Archive of Our Own

The end of the 20th century was a chaotic time. Something nameless inside Nicky was ablaze.

He was a typhoon, a hurricane of half-formed thoughts and dreams, blood-red intensity and profound exhaustion that went hand-in-hand with medical school. He was determined for a change, to bring destruction wherever he went just to create something from the ashes.

Something just came to a head at the time, like a big fat zit, and he wanted to burst and let out all his fiercely contained putrescence.

Yusuf was feeling the same. Nicky knew this through a multitude of factors: proximity, firstly, but also because he knew his beloved down to the raw core of him with only a look, and because Yusuf had been impulsive of late. He had thrown himself into the art scene, or something like it. The dirty, underground, unpleasant art scene.

He would surface from creative episodes with obvious fatigue under his eyes, but an energy in his body that Nicky could only equate to the feeling of being free after time in captivity. The captivity, he figured, was not their work which demanded so much of them, but the absence of work, of something to do.

Nicky’s beloved had reinvented himself, or rather gone back to old roots. He was Yusuf again, Yusuf ibn Ibrahim ibn Muhammed al-Kaysani, called al-Tayyib, and he would not spell it out. Nicky admired him, of course, for his pride, but also for the way he had decided to dress in the last few years. He had turned his art outwards on his body, and dressed then in spikes and studs, torn fabric and visible patches. His hair, too, was usually in some interesting position, or his curls were left to grow wild. His pillow had the permanent musk of hair gel, and Nicky would not deny all the times he buried his nose in it just so he could sleep.

Andromache had an ancient apartment in Toronto, down by the Don Valley where the wild flora concealed the neglected, crumbling apartments, and the million-dollar homes with pristine windows glowered over the ravine like bedazzled kings in their turrets.

The apartment was one crumbling in real time, as when the subway train would rattle by on the bridge above, powdery streams of white plaster would fall from the ceiling. It felt like being in an hourglass, slowly filling with sand. Time’s almost up!

Andromache had a long tradition of sharing, Mi casa es tu casa, as the phrase went, though she predated this by thousands of years. Still, Nicky knew that Yusuf believed they had overstayed their welcome, even without Andy there. In his artistic endeavours which garnered no profit but which Nicky thought were more valuable than gold in any case, Yusuf felt guilty for not being able to leave Andy compensation.

That was, until Yusuf came back to the apartment one day with a job offer.

They were to be getaway drivers, no questions asked, for a mouth-watering sum of money “per job.” The caveat, because there was always a caveat: it was a one-time-only deal. This ended up working well, though, because of the nature of their work. They refused repeat missions for the risk of being discovered.

Nicky was also desperate to work, truth be told. His studies had kept him busy, and on those he was intensely focused. But as much as they were joined in soul and flesh, he was not Yusuf. He had no outlet for the times he would return from a ten hour study session or a full day lab. Then again, even Yusuf’s art did not seem to be enough. There was something else that needed to come out. The two of them together were… congested.

Nicky had searched for an outlet, mostly in a bar that was popular with other graduate students, which he decided immediately upon entering was a no-go. There was Yusuf, though, who, by virtue of his art and performance pieces, knew more hidden spots.

They used to have parties in Bay station, on the subway platform. Not the station used by the public, but the bones of the one that was closed down in the 1960s and remained there, unused, deep underground. It was a hotspot for misfits, to Nicky’s understanding. No cameras would enter, as its existence was a secret. They went down there, he and Yusuf, into the dark.

It was there that Nicky found himself in a situation which demanded much better cognition than he was able to give, having just been forced out of a 13-hour study session on firmicutes by Yusuf. Nicky had unwittingly been invited into a conversation with a rather pointy looking young man whom he knew through Yusuf as Angel.

Angel had attended one of Yusuf’s shows, and was very determined to pick his brain and debate him on any topic he deemed worth the work. Nicky knew only a few things about him: he was also a tired graduate student, of something like English or Philosophy, Nicky could not remember, and his name was a nickname or codename. The name quaintly either matched or contrasted with his tattoos, depending on what the observer thought, because he had two black wings tattooed onto his neck, the feathers curling around the sides and towards the back like a pair of hands.

Now, Nicky was an old, old man who was not by any means obligated to sit down and debate with a twenty-something year old punk on his free night, but these debates promised to be a decent outlet. Plus, the tender look on Yusuf’s face every time Nicky would catch his eye was always such a delight.

Angel had apparently read a science fiction novel* that had induced some deep existential feelings in him, particularly on the nature of what is deemed human. He therefore, having just learned “al-Tayyib’s boyfriend” was studying medicine, had been very interested in getting Nicky’s take on the advancement of technology and machines, and what this might mean for humans.

Technology, in the sense that Angel was referring to, was such a new thing in Nicky’s long life, and therefore precarious. He did not feel threatened by it in the way that Andy did but would not admit, this great technological unknown, but he also did not fully welcome it in the way Booker did. He was not worried about machines replacing humans, if that was what Angel was getting at.

In a way, it was. In the station over pulsing, grating music, Angel had given Nicky a hand-rolled cigarette and told him his hypothesis:

“It’s the next stage in evolution,” he puffed, his lips popping as he pulled from his own cigarette, “man, and machine.”

“Hm,” Nicky hummed around his cigarette, blinking away the smoke. He asked him to continue.

Angel had much to say about the blending of humans and technology, including body modifications and surgery, dermal piercings he had seen that could glow in the dark, tattooed eyeballs, metal plates in the skull and titanium hips, pacemakers and cochlear implants. It was his idea that, eventually, humans and machines would become inseparable, to the point where one could no longer define which parts of a person made them human.

“Cyborgs?” Nicky asked, hopefully with no detectable edge. He did enjoy a good existential discussion, but the cigarette Angel had given him had in fact been hash, and Nicky was feeling very funny about it.

The joke had the opposite effect, however, and Angel just leaned into it harder, becoming very animated as he went off on tangents about all the possible ways humans and machines might blend. Nicky’s eyes crossed when Angel got to micro-chips in the brain with satellite links. Before he could possibly get talking about aliens and anal probes, Nicky excused himself and sought his beloved, who had kept himself closeby, snickering.

The conversation had not done much to ease Nicky’s psychological congestion, unfortunately, but something about it stuck in his mind.

So, when they took the getaway driver job, Nicky found himself rather distracted in the passenger seat by the hum of the engine beneath him.

