Tremble Before My Name (Call Me By Your Name)

[starfishstar]

Summary: Elio and Oliver have found their way back to each other, and everything is old and new again.

Characters: Elio/Oliver

Words: 900

Notes: This ficlet is inspired by a line from “once bitten and twice shy” by elospock, written for me this past Yuletide.

This could be read, if you choose, as following very soon after another fic of mine, “Storm Hits the City and the Lights Go Out” – or it stands equally on its own.


Read this fic on AO3, or here below:


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He trembled, the first time he came to my bed.

In the dark, in the chill of my New York apartment where the heating only ever roared or slumbered, I lifted the covers and drew Oliver down to me, pulled his long-limbed body close to mine. He was very quiet, even now—he'd been quiet all evening—but I heard his exhale against my ear as I wrapped my arms around him. And when I pressed my hands to his back, I could feel the tremor running through him.

Where was the insouciance of the golden, summertime Oliver I'd known? I was enough older now—not very much older, but just enough—to recognize truths I couldn't have comprehended at seventeen. I knew, now, that even the Oliver of those summer days hadn't always been as careless as he'd seemed. But he'd worn it well, the bold certainty that masked his uncertainty.

His hesitance now made him both foreign to me and utterly familiar: He could have been myself back then, age seventeen and so in love I thought I might die of it.

It drew up in me such an unbearable tenderness toward him. My Oliver, here again at last, new and strange. I kissed him and kissed him and kissed him: his strong brow, his fine hair, the skin behind each ear. He sighed and pressed against me like he wanted to be as close as possible and then even closer still. His hands were everywhere: hungry, yet shy, darting away again as soon as they touched. And still he trembled.

I caught one of his hands and pressed my mouth to his knuckles, tasting each of them in turn, feeling the fine hairs catch against my lips. Here was Oliver, the whole of him, the strength and grace and mystery of him. The Oliver of my greatest longings, gone from me once and now suddenly reappeared.

Outside, the snow came down in great, soft clumps. Through the window I could see it drifting in the glow of the street lights, so near it seemed I could reach out and catch some of those soft, cold flakes in my hand.

“It's winter, Oliver,” I said.

“Yes,” he agreed.

What I really wanted to say was, You're here. You came back to me. Is it time yet that I can call this a miracle?

Instead, I said, “Isn't it beautiful?”

“It is.” But even in the muted light, in that room lit by nothing more than street lights reflecting from falling snow, I could see he was looking only at me.

I pulled his face down to me and kissed him hard. I understood his hunger, because I was hungry, too. I was ravenous for the years we'd lost, for all the time we'd had to live through in order to find each other again. I was starved for his lips against mine. I needed to touch him again and again to know he was really here.

We gasped as we pulled apart, both of us desperate to kiss and yet desperate to breathe. Oliver panted against my lips. His hand grasped the back of my head, making sure neither of us could move away, not any farther apart than the small space required to get oxygen into our lungs.

My breath still coming short, I whispered to him, “we look at each other / we exchange dark words / we love each other like poppy and memory / we sleep like wine in the conches / like the sea in the moon's blood ray.”

His one hand still gripped behind my head; the other found its way to my face and I felt his fingers trace the arch of each of my eyebrows, so lightly.

“Paul Celan,” I told him, unnecessarily.

“Paul Celan,” he agreed.

He kissed me again. It was a kiss full of sun-drenched afternoons we'd spent splashing by the little stone pool in the orchard, and humid nights with the breeze blowing in on us from the balcony.

“Elio,” I whispered. And now a tremor ran all the way through him, a shaking that came right from the core of him, from the heart of hearts. I wrapped my arms around him, tight and tighter still, to catch hold of his trembling. To keep him from shaking apart and falling away from me again.

What happened, Oliver? I wondered. What has happened in these passing years that makes you tremble before my name? Who has hurt you, or shamed you, or stood by and let you hurt and shame yourself?

There would be time for all of that. For talking, for questions, for explaining ourselves. Time unspooled behind and ahead of us, and for once it wasn't my enemy.

But that didn't matter, not right now. Not with Oliver in my arms and his breath hot against my cheek. I held him, gripped him hard in the circle of my arms as his body quivered, held him fast until at last his shaking faded to the faintest trembling. Then I stroked his cheek and cupped his face and pressed my lips to his.

I felt him smile in the dark. And when he spoke his name to me, when he whispered “Oliver” into the breath-warmed air between us, his voice was sure and steady.
 

End note: The snippet of poetry quoted is from “Corona” by Paul Celan. (There are definitely callbacks here to one of my first CMBYN fics, “Be My Rest, Be My Fantasy,” in which Elio and Oliver read poetry to each other by the pool on a sun-soaked afternoon.)

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