When Francis Bonnefoy isn't speaking, Arthur Kirkland finds it easier to toy with the idea of actually being able to tolerate him. In silence – this slow, wine-fogged, almost-perfect silence – France almost looks beautiful, and the wine, he'll admit to himself with no little trace of bitterness, tastes better than anything he'll ever find at home.
They sit on the bonnet of Francis' car in a silence that's verging on companionable (but let's not go quite that far so soon), and the sun is starting to sink below the spread of picturesque little hamlets, scattered out below the road they parked on like an elaborate oil painting, all wooden shutters painted red and blue and powder-pink and messy gardens and sweet little churches with real, big, gold bells that chime on the hour. There are flowers bordering the road – the road which Francis had confidently parked smack in the very middle of, insisting no one ever drove down it anyway – and the smell is as thick and as heady as the wine. The sun is making the bonnet warm.
He looks down the gentle dip of the hill to the houses below him and he imagines that the people living in them are probably the types who get up at six in the morning to buy bread and who are actuallycheerful at that ungodly hour. They probably drink in the middle of the day and argue in their gardens.
Francis is blocking his view now, hunching over, his arms draped over his bent knees. He's untied his hair from the ponytail he had had it in during the day and it's fallen in waves around his face, only just brushing his shoulders. It's thicker and softer-looking than Arthur's hair and it's gone a little bit static in the heat; silly, individual hairs are sticking up this way and that, so blonde they look white. The sun has left its mark on his face in the very way it hasn't for Arthur; not tanned, exactly, but just sun-kissed. It'll probably be gone by tomorrow morning, not that he'll be there to see it go. A day with Francis is quite enough.
Everything about Francis is— not skinny, that's not the word— wiry. Sometimes, depending on what he wears, he looks like a wire mannequin someone has hung clothes over. His fingers are long and thin; an artist's or a musician's. He has a girl's wrists and ankles. Arthur could probably encapsulate them with his thumb and forefinger.
He leans back against the car's front window and stretches his stiff legs. The inside of the car had been too uncomfortable; it had gotten too hot in there after a day of sitting in the passenger's seat, and he kept fidgeting against the nasty beige leather and bumping his knees on the glove compartment when he tried to change position. Francis had suggested they take a break and without waiting for a second opinion he had driven him up here, parked the car over what Arthur would soon discover to be the most incredible view, gotten out and instantly blocked Arthur's view by sitting right in front of his face with only the car window between them, reclining back in that horribly French way he did, rapping on the glass with two fingers without looking back as if to say 'come on, then'. Arthur had seen no point in being stubborn, so he had clambered out with significantly less grace, taking the recently-opened red wine with him. He had taken the first gulp of it from the bottle, although it had been the second bottle they had been through over the course of the day. Francis had opened his mouth to say something and Arthur had seen no better moment to seize the opportunity to shut him up for a while. 'I've got an idea,' he had said, 'Let's just sit here for a while in silence. We've not done that all day. Let's just not talk.'
Francis had obliged. He had probably thought it romantic or something stupid.
Half of the wine is gone now. Francis' lips are dyed red and Arthur's probably are as well. They take long, lazy gulps of it straight from the mouth of the bottle because they didn't think to bring glasses, and it tastes thick and cloudy and is strong enough to make Arthur shudder if he swallows it too fast. He begins to wonder if he's getting just a little bit drunk, because everything seems amplified, bigger, more vibrant, more beautiful. In fact, he's almost definitely a little bit drunk, because now he's looking at Francis' face again, his lips more specifically, and he's looking at the way they press together as he looks down the empty road ahead of them and the way the wine has stained them messily, and he's thinking that if Francis decided to lean over and kiss him right now, he wouldn't mind much.
He almost doesn't want to go home.
He's holding the wine bottle, still tasting the wine in the back of his throat as he picks at the edge of the label with his fingernail, making it curl at the corner. What's left of it is tossing back and forth and all over the place behind the moss-green glass and watching it crash in tiny, red waves against the inside of the bottle is almost making him seasick (he's definitely a bit drunk).
Then Francis is looking at him, and he definitely feels something akin to seasickness now, only he's on land, and he blames it on the alcohol in his system because he doesn't have much else to blame it on.
Whether it's with Francis Bonnefoy or not, Arthur loves that feeling you get just before you kiss someone, where you both just stare, and you don't see anything else aside from their face, the one you're about to kiss, and you take in all the little details; the way their nose curves and how their eyelashes grow and the shape of their cheekbones, and how, in those few seconds, it all looks completely gorgeous, like nothing you've ever seen before even though you probably have. They're moving closer together without either of them saying a thing, in that wonderful way that you do, and then he feels Francis touch his face with the back of his hand, and he closes his eyes and lets himself forget how, less than an hour ago, they were yelling at each other in an overheated car and he kind of hated him. He just lets himself be kissed. It seems like a good way to mark the end of the day, as frustrating as parts of it had been.
Far off somewhere, in one of the nameless little hamlets they parked to overlook, the sound of a church bell rings to mark the hour.