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lead me to the edge of night
'till the dawn
the end of time
'till the fire blazing light
shines again within our eyes
“Sorry… what?” Phil replies, dumbfounded, shocked, void of all intellect.
“I said I’m in love with you. Actually, I said I think I’m in love with you, which isn’t true. I mean, I am. I know I am, I don’t know why I said I think.”
Dan’s a small window in the corner of Skype, pixels melting and molding into shapes every time Phil’s dodgy internet connection cuts out. It doesn’t match the audio, Dan’s voice consistently clear and confidently unbroken through the wires of Phil’s thin, white earbuds.
“Oh.” Phil chokes out, barely audible, so he coughs, clears his throat, tries again. “Oh.”
Dan seems nonplussed at Phil’s combined reaction of surprise and bewilderment. In fact, he’s smiling.
“We don’t have to talk about it now. It’s late, we should talk later.”
“Oh,” Phil tries again. “Okay.”
Dan’s grinning now, and shaking his head. He looks fond, cheeks dusted pink and Phil just stares and stares. He thinks he hears a faint ringing in his ears but he can’t be sure of anything right now.
“Okay,” Dan repeats, laughing. “Talk soon.” He puts the fingertips from both hands against his lips and presses them to the webcam, their departure ritual, before he waves and the screen goes blank.
Phil’s left staring at an empty chat window, blinking cursor, calm and cool air around his laptop that has the audacity to remain undisturbed.
-
Phil thinks it's going to be awkward, their first meeting. He's waiting on the train platform under the ARRIVALS sign trying his best not to sweat bullets into his clean t-shirt. He checks his mobile screen again, still no text or DM.
“Boo!” Comes a loud noise from behind Phil. It sends him careening to his left, nearly tackling an old woman struggling with two suitcases and an umbrella.
“Watch where you're going!” She shouts and Phil darts backwards again, only to accidentally ram his shoulder into Dan’s chest.
“Whoa! My fault!” Dan exclaims to Phil, then the woman, catching Phil around his arm and stopping their inevitable fall.
Phil takes stock of their stance for the first time, his back pressed up against Dan's chest, Dan's voice next to his ear and hand wrapped around his arm. Phil's face flushes instantly, warm blood rushing to his cheeks as he lightly pulls away.
“Um,” Phil starts, running a nervous hand through his hair once he's a good distance away from Dan’s half-embrace. “Um, sorry about that. Hi.”
Dan’s grin is impossibly big and dimpled, unabashedly joyful. His shoulder bag is slung across his chest, a diagonal line cutting across his heart that he grips with two fists. Phil can see him worrying the canvas strap between his fingers until he lets go, stepping forward into Phil’s space as he pulls him in for a hug.
Phil wasn't sure if he'd be like this in person, tactile and close like he said he was when they talked online. He likes to cuddle, likes to be kept close and held. Dan had told him late one night as they laid on opposite sides of the bed in opposite ends of the country, voice muted like he was admitting a buried secret meant for no one else. It made him feel safe, he said, not so alone.
He didn't know then if Dan was telling the truth or just being coy and cute, shamelessly flirting. But Dan’s here now, finally, arms wound around Phil’s shoulders and tugging even closer. Phil lets his arms link behind Dan’s back, palms pressing into the soft cotton of Dan’s overshirt. Finally.
When they pull away, they can't bear to be very far apart. “Hi,” Dan replies, and it's felt like years since Phil said it first. His eyes twinkle, rich brown irises with dancing flecks of light, up close and real and not covered in pixels. Phil doesn't remember why he was ever nervous, not when it could feel like this.
Phil smiles, Dan smiles.
It's not awkward at all.
-
Phil blinks and it's Halloween, a haphazard costume thrown together literally on the way to the train station, and then he's in London and there's Dan and then they're swallowed up by the YouTube gathering.
There's lots of people, so many people, and Phil likes socializing but sometimes enough is enough. They both confessed they'd hurried through lunch, skipped dinner to get here on time and are starving. Dan tugs on Phil’s sleeve until they find an open chip shop, two blocks from the gathering and adjacent to a small stone fountain.
