"if your heart is a bad, bad thing." Original/RPS (IDK)
Title: if your heart is a bad, bad thing.
Fandom: Original/RPS
Pairing: Nick Hoult/Lucas Till
Rating: PG-15
Word Count: 10,260
Genre: Slash
Copyright: Title taken from Voodooised by Empires.
Disclaimer: THIS REALLY, REALLY, REALLY DID NOT HAPPEN.
Warnings: Drugs and alcohol abuse, fucking horrible sadness? IDK.
Summary: AU. Caleb rolls his eyes. “He’s the tall hot British guy who cockblocks himself and writes these long epic stories about his badass past,” he says, “everyone knows who he is.”
Author’s Notes: Okay, look, I’ve been in a twitter debate people about whether or not I should change the names of this and make it just a straightforward original fic, but finkpishnets says they’re not OOC, they’re just in different circumstances, and rabiduschathoi has pointed out that Nick and Lucas are not uncommon names and merlins_unicorn (IDK if she has an LJ yet; sorry) said that OOC in RPF AUs is the worst, which it is, and I don’t know what to do, so this is basically original fic but I left the names as they are because they’re pretty names and I like them. But to all intents and purposes this is kind of basically original fic. And I’m proud of it which is why I’m posting it, and, er, yeah, please read this even if (especially if) you don’t know who these people are, because I really like it. Also, er, Caleb Landry Jones’ lawyers, if you’re reading this: I’m sorry, but your client looks so high.
i.
“Um,” Naked Guy says, biting his lip and looking vaguely apologetic, “but my leg’s gone to sleep. Could you?”
“Oh,” Lucas says, “sure, yeah. Also hey, you’re British. Now I can call you Naked British Guy in my head.”
He shifts so Naked British Guy can extract his leg from where it’s tangled with his own and tries to work out if he’s maybe still drunk. He can’t read Naked British Guy’s expression; it’s kind of crumpled and either says wow this guy is still drunk or ow I have a hangover.
“Great,” Naked British Guy says faintly. “I’m so glad we’ve got that sorted out, Naked American Guy.”
They are both really, really naked and clutching bits of cover to themselves even though it might be too late now. It might not be too late now but since Lucas has a big fuzzy gap where last night should be he has no way of knowing either way.
“I don’t know where I am,” he says. “Do you know where we are?”
Naked British Guy looks around thoughtfully and eventually offers: “judging from the photos on the wall I’m assuming we’re in my friend Zoe’s house. Do you know Zoe?”
Lucas’ brain mostly wants to lie in a corner drooling and sobbing but he obediently kicks it into gear and tries to put names to the many, many faces he knows. “...I don’t think so?” he says at last. “Like, the party I went to yesterday was on campus.”
Naked British Guy frowns. “The party I went to wasn’t on campus.”
This isn’t the first time something like this has happened to Lucas because that’s what happens when you like drinking and you’re just a little bit slutty, but usually the night starts in the same place for him and whoever he’s woken up with.
“Was it here?” he asks.
Naked British Guy looks worried. Well, Lucas assumes that expression means “worried”, it could just as easily mean “wow he’s a dumbass”. “...no,” he says at last. “No, it was at least half an hour from here.”
“Okay,” Lucas says slowly. “Okay.” He tries to think back to who he started the night with. “Do you know Jennifer? Blonde, stupidly hot?” Naked British Guy shakes his head. “What about Caleb?”
Naked British Guy screws up his face and does something with his arms that’s a cross between a really bad Jack Sparrow impression and someone trying to swat away a wasp while also carrying a tray full of glasses they’d really like not to drop.
“Yes,” Lucas says. “Caleb. We both know Caleb.” He frowns as the implications of this sink in. “Actually that’s kind of not a relief.”
“He’s in one of my creative writing classes,” Naked British Guy provides. “His poetry is really, really disturbing.”
“It is,” Lucas agrees.
Lucas tries to think back to the last memory he has containing Caleb but everything’s a bit of a blur and he’s going to fucking kill him if he slipped something into Lucas’ drink. Again.
“Was your friend having a party here last night?” he asks.
Naked British Guy shrugs. “I don’t know,” he says. “Not one I was planning on going to, anyway.”
Lucas tries to piece together last night some more. “And this is definitely an accident because I’m ninety percent certain the guy I was planning on seducing at my party last night wasn’t British.”
Naked British Guy arches an eyebrow. He has crazy good eyebrows, Lucas can’t help noticing. “I’m judging you a little bit right now,” he says. “Just so you know.”
Lucas waves a vague hand. “I’ve been judged harder by guys with less clothing and bitchier eyebrows.”
“I’m naked,” Naked British Guy points out and oh, yeah, right, point.
“Did we have sex?” Lucas asks.
Naked British Guy peers dubiously at the sheets and then at Lucas. “You can’t tell?”
“Why would I-” Lucas begins.
“I top,” Naked British Guy says, waving a vague hand at the bed. It’s kind of sexy, even if his hair is a fucking wreck and he looks barely conscious.
“It doesn’t feel like you fucked me,” Lucas says, blunt, because he burned out his shyness somewhere around that time Caleb quietly instigated an orgy and then left to go get high in the garden while everyone else was left to deal with the consequences.
“Okay,” Naked British Guy says. “So we’re naked in bed together at my friend’s house where neither of us started the night and we probably didn’t have sex.”
“Sounds like a waste of a night,” Lucas remarks, and peers over the edge of the bed to find there’s plausibly two sets of clothes on the floor. That’s nice, it would suck to have to do the walk of shame without clothes.
There’s a knock at the door and they both scramble to hide under the covers without touching each other, and a really pretty girl who looks far too tidy and collected walks in carrying two mugs of coffee.
“Oh, so this is where you ended up,” she says, sounding bored. “I bring coffee.”
“Hi, Zoe,” Naked British Guy says, grimacing. “Er, I don’t suppose you know-”
“It’s a long and boring story,” she says, handing over the coffee.
“I wouldn’t mind hearing it anyway,” Lucas tells her.
“No,” she says, “I mean, that’s what you guys told me when you turned up on my doorstep last night. You said it’s a long and boring story and then disappeared up here. Not even in a get-a-room way.”
Lucas exchanges a look with Naked British Guy. “I got nothing,” he says.
“Pity,” Zoe remarks. “But if you could drink your coffee and get dressed and leave soon I’d be grateful.”
Naked British Guy scrubs a hand through his hair, biting awkwardly at his lip. “Yeah,” he says, “I’ll get on that. Er, thanks, and stuff.”
They drink their coffee in silence and then work through the clothes on the floor together until they’re both dressed, and Lucas has to amend his inner monologue to include just plain British Guy now.
“Well, this has been interesting,” British Guy says.
“Yeah,” Lucas responds distractedly, trying to work out where he is; not too far from his own house, he thinks, probably only a few blocks from the look of things. It has been interesting but also a waste of that outfit he was in last night; he knows he looked fuckable. “It’s been nice to meet you, No-Longer-Naked-British-Guy.”
British Guy laughs and ducks his head and in direct sunlight it makes Lucas’ brain go oh. “I’m Nick,” he says, holding out a hand.
Lucas takes it. “Hi,” he says. “I’m Lucas.”
ii.
“You woke up naked in bed with Nick Hoult?” Caleb demands, and then rocks back on his bed and cackles.
Even after two years of knowing Caleb Lucas still isn’t sure which bits are drugs and which bits are his actual personality.
“Hey,” Lucas says. “I know this is all your fault, somehow. Indirectly. Whatever.”
“He’s in my creative writing class,” Caleb continues, ignoring him. “He writes some fucked-up stuff.”
“He said the same thing about you,” Lucas tells him.
Caleb waves his hands around because he has a whole range of crazy-looking arm gestures for all occasions. Talking to him is often like watching semaphore.
“No, I mean, like, fucked up. He has this whole past with, like drug problems and shit and he writes all this stuff about it. It’s like crazy sexy too.”
Lucas narrows his eyes. “Do you have a secret crush on him? Is that why I woke up in bed naked with him?”
Questions like this don’t make sense to normal people, but Caleb isn’t normal. “I don’t have a crush on him,” Caleb says in a way that would be withering on other people but on him just looks vague. “I am in no way responsible for you waking up using his chest as a pillow.”
Lucas considers this for a while. “What kind of drug problems? Like, you drug problems, or...”
“I don’t have a drug problem,” Caleb informs him loftily, pushing himself upright. “This is not a problem. It’s awesome. And anyway, no, like bad drugs, weird trips, all that shit.” He waves his hands around a bit and it worries Lucas that he can interpret all the things Caleb isn’t saying.
“Huh,” Lucas murmurs, because he didn’t peg Nick as the type.
“America’s his fresh start,” Caleb says. “He told us that and then he told us this story that made no fucking sense. It was, like, literate but it made no sense. I think it was just about fucking someone against a bathroom sink.”
Lucas thinks about sunlight glinting off Nick’s eyelashes. “Aren’t all the good stories about that?”
Caleb laughs and flops back onto his bed and one day Lucas will ask him about what exactly it is that he takes and why. “Amen,” Caleb tells his ceiling. “Amen.”
iii.
Lucas doesn’t make a habit of hanging out in the library because he has a reputation of sorts to keep up and anyway he has no interest in watching the geeks attempting to get each other’s attention when he could be out being a skank and helping closeted fratboys work out their tensions - Caleb’s written a poem about him, actually, it’s kind of awesome and all the words have four syllables - but, periodically, he has to hand in an assignment or two so he doesn’t flunk out completely.
Another reason he hates the library is that it discriminates. All the shelves are stupidly high and there are no kickstools around ever and every single book he ever needs is on the top shelf. It’s okay for girls, who are, on average, shorter than Lucas but who can just look helpless until a guy gets a book for them - the guys around here must get so much pussy, Lucas is kind of mad about it even if he doesn’t actually want it - but Lucas doesn’t have that option. He just gets to look like a loser.
He’s fighting to get a book down, stood on tip-toes and silently cursing, when a hand easily picks up his book and he turns to find Nick is standing there, just a little too close and looking guilty.
“Sorry,” he says, handing it to Lucas and suddenly, oh suddenly Lucas gets why this whole thing is meant to be kind of sexy. “I just couldn’t watch you try any more. This is the one you need, right?”
Lucas considers his options and finally sighs and says: “I need volume two, too.”
Nick gets that down for him as well and then steps back. He smells good, like good in a way he hadn’t when he was naked and ruffled-looking, clean and sharp and ugh, Lucas hates everything about this a lot.
“Is this going to be one of those things where we suddenly start meeting despite having never been in the same place ever before in our lives?” Lucas asks.
Nick shrugs. “Possibly? Is that going to be an issue? I can pretend not to see you next time if you like.”
Lucas looks down at his books, curling his fingers around them. “Nah,” he says. “It’s okay. Though I’m not thanking you for emasculating me or whatever, because, you know.”
“Fair enough,” Nick says with a soft smile, and Lucas is pretty sure Caleb is full of shit because while there’s something about Nick that suggests he could be bad with the right motivation most of him just looks vague and nice and English. Caleb probably just projects drug habits on everyone else because that’s how his world works. He hugs his own books to his chest; they’re noticeably thinner than Lucas’, which seems unfair somehow. “I’ll just never mention it.”
