TUESDAY
05 NOVEMBER, 1996
DORIAN

               Our lips have hardly touched before I stagger back. My cheeks burn as I pray the building crumbles before I have to process what I've done. Forget the casualties, I'll never look him in the eye again.

'Sorry–'

Naturally, he has to outdo me. An act that to me is equitable to diving into a shark tank is hardly more daunting than sinking into the river is to him. He shreds my trophy of bravery and tosses the confetti aside.

Before I can finish an apology, his hands have found the sides of my jaw to yank my mouth back to his. For three beats of my heart, I don't know how to reciprocate. My lips are numb. Pain will be worse after this.

But fear has nothing to grip when Isaiah is this close.

The party and the fireworks go silent. All the world's disjointed noise mutes until there's nothing to hear but my heartbeat and his heartbeat, which I feel in my fingertips when they fall to his neck. Unless that's my heartbeat too, unless it doesn't matter, unless they're the same, two hearts that connect like bulbs through the circuit of our veins and glow for the first time in years.

Staggering backwards, I sit on the bed and, with a tuck on the back of his thighs, Isaiah straddles my lap.

The sigh that leaves me when my hands fall to his waist is one of contentment beyond the rush of my blood and dizziness that poises every nerve of my body as a string for him to play; it's beyond anything sexual. This is where my hands belong, holding onto you. This is what HaShem created my hands for.

The moan that follows moments later when, tightening my hold, I pull him firm against me is pure desire.

Fingers knotted in the excess fabric around his waist, I push up his blouse and it untucks from his jeans. Jeans... Why are we both wearing jeans? Who on G-d's Earth thought it apt to make clothes out of such an unyielding fabric?

He grinds into me, desperate for a spark of sensation, but it's when my hands slip under his shirt that Isaiah finally gasps. His body is icier than even I'm used to; I'm sure my touch feels like the lick of flames. Maybe it's the damnation that drags him to such intense pleasure. He breaks the kiss to drop his head back and his eyes shut, moans chasing each other from his mouth.

I graze something foreign on his stomach. A belly button piercing. Three chains of silver dangle from the main bead, all ending in a tear-shaped pendant. I don't even bother stifling the sigh it draws from my throat. (Are you trying to kill me?) Isaiah grins and captures my lips again. (You are. Killing me.)

With ease, I turn us over to lay him on his back. We're still sideways on the bed; his head brushes the wall while his feet plant to the floor. As I latch my lips to his throat, he holds the back of my head (my kippah fell off at some point). His other hand hooks into the waistband of my jeans. His fingers are so close.

I force my consciousness to return to my body enough to meet his eyes. 'I want you inside me.'

What I mean is: here's your proof. What I mean is: I remember.

The crassness takes him aback. He's not used to me being so direct. Then, surprise is swallowed by desire as he swears under his breath, whispers my name like a prayer — Fuck, Dorian. What he means is: I don't recognise you.

He shakes his head. 'We should stop.'

We should. But what's one more regret now?

'Seven more seconds.'

Isaiah shakes his head again. 'Eight.' And with a smile, he turns his hand around, slips it into my jeans, and feels me through my boxers.

My arms give in, my forehead dropping onto the mattress above his shoulder. I haven't been touched in six years and I'm as ready to come into his palm as I was at eighteen when he wrapped his fingers around my cock for the first time.

His left hand remains on my head as he caresses the shell of my ear, the fingers of the right stroking me through my underwear. He sighs as I trace my way down his stomach, but when my fingers find his belt buckle, he pulls away. The visor of cruelty gone to allow such vulnerability into his eyes I have to strangle back tears.

Finally, I beg. 'Please don't leave.'

'I can't...'

'Please.'

'I won't do this with you.' I'm not sure if he means I won't do this with you or I won't do this with you, but he catches his breath enough to repeat himself and I realise it's both. 'I can do car sex and disgusting pub toilet sex and back alley by the rubbish bins sex, but I won't do none of em with you.' He reads my "why?" from my mind and answers. 'I came here to find a fuck, not a lover.'

I pick myself up, sitting back on my heels, as my gaze falls to the bruising around his neck. Is that what he wants? Because that I can't deliver, not even if it was that or never seeing him again...

I nod and, only for the sake of speaking, say, 'You got your belly button pierced.'

