The Sandglass Runs by Dawn Felagund, NelyafinweFeanorion

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Want Me?

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I used to be known in the Calarnómë as an excellent lover. I suppose it is one thing that I approached with true Noldorin diligence: I could not shut my mind to the emotions of others, and it was a rare glimpse of joy to bring connection and pleasure to another person amid the usual onslaught of disappointment and weariness that is the background noise of life. I studied the arts of love—it’s not hard to find texts in the library if one is willing to brave the dust and dark—and attended to the reactions of my lovers, and my reputation grew accordingly. Now, however, I no longer perceive the emotions of others; I am trusting experience borne of long practice.

Artaher’s hand trembles a little as he lights the lamp. I am generally unlovely. My hair is not soft and easily tamed into braids; my eyebrows tend to meet in the middle; I am freckled and flushed, and my skin darkens with exposure to sunlight but never consistently. My visits to the Calarnómë, however, convinced me that I am best viewed in the light of a bedside lamp. I unbutton my shirt and let it slide from me. It is cheap cotton but I behave like it’s silk. My body, I see, is white where my arms are brown, but even though I sit behind a kiosk all day now, my shape isn’t bad, and I haven’t gone soft in the ways of some of the Noldor, once smiths and stone cutters and now sedentary.

I expect to take the lead. I generally undress slowly and let my lover watch, then undress him and kiss what I uncover, but Artaher surprises me: He sets down the flint and grabs me around the waist. He kisses my belly, lower and lower, until I cannot get my breeches untied fast enough.

That is how I end up beneath him with a pillow pressed to my face to keep from moaning loud enough to be overheard by his parents dressing for bed just down the hall. With my mind closed, I experience nothing of what he sees and feels. I am left adrift in nothing but my own pleasure.

Since the drunken night on the pier—the last time we almost did this—I have ruthlessly shoved this part of myself back into hiding. I have gone to the Calarnómë with Amarië—I go at least once a week—but I pass the houses of pleasure or the taverns where I know others go to seek lovers. I play my music, have a drink, and walk home in the dark, my lightning-guitar heavy in my hands, letting the damp and the long, trudging walk suppress any longing I might have felt.

But Artaher—I realize that, just as I received an iota of his gift, he must have received an iota of mine. He is responding to what he perceives of me, taking me to the brink and then drawing back until it is so unbearable that I am almost angry with it, and I flip him onto his back and crush him beneath me—so slender and golden and lovely. He kisses me long to slow me down until I realize what he is doing and growl, “Fuck you, Artaher,” and he responds with simply: “Please?”

I wonder what it would be to open my mind to his while his is open to mine. Taryindë had no gifts in mindspeak; I perceived her—and made love to her accordingly—but what she knew of me was only what I manufactured to be seen and heard. The raw stuff churning behind it, she had no idea unless I chose to reveal it. And I didn’t always. It brought a strange sort of satisfaction to orgasm without her even knowing. But Artaher—

I keep my mind shut. I am inside him; he is losing control as I had done just moments before, and I needn’t touch his mind to use his cries, the way he clutches at me, the way his head lolls back, to guide him to completion.

At some point, he eases from beneath me and leaves me face down, sprawled diagonally across the bed. I doze beside him with him pressed to the length of my body. I think my heartbeat might never come down. He rises from the bed once to set the lock on the bedroom door. He pulls a sheet across me; kisses my neck and shoulder.

I open my mind, just a crack.

He sleeps, snoring lightly. We have shifted to sharing the space more evenly, my arm around his waist and his back to my belly. Under his eyelids, his eyes rove ceaselessly across some strange dreamscape. The urge to know it becomes nearly as unbearable as our need to couple had been.

He has always been pale: a blue like indigo dye dripped once, twice, three times into a vase of water. I used to dismiss him as weak, watery: a person of little substance. I see now that, through such delicate coloring, much passed of the past and future that was unpinned to the present moment. Memories and prophecies shimmer in his mind like fish that could not survive in rock, nor air, but dart and glint in the water of his thoughts. There is one, larger than the others, an answer to a question asked.

