Archive of Our Own

The thing about frat parties, Oscar has decided, is that no one tells you the dress code.

He'd spent twenty minutes standing in front of his wardrobe doing the kind of paralysed cost-benefit analysis that would be more appropriate for a dissertation defence than getting dressed, and had eventually landed on dark jeans and a grey shirt because grey is a neutral and neutrals are safe and he'd read somewhere that you can't go wrong with a classic. He'd arrived at the house and immediately clocked three separate people in vintage band tees and two in button-downs and one in what appeared to be a actual silk shirt, open to the sternum, so there was no dress code, there had never been a dress code, the dress code was chaos, and Oscar had spent twenty minutes on this.

Max had opened the door before Oscar could wonder whether he was supposed to knock.

That was the first thing. Max had been waiting, or close enough to it, because he'd opened the door with this big, easy grin like Oscar arriving was genuinely the best development of his evening, and he'd said, "Oscar! You came," like he'd been slightly worried he wouldn't, which didn't make any sense because Oscar had said he would come, and Oscar doesn't say things he doesn't mean.

"I said I would," Oscar told him.

"Yeah, I know." Max had stepped back to let him in, still smiling. He was wearing a dark blue hoodie pushed up to his elbows and jeans that fit him extremely well and Oscar had noticed that and then immediately filed it somewhere he wasn't planning to look at again. "I'm glad. Come in, come in—"

Inside was already heaving. Not unmanageably so, but enough that Oscar had done an involuntary recalibration at the threshold, taking in the noise and the bodies and the particular humid warmth of too many people in an enclosed space. Max had noticed. Of course Max had noticed, because Max is weirdly perceptive for someone who seems, on the surface, to be a pretty simple guy.

"Hey," he had said, dropping his voice slightly, which required him to lean in a bit, which put him close enough that Oscar could smell his cologne. Something clean and warm. "It's loud, yeah? You good?"

"I'm fine," Oscar said, and then, because Max was still looking at him with this particular careful attention, "It's just—loud. I'm fine. I'll calibrate."

Max had laughed, a short bright sound. "Calibrate. Okay, engineer." He'd nudged Oscar's shoulder with his own. "Come on. I'll get you a drink."

The first hour is—good, actually.

Oscar isn't sure what he expected. He's been to parties before, obviously. He's not a complete social recluse. (Even if he only got invited because his sisters were going. Even if everyone called him the Piastri brother). He's very aware that he has a particular way of existing that is slightly separate from everyone else, like he's watching from a half-step removed, cataloguing things rather than experiencing them. He'd assumed this party would be the same.

It's not, quite, because Max keeps including him.

That's the thing. Max moves through his own party like he's completely at home in it—which he is, it's his home, literally—stopping to slap someone's back or grab someone's arm or laugh at something someone says, and he keeps Oscar in his orbit the entire time. Not in a shepherding way, not in a here's my weird friend, be nice way, but in a way that feels natural, like Oscar is simply someone Max wants near him.

"This is Oscar," Max keeps saying, casual, easy. "He's in engineering. Very smart. Smarter than me, anyway, which is not a hard bar, before you say anything—" and this to Lando, who appears at Max's elbow at various intervals throughout the night like a very hyperactive satellite, and who grins at Oscar with a kind of gleeful assessment.

"Engineering," Lando says, the second or third time they cross paths. "So you're like. Proper smart."

"I'm okay," Oscar says.

"He's very okay," Max says, and the way he says it is slightly different from what Oscar said, slightly warmer, and Oscar doesn't entirely know what to do with that.

He gets a drink—something Max mixes himself at the kitchen counter, which Oscar suspects is stronger than advertised but which tastes fine—and he finds that standing next to Max while Max talks to people is actually a manageable way to exist at a party. He doesn't have to perform. He can just be there. Max checks in on him periodically with these little glances that Oscar is probably reading too much into but can't quite stop noticing.

