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The London Apartment, sometime in 2016
Dan feels like he’s becoming someone’s grandmother. His paranoia about algorithms and spyware increases by the day, and it’s all for one incredibly stupid reason: he’s pretty sure his Instagram algorithm thinks he’s gay. Knows he’s gay.
Thinks. Knows. Whatever.
It keeps recommending him these inspirational videos of people his age discussing their experiences coming out to their families, and, of course, being accepted with open arms, because they wouldn’t put it on Instagram if they weren’t. His social media feed is telling him that everyone around him is gay, or queer in some way, finding new ways to describe themselves, and incredibly fucking happy about it.
Dan does not block out and shun these kinds of videos because he hates them. He blocks them out because he loves them, because they make him bloom with pride, and he doesn’t want to think about what that means. Not yet.
He keeps hitting do not recommend, do not recommend, like some ever-elusive tech-savvy homophobe, but the hits just keep on coming.
Today, on all sides, he is being bombarded by news that in October, the American magazine Covergirl will feature its very first Cover Boy.
People are being very normal about this, as Dan has come to expect. He sees a video of a pastor, giving a sermon at one of those churches, even bigger and flashier than the one he grew up at. The man stands behind a podium with a microphone, which might as well be a megaphone with the way he’s holding it.
The other day, I saw a boy with fingernail polish on. And he looked like a boy! And I thought oh, God…. I want to break his fingers.
Dan slams his laptop shut. He’s sure that there’s some response coming, from a drag queen or someone wearing rainbow eyeshadow with his own painted nails come to tear this man of God to shreds. But Dan isn’t interested in watching that part. He thinks he’d rather stay like this for a while, with his blood boiling in his veins and his apprehension drowned out by rage.
“Dan?” Phil is frowning at him from the other end of the couch. To be honest, Dan had forgotten that Phil was there. He would blame it on a haze of scrolling, but it was something that happened fairly often; Phil is a reliable presence for Dan, maybe the only reliable presence he’s ever had, and that means that Dan isn’t always thinking about the fact that Phil is beside him, the way that no one actually offers daily prayers of thanks for a house with four walls and a roof. Usually, though, a good sturdy house won’t make the sweet concerned expression that Phil is making now, with his eyebrows slightly scrunched. “Are you okay?”
“I want to paint my nails,” he blurts out.
He says it without thinking. It doesn’t really make any sense, not in general and certainly not as a response to violent hatred going viral. But when he’s finished saying it, he doesn’t wonder why he said it. He wonders, instead, why he never fought back against any of the kids who made his life hell when he was in school. Maybe things could have been different.
I’m not going to do that. I’m just not comfortable enough with my sexuality to paint my nails. Just kidding. I just don’t want to.
Maybe things could still be different.
Dan is not in any position to stand up for himself. Not yet. But maybe there are other people — people online, people he sees on the street, people who need defending more than he does — that he can stand up for.
The look on Phil’s face does not entirely dissipate, but he starts to look at Dan less like a flight risk and more like an interesting moth. He smiles mildly, unable to fight in the war Dan’s head is waging against his heart.
“Okay,” Phil says. “Like… right now?”
Dan’s mouth goes dry. It’s one thing to say that you want to do something like this. It’s another to actually step out of your comfort zone in a way that matters. He considers backing down. And then he thinks of all the people who want him to back down, and he backs right back up again.
“Uh.” He stutters, but forges on. “I don’t know. Do we have nail polish in the house?”
“Just because we don’t go outside doesn’t mean that there isn’t an outside,” says Phil, “You could go to the corner store if you wanted to. It’s not too late, they’re still open.”
This is something that Phil does. When Dan has an idea, one that’s good but too big or scary to seem achievable, Phil will bring it up, over and over and over again so that Dan can’t trick himself into thinking he never wanted it in the first place. It’s supremely annoying, and Dan loves him for it.
He must see something on Dan’s face, something that Dan himself doesn’t even recognize, because he says, “I could go instead, if that’s… easier.”
Dan flushes, flattered, but shakes his head. “No. I’ll go. I need some fresh air anyway.” Before he leaves, he leans over the back of the couch and kisses Phil on the temple. Phil makes a happy little noise, and then Dan steps away, into the outside world. No jacket. He barely remembers his shoes.
When he makes it to the drugstore, he walks around for a few minutes, looking listlessly at items that he doesn’t need, just to avoid seeming like he came here for the sole purpose of buying nail polish. He wanders aimlessly, lost in thought, and is only brought back to reality by the sight of grandmother surveying him with a pitying sort of stare. He realizes that he’s ended up in the aisle with the feminine hygiene products, and he laughs at himself. Good. He’d rather look like some poor woman’s bewildered boyfriend than… whatever he really is.
