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Often it feels as though Ash’s entire life has been a series of collisions, some more serious than others.
Right now Sean’s hand is meeting his, skin warm and youthfully soft. He is moving gently, playfully, but Ash has to brace himself in order not to reel with the impact. The hairs on his arm rise anyway, and the shiver creeps over his whole body, the touch expanding across him like the ripple after a blow.
“Show me again,” Sean’s hand drifts; perhaps he learnt this trick of touching when he wants something from his sister, but Ash has never found a woman who used it so effectively, or with a better impression of innocence. “Show me again. I want to be good at this.”
Ash’s mouth is dry. The hotel room smells of artificial rose spray, the confetti over the bed drenched in the stuff; it’s like sitting on a piece of Turkish delight.
“You’ll never get good at anything if you learn when you’re drunk.”
“I had one glass of champagne. I’m allowed champagne. We got married.” Sean leans towards him, smiling and Ash stands up, walks across the hotel room through slatted sunset light to the mini-fridge, and tugs out a bottle of whiskey that right now looks far too small.
“Illegally married, and only until ten tomorrow morning when the con plays out. I think that makes it more of a Lambrini moment.”
“You know, I always wanted to be like Britney Spears.”
“Is that so? You understand I have more or less no idea what you’re referring to?”
Why won’t the cap come off the bottle? His hands are sliding on it, round and round the neck.
Behind him, Sean makes an irritated sound. “Why do you keep pretending to be old? You’re not old.”
“I’m older than you.” He’s hurting his fingers, twisting this bottle top, pressing red marks into his skin.
“And I’m taller than you are – do I win? Come on; show me again how to deal the cards that way. Like you did in the limo, come on.”
Long ago, when Ash started working the bit with the cars, he realised that the way to survive was to stop resisting, to relax, to bend so as not to break, and what applied to car crashes seemed to apply to life as well.
He’s not entirely sure why the fact that he doesn’t want to resist Sean at all makes him feel like he has to.
Somehow Sean has got right next to him, and Ash only realises it at the moment when Sean’s hands are touching his once more, reaching out to take the ridiculous little bottle and cracking it open.
“Do you want some, then?” Sean’s mouth is close to his ear, and he’s holding up the open drink; Ash catches the sharp astringent aroma of cheap whiskey as it burns in his nostrils. He turns around slowly; he’s let himself get backed up against the wall. Sean is not so much taller than he is but it’s enough to make him have to look up when they’re as close as this.
Ash can remember the first time he was hit by a speeding car. The pain was not the worst of it, nor the returning echoes of fear that still sometimes grab him by the throat in the night. It was the moment, the split second in which the brain can outrun what the body cannot, when he knew it was about to happen.
Sean is still smiling, slightly, his eyes dark and his cheeks flushed.
“Sean, you’re drunk. You don’t know what you’re doing.”
The eyes blink, more hurt in them than Ash had calculated to produce. But then Sean seems to throw off all his reasoning.
“I know you,” Sean protests, as if it’s an answer.
Ash shakes his head. “No, you don’t. Now let me pass and I’ll order us some dinner and we can...” He makes vague gestures with his hands; they really can play bloody cards, at that.
“You were first hit by a car when you were nineteen, though that wasn’t when you got your fracture – you didn’t get that from a car at all.” Sean backs away, even as his voice goes deeper and more intense. He is looking down at the carpet, suddenly changed from suave to gauche, and the colour rising in his cheeks seems to suggest it was the former that was the act. “You were going to buy a ring for your girlfriend and you weren’t looking because you were still so amazed she’d said ‘Yes’. You thought you’d be together forever, conning into your nineties.”
They had this conversation about two months ago. Sean can remember it, the long night he spent trying to write some software to disable a new kind of retinal scanner – going crazy somewhere around the curve of two am, head thick with exhaustion, the hairline fracture of his skull aching the way it did sometimes when he was cold and tired, then hearing someone in the kitchen and seeing Sean with two mugs of coffee. He’d wanted to explain himself, somehow, and a few things had come out that he’d never even told Mickey.
There had always been something about the way Sean looked at him, right from the start, that made him... There was something so overwhelming, always, about the fact that even with the flash and glamour and skill and sheer bloody force that was Mickey around, Sean looked at him.
“When your wife said she wanted to stop doing the flop con you said you’d stop too.” This story sounds different from Sean’s mouth; sadder. Sean is almost whispering, taking care of the words, of the things Ash had hidden and yet found himself wanting to show him. “And she said, no, she wanted a divorce. And you let her go and didn’t try to get her back because you still loved her and you wanted her to do whatever she wanted to.”
“I didn’t say it like that.” Ash holds up his hands; suddenly hearing these things is almost unbearable. “Stop talking, please. Just... we have to work together tomorrow and you’re drunk and...” he gestures in the air, then rubs his face – he doesn’t know how to...
“You always try and do things for other people,” Sean makes it sound like an accusation. “You’ve been so nice to me, always so nice to me, helping me, teaching me. You’d do the same for anyone but you did do it for me, and now you think you’re supposed to tell me not to do this. You think you’re supposed to be alone. You’ve bloody well conned yourself into thinking this is what you want from life.”
Ash hits him. Steps forward and, well, grabs his shoulder and shakes him at least, only that’s a bad idea because it brings them close again, and Sean’s eyes are full and wet and still too easy to read, despite all their lessons. Evenings in, the two of them and a pack of cards, a bowl of crisps, two beers; chatting about maybe more than Ash thought at the time, warm. The first time in a long time that Ash had something just of his own to come home to.
“You don’t owe me anything,” he snaps.
And Sean kisses him.
Sean grabs him, one hand to his shoulder, the other to his hair, and collides their mouths together, too fast and too hard and it’s, it’s – Ash had forgotten it could be like this, like hunger, like wanting to give something even more than take it.
Sean’s body is a long warm pressure against him, and he’s moving that little bit, that little rhythmic bit that people do when they really want it.
Ash finally pulls his mind together and tries to draw away, and Sean gets both arms around him and just clasps, tight, breaking the kiss with a gasp and resting their foreheads together, speaking quick and desperate.
“You never want to lead a con, but if you say something won’t work then Mickey never, ever argues with you. You hate Marmite, you love watching The Bill for some undoubtedly insane reason. You look at me sometimes like... ” Sean swallows, flushing again, dropping his eyes. His breathing is ragged, his words all champagne and heat and a taste Ash finds himself recognising and wanting. “You dropped out of Cambridge, you won’t tell me why but you’re going to. You know all the things I’ve done on the streets, even the things I can’t tell Emma, and you still talk to me, you still tell me I can be a good person.”
Ash hugs him back then, reflexively, can’t not. Sean laughs, gently, and meets his eyes.
“You get me hot. Can’t you just believe that?”
Ash stares back him. Feels words rise inside him, long speeches about age and experience and consequences, a million ways he could lie; he could lie so well Sean would never know.
At least, he would have thought he could. With Sean he’s not sure, and for some reason that’s ridiculously, marvellously comforting.
“I make you happy. Don’t I?”
Maybe it’s the tremor of uncertainty in the question, maybe it’s the shifting limbs and the heat that comes with it. Maybe he is old and maybe he is a fool.
“Yes.” Ash is kissing him. Ash is leaning in and kissing him, walking right into the path of the car and thinking: This, oh god, this could be a serious one.