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The late-afternoon sun bled weak through the grimy window of the bedsit, casting a long, amber parallelogram across the floorboards where the dust moved in slow, airborne currents. Ruben watched it for a moment – watched the dust, watched the way it drifted without direction, without weight – and then turned his head to look at Niall, who was sat on the edge of the mattress with his hands folded in his lap like he was waiting for a bus, or a beating, or both.
"Ye've been sat there for forty minutes," Ruben said. His voice was low, carrying the gravel of a bad night's sleep and half a pack of Regal. "Forty minutes, Niall. Ye know what I could do in forty minutes?"
Niall did not look up. He had learned, over the years, that looking up was an invitation. Looking up meant engagement. Looking up meant Ruben seeing something in his eyes that Ruben would then want to scrape out with his thumbs. So Niall kept his gaze fixed on his own knuckles – white, bony things – and said, "I was letting you rest."
"Rest," Ruben repeated, and the word came out shaped around something that might have been a laugh if it had any warmth in it. "Rest. That's very good of ye. Very considerate. Always thinking of me, aren't ye, Bambi?"
The old nickname landed like a stone in still water. From anyone else it would have been a taunt – from Ruben it was worse than that. It was a claim. Ruben had started calling him Bambi the first week they shared a room, back when Niall was fifteen and still flinched at the sound of a kettle boiling. Bambi; all legs and big wet eyes and a heartbeat you could see through his shirt. Bambi; something soft in the forest waiting to be torn apart.
Niall said nothing. His tongue felt glued to the roof of his mouth. The room smelled of stale smoke and something sourer underneath – the bin in the corner hadn't been emptied in a fortnight, and the ashtray on the floor held a small city of crushed filters. Ruben's doing. It was always Ruben's doing.
Ruben pushed himself up from the sagging armchair, a slow uncoiling of muscle and bad intention. He was bigger than he'd been at seventeen – broader across the shoulders, thicker through the neck – but it was the stillness in him that made the difference now. He crossed the room in three strides and stood directly over Niall, close enough that Niall could smell the tobacco on his breath and something sharper beneath it, something chemical.
"D'ye know what I think?" Ruben said. "I think you don't want to look at me."
Niall's throat moved. "Ruben –"
"Nah. Nah, don't ’Ruben’ me." Ruben reached down and took Niall's chin between his thumb and forefinger, just holding. The touch was almost gentle, and that made it worse. That made Niall's stomach drop the way it always dropped when Ruben got quiet like this, when the violence went underground and became something you couldn't see coming. "Look at me, Niall. Go on. I'm not asking."
Niall looked up.
Ruben's eyes were pale and flat, the colour of a winter sky. There was a small cut above his left eyebrow, still beading red, a souvenir from the night before. Niall didn't know what had happened – Ruben had come in around three in the morning, boots heavy on the stairs, and collapsed on the mattress without a word. Niall had lain awake beside him, breathing shallow, counting the cracks in the ceiling until the light changed.
"There ye are," Ruben said softly. "There's those eyes. Big fuckin Disney eyes. You know what they do to me, those eyes?"
Niall didn't know. He didn't know much of anything anymore, hadn't for a long time. The world had shrunk to the dimensions of this room, this moment, the pressure of Ruben's fingers on his jaw. He was aware of his own breathing, the shallow rise and fall of his chest, the way his heart was knocking against his ribs like something trapped.
Ruben let go of his chin and Niall's head dropped forward, involuntary, a marionette with a cut string. That was the rhythm of it; Ruben would pull tight and then release, over and over, until Niall couldn't tell the difference between the grip and the letting-go. Until both felt like the same thing.
"Stand up," Ruben said.
Niall stood. His legs were unsteady, pins and needles from sitting too long. The room swayed a little, or he swayed in it.
"Closer."
Niall took a step. Then another. They were standing inches apart now, close enough to feel the heat coming off Ruben's body – he always ran hot, like a furnace, like something burning under the skin. Niall could see the pores on his nose, the slight yellowing of one tooth, the dark stubble coming through along his jaw. He could see everything. He'd spent thirty years learning the geography of Ruben's face, and still it felt like unknown territory.
