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“Nothing new can be done. Every word, every sentence, has touched someone’s tongue before, and I am a desperate man in the business of plagiarism. Why?”
He surveys the room, holding the gaze of fictional people, as looking in the audience’s eyes would only serve to shatter his focus.
“You ask me this, hanging upside down from a bed. This way, your curious frown looks like a shy smile, quiet. Intimate. ‘Why?’ you ask again. ‘Why do you try when you know nothing new can be done?’”
He smiles, shaking his head as he looks to the floor.
“The answer is at once simple and unexplainable. (You, with your overflowing multitudes, would admire it.
He tilts his head slowly, considering.
“And hate it.)”
He huffs a laugh.
“Why? Well.”
He looks up through his eyelashes at the blinding lights.
“There’s a feeling, tucked under ribs and crushed between fingertips, like paper wings taking flight, or the twisting of bare toes through grass. A deep breath of cold air that aches just enough, the burn of muscles working, heart pumping, life’s most abrasive reminder of its own existence. There’s a feeling that I cannot name, or cannot name sufficiently, that lives in the space between my teeth, trapped under my tongue and longing, fighting, to escape.”
He sighs.
“The feeling is not new. Love has been around since the stars could weep for one another, move across galaxies for a quick, fleeting, consuming touch. Love has been written in constellations long before anyone thought to say the word, and I—I am the unfortunate bearer of this infinite legacy.
“And I know, with the stardust in my bones and the moons in my eyes, the borrowed atoms that make up my skin—I know that this love, beat up and recycled and crinkled in the corners— my love is the first of its kind.”
He smiles, halfway and a little sad.
“But I don’t tell any of this to you. Instead I say, ‘Because I love it. Because I have to.’ and you take it without question. It is not a lie. Not really. You don’t notice. You look back at your homework without a thought.
“The real reason stays lodged in my throat, curled around the tonsils I’ve never gotten out, comfortable. It is possible that I do not need it anymore, but I swallow around it constantly without complaint, anyway. It is my most original work; unique, untarnished, and most importantly, unspoken.”
*~*~*
“Hey, Derek,” Lilian says, and Nursey almost doesn’t react. When he realizes that he, in fact, is Derek, he looks up, blinking around wide-open eyes. Lilian just smiles kindly. “We’re all gonna go grab dinner. Do you want to come?”
Nursey fidgets, shifting his weight. He made plans earlier with himself to sit and watch some Netflix for a few hours while binge-inhaling the rest of the pie in the fridge. “Thanks,” he says, “but no thanks.”
Lilian frowns at him with her eyes but nods. “Alright. Have a nice night.”
“You too,” he says. Their group of literary friends—Joh who likes similes, Hana who enjoys violent imagery, and Tay who is delightfully good at rhyming—turns and leaves with Lilian. Nursey watches them, unmoving, for a few minutes.
He walks back to the Haus.
There are enough people out tonight that it’s likely he’ll see someone he knows. Samwell is like that. Big enough to meet someone new almost every day, but small enough that you’ll never go a walk without a wave from someone-or-other. Usually, Nursey waves back, smiles. Today, he takes out his phone and pretends to be interested in his weather app.
It’s getting colder. Fall is in full bloom—a lovely, ironic statement—and each day brings with it a chillier morning breath. Soon Dex will be warming his not-covered-by-the-gloves fingers with a huff of steam Nursey can watch, and imagine as something physical touching him, rather than an idea.
The weather app says tomorrow’s high will be 48° F, but it’s always a bit off, so it will probably be something like—
“Nursey!”
He looks up. Dex is crossing the road, holding his hand up to thank the driver who let him pass. He jogs, coming to a stop next to Nursey. Looking past him, to the other side of the road, Nursey sees a group of mostly guys and two girls who seem vaguely familiar—which many people at Samwell do—whose eyes trail Dex as he approaches Nursey.
“Hey.” Dex stops in front of Nursey. His breath is quickened only a hair and Nursey listens for the just-short catch in it. He realizes he’s staring at Dex’s mouth and looks up to his eyes. They’re bright, for some reason, something golden, reflective.
Dex blinks.
“Hi,” Nursey says. “What’s up?”
