Archive of Our Own ^beta

The drive should take two hours, but Erik manages it in ninety minutes, using his powers to floor the gas pedal as he scrambles the occasional police scanner. When he whips into the hotel parking lot in a spray of gravel, Emma’s mental greeting is half warm, half weary.

You didn’t have to drive like a madman, she projects. You could have even flown out here like a normal person.

Taking a helicopter to the Hamptons is not actually what a normal person does, he shoots back.

She sends him the uncanny sensation of an eye roll, and then: Hurry up and put on your damn suit.

He dons a baseball cap and sunglasses to check into his room—Emma has him down as “Bruce Wayne,” a name he delivers while remaining successfully stone-faced—and quickly changes into his tuxedo. When he returns to the lobby, Emma is waiting for him, her extremely pale grey gown somehow shimmering despite the room’s low light. He raises an eyebrow.

“Isn’t an almost-white dress basically the same as a white one?”

Emma lifts her chin. “She should be grateful I was willing to wear this much pigment.”

In the car, Emma gives him a run-down of the wedding he has for some reason agreed to accompany her to—he honestly can’t remember if he already owed her one or if she now owes him one, but Emma has some kind of point to make with the bride, apparently a frenemy from her adolescence, and it’s a role he doesn’t mind playing.

“What about the groom’s side?” he says, glancing at her.

She’s on her phone, waving her free hand absently as she says, “New York society types.” Her tone makes it sound like she’s naming an alien species. “I have no idea.”

“I’m sure they’re wildly different from New England society types,” he mutters.

“What’s that?” Emma looks up from her phone, but before he can repeat himself, she says, “I just got an email from Jack, at Paramount. He thinks the likelihood of—”

“I thought we weren’t working this weekend,” Erik interrupts.

Emma’s lips press into a flat line, and after a beat, she tucks her phone into her tiny, sparkling clutch. “You’re right.”

A longer beat passes, and then Erik sighs. “What did Jack say?”

Emma smiles and pulls out her phone again. He presses on the gas as he looks back at the road.

The wedding is at the groom’s family estate in Sagaponack, on a hill overlooking the dunes that stretch out to the Atlantic. At this point, Erik would like to say he can handle any sort of fancy party, but something about these old-money WASP things still manages to unsettle him—maybe because he usually feels more like a curiosity than anything else, as the immediate recognition is smothered by a particular kind of placid facade, like they’re trying to make it crystal-clear that they aren’t dazzled by the presence an actor.

A movie star, Emma corrects as he manages to invoke that precise reaction in one of her school friends at the pre-ceremony reception.

Erik flashes the friend and her husband the full expanse of his smile as he shakes their hands. That’s pushing it.

False modesty doesn’t suit you—and I can read these peoples’ thoughts, Emma sends back. She has a perfect poker face. After she takes a delicate sip of her drink, she adds, Some of them are surprisingly lustful for this hour of the afternoon.

That he can see, in the overlong way many of the women hold onto his hand after shaking it, or when one of the sharpest-dressed men in attendance leans in close and says, “I hope you don’t mind me saying so, but you were robbed at the Oscars. Your performance was…incredible.”

He’s gotten significantly more attention from men since that film—a little ironic, considering that unlike some of his other work, he was fully clothed the entire time.

“It’s a hundred and ten minutes of tragic gay longing and every other shot is a close-up of your face,” Emma had said when he first mentioned it, only laughing a little bit. “Just wait until the show comes out and they see you play gay with your clothes off.”

When a tinkling bell calls them to the ceremony, they take a pair of seats halfway up the bride’s side. But while Erik is steeling himself for what will likely be the most boring part of the day—potentially rivaled only by reception speeches, a true wildcard—Emma stills beside him. He sends her a questioning thought.

“There’s another telepath here,” she says quietly. “Actually.” She cocks her head. “A vaguely familiar…”

As she trails off, Erik can sense it: titanium entwined with an unfamiliar polymer, it’s undeniably the shape of a wheelchair coming towards them. It could be anyone, but somehow, he knows exactly who it is. He whips around to see Charles frozen at the top of the aisle, a complicated array of emotions on his face. They lock eyes, and for an agonizingly long moment, it’s impossible to breathe.

Charles breaks first, shifting to his bland politician smile—which suits him far better at thirty-five than it ever did at twenty—and wheeling towards them. Erik then registers the woman behind him, who’s stopped to chat with someone towards the back of the groom’s side, her blue scales on full display in a backless dress with an almost obscenely high slit in the skirt. They’ve never actually met, but he’s seen Charles’s sister in so many photos; she’s even more striking in person.

His attention snaps back to Charles as he stops just beside their seats, hesitating for a moment before extending a hand. “Erik,” he says. “Quite a surprise.”

Erik raises an eyebrow. “You didn’t sense that I was here before you saw me?”

Charles’s eyes narrow slightly. “I had a bit of advanced warning. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t surprised.”

His hand is still outstretched, and Erik takes it, Charles’s palm smooth and dry and startlingly familiar against his. They don’t shake, so they’re basically holding hands; when their eyes meet again, Charles’s are even bluer than he remembered.

And then Emma clears her throat, and Charles pulls his hand back as glances at her. “Apologies, I’m being terribly rude—Emma, we met a few times, years ago. Before I knew Erik, even—”

“Yes, when you were sixteen and looked about twelve.” Emma gives him a sort of indulgent smile as she reaches across Erik’s lap to daintily shake his hand. “A pleasure to see you again.”

“Charles, we should probably go find the—holy shit.”

Raven stops short, nearly stumbling over her brother. She gapes at them, and then she turns an accusatory glare at Charles. “You didn’t tell me Erik Lehnsherr was going to be here.”

Charles is staring at him again, never breaking eye contact as he says, “I didn’t know.”

The tinkling bell returns, and both siblings glance behind them—Erik hadn’t noticed it before, but he can now see the space towards the front of the groom’s side where a few chairs have clearly been removed to accommodate a wheelchair.

When Charles turns back, he’s biting his lip. “Perhaps we can talk for a bit? At the reception, I mean.”

Erik watches him for a long moment, and then he nods.

They’re cousins with the groom, Emma projects as Erik watches them make their way up the aisle. She chuckles softly. New York society types.

Erik glances at her. You never told me you knew Charles.

Why would I? Emma raises her eyebrows. Neither did you.

It’s then that he realizes she knows everything—she’s probably always known everything. The perils of friendship with a telepath. Because it’s never about what they know, but what they choose to reveal they know.

Cousins, Erik projects instead. You took that from Charles’s mind?

Now Emma laughs outright. Raven’s. I’d need a nuclear blast to break through Charles’s shields right now.

The ceremony isn’t boring after all, as he devotes himself to the singular task of staring at the back of Charles’s head. The hints of grey in his dark hair catch in the sunlight. The broad stretch of his shoulders shifts minutely beneath his perfectly tailored suit jacket. When Charles turns to watch the maid of honor read an insipid poem, Erik is able to take in his face in profile: the curve of his nose, the jut of his chin, the soft press of his lips.

This is the least subtle performance you’ve ever given, Emma whispers into his mind.

He rolls his eyes and forces himself to look back at the bride and groom.

But they don’t get to talk during reception, because Charles and Raven are immediately trapped by the groom’s extended family; as Erik follows Emma around again, he does his best to ignore them. He swaps the champagne for something stronger, also ignoring Emma’s pointed look as he heads back to the bar for another.

Charles still hasn’t managed to escape by the time they’re all seated for the meal—and their tables are on clear opposite sides, so far that Erik can barely even glimpse him from his seat. He and Emma have been put with her school friends, and despite the mean-girl air permeating table’s conversation, the vaguely familiar-looking woman on his left is surprisingly tolerable.

“I know you have to say it’s an honor just to be nominated,” she says, smiling slyly. “But really, how did it feel to lose an Academy Award?”

Erik chokes a laugh into his wine glass. “You’re direct.”

She smirks. “That’s why CNN hired me.”

Now he recognizes her. He places his glass on the tablecloth and says, “I can tell you honestly: if it had been one of the other nominees, I would have felt a lot worse. But Anthony Hopkins…”

“Diplomatic and deferential,” she says, raising her eyebrows. “But is it the truth?”

Erik smiles. “Unfortunately for you, this isn’t an interview.”

The back-and-forth continues, but now that he’s realized who she is, he’s a little on edge; it may have been a coincidence, but he suspects the bride was having a bit of fun with Emma seating them next to a high-profile journalist.

It’s almost enough to distract him from Charles, which is probably why he’s caught off-guard when another mind presses gently against his. It’s a bit like Emma’s mental knock, but it’s obviously not her; he hasn’t felt this precise sensation in a decade and a half. He opens his mind.

They’re going to start the speeches in fifteen minutes, Charles projects, his mental voice warm with amusement. I’m sure you’ll be sorry to miss them, but…meet me inside in ten.

Erik doesn’t outwardly react, and he doesn’t watch Charles leave; when precisely ten minutes have passed, he excuses himself. He attracts an incredible amount of attention as he crosses towards the house—the earlier veneer of disinterest seems to have vanished with an afternoon of heavy drinking, and people are openly staring, even pointing. He can only hope that Charles’s exit was significantly less conspicuous.

By the time he reaches the front drive, Charles is in his mind again, with directions to a ground-floor bathroom off the main foyer; the passing waitstaff don’t spare him a glance, which must be Charles’s doing.

He uses his powers to unlock the bathroom door, and after he shuts it behind him, to lock it again. Charles is next to the sink, staring at him with the faintest hint of disbelief. Erik understands the feeling: it’s hard to process that he’s currently in the same room as Charles. They continue staring at each other for a protracted moment; there’s a fine pink flush high along Charles’s cheekbones, and a lock of hair that’s fallen loose curls invitingly across his forehead.

Erik eventually clears his throat and spreads his hands to gesture at their surroundings.

“We’re uh…catching up in a bathroom?” he says skeptically.

“Well…” Charles smiles slowly and does a little acknowledging nod. “I suppose it’s a classic for a reason.”

“A classic for…?”

Something shifts in the air, and in an instant, Erik understands. He crosses towards Charles in two long strides and bends down to kiss him; Charles arches up towards him with a groan, tugging him into his lap as he pulls him into a deep, filthy kiss.

“Fuck,” Erik mutters when they eventually pull apart. “Charles—”

Charles doesn’t let him finish, kissing him again as his hands surge down his sides and curve around to cup his ass. His telepathy is crackling all around them, and Erik finds himself sinking into it as he writhes almost involuntarily, grinding down into Charles’s lap. Charles fumbles at his belt, his lips tracing up Erik’s jawline and around to the curve of his neck.

Where are you staying? Charles projects, his mouth warm against the dip just below Erik’s ear.

Erik takes a long, shuddering breath as he tries to concentrate enough to project back. Charles just laughs, his lips vibrating against his skin.

“Never mind,” he says aloud as he pulls back slightly. “I can see for myself.”

Erik gives him a flat look, but Charles just offers up one of his stupid little fake-innocent smiles before he kisses him again. He unbuttons Erik’s trousers as he projects: We have a house nearby, in East Hampton. Plenty of space for a guest.

It’s enough to make Erik pause, his mind spinning. He pulls back and glances at the door. “Can you get us out of here inconspicuously?”

“Of course,” Charles says. The stupid little fake-innocent smile morphs into his trademark smug one, which is as infuriating as ever. “If there weren’t a photographer, I could make it so no one knew you were even here.”

Erik laughs softly as he shakes his head. “Leave the camera destruction to me.”

It’s a date, Charles projects. But first— And as he slips his fingers under the band of his briefs, Erik closes his eyes and rocks against him, all his awareness winnowing to the wetness of Charles’s lips, and the warm friction of Charles’s hand against his skin, and the snaking tendrils of Charles’s telepathy in his head, so familiar after all these years that it almost hurts.

*

Charles is still asleep when Erik wakes up, and he spends probably a creepy amount of time watching the slow rise and fall of his pale, freckled chest before he eventually rolls onto his back and blinks up at the ceiling. The past eighteen hours have a surreal sort of sheen to them—which is really saying something, considering how surreal his baseline is these days.

He sweeps the room to find his phone in the pocket of his suit jacket, which he apparently flung over the arm of the sofa in the sitting area at some point last night. It takes a few tries—he’s admittedly a little hungover, which always makes his powers feel slightly creaky—but he eventually manages to maneuver it free and float it into his outstretched hand.

He expected either zero or a hundred messages from Emma, but there’s exactly one text: “You can tell Charles Xavier that I figured out his little trick, and I don’t take kindly to being amongst the telepathically manipulated masses. Currently deciding which one of you I’m going to kill first.”

He smiles and types back: “him. your career would take a massive hit if you offed me.”

It’s only a few minutes before she replies: “Whatever you need to tell yourself, sugar.”

He lets out a little laugh, and Charles says groggily, “What’s so funny?”

Erik glances over at him. He’s got one arm thrown over his eyes, squinting against the sunlight. He holds up the phone and Charles lowers his arm, smiling slowly as he reads the exchange.

“She’s quick,” he says. “I figured she’d break it at some point. She was the only other telepath there.” He raises an eyebrow. “I’m awfully touched that you’d turn me over to be murdered.”

Erik tosses his phone onto the mattress, and then he places a hand on either side of Charles’s head and swings his body until he’s straddling him. “I’m sure you can take care of yourself.”

As he leans in to kiss him, Charles arches up, raking a hand through his hair and tugging him downward. Erik can feel the coiled strength in his grip—he had impressive upper-body strength when they were in college, but he seems even stronger now, his once-wiry frame a good deal thicker, with an enticing solidity to his arms and torso. Even as Erik looms over him, he imagines Charles above him, the force of him pinning him down.

Charles laughs into his mouth and pulls back slightly. “We can certainly do that if you want, you know. Right now, even. Might take some more complicated maneuvering, but…”

Erik swats him in the side. “Nosy.”

“You’re waxing poetic about my upper body with very loud thoughts approximately one inch from my head,” Charles says with a teasing smile. “Really, though, I’m the one who should be complimenting you….” His index finger trails slowly from the dip of Erik’s clavicle down the center of his chest. “You look…”

“Like I have to take my clothes off for millions of people,” Erik says sardonically, pushing up to sit back a little. “You should see what I’m allowed to eat most days. It’s not pleasant.”

Charles’s smile dims slightly. After a beat, he says, “I really loved your last film, you know.”

Erik remembers a particular bouquet of flowers amongst the ridiculous number he received the day they announced the Oscar nominations, running his fingers over the letters of Charles’s name, even though he knew Charles himself hadn’t written the card.

“I know,” he says slowly. “You congratulated me.”

Now Charles looks almost sad as he shakes his head. “That was for the nomination. But I never got to tell you how brilliant you were. In any of your films, but especially that one.”

They stare at each other for a long moment, and Erik wonders whether Charles is reading his thoughts—if he is, maybe he can untangle them, because he sure as hell doesn’t know what to feel right now. Charles’s body is warm and smooth between his thighs, and Erik glances down at the rise and fall of his chest again; it’s easier than looking him in the eye.

Charles clears his throat and gives him a small tap on the arm. “Shall we sort out breakfast, then?”

Erik meets his gaze again. The sad look is gone, replaced by the patented “Pleasantries Only, Please” Charles Xavier smile.

