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Phil wonders why it isn’t weird between them. It should be.
It should be weird, because they hold hands when they’re watching the final of Masterchef, and Dan drifts off and misses who wins, his fingers warm where they rest against the back of Phil’s hand.
Weirder because when it’s Dan’s turn to cook he always asks what Phil wants, weirder because Phil can tweet so convincingly from Dan’s account when it’s three in the afternoon and he’s on the floor again that nobody can tell it’s him.
Weird, weirdest, because when Phil says he’s going to bed Dan turns off his laptop and follows him upstairs, and Dan’s forgotten how to make one coffee, only ever two. Weirdest because they end all their texts with kisses, and phone calls and Skype calls and days with love yous, and they both feel a little like they’ve lost a limb when they’re apart.
Phil wakes up with Dan’s hair in his mouth or a dead hand because Dan’s laying on it, or the steady pressure of Dan’s chest against his back or an arm tight around his waist and yet they don’t fuck, they straighten the back of each other’s hair but Phil still sometimes wonders what Dan would do if Phil kissed him, kissed his ears and knuckles and shoulders and added an I to his love yous in an attempt to make things more weird, and by extension, less so.
He wonders what kind of a mess he’s got himself into when he can’t sleep without Dan, even though Dan could stay in his own room any night he wanted and Phil would have no right to question it. He wonders when he fell into the routine of tugging Dan’s t-shirt down in the middle of the night when it’s all twisted around his chest, or when hearing Dan playing the piano at two in the morning wasn’t an invitation for Phil to tiptoe into his room and sit next to him, blinking his eyes open until Dan moves his fingers from the keys to Phil’s arms and leads him back to their room.
His room, their room, he wonders when that happened, wonders when everything he is became what Dan is too.
He wonders why he doesn’t mind.
One morning Phil wakes up to find Dan sitting cross-legged on the bed, watching him. It’s only when Dan leans down to press a kiss to his cheek that Phil’s reminded of the night before, the nightmare that had left Dan shaking and Phil shaking him awake. It’s only when Dan lies down and cuddles into him that Phil remembers Dan’s fingers gripping the back of his t-shirt, the tears soaking through to his skin, the comforting words that he couldn’t conjure up and the kisses he’d laced into Dan’s hair instead.
They lie there for a while, and then it starts to rain so they lie a little longer, watching the water running down the window. Dan yawns and Phil tightens his arm around Dan’s waist in response, and he’s done it time after time after time but always and only ever in the dark. Now it feels heavier, stronger somehow, like actually seeing his skin on Dan’s in the drizzly grey light makes it real, and then Dan’s lifting Phil’s hand to press a kiss to his palm before rolling out of bed and it’s so incredibly, wonderfully weird that Phil wonders if he’ll ever be able to breathe again.
Later, Dan cooks what Phil wants and falls asleep on the sofa.
Later still, Phil adds an I.