Chapter Text
“I have to go back.”
“Yusuf.”
Louder now, cracking in the middle: “I have to go back!”
Nile shoots a look at Booker in the rearview mirror. Calm him down, Booker says with his eyes. After almost thirty years, she’s getting used to Booker’s expressions, learning them like a second (or third or fourth) language.
“Yusuf, come on.” A hand on his arm now, but Joe flinches away and tugs on the door handle desperately.
Thank god for child locks.
“H-he-” Joe’s shaking, and Nile surges over the buckles and the seat dividers to wrap her arms around Joe.
“Yusuf, please.” She talks fiercely over his broken sobs. “You can’t help him.”
“N-n-n-”
Apparently, immortals can still hyperventilate. She would have been happier not knowing this.
“You can’t help him,” Nile repeats, softer this time. Her own heart is wounded, after all. “We can’t go back, the area’s probably crawling with those assholes by now.”
“The kid’s right,” Booker says gruffly. His eyes are worrisomely on the rearview mirror again as he takes a sharp left turn down the bumpy Virginian road -- it’s pitch black, no streetlights, no headlights. “Joe, you need to breathe.”
“H-he could be-”
“I’m sorry, Yusuf.” Nile fights back tears. “He’s gone, I’m so sorry-”
“We have to go back for him.” A hand scrabbles at the door again, and Nile grips his wrist in a way that would bruise anyone but them. She pulls his arm in until it's cradled to his chest, holds him tighter. “W-we-”
Nile feels one tear escape. “He knew what he was doing, Yusuf - we can’t … we have to honor his sacrifice. He saved you.”
“ Saved me.” Joe laughs, and it’s a mangled, twisted thing. Nothing like his usual bright cheeriness. It fades quickly into ragged sobs, and he shakes his head, sagging against Nile, his fingers curled into a fist against his chest. “W-w-we need to bury him.”
“Joe,” Booker says. His voice is more gentle than Nile’s ever heard it. “Joey, come on.”
“We left him!” Joe shouts. “We left him there, and there’s no one!” Nile tucks her face into Joe’s shoulder because she can’t bear to look at his face as he screams in his agony. “His family is gone, Sebastien, and - and I just left him there.” He collapses again, a puppet with slashed strings. “I left him.”
Nile tries one more time. “Yusuf, he was my friend too, but-”
She’s cut off by another garbled laugh, but Joe doesn’t sound angry now: just sad. Exhausted. Slightly broken.
“ Friend,” he repeats, shaking his head and leaning into her side. “He’s … he is all. And more. And now…”
He trails off, his chest shaking with building sobs, and the unspoken words hang heavy in the dark car.
And now he’s dead.
One Year Earlier
Nicky doesn’t know how many times he’s died since he started this.
His head is pounding, and his eyes feel like they’ve been stuffed with sand, and through it all, he has this endless, remorseless voice in his head telling him to just fucking quit already. Surrendering to the almighty pain in his head, Nicky sinks into the ancient cushion beneath him and groans out of his chest, a paroxysm of agony.
“How many pages, Nicky?”
Oh, it is an angel, come to bring merciful judgement upon him.
A finger prods him behind the ear, and he moans again.
Merciless judgement.
“How many pages, Genova?”
“Six,” he mumbles. “Six pages.”
Another poke to the ear; he twitches and swats it away before fully burying his face out of sight.
“You had seven pages this morning!” Poke poke.
“That was this morning.” Nicky’s voice is muffled by paper. “Now, as you can see, I am in Hell.”
“How many new pages did you tell your advisor you’d have by your meeting tomorrow?”
“Hell,” Nicky repeats. “I am in Hell.” He can sense the next poke coming before it happens, so he answers while attempting to fend it off. “Twenty pages.”
He flaps his hand without much gusto as River continues her assault for a few more seconds.
“Twenty pages!” River cackles and drops into the abandoned chair next to him in his crammed little cubicle. “Jesus, Nicky. Do you have a death wish?”
He grunts.
River taps the pile of essays with fresh green ink (and some mild coffee stains) on them. “Tell me you didn’t stay up all night grading the freshmen.”
“...I didn’t stay up all night grading the freshmen.” He got an hour of sleep. So it wasn’t all night. Ha ha. Ugh.
