AISHE

He’s been in my room for ten minutes, and already everything has changed. It hasn’t changed for the better. It’s gone from hopeless to abysmal. Troy doesn’t want to understand—I see it in his eyes. What is it with guys and not getting stuff even when you spell it out for them?

My tears have dried. My apathy vanished. I have a purpose, and that is to see this train wreck to the station without killing any more passengers.

Oh for him it all looks great from the outside. “I like this girl. She’s cool. She’s different.” Oh hell yes, she’s different. He was there! What amount of fucked-up does he need to understand who I really am?

“Can I explain something to you, Troy?”

His gentle stare moves over my features, quietly assessing me.

I clench my thighs together.

“That’s why I came here,” he says, simply.

I lift my hands to my cheeks, cooling them.

“Why are you flustered? It’s just me,” my new obsession says.

“I can’t stop thinking about you. No, that’s not even all of it.” I sit up on the bed in my effort to explain this right. I have to be truthful, completely truthful, in order for him to finally understand. “My whole body is tuned in to your station. That’s what the love fire of my people does to someone like me. It doesn’t let up. Doesn’t give any breaks. It beats in my blood, faster than a regular heartbeat, and if I could see its color, it would probably be as dark as coagulated blood.”

Troy leans back in his chair at the side of my bed, arms folding over his chest. It makes his pecs contour against the t-shirt, and the V it forms causes his shoulders to seem even broader than usual.

“For instance, the love fire just sucked all of that up,” I say, “the way you crossed your arms, frowned—and did you even know that your lips twisted a little as if they wanted to pucker?”

“Yeah?” He touches his mouth, but his surprise isn’t as big as I expected.

“Yeah. But that’s not the worst of it. The worst part for you is that soon I’ll start scheming. I’ll be a bitch to anyone in my way, anyone you try to have a one-night stand with, kiss, anyone you’d like to see because they’re sweet, nice people.”

“You’ll go were-catty on me?” He bites his lip, pink softness giving to ivory, and I can’t take the sight of him right now.

I shut my eyes, pulling myself together. “This isn’t funny, Troy. I could be your worst nightmare. I’m wired this way, okay? The only thing I can do to escape it is to stay away from anyone I click with, and that’s what I’m trying to do for you.”

“For me.” He nods, thinking this over. “And I don’t get a say if I’m ready for a cat shifter in my life?”

“Stop glorifying this. It’s an affliction, and it has a name. It’s called love fire. People die from it in my family. You love until you burn up and die, or until the subject of your love does.” I swallow, suppressing the casualties lingering in their shadowy ancestral gallery, always at the ready for a game of peek-a-boo.

“That sounds a bit fatalistic to me.”

“Superstitious humbug, right? Oh yeah, that’s why I never talk about it.” I laugh without humor. “Well, I’ve seen it firsthand, and it was the reason why I broke free of my people. I thought, ‘What if it isn’t hereditary? What if it’s simply infectious? Maybe I can’t get it if I’m away from those who’ve had it before me?’”

“Can I hold your hand?” His question interrupts my confession.

I know exactly how I sound, like a crazy person, and yet I know for a fact that ours is a real affliction, a mountain of grief to those of us who get it. His stare holds mine, and the hope I saw in it last night is back again.

“Don’t look like that.” My voice quavers, but I let him take my hand. It makes my heart jolt before it settles in, enjoying his touch.

“How do I look?”

“Like there’s something good about this.”

His calm greens drift up from my hand until they meet my gaze. “This affliction you have. This love fire…”

“Yeah?”

“Is there nothing good about it?”

I scoff out a laugh. “Unless you see anything good in burning up and dying, I’d say no.”

“Then...” He strokes the fleshy part of my thumb. “What you call ‘love fire’ I would call ‘heartbreak.’”

My room remains the same while the night runs darker outside the window. It’s securely bolted against the outside world, but a member of that world made his way inside. He’s still here, and he is listening.

He’s making me listen too. There’s so much wrong with him being here and the two of us talking like this, and yet almost within reach hovers a dream. He makes me taste it, a teaspoonful at a time, and when I refute it like I’m allergic, Troy backs off with a small smile and offers another spoonful from a different angle.

I tell him he’s wrong, that “love fire” isn’t the same as “heartbreak.” He doesn’t believe me. I see this from the small dip between his eyes. It’s why I’m forced to explain the various states of the love fire and their willing and unwilling participants.

While the strong pads of his hand discover the contour of my elbow, he asks me about them, simple questions that make it easier for me to talk. One step at a time, a small one each moment. It is strange that it’s not as painful as I thought.

“So duxia is the state you’re afraid of. No one wants to contract the duxia?”

“Yes, it’s the lovesickness of the mind, and if the lovesick don’t get cured, they reach bruxiante. It’s the burning state of duxia, where the sick at heart gets physically ill too. Some wither and die like flowers without water, their minds first, their bodies following. Others die violently. My sister descended into bruxiante. She almost killed herself.”

There’s quiet incredulity in Troy’s gaze. He hoods it as he caresses my arm. All those months, we toured together. We talked, we laughed, shared board games, breakfasts, and shopping trips.

I don’t blame him for thinking he knew me. In the subtle curve over his shoulder, the way he cautiously leans over the arm I afford him, I read the skepticism of someone born in the west. I understand. I’ve lived here long enough. I would have loved to doubt the existence of bruxiante too.

Never in my life have I talked the way I do now. With my sister, my family, it was always implicit. Why would you lay out the details of something you were born with, the stories, the truths, the feelings, the disease rising around you when it was like fetching water from the well?