“Coffee first?” Erik suggests.

“Yes, of course.” A small groove appears between Charles’s brows. “We didn’t bring any of the staff in for the weekend, but…”

Erik rolls his eyes. “You’re doing this to provoke me. Are there coffee beans in this fifteen-bedroom house? And a means to grind and brew them?”

“The kitchen is fully stocked,” Charles says, grinning. “Thank you for making us coffee.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Erik mutters. He leans in for a quick kiss and then rolls off Charles, scanning the carpet for his underwear, which he spots about halfway between the bed and the sitting area. He crosses the room and slips them back on, and then he locates Charles’s, which he chucks back towards the bed.

“I’m just going to—” Charles points in the direction of the ensuite. “I’ll need a moment to sort things out. Not sure if you—”

Erik waves him off. “I remember. Don’t worry.”

He grabs his dress shirt from the sofa—he said farewell to modesty years ago, but it feels a little lost-weekend to wander around Charles’s giant house in the Hamptons in only his briefs. He pulls it on, but he doesn’t bother buttoning it.

In the daylight, he can appreciate how nice the house is—unlike the Xavier estate in Westchester, which he remembers having a dark, suffocating Gilded Age sort of feel, everything here is light and airy. When he passes a massive sitting room with floor-to-ceiling windows lining an entire wall, he catches a glimpse of bright green lawn, then rolling sand dunes, then the broad, sparkling expanse of the ocean.

Kitchens are easy to spot with all their distinctive metal objects, and the grinder and the coffee maker are similarly easy to locate. The entirely non-metallic beans are another matter; he eventually uncovers them in probably the tenth cabinet he opens, and he’s just started the coffee brewing when he hears a strangled sound from the doorway.

“Holy shit.”

Charles’s sister is standing there, dressed in a black satin robe so short that he’s not sure why she bothered to wear anything at all. Her mouth is literally hanging open as she stares at him.

“Good morning, Raven,” he says, hoping that keeping it casual is the route to diffusing the awkwardness. “Coffee?”

“You…” She swallows. A beat passes, and then she says, “What are you doing here? In…” She gestures vaguely at the lower half of his body.

A small part of him considers buttoning his shirt, but that feels like giving in. Instead, he puts his hands on his hips and decides to rip the bandaid off.

“Charles and I slept together last night.”

There’s a long moment of silence, and then she repeats, “Holy shit.” She turns to glance behind her and then looks back at him. “But are you…?”

When she doesn't finish the sentence, he folds his arms over his chest. “Am I what?”

“Gay?” She makes it sound like it’s the most obvious question in the world.

He raises his chin slightly. “Bisexual.”

Her eyes widen. After a beat passes, she says, “Is this public information?”

“No.”

He can see the gears turning in her head, but she covers it quickly, crossing into the room and sitting on one of the island stools. They stare at each other, the awkward silence mounting, until eventually Charles wheels into the kitchen, looking back and forth between them with an almost comically concerned expression.

“Raven,” he says, turning to his sister. “I wasn’t expecting you to be awake so early.” He manages to make it sound accusatory.

She gives him a flat look. “I wasn’t expecting to find out that you’d mind-whammied me during our own cousin’s wedding reception so you could sneak home to fuck a movie star.”

Charles winces. “It wasn’t a whammy, per se—”

Erik snorts, and Charles gives him a betrayed sort of look. Raven glances between the two of them and then she smiles at Erik.

“You know, I’d love some coffee, thanks,” she says.

Charles wheels across the kitchen and around the island until he’s right next to him, looking like he wants to reach out and touch him, and then thinks better of it. Instead, he gestures at the refrigerator and says, “What should we make for breakfast?”

Erik raises his eyebrows. “Have you learned how to cook in the past fifteen years?”

Charles gives him his fake-innocent smile. “What are you going to make us for breakfast?”

He can feel both siblings watching him as he stalks around their giant kitchen trying to find the things he needs to make omelets. They’re lightly bickering, mostly about Charles’s “little trick,” as Emma put it. Charles assures her that he was going to fill her in this morning, and that he truly was sorry for altering her mind, even temporarily. Raven actually seems less upset about that part—she’s obviously mostly annoyed that she wasn’t let in on the secret last night.

When the coffee’s ready, Erik pours out three mugs. When he hands one to Charles, their fingers touch for a beat too long; when he looks over at Raven, she’s watching them speculatively.

“So when you two were ‘best friends’ in college,” she says, making the air-quotes audible. “Were you actually boning the whole time?”

“No,” Erik says immediately.

“Yes,” Charles says at the exact same time.

They turn to look at each other. Charles’s expression is totally unreadable. Erik swallows against something sharp that’s risen in the back of his throat.

“All right, then,” Raven says loudly. “Clears that up.”

Erik hands her the remaining mug of coffee. She’s still looking like she’s trying—and failing—to figure him out.

They eat their eggs on a sprawling verandah overlooking the ocean. Raven basks in the sun and Charles does his best to remain fully covered by the table’s umbrella, while Erik sits between them.

Raven’s given up on the probing questions and has mostly settled on small talk, which is a relief—he’s not sure he can handle much more than that this morning. He learns that she lives in Paris, where she works as an artist. When he tells her he’d like to see her work, he isn’t just being polite; he’s always been fascinated by shapeshifters.

“And you live in LA, I’m assuming?” she asks him.

He nods as he takes a sip of coffee. “When I’m not filming somewhere, that’s where I spend the majority of my time, yes. But I’m in New York occasionally, too. I kept my mother’s apartment after she died.”

Charles glances over at him and opens his mouth, but Erik just shakes his head and sends a feeling that he hopes simultaneously aborts any conversation about the topic and lets Charles know he appreciates the sympathy. He got Charles’s bouquet of flowers then, too.

In an attempt to change the subject, he says to Charles, “So when do you fly back to England?”

There’s a long pause, and when he looks up from his plate, both siblings are staring at him. Eventually Charles says, “I thought you knew. I moved back to the U.S. five years ago.”

Now Erik is staring right back. “Why would I know that?”

“I don’t know.” Charles shrugs. “The alumni magazine?”

Erik gives him a look.

“Well,” Charles says. “Now you know, I guess.”

They eat their eggs in silence for a while, until Erik finally says, “Where do you live now, then?”

“New York, mostly,” Raven says, something strangely gleeful in her tone.

Charles glances at her before looking back at Erik. “Well, New Haven a few days each week. I’m teaching at Yale now.” He pauses before he adds, “But yes. New York, mostly.”

If the strangeness of the past day felt slightly out of step with reality, the revelation that he and Charles could have crossed paths at any point in the past few years feels like a planet being knocked off its orbit. Realistically, the odds that they ever would have run into each other are nil: he does live in LA, and he’s worked so much in the past few years that he’s barely home at all, and besides, when he’s back in New York, he keeps as low a profile as he can manage.

But then he has a startlingly clear vision of walking along a winding path in Central Park, turning around a bend and seeing Charles sitting in front of him, glancing up from a book and beaming.

Erik takes a deep breath before he says, “The next time I’m back in New York, I’ll look you up?”

He didn’t mean to put a question mark on the end, but before he can try to make the statement more declarative, Charles nods, the corners of his lips quirking upwards.

“I’d like that,” he says softly.

A silence falls over the table again, and he and Charles continue to stare at each other for an extended moment. Erik breaks first, glancing down to pick up his coffee mug, and for a long while, the only sounds are the clinking of forks against plates and the steady crash of waves against the shore.

And then Raven says cheerfully, “So what was it like to kiss Margot Robbie?”

*

The car arrives just before five on Monday morning. Erik is half asleep as he slides into the back seat, but Bobby looks annoyingly chipper for this hour—it’s possible that he hasn’t even gone to bed yet.

“Good morning,” he says brightly, holding out an iced coffee.

The drink is, unsurprisingly, perfectly cold—one of the main benefits of having a PA with an ice-making mutation. As Erik takes a weary sip, Bobby whips out his phone.

“So: the flight is currently on time, and traffic is relatively light right now. You still have a lunch this afternoon, with Tom and Maria from Searchlight—one o’clock, Hinoki and the Bird. I can push back if you’d like, but it’s already a reschedule, so I’d prefer to keep it.”

Erik sighs. “Yes, that’s fine.”

“Also—” Bobby looks up from his phone. “Emma wants to see you ASAP and she says it’s important. I told her you were free after lunch.”

Erik rolls his eyes. “Of course she does.”

“You know, I was thinking,” Bobby says in a faux-speculative tone. “It did seem odd that she was so insistent on seeing you after you spent the entire weekend together.”

“You’re right, that is odd.” Erik keeps his expression carefully neutral, but Bobby still narrows his eyes. He attempts to change the subject with: “Did you have a nice weekend?”

Bobby’s eyes remain narrowed. “Yes. You know I love it when you pay me to come to New York and do nothing.”

“Oh, I’m sure you did something,” Erik says. “Going to every gay bar below 14th Street counts as an activity.”

Bobby just laughs at that and gives him a wink. Erik throws his head back against the seat.

He pretends that Bobby irritates him, but he's by far the best PA that he's ever had, not to mention the one he's had the longest—but he also knows that Bobby, like all PAs, is doing this job for the connections, and he dreads the day when someone finally offers him the right position and he moves on. He obviously wants Bobby to have a successful career, and on a more holistic level, he’s always vocal about getting more mutants on both sides of the camera. But he also wants a PA that he actually likes, and one he doesn’t feel compelled to strangle every other second.

They’ve just entered the Midtown Tunnel when Bobby puts down his phone and says, “No seriously, did something happen with you and Emma this weekend?”

Erik amends his thoughts about not wanting to strangle him every other second. But when Bobby starts poking around, he’s relentless, so he decides to nip this thing in the bud.

“I left the wedding reception a bit early.”

“OK,” Bobby says slowly. “And she didn’t—”

“With another telepath,” Erik clarifies. “Who, uh…misdirected everyone, including her.”

Bobby looks thrilled to hear this information. “You know that she’s going to kill you.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Erik says, waving a hand. “We’ve already been over this.”

Bobby leans back and folds his arms across his chest, giving him a speculative once-over. “So you slept with a telepath this weekend.”

Erik just gives him a look.

“Oh, come on,” Bobby says. “You’re always so weird and secretive about people you sleep with. If you both managed to piss Emma off, you have to give me something here.”

Erik takes a sip of his coffee, and then he says, “I don't see why this is any of your business.”

“You literally pay me to make your life my business,” Bobby says. “This telepath, was she—”

“He,” Erik says, sighing.

Now Bobby looks gleeful. “I was already invested, but I’m suddenly a thousand percent more interested in this story.”

“Too bad that’s the end of it,” Erik says.

Bobby glares at him. “You’d think that getting laid would make you a little nicer. At least temporarily.”

Erik smiles. “You would think that, wouldn’t you.”

He’s glad Bobby isn’t a telepath, because he does spend most of the largely uneventful flight thinking about Charles—and though he tries to focus on the past weekend, he continually finds his thoughts drifting towards their college years, a subject he’s usually an expert at avoiding. A small part of him regrets that they didn’t actually talk about it on Saturday night, but only a small part: he’s not sure either of them are ready for that conversation, and besides, they were otherwise occupied, the physical pull between them so strong it felt nearly impossible to resist.

They touch down at LAX around ten, which gives him just enough time to go home, shower and change, and head back out for his lunch meeting. It was hot and humid in New York but it’s thankfully cooler in LA, though the haze is particularly heavy this morning, blotting out the mountains completely. It’s reassuring, in an eye-rolling sort of way—after a decade of living here, he’s come to be comforted by the sight of smog.

He drives to Century City himself, partly because he likes driving, even in LA, and partly so Bobby can’t immediately reroute him to Emma when he’s finished at lunch. But when he checks his phone while the valet is bringing his car around afterwards, he has a text from her: “You will come to my office at three this afternoon or you will find me in your house this evening. I will not knock. Your choice.”

He sighs and floats his phone back into his pocket. He’s pretty sure other people’s managers don’t threaten to break into their homes as often as his does.

Emma has a new assistant, Betsy, whose purple hair suggests she’s probably a mutant, though an unusual hair color isn’t the best indicator these days. She politely informs him that Emma will be right with him—and then Emma makes him wait for twenty minutes. He thinks a stream of very loud resentful thoughts in her direction.

When Betsy finally ushers him into her office and shuts the door behind her, Emma raises an eyebrow and says, “What a lovely first impression you just made.”

Erik pinches the bridge of his nose. “She’s a telepath, too.”

“Oh honey, you know assistants are always listening in,” Emma says, brushing an imaginary bit of dust from her white suit jacket. “Why limit yourself to phone calls?”

He sits down, spreading his legs as he slouches low in his chair. Emma is standing behind her desk, arms folded across her chest as she watches him speculatively. The decor in her office is overwhelmingly white; sometimes, especially when she’s looking at him the way she is right now, it makes him feel like he’s in a lab and about to become some kind of test subject.

When she doesn’t say anything for a solid fifteen seconds, he says, “Well, I just had a weirdly interesting lunch meeting. Did you know that Searchlight—”

“Erik,” Emma interrupts, crossing around to the front of her desk and leaning against it, which leaves her looking down at him. “Let’s not pretend we’re here to talk about work.”

Erik shakes his head and waves a hand. “Fine. Go ahead.”

“You know, I have quite a few clients who primarily think with their dicks,” Emma says. “I didn’t previously count you among them, but after the choices you made this weekend—”

“We didn’t leave that early,” Erik protests. “And I told you I was leaving, even if I didn’t say why. You got my car back to the hotel just fine.”

It was probably their most clear-headed decision of the night: they decided not to immediately make a run for it, so no cameras were destroyed, and even though they missed the entirety of the speeches, they waited until the dancing was in full swing before staggering their actual exits.

Emma gives him an unimpressed look. “And the part where Charles Xavier cast a telepathic blanket over several hundred people?”

“You’re just mad he did it to you, too.” He tries to keep the smile off his face, but he can’t quite manage it. She narrows her eyes.

“Of course I am,” she says. “I really should kill you both.”

“So you keep saying,” Erik says, and now he’s smiling outright. “Come on—Charles said you were the only other telepath there. No one will know what he did.”

Emma looks skeptical as she pushes herself off the desk and crosses around to sit down, leaning back in her white leather chair with a sigh.

“Charles Xavier,” she says.

He waits for her to say more, but she just keeps watching him in a kind of unnerving way.

“If you want to ask me something,” he says. “You’re going to have to be more specific.”

Emma’s skeptical look deepens, but all she says is, “Hmmm.”

It’s in moments like these that he wonders just how far she’s gone into his head, though he knows trying to guess often leads to a terrible spiral. It was a perpetual question with Charles, too—the source of a fair amount of paranoia, even as he tried not to succumb to anti-telepathic bias, and certainly one of the reasons for the distance that eventually set them on divergent paths.

“We were best friends in college,” he offers.

Her expression doesn’t change as she says, “That I gathered.”

“Uh…” He rubs the back of his neck. “Charles was actually the reason I started acting. He told me to take an introductory performance class—he said I was the most dramatic person he knew.”

Emma snorts, but after a beat, she says, “You know, that’s a funny line—you’d think you would have used it in an interview at some point.”

