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Charlie hears about Nick’s freshers week through two-hour long phone calls before bed, countless Facebook updates and texts every morning that say, “I still miss you :(.”
“Stop texting me sad faces, you’re at uni. You don’t have to wear the sixth form blazer and tie anymore, and you don’t have a form tutor or a set lunchtime or homework.” Charlie holds his mobile phone between his ear and his shoulder, untying the laces of his boots. It’s only the first week of term, his last one at Truham, and Rugby practice is already in full force. “Anyway, once you try out for the uni Rugby team you’ll be too busy to miss me at all.”
“I have coursework. Or, I will do once lectures start, anyway.” Nick groans. Charlie imagines him lying there on his navy blue duvet cover from home that he knows Nick's mum had packed for him, and staring up at the ceiling of his identikit dorm room. “And I’m going to miss you no matter what. It’s weird not seeing you every day.”
“You’re coming home in October half term break," Charlie says. "it’s only six weeks away.”
“No, that's a lifetime away," Nick replies, and, honestly, Charlie agrees, but he refuses to put a dampener on Nick's first term at uni. He doesn't want to be that boyfriend: needy and clingy and jealous of his new friends (even if the guys he's been tagged with on Facebook are, unfairly, bordering on The Ark levels of hot).
Charlie asks, "Shouldn't you be sleeping? Don't you have orientation tomorrow?"
"Yeah.” Nick stifles a yawn. “But you know that talking to you is my favourite thing."
It's Charlie's too, but he has practise after school tomorrow and he can't risk playing badly if he wants to prove that he's just as good a player without Nick on the team. He laughs. "Just think about how much you're paying for your tuition fees..."
Nick makes a strangled noise. "Good point. Goodnight.” There is a moment of silence before he adds in a quiet voice laced with intimacy, “I love you."
Charlie grins from ear to ear. He’s glad that they aren’t on Facetime, or Nick might tease him for his blushes. "I love you too,” he replies. He feels like the luckiest guy in the whole world.
Maybe Nick is right, Charlie thinks as he plugs his phone into its charger and waits for the screen to lock and the room to go dark. Maybe six weeks is going to feel like a lifetime.
As it turns out, six weeks just feels like six weeks, and half term comes around a lot faster than either of them had imagined it would. “Doing this in person is so much better than on the phone,” Nick says as he presses kisses to the underside of Charlie’s jaw. “You should come and visit me soon.”
And Charlie intends to, he really does, but then they both have Rugby games, and Nick has essay upon essay to write, and then Charlie’s A Level prep takes over and it’s Christmas before Nick can remember to text Charlie a “Send me a pic of your mum’s famous roast dinner!” text (complete with a hungry face emoji).
By Summer, Nick is vice Captain of the uni rugby team (“Unheard of for a first year, apparently!”) and Charlie’s exams are over: the anxious wait for results gnawing at the back of his mind. He overthinks every answer he’s written, dreams of exam halls and lost papers and of Nick standing at the front of the school hall and saying, “If you can’t pass your English A Level, I can’t be your boyfriend.”
Nick laughs at Charlie’s descriptions of his nightmares until Charlie laughs along with him. “I wouldn’t dump you for failing an exam,” Nick says. He pulls Charlie back into his lap on the sofa and hugs him tightly.
“What if I fail them all?” Charlie definitely remembers being able to answer the majority of the questions on his exams, but his brain likes to mess with him and remind him at random moments that nothing is certain, and that maybe he actually misunderstood the entire Media Studies A level syllabus and has actually scored zero marks. “Maybe I did really badly.”
Nick hugs him even tighter. “Charlie, if you don’t get A stars in all of your subjects, I'll be shocked.”
“And if I do pass them?” Charlie asks, twisting out of Nick’s bear hug so he can see his face. “What then?”
Nick laughs. “I’ll reward you with a kiss.”
Charlie gets two A stars and one A, a tight hug and four kisses before they even leave the school entrance hall, and an acceptance letter to study music at the same university as Nick goes to.
Tao and Elle meet them at Pizza Express the Saturday after. They’re holding hands over the table and Charlie thinks they might have been holding hands non-stop since they first started going out officially two years before. It makes him smile at the thought of all the day-to-day tasks that would look silly to do hand in hand, like play sports or try to bake a lemon cheesecake like the one they order to share for dessert.
“What are you giggling over?” Nick whispers to him as he watches his best friends share their cake. Tao and Elle are oblivious to him– they look like he feels about Nick and his heart swells.
“Nothing.” Charlie takes a sip of coke and smiles around the straw. Nick squeezes his knee under the table and gives Charlie the widest of grins when he looks at him, and Charlie is bowled over by how happy he is right in this moment, here, with these people.
When Charlie’s own freshers week comes around, he’s excited and nervous and so damn glad that he'll be joining Nick at the same university, because the last year without Nick had been— not awful, exactly, but sometimes it had almost felt like Nick was on the other side of the world, rather than a few hundred miles away, during term time.
Charlie’s first year dorm-room is in the same halls of residence that Nick had lived in the year before, and Nick pulls an impressed face and mentions the, “Upgrade to the common room carpet,” when Charlie shows him round. “Someone used a fountain pen to write up their course notes one night last semester and it exploded all over them and the floor,” he explains. He doesn’t need to explain who that person is, because Charlie has a fair idea that it's a person he knows all too well (and loves for it).
