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Colin leaves on a Thursday night, bisecting the room haphazardly and cramming his half into a duffel bag. Robert watches as bits and pieces of the last three years of his life vanish into a bag, like a magic trick in reverse. Quiet, except for the sound of textbooks being sorted into piles, yours and mine.
Two of his favorite T-shirts join the bundle of books and clothes. Robert thinks about mentioning this. He decides it would make him seem irreverent. Unrepentant.
"Well then," Colin says, eyes doing a quick scan of their room. For a moment, Robert fancies there'll be a flicker in his eyes and then Colin'd stuff him into that bag as well, along with his Give Me Liberty Or I'll Cut You T-shirt and Colin's battered old copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
When Colin leaves, it's sans-Robert. No lingering, no backward glances; the door clicks gently shut behind him.
"Right." Robert says to the empty room, now agonizingly bare without a second pair of trainers to tangle with his own. "Well."
*
The spill of sunlight on pale creamy skin, unhurried tumble of dark hair over the graceful curve of a spine. Robert invites drowsily, “Come back to bed."
She turns towards him, back to the window. Alright, less attractive now, backlights never worked for that complexion. Robert catches himself wrinkling his nose and hastily takes control of his features. "You look lovely, um,"
She looks offended, but it seems perfunctory. The well-choreographed dance of the morning after; they both knew the rules, it was time to tango.
"Sarah," she offers, reaching for her jeans. "Call me sometime."
"I will." Robert says, casting about for the right blend of nonchalance and sincerity. Her answering smile means he came reasonably close.
"Now, I," and Robert is saved from his next attempt at improvising small talk when someone begins knocking methodically on the door. Tap tap tappity tap. A polite, conventional refrain. Pedantic, even, as far as the simple action of knuckle against wood may allow.
Robert lets out a quiet exhale of recognition.
"Rob? It's me. Er, me being David. Matt, um, let me in, because he was awake. Oh God, aren't you awake? I mean, you probably are by now, but were-"
Robert cracks the door open and eyes him. "Hello, David."
David looks flustered, holding two paper bags with a geometrically unpleasing logo of a sombrero on it that Robert recognizes with delight. "I brought you breakfast."
"Mexican? Why, David, you little rebel." he pops his head back in the room, where Sarah is buttoning her shirt. "Want to stick around for breakfast?"
"Thanks, but I've got early lectures." Sarah says apologetically, slipping past him to the corridor. "I'll grab something on the way. Thanks for offering, though." she gives David a cautious smile, and his mouth twitches in reply.
"Well, I'll see you, Rob," she says, planting a kiss on his cheek. Her lips are warm and soft. Familiar. He smiles, almost without realizing.
"Yeah," and she smiles back, and with another smile-nod at David, she leaves.
Robert waits until the front door's shut to turn to David. "If you breathe a word of this to Matt, I swear you'll live to regret it."
"I regret it already and it's still purely hypothetical," David retorts, and Rob laughs, placing a hand on his shoulder. Careful, because these Cambridge boys were something else.
David doesn't tense, however. Rob counts this a minor victory and says, affably, "Come on to the kitchen. I'm sure we have forks and knives, almost as if we were normal people."
"Oh, the horror." David deadpans, and Robert giggles once more.
*
The comedy comes to an abrupt and unwelcome halt over the week. "It's fine," David tells him. Robert eyes him doubtfully, so he adds, "Look, it'll pass, and then we'll go back to writing."
It leaves him feeling disoriented and paranoid, phantom aches and pains when he picks up a pen and stares down at the vast expanse of empty lines on the surprisingly camp brand of foolscap David prefers, feeling nothing but mildly baffled. He reads and rereads old transcripts of Fry and Laurie written in a shaky twelve-year-old’s hand until his eyes are scratchy and dry, trying to reach the humor through the lines of dialog . He manages to grind out two or three rubbishy sketches, no more, and he's no closer to finding what went wrong and fixing it, which is perhaps the single most frustrating thing to ever happen to him.
