New story!
Sea Change
Lotrips, BB/DM, ~10,000 words, adult. Billy's patience runs out.
Notes: Three and a half years later, I finally wrote the sequel to Fatalis. Many thanks to my betas shaenie and msilverstar, and to the various people who got me into fandom and encouraged me to play. I know I wouldn't be writing without you.
You never really thought about patience, not until you went to New Zealand.
It's not that you need it more here than you did back in Scotland. Life will always move at its own pace; you watch for the rhythm of events, stay attentive for signs of the landscape shifting, and do your best to move in congruence with it. When equipment breaks down and the day drips past like treacle, you wait under the tarps with everyone else and bitch along amicably to pass the time. Really, though, the time passes itself, and the unused hours in wigs and prosthetics are nothing to the knowledge that you have a year and a half to make something you already love breathless. Even on your worst days, the aggravation never reaches down to the deep current of wonder running underneath.
You don't consider the scope of your patience because you so rarely have to test it, but you gradually get the sense that it might be unusual, because as the months roll by, almost everyone finds a way to comment on it.
Sean, who keeps letters from his family on set to reread during breaks, asks if you learned it because your parents died when you were young.
Orlando, who pays people to let him jump off high things for the rush of gravity yanking him into motion, guesses that you must've needed it to really get the hang of martial arts.
Elijah's image had been burned into miles of film by the time he was fifteen and you took your first paid steps in front of a camera. His eyes are more than usually serious when he looks at you and says he can't imagine having to wait so long to do something he always knew he wanted to do.
On any given day P.J.'s got so many balls in the air that you're constantly amazed he hasn't been buried under all of them. He doesn't mention it directly, at least not to you, but at the end of one of the first worst days, he stops you on the way off-set, puts a warm hand on your shoulder, and just says thanks. You don't think you've done anything extraordinary, but he sounds so weary and so grateful that you say you're welcome and mean I will if you ever need me to.
Viggo glances over at you, early on a cold and blustery morning, and says it's Scotland, isn't it. All his remarks tend to sound like you've wandered into the middle of a conversation only he knew you were having, but you get what he's saying this time.
When someone brings your patience up, you shrug, smile, say something flip or something unrelated; you don't offer explanations or dispute theirs. As closely as you've worked together, it'd be a surprise if anyone was wrong outright. What they say makes perfect sense to you, so you guess all those things are part of it. What won't fit adequately into words is your sense that patience isn't a thing you possess, a quality or a quantity. It's finding the shape of the world and curving yourself into it. If anyone ever found the right way to talk about it, you might admit to believing that there's an art to that kind of awareness, but you've no more made your own patience than the beaches have rearranged their sands to shape the tides.
Of all the friends you've gained here (because you didn't make them either, you stepped off the plane and found them waiting like you'd all been carved around each other's contours from the start), Dom is the one with the gift for knowing how to say these things, but Dom is the only one who never brings it up. And in the end, when you learn your patience has limits, he's the reason it runs out.
*
The first time you look at Dom and want to kiss him, the newly-christened Black Riders have gone to a pub to celebrate the end of a good day's surfing. Sean says his goodbyes and heads back to his flat early to end his evening on an international call to yesterday, wishing his family a late good night. The other three of you -- bachelors, orphans, wayward sons -- have no such obligations and, more importantly, no need to be in feet for a miraculous thirty-three hours, so here you are, pleasantly tipsy, full of a small mountain of deep-fried food items, and playing increasingly merciless rounds of cutthroat. You lean a hip up against the long side of the pool table and watch Elijah line up a shot you're certain he won't sink. It's not that he's bad at this (though he's not exactly good, either), but the drinks he's been downing kicked in visibly about a half-hour ago. He looks like he's putting some serious thought into spin and angles, but you've got a hunch he's mostly trying to get his eyes to focus. Having manfully demonstrated your Scottish drinking capacity on past occasions, you feel no shame at alternating beer with water tonight; fatigue hums warm in your shoulders and thighs, more satisfying than the louder buzz of alcohol would be.
"Stall all you like, you pansy, I'm going to wipe you off the table next go and there's nothing you can do to stop me," Dom taunts, leaning over the pocket Elijah's aiming for. His fingers tap and dance along the edge of the table, and he bounces a little on his heels, grin wide and manic. He's been drinking vodka and red bulls tonight (a combination you find inexcusable, as it tastes like sugared floor cleaner and doesn't accomplish anything an Irish coffee wouldn't) and has been hopped up and hilarious for a while now.
Elijah glares and sets his cue along the hand he's braced on the table. "Scoot the fuck over, asshole, you're ruining my concentration." You smile into your water and can't blame him. Dom's rings and bracelets and layered shirts flash like a magician's scarves each time he moves, and he doesn't stay still even for a second. Every now and then you spot other patrons looking at him, caught by the shifting display.
"Excuses, excuses, 'Lij," he sing-songs, throwing his hands out at waist-level and flickering his fingers like a carnival barker. "Take your best shot so I can get on with kicking your arse."
"Shithead," Elijah growls, and he pistons the cue forward so sharply that he rockets the cue-ball right off the table. Dom yelps as it flies dead-center for his face and throws himself backwards to avoid it; it misses his nose by maybe a centimetre. All three of you watch blankly as it hits the ground a good two metres away and rolls off under a table. Arms still in the air, Dom turns an accusatory stare -- et tu, Brute? -- on Elijah, who's got one hand spread over his mouth.
Elijah starts stammering -- "Oh shit, man, I swear I didn't mean to, I'm so sorry --" but Dom doesn't manage to hold the wounded expression for more than a second before he begins laughing hysterically, head thrown back and his whole body shaking with it. His mirth is so genuine, so infectious, that these days no one ever tries to resist it. Across the table Elijah dissolves into giggles, hands half-curled in front of his chest, and you're snickering so hard you have to put your glass down or spill it all over yourself. Dom chortles and grabs the edge of the table, sucking air past the hilarity in brief gasps, and Elijah lets loose a horsy snort. Dom's eyes go wide at the sound and he flaps one hand helplessly at Elijah, which is a mistake because it's not there to hold his weight anymore when his legs give out under him and he starts slipping to the ground. You dart over and get your hands under his armpits just before his knees hit the floor, and he turns away from the table to grip the front of your shirt instead. He wraps both arms around your middle and buries his flushed face against your stomach, laughing until he's practically crying; when you finally get him to his feet and prop him up against the table, he claps you on the back with one hand and wipes the tears off his face with the other. You look into his shining eyes and his bright smile and grin back at him, your body alert and wondering what it would be like to push your mouth onto his, to wind your arms around him and feel the warm planes of his body moving against you, with purpose.
Huh, you think, but what you say is, "Wankers." Elijah makes his way over to where the two of you are leaning together, and you run a hand over his salt-stiff hair and go retrieve the cue-ball. The two of them laugh and hug, crack a few jokes, and you smile and sink every ball that either of them has left on the table.
All things come in their own time.
*
As philosophies go, it's a simple one. Applied to Dom, it gets complicated pretty fucking quickly.
You don't mean for it to; you don't do anything to cause complications. It'll come in its own time, you tell yourself, and feel generally content with the friendship that fills the interim. He's a mate, the best you've ever had, and you have no desire to push this. You film, surf, tease each other and go out drinking. It's good, it's easy, and then every now and then the whole thing just tilts precariously sideways.
The first time it happens, you miss it entirely, which might explain your reaction when you catch on afterwards. That night you teach him to swing-dance, and it's good clean fun until you spin him and he comes back around with his face shuttered like a house in a gale. "Stomach's a bit off, think I'll head home for the night," he says, and he makes it all the way out the door without ever meeting your eyes again. You drink a few rounds with your castmates, cracking wise, but you keep turning the moment around in your head trying to find the piece you're missing. An hour later, when almost everyone's cleared out, you go up front to pay the tab and one of the locals mutters something in a tone you're clearly meant to hear. Later, you don't even remember what he said, because it didn't matter. You slap a few bills down on the counter and bait him until he takes a shot, and then you take him apart. He only lands one or two punches and even they shouldn't have happened, but it makes a sour kind of sense when you think about it afterward. Years of training to intercept attacks as they happen, and you leave him doubled-over and bleeding because you're still trying to make up for the one you missed before.
Dom never says a word about the black eye, even though it lingers for a solid week. You don't bring it up either, but you feel the ache of it every time you smile.
*
All things in their own time, and you keep your face to the wind, waiting for the shift you know is coming. As weeks slip into months the two of you go right up to the edge, over and over, and never cross. In clubs so full that the crowd breaks around you like a storm in a cup, you bury yourselves together in the anonymous dark of the dance floor. The music pours over you until every nerve hums, and you watch him try not to look at you, keeping your hands to yourself. You spend every halfway decent day off surfing, riding the waves until your muscles mutiny against you, because the sloping arch and press of the water under you takes the edge off. With the ocean to drown out the noise in your head you can pin him down to shove sand in his wetsuit and never think of a thing. Everything's normal, right up until you remember how you caught him staring at you that morning and how fast he looked away when Elijah sat down, or until you hand him a towel at your flat and he fumbles it when your fingers brush. You let it go; the last thing you want to do is fuck this up.
It's all right. You can wait. So you smile and insult him, lounge around the trailer like you're not half-hard and bent sideways when you fasten your jeans. You laugh together until the stitch in your side folds you double. You film scenes so dizzying and hair-triggered that you collapse into bed at night awestruck that a process so disjointed could yield something that feels so whole. When your sister calls, you tell her that you're happy and you mean it. And still things go sideways when you least expect it. The two of you get completely pissed at a pub one night and you wake up sticky with dried sweat, mouth full of mothballs, sheets knotted around you like the feverish traces of the dream you had. In the bathroom you run the water hot and cold, try to scrub yourself together, and when you fumble your way to the kitchen he's there, hair matted sideway, making tea. From the kitchen table you watch him rifle through your cabinets, sense-memories or deluded alcoholic dreams swirling in your head. The taste of Guinness, rough brick under your fingers, sweet deep burn. He hands you a cup, milk and half a sugar. You almost ask him Did we ...?; he turns his face to squint at the light from the kitchen window, and you don't.
It's not until the afternoon that your palms snag on the fabric of your costume and you find the network of tiny scrapes hidden in your skin. It doesn't mean anything, you tell yourself, and you bite through the inside of your lip on purpose because you can't fucking remember.