At one point Max says something about racing—he's a swimmer, mostly, but apparently he also dabbles in sim racing and karting, which Oscar finds immediately interesting—and Oscar says, "wait, what sim do you run?" and Max lights up in this way that's almost embarrassing to look at directly and says, "you know sim racing?" and they end up in a corner for fifteen minutes talking about setups while the party moves around them like water around rocks.

It's nice. It's genuinely, unexpectedly nice.

Oscar doesn't examine how nice it is too closely. That way lies the section of his brain he's been filing things into all evening, the one he's not planning to open.

Lando finds them again around the hour-and-a-half mark.

Oscar hears him coming slightly before he arrives—there's a particular frequency to Lando's laugh that carries—and then he's there, materialising at Max's shoulder with the energy of someone who has had two drinks and the metabolism to ensure they hit all at once.

"Max," he says, with great urgency. "Max, man, come on."

Max turns. "What?"

"You're the star athlete here," Lando says, and Oscar can hear the air quotes around star athlete even though Lando doesn't make them. "You have to make your rounds. You have to satisfy your loving crowds."

"My loving crowds are fine without me for five minutes."

"It has been forty-five minutes. Sainz is asking where you are. I'm asking where you are, and I'm right here, so that should tell you something about the state of things." Lando grabs Max's arm with both hands and pulls, not hard, but demonstrably. "Come on."

Max doesn't move immediately. He looks at Oscar first.

Oscar has a very brief, very stupid moment of hoping Max will say nah, I'm good here or something equivalent. He doesn't entertain this hope for long because it's not a reasonable thing to hope for—it's Max's party, of course he can't spend all night babysitting Oscar—but the moment exists and he has to sort of gently dissolve it before he does something embarrassing.

"Hey," Max says. His voice does the thing again, dropping a register, becoming slightly separate from the noise. "I'm sorry. I have to—" He tilts his head at Lando, who is still pulling at his arm.

"No, obviously," Oscar says. "Go. It's your party."

"I know, I know." Max hesitates for a moment that feels slightly longer than it needs to, and then he puts his hand on Oscar's shoulder. It's a brief thing, just a warm weight through the cotton of his shirt, but Oscar's brain catalogues it with the slightly forensic attention it reserves for sensory data that matters. "You okay? I'll find you after the party and we'll hang out, yes?"

Oscar nods, quickly. "Yes. Go."

Max grins—that particular grin, easy and warm and directed entirely at Oscar—and then Lando is successfully towing him away and the crowd folds closed and Oscar is alone with his drink and the empty corner.

Right.

The thing about being alone at a party is that you have to look like you're not alone at a party.

Oscar is aware of this principle. He's not sure he's great at executing it.

He drifts. This is his primary social strategy at events where he doesn't know many people: drift slowly and purposefully, like you're going somewhere, and don't stop moving long enough for anyone to notice that you're not actually going anywhere. He's reasonably good at this. He's had practice.

The house is big enough that there are multiple rooms at various stages of intensity, which helps. Oscar spends some time in a slightly quieter room where two people are having a very heated debate about football—the decent kind, not the American kind—and he half-listens and contributes nothing and this is fine. He refills his drink at some point. He finds a patch of wall in the main room that has good sight lines and leans against it with what he hopes is an air of relaxed ease.

The sight lines, if he's being honest with himself, are very useful for a specific purpose.

Max is easy to find in a crowd. This is partly because he's tall-ish and mostly because of the way people orient toward him, like he's a natural centre of gravity. Oscar tells himself he's doing a social observation exercise—he does this sometimes, maps the structure of a social gathering, finds it helpful for understanding group dynamics—and he's not wrong, technically. He is observing. He is observing Max move through his own party with this effortless warmth, laughing with his head back, arm slung around someone's shoulder, ducking to hear what someone shorter is saying to him.

The thing is, Oscar thinks, Max is genuinely kind. That's not something you see as often as you'd expect. Some people perform warmth, do it for social capital, and you can see the machinery if you look. Max doesn't seem to have any machinery. He just—is. Like the warmth is structural, built into him, not a behaviour he puts on.

It's extremely annoying to observe, actually. It makes Oscar feel something in the vicinity of his sternum that he's been carefully not naming all evening.

At one point, Max catches him looking.