It eludes my grasp. I try to close upon it and come up empty, immersed in the watery blue of his feä, time and again. The sense of him is somnolent, and I feel myself drifting to sleep, his coloring just a haze now upon my thoughts and what moves within him—

And then, with one last grasping clutch at the water, I have it.

The question is me. I see myself in his thoughts—my ugly eyebrows, my freckles and moles, my splotchy complexion, my untamable hair—only these imperfections are endearing to him. They inspire kisses and contemplations. I nearly pull away in mortification. His memories of me are generally—to my mind—unpleasant. I am snarking in most of them and, more than I would have reckoned myself, drunk and blathering on about myself while ignoring him. I might as well have been talking to a stone, but—mortified as I find myself again—he doesn’t see it that way. He drinks in every detail of me that way a child might pass a finger around the traces left of a favorite dish. And he is grateful. My face burns, and I’m sure he would have been enamored by the degree of my splotchiness. He is grateful that, after all that happened, I return day after day to be his friend.

But he has wanted more than that. I’d known, in our youth, that he and his brothers and mine had known about my trips to the Calarnómë. They’d had a certain fascination with me that they dared not express. Mockery was easier on the heart than envy. But he’d dwelled on those rumors in a way that none of the others had, for he saw more of me than they did. He let his imagination follow me along those dark streets, through those narrow doorways, and between those cool sheets. He imagined himself as the one I touched and permitted to touch me in turn.

He’d wanted me. Then and now, his desire for me surviving the brutal scouring of Námo to flourish again in his new form, as though that desire was threaded through his feä and not merely an imaginative byproduct. And finding himself still desirous of me, he stretched into the future to discover what would happen if he asked: Would I be horrified? Demeaned? Disgusted? Would his proposition end the friendship that he cherished for how it glanced his desires? How it let him listen to and look upon me nearly every day? Suddenly, immersed in his thoughts, the question he’d asked is a roar. Time begins to tumble toward the future. Even viewed within his mind, the sensation is sickening, like seasickness to one accustomed to the moveless earth. Will he want me?  I see flickers of us together—as friends, as lovers—I see, I hear

will he

will he want

want

want me

me

me?

And then sometime distant but clear, as though seen through a telescope, there is a moment when he watches me waiting in Ostonúmë, on the metro platform. I am eager and stupid, turning to grin at him—I’ve tweezed my eyebrows (somewhat unevenly) and have on a purple shirt that I suppose I will think looks nice—and my clammed-tight mind is oblivious to his heart crumbling inside him even as he smiles at me and touches my back and lets me—bids me to—go—

Taryindë rushes from the metro and into my arms.

I arise with a gasp.

That moment: it rushes toward us. When I leave with her in my arms and forget to look if he follows. But now? Now it is my arm around him, it is millions of moments left to click past before that moment comes and he no longer feels me warm at his back. The first night he goes to sleep alone, like the first night after he banished his wife and lay awake in the room beside his daughter’s chambers, feeling their deaths rushing upon them. The platform, the train, my smile, our parting: It comes like comet. I am vertiginous with the onslaught of time, never before perceived, considered. He chose this, me. He chose his eventual broken heart.

There is a moment left like a playing card fallen during the shuffle: another pier but in Avathar this time. I am sitting, bagged over and weary from my swim, and his arm circles me and keeps me from falling. He kisses a mole on my shoulder, so soft that I don’t feel it.

We are seesawing through time: the past and the future and his imaginings of me like the ball tethered to a child’s paddle toy and vacillating wildly. I yank free of his mind before I am sick with it. He sleeps on. I should join him; I can’t. I remember suddenly a dumb game we played as children, where we’d take one of my father’s sandglasses and tipped it and tried to hold our breath till the sand ran out. The swimmer, I was good at it. Even to the most sensitive ears, the plink of each grain was inaudible, but then you had a puddle, a pile, and then the last diminishing trickle and it was filled without being able to point to the moment when it happened.

It is happening now: the seconds plinking inaudibly.

I clutch him and wish I’d never seen. Wish I’d persisted in thinking we were opposites instead of so pitiably alike. The future comes at me, one grain at a time. Taryindë! She will return to me! But my joy is muted now, the way a mist will dull and dim a landscape and yet remain lovely.

The sandglass runs.