Marseille

It's two weeks before they see each other again.

On the table between them are golden-brown Maghreb pastries flavoured with orange blossom water and accented in tiny paper cups. Antoine licks the syrup from one of the little pastries as Nacer fusses over the use of too many almonds and not enough cinnamon, examining the way the pastry breaks apart in his fingers. This has been his apology; allowing Antoine into his home, opening up to him in the form of sticky and delicious treats from his homeland, made with an elegance he does not posses beyond the kitchen.

At some point their hands meet across the table and Nacer does not pull away. He leans forward and let's his gaze settle on the purplish-pink bruises that remain under Antoine eyes. He's still a little tender all over, but he will live, Antoine says in too quick southern-tinged French, smiling down at where their hands link together. Nacer's hands are narrower but his fingers are longer, his skin rougher and darker, obscured only by a blue plaster wrapped around the shallow slice of a knife across his index finger.

Nacer's room is small and messy and there are posters of Zinedine Zidane and the World Cup winning team of '98 peeling from the walls. Antoine almost knocks over a towering stack of old, old copies of L’Équipe as he makes himself comfortable on Nacer's bed, quietly wondering how he can concentrate with all the shapes and colours around him. It is only made worse when Nacer reaches over and presses play on an old CD player, filling the room with thrum of a heavy bass and quick, explicit lyrics about violence and gangs and racism. Antoine doesn't like it, but he does like the way Nacer mumbles along to the lyrics, lost in his own little world.

The ferocity with which Nacer's temperament hurtles from intense passion and violence to wilting passivity is as volatile as the whims of the storm rumbling across the Mediterranean. It is both alluring and tiring, but Antoine contents himself with taking what he can get when Nacer forgets to be angry at the world. He supposes he has a right to be angry; the world is unfair, terribly so, and it will beat you down if you don't push back. It does not explain why he insists on pushing Antoine away, why he blows so hot and cold with him, but Antoine has given up on ever getting answers.

Antoine never gets angry, at least not properly; he has better things to do, being happy for one, or excited, or peaceful. He is peaceful as Nacer lies beside him and the soft, dark shadow of his eyelashes flutters slow and then camera shutter fast across his cheeks. Antoine thinks he's beautiful, has done from the day they met. The thick, dark hair curling over his forehead and ears is gone, and so is the greasy sheen on his skin and hesitancy in his approach, but he is still Nacer. Still beautiful.

Later Antoine accompanies Nacer to work; a fiery hell of a kitchen in a subpar restaurant by the Old Port, an hour away from the white-grey concrete jungle of La Savine. The bus they catch is ten minutes late and Nacer steals the window seat from Antoine, who eyes the teenagers at the back with a caution Nacer seems oblivious to. He leans his head on the glass decorated with Allez l'OM and NIQUE LA POLICE in dry, streaking paint, and says nothing as he concentrates on the subtle shift in his surroundings.

It is this focus that he'll later blame for allowing Antoine to gently rest his head on his shoulder and run the edge of his thumb along the curve of his thigh, making him shiver.