A List of Available Smiles - part three
A List of Available Smiles
Part Three
Despite all of Phil’s best efforts, though, Dan only deteriorates over the next few weeks. He’s still functioning - he’s still making videos, which is his benchmark for functionality - but he’s spending scary amounts of time doing nothing, staring at the wall in silence, scrolling through tumblr without reblogging anything, staying all day in pyjamas with his curtains closed and never going out.
That doesn’t sit well with Phil. One day, he tries to persuade him to come and visit PJ.
“He’s one of your best friends,” he points out. “You like spending time with him.”
“I don’t want to lie,” Dan says. “I don’t want to pretend everything’s fine and dandy.”
“You don’t have to-”
“Yes I fucking well do!” Dan snaps. “Look at me!”
His hair is limp and unwashed, there are deep shadows under his eyes, and he’s wearing the same t-shirt that he was wearing in his last video. That video has been filmed, edited and uploaded, and Dan hasn’t changed his shirt.
“So take a shower,” Phil says.
“No, it’s not-” It’s unbelievably frustrating. Phil just doesn’t understand. Dan takes a breath. “I don’t want to have to pretend that I’ve watched his last few videos and paid attention, or laugh at jokes or talk about - about anything!”
But now Phil is getting visibly impatient. “Can’t you just-”
“What? Get over myself? Make an effort?”
“Well, yeah!”
And then he realises what he’s just said and jumps back, as if frightened of his own words.
Dan stares. “Did you really just say that?"
But Phil seems to be paralysed into silence.
“Fine!” Dan says. “Fine! I’ll come to PJ’s. I’ll ‘make an effort’.”
“No, Dan, I didn’t mean...”
It’s too late. Dan has already stalked off to the shower. Phil wants him to pretend to be normal? Then that’s what he’ll do.
He’s the life and soul at PJ’s. He’s hilarious, he comes out with quirky observations about the world, he makes pointed jokes at Phil’s expense; he laughs loudly, smiles widely, and feels like shit.
He knows Phil can see what he’s doing, because he looks seriously disturbed. At one point, PJ even asks him what’s wrong.
“Nothing,” Phil says, attempting a smile.
“Oh, don’t worry about him,” Dan says dismissively. “It’s not like he’s ill or anything.”
At that, though, Phil goes deathly white. PJ looks between them, confused, but then Dan’s asking about his end of term project, and the moment passes, the conversation moves on, and once again Dan is glowing with life.
As soon as the door closes behind them, his posture drops, his words dry up, and the light leaves his eyes entirely. On the train home, they sit in silence for a while.
“I’m sorry,” Phil says. And then, “That was the scariest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Dan doesn’t bother to respond. When they get back to the flat, he goes straight to his room and collapses, fully dressed, on his bed. He’s worn himself out, but he doesn’t sleep. He just stares at the ceiling, mind completely blank. If his heart stopped beating right now, would it be possible to tell the difference?
When Phil comes in to ask if he wants anything to eat, his eyes don’t even flicker. He just keeps staring, unseeing, at nothing, and after a minute Phil leaves.
He stays like that all night, awake and unaware, and absolutely hating himself.
When the light begins to seep under his curtains, he slides off his bed and creeps into Phil’s room. He’s asleep, obviously, but his duvet is twisted, half on and half off the bed, and rather than resting his head on it, he’s hugging a pillow tight to his chest. Gently, Dan rearranges the covers, shucks his jeans, and climbs in behind Phil.
“I need you,” he whispers.
Phil doesn’t stir. Dan shifts closer and finally closes his eyes.
***
Dan wakes up at three o’clock in the afternoon to find Phil sitting next to him on his laptop, headphones plugged in. He rolls his head against the pillow and his neck gives a few satisfying cracks. Phil jumps.
“Don’t do that!”
“Sorry,” Dan says lightly, unrepentant.
With that word, though, the previous day seems to come flooding back. Phil sets down his headphones and closes his laptop; Dan sits up and says it properly: “I’m sorry. About yesterday.”
“Me too,” Phil says. “I shouldn’t have been so-”
“Yeah, but I was always the one who said it wasn’t an illness,” Dan insists.
“Yeah, but...”
Dan shakes his head. “I know.”
