Chapter Text
December 2024
George made it as far as the taxi rank.
This was, in retrospect, about as far as he'd ever been going to make it. He'd walked through the terminal with the composed efficiency of someone who had somewhere to be and knew how to get there, had followed the signs for the exit, had joined the queue at the rank in the grey December wet, and had given the driver his address in Shoreditch in the tone of a man who had a plan and was executing it.
He got in the cab.
The driver had a yellow hat — a proper one, wool, pulled down over his ears against the cold — and the radio was on low, and George settled into the back seat and looked out the window at the terminal receding and thought: fine. That's done. You said the thing and now you're going home and that's the end of it.
The cab moved out into the airport traffic.
Dreams came on the radio.
George looked at the ceiling of the cab.
Thunder only happens when it's raining, Stevie Nicks informed him, with the soft and inevitable quality of someone who has been waiting to say this for exactly this long.
George closed his eyes.
Here is what happened in the terminal, which he had not let himself think about while it was happening and was now, in the back of Steve's cab on the A4, thinking about whether he wanted to or not:
Alex had said safe travels.
Not — not nothing. Not cruel. Alex was constitutionally incapable of cruel, which was the whole problem, which had always been the whole problem, and safe travels was a kind thing to say to someone at an airport junction, a reasonable and appropriate thing, and George had said you too and turned and walked away with the careful efficiency of someone who had decided this was simply what was happening now.
He'd made it about twenty metres before he'd looked back.
He hadn't meant to. He'd told himself not to. He'd been walking and then he'd been looking back, which was the precise failure mode he'd been trying to avoid, and Alex had been — Alex had been standing there. Not walking. Just standing in the middle of the concourse looking at the place where George had been, and George had only had a second before Alex turned away and found the tube signs and was gone, but it had been a second long enough.
George pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes.
Okay, he thought. Okay, so that's—
He didn't finish the thought.
He sat in the back of Steve's cab with his eyes closed and the rain starting against the windows and Stevie Nicks telling him that he'd had it and then he'd lost it, something he already knew, and he let the information settle through him the way information did when you'd been refusing to look at it and then suddenly couldn't stop.
Ten years.
He had spent ten years building a story that held, that was logical, that fit the available evidence — and it had held, it had been logical, it had fit. He'd been careful. He'd been disciplined. He'd taken the thing he'd felt in that room and the silence that followed and the way Alex had looked at him afterward and he'd assembled them into something that made sense and then he'd lived inside it, and if it had cost him — if the cost of it had shown up in various ways over the years, in a series of relationships that had never quite fit, in a specific quality of absence he hadn't been able to name or fill — he had filed that under the general category of some things are just how they are and moved on.
It meant everything to me.
He sat with that.
He'd been so certain. For ten years, so certain — and the certainty had been a structure he'd inhabited, had been the walls and the floor and the roof of a particular room he'd been living in, and Alex had said five words on a plane over the Atlantic and the room had simply stopped being there.
He was aware, distantly, that he was not in a functional state. This was unusual. He was almost always in a functional state; it was one of the things he relied on himself for. He noted its absence the way you note a power cut — the sudden quiet of all the systems you'd stopped noticing were running.
The cab moved through the wet December dark.
"You alright back there?" Steve said.
George opened his eyes. Steve's yellow hat was visible above the headrest, the radio still playing, the wipers going steadily against the rain which had intensified in the way December rain in London did — not dramatically, just thoroughly, the kind of rain that meant it.
"Yes," George said. "Thank you."
A pause.
"Heathrow to Shoreditch on a Friday night," Steve said, with the philosophical air of a man who had seen things. "Takes it out of you."
"It does," George agreed.
Steve nodded, satisfied, and returned his attention to the road.
George looked out the window. The city moved past in the rain — the particular wet-lit quality of London at night, the reflections on the tarmac, the Christmas lights in the shop windows doing their best against the dark.
He thought about his flat. The good morning light, the book he'd been reading, the specific silence of a space that was his and that he'd made comfortable and that he went back to every evening and that contained, when he was being honest with himself, a quality of emptiness he'd gotten very good at not noticing.
He thought about the Albon house. The dinner table. Alex's mum putting a plate in front of him without asking because she already knew. Chloe commandeering his left side with the confidence of someone exercising a right. The specific chaos of a house full of people who loved each other without conditions and without keeping score.
He thought about Alex standing in the terminal looking at the place where George had been.