*
For a month you try to wipe the faint streaks of that night from your thoughts or assemble them into a whole picture. They filter the world like fragments of tinted glass, adding unwanted color to words, body language, until you're not sure the line you're so scrupulously minding even exists anymore. But you don't know, and so you cling to the memory of where the line used to be, try to stay on the safe side of it. He never says a thing.
The lost pieces don't resurface, but then you get a new set of images, vivid as a fresh reel on a virgin screen, to play in a loop over their absence. The new ones still wake you up gasping in the middle of the night, heart wild, but instead of the phantom curve of his lips under yours, it's the ghostly blur of his face rolling under the wave that fills your mind to brimming and spills you out of sleep. Not the mobile heat of his body curving into yours, but its chilling slackness when you wrestled him from the ocean. The roar and pound of the water as it stole the sand from under your feet, furious at being cheated of its prize. In the days after it happens, you have to stop your hands from reaching unbidden for his shoulders, his hair, the cuffs of his jumpers. The itch in your fingers runs back almost twenty years to when your parents died and you tracked your sister and grandmother in your periphery, only half-believing that they hadn't been taken too. You were thirteen then, too shell-shocked and adolescent to confirm their presence with touch the way you wanted to. You don't do it now, either, because of what you know your hands will tell you. In some inexplicable way, it's obvious that Dom isn't there.
He is, of course, at least in the physical sense. He gets to the set on time, eats lunch, and heads out to pubs with the rest of you. He smiles and takes the piss, flirts with the makeup crew while they glue things onto him. Passing you in the door of a trailer, he'll squeeze your shoulder. He acts perfectly normal. And whenever he returns his tray to craft services or PJ calls him over to another part of the set, conversation ebbs for a moment as everyone watches him go with their eyebrows raised and passes a look around: what the fuck was that?
Dom's defining characteristic is the impression he gives of being in near-quantum flux: solid, undeniably real, and liable at any second to transform into something completely new. The afternoon he goes under, he's shaken but okay, or so he says when he gets the rest of you to drop him off at his flat. Then the next time anyone sees him, the spontaneity is just ... gone. You talk to him and get the full gamut of his quirks and habits, paraded out for your entertainment like cards from a pack, but with none of the mutability, the life. It's like he's turned into a perfect simulacrum of himself, and it unnerves the fuck out of everyone.
The set acts as kitchen table to a tight-knit and insanely incestuous family, so within a couple days little knots of people start collecting in free corners to contemplate what's going on. Elijah and Sean think it's some kind of trauma response; the way they jump all over each other to explain this theory suggests they've spent an unhealthy amount of time hashing it out. The rest of the cast and crew don't know about what happened and so they speculate inventively: sudden homesickness, shot down by some local girl, Lyme disease. You do your best to avoid all of the whispered conferences, but soon enough people start hunting you down like they held a vote in your absence and nominated you field guide to Dom. When this happens, you assure them that it's nothing, he's probably just under the weather, I'm sure he'll be fine. After enough iterations of this little speech, the corners of your mouth get stiff from smiling empathetically. The truth is, no one's come up with anything that sounds even halfway likely to you, your best friend's been replaced by something WETA cooked up, and you don't have a sodding clue what's going on because anytime you end up alone with him, he vanishes like someone flipped the off switch on the CGI generator.
This goes on for about two weeks, until the next real weekend off. You're lacing up your boots in the trailer, getting ready to head off-set, as Elijah pulls on his sweater and turns to Dom with a grin on his face. "So Orli swears he found an honest-to-God video arcade a few days ago," he says casually, like he just remembered to mention this. Dom glances up at him, fingers occupied with the buttons of his shirt, and Elijah notches the wattage on his smile even higher. "You have to go with us tomorrow, it's gonna be totally sweet. Really, I'll pretend to let you beat me at air hockey and everything."
Dom smiles, shrugging into his coat. "Ta, 'Lij, but I think I'm going to catch up on my sleep a little." His gaze flickers in your direction, too quickly for actual eye contact to occur, and then he looks down as he loops his bag over his shoulder. "Make him cry like a little girl and then take pictures for me, yeah?" Dom heads for the door without waiting for an answer, setting his hand briefly on your back as he slides past you. "Have a good weekend, Billy," he says as he steps out into the dusk. Elijah stares after him, brows drawn down, and then looks over to check your face for some kind of verification. Teeth gritted, you tuck the bow on your left boot into a double-knot and yank it down with a snap.
And just like that, you are done.
*
At half-nine precisely the next morning, you put on your jacket, slide a brass key off the fat ring that hangs by your kitchen door, and drive over to Dom's flat. He doesn't answer the door when you knock -- could be he's out, but you doubt it. He sleeps like a sack of sand, which was what led to the initiation of a group key swap in the first place, and he was the one who tacked up the note above your key ring that read, "In case of emergency, boredom, or bloody exhausted bastards who shut off their alarm clocks and sleep through call." You let yourself in and pad down the hall to his bedroom.
The door hangs partway open, blocking most of his bed from view, and you push it carefully inward. There he is, spread out like a child under the billows and folds of his comforter, head sunk down between his pillows and tipped in your direction. His lips are pursed, open a little, his face pale except for the somnolent flush of his cheeks. He lies with his hands tucked together on his chest, thumbs hooked through holes in the ragged cuffs of his shirt, and you can just make out their rise and fall as he breathes. One bare foot pokes out from under the covers to hang exposed over the edge of the bed. You look at his face, at the shadows smudged under the curve of his lashes and at the long line of his brows knotted together above them, and you settle your shoulder into the doorframe and let your head drop silently against the jamb, because he looks exhausted and you know exactly how he feels. In the thin gray light that filters through the curtains, his eyes move fitfully behind their covering lids, like he's searching for something in his dreams. You pull the door back to its unmolested angle and retreat to the main room.
A while later the first soft sounds of movement make their way to where you sit on his couch: footfalls, the drag of a sleepy hand along the wall. The toilet flushes, and a few seconds later he appears in the hallway in his shirt and boxers, one hand scrubbing along his scalp, and wanders blindly into the kitchen with his eyelids still at half-mast. From the other side of the dividing wall you hear him run the tap, drop the kettle onto the stove, turn the burner on. He drifts back around the corner, heel of one hand pressed into his eye socket, and then flails both arms wide and nearly falls over.
"Jesus fucking Christ, Billy," he yelps, eyes slap-wide, and grabs onto the wall for balance. "What the fuck are you doing on my couch, you cunt!"
You flip the magazine closed with a crisp rustle and drop it onto the cushion next to you. "I'm kidnapping you," you tell him pleasantly.
He stares at you, mouth open and working futily. "... you're -- what?"
You repeat yourself.
His head falls against the wall with an audible thunk, and he groans. "No joke, Bill, but I'm really not up for this today."
You lace your fingers together and lay them neatly on your knee. "Well, Dommie, that does put a bit of a wrench in things," you muse. "I mean, we both know I can get you out of the flat against your will, but I probably can't get you and your clothes into the car in one go, and what with that and the racket the neighbors are bound to ring the cops, and next thing we both get to spend all day answering questions down at the station --"
He slashes a hand through the air in a will you please shut it? gesture that you both know signals surrender and thumps his forehead against the wall again for emphasis. "Some days I swear I'd push the lot of you off a cliff if it meant I could get some sleep," he says.
You have to smile a little as you say, "Maybe this is your lucky day, then." He draws his brows in with a sigh but doesn't open his eyes; you cross the room to lay a gentle hand on shoulder.
"No tricks, I promise," you tell him, and he cracks one eye to look at you. "Go wash up and get dressed; I'll see to the tea." After a few seconds he nods and pushes off the wall; when he brushes past you, one hand squeezing your hip, the contact leaves the impression of fatigue and drowsy heat. You stand there looking down the hallway until you hear the shower turn on, and then you step into his kitchen to rummage through the cupboards. You fry up a couple of egg sandwiches and wrap them in tinfoil, fill a thermos with tea the way he takes it, black and sweet. As you settle everything into a sack, he comes in fully dressed with his shoes in his hands and sits down on a kitchen chair.
"This little adventure of yours doesn't need any special gear, does it?" he asks, chin tucked against his chest as he works his feet into his shoes.
You shake your head and open the drawer where he keeps the leftover take-out napkins. "Just a coat, the wind's got a bit of a bite to it."
He snorts. "That a Kiwi bite or a Scotland bite?" he mutters as he finishes with the laces.
You chuckle, less because it's funny and more because the complaint is familiar. "You won't freeze, you ponce," you say and hold out a hand out to help him to his feet. He flips you the bird but takes your hand, and you haul him up. Once standing, he ends up closer than you expected; his eyes go a touch wide, the casual rhythm of the last minute faltering. You start to loosen your grip, but you hesitate when you realize that his gaze has settled on your clasped palms.
"Where are we going, Billy?" he asks without looking up. You squeeze his hand for a moment before slipping yours free.
"You'll find out when we get there," you tell him, and you settle your palm in the middle of his back to steer him toward the door.
*
It takes a good forty minutes to reach your destination, the inland road curving around the woolly green hills like a river rolling out to sea. The ride passes in silence but for the rumble of the engine. You keep your hand on the gearshift, careful as you steer the borrowed car, and Dom rides with his head against the window and his feet on the dash. When you notice that he's got both hands wrapped around the unopened thermos, you reach down to turn to heat up; he looks over and meets your eyes for a moment, features softened by the faint trace of a smile.
The road drops downward, following the land, and you pull smoothly over into a worn shoulder that tips off into an up-climbing trail. You set the parking brake and twist to reach the rough wool blanket in the backseat. Unfolding himself from his inward curl, Dom looks at you questioningly. "Can you get the food?" you ask.
The footpath winds upward through a ragged field, and the two of you take it at a slow pace, breath fogging the chill air. Less than a kilometer in, it ends abruptly in a bare patch of ground as the gentle swell of the land reveals itself to be not hill but cliff. The view in front of you flings out in all directions, ocean and sky spread like sheets out toward the horizon from this spot where the rocks drop, cragged and grassy, into the water's eager hands. You take a moment to drink in the sight of it, a kind of reverse vanishing point, before shaking the blanket open on the dry ground in front of you and turning back to Dom.
He stares out at the panorama, completely dumbfounded. Some time passes in silence, marked only by the distant hiss of the waves, and then he lets his head fall backward, free hand rising to pinch the bridge of his nose. A dry, helpless laugh puffs out of him, and the sound of it twists your stomach a little. "I swear to Christ, Billy," he says to the pale sky above him, "I don't know what Sean and Elijah have been telling you, but I do not have PTS-bloody-D."
