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Michael awakens slowly, surfacing bit by bit from a warm, vague yet pleasant dream into the fuzzy-tongued, pounding-headed hangover that seems to be his new reality. Damn, he thinks, keeping his eyes shut in the forlorn hope that will stave it off just a little longer. Then he hears a soft Scottish voice speaking on the other side of the room. Fuck, he amends. That seems to be the most apt description, of both his current situation and the one he was apparently in just a few hours earlier.
Michael opens his eyes and sits up all at once, which he immediately regrets. It doesn't make him feel any better when David blinks at him, all wide eyes and gentle concern. Fucking wrap parties, Michael thinks. There's a sense of finality to them that creates a “last day of the world”, “let's send the boys off to war”, “we'll never meet again” mentality, which is patently ludicrous, and can be dangerous. Case in point.
“I didn't mean to wake you,” David says quietly, putting down the phone he'd been speaking on.
“No, no, it's fine.” Michael looks at the bedside clock. Like all hotel clocks, the numbers are far too bright, and feel condemnatory as they tell him it's just past one o'clock in the afternoon.
David pulls on his jacket. “I have to be going.”
“Absolutely.”
“If you happen to find my other sock anywhere...” David holds up a single black sock. With as little movement as possible, Michael looks down and sees that David is sockless in his brogues.
“I'll send it on.”
“Thank you.” David smiles, and Michael remembers exactly how he ended up in this position.
“See you later.”
“Bye.” David shuts the door carefully behind him. Michael collapses back onto the bed, then immediately regrets it as every nerve in his body reminds him they are currently in agony.
A moment later, as he's weighing the pros and cons of girding his loins and crawling, like a man who's spent weeks in the desert, to find an oasis of coffee and paracetamol, his phone trills. He reaches over, fumbling blindly on the nightstand until he finds it.
It's a new text, from David. I had a very nice time.
Michael hesitates. Thanks for everything, he replies. For a Scotsman and a Welshman, he thinks, that was the most English way we could have possibly handled the situation.
*****
He doesn't expect it to happen again, but he and David have an awful lot of photo ops and press interviews together. David is, Michael finds, very easy to love, and extremely hard to resist. The second time he wakes up in a hotel room with him, Michael is a little less hungover, and a little less keen to be left alone to die in peace.
“Do you fancy some breakfast?” He asks David, who smiles. He's half-dressed, his shirt unbuttoned and his hair more disarranged than usual. He does, Michael note, have both his socks. They never did find the missing one.
“All right.” David sits down on the bed. He picks up the room service menu, although Michael's intention had been to go out. Maybe this is better, he thinks. “Full English or continental?” David asks. There's a lewd joke somewhere in there, but Michael is too distracted to find it.
“I'll have what you're having,” he says.
What he needs, clearly, is a stiff drink and for someone to talk some sense into him. Instead, he eats fried eggs and black pudding on the bed with David, and kisses him on the cheek when David says, “I'd best be going.”
*****
Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is a habit. It also seems like the point where they should be talking about intentions and arrangements and just where this is going, but David doesn't bring it up, so Michael doesn't, either. Instead, they lie together late into one lazy Sunday, at Michael's home rather than a hotel for once. When David finally sighs and says, “I should get a shower and get out of here,” Michael says, “You could stay for supper?” It's meant to be a casual suggestion. It sounds more like a plea.
Instead of answering, David kisses him. “Next time,” he says. Coming from David, it sounds like a promise.
*****
Michael wakes up early, disoriented by sunlight streaming into the room from a different direction than usual. It takes him a moment, but he remembers. His new place. Their new place. The cost was eye-watering—even now, the thrifty Michael shudders to think of it—but after five years, he and David have their own home in London, together. Five years of back and forth, of mornings and nights, of waking up together and going to bed together. Five years of arguments and making up, five years of family issues, five years of Internet gossip and paparazzi photos. Michael always feels sorry for those photographers. They can't be making much off a picture of him and David holding hands outside a restaurant in Tower Hamlets, or at a theatre in Stratford.
“Good morning,” David murmurs. Michael turns to face him.
“Morning.”
David glances at the clock. “Mm. You're up early.” He grins, that same smile Michael fell in love with years ago. Fell in love with at that infernal wrap party, if he's honest. “Got somewhere to go?”
“Nowhere at all,” Michael replies, and pulls David close.