As it turns out, the nail polish is in the next aisle over, right next to the curlers for long hair, the elaborate skincare products, and the various other things that were marketed to women. He grabs a small pot of black nail polish – it’s smart, he thinks, to only step out of one comfort zone at a time. That’s just a guess, really. Not like he has much experience.
He picks up a few other things, telling himself that maybe, no one will notice the pot of nail polish if he buys it alongside a bunch of other miscellaneous items. Maybe it’ll fly under the radar. A pack of gum. A KitKat, which he’ll give to Phil. A roll of Scotch Tape, which he’s sure they’ll need for something. The purchase totals just over ten pounds, ten pounds for some nail polish, and Dan feels ridiculous, but he also feels safer than he would have if he were buying just the nail polish, so maybe it’s worth the extra money.
He half expects the cashier to shout at him, or for some bright red alarm to start flaring over his head alerting the whole store to the fucking poof at the cash register, the one who gets his kicks from dressing like a girl, summoning groups of angry teenagers with pitchforks and clubs to do god knows what to him. But none of that happens. What happens, instead, is that an exhausted looking cashier asks him if he’s going to pay cash or card, then sorts his items into bags much lighter than the ones under his eyes, then unenthusiastically tells him to have a nice rest of his night.
I’ll try, Dan thinks, I promise I’ll try.
This kid does not care. He is a kid, younger than Dan, maybe still in school. By the time Dan gets back to the apartment building, the cashier has almost surely forgotten him, but Dan is still lost in thought. He hopes the boy has friends at school. He hopes that people are kind to him. His key makes that clicking sound in the door that he loves so much.
“I’m back,” he calls to Phil.
Phil pads into the foyer, his steps muffled by mismatched fuzzy socks. “You were gone for a while,” he says.
Dan says “Yeah,” and nothing else, not really feeling the need to provide an explanation. “What have you been up to?”
“Still sitting on the couch,” says Phil, “I turned on the new Below Deck.”
“I’ll join you,” says Dan. He brings his shopping bag with him, depositing next to his spot on the couch, but doesn’t take out any of the contents. Not until a few minutes later, when he feels adequately distracted from what exactly it is that he’s doing.
He holds the tiny bottle between two fingers. It looks especially tiny in his hands, like it’s not meant to be handled by someone like him. Dan feels an invisible hand tightening around his throat, gearing up to slam his head into a wall.
Phil surveys him through his peripheral vision. “Black,” he comments, “How revolutionary.”
Dan chuckles. He feels the knot in his chest loosen slightly. “Shut up.”
“I’m just saying, I think you look nice in color,” says Phil, raising his hands in mock defense.
“And how exactly would you know?” asks Dan.
“I’ve seen you in color before!” Phil insists, “Every time you steal my shirts, for starters.”
“That is slander. I would never willingly steal one of your disgusting clown shirts.”
“You sure about that?” says Phil, smirking.
“It’s not my fault that I don’t do laundry often enough,” Dan admits quietly.
It feels nice to banter, but it isn’t honest or natural. Dan, at least, is just going through the motions of what bickering would look like if he weren’t on the edge of a spiral, and he can tell from the encouraging, prompting look that Phil is giving him that he’s trying to pull Dan back from that edge, needling him, giving him something to be annoyed at so that he isn’t angry at himself.
When they’re done bickering and the energy bleeds out of the room, Dan is still left staring at a bottle of fucking nail polish like it’s full of poison. He feels terrified, and pathetic, and more than a little indignant.
“Would it be easier,” Phil asks in a softer, more serious tone, “If I painted my nails first? Or if you did it for me?”
Dan smiles, because he knows what game Phil is playing now. It’s another installation in his neverending thesis that Dan is meaner to himself than he is to the people he loves. This feels fairly obvious. Dan does not pretend to love himself.
Still, it does help to put things into perspective, when he’s scared of doing something – something that’s too gay, something that would attract too much attention — for Phil to do it first. Dan would never dream of abusing Phil the same way he abuses himself. The strategy effectively backs him into a corner. He can’t say that’s horrible and queer and disgusting when Phil is the one who’s participating in the offending activity, wearing the offending item, whatever it is.
Dan rolls his eyes, all fond exasperation. “Do you want to paint your nails?”
Phil considers for a moment. Dan can tell that he’s genuinely thinking about it, but finally, he says, “Not really. Not for any particular reason, I just don’t want to sit around and wait for them to dry.”
Dan snorted. “Of course you don’t. If you don’t want to do something, then don’t do it just because it might make things better for me.”
He says this as they’re sitting in their living room with the blinds drawn tightly shut, because Dan doesn’t want them to risk snuggling on the couch in view of the street. The irony is not lost on him.