Lucas grins at him as they reach the end of the aisle, where Nick is promptly knocked into by a girl who, when Lucas studies her as she bends down to help Nick pick his stuff up, probably did that on purpose. She’s certainly flashing enough cleavage from this angle; he thinks about telling her she’s barking up the wrong tree, but decides to leave that to be Nick’s problem.
Nick shuts her down admirably, with this friendly smile that somehow isn’t friendly at all, and absolutely refuses her offers of coffee, her number, and an apologetic hug.
“Damn,” Lucas remarks as she walks off, “that was mean, Naked British Guy.”
“I don’t know if you’d noticed, but I’m actually wearing three layers,” Nick points out.
“You’ll always be naked to me,” Lucas drawls, and Nick rolls his eyes.
“I assume I’ll see you around,” he says, and walks off.
Lucas grins and then looks down to see there’s a piece of paper mostly hidden under one of the shelves, and bends down to retrieve it. The handwriting on it is messy, scattered, but still just about legible.
And you tell me oh the stars have scattered oh they’re falling in rhythms down your arms and I can’t help laughing biting at the words as they fall and you’ve never been more beautiful than you are like this with your smile and your spilling eyes and your legs and your legs and your legs and your legs and I can’t hear a thing with your mouth against my throat and asking me not to stop or maybe to stop and what’s permission anyway with the mirror cold against my hands you screaming rain into my skin.
Lucas reads to the end, eyebrows raising higher with every line, and finally takes his books to a table semi-hard and somewhat bemused.
He writes short drug-crazed stories about fucking people against sinks he texts Caleb.
You really need to start listening to me about this shit, Caleb tells him.
Lucas bites his lip. How do I get into your creative writing class?
Don’t even, Caleb replies.
iv.
Nick’s making out with a guy with dark hair in the kitchen, sat on the sideboard with his legs around the guy’s waist. Lucas only came in here to get more ice but he’s watching now, kind of fascinated. He shouldn’t let Caleb mix him drinks.
Eventually, Nick breaks off, and turns his head, lips bruised and startling. “Hotter or less hot than the short story you’re about to tell me you didn’t read?”
Lucas considers if for a moment. “Less hot,” he decides eventually. “Have we made out, d’you think?”
Random Guy doesn’t seem to be bothered by this conversation in the slightest, sucking bruises into Nick’s throat. Lucas kind of wants to ask him to stop but, hey, he’s not the one who’s going to have to wear scarves for the next week.
“I don’t remember,” Nick offers. “I don’t remember us meeting. How did we meet?”
Lucas shrugs, opening the freezer and letting the cool air hit his face. It’s refreshing. “I’m a slut,” he says. “It probably wasn’t complicated.”
Nick doesn’t say anything and when he turns back around he finds it’s because they’re kissing again, deep and dirty and distracted. Lucas can see where Nick’s tongue is sliding into the other guy’s mouth, and he thinks about what might have happened if he’d just gone with the waking-up-naked-in-bed-together thing rather than trying to rationalise it all.
“Isn’t America supposed to be your fresh start?” he asks.
Nick pulls away slightly, carding long white fingers though the guy’s hair. “I’m drunk,” he says. “I’m not high. There’s a differentiation.”
“If you say so,” Lucas says.
The guy makes an annoyed sound. “Is he going to be here talking all night?”
“He’s considering it,” Nick says, head tipped enough that Lucas can see one of his eyes glittering. “Have you ever commentated a blowjob, Lucas?”
“No,” Lucas says. “I could have a go, though.”
Nick makes a thoughtful sound and then pushes the guy away, slipping off the sideboard. “Sorry,” he says. “But the party’s still, you know, happening. You’ve got plenty of time to hit on someone else.”
This could get messy or ridiculous or bad but Lucas steps in, slipping an arm around Nick’s waist to keep him upright even though Nick’s, like, a lot taller than him. Lucas doesn’t have a lot of criteria but he likes that in a guy.
They end up in the garden where it’s quiet and someone’s strung fairylights for ambience while their friends fuck in the bushes or whatever. They sit on the grass and Nick hugs his knees and periodically picks up icecubes from the glass Lucas accidentally brought outside with him and slips them between his sore lips, grinning at Lucas with the ice between his teeth until Lucas shudders from just the thought.
“Do you smoke?” Nick asks at last, and Lucas shakes his head. Nick looks rueful. “Neither do I. Not anymore, anyway.”
He looks even prettier in the moonlight, mouth bitten and distracting, eyes shining.
“You’re thinking about kissing me,” Nick says at last.
He’d taste like someone else, though, and that’s only hot if it’s an intentional threesome, Lucas has learned.
“I think about kissing a lot of people,” he says instead.
Nick falls back into the grass, blades of it between his fingers. “You should go back to the party,” he says at last. “Let Caleb get you wasted and push you in the direction of some pretty guy from your Thursday afternoon classes.”
“Wednesday afternoon,” Lucas corrects. “What about you?”
“I’m alright,” Nick says, and he sounds a little wondering at the words. “I mean, you could stay, but neither of us want that.”
(The next morning Caleb takes him out for brunch, which isn’t a meal so much as the munchies, and Alex shifts to get comfortable with the just-been-fucked feeling still skidding through him from morning sex with a guy in his economics class, and listens to a girl he thinks he should recognise telling her friend Nick fucking Hoult slept in my garden last night.
“Why is that a big deal?” he asks Sean, who’s licking cream off his fingers despite the fact nothing he’s ordered has actually come with cream on it.
Caleb rolls his eyes. “He’s the tall hot British guy who cockblocks himself and writes these long epic stories about his badass past,” he says, “everyone knows who he is.”
Well. That’s a thought.)
v.
“I have a crush on my lit professor,” Nick says, with the tone of voice of someone playing I Never.
They’re in the campus coffee shop and all they have to hand are espresso shots, which aren’t a good idea.
“Is he, like, old?” Lucas asks. “Do you want him to put you over his knees and make you recite Shakespeare while he spanks you?”
Nick narrows his eyes. “That’s an oddly specific fantasy,” he says.
“I have hidden depths,” Lucas offers, tracing spilled sugar across the tabletop with a fingertip.
“You own a cowboy hat,” Nick says. When Lucas’ head snaps up, he adds: “you’re presumably hearing stories about me, I’m allowed to hear stories about you.”
“Yeah,” Lucas says, “but your stories are kind of cool.”
“My stories end in an ambulance,” Nick replies. “Anyway, I have a crush on my lit professor.”
“Doesn’t sound any better the second time around,” Lucas tells him. “At least my dirty little secrets come with costumes.”
Nick smirks, quick and self-deprecating, fingers tapping in that way that Lucas has come to realise means he wants a cigarette. He’s learning things, mannerisms, the way Nick’s mouth twists when he doesn’t want to answer a question.
They no longer pretend that running into each other is coincidental.
“Are you offering to lend me the cowboy hat?” Nick asks.
“No,” Lucas says. “The cowboy hat is only for people who intend to actually get laid.”
Nick laughs and it’s beautiful and Lucas is angry for a moment about Nick’s self-imposed celibacy because all he really wants to do is take him back to his dorm room and bite him all over. That’s what Lucas does in these kinds of situations because that’s all that really makes sense to him. Sex is just easier.
(“No, it isn’t,” Nick told him once, quick and sharp. “Not anymore, anyway.”)
“Fine,” Lucas says, “I’ll come to your damn lecture. If only so I can mock you properly.”
Lucas isn’t taking any English classes so he doesn’t really know any of the students here and the lecture room is unfamiliar; Nick rolls his eyes as he just stands there and grabs his hand, tugging him into a seat near the front. Lucas’ heart is beating too hard and he’s not even sure why, not really, and he doesn’t let go and neither does Nick, not until the lecturer walks in and bam, Nick drops Lucas’ hand, burnt.
Lucas is completely ready to hate the guy until he starts talking, brisk and Scottish, the word fuck interlaced in half the sentences, mouth fixed in this grin that’s startling and delicious and oh, okay, this is completely understandable after all.
“I kind of hate you,” he tells Nick afterwards. “Now I have a crush on your lecturer and I don’t even have an excuse to go to your fucking lectures.”
Nick grins at him, wide and unrepentant, and Lucas makes a mental note to be someone’s booty call tonight.
“Weren’t you saying something about spanking and Shakespeare?” Nick asks.
“Hate,” Lucas repeats.
vi.
“I am not picking you up from your pottery class,” Lucas tells Caleb. “Actually, that’s not even the issue, why the fuck are you taking a pottery class?”
“Have you made shit out of clay while stoned?” Caleb asks. “Because it’s awesome, man.”
“Your life choices make literally no sense to me,” Lucas replies. “I mean, no sense.”
“Whatever,” Caleb says. “Kick out whatever piece of closeted prettyboy you’ve got lounging around your bed today and come get me from my fucking pottery class.”
“Aren’t we supposed to sleep together before you get demanding and bitchy?” Lucas mutters, but all Caleb does is laugh his own special brand of cracked laughter and hang up on him.
Lucas has timeshares in a battered car with two of his housemates, which tends to work out well for none of them, although Lucas has learned his lesson when it comes to sex in the backseat of anything, so at least there’s a minimum of unattractive stains. It’s still outside his house, though, which is a good start, and Lucas tries to pretend for a while that he resents Caleb’s implications and then remembers that he’s only doing that because he kicked out the guy he spent the afternoon in bed with before Caleb called.
Sex is less fun these days. He has no idea what that’s about.
Caleb’s directions are notoriously unreliable but he stops off at campus and finds an actual flyer for the pottery class telling him where it’s happening, and finds that at least Caleb had the presence of mind to call him before it actually started, so Lucas isn’t going to be hours late getting to him. That’s happened before.
The class are spilling into the steps when he drives up, but Caleb isn’t with them, which isn’t really a surprise. Lucas huddles into his leather jacket a little more, defence mechanism, and goes inside.
Caleb is waxing lyrical with clay-covered fingers and that growl to his voice that Lucas used to find sexy back when he was trying to work out how to classify Caleb in his head.
“Dude,” he says, “you can’t ask me to pick you up and then, you know, not actually leave.”
Caleb turns to him with one of his pretty crazy smiles and the guy next to him who Lucas hadn’t even noticed laughs a very familiar laugh.
“I don’t even want to know why you take a pottery class,” he tells Nick.
Nick shrugs, long fingers still sliding up the sides of what’s apparently a vase. “Reminds me of rehab,” he says.
“Wow,” Lucas says. “That’s cheerful.”
He thinks the teacher, who’s packing up on the other side of the room, is laughing at them. He doesn’t turn to look.
“I also got good at this,” Nick tells him and, well, yeah, that actually looks like an actual pot or whatever, as opposed to the artistic but ultimately kind of dreadful thing in front of Caleb.
Nick dips his fingers in water and returns them to the pot he’s still forming. There’s a smudge of dried clay on his cheek and Lucas never thought that scene in Ghost was hot, he just thought it looked messy, but there’s something about Nick’s fingers slick and long and delicate carefully sliding through the wet clay that’s nothing short of breathtaking.
“We’re not re-enacting Ghost,” Nick tells him without even looking up.
Caleb bursts into happy laughter and if Lucas is about to find out he did this on purpose Lucas is going to fucking kill him this time.
“Didn’t even cross my mind,” he lies.
