THURSDAY
14 NOVEMBER, 1996
DORIAN

               I loathe cars. I can't hold him the way I need to.

He won't stop shivering. I take both his hands in mine and try to warm them up: rub them between my palms and massage each joint in turn. Isaiah lets me do this but is apathetic to the gesture. His stare clutches onto mine. The interior lights are still off and the puffy redness in his eyes doesn't look as harsh as I know it to be.

'You don't... have to touch me.'

I screw my eyes shut to keep tears from welling into them. Can't I just comfort him without being so weak he ends up having to comfort me? One day I won't break down every time he does. (Or maybe not, maybe I don't want to learn not to, maybe this is what love is: breaking down every time he does.)

Unable to get a word through my strangled throat, I pull his hands, cupped in mine, to my lips, kiss the skin where the webbing of his thumb meets the knuckle of his index, and try to breathe warmth into his bones.

All I can think is: I did this to him.

I might have had good intentions in leaving but I could have done it some other way — any other way. I know Isaiah as deeply as he does me and I knew exactly where the cut would bleed most. Couldn't I have shoved the knife somewhere else? I could have said anything and I chose "this isn't real".

Like a stuck cassette, my mind locks onto his verdict in the stairwell before the call about his mother: "You don't respect me." "You don't respect me and I can't trust you."

"You don't respect me."

'I don't think about you like that.'

His brow creases, wanting clarification but too tired to ask.

'When I–' I swallow but the pressure in my throat eases only a fraction. I caress his skin at a steady rhythm to keep myself tethered to the moment (you've always been my tether). 'When I left, I said it was because you weren't real to me and I didn't mean it. And I definitely didn't mean it like any of the men who've said that to you.'

'I know.'

A sigh rattles in his throat. It turns into a sob and in a blink, he's crying again.

'I'm s–'

He shakes his head before I can apologise. Isaiah wrestles his stare from mine and I ache. You're never the one to break eye contact.

'Being with you... that's what it's supposed to feel like.'

We've been back for nine days and his accent is already regaining its texture; every th-sound getting closer to a d by the hour, letters dropped or transformed so naturally it's as if there's no other way to pronounce them. As inappropriate as it is, I smile.

The tenderness in his voice claws at my chest (I love you. I love you, please let me) but it's nothing compared to the clash of agony and joy when he leans into me ("I think I'm going insane, please hold me"). I let his hands go to wrap my arms around him.

With his head tucked under my chin, the words quiver against my throat; I feel his pain more than I hear it. 'It doesn't feel like that with other people. They don't... The things I put up with... We said it's not a sin because we love each other, it can't be wrong if we love each other. I ain't even like these men so what excuse have I got?' His voice breaks. 'I'm disgusting.'

'No. No.'

'You don't know.' His fingers strangle into my t-shirt and he crams so tight against me, it's like he wants to slip through my ribcage (I want you to, I want you to live inside my ribcage. I made it just for you). 'You don't know, Dorian.'

Next, he tells me. Tells me all the awful things men have said to him, about how he seeks it out and baits them only to regret it when fear becomes solid in his stomach, about the times he genuinely thought he would die. How sometimes he's too terrified to sleep for three nights only to seek it out again.

I did this to him. I did this to him.

Except I didn't, did I? His accidental admission from Friday festers in my stomach, reinforced by what he said only minutes ago. For days, I tried to re-spin it, convinced myself I misinterpreted and searched for alternatives, but the more I think about it, the more obvious it becomes. It recontextualizes everything I thought, at the time, to be nothing more than quirks: the bruises in places I didn't understand though he always found a way to explain them with his own clumsiness, the way how, for years, he insisted to sleep against the wall and spoon me but never the other way around, the fact that we had sex seven times before he allowed me over him.

Isaiah burns up. Ricocheting to the opposite end of the pendulum, he smoulders in my arms and my palms grow clammy from the heat that radiates through his jumper.

