Thicker Than Bone

16th June 2009

16th June 2009

“I hope it f*****g kills him!”

The screech was ear-splitting, even through the walls, and Yazid winced. Ali just laughed.

“Are your neighbours ever quiet?” He stage-whispered. Yazid rolled his eyes as he jiggled the keys in the lock.

“Not that one,” he said, and the door popped open. “Voilà!”

“You cleaned,” Ali said in a suitably impressed tone, reeling Yazid in by the jacket. “I hope you made the bed,” he whispered against Yazid’s mouth. The man tasted like filthy, dirty promises. The best kind of promises, in Yazid’s opinion.

“You’ll have to find out, won’t you?”

Yazid lived in a tiny, grubby top floor flat in the city centre, and he wasn’t quite over the awkwardness of bringing Ali home to it yet. Ali was all long lines, swimmer’s shoulders and ice-blue eyes. His hair was so blond it was nearly white. He was the kind of man that medieval Christians had made stained-glass windows for, for f**k’s sake. A part of Yazid didn’t really like seeing that shockingly beautiful man in this tiny box of a flat. It seemed wrong. Like an icon of Mohammed in a Hindu temple that had been converted into a brothel and was sponsored by Opus Dei. That level of wrong.

But Ali never seemed to mind, and bounced down onto Yazid’s battered sofa, holding out his hands. Yazid took one, and was pulled down with him.

“So,” Ali said, “I actually wanted to ask you something.”

Ali asked a lot of somethings. They’d only been going out for about four months, and there’d been a lot of somethings, ranging from, “What language is that?” through to a very red-faced enquiry about whether Yazid had anything from his previous partners. Ali was always asking something.

So Yazid just said, “Yeah?” and waited for it.

“Um,” Ali said, and went red. He could change colour impressively fast, but Yazid ignored that, too, and just rubbed his thumb over Ali’s knuckles. Waiting. “So…I…hope we’re on the same page about this, but I…really, really like you, and I’m…hoping this is going in the…long-term direction.”

“Which direction’s that?” Yazid asked, pulling up his most innocent tone. “South?”

Ali flushed, laughed, and hit him. Yazid caught both hands and locked those pale wrists together between his palms.

“Gotcha now,” he grinned.

“Lay off,” Ali laughed, and shook his hands free. “And you wish, perv.” Yazid grinned. “No, I mean…”

“Spit it out,” Yazid said when Ali trailed off, and caught a hand again. “If it helps, we are on the same page. About the direction thing.”

Ali’s face suddenly softened into one of his more…tender expressions. Ali was sharp and exasperated most of the time—or he faked it, and Yazid hammed up his own weirdness to get a rise out of him—but every now and then, Yazid apparently managed to say the right thing, and…

And for all he loved the razor wit and the cutting commentary, that soft little look on Ali’s face could make Yazid go literally weak in the knees. Which was a bit inconvenient, but still f*****g amazing.

“I want you to meet my mum,” Ali said.

Yazid’s brain stalled. “Er.”

“Don’t look so worried,” Ali said slowly.

Yazid swallowed, and bit his lip. “Uh, Ali…I’m not so good with mothers.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean…look, you’ve told me about your mum.” Her gardening and her Women’s Institute and her bake sales for various cancer charities after Ali’s dad had died. Their confusing stalemate on the whole gay issue. The way she seemed to support him and not at the same time. “I just…don’t think she’s going to be too keen on me.”

Ali blinked. “What do you mean?” he asked. “I’ve told her about you. That I’ve got a boyfriend.”

“And let me guess, you’ve just called me Yaz.” Ali was actually the only one who did that. Everyone else said Yazid, and Yazid wasn’t really all that ambiguous, but Yaz…Yaz could be short for anything, any old weird nickname.

“So?”

Yazid sighed. “Okay, um…when you say you have a boyfriend, people assume you mean a white guy.”

Ali frowned. It started in the middle of his eyebrows, this little crease above the bridge of his nose, and then it spread down either side of his mouth and chin. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked.

“I mean when people find out I’m queer, they get weirded out. You don’t get queer brownies, Ali.”

“Don’t say brownies!”

