracting or repelling, Ryan lounging too close and Hunter's jaw going tight every time he does it, and then somehow, twenty minutes later, harmonising perfectly on a chorus like none of it happened. It doesn't look like they particularly like each other.
Naim doesn't ask. Isn't his business, and anyway he's got his own thing to be nervous about, tuning up with fingers that feel stiffer than they should, months of sitting around with a guitar tucked as far as it can be in his closet, in his knuckles like rust.
"What d'you listen to?" Ryan asks, dragging a milk crate over to sit close, closer than strictly necessary given the size of the garage. "Not whatever's on the radio."
“Uhhh.. Fleetwood Mac.” A band his cousin got him into years back. Ryan's face turns to bright and delighted, and he's naming the next three songs off that same record before Naim's even finished the sentence.
"No way," Naim says. "Nobody really knows Silver Springs."
"I know everything," Ryan says, entirely too pleased with himself. "Play it. "
He fumbles it, first time through. His fingers forgetting it all, accompanied by an awkward hitch of a chord change, so he laughs at himself. "Sorry, haven’t… haven't played much. In a while."
"You're fine," Ryan says, watching Naim's hands with no impatience in it at all. "Take it again. I'll come in on the second verse."
Hunter, behind them, counts them in a little too sharp on the sticks, and when Naim messes up the change a second time, mutters something under his breath, and Ryan's head snaps round.
"He's fine," Ryan has more of an edge on it now. "Everyone's rusty first time."
"Wasn't saying anything," Hunter says, and goes back to his kit, until the music picks back up and swallows it whole.
They play for two hours. It's the best two hours Naim's had in… he doesn’t want to remember. By the end of it his fingers hurt, blisters forming under his skin.
‘Lay me down where the trees bend low, Put me down where the greenery stings’
It doesn't stay a trio, not always. Some afternoons it's all three of them crammed into the garage; other afternoons Hunter's got work at the servo or just doesn't show, with a few message left unanswered in the group chat, so it's just Ryan and Naim working through songs neither of them can quite remember all the words to, filling in the gaps with hums or nonsense or, once, an entirely improvised verse about Hunter's drum kit that has them both laughing too hard to finish the take.
Those afternoons, Ryan doesn't stop watching him. Ryan's eyes follow his hands on the fretboard, watches his mouth when he sings harmony, watches him even when there's nothing happening, just Naim tuning a string or checking his phone.
"Walk?" Ryan says, one evening, as he picks up Naim’s guitar and packs it away. "Been meaning to show you round properly. You've only seen the really boring bits of this hellhole.”
They go out past the last fence line, where the paddocks give up being paddocks, rotten fences and looser, scrubbier, grasslands that run gold and green all the way to a stand of gums on the horizon and, further past that, a lone cell tower blinking red against a sky just starting to shift toward evening. The air smells like dry grass and something sweeter underneath, eucalyptus oil cooking off in the last of the day's heat.
"Why d'you even want to hang out?" Naim asks, before he's really decided to ask it, the question just falling out of him because there's nobody around to overhear him being awkward about it. “You’ve never asked me one-on-one before.”
Ryan looks over at him sideways, a slow grin working its way up one side of his mouth. "Maybe I just like your face."
"Shut up," Naim says, feeling his ears go hot despite himself, despite the cold coming into the air now the sun's dropping.
"Maybe I think you're interesting," Ryan says.
“Nah, my personality is boring,” Naim mutters, but Ryan just laughs, delighted, and shoves him half-heartedly in the shoulder, enough that Naim overbalances on the uneven ground, grabs at Ryan's sleeve on the way down out of pure reflex, and the two of them go down together into the long grass in an undignified heap, throats hoarse from laughing, dry stalks crackling and folding under them.
They lie there a minute, catching breath, shoulder to shoulder, staring up at a sky, blue bleeding into a deep, ember-edged orange at the horizon.
"What got you into it?” Naim asks, once his breathing's settled. “Singing?”
Ryan's quiet a second, which is unusual for him. "Dunno. Just always felt like the only place I fit right. Like everywhere else I’m… " he flexes his hands at the sky, catching sunlight through his fingers, blocking out the waiting country around them “—too much, or not entirely enough, depending who you ask. But when I'm singing there's no too much, its really just the song." He turns his head, grass rustling under him. "You?"
"My dad," Naim says, and he forbids himself from choking up on it. "Taught me guitar before he… before everything. But I haven't really played since, not till I met you."