He doesn’t really have a good response to that, so he only shrugs.

“And after college?” Emma prompts.

He thinks about a moment from graduation day, just after the ceremony: their last screaming fight had been weeks before, and by that point, he was determined to pretend Charles Xavier simply didn’t exist. But he could sense Charles’s watch and cufflinks and wheelchair only a dozen feet away, and just the slightest hint of an apology pressing against the surface of his mind. He’d somehow managed to keep from turning around.

“We were both…ambitious,” he says, which isn’t a lie, anyway. “Career-wise. We wound up thousands of miles apart: he moved to England for his PhD and I went back to New York and started going on auditions.”

“But before this past weekend, you hadn’t spoken to your college best friend in fifteen years?”

Now he knows that she’s definitely taken more information than she’s letting on. He works to keep his expression neutral.

“Well,” he says eventually. “We have now.”

A long moment of silence passes, and then she gives him a small, almost brittle sort of smile.

“You know, Erik,” she says slowly. “Charles could certainly tell you this, too, but one of the many challenges of being a telepath is letting people keep their own secrets. We could pluck out every last thought in your head, but unless you actually say things out loud—in most situations, anyway—it’s utterly moot.”

Erik folds his arms across your chest. “What’s your point here?”

“If you ever want to talk about what actually happened,” Emma says. “You just let me know.”

He tries to keep glaring at her, but something in her gaze makes him look down at the carpet. They sit there in silence for a long while, as he tries and fails to quiet his swirling thoughts.

Eventually, Emma clicks her tongue and says, “Well, I made you come all the way over here. What was so interesting about your lunch meeting with the Searchlight people?”

Erik looks up at her. She just rolls her eyes and makes a prompting gesture.

“Well, we talked about a bunch of things they have in development,” he says. “But you remember that early mutant rights movement script that’s been kicking around for years?”

“Of course this is the one you want to talk about.” Her tone is sarcastic, but she’s smiling.

Erik smiles in return. “You’ll never guess who’s attached to the project now…”

*

After the whirlwind of Oscars season and the months he spent shooting the show, the summer was meant to be a bit of a break. But as July ticks over to August, he’s starting to go slightly stir-crazy, which is as good an explanation as any for why he starts cyberstalking Charles.

Admittedly it’s mostly just Googling, because he’s not capable of anything more complicated; he semi-seriously considers enlisting Bobby and his superior Gen Z internet digging skills to do the job, but that would mean actually telling Bobby about Charles, which he’s not prepared to do.

His Googling doesn’t yield a ton of new information—Charles’s professional footprint is as boring any academic’s, with basically incomprehensible scientific papers and buttoned-up, stuffy faculty profile pages. He seems to have no public social media presence, which is kind of funny, because Charles always loved forcing other people to hear his opinions.

By far the most interesting results are for Charles the, in Emma’s words, “New York society type,” not Charles the genetics professor. There are photos of him at dozens of charity functions over the years, in London and yes, for the past five years, in New York; Erik studies Charles in each of them, but he also looks at his dates, particularly the stretch of years where he was always accompanied by the same man—his ex-fiancé.

It wasn’t like he hadn’t heard anything about Charles in the past fifteen years. Their mutual friends gave him little updates, which sometimes felt like covering his eyes but peeking through his fingers. He has vivid memories of the day maybe six or seven years ago when one of them told him that Charles was engaged—to a man—and he’d put down his phone and walked out of his trailer and drove off the lot. He kept driving for hours and hours, a long way up the PCH and back down again, while apparently the entire crew thought he’d been kidnapped. He’d bought them many apology gifts the next day, and tried to ignore the whispers about his mental breakdown.

He’s relieved that by the end of August, work begins again: the show premieres in October, so he and Emma have a meeting with his publicist to lay out the plan for the next six weeks.

He’s always liked Angel—she’s a mutant who prefers to work with mutant actors, and in a town full of shallow flatterers, she’s often reassuringly blunt—but sometimes when she and Emma get in the same room, it’s a little terrifying. Today Angel is dressed in all black, and with Emma in her habitual all white, they sit on either side of him like a pair of devils, sketching out the best way to torture him as he embarks on the absolute worst part of this job.

“Profiles,” Angel says, crisply swiping up on the screen of her tablet. “We should agree to at least a few, and a couple of covers. We’re looking at the usual suspects: GQ, Vanity Fair, Esquire, The New Yorker—”

“God, no,” Emma interrupts. “Not The New Yorker.”

Angel gives her a flat look. “It’s a serious show and he’s a serious actor. I don’t say this about most of our clients, but he can handle it.”

Emma shakes her head. “Two hours over lunch is fine. Following him around for days and then fact-checking him within an inch of his life? I can’t have him arrested for assaulting a journalist.”

Erik snorts, and Angel turns her flat look on him.

“She has a point,” he says.

Angel rolls her eyes and turns back to her tablet. “For interviews, we’ll do a day of back-to-backs with your co-stars, pegged to the premiere—we’ll reach out to coordinate on a time and list. We should have at least one or two mutant outlets in the mix. I know you’re probably going to push for more, but—”

“This is a show about mutants,” he cuts in. “I’ll talk to any mutant publication that wants to speak with me.”

“Absolutely not,” Angel says, shaking her head firmly. “We can give them priority—but within reason.”

“And gay outlets?” Emma says. “This is also a show with a gay lead character.”

Erik glances at her. He would characterize her expression as “aggressively neutral.”

“Yeah, so that reminds me.” Angel puts her tablet down and faces Erik directly. “I wanted to discuss this with you at some point: we think it’s likely they’re going to ramp up the baiting questions this time around.”

Something twists low in his stomach, but he tries to play innocent, saying, “What do you mean?”

Based on the look she gives him, he’s pretty sure she knows that he knows exactly what she means. But she still taps two long scarlet fingernails on the conference table.

“One gay role, especially for an Oscar-bound movie, and people chalk it up to capital-A acting,” she says. “And I’m sure you heard your fair share of criticism about playing gay for awards season. But two of these roles in a row…people are obviously going to make assumptions about the choices you’re making.”

Erik shrugs. “They’re correct assumptions.”

Angel rolls her eyes. “Everyone in this room knows that. But you know that’s not how it works.”

He sits back in his seat, frowning at the conference table.

“I doubt anyone is going to ask directly,” Emma interjects. “So we evade. Make it about the character. The importance of telling a certain kind of story.”

“It isn’t anyone’s business,” Erik says, keeping his tone firm as he looks from Emma to Angel. “Not a random journalist—and certainly not some amorphous version of ‘the public.’ It’s the same with mutation. You know how I feel about the right to privacy.”

“And yet you talk a lot, publicly, about being a mutant,” Angel says.

Erik opens his mouth to defend himself, but Emma is quicker.

“I know you won’t want to hear this, sugar,” she says. “But you have an invisible mutation and you’re very conventionally attractive. You may have potentially destructive powers, but that doesn’t affect your marketability in any meaningful way.”

Erik glares at her. “What are you saying, then?”

She gives him a tight smile. “Exactly what I said a minute ago. Evade and redirect. This isn’t a soapbox moment and you know it.”

A little stalemate sort of silence descends over the table until eventually Angel clears her throat and picks up her tablet again.

“All right so: socials. Instagram in particular…”

The rest of the meeting passes without any real argument, but the conversation about his sexuality sits in the back of his head, cycling in a soft but persistent loop. It’s never really been a secret, even early in his career, but being quietly out in Hollywood was not the same thing as making it a part of his public persona. He’d always thought that if people made assumptions, that was their problem—but he hadn’t anticipated how much those assumptions would shift when he started taking queer roles.

“Don’t overthink this,” Emma instructs as they ride down together in the elevator. “I can literally see you doing it.”

“If you don’t want to see that you could try staying out of my head,” Erik snaps.

Emma makes a tsking sound, but she doesn’t say anything further.

It’s not until they’re out in the parking lot and he’s unlocking his car with his powers that she says, “Oh, by the way, HBO wants to do two premieres—New York and Los Angeles.”

He freezes for a moment before he turns to face her. “When?”

“Late September,” Emma says. “Lovely time to be in New York. Or it used to be, anyway. Now it’s still 80 degrees until Thanksgiving.”

His mind is already three steps ahead as he thinks about how precisely to see Charles again while making it seem spur-of-the-moment and casual.

“You know, you don’t need HBO to force you to go to New York,” Emma says. “You have an apartment there. You could fly back literally any time.”

“I thought you were staying out of my head,” he says loudly as he slides into the driver’s seat.

“I’m just trying to help someone who won’t help himself!” she calls out.

He ignores her, slamming the door and starting the car with his powers. He revs the engine a few times before he pulls out of his parking spot, tires squealing as he hauls through the lot as fast as he can.

*

He waits until exactly one week before his flight to New York to text Charles. He tries to keep it simple, just saying he’ll be in town for work and maybe they could see each other at some point. Charles replies almost immediately: “I’d love that. Why don’t you come to mine for dinner?”

The endless barrage of interviews have finally begun to wind down, and even though Emma refused to praise him for not assaulting any journalists, he could tell that she was pleased. The critical embargo will lift the night before the Los Angeles premiere, and he knows he shouldn’t focus too much on the response, but he really does want this show to succeed. HBO’s track record with mutant-focused stories is spotty at best, and besides, this is the first TV he’s done since he broke through—his last TV appearance was probably eight or nine years ago, when he did half a dozen episodes on a deeply forgettable CBS medical drama.

Angel was right about the increase in baiting questions, and Emma was right, too—they aren’t subtle. “Why is playing a queer mutant character important to you?” As though he’s about to lean into the camera and talk about his personal life in some four-minute YouTube-bound interview segment for an outlet he’s never heard of.

But when Bobby tells him about some of the responses to that press, he actually starts to get angry.

“Sorry to report that this is, like, the thing now,” Bobby says, shrugging. “People complaining about straight actors taking queer roles—”

“And how many actors announce that they’re straight?” Erik snaps.

He’s just finished a long and particularly grueling session with his trainer, and despite his exhaustion, the residual adrenaline has him feeling like he could punch through a wall. He redirects it towards his powers instead, reshaping one of the steel sculptures that he keeps in the bookshelves of the living room for this very purpose.

“Look, I don’t think this is a useful line of critique,” Bobby clarifies. “I’m just telling you what happens on the internet, because you refuse to use it.”

“I use the internet,” Erik shoots back. He makes a pressing motion with his right hand, and the sculpture flattens into a pancake.

Bobby rolls his eyes. “Not Google.”

Erik glares at him and tries to flatten the sculpture even more.

“Anyway, these people think they’re detectives or something,” Bobby continues. “They make these TikToks—”

“They need a hobby,” Erik cuts in.

“This is their hobby,” Bobby says. “And a tip: the expression these days is that they need to ‘touch grass.’”

Erik stares at him. “Please stop coming here and telling me things about people on the internet.”

Bobby just laughs and pats the stack of scripts he deposited on the coffee table. “I’ll just leave you to your reading then.”

Erik sighs and returns the sculpture to its original shape.

Emma calls him while he’s driving later that evening, and she greets him with two words: “Universal acclaim.”

“The embargo lifted,” he says, relief flooding through his limbs.

“The reviews so far are fantastic,” she confirms. “And I just got off the phone with Geoff—the second season is a lock. They’re just not sure when they’re going to announce it. No one knows what they’re doing with timing these days.”

Erik snorts. “Yeah, I’ve noticed.”

“Anyway, I’ll see you at the premiere tomorrow night, but—” She pauses, he can almost hear her smiling—properly smiling—through the phone. “Congratulations, Erik. You deserve this.”

He sits there, grinning, at the light at the intersection of Sunset and La Cienega—and then he has a wildly irrational impulse to call Charles and tell him the news. He immediately shakes his head, like that will knock the thought loose. They don’t even remotely have that kind of relationship right now, no matter how things once were between them.

He thinks about the very first play he ever did, in their sophomore year of college—he’d been given the lead role, and it was like his entire life path had been rerouted when that cast list went up. Charles had been so proud of him, and he’d come to every single performance. Erik could sense his wheelchair throughout, a bright point of familiarity amongst a sea of everyday metal, but occasionally, the spotlights would dim, and he’d catch a glimpse of his rapt face in the third row.

The Los Angeles premiere goes relatively smoothly, and two days later, they’re in New York, doing it all again in different outfits. He likes his costars well enough, but he’s never been the sort to strike up real friendships with coworkers: he has a reputation for being overly serious on set, which he’s always thought is a stupid way to describe being focused on doing your job.

The next day, he wears circles into the already-worn rug in the living room of his mother’s apartment until it’s finally time to head over to Charles’s for dinner.

He stops at a wine shop a few blocks south, and then he heads east; the sun’s just started to set as he crosses through the park. When Charles sent him the address, he had to laugh a little: they haven’t just been sharing the same city, but they’ve been literally twenty minutes apart.

Of course Charles lives in one of those grand old Fifth Avenue buildings, and in the penthouse, no less—Erik wouldn’t be surprised if it’s been an Xavier family property for generations. He gives his real name in the lobby and the doorman remains totally unfazed, which suggests that either the man doesn’t go to the movies, or Charles has at least a few famous neighbors.

When he steps off the private elevator that opens directly into a marble-tiled foyer, Charles is waiting for him, smiling brightly as he sends a warm mental greeting. He’s wearing a deep blue sweater over a light blue collared shirt, which unsurprisingly makes his eyes even more striking. Erik leans down, intending to kiss him on the cheek, but instead finds himself placing a soft, lingering kiss on his lips.

Charles is beaming when he straightens, and he says, “Hello to you, too.”

Erik smiles and holds out the bottle of wine. “Thank you for having me.”

The apartment doesn’t look much like the Xavier estate in Westchester or the house in the Hamptons—it actually feels like Charles had some say in decorating, though his knowledge of Charles’s style is admittedly limited to the aesthetics of a twenty-year-old’s dorm room. There’s a lot of leather and brass and dark wood, with massive built-in bookshelves lining one wall. The south and west sides are mostly windows, opening up on a spectacular view of the park and the long stretch of the lit-up skyscrapers of Midtown.

“That’s an incredible view,” he says, which is a totally inane statement, but there’s a vague first-date feeling in the air that’s leaving him almost nervous.

Charles smiles. “I really shouldn’t complain, but it was better before they started putting up those awful little pencil buildings a few years back.”

“Fair enough,” Erik says, smiling himself as he looks out at them. “Though they’re kind of fun to feel up close. You don’t often get to sense a hundred stories of steel swaying that much in a stiff breeze.”

There’s a pause, and when he glances back at Charles, he’s watching him with a sort of awe-struck expression.

“That hadn’t even occurred to me,” Charles says. “Absolutely fascinating—the whole city must feel so different to you compared to everybody else.”

Erik shrugs. He lived his entire childhood without active powers, but can barely remember how the world felt before he manifested.

“How does it feel to you?” he asks.

Charles lets out a little laugh. “Astronomically loud. But it’s never boring, I’ll say that much.”

Just like the weekend of the wedding, just like nearly every day of their four years in college, it’s remarkably easy to talk to Charles. The food is spectacular—prepared by his chef, Charles admits, as though there was some magical reality in which he’d cooked anything at all, let alone something of this caliber—and by the time they’ve finished eating and Charles is opening a second bottle of wine, Erik is feeling a deep, warm sort of flush all over.