Oscar doesn't look away fast enough—this is the problem with leaning against walls for extended periods with no one paying attention to you, you get lulled into a false sense of privacy—and for a moment they're just making eye contact across a crowded room like some kind of cliché, and Max smiles at him, quick and warm, and Oscar looks away first and takes a long drink and stares at the ceiling and decides the ceiling is extremely interesting.

He stays by the wall.

He's fine.

Someone climbs on a table.

Oscar notices this in his peripheral vision—a guy, rugby-player build, flushed with the particular confidence of someone who's had exactly enough drinks to make this seem like a great idea—and then the guy cups his hands around his mouth and bellows, with great enthusiasm:

"If you ain't a brother or fucking a brother, get the fuck outtttt!"

The crowd responds with a mixture of playful booing and laughter and the shuffling movement of people who are, apparently, neither.

Oscar freezes.

His cup stops halfway to his mouth. He does a very rapid, very quiet systems check.

Brother? No.

Fucking a brother? No.

(He is not thinking about Max. He is absolutely not thinking about Max. The heat crawling up his neck is from the drink, it is a warm room, that is all.)

He should leave. Logically. The announcement was clear. He is neither of those things.

Except.

You okay? I'll find you after the party and we'll hang out, yes?

Max had said that. Max had promised that. And Oscar has a very firm relationship with things people say they will do, because when someone says they'll do something, they do it, or they tell you they won't, those are the only two options, and Max had said after the party which implies Oscar should still be at the party—

But what if after the party meant outside? What if after the party he's supposed to wait by the door like some kind of dog? That's embarrassing. He's not doing that.

He drifts slightly toward the wall, which feels like a neutral position. Not leaving. Not staying. Just— existing near an exit. Very casually.

A guy he vaguely recognises from earlier—tall, backward cap—squints at him. "You a brother?"

"No," Oscar says immediately, then panics, then adds, "Max invited me."

The guy's entire demeanour shifts. "Oh, you're Max's guy?"

Oscar opens his mouth. Closes it. "His—I'm not his—we're—"

"Cool, cool, you're good, man." Backward Cap wanders off like this resolved anything.

Oscar stares at the middle distance.

Max's guy.

He's just going to stand by the wall until Max finds him. That's a completely normal and non-embarrassing thing to do. He checks his phone. No messages. He puts his phone away. Gets it back out. Puts it away. Gets it back out, and stares blankly at his lockscreen.

Across the room, Max is laughing at something, head thrown back, easy and bright, and then—like he has some kind of radar—his eyes cut directly across the party and land on Oscar.

He holds up one finger. One minute.

Oscar's chest does something stupid.

He puts his phone away and stays by the wall.

It's closer to four minutes, but Oscar isn't counting.

Max materialises at his side with the easy physicality he seems to do everything with, slightly flushed from the warmth of the room, hair pushed back from his face. He looks at Oscar and his expression does something that Oscar can't quite categorise—something that arrives fast and then settles into a more neutral warmth—and he says, "hey. You survived."

"Calibrated," Oscar says.

Max laughs. "That's my engineer." He says it like it's a normal thing to say. Like Oscar is his something. Oscar adds it to the folder. "Okay. Come on."

"Where?"

"My room. I said we'd hang out." He says it like it's obvious, like this was always the plan, and then he's moving and Oscar is—following, apparently. That decision made itself.

Max leads him through the thinning main room—the table guy has climbed down, the official non-brother exodus apparently complete—and up a staircase that's narrow enough they have to go single file. Oscar is behind Max and is looking at the back of his head and the way the stairs creak slightly under his feet and is thinking, with great deliberateness, about absolutely nothing at all.

Max's door has a sticker of a Dutch flag and a small laminated sign that says KNOCK OR DIE and is decorated with two small drawn skulls, which Oscar suspects is Lando's work. Max opens it without ceremony and ushers Oscar in.

"Okay," he says, flicking on the light. "Welcome to my extremely normal room."

It is, in fact, an extremely normal room.

