v

I wake up to the waft of morning dew and the sight of sun-kissed ceilings and billowing gossamer curtains worthy of Claude Monet's envy. The sky is draped in virgin white, and I know Yashar knows because the fragrance is everywhere. I smell myself; my wrist, my forearm, my fingers. I squeeze the pillow and bury my face in it. Any minute now the delayed panic will grip me and I'll melt like a heat exposed ice-cube. I'll wish to become like the dust particles swirling in the light. Untouchable. Invisible.

There's no sound from downstairs, but I imagine Yashar to be in the kitchen, jugging cups of coffee. God knows he hasn't slept a full night's sleep in weeks. I felt him leaving just as sun began making its ascent. Felt him press his nose to the back of my neck, his body shifting, scooting closer. Felt his soft peck. A good morning-kiss which morphed into a slow-sinking goodbye-kiss the moment his weight left the bed.

I check the drawer. I check the drawer before I check the time, and when both exceed my expectations, I check my reflection in the bathroom mirror. Check for panic, for confusion to make itself know from behind the unsettling smile belonging to the stranger staring back. The reformed insomniac who's slept passed noon for the first time in ages and woke up with a nest of buzzing bees in his stomach. He who's not surprised to realise that he enjoys this game of cat and mouse.

Yashar has made his move. He's left the perfume exactly where it was, despite heaving lungfuls of it this morning, and at some time opening the drawer to get to his belongings. What does that mean? Where does that leave me?

I draw up a plan in the shower and refine it as I put on a fresh set of clothes. Jay-Z sang chess not checkers. I've been playing checkers, mistaking it for chess. As becomes evidently clear when I, lured downstairs by the RnB from the speakers, find the tray of untouched food on the dining table. What really cements it though, is the bouquet of wildflowers in the vase. So delicate a touch and yet so unshakable in its message: check-fucking-mate.

My heart flutters, disturbed by the decadent display of fruits and berries. The rye toast with Swedish pålägg. The boiled egg. The oatmeal. The coffee. The tall glass of orange juice. And the little card which almost goes unnoticed.

Happy Birthday.

It's Claes' business card. Oat-white and firm to the touch, with only the insignia of his gallery on the other side. Yashar's messily scrawled happy birthday greeting is punctuated with a drawn heart. I reach out and test the coffee with my pinky. It's gone cold along with everything else on the tray. I grab the orange juice and gulp it down. Quenching the panic and saving half of it, to sip slowly as I scour the ground floor for any traces of him.

I find his phone on the credenza next to the bluetooth speakers in the living room. When I slide the screen, it opens to a Spotify playlist named Go Shawty, it's Your Birthday, filled with club bangers. The sort of music neither of us listens to regularly. My eyes snag on Lil Kim's Don't Mess with Me a few songs further down the queue, and despite knowing better, I find myself huffing a laugh.

Such theatrics.

The glass door leading out to the garden is left ajar. There's a bite in the air that makes itself known as soon as I draw closer. Of course, he would be in the orangery. Sometimes I think the only reason he's with me is because of Nan's Mediterranean greenhouse, connected through the garden. He's like Elizabeth Bennet in that scene in Pride and Prejudice when she's asked what changed her mind about Darcy, and she replies: I saw his house. Only Yashar stepped out into the garden, not expecting to see a towering glass structure overlooking the River Rib. Unlike most British orangeries, Nan's isn't synonymous with the typical conservatory but is an actual full-fledged greenhouse with citrus and hibiscus and more plants than I dare to name, but definitely cacti and palm trees.

I don't know what to expect as I pull open the door—maybe hostility, maybe birthday balloons and a cake—but certainly not the sight of him sprawled on the bamboo sofa in a tunic and sandals, reading a book while Savanna nibbles on slices of cucumber on his chest.

"I think my heart's about to burst." I say. "No, truthfully." He rolls his head my way, squinting through one eye, no trace of surprise on his face, just a warm, lazy smile. I place a hand over my heart, willing it to slow down.

