Page 1 of Don’t Let Me Go
If there was ever a time when I didn’t love Marcus, I don’t remember. From the moment I could speak, I saved all my words
for him. From the moment I could walk, my legs carried me in his direction. Even now, after all these years, when I’m in a
crowded temple or the busy streets of the Forum, his face is the first thing my eyes seek out, just as his voice is the only
music that delights my ears. He is so much a part of me that I scarcely know how to exist without him.
“Stop it,” Marcus grumbles. His sleep-heavy eyes flutter open as his lips curl into a mischievous smile. There’s more light
in that smile than in all the morning sun streaming through the tiny window of the squalid room we’ve rented over Faustus’s
tavern.
“Stop what?” I ask, stroking a strand of his fine tawny hair away from his brow.
“You’re doing it again.”
“Doing what?”
Marcus slides his strong hand up my back, sending an exquisite shiver down my spine, before arriving at my head and clasping
a tight fistful of my black curls in his grip. I gasp, breathing pleasure into the air, as he pulls me onto my back. Then
the sturdy weight of his body is pressing down on me as his mouth closes on mine, still tasting of honey and wine.
“I’ve told you to stop watching me sleep,” he whispers, his lips so close, it’s impossible to know if his words on my mouth
count as speech or a new form of kissing.
“You tell me a lot of things,” I answer, biting his lower lip when I can no longer bear its absence.
“And you should listen to all of it.”
“If I did that,” I counter, wrapping my legs around his waist, “we wouldn’t be here now, would we?”
He has no answer for that. At least, not an answer of words. He shuts my mouth with a kiss, and I surrender to him. Just as
I’ve always surrendered.
The first time we made love was supposed to be the last.
That was two years ago. Pompeii was sweltering under the oppression of a searingly hot July, and the city reeked of piss even
more than usual. Marcus and I were sixteen and bored, so we escaped our tutors, as we were wont to do when the midday heat
made them drowsy with lethargy, slipped outside the city walls, and spent the day swimming in the bay.
Later, behind the privacy of the rocks, we dried ourselves in the sun. It was there I tried and failed not to stare at his
sun-kissed form, more perfect than any statue of Apollo. It was there we first gave in to each other. Without words. Without
shame. Just his strong arm around my waist and my body welcoming his as the shore welcomes the sea.
In the blushing aftermath, Marcus became adamant that what we’d shared was nothing of significance—a moment of trivial pleasure,
a thing to pass the time, or, if we wanted to cast a more noble light on our assignation, a testament to our unique closeness
and to the friendship that had kept us by each other’s sides for sixteen years.
But, he said, it would never happen again.
That was his resolution, and it lasted until the following day, when he sought me out in the public baths, where we once again found each other in the damp heat of an empty steam room.
The next day it was in a secluded street behind the Temple of Venus.
The day after that it was among the grape arbors of his father’s vineyard.
So it was that in the months that followed, we became thieves of time, stealing an hour here, an hour there, sometimes an
entire night when we were feeling bold, despite the mounting suspicions of our families. It was also in those months that
we stopped pretending that we were merely passing the time, that Marcus didn’t own my soul as surely as I owned his. Instead,
we began pretending something else, something far more impossible: that what we had could last forever.
“I have to go,” Marcus sighs, slowly pulling his mouth away from mine, as if it required all his strength to forsake my lips.
Spent but still wanting more, neither of us has the will to move, let alone part. Instead, Marcus’s body sinks into mine,
his head resting over my heart.
We’ve stayed out later than we should, considering the scoldings we’re bound to receive when we return to our homes. But it’s
an indulgence we’ve allowed ourselves because it’s my birthday and because of the other thing. The thing neither of us wishes
to speak of but that we both know we won’t be able to avoid much longer.
“We have the room until noon,” I remind him, running my fingers through his hair, which always smells faintly of sweat, muskroot,
and myrrh.
