Admissions 1.2: Emile
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Once again, Emile realized as Cylus told the waiter their order, he'd allowed himself to be swept along by a beautiful smile with a suggestion of hunger behind it.
As Cylus turned the full force of that periwinkle-purple gaze back onto him, Emile tried to remember why he shouldn't immediately surrender to it.
I cannot help but observe a pattern in your rash decisions, Emile, Mother had written, three nights ago. He'd sent the family a selfie taken with someone he'd thought a new friend, both of them lifting handfuls of genuine Old Earth dirt and sporting fresh piercings and gendermark earrings that identified them unambiguously as young men. While I congratulate you for committing to the course you have long considered, I am displeased to inform you that we received this news prior to your message. Here she'd screenshotted a Now post from a popular tabloid, led by a selfie similar to his. But this one was taken from the other side, at a much higher angle, showing off Emile's cleavage beneath his partially unbuttoned shirt and highlighting a saucy gleam in both boys' eyes. Below, a headline read: Rowdy Reterra Reveals Dilettante Devigne Daughter As Surprisingly Sexy Son?!
His wrist comm buzzed a message notification, drawing his eyes down with dread. Valerie, again. A guilty relief: better her than anyone else except Father, who'd already sent cheerful, oblivious congratulations to his original message. But even Val's correspondence held ominous possibilities right now, given her family responsibilities.
"Everything alright?" Cylus asked, one pale eyebrow lifting with curiosity.
"How rude of me!" Emile exclaimed, silencing his comm's notifications with a quick, embarrassed gesture. "I apologize."
Cylus shook his head with a smile. "You're fine. You just look a bit like a prisoner waiting for sentencing."
"It's just my eldest sister. I... haven't written her back for a couple days, and normally we message all the time. She's the one who told me about this place, actually!" Before he'd left home, Valerie had compiled a detailed list of her favorite spots in the City. He'd never guessed her recommendations would come in handy so soon. But Callisto's Café was perfect. The decor was spacious yet intimate: open areas partitioned by curtains of translucent, patterned fabric that evoked seaweed, punctuated with softly illuminated hanging glass art in abstract, vaguely aquatic shapes. Tables and booths were numerous, ranging from capacious to cozy enough for two, like the sheltered nook he and Cylie had found near the back. He even spotted several Devigne vintages on the high shelves behind the massive bar.
"You're at the University, right?" Cylus poured them each a glass from the carafe of ice water the waiter had left when taking their order. "I imagine that's keeping you busy."
"Well... yes, but it's not just that. I... ruffled some family feathers recently." Your choice of timing, location, and company for this transition demonstrate a concerning lack of forethought, a deviation from our previous discussions on this matter, and a violation of the Devigne family rules of conduct. I have attached them for you to review prior to your matriculation, Mother's message had continued. Do not forget to update your commcards with your chosen name. True to her word, Lyonesse Devigne had linked the document she and Valerie co-managed on family protocols for online and offline behavior, highlighting the portion about publicizing major life changes. It covered several pages, including security concerns and mitigations, press release review processes, and approved media channels. She'd also included the address of a commcard printer in Europa City, not that Emile had made it there yet.
Cylus studied him with amused interest. "You seem like a proper young man. Hard to imagine you doing too much ruffling. What got you in trouble?"
"An... indiscretion. During my Reterra last week." Emile stalled with a deep drink of water, wincing as frigid cubes threatened to tumble out onto his face. He much preferred his family's practice of chilling beverages prior to serving them. "Have, ah, you ever been?"
"To Old Earth? Haven't had the pleasure. What's it like?"
A smiling server arrived with their wine, leaving Emile time to consider. His eyes lingered on the cascade of red liquid into their glasses, a sight familiar as home, as his memory ranged over the two weeks he'd spent being ferried about Old Earth with a collection of other well-off visitors from across the galaxy.
As the server retreated, leaving two generous pours and the bottle behind, Emile spoke again. "It was beautiful, what I saw of it. They flew us over all the most famous preserves, mountains and forests and grasslands and deserts... like nothing I've ever seen. But they don't take you down into them, which makes sense given the regulations, but I felt so... removed." They'd flown over some of the old ruined cities, too: drowned, or burned, or starved, in the long, bleak era when Terra's population had dropped from billions to its remaining few, heavily regulated millions. The others on the tour had regarded the ruins with the same mild excitement they'd shown for any of the natural wonders, which had left Emile feeling quietly uncomfortable. He sipped the wine to distract himself from the complicated knot of feelings in his chest; it tasted good, mellow and warm with an undercurrent of spice. "But the ocean!" His heart soared and twisted at the memory. "We spent three days on a boat around these remote islands, which was amazing. Have you ever heard of snorkeling?"
