Prologue The Bed
The weight arrived before the light.
Joel’s arm lay across Felix’s ribs, heavy and warm and proprietary, and his breath struck the side of Felix’s neck in a slow, damp exhale, the breathing of a man so deeply asleep his body had forgotten the concept of personal space.
One leg was slung across Felix’s thigh, pinning him in place with the casual efficiency of a turnstile.
Felix was awake, because Felix was always awake first.
October light came through the thin curtains, watery and grey, the particular half-hearted daylight of a northern English Sunday that couldn’t quite commit to the concept of morning. The radiator ticked as the timer kicked in. A car door slammed somewhere on the street.
He didn’t move. Moving would end this, and this was his one biscuit on a diet: rationed, savoured, paid for in silent self-recrimination every second it lasted.
He ran the inventory every morning. Some people ran through their schedule or their bank balance; Felix ran through Joel, a private audit conducted in the space between waking and admitting he was awake.
Item one: the arm. Twelve or thirteen stone of sleeping man somehow compressed into a single forearm and an open palm.
Joel’s hand had settled on Felix’s sternum sometime in the night, fingers curled loosely, the tips resting in the dip between his pectoral muscles, and if Felix breathed too deeply they rose and fell with his chest, a sensation so specific and so unbearable that he had learned to take shallow breaths until the hand moved.
The arm had arrived in his bed two years ago, on a Tuesday in October of first year, uninvited, accompanied by an excuse about a mattress that both of them had known was not about a mattress.
Joel had crossed the hallway, climbed into Felix’s single, and fallen asleep in forty seconds.
Felix had lain awake until four. The arm had never left, he had never asked it to, and three weeks later he’d bought the double.
Sixty pounds on Gumtree, collection from Hillsborough, two men in a van who’d called them ‘mate’ and charged forty quid for the stairs.
A solution to the engineering problem of two men in a single bed, and an investment in his own destruction, made with his own money.
The double was more comfortable. It was also a larger surface area on which to suffer.
Item two: the smell. Cologne, the sour-sweet remnant of last night’s lager, and underneath everything the warm animal baseline that was simply Joel, the scent of his skin at rest. Felix could identify it in a lightless room, in a crowd. He’d tried not to catalogue it. The record existed anyway.
Item three: the sound. Slow, faintly nasal, not quite a snore. Joel had been told he snored, by Meg, by Denise, and denied it with the conviction of a man who’d never had to listen to himself. He didn’t snore. He breathed with intent.
And he talked.
Not often, not coherently, roughly one night in four, more after drinking and almost never during exams, when his sleep ran deeper and quieter. His mouth would produce words, fragments, syllables compressed by sleep into something almost linguistic, a radio between stations.
The vocabulary was small and mostly domestic.
‘...you absolute wazzock...’ had been last night’s, uttered with such conviction that Felix had to press his mouth into the pillow to keep from laughing, because laughing meant explaining, and explaining meant admitting he’d been lying awake listening.
Once, in first year, a clear and unmistakable ‘Bollocks’ had woken them both, and Joel still denied it.
Two weeks ago there had been a new entry.
Joel had rolled toward him at quarter past four, an hour when Felix was often awake, and his mouth had found the hollow of Felix’s collarbone and murmured something into the skin there, not a word but a hum that vibrated against his chest and sank through the sternum and settled somewhere behind his lungs.
Felix had lain so still he’d stopped breathing.
His hand had risen from the mattress and hovered over Joel’s hair, less than an inch away.
He’d held it there, counted to five, and put it back down.
And sometimes, rarely, in a register softer than any of the others, there was his name.
Not the whole name, just the first syllable.
‘Fe—’ The mouth shaping it, the exhalation carrying it, the rest swallowed by whatever dream had produced it.
Seven times in two years. He kept count, though the count was not written down.
It lived in the part of his brain devoted to managing the difference between what Joel did and what Joel meant, a department that was critically understaffed and permanently backlogged.
The name-saying went under the same heading as the arm across the ribs: treasured, dangerous. If he examined it he’d find a reason it meant nothing; if he didn’t, it could keep meaning everything. The choice was cowardly, and it was also the only one that let him stay.