"That's not why I brought you here," you say, voice matter-of-fact enough that he rolls his head sideways to look at you. You stand steady under his gaze but don't try to explain your reason -- that he looks like he's boxed himself in on all sides these days, and this is the most wide-open place you know. You nod toward the blanket and don't reach out to lead him to it, though you want to. "Let's eat before the sandwiches get cold."
It turns out that after the drive they're lukewarm anyway, but not so cold that the eggs to have gone rubbery, and the tea is still blessedly, tongue-scorchingly hot. "It was Orli who found this place," you tell him, swallowing down a mouthful. "We went for a hike a few months back and I pulled off on that shoulder around sunset so he could take a piss. After five minutes of waiting for him to come back, I got out to look for him and found him here." You glance to the west, recalling the deep rosy glow that rolled across the landscape, the golden scattering of clouds and how you saw spots for almost the whole drive home because the colors were so beautiful that you forgot not to look directly at the sun. Beside you, Dom peels the rest of the tinfoil off his sandwich and balls it up into the sack.
"What is it?" he asks, looking around with a little more interest.
You smile wryly. "No idea; we're probably trespassing. But I come out here at least once a month or so, and I've never had someone try to stop me. I like the quiet."
"I had a place like that near Manchester," he says, a few bites later. "Got stranded trying to hitchhike to Leeds the winter I was sixteen. Bloody stupid, really -- got stuck out in a storm and then lost the road when I went looking for shelter. I ended up in this barn -- literally walked into it, it was that dark, and I was so cold I just buried myself in hay and went to sleep. Lucky some farmer didn't take a hoe to me." He laughs, looking out over the water like there's a window to this memory hanging in the clear air. "The next morning, when I woke up -- it was just incredible. I mean, it looked like no one had touched this place in thirty years. There was dust over everything, and it had that feeling some places get, you know, really old places. Like it's not really anywhere, just its own place now, and all that time has built up -- thick, like honey."
You watch him with your face turned a little away and your breath held, the way you would a wild creature. There's a vitality in him now that you haven't seen in two weeks, and you keep your presence as quiet as possible in case direct regard would be too heavy for its reappearance to bear. He's quiet for a few seconds, smiling at the recollection. "I'd go back there sometimes when things got crazy. Sit in that barn until the quiet got in my bones. It was ... peaceful." He takes a slow breath, and the glow fades from his face like someone's drawn a curtain, obscuring that place from his view. "It'd be nice to be able to go there now," he says, and his tone makes you think he's not really speaking to you.
You both finish your sandwiches in silence, trading the thermos cap between you every couple of minutes. When the last of the tea is gone, you rise to your feet and walk a few paces toward a notch in the cliff. Still seated, he frowns up at you in confusion and a bit of alarm. "Come on," you tell him, and step down over the edge onto the rocks he can't see.
*
A series of boulders and outcroppings forms an accidental staircase down the deep crack in the cliff, and the two of you pick your way down it -- you in the lead, feet bypassing the shakier spots by memory, him following behind. Gripping the edge of the sheltering flake, you jump the brief gap onto the broad, crumbling shelf that thrusts out into the ocean like the stern of a ship, its outermost point licked by the hissing spray. Behind you, Dom pauses for a moment, eyes wide as he surveys the broken tangle of driftwood wedged in the crevices below; you move to offer him a balancing hand, but he hooks his fingers into the curve of the rock and swings himself neatly down. Eyes narrowed a little against the glare, he ambles along the span of the shelf, bending now and then to pick up a shell or touch a scraggly patch of grass. You step out toward the edge and breathe in the mineral wind that blows cold against your face, brisk and pure as the midday sun, and then join him where the rock forms a natural bench. Your feet knock a loose pebble into his; he rolls it between his palms for a moment, squints, and tosses it in a long clean arc to the waves. He bends to scrape more pebbles into his cupped hands, shaking them to sift the dirt free, and holds them out to you. They're jagged, knocked off of the cliff above rather than smoothed and spat up by the fitful breakers. You pick through till you find one you like and close your hand around it, feeling its edges bite comfortably into the center of your palm.
"What's going on, Dommie?" you ask, and you throw it out to sea.
He tosses a rock upward once before flicking it into the water. "As regards to what, Bill?" he says, and holds his hand out again for you to choose your next stone. You don't move to take one. He meets your eyes, expression clean and blank, then he curls his hand shut. He lets its contents spill down into his left hand, switches their altitude and does it again. You watch him work a smile onto his mouth, sifting his rocks from palm to palm as he gets ready to lie to you.
He takes a breath and smiles a little more broadly, wrinkles his nose. You try to guess if you're going to yell at him or just get up and walk away. "It's --" he starts, glancing toward you, but he stops short of the lie ("-- nothing") you can hear coming. The seconds spin out, then he sighs and lets the fake normalcy drain out of his face. The stones spill out of his hand, and he bends his head to watch them patter onto the rock. "I don't know," he admits.
You reach down between his feet and pick up one of the fallen pebbles. "Everyone's pretty worried, you know."
He scrubs one hand over his hair. "I wish they wouldn't. Every time I go on set, it's like --" he pauses, palms wide as he searches for words "-- a flock of bloody geese, and I'm their only gosling."
Rolling your rock between flattened hands, you smile. "They are a bit much, aren't they."
"Sean -- Sean! -- he actually pulled me aside to tell me that if I needed to 'go see someone,' he'd go with me 'for support.'" Dom snorts, half-incredulous and half-annoyed. "I swear, one day they're going to write a book about that man, and they're going to call it Alexandra Has Two Mommies."
You give the joke the chuckle it deserves. After a moment, he shakes his head and says, "I mean, that's not even ..."
"Not even what, Dom?" you ask quietly. He opens his mouth, closes it, and then lifts one shoulder in a half-hearted shrug.
"It just ... wasn't that big a thing," he mumbles, swinging an open hand in front of him.
That afternoon, when he'd gone under, it had been funny for about half a second -- the flare of surprise across his face, the windmilling of his arms as the board flipped out from under him and the wave rolled him over. It took you too a moment later, but you'd already dropped down low and just dove forward when it roared over you, rising back to the surface within a few feet. Blinking the water from your eyes, you'd looked around for him already grinning; your grin faded as you did a full 360-turn, another in the opposite direction, and then saw his board spat up and foundering in the shallows. You remember Elijah and Sean scrambling to their feet in the distance, and you remember swimming to where the water was only waist-high, still convinced that the breakers must be blocking him from view. Your heart pounded out the time from when you stood to when you saw his face turn blindly to the surface and go under again, and if you don't know the count in beats anymore, it's because you block it out every time you start to remember. You swam for the spot where he'd appeared with your eyes forced wide open; it wasn't until later, glancing into the mirror after a long, scalding shower, that you'd noticed the salt had scoured the whites of them red. Hands braced on the counter, you'd had to stop and draw in ragged gulps of humid air, learning an hour and a half after the thing was over that you'd never stopped to catch your breath. Sitting on this rock, the two of you safe as houses, the muscles of your arms and back twitch with the recalled strain of dragging him to shore, his weight doubling as soon as the covetous tide grew too shallow to buoy him. You hauled him nearly fifteen yards with your hands clamped around his upper arms; it would have been far easier to carry him braced against you, but in that moment you'd have sooner ripped every muscle and sinew in your body than felt his chest pressed against yours, so horribly still.
"It seemed like a bit of a thing to me," you say.
Scanning your face, he reaches over and pinches a fold of your sleeve between his knuckles. "Sorry," he says, ducking his head. "It's just -- it happened, it shook me up a bit, but ... it's over now." He waves his open hand through the air again, as though to demonstrate the memory's lack of substance. "I doubt anyone'll even remember it a year from now."
You toss the rock from one hand to the other, distracting yourself from the need to punch or maybe kiss him. When you've got yourself more or less under control again, you ask, "What was it like?"
He blinks. "Beg pardon?"
You flip two fingers, pebble between the tips, toward the sea. "Being under there."
"Wet, mostly," he dead-pans. You raise your eyebrows, and he looks away, shrugging uncomfortably. "Really, I don't remember it that well."
"Give it a shot," you say, tone light like it doesn't matter.
He squints off into the distance and presses his fingertips to his mouth, thinking. "It's ... not anything like swimming, really," he says after a moment. "I mean, it's not like going under on purpose. You're swimming, you know where you're headed, where you're coming from. You've got all kinds of things on your mind." The wind kicks up a little, and he hunkers forward over his knees, fingers curling around his elbows. You have to work to make out his words over the waves. "Going under like that -- you're not thinking; there isn't anything left to think about. No past, no ... future; you don't know where up or down is. There's just -- being under, and the water rushes everything else away." He trails off, face a little pink. "It's hard to explain."
The two of you sit in silence for a bit. "Sounds pretty incredible," you say.
He angles his head, considering, then one side of his mouth quirks upward. "Nah; I've had closer calls trying to cross against traffic in London."
"So you'll be coming out with us next time, then," you state, nodding like the question's been closed already. He raises an eyebrow at you.
"Don't know that I should," he counters, but with that lopsided smile. "Really, I'm pretty crap at it."
You shrug. "Yeah, well, you're a shite actor too, but you just keep showing up every day," you say, and he rolls his eyes and flings a handful of dirt at your legs. You bounce your pebble off his shins with a satisfying thunk, and he curses; a brief shoving match ensues. Grinning, he shakes his head and lobs another rock into the waves.
You crack your knuckles and then set your forearms on your knees. "Are you going to tell me the rest of it?" you ask, and he goes stiff as a caught breath.
"The rest of what?" he echoes. His elbow is still pressed against yours, like he's forcing himself to stay put in the hope that his discomfort won't be awkward if he doesn't draw attention to it. The realization sours your stomach and you want to pull away yourself, but you don't.
"You're my best friend, Dom," you tell him, looking resolutely out at the horizon, "and you've not been yourself for days. You say it's not about what happened, and I believe you, so what's going on?"
Out of the corner of your eye, you can see his leg (the one not brushing yours) start to jiggle nervously. He fiddles with the ring on his right thumb. "I've -- had some things on my mind, that's all."
Now come the evasions. "You could tell me," you offer neutrally, as the wind trails gray clouds across the sky like a child dragging a blanket.
He laughs, the same raspy chuckle from up on the hill before, and presses his thumb against the space between his eyebrows. "They're not those sort of things."
Anger flares up behind your sternum, bright and bitter. "I don't know what that means." The words sound flat and more challenging than you mean them to; you feel him wince. He drops his head for a moment, bottom lip pinned between his teeth, and then he dredges up the worn smile he's been parading around for the last two weeks.
