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Josh wakes slowly and to the feel of Wolf’s well-worn pillows on his cheek.
Sighing, he pulls the duvet a little closer, reveling in the softness of Wolf’s linens. His own are always starched, washed and dried and ironed every seven days on the dot, and he replaces them every two years. While it means they’re clean and smell nice, there’s something uniquely Wolf about the ancient sheets.
Josh rolls over onto his back, and winces at the shaft of sunlight that falls through the open curtains and straight into his eyes, squinting to adjust to the bright light.
Before this – before Wolf – he hadn’t woken past eight o’clock sharp in thirty years. It didn’t matter what he’d done the previous day: surgery, a ten-k run, a run of twelve hour shifts. The military hammered into him the importance of being up and ready for the day, and Josh has never seen any reason to forget it.
That first night at Wolf’s, he’d woken the next morning and looked at his watch to see it was nine-fifteen, and panicked – had his age finally started to catch up to him?
But then the next day, when he’d been back in his own bed, it had been an easy seven o’clock start, and—Josh had realized it was just here, with Wolf, in Wolf’s bed, that made some deep buried neurological impulse want to forget everything and just relax.
When Josh stretches out an arm to the other side of the bed, to where Wolf slept, there’s nothing but rumpled duvet, bare sheets, and the vague impression of a head on Wolf’s pillow.
It’s not unusual for Wolf to be gone before Josh has even woken up. The man keeps strange hours, even though most of it is spent just puttering around the house.
Groaning, Josh stretches, warming slightly at the pleasant ache that tingles through his body, then sits up in bed.
A check of his phone, but no one has tried to contact him overnight. In the handful of months since he and Wolf started seeing each other, the occasional texts from ex-hookups have dwindled as they realize that he’s no longer good for it.
Josh rolls out of bed, finding his boxers where they’d landed on the floor last night and pulling them on.
He pads out of the room and down the stairs, to where Wolf is probably doing his usual weekend rounds of his plants or eating cereal or reading through the latest neurology journal, which arrived with the mailman the day before.
Wolf keeps his house toasty, so warm that it gets uncomfortable, and while Josh would never admit it to the man, it’s nice in moments like his, when he doesn’t even have to get fully dressed as he goes to search for coffee, breakfast, and his boyfriend. Perhaps not in that order.
One of the lampshades in the living room is on and the curtains closed, despite the daylight outside, which means that Wolf was in here before dawn, and has probably been awake for a few hours.
Huffing, Josh turns the light off and pulls the curtains back. Wolf won’t like that he’s been moving things around, particular about his space as he is, but there’s no way that Josh is going to let him waste both electricity and money like that.
“Wolf,” Josh calls, loud enough to be heard anywhere downstairs, “you need to stop leaving lights on when you leave the room.”
He moves through the living room, heading for the kitchen, where he’ll either find Wolf or coffee. He’d prefer Wolf, but coffee is fine too.
“It’s a massive waste of—”
Josh enters the room, looking up to see if Wolf is there, only to freeze in the doorway.
Leaning against the kitchen counter, with a brilliant purple suit and high heels and perfectly curled hair, is Dr. Carol Pierce.
And she’s looking right at him.
“Carol,” Josh chokes.
“...Josh,” Carol says.
Her gaze dips down, those perfectly manicured eyebrows rising.
Josh becomes very, very conscious of the fact that he is mostly naked. He becomes even more conscious of the fact that he’s pretty sure he has beard burn and bruises stretching down his pectorals in equal measure, from where Wolf had kissed a line across his chest last night.
“Wolf...didn’t mention that you were here,” Carol says, slow and considered.
Josh absolutely does not perk up at the mention of his boyfriend and eagerly ask if she’s seen him this morning. He outgrew that kind of behavior decades ago. Instead, he folds his arms across his chest, trying to discretely cover up, and says, “He, uh. He didn’t say you’d be coming over either.”
“I’m just stopping by on my way into work.”
The implication is that Josh clearly isn’t; that Josh very clearly spent the night.