“But you always loved acting so much,” Charles is saying, sounding a little incredulous.

They’ve taken the bottle of wine to the sofa in the living room, and they’s sitting close—distractingly so, the subtle scent of Charles’s cologne and the faintest hint of his telepathic aura and every precise line and freckle on his face, all just inches away. The soft inner bit of his bottom lip is stained dark from the wine. Erik stares at it as he takes a fortifying sip from his own glass and tries his best to focus on what Charles is saying.

“The way you’re talking about it now, though…” Charles continues, waving a hand in the air.

“I still love acting so much,” Erik counters. “It’s my favorite thing in the world. Well, maybe tied with seeing a mutantphobic politician get voted out of office.”

Charles laughs. “So the problem isn’t acting—it’s being an actor?”

“Let’s see,” Erik says, leaning over to deposit his wine glass on the coffee table. “When I’m not actively filming something, I have to work out four hours a day, take ten thousand meetings with the actual worst people on earth, and if I want to run a basic errand, I risk having the entire thing photographed and put on the front cover of a tabloid.”

“I thought you had special camera-frying powers,” Charles teases.

Erik rolls his eyes. “People are using their phones now. I really can’t go around melting those left and right.”

“OK, let me get this straight,” Charles says. “Your specific complaint is that you’re famous.”

“It’s not—” Erik cuts off with a sigh. “It’s just…a lot sometimes.”

Charles’s smiles slyly. “Funny, I would have thought you’d love it. Since you’ve always been such an egomaniac.”

“I’m sorry.” Erik raises his eyebrows. “Did the world’s biggest egomaniac just accuse me of being—”

“Ahem,” Charles says. “While I won’t deny that I have a lot of self-confidence—”

“Cockiness,” Erik interjects. “Some might say arrogance.”

Charles laughs and shoves him lightly in the center of his chest. Erik catches his hand, and he uses it to tug him closer, until their lips meet in a long, slow kiss.

When they pull apart, Erik says, “You know, you didn’t actually give me the full tour.” After a pause, he adds, “I’m particularly interested in the bedroom.”

Charles laughs again. “There are six, actually,” he says. “But I can certainly show you mine.”

As he trails Charles down a long hallway and into his bedroom, a small nagging feeling pokes at the back of Erik’s mind: they’re once again going to bed without even a hint of conversation about what happened between them all those years ago.

But as he watches Charles transfer seamlessly from his wheelchair to the bed, as he watches him strip off the sweater and then slowly undo his shirt buttons one by one, as he watches him sitting there, gazing up at him invitingly, it’s very easy to silence that nagging feeling completely.

He unbuckles Charles’s belt with his powers as he crosses to the bed, sinking to the carpet between Charles’s knees, and as he unzips his fly, the past seems very far away—all that really matters is exactly what’s happening between them now.

*

In an ideal world, Erik would stay in New York for the next few weeks and pretend he had a normal life. He could see Charles again, and again, and again—not too often, obviously, just enough to show he was extremely interested, rather than desperate. He could take Charles to dinner, or a show—maybe the opera. They could spend an afternoon in the park, halfway between their respective apartments; the leaves will probably start turning soon.

Instead he’s on another early Monday morning flight, and back in LA, he attends two film premieres, participates in some SAG-sponsored panel event, has lunch with Geoff and the show’s other EPs to talk about season two, takes three meetings with executives who aren’t quite the worst people on earth, receives lukewarm congratulations from Angel on his performance during the press tour so far, and returns to LAX on Friday to fly to the UK for reshoots on a film he’s unashamed to say he did solely for the paycheck.

One small consolation: as he finally left Charles’s apartment that morning after half a dozen failed attempts, Charles had said shyly, “You do have my phone number, you know. In case you ever want to text. Or call.”

Erik had raised his eyebrows. “I thought you hated the phone. You always said it was…” He tried to remember the word Charles had used. “Incomplete?”

Charles smiled. “It is. But it’s better than nothing.”

They do start to text a fair bit, most of it teasingly flirtatious. Emma catches him smiling at a message during one of those lunch meetings, and she sends him a sort of “I told you so” mental sensation that leaves him narrowing his eyes at her as he floats his phone back into his pocket.

But it’s actually Charles who calls first—at midnight UK time, while Erik is lying in bed in his hotel room, trying to will himself to sleep despite the jet lag.

“God, I’m sorry,” Charles says. “I thought you were in California. I’ll let you get back to—”

“No,” Erik interrupts. “I wasn’t close to sleeping anyway. Maybe you can talk to me about genetics. That’s always better than an Ambien.”

Charles just laughs, and Erik turns on his side, cradling the phone close to his ear.

It’s after three when he finally hangs up, which is objectively foolish since he has a six a.m. call time. Bobby knocks on his door at a quarter past five, coffee in one hand and a bag of dry cleaning in the other, and when he catches sight of him, he grimaces.

“What the hell happened to you?” he says, holding out the coffee. “You look like shit.”

Erik takes it as he glares at him. “It’s funny how you have no fear of being fired.”

Bobby just gives him a fake-sweet smile and sails into his hotel room, hanging the dry cleaning in the closet. “No seriously. Are you good to work today?”

“Of course,” Erik says, sighing. “I just couldn’t sleep.”

Bobby frowns as he turns back to him. “Why didn’t you take something?”

Erik pauses, and then he says, “OK, I didn’t sleep.”

Bobby narrows his eyes. “What were you doing?”

Erik decides his next assistant should be a person with zero natural curiosity.

“Talking on the phone,” he mumbles, and then he grabs his jacket from the chair. “Come on, let’s get going.”

“Absolutely not.” Bobby crosses the room so quickly that Erik wonders if his mutation gives him super speed, too. He fully blocks the door with his body as he says, “Who were you talking to?”

Erik attempts to stare him down, but Bobby just folds his arms and raises his chin. Erik sighs.

“The guy from the wedding this summer,” Erik says. “We, uh…saw each other again recently.”

Bobby’s mouth drops open and he smacks him in the arm. “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me.”

“I know you sometimes forget,” Erik says. “But you are my employee, not my friend.”

Bobby rolls his eyes. “I know more about your life than any friend ever will.”

“OK, great,” Erik announces, shoving him gently aside so he’s no longer blocking the door. “Now you know about Charles, so—”

“Charles?” Bobby interrupts, looking gleeful.

Erik pinches the bridge of his nose. “Yes, his name is Charles. Can we go now?”

He opens the door with his powers and heads out into the hallway.

“I’m going to have more questions, you know!” Bobby calls out behind him.

Erik doesn’t turn around as he strides towards the elevator. “I’m going to be sleeping in the car.”

He’s dead on his feet by the time he gets back to the hotel that evening, and he goes to bed almost immediately. He thankfully has a later call the next morning, which gives him time to go for a long run; it’s totally deserted in the damp, still-dark streets, but he keeps his hat pulled low, just in case.

But when he returns to his room, he nearly has a heart attack, because Bobby is waiting for him there, sitting in one of the armchairs and looking like the cat that got the cream.

Erik frowns at him as he kicks off his sneakers. “I thought the pick-up time was seven.”

“Charles Xavier,” Bobby says.

Something sinks rapidly in Erik’s stomach, but keeps his expression carefully neutral as he says, “Yes, that’s him.”

“First of all, he’s hot,” Bobby says.

Erik rolls his eyes. “This is why you break into my hotel room?”

“Second of all,” Bobby says, ignoring him completely. “Do you know his net worth?”

“I have a general sense, yes,” he says flatly. He’s still covered in sweat, so he crosses into the bathroom to grab a towel, rubbing it roughly over his hair. He calls back out into the main room, “I need to take a shower, so if you don’t mind—”

“Third.” Bobby suddenly appears in the bathroom doorway. “Why didn’t you tell me he was your college boyfriend?”

Erik freezes, still holding the towel against the back of his neck. The thing that sunk low in his stomach constricts painfully. He wants to grab Bobby, to shake him and demand where he’s getting his information from, to ask him why exactly he would say that.

Instead, he just says, “He wasn’t.”

Bobby narrows his eyes. “Just very good friends, huh?”

“I need to take a shower,” Erik repeats, and he uses his powers to shut the door in Bobby’s face.

He spends the day doing what he does best: aggressively avoiding thinking about things. It’s thankfully a fairly active day of filming; sometimes when he’s left waiting for seven hours in his trailer, sitting alone with his thoughts can drive him up the wall.

But when he’s back in his hotel room that evening, he gets a text from Charles: “I have no idea what your schedule is, but if you’re free, I have a few hours before what’s guaranteed to be a mind-numbing faculty meeting.”

Erik stares at the text for a solid minute, and then he takes a deep breath and navigates to Charles’s contact info to hit call.

“Erik,” Charles says, sounding delighted.

“Hey.” He presses the phone to his ear with his powers, and then he sits down on the edge of his bed and rests his elbows on his knees. “How are you?”

“How are you?” Charles says. “You sound…”

“Tired?” Erik offers.

“Troubled,” Charles says.

Erik lets out a little laugh. “I thought you couldn’t properly sense anyone’s emotions without your telepathy.”

There’s a pause, and then Charles says, “Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?”

It would be easy to deflect—he’s the king of deflection, after all. But for some reason, an impulse overwhelms him, and he says, “We need to talk.”

“Oh,” Charles says quietly.

Erik suddenly realizes how that sounds, and he says quickly, “No no, not like that.”

“It’s a specifically famous phrase, you know,” Charles says, sounding a little annoyed. “You can’t blame me for assuming—”

“Sorry,” Erik interrupts. “I know. I just meant…” He sighs and sits up slightly, running one hand through his hair. “We should have talked that first night. Or the second one. I don’t think there should be a third until we do.”

There’s another pause, even longer than before, and then Charles says, “You’re right.”

Erik lets out a long breath. “OK,” he says. “So where should we—”

“I’m sorry,” Charles blurts out. “Oh Erik, I’m so, so deeply sorry. For everything. I wouldn’t have blamed you if you’d seen me at that wedding and refused to shake my hand. I wouldn’t blame you if you told me right now that you never want to see me again.” He pauses and takes a deep breath. “I didn’t want to have this conversation because I’m a coward, plain and simple, but you’re right—we can’t move forward until we talk about it so…I just wanted to say that to start. You never deserved what I offered you. You deserved the entire world.”

He falls silent, and for a long moment, the only sound Erik can hear is Charles breathing on the other end of the line, because he’s pretty sure he isn’t breathing at all.

Eventually Charles says, his voice soft and a little unsure, “Erik, are you still there?”

Erik nods, and then he remembers they’re talking on the phone and he blurts out, “Yes!” Before he repeats in a more normal voice, “Yes, I’m here.”

Charles lets out a little self-conscious laugh. “Sorry, that was a lot to dump on you at once.”

“No,” Erik says quickly. “No I….thank you.”

There’s a pause, and then Charles says, “Can I tell you how all of that felt from my perspective?”

“Yes,” Erik says, his voice almost a whisper.

As he lays back against the mattress, all he can feel is an extraordinary lightness, like Charles’s words released some iron mechanism that had been gripping his heart for years. He stares up at the ceiling as he listens to Charles’s voice, and he finds that he can’t stop smiling.

*

The show premieres the following Sunday night, and with the time difference, Erik wakes up to about a million texts and emails. He should probably be more interested in the ones from Emma and Geoff and the producers, but the only messages he really cares about are from Charles. The first reads: “I hope you know that both you and the show itself are absolutely phenomenal.” And then he adds: “And I don’t just mean your sex scenes.” He concludes it with a winking emoticon, which is just out-of-touch enough for Erik to find charming.

Charles has congratulated him plenty of times over the years, not just after the Oscar nomination: flowers arrived after big milestones, things like his first leading role and his first major award. These gestures always left him feeling conflicted, but as much as he resented them, he never wanted them to stop. It was their small but persistent link, as one-sided as it was—and even after the way things ended between them, much to his chagrin, he still cared about Charles’s opinion more than nearly anyone else’s.

After close to a month of grueling reshoots, he’s finally set free—but instead of flying directly back to Los Angeles as planned, he changes his ticket to stop over for a few days in New York.

“OK, so where do things stand with this guy?” Bobby says, eyeing him skeptically.

They’re in a car headed to Heathrow, and Erik had hoped that he could simply mention the reason for his New York detour without being grilled for the entire ride—but he had, of course, forgotten it was Bobby he was dealing with.

“I don’t understand why this needs to be an interrogation every time,” he says, sighing.

“You’re still totally cagey when you talk about him, but now you’re doing a surprise visit?” Bobby’s eyes widen and he grins. “OK, I figured it out. He’s married. You’re the other woman.”

“I could leave you right here on the side of this highway.”

Bobby laughs, but then his expression turns serious again as he says, “No really—is this becoming, like…?” He gestures vaguely. “An actual thing?”

Erik pauses before he says slowly, “There was some stuff we needed to talk through before it went further. And we did. So…” He trails off with a shrug.

Bobby narrows his eyes. “What kind of stuff?”

“Sorry.” Erik gives him an unfriendly smile. “You get one personal detail per conversation.”

“That’s not even a detail!” Bobby protests. “We talked? That’s just a basic human activity.”

“Mutant,” Erik corrects.

“If you’re trying to end this conversation by being relentlessly annoying,” Bobby says. “You’re doing a great job.”

Erik just smiles, and Bobby lets out a huff and turns back to his phone.

He actually has no idea if Charles is even in town this weekend, or if he wants a visitor. He’s pretty certain Charles isn’t seeing anyone else right now, but for a solid hour on the plane, he entertains that possibility in an anxious loop that won’t quit. It’s stupid—they’ve called each other most days since that conversation when they really, properly talked. Charles would have to be working very hard to have a social life on top of hours-long phone calls every other night.

When he lands at JFK, he knows the most sensible thing would be to go back to his mother’s apartment, shower and sleep and get some proper food, and then text Charles tomorrow to see if he’s free for dinner.

Instead, he gives the driver Charles’s address, and finds himself and his two suitcases out on the sidewalk on Fifth Avenue, wondering what the hell is wrong with him.

“Erik?”

Another car has just pulled up to the curb, and Charles has rolled the window down, staring at him in wonder. Erik waves weakly.

“What are you doing here?” Charles says.

“I wanted to—” Erik glances up and down the sidewalk. “Can we go inside?”

Charles continues to stare at him for a moment before he blinks and says, “Yes, yes. Of course.”

Erik steps back and watches the flurry of movement as the driver retrieves Charles’s wheelchair from the trunk and reassembles it, and then Charles gracefully transfers into it. Charles smiles at him, looking like he’s itching to say something, but instead he just projects, I know, I know. Inside.

But they don’t make it all the way to the apartment—the second the elevator doors close, Charles is tugging him downwards and kissing him within an inch of his life.

It’s not until a good while later, when they’re laying in a sweaty, tangled heap in Charles’s bed, that Charles laughs and says, “I can’t believe you came here directly from the airport.”

Erik winces. “Sorry, I—”

“Why are you apologizing?” Charles gives him a sly smile. “It’s very romantic, you know.”

“I just…wanted to see you as soon as possible,” Erik mutters, rolling over to look up at the ceiling.

