A hand closed around his wrist.
Gerffron had been in the process of taking a glass of wine from a passing tray — had been in the process of the entirely routine action of accepting a drink at a formal occasion — when a hand closed around his wrist and redirected the motion.
He looked at the hand.
He looked at the person the hand belonged to.
Styrmir said nothing.
He was moving.
Gerffron went with him — not because the grip was restraining, it wasn't, it was entirely possible to disengage from it — but because the alternative was standing in the middle of the banquet hall asking loudly what was happening, and the banquet hall had already provided sufficient material for the court's social conversation tonight.
"Where are we—" Gerffron started.
"Shh," Styrmir said.
"I am not going to shh on an—"
"Please," Styrmir said, still moving.
The please had the quality of the actual word rather than the polite word, and Gerffron, who had been learning to distinguish between those two things in this specific person for three years, went quiet.
They went through the side door.
The corridor was the formal ballroom's peripheral passage — the one used by staff and by guests who needed a moment away from the occasion's density.
At the corridor's end was a terrace door.
Styrmir opened it.
They went through.
— — —
The terrace was small and unoccupied — a corner space, the kind that existed in large buildings for no particular planned purpose and which became, in the way of useful unplanned spaces, the place people went when they needed to be somewhere that wasn't the inside.
The summer night was warm.
Not oppressively warm — the specific, pleasant warmth of a summer evening that had released the day's heat without yet releasing its temperature, that had the quality of air that had been breathed in and out all day by a living city and had accumulated the warmth of that.
The banquet's light spilled through the ballroom's tall windows onto the terrace's stone in the amber, domestic quality of a large room seen from the outside.
Gerffron looked at the light.
He looked at Styrmir.
"Well?" he said.
Styrmir said nothing.
He was looking at the city.
"Styrmir."
"Give me a moment," Styrmir said.
Gerffron gave him a moment.
He looked at the city too.
The capital's summer night had the specific quality of a city that had been doing this for a long time and had developed, through the accumulation of years, a relationship with its own nights that was less performance and more simple presence.
Gerffron said: "Are you jealous?"
He said it before he had fully decided to say it, in the specific way that questions arrived sometimes before their authorisation.
He immediately wanted to take it back.
"I — that's — I don't know why I—"
"Yes," Styrmir said, defeated.
Gerffron looked at him.
Styrmir had turned from the city.
He was looking at Gerffron with the winter-pale eyes and the specific quality of someone who has decided to be entirely honest about something.
"Yes," he said again. "I'm jealous. You danced with Caelith for eleven minutes and I spent eleven minutes watching from the east wall and being aware that the watching was irrational and doing it anyway."
Gerffron's face did something.
He pressed his hand to his cheek.
The cheek was warm.
"Don't—" he started.
"You asked," Styrmir pointed out.
"I know I asked. I'm telling you not to be honest about it."
"That's not how honesty works."
"Styrmir." Gerffron looked at the city. "I'm twenty-six years old."
"I know how old you are."
"You're twenty-three."
"Also aware."
"Don't joke with your elder."
There was a pause.
Styrmir said: "Is that actually what you're worried about? The three years?"
Gerffron said nothing.
"Because that's—" Styrmir stopped. He looked at him. "Gerffron. Three years."
"I'm not — that's not the—" Gerffron stopped. He looked at the light on the stone. He looked at the city. He said, in the voice he used when he was being honest rather than managing: "I asked you on the dance floor if the offer was still valid."
Styrmir was quiet.
"I asked you," Gerffron said. "I asked you and I didn't take it back, which means I asked you because I meant to ask you, which means—"
"Which means what?" Styrmir said.
The question was gentle.
It was the gentlest version of a direct question — the one that was asking because it genuinely wanted to know rather than asking to make a point.
Gerffron looked at him.
He thought about the east tower and two pebbles and twelve years and a storage room and a man who had counted two hundred and fifty days.
He thought: I am twenty-six years old and I died once already and I never got to. I never got to.
He said: "It means I meant it."
He said it the way you said things that had been accumulating for a very long time and had finally found both the occasion and the courage to be said.
Simply.
Without the management.
Styrmir looked at him.
He looked at him for a moment with the winter-pale eyes and the specific, complete quality of a person who has been waiting for something and has just heard it arrive.
"Gerffron," he said.
"Don't make a speech," Gerffron said.
"I wasn't—"
"You were about to say something that has been fully prepared in advance and has been waiting for this exact moment and I can tell because you have the look you get when you're about to deliver something you've been carrying for a while."
Styrmir looked at him.
"You know my looks," he said.
"I've been watching them since you were eight," Gerffron said.
"Is that supposed to be a deflection?"
"It's supposed to be—" Gerffron stopped. He looked at the city. He looked at the light on the stone. He looked at Styrmir. "It's supposed to be an honest answer to an honest question." He exhaled. "Three years between us is nothing. The three years are nothing. The rest of it — the part that isn't the three years — that part is—"
"I know," Styrmir said.
He stepped closer.
Not rushing.
With the specific, deliberate quality of someone who has been patient for a very long time and has found, in this moment, the invitation he needed and is not going to misuse it.
"I know what the rest of it is," he said quietly. "I know what it costs. I know what it asks of you. I am not asking you to dismiss any of it." He looked at him. "I am asking you to let me be here."
Gerffron looked at him.
The two souls wasted no time by crushing their mouth at each other, they didn't stop, they didn't push each other. They took it slow, soft yet fueled with desire. It was a feeling Gerffron never had, not in his last life, not when he was intimate with Gorgina. They broke away to breathe with a string of saliva connecting their lips, before they again connected with each other's lips. Gerffron leaned back on the railing, pulling Styrmir close to him, pushing his hands inside his purple shirt while Styrmir supported both of their weight gently on the railing of the balcony as he remained tongue tied with the man he yearned for, masturbated for. Since Styrmir's both hands were occupied with supporting Gerffron, so he couldn't touch the latter underneath the garments, he could only bear Gerffron's naughty hands roaming underneath his shirt.
But, not for long.
From inside the ballroom, through the tall windows, through the ambient warmth of a summer evening's formal occasion—
Chaos ensued.
Not the ambient noise of a party.
The specific, alarmed quality of a room that had just encountered something wrong.
They both turned.
Gerffron was already moving toward the terrace door.