Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Prologue

Rain has a taste here. It comes steeped in chip-grease and coal dust, a thin vinegar tang that lifts from pavements worn to the nap.

Across the way, a flyer about an illness no one will name without lowering their voice goes soggy and sags. In a window above the chippy, the television keeps talking about responsibility and unions, about numbers that never look like people, the screen flickers over a living room of unmoving shapes.

It is a night that smells of salt and thunder, of hot oil and cigarettes, of something held and held and not let go.

Inside the pub, warmth takes the shape of breath. The door gives with a damp thunk and the room exhales smoke and laughter and the sweet-bitter bloom of beer. Everything shines in the way only cheap wood shines, lacquered, wiped, sticky at the edges. A television mutters from the far end of the bar. Certain phrases, pride, industry, family, snag and fall away. A man at the bar frowns at an AIDS leaflet like the paper has personally insulted him, then folds it small and puts it under a beer mat as if he’s hiding something contagious.

From the doorway, a body pauses, a coat that isn’t warm enough, a leg that won’t stay still. The knee ticks under the table the moment a chair is claimed, the chair clacks back against wood, the body goes smaller, then refuses to stay small. Eyes skim the ceiling where the nicotine has turned plaster to parchment. Eyes catch on a line of posters tacked crooked above the bar, a grin with a microphone, a square jaw with a guitar, a grave-black government warning everyone pretends is for someone else. Every surface says: stay in your place. Every sound says: don’t.

There is a stage that isn’t a stage, only an inch of plywood on milk crates, a spotlight salvaged from the back room and coaxed to life. Under it, a figure is already waiting, the light cutting him from everything around. There are places the beam refuses: corners stuffed with coats, lips shaped around secrets, there are places the beam loves: the slope where collar opens and the breath at the pulse, the wet shine of a mouth, the hinge of a wrist, the low glint at a sternum where a small silver thing hangs.

The shirt is not really a shirt, it is a wet veil. The fabric has lost the argument with heat and light and now it clings, an admission. Beneath it, an ink-shadow spreads its wings and then holds, a butterfly stalled mid-flight. The hair has given up on being anything but itself, curls riot where they want, some trapped in the sweat along the temple, some haloed by light. When he lifts his hands, the rings make their own music, a soft, bright clatter on wood, a steely sigh along the strings.

There is no voice yet, only the guitar’s throat, the hum of the amp like a small animal asleep. Fingers hover, then press, then find the note that names the room. Dust lifts to it. Conversation slackens, then doesn’t, then slackens again, the sound decides how people will hold themselves. A pint is lowered. A cough goes quiet.

A pair of eyes, sharp and green when the light snags them, look not at anyone and at everyone at once, and something slackens further in a chest three tables back.

The mind three tables back is already busy. It is counting, sorting, queuing thoughts like records to be filed. The damp squeak of trainers, the stick of varnish on the forearm, the exact shade of beer froth when it caves in the middle. The knee is a metronome.

Every habit is a trick built to keep from floating free. It almost works. The light catches at the neck of the one on stage and the trick fails as if it was never a trick.

The music is a flick-knife, it turns in the light and everyone thinks of something they’ve lost and can’t name. If anyone were to ask later what the song was, no one would remember. What they would say, if they dared, is what it did, it unscrewed the lid a little on the locked jar inside the ribcage and let air in.

From the back, the watcher invents language where there isn’t any. It arrives in fragments more than sentences. A mouth like a prayer. Hair like something loosed. Hands that look like they know too much about leaving. The body makes itself smaller again and then, forgetting, leans forward into the light. The knee taps. The mind notices that the player keeps his right wrist strangely soft, that he breathes before downstrokes like a swimmer taking air, that he looks past people in a way that is almost kinder than looking at them. It notices, too, the way certain faces in the room harden at the sight of softness, at the necklace, at the open shirt, at the polished glint of rings. Admiration and resentment ripple in the same motion.

The song finds a pulse and rides it. The voice, when it comes, doesn’t ask for permission. It is lower than expected and warmer. Words pour; some are about a place where the sky is clean and the streets are not made of other people’s histories, some are only sounds held because holding them feels good.

It isn’t what is said, not really. It is the sensation of being included in a secret you didn’t know you wanted, then suspect you can’t live without. It is the feeling of someone looking at you without looking, knowing too much, making the space between tables bend closer.

The watcher breathes shallow, then deliberately deeper. Counting helps, one for the intake, two for the hold, three for the let-go. The heart ignores the rules.

Jealousy pricks and then dissolves and then returns in a better disguise. It says: why can’t I walk through a room like a flame and melt the edges of things. It says: don’t look at him like that where people can see. It says: look, look, look, as if the looking could be inherited, as if by practice one might learn the trick.

There is shame in the same breath as want, an old schoolyard voice pointing and laughing at hips and thighs and softness. Another shift of weight. The body arranges itself in the chair and pretends to be unbothered while everything inside goes bright and loud.

On the plywood, the song changes shape. A quiet arrives that isn’t silence. Fingers leave the guitar and the rings talk to the air in their small metal language. A stool scrapes. The spotlight finds a different angle.

In the corner, a second instrument waits, an old upright with a scar down one side where varnish lifted years ago. The figure crosses the small distance to it, shoulder cutting briefly through the beam so the hair goes incandescent and then goes dark again. When hands settle on the keys, time takes a breath it doesn’t return for several bars.

The first notes are not notes, but ghosts under notes, felt more than heard, as if someone is smoothing a wrinkled sheet with the flat of their palm. Keys are touched and then left, touched again, the music arranged as much from what is not played as from what is.

The spotlight obliges, narrowing, pinning the curl at the temple, the slice of collarbone, the pale of wrist. The shirt, if anything, reveals more as the body folds toward the piano, the butterfly, the small cross at the sternum catching and releasing light like breath.

Then the piano takes over again. All the week’s bad news, factories shuttered, men standing with signs, the wrong sort of love turned into a warning on the telly, thins to a line, then threads through the melody. It is not denial. It is alchemy. The heavy things are not thrown out; they are given to the hands on the keys and returned lighter, possible to carry for the length of a song.

The watchers who resent him resent him more for this, for making sorrow feel almost elegant. The watchers who adore him adore him more, because worship is easier than responsibility.

At the back, the restless leg slows and then stills. The body does not notice this victory until after it has happened.

The piano thins to a thread and then disappears into its own echo. For a moment, the pub is only breathing. Then, like always, noise climbs back in, glasses set down a touch too hard, the scrape of chair legs, the coin-pour clatter into the till.

The figure does not bow. The light loves him without needing thanks. He sits very still and lets the sound reach him and go on past him, as if he knows he is both the cause and nothing to do with it. A smile almost happens and doesn’t. The cross lifts and falls with a breath. The butterfly keeps its silence.

From the back, the chair legs splay under a new weight, the decision to return next Friday. There is a beautiful lie in that promise, that a week is survivable because at the end of it there will be this again, the way light looks poured over pale skin, the way a chord gathers a room into a single held breath, the way a town that teaches you to occupy less space gives you, for an hour, a place to expand.

Rain again when the door opens. The outside world catches in the throat and then slides down, bitter. The pavement receives shoes that are too thin for the cold. On the way home there will be posters that flap and insist they know the future better than you do, there will be windows where people hold their silence like cutlery, there will be a mother who hears a key and puts the kettle on in the same movement without asking why the hands that take the cup are shaking.

Later, the mind will fill the space between ribs with the evening, the way a finger dipped, the precise angle of the jaw under light, a newly learned understanding of how sound can pry a heart open. Later, in a bed too narrow for turning, the breath will remember the measure of the piano and borrow it until sleep arrives.

The town is now a damp map of streets that all run back to the same square, and the square contains a place where a boy made of light and contradiction sits under a borrowed sun and makes strangers ache in chorus.

Chapter Text

The pub door sticks in damp weather. It takes a shoulder and a bad word to budge it, and when it gives, the room breathes out in warm smoke and laughter and the sugar-bitter scent of spilled beer that never quite leaves the floorboards. Zayn puts a palm flat to the wood and grins at the low cheer that rises on instinct, as if the regulars are congratulating them on winning a small battle against weather and architecture.

“Welcome to civilization,” he says, flicking a look back over his shoulder. His hair is perfectly careless, a cigarette tucked behind his ear like a pencil he fully intends to use.

Liam, who has changed shirts but not the smear of grease on his wrist, says, “Reckon civilization could do with a new hinge.“

They take the first empty table they find, round, low, tacky with rings of old lager, and Louis drops into a chair and springs back up at once, the shock of cold varnish through denim making him bite a noise between his teeth. His knee starts its ticking under the table without asking him. He chews a piece of gum he doesn’t remember putting in his mouth. He is hungry and not hungry at the same time.

“Two pints, one lemonade for His Holiness,” Zayn says, already halfway to the bar.

“Oi,” Louis says, but he says it the way someone throws a pebble into a river, casually, knowing it will be carried away. He pulls his jacket tighter around himself; it’s one of those oversized things that eats your shoulders whole, the cuffs worry-scuffed where he’s chewed on them without noticing. Under it, the collar of a band tee peeks out, cracked ink spelling out a name that’s rubbed away to mystery. He tries to sit smaller. Fails. Tries again.

Liam settles, elbows planted, tells him, “You should’ve seen the Cortina today. Carburettor was like a throat full of phlegm. I mean proper.” He coughs to illustrate, a ridiculous, affectionate sound. “I said to the bloke, ‘You ever put proper petrol in it or just soup?’ And he-”

“Good,” Louis says, then, “I mean-go on. Soup.”

Liam laughs like an easy engine catching. “Alright, so the pump-”

The telly over the bar mutters without needing anyone to answer: the voice clipped and certain, vowels flatted thin as cardboard. The room doesn’t look at it, but everyone knows it is there. Words like responsibility and family and strong sound out between the orders called across the bar. On a shelf beside the optics, someone has propped a leaflet about a disease with an alphabet soup for a name. Its folded edge is soft from damp, the black headline blunt against white. A lad in a rugby top uses it to level a wobbly table and then thinks better, tucks it under a napkin as if hiding a sin.

“Here he is,” Zayn says, returning with pints that look like they might solve something. “Moses with the lemonade.” He sets it in front of Louis and taps the glass with his knuckle. “Drink the holiness before you crumble into dust, Lou.”

“Cheers,” Louis says. The first swallow fizz-pops against his tongue and he feels briefly, fakely clean.

He glances around because he always does, because if he maps the room he can make his body sit where it’s meant to. Niall is behind the bar tonight, his hair the cheerful sort that refuses to be tamed. He’s laughing with a woman whose earrings could take an eye out and he has the look of someone who’s been told a joke he intends to keep repeating until closing. In the far corner, the dartboard is all bravado and no aim; the wall around it wears a constellation of failures.

“Your knee’s doing jazz,” Zayn says lightly.

“Tell it to do punk,” Liam says. “Short songs, none of this noodling.”

Louis forces his heel to the sticky floor. It’s like pinning a bird’s wing with two fingers and pretending it doesn’t claw your skin. He rolls the gum in his mouth, counts to three and blows the air out, tries again.

Zayn lights the cigarette from behind his ear with a match he strikes on the underside of the table. “Try breathing like this,” he says, demonstrating - exaggerated inhale, suspended hold, lazy exhale that could be smoke even before it is. “Puts the thoughts in single file.”

Louis copies him because he always does when Zayn turns wise. One, two, three. It helps for three numbers. Then Liam’s still talking about the Cortina’s pump and the telly is still complaining about unions.

It is Zayn who notices the change first because Zayn is a creature of corners and light. “He’s on,” he says, small voice, and tips his chin toward the front.

There isn’t a stage so much as a suggestion of one: a plywood panel on milk crates, the edges gaffer-taped down with hope. The spotlight - rescued from a church hall, rumor has it - behaves like a temperamental god, but tonight it decides to throw its coin of light just so. In the middle of that small sun, someone stands with a guitar hanging off one shoulder like it’s been hung there forever.

Louis has seen people stand there before, he has even clapped for them, but his body is bad with surprises and this one lands in his chest with the good hurt, the ache that makes you look for somewhere to put your hands.

The shirt is too thin for a room like this, some gauzy thing that loses the argument the moment the light touches it. It clings where it shouldn’t, confesses heat down the spine, gives away a secret at the sternum, a cross, small and bright, tapping the bones like a polite guest. Rings flare and dim as fingers test strings. The hair has a mess, curls stuck to the temple. There’s a shadow under the shirt that looks like something alive, wings furled against a ribcage. The noise in Louis’ head goes high and flat and then drops out entirely.

“Christ,” he hears himself say, too quietly to be anyone’s problem. It isn’t a prayer. It’s a report.

“Not bad,” Zayn allows, which from Zayn is a love letter.

Liam nods. “He’s alright, him.” Then, worried: “You all right? You’ve gone two shades quieter.”

“Just listening,” Louis says, which is almost true.

The first notes are nothing showy. They arrive like someone opening a door to see if you’re home. A hum from the amp folds itself into the timber of the room. The guitar has that honest brightness of new strings slapped on an old body. The rings make a click when they catch the fretwire and the click becomes part of the song. He plays like he’s leaving spaces on purpose, like the song isn’t a thing to be filled but a thing to be walked around inside. The voice when it drops in is lower than you’d expect out of someone built with that kind of light. It has smoke at the edges and honey at the middle and it makes some of the men at the bar straighten, unprepared for softness.

“I know him,” Zayn says from the side of his mouth. “He comes in the shop sometimes. Stares at my art and asks Steven too many questions about it.”

Louis swallows lemonade that tastes suddenly childish. He watches the mouth shape vowels. He watches the swallow down the throat when the voice goes to ground and then climbs. If he names the things he sees, he can keep from tilting forward like a plant toward light. The shirt, translucent and unbuttoned enough to count ribs without meaning to. The way his jeans fall on narrow hips, helping and not helping.

Niall leans across the bar and turns the telly down until the speech sounds are only shapes with no weight. Someone swears at him and someone else says thank you and someone else says shut it, Mick, as if all three things could be true at once. In the middle of this, the song keeps making itself out of air and a voice and the clatter of metal on metal.

“Look at his wrists,” Zayn mutters, not unkind. “He’s got those pianist wrists, yeah? Makes a guitar look delicate.”

Liam says, “I like the chorus,” because Liam’s heart goes straight to the big feelings and stands there unafraid.

Louis can’t tell you what the chorus is. He’s listening to how the room changes shape. The men at the bar who watched with the bored interest you give a dog show now find themselves leaning in a millimetre. Someone’s shoulder blades unclench. The woman with the earrings lifts her chin as if daring the song to come for her and the song says, alright then, and does. There’s an ache under Louis’ ribs like he’s been running; there’s a tightness in his jaw from holding his mouth shut against the things that might fall out. He snaps his gum and immediately hates the noise for existing near this.

When the song ends, the room does that ritual where no one wants to be the first to admit they were moved, then someone claps anyway and the rest of them can pretend they’re only being polite. Louis claps too slowly, too carefully, and Zayn reaches across and smacks his wrist, smirking like he’s caught him.

“Precious,” Zayn says.

“Shut up,” Louis says, fond and not.

The next song starts like the first. The light throws a stain on the floor where the singer’s shadow fits. The set is a braid of things: a love song with its teeth hidden, a song that smells like night buses and chewing gum and the inside of your jacket when you’ve run the whole way home because you thought you were being followed. Every so often, the voice breaks slightly when he laughs between lines, like his own notes are catching him by surprise. When it happens, something in Louis turns its face up to the sun. He hates himself for it. He loves it anyway.

“Proper posh, him,” someone mutters at the next table and someone else says, “He’s all right though,” and the first person says, “He knows it, look,” like beauty is a crime if the accused is caught enjoying the evidence. Admiration and resentment sit shoulder to shoulder, drinking from the same glass.

Liam is trying to tell a joke between songs that he’s halfway forgotten the punchline to; Zayn draws something in the condensation on his pint and wipes it away before anyone can see. Louis has the sudden thought that if he stays until the end he will not know how to go home in the body he came in with.

He sets his lemonade down. He picks it up again. He taps his knee and pins it.

Zayn notices everything you don’t say. He says, “Bit warm in here,” which is a kindness and stands so Louis can stand without it being a statement. “Come back if you fancy. Or don’t. I’ll tell Liam the punchline was brilliant whatever it was.”

Liam looks up. “You off? You ok? I can walk you—”

“Back in a minute,” Louis lies, and then he isn’t lying anymore because he is outside.

Rain has started again in the way it always does here, softly and then all at once. The air tastes of fried fat and wet wool. The high street is a ribbon of reflected neon, every sign doubled on the pavement, letters swimming. The chip shop’s extractor fan huffs out a smell that lives in the town’s bones. Somewhere down the way a bus sighs in at a stop like it’s relieved to be off its feet. A couple passes, close but not touching. The woman laughs too loudly at something that wasn’t a joke. A man with his tie loosened glances once at Louis’s legs and looks away, ashamed of himself without knowing the shape of the shame.

The music behind him blurs to a square of sound when the door swings open and shut for strangers. He takes three steps and then three more, chewing because it is something to do with his mouth that isn’t saying I can’t breathe in there. The gum tastes of mint pretending to be peppermint.

He catalogues the things in front of him, the way he always does when his blood is redder than it should be. Left to right: a sun-faded poster in the chippy window for a festival that happened last month and won’t happen again. Next to it, an AIDS awareness flyer, corners losing the battle with condensation; the black letters feel like they’re shouting even though the paper has no mouth. Beside that, two gig posters layered on each other in casual violence: a slash of red with a face you’re supposed to worship; a blue-white square, THE CURE in a font that knows it’s important. Above them, a torn triangle that used to be someone’s eyes. On the brick further down: U2, stretched by damp.

He counts them for the way counting puts the world back in order. He thinks, uselessly, that if he re-pins the corners the town might stop coming apart in front of people. He thinks about the spotlight inside and the way it made a person look already halfway gone. He thinks about thighs and shame and the stupid way his heart did that stutter like it forgot a step on the stairs. He thinks: I am not fourteen, I am not. He thinks: it doesn’t matter. He thinks: it matters.

A giggle bursts out from under the pub awning when someone opens the door and bumps into someone else and apologises too many times in a row. Louis steps out of their path and presses his back to the shopfront, breath catching when the cold glass meets his shoulder blades through cotton. He closes his eyes and all he can see is that shirt under light and the suggestion of ink like a moth with its wings closed. He swallows mint and spit and it does nothing.

Zayn once told him that desire is a kind of theft, borrowing a future in which you are allowed something. Louis wonders what he has stolen tonight. He wonders if he has the hands to hold it.

A car rolls past with the radio up, the sound blurring in the rain’s soft hands. The DJ’s patter is a rubber ball; it bounces and doesn’t break anything. He hears Thatcher again when a door opens, strong families, strong future, and wants to ask whether everyone in the sentence is included or just the people who look right on a Christmas card. He wants to ask and instead he puts his forehead to the cool of the glass and breathes until the nose-fog writes a brief cloud he can draw a line through with his finger.

The door stays open too long, someone arguing with the hinge or with the outside air. Niall’s laugh climbs across the pavement and falls off the kerb. A man says, “He’s got some front, the little-” and another says, “Front’s half the job,” and a woman says, “He’ll get done if he keeps swanning,” and the man says nothing to that, which is agreement. The thing in Louis’ chest rises like a spark and he presses it down like you press down a faulty bit of wallpaper and hope it sticks.

The rain gets colder, which is to say the part of him that can measure it gets a grip again. He tucks the gum into his cheek and feels for the outline of his keys in his pocket. He counts the posters again just to be sure: one for the boys with guitars, one for the men with suits, one for the fear they won’t name, one for the beauty that walks away when you blink.

He leaves without meaning to leave. His feet find the way because they always do. Past the butcher’s where the display lights make everything look like wax. Past the launderette with its bright plastic baskets and the woman inside folding a shirt she will wear to church. Past a window where an older woman watches nothing and everything at once.

By the time he looks back, the pub is an orange square with shadows moving through it, the sound out of it rounded by distance into something that could be laughter or crying. He could go home and his mum would be up, knitting or pretending to read with the telly on low. She would lift her face when the key went and say, There you are, love, as if he had done something impressive, like returning.

He imagines telling her about the singing the way you tell someone about the sea, how it isn’t the sound exactly, it’s the pull, the way you have to stand different to keep from going under. He imagines not telling her because putting the words in the air might make the feeling choose a shape and he isn’t ready to see which one it picks.

He stuffs his hands into the pockets of his jacket as if they could misbehave. The inside lining is unraveling; he catches a thread with a nail and then deliberately doesn’t pull. His trainers squelch and he thinks about drying them on the radiator and the way the smell will fill the flat and his mum will say, They could walk to the shops without you in them, Louis, and he will roll his eyes and do it anyway. The thought steadies him, the way small routine does: the kettle, the tea, the two sugars he’ll pretend to take for her sake and then secretly like.

He thinks of going back for his friends but the idea of opening that door and having the light find his face is too much like stepping into the wrong story. He will tell Zayn he was sick. He will tell Liam he remembered he promised his mum to be back earlier.

He will say anything except, I had to leave because a boy with a guitar put his hands on a room and my mouth forgot itself. He will say anything except, I wanted to watch and I wanted to be and I wanted to be invisible and I wanted to be adored and I wanted to leave town and I wanted to never leave the table I was at.

A bus shudders close and pushes a wave at the kerb that catches the toe of his left trainer. He swears without force. He stops outside the record shop even though it is dark, even though the CLOSED sign sits at an angle in the door. Behind the glass, night-silvered sleeves hold faces he knows better than his own. The window is a scatter of ghosts: Bowie’s calm alien, the Cure’s pale permission, a Fleetwood Mac smile. He looks until he can feel the familiar categorizing tick along his scalp. Alphabetical is a mercy; genre is a warm bath; mood is a church. Tomorrow he will come in early and fix the display. He will line the corners with a ruler, tuck the dog-eared edges under neat. He will control what can be controlled.

His reflection doubles in the glass; band tee stretched thin, jacket too big, jaw he wishes would decide if it’s soft or sharp. He sees himself as if a stranger who is not unkind were seeing him: a lad with restless knees, a mouth that thinks in clever first and honest second, a body that belongs to him even when he wishes it didn’t.

He breathes. One, two, three. The pulse that had been playing treason in his throat gives up the coup and goes back to work. The rain eases to a finer thread. He imagines, because imagining is a power they cannot tax, that somewhere above the pub the boy with the guitar is taking off that ridiculous shirt and swearing at the buttons, that he is scraping a palm across his hair and making it worse, that he is looking at the small cross in his hand before it falls back and telling it nothing. He imagines he doesn’t care about any of that and finds the lie almost plausible.

On the way home he counts the streetlamps like rosary beads: three to the corner, six to the bus stop, two more to the newsagent, four to his door. He thinks of the science teacher who said light travels in waves and particles and decides that want probably does, too. He thinks of the speech on the telly and the leaflet under the beer mat and wonders why fear always comes printed in black on white while the things that save you arrive in colours you can’t name.

His key sticks in the lock, then yields, then he is inside the small, careful space that knows him: the hook where his jacket hangs, the shoe rack with a single rebellious pair of heels he has watched his mother wear with the same awe he gives a perfect solo, the kitchen where the kettle takes the long way to boiling because it likes to be asked twice. The air smells like laundry and toast, like a morning that has stayed up too late.

“You’re early,” his mum says, not looking up from the crossword she does in pen as if daring the day to contradict her. “Everything alright?”

He says, “Yeah. Loud,” because it is a word that covers a lot. He leans in to kiss the top of her head, the way he’s always done, and she makes a soft sound and squeezes his wrist, brief and sure, the way she’s always done.

He pours water on teabags and watches the colour climb. He doesn’t say, there was a boy who made the room his instrument and I don’t know whether I’m furious with him or with my heart for choosing to be susceptible. He doesn’t say, I had to leave before my mouth betrayed me. He doesn’t say, I am going to go back next Friday and next Friday.

Instead he says, “Do you want the nice biscuit?” and she says, “Go on then,” and he gives her the last chocolate one and takes the plain for himself, which is a kind of love languages people misname as politeness.

He rinses two mugs and sets them upside down to dry, the tidy clink deliberate. He peels the gum from his teeth and wraps it in a bit of paper and drops it in the bin like it mattered where endings go. He says goodnight and hears the same back and believes it. He turns out the light and stands in the dark for a second longer than a person needs in order to know what they feel like when no one is looking. Then he goes to bed and is good at sleeping, which is a mercy he doesn’t always have.

Outside, the posters go on peeling. The town goes on swallowing its rain. The pub door sticks and then lets go and then sticks again. Inside that square of light a boy sings and does not have to say his name because the room already knows it, or will claim it, or will pretend not to. On a table at the back, a lemonade glass rings a moon on wood and the mark will be there in the morning, a small tide mark of a night that did not ask permission to matter.

 

***

Morning is a soft hiss against the windows, the kind of drizzle that doesn’t look like rain until you step into it and find your skin salted. The high street hasn’t bothered to wake up properly yet; shops come on in patches, a string of unreliable fairy lights. Inside the record shop, the air is already warm from the ancient radiator’s rattle and the low, constant hum of the fridge that keeps the fizzy drinks not-quite-cold.

The key turns with its usual reluctance; the bell over the door gives its bronchial jingle; he murmurs hello to the dust and means it. He flicks the lamps on one by one, not the ceiling fluorescents, they make everything cruel, but the pool lights that turn sleeves into lit windows. It makes the place feel like a street after dark. A row of faces stares back from the glass: smudged red mouth, painted lightning, boys with fringes like curtains and eyes like warnings, women with cheekbones that could cut him free.

Handwritten placards stick up from the bins (A–C, D–F, NEW WAVE, PUNK, SOUNDTRACKS), his handwriting, small and blocky, all caps with a final line under the word like he means it.

He is alone for the first hour and it is the kind of alone he prefers, the kind with tasks in it. He pulls the A–C bin onto the counter, lifts a stack of sleeves and begins the ritual. Fingers learn the weight of each jacket, the way older cardboards give and newer ones resist, the tiny brittle edge where a corner has been knocked one time too many by someone who didn’t mean harm. He mouths the alphabet not because he needs to but because the song of it keeps the edges of his mind tidier. ABBA, Adam and the Ants, The Alarm, The Animals - slide, adjust. The tiny pleasure of a row that squares itself up, left edges aligned like a line of soldiers who have just remembered they’re not real.

He has a jumper on, one of the oversized ones he always buys from the back rack in the charity shop where the old lady rounds down the price for him with a wink. It swallows his shoulders and makes his forearms look smaller than they are. He tucks his fingers into his sleeves when they get cold and pulls them out again when the cardboard demands skin.

The first customer is a lad from school who pretends they’ve never met. He buys a compilation cassette with a name that promises more than it can possibly deliver - GREATEST HITS OF ’85 - and takes his change like it might burn. “Cheers,” the boy mutters, not a word but a noise, and then scurries back out, as if he worries that music is catching.

The second customer is a man who asks whether they have any “normal music,” and when asked, very politely, to define normal, grows offended in the way people do when handed a mirror.

After that, a quiet like a held breath. He fiddles with the price gun and misfires a label onto his own knuckle. He peels it off, the sticky outline of £3.99 clinging to his skin. Some tourist kid had put Bowie between Ben E. King and Blondie; somewhere, a librarian has fainted. Louis goes on with the Bs because that’s where the harm was done. “Bowie back with Bowie,” he mutters. He runs one finger along the top of the rack to tidy imaginary dust. “There you go then, handsome. Your friends missed you.”

Hyperfocus slides into him like a tide. The world narrows to a crate, a letter, a sleeve corner that needs tucking. Outside, lorries mutter, a bus coughs at the stop; inside, his mind is a long corridor with doors that will not open unless he names the plaque exactly right. Alphabet, year, mood. He can do any of them. He does all three, because too much is sometimes the only amount that calms him.

Mr Patel, the owner, will be in later with a carrier bag of newspapers and an opinion about every headline. He’ll stand behind the counter like a bouncer of taste, polishing the same square of glass with the same cloth and saying things like, You can tell a lot about a person by what they bring to the desk, Louis, watch. He is good company when Louis has the horsepower for company and an easy shadow when he doesn’t.

The radio is on low near the till, tuned to a station that thinks it’s everyone’s mum. Between soft rock and too-cheerful adverts for sofas, a clipped voice says something about responsibility and councils and standards; another voice says the government is looking into materials available to schoolchildren, the words moral and protection doing that ugly handshake they do.

Louis turns the dial a notch down until vowels become a harmless wash. He thinks of the leaflet in the pub last night and the way someone hid it under a beer mat, as if alphabetising could be applied to fear: A is for AIDS, for avoid, for afterwards, for alone. His stomach does a small flip. He returns Bowie to Bowie and the flip settles in a neat drawer marked Later.

He loses fifteen minutes to the joy of a perfectly behaved stack of seven-inches. He cannot stop himself lining them so their centre holes make a marching row of moons. His hand is steady now; his breath has learned a pace and keeps it.

He tucks in a rebellious corner, rescues a torn inner sleeve with a fresh one from the box, rubs a thumb over a smudge until it is gone. The bell jingles twice and then, in a bright breath, someone opens the door and the outside comes in with him.

He doesn’t have to look up to know. The shop’s mood changes. The air goes alert, the way a field goes silent when a shadow crosses. He looks up anyway and there he is, damp curls, a jacket that shouldn’t be warm enough and yet manages to look like it could keep him safe out of sheer charm, shirt that isn’t sensible for October or for anywhere that isn’t a dream. The silver cross at his sternum is tucked away now, just a shine at the throat, but Louis knows it’s there.

The bell is still making its mind up about stopping when those green eyes cut briefly across the room.

“Morning,” Louis says, because mouths are for saying things and he refuses to let his be decorative. He sets a sleeve down and upends a pen in his fingers the way he does when he needs to pretend his hands always know what to do. Cocky is the plan. Casual is the plan. Being a person is the plan.

“Hi,” the other boy says, low, a sound like a secret someone told him for safekeeping.

He moves into the Bowie section without asking for it, as if guided by an instinct for mirrors. He doesn’t flick fast the way tourists do; he doesn’t thumb like a person who wants to be seen flicking. He lifts each album like it might bruise, studies the cover like it’s a face he’s interested in reading properly. His mouth does a small half-smile at Aladdin Sane and a small frown at Low and Louis, ridiculous, files the reactions next to the sleeves as if one could alphabetise a person by what their mouth does when they are minded to be honest.

“Good choice,” Louis hears himself say and then realises the boy hasn’t chosen anything yet, he’s only holding, only weighing. “I mean - obviously. He’s - well. He’s Bowie. It’s not like you’ll go wrong by - this is a terrible sales pitch, sorry, ignore me.”

The boy looks up with the slow grace of someone used to making other people wait for the gift of attention. His eyes hold for a second, a deliberate press and then he looks back down. He says nothing. He does not look amused. He does not look unamused. He is simply considering.

Louis’s interior monologue explodes into fragments: say less / you’re saying more / your mouth is doing that thing again / you can’t unsay a sentence by staring at it / think before / too late. He smooths the corner of a sleeve that didn’t ask for smoothing. He places his pen down with ceremonial care and misses the cup; it rolls two inches, hesitates near the edge of the counter, chooses mercy, stops.

The door goes again and Liam arrives, a gust of weather with him. “Mate!” he announces to the entire stock, “the Escort with the personality disorder came back. You should’ve heard her cough.” He holds up his hands to show off the day’s damage: smear of oil at the wrist like a bracelet, a line of black along the nail-bed he’ll never scrub out. He takes the shop in, blinks at the boy by Bowie, lowers his voice like he’s walked into church. “Alright,” he says to him, as if greeting a cat that might run.

“Alright,” the boy returns, the corner of his mouth doing something that could be called a smile if you were feeling brave.

Liam leans over the counter with his usual full-heartedness, bracing his elbows. He begins to talk about a pump valve like it has personally betrayed him. Louis nods in the right places; the words collect somewhere on the edge of his hearing. What he is actually listening to is the quiet percussion of sleeve against sleeve as the other boy turns them, the small static crackle each time cardboard kisses plastic. He registers, sideways, that Liam is still talking, still obliviously kind, still the same story he has told about a hundred engines: how the thing you think is the problem never is, how you take it apart and find someone else’s bad decision inside, how patient you have to be to rebuild.

There’s a line in a Winterson book about the body as a house with many rooms. Louis tries the thought on for this boy. Which rooms are lit? Which are kept locked? There’s a visible hallway: the aloofness, the casual clothes that somehow don’t look casual, the hair that refuses tidy. Louis can smell the money on his jacket, which is not the same as disliking him for it. He doesn’t know anything. He wants to.

“Lou?” Liam prompts gently.

“Mm?” Louis says, and then, regaining the thread: “Carburettor is like a throat, yeah? You said that last week. Maybe stop giving cars colds.”

Liam looks delighted to be quoted. “Exactly what I told Kev. ‘You keep taking her out in this weather and not warming her up and what do you expect? We’re not built for sudden upheaval, any of us.’ He looked at me like I’d offered him therapy.”

The boy by Bowie glances over again, quick, then away. Louis’s mouth acts before his brain. “You into the glam, then?” he says, aiming the question at the sleeves rather than the face in case that makes it safer. “Or just the faces. We’ve got a Ziggy that’s not first press but she’s clean as a chalked board.”

The boy lifts the corner of a smile properly this time, just enough to make Louis dizzy with the thought that he might know how to be warm when he chooses. “Faces help,” he says, voice low, not intended to carry across a room and somehow doing it anyway. He lets a hand rest on the red cheek and lightning bolt. The rings do that metal-into-paper hush that has already become, in Louis’s head, another instrument. “I like how serious he is about being unserious,” he adds, mostly to the sleeve. “Like he knows it matters more when you call it play.”

Louis forgets to breathe for two seconds and then collects the oxygen so fast he nearly coughs. “I mean, yeah, exactly,” he says, grateful to have been loaned a thought he can claim. “People think it’s-” He gestures a shape in the air: hands, glitter, theatrics. “But it’s the work that lets it look effortless, right? Like a duck. Calm on the top, legs going mad underneath.”

“Like engines,” Liam throws in, pleased. “Or like sticking a bumper on with chewing gum and then telling the customer it’s a temporary measure.”

The boy looks at Liam, then back to Bowie, then to Louis again and that looking is worse than if he had never looked at all. His eyes are very green; the shop’s lamplight pulls strange colours out of them. Up close, Louis notices his lashes are thick enough to cast shadows. He catalogues this the way he alphabets records: not because he plans to use it, but because it gives him peace to know where things are.

He wants to be the sort of person who says something sharp and then leaves it at that, lets the silence do its elegant work. The words that present themselves are not elegant. “So - uh - Friday,” he hears himself say, tone pitched cunning and landing somewhere between medical and pub quiz. “Last night. You… um.” He gestures in what he hopes is the universal sign for You existed in a way that offended my peace.

The boy’s mouth does the not-smile again, an acknowledgement of a shared problem. He dips his chin a fraction. “Friday,” he agrees, as if it’s a ritual rather than a day. “I do that sometimes.”

Do that. Louis knows what it is to understate yourself so aggressively it becomes a mask. He tips back on his heels and makes his mouth into a smirk to cover for how stupidly his pulse is behaving. “Yeah, well,” he says, and then cannot find an ending that doesn’t sound like confession. He goes with banter because banter always fits even when it doesn’t. “Don’t let it go to your head. The pub only clapped because the telly was on about taxes.”

“Mm,” the boy says, considering the sleeve of Low as if it will answer for him. Up close, his knuckles look delicate and capable at once. A ring catches the lamplight and throws it back. “Good to know.”

“Want me to put anything aside?” Louis says, sudden, because the idea of him leaving with empty hands feels wrong. “We’ve got a station wagon of a sale coming in on Monday, a bloke from over the hill selling his collection because he’s-” He stops before the word unemployed can jump out of his mouth and bruise the day. “Because he’s going away. There’ll be a Hunky Dory with your name on if you want it. I mean, not literally. Unless your name is-” He realises he doesn’t know it and the not knowing is a small pain.

“Harry,” the boy says, quickly enough it sounds like a gift returned. It fits him like a suede jacket. He does not offer a hand and Louis is glad; he has learned how much a handshake can give away about a person’s heart. “And you’re Louis,” he adds, before Louis can decide whether to be coy. “Zayn said. Last night.”

Zayn. Of course Zayn. Louis feels something complicated fold itself into a smaller, neater shape. It is gently humiliating to be already known. It is also, as an experience, strangely soft, like stepping into a room you used to live in and finding your mug still in the cupboard. “Right,” he says. “That’s me. I do… this.” He gestures at the bins, the order, the shrine of sleeves. “And a bit of-” He mimes stacking boxes, carrying too much at once, making yourself useful. He stops before he starts to mime hiding.

“Do you like it?” Harry asks and it is the tone he used on stage when he spoke between songs, a low murmur that treats a small question as if it were a valuable object. He looks not at Louis but at the rack of records, as if he’ll accept an answer from paper if a person refuses to provide it.

Louis picks at a hangnail he didn’t know he had. He doesn’t want to sound like a boy who has married a building. He doesn’t want to sound like someone who will never leave. “It’s-” he says and then tells the truth because even small truths are a relief. “It’s the only place where everything does what it says on the tin. You put the A with the A and the chaos goes quiet for a bit.”

Harry’s mouth goes soft in that way that isn’t a smile and is somehow kinder. “Must be nice,” he says, and then, as if he’s said too much, looks back down and resumes the gentle, precise work of flipping sleeves. He pauses over a battered Heroes and thumbs the corner as if he knows how to comfort paper.

A couple of lads tumble in then, school blazers unbuttoned, laughter too loud to be strictly legal before noon. Louis does the shopkeeper’s quick scan, hands, pockets, eyes. One of them touches a sleeve with all the reverence of a burglar casing a saint, then snatches his hand back as though he’s been caught by the sleeve itself and not by the quiet attention of the counter. They drift toward cassettes, not the albums, and that is forgiving; cassettes forgive more than vinyl does.

One of them picks up a Springsteen tape and says, “My dad says he’s the working man’s-” He cannot remember the ending; he puts it back. They leave a smell of rain and school corridor that makes Louis sudden and irrationally sad and he has no idea why.

Liam is still at the counter, idly tracing circles with a finger on the glass. “You coming by later?” he asks Louis. “Might need a second pair of hands on the Cortina. She bites.”

“After six,” Louis says. “Mr Patel’s in till five and he’ll moan if I leave him with the post. You know he reckons the postman’s in a conspiracy? Like, personally hates Bowie. Imagine."

Liam grins. “I’d fight a postman for you.” He says it with the unguarded affection of a stray dog who has chosen you. Then, catching a sign from Louis that says not now, not in front of the boy he’s trying to impress without being seen to try, he pats the counter twice and says, “Right, I’m off before Kev decides to clean the sump with his mouth again.” He tips his chin at Harry in awkward farewell and leaves with a squeak of the bell and a gust of cold.

Silence returns and sits down between the bins. It wears a comfortable coat. Harry has moved to The Cure and is doing that careful reading again, like an optician checking a lens. Louis takes the chance to watch without being rude: the way Harry’s mouth shapes concentration, the set of his shoulders under a shirt that is too fine for the weather but somehow not ridiculous. He looks like he belongs to any room he stands in, which is a kind of witchcraft.

“Got Disintegration coming in,” Louis says, which is both true and a promise he will bully Mr Patel into fulfilling by Monday. “If you’re on that mood. Listening-to-the-rain mood.”

Harry nods once, slow. “Mood,” he agrees, like someone trying on the word to see if it fits. He lifts a sleeve that has a small tear at the top; Louis feels the wound in his own skin and slides a new inner across the counter without being asked. Harry takes it with a ring’s soft clink. “Thanks.”

The radio does that drift where a song’s end is slower than its beginning; the DJ comes back with a voice like a smile painted on. An advert for a charity plays and then the news again: unions, councils, noise in Parliament, a new piece of paper that will decide what can be said to children. The words are careful and unkind. Harry’s eyes flick up at the sound and then away. Louis reaches for the dial and turns it a notch down, not off, because to turn it off would be pretending it isn’t there.

He slides Heroes from its sleeve and checks the vinyl the way a careful person does: light, angle, slow turn. “You keep the good ones,” he adds, not quite a question.

Louis snorts softly. “We keep the good ones for people who’ll listen all the way through,” he corrects, pleased to have been seen and determined not to give it away. “Not for blokes who only want the poster for the wall of their bed-sit so they can pretend they went to London once.”

Harry’s mouth curves, a proper smile this time, small and devastating. “Right,” he says, as if they’ve reached the end of a lesson they both thought was going somewhere else. He taps the sleeve’s spine with one ring against another and the sound is almost music.

“Do you-” Louis says and then realises he is about to ask something like Do you want to get a coffee which is ridiculous because he doesn’t drink coffee and because that isn’t how this works here, not in this town, not with the news on and the leaflets in the pub and neighbours who collect people’s business like milk bottles. He edits mid-sentence like a man swerving a pothole. “Do you want me to start a list for you? For Monday. So I can - uh - hide things in plain sight until you get here.”

Harry studies him for half a heartbeat that lasts a long time. “Would you,” he says, soft enough that a person could claim later they misheard. Then, as if he’s repaying a debt, he adds, “Thanks.”

Louis clears his throat because something in it has decided to be unreasonable. “Write your name,” he says instead of I would open this shop at midnight if you asked. He slides the small order book across, opens it to a clean page. “And what you’re after. Or…just your name. The rest I can guess. You’re-” He stops because he is about to say: you’re a Heroes and a Hunky Dory and a Disintegration and a record that hasn’t been written yet. He says, lamely, “You’re a Bowie. Obviously.”

Harry picks up the pen. His handwriting leans as if it’s trying to go somewhere else. He writes his name carefully, like he has been told off before for mess. The H looks like a ladder. He pauses over what to ask for, then draws a small dash and leaves it at that, as if to say: surprise me or as if to say: I don’t know what I want until I hear it. He pushes the book back and touches the edge of the counter with his fingers instead of a thank you.

“Monday, then,” Louis says and hears the way his voice makes a promise out of a day. “Afternoon. Don’t come in the morning unless you want to hear Mr Patel explain why Phil Collins is the end of civilisation and also somehow its saviour.” He cannot help showing off when he is nervous, little jokes like buttons he can fasten in a row.

“Afternoon,” Harry repeats. He doesn’t say goodbye. He doesn’t have to. The bell does its best impression of grace as he steps into the grey.

For a second, the shop feels foolish without him, like a room that has just been told a secret and is not sure where to put it. Louis stands very still and listens to the radiator rattle, to the distant snore of traffic, to the soft sigh of posters breathing on the wall. Then he picks up the little order book and stares at the ladder of the H until it stops making his heart behave like a drumline.

He could call Zayn. He could call and say, He came in, and Zayn would make a good sound and then a better one and then come down on his break to say something irrelevant and clever. But the phone on the counter is heavy and the cord would tangle and Mr Patel will arrive any minute with his opinions and his bag of papers and the arithmetic of the day will begin. Louis tucks the book under the till instead, gentler than it requires, and returns to the bins.

He alphabetises with his whole spine. The shop has taken his pulse and slowed it to match its own. He puts Bowie back with Bowie and Cure with Cure and when he reaches HUNKY DORY he finds himself smiling, private, ridiculous. Outside, drizzle chooses a mood and commits. The bell will ring again and some faces will be kind and some will be careful and some will be cruel disguised as casual.

Louis reaches to straighten a sleeve he’s already straightened and stops himself because he has decided to learn the shape of self-control. He goes to the window and checks the display from the street side, as if the town might see it better if he sees it the way the town does. His reflection hovers over Bowie’s bolt and The Cure’s pale and U2’s earnestness. He lifts a sleeve’s corner - just a hair - to catch the light. His hands look steady in the glass. His mouth looks like it could keep a secret and then another and then one more on top.

A week later he meets Zayn and Liam at the pub because that is the order of things: company first, then the part where he forgets how to be still because someone else has taken the job. The door sticks, the room exhales and Friday takes its seat in him.

“Got you a half,” Zayn says. “You can make it last the length of your self-control.”

“Which is?” Liam asks, already grinning.

“Depends who’s playing,” Zayn says, flicking ash into a tray that’s seen better motives. He tilts his head toward the plywood stage. The spotlight is a coin waiting to be spent.

Niall passes behind the bar with the efficient cheerfulness of someone who hears every problem in a town and knows which pint to put with which story. He nods at Louis.

When the light climbs and holds, Louis’s breath behaves in the now-familiar way: small at first, then larger, then completely unreasonable. It is almost funny how quickly the body remembers. He makes himself smile into his glass at nothing. It doesn’t help.

The intro that night comes like a conversation you’ve had before but needed to have again. He hears what he didn’t know he had learned to listen for: the right wrist soft like a swimmer’s breath; the click of metal on fretwire when the ring slides a fraction too far and corrects; the tiny delay before the first chord, like the fingers are taking the last possible permission.

That was the first Friday’s way in - soft invitation, space where a person could put themselves if they dared. The second Friday had been different; he’d started sharp, a jay of a note, like the town had annoyed him on the way over and he’d decided to take it out on the strings. Tonight it’s something else again: a climb from low to low-higher, stair-steps a careful person could manage, a promise that keeps its voice down.

