Chapter Text
Harry didn’t have the best track record when it came to general decision making—perhaps doing an additional fifteen credits alongside joining the rugby team was a bad idea—but everyone made mistakes, didn’t they? Unfortunately, for him, everyone else’s mistakes were far more mundane and didn’t generally involve choosing to move in with their nemesis.
Though Harry would maintain he jumped before he was pushed. After all, as much as he loved his friends, he did not enjoy being the constant third wheel hanging around the apartment, always walking in on something he absolutely did not want to see. He also didn’t want to be forced to live with an undergrad who didn’t know what laundry was and thought pre-pre-drinks were cool.
Ideally, he’d needed a flatmate who didn’t mind unsociable hours and kept a similar schedule so that meals weren’t an absolute nightmare, and preferably, they'd be local too and allow him to have moved in within a week. Being that specific really narrowed down the options and in the end, the only person who came even vaguely close had, unfortunately, been Tom Riddle.
What made it worse was how damn perfect Tom had been to move in with. They were on the same course and had the same classes every week, they had a similar budget, and the lease was only for the year. It even had a bike store and great chip shop around the corner and a late-night Chinese takeout a couple of streets over. Needless to say, Harry had agreed to it in less than half an hour and had moved in just a day later.
Of course, it had raised more than a few eyebrows when they moved in together, after all, most people had watched them be at each other’s throats for three years straight. In the Student Union's inaugural 'most likely' awards during their final year, they were named the peers most likely to murder each other—an unofficial write-in category that both their groups of friends had mercilessly exploited.
And perhaps it was deserved. They’d got quite the reputation by the end, anyone would when, over the years they'd had several very public arguments, a good amount of petty bickering, at least four instances of criminal damage, and one brawl, which Harry liked to remind everyone that he would have won if they hadn’t been broken up. To anyone else, it must have looked insane that they'd want to live with one another, but since he’d graduated, Harry had almost—almost—missed having someone around who was quite so amusing to wind up.
But, if anyone asked, he’d moved in for the apartment, and Tom had just been a tiny little drawback.
All things considered though, living with Tom wasn’t as bad as Harry had thought it might be. He spent most of his time doing research or working, he had quiet, inoffensive hobbies, he could cook and was even willing to combine their budgets so they could buy some decent groceries. Basically, he was that perfect phantom flatmate that he’d thought only existed for plot convenience in television romcoms.
He couldn’t even accuse Tom of having bad manners like sneaking back in after a night out because, on the rare occasions that Tom did come back late, he was courteous, and he never brought anyone over. Though that probably had more to do with the type of person Tom was meeting than him being polite.
His friends were exclusively the offspring of Tory-voting toffs and the local landed gentry, the type who'd forgotten the feudal system had actually been abolished for several hundred years; some of them even had titles. They just weren't the sort of people who went back to crumby high-rise flats in a London backwater. So, whenever Tom didn't come home, Harry just assumed he was at one of friends' the multimillion-pound skyscraper apartments that were ninety percent glass and ten percent status posturing.
Tom had never explained why he didn't stay there all the time, though Harry would say it had something to do with his insufferable personality. Even his friends must struggle to like it for more that eight hours at a time. Tom was just lucky to possess a face that made people willing to overlook those obvious personality flaws. Quite frankly, Harry had had just about enough of hearing how good looking he was. He got it. Everyone got it. Tom was fucking gorgeous; it was time to move on.
Unfortunately, he was living with the man and that tended to involve having to look at each other. And now, after seven months of living together, Harry had documented every inch of Tom and was getting pretty good at predicting his infamous mood swings. It was a talent he was considering putting on his CV given how fucking impressive it was
Still, Harry wouldnt say they were really friends but they could be civil, even nice, with each other for extended periods of time. They watched movies together on Monday nights and they ate dinner together every evening; hell, they cooked together—it was so fucking domestic. But they also argued. A lot. Most of it was good-natured academic ribbing, some was unpleasant jibes and just a little was outright offensive personal insults. Recently, it had been much more of the former and far less of the latter, well, it had been until now.