He doesn't mention to anyone else that his knack for honing in on potential humor has been shot all to hell. Olivia asks him a couple of times whether he's sure he's not ill; he waves her off and keeps his fingers crossed.
*
It’s Thursday night, and, not unpredictably, they’re at the pub.
Matt goes quiet nearing midnight, staring into his pint and biting his lip. Robert keeps an eye on him, out of an inexplicable and unprecedented sense of responsibility. Mostly he's just listening to David.
David is a solid-gold minefield of twisted logic. He goes off in tangents with worrying earnestness and makes his eyes grow ludicrously big when he's making a point; it’s curiously attractive.
Earlier on, when the night seemed to have a different plot entirely, Olivia made to interject with comments of her own, only to be shushed by Robert, who would gesture at David to go on. David, flushing and dropping his eyes to his glass, mumbled something cuttingly self-deprecating while Robert glared accusingly at Olivia.
Now, Olivia's as much in thrall as everyone else at the table, staring at David with an almost devout expression as he talked. He barely pauses for breath, and his cheeks are flushed; Robert is utterly fascinated.
He slips his arm around David's shoulders, and that earns him a smile, a sideways glance, shy, joyful. David's talking about the student dorms, and the people around him are nodding and laughing. Matt catches his eye and even he looks marginally less forlorn; he grins at Robert and gives him a thumbs-up. Robert's eyes do an instinctive sweep of the bar before he recognizes what he's doing: that he's looking for Colin to share a silent inside joke. The realization makes his blood freeze up instantly.
David's voice stumbles, stutters, and goes up in pitch. "Are you alright?"
Rob takes his arm away. Some stupid childish notion leads him to believe that the icy fear in his veins could spread outwards, turn David to stone. That seems, it just is,
"Unforgivable," Robert mumbles. His lips are numb. He has perhaps drunk too much; Matt kept the booze coming and he, he was distracted.
David says his name again, wretchedly uncertain.
Robert is aware that he's having a panic attack in the middle of a student pub. He tries to reassure someone, tell them he's fine, really. It seems the proper thing to do.
"Nauseous," he explains, before someone pulls him unceremoniously to his feet. He sways a little, almost rhythmically. A hand steadies him.
"Come on, we're leaving," Matt says matter-of-factly. "You, my friend, are plastered."
Robert allows himself to be sheparded out of the pub, through the crowd near the door. "Do you need to throw up?" Matt asks grimly.
Robert breathes in a lungful of fresh air. It lands like a punch, and he tips his head back to look at the stars.
"He told me that I've changed." Robert addresses the stars, laid out like magic carpet, breathtaking and improbable. "That I wasn't the person he fell in love with. Cockblocked by my own past self."
The stars keep quiet. Matt offers, "That's terrible, mate."
A brief snatch of conversation, and then the sound of a closing door. David says, "I brought your coats."
"Well done," Matt's voice is unexpectedly sharp. Robert turns his head to look at them. David's face is flushed, his hands running repeatedly through his hair. He looks, Robert is startled to observe, almost appallingly young.
"Are you," David hedges, determinedly not looking in Matt's direction, "Are you alright?"
"Peachy," Robert pushes himself off the wall he'd been leaning against. "Full of beans and ready to go."
David's mouth twitches, but he still looks nervous. "Are you-"
Robert touches his arm purposefully, which has a curious effect. David stiffens and looks up at him, eyes wide.
"Let's go back inside," Rob says, keeping his voice neutral. Even so, he can hear Matt's disbelieving snort.
David nods jerkily, blushing worse than ever. "Alright."
*
*
Mia's the kind of girl who tells him about bikini waxing, laughs at his grimace, and leads him into her bedroom with his arm over her shoulder. He meets her at the pub.
