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All in all, Charles was rather proud of himself.
He’d meticulously worked out Erik’s schedule for the week, which had taken some doing since it was mid-December already and Erik always piled on obligations at the end of the semester, as if he didn’t have enough things on his plate already. He’d double-, triple-, quadruple-checked that Erik’s roommates had already left for home for the holidays. He’d sneakily swiped Erik’s apartment key the last time he’d visited, knowing Erik never used it anyway and had probably forgotten it even existed. He’d figured out how to tie the damned bow around himself, no thanks to the ridiculously complicated YouTube tutorial Raven had forwarded him yesterday. And he was at least ten minutes ahead of schedule, which gave him ample time to wander around the living room trying to decide on where to get situated.
He had just settled on the couch, tugging at the huge red bow around his middle so that it tastefully covered the most important bits, and was in the process of shooing Erik’s cat away from the curling ribbon ends of the bow when he sensed someone approaching the door. A quick mental brush confirmed that it was Erik, and Charles’s heart leaped into his throat.
Terror and doubt rushed dizzyingly over him all at once. Suppose he’d been reading all the signals wrong? Suppose Erik wasn’t really interested in him? Suppose Erik was appalled Charles had essentially broken into his home to proposition him naked? Or worse—suppose Erik laughed?
He’s supposed to laugh, Charles told himself sternly, clutching at the couch cushions to keep from flinging himself off them and fleeing out the nearest exit, be it door or window. He’s supposed to laugh so it isn’t awkward, and then he’s supposed to be turned on, that’s the whole point.
Charles had spent the entire week envisioning how this moment would play out, and he was relatively certain of how Erik would react. He’d be shocked, of course, but he wouldn’t be angry, or offended. He liked when his partners were forward, hadn’t he said as much to Charles once? And what could possibly be more forward than slapping a giant bow on oneself and lounging naked on the couch, ready to be discovered?
The lock slid open. Charles could easily picture the little motion Erik made with his fingers, the same one he made whenever he unlocked anything with his powers. Practically vibrating with adrenaline, excitement, and fear, he propped himself up on his elbows and affected a very casual expression.
The door swung open, and Erik entered, arms full of groceries. He didn’t immediately spot Charles over the paper bags, so Charles said nonchalantly, “Hello, darling.”
Erik jumped. “Jesus, Charles, what the hell are you doing—”
Then he lowered the bags enough to see Charles lying there and stopped dead in his tracks. As his eyes widened, taking in the scene, Charles forced himself not to squirm in embarrassment and instead gave his best smirk. He was fairly certain he was blushing, but—well, past boyfriends and girlfriends both had informed him that he was very pretty when he blushed.
“Charles,” Erik croaked.
“Erik,” Charles replied, his smirk growing. He wiggled his hips a little, causing the bow to shift. Erik’s eyes followed the motion like a fish on a line.
“Charles, you can’t be here,” Erik said, strangled. He looked close to passing out. “Not like that, what the fuck—”
Charles’s smirk faded. “Oh.” The panic and disbelief practically pouring off of Erik struck him like a slap to the face. “Oh god, this was a bad idea, wasn’t it? It’s too much? Oh god, Erik, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.” Why the hell had he left his clothes on the armchair across the fucking room? “I’ll—I’ll just get dressed—”
In his haste to scramble up from the couch, the admittedly haphazard knot on the bow came loose, and the whole thing fell to ribbons at Charles’s feet. Charles yelped, face burning scarlet. Erik made a sound like someone had just stamped on his windpipe. And at that exact moment, Erik’s mother appeared in the doorway behind him, arms laden with a second round of groceries.
“Erik, what are you doing standing there like a lump?” she tutted. “We need to get started on the latkes before…”
Her eyes fell on Charles, who had never in his life experienced such mortification that it felt like every organ in his body was shriveling up and crumbling to dust. If he hadn’t been so frozen with horror, he might have just collapsed straight to the floor like one of those goats that fell over when they were frightened.