They order two servings of chips and opt out of fish, Phil claiming he's not that hungry but really just not wanting his breath to smell like that oily breading they use.
At the edge of the fountain, they dig in. They stay pressed together at their sides, making small talk and eating their dinner ferociously. Forgetting to get napkins, they unceremoniously wipe their greasy hands off on their jeans, leaning back and groaning from satiation once they've finished.
“Logically I know those weren't the best chips in London,” Dan starts, “But I think my hunger has blinded me.”
“I mean, I'd say top five easily,” Phil agrees, after he's come back from throwing their paper bags in the bin. “Definitely beats anything in Manchester.”
Dan makes a sound of protest, “No, that one near our Starbucks is so good!” And Phil tries valiantly to ignore the tiny flutter in his chest at our. He doesn’t succeed.
They talk about everything, about nothing. About the weather, their shitty Halloween costumes, the general lack of organization of the gathering. About their families, about Phil’s time at uni and Dan’s rapidly-approaching expiration date on his gap year.
About YouTube and where it’s going, and Dan’s ideas for his future channel.
“Like I have these ideas, pages and pages of them in Word, Phil,” Dan starts a sentence like he’s already in the middle of a story, and it already feels natural to Phil, “And I don’t know how to organize them. How to start plotting things out to film.” Dan plucks the head of a fallen leaf off its stem, tosses both parts into the babbling water of the fountain.
“I can help you,” Phil reassures. “We can pick a good sketch and make a shot list next time you come visit me. It’ll be fun.”
“What if I get laughed off the internet? What if I make a complete idiot of myself?” Dan groans, but he’s laughing, shrugging. He lets his face drop into his hands. “Maybe my imminent downfall will make a good video in itself.”
Dan’s laughter dies down. There’s a change in his tone, Phil’s learning, when it doesn’t feel genuine anymore.
“I think…” Phil starts after a pause, “I think you could do anything you wanted and you’d be wonderful at it.”
Dan chuckles sardonically. “You have to say that because you’re my best friend.”
“No I don’t,” Phil argues quickly, serious suddenly. He wants Dan to know this. He chances a look down at him when Dan doesn’t answer, bends his head and tries to find Dan’s eyes. “Dan, I don’t.”
Dan raises his head, looking far younger than his teenage face normally allows. He breaks their connection as quick as it’d started.
“You don’t even know what you do to me, do you, Phil Lester?”
The words could almost be scolding, quiet in that Phil might've not been meant to hear it, but Dan’s voice sounds so fond. Gaze downward again and shaking his head in disbelief. Phil would be concerned if Dan’s grin wasn’t so big, dimple prominent in his rounded cheek. There’s a long pause before Phil knows what to say.
“What do you mean?” Phil asks quietly, moment charged, and Dan doesn't answer. He leans in, warm palm pressing against Phil’s cheek when he tugs, presses their lips together soundly.
Phil doesn't know what to do other than kiss back, eyes sliding closed quickly, but before he knows what's happened, it's over. Dan separates them with a loud smack!, big and theatrical like a movie sound effect kiss, like they'd been playing a scene in their own film.
“Oh,” Phil says in the space between their mouths. Dan’s hand is still at his cheek, connecting them, hasn't let him get away yet. “I see.”
“Oh,” Dan mocks playfully, and he grins, massages his thumb into the clenched bone of Phil’s jaw and pulls in again.
It's salty from their fingers and oily from their chips and completely imperfect in every way, Dan’s nose smashing into Phil’s, Phil’s leg tingling from being bent at an awkward angle beneath him. But Dan opens his mouth, turns his head and holds on with both hands and Phil swears to whatever god is listening that he'll be a better person, he'll help old ladies cross the street and donate to worthy causes and do a thousand hours of charity work if it means they can keep doing this. Because he never wants this to stop.
In the end, it doesn't take all that. And in the end, it's more perfect than he’d let himself hope for.