He sat with that for a long time.
Then he leaned forward.
"Actually," he said, "I need to change the address."
Steve glanced in the rearview mirror. "Yeah?"
George gave him the address. He said it without checking his phone, without hesitating, with the flat certainty of someone reciting something they have known for a long time without ever deciding to memorise it.
Steve put it in the sat nav. Didn't ask. George appreciated this about Steve.
"Bit out of the way," Steve said.
"Yes," George said.
"Weather's getting worse."
"I know."
Steve nodded again, merged onto a different road, and said nothing further, which was exactly the right response and which George found, obscurely, very moving.
Dreams had ended. Something else was playing now, something George didn't recognise, and he looked out the window and watched London go past in the rain and thought about what he was doing with the part of his brain that was still capable of thinking about it clearly, which was a diminishing part.
He was going to Alex's mother's house.
He had memorised the address in the way you memorise things you tell yourself you're not going to need — passively, over years, through the accumulation of references and the particular quality of attention you give to things that matter to you even when you're pretending they don't.
He was going to knock on the door and Alex was going to open it and George was going to — he was going to say something. He didn't know what exactly. He had, somewhere between the terminal and the A4, stopped being the kind of person who had prepared remarks, and he was now simply a person in a cab in the rain going somewhere he needed to go.
This was, he thought, almost certainly a terrible idea.
He kept going anyway.
The rain had made up its mind by the time Steve pulled up outside the house.
Absolutely decided, was the phrase that came to mind — not a downpour, not dramatic, just completely committed, the kind of rain that soaked you between the cab door and the pavement. George paid, thanked Steve, got out.
Steve drove away.
George stood on the pavement in front of the Albon house and got rained on.
It looked the same. That was the first thing — it looked almost exactly the same, the front garden with its unrealised ambitions, the door that Alex always opened with his shoulder because the lock stuck. The lights were on inside, warm and yellow behind the curtains, the particular glow of a house full of people in the evening.
George was already soaked. This had taken approximately forty-five seconds.
He stood there for a moment longer, the rain doing its thorough work, and had a brief and vivid internal experience of what he looked like from the outside — a man in a good coat, completely drenched, standing on a pavement in the dark staring at a house — and found he didn't have sufficient energy to care about it.
He walked up the path.
He knocked.
The wait was perhaps ten seconds. It felt longer. George stood in the rain and did not think about anything in particular, which was the only option available to him, his mind having apparently decided it had done enough work for one evening and was going to let events proceed without commentary.
The door opened.
Alex was in a jumper he'd clearly just put on, socks, the slightly unfocused expression of someone who had been doing something quiet and had not expected a knock. He looked at George.
His expression moved through several things.
"George," he said.
"Hi," George said.
A pause. Alex looked at him — at the soaked coat, the wet hair, the rain still coming down behind him — and then he looked past him at the street, at the weather, at the thoroughly committed December rain, and then back at George.
"You're soaking," Alex said.
"Yes."
"How long have you been standing out there?"
"I wasn't — I just arrived. The cab—" George stopped. "I changed the address."
Alex looked at him. Something was happening in his face — careful, attentive, the way he looked when he was receiving information and hadn't yet decided what to do with it.
"From Shoreditch," Alex said.
"From Shoreditch," George confirmed.
The rain came down. Alex was half in the doorway, the warm light of the hallway behind him, and George was on the step getting rained on, and neither of them moved.
"Okay," Alex said, quietly. Not come in. Just: okay. The way he always said it — not a question, not a conclusion. Just: I'm here. I'm listening.
George looked at him.
He opened his mouth.
What came out was not what he'd planned, because he hadn't planned anything, because the part of him that planned things had gone offline somewhere on the A4.
"I have some. Things to say, if you care to listen. Um. Okay. So I've been in love with you since I was fourteen years old," he said. "I worked that out recently. I thought it was sixteen, I thought it was the kiss, but it wasn't — it was fourteen, it was the time I stayed for dinner at this house and your mum put a plate in front of me without asking what I wanted and I thought—" He stopped. "That's not — I'm not explaining this right."
Alex didn't move. His hand was on the door frame. His face was doing everything at once and he was letting it, which was not like him, which meant something.