Ruben tilted his head, studying him. "You're shaking."
"Aye."
"Good." Ruben said it without malice, as if he were noting the weather. Then he leaned forward and spat, a quick clean arc that landed on the hollow of Niall's throat, just above the collarbone. Niall felt it – warm, then cooling, sliding down toward the neck of his shirt – and did not move to wipe it away. He knew better. He'd learned that lesson the hard way, years ago, in this same room, when Ruben had broken two of his fingers for flinching.
"Brothers do this," Ruben said, almost conversational. "This is what brothers do. Ye know that, don't ye?"
Niall nodded, a small jerky motion. "Aye."
"See, people don't understand. They look at us and they think – what's wrong with them? What's wrong with those two?" Ruben smiled, not a nice smile. "But they don't get it. This –" He gestured between them, a vague wave of his hand. "– this is the real thing. This is what it means. Ye don't get this clean, Niall. Ye don't get it in a card shop."
Niall felt the spit drying on his throat, a tightening of the skin. He could smell it now, too – Ruben's smell, salt and smoke and something animal. It was disgusting. It was familiar. The two things had become so tangled over the years that Niall couldn't separate them anymore, couldn't say where revulsion ended and something else began.
"I'm getting married tomorrow," Niall said, and his voice came out thin, reedy, a boy's voice trapped in a man's body.
Ruben's smile didn't change. "I know ye are."
"He's good, Ruben. Alby's good. He's –"
"I know who Alby is." The name in Ruben's mouth became something ugly, something flattened. "I know exactly who Alby is. I've known Alby since he was a wee boy following you around the union, looking at ye with those –" He broke off, made a face. "Ye don't need to tell me about Alby."
Niall's hands were shaking now, visibly. He clasped them behind his back, a gesture so old and ingrained that he didn't notice he'd done it. "Why are you here?"
"Ye invited me."
"I – aye. I did." Niall had sent the invitation six weeks ago, sitting at the kitchen table in the flat he shared with Alby, Alby asleep in the next room. He'd addressed the envelope in his neatest handwriting, put a stamp on it, walked it to the postbox at the end of the street. He'd done all of that knowing exactly what it meant, and he'd done it anyway. That was the part he couldn't explain to anyone – not to Alby, not to himself. The part where he'd wanted Ruben there. The part where the wedding didn't feel real unless Ruben was present to witness it, to ruin it, to remind Niall of who he actually was under the suit and the vows and the careful, constructed happiness.
"Ye invited me," Ruben said again, "and now ye're standing there asking why I'm here. That's you all over, isn't it? That's you in a nutshell." He stepped back, giving Niall room to breathe, but the reprieve was brief. "What do you want me to do about it, Niall? What do ye want from me?"
Niall opened his mouth, but nothing came out. The question was too large. He'd been asking himself the same thing for three decades and had never found an answer that stuck. What did he want from Ruben? Protection. Punishment. Approval. Annihilation. All of it, at once, forever.
Ruben watched him flounder, and something flickered across his face – satisfaction, maybe, or a cousin of it. "Thought so. You don't know, do ye? You've never known. That's the problem right there." He reached up and scratched idly at the cut above his eyebrow, smearing the blood sideways. "I'm going to do something now, Niall, and I want ye to understand that this is not because I'm angry. This is not because I hate you. This is what we do."
Niall braced himself. Thirty years of practice had taught him to read the signs – the shift in Ruben's posture, the lowering of his centre of gravity, the way his hands would curl at his sides. But knowing what was coming and being ready for it were two different things, and when Ruben's forehead slammed into the bridge of his nose, Niall was not ready.
The pain was immediate and spectacular – a white-hot detonation behind his eyes that sent him staggering backward, hands flying to his face. His vision blurred, then cleared, then blurred again. He felt the blood before he saw it, a hot rush over his upper lip, copper in his mouth. His knees hit the floorboards with a crack that he felt rather than heard, and then he was on his side, curled like a question mark, making small animal sounds that he couldn't control.
