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It’s never been unusual for Calum to stop by unannounced. Not when they were fifteen and still in their Myspace phase playing backyard gigs, and not now that they’ve just finished supporting One Direction on their world tour with four singles under their belt and a new album ready to drop. The only tangible difference is that Michael’s always got beer in his fridge. Calum’s more likely to drink it than he is, but Michael’s eighteen now and the novelty of being able to buy it whenever he wants hasn’t worn off yet. November means his birthday and a Summer so dry he’s grateful for the beer to wash away the taste of inner-city pollution that clots in the back of his throat.
When Calum comes around he lets himself in with the spare key, hidden in the hanging pot plant tat Michael’s mum bought him as a house-warming present, one he forgot about and let shrivel into a crunchy mass of leaves and dried roots that stick to the hand of whoever grabs the key. Michael’s parked in front of the computer and the new Left 4 Dead but expects the hand Calum rubs through his hair and the debris that follows.
“Thanks for that, bro,” Michael greets, never taking his eyes off the screen. He pushes one side of his headphones back for Calum’s retorted, “you needed to wash your hair anyway, mate,” as he looks disgustedly at his hand.
Calum boots up the second computer and a minute later he joins in. One of the perks of being a rockstar is that Michael has four desktops for the others and the days when there’s nothing better to do, which, Michael argues, is every day. For the next two hours they sit in semi-companionable almost-silence, save for the shouting matches over which direction they’re going in and an argument about the zombie they’d rather fight if they only had their guitar to defend themselves.
(Calum picks The Witch, because he’s insane.)
Michael’s grateful for it. After a year of living, touring, and recording together, he can’t get used to being by himself. His spare moments are accompanied by a dull ache and overwhelming silence. The four of them lived together in London, rented a flat right after touring the US because it felt like what was happening wasn’t real unless they were together.
Michael still feels like that, that unless Ash narrated it or Luke’ was waiting with a smartarse comment, it didn’t happen. His flat isn’t much — mostly unpacked boxes and microwavable pizzas in his otherwise empty freezer — but it’s even less without the others. The mess would be bigger, for one. Practically uncontrollable.
Eventually he and Calum head into the kitchen for a snack break, and then order pizza when finding anything edible in Michael’s cupboards proves too difficult a task for teenage dropouts. While they were on tour, Harry showed them how to make popcorn from scratch and even though Michael’s got the tinned corn, sitting there for a month since the first time he went shopping, he can’t remember the rest of the recipe. There might be butter in it. That’s where he’ll really fall down.
Michael tosses the phone to Calum and goes to take a shower. Sometime between washing dirt out of his hair and singing loud enough that when he forgets the lyrics to the new Miles Kane song Calum texts the rest of them to him, Michael is hit by how eerily domestic it all is. Not just the day but the last few years. He’s got a flat now, that the guys helped him move into — which just meant getting Ashton to drive Michael’s computers and mattress over, since the new place came furnished — and ever since then they make a point to at least four-way Skype if they can’t meet up in person. They might as well move in together, since they live in each other’s pockets.
Michael wonders how weird that would look to outsiders, if they’d get sick of each other or if the music would be enough to keep them strong.
He emerges out of the bathroom and a cloud of steam back into the living room, where Calum is twenty minutes into Wall-E, one eye on the tv and the other on his phone in a show of first-class multitasking. The sun is dropping slowly, filtering the the entire house honey-yellow where it shines through the glass doors, but the temperature is still high enough that the warmth from Michael’s shower stays with him, perspiration sticking his clothes to his skin.
“I really need to get a new tv,” Michael says, dropping down on the couch with a sigh.
“Yeah, I thought they switched out all the analogue ones by now,” Calum teases. He leans over and shows Michael a picture someone’s tweeted them that makes them look like they’re in a raunchy movie about spies or gay porn or something. Michael responds by showing Calum a YouTube video of a dog barking the tune to Britney Spears’s “Toxic”. Calum laughs so hard his face scrunches up and leans into Michael’s shoulder to muffle it. Underneath the pull in Michael’s stomach, what feels like an answer to a question he can’t parse out, he feels like he’s won something.
The pizza arrives and when Michael comes back into the living room with it Calum’s got two beers on the table and he’s traded Wall-E for something with more cars and more boobs.
//
The living room is bathed in the glow of the television screen as the start up menu loops, still stuck on whatever Vin Diesel movie they were watching before Michael dozed off. He’s half-delirious from sleep, brain fuzzy and bladder protesting, feels like he’s risen from the dead rather than a nap. His heartbeat picks up when he finds Calum’s spot empty, all the warmth leached away sometime after the sun fell. The urge to call out rises and falls with the motions of his breathing. He doesn’t like being alone and not in this house that’s so new he can smell the lingering mixture of Glen20 and repression from the previous owners. It’s not really his yet, when no one else is there.
The dvd goes quiet before it loops over, and Calum’s voice carries back into the house, echoing across the kitchen tile floor. Michael’s heart stops beating so fast; he hears Calum laugh and it puts him at ease, melting back into the couch cushions despite the weight that’s lifted from his chest.
A minute later Calum comes back in, leans on the back of the couch, smiling when he sees that Michael’s awake.
“Who s’at?” MIchael asks, too lazy to manage the words and it comes out a drawl.
“Luke and Ash. I told them you were sleeping and they said, ‘typical’.”
Michael throws his hand up in a gesture that means, “what are you gonna do”. Calum laughs and leans over to stick his cold hands on Michael’s skin. The shock of it has him wriggling away, until revenge takes over from self-preservation and he grabs Calum’s arms to haul him over the back of the couch.
“Get off it,” Calum complains. He’s saved from rolling onto the floor by MIchael’s limpet arms around him.
“No,” MIchael replies, shushing Calum’s protests. “Cuddles now.” Calum relents quickly, settles his head on MIchael’s stomach, breath huffing in a laugh against the bare skin where his shirt’s ridden up.
It’s still too hot for this, even hours after the sun’s gone down, with no fans or air conditioning. But Michael keeps him close anyway, falling asleep slowly enough this time to savour it.