"The story I told myself," George said, "about the kiss — about what it meant, about what you — I told myself it was nothing to you. I was so certain. For ten years I was certain, and it was — it was the only way I could make it make sense, the only way I could put it somewhere and leave it there, and then you said—" He stopped again. His voice was doing something he couldn't control, which was new and not particularly welcome. "I got in a cab. I was going home. I was going to go home and just — have that. Have what you said and go home with it and that was going to be enough, I'd decided it was enough, and then I—"
He looked at the wet step. At his soaked shoes.
"I don't want to go home," he said. "I don't—" The voice again, worse this time. He pressed on. "I've spent ten years being very certain about something that was wrong, and I've spent ten years not — not letting myself, and I am so tired of — of not letting myself, Alex, I'm so — I missed you. I missed you every day and I had no right to because I was the one who left without — I just left, I didn't explain, I know I didn't explain, and you deserved—" He stopped. "I know it's been ten years. I'm not asking for anything. I just needed to say it. I needed you to know."
He ran out of words.
He looked up.
Alex was crying. Not dramatically — just quietly, the tears present, his expression completely open in the way it almost never was, all the management gone. He was still half in the doorway, the rain just reaching him now, not caring about the wet.
"George," he said. His voice came out rough. "I owe you an explanation too. I owe you—" He stopped, pressed on. "I should have told you. After the kiss — I should have said something that night and I didn't, and then my mum got arrested two weeks later and everything fell apart and I kept — I kept trying to find the words and they kept not being right and the longer I left it the more impossible it got and I just—" He exhaled. "I lost you because I ran out of words to fix it. That's the truth. Not because I didn't want to, or — or because it didn't mean anything. I was eighteen and I was drowning and you were the thing I couldn't work out how to ask for."
The rain came down.
George looked at him.
"I looked you up," Alex said, quieter now. "Over the years. Not — just to know you were okay. I told myself that was enough." A pause. "It wasn't enough."
"No," George said.
"No," Alex agreed.
A silence. Rain on the step between them, rain on George's shoulders, rain dripping from the guttering above the door.
"I have your address memorised," George said. "I've had it memorised for fifteen years. I told myself I'd never use it."
Something moved across Alex's face. "What changed?"
"You looked back," George said. "In the terminal. I saw you."
Alex went very still.
"I was already walking away," George said. "I wasn't supposed to see it. But I did."
Alex looked at him for a long moment — at the soaked coat, the wet hair, the rain still coming down — and something in his face settled into something that had no performance left in it at all.
"Um," George said. "Yeah. That's it, I guess."
He turned slightly — not really to leave, just the directionless movement of someone who has said everything and doesn't know what their body is for now — and Alex's hand closed around the front of his coat.
Not gently.
George was yanked forward off the step and into the doorway and into the kiss, which was nothing like the lamp-lit room a decade prior — not tentative, not suspended, not a question with an undecipherable answer. It was an answer. It was everything that had been sitting in the wrong configuration for sixteen years finally finding the right one, and George was soaking wet and half inside a doorway and he didn't care at all, and the rain kept coming down on both of them because Alex hadn't fully let go of the door and neither of them was thinking about the door.
They were still snogging when the kitchen door opened.
"Is that—" A familiar voice, warm and slightly distracted, the voice of someone who has been doing something in the kitchen and has heard something and is investigating. "Is that Georgie?"
Alex made a sound against his mouth that might, in other circumstances, have been a laugh.
George pulled back just far enough to see Alex's mum standing in the kitchen doorway in her dressing gown, looking at them with an expression of profound unsurprise — the expression of a woman who had been waiting for this for approximately twelve years and was not about to make a fuss about it now.
"Hi," George said. His voice came out slightly wrecked. "Sorry. I — hi."
She looked at him. At the soaked coat, the wet hair, the tears he hadn't managed to deal with. At her son standing next to him still holding the front of his coat like he wasn't planning to let go of it anytime soon.
"You're soaking," she said, which was the second time someone had said this to him in the last ten minutes and which he found, inexplicably, the funniest thing he had ever heard.
He laughed. Alex laughed. It came out slightly wrong, the way laughing after crying always did — uneven and unmanageable and entirely real.
"Come in," she said, already turning back to the kitchen. "I'll put the kettle on."
George looked at Alex.
Alex looked at George. His hand was still in his coat. His face was still doing everything at once, undone and open and entirely itself, and George thought about fourteen years old and a dinner plate put in front of him without ceremony, about a moped and a park and a lamp-lit room, about ten years of the wrong story finally running out of road.
"Okay," George said.