"Sorry about the mess," she says unapologetically, sweeping her duvet off so that half a dozen textbooks tumble to the floor. Rob catches the titles of a few, and deduces that Mia's a Psychology student. He's never slept cross-department before.
"Your loss, obviously," Mia says, when he mentions this.
She opens the packet with her teeth and slides the condom on with a sort of clinical efficience. Rob watches, mouth slightly open, as she lowers herself on to his dick. She closes her eyes for the barest fraction of a second and seems to concentrate very deeply.
In the morning, she smiles appreciatively when he makes her tea, and drinks it with her feet tucked under the duvet, looking, for an instant, remarkably young.
They exchange phone numbers. For once, it doesn't feel perfunctory. She has delicate fingers and hands as she taps away at his phone, and looks up with a smile. "There. All done."
Before he leaves, Robert takes a look around the room. It's bursting with color, neon green cushions and pink bedcovers.
David's voice in his head sounds lightly condescending. I suppose subtlety is for the small-c conservative.
Mia clears her throat.
"Just admiring your color scheme," Robert says, smiling inadvertently. He realizes that he's affecting David's repressive tones belatedly, and coughs. "It's very, um. Striking."
Mia shrugs. "Yeah, well. I know who I am."
She looks at him meaningfully as she says this.
Robert reaches for his coat. "Lucky you,” he says, mildly.
*
Matt picks up a habit of leaving rooms whenever Robert comes in, making sure to knock their shoulders in the most painful way possible. He also begins glaring at Robert when he's chatting up potential shags, which makes Rob irritable and distracted, and on more than a few occasions, ultimately unsuccessful.
"What's his problem?" Olivia asks lightly, when Matt shoves past Robert on his way in to the kitchen.
Robert shrugs. "Best ask him, really." He goes over to the couch and squishes himself between David and Tom. They both make annoyed noises, but proceed to budge up reluctantly. "What are we watching?"
"Yellow Submarine," Tom tells him glumly.
"What, again?" Rob turns his head to glare accusingly at David, who makes an exaggeratedly innocent face. Robert snorts, and looks back at the screen. "What Mitchell wants, Mitchell gets, I suppose."
David goes very quiet beside him. Robert pretends not to notice.
*
Robert spends the rest of the week puttering about the house in a dressing gown, organizing things. He shuffles books around and alphabetizes the DVD collection; by the time he gets to the L's, he stops being entertained by spotting the similarities of the plot points of most Hollywood films and gives up.
Mia texts him sometimes- little jokes, odd observations. More often than not, Robert finds that he focuses on the wording than the whole itself, critiquing the structure of the jokes, turning the wording over and over in his mind before he realizes what he's doing and stops himself. He and his mates make a considerable effort to keep their texts bland and businesslike, and that's what he's used to; it's developed into a form of etiquette.
But he likes Mia, he thinks. Kooky is the word Matt uses to describe girls like that, and, well. It's not as if he could click with someone who was normal on any level.
He sends back carefully-composed replies, little witticisms that compliment hers. Maybe he takes too much time with them, because she doesn't bother to respond after that.
*
Rob has never claimed to understand what’s going on. He has clear plans for the future, and the past is something he’s moving swiftly and decisively away from. He just happens to be quite bad at seeing the present with any degree of objectivity.
It’s never bothered him, before.
Now, however, he’s beginning to think of it as a failing than an inconvenience, because the present has developed a truly irritating habit of twisting out of shape when he thinks he sees a clear picture.
He hears David’s voice in his head when he’s with other people, which is fine, because David’s the okay sort. David is his comedy partner, and having him join in in the commentary of Rob’s life means that the comedy wasn’t quite as far away as Rob feared it was.
David stares at his mouth when he thinks he isn’t looking, and blushes and stammers and looks pleased when Rob slings an arm around his shoulders, and Rob thinks he understands that well enough.
It’s when he’s with David that everything goes pear-shaped, because when he’s with David, he hears Colin’s voice.
