This is a submission for POTO Fluff Week 2022.
Sweet Sweat
The sultry summer heat blanketed Mazandaran with all the familiarity of a well-worn lover. It hung heavy and moist in the air. It clung to the skin and mingled with the sweat. The air was oppressively still, as though the wind itself had been held captive in some other season. August had arrived and with her a string of uncommonly hot days, each one growing more uncomfortable than the next.
They found themselves caught in the heatwave as they trekked from Erik's secondary apartment in Amol, through the Alborz mountains, back to the Golestan palace. They had avoided their duties at court for as long as they could allow until a messenger, soaked with sweat and nearly falling off his horse from exhaustion, delivered a summons for them to return. With great reluctance, they gathered all provisions required for the three-day trek along the old caravan road and mounted their horses.
On the first day, they were offered reprieve from the bulk of the heat as they cut through the heavily wooded Hyrcanian forest. The sun was blocked by the high canopy of trees richly filled with bird song. At night, they made camp on the soft carpet of lush, green vegetation and took relief in the cool kiss of night while the bray of wolves filled the forest in a melancholy chorus.
The second day, they were assaulted with the full force of the summer blaze as they lost the sheltering forest and descended through the ravines of the Alborz. The moisture in the air had grown stifling to the point of unbearable and the sun beat against them from above. They set up camp in a deep glen beside a stream cutting through the valley.
Nadir splashed his sweat soaked face in the fresh water of the brook while Erik tended the horses. The sun was still suspended in the sky like the golden eye of a wrathful god as it surveyed the world above the peaks of the mountains. The overheated Persian watched his companion give tender, wordless thanks to the tired beasts with strokes from long hands. Erik's sleeves were pushed up to reveal pale, sinewy forearms which contrasted with the rich, jeweled color of the fabric. It was impossible not to admire the fluid movement of his raw-boned frame or the invisible music of his hands.
Erik was a kaleidoscope of identities, each one shifting into the other with every turn of the eye, but Nadir had seen nearly all, even those kept secret from the rest of the world. Killer, poet, wickedness and innocence, brutal violence and sublime tenderness, all cohabitated within the same man—the same man who now joined Nadir on a blanket for supper.
"Oh my, these survived the day," Nadir nearly crooned as he withdrew a pair of peaches from an open satchel and set them beside figs, almonds, flatbread and pilaf already spread out for their feast. "I was sure they would boil in the heat."
Erik stretched out upon the blanket like a lizard in the sun, his aurous gaze taking interest with Nadir's hand as it gave one of the velvet-covered fruits a gentle squeeze. He reached up a hand with a forced nonchalance to remove his featureless grim black mask. Despite all they had endured together, the darkness and the grief, Erik's reluctance to expose himself this way had stubbornly lingered like a chronic disease.
"You look as though you've been boiled yourself," Erik replied with humor and the rare flash of a wolf's smile that made Nadir's heartbeat like a rabbit on the chase, "One would think we were having you for supper."
The peach was immediately forgotten, and Nadir tried to recover from the additional heat those words manifested.
"Are you saying you are immune to the heat?" He replied with amused skepticism.
"I am not immune," Erik replied wistfully. Nadir could hear sadness and longing in those words.
"I see you have not broken a sweat," Nadir pushed further.
"That is true, but I am not immune—I feel the heat just as you," Erik rolled the forgotten peach towards Nadir with the lazy flick of a sharp-tipped finger.
Nadir lifted the peach to his lips and sunk his teeth into the succulent flesh as he considered Erik who returned his gaze.
"At any rate," he said around a bite of the ripe fruit, "You seem to handle the heat far better than I."
Those strange eyes watched Nadir with a rapt fascination that caused a shiver of delight to surge to his toes. He rolled the second peach towards this unusual Frenchman who had somehow managed to become his entire world over the course of a year. There had been moments, however brief—often in the flash of a glance or the accidental brush of a hand—that had caused him to question the very fabric of their relationship. Something flickered hazily out on the horizon, always there, but refusing to be drawn into sharper focus.
And then something magical happened.
Erik laughed and whatever strange bubble of tension had formed between them seemed to burst in an instant.