"I'm all right, I promise," he says; his eyes are blank, as reassuring as a hospital curtain. "It's been a long couple of weeks, and all I want is for things to get back to normal. Thinking about things -- it's just more noise in my head. I need to let it go, get some sleep, and everything'll be fine."
Watching him look at you with great sincerity, you struggle against the burning desire to push him off the rock and into the water. "What if it doesn't work that way?"
His smile slips a little. "It will."
You close you eyes -- in aggravation, but also because you're too sick of that expression to look at it anymore -- and push your hands against your forehead. "Not everything in life goes away when you tell it to," you retort, and the words come out hard, with a helpless edge you can't really blunt. "Things happen without your permission, and you can try to ignore them, but sometimes they just keep happening."
He's shaking his head even as you finish the sentence, the movement carried across by the arm that's still pressed against yours. "This won't -- it can't." The denial sounds as brittle as glass.
"What if it does? Do you expect the rest of us to --" Your volume starts to rise and you take a deep breath, running your fingers back along the curve of your head, trying to focus on what you set out to do here. Turning on the rock so you can face him directly (and he doesn't move away as your legs bump, but you can see him press his hands against the curving stone, like he's bracing himself for something) you continue in as gentle a tone as you can manage, "Dom, I get what you're trying to do, but it doesn't seem like it's working, and I'm tired of watching you fake it. If you'll just tell me what's going on, we can --"
Without no warning Dom's fidgeting turns to motion, and you've barely caught what's happening before he's a metre away, hands shoved tight into his coat pockets. Taking a deep breath, he says, "Uh, Billy, it's -- really bloody cold out here, I think I'm going to head back to the car." You stare up at him, mouth half-open; he presses his lips into a brief, bracketed curve that doesn't even approximate a smile and jogs across the rock shelf. On the other side, he hesitates, turning back to you; his hand drifts up a little, palm open. Your mouth latched shut and your breath coming hard and furious, you stare across the wind-filled space and fight the urge to bend toward him, because you will move hell and earth to fix whatever's wrong for him, but there's not a thing you can do if he won't open the fucking door. He opens his mouth a little, his chest swelling visibly, and --
"Thanks for showing me this," he says, pulling his reaching hand back to his side. "It's really lovely. Stay as long as you like; I'll be up there when you're ready to go." Then he turns, grips the rock tightly, and steps up and out of sight.
You drop your head down to your chest and let your whole body curve in on itself. Holding your breath, you clench your fists, your eyes, your jaw, building the tension, willing it to obliterate everything from your skin on outward. You stay like that until the clamour of your blood and bones gets too loud to hold off, until the dark behind your eyelids is negative-edged in white, and then you let your breath come bursting out. The wind burns your eyes, making them water, and you blink your vision clear again, arms curling around your waist as you gaze out at the water. You think maybe he's on the cliff above you, looking down, but you don't turn to check. The gray waves hurl themselves against the rocks, clearing the way for crests that run together in curved and dovetailing peaks. The chaotic oscillations of the surface recycle themselves, over and over, and you sit there until your face and hands go stiff with cold, staring past the surface motion at a boundless expanse that does not go away, does not change, and bars you from a lost and unrecoverable landscape that should stretch as far as your eyes can see.
*
The drive back isn't any longer than the trip out, but you feel every interminable minute of it, the air in the car thick with the knowledge that neither of you is going to say a word. You don't look at him and you never once see him turn his head towards you, but when you check the side-view there's no way to blot out the shape of his shoulders, hunched and unhappy. As much as possible you just stare at the road ahead, teeth ground down and your own spine upright under the stifling weight of the silence.
At his flat you climb out of the car before he does, leading the way up his steps and unlocking the door for him. He pauses on the threshold, and you glance back without quite making eye contact and jerk a thumb in the direction of his loo. He flushes and waves you toward it, but you don't bother waiting for him to complete the gesture before you head off down the hall.
Most of an hour with the car's heat on full blast hasn't fully managed to thaw the cold from your bones; after you zip up and wash your hands, you stand in front of his sink for a long time, hands pinkening under the hot water while your reflection watches you with expressionless eyes. You look pale and tired, eyes sunk deep in their sockets, your face ground down to angles and deep grooves. Shutting the water off, you grip the edges of the counter, eyes closed against the knowledge that sooner or later you're going to have to walk back out there again. Whatever thing Dom's been living under, there's no question that you've made it worse today and on top of that shredded the last scraps of friendly ease you shared all to hell. It's over, you think, and you don't even know what the words apply to, but the loss keeps you there for two full minutes more before you can walk out into the hall.
He's standing in sock feet by the front end of the kitchen, and he turns when he hears you coming. You have to force yourself to close to normal conversation distance before you stop; if this is the way things are going to be from now on, better that you get the practice in without an audience. Fidgeting with the zip of his jumper, he moistens his lips nervously and draws a deliberate breath, like he'd been rehearsing for this while you were out of the room. "Listen, Bill, I really appreciate your coming over today, but I'm still pretty shagged out and it'd probably be best if --"
Before you even know what you're about, you surge forward to seize his head in both hands. He freezes, mouth shaping the next words of his excuse, and you slot your lips right into that interrupted space. His skin still carries the wind's chill but his mouth, God, the inside of his mouth is blood-hot, and it rips through you like a sudden fever. He pulls back against your grip, hands twisting free to brace against your ribs. In half a second he'll shove you away; there's not a bridge back from this moment that isn't burning, and so you pull him hard against you, stealing everything you can. Just as you're about to step back, he makes a wordless sound into your mouth and his hands tighten around your waist. You strain against each other until there's no space left to breathe, and you still don't know if this is the first or the second time you've kissed him, but the give and movement of his mouth under yours is more intoxicating than all the dreams you had. The carnal rush of it pounds through you, washing away everything but the relentless draw of his body shifting against yours, its tidal pull.
When the kiss ends, you can't tell which one of you does it. Your hand drifts up to your lips, and they buzz with phantom electricity when your fingers tremble against them. Dom sways and drops back against the kitchen wall.
"Like that," he says, the words blurred around the edges, more breath than air. The long line of his throat undulates as he swallows, blinking his eyes into focus. "It was almost exactly like that."
For a moment, you don't know what he's talking about -- and then you do, and everything in you winds to a stop. There are a thousand things you want from Dom, a hundred thousand things you crave so badly that you wake up every morning to the same nameless ache, but the last thing you would want is to take any part of him away. Just the thought of it -- of being something he cannot hold back, something he could drown under -- hollows you out until you have to close your eyes against the chill of it. You squeeze the top of his shoulder, a last touch you can't keep yourself from stealing, and let your hand fall down the slope of his chest. Just as you start to turn away, he grabs the edge of your sleeve. The gray of his eyes is dark with surprise, confusion; you keep your face as still as you can, but you can't quite smooth the ragged edge from your voice when you tell him, "Sometimes things just happen, Dom."
The furrow between his eyebrows deepens, and he catches his lower lip between his teeth for a second. Thoughts swirl back and forth in his expression, changing too quickly to read.
"No," he says, and his fist tightens more securely around your cuff as he looks up at you, face determined and astonishingly clear. "No, they don't."
Your mouth goes dry and your breath deserts you; you stand there like an idiot. Shifting his grip to your elbow, he slips his other hand under the edge of your jacket to flatten against the small of your back. Slowly, you reach out and lay your hand on the broad curve of his ribs; you feel his heart beat, firm and startling under your palm, and then he pulls your mouth down to his.
The two of you twist and arch against each other, finding your joint balance, hands hungry and skin out of reach. He shoves your jacket down your arms until it drops onto the floor; you run your fingers up his sides, under his shirt, and taste his gasp as he shivers under your touch. You kiss him until you're dizzy, craving friction and weight you can't get while standing, unable to come up for air until he growls, "Christ, stop, I'm not having sex with you in the middle of my fucking kitchen," and shoves you back so hard you nearly fall. He grabs your wrist and pulls you through his flat, still kissing you, navigating by memory and by the feel of the walls you're knocking into as you tack off toward his bedroom. Once there, the two of you break apart long enough to strip out of your clothes, too charged up for finesse or slow undressing, and then fall together onto the bed. You run your hand along the length of his spine, the strong flex of his thighs, the muscles of his stomach, places you've seen a thousand times in the months you've known him and never, ever got to touch.
"Have you done this before?" he asks a little later, when your back is pressed against the headboard, your cocks dragging along each other in a counterpoint so sweet that the pulse of it bows your spine. Hands splayed against his back, you nod, too derailed to get words to come. He kisses you briefly, crushingly, and bites your jaw as he pulls away to yank his nightstand open. When he pushes himself down onto you, he digs his fingers into the tops of your shoulders for balance. The pressure and the heat of him unravel you, until it's all you can do to bury your face in the salt-slick curve of his neck and keep breathing. You grip his hips so hard your hands shake, taking his weight, helping him draw it out as long as he needs to. When his body gives way, his back curves into a hard arch and he sucks air down in a long gasp like paper tearing. Fierce as the rush of pleasure is, it can't match seeing his face from centimeters' distance -- his eyes half-lidded, his lips pink and open, fucking beautiful and real and here. The two of you move in syncopated sympathy with your pulse and his heartbeat when it pounds against your chest, until a larger rhythm takes you both and pulls you out to the crest together.
Afterwards, the condom discarded, the two of you lay twined together under the cool drape of his sheets. He runs his fingers over your chest, like he's learning your topography by touch, and asks, "How long?"
You lift your head a little off the pillow, tilting your chin down to get a better look at him, and he peers up at you with bright eyes. "The day Elijah nearly brained you with the cue ball," you say and watch the corners of his eyes crinkle up at the answer. You skim your palm along the downy skin of his shoulders and he twitches, grinds his hips against your leg with a sigh.
Propping himself up on one elbow, he frowns at you without displacing the smile. "Why didn't you say anything?"
You study his face and think of the thousand different answers you could give him, all the times you almost told him, almost stepped in close and showed your hand. You remember mobiles ringing, people coming around corners at the wrong moments, the beat of the music picking up or dropping out just as you got ready to bridge that last little gap. You think of the certainty you couldn't shake: that this could happen, if you just waited long enough, but that the second you reached for it, it would disappear. In the end, though, there's one answer that covers the rest, so you run your thumb down the side of his face and tell him, "All things in their own time."
He grins and presses a kiss into your palm. "Pretentious wanker," he says, and you dig a knuckle into his ribs, snickering when he swears and feeling time and space flow into place around you, working this new landscape of your bodies into the shape of things to come.
