"You afraid aliens are going to try and take over the world or something, Bill?"
Billy looks up from the paper, confused, his mouth full of half-chewed sandwich. Orlando is squinting at him from across the table, searching Billy's face as if he's looking for something. Billy says nothing, only stares back, and Orlando continues, unfazed:
"I mean, it's like in that movie with Braveheart in it, you know the one, with the..the…" Orlando makes an enthusiastic spinning gesture with his finger, rotating the whole of his hand on his wrist like a top. He looks at Billy as if to say 'Help me out here' but Billy can't, just shakes his head and shrugs. "Crop circles!" and Orlando jumps, like the phrase has sprung up and bit him in the arse. "That's it, crop circles, right…and Mel Gibson, yeah? He's the…" Orlando gestures again, more frantically this time, something that looks like the international sign for 'I'm choking'. "He's...the preacher or priest or whatever, and…" Across the table, Billy's mouth begins to chew again – slowly at first, afraid that any sudden movement will make Orlando loose his train of thought. "And in the end, right," Orlando is still saying, "the aliens come down to take over the world and the only reason Mel Gibson's able to save us all is cause of his daughter." Orlando's concentrated expression brakes for a minute and he flashes a hopeful smile. "…You know?" he asks.
After a short pause, when Billy thinks it's finally safe to speak, he says, "What the fuck're you going on about?" The words are muffled as they try to find space in Billy's mouth, squeezed somewhere in between all of the chewed lettuce and bread.
Orlando's smile disappears and is replaced by a careful, pained expression, one that makes all of the muscles in his forehead and around his eyes pinch. It's the patented 'What am I speaking, Swahili?' Orlando Bloom expression and Billy knows that, despite all of the starts and stops and 'right's in his monologue, Orlando's convinced that he's making nothing but crystal clear coherent sense.
"The little girl in the movie," Orlando says slowly, mildly irritated. "Glasses of water." He leans over the table and flicks his finger against the tall glass sitting beside Billy's plate. It makes a lucid ringing noise like the toll of a tiny bell.
They both watch as ripples coast through the light refracted through the liquid onto the tabletop, and Orlando says simply: "You're just like her."
…
Billy knows that it's a strange habit. One he picked up years ago when he was much younger and was haunted by strange memories of the dead. Vivid dreams of his parents and the River Styx, and whenever Billy would wake with a sudden start and a cry in his throat, he would taste blood on the back of his tongue and remember their faces as they crossed into the darkness.
Tarnished pewter rounds covering their eyes, dirty copper coins filling his mouth.
He began keeping glasses of water near his bedside because Nan told him to do so, even though it made him feel like a little kid needing to be coddled. It was a very typical thing for parents to do, he later learned, when a child had a nightmare: smooth over their hair and kiss their damp forehead, give them a glass of water and convince them it's all they need to have their bad dreams go away.
And they did. Eventually.
Rinsed away like the metallic taste that coated Billy's throat, reminding him of the ancient rotting smell of Charon's boat as it pushed off from shore. Swallowed down but never properly digested, the dreams lingered in his stomach – heavy but not unpleasant, like a constant, pressing reminder.
And like the dreams, the glasses of water persisted and remained. They doubled and multiplied and followed Billy everywhere: from his bedside table out into the rest of the world, through university and play productions and movie sets, confounding flat mates and cast mates and strangers alike.
Whenever they'd ask (and they always did), Billy would just shrug with one shoulder and take another sip before abandoning the glass and say, "I guess old habits die hard." Even now, in Orlando's house in New Zealand, there are glasses of water scattered everywhere.
Half empty, half full, untouched and forgotten, they dot the landscape of Orlando's bedroom – his kitchen and his living room – and complicate the silhouettes of all the windowsills and table tops. Some of the water has gone murky and unclear – the liquid clouded with dust and other unidentifiable motes, little dead things that have fallen from the air and sunken to the bottom to disintegrate. Most of the glasses are still clear, however, their water still pristine, and the glasses that are oldest are mostly empty. The memory of water is retained through evaporation lines, powdery white marks that fill the inside of each glass and indicate age like the rings of a tree.
Billy always means to clean them up, but never gets around to it. His tolerance for clutter is surprisingly much higher than Orlando's, and Orlando spends every Sunday wandering about the house, collecting all of the glasses to pour their contents down the kitchen drain.
"Next time you come 'round, bring some glasses with you, right?" Orlando says half-jokingly one night as his sponge squeaks inside the mouth of an oversized glass teacup. "At this rate, I'm gonna run out, mate."
"I will," Billy whispers, and stands precariously on tiptoe to brush his lips along the ridge of Orlando's ear. The glass slips from Orlando's hands and into the sink with a fated crash, a bright splintered noise initiating their kiss as Orlando twists round to cup Billy's jaw with damp, soapy fingers.
That night, when they fuck, Orlando pins Billy's wrist down at the edge of the bed so that the back of his hand comes in contact with the bedside table. The assorted tumblers on the nightstand shiver against one another in time with Orlando's thrusts and Billy feels the weight of the past in his belly lighten ever so slightly. The glasses complain and threaten to topple; they chatter to each other in keeping with Orlando's moans and whispers.
When Billy comes, he knows they are both speaking to him, and he understands, because they are sounds only he can decipher.
…
In the morning, Orlando knocks over a small glass on top of the dresser and its day-old contents spill out over the varnished wood and onto the floor. "Bollocks," Orlando mutters, simultaneously doing a tiny dance to avoid the water and leaning over to the side table to grab a fistful of tissue paper. Unsuccessfully trying to mop up the mess, he calls out: "Bill, I think we need to talk about this water thing of yours, mate, this is getting totally ridiculous." When there's no answer, Orlando stops trying to clean up and listens.
The sound of faint talking in another room, the tap running. "Bill?" Orlando calls again and then there's soft footfall coming down the hall – the familiar padding of Billy's bare feet on the hardwood floor. When Billy appears in the bedroom door a minute later, he has his mobile in one hand and a newly-poured glass of water in the other. His face is scruffy, his hair tousled, and the hem of his flannel pajama bottoms hangs low, exposing the left rise of his hip. Before speaking Billy takes a tentative sip of water, and Orlando can see a faint trace of liquid linger on his bottom lip. Billy swipes at it with his tongue.
"I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you, Maggie was on the line," Billy then says blearily. He rubs at his eye with the rounded point of his knuckle before setting down the glass onto the nightstand. It dings as its lip hits the side of a fat, stemmed wine goblet that Bean had given Orlando as part of a set for Christmas.
Billy smiles at him sleepily, apologetically. "What were you saying?" he asks. Orlando tosses the soppy mess of Kleenex into the bin. It lands in the basket with a wet flop.
