the mystery is that there is something to keep the light from passing through
Sunlight pouring across your skin, your shadow
flat on the wall.
The dawn was breaking the bones of your heart like twigs.
You had not expected this,
the bedroom gone white, the astronomical light
pummeling you in a stream of fists.
You raised your hand to your face as if
to hide it, the pink fingers gone gold as the light
streamed straight to the bone,
as if you were the small room closed in glass
with every speck of dust illuminated.
The light is no mystery,
the mystery is that there is something to keep the light
from passing through.
— Richard Siken, "Visible World" in "Crush" (Yale University Press, 2005) (via @Regina Rosenfeld)
Martin has the TV set to a low murmur, letting Bake Off reruns play in the background as he combs his fingers through Gerry’s hair. It’s warm in the flat, the summer worming its way in through the cracks of the place and turning everything hot and tight. The fan is louder than the TV, oscillating back and forth between the two bodies slumped on the sofa and the one on the chair.
Jon grumbles as the movement rustles his papers, his glasses low on his nose and gaze intent on the paper he’s reading.
“You know,” Gerry says from his comfortable position on Martin’s lap, “if you didn’t assign so much work, you wouldn’t have so much to grade.”
Martin pinches Gerry’s ear in admonishment as Jon makes a noise of protest from his comfortable perch on the arm chair. Gerry yelps and then laughs, swatting at Martin’s hand.
“I’m just saying, you do this to yourself.”
“Hush,” Martin says, tugging gently on a lock of black hair, “It’s too hot to deal with you.”
Gerry hums, picking his head up enough to wink at Jon who just sighs in reply. Gerry settles back in and Martin resumes his petting. It’s nice, despite the heat, one of the very few days they have to spend together. Jon had offered to help out with a summer class at the university that had been overbooked and Gerry had recently been promoted to manager at the bar he’d been working for, which was all phenomenal and Martin was so proud of them both, but it left them all with shockingly little time together.
Martin’s thumb strokes down Gerry’s neck, rubbing over an old tattoo of an eye, pressing down slightly at the pupil. Gerry huffs a breath into his lap and turns just enough to look at him. “Hi,” Martin says.
“Hey.” Comes the soft reply, warm and fond.
Martin would very much like to kiss him, but that would require a level of flexibility he’s never possessed, so he settles for bringing his own hand up to his palm and kissing the center of it before setting it back down lightly over Gerry’s mouth. He can feel the smile tugging at Gerry’s lips before his palm is being kissed in return and Martin brings it back up to his mouth. “Tea?” He asks after finishing the ritual.
“Christ,” Jon says, letting his papers and pen fall onto the small table at his side. The pen jumps at the small shock and rolls off onto the floor. “Please? If I don’t take a break I may actually start pulling my hair out.”
“Well we wouldn’t want that.” Martin says.
“Mmm, I don’t know.” Gerry says, tapping his finger to his chin as if in indecision, “Bald can be sexy. I seem to recall a time when you shaved your head and it didn’t look that bad.”
“Oh?” Delight suffuses through Martin like honeyed sunshine, “Now that’s something I would have loved to have seen.”
Gerry’s face lights up and he sits bolt upright. “Wait here a second,” he says before hopping off the couch and bounding toward the bedroom. There’s a loud crack, like the door has banged off a wall, and then the sound of things hitting the floor in a hurry.
Martin looks over at Jon, bewildered, but Jon just gives a helpless shrug, looking just as lost as he feels. He’s about to get up and go see just what the hell Gerry is doing when he comes tearing back into the room, clutching something in his hands.
“Look!” He crows, clearly pleased with himself, and hands out a book to Martin.
It’s not very large, about the size of a standard journal, and bound in worn, brown leather. The front of it is scuffed, the top corner bent inward like it’d been stepped on or stuffed somewhere and left like that for a long time, forgotten. “What is-“
From the chair he hears Jon say, “Is that-“
But Gerry drowns them both out with his plea of, “Open it!”
So Martin does.
Inside the front cover is a mess of pen drawings and doodles. A stylized eye, a moth, an anarchy symbol, a middle finger, half of them overlapping and the lines blurring. There’s a burst of black in the top right, a dark blot like a burst pen. In the center of the mess are big blocky letters, all caps.
PROPERTY OF GERRY KEAY
Below that, in a much smaller font that Martin can only decipher from years of recognition and practice.
and Jon Sims.
Martin looks up at Gerry who just grins and flops back down on the couch next to him, pressing hard up against his side like he’s eager to watch. Martin flips to the next page.
There’s a polaroid taped to the center, two young boys staring up at him with twin grins of mischief and joy. The boy on the left has chestnut brown hair cropped short. His mouth and hands look sticky and stained a bright red, the likely cause of which being the ice lolly stick still clutched in his right hand. The boy on the right is much smaller, with unruly black hair and red stains on his button down shirt and a matching red mouth. At the bottom someone had written in a tight, cursive script ‘Gerard and Jonathan, August 1999.’ Someone had drawn an ice cream van on the bottom of the page. At the top, in Gerry’s capital letter font, were the words PARTNERS IN CRIME.