Ryan turns to look at him, and smiles.
“I’m getting out of here," He then says eventually, turning his eyes back up to the sky. "Soon as I can, to the city, not whatever waiting room this is. I don't wanna die in some waiting room."
Naim's never thought that far ahead about anything, not lately. He turns his head in the grass to look over at Ryan, and the angle catches the last light through the stalks between them, gilding the edge of Ryan's hair, the curve of his ear, gold going to fire at the tips where the sun's coming through.
"Hunter going with you?" Naim asks. "When you go."
Ryan huffs. “Nah. Not Hunter." He doesn't elaborate, and Naim doesn't push.
Ryan props himself up on one elbow instead, looking down at Naim, grass shadowing half his face, the cell tower blinking red once, twice, somewhere behind his shoulder like a slow pulse keeping time for both of them.
"What about you?" Ryan says. "What're you even doing here, in this place?"
“Mum…” Naim says. “I didn't choose it."
"But is there any reason you'd stay?” Ryan says, barely above a whisper as his breath ghosts Naim’s lips. "Any reason you'd like it here? Once you'd had the chance to?”
Naim thinks about the greyness that met him on the drive in, the pane of glass he's been living behind for months, the way none of it had felt real until a voice came out from behind a gym shed and cracked something open in him he'd thought sealed for good.
"Nah," he says, honest, the word coming out on a breath. "Don't think there is."
He feels Ryan inhale on his lips, and Naim is staring directly into his eyes, and it's making him go dizzy, and when they crash together, the stirring in his gut that's been sitting there all day disappears.
He leans further into Naim’s space and envelops all of his senses. It's harsh; he's kissing him senseless until Naim brings a hand up past his ear, into his curls, and he stills for a moment. Waits for Naim to part his mouth before he pushes his tongue in and melts his brain.
The grasshoppers are chirping off in the paddock, the cell tower's red light is steady now against a sky bruising toward black, and Ryan's still looking down at him like he's found something he wasn't sure existed, and the space between them has gotten smaller without either of them seeming to move it there, dry grass and dust and the smell of eucalyptus and the two of them, tangled up in the only place either of them has to be.
‘That picture on the wall you’re scared of looks like you.’
Sunday, Naim's mother makes him go to church, same as always, and this time he notices Ryan there too, who sits stiff and unfamiliar in the pew. Naim's aware of him the whole hour, the whole sermon, the heat of his body two inches away and not one inch closer.
Naim says nothing. Ryan says nothing. They just stand there in the gravel lot afterwards, with the church bell still singing somewhere behind them, and later, walking home, neither of them brings it up, not really, except Ryan reaches over at some point and laces their fingers together anyway, right there in the open.
Naim doesn't pull away.
‘Wishin’ I was the way you say you were.’
Naim's running late again to practise, and he's got his bike walked halfway up the drive to the garage when he hears raised voices, coming through the propped side door. Hunter's voice, mostly.
He stops and stills his hands on the bars of his bike, contemplating going in.
"—so that's it, then. That's just it."
"I don't know what you want me to say." Ryan says tiredly.
"We've been doing this for like a year, man."
"Doing what, Hunter? What have we been doing?”
"Fooling around," Hunter finally spits out, like the words taste bad.
"Yeah." Ryan, quiet. "And I don't want to anymore. I haven't wanted to in a while, if I'm being honest. I don't think you have either, not really. I think we just didn't know what else to do with each other."
"Is it him?" Hunter's voice drops. "Is this about Naim?"
Naim's stomach drops straight through the driveway.
"Don't," Ryan says, and there's a warning in it now, sharp.
"Don't what, don't say his name? Everybody sees it, Ryan. You don't even try to hide it—"
"Hunter—"
“Like I'm just supposed to sit here and watch you—“
There's a crash, something knocked over, a cymbal stand maybe, and a door somewhere down the hall slams so hard the whole garage seems to shake with it. Naim turns his head just in time to see a shape bolt past the far window and down the porch steps. Hunter's sister, bag still on one shoulder, face white, running like the house is on fire.
Naim doesn't go in. He gets back on his bike and rides home.
‘Saying if you could, you'd leave it all.’
It doesn't stay quiet. Ryan shows up at the edge of Naim's yard at dusk, hands jammed in his pockets, and mutters, "She told my parents. Hunter's sister. Guess she told hers too, and hers called mine."
"Told them what?”
