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“I don’t have the energy for a revolution,” Dan shrugs.
He’s sitting in the quiet corner of his second favourite coffee shop next to Phil who’d met him there ten minutes before.
“No?” Phil asks, trying to keep a smile at bay.
Dan shakes his head. “I don’t have, like, the pluck. I can’t be a pioneer. I can’t rebuild.” He leans forward and digs his elbows into his knees now. “I genuinely kinda hope I get killed off in the first wave, you know?”
Phil does smile then, even laughs when he says, “Oh, me too,” because Dan’s tone is too serious not to laugh along with. He needs to inject levity where he can. “I mean, imagine if a bomb went off when I wasn’t home and Rita died, but I make it out alive? Who am I without my cat? That’s like, the worst conceivable timeline.”
“But what if the only people that survive the first wave are all assholes? And then they get to rebuild and things are even worse than they are now?”
“Well then that literally won’t be our problem,” Phil says. “We’ll be dead.”
Dan tips his cup back, so far that his neck stretches too tantalizingly in front of Phil and the cup is all but upside down.
Phil wants to add something that makes him sound less callous over what would and wouldn’t be his problem if the world was destroyed only to be rebuilt by assholes. Something like hope living on in the robot resistance, or the alien invaders that are sure to step in as soon as things get too messy.
Before he can though, he’s interrupted by an alert on Dan’s phone. Dan’s break is over. “You coming with me?” he asks.
Phil still has half his coffee left, but no interest in drinking it alone. It’s the weekend, and he has the day off even if Dan doesn’t; he isn’t willing to miss out on any time they can have together. So he stands up and takes his coat which Dan holds out for him.
Besides, he knows the other folks who work at the bookstore wouldn’t care if he hung around there the rest of the day or not.
“We got that box of donations still unsorted and pretty close to overflowing,” Dan’s manager, Kit, says from the third rung of a ladder where she is shelving the small stack of books in her hand when the two of them walk in and throw their coats behind the register. “Your mate can help, so long as you handle the price gun.”
“Because he couldn’t possibly understand the delicate art of pricing a used book,” Dan says while folding his arms and not really committing to any kind of tone. “He might accidentally undercharge and cause a chain reaction that’ll make the late aughts look like a hiccup compared to the Great Book Recession.”
“Recession reference instead of Great Depression reference,” Phil says while placing his coffee somewhere safe from tipping over and ruining the merchandise. “We’re truly products of our time.”
“It’s because handling a price gun is something an employee does,” Kit says like it’s a bantered argument they’ve had before. She says it like that because it is. She climbs empty-handed from the ladder and, now quite a bit shorter than Dan for having lost the height advantage it gave her, tilts her head back. “It’s something I’d have to pay him for.” She turns to Phil. “Without it, you’re just browsing what we have in stock.”
“I didn’t know you had a union I could’ve been reporting you to.”
Kit turns back to Dan. “Don’t you dare give him the number.”
She shrugs her own coat on after moving Dan’s out of her way. She checks the pockets for a lighter before stepping out and the two are alone in the shop. A customer might join them at any moment, theoretically. But it’s so unlikely during this autumn slump between the beginning of classes and holiday shopping that it doesn’t ever cross their minds.
They expect to be alone until Kit’s smoking break is over and until she walks the five blocks to the bakery to get them a chocolate croissant which will both thank Phil for helping out while reiterating the fact that she has no intention of paying him.
Phil isn’t bothered by not getting paid, for a few reasons.
One is that the bakery in this part of town has the best damn chocolate croissants he’s ever had.
Another is that he hardly helps at all, really— just sits with the donated books stacked around him and flips through them to make sure they’re intact and mostly unmarked.
The biggest reason is of course that it’s more time spent with Dan, something he thinks he never gets enough of even if it’s how most of his time is spent.
He might not have to feel like that for much longer, he thinks, but it’s an exciting scary thought that he tries to push to the back of his mind by picking up another few books and dropping them in the space between his crisscrossed legs.
His lease is up next month on the studio flat he’s burrowed in since uni. And for the first time, he isn’t itching to renew it.
Dan has a one-bedroom apartment he’d moved into about a year before he and Phil first met. It’s almost twice as big as Phil’s place, with a proper kitchen that puts Phil’s kitchenette to shame, and a balcony that overlooks a busy street but has a killer view of the Manchester Eye. Or did, at least. A few years ago. Dan often jokes that the landlord had told him that when showing off the place like it was a selling point.
It’s a nice apartment. One that Dan has offered him a place in, but which Phil has been hesitant to accept. He’s not even really sure why.
But he has a hunch. He’s afraid of change. He’s afraid of a lot of things and change is one of them. Thankfully, Dan’s been more patient than Phil really thinks he deserves.