"Good day to you and everyone in beautiful Thundridge, except your racist, homophobic neighbours." I chuckle, unsure if he's being funny or not. His expression is unreadable for a few seconds due to the sunglasses that fall down across his eyes as he bends to place Savanna on the mosaic floor next to Tundra. But even so, the second I'm not met with a casual smile, my heart lurches into overdrive.

"What the fuck did they do?" I ask. He pushes the sunglasses back atop his crown and scoots to make room for me on the sofa.

"Does she usually refuse to open the door when you knock to get your bunnies back? Or, I don't know, follow you back to your house while interrogating you?"

"She did not do that."

"She did. Maeve. Now, I'm not British, but even I know that's a fucking cliché of a name." He turns to look at me, "Do you think they overheard us last night?"

"You're trying to lighten up the situation, I get that, but this is another level of disgusting, what they did. I'm so sorry. I'll talk to her—I'll talk to both of them. They should fucking know who you are by now. I mean, how many times have they met you?"

"I think she thought I was going to kidnap these cuties." He reaches down to pet Tundra, "And, I don't know, make a fire in your garden and roast them or something. You should've heard her. Like a broken record, 'Are you sure Frans is in?' I was like 'Yes, he's sleeping,' but she kept asking if she could come in to confirm it. Like, who does that?"

I laugh, imagining poor Mrs Edwards. "To be fair, she loves these two as if they were her children. And I love her for it, but she's old and bigoted in that English pearl-clutching way. She probably took one look at your shaved head and those powerful calves in that tunic—I mean, you're not wearing any trousers!" I chuckle, grazing his earlobe, "And all these earrings, she must have thought the devil had paid her a visit." I hug him from the side, calmed by his subsiding laughter. "I'll talk to her and I'll let her know how in love I am with the sight of you. How literally just seeing you with Savanna melted me. And that she can take her covert bigotry and shove it where the sun doesn't shine."

"You know," I add, pulling away to look at him, "I would've never thought you'd go over there. Especially when you call these beauties rodents every chance you get. So thank you. And..." I stall, not knowing if I'm ready to go there just yet. Oh, what the hell. "Thank you for the birthday surprise, although I hope you know it's not my birthday for another month."

His expression shifts, just as I knew it would. "Who said it was for you?"

It's not the response I was brazing myself for. "Eh," I start, "it's not?" I show him the card, in case he's forgotten. He takes it from my hand and turns it to his writing as if it's his first time seeing it.

"Oh, this? It's for me. I even called Claes, thanking him." He smiles.

"Why?"

"For the present of course. You know," he scoffs, incredulous, "I woke up and I could...I could sense it in the air, you know? That it wasn't going to be a normal day. And then, that present. Wow! I thought someone must've turned the clock forward two months. I mean why else—" he asks, his voice turning back to its normal octave, "why else would someone do that?"

I'm too lost for words and he seizes on the lull. "It was Claes wasn't it? I mean, let's just face it, you've neither got the contacts nor the money to acquire a twenty-something-year-old perfume from out of thin air. And—" he holds up a finger to shush me, "I can bet you everything I have that he has, in his hands, right now, the original bottle."

"Yes."

"Yes, what?"

"He has the bottle. It's hundred percent safe. But listen, Claes doesn't have anything to do with—"

He flies out of his seat and turns on me, "Oh my god. You're so fucking dense. You don't even see that he's playing you. Why the fuck would you give him something of mine? Why? When I've explicitly told you I want nothing to do with that man. Isn't it enough that I have to cover my mirrors? Now he's using you to what, to steal from me?"

"Steal? Jesus Christ, can you calm down for a second? Can we talk about this like rational adults? Why don't we wind back to your first question, huh? Let's do that. Let's start by asking, calmly, why I did it? I did it because of how distant and secretive you've been acting—"

"Secretive, oh, that's rich. Sorry, am I the one who stole—yes, stole—something from you and hid it, only to put it in a drawer and surprise you like a fucking jack-in-the-box? You mean that kind of secretive?"

