Roy smiled politely and laced his fingers together, resting his elbows on his legs. He hadn't intended to come. She'd called him forty-five minutes before he'd been ready to leave work. She'd found some of Maes' old photographs: Did he want any of them?
Roy had told her that he had work to take home with him, that he wouldn't be able to drop in. But there had only ever been one person to whom Roy could never breathe the word "no." Now, in his stead, there was Gracia.
And so, with Elysia playing on the carpet in front of them, he sat on her couch, watching graceful fingers slide the lid off a box of memories that he was certain he would rather have left buried.
"They must be from the war," she said, carding through several photographs, "There's a lot of you."
A lot of i him/i Roy was sure that he had taken every precaution to avoid having his picture ever taken.
"I don't know why he never showed these to me. They're lovely."
Roy reached out at she slid one out of the box and handed it to him. He heard her giggle as he took in the image of himself stumbling out of a tent, wrapped in a green regulation blanket. His hair thumbed its nose at gravity, his eyes were puffy and shut, and his mouth was pulled down in a scowl. "Lovely" wasn't the word he would have used to describe the image, but he wasn't in the mood to argue with a widow.
"I'll be keeping this one," he said, smiling and slipping it into his jacket pocket.
Gracia laughed. "Of course. It would be shame if it were to fall into the wrong hands."
She flipped through a few more. "I think you'll like this one better," she said, holding it out for him, "I'll go make us some coffee."
She patted his arm as she rose and disappeared into the kitchen. Roy looked down at the photograph she had put in his hand.
He might not remember the picture being taken, but he certainly remembered the location. It was the canyon. Their canyon. They had found it when they were still young enough to be intrigued with sneaking out of the academy late at night. There was a spot at the turnaround of the oxbow river in the bottom, a spot blocked from view by low bushes and outcrops. There was a spot of flat ground where they had often fallen asleep. Where they had, one afternoon, done far more than they had ever planned to.
Roy glanced into the kitchen at Gracia heating water and back down at the photograph. This picture was taken after two male bodies had tangled together for the first time and deep voices had moaned into the emptiness of the canyon, echoing more than they should have allowed. Roy saw himself from behind, wearing only loose-fitting pants, kneeling beside the water to wash the dust out of his hair. Hughes' face was grinning and flushed in the foreground, making it clear that he had held the camera in front of himself and his new lover. The man was grinning, his face bare of the beard he would grow in later years, and rounder from lack of age. Roy's own back was tanner than it ever got anymore and narrower. He could see his ribs as his arms were plunged into the water. He couldn't see them in the picture, but he remembered the red marks Hughes had left on his neck and shoulders and chest. Marks that he had to explain away the next day at the academy, though he didn't much mind.
Roy smiled weakly at the picture and slid it into his pocket. Maybe he would keep that one as well.
Gracia came back in, carrying a pot of coffee in one hand, two mugs hooked over her thumb on the other hand.
"Find a keeper?"
Roy fought back the blush and new rush of guilt. "Yeah."
"The one by the water? You both look nice there. I didn't know you two were hikers."
He glanced up with pink on his cheeks.
"Poor Maes looks so miserable and warm. But he looks happy," she said with a smile, "He always did with you."
Roy could only look down. Here he was, sitting with his best friend's widow, looking at post-coital pictures. The canyon picture felt hot in his pocket. He and Hughes, they had just been... How could he be sitting next to Gracia?
"Oh," she said, pulling another photograph from the box, "This one is nice. You're both so young!"
Roy watched as she smiled over the picture of he and Hughes in their dress uniforms at their graduation. Hughes' face was marked with a wide grin and joyful eyes, his arm slipped around Roy's shoulders. This one, he remembered. He remembered that ceremony, how hot it had been under all those layers of clothing and pride. He remembered how anxious they had been to return to his home and get out of them. He almost winced as he remembered his father knocking on the door. They had almost been caught that time. How they had managed to be lovers for over two years at that point and not get caught, Roy would never know.
"Elysia, come look at this one," she said, patting her lap.
The small girl bounced off the floor and scurried over to the couch, climbing up onto her mother.
"See? It's daddy."
"Oooh," she said, her eyes wide. She reached out to touch the photograph, maybe trying to make it more real. "And Uncle Roy!"
Roy smiled weakly and rested a palm on her head. She looked like her dad when she grinned. Sometimes it made him twist inside, but most of the time he was very happy that his friend had gotten to have this life, even if for only a short while.
But it ached like nothing else to show her that picture. He supposed that Gracia had invited him over in part because she wanted to hear his stories, his memories behind these newfound images of her husband's past. He was deeply sorry that he couldn't share them with her. He sipped at his coffee.
She handed him more pictures over the course of the evening than he had hoped to ever be reminded of. Most he didn't remember having taken, but he could always remember the event, the emotion. Roy didn't know why he was surprised that Hughes had a box of photos of their time together. The man documented everything with meticulous care and passion. Why would his first infatuation be any different?
Each new picture showed him in various states of undress and annoyance. One in particular - a shot of him asleep on what he knew to be Hughes' pillow, a dark ring of violet blooming around his eye - almost made him laugh out loud. He didn't, though, because he wasn't sure how Gracia would take to an explanation of how her husband had known that Roy was going to call out in pleasure and he didn't want them to be caught by his parents, so he reached up to clamp a hand over his friend's mouth, but missed and struck him in the eye instead. Roy had spent his weekend mostly hiding out in Hughes' basement, waiting for the swelling to go down.
But Gracia probably didn't want to know that. Even if he had assured her that they had stopped coupling that sweaty, driven way long before Hughes had met her, he didn't want to sully her husband's name in that way.
She smiled sweetly as he slid a few more pictures into his pocket. "I like your graduation picture," she said, "I think it's the only one where you were smiling."
He smiled once for illustration. "You know Maes and his camera," he said with a smirk like it explained everything and it mostly did.
"You two really were just like brothers, weren't you?"
He looked down at the ground, before beginning to rise. "Yeah," he said, "Something like that."