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Jay is reading a book.
This is decidedly not a normal activity for Jay, first of all. Matt honestly wouldn’t have been that surprised to find out that Jay couldn’t read at all if he hadn’t known otherwise after two decades with him.
It’s Matt’s fault, this abnormal behaviour. Jay would never admit it, but Matt knows – it’s not exactly subtle. Yesterday, after a disastrous failure of a plan involving trying to ingratiate themselves with a street gang so they could coerce the Rivoli into letting Nirvanna the Band play, a series of escalating events had culminated in Matt accusing Jay of being inerudite. Matt doesn’t think it’s the worst thing he could have called him, really – Jay had said such stupid things to the thug they were talking to that he'd nearly gotten them both shanked – but it probably hadn’t helped that he’d gone on to explain in patronizing detail what exactly inerudite meant. Hey, it wasn’t his fault that Jay hadn’t known the word!
Anyway, there may have been a comment or two related to literacy and books in Matt’s rant that Jay had clearly taken to heart. Whatever.
The important thing is that when Matt wakes up in the morning, Jay is already up and he’s lounging on the sofa with The Great Gatsby cracked open in front of him.
He looks stupidly, disgustingly good. It’s something about the way that he’s sprawled out, maybe, that makes him look – somehow, impossibly – even better than usual. Which is saying a lot, because he always looks stupidly, disgustingly good.
Or maybe it’s the pseudo-intellectual look he’s got going on, with his nose in the book, held loosely in one slender hand while his fingertips flick idly over the pages. Matt doubts that Jay is actually reading, or at least doubts that he’s actually absorbing the words in front of him, but somehow that doesn’t make him seem any less attractive to Matt – more, if anything.
Something’s wrong with him, but then he’s always known that, hasn’t he?
Matt forces himself to stop staring and gets out of bed. To his chagrin, Jay doesn’t look up as he clambers down from the top bunk and strips off his sleep shirt or when he bangs his way into and then out of the bathroom or when he loudly hurls open the cupboard to get to the cereal. Matt hesitates in front of the cabinet with the bowls, glancing over at Jay through the doorway. He still doesn’t look up, even after Matt clears his throat pointedly.
He sighs and accepts that he’ll have to be the first to speak. “Have you eaten already?”
Jay hums affirmatively in response, turning the page of his book with a smooth shick.
“Bird,” Matt whines.
“Shh.” Jay is rubbing the edge of the paperback cover between his index and middle fingers in a way that strikes Matt as frankly obscene, borderline pornographic. “I’m reading, dude.”
Matt tugs at the collar of his shirt; his skin’s gone hot and itchy underneath. “The Great Gatsby, really. Of all the books to choose.”
“Hey. It’s intellectual.”
“Maybe to high school English teachers. Come on, bird, we both know you’re not actually reading. Let’s make a new Rivoli plan instead, get on the piano.”
Jay finally looks up, but just for half a second and only to scowl at him. “Yes, I am. Stop bothering me.”
Matt can physically feel himself rapidly shifting into maximal annoyance mode, irritated at the brush off. “Bird, that’s a stupid book. I read it in school, and it was stupid then, and it’s stupid now. C’mon, put it away.” He puts the bowl and cereal box back in the cabinet and bounds out into the living room.
“Bird. Bird.” He drops down at the end of the sofa, right on top of Jay’s lower legs. Jay groans and wiggles his feet out from under Matt’s thighs, then rests them on his lap. He turns the page again, still not paying him any mind. “Jaybird, you psycho, you freak. Stop. Stop. Stop –”
“Shut up.”
Matt pokes Jay’s side, just below the jut of his ribcage. Escalating – overreacting, Matt would say – Jay kicks him hard with his heel in retaliation, digging viciously into the meat of his thigh. He grabs Jay by the ankle and holds his foot in place to keep him from kicking; Jay squirms and tries to kick more, but Matt has no trouble holding his leg in place. His wiggling around causes his pant leg to ride up, though, and Matt very suddenly finds himself sort of caressing Jay’s bare ankle. The skin under his hand is warm and smooth.
Matt swallows. His throat hurts.
“Stop it! Stay still. Put the book away. I bet you couldn’t even tell me a single thing that’s happened in it.”
Jay frowns, looks down at the page in front of him. “Gatsby bought his house just so Daisy would be right across the bay,” Jay says to Matt, tone strangely plaintive.
“Great. You done?”
“It’s sort of. Romantic.”
Matt remembers thinking the same thing, the one time he’d read the book. He’d spoken in class, even, something he usually knew better than to do by Grade Eleven, said he thought that level of devotion was clear proof that Gatsby must have loved Daisy more than her husband ever did. He’d swiftly been told by several people that his behaviour was obsessive and creepy, actually, and had then promptly shut his mouth and sulked quietly for the rest of the class.
