Category: Rare Experiences
The wind arrived before the light.
It moved across the limestone plateau in long, steady breaths, carrying salt from the Indian Ocean and the dry mineral scent of the hills. It tugged at Noah’s shirt and lifted the edge of Elias’s scarf. Above them, the dragon blood trees stood with their strange, umbrella-shaped crowns spread against the pale morning sky.
They did not look real.
Their branches rose and divided until each tree became a wide green canopy, almost architectural, as if someone had built a shelter for the weather and forgotten to add walls. Beneath them, the ground was rough with limestone. There were few young plants. The ancient trees seemed to have gathered all the available space, all the water, all the patience.
Noah stopped walking.
Elias took three more steps before noticing. He turned, his face softened by the uncertain grey of dawn.
“What is it?” he asked.
Noah looked at the trees. Then at Elias.
“Nothing.”
It was the answer he had been giving for months.
Nothing was wrong when he went quiet at dinner. Nothing was wrong when he flinched from tenderness in public. Nothing was wrong when he watched Elias laugh with someone else and felt jealousy rise in him, sharp and humiliating, before he could push it down.
Nothing was wrong when he had finally said, I think I’m bisexual, and then immediately wished he could gather the words back into his mouth.
Elias had not laughed. He had not stepped away. He had only looked at Noah with a care so open that Noah had wanted to run from it.
Being seen was more frightening than being rejected.
Rejection had edges. It could be understood. It could be survived.
But Elias’s acceptance had no boundary. It asked Noah to remain present inside it.
They had come to Socotra because Elias wanted to see the dragon blood trees. He had read about Dracaena cinnabari, a species found naturally nowhere else in the world. He had shown Noah photographs of the trees’ dense crowns and crimson resin, explaining how the canopies could collect moisture from fog and drizzle, helping life survive beneath them.
Noah had pretended to listen.
In truth, he had been studying the way Elias’s hand moved across the screen. The small crease between his eyebrows. The quiet pleasure he took in unusual things.
Elias had always loved what other people called strange.
That had been one of the reasons Noah loved him.
It had also been one of the reasons Noah feared him.
The place where nothing looked ordinary
By sunrise, the grove began to change.
The grey light lifted from the limestone. Green spread through the landscape, muted and dusty at first, then deeper beneath the trees. Their crowns caught the wind and gave it shape. Leaves shivered at the ends of the branches. Somewhere overhead, a bird called from inside the hollow of an old trunk.
Noah tilted his head.
“Did you hear that?”
Elias smiled. “You did listen.”
“I listen.”
“You worry loudly. It can be difficult to hear anything else.”
Noah gave him a look, but Elias was still smiling. The familiar warmth of it loosened something in Noah’s chest.
They walked beneath the trees, careful with their footing. The plateau was beautiful without being gentle. The stones shifted beneath their boots. The wind pressed against their backs. The trees offered shade, but not complete shelter.
Noah thought of all the places he had tried to make himself smaller.
School corridors. Family gatherings. Rooms where men spoke about women as if desire had only one direction. Relationships in which he had allowed himself to be loved only in ways that did not require explanation.
He had spent years believing that uncertainty made him untrustworthy.
If he could love Elias, then what did that mean about the feelings he had once had for women? If he had wanted a different life before meeting Elias, did that make this love less real? If he was still frightened of naming himself, did Elias have the right to ask for anything more than friendship?
The questions had become a second weather system inside him.
Elias stopped beside a tree whose bark was dark and ridged.
“Look.”
A thin mark of red showed where the bark had been damaged. It was not bright like blood, but it carried the same startling colour: deep crimson against grey-brown wood.
“Dragon’s blood,” Elias said.
Noah reached toward it, then stopped before touching.
“It looks wounded.”
“It’s resin. The tree uses it to protect itself.”
Noah studied the red line. “That sounds like something people say when they want pain to have a purpose.”
Elias’s expression changed.
The wind moved between them.
“I’m not asking you to turn your pain into something beautiful,” he said.
Noah looked away.
“I know.”
“Do you?”
The question was quiet, not accusing. That made it worse.
Noah watched the trees bend and recover. Their roots held to the thin soil. Their crowns gathered water from air that could not always be trusted to provide rain. They had survived by becoming exactly what the island required: unusual, wide-branched, patient, difficult to mistake for anything else.
“I’m afraid,” Noah said.
Elias did not interrupt.
