Breath

by MM Roman

We've all experienced that innocent, warm feeling of a crush. Sometimes you get over it, and sometimes it grows. It can grow to be so beautiful, into something we call love. But, while beautiful, it can be so confusing. Latvia is about to find this out. To put it frankly, shit is complicated in the love life of Latvia, especially when it comes to the Russian in the room next door.

Prologue

If you had ever been there, during the night, in the little room the first on the left, you wouldn't have guessed that there was a person sleeping in the bed. Not a single movement would have alerted you of the presence of a tiny body existing beneath the covers. He didn't shiver, or shake, not a sound escaped his blushing lips, and the size of him made it nearly impossible to tell there was a person. The only thing that may have given him away was a pair of periwinkle eyes wandering around the room.

They weren't really searching for anything. They were simply looking, leaning against the things scattered about the room, and staring at what light escaped from the hallway. There wasn't much to look at. But to the little Latvian in the bed, there was much more to hear.

Breathing. It wasn't snoring, but it was loud enough to hear from his room. He tried to regulate his own breathing to match it, often, but (probably due to difference in body size) he could never comfortably do it. It was a complex sort of noise, not wheezing, but it didn't sound easy, either. It sounded stressed. Unhappy. It was the kind of breathing that was done by a man who worked too hard, and collapsed the second he got home, with more work ahead of him to be done. For some strange reason, the Latvian was intrigued by it. The sound of the air being pushed out of the lips. The occasional and suspensful pause where there would be no noise at all, followed by a louder pull of air, yanking it inside by force. It wasn't that it calmed him down, no, it wasn't that simple. He couldn't exactly pinpoint the feeling he experienced, listening to it, but he knew he felt better when he did. Knowing that the other man was there.

He often imagined the chest, rising and falling. From time to time, you could hear a swallow, followed by the licking of lips. As Latvia licked his own lips, he imagined the other doing it. He saw the faded mouth in front of his eyes, dampening with the entrance of a pink tongue sweeping the surface. He longed to see for himself, to sneak into the room, and to watch the man as he slept. But he didn't budge. He remained achingly still, for he knew that he could never summon the courage to enter the room of the Russian.

So he continued to listen, avoiding all other thoughts, to the steady breathing. Like a slow, perilous heartbeat of the night, it kept him awake. He closed his eyes several times, but he knew that sleep wouldn't come to him until pearls of light began peeking in through the house, and the breathing slowly began to wake up.