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Howard sometimes sleeps through his alarm in the mornings. He still has a clock radio. It’s tuned to a local jazz station, but set to a volume barely higher than a whisper to avoid setting off Vince’s allergies and giving him night terrors. If the morning DJ is on a run of particularly peaceful songs, it’s all too easy for Howard to snooze an extra fifteen minutes. Luckily, he’s still the first one up every morning, so his roommates haven’t ever noticed.
He never sleeps through this alarm, though — the thunk, thunk, creeeak, “Shit!,” thunk soundtrack of high-heeled boots trying to be quiet on the stairs from the shop to the flat, but inevitably forgetting about that one squeaky step Naboo keeps claiming he’ll have fixed.
By the time Vince’s head pops up on the landing, Howard’s already propped himself up on his elbows and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. His book, splayed open with pages down across his chest, slides down his vest to rest on his stomach.
Vince spots him on the sofa immediately and grins. “Alright, Howard. Still up?”
“Still up,” Howard lies, watching the rest of Vince gradually appear in the flat. Howard isn’t trendy. He can’t tell cottagecore from boho, but he’s aware enough of Vince’s preferred styles to know it was a goth night from the way his friend is dressed — not only all in black, but with a tattered sort of red plaid skirt, straps and spikes crisscrossing on his chunky boots, and hair teased to almost twice its usual height. His carefully-applied black eyeliner has smeared in the hours since he left the house, forming deep, blurry rings beneath his bright blue eyes, and Howard sits up a little straighter at that, but there’s no tell-tale redness to Vince’s face that would indicate tears.
Just in case, he asks, “Good night out?”
Vince beams and kneels to start the long process of unbuckling his boots. “Absolutely genius. You would have loved it. You should come next time!” He flops onto his butt gracelessly to tug one shoe off, wriggling his toes in their pink sock, legs splayed and skirt hiked, before tackling the other side.
“Maybe.” Howard is pretty sure he would not have loved it, and by the time Vince circles back around to the goth club in his rotation of nights out, he’ll have forgotten he ever asked Howard to come anyway. “What was so brilliant about it this time?”
“Well,” Vince huffs. The other boot pulls free. The other set of toes dance in a different, though still pink, sock house. “You know how Jacques le Cube’s flat burned down last year in that glitter bonfire?”
“Sure.” Howard can’t keep the amusement from his voice. He doesn’t remember any such thing, but it’s not important.
“So he hasn’t been out to the clubs in ages after that fiasco with the reconstructive surgery, and tonight was meant to be his big return.” Vince uses the stair rail to haul himself back to his feet. He leaves his boots lying flat like so many discarded candy wrappers and darts into the bathroom. Howard hears the taps scream, the rush of water filling the tub, then Vince reappears and flounces into their bedroom, skirt swinging, hairspray-stiff hair unmoved. “He’s had a name change and everything.”
Howard raises his voice a bit, trying to walk the line between being heard and not waking Naboo — or worse, Bollo. “What’s the new name?”
“Jake the Sphere.” Vince’s answer floats through the living room.
“Wow. That plastic surgeon must be a menace.”
“I heard he had to flee the country. Jacq— I mean, Jake, he knows some pretty powerful people. The shape mafia.”
Peace settles over the flat again, silent save some faint shuffling from the bedroom, barely audible over the rush of water still running. Whisps of steam escape the bathroom, catching the light in the hall before vanishing like shy ghosts. Howard digs through the couch cushions until he finds a crumpled receipt from the Tesco and uses that to mark his page.
When Vince reappears, he’s swaddled in his favorite kimono, a pair of fuzzy unicorn slippers on his feet. He shuffles out into the hall, unicorn heads bobbing, a contrasting image beneath the dark hair on his calves, and pauses in the doorway to look back over his shoulder at the sofa.
“Coming?” He asks, and Howard is already on his feet.
It’s become such a routine now, they move around one another in the cramped bathroom like clockwork pieces in an old cuckoo clock. Howard perches on the closed toilet, book balanced on his knees, as Vince steps up to the mirror. His blue eyes stay fixed on his own reflection even as he reaches for items around the sink, knowing by memory and feel where everything is — the face wipes, the rinse, the spray bottle, the comb. Once everything is lined up, balanced on the sink’s edge, he turns on the water and begins the routine.
Howard looks away long enough to shut off the bath — Vince is prone to forgetting, leaving it to overflow, and besides, he turns the water so hot he’ll cook himself like a lobster if there’s no time for the bath to cool down. When Howard settles back into his seat and looks again, Vince is just touching the makeup wipe to his forehead.