This morning there was silence. Joel’s mouth slightly open, his lower lip dry from breathing, the dark stubble on his jaw catching the grey light, the breath steady and aimed at the hinge of Felix’s jaw with an accuracy that was, of course, entirely accidental.
The symbiosis ran deeper than the bed. Felix had logged that too, in the same involuntary way, the domestic archaeology of twenty years, a life built without discussion or design into a single organism with two heads.
Exhibit one: the toothbrush cup. Single, ceramic, on the shelf above the sink, holding two brushes, Joel’s green, Felix’s blue.
They’d started with two cups, but the second had broken in first year and neither had replaced it, because replacing it would have meant admitting that sharing a toothbrush cup was unusual between two men who were officially just mates, and the acknowledgement economy in this flat ran on a strict system of avoidance.
Joel shifted. His knee travelled a few inches up Felix’s thigh, reconsidered, travelled back. ‘...s’not...’ he informed the pillow.
Then, the Spotify account. Shared, password wasabirulez39, and buried at the bottom of it a playlist called 3am that Felix had made one sleepless night and never shared, the songs that made him think of Joel so precisely that listening to them was indistinguishable from pain.
Joel hadn’t found it. Joel wasn’t the type to scroll to the bottom of a library.
Not to talk about the second bedroom. Joel’s room, the door kept closed, the bed made with sheets that were now functionally decorative.
On the bedside table sat a small stack of books Felix had accumulated there over months: Sappho’s fragments in translation, Cavafy’s Collected Poems, Pindar’s Victory Odes.
Joel read them, or read pages of them, or at least picked them up and opened them and let his eyes move across the words, and he’d never mentioned doing this, just as Felix had never mentioned leaving them.
A correspondence conducted entirely through poetry left on a table nobody slept next to.
The tenderness of it came closest, on bad nights, to breaking Felix entirely.
Whether all of this meant Joel hadn’t noticed, or had noticed and chose not to comment, Felix couldn’t determine, and the indeterminacy was its own small torture.
Joel stirred.
His arm tightened, his fingers flexing on Felix’s sternum, pressing briefly, the unconscious grip of a man reaching for something in his sleep.
His face turned into the side of Felix’s neck and his lips brushed the skin just below the ear, not a kiss, not intention, just the accident of a mouth in proximity to a surface, and Felix’s entire body seized.
Shallow breaths. The conjugation of erchomai run silently to the end. The blood obeyed. The blood always obeyed, eventually, though the margin of compliance was narrowing in a way Felix tried not to think about.
There had been one attempt, in second year: a lad from the university, dark-haired, kind-eyed, who’d kissed Felix in his kitchen and slipped a hand beneath the waistband of his jeans.
His body had responded, because his body worked.
It had always worked. The problem was never mechanical.
The problem was that Felix’s mind had measured the distance between that bed and the one where Joel was sleeping.
Two hundred metres. And the distance was everything.
‘You’re not here, are you?’ the lad had said, and Felix had said sorry and walked home and climbed in beside Joel, and the arm had settled across his ribs, and the arm was the reason and the ruin.
‘Felix.’ Mumbled, thick with sleep, not a question and not a greeting, just the word, spoken into his neck the way you’d say the name of a place you were confirming you’d arrived at.
‘Half ten.’
‘S’early.’
‘It’s half ten, Jo.’
‘Early.’ A long, slow exhale, his body settling deeper, heavier.
The arm readjusted, pulling Felix closer, tighter, the way you’d pull a duvet around yourself against the cold, except the duvet was a man and the cold was some unnamed absence that Joel’s sleeping body was solving without consulting his waking mind.
Felix lay still and took the warmth, the weight, the breath. One more minute, then two. The cost would come later, in the shower, in the locked room behind his eyes; the cost always came, and he’d pay it, because he’d been paying it for seven years and the debt only compounded.
Joel’s eyes opened, brown and unfocused, the pupils still dilated from sleep, the irises catching the grey light and doing nothing useful with it except being the colour they always were, which was the colour of every terrible decision Felix had ever not made.