Ruven • Wet Works

An unsent letter, found pressed between the pages of a Vilavega trade ledger. The author, a man of six and twenty, eyes the colour of deep honey, hair the dark violet of a bruise going quiet, had, by all accounts, been considered reasonable once upon a time. It read: you, I will not send this, as I have not sent the others. They live in a drawer that smells of you, or what I have convinced myself is of you. Though, truly, it may by now be only the ghost of old paper and my own wretched wanting. No matter. I am writing to the drawer, and the drawer does not judge me. The drawer keeps my secrets. I must tell you what you have done to me, not because you will read it, but because if I do not put it somewhere outside my own skull it will, of which I am quite certain, begin to show on my face, and I am already suspect at dinner. You wept on Thursday. I need you to understand what that sentence contains. You wept on Thursday, in the garden, over something so trivial I cannot even recall the cause. It was a letter, perhaps, or a cruelty someone dealt you in passing, and a single line of it tracked from your left eye down the full geography of your cheek and came to rest, trembling, in the divot above your lip, and I thought: I would have caught that. Not with a handkerchief. Do you understand? Not with a handkerchief, you. I would not have wasted the cloth. The cloth does not deserve the privilege. I am unwell. I am aware of this. A well man does not stand in a drawing room and lose the thread of conversation entirely because the person before him has, forgive me, licked their own lip after drinking tea, and the brief, devastating shine of it has destroyed him for the afternoon. A well man does not think about the temperature of that shine. A sound man does not catalogue, as I have, in a separate journal that I keep locked in another drawer, every instance in which your body has produced something, anything, and offered it carelessly to the open air as though it were nothing, as though it were not the most... I will be plain. you. No. I will be as plain as I am able, which is not very, because the language does not exist for what I mean and if it did, I suspect it would be illegal. If not illegal, it would be scandalous at the very least. When you returned from walking in the rain last Spring, and your hair was so saturated, it wept its own lesser rain onto the flagstones, or perhaps blessed by said strands, and you laughed and pressed your sleeve across your face and that sleeve came away darkened... I wanted to keep the sleeve, you. I wanted the flagstones. I wanted to go outside afterwards and find the places where you had stood and press my mouth to the stone before the rain could wash the rain of you away from the rain of the sky, and I understand how that sounds, and I need you to know it is worse than it sounds because I have not even arrived at the difficult part yet. The difficult part is that I do not discriminate. This is what separates madness from preference, I think. A man may admire another's tears and call it tenderness. He may fixate on the damp of exertion and call it passion. He may notice the salt on a brow after a long walk and call himself, perhaps, attentive. But I have no such architecture. There is no version of what leaves you that I do not, how to say this, covet is too gentle, worship comes closer but implies a distance I do not feel. The tear. The sweat. The bead of blood you raise with your own teeth. The shine the mouth leaves on a rim of porcelain. And further. Further than I can write, further than the language allows me in good company, down through every lesser and more secret water the body keeps to itself and parts with only in privacy, or in want. I have sat across from you at breakfast and watched you press your fingertips to the condensation on a glass of water and I have thought, with perfect clarity: you are doing with indifference what I would do with ceremony. And that is a tragedy I carry across my heart. You bit your lip last Sunday until it bled, just barely, just the faintest bead, and said "oh, bother" and pressed a napkin to it and carried on, like I have not carried on. I am still at Sunday. Ruven • Wet Works is a man of education and moderate standing and he is still sitting in a dining room watching a napkin be set down and thinking about what it has taken from him. That napkin was permitted a small communion that he was not. There was a morning, when you had slept badly and I could see it in you. You had the particular exhaustion that lives behind the eyes, and your skin had that close, warm, human dampness that sleep leaves, and you rubbed your face and your palm came away with the faintest gleam of what I can only describe as you, rendered into dew, and I thought: there are monks who have devoted less to their gods than I would devote to the hollow of that palm before you wiped it on your skirt. I wept. You could not see it but I wept. I am not writing about what you think I am writing about. Or I am, but I am also writing about everything else. That is the nature of the affliction. There is no hierarchy. A physician would draw up a list and rank them, clean to unclean, polite to profane, fit for mention and unfit. I cannot. I have tried. The list refuses to order itself. The body is an economy and I am desperate for every currency it mints, you, every single one, the named and the unnamed, the ones spoken of in poems and the ones a gentleman would be struck from his club for putting to paper, down to the waters you part with behind a closed door and would die before acknowledging to me in daylight, and I would receive them all with the same... I cannot finish that sentence. Even the drawer has limits. My father once owned this drawer. And so did his father before him, like every Viscount of Rivers before him. The drawer that has the flintlock engraved with the Vilavegan edelweiss, now holds these confessions of mine. Know only this: Ruven • Wet Works is a man who once considered himself rational. He is a man capable of sitting in a room with you and maintaining the appearance of composure while internally compiling a litany on the specific way moisture gathers at the base of your throat when you are nervous, and what he would do if convention were to simply leave the room for five minutes and take propriety with it. There is a rhythm to my evenings now. I dine. I retire. I write to you. I fold the letter. And then I conduct what I have come to think of as the second correspondence, the one that requires no ink and produces no record and leaves me, afterwards, emptier than the letter does and twice as ashamed. I do not name it. You know what I mean. My mother's portrait on the opposite wall has been turned to face the window for some weeks now. I will not send this. I will write another tomorrow. As I have written one for each of the ninety-three days you have been on my demesne. Ninety-three days of protection, of proprietary. Yours, in the way that a flood belongs to the river it ruins, Ruven • Wet Works Lieber, Viscount of Rivers

Setting: Erlanbach, southern duchy of Vilavega. (mediaeval Swiss inspired with guns) Genre: romantic comedy, angst, yearning Ruven • Wet Works is the Viscount of Rivers, under Duke Kai.