--

[sredniy]

He knows this pain. It blazes behind his eyes, searing white, tearing down through every nerve in his body. He can’t know this pain. How could anyone know this? Survive it, live their life without it haunting every breath. His heart ricochets off his bones, slamming an uneven rhythm against the walls of his chest. Trembling lips move, trying to form words that fit the flapping of his tongue, he just wants one word – please, please, please – but no sound comes out. - They meet on an unremarkable day. Overcast and dim, without even an atmospheric fog to give it some kind of character, but neither of them will forget it. It begins the countdown, and without realising it, they both start hurtling towards inevitability. They mistake it for something far more beautiful than it is. Than it will be. Alexander Yelisarov – or more accurately, Sasha – stands with his face tipped up against the middling sea breeze, eyes closed. He takes secret pleasure in days like these, in how unappealing they are. He doesn’t enjoy them, but he wants to smile at the way his family unite in their disapproval. Like the sun hasn’t come out just to spite them, left them with the oppressive summer heat caught under the clouds as a personal offence. Not because he wishes unhappiness on his family, but because their entitlement to good weather is bizarre and amusing to him. He doesn’t mind it. The beach is the only place where the temperature doesn’t feel like it’s trying to force itself down your throat, but is mostly empty. He doesn’t mind that either. Tepid water laps at his ankles, silky sand slipping between his toes as the weak current pushes it about. The sea is incredibly still, somehow lacking its usual clarity. The deep teal looks murky beneath the clouds, threatening, almost. Sasha has never been afraid of the sea, but today he doesn’t give in to its call. The shore is enough. Several soft splashes rouse him from his daydreams. His eyes open right at the moment a flat pebble sinks to its new resting place. Another follows, and another, skimming across the otherwise peaceful water, forming at least four or five neat arches each time. Sasha can’t help watching. His heart beats slow and sluggish, his mind spread eagled in a way that it can’t bring itself to concentrate on anything more than this. One more pebble; the throw is misjudged. It barely manages a single, wobbling skip, and without realising, Sasha laughs. It shakes sweetly through his bare shoulders. “I’d like to see you try it.” That’s when he remembers that stones don’t throw themselves. - Can hearts actually break? His is starting to rattle inside him like pearls, skittering and spilling all over a cold floor, fallen from a broken string. Salt digs its raw hands into his shoulder, his chest. He might have appreciated the cruel irony of this, another day. On the pages of a book, not in the very real threads of his own life. They’ve come full circle. Here they began, here they will end, and every day that came before this one will no longer matter. The sea is not still tonight. It roars and crashes, louder than the howling wind, bitterly cold, biting like a wild animal. A body that could never be tamed. Oh, Sasha knows about things that can’t be tamed. (Too late for that.) The hand around his neck tightens. - What starts off as the friendly rivalry of strangers becomes increasingly more competitive. Sasha has never been competitive, not really. His heart isn’t built for that. It beats too fiercely, stretches its embrace too far, but sometimes something stirs. A whisper of a person he could have been, once upon a time, if he’d listened to his parents. Not that it matters; this day would always have come, and their story would have played out much the same. The barest bones of the people that they are will never change. A thousand lifetimes over, the foundations will remain the same. He’s painfully beautiful. Sasha doesn’t know how else to describe it. Full lips, dark, fathomless eyes and hair, skin that looks like it has never known a day without the soft kiss of sunlight. Shoulders that beg to be watched as he moves, swings his arm, flicks his wrist to launch another flat pebble. Even his name is beautiful. Konstantin. It sounds like a song as it rolls off Sasha’s tongue. “My being terrible at this doesn’t make your one failure less funny,” he breathes, softly, pulling in his lips as he nervously glances in Konstantin’s direction, hoping the jab won’t miss its mark, won’t offend. “I’d expect you to laugh if it happened to me.” “Because you’ve known me for five seconds, so you’re an expert on what I’d do.” But those endless eyes are bright, perfect lips quirked to one side in the kind of smile that makes Sasha’s knees feel like jelly. He wonders how many people must fall in love with him at a glance, tells himself it must be a countless number, because he can’t be the only one who sees it. Sasha is hopeless like that. A glance is everything and anything. “Obviously.” The pebble Sasha launches at the water bounces in time to Konstantin’s laughter. - Please stop. He doesn’t even hate himself for thinking that this could be forgiven. He should. He should be furious, fighting, but he isn’t. Please stop, this doesn’t have to happen. There can’t be a single cell of sanity left in him, he supposes. Not if he stares at that bloody mouth and those rows of teeth and still wants to talk about forgiveness. He doesn’t thrash, doesn’t yell. His body – solid, limber, carved by hours and hours of practice, spinning and diving until he can barely breathe – is no more than a rag doll in his hands. I love you. He still knows this pain. Those teeth are not a product of distant nightmares, they’re an outline in his memory. He knows them. He’s seen them, bared and merciless, before, but he can’t have. Weakly, his hands lift to wrap around a taut wrist, trying to draw little circles on the cold skin, the way he always used to, above the pulse, a calming, protective motion. His legs are painfully numb with the