Oscar stands in the middle of it and does his usual arrival mapping—dimensions, layout, exits, notable features—and finds: a bed (double, pushed against the wall, navy duvet, reasonably neat), a desk (chaotic in a functional way, textbooks stacked but not organised, laptop open), a wardrobe (door slightly ajar, one sleeve of something hanging out), a small window overlooking what appears to be the side of another building. Normal. Manageable.

And then, less normally: in the corner, taking up a not-insignificant portion of the available floor space, an extremely serious sim racing rig.

Oscar stares at it.

"You weren't joking," he says.

"About what?"

"The sim rig." He takes a step toward it. The seat is mounted properly, full frame, direct drive wheel, load cell pedals—Oscar doesn't know exactly what he expected but it wasn't this. "This is a proper setup."

Max's face does the thing again, the lighting up thing, like a switch. "Right? Lando thinks it's too much for a bedroom but Lando also thinks a PS5 controller is an adequate substitute so his opinion is invalid."

"No, he's—no, this is correct." Oscar crouches slightly to look at the pedal setup. "Is this load cell?"

"Yeah. Took me forever to calibrate the brake."

"What're you running for a base?"

Max tells him. They have the conversation. Oscar is crouched by the pedal assembly and Max is leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed and this big private-looking smile on his face that Oscar is not examining, and they talk about sim racing for a few minutes in the way they'd talked downstairs, easy and genuine, the party noise muffled below them.

It lasts until Oscar stands up, satisfied, and notices the other thing.

On the windowsill—the narrow ledge between Max's desk and the wall—there is a very small plant. It's in a terracotta pot that is slightly too large for it, which makes it look a bit forlorn, like a child in an adult's coat. It appears to be some kind of herb? Maybe. Possibly. It's very small and slightly lopsided and honestly Oscar is not entirely sure it's alive.

"What's that?" he asks.

Max follows his gaze and immediately looks caught, in a very endearing way. "Oh. That's—that's John."

A beat.

"Your plant," Oscar says, "is John."

"My basil," Max says, with great dignity, "is named John. Don't look at him like that, he's had a hard month."

Oscar looks at the plant—at John—more carefully. He has, objectively, had a hard month. He's listing noticeably to the left, toward the window and the weak grey square of night sky beyond it. He appears to have approximately six leaves.

"Does he get enough light in here?" Oscar asks.

Max blinks. After a moment, his face melts into extraordinary relief, like he'd been prepared for mockery and got a structural question instead. "That's the thing, he's supposed to get like six hours but obviously in here it's—" He gestures at the window, which is not providing six hours of anything. "So I've been supplementing."

He points to Oscar's left and Oscar turns to find a small grow light clipped to the edge of the desk, currently off, angled toward the windowsill.

"You have a grow light," Oscar says.

"For John, yes."

"You are a frat boy with a grow light for your basil plant. Named John"

"He's struggling, Oscar, I can't just—" Max stops himself. Laughs. Runs a hand through his hair. "Okay, yes. I have a grow light for my basil plant. You can tell Lando if you want. He already knows and he already never lets me hear the end of it."

Oscar looks at the grow light. Looks at the plant. Looks at Max, who is leaning against his desk with his arms crossed, smiling in this slightly rueful, slightly hopeful way, and Oscar thinks—

He doesn't finish the thought. He just thinks that Max is unexpectedly, inexplicably, almost alarmingly endearing, and that the folder in his brain is getting very full, and that he's been worried about various things tonight that he's now finding it hard to remember.

He sits down in the sim rig seat. Not to drive—he just—it seems like a comfortable place to sit. Max watches him do this with an expression that is warm and amused and something else that Oscar doesn't have a name for.

"So," Max says. "Better?"

"Than the party?"

"Than standing by the wall watching the party."

Oscar pauses. "You saw that."

"I always saw you," Max says, and then seems to hear himself, because something moves across his face and he tilts his head slightly to look at the floor. "I mean—I was keeping an eye on you. Making sure you were okay."

"I was okay," Oscar says. "I was calibrating."

"Yeah." Max smiles at the floor. "You mentioned."

