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The radio died half an hour ago, when they turned onto an empty road away from the highway. The phones could barely catch a signal, and the silence inside the car was getting more and more oppressive. It felt cramped and stuffy even with the windows down. Matt was staring at the road, his eyes hidden behind the sunglasses. Dom was looking out of the window at the trees sweeping by and could barely contain his hollow laughter. The two of them had successfully been avoiding each other for almost five months only to end up being stuck in the car for the next three hours. They were both late because their flights to Toronto had been delayed, so they had to rent a car at the airport and drive to a forest location, where the set had been based for some Seelie Court scenes.
Dom stretched his arm trying to catch the wind between his fingers. It was the end of April, the sun was already creeping down and its warm rays were almost shyly touching his skin. Dom only wished he could stuck his head outside and let the wind blow all the painful splinters, that used to be his thoughts, out of his head.
Shooting till the end of Season 1, conventions, photo shoots, interviews - the world had never known greater actors than he and Matt were. They could play best friends on the show, they could pull it off behind the scenes, too. Nobody saw them deliberately taking places as far from each other as possible. Nobody noticed how they recoiled when the last photo was taken. Nobody knew that they stopped talking if there were no other people around. Just like it was right now. Dom tried to turn on the radio again but all he heard was the screeching noise, which he didn’t mind considering the situation. But he noticed that Matt winced painfully at the sound, so he turned it off.
They had played a heart-to-heart talk at the so called bachelor party without a hitch. They had stood side by side at Alec’s failed wedding. They did what they had to do and said the lines they had to say. Everything seemed the way it used to be. Except it wasn’t and probably would never be. “Hope you’re not kissing,” Alberto had once said when he had found both of them in the gym. A harmless little joke, the one Dom had used to repeat all the time, and nobody cared. He could almost hear the sound of breaking glass when something inside his head crashed at that very moment but he miraculously managed to stay on the bars. Matt ignored it just like he had always done before. It could have been a coincidence but since then, they had never worked out together.
Still, it was impossible not to appreciate how hilarious it was. Now that he knew exactly how it felt to kiss Matt, how it felt to be kissed by him, he would finally stop joking about it. The irony of it all. Dom couldn’t help snorting as he thought about the absurdity of this whole situation, about a silly joke that had led them to a disaster.
“What?” Matt asked as he glanced at him briefly.
“Just a random thought,” Dom shook his head.
“Do you know that it’s called mind-wandering?” Matt said thoughtfully after a moment of silence, as if reading a passage right out of his mind. “Spontaneous thoughts are accessed by the brain in ways we can’t predict and some of them from the possible millions pop into awareness.”
Dom froze when his heart sank for a moment and then went straight to a sprinter pace. He had never realized how much he missed listening to Matt talking about everything. How much he missed Matt talking to him. Sometimes the silence between them felt almost like physical pain, like a sore burning throat. He couldn’t go on like this, not even a second more.
“I once read that…”
“Matt,” he interrupted softly. “We should have talked.”
“You ran off to England,” Matt said after a short pause, his fingers turned white from squeezing the steering wheel stronger than needed.
“And you ran off to New York,” Dom stated defensively.
All of a sudden, a loud bang came from the outside along with the metallic screeching. The car swerved right, then left, and Matt twisted the wheel sharply to stabilize it. When he hit the brakes, the car stopped at the side of the road leaving a deep trail in the sandy ground.
“God, I love rental cars,” Matt grumbled as he took off his sunglasses and got out of the car.
“Great,” Dom muttered as he followed him.
They both stood with their arms crossed, looking at the driver side tire that was basically torn into pieces.
“Do know you how to change a tire?” Dom asked casually as if it was just idle curiosity at a party and had nothing to do with reality.
Matt shrugged, “Theoretically. You?”
“I’ve seen it once.”
“Okay,” Matt rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. “Seems like we’re all professionals here. What can go wrong?”
Of course, everything went wrong pretty quickly.
“Easy, you’ll flip the car,” Matt said when Dom seemed to have mistaken changing a tire with a work-out session. “It’s too high.”
“Is it supposed to be this way?” Dom asked and jerked a handle that somehow didn’t look right to him.
“Wait, don’t…” the jack snapped, slipped from under the bottom, and the car fell back down heavily on the side of the road, kicking up all the dust in the world.
Both Dom and Matt jumped away but still got caught in a cloud of dirt, coughing and then suddenly laughing helplessly.
“What did you say?” Dom asked wiping his eyes.
“I said don’t touch that,” Matt was barely breathing with laughter. “You never listen.”
After the jack had been successfully installed again, it turned out that the only wrench they found in the trunk was in a wrong size. Fortunately, they still could use it but it was taking Matt at least ten times longer to remove each nut. Dom was sitting on the ground next to him, his back against the side of the car. The sun was already touching the tops of the hills far away, and the world was getting quieter.
“It’s gotta get bad before it gets good, right?” he chuckled throwing little stones over the road.
“I’m sorry about you and Sarah,” Matt said suddenly, turning the nuts, but with the ill-fitting wrench it looked more like he was trying to wrestle them to death.
“And you got married,” Dom said without looking at him. “That was fast. I mean, congratulations?”