“There are at least three guys in here who’d be willing to smear you in wet clay while fucking you,” Nick says quietly, carefully forming the last lip of the vase with shivering fingers. “Turn up earlier next week.”
“Are you, like, pimping out your pottery class?” Lucas enquires.
Nick looks up at him long enough to flash a grin with teeth.
“That’s not something we generally do in here, Mr Hoult,” the teacher calls over mildly, but she doesn’t sound like she minds all that much.
“We should get frozen yogurt,” Caleb announces, like he’s the first person to ever, ever think of this.
“Alright,” Lucas says, because he’s not actually opposed to this at all. Caleb’s munchies are usually a good excuse to go for awesome food at ridiculous times. “Nick?”
“I’m going to finish this up,” Nick says quietly. “And then I am going home for a very, very long bath.”
“It’s okay,” Caleb says, getting up and knocking a shoulder into Lucas’, “I can flirt with you all night and then go home without sleeping with you too.”
“My life,” Lucas says bleakly.
Nick laughs, eyes still on his vase, and offers: “I hear the guy who works behind the counter is pretty easy.”
“God,” Lucas says, “do you have, like, a list called People Lucas Can Sleep With Who Aren’t Me?”
“Maybe,” Nick says, dipping his fingers back in the water.
Lucas thinks about this for a moment, and then decides that actually saying whatever is or isn’t happening between us is very, very weird aloud will probably make things worse.
“Okay,” he shrugs instead. “Enjoy your clay.”
“I didn’t do that on purpose,” Caleb says when they’re in the car.
“I don’t care,” Lucas says, horribly aware his hands are shaking.
“You do,” Caleb sighs, slumping down in his seat and closing his eyes. “You really do.”
vii.
Nick arches an eyebrow when he sees Lucas waiting outside his lecture hall for him, leant against his car in sunglasses he thinks he stole from Caleb at some point because these scream stoned rockstar and Lucas is pretty sure he wouldn’t have actually bought them.
“Roadtrip?” Lucas suggests.
Nick glances over his shoulder at the people Lucas is starting to loosely recognise as Nick’s study group; it scares him, sometimes, how much he’s starting to know about him. Sometimes he thinks he might know more about Nick’s life than he does about his own, which is ridiculous because he knows nothing about Nick except the fragments he picks up from awkward silences and reading the bits of paper scattered on his bedroom floor.
“Sure,” Nick says, and folds himself into shotgun, helping himself to another pair of Caleb’s sunglasses left on the dashboard.
They play the radio too loud and bicker over the stations and open the windows too wide and laugh about nothing in particular, and Nick taps his fingers on his knee like he’s thinking about cigarettes and Lucas wants to cover his hand with his own to make him stop, but that’s dangerous, yeah?
“What set this off?” Nick asks, on a lull, radio turned down and stuck in traffic heading out of town.
“Nothing,” Lucas says. It’s mostly a lie; there’s a pretty guy lying asleep in Lucas’ bed and Lucas has no idea what his name is and no interest in knowing and once that used to feel like a badge of honour but now it just feels like surrender, bitter and never enough.
Nick’s mouth twists, one of the awkward movements Lucas still hasn’t deciphered yet, and says: “alright”.
There’s nowhere to go really, not if they want to be back for tomorrow’s classes - which they both do, not that they’ll ever admit it - but there’s a hill outside of town and if you drive up it you can survey everything and feel like a king for a few hours. It’s starting to get dark and the lights below are bright and blurring and beautiful.
Nick skips his fingers over cans of soda and selects beer instead, and Lucas opens his mouth to say something and then closes it again, cracks open another 7UP, designated driver and all that. It can’t be that he doesn’t trust himself. They drink in silence, eyes on the view, sat on the hood and leant back against the windshield and Lucas keeps his sunglasses on even though it isn’t really worth it anymore.
“You look ridiculous,” Nick says, sunglasses pushed on top of his head and hair sticking up, and Lucas wants to say the same and doesn’t.
They watch the sunset, shoulder to shoulder, and when it’s over Nick buries his face in Lucas’ neck and breathes and Lucas curls into him, fingertips under his t-shirt and pressed to the warm skin stretched over Nick’s hipbone.
“This is a designated makeout spot,” Nick says eventually, quietly, carefully.
Lucas closes his eyes. “I know.” He shifts until Nick pulls away, falls back against the windshield. He isn’t drunk, Lucas knows, but blurring a little, edges worn raw and smooth.
Nick reaches up, curls a finger around the arm of Lucas’ sunglasses and tugs them off. “You spend a lot of time thinking about kissing me,” he murmurs.
There are too many answers to that, and Lucas is, underneath it all, a better guy than even he himself knows. “Not as much time as you spend thinking about kissing me,” he says instead, and looks away so he doesn’t have to catch Nick’s expression.
“Touché,” Nick allows, and sighs.
This is the most awful and the most wonderful situation Lucas has ever caught himself in, and he keeps his eyes on the city, on the thousands of people down there who aren’t fucked up and tired and less confused than they probably should be by all this. After a while, Nick shifts, wrapping arms around Lucas from behind and pressing his face into the back of his shoulder.
I think you’re what going mad feels like, Lucas thinks, and then tries to work out if he’s found poetry a few years too late or if he read that on yet another post-it left careless on Nick’s desk.
He drops a hand to where Nick’s fingers are interlaced over his stomach, leaves it there for a moment, and then pulls away.
“We should get back,” he says, and Nick doesn’t fight him.
They keep the radio down on the drive back, and Nick falls asleep with his face pressed to the window. Lucas watches him more than he watches the road but it’s alright, there’s not much traffic, and if he runs one red light because he’s more in love than he thought he’d ever be no one will blame him.
viii.
As it turns out, Nick’s friend Zoe just happens to be best friends with Lucas’ friend Jennifer, which feels like one of those things that shouldn’t really happen but does.
“You two are, like, fated,” Caleb says. Lucas kicks him under the table, and Nick ducks his head, hair falling into his eyes.
“You are dating, right?” Jennifer says. Lucas wonders what exactly Nick’s said about him. He wonders if Nick ever says anything about him.
“Actually, we’re not,” Lucas says, because Nick’s staring at his nails and any minute now Caleb’s going to pull out his cigarettes and they’ll be in for a world of withdrawal regret. “We’re really not.”
“I have no idea what gave you that idea,” Nick says, looking up, grin wicked and pleased like an in-joke. Except that Lucas isn’t sure either of them are actually in on this one, and that’s the shittiest part.
“Jesus,” Zoe mumbles, reaching for her coffee.
They’re all out for breakfast or Caleb’s morning munchies or whatever they’re calling it, and they’re not playing footsie under the table because footsie would imply flirting and this is something else, something worse, because their ankles are entwined where no one can see and Nick’s talking about their stupid hot waiter and Lucas is, for some reason, joining in.
“You do realise everyone thinks he’s your boyfriend?” Jennifer says, glaring at Lucas.
“Well, that explains why the last guy who fucked me apologised,” Lucas muses.
“You’re not bothered?” Zoe demands and, yeah, that’s Caleb pulling out his cigarettes. They should’ve sat inside where he couldn’t do this.
“They love it,” he drawls easily, wearing dorky sunglasses and an I haven’t-slept-in-three-days grin. “Nearly as much as they love each other.”
Lucas feels his heart stop and Nick’s foot slides away from his like it’s been burned. “What the fuck,” Lucas says.
“Too far,” Nick adds.
Caleb waves a vague hand. “Nothing you didn’t already know and hadn’t made your peace with.”
“Oh my God,” Jennifer says, covering her face with her hands, “oh my God, this is the worst.”
“Car crash,” Zoe agrees.
Lucas can’t look at Nick but that’s okay because he knows Nick isn’t looking at him; walled-off and quiet in a way he never is when Lucas is sleeping on his floor because they watched movies until it got too late, and he’s got a single bed and neither of them are stupid. Nick always wakes up first and brings him tea in a chipped mug and Lucas likes it and it doesn’t matter anymore, whatever he can and can’t have, whatever it is that keeps him awake smiling at his ceiling and flirting with other guys because it’s really all he knows how to do.
Caleb’s phone chirps and he looks at it and then at Lucas. “Your housemate wants you to know that conquest number whatever is awake and cooking them all breakfast, do you want to keep him?”
Lucas rolls his eyes.
“Does he actually have a number?” Jennifer asks.
“Not one I’m telling you,” Lucas replies. He risks a look at Nick, who’s staring at his shaking hands and biting into his lower lip. He can’t work out if he wants a cigarette or if he just wants to avoid Lucas; none of this really makes any sense when you get right down to it.
Caleb laughs, cracking in the sunshine, and after a moment Nick’s foot slides in line with Lucas’ again.
ix.
Caleb’s parties are the absolute worst, the kind where if you’re upright and alive in the morning you feel like you’ve earned a gold star of some sort and that karmic retribution is probably coming to fuck you up one day. The worst bit about them is that Caleb never lets on which parties are his; he gets other people to host them and it’s only when you can’t feel your legs and are sobbing to a Cure CD that you realise Caleb was behind it all.
“I’m never leaving my house again,” Lucas informs the carpet, and it takes a monumental effort to roll onto his back. He has no idea what he took or what was given to him and if he’s drunk or high or some unholy combination of the two, and all he really knows is that at least this isn’t one of Caleb’s orgy parties because no one can move.
Caleb is playing disjointed notes on his guitar, fingers flickering and there’s candlelight which is such a shitty idea, really, they’re going to die in a fire, who’s house is this anyway?
“That would be a pity,” Nick offers. He’s lying about a foot away, curled onto his side, eyes glittering in the light and smile lopsided. He’s just drunk, Lucas knows, because Caleb’s a lot of things but he’s not the level of cruel you need to give a recovering addict actual drugs. That’s a mercy of sorts.
Lucas rolls his eyes. “What the fuck do you know.”
“More than you do,” Caleb offers, and there are murmurs of assent from those still conscious. Caleb is cradling his guitar and he plays waterfalls of broken chords from time to time, humming what it ought to sound like, beautiful and cracked and still so perfect despite it all.
Lucas closes his eyes and drifts off and when he wakes up it’s to Caleb saying: “worst thing you ever did.”
“Girlfriend in a coma.”
“Smiths song.”
“Douglas Coupland novel,” Nick counters, and Lucas fucking hates Caleb’s parties.
Someone who isn’t Nick or Lucas or Caleb starts humming the chorus.
“Really?” Lucas asks the ceiling.
“Boyfriend in a coma,” Nick amends. “Well, no. Fuckbuddy in a coma?”
“Rolls off the tongue less easily,” Lucas offers.
Caleb’s picking out the fucking song on his guitar and Lucas has no idea if any of this is even real. Candlelight and buzzing limbs and everything about him hurts. Caleb’s parties work on a don’t ask, don’t tell basis; you don’t ask what he’s put in your drink and he doesn’t tell and if you survive you don’t learn and you come back for more.
“Too many syllables,” Nick agrees, and Lucas doesn’t know when he got so close, reaching a shaking hand to slide fingers through his hair.
