Page 29 of Rhymes with Metaphor

Downstairs, he checked his email and found a curt reply from the chair about “pushing your luck,” which Reg thought was a cliché thing to write, but then she was an administrator, not a creative.

She hadn’t rejected his thesis out of hand, which was something.

She said she would get back to him with a date for his defence, which left Reg with a complete absence of responsibilities or worry for the next two weeks at least.

He wandered into the kitchen, pulled some chocolate and almond croissants out of the freezer, and put them in the oven. Then he made Turkish coffee. When they were ready, he brought them upstairs on a tray. Joel lay prone in the bed, comatose. Reg got in beside him and started eating.

Joel stirred and lifted his head.

“Morning,” said Reg. “Or should I say ‘Evening’? Come and eat. I’ve got to keep my personal secretary and muse properly fed.” He balanced a small plate with a croissant on Joel’s chest.

Joel rubbed his eye with the heel of his hand and sat up. “I’ve pulled all-nighters before, but I never felt this wiped after.”

“That was before you had mono.”

By the time they’d finished the coffee and only a few scattered flakes of croissant remained, Joel was looking more spirited.

“Now,” said Reg, setting the tray on the floor. “Take your clothes off.”

“You first.”

“If I must, I must.” Reg got his clothes off and dropped them on the floor. Joel watched, looking solemn.

Joel got out of bed and stripped off his clothes, not slowly or seductively, but with alacrity.

Reg patted the bed.

“I should have a shower,” said Joel.

“Not yet, cariad. But you’ll want one after I’ve finished with you.”

Joel climbed onto the bed. He was trembling.

“Don’t you look a picture?” said Reg, regarding Joel’s body appraisingly.

In the bottom drawer of his desk was a plastic bucket filled with drawing implements: Crayons, pastels, coloured pencils, and markers. Reg dug out a fistful of markers and placed them on the bed.

“What are those for?” said Joel.

“You’ll see. Lie back for me.”

Joel did, and Reg touched him here and there, light caresses that visibly excited Joel.

“Shut your eyes,” said Reg.

Joel did, and Reg picked an ultra fine tip marker from the pile. He straddled Joel and held his left eyelid down with the tip of his thumb. The marker needed only a light touch to leave a mark. Reg wrote addoli on Joel’s left eyelid and cariad on his right.

“I can see stars,” said Joel.

Reg lifted his thumb and capped the marker.

Joel blinked. Reg could almost feel the force of devotion in his gaze.

Reg picked out a green, food-grade marker from the pile. “Open your mouth and stick out your tongue.”

Joel complied, and Reg pulled on his tongue and wrote apse while Joel’s saliva pooled around his thumb.

Reg whispered, “I’m putting words in your mouth.”

Joel closed his mouth around the marker and sucked.

“What you do to me.” Reg drew the marker slowly from between Joel’s lips.

Joel let out a drawn-out sigh. “Your thumb tastes of marzipan. But the marker’s bitter.”

“It’s for writing on cookies, cariad, so it won’t poison you.”

“Why do you call me cariad?”

“It means ‘sweetheart’ in Welsh. Do you mind?”

“No,” said Joel. “I like it.”

Reg kissed him, tasting the bitter green of the marker. Then he pulled away, held the back of Joel’s neck, and across the ridges of Joel’s larynx, he wrote, treasure box , feeling the vibration as Joel laughed.

Above his collarbones he wrote, in gold, starlight, and in silver, moonlight, and in the dip between, what have you .

In red, he wrote alchemy on the bone below the hollow of Joel’s throat.

“That’s my manubrium,” said Joel, watching.

Reg wrote, NERD in purple glitter around Joel’s left nipple. Joel laughed again.

In orange marker, he wrote over Joel’s heart Bury me under the rowan tree .

Then he drew an unbroken line from Joel’s heart, across his shoulder, along his left arm, and in a long, slow scroll, wrote swell , backwards over his biceps.

Reg took Joel’s wrist and held it while he wrote on the smooth, hairless skin where his watch used to lie, manacle of time .

..joining the dots around his wrist like a bracelet.

Then, in a circle around his palm, Reg wrote, My sword will not sleep here.

Reg hadn’t intended to compose a poem, but Joel’s body inspired him by angle and hollow and word by word, possessing them both, and drawing them together. Joel’s energy pulled Reg’s hand and swept him along.

He wrote Cold Crash on the edge of Joel’s floating rib and slipway along the fall and rise of his flank.

When Reg pressed the hard tip of the marker into the divot below Joel’s kneecap, Joel twitched, nearly kicking Reg, and Reg chided him.

“That’s my patellar reflex,” said Joel. “It’s involuntary.”

Reg picked out a fine tip marker, grasped Joel’s right hand in his left, interlacing their fingers and then, pushing the nib against the pads of Joel’s fingertips hard enough to make him wince, he wrote, SWOT .

He wrote a stanza slowly up Joel’s inner thigh while Joel grew more excited.

“It’s called ‘subtext,’” said Reg to Joel’s erection. “Turn over.”

Joel eagerly complied.

In the hollow behind Joel’s left knee, on the smooth, pale skin, he wrote cup of cream while Joel groaned softly into the pillow.