The following pages are similar, photos taped onto the pages, sometimes overlapping each other. Some were clearly taken by Jon’s grandmother - the two of them dressed in suits for some function, the two of them sitting at a table and studying, the two of them asleep in the backyard. Others were clearly taken by the two themselves - Gerry smoking a cigarette and flipping off the camera, Jon holding a bottle of beer, Jon reaching for the camera and looking angry, Gerry riding a skateboard, Gerry on the ground with his skateboard upside down next to him. Some of them held commentary - WE LOOKED LIKE TWATS we were eleven!, Gerry has never once landed a kick flip HEY!!!!, we stayed up waiting for the meteor shower, BEST MATES FOR LIFE. Even more held doodles - ocean waves crashing against a rock, a pair of doves, zig zag mazes and tic tac toe, a lit cigarette and a bottle of beer.
“Ah-ha!” Gerry exclaims when Martin is more than halfway through the book, jamming his finger down at the picture taped there.
Martin jumps and looks at him.
“I knew it was in here,” Gerry says smugly.
By this point it looked as if Gerry had already started dying his hair black and growing it long, almost past his shoulders. His eyes were rimmed in black eyeliner and he had at least two piercings that Martin knew hadn’t come with parental permission. Next to him was Jon, hair buzzed down to his scalp and scowling impressively at the camera, wearing a too large leather jacket and a t-shirt for a band Martin had never heard of.
“Oh!” Martin says, grinning, “It looks so good!” He looks up to gauge Jon’s reaction, maybe even tease him a bit, but the words die quickly in his throat.
Jon’s looking right at Gerry, his face a mass of emotions that Martin is at a loss to try and describe. His eyes look wet.
“Jon?” Martin asks, concern tugging away his amusement and leaving it raw.
Gerry’s head snaps up, his own smile rapidly disappearing in the weight of Jon’s gaze.
There’s a long moment where none of them say anything and the room is stifling from the heat and tension. Martin looks between the two of them, trying to piece together what on earth could possibly be wrong, but he’s coming up short on pieces to work with.
It seems like forever before Jon finally says, “You kept it?” The tone of his voice is raw and brittle.
Martin very gently closes the book and sets in down on the coffee table.
Gerry’s mouth opens and closes a couple of times, confused noises eeking out like the squeaking of a rusted hinge. He seems almost as lost as Martin is. Finally his words take shape and land on, “Yes? Yeah, of course I did. Why wouldn’t I have?”
Jon’s eyes flicker away, to the oscillating fan and then to the TV kindly asking if they were still watching. He picks at a loose thread on the chair, fingers working anxiously. “I thought…after your mother- after you left- I thought that…”
Gerry’s eyebrows pull together, his lips tipping down into a frown. “What? Did you think I’d thrown it away?”
Jon shrugs, first one shoulder and then the other, like the collapse of a building. “Just kind of...assumed.” His hands were wringing together now, picking at the skin gently and scratching at his wrist. “After the...after the funeral we weren’t really talking, and then you were just...gone. Thought maybe…” Jon shrugs again, this time lower, hunching himself down smaller, “maybe you didn’t want to remember.”
Oh, Martin thought distantly. Gerry’s mother, Mary, had died when he was only 16, apparently by suicide. It had been a sudden, violent thing that had sent Gerry’s childhood spiraling in a direction he couldn’t control. Less than a week from the time his mother had died, Gerry had been uprooted from the home in Bournemouth he’d always lived in and made to move in with a distant relative named Gertrude up in London. He’d barely had time to process any of it, let alone let Jon know what was happening. It was over ten years before they’d seen each other again, and the gap had always been a sore spot for both Jon and Gerry.
Gerry makes a choked noise and crosses the room in quick strides to kneel in front of the chair. He gathers Jon’s hands in his own, cradling them together. “No,” he says, so softly Martin can barely hear him, “Not you.” He brings their hands up so he can kiss the backs of Jon’s hands, brush his lips over the knuckles. “I never wanted to forget you.”
Jon’s breath hitches.
Martin watches Gerry hold Jon’s hands to his face and mumble something that he can’t make out. Jon’s fingers twitch in response and he huffs out a breath. After a moment he gets up and goes into the kitchen to make them all some tea, flicking the switch on the electric kettle and rummaging through the pantry to find the container of lemongrass tea that he knows Jon likes and the mint tea that Gerry prefers. It doesn’t take long, but he likes the ritual of it anyway. He gathers their two mugs in one hand, and his own mug of a spicy black tea in the other and heads back into the sitting room.
Jon has moved over to the couch, tucked under Gerry’s arm with the book in his lap.
Martin smiles and sets their tea down.
When Jon looks up, Martin bends down and kisses his forehead and then grins wider when Jon’s nose and forehead scrunch up.
“Okay?” Martin asks.
Jon waves at him dismissively but makes a grab for his shirt when Martin turns like he’s going to take the chair. “Yes,” he says, exasperated, “come here, please.”
Gerry squishes himself into the corner and pulls Jon closer to make room, so Martin sighs and fits himself in next to them on the sofa. It’s a cramped fit, but ultimately worth it for the way Jon relaxes against him, flipping absently through the book of memories on his lap.
“Gerry had a point, at least.” Martin says.
“Hm?”
“You looked good with a shaved head,” Martin says too lightly, “might be a good summer to try it again.”
Jon’s protests are drowned out by Gerry’s instant and joyous peal of laughter.
Jon says something about ‘nothing being sacred’, the tips of his ears burning, while Martin tries to hide his grin in his cup of tea. He almost succeeds.