It was an old car, nothing fancy, all fake leather seats and a leopard-print plastic speedometer, a glove compartment with a broken clasp, seat belts that went across the waist but nothing more.

Nicky remembered driving a similar model in the early 80s in Tijuana. The engine did not sound the same. This one was louder, like the purr of a jungle cat just behind his ear, hiding in the dark.

The job had been good for the two of them, because one needed to drive while the other covered. The latter was Nicky’s job, as he was known to have a keen eye and sure aim.

Nicky’s hands were busy moving on their own, going through the motions of checking each of their handguns for full cartridges and functionality in his lap, his knees spread wide in his jeans, one pressed against the door handle. He checked a magazine. Slammed it into his handgun. Pulled back the slide with a snap. Set it down on his thigh. It took him three seconds flat, then he picked up the next gun. On the seat between his thighs were a smattering of bullets, which made a tinkling sound as he sifted through them and pushed them one by one into another magazine.

He could feel Yusuf watching him do this, and he turned his head to see him, to give him his attention, still loading the guns.

Yusuf had that air to him that he adopted before every job. His shoulders were slightly hunched, not out of anxiety or caution, but out of concentration. His face was forcefully hard, his eyes focused and dark as he watched Nicky. Then his eyes darted down to Nicky’s lap, just a flutter of long lashes in the darkness, and he squirmed in his seat, his hand tight on the wheel.

Nicky relaxed further into his seat, his legs naturally falling more open until his knee pressed against the gear shift, where Yusuf’s right hand laid.

“What are you thinking?” Nicky asked.

“Thinking about seeds,” muttered Yusuf. To any other lover, this would have been a strange non sequitur, but Nicky knew his heart and so he knew there was more to that sentence. It was why he was teasing him with his body language.

“Seeds of metal,” Yusuf mused, and Nicky hummed. “Between your legs.”

Nicky clicked his tongue, clicked back the slide on his handgun. “Naughty. We are at work right now.”

Yusuf huffed a laugh through his nose, the sound weak and unsteady. Nicky recorded the sound in his mind, for later.

The job was a quick one and, as agreed, they did not ask any questions. They were handed the cash first, then they dropped off three people, and there was no need for Nicky to fire a single bullet, though he kept his eyes out the windows the entire time.

When their young criminals — who Nicky had gathered had stolen something from a warehouse that he knew belonged to a museum, so he hoped that the item was at least going to its native home — were safely delivered, he and Yusuf peeled away toward the highway.

It was deep into the night. A quick glance at the glow-in-the-dark numbers on his watch told Nicky it was nearly four in the morning. The car, moving at a high speed, was loud, its engine smooth in a way that reminded Nicky of his lover’s voice.

The familiar register induced his mind to wander, back to times of old when that voice would hum around a campfire when Nicky was pretending to sleep.

He had not realized his eyelids had gone heavy until Yusuf’s voice drew him out of it. His actual voice, not the hum of the engine, saying, “Should we park?”

Pulling himself a little upright in his seat, Nicky blinked at him. Then he smirked and waggled an eyebrow, which made Yusuf laugh, though there was still a touch of concern to his features.

“Here, Yusuf? Or shall we get a hotel?”

Yusuf was shaking his head, grinning with his eyes on the road. “I mean you look tired.”

“Rude,” Nicky laughed, shifting in his seat. The way the seat belt constricted his hips bothered him, and he considered taking it off.

See, he could have. It would not have been the first time, and it was only recently that cars were even manufactured with seat belts, and what was risky behaviour to them? If anything, though Nicky would only admit this to Yusuf and their small family, a little danger excited him.

Nicky would think about this later, years later:

What if he had unbuckled his seat belt? What if he had been ejected from the windshield? What if, as he flew across the road, somewhere between the milliseconds it took him to fly and for his body to break upon the asphalt, what if this gift, that thing that made him immortal, vanished?

But that was not what Nicky was thinking about in the moment.

In the moment, he was looking at Yusuf. They were passing through that dark stretch between yellow street lamps, and Yusuf’s eyes were glittering with the little lights. Like a moth to a flame, Nicky was drawn to them, and it was only three seconds, maybe four, but it was enough time for Yusuf’s body to respond to him, to grow heavy and warm, for Nicky to lean into his arm…

And Nicky glanced out at the windshield at the shadow of a large animal standing on the road, maybe a dog, and he said the beginning of Yusuf’s name, flinging his arm across his chest on reflex, before Yusuf swerved. Hard.

Later, Nicky would imagine that moment as if it spanned a hundred years, every second unfolding into smaller and more intricate parts, much like the glass of the windshield as the car rolled over, much like the blood vessels in his body as he was slammed against the barrier of the seat belt.

They rolled, and the light was beneath them, and a deafening metallic grind sounded all around them like a death cry. There was glass in Nicky’s hair, and at some point in the chaos the dashboard had crumpled down on Yusuf’s legs, sending the wheel into his pelvis. They were rolling again, so fast the world was only a grey blur and a metal scrape. At some point, Nicky was not sure if it was their heads colliding or the shift in gravity, he lost consciousness and could no longer, see, feel, hear. He was gone in an instant.

He came back upside-down, his seat belt being the only thing saving him from sliding beneath the crushed remains of the dashboard. He was conscious, he thought so, but for a long time he could not move. The air had been completely sucked from his lungs.

A glance to his left proved that he could still feel pain, and an involuntary sound garbled out of him when he saw that Yusuf was also upside-down, bleeding from his head and struggling to release his seat belt.

The air bags had deployed and were deflating. Blood had dripped onto Nicky’s, though no more. Wherever he had been bleeding from had sealed itself. His ears were muffled as if clogged with water, though somewhere he could hear a repetitive ding, and the more he struggled out of his position, the more he heard the scrape of the car on the asphalt as it shifted with them both.

Nicky got out first. His seat belt released and he went tumbling down into the broken carcass. He knew there was glass under his skin, could feel it poke itself out and finally, as his ears corrected themselves with an eye-watering pop, he could hear the shards clink against broken metal as they fell.

Yusuf’s seat belt had jammed and the wheel had crushed the bones of his pelvis. Nicky could hear them cracking as they fixed themselves back in place. Yusuf managed to slide himself under the seat belt by using his legs on the ceiling, which was actually the floor, to push himself down and to the side of the wheel. Nicky was about to help him when in that moment he was released, and with a scrape of metal and a flurry of glass, he went tumbling on top of Nicky.