“You going back to the Haus?” Dex asks. Nursey affirms. Dex nods. “I’ll walk with you.”
“Okay.” Dex turns to go. Nursey’s eyes flicker back across the road. “What about your friends?” Part of the group has started to move, though one or two stay in their spot, chatting idly, eyes hovering around Dex and, subsequently, Nursey.
Dex doesn’t look back at the group. He waves his hand, dismissive. “They’re going to some thing in the lot behind So-quo.”
Nursey says, ‘oh’ like he’s in the know about the event. He probably got an email about the thing behind South Quad but he gets so many emails. If he’s feeling brave he tries to read them, but more often than not he just puts them in his trash bin and sighs.
Dex knows this. He explains, “Someone got a bunch of shitty beer and they’re gonna play human versions of board games or something.” The way he says it makes Nursey duck his head to hide a smile. Of course Nursey doesn’t know about it, Dex’s glib tone implies, why would he waste his time caring about something so lame?
“That sounds like exactly the kind of nerdy shit you’d like,” Nursey says to the ground, riling Dex up on purpose.
Dex rolls his eyes. “Fuck off,” he says. “It sounds cool, but I’d rather just hang with you.” Dex blinks, turning to look at Nursey. He furrows his eyebrows. “Did you have anything planned tonight?”
He debates whether or not he should be honest, but Dex always knows when he’s lying anyway. “I was gonna watch Netflix and eat pie,” Nursey says.
Dex grins. “That sounds ‘swawesome. Mind if I join?”
Something sweet and full swells in Nursey’s chest. He tastes it on the back of his tongue. “Not at all,” he says, and swallows with a smile.
*~*~*
“Do we want popcorn?” Dex yells up the stairs. Everything in the Haus is so old that sound doesn’t hesitate before walls or doors, a specter even more obtrusive than either of the girls upstairs.
“Okay!” Nursey yells back. He looks at his bed and frowns. They managed to shove a queen just barely into the alcove-where-a-closet-once-lived when they moved into this room. The bottom attachment of the bunk was rotted after being in the basement so long and putting a bed here meant that there is a clear distinction between the Dex Area and his own.
But the same can’t be said for Nursey’s bed. Wide and expansive as it is, the logistics are difficult to imagine. When he was in high school, teachers would hand out large cardboard rectangles, folded at either end, to be put up around students to block them from looking at other exams. Whenever Nursey had one, ducking his head to look at the paper felt akin to being shoved in a box, and his heart rate wouldn’t quiet until he’d handed in his paper. It made him go faster, if nothing else.
Unfortunately, the same thing can’t be performed here. Instead, the space between their stray knees and bumping elbows will be a plot point more engaging than whatever they watch, and Nursey’s ability to calm down will dwindle with every brush of a thigh.
He sighs.
“Got the popcorn,” Dex says, as he enters their room. He closes the door behind him, and though Nursey never had enough friends over to the brownstone in New York for his parents to implement an ‘open door’ policy, the act makes Nursey shiver. “What’ve we got on the queue?”
“Gilmore Girls.” There’s nothing like the incessantly clever banter of Lorelai and Rory to soothe Nursey’s literary-nerd brain.
Dex sits down on the edge of Nursey’s bed and pushes off his shoes. Nursey watches him slide up the bed until his back is against the pillows. He’s left a trail of rumpled duvet in his wake, and Nursey finds his eyes caught on the implications of a mussed bed.
“Coming?” Dex asks.
Nursey nods jerkily and shoves the idea into the back of his mind. This whole thing was probably doomed from the beginning.
Still, when Nursey settles in next to Dex and the if you’re out on the road, feeling lonely and so cold… fills up the room with memories, their knees brush through their jeans, and Nursey is grateful, as he’s been taught, for pieces.
*~*~*
The thing isn’t that Nursey doesn’t like what they have.
This he thinks, emphatically, as he holds himself perfectly still. Two and a half episodes in, Dex fell asleep and has since been leaning heavily into Nursey’s shoulder with his cheek, soft, crushed against the fabric of Nursey’s sweater. Nursey, meanwhile, has been wholly preoccupied with the thought that when Dex wakes, there will be an imprint on his cheek in the same pattern as the knitted wool of Nursey’s sweater. It’ll fade, eventually, but for a short while, Nursey will have touched him in a physical, tangible way. The thought of it is infinitely more interesting than watching another episode of witty banter.