“Didn’t mean to intrude,” Carol goes on, even though they both know that nothing she does will ever be intruding in Wolf’s life.
“Well,” Josh says, at a loss for words. “That’s—fine.”
Silence sits between them for a very long, very awkward moment.
Carol is actually a friend of Josh’s, albeit the kind of friend who he has semi-regular lunches with and mostly tells the surface levels of his life, in exchange for hearing about her separation weeks after the fact and a sanitized version of what her daughter is up to.
Wolf’s ancient coffee maker dings.
They both startle.
Quickly recovering, Carol whips around to pour herself a healthy dose of black coffee. Without looking back at Josh, she asks if he’d like some.
“Yes,” Josh says. “Yes. Please.” He does not want to be doing this un-caffeinated.
He doesn’t want to be doing this at all, but that option vanished the second that he walked into this kitchen in his underwear. In his ideal world, he and Carol could have maintained their careful avoidance of the topic of him and Wolf for several years more.
Josh should excuse himself to go and put some actual clothes on – but that would mean acknowledging that he’s currently not wearing clothes; speaking the unspoken thing. And that might mean actually talking about this.
Carol gets another mug from Wolf’s eclectic collection – this one is bright yellow with a zigzag pattern – fills it almost to the brim, and carefully sets it on the counter close to Josh.
He mutters a thank you and drinks deeply.
The coffee is hot, almost scalding his throat, but Josh doesn’t flinch. He really, really needs the caffeine.
When he finally swallows, and lowers the mug, Carol is watching him with her eyebrows raised even more. “So. How are you?” he asks, clipped and awkward.
“I’m fine, thank you,” Carol answers, nodding her head.
“Maya?”
“Also fine,” Carol says. “Her soccer team got through to the semi-finals yesterday afternoon.”
“Good,” Josh says. “That’s good.” He tries for a smile. “You should be proud.”
“We are,” Carol says. “I mean—I am.”
Josh politely doesn’t mention her slip, and instead hides his face in the mug, taking another sip of coffee. It burns his tongue.
Carol curls her hands around her own mug, her nails clicking against the ceramic surface. She leans back against the counter again, and casts an eye across the kitchen, pointedly looking everywhere but Josh.
It’s been long enough that Josh finally – finally – allows himself to ask the question. “Where is Wolf? He’s usually made an appearance by this time.”
The very corners of Carol’s mouth twitch up at the word usually, which Josh realizes is too big of a giveaway for how often he’s staying over here.
It’s not like she doesn’t already know; as far as Josh can tell, Wolf and Carol share everything. Besides, he’s an adult, as is Wolf. They’re allowed to sleep at each other’s places. One convenience of dating another doctor from the same hospital is that neither of them are able to live all that far from work, so it doesn’t even add much time to his commute.
“He said something about needing to fetch something or other from the shed, and disappeared.” Carol uses her mug to gestures vaguely through the kitchen window, out to the back of the house. “It’s Wolf, so it could be…anything.”
Fondness warms Josh’s chest, and he uses his mug to cover the sappy expression working its way onto his face. “Mm.”
Silence falls again as they both drink their coffee and wait for Wolf to return.
The ticking of the clock in the living room is audible, each passing second making Josh tense further and further.
Just as he decides it’s been too long, and Wolf isn’t coming anytime soon to break this awkwardness, and he needs to bite the bullet and excuse himself to go and get dressed, Carol clears her throat, sets her finished coffee down next to the sink, and gestures to Josh’s chest. “Do you always walk around the house naked?”
The words Josh had been preparing catch in the back of his throat, and he chokes.
“It’s just,” Carol goes on, talking over his spluttering, “I’d like to know if that’s the case, so I can give fair warning and allow you some time to dress yourself. Perhaps we could come up with a signalling system for when I’m here? I leave my shoes by the door, or some such?”
“No,” Josh finally manages to get out. “No, that’s not—I’m not—I don’t usually—”
Carol gives him a moment, arching one eyebrow judgmentally and crossing her arms.
