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It’s past one in the morning by the time that Phil admits to himself that he might not be able to fall asleep without Dan.
They went to a party tonight before turning in and going back to the hotel – a sort of afterparty for the first night of Vidcon that neither of them really wanted to be at but that Dan was reluctant to leave. They got back exhausted around midnight, like two Cinderella characters who were left on the cutting room floor by the anti-gay Disney censors. Despite how exhausted Phil is – and he really, really is, it’s undeniable – he can’t bring himself to sleep.
He rolls over in his tiny twin bed, his legs splayed like a scarecrow’s underneath the fluffy hotel blankets. Every time he and Dan stay in a hotel, they have this problem. The beds are too small, and they promise to themselves and to each other that next time, next time, they’ll remember to ask for jumbo twin beds.
And every time they make that promise, there’s a hell of a lot that’s left unsaid. Mainly, the fact that no twin beds, no matter the size, will ever feel like they fit.
He makes a list, against his best interest, of everyone who was at the little party they went to. Felix and Marzia. Mark and Amy. Anthony and Ian, both of whom brought their girlfriends. They probably all went back to hotel rooms with one bed. They didn’t have to follow their request for a single room with excuses about business partnerships and work deadlines.
Phil feels angry and lonely. He feels cold. Not physically, it’s impossible to be physically cold in California in July, but emotionally, he feels frozen solid. Somewhat appropriately, for someone who’s frozen solid, he can’t bring himself to do what he really wants to do. Every nerve in his body is screaming at him to get up and push the two beds together. Or maybe just to climb into Dan’s twin bed. It doesn’t matter if there isn’t space for the both of them. They could defy a few laws of the universe. They’ve done more difficult things. But Phil doesn’t want to push.
Dan is the one who always explicitly asks for two beds when they’re finding a hotel room. Phil knows why it has to happen, and he agrees — he isn’t any more ready to be outed to millions of people than Dan is. Still, every time Dan asks, it’s a reminder, a punch in the gut.
The true irony of all of this is that they don’t even snuggle to fall asleep. If they were lying in the same bed, they’d probably be doing exactly what they’re doing right now, just closer. And that’s what Phil wants, what he needs. To be as close to Dan as possible. If he could crawl under Dan’s skin without hurting him, he would do it. Just stay there, nice and cozy.
He doesn’t get up and push the beds together. He doesn’t want Dan to feel like he’s being backed into a corner, and he doesn’t want Dan to feel like Phil resents him, because really, he doesn’t. The very few people that he’s out to have asked him how that’s possible. To Phil, it feels fairly obvious. He doesn’t get angry often. He just doesn’t have that much rage inside of him. But when he does feel it — like right now, says a treacherous little voice that he tries to ignore — it’s never at Dan. At the world, yes. At the people who ever made Dan feel this afraid in the first place, absolutely. But never at him. Dan’s fear, like his tendency to shrink away, is a symptom of the problem, not the cause.
More relevantly to this exact moment, Phil’s pretty sure that Dan is asleep.
He stays on his own side of the room, laid on his back with his hands crossed over his stomach. It’s an unnatural position for him and he’ll never fall asleep like this, but it makes him feel a bit more grounded, a bit more in control.
His vision traces over the patterns in the ceiling, his own version of counting sheep. He remembers the hotel ceiling being covered wall to wall with a lovely paisley design, but that was then. Now, Phil is tired, and he’s not wearing his glasses, so the paint just looks like one all-encompassing night sky, filled with little strips of silver clouds. He wants to float away in it, like Peter Pan, maybe disappear to a place where everything’s a little less… realistic.
Instead, he feeds himself pretty platitudes. He tells himself that distance makes the heart grow fonder, even though he knows from personal experience that falling asleep with Dan softly breathing beside him, his curls tickling Phil’s face, is much more effective in that department. He tells himself never to trust how he feels about his own life after one in the morning. That one, at least, rings true.
At some point, he realizes that when he told himself that Dan was asleep, that, too, was a comfortable lie. He knows what it sounds like when Dan falls asleep – the way his breathing evens out and becomes deeper, and he curls into himself like a little napping woodland creature. He knows it well by now. Whatever’s happening on the other side of the room is decidedly not that.
Phil is about to whisper into empty spaces, to ask Dan if he’s alright, when suddenly, Dan basically throws himself out of bed. His blankets bunch up around his ankles and a pillow falls to the floor as he stumbles awake with a huff.
“Dan?” Phil says. His voice comes out sleepier than expected. “Baby, are you okay?”
“Nope,” Dan answers, “No, no, no. None of this is okay and you know it.” He takes hold of the side of his corner bed and pulls, until it’s far enough away from the wall that he can go to the other side and push. “I’m sorry, moon. I should have done this by default.”
Phil’s heart is opening up like a flower in springtime. He feels warm, and all at once, his exhaustion has faded to a comfortable sort of sleepiness. He can’t help the light giggle that bubbles out of him. “Don’t apologize, just come here.”
“Of course.” Dan says it like a promise, like it’s the most important thing in the world. “Of course.”
Briefly, his smile drops, and he narrows his eyes at the spot where his bed used to be, where the floor meets the wall.
“What’s wrong?” Phil asks, suddenly concerned all over again.
“This wall,” says Dan, “It’s entirely wrong. There’s enough gum to feed a large family stuck to it, and… is that blood?”
“Just ignore it,” says Phil.
“Phil, I’m telling you, someone might have died in this room.”
“Does it matter?” Phil asks. Does anything in the world matter except for us?
He doesn’t say that last part out loud, except maybe he does, judging by the way Dan’s eyes get all big and lovey. Woodland creature, Phil thinks to himself with a hint of delirium.
“No,” says Dan. He crosses the room, pulls the covers up from between the two twin beds so that there’s nothing between them, and lies down. And while it’s true that they don’t usually fall asleep holding each other, tonight, when Dan drapes an arm around Phil’s waist, Phil melts into it and doesn’t stop him. They both need it.
They need each other.
—
Years later, Phil is on the phone with a nice resort in Vietnam when the woman on the phone asks him that fateful question.
“Sorry, can you repeat that?” Phil says, “Were you asking about – about the number of beds?”
He heard her loud and clear. But Dan is sitting across the table from him, scrolling lazily through his reels, and he can’t hear the other side of the conversation. At the mention of beds, he glances up at Phil.
“Uh, one bed or two?” Phil repeats, still under the guise of not having heard. He’s always been a terrible liar.
Without a single word, Dan holds up his index finger.
Phil beams. “Just one.”
It’s hard to explain why, but as they embark on their Vietnam extravaganza, Phil feels so nervous that he’s nauseous. Their first holiday as an out couple. Their first week going out in the world with nothing to hide. Maybe he’s scared because he feels like so much of his life has led up to this one moment. He doesn’t know what he’ll do if it goes wrong.
Then, the most wonderful thing happens. Everything goes perfectly right.
Their fingers interlock under shitty tray tables on the airplane. The hotel staff refers to them as Mr. and Mr. Lester and neither of them bother to tell them otherwise. And then they fall, exhausted and disheveled, into their one bed, and Dan peppers Phil’s face with kisses. When Phil feels the dampness of Dan’s quiet tears against his cheeks, he doesn’t say anything. He just pulls back to brush them away with gentle fingertips. Kisses his tear tracks with finality as if to say, that’s all done now.
It doesn’t change the fact that they spent a decade and a half pretending. It doesn’t make those lonely nights of sadness go away. But they have more time ahead of them than behind. And this moment – finally – feels pretty damn good.