The weather had been awful for a straight week and a half, which had put off practice and forced Harry to stay inside. The rain made the flat cold and frankly damp and neither of them were willing to turn up the heating, so they’d been relying on a second-hand fan heater that was older than the two of them combined. Even it had given up yesterday with a spluttering like a cat being sick and a dramatic puff of smoke that nearly set off every fire alarm in the building.
To make matters worse most of his friends were either away for the break or studying, and the library was having necessary refurbishments, so he had to work at home. Add into that, without classes and the library, Tom was also home all the time, and their flat was so small it should really be illegal to call it a two-person flat at all.
It was fair to say things were starting to get tense.
They were constantly on top of each other. Neither wanting to be cooped up in their rooms all day, but the kitchen was too small to fit a table and the built-in breakfast bar could barely fit a side plate let alone a laptop. That only left the living space with the three-seater sofa and one armchair, they didn’t even have a coffee table right now because Harry had tripped over it and, well, it hadn’t been as sturdy as it had looked.
Today, when he got back to the flat, Harry was soaked from the cycle back from campus—helping undergrads with their essays made him a good person, but rarely put him in the best mood—and he wasn’t looking forward to being around Tom. In the dimness, he slapped hard on wall, trying to hit the light switch. He managed it on the third try and the kitchen light stuttered pathetically, before spitting out a florescent beam that was bright enough to burn your eyes out. It was the only reliable overhead light in the entire place and turning it on with like igniting an atom bomb in their apartment.
"I can hear you dripping," Tom said from across the room. He was in the living room part of the flat, by the glass doors that led onto the concrete balcony, sitting in the armchair with a book and a packet of sticky notes. “You’ll ruin the linoleum, and I would quite like my deposit back.”
Harry was pretty sure that a full-on nuclear holocaust couldn’t destroy this particular linoleum flooring. He’d dropped countless things on it, scuffed his shoes more times than he could remember, he’d even walked across it in his new studs and there wasn’t the slightest damage—it had clearly sold its soul for eternal youth.
“Thanks for the welcome.”
Tom deigned to look up from his book. “Oh, my apologies,” he said, “should I have been aiming for fifties' suburban housewife?" Harry couldn't see Tom's face, but it was probably deadpan. Tom continued, "how about, honey, I’m so glad you're home, dinner will be ready in an hour—that more your thing?”
Well, that confirmed it, Tom was in a similarly bitchy mood, and it wasn’t even five o’clock yet. There was another four hours and dinner to get through before Harry could realistically go to sleep. He tried to calculate exactly how many minutes that was just to take his mind off the stupid fluttering in his stomach at being called honey.
“A simple ‘hi’ would’ve cut it,” he said.
Tom hummed a response, going back to his book. Apparently, he’d decided that this wasn’t the hill he wanted to die on today—there'd certainly be other opportunities in the next two hundred and thirty-five minutes.
With a sigh, Harry unpacked his bag, dumping a plastic tub in the sink for washing up later and a couple of wrappers in the bin, before grabbing an apple out of the bowl balanced on the side. It would tide him over until they had to hash out an agreement on whatever the fuck they were going to eat tonight—if it was anything like yesterday's discussion, it was going to be long and deeply unsatisfactory.
He switched off the kitchen light, plunging the whole flat back into fifty shades of grey that were almost as tepid as the movie had been, and headed towards his room. Harry made it all the way to the door—his hand was on the bloody handle and everything—before Tom spoke again.
“We need to talk,” he said, blunt as ever, continuing to look at the book even though he couldn’t possibly be reading it. Tom could be gorgeously silver-tongued when he wanted to be, he just couldn't be bothered around Harry, and he hadn’t yet decided whether that was a compliment or an insult. Either way, Tom addressing him like that made him feel like a naughty child called to the headmaster’s office, and right now, he didn’t want to deal with one of Tom’s petty squabbles.
“Look," he said, coming towards the sofa and dumping his wet bag on it just to be annoying, "if this is about the other night, I did tell you I was going to be late so it’s not my fault if you didn’t listen—”
"It's not about that."