They were stuck for a short time in the roof of the car, wedged between the seats and the windshield which had folded down and shattered into a spider web of cracks. They knew they had to move, had to leave the carcass behind as help would soon be on the way and they could not be discovered. But they just stayed there for a while, re-learning how to breathe, as Nicky’s ribs snapped back out and his collapsed lung expanded in a painful rush.

It was much like a rib cage, the ceiling of the car where they laid in a broken bloody pile. The doors and walls, glass broken through, were its ribs. The engine, still sputtering and wheezing its last breaths, its heart and lungs. But it was them who were filling it with blood, their mingled blood which they unwittingly smeared across the dashboard. It was so stark a scent, that and engine oil, burnt rubber from the streaks on the road.

As Yusuf raised his head to look at Nicky, his nose clicked crudely back into place and he held Nicky’s head in his hands, leaving blood on his skin. Nicky felt his own ankle crack as it righted itself, and he winced. Yusuf was looking into his eyes, making sure he was still with him. There was blood in his curls, laying them in heavy ringlets on the side of his head. In the glaring red light of the one unbroken headlight, tiny shards of glass in Yusuf’s face gleamed.

Be it the relief at being okay, or perhaps the thrill of having died together once more, Nicky’s body, cracking and wheezing as air escaped the healing hole in his lung, surged up and he crushed their lips together.

It tasted like metal.

~*~

Something still stirred within Nicky. Perhaps it was simply that time, the sticky period between spring and summer where one could not commit to much of anything, what for the dramatic weather changes and the disorienting return of the evening sun. It was still light out, or rather a deep and dusky blue, though it would become dark soon.

At that time of year, in those particular days, Nicky knew that Yusuf preferred the night. His restless body would pull him out of the bedroom and toward the car keys hanging by the door — Booker’s car keys, belonging to one from his collection which he only claimed to care about when Nicky took it. They both knew Booker would disapprove, as he was only lending them the car, but when Nicky was busy with classes or holed up in the living room studying, Yusuf would take the car and go on night rides.

Nicky did not know exactly where he went, but he had never needed to keep tabs on him. At the very least, he didn’t crash Booker’s car. Often, he would return before Nicky even put his books away, and it would be Yusuf dragging Nicky to bed.

Booker’s car was a silver Subaru nearing the end of its life, yet the ancient thing refused to die much like them. He had bought it second-hand sometime in the late 80s, and since then they had all carted it around a good chunk of North America on various jobs. For this reason, there was a certain serenity to sitting behind the wheel that Nicky understood. He felt comfortable, but more than that, eager to drive it again.

He could have cautioned Yusuf from doing his night rides, given the recent crash. But the two of them were anything but afraid. That feeling, that slight tickle in Nicky’s spine that warned him of impending doom, was always there then when he finally took the car to the highway, Yusuf accompanying him in the passenger seat. Nicky found himself steering towards that feeling rather than away, pressing down on the gas pedal just a little more, as if chasing something along the horizon.

“You’re taking us to Lakeshore,” Yusuf noticed quickly.

Nicky nodded. “The scenic route.”

“Mm,” Yusuf hummed. Then, “Still not too tired, after class?”

Nicky shook his head. If anything, his classes that day had invigorated him, inspired his mind to turn and turn.

Yusuf could tell there was something on his mind, of course. Nicky was being too quiet. In his peripheral vision, he could see Yusuf stretch his legs out — at least as much as the car would allow, given the length of them — as he watched Nicky drive. Finally, knowing Nicky tended to engage in long conversations with his classmates on their campus-wide walk after class, he asked what they had discussed this time around.

“Surgery,” Nicky said, “but in particular cosmetic enhancements.”

“Oh?”

Nicky glanced at Yusuf to see his raised brow, before he turned back to the road. They were approaching the Lakeshore stretch, and would soon be gaining speed.

He hummed, digging himself a little deeper into the seat much like the way he would shuffle back into Yusuf’s chest when they slept. The feeling could not compare, of course, and so Nicky had to make due imagining the feeling of Yusuf’s warm chest expanding, his heart beating steadily against his back.

“There was the beginning of a debate going on,” he explained. “Some of my colleagues believed cosmetic surgery to be liberatory and euphoric, because the subject is able to gain control over their appearance. Others said that cosmetic surgery would be the death of individual flaws, or what makes us truly human. They were stuck in these polarizing stances.”

Yusuf huffed, amused. “Does one of your classmates go by Angel, perchance?”

Nicky huffed a laugh and drifted them a lane to the left.

“Angel,” Yusuf snorted, “who thought that humans and machines, or, I guess, artificial materials, would eventually blend into each other, ergo creating the next phase in evolution.”

“Yes, interesting.”

“Yeah. But, see, I was thinking about those artificial parts. How long does an implant stay in the body before it becomes part of the whole? Is it ever considered human? How many pieces and chunks can be replaced, how many organs and tissues extracted and how many machines inserted into the body, until it is no longer ‘human’?”

“Theseus,” said Nicky.

“Sure.”

With humour, Nicky challenged him. “You cannot believe that it’s simply organic material that makes us human.”

Yusuf went quiet, and Nicky knew he had him. He glanced over to see Yusuf’s pursed lips, his eyes focused on the glass of the windshield rather than beyond it.

The nature of humanity was a hot topic for them, and an old one at that. It had to be, given their gift. Their shared definition human concerned what was within: connection, love, loss, and reflection. Just so, there were people who had qualities that made them inhuman.

“If we are talking about the human body, then it should be said that it already functions like a machine,” Nicky continued, when it seemed Yusuf had no response.

He liked to speak like this in the quiet hours when the veil between dreams and wakefulness was thin, when Yusuf’s mind was flooded with ideas. They both enjoyed it. That type of talk reminded Nicky of their early years, cold and curious nights around a campfire trying to make sense of their impossible lives and impossible bodies.

Yusuf hummed for him to continue, and Nicky felt the rumble in the base of his skull.

“In essence,” said Nicky, his voice lowering as it would when they were in bed, “the body is an amalgamation of meat and bone. It is a system intricately working with itself, through tendons that move bone, through a muscle that pumps blood. Look closer, and we find that our bodies are not even our own. We have a symbiotic relationship with the bacteria that live in our intestinal walls.”

“An organic machine,” said Yusuf.

The small bit of traffic had cleared away and they were speeding along, the lake to their right, its pungent sulphuric scent seeping in through the car’s cracks. Yusuf rolled his window down to its half-point, and the rumble and groan of the car’s engine competed with the wind.