She picks up the abandoned mug near his monitor and sniffs it dramatically. “Oh, Nicky. Tell me this isn’t a shot of Five Hour Energy mixed with day-old espresso.”
He finds it harder to lie about that.
“Nicky.” She sets the mug down and tugs on his arm; Nicky moans and wishes for death again. “Nicolo Genova! An Italian should know better!”
“If you have come to kill me, River, I ask that you do it now.” Nicky nuzzles back into the seam of the open book under his head. “So that I may take a nap after.”
River giggles and pokes him one last time before shoving his rolly chair out of the way so she can situate herself in front of his laptop. Nicky’s too tired to grunt in protest as he’s shoved sideways, merely rolling with the chair, his large feet dragging across the shitty stained carpet in his tiny office.
“You just wrote this said something in Arabic over and over again … twenty … no, twenty-three times,” River counts quickly. “Nicky, your footnote says learn Arabic, asshole . You better delete that before your advisor sees!”
“Maybe that was a note from my advisor.”
“Nope. Not even Andrew is that much of a dick.” River hums and cracks her fingers loudly; Nicky winces and pretends he can’t see the noise of it ricocheting around his sore head. “Maybe. He’s probably not that much of a dick.”
“Did you come here to help me or give me a panic attack?” Nicky asks, rolling his tongue around his teeth. Ugh. He tastes like diner coffee and yesterday’s half-eaten sandwich. He needs water. Or more coffee.
Or vodka.
“Definitely came here to help,” River promises. “I know a guy who can help you with this poem.”
That gets his interest.
Nicky lifts his head from his abandoned collection of Laudomia Forteguerri’s poems and opens bleary eyes to stare at River with renewed hope, feeling like the sun has peeked through at last through dismal clouds of despair and reduced graduate funding.
His mouth still tastes like ass, though.
“Oh?” Nicky blinks, confused, wondering if in his exhaustion, he hallucinated her comment.
“I know someone who speaks Arabic,” River says, strangely nonchalant in her expression.
“I know people who speak Arabic too, River,” Nicky points out flatly, not wanting to be rude, but not knowing how to be less blunt in English. “But they do not speak a random dialect that went extinct almost a thousand years ago.”
“This person does.” If he didn’t know better, Nicky would say River looks amused.
“They know … Siculo-Arabic?” Nicky repeats. He’s definitely hallucinating. River just nods. “...not Maltese, right? Because I found someone who spoke Maltese but couldn’t translate this.” River shakes her head. “But actual … Siculo-Arabic?”
“Yep.” She pops the ‘p’ with intense enthusiasm.
“It went extinct after 1300,” Nicky says. There’s a bit of dried drool on the corner of his mouth, and he uses the long sleeve of his sweater, pulled over his hands, to paw at it until he doesn’t feel it anymore. “It -- no one alive should speak it.”
“And yet.” River grins. “I asked around, okay?” She rubs his arm affectionately. “I got tired of watching you mutter to yourself in the blue light from across the hall.”
Nicky thinks he might cry. Or vomit. The second one’s from the lack of sleep, though.
“Who is this magical person?” Nicky breathes, eyes wide. Hell, even if River got it a little wrong and the person speaks some different dialect of Arabic, some modern version that, again, wasn’t wiped out by the Aragonese when they invaded Sicily, he’ll at least see if they can help him parse out another verse.
Any verse. Even a fucking cognate of one more word.
Anything to get him to more than six pages in his dissertation so he doesn’t get murdered by Dr. Andrews tomorrow.
(Dr. Andrews would not murder him. He is a very nice, mild-mannered man in his sixties who has a little house in Georgetown and a big shaggy dog, and would definitely not murder exhausted, broke PhD candidates who were so tired they sometimes forgot they were speaking Italian in the Starbucks at DuPont Circle).
River laughs to herself and hands Nicky a flashcard that’s been ripped in half, with Trumbull Hall, Rm #1069 written on it in a quick scrawl.
J Jones is written right below it.
“Jones?” Nicky repeats. Then he frowns. “Trumbull? That’s the Art building, River--”
“Artists can’t speak Sicklo-Arabic?” River asks, an eyebrow perfectly arched.