Tom looked up at last and Harry immediately wanted him to look back down again. He must have taken a shower earlier and now his hair was soft, and he was fresh and neat and entirely too handsome for his own good. It made Harry feel like even more of a mess, with his damp hair plastered to his forehead, saturated jacket and ratty sweater he really should have thrown out by now. He solved one of those problems by yanking off the jacket and tossing it over the back of the sofa.
"What is it then? Did I eat the last yoghurt? Or leave a mug on the side?" It was petty and goading, but Harry was in the mood for a fight, a proper one. None of this niggling, he wanted to shout at someone, and Tom was as good as target as anyone, better even, because he appeared to want this too.
"It's about last night," Tom continued as calm and collected as ever. Harry hated it. No one had the right to be so utterly unaffected by human emotions. Except, Tom wasn’t nearly as immune to feelings as he liked to make out, and if Harry pushed hard enough for long enough, he could drag them out of him kicking and screaming. This afternoon, he was in the mind to push.
"Last night?” Harry said, “I didn't fucking do anything last night."
Tom turned his attention down to the book. "Now that's just not true, is it, Harry?" he said, turning the page louder than necessary to make his point. "We both know you were up half the night."
"So what?" He said, "I got back late, it’s not a crime." He could taste the terseness in his tone before he could hear it, just the rising barbs prickling down his spine like a cat arching it's back. Around them, the room was quite still as if all the furniture was cowering, waiting for one of them to say something that would turn this little spat into a full-blown argument.
"I never said it was. I’d just prefer that you'd have the guts to tell me when you were bringing someone with you," Tom said flatly, and his tone didn’t need to change when he gave Harry that look. The look of a parent catching you sneaking out after you said you weren’t going to, or a coach who knew you hadn’t trained like you said you had and that was why you couldn’t make that pass; it was a look of eternal disappointment delivered with such succinctness that Harry could feel his ears prick with humiliation.
"Seriously?” he said, trying to will away the hotness from his cheeks, “I can't even bring someone back to my own apartment anymore?"
“It's my apartment too and I’d appreciate knowing who’s in it.”
A polite flatmate would take the criticism and just move on; even a decent flatmate would do something overly passive-aggressive, before conceding that they had a point. Harry was prepared to do neither and if that made him a bad flatmate, so be it. He gritted his teeth and leaned against the back of the sofa—it was safer if they kept something physically too big to move between them.
“Well, I’m real sorry,” he said as icily as he could, “but since when have I had to get your approval to date?”
Tom didn’t even deign to look at him. “I’d hardly call what you’re doing ‘dating’?”
It was supposed to get under his skin and by god, it did. It wasn't just the point itself that got Harry fuming, it was the absurdly middle class distaste in Tom's tone, as if his affairs were singlehandedly dragging down local property prices and bringing shame to the entire village.
"What the hell do you want me to do then?" he snapped, the simmering frustrated getting closer to the boil. "Let you do a full background check on everyone? Or should I get their passports and you can play fucking border control at one in the morning." Harry glared, his chest heaving even as Tom continued to sit as serene and as unbothered as a princess on their best behaviour.
"Maybe, you'd prefer to see their driver's licence? Their birth certificate? A full DBS check?" He glared at Tom, willing him to react. "Or perhaps you want to interview them, should I invite you to dinner with us and they can tell you all about their intentions towards me?"
He immediately regretted that because imagining taking Tom to dinner got something hot and heavy churning up his stomach. He didn’t like that one bit. So Harry leaned further over the back of the sofa, his finger stuck out in front of him like Hermione did when she was giving him a lecture.
“Her name was Ginny, by the way, and—”
“Oh, I know her name,” Tom interrupted, raising his chin and tilting his head just so, “I couldn’t fail to, not with you wailing it all night.”
Harry balked, and he could feel his face getting hot again. "I was not—"
“You were," Tom said, quiet and snide, the type of argument that was less about getting something off your chest and more about point scoring. The type of argument that Harry hated. It would be better for everyone if they'd just shout obscenities each other until the neighbours were banging on the walls, and then order takeout. At least then, they'd have something good to show at the end of it. As it was, the only thing they were going to get were some bruised egos and probably some damage to personal property.