“So,” said Yusuf, “the next phase in evolution is a fusion of organic material with the inorganic machine.”

“Would cosmetic surgery count for that?” Nicky glanced at the speedometer’s little hand ticking, edging farther to the right. He gripped the wheel, planting himself firmly in the seat. The seat belt was once again digging into him, his pelvis this time, and his body was struggling to not imagine the feeling of the bottom of the wheel grinding into his most intimate parts.

“I was thinking a more immediate event,” Yusuf said. “Think, like a chemical reaction. A bang, almost instantaneous deconstruction and reconstruction.”

“Evolution is very, very slow.”

“But machines have evolved very fast.”

“Hmm.”

A glance at Yusuf’s eyes showed they had gone heavy-lidded. He was looking at Nicky’s hands on the wheel, noticing his grip. And in all likelihood, he had also noticed Nicky squirming against the seat belt. With intentional, agonizing slowness, Nicky reached over and put his hand on Yusuf’s thigh.

Yusuf honored his wish, and continued talking.

“A near instantaneous blending of organic material with that of a machine… What can do that better than a car crash? Organic and machine are together deconstructed, and something new is formed from the two. A marriage, of sorts.”

Yusuf’s eyes had gone very dark. Nicky said, “Marriage? I was going to say birth.”

The laugh that puffed out of Yusuf only released a smidge of the tension in Nicky’s body. “Only because you are un-romantic,” he joked.

“But,” Nicky added, popping the ‘b’ as the word all but exploded out of him, the tension still mounting, “what you say compels me… The two of us together in such an event. What makes you you, in me… what makes me me, in you. The car crash is the event. The car, the material used to reconstruct our bodies and selves, until we are one.”

Nicky took his eyes off the road to see the heat in Yusuf’s.

“One flesh.”

“One mind.” Nicky nodded. “Yeah.”

Then they both went quiet, Yusuf’s shimmering eyes only on Nicky, hungry and dangerous.

They said, Give it a try.

That was a dangerous look indeed, and one so ancient. It was the look that had gotten them in trouble countless times, seconds before slitting throats, bursting through windows, diving off cliffs, fucking rough on the ground…

Just to see that look linger a while longer, Nicky pulled the wheel just a smidge to the left. The car obeyed his command, swerving just slightly off the painted lines. It was not like steering a horse, which of course had eyes and senses and an instinct to peel away from danger.

A vehicle, on the other hand, a machine, obeyed its driver’s every command. Behind the wheel, Nicky was the vehicle’s mind.

He brought them close enough to brush the guard rail, the left headlight leaving the phantom of a kiss on the cement. Yusuf’s eyes were titanium. Nicky’s hand was gripping Yusuf’s thigh, his fingers curling, digging into the inner seam of his pants. Nicky could feel his lover’s body humming hot and low, like the engine.

And just as that look darkened and he could feel Yusuf’s resolve collapse into desperate want, Nicky pulled them away.

He watched Yusuf settle back into his seat, watched the steel in his eyes soften and the animal retreat. But he could feel it within himself as well, whirling like pistons, thrumming with heat.

“Somehow,” Yusuf said, “I don’t think that’s what Angel was getting at.”

There were times, every now and again when the desperation ran high, that Nicky purred.

Not in a literal sense, not really. It was a low rumble, deeper even than his speaking voice. It was usually involuntary, Nicky not being aware he was doing it, but Yusuf often said it could be felt in his own flesh like vibrations, sometimes as light as a tickle and sometimes deep enough to shake his bones.

So they had stopped Booker’s car in an empty dirt patch along the Lakeshore, just out of sight of the highway and near an underpass, and the first thing Yusuf did was pounce on Nicky.

Booker’s car was old and shitty, but Yusuf managed to force the seat to lean back. Then they were kissing and grinding, Yusuf’s plaid slacks against the hardness of Nicky’s denim. Yusuf put his hand between them to offer the meat of his palm for Nicky to grind up against, and there Nicky could not contain his noise. Yusuf turned his head to put it up against the pulse in his throat, his jaw going slack against Nicky’s face.

A while like that, and Nicky had snuck his hand into Yusuf’s pants. He was suckling on Yusuf’s neck, savouring the taste of his flesh, and was that the sound of Yusuf’s arousal, or the sound of the engine stalling beneath them?

Yusuf put his hands on Nicky’s chest and pressed him harder into the seat, which groaned under their weight. Then the rest of the world beyond the machine which enveloped them faded away, and the animals that made up the two of them came together as one.

It had been like this for as long as Nicky could remember. Raw, heated bliss. He poured himself into Yusuf, and felt all the weight in his lover’s body become liquid over his lap, over the press and squeeze of his hand.

With Yusuf’s slickness, he coated his fingers, and with only a few tender teases to his hole, he pushed two fingers inside.

Yusuf threw his head back to gasp, grinding onto Nicky’s fingers, shaking the car. The sudden jolt and rock of the vehicle startled Nicky into a quiet laugh, and Yusuf was laughing too, moving his hips faster and faster to make the car rattle.

His cock was dripping onto Nicky’s shirt, but neither of them cared. Nicky thought then about the two of them spilling freely in the car, spreading their combined fluids over the seats, marking the internal components of the vehicle forever as a vessel that had brought them together in death, now in life.

Booker’s car was not the one that had crashed, but it did not matter to them. He knew Yusuf was thinking the same. He could tell by the increasing desperation of his sounds, unguarded then, and the grinding of his hips.

They were panting into each other’s mouths, not so much kissing as they were exchanging air, not letting a single breath go without sharing it. Nicky had every intent of driving Yusuf insane, his fingers in his ass and his other hand stroking him frantically.

Hungry and wild, Yusuf dove into his mouth, devouring him more than kissing him. He sucked on his tongue and Nicky groaned. Their teeth clashed together and Nicky snarled. Then Yusuf put his teeth to use and he took Nicky’s bottom lip into his mouth, sucking it, worshipping him, and then he bit down.

Nicky’s fingers never stopped moving, even as Yusuf’s canines pierced his lip and hot blood flooded between them. He bit down again, keeping the wound open a moment longer before it would seal itself away, and then, moaning and mindless, Yusuf mouthed at Nicky’s cheek, his jaw, his neck, marking his skin with his sticky blood.