“But she made it?” In the tilt of his mouth, I see how he remembers her.

I introduced him to my baby sister and her husband when they came to a Clown Irruption concert last year. Troy saw firsthand the brand of her love-fire happy. Now, my smile opens at the thought of her too, of my beautiful, beautiful sister.

“She is a maxchia woman. As her husband is a maxchio man.”

“A macho man?”

I’m ready to correct him, but then I see his smile. “You’re teasing me.”

“Maybe. What does it mean? Maxchia, maxchio. They sound like female and male, like Silvia and Silvio.”

“Yes.” He’s making me think. With Troy patiently stroking my arm, waiting for whatever my culturally divergent brain offers up, I want to make him understand.

“Drago Fuoc.” I breathe my people’s fear out in a shudder. “Different clans have different names for it, but this is ours. It’s our Romani name for the love fire.”

A quick blink of his eyes. “Dragon. And fuego means fire in Spanish.”

“Yeah, not the same.” I send him a shy smile for the effort. I appreciate it. “In Romani, dragoste means love, and foc means fire. But we’re a little different. Dialects, you know.” I try for a shrug, but I can’t make it look sincere.

He bobs his head in that slow, long dance that makes me want to throw myself at him. He’s the rocking chair of peace right now, and I want to be in it. “And your sister and her husband have it, the… Drago Fuoc?”

He smiles when I enjoy his perfect pronunciation. “Good job. My father would have been proud of you. For a gadjo, you totally pulled that off.”

“A gadjo, huh?”

“The Romani version of a gringo,” I say without thinking, and it makes him burst out laughing.

“You’re calling me a gringo? Me?” he says, making me see what he sees.

I want to laugh too as I run my stare over dark muscle and the white of his eyes, a breathtaking contrast to his skin.

“The definitions are different. It has to do with geography, culture, and origin, instead of race and skin color.”

Gently, nimble fingers massage the muscle between my thumb and forefinger while he waits for me to continue. Troy makes it all about me, while I tend to choose friends who fill the air around them with their own words.

“They’re no less judgmental,” I puff out.

“No?”

“No. For my clan, a gadjo is someone who knows nothing of us, a baby to our culture, someone who looks different and has no trace of Romani in him.”

“Can I?” Troy’s eyes go to my bed and the soft pillows by my side. “This chair is killing me.”

I consider it only for a second before I scoot toward the middle of my queen-size and make a show of fluffing the extra set of pillows. Grateful, he sinks down, rocking his dizzyingly perfect ass a few times as he settles in.

“We’re like that too,” he murmurs as he turns his face toward me. “Most people are, I bet. What we don’t know, we don’t understand, and by huddling together, us against them, we feel more confident. For us, it’s white people.” He says it with a widening of the eyes, the way you’d exclaim, ‘Aliens!’” It makes me laugh.

“But your sister,” he returns to where we were. “Do they have a different stage of Drago Fuoc that isn’t bruxiante? Like, they’re lovesick but in a good way?”

The air conditioner blows a gust of frigid air at us. The curtains flutter above it, and I burrow my free arm under my comforter. I see what I’m doing: I might be cold, but not cold enough to remove my other arm from his touch.

“Yes,” I say. “She was bruxiante. But when the love of your life has the Drago Fuoc for you too, then he’s your medicine.”

Troy slides lower on the bed, his dreadlocks running along the side of my arm on the way down. His stare meets the ceiling as he says, “So there is a cure for the Drago Fuoc.”

“No, there isn’t. Once you have it, you have it. There’s only living with it, like HIV.”

“So your sister doesn’t have AIDS, but she’s living with the Romani love version of HIV?” He’s not laughing, but a tic of mirth triggers his miniature dimples.

“No.” I pull my hand out of the safety of my duvet and smack him playfully. “But yes. If HIV were nice and AIDS were bad and they were still related. My sister is maxchia, and my brother-in-law is maxchio, right? In English, it’d mean something like ‘always beloved.’”

“Is it like a promise that they will always be in love?” He rocks on the mattress again, making me have to force my gaze away from him. He’s the one who should cover up under this comforter. A pair of jeans and a t-shirt isn’t enough on him tonight.

“No. It’s nothing like becoming engaged or getting married. Sange Inima is the blissed-out state of the Drago Fuoc. My sister and my brother-in-law have found the Romani version of nirvana—if nirvana had to do with love between lovers, that is.”

“Another expression, now? Sange Inima?” At this, he turns on his side and leans his cheek into a hand, looking up at me.

“Yeah.” I smile; there’s nothing better than a reminder of someone you love being set in the bliss department. “If you have become a maxchia and get to live with your maxchio, you have reached the ultimate state of Drago Fuoc, and you live in Sange Inima together for the rest of your lives.”

I only feel like I’ve overdone my language class until a contented sigh expels from the beautiful man at my side. When I turn my head for a full look, he’s still contemplating the ceiling above us.

“I think I’ve got it,” he murmurs. “When your people fall in love, it’s called the love fire, or Drago Fuoc. If that love isn’t reciprocated, their hearts are broken, aka bruxiante. But if their love is reciprocated, they can live together and be happy ever after. Maxchia and maxchio are lovers, and if they reach Sange Inima together, they’re in a love relationship.”

My mouth feels slack. I stare at him, at the easy turn of his lips as he lets out the last sentence. Did he just trivialize one of the most important cornerstones of my being?