Chapter Nineteen Everybody’s Happy Nowadays
Chapter Nineteen: Everybody’s Happy Nowadays
Michael woke Julian with a kiss to the sharp angle of his bare shoulder blade. He looked good in Michael’s bed. Asleep on his stomach, face buried in the pillows, the hair he usually took pains to maintain now devolved into a veritable rat’s nest.
He didn’t wake at first, merely made a muffled noise of protest from deep in his pillow burrow.
Michael kissed him again, this time on the tiny mole that stood out starkly on his pale shoulder like an ink spot.
An eye made an appearance between the mess of hair and the pillowcase.
It squinted up at him, bleached by the white morning light, making it look grey and colourless.
“Morning,” Michael said, rubbing circles over the smooth planes of Julian’s back.
“Morning,” came the slightly less muffled reply as Julian freed his smiling mouth enough to speak. He revealed an adorable crease in his cheek made by the pillow.
Michael leaned forwards to kiss him but Julian quickly reburied his face.
“I’ve got morning breath, haven’t I?” he complained from within the pillow’s recesses.
“I don’t mind.”
“I do!” His voice went up an octave in outrage.
“It’s embarrassing, innit? Especially when we only just started seeing each other.
” He looked up so Michael could see his earnest expression -- one that was hard to take seriously with pillow marks crisscrossing it like a tube map.
“Nine out ten relationships end because of morning breath. Ask anybody. It’s the leading cause of divorce in Britain. ”
“Would you like if I gave you an unopened toothbrush with which to brush your teeth?” Michael supplied, trying hard to mask the amusement in his voice.
“Well, why didn’t you start with that?”
They brushed their respective teeth side by side in front of the bathroom mirror.
Julian kept wrinkling his nose at his reflection.
Whatever eyeliner he’d applied the night before had disappeared through a combination of rubbing and sweat, and with the barest hint of a shadow appearing on his jaw and upper lip he looked rather more masculine than Michael had seen him in some time.
Julian clearly didn’t approve of this. Or of the wild state of his hair.
Michael was fascinated by these little hangups of his.
He thought Julian looked just as handsome with a freshly scrubbed face and a bit of stubble as he did kitted out on stage with eyeshadow and lip gloss.
They were two facets of the same person whom he’d grown to desire with a feverish passion from afar, then with an ever-mounting intensity as he came to spend more time with him.
But Julian clearly didn’t see it that way.
It seemed to Michael that the persona he crafted was one he wanted others to see of him at all times, and not just a conceit for special occasions or stage presence.
He wanted to be someone else. He wanted to be this mien he was fabricating for himself.
If he held onto that persona even behind closed doors, Michael would have been inclined to allow him that concession.
But he’d seen him when he was alone, at his most vulnerable and raw, and that facade fell away as readily as makeup washed off the face.
It was the closest people in Julian’s life whom he allowed to see him in such a state.
His sister. And… Michael’s mouth soured even as he thought it… Rahul.
Michael spat out his toothpaste and rinsed his mouth with water from the tap. He met Julian’s eye in the mirror.
“You’re stunning,” he told him in a tone that brooked no room for argument.
Even so, Julian snorted and tore his gaze away to spit and rinse. Michael frowned at his own reflection. Julian hadn’t believed him. But he’d told him the truth.
“Mind if I use your shower?” Julian asked cheerfully as he stood back up. “Reckon I smell as bad as I look.”
“You do neither.” Michael quickly recovered his usual slick flattery and pulled Julian close, dipping down to kiss him thoroughly now that he was allowed. He put that earlier hiccup out of his mind. He had time yet to work on Julian’s self-esteem.
When they parted, Michael said, “But if you’re going in, I’ll join you.”
Julian grinned wickedly up at him.
The shower was not strictly about getting clean. It was mostly, in fact, about giving each other soapy hand jobs. Soap didn’t make the best lubricant, per se. It even stung a bit over a prolonged period of time. But it did in a pinch, and was better than water.
When they were as clean as they were going to get, Michael shut off the water and set about drying Julian as if he were a stray he’d just brought in off the street.
Snatching the towel away from Michael with a laugh, Julian tied it around his waist and swiped a palm over the steamed-up mirror.
He scrutinised his reflection in the hand-sized window he’d made.
Michael made an effort to pre-empt his needs and handed him a razor.
