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“Don’t get dramatic,” Hickey says immediately, once Tozer pulls the door open and stares. The expression on his face is dramatic enough for the evening, Hickey thinks, although it is expressions, shock, confusion, hurt, then anger, in quick succession, as well as several others that Hickey can’t identify.
And then, nothing. Like a door in Tozer's face slams shut. “You were gone for four months,” Tozer says finally.
“Well, here I am now,” Hickey says, craning his neck to see past Tozer in the doorway. The apartment looks the same as he’d left it; a little bit messier, maybe. He’ll make Tozer do some tidying up tomorrow.
“You can’t..." Tozer trails off. He's looking at Hickey in a funny way; like he's a ghost, or like he'll vanish as soon as he takes his eyes off of him. "I thought you’d died, or something.”
“Died?" Hickey echoes, incredulous.
“Where were you?”
“Traveling,” Hickey says evasively, which is true.
“Traveling. Traveling?” Tozer rubs his face; he looks tired, Hickey notes. Beard overgrown since he’s seen him last. He has some nerve to look tired, after the long, long journey Hickey's undertaken to find himself here again. "You didn’t answer my messages—“
“My phone broke,” Hickey lies. "For a little while."
“Right, well, you could’ve used someone else’s,” Tozer insists. “You didn’t tell me where you were going, you didn’t tell me anything—"
There's a strange, heavy feeling in Hickey's chest—not quite a lump in his throat, but a similar sensation. It's occurring to him now that this is not how he'd wanted this to go, or expected it to go, or that he had expected this to go some way, at some point, a thought he'd had on one of the long, lonely bus rides he's taken back here, thinking about Tozer, thinking about when they'd next meet. It prickles at his skin like a burr, that realization, and before Hickey can think, he speaks.
“I'm not a prisoner here,” he snaps. “I've a right to come and go.”
Those words hang in the air, just for a moment. Despite Hickey's previous directions in relation to the evening's dramatics, Tozer looks, for a moment, like he'd been slapped.
“Yeah. Yeah, I suppose you do," he says slowly. "Well, you’re not staying here.”
Hickey frowns. “Sol.”
“You’re not," Tozer says, and Hickey realizes, suddenly, that he's serious. "I was worried. And you don’t care. You can’t just—you only think about yourself. Come back when you’re better than this."
That strange feeling in Hickey's chest gets heavier, weighing him down like a stone. A thousand ways to respond to that fill his head; but when he goes to say them, he can't find the words. "Sol," Hickey tries instead, for the second time, but he barely gets that out before the door's shut in his face.
***
So Hickey goes to Hodgson’s.
Hodgson isn't his first choice, or his second, or even his third, but Billy’s not speaking to him currently, and Crozier hasn’t quite arrived to the same conclusion that Hickey has regarding their acquaintanceship and where it might lead, and the AirBNB Des Voeux rents out isn’t an option—death to landlords, parasites, all of them, Hickey thinks mutinously, but only when Des Voeux doesn’t respond to his text messages within the hour, and only when Hickey pays a visit to the AirBNB in person only to discover that at some point he’s traitorously changed the passcode to the key lock since Hickey last stayed there.
“Just until I’m back on my feet,” Hickey tells Hodgson, who appears to be delighted to see him. That’s an interesting novelty, even if Hickey’s preference would be that that sentiment would come from just about anyone but George Hodgson. It’s how Tozer ought to have looked, he thinks, and then dismisses the thought.
“Of course,” Hodgson says. Since the hour is late, he’s dressed for bed; flannel pajama pants and an overlarge T-shirt with the gormless face of a Golden Retriever splashed across the front. Hickey stares into its eyes. “I’ll be scarce, I’m afraid, but you can stay as long as you’d like. It’s just a couch, but it’s a lovely couch.”