ADHD is good for this; it is terrible for everything else. Louis can’t keep a dentist appointment in his head for love nor money, but he can tell you exactly how the third bar lands compared to last week, could talk for ten minutes about a chord change. He doesn’t point it out to Zayn. He doesn’t need to prove he’s listening; the listening proves itself.

The crowd is Friday-shaped: men easing the week out of their shoulders, women with eyes that say not tonight or try me, kids pretending to be older, older people pretending to still care about darts. The telly over the bar is doing its evening sermon in low vowels; the sound is turned down, as if the town is too polite to be told what it already knows. The AIDS leaflet from last week is back at its corner, edges curling like a mouth ready to flinch; someone’s drawn a moustache on it as if mockery could act as a mask.

Louis looks away because looking at it long isn’t helpful and because guilt isn’t a posture you should hold when music is happening.

On the stage, the shirt has made the same mistake as the other times and Louis thinks, not for the first time, that some mistakes deserve to be repeated forever. The fabric is a fog where someone has drawn the suggestion of a person, then forgot not to breathe. The cross is a brief gleam at the sternum when he leans to tune; the tattoo under the cloth is only a rumour, but rumours can be enough to live on for weeks.

The first song ends and Louis claps like a normal person. The second song opens with that new stair-step lick and something in him climbs alongside it. He is careful, has trained himself to be careful, about looking in public the way he wants to. He watches from the side of his eyes. He laughs at something Liam says and lets the laugh cover how his pulse lifts when the voice drops into the line that sounds like summer back when summer wasn’t a performance.

Between songs, the singer’s mouth almost smiles, then doesn’t, and it’s like watching weather change over moorland. He doesn’t talk the way other lads talk; he issues small coupons of sound and the room scrambles to spend them.

Louis sips his half and makes it last and knows he will leave early because he always leaves early now, because staying until the end feels like admitting something out loud and because he likes the walk home with the sound still inside, like carrying a lantern no one else can see.

He does leave early. He touches Zayn’s wrist, says, “Mum,” as if that explains anything, which it does. Zayn nods and steals a cigarette from his own packet to pretend he stole it from Louis, a silly ritual that makes Louis grin into his collar. Liam gives him a look that means Be warm and Don’t forget tonight needs a story to become what it is, Louis nods back because he has never been good at doing either of those things and he likes to pretend he might be.

Saturday is for groceries because his mother works long hours and shouldn’t have to decide between her feet and the cupboards. He can do this one thing. He puts bread and milk and a careful list into a basket and then puts the basket back because it squeaks and picks another one because it doesn’t. He is not fussy, he is precise, he tells himself and then laughs at himself because it is, of course, both.

At the till, he gets flustered over exact change because the woman on the register has a kindness in her mouth that makes him want to earn it. He drops a bag of sugar with the faint comedy of a bad juggler and watches as the corner splits like it’s been waiting to. Fine white drifts across the tile and makes the checkerboard look like snow.

“Leave it, love,” the woman says. “We’ll get the brush. You all right for another?”

Louis says, “Yes, sorry, sorry,” as if he’s knocked over a person and not sweet grains of a thing literally designed to dissolve. His ears go hot, which is childish and accurate. He picks up the second bag and pays for it. He puts the coins in the right part of his wallet and allows himself to breathe in the doorway before he steps back into air.

On the walk home, he takes the long way without naming it that. It takes him past the café with the good windows, the ones that let you see a life without having to live it. He’s rehearsing in his head how he’ll tell his mother about the sugar in a way that makes it sound endearing rather than incompetent when he finds himself in the middle of someone else’s scene.

They are half in the doorway, half out of it: Harry and a woman who looks like someone has taken him and written the first draft in a sharper hand. Her hair is darker but the cheekbones rhyme. She’s older, he thinks. She has an umbrella hooked on her forearm and her mouth is the polite British version of fury.

“-not about you wanting,” she’s saying, low and fast, “it’s about Dad deciding what a life looks like and you pretending you can opt out of gravity-”

“I’m not pretending,” Harry says, too steady to be anything but practice. He’s wearing a jacket and a shirt that has no business on a cloudy day. There’s a tiredness in the corners of his mouth, the kind that isn’t sleep’s fault. “I’m saying no.”

“You’re saying no to being safe,” she says. “To being-” She presses her lips together; the word acceptable is there even if she doesn’t put it in the air. “Do you know how many people would-”

“Go to America for a degree they don’t want and a future that fits like a borrowed suit? Lots,” he says, not unkind. “They should, if it’s theirs. It’s not mine.”

“Dad wants-”

“I know what Dad wants,” he returns, softer now, which is worse than raised voices. “Do you?”

Louis realises he has stopped, which is the first mistake in a small town. He realises he is staring, which is the second. He realises he is holding a bag of sugar like it’s a newborn. He drops his eyes to the pavement, to the spilled glitter of precipitation, to his shoes that need replacing but are loyal and keeps walking. The temptation to rewind, to catch more, is sharp and mean and he doesn’t like himself for having it.

“-you’ll regret it,” she says and the sound he hears before the door takes the rest is the tired clink of a teaspoon against a saucer.

He walks faster, the sugar bag thumping his hip in time with the ridiculousness of his heart. He doesn’t chew gum much anymore; he’s been trying not to telegraph his nerves like a semaphore tower with a sweet tooth. Today he digs a piece out of his pocket and bites down too hard anyway. The mint is medicinal. His jaw relaxes a little and he hates that the trick still works.

He will not think about them because it isn’t his business. He thinks about roads across oceans anyway, about fathers who think life is a curriculum and sons who can’t sit still through a lecture that never ends. He thinks about sisters who are half mother and half mirror and the cruel kindness of both.

He thinks about what it is to be told you could be safe if you would only agree to be smaller.

His mother takes the sugar and says, “You’re a darling.“ She appraises him briefly with the efficient eye of someone who has had to read weather in faces. “You look like a boy who wants to tell a story and knows he shouldn’t,” she says, without looking up from putting the bread where bread lives.

“I saw... just people,” he says, which is true. He tells her about the bag splitting because that part is funny with the right slant, and she laughs and calls him a calamity and kisses his hair as she passes, which is the right size for mercy.

The afternoon wanders toward evening. The days continue. He meets Zayn and Liam again because of course he does, because Friday is a road you don’t have to think your way along. The pub is fuller than usual; payday must have coincided with a grief someone wanted company for. Niall is three orders deep and still manages to wink at him as if there’s room in the evening for a shared joke.

Harry’s on. It feels like an event rather than a fact; the way the room shifts tells you what’s about to matter. The first song is a careful thing, the second is meaner with itself. The third, Louis knows before the first chord that it will be the kind that sits down inside him and stays. The intro is the stair-step again, but the steps are smaller, closer, no more mountain, more a path in a garden you could only find at dusk. He knows that if he were to say this out loud, Zayn would call him a poet with the affectionate eye-roll that protects people from their own sincerity. He keeps it in.

Midway through, the singer looks up. It is not a sweep of the room, not the casual survey of a king; it is a line drawn between two points with the impartiality of geometry. It lands on Louis as if it had always been heading there and only needed the right second to arrive. It isn’t a shock so much as a confirmation, yes, you; yes, I am also here. The look lasts just long enough to be unmistakable and short enough that he could lie to himself about it should he need to later.

Louis flushes and can’t decide whether to be annoyed with himself for being the kind of body that tells on him, or pleased that his skin has learned how to be honest without asking his permission. Zayn’s knee bumps his under the table, steadying.

A line breaks across Harry’s mouth, something close to a smirk, something more like relief, and then he is back to the business of making noise into something useful. The rings click; the notes thread; the song grows a spine and stands up.

Louis drinks as if that will steady him and fails to be steadied. He watches the left hand on the neck of the guitar and already knows he will dream a close-up of it later: the tendons working like small, reliable machines, the places where the veins lift under the pale, the flash of metal as the ring turns a fraction with a chord. He will dream the cross and the butterfly, - how does he know it’s a butterfly when he’s only ever seen it through cloth? - and wake with an ache that has no polite name.

Between songs, the pub reminds itself of its other jobs: someone drops a glass and swears with impressive creativity. But the room keeps leaning back toward the stage the way a plant finds the light and Louis, for once, doesn’t fight the lean.

Eye contact happens again, not on purpose, not an accident. The corner of Harry’s mouth lifts and Louis feels the lift like someone put a lighter under him at low flame. He looks down quickly and studies the table’s old ring marks with an anthropologist’s attention. He must look like a person engaged in a passionate affair with wood. Zayn’s smirk turns fond.

The set ends the way all good things end in this town. Niall bangs the till shut like a cymbal. People stand and sit and stand again. Harry doesn’t bow; he lets the noise pass over him, nods once to Niall as if paying a debt no one else can see and disappears the way he always does, through the narrow gap between the amp and the wall.

“Back in a minute,” Louis says, surprising himself. He doesn’t know where he intends to go.

“Where-” Zayn starts, then catches sight of his face and edits. “Right. Just… don’t let anyone set your heart on fire without buying you a drink first.”

“Thanks for the tip,” Louis says, because banter is an easier language and because gratitude makes him shy.

He doesn’t go towards the stage. He goes the opposite way, towards the corridor that holds the nothing rooms - the grotty toilets, the storeroom where broken stools go to forget, the side door that leads to the small triangle of alley with the broken bottle that no one quite manages to sweep. He tells himself he wants air; he gets a tide mark of damp instead.

He stands with his back to the brick and the little alley gives him its unlovely gifts: the bin smell that is every night’s secret, the distant argument of a couple who have had this fight before, a line of rain that has found an angle and sticks to it. He hears his own breathing and tries to arrange it into an uninteresting rhythm.

The side door opens and a slice of light cuts the dark, he knows the silhouette before the body becomes itself. Harry steps out like a person visiting his own life from another room. He has the look of someone who has not decided whether to be alone and is about to pretend he chose it.

He sees Louis and the pause is brief, the kind of pause that counts as greeting when you are practising not to be seen. He gives him a small nod, polite, not dismissive, and takes one cigarette out of a pack with the delicacy of a man lifting a hair from a lover’s cheek. He lights it with a match that flares too soon, shields it with his palm. He draws in and looks at nothing for a moment, then looks sideways at Louis as if to check he is still real.

“You were-” Louis begins, then remembers that even compliments have bones that can get broken. He tries again. “I liked the third one.”

Harry exhales into the rain, the smoke makes eager cousins of the damp. “Me too,” he says, a small smile not intended for an audience. “It’s new. I keep deciding how it begins.”

Louis nods because yes, he noticed, yes, he knows, yes, his skull is a museum of the ways the intro works. He doesn’t say any of that because it would sound like showing off or worse, devotion. “The low stairs,” he says instead, risking the metaphor. “Makes people think they can climb them.”

Harry looks at him properly then, a soft, amused consideration. “Low stairs,” he echoes. “Alright.” He flicks ash with a ring that catches alley-light and goes briefly holy. “You dropped sugar today,” he adds and Louis blinks because of course, of course this town tells on you to the people you’d prefer didn’t know. Or because, he thinks, with a sharp, embarrassed hope, maybe he just…saw. Maybe coincidence doesn’t require conspiracy.

“Saw that, did you,” Louis says, managing dry without sounding cruel. “It survived. There’s more of it where it came from.”

“Some things there are,” Harry says and the words could be about any number of sacred or ordinary materials. He taps the ash again, then looks as if he’s about to say something larger and chooses not to. The rain grows bored and tries harder. “See you,” he says instead, which is the exact right size of risk.

Louis, without meaning to, smiles the sort of smile he usually saves for when a box fits perfectly on the first try. “See you,” he says, because he’s practiced it and because saying it now makes it feel like something that will happen whether or not the gods feel like being kind.

Harry nods, a small bow to the idea of the future, and goes back inside, the door closing behind him. The alley exhales. Louis stands there another thirty seconds longer than he needs to and lets his cheeks cool in the damp, then goes back in the front door because the ritual requires witnesses if it wants to call itself a life.

Zayn clocks him, raises an eyebrow that could be interpreted a dozen ways and does him the kindness of picking the least intrusive one. “You’ve missed nothing but Mick losing at darts,” he says. “And the important news that Liam’s bringing us greasy chips as a proof of loyalty.”

Liam arrives at the table with paper packets. “For my favourite men,” he declares, then blushes because the sentence heard itself. He recovers with the confidence of a Labrador who has dropped your shoe into your bathwater and expects praise. “Eat. It’s against the law to be thin on a Friday.”

They eat and talk about nothing that will matter in three days. The telly does sports and is ignored correctly. Someone in the corner tells a joke that doesn’t make it to the punchline.

Louis leaves before closing like he always does now, not because he is better than mess, but because he is trying to learn the line between enough and more than. The town receives him the way it always does, untidy, withholding, home anyway. He walks the long way again without needing an excuse. The café has pulled its chairs in; the window shows only his own face and the ghost of someone else’s over his shoulder. He doesn’t stop. He counts the lamps to his door.

At home, the flat is the shape of himself he likes best. On the table is the week’s paper with the crossword half-done; she never cheats, which is her favourite lie.

In his room, he sits on the bed and puts his hands on his knees and lets the evening and the last days replay with his eyes open like a film on a sheet. The low stairs of the intro. The smirk that was relief. The cigarette lit with a match in the rain. The sister with the sharp mouth saying you’ll regret it and meaning I am worried and meaning also I am tired of being the only sensible person in a family that mistakes posture for spine.

He could invent a future in which none of this matters. He will not. He could invent one in which it matters so loudly he cannot hear anything else. He refuses that, too.

He lies down and closes his eyes and does the counting thing that sleeps have come to expect as payment: four for the hold, seven for the release, again, again. When sleep decides to have him, it brings with it the old pub smell and a neat pile of low wooden stairs and he climbs them without remembering his knees.

Tomorrow will be less pretty and more survivable. Monday will arrive the way Mondays do, stubborn and suspicious. Between them sits a boy with a shoebox under his bed and a church he keeps going to without believing in god and it will have to be enough.

Chapter Text

The pub knows them now the way a parish knows the pew each family claims. Friday again, rain again, jokes that have grown moss on their sides. The place has its Friday face on: mirrors fogged at the corners, a sheen on the varnish that is part polish and part history, the telly doing that grey hum of important people saying important things at a volume designed to shame you for not caring. A local councillor is speaking about “materials in school libraries” and “protecting children,” the chopped-up language of decency that has learned how to say don’t without naming who it’s saying it to. Someone shouts for darts over it. Someone else calls the councillor a muppet.

Niall moves like the quickest kind of kindness behind the bar, a towel over one shoulder and a grin that makes even grudges turn up their collars and behave. “You missed Kev telling my dad that darts is a sport and should be on telly more than football.”

“Poor Kev,” Liam says cheerfully. “Imagine being wrong so loudly.”

Niall slaps three glasses down and then, noticing whose table it is, replaces one with a lemonade like a magician swapping a rabbit for a dove. “Insurance,” he says. “So you can stay for the good bits.”

“What if the good bits are now?” Louis asks.

“Then you’ll have a story to tell about how you missed them.” Niall leans in conspiratorially. “He’s on second. Warm-up act is the lad who plays every song like if he doesn’t strum hard enough his father won’t love him.”

“Christ,” Louis says, amused in spite of himself.

“Stay after, yeah?” Niall adds, softer. “I’ll bring him over. Saves you both that weird ‘we’ve-met-but-not-properly’ shuffle you’re doing like it’s a dance.”

“We’re not doing a shuffle,” Louis says, feeling his face heat at the truth of it.

“Course not,” Niall says, already pouring a pint for a man who will tell him about a dog that isn’t as clever as it thinks. “Back in a bit.”

"You’ve got that look on you,“ Zayn says, tearing a napkin into strips he’ll later pretend were always meant to be art.

“I look perfectly normal,” Louis says, which is the sort of sentence that proves itself a lie the moment you say it. He has on a Joy Division tee that’s been washed into a greyscale memory and a jacket with one elbow shiny. He’s made peace with his hair today, it’s done what it likes and he’s called it style.

Liam claps him on the shoulder too hard. “You look very handsome and not at all haunted,” he assures him. “I’m going to get us chips in a bit so you don’t faint when beauty enters the room.”

“Beauty has legs,” Zayn says, flicking his eyes towards the front where the makeshift stage waits. “Beauty can walk itself to the piano.”

Louis rolls his eyes because they’re dramatic and because it would be worse to agree. He drinks half his half and sets the glass down exactly on a ring mark as though matching scars might bring luck.

The warm-up act appears and does exactly what Niall promised he would: plays like approval is a resource that must be mined from the crowd with a pickaxe. They clap because they were taught to. The telly moves on to the scores; someone cheers or groans for a team that barely knows this town exists.

Then the light decides to be money instead of dust. The spotlight clicks from suggestion to coin, and there he is, the shirt foolish again, the small silver fact of the cross at the sternum, the hair not trying to behave. He stands like the stage has learned his posture. The first chord is the soft step of a person who knows the house well enough not to turn on the hall light. Louis breathes like he’s been teaching himself quietly how to do it all week. He doesn’t look directly until he has to. When he does, it’s by accident and on purpose. He presses his thumbs to the underside of the table and lets his hands ache as if that will clean the rest of him.

He’s good, tonight. Lighter, somehow. Midway through, he laughs at himself for a stumble and the laugh has that crack in it, the small break that Louis feels at the base of his spine. The men at the bar pretend not to notice their mouths turn softer.

Niall turns and angles them a view as if he’s choreographing a dance: the gap between sets, the man of the hour stepping off the plywood sun, a towel to a temple, the small ceremony of rings loosened and turned.

He catches Harry by the sleeve on his way offstage, a brief touch that would look like nothing to anyone who isn’t fluent in this room’s gestures, and steers him toward the table as if the night had decided a roundabout path. Up close, the shirt is worse, it has lost the argument with heat and light entirely. Louis finds something to look at that doesn’t feel like trespass, the button sewn back on with the wrong colour thread, the tiny freckle near the collarbone that probably no one knows about unless they’ve earned it.

“Lou,” Niall says, bright as declaration. “This is Harry. Harry, Louis. I know you know you know” - he rotates his hand in the air, indicating the complicated geography of familiarity - “but now we’re pretending I’m respectable and you’re strangers about to be less strange.”

Harry’s mouth tilts. “Hi,” he says.

“Hi,” Louis manages, prepared for this exact syllable and yet tripping over it anyway. He stands because he forgot to remember not to, the chair’s legs complain. He offers his hand before he can think better of it.

The handshake is nothing and everything. A brief clasp, cool metal against the soft where thumb meets palm, pressure light enough to be polite and clear enough to be undeniable. The rings are cold, the skin under them warmer. A static kiss as they let go, the kind you could write off as weather if you were a coward.

His eyes land on Louis as if it’s where they were always heading. “You watch close,” Harry says, not accusing, not teasing, more the way you’d read from a label: CONT AINS THAT WHICH YOU SUSPECT.

Louis could laugh it off, he could play clever, he could do any of the things he does when feeling cornered by kindness. He says, “I like to see how things work,” which is the truth disguised as an apology disguised as a fact.

Harry nods as if the answer is worth filing somewhere. “Me too,” he says. He takes the empty chair Niall conjures like a magician with furniture and sits with his elbows open, not wide, just enough to claim the space without apology.

Liam leans forward, earnest and golden. “You were class just then. The one with the-” he hums a bar, fails at carrying it, apologises to the idea of music. “That one. Got me right in the old-” He thumps his chest where a cartoon heart would be.

“Thanks,” Harry says. “You fix cars.”

“I do,” Liam says, delighted to have been seen in the general direction of the truth. “They come to me like wounded animals. I put my hand under the bonnet and say there there. They bite. I love them anyway.”

“Poet,” Zayn murmurs, then, without looking up, to Harry: “You wear the wrong clothes for this climate.”

Harry glances down at the shirt and makes a small, private face. “They’re the clothes that let me breathe,” he says.

Zayn looks him over, not unkind, the way you look at a painting you’ve decided to like before you’ve read the plaque. “You look better under a bad light than most people manage in daylight,” he says. It sounds like an insult. It is not.

Louis wants to be easy with this, to turn himself into banter and float. He finds instead his edges. “Harry came into the shop,” he offers, like he’s being helpful to a person cataloguing his own life. “He has a good music taste.”

Harry’s eyes lift, amused and interested both.

“He alphabetises people,” Zayn says with affection he rarely shows. “Watch yourself or he’ll put you between the Cure and Dire Straits.”

“Cruel,” Louis mutters, folding the napkin’s corner under for something to do with his hands.

“Accurate,” Zayn says.

Niall returns with crisps, the sort of salt-and-vinegar that takes the skin off your mouth and two small plates of chips because someone somewhere raised him right. He sets one plate down with a flourish and then looks, deliberately and fondly, at the formality in the air. “Everyone met,” he says. “Good. Harry has a short second half so don’t say anything too complicated he has to think about. I need him to hit the nice notes.”

“I can think and sing,” Harry says, dry.

Niall snorts. “Sure you can, Haz. I’d just rather you sing.” He squeezes Harry’s shoulder like a brother with permission. To Louis, quick and quiet: “You good?”

“I’m breathing,” Louis says.

“Calls that a win and now eat,” he commands. “And be civilized. I’ve got respectable customers who think I’m respectable.”

“You’ve got Mick,” Liam says. “He owes you for the darts board damage.”

“Respectable adjacent,” Niall concedes. He looks at Harry with the kind of fond that hides itself under bossiness. “You looked all right,” he says, which is how love sounds in a place like this.

Harry’s eyes soften in that sideways way he does, never dead centre, as if direct tenderness might crack the glaze on the moment. “Ta,” he says. He picks up a chip, considers the salt with the seriousness of a man reading doctrine, eats. The ring on his index finger catches the light and throws it away again.

Louis tracks the small gleam without meaning to. He wonders if desire is just a series of lights you keep thinking you might pocket if you were quick enough.

“Dad in?” Harry asks Niall, casual as an elbow on a windowsill.

“In the cellar swearing at the barrels,” Niall says. “He’s decided pressure is a metaphor.”

“For what?” Zayn asks, because Zayn never lets a sentence off the hook if it looks like it might sing.

“For life,” Niall says. “For me never taking a holiday. For the price of oranges. For every choice he didn’t make and wants to blame physics for.”

Harry’s mouth does the small not-smile that has already rearranged Louis’s insides twice tonight. “Reckon he’ll let me near the piano?” he asks, out of nowhere and entirely in line with how he behaves: drop a coin into a conversation and see what makes the slot machine do. “It’s sulking from neglect.”

Niall considers the ceiling in the performative way a man does when he’s already decided. “If you don’t play that sad one that makes the barmaids cry into the clean glasses,” he says. “And if you don’t get sweat on it. And if you do, you mop up.”

“Deal,” Harry says and the word is almost bright.

There’s an ease settling, the kind that arrives when everyone at a table remembers their jobs. Liam makes a joke about the Cortina; Zayn diagrams something with salt as if tenderness could be taught with seasoning; Niall manages to be present and on his way at the same time. Louis watches and takes part and also somehow stands outside himself observing the scene, a boy through his own front window.

Harry turns to him when the others tangle their talk into a separate mess. “You keep a list, you said.”

“Of course I keep a list,” Louis says, offended and charmed. “It’s under the till. It’s not for savages.”

“What’s on it for me?” Harry asks and the for me lands in Louis’s chest like a coin in a charity tin.

“Things that go all the way through,” Louis says, as if that is a category a person besides him would recognise. “Albums that don’t let you out once you get in.”

Harry nods once. “Good,” he says, satisfied. “I’m tired of doors.”

Liam laughs and slaps the table. “What does that even mean?” he demands, delighted.

“Means some of us are tired of thresholds being the most exciting bit,” Zayn says, not looking up from the napkin he’s committing something to. He draws quick and decisive, the way he smokes: as if there’s time and there isn’t.

“Zayn thinks metaphor is a sport,” Louis explains for no one who needs explaining.

“It is,” Zayn says, drawing again. “Also-” he tilts the biro toward Harry’s hands “-men with good rings get away with more.”

“They clink on the strings,” Harry admits, offering his own flaw before anyone else can point it out.

“It sounds good,” Louis says, too quickly. “Like the song’s wearing jewellery.”

Liam laughs too loud with relief. “I’m stealing that,” he says. “I’ll tell Kev his Cortina sounds like it’s wearing jewellery and he’ll stop driving it through puddles.”

“Say it nicked the jewellery from its mum,” Zayn adds, wicked.

Louis looks to see what Zayn’s making and Zayn, - who knows him the way you know your own bad habits - turns the paper away for a second like he’s seasoning a stew.

“Show me,” Louis says, soft.

Zayn flips the napkin and slides it across. It’s a fast portrait of a boy trying not to be seen wanting to be seen. The cheek is a slope, the eyebrow too judgmental, the mouth a line trying to decide between clever and kind. It is unmistakably Louis and painfully fair.

“You look miserable,” Zayn says, but his voice says, I know the room you live in and I’ve painted the light kindly.

“Rude,” Louis murmurs, and presses the napkin down flat as if he can iron his expression smoother. He wants to say thank you and he doesn’t want to say it in front of an audience, so he settles for looking at Zayn and letting his face do what his mouth won’t.

Liam laughs too loud at a joke none of them made. “He’s happy as a clam,” he insists, and then to Harry, conspiratorial: “He’s got the opposite of resting bitch face. He’s got... what is it. Resting poem face.”

“Shut up,” Louis says, laughing in spite of himself. He can feel heat at his ears and pretends it is the room. “I’ll ban you from the shop.”

“You can’t ban me,” Liam says. “I am your security detail. Who else will chase away the teenagers who try to shoplift cassettes of Queen?”

“Let them,” Niall calls as he passes, catching only that word and none of the sense. “Let them nick Mercury. He’d approve.”

The break ends itself. Niall touches Harry’s elbow and the movement has permission in it. Harry sets his glass down untouched and inclines his head at the table in a gesture that refuses to be a goodbye because it prefers an encore. “Nice to meet you properly,” he says to Louis.

He touches the back of his neck, a quick sweep that lifts curls and reveals the pale nape; Louis looks away because looking too long at a vulnerable patch of skin feels like a trespass. When he looks back, Harry has already threaded the gap between the table and the speakers and the beam has found him again the way night finds the sea.

Zayn waits until Harry is halfway to the stage to push the napkin back to Louis. “You look miserable,” he says again, this time kind all the way through.

“That’s my face,” Louis says. “I was born like this.”

“Your face is fine,” Liam says bracingly. “It’s your insides that are dramatic.”

“Thanks very much,” Louis mutters, shaking a chip of salt over Liam’s hair.

Louis doesn’t think of drowning until he’s already under.

The piano’s first chord is a door swung open on a room that has been airing itself for years. Harry sits slightly off-centre on the bench, knees a fraction wider than politeness, hands hanging for a second above the keys like a hawk’s shadow over field. When he plays, it’s not flash or speed. It’s weight and patience, fingers laying down a line you could walk in your socks. The spotlight catches a sweat-shine at the throat, kisses the cross and lets it go, brushes a curl that refuses to behave and crowns it.

Louis has been very good at listening to guitar, he has taught himself the fretboard without touching it, he can keep a catalogue of tunings in his head the way other people keep birthdays, but piano is a different crime. It has the intimacy of a hand on your throat that doesn’t squeeze.

The first notes are tiny footprints across a kitchen floor in the dark: you could miss them if you insisted on being brave about it. The right hand tests the air, the left lays down the ground you didn’t know you were standing on. Then the melody finds him. Or he finds it. The distinction is academic and no one here is that sort of academic.

Conversation dissolves at the edges. Even the men at the bar with the fat opinions go slimmer in the mouth. Zayn’s pen stills, not because he’s finished but because he’s listening with whatever part of himself says yes without turning it into a word.

Louis has the brief, stupid thought that if he had been taught how to pray he might try it now, then remembers that his body has been praying all along, to order, to sound, to the script of a week that offers him this one hour and calls it salvation without shame. He tries to sit back in his chair like a man unaffected. He fails spectacularly and well.

Harry’s head is tipped, listening to the thing he’s making. The soft click of a ring against ivory becomes part of the rhythm, a breath at the end of a phrase becomes the reason the phrase exists. He plays the way someone writes a letter and doesn’t send it, lays it in a drawer, takes it out years later and reads it aloud over a sink.

It isn’t sweetness. It isn’t pain. It’s that uncomfortable third thing that makes a person want to be bigger than they are.

Halfway through, he looks up. It isn’t a sweep. It isn’t an accident. The beam catches green and makes a saint of something that refuses sainthood. The look lands, there, the same geometry as earlier, a straight line between two points in a room full of circles.

Louis does not move, he cannot. He feels the sound in his teeth. If he had words, they would be rude: get out, get out of my lungs, get out of my chest. If he had better words, he would ruin himself with them.

The song swells, finds the place where you’d argue it should end, refuses, says no, one more and it’s the one more that kills him.

Louis’s body does the thing bodies do when they’re trying not to cry in public: throat tight, eyes hotter than they should be, dissatisfaction with oxygen. He presses his tongue to the back of his teeth like that could convince the floodgates to respect property lines.

He doesn’t look at Zayn because Zayn is the kind of friend who will notice and then turn his noticing into something protective and Louis isn’t ready to be seen generously.

When it ends, the room doesn’t know how to put its hands together. A few people start and stop, a few throw noise early like confetti and then someone brave claps and the rest follow the map.

Harry sits very still for exactly one second after his hands leave the keys, like the music might be trying to find its way back. He nods once, which is either gratitude or the refusal of it, and stands with the unhurriedness of a person who has remembered where his body ends.

He doesn’t come straight back to the table, which is a mercy. He disappears in the direction of the stockroom, perhaps to be told off by Niall’s dad for existing while melodic.

The table breathes like people who’ve been underwater. Liam wipes his eyes with a fist and pretends it’s sweat. “Chips?” He says, voice bright because he has chosen joy in the face of it. “I’m buying. I’m buying forever if anyone lets me.”

“Buy me a lifetime,” Zayn says. “I’ll pay you back in sketches of your heroic jaw.”

“My jaw is absolutely-” Liam begins, then stops, embarrassed by the proof of his own wanting to be adored and laughs at himself like a decent man.

When Harry returns, he doesn’t sit, he rests a hip on the chair, the posture of a person who will leave before anyone can accuse him of staying. “Niall,” he says, “your father is a-” He stops, finds a word that isn’t impolite, settles on, “romantic about pipes.”

“Welcome to the family,” Niall says. “We love you once and then we bully you forever.”

“I’ll write a song about it,” Harry says, deadpan and Louis wants to hear it.

They talk - God, they talk - about too many small things to list: the engine Liam is absolutely certain he can reanimate, the tattoo Zayn wants to give himself and will not because he’s romantic about skin, the way the chips are better on rainy nights, a film none of them saw last week but all of them have opinions about.

Harry says less than anyone and somehow creates the space they all put their sentences into. Louis offers two thoughts he’s proud of and swallows five he isn’t sure about and thinks, if this is what being near him is going to be like, I could learn to be a gentler version of myself.

There’s a lull the size of a breath and in it Harry turns his eyes to him again. “You left early last week,” he says, not accusing, not anything.

“I was tired,” Louis replies before he can stop himself. Then, because there’s no point lying to someone who treats sentences like litmus tests, he adds, “And because I like the walk home better if I’ve still got something ringing in me.”

Harry nods. “I know the ringing,” he says. It’s the kind of line that’d sound like a pose coming from most mouths, from him it’s a fact reported gently. “It’s worse when it stops.”

“Don’t let it,” Zayn says, not looking up. “Start the next one before the last ends.”

“That’s greedy,” Liam says.

“That’s living,” Zayn counters.

Niall snorts. “That’s a nightmare to stack glassware to,” he says. “But all right, poets, I’ll allow one last round if you promise not to go home and ruin your mothers’ carpets.”

Time decides to be the kind version of itself for an hour, elastic, silly, suspiciously generous. The boys spill jokes into each other’s pockets and call it wealth. When Harry goes for the door, Niall flings a dishcloth at his head without looking and hits him and Harry catches it and tosses it back in a single, lazy arc that lands exactly on the tap handle like a magic trick. He doesn’t say goodbye and there is no need; he is the sort of person who can include you in an exit.

“Alright,” Zayn says, like he’s setting down a heavy bag. “That was nearly normal human conversation. On a scale of one to feral, you did medium.”

“Thank you,” Louis says and he means it for the whole evening, for the way Zayn made ugly mercy beautiful and Liam made noise into comfort and Niall made the room a shape he could inhabit and the way Harry looked at him like a sentence with a decent verb.

“Another?” Liam says, lifting his glass.

“No,” Louis says, and then, because he’s trying to learn how to make statements that don’t hide: “I want to remember this.”

“Alright then,” Liam says, like agreement is a warm coat. “We’ll remember it with you.”

They don’t wait for him to leave early, they don’t prod him to stay. They let Friday do its work and allow Louis to be a participant instead of a witness. When he does stand, the room doesn’t tilt, it simply lets him go, the way rooms do when they trust you to come back.

On the way out, the posters on the wall near the toilets flicker as people pass: A new addition for a benefit night somewhere across town: WHO WANTS TO LIVE FOREVER? in letters that glitter under cheap light as if the printer knew the only way to sell grief is with glamour. Someone has written in a neat hand: WE DO, and underlined it twice.

At the door, he looks back as if he’s in a film and laughs at himself for it. The stage is an empty square that still hums with the last of the piano.

Friendship, he thinks, is a thin edge you can cut yourself on coming or going.

But live will go on. He will put the good sleeves on the counter and pretend it is only his job. He will be as kind as he knows how and as clever as he can manage and as brave as he can bear.

 

***

Mr Patel locks the till with the solemnity of a man sealing a letter he will not reread. “Go before the sky decides to be Scottish about it,” he tells Louis, but he’s smiling around the edges, eyebrows doing most of the talking. The shop is that half-light it gets in the evening, fluorescents humming like tired bees, the window a pane of pale where the street only just remembers you exist.

Louis alphabetises the last strays, two Fleetwood Macs that had been flirting with the wrong section, a Madonna single pretending to be a twelve-inch because it likes attention. He straightens a row he’s straightened twice already and lets himself stop exactly there.

Outside, evening has chosen orange. Sodium lamps throw halos on wet pavement, the chip shop breathes fat and vinegar into the air like a parable about sin you don’t mind repeating. Someone cycles past with a crate of flowers on the front and the petals look like their own small refusal.

He pulls his Walkman from his jacket pocket, the foam ear pads a little flattened from a boy who forgets where he leaves his head. He thumbs the latch, the cassette springs like a polite secret and he flips it, side B to side A, then reconsiders and flips it back. He has rituals for when he needs a spine.

The tape clicks into place, the plastic door shuts with that cheap, satisfying snap. He presses play. Hiss. A heartbeat. Then Jimmy Somerville’s voice arrives from somewhere both farther away and closer than London, all ache and trajectory. The song doesn’t ask, it tells. Louis’s stride finds its time to it. Not quite marching. A particular sort of leaving that keeps your hands in your pockets.

At the corner by the bookie’s, the soundtrack shifts, - his choice and the town’s. He thumbs the volume up, then down, he needs the voice and also he needs the street. There’s a cluster under the broken streetlamp: three men, one mid-forty and wearing a tie his wife ironed like she loved him and resented it, two in the age where men choose between soft and mean and pretend it isn’t a choice.

They’re laughing about something that uses the word proper like a cudgel. There’s talk of books and schools and who’s allowed to want what in a room where the lights are turned on at three. “…you start letting filth in the schools,” one says, the word filth landing like something wet on tile. “Books with-” He gestures, extrapolates. “Then you’ll have boys in dresses demanding-”

“Demanding basic human rights?” the one with the tie offers and they all laugh like that’s the funniest thing they’ve said since the price of beer went up.

Louis could keep walking. He has kept walking his whole life. But the song in his ears is a boy in a small town with a suitcase and there’s something in the synth that insists upon the spines of people.

He doesn’t plan to stop. He plans to pass. He plans a sentence that is a small, sharp thing to knock off the top of their laughter like a hat.

He slows one fraction, enough to place the sentence like a coin in a slot machine. “If you’re so worried about what boys read,” he says without taking the headphones off, “you might try a book yourselves.”

One of the older men blinks, laughs, doesn’t like that his laugh arrived late. “What’s that then?”

“Start with a dictionary,” Louis says, borrowing a bravery he will have to pay back later with interest. “Look up decency. It’s not spelled C-O-W-A-R-D-I-C-E.” Sharp, then. The line lands and splits. He hears it; they hear it. He keeps walking because he wants to be a person who says the thing and then continues to exist.

Tie-man’s expression curdles into that particular sour that lives between embarrassment and the need for a target. “Oi,” he says. “Watch your mouth.”

The shove is not dramatic. It’s meanly intimate, a hand that wants to remind a person what they’re made of. It catches him off-centre, the left shoulder where his bag strap has trained his body to tilt, and he stumbles as if auditioning for clumsiness, as if falling is a hobby. His knee finds the pavement with the weird quiet sound skin makes when it realises it’s about to change. The denim tears open with a rip that manages to be both comic and personal. Blood is immediate in the way some decisions are. Cold comes after.

There’s a laugh from the oldest, a mean old laugh that’s been practicing. “Watch it, lad. Fancy lads bruise easy.”

A word follows, short, ugly, too familiar. He doesn’t need the actual letters to feel it. It’s the kind you recognize by the shape of the air after it’s been said, a jag that makes you wear your mouth like you stole it. It slides over his skin and under it, a cut that doesn’t bleed until later. His face runs hot and dumb. Shame’s a trick of biology; the skin does what it likes.

He is up faster than the humiliation would prefer because he has trained his body for this: get vertical, make the laugh a closed door. He checks the tape without looking panicked, he presses stop and play and the hiss returns like a friend you owe money to. The knee throbs, jeans flower dark around the tear. He brushes gravel from his palm and his own hand shakes and he despises it. The men watch with an attention that isn’t concern. Their laughter turns communal. The song in his ear lifts into the place where a human voice sounds like a siren and an altar both.

He is suddenly all knee and backside and elbows, exposed in a way that has nothing to do with skin. He feels thirteen; he feels six; he feels the age of any boy who has ever been asked to be smaller than the room. The echo of a school corridor, the boy who called his arse a girl’s arse and taught him how to carry a jacket like a curtain. He is furious and haunted by the fact that he is also frightened, which makes him angrier because he has trained his fury to wear wit as a coat.

The old man’s laugh has whisky for bones. “Go on, son,” he says to Louis, a father's tone borrowed for the occasion. “Run along home to mummy.”

He could go back to the shop. He could call Zayn with a story and make it a joke. He could go home and put his knee under the tap and pretend he tripped on a paving stone because the town never cleans properly. He could also refuse all of those rescue ropes and make himself walk past them with the same face he wears when a record skips and he decides to convince the skip it wasn’t a mistake.

Louis makes his mouth behave and because he cannot bear to give them the dignity of his fear, he does something both brave and stupid: he smirks. He turns his face into a mask that looks like he believes his own line.

He adjusts his headphones, as if repairing the aesthetic will repair anything. He presses play again because he needs the boy with the suitcase more than he needs his own voice. He takes one step, then another. The men shout something about the weather. The words don’t choose him.

He does not hurry until he’s four paces past them. Then he takes the corner like he meant it, breath held because breath might bring tears and tears would be the sort of truth he refuses these men.

His knee speaks with every step, a new vocabulary that says you did this to yourself and also good. He tastes metal and realizes it’s inside him, he swallows and the taste moves.

A shape joins him and does not say hello. A coat appears in his peripheral vision, dark and expensive enough to have a conscience. He knows the height without looking, knows the way a shoulder can take possession of air without knocking. A cigarette leans from a mouth, he senses silver before he sees it, the necklace catching the streetlamp once then letting go. He knows who it is before he allows his eyes the permission.

The cigarette hisses softly under the drizzle and is protected by a cupped hand. The rings flash and go dull again. The presence is not a rescue; it’s the introduction of an alternative.

They walk. The three men behind them perform boredom at each other until they are genuinely bored and the performance can cease. Louis doesn’t look back because he refuses to be a mirror.

They go two streets like that, past the shuttered florist, past the school gate where someone has looped red yarn into the wire to make a heart and someone else has cut the heart in half with a knife so as not to be implicated. A fox looks up from the bins and decides this particular procession is not edible and lets them go. When they are under a working streetlamp, one of the old ones that does its job like a promise, they stop in that awkward choreography people use when they are finished walking but aren’t ready to say why.

Louis slides the headphones down around his neck, the pads land against his collarbones. He doesn’t know whether to be furious or grateful or both; the fury arrives first because it knows how to run faster.

“You shouldn’t have to be good at that,” the other boy says, voice low enough to belong to the hour and the wet. He doesn’t say what that is. He doesn’t need to.

“Walking?” Louis tries. It comes out sharp and wrong. The laugh that follows is too bright on his tongue. “I’m clumsy, not immoral.”

The shadow of a smirk. “I meant the part where you make yourself invisible while you bleed.”

He has, of course. The knee, now that a lamp and a companion have acknowledged it, reminds him of the facts. Blood is a tidy red line and then a mess. The denim has surrendered in a jagged mouth. The skin beneath is pale and humiliated.

“It’s fine,” Louis says, reflex. “I like to accessorise with injury. Adds drama.”

“Here,” Harry says, and there’s a handkerchief from a pocket like a magic trick, white and ridiculous, monogrammed with a letter that once expected to belong to a better world. He crouches without flourish. The rings clink against the lamp-post as he balances. The handkerchief meets the skin with a gentleness that feels impolite to witness.

Louis flinches because it’s reflex, not fear. “You don’t have to-”

“I know,” Harry says. “ But I want to.”

They look at the kneecap together like it’s a small complicated instrument. The cigarette acts as a metronome in the hand not doing triage. Louis wants to make a joke about ash and infection, the joke dries up in the warm part of his mouth that has not decided whether to be brave or soft. The hand dabs, the rings glint, the laces of the Harry's boots darken with rain.

“You’re very-” Louis begins and edits three adjectives where no one can hear. He tries again. “That was... thank you.”

Harry sits back on his heels, handkerchief now pink in one corner. He’s wearing that coat that looks like it’s meant for trains and foreign stations, underneath, the suggestion of a shirt that would be transparent in a better light and, now, just generous. The cross at his throat is a small line of honesty. His hair is damp chaos.

“You’re welcome,” he says. “Do you have a face you need to save, or can we talk like normal people for five minutes?”

“I don’t know any normal people,” Louis says. Then, because the truth might make this a better night: “I don’t know how to be one.”

“That’s good,” Harry says. “They’re boring.”

He stands, slower than anger and quicker than pity and leans on the lamp in a posture that makes him look taller. He offers the cigarette, Louis shakes his head. Harry takes a drag and looks at the space just left of Louis’s face, as if direct contact would set fire to the bit of air keeping them safe. Smoke knots, then opens.

“You hear what he called you,” Harry asks, equal parts real and rhetorical.

“I’ve heard it before,” Louis says and hates how that sounds like a boast instead of a scar. “You’d think I’d be better at dodging it.”

“Dodging isn’t the job,” he says. “It’s not on you.”

“Oh, good,” Louis says, relief arriving disguised as sarcasm. “I thought everything was on me. I thought-” He stops because the sentence is too big for a lamp and a wet pavement.

Harry's mouth does the thing it does when he’s about to make a joke and chooses not to. “I was coming from a rehearsal,” he says instead, a translation of a confession. “We finished late. Took the long way. Heard the bright voices of men who know they won’t be hit. I didn’t know if you needed-” He flicks ash. “-a witness. Or a second pair of legs.”

“Both,” Louis says before he can be cool about it. “But if I ask for help, I feel like I’ve given them something I don’t owe them.”

“You haven’t,” he says, precise. “You owe them nothing.”

“I know,” Louis says, half-laughing because the truth aches. “I also know nothing about being looked after without paying for it with a joke.”

“So don’t,” Harry says, plain as a chair. “Let me be useless and stand here smoking until your hands stop shaking.”

Louis looks at his hands. Stupidly, they are shaking. He tucks them into the sleeves of his jumper, swallowed by wool. “I’m not-” he says and the sentence drops a shoe. “I’m not someone who-” He gestures helplessly at his own chest. Who gets saved. Who deserves it. Who can be seen bleeding.

“Someone who gets bothered on a pavement,” Harry supplies, mercy disguised as banter. “That’s all I saw.”

There’s a silence with muscles in it. Other streetlamps take their turns at throwing light, the wet tarmac tastes it and reflects. The music, forgotten around his neck, hums a little in protest at being excluded. Louis feels the outline of the tape player at his hip.

Louis risks a direct look. The face he’s been not-looking-at is less myth under sodium light, a mouth that wants to be kind and keeps catching itself, eyes like they’ve been practising how to be careful with other people’s secrets. He wants to catalogue the details, - freckles like punctuation, the curve of the cheek where laughter sits when it decides to stay - but cataloguing feels like theft in a moment designed for giving back.

“Are you all right?” he asks, surprising himself with the direction of his concern.

Harry huffs a laugh. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Because,” Louis says and stops.

“Because I heard them too?” he offers. He looks at the ground, then again at that safe left-of-face point. “I hear them every day,” he says, not dramatic. “In the paper with better grammar, in my house with better cutlery, in streets like this with better jokes. Tonight I heard them about you. Which is worse and easier, both.”