The first layer of the night peels away, and Howard leans back, propping his head up on the wall. His eyes are aching from being awake so late, and it’s tempting to let them close, let himself drift while Vince hums snatches of songs from the club, but this is one of his favorite parts.
He never watches Vince get ready. Vince wouldn’t let him, for one thing. He likes the big reveal of making every wardrobe change a surprise. But Howard gets to watch this part, the disassembly, and he likes that better anyway. Bit by bit, Vince cleans away the sweat, the layers of foundation and eyeliner and all of that, the lipstick — his own and ghosts of others — and as the seconds tick by Vince Noir, Prince of Camden, disappears, and the other Vince (home Vince, watching bad films with popcorn and nutella toast Vince, laughs at stupid jokes until his nose goes snotty Vince, Howard’s Vince, the real Vince) stares back at them both from the bathroom mirror.
After he’s splashed water on his fake and dragged the comb through his mane, breaking some of the product stiffness (and breaking a few teeth from yet another comb), Vince turns to untie the belt on his kimono, and Howard averts his eyes to the floor.
Nothing he hasn’t seen before, of course, but it never feels right to look on these nights. He waits until he hears the slip of water lapping at the rim of the tub, followed by Vince’s tell-tale sigh when the water climbs his chest. Then, Howard slips off the toilet and turns, sitting on the bathmat with his back pressed to the cold porcelain edge of their clawfoot tub.
With legs stretched out, his toes brush the opposite wall. He rests his book on his knees, holding onto it as he asks, “So, what happened with Jake?”
The scrape of a lid unscrewing from one of the many jars on the nearby shelf, and then the scent of lavender fills the little room. “Hm?” Vince has lost the thread already.
“Jake the Sphere? How was the big coming out party?”
Water sloshes, high enough to dampen a spot on the back of Howard’s shirt. “Oh! Right. So, the scene was all set for a grand entrance. They hired some new DJ who was absolutely mental. He was mixing The Cure with train crash noises and then layering in a chorus of dying seagulls, I think. It sounded insane. Bob Fossil was there, the tit. He climbed up to one of the cages and threw the dancer onto the floor, but she came back later with her boyfriend, and I have never seen Bob run so fast.”
“I didn’t know he could run at all.”
“Apparently, if a rugby player who’s half rhinoceros is chasing him.” Vince sighs again, sinking further into the tub. Each little splash spikes the scent of lavender in the room, and before Howard knows it his eyes are half closed, head lolling. He straightens up and blinks back sleep when Vince says, “I missed how the fight started.”
“The fight?” Howard blinks hard again, as if it will help unclog his ears or shake the warmth from his brain. “With Bob Fossil?”
“No, this was a bit later. I think it was some friend of the DJ, maybe. There was some bloke stumbling around up by the stage area, ranting. I was staying well out of it, chatting up a couple goth girls in one of the booths. Things were going pretty well; they were totally into me, and then Jake made his big entrance.”
“Was it good?”
The water sloshes at Howard’s back — a shrug. “It was alright, I guess.” There’s a thickness in Vince’s voice that means it was great, actually. Good enough to make him jealous. Howard smiles. “But then right when the music paused, someone threw a punch.
“It was absolute madness! No one knew why they were fighting or who started it, I think. People just started punching and shoving one another. They jab this way! They punch that way! Someone’s clothes went off. It was like an orgy took E and then stumbled into a mosh pit.” Furious splashing. Vince is talking with his hands, as usual. He taps the back of Howard’s head with one of his flailing gestures on accident and draws back. “Sorry. It was well chaotic. I barely managed to get out of the crowd in time to avoid it myself. Had to use my jungle skills to leap from the booth to the rafters, hung up there upside down like a possum and had a view of the whole thing.”
Picturing Vince in his goth getup, arms and legs wrapped around a rafter and dangling over a massive fight in a dark club, Howard huffs a laugh. So far, nothing Vince has described would make Howard remotely want to join him on the next outing, but he would have liked to see that bit.
“I think they’d have gone on fighting forever, but then someone knocked Jake into the bar. Caved his head in.” The bathroom goes quiet, then Vince adds, “Not seriously, of course. Wouldn’t be a good story, then. But, you know, he’s had all that work done now. They bumped him and the next thing you know The Sphere is more like The Cone.”