“My father wants me to go with him to inspect Gaius Lucretius’s vineyard this afternoon.”
“You mean your father wants you to go with him to inspect Gaius Lucretius’s daughter.”
Marcus frowns. This isn’t a conversation that either of us wants to have.
Not on my birthday. Not any day. Not when there are so many sweeter things we could be whispering to each other.
Like how his hair in this moment looks like burnished bronze gleaming in firelight.
Or how his eyes are bluer than the Bay of Naples. Or how his heart is half my own.
But we’ve put off this talk for too long already.
“They say Lucretia is very beautiful,” Marcus answers simply.
“Lucretia could have the face of a horse and the brain of a mackerel, and your father would still expect you to marry her.”
Marcus’s shoulders tense. He knows I’m right. Gaius Lucretius owns one of the largest vineyards in Pompeii, second only to
that of Marcus’s father, and he has no heirs except his daughter. A marriage between their two families, therefore, would
be not only convenient but highly lucrative.
“We must all marry sometime or other,” Marcus sighs. Then, extracting himself from my embrace, he rises from the bed to dress.
Without the furnace of his body to warm me, I feel the chill of the early autumn air. It’s subtle but pervading. Not unlike
loneliness.
We must all marry sometime or other.
It’s a statement not worth refuting.
The stories of Jupiter and Ganymede, of Hercules and Hylas, may be known to every man in this city. Such loves may be celebrated
as the true and rightful passions of the gods and their favorites, but nonetheless they are passions that most Pompeiians
prefer to witness in their poetry, not their neighbors.
Hypocrites.
There’s hardly a youth who hasn’t played Patroclus to another boy’s Achilles in some fevered moment of desire, and yet there
isn’t a single elder in the entire city who wouldn’t condemn a man as unfit for public office if he dared to play the wife
instead of taking one.
But that’s the way of the world, isn’t it? What is pure and noble between a god and his cupbearer on the heights of Olympus
is sullied and unspeakable when it occurs between two merchants’ sons.
There’s no surprise in this, and so there’s nothing to say as I watch Marcus sit on our bed and don his sandals in the late-morning light. From the first time that our hearts marked each other as our own, we’ve known there is only one way for our story to end.
“I’ll see you later tonight if I can,” he whispers, leaning across the bed to kiss me.
Our lips touch, and it occurs to me that the next time I see him, the next time that he is in my arms, he may very well be
betrothed to another. How long until he is wed? Until I am wed? Until wives and children and obligations fill up our lives
so that there is no longer room for each other? Until this kiss and all our kisses are nothing but distant memories of some
other life we once led?
Pushing those thoughts away, I clasp his cheeks between my palms and hold his face against mine. If this is the last time
that I will call him my own, truly my own and no one else’s, then I want to hold on to this moment. I want it carved in marble.
Or written in song. A kiss between two boys captured in time forever.
Marcus gently pries my fingers from his cheeks. He kisses my left hand, then my right, then folds them both against my chest
directly over my heart. My heart that will never be anything but his.
Then, without a word, he’s gone.
The noonday sun is warm on my face as I wander through the busy stalls and shops of the market district. There’s nothing I
want to buy, but when your soul is heavy, it’s better sometimes to be adrift in a crowd than to be a prisoner of your own
solitude.
I should head home, make an appearance before my family starts to worry, but I’m not in the mood for Mother’s prying eyes
or pointed questions. Father, thankfully, is in Naples today, hiring more fishing boats to add to his fleet, or else I’d have
to endure his scrutiny too.
I wonder if he’ll be home in time for my birthday feast tonight.
I shouldn’t count on it. Not content to be the most successful garum merchant in Pompeii, my father recently declared it his intention to become the largest distributor of fermented fish sauce in all of Rome’s wide empire.
He’s even started marketing a special garum made without shellfish to sell to the Jews so that no household on the peninsula will be without Titus Flavius Maximus’s special sauce.
