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“You ordered way too much.” Phil chuckles as he accompanies Dan in taking various boxes out of a large paper bag, damp and ripping at the bottom.
There are bags under Phil’s eyes but a soft smile on his lips. The words come out fond and tired. Happy. Dan wants to order too much food every day for the rest of his life to keep hearing him sound like that.
“We deserve it.”
“We do. I feel like I could sleep forever.” Dan wants to tell he can. He can’t. They have a little break from the tour now, but soon enough it’ll be back—and in America, a whole new beast in its own right. And there’s videos and contracts and visas and surely other logistics to deal with in the meantime. Besides, Dan would miss him.
“Me too.” He settles on saying instead. It’s not particularly true. Right now, he feels close to immortal, invincible—restless. Like a shark, like he could keep moving forever and is unsure of what’ll happen now that he’s temporarily motionless. Nothing bad at all, it seems so far.
Their coffee table is a little too full. Dan feels almost proud at the spread, at the sheer excess of it all. They can do this now.
It’s not like tour is particularly profitable endeavour, but with everything they have built up to this point, gone are the days where they’d force themselves to cook because they didn’t want to force themselves to ask Phil’s parents for money at the end of the month.
They are worlds away but there are parallels. It’s still them, it’s still Domino’s, it’s still the floor of their living room over a dining table—but Dan ordered everything that sounded good to him. He didn’t think anything of the total, or the delivery fee, or of tipping the delivery guy. It’s nice. He stares as Phil, a little too endeared by a guy struggling to open a box of deep-fried potato edges. It rips, and Phil puts the ripped lid on the ground. He catches Dan’s staring when he looks back up.
“Shut up.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You thought it.” Dan smiles at him, without replying. “Shut up!”
There’s a playful whine in his voice, creeping into the tiredness. Yeah. This is nice. It’s beyond his wildest dreams, even. Dan doesn’t want to lose any part of it. Not Phil, not the career, not the simultaneous and irrevocable association and separation of the two. It’s necessary for the maintenance of his evenings looking like something he could imagine himself deliriously wishing for as a teen.
“Are you not going to eat? I definitely can’t do this alone.”
Neither can I. Dan almost says, before he’s even fully snapped out of his thoughts. There’s already a grease stain on Phil’s jumper. He attempts to smile but his face was already long ahead of him.
“Yeah, sorry. Of course.”
They don’t talk much while they’re eating, and what they do is about the shows, the people they met, the people they’ll meet in a few months. Dan can imagine it’s not great to talk about their professional life in moments where they’re just living their personal one, but it doesn’t feel like that. Once again, it’s both the association and separation. And besides, it’s not general work, it’s maybe the best part of it.
Dan is glad he can do it for a living, and like this. He and Phil got on like a house on fire from the very first moment, their chemistry is the truest thing he’s ever known: it’s palpable, it’s genuine, it’s personal—and it translates. They took the way their brains were cut from the same stretch of fabric of the universe, and made a career, an empire, out of it.
There are less than positive things associated with this. Two young men had their pinkies linked on the tube the other day. He imagined himself, and Phil, as a faded glass painting over their frames, their own pinkies interlocked in place of theirs. It partly looked like a dream. It mostly made him want to throw up. Dan looked away. It wasn’t worth dwelling on either way, but he would have tried to take a step away from Phil if he wasn’t already pressed into the wall of the carriage. He caught Phil looking at their hands too. His gaze lingered a bit too long to be discreet, but Dan didn’t have the heart to call him on it.
He also couldn’t pretend he didn’t notice the way Phil was a little quieter the rest of the way home, a little clingier once they got there. The way that for a few hours his laugh was a little more muted, his smile didn’t reach his eyes quite in the same way. Dan was almost angry at the boys for causing that, and then he was angry at himself, because they were but innocent bystanders—he’s the real villain here.
Phil would be even more upset if Dan had voiced that to him, so he didn’t. Instead, without telling Phil, he ordered burgers and fries and milkshakes, put on The Real Housewives of Atlanta and let Phil fall asleep cuddling up to him in the couch, even though it hurt his shoulder and made his arm go numb. It was worth it. He could be good for Phil. He is good for him, just not in every single way, as much as that pains him. He is in the ways that matter. He has to be. All of it has to be worthy.
He’s taken away from his thoughts by a tiny yelp—Phil spilled Pepsi on the carpet. Dan reprimands with a grin on his face and his hands already ripping sheets of kitchen roll.
There are only a few slices of pizza leftover, somehow. Dan is full. There’s still something buzzing under his skin. He stills feels as though he could eat the world. He climbs next to Phil on the couch, places a hand on his chest. Phil is settled against the cushions, chin raised, arms at his side.
“What are you doing?” Phil asks. Dan wasn’t aware he was doing anything. He tells Phil so.
“You are. And you keep looking at me like that.”
“I’m not looking at you like that.” Dan replies, mimicking quotations marks around the last couple words with the hand not currently moving down Phil’s torso. The littlest edge of his pinkie moves under Phil’s waistband. Phil groans, deep in his throat. It’s exasperated rather than pleased.
“None of that. I feel like a beached whale.” Dan doesn’t move his hand any lower, but he does keep it on Phil, tracing lines up and down, slowly, gently. A threat of cotton from Phil’s jumper catches at his fingernail. He would ask Phil to take it off, but then he’d be cold.
“You don’t look like one.”
Phil doesn’t laugh, but he does raise his head to look at Dan. There’s an amused glint in his eyes. Dan thinks he could describe in detail every single expression he has seen in them. “It’s that supposed to be flirting? Telling me I don’t look like a massive, bloated, decomposing carcass?”
“I mean…It’s worked for me so far. I’m here, am I not?”
“I guess. You stalked your way into my life, I didn’t really have a choice, did I?” The words are accompanied by a smile so tender it renders them meaningless.
Dan goes onto his knees on the sofa cushion, so he can look down at Phil’s face. It’s a nice face. He could look at it forever. He’s planning to.
“Shut up. You love me. You’re obsessed with me. You waited your whole life to meet me.” The words ring true as he says them—they don’t always. He’s glad they do right now. He pokes Phil’s side for emphasis—not enough to make him ticklish. He has the technique down, like any others related to Phil. He’s glad for that too.
Phil raises an eyebrow. “Mighty big ego there.”
Dan raises his own back. “You didn’t deny it.”
“I didn’t.”
And that is the thing that finally knocks the wind from his chest. He sits back on his heels. You’re a dream come true. He doesn’t say. How did you manage to make this out of my life? He doesn’t ask. He settles on the cushions and presses his face into Phil’s neck instead, kisses the skin there like it’s the only thing he can do. His hand grips the fabric of Phil’s jumper on its own accord.
“Thank you.” The words come out low and muffled. Phil hears them, understands them anyway. Of course he does.
“For what?”
Dan didn’t plan this far. He thinks of snow on Phil’s parents’ backyard, of a tiny bedroom in a tiny flat up North, of cardboard boxes, of radio studios, of cherry blossoms, of the hundreds of faces they’ve seen together over the last few months, of the leftover pizza on their coffee table. He looks up at Phil. He thinks of those eyes, as they are, as they were, half-covered by a mane of dark hair, all those years ago.
“Everything.”
“Oh. It’s nothing. Thank you, too.”
Like it’s the easiest thing in the world. It is. (It’s not.) Phil drops his head onto his shoulder. Dan puts an arm around him, presses a kiss on the top of his head. It is. (It’s not.)