“What exactly is your problem, Tom?”
Tom lowered his book into his lap and looked and him with a withering scorn that could probably kill an undergrad at twenty paces. “I just think its courteous to tell your flatmate if your desire to be Britain's next top revolving door is going to keep them up every night.”
Tom had never given his opinion on who Harry brought home, in fact he'd never mentioned it at all, and Harry had almost deluded himself into thinking that Tom hadn't noticed. But, of course, he'd fucking noticed. He'd probably been through his dating history with a fine comb, making notes and saving every little thing up to dump on him at the optimum moment and last night was just an excuse.
“Are you jealous?” Harry blurted out, less like a confident Casanova and more like an exasperated flatmate grasping at straws.
Tom looked up him, every part of his expression dripping with a disdain that took practice to master. “Why would I be jealous of you?” he said like it was the dumbest question anyone had ever thought of asking. Which Harry should have realised because, of course, Mr fucking Perfection here didn't waste his time with such trivial things as relationships; that would be far too beneath him.
“Of her, then,” he snapped.
“Now, you’re flattering yourself."
Harry should really leave it there, take the hit to his pride and just go and slam his door and seethe in his room. That was what he should do, but the way Tom had just looked down at his book again like Harry was nothing more than a fly knocking itself against the window, was just infuriating. He was sick of Tom watching him over the rim of his books with his disgustingly gorgeous face, acting like he had the right to judge him. He fucking didn't.
Without thinking what he was doing, Harry marched right around the sofa and yanked the book out of Tom’s hand, chucking it onto the floor. “I don't give a fuck what you think, you know that right?” he said, “and I’m really not in the mood to deal with one of your bullshit mood swings right now.”
Tom gave him a derisory once over like an old dowager looking at the man who wanted to marry her only granddaughter, and slowly got up. When he was standing, they were of a height, though Harry was broader and must have had, at least, a good stone on Tom, and he was so damn close, which was entirely Harry’s fault for standing too close to the chair in the first place. Not that he was going to do anything about it. If Tom wanted more space, then he’d have to ask for it nicely or embarrass himself trying to get Harry to move. And if he tried the latter, well, Harry might be forced to manhandle him, and he had a feeling Tom wouldn’t like that at all.
"What was that, Harry?"
"I said, I'm not in the mood for your bullshit, Tom." He gave him what he’d like to believe was an absolutely withering glare. "So stay the hell out of my life."
"You know, as well as I do, that’s going to be difficult when your life has a habit of coming through my wall every night."
Tom was really fucking lucky that Harry was aiming to avoid a criminal record, or he might have decked him in his fucking perfect face for that, though from this distance, he wouldn’t have managed anything more than a scripted reality television slap. Tom must have realised he was safe from any physical retribution because he looked so disgustingly smug and even had the audacity to pat Harry on the shoulder like a fucking football coach saying better luck next time, champ.
If Harry had even the slightest bit less self control, he'd have grabbed Tom's arm, twisted it, and had him up against the wall before he could get another patronising word out of his pretty mouth. It might even have made him feel better. To just manhandle Tom exactly how he deserved to be, to make him shut the hell up, to just put him physically back in his place for once.
But Tom couldn't even let him fantasize. He had edged past him, that hand lingering for just long enough to make Harry’s imagination run away with itself, and was halfway to picking up his book when he turned back to Harry.
"You're shameless enough," he said, “that I'd almost say you want me to hear you."
"Maybe I do."
As soon as the words left his mouth, Harry regretted them. In his head, it had been a witty clapback worthy of Oscar Wilde, but in reality, it was more like an amateur scriptwriter's first attempt at soft-core porn. Either way, Tom was just staring at him like he'd crossed over some invisible line of appropriate behaviour—and why wouldn't he? Good flatmates didn't tell each other they wanted them to hear every time they brought someone home.
"Maybe I do want you to hear," Harry said again before Tom could recover himself enough to come up with something, not that he looked like he would any time soon. This might even have been the first (and probably only) time Harry had ever seen Tom genuinely struck dumb and for some stupid reason, it was making him feel all soft and melty inside, which just wasn't okay.