“Easier?” Louis repeats.

“Because I could walk next to you,” he says. “And worse because I wanted to go back and make them understand something they’re not built to hear.”

“And what’s that,” Louis asks, not because he craves the answer but because he likes the sound of Harry deciding to say a thing.

“That you were trying so hard to be brave you forgot you already are,” he says, a little exasperated and not at all tender until after the sentence lands. Then he looks embarrassed and rescues himself with a drag. “Anyway. I’m sorry they did that to your knee. Your jeans are-” He does an apologetic hand-wave. “-having a difficult evening.”

“They’re not the only ones,” Louis says. The laugh they share belongs to people who cannot afford to name fear and are renting humour by the minute.

“I should stop talking to old men,” Louis blurts, the shame rising up and demanding to be charming. “I mean, I should stop correcting them in public. I should… just keep my mouth shut, probably.” He hates himself for saying it, he hates that it sounds like surrender.

“No,” Harry says, evenly. “Correct them in public. Choose your exits.” He flicks ash like a conductor. “You’re good at lines. Spend them where they cost you least.”

Louis barks a laugh that hurts his ribs and loves them for it. “Do I seem like I’ve got a lot of lines,” he asks and then wants to pull the sentence back where no one can see it. He fiddles with the tape door on the Walkman to stop his hands telling on him.

“You seem like you’ve got the right ones,” he says. “And also like you’d rather write them down than say them.” He twists a ring, it clicks softly. “Which is… not a failure.”

“Feels like one,” Louis says, then, lower, the truth he didn’t mean to share: “Feels like if I try to be small enough I might stop being the sort of person men like that itch to-” He can’t finish. The verb is both too many and not enough.

“Cruelty’s a habit,” Harry says. “Some men inherit it like a coat.” He looks toward the corner Louis turned at speed, where the club still hums with cheap lights and cheaper sentences. “Some of us are trying to forget our sizes on purpose.” He smiles with half his mouth at that, as if confessing and joking can share the same bed.

Louis thinks of the café and the sharp-faced sister and the sentence I’m saying no. “How’s your gravity,” he asks before he can stop himself. “Is it still trying to make you American.”

He huffs, amused, surprised, found out. “My gravity’s a committee,” he says, mouth wry. “It meets daily. Sends memos. I ignore them and get called ungrateful in four languages.”

“Do you understand all the languages,” Louis asks, genuine curiosity where sarcasm would usually live.

“Unfortunately,” Harry says. The cigarette has burned to a stubborn nub, he pinches it, kills it against the lamppost, tucks the butt into the cigarette packet instead of flicking it to the ground. He is, Louis notes with an affection he tries not to feel, conscientiously glamorous.

“You don’t have to walk me home,” Louis says, vague and specific at the same time. He very much wants him to. He very much wants to say he very much wants him to and will not.

“I know,” he says. “I’m walking me.” A beat, dry. “It happens to be your direction.”

They set off in that half-step designed for damp nights and complicated hearts. He tucks the Walkman into his pocket, the tape will keep humming without him until he asks for it again. Harry flicks the cigarette away and tucks his hands into his coat.

They reach the row of terraces where Louis and his mother share their careful life. The upstairs window has a square of lamplight, the lace curtain moves in the heat’s breath. Louis feels suddenly protective of the small domesticity his mother has constructed from thrift and gentle orders. He does not want blood in the hallway, metaphorical or otherwise.

“This is me,” he says, stopping under the gutter drip. Water freckles his hair and he allows it.

“Alright,” Harry says. He looks at Louis’s knee again, as if checking his earlier work. “Clean it,” he says. “Tell your mum you tripped over your own shoelace. Or tell her I was there and she’ll find my house and shout at my father for me.”

“She’d win,” Louis says, pleased by the picture.

“Goodnight, Louis,” Harry says, The lamplight draws a line along his jaw that looks like a promise pretending to be a bone.

“See you,” he says. Louis stands in the open doorway until the night has decided not to call him back, then closes it because warmth is not a resource you should waste in a house like this. He climbs the stairs on the careful edges of his feet because his mother is sleeping and he has no wish to perform his arrival.

The knee looks worse under honest light, which is the job of both bathrooms and truth. He cleans it, hissing, the handkerchief folded on the counter like a swan. He washes the blood from it carefully, guiltier about linen than skin, and hangs it on the radiator to steam its way back to innocent.

In his room, he peels the jeans off without looking down too long. He hates his thighs, he hates hating them, he hates the way shame is an inheritance and pride is a purchase he keeps saving for. He pulls on track bottoms older than his opinions and sits on the edge of the bed with the Walkman on the duvet, the tape waiting for permission to sing.

Louis puts his hand against the ache at his knee, then against the warmth in his chest and discovers both are survivable.

He closes his eyes. He presses play.

Louis wakes to the hum of a flat that cares for him, kettle preening on the hob, a pan’s shy rattle, the radio trying to find a station through a curtain of static.

The kitchen is a warm square you could fold into your pocket. Floral wallpaper the colour of old lemons, a table with one leg that won’t admit to wobbling, the window doing its best with a day that hasn’t decided yet. From the radio: Fleetwood Mac - I’ve been afraid of changing - slipping between adverts for double glazing and a woman’s cheerful voice reminding them to separate cardboard from glass. The kettle begins to mutter; the air goes soft around it.

His mother turns like the song turned, easy, practised, one hand on the kettle, the other tucking a stray hair behind her ear. “You slipped in like a spy last night,” she says. The tone is fond, the eyes do the worrying.

“Didn’t want to wake you,” he answers, sliding into a chair and folding himself smaller than he needs to be out of habit. He keeps his bad knee under the table.

“You never do,” she says. “That’s the trouble.” She pours the tea. “You don’t eat enough,” she adds, ritual as heartbeat. “I can see your ribs in your face.”

“That’s not how ribs work,” he deadpans, which earns him the small smile she saves for times he tries to be clever and kind. She sets a slice of toast before him, buttered to the honest edges, a smear of jam that looks like it still knows something about summer.

“I saw.” Her eyes do a quick inventory of him like a shopkeeper checking stock, hands, eyes, shoulders, the weather of his day. “Anything you need me to pick up?”

“Gaffer tape,” he says, then, because she won’t accept suspicious nouns without a pedigree: “For the shop’s Dolly Parton, sleeve’s tearing at the seam. It’ll kill me if I let the queen go ragged.”

“I’ll add it,” she says, scribbling on the list magneted to the fridge: potatoes, washing-up liquid, gaffer tape for Dolly’s modesty.

“Don’t write that,” he laughs into his tea and warms on the way down.

Fleetwood Mac yields to a long sigh of news; the words are spoken in the clean, officious voice bad ideas often choose. His mother’s mouth goes a straight line. She clicks the radio off with a gentleness that says it did nothing wrong and isn’t being punished. The quiet they grow together is the kind of quiet that looks after you.

“How’s the knee?” she asks, too casual. She was born with a radar for damages that don’t throw tantrums.

He tries for endearing rather than dishonest. “Performing,” he says. “Understudy for a small part in a tragedy.”

“Show me,” she says, raised him on the belief that shame loses half its power when shared with a woman who knows three ways to remove a stain. He makes a meal of pushing the chair back and the track bottoms up, his body protesting out of principle and reveals the skin faintly pink around the scrape, the dried kiss of gravel beneath the knee’s bossy cap.

She inhales, a small sympathetic sound that lands like a cushion. “Nasty,” she says. “Proud of you.”

“For getting into a fight with a pavement?” He aims for cheerful. It mostly lands.

“For getting home,” she corrects, crossing the kitchen and kissing the top of his head as if her mouth could be a blessing. “Cold water will have done it. Hang the cloth near, not on, the radiator or it’ll stiffen and sulk.”

“I know,” he says, glad to be told anyway.

They eat like people who understand the economics of comfort. Toast goes, tea goes, the radio stays off except for her humming as she moves, bits of “Landslide” stitched to bits of “Songbird,” the habit of a woman who won’t let the world bully beauty out of reach. She fusses about groceries, she rearranges fruit the way you organise the future under your thumb.

“You’ll come with me later?” she asks. “The market man always throws something in if you look hungry.”

“I always look hungry.”

“You always look like you’re pretending not to be,” she says, unruffled.

He finds himself smiling without permission. “I can come. After work.”

In the doorway he hesitates, a good messenger not sure which letter to deliver. “Mum?”

She hears the shape of it first. “Mm?”

“If anyone says anything stupid to you today, about the flyers, or the telly, don’t… don’t listen.”

“Darling,” she says, turning with the look she reserves for both comedy and love, “I stopped listening to stupid men in ’79.” She flicks his chin. “Go on. You’ve got records to alphabetise and lives to save.” She taps the list. “And bring back change.”

“Can’t,” he sighs, climbing into his jacket with theatrical despair. “All change is being outlawed by the council. New policy.”

“Then bring back coins.”

“Coins I can do.”

The walk to the shop is a map inside him. Past the launderette where shirts revolve like anxieties. Past a council noticeboard whose new flyer has all the charm of a warning label. A schoolkid lugs a trombone case like a punishment that might become love later. Yesterday’s men smoke outside the social club as if the habit is rented to them by the week. He doesn’t look. His knee edits his stride into something almost jaunty, he lets it.

The bell above the record shop door rings, Mr. Patel looks up from the counter with eyebrows that could adjudicate. “Morning, Aristotle,” he says, the nickname since Louis once analyzed a political argument back into its sleeve.

“Morning,” Louis says. “I come bearing Dolly-related emergencies.”

“We contain multitudes,” Mr. Patel replies. “Also gaffer tape.” He nods at the drawer that contains miracles and elastic bands. “You look taller,” he adds.

“Toast,” Louis says solemnly. “Buoyancy.”

He starts with what he can fix. Dolly’s sleeve has split an obedient inch, he tapes it smooth, coaxing vinyl back into dignity. He checks the Os and Ps, still friends. He slides Madonna back into M, murmuring apologies. He rotates the listening stack: Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me to the front for morning, a Ben E. King 7-inch near the till for the women who ask by humming, Fleetwood Mac on the player, quieter than truth.

When a lull lands, he tries reading. He lasts four poems and a quarter, his eye keeps darting to the margins as if someone might have left a better ending there. ADHD invents new rooms in his skull and invites him to visit all of them at once. He lets it. He places the book face-down (betrayal, but tender), turns to the till-pad instead, draws a square, fills it in. He writes a line that isn’t quite a thought - things that go all the way through - and underlines it, because sometimes the only power you have over your mind is typography.

The bell rings and gives him something to hold. A woman in a green coat buys “Stand By Me” for her sister’s anniversary, he finds a copy with minimal crackle and slides it into a bag.

“Do you sell sleeves?” she asks, eyeing the paper as if it might fail the record.

“We sell hope,” Mr. Patel says. “Sleeves are over there.” He winks at Louis when she isn’t looking.

Two lads in school blazers pretend they’re not skiving, he pretends not to notice. They argue Bowie vs. Queen with a seriousness that makes him happy.

“Bowie,” one declares. “He’s an alien.”

“Exactly,” the other says, triumphant. “Freddie’s a god.”

“Gods are worse than aliens,” Louis throws in, unasked. “Gods want worship. Aliens want to be understood.”

They consider this like a new chord. The taller one nods, solemn. “I’m telling my mum you said that.”

Between customers, Mr. Patel argues amiably with the radio, then with a crossword, then with a distributor about a missing shipment. “Your box of pop,” the man on the line says. “No pop is missing,” Mr. Patel replies. “Only records.”

Liam drops in with oil on his cuffs and good news about a Cortina that finally agreed to live. He produces a warm paper bag like a medal. “Eat.”

“I am eating,” Louis lies, then bites.

Liam glances at the noticeboard, mouth flattening at the tombstone leaflet. “Hate those.”

“Me too,” Louis says. “They look like they want you to die tidy.”

“They do,” Mr. Patel agrees. “They will learn we are messy.”

The bell rings again, a boy Louis knows by face and not by name buys a Smiths single with a frown like a thesis. The council flyer on the corkboard (APPROPRIATE MATERIALS / PROTECTING FAMILIES) catches a draft and flaps. A woman in a camel coat eyes it, then Louis. He raises his eyebrows into perfect neutrality.

“Children don’t need that,” she says to Mr. Patel, indicating everything vaguely.

“Children need paper bags that don’t split,” Mr. Patel says. “Tea?”

She sits in it for a second, the undefeatable softness of a shopkeeper who refuses to fight on your terms and leaves with Sinatra and fewer opinions than she arrived with. Small victories count as currency.

Between customers, Louis’s attention does its cat-and-furniture routine. Poetry again; one sentence admired, lost, found, lost. He allows himself exactly one inhale and one exhale of thinking about Harry, hand on the latch, the knot tied gently and twice, the shared silence, half-silly/whole-kind under the streetlamp. He puts the thought on the counter like a coin and lets it sit in the light. Then he counts the Depeche Mode 12-inches (eleven), the R.E.M.s (three, unjust), the U2s (plenty; Mr. Patel’s eyebrows approve).

At noon, Mr. Patel makes tea the way his mother does, with the belief that tannins can anchor a day. They drink behind the counter, conspirators against weather and policy.

“You look taller,” Mr. Patel says again.

“Toast,” Louis says, then: “Going to help Mum at the market. After work.”

“Tell her buy potatoes from the woman with the loud laugh,” Mr. Patel instructs. “They taste like childhood.”

They go back to work. Louis moves sleeves and the world gives him permission.

Across town, the world is cold.

Not the honest cold of a kitchen window or a February bus stop, but the cultivated chill some houses call taste. Floorboards trained not to creak. Carpets deep enough to drown a small man’s conscience. A dining table long and polished, ready to be both weapon and altar.

Harry is already at it because being late is a rebellion he hasn’t permitted. Rings on, his father has tactfully not noticed many times before. He twists one without meaning to. It gives him away, he keeps doing it because small honesties are relief.

His father sits with the posture of a verdict. The tie is severe. The mouth is the same. When his voice arrives, it has lectured rooms that clapped because that’s what rooms do when power gives instructions. “Princeton have written,” he says, lowering a paper he’s raised three times this week. “Open day. It would be… beneficial.”

Harry looks at his mother because he believes in witnesses. She is present the way a vase is, water that should have been changed yesterday. Hands folded like apologies. Pearls she didn’t buy. Her eyes meet his, then flinch away in apology.

“I have commitments on Fridays,” he says, mild. He chooses his voice the way you choose shoes for difficult ground.

His father laughs a non-laugh. “Commitments,” he repeats, spitting the word into a linen napkin. “To a public house. To performance for people who would cheer darts as readily as a son.”

“You went to America,” Harry says. "You came back. How was it?"

“Educational.” He pronounces "Harvard" the way some men say "God" when they believe he favours them. “I learned the value of names. The world opens to men shaped correctly.”

Harry thinks of shirts that behave, mouths that abstain, wrists that never show unapproved bruises. He thinks of Niall’s dad who calls every boy "son" that needs it.

“There are scholarships,” his father continues. “Fellowships. Men delighted to mentor you away from… this.”

“This,” Harry repeats softly. Naming the miracle to hear it dismissed is a tidy way to break a heart you can frame.

“Your mother and I-” his father says, turning the phrase into a cudgel, “-have done everything to give you a future that does not involve grease and cheap applause.”

His mother does not contradict the sentence that uses her name like a synonym for consent. She contemplates her hands. The room smells faintly of something expensive and boiled.

On the telly in the other room the news mutters Section 28 again, councils and clauses and what can and can’t be said to children, as if saying were the danger instead of what’s done to them in corners. A “Don’t Die of Ignorance” advert flashes, grim tombstone font, fear in a government voice. His father inserts it into his speech without knowing.

“School libraries,” his father says, “are not the place for-”

“Stories?” Harry asks.

“Propaganda,” his father corrects. “We must have standards.”

He thinks: Who shapes them. Who benefits.

If he says "I can’t breathe here", his father will say "open a window". If he says "I don’t want to go", his father will say "that is why you must". If he says "I want", his father will say "you’re not qualified to want". Words have become chess, his father owns both sides.

His mother’s voice arrives like a hymn beginning. “He’s eighteen,” she says. “We could... at least... hear him.”

“Hear him,” his father repeats, pleased to perform magnanimity. “Very well. Explain to me, Harold, how playing to drunks is a vocation.”

Harry closes his eyes for one disobedient second. He sees the pub’s corner of light. He hears Niall telling a room how to be kind without saying the word. He sees a boy across a table wearing miserable like a joke and making it mercy. He hears the piano choose him back.

“It makes the room kinder,” he says. “For an hour. Sometimes longer.”

“That is not a profession,” his father replies. “That is vanity.”

Harry stands because sitting feels like lying. “I’m going to my room,” he says with the politeness of a foreigner who learned a language chiefly to leave rooms without breaking furniture.

Upstairs his room tries to be kind. Sometimes it is too large, a person he cannot fill. He opens the window and lets atumn walk in. He sits on the sill in shorts, not defiance, just accurate. Skin stipples in new truth. The night is a flatter, more expensive version of the same town, the foxes here have private educations. A piano in the hall, relegated because it looks like class more than it sounds like it, sulks audibly.

He takes the guitar without thinking, it knows the shape of his lap. Rings click on strings, he refuses to apologise to the sound. He finds the chord he’s avoided, then the one that makes it make sense, then the note he will never play at the pub because it feels like giving people his spare key.

He flips the notebook to a clean page and writes:

Warmth vs. cold.
Kitchen light vs. chandelier.
Hands that know your name vs. hands that know your options.

Music arrives the way tips do, piecemeal and sufficient. He hums a line. Nothing. Hums again. Not nothing. A melody that steps down instead of up, like a person choosing to sit beside you rather than call you from across a room. He finds it on the guitar and the string says yes without becoming sentimental. He writes a couplet in love with the word "keep" and crosses it out because easy vows are dangerous even to paper.

Fragments arrive like Winterson promised in the book he keeps under the bed (too dear to shelve): I want the ordinary to be extraordinary. I want the extraordinary to stop showing off. I do not want to be wanted only when I am singing. What if that’s the only time I’m worth it. He writes, crosses out, writes. He lets one stand: Your knee under a streetlamp looked like an argument with the world and I wanted to lose.

He laughs at himself. He is ridiculous. He is also allowed.

He thinks about class because the house insists, the smell of polish and something always fractionally spoiled, Niall’s home like yeast and lemon, Louis’s building like detergent, tea and the kind of frying that starts as a mistake and becomes a recipe. He thinks about the kind of cold money buys and the kind warmth refuses to price. He thinks of the AIDS leaflet on the corkboard, fear turned into font.

He plays the progression from last night, the middle eight he dodged without telling anyone. Slower, he hears the version he wanted and didn’t take. He thinks of a mouth set to stubbornness and eyes giving the opposite away. Correct them in public. Choose your exits. He plays that. He plays choosing.

He stubs his toe on the carpet, swears in a whisper, practising being an adult when no one is watching. He shuts the window halfway, the room thanks him. He turns off the main light, the guitar glows a little, embarrassed to be beautiful.

Back to the page:

I want to be ordinary with you in a way that makes “ordinary” work harder than it ever has.
I want to tell the truth without needing to sing it.

He closes the book and sits with the quiet until it feels like a friend rather than a dare. He leans his head to the wood and lets the song inside and outside overlay until the seam goes invisible.

The air moves. He thinks: I could leave. He thinks: I do not want to leave him behind. He thinks: I do not know him yet enough to use the word him like a promise. He thinks: Louis - and there is no line through it to make it safer.

Chapter Text

They go up the back like thieves and parishioners, quiet, reverent, complicit. The service alley behind the parade stinks of bins, fryer oil, something sweet that went wrong. Zayn tests the rusted ladder with the heel of his hand, then with his weight, it complains and submits. Liam goes next, a careful bull in a china sky. Louis follows with a bottle clinking treacherously in his coat pocket, his knee sending minutes to his brain like telegrams: mind the rung, mind yourself, mind the drop.

At the top, the roof is tar-paper and gravel, puddled where the day couldn’t be bothered to dry. Chimney pots crowd the skyline like gossiping old men, TV aerials stick their elbows out. A washing line has crept up here from a lower flat and been forgotten, three pegs, a sock that claims to be white. The town lies around them, tight and ordinary, the river a black ribbon, the mill a dark tooth, streets like gramophone grooves you could drop a needle into if you wanted to hear the song of your own smallness.

Zayn lights up, the flare painting his cheekbones for a second. “Welcome to the roof,” he says, the way magicians introduce rabbits they didn’t bother to hide. He sits on the low wall with ease that didn’t come cheap, exhaling like a man who has made a pact with the sky.

Liam unscrews a bottle and raises it to the town. “To not falling,” he says.

Louis’s attention does the usual, - catalogue, classify, then go soft at the edges. He counts chimney pots because counting is a courtesy his brain offers when talk might go dangerous.

“State of that voice,” Liam says, nodding toward the Thatcher in the window. “Sounds like she’s telling the entire country off for existing.”

“She is,” Zayn says. Smoke frays from his lip, lazy and fully employed. “We’ve been very naughty, demanding libraries and bread.”

Louis lies back so the roof becomes a planet and they become constellations. He can taste the tar, salted black on the air. “She’d ban weather if she could bill us for it,” he says, lazy, thin with an edge.

They talk the way boys talk when the ground is not quite under them and the sky is saying go on then, see if I break you. Politics first, because it’s cheap and dear. The miners come up like ghosts you can still buy a pint. Zayn’s cousin moved to Bradford for work that turned into two jobs, Louis’s mother’s hours are longer now that the council’s fused morality to budget. They say Section 28 without saying it, because the law knows how to announce itself and you still feel dirty putting your mouth around its number.

“Protecting families,” Liam mutters, insulted on behalf of the word protect. “As if we’re feral.”

Zayn snorts. “Speak for yourself,” he says, then, with that unslanted glance of his, softens it, “You’re a Labrador.”

“Golden retriever,” Louis says.

“Oi,” Liam laughs, delighted to be seen accurately even when mocked. He bumps Louis’s shoe with his trainer. “Anyway. I’m sick of men who’ve never read a book telling me what books should exist.”

“Books are dangerous,” Zayn says, deadpan. “I learned how to kiss from one.”

“Did you,” Liam says, immediately curious, immediately wholesome about it. “What book?”

“A good one,” Zayn replies, lips tilting. “Might lend it to the council.”

They drift into safer lanes, because they are boys and not saints. Liam talks about a girl from the garage who knows alternators and football, he is equal parts impressed and besotted and uses sentences that end with himself laughing at himself. He means no harm. Louis could love him for it. He listens, he laughs, he makes jokes as shields and offerings.

“Anyway,” Liam says, glad to domesticate the topic with gossip, “I told the woman at the garage I liked her hair and she said she was married to it. Married! Imagine being married to hair. How would you even sign the register.”

Louis drinks. The beer is sweet where his mouth is sore. He says nothing, does the old trick of turning himself into a corridor so the conversation can pass through without catching on the furniture of him.

Zayn rolls his cigarette, listening with one ear, eyes tracking the horizon like he expects to sketch it later without cheating. He is not unkind, he is simply allergic to performances that don’t do their own work. “Girls,” he says finally, bored like an artist who has seen this painting. “We’re going to sit on a roof like thieves in a painting and talk about girls?”

“What else do people talk about on roofs?” Liam asks.

“Music,” Zayn says. “Politics. Heaven.“

“Fine,” Liam says. “Politics then. The miners. The…library thing. The…radio saying things are fine when they’re not. The fact Kev thinks darts is sport.”

“It is,” Zayn says, purely to see Liam rise to it.

“It isn’t,” Liam obliges and then, faster than you’d think he could, “why are you angry, really.”

Zayn shrugs, a one-shoulder thing that says: I am always angry and always fine. “I want to do something that leaves a bruise on the night,” he says. “I’m bored of being gentle.”

“We’re not gentle,” Louis says.

“Compared to them,” Zayn replies, chin toward a window where men laugh like they’ve never been wrong. “We keep asking nicely to be.”

“Alright then,” Liam says, generous even with challenges. “What’s your plan, oh prophet.”

Zayn takes his time with the inhale. The tip of the cigarette glows orange, the town inhales with him. “Something like kissing a boy,” he says, casual as weather. “Right in front of whoever hates it most. Just to watch their faces struggle with the idea that we exist.”

Liam chokes on his beer and laughs the laugh that makes old ladies forgive him everything. “You absolute menace,” he says, delighted. “What... here? You and who? Me? I’m flattered.”

“Not you,” Zayn says, not unkind. “We’d ruin each other.”

“True,” Liam says gravely. He flips onto his side, propped on an elbow. “Why then.”

“To ruin their night,” Zayn says, jerking his chin at the window where the PM’s voice has now settled into the compliance of punctuation. “Imagine.” He grows animated, hands describing the illicit geometry. “Two lads up here, full view of the stupid buggers in the haircuts and we kiss like it’s the end of the world and the start of the good bit. They’d choke on their crisps. They’d call the council. They’d write letters. Think of the fury. It would be art.”

Liam laughs so hard he has to hold his midriff. “Zayn Malik, agent provocateur. You’d actually, though? You do it to make them mad?”

“To make them tell the truth out loud,” Zayn says, smoke leaving his mouth in a slow sermon. “Make them say what they’re saying anyway. Half this town’s a whisper. I want them to choke on the volume.”

Louis goes very still, the kind of still a deer does when it knows stillness isn’t invisibility but it’s all it has. His heart clatters at the idea, the audacity, the invitation of violence. And the hunger behind it. Zayn smokes, unconcerned with the effect of the match he’s thrown on their small pile of nerves.

Liam sobers a fraction, propping up his joy with something steadier. “You’d get your head kicked in,” he says, practical. “They’d climb the drainpipe like Jacks and beat the beanstalk out of you.”

Louis says nothing. He looks at the sky until it blurs and then of course, he looks at Zayn. Zayn’s face is his usual, the one he wears when the bit under it is complicated: relaxed mouth, eyes full of angles. He wonders if Zayn just lobbed a grenade and is counting the seconds, or if he simply wanted to see the shape of the night with the truth put into it.

Liam, who is better than most men and worse than saints, does something that makes Louis love him harder: he shifts his weight closer to Zayn, not away. “If you do,” he says, “for the record, I will stand on the other side of you and glare like a dog at the men who look at you wrong.”

Zayn laughs. “Golden retriever,” he says. “I told you. Besides, I’d be kissing a boy. Might be worth it.”

Louis swallows. A hundred clever things crowd his mouth, offering to be shields. He picks a small one. “Who says the boy would be any good.”

“Ah,” Zayn says, bright. “There it is.”

“There what is,” Liam says, genuinely puzzled, falling into the role he plays perfectly: golden retriever with a pocket guide to human complexity he reads upside down and still manages to understand.

“Nothing,” Zayn says. “Just Louis being Louis. Our philosopher of exits.” He leans back on his palms and looks past the chimneys to where the night collects. “If I could draw on the sky, I would write: DO NOT PERMIT SMALL MEN TO DEFINE LARGE WORDS.”

“Like decency,” Louis says before he can stop himself.

“Exactly,” Zayn says and tips ash at the pavement below as if he has chosen his battlefield.

Liam, ambitious to keep the mood in the light, offers the bottle around. Someone below has put on music to drown the speech. For a moment, the perfect guitar-spine of Bowie’s “Heroes” threads the evening together: the underwater riff, the voice that knows what longing costs and sings it anyway.

“See,” Liam says, pointing with the neck of his bottle to nothing in particular, “that’s what I’m on about. That right there. That’s life.”

“What is,” Louis asks, liking to make Liam prove his metaphors.

“That bit where the music says you can for three minutes,” he says. “I fix cars all day that say you can’t. That says you can. It’s maths.”

Zayn lies flat now. “You’re not wrong,” he says, which is Zayn for I love you. “But also, maths is what makes walls. Songs make windows.”

A clock on a church takes its time chiming the hour. Somewhere, a bus sighs, opens its mouth, eats an evening, leaves. A bottle clinks against the parapet in the official music of boys not yet letting themselves sing.

They keep at it. Talk, I mean. They let the conversation wander in the untidy way truth likes, Section 28 again, Lotto winners who buy boats, the price of bread, the cost of dignity. Louis says less than he thinks. His thoughts are running laps with numbers pinned to their chests: Zayn-boy-kiss-men-roof-him-his name. He files them the only way he knows, under later, under maybe, under don’t you dare.

The metal rattle of the ladder interrupts the night as if it were the run-in to a chorus. Niall’s head appears over the parapet first. “No one’s dead,” he says by way of greeting. “Excellent. I’ve brought improvements.” He hauls up a paper bag of beer, a packet of fags and a grin that looks like it got in trouble in school and never apologised properly.

Behind him, Harry climbs with a grace that doesn’t match the ladder. He swings a leg over the parapet and stands in the strange light, the kind that makes his shirt and his skin and the silver cross have a quiet argument. His hair is a study in decisions that looked accidental on purpose.

“Dad says roofs are for chimneys,” Niall announces, passing bottles like awards. “I told him they’re for poets. He asked if that meant cigarettes. I said yes.”

“Your dad is a philosopher,” Liam says.

“He’s a barkeep,” Niall replies. “Which is the same job but with better stories.” He sprinkles himself down onto the tar with familial confidence, clamps a bottle between his knees and starts talking about the barrel that exploded today “like a man auditioning for the navy.” He mimics his father’s swearing with the affection of a son who will never, ever leave for long.

Harry sits a little apart. Niall offers him a cigarette with the familiarity of liturgy. Zayn arcs his lighter toward them. Harry takes a drag, slow, the smoke escaping his mouth with the kind of patience that refuses to be embarrassed by gravity. He watches the thread of it unwind. He doesn’t look at Louis. Which is of course how Louis notices he is being looked at from the corner of an intention.

“Alright?” Harry says, voice small.

“Alright,” Louis says, too casual. Heat runs a little up his neck, then settles in his chest like a pocket-warmer.

Niall makes the roof into a pub without asking. He tells a story about Mick’s darts score that grows a tail. Liam counters with the engine that came back to life as if it believed in Easter. Zayn lays out a reckless little thesis about kissing and revolutions with the voice of a man who pretends a workshop it isn’t. The beer is lukewarm and perfect. The clouds break their hearts slowly.

“Heroes,” Niall says with ceremony, pointing his chin at the radio in the open window that has chosen, by miracle or algorithm, to play it again. The volume is low, the room below not generous, but Bowie’s we could be gets out and onto the roof and the next bit is mostly implied. The boys go quiet because you do.

“Terrible song,” Zayn says, which is how he says, I am not going to cry about courage in front of you.

“Perfect song,” Liam answers, which is how he says, I am.

Harry flicks ash and smiles without performing it. Louis allows himself three seconds of watching at a time, then looks away, then tries again like it’s a sport he can train for. Harry glances, not the stage glance, not the sweep, but a specific, almost private reconnaissance. It lands and then it doesn’t, it respects the fact of others. It sits beside him uninvited and doesn’t ask to be moved on.

Niall and Liam get into a cheerful quarrel about darts and football, Zayn lies on his back and invents constellations that don’t exist until he names them, Harry gets up and walks the parapet with hands in pockets, the born habit of boys who needed to learn their edges.

Louis follows the way a magnet follows rules. He takes his beer, which means the hand that would have fidgeted has a job. He practices his normal mouth on the walk over, the one that doesn’t let his thoughts leak. He overshoots where Harry stops by a chimney pot, then glides back like he meant to admire it.

Harry’s curls are damp at the temple, the cross glints when he turns, then goes shy. The shirt is a chaos theory. The rings are ridiculous and right. His eyes, well. They hold a roof without having to try.

“You look very…” Louis starts, then abandons adjectives before they betray him. “Roof-appropriate.”

Harry huffs a laugh. “I left the chiffon at home,” he says. “Thanks for letting me crash your sky.”

“It’s not mine,” Louis says.

“Feels like it might be,” Harry says, tipping his chin at the town. “You know the names of things from up here.”

“Chimneys,” Louis says. “Aerials. Puddles. The usual romance.”

Harry’s mouth tilts. “Romance is mostly nouns,” he says. “People pretend it’s verbs so they can feel busy.”

Louis files that to enjoy later when his hands are not occupied with existing. He looks out over the town and lets the view climb into him. The stadium floodlights farther off make a cheap galaxy, the mill’s windows are blacked like teeth. The speech below has ended or become something else, the radio tries on a different song and fails them. The air is fuller than it was.

“I feel like I could leave this town forever,” Louis says and the sentence arrives without his permission, fully dressed and already halfway out the door.

Harry turns his head, the kind of slow that isn’t affected but attentive. “Do you.”

Louis wants to take it back and stamp it with a joke. He breathes once through the nostrils he does not trust. “Sometimes,” he says. “Sometimes I think if I stay I’ll turn into a leaflet.”

“What kind of leaflet,” Harry asks gently, eyes on the street, not on Louis.

“The kind you find under pint glasses,” Louis says. “Soggy with other people’s intentions.” He looks at his bottle as if it can explain him to himself. “And then sometimes I think. I don’t know. That the things I like about staying are the exact things I’m ashamed of liking. It’s stupid.”

“It’s not,” Harry says, the firm voice of a man who noticed earlier where Louis hid the bruise and saved the plaster for the quiet. “Recklessness and domesticity are not enemies. They’re cousins who share a room in your head and borrow each other’s jumpers.” He takes another drag, then offers the cigarette without looking like it’s a magic trick, no dare in it, just a tool shared between apprentices.

Louis hesitates, then he takes it, because he is slightly drunk and because the roof is telling him he can be a version of himself that isn’t all armour. He inhales badly, coughs without embarrassment, tries again and gets it right enough to pass. He returns it and their fingers don’t meet, which is somehow worse.

“What about you,” Louis asks. “You wanting to leave.”

Harry’s laugh is smaller than a coin. “Every hour,” he says. “Every hour and then also never. It’s very inconvenient.”

“Your dad,” Louis says, because he cannot help himself. He tries to make the words rounder so they bounce and don’t bruise.

Harry hums acknowledgement. “He thinks the world is a club and he has a laminated card. He thinks I’ll lose my life if I don’t get one.” He looks at the town without hating it, which is a skill. “But sometimes I think the door that says exit is a prank. Sometimes I think the room gets bigger if you make a noise where you are.”

“Like a song,” Louis says, before he can stop himself from giving that away.

“Like a song,” Harry agrees, so mild Louis almost misses the thank you inside it. A breath later: “I like your shop.”

Louis blinks at the sky because eye contact is dangerous when it contains compliments. “It’s Mr. Patel’s shop,” he says. “I’m just the boy who tells the vinyls where they belong.”

“That’s a God,” Harry says. “By any other name.”

Louis feels that land somewhere dangerous and good. He wants to deflect. He chooses instead to let it stay. The song from the below window changes again, news, a quiz, something about fisheries. A cat yells at the night like it owes him money.

“Zayn wants to kiss a boy in front of old men,” Louis hears himself say, as if the words have been staging a jailbreak and found a gap in the conversation’s fence.

Harry’s mouth does that not-smile that is mostly respect. “He wants to be a problem for the right people,” he says. “He’s very good at it.” He glances over his shoulder at Zayn, who has his smoke balanced on his bottom lip, hands behind his head, Liam talking at him about something trivial and vital, Niall explaining the intricacies of keg pressure in a way that makes it poetry. “He’ll choose carefully,” Harry adds. “Where. Who sees.” He looks again at Louis then, directly, briefly, without a bit of theatre to hide behind. “He won’t be alone.”

The wind, such as it is, lifts and puts down a curl at Harry’s temple. Louis wants to put his hand there the way you put your hand on a dog’s head when it presses into your knee, simple, grateful, uncomplicated. He puts the desire in the safe under the counter in his chest and pretends the combination will not be obvious to anyone paying attention.

“Tell me something true,” Harry says, as if truth were a game boys play when roofs make them brave.

“I hate my thighs,” Louis says, surprised into accuracy. He laughs immediately, mortified and relieved. “Jesus. That wasn’t the romantic sort of truth.”

“It’s the only sort worth anything,” Harry says. He leans his hip against the chimney and turns his rings, not to show off, a nervous rosary. “I hate that people like me better when I’m singing than when I’m not.”

“I like you better when you’re not,” Louis says and then dies for a second and then lives because roofs forgive. “I mean. Not better. Just. It’s good both ways. Jesus Christ. Kill me with a chimney.”

Harry stares at him for a beat, then lets out a laugh that has the fracture in it. Louis would crawl into that imperfection and live there forever if zoning laws allowed. “That’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to me in months,” Harry says. He looks down, then up. The cigarette embers ladder from orange to dark. “My mother thinks quiet is the most decent version of me. Niall thinks anything louder than a whisper is my natural vocabulary. You, apparently, think not singing is still me.”

“I think talking is a song,” Louis says, emboldened by the fact he didn’t die saying the last thing. “It just doesn’t always rhyme.”

Harry nods. The night leans closer as if it wants to eavesdrop better. Somewhere below them, men laugh for free, somewhere farther off, a siren tries to arrange fear into a line of travel.

“Do you want to be…” Louis begins, then abandons adjectives for the safety of names. “Do you want to be a singer?”

“I want to be allowed to keep being one,” Harry says. “I don’t know if that’s the same thing.”

“I think it is,” Louis says. “Being allowed is half the job.”

They stand with that. Bowie fades out of one window and returns somewhere else, as if the street has passed him along like contraband. We could be us, the lyric insists from a smashed speaker and Louis decides to believe it for exactly one song per week until proven otherwise.

Behind them, Niall mimes falling off the roof and catching himself with a face that should be illegal, Liam calls him a muppet, Zayn pretends to be bored by both and isn’t. The roof is undiscovered country and also five minutes from home.

Harry tips his head back and closes his eyes. “Do you know that thing,” Harry says after a while, “where you’re in a place and the place keeps talking at you even when your mouth is shut.”

“Yes,” Louis says. The wind collects his hair, he keeps his hands where they are even though they want to perform. “Yes.”

Harry nods once. “I keep thinking if I can get above it-” he gestures with the cigarette to the roofline, the chimneys, the idea of air “-it’ll sound further away.”

“Does it,” Louis asks.

“Not really,” Harry says.

Niall wanders over because he is incapable of leaving a high moment alone, he slings an arm around each of their necks. “What’ve we got, philosophers,” he says.

“Invented a way to overthrow the council with custard creams.”

“Nearly,” Harry says. “We’ve tired them out by not apologising.”

“Excellent,” Niall says. “I’ll put it on the sandwich board.” He squeezes, quick, fraternal, mercilessly fond. “My dad thinks you’re a bad influence, Louis.”

“Good,” Louis says. “I’ve always wanted to be someone’s moral panic.”

“Go on then,” Niall says. “Panic me. Both of you. Stay up here and tell the sky your plans. I’ll make sure no one steals the ashtrays from down there.”

He wanders back, whistling something that wants to be a tune and is satisfied being an attempt. He does a spin that’s fifty percent balance and fifty percent hope, nearly drops the crisps, bows to no one in particular, then launches into a dance. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he announces to the chimneys, “the entertainment.” He wiggles his hips.

Louis laughs, involuntary, clean. “He’s going to hurt himself.”

“He won’t,” Harry says, fondness barely disguised as fact. “He’s bendy. I’ve known him since before he knew doors were for opening and not for climbing.”

“Childhood sweethearts, you two?” Louis asks.

“Practically,” Harry says. “He taught me how to lie convincingly to adults. I taught him how to make a sandwich that doesn’t collapse under the weight of ambition.” He watches Niall for a moment. “He’s good at keeping the room warm.”

Niall hops to the parapet and back, cigarette tucked behind one ear. “What’s the verdict?” he demands, hands on hips.

“Offensive to ballet,” Zayn calls, not looking up from where he’s flicking ash into the tin and describing tattoo designs to Liam. “But we respect the effort.”

“Jealousy registered,” Niall says grandly. Then, to Harry and Louis, stage whisper: “He’s in love with Liam’s puppy eyes. It’s made him cruel.”

Liam, who has been grinning through the abuse, blushes like a sunrise and tips the last of his lager down with bravado. “I am nobody’s puppy,” he insists.

Zayn snorts, reaches for Liam’s bottle, steals the remaining mouthful without asking. The beer has acquired that end-of-bottle sweetness that makes sentences brave beyond their means. The night is widening its pockets to hold more of them.

Niall chooses a new song to whistle, closer, now, to recognisable: Springsteen.

“Play it,” Zayn says abruptly, nodding toward the hatch, the shop below it, the turntable waiting for an excuse. “Let’s have the Boss say the thing we can’t make tidy.”

Niall salutes. “Aye aye. Don’t fall off and make me fill in a form.” He drops through the hatch with the clatter of an enthusiastic seagull. A moment later, the first drumbeat climbs the stairs, then the second, then the guitar’s square-shouldered promise. The roof turns itself to face the sound. Dancing in the Dark hits the night not like a banger but like a plan.

Niall re-emerges in triumph, volume sanctioned. He is already shoulder-shimmying, face bright, ridiculous. He points at a chimney like it’s a spotlight and gives them his best imagined stadium. “You,” he tells Zayn. “You, Liam. You’re on in five.”

“I’m booking us for Glastonbury,” Liam says, breathless with laughter.

“They couldn’t afford you,” Zayn replies and then something in his face shifts, shuts, opens again. He taps a cigarette out of the packet and cannot be bothered to light it. He looks, not at Liam’s eyes. “We could,” he says, the words coming slower than his mouth wants, “be braver than this.”

Liam blinks. “Than… what? You mean... what do you mean?”

“I mean,” Zayn says, exasperated with himself, with the world, with gravity, “it’s a roof and I’m bored of pretending my mouth doesn’t know what it wants.”

Louis feels his stomach light up with a sudden, unhelpful heat. His brain obligingly opens twelve doors at once: leaping off, looking away, laughing, cataloguing the exact angle of Zayn’s head, the way Liam’s hands have gone polite at his sides, the way “Dancing in the Dark” will not stop insisting on itself.

“Zayn,” Liam says, warning and invitation both.

“Liam,” Zayn says back, soft and steps in like it’s choreography and not a revolution. He reaches, stops, tries again, reaches properly. One hand at Liam’s neck, the other somewhere indecisive and tender between shoulder and collar. Liam does not pull away. He leans, clumsy with grace, and meets him.

The kiss is not coy. It is not performed for the chimneys. It’s the swift, hungry press of boys who’ve been waiting for something like this.

Zayn kisses like he’s thought about it, Liam kisses like he’s discovered something unbreakable and is terrified and ecstatic at once. Their mouths find a tempo that ignores the song and respects the night. Zayn’s cigarette, forgotten between fingers, smokes itself into a small, ridiculous halo. Liam’s mouth opens like consent he’s been practising without vocabulary.

Niall whoops, genuine, a sound with vinegar in it. He claps like a child at fireworks and then, because joy is his chosen activism, wolf-whistles in the direction of a window where a telly glows, daring anyone to look up and care.

Harry does not whoop. He stands very still, listening, Louis thinks, taking the temperature of the roof. His face is a neat equation of relief and envy and a kind of reverence a person reserves for risk.

Louis cannot look away. The heat in his stomach pulls a thread through his ribs and up into his throat, tightening, not painful, exactly, but insistent. Shame arrives out of habit and takes a seat, desire kicks it in the shins and stays standing.

He takes a long pull of beer to give his mouth a task and because the bottle is cold and he is suddenly too warm. The world rushes a little at the edges, the labels on the chimneys swimming, the tar blurring into something that wants to be a lake. He thinks of the times he has seen in films where the background is slightly out of focus so the main figures glow, and tonight he is background and it is right and it is wrong.

He tips the bottle up and empties it in three gulps that are less about thirst and more about convincing his hands to stay where they’ve been told. He swallows, swallows again. “Well then,” he says to the night, to the song, to his own panicking heart.

Liam breaks first, not exactly breaking, more like stepping back to see what he’s made. His eyes are wet in a way that isn’t tears, Zayn’s are amused and terrified, both of them are breathing like boys who’ve run uphill and found the view worth it.

Niall bounces on his heels. “You magnificent idiots,” he declares, voice cracking on the last syllable. He points at them both. “Pub policy updated, no kissing unless it’s excellent. That was excellent.”

“Shut up,” Zayn says, but he’s smiling, which ruins it. He puts the unlit cigarette behind his ear and looks at Liam like the problem has been renamed Liam and filed under solved, for now.

Liam covers his face with his hands and peeks through them. “I’m-” He shakes his head and laughs, golden at the edges. “-I’m fine.”

“Of course you are,” Zayn says, gentler than Louis has ever heard him. He bumps his shoulder against Liam’s.

“Again,” Niall orders.

“Go away,” Zayn replies, scandalised, but kisses Liam once, quick, like a receipt.

Louis drains the rest of his other bottle because the air has become fiddly and his hands are useless and because wanting is easier when your head is a little sea. The alcohol arrives in soft waves, blurring and brightening, the roof goes companionable, the moon smug. He puts the empty bottle down too hard, catches it before it skitters to the edge, earns himself a chorus of “careful”s and feels, unexpectedly, looked after.