For a while there’s silence, heavy but comfortable. They’re forgiven.
“I get what you said, now, about acting yourself,” Phil says. “How do you do that?”
Dan shrugs. “Had to. Got used to doing it at uni. Just haven’t done it to you before. Not like that.” He frowns. “Was it really that weird? I mean, you’ve seen me doing videos.”
“Yeah, but that was for the camera,” says Phil. “Yesterday, it was for PJ, and he didn’t have a clue. And I just... I don’t know if I would’ve known, if I hadn’t...”
“I’m a fucking good actor,” Dan says, his voice flat. He sighs. “I think you’d’ve guessed. I hope you’d’ve guessed. We spend too much time together. And... I don’t feel it, you know? I can smile and laugh and all that shit, but I don’t feel the emotions that are supposed to go with it. So it’s sort of like pasting the appropriate expression on your face, like picking out faces from your list of available smiles.”
“All the time?” Phil asks quietly, and Dan knows what he’s thinking. He’s thinking of all the times that Dan’s been smiling around him over the past month or two, all the times Dan has laughed with him, at him, and wondering if it was all a lie.
“Not- not entirely,” he hedges.
“But mostly.”
“Yeah. I’m sorry.”
Phil nods, but he’s not meeting Dan’s eye, and he must be chewing on the inside of his cheek from the expression he’s pulling. Abruptly he swipes at his eyes with his sleeve, and Dan realises that he’s crying.
“Don’t-” he says, but what he really wants to say is don’t be sad, and he knows that’s not his choice. He knows all too well that you can’t just change how you feel at someone else’s request. The words stay unspoken on his tongue, and instead he shifts so he can pull Phil to him in a hug.
There’s a crack in the curtains where Phil has opened them just a tiny bit so he could see without waking Dan. The beam of light is streaming into Dan’s eyes, but he just stays there, holding Phil, rocking slightly so the light flickers across his vision, sometimes blinding, sometimes barely there.
When Phil finally sits back, he leaves his hands on Dan’s hips. “Please don’t do that to me again,” he says. “Be honest with me.”
“I am,” Dan says.
“No, I mean completely honest. Like you said in your video. Saying everything that comes into your head, and only saying sorry when you mean it, and saying no, even when it hurts.”
“But I do,” Dan says, and is surprised at his own words. “I said no to you, didn’t I?”
God, he did. He said no to being with Phil. And he thinks again about his criteria for honesty: only Phil has heard every thought he has about depression, and... he’s got no evidence for saying sorry when he doesn’t mean it, because he’s sorry whenever he hurts Phil. Even if, like yesterday, Phil hurt him first.
Problem solved? No, not really. He’s still convinced the world’s stuck in a cycle of polite dishonesty, playing games and telling pretty lies ninety five per cent of the time, and that’s still utterly depressing. But it can be him and Phil against the world. And that’s better.
But he said no to Phil. He said no. And suddenly, he’s not quite sure that was such a good decision.
***
Dan has long been aware that he wants everything from Phil. He’s also long been aware that he really shouldn’t ask for anything more than he already has, for oh-so-many reasons, and absolutely nothing has changed about that.
From the day that he first sent a less than three and Phil sent back <333, through the time when Phil said “I love you” and Dan wished he could say it back, right up until this moment, nothing has changed. However Dan might feel about Phil, Phil’s the only person with the freedom to voice his feelings. This has been the state of affairs possibly forever, and it shows no sign of changing. Dan still has nothing to offer Phil, no guarantee that he can be anything approaching a good boyfriend. For Phil’s sake, he can’t do this.
It’s only at the depth of his self-loathing that he can admit that his motives for holding back are nowhere near that selfless.
He’s scared, alright? What if Phil finally figures out that he doesn’t have to spend his time putting up with an invalid? Or what if he starts wanting more from Dan, like that time when he insisted they went to PJ’s? Or even if Dan were to get better, and they were to have a perfectly normal relationship, probability dictates that they wouldn’t stay together forever. And what then? What happens when they break up and Dan loses the one person with whom he doesn’t have to pretend? What happens when Phil retreats from him and Dan is thrust back into the real world, standing in a spotlight with the eyes of the world on him, open to the harsh scrutiny and the glaring lies that make up reality?