“Siculo,” Nicky mutters, mostly to himself. His thumb strokes over the written words. He feels weird, like a buzzing in the back of his skull that wasn’t there before.
Must be the caffeine. And sleep deprivation. When was the last time he went home?
“Jones is great,” River promises. “You’ll get along famously.”
“Huh.” Nicky rubs his jaw and blinks again. He turns and gives River a quizzical frown. “Is this a ploy to get me to walk across campus? Because I swear, I have been outside in the last 24 hours.”
“What day is it?”
“Tues--” He catches her expression shift. “Wednesday!” He holds the flashcard aloft as his trophy. “Because my meeting with Andrews is Thursday, and that’s tomorrow!”
“And you only have six pages,” River reminds him, far too cheerfully.
Nicky is not proud of the noise he makes.
“Go see Jones.” River pats him on the back, but that quickly becomes repeated taps to his shoulder blades, pat pat pat pat pat until he finds himself scooting up and off his chair. Her feet claim his seat immediately, and she beams up at him, incandescent and chipper and fresh-faced as always. “Go go go!”
“Ugh.” Nicky saves his progress (all sixty-five words of it), closes his poetry book, tucks it into his satchel with all his pens, almost grabs the essays, leaves them on the desk because fuck those essays, and then slings his bag over his shoulder. “Jones,” he repeats, rubbing the crick in his neck. “I’m going to see …”
“Dr. Jones,” River repeats. She cracks open his mini-fridge and ooo’s in excitement.
“Don’t touch my yogurt-” Nicky warns.
She’s already pulling out the Yoplait. “Come back at 5 PM with at least three more pages, and I’ll buy you new yogurt,” she promises. “Chobani, even.”
“You are a thief,” Nicky says, weary to the bone. He tilts his head. “Chobani … Flippys?”
“Flips,” River corrects serenely, pulling a spoon out of her backpack. “And yep. After you see Jones.”
“Jones,” Nicky repeats. “Alright.”
“ You’ll both thank me later, ” she mutters when he has his back turned.
“What?” Nicky turns back at the exit to his cubicle, but River’s already happily consuming her yogurt.
“Huh?” She repeats back at him, guileless and unbearably cute.
“Bleh,” Nicky shakes his head, chalks it up to more sleep deprivation, and slumps his way to the exit of the grad student offices.
He probably should have brought some kind of jacket, but he only owns the one, and it’s at his apartment which he always forgets to go home to. It’s beginning to rain, in that pathetic DC-in-early-November kind of way, and Nicky shivers miserably as he walks across campus. The sky is unbearably grey for ten in the morning, and he wishes he had an umbrella, even though it wouldn’t do much good.
The air is full of drizzle, and the sidewalk smells like rusted earth under the water that soaks through the shoulders of his sweater and dampens the cuffs of his scruffed-up jeans -- it’s not raining enough to threaten his laptop or work, so he doesn’t feel the need to start sprinting like some people around him.
Trumbull is only a ten minute walk from the grad offices, and Nicky finds himself squinting at the campus maps that are posted along his route twice to double-check where he’s going.
He never has much reason to go anywhere but Austen Hall and the grad offices, so he’s very pleased with himself when he sees the sign for Trumbull and jogs up the damp steps to the clear doors that promise warmth and dryness to his aching body.
There are art installations hanging from the ceiling, fabulous things that look like wisps of smoke; it draws his attention, which means he nearly body-slams into a man coming out of Trumbull.
“Scusi, mi scusi,” Nicky says hastily, nearly taking himself out in his attempt to not collide with the stranger.
“Non si preoccupi,” the man answers with a pleasantly strange accent forming the familiar words. Nicky blinks rainwater out of his eyelashes and realizes the guy he almost knocked over is …
Hot. Really hot.
Blonde, muscle-y, with pretty eyes.
“Uh,” Nicky coughs, and the man holds the door open for him with a faint smile.
His eyes are sad, Nicky realizes upon closer inspection. It makes him overcome his initial anxiety and smile back.
“Grazie,” he murmurs, nodding his head.
“Prego, prego,” the man answers, and he lets the door close behind Nicky as he scoots his dripping body over the threshold.