Father is a mediocre man of great ambitions. And whether I like it or not, those ambitions extend to me. Someday I shall inherit
his “empire.” That is the life that he has decreed for me. A life of commerce and condiments.
Crossing the square, I pass a wine vendor, whose shelves of amphorae bring to mind an afternoon of bliss I once spent with
Marcus in his father’s storeroom, our ruby-red lips stained with wine and kisses.
I wonder if Marcus has left for the Lucretian vineyard yet. If so, is he thinking of me? Or is he even now steeling himself
against the future by erasing all traces of me from his heart?
The thought of someday being nothing more to Marcus than a youthful indiscretion—a half-forgotten memory—is enough to bring
tears to my eyes.
Why didn’t I try to stop this marriage when I had the chance?
For months, the threat of Lucretia has loomed in the distance, casting a shadow over our happiness, but I held my tongue.
I stayed quiet even though all I wanted was to beg Marcus to refuse the match. To refuse every match his father might make
on his behalf.
Even now, the blood pounding in my ears is telling me to run. To find him. To stop him before it’s too late.
But I don’t. Not because I fear his father’s wrath or even the wrath of my own father. No, what I fear is far worse and at
the same time far simpler. I fear the truth.
If I asked Marcus to choose me above everything else—above family, duty, reputation—what would he say?
For my part, I know that if he asked me to, I would turn my back on the world and forsake everything for him. But would he
do the same? Would he risk the ridicule and the censure of his friends and family for me? For us?
I’m afraid to ask for fear of what his answer might be, so I delude myself that we have no option but to submit to the careful
lives that our parents have planned for us. The lie that we have no choice hurts less than the truth that we do and that Marcus
won’t choose me.
Pushing aside this thought, I turn onto the main thoroughfare and head north toward the Forum. As I do, my feet stumble, and
I’m forced to steady myself against the nearest storefront to keep from tripping. When I resume my walk, I stumble a second
time, at which point I realize that it’s not my distracted thoughts or tired feet that are at fault but the ground itself
that has started to shake.
A clay amphora topples from a merchant’s passing cart and shatters on the street. A whimpering dog scurries inside its master’s
shop and hides under a table. All around me, the early-afternoon shoppers steady themselves against the sides of buildings
or cast nervous glances at their companions as they cling to one another in surprise.
I force myself to stay calm. Earthquakes are as common as thunderstorms in Pompeii. I’ve grown so accustomed to them over
the years, they’ve become easier to ignore than the persistent stench of anchovies that pervades my father’s clothes.
There’s nothing to do but wait. If this earthquake is like the others, it will soon spend its anger, and the city will be
no worse for wear save for a few cracked plates and broken vases.
But as the minutes pass, the shaking increases, and a terrible doubt takes root in the back of my mind.
Something is wrong.
There’s a strange fury to this earthquake, a violence I have never known before. As if the earth itself is in a rage against
its own existence.
I close my eyes and offer a quick prayer to the gods.
To my great surprise, the world around me grows still. I’m hardly presumptuous enough to think my prayers alone have placated
the great divinities, but I’m relieved nonetheless to open my eyes and find the world as it was: silent and unmoving.
Then I hear it. A sound unlike anything my ears have heard before. Like the heavens are being torn asunder.
A woman in the street collapses to her knees and points toward the northern horizon, her face twisted and white with terror.
I follow her gaze, and there in the distance, rising far beyond the walls of our city, I see a thing that I have no name for
but that every instinct in my body knows is death.
Vesuvius, the mountain that has watched over our city since the time of the Oscans, is exploding. Like some ungodly furnace,
it vomits a burning column of smoke and fire into the air.
My mind struggles to understand what I’m seeing, but understanding is gone. All I can do is stare in horror as the mountain
belches its foul contents up into a dark cloud that consumes the sky, blanketing the horizon and blacking out the sun. A false
night falls over the city, but instead of stars, the sky is filled with ash and smoke.
When the stones begin to rain from the sky, I run.