"You have juice all over your beard, my dear friend," Erik informed him with such sweet and tender amusement, it rocked Nadir off his very foundation.
His fingers self-consciously flew to the beard which had rapidly grown over the past few months, a subtle display of his grief. The loss of his son had carved him out leaving a hollow behind and somewhere inside that cavity was Erik, somehow keeping it from collapsing in on itself. In those weeks following his son's death, he had wanted to disappear from the world and each time he looked in the mirror he seemed to do so under the cover of hair growing on his face. So, he had left it and allowed it to gain purchase, like an abandoned building reclaimed by nature.
"I should shave it," he murmured as he blotted the sticky syrup with the corner of his sleeve. He sank down upon the blanket, stretching himself out to look towards the sky, "I should move forward and leave his memory behind me."
"No." Erik commanded lowly, "His memory stays."
Nadir turned to the man laid out beside him, "You loved him too," the obvious statement was drawn out in a hoarse whisper.
Erik gave a painful sigh. "As though he were of my own body."
They stared silently at one another for an indiscernible length of time, their faces only two handbreadths apart, allowing for Nadir to take in all the subtleties of Erik's terrible, mythological face. That skin was so pale and thin he could see the fine, blue network of veins beneath. There was a distinct lack of stubble, on the severe line of his jaw. The skin was smooth and unblemished as a babe.
"You don't grow a beard," he mused vocally.
Erik shrugged and seemed unperturbed by the observation, "It saves me great trouble; I dislike them."
"I'll shave it," Nadir blurted without knowing the words were coming and he felt the blush paint his cheeks in large brush strokes.
The pupil in Erik's yellow-hued eyes seemed to grow large like an owl's.
"It has grown too warm for it," Nadir attempted to brush off the awkward moment. "I should be well rid of it."
"Does it itch?" Erik asked this with the seriousness of a scientist, but his eyes were still round as dinner plates. He had adopted an obvious expression of interest and Nadir wondered if Erik was aware how readable he was without a mask.
"Only in the beginning." Nadir replied. He could not stop himself when softly offered, "You may feel it if you like."
An eager hand was at his face the moment the words had left his mouth, with unusually slender fingers, Erik tentatively touched the surface of the beard, but soon gained confidence and sunk into the thick of it like a comb. The intimacy of the act sent gooseflesh all along Nadir's arms and he timidly stretched his own fingers to trace the hard line of Erik's smooth jaw.
Erik closed his eyes in humble pleasure.
"It is softer than I imagined…" he murmured, his hand trailed away from the soft down and one of his long fingers migrated like a lost pilgrim to the nose, feeling the bold bridge, the firm structure of it.
"You've not felt a nose before, either?" Nadir softly asked, with all the tenderness reserved for an uncertain child.
Erik blushed, a dull peach blooming along the carved bones of his sharp cheeks. "Only with my fist. Not like this." His hand trembled, his voice dropping to a thready whisper, "Never like this."
Nadir did allow his fingers to move any further than Erik's jutting, ivory cheek. He did not dare encroach on that sacred territory centered on Erik's face, which seems a holy place now. It had ceased to unnerve him long ago. The cadaverous nature of the face, so incomprehensible in its construction, no longer reminded Nadir of his own mortality—now, he wondered other things, such as, how those tight lips would feel pressed against his own.
"Your eyes," Erik breathed, "They don't hurt me like the eyes of everyone else."
"That is because I see you, Erik," Nadir's breast with filled with an incandescent emotion that spilled into his words. "I see you for what you truly are and who you could truly be."
Invisible threads had pulled their faces closer. Nadir closed the distance and placed the faintest kiss upon those stony lips, cool to the touch, the stark contrast to the humid summer heat making them more inviting that anything. It could be interpreted as a kiss of a lover or the kiss of a brother just the same, but he knew deep in his heart of hearts he had given it as the former.
And then he pulled back sharply, afraid he had crossed some forbidden boundary, assaulted by the lessons on morality he had heard his entire life, the words in the Quran which condemns such a love, but more than all that, he was terrified he had misinterpreted and would give rise to Erik's offense.
His fears were premature.
Erik fell against him, gripping Nadir's face in both of his hands. He lowly moaned his plea, "Again, please, kiss me again."