“Um,” Erik said intelligently.
“Charles,” Edie said, her voice very measured. It was utterly impossible to read her expression.
“Hello, Mrs. Lehnsherr,” Charles said politely. He had no idea what spirit possessed his body right then, but he was glad for the way it piloted him over to the armchair and scooped up his clothes, calm as you please. He walked down the hall to Erik’s bedroom, into the bathroom, and shut the door.
The cat was busy scratching at her litterbox and turned to glare at Charles as if he had interrupted some intricate ritual. Charles whispered, “Want to switch places?”
She went back to scratching. Charles mechanically put his clothes on and then, before he could think better of it, went out to Erik’s bedroom and hauled open the window.
He heard Erik call his name from inside and jumped before Erik’s voice could get any closer. Thank god Erik lived on the first floor—breaking an arm or a leg in his escape would truly be the greatest of all indignities. Erik shouted his name again, more insistent this time, and Charles bolted.
Three blocks away, he groped in his pockets for his MetroCard and came up empty. Confused, he patted all his pockets over again and—nothing. But he’d had it on his way to Erik’s place so…
He had to stop for a moment to close his eyes in existential despair. He must have dropped it somewhere in between getting dressed and leaping out the window. Which meant he’d have a long trek home.
Plenty of time to figure out a way to fake his own death and disappear to an island in the Atlantic no one had ever heard of, Charles thought pragmatically.
By the time he got home, sweaty and out of breath and worn out, the only thing he wanted to do was collapse into a hot shower and pray that the entire afternoon had been some sort of hellish nightmare concocted by his sleep-deprived brain. His hand shook as he fumbled the key into the lock and twisted it open.
“Took you long enough,” Erik said.
Charles screamed.
Erik stood in the hallway, arms crossed, scowling. Charles simply gaped at him, unable to process the reality of Erik being here. In Charles’s apartment.
Somehow words made it through the constriction in Charles’s throat. “What—what are you doing here?”
“You literally jumped out of my bedroom window,” Erik said, each word slow and deliberate. “Did you think I wasn’t going to come after you?”
“Did it not occur to you that when people jump out of windows to get away, they generally prefer not to be chased?” Charles demanded, incredulous. Then he took a closer look at Erik: pristine hair, sweatshirt not at all rumpled or sweated through, jeans. Clearly he hadn’t sprinted like Charles had. “How the hell did you get here before me?”
“Trains are usually faster than people, believe it or not.” Erik held up a MetroCard. “You dropped this.”
“You didn’t have to return it right away.”
“What, and give you time to flee the country?”
“I was not going to—”
“It’s the first thing you say anytime something remotely terrible happens to you,” Erik interrupted. “Don’t act like I don’t know you.”
Charles flushed. “Well. Thanks for bringing that by. You should probably get going now.”
He shifted to the side of the door. Erik didn’t budge. He merely stood where he was, gazing at Charles now with an inscrutable look in his eyes that made Charles want to jump out the nearest window all over again.
“Well?” Charles said, faintly exasperated now. “Can you please leave so I can get started on drowning myself in the bath?”
Erik raised an eyebrow. “We aren’t going to talk about what happened?”
Charles suppressed a world-weary sigh. Pluto would be deemed a planet again before Erik let anything go. “What is there to talk about? Besides the fact that I just flashed you and your mother and then ran away?”
“You really think there’s nothing in there to unpack?” Erik said dryly.
“Not at all,” Charles said, turning on his poshest accent, the one that Erik always found irritating and ridiculous. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I require some alone time.”
He forced himself to close the distance between them and squeeze past Erik to continue down the hall. He was half-afraid Erik would reach out to catch him, but he only trailed a few steps behind and asked, “How am I going to get answers out of you if you drown yourself in the bath?”
“You’re brilliant. I have faith you’ll find a way. There’s psychics, you know. And ouija boards.”