Josh clears her throat, gets his choking under control, and says, “Normally, I don’t walk around the house naked.” He doesn’t mention that he only just woke up; it wouldn’t do for Carol to think he’s some sort of layabout. “We don’t need a system.”
“If you say so…” Carol says, sounding all-too-doubtful.
“I do,” Josh says. “Say so, that is.” He shifts his weight uncomfortably from one foot to the other. “This isn’t—this won’t happen again, Carol.”
Carol’s lips pinch together, but she inclines her head in acceptance.
He drains his coffee, sets the mug down on the counter near him – no way is he encroaching into Carol’s territory to put it in the sink, and if Wolf doesn’t like it, then he can just deal with it – and is about to finally, finally, excuse himself.
Only the backdoor rattles, and Wolf shuffles in with what looks like a photo album tucked under each arm.
He blinks at the sight of Carol and Josh’s stand-off, gaze sliding from Josh’s bare chest to Carol’s stiff posture then back to Josh’s bare chest. “Good...morning?” he says hesitantly.
“Good morning, Wolf,” Josh says, tight.
The look that Carol levels Wolf is one of pure exasperation. “Nice of you to finally join us, Wolf.”
“...Right,” Wolf says. He’s got that look on his face, where he’s trying to process a situation or circumstance but it isn’t making sense to him and he thinks he might have missed a vital piece of information. “What, um. What exactly is going on here?”
“What’s going on,” Carol says, “is that you didn’t bother to inform me that your naked boyfriend might perhaps make an appearance.”
“...I wasn’t aware that he would,” Wolf says. He pulls a face. “And he’s hardly naked, Carol.”
Carol gestures sharply in Josh’s direction. “He’s all but!”
“‘All but’ is not the same thing as naked,” Wolf tells her.
“I’d rather not be anything close to naked,” Josh mutters.
Wolf frowns at him. “You’re the one came downstairs like this.”
“Because I didn’t—” Josh starts, too loud, too annoyed, and cuts himself off. Exhales a breath. Calmer, tries again: “Because I didn’t know that Carol was here.”
Wincing, Wolf says, “Ah. Yes.”
Josh draws himself up, trying to claw back the last remnants of his dignity. “I,” he says, “am going to leave you two to it.” He nods to Carol. “It was—good to see you.”
It’s etiquette alone that has Carol murmuring, “You too, Josh.”
Josh doesn’t say anything to Wolf before retreating back through the house, hurrying up the stairs to Wolf’s bedroom and firmly closing the door behind him.
He wants to face plant on the bed and pretend this entire morning never happened.
Instead, he goes into the shower, making sure to lock that door too, and thinks about trying to drown himself in the stream of water.
Josh takes his time, scrubbing his entire body until it’s pink and clean, then thoroughly dries himself off. He brushes his teeth for three minutes instead of the usual two, timing it on his watch, spits into the sink, then knocks on the inside of the bathroom door and calls, “Anyone there?” and only moves into the main bedroom when there’s no response.
He dresses quickly and efficiently, and only relaxes when the last button on his shirt is done and his belt is safely buckled.
He waits in Wolf’s bedroom until the faint noises of Carol leaving filter up to him.
Only once he can be completely sure that she’s gone does he finally head back downstairs.
Wolf is frowning at a dirty shoe mark left on his floorboards, but he looks up when he hears Josh, smiling warmly at him. “Nichols.”
Josh brushes straight past him, heading straight to the kitchen so he can finally eat something. “I,” Josh calls back over his shoulder, “am not going to be able to look Carol in the eye for a week.”
“That’s not true,” Wolf says with a huff, following after Josh at a more sedate pace.
“Oh, it’s very true.” Josh gets the eggs out of the fridge, closing it with enough force to send it rattling, and sets them on the side next to the stove. “I have to work with her.”
“So do I!”
Josh levels Wolf with a deeply unimpressed glare. “You weren’t the one prancing around in your underwear.”
That makes Wolf choke on a little laugh. “You were hardly prancing.”