“I get the feeling,” Charles says softly, and then he gently presses his lips against Erik’s cheek.

Erik is well aware that he could go back to his mother’s apartment at any time, but by unspoken agreement, he and Charles decide to act like he’s come for a weekend visit—never mind that he brought two large suitcases containing all the clothing he’s been wearing for the past month. They order takeout and he he tries not to fall asleep at nine p.m. The next morning, he does the crossword in Charles’s copy of the Times while Charles works through a stack of student papers.

“God,” Charles says at one point, removing his reading glasses and rubbing his eyes. “Some of my students are brilliant, but a few of them really must think I’m an idiot.”

Erik snorts. “You’re telling me you never dashed off something in college on the hope that you could get away with the bare minimum?”

Charles raises his chin. “I was a model student and you know it.”

Even as they’re both laughing, Erik is very aware that they’re talking—joking, even—about their college years, and it feels absolutely normal. It’s a relief, because despite all the painful parts, he has so many wonderful memories of those years with Charles—they were best friends, after all, and it was certainly the most meaningful friendship that Erik has ever had.

He looks up to find Charles watching him, a mix of emotions on his face.

“Everything all right?” Charles says.

Erik clears his throat and holds up the folded newspaper. “I’ve finished the crossword. Do you want to take a break for lunch?”

Charles glances vaguely in the direction of the kitchen. “I’m not sure what you’re in the mood for, but—”

“Why don’t we go out?” Erik gestures at the windows, where the park is a spectacular riot of fall colors. “It’s beautiful outside today.”

“That sounds lovely,” Charles says slowly. “But can we actually…?”

Erik frowns as he tries to understand the question, and then he realizes.

“We shouldn’t, I don’t know, make out at the table,” he says. “But I do have meals in public with people nearly every day.”

Charles laughs. “You think you can resist me for the length of a meal?”

Erik rolls his eyes, but he’s smiling as he stands up from the sofa. “I’ll do my best.”

For all his casual talk, it is a little strange being out in the world with Charles—walking beside him down the sidewalk, seated across from him at the restaurant, noticing other people noticing him, and then the pair of them, and wondering what they’re thinking.

“I can tell you what they’re thinking,” Charles says, leaning in across the table. “I can also make it so they don’t notice you at all.”

He seriously considers it for a moment—for all he’s gotten used to blocking out the stares, he’d be lying if he said he didn’t miss a normal person’s general anonymity. But Charles can’t follow him around all the time like a telepathic security blanket. He shakes his head.

“Thanks, but I’m fine,” he says. “Though if you don't want them looking at you, don’t let me stop you.”

Charles smiles slyly over the rim of his coffee cup. “I thought I was the world’s biggest egomaniac. Maybe I love the attention.”

Erik just laughs and shakes his head as he looks down at his menu.

The strange, heady bubble that encompassed them all weekend bursts on Sunday evening, as Erik faces the reality of his six a.m. flight the next morning.

“You can stay longer, you know,” Charles says. He’s sitting on his bed, watching Erik finish packing. “As long as you’d like, even.”

“Obviously I want to,” Erik says as he carefully lays a pair of trousers in the suitcase. “But I have at least fifteen meetings this week, and you…also have a job.”

Charles laughs. “A bunch of ungrateful students? I’d blow them off in a heartbeat.”

Erik laughs, too, abandoning his packing and climbing onto the bed on all fours until he and Charles are face to face. “You wouldn’t and you know it.”

Charles smiles and gives him a small, soft kiss. “You’re right, I wouldn’t. Not that they don’t deserve it.”

Erik kisses him, deeply this time, and Charles responds in kind. They kiss for a while, the heat building and beginning to cycle between them, but just as Erik moves to push up Charles’s t-shirt, Charles catches his hand.

“Hang on,” he says. “What time is it?”

Erik gives him a quizzical look as he feels the hands on his watch. “A quarter to nine?”

“We can’t do this now.” Charles pushes him back slightly. “We have to watch your show.”

Erik blinks at him. “Absolutely not.”

“Why not?” Charles says, frowning. “I love it.”

“No,” Erik says. “I cannot sit next to you while you watch it. I’ll lose my mind.”

Charles is still frowning. “You liked it when I came to your plays.”

“I did,” Erik confirms. “If I do another play, I’d love to have you in the audience. But that’s not the same thing.”

Charles folds his arms across his chest. “This honestly seems pretty irrational.”

Erik sighs and pushes back off the mattress. “I need to finish packing.”

“Great,” Charles says, throwing up his hands. “I can’t watch your show and we’re not going to have sex?”

“Oh, we’re going to have sex!” Erik snaps, raising his voice. It almost sounds like a threat.

They stare at each other for a beat, and then they both burst out laughing.

“Finish packing, you idiot,” Charles says, his tone fond. “I’ll occupy myself by imagining my favorite scenes from the last episode. It’ll get me in the mood.”

Erik glares at him. “I’m going to murder you.”

“First Emma, now you,” Charles says, clicking his tongue. “Seems like a very violent industry.”

Charles only stirs a little when the alarm goes off—he was always a heavy sleeper, something about training his mind to keep him asleep, so he wasn’t woken up by every strong passing thought. Erik watches him for a long moment, his profile illuminated by the faint sliver of city light through the curtains. He gently brushes back Charles’s hair to place a kiss on his temple, and then he gets out of bed and dresses silently in the dark.

He sleeps through most of the flight, and when he touches down at LAX, he sees a long string of messages from Charles. His immediate instinct is to panic, but as he starts to read them, he relaxes.

“Thank you for visiting me this weekend,” the first one reads. “I had a wonderful time—I hope you did, too. Safe journey home.” And then, timestamped five minutes later: “I’m now going to watch the show over breakfast, which is the height of decadence, really, and I will send you my live reactions so you can see how un-mortifying it would have been to do this IRL.”

Erik laughs out loud, and the person sitting next to him glances over sharply. He angles the phone towards the window and then starts to scroll.

“This is all going to be very shallow commentary, mind you,” the next one reads. “Like already here, in minute four. You look ridiculously good in that suit!”

He tries his very best not to laugh out loud again, so he just sits there on the runway, grinning wildly at his phone as he scrolls through every last message.

*

Erik doesn’t get a chance to see Emma until they meet Geoff at Crossroads Kitchen on Wednesday evening. He’s still thinking about the weekend in New York, but he tries hard to pay attention to the conversation, which is almost exclusively about the show: Geoff’s frustrations trying to get actual streaming numbers out of HBO, or the rough timeline for the second season, which will likely start filming in March or April.

And then Geoff’s phone rings, and he says, “A thousand apologies—I have to take this.”

They both watch his retreating figure until Emma leans across the banquette and says, “Do you forget that I can hear you loudly thinking about other things during meetings?”

Erik points at his plate. “Like about how I’m tired of eating fancy vegan food?”

Emma gives him a flat look as she sips her martini.

“While he’s gone, I did want to talk to you.” He takes a deep breath. “I want to do a play.”

Emma raises her eyebrows and carefully places her glass back on the table. “What kind of play?”

He shrugs. “Whatever. New, revival, Shakespeare—I don’t really care. Something rigorous.”

“OK,” Emma says, nodding. “Maybe in London, then?”

Erik stares at her. “In New York.”

The corners of her lips quirk up just slightly. “Ah, I see.”

He decides to ignore her tone. “I’d like to do something soon.”

“You do remember that you’re shooting a film starting next month?” she says, sounding like she’s talking to a small child.

“Of course,” Erik says, sighing. “After that, I mean—but still, as soon as possible.”

“Honey, this is sad.” Emma gives him a sort of pitying look. “You know this stuff takes a year to set up—or it does for someone at your level, anyway. You can’t just stroll down to an off-off-Broadway theater and audition for whatever they’re doing next.”

“Maybe if someone drops out of—”

“Sure, maybe,” Emma says, her tone making it clear she thinks that’s deeply unlikely. “Or you could just go to New York—a place where you continue to own an apartment, and also one with an extraordinary number of hotel rooms—specifically to spend time with your boyfriend.”

“He’s not my—”

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Emma says sarcastically. “To spend time with your college best friend.”

Thankfully Geoff strolls back in at that exact moment, which is a relief—he can tell Emma is gearing up to go into full-on mean-teasing mode.

Erik isn’t looking forward to being stuck in New Mexico through the end of the year, but he is excited about the film he’s about to shoot: he’s wanted to work with the director for years, and it’ll be the first time he’s done anything even remotely resembling a Western. He spends most of his unscheduled time over the next few weeks buried in the script, and he’s grateful for something to focus on—it helps him not think about Charles all day, every day.

They do continue to talk a lot—mostly on the phone, but once on Zoom, where Charles tells him that as much as he likes seeing his face, without even a hint of his mind to accompany it, the whole thing is too unnerving.

“But how do you even watch movies, then?” Erik protests.

“That’s different—it’s passive,” Charles says. “But I do greatly prefer seeing a play over a film.”

This prompts a thought that had never occurred to him before: Charles sitting in the audience, watching them all pretending to be fictional characters, while he senses their real-life minds chugging away under the surface. He describes this aloud, and Charles smiles and nods.

“It’s always interesting—and of course I wouldn’t know what it was like to watch a play otherwise,” Charles says. “Obviously I’m not trawling the deep recesses of their minds. But I do hear a lot of the surface thoughts. Some of you think almost exclusively about blocking.”

Erik raises his chin. “It’s important to hit your mark.”

“Don’t worry, not you,” Charles says, laughing. “Your mind when you’re onstage…”

Erik leans a little closer to the screen. “Yeah?”

“I don’t know, maybe it’s different now,” Charles says. “But it was always remarkable.”

Erik wishes he could tell Charles that he’ll be able watch him onstage sometime soon, but he knows that Emma is right—that isn’t how it works. Instead he tries to figure out when he can take her real advice and just go to New York for a visit, which leads to an extremely frustrating session with Bobby and his calendar.

“Not next weekend,” Bobby says, frowning at his phone. “And not the weekend after that, obviously—you’re in New Mexico from the 6th.”

“Can I cancel something?” Erik says, leaning back and folding his arms behind his head.

Bobby gives him a sardonic look. “Well, you could. You can do whatever you want, right?”

Erik sighs. “Point taken.”

“So this is, like, really happening then,” Bobby says, grinning. “You’re dating him. It’s wild—you never date anyone.”

The denials he might have pulled out even a few weeks ago seem increasingly irrelevant. Now, he just smiles.

“I guess so,” he says. “I hope so.”

“But still keeping it private? Or are you gonna…” Bobby trails off slowly. After a beat, he says, “Have you talked to Emma about any of that? Or Angel, for that matter?”

Erik frowns. He’s been trying not to get ahead of himself when it comes to Charles, but he’s mostly avoided thinking about the broader implications if things did get serious between them. Would he have to do a big formal coming-out thing? The thought of doing some bland photoshoot for an entertainment magazine cover story makes him cringe. Couldn’t he just start bringing Charles to events and…never comment on any of it publicly? If the press and the whole internet are so concerned with his personal life, wouldn’t that shut them up once and for all?

Instead he says, “I don’t know. I hadn’t really thought about it.”

“Uh huh.” Bobby sounds like he doesn’t believe him for a minute. “It’s not great timing, with all the commentary. Or maybe it’s perfect timing, I don’t know.”

Erik stares at him. “What commentary?”

“I thought you didn’t want to know about people on the internet,” Bobby says innocently.

“Bobby,” he says in a warning tone.

Bobby waves a hand. “Oh, let’s just say there’s been a notable increase in chatter about you playing queer roles since the show premiered. Mostly kind of presumptuous speculation, but there’s been some…well, there was this one piece in Vulture the other day that kind of—”

“People are writing articles about this?” Erik interrupts. “Don’t they have better things to cover?”

Bobby gives him a flat look. “I think you fundamentally misunderstand what happens on the internet.”

Erik throws his head against the back of the couch and looks up at the ceiling.

“If it’s any consolation,” Bobby says. “You’ve also been the subject of a ton of memes since the show premiered.”

Erik slowly lowers head to look at him in disbelief. “Why would that be a consolation?”

Bobby pulls out his phone and starts scrolling. “I can show you some of them if you’d—”

“No,” Erik snaps. “Leave my house now.”

Bobby’s laughing as he hurries towards the door, and he calls out over his shoulder, “I’ll send you the best ones!”

Against his better judgment, he looks up the Vulture piece later that evening. As he scrolls through the first few paragraphs, he starts to frown; by the end, he just stops himself before he fries his phone with his powers. He settles for chucking it against the couch cushions instead.

After he glares at it for a solid minute, he floats it back to his hand to call Emma.

They already had a meeting on the books with Angel for later in the week, and he and Emma arrive in the lobby of the firm’s building at the exact same time.

“So what’s the official party line?” Emma says as they ride up in the elevator.

Erik glances at her in confusion. “About what?”

“Can we tell her you’re seeing someone?” Emma says, using that talking-to-a-child tone again. “A male someone, specifically.”

“You know, I don’t think I ‘officially’ told you that, either.”

Emma just gives him a patronizing sort of smile, and Eriks sighs.

“Yes,” he says. “We can tell her everything.”

Emma raises an eyebrow. “Everything?”

The elevator doors slide open, and Erik pushes past her so he doesn’t have to respond.

Angel is wearing all red today, which only furthers the devilish impression. They’re ostensibly here to talk about the round of press pegged to the season finale, but first Erik tells her about Charles, keeping the details to an absolute minimum. Her expression doesn’t give anything away, and when he finally finishes speaking, she only nods.

“You’d like to continue to keep this private?” she says, pulling up something on her tablet.

Erik frowns. He’s not sure what he wants—and he definitely doesn’t know what Charles wants. They’re obviously going to have to talk about this at some point, but he’s in no hurry to do so.

He decides to deflect. “Do you think I should?”

Angel gives him an even stare before she clicks her tongue. “I’m sorry to say it, but the answer is yes, you probably should. Under normal circumstances, nothing would really change unless you want to, I don’t know, bring this guy to the Oscars.”

She pauses, and Erik realizes she’s implicitly asking, not just naming a hypothetical.

“I don’t know,” he says, which is the truth.

“You know as well as any of us that this is a town of open secrets.” She taps her nails on the conference table; they’re gold today. “Unfortunately there’s a bit more scrutiny on your personal life right now than I’m happy with. I’m not sure if either of you saw the article in—”

“We’re not giving any attention to a…” Emma pauses, disdain clear in her voice as she says, “Thinkpiece.”

The corners of Angel’s lips quirk upwards as she shakes her head. “No, of course not. But I do think that conversation is going to embolden the journalists you speak with in the next few weeks, Erik. You can’t let them provoke you.”

“Right,” Erik says. “I got it.”

There’s a long pause, and he can almost hear Emma projecting her skepticism, but Angel seems to take him at his word, nodding and swiping again on her tablet.

“Great. So we’re coordinating the Variety cover with the studio…”

Both he and Emma whip out their phones the second they set foot in the elevator. He has a longish message waiting for him from Charles, and he’s already smiling as he starts to read it when Emma says, “Fuck.”

He glances over at her sharply. “What?”