Charles tried to push the bathroom door open, but it refused to give. It took a very great effort not to start banging his head against the wood in frustration.
“I’d rather be proactive,” Erik said from behind him, so close that Charles could almost feel the heat of him.
Whatever god existed in the universe was clearly curious to see if Charles could die of humiliation. After a moment of resting his forehead against the bathroom door, he took a deep breath, turned, and forced his eyes up to Erik’s.
For a long moment, they simply stared at each other. At the very least, Erik didn’t seem…disgusted with him. He didn’t seem furious either. His gaze roved over Charles’s face, keen and searching. Not knowing what else to do, Charles studied him in return, profoundly relieved when he couldn’t detect any revulsion, or anger.
“You turned up at my place,” Erik said slowly, “naked. With a bow.”
Charles winced. Put so starkly, it really did make him seem completely daft, didn’t it? “I am so sorry. I don’t know what got into me. I thought—” He shook his head sharply. “Never mind what I thought. It was—inappropriate, to say the least, and I—I understand if you’d rather not see me again after that—”
“You’re my best friend,” Erik broke in. “You really think I’d end our friendship over something like that?”
“Well…maybe?” When Erik continued to stare at him as if Charles had just announced his intentions to run for president of the moon, Charles blurted out, “I came onto you! I practically ambushed you in your own apartment! And your mother saw me! Like that! That’s not nothing, Erik!”
“No, it’s not nothing,” Erik said, much more calmly than Charles thought was warranted for the situation. “So that’s what you were doing? Coming onto me?”
“I was naked, Erik! I had a fucking bow on my cock!”
Erik’s lips twitched. Charles felt suddenly like hitting him.
“Oh piss off,” he said irritably, shoving past Erik again and making his way back to the kitchen. If Erik wasn’t going to let him barricade himself in the bathroom, then he was at least going to make a pot of tea.
“You have to admit,” Erik said, following after him. “It was pretty funny.”
“Oh yes, it was hilarious,” Charles said scathingly, practically slamming the kettle down on the stove. “Not only has my best friend seen me naked, now his mother’s seen me naked as well, which means I can’t look either of them in the eye ever again. My only options are to flee to a non-extradition country or post the whole story on reddit for some pity upvotes from people feeling sorry for me for getting rejected and humiliated all in one day—”
“Hang on, who said you got rejected?”
Charles froze for a split second. Then, trying to cover up the way his heart was stuttering in his chest, he said evenly, “Well, I think it’s a rather moot point now.”
“A moot point?” Erik echoed, sounding more than a little exasperated now. “Are you fucking kidding me, Charles? You can’t just—do that, and then act like we can get over it without talking about it!”
“I just don’t think there’s much to say beyond—”
“Do you have feelings for me?”
Charles shut his mouth. When he tried to turn back to the kettle, Erik grabbed his arm. “Don’t run away,” Erik said, close and fierce. “Not again.”
Something deep inside Charles trembled—with fear, or desire, or longing, Charles had no idea. He felt a sudden, strange surety that if he brushed Erik off, if he made a joke, if he lied, he would never get this chance again.
“I’ve been in love with you since sophomore year,” Charles said softly, fixing his gaze on Erik’s throat. “Longer than that, probably, but I didn’t realize it until then.”
When he finally dug up the courage to raise his eyes to Erik’s, he found Erik staring back at him with open wonder and disbelief. Biting down on the urge to backtrack wildly, Charles forced himself to wait through one agonizing moment of silence, then another, then another.
Finally, Erik lifted his hand. Charles held very still as Erik cupped his cheek, his thumb brushing over Charles’s lower lip.
“You idiot,” Erik said at last, fervently. Then he bent and pressed their mouths together.