“I might as well have been.” Josh gets a frying pan out of the cupboard, half-places, half-drops, it on the stove, then turns the gas on. “You could have least have given me some kind of warning.”
“When was I supposed to do that?” Wolf counters. “You were asleep when she arrived. I didn’t even know that you were going to wake up before she left – or that you weren’t going to bother getting dressed.”
The side-eye Josh gives him is sharp. “Oh, because you’ve never shown any enthusiasm for me walking around in my underwear? You couldn’t possibly hold any responsibility for this?”
“No!” Wolf says, spreading his hands wide, loud and offended.
Josh cracks an egg into the frying pan, but he puts too much force into the motion, and shell flies across the pan.
Barely resisting the urge to curse, Josh makes a frustrated noise and grabs Wolf’s spatula to attempt to scrape the pieces out. “You,” he says, “are the most infuriating, annoying, ridiculous—”
He’s cut off by Wolf moving up next to him, expression going soft and sympathetic, and raising a gentle hand to his jaw.
“Wolf…” Josh says, warning, but he doesn’t mean it. Not really.
“I’m sorry,” Wolf says, quiet, soothing. Perfect. His fingers stroke the faint stubble on Josh’s chin, and Josh subconsciously leans into the motion. “I wasn’t thinking.”
Josh exhales, long and slow, sagging a little as he lets the tension in his muscles go. He shuts his eyes. “I know,” he says, just as quiet.
Wolf hums, moving further into his space, and he’s chilly from going outside earlier, but Josh doesn’t particularly mind.
“And…” Josh prompts.
“And?”
Josh opens his eyes to find a confused-looking Wolf just inches from him. “And,” he says, “you like it when I’m mostly naked?”
Annoyance flickers across Wolf’s face. “Nichols, that’s not—”
“Say it,” Josh says.
“I’m not going to—”
“Say it or you’re not getting any eggs.”
Wolf perks up at that, his eyes falling to the abandoned frying pan and single sunny-side-up egg sizzling. “You’re making eggs for me?”
In what world was Josh going to make eggs for himself and not Wolf? “Yes.”
“Okay,” Wolf says happily. “I like how you look naked.” He leans in to press a quick kiss to Josh’s cheek, adds, “That egg’s going to burn if you don’t turn the heat down,” and moves back to perch on the counter, his mission accomplished.
God, Josh is so fond of this man.
He turns the heat down and cracks another three eggs into the pan, without any shell this time, then looks to Wolf again. “Why was Carol here?” he asks curiously.
“She doesn’t need a reason,” Wolf says.
“Did I say that?” Josh counters.
Wolf shrugs, but answers his original question. “With…” He gestures vaguely. “…the separation, Maya’s been showing an interest in what Carol was like before she and Morris met, so Carol came to pick up her old scrapbooks from our early college years.”
Faint surprise echoes through Josh. “Scrapbooks?”
“Mm, I know,” Wolf says, smiling. “She had a phase. Didn’t we all?”
“What was your phase?” Josh asks.
Wolf grimaces. “That,” he says, “is not something that you need to know.”
Chuckling, Josh looks down at the eggs and moves them around in the pan.
“Tell me yours, and I’ll you mine?”
Josh shakes his head, still smiling. “While you were scrap booking, I was busy going through basic training. Not exactly a lot of time for phases there. By the time I went to college, I was considerably older than the other kids.”
“Too good for them?” Wolf teases, but the playful edge has faded from his voice.
“Of course,” Josh says.
“Of course,” Wolf echoes with a huff. He rolls his eyes.
Josh takes his hand and presses a kiss to his palm. “I would have liked to see you as a college student.”
Wolf laughs at him, deep and full-throated. “Oh, I was deeply closeted. A sexy military man would have terrified me.”
Josh shrugs a shoulder, and rubs his thumb into the meat of Wolf’s hand, using the exact right amount of pressure to make Wolf hum happily. “I’m sure I could have convinced you.”
“And there’s that famous ego,” Wolf says.
“It’s not ego if it’s true.”
“Well, it’s not true.”