Feedback is always welcome.
Lotrips, BB/DM, ~10,000 words, adult. Billy's patience runs out.
Notes: Three and a half years later, I finally wrote the sequel to Fatalis. Many thanks to my betas shaenie and msilverstar, and to the various people who got me into fandom and encouraged me to play. I know I wouldn't be writing without you.
You never really thought about patience, not until you went to New Zealand.
It's not that you need it more here than you did back in Scotland. Life will always move at its own pace; you watch for the rhythm of events, stay attentive for signs of the landscape shifting, and do your best to move in congruence with it. When equipment breaks down and the day drips past like treacle, you wait under the tarps with everyone else and bitch along amicably to pass the time. Really, though, the time passes itself, and the unused hours in wigs and prosthetics are nothing to the knowledge that you have a year and a half to make something you already love breathless. Even on your worst days, the aggravation never reaches down to the deep current of wonder running underneath.
You don't consider the scope of your patience because you so rarely have to test it, but you gradually get the sense that it might be unusual, because as the months roll by, almost everyone finds a way to comment on it.
Sean, who keeps letters from his family on set to reread during breaks, asks if you learned it because your parents died when you were young.
Orlando, who pays people to let him jump off high things for the rush of gravity yanking him into motion, guesses that you must've needed it to really get the hang of martial arts.
Elijah's image had been burned into miles of film by the time he was fifteen and you took your first paid steps in front of a camera. His eyes are more than usually serious when he looks at you and says he can't imagine having to wait so long to do something he always knew he wanted to do.
On any given day P.J.'s got so many balls in the air that you're constantly amazed he hasn't been buried under all of them. He doesn't mention it directly, at least not to you, but at the end of one of the first worst days, he stops you on the way off-set, puts a warm hand on your shoulder, and just says thanks. You don't think you've done anything extraordinary, but he sounds so weary and so grateful that you say you're welcome and mean I will if you ever need me to.
Viggo glances over at you, early on a cold and blustery morning, and says it's Scotland, isn't it. All his remarks tend to sound like you've wandered into the middle of a conversation only he knew you were having, but you get what he's saying this time.
When someone brings your patience up, you shrug, smile, say something flip or something unrelated; you don't offer explanations or dispute theirs. As closely as you've worked together, it'd be a surprise if anyone was wrong outright. What they say makes perfect sense to you, so you guess all those things are part of it. What won't fit adequately into words is your sense that patience isn't a thing you possess, a quality or a quantity. It's finding the shape of the world and curving yourself into it. If anyone ever found the right way to talk about it, you might admit to believing that there's an art to that kind of awareness, but you've no more made your own patience than the beaches have rearranged their sands to shape the tides.
Of all the friends you've gained here (because you didn't make them either, you stepped off the plane and found them waiting like you'd all been carved around each other's contours from the start), Dom is the one with the gift for knowing how to say these things, but Dom is the only one who never brings it up. And in the end, when you learn your patience has limits, he's the reason it runs out.
*
The first time you look at Dom and want to kiss him, the newly-christened Black Riders have gone to a pub to celebrate the end of a good day's surfing. Sean says his goodbyes and heads back to his flat early to end his evening on an international call to yesterday, wishing his family a late good night. The other three of you -- bachelors, orphans, wayward sons -- have no such obligations and, more importantly, no need to be in feet for a miraculous thirty-three hours, so here you are, pleasantly tipsy, full of a small mountain of deep-fried food items, and playing increasingly merciless rounds of cutthroat. You lean a hip up against the long side of the pool table and watch Elijah line up a shot you're certain he won't sink. It's not that he's bad at this (though he's not exactly good, either), but the drinks he's been downing kicked in visibly about a half-hour ago. He looks like he's putting some serious thought into spin and angles, but you've got a hunch he's mostly trying to get his eyes to focus. Having manfully demonstrated your Scottish drinking capacity on past occasions, you feel no shame at alternating beer with water tonight; fatigue hums warm in your shoulders and thighs, more satisfying than the louder buzz of alcohol would be.
"Stall all you like, you pansy, I'm going to wipe you off the table next go and there's nothing you can do to stop me," Dom taunts, leaning over the pocket Elijah's aiming for. His fingers tap and dance along the edge of the table, and he bounces a little on his heels, grin wide and manic. He's been drinking vodka and red bulls tonight (a combination you find inexcusable, as it tastes like sugared floor cleaner and doesn't accomplish anything an Irish coffee wouldn't) and has been hopped up and hilarious for a while now.
Elijah glares and sets his cue along the hand he's braced on the table. "Scoot the fuck over, asshole, you're ruining my concentration." You smile into your water and can't blame him. Dom's rings and bracelets and layered shirts flash like a magician's scarves each time he moves, and he doesn't stay still even for a second. Every now and then you spot other patrons looking at him, caught by the shifting display.
"Excuses, excuses, 'Lij," he sing-songs, throwing his hands out at waist-level and flickering his fingers like a carnival barker. "Take your best shot so I can get on with kicking your arse."
"Shithead," Elijah growls, and he pistons the cue forward so sharply that he rockets the cue-ball right off the table. Dom yelps as it flies dead-center for his face and throws himself backwards to avoid it; it misses his nose by maybe a centimetre. All three of you watch blankly as it hits the ground a good two metres away and rolls off under a table. Arms still in the air, Dom turns an accusatory stare -- et tu, Brute? -- on Elijah, who's got one hand spread over his mouth.
Elijah starts stammering -- "Oh shit, man, I swear I didn't mean to, I'm so sorry --" but Dom doesn't manage to hold the wounded expression for more than a second before he begins laughing hysterically, head thrown back and his whole body shaking with it. His mirth is so genuine, so infectious, that these days no one ever tries to resist it. Across the table Elijah dissolves into giggles, hands half-curled in front of his chest, and you're snickering so hard you have to put your glass down or spill it all over yourself. Dom chortles and grabs the edge of the table, sucking air past the hilarity in brief gasps, and Elijah lets loose a horsy snort. Dom's eyes go wide at the sound and he flaps one hand helplessly at Elijah, which is a mistake because it's not there to hold his weight anymore when his legs give out under him and he starts slipping to the ground. You dart over and get your hands under his armpits just before his knees hit the floor, and he turns away from the table to grip the front of your shirt instead. He wraps both arms around your middle and buries his flushed face against your stomach, laughing until he's practically crying; when you finally get him to his feet and prop him up against the table, he claps you on the back with one hand and wipes the tears off his face with the other. You look into his shining eyes and his bright smile and grin back at him, your body alert and wondering what it would be like to push your mouth onto his, to wind your arms around him and feel the warm planes of his body moving against you, with purpose.
Huh, you think, but what you say is, "Wankers." Elijah makes his way over to where the two of you are leaning together, and you run a hand over his salt-stiff hair and go retrieve the cue-ball. The two of them laugh and hug, crack a few jokes, and you smile and sink every ball that either of them has left on the table.
All things come in their own time.
*
As philosophies go, it's a simple one. Applied to Dom, it gets complicated pretty fucking quickly.
You don't mean for it to; you don't do anything to cause complications. It'll come in its own time, you tell yourself, and feel generally content with the friendship that fills the interim. He's a mate, the best you've ever had, and you have no desire to push this. You film, surf, tease each other and go out drinking. It's good, it's easy, and then every now and then the whole thing just tilts precariously sideways.
The first time it happens, you miss it entirely, which might explain your reaction when you catch on afterwards. That night you teach him to swing-dance, and it's good clean fun until you spin him and he comes back around with his face shuttered like a house in a gale. "Stomach's a bit off, think I'll head home for the night," he says, and he makes it all the way out the door without ever meeting your eyes again. You drink a few rounds with your castmates, cracking wise, but you keep turning the moment around in your head trying to find the piece you're missing. An hour later, when almost everyone's cleared out, you go up front to pay the tab and one of the locals mutters something in a tone you're clearly meant to hear. Later, you don't even remember what he said, because it didn't matter. You slap a few bills down on the counter and bait him until he takes a shot, and then you take him apart. He only lands one or two punches and even they shouldn't have happened, but it makes a sour kind of sense when you think about it afterward. Years of training to intercept attacks as they happen, and you leave him doubled-over and bleeding because you're still trying to make up for the one you missed before.
Dom never says a word about the black eye, even though it lingers for a solid week. You don't bring it up either, but you feel the ache of it every time you smile.
*
All things in their own time, and you keep your face to the wind, waiting for the shift you know is coming. As weeks slip into months the two of you go right up to the edge, over and over, and never cross. In clubs so full that the crowd breaks around you like a storm in a cup, you bury yourselves together in the anonymous dark of the dance floor. The music pours over you until every nerve hums, and you watch him try not to look at you, keeping your hands to yourself. You spend every halfway decent day off surfing, riding the waves until your muscles mutiny against you, because the sloping arch and press of the water under you takes the edge off. With the ocean to drown out the noise in your head you can pin him down to shove sand in his wetsuit and never think of a thing. Everything's normal, right up until you remember how you caught him staring at you that morning and how fast he looked away when Elijah sat down, or until you hand him a towel at your flat and he fumbles it when your fingers brush. You let it go; the last thing you want to do is fuck this up.
It's all right. You can wait. So you smile and insult him, lounge around the trailer like you're not half-hard and bent sideways when you fasten your jeans. You laugh together until the stitch in your side folds you double. You film scenes so dizzying and hair-triggered that you collapse into bed at night awestruck that a process so disjointed could yield something that feels so whole. When your sister calls, you tell her that you're happy and you mean it. And still things go sideways when you least expect it. The two of you get completely pissed at a pub one night and you wake up sticky with dried sweat, mouth full of mothballs, sheets knotted around you like the feverish traces of the dream you had. In the bathroom you run the water hot and cold, try to scrub yourself together, and when you fumble your way to the kitchen he's there, hair matted sideway, making tea. From the kitchen table you watch him rifle through your cabinets, sense-memories or deluded alcoholic dreams swirling in your head. The taste of Guinness, rough brick under your fingers, sweet deep burn. He hands you a cup, milk and half a sugar. You almost ask him Did we ...?; he turns his face to squint at the light from the kitchen window, and you don't.
It's not until the afternoon that your palms snag on the fabric of your costume and you find the network of tiny scrapes hidden in your skin. It doesn't mean anything, you tell yourself, and you bite through the inside of your lip on purpose because you can't fucking remember.
*
For a month you try to wipe the faint streaks of that night from your thoughts or assemble them into a whole picture. They filter the world like fragments of tinted glass, adding unwanted color to words, body language, until you're not sure the line you're so scrupulously minding even exists anymore. But you don't know, and so you cling to the memory of where the line used to be, try to stay on the safe side of it. He never says a thing.