“I’m afraid that if I tell you everything, you’ll decide I’m not what you thought I was.”
“I already know you’re not what I thought you were.”
Noah’s face tightened.
Elias reached for his hand, but stopped a few inches away, offering the choice.
“I thought you were someone who knew how to stay,” Elias continued. “Now I know you’re someone who wants to stay and is terrified of what it might cost.”
Noah looked at the offered hand.
“And if I leave?”
“Then I’ll be hurt.”
The honesty of it struck harder than reassurance would have done.
“But I won’t turn you into a villain for being afraid,” Elias said. “And I won’t pretend I don’t deserve honesty.”
Noah took his hand.
It was a small gesture. The kind of gesture no one would remember years later if they had not been there. But the moment his fingers closed around Elias’s, the plateau seemed to widen around them.
The trees remained strange. The wind remained strong. Nothing had been solved.
Still, Noah felt the first quiet movement of belonging.
What the trees knew about home
Later, they climbed to a ridge above the grove.
The sea lay beyond the hills, silver beneath the morning haze. Socotra looked both ancient and newly made, a place shaped by isolation, weather, and time. More than a third of its plant species are endemic. The dragon blood trees are among its most recognisable inhabitants, but they are also vulnerable. Climate change, stronger cyclones, drying conditions, and grazing pressure make it harder for new trees to survive beneath the old ones.
The forest can look abundant while its future is missing.
Noah thought there was something unbearably human in that.
The mature trees stood tall enough to inspire awe. They had endured for generations. But survival was not the same as security. A life could appear rooted and still be threatened by the next storm.
Elias sat beside him on the ridge.
“Are you going to tell me what you need?” he asked.
Noah watched a cloud pass over the distant water.
“I need time.”
“Okay.”
“I need you not to treat every hesitation like proof that I don’t love you.”
Elias nodded.
“And I need you to tell me when you’re jealous instead of becoming cold.”
“That seems fair.”
Noah glanced at him. “You’re agreeing too quickly.”
“I’ve been waiting for you to say something honest.”
The jealousy returned then, less like fire and more like an ache. Noah looked down at their joined hands.
“When you talk to other people,” he said, “I imagine you finding someone easier.”
“Easier than you?”
“Less frightened.”
Elias turned toward him.
“I don’t love you because you’re easy.”
Noah gave a short, uncertain laugh.
“That’s not necessarily comforting.”
“It’s the truth.”
The wind rose again. It moved over the ridge, around their shoulders, through the sparse grass. Noah leaned into Elias, not dramatically, not with the certainty of a man in a story who has finally conquered his fear.
He leaned because he was tired.
Elias rested his cheek against Noah’s hair.
For a while, they watched the dragon blood trees below them. Their crowns gathered the light. Their shadows touched the pale ground. Each one stood alone, but none stood entirely apart. The trees made a grove by existing beside one another.
Noah thought of roots.
People spoke about roots as if they were proof of permanence: family, history, certainty, a fixed place in the world. But the trees of Socotra suggested another possibility. Roots did not have to grow in familiar soil to be real. They did not have to resemble anything else. They only had to hold.
Perhaps home was not the place where fear disappeared.
Perhaps it was the place where fear could be spoken aloud and still leave two people sitting side by side.
A note from Read with Pride
For readers drawn to a gay love story with an emotional journey, complex inner lives, and the quiet intensity of being fully seen, Morning Edition offers a literary approach to MM romance. This is character-driven queer fiction for emotionally invested MM readers who want more than a simple destination: they want the weather, the uncertainty, the jealousy, the tenderness, and the difficult courage of staying.
Explore more LGBTQ+ ebooks, gay books, MM romance, queer fiction, gay novels, and heartfelt gay love stories through Read with Pride, including Dick Ferguson’s available titles at the Dick Ferguson Read with Pride store.
Three possible next Morning Edition stories
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The Lighthouse at the Edge of Skellig Michael : Two men confront old loyalties, religious shame, and the fear that love cannot survive distance on a windswept Irish island.
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The Blue Hour of the Atacama Desert : A bisexual photographer and the man who has loved him quietly for years navigate grief, jealousy, and the strange mercy of an almost empty landscape.
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Under the Ice of the Lofoten Islands : Two men return to a Norwegian fishing village where one of them once hid his identity, discovering that forgiveness is not the same as forgetting.
Images from Socotra
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