TUESDAY
05 NOVEMBER, 1996
ISAIAH

               Dorian pulls me flush against him. The strength of his arms is foreign but it builds a secure cradle I wouldn't mind getting used to. Whether due to anaemia or his touch, flutters tickle my knees; if he lets go, I might collapse.

He doesn't seem to intend to let go. All he does is pull me closer.

It's counterintuitive, but Dorian becomes more confident when he's naked. He was always most himself at night, dressed in nothing but boxers, like he sheds timidity along with his clothes. That hasn't changed — in fact, he's more bold than ever before.

I'm dizzy when I pull away from the kiss, craning my neck so the rest of our bodies can stay in touch. 'Are you sure about this?'

'Yes.'

A smile tugs at my lips. 'Me too.'

We have to postpone touching long enough to spread the towel on the bed. I only have two pillows but I allow Dorian to arrange them as he likes.

I still ask. 'Are you comfortable?'

'Yes.'

Nodding, I settle onto my heels between his legs and lose myself in the sight. The orange glow falls like honey on his dark skin, skin as brown as the most arable soil that nourishes the most abundant of apple trees, and within a second, I re-live every Rosh Hashana we spent together. When I kiss his chest now, I'm also seventeen and sixteen and fifteen, sharing honey-dipped apple wedges with him, still fully enchanted that youth will last forever.

His abdomen is firm to the touch. I've never considered myself "into" muscle, but when his shiver under my fingertips, I couldn't imagine anything more attractive. There's nothing violent about muscle on Dorian. They don't say I can snap you in half if I want to, but I won't get tired even if I have to carry you up five flights of stairs.

Though his body is unrecognisable, his skin is exactly as smooth as I remember. There are only two scars on him: one on his left thumb from a slipped knife when cutting an apple, and another on his knee from the time I dared him to climb an oak by the river and he fell. We were eight then.

I apologized with tears in my eyes and Dorian just beamed. 'I'll treasure it forever.'

Do you still?

I kiss the scar on his finger first, then his knee, which I use as a starting point to travel his thigh. His skin becomes progressively softer and more sensitive until his legs attempt to clamp shut. I grin into the flesh centimetres from his groin and, latching my eyes onto his, I graze the skin with my teeth.

Dorian jerks. His breath braids "God" with "Shay" and the two become interchangeable on his tongue.

'Don't do that.'

I pull back with a blink of feigned innocence. 'You ain't like it no more?'

'Like it?' he repeats. 'It'll ruin everything else.'

I settle onto my stomach. 'I don't think it will,' I sing as I trace my hand down, allow him to welcome relief only to retreat. With a huff that means fine, I'll do it myself, Dorian wraps his fingers around his shaft only for me to pry them off. 'No. I want to make you come.'

'Touch me then.'

'I am touching you–'

'Please.'

I pry my wallet from my jeans pocket and fetch a small lube packet, the kind of plastic pouch that you get condiments in with your takeaway. Ripping it with my teeth, I squeeze it into my hand and spread it over him. Dorian writhes at every brush against his perineum, whines flowing into each other.

I make a show of rolling my eyes. 'America really did spoil you. You wasn't never this impatient before.'

A rebuttal builds in his throat but before it climbs to his tongue, I take him in my mouth and he dissolves. As if by instinct, Dorian grabs my hair with both hands. That alone makes me grind against the bed, my jeans more stifling by the second. How does he still remember the exact force I like for my hair to be pulled? I would remember, but the sex he's had in America is nothing like the sex I've been having in Oxford.

Shame tries to reclaim its territory but as I ease my fingers inside, Dorian tugs again and it's like he yanks the memories of every other sexual experience out of my brain.

When his thighs start to tremble, I pull away. I wrestle out of my jeans and boxers, then reach for my socks but Dorian whines, 'Just leave them on. Your feet are always cold anyway,' and I smile. Not that we save any time; my fingers decide now is the perfect moment to numb and I fumble with the condom for nearly a minute before Dorian opens the foil. With a kiss on my cheek, he rolls it on for me.

So he doesn't have an aversion to touching latex anymore. American boys.

I black out for a breath when I'm fully inside him. It takes a while before I dare to move. When I do, bursts of pleasure explode in the divine fissure between thought and sight, not quite the back of my eyes but not the front of my mind either. They send waves across my whole body — correction: my whole being.

I was wrong: sex isn't better when it's purely physical.

