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Martin watches with a steady, silent gaze. Something like concentration mixed with curiosity, combined, and pointed towards James. The orange ember glows with every inhale, brightening every time it’s reduced, incrementally, to ash, and Martin thinks he understands it. Expending yourself if it means being absorbed by something greater. Letting what you love take little pieces of you, the moment they ask, even if it makes you a little uneven.
He has seen sailors do this before on moon-washed decks, and he wonders if this is something humans only tend to do by the sea. Or perhaps the sea itself is not so compelling, but the vast, subdued emptiness of it. The docks are ever so quiet at this hour, nothing but the susurration of weak waves beneath their feet, where they sit on the edge of the pier. The crude smell, worse alongside briny coastal air, is enough for Martin to recognise that there’s a reason why loneliness seems to be a prerequisite.
“That’s not good for you,” Martin says casually.
“Yeah, well,” James says, looking up at the stars.
Martin just looks at him. Waits on a continuation of the sentence, a clarification of his thoughts that he never receives. Instead he watches James’s shoulders drop around bitter smoke and wonders what was holding them up so rigidly in the first place. Wonders what the cigarette did to take the weight away.
“Is it nice?”
James hums, a noise somewhere between agreement and disagreement, and looks towards him slowly. “You’ve never had one?”
Martin shakes his head.
“Hm,” he seems to think to himself briefly. “Wanna try?”
Martin blinks like he wasn’t expecting the offer. He turns the thought in his head, flips it a few times, inspects it.
Something new. James makes it look nice.
He doesn’t see why not. “Yeah,” he says, and his voice feels halfway to a whisper. He looks to James expectantly, and James holds his gaze with a look he cannot quite place. James takes the cigarette from his lips and hands it to Martin.
Martin grasps the thin paper between his thumb and four fingers, examines it for a minute, and James laughs a soft, quiet thing.
“Why are you holding it like that?” he giggles. “Just use the two.”
Martin smiles before putting it between his middle and pointer fingers. Brings it to his lips. Inhales.
He feels the smoke crawl into his mouth, acrid and almost caustic, scraping at his throat. Itchy. He swallows, and the smoke claws its way down, not to his lungs, fuck, it’s going down his oesophagus—
Martin coughs violently, abrasively, like his throat has been corroded. Tears prick his eyes, which are burning too, and his shoulders shake with his throat as it tries to reject what feels like poison gas. It is poison gas though, isn’t it, he thinks as the coughing fit dies down.
A flash of concern crosses James’s face and he looks, distantly, like he’s standing on the verge of an apology but unable to determine how far the drop is. Martin gives a sheepish smile and James seems to soften, decides he’s okay.
“I’ll try again,” Martin says, faintly determined now.
James looks at him before speaking. “Okay,” he says calmly as he reaches for the cigarette. “Watch me first.”
He makes it look easy, grasped between fingers that look too steady not to be practiced. One slow drag, the orange glow brightens in a dim, unfinished way, and one slow exhale that looks a bit like a sigh. Smoking is like sighing, Martin figures. It flattens the frayed edges around James’s body just the same.
James watches the smoke disperse into the cool night air, light grey against stark black.
“Don’t swallow it, treat it like breathing,” he suggests as he hands the cigarette back.
Martin takes it between two fingers. “Like breathing,” he echoes.
Maybe James is more practiced than he lets on.
Martin breathes it in, slow and dedicated. It almost works, smoke fill his lungs, but then there’s too much of it, and — shit, the burn flares up his throat, he’s choking around weightlessness again—
“Why is this so — difficult,” Martin rasps, brows furrowed.
James takes in the sight of Martin, a little red and teary and failing miserably. And then he’s laughing, because Martin looks like he’s sulking, and something seems to click.
“Give it here,” he says, low and placid. Martin expects another demonstration. James inches closer.
“Keep your lips parted,” James says before taking a slow drag — and he’s inches away now, Martin can feel the shadow of his presence, that tingle you get when somebody is close enough to touch. He thinks his heart picks up speed. He’s not sure why.
James leans in further, impossibly close. Martin feels the heat of his breathing more than he can hear or see it, and his own breathing stutters. James looks up at Martin with an almost searching gaze.
Right. Lips parted. He’d forgotten.
James gives him a brief pause, and then, there’s smoke.
He exhales directly into Martin’s mouth, breaths shared, oxygen and carbon and something intoxicating in a way that goes beyond the nicotine. His head feels light and heavy at once, the smoke comes with a visceral pull to it, almost like gravitas. He keeps inhaling, he wants every last molecule of it; smoke tastes better when it’s James’s.
Feels better, too. The smoke feels soft rather than scathing, like the chemicals soften when they pass through James first. Nothing burns this time. It’s warm, mellowing, and he exhales the borrowed vapour with a calmness that feels like it belongs to James.
They burn through the filter slowly, through steady passes of shared space, and something anaesthetising settles in Martin’s bones. At some point, he finds his fingers woven into the fabric of James’s jacket, gripping, grounding.
The last wisp of grey passes between them languidly, but neither moves for seconds that feel as though they stretch into minutes, as though time has decided this moment is important enough to hold them there.