Zayn and Liam fall into a conversation so low-voiced and intimate that even the wind declines to eavesdrop. Niall tries to harmonise with Springsteen and fails with such enthusiasm the song forgives him. Harry looks at Louis like a man consulting a map and deciding the scenic route is worth it.

“Come on,” Harry says and Louis knows what come on means when the shop is below and the song is this one and the night is spoiling for a dance. Harry tilts his head toward the hatch. “Before Niall auditions for backing vocals and gets us all arrested for breach of taste.”

“Oi,” Niall says, not offended. “I’m a treasure.”

“You are,” Harry says and disappears into the dark.

The metal ladder is rude to Louis’s knee, he loves it anyway. The stairwell smells of dust and the complicated optimism of old posters. On the shop floor, the light makes warmth like a deliberate choice.

Louis finds the spare key behind the ledger book because the ledger likes feeling useful. He clicks the lock open and the record shop inhales them: wood, paper, the sleeping warmth of a room full of work. The streetlight makes a pale rhombus on the floorboards. Behind the counter, Mr. Patel’s list waits on its magnet, under the corkboard, the AIDS leaflet squares its shoulders, Bowie bleeds heroic from the wall poster without moving.

“Welcome to the church,” Louis says. The words don’t need to be clever to be true.

Harry runs a hand along the edge of the counter, fingers finding the tiny nicks and varnish runs. “I want to live here,” he says and it’s probably the drink but it’s also probably not. He goes to the player with the instinct of a man who knows where the ignition is in someone else’s car.

“Careful,” Louis says, because he must. “The needle jumps if you don’t talk nicely.”

“I can be polite,” Harry says, mock-offended. He flips through the stack with a care learned in a different church: Queen, Bowie, R.E.M., Springsteen. His fingers hover, then select like fate choosing a vein. “We can be literal,” he offers, holding up Born in the U.S.A. like a sacrament.

Louis laughs. “Do it.”

The first snare cracks and the shop becomes a machine for living. Harry turns the volume up to the edge of trouble. You can’t start a fire / you can’t start a fire without a spark. The line lands between them like a dare. Harry moves into it without choreography, hips, shoulders, a lazy bounce that turns into accuracy. Rings catch the fluorescent and toss it back. His mouth is open the smallest hopeful amount.

At some point, they are both sweating. The shop air goes thick, Springsteen goes long. Harry kicks his jacket off, the shirt underneath has lost the argument with his body and the night and is clinging out of principle. The cross at his throat taps its own rhythm. His hair has entered its own weather system. Louis feels his own face heat, alcohol, movement, want, and gives up trying to pretend otherwise.

“Dance,” Harry says over the drum, over the way the shelves make a small canyon out of sound.

Louis should be cool about it. He is not cool about it. He starts alphabetising. He looks away because he must and wanders toward the stacks because he cannot stand still.

“Uh-oh,” Harry says, voice bright with a very specific dread. “I know that look.”

“What look,” Louis says, already - god help him - re-shelving with missionary zeal. The Springsteen is two tracks into its churn and his hands have autonomously begun correcting the alphabet’s sins. “This is fine. This is harmless. The Ps are in shambles. I’m only-”

“You’re drunk,” Harry says, delighted, “and alphabetising.”

“It’s a public service,” Louis replies, lining up Peters Gabriel and Hammill like newly reconciled cousins. He darts to the endcap, plucks out a misfiled Pretenders and returns it to its parish. A card behind the till becomes a list, tiny, sensible: tape B / reorder King / sleeves for 7"s / rename bargain bin (less cruel). He writes with his tongue between his teeth, which he will have to forgive himself for later.

Harry leans on the counter, watching like a man at a good play. “Does it feel better?” he asks, not mocking.

“It feels…” Louis considers, rehomes a stray Police LP, looks at the newly obedient shelf and lets relief land like a weighted blanket. “It feels like the room isn’t arguing with me.”

Harry nods, softened by the seriousness. “I know that one,” he says. He points with his chin toward the turntable. “That’s what this does for me.”

Louis looks at him then, properly, not through the safe glass of distance. Sweat at the temple, lashes spiked, mouth softer than the room has any right to deserve. The world narrows in a useful way. The song rumbles forward, a machine. Niall’s laughter filters faintly down the stairwell, the roof sends back the scuff of boys becoming braver in increments.

“Come back,” Harry says, barely above the music.

Louis goes, because he has promised himself to follow the nice versions of orders. The middle of the floor is hotter than the edges. Harry meets him there, not quite close, but near enough for the air to admit what it’s been doing all night.

Harry matches him badly and perfectly. He has rhythm like a secret, he has restraint he lets go of in increments, he laughs with the line in his throat that breaks at precisely the point it should. They spin in the narrow between bins, nearly collide, do collide, grin into almost-accidents. The record jumps and then forgives them. Louis puts a palm to the player to calm it and Harry puts a palm over Louis’s and for one second the world makes an indecent amount of sense.

They break apart before that sense can ruin them. Laughing again, louder, hands to hair, sleeves pushed to elbows. The chorus returns and they shout it like the room will be punctured if they don’t. They dance until the needle runs out of groove and the arm lifts with that small, tidy motion that always feels like a polite person leaving.

Silence falls like the good kind of curtain. The shop’s hum comes back into focus, the fridge at the back with two glass bottles, the radiator being dutiful, the distant bus sighing under a lamppost. They breathe. Louis’s heart, a drummer that thinks it’s the band leader, tries to calm itself without instruction.

“Again?” Harry asks, hopeful but unwilling to maul the moment.

Louis shakes his head with a grin that has just enough shame to be charming. “I’d die,” he says. “There’d be a small funeral. The vicar would say he died doing what he loved: misfiling Roxy Music.”

“Tragic,” Harry says gravely. He steps closer not the way men step closer in films, no predator grace, no cinematic six inches, but like a boy at a bus stop rediscovering that warmth is a currency and he is done pretending he doesn’t need to spend it. Close enough that Louis can count the flecks in his eyes if he were suicidal enough to look.

He looks.

The shop light is honestly unflattering. It spares no one, it spares him nothing. Harry looks good in it anyway, the exact opposite of a spotlight, easier somehow, less like myth. His curls are damp, he smells like cigarette and skin and a ghost of cheap lager, which just now is the right perfume.

“Hi,” Harry says softly. The word is absurd, two letters and a vowel with its hand up, and it makes Louis’s knees briefly reconsider employment.

“Hi,” Louis says back. The room holds its breath. The shelves approve. Somewhere outside, someone yells affectionately at someone else, a car horn braaps twice like a bad joke and then goes away.

Harry’s gaze dives to Louis’s mouth and returns without apology. The distance is small and fuses into a single idea. Louis can feel the air change like the second before rain. He has dreamed ridiculous versions of this moment where he is suave, where he says something cut with diamond edges, where his hand does exactly what it should. Instead his hand shakes slightly with honest biology and he hates and loves himself for it.

“You-” Harry begins.

The car horn returns, vindictive, long, comic, somewhere immediately outside. Both of them startle into laughter, heads tipping forward as if bowing to a joke they didn’t ask for but freely accept. The moment, because moments are snobs, picks up its skirts and leaves by the side entrance.

“Christ,” Louis says, wiping at his eyes with the heel of his hand, adrenaline making him do the stupid thing of looking at Harry’s mouth, then away, then again.

“Rude,” Harry says to the horn, to fate, to the town.

Harry pushes damp hair off his forehead, leaves it worse, does not care. Louis presses a hand to his side and winces, laughing. They grin at each other like criminals who have stolen something small and essential and intend to hide it in plain sight.

“You alphabetised while drunk,” Harry says, admiring. “That’s a talent.”

“You danced like no one was judging,” Louis says. “That’s a revolution.”

“Don’t tell my father,” Harry says, and the joke is a little heavier than it wants to be, but the room can carry the weight.

From above, a thump, a cheer, a very specific kiss-sound and Zayn’s voice, smiling in it: “Again, then.”

“Good boys,” Harry says to the ceiling, affectionate.

“Brave boys,” Louis adds.

They tidy without pretending it’s necessary, the way people do when they’re not ready to end a moment. Louis rescues the pretenders he saved from the wrong shelf. Harry rights a wobbling display stand. The bell gives a tiny, involuntary ring in the draft and both of them look at the door. No one comes.

“Do you ever,” Harry asks, unbuttoned to the words now, “think we’re practising for a life we might one day be permitted to live?”

Louis considers the counter, the radio, the lists, the floor. “Yes,” he says. “And also that we’re already living it in bits.”

Harry nods, the motion more solemn than the shop deserves. “Bits count.”

“They do,” Louis says. “They add up.”

He moves to the door, double-checks the lock not because it needs it but because he needs to touch the mechanism. Harry is beside him in a second because that’s how he is, arriving where the nerves are and not asking for credit. They stand shoulder to shoulder like men at a bus stop in a film, pretending to be casual.

They climb back to the roof because it would be ungrateful not to say goodnight to the night from where they first borrowed it. Niall is mid-speech to an audience of two and three-quarter chimneys, extolling the virtues of chips as political theory. Zayn and Liam sit pressed thigh to thigh, newly careless about space, sharing a cigarette.

No one asks where Harry and Louis have been, no one needs to.

Chapter Text

Sunday does its best impression of mercy. The air smells of wet bread and ink, the paperboy has left the headlines folded like birds at doorways: more clauses, more councils, more language about appropriate that asks you to shrink to fit.

Louis takes the long route past the park. He turns into Zayn’s street, where the brick is darker and the paint on the sills is brighter and the tattoo shop below his bedsit has a sign that looks like it has smoked its way through adolescence. In the window: flash sheets with tigers and women and names pretending to be birds.

Zayn buzzes him in after the second press, like he always does. The stairs up smell of disinfectant, graphite, cloves. On the landing a pot plant has committed to survival in difficult circumstances. Louis knocks with his knuckles because the doorbell is decorative, the door opens on Zayn in a soft black tee and smoke-drawn eyes, a cloth in one hand and a fierce joy he’s trying to pretend is cool.

“You’re late,” Zayn says, stepping aside.

“I’m on time,” Louis says, stepping in.

“You’re late in spirit,” Zayn replies, already amused. The bedsit is brighter than it has any right to be, one big window catching a pretence of sun, two walls pinned with sketches, one table colonised by paper. The air hums with the careful electricity of ink machines asleep.

Liam is already there, sitting on the edge of the kitchen counter like he isn’t sure whether to be furniture or boy. His hair is damp from a shower. His eyes have the dazed, satisfied tilt of someone who slept and didn’t do all of it alone.

“Hi,” Liam says, too careful.

“Hi,” Louis says back. He feels a small difference in the room’s gravity, something tilted, newly balanced.

Zayn clocks the look and smirks around it. “Tea,” he says, and then, because he can’t help himself, “and scandal.”

“Zayn,” Liam warns, colour rising on his cheeks.

“It’s Sunday,” Zayn says innocently. “Confession is good for the soul.”

Louis raises both hands. “I’m here to look at tigers,” he says. “And whatever insane mandala you’ve bullied onto a knuckle this week.”

Zayn flicks the cloth aside, lifts a battered portfolio like it’s holy and he doesn’t believe in holiness. “We will get to that,” he says, then, casual as ash tapped into a tin, “We also did a little kissing.”

Liam closes his eyes and groans. “A little,” he says, which is not true.

Zayn grins, teeth sharp, delighted with his own generosity. “A medium amount,” he amends. He flips through sketches, swallows, rope, a saint with better eyeliner than God. “And then,” he adds, as if reporting weather, “we did a little more.”

Louis tries not to react. “Right,” he says. “Good. Well done.”

Zayn leans an elbow on the table, enjoying himself. “Very respectful. Very educational. We wrote a small syllabus: kissing, hands, the bit where he forgot his name and said mine instead-”

“Zayn,” Liam pleads, laughing despite himself.

“-and then there was this moment,” Zayn continues, merciless and fond, “where I said look at me and he did, like a miracle, and it clicked, you know? Body learning a language it already knew.”

Liam is pink enough to set the fire alarm off. “It was- It made sense,” he says, shoulders hitching. “I’m not… I don’t know what I am. I just- It felt like not lying.”

“‘Just for fun’ is a stupid phrase,” Zayn says. “Fun’s a serious business. Anyway, we were tidy about it. Hygiene and consent. The usual. He’s very polite.”

“I hate you,” Liam says lovingly.

“Yes,” Zayn says. He slides mugs along the table like bribes. “You’re very pale,” he tells Louis. “Don’t faint. I’ll have to draw you like a Victorian governess.”

“I’m fine,” Louis says. It isn’t a lie, it’s just a bad summary. He feels something pinched and warm in his chest, tender for Liam’s soft, honest awe and a thin thread of grief for the ease of it, the naming without punishment. He smiles because it’s the cheapest sort of support. “I am delighted for science.”

“Science appreciates your service.” Zayn opens the portfolio. The top sheet is a knife turned into a swallow midway through the trick. “Birds?”

“Birds,” Louis says, grateful for a rung.

They lean over paper. Zayn’s birds are angular, impatient, stitched with shadow. “You’re getting meaner,” Louis says, approving.

“Meaner is honest.” Zayn flips: a ship with teeth; a heart wired like a plug, a hand releasing a moth that might be a thought. “I want a run of small ones we hide where bosses can’t sack you for being interesting.”

“Where?” Liam asks, deeply invested.

“Here,” Zayn says, tapping his wrist. “Here.” A quick, casual touch at his own hip. “Ankles. Ribs. Places you can keep what’s yours without being set on fire in a staff meeting.”

“Ribs hurt.”

“You’ve got nice ribs,” Zayn says, too fast, and Liam barks a laugh.

“Shut up,” Louis tells them, grinning. They eat biscuits Zayn pretends he doesn’t buy on purpose.

When Louis leaves, the day has gone that particular Sunday grey that makes men in pubs feel both justified and wrong. He tucks his jacket closer and heads toward the market because his mother asked for coriander and he likes the way it smells.

The lane between the butcher and the laundrette is a small geography he trusts: two skips, a bin with a missing lid, a strip of posters turning themselves into papier-mâché on brick. WHO WANTS TO LIVE FOREVER? asks one with glitter, someone has written ME above it in biro, then crossed it out, then circled it, undecided. He’s thinking about ribs and birds. He’s thinking about Zayn closing his door on relief, about Liam’s silly, complicated grin. He isn’t thinking about men.

He doesn’t see them until the lane narrows. Two in front, one shadowing behind. Coats cheap, shoulders expensive. That way of standing some men have when they’ve been paid in numbers and want to claim a person as a receipt. Beer on breath. Righteousness on breath.

“Alright, sweetheart,” the first says.

Louis keeps moving because movement is citizenship. “Excuse me,” he says. He says it like a knife he doesn’t intend to use.

“Excused,” the second replies, stepping neatly into his way. “Going somewhere pretty in a hurry.”

“Home,” Louis says. “You should try it.”

The third laughs, one sharp bark that makes the afternoon resent itself. Moustache, older and sure of his type, tilts his head. “Saw you last night,” he says. “Up by the shop. With your little lot. Dancing. Kissing.” He doesn’t say who kissed whom. He doesn’t have to. He chooses the tone that turns a boy’s evening into a public offence.

“I sell records,” Louis says. “We are therefore a threat to civilisation.”

“Don’t get clever.” Moustache’s mouth thins. “You lot think you’re funny. Laughing at decent people. Shoving your-” he gropes for a polite word, fails, changes gear. “We don’t want your disease in our town. It’s not on.”

There it is: not on. A phrase that can be applied to muddy boots or a life. Heat spikes behind Louis’s ribs, anger, fear, the old exhaustion of being turned into a thought other people like to think about without paying rent.

He could run. If there were a gap. If his knee were better. If he were built different. The lane has always been narrower than he gave it credit for. The first shove is administrative, a man moving a boy out of a queue. The second is policy.

Louis’s back meets brick in a conversation that goes poorly. He brings his hands up out of habit. “Don’t,” he says, calm. He is proud of his unshake even as the rib begins its complaint. “Leave it.”

“You leave it,” one of them says, delighted at the joke.

The third man comes from behind, hand at Louis’s neck, pushing his cheek to brick. The first kick is a mistake, it skitters off the hip. The second isn’t. Boot finds rib and says learn.

“You dirty little-” from behind his ear.

“Bent fucker,” from the front.

“You think we want your-” a word he can only hear as static, then “in our pubs.”

“Say sorry,” one suggests, magnanimous.

“For what,” Louis says into grit.

“For breathing wrong,” the second says, thrilled at himself.

Another kick. A scrape at his knee, the old wound waking up angry. The world tilts, the lane goes two inches to the left. The humiliation arrives like a boil, high and mean: the way the body tattles, the way the world learns your noise. Brick flaking into his hair. The taste of iron waking up in his mouth.

He curls because the part of his brain that counts sleeves says curl. Hands up, guard the face, hide the soft parts. They find him anyway. A boot kisses the softness under the short ribs with a long, stupid vowel. His breath takes its ball and goes home.

“Look at him,” one says to the others. “Look at the state of it.”

Another laughs. “You gonna cry, sweetheart?”

He is not going to cry. He is going to throw up.

The lane does that drunk spin where you haven’t drunk anything. He has the absurd thought that Zayn would be furious at the composition, how ugly the scene is, how bad the light.

“Problem?”

The new voice doesn’t arrive with sirens. Calm, low, that precise warmth Harry keeps for rooms that need to hear themselves. It lands and it takes.

They turn because men always turn for another man. The hand on Louis’s neck lifts like it’s been caught stealing biscuits. The lane redistributes blame.

“Not yours,” Moustache says. “Move on.”

Harry steps into the space. Jacket, curls, rings, none of it the point. The point is the line from his eyes to the man’s face, delicate and merciless. He isn’t performing. He’s counting exits. “It is,” he says, even. “That’s mine.”

The word detonates quietly. Louis feels it through the brick like a second heartbeat. Mine. Stupid solace. Dangerous word. Useful as a hand.

Moustache squares shoulders to a history of mistakes. “You the piano fairy?,” he asks, fishing for laughter.

Harry looks at him. “You need to leave,” he says. “Now.”

“Or what,” the second says, happy to find the script. He moves first because he doesn’t know better.

Harry is slower than anger and faster than etiquette. He uses his shoulder like people do on crowded trains, he refuses one arm with the economy of a doorman. It isn’t a fight until the third decides his hands miss school. There is a tangle, no grace, no choreography. Louis hears the rough vowels of it: oi, you, get off, fuck’s sake, - and the stupid, specific noise a head makes against brick.

He tries to get up and his body says don’t be valiant. He gets up anyway. The lane tilts. He steadies on the bin, misses, steadies on air. He sees Harry’s fist regain its language, the neat split across knuckles. He sees a mouth he would ruin happily shape a slur he’d like erased from the world.

“Enough,” Harry says, not loud, weirdly final. He has one man by the jacket, the jacket is finished with him. The other two have learned the logic of leaving. They obey it with the dignity of cowards: chin up, feet fast.

“Freaks,” one throws over his shoulder.

“Look in a mirror,” Harry answers and lets go. His hands shake afterwards, now that they’re allowed to.

They stand in the wrecked quiet lanes acquire after an argument. Louis’s balance is late to arrive. He breathes shallow because deep isn’t an option. The edges of the world are velveteen. He feels hot and cold in layers.

“Alright?” Harry asks. Nothing and everything.

“Fine,” Louis says.

Harry’s face folds fear into patience. He steps close, offers a hand, withdraws it, offers it again. “Can you stand?”

“I am standing,” Louis says, miracle-drunk and cross about it. He clocks details because that’s how he feels in control: the red seam on Harry’s knuckles, raw, bright. He wants to kiss the hurt out of them, or put it there himself so he can be the one to tend it. Dizzy again. The pavement moves by a polite inch.

Harry does the only rude thing he’s done all day: he takes Louis’s wrist and pulls Louis’s hand gently down from his mouth. He looks at the split lip the way people look at paintings they respect. “Okay,” he says, filing it. He finds a handkerchief and presses it into Louis’s palm. “Hold.”

“Don’t use your good-” Louis starts.

“It’s a handkerchief,” Harry says. “Its job is to be ruined.”

They start walking. The first step is an essay. The second is a footnote. The third is doable if they don’t expect much from the paragraph. Harry keeps half a step to Louis’s right. He says nothing because talk is petrol.

The town pretends nothing happened because it prefers its dramas indoors. An old woman with a dog glances once and away, a mercy and a wound. A bus sighs. The tombstone poster does its gravestone work.

At the flat the lock requires sugared coaxing. “Bathroom,” he says and Harry steers careful, hand at elbow, not possessive, not timid. The room is small and honest. The mirror is kinder than the kitchen light. Louis sits on the edge of the bath. Harry kneels on the mat because nobody is watching and he has decided to be the sort of man who kneels when it’s useful.

“May I,” Harry asks, already wetting the flannel.

Louis nods. Eyes closed because he can. The first cool press is paid-off debt. He hisses like a kettle denied. Harry’s hand is steady, careful in a way that absolves Louis of apologising for flinching.

“They got a few,” Louis says, conversational out of principle.

“They did,” Harry says. “Then they didn’t.”

“You’ll scar,” Louis says, peeking. The cut is neat, a small red mouth refusing to be pretty.

“Probably. Adds character. I’m frightfully lacking.”

“You’re fine,” Louis says, meaning unbearable.

Harry rinses the flannel. He notices the little white bottle near the mirror, label chewed by glue. He doesn’t look at Louis to read it, he reads it because it’s there. He sets it back gently, the way you return a book to a shelf you’re not borrowing from. “I know what that is,” he says, soft. “It helps. Mostly.”

“Sometimes it turns bees into an orchestra,” Louis says, tired. “Sometimes it turns me into a row. I’m learning how to be a person around it. It isn’t romantic.”

“Neither is breathing. I am pro-breathing,” Harry says. He reaches for TCP, pauses. “This will sting,” he warns.

Harry presses the cotton. Louis flinches. Harry says, “I know,” in that low voice that means I’m here, keep going. He works around the bruise flowering under the ribs, careful not to ask to see, careful to see anyway because the shirt has to lift.

Louis pulls the tee up. It feels like admitting. The mirror catches him: narrow waist he doesn’t trust, hip he pretends not to mind, the stern geography he has learned to hide. Harry’s breath catches but he doesn’t make it a performance. His face does three things very quickly, desire, anger, reverence, and settles on worried.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Louis says, not unkind. “Like I’ll blow away.”

Harry traces the air a fraction above the purple, not touching, like you do with a gallery painting and a guard watching. “Fuck,” he says softly, “they hurt you.”

“They tried.”

Harry’s mouth goes a thin, unfamiliar line. He swallows whatever version of rage would make this room worse. “I am going to make tea,” he says, because men in this town have been taught to turn love into kettles. “And then I’m going to sit with you until your mum gets back and says a spell.”

“She’ll know,” Louis says, dread and longing mixing.

“She will know what you want her to know,” Harry says. “She loves you.”

He brings the tea. He puts Louis’s cup on the toilet lid and his own on the windowsill because the bathroom has to pretend to be a lounge for a while. He sits on the bath edge, hands idle for once, knuckles caught in the stupid, bright light.

“What happened?,” he asks in the end, because you have to build the official version.

“Men in lanes,” Louis says. “Words then hands. I did a joke. They did a lesson. Same curriculum as always.”

Harry nods. “I am pretending I don’t know their names,” he says, “so I’m not tempted to do something that generates paperwork.”

“Don’t be dramatic.”

“I am consistently dramatic. It’s my brand.”

Louis puts his forehead to his fingers. Breath in, rib argues, breath out anyway. “I hate this town,” he says, and then, refusing to be cheap, “and I love it. I hate that those can both be true in one postcode.”

“Same,” Harry says. “Sometimes it’s a song. Sometimes it’s a law.”

They look at each other the way people do when they’re training a possibility not to be frightening. The flat listens. The kettle in the other room clicks as it cools.

“Stay,” Louis says and the word is an essay. He adds, coward and brave: “Until she’s back.”

“Of course,” Harry says. He doesn’t touch him. He sits with him in the ugly, which is a kind of touch. He tells a quiet story about Niall attempting to ban a man for crimes against karaoke and failing because the man’s wife was laughing too hard. He asks nothing huge. He is there.

When the key turns, Louis’s mother arrives wind-pink, coriander in hand, bag against hip. She stops. She takes the scene in with the speed of a woman trained in triage. Her mouth tightens and softens at once. She does not ask whose blood belongs to whom. She gives Harry a look long enough to locate him on a map. Then she crosses to them and bends without ceremony, one hand on Louis’s shoulder, one hand on Harry’s wrist, as if to check the temperature of this small, sacred disaster.

“Thank you,” she says to Harry. “For bringing my boy home.”

She puts a hand on Louis’s hair like a blessing. “And thank you for letting yourself be brought.”

Louis makes a noise that might be a laugh if it weren’t so tired. “I’m fine,” he attempts.

“You are,” she says serenely, “and I’ve never met a finer liar.”

Harry watches the way Louis’s mother moves, like she’s learned which violences can be undone with heat and which with sugar and she’s going to try both. He holds the mug and doesn’t leave. Louis breathes and doesn’t break.

Louis wakes in fragments. Breath first, shallow, experimental, then the ache under the rib announcing itself like a neighbour with a broom. His lip is a careful throb. The knee complains as if consulted and ignored. He lies still long enough to file each sensation, then rolls, too fast, and pays tax.

On the floor next to the bed: Harry, half-asleep, one arm flung over his eyes, blanket turned diagonal. He’d insisted, when Louis had offered, embarrassed, grateful, “I’ll take the floor,” with the calm certainty of a boy who has learned how to ease a person past their pride without leaving fingerprints. Sometime in the night he’d rolled and bumped an elbow on the baseboard, he didn’t swear. He made a small noise and then breathed again.

Louis watches him as if there will be an exam. Curls in disorder, the slope of one bare shoulder, the fine ridge of clutch lines across the knuckles. The handkerchief, the good one, has dried on the radiator. The bottle on the sill, his tablets, catches light and turns it into a quiet.

He is not better.

He would like to be. He would like to be the sort of boy who wakes victorious and says something droll to an audience of one without revealing that it took him five minutes to arrange his breathing. Instead he turns his head and stares at the water glass on the bedside table, prints smudged in the condensation ring like a crime scene he cannot deny.

Harry stirs, lifts his arm, blinks into usefulness. His face goes from stranger to familiar in less than a second. The first look lands, not on Louis’s mouth or the dramatic rib, but at his eyes, as if checking a pulse. “Morning,” he says softly, voice smoked with sleep.

“Morning,” Louis manages.

Harry pushes himself up onto an elbow. The blanket slides. He is all wrong for this floor, too long, too beautiful, too carefully made dangerous by a world that loves to punish boys for looking like this. He reaches, stops himself a half-inch shy of touching Louis’s shoulder. “How bad?,” he asks.

Louis produces a shrug he hopes reads as “fine” and not “every breath is an essay.” “Alright,” he lies with a competence that makes him dislike himself.

Harry sits up, stretches, winces as his knuckles flex. The cuts look angrier in daylight, small mouths with opinions. He catches Louis watching and lowers his hand automatically, as if the body has chosen modesty. “Right,” he says to the room. “I’ll put the kettle on.”

“You don’t have to-” Louis starts.

“I want to,” Harry says.

The kitchen receives him the way it receives anyone who means well: it provides tasks that feel like love. Gas up, kettle on, two mugs out, the little sugar jar ratcheted open. He cracks the window to a slice, enough to admit clean air without surrendering warmth. The radio, coaxed awake, finds a station whispering about weather and strikes and a band in town next week who will be “one night only, folks, get your tickets, no refunds if the drummer leaves again.”

By the time he returns, Louis is sitting up against the headboard, expression arranged. The duvet is pulled high enough to hide the colours blooming at his side. He wants to be charming, to be his easy version of himself, the one who can wear a shirt like a joke and a mouth like a knife. Instead the first sip of tea almost ungends him with relief. He hides it behind a small noise that could be approval.

“Your mum left soup,” Harry says, placing the other mug on the desk and leaning there, arms crossed in a posture that tries to be relaxed and lands on attentive. “And a note. She’s absurdly kind.”

“She is,” Louis says. Safest truth there is.

Harry’s eyes flick to the sill. “Do you want-” he turns the words over gently, not to bruise them “-your tablets?”

The hinge breaks. Something small and mean inside Louis snaps its teeth at the hand offering help. He feels it, sees it, loathes it, and can’t pull back. “No,” he says too quickly.

Harry doesn’t flinch. He nods as if the room had coughed. “Alright.”

“Don’t say alright,” Louis says, halfway to a scoff that tastes of salt. “Like you’re… like you’re supervising.”

“I’m not,” Harry says. He uncrosses his arms because sometimes posture is a weapon. “I asked. You said no. That’s the entire thing.”

“You love a good rescue,” Louis says, reckless, because the sight of those knuckles has put flame in the part of him that hates needing anybody. “Lane as proof. Heroics. ‘That’s mine.’”

Harry’s mouth tips, then straightens. He could argue. He could withdraw. He does neither. “You were being hurt,” he says simply. “I was there. I will never be sorry for that sentence.”

“And now you want to make tea into a cure,” Louis goes on, unable to stop because if he stops the crying will start and he has decided that crying is more humiliating than picking a fight with a person who slept on the floor for you.

“Tea as medicine. Handkerchief as solution. You boys with your-” he gestures vaguely at Harry’s person, at the aura of resources he hates and wants “-with your blanks you can fill in.”

Harry leans his hip more firmly against the desk, anchor instead of exit. He keeps his voice so careful it feels like a cloth over a cut. “Say the thing you actually mean.”

Louis laughs, a tiny awful sound. He hates himself for it. He is awake inside the cruelty and he cannot dismount. “I mean,” he says and the words are shards he puts in his own mouth, “I don’t need saving.”

“I wasn’t trying to,” Harry says, automatic and soft and very tired.

“Yes you were,” Louis says, even knowing it’s unfair. “You always are. You stand in rooms and make them kind for an hour and then you leave and we have to live in the after.” He surprises himself with the accuracy of that and hates the mirror for being so clean. “I don’t- I can’t... I don’t want to be a project.”

Harry’s jaw works once, once only. When he looks at Louis, his eyes are the green of a calm sea right before a storm it will not perform. “I don’t want you to be,” he says. “I want you to be you. Preferably not in pain.”

“Don’t,” Louis says, the word small and brittle, “be nice.”

“Why not,” Harry asks, genuinely confused. “What is the alternative?”

“Pity,” Louis spits. “You looking at me like you looked at that cut on your hand. Like it’s… interesting.”

Harry looks, because the room deserves honesty. He does not look at the lip. He looks at Louis’s eyes as if there is a test he is willing to fail and refuse to retake. “I am not interested in your pain,” he says very quietly. “I am interested in you. I like you when you talk nonsense about the alphabet and when you go silent for whole minutes because a guitar solo is trying to be a planet. I like you when you pretend not to be sweet. I like you when you don’t pretend. None of that requires you to hurt.”

“Stop,” Louis says. It sounds like please again. His hands have started to tremble, he folds them into each other and makes a poor fist. He is furious with himself for wanting to be held, for wanting to be strong, for not knowing the difference. He grabs the nearest tool in reach: his own mind. “And don’t talk about my tablets like they’re- like they’re part of an exhibit. The Boy and his Brain.”

“I asked if you wanted them,” Harry says, level. “Because your mum asked you to. Because they help. Because you looked like you were staring at the label as if it had teeth.”

“It does,” Louis says, because he hasn’t slept enough to lie well. “Sometimes. Sometimes it bites and sometimes it tucks me in. I don’t want you to have an opinion about it.”

Harry opens his hands in that helpless way he has when the world refuses compromise. “I don’t,” he says. “I have… care. Which is embarrassing enough without you accusing me of policy.”

“Care,” Louis repeats. “Yes. Well. That’s the trouble. I don’t have the bandwidth for your care today.” He wants to be cruel so he doesn’t have to be needy. He wants to say go home before the scene calls it a dismissal.

Harry absorbs it the way brick absorbs rain: steadily, with a patience that will later turn into cool. He nods once. “Okay,” he says, and there is no sulk in it, only decision. He lifts from the desk, sets his empty mug on the wardrobe top because cleanliness is one of his mild rebellions. He smooths his shirt like a man checking his instruments. “I’ll go.”

Louis blinks. The world does that unpleasant jerk it does when the train you didn’t want to catch leaves anyway. “What,” he says, stupidly, because he had written a fight with more flourishes, he did not expect the quiet. “Where?”

“To the kitchen to make more tea,” Harry says, voice too careful to be sharp, “maybe then you can pull yourself together and we can have a normal conversation.” He lifts the mug from the desk and goes, not slamming, just leaving.

Louis lies still, heat rising stupidly to his face at the sentence he earned. The rib complains when he breathes big, so he breathes narrow. The duvet feels heavy in a way blankets shouldn’t. Pride has made the room smaller, pain has pulled the walls an inch closer. He swings his legs off the bed and the movement pulls at everything the lane bruised, knee twinge, lip sting, that dull, stubborn ache along the ribs.

He stands too quickly and the floor tilts once, warning only. He waits. He keeps one hand on the bedpost. The carpet’s frayed patch snags at his sock. He swears under his breath and hates how childlike it sounds.

Louis follows the sound of water beginning to think about boiling, palm flat to the wall for the first four steps, then pretending he doesn’t need it for the next four. Each breath is a note he places carefully so he doesn’t split the measure.

He reaches the kitchen and leans, casual on purpose, against the doorframe. Harry’s back is to him, shirt rumpled at the spine, curls shoved one way by a frustrated hand. He’s set two mugs on the counter already, lined up like good intentions.

“I can make it,” Louis says. He hates the sentence before it’s finished. He hears himself, petty, defensive, small. He sees the scene he’s creating and loathes it.

Harry’s attention goes gentle at the edges in that way Louis is currently allied against. “You can,” he says. “You also can’t lift the kettle with that rib without swearing in front of your neighbour’s holy pictures.”

“Mrs. Doyle loves a swear.”

“Let me earn my keep.” Harry’s smile is a small, tired thing. “It’s the only currency I’m flush with.”

Louis doesn’t say thank you. He doesn’t say anything.

Harry brings the mug over like peace. “Sip,” he says. “Bossy, aren’t I?”

“Very,” Louis mutters, but he takes the mug because his hands are obedient before his mouth is. Heat finds his fingers and announces a truce to the nerves.

Harry leans back against the kitchen counter and folds his arms. The posture is casual, the jaw is not. He’s seeing more than he’s saying. Louis hates that about him, he’s grateful for it, he hates being grateful.

“How are you really?” Harry asks.

“Fine.”

“Try again.”

“Fine but with footnotes.”

“Mm,” Harry says. “Painkillers?”

Louis nods toward the shelf by the mirror. “Paracetamol. And the… other.” The bottle with his name half-eaten by pharmacy glue sits where it sat last night. He does not want this to be a conversation. He wants the bottle to be a piece of scenery. He wants to be the kind of boy whose brain does not come with paperwork.

“Eat first,” Harry says and then he’s rummaging for bread as if he owns kitchens by instinct, finding the slice, buttering it. He toasts it under the grill and doesn’t set anything on fire.

Louis chews. He resents how good butter is at solving small problems. He swallows the paracetamol. He doesn’t reach for the little white tablet yet. His face is doing that neutrality he learned from shop windows.

“You don’t have to perform.” Harry’s voice has gone quiet enough that it barely counts as sound. “Not in here.”

“I’m not-” The word performs itself before Louis can stop it. Heat runs bright behind his eyes and he blinks hard like that will make biology negotiate.

Harry doesn’t move from the counter. He crosses and uncrosses his arms, not in impatience, just needing somewhere to put them that isn’t on Louis’s shoulder like last night. “What helps,” he asks and the question is so reasonable Louis wants to throw it down the stairs. “When your head’s… busy. What makes it worse?”

Louis looks anywhere except at Harry. He looks at the desk, at the scratch on the varnish shaped like a small country. He looks at the Walkman, its patient orange button. He looks at the white bottle. Shame is slow this morning, thick as honey, and he is drowning in it without drama.

He hears himself say, because the truth has an impudent streak, “Lists. Music. Order. Jokes. Touch sometimes. Not-” he grimaces. “Not pity. Not being… minded.”

“I wasn’t minding you,” Harry says, too fast, then hears himself and corrects with pain. “I mean... I don’t think of it like that. I think of it like-” He stops. The line is difficult to cross without tripping. “Like last night I watched you hurt and something in me refused it.”

Louis breathes in. The rib reminds him he can’t. He breathes different. Anger is easier to carry than gratitude, it has handles. He reaches for it because he can pick it up without using the rest of himself. “You like being a hero,” he says, which is a low blow and an untruth and a sentence he has been saving up without admitting it.

Harry blinks. Whatever he was expecting, it was a better version of Louis than this. “No,” he says and the no is uncomplicated. “I like it when people I like can walk down a road without being turned into an object lesson.”

“People you like,” Louis parrots. “Well done.”

“Stop,” Harry says. Just that: stop. Not loud. The radio off-button of a word. “You’re in pain and you’re making everything a weapon. Don’t do that to me.”

The shame is so immediate Louis goes hot-cold with it. His mouth is already too far down the track to brake. “You think because you’ve got a nice voice and a nice face and a father who hates the exact right things about you that you get to- what... arrive in lanes and in kitchens and-” He gestures uselessly at the low wardrobe, the chair with the missing rung, the boy on his own thin carpet who does not want anyone to see him. “You’ll go to America,” he says, and there’s the real anger, the stupid, class-sour truth. “You’ll go eventually. You’ll leave and you’ll be sad for art reasons and I’ll be here with the same posters and the same council and the same men in the same lanes and-”

Harry has gone white with a very specific feeling: not guilt, not even hurt, but the shock of being accused of a thing you are already punishing yourself for.

He puts his head back against the wall. “I said no,” he says quietly. “I’ve been saying no and every time I say it it costs me. I’m not- This isn’t a rehearsal for my exit.”

“Good for you.” The phrase tastes like pennies. Louis hates himself for it even as he says it. He is the worst version of himself, neat sentences for ugly feelings.

Harry looks at his taped knuckles, turns his hand, examines the small bureaucracies of healing. When he speaks next he takes aim not at Louis’s armour but at the gap beside it. “I don’t know how to do this,” he says. “Not with you. Not without hurting you. Not without you hurting me. I keep trying quiet and showing up and tea and handkerchiefs, because those are the tools I own.” He breathes out through his nose, sharp. “Talk to me about the tablets. Or don’t. But don’t pretend you’re bleeding from a place I cut when I wasn’t holding the knife.”

The room goes thinner. He presses a thumb to the ridged edge of the mug because pressure sometimes tells him what to do. Tears drag behind his eyes.

Harry lifts the little white bottle and sets it back in its spot. He doesn’t look at it longer than a second. He picks his next words as if they might break a tooth. “Does it help you feel more like yourself,” he asks, almost formal, “or less?”

Louis stares at the bottle with the stupid, useless urge to defend it from interpretation. “Both,” he says. He is embarrassed by the complication. “Sometimes it turns the bees into rows. Sometimes it turns me into a row. Some days the rows are how I get through the till without shouting. Some days I want the bees. They make me-” he gestures to the records in his head, to the alphabet, to the shelves everyone else mistakes for personality “-they make me… me.”

Harry nods. “Okay,” he says. “Thank you.” He leans back again. “I’m not judging. I asked because I’d like to know the weather before I suggest a walk without a coat.”

“That’s nice,” Louis says, the words landing sideways. He drags a palm over his face and it comes away damp, he didn’t notice it start. “I don’t-” he is suddenly twelve again, furious at his own honesty, “I don’t like being watched. I don’t like being… worried at.”

Harry’s gaze softens in a way that is absolutely the wrong kindness for today. “I’m not watching you like a problem,” he says. “I’m watching you like a favourite song I don’t want to finish.”

Something in Louis goes to make a joke out of that and something else, something older than the jokes, something made of mornings and chipped mugs and survival, steps in front of it. He feels as if he has been turned inside out, all the clever labels on the jars are showing to the wall. He would like to leave his own room and go somewhere else, a small place, under the bed is fine, where the air is different.

“I’m- I’m going to go,” Harry says, gently. “So you can be furious without a witness.”

Louis wants to say wait and also get out and also stay, please, and also I am sorry and also I cannot stop being like this and also I don’t know how to let people see me.

He picks none of those verbs. He sits, mute as furniture, while Harry pulls on his jacket. The rings flash in the mean light. He looks at Louis and doesn’t flinch.

“Bye,” Harry says. It lands tired in the room. Louis doesn’t answer. He hates himself for that immediately, but the door has already done its one good click. The stairwell accepts him. The neighbour’s Hoover continues its complaint and then stops.

Silence arrives with its ridiculous luggage.

Louis sits for a long time without being good at it. The mug cools to the exact temperature that makes tea taste like the past. He sets it down. The click of the ceramic on the worn desk is an ordinary noise, he hates how much it hurts. The room is suddenly too much. the fray in the carpet by the wardrobe he has pulled and repented of nineteen times, the nick on the chair rung, the pencil rolled under the shelf months ago that somehow never collects enough guilt to be retrieved. He notices everything because everything is trying to make up for the absence of a boy who left politely.

He presses his palms against his eyes until stars happen, he removes them and the world is worse because it is clearer. He imagines running down the stairs. He imagines catching Harry on the landing, saying wait like a boy in a song he pretends to despise. He imagines apologies: messy, comprehensive, deserving. He imagines the look on Harry’s face, tired, kind, newly wary. He imagines not deserving the hand he wants held out to him.

The tears come in an unspectacular way, none of the grand cinema of sobbing, just a steady spill like he has tipped a glass no one will arrest him for. He hates himself with that intimate, bored hatred you reserve for habits. He hates how quickly he could bruise Harry with the cheap tools of class and fear and then turn around and stroke the bruise like a poet.

His head plays back the conversation with live commentary: You said hero because it was quicker than I am embarrassed you saw me on the floor of a lane. You made the wrong joke. You made the wrong joke. You made the wrong joke. It stacks the phrases on top of him until he’s shorter.

He tries to breathe in for four, hold for four, out for six. The rib has notes on the choreography. He compromises. He counts the cracks in the ceiling. He hates counting. He counts anyway.

On the desk, between the mug and the radio, the little white bottle sits with its patient font. He reaches for it, then doesn’t. He puts his fingertips on it lightly, as if it were a live creature you can calm by not startling. He thinks about bees and rows, and that third thing that happens when he is with Harry, how the row feels like a song and the bees like an audience.

Rage prickles again, but it’s the humiliation kind, the you did this to yourself kind. He stands too fast and the room slaps him gently. He crosses to the shelf without remembering walking. He flicks the radio on because penance sometimes sounds like news. U2 leaks in instead, as if the station has been waiting for its cue. See the stone set in your eyes / See the thorn twist in your side / I’ll wait for you-

He barks out an involuntary laugh that turns into something wetter. “Of course,” he tells the ceiling. “Of course you would.”

He could switch it off. He doesn’t. With or without you. Stupid, sincere, exact. The chorus arrives and he winces at the unclothed earnestness of it. He drops into the chair and the chair answers with a loyalty creak.

The song makes him braver in the laziest way, a bravery that requires nothing but sitting still in its noises. He remembers the way Harry’s mouth went careful around the words: I wasn’t trying to. He remembers last night’s hand on his wrist, the lane voice saying that’s mine.

He presses the heel of his hand to his mouth, then forgets and laughs wetly because he’s seen that in films and promised himself not to be that person. Tears have made his face sticky. Anger has made him hot at the collar.

A small, practical thought knocks, asks for entry: You were cruel because you were frightened. He opens the door to it like a landlord. You were frightened because he saw you on the floor. Because he stayed. Because he asked what helps. Because not many people have the sense to ask. The thought is unbearable in its simplicity. He places both palms on the desk as if steadying himself for a boat.

The track ends, the DJ speaks, the voice does that arch thing morning DJs do. Louis turns the radio down with two fingers and the gentleness of doing so makes him cry again for a stupid second because kindness is worse than scolding some days. He reaches for the Walkman. The tape inside is one he made months ago on a Sunday with Zayn laughing at his devotion, Side A a chain of songs that make the day plausible. He clicks play and the tiny machine says yes in that small mechanical way: a whirr, a sigh, a drum in the distance.

He goes back to his room and lies down carefully on the bed. He does not take the duvet, he doesn’t deserve it, he tells himself, an old habit that needs firing. He drapes his forearm over his eyes and lets the tinny version of the chorus arrive and arrive and arrive. He feels ridiculous and young and precisely the age he is.

Louis thinks of Harry leaving without slamming. He thinks of how much he wanted Harry to slam. He thinks of the word mine and its stupid magic and the way good words can do harm in bad lanes. He thinks of a boy leaning on a counter, arms crossed not to forbid touch but to keep from reaching. He thinks of the right sentence and how it refuses to arrive until the room is empty.

He cries some more, because he can, because it doesn’t make the rib worse, because no one can be obliged to be handsome in private. He apologises out loud to no one and to Harry and to the part of himself that insists on order when chaos might be kinder. “I’m sorry,” he says. Then he is crying, properly, the stupid, beautiful, ugly kind that comes from too many rooms being unlocked at once. He hates it. He hates that it helps.

