Joe yawns, jaw-cracking and eye-wateringly wide into his elbow as he wanders down blinding bright aisles. He’s not even sure what he’s looking for, not at this time of night, but it’s better than staring at the walls in his temporary flat. Some new kind of tea, maybe. Or maybe a book, from the sparse collection of new releases clustered protectively together between the glossy magazines and wilting, already out of date newspapers.
He yawns again as he rounds the corner, eyes closing with the force of it. It annoys him even as it happens, he knows the second he lies down he’ll be wide awake, but here he is, yawning his head clean off in public. It’s embarrassing.
Case in point, in his bare seconds of blindness, Joe walks headfirst into someone with a discordant clatter of dropped groceries.
‘Scusami,’ says a rough voice, as Joe blinks through the new blindness where the stranger’s head met his nose. ‘Are you alright?’
‘Fine,’ gasps Joe, rubbing at his eyes. The pain’s already receded, no harm done, but it takes him a moment.
When he can see again, he thinks for a wild and vertiginous moment, that he’s dreaming.
For three hundred years, Joe has seen those eyes every time he closes his own. Seeing them again, now, under hideous supermarket fluorescent lights in a backwater Belgian suburb? Impossible.
Joe knows that voice, knows that face; has thought of that face every day for centuries and now it’s here, creased with shock and pain and confusion, and fuck if he doesn’t know what to do. It’s impossible. Inconceivable.
It is him. It is. It’s Nicolò, looking exactly as he had when Joe had walked away from him in Turin all those years ago, taking only a miniature of his eyes and the knowledge that he had met and lost the great love of his life with him.
His hair is shorter now, he no longer has his scruffy beard, but that beauty mark by his lips, the elegant curve of his nose, those eyes—Joe knows no other face so well as he knows Nicolò’s, he’s drawn nothing in his excessively long life as much as he has the curve of Nicolò’s cheek.
(Although he sees now where his memory was failing him, the tiny folds of skin where Joe had imagined him developing wrinkles; the dark shades of his hair Joe had been picturing turning salt-flecked with age and venerability.)
‘I would give all the stars,’ says Nicolò, wonderingly, staring at Joe with eyes so wide they seem to glow. ‘For one day more in your presence. I would drain the sea, to share a second more with you.’
A bell rings, somewhere in the dark of Joe’s memory. He wrote those words, pressed them into Nicolò’s hand while he slept, the morning he slipped away. Curled his fingers over them and sealed them with a kiss before he fled like a coward into the night.
‘I always wondered,’ continues Nicolò, reaching out with a shaking hand to touch the bulge of Joe’s locket beneath his shirt, the pale imitation of the vibrant colours that have somehow spilled back into Joe’s life. ‘Why you would say such things to me, when you could have spent your whole life with me, if you had wanted to.’
Joe reaches up, feeling like the world has somehow started to turn backwards beneath his feet. Nicolò’s skin feels just the same under his fingers, soft and warm, the same scar at the base of his thumb. He knows this hand.
‘But you could not have, could you?’ asks Nicolò, stepping closer, peering at Joe like a puzzle he’s trying to solve. ‘All that time, I thought it was me, stealing every moment I could, hoarding them. But you were too. What could we have gained, if only one of us had cut his cheek shaving in front of the other, or slipped with his knife at dinner? What have we lost, in the time between?’
They had a month together, entwined every second, never apart from the moment they met as all the love Yusuf had ever wished for had raged through him like Greek fire. Pulling himself away from Nicolò had been necessary, he had to protect his heart from the agony of watching Nicolò fade away. If he couldn’t see him go, then he could always be exactly as he was, in those perfect summer days.
How right he was; how wrong.
‘My heart,’ rasps Joe, clutching tightly at Nicolò’s hand, pulling it helplessly up to his lips to kiss his beloved for the first time in three hundred years. ‘You’ve been absent from me for so long. I’ve been a shade without you. What have we lost that we can’t regain?’
Nicolò smiles, the first breeze on a becalmed sea; the first snowdrop as winter ends; the first drop of rain after a drought.
‘We can regain everything, my love.’
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