TUESDAY
05 NOVEMBER, 1996
ISAIAH

               He's going to make my car smell like camomile and cypress. He's going to make my bed smell like camomile and cypress. I'm going to regret this.

I pluck a cigarette from the slit below the radio intended for storing cassettes and punch the lighter into its socket. Though it'll take a minute to warm, I roll down my window and the November night swarms in. It manages only to highlight Dorian's presence in the passenger seat. I went to the party to forget Dorian, not to bring him over.

How is it that after six years you still have the same scent? Dorian never used any cologne or perfume but I would've hoped after five years in America, he'd come back with the fragrance of caramelised nuts or exhaust fumes.

Camomile I understand; your favourite tea remains your favourite tea precisely because it always has been. But the cypress is so violently Halsett, so wreathed in dewy mornings ambled across the grounds of Coeus Academy for Boys I keep slipping into a mirage of driving through Suffolk and slapped out by the grand architecture that closes us in.

You can take the boy out of the country, but...

I never thought I'd say that about you. Couldn't you have done me the courtesy of aftershave for one night? He's going to make my bed smell like camomile and cypress. I'm going to regret this.

The lighter pops out. We both flinch.

I let go of the steering wheel long enough to light my cigarette and Dorian curls his lip. His stare burns the round scar on the flat of my left forearm until it stings despite being nine years old. Still, I refuse to look at him just as I refuse to say anything as if acknowledging his protest would be equal to admitting it legitimate.

You would never smoke.

It's not personal, Doron. I don't recognise myself either.

The first inhale of nicotine soothes the itch under my skin. My shoulders ease a fraction and I finally settle into my seat, resting my arm on the ledge of the open window. Still, critters scuttle in my stomach. They rise in my throat like bile, stitch into admissions and prayers that claw my tongue with the need to escape.

I want to tell him everything.

When a person sits in a car with another, they are always overcome with the urge to bare their soul. Catholics have confession and the rest of us have taxi rides shared with strangers to split the fare. But where handing intimate pieces of yourself to people who you never exchanged names with might be liberating, doing so with the person you once trusted with all of you is a tourist trap. It'll cost everything and give nothing, not even the thrill of novelty.

I exterminate the insects with a deep drag of my cigarette and jab the radio on. It's All Coming Back to Me Now comes on I instantly turn it off again. God is mocking us, or Céline Dion is at the very least. I consider one of my CDs but none of them feels fitting. What kind of music do you listen to when you're in the car with your once-lover-and-best-friend about to have sex?

My cigarette ends when we reach the motorway and I have to roll the window up. Within minutes, silence has gnawed my bones hollow.

I cave. 'So, was New York everyting they say?'

Dorian twitches at the threat of small talk but manages a passable imitation of curiosity. 'What do they say?'

That isn't the response I expected and I take a moment to compile every movie and song about the city into a few words: 'Loud. Inspiring. Greedy.'

'It could've been all those. Sure.' He catches my inquisitive glance and, ironing creases in his overnight bag which he clings to in his lap though I offered to put it in the boot, explains: 'Aside from unavoidable things, I didn't really go outside.'

His gaze adheres to the contour of the trees that line the motorway though he feels me looking — probably because he feels me looking. I know it makes him uncomfortable but I can't stop myself from staring. Dorian always dreamed of living somewhere with culture and now he's telling me he lived in New York City for four years and didn't go to one performance at the Lincoln Centre?

The car rattles and I snap my attention to the road. Apologising, I swerve away from the sleeper lines. I leave an intentional pause to prove I'm focused before I speak again. 'Did you at least see the Statue of Liberty?'

'No. What would I do there?'

'Uh... Admire liberty,' I say, so uncertainly it sounds like a question. 'Did you at least say "hey, I'm walkin' here!" once to piss off locals?'

Dorian laughs and the sound streams right to my chest where it revives cadaverous roots. He shakes his head, squinting and dimples displayed. 'No.'

I adjust my grip on the steering wheel and shift in my seat. The backs of my thighs sweat. His laughter continues to strum through my heartstrings, making my blood flow too quick for comfort and forcing acute awareness of my body onto me as the tea light under my heart ignites. It infects me until I'm biting down a grin.

