Prologue The Bed #2
He smiled, the smile that used his whole face, eyes creasing, mouth wide, the unguarded one that existed only in the space between sleep and waking, before the day’s architecture reasserted itself, and which had been, for as long as Felix could remember, the thing that made the whole arrangement simultaneously necessary and unsurvivable.
‘Coffee?’
‘Yeah.’
Then came the extraction.
Felix had perfected this over two years, because you couldn’t just sit up; lifting Joel’s arm produced a tightening reflex, the sleeping body objecting with a force disproportionate to the gesture.
He’d learned this the hard way in first year, when the direct approach (sitting up, swinging legs to the floor, adult human leaves bed) had ended with Joel pulling him back so violently their skulls cracked together.
Joel had woken, said ‘What?’ like Felix was the one who’d done the assaulting, and gone back to unconsciousness within eleven seconds, and Felix had lain there with a ringing skull and an erection he’d had to talk down in Aeolic Greek, and thought: Right. New method.
The method was lateral. You rolled toward the arm, not away from it, pressing into the weight until Joel’s elbow bent and made slack, then sliding down under the forearm in one smooth movement, no pauses, because pausing gave the reflexes time to recalibrate.
He rolled, Joel’s arm bent, and Felix slid.
Joel’s hand caught his hip, fingers hooking the ridge of it, gripping with an unerring specificity that suggested his sleeping body had memorised Felix’s skeleton and could locate any part of it without visual input.
The thumb pressed into the dip beside the hip bone and Felix froze.
The grip held for three seconds. (He counted.
Counting was the only control available when a sleeping man’s hand was on your hip and your blood was performing its nightly mutiny.) Then his thumb moved: one slow drag across the skin, from the crest of the hip towards the middle.
A movement so deliberate it seemed awake, and yet impossible to attribute to a waking mind.
Three. The fingers loosened, and Felix extracted himself and stood, and the cold air hit his skin with a precision that targeted every point Joel’s body had been touching: ribs, hip, thigh, the patch of neck where his breath had landed. Each absence registered separately, and he ignored it.
Joel rolled into the warm patch Felix had left, face down, one arm reaching across the empty space, finding nothing, settling.
A sound left him, not a word but lower than a word, the protest of a body that had lost its heat source, and his back rose and fell and he was asleep again within seconds.
That was Joel’s gift, the ability to surrender consciousness without negotiation, the metabolic equivalent of hanging up a phone mid-sentence.
Felix had never been able to do this; his own consciousness clung to him like a creditor.
Felix pulled on yesterday’s jumper and went to the kitchen and filled the kettle, the motions automatic, performed by a body that had done this so many times the muscles contained the memory independent of the brain.
While the kettle boiled he straightened Joel’s trainers by the door.
They’d been kicked off at angles last night, one on its side, the laces still knotted because Joel had never learned to untie shoes before removing them and Felix had stopped mentioning it after the third week of first year.
He set them parallel, toes to the wall, the left one slightly forward, because Joel put his left foot down first and the half-second advantage mattered on Monday mornings when they were late, which was most Monday mornings.
The trainers were just trainers, the straightening just tidiness, and that he could identify Joel’s shoes by the wear pattern on the soles (heavier on the outside edge, an old rugby habit) was just observation, the thing a classicist did to old texts, applied to a flatmate.
Not devotion, just attention. The distinction mattered.
The kettle clicked off.
He made two coffees, Joel’s with milk and one sugar (always one, except on hangovers, when he added a second and called it ‘medicinal’), Felix’s black and no sugar: small pleasures denied as practice for denying the large one.
He carried both mugs to the bedroom, where Joel had sat up, duvet pooled at his waist, hair shoved back with one hand, the dark strands standing in three directions.
His chest was bare, because he’d taken his shirt off at some point in the night, a habit Felix had stopped remarking on — looking required restraint, and restraint was becoming more expensive.
Felix handed him the mug, and their fingers touched on the ceramic. Joel’s were warm; Felix’s were cold.
‘Cheers,’ Joel said. Drank. Closed his eyes in the ecstasy of a first sip. ‘Yours always tastes better than mine.’
‘It’s the same coffee, Jo.’
‘It’s not, though.’
It was, of course, identical brand, identical kettle, identical process. The difference was imaginary, or emotional in a way that neither of them had the language for, and Felix didn’t pursue it.
‘You straightened my trainers again.’
Felix looked at the mug. ‘They were blocking the door.’
‘They’re never blocking the door.’
‘Near enough.’
Joel watched him over the rim, the brown eyes steady now, awake, the sleep burned off by caffeine and the alertness Joel directed at Felix when Felix was lying about something minor, an alertness that never, mysteriously, extended to the major things.
He could detect a lie about trainers at thirty paces, yet the lie underneath the lie, the one that had been running for seven years and was visible from space, he missed entirely.
‘You’re weird,’ Joel said. Fond. The word landed like a hand on the back of the neck, brief, warm, possessive.
‘Your trainers are weird. Who ties double knots and then doesn’t untie them?’
‘Efficient people.’
‘Lazy people.’
‘Same thing.’ Joel grinned and drank more coffee. The grin was the daytime version of the smile, less unguarded and more deliberate, but it still used the whole face and it still aimed itself at Felix with the directional precision of a thing that knew exactly where it wanted to land.
They sat at the kitchen table over toast, Marmite for Felix and jam for Joel, the Sunday paper open between them, Felix the Review and Joel the Sport. Joel’s knee pressed against Felix’s under the table, the contact so habitual that neither registered it as contact.
Joel’s phone buzzed. He glanced at it, laughed, and turned the screen toward Felix, a message from Meg: Tell Felix his mum called mine asking for a recipe. Our families are merging. This is your fault.
‘Your fault,’ Joel confirmed.
‘My mum asked your mum for a recipe. That’s not a merger. That’s a recipe.’
‘It’s the thin end of the wedge. Next it’ll be joint Christmases.’
Felix said nothing. The image of a joint Christmas, Anne and Denise in the same kitchen, Meg drinking too much sherry, Joel in a paper crown, arrived fully formed, lodged itself behind his sternum and refused to leave.
He drank his coffee, and the coffee was bitter and black and necessary and did nothing to dissolve the image.
Outside, the street was quiet, a pigeon arguing with something on the roof, the sky the colour of old tea.
Seven hundred and thirty-one days, twenty years of proximity, seven years of knowing, and the locked room was cracking, the cracks widening, the thing behind the door pressing against it with a patience that had outlasted every defence Felix had built, and one morning, not this one but soon, soon, the hinges would fail.
Not today.
Today was toast and coffee and Joel’s knee against his and the quiet devastation of being loved in exactly the wrong way by exactly the right person.
Get Both Sides of the Bed on