The metallic taste awoke something ancient in Nicky. Were it not for the car and its hum, its smell, surrounding them, he would have thought they had transported in time to one of their earliest nights together. Testing the boundaries of their pleasure and pain.

When he came, Yusuf screamed. Then he forced Nicky’s hands free and, without another second of hesitation, tucked himself under the dashboard on his knees.

After, they sat panting in their seats. They had fogged up the windows, which Nicky found just as much amusing as it was erotic. Yusuf had turned his head to see him as Nicky rested his hand on the wheel, just grounding himself. The first two fingers of his right hand were still wet, glistening under the distant lamplight.

Nicky could hear Yusuf swallow his blood, and the sound of it, the thought of it, had Nicky’s insides burning.

“I’ve thought up a method for my next art show,” Yusuf said.

Nicky turned to him, his eyebrow raised.

“Finger painting,” Yusuf said, and Nicky burst out laughing.

~*~

Starchy blue sheets hung on metal rods, containing the sterile space in an intimate circle. A tray of steel instruments waited on a table, to be handled by gloved expert hands. Powerful lights bore down on the scene, illuminating a thin padded table and the patient who lay there in waiting. An oxygen tank hissed on the floor, and a reverberating electronic beeping with no visible source made the display all the more dreamlike.

A lone man wrapped head-to-toe in a surgical gown began by lifting a tool from the tray. A small scalpel, which he held up to the light, inspecting its lethal edge. So little and almost delicate in its sloped shape.

The patient was covered by a green sterile paper tarp, save for his face which wore an oxygen mask, and his midsection upon which the white lights were glaring. A carefully cut hole in the tarp exposed his sternum to his navel, dyed a crude red which had bled into the tarp — iodine. With extreme slowness and concentration, the surgeon placed the tip of the scalpel just under the patient’s sternum, in the middle where the apex of his ribs could just be seen.

The patient jolted at the touch, and the surgeon lifted the scalpel. There was a pause, the surgeon looking down at the patient through his mask and goggles, the patient blinking hazily up at the surgeon. Awake and alert.

Then the scalpel came down again and, like the parting of drapes, it split a clean line down the center of the patient’s stomach.

Blackness flooded out from the cut, pouring over the patient’s pale flesh and saturating the tarp, sticking the paper to skin. The smell was thick and strong. Oil.

Nicky was suspended.

He inhaled through his nose, and even though no actual anesthesia was coming through the mask, he could smell the chemicals, could feel them tickle his nose and his mind. Yusuf looked ethereal from his place above him, illuminated by lights that were nearly blinding.

Nicky did not raise his head — he was supposed to be paralyzed under medication — but he could see under his nose the wires that Yusuf was pulling out of him. Little, spidery wires in red and white tangles, before he would find the pièce de résistance, the thickest blackest cord that was no less than five meters long.

Nicky could not see past Yusuf because of the lights, but he could hear people murmuring and whispering. They were a polite crowd, studious even, like real medical students overlooking a real operating theatre.

Yusuf had set up the theatre in the main entrance of the house — a trap house, really, where underground artists came to share in their strange inclinations — where observers could stand on the upper floor overlooking the banister. The setup mimicked a real operating theatre well enough, with a deliberate touch of the surreal and uncomfortable.

Nicky could not feel anything, of course, as it was all prosthetic. It was a real scalpel, though, and he found himself repeating that first cut in his mind, imagining that Yusuf had laid just a little bit more pressure. It would have pierced his real flesh underneath, engine oil mixed with his blood. And the crowd would be none the wiser.

Yusuf had found the black cord, and it was then that Nicky was supposed to start screaming, breaking from the anesthesia. Yusuf gave it a pull and Nicky jolted with it, shouting once. Yusuf startled back, not expecting the patient to be able to feel pain. Experimentally, he tugged the cord again.

Nicky bucked with it, shouting again. Then Yusuf pulled his goggles off in disbelief and got two hands around the cord, tugging ruthlessly and with only one goal in mind.

All Nicky could see was white, the light in his eyes, as he screamed as if everything in him was fighting death. The oxygen mask slid off his face, and Yusuf propped a knee on the surgical table for leverage, pulling the creature’s lifeline in fear and hatred.

Then it happened. With that final bit of leverage, the cord detached, and Yusuf was thrown back by the force. Nicky dropped to the table like a doll, his eyes wide open at the lights, his body bleeding oil all over the floor.

Yusuf was huffing, and although Nicky could not move his eyes to see him, he heard him react to the look of the cord. Like a snake, it wiggled in his hand, and Nicky knew that there was an appendage on the end of it. Pulled from his ribcage, it was a fleshy bloody mass. The steady beeping had culminated to one final keen, but as Yusuf stared at the organ on the end of the cord, the room began to fill with a deep, distant heartbeat.

It was a pig heart, no less realistic than one of a human. Nicky could hear Yusuf drop it with a shout, and then he stood there in shock, looking at his massacred cyborg on the table.

Nicky’s eyes watered and stung from keeping them open under those lights for so long, but soon enough the lights all went out, the thumping ceasing, and there was silence before applause.

Yusuf pulled Nicky’s hand until he was sitting upright, and in the dark he helped him get a robe on. They would remove the prosthetics and all the mess later. For the moment, as Yusuf’s gaggle of artists clapped and murmured amongst each other, Nicky pulled him in by the tight collar of his gown and hissed into his ear.

“You can press harder next time.”

A chill woke Nicky around four. For a split second, his mind could not conjure the year nor the place. He thought he was back in the desert, in his early years, shivering next to a dying fire with Yusuf cautious and curious at his back.

Yusuf was not in bed with him, hence Nicky’s body was cold. It was odd how that happened. Odd, but something they were long accustomed to. They had needed to share body heat an incalculable number of times in nine-hundred years, yet even when there was no need, when they were comfortable in apartments with blankets and heating, Nicky still felt that their flesh was somehow connected. He was cold, so Yusuf, wherever he was, was also cold.

He was not on Andy’s couch, nor was he in the bathroom. Nicky only managed to find him by chance, because he had begun to internally panic and ran down to the garage to get the car, to go looking for him.

There Nicky found him. He flicked the lights on and the shape of a person nearly sent his soul leaping out of his body. It was only the length of a powerful heartbeat, then he recognized him.

Yusuf tilted his head toward him, a slow and mechanical movement. Then he smiled.