Later, after the song has done its rounds and the tape has clicked and begun again, after the tears have made their case and been rebutted by thirst, he swings his legs out of bed and immediately regrets the choreography. The rib knocks on his breath like a debtor at a door. He stands anyway. He paces to the desk, stops, turns, paces to the window, stops, turns, fiddles. He straightens a stack of sleeves that didn’t need straightening, then throws them into chaos because order feels like a joke when your insides have gone feral, then realigns them again because that is how he tells the panic to sit.

He hates making choices when anyone else might be watching, now he hates it because no one is. He thinks of the way his mother writes Take your tablets like an instruction written on a parachute. He thinks of Harry saying I know what it is without flinching, without reaching for the thesaurus of pity. He hates that that gentleness made him feel seen and therefore endangered.

He takes one. He swallows with the tepid water that tastes faintly of last night’s coriander. He waits for the bees to vote. He doesn’t feel better, that’s not how it works. He feels marginally less like he is inhabiting twelve rooms at once and more like he might be able to make one bed and lie in it.

He looks at the blanket Harry abandoned on the floor. He picks it up, because he cannot bear the way it looks like a temporarily-empty version of him. He folds it in half, then in half again, then slings it over the chair back. He sits on the bed and puts his head in his hands and then his hands under his thighs because he doesn’t trust them not to perform.

He stands again because sitting feels like surrender. He limps to the bathroom, rinses his mouth, watches his own face behave like a stranger’s. The bruise will be worse by tea-time. He touches his lip and says, out loud to the mirror, “You don’t need saving.” He says it again because saying things twice often makes them more true. Then, because the mirror does not clap, he says quietly, “I want it anyway,” and his eyes go wet again and he laughs at himself like a decent man who has finally understood that humiliation is often just tenderness turning on a light.

Back in the room, the desk waits with its dent and its paper and the biro Zayn left here by accident, or on purpose, like a benediction. Louis sits. He writes Sorry at the top of a page, looks at it until it stops being a word and becomes a shape, crumples the paper, writes I was scared instead. He adds, It isn’t about you. It’s about me. I know that’s the least useful sentence in English. He tries, You make rooms kinder, then crosses rooms and writes me and crosses me because it is too naked.

He writes nothing for a long time and then, finally, writes something he can bear to keep:

I don’t know how to be looked at gently. It feels like a trick. I think I’ve been waiting for the punchline so long that I throw the first one to feel in control. That’s not an excuse. It’s me asking you to wait for me to catch up to the person I’d like to be when I’m near you.

He stares at it, breath snagging around the rib that thinks it’s in charge. He folds the page badly, then refolds it neatly, then smiles at himself for thinking this is about paper. He stands, sits, stands again, carries the folded apology to the door, does not open the door, tucks the paper behind the photo frame on the dresser instead, as if the mirror were a friend who would hold his place in line.

The clock over the cooker clicks its way into a later morning. With or Without You loops in the back of his head in that way songs do when they’ve found a seam in your day and refuse to leave quietly. He doesn’t sing along. He lets the title do the work, seesawing for him. With, his chest says on the inhale. Without, it says, flatter, on the exhale. He stands square in the middle of that seesaw and tries not to choose yet.

When his mother comes back at lunch, she pretends not to clock the absence of Harry as anything but logistics. She sets tomatos on the counter and ladles soup into bowls and instructs him to sit down. “How’s your friend’s hand,” she asks, as if she is commenting on weather.

“Cut,” Louis says and has to look away because he is not ready to be a boy who says he left without crying.

“Ah,” she says, in the national language of mothers who know which questions move a story forward and which break it. She brings him a spoon and lets it clink gently against the bowl so he can come back into his body through domestic sound. “Eat. Then you can decide what to do next.”

What to do next. It’s as simple and as impossible as that. He eats because soup is a strategy. He nods because nodding is. He thinks of the record shop’s bell, of the way it gives him back his name when he arrives, of the list under the till that includes people you can call geniuses and the secret addendum where Harry sits with his ridiculous shirts and his careful voice.

Chapter Text

Monday comes in grey and stays there. Louis works at making the shelves look like certainty. He cleans the counter with a cloth that has stopped believing in redemption and starts again anyway. He re-sleeves cassettes that weren’t undressed. He alphabetises and then, because the tightness in his chest demands new labour, re-alphabetises by country, then by decade, then by the secret axis in his head that sorts music into two piles: saves me and does not.

Mr Patel watches him over the top of the till with the long-suffering patience of a man who has decided to love all his children, even the ones who re-file Kate Bush under church. “You are making a meal out of the alphabet,” he says mildly.

“It keeps me from making a meal out of customers,” Louis says, which earns him a soft snort and a teabag plopped extravagantly into a mug like a treat.

He works like a person refusing a thought. The thought persists anyway. The screwed-up apology behind the mirror. The way Harry had left in a silence that was neither theatre nor punishment, only fact. The way Louis had cried after, unhandsomely, like a tap with a ghost in the pipes.

At noon Zayn breezes in with a sketchpad and a joke he can’t be bothered to deliver. He smells faintly of smoke and pencil shavings and has a small inked sparrow on the web of his hand that he keeps pretending is temporary. “You’re nesting,” he says, surveying the shop as if Louis has laid eggs under every display.

“I’m curating,” Louis says flatly, not looking up from where he is deciding whether Roxy Music belongs with Romance or Ruin. “How are you?,” he adds, because it is easy to be kind in the exact places you aren’t currently hurting.

Zayn grins, wicked and unrepentant. “Very good,” he says. “Liam is a fool and also a saint. I will draw him until he gives up and lets me.” He flips the sketchpad open and shows Louis a shoulder rendered with such appetite it counts as confession.

“Gross,” Louis says affectionately, swallowing envy like a vitamin he doesn’t want to admit is good for him. Gross because Zayn has decided to want things out loud and the sky has not struck him for it. Gross because the room allows it.

“Your turn,” Zayn says, nudging the pad towards him, eyes quick. “Draw me your brain today.”

Louis draws a rectangle and fills it with lines that refuse to stay parallel. “Shelves,” he says. “On fire.”

“Mm,” Zayn says, accepting the translation. He looks at the window, then at Louis’s face. “You seen him?”

Louis doesn’t ask who. Zayn never wastes pronouns. “No.” He aims for a shrug, his rib reminds him it has minutes to live. “Yes. Twice. Town does not have enough corners.”

Once at the greengrocer’s. Once again through a car window, his father at the wheel, the car too quiet, Harry in the passenger seat with his palms flat on his knees as if the upholstery might misinterpret him if he fidgeted. Both times Louis had pretended interest in carrots or clouds.

Zayn watches him the way he watches a tattoo client about to do something brave and stupid. “You will have to talk to him,” he says softly, not nagging, just drawing the future with a blunt pencil.

“Friday,” Louis says, because that’s the script the town wrote for him and because hope is easier if you assign it a day of the week.

Zayn’s mouth does the small sympathy, then shrugs. “Or a Wednesday,” he says. “Cheap surprise.”

Liam lollops in a bit later smelling of oil and sunlight, oblivious to the inside of his own glow. He notices Louis’s arrangement and says, earnestly, “You’re doing God’s work, mate,” as if God were a clerk with opinions about sleeve order.

Louis loves him so much in that moment he wants to kick him.

Instead he sells him a Bruce Springsteen single he already owns, because Liam has decided to buy joy twice when he can afford it.

Tuesday is worse because nothing new happens and the brain needs a plot. The morning is a theatre of minor irritations: a schoolgirl smuggling a cassette into her blazer then un-smuggling it when Louis’s face accidentally does the unbearable kindness look, Mr Patel arguing with the bank over a fee that sounds invented. Louis’s hands can’t keep still, he drums the edge of the till, the back of a sleeve, the counter, his own knuckles, a rhythm for a song he refuses to admit is Harry’s. He chews his bottom lip and remembers not to. He tries to drink water. He catches himself scanning the pavement outside like a dog ridiculous about a particular set of footsteps.

Niall pops by mid-afternoon with a crate of empty lemonade bottles and gossip. He leans on the counter and grins without asking permission. “You two are idiots,” he says, which is both diagnosis and greeting.

“Good afternoon to you too,” Louis mutters, over-occupied with aligning a row of sleeves so their corners make a clean skyline. “We sell records here, not insights.”

“Insight is on special,” Niall says cheerfully. His face turns, for a second, into someone’s older brother. “He’s… not grand. Dad’s being Dad. His own Dad squared. There’s talk of applications. There are brochures in the house now like flowers gone wrong.”

Louis keeps his head down so no one has to watch it float away. “Right,” he says, as if that were an ordinary noun in an ordinary sentence. “Right.”

“Princeton,” Niall says, “Harvard,” with the same tone. “His father says: ‘men of our standing.’ I say: ‘men of our arse.’ Harry says nothing and then goes upstairs and makes a sound with the guitar that makes the dog hide under the table.”

Louis wants to ask a hundred questions that are all really one. He wants to say: What’s my part in this story that keeps happening offstage? He says instead, “He looks tired.”

“He looks like he’s learning to wear armour he didn’t order,” Niall says. He leans in, conspiratorial. “Friday’s not guaranteed. If the piano appears it’ll be because he nicked the time out of the week when no one was looking.”

“Right,” Louis says again. His stomach does that adolescent tilt it does when someone lifts the world a millimetre and shows you the mechanism underneath.

Niall softens it with his ridiculous kindness. “Your face is doing a mutiny,” he says gently. “Come by later. I’ll spill a pint and call it a sign.”

Louis shakes his head because this is his penance: order, shelving, not asking for news delivered to his table with chips. “I’ll be here.”

Niall nods like he sees the shape of Louis’s cruelty to himself and is choosing not to argue with it today. “Alright then. Don’t alphabetise U2 under Ulcer. It’s gauche.”

After he goes, the shop feels briefly emptier in a way that has nothing to do with space. Louis writes a list on a receipt to stop himself writing a letter: replace the cracked Smiths case, ask Mr Patel about a stool with a back, buy plasters. He adds, beneath, and then scribbles out twice, the thing he actually wants to write: I’m sorry. I was frightened and made it your fault. Please don’t let your father win. Please don’t let me be wrong about you.

Wednesday rains like it forgot any other idea of weather existed. The town goes damp at the edges. The chippy smells like theology. A boy in a parka stands outside the window and makes the fatal mistake of eye contact, Louis sells him a Joy Division single he’ll pretend he’s known all along. At lunch, Mr Patel wanders to the door, looks thoughtfully at the street and says, not looking at Louis, “Sometimes silence is the only part of an argument you can control.”

“Who told you I’m in one,” Louis says, defensive because the truth weighs like a jacket he picked that morning and now can’t remove in a crowded room.

Mr Patel smiles without teeth. “You are a small radio,” he says. “You think you are on mute. You are not.”

Louis stores the line away for later when he will pretend to Zayn it was his. He eats a buttered roll in the back room and stares at the mop bucket like it might share a secret. He practices sentences at the mop handle: You were kind and I used a knife voice. I am sorry I punished you for staying when that is all I have ever asked the world to do. He hates every sentence. He hates his mouth. He hates that the world continues to require you to speak when the correct answer would be to press your foreheads together and breathe like idiots.

At four, the bell rings and Gemma stands there with rain in her fringe and a look on her face that says: I have been a girl longer than you have been a boy, I am tired, I am also fine. She lifts a hand in a hello so unbothered it might count as generosity. “You’re Louis,” she says, not a question.

“I am,” he says.

She gets straight to it, the way sisters do when life has trimmed them of patience. “He’s a mess,” she says matter-of-factly. “He thinks he’s making a decision that lives in a single sentence. He keeps asking the wrong question.”

“What question,” Louis hears himself say, which is funny given all the questions he brought to today.

“Is it more cowardly to stay or go,” Gemma says. “When the actual thing is: where do you get to be a person.” She looks at him like she’s checking his scaffolding for rot. “Are you a friend?”

“I’m trying.” The admission sounds small and so wide it frightens him.

“Good.” She looks around at the shelves, the tidy world Louis has made to stand upright in. “He likes that you love ordinary things like they’re rare. It gives him ideas.”

Louis wants, wildly, to ask if Harry said that in those exact words, to ask if he is part of a thought that gets written down in the margins of newspapers. Instead he nods like a clerk. “Tell him-” He stops because he can’t choose between Don’t go and I will be here and I am awful but better in progress. “Tell him the list under the till is wrong if it doesn’t have his name where the good names go.”

“Alright,” Gemma says, satisfied like a nurse when a patient finally swallows. She reaches into her bag, slides a small brown-paper-wrapped packet across the counter. “He bought this last week and didn’t pick it up. Cohen. Please don’t sell it to a sixteen-year-old who wants to be sad on purpose.”

Louis puts his palm on the parcel. “I won’t.”

“Good lad,” she says, and for a second he wants to be folded into a family by someone who isn’t his mother. Then she’s gone, rain swallowing her, the bell ringing its one note of gossip.

Thursday is all nerves under skin. The men who always come in after work come in after work and speak too loudly about money and a match and whether the council has the right to tell anyone what a book is. They look at the AIDS leaflet and look away and mutter the word decency the way people do when they mean fear. A boy and a girl put their heads together over a sleeve like an alibi, the girl laughs and hides it under her scarf. Liam phones from the garage to say the Cortina finally sang and Louis laughs and then wants to cry because saving things is intoxicating when it’s possible and everything else is this.

At dusk he sees Harry on the other side of the street, alone, coat open like he’s lost the knack of protecting himself from weather. His curls are damp, the cross at his throat is a small honest gleam. He looks up as if he heard his name through a window. Their eyes catch. Nothing dramatic happens, the music doesn’t swell, the town doesn’t stop, but Louis feels the pinch behind his sternum.

Harry gives the smallest of nods, acknowledgement, not invitation. Louis nods back because that is the only language today is willing to translate. Then Harry goes and the street swallows him like a mouth that doesn’t mean harm and might still do it.

When he gets home, his mother is already in the kitchen with hair escaping its clip and the news turned low. The flat smells of onions getting friendly with butter. She keeps cooking, glancing at him the way you check on bread. “You didn’t stop in at the pub,” she says.

“No,” he says and then, because he hates the way the word hangs alone in a room, adds, “Big day for the alphabet.”

She puts a ladle down and turns, really looks. Her eyes do that good scan that has always made him feel like a human being and a project simultaneously. “Is something wrong?” she asks gently.

He performs a shrug, his rib calls him a liar. “Everything’s fine.”

She lets the claim sit in the air like a tea bag in water, colours moving slowly, facts steeping. “You don’t have to tell me,” she says after a moment. “You never do. That’s the trouble.” Her mouth softens before it can harden. “But if you wanted to tell me, today would be a day I could listen a long time.”

He fiddles with the edge of the kitchen table, the place where the varnish has worn away into a thumb-shaped truth. He is not good at saying the large sentences. He picks the small ones and hopes they add up. “I was… unkind,” he says and the admission is surprisingly heavy in the room. “To someone who didn’t deserve it.”

She nods slowly. “That’s almost always about being frightened.”

He exhales like he’s been hiding smuggled breath in his lungs for inspection. “I am,” he says. The words hang there, ridiculous in their simplicity, extravagant in their honesty. “Of… change. And of not changing. Of being seen. Of being left. Of being left visible.” He huffs a laugh, more steam than sound. “Of men with loud opinions. Of men with quiet ones. Of becoming a person I don’t despise.”

She leans her hip against the cupboard in that stance she’s had since he was five and decided jam counted as dinner. “I’m frightened of the rent,” she says matter-of-factly. “Of the boiler. Of you lying to me. Of you telling me the truth and me not knowing what to do with it.” She stirs the onions and the room goes sweeter. “I was frightened when I was your age. The world insisted on it. Your Nana used to say, ‘fear is an excellent housekeeper. It keeps everything tidy and un-lived in.’” She smiles at her own mother, dead and still bossy. “She also used to say, ‘eat before you talk or you’ll mistake hunger for philosophy.’ Sit down.”

He sits because he is obedient to good sense when it wears her face. She ladles stew into bowls and slides one in front of him with a spoon that makes the small, kind clink. They eat. It helps. It does not solve. Rain frosts the window and argues with the streetlamp.

After a few spoonfuls she says, easy, “Is he alright?”

Louis’s mouth does a strange thing: it smiles. “He will be. He’s… in a house where the furniture talks at him in his father’s voice. There are brochures.” He can’t say the names. He says, “America,” like he’s pronouncing a complicated postage category. “Niall says it’s bad.”

She lets out a soft “ah” that carries a history of too many men who loved cleverness more than they loved people. “And you?”

“I said unkind things because I was scared.” He looks at the table. “I am trying to be a better person faster than I know how.”

She puts her hand over his on the table. “I know,” she says simply. “You are already doing it.” She squeezes once. “You can apologise without letting him be the one who decides who you are.”

He nods, throat stupid. After a while, he says, because he can’t not, “I want him to stay.”

“I know,” she says again, and then, because she is built of mercy and also steel, adds, “If he doesn’t, the world won’t end. It will be harder to like for a while. Then it will be different.”

He breathes in carefully around his rib and lets the stew and the sharing and the weather inside loosen something that has been screwed down all week. “What if different is worse?”

“What if different is the only way to get to better,” she returns, not pious, just experienced.

He laughs into his spoon because sometimes wisdom sounds like a fortune cookie in a kitchen in Yorkshire. “You and your sentences.”

“Me and my sentences.” She taps the rim of his bowl with the ladle. “After you wash up you can go to your room and write one of your own. And maybe tomorrow, if you see him, you can say it to a person instead of paper.”

He washes up. He listens to the plate squeak under the tea towel. He goes to his room and writes: I am sorry for making you a wall to push against when I was actually furious with myself. He leaves the page on the desk because carrying it would turn apology into theatre and he does not have the costume for that tonight.

Friday arrives anyway. Morning finds him at the shop early, a man doing inventory on his own courage. He takes the Cohen book from behind the till and runs a thumb over the paper. He lines the sleeves up so clean the shelves become a horizon he could walk along.

At ten, the bell rings and no one is Harry. At eleven, a postman who does not respect categories tries to deliver a parcel to “Everyone.” At noon, a woman buys “Stand by Me” for a wedding and does not hear the ache under the sweetness. At one, Mr Patel returns from the bank and slaps the counter with a victorious palm because he won a five-pound argument on principle and principles pay in a currency only he knows how to spend.

At two-fifteen, the door opens and there he is. Harry carries the weather inside with him the way some people bring in a smell of smoke, the cold clinging to his coat, the damp turning the curls at his temple purposeful. He looks like he has slept against a wall you aren’t supposed to touch and acquired a pattern from it. His eyes find Louis too fast for dignity and then behave like they were always coming here.

“Hi,” he says.

“Hi,” Louis says. He is very calm, the way people are before surgery. He slides the book across the counter. “This belongs to you.”

Harry looks down and smiles the small, startled smile that always makes Louis feel like he’s stumbled upon a garden in a pocket. “It does,” he says. He touches the book with two fingers. He looks up. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Louis says. The shop goes attentive the way rooms do when people are trying not to be any larger than they have to be. “I-” He stops because the apology has too many branches in his mouth. He picks one. “I was… cruel. Because I was frightened. Because I wanted to be harder than I am. I’m sorry.”

The relief that crosses Harry’s face is not dramatic, it is obscene in its beauty. “Thank you,” he says again. He rests his knuckles on the counter. “I wasn’t trying to save you.”

“I know,” Louis says and realizes in the saying that he does. “I know. I think I was trying to save myself from being… seen. I was bad at it.”

Harry breathes a small laugh, humour without gloating. “We’re all bad at it.” He looks over Louis’s shoulder at the shelves and the holy order. “You moved Bowie again.”

“Bowie moves himself,” Louis says and just like that the room becomes a room again. The terror loosens enough to be breathable.

Harry taps the parcel once with a ring. “Tonight,” he says, as if the town needs to be told where to be. “Piano if the gods of Father and Schedule look the other way.”

“I’ll be there.”

Harry nods, steps back, bumps into the door like a boy who has not yet learned to leave beautifully when it matters. He recovers, makes the bell ring twice on purpose and goes. The cold swirls after him and changes its mind about the day by a degree or two.

In the brief vacuum that follows, Louis puts both hands flat on the counter, feels the grooves cut by customers who had their own weeks of avoidance and returned anyway. He looks at the Cohen book sitting there in absence, thinks of a line about wanting the ordinary to be extraordinary and vice versa, thinks of kitchens and lanes and roofs and the dignities of small, correct sentences. He breathes in. It is not easy. He breathes out. It is easier than Monday.

He works the afternoon with a steadiness that isn’t peace but could be a path to it. He sells a Cure record to a girl who speaks French and tells her to play it loud, he refuses a man a request to put Smiths next to Simply Red, he eats a biscuit Mr Patel pretends not to have bought for him.

At home, his mother is peeling potatoes with a grace that should be televised. She looks up when he comes in and her eyes do the small check. “Alright,” she says.

“Alright,” he says and her mouth does that proud thing it does when he tries for accuracy and lands somewhere near it.

They eat. They wash up. She sends him out for milk he suspects she doesn’t need, on purpose, so he can feel the street under his feet and decide something while pretending not to. On the walk back he passes the pub, the door’s open and the light is that friendly kind that makes a person dumb enough to believe in songs. Inside, the upright waits. The stool is sulking. Niall is most likely behind the bar bullying a glass into honesty.

Louis stands there with the milk in a bag and the night saying go on then. He thinks of fear as housekeeper, of rooms tidy and un-lived in, of the opposite: mess as proof of residence. He thinks of a boy with rings who left and came back, who said thank you like a vow, who will sit on a piano stool tonight and make time misbehave for an hour that will have to carry them both through the week after.

He pushes the door with his shoulder, he steps inside and the pub turns its head to see who has arrived and then turns, obligingly, back to the stage. Someone has chalked on the blackboard in a careful hand: FRIDAY SETS — 8:00 & 9:30. Underneath, someone else added: BE NICE.

Zayn and Liam have colonised the darts board, and, because they are themselves, have turned it into a morality play. Zayn slouches, cigarette tucked behind one ear. Liam squares up as though the board owes him rent, jaw earnest, sleeves pushed to elbows.

Louis slides in beside them, palms already itching for something to fiddle with. “How many civilians have died in this battle,” he asks, leaning shoulder-first against the panelled wall.

“Couple,” Zayn says, unbothered. He looses a dart, it bites into the green between numbers, insolent and stylish.

“Hey,” Liam protests, cheerful as always. He steps, tosses, the dart lands on thirteen. “You’re only winning because you’re pretending not to care.”

“I am winning because I am a genius,” Zayn says calmly. “History will vindicate.”

“You two are more exhausting than a double shift,” Louis says, not meaning it.

Niall clocks him with a grin and a glass lifted in salute, the grin says: good lad, the glass says: wait for it. The stage is still empty, a square of intent. Louis lets the absence of Harry be a kind of foreplay. He doesn’t scan the door. He doesn’t.

He lasts a minute and then he’s scanning, as if the bell over the pub door were wired directly to his ribcage.

“Hi there,” a voice says behind his ear.

He turns. He was ready for the shirt, the glint at the throat, the curl at the temple. He wasn’t ready for the tired, thin across the eyes, a new set to the mouth, as if the week has been trying to file him under a category he refuses. It makes something in Louis’s chest both ache and bare its teeth.

“Hi,” Louis returns. He tips his head towards the board. “Behold men pretending playing Darts is personality.”

Harry’s mouth does the small smile that doesn’t ask to be watched and therefore is. “He’ll pretend he aimed for thirteen,” he murmurs, eyes on Liam and Louis has to bite an undignified grin in half. Up close, the bruises at Harry’s knuckles have gone yellow at the edges, the skin on one split has learned a new language of healing. The rings are back where they belong, returning the light like a habit.

“Show us how an artist throws,” Liam calls, already two pints into magnanimity. “We’ll grade you.”

“I abstain,” Harry says. “I am a conscientious objector.” He steps in beside Louis with a politeness that leaves warmth in its wake.

They watch Zayn throw another perfect not-bullseye. “If you hit the middle,” Liam warns, wagging his finger, “you’re sleeping on the sofa. Again.”

“Promises, promises,” Zayn says, flicking his wrist. The dart kisses the outer ring. Liam cheers like he won a referendum. Zayn bows to the board, deadpan.

Louis uses the distraction to angle his mouth closer to Harry’s. “I meant it,” he says, quiet. “What I said at the shop.” The apology has lived all week under his tongue like a sweet he couldn’t quite finish. “I was unfair. To you. Because I was-” he swallows, “afraid and pretending I wasn’t.”

Harry doesn’t make a show of receiving the sentence. He just looks at him, the kind look that takes the sting out of being seen. “Thank you,” he says. “It helped.” A beat. “I was… loud, in a lane. I am sorry for that bit. The word I used.” He doesn’t say it. They both hear it anyway.

Louis lets out a breath he didn’t own. “You were trying to make idiots understand a category. I’d forgive worse.” He watches the tiny relief cross Harry’s face.

“How are you?” Louis asks and the question feels ridiculous and huge. He tries again. “At home. With-” he doesn’t say father, as if the name might invoke the man like a curse, “everything.”

Harry’s gaze slides to the stage, then back. “He’s discovered new verbs for the same sentence,” he says, there’s humour in it and fatigue. “We’ve had brochures in the house like unwanted guests. He leaves them on tables. I turn them over. He turns them back. A stupid dance.”

“America,” Louis says, making it sound like a disease he’s read about in the paper. “Do you-” he stops, because the wrong verb is begging at his mouth: do you want?

Harry rubs his thumb absently under the band of a ring. “I want to be allowed to want.” His eyes go up to the dark ceiling beams like he’s checking for leaks. “I don’t want to go there because saying yes to a house that hates my shape doesn’t sound like freedom. But I don’t want to stay here only because I’m stubborn. I want-” he huffs a laugh that hurts. “I want a third option."

“You want a world that doesn’t exist yet,” Louis says before he can make it sound cleverer. “Same.”

There’s a noise in Harry’s chest that might be a laugh if you were kind to it. “Will you-” he starts, then stops, then decides on the sentence as if choosing a chord. “Will you meet me after. Backstage. The changing room.” He glances at Niall. “The place that used to be a broom cupboard and now thinks it’s a green room.”

Louis’s pulse does the exact ridiculous thing he’d begged it not to. “Alright,” he clears his throat. “We’ll- the three of us... we’ll be at the table.”

“Good.” Harry’s mouth tilts. “Bring your opinions.”

“Always do.”

Niall appears like a conjuring trick, dishcloth hooked at his shoulder, grin weaponised. “You,” he says to Harry, “are on in two, sunshine. No sad piano until later or the regulars will throw their wet hearts at me. And you lot-” he points his cloth at the three of them, “order crisps like citizens or I’ll tell everyone your secrets.”

“We have no secrets,” Zayn declares, mock-insulted. “We are men of the people. Salt and vinegar. Two.”

“Three,” Liam adds, generous. “He needs feeding.” He jerks his chin towards Louis.

Harry leans in, the smell of him is stage-light and clean soap and something wintry. “Two songs,” he says quietly to Louis. “Then look at me or I’ll think I dreamt you.”

“I’ll look,” Louis says and there’s no chance in any world in which he wouldn’t. He watches Harry go stageward, the way he threads through a crowded room without making anyone feel stepped around. The beam above the little raised square warms in anticipation, a sun on a timer.

They stake a table near the popcorn machine where they always do, just enough distance to pretend objectivity, close enough to be killed and revived by a chord. Niall slaps down crisps and chips and three pints he’ll never put on a tab.

The set starts light, as Niall requested, Harry’s guitar turned chattier than usual, the smile a thing he lets his mouth try on like a shirt and discovers fits. He is not better-looking tonight, he is just more precise. It lands harder.

The piano. The room hushes, even the men with opinions in the corner practice not having them. Harry sits a fraction off-centre, as he always does, knees a little wide, fingers hovering. The first notes are a conversation he and the instrument invented last week in a different room, Louis recognises the part where the melody hesitates and then chooses. He presses his tongue to his teeth like he can hold his own face still by force.

Zayn nudges him, not looking away from the stage. “Don’t fall over,” he says. “I don’t have the moral capacity to break your fall tonight.”

“Shut up,” Louis says, smiling, eyes hot in the way they get when a person puts a hand on a part of you no one else knew was there.

The song turns, in the middle, into the thing Harry promised on the roof but didn’t name: not escape, not resignation, something like declaring a country you’ve never been to because you can describe it well enough to make a border. Louis feels the back of his eyes go river. He doesn’t blink. He is not missing a second of this in exchange for the dignity of dryness.

When applause happens, untidy, late, Zayn fishes his sketchbook from his coat. He keeps it low, secrets in a bar being a version of good manners. “I did homework,” he mutters, slanting the book so only Louis can see.

It’s him. Not a portrait. Not mercy. Something angled and precise, the way he sits when the song he loves starts and he doesn’t trust his mouth, the jaw set to unkind in case kindness arrives early, the hands, - Zayn has drawn his hands with an attention that makes Louis want to flinch - the thumbnail picked raw, the line of vein, the almost-fist he makes under the table when the melody goes where he needed it to. Underneath, in Zayn’s easy, arrogant, affectionate hand: You don’t see yourself right.

Louis’s breath stumbles, then corrects. He wants to laugh and he wants to crawl under the table and live there. “You’re a menace,” he says, it is nowhere near enough and also exactly right.

“I am a public service,” Zayn says quietly, still watching the stage. “Let it into your skull or I’ll tattoo it there.”

Louis turns a page and sees, God, the other one: a quick, hungry line of Harry at the piano, head tipped, the ring bright on one finger like a star. Louis looks away, then back, then away again, the seesaw inside him ridiculous. He wants to say everything and something tiny, like thank you.

And then, of course, Liam arrives, late to his own life, bouncing with a kind of cheer that makes rooms forgive him. “Right,” he says, skidding the last step, cheeks gone pink from a dash to the loo where he’s evidently failed to wash, a smear of machine on his face like war paint. He plonks a pint and a bowl of peanuts on the table with the triumph of a returning sailor. “I fixed Niall’s tap in the cellar. There was a - a flange? - a thing, anyway, it obeyed me, which is more than you two do.”

Zayn flips the sketchbook shut so fast it makes a papery gasp. Louis sits very still like a man at a crime scene trying to look like furniture. Liam clocks none of it, bless him, he is one of those rare people who does not immediately assume things are about him or require his oversight. He leans in with earnestness that could power a small town. “Christ, he’s good tonight,” he whispers reverently.

“Mm,” Zayn says, which is Zayn for I am being rearranged chemically, please don’t ask me to speak while it’s happening.

Harry doesn’t look at them this time, it’s worse. It means he trusts them to be there even without eye contact, which is somehow a deeper inclusion, a more perilous one. Louis threads his fingers together on the table and imagines the old desk at home, the scratch in the varnish, the apology under the mirror, the cup that did not quite do its job, the boy at his kitchen who thinks tea is a kind of oath.

A man near the bar mutters something about “bloody shirt,” and another man shushes him without turning, a kindness so casual it counts as insurgency. A woman at a corner table tears her beer mat in half and watches her hands do it like she’s not part of the decision.

Onstage, Harry leans toward the mic and does the thing he rarely does. He speaks. Just a little. “Last one,” he says, voice low enough that the room has to lean in and therefore remembers to be kind. “For the week that… had opinions.” Someone laughs, he lets them. He looks out across the dark and not-dark until, deliberately, he stops pretending not to find Louis. When he does, it’s a small thing, like laying a hand on the head of a dog that’s been good while you were gone. Louis doesn’t smile. He doesn’t move. He lets himself be found.

Niall ghosts past their table and murmurs to Louis without looking at him, “Back door’s propped with a crate. When he says goodnight, give him five and then go. And if my dad asks, you are all fixing the fuse box.”

“We are men of electrical skill,” Liam says solemnly, trying to wipe the smear of cellar on his cheek with the sleeve of his jumper and only redistributing it.

“Don’t touch your beautiful face,” Zayn says, catching his wrist and doing the cleaning himself with a napkin, brutal and tender. Liam goes obediently still with the ease of someone who likes belonging.

When the final note lifts and the clap rises messy and sincere, Louis stands. His legs remember the map to the side door because he walked it in his head every hour this week that he was meant to be doing something else. Zayn squeezes his thigh once under the table in the old, rough way that means go on then, coward. Liam, mouth full of chips he doesn’t recall ordering, says around them, “Tell him he was… that he made... You know. Tell him.”

“I will,” Louis says, which is the truest sentence he owns tonight. He turns to the soft-edged corridor by the gents, where the wall remembers a thousand nights of men pretending to be taller. The crate props the door like a consent. Cold air fingers the hem of his jacket. Backstage is a word too glamorous for the little corridor with paint that won’t stop peeling and Niall’s “employees only” sign that everyone ignores. It smells of soap and damp wood and something small that might be fear and might be beginning.

He goes.

Backstage is two coats of paint trying to forget what colour they were before. The corridor kinks left, then right, then gives up and delivers a door that sticks unless you lift while you turn. Inside: a room that used to be a broom cupboard and still remembers, mop-sour, a calendar from two years ago with a girl in a tennis skirt pretending she isn’t cold, a cracked mirror that has decided to be generous. A single bulb hums. Someone, probably Niall, has balanced a vase-less carnation in a chipped pint glass like a joke that refuses to wilt.

Louis steps in and closes the door with the carefulness of someone entering a church he hasn’t been invited to. The noise from the pub comes through the wall in the way music does when it’s decided to be a heartbeat instead. The small table under the mirror holds the ritual debris of performance: a loop of cable, three plectrums, a tea mug with a lipstick ring he can’t explain and a notebook the colour of a night bus.

He means to sit. He means, at the very least, to look anywhere else. The notebook is not a trap, it is an ordinary object in a room.

He tells himself he’ll check the first page to see if it’s blank, polite curiosity, nothing more. His hand is faster. The cover gives with a soft complaint. The first page is not blank. The handwriting is cramped and clean, the lines slanting as if they’re leaning toward something they intend to say.

A date. Then a title crossed out, then a different one, then no title at all, because some things refuse names. He reads the first line out of simple human weakness and is lost.

The words are tuned to breathe. Not pretty for the sake of it, not rough to prove a point. He feels the shape of a voice he already knows, what it does to a room, how it lays a hand on the air and persuades it to behave, and now that same voice on paper, unlit, unsmoothed, honest.

He turns the page. He is not skimming, he is falling, line to line.

I want the ordinary to be extraordinary.
The door says PUSH and I am a boy who pulls.
If I leave, let it be to run toward, not away.

A margin note in smaller script: don’t rhyme pain with anything.

He turns again. A lyric that feels like the inside of the lane last week:

Three voices. One body.
Yours is the only one that makes me answer to my name.

He keeps going because stopping is harder, because pages, unlike people, do not notice you being greedy. The pencil has given way, here and there, to ink, places where a line wanted to be permanent. The ink has bled through on one spread, a dark confession bruise. The words on that page are different, less cautious, heat through thin paper:

I have a mouth and a pulse and I am tired of pretending the one is not for the other.

He hears footsteps somewhere far away and the soft applause of a door closing and still he reads. Drawings interrupt him: quick, hungry studies, hands mostly, a wrist with the vein sketched like a map, a mouth softened by a thumb. There are bodies, too, not graphic so much as inevitable, two halves angled into one shape, knees crooked, collarbones ink-lit. One sketch is just the back of a neck with hair pushed up by a palm. It makes his stomach do something implausible and real.

He turns a page and the air in the room changes. The handwriting grows surer; the lines crowd, less margin, more need. The lyric is bolder, shameless in the way honesty is when it knows time is watching.

You are the ruin I would choose.
You are the hymn that starts in the throat and ends in the hip.
Say please with your hands.
Say yes with your breath.

Heat moves up his neck, he knows he should stop. He knows what trespass is, he also knows the exact shape of compulsion when it has found a door that fits its key. He turns the page anyway.

Here the words tip closer to hunger. Not crude, never that, but unafraid to stand the body upright and call it by its right names. Heat without the theatre of pornography, ache, specific and tender.

I will learn your shoulder like a language.
We will invent a room inside our mouths.
You say now? and I am already there,
I say more and it becomes a kind of prayer.

The drawings beside these lines are bolder. The slope where waist narrows to hip, a hand splayed at the small of a back, the suggestion of two foreheads leaning together, eyes not shown, as if privacy could be honoured even in graphite. He realises, late and stupid and exact, that these are not theoretical bodies. The lyric is not genderless for modesty’s sake, it is genderless the way poems sometimes are until they decide not to be.

On the next page, a single pronoun: he. Not circled. Not defended. Just true, sitting upon the line as if it has sat there all its life.

Louis’s breath stumbles. He looks up, as if someone might have entered and caught him stealing a thing that also, suddenly, feels returned, a mirror he didn’t know he owned.

He flips back by one, then forward again, confirming. He. The room tilts and rights. The town outside the wall keeps talking, laughter, a glass set down too hard, Niall’s voice corralling decorum, but in here there is only the word and what it does as it settles in him, relief and terror, yes, but above all the noticeable, traitorous joy of not being the only one.

The notebook wobbles in his hands, he steadies it on the table and sees, under it, a small cylinder he’d missed. The lipstick is rolled down, cap off, the bullet blunted by use into a shape the original manufacturer didn’t intend. It’s not a barmaid’s. It is a colour he’s seen only in the corner of his eye, the soft-blood red that lives in the crease it leaves on porcelain. He feels like he’s standing on the edge of a map no one gave him, looking into a country he had suspected and did not name.

“Find anything interesting?”

Harry’s voice is not sharp. It is careful. Louis startles, every nerve standing. He slaps the notebook closed a beat too late, guilt ringing in the hinge.

“I-” he begins and flounders. “I shouldn’t have- I’m sorry. It was just- it was there and...” He shuts his mouth. Apologies feel flimsy when you’ve stepped over a line you drew for yourself.

Harry stays where he is, back to the door, shoulder resting on the frame. Stage-light has abandoned him, sweat curls the hair at his temple, he looks beautiful in the way people aren’t allowed to when others are watching: tired, unarmoured.

His eyes go to the notebook, to Louis’s hands, to the lipstick, back. He closes his eyes for a single counted beat, opens them on a decision that hurts because it is honest.

“I keep it here because it’s the only room with a lock,” he says and his voice cracks on nothing. He doesn’t clear it. “Even though the lock is a rumour.”

“I’m sorry,” Louis says again, quieter. “I didn’t mean to-” he waves his hand at the air.

Harry gives a small, resigned huff that is not a laugh. “I can’t breathe in this town,” he says, suddenly. “Not really. Not without singing to trick my lungs.” He glances at the notebook, then away, then back, as if he can’t decide which is the more dangerous: what he writes or who has read it. “If I don’t put it somewhere outside me, I’ll drown in the inside of my mind.”

Silence swings its legs under the table. Louis doesn’t trust himself to move. He places one fingertip on the notebook’s edge as if the object were a creature that might bolt. “I read-” he starts, then stops, cheeks hot. “I read enough to… to understand.” He forces braver words through a narrow throat. “Him.”

Fear and relief do a wrestle through Harry’s face. He looks, for a moment, younger than he has let himself be in public. He nods once. “Right,” he says. “That’s one less lie available.”

“I’m not-” Louis rushes to cover the ground he imagines is about to crumble. “I don’t... It’s not...” He wants a neat sentence and finds none.

Harry saves him from his own grammar with a tired, exquisite kindness. “You don’t have to say anything clever.” His eyes, when they lift, are wet. “You just have to not run.”

“I’m here,” Louis says and it is not performative, it is not brave, it is a small, simple piece of geography. He is in a room with the boy he has been watching like a thief. He is holding the book where the boy stores his breath.

Harry pushes off the door and crosses the cupboard in careful steps. He stops a foot away. His hands are empty and he doesn’t know where to put them. He tucks them under his arms. Untucks them. Fails to disguise the tremor. “When I dress like this,” he says at last, chin tipping toward the ridiculous shirt, the thin chain, “it’s not a dare. It’s the only way I can breathe without lying.” He swallows. “And then the looks happen. Praise and punishment at once.” He tries to smile and can’t pay for it. “My father says dignity like a collar. The council says appropriate like a padlock.” He breathes out through his nose. “Section 28 tells schools they shouldn’t even say the word us to children. You grow around that, like a tree around wire and it cuts.”

Louis’s mouth answers before his finesse can stop it. “I know that exact thing.” The admission unlocks the next truth. “I drown in baggy most days. Disappear before anyone has the chance. Then I hate the disappearing. Then I hate the hating.” He lifts a shoulder, self-mockery without cruelty. “It’s exhausting being the wrong size for the room.”

Something in Harry’s stance loosens a fraction, as if proximity itself has moved a weight. He doesn’t step nearer. He also doesn’t step back. “What do you want,” he asks and the question is so plain it burns.

Louis feels the answer knock from far down the hall of himself. He opens that door slowly. “To be looked at kindly without thinking it’s a trick,” he says. He forces himself to glance down the familiar betrayals: narrow waist he mistrusts, sharp collarbones, heavy thighs he alternately forgives and prosecutes. “To not apologise for taking up this shape.” His voice goes smaller at the end, then finds itself again. “You?”

Harry looks at his own hands like they could translate. “To put my mouth on people I’m allowed to love,” he says, very low and the rawness of it makes him wince at himself and keep going anyway. “Without the world ending theatrically on my behalf. Failing that... feminism would be a start.” His mouth quirks despite his eyes. “Girls allowed to be large without punishment. Boys allowed to be small without being broken for parts.”

They stand too close, carefully. Breath braids. The room decides to be bigger by refusing to end where its walls do.

Louis’s palm finds the table. He turns it up, not touching, offering. Harry’s fingers hover an inch above and drop, tentative, then firm. Their hands don’t fit like a statue, they fit like people, wrong at first, then better when they pay attention. The ring taps once against Louis’s knuckle, electricity’s smallest cousin goes through him.

A sound escapes Harry he didn’t mean anyone to hear. “I feel like I could-” he starts and doesn’t name it. Leave. Stay. Break. Mend. All four.

“You could,” Louis says. He has no idea which one he’s blessing. Maybe all of them.

Harry’s lashes go damp. He blinks up fast as if to keep them from dropping to his cheeks. “What did you… like. In it.” The it hovers between notebook and boy.

Louis’s mouth is dry, his honesty isn’t. “The line about ruin,” he says, throat wanting to close on the word. “And the one that said answer to my name.” He risks the smaller, hungrier truth. “And the way you put please in hands instead of mouths.”

Colour moves up Harry’s throat in a tide. His eyes shine now without asking permission. He laughs once, quiet, wrecked. “I wrote that on the bus and hated it for being sincere and then couldn’t cross it out,” he confesses. “That’s the worst of it. Sincerity feels like walking into town without shoes.”

They both look at the door. The town presses its ear to wood and pretends it isn’t listening. Louis thinks of lanes and elbows and words that bruise by existing. He squeezes Harry’s hand in the way a person does when all other methods fail. “I won’t tell anyone,” he says.

Harry steps forward and then he doesn’t step at all, the space diminishes of its own accord. Harry reaches and Louis moves and then they are wrapped, chest to chest, chin to shoulder, both of them making those noises you make when novelty gives up and the body recognises a thing it missed before it had it.

Louis presses his palms between Harry’s shoulder blades and feels, with awe and a small terrified joy, the human weight of someone who has been performing for hours and has stopped. Harry’s nose goes, absurdly, into Louis’s hair, he breathes once and the sound he makes is not elegant. It is honest. Louis feels the wet at his own eyes and does not correct it.

They separate by inches, not by intention. Foreheads hover, not quite touch. Their hands remain, a small contract signed in pulse. The lipstick sits between them like a red-lacquered truth.

Harry follows Louis’s look to it and hesitates, more afraid now than of anything they’ve said. He doesn’t reach. He speaks first. “Sometimes,” he admits, voice roughened with the indignity of having to narrate your own permission, “before I go on, I think about putting some on. Just a little. Not for shock. For accuracy.” He winces as if he’s showing a bruise. “Sometimes I do it alone in here and wipe it off at the door like a boy washing his hands before supper. It makes my mouth feel… like it’s allowed to mean what it does.” He laughs at himself, gently, not unkind. “It also makes my father’s ghost try to come in through the skirting board.” He looks up then, green wet and unembarrassed. “I am so tired of my father’s version of handsome.”

Louis’s ribs ache in a way that has nothing to do with bruises. “I am tired,” he says, “of my own version of man.” He squeezes, quick. “We could-” The sentence is a field full of landmines, he tosses it anyway. “We could be idiots together about it. Try things. Hate things. Keep some.”

Harry laughs and this time it is almost like laughter. “Will you laugh with me,” he asks, clumsy as anything, “if I look like a fool?”

“Always.”

“Don’t wipe it off for me,” Louis says into a curl, his mouth half in Harry’s neck, half in his own courage. “If you put it on. The… colour.” He manages not to say lipstick as if saying it might break it. “Don’t… don’t hide the thing that lets you breathe.”

Harry’s hands tighten, low on Louis’s back, careful and sure. “And you,” he answers, a little wrecked, “don’t make yourself smaller for me. Don’t-” His voice shakes. He fixes it, just enough. “Don’t apologise for being the exact size of your want.”