There are times when I could have strangled her Caleb creaks, and Nick’s eyelashes are too fucking long and his eyes are dark, shrouded in flickering candlelight, and his elbow is digging into Lucas’ chest and if he moved a couple of millimetres oh, oh he could ruin everything. Nick exhales and Lucas can taste it and their faces are touching everywhere except the mouth and Lucas has no idea why he isn’t leaning into it when he can blame it on Caleb and cheapen the whole thing later. Nick’s fingers slide from his hair to spider against his cheek and they’re breathing each other’s breath now and Caleb’s voice is cracking up and down the song before it slips into something else, something Lucas doesn’t recognise, and Nick makes a soft broken sound and shifts so his face is pressed into Lucas’ shoulder.
“It’s okay,” Lucas says, even though it isn’t, and bookmarks that as the best fucking kiss he never had.
x.
Nick’s mouth is as soft as it always looked like it would be, biting lingering kisses into Lucas’ neck, and the music is thudding from downstairs and neither of them even wanted to be here, they just got dragged along because everyone else they knew was going and Caleb swore absolutely blind that this wasn’t one of his parties.
The fact that this is twice as disastrous as any of Caleb’s parties have ever managed to be is just the fucking cherry on top, really.
They were supposed to be watching movies tonight, something artsy and pretentious and black and white and Nick had assured him he’d hate it with a grin full of teeth and Lucas had agreed to watch it anyway, ignoring the mumble of pussy whipped behind him because when did their whole damn uni get so involved in something that’s none of their business anyway? Except then Caleb called up and whined and said a number of ridiculous things and they agreed to come here and now Lucas is pinned to the wall by a shivering Nick, trying to work out if turning his head and making at least some of this into actual kissing would make it worse or make it better.
Lucas doesn’t even know whose house this is, where they are, what they’re doing, but there’s something desperate and frantic in all of this and it’s the wrong place, the wrong time, the wrong everything and Lucas can’t pull away, won’t pull away, doesn’t know how to pull away. He’s got the fingers of one hand curled in the back of Nick’s hair and the other hand alternates between clenching in the back of Nick’s t-shirt and stretching out into air like someone begging for a lifeline.
Nick’s drunk, okay, like the kind of drunk that would leave Lucas incapable of standing up and he’s no lightweight, the kind of drunk that you really, really shouldn’t get if you’re hoping to recover from anything, and his fucking hands are everywhere and every part of Lucas is screaming that he should stop this before they manage to ruin everything and he can’t, he can’t.
“We should,” he breathes, unable to work out if it’s a plea to start or to stop, and he was perfectly happy flirting with this guy who may or may not be in his Monday afternoon lectures when Nick just pounced, arm around Lucas’ shoulders and the bitterest of sorry, he’s taken which Lucas isn’t, they both know that, and then Nick was hustling him upstairs with his hands under Lucas’ shirt and his mouth nipping kisses along his jaw and Lucas can’t stop him because he doesn’t want to stop him and he supposes they’ll both have to live with that.
Nick pushes and Lucas pushes back and they end up on the bed in a tangle of limbs and Nick’s breathing sharp and fast into his ear and Lucas can feel how hard he is from the leg that’s ended up between Nick’s thighs and oh God this is too much, it’s not right, they shouldn’t do this when Nick’s barely in control of himself and when they haven’t even kissed yet.
“Nick,” he says, pushing, hating himself for it. “Nick.”
He pushes again, hard, and Nick falls away from him, staring at him with wide betrayed eyes, until they focus a little more and yep, there it is.
Nick curls into himself immediately and apart from the thumping beat from downstairs all they can hear is each other’s ragged breathing; Lucas still flat on his back, still fucking hard - and maybe that’s the worst part - and Nick sitting up at the end of the bed, arms wrapped around himself.
“I’m sorry,” Lucas says, and he doesn’t realise he’s crying until his tears start rolling into his ears. “I’m so sorry.”
Nick makes this wounded sound and all Lucas can see of him are trembling shoulders and he wants to reach out and touch him and knows that that would be the stupidest thing to do in this situation. He pushes himself upright though, curls trembling fingers into his palms.
“Look at me,” he whispers, and his voice is shaking and breaking, “Nick, please just look at me.”
It’s like dropping a glass, what happens next; Nick shatters and Lucas has never seen anyone cry like that, these deep, angry sobs that sound like something ripping, aching and repetitive and so fast Nick can barely breathe, and Lucas has no idea what to do with that level of raw devastation in front of him.
The door bangs open; Caleb looks at them for a long moment and then takes off his sunglasses, breathing: “Jesus Christ, you two.”
Lucas looks at him pleadingly because he doesn’t know what else to do, and Caleb sighs and says: “get out.”
Nick doesn’t move and Lucas doesn’t want to go and doesn’t want to stay and Caleb glares until Lucas gets off the bed. He’s shaking all over and his head is swimming and Nick still won’t look at him and in the end he walks out because there’s nothing left to do. Caleb closes the door behind him and Lucas leaves the party, bumping into people and tripping over his own feet, and manages two and a half blocks before he throws up in someone’s garden. He sits on the kerb until the sun rises, and no one says anything when he finally makes it home and passes out.
xi.
The next week is very long and very quiet and very scary. Lucas lives in almost permanent fear of running into Nick even though he knows his haunts and is consequently avoiding them, and Caleb informs him bluntly that he will never need a ride home from his pottery class ever again.
“Are you mad at me?” he asks when Caleb brings over black coffee and Red Vines.
“Not as mad as you are at yourself,” Caleb responds on a shrug, lighting a cigarette even though he knows Lucas doesn’t like him smoking in here.
Lucas sighs and reaches for a coffee and fights not to ask if Nick’s said anything and if so, what it was.
A few days later he gets a text from Nick: am I avoiding you or are you avoiding me?
Lucas hesitates before he replies I don’t know anymore.
They meet in a park the next afternoon; Nick looks tired, worn, and his smile is real but broken. He pulls Lucas into a hug, shaking and desperate, and they cling to each other for a few minutes, breathing each other in. Lucas keeps his eyes shut because he feels like whatever they say next isn’t going to end well and he didn’t even know it was possible to miss someone as much as he’s missed Nick.
“This... there’s no easy way to say this,” Nick says later. He’s got his eyes on his knees and his hands are trembling.
“Just say it,” Lucas replies.
Nick looks up, catches his eyes. “It’s... it’s not...”
“I know,” Lucas tells him. “But say it anyway.”
Nick shuts his eyes and says: “you make me want to relapse.”
The words are like being punched in the stomach; they take all the breath out of Lucas and they hurt, oh dear God they hurt.
They’ve cried at each other enough for a lifetime so he bites the inside of his mouth until his vision stops blurring, and says: “I know.”
Nick’s twisting his fingers together and Lucas wants to tell him to stop but he can’t, so he just sits and waits until he can’t stand it anymore and says: “what do you need?”
“My therapist says you’re bad for me,” Nick says. “And I’ve been trying to hide in a hundred different games and that’s not working out too well either.”
Lucas sighs. “So basically you need not to see me again.”
“You said it, not me,” Nick tells him, soft and sharp.
Something splinters.
“You’re a fucking coward,” Lucas snaps. “That’s all you are, really, you’re a fucking coward.”
Nick’s head shoots up and he stares at Lucas with hurt eyes but that doesn’t even matter because he doesn’t know the meaning of hurt.
“Well,” Lucas says, voice and body shaking, “one of us has to be brave here.” He scrubs a hand through his hair, laughs awkwardly, and says: “I’m in love with you.”
Nick’s eyes widen and his lips open like he’s trying to think of a response, and Lucas gets up and walks away.
“Lucas!” Nick yells, cracking, but Lucas doesn’t turn around. “Lucas!”
Caleb raises an eyebrow when he opens his door, and Lucas says: “I want whatever it is you take that makes you so fucked up all the time.”
“I don’t think-” Caleb begins, and oh, now, right, now he’s suddenly got a conscience.
“Either you give it to me or I’ll go and find someone else who doesn’t have any interest in my welfare at all and we’ll see how that ends,” Lucas tells him.
Caleb sighs, and says-
Lucas wakes up in the hospital.
xii.
“I brought grapes,” Caleb says. “I mean, like, I don’t know what they’re going to do to fix your arm, but, like, it’s what people do, right?”
“It is,” Lucas agrees, and watches Caleb dump the grapes with the cards and the flowers and the merciful lack of soft toys.
The doctors don’t know how he broke his arm and Lucas has absolutely no interest in finding out. He doesn’t remember anything of that night but that’s okay; he’s checked his phone and he knows with absolute certainty that he didn’t call Nick while under the influence of fuck-knows-what and that’s the important bit. That’s the only part that matters, really.
“It’s a hospital,” Lucas says as Caleb sticks a hand in his pocket, “you can’t actually smoke in here.”
Caleb shrugs and sits in the chair next to his bed and Lucas fights the urge to try and move his morphine drip somewhere out of reach.
“I don’t know how you guys do this,” he remarks eventually. “I mean, Jesus, I had one try at recreational drug use and I’ve got a broken arm.”
“What you were doing wasn’t recreational,” Caleb informs him, opening a box of chocolates that Lucas is pretty sure came from a one night stand. He’s not sure because he doesn’t quite recognise the name. He’d be ashamed but he’s too tired for it. “And it’s pretty simple. I don’t hate myself, so I have fun. Nick hates himself so he doesn’t have fun. And you hate Nick, so you screwed up completely.”
Lucas thinks about saying I don’t hate Nick and then remembers that Caleb always calls him out when he lies.
“I don’t only hate Nick,” he says instead.
“No,” Caleb agrees, “and that’s the tragic part. Can I write on your cast?”
Everyone else who’s come to see him has, so Lucas obediently holds his arm out and Caleb scribbles with a sharpie on his elbow, where he can’t see.
“I’ll be back tomorrow,” he informs Lucas. “I’ll bring beer.”
“No, you won’t,” Lucas replies.
Caleb glances blearily around, like he’s taking in where they are for the first time, and says: “fuck. No, I won’t.”
Lucas has been in the hospital for about a week; there was some stuff involving a concussion and some cracked ribs and he apparently walked himself into the ER, which is nice because it means that at least he’s got some shreds of self-preservation left somewhere inside him. They’re due to discharge him in a couple of days.
“It’s alright,” Lucas tells him. “I think this is known as a wake-up call.”
Caleb looks thoughtful. “Yeah,” he says, “but who for?”
When he’s gone, Lucas finds he’s left a white plastic poker chip on the covers by Lucas’ thigh. He frowns, turning it over with the fingers of his right hand, and it’s probably deliberate because Caleb might be crazy but he doesn’t generally have poker chips falling out of his sleeves. Unless that’s his new thing. Later, he does some awkward twisting in the bathroom mirror and finds that Caleb’s written DAY ONE on his arm.
His phone goes off at three in the morning; Lucas is awake anyway and he doesn’t need to look at the number withheld on the screen to know who it is.
He doesn’t say anything, and neither does Nick, and they just listen to each other breathing.
Lucas hangs up first. When he looks at the screen, it tells him it’s five forty-five a.m.
xiii.
The next time Lucas sees Nick, it’s three and a half months later and he’s just got out of a physiotherapy session.
Nick stops dead in the middle of the street and his expression is the most beautiful and terrible thing Lucas has ever seen.
(“He wrote a story about you,” Caleb informed him, cigarettes and alcohol and one of Lucas’ painkillers. “It was kind of incredible. The whole class cried. The teacher cried.”
Lucas thought about his answer for a while. “Did you cry?”