He turns and watches the man stroll away in the rain, his face tilted back to feel the raindrops; everyone around him rushes to and fro on the sidewalk, trying to get out of the rain, boots clacking against pavement --
He simply stands, watching the rain fall around him. He’s alone on the sidewalk, no bag, no hat, no real jacket behind the suede outer layer that looks like it’s taken its fair share of beatings.
The man looks impossibly lonely; and for some reason, that makes Nicky sad too.
As he climbs the stairs to follow the signs to 1050-1074, he realizes it’s because Nicky is lonely -- and he doesn’t wish that feeling on anyone.
He’s lost in his thoughts, his head muddled and stuffed with exhaustion and empty anxiety about his looming deadline, so he misses 1069 and has to double back from the end of the hall. Now, he notices some lovely still lifes on the walls of the corridor, and a few interesting sculptures that resemble spiders that rise up from the corner of one door.
J Jones is on the door of 1069, and Nicky feels that weird buzzing in his head again, like pent-up pressure at the base of his skull, vibrating with more and more intensity that swirls through his system to take up residence in his stomach.
He tilts his head and whacks at his ear with the flat of his palm, trying to shake it off. When it doesn’t go away, Nicky comes to the conclusion that his doctor was right. He probably needs to take Vitamin B supplements.
His sweater sleeves still pulled over his knuckles, Nicky lifts his hand and raps three times on the office door.
“Come in,” answers a pleasant male voice. Nicky tries to place the accent -- Dutch, maybe? -- before pushing the door open.
And, clearly, the universe is trying to make him feel better after the last three shitty Grindr dates he’s been on because not only did he literally run into a very hot man at the entrance to the building, but …
Dr. Jones is probably the Most Beautiful Man he’s ever seen.
“Uh,” his mouth feels fuzzy. Why don’t I come to the Art Building more often? He wonders to himself, eyes wide but heavy with missed sleep.
Thank God he’s so tired that his mouth doesn’t physically form those words.
“Hello.” The man stands from his desk and gestures at the seat in front of him. “Come in, come in. How can I help you?”
“Uh. I … I need help,” Nicky manages to say. His entire face is on fire.
If River were here, she’d say fuck yes, you need help. Immediate help. Where are those nice boys from Queer Eye? Karamo, please, you’re our only hope!
Thinking about River makes him feel a little bolder, and it also reminds him to say --
“With a translation!”
Of course, he says this at the same time Dr. Jones asks, “Help with what?”
If the Guiness people could do a record for most awkward tension, Nicky thinks he’d win. Any day. Maybe the floor will eat him now. Goodbye, Nicky.
He turns his head, wondering if he should just run for it now, but his eye catches on a beautiful charcoal sketch that’s hanging on the wall. He takes a step towards it, frowning, catching the expressive sweep of a woman’s jawbone, her hair thick and dark where it falls to her shoulders.
“That’s … that’s very good,” Nicky says softly, his fingers gripping the strap of his bag.
“There’s art in this office worth millions of dollars, and that’s the one you see?” Dr. Jones asks, but he doesn’t sound rude about it. Quite the opposite.
Nicky struggles with other languages and their connotation sometimes, but he does know tone very well -- the man sounds … wondering.
He glances around the office quickly; he sees a beautiful vase that’s probably worth more money than he will ever make in his sad, exhausted, English-studying life; there’s an oil painting on display behind the desk that looks like Van Gogh but with different colors; he also sees what can’t be but probably is a faberge egg.
Nicky shrugs and goes back to the sketch of the woman. “I like this,” he says, sleepiness making him honest and more open than normal. He tilts his head, sees the way she’s looking away from the viewer, sees the way that if he tilts his head a different way, it looks like she’s screaming and not laughing --
“It makes me sad for some reason,” he says. “But I like it.”
“Why?” Dr. Jones’s voice is soft.
“Because the person who drew it loves her,” Nicky decides. Yes, that’s it. “ She’s loved. And she knows it.” That thought makes him smile.
There’s a sharp inhale across the office, but when Nicky tears his eyes away from the drawing of the beautiful woman -- beautiful because the artist loves her, but also beautiful objectively, she’s clearly lovely -- Dr. Jones is perfectly composed.
