i

The man of my life is a visitor. He makes aush in the morning with the soft crooning of aunt Googoosh in the background, and I'm convinced he's going to leave while I'm still brushing my teeth. Some days he's present. Most of the year, in fact. It's just in the spring. Something about the burgeoning warmth and the bursting of life that makes his eyes a bit glazed; makes him unpack the little box, revive Googoosh and Aref, and reacquaint himself with Hafez and Sufi dhikr while in Downward Dog.

It's mornings like these I'm reminded that he's from a place not quite real enough to speak about. That he's lived many lives, some which still entice foreign words from his lips while he's asleep. Which make him harder to reach even when he's physically here, standing in the kitchen, humming along to his mother's favourite record.

"No cereal this morning?"

He stirs a pot of simmering soup which should overpower the smell of everything else around him, yet doesn't. Not the laundry softener which mixes with the dill, and the cumin, and his body-wash. I inhale deeper, digging my nose into his back to extract and file all the traces of him that were missing when I woke up.

"It's for later," he says, turning in my embrace, "I thought it might be nice not having to worry about making food when we get there. Just heat up the soup, maybe buy some bread on the way, et voilà." His lower eyelids are smudged with kohl from last night's performance, and he smiles—not entirely tiredly, but with enough emotion akin to it that I slowly untangle myself from the embrace.

"We would've eaten out. We always do." It's not the concern I want to show, but I can never quite bring myself to point directly to the signs even when, in the moment, it always feels like my thoughts have made themselves known. And maybe they have, in my voice or on my expression because there he goes, sighing again.

"Already made it, Frans. Meat-free. Just like you like it."

I reach for his phone on the counter and lower the volume. With Googoosh now climbing to the chorus with less pop-diva intensity, the outstretched ladle in his hand feels like a de-escalation of sorts. I slurp up the soup, letting the sourness of the lemon and the starchiness of the potatoes wash away my most pressing worries.

"Delicious." I flash him a convincing smile and squeeze his shoulder. "Thanks. It's lovely."

I always choose peace. That's why he stays. I'm good like that. I don't interrogate; don't mention the time of night he tiptoed into bed or bring to light my suspicion that he's only awake at this hour so that he can fall asleep in the car later to avoid talking about the things that matter. Like his mother. Like why he only ever plays that song—Googoosh's Harf—this time a year, and whether it's to her his thoughts wander to when he gets that glazed-over look in his eyes. How did she die, I don't ask. Tell me why you never talk about her.

He's just a visitor, my Yashar, but I want him to stay and unpack his luggage. Make a home in my scents as I have in the faded jasmine on his pillow and the wisps of frankincense and rosemary enveloped so thickly and evenly around all his belongings. I press my cheek to his collarbone and count down the seconds till he pulls away. One Mississippi. His hand is in my hair, trailing—two Mississippi—down. My eyes flutter shut. Three Mississippi. He grabs my shoulders. "Frans?" Four Mississippi.

"Want some coffee?"

Five Mississippi.

It's raining in east London. The old converted warehouse with its large, multi-pane windows is accumulating droplets at the same speed it's losing them to gravity. Inside, the beat of Kamasi Washington's The Magnificent 7 is inappropriately timed to our meanderings around the flat. If Yashar has anywhere he needs to be, it's the sort of arrangement that can wait while he tries on an ever-evolving selection of clothes. Usually, I'm the better out of the two of us, but today I'm trying to dress a day that would've otherwise fused with the 360-something uneventful days of the year and disappeared off the highlight reel. I want to feel powerful—a process that's stalling the longer I keep looking at the knitted sweaters I've brought from home.

"Do you have anything that would fit me? Actually, not anything. I need something..." My hands cup as if to weigh the gravitas of what I'm trying to express. "Something that on the one hand says, 'no disrespect, ma'am,' but on the other, 'I intend all the disrespect.'"

That's putting it mildly. What I really want is clothing that will imbue me with the confidence to look Giselle Astor-Johnson in the face and make the sort of outlandish request that would rightfully get me escorted out of her premises.

"Something smart," I add, eyeing the industrial pipe he's converted into a clothing rack.

For the price of her services, I should be allowed to walk in and walk out of her boutique wearing nothing but pants and drag my palms all over her glass displays. And I would if I had a standing chance of leaving with what I came for.

