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They, John and Paul, return to Liverpool in seemingly good weather. The sun, as it sets, glares through the foggy, grimy windows and bounces off the snow, its light flickering like fireflies, and John squints against it as sunlight streams in between the passing buildings.
But, it is…fucking freezing…, he thinks.
He also thinks that the sun is an illusionary nymph that frolick around them giggling and grinning, it is a thing that feels cruel in its capriciousness because it seems ignorant to how the world freezes over in wintertime.
He rubs a hand over his face, dragging down on his eyelids, closing them in the motion. He stops and feels the thin skin under his eyes and wonders whether he looks worse or better than he did two weeks prior, something along the lines of sex and rejuvenation and Paris and Paul lead his thoughts.
Next to him, Paul stirs from his sleep, a low whine escapes his throat and he nudges himself closer against the side of John’s arm like a wounded bee seeking warmth from a palm.
When he looks down he sees Paul blink awake and, in the barest movement, glance up at him before shutting his eyes again, perhaps in an effort to return to slumber, or perhaps just to look away. He thinks Paul thinks that John didn’t see him wake up, or that he’s going to feign ignorance, which is true anyways.
John brings his hand down from where it was resting, stagnant, at the bottom of his face and nudges a finger into Paul’s enclosed hand, that laid like a nested egg in his lap.
He feels him squeeze on his finger in a warm and clammy embrace and smiles because, despite the grueling strom outside and inside the bus, Paul is warm and Paul has welcomed him.
And also because John sees the corners of Paul’s mouth twitch, he sees the quirk of it as he bites down on his lip to suppress his grin, endearing little thing.
“Mornin’ Paul.” John whispers.
“John.” Paul wisps back. He opens his eyes now, and he tilts his head upwards, and his gaze clicks into John. He feels the world ooze around him as Paul shifts his hand to hold his, their fingers slot in between the other like gears, he knows Paul feels it too, feels it in the shimmer in his eyes and the dilation of his pupils.
He notices how the lines of his leather jacket are pressed onto Paul, its wrinkles transferred over like printing spores from mushrooms.
There is something about this detail that makes Paul soft and delicate, thin and fragile like a flower petal, and he takes a sick sort of pleasure in being the person whose mass pressed the blooming marks of red upon Paul, an act of deflowering and tainting if he thinks too hard about it.
John leans down, just the slightest, and kisses Paul’s forehead through his short chopped bangs. The ends of his fringe tickled against his nose as John rested on his face on his forehead.
Though they had gotten the same haircut, or so he hoped, by the same hands, John thinks Paul looks better. He did brush and fuss with it absentmindedly, preening it like an anxious bird. Maybe that could account for the natural curl of hair that framed his face neatly.
He silently hopes that as both of their hairs grow out it’d grow out unevenly. That, even then, Paul would assent to the unspoken contract that they’d cut it neater in synced times. He silently hopes that, even after the chilled and coffee-tinted mornings of Paris have faded, he and Paul would still continue to converge into a being of togetherness.
John, blinking himself out of his thoughts, smelled Paul deeply, inhaling his scent of sweat, morning dew, and leather before he was shoved off by a hand under his chin. John reached out to pinch and pull on the tip of Paul’s nose in retaliation.
With a scrunched face of bemused amusement, Paul reached up and fisted the hair at a side of John’s head to knock their foreheads together. The motion took John by surprise and let out an exclamation when they contacted. It was hard enough for him to see a flash of white, and grip Paul’s nose harder, who only slapped John’s hand away before falling to lay down on his lap, giggling.
“Cheeky git.” John said, but he only sighed and ran one hand through Paul’s hair while bringing the other up to rub on his own aching forehead. “What’s up with you anyhow, woke up all funny?”
Paul hummed and closed his eyes in reply.
The way he laid was ludicrous, sure to be uncomfortable, with his legs bent up on the seats, hands clasped all corpse-like on his chest, and fingers tapping a nameless beat.
Perhaps out of enamor, John trailed his hands across Paul’s face, starting from the spot where his own forehead ached onto him.
He traced down the center of his face, down across the bridge of his nose to its pink, icy tip.
It was like slicing a fruit he thought, a wet fleshy fruit. A peach or apricot maybe.
He continued to drag his hand. This time up Paul’s nose bridge, retracing his path but diverging to ghost over the lines of his eyebrows and the soft M shape of them. He slid his fingers down the sides of his face next, down the peach fuzz softness of his cheek, and down to his lower face, roughened by the sprouting shadow of hair. When he reached his chin, he walked his fingers up. Up until his index finger pressed onto Paul’s plushy bottom lip. Paul’s lid fluttered open to gaze up at John through lazy, lidded eyes when John pressed his middle finger down onto his lip, pushing it down enough to tease the open his mouth, enough to expose a peek of his wet and pink gums.
“Maybe I’m the funny one.” John muttered, withdrawing his hand to curl against his stomach and leaned his head on the window, tilting down to keep his focus on Paul.
“Maybe you are.” Paul responded. “Maybe we’re both, ever considered that?”