Ruben stood over him, breathing hard, his own forehead already reddening where it had connected with Niall's face. He didn't look angry. He looked, if anything, almost peaceful. The way a man might look after finishing a hard day's work.
"Shh," Ruben said, crouching down beside him. "Shh now. It's done. The worst bit's done." He put a hand on Niall's shoulder, heavy and warm, and Niall flinched but didn't pull away. He couldn't. His face was a symphony of pain, his thoughts scattered like glass. "Breathe through your mouth. Go on. Through your mouth."
Niall tried. The air tasted of iron. His nose was fucked – he could tell that much, could feel the wrongness of it, the way cartilage had shifted out of true. He'd had his nose broken before, twice, both times by Ruben. The first had been when they were teenagers, after Niall had snitched about something small – a stolen bicycle, maybe, or a fight at the pub – and Ruben had held his head underwater in the canal until he'd passed out and then broken his nose for good measure when he came to. The second had been at university, in the hallway of his halls of residence, with Alby watching. Alby had been watching then, too. Alby was always watching, the audience to the longest-running horror show in Glasgow.
"How's that feel?" Ruben asked, and his voice was genuinely curious, like a doctor asking a patient to describe their symptoms.
"Fuck," Niall managed.
"Fuck," Ruben agreed. "Aye. That sounds about right." He pulled a crumpled pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his jeans, tapped one out, lit it with a cheap plastic lighter. The smoke unfurled in the dim air, bluish-grey, reaching for the ceiling. Ruben took a long drag, held it, exhaled through his nose. "Ye still with me, Bambi?"
Niall didn't answer. He was on his hands and knees now, head hanging low, blood dripping steadily onto the floorboards in fat dark drops that spread outward in slow, irregular circles. He watched them fall, fascinated and horrified in equal measure. His brain was trying to process the pain, to file it somewhere manageable, and failing. He felt, distantly, that he might be sick.
Ruben watched the blood pool for a moment, then reached down and hooked a hand under Niall's arm, hauling him upright with an ease that was almost insulting. Niall's legs buckled, and Ruben caught him, held him steady, their bodies pressed together in a parody of an embrace. "Come on now. Up ye get. Ye can't lie on the floor all night. Wedding tomorrow. Big day." He grinned, blood on his forehead, blood on his teeth from where the impact had split his own lip without him noticing. "Ye want to look your best."
Niall made a sound that might have been a laugh or a sob; even he wasn't certain. His face was a ruin. He could feel his left eye beginning to swell, the socket filling with a hot, pulsing pressure. "Why do you –" He stopped, swallowed blood. "Why do you always –"
"Why do I always what?" Ruben's voice sharpened. He was still holding Niall up, one arm around his back, the other hand holding the cigarette between two fingers. The smoke curled up between them. "Go on. Say it."
Niall didn't say it. He'd learned not to say things.
"That's what I thought." Ruben pulled the cigarette from his mouth, looked at it for a long moment. The tip glowed orange in the half-light, a small angry sun. Then he pressed it to the bare skin of Niall's forearm.
The sound Niall made wasn't a scream. It was something older than a scream, something from the back of the throat, a guttural noise that belonged more to animal than to man. His body jerked, but Ruben held him fast. The cigarette sizzled against his flesh, and the smell came a moment later; acrid, cooked, unmistakable. Skin and tobacco, burning together.
Ruben held it there for a count of three – one, two, three, the way he always did – and then pulled it away, examining the small circular burn with something that looked almost like tenderness. "There now," he said. "That'll scab over nice. Ye'll have something to remember me by."
Niall's arm throbbed. The pain was different from his nose – sharper, more localised, a pinpoint of pure agony that seemed to drill straight through skin and muscle and down into bone. His eyes were watering, tears mixing with the blood on his face, turning it pink. He hated that he was crying. He hated that Ruben could see it. He hated, most of all, that some part of him – some small, shameful part – was grateful for the pain, because the pain was proof. The pain meant Ruben was still here. The pain meant Ruben still cared enough to hurt him.
Ruben let him go, and Niall slumped backward against the wall, his legs giving out entirely. He slid down until he was sitting, knees drawn up, head tilted back against the peeling wallpaper. His arm was still smoking faintly. He watched the smoke rise and thought about nothing at all.