*
David drops by at mid noon to help Robert stack biscuit tins in a pyramid formation. They don't speak. Much.
"This one's dented," David says once, as he frowns at a tin wobbling uncertainly among its peers.
Robert glances over. "Oh. We had trouble opening that one, and."
And Colin had bashed it repeatedly against the edge of the table until the lid yielded to brute force and became unstuck, and they had set upon it gleefully, laughing, feeding each other pieces of fudge Colin's mum had sent them. The individual pieces had been bite-sized; Colin's thumb had brushed against his lower lip.
"Right," says David, and clears his throat.
There doesn't seem to be a point in conversation after that.
At around five, Matt storms in.
"Fucking professors and their sick fucking power trips and-" he pauses, his eyes sweeping dubiously over the kitchen. "Hello David."
"Hello, Matt." David keeps his eyes on the pyramid. He tells Rob, "The structural integrity is compromised by the flawed tin."
"Is it?" Robert's voice comes out bland and flat. He clears his throat, blushing, as Matt's eyebrows hike up. "I mean, is it?"
David nods, not looking at him. Robert turns to Matt, vaguely desperate.
Matt grins, showing his teeth. "Well, I've a formal dinner to dress up for. Have fun with your architectural accuracies."
"We will." Robert calls after him as he clatters upstairs. He shoots another nervous glance at David, who's fiddling around with the dented tin with an expression of absolute concentration.
The silence that hangs heavy in the kitchen amplifies the noises coming from upstairs, Matt stomping around, Tom strumming aggressively on his guitar.
His throat dry, Robert begins, "Do you fancy--" the same time David says, "Why do you always-"
They both trail off awkwardly.
Robert clears his throat and tries again, when it becomes clear David isn't going to. "Do you reckon -I mean, well. Do you want to have dinner? Go out, I mean. Do you want to go out. With me."
David's face goes slack with surprise.
"Not if you don't want to!" Robert adds, quickly. His hands are shaking slightly, so he clasps them behind his back. "I mean. I thought it would be nice."
"You mean a date," David states carefully.
Robert tries to analyze his tone, isolate whatever it was that made it sound strange. Almost hopeful.
"Yes, a date." Robert says. His hands come up of their own accord, gesturing. "If you want to. Not just because you want to, if you do, of course. Because I want it too. I mean, I would quite like-" he shrugs helplessly, and reclasps his hands.
David says, "Yes."
Robert blinks. "Pardon?"
David smiles widely, his cheeks going pink. "I said yes."
"Oh." Robert blinks some more, then the corners of his lips push upwards in degrees, until he's grinning like a fool. "Brilliant."
*
Falling in love with a friend's always a good thing, Robert tells himself the next day. He's eating cereal, dry, straight from the box, and staring out the window at the bleak landscape of the building opposite, and a handful of drooping trees. In fact, if Hollywood is to be believed, it's practically a life goal.
He's never gone out with someone he knew past the preliminary introductions before. Most of his 'serious' relationships tended to be with girls he met at various house parties and, most recently, his orientation club night where he ended up in a restroom stall frantically snogging a boy from second year who had pale blue eyes and a knee-weakening smile. He thinks the change might be good for him. Might even be exciting.
"Morning," Matt sounds marginally more awake than he normally does at this time. "How was your night?"
"Fine." Robert eats some cereal. "You?"
"Oh, fine." Matt says airily, rolling his eyes. "You know, a scintillating evening of sycophantic conversation."
Robert hums. Then he says, with a studied attempt at nonchalance , "I'm dating David now."
Matt doesn't respond for a beat. Then he says, flatly, “You shit."
Robert's eyes widen until his head begins to hurt, his skull too big, his head too small.
Matt shakes his head once, and shoots him a look of absolute contempt.
Robert turns away, back to his box of cereal. His hands are shaking violently. He hopes Matt doesn't see.