Charlie doesn’t like beer much, but here he is: can in hand, standing in the shared kitchen where he guesses he’ll attempt to make his mum’s spaghetti bolognese recipe once and then inevitably live off beans on toast for the next eight months. His new flatmates stand around him, sharing A Level exam horror stories and talking about the prospect of 8am lectures. There’s a frisson of nervous energy in the air, everyone hoping to make their best impression on the people they’ve been randomly selected to live next to.
Lewis, who Charlie has learnt is studying Geography and has the room directly opposite his, says, “I read that you should never go to university in a relationship.”
“Where did you read that, Nuts magazine?” Jack, a tall, wiry guy with brown hair styled into something he’s copied from one of the cast of The Only Way Is Essex, scoffs.
Lewis doesn’t seem offended, but he replies, “Fuck off,” with a grin, and swigs from his beer. “My older brother told me too - you have to be single for freshers week. No fun, otherwise!”
Charlie watches the exchange unfold, his beer going warm in his clammy grip. He wonders if Nick felt the same the year before, he wonders if he should feel the same now? Maybe there is something wrong with him to not want to kiss other guys at university?
“Earth to Charlie!” A girl in a vintage-store Spice Girls t-shirt pokes him in the ribs to get his attention. Jack and Lewis are looking at him as though he’s from another planet. “Lewis is talking to you,” she says. Her lips are stained blue from the vodka slush someone has made using crushed ice-cubes and food colouring.
“I was just saying us single lads should stick together in freshers week,” Lewis says. “Are you with us, or have you got a girlfriend back home?”
Charlie shakes his head. “Nope, no girlfriend.”
“So, we’re all single!” Lewis cheers. Some of the beer in his can swills over the edge and into the linoleum floor. “Get in!”
Oh.
“Er, not exactly.” Charlie is regretting joining this conversation, but then he doesn’t want to lie, even if he’s nervous - always nervous - about telling people that he doesn’t know well enough to trust about his sexuality. But he’s started speaking now and there are three expectant pairs of eyes on him and he isn’t sure where else to go with this speech than straight to the truth. “I’m not single. I just don’t have a girlfriend.”
“Oh-- Oh!” A look of understanding washes over Lewis’ face. “That’s cool.”
“You’re too good looking to go to freshers with if you were straight, anyway, all the girls would want to shag you,” Jack says with a grin. “Now I’ve got more of a chance of pulling!”
“Thanks. I think?” Charlie laughs, and by the end of the night halls almost feels like a new home-from-home.
Nick meets Charlie outside his flat and hands him a steaming take-out cup of hot chocolate. “What are the guys on your floor like?” He asks as they wander through campus. “Are they nice?”
“Yeah. My neighbours are called Jack and Lewis.” Charlie smiles. “They play football.”
“Shame they’re not into rugby.” Nick pouts, his fringe blows back off his forehead in the breeze and Charlie resists the urge to pat it down. His hair is doing the same, anyway.
“They might be, I haven’t asked them about it,” Charlie points out. “They mainly talk about nights out and how many girls they’ve slept with, but not in a Harry way. They’re nice really.”
“Bloody hell. Imagine having to live in halls with loads of Harry clones.” Nick laughs. “Ugh. Did you tell them about…Us?”
“Yeah.” The hot chocolate is still too hot to drink, so Charlie just holds it tightly to warm his hands. “Yeah, I did.”
“And?” Nick nudges him gently. There is a crease in his forehead, and Charlie knows he’s gearing up to get into protective-boyfriend mode.
“And they said I’d be too much competition if I was into girls. I quote, ‘you are really good looking’. Well, it was something like that.”
“Hey- they better keep their eyes off my man!” Nick stops walking and then wiggles his eyebrows mischievously. “Hold me back or I’ll go and start on them!”
Charlie reluctantly takes a hand off his hot chocolate to punch his boyfriend on the arm. “Don’t even joke like that!” He laughs. “You sound like an idiot.”
“I would never,” Nick replies. He presses a soft kiss to Charlie’s nose. “I’m a lover, not a fighter, you know.”
"I know." Charlie smiles, and when Nick leans in again and kisses him properly, the point is only reinforced.
They sleep in the same bed as often as they want, now. Being squeezed into a single bed is uncomfortable at times, and Nick has a habit of kicking off the duvet in the night, leaving Charlie with cold feet, but the negatives are far, far, outweighed by the fact that they get to wake up together whenever they want to.
Even on mornings when it's raining and they both have early lectures, Charlie still feels a little spark of joy in waking up next to his favourite person, and he knows that Nick feels the same way, because he tells him so. "I'm so happy," he says, and his voice is still laced with sleep, and his hair is sticking up at an odd angle against the pillow, but Charlie wouldn't want him any other way.
"I'm happier," Charlie replies, to which Nick shakes his head and insists that he is the happier one. This is their usual routine and Charlie isn't sure he will ever get sick of it.
“When we graduate, we can get a place to ourselves and we’ll get to do this every single day of our lives.” Nick pulls Charlie closer into his side. "In a proper double bed."
Charlie asks him, “Will you help wash the dishes when we live together?”
“I’ll dry the dishes if you wash them," Nick says. "Deal?"
"Deal." Charlie nods. "I'm looking forward to it."
Nick's hand finds his own under the duvet and squeezes it tightly. Charlie closes his eyes again he pictures a warm kitchen and a warm love, and maybe a dog of their own at their feet, and for the next fifteen minutes, until their second alarm goes off to signal they have to get up or they'll definitely be late for first lectures, Charlie Spring feels like maybe he is the luckiest guy in the whole world once again.