He yanks himself free. Panic plucks my veins.

'All my life, I put up with everyting and now I can't retaliate if I wanted to.'

He tears his jumper over his head and whips it onto the dash. His glare on the windscreen threatens to crack it. His disclosures are crammed into the backseat as getting him to relax claims first priority.

I shift, edge only a centimetre closer to his heaving frame. 'It's not your fault.' I'm relieved my voice is steady and at a regular volume; this isn't a subject for whispers. 'The way people treat you is never your fault — you told me that once.'

Isaiah remains unresponsive long enough for me to worry maybe he hasn't heard me over his wheezy breathing (cigarettes did you no favours). Just as I'm about to repeat myself, he speaks.

'Did you know Kitner got sacked? Because of Section 28. My muma told me when it happened.'

The change of tracks stuns me too much to respond.

Kitner was Isaiah's A-level literature teacher, his favourite at school. So much was obvious from the smile that always graced his face after class or how he did English coursework first regardless of earlier deadlines.

'Him were the only teacher at Coeus who defended me. I always told him not to, that I could handle it and I didn't want him to get sacked cause of me.' Hunching over, he covers his face with his hands and his words muffle again. 'You know how him responded? "I wouldn't be losing my job because of you, I'd be losing it because of my humanity..."'

Isaiah's sobs shake the words out of him.

'My first year at Oxford, when I stayed in accommodation, my flatmates joined one of them those protests against Section 28 and they invited me. I didn't go cause I knew the police would come and I can't get arrested: I'd lose my scholarship.

'I lived my whole life like that.' His voice drops back to a whisper, not cracked but unsteady in a way that makes it obvious he's balancing on the edge. 'Everyting's always been for a rassclat scholarship.

'For a literature degree, too, that I'll never make no bank with — which is fine, cause I adored it, but... I've tailored myself into the ideal student at the expense of so much. I've sacrificed so much of my humanity to get out of this place. Coming back and seeing it's ain't nuttin like the fucking gulag I built in my head is just salt in the wound. It were for nuttin. I didn't need to leave. I needed to move out. I didn't need to leave.'

One has to leave to come back. We despise the homes we're born into, then we leave only to wish we never had but if we never had, we would never learn not to despise them. Maybe regret is sometimes necessary, maybe some wounds must rot if they are to be healed. Maybe homes can't be given and must be made.

It's a cruel joke.

I place my hand on his shoulder. Isaiah flinches at the touch but looks up before l can retract it. Tears cling to his eyelashes like dew to blades of grass in Coeus grounds.

Slowly, like a fallen tree into a bog, he sinks forward until his head meets my clavicle. Cigarettes still cling to his clothes and burnt coffee tries to suffocate me the same way it did whenever I'd cross the English corridor at school (why do English teachers always drink burnt coffee?), but beneath it, the sweet tang of his skin unearths.

'I can't live like this no more.' I'm not sure whether it's a realisation, a promise, or a prayer... Unless it's all three at once. 'I regret every decision I've ever made in my life... Except you. It should be the other way around. I'm supposed to regret you.'

I toy with the loose fabric of my joggers. 'I feel the need to apologise.'

'Don't.'

Isaiah sits up and, by some miracle, smiles at me. His lips part just enough to flash a sliver of his tooth gap and Liszt's Liebestraum no. 3 tickles through my chest. He cups my face and I don't move for fear I'll scare him off but he caresses my cheekbones so tenderly I couldn't him ever imagine him withdrawing touch.

'I dunno what's going on with you or what exactly happened in America — and you ain't gotta tell me. But you can. You can talk to me bout if you ever want.'

I nod.

Gazing at me, his eyes so impossibly large (and so beautifully brown — there's nothing I adore more than the way your pupil is entirely indistinguishable from your iris, just like mine, there's nothing I adore more than the fact my eyes are the same as yours), he moves his hands to my hair and kisses me. A firm close-mouthed kiss that flattens our noses against each other but remains motionless.