*
He sees David in corridors, between lectures, twice. David's smiles are hesitant, but unquestionably brilliant. Rob pretends to be in a hurry.
He feels vaguely ill afterward.
Olivia bumps her shoulder against his arm companiably. "David looks pleased to see you."
Robert's distracted by the crowd. "What? Oh, yes. We-" and he stops short. "We hang out."
"Alright," Olivia says, placidly.
*
When Robert comes home, Colin is sitting at the kitchen table, looking at the biscuit tins. He looks so familiar Robert has trouble recognizing him.
"Hi." Says Colin, smiling at him.
"Hello." His voice sounds as if it has rust clinging to it. He clears his throat. "Um, hello. What're you doing here?"
Colin shrugs. "Came to pick up my stuff. Is, is that alright with you?"
He nods automatically. "Sure, fine." Why didn't he call ahead? Is that normal?
Robert stands in place, uncertain. "Want to come upstairs?"
Colin smiles again, but it seems hollower, more. Forced. "That's be excellent."
Excellenté, Rob corrects mentally.
"Come on," he gestures awkwardly at the stairs.
"I like what you've done with the, um," Colin points at the pyramid, his smile turning a degree warmer. Robert gives up on trying to be covert and stares. Colin still has that impossibly mobile face, a thousand expressions flickering past within a minute. Artfully mussed fair hair and a sensitive mouth and eyes the color of faded denim.
"Penny for your thoughts, Rob." He says, catching him.
Robert shakes his head, attempts a smile. "Sorry, what were you saying?"
"I was complimenting your pyramid."
"Oh." Rob's aware he sounds too casual. "Thanks. David helped."
"David?" Colin's eyebrows are doing something complicated. His smile finally slides off his face, and Robert can see him physically force it back on. "That's nice."
His tone sounds off, distant. Full of the unspoken. Which would, if all went well, remain unspoken. Robert sincerely hopes that they never have to talk about this ever again. "Yeah."
"Oh. Well, good for him." Colin says, neutral.
"Yeah." Robert agrees vaguely. Awkward conversational circles between people who've seen each other naked. The comedy was implicit, surely. He asks, "Where are you staying, anyway?" because it was good to show that he cared, and anyway, this was his place as it was Robert’s, if not more so-
(Come over, come on, the boy with the blonde hair –Colin- had said, tugging Rob’s hand, kissing the corner of his mouth, you need a place to stay and we need another housemate. It’ll be perfect. ’Sides. You practically live here already.
Okay, Robert replied. Dazed.
Colin had grinned. Brilliant.)
"Over at Lizzie's." Colin tells him, shrugging.
"Oh." Rob remembers Lizzie; she was in Colin's Latin class, and, Robert had noted, in the grand total of two times they'd met, that she was undisguisedly infatuated with Colin.
They climb some more steps.
"So," Robert begins casually. Possibly too casually. "are you two...?"
Colin's expression remains blank for a handful of seconds. Then, his eyes flash.
"You know what, never mind." Robert says quickly.
"Jesus, Rob." Colin says, his voice ugly and bitter. Robert flinches. "Fucking hell, of course we're not. Who the fuck--"
"It doesn't matter," Robert says, desperately. "It's all fine, I just-"
Colin grabs hold of his wrist, turns him around. They stand there, Robert two steps ahead of Colin, breathing hard.
"Do you really believe," Colin says, in a very even voice, "Do you genuinely believe that I left you to go sleep with girls in my Latin class?"
"I don't," Robert protests, because he doesn't. He’s just confused and disoriented and it was two years. People got married after less, and he knows it and he knows that Colin knows it and it was all a bloody mess. "I mean, not that you made that perfectly clear before you left, so you can't really blame me, even if I did."
"Fucking hell, Robert." Colin says again. He sounds tired. Older. "I told you why."