“Fine, whatever, you don’t get queer ethnic minorities,” Yazid said, waving a hand. He’d grown up mostly in foster care; he’d heard way worse than brownies. Ali’s affronted defensiveness on Yazid’s behalf was kind of sweet, truth be told. “People don’t expect it, and they assume I come with a lot more weird baggage than I actually do, and it makes everything really, really awkward. They’re dying to ask, but they think it would be rude, and they make all sorts of assumptions, and it gets exhausting. Your mum isn’t going to be expecting me. It’s going to throw her, and…people don’t like being thrown.”

Ali’s frown hadn’t dissipated. “It doesn’t matter,” he said flatly. “If people think you can’t be queer because you’re Iraqi, then they’re stupid.”

“That’s not my point, Ali, my point is she’ll be expecting something else,” Yazid said. “And given you keep saying she’s sketchy enough about you being gay…look, she’s not going to like you turning up with someone who’s bound to have a lot of issues, a huge cultural gap…”

“But you don’t.”

“She doesn’t know that.”

“She’ll learn,” Ali said, and shrugged. “We’ll just tell her. Show her. She’ll take a bit of time anyway, Yaz, she hated Jo’s boyfriend for, like, two years.”

“Oh, thanks,” Yazid said dryly.

Ali laughed, scooting across the cushions to offer a hug.

Yazid clutched back gratefully, feeling oddly nervous. He thought he’d grown out of this wariness, but then he supposed the mother of the first guy you’d been serious about in a long time—if not ever—was bound to do that.

“Don’t worry about it?” Ali said lowly.

Yazid closed his eyes at the faint pressure of a kiss being pressed to the top of his ear.

“It’s not…look, this is going to sound a bit weird and horrible.”

“Okay?”

“I kind of…want to show her I’m not kidding, you know?” Ali said, sitting back and keeping a hand on Yazid’s elbow. They were facing each other, leaning against the back of the sofa, almost close enough to kiss but for the way Ali had twisted up his leg to wedge between them. “She always drops hints about me not having a boyfriend, and I kind of…I kind of want to be able to say, ‘Look, there he is, now you’ve met him, lay off.’ She’s gone all…match-maker-y since Jo got married. And she keeps using my lack of a boyfriend to hint that I should try meeting some nice girls.”

Ouch. “You want to show me off?”

“Uh, yeah,” Ali said, and snorted. He dropped an arm along the back of the sofa until the hand was toying with Yazid’s hair. Yazid eyed him, bemused. “Seriously, what do you see when you look in a mirror? Because it’s not what I see.”

Yazid snorted. “Yeah, like you can talk, Mr Skinny-Jeans-Make-My-Arse-Look-Weird.”

“They do!”

“Your arse could turn an imam,” Yazid said flatly.

Ali pushed him before dropping his leg and scooting closer. Yazid slid both arms around Ali’s waist and squirmed until the hug could conceivably be called a cuddle.

“I just want to show my mum I have this gorgeous, wonderful guy who hopefully is going to be this gorgeous, wonderful, permanent guy. I don’t care if she likes you or not, or if she takes ages about figuring out you’re not Muslim and you don’t have weird religious issues with being with me or something. I mean, she’ll be too polite to say anything to your face anyway, Tony’s the—” Ali stopped abruptly.

“Tony’s the what?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Ali mumbled.

“Who’s Tony?” Yazid asked when the mumble trailed off into what he already knew was Ali’s distinctly-not-pleased voice. It usually spelled danger, but it often spelled unhappiness, too, and Yazid got this weird sick feeling when Ali was obviously upset.

Ali groaned. “Yaz.”

“Who is he?” Yazid persisted.

“He’s my older brother,” Ali mumbled, and scowled. “Forget about him. You won’t be meeting him.”

“Why not?”

Ali snorted. “My mum is awkward, but my brother is just out-and-out racist.”

“Are we talking Polish people go home racist or let’s kick the s**t out of an Indian lady racist?”

Ali’s face was deadly serious, and something about that was more chilling than his words.

“Tony has swastikas tattooed on his hands. Trust me, Yaz. You are never going to meet him.”