Dorian clings to me, keeping me from sitting up even if I had the core muscles to do so. I don't; my body evanesces further with every ebb and flow and whatever it is that habits it — my soul, my spirit, my consciousness — that I've stubbornly denied the existence of glows brighter and warmer. Sweat only enhances his scent. Home. I want to stay like this forever.

One of his hands cups the side of my face and aligns my eyes with his. My bliss reflects back to me. The chain of my necklace is long enough to land on his chest and at some point, it moves partly on top of his. My Star of David kisses his Star of David.

The sight thaws my final shackle as if it was made of sugar and not wrought iron. I don't have the energy for this anger. What does it matter? He's here now.

The words taste of apples when they reach my tongue.

'I lo–'

Pleasure is swept by a flash of white pain. I collapse.

I grit my teeth against the mattress. As much as I try to power through it, the pain is so sharp that, for a moment, I think Dorian has stabbed me in the shoulder, that this was all some Shakespearean scheme, and I'm relieved. It's a theatrical way for things to end and what else can I ask for? It will be God's final lesson of the teachings I refused to learn.

Of course, he hasn't. Dorian pats my shoulder as if tapping out of a wrestling match. He could shove me off with ease. 'Are you okay?'

For three breaths, I allow myself to bite down on the corner of the towel. Then, I lift myself up and smile as if the agony doesn't stretch across half my back. ''S all criss.' My voice sounds perfectly candid.

I hate how easy it is to lie to him. I could never have done it straight to his face before — certainly not ten centimetres from his face. Regardless of how easy it is to sell, there's no guarantee Dorian will be a quick buyer.

He squints as he inspects my features. 'Are you in pain?'

'No.'

'We can switch if you're in pain.'

'I'm not in pain. Perfectly fine. Mi irie — that means I'm perfectly fine.'

'Are you tired?'

'I'm fine.'

'Your stamina is awful.'

'It's got better.'

'Smoking made it better?'

'Medical miracle.' Even as I say it, I have to disguise the breathlessness this conversation alone has brought on. Air saws my throat and I have to swallow it down.

'Switch.'

'I'm fine.'

He shuts his eyes for a breath, then opens them to staple his stare on mine. God, you have the world's most beautiful eyes. And God, have I missed them.

I'm stunned for a moment. A moment long enough for Dorian to slide from under me. Fear strikes through my chest, fear he's leaving, that he's had enough and he'll put his clothes back on and take the coach to Oxford without bothering to finish. I'll be left here, curled up in pain for the days.

But all he does is press my chest onto the bed where the towel is damp with his sweat.

Dorian moves both pillows under my hips but they're too flat to offer any sort of support. Positioning himself behind me, he runs his hands down my thighs. His fingertips are rougher than they used to be and I remember the guitar in his Oxford dorm. Does he play it for someone else now? Someone worth deep callouses on every finger?

He tightens his grip to feel the resistance of my flexed muscles and retraces his path to the junction of my pelvis. 'You can just lie down, yakiri.'

Jaw clenched, I'm ready to insist I don't need to, but with a single caress, I give in. The pillows under arch me into position without effort. Satisfied, Dorian's hands slide around my hips and his thumbs hook into the indent of my spine just short of my waist. It takes me a moment to realise the roadblock is my tattoo.

It's simple, nonsense to everyone else — not because they can't deduct basic Latin, but because they lack context and I never offer it. Inked vertically along my spine, low enough to be covered by mid-rise jeans, are two words: SALVA ME.

Why did I get it? For closure, I suppose. But in the same way you bury the dead in a cemetery and not your garden, I don't want the tombstone somewhere I have to look at it every day.

I'm about to fill the silence when his hands continue their journey over my ribs. 'Where does it hurt?'

'Nowhere.'

Dorian presses the heel of his palm into the knot under my shoulder blade and I jolt. 'Here?' he asks, continuing to push against the muscle which is enough for my resistance to crumble in his hands. All I manage to say is, 'Everywhere.'

'Okay.'

He shuffles up my body to sit on my lower back. By a sixth sense, Dorian knows the exact weight to place on me that causes no pain but stretches my spine with a series of pops and cracks that makes him convulse. As disgusted as he is by the sound, he reaches for the drawer in my nightstand to fetch a tub of Vick's VapoRub.

I smile into the mattress at the ease with which he looks through my clutter of medication and granola bars for days I don't make it out of bed, a sight that would scare, if not outright revolt, all the other men I've been nude in front of. Not Dorian.

The smile is spat out as Dorian daubs the ointment onto my shoulder with no warning. Unbothered by my hissing at the unexpected cold, he's rough in his treatment, much stronger now and therefore able to knead even the knots that have been building for six years. The knots are undone with flares of pain and floods of relief that melt me into the bed.

