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Love is bullshit, he had said. He had told Bahorel the night they’d met, between tattoos and sex, explaining why love was just setting yourself up for heartbreak.
Except now Grantaire doesn’t know what’s happened. He doesn’t know when their casual friends with benefits had started into something more. He doesn’t know when they started dating. They refuse to admit it, the great unspoken elephant in the room, but Grantaire knows they’re dating.
Grantaire is in love.
Bahorel greets him with a tired smile when he walks into the kitchen. It’s seven AM, and they’re meeting on opposite ends of the morning; Grantaire up early for a client, and Bahorel coming in from a late night at the bar. It shows, too. Grantaire is mussed and bleary-eyed, wearing a hoodie that comes down past his knuckles and that smells of Bahorel. Bahorel is freshly showered, wearing obnoxiously coloured PJs that hang low on his hips, and his face is drawn with a need to sleep. He’s sipping from his ridiculously oversized mug, and he nods to the coffee sitting on the counter as he says, “I made you a cup."
It feels like someone’s stripped the air from his lungs.
Grantaire is in love.
He’s spent the night at Bahorel’s place, without Bahorel there and it feels right. Normal. Like he belongs here, not at his shitty apartment that he shares with Montparnasse and whatever Montparnasse is fucking that week.
He realises he hasn’t said anything when Bahorel raises an eyebrow and asks, “You okay?"
"I’m fine," Grantaire says with a shrug, as he tries to remember how to breathe. “I slept weird. Your bed’s fucking huge when it’s just me in it."
Something about that sentence sits heavy on his tongue, sits wrong, makes him want to take it back and say our bed. Bahorel watches him, and Grantaire can read the skepticism in his face. He knows Grantaire too well. He can read Grantaire like an open book and it’s terrifying.
Bahorel has surrounded every aspect of his life. Grantaire calls him to complain about dumbass customers, who ask for stupid tattoos. He has his own ink supply at the shop, because Grantaire doesn’t charge him anymore. He texts Grantaire in the morning to say bring home milk you fucktruck since you drank the last, and home, as if he knows Grantaire is going to come over. Grantaire wears Bahorel’s hoodies, enjoys the way they surround him with oversized warmth. He has Bahorel’s stupid fucking initial on his ankle and has never thought of changing it. It’s overwhelming how, everywhere he turns there’s something distinctly Bahorel there. He’s everywhere.
Grantaire has inserted himself into Bahorel’s life with the same ease. He has his own cereal, his own toothbrush, his own drawer, all at Bahorel’s house. He’s left his permanent mark on Bahorel’s skin. They share friends. Bahorel knows his legal name, knows that Grantaire is just a stupid name he made up because he can’t stand the one on his birth certificate.
They’ve become so intertwined that Grantaire can’t tell where his life ends and Bahorel’s begins. He can’t separate the two, and it makes him so stupidly happily.
He’s painfully in love.
"Are you sure you’re okay?" Bahorel says, fingers curling around Grantaire’s bicep, as if worried he’s going to fall down. Or apart. Grantaire can’t help himself, he leans forward, pressing his face into Bahorel’s chest and breathing in. It’s comforting, a mix of alcohol and Old Spice, of sweat and something warm, spicy and distinctly Bahorel. He feels, rather than hears, the concerned rumble Bahorel makes in his chest as he says, “Grantaire?"
"I’m okay, I just," Grantaire starts, stops, tries to explain himself without saying oh shit, I think I’m in love with you. “Can I just—"
"Yeah," Bahorel says, and curls an arm around his shoulders, pulling him in and holding him tight. Grantaire heart clenches in his chest, when all he has to do is ask and Bahorel gives without question.
Grantaire is painfully, painfully in love.
They stand like that for a while, Grantaire’s fingers clutching at Bahorel’s sides and Bahorel holding him tightly, keeping them together. It’s a mutated hug, cuddling turned to desperate clinging, because Grantaire realises if he’s in love, if he has this, he can lose it too. If Bahorel doesn’t feel the same, if Grantaire sabotages this with his amazing ability to fuck up, then he could lose Bahorel.
He doesn’t want to lose Bahorel. Doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life without Bahorel’s tiger grin or his stupid hair, without his pet snake and their opposite hours jobs, without the way their mouths fuse together, or the way Grantaire fits just under his chin like he belongs there, like they were made to slot together. When you love someone, you’re giving yourself to them, they can basically destroy you, Grantaire had said, and faced with the idea of losing everything Bahorel is, he’s never hated the lyrics on his hip more than he does now.
"You’re shaking," Bahorel says, voice a low murmur, and his fingers play absently at where Grantaire’s curls have fallen from their tie.
"I’m sorry," Grantaire murmurs against black-lined skin.
"Don’t be," Bahorel says simply, pressing a kiss to the top of his head. Grantaire digs his fingers in, anchors himself, because he can’t lose this.
Because Grantaire is in love with Bahorel.