As Hickey is sitting on it, he’s able to come to the conclusion that it is a lovelier couch than Tozer’s. Hodgson has a lot of lovelier things than Tozer has, which is unsurprising. As he skims the room for a quick inventory of the room and its contents—and for several items, the potential resale value—he takes note of a door with a sign on it, written in a neat hand: Please knock.
A thought occurs to him, and Hickey glances back at Hodgson warily. “That’s not…”
“Oh, no,” Hodgson says. “It’s not John. I wouldn’t have been allowed to invite you here if it were. That’s my new roommate. His name is Harry. He’s very nice. He likes to sit in his room.”
“Does he.”
“He’s a doctor. I think. Not medical, but—some form of one. He keeps odd hours. He’s really very nice. Spectacularly nice.“
Hickey yawns.
“He’s been here for eight months since John moved out.” Much to Hickey’s horror, Hodgson starts to get slightest bit misty-eyed. “I do miss John, sometimes, but I see him twice a week—“
Hickey yawns, a little bit more theatrically.
“And you did get off on the wrong foot with John, or John did with you, I know, but I think that perhaps if you gave him more of a chance—”
“Well, I suppose I ought to get to bed,” Hickey interjects loudly. “I have a job interview tomorrow.”
This is a lie, but it seems like something good to say when staying on someone’s couch for free for some indefinite period of time, which Hickey is hoping to make as definite as possible, as that's the decent thing to do, and also because Hodgson is best enjoyed in small doses.
“Do you?” Hodgson asks, surprised. “I thought you were working with Solomon.”
Hickey fixes his eyes on the clock on the far wall, also—by some strange coincidence—lovingly painted with frolicking golden retrievers. “No,” Hickey tells the retriever at 10:00.
“Do you see him much anymore?”
Hickey closes his eyes. It is a lovely couch. Lovely, and soft, and well-padded. Like lying on a cloud.
“Hickey?”
***
Foggy with sleep, and squinting in the punishing light of the early morning, Hickey has to read the texts two or three times over to absorb them properly. At some point in the night, someone—Hodgson, presumably—had put a knitted blanket over him, but it’s been a cold October, and even with that, he’d woken up shivering.
Now, he thinks about how hot Sol is at night lying next to him, like a sweaty furnace, useful in the winter, intolerable in the summer. He thinks about how he whistles when he’s up and getting ready for the day.
And he lurches up, setting his phone aside before he thinks about that too much more, although the matter that his mind turns to is adjacent. He comes to the realization that something has to be done about Tozer, or so he tells himself. It had been a convenient situation, practically speaking; it’s a decent flat, and Tozer hadn’t asked him to pitch in with rent, recognizing the value, perhaps, in Hickey’s skills in household management, even if Tozer traitorously only hoovers half of the times that Hickey directs him to.
So he sets that thought to work itself out to completion at the back of his mind and starts his day, the first order of business being to look and see if Hodgson is present (he isn’t) and the second to brush his teeth and then take a shower. Once he’s dressed again, he continues to make his inventory of Hodgson’s flat, pocketing a handful of smaller things that won’t be missed here and there. And finally, he pulls open the door to Harry’s room, intending to make an inventory of its contents as well, only to find Harry himself sitting in front of a laptop at a desk and staring at him.
“Hello,” he says, after a pause.
“Hello,” Harry says. “You must be...Connell, was it?”
Harry is a small, bespectacled man, with curly dark hair and a weary, intelligent face. Framed posters line the cluttered room; intricate anatomical diagrams of animals, vegetables, and minerals. Hickey supposes that he would sleep with him if Harry made a pass at him.
“Cornelius,” Hickey says. “But you can call me Hickey.”
“Right. Well.” Harry offers him a wan smile. “Harry Goodsir. Hello. It was nice to meet you, but I’ve really got to get back to…”
A thought occurs to Hickey; he recognizes it as the one that’s been continuing on at the back of his mind, now fitting that last piece into its associated puzzle. “Are you a doctor?” he asks abruptly.
Harry blinks. “Yes. Technically speaking.”