"Do you still have those green trousers—" I break off at the look of disbelief on his face. Disbelief that within seconds morphs into a grin of wicked excitement

"Are you—Wait, seriously? Do you know how long I've been waiting for you to ask me to dress you?"

"I don't want you to dress me, just," I make a general gesture to the overflowing rack, "point me to whatever's clean and...wearable." He steps closer, the chiming phone in his hand long forgotten. "Babe, you don't want wearable. You want sexy. Tell me, who're we trying to impress? If you say Claes, I'm going to puke."

I sigh, my smile growing involuntarily. "Not Claes."

"Should I be worried?"

"Depends on what you choose, really." Our gazes lock on the rack that spans the entire length of his brick wall. He immediately starts examining his clothes with such focused frenzy that I'm soon pushed to the side; discarded out of the equation and made to slowly suck on the good intentions of my words until they crumble against the roof of my mouth. And they do—crumble that is—when he some seconds later waves a sheer, glittery something in my direction. My sinking mortification is only alleviated by the evident joke that is the Bowie-esque star-spangled shoes he bends to pick up.

"Yashar! I swear to god." I jostle him out of the way. His laughter god his fucking laughter drills into my heart until my frustrated exterior evaporates.

"Relax," he says. The glittery abomination goes back onto the rack with a clatter. "Would I really do that to you?" The devil's grin is still traceable in his voice.

"Come on, work with me. What did you say you wanted? Disrespectful, but smart?"

I glance at him, still not ready to trust him.

"Yeah?"

"It needs to be subtle, and that's not your..." I trail off as I pull a polyester-yellow turtleneck off the rack. The one he wore to Joachim's birthday bash ages ago. I can almost smell the late summer night breeze as I test the elastic sleeve between my fingers. Almost taste our honeyed, rosé-infused kisses on the balcony. God, we were so new.

"Not my thing?" Yashar finishes. "You're right, but you don't want subtle. Subtle is your default. You want to be..." Now it's he who trails off. We hold each other's gazes, perhaps for entirely different reasons, but it doesn't matter. I trust him. It's a strange realisation to have; to realise this isn't the first or last time I'm seeing him. There's relief in that, but more intensely, there's the kind of trust that says: I know your face better than you do, therefore I trust that you know mine. Know me in ways I'll never know myself.

Whatever he says after that melts away and becomes like the weighted raindrops streaking the windowpane; like the succession of Kamshi's saxophone notes from the turntable that are heard once, never to be heard again. I trace his lips, follow their shape. Make out 'bold' and 'matador' and 'Saudi-oil-sheikh.' When he breaks eye contact to turn to the clothing rack, my anxiety isn't there to fight me for their context. I simply pull back. Trusting. Not that it will be all the way right, but that it will make me feel perhaps even just a fraction of whatever makes his frame so lithe and battle-ready each morning.

To be in Yashar's company is to lend a pair of eyes to his performance art. It's to realise, for better or worse, that he sees convention as an affront, therefore choosing to be the foreigner, the alien, the unknowable, everywhere he goes. Some bigots can't stomach that. Can't wait to hurl whatever slur they think will cut the deepest, but I love it—and not like how friends and acquaintances have grown to love it, but have loved it instantly since the moment I first saw him, in a cloud of cotton and tulle and a thousand clinking accessories.

He throws me a pair of white trousers. A soft textured, baby-blue, turtleneck sweater follows, and while I'm too busy wrestling with the two hangers, he walks over to the built-in wardrobe and unearths something in a clear plastic bag.

A matador jacket.

"Yashar, what the actual fuck." It's white and heavily bejewelled and distressed. My surprise is partly performative because, in all honesty, I'm not all that surprised that he should own such an outrageously beautiful garment.

"Try it on."

I don't know if I comply because of his voice or because I'm compelled to touch it. I catch myself trying to slip an arm into the sleeve even as I'm protesting it's too much, and is he sure because this is way too gorgeous to try on.

"Hold on," he grabs the hem of my t-shirt. "Without this." He helps me pull it over my head. The jacket comes on, much heavier and much colder against my upper body than I would've anticipated. And then I'm stood there, unmoving, in my briefs and the matador jacket; watching him watch me as I become the ant under his magnifying glass.