“Have a seat,” he says, gesturing at the empty chair.
Nicky remembers that he feels like death warmed over sixteen-times on one of those hot-dog rolly things at 7-11, and he collapses into the chair gratefully, dropping his satchel to the floor at his feet.
The man smiles at him, his brown eyes beautiful, expressive, gentle -- Nicky forgets to breathe for a second, and then the man clears his throat and holds his hand over the desk.
“I’m Joe Jones,” he says in that ridiculously nice voice of his. “And you are?”
“Nicolo Genova, but people call me Nicky,” Nicky answers, some level of ingrained manners forcing him to sit forward and take the man’s hand.
The buzzing in his head becomes a screaming becomes a tsunami --
Vanishes.
There’s warmth spreading up his arm, and he sits back in his chair, blinking tiredly. He rubs his temple. Not a migraine. Not today. Please no migraine. Let me write ten more pages and then I will have the migraine, how does that sound, god of Migraines? I will sacrifice my firstborn at the altar of Excedrin.
He does not mention to this imaginary god of Migraines that he will, in fact, not be producing a firstborn considering that he is, as River charmingly, out-datedly says, “a Kinsey Six.”
Whatever that means.
Dr. Jones has said something in the meantime, and he wishes, once more, for the ground to swallow him. It would only be polite.
“Sorry. I’ve … I’ve been awake for a while.” He laughs awkwardly and curls his hands into loose fists over his thighs, stretching his lower back a little. “Could you --”
“I said, Nicolo, what do you need translated?”
“Ah.” Nicky nods eagerly and pulls out his laptop, already talking full-speed. “So, I am writing my dissertation, and it is on queer love poetry from 1200 to 1500, give or take a decade or so,” he waves his hand around in the air demonstratively as he cracks open his ancient laptop. “And the effects on modernist homoeroetic love poetry in the western canon -- and, I have found the most perfect poem, by a little known poet, and I know it is perfect because another poet referenced it in … ah, yes, in, uh, 1350 in a different account of love poetry between men, and he’s supposed to be an influence on Shakespeare on his Young Male sonnets, but, uh--” he coughs and looks up from the laptop where the scanned poem resides. “It’s … it’s in Siculo-Arabic. Specifically a dialect that. Uh. No one speaks anymore?”
“I can take a look at it,” the professor (sexy professor, sexy professor, sexy professor, his brain uselessly chants in every language he knows) offers, holding a hand out.
“Grazie,” Nicky says, deflating a little as he holds out the laptop like that cartoon about lions that his mother made him watch when he was a baby.
Lion King. God, I forgot The Lion King.
Then, as Jones is examining the poem, a strangely amused smile on his face, something occurs to Nicky.
“You spoke in Italian?”
Dr. Jones looks up, blinking, with a puzzled smile on his (terribly, awfully) perfect mouth. “You spoke in Italian, so I thought it was … only polite?”
“Oh.” Nicky’s face is on fire. This is the only explanation for the heat consuming his head. “Sorry. I …”
“Haven’t slept recently?” Jones fills in, more teasing now. He hums and goes back to the poem.
Nicky switches back into English, determined to not look like an ass again. “The poem is by someone named Al-Kaysani, and it’s supposed to be a … a yearning.”
“Yes,” Jones murmurs to himself, looking sad now. “Yes it was.”
“You can read it?” Nicky breathes, eyes wide.
Jones hums in assent, scrolls down the page, and doesn’t see how Nicky’s about to start crying.
“Oh thank God,” he mutters in Italian, almost crossing himself out of sheer habit. “I have to be in front of my thesis advisor tomorrow and I … I am …” he struggles to find the words in English.
“Up Shit Creek without a paddle?” Jones suggests helpfully.
Nicky frowns. “Why would I be in a creek full of shit?” He blinks, registers it as an idiom and nods. “Ah. No. Yes, that is … suitable.”
“Why aren’t you getting your PhD in Italian Literature?” Jones asks suddenly, setting the laptop down. “Why all the translations into English?”
“I moved here in 2006,” Nicky answers, shrugging. “Never made my way back to Italy after…” He trails off, red in the face again.