I sigh, feeling the headache building up as I sag against the sofa, "I can't talk to you when you're like this."

"Good. Don't talk to me. Don't say anything to me until you've handed me my perfume back."

I pull him back. It's so impulsive, so driven by rage and hurt and confusion that I don't realise I've actually charged at him until he's spinning out of my grip.

"What're you so afraid of?" I ask. "Fuck Claes, okay. Forget him. Throw him out of the equation. It's you, it's me, it's that little box that you hide in your closet. It's a family you never talk about; a childhood you never talk about. It wasn't... I wouldn't use it to hurt you. Fuck, Yashar, I wouldn't... I just—"

"Frans," his voice is level, cool, detached, "I want my perfume back from that vulture. This isn't a joke to me. This isn't something—"

"You'll get it back. I swear on my mum's life you'll get it back exactly as it was, okay." I mirror his movements, trying to buy as much eye-to-eye communication as possible. Trying to make him see my sincerity. "I was desperate for an opening to talk to you about the things weighing on you. That's all I ever wanted. I know how much it means to you, and when I saw that you only had a few drops left, I thought..." I sigh. "I hate seeing you like this, so bottled up and...and emotionally distant, and you're not sleeping..."

I'm hoping he's going to interrupt me any second now, but he never does. The conversation fades, leaves behind vibrations of sound too faint for the ear to catch, but which I'm still hoping will make its way to him, telepathically. My sorrow, my regret, my hope that finally, finally, we might acknowledge it. But I'm losing him. He's retreating into a smile that is as fake as a human expression can get.

"I lied." He snorts humourlessly, "God, you must be feeling so stupid now that you know. I lied, there you go. Happy?"

"Lied about what?"

He steps closer. "The perfume. How much did you pay for it? It couldn't have been cheap. And now you're starting to realise, aren't you?" He holds my gaze. His mocking. Cruel.

I take a step back. "It was never about the perfume, Yashar. I don't care about the perfume."

"No? You don't care to know that it was never my mother's? I lied. I've been lying for so long." His voice fades, and the pain breaks through, "I lied to my sister. She wasn't the kind of woman who wore perfumes, my mother. Wasn't the kind of woman who tolerated her son wearing them either. I stole it—yes, ironic, I know."

There's no humour in his voice. "I stole it from my aunt and told my sister it was my mum's." I wait, afraid of interrupting and disturbing his train of thought as his eyes flick around the greenhouse. "My aunt... It wasn't that she was freer, but sometimes I could sense that my mum wanted her kind of life, if she could start over. My aunt lived in the suburbs, in a three-bedroom house. Quiet. So much space. No husband. No children. Which she always said made her job as a lawyer that much easier. I mean, she had everything: the money, the clothes, the socials. Society valued her. It didn't look down on her. Mum... She didn't like her very much. But to be fair, she didn't like anyone from my father's side of the family. It didn't stop them from being quasi-friends, though.

"She'd gotten fired from yet another job—my mum. She was always getting fired to make room for someone who could speak the language. As soon as there was the tiniest miscommunication they were like—bye bye."

He stops and looks at me, as if he can't decide on something. "Go on," I grab his hand and force all my hope into my grip. "Please."

After a bit of wavering he continues, "I could tell that it was different this time. It had gone weeks and she wasn't bouncing back. I made myself as small as possible to survive. My mum—" he breaks off, swallows, "she could be incredibly kind, but also... not. She had these rages that were like forest fires. It was like she saw black, or stopped seeing all together Anyway, we're at my aunt's and everything that could go wrong that week had gone wrong. Mum's there to let down her hair. They're drinking tea, chatting. I sneak off to my aunt's bedroom. It's me and Nasrin. We're children, you know. Just playing. Pretending we're Cinderella or something, trying on my aunt's things. To Nasrin and I, this is magic. We're witnessing magic, seeing how much stuff she owns."