Howard snorts. “Oh god. He’s not going to change his name all over again, is he? Jack the Cone.”
“Jock the Cylinder.”
“Jim the Pyramid.”
“Jemima the Pentagonal Prism.”
They both dissolve into giggles at that. Something undeniably hilarious about the words ‘pentagonal prism.’ A cap clicks open, the sound echoing off the bathroom tile, and then the smell of citrus intertwines with the lavender bath salts. Howard rolls his shoulders and runs a hand over the cover of his book.
He bites back a yawn. “What happened after the fight ended?”
Vince launches back into the story of the evening, settling into a familiar patter as he washes up — names of people Howard can’t remember meeting, fashion terms he’s heard but never understood, bands and songs the DJ played and how they made Vince feel energized or dismayed or alluring. Howard hums in the appropriate places, strokes the cover of his book and the embossed gold letters, and debates if Vince would notice, much less care, if he multitasked and read a few paragraphs right now.
Then, Vince sighs, and Howard stills. That sigh is out of place. In the melody they’ve established these nights, the rhythm of behaviors, this doesn’t fit. “Something wrong, little man?”
Faint splashing, like fingers running through the bathwater, tracing patterns that disappear in an instant. Vince’s voice is quiet between the drips of the faucet. “Just thinkin’ about something. You like my hair, Howard?”
“Of course I do.” That shouldn’t even be a question. “Everyone likes your hair. It’s your strongest feature.”
“That’s what I thought too, till tonight.”
Howard twists around so he can see Vince’s face. It’s an impulse he immediately regrets, considering how much of Vince he can now see in general. The water is milky and slightly opaque from the bath salts and soap residue, so most of Vince’s body below the waist is obscured, provided Howard doesn’t look too hard. He’s still, however, treated to a full view of the long line of Vince’s bare torso, ribs too near the surface beneath pale skin and stubble dotting his chest where he shaves for those ridiculous jumpsuits he wears now.
All in all, Howard can’t see much more of Vince than he could in a jumpsuit or during a satsuma battle, but the context of the moment — the bath, the wee morning hour — leaves Howard feeling like he himself is exceptionally naked.
Blaming the flush of his cheeks on the steam in the room, Howard forces himself to zero in on his friend’s downcast eyes. “Did one of those empty-headed bastards say something to you?” It’s not unheard of for Vince’s Camden crowd to verge on the catty side — a term that’s being generous. With his sunshiney demeanor, Vince draws in all types of people. Then, he’s too nice, too worried about keeping his reputation, to tell them off when they’re being assholes.
“Nothing like that,” Vince says, and Howard relaxes a bit. But Vince is still looking down into the water, skimming his fingers across the milky surface instead of washing up. Before Howard can press the question, he blurts out, “Geoff said long hair is on its way out. Boys and girls alike; androgyny is all about shaved heads and pixie cuts now.”
Howard stares. He’s seen Vince with short hair, briefly, once or twice. They both prefer to pretend those incidents never happened. The concept of Vince strolling in with his head shaved is — “What the hell could someone named Geoff possibly know about hair that you don’t?”
Vince sits up, turning to face Howard, who quickly averts his eyes as the water sloshes about in revealing ways. “Geoff’s only Cheekbone’s best ninja! He gets to read the issues before they’re even out. He’s my secret source.”
A secret Cheekbone ninja. Howard can’t possibly compete with that opinion, but he finds himself pinching his own arm beneath the lip of the tub, where Vince can’t see. “You’re not seriously considering shaving it?” The very thought makes him want to wring his own arm like a damp flannel.
Vince nibbles his lower lip and stares at the subway tile on the bathroom wall. “Maybe it could do with a trim. Something more reasonable.”
“Since when do you care about reasonable?” Howard’s little outburst echoes in the tiny room. Classic bathroom acoustics. He should try writing some new songs in here. “It’s not as if no one’s ever tried to get you to cut it before. Remember that time at school?”
Just like that, they’re distracted, pulled out of the tense chat into a crimp about their old primary school and its uniform regulations.
It’s a brief fling with shared memory, and then the words fade and Vince stirs his hand through the bath water again. “That was different. The people were different from the types I hang out with now. I don’t want to fall behind.” He purses his lips, and Howard can see his brain cell struggling, trying to find a work around to get Howard on board. “Short hair would be a lot easier — less styling in the mornings, and it’s easier to wash. Faster, too. Shorter showers.”