They sway once, then stop, because swaying would imply music and the only song here is the one that has been trying to write itself through their mouths all night and keeps deciding to spare them for one more chorus. The mirror over the table holds them badly and that is somehow perfect, the blur doing them a kindness film never would.

“I’m scared,” Harry says into his hair, because once you begin telling the truth it’s greedy. “Of my father. Of being the wrong kind of beautiful in the wrong decade. Of leaving. Of staying. Of the church that taught me to love gold and hate my mouth.”

“I’m scared,” Louis answers, “of my own trousers.” Harry laughs, startled and grateful, and Louis breathes a laugh too that hurts and helps. “Of old men with opinions and young men with fists. Of mirrors that want to make the room into a courtroom. Of wanting.”

Harry shifts. He doesn’t let go. “We can be frightened in the same direction,” he says and it’s the sort of sentence you only get to say in a small room that smells of cigarettes and hope. “We don’t have to be brave. Just-” He tips his forehead to Louis’s forehead, two coins pressed together for luck. “Just here.”

Outside the door the pub argues amiably about something forgettable.

Harry follows his gaze. “If I wore it out there,” he says, chin toward the door, “what would they do?”

“Some would look,” Louis says. “Some would laugh in a way that tells on them. Some would write a letter to the paper. Some would ask what shade.”

“What would you do,” Harry asks, too quick, as if the room owes an answer.

“Stand,” Louis says. The word costs. He pays. “Near. So the looking has to go through me before it gets to you.”

“You are going to ruin me,” Harry says, smiling with tears in his voice.

“I read your lines. Not all.” He swallows. The truth has sugar stuck to it and sand. “They’re… beautiful. They made me… want to be braver.”

Harry closes his eyes. “They are also messy,” he says. “Some nights they are just the word want written like detention. Some nights they are just no written like survival.” Harry squeezes his hand once and lets go before it starts to look like a vow. “I have to go back out. Niall will come in here with a mop if I don’t.”

“Go,” Louis says, which is also stay and come back and don’t wipe yourself small for them. He stands aside. He does not move far.

Harry opens the door and the pub looks up the way villages in stories look when the hero returns from the wood. He pauses on the threshold, glances at Louis once more, eyes briefly fierce in the best way. Then he goes, the applause finding him like the tame sea it is.

Louis lingers. He places his hand on the notebook the way you put a palm to a church wall, thank you, I’m sorry, I’ll come again. He straightens the mint-leaf plectrums, for no reason except order is a spell he knows.

Then he follows the noise back into the room where the song is already beginning to ask the air to be kinder.

Chapter Text

Zayn’s shop smells like pine disinfectant and the iron tang of ideas. It’s a thin rectangle of a place on a side street that, front window hand-painted with ZAYN MALIK—TATTOO in cream serif, a bell above the door that refuses to ring properly, a partition curtain in grey ticking that turns the back half into a rumour. Flash sheets line the walls, daggers wrapped in roses, swallows with ribbons in their beaks, a mermaid rolling her eyes like she’s heard every man’s story twice.

They’ve crowded in on a Wednesday because the week needs interrupting. Niall arrives with a brown paper bag and a grin that could open a safe. Liam is already there, shoulders hunched in the way big men do when they’re trying to be delicate, perched on a folding chair as if it might object. And Harry, Harry is on the padded table, shirtless, head canted toward the ceiling, curls pushed back with a bandanna. His chest is pale where the sun has been stingy, two stencils sit mirror-perfect over his heart, swallows, flight folded in.

The sight lands like a stone thrown into a lake in Louis, the ripples keep going long after decorum should have smoothed the water. He tries to come in sideways, be the voice before he’s the eyes, but the heat is unkind, leaps his neck to colour his ears.

“About time,” Zayn says without glancing up, gloved hands resting, machine silent in his palm.

Harry tips his head, that small half-smile finding the room by habit. “A pleasure to be ruined by a professional.”

“Jesus, put your shirt on,” Niall says, appalled for form’s sake and delighted in fact, already shucking bottles onto the low table. “Or don’t. We’re among friends and a tragically heterosexual selection of saints watching from the flash.”

“Oi,” Liam protests weakly, then melts at the sight. “Alright, though,” he adds, generous. “Those look… proper.”

“Classic,” Zayn concludes. His voice goes work-flat. “Lie back. Arms easy. Don’t flex at me, you’ll only make me flirt harder.”

Harry laughs, the sound breaks slightly in the good way. Louis finds the wall with his shoulder. He is trying not to stare and succeeding the way a man succeeds at not breathing when someone tells him to. He arranges his mouth around a line that will pass for banter. “Two swallows,” he says, nodding at the stencils. “Ambitious. You planning to be a whole aviary by summer?”

“Left to myself, yes,” Harry says. “Sadly I am not left to myself.” His gaze flicks to Louis, then he looks away because Zayn has lifted the machine and the room acquires a new sound, that small electrical vowel of the needle.

“Right,” Zayn says, voice dropping into its work register, half priest, half mechanic. “This’ll bite and then it’ll get shy. Breathe like a person.”

The needle kisses skin. Harry inhales through teeth, then steadies, obedient to craft and instruction. The first line draws itself in: wing-to-body, a thousand little storms harnessed into ink. He does not pose, he does not martyr. He simply endures with a dignity that makes Louis’s mouth dry.

“Drink,” Niall orders, thrusting a bottle toward Louis without looking. “And stop looking like you’re about to faint.”

“I’m fine,” Louis lies. He takes the bottle because his hands want an alibi. Cider sweet at the front, mean at the back. He finds a chair, then doesn’t sit, then sits after all.

“Don’t you dare get him drunk before I’m finished,” Zayn says, which is the sort of sentence you can only say if you have gloved someone and made a line on their chest.

“I’m not a monster,” Niall says, appalled. He produces four small cups and pours something clear and mean into each. “I’m a nurse. With Guinness credentials.”

Harry laughs, a quick breath through the nose. Zayn’s machine sings, lifts, sings. The birds become.

“What’s the plan for placement aftercare,” Liam asks earnestly. “Cream? Cling film? Witchcraft?”

“Soap. Warm water. Don’t be a hero with a flannel,” Zayn recites. He leans back to check symmetry, thumb hovering an inch above clean line. “No gym. No pond. No letting the barmaids touch it before it scabs.”

“Break my heart why don’t you,” Harry murmurs, and Louis chokes on nothing, because the picture arrives uninvited, barmaid fingers, pub light, that chest. Heat sparks low and mean under his jacket. He takes another swallow of cider he doesn’t need.

“How’re you doing,” Niall asks into Harry’s hair, soft as a brother.

“Like a map,” Harry says, eyes closed now, surrender tidy. “Lines first. Colour later.”

“Poet,” Zayn mutters. “Stay still.”

Liam leans toward Louis, breath a warm question. “You alright, mate?”

“Never better,” Louis answers, too bright, and then tries to make it quieter. “They suit him.”

“They do,” Liam agrees, happy to approve beauty when it isn’t asked of him. “Pairs are good. Balance.” His hand hovers awkwardly, then he remembers and places it on Louis’s knee in the friend way that has saved Louis from falling over more times than he’s admitted. “Have a drink. Niall’ll be offended if you don’t.”

“I’m never offended,” Niall says, offended. He tosses Louis another bottle anyway. “To swallows. To bad decisions that will age beautifully.”

“Saint Niall of Hospitality,” Zayn says, not unkind, and the needle hums him back into attention.

They fall into the easy talk that schools itself around the machine’s song: Liam’s Cortina (“She likes to be spoken to,” he says, and Zayn draws the tiniest, fondest smile), the shop (“Mr. Patel’s added a list of people you’re not allowed to call geniuses on Saturdays,” Louis says, Harry’s mouth, eyes closed, lifts at the corner). Someone quotes a line from Bowie, someone else answers with Ben E. King.

Zayn finishes the first outline. The left-hand swallow sits defiant, beak open, wings sketched into motion. He pauses, wipes, turns the angle of Harry’s chin with two knuckles, not intimate so much as professional and somehow more intimate for that. “You doing alright?”

“Grand,” Harry lies admirably.

“You can squeeze my hand, you know,” Liam offers, earnest to a fault, holding out a fist like a charitable cartoon.

“I’ll squeeze your head,” Zayn says without malice. “Don’t touch him. Sterile field. Niall, if you slosh that over my flash sheets I’ll tattoo Idiot on your face.”

“Fascist,” Niall says fondly. He goes to the radio on the shelf and nudges the dial until music insinuates itself into the hum. The Cure, a song that walks the line between ache and wink. “For mood,” he says and sways in a circle a man his size should not attempt.

Louis watches the second bird become inevitable. He notices stupid details. The way the skin blushes where the needle has been and then calms, like a person deciding to forgive. The way Zayn’s mouth goes soft when his hand is doing something hard.

“Meaning,” Niall says, sipping and tipping, “next time you’re on stage-” he gestures with his cup at Harry’s chest, “-you’ll blind them with symbolism as well as sex.”

“God,” Liam says, horrified. “Niall. His mum’s pearls will crack from here.”

Harry laughs properly, can’t help it. Louis laughs too because the room demands it and because if he doesn’t he might say something unforgivable.

“Swap,” Zayn says after a while, wiping clean, moving to the other swallow. He nods at Louis. “Come here. Distract him.”

Louis startles like a boy in assembly called on by an unexpected teacher. He moves to the head of the table, where Harry’s eyes will find him when they open. He can’t think of anything clever. He looks down and forgets to be witty at all.

Up close the chest is unbearable. Pale skin that freckle only on insistence. A thin dark line of hair sternum to stomach. The aftermath of breath beneath it. Ink shining wet in the swell of fresh hurt. Harry opens his eyes under the bandanna. Green lifts and meets blue and for a second the room is a cupboard with a humming bulb again.

“You alright?” Louis hears himself ask and the quiet in his voice is a thing he did not plan.

“I’m in a room where the pain has a purpose,” Harry says, steady, and Louis has to pretend to roll his eyes so he doesn’t do the other thing his body is auditioning for.

“Don’t flirt with the pain,” Zayn warns. “It flirts back and then you’re both disappointed.”

Niall produces another bottle. “To disappointment then,” he declares cheerfully. “May it always be brief.” He clinks the neck against Louis’s in an old-fashioned toast that feels like blessing. “He’ll be done in a tick.”

“Don’t rush me,” Zayn says, offended on behalf of art and skin. The needle sings, stops, sings. “Alright.” He leans back, wrists floating. “Done drawing. Wipe. Breathe. Look.”

Harry lifts his head, Zayn holds up the mirror. Two swallows regard him from his own chest, tails parted, wings poised mid-yes. For a moment his face goes very still. Then he laughs in pure relief, which is the sound Louis has privately decided he believes in.

“They’re beautiful,” Liam offers, too loud with sincerity. “Sorry. They are.”

“They are,” Harry agrees. He sits, winces, breathes through it, sits anyway. Zayn tapes a square of cling film across each bird with the care of a man assembling a small plane.

“You’ll hate this for six hours,” he warns. “Then you’ll love it for thirty years.”

“I’m counting on it,” Harry says. His eyes slide, find Louis, hold a fraction longer than the room allows most people and move on before anyone can call it what it is.

The bottles go round, tea ignored, radio muttering in the corner about football and a council vote that doesn’t touch any of them and touches all of them. Niall tells a story about a hen party with matching ankle roses. Zayn, finished, peels off gloves with a flourish that would be camp if he were anyone else and tosses them in the bin.

Harry pulls his shirt on carefully, hissing as cotton kisses cling film, and then tucks it in. He keeps a hand flat for a second along his sternum like he’s blessing something through the fabric.

Louis pretends not to see. He drinks too fast. He laughs when Niall fails to tell the punchline to his own joke. He looks at Zayn’s hands and thinks about the line between drawing and touching. He considers, for a terrifying second, asking about tattoos in places no one will ever see. He does not ask. He files it under Later, which is the shelf where bravery goes to nap.

They empty into the evening in slow, reluctant clumps. Zayn locks up with that proprietary affection men have with their tools. Liam kisses his cheek without making a show of it and blushes scarlet and pretends it is because the night is cold. The sky has been rubbed with a blue cloth until it goes almost navy.

“Which way?” Harry asks, too casual, hands in pockets.

“Home,” Louis says. He knows where Harry’s house is. It is not that way.

“Same,” Harry lies politely.

Niall watches them go with the slanted smile of a man who knows where truth is and is content to let it walk there. “Don’t get arrested,” he calls.

The street feels like something borrowed. Pavements sail them past sleep-hungry terraces, a cat decides not to be interested. The air tastes of cold and cigarettes and the last of the chip fat under the extractor fan two streets over. Harry lights one and offers without looking, Louis shakes his head and then takes it anyway when Harry’s mouth tilts like please humour me. Smoke turns their breath visible, they walk through their own evidence.

They are both a little drunk and that particular relief, when edges go round and wit loosens its necktie, turns the conversation into a slow spill. They talk nonsense first, the sound a needle makes in bone, the superiority of salt-and-vinegar over ready salted, the way Liam says carburettor like he’s in love with the letter R. They step in time because the street makes them, they jitter out of time because nerves do.

“You looked-” Louis begins, then stops. Compliments are worse than confessions.

“Like what?” Harry asks, chin down, smiling into his collar.

“Brave,” Louis says, annoyed at himself for sincerity. “On the table. Skin like… I don’t know. Like saying this is me without the press release.”

Harry exhales a laugh that fogs and drifts. “It hurt,” he says cheerfully. Then, quieter, “It also didn’t. It was… chosen. I like chosen.”

“Me too,” Louis answers. His hand brushes Harry’s knuckles because pavements are too narrow for boys with complicated hands. Neither of them comments. The touch happens again later because streets like theirs bend at the corners but do not widen.

They pass the library noticeboard with its stern new leaflet about appropriate. The word winks at them in the sodium light. “Appropriate,” Louis says, lightly enough to be forgiven by midnight. “My favourite swear.”

Harry hums. “I’ve been thinking about permission,” he murmurs. “What it looks like in a place like this.”

“Small,” Louis says. “Wee.” The words make them both laugh and the laugh nearly trips them because joy always feels like a stone under the sole here.

They fall quiet in the good way, the kind that makes the world turn up the volume to compensate. A woman leans from a window to shake a towel and pulls back inside. The cigarette burns down. Harry keeps it, reluctant to give up ceremony.

At the corner where the estate begins its grid, a geometry he knows in his sleep, Louis stops. “This is me,” he says, the lie a mercy they both understand.

Harry nods. The nod says I know where I’m going, it isn’t this way, and also I’ve brought you as far as I can without making it a thing. He flicks ash, it embers like a tiny vote. His mouth opens and closes, the street waits the way streets sometimes do.

“Louis,” he says and it’s nothing, just a name, but this week has rearranged that word in Louis’s body.

Harry’s hand lifts in a gesture that has a hundred endings. It finds none of them. He shifts his weight, a boy in a museum choosing which exhibit to stand in front of. Then, without fanfare, without witness, without even the courtesy of a preface, he leans in and kisses him.

It isn’t cinematic. No cue, no swell. Just the softness of a mouth that has been practising words all week and finally chooses touch, the careful press of lips that are trying to mean what they do, the cold of ring near cheek, the warm of breath.

Louis goes statue-still because his body has pulled the fire alarm and evacuated the building. His hands, traitors, do nothing.

Harry feels the stillness the way careful boys do. He pulls back immediately, apology already climbing his throat. “I- sorry- no... God...” He laughs a little at himself, ruined. “I’m drunk and stupid and-”

Louis moves. He doesn’t think about it, he doesn’t write a thesis. He leans in and finds the same mouth and answers in its language. The kiss is different now, purpose instead of accident, hunger instead of question. He opens where Harry’s hesitation had grazed. Harry makes a sound, small, lost, into his mouth and Louis rewards the noise by giving it somewhere to live.

Louis’s hand rises, unsure, and lands at Harry’s jaw, thumb along the stubble, fingers behind the ear, Harry shivers and chases the touch. When their tongues meet it’s clumsy for exactly a second, then not at all, heat and salt and the faint ghost of cider, the obscene relief of oh, and they both groan, low and involuntary, because there’s no other way to pay for this. Harry steps into him to keep the night from stealing space, presses Louis back very gently toward the wall and Louis lets it happen not because he is cornered but because the bricks are cool and his back has been holding him up all week. He presses up on his toes to meet more, to be taller for a kiss, to stand the way he has always stood in his head when daydreams refused to afford him.

Harry kisses like he plays piano when the room is kind, deliberate, then reckless, then tender because there is no other choice. The little noises embarrass and thrill them both, the wet catch of a breath, the soft involuntary hah when Louis pulls away just enough to kiss the corner of Harry’s mouth and then returns to the centre like that was merely intermission. Louis’s hands have learned a route across Harry, jaw, neck, the place behind the ear where boys become boys, the edge of shirt where cling film crinkles under cotton. He remembers in a flash and flattens his palm to avoid pressure on the fresh swallows, and Harry’s gratitude shows up in the way he opens, wide and unashamed, as if to say yes in the language they learned in the notebook.

It ends because all kisses end when bodies remember to be bodies. They part by inches first, not brave enough for the clean break. Harry’s forehead rests briefly against Louis’s cheek, Louis breathes into a curl and reels. They look at each other like men who found a door and walked through and are surprised to still be inside the same house.

“Okay,” Harry says and the word is an astonished laugh. “Okay.”

Louis’s mouth is numb in the best way. He wants to say a hundred things and the first one out is cruel because fear likes to be fastest. “We’re drunk,” he says sharply, as if that might disown his own mouth.

Harry blinks. The light leaving his face is not dramatic, it is worse, incremental, careful. “Right,” he says. He steps back the exact amount that reads as apology. “I shouldn’t have-”

“It’s not that,” Louis says quickly, because something inside him howls at the thought of being misunderstood by this particular person. “It’s- I don’t-” He fights with the shape of himself and loses. “I don’t know what to do after. With it. With me.” He laughs, cruel to himself. “Look at me.” He gestures at his jacket, his ankle-turned jeans, his small, loud body. “I’m not-” He means safe. He means ready. He means anything but a boy in a lane last week, knees and blood and a word he can’t stand to repeat.

Harry’s jaw tightens, then releases. Frustration flickers through him like a pilot light. “You kissed me back,” he says, not accusing, not gentle either. “And now I feel like I’m being punished for it.”

“I’m not punishing you,” Louis protests, ashamed, the shame comes out as temper. “I’m punishing me.”

“Great,” Harry says. “I’ll just stand here and be adjacent to that, shall I?”

Louis flinches. He drags a hand over his face and comes away with cold on his fingers, though he doesn’t remember crying. “I’m scared,” he says, because honesty is the only rope left. “I’m always scared. Of what it means. Of what happens next. Of wanting you and then the wanting being a thing the town gets to vote on.”

Harry nods, once. “I can’t do the version where we pretend Friday never happens,” he says gently, “I can do slow. I can do quiet. I can do cupboards and rooftops and not telling the paper. I can’t do pretending this isn’t true.”

Louis’s chest is a fist. He opens it and it closes again. “I don’t-” He shakes his head like it might loosen better grammar.

Harry looks at him properly, wrecked and careful. “I will not let you turn me into a mistake, Louis.”

The sentence lands and sits down between them. Louis’s mouth forms a useless shape. He hates himself for every clever line he’s ever used to keep people a room away. He wants to step forward and kiss Harry again and say yes yes yes and also not yet. Both truths pull his ribs in opposite directions until they creak.

“I should go,” he says and it’s cowardice and triage and the only thing he’s capable of without lying. “I’m... I’m sorry.”

Harry nods, the nod is older than both of them. “Okay,” he says softly. “Go.” Then, quieter: “Don’t rewrite it when you get home.”

“I won’t,” Louis says, because he knows himself and because he is trying to be the person who wrote a note and didn’t deliver it. He steps back into the geometry of his own street. He nearly says Friday. He doesn’t, because he has not earned easy promises tonight. He lifts a hand, fails to turn it into a wave, turns away instead and lets the estate swallow him.

He walks too fast and then too slow because neither speed helps. The kiss keeps happening in his mouth, replaying as if he has found a way to rewind a sensation with the same muscle memory as a tape. He hates himself for the mean thing, he loves himself for the exact sound Harry made when Louis’s tongue met his. He feels filthy with joy and raw with fear and lightheaded with the effort of fitting both inside a single body with old knees.

At home, the flat is asleep. He stands in the kitchen under the friendly light and presses his fingers to his mouth like a fool. The mouth is there. It is the same and not the same. He fills a glass, doesn’t drink it, stands with it until the water gathers its own condensation and can be put down without leaving a ring if he chooses carefully.

In his room, he does not turn the light on. He sits at the edge of the bed and lets the dark behave. The Walkman sits where he left it like a patient. He does not press play. He doesn’t want the music to intrude, or else he wants the silence to tell the truth without accompaniment. He lies back and the mattress does the small, loyal noises mattresses make for boys who haven’t earned ease.

Sleep refuses him, graciously. He tries to be fair to himself and fails, then tries again. He counts breaths and gets to nine and loses count and swears softly, then apologises to no one.

At a filthy hour he dozes, brief and unhelpful. He wakes just before light with the taste still in his mouth and the fear still in his rib and the strange, pure certainty that the smallest room in the pub will have to make more space on its table for the word "us", even if no one ever says it out loud.

The next morning he rings Mr. Patel before he has decided how to lie and the decision makes itself somewhere between the first burr and the second.

“It’s me,” Louis says. “I’m-” The word sticks. He coughs around it and makes the coward’s choice. “Sick.”

A pause. No disapproval, but the air allows for it. “Sick,” Mr. Patel repeats, rolling the syllable as if checking for stones. Then: “Take care. Drink water. If you are dying, do it after inventory. Otherwise come tomorrow and alphabetise your conscience.”

“I will,” Louis says, wincing into the phone. He expects the lecture that doesn’t arrive.

At the table his tea goes tepid before he remembers to drink it. The yolk on his plate looks like a sun someone forgot to turn on. He cannot keep still, the chair is a foreign object, he shifts and shifts until even shifting is too loud. He pushes back and leans in the window’s shallow bay. The glass is cold enough to pretend to understand him.

His mother watches him. “You don’t look right,” she says, not unkindly. “You’ve got a not-right pallor.”

“Very fashionable,” he mutters, forehead at the pane. Outside, the sky is a sheet that hasn’t decided which side is up. He rolls his shoulders and closes his eyes. “It’s nothing.”

“Nothing is extremely busy this morning.” She sets a fresh slice of toast on his plate, because sometimes love is butter delivered at the right angle. “You didn’t sleep.”

“Did, technically,” he says. “In a metaphysical sense.”

“Ah,” she says. The kettle sings behind her and she hushes it with the respectful attention you give an opera singer who has done her best. She does not press. That is the kindness that undoes him. He turns, suddenly hot at the eyes and it comes out sideways: sharp where it should be soft.

“I’m fine,” he snaps, then hears the ugliness of it and hates himself keenly, as if shame were a mirror he’s trained to carry. “Sorry,” he adds at once, voice smaller, the apology running to catch up.

She crosses, takes his chin in her fingers gently. “I know,” she says. “Sometimes the air is loud. Tell it to hush.”

He snorts, ashamed and grateful. “I’ll write it a letter.” He can’t sit again, the chair will bite. “I might go back to bed.”

“Do. Answer the door if it knocks. And if you break your own heart, it’s your job to sweep up, not mine.”

He half-smiles, that particular shape he’s inherited from her. “Noted.”

Coat, scarf, keys, then she kisses his temple. “Back at four,” she says. “If the world asks, tell it to wait.”

When the door shuts, the flat arranges itself around him, hesitant, like a friend who wants to sit close and isn’t sure where to put its hands. He peels his shirt off because his skin feels too hot for modesty. It’s not fever. It’s weather in the chest.

In the mirror he meets the body he refuses most days: collarbones like parentheses arguing, the rib bruise clouding from purple to bureaucratic yellow, waist narrow enough to invite a frown from men, thighs he forgives, condemns, forgives.

The bell rings.

He doesn’t grab a shirt. Habit says don’t keep people waiting louder than habit says cover yourself. He opens the door, half-turned, already apologising for nothing.

Harry.

Coat unbuttoned, curls misbehaving, a strip of white shirt visible where the wind has chosen a lapel to play with. Under the shirt something careful in his posture gives away the new tattoos, he’s holding himself like a man who has learned two small, exquisite ways to ache. His eyes flick instantly down Louis’s body, stomach, hip, the bruise an ugly flag at the rib, and then up again, not licking, not flinching. The look is shock and want and something rawer, something like recognition with its coat off.

Louis remembers, too late, that he is not dressed to answer the door to saints or boys. Heat detonates under his skin. He grabs for the frame as if it can cover him. “I-”

“Don’t,” Harry says, voice husked by the weather between last night and now. Just the one word, a stay, not a command.

It stops him. It’s ridiculous that it stops him and it stops him anyway. The panic flickers and goes down to an ember. He hears himself say, in a voice that belongs to a gentler cousin, “Do you want to-” He steps back, door open. “There’s tea. There’s always tea.”

Harry comes in, he takes the coat off without looking away, as if the room will object if he does. It lands neatly on the chair back because Harry is the sort of person who tidies even his exits. He closes the door and the flat accepts him, slightly shy.

Louis bolts for his room, not running, not not. A shirt from the back of the chair, it should be nothing, a casual tug, but his hands misbehave and he fumbles the hole, makes a spectacle of sleeve. He yanks it on too fast and the bruise complains about being included in the day. He sits on the bed because standing in the middle of his own room is a theatre he can’t afford. The sheet is creased where last night refused to be smooth.

Harry fills the doorway. He leans his shoulder to the frame and looks in that gentle, infuriating way he’s perfected, curious without prying, tender without pity. “Are you alright?”

“No,” Louis says, then startles at his own accuracy. “Yes. I mean-” The sentence disintegrates under the pressure of truth. He laughs once, wrong. “I don’t know how to be a person today.”

Harry nods. “You can outsource that,” he says lightly. “I have a spare person for rent. Very reasonable rates. Comes with tea.”

It should help. It does, a half-inch. The relief loosens the latch he’s been holding on his chest. The latch swings. Everything inside him rushes the door.

“It was-” he starts and then the mouth finds second gear, the one built for confessions disguised as commentary. “It was too much. Not the kiss... I mean yes the kiss, obviously the kiss. Jesus. But also... afterwards. The minute where the world turned back on like a horrible bright kitchen light and I remembered where we were and who we are and what men say and what men do and the way I could hear the word for us in somebody else’s mouth and it sounded like a brick. And I wanted to be better than that and I wasn’t. I wanted to be brave and I wasn’t. I wanted to be funny and I wasn’t and then I wanted to be nothing and I was nearly good at that.”

He doesn’t look at Harry. Pride wants to, shame won’t allow it. He stares at his hands like they belong to a child he’s responsible for.

Harry takes half a step in, slow enough to be read as a sentence. “You were-” he chooses the verb with care, “you.”

Louis barks a laugh that injures itself on the way out. “God forbid.” He scrubs a palm over his face. “I’ve had exactly three phrases said to me about myself since I was twelve and I keep them all on notecards. Do you want to hear them? I could set them to music. I could do a medley.” His voice breaks into parody and then doesn’t come back in time. “Too much. Too soft. Girl’s bum. Not a real lad. Not a proper-” He chokes on the noun and strides past it with a footwork that looks like anger and is, in fact, fear. “So I wear the uniform. Baggy shirt, bigger jacket, yes those trousers, no you can’t see anything I don’t have. And then last night...” he gestures at the air behind Harry as if the streetlamp is still installed over the hinge, “you put your mouth on mine and I was an actual person for a whole minute and then I wiped it off because I remembered the rules. Like a coward. And now I am a coward in my own house and in my own mirror and it is exhausting."

He is shaking. It’s ridiculous, it’s partly the lack of sleep and partly the excess of thought and partly the way the room has narrowed to the width of Harry. He laughs again and it’s not a laugh.

“Look,” he says and before he can stop himself he hooks his fingers in the hem of the shirt and drags it to the rib, like a man presenting evidence to a jury that never asked for exhibits. “Look at this. This is what they mean. Too narrow. Wrong angles. ‘Like a girl,’ they say, like girls are a crime scene. Big thighs, congratulations, here’s your prize, it’s shame.”

The shirt rides higher, stupidly, his collarbones thrown at the mirror’s mercy. He is crying, properly now, the ordinary ugly kind, which is the only kind that works.

“I hate it. I hate hating it. I hate that I want you and I hate that I want to hide. I hate the mirror and I hate the boys and I hate the vocabulary for it. I-” He stops because the sentence has no oxygen left.

Harry comes forward, he sets two fingers at the hem and eases the shirt back down with the tenderness people reserve for closing a sleeping child’s hand around a toy. “Enough,” he says, not scolding, not saintly. He smooths the fabric once, palm light over bruised bone and then he does the only right thing left: he opens his arms.

Louis falls.

They go down together because grace is not real in a room this small. The bed takes their weight with a dignified squeak. Harry arranges him wordlessly, the way you arrange treasure and damage, one arm under Louis’s shoulders, one across his back, curls tickling his temple. Louis fits the way he didn’t know he could, awkward and seamless, exact and improbable. He cries into the warm at Harry’s throat until the crying turns into something else, a kind of breathing that remembers it used to be good at itself.

“I’m sorry,” he says into skin. “I’m sorry about last night. I left you in the street like you were not the person who-” He stops, seeking a noun that won’t trap him. “-who was there.”

“I was a very stupid boy who kissed you in public because he had run out of clever places to put his wanting.” Harry is trembling a little, too, it’s relief, not fear. His thumb finds the notch at Louis’s shoulder and stays. “And I am not sorry about the kiss. At all. Ever.”

Louis’s chest manages a laugh that is only partly pain. “Good,” he says. “Because I’m not either. I’m just… frightened. And I hate that frightened is so boring.”

Harry turns his head and presses his mouth to the corner of Louis’s damp eye. Not a kiss, not exactly. “Fear is not boring,” he says. “It’s hard work worn inside out.”

The quiet that follows is the right kind. Not the embarrassed sort that begs jokes. Their bodies learn how to be still in contact without auditioning. The radiator ticks its opinion and then forgets what it was saying.

After a minute that is several minutes long, Louis tilts back enough to see Harry’s face. He takes inventory with the care of a man reading the minutes of the meeting he accidentally missed: eyes edged magpie-blue from the late night, the tiny nick where a razor lost patience, the mouth already too familiar as an idea. Under the thin cotton of his shirt, the bandage over the swallows shows faintly, plastic’s glossy truth. When Harry shifts, the hem lifts and Louis glimpses the butterfly, ink he had clocked and tried not to stare at before.

He sets his finger, feather-light, at the edge of the shirt and the butterfly breathes under fabric like proof. “You carry a lot of creatures,” he says, steadier now. “Swallows for leaving. Butterfly for… what? Becoming?”

“For trying,” he says. “For the bit in the middle where it looks like nothing is happening and actually everything is.”

“Cross for faith,” Louis murmurs and is amazed he can say the word without flinching.

“Cross for stubbornness,” Harry corrects quietly. “For me and the women who taught me to love the gold and not the rules.” He looks at Louis. “I don’t want you to make yourself smaller because of me. I don’t want to be a reason for you to wear a bigger jacket. If anything-” He falters, then proceeds, because bravery is sometimes a stupid little man who stands up anyway. “If anything I want to be a reason you take one off. If you want to.”

Louis watches that land in his chest in real time. It is not a demand. It is not a poster. It is permission as a suggestion. “And you...” he says, risky now, “you don’t wipe off your mouth for me.”

Harry huffs a laugh into the pillow. “Deal.” He swallows. “It is not just the kiss that frightened you,” he says, not fishing, not diagnosing, just laying a palm on the truth and not pressing. “It’s… this. Us. The word you’re not letting into the room yet.”

Louis covers his face with his hand briefly, then uncovers because there’s no point. “If I put the word in the room,” he says, “the room will read it out loud. And the town will be standing outside with its ear at the door.”

“Then we whisper at first,” Harry says simply. “We learn to be fluent in quiet before we try loud.” He laces his fingers with Louis’s, loose, unthreatening, patient. “I am not in a hurry that hurts you. Tell me where it pinches and I’ll take my hand away and put it somewhere else.”

Something in Louis uncurls a centimetre at that. He breathes into the space he didn’t know had been holding. “I don’t know how to be… seen,” he says. “Not like this. Not without armour.”

“Then wear mine until you make your own,” Harry says and it should sound like a line and it doesn’t because he means handkerchiefs and kettles and the ground I will stand on without flinching when you need me to. He looks at Louis with that too-direct honesty that used to feel like exposure and now feels like instruction. “I have been wanting to kiss you since the alley behind the pub,” he says. “It has been physically inconvenient. I have gone home and written lyrics like a lunatic and then crossed them out because I thought the page wasn’t trustworthy enough to keep your name.” His smile is shy and fierce at once. “Last night I ran out of hymns and did the thing.”

Louis’s face breaks on a grateful laugh. “You idiot,” he says, full of joy and terror. “You brilliant idiot.”

“And you,” Harry returns softly, “with your lists and your storms and your good mouth and your bad coat.”

They lie like that for a while, the bed learning their weights. Harry’s hand finds its own work, thumb at the cheekbone, palm to hair, the sort of touch you give a person you’re not trying to fix. Louis lets it happen and doesn’t catalogue his failures in the act.

Quiet makes room for names they haven’t said and won’t yet. Instead they give each other pieces from other drawers.

“My dad,” Harry says finally, the syllables cautious, “has started calling the brochures by their names again. Harvard. Princeton. He says them like I’ve failed to pronounce the instructions on medicine.”

Louis feels an old anger flare on behalf of a boy he didn’t know he would ever get to hold. “He can read in his own house,” he says flatly. “You don’t live in that sentence.”

“I won’t,” Harry says, small steel in it. “But I’m- I’m tired. I’m tired of the kind of cold that calls itself taste.”

Louis thinks of Niall’s dad’s warm pub and Section 28 on the telly and the noticeboard at the library and the way men can weaponise a word like family and make it look like a biscuit advertisement. “We’ll build a small hot world,” he hears himself say. “Under the big cold one. With lists and music and ridicule we aim only at the deserving.”

Harry smiles, wide this time, enough teeth to be useful. “And your mother,” he says, reverent. “She looked at me like I was a person.”

“She’s got a habit of that,” Louis says, softer than a joke. He swallows. The fear is there and not. The want is there and very. “I am… trying,” he says. “I can’t say the big words yet. They’re too loud. But I can say... I want you upstairs in my room when I’m frightened and downstairs in the pub when I’m pretending I’m not.”

Harry nods as if given instructions he intends to follow exactly. “And I want-” He stops, recalculates. “I want to put my mouth on you again very much, but not if your body thinks the street is in the room.”

Louis goes hot everywhere language lives. The fear, annoyingly, does not stand up. It lies down beside the want and lets it have the pillow. “Not the street,” he says. “Not… yet.” He swipes his thumb under his own wet eye and huffs. “You make me ridiculous.”

“Likewise,” Harry says, delighted. He kisses the corner of Louis’s mouth.

They don’t move for a long time. Harry lies half-on his side, propped against the wall, one knee drawn up to make a small harbour, Louis fits into it like someone who has learned, at last, which way his own spine curves. Their hands are untidy together on the duvet, knuckles, ring, the inherited complication of thumbs, resting, separating, finding each other again with the sleepy accuracy you only get when you’ve stopped trying.

“Tell me something not important,” Louis murmurs into the soft at Harry’s collar.

Harry thinks, amused at the assignment. “I don’t like bananas,” he says. “I don't like the taste.”

Louis huffs. “You’re a menace.” He tilts his head back to see him. “Alright, when I was eight I wanted to be a postman because I thought it meant you always knew where everyone lived and that felt like a superpower.”

“Postman Louis,” Harry says, with an approving nod that makes his curls wobble. “Natty shorts.”

“Shut up. Your turn. Another.”

“I once cried at the laundrette because a sock went missing and I thought it meant I was the kind of person socks left.”

Louis swallows an unhelpful rush of love for the image. “You are not a person socks leave,” he says, firm as law.

“Thank you.” The corner of Harry’s mouth goes helpless. “And you are not the kind of person who has to be the joke to be invited to the party.”

“That,” Louis says, colour rising as if he’s been caught somewhere tender, “is important.”

“Sorry.” Harry strokes his hair back, quiet apology. “Not important: I stole Gemma’s eyeliner once in Year Ten. I did very badly.”

“I would pay money to see that.”

“Absolutely not,” Harry says primly and they both grin, tension loosening by increments.

They fall quiet. It isn’t empty. The quiet grows a spine and stands for them. Outside, somebody drags a bin, the building replies with a pipe-click. Harry brushes a curl back from his eyes and the ring touches skin with a tiny, clean sound. Louis watches the ring, then Harry’s mouth, then his eyes.

“Sometimes my head… does a wasp nest,” Louis says, picking a thread on the duvet. “And sometimes it’s rows of chairs. Today it’s both. I want-” He stops, embarrassed by the size of the verb.

Harry tips his forehead to Louis’s. “Say it,” he whispers. “We’re both eighteen, we’re allowed to want things we can pronounce.”

Louis laughs, small and grateful. “I want to be here without rehearsing how to leave,” he says. “And I want-” He blushes but keeps going. “I want you to touch me without me inventing an audience.”

Harry’s eyes go soft and iron at once. “We can do that,” he says, as if it were a skill you could learn with a good teacher and patience. “We can do slow. We can do stop. We can do yes one inch at a time. We can do no and make it part of the choreography.”

“I don’t know the steps,” Louis admits, cheeks warming.

Harry smiles. “I can show them to you.”

The air changes the way light does when a cloud makes a decision. It doesn’t thicken, it clarifies. The talk doesn’t end, it sheds its coat.

“Okay?” Harry asks, voice lowered not for secrecy but for care. “If I take this slow?”

Louis nods, then remembers nods are for mirrors, not people. “Yes,” he says. “Please.”

Harry shifts up onto an elbow. He reaches for his top button as if asking the button how its day has been. One, then the next. Fabric parts around the soft silver of the chain, the cross taps once against his sternum like a metronome that approves. He watches Louis’s face as he undoes each one. By the third, Louis has his bottom lip between his teeth. By the fourth, he’s breathing like someone running a marathon.

“Stop me if you need to,” Harry says and means the full sentence: stop me because you changed your mind, stop me because the room shifted, stop me because you want to laugh.

“I will,” Louis says, surprised to hear the steadiness in his own mouth.

The shirt opens. The tape over the swallows shows faint and glossy, two small, brave aches. Beneath, the butterfly. It isn’t the dramatic kind, no swaggering edges, no shout. It looks like motion decided to sit down for a second and let itself be looked at. Louis’s hand lifts without instructions.

“May I,” he whispers.

Harry takes Louis’s wrist, lightly, turns the palm down, and guides it to his skin. Warm. Human. Not performance. The butterfly’s ink under the pads of his fingers feels like a secret he’s being allowed to learn by touch. Louis exhales so slowly a person who didn’t love him would miss it. His fingers explore the edge of wing, the small inward curve where image becomes body again. He is reverent, his breath hitches, not fear this time, not even quite desire, recognition, like a lost word found.

“Okay?” Harry asks again.

Louis nods, then says “Yes,” because learning is useful.

Harry bends and kisses him, patiently at first, the kind that tells the mouth we have an hour, we’re not catching a train. Louis opens on a sigh that feels like surrender to something he chose. The kiss grows, more pressure, a soft pull at the lower lip, a shared breath. Harry’s hand finds the back of Louis’s neck, not to insist, to anchor. Louis’s fingers, ambitious now, slide from the butterfly to the careful width of Harry’s side.

“Tell me if anything hurts,” Harry murmurs against his mouth.

“It hurts not to,” Louis answers and feels Harry laugh quietly into him.

They learn each other’s pace the way you learn any instrument worth your time: by listening. Harry kisses the corner of his mouth, the notch below the cheekbone, the hinge of the jaw where nerves keep their history. Louis’s hands, braver, sketch up the line of Harry’s back and come to rest between the shoulder blades, that warm plane made for a palm.

“Is this okay?” Harry asks, mouth near his ear.

“Yes,” Louis says, too quickly. “Yes.”

Harry smiles against his skin, kisses lower, then lower, slow enough that the room can understand what’s being promised without having to fear the promise. His hands hold Louis’s waist—not pinning, not pushing, just anchoring the idea that bodies can be safe places you go to, not rooms you have to escape.

Louis’s breath hurries, Harry hears it and slows further, a deliberate mercy. He lifts his head, meets Louis’s eyes again and waits.

Louis looks back at him, cheeks flushed, mouth already ruined, blue eyes huge with the miracle and the fear and the decision he keeps making and making again. He nods.

Harry kisses the smile that arrives with the nod and then begins to move, slow, careful, wanting, patient, to do the thing Louis asked for, to turn yes into touch and touch into a language they are finally allowed to speak.

The lamp turns skin to honey, Louis’ stomach flutters, his thighs tense under Harrys wrists.

And then, Harrys hands, suddenly brave, find Louis. One slides up under Louis’s shirt and he shivers, betrayed by his own skin. Harry’s palm flattens at the narrow of Louis’s waist, thumb stroking the thin place where rib gives way to belly.

“Can-” Harry’s voice is a rasp. “Can I… see you?”

Louis hesitates for the space of a breath, old shame, old commentary, and nods anyway. Harry sits up on his elbows to help, mouth parting as the shirt lifts. The light makes a small ceremony of Louis’s collarbones, the clean line of his chest, the taper of waist into hip.

“Look at you,” Harry breathes, reverent, almost upset by it. His fingers span Louis’s waist like they’re measuring astonishment. “You don’t have to hide from me.” His hands slide lower, over the soft strength Louis keeps apologising for, down to those thighs, to the curve of his arse through cotton. He squeezes, gentle, claiming without taking, and a low sound leaves him he’s never made in public. “Perfect,” he says, helpless. “I think about you like this... fuck, constantly.”

Louis’s face flames. He laughs, a tiny, wrecked sound. “You’re a menace.”

“Obsessed,” Harry corrects, shame nowhere in it. He noses along the inside of Louis’s wrist, kisses the place where pulse insists. “With all of you.” His palm cups Louis’s bum again like a benediction. “Especially this,” he admits and the honesty is filthy and holy at once. He kisses a path down Louis’ chest, tongue tasting salt and lucky, mouth open, at the same time he slowly pulls Louis' pants down. His hands slide to Louis’ thighs and ease them wider, Louis spreads for him and then flushes at his own obedience, a blush that climbs his throat and stays.

“Still good?” Harry murmurs into skin.

Louis nods, breath hitching. “Please.”

“Good.” The praise lands like heat. Harry makes a pilgrimage of the inside seam of Louis’ thighs, he bites once, gentle, just to hear that shocked little sound, and soothes with his mouth, apology and promise stitched together. He noses higher, breath hot at the delicate skin and Louis says a word that has no place in church.

Then Harry has his mouth on him, slow at first, a long, sure slide of heat, and Louis’ hand flies to Harrys hair on instinct. He doesn’t push, he holds, thumb rubbing the short curls at the back of Harrys neck like gratitude has discovered a vocabulary. Harry hums and the vibration turns Louis’ breath into a stuttered, helpless thing.

“Look at me,” Harry says, lifting briefly and Louis does, meets eyes dark and kind, a question set in them like a jewel. Louis nods, too quick, already bright everywhere under his skin.

Harry goes back down, slower, deeper, one hand holds the base, the other splayed over Louis’ lower belly so he can feel what his mouth is doing. He keeps a courting pace, not a race: in, press, shallow pull, tongue flattening on the draw back, lips easing, breath measured through his nose, a small satisfied sound when Louis’ thighs tremble against his shoulders. When Louis tenses, Harry pauses, squeezes his hip, looks up.

Louis’ chest rises too fast and then hesitates. Harrys hand cups him lower, gentle, rolling and Louis gasps like he’s been lifted out of his own life.

“Oh... oh, God... Harry-”

“Mm.” Harry assent is pure heat. His thumb slides back behind, not pressing where they haven’t talked about, just stroking new skin like a promise for another night. Louis jolts, his eyes go wide, wanting opens a door he hadn’t dared even knock on. Harry backs off at once, kisses the inside of his thigh. “Not tonight,” he murmurs, patient and sure. “Soon, if you want. Just you and me.”

“Yes,” Louis says, immediate and wrecked. “Yes.”

The rhythm rises. Harrys cheeks hollow, his throat works, his hand sets a counter-tempo that makes more sense to Louis’ body than thought ever has. Heat climbs Louis slowly, he tries to warn.

Harry answers before he speaks. “Give it to me,” he says, a groan threaded through. “I’ve got you.”

Louis goes with a broken, bitten-off sound, coming hard, spine bowing, vision silvering at the edges. Harry holds him through it, steady, sure, swallowing, and doesn’t overdo the pull when Louis shakes. He eases him down with long, slow licks, hand a warm cradle until the aftershocks stop.

Louis floats and then drops back into himself. “Jesus, H” he whispers.

Harry smiles, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, wrecked and pleased. He kisses Louis’ hip, then retraces the map he just drew, lower belly, ribs, chest, ghosts a breath over a nipple, laughs when Louis shivers and tries to pretend he didn’t.