“Well, I’ve got a problem,” Hickey says. “Maybe you could help me with it.”
“I do research, primarily,” Harry says. “I would advise that you see your G.P.”
“It’s not physical,” Hickey explains. “It’s an interpersonal conflict. And—you’ve taken psychology classes, though. Surely. If you’ve gone to medical school. And I was thinking that—“
As Hickey had been speaking, Harry had taken off his glasses and rubbed his face; when he emerges again from behind his hands, he looks twice as tired. “Hickey, was it?” I’m sorry, but I’m really very busy at the moment. I've got to get this tended to before I go to work. Maybe George can help you.” A shadow passes over his face. “He loves to help.”
“But—“
“Close the door on the way out, if you would,” Harry says, quite firmly, and turns back to his laptop, clearly considering the matter to be settled.
Even if it’s not. Hickey goes out and closes the door behind him as directed, not unquietly. He sits back on the couch, and thinks some more. It is, he still thinks, a good idea.
After a moment, he gets up and finds the router in the corner of the room. He removes one of its cables, stows it in his pocket, and sits back down on the couch again. It wouldn’t be a good idea if it didn’t have obstacles in front of it, he thinks serenely; as the universe is challenging him to resolve this matter, so it would reward him, too, for doing it cleverly.
It’s seven minutes before Harry emerges from his room again, confusion written plainly across his face. Hickey watches him as he goes to the router and fiddles around with it; it takes a moment for him to take note of its missing cable, and then another moment for another realization to dawn on him, and another to turn and look at Hickey warily. Hickey smiles at him.
“I’ll give it back once you help me,” he tells him magnanimously, patting the couch next to him. Harry doesn’t move. “Now, before you get irate at me — I know you’re not a psychologist. But what would you say if you were on a plane and someone had broken his leg, and they were calling for a doctor? Not—sorry, I only do research. Nothing I can do.”
“Under what circumstance would you break your leg on a plane,” Harry says icily.
“Well, Dr. Goodsir, is your duty,” says Hickey with a shrug. “You know, the what’s it called. Hippocratic Oath.”
“It’s not, really,” Harry says. He does not sit next to Hickey as directed, but he does sit in the chair across from him, with a certain indignant compliance. “You’re not dying. It just sounds like you’re having an argument with someone.”
“It’s someone I live with,” Hickey says. “He’s cross with me.”
“I couldn’t imagine why,” Harry mutters.
“It’ll only take a few minutes of your time. Essentially, I had other things to attend to, elsewhere. And I’d been living with this man, Sol, and we’d been—we’ve become quite—“ Hickey stares at the ceiling, searching for a good word. He doesn’t come up with one; if there’s some background process in his mind devoted to solving that puzzle, it hasn’t come up with an answer yet. “Involved. But I had to leave to accomplish them.”
“And he’s upset that you didn’t take him along?”
“No. I didn’t tell him I was going, actually.”
Harry eyes him. “How long were you gone?”
“Four months,” Hickey says. “And a bit.”
Harry closes his eyes, for a long moment, and then opens them again. “You vanished for four months, and you’ve now held me hostage because you can’t work out by yourself why he might be upset.”
“I’m not holding you hostage. The internet isn’t everything, Harry,” Hickey tells him helpfully. “And if it’s sent you into this much distress, perhaps that’s a sign you’ve an unhealthy dependence on it. Go out into the real world. Open your mind to—“
“You should apologize to him,” Harry says tiredly. “Can I have the cable back now?”
It’s not the answer that Hickey had expected. He frowns. “Why should I? I don’t owe him anything. I’m a free man.”
“It’s not about what you owe him,” Harry says. “It’s about taking his feelings into account, if you do care for this man.”
Hickey opens his mouth, and then shuts it, turning the words over in his mind. If you do care for this man. Caring can be useful, his mind offers up to him, feebly. Caring can get you things, it adds, with even more uncertainty after that. Hickey crosses his legs, drums his fingers against the couch, uncrosses his legs again, and then fishes the cable out of his pocket and passes it over to Harry.