She looks up, her expression grim. “Well, it looks like you have plenty of time to go and visit your boyfriend next month, because—”

“Hey,” he snaps. After the conversation with Angel, he feels weirdly paranoid; he looks up at the corners of the elevator for cameras. “Could you maybe not—”

“One of the main backers pulled out.” Emma holds up her phone and waves it. “Assuming they can secure the funding from another source, filming will likely be pushed back to later next year—probably in the fall, Mark is guessing. No one wants a summer shoot in New Mexico.”

As her words sink in, Erik is immediately torn: he’s disappointed about the film, of course, especially after all the prep work he’s done recently, but he’s suddenly facing a long string of weekends that are now absolutely free. He tries hard not to smile.

“Just incredible,” Emma says, shaking her head as she tucks her phone back in her bag. “Never thought I’d see the day that Erik Lehnsherr was happy about losing work.”

“It’s not lost,” he protests. “It’s just…conveniently rescheduled.”

She snorts and pats him on the shoulder as the elevator doors open. “Have a nice time in New York, sugar.”

He calls Bobby from his car to tell him the news, and to ask him to book him a flight to New York next weekend. He hangs up mid-sentence when Bobby starts teasing him.

When he calls Charles, Charles picks up immediately.

“Is everything all right?” he says quickly. “I have to teach a class in ten minutes, but I can—”

“Everything’s fine,” Erik assures him. “More than fine, actually.” He takes a deep breath before he says, “Would you like a visitor for a little longer than a weekend?”

*

“Just one suitcase this time?” Charles teases as Erik steps into his apartment.

Erik floats his bag to the ground and crosses over to lean down and give Charles a long, firm kiss before he says, “Maybe I’m not planning to wear much on this trip.”

Charles laughs against his mouth. “You always said my lines were awful, but I honestly think that was just projection.”

Erik laughs, too, and leans in to kiss him again.

If the surprise weekend in October felt like a strange but wonderful dream, this trip is more like a fantastical sort of secretive honeymoon. He makes Charles breakfast in bed. They have sex in every single guest bedroom. On Sunday night, he allows Charles to watch the show in a different room and text him his reactions; it’s only slightly bizarre to hear Charles laughing down the hall.

But then, some of it isn’t so secretive—they go out to eat a fair bit, and they even spend an afternoon in the park, just as he’d imagined they might weeks ago, though most of the leaves have already fallen. They don’t discuss it, but he still wonders what Charles’s baseline awareness of their surroundings is, and how often he’s using his telepathy to nudge peoples’ attention away. In his normal life, he never forgets when he’s in public; sometimes, with Charles, it’s hard to focus on anything but him.

Charles has to spend the middle of the week in New Haven as usual; he offers to come back in the evenings, but Erik isn’t about to force him to commute three hours a day. He considers just spending the time in his mother’s apartment, but Charles tells him he’s welcome to stay until he returns, so without thinking too hard about it, he does.

It’s a little strange to be in Charles’s apartment alone—at times, he feels like some combination of anthropologist and stalker, mostly because he does a lot of snooping around. He looks in Charles's closets. He examines Charles's exercise equipment. He spends a solid hour studying Charles’s bookshelves, which are on a whole pretty predictable, though a few titles do catch him off-guard—in a good way.

When Emma calls on Wednesday, he almost doesn’t pick up—after all, he’s supposed to be on vacation this week, and he’s given Bobby the week off, too. But they’re still in the middle of the final leg of press for the show—he’s even agreed to do one of the last big interviews out here next Monday—so he figures if she’s calling, it’s probably about something important.

“Guess what?” she says, and she truly does sound pleased, which is totally incongruous with the next words out of her mouth: “Adam Driver broke his foot.”

Erik blinks. “I’m not sure what’s more confusing—why you’re happy about this or why you felt compelled to call and tell me.”

“Honey, you’re about to owe me a thousand favors,” Emma says. “Adam Driver broke his foot a few weeks before rehearsals for the play he was set to star in—opening in February at the Public.”

“Wait, do you mean—”

“Maybe if someone drops out, ” she says, repeating his words from dinner a few weeks ago. “I’m negotiating with the producers now. Presuming you’re still willing to do literally any play—”

“I am,” he says immediately. After a beat, he adds, “Though what play is it?”

Emma just laughs. “I knew you actually cared. It’s new—this will be the world premiere. I’ll have them send over a script; just let me know once you’ve read it.”

Deep down, he already knows he’s going to say yes, and when the messenger delivers it an hour later, he sits on Charles’s sofa and reads the whole thing cover to cover. It’s nearly dark by the time he’s finished, and he floats over his phone and texts Emma: “i’m in.”

He waits to tell Charles the news until he sees him in person on Thursday evening. Because he doesn’t have much else to do, he spends the better part of the afternoon cooking, which leaves Charles shaking his head in disbelief as he wheels up to the dining table.

“Sometimes I wonder if this all isn’t some elaborate illusion I’ve telepathically tricked myself into seeing,” Charles says. He pauses, looking thoughtful. “Hmmm, do you think I could actually do that? It’s kind of twisty, conceptually, but I suppose if I were to—”

“Hey,” Erik says, waving a hand in front of his face. “This is reality, you idiot.”

Charles laughs. “Would illusion-you insult me so much?

Erik smiles as he pours out the wine. “Almost definitely. It’s part of my appeal.”

Still, Erik knows the feeling. When they first fell back into bed together, he thought of it as “surreal.” Now he’d be more inclined to say “unreal,” as fine a distinction as that might be—sometimes he feels like he’s in an alternate universe, and one day he’ll put his hand through some kind of invisible barrier and be dragged back into his own dimension.

As much as he hates to think much about those years, it does remind him a little bit of college: the nights together where all he needed to do was squint and temporarily forget about the rest of it and things felt absolutely normal between them. Sometimes, things felt perfect.

“You said you had some news?” Charles says, knocking him out of his introspection.

Erik glances up at him. “Did I? Or did I just think about my news?”

Charles looks slightly chagrined, but he just gives him a go-on gesture with his wine glass.

“Adam Driver broke his foot,” Erik says, smiling.

Charles frowns. “Why are you smiling? Were you the one who broke it? Is he your enemy?”

Erik’s smile only widens, and he takes a sip of his wine before says, “So there’s this new play…”

Bobby arrives on a redeye Monday morning, and by nine a.m., he’s stepping off the private elevator into Charles’s apartment, his eyebrows sky-high.

“Jesus,” he says, glancing around. “I know you’d probably say you’re above marrying for money, but you should seriously consider—”

“We’re not getting married,” Erik snaps, lowering his voice. “And don’t make me regret giving you this address.”

“Ah, you must be Bobby,” Charles says, smiling brightly as he wheels into the room and extends a hand. “Charles.”

Erik does not like the appreciative look Bobby gives Charles as he shakes his hand. Charles clearly picks up on this, because he sends a teasing sensation that leaves Erik rolling his eyes.

“Can I make you a cup of tea?” Charles offers. “Or perhaps Erik can make some coffee?”

“I am not making coffee for my assistant,” Erik says flatly.

Bobby just laughs. “Tea would be great, thank you.” He claps his hands together. “And then we can get to work, right, boss?”

“How are you this chipper off a redeye?” Erik mutters, turning to follow Charles to the kitchen.

“I’m twenty-four!” Bobby calls out cheerfully.

Once the tea is made, Charles retreats to his office; Erik and Bobby set up in the living room, where they run through his calendar and do some brief prep for his interview today. After his time off, talking to a journalist really feels like plunging head-first into icy waters, especially after Bobby tells him that several more thinkpieces about his personal life have been published in the past week.

“Do I want to read any of these?” he says, using his powers to twirl his phone in the air.

“You do not,” Bobby says. “And you’re going to keep your cool this afternoon if the subject comes up.”

Erik raises an eyebrow. “I am, am I?”

“I’m trying to be intimidating like Emma,” Bobby says. “Is it working?”

Erik snorts. “I suggest you pick a better role model.”

Bobby waits until they’re in the car downtown before he says, “OK, we can finally talk about the important subject: Charles.”

Erik gives him a look.

“I know, I know. I get one personal detail per conversation.” Bobby pauses for a moment before he asks, “How are things going?”

A beat passes, and then Erik says, “Well.”

Bobby sighs. “I knew I should have phrased that more precisely.” He holds up an index finger. “This one is about me: I’m booked in at the hotel for a week. Do you think I’ll stay longer?”

Erik wants to say something sarcastic, but it’s a real question. He may have been given a temporary reprieve from reality, but he’s going to have to go back to LA and resume his regular life sooner rather than later. He’ll be back here in a few weeks, of course—rehearsals for the play start in December. He thinks about his mother’s tiny apartment, and he thinks about his week wandering through Charles’s, piecing together his life one room at a time.

“I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe.”

Bobby watches him with an unreadable expression on his face, but he doesn’t say anything.

He hasn’t been to Balthazar in years, which he tells the journalist from Vanity Fair—Andrew—as they’re seated at the corner of two long banquettes beneath an enormous set of mirrors.

Andrew smiles. “It’s a classic for a reason.”

Some journalists are clearly nervous when they talk to him—and some get a little aggressive as they try to compensate for their nervousness. His least favorite mode is when they try to act like his best friend, as though a few overly familiar jokes will fool him into letting his guard down. Andrew is none of these things: cooly professional, an attentive listener, and, for the first half of the conversation anyway, armed with reasonably interesting questions about both the show and acting in general.

But then Andrew says, “So…a bit of a subject change, but: there’s been a lot of speculation about your personal life recently.”

Erik keeps his expression as neutral as possible. “I wouldn’t know. I’m not really online.”

Andrew looks skeptical, but he nods. “This profile won’t be published until just before the show’s finale, but…” He leans in a bit closer and lowers his voice. “I’ve heard about a story coming out soon, and I wanted to give you a chance to get ahead of it.”

Erik stills. “What kind of story?” he says, trying to keep his tone casual. “Where?”

Andrew smiles, but he doesn’t look happy. “I’m not supposed to know about it. I’m sure they’ll call your publicist for comment.” He carefully places his pen on his notebook and folds his hands. “Look, Erik. I’ve been an entertainment journalist for a long time—a gay entertainment journalist, for that matter. I understand exactly how all of this works. I can offer you an opportunity to control the narrative, and with a sympathetic lens, not a semi-hostile one.”

He’s certain Andrew and also the people at the next table over can hear his heart pounding, but he says in a perfectly even voice, “Sorry—I truly don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Andrew stares at him for a moment, the disappointment written clearly across his face; his shoulders droop a bit as he picks up his pen again. “Well, if you change your mind…it’s an open-ended offer. I hope you know that I really admire you, as an actor.”

Erik wants to thank him, or to tell him maybe someday he’ll think about it, or to stand up and walk out of the restaurant and sprint all the way back uptown. Instead, he picks up his sparkling water and watches Andrew as he takes a sip, careful to give absolutely nothing away.

“So,” Andrew says, his smile obviously forced. “I’ve heard you’re returning to the stage soon?”

He quickly texts Emma under the table when Andrew gets up to go to the bathroom; when he finally leaves the restaurant, he has a series of messages in response. He reads them as he slides into the car waiting on Prince Street.

“So how did it…” Bobby trails off. “What happened? Did you lose your cool?”

“I just got off the phone with Angel,” the most recent text from Emma reads. “Don’t speak to anyone else until you hear from us.”

Erik wordlessly hands his phone to Bobby, who reads through the exchange with a frown.

“Well,” he says after a minute. “I guess the obvious question is: How would you feel if your personal life wasn’t personal anymore?”

Erik throws his head against the seat. “It’s just…why is any of this newsworthy?”

“I understand that’s rhetorical,” Bobby says. “But that’s also not an answer to the question.”

Erik could tell him that’s because he doesn’t have an answer to the question. Instead, he says nothing, and continues to look up at the car’s ceiling.

When he gets back to Charles’s apartment, he sits down on the sofa in the living room and stares at the carpet until Charles finally wheels in with a frown.

“You know that you’re blasting a lot of negative—” He cuts off, his frown morphing into a concerned expression. “Are you all right?”

“Go ahead,” Erik says, pointing at his own head. “I don’t want to talk about it. Just take it.”

Charles folds his arms across his chest. “I don't want to get in the habit of communicating that way, you know.”

Erik stares at him, and after a beat, Charles sighs.

“Fine. Just this once.”

Charles wheels up to face him directly, their knees touching, and as he closes his eyes, he gently places two fingers on each of his temples. Erik knows Charles doesn’t need to touch him to do this, but there’s something infinitely comforting about the feel of his fingers against his skin. When Charles opens his eyes and lowers his hands, Erik catches them and holds on tightly.

Charles takes a deep breath. “OK, well…” There’s a long pause, but then he only says, “This…isn’t great.”

Erik studies his face, but he can’t actually glean any of what Charles is thinking. He pushes a questioning thought his way. There’s another silence, and then eventually, Charles lets out a shaky laugh.

“I’m thinking…self-centered things,” he admits. “Like how this big story isn’t just about you. Or eventually, it won’t be.”

Erik sits back slightly and raises his eyebrows. After a beat, he says, “Well, that’s honest.”

Charles purses his lips. “I said it was self-centered, didn’t I? It’s just…this stuff…” He looks down at his lap. “You know it's complicated for me.”

Erik stares at him. “You’ve been out for years. You were engaged to a man.”

“I was engaged to a lawyer,” Charles says quietly. “Not a movie star.”

Something cold settles in the center of Erik’s chest, and he lets go of Charles’s hands.

“I don’t think it’s about that,” he says.

Charles shakes his head. “Of course it’s about that. Do you understand that everyone recognizes you? Constantly? I’ve been diverting their attention every time we go outside—”

“I didn’t ask you to do that!” Erik says, his voice growing louder.

Charles throws up his hands. “What else was I supposed to do?”

“OK, I stand corrected,” Erik says, raising his chin. “Maybe it is all about me being famous. Maybe you only wanted to try this again because it had to be a secret this time.”

Charles’s eyes widen. “Erik, no—”

“An ironclad excuse. It’s perfect,” he continues sarcastically. “Or I guess it was—until now.”

Before Charles can respond, Erik shifts his lower body so he can get up from the couch without tumbling over him; as he stands, Charles catches his wrist, looking at him with an urgent expression.

“You’re wrong,” he says firmly. “Think what you want about me, but you’re wrong. I love you—I loved you in college, for all I was totally incapable of admitting it—and I love you now. Erik, I love you so, so much.” He bites his lip before he continues, “But you know this is a huge deal. Obviously it’s a far, far bigger deal for you, but…I just need a little time to process—”

“Well, by all means,” Erik snaps. “Take all the fucking time you need.”

He turns his back on Charles as he marches towards the elevator, trying to focus all of his thoughts on getting out of the apartment as quickly as he can—he can’t let Charles hear him thinking about the words “I love you so, so much” running in an endless loop, rattling against his skull.

*

Like a coward, he has Bobby go and collect his things from Charles’s apartment later that afternoon, and they’re on a flight back to Los Angeles the following morning.

Emma tells him that neither she nor Angel have been contacted for comment on any upcoming story; he plans on stopping by her office the next day, but that evening, she rings his bell with a bottle of very dry white wine. They crack it open out on the pool deck while they watch the light fading over the hills, and after a glass and a half, he decides to tell her everything.