Dan’s always incredibly patient.
On days when Phil is exhausted, strung out entirely from working the front desk at an investment firm, Dan is patient when he complains about his headaches under the fluorescent lights and when he complains that some of the older advisors confuse reception duties with secretarial so he’s asked to stamp and seal hundreds of generic holiday cards or prepare coffee for visiting clients.
Dan is patient when he tells Phil how brave he thinks it is that Phil’s job is largely answering phones and transferring calls, such a commonplace stressor for his anxiety, and yet he still faces it day after day.
And he is patient every time he reminds Phil that nothing is stopping him from getting any other job in the world, one that won’t have five lines of ringing phones to be waded through.
He is patient when Phil hesitates over the idea of change— even good change, like leaving a job he hates or moving in with a man he loves.
And Phil really doesn’t think he deserves such patience, but he’s grateful every time Dan extends it towards him anyway.
He’s staring at Dan’s knee poking through his ripped jeans when the bell over the door announces a few customers stepping inside.
Dan stands and puts on a plastic smile and says, “Good afternoon,” in a tone Phil would like to tease him for if they were alone. Dan’s never that syrupy, not when talking to his grandmother or to Phil’s cat or even to Phil himself when they’re wrapped up in one another under his colourful duvet.
Only with customers; only because he must.
Dan just doesn’t go in for syrupy, Phil has long since learned. He can be soft when saying, “Hello there!” to a child or to a pet, and he can be pleasant when thanking the postman or the person handing him his takeaway. But syrupy is different, the saccharine tone too many notes higher than he normally speaks. He is never syrupy when he is sincere.
It used to bother Phil, back in the very beginning. Before he understood the differences, the nuances, the careful way Dan categorizes tone. It doesn’t bother him in the least anymore.
Because Dan is kind in countless other ways— he is kind in his touch and in his honesty and in the way he listens.
Sometimes, when spending a rare night alone in his own flat, Phil will lay curled up on his side facing the back of his sofa and the clock on the street below will strike 3 am as he thinks about the ways he isn’t half so kind as Dan.
He thinks that he doesn’t have the gumption to be a bad person, really. How he doesn’t have the nerve to actually be malicious. How the very idea just makes his stomach ache. But how he’s just so far away from being a good person, an actively good person, someone whose default is to choose kindness.
He’s just as bland, flat, neutral of a person as they come.
And isn’t that almost worse than being bad, somehow? Because it all adds up to nothing.
Just nothing.
While people like Dan, well, they’re everything.
Dan is everything to Phil, in a consuming and terrifying way that he’s never really believed in before.
He remembers quite clearly the moment Dan became human for him, the moment he was no longer just this impossibly beautiful, hazy vision Phil had seen him as the first few weeks after they met— the moment Phil learned you can love someone so much it makes your ribs ache, but you can’t burn yourself at another person’s alter.
Dan had mentioned early on his struggle with depression, how the worst of it hit him in uni and how in recent years most days were manageable. How therapy helped, how other things like medication and exercise and sleep helped too. How some days were still impossible.
Phil figured he understood it enough. He’d been to a few doctors over his anxiety in the past; he’d started a prescription then stopped then started again.
But it took seeing Dan during a moment of low stimulation to really hammer home how different it was to his own moments of high stimulation. It took seeing a depressive spiral to understand just how different it was to a panic attack.
After, he felt it should’ve been obvious. But… well, brains not doing what brains are meant to do? He hadn’t thought about the varieties.
It was the fourth time he’d stayed the night over at Dan’s flat. They were still new and tentative and yet radiated such eagerness. The night before they’d kissed hungrily and their touches were heated and Dan coming undone on top of him, due to his efforts and his alone, had reminded Phil of Esther Greenwood in The Bell Jar careening down a mountain on borrowed skis thinking “This is what it means to be happy” before crashing and breaking her leg. Except nothing of Dan’s had broken other than his voice when he choked out Phil’s name.
But when Dan woke up that next morning his eyes were dull and flat; he looked right through Phil before burrowing his head back into the pillow and saying nothing when Phil murmured, “Good morning.”
After a few moments of Phil running his hand along Dan’s back, he said, “You should go,” and his voice was so cold that Phil’s hand flinched back.
“I should?” he asked.
“You should,” Dan said, without so much as turning to face him.
“I thought…” Phil tried, but any words that were coming to him felt like too much to actually say. Words like I thought this meant something or worse. Instead, he left. As Dan had asked him.
Then he didn’t hear from Dan for three days even though he texted him twice saying, “I hope I didn’t do something wrong,” and, “I understand if you don’t want to see me again but I guess I’d just like to know why? Not that you owe me. But I guess I’ll wonder until I’m like 90 if you don’t actually tell me. And even then I’d wonder but I’ll be so senile I’ll forget or something but it’ll still eat at me.”
