Love as a Second Language
By Fewthistle

Author's Note: Written for Challenge Five, Prompt Three at the Livejournal Community even_angels_.

Spoilers: None. Supposes a relationship pre-Loss.

With thanks to Peanuts for the ever gorgeous prompts.

A lover's alphabet falls from your lips. Words plump and plum shaded, laced with the flavor of ripe nectarines, laden with the scent of new grass and the smell of the sun: they land solid as a dream in my lap. An alphabet as unfamiliar to me as the lilting cadences of some lost, ancient dialect.

I stumble over the syllables, my lips not quite forming the rounded vowels of desire. The click of my tongue against my teeth misses the subtle staccato of longing. Even in the rolled consonants of love, my pronunciations are stilted, my accent provincial at best.

Two hundred and twelve days have passed by since this began, since we began. Days that have slipped into the rhythm of a slow waltz, circling, swaying, and I am still left dumb-stuck at the sight of your face on the pillow beside me, pale grayish-gold light of morning falling lazily across the bed.

Slits of sapphire slowly widen as you wake, stretching like a cat in a warm window. You smile at me, that teasing grin that promises a kiss, a less than quick morning tumble, and if I'm really good, an omelet and coffee.

I try to be good. I always try to be good. I always try to be what I know that you deserve. I fail more than I succeed.

“Alex, what're you thinking?” You ask me, lying back on the pillows, your hair arrayed like Solomon's jewels against the forest green of the sheets. There's still a faint sheen of perspiration on your skin, and the blue of your eyes is dark with lingering desire.

I want to tell you that you're beautiful. That when I look at you, I lose all those pretty, distracting words, the ones that I use to draw attention away from the little man behind the curtain. I want to speak to you in that secret language, the one that flows like water from your lips, the one with words like joy and need, adoration and love.

“I was thinking that we should get the walls painted. There's a stain from that bathtub overflow upstairs there in the corner,” I answer.

You chuckle softly, and run your hand down my arm, the pads of your fingers raising the fine down of hair and sending shivers racing across my exposed flesh.

“Yeah, we probably should,” you affirm gently, swinging your legs over the edge of the bed and disappearing into the bathroom. Moments later the sound of water battering against the tiles of the shower drowns out my muffled groan as I fall back on the mattress in defeat.

I'm still lying there when you emerge from the bathroom, terrycloth-clad goddess, a towel-turban of blue to match your eyes.

“Not working today?” Your voice is muffled as you paw through the myriad of suits in the closet, your upper body disappearing partially as you reach toward the back, the rustle of fabric sounding for all the world like teasing whispers. I can just imagine that they're talking to you about me. I doubt that it's good.

“Yes. Work. I should get moving,” I answer, pushing myself up from the bed and into the hazy air of the bathroom.

I let my cotton nightshirt slip from my shoulders. In the steam covered mirror over the sink, I can just make out my reflection, amorphous, indistinct. A blur of platinum hair and pale flesh, growing pink in the lingering heat left by your shower.

Turning, I bend over and start the water running, my fingers under the tap testing the temperature. A metaphor for my life. Always testing, always checking to make sure that it isn't too hot, that it won't burn.

Stepping under the spray, the stinging pellets of the massage setting pummeling my back and neck, I close my eyes and the Alex that can speak in tongues murmurs the things I should have said. Words that are caught in the rivulets of water cascading over my face, flowing to disappear without a trace down the drain.

I can persuade twelve strangers to send a fellow human being to his death, but I can't manage to make you understand that I feel less empty with you than I have ever felt in my life. And I can't make you see that that's the best I can offer.

It's funny. After all of these months, it would seem that I would have learned a little something, picked up a few phrases. Hell, drop me in Paris and after two or three weeks, I could probably order dinner and find Montmartre. Yet, I can't tell you I love you and make it sound like I mean it. And I can't find my way past the feel of your skin under my hands; as if that were all this is.

By the time I emerge from the shower and find something to wear, you're gone. There's a note in the kitchen, next to a full mug of coffee and a plate nearly covered by the pale yellow of a cheese and mushroom omelet. Court at 9, you tell me. See you tonight. I love you, Alex, you say in slightly slanting script.

Sinking onto the caned bottom of a kitchen chair, I shake my head in wonder. As if I needed the note to tell me that. Perhaps this alphabet isn't so difficult to learn, after all. Maybe I was making it too hard. Simple really, when I stop and study it. Two hundred and twelve days to realize that this language has nothing to do with vowels and consonants, nothing to do with words at all.

Already you've taught me what it is to be unadorned.