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The groaning of the clouds is incessant and it rattles the motel room on its foundation. Neither occupant pays mind.
They are slick with sweat and the heavy humidity of the air; backs subjected to the slow drip of the roof. Their coupling is through and they lie still as stones in the aftermath, insides tender. Sousuke smiles to him, white-toothed and glass-eyed. Reflective. They are flush shoulder to ankle - but a few moments ago nipple to groin - and the hairs on their arms are cilia that grasp and push. Two specimen in a petri dish.
Sousuke turns with a high-cheeked blush, humility. He lights himself a cigarette. The ash tray rests over his solar plexus and Rin considers his energy, imagines it a dinner plate. He could eat Sousuke's ash with a knife and fork and grind his spent pieces to death between his teeth. He doesn't know if there is a word loud enough to describe the compelling urge that drives him to gobble up even the ugliest parts of the other; knows only that with him he is endlessly hungry and knows no peace for it.
There are water stains on the motel ceiling and Sousuke grins at a private joke. "What?" Rin asks. He lifts Sousuke's hand by the wrist and steals it. Plays at the fingers as though they are his own. As they could be, but are not. Never completely.
"I should have a punch card," Sousuke says, hand limp, "that you poke a hole into every time we meet. So many and I win a prize."
Rin stops his drawing on the other's palm and speaks rhetoric, "Is this how you feel?"
Sousuke hums to the mold spots above them in tune with a clap of thunder. Neither jumps at the suddenness; the storm has been brewing since they came together and this is not its height.
"I've been trying to keep local," Rin breathes through his teeth.
This is not a fight, it is too maudlin. The air on his teeth reminds him that they are each individuals. They are apartment buildings for cavities to take root in.
Self-fabricated obligation draws him over the equator and west, his face on billboards advertising clothing he does not wear, his hands on a bottle of Powerade, hair reeking of chlorine. The cash it puts in his pocket pays for the home he never sees, and somewhere in it - literal or metaphorical, dependent on his sway - Sousuke wakes alone.
And so they love in a leaky-roofed in the between of here and there.
"How bad?" Rin asks, taking his temperature. Lips to forehead.
Sousuke presses the failing smoke into the ashtray under his heart as though he means for it to be his skin. It dies.
"Enough."
The expression of the sentiment should be plenty, he feels quietly. He does not say.
Rin feels sick and wrong though this had been a sad fact since their inception; a promise of waiting is not one of halting, of going actionless. Sousuke could not say for that he is sorry. Only sad, truly. Rin knows the taste.
If it weren't for Sousuke's ailing father Rin would drag him over the world, this is the unspoken promise. The old man is nearing his end with a sickness of the lungs and there is no way to plan a getaway around such a thing. The ticking of the clock. Death comes with no forewarning. Soon it will take him and Rin will not be there. They do not speak of it.
The weather lessens to a patter on the rooftop and it is not a relief.
"If I could have you every day," Rin says, eyes snared by the shimmering glow of the reflected raindrops sliding down Sousuke's cheeks, his chest. "I would be lucky."
There is a crevasse, a void between their two cliff edges where a dalles runs in a narrow silver skein. It swells and neither can say with natural honesty that closeness would fit them. Absence makes the heart fond, makes it pine and speak in rose-tint and Ferrero Rocher. They could live best here. Neither can say.
Rin read a poem once about the horror of loving one's own reflection, of keeping it at arm's length and romancing it there.
They are fueled by the almost of it.
The bed protects, lumpy mattress a warren to them. Two rabbits starved for sunlight, crumbling clay between their bunny teeth.
Rin drops the hand, the warm sad thing, and steals a kiss. A heinous thief. Sousuke - rain stained as he is - returns it, crystal and ash striking the dingy carpet floor with an ugly thump. Neither jumps at the sound. This has been brewing. And so they lie flush nipple to groin - but a few moments ago shoulder to ankle - and photosynthesize on the other's light: one of them the sun and the other the moon, though they could never agree which is embodied by whom.