The Sandglass Runs by Dawn Felagund, NelyafinweFeanorion

Schoolboy

I wake up the next morning in a bed that isn’t my own, with a dry mouth and a pounding headache. Spears of sunlight are jabbing through the window and into my eyes. A breeze pushes in the gossamer curtains and the sounds of seagulls screaming for rights to the guts and scales from yesterday’s catch.

My heart clenches in a panic—where am I? whose bed is this?—that just as quickly subsides. I’m at Artanis’s resort. That’s why I’m not bundled into my own windowless shack back home outside of Tirion. There’s a painting of a ship, sails plump with wind, on the wall and a conch shell on the table: standard fare for these kinds of places, I know, without ever having been to another such place but here. I roll away from the stabbing sunlight and press my pillow over my ears to shut out—or at least muffle—the sounds of the gulls.

It wouldn’t be the first time I awoke in a strange bed, though it’d be a first for this body, which is as virginal as new-fallen snow. As a young man, experimenting with Taryindë had awakened my body (and hers), and then she went off to the south for her apprenticeship, and we gave each other permission to sate our urges with others. “If we return to each other, we’ll know,” I remember her saying to me. Neither of us had yet pronounced the word love to the other. But in those long years, the Calarnómë—the labyrinthine streets of Tirion that lay in the shadow of Túna—became a place of refuge for me in a progression much like last night: exhaustion, alcohol, sex, and awakening to wonder what my lover would look like when I rolled over.

I remember being told that the urge would diminish as I aged, but it never did for Taryindë and me, even once we knew our second daughter would be our last child. We used to laugh at our own insatiability and took it as a sign of the same vein of perversion that drove us into exile in the first place. But I have no interest in sex now. My lack of desire is a relief; to romp about as I’d once done feels exhausting now. I am pleased, then, that the unfamiliar and nondescript bedroom in which I have just awakened is solely due to my cousin’s dull, kitschy taste in decorating for tourists and not because the obliteration brought on by last night’s drinking led me to a questionable choice, considering my family are in the rooms around me, and a return to bodily needs and a separation from Taryindë far more durable than an apprenticeship.

I roll over, away from the light, and my nose bumps someone’s shoulder and there is blowsy golden hair, blue eyes, skin already browning—without burning, without freckling—from just a day’s exposure to the sun.

The next half-hour is illustrative, and I perform the full range of emotions for which I am renowned.

He brought me up last night because (he alleges) I could not walk on my own. Lacking the key to my room and not wishing to reveal my inebriation to my family, he put me to bed on the sofa in the closet that Artanis claims is a sitting room.

I did not stay there long before entering the bedroom and getting into bed with him.

I kissed him, on the dock and in the bed. He did not initiate, though he reciprocated.

(“I did not know you liked boys too. It was always the girls who talked about you in the Calarnómë.” He sounded like a fucking schoolboy. I told him as much.)

He had touched my thigh and chest. No more! He swore to it. (“I wanted to. But you were drunk—I didn’t. I swear to it.”) I touched him thoroughly. That’s how he put it, and I didn’t ask him to elaborate. I bit him where his shoulder met his neck. He showed me the mark.

“I think you could have made different choices,” I say when he is finished, and even though it is my voice, it might be my therapist, or Uncle Arafinwë, or Lord Námo. I laugh. I expect him to, but he doesn’t ask me why.

At last he says, “I didn’t want to.”