“Damn it,” Matt cursed when the wrench slipped off the nut, and glared at Dom as he angrily blew his hair off his face. “And what are you doing?”
“Enjoying the view,” Dom winked and kept his eyes on Matt just a bit too long before he briefly looked at the crimson skyline. “Why?”
Matt seemed to be taken aback, he shook his head and continued his battle with the wrench. Dom thought he saw him blushing slightly, but that was probably due to the exertion. Two nuts down, Dom couldn’t stop thinking about the question he meant to ask since he had heard the news. He knew he should have bitten his own tongue off but it was annoying how Matt ignored the subject of his sudden and almost secret marriage, which everyone found out about from his girlfriend’s Instagram post.
“Did it work?” when the third nut was removed, Dom reached out and tapped slightly at the ring on Matt’s left hand. “Helped you to forget what had happened?”
Matt flinched but managed to keep a straight face, “There’s nothing to forget.”
“Oh, that hurt,” Dom dramatically clutched at his heart, smiling bitterly. “Was it that bad?”
Matt jumped to his feet and threw the wrench onto the ground next to him.
“Here, it’s your turn,” he snapped and strode along the road, as if he was going to walk all the way to the stupid Seelie Court.
Dom watched him until he slowed down and started pacing back and forth along the road. Then he sighed and started to work on another nut, which really was a pain in the ass. He managed to remove the last nut and the tire itself when Matt came back and took a spare out of the trunk.
“Better now?” Dom knew his tongue was his worst enemy but he couldn’t control himself now when he missed Matt as much as he hated him.
“You never know when to stop, do you?” he winced as if in pain.
“You could have stopped me,” Dom went on, almost cruelly enjoying the way he could rub salt in their wounds, with both of them knowing that he wasn’t talking about today. “If you wanted to.”
Matt dropped the spare and leaned onto the car, as if suddenly exhausted, his voice quiet, “I don’t even like guys that way.”
“Me neither,” Dom sat on the spare and ran his fingers through his hair.
They kept quiet for some time. The dusk was slowly growing over the hills and trees.
“It’s you, okay?” Dom finally sighed and looked up at him with all the courage he could find in himself. “It’s not about liking guys. It’s just about you, Matt. I don’t know what it is. I just know it hurts like hell not seeing you or not talking to you. Not touching you.”
Matt shook his head and rubbed his forehead, as if he could allow himself to listen. “There could be a lot more hurting if we let it go too far. And not just us, other people too.”
Dom knew all of that, he had thought about it a thousand times, but whatever consequences he could imagine, nothing had been worse than those past months when he kept feeling like he had lost something vital, like he had been lost, too. Dom knew that for him it was a do or die thing.
“Look, when we get to set and get out of this car, I’ll never say a word about it again and we’ll keep pretending nothing has ever happened,” he got up and leaned against the car next to Matt, both staring at the road in front of them. “And we’re really good at this.”
Matt folded his arms over his chest as if he was cold, his jawline tensed ever so slightly.
“Just tell me right here and right now that you haven’t thought about it. That you don’t remember how it felt. That it was just a stupid joke that had gone too far,” Dom went on, suddenly knowing that Matt could say that. He was strong enough to pretend for the rest of his life or maybe he had never wanted any of it, and it was just Dom himself going hopelessly mad.
“Tell me you have never wanted to do it again, not once,” he turned to looked at Matt, his voice cracked with too much of himself revealed in the middle of the empty road. “Can you tell me that?”
Matt gripped the trunk behind him as if trying to steady himself while the walls around him were crumbling down. Dom could see it in his eyes, in the trembling eyelashes, in a tight line of his lips - drowning, suffocating, falling apart. He knew it all too well.
“No, I can’t,” Matt swallowed nervously and bent his head in surrender. “I keep thinking about it all the time and I remember and I... I just think I’m going insane.”
Dom hesitated just for a moment and then he hugged him, stroking the back of his neck, relishing in the scent of his skin, in his warmth, in the relief that washed over him, when Matt immediately wrapped his arms around him.
Everything fell into place, everything clicked like the long lost pieces of the most intricate puzzle. They were exactly where they should have been, even if it was in the middle of nowhere, covered in dirt, unable to hold each other closer or inhale each other deeper.
“You can’t be insane if it’s both of us,” Dom whispered, as he felt Matt relax against him, letting his guard down, and his own tension was slowly slipping away. Now it seemed that for the past few months they had been functioning like two live wires.
“Actually, there is that thing known as shared psychosis…” Matt muttered into his shoulder.
“Matthew,” Dom pulled away, his hand still on the nape of Matt’s neck, as he looked deeply into his eyes, their lips barely apart. “Shut up.”
Matt burst out laughing and pushed him away in a very ungentle manner.
“You shut up,” he picked up the wrench and shoved it into Dom’s hands. “Keep going.”
“And what are you gonna do?” Dom crouched in front of the long-suffering wheel, smiling up at him.
“I don’t know,” Matt leaned back against the car, Dom’s smile reflecting on his lips, his posture no longer bearing that painful tension, as if he had finally allowed himself to breathe. “Enjoy the view maybe.”