The lost pieces don't resurface, but then you get a new set of images, vivid as a fresh reel on a virgin screen, to play in a loop over their absence. The new ones still wake you up gasping in the middle of the night, heart wild, but instead of the phantom curve of his lips under yours, it's the ghostly blur of his face rolling under the wave that fills your mind to brimming and spills you out of sleep. Not the mobile heat of his body curving into yours, but its chilling slackness when you wrestled him from the ocean. The roar and pound of the water as it stole the sand from under your feet, furious at being cheated of its prize. In the days after it happens, you have to stop your hands from reaching unbidden for his shoulders, his hair, the cuffs of his jumpers. The itch in your fingers runs back almost twenty years to when your parents died and you tracked your sister and grandmother in your periphery, only half-believing that they hadn't been taken too. You were thirteen then, too shell-shocked and adolescent to confirm their presence with touch the way you wanted to. You don't do it now, either, because of what you know your hands will tell you. In some inexplicable way, it's obvious that Dom isn't there.
He is, of course, at least in the physical sense. He gets to the set on time, eats lunch, and heads out to pubs with the rest of you. He smiles and takes the piss, flirts with the makeup crew while they glue things onto him. Passing you in the door of a trailer, he'll squeeze your shoulder. He acts perfectly normal. And whenever he returns his tray to craft services or PJ calls him over to another part of the set, conversation ebbs for a moment as everyone watches him go with their eyebrows raised and passes a look around: what the fuck was that?
Dom's defining characteristic is the impression he gives of being in near-quantum flux: solid, undeniably real, and liable at any second to transform into something completely new. The afternoon he goes under, he's shaken but okay, or so he says when he gets the rest of you to drop him off at his flat. Then the next time anyone sees him, the spontaneity is just ... gone. You talk to him and get the full gamut of his quirks and habits, paraded out for your entertainment like cards from a pack, but with none of the mutability, the life. It's like he's turned into a perfect simulacrum of himself, and it unnerves the fuck out of everyone.
The set acts as kitchen table to a tight-knit and insanely incestuous family, so within a couple days little knots of people start collecting in free corners to contemplate what's going on. Elijah and Sean think it's some kind of trauma response; the way they jump all over each other to explain this theory suggests they've spent an unhealthy amount of time hashing it out. The rest of the cast and crew don't know about what happened and so they speculate inventively: sudden homesickness, shot down by some local girl, Lyme disease. You do your best to avoid all of the whispered conferences, but soon enough people start hunting you down like they held a vote in your absence and nominated you field guide to Dom. When this happens, you assure them that it's nothing, he's probably just under the weather, I'm sure he'll be fine. After enough iterations of this little speech, the corners of your mouth get stiff from smiling empathetically. The truth is, no one's come up with anything that sounds even halfway likely to you, your best friend's been replaced by something WETA cooked up, and you don't have a sodding clue what's going on because anytime you end up alone with him, he vanishes like someone flipped the off switch on the CGI generator.
This goes on for about two weeks, until the next real weekend off. You're lacing up your boots in the trailer, getting ready to head off-set, as Elijah pulls on his sweater and turns to Dom with a grin on his face. "So Orli swears he found an honest-to-God video arcade a few days ago," he says casually, like he just remembered to mention this. Dom glances up at him, fingers occupied with the buttons of his shirt, and Elijah notches the wattage on his smile even higher. "You have to go with us tomorrow, it's gonna be totally sweet. Really, I'll pretend to let you beat me at air hockey and everything."
Dom smiles, shrugging into his coat. "Ta, 'Lij, but I think I'm going to catch up on my sleep a little." His gaze flickers in your direction, too quickly for actual eye contact to occur, and then he looks down as he loops his bag over his shoulder. "Make him cry like a little girl and then take pictures for me, yeah?" Dom heads for the door without waiting for an answer, setting his hand briefly on your back as he slides past you. "Have a good weekend, Billy," he says as he steps out into the dusk. Elijah stares after him, brows drawn down, and then looks over to check your face for some kind of verification. Teeth gritted, you tuck the bow on your left boot into a double-knot and yank it down with a snap.
And just like that, you are done.
*
At half-nine precisely the next morning, you put on your jacket, slide a brass key off the fat ring that hangs by your kitchen door, and drive over to Dom's flat. He doesn't answer the door when you knock -- could be he's out, but you doubt it. He sleeps like a sack of sand, which was what led to the initiation of a group key swap in the first place, and he was the one who tacked up the note above your key ring that read, "In case of emergency, boredom, or bloody exhausted bastards who shut off their alarm clocks and sleep through call." You let yourself in and pad down the hall to his bedroom.
The door hangs partway open, blocking most of his bed from view, and you push it carefully inward. There he is, spread out like a child under the billows and folds of his comforter, head sunk down between his pillows and tipped in your direction. His lips are pursed, open a little, his face pale except for the somnolent flush of his cheeks. He lies with his hands tucked together on his chest, thumbs hooked through holes in the ragged cuffs of his shirt, and you can just make out their rise and fall as he breathes. One bare foot pokes out from under the covers to hang exposed over the edge of the bed. You look at his face, at the shadows smudged under the curve of his lashes and at the long line of his brows knotted together above them, and you settle your shoulder into the doorframe and let your head drop silently against the jamb, because he looks exhausted and you know exactly how he feels. In the thin gray light that filters through the curtains, his eyes move fitfully behind their covering lids, like he's searching for something in his dreams. You pull the door back to its unmolested angle and retreat to the main room.
A while later the first soft sounds of movement make their way to where you sit on his couch: footfalls, the drag of a sleepy hand along the wall. The toilet flushes, and a few seconds later he appears in the hallway in his shirt and boxers, one hand scrubbing along his scalp, and wanders blindly into the kitchen with his eyelids still at half-mast. From the other side of the dividing wall you hear him run the tap, drop the kettle onto the stove, turn the burner on. He drifts back around the corner, heel of one hand pressed into his eye socket, and then flails both arms wide and nearly falls over.
"Jesus fucking Christ, Billy," he yelps, eyes slap-wide, and grabs onto the wall for balance. "What the fuck are you doing on my couch, you cunt!"
You flip the magazine closed with a crisp rustle and drop it onto the cushion next to you. "I'm kidnapping you," you tell him pleasantly.
He stares at you, mouth open and working futily. "... you're -- what?"
You repeat yourself.
His head falls against the wall with an audible thunk, and he groans. "No joke, Bill, but I'm really not up for this today."
You lace your fingers together and lay them neatly on your knee. "Well, Dommie, that does put a bit of a wrench in things," you muse. "I mean, we both know I can get you out of the flat against your will, but I probably can't get you and your clothes into the car in one go, and what with that and the racket the neighbors are bound to ring the cops, and next thing we both get to spend all day answering questions down at the station --"
He slashes a hand through the air in a will you please shut it? gesture that you both know signals surrender and thumps his forehead against the wall again for emphasis. "Some days I swear I'd push the lot of you off a cliff if it meant I could get some sleep," he says.
You have to smile a little as you say, "Maybe this is your lucky day, then." He draws his brows in with a sigh but doesn't open his eyes; you cross the room to lay a gentle hand on shoulder.
"No tricks, I promise," you tell him, and he cracks one eye to look at you. "Go wash up and get dressed; I'll see to the tea." After a few seconds he nods and pushes off the wall; when he brushes past you, one hand squeezing your hip, the contact leaves the impression of fatigue and drowsy heat. You stand there looking down the hallway until you hear the shower turn on, and then you step into his kitchen to rummage through the cupboards. You fry up a couple of egg sandwiches and wrap them in tinfoil, fill a thermos with tea the way he takes it, black and sweet. As you settle everything into a sack, he comes in fully dressed with his shoes in his hands and sits down on a kitchen chair.
"This little adventure of yours doesn't need any special gear, does it?" he asks, chin tucked against his chest as he works his feet into his shoes.
You shake your head and open the drawer where he keeps the leftover take-out napkins. "Just a coat, the wind's got a bit of a bite to it."
He snorts. "That a Kiwi bite or a Scotland bite?" he mutters as he finishes with the laces.
You chuckle, less because it's funny and more because the complaint is familiar. "You won't freeze, you ponce," you say and hold out a hand out to help him to his feet. He flips you the bird but takes your hand, and you haul him up. Once standing, he ends up closer than you expected; his eyes go a touch wide, the casual rhythm of the last minute faltering. You start to loosen your grip, but you hesitate when you realize that his gaze has settled on your clasped palms.
"Where are we going, Billy?" he asks without looking up. You squeeze his hand for a moment before slipping yours free.
"You'll find out when we get there," you tell him, and you settle your palm in the middle of his back to steer him toward the door.
*
It takes a good forty minutes to reach your destination, the inland road curving around the woolly green hills like a river rolling out to sea. The ride passes in silence but for the rumble of the engine. You keep your hand on the gearshift, careful as you steer the borrowed car, and Dom rides with his head against the window and his feet on the dash. When you notice that he's got both hands wrapped around the unopened thermos, you reach down to turn to heat up; he looks over and meets your eyes for a moment, features softened by the faint trace of a smile.
The road drops downward, following the land, and you pull smoothly over into a worn shoulder that tips off into an up-climbing trail. You set the parking brake and twist to reach the rough wool blanket in the backseat. Unfolding himself from his inward curl, Dom looks at you questioningly. "Can you get the food?" you ask.
The footpath winds upward through a ragged field, and the two of you take it at a slow pace, breath fogging the chill air. Less than a kilometer in, it ends abruptly in a bare patch of ground as the gentle swell of the land reveals itself to be not hill but cliff. The view in front of you flings out in all directions, ocean and sky spread like sheets out toward the horizon from this spot where the rocks drop, cragged and grassy, into the water's eager hands. You take a moment to drink in the sight of it, a kind of reverse vanishing point, before shaking the blanket open on the dry ground in front of you and turning back to Dom.
He stares out at the panorama, completely dumbfounded. Some time passes in silence, marked only by the distant hiss of the waves, and then he lets his head fall backward, free hand rising to pinch the bridge of his nose. A dry, helpless laugh puffs out of him, and the sound of it twists your stomach a little. "I swear to Christ, Billy," he says to the pale sky above him, "I don't know what Sean and Elijah have been telling you, but I do not have PTS-bloody-D."
