Excerpt: Heaven and Oblivion

Afterwards, Adam lit candles rather than turn the lights back on.

The smoke curled up in long grey tendrils, sweet and bitter at the same time, the flames standing straight and tall in the warm, still air. Severin noticed, seemingly for the first time, how many mirrored surfaces there were in the room: the mirror over the fireplace, the glass front of the bookshelf, the glass of the photographs on the dresser, the polished frontage of the piano. The candle flames shone from all the corners of the room, doubled and redoubled, carving a little world of warm yellow radiance out of the dark.

Severin leant back into the corner of the long sofa and watched the smoke coil. Adam reappeared a few moments later, a wineglass glinting crimson in either hand, and perched on the arm of the sofa next to him. “Here.”

Severin took the glass and sipped absentmindedly at it. Adam slid down onto the sofa next to him, and rested his head in the soft hollow of Severin’s shoulder. Severin put his arm around Adam’s waist, and they sat in reflective, companionable quiet for a few moments, drinking the wine and watching the flickering candlelight reflected in the dark glass.

Adam yawned. Severin put down his glass on the little inlaid table between the sofa and the door and murmured “Tired already?”

“A little,” Adam said, and tipped his head back until they were eye to eye. “Why, do you blame me?”

Severin kissed him on the forehead and said “Not in the slightest.”

Adam shifted position, wincing a little, and had some more wine, swilling the remainder around the bottom of the glass to make the liquid flash and flare scarlet in the light of the candles. “You know something, Sev?”

“What?” Severin murmured back.

“I look at this -” he gestured with the wineglass, “and the house, and most of all you, and wonder what in the world I did to deserve it.” He drained the glass and bent forward to stow it behind a leg of the sofa. There was a kind of exhausted grace even in that small movement that made Severin want him all over again. Adam leant back, nestling his head on Severin’s shoulder, and said musingly “Life is a very strange thing.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Severin agreed, and suited the action to the word. He put the empty glass down again, even the sharp tang of the wine not quite able to obscure the taste of Adam’s skin that still lingered, and said “Strange, but good.”

“Better than I could have imagined,” Adam said contentedly.

Severin nodded.

“More wine?” Adam said consideringly.

“Why not?” Severin murmured back.

Adam stood up, stretched, collected the wineglasses and disappeared in the direction of the kitchen. Severin got up and walked around the room, breathing in the thin sweetbitter smoke and looking at the things that had always been there, but seemed somehow different and more important in the hazy, exhausted half-light.

There was the bookshelf, with its two sets of course books treasured since leaving university: his own, their titles charting three years of the Art in general and two in transmortal phenomenology, and Adam’s, the colourful spines of textbooks testimony to nearly seven years at medical college. Their graduation photos, in all their embarrassing glory, atop the piano; with them the little cluster of family photos in little silver frames, Severin’s sister and his parents, Adam’s parents, his older brothers, his nieces. And the token photo of the two of them together, taken at a party neither of them had more than a bleary recollection of: carefree and a little drunk, arms round one another’s waists, laughing for the camera. Severin smiled at it, and wiped a little dust off the frame.

The door creaked. In the mirror he saw Adam come back in, put two more glasses of wine down on the little side table, and then take advantage of the sofa’s emptiness to stretch out full-length across it.

Severin lingered over the photo a moment longer, then crossed the room, had a sip of wine and said to Adam “Move over.”

Adam looked up at him, the candlelight shining off his fair hair, laid one languid arm over the back of the sofa and retorted “Make me.”

Severin rolled his eyes and returned to the wine and his study of the room. The old piano stool, too stuffed with yellowing sheets of music to close properly, was faint velvety green in the yellow light; the cushions on the wide window-seat had the same threadbare sheen to them. Most of the things in the room were old, brought from one or the other of their family homes. The candlesticks, two tall, fluted silvery stems, had been a gift from Severin’s grandmother, years before. There was little in the room, even in the house, that was new, and yet everything he looked at seemed somehow new and unfamiliar.

On the mantelpiece were a few leftover birthday cards, weeks old, that somehow neither he nor Adam had got around to throwing away. Adam’s thirty-third. The little subdued celebration had melted into the past like everything else, and seemed as faded as if it might have happened years ago.

“Sev?” Adam said quietly from behind him.

He turned back, and saw that Adam, never able to stay still for very long even when asleep, had abandoned the sofa and was perching on the arm. “Yes?”

Adam raised his glass, the wine in the bottom sparkling wickedly in the candlelight, and said mischievously “A toast. To us.”

“To us,” Severin echoed, and drank.

Adam knocked back the last of his glass, in the carefree way he had, set it down, and said with a grin “The night is young.”

“Both of us,” Severin pointed out, “have to leave for work at midnight.”

“We should probably get started, then,” Adam said, straight-faced.

“You’re incorrigible,” Severin told him.

“And I reiterate, you wouldn’t have me any other way,” Adam said sweetly, and smiled the same devastating smile that had stolen Severin’s heart out of his chest however many years – so many years – before.