Even though Phil jumped at his phone during those three days anytime he heard a phantom vibration, Dan appeared at his door rather than ever calling or texting back.
He appeared at Phil’s door and didn’t say a word when Phil answered but instead wrapped his arms around him and held on so tightly Phil couldn’t properly breathe. He shook with sobs that weren’t making any noise and Rita, the most empathetic cat in the world, plopped herself down by his feet while the three of them stood there in the silence.
Eventually, they pulled apart and the silence broke; Dan apologized and Phil kissed him and Rita purred.
Dan let a litany of words pour out, saying he’d woken up in the hole and the buzzing in his brain wouldn’t shut up about what a mistake Phil was making by giving him the time of day and how much better it would be if he just cut him off now before they grew any more attached. Phil listened and nodded and noted how the shadows under Dan’s eyes were so dark it almost looked as though he hadn’t slept at all in the last three days.
Afterwards, as they sat with their limbs twisted together on Phil’s couch, with dinner ordered and on its way, Phil said, “So the next time you tell me to go, I should just ignore you?”
“I’ll probably get angry, or annoyed,” Dan shrugged, “but yes, please ignore me. Ignore all my bullshit.”
“Noted,” Phil said. He kissed him again, kissed this human man with flaws and rough edges who he cared about so much already.
That must be where the hesitation of moving in with Dan stems from, even all this time later, Phil figures. Because then what happens when Dan decides to leave? Even if they’d made a very loose pact that Phil won’t leave, Dan leaving is a simple possibility.
Anyone leaving at any point in time is a simple possibility.
And some ugly cracked voice in the back of his head tells him that Dan will leave, someday, sometime, eventually.
Even his Rita will die someday; she’s already five years old. He has another ten, maybe twelve years with her left. At best. At best, he’ll be nearly 45 when she dies. Nearly 45… still so much of his life left to live. Decades after that won’t include her.
He feels pretty certain that he won’t be ready to lose her even then, that he’ll still be fragile, that it’ll be too much for him to take.
Then he feels stupid and selfish. It’s just a fucking cat.
But she’s a cat who sits on his chest and purrs when he lies on his bathroom floor after a panic attack— and the tile on his back is so cool while her body on his front is so warm that it helps ground him and he could swear she knows it.
So she’ll be hard to say goodbye to. Some distant day, when he has to. Not for a while, a long while, but someday.
Luckily, these kinds of thoughts only really roll in when he’s facing the back of his sofa and the clock on the street below chimes 3 am.
Sometimes they roll in when he’s forgotten to take his anxiety meds for too long, but he’s gotten better about that lately. Dan’s good at reminding him; Dan knows firsthand the sort of agony that comes from skipped doses.
Otherwise, he’s mostly free of these kinds of thoughts.
The customers don’t distract Dan for long. Folks don’t come into a used bookstore to be hovered over by attendants, and they don’t come in with the intention of being quick. They come in to browse, to see what the shelves have waiting for them. To make a find that seems fated.
So Dan is back sitting beside Phil before long, sitting so their bent knees brush against one another. Sitting so Phil can feel the warmth coming off him, the constant warmth that Dan exudes.
Phil picks up a gaudy looking poetry book, bright oranges and purples on a cover that he hates less the more he looks at it. Normally he loves bright, saturated colours. This combination took a moment to grow on him.
“Hand me my coffee?” he asks Dan as he turns the book over in his hands.
“Could’ve asked before I sat down,” Dan says, standing anyway.
“Could’ve,” Phil agrees.
There isn’t any damage to the book so far as he can tell. Some markings, some dog-eared pages, not the worst he’s ever seen.
There’s a message on the inside of the front cover that he stops to read while taking a gulp of the now-cold coffee.
He loves the messages left behind in the donated books, something he never thought about before he started hanging around the shop to spend more time with Dan. The little annotations, the way children write “This book belongs to…” with scrawled hand, the letters explaining why this book was chosen specifically for the person it’s being gifted to.
It’s a form of intimacy Phil never gave much thought to before, and now consumes greedily whenever he finds it.
“I got this book years ago, and have loved it dearly,” it reads, “I even started circling my favourites, and the ones that remind me of us.” The note is dated 2007, and it ends with a “Happy Birthday, my love.”
Phil swallows the rest of his coffee so he won’t have to worry about it anymore before he goes looking through the book for the promised circled poems.
They’re about women who love women who remind them of trees; they’re about women who love women who are covered in grease. They’re about women who want to climb into the spaces between another woman’s ribs. They’re about women who want to reclaim chivalry and what it means to them. They’re about women who feel far more than they could ever hope to say, even while they’re in the act of writing a poem all about it.