-
They’re filming what feels like the five-hundredth scene for the epic Christmas adventure videos, hand-drawn outline clutched in a wet mitten Phil would very much like to take off sometime soon. Snow is piled high up in smooth mounds around them, but they’ve found a flat expanse for Dan to flop down on and make a forward-facing snow angel.
“Ready?” Dan asks, pulling his hat down a little farther over his forehead. Phil nods and holds up the camera.
They do their narration and Dan drops down in the snow, arms and legs flapping in half-circles. When Phil yells cut, Dan sits up groggily and turns to look at him.
Dan’s entire front is covered in bright white frost, tiny frozen snowflakes stuck to every thread, fibre, and piece of exposed skin all across his front. He looks like someone tossed a bag of flour on him and ran away.
Phil can’t contain the burst of laughter that chokes its way out of his chest, echoes across the snowdrifts around them and only increasing in volume when Dan wipes two giant gaps in the snow where his eyes are.
“Oh God, I can’t breathe,” Phil manages to get out, doubled over.
“So you’re saying this isn’t a good look?” Dan asks, holding out his arms. He looks like a skinny Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man. Phil can’t even respond.
Phil brings him inside the empty house, spoils him with hot chocolate, a fluffy blanket, and a roaring fire (after a few failed attempts). They put on a film and picnic lounge it, spread out a sheet as their dining area and Phil surrounds them with bowls of snacks from the kitchen.
“When did you find time to make all this?” Dan teases with a faux surprised look on his face, gesturing at the exclusively processed foods in front of them in the various forms of chocolate, biscuits, fruit snacks, and popcorn.
“Ha, ha,” Phil replies flatly, rolling his eyes and purposefully kicking his foot out into Dan’s thighs as he makes himself comfortable on the floor.
Dan sidles up next to him, leans across Phil’s lap to get the bowl of peanut M&M’s. Tugs a little more on his side of their shared duvet, a green and blue checked one pulled directly off Phil’s bed.
Dan makes himself at home in every aspect, settling into the corners of Phil’s life like he’s supposed to be there. Phil keeps anticipating the impact of awkward, bracing himself for when it’ll all feel like too much and he’ll inevitably cut himself loose before it gets too challenging.
He doesn’t know when he realized he was safe, put his guard down to crack the blinds and chance a look through. The place saved for worry in Phil’s heart holds fear now, a gray mass of stormclouds that ebb and flow in his chest. It manifests itself into a physical pain when Phil gives it too much attention, laying alone at night in bed and letting his mind crank out libraries full of situations in which he fucks it up or it gets away from him and this still-unnamed thing that could be really good shatters right at his feet.
But Dan is of course oblivious to all this, so he just reaches between a couch cushion behind them to find the remote, skipping the trailers at the beginning of the The Dark Knight DVD and pulling the popcorn bowl into his lap. He crosses his legs so his knee lands on Phil’s thigh, any pretense of flirting lost on the chaste, familiar way he leans into Phil’s side, angles his body into the crook under Phil’s arm.
By halfway through the movie they’ve snaked their way backwards onto the couch, pressed parallel against each other and smorgasbord left spread out on the carpet below. Phil pulls him closer first, a night of Dan looking too rumpled and happy and comfortable and sitting there all relaxed with his pink cheeks and natural hair for fuck’s sake just too much for Phil to handle anymore. Dan makes a noise of surprise, caught off guard, but mirrors Phil’s insistent kissing as he tugs Phil up to bracket above him.
“Look so good like this above me,” Dan murmurs into their shared space, and Phil’s chest deflates, releases a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding.
Dan tucks his elbows in, holds Phil’s face with both hands like he’s something to be cherished while he kisses him. Phil slides the hand that’s not holding his weight up under Dan’s jumper, finds him blissfully naked beneath the well-worn cotton. He wants to crawl inside, inexplicably, get them closer to skin on skin, so he settles for tugging on its hem, pushing it until Dan raises his arms and the jumper comes off, landing in a puddle on their picnic blanket.