The room settles. The noise from downstairs is still audible but distant, like something happening in another country. Oscar is sitting in the sim rig with his feet on the floor and Max is leaning on his desk and the grow light is angled at the struggling basil and it's—

It's very nice. Oscar allows himself to think this. It's very nice and he's warm from the drink and from the room and from something else he's still not naming, and Max looks comfortable and easy in the way he always seems to look, except up close there's something slightly less easy about it, some attentiveness in the way he keeps looking at Oscar that Oscar—

Can't quite read. He's not always great at reading faces. He doesn't let himself assume.

Max pushes off from the desk after a while and drops into his desk chair, spinning it slightly to face the sim rig. He's been asking Oscar about his degree—genuinely asking, not the polite asking people do at parties where they're already looking past you for someone more interesting—and Oscar has been talking about aerodynamics, about the semester project he's been working on, and Max keeps saying things like that's actually so cool and wait, explain that part again and the again part is what gets Oscar, because people don't usually ask for the again.

"You love it," Max says. Not a question.

"Engineering?"

"Yeah. You love it. Your whole face does something when you talk about it."

Oscar considers this. "My whole face."

"Like—" Max doesn't explain, just makes a vague gesture toward Oscar's whole face. "It's good. It's really good. I like it."

Oscar looks at John to avoid having to process this directly. "You like aerodynamics?"

"I like—" Max stops. Smiles. Rearranges. "Yeah. Aerodynamics. Riveting stuff."

There's a pause that Oscar would normally find nerve-wracking but doesn't, quite.

"What about you?" he says. "The swimming. Do you love it?"

Max's expression shifts, becomes something more considered. "Yeah," he says, after a moment. "But it's different from what you've got. I like the racing, but part but—swimming, it's in my body, yeah? I don't think about it the way you think about your work. It's more—" He tilts his head. "Automatic. And then the sim stuff is where I get to think. If that makes sense."

"It makes sense," Oscar says.

"Yeah?"

"You're describing intrinsic versus acquired motivation with a physical versus cognitive axis." Oscar pauses. "That's—sorry. That's an annoying way to put it." He took a psych class for the credit, and something about it stuck.

"No, I—" Max is looking at him with something that Oscar can't file away quickly enough. "No, that's exactly what I meant. That's exactly it." He leans forward slightly, forearms on his knees. "You're very good at that."

"At what?"

"Understanding what people mean. Like what they're actually trying to say."

Oscar blinks. People have told him various things about his communication skills over the years, and you're very good at understanding what people mean has not, historically, been on the list. "I'm—usually I'm told the opposite."

"Yeah?" Max frowns, like this offends him slightly on Oscar's behalf. "That's their problem, then. I think you're—" He stops. "Never mind."

"What?"

Max shakes his head, smiling. "Nothing. You want some water? I've got a bottle somewhere—" He's already turning to rummage on the desk, conversation redirected, and Oscar watches the back of his head and thinks about the half-finished sentence and doesn't ask.

It's past four when Max stretches, arms over his head, spine cracking in a way that makes Oscar wince sympathetically, and says, "hey. You should crash here. It's a long walk back to yours."

Oscar processes this.

The drink has settled into a soft warmth that's sitting somewhere between his thoughts, making them slightly slower than usual, slightly more—porous, maybe. He's been comfortable. He's been in the sim rig seat for—he checks his phone—nearly an hour, and Max has been three feet away the whole time, and the party below them has gone quiet, and he's been—really, genuinely comfortable. He can't remember the last time he was this comfortable somewhere that wasn't his own room.

He processes the statement. Crash here. Long walk back.

"Ah," he says. "Sorry—you don't have to walk me back if you don't want to. I can get there on my own."

A pause.

Oscar looks up from his phone to find Max very still.

It's subtle—Max is generally the kind of person who holds himself in an easy, open way, like the world is something to lean toward—but something has changed in the last three seconds. His shoulders are slightly different. He's looking at the desk, not at Oscar. His hands, which were loose on his knees, have tightened slightly.