He sighs, "At this point, my dad has no idea I'm taking dance classes. Mum knows and her only, like, demand is that I keep my grades up. And... Well, my grades are slipping—and it's not because of Dance—it's because I'm... I'm getting bullied, and I have no friends, and school is literal hell, and the only thing keeping me there is knowing that at 3:30 PM every day, for ninety minutes, I get to dance. It's the only time I feel alive. That I feel capable and I'm not laughed at for speaking the language like a four-year-old. I don't have to speak at all. I don't have to memorise tenses and be in constant fear of ridicule because of mispronouncing. I can make myself heard through movement; I can express happiness and anger and longing. I feel human. I feel like I used to, back in Iran before everything changed."

He chuckles, but it's to mask the sadness and the tears welling up in his eyes. "Anyway, we're at my aunt's. Just prior to going there, Mum was called in to school to talk about how bad I am at spelling and reading. I get an earful on the bus in front of thirty-something strangers that sure as hell didn't sign up to hear her yelling in Azeri about how she's planning on telling my father everything. I don't know why, but when we get to my aunt's and I try on her perfume, it's like I forget how to make myself small. I forget how angry she is. I forget how bad things are at home. I feel...I don't know...I must have liked that feeling because I stole it."

"What happened once at home?" I ask when his voice fades and it feels like he won't resume. His gaze is fixed on a cactus, and when, some seconds later, he turns to look at me, his expression is a careful curation of pleasant.

"She yelled at me. Not the same day, but... It's not like it's a subtle scent, is it? She smelled it on me."

"Why did you say you lied to your sister about the perfume?" I've stepped on a land-mine. He shuts down, sucks every hint of emotion from his body so fast it leaves me wishing for something to hold on to. "No, I'm sorry." I pull him closer, desperate to keep him talking. "I'm not here to ask questions."

There's a long pause in which I fear I've lost him before he speaks again, "I only lie to my sister after she's passed away." I can tell every word hurts from the way he avoids looking at me. "Just one lie. One lie that I forget about as soon as it leaves my mouth, but she doesn't. And now I've been lying for so long sometimes I forget it's a lie. If my sister believes it, why can't I? Why can't I buy into that reality when it's so much kinder than the truth? She dies a few days after she tells Dad on me—my mum.

"We're not allowed back into the flat, so we live with our aunt, who sometimes works late, and sometimes sleeps at the hospital to keep an eye on Dad. We're left with her neighbours a lot; Björn and Karin." His voice grows so low it's almost a whisper by the time he continues. "They take such good care of Nasrin, even though she's inconsolable. I'm lucky in that I have Dance and that I'm older and understand a bit more. I'd hoped everything Björn and Karin were providing would...I don't know, distract her? But she's grieving in a way no eleven-year-old should ever have to grieve. Not getting out of bed. Not eating. Refusing to speak anything other than Azeri. So, I make up a lie to protect her. To give her closure. I tell her it's the last thing Mum reached for. The last thing she grabbed and handed to me before the ambulance and the firefighters arrived."

His words drain him. He staggers to the bamboo sofa where his knees give out. His shoulders hunch forward; his forearms on his thighs. I crouch before him, grabbing his hands, needing to see his face.

"How did your mum die?"

"Please don't ask me that." He whispers, head still bowed. I squeeze his hands. Massage his fingers. Waiting patiently for his voice to regain its strength to carry on.

"Nana used to call my mum, passionate lady," he says at last. "After the hottest part of the flame, which is also the word for love—sevda. She was uncontrollable; passionate in a way that could drive most people crazy. Back in Iran, she and Dad rarely lived under the same roof for more than a week at a time, and I came to understand why when in Sweden we were crammed into a single bedroom flat. My dad hates her. He comes home and the first thing he does is beats the shit out of her. She sulks. He apologises. She does something that pisses him off. The cycle repeats. The last argument they have is about her spending too much money on phone cards. It overlaps with her getting fired, my poor grades, my dancing, and me walking around 'smelling like a whore.'