Dan’s so warm and open and inviting and Phil drops his mouth in a line against Dan’s sternum, the tick of a pulse against his lips that he presses in light, suckling kisses. Dan’s literally writhing from the intimacy, runs one hand through Phil’s hair and tugs at the shoulder of his jumper with the other. Phil understands, squares his knees and bends up to lift the both layers off him, arches his back to toss them behind him when he’s shirtless.
“I don’t know why you looked so hot doing that, but get back down here,” Dan grins mischievously and yanks at the waistband of Phil’s jeans, laughing when Phil yelps and tumbles down onto him. He doesn’t have time to let his reticent thoughts take anchor, mind too caught up in single-syllabled feelings like soft and skin and warm and yes.
It feels like hours, or maybe minutes, Phil can’t tell. At some point he stops thinking so much and follows Dan’s lead, just enjoying the moment and trying to remember little details he can come back to later. The low light of the TV playing across Dan’s face in the dark room. The tiny waves Dan makes with his hips underneath Phil, silently asking for more. The way Dan glides his palms across Phil’s back, the way he always wants to hold Phil’s face when they kiss.
“I want to go to your bedroom,” Dan whispers. “Take me back to your bed.”
They’ve made it down to just their boxers now, and as their movements still Phil slides a hand against the bare thigh wrapped around his waist. His heart beats rapidly against its constraints of skin and bone. “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” Dan breathes heavy between them, eyes wide and searching. “Yes, of course.”
Phil nods after a beat, lays a soft kiss against Dan’s cheek before he drops to the side, letting Dan slide out from under him. Dan gathers up Phil’s duvet and drapes it around his back, bare shoulders and wavy hair peeking out from the top of the fabric wrapped around him.
Phil watches him start to walk away.
“Dan, wait.”
Dan turns to look at him expectantly, backlit by the hall light shining into the dim lounge, running a distracted hand through messy curls. He looks long and lean, sharp bones and rounded corners that Phil wants to map with open palms and an open mouth and an open heart.
“Do you still -- ”
Still feel the same? Still want to be with me? Still love me? What’s the end of that sentence?
They’re quiet for a long time, Phil not daring to break the fragile silence around them.
“Don’t worry, Phil,” Dan says gently, finally, matter-of-fact. “It’ll be okay.”
It makes Phil sad, oddly, ever-present stormclouds a hurricane in his chest. He looks and looks, willing himself to try and feel this thing that could be really good, staring him in the face like the world’s easiest solution to what doesn’t have to be the world’s most difficult problem.
Dan just lets the corners of his mouth turn up minutely, stretching out an upturned hand like a lifeline.
“Come to bed,” he requests. Phil acquiesces.
Phil wants to believe him. Phil wants it to be okay.
-
Phil’s cereal is not very interesting. He pushes it around his bowl, sitting at the kitchen table, until it coagulates into a disgusting mix of soggy flakes and greying milk.
“You okay, Phil?” His mum appears around the corner in the kitchen, knotting the tie on her robe and reaching in a cabinet for the coffee tin.
“Couldn’t sleep.”
She hums, a silent prod for more information that she doesn’t elaborate on, busies herself filling the coffee pot reservoir with water. Phil’s cereal seems to have solidified into a single mass islanding in the middle of his milk in the waiting silence.
“Mum, how did you meet Dad?”
Phil’s mum turns around with her coffee cup, spoon circling as it stirs in the cream. “You know this story, sweetheart, we’ve told you and your brother a hundred times.”
“Yeah I know, but tell me again.”
Phil’s mum smiles, turns to pour another cup of coffee as she starts talking.
“I had a class at uni I was dreading… Introduction to Elementary Geometry. What geometry and elementary were doing in the same course title, I’ll never understand, because there was nothing elementary about it.”
She adds a bit of sweet cream, a bit of sugar. She puts a spoon in the mug and sets it adjacent to her son’s downtrodden cereal bowl, sitting at the table across from him.
“Your father was the teaching assistant, this quiet boy with unfortunate hair and pale skin like snow and taller than anyone I’d ever met.” She takes a small drink from her cup and cuffs Phil’s chin. “That’s where you and your brother get it, I suppose.” Phil smiles.