Dr. Jones does not need to know what stopped Nicky from going back to Italy, from going back home.
“I went into seminary,” Nicky continues. If that surprises Dr. Jones, it doesn’t show on his face. “And we studied Latin, and I spent a lot of time in translation, and thinking about what translation can do and capture and change - and … and I didn’t become a priest.” He holds his hands up as though to say obviously . “So, I came here to study. I like poetry.”
“Do you write it?” Dr. Jones asks. “Love poetry?”
His smile is nice; it makes his eyes crinkle warmly, and Nicky wonders if the skin would be soft there, if he swept his fingertips over the gentle wrinkles of happiness, if he let himself touch and wonder freely --
“No,” Nicky answers quickly. “I am much better at … at reading than writing.” He smiles, and it’s a little humorless. After all, you should probably be in love before you write about love. “I’m no poet.”
“I find that hard to believe,” Dr. Jones murmurs. There’s a painful, wonderful moment where their eyes meet, and Nicky thinks he’s never seen brown eyes hold so much light, he thinks he’s never felt a person’s specific gravity before, but here he is tilting in, in, in --
Dr. Jones blinks and scratches at the corner of his thick, beautiful beard with the backs of his fingers.
“I can translate this for you,” he says serenely. “Do you want to send me this file, and I can--”
Nicky nods quickly, hands shaking as he takes the laptop back and fires up his email account.
“Who should I send it to?” He asks, wondering if he sounds breathy, and if he is breathy, is it because Dr. Jones just single-handedly saved his ass, or is it because Dr. Jones just single-handedly ruined all men for him.
"Joseph.jones @dupont.edu” Dr. Jones supplies helpfully, and Nicky has to back-space Joseph a few times joesph - josehp- - joseph - because he’s so excited.
“Thank you, Dr. Jones,” he says earnestly, holding his hand out and shaking the other man’s hand warmly many times, probably too many times.
You need to do the chill, an irate voice hisses in his brain.
It’s just ‘chill,’ Nicky, a voice that sounds more like River corrects sweetly.
“I don’t know how I can ever thank you enough,” Nicky says, remembering to let go of Dr. Jones' hand.
“You can start by calling me Joe,” Dr. Jones says with another radiant smile.
It’s like staring into the sun.
Fuck, if the sun was that beautiful, Nicky might build a rocket to launch himself into it.
I need to sleep, he remembers.
“And maybe you can buy me dinner?” That’s accompanied by a wink, flirtatious, real, and it spools through Nicky’s body, liquid-hot and endless and oh, he’s hallucinating again, surely, and --
He tugs on his earring nervously and nods. “Yes, dinner,” He hears himself saying, as though down a long hallway, and maybe through a few ventilation shafts, echoing and distant and what are you doing, what are you doing --
“Friday?” Joe asks, standing when Nicky does, smoothing out nonexistent wrinkles from his loose linen shirt that does very little to hide how firm his body is.
Do you workout? Nicky wants to ask, delirious in his exhaustion.
“Friday,” Nicky repeats distantly.
(Maybe that man from the front of the building knocked Nicky down the steps, and he hit his head, and now he’s bleeding out in front of Trumbull, and Dr. Joseph Jones is a beautiful amalgamation of the EMT who saved his life and the doctor who’s bringing him into surgery and the angel that God has sent to bring his soul to Heaven where it will be regrettably turned away by San Pietro due to irreconcilable differences--)
“Send me the details,” Joe says, walking Nicky to his door. “I look forward to hearing from you, Nicolo.”
Nicky, miraculously, does not trip, not even when Joe’s warm hand goes to the small of his back.
“Right,” Nicky repeats, eyes wide, nodding more to himself than to the gorgeous, warm, real man standing next to him as he slings his bag over his shoulder again. “Goodbye, Dr. Jones-”
“Joe,” Joe corrects, another sweet smile on his glorious face.
“Joe,” Nicky repeats, smiling to himself. “Goodbye, Joe.”
“Goodbye, Nicolo.”
They smile at each other in his doorway, and then Nicky nods once more and heads to the left.
“Other way,” Joe murmurs quietly at the same time Nicky realizes the numbers of the doors are going up.