Ryan looks at him like the question answers itself. "Everything."
Naim doesn't know what to say to that, so he doesn't say anything, just watches Ryan pace a short line back and forth across the dead grass like there's a rut he's already worn into it.
"They're gonna sit me down tonight. My parents." He stops pacing with a shaky breath and looks at Naim dead on. "Let's go."
"Go where?"
"Away. Anywhere. Before they get the chance to make it a whole thing, before your mom gets some phone call and decides she's got fucked opinions about it too." He steps closer, and his voice drops a bit lower. "I don't want to fool around with anyone. Not you, not… I don't mean like that. I mean I don't want this to be nothing, with you. I want it to be real. I want to do everything we talked about. Sell CDs out of a duffel bag, sleep in shitty motels, play some dive in some town nobody's heard of and then get in the car and do it again the next night. I know it's not the life you deserve. I know it's nothing. But I want to give you my whole stupid life anyway, if you'll take it."
Naim's throat's gone tight. "Ryan…”
"I mean it." Ryan laughs, short, disbelieving at himself. "God, listen to me. I don't even know what I'm saying anymore, I just know I don't want to search the sky for something better without you next to me doing it too. You and me. I don’t want some other dickhead.”
‘You’ll go fight a war, I’ll go missing.’
Naim goes home that night and his mother's at the kitchen table when he comes in, Bible still open in front of her though she's not really reading it, just resting her hand on the page titled 'Leviticus'.
"You've been spending an awful lot of time on this music thing," she says, not looking up.
Naim startles a bit. “You're the one who brought the guitar."
"Well. I didn't expect you coming home this late."
"You said get into something. You said it'd be good for me to have… " he stops himself before he says it, then says it anyway, because he's tired of not saying it. "You said it'd be good to have a piece of Dad around. You told me that."
She closes the Bible tenderly. "I don't want to talk about your father right now."
"You never want to talk about him!"
"Naim."
"Forget it." He's already backing toward the hall. "Forget I said anything."
She doesn't call after him, and doesn't ask where he's going. Later, when he comes back down with a duffel bag slung over one shoulder and his beat-up guitar case in hand. She's still sitting at the table, Bible firmly closed now, staring at nothing in particular, and Naim realises, standing there in the doorway with his whole life packed into two bags, that she isn't going to. She's not going to ask. She doesn't care enough to ask, and either way it means the same thing.
He leaves without saying goodbye, because he doesn't feel like there's anyone to say it to.
‘Suffering’ the while to lie a time or two.’
Ryan's waiting at the end of the road, headlights off, engine idling low in the dark. His parents' car, a hunk of rust-eaten hatchback that's seen better decades, sits crooked against the curb.
He's pacing again when Naim gets close, a tight nervous line worn into the gravel shoulder, and there's barely a moment where Naim almost turns around. Almost. The weight of the guitar case in his hand nearly enough to convince him this is a stupid, reckless decision made out of spite and heartbreak and not much else.
Then Ryan looks up and sees him and every line of him goes soft with relief, like he'd been genuinely bracing to be left standing there alone, and so Naim keeps walking.
"Hey," Ryan says, voice cracking on the one syllable.
"Hey."
They load the car in near silence, duffel bags shoved into whatever gaps are left. Ryan's hands are shaking a little. Naim doesn't say anything about it. His own aren't much steadier.
They pull out of town with the headlights finally on, throwing long yellow stripes across the empty road, and nobody chases them, nobody's porch light flicks on, the whole place just lets them go, because it was never all that attached to them in the first place.
Naim rolls his window down with the handle and sticks his hand out into the rushing dark with his fingers spread, feeling the night pour through them. Besides him, Ryan's got one hand on the wheel and the other reaching over blind, finding Naim's knee, his hand lacing their fingers together right there over the gearshift like it's the easiest thing in the world.
"You good?" Ryan asks, glancing over, then glancing back at the road.
"Yeah." Naim watches the fence posts strobe past the window, stars starting to prick through the sky one at a time. "Yeah, I'm good."
Ryan turns the radio up. Some static-choked station is playing and it doesn't matter, they sing along to it anyway, Naim's hand still tangled in his the whole time, the whole dark road home to nowhere stretched out open in front of them.
‘When we won’t wake up on our own, held close all the time, knowing im half of you.’
They land at some car park of a motel when it gets too dark, a sign out front's missing half its letters, just a buzzing shell of red neon spelling out something close to VACANCY if you squint, and the crickets out here are way too loud. Ryan pays cash for the room. Mostly change, a couple crumpled bills.
