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It was late and a few hundred feet away was the wet neon glow of the services, its lights smeared across the puddles on the concrete and dripping down the windscreen. In the darkness, it was a blaring capitalist oasis and just looking at it stung his eyes. They were here because Harry had wanted doughnuts—the trashy kind that left icing sugar all over the seats—and after midnight in the middle of nowhere, they were hard to find.
Harry had come back, crowing his victory, nearly ten minutes ago and there was, predictably, a fine coating of sugar all over the upholstery, the centre console, and even the dashboard. It was dark inside the car, except for the dull haze that diffused from the buildings and glazed everything they touched in a Halloween green. The current casualty was Harry’s tongue and the tips of his fingers as he licked up the sugar of his second doughnut.
Technically, Tom was owed half the packet, but he was still nibbling at his first, washing down every tooth-rotting piece with a gulp of tea—despite the face Harry was giving him, it wasn’t the worst combination he’d ever had.
“Can’t believe you’re drinking that,” Harry said, pausing only to slurp the last of his offensively sweet coffee. This close to each other, Tom could see how his hair was damp from the rain, and he could see the speckles of water still coating his eyelashes, and sketching lines down his throat. Harry’s t-shirt was damp at the collar and sodden at the shoulders, and it was plastered to his skin; it was perfectly natural that he wanted to touch him. It was perhaps less natural that Tom just wanted to trace his edges, touching in the same careful, respectful way that the devout touched the icons of their deities—just to learn the shape of an immense thing they would, and could, never know.
“I did ask for breakfast,” he said.
“I couldn’t ask for breakfast tea at two in the fucking morning.”
“But peppermint and strawberry with a hint of…” he paused to flip over the tag, “hint of black pepper was just fine, huh?”
“I panicked,” Harry replied, waving his third doughnut around in mock indignation, spraying the rest of the car with sugar and crumbs. Not for the first time, Tom was grateful that hadn’t offered to drive.
“Sure.”
“Hey,” he said, and he would definitely have said more if the speakers hadn’t spat out his current fixation. The radio was tuned to some abysmal pirate radio station based in Liverpool that Harry insisted was the best. Tom had gotten the impression that it was an acquired and incredibly specific taste, but he was willing to endure it to see the way Harry grinned at the awful jokes and nodded his head along to the absolute garbage music they were playing.
The song finished and Tom turned his gaze from the window back towards Harry, only to find that he was already watching him. He offered that diamond smile, the one that made people lose themselves a little; he’d got Rosier to explain to him once and she said it was like having a being caught in a wave when you weren’t expecting it and that it was hard to do anything for a moment. Harry certainly looked a little bowled over as he shifted before sliding the seat further back.
He didn’t even know why he did it because it wasn’t like he wanted what would inevitably come next. Perhaps it was just the validation of being seen that he was looking for; the simple need to feel desirable for a moment because it was the only currency he knew.
“You know you’ve got—” he said, changing the subject and trying to point, but Harry wasn’t getting it, so he leant over the central console and touched Harry’s face. It was painfully intimate as he rubbed the sugar from Harry’s cheek with the pad of his thumb; they’d never deliberately been this close before and he could see the neon reflected in Harry’s eyes and the sugar still clinging to the corner of his mouth. Harry licked his lips, and he could feel the warmth of his tongue, and part of him wondered how warm Harry’s mouth would be and what it might be like to press his fingers into the cushion of his tongue, the rest of him was self-conscious.
The radio was conspicuous in their silence, and he could hear the pelting of the rain against the roof. He should really sit back in his own seat and put a stop to this before it went any further, but he suspected he’d already stumbled too far to do that. After all, Harry was looking at him, really looking, and his gaze was tainted with an affection that made Tom’s skin prickle and not for the right reasons.
Inside the car had become weighted with expectation, and the inescapable feeling of what he should be doing was pressing down, hard, on his lungs, crushing them into his ribs until it hurt to breathe. Everyone had seen the films, the cinematic lights, the swelling music, the rain scoring down the metalwork that preceded the inevitable confession of love, and it all framed as a profound moment when the body of youth wrinkled and from its folds emerged an adult.
Harry leant in, shrinking the space between them down to a few inches, the hand that wasn’t holding the doughnut resting on Tom’s knee. And it was fine, but he could feel a lump starting to swell in his throat and the itch to push Harry off him just starting under his skin. He wasn’t opposed to the whole touching thing per se, it was just weird to have someone else doing the touching, someone autonomous and spontaneous and independent from him.