He wore only his underwear and had draped his chest over the hood of the car, his arms spread wide and long fingers fanned out. The silver of the hood shined in his huge pupils, so black his eyes became mirrors. His head lifted only for him to smile, then he lowered his cheek once again to the hood with a weighty thunk.

Nicky approached him, wondering if Yusuf was somehow sleepwalking. “Joe?” he asked. But when Yusuf did not move, he came in close, crouching down so their eyes were level.

“Hello, my love,” said Yusuf. “Night ride?”

Nicky huffed a laugh. He did not have a class in the morning. He could afford it.

Then Yusuf lifted himself from the hood, his movements slow and deliberate, his hands pressing hard into the metal until the surface dented and warped under the incandescent lightbulb.

Nicky took the hand that was offered and he pulled Yusuf in. Yusuf kept himself low, though, still bent over the hood as if his skin were fused to the metal, and he stuffed his face into Nicky’s stomach and inhaled, balling up his t-shirt in his fist.

“You still smell like oil,” he exhaled, muffled against Nicky’s shirt.

He did; he could smell it on himself. “Thanks to your show,” Nicky joked, a soft laugh trembling out of him. The way Yusuf was sniffing him made his head light, his knees weak. That, and the memory of being on his table, open and exposed, the heady scent of the oil pulling him under as if he truly were being pumped with medicine.

Yusuf had rucked the hem of Nicky’s shirt up with his nose, and his teeth and wet lips nicked the soft flesh under his ribs. Nicky got a hand in his curls — overgrown, wild from restless sleep and crunchy with hair gel — and yanked his head back until Yusuf could look nowhere but up at him.

“I will drive?” Nicky said like a question, though they both knew it was a demand. Yusuf was far too excited to get behind the wheel, and Nicky did not know how many hours he’d slept.

Yusuf smiled up at him and said, “Please.” And Nicky tugged on his hair just a moment longer before they climbed in.

In the morning, that was, eleven o’clock, it felt like a dream.

Hunched over a pan of scrambled eggs and tomatoes, Nicky remembered the coolness of the lake air through the car windows, the fuzzy lights of cars in the distance so early in the morning. He remembered Yusuf at his side, the musk of his hair gel as the wind threw his curls about, the heaviness and heat of his hand that pressed into Nicky’s groin.

There wasn’t much else, not beyond some more groping and a healthy dose of speeding. Standing there in the kitchen after the fact, grasping for sense memories, Nicky felt that simmering want again, that restlessness stirring within him.

His beloved was sitting at the small round table just an arm’s length away. Nicky could feel his body from the stove, could feel all of Yusuf’s nerves sing in tandem with his own.

They were not saying it yet, but there was only one place they both wanted to be.

Nicky was about to abandon the eggs, but the telephone rang then, sobering them both quickly and bringing a chill to the room.

Andy’s apartment had a landline, should they ever need to reach each other. Normally when they would part, Andy would go off on her own and resurface mysteriously some months, or rarely, years later. She liked her solitude. At least, she liked it in that century.

So, it was likely not Andy who was calling. Unless it was an emergency. Nicky turned the stove off and wiped his hands nervously on his hips, making for the telephone on the wall. Yusuf got there first, an expression of equal concern and thinly veiled panic creasing his face.

“Yes?” he answered. A moment of silence, then he sighed out and flicked his eyes up to Nicky. He pressed a button on the machine and hung the phone back up on the wall, and Booker’s voice came scraping out of the receiver.

“—eard about your art show, al-Tayyib. You know, if you’re going to keep making your art public, you should really think up a new alias.”

“Hey, Book,” Yusuf said with an affectionate eyeroll, leaning a shoulder on the wall. “This one has served me faithfully for nine-hundred years.”

Nicky allowed himself to relax, but he left the stove. His posture mirrored Yusuf’s, a shoulder against the wall, his arms crossed over his chest.

“Yeah, that’s kind of exactly the problem,” said Booker.

Nicky asked him, “Where did you hear about Yusuf’s shows?”

There was a crackle, then Booker replied, “Ah, so there’s more than one?” Yusuf raised an eyebrow at Nicky, and Nicky cleared his throat.

Booker continued. “A guy who comes into a book shop I frequent wanted to write a piece on a local performance artist. Said he did weird things with machines and possibly stole medical supplies.”

“I would never, ” said Yusuf, with a wink at Nicky.

“Local?” Nicky frowned. “You are in Toronto?”

“ Sorpresa. ”

They looked at each other in shock, then it made less sense as the seconds crawled on. Where was he, then?

“I’ve got my own place,” said Booker. “It’s on the other side of the city from Andy’s place, if I’m assuming correctly that that’s where you guys are staying?”

“That’s right,” said Yusuf, his mouth still hanging open on the end as if to say more.

Nicky finished Yusuf’s thought. “Does this mean you have been in contact with Andromache? Do we have a new job?”

“Possibly, yeah.”

There was another pause where they just looked at each other, waiting for Booker to say more, thinking about going back to work as a full team. Nicky was in school, which he did not normally cut short for work, but it could be done…

And Yusuf, he was enjoying making his art, insufferable graduate students in attendance be damned. Nicky found himself sitting with the uncomfortable and unusual feeling of resisting work. There was still something inside him, something unfinished and coming to a boil that needed to be resolved, and he was beginning to think that their usual work would not satisfy it.

“More to come,” Booker said. “I’ll be waiting here for Andy. You guys have my car?”

Their eyes met in a flash and Yusuf sucked his lips in, no doubt to contain a snort. “Yep,” he said.

There was a crackle that was the sound of Booker sighing, and he said, “Okay. Just don’t let Nicky drive. He’ll crash her on purpose.”

Yusuf opened his mouth, but Nicky grabbed the receiver from the wall then to speak directly into it. “Good to hear from you, brother. Take care now, talk soon.”

Booker huffed another laugh, and Nicky could perfectly conjure the image of his playful smirk. “Likewise.” Then he hung up first.

Like a mirror, Yusuf and Nicky stared at each other in silence. Without touching, Nicky felt his heart’s body, read his thoughts. There was a twitch to Yusuf’s thumb which held the outside of his elbow. A stutter in his throat when he swallowed dry, his eyes assessing and lingering on Nicky in the same way. The silence began to fill with the rush of blood in Nicky’s ears, and if he concentrated hard enough, focused on that spot on the side of Yusuf’s throat, he could hear Yusuf’s blood flowing too.

“I have an idea for your next art show,” Nicky said.