“Here you go,” he says shortly, mind already working by the time that Harry gets up to fiddle with the router, enough so that the icy look that Harry shoots him is promptly ignored. Perhaps he doesn’t have to apologize. If Tozer knew the trouble he’s gone to already this morning to solve this problem, that wouldn’t be an implicit apology, or any admission of fault, but—it would mean something, surely.
If you do care for this man.
He likes Harry’s voice a lot more when it isn’t in his head. Irritated, he takes out his phone from his pocket—thinks, for a moment—and then fires off a text.
***
After this, Tozer sends him a blurry photo of a frog that he’d seen on his morning walk to work, the true meaning of which is largely mysterious to Hickey but nonetheless leads him to conclude that Tozer’s resentment towards him might be beginning to thaw, and that that morning’s experiment had been a resounding success.
And as usual, the universe doesn’t appear to be short on useful coincidences for him. By that afternoon, he’s worked out Harry’s place of employment: it’s walkable. Hardly ten minutes away.
***
“I did speak to Harry this morning,” Hodgson says, his voice coming through the phone timid and uncertain. “He said that, um. You hid the internet cable from him?”
“Don’t know why he’d say that,” Hickey says cheerfully, turning a corner and slipping past a sleepy-looking guard with a smile and a flash of Tozer’s driver’s license, which he’s coincidentally borrowing at the present, and conveniently slightly resembles the security pass that’s required to get through to the next wing. Tozer, presumably, hasn’t worked this out yet, Hickey reasons, or else he wouldn’t have sent him that photo of that frog.
“Oh.”
The security guard waves at him half-heartedly, attempting to call him back; Hickey ignores her and hurries on. “Might have been a dream he’d had, or something.”
“Well if it hadn’t been a dream. I’d prefer that you not do that. If possible.”
Hodgson can’t see the wounded look on his face, but Hickey, bumping open a door with his shoulder, puts it on anyway. “Are you calling me a liar?”
“No! Of course I’d never—“
He hangs up, scanning the doors as they pass. Dr. Emma such-and-such, room 201. Dr. Silna something-or-other, room 202. And then, finally, in room 203, one Dr. Harry Goodsir. He doesn’t bother to knock.
***
“Hello, Harry.”
The sunny smile he gives Harry is not returned; for some reason he seems to be alarmed. This morning, Hickey had found him typing away at his computer, and now at work he's found him doing more of the same, although Hickey doesn’t know where the router is here—he’ll have to find some new form of leverage.
“What are you doing here?” Harry asks, bewildered, as Hickey takes a seat across from him. “You’re not supposed to—”
Hickey folds his hands in front of him, fingers laced together on top of Harry’s desk. “I’ve apologized,” he says. “What should I do now?”
“I don’t know!” Harry says exasperatedly, jerky and frenetic with energy, as Hickey’s learned that he becomes when he’s vexed. As he has been most of the time, during their limited acquaintanceship. “But you can’t be here.”
“Well, I won’t be, as soon as you tell me what to do,” says Hickey.
“I-I don’t know,” Harry says, sitting back, looking like he’s considering it for a moment, until he realizes that that’s what he’s doing. “I don’t know! I’m not a psychologist, and—psychologists aren’t meant to do this, tell you how to resolve arguments, they’re supposed to—“
“Ah,” Hickey says serenely. “So you do know what a psychologist is supposed to do.”
Harry falls quiet, glowering at him. He does seem very busy; there’s the muted sound of email notifications going off in the background. “I don’t know,” he repeats finally, for the third time. He sounds resigned in a new way. He slouches back in his chair, looking at the door, and for a moment Hickey wonders if he's going to try to leap over the desk and make a break for it, until suddenly, he speaks again, wearily. “You went traveling. Did you get him a souvenir?”
