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“What the fuck are you doing?”
The words hissed through gritted teeth as Tyler ducks under his arm, throwing a furtive look down the hall as he smooths down his hair. Not that Fandango even touched his hair – he knows better than to do that – but he’s noticed that it’s almost a tick for Tyler. A gesture he falls back on when he feels uncomfortable or insecure. A frown creases the space between Fandango’s eyebrows.
“And hello to you too,” he says, trying to appear unruffled. It won’t do any good to act hurt or angry. Tyler will just get defensive, possibly storm off, forcing Fandango to make amends with some particularly expensive gift if he wants so much as a kiss on the cheek in the next 72 hours. But still, it’s hard to seem unfazed when your lover reacts to an attempted kiss like you’ve attempted to drown his puppy.
“What’s wrong?” Fandango asks, still going for light and airy. There’s something heavy settling in the pit of his stomach that tells him this is a loosing battle, but he perseveres. “Don’t I get a kiss?” The first tendrils of panic are seeping into his confusion because, fuck, it took them so long to get to this point. Tyler calling him his boyfriend (and that word still makes his heart do the samba); Tyler still being there when he wakes up in the morning; Tyler accepting his gifts rather than shoving them back in his face, calling him pathetic as he examines his nails. It’s taken fucking months of work to get Tyler to open up to him – he even asked fucking Summer Rae for advice, and he doesn’t think he can stand it if Tyler is having second thoughts.
“Not here!” Tyler says, and the familiar whine is back in his voice. “God, Johnny, any uggo could be walking past. We can’t just- You can’t do that where people might see!”
Ah. The penny drops, finally, and Fandango is overcome with a wave of warmth and sadness for Tyler, because he gets it, he does, and he wants to be able to make Tyler feel safe, protected, untouchable with nothing more than his arm around him, but he can’t and God, it fucking hurts sometimes.
He’d sat next to Tyler while he was on the phone to his father, held his hand when Tyler cried while his dad told him he didn’t want a fag for a son, and God, he’d thought he’d get over being such a girly little shit now that he was doing a real man’s job and fighting for a living.
He understands, and wishes he didn’t. He wishes that Tyler had a dad like his, who worked two jobs to pay for him to take dance lessons when he asked for them on his sixth birthday and a mom who hand sewed his first pair of dance trousers, supergluing rhinestones on until two in the morning.
He doesn’t try to hug Tyler again, although he wants to, needs to. Instead, he nods, and takes a step back, and when he looks into Tyler’s eyes, there’s something like shame there.
“I’m sorry,” Tyler mumbles, so quiet it might have been nothing.
“What was that?” Johnny asks.
“Oh fuck you,” Tyler snaps, and it’s brilliant because the laugh is back in his voice, the confidence back in his eyes. “I’m not saying it again, you know I’m not. Now let’s get changed and show these uggos how brilliant we are.”