He hasn’t read or even thought about the book since, until now. For some reason, he feels a bit funny knowing that Jay agrees with him. He tries not to think about the fact that technically he had bought this house just so Jay would stay with him, stay close to him.
He clears his throat. “Seriously, let’s do a plan today.”
“Do you even have one?”
“Well, I will once you give me some background music to brainstorm to, bird! We’ll come up with one together, just! Get! Up!” He punctuates each word with a shove to Jay’s calf. He remains stubbornly in place, legs heavy and warm in Matt’s lap, ankles bare. Maybe the Victorians were onto something with their whole ankle thing after all, he thinks faintly.
“I don’t want to move,” Jay whines, but at least he finally sets the book down, spread open spine-up on the floor.
Matt sighs heavily, but doesn’t immediately try again to shove Jay off of him. It’s kind of nice, sitting like this. Even without musical accompaniment, he’s already turning ideas over in his head, trying to formulate something that will capture Jay’s interest, running on the one new source of inspiration he has.
The Great Gatsby plan – no, the Great Gatsby Gambit. They – they throw a party to get the attention of the Rivoli, something so grand and ostentatious that the booking manager will beg for them to come play a show. Like the Rivoli is Daisy Buchanan and her green light and they’re Gatsby, or Nirvanna the Band is Gatsby, or, or something. He’s losing track of the idea already, it’s probably a good thing that he isn’t trying to write this out on the board for Jay. It’s not one of his best. And it hadn’t worked out so well for Gatsby in the end either, had it?
“Fine,” he capitulates, partly because he’s realized that he doesn’t have any new ideas to pitch and partly because he does kind of want to stay here like this with Jay a bit longer, with his hands on his ankles. “I guess we can just rest today, since you want to so bad. You’re welcome.”
“Okay,” Jay says, bright and empty. He settles a little deeper into the sofa, heels rolling against Matt’s thigh, and stretches his outside arm down to reach for the book again.
Matt snags him at the wrist by the soft baby-blue fabric of his light overshirt, pulling his hand back up before he can grab it. He hesitates a moment where he should have let go, and for some reason Jay’s fingers curl around the back of his hand, settling with his pinkie just above his wrist bone. His index finger swirls and loops, drawing tiny circles along the line of Matt’s knuckles.
It occurs to Matt that it’s a rather similar motion to what Jay had been doing to his book a few minutes ago and he needs to direct his gaze away hastily. It ends up being far too jerky and obvious; he throws his head back in a single violent movement so he’s staring straight up at the ceiling, and he’s gone tense and stone-still under Jay. The circles over his knuckles stop.
“MJ?”
Matt doesn’t move, or respond, or breathe. He stays perfectly still and tries to get a hold of himself, to remember what this is and more importantly what it isn’t, the lines he’s not allowed to cross. It’s all gone blurry in his head, though, and all of a sudden it’s too much to handle. He’s never – it’s always been like this, he’s always felt like this about Jay, but he’s never felt this completely out of control of himself like he does right now.
He’s never had this much trouble keeping it pressed down before. It’s never been this stark in his brain, this impossible to ignore – he’s gotten so good at ignoring his feelings that he honestly doesn’t even remember that he has them, most of the time. The whole being in love with Jay McCarrol thing is usually much less of a problem than he initially had expected it to be when he’d first consciously realized it nearly a decade ago in their old Queen Street apartment. If there’s one thing that Matt is good at, it’s ignoring inconvenient feelings. Well. Until now, seemingly.
The alarming out-of-control wanting refuses to wane, and Matt keeps staring up at the ceiling, face hot and prickling. He can feel that his hand is trembling a little where it’s still curled around Jay’s right ankle, but he can’t gather the resolve that he’d need to tear it away.
Jay coughs, pointed. Matt can feel the weight of his eyes, watching him.
“Um,” he says to the ceiling. “Bird, I, just give me a moment.”
“Why?” Jay asks. His forefinger taps against the back of Matt’s hand once, twice. “What’s… what is going on right now?”
Matt’s stomach is doing something completely stupid, flipping all over the place like he’s riding a roller coaster at Canada’s Wonderland. It’s killing him to not know what sort of expression Jay has on his face, and so he finds himself slowly tilting his chin down until he’s looking at him again.
Jay has half-raised himself up so that he’s moved his face closer to Matt’s, propped up by one elbow while he uses his other arm to continue to hold on to Matt’s hand. They sit there like that for a long moment, just looking at each other. Jay’s face is expectant and increasingly impatient, but words have completely failed Matt at this point. He just sits there gaping dumbly with his mouth half open, drinking in the way that the light reflects and dances in Jay’s eyes. Then, eventually, when it’s already been way, way too long, he goes and makes it even worse and starts looking at his lips instead.
Jay swallows, and shifts in a way that results in Matt being able to feel the pulse in his ankle, under his thumb. It’s going lightning fast.