“If you’re just trying to get out of washing it every day, I’ll wash it,” Howard snips, then pauses, running his tongue over the roof of his mouth. He hadn’t known he was going to say that until he had, and that makes him uncomfortable… though not as uncomfortable as the thought of Vince cutting his hair.
Vince, who’s staring at him, eyes the size of saucers. “Really?”
That look always activates Howard’s most stubborn instincts. He firms his shoulders, raises his chin, and says, “Really, sir. If that’s what it takes.”
Vince is watching Howard like he’s a patch of ice on a winter sidewalk. In the heels he wears, Vince has developed a killer instinct for where to step. “You remember what I used to say when we were little, Howard? About what I’d do when we grew up and got famous?”
“Rent every ice cream truck in town to come to your birthday party and have a snowball fight using all your favorite flavors?”
“No, the other one.” Vince’s face splits into a grin. “That one is genius too, though. I’m keeping that. I meant about washing my hair.”
Oh, right. That was one of Vince’s favorite dreams back when they were at school. Every time he went to the salon and got a new style, he’d always be lying up against Howard, blissed out and smelling like wildflowers and candy from all the product in his blonde mop. When I’m famous, I’m never washing my own hair again. I’ll hire someone else to do it every morning.
Howard, who had never had a proper haircut from a professional, hadn’t understood that particular fantasy. But then, that was what it was often like, daydreaming with Vince. He had some truly incomprehensible ideas of what life would be like in the future. Compared to sewing machines that used candy floss for thread, having a personal hair washer wasn’t worth blinking at.
“I’m not going to be moping around the flat, coming at your beck and call every morning when you wake up,” Howard warns. “You’ll have to adapt to my schedule, be awake at seven on the dot and ready to go.”
It’s an exaggeration, seven. Howard likes to think he wakes at seven, but his alarm is set for eight-thirty. Still, Vince doesn’t know that, and he wrinkles his nose. “Maybe we should do a test run. Maybe it’ll be rubbish, actually. I mean, you’re not trained. You don’t even know how to do a scalp massage.”
“Of course I do. I’ll come at your scalp so hard, your toes will fall off. You’ll have to buy smaller shoes.”
Vince chokes, giggling into his hands until Howard is grinning along with him. “Don’t think that’s ideal either,” he gasps between laughing. “But why not? Give it a try.”
Howard freezes. “Now?”
“Sure.” Vince shrugs and trails his hand through the tub. “I’m already in the bath, and the water’s getting cold.”
There’s still steam rising off the tub thanks to how committed Vince is to boiling himself every night. He’s a liar, but he does have a point. And Howard did say he could do it.
“Alright,” Howard turns himself properly to kneel facing the tub, setting his book aside on the bathmat. His eyes are firmly fixed to the bathroom wall, and he reaches for his wrists to roll up his sleeves before remembering he’s worn a short sleeved shirt. He doesn’t blush at that. It’s not going to chart at all on the list of Most Embarrassing things he’s doing tonight. “Let’s do it.”
In answer, Vince sinks further into the tub, sliding down the porcelain. His pale knees rise out of the water like a pair of beluga whales surfacing to breathe, and his dark hair fans out where it hits the surface, floating around his face. Howard has the ridiculous, somewhat hysterical image of Vince’s pointy face as a sort of island — his nose, a volcano rising from the rock, and his hair the reef.
Howard glances at the shelves where Vince stashes his products — row after row of many-colored bottles in various stages of squish. Howard’s shelf has one bottle and a disposable razor. Bollo has more hair product than he does, but then, arguably Bollo does have more hair, even if he does only bathe once a month.
“Just the front two, on the bottom,” Vince says, relieving Howard of the need to ask. Then, he grins. “Oh, my voice sounds well weird with my ears underwater. Howard, you hear that?”
Smiling, Howard shakes his head as he reaches for the two bottles. “No, they’re your ears, you berk. I can’t hear with them.”
“Oh.” Vince purses his lips. “Too bad. It’d sound good for singing.”
That’s a thought. Howard spends the next few seconds on autopilot, glancing over the bottles of product but thinking about underwater mic rigs and actual sea funk.
“The pink one’s the shampoo,” Vince says suddenly, and Howard jumps a little, jolting back into the present. Right. Vince’s hair.
“I knew that,” he says defensively. “I can read.”
Vince’s knees climb closer to his chest, sinking him further in the tub. “If you’ve changed your mind…,” he begins, and Howard promptly inverts the shampoo bottle over his palm.
