I would love it if this became a longer novel one day. It’s one of those things on my wishlist to myself.
When Kade and Pearl were kids, after they finally met each other and became fast friends, they’d take turn going to each other’s houses after school. Now, they mostly go to Kade’s apartment. They’re in there now, the breeze ruffling through Kade’s light, gauzy curtains and making them dance. It brings strange tidings, a weird scent from far away, although neither of them notice.
Kade’s sheets are dove grey, soft and clean and tucked lovingly around his bed. He’s currently messing them up with his body. Or Pearl is messing them up. He’d pushed Kade down onto the bed, and now he’s straddling him. Kade has time to register the keen, bright look in Pearl’s eyes, new and old at the same time—considering and ancient as a snake—before Pearl is leaning down, the soft white touch of his fringe falling around Kade’s face like gentle rain.
Pearl’s lips are warm and soft. His breath tastes sweet. Pearl kisses him, and Kade doesn’t know how to respond.
“What—” he starts. “Get off of me.”
He’s always thought of Pearl like a brother. His mind is buzzing.
“It’s okay. Hey, hey, it’s okay,” Pearl says, restraining Kade’s hands in the most uncomforting manner. He’s got Kade pressed back against the bed. He’s sitting on his lap, confining the movement of Kade’s hips with his own body.
“Let me go,” Kade says, breathing hard with wide eyes.
“It’s okay,” Pearl repeats. “We’re not related. I checked.”
Pearl grins as emotions flit across Kade’s face. He scrambles upright, and it’s only by the grace of Pearl—strong, even though he’s so wiry—that Kade actually manages it.
“What do you mean, you checked?”
He wiggles on Kade’s lap, and that’s helping absolutely nothing.
“I mean I checked. I sent your DNA and my DNA to a lab, and they tested it. We are 100% not related.”
“That’s not possible,” Kade says, mind whirring even faster. He skips over the part where Pearl apparently violated his consent somehow and took a DNA sample, he’ll—deal with that later.
Kade’s concerns are founded if only because they look so much alike. Not alike in the way that people say pets and their owners, or couples, get, adopting mannerisms and dressing alike after spending year upon year with each other.
Kade and Pearl are exactly identical, down to their fingerprints and eyelashes, down to every last ghostly freckle, every tiny mole. Perfect mirror images, like through the looking glass.
Even their parents struggled to tell them apart.
“But!” Pearl says, still wearing that wide, wide grin, growing wider and more manic by the second. “It happens to be completely true. Kiss me, Kade.”
“I don’t want to kiss you,” Kade mumbles.
“That’s a lie,” Pearl says, his liquid-dark eyes flashing. “That’s a lie, and I know it’s a lie.”
He’s going to pout now. Pearl draws back, wearing a strangely vulnerable, wounded expression. It pierces straight through Kade’s heart. It couldn’t have been better done if Pearl had planned it, but he knows that he hadn’t. Pearl is a lot of things, but Kade is the schemer among them. That’s part of why it throws him so badly when Pearl has these moments.
Pearl violent, Pearl capricious, Kade can deal with those things. He has a ring of scars in the shape of Pearl’s teeth on his right forearm from the time Pearl had bitten him, and they’d never been young enough together for that to be a reasonable thing for him to have done. They’d been in middle school when Pearl bitten down hard and then sucked the blood from the wound, only crying when Kade had ripped his arm away—not when Kade hit him or yelped out in pain, only when Kade took himself away from him.
Kade can deal with those things. What he can’t deal with—then or now—is the expression on Pearl’s face, small and delicate and making him look so young and fragile. The pink pout of his lip quivers, and his eyes are slicked over and glossy. They wrinkle at the corners and underneath, fine spider-leg lines of tension; the puckering of his chin.
“Why are you lying to me?” Pearl asks, his voice cracking so slightly.
“Because,” Kade says.
“Because why?”
He doesn’t know. Pearl’s right; he was lying. He hasn’t thought it before. He’d done a very good job of pushing any hint of the thought away, all those times when he thought that Pearl was his brother, but looking at him now, he has no reason not to want it. Pearl’s lips are so pretty. They look soft and pink.
He only feels like something terrible will happen if he does, but it’s some inchoate feeling, some nameless, childish dread, and that’s hardly a reason at all.
“Come here,” Kade says, relenting. “Come back.”
Flashback to: when they were in middle school.
Kade met Pearl in the middle of eighth grade. Kade was gangly back then, in the in-between place between child and adolescent. His legs were growing fast enough that they ached constantly, a gnawing pain in the bones. Private school with terrible uniform shorts that showed off his knees, a big, navy jacket with an oversized hood pulled sullenly over his face.
He was a transfer student and mad about it. Even back then, he was too frosty to throw anything approaching a real tantrum, but the frost hadn’t fully settled in yet. At the time, there was still snowmelt below the surface. He glared in his mom’s car, making his parents worry. He glared through his first classes, standing up to introduce himself when he was made to, gritting his teeth and pretending to see through everybody.
“Hey. Psst, hey.”
This class had shared tables. Someone to his left sitting at his same table was trying to get his attention. Kade didn’t want to talk to anyone. His stomach felt like there were lit coals in it.
Somehow, the person next to him didn’t get the message. Being ignored was apparently a war crime. The pestering got louder and more insistent. Kade’s mouth twitched, and he sank lower in his seat, deeper in his hood.
“Psst. Hey. Hey!”