Caleb looked at him over his sunglasses. “Baby, I’ve done all the crying over you I’m ever going to do.”
Lucas shoved him and then said: “did Nick cry?”
“I’m not going to tell you,” Caleb responded, “because you don’t want to know.”
“True,” Lucas agreed.
“It was called The Last Train Home,” Caleb added.
“Fuck.”
“Yep.”)
They’re on opposite sides of the road and Lucas puts his good hand in his pocket and fingers the poker chip; Caleb’s upgraded him to red and gold. He can’t work out if Nick looks better or worse than he did the last time he saw him; his memories have turned Nick into something like a god and something like a monster and as it turns out Lucas isn’t any less in love with him. It’s kind of sad to find that out, and kind of a relief, and Lucas wishes he was still angry because all he is now is tired.
He thinks about crossing over and then can’t and Nick’s clearly in the same position because he’s frozen too.
“We probably shouldn’t do this,” Lucas yells and several passersby turn around and he doesn’t care.
“We shouldn’t!” Nick calls back on a relieved grin.
Lucas gets four steps before Nick shouts after him: “By the way, I miss you.”
He turns back but Nick’s already rounded the corner and that’s okay, that’s fine, they’ve both probably said enough.
“The way this isn’t getting better is kind of astonishing,” Zoe says later, iced coffee and a grimace. “Like, I’ve never seen something this clusterfucked. Ever.”
“You’ve read The Last Train Home, haven’t you?” Lucas says.
“Everyone has,” Zoe shrugs.
Lucas spends a while processing that. “Did it make you cry?”
“Like a child.” Zoe toys with her straw for a minute and then says: “so where’s your masterpiece?”
Lucas rolls up his sleeve and shows her where Caleb, deprived of a plaster cast, has written DAY ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHT straight onto his forearm.
“It’s pretty,” Zoe remarks at last.
“Oh,” Lucas sighs, “I know.”
xiv.
Lucas ends up getting a job in the campus coffee shop; he has all this free time on his hands now and as it turns out he makes a mean latte.
It takes two weeks for Nick to come in, and when he does he looks totally floored. Lucas thinks about it and then starts making his usual.
“I was never very good at small talk,” Nick says. “And I know you’re about to tell me that I don’t have to talk to you at all, but I want to, because you’re still the best friend I’ve ever had.”
“If I wasn’t in the same position I’d tell you how lame and depressing that is,” Lucas replies. “Since I am, I’ll just tell you that your coffee’s ready.”
Nick sits on the counter with his drink and Lucas waits for his supervisor to tell him that customers don’t get to sit there but she doesn’t, and that means everyone knows what’s going on and that’s kind of terrible.
Caleb turns up fifteen minutes later when Nick’s giving Lucas a blow-by-blow of his hot literature professor’s latest lecture and says: “damn, you two do not learn.”
Lucas puts on fresh coffee for Caleb’s double espresso and rolls up his sleeve. Caleb hands him a blue poker chip to start him off before writing DAY ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-THREE onto his arm. Lucas is very aware of Nick’s gaze on him but he doesn’t look because he doesn’t think he can bear it.
“You may as well tell him,” Caleb says when he’s got his coffee, ruffling a lazy hand through his hair and leaving.
Lucas can feel Nick waiting, and he serves three customers to buy time. In the end, he says: “So, like, in certain AA meetings you take a poker chip announcing that you’re not going to drink for the next thirty days.”
“I wasn’t really aware you had an alcohol problem,” Nick says, tone light, careful.
“I don’t,” Lucas replies. “This one’s for sex.”
“Oh,” Nick says. And that’s all he says.
“Yeah,” Lucas murmurs, laughs uncomfortably, and adds: “I think you should probably leave now.”
Later that night, he gets an email saying: I think you should probably email me your work schedule.
Trying to avoid me? He wishes he could snap in email, shout properly.
Tell me you want to see me and I’ll be there Nick responds almost instantly.
Half an hour later, Lucas emails him his schedule.
Caleb calls him up and talks to him until the urge to forget the damn promise he’s made to a piece of damn plastic has passed. He thinks about writing you make me want to relapse too but there’s already been too much oversharing and anyway, Nick’s got to know what they do to each other by now.
They’re taking bets in this bar I’m at as to which of you dies first, Caleb texts him later.
You go to the most fucked-up bars in the world, Lucas replies. After a couple of minutes, he adds: put a bet on Nick.
That’s funny, Caleb says, he said the same thing.
That isn’t funny at all.
No, Caleb agrees, it really isn’t.
xv.
“If this turns out to be one of your parties I’ll fucking kill you,” Lucas tells Caleb for the eighth time in the last half hour.
“Dude,” Caleb says, “I’m like your sponsor or whatever, sponsors don’t take their fucked-up recovering crazy people to their parties.”
“Am I going to find out after all this time that you’re actually secretly an awesome person?” Lucas asks.
“I’ve always been awesome,” Caleb shrugs, and takes another drag of his cigarette.
Parties like this are less fun when you’re sober and not planning on hooking up with anyone, but Caleb informed him it was an important valid test and Lucas supposes he was kind of right. Also, sober, he can tell that he’s easily slept with a third of the guys here, which isn’t really anything to be proud of.
“My life choices,” he says when he next runs into Caleb.
“I fucking know,” Caleb agrees.
He finds Nick in the garden, back against the French windows and eyes on the sky.
“Not drinking?” he asks.
“Learned my lesson,” Nick tells him, and Lucas sits down next to him. “What about you?”
“Next time I wake up naked in bed with someone I don’t know they’ll probably be selling my kidneys on ebay,” Lucas replies.
“Does that actually happen?” Nick asks.
“Caleb had a whole Powerpoint,” Lucas tells him. “I don’t know.”
You can just about find stars if you stare hard enough, and they pretend to pick out constellations for a while, while Lucas tries not to think about Nick’s skin and the way that he smells and the way that he feels when you’re pressed in desperate and close.
“What was the last line of your story?” he asks at last. He thinks he’s the only person on campus who hasn’t read it.
Nick sighs and plays with the fraying knee of his jeans and at last murmurs: “I don’t want to leave and I have no idea how to stay and oh, neither do you. Neither do you.”
Lucas pushes himself to his feet and offers Nick a hand which he reluctantly accepts. “I don’t want to be here,” he says, “and you definitely don’t. Come on.”
Lucas’ place is closer and they don’t look at each other as they shuck their jeans and climb into his bed.
“Clean sheets,” Nick mumbles, “it’s almost like you were planning this.”
“I never plan anything,” Lucas replies, and falls asleep with Nick’s heartbeat under his palm.
He wakes up in the morning to find Nick is watching him sleep, and he smiles a little in what he wants to be recognition and what probably looks like fear. Nick reaches to brush his hair out of his eyes, leaning closer, fingers curling against the base of Lucas’ skull as he presses their lips together. It’s careful and light and they’re both trembling when Nick pulls away, leaving Lucas’ mouth feeling bare and too-warm.
Lucas can see himself reflected in Nick’s eyes and it’s the most fragile, perfect sight, and there’s nothing to say anymore as he reaches for him, pulling Nick closer and guiding their mouths back together.
It’s a silent morning; Lucas’ housemates will all be asleep, passed out from last night, and Nick is a singing taut wire of fear and Lucas is pretty sure he’s not much better.
Lucas opens his mouth to Nick and tries not to hold him as tight as he wants to, so tight there’ll be bruises and marks and pain because he never, ever wants to let go. Nick moans, soft, breaking the moment and rolling so he’s on top, a jumble of limbs and weight on Lucas and Lucas doesn’t care if he suffocates here, wrapped up Nick, in the way he smells and tastes and feels.
Caleb finds them later, post-coital coffee and a silence easier than it ever has been, looks at their entwined fingers, and hands them each a white poker chip.
“Day one,” he says.
Fandom: Original/RPS
Pairing: Nick Hoult/Lucas Till
Rating: PG-15
Word Count: 10,260
Genre: Slash
Copyright: Title taken from Voodooised by Empires.
Disclaimer: THIS REALLY, REALLY, REALLY DID NOT HAPPEN.
Warnings: Drugs and alcohol abuse, fucking horrible sadness? IDK.
Summary: AU. Caleb rolls his eyes. “He’s the tall hot British guy who cockblocks himself and writes these long epic stories about his badass past,” he says, “everyone knows who he is.”
Author’s Notes: Okay, look, I’ve been in a twitter debate people about whether or not I should change the names of this and make it just a straightforward original fic, but finkpishnets says they’re not OOC, they’re just in different circumstances, and rabiduschathoi has pointed out that Nick and Lucas are not uncommon names and merlins_unicorn (IDK if she has an LJ yet; sorry) said that OOC in RPF AUs is the worst, which it is, and I don’t know what to do, so this is basically original fic but I left the names as they are because they’re pretty names and I like them. But to all intents and purposes this is kind of basically original fic. And I’m proud of it which is why I’m posting it, and, er, yeah, please read this even if (especially if) you don’t know who these people are, because I really like it. Also, er, Caleb Landry Jones’ lawyers, if you’re reading this: I’m sorry, but your client looks so high.
i.
“Um,” Naked Guy says, biting his lip and looking vaguely apologetic, “but my leg’s gone to sleep. Could you?”
“Oh,” Lucas says, “sure, yeah. Also hey, you’re British. Now I can call you Naked British Guy in my head.”
He shifts so Naked British Guy can extract his leg from where it’s tangled with his own and tries to work out if he’s maybe still drunk. He can’t read Naked British Guy’s expression; it’s kind of crumpled and either says wow this guy is still drunk or ow I have a hangover.
“Great,” Naked British Guy says faintly. “I’m so glad we’ve got that sorted out, Naked American Guy.”
They are both really, really naked and clutching bits of cover to themselves even though it might be too late now. It might not be too late now but since Lucas has a big fuzzy gap where last night should be he has no way of knowing either way.
“I don’t know where I am,” he says. “Do you know where we are?”
Naked British Guy looks around thoughtfully and eventually offers: “judging from the photos on the wall I’m assuming we’re in my friend Zoe’s house. Do you know Zoe?”
Lucas’ brain mostly wants to lie in a corner drooling and sobbing but he obediently kicks it into gear and tries to put names to the many, many faces he knows. “...I don’t think so?” he says at last. “Like, the party I went to yesterday was on campus.”
Naked British Guy frowns. “The party I went to wasn’t on campus.”
This isn’t the first time something like this has happened to Lucas because that’s what happens when you like drinking and you’re just a little bit slutty, but usually the night starts in the same place for him and whoever he’s woken up with.
“Was it here?” he asks.
Naked British Guy looks worried. Well, Lucas assumes that expression means “worried”, it could just as easily mean “wow he’s a dumbass”. “...no,” he says at last. “No, it was at least half an hour from here.”
“Okay,” Lucas says slowly. “Okay.” He tries to think back to who he started the night with. “Do you know Jennifer? Blonde, stupidly hot?” Naked British Guy shakes his head. “What about Caleb?”
Naked British Guy screws up his face and does something with his arms that’s a cross between a really bad Jack Sparrow impression and someone trying to swat away a wasp while also carrying a tray full of glasses they’d really like not to drop.
“Yes,” Lucas says. “Caleb. We both know Caleb.” He frowns as the implications of this sink in. “Actually that’s kind of not a relief.”
