This is unbearable pain.
It is insurmountable joy.
The two extremes Cairo always evokes in him. He drags them, screaming, to the forefront of Zayir’s soul. Rarely a man of excess, he melts now into the press of skin against skin. Always a man of pragmatic senses, he rests his head tiredly against Cairo’s shoulder as they dance. There, Zayir almost feels at ease. There, the heat of their bodies is a salve. He thinks, tentatively, full of fear: as long as Cairo has lived, I have not failed.
The thought is only ointment to a burn.
The thought is a haphazard, too-late-to-help truth.
And it is too much to bare. So, as always, one of them turns away. He is hardly to the bar when Cairo has caught up to his escape—but you weren’t really trying to get away, were you, Zayir?—and the gold-and-white Arete turns to face him. Then why did you return?
Zayir’s look is fierce and leonine. It is the glance of a general, a commander, a soldier-for-life. He brings that expression, sometimes, into the intimacies of his personal affairs. And it is here now, like an armour. Why did you return? He asks it of himself. His tongue is sharpened with a thousand things he could say; a thousand, hurtful things. Yes, Zayir nows how to deliver a death of a multitude of small, seemingly harmless cuts. Abruptly, he deflates.
“Because, Cairo.”His answer is noncommittal and stiff. How can the other man not see it? How can he not recognise how badly Zayir needs him? Was Zayir’s head resting, momentarily, on his shoulder not enough? His voice is thick and self-deprecating when he says, “The fraction of yourself that you give me is better than the whole anyone else would offer.”
Is it a truth?
Zayir doesn’t know. He still dreams of the foreign prince, of running beneath the desert stars together, of hunting lions in the distant Savannah. Of sheets, and gemstones, and feeling—for once—wanted.
But Zayir is not in that foreign city any longer. He is here, in Solterra and Cairo has followed him. He blocks whatever escape Zayir may access; but Zayir stands. He takes another shot of liquor from the bar and, by now, he is beginning to feel the way it makes his entire body burn.
“But that isn’t as important of a question, as to why you always seem to leave.” His courage is righteous; dignified; burning. He presses closer to Cairo now. The other stallion is slightly taller, but Zayir is broad like a beast is broad; he postures his neck, stiff and snakelike, until they are so close they nearly touch but not quite, not quite.
“So, Cairo, why? Why am I not enough for you?” What Zayir does not say is that he would be enough for anyone else. He would be enough. He does not mean for his voice to break the way it does.
“speech”