Harry crawls up and kisses him, unhurried and filthy, letting Louis taste himself and Louis moans into it, hand cupping Harrys jaw like gratitude has a shape. That’s when Louis properly sees Harry, how hard he is, patience written into the line of his mouth.

“Let me,” Louis says, voice returned as a rough instrument. “Please.”

Harrys eyes flutter shut, he nods and Louis’ fingers make short work of button and zip. He palms Harry through cotton first then wraps warm around him. Harrys breath catches, a small, involuntary flare.

“Good?” Louis asks, cheeks still pink, eyes steady now.

Harrys laugh is a ragged exhale. “So good.”

Louis strokes slowly at first, slick with spit and what Harry left on his own wrist, stealing Harrys rhythm from earlier and handing it back like a gift: drag, twist at the crest, brief pause that makes Harry swear softly into Louis’ throat. One of Harrys hands slides to the back of Louis’ thigh and squeezes, thumb denting the soft muscle he keeps hiding. He lowers his voice to a wrecked little confession. “I wasn’t joking. I think about you... these-” another squeeze, reverent and obscene, “all the time.”

Louis makes a noise that could be a laugh and could be surrender. “You’re going to be the death of me.”

It doesn’t take long, it isn’t meant to. Louis keeps his eyes on Harry, keeps his hand sure. Harrys jaw tightens, the line of his throat goes helpless. He comes with a fractured sound, warm over Louis’ fist and belly, eyes squeezing shut. Louis gentles him through it, easing when Harry flinches, kissing his mouth open again when breath remembers its job.

They collapse laughing, shocked and soft, foreheads touching, noses bumping, no urge to correct the angle. Breath evens. The lamp hums its small approval. Harry’s hand, sated and a little trembling, slides back to Louis’s thigh, one more grateful squeeze that says I meant what I said and I’ll say it again tomorrow.

Louis huffs a grin into Harry’s cheek. “We’re a right mess.”

Harry looks at the evidence on Louis’ stomach and snorts, happy, shy. “We are.” A beat. “Tea?”

“In a minute.” Louis kisses him once more, slow and ridiculous, like a man learning what home feels like with his mouth. “Stay.”

“Yeah,” Harry says, breathless and sure. “I’m staying.”

Chapter Text

For three days the town doesn’t change and they do.

It’s in the way the shop bell sounds different when Harry ducks in on a Tuesday, the same tinny trill, but with the overtone of a secret woven through it. He stands two paces inside the door in a shirt that has no business behaving around his shoulders and asks, innocent as a man examining a fruit display, “You got the first press of Hounds of Love in yet?” while his eyes say, hello, I haven’t slept either.

Louis says, “Maybe,” because he has decided maybe is safer than every yes his mouth is begging to volunteer. He finds the record and when their fingers trade cardboard one ring kisses one knuckle, no accident, no proof.

A cough that means tonight?, the brush of a wrist that means I can’t breathe until I see you alone, the way Louis stands a little too long behind the counter pretending not to watch Harry walk to the back, the way Harry’s shoulder pauses by the jazz section like a man performing indecision when he has already decided everything.

Niall learns their language without demanding a dictionary. He takes one look at their faces on Wednesday and spins the till. “We’re doing stocktake,” he announces to the empty shop. “Takes hours. Tragic.” He winks at Louis, then at the back door. “Mind the alley. Delivery men about.”

“Delivery,” Louis repeats, deadpan and burning. “Of what?”

“Romance,” Niall says, affronted. “Pallets of it. Two men, no dolly. I’ll draw up a rota.”

They last eight minutes.

Louis steps out with a box he doesn’t need and finds Harry already there, leaning against the wall like a boy practicing nonchalance for a part he’s already won. Cigarette, unlit, a prop. He isn’t a smoker today, he’s a man deciding to kiss someone in daylight and selecting the right excuse to exist.

“I shouldn’t,” Louis says immediately, because he has learned that if he doesn’t say it aloud it grows teeth in his throat.

“Alright.” Harry’s mouth curves. “Come here anyway.”

Louis is careful with the wall because the wall isn’t clean, Harry is careful with Louis because Louis isn’t ready to believe he’s allowed to be touched this way in public air. They kiss quick and perfect, then slow and greedy, then quick again because greed is how you get caught. Harry laughs once against his mouth, helpless, and Louis tastes the happy and keeps it for later.

“Later,” Harry says, forehead pressed to Louis’s. “Please.”

“Later,” Louis promises.

That night is the corner of a park no one uses after dusk because the lamps are lazy. Harry sits on the lowest rail of the climbing frame, Louis’s thighs bracketing his hips, both of them dressed in the civilian uniform of boys trying not to be noticed. Their breath makes clouds of the kind the town ignores.

“I shouldn’t be this happy,” Harry says into Louis’s jacket.

“I know,” Louis says. He does. He kisses him anyway.

They get good at exits. Louis straightens his shirt by reflex in case a curtain twitches, Harry wipes his mouth with the wrist of his sleeve out of a habit he hates. Niall’s silhouette appears at the end of lanes with bad timing on purpose: “Oi, My dad is looking for you, said he’d forgive you for being late if you can name five tracks off Boys Don’t Cry in order.”

“I have to go,” Harry tells Louis, meaning I have to go sing or I’ll explode. He steals one last kiss and walks backwards three steps because he is trying to delay leaving without being the kind of boy who begs. Louis makes an obscene little kissy noise because if he doesn’t joke he may say something too true.

Harry laughs, green eyes bright, shoulders lighter than they have any right to be, and nearly collides with a dustbin. He bows to it with a flourish and then does, in fact, run.

They discover a road out of town that citizens have forgotten. It leaves behind the bite of chip oil and the tobacco stink of men doing opinions and turns into hedgerow, the soft law of green. They go on a Thursday when laughter in the shop keeps turning sour because the telly’s been telling women to be appropriate and men to be more.

Harry brings an apple he never eats and turns it over in his hand. Louis brings nothing but his mouth and the bright ache of wanting to be better than his fear.

“What if,” Harry says when a field opens up, “we just kept walking?”

Louis imagines it because that’s one of the things his head is good at when it remembers not to hurt him, the long road to somewhere that can bear them, the way the sound of their feet would become a rhythm even he could keep. “We’d starve,” he says finally, practical. “We’d end up in a larger town making smaller choices.”

Harry considers this and nods. “We could do that and still not be lost.”

They talk about music because it’s the language they share, about the middle eight he keeps changing in one of his songs (“You noticed?” “Three ways, three Fridays, I may be clinically unwell”), about Mr. Patel, who once threw out a man for saying poofter within hearing distance of Rumours. They talk about Harry’s father only when the hedgerow is loud enough to hide the shape of the sentences.

“He keeps saying dignity,” Harry says at last. “As if the word is a lock and he has the key.”

“Maybe it’s a window,” Louis says. “Maybe you can open it from the inside and he can’t reach.”

Harry looks at him like he’s just been offered water after a long day of being beautiful in public. “Stay,” he says, despite the field. “Stay until I stop believing I need a permission slip.”

“I’m here,” Louis says, uneven. The wind folds the words sideways and plants them in the ditch where things grow because no one asked them to.

On Friday, they are caught.

It’s the “backstage room,” and the door has been left on the latch. Harry’s set starts in four minutes, his throat is already warmed with vowels. Louis has him half-sat on the edge of the table, hand in his hair. Harry’s mouth is open and not singing and both of them have forgotten to perform being careful. There’s a kiss, then a better one, a small sound that would shame them if it belonged to anyone else and a laugh because of the sound and then-

“Christ Almighty,” says Liam at a volume that implies the Almighty needs to learn about timing.

Zayn, behind him, inhales like a man seeing exactly the painting he hoped would be in this gallery. He smiles with half his mouth and then, because he is that friend, uses the other half for mercy. “Carry on,” he says. “I’ll sketch from life.”

Louis makes a noise and jerks back too fast, Harry’s ring skims his cheek, they both freeze. Shame, want, fear, joy, four quarreling brothers, stampede through the room in a pack.

Liam blinks twice. “You’re alright,” he says to Louis, which is the precise sentence required. “You’re more than alright.”

Zayn tips two fingers to his own temple. “I’ll give you privacy,” he says and doesn’t move.

Harry laughs against the back of his hand, then clears his throat into a better eternity. “Give me thirty seconds,” he says, front-of-house voice locked and loaded. “Louis is-”

“Helping you tune,” Zayn says solemnly, eyes averted. “As one does. With tongues.”

Liam snorts, blushes, tries to smother the blush with dignity, fails delightfully. “We’re happy for you,” he tells the room with a sincerity so big it needs both hands. “Honestly.”

“Don’t tell Niall,” Louis says, as one last, pious attempt at secrecy.

The universe answers in the form of Niall’s voice right outside the door: “I will absolutely tell Niall. He already knows. You’ve both been smiling at walls.”

The door swings wider. Niall’s eyebrows do acrobatics, his mouth does joy. He clocks the air, the cheeks, the look and then, being Niall, says the one thing that will save them from their own tenderness. “Right,” he says briskly. “Lovely. Harry, your public. Louis, stop eating the staff.”

Harry grins like a sinner reprieved.

“Do we hug you now or later?” Liam asks, genuine in the way that makes Zayn want to sketch his heart.

“Later,” Louis says and Harry, pink-eared and blissed, nods. He leans in, quick, steals a last kiss that tastes like fight me and thank God and pulls Louis’s lower lip between his teeth. Then he’s out the door, rings clinking on the handle, stepping into his light as if it has been tuned to him.

Zayn watches Louis watching Harry and softens enough to make art of it later. He reaches into his jacket and produces his sketchbook because the man does not know how not to be himself. “I’ve got something for you,” he says once Harry’s first chord has convinced the room to stop pretending it wasn’t waiting. He flips to a page and turns the book around. It’s Louis, of course it is, but it’s the version he hasn’t met in mirrors: mouth less armored, eyes set to brave, the unkind places softened by the fact of being seen tenderly.

“This is fairer.”

Louis swallows. “You make me kind,” he says stupidly.

“Don’t give me that power,” Zayn replies, smiling with the corner of his mouth. “Just use it when you forget.”

Liam barrels back in with a tray he definitely stole from the bar. “He’s good tonight,” he announces to three walls and the inside of Louis’s ribcage. “He’s very good.”

“Better audience,” Niall says, appearing like a benevolent haunting with three pints and an orange squash that will never see the right owner. “Move your gorgeous arses. Let the man sing and then you can snog him senseless on my time if you must.”

They obey. They go to their table and watch Harry be himself in front of people who don’t deserve it and do. He finds them in the room twice and does not milk it. Louis breathes like it’s an assignment, the air passes, he lives.

They steal nights when they can. Sometimes Louis’s room, sometimes Harry’s car in a dark lay-by, once, wildly, the storeroom off the pub where the mop judged them and the stacked crisps were neutrals in the war. They do not always undress. They do not always manage to talk. Some nights are just breath on the back of a neck, a hand on a hip, the circle of an arm, the pedestrian miracle of falling asleep without having to perform the act of deserving it.

Once, after closing, they end up on the roof. Harry lies flat on the tar. Louis props himself on an elbow, cheek in his palm and studies the freckles at Harry’s shoulder as if he could plot them into a map and find a way out of everything.

“You’re so… much,” he says, half accusation, half prayer.

Harry turns his head. The smile he offers is unshowy and fatal. He lifts his hand. It’s ridiculous. It’s perfect. They decide not to laugh. Louis sets his hand in Harry’s palm and leans. The noses bump. They both make the undignified little sound and keep going, greed gentled by practice.

“What am I looking at,” Louis asks, thumb tracing a line between two freckles. “This cluster.”

“Orion if he got lost on his way to a pub,” Harry says, then, softer: “My mother called them kisses once when I was small. Said God got bored and flicked paint.”

“God has questionable taste in men,” Louis says and taps one freckle with a finger. “Still, good work here.”

Harry tilts his head, considering Louis. “You know,” he murmurs, “you’re the only person I’ve ever wanted to know the names for all my bits of sky.”

“Don’t say that,” Louis says, mortified and pleased. He kisses the shoulder once, quick. “I’ll get possessive.”

He runs a knuckle lightly along the ridge of Louis’s jaw, then stops before it becomes habit. “Tell me a star.”

“Polaris,” Louis says at once. “Boring, but faithful.”

Harry points upward with two fingers. “Which one is being faithful tonight?”

Louis squints, then gives up with a laugh. “One of the stubborn ones pretending it can be seen from here.”

“Then it’s us,” Harry says.

They go quiet long enough for their bodies to remember they’re allowed to be still together. Harry’s fingers find the hem of Louis’s jumper and rest there, asking nothing. Louis’s hand settles carefully over the cross, feeling the steady, unlikely drum under it.

“D’you ever feel,” Harry says finally, voice turned sideways, “like the world is a room that’s decided your chair for you?”

“All the time,” Louis says. “I keep swapping chairs so no one gets the satisfaction.” He looks at the dark of the town, at the few windows still awake, at the ones that would complain if they knew how. “Saw a woman on the bus get told to smile last week. Thought about biting a seat in half.”

“I hate how they make being gentle a crime. For girls, for boys. For anyone who doesn’t want to fight before breakfast.”

Louis hums. “Had a teacher once who told me to ‘man up’ because I cried at a poem. Wasn’t even a good poem. I still feel stupid about it. That’s how stupid works.”

Harry turns his face toward Louis’s and inches closer on the tar. “If I have a son,” he says and then corrects it, not wanting to put pressure anywhere the future hasn’t agreed to, “if there is a small person near me I’m responsible for, I’ll teach him to cry at better poems.”

Louis snorts, then sobers. “They’re going to make more laws,” he says. “About what kids are allowed to know.”

Harry’s hand leaves the hem of the jumper and finds Louis’s wrist. “Then we’ll have to be the book under the till.”

“We are not safe,” Louis warns, because being giddy in the dark is a luxury and he respects the invoice.

“No,” Harry agrees. “But we’re not alone.” He nods at the chimneys. “Even they look like they’re on our side tonight.”

Louis studies him in the mean light. The face that becomes myth under a spotlight is plain here, beautiful because it’s unarmed. “You look younger,” he says, surprised by tenderness happening to him mid-sentence. “On your back like this.”

Harry’s smile is a small surrender. “Onstage I don’t have to explain why I want things,” he says. “Up here neither of us does.”

Louis lies down then, shoulder to shoulder, their arms touching from wrist to bicep. The contact is steadying, the kind that doesn’t need attention to maintain. He points with his free hand. “That one’s not a star.”

“Plane,” Harry says.

“Or someone leaving,” Louis says.

“Or someone coming back.”

“Or both,” Louis allows. He turns his head. “When you go... if-”

Harry exhales. “If.”

“If,” Louis repeats, obedient. “When you go, take this roof with you. Take this exact piece of air. I’m putting it in your pocket now.” He pats Harry’s front jeans pocket. “There. Contraband.”

Harry laughs, he catches Louis’s hand, holds it there a moment longer than the joke requires, then brings the hand up and kisses the side of the thumb. “Consider me smuggling.”

They lapse into the kind of talk that sounds like nothing and is everything. What the chimneys might wish for. How many foxes live between here and the estate. Who would win in a fight between Thatcher and the moon. Then the talk tips, as it often does, into their private politics, the manifesto they keep drafting, handwritten, with corrections, on nights like this.

“I hate the word tolerance,” Louis says. “Like we’re noise someone’s agreed to endure.”

“Let’s aim for welcome,” Harry says. “Or at least leave-us-alone-with-our-hands.”

“Leave-us-alone-with-our-hands is very catchy,” Louis muses. “We could put it on a t-shirt. Raise funds for Niall’s crisps.”

Harry turns his head and kisses the corner of Louis’s mouth, then the other corner, reverent as liturgy. Louis answers with a kiss that stays closed because it doesn’t have to prove anything, then opens because it wants to. Harry’s palm skims Louis’s side, over fabric and heat, Louis’s fingers slide into Harry’s hair, curl there, stay.

“I love the way you look at me,” Harry says, quiet. “Like I’m allowed.”

“You are,” Louis says. “Up here, you are. Down there-” he nods toward the street, the councillors, the men who go home to opinions, “we’ll take turns being the wall.”

Harry breathes something that could be yes or thank you or don’t move. Louis watches the breath enter him, lift the cross a fraction, leave again.

“Tell me another star,” Harry asks, eyes almost closed.

“Cassiopeia,” Louis says. “Queen in a chair. Upside down half the year for her sins. I always liked her.”

“Because she’s punished for being beautiful,” Harry guesses.

“Because she refuses to sit properly,” Louis corrects.

Harry smiles into the dark. “To improper chairs,” he says, lifting their joined hands as if toasting.

“To not being good at leaving each other alone,” Louis adds.

They lie there until the tar leaches the heat from their backs and the cold finally argues them into standing. When they do, it’s with the carefulness of men who have been holding something breakable between them and have decided, for now, not to set it down. On the ladder Louis goes first, Harry’s hand ready at his waist without touching, on the pavement Harry goes first, Louis’s hand a breath behind his elbow, proof rather than protection.

The whispers begin the way all stupid choruses do, in threes.

Two men by the popcorn machine talk too cheerfully about “types.” A woman at the butcher makes a face when she sees Louis with a packet of tea cakes and says, “I always think those are a bit… you know,” as if baked goods belong to men with a certain number of opinions. A letter appears in the local paper signed A Concerned Parent, tutting about “appropriateness in public spaces” and “performers who forget the town’s values.”

Louis reads it, folds the page very neatly and puts it in the bin. His hands shake exactly once. At the shop he adds a small sign near the till: Be Kind or Be Quiet. Mr. Patel reads it, snorts, and places a bowl of butterscotch underneath it like a votive.

Harry reads nothing. He avoids the noticeboard, he plays harder. The set gets an edge, still tender, but the kind of tender you get from caring for a wound properly. People clap earlier. A man who has never clapped claps, another doesn’t and finds his pint somehow less satisfying for it.

One night, a boy barely older than them lingers after the set, shoulders hunched to disguise the hope that has turned his mouth into a bigger thing than it can handle. He doesn’t speak to Harry, he speaks to the space near him, which is the courage he can afford. “Thanks,” he says, and turns to go, and Harry, careful, reaches only for the air. “Come back,” he says. “If you want.” The boy nods too quickly, almost runs. Louis watches him leave and feels the kind of ache that is a duty disguised as love.

They go walking again when the sky is the colour of a polite bruise. Past the allotments and the row of garages, out where the fences forget to be exact. Harry has his hands in his pockets because if he doesn’t he will keep reaching. Louis has his hands in his pockets because if he doesn’t he will keep shaking.

“Do you think,” Harry asks the ditch, “we’re brave?”

“No,” Louis says. He kicks a stone, fails to look cool doing it. “I think we’re stubborn. Brave would be kissing you in the middle of the street.”

Harry laughs, startled and wrecked by affection. “I’d marry you outside the record shop if they’d let me.”

“Language,” Louis says lightly, as if his heart hasn’t heard the verb and gone off to write a will. “You’ll scare the lettuces.”

They talk about leaving like a joke, then like a plan, then like a thing you don’t say in case it stops being a possible thing. They talk about staying like a punishment and then like an act of love.

Harry says, “If I go, I don’t want to go alone,” and Louis says nothing for a long time because his stomach has just learned a new step and needs to practice.

“Ask me again when it rains,” he says eventually, because rain is when his head is kindest.

“Alright,” Harry says. “I’m patient.”

“You’re not,” Louis says fondly.

They reach a stile, two planks and a suggestion of civility, and decide it’s a stop. Harry sits, Louis steps up and turns to stand between his knees because that’s what knees are for if you’re lucky. Harry’s hands find his hips. Louis sways once, not enough for music, enough to make the moment believe itself. They kiss the way people kiss when the sky isn’t watching, quiet, thorough, greedy without apology. Wind fusses at their hair and gives up.

A farmer passes along the far hedgerow with a dog that has made a religion of minding its business. The dog glances once as if to say I’m proud of you for attempting joy. The farmer does not look. The mercy of distance.

Harry looks at the road, then at Louis, then at the road again. “I told Gemma,” he says. “Last night.”

Louis forgets how to stand for a second. “About… us?”

“About-” Harry’s mouth winces and corrects. “About me. She already knew about you. She has eyes.” The smile arrives, shy and intact. “She asked if I was happy like it was a trick question. I said ‘sometimes, more lately, when I’m with-’ and then she hugged me because she’s smarter than me. She said, ‘Dad will be a storm. Come here when it starts.’”

Louis leans forward until their noses touch. Breath stitches. “Tell her I said thank you,” he manages. He kisses him, small and exact, to make sure the good doesn’t evaporate.

Harry tucks his chin on Louis’s shoulder his hands slide up under the back hem of Louis’s jacket to the waistband of his jeans, his thumbs a slow, almost absent circle over bone. “You don’t have to come to mine,” he says. “Not until it’s-” He searches. Finds it. “Safe enough for you to still be yourself on the way back out.”

“I’m very portable,” Louis says, joking to hold the ache still. “I fold.”

Harry’s laughter lands in the notch of Louis’s throat and stays there. He sobers. “Sometimes I’m scared that being with me makes you a target.”

“Sometimes,” Louis says. “Sometimes being me makes me a target. Might as well be me near you.” He shrugs one shoulder, the movement nudges Harry’s hands, both of them feel it.

They go quiet, the kind that has weight. In the hedge a blackbird argues with a version of itself it met yesterday. A plastic bag does a ballet no one asked for and nails the landing on a bramble. “Do you want-” Harry begins, cautious at the edges, “-to be known?”

“By who,” Louis says, immediate. “By them?” He tips his chin toward town. “I’d rather be rumour than specimen.”

“And by… us,” Harry says, smile small. “By me.”

Louis thinks of the backstage room, of the lipstick, of the way Harry’s hand had found his and held like first principles. He thinks of the roof and the word yet. He thinks of his mother making tea a little louder when she wants to drown out the news. “By you,” he says finally. “Yes. I want that.” He kisses him again, softer and when he pulls back he stays inside the breath they’ve made. “Tell me something you haven’t said out loud.”

Harry thinks. His thumbs are still absent-circling, a metronome for courage. “I like the way you ask for things you think you don’t deserve,” he says. “It makes me want to teach you you’re wrong.”

Louis’s laugh is small and broken and happy. “That’s not fair.”

“No,” Harry agrees. “But it’s true.” He glances at the low sky, at the near field, at Louis’s mouth. “Your turn.”

Louis looks down their bodies, at the way Harry’s knees bracket him like a decision, at his own hands in his pockets because if he takes them out he’ll give the whole game away. “Sometimes I want to wear something that fits,” he admits, as if confessing to theft. “Properly. Not to be brave. To be accurate.”

“Do it,” Harry says at once, then catches himself, gentles. “When you want. Not for me. For you. I’ll… I’ll deal with the consequences of you being more impossible to ignore.”

Louis feels something in his chest unclench that he did not know he had been holding since he was thirteen years old and the first boy called him a word he still sometimes hears in the shower. “You’re good,” he says, then amends, because good is a small word for what he means, “You’re kind.”

Harry’s mouth tilts. “I’m selfish,” he says. “I want to live in a world where you take up your exact shape.” He nods toward town. “If they don’t like it, they can write to their councillor about how gravity offends them.”

They sit like that until the cold persuades them to move. When Louis steps down from the stile, Harry’s hands stay at his hips until balance reasserts itself. As they turn back toward the garages, they see a pair of girls ahead, school blazers unbuttoned, ties in pockets. One is mid-rant, the other is laughing and shaking her head and not apologising for the noise she makes when happiness chooses her.

“I hope they keep that,” Harry says. “The size of themselves.”

Louis nods. “We’ll stand in the way if the world tries to trim them down.”

“Politely,” Harry says.

“Rudely,” Louis corrects, and threads their fingers together for exactly three steps before letting go because the path bends and someone might be there and also because it is more delicious to hold back an inch and live with the ache until the next corner.

At the corner they stop as they always do, in the unlit bit where the town fails to supervise. Harry glances up. The first polite drops find them, the sky has kept its side of the bargain. “Come with me,” he says, meaning not only tonight.

They get good at triangulating danger, where to stand, when to let go of hands, when to look bored and when to look back. They do not always choose right. Once a burst of laughter from a passing group lands at their feet like broken glass and Louis cannot find air for three heartbeats, Harry stands taller, then smaller, then just Harry again and the world does not end, not even a little.

“What will you do if he makes you go?” Louis asks one night after a set. The door behind the stage is propped with a crate, the corridor smells like lemon and the ghost of beer.

“Write,” Harry says. “And send it back here like a message in a bottle. And come home before the ink dries.”

“Good,” Louis says and means it, and hates that he means it because wanting things is a way to lose them. He kisses Harry once, hard, and once more, carefully, to apologize for the hard.

“Back on,” Niall calls. He points two fingers at his eyes and then at them. “Do your job.”

Louis wipes his mouth with a sleeve because the room still punishes joy if it’s shiny and slips out to the table. Zayn raises an eyebrow the way only men in possession of their own grace can. Liam hands Louis a pint. “He’s about to do the miracle,” he says. “Watch close.”

Louis does. The miracle happens. It’s no less miraculous for being expected.

After, walking home, there’s a new sort of quiet between them, the practiced kind that isn’t hiding, just letting the night lay its palm on their backs. Harry’s knuckles brush Louis’s, idle accident. Louis turns his hand over and Harry takes it without theatre. There is no one on their street who matters.

***

Harry’s house looks bigger when you’re inside it. The hallway is all hush and photographs, silver frames that insist on contours and pedigree. His room is at the end where the light goes blue at this hour, door painted the expensive kind of white that doesn’t admit to yellowing. He opens it with his shoulder.

Louis steps in and forgets to be sly about looking. The room is huge. A window open a careful inch. A long desk with neat stacks: paper, books and chord charts. A record player with the dust brushed in a perfect arc where a hand always lands. On the wall above the bed, a small gallery hung with magnets and nails, postcards of paintings, a Polaroid of Niall making a face, a torn-out page of Bowie’s 1979 profile and in the centre a pencil sketch of hands that Louis recognises as Harry’s because of the way the veins have been forgiven.

“You live in paradise,” Louis says, picking up the Cohen book and putting it back exactly. He wants to touch everything twice.

Harry smiles without showing teeth. “I live like a boy who keeps his secrets alphabetised,” he says. “Shoes under the bed, sins in the drawer.”

Louis noses toward the bookcase. “Show me your worst one.”

Harry pulls a clothbound notebook down and holds it to his chest theatrically. “No.”

“Tease,” Louis mutters, fond. He runs a finger along a row: Baldwin, Woolf, a textbook whose title is all frown, a little book about lipstick, of all things, that makes his mouth twitch.

Harry follows his look and shrugs. “Practice,” he says. “History. Permission.” He kicks his shoes off with adolescent relief and leans his shoulder to the post of the bed. “We’re alone,” he adds, “mum’s at Auntie’s. He’s at a dinner, trustees and port and the correct laughter.” A furrow passes through his brow almost invisibly. “We have time.”

Louis’s stomach lifts like a bird testing air. “Time,” he repeats.

It turns without either of them moving very much. The small sort of gravity that rooms acquire when two boys stand near a bed and run out of jokes. Harry reaches first, he touches Louis’s jaw with a forefinger, the way you’d brush dust off a record you love. Louis turns into it. Then it’s a kiss, soft, aimed, deliberate.

“Alright,” Harry breathes, “alright.”

Louis answers with a “yeah” that lands in the skin below Harry’s ear and shivers both of them. He finds Harry’s shirt hem, the stupidly lovely translucent thing he wore to annoy gravity and men, and slips his fingers under to count ribs with his palms. Harry inhales. The necklace kisses Louis’s knuckle. When they pull apart a fraction, both of them already look changed, lips fuller, eyes dark and ridiculous.

They end up on the bed. Harry sits back on his heels and pulls his shirt over his head, arms crossed, and Louis has to hold the moment in two hands to keep it from spilling. His mouth parts, he tries not to stare and fails humanly.

“Hi,” Harry says, embarrassed and beautiful.

“Hi,” Louis says, wrecked. He reaches and presses his palm to Harry’s chest bone, feeling the start-stop of it. “You’re unfair,” he blurts, then softens it. “In a way that feels like mercy.”

Harry laughs. “Let me,” he says and comes forward on his knees to get Louis’s jumper. He goes careful, careful, careful, hem up, breath warm on stomach, hands not greedy. When the jumper is off he doesn’t look away from Louis’s eyes right away, he gives him those seconds to change his mind about being seen.

Louis holds and then lets go. He watches Harry look. The baggy has always been his disguise, now he is in a room where it is a story he doesn’t need to tell. His waist is narrow, his thighs are what people have called them and something better, his bum... well. He braces for the flinch he’s trained himself to expect.

It doesn’t come. Harry’s gaze goes reverent, like boy-who-got-what-he-wanted-and-is-terrified-to-break-it. He touches Louis with the backs of his fingers along the hip, a sweep that could be mistaken for a breeze, then turns his hand and lets the warmth follow. “God, Lou,” he says helplessly. “You’re-” He runs out of architecture. “Look at you.”

“I hate this bit,” Louis confesses, which is to say, the bit where someone is kind to the parts of me I’ve been taught to hate.

“I know,” Harry says and kisses each place anyway. The swell of thigh. The dip where pelvis becomes belly. The notch under the ribs where the skin remembers breath. “I know,” he says to skin that has never been told it is allowed to be. He tips Louis back onto the pillows and follows, propping himself to keep weight off, hands braced either side of Louis’s head, curls falling and then being pushed back because seeing is the point.

Harry makes those small, untrained sounds that make a person feel like they’ve discovered a new instrument. Louis answers with fingers and throat and the body he has finally decided to bring to the room. Harry’s mouth takes a road down Louis’s neck that ends where Louis forgets to keep his voice quiet. He murmurs “good” like a secret too decent to keep.

Time decides to be generous with them. Shirts go somewhere (the chair catches one and keeps it). A belt unthreads. The bed argues once and then agrees, having remembered adolescence in other decades. Harry kisses the inside of Louis’s wrist.

They are past thought when the knock happens, one of those polite taps a house learns when it has trained silence to be a virtue. Neither hears it. The handle turns anyway.

The door opens.

Everything in the room stands up.

Harry’s father takes in the scene in a single, trained sweep: the bed, two boys on it, no shirts, the mouths that have not stopped being kiss-shaped. His face doesn’t so much contort as settle into an expression it prefers: pure horror.

For a blink no one speaks. The shape of the moment is ludicrous and holy and dangerous. Louis’s hand is still on Harry’s cheek. Harry’s palm is still on Louis’s hip. They unstick from each other slowly, like men stepping out of glue, like the room might explode if they move too fast.

“What,” Harry’s father says, very calm, very British, “is this.”

No one answers because there isn’t a version he’ll accept.

“Get off him,” he says to Harry and the tone is worse than shouting. It is the voice people use in churches when a child is running. It is the voice that ruined nations in committee rooms. “Now.”

Harry goes white, he slides back and stands up by reflex. He reaches for his shirt and then doesn’t, because there is no correct thing to wear. Louis sits up on his elbows, humanity and bad timing. He cannot decide whether to stand or vanish. He chooses freezing, the least useful of the three.

His father steps in two paces. The door stays open behind him.

“This,” he says, “in my house.” The next word is one Louis has heard in lanes, in jokes, in the mouths of men who think they are misunderstood heroes, here, in a soft-carpeted room, from a man in a tie, it takes on a new ugliness. “Disgusting.” He looks at Louis as if he were a stain the carpet has somehow invented. “Get out.”

“Dad,” Harry says and his voice breaks in a way Louis has only ever heard on stage when a note decided to be too honest. “Please.”

“Harold.” The name hits him like cold water. “You will not humiliate this family. You will not throw your future away on-” his hand flicks toward Louis, “-this.”

Louis has been insulted by men who do not matter. This is different. The shame is a tide he knows how to swim, the tone is a knife he hasn’t been cut with before. He fights the instinct to say sorry to a man who would be satisfied by that surrender for the rest of his life.

Harry’s mouth opens, the words come too fast and true. “I love him.”

His father’s face performs a little theatre of pity for exactly one second, then it collapses into fury restrained by education. “You are eighteen,” he says. “You love nothing except the parts of yourself that applaud.”

“Stop,” Harry says, tear-slick now, eyes enormous, equal parts the boy who learned to be gentle and the man who is done being handled. “Stop making me small because it fits your table.”

“Put your shirt on,” his father says.

“Sir,” Louis manages, polite by muscle memory, voice a scraped thing. “I- I should go.” He is shaking. Hands, knees, the little muscles in his face he usually keeps steady with jokes. The room is too big, the window is too small, his mouth is a hallway he can’t find the end of.

“You should,” Harry’s father says, pleased to be agreed with. “You will not bring him here again, Harold.”

Harry turns to Louis and the look is the worst thing Louis has ever had to swallow: apology, terror, an urge to get between Louis and the world with his bare hands. “Go,” he says and the word is not dismissal, it is protection spoken quickly. “Please. I’ll-” The end of the sentence is not available.

Louis freezes one more heartbeat because his body refuses to abandon someone crying his name in a house that hates the sound. Then he stands, finds his jumper by miracle, pulls it on wrong and doesn’t correct it. His fingers won’t work the door handle, Harry does it for him without touching him and Louis hates everything about the kindness. He leaves, because love sometimes looks like retreat. He leaves, because staying would let a man like that practice his cruelty further. He leaves, because Harry asked him to.

The corridor is a palace for ghosts. He finds the stairs by luck. At the bottom the front door is a bright, dumb square. He steps out into air that has no opinion of him and doesn't have a father.

He walks home on legs that know the route without help. He stands in the dark kitchen and lets the shock pour through him in stages: silence, shaking, anger, the foolish, unstoppable desire to fix what can’t be fixed with an apology. The ADHD in him, which on ordinary days is bees he can charm or rows he can arrange, becomes both at once, too many rooms open, no doorways wide enough.

His hands go useless. He drops his keys. He picks them up. He drops them again. Breathing is a negotiation he keeps losing.

He thinks, wildly, of the little white bottle, of the trick he knows for drowning a panic with numbers. He starts counting, tiles, the grains of wood on the chair, then loses the number and hates himself for losing it, which makes the panic romanticise itself and grow. He grips the counter. He tries to sit and forgets how to. He stands, he can’t tell if he’s moving.

Knocking. Knocking again, stupidly ordinary. His name, low, not to scare the neighbours. “Louis. Lou, it’s me. Please.”

He opens the door on instinct because his body has always been loyal to this one person. Harry stands on the landing, there’s colour high in his cheek like he sprinted the last bit and didn’t care who saw. He’s wearing his coat wrong, one sleeve pushed to the elbow, the other stuck halfway. Eyes red and raw. He is crying.

He steps in and kicks the door shut behind him. “Look at me,” he says, soft, not a command. “Can I touch you?”

Louis nods because his mouth doesn’t work, his hands are shaking in the showy way he hates. He makes a noise that isn’t a word.

“It’s me,” he says again, softer. “It’s just me. Look at me.” He puts both hands up where Louis can see them and then, slowly, so there is choice, rests them on Louis’s biceps, warm through cotton, a pressure that says welcome back.

“Can’t,” Louis manages, meaning breathe, meaning think, meaning behave, meaning a dozen verbs that won’t stand still. The room’s edges are too sharp. His heart is running a race he didn’t enter.

Harry nods, as if he and panic have worked together before. “Okay,” he says. “We’re going to sit down on the floor. The floor isn’t far. Ready?” He doesn’t wait for a lie. He simply unfolds with Louis, taking him with him, back against the door, tile cool through jeans, shoulder to shoulder.

“In for four,” Harry murmurs, demonstrating it so Louis can copy a body, not a number. “Hold for two. Out for six. If six is too long, do four. We’ll cheat together.” He keeps count under his breath until counting becomes air and not arithmetic. He doesn’t say you’re fine, he says you’re here.

Louis’s hands are buzzing and then, gradually, only his fingers are. He watches Harry’s throat work and steals its rhythm. He notices that Harry is crying, quietly and outrageously, tears moving with no theatrics, evidence that the body refuses to be a gentleman and feels, absurdly, protected by it.

Harry’s hands, cool from the night, warm from being alive, cup Louis’s jaw. “In through your nose,” he says, breathing with him, demonstrative, ridiculous. “Out slow. Good. Again.” He matches him. “Kitchen or bed?” He asks softly.

“Bed,” Louis says. Harry gets him there like you get a person through a crowd, hand on elbow but not pushing, staying one half-step ahead to catch whatever falls. In the room the familiar mess greets them. Harry sits him on the edge of the mattress and kneels to unlace his trainers because Louis’s hands have declared bankruptcy. He tucks a pillow behind him. He finds the blanket and lays it over his thighs.

“I’m-” Louis starts and Harry shakes his head and Louis stops. The stopping is a gift.

“Later,” Harry says. He climbs in beside him without making a scene of it. They lie on their sides, the way brothers and conspirators do, then, quietly, the way lovers do. Harry’s hand finds the back of Louis’s neck and stays there. Louis shakes less. He notices the smell of Harry’s skin, soap, that new smell panic made and then left. Tears happen again, the ordinary way, because the body has decided it’s allowed.

“Is he-” Louis asks into the fabric of Harry’s shoulder.

“Livid,” Harry says. “Inventing a new Latin root for it as we speak.” A breath. “Mum cried. Not because of us, because of him. Gemma is at the door with the stupidest slippers I’ve ever seen and she told me to leave before he remembered how to use the telephone as a weapon.” He tips his forehead to Louis’s, miserably fond. “I ran because you were the only place I wanted to run to.”

Louis’s chest tightens with a feeling that makes the earlier panic look like practice. “How are you so-” He doesn’t find an ending he trusts. He settles for, “Present.”

“I’m not,” Harry says, honest. “I’m held together with string.” He strokes the nape of Louis’s neck. “But the string is yours, so it’s stronger.”

Louis makes an idiot noise and burrows closer, then apologises, then refuses to apologise properly by staying. The blanket becomes a tent, the two of them are small inside it in a way that feels like being right-sized at last. He wants to ask a hundred questions, did he hit you, what did he say, what happens now, but the questions would only make new air for the fire.

“Tell me something boring,” Louis says.

Harry kisses the corner of his eyebrow. “There are exactly six books in my house I didn’t choose,” he says. “All of them have wars in them and none of them have mothers who are allowed to speak.” He reaches behind him without looking and finds Louis’s Walkman on the bedside table and presses it into his palm like a relic. “Pick anything that isn’t a march.”

Louis clicks play. The tape finds the middle of a song and does its best. Harry hums, then stops and listens, his throat works once. “I’m sorry,” he says suddenly, small and fierce. “About tonight. About any room I ever asked you to be brave in before you were ready.”

“You didn’t,” Louis says. “I was ready and I was terrified. Both things.” He wipes his face with the heel of his hand. “Are you-” He can’t say safe. He says, “Okay?”

“No,” Harry says and then, soft and astonished: “And yes. Because I’m here.” He slides Louis’s hand under his own jumper and pins it there at his waist. “Sleep. If we can.”

They don’t, not for a while. They lie and whisper the low things. Harry traces the lines of Louis’s knuckles, Louis counts the freckles at Harry’s temple like stars that stayed. At some point Louis’s mother opens the front door carefully and then closes it again even more carefully, a mother knows when a house is full of a kind of grief that sleep can heal and words cannot.

Chapter Text

Harry’s hair has gone every direction devotion allows. When he blinks awake, he does it all at once, eyes to green, breath to present, mouth to soft.

“Hi,” Louis whispers.

Harry opens his eyes, a tiny crease appears between his brows, then goes, replaced by a smile he couldn’t stop if he tried. “Hi.” He’s on his side, arm draped across Louis in that unthinking claim sleep permits. His thumb has strayed under the hem of Louis’s jumper to the bare skin of his waist, it stays there, surprised to discover it is allowed.

They don’t move for a while. It makes a kind of sense to let the bad night learn, very slowly, that it doesn’t get to own the whole bed. Louis watches Harry’s face reboot, worry checked, weariness catalogued, the new thing (us, yesterday, this) held up to the light.

“Does your chest hurt?” Harry asks at last, voice lower from sleep.

“Not as much as yesterday,” Louis says. “Not as much as last year.” He risks turning, a small wince and then the reward of fitting again along Harry’s front like he was cut to.

Harry’s thumb finds his wrist, that now-ritual stroke that tells bees to queue. “I dreamt your mum made me an omelette and told me off for being posh about eggs,” he confesses, eyes creasing. “I apologised to the chicken.”

“She does inspire good manners,” Louis says. “She’s in. Early shift’s over. I heard the key earlier.” The thought lands in both of them and changes the temperature, anticipation, fear, a childhood certainty that the adult in the house will know what to do.

They look at each other for permission in the silly way you do when you’ve already decided to be brave. Louis nods first. He feels worse for the nod and better because of it. They disentangle with the tragic grace of boys who slept too close on a too-small bed and stand at the same time. Harry straightens the duvet because neatness is how he courts courage, Louis presses his palm to the sill where the pill bottle sits because touching small, certain things helps.

They step into the kitchen together and freeze in the doorway.

She is at the cooker with her back to them, cardigan shrugged on, hair up with a pencil through it. On the counter, three mugs, already claimed by their steam, bread by the toaster.

She turns. Takes them both in, the rumple, the night, the careful distance, and the expression she wears is not surprise. It’s the look of someone who has already made the tea. “Oh, boys,” she says and the words open like arms. She crosses the lino and hugs them both at once, Louis’s shoulder under her chin, Harry’s chest pressed into her good apron. “My darlings. Sit down before the toast gets ideas above its station.”

Harry startles, then holds on for a second longer than decorum demands. When she lets go he wipes his eyes without heat and pretends he had something in them. Louis watches that precise movement and stores it under Awe.

“I’d ask how your night was,” she says, “but I suspect you’d tell me ‘eventful’ and I’d have to smack someone else’s father with a frying pan.”

Harry startles a laugh that has tears at the edges. “He… wasn’t at his best,” he admits.

“Men rarely are,” she says crisply and kisses the top of his head in passing like he is already her own problem. “Tea first. Grief after.”

Louis watches her hands and feels the ground return, knife, bread, small, ordinary acts that terrify disaster into behaving. “Mum,” he begins, and doesn’t know where he meant to aim.

She hears anyway. “I’m not the town,” she says. “I’m your mother.” She sets the mugs down with purpose. “Which makes him” a chin-jerk at Harry, “family if you say he is.” She gives Harry a look that brooks no argument. “Egg?”

“Yes, please.”

They eat. It’s imperfect and therefore good. Harry fumbles his first bite and recovers, Louis gets yolk on his knuckle and licks it absent-mindedly and blushes like he’s been caught with something more famous. The kettle sighs again, the radio clears its throat and becomes the news. A grave voice, clipped, practised. “New HIV figures released today-” A pause. “Government urges caution.” A clip from a press conference. A woman says the word promiscuity as if it were a maths problem, not a person’s life. The station shifts to the familiar advert, the stark tombstone, the cold water sound and Louis’s mother is faster than the second sentence, clicking the thing off with a precision that looks like mercy.

“They’re putting more of those posters up,” she adds, as she hands Harry a second slice like a vote. “The tombstone ones. Don’t die of ignorance.” She makes a face on the word ignorance that belongs to a soldier and a teacher. “As if terror will teach you anything but running.”

Louis’s jaw works. He cuts his toast in half with too much care. “They’d prefer we died politely,” he says, tone light, eyes not. “Please-and-thank-you deaths. Quiet ones you can fold into a statistic.”

Harry stares into his tea. “Dad says we must be ‘realistic,’” he says, making the quote marks only with his voice. “He means afraid.”

“At our house,” she says, “realistic means we do the washing and we pay attention. Afraid means we waste a day.” She squeezes Harry’s shoulder with the hand not wielding the knife. “We’ll be careful. And we’ll live.”

He nods, too grateful to be eloquent. Louis notices how Harry’s shoulders lower by a degree, how his mouth remembers softness. He wants to frame the sight and hang it where the house will have to see.

The day does what days do when the country is running a fever, it goes on anyway. Outside, the town has been papered with certainty. Noticeboards bloom with “materials guidance”, the chemist’s window has a neat display of pamphlets that want to be helpful and look like threats.

They split for work because salaries don’t respect narratives. “I’ll come by the shop later,” Harry says. “Buy something I can’t afford.”

“Queen’s Greatest,” Louis says. “I’ll do you a mates’ rate if you promise to take the piano hostage again.”

He does come by. The bell above the record-shop door rings. Mr Patel looks over his glasses like a magistrate who prefers mercy. “You. You will bring the piano back if you run away to America. I cannot have our young people under-cultured.”

“I’ll post it first-class,” Harry says dryly.

Mr Patel gestures to the radio, where the presenter has changed from concern to cheerful hysteria. He turns the volume down. “If the country goes to pieces,” he says, “we will glue it with Bowie and receipts.”

A mum with a child comes in, the child immediately entranced by the cassette rack. The mum hovers by the counter. “Do you…” She swallows. “Do you have anything… safe. For the kids?” Her eyes flick towards the newsprint glimpses in bags.

“Plenty,” Mr Patel says. He reaches under the counter and pulls up three tapes: one nonsense, one glory, one lullaby. “And this, for you.” He taps a slim paperback and slides it across. The cover is gentle, the contents are braver than the town would prefer. His voice is quiet. “Under the till is where the country ends and the real place begins.”

