Under the White Light

Chapter 4 : I Found You & It Was Enough

Your beauty reaches the moon

Tine doesn't initiate their next meeting. He doesn't call on Sarawat.

He walls himself inside his home and comes out when necessary only.

He is afraid and struck by the grotesqueness of life without Sarawat, but he can't move himself to face him. That is until Sarawat shows up at his doorstep a few days later uninvited, stubbly, and very much fuming in anger.

The first thought that surfaces from the sea of instincts is to clap the door closed and hide, but Sarawat holds it wide open, snarls until Tine just had to let him inside.

"Why did you do it?" Sarawat asks, firmly, with a hand already outstretched and ready for his answer.

Tine has missed his hand dearly.

He knows he is juggling with chance when he tries the oblivious route. Maybe it would work.

'You trespassed —'

"No, that's not what I asked, Tine." Sarawat hurries to interrupt him.

'Don't know what you're talking about.'

"Bullshit, and you know it." Sarawat growls.

Well, the ignorance play apparently isn't working.

'I don't know.' Tine writes slowly, choosing his words with care, 'There isn't always an explanation for everything.'

"Don't lie." Sarawat doesn't growl this time. Something breaks in his voice and he just stops.

An uncomfortable void of speech stretches between them.

"Do you like me?" Sarawat wants to know.

Tine doesn't know what he wants with knowledge like this. He stares at Sarawat's offered hand and for the first time, Tine doesn't want to write his secrets into it.

In the very fragile silence that takes over once more, neither of them dares to breathe.

"Because I love you, Tine ..."

Tine's gaze shoots up from Sarawat's hand to his face in the fraction of a second. He doesn't dare to get his hopes up. This could be a trap. It has to be.

"... Ever since you first offered to shave me."

Shock prompts Tine into movement.

'What?'

He can't dig hard enough into the soft tissue of Sarawat's Venus mount to scream the question marks, 'That was almost two years ago!' Tine scratches across Sarawat's skin furiously, 'Why didn't you tell me?'

There's a smile on Sarawat's face when he gets his tacit admittance of mutual affection. He seems to have abdicated all responsibility for the damage done with this little confession.

"For the same reason you didn't tell me because we are so fucking stupid in the most humanly ways."

____________________

Sarawat's been blind since before he met Tine. It's been that way for almost half of his life — he was born normal, healthy without any complications. His vision stuck around a long sixteen years for him to learn the faces of his family and friends and the colours of the world around him.

He met Tine at his concert and apparently he was the guy who he thought was going to murder him.

What a small world!

Tine is damaged goods, just like him and they just somehow clicked — well, through the faults that they were dealt with. He has been by Sarawat's side almost everyday from the moment they met, though, and it's been refreshing, having a friend who doesn't get tired of you, your handicap, essentially.