“Cheers,” Julian thanked, but appeared unappeased.
“D’you have anything for hair? Like a pomade or hairspray or anything?
Soon as this dries, it’s going flat. And let me tell you, you won’t fancy me with flat hair.
I look like Joey Ramone in traffic court.
I look like an oil slick with eyes. I’m like a melted Blackjack. ”
“I have pomade,” Michael quickly interjected to cut off his litany. “It’s in the cabinet with the shaving cream, and I, ah, hope this will do?” He lifted his blow dryer from its basket above the toilet. A powerful, sleek, French model that had been a vanity purchase he had yet to regret.
Julian’s eyes widened and sparkled. “Michael, you’re a diamond.”
Julian took long enough making himself presentable that Michael had time to cook breakfast. Eggs in a basket.
Made with his particular flair of pimentos and rosemary.
Not to mention bacon as an accompaniment.
As much as he enjoyed having Julian sleep over, he hoped he didn’t make a habit of it.
It would simply wreak havoc on his diet.
Somehow, Michael thought, feeding Julian his usual fare of yoghurt and granola or a lean spinach and blueberry smoothie would go down about as well as a lead balloon.
Julian emerged at last, looking very much as he had the night prior.
He’d redressed in his clothes and smelled not only of Michael’s deodorant but his aftershave as well.
It was slightly surreal. Michael had never had a romantic guest help himself to the scents Michael thought of as his own.
Then again, he had never allowed another gentleman caller, as it were, to spend the night.
“Eggies in a nest?” Julian exclaimed, delighted, as he came round to the kitchen counter. “Genius! Michael, you’re --”
“A diamond?”
“Cheeky,” Julian scolded happily, giving Michael a playful pinch to same-said cheek.
Michael watched Julian slide onto the stool and begin shovelling food into his mouth, almost without a pause for breath.
He looked so out of place in Michael’s kitchen.
He was a black and purple wound upon the pastel creams, pinks, and greys of Michael’s flat.
He was a motorcycle in a country village.
A blackbird in a robin’s nest. What right did Michael have to bring him here?
Why separate him from his own kind? Why try to make his non-Euclidean shape conform to the square peg of Michael’s existence?
Was he trying to make him conform? He hadn’t thought so.
He’d thought he was merely appreciating him and his wild existence.
But by bringing him into his spaces, his home, his haunts, he was inadvertently forcing him to integrate with them.
Would Julian eventually become as pastel as these surroundings?
Would enough time around Michael and his colourless life turn him colourless as well?
“Aren’t you having any?” Julian asked around a mouthful of eggs and toast, gesturing at Michael’s untouched plate with his fork.
“Sorry, yes.” Michael smiled thinly. “I was only thinking.”
* * *
Rahul was cold. He’d been cold for the past two hours and thirty-six minutes.
He was rather damp to boot. He didn’t mind either, to be honest, nearly as much as he minded the boredom.
He was kicking himself for not having had the foresight to bring a book or, barring that, one of the many notepads and Biros he habitually used to scribble down his ideas and, yes, poems -- something he hadn’t ceased doing since his moody teen years.
Alas, he was sat on the steps in front of Julian’s flat door, cold and damp and bored.
And he had been sat there long enough that he was fully willing to continue to sit there until Julian either returned or he was consumed by the heat death of the universe.
In Rahul’s defence, he hadn’t thought Julian would still be out at half past ten in the morning.
The only things that kept Rahul rooted to the spot were sheer stubbornness and a horrific, stomach-gnawing guilt.
He’d returned to his flat late the night before quite out of sorts -- if “out of sorts” were a euphemism for crying like a snot-nosed little girl.
Kwambe had found him some time around two in the morning, lying in the foetal position on the kitchen floor, wrapped around a bottle of Scotch.
Like a saint, he’d sat him up, made him tea, and asked him what Julian had done now.
“What do you mean by that?” Rahul had asked, red-eyed and belligerent.
“Whenever you’re in a state, it’s always something to do with Julian,” Kwambe had explained calmly as he’d loaded his tea with an ungodly number of sugars. “And don’t bother playing the fool with me, Chaand. I’ve known you for too long. I’ve known you both for too long,” he added meaningfully.
Rahul had sniffed, eyes stinging as tears re-formed in them. “I’ve done it this time. I really have. I’ve made a right dog’s dinner of it. Jules’ll never forgive me now.”