Work Text:
I was crouched in my chair, looking for another pen, when there was a shallow knock on the front door. I paused for a moment, waiting for Meredith’s call to say she was answering. I pushed my chair back, remembering she was still out filming. I knew I had to stop relying on her for things, it was unbecoming. Felt like Dellecher all over again. Tied up between her and—well, there was no other post to wrangle myself around. Just her. And still one end hanging lifeless in the wind.
“Coming!” I said, sliding my hand down the banister to keep myself from running. The knock sounded like it was a slow-response away from ditching.
Any other greeting I expected to say died on my tongue the moment I saw who had come—who had found me.
“James.”
Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more,
For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead
It startled me to see he was soaking wet, like he’d walked right out of the sea and straight back to me—but how could he have heard me? I cried silently and angrily in the hidden shadows of sleep, and isolated moments when Meredith would slip from the house for days at a time. I noticed, finally, that it had begun to rain outside. The explanation felt like a lie. Not the whole truth, as usual.
He seemed to notice my staring, my long dragging glances over his clothes, over his body. He was so much leaner than I remembered, than I ever dreamed of either, but he was still James. How could I find him unfamiliar?
"I’ve been here for over an hour... Trying to see if I should knock.” James sounded unsure if he’d done right. I pushed the door farther back to tell him he had. He didn’t move. “Truth is, I don’t know what to say to you.”
“Whatever you would like.” I said.
I tried not to overwhelm him with the truth of what simply the sight of him was doing to me. The return of a sailor we all thought had been lost to sea. I wasn’t even angry that he had been alive for years without a visit or a note—except the one Filippa sent to me—I didn’t care about the life he had before. It didn’t really matter. His had only started now that he was with me. And I felt the relief with as much greed as I thought to.
“We aren’t friendly enough for that anymore.” He whispered and it nearly disappeared into the rain.
"James,” I sighed and held a hand out to him. He’d begun to shiver. He resisted and I sighed, catching the wind of the rain. I spoke between the falling sheets. “For we were nurs'd upon the self-same hill, / Fed the same flock, by fountain, shade, and rill; / Together both, ere the high lawns appear'd / Under the opening eyelids of the morn.”
My verse stopped him, shivering and all: surprised but not put-off. It wasn’t Shakespeare, but then again, we were different boys than those that could converse with only another man’s words. We were lost-and-found men. It felt wrong, at such a raw and exposed reunion, to start putting up the thin veil of our old selves, our old routine.
He stepped inside and I grabbed his coat, hanging it on the doorknob. The wet bottom hem stayed on the doormat, staying with James’s wet boots, as he toed them off. I half expected him to start shimmying out of his jeans, getting ready for bed after a long rehearsal.
Oh, how I wish there had been one. Maybe I would’ve had better lines prepared.
“What happened, James?” I started for the kettle as I lead him into the kitchen. I wanted to distract myself, but also didn’t want to take my eyes off of James. How had I gone without a single real glimpse of him for years? How had I allowed myself to become so starved?
I remembered it hadn’t been me who had made the decision.
“What do you want me to say?” He was genuinely asking. Calling for a line prompt. “The guilt swallowed me, Oliver. And I thought once I hit rock bottom it would be over. But it kept swallowing me. Over and over, right over my head, like—”
Like waves.
He ask'd the waves, and ask'd the felon winds,
"What hard mishap hath doom'd this gentle swain?"
“You’re alive.” I prompted him finally.
"After the hospital,” James spoke softly, easing himself into the chair. The pain on his face told me of the time he spent, most likely cooped up and staring his guilt dead in the face, unable to utter it. Unable to heal. “I went to my family but, mostly to keep quiet. Gather myself without you knowing.”
“Me?” Anger flared in my chest suddenly, the hiss of the kettle a whimper compared to my impending growl, ferocious and unhinged after years in a cage. “Does everyone else know?”
“Meredith isn’t filming. She’s with Wren right now. I told her... I wanted to tell you myself. Alone.”
I glared at him, nostrils flaring as I tried to grapple with the sudden exposed strings tied to me. I heaved a breath, ready to scream, to rally a fight, but—I sighed, seeing the guilt etched, again, on James’s features. They’d never return to the ones I used to study on stage; from across the room; once, right under my nose.
