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Nicolo wanders into the sitting room, barefoot and hair sleep-mussed. Even after hundreds of years together, the sight still takes Yusuf’s breath away. He doesn’t think that will ever change, not until their immortality fades and they die their final deaths. Perhaps not even then. He’s never been able to shake the possibility of an afterlife.
They’re in a hotel somewhere in Saudi Arabia, staying in a suite with windows that overlook the surrounding city for miles and miles. It’s a nice place, a rare indulgence, but well worth it for the silk sheets and the view. The sitting room is decked out with wingback chairs in a garish shade of chartreuse clashing with the bright yellow of the end table. The carpet is plush and gold and the walls a perfectly average shade of beige. The place emanates indecision and furniture that no one else knew what to do with. It’s comfortable, though, so Yusuf can’t complain too much. A part of him enjoys the chaos in it, despite the artist's desire to repaint the end table to a more appropriate color.
“What are you reading?” Nicolo asks, rounding the chair to look over Yusuf’s shoulder. He places a kiss among Yusuf’s curls.
Yusuf holds up the book to show him the early edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy in the original Italian, a book he stole from one of Nicolo’s safe houses on their last visit. “Your notes in the margins are illuminating.”
“You can read my handwriting?”
“Of course I can, love.” Yusuf closes the book without marking the page—he’ll remember where he left off, he always does, and turns to look up at Nicolo. He still looks haggard from their last mission. “Are you all right?”
“Come to bed with me,” Nicolo says instead of answering, coming to the side of the chair and taking Yusuf’s hand. His bottom lip is bitten raw and Yusuf wants to soothe it with his tongue. “I had another nightmare.”
“Which one?” Yusuf closes their hands together, Nicolo’s skin as familiar as his own, and allows himself to be pulled to his feet.
“The oldest one,” Nicolo says simply because he knows Yusuf will understand.
He does, of course he does. Nicolo has many nightmares, but the oldest one belongs to the time of the Crusades. Before they laid down their weapons and dedicated their lives to each other and the world. Yusuf doesn’t know the details, Nicolo has never shared them, but he knows early in those bloody years Nicolo was captured, raped, and tortured before death rescued him for the torment.
It’s been a while since Nicolo’s sleeping mind has visited that long-ago trauma. Yusuf follows him wordlessly to the bedroom, the centerpiece of which is a canopy bed with golden curtains, and climbs in beside him. Nicolo curls up into a ball and Yusuf wraps himself around him like a shield.
“I’ve got you,” Yusuf says, pressing a kiss to Nicolo’s shoulder and then the back of his neck. “Nothing can hurt you while I’m here.”
It isn’t true—particularly with their line of work—but Nicolo relaxes into his embrace anyway. Yusuf dots kisses anywhere he can reach—Nicolo’s throat and hair, his shoulders, the top of his spine—and whispers how beautiful Nicolo is and how much he loves him in every language he knows. It still thrills him that he’s allowed this beautiful man, that he can say “I love you” to him every day for the rest of their immortal lives.
“Dream of me,” Yusuf whispers, like a spell, like a prayer. “Fall asleep and dream of us lying in the sun on a beach somewhere. No missions. No danger. Just us and the waves.”
Nicolo lets out a soft sigh and goes boneless in his arms, asleep. Yusuf smiles as he presses one last kiss to Nicolo’s throat, feeling the thrum of his pulse beneath his lips, and closes his own eyes.
He dreams of a beach, Nicolo’s hair tossing in the wind, the two of them sun-kissed and dripping saltwater on each other’s skin as they kiss. A vacation from their vacation here in Saudi Arabia before the real world calls them back.