But, see, this is good. Nursey likes this, at least more than anything less. He sits and waits for moments like this, like 2:00 A.M. drunken, whispered conversations from across the chasm of their room, or the life-time-lasting seconds of a celly, pressed close enough that Nursey can smell the sweat, feel the warmth of Dex’s adrenaline even through the pads. Nursey collects these things, the splatter of flour over freckles during an errant baking session, or the swish of socked toes on creaky floors when they’re studying quietly in the room and Dex needs to get up and stretch and a soft sliver of skin reveals itself like a rising sun and—
And Nursey likes them, the pieces. Nursey can live on the pieces.
Even if, when they’re gone, the empty places hurt like physical things, even if holding on to a piece of Dex means giving up a part of himself. Even if it killed him, with his dying breath Nursey would say nothing but Thank You.
The episode ends. A new one starts. The intro choruses, louder than the rest of the audio, and Dex stirs. Nursey watches in the darkness of the computer screen’s reflection. First Dex blinks, eyelids crinkling against the fading light of the sun through the window. He sighs, corners of lips frowning but plump middles resigned. He rises, removing his cheek from Nursey’s shoulder. Cold air rushes between them quick enough to make Nursey stifle a gasp, but Dex doesn’t appear to notice.
“Sorry,” he says, lips still not awake enough to part for the word’s passage. He raises one shoulder, then the next, a soft crack hitting Nursey’s ears. Through the t-shirt Dex is wearing, Nursey watches the muscles work, fingers aching. “I didn’t mean to pass out.”
“It’s chill, brah,” Nursey hears himself say. “You probably needed it.”
Dex rolls his eyes—likely at the chill—but smiles. “Thanks.” He looks at Nursey’s shoulder, probably seeing the new open wound that sits in its place. He reaches out and pokes the top of Nursey’s arm. Nursey inhales too quickly. “You make a good pillow.”
Dex’s cheeks are pink. Nursey stares at the color. It’s too light to be anger—and context gives no reason for that emotion either—but it’s almost the shade of embarrassment, which also seems implausible for the moment. It is warm in the room. That could be it.
“Use me any time,” Nursey says. His tone was slightly off—not quite joking enough—so he throws in a wink. Dex’s smile widens. It distorts the knitted imprint on his cheek. Nursey shoves his fingers under his thighs.
“I’ll remember that,” Dex says, cheeks still singing, and Nursey gasps a little. That could almost be flirty. Is Nursey projecting? He tries not to do that.
“Are you offering to be my cuddle buddy, Poindorkster?” Was that teasing enough? Should he have chosen a different nickname? Does it sound like he wants that?
Dex’s lips fall into something soft. He knocks his knuckles on Nursey’s knee and says, “Something like that.” Nursey doesn’t have a response to that. His heart is trying to push up his throat and things are getting tangled. Dex, after a moment, nods. “I’m gonna go start dinner. It should be ready in like half an hour, or so.”
“I’ll be there,” Nursey says. He adds a smile because he feels tilted and Dex watches him for a moment before actually leaving.
When the door to their room closes between them, Nursey sighs. He falls back against the duvet. The heat from where Dex was sitting is already fading. Nursey tangles his fingers in the fabric anyway.
*~*~*
Dinner is a quiet affair. Bitty is in Providence for the weekend and Chowder is staying at Farmer’s tonight because they’re going apple picking early tomorrow morning and it was better, logistics-wise. Ollie and Wicks went out—date night—and none of the Waffles or Tadpoles have stopped by. So it’s just Dex and Nursey. Sitting at the dining room table. Eating in silence.
Dex lets the table hold his body weight as he lazily brings the fork back and forth from the plate to his mouth. His under-eyes are smudged purple and the imprint from Nursey’s sweater is just beginning to fade. Nursey stares at him from under the safety of his own eyelashes and thinks about all the ways he could try to make Dex feel better.
