I look at the ceiling. It’s barely visible in the darkness, but I can see the plan for it, overlaying the actual thing like mist, in my mind’s eye. It’s blueish, and what will become the ceiling is all long, smooth lines with minuscule numbers running alongside. It’s beautifully complex to be the key in creating something as simple and uninteresting as our ceiling.

I remember the first time I saw one of those plans, before I was even in school, unable to understand what it was, but drawn to it nonetheless. I was peeking inside her father’s workroom after wandering away from them when we were heading outside to play, and I shouldn’t have been there, but I was, and it was . . .

It was . . .

It was a really stupid thing to have left such an impression on a kid who was probably all of three at the time. I swear under my breath, but very softly, and fall heavily back onto my pillow, tugging the blankets up to my shoulder roughly as I roll onto my side.

I suppress a sneeze as damp hair tickles my nose, and I carefully, gently, so not to wake him, smooth his hair down with my hand, nudging his head away from me ever-so-slightly.

He sighs softly in his sleep, the blankets tangled around his waist, and his legs twist about. His heel comes into sharp contact with my ankle, and I bite down on the corner of my pillow to keep from crying out. He’s thin and not very strong, even if we are the same heigh, but he’s very boney, and when he kicks, even in his sleep, it hurts enough to bring tears to my eyes.

I wonder if he’s having an nightmare.

I lower my hand and stroke gently between his shoulder blades. He twitches slightly, as though trying to shrug my caress off, then stops. Pressed against my body as he is, I can feel it when he relaxes.

We share a futon, and it’s a small one. There’s barely enough room for the two of us on it, and we always have to press close to one another, even if we aren’t interested in doing anything but sleep.

When he came home tonight, it was already dark, and I was already in bed, exhausted from spending a lonely, quiet night studying.

He was soaking wet and shivering with cold.

I don’t even think about it anymore, I just get out of bed and go to heat up water for a bath while he strips out of his soaking clothes.

Sometimes it takes a while for the water to heat up, and I’ll still be glowering at the big kettle over the fire when he pads in silently, wrapped in a blanket that doubles as a towel. While we wait, I make him drop the towel, and check to see if he’s hurt.

He doesn’t get hurt much anymore, not like when we were kids. I don’t know if anyone else can tell, I don’t know if even he can tell, but he’s gotten a lot stronger in the past few years. Not the sort of strength you find in warriors, but a different sort of strength, a strength inside of him that glows like a fire. It’s impossible to extinguish that fire, that thing that drives him ever forward. Something about it makes it harder for him to be hurt. Maybe he’s just faster, or more careful, or less willing to back down, but I hardly ever find anything on his slim body besides scrapes and the beginning of bruises among his freckles.

Tonight’s a good night. Even though he came home looking like something the cat dragged in – pardon the expression – he was quite happy with himself. That’s rare. Even if he doesn’t get hurt much, he usually looks like he’s been to hell and back. But tonight, in the wavering light of the lamps and the fire, his eyes glow, and he smiles at me as I run my hands over his body, searching for even the tiniest scratch.

At one point I look up and meet his eyes. They’re full of quiet, dancing amusement. He laughs at my concern softly. Not mocking, just sort of happy that I still worry so much. He catches my hands with his, and he smiles at me again, leaning over to press his forehead against mine. Our noses touch.

With his thumb, he strokes the palm of one of my hands. I shiver slightly. “I’m fine,” he says softly, and when he speaks his lips move against mine.

“I’m glad,” I answer, which is an understatement, but I don’t think I’ll ever have the right words to describe how I feel about him, or how relieved I am when he comes home intact.

We kiss, slowly, and he’s cold and soaking wet, but I don’t care. He shifts and presses himself against me, getting water and mud on the front of my dressing gown, and I ignore the mess as his hands rest on my thighs and his tongue explores the inside of my mouth, feeling like warm sandpaper.

I groan slightly and my back arches, pressing us closer together. I have my arms wrapped around his waist when I hear the damp hiss of water extinguishing the fire as the kettle begins to boil over. Hurriedly, he pulls away, too quickly, and ends up falling down. We both laugh, feeling embarrassed and very young.

It’s weird that when you get around to thinking of yourself as being all grown up and mature, something that’s essentially an adult thing can make you feel like such a little kid. We would have never dreamed of doing anything like this when we were kids.

He folds up the blanket and puts it in a corner where it won’t get any wetter, and I unhook the kettle carefully, grunting slightly at the sudden weight. I pour the contents into the large wooden tub, watching as the boiling liquid sloshes over the edge to stain the floor.

“You filled it too full again,” he remarks as he pads over, staring down at the tub. “Aren’t you supposed to be good at figuring out how much water you need to fill a bathtub?”

I make a face at him, kicking the tub lightly and making more water slosh out over the brim. “I’m so burnt out I probably couldn’t add two and two, let alone figure out the volume of water necessary to fill this tub to the brim, with you inside.”

He laughs and wraps his arms around me, licking my earlobe with maddening slowness before leaning down to rub his nose against my collarbone. “I would have been a wasted calculation, anyway,” he murmurs, and the tone of his voice is distinctly wicked. No one else who knows him would ever believe that he could speak with such slyness, every word packed with innuendo, promising tantalizing, pleasurable things to come.