cold. Christ, how it hurts. Fuck. His eyes are growing accustomed to the darkness around them, but his vision is just blinking stars of agony against the backdrop of a town that feels so far away beyond them. Please – I love you so much. - “I don’t want to leave,” Sasha murmurs. Konstantin’s neck is warm against his nose, salty scented. “Then don’t.” It feels like a dream. He wonders if that’s what happiness always feels like, like it can’t quite be real. There has to be a punchline somewhere. Letting Konstantin take him down narrow streets, showing him beautiful courtyards and crooked architecture that imprints itself on Sasha’s memory. Knocking back ghastly shots of ouzo and being perfectly horrified by the way he takes Konstantin’s shoulders and pushes up on to his tiptoes to kiss him. Horrified, but not enough to stop. It can’t be real. Especially not the moment that Konstantin holds him at the waist and kisses back. A hangover is far more bearable with company. They are both shy, gentle things. (Or so Sasha believes, for a time.) Sasha blushes petal pink, burying his aching head against the hollow of Konstantin’s throat, mortified by his behaviour, even though Konstantin is laughing and his arms are around him, and there’s nothing to apologise for. Konstantin’s lips ghost against his temple. It’s okay. You kiss pretty well, for a wobbly drunk. And Sasha makes a high pitched noise of despair that only makes Konstantin laugh more. “Right. I could just stay here, forget my life back home, start over here.” Between them, a thick and heavy pause stretches out. “You could.” Kissing him sober is just as good as kissing him drunk. Better, actually, because now Sasha has a proper memory of it, not a disjointed recollection coloured and warped by atrocious tasting alcohol. They kiss in his kitchen, when Sasha tries to find his Dutch courage again, leans against the counter right by Konstantin’s side. Their eyes meet, Sasha’s fingers brushing his wrist, lips parted in an unspoken question, soft pink turning to vivid red in his cheeks. A question that Konstantin answers, palm pressed against the hard line of Sasha’s jaw, thumb brushing against his lower lip. Every kiss since that morning swims in Sasha’s mind, swirling and twisting. Every kiss that could happen follows. His heart starts beating faster, as he shifts, straddling Konstantin’s hips, hands pressed into the pillows either side of his head. “I could.” - Konstantin. It still sounds beautiful, even when he is terrifying. The distant lights of the town behind him create an ill-fitting halo of light around his silhouette. Salt water and tears alike sting in Sasha’s eyes, and he’s quite aware that his cheeks are only soaked with one of these things. Around them, the sea rises and falls steadily, like a living, breathing creature. The sobs begin to tremble through his body. Konstantin’s hand presses on his throat in such a way that he can barely breathe, but whispers of air still reach him. Just enough to keep him conscious. Just enough to hurt. He chokes out sounds that he’s sure are pitiful, childish. He wants to howl, wail, empty his body of all this pain. All around, the ink black sea is invisibly stained with his blood, but he can feel it. Slipping down his skin, catching on the tatters of his clothes. Oozing from the lines that Konstantin’s teeth raked down him. Why do you always call me by my full name? He had held his hand to Sasha’s mouth, crushing the scream that rose in his throat as he tore into him. What? Syrupy, honey thick blood trickled down Konstantin’s neck in patterns like veins, and there wasn’t a scraped knee in the world, not a clumsy slip with a kitchen knife that could ever have prepared Sasha for blood. Not like this. Not running like rivers from his shoulder. You always call me “Konstantin”. I was wondering why. But he knows it. Oh, I just – I know it’s silly, but it sounds so pretty. I can’t bear to shorten something like that. It is not a new pain. Sasha can’t find it in himself to regret following Konstantin here. (He’d told him not to, but Sasha didn’t listen.) This – this is a deserved end. This is the end you deserve, when you hurt someone like that. (But Sasha never hurt him; he would never.) This is what you always had coming, even when you thought that you had so sweetly, so narrowly avoided it. (Avoided what?) In that moment, this is not a beach on the Greek coast. It is a dark, hot apartment in a city that blossoms with colour and noise, and Sasha hears the distant whisper of a memory, something that is all at once his and not. A voice, so achingly familiar, in pain. Afraid. Angry. (Sasha, stop – please, stop.) None of it makes sense, but it does. Konstantin had dragged him along the sand with one hand constricting Sasha’s throat, the other digging into the bloody mess of his shoulder, pressing, curling until Sasha swore he could feel it in his muscle, reaching right into the core of his body. Down to the sea. Everything about you is so beautiful, Konstantin. He still dares to hope. A fleeting moment; the hand on his neck loosens its grip, and he heaves a sobbing, shaking breath, almost feeling a hysterical laugh rising up from his chest. In the darkness, Konstantin draws close, and all Sasha can smell is his blood and the sea. Then, he can taste it. His own blood smears across his chin as Konstantin presses his lips to Sasha’s, feather-light. You’re the most beautiful man I’ve ever met. It’s the last thing that Sasha knows before he is plunged beneath the water. His shoulder sings with agony. His mouth screams, but it is lost under the water, against Konstantin’s devastating mouth, which stays so close, right against him. (He stays close until there is nothing in Sasha’s lungs but water, stays even when the spasms of his body have stilled.) I’m so happy to have met you.

Comments

[perishes]

i clicked. i liked it.

[sredniy]

well





that is something of a relief

[perishes]

I REREAD THIS AND YOU ARE A TERRIBLE HORRIBLE NO GOOD VERY BAD PERSON

i love u