'Okay, so you moved to New York for four years to sit in your flat and write music? Cuz, if you wanted to isolate in an overpriced shoebox, there are plenty of em in Oxford. You coulda just done that h–' I cut myself off. Laughter shrivels.

You could have done that here, Dorian.

'Julliard–'

'Ranks as the top music school in the world. I remember.'

Dorian plays with the zipper on his bag, a non-stop clinking that, rather than ease the discomfort, sharpens it to a knife's edge.

'You like it here?'

'Sure. Yeah, it's...' Hell. 'It ain't Halsett.'

Silence becomes oppressive again. Neither of us attempts to dodge it for the rest of the drive.

'This is it.' I turn into the car park of a squat building across the road from the train tracks. Beyond them, gleams River Cherwell, which is no sight in comparison to the gracious current of River Arene.

I turn the engine off and the lights come on. Still, neither of us climbs out of the car until the timer has run out and darkness swallows us again, which is when I clear my throat and unbuckle my seatbelt. As we walk to the doors, doom music plays in the back of my mind, the kind you'd expect in a disaster documentary depicting the final minutes before tragedy. Don't do it. Whatever you is thinking of doing with him.

This is a mistake.

Despite the fact it mostly houses retirees, there's no lift in the building and I lose my breath in the climb to the second floor. I try to soften my gasps when I reach my door, but the effort is, as always, counterproductive. My fingers shake too much to get the key into the lock for at least a minute when Dorian finally offers to do it.

I grimace as I hand him the keys. 'Sorry.'

'Why are you apologising?'

I don't warrant him a response.

I'm purposeful to look anywhere but him when he unlocks the door. To an untrained eye, the flat is quite disinteresting; small and empty, but Dorian knows me to my core. I could hope that after six years, he might be a little rusty in the language of my soul, but he notices every detail on his first glance and understands them on the second. The kitchen table with paper crammed under one leg to stabilise it, an awkward mid-size, not for one but not for two either. The dishes on the drying rack and the dry laundry on a clothes horse I never have the energy to put away. The dust visible in every corner.

And most importantly, the absence: absence of a rug, of curtains, of a radio, posters, fridge magnets, anything.

Dorian takes one look at the non-brand velcro trainers I wedge off my feet and knows I bought them after seven occasions of going to sleep with my shoes on because I knew I'd never get them back on in the morning and the task is slightly easier without laces. He sees the Aldi leaflet advertising back-to-school sales tucked partly under the baseboard and doesn't brainstorm potential purposes for it to be on the floor but knows I just don't dare to pick it up. With fibro, bending over is a gamble. There's always a fifty per cent chance I won't get back up. One advertisement isn't worth the possibility of staying curled up by the door for anywhere between minutes to most of the day.

'You can see the river from here.'

What he intended to say was some variant of you have a lovely home but he's always been terrible at lying.

Dorian eases off his trainers to get to the window. Both hands on the sill, he leans forward until his breath fogs the glass. The streetlamps highlight his cheeks while the rest of him is obscured into a silhouette.

As if turning the light on might sever the dreamscape, I leave the flat dark and tread to his side. The water is as inky as the sky, distinguishable from the field beyond it only by its reflective surface. It mirrors the amber sparks of fireworks in the distance, far enough to be silent and not agitate Dorian.

Dorian's black eyes are the ideal backdrop for fireworks; much better than the sky because they never suffer clouds.

Warmth imbuing my cheeks, I turn back to the river. 'Wouldn't swim in this one. It's got cyanobacteria.'

In my periphery, I watch his mouth twitch prematurely at his own joke. 'Better than radiation.'

Dorian's smile wilts the thorns around my heart and allows the depleted muscle to reinvigorate. It swells too quickly for me to keep it to myself the way I do muscle spasms that jump me in public. Blood reaches my fingers and toes for the first time in years. The only thing that would be less subtle is if I started levitating. It feels like I already am...

