Page 42 of Nights Without Night
“No, I meant don’t turn it down. You can use them, but don’t turn the show down.”
“I haven’t even gotten it yet.”
“You will,” he says with all the confidence in the shadowlands. I snort but smile. Something in me settles.
Isadoro pulls away from me suddenly, rolling towards his bedside table. He turns on the lamp and I close my eyes, pushing my face into the pillow to guard them. I hear rustling, and then feel Isadoro rolling back towards me. I open my eyes.
Like an offering between us, Isadoro is holding one of the clay animals I made him when we were young. My hands wrap around his, holding it with him, twisting the creature so it catches the light.
I remember making it when I was eighteen out of real clay, painted and fired so it’s hard and shiny. The figure is a nebulous mass of curling smoke, caught in the shape of a prowling wolf. Its eyes stare back at you, a challenge. It dares you to touch what is his, to reap the consequences. The billows and muscles of the smoke seem to move when the light ripples across it as if you’ve caught it just at the right moment before it dissipates into something else.
“The other ones are at home, but I keep this one with me,” he explains. I don’t have to ask him why this one.
It’s the one that fits him the most.
His other hand envelopes mine where it's tracing the grooves of the animal’s face. I look at him. He looks back.
We fall into the kiss.
The creature is placed carefully on the bedside table and we burn into each other. God, it feels so good to have him pressed against me. To have him in my hands, even if he turns to smoke when it ends.
Each time we touch now, I feel desperate. Feel like yanking at his clothes and digging my fingers into him until they pierce skin and muscle and bone and I’m all inside him, but Isadoro is a tempering force. He drags the kisses on, and on, and I go with them. He rolls on top of me, pressing his whole body against mine, sinking my body into the bed. I let out a moan. I try arching against him, but I’m trapped.
There’s nowhere I want to go.
When the kisses have left my lips puffy and raw and wet, he pulls away and drags my shirt over my head. We undress, uncoordinated, slow, tripping over each other and kissing in between like we can’t help it. When we’re done, he presses me down again, his whole body against mine, and I almost can’t take it.
This is what people don’t talk about. The simple pleasure of having someone else’s body against yours. All their skin and their rivets and the framework of their bones. The feel of their muscles, of their soft undersides, the dips and rises that make them. The small movements of their bodies, the rise of their chest against yours as you feel them breathe, the shudders of their skin.
Oh, their miles of skin. I can feel all of Isadoro’s textures. I feel the rough skin of his hands and the dryness of knees, the prickly hair down his stomach, the soft down across his ass. The little scars from battle, from childhood, markings on the canvas of him. All those little things that make him human. They all add up to one thing.Isadoro. The one person I’ve always loved.
He opens me up with slow fingers. Takes his time, watching me, feeling my own skin and blood and organs and bones. He scissors two fingers wide and I moan at the sudden stretch, arching. He turns them around and hooks them, rubbing inside, and the pleasure is a trembling light. Blinding, perfect.
I let my body be his. Let him look at me, settled under the shelter of his body. When he pulls his fingers out of me, I don’t protest. When he turns me around, I don’t question it. Trust is a clear water flowing between us.
When he sinks into me, it's followed by the press of his body against mine. My hips are tilted up, but my chest is flat on the bed, my face turned sideways on the pillow so he can see me gasp and flush and say his name. He digs an arm under me, holding me close as his other one leans on the bed. When he starts thrusting, I feel it in my whole body. I feel it in the chest against my back. I feel it in his breaths against my neck. I feel it everywhere, inside and out, in the air all around me. It’s Isadoro. It’s always been him.
His arm under me shifts and he tightens a fist around my cock. I mumble his name, or maybe that’s just in my head, as he starts stroking me. It’s a perfect tempo with his thrusts. The pleasure rises as a steady tide. The salty wash rides up, and up, and up until it reaches my feet and drags my whole body with it. It goes through every part of me. It washes me away.
Isadoro fucks me through it and then further still until his hips are stuttering. He buries his face in the back of my neck and I hear my name there, to be buried between skin and hair forever.
We stay pressed close in the aftermath. Our panting breaths turn to soft silence until my voice comes out of nowhere to break it.
“I went to the V.A. a few weeks ago,” it says. I don’t want anything in particular from this conversation. Suddenly, I just want him to know.
“I just asked for advice. I just wanted to…know. That I wasn’t doing the wrong things. To try and know what’s going on,” I say. The silence that follows is long, but he doesn’t move away from me. His hand traces a line, up and down and up and down my back.
“What did they say?”
“That…you’re your own person. That I can’t be in charge of change, only facilitate it as far as you’ll let me. That trauma can take many shapes, but that the biggest thing right now may be the process of adjusting to civilian life. Stuff like that,” I say.
This silence is even longer, but when he talks, he finally says something.
“I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know why I’m in this fucking bed I can’t seem to leave. I was a Team Sergeant of a Special Ops Alpha Team, and now I’m throwing a fucking tantrum over making a bed. It’s like I don’t know myself. It’s like I’m trapped in somebody else’s body. A civilian body I just don’t know how to navigate,” he says in bursts of frustration. I don’t reply, sensing there’s more.
“What am I even going to do here? I can’t go back. I just, I just can’t…but what else is there here? What, I’m gonna deal with fucking drunk people for the rest of my life, watching you get grabbed by sleaze-balls and having to shut up and be nice about it?
“And I know I’m fucked up, okay? I know the way I’m thinking about things isn’t right. It’s like the line between mission and life is blurred, and I’m always looking for something to react to. There’s no structure, there’s no…purpose. I just…” he trails off, lost. I pull away slightly. He resists for a moment, but I push until I’m looking at him. He doesn’t look back.