"That's not why I brought you here," you say, voice matter-of-fact enough that he rolls his head sideways to look at you. You stand steady under his gaze but don't try to explain your reason -- that he looks like he's boxed himself in on all sides these days, and this is the most wide-open place you know. You nod toward the blanket and don't reach out to lead him to it, though you want to. "Let's eat before the sandwiches get cold."
It turns out that after the drive they're lukewarm anyway, but not so cold that the eggs to have gone rubbery, and the tea is still blessedly, tongue-scorchingly hot. "It was Orli who found this place," you tell him, swallowing down a mouthful. "We went for a hike a few months back and I pulled off on that shoulder around sunset so he could take a piss. After five minutes of waiting for him to come back, I got out to look for him and found him here." You glance to the west, recalling the deep rosy glow that rolled across the landscape, the golden scattering of clouds and how you saw spots for almost the whole drive home because the colors were so beautiful that you forgot not to look directly at the sun. Beside you, Dom peels the rest of the tinfoil off his sandwich and balls it up into the sack.
"What is it?" he asks, looking around with a little more interest.
You smile wryly. "No idea; we're probably trespassing. But I come out here at least once a month or so, and I've never had someone try to stop me. I like the quiet."
"I had a place like that near Manchester," he says, a few bites later. "Got stranded trying to hitchhike to Leeds the winter I was sixteen. Bloody stupid, really -- got stuck out in a storm and then lost the road when I went looking for shelter. I ended up in this barn -- literally walked into it, it was that dark, and I was so cold I just buried myself in hay and went to sleep. Lucky some farmer didn't take a hoe to me." He laughs, looking out over the water like there's a window to this memory hanging in the clear air. "The next morning, when I woke up -- it was just incredible. I mean, it looked like no one had touched this place in thirty years. There was dust over everything, and it had that feeling some places get, you know, really old places. Like it's not really anywhere, just its own place now, and all that time has built up -- thick, like honey."
You watch him with your face turned a little away and your breath held, the way you would a wild creature. There's a vitality in him now that you haven't seen in two weeks, and you keep your presence as quiet as possible in case direct regard would be too heavy for its reappearance to bear. He's quiet for a few seconds, smiling at the recollection. "I'd go back there sometimes when things got crazy. Sit in that barn until the quiet got in my bones. It was ... peaceful." He takes a slow breath, and the glow fades from his face like someone's drawn a curtain, obscuring that place from his view. "It'd be nice to be able to go there now," he says, and his tone makes you think he's not really speaking to you.
You both finish your sandwiches in silence, trading the thermos cap between you every couple of minutes. When the last of the tea is gone, you rise to your feet and walk a few paces toward a notch in the cliff. Still seated, he frowns up at you in confusion and a bit of alarm. "Come on," you tell him, and step down over the edge onto the rocks he can't see.
*
A series of boulders and outcroppings forms an accidental staircase down the deep crack in the cliff, and the two of you pick your way down it -- you in the lead, feet bypassing the shakier spots by memory, him following behind. Gripping the edge of the sheltering flake, you jump the brief gap onto the broad, crumbling shelf that thrusts out into the ocean like the stern of a ship, its outermost point licked by the hissing spray. Behind you, Dom pauses for a moment, eyes wide as he surveys the broken tangle of driftwood wedged in the crevices below; you move to offer him a balancing hand, but he hooks his fingers into the curve of the rock and swings himself neatly down. Eyes narrowed a little against the glare, he ambles along the span of the shelf, bending now and then to pick up a shell or touch a scraggly patch of grass. You step out toward the edge and breathe in the mineral wind that blows cold against your face, brisk and pure as the midday sun, and then join him where the rock forms a natural bench. Your feet knock a loose pebble into his; he rolls it between his palms for a moment, squints, and tosses it in a long clean arc to the waves. He bends to scrape more pebbles into his cupped hands, shaking them to sift the dirt free, and holds them out to you. They're jagged, knocked off of the cliff above rather than smoothed and spat up by the fitful breakers. You pick through till you find one you like and close your hand around it, feeling its edges bite comfortably into the center of your palm.
"What's going on, Dommie?" you ask, and you throw it out to sea.
He tosses a rock upward once before flicking it into the water. "As regards to what, Bill?" he says, and holds his hand out again for you to choose your next stone. You don't move to take one. He meets your eyes, expression clean and blank, then he curls his hand shut. He lets its contents spill down into his left hand, switches their altitude and does it again. You watch him work a smile onto his mouth, sifting his rocks from palm to palm as he gets ready to lie to you.
He takes a breath and smiles a little more broadly, wrinkles his nose. You try to guess if you're going to yell at him or just get up and walk away. "It's --" he starts, glancing toward you, but he stops short of the lie ("-- nothing") you can hear coming. The seconds spin out, then he sighs and lets the fake normalcy drain out of his face. The stones spill out of his hand, and he bends his head to watch them patter onto the rock. "I don't know," he admits.
You reach down between his feet and pick up one of the fallen pebbles. "Everyone's pretty worried, you know."
He scrubs one hand over his hair. "I wish they wouldn't. Every time I go on set, it's like --" he pauses, palms wide as he searches for words "-- a flock of bloody geese, and I'm their only gosling."
Rolling your rock between flattened hands, you smile. "They are a bit much, aren't they."
"Sean -- Sean! -- he actually pulled me aside to tell me that if I needed to 'go see someone,' he'd go with me 'for support.'" Dom snorts, half-incredulous and half-annoyed. "I swear, one day they're going to write a book about that man, and they're going to call it Alexandra Has Two Mommies."
You give the joke the chuckle it deserves. After a moment, he shakes his head and says, "I mean, that's not even ..."
"Not even what, Dom?" you ask quietly. He opens his mouth, closes it, and then lifts one shoulder in a half-hearted shrug.
"It just ... wasn't that big a thing," he mumbles, swinging an open hand in front of him.
That afternoon, when he'd gone under, it had been funny for about half a second -- the flare of surprise across his face, the windmilling of his arms as the board flipped out from under him and the wave rolled him over. It took you too a moment later, but you'd already dropped down low and just dove forward when it roared over you, rising back to the surface within a few feet. Blinking the water from your eyes, you'd looked around for him already grinning; your grin faded as you did a full 360-turn, another in the opposite direction, and then saw his board spat up and foundering in the shallows. You remember Elijah and Sean scrambling to their feet in the distance, and you remember swimming to where the water was only waist-high, still convinced that the breakers must be blocking him from view. Your heart pounded out the time from when you stood to when you saw his face turn blindly to the surface and go under again, and if you don't know the count in beats anymore, it's because you block it out every time you start to remember. You swam for the spot where he'd appeared with your eyes forced wide open; it wasn't until later, glancing into the mirror after a long, scalding shower, that you'd noticed the salt had scoured the whites of them red. Hands braced on the counter, you'd had to stop and draw in ragged gulps of humid air, learning an hour and a half after the thing was over that you'd never stopped to catch your breath. Sitting on this rock, the two of you safe as houses, the muscles of your arms and back twitch with the recalled strain of dragging him to shore, his weight doubling as soon as the covetous tide grew too shallow to buoy him. You hauled him nearly fifteen yards with your hands clamped around his upper arms; it would have been far easier to carry him braced against you, but in that moment you'd have sooner ripped every muscle and sinew in your body than felt his chest pressed against yours, so horribly still.
"It seemed like a bit of a thing to me," you say.
Scanning your face, he reaches over and pinches a fold of your sleeve between his knuckles. "Sorry," he says, ducking his head. "It's just -- it happened, it shook me up a bit, but ... it's over now." He waves his open hand through the air again, as though to demonstrate the memory's lack of substance. "I doubt anyone'll even remember it a year from now."
You toss the rock from one hand to the other, distracting yourself from the need to punch or maybe kiss him. When you've got yourself more or less under control again, you ask, "What was it like?"
He blinks. "Beg pardon?"
You flip two fingers, pebble between the tips, toward the sea. "Being under there."
"Wet, mostly," he dead-pans. You raise your eyebrows, and he looks away, shrugging uncomfortably. "Really, I don't remember it that well."
"Give it a shot," you say, tone light like it doesn't matter.
He squints off into the distance and presses his fingertips to his mouth, thinking. "It's ... not anything like swimming, really," he says after a moment. "I mean, it's not like going under on purpose. You're swimming, you know where you're headed, where you're coming from. You've got all kinds of things on your mind." The wind kicks up a little, and he hunkers forward over his knees, fingers curling around his elbows. You have to work to make out his words over the waves. "Going under like that -- you're not thinking; there isn't anything left to think about. No past, no ... future; you don't know where up or down is. There's just -- being under, and the water rushes everything else away." He trails off, face a little pink. "It's hard to explain."
The two of you sit in silence for a bit. "Sounds pretty incredible," you say.
He angles his head, considering, then one side of his mouth quirks upward. "Nah; I've had closer calls trying to cross against traffic in London."
"So you'll be coming out with us next time, then," you state, nodding like the question's been closed already. He raises an eyebrow at you.
"Don't know that I should," he counters, but with that lopsided smile. "Really, I'm pretty crap at it."
You shrug. "Yeah, well, you're a shite actor too, but you just keep showing up every day," you say, and he rolls his eyes and flings a handful of dirt at your legs. You bounce your pebble off his shins with a satisfying thunk, and he curses; a brief shoving match ensues. Grinning, he shakes his head and lobs another rock into the waves.
You crack your knuckles and then set your forearms on your knees. "Are you going to tell me the rest of it?" you ask, and he goes stiff as a caught breath.
"The rest of what?" he echoes. His elbow is still pressed against yours, like he's forcing himself to stay put in the hope that his discomfort won't be awkward if he doesn't draw attention to it. The realization sours your stomach and you want to pull away yourself, but you don't.
"You're my best friend, Dom," you tell him, looking resolutely out at the horizon, "and you've not been yourself for days. You say it's not about what happened, and I believe you, so what's going on?"
Out of the corner of your eye, you can see his leg (the one not brushing yours) start to jiggle nervously. He fiddles with the ring on his right thumb. "I've -- had some things on my mind, that's all."
Now come the evasions. "You could tell me," you offer neutrally, as the wind trails gray clouds across the sky like a child dragging a blanket.
He laughs, the same raspy chuckle from up on the hill before, and presses his thumb against the space between his eyebrows. "They're not those sort of things."
Anger flares up behind your sternum, bright and bitter. "I don't know what that means." The words sound flat and more challenging than you mean them to; you feel him wince. He drops his head for a moment, bottom lip pinned between his teeth, and then he dredges up the worn smile he's been parading around for the last two weeks.