“He’s in one of my creative writing classes,” Naked British Guy provides. “His poetry is really, really disturbing.”
“It is,” Lucas agrees.
Lucas tries to think back to the last memory he has containing Caleb but everything’s a bit of a blur and he’s going to fucking kill him if he slipped something into Lucas’ drink. Again.
“Was your friend having a party here last night?” he asks.
Naked British Guy shrugs. “I don’t know,” he says. “Not one I was planning on going to, anyway.”
Lucas tries to piece together last night some more. “And this is definitely an accident because I’m ninety percent certain the guy I was planning on seducing at my party last night wasn’t British.”
Naked British Guy arches an eyebrow. He has crazy good eyebrows, Lucas can’t help noticing. “I’m judging you a little bit right now,” he says. “Just so you know.”
Lucas waves a vague hand. “I’ve been judged harder by guys with less clothing and bitchier eyebrows.”
“I’m naked,” Naked British Guy points out and oh, yeah, right, point.
“Did we have sex?” Lucas asks.
Naked British Guy peers dubiously at the sheets and then at Lucas. “You can’t tell?”
“Why would I-” Lucas begins.
“I top,” Naked British Guy says, waving a vague hand at the bed. It’s kind of sexy, even if his hair is a fucking wreck and he looks barely conscious.
“It doesn’t feel like you fucked me,” Lucas says, blunt, because he burned out his shyness somewhere around that time Caleb quietly instigated an orgy and then left to go get high in the garden while everyone else was left to deal with the consequences.
“Okay,” Naked British Guy says. “So we’re naked in bed together at my friend’s house where neither of us started the night and we probably didn’t have sex.”
“Sounds like a waste of a night,” Lucas remarks, and peers over the edge of the bed to find there’s plausibly two sets of clothes on the floor. That’s nice, it would suck to have to do the walk of shame without clothes.
There’s a knock at the door and they both scramble to hide under the covers without touching each other, and a really pretty girl who looks far too tidy and collected walks in carrying two mugs of coffee.
“Oh, so this is where you ended up,” she says, sounding bored. “I bring coffee.”
“Hi, Zoe,” Naked British Guy says, grimacing. “Er, I don’t suppose you know-”
“It’s a long and boring story,” she says, handing over the coffee.
“I wouldn’t mind hearing it anyway,” Lucas tells her.
“No,” she says, “I mean, that’s what you guys told me when you turned up on my doorstep last night. You said it’s a long and boring story and then disappeared up here. Not even in a get-a-room way.”
Lucas exchanges a look with Naked British Guy. “I got nothing,” he says.
“Pity,” Zoe remarks. “But if you could drink your coffee and get dressed and leave soon I’d be grateful.”
Naked British Guy scrubs a hand through his hair, biting awkwardly at his lip. “Yeah,” he says, “I’ll get on that. Er, thanks, and stuff.”
They drink their coffee in silence and then work through the clothes on the floor together until they’re both dressed, and Lucas has to amend his inner monologue to include just plain British Guy now.
“Well, this has been interesting,” British Guy says.
“Yeah,” Lucas responds distractedly, trying to work out where he is; not too far from his own house, he thinks, probably only a few blocks from the look of things. It has been interesting but also a waste of that outfit he was in last night; he knows he looked fuckable. “It’s been nice to meet you, No-Longer-Naked-British-Guy.”
British Guy laughs and ducks his head and in direct sunlight it makes Lucas’ brain go oh. “I’m Nick,” he says, holding out a hand.
Lucas takes it. “Hi,” he says. “I’m Lucas.”
ii.
“You woke up naked in bed with Nick Hoult?” Caleb demands, and then rocks back on his bed and cackles.
Even after two years of knowing Caleb Lucas still isn’t sure which bits are drugs and which bits are his actual personality.
“Hey,” Lucas says. “I know this is all your fault, somehow. Indirectly. Whatever.”
“He’s in my creative writing class,” Caleb continues, ignoring him. “He writes some fucked-up stuff.”
“He said the same thing about you,” Lucas tells him.
Caleb waves his hands around because he has a whole range of crazy-looking arm gestures for all occasions. Talking to him is often like watching semaphore.
“No, I mean, like, fucked up. He has this whole past with, like drug problems and shit and he writes all this stuff about it. It’s like crazy sexy too.”
Lucas narrows his eyes. “Do you have a secret crush on him? Is that why I woke up in bed naked with him?”
Questions like this don’t make sense to normal people, but Caleb isn’t normal. “I don’t have a crush on him,” Caleb says in a way that would be withering on other people but on him just looks vague. “I am in no way responsible for you waking up using his chest as a pillow.”
Lucas considers this for a while. “What kind of drug problems? Like, you drug problems, or...”
“I don’t have a drug problem,” Caleb informs him loftily, pushing himself upright. “This is not a problem. It’s awesome. And anyway, no, like bad drugs, weird trips, all that shit.” He waves his hands around a bit and it worries Lucas that he can interpret all the things Caleb isn’t saying.
“Huh,” Lucas murmurs, because he didn’t peg Nick as the type.
“America’s his fresh start,” Caleb says. “He told us that and then he told us this story that made no fucking sense. It was, like, literate but it made no sense. I think it was just about fucking someone against a bathroom sink.”
Lucas thinks about sunlight glinting off Nick’s eyelashes. “Aren’t all the good stories about that?”
Caleb laughs and flops back onto his bed and one day Lucas will ask him about what exactly it is that he takes and why. “Amen,” Caleb tells his ceiling. “Amen.”
iii.
Lucas doesn’t make a habit of hanging out in the library because he has a reputation of sorts to keep up and anyway he has no interest in watching the geeks attempting to get each other’s attention when he could be out being a skank and helping closeted fratboys work out their tensions - Caleb’s written a poem about him, actually, it’s kind of awesome and all the words have four syllables - but, periodically, he has to hand in an assignment or two so he doesn’t flunk out completely.
Another reason he hates the library is that it discriminates. All the shelves are stupidly high and there are no kickstools around ever and every single book he ever needs is on the top shelf. It’s okay for girls, who are, on average, shorter than Lucas but who can just look helpless until a guy gets a book for them - the guys around here must get so much pussy, Lucas is kind of mad about it even if he doesn’t actually want it - but Lucas doesn’t have that option. He just gets to look like a loser.
He’s fighting to get a book down, stood on tip-toes and silently cursing, when a hand easily picks up his book and he turns to find Nick is standing there, just a little too close and looking guilty.
“Sorry,” he says, handing it to Lucas and suddenly, oh suddenly Lucas gets why this whole thing is meant to be kind of sexy. “I just couldn’t watch you try any more. This is the one you need, right?”
Lucas considers his options and finally sighs and says: “I need volume two, too.”
Nick gets that down for him as well and then steps back. He smells good, like good in a way he hadn’t when he was naked and ruffled-looking, clean and sharp and ugh, Lucas hates everything about this a lot.
“Is this going to be one of those things where we suddenly start meeting despite having never been in the same place ever before in our lives?” Lucas asks.
Nick shrugs. “Possibly? Is that going to be an issue? I can pretend not to see you next time if you like.”
Lucas looks down at his books, curling his fingers around them. “Nah,” he says. “It’s okay. Though I’m not thanking you for emasculating me or whatever, because, you know.”
“Fair enough,” Nick says with a soft smile, and Lucas is pretty sure Caleb is full of shit because while there’s something about Nick that suggests he could be bad with the right motivation most of him just looks vague and nice and English. Caleb probably just projects drug habits on everyone else because that’s how his world works. He hugs his own books to his chest; they’re noticeably thinner than Lucas’, which seems unfair somehow. “I’ll just never mention it.”
Lucas grins at him as they reach the end of the aisle, where Nick is promptly knocked into by a girl who, when Lucas studies her as she bends down to help Nick pick his stuff up, probably did that on purpose. She’s certainly flashing enough cleavage from this angle; he thinks about telling her she’s barking up the wrong tree, but decides to leave that to be Nick’s problem.
Nick shuts her down admirably, with this friendly smile that somehow isn’t friendly at all, and absolutely refuses her offers of coffee, her number, and an apologetic hug.
“Damn,” Lucas remarks as she walks off, “that was mean, Naked British Guy.”
“I don’t know if you’d noticed, but I’m actually wearing three layers,” Nick points out.
“You’ll always be naked to me,” Lucas drawls, and Nick rolls his eyes.
“I assume I’ll see you around,” he says, and walks off.
Lucas grins and then looks down to see there’s a piece of paper mostly hidden under one of the shelves, and bends down to retrieve it. The handwriting on it is messy, scattered, but still just about legible.
And you tell me oh the stars have scattered oh they’re falling in rhythms down your arms and I can’t help laughing biting at the words as they fall and you’ve never been more beautiful than you are like this with your smile and your spilling eyes and your legs and your legs and your legs and your legs and I can’t hear a thing with your mouth against my throat and asking me not to stop or maybe to stop and what’s permission anyway with the mirror cold against my hands you screaming rain into my skin.
Lucas reads to the end, eyebrows raising higher with every line, and finally takes his books to a table semi-hard and somewhat bemused.
He writes short drug-crazed stories about fucking people against sinks he texts Caleb.
You really need to start listening to me about this shit, Caleb tells him.
Lucas bites his lip. How do I get into your creative writing class?
Don’t even, Caleb replies.
iv.
Nick’s making out with a guy with dark hair in the kitchen, sat on the sideboard with his legs around the guy’s waist. Lucas only came in here to get more ice but he’s watching now, kind of fascinated. He shouldn’t let Caleb mix him drinks.
Eventually, Nick breaks off, and turns his head, lips bruised and startling. “Hotter or less hot than the short story you’re about to tell me you didn’t read?”
Lucas considers if for a moment. “Less hot,” he decides eventually. “Have we made out, d’you think?”
Random Guy doesn’t seem to be bothered by this conversation in the slightest, sucking bruises into Nick’s throat. Lucas kind of wants to ask him to stop but, hey, he’s not the one who’s going to have to wear scarves for the next week.
“I don’t remember,” Nick offers. “I don’t remember us meeting. How did we meet?”
Lucas shrugs, opening the freezer and letting the cool air hit his face. It’s refreshing. “I’m a slut,” he says. “It probably wasn’t complicated.”
Nick doesn’t say anything and when he turns back around he finds it’s because they’re kissing again, deep and dirty and distracted. Lucas can see where Nick’s tongue is sliding into the other guy’s mouth, and he thinks about what might have happened if he’d just gone with the waking-up-naked-in-bed-together thing rather than trying to rationalise it all.
“Isn’t America supposed to be your fresh start?” he asks.
Nick pulls away slightly, carding long white fingers though the guy’s hair. “I’m drunk,” he says. “I’m not high. There’s a differentiation.”
“If you say so,” Lucas says.
The guy makes an annoyed sound. “Is he going to be here talking all night?”
“He’s considering it,” Nick says, head tipped enough that Lucas can see one of his eyes glittering. “Have you ever commentated a blowjob, Lucas?”
“No,” Lucas says. “I could have a go, though.”
Nick makes a thoughtful sound and then pushes the guy away, slipping off the sideboard. “Sorry,” he says. “But the party’s still, you know, happening. You’ve got plenty of time to hit on someone else.”