“Mad ‘cause of each other, aren’t we?”
“Mm.. Lost cause, us.” Paul smiled around his words, coy and perhaps accepting, and unclasped one of his hands to reach up and hold one of John’s, pulling it back down to fiddle with on his chest. His eyes dropped and shut again and John turned to face out the window again, he smiled against his palm as he felt Paul slow his fidgeting to hold his hand loosely.
It didn’t take long to get back near their stop. John thinks only 10 minutes or so has passed. The sun has set lower, yes, but it is still up in the sky.
Only now it’s fallen to the middle.
Everything was cast in a yellow-orange, yolky hue, seemingly warm like an oven if not for the puffs of condensation that were exhaled by passerbys.
John jerks his leg under Paul and feels a bit of joy in seeing him furrow his brows and lick open his lips to a yawn, a cattish behavior he had been able to stare at from across a pillow recently.
“Come ‘ead now, you fell asleep that quickly?” Paul grinned up at him and squinted up at him through one sleep dampened eye.
John scoffed quietly and used his free hand to shove at Paul’s shoulder, hard enough to move him but soft enough to keep him on his lap. Paul yelped and flung himself up, during the scramble he latched onto the lapels of John’s leather jacket. John has to hold himself up by grasping on the edge of the seat in front of them, his breath hitching in his throat as he makes a little surprised noise that becomes snicker.
He lets his head fall sideways onto Paul’s leather-garbed back and sighs against it.
Paul’s breaths come in short spurts of inhales and exhales, but he loosens after a few seconds and leans against John. John rubs his temple against the midpoint of Paul’s shoulder blades and Paul tips his head backwards, John feels it hit the top of his head.
When the bus hisses to a stop, the both of them jerks forward and Paul rapidly pushes himself off of John and reaches underneath their seat to grab his drawstring bag.
There is a renewed sense of energy thrumming through him. It singes the nerves behind John’s eyes and ears, makes the tissues of his brain ache.
Actually, he feels a flaring tension rising.
He realizes that it has been rising really. There has been a hunched and uneased air floating around Paul since the morning. He thinks he’s been seeing it in the way Paul has been tensing up before willing himself to ease up. He thinks there is something flighty about him now, something about wanting to come back to the same person, despite the both of them changing irrevocably.
John bites his tongue and clenches his jaw, turns away so he doesn’t see Paul in his peripheral vision, though he can still feel his droning presence next to him, and grabs his own bag.
He doesn’t want them to fall back, but he can feel their old shells crackling back around them, around Paul moreso. He doesn’t want the effort he had put into peeling back each layer of skin and muscle on his chest, that he had put into snapping and twisting open his ribs, that he had put into giving Paul what was most vulnerable to him to go to waste. He doesn’t want what he saw in Paul, the raw red meat of his inner self open and gaping by the palms of John’s desperate hands, to end up meaning nothing, or meaning more than it actually was, which is everything.
John knows, though, that Paul will not let them emerge differently. That, for him, it is an expectation for the both of them to move on, dust the Parisian cigarette smokes off their shoulders, pat the air of them out of their leather jackets. Is it not a jacket’s nature to be washed with methods besides soap and water?
It’s hackneyed, this sick feeling of being let down so quickly, he cringes at it. And yet he indulges in allowing himself to feel it for Paul, out of spite of Paul.
John closes his eyes, presses a palm to them from under his glasses, and pushes down hard enough for him to see blinking lights.
He feels Paul’s gentle touch graze the back of his hand and he drops it.
When he felt the glass ball in his stomach weigh against his organs, the discomfort forced him to look up and into Paul’s guilty eyes. He strokes the skin underneath John’s eye with the pads of his thumb, there is the smallest amount of affection he feels, it’s enough to be apologetic to John.
“Soft.” He said, very quietly now, and turned his head away.
“Soft.” Paul mirrored, also apologetically.
After a second he cleared his throat and said gently, “Let’s go now, before we have the chance to run away.”
“Too bad we can’t do what we want ‘ay?”
“Too damn bad.”
He kicked John’s shin to coerce him to get up, not once though, a couple times, 5 rapid kicks to annoy him.
John slapped his thigh back and made a move to grab at him. Paul laughed when he missed, glee dripping off the notes of his voice, and grabbed John’s outstretched hand to pull him up.
As Paul ran out of the bus with John behind him, the two of them filling the bubble around them with cackles and an air of excitement, he looked back only once.
He was grinning so foolishly that John only cracked up louder, a smile digging its way out of his face, as it usually does when he’s with Paul.
It’s fine, John decides he will relish these fleeting moments where Paul isn’t wrapping up his self with a sheet of the he that is shown with everyone else.
Where Paul shows him himself.
It’s fine to be in this cycle, even if he feels a choking sense of something knowing that Paul would rather return to the before of it all.
It’s fine because he has nothing else to lose but Paul and nothing else to gain but Paul.
They, John and Paul, run through the sidewalks stomping on the slipping pavement and the world crumbles, for now, around them. The sun and Paul are warm enough to ignore the numbing cold.