"Right," Max says. "Yeah. Sorry." The word sorry comes out flat, not in the way someone apologises when they've inconvenienced you, but in the way someone apologises when they've made a mistake and are embarrassed by it. "Of course you can go home. I just—" He stops. "My room is too small for us, anyway."

There's something wrong.

Oscar doesn't know exactly what it is—this is the part he's bad at, the part where the subtext is apparently visible to everyone except him—but he knows something is wrong because Max sounds like a different person. Oscar doesn't think it's anger but he's just—smaller, somehow. Turned in.

He's not looking at Oscar.

Oscar misses his eyes, and that's—a strange thing to miss, a strange thing to notice you're missing, but there it is. Max's eyes are blue in a specific way that Oscar has been cataloguing all evening and he's not looking at Oscar and something has gone wrong and Oscar did it, somehow, he always does this—

He runs through the last thirty seconds. You should crash here. It's a long walk back.

Oscar doesn't get it.

He knows he likes Max. He knows Max looks unhappy. He knows he caused it, somehow. He doesn't know exactly how, and he doesn't know exactly how to fix it, but he knows he has to try because Max has been nothing but kind to him all evening and Oscar doesn't want to leave with it like this.

He also knows, from experience, that the direct approach is the only one that actually works. People always find it weird when he asks. He's aware of this. He asks anyway, because what's the alternative—guess? He's terrible at guessing.

"Did I do something?" he says. His voice comes out slightly careful, the way it does when he's navigating territory he can't fully map. He adds, because it's true and because acknowledging it sometimes makes people less defensive: "Sorry. I kinda suck at this."

It's wry when he says it. Self-deprecating, but not self-pitying. It's the tone he's developed over years of these moments, the one that says I know, I know, I'm working on it without requiring the other person to reassure him.

Max goes still in a different way.

Finally, he looks up. There are his eyes. Blue. Tired, a little—it's late, it's been a long party—but looking at Oscar with something that has shifted, opened slightly. The smallness from before is still there but it's mixed now with something else.

"No," Max says. "You didn't do anything. I just—" He exhales. Looks at his hands for a moment. "I got mixed up."

"About what?"

A long pause. The moon is casting a faint warm glow across the room. John leans quietly towards it.

"When I said crash here," Max starts, then stops, then tries again. "I wasn't— I meant, like. Stay. Sleep here. Because I wanted—" He makes a small frustrated gesture, vague in the way gestures are when someone is trying to say something that's more than the words. "I've been really—tonight was really good. You're really—" He stops again. Exhales. "I like hanging out with you, Oscar. I like it a lot. I was hoping to not have it end yet."

Oscar is quiet for a moment.

He turns this over. Examines it. Holds it up and looks at it from a few angles, the way he'd examine any proposition that required careful analysis.

Max was asking him to stay. Because Max wanted to keep hanging out. Because tonight was really good and Max wanted more of it.

And Oscar had said—

"Oh," Oscar says. Then, with the dawning clarity of someone who has put a difficult problem together and arrived at an answer that seems almost too simple: "Oh, I would love to. Your room is really nice." He looks around at the sim rig, at John, at the warm small space of it. "I don't know why you didn't just—say that."

Max stares for a moment.

Eventually, he laughs. It starts small and grows into something genuine, a little helpless, the kind of laugh that's surprised out of a person. He puts one hand over his eyes, head dropping. "Oscar."

"What?"

"I—" He's still laughing. "Nothing. You're—" He looks up again and his eyes are bright and crinkled at the corners and Oscar is immediately adding this to every other thing he's been collecting all evening, filing it nowhere because it's too much to file, it keeps spilling out of whatever container he tries to put it in. "I did say it."

"You said the walk was long. I thought you were talking about the walk."

"I was talking about—I didn't want you to go, is what I was talking about."

"Well," Oscar says, "I didn't want to go either."

There's a pause. Max is looking at him with this expression that Oscar could maybe describe if he had more time and a dictionary, but which currently he's just experiencing, like weather. Like walking into a warm room from the cold.

"Yeah?" Max says, quietly.

"Yeah."