"It's a bad week in a line of bad weeks, and the night it happens," he raises his head and I'm surprised when he doesn't pull his hands back. His face is grief stricken. "I'm twisting and turning, I can't sleep, and I hear Mum from the other side of the door, speaking on the phone. I know Dad isn't awake, so I don't fear getting out of bed to grab a glass of water. She's in the kitchen and it smells like food. It's past midnight and she's holding a phone between her ear and shoulder, stirring something on the stove. When she notices me, she drops the phone and starts yelling at me to get out. She chases me out of the kitchen and locks me inside my bedroom. I hear the key turning, her footsteps as she retreats. I hear her going back to her chipper conversation. And then I fall asleep.

"I wake up to the most," he shakes his head, closing his eyes as if to shut out the memory. "The most...inhuman scream that can come from a human." I don't think he realises how hard he's gripping my hands. "And... I can't do anything. I'm banging on the door, and nobody is opening. The screaming continues until it doesn't. Until all I hear is my mother's sobbing. When after what feels like forever, she unlocks the door, I run into her arms, expecting her to be hurt. I check her stomach, thinking he must have stabbed her. Thinking she's dying. She falls over me, bringing both our bodies to the floor. She's shaking but no longer making any sounds, and that's when I smell it." His eyes well with tears and he sniffs as if smelling an olfactory hallucination. "Like chips... only nothing like it. Like frying oil and burnt flesh."

"She asks me to call an ambulance. I think... I don't know what I think. She goes back outside to grab the phone and I follow her. That's when I see him, lying face down on the floor next to the pull-out couch in the living room. The pot she'd been stirring next to his...."

He never finishes, I don't give him the chance as I squeeze his shaking frame. Holding him together, so that he can break safely in my arms. God, what have I done. I swallow and swallow but the lump in my throat refuses to wash down. My heart has morphed into an automated jackhammer and all I can see is fried skin and the hottest part of the flame and his mother standing over his father, a pot of hot oil in her hands. I shut my eyes against the onslaught of projections and instead focus on his laboured breathing against my shoulder.

"I'm so sorry. Yashar, I'm so sorry. I shouldn't have... I'm so sorry." I squeeze him tighter; prepared for him to never speak to me again after this silence.

His hot tears soak my sweater. I've broken him. I've broken this unbreakable being. I did this. My mind is whirling, trying to tie the story together. She pours frying oil over him, he passes out after screaming, yet she's the one who dies and he survives. And where's Nasrin? The emergency personnel are called. Yashar and his sister are taken to their aunt, who sometimes visits his father at the hospital, but what about his mother? Was she stabbed, is that how she died?

I'm getting nauseated the more I think about it. Who can survive something like this? Who can carry on living and live in such a way that brings so much light and love and happiness to other people?

She dies a few days after she tells Dad on me.

A few days?

I see images of his mother bleeding out, clutching her hands around the knife in her stomach. A teenage Yashar is there in my mind too, once carrying his mother's lifeless weight and in another comforting his sister with a make-believe story about a perfume to coax her out of her grief.

He mumbles something against my shoulder. I pull back, so that when he repeats it, I catch it. "Nasrin returned the perfume to me once she moved out of Björn and Karin's to live with my father."

I grab his face with both my hands and tilt his head towards me. "You must know, Yashar, that I never intended for this. I acted out of ignorance and insecurity. If I had known.... Please, please, know I didn't mean to hurt you by bringing this up. I get it now. I understand. There are certain boundaries that should never be crossed because of how I feel. I should've brought up my concerns and not hidden them to ambush you like this. Please, eshgham, know that I—"

"It's not like I didn't know." His eyes are red rimmed, sleep deprived, bone-tired. And yet also ethereal. "I knew it was coming when you put on my father's music—the questions in the car—I was just too much of a coward to bring it up myself." He sighs, closes his eyes. I bring my lips to his, softly, like magnolia petals falling to the mosaic floor.