I couldn’t be angry at him. Between the two of us, what good was it? There was no score anymore. Just an extended intermission. Unfinished verse.
My anger caved and washed out of me and I nearly collapsed into the seat across from him.
Who would not sing for Lycidas?
“I can understand not seeing me, but you could’ve, at the very least, told me you were alive.” I said, trying to remain firm. “That’s all I cared about. Not the—not an apology.”
“God, apology.” James became distraught again. He looked too weak to stand, but panicked enough to express another desire to disappear. “What can I even say to apologize? You wouldn’t let me—and now there’s nothing I can say to give you back that past ten years of you life. I mean,” he choked on a long sob. “what could I possible do to give you any of that back?”
“Tell me you know why I did it.”
“What?” He ran the back of his sweater sleeve—already soaked—along his upper lip, composing himself.
“Tell me you know why.”
“I—” The truth was right there, held in our own held breaths. In the way our hands were both flat against the table top, finger tips too far apart to be purposeful, but trembling enough to say they were missing another half. “I don’t know what you want me to say.” James said more desperately. The words were as unrehearsed for him as they were for me.
I, again, chose words not of my own, hoping to dislodge the ten years of rust I’d let form around them. Never spoken, never practiced.
“Where, other groves and other streams along, / With nectar pure his oozy locks he laves,” I blinked twice, looking down at my own hands. They weren’t as harsh red and thawing as James’s. I looked back up, knowing the rest of the verse, but changing it anyway. “And hears the expressive nuptial song, / In the blest kingdoms meek of joy and love.”
"I-I don’t know Milton this well.” Fresh tears had started in his eyes. One dangled over his cheek, his trembling body threatening his composure again.
I was pleased he at least knew the poem. I wasn’t just speaking in scattered verse, not just in a foreign tongue. It was code again. A secret layer of communication we could tuck between, like a warm blanket and firm mattress.
“Now, Lycidas, the shepherds weep no more:” Against my better judgement—against all judgement, really—I rose from my seat and reached to brush the tear from James’s cheek. My hand never retracted. It stayed on him, thumb gently braced on his sharp, jutting cheekbone. “Henceforth thou art the Genius of the shore, / In thy large recompense, and shalt be good / To all that wander in that perilous flood.”
Weakness be damned, James himself stood again. He reached for me over the table, my shirt too simple for his grasp and going for my shoulders. He nearly folded me over across the table, bringing me to his lips. He was fully weeping by then, no sparse or embarrassed tears to be found. These tears were hot and pitiful: only I, a lost shepherd staring out over the sea, would be so foolish to be in love with him. Would forgive him with a heart so light it could so easily be handed over, passed from lips to lips.
“Don’t ever do that again.” He said, finally finding my face with both of his freezing hands. “Don’t you ever do that again.”
I wanted to make a joke—a note that it wasn’t my decision, not really—but I kept my mouth shut. Or, otherwise pre-occupied.
“I’m sorry.” I didn’t mean it entirely. So I went on. “I wouldn’t have ever let you trade with me, but I’m sorry it meant you had to be with the guilt—”
“All without you.” He took my sentence and tied it up, keeping it ended. “There’s no one like you.”
“James,”
“No, no,” he said, pushing my hair back and cradling my face like he’d gotten to touch a marble statue: intimately and with wonder. “fuck ordinary and nice and disposable. Oliver, there is no one on this Earth like you, and I can’t believe that I let you fall for me.”
“There’s no one else like you.” I said, stepping around the table to take him in my arms.
He was sturdier than I would have thought, but maybe that was just years of harsh reality building a shell around him. I kissed him again, ignoring his quiet whimper of disagreement to my confession. His hand laid flat against my chest, an echo of a memory never finished. His fingers pressed against my collar bone, trying to find my heartbeat. As if he needed a jumpstart to his own.
“No one else worth knowing, quite like you.” We were both breathing heavy, my words nearly lost in James’s continued shy nips at my lips. He was trying to stop me from speaking, but I could tell he was eager for absolvement. Not of sins, but of shame.
Finally, I brought him to rest against me. Fiery passion and frail relief encased us both. Our arms tightly tried to keep the other impossibly closer—as if it would push the rest of the world away. I thought to myself, incorrectly but with a hidden smile:
But O the heavy change now art gone,
Now art gone, and never must return!