“You know all of this already, don’t you?” he says, glancing over at her.

“It doesn’t count until you say it out loud,” she reminds him.

He looks straight ahead again, and after a moment, he shakes his head and lets out a little laugh. He places his glass on the table and turns to face her properly.

“We actually were best friends, you know,” he says. “For the first two years, it was only that.”

“But you were in love with him?” she says.

He pauses, unsure how to answer. “Probably the whole time, yes,” he says slowly. “But I didn’t realize it until our sophomore year.”

“Did you know you were bisexual?”

He nods. “I’d only been with women up to that point. But he wasn’t the first boy I found attractive, no.”

There’s a long stretch of silence, so she prompts: “But Charles was…?”

“Straight,” he says. “Very obviously and loudly straight. He flirted with literally every woman he encountered. He actually slept with a surprising number of them, considering how bad his pick-up lines were.”

Emma laughs. “Honey, it’s not so surprising. He’s very attractive and very rich.”

“Yeah, well.” Erik rubs the back of his neck. “You haven’t heard his pick-up lines.”

“But he said he was straight?” she asks. “You weren’t just assuming.”

“He did, but…” Erik sighs. “We always had a lot of political arguments. Even now, he leans towards respectability—but back then, he was so desperate to be normal, whatever he thought that even meant. He was always taking the mutant assimilation angle, and he had complicated feelings about people knowing he was a telepath—”

“Trust me, sugar,” Emma interrupts. “We all do.”

“No, I get it,” he says. “I really do. I mean, obviously we have very different experiences of mutation. He struggled with his disability, too—though when he talked about that, it was mostly to vent, because unsurprisingly, people can be total shitheads about it.”

“One thing you can hide,” Emma says, reaching over to refill his wine glass. “One thing you can’t.” She pauses before she adds, “And then, there was another thing to hide.”

He shakes his head as he takes a sip of wine. “I think he really thought he was straight. People realize it at different times.”

Emma’s silent for a moment, and then she says, “But you didn’t tell him you weren’t straight. Or that you were in love with him.”

“I nearly panicked that first night when I realized,” he admits. “And then I started to envision this…I don’t know, sort of steel shell, I guess. Encasing my thoughts—protecting them. And I thought I’d been successful, because he never gave any indication that he’d caught on.”

Emma gives him a pitying look. “You know that he knew the whole time. We always know.”

“Yeah,” he says quietly. “I know.”

It’s almost completely dark now. Emma’s face is illuminated by the glow from the pool, and the lights of the city below seem to stretch out forever.

“So you were best friends,” Emma prompts again. “But at a certain point, something changed.”

“I told you Charles was the one who encouraged me to take a drama class,” he says. “I was in my first play in the spring of my sophomore year—that was actually where I met the first guy I fooled around with. During breaks we’d give each other blow jobs in a dusty corner of the prop room.”

Emma bursts out laughing, but Erik just shakes his head.

“It was so gross down there,” he says. “I guess we all did stupid shit when we were nineteen.”

Emma gives him an imperious look. “Even nineteen-year-old me wouldn’t have sex in a dusty storeroom.”

Erik smiles. “I’m somehow envisioning nineteen-year-old you in a pristine white pantsuit.”

Emma laughs again as she waves him off. “So this play…”

“Right, so.” Erik takes a deep breath. “It was after the final performance, and after the cast party. I went to Charles’s dorm room because…I don't know, I was pretty drunk.” He pauses to take a sip of his wine, staring ahead at the water gently lapping in the pool. “He was the one that kissed me—though after I got over my shock, I didn’t hesitate for a second. And then we slept together for the first time.”

“Did he ever tell you what changed for him that night?” Emma asks.

Erik nods. “Only recently, when we talked about all this a few weeks ago. Apparently it was seeing me onstage…” He pauses, thinking of the way Charles described it, before he continues, “Anyway, that night I felt like I was dreaming. I couldn’t believe it was actually happening, that it had actually happened. And then the next morning we woke up and he rolled over and asked me very politely if actually, we could keep this just between us.”

There’s a long pause, and then Emma says, “I have to say, I knew this was coming, but it still sounds so shitty when you say it out loud.”

“Yeah,” he says. “Shitty is one word for it.”

Emma clicks her tongue. “Did he explain that one recently, too?”

“He did,” Erik says. “And look, it can be shitty and he can be truly sorry about how he behaved and it can still make perfect sense. He didn’t know what he was doing—he wasn’t even close to figuring things out.” He frowns as he thinks about Charles’s final words yesterday before he stormed out of his apartment. “He loved me, too, and that terrified him.”

“But you kept sleeping together?” Emma says.

“But we kept sleeping together,” Erik confirms. “Friends with benefits, I guess. If I’d had any sense, I would have told him no—just friends had been perfectly fine for us before, even when it wasn’t, really. I certainly could have found someone else to sleep with. But I…”

“…was a horny nineteen-year-old,” Emma suggests.

Erik snorts. “Oh, absolutely. But also…I was in love with him. I guess that went both ways, now that I know Charles’s side of the story.” He pauses and sighs. “Friends with benefits who were secretly in love with each other.”

“Except one of you was a telepath.”

Erik nods. “Obviously that made things worse. I felt like he should have known how I was actually feeling. Or that if he did know, that he should say something about it.”

“Hmmm,” Emma says. “Even though you never said anything about it, either?”

Erik rolls his eyes. “Of course the telepath would frame it that way.”

“I’m going to choose to ignore that,” Emma says loftily. “So: How did things end, then?”

“Poorly,” Erik says. “Our squabbles started turning into actual fights. We independently made post-graduation plans that were totally incompatible. A few weeks before graduation, I finally snapped and told him to get the fuck out of my life forever. And then…” He shrugs. “We didn’t speak again directly until your friend’s wedding.”

“And somewhere between then and now, he figured himself out?”

“He came out a few years after college,” he says. “And I only learned that later, when I found out he was engaged to a man.”

“His ex-fiancé, right,” Emma says. “And meanwhile, you embarked on a life where remaining semi-closeted is a professional necessity.”

That makes a spark of anger flare up inside him, and he places his wine glass firmly on the table.

“I’m an actor because I love acting.”

“Of course,” she says. “You have to admit it’s convenient, though.”

“Oh, fuck off,” he snaps, turning away from her and folding his arms across his chest.

“Erik, honey, I’m not blaming you,” she says softly, the flippant tone gone. “Of course it’s fucked you up—this whole thing would fuck anyone up. But you are also one of the most avoidant people I’ve ever met. You’re constantly working, always onto the next thing. It lets you barrel on ahead without ever even attempting to face your issues.” She lets out a small laugh. “Another way you fit right in in Hollywood.”

He looks back at her. “What’s your point?”

“No point,” she says, shrugging. “Just an observation.” She laughs a little, shaking her head. “God knows I’m not any better. I certainly used work to distract myself from my divorce.”

Erik remembers—he was one of her first clients after her very messy, very public split with one of the slimiest producers in town.

“You had to build a business,” he says, shrugging. “I had to build a career.”

“And build them we did,” she says sardonically. She reaches over to split the dregs of the wine between their glasses. “So this story that’s supposedly coming out in a mystery publication—what do you think it’s actually going to say?”

“I have no fucking idea,” Erik says, sighing. “I’m ninety-nine percent certain no one in college knew the truth about Charles and me. Every guy I’ve slept with in the past decade has been circumspect, or has had a mutual reason to keep quiet. And things with Charles the past few months…”

“What about things with Charles yesterday?” she asks.

“I wasn’t kind to him,” he says. “I don’t know. I was upset.”

“Do you think you can work it out?”

Erik shrugs. “Does he even want to work it out?”

“What do you want?” Emma says. “Forget about this stupid article, forget about all the upcoming press. Forget about—I can’t believe I’m saying this—your career.”

Erik laughs, but then he’s silent for a long moment. When he finally speaks, it’s nearly a whisper. “I do want to work it out.”

Emma smiles. “Great,” she says briskly. “Then we’ll make it work.”

“You’re going to try to manage this, too?” he says, smiling as he shakes his head.

“Of course.” She raises her glass in a mock-toast. “It’s what I do best, sugar.”

*

Everything is a little fuzzy the next morning—when they finished the wine, they regrettably decided to break out the gin—but things immediately snap into focus when Erik floats the phone from his bedside table and sees the waiting text from Emma: “They called. It’s fucking New York Magazine again. Angel’s coming to us. My office, 11.”

He blinks at the words for a while, and then he rolls back over and presses his face directly into the pillow.

“They claim it’s not a hit piece,” Angel tells them, scrolling quickly on her tablet. “More a…hang on, I wrote it down—ah yes, ‘a critique of the current status quo for queer actors in Hollywood.’”

Emma rolls her eyes. “And they can’t do that without making an example of a specific actor?”

Angel gives them a tight smile. “Funny how that works.”

They’re seated side-by-side in the chairs in front of Emma’s desk; Angel’s got her legs crossed, and Erik stares at the very long, very pointy heel of her boot as it bobs in the air. He knows she can spit acid, but he’s pretty sure she could kill a man with that even quicker, especially if she did it while in flight—

“Hey.” Emma snaps her fingers in his direction. “Extremely important conversation about your career happening over here.”

Erik looks up and spreads his hands in a sort of shrugging gesture. “Until I see what they’re going to write, I don’t really know how to respond to this.”

“I tried to press them a little without ceding anything on our end,” Angel says. “They wouldn’t give me any specifics, but it seems pretty clear that they’re going to out you in some capacity—even if it’s under the guise of ‘speculation.’” She pauses, frowning, before she adds. “I’m sorry, Erik.”

Erik blinks at her, trying to process what she said. It feels like they’ve been talking around this for ages, so it’s strange to actually hear the words out loud. He looks down at his knees.

When he eventually glances up, they’re both watching him. He knows they’re waiting for him to say something about his feelings, but all he can manage is, “So what exactly did you tell them?”

Angel hesitates, and then she scrolls down her tablet again. “While we don’t comment publicly on the personal lives of our clients, we would hope that any reputable media outlet would respect a public figure’s right to privacy.” She shrugs. “Boilerplate, but there wasn’t much else to say.”

He looks at Emma. “Tell me honestly: beyond the immediate blowback, do you think this could do real damage to my career in the long run?”

Emma is silent for a moment, her expression speculative. “Honestly? I can’t tell you anything with complete certainty,” she says slowly. “But you’re extremely well-positioned right now. You’re booked for quite a while, and you’re only seeing a fraction of the offers I’m fielding. Plus you have the multi-year contract for the show—and you’ll win an Emmy next year for sure.”

He scoffs. “Come on. Maybe.”

“Honey, this show is a cultural phenomenon,” Emma says. “How are you missing this?”

“It’s true,” Angel chimes in. “I’m sure you’ve seen all the memes.”

“No, I haven’t seen the—” Erik cuts off with a sigh. “OK, so what’s the plan, then?”

Emma and Angel glance at each other, and Angel says, “I think we just have to wait. We don’t know what narrative they’re going to spin. We should prepare for the worst, but…it’s impossible to say.”

Erik remembers his conversation with Andrew, the journalist from the other day, and his words “sympathetic” versus “semi-hostile.” He can’t even begin to guess what this mystery article will say; it’s far easier to imagine how he’d tell this story on his own terms.

He suddenly has an almost desperate urge to call Charles and talk through all of this. He pushes the thought forcibly from his mind.

After a long pause, Emma says, “Yes, I agree—let’s see what they actually publish and assess the damage then.”

Her expression is perfectly neutral, but there’s something in her tone that seems a little off.

“OK,” he says slowly. “Did they give any indication of when that would be?”

Angel shakes her head. “I’m guessing they’re not in a massive hurry. While the show is airing, you’re more topical than usual. And if the journalist you spoke with on Monday—who works for a totally different organization, mind you—had already heard about it through the grapevine…I’d bet it’s been around for a little while.”

Emma lets out a sardonic laugh. “Back in the day they would have fallen over themselves rushing this kind of thing to press.”

“I was thinking that too,” Angel says. “Which makes me wonder if they’re internally debating whether it’s even worth publishing.”

“But the internet…” Erik trails off as they both turn to look at him. He feels a little foolish, but he plows ahead. “Bobby said there’s a lot of talk about this stuff on the internet. People make these…videos…”

Angel looks like she’s trying very hard not to laugh. “People on the internet do make videos.”

Erik slouches a bit as he folds his arms across his chest. “You know what I mean.”

“I do,” Angel says. “I’ll also tell you this: for every one of these speculation posts and callout videos, there are dozens of people in the comments telling the poster to back off—to respect the privacy of you and every other actor they’re doing this to right now.”

Erik raises his eyebrows. “Really?”

“Public sentiment on this stuff is changing as we speak,” Angel says. “Which is a good thing on the whole. As for this specific situation, though…”

“Wait and see,” Emma finishes.

Erik sighs. “Right. Wait and see.”

The next few days pass in a blur: he schedules extra sessions with his trainer, goes on unnecessarily long drives, tries to watch a few movies he’s been meaning to see for ages. Anything to distract himself from the formless dread of the mystery article—and more importantly, from Charles.

On Friday, he’s floating on his back in the pool, staring up at the cloudless sky, when Bobby appears on the pool deck, hands on his hips.

“Thank God you start rehearsals in two weeks,” he says. “Because I don’t know how long I can handle your depressive state.”

“I’m swimming,” Erik calls upwards.

Bobby is arranging something in the kitchen when Erik comes inside. He grabs a Diet Coke from the fridge as he runs a towel over his hair.

“Still no word on this article, huh?” Bobby says, glancing over at him.

Erik gives him a flat look. “What do you think?”

Bobby shuts a cabinet. “I do wonder what exactly they have on you.” He pauses and adds, “Do you think they know about Charles? You’ve been out in public a bunch…”

Erik opens his mouth to say that Charles has likely been mind-whammying strangers left and right when they go outside, and then he shuts it again. He doesn’t really want to talk about Charles.

But then, a thought nags at the back of his mind. “Bobby, when we were in the UK, and you figured out Charles’s full name—”

“The wedding guest list.” Bobby waves a hand. “That part was easy.”

“Why did you say we dated in college?” Erik says slowly.

“Oh,” Bobby says, smiling and shaking his head. “That was kind of a bluff—I wanted to see how you’d react. But I found photos of you both.”

Erik frowns. He thought he’d removed that period of his digital life from the internet. “What photos?”

“Oh, nothing incriminating, don’t worry,” Bobby says. “Generally it was pretty boring stuff—yearbook archives, the student paper. But seeing you next to each other…it seemed pretty obvious.” He pauses, and then he adds, “Well, he was the obvious one, really. I guess you were already good at doing that impassive photo face back then.”

The words hit him in a rush, and it feels like something is squeezing his ribs. He thinks about four long years of what he assumed was totally one-sided affection—about how they slept together probably hundreds of times, and they never once said how they felt about each other. They were both so stupid then; he wonders if they’re any better now.

“Bobby,” he says suddenly. “I need you to book me a flight back to New York—ASAP.”

Bobby blinks at him. “You were there four days ago,” he says, slapping the counter with each word for emphasis. “Do you know how bad long-haul air travel is for the environment? You should not be actively advancing climate change every time you have a tiff with your—”

“Bobby,” Erik says flatly.