He can’t exactly do any of them, but the thought of it is nice. He could imagine guiding Dex up the stairs and into his bed, Nursey’s hands on his shoulders and the small of his back. He could imagine pulling the comforter up to Dex’s chin, letting his hand drift and smooth over Dex’s forehead, into his hair. He could imagine a sleepy thank you from Dex’s barely-parted lips, or a goodnight, or even just a soft smile.
Nursey can imagine like nearly no other. Unfortunately, when he blinks his way back into the room, the loss of it feels worse than before.
“I’ll get the dishes,” he says, when Dex finishes eating.
“I can help—”
“Really, dude. Go shower or something and go to bed.”
Dex sighs. His shoulders fall. He smiles. “Thanks.”
Nursey doesn’t have a response to that except I love you so he just nods.
Nursey does the dishes, listening for the shower upstairs. The pipes are old, so they become just another noise to tune out, but they’re easier to focus on than emotions. Nursey knows Dex’s shower routine. He’s observed it, peripherally, from the sink in the mornings, only a thin curtain between them. Shampoo, face, body. Sometimes, if he’s in a rush, he’ll brush his teeth somewhere in the middle. When he gets out of the shower, his wet hair will curl around his ears—he’s been letting it grow out and Nursey sighs every time he notices it—and his freckles will sparkle as they reflect the light through water droplets.
Nursey finishes washing the dishes and decides to leave them on a drying rack overnight instead of doing it now. He makes his way up the stairs, thinking of Dex with skin warmed from the shower spray, distracted. He walks into their room and Dex is just pulling on a t-shirt for the night, back muscles working under lightly freckled skin.
The floor creaks. Even after Dex replaced it, there was nothing to be done about the way it moaned as they stepped on it. Dex turns around, smiling preemptively at seeing Nursey, his hair curled and wet, his mouth relaxed. Fuck. Nursey should stop looking at his mouth.
“Hey.” Dex’s voice is quiet like when he wakes up too early, but without the same roughness. Nursey pulls at the material of his sweatpants and swallows.
“Hi.” Nursey can’t hold all of these pieces. “How was your shower?” His empty places ache with want and he knows in his mind that he ought not want for things he will never get but still his heart fights its way up his throat.
Dex sighs. His smile widens just barely. “Good,” he says. His eyes twinkle. Nursey watches him as he takes half a step forward, another, and then they’re standing so close that Nursey can count Dex’s eyelashes. Dex curls his fingers around Nursey’s shoulder and leans in just enough. His lips brush the corner of Nursey’s mouth. They move around, “Good night,” and they’re gone.
Dex has climbed into bed, back towards the room, and Nursey remains standing in his spot. The corner of his mouth itches, buzzes, pleasantly. His empty parts sing. His heart sits, impatient, on the tip of his tongue.
Nursey just tries to focus on breathing.
*~*~*
Dex takes half a step forward.
Dex leans in.
Dex presses his lips to the corner of Nursey’s mouth.
Skrrrch. Pause.
In the darkness of the room, Nursey stares at the glow-star constellations on his ceiling and replays the moment of contact relentlessly. Soft lips. A quiet exhale. The way they moved around the mumbled vowels, the impact of the guh, the bite of the t. Nursey can remember it all, feel it all, in high definition, endlessly looping behind his eyelids, under the skin at the corner of his mouth.
See, he replays it over and over, but he stops at the moment.
Step forward. Lean in. Lips to mouth. Stop.
He stops it because after that moment lies something Nursey can feel in the hairs on the back of his neck. In his fingers twisting in the sheets, in his coiled back muscles unrelaxing against the mattress, in his eyes, unwilling to close to sleep’s will. The moment he blinks, the moment he lets the memory move past the touch, he will have to think about what comes next.
So he focuses on the kiss, on the touch, on the sigh of final words, and he must fall asleep to that at some point, but the lullaby is sweet to the last.
*~*~*
The sun breaks through the curtains Dex picked out and Nursey blinks himself awake. The Haus settles as it usually does in the late-autumn wind, but it is silent besides that. The room is empty. Nursey knows, logically, that Dex has a study group that meets early every week on this day, but the echo of last night still rests on his lips and he can’t help but feel like this is different.