Hickey frowns. “No.”
“Get him something else then. Make him something. Food, or—actually, don’t do that,” he adds hurriedly, apparently arriving to the same conclusion that Hickey has, which is that that would require use of Hodgson’s kitchen. “Get him a gift. Something he likes.”
Hickey considers this until something occurs to him. “Well," he ventures, giving Harry a coy look. "He likes it when I let him—“
“Not that kind of a gift,” Harry interrupts hastily. “Mr. Hickey. Please, I don’t want to know that much information. Please. Thank you.” He pauses, watching to see if Hickey intends to continue on like he’s waiting for a bomb to go off; when he doesn’t, he relaxes, just a little bit. “Something else.”
“Something else,” Hickey echoes thoughtfully.
***
He knows the Nando’s Tozer goes to for lunch, and what time Tozer takes his lunch, approximately, and so, several hours later, he sights him sitting at one of the outside tables before Tozer sees him.
When he does, Tozer’s so astounded that he chokes on his drink.
“Don’t die,” Hickey tells him, sliding in on the opposite side of him. As he waits for Tozer to take another swallow and clear his throat, he begins to sort through his pockets.
“Christ,” Tozer croaks, eyes watery. “What are you—“
“I have this,” Hickey informs him, presenting him with a fistful of balled up fabric and depositing it on the table between them. “It’s for you.”
Tozer looks at him, and then at the table between them, eyeing Hickey’s gift with a suspicion that’s faintly insulting. “I’m not touching that,” he says. “Not until you tell me what it is.”
“Come on. What do you think it is?” Hickey asks, and then, before Tozer can insult him with an answer to that, forges on. “It’s a silk pillowcase.”
This does not dispel Tozer’s suspicion. In fact, he now looks at it like he thinks that it might have a dead rat bundled up somewhere within it. “A what?”
Impatient, Hickey takes Tozer's hand. “They feel nice on your face," he explains, bringing that hand to the pillowcase between them and settling it down. “See?”
And he lets his hand linger, just for a moment—feeling the heat from Tozer’s skin against his palm. He's got big hands, but they're not as clumsy as you'd think. Tozer goes quiet too, for a second, his hand still underneath Hickey’s, until Hickey realizes that he’s lingered a moment too long, and he draws his arm back hastily.
“Where did you get that?” Tozer asks, glancing up at Hickey.
“I bought it for you,” Hickey says. “As a gift. They’re expensive, those are.”
“Well. Alright. Thanks,” Tozer says, still faintly mystified—but he does seem pleased, a little bit, and Hickey thinks that might make this a victory. “Where have you been staying?”
“Here and there,” Hickey answers, evasive out of habit, but when dismay flickers across Tozer's face, He hesitates. “With Hodgson.”
“Ah. And you’re seeing a doctor?” asks Tozer, and it seems, suddenly, like a good time for Hickey to go back through his pockets again; this time, he comes up with Tozer’s driver’s license.
“I have this for you as well,” Hickey tells him, sliding it across the table. Tozer stares—and snatches it up, bewildered, to take a second look.
“Why do you have this?" he asks, once he's given it a once-over, plainly confused. "And you’ve just said it like it was a present as well. Christ, Cornelius. I’ve been driving around without that for months.”
“I took it by accident.”
Tozer rolls his eyes. “That’s a lie if I ever heard one,” he says, but tucks it away in his pocket nonetheless, so Hickey supposes that he's forgiven, mostly. For a moment, his eyes linger on Hickey’s face. “You look well.”
“Yeah?” Hickey tilts his head, watching Tozer back, looking for—he’s not sure, really. Maybe he’s just looking at him to look at him. He doesn’t look as tired as he did before. Hickey wonders how he’s been sleeping.
It’s Tozer who tears his eyes away first. “Well, I’ve got to get back to work,” he says gruffly, getting up from the table, stuffing the pillowcase in his jacket, Hickey notes. “As you know, probably, as you monitor my schedule, for some reason.”