Isaiah tastes of himself again, of the apple lollipops he started eating again to, I now realise, help ease his cigarette cravings.

When he withdraws, his attention floats to my hairline. He palms my waves. 'You ain't wash your hair today?'

Beneath the farce of a casual question, worry strums a base chord. I always wash my hair on Thursdays, just as he does, except I'm much worse at letting go of routines — the fact that he hasn't washed his hair today even if his shiva has passed is nothing worth noting, but I don't change my schedule just because I'm "too tired" or forgot. Isaiah knows this.

The truth is, after I stopped working on my music at seven, I spent five hours in agonising spirals. Don't leave me alone in a motel room if you're not ready for me to incarnate the apocalypse.

'I can do it... tomorrow.'

'You gonna wash your hair on Sabbath?'

Isaiah mocks me and all my wounds heal. His mockery is devotion born from intimate knowledge. He knows me and what are you to do when you know every profound corner of someone's soul other than make a well-natured joke at their expense?

'I'll do it before sunset.'

'Let me do it. Now. Please.'

He's pleading (you're pleading). It stuns me. Why are you pleading? Have I not begged for this since our reunion? Haven't you been the one to refuse?

'Okay.'

As though his body is suddenly feather-light, he bounces to his feet. He rounds the car to open my door and takes my hand to guide me to the door and into the bathroom where the lights have the same green tint as the rest of the motel. One clothing at a time, he undresses me, then helps me into the tub like coachmen help royalty out of their carriage in period dramas.

Throwing his own clothes on the floor, Isaiah climbs in and adjusts the water temperature, waits for it to warm before he pulls me under the shower. Once we're clean, he plugs the drain but leaves the water clear. You remember I don't like the way foam feels against my skin? I must have only mentioned it once.

My smile grows. I hide it in my arm as I sit down.

Isaiah slips behind me, legs bending naturally around my middle. He turns the water off before the tub would be considered full by most people and something churns in my gut.

I've always taken everything for granted. When I lived with my parents, I took a bath at least once a week even if I never stayed in the water for long, unable to handle the way anything feels when the pads of my fingers crinkle. I always filled the tub to the brim until I couldn't move without sloshing it over the sides. It's no wonder I'm damned to drown.

I took everything for granted. Him too.

Isaiah lathers shampoo in the direction of my waves and doesn't notice when I hang my head. He gently rakes the shampoo in with a comb, careful not to disturb the pattern and I pray to live in this moment forever. I think it's moments like these that I'm most alive.

Please, won't you let me wash your hair for you too? I long to roll each loc between my palms (every Thursday, you will be the holiest of my routines) and to massage castor oil into your scalp until it becomes my scent too.

Otherwise, you curse me to a restless existence. My hands will never be content with anything less.

The sensation of him rubbing my scalp cradles me so close to sleep that I think I dream it when he speaks.

'Thank you, Dorian.'

He means: for everything. For driving him here and helping him with his mother and comforting him now. I hate that he's thanking me. I hate that it isn't a guarantee, that it isn't something so obvious he wouldn't need verbal gratitude.

The fear of getting shampoo in my mouth paralyses me but the ants crawling under my skin quickly surpass and I have to get them out.

'I hate that I left.'

His hands halt in my hair. They rest on the top of my head, a comfortable weight I enjoy more than I want to, more than is appropriate in this context. Isaiah allows silence to linger but it isn't tense, it doesn't knot each of my ribs in turn like corset strings until I can't breathe, much less speak. (This is not my mother's silence.)

So I continue: 'I'm sorry.'

What I mean is: I can't live like this anymore either. I hate the way I left and the way I lived the 2,122 days after. All it would've taken is one call, one letter, one look in the phonebook to find your address or at least your mother's. I never did.

My shame echoes in the bathroom.

Isaiah disrupts it. A single word, whispered but clear, that erupts goosebumps over my arms regardless of the warm bathwater: 'Okay.'