He pulls himself vertical and lets his eyes rest on the empty bunk bed. Dex always makes his bed in the morning, probably some holdover from a proverb given to him by one family member or other. Nursey always thought it was a little silly, something ridiculous that only served to endear Dex further to Nursey’s aching heart, but today it simply becomes a reassuring constant. Things have not changed. Dex is at his study group. His bed is made. Everything is in its place.
Except. Nursey blinks and—yes, there it is. At the foot of Nursey’s bed sits a nightstand he uses for his phone, stray books, the like. Sitting on top of one of Shakespeare’s plays is a notecard, folded in half and propped up. On its plain outside, it reads in Dex’s sure, thin writing, Nursey.
The touch of fingertips on gently rough paper prompts a fluttering in the corner of Nursey’s mouth. The kiss there sings an optimistic tune and Nursey frowns to stutter it. Inside, the notecard continues in Dex’s writing. It asks, Can we meet for coffee around noon? It is signed without preamble Dex.
Noon is a long way away. Hours full of minutes and minutes full of seconds, and the kiss was only moments and look at how long that lasted. Nursey folds his legs in closer to himself and thinks about noon. At once, he can both imagine it at the foot of his bed, looming ever closer with each ticking moment, and also so incredibly far away that he cannot even imagine what it might look like.
No amount of idling will affect the distance between now and then, though. So with a great sigh, he pulls himself from his bed and begins his day. Everything is, of course, tainted with the suffix of noon. Breakfast is three and a half hours from noon, brushing his teeth ten minutes less than that, and on and on he counts down the moments from now until then until, suddenly, they are one and the same.
Annie’s is the only acceptable coffee place in town, as Jerry’s doesn’t offer just that and the local Starbucks is regarded as an encroachment by Big Business trying to simultaneously support capitalism and ruin the sanctity of small-town mom-and-pop-shops. Also, it’s five extra minutes away, and no college student—Division 1 athlete or not—is willing to walk that far for sub-par coffee.
Nursey arrives at Annie’s ten minutes prior to noon and waits outside the shop fiddling with his phone. At 12:01 Nursey’s foot refuses to stop tapping against the pavement and Dex arrives in a flurry of papers and chapped-lip smiles and it promptly steals the breath from Nursey’s chest.
“Hey,” he says, with an apologetic tilt to his lips. Nursey can feel the kiss in the corner of his mouth throbbing, perched and ready to take flight. “Sorry, things are going crazy today.”
Nursey wants to say I know what you mean but the kiss steals the words from his tongue. “Don’t be sorry,” it lets him say. “You’re barely a minute late.”
“It’s actually an apology for the rescheduling.” Dex winces lightly, his nose wrinkling the freckles into an arrangement of stars even better than flowers. “My crazy professor decided last minute that he couldn’t meet with me at two and now is my only chance to find out what he actually wants from us about that essay. I’m really sorry, but can we talk later?”
“Yeah,” Nursey says automatically. “Yeah, of course. Good luck with your professor.”
Dex sighs out relief and reaches out to squeeze Nursey’s hand. Not his shoulder, not his upper arm, his hand. His callused fingertips—not from hard labor, but from learning to play the guitar—brush against Nursey’s tender palm, following for a moment what Nursey swears is his love line. Then he goes, without word or explanation, in the same flurry he arrived in.
Watching him go, Nursey’s heart clenches and then attempts to wrap itself in stone. For many years, for a thousand moments, Nursey has let himself believe that something could possibly happen, that somewhere behind Dex’s snark and banter and eventual teasing there lied something affectionate, something romantic. Nursey has tortured himself with possibility, watching the way Dex behaved with their friends and comparing every action to similar ones of his own, and he eventually arrived at the only conclusion he could tolerate.
Dex loves his friends and Nursey has become one of those precious few, but that is all it will be. Nursey can pretend and imagine and allow himself to think about all the possibilities that this is wrong, but it will not change the fact of it. He can let himself break apart over these impossible speculations, or he can accept what he has and be content. These moments, last night and now, cannot break this resolve he has built for himself, or the whole thing will come crashing down on his head, and he will lose it all.