He turns back to the note on the inside of the front cover, and something inside him aches—
Something about this book being in his hands now, not on the bookshelf of the woman who was gifted it for her birthday back in 2007 by another woman who thought the world of her. The ache moves to the palms of Phil’s hands. He pokes Dan’s shoulder with a corner of the book.
“Buy this for me, will you?” he asks. Phil had always been a bookworm, but having copious amounts of free time at his work desk, between the calls and coffee and more calls, combined with dating someone who works in a constant supply of new words means he’s always picking up more than he could ever read.
But he doesn’t think he’d take this book to work. He thinks he wants it on a shelf in his flat until he can work out just what this ache is.
Dan is about to answer when the customers head for the door, arms empty.
“Have a nice day!” he calls out after them, still syrupy. Then he takes the poetry book out of Phil’s hand and places it by the register.
He also tosses Phil’s empty coffee cup in the recycling bin though Phil hadn’t asked, and Phil is reminded that no one has ever been so caring towards him in continuous small ways in his life— continuous small ways that add up monumentally.
“Thanks,” he says, for the book and for the coffee cup and for his kindness. He wonders if he says it enough. “You spoil me.”
“You sap,” Dan says with a smile that leaves crinkles by his eyes. The syrupy tone is gone. This sweetness is sincere, and it’s just for Phil. “You coming over to mine for dinner?” he asks while he sets the price gun for the books Phil has already flipped through.
Phil wants to say something then, something sappy since he’s already been accused of it. Something that will answer the question that’s been hanging between them since Dan first offered his home to Phil.
Something like, “I’ll go over to ours,” with an eyebrow arch on the last word.
The certainty frightens him. Moreover, it surprises him— he isn’t sure when it settled in his stomach but supposes it was somewhere around the second time he read the note in the cover flap of the poetry book.
That’s why he decides not to say something so sappy, he figures, because logically reading the note should have made him less certain he wants to live with Dan, not more certain. Couldn’t he be left behind as easily as that poetry book one day after all? Be dog-eared and dusty and covered in scribbled affectionate words that are outdated and expired. Isn’t that what his hesitation has been about?
And yet—?
When Dan had asked him to move in, Phil’s anxiety hadn’t been the first reaction. It’d been his surprise. “Why?” he’d asked.
“Why?” Dan’s smile crinkled his eyes and his dimples were deep and Phil thought he was too fucking beautiful to look at full-on. So he looked down to his neck instead, which was still distracting but manageable. “Because you make me happy, idiot,” Dan said. “Because I’d forgotten how to have fun before you stumbled into my life. And I’d like to have that around more often, if it’s all the same to you.”
Phil could feel the heat of his blush as it scorched a path across his skin. “I mean, thanks. I wasn’t fishing for compliments or anything.”
“Well, you caught some anyways,” Dan rolled his eyes.
“I just meant like… why? I’ve never lived with someone I was dating,” Phil shrugged. “Surprised me that you’d want to, is all.”
And Dan demonstrated again just how patient he is. He didn’t press the issue; he didn’t rescind the offer but he didn’t pester Phil either. He just waited, showed his patience and his kindness and waited for Phil to work through his anxious hesitation towards any and all change.
Instead of something sappy, Phil settles on saying, “Yeah, but we should get takeaway. Thai, maybe. Or Indian. I don’t want to cook,” because it’s true and he can say something later that has more commitment.
Now that he’s made his choice, the hard part is over.
He feels like he’s a YouTube video that just finished buffering. He feels like a payment that just finished pending.
He feels like a bag of microwave popcorn; the microwave has just beeped and most of him has popped but the last few kernels are still going and when they’re finished he’ll find some sappy way to tell Dan something more concrete.
Now that the thought of living with Dan isn’t some ominous idea, he can think about where in Dan’s flat he’d put Rita’s litter box and whether he wants to bother lugging his heavy cherry wood desk across town in the move or just place it on the sidewalk with a “free” sign.
Kit comes back only a few minutes after Phil has finished looking through the entire stack of donated books. She hands over the chocolate croissant and asks Dan if there had been any customers while she was away.
“Yeah,” Dan tells her, “three old birds that wanted the first edition Joyce but only had Canadian cash. Phil let them have it for £20 before I could stop him.” His cheek doesn’t so much as twitch in the hint of a smile.
“I told you to stop letting him do that,” Kit says shrugging her coat off, a little damper than it was when she had shrugged it on. She smiles even if Dan won’t. She turns to Phil, “Only employees can handle the first editions.”
“How am I supposed to know? Put up a sign or something.” Phil doesn’t hide his smile either.
“Any actual customers?” She asks, turning back to Dan.
“None that I saw,” he shrugs. Then the bell above the door interrupts him. “There’s some now.”