Harry turned to face him properly because some insults could only be said to a guy's face. "Just think of it as the closest thing you'll get to a real relationship any time soon."
Well, it was certainly provocative if Tom's reaction was anything to go by. His face had immediately switched from surprise to irritation as if Harry was an nuisance that just wouldn't quit.
"I have—" Tom stumbled for just long enough to be embarrassing. “I have options," he managed, "not that it's any of your concern."
"Sure, you have options," Harry said mockingly, "but no one's fucking you for your stellar personality, are they, Tom? They only want you for your pretty face."
The words sounded a lot worse out in the open than they had inside his head, and Tom's expression was somewhere between complete disbelief and inclined to commit grievous bodily harm. They'd never got quite so personal before, but, then again, if Tom didn't want to hear it, he shouldn't start things he couldn't finish.
Though Harry might just have miscalculated this one because Tom didn't yell or scowl or spit out some horrid insult, he just smiled like a goddam Shakespeare villain. He watched as Tom tossed the book idly onto the chair and took the couple of steps forward, his footsteps muffled by the cheapest carpet known to man, but Harry still felt the press of his feet on the floor. He shifted on the spot—not stepping back—just moving his weight around because he couldn't keep still.
Tom stopped in front of him. He had a look about him that Harry did not like one bit, it was too polished, too assured, and it made him feel horribly like a new pet hamster that had just caught the eye of the local cat. Next time, he'd just take the humiliation and the stupid hit to his pride; frankly, he'd take anything at all over the awful churning in his stomach.
Tom was close enough to take a bite out of when he next spoke. "I've got a pretty face, have I?" he said slowly, each word pronounced with a care and integrity that made it so much worse to hear. "Is that why you can't take your eyes off me?"
The back of Harry's neck was hot and he was filled with the urge to step back out of Tom's space, but that would be conceding defeat. So instead, he squared up, going almost toe to toe with his flatmate like this was a WBC title fight and not some spat over personal etiquette.
"So, I can't even look at my flatmate now, huh?"
"You know what I mean."
"No I fucking don't."
"For your sake," Tom said, "I really hope you're not actually as oblivious as you're making yourself out to be."
“I don’t look at you,” Harry said through gritted teeth, like it would help. It wouldn't though, it wouldn't because it was a fucking lie.
Of course, he looked at Tom a little, okay, quite a lot, but it was always just a glance. Everyone did it. He’d conceded the first day they’d ever met that Tom was hot, and a week later that, if he’d been anyone else, Harry would have tried to shoot his shot. But Tom wasn't anyone else, he was an obnoxious prick who was out to make his life as difficult as possible, a calling he'd resolutely kept up for three years.
And was it really any of Tom’s business, if Harry thought about him at... other times too? Only sometimes, occasionally, barely at all, really, he might have thought about Tom when whoever he was with just wasn't... well, wasn't quite doing it for him. It was hardly his fault that he saw Tom more than anyone else, and when he saw him, he was fresh out of the shower, or had his sleeves rolled up and was doing something with his hands because Tom's hands were just... urgh.
But thinking about your flatmate's hands and what they could do to you while someone else was going down on you was totally normal, right? Right?
"I don't look at you," Harry repeated, this time ignoring the bitter taste the words left in his mouth.
“You’ve always been a bad liar, Harry," Tom said, still wearing that look that could get him on the cover of any magazine. He leaned in a little closer, dropping his tone into territory that was downright seductive. "Frankly, it's a little embarrassing."
If this was anyone else—anyone at all—Harry would have said the evening was off to an absolutely cracking start, but this was not anyone else, this was his flatmate, his nemesis, his least favourite person on the entire bloody planet.
"I'll tell you what's fucking embarrassing," he snapped, "you, thinking you're so goddam gorgeous that everyone is just dying to shag you. News flash, they're not."
"At least one person is."
"And who's that?"
Harry knew he'd made a mistake before he'd even finished talking, and he knew the answer Tom was going to give him from the way he titled his head, but it was a shock to have Tom look him right in the eye and say it with complete seriousness.