Ruben finished his cigarette in silence, stubbed it out on the floorboards, and stood looking down at Niall for a long while. His expression was unreadable. "D'ye remember," he said eventually, "the first time ye ever pissed yourself?"
Niall blinked. The question was so unexpected that it cut through the fog of pain. "What?"
"The first time. D'ye remember? I do." Ruben crouched again, bringing his face level with Niall's. The blood was drying on his forehead, a dark smear like a thumbprint. "First day of school. First week, even. Ye were sat in the back of the class, and the big bad bully and his lads had been at ye all morning, calling ye a poof, calling ye a fairy, all the usual. And ye just sat there, didn't say a word, didn't cry, didn't do anything. And then the bell rang and ye stood up and the whole front of your trousers was soaked. I saw it. Everyone saw it. And the boy pointed and laughed – Jesus, he near pissed himself laughing – and ye just stood there. Didn't run. Didn't hide. Didn't do a thing."
Niall remembered. Christ, he remembered. He'd been fourteen, small for his age, still soft around the edges in a way that marked him out from being homeschooled. He'd stood in that classroom while everyone filed out, the wet spreading cold against his thighs, and he'd felt nothing. No. That wasn't right. He'd felt everything, but he'd packed it away so tightly that it had become nothing. A neat trick. A survival mechanism. He'd been doing it ever since.
"I saw that," Ruben said, "and I thought – there's a wee fella who needs someone to look after him. Someone to teach him. Someone to make sure the world doesn't eat him alive." He smiled, and for the first time there was something almost soft in it. "And I did, didn't I? I taught ye. I taught ye how to fight. I taught ye how to take a punch. I taught ye how to be hard when ye needed to be hard."
"You taught me how to be afraid," Niall said. His voice was barely there, a whisper scraped raw.
Ruben considered this. "Aye," he said. "Same thing."
He reached out and took hold of Niall's jaw again, thumb pressing into the soft place beneath the chin, and Niall felt a fresh spike of pain from his broken nose. Ruben's face was very close. His eyes had gone dark, the pupils wide, swallowing the pale. "The thing is, Niall – the thing is, I need to know that you're still mine. Tomorrow, you're going to stand in that church and you're going to say words to Alby, and Alby's going to think he's won something. Alby's going to think that he's taken you away from me. And I need to know –" He squeezed, just slightly, just enough. "– I need to know right now that he hasn't."
"What do you want?" Niall whispered. The question again. The question that never got answered.
Ruben leaned in close, his mouth at Niall's ear, his breath hot and damp. "I want ye to let go," he said. "Right here. Right now.
There was a silence. A long one. Niall's mind went white, then blank, then filled with a roaring static that drowned out everything else. He knew what Ruben was asking. He knew, and the knowing was worse than the asking, because it meant that Ruben understood him in ways that no one else ever had. Ruben knew exactly where the limits were, and exactly how to push past them.
"I can't," Niall said.
"Ye can." Ruben pulled back, and his expression was calm, almost kind. "You've done it before. I've seen ye. I've been there every time." He stood up, took a step back, giving Niall room. "Go on, Bambi. It's just us. No one's watching. No one's going to know except you and me, and we already know everything about each other anyway, don't we? So what's one more thing?"
Niall looked up at him. The blood had mostly stopped, his nose now a swollen, throbbing mass in the centre of his face. The burn on his arm had settled into a steady, nauseating ache. His whole body was a map of everything Ruben had ever done to him, and he was still here, still sat on the floor of a Glasgow bedsit, still waiting for the next thing, the next blow, the next impossible demand.
He closed his eyes.
And then he let go.
The warmth spread through his trousers, dark against the grey fabric, and he felt it – Christ, he felt it – the relief and the shame all tangled up together, the surrender of something he hadn't even known he was still holding on to. The floorboards beneath him grew wet. The air filled with the smell of it, sharp and human. He kept his eyes shut, because opening them would mean seeing Ruben's face, and he couldn't do that. Maybe not ever.