Pressing the marker into the arch of Joel’s right foot, Reg drew the head of a blackbird, while Joel laughed and squirmed, and Reg admonished him to keep still.

Reg crushed the frayed nib of the marker hard into Joel’s tailbone, Forte , and Joel’s body arched under him as he hitched against the mattress, and in quick, little jabbing strokes, Reg penned, Accelerando up the small of his back, holding Joel still with his palm. Joel pressed himself into the mattress.

“Not yet, cariad, not yet,” said Reg. “On your back again.”

Joel was very disinclined to turn over and continued pressing himself against the bed for a few more moments before complying.

In indigo ink, along the valley of his groin, Reg wrote blue run in cursive, one word flowing into the next, and in three quick strokes, Joel came.

Reg eyed his handiwork, feeling pleased with himself, then wrote Here love lies around the edge of the semen pooling on Joel’s belly, which moved under the marker as Joel panted, the dizzying smell of sex and marker making every detail seem sharp and hyperreal.

“How long did you last?” said Reg.

Joel let his head drop back to the pillow. “Oganesson.”

“Spell it,” said Reg.

As Joel recited the letters, Reg wrote up Joel’s belly, pressing gently, and underneath, he signed his name.

“The well has run dry,” Reg whispered, capping the marker. “You did brilliantly, my little muse.”

“Why didn’t you fuck me?” said Joel peevishly, still panting.

“All in good time.”

“It was the perfect fucking time,” said Joel.

Reg plucked tissues from the bedside dispenser and wiped Joel clean. “Oh dear.”

“What?” said Joel, eyes half open, cariad and addoli obscured.

“It appears that some of these markers were permanent. I’m sorry.”

Joel’s belly trampolined under Reg’s hand as he laughed, and then Reg laughed, and they held each other.

“What will you do when you run out of elements?” said Reg.

“I already have. Oganesson’s the last one. I could do constellations.”

Reg tapped Joel’s glittered left nipple, and Joel laughed again.

Before Joel got dressed, Reg asked if he could photograph the words on his body.

“I could transcribe them onto paper, of course,” said Reg. “But the effect would be lost. I promise not to show your face.”

Joel indulged him, and Reg had him pose, sprawling across the rumpled bed covers. The word on his tongue had blurred, so Reg had to re-ink it.

“I’ll give you something to eat afterwards to sweeten the taste,” said Reg, which led to kissing, which grew heated until Reg had to call a stop as he hadn’t finished taking photographs.

“Shall I take you to dinner?” said Reg.

“I need a shower first.”

As it happened, apart from the food-grade marker on Joel’s tongue, all of the markers Reg had used on Joel were permanent. Joel came out of the bathroom in much the same state as he’d gone in.

“I can’t go out like this,” said Joel. “I look like an underpass.”

“I’m the one who made you indecent,” said Reg. “It’s my responsibility to make you decent again.”

Reg dressed Joel in long pants and a long-sleeved dress shirt fastened with cufflinks, and he pinned a silk scarf around Joel’s neck. He completed the look with a pair of white cotton gloves and sunglasses.

“How do I look?” said Joel suspiciously.

“Like the bearer of deathless verse, who’s had a very satisfying evening.”

They ate on the patio of the local pub. Joel had a ravenous appetite, but it was a warm evening, and he was uncomfortably hot in his clothes.

“All right?” said Reg. “Are you melting?”

Joel downed a glass of water and asked the server for another.

As soon as they got home, Joel didn’t bother to go upstairs but went straight to the pool, stripped off his clothes where he stood, and dove in.

“Aren’t you a picture?” said Reg, watching him swim.

A picture needing words. Perhaps a thousand of them.

He scrabbled desperately at his pockets to locate his notebook.

He wrote with an errant marker on the paving stones and was still at it when Joel pulled himself from the water and sauntered over to watch him write.

Reg gazed at him, dripping, lit by the golden spotlights around the pool, and he did look like he’d just fallen from heaven.

The next evening, Joel asked Reg to take him to an outdoor production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream , as he’d seen an advertisement in the pub, and he’d read the play in the library a few weeks earlier.

Joel covered up again, but it wasn’t as venomously hot as it had been the night before. In the dark, as they watched the play, Joel slipped off his sunglasses, and his hand stole to Reg’s, clasping it.

As they walked home in the dark, the sound of their footsteps unnaturally loud in the quiet, a fox ran across the road, stopped to look at them, then ran on. They could have been the only people on Earth.

Joel said, “I enjoyed that. I’m starting to understand Shakespeare now. I think the reason I didn’t before was because I’d never been in love.”

Reg’s heart stopped for a moment. He felt a burst of joy, followed by crashing guilt.

He had been on the receiving end of declarations of love before, usually when it wasn’t mutual and he’d done nothing to invite it.

He couldn’t make either claim now. It was disconcerting to feel the weight of what was at stake when he’d spent weeks and months thinking, This is pleasant.

I hope it continues. He’d been unfair and irresponsible, like the woman who’d surrendered an owlet to the wildlife centre after allowing it to imprint on her.

Reg had stopped walking, and Joel stopped too. He was smiling, puzzled, but sincere. He blinked, and Reg’s own words, cariad, cariad, cariad , flashed at him, like a reproach.