I watch his fingers as he unties the sash of my dressing gown, the white of his skin bright against the dark cloth, and then he reaches up to push it open and up over my shoulders so it falls to the ground. After a moment of consideration, he rubs a hand in his messy hair and runs it down my chest, leaving a smear of green-brown mud behind. “Now you need a bath too,” he says, his eyes daring me to dispute this logic, before he steps into the tub, causing it to overflow.

I can only follow.

We make a very big mess.

I know, even as we make the mess, that I’ll have to deal with it in the morning before I go to write my exam, and I manage a brief sigh before the feeling of his lips on my chest distract me.

Afterwards, we towel each other dry, very slowly, getting our limbs tangled in the process. When we’re done, I wander into the tiny kitchen to make tea. I juggle the cups and the pot on the way back to our room, and settle them between us on the covers of the skinny futon.

We sit under the covers, nestled together, comfortably naked as we drink out tea.

He’s asleep almost as soon as the cup is drained, and I move the pot and cups to the floor, pushing them away with my foot in the hope that the gesture will prevent them from being crushed by an errant foot in the morning.

I behave like such an idiot when we’re together.

I sigh and roll onto my other side, listening to the odd rumbling noise that’s probably a snore, technically, even though it seems to come from somewhere in his chest, and he sleeps with his mouth closed.

My hair’s still wet, too, but not as wet as his, and I poke at the damp patch on my pillow for a bit, lacking anything better to do.

I wish that tea would work its magic on me.

Magic . . .

He does magic. He says he doesn’t, but what else can it be? His family says it isn’t magic either, but, well, they’re likely to have a rather odd view of things. He says it’s just as much magic as what I do with numbers, but that’s not magic at all, that’s just taking something that already exists and making it work through logic and formulas.

We discuss it, sometimes, and I try to understand the way he sees it, but I never quite manage it. Maybe it’s because we hardly ever talk about that sort of thing, unless we’re out at a bar. Not that I can’t handle my drink or anything, but it’s likely to affect your ability to focus somewhat.

We never fight about it.

We have other things to fight about.

When we were first able to admit to each other that there was a sort of an understanding between us, and that our friendship wasn’t exactly like the friendship we had with other people because, well, there were things you never really wanted to do to your friends, but you couldn’t help imagine doing to each other . . . Then, we didn’t have fights. We couldn’t, really, even if something in us tried. I’d just raise my voice and he’d get this horrible, stricken look on his face, and all the anger would fizzle out of me.

Now that we’re older, though, we do fight, sometimes, because he’s stronger, I guess, and he doesn’t just fall to pieces when someone’s angry at him, or around him. It’s still not the satisfying sort of fight you can have with other guys, which is weird, because I never want to hit him or anything, not in a million years. I just get angry about something, and I yell, and he gets this horrible look on his face. It’s not sad, and it’s not really angry either. It’s just sort of tight and expressionless. He watches me as I yell and his eyes are really cold, and his lips go all thin and tight. He clenches his jaw and what happens once I run out of breath depends on him.

Sometimes he’ll just walk out of the room. Once or twice he’s walked out of the room and passed me a glass of water as he goes, wearing a blank expression on his face. The worst fights are when, instead of leaving, he just stands there, and loosens his lips and jaw enough to say something. When he says it, it’ll always be really quiet, and really careful. It’ll sound perfectly innocent, but if you know him as well as I do, and you’re around him all the time, you can hear, buried under his constant politeness, the sharp venom of sarcasm.

We really must be grown up, for him to be using sarcasm. He never did that when we were kids. He never did anything remotely cruel. Stupid, yes. He was stupid a lot. He still is. Incredibly, unintentionally, helplessly stupid, but now he can sometimes, when he’s really angry, be mean, too.

It’s weird, but there’s a part of me, deep down, that just kind of flares up when I hear that well-hidden note in his voice. That little part of me jumps up and down, screaming, and generally demands that I take him that instant, on the bed, floor, table, or whatever happens to be available. I usually get angrier to cover it up.

We don’t usually get angry about each other. We do, I guess, but it’s not because of stuff we do to each other, but stuff we do to someone else, or say to someone else. We’ve gotten in fights because of friends, or people we knew from school who aren’t really friends but we still know horribly well, or my sister, or her husband, or, with depressing frequency, my mother.

Sometimes I start them, sometimes he starts them, and sometimes they just seem to start themselves. He gets annoyed with me when I get annoyed with other people. I get annoyed with him when he doesn’t get annoyed with people who he should by all rights be annoyed with.

We live in a part of the city where most people don’t know who he is, and have no qualms about making their opinions concerning the two of us known, although they don’t’ actually say anything. That would be rude, and we, as a people, are rarely rude.

He doesn’t think I should get angry with anyone because of what they think, whereas I think he’s being stupidly passive for letting them think stuff like that about us.

He thinks I should start talking to my mother again, which just shows the stupidity he usually displays, because it’s not like I even started the not-talking, it was her, and he doesn’t even have a mother, so I think his opinion is moot on this subject. She doesn’t even like him. Or, she does like him, in a way, because to not like him would be a very bad thing.

You can’t go around not-liking your future king, especially when he’s so likeable.

You can, however, go around not-liking your future king because you don’t think he should be sleeping withy our worthless, lowborn son. Apparently. Then you aren’t really disliking him, you’re just disliking the person he’s sleeping with, who happens to be your son, who should obviously know his place in the world, and know that his place in the world should be nowhere near the crown prince’s bed, even when it’s also his bed . . .

I growl slightly and roll onto my stomach, and press my face into the damp pillow, breathing in the musty scent. Happiness shouldn’t make things so damn complicated.