Epilogue
THREE SATURDAYS LATER
The short double-bip of a horn announced Sev and Jo pulling up outside.
It hadn’t taken as much convincing as I’d expected to talk Matt into letting the outdoor table in the living room go to them.
We’d already disassembled it, ready for a new life in their garden.
Simon was hoping it’d mean they weren’t around at his place any time the sun was out, because he rather liked it just being us sometimes. And I was getting used to that too.
I scrabbled past the stacked pieces clogging the hall to let them in. And froze in the doorway.
Strapped to the roof of Sev’s car was a two-seater sofa lying on its back.
“Erm.. Sev? I don’t reckon you’re going to fit the table on there with that strapped to the top.”
“Oh no,” she said. “I must have forgotten how to use a measuring tape.” Sev whacked my upper arm. “It’s for you. Idiot.”
Simon uncrumpled himself from the back seat. “It’s Richard and Temp’s. From their third living room.”
“...What?” He wasn’t even supposed to be here yet. The three of them must have driven all the way to Heybourne and back this morning. “Why?”
Jo hugged me. “Happy housewarming!”
“But… we’ve lived here ages?”
Simon crinkled his nose, signing to me. “Lived is debatable.”
Behind me, Matt laughed. “Alright Waistcoat?” he signed, raising a hello wave, leaving Simon frowning down at his own chest.
“I’m not wearing a— Oh.” Matt had given him a sign name. Simon’s smile glowed. “Thank you.”
Matt shrugged. “Got to call you something. Come on Big Ben, let’s get this inside. Short Stuff here sent me the dimensions last week. It’ll go perfect on the other side of the new coffee table.”
“You all planned this?” I spluttered, signing and speaking at the same time.
A month ago Ben Cooper made do and kept quiet and didn’t get what he wanted.
And no one cared, because no one knew. But I’d started speaking up after everything with Simon, and the roots of my whole reality were bedding in for change.
Jo patted my cheek, brushing past me on the way inside. “We’re bringing you things because we like you. Accept them.”
Between the five of us, we got the sofa into the living room, opposite our Catford freecycle find, without anyone getting crushed.
Matt and Sev lashed all the parts of the table to the roof of the car with a bungee net and flat straps, in a systematic and highly complicated array of knotwork. Jo rolled her eyes at the pair of them.
“Matt’s helping us unload at the other end. So the table settles into its new home without any feelings of abandonment.”
“You’re not staying for lunch then?”
“Apparently not.”
Sev floored the accelerator, and the three of them roared off up the street, with everything on top shaking.
Inside, the house wasn’t aesthetically perfect like Simon’s place, but it wasn’t empty any longer. These weren’t all other people’s things. They were mine.
All the way up the stairs, what used to be a blank wall now had a multitude of pictures pinned to it in an asymmetric scattering.
One night after work, Simon had shown up with an armful of frames, and we’d spent an hour sitting on the carpet taking the best photographs out the shoebox under my bed, bringing them into the light.
Matt added snaps of him and Cathy and all three of us together. Cathy and Graham. A couple of me and Simon appeared.
Above my desk in my bedroom, I hung the rest. Me and Simon smiling at each other for days. Mam all sunkissed in the garden, glowing in the fading orange burn of twilight.
Holding my breath, I levered the flat blade of Cathy’s screwdriver under the rim of the paint pot lid. It popped free with a burped metal ding, splattering a blob of dark blue onto my hand.
“Oh wow. That’s a lot.”
The drip of colour inked into the grain of my lifeline, my love line, pearling under the friction as I rubbed it away, leaving a high-pigment smear. I puddled the almost blacked-out blue into the roller tray, and some demon of abject and total doubt skittered through me.
“You sure about this?” Fiddling his cufflinks free, Simon rolled his shirt sleeves above his elbows.
His choice if he wanted to help paint my room in a suit.
I did not fixate on the soft rise of hair all over his forearms. I didn’t have to obsess any longer.
A lot more than his forearms was on offer whenever I wanted.
“Not even a little bit.”
“Oh well.” Simon glinted, wicked with humour. “Far too late to change your mind now.”
Last week, Jo did me a sketch on a piece of paper, and I’d painstakingly scaled it up onto the bare wall behind my headboard where the sun puddled in the late afternoon.
A ying-yang of fins. Light and dark circled each other in sketchy pencil strokes.
Everything I’d been telling myself I shouldn’t have.
The next tin was vibrant orange-red.
“Why goldfish?” Simon dipped a thin brush and traced the outline on the wall with such deep concentration I had to wait for him to look up from putting the final touches to one swirling fin.
“They’re koi carp. Technically.”
“I stand corrected.”
“Me and Mam had a pond in the garden. I wanted a pet, see? So we got fish. We used to go out and feed them together, even in the rain. They’d come to the surface, lipping at it, blowing bubbles. And we’d watch for hours.”
Simon softened. “I love that.”
When he listened, it didn’t feel like telling secrets, or losing hold of what I wanted to keep.
With him, I didn’t have to avoid talking about the bad bits, but he wanted to share the good bits too.
He made my memories stronger. Every time I told him about Mam, it fed life back into who she’d been.
And none of that was going anywhere. No one in my life now would ever throw out anything this important to me.
“How’s your new interpreter working for you then?” I asked, charging up the roller.
Simon hesitated, his brush hovering away from the wall. “She’s… exceptionally competent.”
