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ALEK
Ian was lying to him. Nothing explained why Alek would have been so acquiescent as to allow Ian’s departure from the Victorian.
And Ian finally accepting his marriage proposal? Alek wished he’d lost all of his English so he wouldn’t have learned that Ian only wanted to marry him because he thought he was about to die. Of course, the idea of marrying him was made more palatable if death would soon part them anyway.
Ian was watching the keyboard with as much intensity as if it were a bomb about to explode. He shuffled from one foot to the other, his arms hanging stiffly at his sides like he didn’t know what to do with them.
Alek wasn’t nervous. He already knew he couldn’t play piano the way he had before the fall. Testing his theory on the keyboard was only a formality. He could tell as soon as he woke up that something was missing.
The endless soundtrack that played inside his mind was gone. The music that tangled with his senses until he couldn’t smell without memories and see without sound and listenwithout feeling. All of it was gone. His entire life, he’d never existed with such silence.
Before the fall, when Ian talked, an entire forest grew inside Alek’s head. The quiet roar of Ian’s breathing was like wind through treetops. Even the nearly inaudible crackle of the strands of Alek’s hair when Ian ran his fingers through it sounded like autumn leaves underfoot. Now when Ian talked only words came out. Every sound he made was just noise and nothing else.
Where Alek usually read the black and white piano keys as infinite potential combinations of sound, sense, and emotion, he only saw white letters A through G and black notes sharp and flat. Alek’s hands weren’t his hands anymore; they were ugly and didn’t move the way they used to. It was like he had to manually pull the puppet string of each finger to get them to go where he wanted them to. But he would try, not because he hoped for a miracle, but to take inventory of exactly how much he’d lost.
The acrylic keys were a cold and hollow substitute beneath his fingertips, and when Alek pressed down, the keys grated against each other like teeth gnashing. He tried to select a song to play, but couldn’t summon any of the songs he’d composed or the songs he hadn’t composed but memorized.
Alek looked at the sheet music the nurse printed for him. The notes might as well have been characters from an entirely different language. They made no sense to him. His ears began to ring. He lifted his hands and laid them in his lap. He’d lost his music and would rather have died than face the world without it.
Ian knew without asking. He pushed the table aside and bent down, leaning his forehead against his.
“Alek, I’m so sorry.”
What would Alek do with his emotions if he couldn’t give them to the piano anymore? All of his sorrow, all of his regret—it would consume him whole. The only time he’d ever skipped a day playing the piano…
River rocks knocking against each other, ash over keys that cut like broken glass beneath his fingers.
He couldn’t breathe. His heart thumpedlike a train traveling fast over tracks, only one moment away from going off the rails.
He wanted to die. He should have died.
Ian pulled back, concern knitting his brows together, but Alek brought his good hand to the back of Ian's head, tangling his fingers in his hair and dragging him close enough to nip his lower lip. Ian gasped, and that should have taken the pain away some, but it only twisted the knife deeper because before the fall, Ian’s gasps sounded like splotches of starlight and now it was all dark.
Their lips were so close that every fast, jagged breath Ian exhaled went right down into Alek’s lungs. Maybe if he tried hard enough, he could pull Ian inside of him so he’d never leave.Without words, Alek dared Ian to steal the kiss, to stop treating him like he was fragile, to kiss him the way he always had, like death was on his heels and Alek was his salvation. Every atom in Alek’s body strained to merge with Ian’s, to fuse completely.
Ian lunged forward and when his lips crushed against Alek’s with a bruising intensity, gravity imploded and Alek was flying.
It had been twenty-three days since they last kissed. Alek had kept track, marking the days he’d been trapped in a prison of his own design. Now it felt like he’d been counting the days down to freedom.
Ian mumbled a low, satisfiedmmmthat vibrated deep inside Alek’s own chest.
“I love you. I love you. I love you,” Ian chanted before their lips fully parted and Alek said the same and it didn’t matter that it was in Bulgarian, because their language was their own.
But that was only an intermission, a comma joining the first kiss to the next, because Ian’s lips were back on Alek’s, and then Ian’s mouth moved to Alek’s temple and over to the space in front of his ear, before descending to his neck, kissing and licking and sucking as he reclaimed each and every inch of territory that had always belonged to him, had only ever belonged to him.
Ian moved to press his ear over the spot where Alek’s heart cantered erratically inside his chest, like each beat was precious to him and maybe it was. Alek let his head fall back against the pillow. He was tired. His head ached terribly. He wanted to sleep, but he was afraid to miss even a single moment with Ian. They’d already wasted so much time.
Ian’s face tilted upward, assessing Alek. “You’re taking pain medicine. Now.”
Before Alek could disagree, Ian pressed the call light and summoned the nurse. A handful of minutes later, the nurse came and went, leaving Alek with the obliviating buzz of opiates coursing through his veins. His eyelids were so heavy, it was impossible to keep them open.
“Go to sleep, Alek.”
“Loving you is the only thing I don’t regret,” Alek tried very hard to say in English.
“I’ll be here when you wake up. Go to sleep.”
Bulgarian then. Maybe he’d be able to say it in English when he woke up.