Max shifts forward in his chair. He's close—the sim rig and the desk chair don't leave a lot of space, and Max is now close enough that Oscar can see the specific way tiredness sits around his eyes, can see the faint flush still in his cheeks from the alcohol. Oscar is still sitting in the sim rig seat and Max is leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and the distance between them is—

Small. Is what it is.

"I really like you," Max says. He says it directly, without preamble, in the way Oscar has come to understand is actually his natural mode—that the easy social warmth is real but this, this direct unadorned thing, might be even more real. "I have for a while. Tonight I was just—I wanted you to know."

Oscar processes this.

He processes it with the particular thoroughness that he brings to information that seems important, turning it over, making sure he's understood it correctly, making sure he's not—assuming. He's wrong about these things sometimes. He knows he's wrong about these things sometimes.

But Max is looking at him with no ambiguity in it at all, and he's said I really like you in plain words, direct words, words that Oscar doesn't have to translate, and Oscar's chest is doing the thing it's been threatening to do all evening, the thing he's been firmly redirecting—

"I like you too," Oscar says. It comes out slightly smaller than he intends— but true. Completely true. "I've been—yeah. I like you."

Max's expression does something enormous and quiet at the same time. Like a door opening onto a lot of space.

He reaches out—slowly, no sudden movements, in a way that Oscar's brain registers as considerate before he registers anything else—and his hand comes up to Oscar's face. Just the side of it. His palm against Oscar's cheek, warm, and his thumb near the corner of Oscar's jaw, and Oscar—

Stays absolutely still for approximately one second.

Then he stops being still.

He's not sure who moves first, exactly—maybe they both do, or maybe Max does and Oscar meets him—but then they're kissing and it's—

Good.

It's really, stupidly, almost unfairly good.

Max kisses the way he does everything, Oscar thinks—or doesn't think, he's not really thinking, but the impression is there—with warmth and attention and no excessive sense of hurry. His hand stays gentle against Oscar's face. He's so close, the warm smell of him, and Oscar has his eyes closed and his hands have found the fabric of Max's hoodie almost without consulting him.

They break apart slowly. Not rushing that part either.

Max presses his forehead to Oscar's. His eyes are still closed. Oscar can feel him smiling before he sees it—there's something in the way his whole face changes, in the quality of the breath.

"Hi," Max says.

"Hi," Oscar replies.

A pause.

"You can have the bed," Max says. "I'll—I've got a sleeping bag somewhere, I can take the floor."

Oscar pulls back slightly to look at him. "You're not sleeping on the floor of your own room."

"Well, the bed's only—"

"Max."

Max blinks.

"The bed," Oscar says, "is fine. It's a double."

Max looks at him for a moment. The smile is back—that particular one, the warm and private one—and he says, "okay." Just that. "Okay."

They don't kiss again, not right then. Max gets him a spare toothbrush with the matter-of-fact hospitality of someone who keeps them specifically for this sort of occasion and does not comment on it. He finds Oscar a clean shirt to sleep in. He turns the grow light on for John before they sleep, which he explains is necessary because John missed his afternoon session.

"You scheduled your plant's light exposure," Oscar says.

"He needs structure," Max says, defensively.

"You care so much about John, I don't know how he's still so dead," Oscar says.

"Yeah," Max agrees, with absolutely no distress. "Get in the bed, Oscar."

Oscar gets in the bed.

Max gets in on the other side, and the room is small, and John glows softly under his grow light, and Max says goodnight with his voice low and his accent softened with tiredness, and Oscar lies in the dark and feels the warmth of someone nearby and thinks—

He thinks that he arrived at this party with a grey shirt and a pre-planned social strategy and no particular expectations, and something has happened tonight that has no structural formula and no optimisable variable and doesn't need one.

He thinks he'll tell Max about the folder, eventually. All the things he kept filing away.

He thinks Max will probably laugh in that warm way and say I know, because Max has been paying attention all night in a way that Oscar is only now fully understanding, and that is—that's something. That's a lot, actually.

He thinks about Max's palm against his cheek.

He thinks: you're Max's guy, and doesn't find it strange anymore at all.

He sleeps.