By then, the calling voice was practically a yell. Everyone had turned around to stare at them except a few brown-nosers who kept their eyes firmly fixed front like this was a military-grade awareness check. Much like Kade’s iciness, which had yet to fully set in at 13, his thin face had yet to develop any resiliency. People were looking, and Kade felt his face turn red as he sunk even lower into the hard plastic seat by slow, unconscious degrees.
Their English teacher, a woman with mousy brown hair, a pretty face, and big, round glasses, was apparently feeling nonconfrontational at a bunch of middle schoolers. She cleared her throat, which set a bunch of people giggling, and ‘now, class’ed them slowly, generally back into the direction of the whiteboard. It was like herding a bunch of particularly stupid sheep.
“What?” Kade finally hissed, whipping his head around to glare at the guy next to him.
The guy who looked exactly like him. Who apparently decided, of his own devices, that Kade was taking entirely too long to respond to his summons. He already had a gummy, chewed up looking eraser poised in his hand. He’d already thrown it right at the moment that Kade had turned around. It smacked Kade in the cheekbone, feeling like a bruise, before tumbling harmlessly to the floor.
His laugh was fucking weird, a little hehe.
Kade turned red, the color vivid and splotchy over his pale skin, extending all the way up to the ears hidden in his hood and making them hot.
“What’s your problem?” he snapped.
“You look like me,” the boy he’d later find out was named Pearl said, cocking his head. “Take off your hood. I want to get a better look. And don’t ignore me, okay?”
“The fuck is your problem,” Kade muttered.
Pearl snatched off his hood, and at that point, they could only become enemies or best friends.
So, yeah, Pearl was fucking weird, but also they looked exactly alike.
Except… what was gangly on him was unbearably pretty on Pearl. Like weird pretty for a teenage boy. He had these long, dark eyelashes that curled at the tip and framed his face like a doll’s eyelashes, these big dark eyes, and these lips that curled like a drawing of a cat. He looked like an angel as long as he wasn’t opening his mouth. His laugh was creepy as hell.
Kade grew into his looks, eventually. It’s possible they got more and more alike, soaking up each other’s mannerisms like some kind of parasitic amoeba.
Cut to today— everything Kade is is everything Pearl made him, in some kind of fucked up way or another.
“I want to kiss you,” Kade says, twenty years old, sprawled back against the wall sitting on the bed in his own apartment, small but airy and pleasantly furnished and most importantly of all, his.
He takes Kade’s wrists in his hands, holding tight to the bone. Pearl’s arm hair is sparse and thin, the color of the painful little stickers on California grass, those filaments that dig needle-like into the skin. He grabs Pearl’s wrists and pulls them to the side, spreading him open.
“C’mon, don’t chicken out now,” Kade says.
“Do you really want to,” Pearl asks, voice flat like a bell. “Don’t fuck with me.”
“Who’s fucking with you? I’ll beat them up.”
Pulling his wrists further apart, reeling him in. Pearl looks at him with eyes dark like abyssal pits, flat black and beady in the light. Their mouths meet in the middle. The kiss is only nice if you think that teething animals are nice—little puppies looking for milk with their sharp, fucked up little milk teeth; some kind of mean and mangy animal fighting for its fair share.
Pearl kisses like he’s trying to attack Kade or maybe like he’s trying to eat him up, devour him and keep him safe inside. Which is to say he bites hard enough to make Kade taste the scraped-lip hint of his own raw meat, too much teeth, chewing on his lips before he can remember to slide his tongue in.
Kade doesn’t give him shit, doesn’t say ‘gross, Pearl,’ doesn’t try to get him to lessen up. That would be a betrayal, wouldn’t it? If he did that, they wouldn’t be them. This was Pearl’s idea, but Kade will drag him off every cliff when he doesn’t have the nerve, just like Pearl will prod him with prodigal knives to do the same.
They kiss, and Kade digs his blunt-nailed fingers into the tendons that run down the inside of Pearl’s wrists, squeezing hard enough to part them like the Red Sea. Pearl hisses into his mouth because it hurts. But then it makes him hot because he’s sliding into Kade’s lap, bumping his front against Kade’s pelvis, hard down there and needy.
Kade doesn’t feel like it. He leaves that part of Pearl alone. He’s doing enough by kissing tonight.
They kiss long enough to be into it, breathing hard and panting into each other’s mouths. The way Kade holds Pearl is like a spring about to snap, holding and holding, the tension growing tighter and tighter. When he finally lets Pearl go, Pearl winds his arms around Kade’s neck, tackles him back against the stucco wall.
Kade stays sprawled where he lands when Pearl finally pulls back to look at him, his expression almost ghostly, partially hidden in the light that’s bleeding away as evening dawns outside the window.
“You’re mine now,” Pearl says, looking down at him. There’s something wounded animal in his eyes, something hungry and hunted and also—so delicate.
Kade is still breathing hard, his panting chest only starting to come under control, slowing to a more acceptable rhythm. He looks debauched spread out below Pearl. His soft grey hoodie is askew, revealing a sharp slice of collarbone where his too-wide shirt collar is pulled down, rucked by Pearl’s grasping hands. He looks regal and no less majestic than Pearl, no less strange. His dark, serious eyes look up at Pearl, looking like some country’s dark and somber lost little prince.
He touches the lip of his tongue to his sore lip and doesn’t say anything. He grips Pearl’s thighs.
Book Tie-In
Pearl and Kade have to do with the black court, which also appears in Fragile Tender.