It doesn’t bear thinking about. God, it bites, having to think of himself as so fragile, but it’s the truth, and it’s just one of the reasons why Dan really shouldn’t go out with Phil. Why, then, is he so tempted?
Part of it’s just that he’s always been tempted. He’s always wanted everything from Phil, from the halfway reasonable - spending almost every waking minute with him - to the really quite disturbing - finding a way to burrow inside him, to climb directly into his chest and stay there, safe and cut off from everything that isn’t Phil.
Being bisexual, Dan always goes through a period of working out whether he wants a new guy in his life to be his friend or his boyfriend - it’s not as important with girls because of the statistical probability that they’ll be into guys. There’s time to work it out with girls. With guys, there’s no such luxury, which normally results in Dan briefly obsessing over any new male friends to work out whether or not he should be making a move.
With Phil, that never happened.
Maybe he was suppressing the issue subconsciously, maybe it was the idea that Phil was out of his league, or maybe it was just that he wanted to be with Phil on any terms, be that as his friend, best friend, boyfriend, flatmate, or anything else at all. Perhaps that’s love. It’s as good a definition as Dan’s come up with before.
Because he does love Phil. Of course he does. He loves everything that Phil does for him, but he also loves the little things that make Phil Phil: the bad jokes, the eternal optimism, his stupid puppy dog face... just everything about him. Well, not everything, he amends: he still can’t stand Phil’s messiness and his tendency to eat all the food without replacing it, and Phil always leaves every light in the flat on. But that’s all sort of par for the course. It doesn’t change the fact that he loves Phil. It doesn’t change the way that Phil is a constant in his life. And Dan doesn’t want to imagine it any other way.
But he can’t risk it. He mustn’t risk it. Anyway, Phil’s going on holiday to Florida soon. Perhaps then he can learn to distance himself a little.
***
“Are you sure you’ll be okay?”
“Stop it - I’m not going to kill myself.”
“Yeah, but you have to eat and stuff.”
“I promise I’ll eat. Alright?”
“Alright.”
“...”
“I’ll miss you.”
“Shut up.”
“No, but seriously.”
“You’re gonna miss your train at this rate.”
“Okay, I get the hint. See you in a couple of weeks, yeah?”
“Yes, Phil. Now go get tanned.”
***
“I don’t know why I’m doing this. Like, you’re on Skype. I could just Skype you, but instead I’m filming a video for you. Why are you on Skype, anyway - you’re on holiday. What’s the point of going on holiday if you’re just going to stay in touch with the internet?
“I don’t even know what I want to say. I just... Oh, fuck it.”
DELETE ALL SCENES? YES.
***
“I’m eating, I promise. And showering, actually. You won’t come home to toxic gas or anything. Honest.
“I do miss you. I sort of wish I didn’t, actually. I wish I could-”
DELETE ALL SCENES? YES.
***
“See, the thing about YouTube is you’re talking at people. You’re not connecting with them, not really - there’s too many people watching. You can’t talk directly to every single person watching your video, because you can’t tailor what you’re saying to them. That’s what you do when you talk to anyone in real life. I don’t know, is that lying? Or is it just trying to find the best way to get through to someone? Both, maybe.
“So, with these private videos, I’m not talking at you, I’m talking to you. But... I want to talk with you.
“So why the fuck don’t I Skype you? I’m a fucking idi-”
DELETE ALL SCENES? YES.
***
The day Phil gets home from Florida, he sends Dan a text to let him know that he’s travelling straight from the airport to their flat rather than going back to his family home for a night. He’ll’ve been travelling for hours, Dan thinks, so he decides to make dinner for when he gets in. It’ll be about four o’clock in the afternoon, but Phil will probably have skipped lunch rather than eat aeroplane food, anyway. Dinner at four isn’t completely ridiculous. It’s not as if Dan’s own body clock is clear enough to protest.
He decides on spaghetti bolognese, because he can just leave the sauce going and do the pasta when Phil actually gets in. Dan’s not actually a terrible cook, bizarrely enough for a student, though he does best with recipes where timings aren’t the be all and end all. Spag bol falls safely into that category and has the added benefit of being one of Phil’s favourite comfort-food meals.