“I failed my first exam and my professor said I’d need to attend a study session outside of class, led by his previously-mentioned pale teaching assistant,” she smiles wryly. “I told him I was having trouble with proofs and wanted to see some example sets, he misunderstood me -- ” Phil chuckles to himself, “We had a laugh.”
Phil’s smiling now too, thinking of the guy he’d always known just as Dad as some nerdy maths tutor, young and awkward, black-rimmed glasses slipping down his nose and clumsily trying to impress the pretty girl in his class.
“How’d you know?” Phil asks.
“Know what, darling?”
Know what? Good question. Phil doesn’t know what he means. He doesn’t even know why he’d asked, really. He just shrugs.
Phil’s mum leans back in her chair, fingertips reaching just far enough to grab a small plate piled with sweets baked fresh yesterday from an elderly neighbor. She puts them on the table, taking one off the top and biting into it.
“Sometimes you just know,” she says, careful to not drip the precious apricot filling out of the sweet. “Sometimes you don’t, and it sneaks up on you.”
“Mum, you remember Dan, right?” Phil asks, careful to control the tone of his voice to be as casual as possible as he reaches for an apricot sweet, tearing it open with his hands.
“Of course.”
“I love him,” Phil says into his coffee cup, casual and straightforward, like he’s commenting on the weather. Hello, how are you, lovely sunshine we’ve been having for December, isn’t it? I love one person and one person only and his name is Daniel Howell. He supposes he should feel more shocked, or maybe elated or worried or anxious or something grander than this… unrelenting sense of calm.
Phil’s mum takes her mug in both hands, sips it gently. She hides her smile behind the porcelain but can’t do much about her cheeks pinking in delight. Not that her sweet, bewildered son even bothers to notice.
-
Now armed with this information, Phil doesn’t know what to do with it. He visits Dan in Wokingham, Dan comes up to Manchester again. He's the same as he always is, happy and full of energy and new ideas, eager for Phil’s feedback and collaboration, tactile and loving as he’s been this entire time.
But Phil’s changed and he wants to think it’s for the better, so why doesn’t it feel that way? This tightness in his chest, shortness of breath whenever he thinks about seeing Dan or touching Dan or even just being in the same general vicinity. If realizing he loved him back was supposed to be this perfect feeling like all the films and songs and books and blogs and videos said, why does Phil suddenly feel like he has to throw up?
“You have to tell him, stupid,” Martyn says over their game of Scrabble. Like Phil should just like. Know that. Know he has to tell the guy he loves that he loves him to release the pressure gauge on his anxiety-ridden heart.
“I… What?” Phil’s vision starts to get very spotty.
“Do you think Dan can read minds or something? Kid is probably going crazy hoping you’ll feel the same. Now you finally have and you won’t even tell him?” Martyn shakes his head, disappointed.
“I’m not trying to hold it back!” Phil sounds panicked. He clears his throat. “I mean, I think I want him to know. He should know. Right?”
Martyn looks astonished at the lack of common sense radiating off his otherwise-intelligent little brother. “You think?”
Phil looks down at his letter tiles. There’s no answer there, they just blur together in unhelpful combinations like LANE and TOT and RATE that have nothing to do with his situation and are rude enough to not even be high-point words. He sits back from the table and folds his arms, frowning.
“IMBECILE,” Martyn states and Phil’s eyes shoot up, eyebrows furrowed in an angry line. But Martyn’s laying tiles down on the board, tapping them with his finger to add up the points. “‘E’ on a double letter, ‘I’ on a triple word… Forty-five points, little brother.”
Phil scowls and writes it down on the notepad next to his own pathetic pile of tiles. When he looks up again, Martyn is smirking.
-
There’s this new year’s party they go to at someone’s house, Phil doesn’t even know who, the friend or boyfriend of PJ’s cousin or classmate or something. It doesn’t matter because there’s drinks and music and snacks and PJ promises Guitar Hero on a big-screen.