The hand on his knee dragged upward to splay across his thigh and it probably worked a treat on anyone else but right now, it just felt a little awkward, and that itself was embarrassing. Harry was still looking at him like he had an entire cosmos webbed through his eyes and Tom’s hand was still curled around his jaw, and it was also so intimate that he didn’t want to be the one to ruin it.
Harry licked his lips again. “Can I—can I kiss you?” he murmured, soft and careful and so monstrously hopeful that he could feel the wanting swelling between them, crowding out the space until there was scarcely room for him. “Can I do so much more?”
He already knew the answer and that was the only consolation. He knew the truth of his embodiment, that he could recognise his body as his own and yet he felt none of what everyone else felt when they saw it; he didn’t loath the shape he took, just the meanings that were ascribed to it. He was an object, an instrument, a screen onto which everyone projected their romantic daydreams—there must have been thousands of versions of himself inside other people’s heads, and all of them were things he wasn’t. The reproductions that proliferated in this collective romantic consciousness loved their creators; they had starry eyes and tender hearts and they were capable of everything that everyone wanted from him, but that he couldn’t give.
People were greedy. They ate each other up, taking romantic and sexual trinkets from one person and using them on the next, they cannibalised each other and in turn, they too were cannibalised. Love was a bloodbath and sex was a massacre, and frankly, he didn’t want it.
He still hadn’t said anything and perhaps it was because it was just too much to be made so raw in front of someone else. Harry was handing him a part of himself that he’d so carefully levered out, and he was asking for him to love it and treat it so kindly. And he was showing himself, truly showing himself, and asking that Harry might accept him on his own terms.
Tom swallowed; his brain was staticky, and his stomach was cold. He didn’t want to have to do this, and it was why he didn’t advertise himself as available because it usually ended in disappointment and resentment for both parties.
“No.”
The reaction was immediate. Harry pulled back, yanking his hand with him. “Sorry, I thought…” Harry turned to look at the blank dashboard, “it doesn’t matter.”
It was hard not to feel horrid. Love was presented as this cosmic, universal precipice, and once you gave in to it, once you let it eat you, once you let yourself fall from the cliff, then you supposedly became someone. And he’d just snatched that away from someone and he knew he shouldn’t feel guilty for not fitting into the rigid structures but when they were all you knew, it was easy to succumb to that gnawing guilt.
“I care about you,” Tom said, talking to the Styrofoam cup because he couldn’t bear to look at Harry, “but it’s not love.”
“I can wait.”
Tom bit his tongue, with despair, with the tiniest spark of resentment because everyone always clung to their perfect romance even when it was dissolving between their fingers. His throat was sticky, and he shifted a little closer to the door, just to give himself something tangible to hold, to anchor himself in reality, while every possible answer blurred around him. There was a realisation too—a recognition that this was real—and a particular type of mourning attached to realisation, a monumental grief for the person you’d believed—maybe even wished—you were.
“Waiting won’t change anything,” he said slowly, watching as the edges of Harry’s mouth crumpled before he could stop them. “I don’t love you and I’m never going to, but I do like you.”
“Like… platonically?” Harry said.
This time, Tom looked up and Harry was looking at him again with the same easy expression he always had. “Not exactly,” he said, letting himself turn to face him and close the space that had begun to gape between them. “I don’t think there’s a word for it,” he continued, “but, I guess on that scale, it’s somewhere between platonic and romantic.”
What he was feeling might have been between platonic and romantic, but it had little to do with either label; it wasn’t a lesser or greater sort of love, in fact, it barely counted as love at all. The word didn’t feel right to describe something that held so much more. This feeling inside him wasn’t love, it didn’t make his heart flutter and his stomach tie itself in knots, it didn’t make him ache and squirm. Nor was it friendship in the conventional sense.
He wanted to touch Harry, to hold him, to sit here in their own little slice of the universe, surrounded by the gentle patter of the rain and steady static of the radio, and know that he was acknowledged, appreciated, and adored. He just wanted to have some space of his own that didn’t have to make room for love or friendship or sex, someplace he could be seen with no expectations, and he would really like Harry to be there too.
As if he’d read his thoughts, Harry leaned over and touched at Tom’s hand, running the tips of his fingers over his knuckles, glancing up for reassurance. “I think we should find a word for it,” he said quietly, “but for now, I’m glad you like me and if it’s worth anything, I like you too.”