"As you can see, I'm not running for the hills," I chuckle against his lips, "if that's what you were afraid of."

Eyes still closed, he says, "I rather you not have known. I didn't want to bring all this baggage on our holiday." His eyes open and it's like getting hypnotised by a hazel kaleidoscope marred by trauma.

"Our holiday lasts for five days, we're going to last longer than that." I say. "I mean, you would've told me sometime, right?"

He smiles, but there's no humour there, "No. Frans, no. Sometimes—trust me, it's better not knowing. When life is this short, it's just better to fill it with pleasant things, beautiful things. What good could come out of this?"

"You mean, it's better to pretend it's not there at all? To go weeks, sometimes months, where it feels like I can't reach you. Sometimes I look at you and I realise how little I know about you. I've come to call you my visitor. My beautiful visitor who's going to walk out on me at any second."

When he says nothing to that, I add, "Now, at least I have this; this pain as staked through your heart as it is now mine. And this moment which ties you to me wherever you go. I can no longer convince myself you were an enduring visitation because I can't make this up. These parts of you—not in a million years. You're realer to me now than you've ever been before." I trail my hands to his shoulder, feeling his body, his physical entity, his realness. "Sometimes the truth is unpleasant, doesn't make it any less real, does it?"

I've left him speechless. I seize on that to change the subject. "Tell me why Nasrin moved out to your father's, but you didn't." I intertwine our fingers to say, I'm here and I don't intend to go anywhere so you might as well tell me.

"In the end, we all make our own choices. I wanted freedom and she wanted normalcy." He sighs. "I thought I was protecting her by keeping the worst of it hidden. But then she started asking questions and demanding answers. Selfishly, I kept evading her because I didn't want to go back to him. I would lose everything. I wouldn't be able to dance. And that's all I've ever wanted. That's one reason out of many. She also wasn't getting along with Karin. I think she thought Karin was trying to change her."

"Why didn't you go live with your aunt? Why Björn and Karin?"

"Because they actually wanted us and she didn't. She found a job elsewhere and relocated while our case was being processed. And maybe she thought we were cursed. She did say that in the courtroom once."

"So you were literally stranded on the steps of the orphanage like some sad Oliver Twist?"

He chuckles, the first sign of humour seeping into his face. "Yeah, but now I loved them more than life itself so..."

"They sound like amazing people. I love them for you."

"That's such a Foy thing to say, 'I love them for you,'" I laugh at his imitation. "I'll have to take you to meet them," he says. "They're very Swedish though, so they might try to feed you herring and potatoes."

"Fish and potatoes? That's practically what we live on here in the British Isles."

"You think the herring's fried? No baby, it's fermented."

"Okay, maybe that meeting can wait."

He laughs.

"At least until I've built up some immunity."

"But," I say tentatively when there's a lull, "it sounds like you had a happy childhood with them."

"I was fourteen, don't think I had much childhood left to live out, but yeah. I was with them two years and then I was off to the RSBS in Stockholm." He sounds proud when he says that. My heart swells as it sinks in what an uphill battle it must have been for him to get into the royal ballet school.

"And your dad, have you met him since?" I ask slowly, careful not to step on any metaphorical land-mines.

"Yeah." I'm surprised he's still smiling. "The day he came to pick Nasrin up. Christmas Eve, 2001. And then again at Nasrin's wedding, almost six years ago."

"Is he...has he changed?"

He stares at me for a moment. "If he has, he hasn't changed for me. I don't care either way. He could be a saint today. And I would love that for him, I really do. But does it matter? Should it when wasn't a saint when it counted?"

I mull on that for a bit. "Did he ever go to jail?"

"My dad? No."

"I mean...didn't he...your mum?"

Realisation seeps into his face. "You think he killed my Mum?"

"Well, no... Maybe. Did he?"