"I don't monitor it," Hickey says. "I'm aware of it."
"That's the same thing," Tozer says, and in an altruistic impulse, Hickey decides not to argue. He's watching Hickey again, besides. "Keep in touch," he says, finally. "I'll—see you around, I suppose. Alright?"
"Alright," says Hickey. "You have my number."
Tozer gives him a look. "Working again, clearly."
"Miraculously," Hickey adds. "Enjoy your pillowcase."
***
Hickey gets back late—after Hodgson’s asleep, in an effort to evade any uncomfortable questions about Hickey’s treatment of his flatmate or the location of Hodgson’s missing pillowcase. He goes straight past the couch and into Harry’s room, where he finds him sleeping as well, at least until Hickey sits on the bed and roughly shakes him.
“Wake up,” Hickey says loudly, and Harry lurches up like he’d just been shot, flailing at Hickey—landing, by some stroke of luck, a blow to Hickey’s jaw. Hickey scrambles back, clutching his face. “Ow. Watch it.”
“What—what are you doing,” Harry gasps, clutching at his chest. “What is wrong with you.”
This seems like a rhetorical question, so Hickey forges on. “It did work,” he says. “What you said. He liked it.”
Harry looks at Hickey and then lies back down. He doesn’t close his eyes, though; he keeps them on the ceiling. He looks resigned, like a prisoner condemned.
“You’re not going to leave until you’ve asked what you wanted to ask, will you,” he says finally. He’s intelligent, Harry is. That’s why Hickey likes him.
“What should I—“
“Take him out to dinner. Please,” Harry mutters. “Ask him on a date. Ask him if you can come home. Never come back here again.”
“That’s not very nice, Harry,” Hickey says, but Harry’s already shut his eyes, either asleep, or pretending to be.
Hickey is kind enough to leave him to it. He has what he came for, after all.
***
“I want to make you some soup,” Hickey announces to Tozer, who promptly ruins the romance of the overture by looking suspicious.
“What are you going to put in it?” Tozer asks—but he steps aside to let Hickey wind past him in the doorway nonetheless. “Are you…drugging me, or something?”
Hickey rolls his eyes. “I’m not going to drug you,” he tells him. “Christ. What kind of man do you think I am?”
“Do you want me to answer that?”
Hickey does, a little bit, but he’s not so emotionally needy to go out and say it. As he heads for the kitchen, he takes note of his surroundings; everything that’s changed since he’d been here last. More clutter than Hickey likes, but it’s all evidence of the life that Tozer’s been living in the months that he’s been gone, something he finds himself wondering about now. The football by the door has migrated to the living room. Tozer’s fall jacket has been dug out of storage; it’s slung over one of the chairs. He wonders if he’s fetched the warmer duvet from the hall closet and lain it on the bed.
“Do you even know how to make soup?” Tozer asks as Hickey sets down his grocery bag down on the table.
“Yes,” Hickey lies. “You put things in a pot and boil them. It’s not hard.”
It doesn’t seem hard, albeit slightly harder than just having soup from a can, which Hickey had, in fact, considered for a moment when he’d planned this venture before he’d decided to make a little bit of an effort. As Hickey unpacks his bag—there’s the boxes of stock, there’s the vegetables, there’s the chicken—Tozer retrieves a beer from the fridge.
“I would offer, but I know you don’t like it,” Tozer says. Hickey watches the muscles in his arm work as he attempts to pry off the cap with a butter knife. “Why are you doing this?”
“Well, we’re having a date,” Hickey says.
Tozer does not have the decency to even attempt to keep himself from appearing completely and utterly shocked. “A date?” he asks, and Hickey can feel his ears go hot, suddenly.
“That’s what I said. Now, chop these carrots,” Hickey orders, fumbling around some more in his grocery bag. “I’ll do the onions.”
“Shouldn’t I peel them first?”