A freight train releases me from the plight of filling the silence. We watch the containers and lumber cars zoom below the window, as if it's common etiquette not to speak while a train passes. It takes over a minute for its forlorn whisper to fade into the night.

'Have you ever gone back home? Sorry.' For a fraction of a second, I think he's apologising for giving in to impulse, but he corrects: 'You probably don't call it home.'

Leaning against the windowsill with my forearms, I drop my gaze to the car park. Dry leaves spiral over the asphalt, threatening tornadoes until they disperse.

'No.'

Dorian wonders whether I mean no, I haven't or no, I don't but doesn't ask for clarification. Instead, he leaves his own answer equally ambidextrous: 'Me neither.'

'Sometimes I miss it,' he adds, only to regret it instantly and rush to justify his sin. 'The rest of the world is so loud. I can't sleep.' He doesn't allow that to land either before his shoulders slump. 'Maybe I just miss you.'

To Dorian, there's no Halsett without us. The time before is the malleable memories of a five-year-old and he never was aquatinted with time after. Halsett was home with you, but I had half a year alone to contemplate cliché idioms about hearts and houses.

'Guess I had the chance to separate the two,' I say. 'Silver linings...'

When silence stretches with no fireworks or trains coming to our rescue, Dorian peels his attention from the night with a budding smile. 'This isn't the best foreplay conversation, is it?'

'I'd have to put it in the top ten per cent,' I lie. He's in the top percentile for even speaking.

Maybe that's what finally grants me the courage to look at him. Save for the change in his build, he's identical to the Dorian in my memory: the same dark eyes, same wondrous lashes, same under-eye wrinkles and crow's feet, same flat nose, plump lips, and smooth cheeks save for a handful of new acne scars.

But something's different. Where hope used to be the string that laced him together, his features are now kept in place by a rough stitch of sorrow. He carries the aura of someone who finally makes it inside from a fiendish storm and now pours rainwater on the entrance rug with a fever already latched to their heels. His misery beguiles me to lower my shield and that makes him twice as dangerous.

I can deal with men doing what they will with my body but Dorian can do what he will with my soul. All I can do is ask you not to kill me. I can take violence but I won't survive hurt again.

You're going to regret it. I'm going to regret it. Do I care?

I take his hand. It's warm, calloused from gym equipment, yet soft as velvet. I doubt anything could make Dorian's palms rough, not with the way he lathers every bit of his skin in oils and butters as if it's a Thoracic ritual. Both of us watch my thumb travel the mountains and valleys of his knuckles.

Both of us look up to find the other's gaze. I lift my free hand to his face, trace the arch of his eyebrow to get to his head where I caress the ripples his hair is styled into. Maybe I'm biased but he looks better with his hair in waves than shaved to a buzzcut.

'I still wanna have sex with you,' I whisper.

'Me too.' Instantly adopting my protocol, Dorian keeps his voice low. The hand that isn't holding mine lands on my back. 'I'll go wash first if that's okay.'

I cup the back of his neck and pull myself up to peck his lips. 'Whatever makes you comfortable.'

He smiles. Smiles when he kisses me. Though it's an autumn night, Dorian pours sunlight into me; golden as Halsett daybreak, sweet as apple juice. I lift onto my toes, let go of his hand to clutch his shoulder, and I know I'm doomed.

I keep hoping I'm over him by now, that I'll get through tonight and it won't tear me apart. I can enjoy the sex without remembering every touch we've ever shared. But I knew you for eleven years. It'll take twice as many to get over you...

The love we shared couldn't be cleanly winnowed. We met too young, love started when we were too young. It grew with my body, my body with it, and as a result, it entwined into my veins, fused so close it was impossible to separate the two and my emergency surgery left me with only half a circulatory system. Six years later, I still find roots in places I never thought I would.

My love for Dorian was never world-stopping grandeur — it just was. Reliable, certain, mundane. It was one of those things a person trusts is above change. My friendship with Dorian was the one thing I always trusted was above hurt.

It didn't need to stop the world because it was the world. And now there is no world. I've accustomed to life as an exile, and now Dorian threatens to invite me back home. His lips open the doorway. It's so habitual that I can't stop myself from stepping into it.