She takes it. “Thank you,” she says, and then, to Harry in that curious way people acknowledge beauty after they’ve remembered their children exist, “I saw you last week. On the stage. I liked the bit where you made the room behave.”

“I like that bit too,” Harry says, shy. He buys a thing he doesn’t need because you pay your way where you can.

Early evening. The pub is full and restless, they’re at their little table, Louis doing the job of being the joke so Harry can do the job of being the quiet, Zayn is there, long-limbed and faintly bored, tender as a blade. Niall is a comet passing between planets with crisps. The moon is probably at its most embarrassing phase.

Someone has tacked a “NO POLITICS” sign to the mirror, which works until it doesn’t. Men arrive with their sports and their tongues.

"If they make those posters any bigger,” Louis says, inspecting a pint as if it had news inside, “they’ll have to start putting the names of the dead on them to save space.”

“We already write them,” Harry murmurs. “Just not where they can see.”

It should be ordinary. It nearly is. Then the comment arrives, the one that always does. A man with a neck like a cupboard door and a mouth that looks practised says, too loud, “Disgusting.” He doesn’t look at them, he lets the word walk around and sniff. “We don’t want that disease in here.”

Silence follows, not the restful kind, the kind that decides what happens next.

Harry keeps walking because that is what years teach you: look away, get small, live.

The man gets braver on the smell of it. “Look at him,” he tells the room, turning his head. “Shirt like a tart’s curtain. Swaying like he wants to be looked at. Oi, pretty boy. You’re in the wrong pub.”

Louis is halfway across the space before the thought has formed. “He’s in exactly the right pub,” he says, not loud, not quiet.

The man grins, no humour in it. “What are you, then? Little fairy’s handbag?”

It’s a clumsy insult, but it’s enough. “Fuck off,” Louis says and hates how good it feels to say the exact word.

“Language,” Niall calls mildly from the bar, towel already in hand.

The man lifts his chin. “I don’t want-” he gropes for vocabulary and comes up with the only one he thinks he needs “-gays infecting my pint.”

“Fuck off,” Louis repeats to the man and the room has decided this is the right dialogue.

“Louis-” Harry begins.

“Or what,” the man says, pleased. “You’ll kiss him at me?” He leans into the hardness of his own joke. “Go on, then. Kiss your boyfriend. Show us what you are.”

Louis’s mouth is a furnace and a library. He chooses a book that fits in a fist. “You’ll have to squint,” he says, smiling with his teeth. “You can’t see love from where you’re sitting.”

Zayn’s mouth opens in a soundless wheeze, Liam’s shoulder squares a fraction. The man goes that sad, obvious red. The shove arrives, as predicted, inelegant, all elbows, hoping for applause.

Louis rocks back a step, then another, the rib rehearsing old pain. Liam’s hand comes down on the man’s wrist. “Wind your neck in,” he says, sunny and terrifying.

The man bares his teeth. “Queers,” he announces, kindly sharing his education. “Dirty.”

“Oi.” It’s Niall now, patience gone to flint. His hand hits the bar like a bell. “We don’t use that word here.”

“What word?” the man asks, delighted to have an audience. “Queer? Poof? Pansy? Which one hurts your feelings today?”

“The word you’re saying with your fists,” Niall replies. He gestures to the door with a publican’s fatal politeness. “Finish your pint and leave.”

“You can’t-” the man begins.

“I can,” Niall says and his father appears at his side. “Because it’s our pub. And because I’m bored of people like you pretending hatred is a team sport. Take your mate and your vocabulary and go home.”

The man puffs. There’s always a second act. He looks at Harry’s shirt and smiles his smallest smile. “Dressing like that, begging for it,” he says.

Niall’s dad snatches the beer from their hands with a speed that suggests long practice. “Out!”

There is a brittle, exquisite ten seconds in which violence tries to remember its choreography and fails. The friend tugs the man’s sleeve, urgent now. The man spits toward the floor, misses the exact tile he meant to punish and stumbles out. The door closes. The pub breathes. Zayn releases a line he’s been holding in his jaw. Liam lowers his shoulders.

Niall returns to the bar and serves three pints very calmly. His dad stands in the door for an extra ten seconds and then returns to his realm.

Harry turns to Louis. His hands are shaking now because they were brave when they were needed. Louis wants to put his mouth on each finger and remind it what else there is to be for. He does not. He reaches for Harry’s wrist under the table and presses into his pulse with his thumb. “I’m alright,” he says, because somebody should say it. “Are you alright?”

Harry nods, which is neither true nor false.

After, walking home, they don’t talk. There’s not much left to say that their bodies aren’t saying for them, Harry’s shoulder a little higher than usual, Louis’s jaw set to don’t, the unfinished tremor in Louis’s fingers, the finished steadiness in Harry’s palm when it brushes his sleeve and retreats as if the air itself were a witness they don’t want to have to bribe.

At the corner where they usually split, they don’t. The night is cool and complicated.

“I wanted to hit him,” Louis says evenly.

“I wanted to sing at him until he cried,” Harry says and that makes Louis laugh, grateful and wrecked.

“Next time,” Louis says, “we’ll try both.”

Harry’s mouth curves, then the curve fades. “Are you-” he begins, running out of synonyms for okay.

“No,” Louis says. A breath, he tries again. “Yes. Not sure. I’m… here.”

Harry nods. “Come on,” he says. “I’ll walk you home. We can not hold hands very convincingly.”

They set off. Their knuckles make accidental contact three times. The fourth time, Louis turns his hand over. Harry looks once left, once right, the town all windows and opinions, and threads their fingers without theatre.

The sky, lately full of leaflets, has chosen to be only sky. The world will remember them tomorrow, tonight it lets them pass. They do not talk about bravery. They do not talk about fear.

Louis is not made for patience but he tries to learn it, because some days it is the only gift he can give. When men say disgusting, he doesn’t always bite. On the worst afternoons he goes home, closes the door of his small room and rearranges his records by sleeve colour because order is a kind of lullaby. Harry arrives with a knock and lies on the rug with his head beneath the chair. Louis passes him a tape and a joke and then, because the day demands a better transaction, a hand.

They still climb the roof sometimes. On one such night a gull falls in love with their chip paper and refuses to learn boundaries. They talk about films they haven’t seen yet, cities that might be exaggerations, the exact size and shape of leaving.

At Harry’s house the cold has become a hobby. Carpets swallow footsteps the way money swallows noise. His father’s study door is a line in the floorboards, his mother balances on it like a tightrope walker trained to make you forget she’s performing.

They sit at the long dining table that has never learned appetite. Harry has his rings on because his hands need to know where they end. He has chosen a shirt that makes him feel like himself and will be punished for it. The radio in the kitchen murmurs a report about Section 28 and promotion and protecting children from words. His father clears his throat like a gavel.

“We have had enough of this,” his father says. “Enough of the-” he searches for a word that will permit him grace while offering cruelty “-spectacle.”

Harry looks at his mother. Her eyes are doing the work her mouth is forbidden.

“What spectacle?”

“The pub. The performance. The-” another word hunt, he lands on safety then throws it away for scandal, “talk. Do you read the papers? Do you know what people say?”

“I know what some people say,” Harry replies. His voice is the one he uses for difficult chords. “They have been saying it for years. They’re simply louder now.”

“Princeton,” his father says, touching the envelope with two fingers. He has said the name enough times to salt the air with it. “December. Early. They’re very keen.”

Harry watches the light through the whisky and tries not to convert it into a metaphor. “I have gigs booked,” he says, politely, because his mother taught him that courtesy is a safer weapon than any of the ones men prefer.

“You have hobbies booked,” his father corrects. “What you have here”, he indicates the house as if it were a word pronounced in italics, “is a way out.“

“I live here,” Harry says.

“No,” his father says. “You perform here.” He breathes in the way men do before saying a cruel thing. “And, let’s stop pretending, the… situation with the local boy-”

“Louis.”

“-the situation,” his father repeats, “has made you very foolish, Harold. This isn’t Paris. This isn’t-” he glances at the radio, which he listens to as if it were a competitor, “San Francisco. This is England. There are… standards. There are dangers. There is the name I have given you, which you seem intent on defacing.”

His mother’s hands are folded in her lap. She looks at Harry once, then at the carpet, then at the candle that is never lit. “We want what’s best,” she says, every syllable ironed.

“What you want,” Harry says, mild because he will not give them the performance they’re paying for, “is quiet.”

“What I want,” his father says, pleased to be invited, “is a son who is not a scandal.” He prods the envelope. “This is the antidote to scandal. In three years no one will remember this phase, they will remember the degree.”

“You mean,” Harry says, “they will remember me incorrectly.”

His father’s smile is the little one he reserves for closing arguments. “They will remember you safely. Which is more than I can say for the path you’re on. Do you know what men like that-” he gestures, vague, enlisting the whole town into his prejudice, “bring into houses? Do you know what they carry?”

Harry could ask, Which men are you using me to say you hate? He could ask, When you say carry do you mean love? Or death? Or both? He could ask, Why does your mouth use the word "they" when your eyes are looking at me? He doesn’t.

Instead he says, because he can’t bear to give his father a better sentence: “I’m not an accusation you get to make against the world.”

His father leans back, satisfied with having reached the part of the conversation he rehearsed. “You will go to Princeton in December. You will spend the next weeks preparing. You will stop these… public performances immediately. If you do not, we will cut you off. Financially. Patronymically.” The last word is a flourish, he loves Latinate threats. “You will not make a spectacle of this family for a boy who sorts records for a living.”

Harry feels the sentence hit and refuses to bleed where it wants him to. “For the record,” he says, “he doesn’t just sort them. He listens. He saves people one side B at a time.”

“Enough,” his father says, contempt curdling in his throat. “This, Louis, has already taken from you. Your reputation, your focus, your sense.”

“My sense of what?” Harry asks, quiet.

“Of reality,” his father says. “Of what is and isn’t possible. You think you can stay here, parade about in silk and sentiment and not suffer consequences? Grow up!”

Harry twists a ring until the skin protests. He looks at his mother because he still believes in miracles. She meets his eyes and flinches and that is its own kind of answer.

“What if I don’t go,” he asks, though he knows. He needs to hear the threat arrive in the language it chose.

“Then you are not my son,” his father says, savour in it, as if he’s relieved to have located a line worth crossing.

The room goes smaller without theatrics. The chandelier, always ridiculous, suddenly looks like a toy bought to distract a child during a tantrum. Harry thinks of Louis’s kitchen with its pencil in his mother’s hair. He thinks of the roof where the stars are disobedient and kind. He thinks of the boy who keeps his tablets in a bottle with a patient label and who has learned to make his breath queue up. He thinks, I will not let him think he made me leave. I will not let my father make him into a cost.

“When?”

“Three weeks,” his father says, triumphant. “It’s all arranged.”

Harry nods. He stands because sitting is suddenly a trick chair. “May I be excused,” he says, absurdly, and walks to the door without touching the walls.

In the hall he stops, palms flat on either side of the envelope. He reads Princeton University as if it were a diagnosis. He puts it down gently and leaves the house that insists it owns him.

He tells Louis at night because night has been kind to them before and he hopes for consistency.

They lie on Louis’s bed, Harry describes the dinner table like a crime scene. He gives each sentence the exact number of words it can carry. When he finishes he looks at the ceiling and closes his hands on air, as if ready to catch something heavy.

“How long?” Louis asks.

“Three weeks,” Harry says. Then, carefully: “I don’t want to go.”

“I don’t want you to,” Louis says, because if you don’t say the obvious it becomes the ghost in the room. His eyes go hot. He blinks up, hopeful that gravity will help. It doesn’t.

Harry props himself on an elbow and studies Louis the way he has taught himself to, tender first, accurate after. “I can’t… not go. Not without asking you to pay for it every day. He’ll pull the money. He’ll pull… everything he knows how to pull. He’ll drag you into the light like a warning. I can’t make you my consequence.”

“Don’t make me the reason you go either,” Louis says and the sentence burns his mouth.

Harry swallows. “You’re not the reason. You’re the… proof.” His face breaks and fixes. “That there’s something worth coming back to.”

Louis stares at the underside of his own hand as if it might offer notes. “If you stay,” he says, slow, careful, building a bridge he knows they can’t cross, “we could… I could find a second job. Zayn says Dean at the supermarket needs someone to clean on Sundays. Mr Patel would pay you in cassette players and call it a scholarship. We could hide in plain sight. We could-” He runs out of verbs.

Harry places two fingers on Louis’s wrist. “I want that,” he says. He lets the want, enormous, sit in the room without apology. Then he does the cruelty kindness demands. “But if I stay now, I think I stay small. Small at the piano, small in my own mouth. I think I make my whole life one long argument with a man who will never learn to hear. And I become a person I don’t like being near and then what have I brought you to?”

Louis turns his face to the wall so he can make the sound privately. It comes anyway, a wrecked small thing. Harry’s hand is on his shoulder at once, not urging, only existing, and Louis hates him for being good and loves him for being careful.

“What if,” he says to the wall, and feels the sentence in his teeth, “we don’t do goodbye like people in films. What if we do… intermission. You go to your… university. I stay here and alphabetise the country. We write. Not just letters we can pretend are about songs. Letters that say the words we don’t say out loud in supermarkets. We… call, when the queue at the box is shortest. I’ll save coins and you’ll pretend to be an American who says "Dude" without dying of shame. You come home when you can. I’ll meet you at the station with no performance. We practice being an us in different worlds.”

Harry laughs, wrecked. “Intermission,” he says. “You’re the only person I’d let sell me the interval as a happy ending.”

“It’s not an ending,” Louis says. “It’s a… comma.”

Harry leans in, forehead to forehead, the country reduced in a good way. “It’s an ellipsis,” he argues.

“Stop trying to win grammar,” Louis mutters. He wipes his face with the sleeve of a jumper. “I’m scared.”

“I am too,” Harry says. He takes stock, out loud, because naming monsters kept him alive as a child. “I’m scared of going and loving it. I’m scared of going and hating it and coming back smaller. I’m scared of you getting good at not needing me. I’m scared of me trying to be the version of myself my father thinks he can love.”

“I’m scared of the post,” Louis says. “That it will lose us. I’m scared of this world putting its mouth on you while I’m not standing in the way. I’m scared of lads whose names I don’t know deciding your face has done something to them only their boots can solve.”

Harry takes his hand and places it flat to his own chest. “I will not leave you for a country,” he says, solemn as a boy promising the sea to a boy who has never seen it. “I will go to a school.” A small, rueful smile. “Princeton,” he adds. “I will come home to a person.”

Louis breathes. He nods. “What if you… meet someone. Someone with… novelty?” He hates himself for the question, he asks it anyway.

“I will meet everyone,” Harry says, eyes steady. “And if any of them are kind to me I will be grateful in the precise amount their kindness requires. But I will not do this-” he lifts their joined hands, “with anyone else.” He blinks and a tear falls and rolls down his cheek. “I want to be allowed to want you,” he says, very softly, “in the present tense.”

Louis makes a noise even he doesn’t recognise, it hurts and helps. He drags Harry down and then gentles the drag, because if you don’t respect the person you love you become the person you were taught to be afraid of. They kiss the way people do when they are trying to memorise a language before leaving the country where it is spoken. It is not careful and somehow not dangerous. It is exactly what it needs to be.

“Tell me everything I’m allowed to know,” Louis says against his mouth and Harry does, because sometimes the way you save each other is by furnishing the rooms you can’t yet share, the lecture halls with their old carpets, the boys with their gold watches and their pain, the trees that will pretend to be American with a seriousness English trees would find embarrassing.

“And you,” Harry says, “tell me the small things I can carry without customs taking them, Mr Patel’s newest argument, what Zayn draws when he pretends he isn’t in love.” He kisses his cheekbone. “Tell me what the roof is doing without me.”

“It sulks,” Louis says, tears laughing. “We’ll go up before you go. That’s not a question.”

They make a plan like a list under the till.

1. Write once a week. No apologies for bad handwriting.
2. Call on Sundays when the pub cashes out and the phone box tastes of beer.
3. In letters, say you more than I if the day is heavy. Reverse if lonely.
4. If the town grows teeth, tell Niall; he owns a broom.
5. Bring back songs that don’t sound American unless they must.

Louis adds a sixth in biro on Harry’s wrist: come home when you miss me.

Harry looks at the blue word home where a vein moves. “I’ll try.”

Later, they lie in the careful tangle they’ve invented, Louis on his side, Harry fitted behind, one arm under, one arm over, hands finding the small squares of skin they’ve learned can hold a person together. The radiator ticks because it has a limited vocabulary and wants to be helpful.

“Tell me something I can sleep on,” Louis says, eyes open because shutting them makes the picture brighter.

“That thing you hate about your body,” he says, “the one you worry will make me love you in the wrong way, it is exactly where I put my hand when I need to know where I am.” He waits for the flinch. It doesn’t come. He goes on, reckless and careful. “And, you are not a detour I took on my way to a life. You are the road that taught me walking was a thing you can do beside someone.”

Louis’s throat does its small stupid bravery, he swallows, he doesn’t ruin it with quips. “Something from you,” he says, “that I can keep in my pocket.”

Harry smiles and gives him a small kiss on his forehead. "I love you," he whispers softly.

The next three weeks are hard. They try to enjoy their remaining time together, but it's difficult when this gray cloud hangs over everything and everyone, one that won't go away. The thought, the knowledge, that Harry will leave.

Louis doesn't know when, or if, he'll ever return; they don't talk about it.

Instead, they spend too much time naked in Louis's bed, chasing the feeling of freedom and infinity, as if that would change anything. At night, they whisper secrets and truths to each other that they would never say out loud in the daylight, because the world is too cruel.

They pretend it's enough, but it isn't, it never will be.

When the day has come, Harry is already dressed the way boys dress when they need armour that can pass as clothing, white shirt that won’t behave at the collar, black trousers too sharp for the street they’ll cross, the little cross tucked under the first button like a confession.

“They said half eight,” he murmurs. His voice has been polished down overnight so it won’t cut him when he speaks. “Assistant. Car. No audience.”

“I hate every word in that sentence except you,” Louis says and tries for a grin that knows its job. It gets halfway there.

They stand close enough to count freckles, far enough to pretend they might be sensible. Harry reaches first, then stops, as if one more touch will make the morning arrange itself differently. Louis solves it for them, one palm to Harry’s jaw, thumb to the little just-shaved scratch he missed.

“Before,” Harry says softly, “when we’re fine enough to say things.” He swallows. The green in his eyes goes to sea-glass. “I need you to know I will keep us like a candle I don’t let go out, even if I only get to cup my hand around it every Sunday on a terrible phone.”

“You’re allowed to say it without a metaphor,” Louis says, because if they don’t tease they will drown. “Just say it plain.”

“I love you,” Harry says.

Louis mouth is already shaking when he answers. “I love you more than I know how to carry. I’ll learn.”

They kiss like careful people who once survived anything but haven’t yet had to survive this. It’s not a last kiss, neither of them will call it that, but it’s the kind that tries to memorise a person’s mouth from the inside, the soft at the back of the top lip, the way breath is a third participant. Louis tastes toothpaste and something salt and something Harry, that impossible sweetness that sits in the dip behind his front.

“Slow,” Harry whispers against him. Louis slows. He touches Harry’s neck in a polite line, his collarbone, the notch where shoulder becomes chest where he pressed his face last night until the world agreed to be quiet.

They pull apart because oxygen is stubborn. They look, really look, with the greedy steadiness of people saving a photograph to their nervous systems. Harry’s lashes are wet. Louis thinks, stupidly, that he would like to write to Princeton and ask if they have rules about lashes. Harry’s eyes do that softening and Louis has the terrible urge to make him laugh and the more terrible urge not to.

Harry slips a folded envelope from the inside pocket of his jacket. Louis’s name is on it in a hand he’s traced with his finger before, absent and holy. Harry doesn’t give it to him yet. He holds it between two fingers. “In your room,” he says. “Alone.” He offers it out. Louis takes it and it feels heavier than paper has a right to be.

From the street comes the indifferent throat-clearing of an idling engine. The sound is expensive, the smell is ordinary. Harry flinches, his jaw practices resignation, he fails it.

“Come on,” Louis says and his voice is steady in the exact way his insides aren’t. He leads Harry through the flat. At the door Louis stops, hand on the latch and turns Harry by the elbows into light. The day isn’t kind, but it tries.

He lifts his hand and smooths Harry’s collar with fingers that have never obeyed him until this morning. He presses his mouth once to Harry’s cheekbone, once to the corner of his mouth, once to the place under his jaw. Harry shivers like the temperature has made a decision.

“Look at me,” Harry says and Louis does. Green, then greener, then the little flare that happens when Harry decides to be brave. “It’s not an ending.”

“It feels like one,” Louis says honestly.

“It feels like drowning,” Harry corrects. “The part before you remember you can float. I’ll write before I unpack. I’ll ring before I sleep. I’ll be back before you stop expecting me.”

Louis nods even as his body mutinies. He opens the door.

The assistant is a man built of muscles. He stands by the back door of a black car and looks at his shoes when he isn’t looking at them. “Mr. Styles,” he says. The tone is studiously neutral. “We’ll want to leave now to make the connection.”

Harry says, “Just-” and the man nods and stares at the horizon on purpose.

Louis breathes into Harry’s neck until he finds the pace his chest forgot. Harry’s hands, one high between Louis’s shoulder blades, one low at the small of his back, are steady like doors, like guards, like home. If anyone were to walk by, they would see two boys hugging too long on a mean landing and would not know it was the axis of a world.

“Say something awful,” Louis whispers, because if they don’t put a crack in the moment it will swallow them.

“Gemma told me americans are so stupid, some think Europe is its own country.”

Louis huffs into his throat, grateful, broken. “Write that down.”

“I’m writing it down now,” Harry says, tapping Louis’s sternum like a page. Then his mouth finds Louis’s one last time. “Be kind to yourself on purpose,” Harry says, the bossiness he’s earned. “Take your tablet when the bees get greedy. Eat. Sleep. Don’t make jokes when you need mercy. If it’s too loud,” he adds, “find Niall. Find Zayn. Find Liam. Tell them I hired them in my absence to guard the crown jewels.”

“You’re the jewels,” Louis says and then “go,” because he can feel his face begin to fail him and he won’t have Harry see that particular collapse.

Harry looks once more at the door to Louis’s room, at the little dent in the carpet where the desk chair lives, at the life he has been permitted to inhabit. He touches Louis’s cheek, just the brush of knuckles. “I’ll see you,” he says and in his mouth "see" is a verb that includes letter-writing and surviving and choosing not to be afraid.

He walks down the stairs. The car door opens. He gets in. The assistant closes it with a gentleness that suggests he is aware of everything and trained to say nothing.

Louis stands at the window because he is cruel to himself in tiny, survivable ways. Harry looks up at the exact second Louis expects him to, he always looks up in time. He presses his palm to the window. Louis presses his to the glass of the kitchen.

The car pulls away into the street. Louis holds his breath for the three heartbeats it takes to reach the corner. At the corner the indicator flashes, a small, stupid, dutiful blink and then the car is gone.

In the car the assistant turns the radio down to a humane murmur. The air smells of upholstery and decisions. Houses go past pretending not to stare.

A song comes on because the universe is a dramatist with no sense of humour. The low bass thrum, that patient drum, the voice - When the night has come / and the land is dark. Harry closes his eyes. He doesn’t need to look to know Louis is listening to the same song in another future, another kitchen, another trouble.

Stand by me.

He will. It will be inconvenient and unglamorous and real. He watches the small repetition of pavement, lamppost, hedge and practices not crying in front of men who have been told crying is a weakness. He fails gently. The assistant keeps his eyes on the road.

At the station the platform smells like diesel and wet paper. The car stops. The assistant looks at Harry the way kind people look at boys they can’t fix. “Do you need-”

“I have it,” Harry says. He steps out into a morning that has decided to be bright now, of course it has. He stands, bag at his feet, and feels the town tilt. He doesn’t look back at the car. He doesn’t look forward at the timetable. He looks, helplessly, into the part of the air where Louis’s face has just been and nods once, as if air can keep secrets.

On the train, he takes a seat on the wrong side for the best view. He pulls a notebook out of the bag, writes "Letter One" at the top and begins.

Louis doesn’t leave the stairwell so much as his legs decide not to hold him and the stairwell decides to keep him anyway. He gets as far as the kitchen by accident. The room is a square of things that don’t know what he’s done. His mother turns from the sink with a dishcloth in her hand and a face she has already prepared.

“Oh, Lou,” she says and the sound unlocks every door inside him at once.

He comes apart like a person doing exactly what his body was built to do when intention runs out. It is not cinematic. It is ugly and perfect. His breath goes thin and wrong, his chest tightens around a fist he doesn’t own. His hands try to explain and then forget the words for it. His leg begins a shake that refuses off. A high note starts in his throat and holds.

She’s there before the second noise. One arm around his shoulders, one hand at the back of his head, the old sway from when he was half his size. “Kitchen floor,” she says. “Best place for this.” She guides him down. The lino is cold through his joggers and that is good, cold is honest. She sits with her back to the cupboard, pulls him against her like he is allowed to be as small as this, and sets the rhythm with her palm on his sternum, firm, slow, the way you coax a choking engine.

“Breathe with me. In on four. Hold a bit. Out longer.” She does it out loud so his head can borrow her counting when his has emptied.

He tries. The rib refuses at first, then remembers the choreography. His hands are shaking because they were never trained to be useful in these situations. He hates himself for the shaking. “I’m-” he manages. The word is ridiculous. “I’m-”

“You are having a fright,” she says calmly. “And you are allowed. Keep the breathing, love. We’ll tidy up after.”

He sobs. It is indecorous, it is wonderful. The sound in the room is the sound of loose parts settling. His ADHD, usually a houseful of mice, sprints in twelve directions, every cupboard door is ajar, every thought is a radio attempting a station. “Too much,” he chokes. “It’s too much.”

“I know,” she says. She doesn’t say it will be alright because she is not a liar. She says, “It will be bearable,” which is kinder. She keeps her hand steady on his chest, like she is ironing a sheet. “If the bees are loud, we can give them a job.”

He nods, frantic and then remembers to finish the nod with breath. “List,” he says. “Need... a list.”

“Good, let’s do one.” She speaks slowly so the words can stick. “One: tea. Two: sit on the floor with your mum. Three: read the letter when your head got quiet. Four: ring Niall if we need someone ridiculous. Five: breathe again.”

“Tea’s good,” he sobs, half laugh. “Everything is-” He can’t find a noun. “Everything.”

“Mm,” she says, because she has learned yes is sometimes too heavy a word. “Everything.” She shifts him so his head is against her shoulder like when he was small enough to be put places. He cries harder for a minute, then softer. The panic gives up an inch at a time.

“My Chest,” he manages. “It hurts.”

“Yes,” she says. “It does that, but it will get better.” She taps the bottle on the sill without looking. “Tablet?”

He nods. She reaches up, one-handed and gets the little white friend down. She doesn’t offer it like rescue, she offers it like a seat. “Water?”

He nods again. Swallows. The ache in his chest refuses to be impressed by chemistry yet, but the gesture pleases his brain.

“I made porridge,” she says, because hunger is a practical argument. “I can reheat it.”

He snorts wetly, which helps, stupidly. “You’re cruel.”

“I’m busy,” she says. “Cruelty is for people with time.” She keeps stroking, keeps counting softly, keeps being exactly the size of the moment. When his breath has learned something like normal, she’s gentle and bossy in the exact ratio he needs. “Up you get. Slowly.”

He obeys because defence has used up all the clever. The chair holds. The room comes back into focus, the radio with its mouth shut, the fridge magnet that says "Mind how you go", the plate on the table with cling film now pressed down properly, because she fixed it while he was crying.

He wipes his face with the cuff of his jumper. “He gave me a letter,” he says and the word letter tries to be both bomb and flower.

“I know,” she says. “It’s in your room where it’s supposed to be read. Porridge first.”

“I can’t taste anything.”

“You don’t have to,” she says, already at the hob. “You just have to swallow.”

She brings him the bowl, a spoon, a mug. He takes a mouthful, the heat surprises his tongue. The sweetness finds him a minute later. He nods to show the porridge it has permission to help.

“He’s-” he starts, then stops, as if he might be punished for finishing the sentence. He tries again. “I made a person-shaped space in my day and it’s… still there.”

“Good,” she says, ruthless and right. “Keep it. Let it make you tidy. Let it make you late. Let it make you remember to buy milk.”

He cries again, because this is precisely too kind. When that settles she wipes his face with the edge of the tea towel like he’s six and going to school and the bell is a promise instead of a threat. “Go to your room,” she says, soft order. “Read the letter. I’ll be here. If I hear the radio I’ll come in and take the batteries out.”

He goes. His room is the scene of the crime and also the place the crime did not happen. He closes the door because reading requires a boundary. He sits on the bed, his hands are steadier, insultingly. The envelope looks back at him.

Louis,

I want to start with a brave sentence but today I only have honest ones and they all hurt.

In an hour a car will collect the part of me that can be carried like luggage. They will call me "son" with their faces turned away and put me on a train whose windows are designed to rub fingerprints off boys like me. When it starts to move I will become the right kind of silence in the wrong kind of suit and I am frightened of how quickly a silence can learn new tricks.

I have been trying to memorise you in small squares I can hide: the crease that appears when you pretend not to laugh, the way your hands decide things before your mouth does, the heat that lives where your waist begins, where shame once rented a room and found the landlord kinder than advertised.

Everyone says to take a photograph. Photographs lie. I am writing because paper keeps a pulse longer than glass.

There’s a noise in this town that tells us which bodies may be forgiven. It comes from the telly and the pub and the tidy mouths of fathers, it arrives disguised as advice. It says: be smaller, be harder, be cure or apology.

I am going to a place that speaks that noise fluently and prints it on letterhead. Princeton... there, I’ve written it to rob it of its thunder. If it teaches me to be ashamed, throw this letter back at me when I return. Peel off whatever sentences they have buttoned me into. Wash me until I am human again. If I cannot be washed, do not make a shrine. Close the window. Live.

You once told me you hate being looked at like a problem to be solved. I have looked and looked and there is no equation, only the miracle of you, untidy and exact.

This is the part where other letters lie and call pain a lesson. I won’t.

Pain is just pain. But I will say this: the hour on the roof when you named the stars wrong and they forgave you taught me more about the future than any book. The first kiss in the lane re-wrote the town for a minute. It will try to edit itself back. Let it try.

If the posters multiply, if the news learns new ways to say filth, if the council writes another law that tells children not to know our names, stay clever and unafraid on purpose. Give your sympathy first to the girls told to fold themselves into chairs and then to us when we are told to turn to stone.

Grow larger. Soften harder. If anyone asks where you learned that, tell them: from a boy who left and hated that he had to.

If you meet someone kinder than me, refuse tragedy’s vanity and choose kindness. If you don’t, keep the key under the plant, keep the light on, keep alphabetising the world until it learns its order from your hands. Zayn will draw the exits, Liam will bring the spanners, Niall will laugh at the end of the worst sentence and break it in half. Your mum will put a spoon in your palm and remind your lungs of the choreography.

I am trying to be the kind of man who deserves to be in that list. I may fail. I am sorry in advance for all the future apologies.

I will keep writing on whatever they give me, margins, envelopes, the dull backs of official forms. If I am forced to speak a language that doesn’t know how to say your name, I will smuggle it in through song.

I love you, Louis and I know that I will love you forever. No one could take this love away from me.

If you need to forget me to live, forget me.

But Louis, I will never forget you and the things you teached me. I love you.

-H

 

He doesn’t read it twice. He can’t yet. He lies back with the letter on his chest because that’s where his mother taught him to put heavy things so the heart can argue with them. Tears arrive again, less theatrical and more total. He fists the duvet, he presses the heel of his palm to his eyes until small planets appear and orbit a while and he can pretend the ceiling is a sky he chose.

His mother knocks once. “Can I come in?”, she asks, not already entering.

“Yes,” he says, wrecked and polite.

She doesn’t ask to read. She doesn’t ask what was said. She sits on the bed and strokes his hair back the way she did when he hated haircuts because change is one of the thousand things he is afraid of. “He’s a good one,” she says simply and the simplicity is what does him in.

“I hate him,” he says into the letter, which is to say I love him and I hate that the world is full of cruelties.

“I know,” she says. “Both is allowed.”

“I can’t… I can’t make my head be one thing at a time.” He’s ashamed, suddenly, of how he shakes. “It’s like all the windows are open and some bastard’s banging pans in the street.”

She nods. “Right. Close what you can. We’ll go window by window.” She points, gently, to the obvious. “First: breathe.” He does, bewildered to discover it possible. “Second: water. Third: beans on toast because you need more food.” He snorts and she smiles, victorious. “Fourth: write him two sentences. Not a letter. Two. Then you will have done a thing and your head will permit another thing.”

They go back to the kitchen together. He eats. On the radio, because timing is a bully, Ben E. King finds them. The first bars land like a hand on a back. His mother doesn’t move to switch it off. They let it play.

When the night has come / and the land is dark - Louis puts his spoon down. The ache in his chest changes key.

“You can cry and chew at the same time,” she says, proving again that love is unromantic and saving. He does both, badly. She presses her foot to his under the table.

He thinks about the car turning the corner, the blink of the indicator, the small idiocies that make up a day. He thinks about the way Harry said comma in his mouth and made it into a place a person could sleep. He thinks, this hurts in a way that makes me bigger instead of smaller and I will allow it.

When the plate is empty enough to count as done, he stands. “I’m going to the shop,” he says, voice new. “Mr Patel will let me dust doom off the sleeves.”

“Take a hat and a scarf,” she says, because mothers speak both poetry and weather.

He puts on his oldest jacket because it smells like the version of himself that got him this far. At the door he pauses. “Mum?”

“Yes, love?”

“Thank you for… beeing there and honest for me.”

“I’m too tired to lie,” she says. “Besides, truth looks better on you.” She straightens his collar and lets her hand rest a second on the back of his neck in the place Harry left warmed. “Stand by him,” she adds, simple instruction.

“I will.”

Outside the day has the decency to be ugly. He walks the route his feet know, past the noticeboard blistered with leaflets, past the bus stop where boys learn to be cruel if no one interrupts them. He nods at the roof in passing. It pretends not to care he’s ignoring it. He pushes the shop door. The bell rings like salvation performing normality.

Mr Patel looks up. “Late,” he says, which is welcome. He gestures with his chin to the back. “New arrivals. Touch everything carefully.”

Louis smiles, wrecked and ready. He steps behind the counter where his life is filed in a way that makes sense only to people who have stood exactly here. He picks up a sleeve, breathes in cardboard and ink and the possibility of noise and says to the quiet, to the bell, to the boy an ocean away with a notebook open: “I’ll see you.”

Chapter Text

epilogue

 

Half a year is a long time if you measure it in Sundays.

Louis learns that grief is not a cliff but a field you cross daily, sometimes on your feet, sometimes on your knees, sometimes on a bike you forgot you owned. He learns that a town can remain cruel and still hand you oranges in paper bags. He learns that love is not a performance you either nail or botch, it’s a craft and crafts survive bad seasons.

On Mondays, he is efficient. This surprises him. Lists help. He keeps the good radio station for after six. He lets the rest of the world plead its case in the afternoons when he’s strong enough to hear it.

On Wednesdays, he visits Zayn at the shop and watches the new designs hatch. Zayn has made tenderness into a style, swallows, hands, a sequence of tiny stars for girls who sit bravely with their sleeves rolled. Liam sits in the corner with his arms crossed. They are both the same and much better. Sometimes they argue about fonts. Sometimes they kiss in the room where Zayn stores his work equipment. It makes the room kinder.

On Fridays, he works the pub floor before Harry’s old set time because Niall asks and because paying attention to other people’s thirsts is an honest way to spend a night.

Niall has a girlfriend now, a girl called Maeve from the library who can carry three thoughts and two pints at once. She defeats cruel men with exact change and a voice that could tidy a street. When she laughs, her eyes sparkle. Niall looks at her like a lad who’s been given permission to grow into the man he is.

“I wrote to him last week,” Niall says once, polishing a glass to the point of philosophy. “Just told him the pub’s still ugly and Zayn’s birds look like they know secrets. He sent back a postcard of a bell tower and wrote, tell the popcorn machine I miss it.” Niall’s grin is soft. “Idiot.”

On Sundays, Louis goes to the phone box with a coin warm from his pocket. Sometimes the line rings just once and then the Atlantic swallows. Sometimes it rings and then a miracle: “Louis?” -Harry measuring the distance with a name. Some calls are full of timetable, classes, the bus that smells of pencils and American rain. Some calls are only breathing: can you hear me, I’m here, the week survives. Sometimes there’s no call.

Letters arrive in threes and fives, in bursts. He keeps them under his bed in the shoebox. The newer letters are messier. Harry’s handwriting has learned to run. He writes about cafeterias and sheet music and a night when fluorescent lights made him feel holy, about men in their residence who call everyone dude as if the word were an apology for never saying anything dangerous, about a girl named Kaia who cuts her hair blunt and talks politics until her throat is sore, who passes him feminist zines with staples like declarations.

He writes: I am reading the people they told us not to. Everything opens. Everything hurts.

Louis learns to stop assuming every good thing in America is a threat to him. He learns to let himself feel the clean pride of watching someone you love get better at being themselves. Some days the pride and the fear sit in opposite chairs and glare at each other across his chest. He makes them tea and tells them to share a biscuit.

The town changes and stays. At the shop, Mr. Patel looks at Louis and says, quietly, “The next world is taking reservations. It will need ushers.”

Louis learns to cook three new things. He learns the value of a nap. He learns to take his tablet before the panic asks for its chair back. He learns he is allowed to book a day for rain and have it, even if the weather doesn’t agree.

He doesn’t stop missing. He learns to carry missing without it spilling all over the table.

The day he goes to London, the sky is dark. He’s told Mr. Patel he’s off for “a short complicated errand.”

Mr. Patel sighed like a father and pressed two Mars bars into his palm. “In case America is low on sugar,” he said.

His mother tied his scarf as if the plane would be windy.

“Are you sure,” she asked at the door.

“No,” he said, smiling with his whole face. “But I’m going.”

“Good,” she said and then, softer, “My brave boy.” She kissed his cheek with a tenderness that refused the word tragic. “Bring me back a story.”

On the train to London he sits backwards so the towns peel away rather than attack. At a stop outside the city, a woman boards with a baby who regards him gravely and then smiles. He thinks: survival is democratic. Anyone can vote with their morning.

He could have waited. He could have asked Harry first, secured the guest bed, made the itinerary respectable. But the week had frayed, an old man on the high street let the word AIDS fall from his mouth like a brick, the telly used a rhyme that insulted grief, his body went loud for a day and then quiet in a way that felt like defeat.

He had his rabbit days and his bear days and his human days, this was a human day with a bear’s jaw. He said to the small mirror above the sink, “I can cross an ocean.” The mirror, for once, did not argue.

On the Tube he watches faces like pages, so many lives stacked, stapled, passing. He loves London. A boy with eyeliner leans against a pole and reads a dog-eared paperback, entirely unbothered by his beauty. A woman in a suit eats a banana. The map above the doors is an act of mercy: the known in coloured lines. He touches the spot where Heathrow is printed and hopes the map keeps its promises.

At the airport he is briefly convinced he has impersonated someone competent. People drag villages behind them in wheeled suitcases, a tannoy apologises for things it will never fix. He has filled in the card with careful truths. Purpose of visit: a friend. He wants to write "boyfriend" in the margin. He writes nothing.

He stands in the queue and lets other countries’ perfumes move past his head. When it’s his turn the officer examines his passport with the same sternness Mr. Patel applies to price guns. “First time to the States?” the officer asks, not unfriendly. “Yes,” Louis says. He feels his entire village listening out of his chest. “Have a good trip, Mr. Tomlinson” the officer says, stamping a small thunder into the page. Louis breathes for the first time in an hour.

On the plane he sits by the window. The ocean turns into a thought you can have without drowning. He tries to read and doesn’t. He puts the book on his lap and watches an older couple argue tenderly about crosswords. He thinks about Harry at a practice room piano in a building with too much heating, sleeves pushed, mouth set to concentration. He thinks: if courage is a room, sometimes it’s just you at a seat you didn’t think you were allowed to take.

He dozes and dreams in fragments. He is back on the roof. Harry says, we’ll be ordinary, but loudly. Someone sprays the phone box with cleaner and the glass turns briefly beautiful. Zayn draws wings on the departures board. Niall sells chips to the pilot through the little window.

When the wheels touch down, the cabin applauds. He laughs, because sometimes you have to applaud a machine for keeping its word. Immigration is a polite maze. He answers questions with a good boy’s vowels. Outside, America smells like tarmac and cinnamon and rain about to renegotiate. A bus takes him to a train.

On the last train he practises what he’ll say and discards it because every draft tastes like theatre. He has brought a cassette with a playlist he made the previous night in a hurry, Ben E. King because Ben E. King is a law, Bowie, one recording of Harry at the pub with clink and laughter at the edges. He doesn’t press play.

He thinks about what changed. Not the world, although it has, in terrible and useful ways, but the interior architecture of his days.

He knows where the hooks are now: sleep when you can, feet on the ground, breathe to six, don’t forget water, take the tablet, laugh early before the day decides it won’t let you. He knows that softness is not a vice but a resource. He knows that the town did not shrink when Harry left, it simply revealed the size of his staying. He knows that his body, with its stubborn thighs and its narrow bit and the waist he used to hate like a rival, has walked him to the end of himself and then further. He knows his mother is the bravest person he knows. He knows Zayn is teaching the neighbourhood to wear their stories. He knows Liam will answer the phone at stupid o’clock. He knows Niall will be the last to leave the bar when trouble knocks because someone has to love a room until it behaves.

He knows politics will keep inventing cruelties with respectable fonts. He knows the virus is still here and fear is still its accomplice and kindness remains the only practical technology that scales.

He knows he is strong in ways that do not look like posters. It isn’t the sort of strength anyone cheers in a square. It is the sort that gets up, makes tea, posts a note on a noticeboard that says we’re still here, and then goes to the station. It is the kind that spends months teaching bees to queue and then buys a ticket. It is the kind that sits on a train and watches the country refuse to be one thing.

At Princeton Junction the air is an unfamiliar intelligence, cleaner, colder, different birdsong. He stands on the platform with his small bag and the big feeling and laughs once because he has done it and because the doing hasn’t solved anything except the problem of not doing it. That’s enough.

He asks for directions with his ridiculous accent. People are kinder than he deserves. The bus hums a low American hymn. Students get on with faces that haven’t discovered the corners of themselves yet. He is, all of a sudden, older than he was this morning.

He gets off two stops too early because that is how you learn a new city, by being wrong.

He walks under trees that have had money explained to them. He finds the music building by following the smell of resin and the sound of a piano being good. His hands sweat like they used to before exams. He wipes them on his jeans and immediately feels gauche in a way that would have mortified him last year and now just registers as information.

There’s a corkboard by a set of double doors. People have posted flyers for quartets and protests, auditions and reading groups, language tables and an ACT UP meeting off-campus on Thursday. He studies the board. In the bottom left corner, someone has tacked up a photocopied poem, no author, no title. The first line reads: We learn courage by standing still where the world tells us to move.

The door opens to a corridor that has heard every kind of practising in the world. He follows the long vowel of a piano holding its breath. At the end, a room with a glass panel, a figure inside, curls his hands know, a mouth his mouth remembers, a shirt that doesn’t apologise for its shape. Harry is turned half away, head bowed, counting the invisible bar before the chorus. Louis opens the door on the off-beat because he’s always been better at that.

Harry starts. His hands miss the keys. He looks up. There is a half-second where they are both boys again, roof, lane, record shop. Then Harry stands and the room does the decent thing and pretends it isn’t watching.

“Hi,” Louis says, because men in novels always say too much at this point and he refuses to be a cliché.

“Hi,” Harry says. He is smiling in a way that makes his whole face light up. He steps forward and stops.

“Can I-” Harry begins, gesturing to the air between them.

“You can,” Louis says and then they are where they should be: in the first careful hug again and then the second improved version and then the ordinary one you do after, to confirm this is not a dream.

When they pull back there are tears neither of them apologises for. “You came,” Harry says, awed and obvious.

“I did,” Louis says. “I’m very good at trains and planes.”

Harry laughs that old helpless laugh and then sobers, as if remembering the clause that always sits at the end of joy these days, the world, its leaflets, its laws. “How long can you...”

“As long as I can,” Louis says. “Long enough to begin again.”

Outside, America keeps doing its strange noon. Inside, two boys who refused to be told their size stand at the exact distance that turns wanting into welcome. No violins arrive. The poster on the corkboard does not fall. A radiator coughs the same way radiators cough in every decade.

Later, there will be the awkwardness of rooms you don’t know, there will be sentences about visas and semesters and rent, there will be phone calls across new bureaucracies and Sundays that become Thursdays and the old town still doing its old theatre with new cast. There will be long walks in a different air. There will be fights and their repairs.

If anyone asks for a lesson: read books, listen to music, trust kitchens and clever girls, learn which laws are lies.

The boys do not hurry to sit down. They are busy, for once, being the kind of ordinary that revolutions are built from. If the future wants them, it will have to come through this door.