“Actually,” he continues, “If you wouldn’t mind painting my nails for me…”
Phil raises his eyebrows, and Dan understands his surprise. Logically, having his boyfriend paint his nails is not any less vulnerable or any less gay than just doing it himself. All logic is drowned out by the fact that if Dan was having heart surgery, he would want Phil to be the one holding the knife.
“Okay,” says Phil exuberantly, “Is here good, or do you want to go somewhere?”
“Uh.” The dulcet tones of Below Deck fill the silence in the living room and the empty spaces in Dan’s head. He feels like a kid who’s trying to distract himself from a doctor approaching with a needle. “Here is good.”
Dan rests his hand on his knee and watches in quiet fascination as Phil struggles to uncap the bottle of nail polish. He’s not sure if those things are hard to open, or if Phil just doesn’t have a single ounce of strength in his entire body. Either way, it’s endearing, and he figures it out eventually. He takes Dan’s hand in his – Dan feels grounded by the touch — and spreads nail polish over the nail of Dan’s pointer finger.
It’s there that the trouble starts. If Dan thought that his own cripplingly poor self-perception presented a challenge, it is honestly nothing at all when compared to Phil’s clumsiness. The brush runs over the edge of Dan’s finger as well as the nail, a thin drop of black making its way down his finger to the bend of his thumb.
“Phil,” he says.
“Wait wait wait,” says Phil, “Beginner’s fuck-up. I’ve got this.”
“Isn’t it supposed to be the other way around?” Dan grumbles. He watches as Phil takes a different approach, jabbing the polish covered brush over his nail repeatedly. This time, it doesn’t overflow, but it also doesn’t cover the whole surface of his nail or look good in the slightest. The entire left side has been neglected, and now his middle finger looks like yin and yang drawn by a toddler.
He raises that finger, the middle one, for… demonstration, and Phil giggles. “Oy. I’m doing my best.”
The wayward drop of black has dropped onto Dan’s jeans, which are, thankfully, also black. He hopes that the stain will wash out, or, at least, won’t show up the next time he wears these.
“I can’t believe I thought this would be a good idea,” says Dan.
“Hey, no,” says Phil, suddenly serious, “This is going fine, right? You’re feeling okay?”
They’re questions, but halfway to statements, as if Phil is trying to check in with him and reassure him all at once. Neither are necessary. Strangely, Dan feels entirely at ease, sitting here and laughing with Phil.
“I didn’t mean the nail polish, spleen,” he says, “I mean the nail polish as administered by you.”
“Oh, okay,” says Phil, relieved, “Yeah, that’s fair. I don’t know why you thought that was a good idea either, honestly. I have all the coordination of a newborn baby horse.”
I don’t remember you protesting, idiot, Dan thinks but doesn’t say. Instead, he takes the nail polish cap from Phil without a word and starts applying the liquid black to his own nails. It’s only when he’s finished that he realizes what he’s done. He looks up at Phil. Phil is looking back at him with pride.
“Philip,” says Dan, “Did you pretend to fuck it up so that I would do it myself?”
“Dan, no,” says Phil, “You’ve known me for long enough to know that I don’t have to pretend to be clumsy.” Dan can tell that he isn’t lying. And even if he was, Dan wouldn’t do much about it.
He looks down at his nails, all shiny and black in the overhead light. “I think it looks good,” he says quietly.
“I think so too,” says Phil.
Silence sits comfortably between them for a few moments. Then, Phil sweeps in, kissing Dan on the cheek.
“Philllll,” Dan admonishes, not making the slightest effort to pull away, “Don’t bump my hands. I need to let them dry.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t.”
And he doesn’t, even as he continues to pepper kisses all over his face. As clumsy as he is, Phil can be so, so careful with Dan when he needs to be.
Dan looks at his hands, then back up at Phil, then back down at himself again. “I’m going to wash them off,” he says, “Tomorrow morning, or before the next time we film. I’m not ready for…” For anyone but you to see me like this.
He doesn’t have to say it out loud. Phil nods his understanding and lightly squeezes one of Dan’s wrists, without access to his hands. “Whatever you need to do, Dan.”
“We don’t have nail polish remover,” Dan says absentmindedly.
“I’ll go get some for you,” says Phil.
It’s as easy as that. Dan nods. For a fleeting moment, he wonders if maybe he’s capable of more, if maybe, he doesn’t have to take his nail polish off at breakfast. Could he show up with it in a video? Could he walk down the street with it without imagining that every single passerby wants to hurt him? Not now. He’s not sure when — whether it’ll be a month, a week or a year — but he knows that it’s not now.
One step at a time. One barely noticeable yet impossibly difficult step at a time. And maybe someday, he’ll actually get somewhere. He isn’t being fair to himself, though. It might be hard to see it from where he’s standing, but Dan knows that he’s gotten somewhere already.