The viscous stuff is translucent, a pale pinkish orange, and the smell of sweet citrus overwhelms the last traces of lavender as Howard rubs his hands together, spreading the soap over his fingers. “Right. Sit up, then.”
For the first time in his life, Vince does as he’s told without a joke or a complaint. He folds himself forward, over his knees, and stares down the dripping faucet as Howard kneels on the bathmat to get closer. Vince’s normally fluffy hair hangs in limp strands that stick to his cheeks, and his pale back curves up out of the water, the knobs of his spine visible like a ring of rocks in a pond. Howard sees Vince half-dressed often enough (too often, some might say), but he can’t remember the last time he saw Vince with wet hair. The question brings up a brief flash of memory — Vince in his school uniform on Howard’s doorstep, ragged blonde locks sluiced to his head from a storm, shivering as the water ran in rivulets over his baby fat-rounded cheeks.
Try as he might to pull up more of that image, Howard can’t seem to remember the when or why of it. When the space between his temples starts to ache, he gives up. He’s procrastinating, anyway. Spindly arms wrapped around his knees, the present day Vince shivers too, and Howard takes a fortifying breath.
When his fingertips sink into Vince’s wet locks, Howard can see his thin shoulders tense. He half expects to hear a snapped Don’t touch me before it strikes him how odd that would be. He’s just not used to Vince flinching away from touch, not even when his hair is involved, not when it’s Howard.
But the stiffness dissipates as soon as Howard begins to move his hands. It’s not much different that washing his own hair, really, aside from the change of angle and unfamiliar shampoo. He settles into the motion pretty quickly, and when Vince tilts his head back, pressing harder into the touch, Howard takes that as the go ahead to play around a bit.
It’s kind of fun, once he gets into it. He tries changing up the pressure, using his nails to give the scalp a good scratch under Vince’s fringe, then tracing firm patterns into the back of his head, pressing his fingers in different patterns like he’s playing the trumpet. They both sprinkle commentary into the room at first.
“Is that okay?”
“Perfect. Bit harder behind— Yeah.”
“Can I— ?”
“Just be careful of the ears.”
As he continues, Howard slowly becomes aware that he’s spent far longer scrubbing Vince’s scalp than he’d spend on an entire shower for himself. Vince’s comments have stopped, replaced instead with sounds — a quiet hum, a sigh, a small grunt. When Howard leans forward, eyes darting to Vince’s face, he finds his friend’s eyes have fallen closed. Vince’s features are relaxed, lips parted, dark lashes fanning high cheek bones. There’s a slight flush to his skin although the water has, in fact, cooled. He looks small, open, beyond sleepy into something more like a dream state.
His lashes flutter, slitted blue peering out. “Howard?”
“Yeah?”
“You stopped.”
Howard feels his own face heat as he drops his hands into the soapy water behind Vince to clean off. “Er. Time for a rinse?”
As Vince sinks back into the tub to wet his hair again, Howard pretends to read the instructions on the conditioner bottle.
The conditioner, when he squeezes it into his flat palm, is thicker and opaque, a pale green substance that fills Howard’s nostrils with the scent of peppermint. As he coats his fingers with the stuff, Vince sits up and turns himself slightly in the tub, twisting so his back is more toward Howard.
Leaning up on his knees, Howard begins to comb the conditioner through the black strands, starting from Vince’s temples. At this angle of approach, the view is different. He’s taller than Vince like this, and looking down at him it’s impossible not to notice a dozen little things — the line of his throat where he tilts his head back, the darker shadows visible under his eyes from exhaustion and lingering dark makeup, the rise of his profile, or the way the water makes his hair look even darker and longer than it is.
Vince’s eyes stay closed, but he sighs, content, as Howard’s musician fingers coax the minty conditioner into his hair from the hairline to the very tips. Even after the last of the conditioner is in, Howard can’t resist a few more passes, petting Vince’s head like he might stroke a cat’s back and watching as Vince similarly leans into the touch.
“There,” Howard pronounces, more to force himself to stop than to boss Vince around. He splashes his hands through the water at the back of the tub, then adds, “You can rinse again.”
Vince’s eyes peel open slowly, remaining slitted. “Cheers,” he mutters before sliding back below the surface, dark hair floating like moss around him.