Mortified, he walks the other way, giving an awkward wave as he uses his long legs as well as he can, walking swiftly to the stairs and away from the cozy office of Dr. Jones.
The cold rain is a blessing on his face as he stumbles out of Trumbull and down the steps. Nicky turns his head to the sky and closes his eyes as he stands on the sidewalk; he thinks ridiculously of baptism, of vows broken and kept, and he lets out a deep breath he’d swallowed as he walked away from Joe Jones.
“I’m fucked,” he croaks to himself.
“Join the club,” someone says in a French accent, and he lowers his face to see The Hot Man from before, stretched out on a bench, staring apathetically at the bower of trees above him.
“Are you okay?” Nicky asks hesitantly.
“Meh.” The guy shrugs and says, “Life is a trial that we all must suffer through,” as though he were merely commenting on the weather.
“Have a nice day anyway!” Nicky says as genuinely as he can before walking away from the man.
“You too,” is almost swallowed by the sound of increasing rain.
Nicky makes it back to his apartment (he has to circle back to the grad offices because he left his keys there, of course he did) and collapses on his bed; he thinks about warm smiles and brown eyes and thick beards and lovely hands and he falls asleep feeling more calm than he has since his Xanax prescription ran out eight months ago.
When he wakes up, he rolls over to his laptop -- a ping of an email notification woke him from his doze, and he cracks open his eyes as he much as he can to see who it’s from:
Joseph Jones --
Nicky sits bolt upright and flings his computer open and in front of his now-crossed legs, almost flinging it off the bed in the process.
It’s the translation.
It’s the Honest to God translation of al-Kaysani’s love poem, from the late thirteenth century, translated from a barely translatable dialect that not a single person he could find had the time or the patience to translate, not a Linguistics student, not students fluent in Arabic and Maltese --
It’s the translation.
“I’m going to marry that man,” Nicky croaks to no one but himself and the patter of rain against the dingy window of his tiny studio apartment.
He pulls his laptop towards himself, scans the document fifteen times. It’s such a lovely poem, he realizes, his chest aching, I want to reach back in time and hold him -- no one’s ever, ever captured how lonely Nicky feels, not like this. It’s like he’s talking to this almost non-existent poet, and to be fair, he’s the first person reading this poem (well, second really, Joe read it first) in hundreds of years, sitting here on his collapsing mattress, drumming his fingers against his leg, tears building in his eyes for a person he’ll never meet, a person lost to time.
He starts to type.
Nicky looks up, fevered, three hours later, to discover that he’s written an extra twelve pages; he sends a text to River in both celebration and relief but mainly gratitude, and then remembers his deal with Dr. Jones.
Debating with himself over whether or not the professor -- as sexy, mature, and wonderfully composed as he was -- was kidding with him or not, Nicky pulls open his email, cracks his fingers a few times, and then makes himself write:
Dr. Jones (Joe),
Thank you for your help; this poem feels like it’s been missing from my life since I was born, if that makes sense. It’s a beautiful poem, and I’m sure your translation made it even more beautiful. Thank you. Endlessly.
Maybe we could talk about it at dinner on Friday? Does 7 work for you?
-Nicky
He almost signs it Nicolo -- it was what Joe had called him, after all -- but he worries that he’ll sound pretentious. Everyone he’s ever met in America has made fun of his name, of the way it takes form in his mouth. And it’s not like he likes how it sounds in their mouths, either.
But Joe had said it so beautifully. He seems to say everything so beautifully.
Nicky rubs the back of his neck and groans, from deep in his stomach -- maybe he should eat something. Something other than a sleeve of crackers with a spoon of peanut butter.
He’s about to go to his chest of snacks to do just that when his email pings again. He rubs his eyes three times to make sure he can read correctly:
Nicolo,
Seven sounds perfect. Would you like to meet off-campus? I know a lovely spot.
Here’s my number: 703-xxx-xxxx
I will see you soon, Nicolo, and I look forward to discussing poetry with you further.
Joe.
There’s a link to a nice restaurant attached, and Nicky can look at his bank account later and hyperventilate, but for now, he folds his laptop up and hugs it to his chest, smiling to himself. He forgets all about dinner-snack and sinks back down to the mattress where he falls into a blissful, stress-less sleep.