Josh makes a disagreeing noise.
“Go back to your eggs,” Wolf tells him.
Josh takes it as a sign that he’s won the disagreement, and checks on the eggs. The one that he’d dropped in before Wolf apologised is well and truly cooked, so he separates it from the others and plates it up, then moves the others around some more. “Put some toast on,” he tells Wolf.
Wolf obeys easily.
The smell of toasting bread fills the kitchen.
Soon enough, everything is cooked, and Josh makes up two egg sandwiches. He goes to carry them through to Wolf’s dining room, which – as always – makes Wolf pull a face.
“Why do you even have a dining room if you’re not going to use it?” Josh says pointedly, continuing through and setting a plate down at the head of the table, and one directly to the left, where he seats himself.
“It came with the house,” Wolf says.
“You don’t have to have a dining table in here,” Josh says. “You never use it.”
“We’re using it now.”
Josh gives him a look. “Only because I insisted.”
“You’re allowed to have that opinion,” Wolf says, and digs into his sandwich, effectively ending the conversation there.
Sighing, Josh bites down on his own.
They eat quietly for a while, until Josh finishes his sandwich and asks, “So, what was your phase?”
“Hm?” Wolf glances up from the spot he’d been staring at on his table.
“In college,” Josh says. “What phases did you have?”
Wolf sets down his own sandwich, Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallows his mouthful, and seems to consider it for a moment. Eventually, he says, “You know, I didn’t really have that many.”
“Come on,” Josh says.
“Most of my phases are less phases and more...lifestyle choices that I’ve kept up,” Wolf says. “My ferns, for example.” He gestures to the sideboard, which, like every other surface in this house, is laden down with plants. “Weight-lifting is another. Swimming.” He eyes turn a little sad. “A lot of Carol’s college experience was defined by whichever boy she was seeing at the time, but…”
Josh understands. “You didn’t have that,” he says, looking down at his empty plate.
Wolf just nods. Sits there, still, for a moment.
Then he finishes off his sandwich and stands to carry both plates through to the kitchen.
Before he can go more than a step, Josh is pushing to his feet and hooking an arm around Wolf’s waist; he uses the other to gently take away the plates, discarding them on the dining table, as he pulls Wolf in for a kiss.
Wolf makes a surprised little noise but quickly melts into it, melts into Josh.
His beard scratches at Josh’s cheeks, and his lips taste of eggs and butter and coffee, and he smells of toast, and he is so perfectly Wolf that Josh can’t do anything but sigh into Wolf’s mouth.
That, of course, is the moment that his phone rings.
Josh breaks the kiss with a groan, pressing his forehead against Wolf’s.
“I’d say ignore it,” Wolf says, his voice coarse, “but…”
“It might be the hospital.”
Josh himself is not on call, but since registering their relationship with HR, at Josh’s insistence, someone in the hospital has figured out that if they want to get ahold of Wolf, Josh is the best person to call. And, as the only neuro doctor in the hospital, Wolf is always available.
In moments like this, Josh entertains the idea of strangling that person.
Instead of doing that, though, Josh slumps back against the dining table, fetching his cell from his jeans pocket and swiping across the screen to answer it as he brings it up to his ear. “Dr. Nichols speaking,” he says, perhaps a fraction too sharp.
Wolf takes the opportunity to straighten his shirt and wipe his lips with the back of his hand.
“Dr. Nichols, I’m sorry to bother you,” says the familiar voice of one of Wolf’s interns. Dr. Kinney, Josh thinks. “Is Dr. Wolf there?”
Josh doesn’t say anything. Just silently passes the phone to Wolf, who takes it and immediately starts up a rapid-fire conversations with Dr. Kinney.
Apparently, they have a patient who has gone from never having a seizure in her life to having multiple in the past hour. Wolf is needed there are soon as possible. The other interns are also heading in.
The chance of a lazy Saturday morning, barring Carol’s unfortunate appearance earlier, is disappearing by the second.
Josh resigns himself to another day in the hospital and goes for his coat.