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This wasn’t quite how Tom had imagined he’d be spending his Saturday night. He and Harry were sitting on the stairwell leading up to their flat, Harry was on the platform, just to the right of the door, leaning against the railings, whilst Tom was perched on the topmost step. When they’d started renting a third-floor flat where the only access was via an outdoor staircase, everyone had told them to get three copies of the key—they hadn’t, and Tom was really regretting that now.
They were locked out and had been for twenty minutes now. He would maintain that it was Harry’s fault because Harry was the one who’d insisted that he’d got his key when they went out. Every so often he reminded Harry of this fact with a glare and Harry had now run out of useless junk to throw in retaliation; he’d managed two elastic bands, a conker, a toffee from God knows when, and half a crayon—a good proportion had hit their mark too.
It didn’t help that it was later than either of them had been expecting and the air was really starting to cool. Tom put his hands deeper into his pockets, refusing to shiver—the locksmith said she’d be here in half an hour, and they were going to wait it out under their pink outside light that flickered every few minutes and automatically switched off after ten until someone got up and gestured wildly in its direction. Who had even put a neon sign up there was clearly on a mission to bring a little of the Soho glitz to provincial England and Tom wasn’t convinced; Harry was though, that was why it was still there, blinking above their door like it was the entrance to a seedy strip club.
He checked his watch again, twenty-nine minutes to go.
“So, uh…” Harry started, he had his knees drawn up to his chest and his hands hooked on top and he wasn’t looking at him, which was never a good sign. “I was thinking,” he continued, “about the other week.”
Tom didn’t want to talk about it, but he wasn’t an idiot, Harry had been building up to this for a while now and he was a captive audience. In fact, he wouldn’t put it past Harry to have thrown his key down the drain just to force him into this conversation.
“What about it?” he said, as he gazed disinterestedly at the houses around them. They weren’t above them per se, but they were high enough to look down at the second-floor windows and see into the small strips of gardens with their plastic garden furniture and birdfeeders, illuminated by the soft yellowing glow spilling out from the windows and the cheap fairy lights that had been put up in the summer and were still offering a meagre light along the fence.
He heard Harry swallow and shift a bit, the metal rattling under him. “Do you regret it?” he said, far softer than he’d expected. He’d thought that after a week of avoiding the topic, Harry might be defiant and determined to yank an answer out of him, and he wouldn’t lie, he’d already been on Zoopla for other options in case things went South.
“It’s just… you never said anything,” Harry continued, the words blurring together like he was trying to remember a speech he’d practised in the bathroom mirror, “and I—I said…” He swallowed, “I said I loved you and we… you know, and you never actually said anything about it and then you acted like it didn’t happen.”
A good person would answer that immediately and reassuringly, Tom had never professed himself to be good though. He could lie about it, but Harry didn’t deserve that. Instead, he just continued the nauseating silence and watched as a car drove down the street to the left, its headlights beaming down the tarmac and scaring a cat. While he didn’t want to lie, he hardly wanted to tell the truth either—the truth tended to crush people and even if they hid it well, things were never quite the same again.
His silence was already an uncomfortable answer and Harry must have known it because he spoke again. “If you didn’t like it, I’d rather you just… said it.”
Tom turned towards him; Harry was still looking at him with those mooning eyes that wanted so much he couldn’t give. Under the pink light, the shadows were deep and purple and honed the sharper edges of him, not that Harry had many sharp edges, to begin with. He was handsome in that light, bold and otherworldly, cosmic even and it was at moments like that, that he could almost fool himself into thinking he was like other people because he did feel something.
Whatever it was, didn’t yet have words to describe it, but if he had to try, he’d call it a fascination, an intense pull towards someone without all the usual messiness that entailed. He wanted to touch him—not like that—he just wanted to trace the light with the tips of his fingers, find the edges where the light skimmed light and easy and the hollows where the shadows pooled; he wanted to take him between his palms and see the specks of dust between his eyelashes, and maybe discover the secrets a man hid inside his mouth.
“No,” he said softly, “no, I don’t regret it.”
And it was the truth, he didn’t regret it, but it wasn’t life-changing nor was it, life-affirming—he, once again, didn’t get that magical awakening everyone fixated on, but he knew he wouldn’t. He was old enough now to understand himself and that meant acknowledging he didn’t feel things the way other people felt them. When he looked at Harry as the pink light consumed him, he didn’t have an ache beneath his ribs nor did his stomach tie itself in knots; he didn’t want him.
“How do you feel, then?” Harry said and there was the sharpness he’d been expecting, the unintended sharpness that cut to the bone of the problem, of him. It must have been too sharp even for Harry though because he backtracked. “I mean… I think I love you and I’m putting myself out there saying it, and you look at me like I’m insane.”
Love was a form of insanity. It was a brutal and humiliating thing, and people scrubbed themselves raw, they sanitized and mutilated themselves just to get a single taste of that sweet, sweet thing they called love. They would get down on the pavement, scraping their knees right down to the bone and crawling like animals on the concrete if they thought it could get them the suburbia dream.
Love wasn’t supposed to be like that. Love was supposed to be tender and intimate; it was supposed to be the twitch at the corner of someone’s mouth just before they smiled, or the taste of someone’s fingertips; love was supposed to be felt with your hands and your tongue. It was dirty and cheap and sublime. Love was just so much bigger than the rigid space people were always trying to cram it into and the more they squeezed it in, the less it seemed to fit.
