Excerpt from “To Speak, To Hum”

Excerpt from “To Speak, To Hum”

By Devon Bellamy

Absentmindedly, I scratched the space between my shoulder and my neck. Sawyer stirred his coffee. I remember how we used to go out for coffee, how he would order some convoluted, overdone nonsense, and I would wipe abhorrent amounts of whipped cream from his mouth. Now, like everything, his cup wasn’t really coffee. It was some synthetic product that some man made in his sterile-white laboratory ten years ago that just happened to be cheaper than exploiting foreign laborers. It didn’t even taste good. It tasted like fucking shit.

His eyes followed my fingernails as they raked over the already-reddening skin. His lips pulled downwards into a frown, one that I knew he was holding back so that I wouldn’t be upset. I knew all of his microexpressions. He knew all of mine.

He shook his head in a way that I knew meant that he wanted me to stop. In a patient and methodical way, he signed to me.

Stop it, Adrien. You are not meant to do that.

My eyebrows furrowed. Who was he to tell me what to do and what not to do?

Do what? My wrists sharply flicked outwards.

He deflated and set his cup back on the counter.

I don’t want to argue.

How else am I supposed to resist? They are everywhere, Sawyer. They are in our homes. They have taken people away. They made your coffee. It’s not real.

Sawyer walked over to me and held my wrists to his chest. I hated that this had become a habit. I felt restrained. We already couldn’t speak to each other. I was forgetting the sound of his voice, how it lilted upwards when he laughed or when he spoke about something he loved. I could remember vague shapes of it, but only ever images, concepts of images. How his mouth rounded over his singing. The sharp, orange peaks of his laughter. How the back of his throat would constrict around the spiral shape of urgent hums when he would kiss me.

Now, like this, we were locked together. A stalemate, in which he sacrificed his words for the sake of mine, so I wouldn’t say something I didn’t mean. I hated it. I hated him when he would do this. I could see the way the world was bleeding into him, and fuck, it was my job to keep him from all of it.

I wrenched my hands away. Sawyer looked as if I had hit him. No.

He was frustrated, and when he was frustrated, he always tried to speak to me. I watched him try. The muscles in his throat seized and tightened reflexively, remembering a habit from long, long ago. He gave up, pressing his palms into the column of his throat and letting them drop back to his sides.

Look. You even tried.

His shoulders trembled. His head swayed back and forth, reflexively denying anything, just like I had taught him to. Hot tears spilled from the base of his eyelashes. He shook his head back and forth like the motion could push my anger out of me.

How can you silence me? We must. I must, Sawyer. For us. 

You cannot. He adamantly pulled his fingers across him like he could slice the words in half.

Why? Why do you refuse me?

It’s almost been six months. His hands, shaky and wet with the tears he managed to catch before they fell, raised to my jaw. He let his fingers brush the edge of my lips, the outside corners of my eyes. Despite myself, I relaxed into the way he traced over me.

I am proud of you, Adrien. Don’t throw your work away for something that’s not guaranteed.

The base of my neck ached. I narrowed my eyes up at him because I didn’t know how else to challenge his authority. I was running out of excuses. I felt all of my feelings boil down into primal desperation, and I clutched the tips of his fingers in mine. I was surely hurting him, but Sawyer only fixed me with the same patient gaze that he always had. My throat worked around the intrusive structure of the metal lodged there. My lips tightened over vibrations that I could no longer summon. When my mouth opened, Sawyer let my hands go.

I feel bad. It feels good. My hands moved in a flurry. My eyes felt hot. I just want to feel good.

His gaze softened, like it always did. He always gave in to me. My fingers twitched around nothing, and he clasped his own hands over them.

I can do that. He kissed my forehead, reverent.

When he let me run my hands over him that night, his face reflecting the light of the moon from the peephole window over our bed, I could feel the way he mouthed words over my bare skin. He couldn’t speak. Neither could I. He knelt for me like a convert at the altar, and I almost believed that this, his hot palms and the sheen of spit over his mouth, could be enough. His teeth in my neck almost felt like a needle, almost, and it was enough to distract me from the immediacy of it all. He cupped my waist, laid me down, and lapped the tears from my cheeks. Despite it all, all my reservations and how I always fought him before I gave in, he was right. It did feel good. It felt like survival.