"No, you gave me an excuse that sounded like you had Austen write it out for you," Robert was aware of the way his voice had taken on an edge of irony. Almost as if he were angling for a punch line. "You could have had the decorum to come up with something a little more original."
"I told you the bloody truth, Rob!" and Colin's voice cracks. His fists are curled. Distantly, Rob is aware that this could end unfavorably. "If you can't-"
Robert swears as his entire body jolts with the impact of his phone's ringtone. He takes it out with shaky hands and answers.
"Rob? It's, uh, me, David. Just calling to tell you that I'm, um, really looking forward to tonight." His voice sounds impossibly far away.
It takes a beat to digest what he said. "Not now, David," Robert says tiredly.
"Oh." And Robert can all but see him blink rapidly and feels like shit. "Alright, then. I'll just-" and he hangs up.
Colin's eyes are hooded, but Robert's not fooled. He's furious. "You don't-" he shakes his head. "Fuck, Robert, why do you have to try so bloody hard to fit in?"
Because I don't, Robert wants to shout back. But he doesn't know where that came from, and, to be honest, he's too tired and doesn't feel like talking about feelings with his ex. So he just says, "I think you should leave."
Colin rubs his temples. "Yeah. Yeah I should."
He bites his lip, like he's trying to think of something positive to say. He might as well have a sign painted on his forehead, 'Mama raised me right.'
Robert says, "Just go."
He does.
*
When David comes over, Robert's sitting on the floor of the living room, beer bottles lined up neatly next to him.
He had been going for a gesture; maybe spell the words 'I'M SORRY' with the bottles.
It just so happens that he doesn't have to. David takes one step into the room, looks searchingly into Robert's eyes, and his face goes blank. "Oh."
"I'm sorry." Robert says, just as a matter of procedure. He thinks he owes David that small, rather pathetic degree of convention, at least. Sorry doesn’t come even remotely close. He thinks, momentarily, that he could always go against a lifetime’s habit and talk it through, but it just feels instinctively wrong.
David waves him off. He's got a shopping bag in one hand, and the contents clink tellingly.
"Do I-" He begins, haltingly, "What."
Robert lets his head fall back against the wall with a thunk. "The timing, mostly." He plays with the bottle in his hands, tearing at the label. "I wish I'd met you first," and he doesn't know where that came from, either.
"Before Colin, you mean." David says. His voice sounds strange. Muffled.
"Yeah." The feeling drained out of his voice, Robert sounds listless, even to his own ears.
There’s a silence. Rob fights the urge to add, it’s not as if no one warned you, remembering Matt’s angry eyes and clenched fists.
"Alright."
And then David comes and sits carefully beside him, feet tucked under him, a flipside to Robert's boneless sprawl. He checks for dust first. Robert doesn't understand what's happening.
"I don't understand what's happening."
"I'm joining you in your self-pity." David sounds matter-of-fact, but there's a hitch in his voice when he says the word pity. Robert raises his head to look at him, and his eyes are very bright. "We can become alcoholics together."
Rob takes him in, the twisted mouth, the eyes under threat of becoming unforgivably blurry. One long, cathartic exhale, and Robert pushes one of his beers over. "Or tramps."
"They go hand-in-hand, really." David says. Robert remembers to crack open David's beer for him, and as he does, he snorts.
There's the dullest of aches in his chest, one that's nameless and unexplored. It seems oddly transient. He watches David hold the bottle with both hands and take a tentative sip, almost as if it's his first time, even though Robert knows different, and he feels. Something. Not quite content, but.
"Saving the world, one beer a time." he says.
David nods, his eyes glimmering with withheld amusement. "Amid the fear and despair of the human race, who is left to fight for all that is good and pure and gets you smashed incredibly quickly?"
"For under a fiver," sniggers Rob. His eyes catch on the menu attached to the fridge as he improvs. "The Surprising Adventures of Sir Caesar Salad!"
David catches his eye, and Robert looks back.
They burst out laughing.