Chapter 7 #3
‘My father doesn't do questions. He makes statements. Children need stability. This family doesn't make a fuss.’ He paused. ‘He said that at my grandmother's funeral. She was being lowered into the ground and he told my mother not to cry because the neighbours were watching.’
‘Christ.’
‘Yeah.’
‘My family... Kieran doesn't remember the worst of it. He was too young. I remember all of it.’
‘Is that why you took him?’
‘That's why I couldn't not take him.’ He paused. ‘I've never had a relationship last more than a few months. I can. That's the problem. Every time it starts to matter, I think: what happens when it falls apart? What happens to Kieran? What happens to the stability I'm killing myself to build?’
He stopped. Picked up his wine. Put it down untouched. His hand wasn't steady.
‘Sorry. I don't usually...’ He gestured at the air between them. The sentence died. He ran both hands through his hair and the gesture was too fast, too rough.
‘So we're both terrified.’
‘Apparently.’
‘Brilliant.’
A ghost of a smile. The real one.
‘We're a right pair,’ Rory said.
Neil almost laughed but didn't. But the corner of his lip tightened, and the movement cost him less than he'd expected.
Rory reached across the sofa and took Neil's hand, deliberately, lacing their fingers together.
Neil looked at their joined hands. Rory's paint-stained, the serpent visible at the wrist. His own clean, the knuckles that had been white from clenching now releasing, one by one.
He didn't pull away.
They sat like that for a long time. The rain eased. The light shifted to darker grey. The Schiele book lay on the floor, open to a body that refused to be anything other than what it was.
Rory got up to close the curtains.
That was it. That was the thing.
He'd stood, and Neil had watched him cross the room, and felt the sentence forming in his chest before he understood it.
Stay. Don't go yet.
He thought it, he didn't say it. But his body stood too, and his body followed, and now they were both in the narrow hallway between the living room and the studio, Rory two steps ahead, half turned with a question in his mouth that never made it out because Neil caught his wrist.
The serpent moved under Neil's thumb. The tattoo at the pulse point, the one he'd touched a hundred times in the dark and never once by daylight.
‘Neil...’
‘Don't.’
It came out softer than he meant. Ragged at the edges. Rory's expression shifted: surprise first, then recognition.
Neil stepped forward. Rory's back found the wall between the two rooms, where the plaster was cold and smelled faintly of linseed. Neil put his forehead against Rory's jaw and stayed there.
‘I don't know how to do this.’
‘I know.’
‘I'm not walking to the bedroom. I can't make it to the bedroom.’
‘All right.’
‘I'm not going back to the sofa.’
‘All right.’
Rory's hand came up to the back of Neil's neck, just there, not pulling. The steadiness of it undid Neil for three months.
He kissed Rory. The kiss was neither careful nor practised. It came from somewhere else. Rougher at first because he didn't trust the softness, then softer because Rory met him where he was and wouldn't be led away.
The hallway was narrow. Their chests pressed flat. Neil got a hand under Rory's jumper and the skin there was warm in a way that shocked him every time, like he kept forgetting men were warm in the same places he was. Rory made a sound at the back of his throat, low, not quite a word.
‘Kieran's at his mate's,’ Rory said into his mouth. A statement. A reassurance.
‘I know.’
‘Just checking you were going to remember.’
‘I'm remembering.’
Neil got his own belt open one-handed. The other was braced on the wall beside Rory's head. His fingers were unsteady but not like the first time on the sofa. Different unsteady. Different reason. He worked the button on Rory's jeans and felt the breath go shallow against his ear.
‘Neil.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Slower.’
‘No.’
Rory's laugh was a huff more than a sound. ‘God. All right.’
They opened each other. Opened. Jeans pushed down at the hip, boxers shoved aside, Rory's cock already half hard against Neil's wrist, then harder when Neil took him in hand.
Neil spit into his palm, ungraceful, necessary, and folded them together, his cock against Rory's, Rory's foreskin dragging against the head of his own, the clumsy friction hitting him somewhere deeper than the first time had.
Rory's hand covered his, not replacing, accompanying. Both their palms around both their cocks. The serpent at Rory's wrist against the tendon of Neil's forearm. Neil pressed his forehead harder into the hollow above Rory's collarbone and breathed through his teeth.
‘Fuck,’ Rory said. Quiet. ‘Fuck, Neil.’
‘I know.’
‘You're...’
‘I know what I'm doing.’
He did. For once. He was doing it badly, rhythm uneven because his hand kept tightening when it shouldn't, because Rory's breath at his ear kept wrecking his concentration, because standing up was harder than either of them had pretended it would be, and Rory's knee knocked the skirting board and they both laughed, Rory properly, Neil a single exhale, and the laugh didn't stop anything, it just made it theirs.
Rory came first. That was the other inversion.
His whole body locked against the wall. He made a sound Neil hadn't heard before, half word, half nothing, and clamped down hard enough that Neil's knuckles ached. Slick, over both their fingers. Rory's forehead dropped to Neil's shoulder and stayed.
‘Keep going,’ Rory said, rough. ‘Don't stop.’
He didn't. Rory's hand guided him through it, Rory's breath at his ear, Rory's other arm round his back now, holding him in place as though Neil were the one who might fall.
Neil came against Rory's stomach with his teeth set in his own lower lip, not because he didn't want to make a sound but because the sound that wanted to come out was a word, and he wasn't ready for the word yet.
They stood there. Breathing.
The hall light hadn't been turned on. They were in the dim hallway of a man's flat at the end of a Saturday afternoon, half dressed, leaning into the wall and each other because the wall wasn't enough.
‘Tissues in the bathroom,’ Rory said eventually.
‘In a minute.’
‘In a minute.’
Neil didn't move. His forehead was still against Rory's jaw. He could feel the prickle of stubble and the slow return of Rory's pulse and the specific silence of a flat where nobody was listening.
‘I didn't come here for this,’ he said.
‘I know.’
‘I don't want you to think I came here for this.’
‘Neil. I know.’
A pause. The radiator clicked somewhere. The rain had stopped without him noticing.
‘The rule,’ Neil said.
‘What about it.’
‘I don't know what it is anymore.’
Rory's hand moved at the back of his neck. Thumb against the hairline. That small unthinking gesture.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Me neither.’
When Neil left, it was fully dark. He stood on the step and breathed cold air and felt lighter. The fiction was gone.
He got in his car. Drove home. Didn't turn the radio on.
It was how far the light could reach before it touched Freddie.