Bobby rolls his eyes. “Fine.” He pulls out his phone and mutters, “I should put you in coach.”

He gets in late that evening and heads directly to his mother’s apartment. It’s finally gotten properly cold in New York—not that cold, he realizes when he checks the weather, though it feels downright frigid, a sure sign that California has totally ruined him. When he remembers he actively signed up to do a play in New York in the very depths of winter, he laughs out loud.

He waits until the following afternoon to cross the park and give his name to Charles’s doorman. He only has to hold his breath for a few seconds before he hears, “Yes, sir. I’ll send him right up.”

Charles is waiting for him in the foyer; he’s wearing corduroys and an oversized navy sweater, which makes him look like a small boy. When Erik steps out of the elevator, they stare at each other for a very long moment, until someone clears their throat.

Erik nearly jumps. He glances up to see Raven leaning against the doorway to the foyer, her arms folded across her chest. She does not look happy to see him.

“Raven,” he says, nodding. “Back in the U.S. for a visit?”

“For Thanksgiving,” she says coolly. “And to spend time with my brother.”

With a start, he realizes that he had no idea that Thanksgiving was coming up. He tries not to let his surprise show on his face.

“Erik,” Charles says quietly. “What are you doing here?”

“I, uh…” He rubs the back of his neck, looking down at the intricate designs on the marble floor before he meets Charles’s gaze again. “Can we talk?” After a beat, he adds, “Alone?”

Charles glances at his sister before he looks back at him, and then he nods.

He follows Charles to his office—which he can admit is probably a more sensible choice than his bedroom—and shuts the door behind them. When he’d snooped around the apartment, he’d noted that this was by far the messiest room: there are books and papers stacked everywhere, with the general air that the cleaning staff have decided to simply dust around them.

Charles must have been working—there’s a fire going in the fireplace, and a text document open on his computer. Charles gestures to a very old-fashioned looking wingback chair in front of the fire and positions his wheelchair a few feet away.

They sit in silence until Charles eventually says, “Bobby told me you were flying back to California on Monday. Did you actually stay here?”

Erik stares at him, because Charles could easily take that information from his mind. But then he thinks about his conversation with Emma, and decides that going forward, he is going to say things aloud.

“I did fly back to California,” he says. “And then yesterday evening I flew back here.”

Charles’s lips quirk. “Very bad for the environment, you know.”

Erik rolls his eyes. “Not you, too.”

Now Charles is smiling properly, but it fades slightly as he says, “What are you doing here, Erik?”

Erik watches him for a long moment, and he realizes that he wants to tell him everything. How desperately he loved him in college. How much what happened in those years destroyed him. How safe and cautious and distant that part of his life has felt as he focused almost wholly on his career. How seeing Charles again this summer utterly changed his trajectory, and how startling that’s been. How angry the idea of this article makes him, and how much he wishes he could just come out with everything before they have a chance to publish it. How sorry he is for everything he said the other day. How much he loves Charles, and hopes that Charles still loves him too.

So he opens his mouth, and he says it all.

Charles looks close to tears at several points while he’s talking, but he’s actually crying by the end. He laughs a little and shakes his head as he wipes away a tear with his thumb.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

Erik smiles. He feels a little like crying, too. But he just says, “You were always the dramatic one.”

Charles laughs outright at that, and Erik can feel the laughter through his telepathy—it’s like being suffused in bright, dancing light.

“Thank you for telling me all of that,” Charles says.

Erik shrugs. “We should…talk more. I mean, like, properly talk.”

Charles nods. “It’s not my strong suit. But we can see where that’s got me in the past, so…”

They both share a sort of sad smile, and then Charles clasps his hands together and says, “Would you like to stay here this weekend? Or longer? I know you probably have Thanksgiving plans, but—”

Erik laughs. “In all honesty, I totally forgot about Thanksgiving.” He glances at the door and says, “Is your sister…?”

“Feeling protective of me,” Charles says, rolling his eyes. “She’ll get over it.” He smiles slyly and adds, “She really loves the show, you know. Even though she was mad at you, she was still planning on watching it tomorrow. She follows a bunch of people who livetweet it—she says it’s great for memes.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Erik pinches the bridge of his nose. “I guess I’ll just go find a bar to wait in or something.”

Charles laughs, reaching out to catch his hand and squeezing it before letting go. His expression turns serious again as he says, “This article—you’re worried about it.”

“Not worried necessarily, just…” He thinks for a bit before he continues. “I don’t know. It’s been hard to actually process. I’ve spent my whole career working under this basic assumption…” He trails off, frowning.

“That you have to hide your sexuality,” Charles finishes quietly.

Erik can tell he’s making the exact parallels Emma brought up the other day. He shakes his head.

“It’s not even like that,” he says. “People are out in Hollywood. It’s just not…public-public.”

After a long moment of silence, Charles says, “What do you actually want, Erik?”

He thinks of Emma asking him that question about Charles. Now Charles is asking him that question about his career.

“Well,” he says. “At the meeting the other day, we—”

“No,” Charles interrupts. “I don’t want to hear your media strategy and I don’t want to hear what Emma wants. You said a few minutes ago that you wished you could just come out with everything before anyone has a chance to beat you to it.”

“There’s this journalist,” Erik says slowly. “From Vanity Fair. The one I spoke with the other day, who told me about the article.” He takes a deep breath. “I think he’d do a story with me. He told me I had a chance to reclaim the narrative.”

“All right,” Charles says. “So is that what you want?”

He thinks about what it would be like for absolutely everyone to know—the way that they know he’s a mutant, a basic descriptor in front of his name or the word “actor,” a simple fact of who he is, right there in plain sight. It’s hard to wrap his head around. But in an instant, he knows that for all his ambivalence this past week, that’s what he wants.

“Yes,” he says. He swallows, wanting to add something more meaningful, but he only repeats, “Yes. That’s what I want.”

Charles’s expression is hard to parse, but he still nods firmly. “You know that whatever you choose to do—I’ll support you.”

The words make Erik feel warm at first, but then a small, cold thought starts to poke its way through. He can be outed against his will, he can come out on his own terms—but either way, Charles’s continued association with him will seem pretty obvious to any outside observer. He has no idea if Charles is prepared for that—or if, for that matter, he wants to be the boyfriend of a movie star, and all of the absurdity that entails—and he’s far too scared to ask.

So all he does is smile and say, “Thank you,” and then he leans forward to give Charles a kiss.

For the rest of the afternoon, the past few days quickly start to feel like a weird, distant memory. Charles clearly tells Raven to back off, because she’s now largely polite to him, and she actually starts to warm up over dinner. They learn that they share a lot of political leanings, particularly around mutation, and also a mutual interest in teasing Charles—a development Charles does not seem to appreciate at all.

And that night, as he rests his head on the broad expanse of Charles’s chest and listens to him breathe, Erik tries not to think about that small, cold thought, even as it’s steadily growing. This is enough, he reminds himself; for right now, it’s perfect.

*

The next day is crisp and sunny, so he and Raven decide to go for a run around the reservoir. He initially feels guilty leaving Charles behind, but Charles waves him off and says that he didn’t like running before, and he’s a hundred percent certain he wouldn’t be joining them now even if he could.

They run for a long time—Raven’s mutation seems to give her almost superhuman stamina, and Erik is happy for it, because he’s been pushing himself harder and harder recently. When they eventually stop, they cool down by taking a long, winding route south through the park.

People definitely notice him—it’s always a risk of running here—and he tugs his hat lower to cover as much of his face as possible. Raven catches him doing it, and she pulls back her sleeve and holds up her arm. He watches in wonder as her blue scales turn to a pale, peachy sort of skin, and then she says, “I can shift to whatever, if it would make you less conspicuous.”

Erik frowns and shakes his head firmly. “Absolutely not. I wouldn’t want anyone hiding their mutation on my account.”

Raven just shrugs, and the blue scales zip back up her arm before she lowers her sleeve.

They walk in silence for a while, and then he says, “You’re used to being noticed, huh?”

Raven laughs. “Obviously. But that’s not the same thing as being famous, is it?”

“I’m sure there are some similarities,” Erik says. “But no, I guess it’s not.”

After a pause, she says, “Charles and I would fight about it sometimes, you know. When we were growing up. He thought it would be safer, in some situations, if I went around in a more ordinary-looking body.”

Erik frowns again. “That’s…”

“Kind of offensive, yes,” Raven finishes. “But sometimes, I don’t know…” She sighs. “Obviously it was, like, a peak protective-older-brother thing. But he also said I couldn’t fully grasp the kinds of things people thought about me…and, yeah, he’s right. I can’t. I do get how the world looks totally different to him than it does to us.”

“Right,” Erik says. “But…”

“Right,” Raven repeats, letting out a little laugh. “Thankfully we eventually wound up at a stalemate on that one. But I still think about it a fair bit—not just about my own life, but his, too.”

Erik glances at her, guessing at what she’s getting at. “Were you surprised when he came out?”

“I was, actually,” she says. “Well, I was more surprised when he started dating Simon—the guy he was engaged to for a while.” She gives him a sly smile as she adds, “Simon was also hot, but you’re about a thousand times more interesting than he was.”

Erik laughs as he shakes his head. A small, petty part of him feels pleased about the comparison.

“My life is nothing if not interesting,” he says. “For better or for worse.”

“Yeah, so look,” Raven says. “I don’t think Charles has told me every single thing that’s happened between you, but I’ve certainly heard a fair bit of it in the past few days and…the fact that you’re here right now says a lot. I’m sure it does to him, anyway.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” he says slowly. “But I’m just not sure…”

Raven stops short and puts a hand on his shoulder that stops him short, too. “No. You cannot leave again. I’m not having him crying all through Thanksgiving dinner.”

Erik holds up his hands in an innocent gesture. “I’m not planning on leaving. I was just going to say…I’m not sure our lives are compatible, in the long-run. Or even the short-run. This article about my sexuality will be published any day now. There’s going to be a ton of scrutiny about my personal life. That’s…a lot to put on him.”

Raven looks at him for a long moment, her expression searching. Eventually she says, “I have no idea what actually goes on in Charles’s head, OK? But I’ve had to listen to him talk about you nonstop for several days, and after all of that, I’d just say…don’t just assume how he feels about things. Let him tell you—or let him show you.”

Erik nods slowly, and after a beat, Raven nods, too. She shoves her hands in the pockets of her running pants, and they both turn back down the path.

“OK, but also,” she says after a minute. “Charles told me not to mention it, but please can I ask you about the show?”

Erik sighs. “I can’t tell you what’s going to happen in the finale.”

“Come on,” she moans. “You’re fucking my brother—that has to warrant me some kind of insider information.”

Erik smiles. “Who said I was the one doing the fucking?”

“God,” she says. “Now you’re emotionally scarring me. That has to be worth at least one detail!”

Erik just laughs. “OK. I’ll give you exactly one tiny, inconsequential detail…”

He doesn’t actually retreat to a bar that night, though he does hide out in Charles’s bedroom while the show airs, listening to both siblings laughing and, at one point, having some kind of loud argument about the plot that he’s pretty sure he could easily end if he wanted to. When Charles wheels back in and transfers from his chair to the bed, he looks exhilarated.

“You look so good while you’re doing crimes. This season ends with you in jail, right?” He sounds delighted. “Wait, don’t say anything out loud. How long do you remember your lines after you film something? I can probably just take—”

Erik cuts him off by tickling him in the sides, and as Charles calls out, “I won’t, I promise! I surrender!” Erik silences him with a kiss.

He wakes first the next morning, and he lays there for a long time, watching Charles sleep as he thinks about the conversation that they probably need to have sooner rather than later. In the thin pre-dawn light, he can almost resolve himself to doing it today—this morning, even.

But when Charles wakes up a little while later, Erik only smiles and kisses him, and he knows he’s a coward.

Raven leaves after breakfast, saying something vague about an appointment as she hurries out the door. Charles has work to do, even if it’s a holiday week, so Erik retrieves the script for the play he packed in his small overnight bag and brings it back to the living room.

He’s just finished annotating the first three scenes when Charles says suddenly, “Erik?”

He glances up at him. “Yes?”

“The other day, when you said you’d rather publicly come out on your own terms,” he says slowly. “In a piece with that journalist from Vanity Fair, even.” He pauses and bites his lip. “You haven’t changed your mind, have you?”

Erik is silent for a moment, his thoughts whirring. Setting his relationship with Charles aside, he knows what the answer is. But the idea of setting his relationship with Charles aside feels too much like letting Charles go.

So he opens his mouth to say that he isn’t sure, that he’s still thinking about it, but what comes out instead is, “No, I haven’t changed my mind.”

Charles nods slowly. “You’d be ready to do that soon? Even today, if the opportunity arose?”

Erik stares at him, trying to understand the question. It’s a weird hypothetical. Or is Charles trying to get him to call that journalist?

After a beat, he says, “Sure. I would do it today, I suppose…whenever.”

“OK, that’s good, because—” Charles takes a deep breath, and then the doorman’s line rings. He gestures towards the foyer. “Do you want to get that?”

Erik gives him a look, but he crosses over to the elevator and picks up the phone.

“I have an Andrew Goldman here for you, sir,” the doorman says.

Erik searches through his memory for the name, but he has no idea who that is.

“He says he’s from Vanity Fair,” the doorman clarifies, and Erik feels like the bottom of his stomach has dropped out.

“I, uh…” He swallows. “Send him up, I guess?”

He walks back into the living room in a daze. Charles is looking up at him with an apprehensive expression.

“Is this all right?” he says quietly.

Erik stares at him. “How did he get your address? How did he know I was here?”

After a beat, Charles says, “I gave it to Emma. Emma gave it to him.”

“You gave it to…” Erik stares at him for a moment longer, and then the elevator bell dings. He hurries back to the foyer, where Andrew is stepping out of the elevator, gazing around and looking gobsmacked.

“Uh…hi,” Andrew says when he catches sight of him. “It's nice to see you again.”

Charles is wheeling into the foyer, hand outstretched. “Charles Xavier. It’s lovely to meet you.”

As Erik watches Andrew shake Charles’s hand, he feels like he’s losing his grip on reality.

“Please come in,” Charles says, gesturing towards the living room, and then he turns back to Erik and projects, I’m terribly sorry to spring this on you—and I can absolutely send him away if you’d like—but after we talked on Saturday, I contacted Emma and…

Erik stares at him. He still can’t quite grasp what’s going on.

This is your story to tell, Charles continues. But if you want me to be a part of it, I’m ready for that, too.

All the blood is rushing to his head now, and he continues to stare at Charles, who’s looking up at him with a hopeful expression. He glances through the doorway, where he can see Andrew seated on the sofa, placing his notebook and recorder on the coffee table. He looks back at Charles in disbelief.

“Are you sure?” he says out loud. “I mean really, really sure?”

Charles smiles and nods, and then holds out his hand. “Are you sure?”

Erik reaches out and takes it, lacing their fingers together as he smiles back. “Yes. Absolutely.”

Charles leads him into the living room, and they sit side-by-side across from Andrew, who’s looking between them, a small smile on his lips.

“Is that thing on?” Erik says, pointing at the recorder. He glances at Charles one more time before he says, “Because I am ready to start talking.”