Cylus hadn't. Before Emile realized it, he'd finished his glass, waxing rhapsodic about the experience. He'd been one of few on the trip who knew how to swim, and never more grateful for it than when stroking through rock arches and exploring strange stony landscapes below the waves.
But then he paused, sorrow surging through him. "It's so sad, though," he said, voice sinking to a whisper. "It used to all be alive, you know? You can see the echoes of it; shells and skeletons and dead reefs. I've seen vids of how it used to be, before the last mass marine extinction and the resulting... conservation efforts. Now, at least where we were, it was so... empty." Even some of the fallen cities had looked more alive, green with plants reclaiming spaces humans had been forced to abandon.
Silence fell between them for a moment, Cylus studying him over a half-empty glass. "Anyway," Emile continued, a wave of self-consciousness rushing him forward, "We ended up in New Singapore, which is where Brenn and I..." He hadn't meant to mention Brenn. But the experience felt tangled inside him, and he ached to talk about it to someone who wasn't a member of his family. For all he knew, Cylie and everyone else at the University had seen the post already, like the leader of the boys he'd fallen in with after convocation had. Maybe all his prevarication was for nothing. "We... connected, and then got gendermarks together. Then a picture of us got posted on Now, and went... a little viral. And that's how my family found out."
"Ahh," Cylie nodded, refilling Emile's glass without evidence of recognition. "Are they strict about that kind of thing?"
"Not about gendermarks or anything weird like that. My eldest sister got one younger than me. And my third-sib..." Emile recalled Dion's reply to Lyonesse's stern message, perfectly calculated to draw their mother's ire. Dion had taken a series of pictures at a club, surrounded by scantily clad celebrants with left ears pierced but empty. All their gendermark earrings hung from the ornate tunnel plug stretching Dion's left lobe: an assortment of triangles, diamonds, and circles overlapping in various orientations. Dion's note had read: Congrats, little brother! I wanted to follow your example but couldn't decide which gender this time. Think I should hold a public poll??? "Well, they change marks often. It's that my family is..." Once again, he teetered on the brink of dropping his surname; once again, he swallowed it. "...kind of private."
Obfuscation always felt awkward in his mouth. He hadn't thought twice before sharing his family name with the other members of his Reterra tour group. But he'd discovered how the very presence of that name drew conversations into inexorable orbit around the world Emile had spent his whole life deciding, with great reluctance, to leave. And then Brenn, who'd seemed more interested in him than his name, had... Well. Mother seemed sure Brenn had sold the image to the outlet that published it, but maybe someone had harvested it from a more private gallery. After all, Emile hadn't told him to keep it secret or anything.
"Does that mean I shouldn't ask anything more about them? I confess I'm terribly curious now, but I wouldn't want to get you in more trouble."
Cylus' teasing tone made Emile want to keep talking, despite everything. "Well, I'm the youngest of seven..."
Another member of the waitstaff appeared as if sent to spare Emile from his own incipient folly, carrying a plate of the flaky pastries that were the café's specialty. "What about you, though?" Emile asked as he cut one of them open, salivating at the scent from within. The first bite, chased with a sip of wine, sent his eyes rolling back in his head for a moment before he collected himself. A spring-harvest white from home would have been Emile's choice to accompany fish, but the red Cylus had chosen earlier matched better than Emile had expected with the vivid seasonings, creamy sauce, and finely chopped celery and lotus root rounding out the fish pastries. He swallowed, cheeks warming to notice Cylie watching him, and remembered to finish his question. "What's your family like?"
Cylus had a twin sister, it turned out; they were traveling performers, which sounded terribly romantic to Emile. He'd always wanted to see the Masked Parade in person, and Cylus said that he and Cynthia had even traveled with them for a time. Before he could ask more about that, though, Cylus shared that they were visiting to decide if they wanted to go to the University too. When Emile volunteered that he was only just starting there himself, Cylus had leaned forward with obvious interest, veering their conversation into the minutiae of the application and admissions process.
By the time Cylus seemed satisfied with that topic, they'd finished the bottle of wine and half a dozen of the buttery, spicy fish rolls. Emile had grown up sipping at his parents' table and had body mass to handle his drink, but by now even he was starting to feel altered.
Though he had enough self awareness left to attribute some of that feeling to how Cylus' eyes kept lingering on his.