*~*~*
The rescheduling does not happen due to an unfortunate, unforeseen event. This event, in its most basic explanation, is the arrival of Holster and Ransom and a car full of booze. Having already started an event on Facebook, the entirety of Samwell arrives with them. Without Bitty there to mediate, the Haus becomes utter chaos within the first hour.
The Haus fills with people unlike any building Nursey has ever inhabited. The walls seem to expand with each added step, the floors shake and the ceilings grow to accommodate the dancing, the windows begin to rattle with the intensity of the music pumping through the speakers. Louis is laughing in the center of several attractive people, an underwear crown on his head, and Hops appears to be detailing something incredible to a rapt-looking Chowder while Farmer and Bully destroy a pair of basketball bros at pong. Holster and Ransom are nowhere to be seen, but even if Nursey didn’t know this was their doing, their touch lingers in every laugh, every dance move, every woo-hoo.
Ollie and Wicks brew up a batch of tub juice in record time and are distributing it with relish seconds after the mixture is complete. Nursey stumbles upon them in the kitchen and—in a moment of utter poor decision making—downs two of them in quick succession. Ollie reminds him to lock his room and Nursey suddenly doesn’t remember if he’s done that or not and promptly goes to check.
However, when he reaches his bedroom, he realizes that he is not in the mood to party despite the gloriousness of the ruckus below his feet. The corner of his mouth aches with each inhale and his chest feels at once both empty and much too full. He locks the bedroom door behind him and steps out of his day, falling into bed. The pillows under his cheek thump with the bass of the music and he doubts he will ever be able to fall asleep, and continues to doubt it until he wakes up some indeterminate time later.
The music is now only vestiges of vibration in the walls and the patter of dancing feet has mellowed into a lullaby. Nursey wakes in parts, first with his ears and then his touch, and he feels a body join him in his bed. He is not awake enough to be alarmed and by the time that part of him twitches towards lucidity, there’s a hot breath across his neck accompanied by the words, “It’s jus’ me.”
Dex.
The part of Nursey’s brain that worries and wonders and aches is still asleep. Any attempts it makes to awaken are nulled by the heavy forearm that relaxes over Nursey’s hip. His parts begin to fall back to sleep as he’s pulled against a warm chest, his feet tangling unconsciously with other, socked ones. The last thing any of him registers before he’s gone once again is the soft mumbling of, “Sleep tight, Nursey,” and even that could be a dream.
*~*~*
The second time Nursey wakes that night, he does it all at once. It is still some hazy time between yesterday and tomorrow but not exactly today. The room is completely dark and he must learn from his other four senses alone. It’s raining, as he can smell the wet wood of the Haus fold around its insides, protective. He probably hasn’t been sleeping too long, as his tongue is not yet heavy under the cotton of sleep and still retains the traces of tub juice that never seem to truly leave. He can hear his own breathing and the settling of the Haus, but most of all he hears the steady thrum of exhales against his ear. Along with that, he feels every puff, and the warm encasement of a body around his own. He panics momentarily before he feels the guitar-string fingertips against his bare hip.
He inhales sharply. Dex.
It’s hard to remember facts and sureties when he can feel Dex’s wide chest against his back. The sole of his foot rests against Dex’s shin and he can feel the rough caress of his coarse hair against the ticklish spots of his instep. A nose, gently probing, rests against the curl of his ear, and his hair must be tickling the freckles on the bridge of it, but Dex doesn’t seem to mind.
They fit, Nursey realizes with a sudden, horrible inhale. The pieces Nursey has been collecting and giving away for so long, all of those aching places suddenly don’t, as something else fits into them. He was never broken, but the matching set is suddenly there, and he now knows—viscerally—the difference between existing and being home.
No, he tells himself, you’re making it up. Dex could never love Nursey back, he could never, he—he is starlight and breathless smiles and making himself rough to give the world a song and hard work and focus and unrelenting, stubborn affection, and he couldn’t possibly be Nursey’s on top of all that. Dex, infuriating and ridiculous as he can be, is this beautiful contradiction of anger and kindness and he is better than Nursey could ever hope to have. Their friendship is already so much, why can’t Nursey just be happy with what he has?