'You don't have to be embarrassed, Shay. You're disabled– Sorry, ill. You aren't going to be able to do everything that everyone else does.'

'You can say disabled.' My voice is flattened by the pressure on my lungs and throat, though I doubt it would be spirited either way. As a teenager, I refused the label like oil does water. Calling myself "ill" as opposed to "disabled" kept open the door for a cure, for it to spontaneously fade if I drank enough green tea. 'If there's one thing I learnt after you left it's that I am definitely disabled.'

'It's not a bad word.'

'Easy for you to say.'

Though I know he has them, he keeps his protests to himself. We've had this conversation enough times to know every variation of it.

Dorian doesn't stop when my eyes shut. He massages everything from the tips of my fingers to the base of my skull and as low on my back as he can get without moving. I'm vaguely aware of the trains that croon past, the sound of celebration echoing in the night, and fireworks in the distance, but they all drift further and further away. Or maybe I'm the one drifting. I sink into a cloud of camomile and cypress, guided along a river by warm hands.

Just as I'm on the brink of sleep, Dorian presses a kiss to the crook of my neck. It kindles a spark that, not unlike a firework, fragments into dozens of stars. They radiate across my back until my body is burning.

Dorian's smile hovers millimetres away. 'My turn.'

The remnants of VapoRub on my skin make it twice as reactive; his breath is enough to wake up every nerve in me and rewire them to a single circuit of pure need. Not that he's in any rush now, happy to torture me with mere grazes of his lips against my spine.

Dorian kisses the shell of my ear. 'I like your hair like this.' The complement is so out of context, it confuses me out of my desire for a heartbeat before his hand knots into my locs. 'It's perfect for pulling.'

Without further delay, pulls me back and latches his lips onto my throat.

I curse. Then continue to string his name with every nip and lick until they crash into each other and Dorian pulls back just enough to meet my gaze. 'You don't like it anymore?'

I do my best to seethe at him but I'm too horny to bother. Instead, I slide my hand under myself only for Dorian to grab the wrist and pin it, along with my left, onto the mattress above my head.

'You can keep your hands right here, yakiri'

My head is still pulled back and I have no hope of filtering out my need. 'Message received. You can stop now.'

He releases my wrists and my hair but refuses to move any faster. Hands returning to my sides, he kisses the base of my skull and works his way down until he has to move back over the mound of my ass to continue. When he does, still leaning over me, his cock lands heavy on the curve and I squirm. Dorian smiles into my spine.

His lips find every knob in turn until he reaches my tattoo and jumps over it. Just as I think he decided it best to leave it untouched, he kisses the skin right below it and, with no foreshadowing, licks both words in one stroke.

Fuck.

'Do you feel okay?'

Tears burn at the corners of my eyes though I can't tell if they're brought on by sheer frustration or the kindness he still affords me after all this time. You're still too good to me.

'Okay? Doron, if I feel any better, my skeleton might collapse.'

'Good.' He squeezes my hip in friendly reassurance. 'Please tell me if you're in pain.'

This time, I don't doubt the source of my tears.

He continues to kiss all the way to my tailbone where I expect he'll stop. He doesn't. Suddenly, I'm panting in terror. And consuming lust.

I would think with the amount of sex I've had, I would've become less sensitive but it's been so long since I've been touched that pleasure has obscured into unknown territory and consequently, turned intimidating. With him, I'm too vulnerable.

It'll ruin everything else. This will ruin everything else. I might have done it once but how will I ever be able to accept the sex strangers give me a second time after he reminds me what it's supposed to feel like?

This isn't pleasure, it's heaven. He makes me human when I've conditioned myself into a body and I'm not sure I'm ready to deal with everything humanity comes with.

Rather than tell him to stop, all I manage to say is, 'I'm gonna come before you even get inside me if you keep going like this.'

'You're an adult. You can hold it.'

Before I have to argue, he pulls away and finds my wallet for a second condom. He fetches a packet of lube too but thankfully has given up the teasing act. He eases into me and leans down to press his chest to my back, interlacing the fingers of both our hands — right with right, and left with left — on either side of my head.

His lips find the shell of my ear and when he whispers, 'You saved me,' I can't find venom to spit at him. Because he saved me too — seventeen years ago, six years ago, and tonight, and there's nothing I want more than for him to continue to do so every day for the rest of my life. Sweet nectar floods my mouth and I share it with him the way we always used to.

I'm home.