As a telepath, Charles could count on one hand the number of times someone had genuinely surprised him. The moment it clicked that Erik was kissing him—Erik was kissing him!—Charles made an undignified, confused, squeaking noise against Erik’s mouth, which made Erik pull back, brows furrowed. And Charles couldn’t have that, so he seized two fistfuls of Erik’s sweatshirt and yanked him back in for a second, better kiss.
When Erik finally pulled back a minute or ten later, Charles was reeling and breathless. Erik smirked. “Good?”
“I may have to apologize to Moira,” Charles gasped. “I once told her confidently that I was the best kisser in New York.”
“Oh?” Erik said, radiating immense smugness. “That good?”
“To be fair, I was drunk at the time,” Charles said, his head still spinning slightly. “And to be fair, I hadn’t kissed you at the time.”
Erik wrapped his arms around Charles, tugging him closer. “I think we’d better try it again,” he murmured, bending to nuzzle at Charles’s cheek. “You know, for science.”
“Empirical data and all that,” Charles agreed vaguely, distracted by the overwhelming reality of having Erik so near, of having Erik touching him.
“And,” Erik added, pressing a kiss to the corner of Charles’s mouth, “I’d like to get a better look at what was under that bow.”
Charles groaned. “Can we never talk about that ever again?”
“Oh no,” Erik said, his smile curving against Charles’s cheek, “you’re never living that down.”
Charles buried his face against Erik’s shoulder, knowing he must be red all over. “Your mother,” he moaned into Erik’s sweatshirt. “She must think I’m—I’m—indecent—”
“My mother loves you and you know it,” Erik said with a laugh, hugging him close. He kissed Charles’s hair firmly. “Honestly, she was worried you hurt yourself falling out the window. If I hadn’t gone after you, she would’ve done it herself.”
“I climbed very gracefully out the window,” Charles grumbled.
“Yeah, and you managed to drop your MetroCard and your phone in the bushes.”
He reached reflexively for his phone in his back pocket and, sure enough, found nothing.
“So I’ll never be James Bond,” he sighed.
“No,” Erik agreed, “but if you were James Bond, I probably wouldn’t love you so much.”
Charles reared back, eyes wide. “You…”
Erik laughed at his expression. “Why are you surprised? I’ve been in love with you forever. Practically since the day we met. Honestly, you’re a terrible telepath. Has anyone ever told you that?”
“Raven only mentions it every time we talk,” Charles said, barely hearing his own words. He swallowed hard. Something had reached into his chest and seized a hold of his heart. With difficulty, he managed, “You’re in love with me?”
Erik’s expression softened. “I’m in love with you. Really.”
“Really,” Charles repeated, feeling very stupid.
“Maybe you did hit your head on the way out the window,” Erik teased.
“Maybe I knocked myself out and this is a coma dream,” Charles said, nodding. Somehow that sounded more plausible than this: Erik holding him, kissing him, loving him.
“Alright,” Erik declared, kissing his forehead. “I can feel you thinking too hard. You’re going to sit down. I’m going to make you tea.”
“You don’t have to—”
“Charles,” Erik said sternly, “sit down.”
Charles sat. And slowly, as Erik bustled around his kitchen making tea exactly the way Charles liked it, humming a song Charles didn’t recognize as he did, reality began to sink in. He loved Erik. Erik loved him. Somehow, against all odds, he hadn’t blown his life up in the most spectacular fashion.
After a few minutes, Erik set a steaming mug down in front of him. He waited until Charles had taken several calming sips, then said casually, “You know, today’s only the first day of Hanukkah.”
Charles frowned quizzically. “Yes?”
“I’m just saying, it’s going to be hard to top today’s gift,” Erik continued, grinning wolfishly. “I can’t wait to see what you’re going to put a bow on tomorrow.”
Blushing, Charles took another steadying sip of tea and said primly, “That depends.”
Erik arched an eyebrow. “On?”
“On what you do with your present today.”
“Oh.” Erik’s eyes darkened. “Challenge very much accepted.”
And—well, Charles could hardly be expected to finish his tea after that.