He shakes his head at himself and his ridiculous wants, and it must be the irritant Dex’s nose needed to wake itself up, because with a shudder, Dex is suddenly awake. Nursey tenses in his arms, but Dex doesn’t appear to notice. His nose digs in deeper until his lips rest against skin. He mumbles, “Nursey,” into the line of Nursey’s ear, louder than anything Nursey has ever heard.
His breath rattles around in his chest.
The lips become bolder. Instead of words, they press kisses. At first, Nursey hears them more than he feels them, but they begin to trail down, following a path only they seem to know, but they do so confidently and without hesitation. Fingertips dance along his hip, across his lower stomach and splay below his tensed abdominals. His shin brushes past Nursey’s framing feet until Dex’s entire thigh is pressed tight against the back of Nursey’s legs, and then in a smooth motion, Dex pushes himself on top.
The moon is hardly round enough to illuminate Dex’s sleep-soft face, but Nursey can make out the fire-filled eyes, the parted, panting mouth full of questions, the glow of a million constellations that Nursey wishes he could know the names of. “Nursey,” Dex says, louder but softer and asking so many things Nursey can’t decipher.
He knows Dex isn’t his to hold. He knows this will have to end with the sunlight. He knows he is only giving away pieces that will ache in the morning.
Still, he leans up and answers every question hidden under Dex’s tongue. He would do it again, a million times, as many times as he’s given the choice. Nursey knows that it’s going to hurt, but he has to believe that a moment with something whole will get him through the following lifetime of pieces.
*~*~*
Daylight streams through the barely parted curtains. Nursey is warm everywhere, but mostly his torso. He is thrown over something, his heart higher than his legs and his middle stretched to reach it. The something rumbles and rises and shakes. A heart beats under Nursey’s cheek, relentless and comforting. His fingers curls of their own free will into the elastic of the something’s pajamas. The something is wearing pajamas. The something is a person.
Nursey struggles to pull his eyes open. He knows this chest, the fingers at his back, the heartbeat pulsing under his cheek. Without moving, he looks up and sees a chin, spotted with orange stubble. Above that, a rounded nose that curls up towards the ceiling, two fans of yellow eyelashes resting against freckled cheeks. Dex sleeps, his lips barely parted, and Nursey knows that they are the wrong color. He has spent too long staring at Dex’s mouth not to recognize how pink they are, bruised and softened and—and—
Dex has always meant contradiction. Hard, yet soft. Loud, yet silent. Irritating, yet endearing. He has always caused contradictions in Nursey’s chest, but the war of fullness and empty rattling around his ribcage is unbearably tumultuous. He imagines that he can hear the flutter of his heart as it flies around the back of his throat, unsure of where to go or whether it is even needed any more. Nursey can taste its indecision, its panic, and he feels it acutely when it stutters to a stop.
Dex has woken up.
Nursey has dreamed and he has wondered for so long, but those eyes are undeniably real. They twinkle in the yellow light of the morning and they seem to smile as if nothing is different but every is, too, and Nursey, he—
He doesn’t know what the picture means. He’s been staring at the pieces for so long that any message has been lost. He has his pieces and his facts and his troubled heart, but none of it has ever meant that Dex loves him back.
“Good morning,” Dex says. His voice is rough from sleep but tender after every rasp.
“Hey,” Nursey says. He has a script to follow when his tongue gets heart-tied and he knows his part well. “Sleep okay?”
There is laughter in Dex’s consonants when he says, “Well enough.” He squeezes Nursey’s middle and it makes his ribcage rattle. “How about you?”
“Fine.”
The laughter leaves and in its place there is a sigh. Dex’s hand leaves his hip and his musical calluses follow the path of Nursey’s jawline slow enough that Nursey can’t hold his breath for the whole journey. His fingers stop at Nursey’s chin, a light pinch. Dex moves closer, his shoulders a hard line but his eyes insistent. “I love you,” he says, quiet as anything.
Nursey’s lips part in his unbelieving gasp, but Dex has kissed him before Nursey can ask any question.
The kiss melts, simmering in the morning sun, and with a sigh Nursey realizes what every piece was trying to say. His heart yawns in his throat as it floats itself down to Nursey’s chest, resting. Finally, it is home.