This could get messy or ridiculous or bad but Lucas steps in, slipping an arm around Nick’s waist to keep him upright even though Nick’s, like, a lot taller than him. Lucas doesn’t have a lot of criteria but he likes that in a guy.
They end up in the garden where it’s quiet and someone’s strung fairylights for ambience while their friends fuck in the bushes or whatever. They sit on the grass and Nick hugs his knees and periodically picks up icecubes from the glass Lucas accidentally brought outside with him and slips them between his sore lips, grinning at Lucas with the ice between his teeth until Lucas shudders from just the thought.
“Do you smoke?” Nick asks at last, and Lucas shakes his head. Nick looks rueful. “Neither do I. Not anymore, anyway.”
He looks even prettier in the moonlight, mouth bitten and distracting, eyes shining.
“You’re thinking about kissing me,” Nick says at last.
He’d taste like someone else, though, and that’s only hot if it’s an intentional threesome, Lucas has learned.
“I think about kissing a lot of people,” he says instead.
Nick falls back into the grass, blades of it between his fingers. “You should go back to the party,” he says at last. “Let Caleb get you wasted and push you in the direction of some pretty guy from your Thursday afternoon classes.”
“Wednesday afternoon,” Lucas corrects. “What about you?”
“I’m alright,” Nick says, and he sounds a little wondering at the words. “I mean, you could stay, but neither of us want that.”
(The next morning Caleb takes him out for brunch, which isn’t a meal so much as the munchies, and Alex shifts to get comfortable with the just-been-fucked feeling still skidding through him from morning sex with a guy in his economics class, and listens to a girl he thinks he should recognise telling her friend Nick fucking Hoult slept in my garden last night.
“Why is that a big deal?” he asks Sean, who’s licking cream off his fingers despite the fact nothing he’s ordered has actually come with cream on it.
Caleb rolls his eyes. “He’s the tall hot British guy who cockblocks himself and writes these long epic stories about his badass past,” he says, “everyone knows who he is.”
Well. That’s a thought.)
v.
“I have a crush on my lit professor,” Nick says, with the tone of voice of someone playing I Never.
They’re in the campus coffee shop and all they have to hand are espresso shots, which aren’t a good idea.
“Is he, like, old?” Lucas asks. “Do you want him to put you over his knees and make you recite Shakespeare while he spanks you?”
Nick narrows his eyes. “That’s an oddly specific fantasy,” he says.
“I have hidden depths,” Lucas offers, tracing spilled sugar across the tabletop with a fingertip.
“You own a cowboy hat,” Nick says. When Lucas’ head snaps up, he adds: “you’re presumably hearing stories about me, I’m allowed to hear stories about you.”
“Yeah,” Lucas says, “but your stories are kind of cool.”
“My stories end in an ambulance,” Nick replies. “Anyway, I have a crush on my lit professor.”
“Doesn’t sound any better the second time around,” Lucas tells him. “At least my dirty little secrets come with costumes.”
Nick smirks, quick and self-deprecating, fingers tapping in that way that Lucas has come to realise means he wants a cigarette. He’s learning things, mannerisms, the way Nick’s mouth twists when he doesn’t want to answer a question.
They no longer pretend that running into each other is coincidental.
“Are you offering to lend me the cowboy hat?” Nick asks.
“No,” Lucas says. “The cowboy hat is only for people who intend to actually get laid.”
Nick laughs and it’s beautiful and Lucas is angry for a moment about Nick’s self-imposed celibacy because all he really wants to do is take him back to his dorm room and bite him all over. That’s what Lucas does in these kinds of situations because that’s all that really makes sense to him. Sex is just easier.
(“No, it isn’t,” Nick told him once, quick and sharp. “Not anymore, anyway.”)
“Fine,” Lucas says, “I’ll come to your damn lecture. If only so I can mock you properly.”
Lucas isn’t taking any English classes so he doesn’t really know any of the students here and the lecture room is unfamiliar; Nick rolls his eyes as he just stands there and grabs his hand, tugging him into a seat near the front. Lucas’ heart is beating too hard and he’s not even sure why, not really, and he doesn’t let go and neither does Nick, not until the lecturer walks in and bam, Nick drops Lucas’ hand, burnt.
Lucas is completely ready to hate the guy until he starts talking, brisk and Scottish, the word fuck interlaced in half the sentences, mouth fixed in this grin that’s startling and delicious and oh, okay, this is completely understandable after all.
“I kind of hate you,” he tells Nick afterwards. “Now I have a crush on your lecturer and I don’t even have an excuse to go to your fucking lectures.”
Nick grins at him, wide and unrepentant, and Lucas makes a mental note to be someone’s booty call tonight.
“Weren’t you saying something about spanking and Shakespeare?” Nick asks.
“Hate,” Lucas repeats.
vi.
“I am not picking you up from your pottery class,” Lucas tells Caleb. “Actually, that’s not even the issue, why the fuck are you taking a pottery class?”
“Have you made shit out of clay while stoned?” Caleb asks. “Because it’s awesome, man.”
“Your life choices make literally no sense to me,” Lucas replies. “I mean, no sense.”
“Whatever,” Caleb says. “Kick out whatever piece of closeted prettyboy you’ve got lounging around your bed today and come get me from my fucking pottery class.”
“Aren’t we supposed to sleep together before you get demanding and bitchy?” Lucas mutters, but all Caleb does is laugh his own special brand of cracked laughter and hang up on him.
Lucas has timeshares in a battered car with two of his housemates, which tends to work out well for none of them, although Lucas has learned his lesson when it comes to sex in the backseat of anything, so at least there’s a minimum of unattractive stains. It’s still outside his house, though, which is a good start, and Lucas tries to pretend for a while that he resents Caleb’s implications and then remembers that he’s only doing that because he kicked out the guy he spent the afternoon in bed with before Caleb called.
Sex is less fun these days. He has no idea what that’s about.
Caleb’s directions are notoriously unreliable but he stops off at campus and finds an actual flyer for the pottery class telling him where it’s happening, and finds that at least Caleb had the presence of mind to call him before it actually started, so Lucas isn’t going to be hours late getting to him. That’s happened before.
The class are spilling into the steps when he drives up, but Caleb isn’t with them, which isn’t really a surprise. Lucas huddles into his leather jacket a little more, defence mechanism, and goes inside.
Caleb is waxing lyrical with clay-covered fingers and that growl to his voice that Lucas used to find sexy back when he was trying to work out how to classify Caleb in his head.
“Dude,” he says, “you can’t ask me to pick you up and then, you know, not actually leave.”
Caleb turns to him with one of his pretty crazy smiles and the guy next to him who Lucas hadn’t even noticed laughs a very familiar laugh.
“I don’t even want to know why you take a pottery class,” he tells Nick.
Nick shrugs, long fingers still sliding up the sides of what’s apparently a vase. “Reminds me of rehab,” he says.
“Wow,” Lucas says. “That’s cheerful.”
He thinks the teacher, who’s packing up on the other side of the room, is laughing at them. He doesn’t turn to look.
“I also got good at this,” Nick tells him and, well, yeah, that actually looks like an actual pot or whatever, as opposed to the artistic but ultimately kind of dreadful thing in front of Caleb.
Nick dips his fingers in water and returns them to the pot he’s still forming. There’s a smudge of dried clay on his cheek and Lucas never thought that scene in Ghost was hot, he just thought it looked messy, but there’s something about Nick’s fingers slick and long and delicate carefully sliding through the wet clay that’s nothing short of breathtaking.
“We’re not re-enacting Ghost,” Nick tells him without even looking up.
Caleb bursts into happy laughter and if Lucas is about to find out he did this on purpose Lucas is going to fucking kill him this time.
“Didn’t even cross my mind,” he lies.
“There are at least three guys in here who’d be willing to smear you in wet clay while fucking you,” Nick says quietly, carefully forming the last lip of the vase with shivering fingers. “Turn up earlier next week.”
“Are you, like, pimping out your pottery class?” Lucas enquires.
Nick looks up at him long enough to flash a grin with teeth.
“That’s not something we generally do in here, Mr Hoult,” the teacher calls over mildly, but she doesn’t sound like she minds all that much.
“We should get frozen yogurt,” Caleb announces, like he’s the first person to ever, ever think of this.
“Alright,” Lucas says, because he’s not actually opposed to this at all. Caleb’s munchies are usually a good excuse to go for awesome food at ridiculous times. “Nick?”
“I’m going to finish this up,” Nick says quietly. “And then I am going home for a very, very long bath.”
“It’s okay,” Caleb says, getting up and knocking a shoulder into Lucas’, “I can flirt with you all night and then go home without sleeping with you too.”
“My life,” Lucas says bleakly.
Nick laughs, eyes still on his vase, and offers: “I hear the guy who works behind the counter is pretty easy.”
“God,” Lucas says, “do you have, like, a list called People Lucas Can Sleep With Who Aren’t Me?”
“Maybe,” Nick says, dipping his fingers back in the water.
Lucas thinks about this for a moment, and then decides that actually saying whatever is or isn’t happening between us is very, very weird aloud will probably make things worse.
“Okay,” he shrugs instead. “Enjoy your clay.”
“I didn’t do that on purpose,” Caleb says when they’re in the car.
“I don’t care,” Lucas says, horribly aware his hands are shaking.
“You do,” Caleb sighs, slumping down in his seat and closing his eyes. “You really do.”
vii.
Nick arches an eyebrow when he sees Lucas waiting outside his lecture hall for him, leant against his car in sunglasses he thinks he stole from Caleb at some point because these scream stoned rockstar and Lucas is pretty sure he wouldn’t have actually bought them.
“Roadtrip?” Lucas suggests.
Nick glances over his shoulder at the people Lucas is starting to loosely recognise as Nick’s study group; it scares him, sometimes, how much he’s starting to know about him. Sometimes he thinks he might know more about Nick’s life than he does about his own, which is ridiculous because he knows nothing about Nick except the fragments he picks up from awkward silences and reading the bits of paper scattered on his bedroom floor.
“Sure,” Nick says, and folds himself into shotgun, helping himself to another pair of Caleb’s sunglasses left on the dashboard.
They play the radio too loud and bicker over the stations and open the windows too wide and laugh about nothing in particular, and Nick taps his fingers on his knee like he’s thinking about cigarettes and Lucas wants to cover his hand with his own to make him stop, but that’s dangerous, yeah?
“What set this off?” Nick asks, on a lull, radio turned down and stuck in traffic heading out of town.
“Nothing,” Lucas says. It’s mostly a lie; there’s a pretty guy lying asleep in Lucas’ bed and Lucas has no idea what his name is and no interest in knowing and once that used to feel like a badge of honour but now it just feels like surrender, bitter and never enough.
Nick’s mouth twists, one of the awkward movements Lucas still hasn’t deciphered yet, and says: “alright”.
There’s nowhere to go really, not if they want to be back for tomorrow’s classes - which they both do, not that they’ll ever admit it - but there’s a hill outside of town and if you drive up it you can survey everything and feel like a king for a few hours. It’s starting to get dark and the lights below are bright and blurring and beautiful.
Nick skips his fingers over cans of soda and selects beer instead, and Lucas opens his mouth to say something and then closes it again, cracks open another 7UP, designated driver and all that. It can’t be that he doesn’t trust himself. They drink in silence, eyes on the view, sat on the hood and leant back against the windshield and Lucas keeps his sunglasses on even though it isn’t really worth it anymore.