A tick of an eyebrow. Oh? Yusuf uncrossed his arms, leaning just a bit closer against the wall, his shoulder rolling over the chipped paint.

Nicky only nodded once, conjuring all the seriousness and promise he could in his eyes. Then he turned back to the eggs, thrilled at leaving Yusuf hanging — literally, as he could hear his shoulder slip on the wall from leaning too far in.

Soon, Nicky thought. Nightfall.

~*~

The city had cheaped out on street lamps. They hadn’t updated them since the 70s, easily, their orange murkiness and shattered glass telling. The road, just a long, straight line, was poorly illuminated, but the wetness of the asphalt from some evening rain spread the orange light like liquid fire.

Nicky didn’t need to see.

He stood with Yusuf at their spot, the dirt patch out of sight of the highway above. Between them, the machine. It was not silver, but gold under the lamplight, sputtering and shuddering as it waited empty, filling the air around them with heady, purple smoke.

“A final show,” Yusuf had said, after hearing Nicky’s idea, “just for us.”

“No witnesses,” agreed Nicky. This was too intimate a piece.

Yusuf’s art was always intimate, even the scribbles he left on napkins — napkins from one of their homes, napkins saved from a diner where they had shared a slice of pie, ‘Oh, I think I will put one in my pocket, just in case you need it.’ Yusuf’s art could never be excised from his self, the intricate mechanics of passion and ideas that made Yusuf Yusuf. Nicky knew that, of course. To observers, however, Yusuf’s art began and ended with an experimental performance piece of a surgeon dissecting a cyborg. They could not understand. They could not know.

But this time, no, this last piece was for them only. It was to be experienced in full, using all of their shared senses.

All was quiet around them in the early hour. No cars in sight.

Nicky began.

He started with a stroke to the car’s hood, feeling its contours and creating shadows in the golden light, drawing the feeling through the metal of Yusuf’s bare flesh pressed against it. Yusuf stood on the other side, not watching his hand, but his face.

“The immortal subject is against nature,” he began, his voice hushed and intimate only for Yusuf’s ears. “You and I, our tissues lack the memories to maintain scars. Our DNA, the proteins that induce aging. We are ice men, frozen at the exact moment of our death, frozen in evolution.”

His hand was stroking up the side of the windshield then, admiring its smooth slope. He could feel the vibrations of the engine under his palm, could feel them rattle up the bones in his arm. So too could he feel Yusuf’s restlessness, as if his touch were upon Yusuf’s skin.

“It begs the question, then,” Nicky mused, “if even the ecosystems of microorganisms within our bodies remain stagnant.”

Eyes flashing with the lights, Yusuf asked, “How would we know?”

He knew the answer to his question, but still Nicky indulged him. It was their game. “We would feel it. Here.” He put a finger to his heart, dragged it down to his navel. “We would feel that it does not change.”

“The change, then?” asked Yusuf.

Nicky nodded to him, wanting to hear him say this part.

Yusuf smiled, nicking his bottom lip with his teeth as he stroked his gaze over the rumbling machine between them.

“The reaction has to be forced,” he said. “Chemical, like a bang. Only then could we alter our genetic codes.”

“Deconstruction and reconstruction,” said Nicky.

Yusuf cut the tension then with a chuckle. “Just a little alchemy.”

Nicky huffed a laugh at his ridiculousness. Then their eyes met one more time, permissive, checking with each other… And they climbed into the car.

The car shuddered when they entered, Nicky behind the wheel and Yusuf at his right. This was it. The final show.

Eyes still on Yusuf’s, Nicky ran his hands up the wheel and wrung the leather. He drifted his right hand between them and Yusuf put his there, and with the utmost intent, Nicky cradled it and brushed a kiss to his knuckles.

Then Yusuf’s eyes went ahead, and Nicky dropped his hand to the gear shift. Gas pedal next, all the way down to the floor. The car groaned with a moment of restraint, and then…

They were flying, launched forward and gaining speed, the streetlights blinking as they passed, shadows bleeding in through the windows. Nicky glanced over at Yusuf, who was watching him with an age-old concentration. Soon — not yet, but soon — Nicky would look fully away from the road.

A glance at the speedometer showed they had ticked past 85, and were quickly gaining speed. Nicky laid his boot down on the pedal harder, hard enough to feel the floor and the shudder and wheeze from the engine. Yusuf touched his arm, but there was no fear in his grip. Nicky focused on that feeling, the warmth and dryness of his hand, the elegant length of his fingers. Such art that had been molded into Yusuf when he was created. Nicky could feel him closer than ever before. The sound of his heart, the thrum of his blood in his extremities.

The moment came when Nicky could no longer get a clear picture of the speedometer. The road was jolting them, humming in their bones and their flesh, and there was no longer light or darkness, just a wild amber blur, like the colour of Yusuf’s eyes.

Nicky turned to him. He saw his eyes, his blown-out pupils, the caught breath in his chest, and then Nicky swerved the wheel to the right.

They hit the guard rail, but he could not feel it. There was only Yusuf’s body, Yusuf’s breath, his heart, his voice, as they went airborne over the rail, their bodies and selves mixing with the glittering chaos of the car’s interior, its carcass.

There was the sound of metal, that dying groan once again as the machine crumpled inwards on them, swallowing them, holding their broken bodies.

It was not pain, not quite euphoria. All happened too fast to feel, to see, as the gravity in the belly of the vehicle shifted and at the precipice, at the exact same moment, their minds and selves were separated from the Earth, cut like a cord.

Life returned much like the first time, in blood and blindness.

Nicolò, he was Nicolò — he could hear blood rushing in his own veins, flowing out from his body, but he could not feel it yet. He could feel Yusuf, somehow, he swore — the heat of Yusuf’s blood on his skin, the taste of it in the air.

Engine oil had leaked somewhere, the scent staining the inside of his nose. The car, the broken machine, groaned around them but there was no longer a rumble. Nicolò reached for Yusuf in his mind, reached for him with his hand, not even certain he was all back together yet.

All senses flooded back in an overwhelming instant, like a bone clicking back into place. There was glass and blood, twisted metal and slick oil, the brightness of a street lamp just above, and a pain that burned every nerve like the surface of the sun.

Nicolò was not inside the car, but had been thrown partway out the windshield. His right leg had caught him on the wheel, which had bent out of shape with the force of his body. His leg was a mess, unnaturally long with his hip popped out of place and his shin twisted halfway around. He had enough cognizance to understand that the break had torn his femoral artery, because what was left of the interior of the car was a bloodbath. Yusuf was not there.