“I don’t know.” Hickey considers this. “Maybe. Yes.”
***
The good part of it, Hickey discovers, which gives him a strange twinge in his chest, is cooking with Tozer—how the room got hot and fragrant with the smell of simmering vegetables, the easy rhythm of their conversation, the argument they get into over what technically qualifies as ‘early afternoon’, the shape of Tozer’s body behind his when he stretches to reach over Hickey’s head for the cutting board, and so on.
The bad part of it is eating the soup.
A strange look crosses Tozer’s face. Spoon in hand, he squints at the bowl in front of him with great unease. “Why’s it taste so sweet?”
Now they’re huddled around their ramshackle kitchen table, Hickey in the nice chair, Tozer in the folding one that Hickey had borrowed from a neighbor’s patio two summers ago without technically asking. Hickey had already started on his soup, and had already noted that peculiar quality; truthfully, he’d hoped that Tozer wouldn’t notice.
“Well, it was too salty, so I improvised and put some honey in it,” Hickey admits reluctantly. “While you went out for a smoke. I forgot to mention. Maybe I put too much of it in there.”
“I don’t mind it,” Tozer says, even if the look on his face says otherwise. “It’s interesting, I suppose.”
Hickey doesn’t normally care to be patronized, but they had spent a full two hours cooking, and if that’s what he’s going to get for that tremendous effort, he’ll take it. “I don’t really know why people like soup,” Hickey admits, frowning.
“You chose it.”
“I thought it would be easy,” Hickey mutters, before an idea occurs to him. He glances at Tozer. “Maybe,” he adds sweetly. “We should just—“
“I’m not spending money on takeaway,” Tozer sighs. “If that’s where you’re going. You can’t steal my license, vanish for four months, turn up here, and then expect free takeaway from me.”
Hickey supposes that he has a point there, and that Tozer does now have a grudge to hold against him, which, given Hickey’s understanding of Tozer’s behavior, of which he’s given an awfully close study, is something he’ll hold onto for the next eight to nine years. He supposes that Harry had had a point as well, in his instruction as to what he ought to do, now that he thinks about it, despite his recurring claim of not being a therapist, but now he feels those words in his mouth, I’m sorry, and they’re bitter on his tongue.
“They weren’t good, those four months. In case you were wondering,” he ventures haltingly instead. “I just thought I was due for a change. I don’t stay in places forever. So that’s why I did it. That’s why I didn’t call. But it felt like—I’d left myself behind. I don’t know.”
His face feels hot, suddenly. He feels hot all over. It might be the soup. He doesn’t want to look up; he thinks that Tozer might be looking at him, and now, suddenly, the last thing that he wants is to be seen.
“So you came back here,” Tozer says, and theres an earnestness in that, a hopefulness, enough so that Hickey is compelled to look back up at him, and the look on Tozer’s face sends him up to his feet like an electric shock might.
“Well, I ought to head back to Hodgson’s,” Hickey says loudly, over the sound of the chair scraping as he pushes it back—the soup, just a quarter eaten, rattling forlornly from the force of it. He makes it as far as the narrow hallway leading to the front door when Tozer catches up, grabbing him by the arm, not roughly, and turning him so that he can look at him
“What if you stayed?” Tozer asks, and Hickey thinks about staying. He feels like he’s wanted to touch Tozer for years and years, and he’s only been gone months, so he puts his hands on him—his waist first, feeling the heat of him bleed through the thin cotton fabric of his t-shirt, and when he looks up, Tozer kisses him, bumping him back against the creaky closet door, and traitorously, Hickey’s heart rattles in his chest like it had been the first time.
This goes on for what feels like a long while until Hickey breaks off. “You taste like beer,” Hickey tells him. “I hate beer.”
“I know,” Tozer says.
“I want to stay,” Hickey says, hands slipping up so that he can cup his face and hold it.
“I know,” Tozer says again, grinning, just before Hickey pulls him down into another kiss, and then another, anyway.