Erik did not make a habit of saying 'please'. It was not a word Nadir had ever heard him say.
Nadir further stepped past that threshold, into that forbidden territory and opened himself to Erik fully as a Lotus flower to the sky.
The kiss was painful at first. Erik was exceedingly enthusiastic and inexperienced, the unforgiving angles of his face dug into Nadir's flesh, but within a short amount of time he caught onto the of the natural rhythm of the slick pull and slide. Teeth and tongues mingled like dancers, accompanied by a chorus of sighs. They were overcome by the devastating sensuality of fumbling, inexperienced hands as they roamed body parts familiar yet new.
This was a terrifying precipice they were both jumping over. Gravity had taken its claim. They knew they could never return to how it was before.
Nadir's hand slipped past Erik's Qaba and into the slit of his thin cotton shirt where it pressed against his heart.
He drew back, panting and surprised, "You are warm."
"I told you I was not immune," Erik sighed dreamily as he touched his forehead to Nadir's and then he pulled away to look down at his pants which had been soaked by some unknown fluid. He reached his hand beneath himself to retrieve the cause.
He had squashed the peach and laughter came bubbling out of him like an effervescent spring. And all Nadir could do was stare in dumbstruck amazement at the sudden transformation occurring before him, to see the severe man stripped away and a buoyant youth put in his place.
Erik tossed the smashed peach with a snap of his wrist and lay back upon the blanket as the aftershocks of laughter left his body.
"I never thought," he stated with no shortage of wonder saturating his voice, "that this would ever happen. I had not even allowed myself to hope. I had simply buried those desires far beneath me and prayed they would never surface again." He sighed so prettily. "Oh, Nadir, you do not know what a gift this is."
Nadir closed his eyes and folded himself against the ugly, wonderstruck man, still reeling from the newness of this burgeoning relationship himself.
Erik heaved a great sigh.
"If only we could remain here in this moment for all eternity."
"We could leave," Nadir said suddenly in a low rush.
"Leave…" Erik mirrored even lower.
"I've nothing to tie me here. I am a man adrift…but with you…with you—" he faltered as he lost the words which seemed far too large and important for him to speak.
The world which awaited them back at court was not good for Erik, who had drawn his self-worth from a power which had corrupted him. Nadir had watched as his friend grew more and more weary beneath the heavy pressure his conniving intrigue had caused.
He had taken any side he could in any conflict, so long as it benefited him personally. Nadir knew it was only a matter of time before Erik could no longer play the part of the puppet master, that the marionettes he had controlled with such delicate mastery until now would turn their angry heads, cut loose their strings and make him pay for his temerity.
"What of my palace?" Erik replied, his voice strained as he became caught in the rush of possibility and uncertainty. "It is so nearly complete. I could not abandon it now."
"We will build palaces together. Not of stone, but of dreams—of love," Nadir insisted with ardor.
Erik folded himself around Nadir and pressed his forehead again the other man's.
"Oh but, Nadir, I am so broken," Erik, puffed up with temporary hope, suddenly crumpled beneath the weight of his despair.
"As am I, but we need not be. I know you are afraid. I am as well. Let us be terrified together. Replace the walls in your heart with me. As I have with you." He drew near "Listen, let me tell you how I see our life to come,"
As he whispered intimately in Erik's ear all his visions and plans, the sun had begun to dip past the mountains coloring the sky like a renaissance painting as they stripped of their clothes. They reveled in the stark contrasts of their bodies and gave liberties to their enflamed passion with tenderness and shy awkwardness until their carnal bliss grew to fevered heights. They were both sweating and sated when the night had begun to darken the sky.
As Nadir started to slide to sleep, still naked beneath the star-dewed sky, Erik whispered in his ear.
"You have always been there, Nadir."
"Hm?" Nadir replied drowsily.
"My heart," Erik said as though he had just discovered something that surprised even himself, "You had torn down a wall and crawled inside long ago." He was silent for a moment as he nuzzled his bare face into Nadir's sweat lined neck. "Together," he whispered, "We will leave together.
As Nadir nodded his head in relief, he closed his eyes and drifted to sleep, knowing that for the first time in his life he finally and truly felt free. He knew Erik felt the same.