He heard Ruben exhale, a long slow breath that sounded like satisfaction. Then footsteps, crossing the room toward him. Then Ruben's voice, very soft, very close; "There now. There's my boy."
He felt Ruben settle on the floor beside him, felt the weight and warmth of him pressed along one side. Ruben's arm came around his shoulders, pulling him in, and Niall went. He went without resistance, his body fitting into the curve of Ruben's the way it had always fitted, the way he'd been shaped to fit over three decades of practice. His face throbbed. His arm burned. His trousers were soaked and cooling. And Ruben held him, one hand cupping the back of his head, cradling him like something precious, something breakable.
"There," Ruben murmured into his hair. "That's it. That's the whole of it. Nobody knows you like I know you. Nobody ever will."
Niall didn't answer. His throat was too full. He pressed his face into the hollow of Ruben's shoulder and breathed in the smoke-and-sweat smell of him, and somewhere in the back of his mind – the part that was still capable of thought – he understood that this was exactly what he'd wanted, what he'd always wanted, what the wedding invitation had been designed to deliver. Ruben, here, dismantling him piece by piece. Ruben, holding the pieces afterward, keeping them safe.
Outside, the sun had set. The room grew dark. They sat together on the wet floorboards, and the silence spread out around them like a bruise, tender and deep and taking its time to heal.
After a while, Ruben shifted. "We should get ye cleaned up. Wedding tomorrow."
"Aye." Niall's voice was hoarse, distant. "Wedding tomorrow."
Ruben helped him up, steadied him when his legs wobbled, and led him toward the bathroom. The faucet groaned when he turned it on, the pipes shuddering inside the walls. Water splashed into the sink, and Ruben wet a cloth and pressed it gently to Niall's face, dabbing at the dried blood, the smeared tears, the spit on his throat. His hands were careful now. Almost reverent.
"This'll bruise up nice," Ruben said, touching the bridge of Niall's nose with one tentative fingertip. "You'll look like a boxer. Very manly. Alby'll be impressed."
Niall laughed – a small, cracked sound that hurt his ribs. "Alby doesn't want a boxer."
"Alby doesn't know what he wants." Ruben's tone was light, but underneath it ran something else, something darker. "Alby's never known."
They didn't talk about Alby after that. Ruben finished cleaning Niall's face, dabbed antiseptic on the burn on his arm, found a pair of trousers in the wardrobe that were only slightly too big and helped Niall into them. The wet clothes went into a plastic bag. The floor got mopped. Evidence, disposed of. Ruben was methodical about it, moving through the flat with the efficiency of long practice, and Niall sat on the edge of the mattress and watched him, still dizzy, still floating somewhere above his own body.
When Ruben was done, he came and sat beside Niall on the bed. Their shoulders touched. Neither of them spoke.
"Ye should eat something," Ruben said eventually.
"Not hungry."
"Don't care. Ye'll eat." He got up, rummaged in the tiny kitchenette, came back with two slices of white bread and a jar of jam. "Here. Get that down ye."
Niall ate because it was easier than arguing. The bread was stale, the jam too sweet, but it settled his stomach. Ruben watched him with an expression that Niall couldn't read – had never been able to read, not in thirty years of trying.
When the bread was gone, Ruben said: "I'm not coming to the wedding."
Niall went still.
"Not the ceremony, anyway. Maybe the reception." Ruben's voice was almost too casual. "I wanted to see ye before. Just us. Before all the –" He waved a hand, encompassing the church, the guests, the life that Niall had built without him. "– the performance."
"Is that what it is?"
"Isn't it?" Ruben looked at him sideways. "You, in your suit, saying words in front of everyone, pretending that ye belong to him? When we both know that ye don't. When we both know that this –" He tapped his chest, then tapped Niall's, a quick two-beat rhythm. "This is the real thing? Of course it's a performance. And ye've never been a very good actor, Bambi."
Niall opened his mouth to argue, but the words wouldn't come. Because Ruben was right. Of course he was right. He was always right about the things that mattered, the ugly things, the things that Niall had spent his whole life trying to hide from himself.