"No." He frowns. "First of all, how you just asked that is sending me. Frans, are you in shock? Is any of this fazing you?"

I swat away the hand he waves in my face, "No, and don't change the subject. What happened? How did she..."

"Die?" He finishes, his voice growing sombre. "She jumped off a building. Ninth floor, died instantly on impact."

Seeing my floored expression, he continues, "She was taken into custody that night. I guess she wasn't feeling that well because she asked to take a breath of fresh air and they took her up to the roof where they have a designated smoking area. One side of the building is under construction and..." he rubs his forehead, "maybe the guard isn't paying attention or whatever. But... next thing, she's up on the scaffolding and jumps.

"My grandmother predicted that her passion would kill her, that's why she was Sevda," he says as casually as one would when talking about the weather. "She also predicted that I would die alone, abandoned by everyone I ever loved. That's why I'm Yashar. I'm the one who lives on. And so, I will outlive everyone—"

"No. You can't believe that non-sense."

His expression has gone all wrong; grief and sadness weaving itself into his creases. "It's true, though."

"It's not."

"You don't know my family. My aunt was right; we're cursed. I don't expect you to understand, Frans Dahl. I mean, just listen to your surname, or I don't know, look around this place—"

"You're so full of shit. How can you spew all that rubbish when I can bet money you were the one who walked away from all of your previous relationships? 'Dying alone?', 'Outliving everyone?' What are you fourteen and on Tumblr? How can you say that when I'm standing right here? Am I some kind of broken record? Repeating 'I love you' 'I want to be with you' over and over again."

I don't expect to be overcome with emotion when I reach and grab him by the cheeks. Squishing his face. "And I swear to god, if you ever again use my name, or what I have to try to undermine the validity of my experience and how deeply I care for you—"

"Then what?" He's trying to smile, but looks ridiculous. I snort, releasing him.

"Then you're banned from the greenhouse."

He mock gasps in shock. "Not the greenhouse."

"I mean it."

He grabs my hands and intertwines them with his. His growing lightheartedness and ease evident through the increasing pressure on my knuckles. "I know you do. You really are something else, eshgham. Thank you for taking all of this so well, even though you still might be in shock, and who knows what your real reaction will be—" I squeeze his fingers painfully, causing him to break off into a chuckle. "I love you, god how I fucking love you, and I'm sorry that I didn't trust it to last; not for a week, not for a month, and certainly not for two years. To be honest, I still pinch myself. The fact that you're real and that I get to call you mine? Today? Tomorrow? Thank you. Thank you for your foolish bravery. How on earth you found a two-decade-old perfume I don't know, but thank you for wanting to."

I trap him in a kiss as warm and lazy as the sun streaming in through the glass panes above and around us. "You have to admit though," I say against his lips, "the whole birthday breakfast tray, the playlist, it was a bit too much."

He pulls back, indignant. "I'll do no such thing."

"I mean, it was borderline psycho. The playlist? Go Shawty, it's Your Birthday when did you have time to think that up?"

"Did you see that I added Lil Kim's Don't Mess with Me and Nicki's Did it on 'Em?" He asks all proud.

"You're a fucking psychopath."

"Oh, babe, if you're just finding that out you've got another thing coming."

"You saying that to scare me away?"

"Is it working?"

"Out of all of things I know about you, including how fucking horribly you sing in the shower, you think that's what's going to scare me away?"

He reclined against the backrest of the sofa, tilting his head towards the glass ceiling. Displaying jaw and throat and collarbones in all their sun-kissed glory. "Eshgham, you're gonna leave me before I leave you and that's fated."

.........................................

THE END

If you made this far, thank you. It's been a pleasure writing this story and I hope you enjoyed reading it just as much as I did writing it. Thank you for all your votes and comments. If you haven't commented and voted, I'm seriously side-eyeing you and questioning your choices. Also, please consider putting this on y'alls reading lists so that other kind strangers on this site might find it easier.

Kheyli dooset daaram! <3