“Birdie,” he chokes out breathlessly. He can’t stop staring at his mouth.
“Oh my god,” says Jay. “Oh my god. You – ?” He sits up properly, and in the process folds up his knees, removing his feet from Matt’s lap and dislodging his grip from his ankle.
Miserably, Matt pulls his hand to his chest, cradling it in the palm of his other hand, which he tugs from Jay’s grip. “Jaybird, it doesn’t matter, okay? Please don’t be angry –”
“Oh my god,” Jay says again, with sharp emphasis. He doesn’t sound mad at all, more radiantly delighted, if anything. And then, before there’s time to even begin processing the implications of that, he gets his hand around the back of Matt’s neck and drags him down into a kiss.
It’s a terrible kiss, because Matt makes it terrible. Stunned, he doesn’t react for far too long and then when he finally does he nearly bites Jay’s lip off instead of kissing him properly. They pull apart and Matt’s gasping like he’s ran a whole marathon at a sprint. It should be embarrassing, mortifying, but Jay is grinning at him as if he’s the most incredible thing in the world anyway and Matt doesn’t have room to feel anything but euphoria.
“Jay,” he says, or tries to say. What comes out instead is more of a crazed sort of laugh mixed with a genuinely giddy squeal.
Jay is still holding him by the back of his neck, grip firm and steadying. His fingers are threaded through the wispy hairs at the nape of his neck, drawing circles into his skin again. Or maybe they’re little hearts, even, either way it’s so unbearably sweet that Matt wants to vomit. He turns on the sofa so that he and Jay are facing each other properly in more comfortable positions. Their faces are so close that he can feel the warm whisper of Jay’s breath against his skin, and he giggles helplessly. They’d just kissed.
Well, sort of. Badly. The responding thought strikes him like it’s come from somewhere else entirely: They’re about to kiss again, but this time he’s going to do it better. He half-wonders for a second where the thought had come from, but then he finds himself sliding a hand up to Jay’s cheek and pulling him back in.
They do kiss again, and it is better. Matt’s got Jay’s face cradled in his hands and he guides him gently like that, pressing in so that their mouths slide smoothly together. Jay’s fingers curl into his hair, holding him tight and ensuring that he can’t pull away – not that Matt would ever want to, but the sentiment alone is thrilling all the same.
Jay’s lips part and then their mouths open into each other and there’s tongue. Matt hasn’t tongue kissed anyone in probably a decade and he certainly has never actually enjoyed it before.
He’s definitely enjoying this.
They shift and roll until they’re lying entwined together on the sofa, never breaking the kiss. Matt’s higher brain functions have yet to fully return to him, but it’s starting to sink in that he is currently experiencing the best thing that has ever happened to him. The realization only has him holding Jay tighter, deepening the kiss further.
Time passes, or maybe it doesn’t. Everything is spinning and swirling and bubbling with little cartoon hearts and Matt doesn’t know anything except for Jay and kissing Jay and touching Jay.
When they eventually slow – maybe only a couple of minutes later, or maybe it’s been hours or even days – Jay props himself up and takes Matt’s hands in his. “That was nice,” he whispers, adorably shy about it.
“Nice?” Matt scoffs. “Ringing endorsement, bird.”
“No, I mean… I’ve wanted to do that for a long time.”
They could be actively playing a show at the Rivoli and Matt still couldn’t possibly feel even a fraction of the joy that he does right now. “Me too,” he confesses, and it barely even feels like a confession at all – Jay had said it first, even!
Jay smiles, all soft and happy, and then mutters “I didn’t know if you were – if you’d be into this.”
Under different circumstances, Matt might have kicked up some sort of fuss about that. Under this one, he just squeezes Jay’s hands and says the honest truth, which is “I’m into you. Everything, anything, with you.”
“Oh,” says Jay, “good. That’s… yeah.”
“It’s yeah?” Matt teases.
“It’s definitely yeah. Very yeah.” Somehow, Jay manages to make that non-sensical phrase sound like some sort of romantic revelation.
Matt laughs weakly and presses his forehead against Jay’s. It spills right out of him: “Let’s do this forever?”
It’s a question that he’s never before dared to ask, the question under everything he’s ever done, driving all his actions on a deep, fundamental level. He had never intended to ask it out loud – it’s too risky, the answer could be devastating, the type of thing he could never recover from – but it’s burst out of him thoughtlessly now, here with his lips numb from kissing and cheeks raw with beard burn, here with Jay’s fingers threaded through his, here on their living room sofa, here on top of the world.
Jay knows exactly what Matt means, he can tell from the light of recognition in his eyes, the way his face softens and steadies. He also seems to realize, somehow, that Matt’s gone and handed him his heart. Jay treats it with care, leans forward and kisses him again with near unbearable tenderness, then smiles at him soft like the kiss and says “alright. Let’s do this forever.”
And the madly insane, magical, incredible thing is this: They do.