"I'm all right, I promise," he says; his eyes are blank, as reassuring as a hospital curtain. "It's been a long couple of weeks, and all I want is for things to get back to normal. Thinking about things -- it's just more noise in my head. I need to let it go, get some sleep, and everything'll be fine."
Watching him look at you with great sincerity, you struggle against the burning desire to push him off the rock and into the water. "What if it doesn't work that way?"
His smile slips a little. "It will."
You close you eyes -- in aggravation, but also because you're too sick of that expression to look at it anymore -- and push your hands against your forehead. "Not everything in life goes away when you tell it to," you retort, and the words come out hard, with a helpless edge you can't really blunt. "Things happen without your permission, and you can try to ignore them, but sometimes they just keep happening."
He's shaking his head even as you finish the sentence, the movement carried across by the arm that's still pressed against yours. "This won't -- it can't." The denial sounds as brittle as glass.
"What if it does? Do you expect the rest of us to --" Your volume starts to rise and you take a deep breath, running your fingers back along the curve of your head, trying to focus on what you set out to do here. Turning on the rock so you can face him directly (and he doesn't move away as your legs bump, but you can see him press his hands against the curving stone, like he's bracing himself for something) you continue in as gentle a tone as you can manage, "Dom, I get what you're trying to do, but it doesn't seem like it's working, and I'm tired of watching you fake it. If you'll just tell me what's going on, we can --"
Without no warning Dom's fidgeting turns to motion, and you've barely caught what's happening before he's a metre away, hands shoved tight into his coat pockets. Taking a deep breath, he says, "Uh, Billy, it's -- really bloody cold out here, I think I'm going to head back to the car." You stare up at him, mouth half-open; he presses his lips into a brief, bracketed curve that doesn't even approximate a smile and jogs across the rock shelf. On the other side, he hesitates, turning back to you; his hand drifts up a little, palm open. Your mouth latched shut and your breath coming hard and furious, you stare across the wind-filled space and fight the urge to bend toward him, because you will move hell and earth to fix whatever's wrong for him, but there's not a thing you can do if he won't open the fucking door. He opens his mouth a little, his chest swelling visibly, and --
"Thanks for showing me this," he says, pulling his reaching hand back to his side. "It's really lovely. Stay as long as you like; I'll be up there when you're ready to go." Then he turns, grips the rock tightly, and steps up and out of sight.
You drop your head down to your chest and let your whole body curve in on itself. Holding your breath, you clench your fists, your eyes, your jaw, building the tension, willing it to obliterate everything from your skin on outward. You stay like that until the clamour of your blood and bones gets too loud to hold off, until the dark behind your eyelids is negative-edged in white, and then you let your breath come bursting out. The wind burns your eyes, making them water, and you blink your vision clear again, arms curling around your waist as you gaze out at the water. You think maybe he's on the cliff above you, looking down, but you don't turn to check. The gray waves hurl themselves against the rocks, clearing the way for crests that run together in curved and dovetailing peaks. The chaotic oscillations of the surface recycle themselves, over and over, and you sit there until your face and hands go stiff with cold, staring past the surface motion at a boundless expanse that does not go away, does not change, and bars you from a lost and unrecoverable landscape that should stretch as far as your eyes can see.
*
The drive back isn't any longer than the trip out, but you feel every interminable minute of it, the air in the car thick with the knowledge that neither of you is going to say a word. You don't look at him and you never once see him turn his head towards you, but when you check the side-view there's no way to blot out the shape of his shoulders, hunched and unhappy. As much as possible you just stare at the road ahead, teeth ground down and your own spine upright under the stifling weight of the silence.
At his flat you climb out of the car before he does, leading the way up his steps and unlocking the door for him. He pauses on the threshold, and you glance back without quite making eye contact and jerk a thumb in the direction of his loo. He flushes and waves you toward it, but you don't bother waiting for him to complete the gesture before you head off down the hall.
Most of an hour with the car's heat on full blast hasn't fully managed to thaw the cold from your bones; after you zip up and wash your hands, you stand in front of his sink for a long time, hands pinkening under the hot water while your reflection watches you with expressionless eyes. You look pale and tired, eyes sunk deep in their sockets, your face ground down to angles and deep grooves. Shutting the water off, you grip the edges of the counter, eyes closed against the knowledge that sooner or later you're going to have to walk back out there again. Whatever thing Dom's been living under, there's no question that you've made it worse today and on top of that shredded the last scraps of friendly ease you shared all to hell. It's over, you think, and you don't even know what the words apply to, but the loss keeps you there for two full minutes more before you can walk out into the hall.
He's standing in sock feet by the front end of the kitchen, and he turns when he hears you coming. You have to force yourself to close to normal conversation distance before you stop; if this is the way things are going to be from now on, better that you get the practice in without an audience. Fidgeting with the zip of his jumper, he moistens his lips nervously and draws a deliberate breath, like he'd been rehearsing for this while you were out of the room. "Listen, Bill, I really appreciate your coming over today, but I'm still pretty shagged out and it'd probably be best if --"
Before you even know what you're about, you surge forward to seize his head in both hands. He freezes, mouth shaping the next words of his excuse, and you slot your lips right into that interrupted space. His skin still carries the wind's chill but his mouth, God, the inside of his mouth is blood-hot, and it rips through you like a sudden fever. He pulls back against your grip, hands twisting free to brace against your ribs. In half a second he'll shove you away; there's not a bridge back from this moment that isn't burning, and so you pull him hard against you, stealing everything you can. Just as you're about to step back, he makes a wordless sound into your mouth and his hands tighten around your waist. You strain against each other until there's no space left to breathe, and you still don't know if this is the first or the second time you've kissed him, but the give and movement of his mouth under yours is more intoxicating than all the dreams you had. The carnal rush of it pounds through you, washing away everything but the relentless draw of his body shifting against yours, its tidal pull.
When the kiss ends, you can't tell which one of you does it. Your hand drifts up to your lips, and they buzz with phantom electricity when your fingers tremble against them. Dom sways and drops back against the kitchen wall.
"Like that," he says, the words blurred around the edges, more breath than air. The long line of his throat undulates as he swallows, blinking his eyes into focus. "It was almost exactly like that."
For a moment, you don't know what he's talking about -- and then you do, and everything in you winds to a stop. There are a thousand things you want from Dom, a hundred thousand things you crave so badly that you wake up every morning to the same nameless ache, but the last thing you would want is to take any part of him away. Just the thought of it -- of being something he cannot hold back, something he could drown under -- hollows you out until you have to close your eyes against the chill of it. You squeeze the top of his shoulder, a last touch you can't keep yourself from stealing, and let your hand fall down the slope of his chest. Just as you start to turn away, he grabs the edge of your sleeve. The gray of his eyes is dark with surprise, confusion; you keep your face as still as you can, but you can't quite smooth the ragged edge from your voice when you tell him, "Sometimes things just happen, Dom."
The furrow between his eyebrows deepens, and he catches his lower lip between his teeth for a second. Thoughts swirl back and forth in his expression, changing too quickly to read.
"No," he says, and his fist tightens more securely around your cuff as he looks up at you, face determined and astonishingly clear. "No, they don't."
Your mouth goes dry and your breath deserts you; you stand there like an idiot. Shifting his grip to your elbow, he slips his other hand under the edge of your jacket to flatten against the small of your back. Slowly, you reach out and lay your hand on the broad curve of his ribs; you feel his heart beat, firm and startling under your palm, and then he pulls your mouth down to his.
The two of you twist and arch against each other, finding your joint balance, hands hungry and skin out of reach. He shoves your jacket down your arms until it drops onto the floor; you run your fingers up his sides, under his shirt, and taste his gasp as he shivers under your touch. You kiss him until you're dizzy, craving friction and weight you can't get while standing, unable to come up for air until he growls, "Christ, stop, I'm not having sex with you in the middle of my fucking kitchen," and shoves you back so hard you nearly fall. He grabs your wrist and pulls you through his flat, still kissing you, navigating by memory and by the feel of the walls you're knocking into as you tack off toward his bedroom. Once there, the two of you break apart long enough to strip out of your clothes, too charged up for finesse or slow undressing, and then fall together onto the bed. You run your hand along the length of his spine, the strong flex of his thighs, the muscles of his stomach, places you've seen a thousand times in the months you've known him and never, ever got to touch.
"Have you done this before?" he asks a little later, when your back is pressed against the headboard, your cocks dragging along each other in a counterpoint so sweet that the pulse of it bows your spine. Hands splayed against his back, you nod, too derailed to get words to come. He kisses you briefly, crushingly, and bites your jaw as he pulls away to yank his nightstand open. When he pushes himself down onto you, he digs his fingers into the tops of your shoulders for balance. The pressure and the heat of him unravel you, until it's all you can do to bury your face in the salt-slick curve of his neck and keep breathing. You grip his hips so hard your hands shake, taking his weight, helping him draw it out as long as he needs to. When his body gives way, his back curves into a hard arch and he sucks air down in a long gasp like paper tearing. Fierce as the rush of pleasure is, it can't match seeing his face from centimeters' distance -- his eyes half-lidded, his lips pink and open, fucking beautiful and real and here. The two of you move in syncopated sympathy with your pulse and his heartbeat when it pounds against your chest, until a larger rhythm takes you both and pulls you out to the crest together.
Afterwards, the condom discarded, the two of you lay twined together under the cool drape of his sheets. He runs his fingers over your chest, like he's learning your topography by touch, and asks, "How long?"
You lift your head a little off the pillow, tilting your chin down to get a better look at him, and he peers up at you with bright eyes. "The day Elijah nearly brained you with the cue ball," you say and watch the corners of his eyes crinkle up at the answer. You skim your palm along the downy skin of his shoulders and he twitches, grinds his hips against your leg with a sigh.
Propping himself up on one elbow, he frowns at you without displacing the smile. "Why didn't you say anything?"
You study his face and think of the thousand different answers you could give him, all the times you almost told him, almost stepped in close and showed your hand. You remember mobiles ringing, people coming around corners at the wrong moments, the beat of the music picking up or dropping out just as you got ready to bridge that last little gap. You think of the certainty you couldn't shake: that this could happen, if you just waited long enough, but that the second you reached for it, it would disappear. In the end, though, there's one answer that covers the rest, so you run your thumb down the side of his face and tell him, "All things in their own time."
He grins and presses a kiss into your palm. "Pretentious wanker," he says, and you dig a knuckle into his ribs, snickering when he swears and feeling time and space flow into place around you, working this new landscape of your bodies into the shape of things to come.
Feedback is always welcome.