Tom gazed out at the dark, endless sky. The moon was out and so was the stars and he could feel the dampness of the October air crawling down his shirt and clinging it to him. There was a strange vulnerability in love; as if you were opening up your chest, letting everyone see the bloody, mangled thing you kept inside yourself and hoping they would see the beauty of it; it was allowing someone else to see the soft helplessness of your flesh and inviting them to make a choice. Love was simply baring yourself to another and asking them to choose to be kind to you.
When he turned back to him, Harry was still looking at him, still waiting.
“I don’t…” Tom started carefully, trying to find words someone else might understand. “I don’t love you how you’re used to being loved.”
“Well, yeah,” Harry said with one of those paper-thin smiles, always at risk of tearing. “That’s kinda obvious.”
Harry continued to hold his smile together as he dropped his gaze to the ratty doormat they’d inherited from the last tenant; he ran his knuckles over the faded pattern. “But you still like me, right?”
Tom didn’t reply quick enough and Harry raised his head like a small puppy, looking at him with the forlorn gaze of someone who just wanted to be noticed. “Right?” he said.
To regard a man who looked at you like you held the stars in your palm, and feel nothing was an isolating thing. Perhaps there was a film spread over his skin, a soft gauze so thin that it almost wasn’t there at all, but he could feel it, separating him from the rest of the world, and no matter how close he got to someone else, no matter how much he touched and tasted and them, he couldn’t get through. He wouldn’t deny the agonising endlessness of being so disconnected from everyone and everything. Sometimes, it made him sick with want and a desperate yearning for a feeling he didn’t even need; he just wanted to know what it was all about.
And sometimes—just sometimes—he thought he got it. Times like now, as he sat there and watched Harry, bathed in the neon light, flexing his fingers and turning his neck, the skin blurred with every shade of pink from fuchsia to raspberry. There was a beauty to human bodies, to the curves and angles, the soft shapes and tough muscle; to the lives that that body had lived and the things it had endured. The body was like an altar and there was more than one way to show your devotion.
“I like what I do to you,” Tom murmured, and it was his turn to look at the metal stairs. “I like the unashamed way you look at me and I like imagining what you’re feeling; I like knowing that I did that.”
Harry swallowed and shifted, his knees still drawn up, but his legs parted a little, his hands by his sides. “And what do you think you do to me?” he said, his voice so small and painfully genuine.
Tom glanced at the dark gardens and lowered blinds that surrounded them and listened to the quiet that coated the neighbourhood at this time of night, and he made a decision. It might have been more aesthetically pleasing to crawl, but that act was beneath him, so he got up and then sat down again, this time beside Harry, close enough that their shoulders touched, and Tom let them. This might not be his thing and he felt like a foreigner stumbling around the native language as he tried it out, but however clumsy the attempt, Harry would appreciate the effort.
He reached out and with his thumb on Harry’s chin, turned Harry’s face towards him. He didn’t let go and Harry didn’t ask him to. They were pressed in close enough that he could feel the warmth of Harry’s skin and the way the pink light curled through his iris like a nebula, and the way that Harry was looking at him would always haunt him, but love was supposed to be a kind of haunting, wasn’t it?
“I attract you,” he said, as he traced the outline of Harry’s mouth with his thumb, feeling how he trembled, not with cold but with the enormity of knowing he was noticed and appreciated, and perhaps even loved. “I get under your skin, and it turns you on, doesn’t it?” he murmured, “I turn you on.”
“Yeah,” Harry breathed, and he didn’t resist when Tom eased his thumb between his lips and between his teeth, right into his mouth. Deep enough to push down on Harry’s tongue and realise the dichotomies of love; how it was power and trust, sensual and horrible, cool and demanding all at once. And the more he surveyed the contours of Harry’s mouth, memorising every hidden part of the body, the more Harry shifted and the more he looked like he wanted to put his teeth straight through Tom’s fingers—bite him just to relieve the feelings spilling out all over the place.
“And you like it.”
“Yeah.”
With a smile, Tom slid out his thumb and let it drag, drawing a wet line down Harry’s chin that must have stung in the cold air, before latching onto Harry’s t-shirt and dragging down the collar too far in the selfish hope that it might stretch, and Harry would have a tangible thing to remember him by.
He rested the weight of his hand on the zipper of Harry’s jeans and watched how he squirmed. He liked it but it felt like someone else was using his body to do this—he was still there, but he was just watching how a body moved when there was something it wanted and listening for footsteps on the stairs. It didn’t seem to matter to Harry though because he pressed in closer, pushing his forehead into Tom’s shoulder and curling around his hand.
Perhaps the light could sense this was something too intimate to be seen by the world, for that moment it flickered off and they sat there, consumed by the darkness. And it was so very dark, the air close and cool on his cheek and the metal prickling with cold beneath them, as their entire universe was framed by the railings and each other.
“Tom,” Harry said, the single syllable spoken with an intimacy and desperation as if it was the last word left in the world. “Tom.”
“Now, that’s something else I like,” he said, raising his hand to tilt Harry’s chin to look at him again, this time against the endless black of the night. “I like knowing that it’s my name stuck right here.” To emphasise the point, he pressed his thumb into the hollow of Harry’s throat, “would you call that love?”
“I’ll call it anything you want me to call it,” he said, sounding hoarse, “I just want you to let me love you.” The way he said it was quietly vulnerable, his tone crinkling a little at the edges and he pushed his face back down into Tom’s shoulder as if he was unable to bear the humiliation of wanting to be loved.
“You can love me,” Tom replied, though somehow it felt like a betrayal to try and fit yourself inside the frame you’d always been excluded from, then again, perhaps it was a radical act of reclamation, taking back that space no one had the right to keep you out of. “You can love me,” he repeated, “if you don’t mind an asymmetric kind of love.”
“Why would I mind that?”