It’s in one of these unbearably huge houses in Chelsea, a giant standalone thing that doesn’t share walls with anyone so the noise is hardly a problem, not that anyone at the party cares. Dan has a bottle of rum in his hand within five minutes of walking through the front door, Phil wearing a sizeable amount of it across his button-up within a half hour thanks to a game of truth or dare gone wrong. There’s pictures being taken and videos being filmed and Phil tugs Dan across the house, hand in hand but away from the glazed-over eyes of strangers.
“Can you imagine living in a place like this someday?” Dan sounds awed, spins on his heel to look up at the vaulted ceilings, and to be honest, he can. Maybe not this extravagant or cavernous, something a little more homey. They'd been in London so much recently, Phil had started to think finding a future here could be more of a reality. He didn’t used to, thought maybe Manchester was it for him, not that that was a bad thing.
But things have changed.
Phil comes up behind Dan, who’s looking out of the tall picture windows onto a snow-dusted back garden. It looks like something from a Christmas postcard, or out of a movie maybe. White Christmas when they open up the barn at the end, even Home Alone when the guy everyone thought was scary was really just a granddad missing his grandkids.
“Looks like the end of Kill Bill when O-Ren gets her scalp sliced off,” Dan comments sitting on a couch beside the window. Phil snorts a laugh.
“As last looks go, you could do worse,” he quotes, sitting down next to him. Dan leans his head on Phil’s shoulder, who opens up his arm to let him in.
“This year has gone by really fast,” Dan comments. Phil makes a sound of agreement, kneads lightly with his palm into the back of Dan’s neck.
It’s a long time before they talk again. They watch the snow fall, fat flakes stark white against the black sky. The silence is comfortable, loud sounds from the party muffled and distant this far into the unoccupied side of the house.
“I don’t want to start uni in the fall.”
Phil looks down at his chest where Dan’s curled up. He sounds so heartbroken.
“Don’t worry about that now,” Phil contends. He combs fingertips through the hair at the back of Dan’s neck. “We’ve got time.”
Something about what Phil says makes Dan stiffen in his arms, turn to look up at Phil with bright eyes. Phil stops his ministrations and stares. “What? What’d I say?”
But Dan just surges up, kisses Phil hard and biting, sloppy from his smiling and holds onto Phil’s cheeks like they’re the only thing keeping him afloat. Phil chuckles at Dan’s urgency, kissing back and winding an arm around Dan’s waist when he climbs into Phil’s lap. Dan threads his fingers into Phil’s hair, lets out a blissful cry into Phil’s mouth when he slides his fingers across Dan’s lower back.
Eventually, Phil can hear the forgotten partygoers counting down from ten, a faded, distant sound at the back of his brain since most of his conscious mind is just thinking dan dan dan dan in a loop synced with the beating of his heart.
He’s never kissed anyone this much, Phil thinks in a whirlwind to himself, this long and this close and this intense, he feels like he could do this forever, could die doing this and he would have no regrets to confess to St. Peter other than it didn’t go on longer.
Things go very fast very quickly, down from ten where Phil felt like he had all the time in the world but now they’re at five, four, and he panics a little --
“Three, two,” Dan says against his lips, broken apart long enough to whisper the words between them, hot and perfect and all Phil’s, “One -- ”
“I love you,” Phil murmurs hastily between them, before Dan can finish or start or whatever he was planning on doing next, wanting it to be the first thing he says to Dan in the new year, “I love you, I’m in love with you.”
Dan doesn’t really get to respond then because Phil presses up, swallows Dan’s chuckles down when he tightens his arms around Phil’s shoulders and sits up, back tall and straight and bringing Phil to his lips, sloppy and uncoordinated from smiling and laughing. “I love you,” Dan reaffirms, “I love you so much, you complete buffoon -- ”
It’s Phil’s turn to laugh and he does, bright and clear and happier than he thinks he’s ever been. When Dan leans in again he’s already there to meet him, ready and waiting, like he will be for every new year in the future.
But they’re not thinking about that future yet, don't even know it's going to happen. Just here, just now.
They have plenty of time.