Isaiah shuffles back to lean against the wall so I'm straddling his calves rather than his hips. He untangles the chains of the navel ring and tucks the front of his blouse back into his jeans. It doesn't make him look any less dishevelled — his lips are swollen and his locs messy, any passer-by will know what he's been doing — though I'm sure the gesture is more symbolic than pragmatic. It means: this was fun but I'll leave now.

'Yeah... I always wanted my ears done but I reckoned if I got any visible piercings or tattoos, I might as well move back into my car and quit my jobs. So got em in places people won't see.'

A blade in my chest, I go to ask him what he means by moving back into his car but when I speak, it's a different question that comes out. 'You have a tattoo?'

Isaiah hums the affirmative but before I can ask for details, his eyes narrow. 'And you better not start quoting no damn Leviticus at me–'

'I wasn't going to. Why would I?'

Already out of breath, he leans against the wall and watches me. 'You always thought you was a better Jew than me.'

I scoff. What I'd like to do is burst into tears, but isn't anger always so much easier than sincerity? That's what I learnt in adulthood. 'No, I didn't. Not once in my life have I thought that. That's all you.'

Arms wrapping over his chest, Isaiah turns his head to scowl at my bookcase. 'I got it for you.' For a moment, I don't understand what he's talking about, but there's a crack in his voice spackled by venom.

Exasperation dissolves. 'Why?'

'Why do people get tattoos for their dead grandmothers?'

The answer is so candid, and consequently so cruel, it stuns me. It wipes me blank. Which is nothing to the sight of him pinching himself before he looks at me, the way one does when getting vaccinated or a tooth removed even if the effort proves futile every time.

'Why did you buy me poetry, Dorian?'

'New York has a lot of queer bookstores. I thought of you...' I pick at a loose thread at the hem of my t-shirt. 'I thought if I bought it for you, HaShem would have to cross our paths again.'

The laugh that tears out of him skins me to the bone. 'You ain't changed a bit.'

I watch his hands wring in his lap, watch as he nearly breaks his fingers when his knuckles refuse to crack.

'If you wanted our paths to cross, you coulda just come back. You always known where I were. You didn't have to wait six years for us to coincidentally bump into each other.'

'I know.' The whole answer is: I thought if I bought it for you, HaShem would cross our paths again at a time by which you would have miraculously forgiven me, it would be a sign that you want us to be friends.

My eyes crawl up to his. His tears soak the soil, cleansing out toxins until the brown slowly returns to the shade I'm used to. It doesn't sow relief. The seeds that sprout are those of betrayal.

'We been at the same uni for a year, Dorian. You coulda looked for me.'

A new apology claws out of my stomach but I trap it in my throat. Apologising now feels self-serving. I could have. I should have. What I did instead was isolate in my accommodation for a year and try to run away when I saw him. Where did I get the nerve to ask him to do anything different?

'Not one phone call, not one postcard, not one fucking courier pigeon. You coulda used the white pages if you wanted.'

'You made me promise not to,' I say lamely.

'Yeah, I did. Before you moved to another fucking continent.'

I move off his ankles and sit instead on the edge of the bed, unable to face him any longer. Noise drips back in: the music I could never identify, laughter, drunk arguments, fireworks. Isaiah doesn't leap to his feet once the final obstacle is removed. Rather, his head thuds against the wall and though I'm faced away from him, I know he's pleading with the ceiling.

'One night.'

I twist to look at him. He doesn't reciprocate.

'I can pretend for one night. Tomorrow, I'm done. I don't want you to find my number or coincidentally bump into me after tutorials even though we go to different colleges.' His eyes dart from the ceiling to pin me in place. 'I mean it. If you give me another book, I'll punch you in the face...'

A smile hovers over his mouth. 'Even though it'll hurt me more than you.'

I keep my expression as neutral as I can. 'I accept those terms.'

Isaiah massages his fingers, working each phalange in turn. 'We can go to mine. Less noise.'

Shock starts at the back of my throat before I catch it. Isaiah never allowed me to visit his home in Lower Halsett. He never even allowed me across the bridge.

'I live in... Banbury, though... The rent's way cheaper and I gotta send money to my muma–' Grimacing, he cuts himself off. 'It's a bit of a drive, if you don't mind.'

Mind? G-d, I pray we hit every red light, a roadblock, get a flat tyre — anything that will make it last. I'll do anything for the next ten hours to be infinite.

Notes

Leviticus 19:28: You shall not make gashes in your flesh for the dead, or incise any marks on yourselves.