"So, Emile," Cylus asked as he refilled Emile's glass from a freshly arrived bottle, "What made you decide to go to Europa University?"
Emile couldn't help thinking back to convocation that afternoon, and the dean's opening address. Yours are the minds that will guide the future of this system, and perhaps this galaxy. And we at Windfall's Europa University will be with you every step of the way.
Emile hadn't come to Europa to guide the future of the galaxy. Right now he was struggling to guide his own eyes, which kept wandering along the curve of pale hair at the edge of Cylus' jaw. "Well... my sister Valerie... she went here. Did really well. She's amazing. She helped convince my parents it might... I don't know, awaken something in me? Not like that," he groaned when Cylus snickered. "My mother literally just..." He'd almost said sent me of our family rules of conduct, the sort of comment almost as bad as dropping his family name. "... Reminded me to behave, after the whole... gendermark incident."
"What kind of misbehavior is she worried about? That kind of 'incident' doesn't seem like it'd come up too often, except maybe for someone like your third-sib." Cylus' tone was light, but his gaze held a sharp edge of interest.
That edge sent pleasant shivers through him; words spilled before he thought better of them. "They... don't love either of my longer term sweethearts." Xiomara, too threatening; Marc, from the wrong class. "And on top of that, our family... entertains a lot of guests, and I was supposed to help out. But I kept... Entangling with the guests. Sometimes more than one... on the same night. At the same time."
"Sounds like a perk more than a problem, if you ask me." The warm lack of surprise in Cylus' smile filled Emile's body with champagne bubbles, as did his lack of dismay at Emile's mention of other lovers.
"It wasn't always sex, even!" Emile continued, buoyed by that lightness. He really ought to ask if Cylus was making an advance. "I like... talking with people." Despite what his array of sexual encounters might suggest, Emile had often been told that he was flirting when he hadn't intended to, and equally often his own attempts at flirtation passed unnoticed. He was worse still at recognizing when people were flirting with him. It all ran together in his mind, a blurry continuum of interaction that seemed to have clear demarcations for everyone else. "But Mother's always telling me to think more about others' judgments. How they might harm me, or the family. She's been in PR for a long time, since before any of us were born. I guess it's hard for her not to think about it. But I'm not good at living that way. I just want to..."
The world seemed to contract around the two of them, a bubble of warm stillness.
"I just want to connect," Emile said softly, meeting Cylie's eyes for an instant before averting his gaze into the depths of his wineglass. "With people, and with the world."
Memories swept through him. Home: the tannic taste of first-harvest grapes, seeds slick against his tongue; the warmth of an apple tree trunk against his back as he tinkered with a damaged drone harvester; the scent of crushed green as his father culled unwelcome evidence of their planet's lingering wildness. Xiomara's firm touches; Marc's gentle, enveloping embrace. And more recently, the weightlessness of water; the dance of sunlight on stone; the feeling of earth between his fingers and the sting in his earlobe and the weight of Brenn's arm slung around his shoulders.
His hand fell away from his wine glass, palm upward on the table between them. "So I... I'd really like to know whatever you'd like to share about yourself," Emile finished, self consciousness creeping in again. "Because I also like to talk about myself, apparently. Far too much."
The touch of Cylus' fingers on his hand brought his eyes back up with a jolt. Something in Cylus' expression seemed... open, in a way it hadn't before. "Alright, then. Do you want to hear about the time my sister and I performed on the promenade of Vega Station?"
Emile, savoring the warmth of Cylie's hand against his, wanted nothing more.
The conversation flowed from there, melting into an easy exchange of stories and reflections. All of Emile's were from home: enough interesting people came to Devigne's Paradise that, without naming names, he managed to at least keep up with Cylie's array of far-flung adventures: from an asteroid colony in a distant system, to the crowded streets of Titan, to a harrowing visit to a volcanic planet on the verge of reclamation. As Emile listened, he remembered how Cylus' hand had closed on his shoulder, earlier; the way those fingers had curled against his waist while he was doing tricks with his knives. How fast those transparent blades had spun, how close, while Cylus wove words into the most beautiful shapes...
Across the table, Cylus' mellifluous voice paused.
Emile jolted, realizing he'd practically fallen into a trance; lost in the rhythm of words to the point he'd stopped absorbing their content. "Oh my goodness, I'm so sorry," he gushed, searching for Cylus' expression in the dim cafe light. He needed to clean his glasses; pulling his hand back and retrieving a cloth from his breast pocket, he did so frantically. "I, I drifted away, there! You have such a wonderful voice." No, that was too forward for having just utterly lost the thread of conversation. "I, uh, please, would you be so kind as to repeat the last bit of your story?"