Ruben saw the surrender in his face and smiled – that slow, knowing smile that had haunted Niall since adolescence. "Don't worry. I'll behave. I'll sit at the back and I'll smile and I'll clap when I'm supposed to clap. I'll be the picture of brotherly love." He reached up and touched the cut on his forehead, which had finally stopped bleeding. "Unless ye want me to cause a scene."
"No," Niall said quickly.
"No?" Ruben raised an eyebrow. "Ye sure about that? Because the way I see it, if I cause a scene – if I stand up and tell everyone exactly what we are to each other – then ye don't have to go through with it. Ye get to blame me. Ye get to say to Alby, it wasn't my fault, it was Ruben, Ruben ruined everything." He leaned in. "Is that what ye want, Niall? D'ye want me to save you from yourself?"
Niall looked at him for a long moment. The swelling around his eye had reduced his vision to a slit on one side, but he could still see Ruben clearly enough: the face he'd been looking at for thirty years, the face that had been the first thing he saw in the morning and the last thing he saw at night for more of his life than not. The face that meant danger and safety and everything in between.
"No," he said, and this time he meant it.
Ruben held his gaze, searching for the lie. Whatever he found there seemed to satisfy him, because he nodded once and leaned back on his hands. "Alright then. Alright. I'll be good." He was quiet for a beat. "D'ye love him?"
The question landed harder than the headbutt. Niall felt it in his chest, a sharp quick compression. "Aye," he said. "I do."
"More than you love me?"
Niall's breath caught. The room seemed to hold still, the dust suspended in the amber light, the whole world waiting for his answer. He thought about lying – he was good at lying, he'd had thirty years of practice – but lying to Ruben was like trying to hide from your own shadow. Pointless.
"It's different," he said finally. "What I feel for Alby. What I feel for –" He couldn't say it. Couldn't say you. "It's different. That's all."
Ruben absorbed this. His expression didn't change, but something moved behind his eyes, something that Niall couldn't name. "Different?" he repeated. "Aye. Well. That's something, I suppose."
He stood up, and the moment broke. The room was fully dark now, the only light coming from the streetlamp outside, a thin orange glow that cut through the gap in the curtains and lay across the floor like a ribbon. Ruben walked to the door, pulled on his jacket, and stood with his hand on the handle for a long moment.
"Tomorrow," he said, not turning around. "I'll be there. I'll sit at the back. I'll be good. And then afterward –" He turned his head, just enough that Niall could see the side of his face. "– afterward, we'll see."
Niall wanted to say something. Something that would sum up thirty years of damage and devotion, something that would explain the two of them in a way that made sense. But there were no words for it, not in English, not in any language. There was only this; the two of them, in this room, in this city, in this life they'd made together and broken together and couldn't seem to leave.
"Ruben," he said.
"Aye?"
Niall hesitated. "Don't be late."
Ruben's mouth twitched. It was almost a smile. "Wouldn't dream of it."
The door opened. The door closed. Niall sat alone on the mattress, listening to Ruben's footsteps on the stairs, the heavy familiar tread fading into silence. The flat smelled of smoke and blood and ammonia. His face throbbed. His arm throbbed. His heart, against all odds, was still beating.
He looked down at his hands. They were shaking. They were always shaking. He remembered what Ruben had said – I taught you to be afraid – and thought, maybe that was the truest thing anyone had ever told him. Maybe that was the whole story of his life, right there.
He lay back on the mattress and stared at the ceiling. The cracks were still there, the same cracks he'd counted every night for years. In the morning, he would get up. He would shower. He would put on his suit. He would stand in front of a church full of people and promise himself to a man who had never hurt him, who had never broken his nose or put out a cigarette on his arm or made him piss himself to prove a point.
And Ruben would be there, at the back, watching. Ruben would always be there. That was the deal. That was the bargain Niall had made with the universe thirty years ago, and he was still paying on it, and he would probably be paying on it until he died.
He closed his eyes. In the dark, he could still feel the phantom pressure of Ruben's arm around his shoulders, the warmth of his breath against his hair, the low rumble of his voice saying there now, there's my boy. He held onto it. He held onto it the way a drowning man holds onto a stone.