"You, obviously," Tom said, as if it really was the most obvious thing in the world, as if they the will-they-won't-they couple on any American sitcom and the audience was four series in.
"Now, why don't you sit down, hmm?"
"What?" Harry swallowed hard, trying to stop his mouth being so dry and his stupid heart from fluttering so much. "What the hell?" he said with more bitterness than he meant.
Tom didn't rise to it—fucking bastard.
"I told you to sit down, Harry," he said, "and you're going to do what I say."
Harry glanced at the sofa behind him, his damp jacket slung across the back and his bag splayed over half of it. Never mind on the sofa, if this was any of the people he'd been with in the last six months, he'd be on his damn knees just from that tone. But the last thing he was going to do was give in to Tom just because he got his heart racing.
"And what makes you think I'd do that?"
"Because you're curious what I'm going to do next," Tom said, "and I'm not doing anything until you're on the sofa."
Well, he couldn’t argue with that. Without taking hia eyes off him, Harry stepped backwards towards the sofa, watching as Tom stepped forward to maintain the distance. He swallowed and went to sit down, but as he did so, he yanked on Tom's shirt to pull him down too.
Now, he'd been hoping that Tom would faceplant the sofa in an embarrassing set of circumstances that he could use as ammo for weeks. Unfortunately for him, Tom caught himself on the lip of the sofa and for an agonising moment Harry was cornered—hemmed in on all four sides. And sure, Harry had been close to Tom plenty of times—you couldn't fight someone without getting pretty damn close—but it had never been this intimate.
From here, he could feel the warmth of Tom's hands beside his neck, and no one was entitled to look so good in the grey light of a wet afternoon. Harry's gaze followed one of Tom's more vivid veins as it ran down his neck and under the collar of his shirt—he wanted to trace it with the very tip of his tongue. And god, he should not thinking about his flatmate and, not to mention, nemesis in that way.
He darted his eyes back to Tom's, which was a mistake too because Tom was looking at him like that. People would pay to have someone look down at them with that half-smile that could melt butter and Harry was getting it for free. It was criminal.
"Do you do this to everyone?" Tom said, smoother now, the words just dripping off his tongue.
"Nah," Harry said, trying and failing to be cool about it, "I just don't want you to think that you're the one running this show."
"But I am running it, Harry," Tom said, leaning forward and lifting himself onto the sofa. Tom rested his knees on either side of Harry’s thighs, the cheap leather groaning under them, and sat back. And Harry just sat there, gazing up at him like a starstruck bloody teenager. If anyone had told him that this evening was going to end with Tom in his fucking lap he'd have laughed in their face, but he was definitely not laughing now.
Not when Tom's hands were curling around the back of his neck, his thumb rubbing up into his hairline, until Harry had to focus on keeping his breathing as normal as possible so as not to give away just how much this was making him want to squirm.
"So now we've got that sorted," Tom said, still soft and slow, "why don't you just shut your mouth for once and try to be a good boy?"
Oh boy, did he even know how hot that sounded? And Harry found himself shutting his mouth before he'd ever really thought it through. He had never been opposed to taking the lead himself, but there was something about people who knew what they wanted and knew how to get it, that just got under his skin. Tom was one of the those people—not surprising, really, when he absolutely oozed control. Being around him for long enough was bound to make anyone lightheaded, and when he was actually in his lap, well Harry would let him do anything he wanted.
Which was bloody embarrassing if he thought too much about it.
He still had a fistful of Tom's shirt scrunched in his hand and Tom had a fistful of Harry's hair—mutually assured destruction. God, it shouldn't have been so fantastic. Tom was the first to drop his hands, just sliding them down Harry's neck to where it met his shoulders. To retort, because he was not about to be outdone, Harry dropped the shirt and instead placed both his hands on Tom’s knees; he slid them upward right to the crease at his hip.