So he gets up at a reasonable time, goes and buys mince and chopped tomatoes, diced pancetta and dried oregano, a bottle of cheap red wine and a tube of tomato paste. They still have pasta in the kitchen from when Phil bought it in an effort to get Dan cooking again, and Dan didn’t bother. He’s been eating deconstructed sandwiches for the past fortnight - surely if he’s getting all the food groups in, it doesn’t matter if they’re not put together in a conventionally pleasing manner?
Phil is duly exhausted when he gets in, just as pasty as ever he was, and clearly delighted to see Dan. They sit together on the sofa, Phil’s knee a light touch against Dan’s thigh as he chats happily about his experiences in Florida, name-drops all the American sweets - candy - he’s brought back for Dan and finally claims starvation.
“The airplane food was disgusting,” he says.
“Aeroplane,” Dan corrects. “God, you’re turning American on me.”
“Yeah, whatever,” Phil drawls in his best American accent, adding an unnecessary r to the end of ‘yeah’. “D’you wanna get a takeaway?”
“Actually, I made spag bol,” Dan says. “Just got to put the pasta on.”
Phil’s eyes widen in surprise. “Really?”
“No, I just said that for the pleasure of dashing your hopes. Yes, I’ve made spag bol.”
He gets up and puts the water on to boil. Phil stays sat on the sofa, but Dan feels his eyes tracking his movements like a laser beam.
“Hang on, have you set the table?"
“Yeah,” he says, almost defensively. “I was bored.”
Phil does get up after that, ostensibly to drag his suitcase into his room, but Dan’s fairly sure he’s just going to snoop around the flat to see if Dan has done anything else domestic whilst he’s been away. He’ll be disappointed - Dan’s room is still a tip, Phil’s is just as he left it, minus a couple of tops that Dan nicked when he couldn’t be bothered to do the laundry, and the bathroom really does need cleaning at some point. Ah well, it’ll keep.
Dan adds the pasta just as Phil returns and kisses him on the cheek.
“Thank you,” he says.
Dan puts the lid on the pasta and shrugs away.
“Dan...”
“Phil-”
“No, hear me out, okay?”
Dan catches the inside of his lip between his teeth, but nods. It’s only fair. It’s only what he’s always asked Phil to do.
Phil takes a deep breath. “You’re cooking me pasta because you knew I’d be tired when I got in. You’re wearing one of my shirts - we share clothes all the time, and sometimes toothbrushes when you forget to bring one somewhere. We finish each others’ sentences, we burst into each other’s rooms without looking - I mean, how many times have we woken up in each other’s rooms and just been like ‘oh yeah, I was feeling lonely last night’? I think - Dan, by most people’s standards, we’ve been together for a long time.”
Dan realises he’s been holding his breath, and exhales shakily. “But, Phil...”
“No, listen. You’re always worried about what you can give me. I just... I just want you. I don’t want some perfect person, I don’t want the mask you give to the world, I just want you. Even when I don’t understand, or when I want to go out and you can’t do that, or whatever - I just. I just want you. I always have. Please, Dan.”
The saucepan lid rattles and Dan sets it on an angle to let some of the steam out.
“But what if we break up?” he says. He’s looking at the hob, not at Phil.
“What if we don’t?”
But it doesn’t work like that. The stakes are too high to gamble like that. Aren’t they?
“You’ve been my boyfriend for months, Dan. It’s not - it’s not changing anything. It’s just... calling a spade a spade.”
It all sounds so logical the way that Phil says it. Has he spent his whole holiday thinking about this, thinking up the best way to put it so that Dan would capitulate?
“Go and unpack,” he says. “I’ll... I’ll think about it.”
For the rest of the evening, they carefully don’t mention the topic hanging in the air between them. Instead, they talk about Florida, and why Phil felt the need to stay online on holiday, and whether they should go to Reading & Leeds this year - what’s the chance they’ll be recognised? And even with this conversation waiting to happen, it’s easy between them. It’s right. And most of all, it’s just them.
At three o’clock in the morning, Dan slips into Phil’s bed. When Phil eventually wakes up, still mostly on Florida time, Dan just tells him, “Okay.”
“Why?”
He has a choice. He could say something sappy and romantic (and probably true) or he could give the real reason.
He goes for the latter:
“Because I don’t think breaking up with you could hurt any more than it already would.”
Part four