Inside, it's about what you'd expect. One bed, sagging in the middle. Naim doesn’t want to check the sheets. A window unit is rattling in the corner, doing nothing useful. And a window, pretty broken, Ryan checks, sees a spiderweb crack fanning out from a hole about the size of a fist, taped over on the inside with something yellowed and half-peeling that's clearly been there longer than either of them have been alive.
They sit out on the concrete step in front of the room for a while first, backs against the door, watching the parking lot do a whole lot of nothing. Naim digs a pack of cigarettes out of his jacket, which is annoyingly half-crushed from the drive, and a lighter, plain metal, nothing special, just an ordinary beat-up Zippo he's had kicking around for years. He lights up, and offers the pack over.
Ryan waves it off, then changes his mind, and takes one anyway. "Didn't peg you as a smoker."
"I'm not, really. Just… kinda figured for tonight."
"Fair."
They sit there a while, smoke curling up into the bug-loud dark, neither of them saying much. It's Naim who breaks it, staring at the cherry burning down between his fingers.
"So what's the plan?”
Ryan huffs something that's not quite a laugh."The plan's the same as it was an hour ago. We drive till we find somewhere that'll let us play. We sell what we can, and we'll figure shit out as we go."
"That's not entirely a plan."
"No," Ryan admits. "It's not."
Naim looks out at the dead parking lot, one lonely truck parked crooked under the buzzing sign. There’s no home to go back to, no money to speak of, nothing but each other and two guitars and a stolen car with a quarter tank of gas. It should scare him more than it does.
"Okay," he says, finally, and stubs the cigarette out against the concrete.
They go inside a while later, neither of them tired exactly, just wrung out and not sleep-hungry so much as bone-tired of the whole day. They lie down anyway, on top of the covers, not under them, same as they used to in the grass, side by side, almost touching, staring up at a water-stained ceiling instead of a sky.
It's Ryan's hand that moves first, fingers brushing the back of Naim's knuckles slowly, tentatively. Naim turns his hand over, laces their fingers together, and for a while that's all it is, two hands, tangled, breathing in the dark, the window unit rattling its useless rattle in the corner.
Naim's eyes drift to the broken window. The crack fanning out from that one small hole, taped and yellowed and patient, letting a thin seam of night air whistle through no matter how many times somebody's tried to seal it shut.
"Hey," Ryan whispers, and when Naim looks over he's already being looked at, and Ryan draws him in with nothing more than that same soft insistence, brushing the tape-crack window and the dead-end town and everything either of them left behind clean out of the room.
There's no space between them.
Weeks of hunger, felt like entire months, maybe, and Naim wasn't counting.
Ryans hands find his face, his jaw; holding him like this is something he's thought about with a great deal of specificity, like he knows exactly what movements will get Naim to pull noises from his throat. Naim makes a sound against his mouth and doesn't try to stop it. His hands find Ryans collar. He pulls him in.
Ryan immediately pins him back to the headboard of their shitty motel room, his mouth attaching itself to Naims throat, marking all over his neck, causing breathy sounds to fall from his mouth. One nip too hard has Naim groaning, head resting against the wall with a soft thud.
He wastes no time shoving Naims shirt up and over his head, hair catching in the process, which Naim tries to shake out with his hand. Before the shirt has even landed on the floor Ryan is back on his mouth, then down his collarbone, hands gripped onto Naims waist, rubbing circles into his skin. Naim tugs at Ryan’s shirt and he slowly goes to unbutton its plaid material. When its finally off, they look at each other for a while. Naim lets himself look.
He reaches out his fingers, grasping onto Ryans arms, and pulls him in. He lands on him harsher than he probably meant to, and they smile into each others hair, choosing to lie there for a while.
The lamp gets switched off not long after. The crickets don't stop, they never do, out here, and the window unit keeps up its tired rattle, and everything else fades into the dark, two people finally where they mean to be.
Naim rests there listening to Ryan's breathing even out beside him, one arm slung heavy and warm across his chest. He doesn’t have the energy to think back on what he’s done. None of it matters much now. Not really. Not the life either of them's leaving behind in some town that never much wanted them to begin with.
What matters is fuck-all to their names and no plan worth calling a plan. Together. Away from all of it.
Naim closes his eyes. They don’t need a map.
Just need this. Just him.
'To love me is to suffer me.'