I laughed. “That on the same level as passable footage?”
The bastard flicked paint at me. “No comment.”
“Oi!” I swiped at the glob soaking into my t-shirt, smearing it down his cheek instead, and he swatted me away. “You like her better than me, is that it?”
“Never.” He caught my wrist, eyes flashing with hungry heat he wasn’t even trying to disguise. How had I ever been convinced it hadn’t been there? “But, she doesn’t swear nearly as much as you. Can’t decide whether she’s sanitising everything, or you’ve just got an epically filthy mouth…”
My grin quirked. “Two things can be true.”
Simon wet his lower lip. “Mm. That reminds me. Your mattress needs christening.”
The new plastic-covered double leaned against the radiator. I’d had it delivered along with my brand new bedframe when Cathy officially signed me up with the students she didn’t have the hours to take on. New job, new bedroom. Actual boyfriend.
“Bet.”
Simon let me strip him off with paint sticky hands, layering guilty fingerprints down his ruined shirt front, kissing him breathless. We pulled the mattress onto the floor and he tugged me next to him, teeth rough on my earlobe, his rumbled voice lighting me up. “Ben, show me how gentle you are.”
Lube lived in the top drawer of my bedside table, next to the condoms and other things. I fumbled both out, snapping one on.
On the mattress, our thighs tangled, his across mine, and he smiled as I coaxed into him.
Watching the play of his features shift, I fingered deeper, and he arched his long neck on a simmering sigh, still holding eye contact.
Dipping to kiss his Adam’s apple, I stalled with three fingers pulsing wide, knuckle deep. Simon swore blearily.
“Keep looking at me.” His grip on my forearm tightened, almost desperate. I didn’t duck away again.
I worked him until sweat beaded on his forehead and his eyelids dipped every time I got it right.
“More?” I signed, one handed, tight against my chest.
“Yes.”
I fucked into him as slow as I could bear, cock pulsing harder with every smooth, slow thrust, and the satisfying slap of my balls against his body.
He gritted his teeth and squirmed, alive with pleasure.
I fisted his cock in steady strokes, matching pace with the curl of my hips, rationing my breathing to match his.
Sweat pooled between us, gluing the plastic on the bed to my skin. I didn’t care. I wasn’t stopping.
I wanted to make him feel good. Wanted him to know he was worshipped, adored. Everything with Simon worked as easily as breathing. In me. In him. I didn’t have to prove a thing, or act a role. Everything I was with him was already enough. And Simon could be my universe.
He drew his knee up, kissing me, and I groaned against his mouth, shifting with him. Then I was up, arms braced, propped for a deeper angle. My pace quickened, hips snapping, chasing the building need to finish hard inside him.
Simon nodded, eyes pupil-blown and dark, urging me on. And I went for it, working him with solid strokes as I buried into him over and over, racing him and myself like all the resistance in the world had dropped away.
When Simon’s body clamped me, fierce and fluttering as his cock pulsed, I came hard enough my vision dimmed.
In close and sticky, I rolled my hips again, and Simon pulled me into a deep kiss, unbothered by me dripping sweat. For a long moment, neither of us did anything apart from breathe.
When we rolled apart, our legs stayed tangled.
“You know, you could just keep coming over to my place if it’s wall to wall colour you’re lacking in your life.” Simon stretched. “Then we wouldn’t have to decorate.”
“Lazy git.” I murmured. The flash of his eyebrow told me he’d still caught it. “I do love your place.”
“Just my place?”
Curling in close again, my painty hands found his sides. “More than just your place.”
“Good.” He brimmed with satisfaction. “But… you need something that’s yours, right?”
Lying in the wreck of my half-decorated bedroom, I should have said being with him was everything that felt right in the world.
That when I walked into his flat, the tension in my shoulders dropped, because I loved it there, muddled in with his plants and his books and all the smiling faces in their frames.
Being with him could be all I’d ever want. But—
No more bullshit.
“It’s... all full of your things.” How to tell your boyfriend he wasn’t enough without telling your boyfriend he wasn’t enough? My nostrils flared like I was allergic to the truth. “Like – this place was full of Cathy’s, and Gran’s was full of hers, and—”
Simon stroked along my arm. “Ben, I know.”
My voice clean stopped working. Thank fuck for BSL. “You do?”
He nodded, in so close he could kiss me. So close I could beat him to it.
“You need something that’s really yours, first.” Voice steady. Terrifyingly calm. Straightforward. “So, this is home for now?”
“Yeah.” I looked away while my whole heart contracted. With Simon, it never had to be an either/or. I should have known that. “It is.”
“Well, I’m starting to like what you’ve done with the place,” he continued.
“Really?”
“What could possibly be wrong with a giant goldfish wall in a teenage-black emo cave?”
“Fuck off. It’s not teenage-black, thank you very much,” I grouched. “It’s Celestial Midnight.”
Simon scoffed. “Excellent rebranding tactic by the paint company.”
Laughing, he pressed a dry kiss to my lips and my mouth softened under his. Even if he was just trying to shut me up. Beneath us, the plastic on the mattress crinkled.
“Whenever you’re ready, Ben Cooper, we’ll find a place with a pond in the garden, and choose the colours to paint every room of the house. Together. But until then, whatever you want is perfect.”
Simon Azie really did not give the tiniest of monkeys who I slept with.
Fact.
Just as long as that person always happened to be him.