Les Noyades

19: When I Have Fears

The next day seemed a new world. Had the sky always been so filled with heavy white cloud, and the trappings of light against the walls so delicate, and the syrupy lilt of birds so delightful? With his head laid against Yves' shoulder, Rumi awoke contented. And then he became deeply afraid. It was a disguised fear, showing no root but plenty of promise, and it latched onto his senses though that he sat up and scrambled for his clothes so that he could let himself from the van and into the feathered frost of the morning, frightened as a newborn child— and he did feel newborn, in the odd new world he found himself in. It was achingly beautiful and yet he still was terrified.

Once outside he came somewhat to his senses; they had been in the van all night, and they had not returned in the morning, where other nights spent there they had crept back to the house before the sun rose. Surely his father would be wondering where he was. Sédar he did not so much mind— Sédar knew the truth.

His father had no idea about him, and how could he? How could Rumi ever allow him to be privy to such a secret? He had no shame over it, but he had fear, and he had knowledge of what it meant. Because what they were doing was illegal. Men had been sent to prison for it, sent down for years and years, and it had killed many a suffering afflicted for the simple crime of something so gentle as a wanted touch. Culshawe had told him that the world did not know what men ought to be ashamed of; that they had it the wrong way, and that the men who would punish this small desire ought to be hanged.

He could not go into the house, not with his head contorted so, and not with his stiff body that betrayed him at every instant— he went to sit upon the grass and his every muscle seized at the invasion of sensation such movement brought him. He could not be stood across, visible as day, from his father whenever he met Yves' looks and thought involuntarily of how his face had changed in the throes of a pleasure which Rumi could only describe, on reflection, the most natural consummation of what they had become.

There was, beneath all of it, some secret thrill, in that he was entirely overwhelmed by quite how quickly it had come over him; he was in love, or some variant of it. How long he had sat in Culshawe's library as he was brought boy upon boy to sit and read besides, wondering why he did not want a single one of them. What it was in Yves that has ensnared him he did not know... But then he had never particularly been seen before. All of the boys he had met, Culshawe's wards and his father's students alike, were sycophants only to the academics they were lulled in by– what interest had they in some unremarkable son who hardly spoke but to introduce himself as he had been told to do?

Yves was under Declan's tutelage but he was not a blind ambassador of his work. He had walked into the kitchen at Doha and at first dismissed Rumi as every visitor did, but then had come a small noticing, and then it was as if Rumi could not get away from him— hours of driving in the same van which Yves was asleep in at that pensive moment, and staying at Sédar's, and even meeting at Errol House and discussing Maurice. And what of that first morning in Scotland, when they had sat together on that wall and then he had fled to the van in terror of what Yves was making him feel, with all his talk of Culshawe's pursuits, and they had come so close to each other so as to breathe the very exact air in the front of the van. How he had trembled then.

He trembled now. He was so awakened it still frightened him.

§§§§§

Yves came out to side beside him on the dew-soaked grass when the sun had fully risen and there would be no dishonesty in their approach to the house when they returned. They would be known.

"Are you very different now?" Yves asked, taking his hand to Rumi's hair.

"Not sure yet," Rumi whispered, not daring to lift his voice when the birds above it were so beautiful uninterrupted. "Should I be?"

"I was."

"When did it happen?"

"I was just a little child. No, I was your age— are you so young? Am I so old?" Yves' hand dropped and he looked back towards the house. "Hardly any difference between us."

Rumi wanted him to look back, to forget that the house was there for them to go back to—surely they could forget for a little while, absentminded with purpose. He lay with his head in Yves' lap and looked up at him, his eyes tracing that jaw which had clenched around his name as it did now in trepidation, and he couldn't stop his hand reaching up to trace his fingers over it, as if to preserve the shape in his mind. He was so devoted.

"I have to tell my father about it," he said.

Yves' eyes fell to peruse his face with hesitance.

"Rumi, it's dangerous to talk about this sort of thing."

"I can't hold it. It has to come out."

"Tell Sédar if you have to tell somebody."

"He already knows."

"He— Rumi, please be careful with this. I'll be in a lot of trouble for it."

"He won't make any trouble."

"What if he does? And what if he makes you leave home, or hurts you, or turns on me?"

"Then we'll get in the van and we'll drive away to France. It's alright there."

"It's not alright. It's legal, but nobody wants us there."

Rumi pressed his cheek against Yves' thigh and heard the depth of his inhale.

"I'll talk to him," he said. "I can't hold this."

§§§§§

Rumi went back to the house without Yves, and his father was in the kitchen with Henry at his feet. Rumi sat at the table and waited for his father to notice his arrival. When he did not, Rumi called for Henry, who got huffily up and padded over for the affection he accepted with a gruff reluctance. Declan looked up and smiled.

"Good morning," he said, going back to the papers in his hands. "Yves not back in yet?"

"No." Get it out with, Rumi was telling himself behind his words.

"We're close to finishing, you know. Soon we'll go home and you can get back to Culshawe's books. I called him yesterday from the town— he asked after you. Wanted to know how you're getting along with Yves, he said, he thinks you two will make good friends. He's right, of course. You've been getting along well, haven't you?"

Rumi almost felt that his father was leading him to it.

"Culshawe has always been very invested in you," Declan went on to say, and then Rumi felt that he was being led somewhere different, and he panicked.

"Dad, I'm— I'm in love with Yves," he said quickly.

There was a pause that stretched for a long time, during which Declan's expression did not change as he sat back into his chair. After a while he got up and went to piece through some stacked paper upon the table, and out of one of the piles he lifted a few tied-up wads. He sat down with them set on his knee. Rumi gripped his hands together and tried not to vomit.

"All these poets," Declan said slowly, "all of them and their sonnets."

"Dad."

"So many sonnets about—"

"Dad."

" 'I hold it to be noble'," Declan quoted against the rustle of paper. "Noble."