With effort, Nicolò got two hands on the hood of the car and pushed himself back inside, dragging shards and cubes of glass into his stomach over the dashboard. His left wrist had sustained some sort of injury and was righting itself as he did so. He tried to call for Yusuf, but he found he had no voice, no air. Yusuf was not in the seat, not under the dashboard. Nicolò only figured out which way the car was tipped when he looked back out the shattered dashboard and saw grass much closer than expected.

There he also saw a lump, not far from the crumpled hood. Yusuf had been ejected and was not moving.

Nicolò dragged himself back out the hole his body had left, and somewhere in the back of his mind he knew his mangled leg was stuck, for it resisted when he pulled. He didn’t care for the pain, so hot and intense it surpassed physical feeling — he just pulled himself until he heard the crackle of tendons and tissue ripping, and felt a pop. His leg would heal in moments.

He wheezed Yusuf’s name as he crawled over the wreckage of the hood. He willed Yusuf’s mind to come to him, for them to feel each other in the ether, and he could feel his heart, his euphoric pain.

Yusuf was moving, just a bit. He was face-down in the grass, his left arm flung behind him and dislocated at the shoulder. As Nicolò dragged himself over the grass, the shards of metal and puddles of oil, Yusuf’s shoulder slid back into place with a meaty pop, and he grunted.

When Nicolò reached him, he realized Yusuf was in a pool of his own blood. Nicolò had no doubt dragged his own blood to them. He turned Yusuf over, and his face was healing, his skin spitting out little beads of glass and sewing the gashes shut. Yusuf winced, and even as the wounds on his face healed, he continued to hiss and gasp, trying to draw in air that would not come.

Nicolò held his face, trying to speak to him. He could only see through one eye, sure that his left eye was filled with blood or gone, and so it took him a moment to see the wound in Yusuf’s abdomen.

It took one moment more for his brain to understand what it was looking at. It was not so much a wound as it was an opening — Yusuf’s midsection torn completely open, his intestines having exploded out of the constraints of his flesh and muscles. Nicolò thought that he had been severed in half the gash was so wide, the blood so plenty. As he stared, hovering a hand over the mess, Yusuf’s intestines wiggled to life, slowly shifting to find their way back.

Yusuf put a shaking hand over his, and pressed it into the wound.

Their faces were close when Nicolò looked at him again. There was blood in Yusuf’s teeth as he smiled up at him, blood in the sclera of his eyes which flicked side to side, seeing Nicolò.

“Do you see?” Yusuf asked, his voice a phlegmy wheeze. “Can you feel it in you, in me?”

Nicolò exhaled, shuddered. The inside of Yusuf’s body was hot, squirming and alive. The gash was already sealing up and shrinking, his intestines fighting for space and wrapping around Nicolò’s wrist like loving fingers, trapping his hand deep inside. Nicolò could feel every one of Yusuf’s breaths, every twitch and every beat of his heart.

“There you are,” Nicolò whispered to him.

Yusuf smiled, a bit dazed, and said, “I can feel you.”

With only a careful look of warning, Nicolò pulled his hand free, and Yusuf gasped at the feeling, still smiling. Nicolò did not have to imagine the feeling. They were connected, their souls and selves deconstructed and reconstructed as one.

“Together in death,” Yusuf said.

With their eyes locked, his hand on Yusuf’s cheek, Nicolò promised, “One flesh.”

“One mind,” Yusuf finished.

Then Nicolò leaned down, covered his lover’s healing body, and crushed their lips together. Their blood mingled over their tongues, their teeth, and Nicolò swallowed every gasp and grunt from Yusuf as his body sealed itself closed.

There was a fire within, finally come to the surface. That wild feeling inside Nicolò had come to light, and searched then for release. His leg was healed. Yusuf was healing. Nicolò could not fight it in himself, not with the way Yusuf was pulling him on top of him, tearing off the torn remains of his jacket.

“Please,” Yusuf was saying, their teeth clashing, bruising their mouths. “Please.”

Nicolò made a sound somewhere between hurt and pleasure, and with frantic movements he tugged Yusuf’s pants down. They would have to be quick. There was no sound of sirens in the distance yet, but very soon there would be, and they would have to set the car with all their blood ablaze and disappear.

Yusuf was whispering into his ear, his cheek, as Nicolò got one of his legs free and tugged it around his own hips. Yusuf bit the tendon in his neck, and Nicolò, not wishing to separate them for even a second, used the weight of his body to grab Yusuf beneath the knees and bend him in half. Yusuf yelped, his healing wound seeping thick blood.

“Please, please,” Yusuf kept saying, so desperately Nicolò could not locate in his mind which language he was speaking. Perhaps he wasn’t speaking at all, and Nicolò was hearing his thoughts.

He swiped over the blood on Yusuf’s abdomen, oozing down over his chest then as he was bent quite harshly, and Nicolò used it to stroke himself, only a few times, only what was necessary.

It would be painful, of course, and would not be enough. They both knew that.

But the moment Nicolò entered him, speared into him with ferocity, all thoughts towards the sound of sirens and the need to be hidden vanished instantly. There was only Yusuf, who howled as his head flew back and hit the grass. Only Yusuf, whose fingernails drew blood from Nicolò’s shoulders and hips as he moved.

It was rough, raw, and it burned for both of them. Nicolò only had half a mind to put his hand in the puddle of engine oil in the dirt, and to add it to the mess where they were joined. The heady scent had him dizzy, and Yusuf was faring similarly. His eyes were rolled back in his head, his leg holding Nicolò in a snare, the grip of his hands encouraging Nicolò to pound into him even harder.

Nicolò fell over him, unable to keep himself up, unable to spare another second where the whole of them was not connected. Yusuf mouthed at his neck, using teeth, and he whispered to him in his ear as Nicolò reached between them and began to stroke him quickly and violently.

Yusuf was whispering nonsense, only half his words legible, dissolving finally into Nicolò’s name said again and again and again, as he reached his peak and went completely silent.

Even this happened at the same time. Their bodies were sychronized in pleasure and pain, the universe shrinking to a pinpoint as they reached their peak.

Somewhere behind them, the engine had caught fire. Nicolò could smell a campfire, sand beneath them, heat between their bodies and the musk of Yusuf’s sweat. He was inside Yusuf, Yusuf inside him. Suspended between time and space, pain and euphoria.

It was perfect.