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The flat smells of Deep Heat and whatever black lipstick Aerion left melting on the radiator again.
Dunk comes through the door shoulder-first because his left arm still won't lift past forty degrees, kit bag dragging a wet line across the laminate. Thirty-six years old and the young lads in the scrum still treat him like a battering ram they don't have to pay for. He's too old for this. He's been too old for this since he was twenty-five.
But the mortgage needs paying, and Aerion's student loans won't vanish by themselves.
"You're bleeding on the carpet."
Aerion is curled in the armchair that's more his than Dunk's – the velvet one he spray-painted black last spring, the one Dunk's mum refuses to sit on – laptop balanced on his bony knees, a half-empty mug of something that might be tea or might be absinthe cooling on the floor beside him. His hair is freshly dyed, that bruised-plum colour he favours in autumn, and he's wearing Dunk's old Wasps jersey despite owning five of his own.
Dunk looks down. There's a smear of red across his forearm, crusting at the edges. "It's not mine."
"It's someone's." Aerion doesn't look up from his screen, but his mouth has gone tight – that particular pinch that means I am going to make this your problem. "If you've brought another man's blood into our home, Duncan, I will be deeply unimpressed."
"Got caught in a ruck. One of theirs – nose, I think." Dunk drops the kit bag by the door – he'll deal with it tomorrow, or Aerion will burn it in the garden as a ritual sacrifice, whichever comes first – and crosses the room with the particular heaviness of a man who's been folded in half by fifteen stone of flanker. The sofa groans under him. "It's fine."
"It's fine." Aerion finally closes the laptop. His nails are painted black, chipped at the thumbs. He sets the machine aside and rises with a theatrical slowness that would look performative on anyone else but on him just reads as Aerion. "You're sitting in my chair, by the way."
Dunk blinks. "This is the sofa."
"And you're in it. My sofa. Move."
But when Dunk tries to shift, his hip seizes, and what comes out of his mouth is less a word and more a noise that embarrasses him. Aerion stops. Stares. Then sighs like a man accepting his fate, and climbs into Dunk's lap anyway – all sharp elbows and jutting hipbones, the cold press of his septum ring against Dunk's jaw.
"You're getting blood on my jersey."
"Your jersey?"
"I live here. Everything is mine." Aerion settles against his chest, one hand coming up to push at Dunk's damp hair. His rings catch the light – silver, all of them, because gold is tacky. "You smell like a public toilet."
"Cheers."
"Was that sarcasm? I don't like it when you're sarcastic. It doesn't suit you." But he doesn't move. His thumb drags across Dunk's brow, slow and almost tender. "You're going to do something about that arm."
"Tomorrow."
"Now."
"Bright-Eyes, I can't –"
"Duncan."
And that's the thing about Aerion. He's twenty years old and ninety per cent spite, and he wears his mother's silver chains and his father's temper like armour. He's dramatic and difficult and once set fire to a neighbour's garden gnome because it looked at him wrong. But when he says Dunk's name like that – flat, final, I am not asking – it means he's already won. It means he's been worried since the match started, probably tracking the scores on his phone in the back of a lecture on postmodern theory, and this is the only way he knows how to show it.
So Dunk lets him pull the jersey off – careful, careful over the bad shoulder – and sits in his pants on the sofa while Aerion rummages through the bathroom cabinet for the decent plasters, the ones with the proper adhesive.
"You're staring," Dunk says.
"I'm admiring. There's clearly a difference." Aerion kneels between his knees, tube of antiseptic in one hand, and his eyes are very dark in the low light. "You're ridiculous, you know that?"
"Aye."
"You're thirty-six years old and you let children throw themselves at you for fun."
"It's not –"
"It's embarrassing." But he's smiling. Just a little. Just at the corner of his mouth, where the lipstick smudges. "For both of us."
Dunk reaches out – slowly, so Aerion can pull away if he wants – and tucks a strand of that ridiculous silver hair behind his ear. The shell of it is pink. Warm.
"You coming to the next one?"
Aerion rolls his eyes. "Obviously. Someone has to drive you home when your knees give out."
And then he bends his head and gets on with the patching-up, and Dunk watches his husband's hands – small, clever, stained with ink from a notebook he'll never let anyone read – and thinks that he doesn't deserve this. Has never deserved it. But Aerion has never cared much for what anyone deserves.
He wants what he wants.
And what he wants, apparently, is a thirty-six-year-old rugby player with a bad shoulder and blood under his nails, sitting on a stolen sofa in a flat that smells of Deep Heat and black lipstick.
Dunk can live with that.