Tom's gaze followed the motion and when Harry stopped, he raised his eyes to look at him, all heavy and intense. The air between them was so thick he could cut it and serve it for dinner, but Harry kept his hands steady and sure because Tom couldn't climb sober into a man's lap and expect him to do nothing. It was the ultimate game of chicken, neither of them wanting to be the coward, even though this was not how things should be going between them. They should be yelling mildly sarcastic insults at each other, the kind of witty irritation that got his chest heaving
It wasn't irritation in his chest anymore, it was something so much worse. Harry's entire face was burning and must have been the kind of plastic pink only found in aggressively gendered ads for children's toys. He tried to convince himself that having anyone this close would do the same, even if he knew deep down it wouldn't.
"Is it as good as you imagined it would be?" Tom said.
This was rapidly heading in a direction Harry couldn’t say he’d anticipated, which was the polite way of saying he felt like he was in an aeroplane that was spinning madly out of control as it hurtled towards the ground. Was this what you normally did with their nemesis? Granted, he'd never actually met someone with a nemesis before, but still.
"Who said I'd imagined anything?"
"Well, have you?"
Harry opened his mouth, fully intending to deny ever thinking of Tom, but Tom would guess if he was lying. That was the problem with living with someone, they learnt all your stupid tells and then used them against you in a form of psychological warfare. Harry shut his mouth, but couldn't bring himself to look away.
"I'll make it easier for you," Tom said, "were you thinking about me last night?"
Harry had hoped this information would never reach the light of day because Ginny was a great girl—absolutely fantastic, really—she was funny and athletic and definitely Harry's type. And they'd had a good evening and got back here and into his room, and everything had been going fine because it wasn't her—god, it wasn't her.
It was his hand hitting the wall that started it all. He'd smacked their connecting wall hard with his palm and all it took was a moment of wondering whether Tom had heard, for Harry to be imagining a full-blown porno. He just wanted to know if Tom was awake, if he was listening, if he had his hand shoved down his briefs and was getting off on it. And by then, he was in too deep and as Ginny did her thing—and what a thing it was—he was thinking about Tom doing it. Tom doing it better.
He'd felt guilty after, when she was lying beside him, working up the effort to get dressed because she had early practice in the morning. But what no one knew couldn't hurt them, except now someone knew. Tom knew. After all, his silence was as damning as a signed confession.
His face was burning under Tom's gaze and he gripped at Tom's thighs just to stop himself from showing him off to go hide in his room and be an absolute coward. Tom wasn't helping things either, not when his mouth was so obscenely close to Harry's and looking so awfully kissable that Harry might die.
Harry was just starting to realise how much he wanted to kiss his flatmate. How much he wanted to keep him up at night, not through a wall, but in his bed with him.
Tom interrupted that thought, which was jut as well because it was rapidly leaving PG rated territory. "Oh, Harry," he said in that condescending tone that just did things to him, and accompanied by his hand, dropping to the hem of Harry's sweater, "what are we going to do about that?"
Harry had plenty of suggestions, but if he tried to say a complex sentence right now, he might just choke on his own saliva. So he went with short, sweet and straight to the point, so that maybe they could get over this mortifying unrequited crush ordeal, and move on.
"What the fuck do you want, Tom."
“Let's start with what I don’t want, shall we?" he said, his fingers creeping under the hem. "What I don't want is to hear other people getting their hands on you in our apartment.”
“Because that’s something only you can do, huh?” Harry half meant is as a joke, but the words withered before they'd even left his lips and it came out as more of a croak that sounded embarrassingly sincere. The silence that followed was agonising and Harry was just starting to wish he hadn't said anything at all, when Tom leaned in nice and close.
"Yes," he murmured, his mouth catching on the rim of Harry's ear. Tom's hands were under his t-shirt by now, stupid cold hands running over his waist, easing the material up. "I think that's what I want."
Harry's entire world stopped with a jerk. Tom—the best damn looking guy he'd ever seen—wanted to get his hands on him; Tom—his fucking nemesis of three and half years of his life—wanted to get his hands on him. It was enough to make a guy swoon. Not that Harry had ever been one for swooning, so he just latched his fingers into Tom's belt loops and, ignoring the hammering of his heart, yanked him even closer.
"Why don't you fucking do it, then?"