Staying at the summer palace in Ios for a week like Damen said they would :D
Laurent’s balance is good. He doesn’t extend his arms to the side as he walks around the narrow edge of the fountain, though occasionally he flicks out a hand from the wrist in a minute adjustment. His skin is pink from exposure to days of sun, fountain-spray glints on his bare legs, and there is a mark beneath one corner of his jaw that makes Damen’s mouth water with memory.
Damen settles his shoulders against the tree, lazy and content. Laurent leaps lightly down from the ledge, and his feet follow instead the line of an eel picked out in blue tiles on the busy mosaic that spills out from the fountain’s base.
There’s something odd about the action; it’s as though Damen is watching an actor play Laurent, an actor who has the look of him down to perfection but has never seen him in real life. After a moment Damen realises this is because the action is entirely aimless. There is no purpose to it beyond enjoyment, and idle whim. For the first time Damen is seeing Laurent as he might have been as a boy; as he might have always been, had their histories been different.
“What?” Laurent says, not looking up from the ground.
Damen sees no reason not to tell him. A hint of embarrassment curls into the edge of Laurent’s mouth as Damen speaks. He pauses, not far from Damen, both sandaled feet still neatly within the bounds of the blue tiles.
“You keep mentioning that,” Laurent says neutrally. “What might have been.”
Damen stands up and goes to him. He takes one of Laurent’s hands and kisses the white fingers, then tugs it towards his chest, top and centre, where he holds it pressed beneath his own. Sometimes the only way to keep Laurent from slipping away is to pin him in place.
“I like seeing you happy,” Damen says.
Laurent says, “Do you still wish things could have happened differently, between us?”
It seems an easy yes, but these days at the summer palace have been gorgeous, slow, and Damen’s thoughts, also moving slowly, manage to catch on the question’s barbs where they might usually brush heedlessly past. He considers where they are. He considers the tiny rainbows forming in the spray; the scent of oranges on the breeze. The slow stirring of Laurent’s fingertips at the hollow of Damen’s throat.
“If I could spare you the pain of the past, I would,” Damen says, “but I wouldn’t do anything that might lead us away from this point. Here, right now.”
Laurent doesn’t waver. “Yes, it would be a shame to have missed this opportunity to bake my skin pink.”
But he slides his free hand into Damen’s hair, leans up and kisses him very, very lightly on the lips, a kiss that’s like the touch of eyelashes or the quietest of sighs, before tucking his sun-flushed face into Damen’s neck, to one side of his own trapped fingers.
Like everything Laurent does, the action is imperious in its own way. Damen does what it asks and wraps his arm around Laurent’s back, pulling his body close. Laurent’s hair smells good. The water in the fountain chuckles like a lively melody poured out of a flute, and the wind tosses leaves around their ankles.
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