does the dark feel warmer than the light now; isakov

[sleaze]

I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife

That same peace falls over him, and he no longer knows now if it is magic or Isakov, or some blend of the two. He welcomes each touch, feels warm and lit beneath them, and he returns the motion. His own mouth is bolder now, made hungry by time and distance, by Isakov’s own eager advances.
The truth: Sleaze doesn’t know how to do this. His experiences with romance – with love – are so limited, so skewed. His father and those strange embraces that were never untoward but weren’t normal, either. Malis, with that same distorted reality, bonded not in love but in trauma. A shared nightmare reality.
He knows that he wants - a vague verb, a hungry one, ill-defined yet all-encompassing. He wants Isakov, he wants to touch him, he wants to whisper to him, he wants these moments to stretch on and on for days or years.
He cannot say this. He is trembling. He is wanting.

I’ve missed you, Isakov says. Sleaze is warm at the thought.
“I’ve missed you too,” he says, then, “I’ve thought of you often.”
So often – Isakov was a dream to pass his sleepless nights. He cannot say this, though. He cannot be so brazen.
“I’m not sure what to do,” he confesses – brazen in another kind of way, “you’re different. It frightens me.”

Sleaze

@[isakov]