"Feels like medieval armour, doesn't it?" I want to reply, it feels much more fragile than that but he turns me around towards the full-length mirror, and everything I was about to say disappears. There's only the artfully distressed fabric; the holes, the dangling junks of glinting beads, the intricate silver embroidery.

"Fuck." I poke a finger through the hole in the armpit. "You must have paid a fortune for this."

For a second his expression is guarded, but then, he strikes a matador's pose. "Así así!" I laugh, taken aback by his puffed-out chest and his extended arms. His silly imitation continues as he sprints to the bed, pulls off the reddish bedspread, and starts prancing around with it.

"Eres un matador de toros. Come on," he pulls me along with him. "You are Man facing off against the beast." As always with Yashar, slipping into play is just par for the course. I grab the bedspread from his hands and start baiting him like a matador does a bull.

I strike all the right poses under his guidance. I swirl with the fabric extended away from me for a second, imagining myself as a crossover between a killer and a dervish in meditative prayer. Suddenly, the weight of the jacket isn't so overbearing, the beads not as cold against my skin. Suddenly, it becomes clear to me why Yashar called it an armour.

"It was a gift from a friend, when I left Madrid." He volunteers, and I take it from the way he avoids my gaze that I shouldn't push my luck. He kicks up the white trousers off the floor and throws them in my direction. "Get dressed. I want to hear the verdict."

If I weren't a coward I might've feigned the kind of ignorance that isn't afforded me and asked what friend? Just once I would like to be allowed to pry into his past; dig for stories about the teenager in Stockholm, the young professional in Madrid, the child in whatever town in Iran he grew up in. But for some reason, he's come to the one-sided decision that I'm too frail, too faint-hearted to handle a little bit of baggage.

I want to change that—and believe it or not, that hinges on how persuasive this outfit is in painting me as the kind of person that can cause actual damage to the Astor-Johnson brand. I want him to know, even indirectly, that I went into her establishment in Mayfair in a matador suit and fought to get to know all the ugly and broken parts of him. The parts he relegates to a little carton, no fancier than a shoe box, because he doesn't think they can, or should, take up space.

I have a feeling nobody's ever done that for him—scraped deeper than the surface and showed him how not to be a stranger. A loner. A beautiful visitor who'll pack up and leave just as he whispers he loves you. Therefore, I need to see this through, to anchor him to me, even if that be at the cost of a little bloodshed from piercing his skin with the harpoon that'll inevitably tie me to him.

I need to be the matador. The killer. The peaceful dervish. The kind of man who'll gladly use the Art of War on a sixty-year-old woman and her store associates to get what he wants.

"I feel like I could slay a dragon," I say truthfully when I've put on the high-waisted trousers, tucked the turtleneck in, and mounted the jacket on top of my shoulders. I look at him. "Is this how it feels?"

"How what feels?" he steps closer so that he's visible in the mirror. Even without shoes on his buzzed head peaks over mine. He rests his chin on my embellished shoulder and waits for my reply in the reflection.

"Being you every morning before you walk out the door." His chuckle tickles my neck, but I daren't move an inch for fear of losing his warmth.

"Why're you so sweet to me? It's okay to say you don't like it—if you don't."

"Hey!" I swerve my head so that we meet cheek to cheek. He nuzzles my neck, trails his cold nose along my hairline.

When he speaks his voice is muffled. "Maybe I've pushed it—I don't know. I can't read your mind."

I intertwine our fingers and bring them up to my chest. "You could've dressed me up as a hotdog, told me I looked dandy, and I would've walked out the door believing it. It's merely a bonus I'm in a matador jacket—do you know how sick it sounds saying it." Turning around, I insist, "It's fucking sick."

"And you're not going to tell me who you're making all this effort for."

"I already did. Not Claes."

I've always been cognisant that his tight-lipped nature is a two-way street. I watch the cogs turning as he grabs the back of my neck and brings our foreheads together; watch how the curiosity in his eyes gets buried by smile lines.

"Well, you tell whoever this not-Claes person is that I'll need you here no later than four-thirty."

"Anything exciting happening around that time?" I ask cheekily.

"Oh, I'm only going to my favourite place on earth with my favourite person, you know, nothing special."

I pinch his cheeks and steal a kiss. "Four-thirty? How about three, you know, in case you start missing your favourite person?"

He laugh and returns the kiss. "Deal."