Fumbling spectacles back onto his face, he blinked to find Cylus laughing softly, something new in his eyes.
Something warm, and wicked.
"You're sweet." Cylus drained scarlet dregs from his wineglass without releasing Emile's gaze. "Being flustered looks good on you."
Without thinking, Emile picked up the wine bottle, angling it above Cylus' glass in unspoken offer. Cylus' smile widened, head inclining approval. Emile's next words spilled from his lips as inexorably as the pouring wine. "You're beautiful. Anything would look good on you." Only the truth. Cylus' dress was plain, the same flat gray trousers-and-shirt that Emile had noticed on a number of people in both the Terran and Europan spaceports. Perhaps some widely available matter-printer pattern? Regardless, those plain garments did nothing to diminish the force of his appearance: delicate features, soft-swept hair, and those slender-fingered hands, which had moved with such precise confidence. His skin looked untouched by sunlight in a way that Emile had never seen before leaving home, almost worryingly pale. But paired with his platinum hair and those striking amethyst eyes, Emile found the full effect eerily beautiful.
Cylus snickered, breaking Emile from another momentary reverie. "Really thought you were about to drop a line, there." When Emile blinked, confused, Cylus leaned forward, lowering his voice. "You know, 'anything would look great, nothing would look even better'?"
Emile flushed, shifting with sudden awareness of how wet he was. "I mean, I'm certain that's true, but I, um, didn't think of it and also I wouldn't want to be impolite..."
"Don't worry." Cylus smiled over the rim of his glass, licking a trace of red off his lips. "You've been very polite. Lucky for you..." Pressure ghosted against his calf. Emile nearly jumped from the padded booth seat. "...I'm not." The contact firmed, sliding upward: Cylus' foot, teasing the inside of Emile's knee.
Emile's breath sped.
Cylus' foot stilled, maintaining a light contact that felt like it was drawing all of Emile's blood down towards it. "Now, if I promise I won't consider it rude," Cylus swirled his glass, scarlet liquid dancing in lazy circles, "Would you like to try your line again? If you really want to be proper," Cylus' long lashes lowered, periwinkle shadowing into indigo, "You can work in a please."
"Please," Emile breathed without further thought. "Would you..." The touch against his knee intensified, pressing outward. He let it move his leg apart from its opposite, cheeks burning hot. Cylus' eyes seemed to swallow the world as that pressure shifted to Emile's inner thigh.
Emile let the first words that reached his tongue come tumbling out. "Please would you show me how those knives work?"
Cylus' touch on his leg froze.
Between heartbeats, Emile lived and died a hundred lifetimes. Why that question? Why not the line Cylus had offered him? Everything had been going so wonderfully...
This time, Cylus' laughter was no soft, seductive thing, but a burst of amusement that shocked Emile's heart into beating again. "You..." Cylus just managed to set his wine down without spilling it, bending over the table and muffling a delightfully undignified series of snorts and gasps with one hand. The touch on Emile's thigh vanished, and his whole body lamented its departure. But Cylus' overflowing mirth replaced its command of his attention.
Emile's face split into a grin so wide it hurt. In that moment, he would have said or done anything in his power, if it meant he would hear Cylus laugh like this again.
As Cylus regained control of his breath, Emile seized the wave of exhilaration and rode it through his next few words: "And also please tell me we're flirting and I'm not imagining it because I also would love to see you in anything you want, including nothing. If that's something you'd like too. P-please."
That set Cylus laughing again, which felt so good that Emile found himself able to sit comfortably with the near-agonizing fact that Cylus hadn't actually answered him yet.
"Oh," Cylus managed at last, wiping his eyes with the same red silk scarf he'd conjured earlier. "People underestimate you, don't they, Emile?"
"Sometimes," Emile admitted, suddenly shy. "You too?"
Cylus smiled and slid out of the booth in one graceful motion, standing and extending a hand towards Emile. "Well, I can't do either of those fascinating things you requested here, can I? I don't suppose you know anywhere that's good for a more... private conversation?"
It was only after he'd paid and followed Cylus out the door that he realized Cylus had deflected his last question with two others.
That counted, Emile told himself—hand exquisitely enfolded by Cylus' warm, dexterous fingers, the street air cool against his flushed face— as the best kind of answer: the kind that trusts the listener to figure it out themself.
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