In the long minutes they’ve passed in the bath — Howard refuses to look at his watch, doesn’t want to even think about how late it is — the soap suds have popped and the salts have dissolved. The water is no longer so milky opaque as it once was, a fact which Howard notices when Vince’s knees climb back into the air. If Howard focused, now, he’d be able to make out the details of Vince’s body beneath the water. He can already see the angry slash of his burn scar glaring across his hip. Howard zeroes in on the subway tiles behind him instead, doing a thorough check of the grout for any sign of mildew.
After a few seconds, Vince’s head rises from the water again. The temperature in the tub is lukewarm at best, but Vince’s cheeks are a charming shade of pink.
“Do you need anything else?” Howard asks. He’s heard of lather, rinse, repeat in Vince’s many beauty mantras. He’s well prepared to groan and sigh and banter, then do the whole process over again, but Vince shakes his head.
“I’m just gonna finish up.” Howard nods. A beat of silence, and then Vince puts on the veneer of his punk sneer and adds, “Oi, little privacy maybe?”
“Oh, right.” Howard scrambles to his feet and engages in a dance that was perhaps choreographed by a blind penguin and an apprentice librarian — standing, then looking around for his book when it drops, averting his eyes, feeling around on the floor for the book while keeping his gaze fixed on the wall, and finally when he’s able to seize the spine of his novel, practically jogging backwards from the room, the sound of Vince’s delighted cackle chasing after him.
He shuts the bathroom door and releases all the breath from his lungs. His traitorous, awful brain jumps into action immediately, serving up generous helpings of memory of images, sounds, a whole buffet of ridiculous and potentially mortifying things that just happened in the bathroom. Howard, on instinct, stomps them. Those are for being paralyzed by later, when his head chooses to replay them at the most random possible moments, leaving him jittery and confused for no apparent reason.
For now, he quashes them and shuffles into the bedroom. His book goes on the bedside table, and he swiftly strips down to his pants and changes into a pair of comfortable, fawn and beige-striped pajama pants before sliding into bed. Clicking off his lamp dims the light in the room, but doesn’t extinguish it — Vince’s side is still lit by that absolute fire hazard he insists on having by his bed, a floor lamp with several scarves draped over the shade. No matter how many times Howard lectures him on fire safety, the scarves come back. Vince insists the lamp is, in fact, a scarf tree, and it sprouts them. Howard may not know much about clothes, but he knows bullshit when he smells it.
The edges of their bedroom window are glowing with false dawn when Howard lets his eyes drift closed, breathing deep. Through the gap in the door, he can hear echoing splashes from Vince’s bath and the deep growl of Bollo’s snoring from Naboo’s room, but aside from that the flat is silent. Howard drifts off to the muffled swish of water.
He wakes again, some unknown time later, as Vince pads into the room. He’s swaddled in his kimono with his hair in a towel. In the near-dark, he looks like a phantom, probably a wealthy young woman cruelly murdered by her spurned lover or something. Howard keeps his eyes half-closed, watching, knowing Vince will be up for hours still, working on projects while he waits for his hair to dry, and it’s one of the few parts of Vince’s life that Howard rarely gets to glimpse.
But he blows his own cover almost immediately, while Vince is still sorting combs and lotions by the vanity. Worn and pressed in on all sides by his need for sleep, Howard cracks a wide yawn.
On the other side of the room, Vince pauses. “‘oward?”
“Trying to sleep here, Vince.” Not that Howard can’t sleep through Vince talking at him. He’s been honing that particular skill since year six, after all.
For a second, Howard thinks Vince has actually listened to him. There’s nothing aside from the rustle of bottles being uncapped, and Howard lets his eyes fall closed, the lids still heavy. Then, of course, Vince speaks again. “You don’t haveta do that every night. I’m not cutting my hair. Geoff can piss off.”
Howard grunts, keeps his eyes closed tight. There’s a warmth in the center of his chest and a tickle on his tongue to say something more, but he tries to hold it in, doesn’t want to wind Vince up when it’s nearly dawn out.
He’s never been much good at restraint with Vince, though. Especially not when they’re alone in the wee hours. “What if I wanted to do it sometimes?” He says it so softly that for a moment in the following silence, he expects Vince didn’t hear him, and he’s glad of it.
When Vince answers, his voice is as quiet and warm as the sun edging past the curtains and creeping across their floor, “Yeah. Guess if you wanted to, that’d be alright.”
Howard falls asleep to the creak of Vince’s bed springs as he crawls up the mattress, a bundle of fabric under his arm and a sewing needle between his teeth. Outside, the earliest birds are chirping, rehearsing ahead of full-throated song, and Howard covers his ears with his pillow and buries his smile.