“You look ridiculous,” Nick says, sunglasses pushed on top of his head and hair sticking up, and Lucas wants to say the same and doesn’t.
They watch the sunset, shoulder to shoulder, and when it’s over Nick buries his face in Lucas’ neck and breathes and Lucas curls into him, fingertips under his t-shirt and pressed to the warm skin stretched over Nick’s hipbone.
“This is a designated makeout spot,” Nick says eventually, quietly, carefully.
Lucas closes his eyes. “I know.” He shifts until Nick pulls away, falls back against the windshield. He isn’t drunk, Lucas knows, but blurring a little, edges worn raw and smooth.
Nick reaches up, curls a finger around the arm of Lucas’ sunglasses and tugs them off. “You spend a lot of time thinking about kissing me,” he murmurs.
There are too many answers to that, and Lucas is, underneath it all, a better guy than even he himself knows. “Not as much time as you spend thinking about kissing me,” he says instead, and looks away so he doesn’t have to catch Nick’s expression.
“Touché,” Nick allows, and sighs.
This is the most awful and the most wonderful situation Lucas has ever caught himself in, and he keeps his eyes on the city, on the thousands of people down there who aren’t fucked up and tired and less confused than they probably should be by all this. After a while, Nick shifts, wrapping arms around Lucas from behind and pressing his face into the back of his shoulder.
I think you’re what going mad feels like, Lucas thinks, and then tries to work out if he’s found poetry a few years too late or if he read that on yet another post-it left careless on Nick’s desk.
He drops a hand to where Nick’s fingers are interlaced over his stomach, leaves it there for a moment, and then pulls away.
“We should get back,” he says, and Nick doesn’t fight him.
They keep the radio down on the drive back, and Nick falls asleep with his face pressed to the window. Lucas watches him more than he watches the road but it’s alright, there’s not much traffic, and if he runs one red light because he’s more in love than he thought he’d ever be no one will blame him.
viii.
As it turns out, Nick’s friend Zoe just happens to be best friends with Lucas’ friend Jennifer, which feels like one of those things that shouldn’t really happen but does.
“You two are, like, fated,” Caleb says. Lucas kicks him under the table, and Nick ducks his head, hair falling into his eyes.
“You are dating, right?” Jennifer says. Lucas wonders what exactly Nick’s said about him. He wonders if Nick ever says anything about him.
“Actually, we’re not,” Lucas says, because Nick’s staring at his nails and any minute now Caleb’s going to pull out his cigarettes and they’ll be in for a world of withdrawal regret. “We’re really not.”
“I have no idea what gave you that idea,” Nick says, looking up, grin wicked and pleased like an in-joke. Except that Lucas isn’t sure either of them are actually in on this one, and that’s the shittiest part.
“Jesus,” Zoe mumbles, reaching for her coffee.
They’re all out for breakfast or Caleb’s morning munchies or whatever they’re calling it, and they’re not playing footsie under the table because footsie would imply flirting and this is something else, something worse, because their ankles are entwined where no one can see and Nick’s talking about their stupid hot waiter and Lucas is, for some reason, joining in.
“You do realise everyone thinks he’s your boyfriend?” Jennifer says, glaring at Lucas.
“Well, that explains why the last guy who fucked me apologised,” Lucas muses.
“You’re not bothered?” Zoe demands and, yeah, that’s Caleb pulling out his cigarettes. They should’ve sat inside where he couldn’t do this.
“They love it,” he drawls easily, wearing dorky sunglasses and an I haven’t-slept-in-three-days grin. “Nearly as much as they love each other.”
Lucas feels his heart stop and Nick’s foot slides away from his like it’s been burned. “What the fuck,” Lucas says.
“Too far,” Nick adds.
Caleb waves a vague hand. “Nothing you didn’t already know and hadn’t made your peace with.”
“Oh my God,” Jennifer says, covering her face with her hands, “oh my God, this is the worst.”
“Car crash,” Zoe agrees.
Lucas can’t look at Nick but that’s okay because he knows Nick isn’t looking at him; walled-off and quiet in a way he never is when Lucas is sleeping on his floor because they watched movies until it got too late, and he’s got a single bed and neither of them are stupid. Nick always wakes up first and brings him tea in a chipped mug and Lucas likes it and it doesn’t matter anymore, whatever he can and can’t have, whatever it is that keeps him awake smiling at his ceiling and flirting with other guys because it’s really all he knows how to do.
Caleb’s phone chirps and he looks at it and then at Lucas. “Your housemate wants you to know that conquest number whatever is awake and cooking them all breakfast, do you want to keep him?”
Lucas rolls his eyes.
“Does he actually have a number?” Jennifer asks.
“Not one I’m telling you,” Lucas replies. He risks a look at Nick, who’s staring at his shaking hands and biting into his lower lip. He can’t work out if he wants a cigarette or if he just wants to avoid Lucas; none of this really makes any sense when you get right down to it.
Caleb laughs, cracking in the sunshine, and after a moment Nick’s foot slides in line with Lucas’ again.
ix.
Caleb’s parties are the absolute worst, the kind where if you’re upright and alive in the morning you feel like you’ve earned a gold star of some sort and that karmic retribution is probably coming to fuck you up one day. The worst bit about them is that Caleb never lets on which parties are his; he gets other people to host them and it’s only when you can’t feel your legs and are sobbing to a Cure CD that you realise Caleb was behind it all.
“I’m never leaving my house again,” Lucas informs the carpet, and it takes a monumental effort to roll onto his back. He has no idea what he took or what was given to him and if he’s drunk or high or some unholy combination of the two, and all he really knows is that at least this isn’t one of Caleb’s orgy parties because no one can move.
Caleb is playing disjointed notes on his guitar, fingers flickering and there’s candlelight which is such a shitty idea, really, they’re going to die in a fire, who’s house is this anyway?
“That would be a pity,” Nick offers. He’s lying about a foot away, curled onto his side, eyes glittering in the light and smile lopsided. He’s just drunk, Lucas knows, because Caleb’s a lot of things but he’s not the level of cruel you need to give a recovering addict actual drugs. That’s a mercy of sorts.
Lucas rolls his eyes. “What the fuck do you know.”
“More than you do,” Caleb offers, and there are murmurs of assent from those still conscious. Caleb is cradling his guitar and he plays waterfalls of broken chords from time to time, humming what it ought to sound like, beautiful and cracked and still so perfect despite it all.
Lucas closes his eyes and drifts off and when he wakes up it’s to Caleb saying: “worst thing you ever did.”
“Girlfriend in a coma.”
“Smiths song.”
“Douglas Coupland novel,” Nick counters, and Lucas fucking hates Caleb’s parties.
Someone who isn’t Nick or Lucas or Caleb starts humming the chorus.
“Really?” Lucas asks the ceiling.
“Boyfriend in a coma,” Nick amends. “Well, no. Fuckbuddy in a coma?”
“Rolls off the tongue less easily,” Lucas offers.
Caleb’s picking out the fucking song on his guitar and Lucas has no idea if any of this is even real. Candlelight and buzzing limbs and everything about him hurts. Caleb’s parties work on a don’t ask, don’t tell basis; you don’t ask what he’s put in your drink and he doesn’t tell and if you survive you don’t learn and you come back for more.
“Too many syllables,” Nick agrees, and Lucas doesn’t know when he got so close, reaching a shaking hand to slide fingers through his hair.
There are times when I could have strangled her Caleb creaks, and Nick’s eyelashes are too fucking long and his eyes are dark, shrouded in flickering candlelight, and his elbow is digging into Lucas’ chest and if he moved a couple of millimetres oh, oh he could ruin everything. Nick exhales and Lucas can taste it and their faces are touching everywhere except the mouth and Lucas has no idea why he isn’t leaning into it when he can blame it on Caleb and cheapen the whole thing later. Nick’s fingers slide from his hair to spider against his cheek and they’re breathing each other’s breath now and Caleb’s voice is cracking up and down the song before it slips into something else, something Lucas doesn’t recognise, and Nick makes a soft broken sound and shifts so his face is pressed into Lucas’ shoulder.
“It’s okay,” Lucas says, even though it isn’t, and bookmarks that as the best fucking kiss he never had.
x.
Nick’s mouth is as soft as it always looked like it would be, biting lingering kisses into Lucas’ neck, and the music is thudding from downstairs and neither of them even wanted to be here, they just got dragged along because everyone else they knew was going and Caleb swore absolutely blind that this wasn’t one of his parties.
The fact that this is twice as disastrous as any of Caleb’s parties have ever managed to be is just the fucking cherry on top, really.
They were supposed to be watching movies tonight, something artsy and pretentious and black and white and Nick had assured him he’d hate it with a grin full of teeth and Lucas had agreed to watch it anyway, ignoring the mumble of pussy whipped behind him because when did their whole damn uni get so involved in something that’s none of their business anyway? Except then Caleb called up and whined and said a number of ridiculous things and they agreed to come here and now Lucas is pinned to the wall by a shivering Nick, trying to work out if turning his head and making at least some of this into actual kissing would make it worse or make it better.
Lucas doesn’t even know whose house this is, where they are, what they’re doing, but there’s something desperate and frantic in all of this and it’s the wrong place, the wrong time, the wrong everything and Lucas can’t pull away, won’t pull away, doesn’t know how to pull away. He’s got the fingers of one hand curled in the back of Nick’s hair and the other hand alternates between clenching in the back of Nick’s t-shirt and stretching out into air like someone begging for a lifeline.
Nick’s drunk, okay, like the kind of drunk that would leave Lucas incapable of standing up and he’s no lightweight, the kind of drunk that you really, really shouldn’t get if you’re hoping to recover from anything, and his fucking hands are everywhere and every part of Lucas is screaming that he should stop this before they manage to ruin everything and he can’t, he can’t.
“We should,” he breathes, unable to work out if it’s a plea to start or to stop, and he was perfectly happy flirting with this guy who may or may not be in his Monday afternoon lectures when Nick just pounced, arm around Lucas’ shoulders and the bitterest of sorry, he’s taken which Lucas isn’t, they both know that, and then Nick was hustling him upstairs with his hands under Lucas’ shirt and his mouth nipping kisses along his jaw and Lucas can’t stop him because he doesn’t want to stop him and he supposes they’ll both have to live with that.
Nick pushes and Lucas pushes back and they end up on the bed in a tangle of limbs and Nick’s breathing sharp and fast into his ear and Lucas can feel how hard he is from the leg that’s ended up between Nick’s thighs and oh God this is too much, it’s not right, they shouldn’t do this when Nick’s barely in control of himself and when they haven’t even kissed yet.
“Nick,” he says, pushing, hating himself for it. “Nick.”
He pushes again, hard, and Nick falls away from him, staring at him with wide betrayed eyes, until they focus a little more and yep, there it is.
Nick curls into himself immediately and apart from the thumping beat from downstairs all they can hear is each other’s ragged breathing; Lucas still flat on his back, still fucking hard - and maybe that’s the worst part - and Nick sitting up at the end of the bed, arms wrapped around himself.
“I’m sorry,” Lucas says, and he doesn’t realise he’s crying until his tears start rolling into his ears. “I’m so sorry.”
Nick makes this wounded sound and all Lucas can see of him are trembling shoulders and he wants to reach out and touch him and knows that that would be the stupidest thing to do in this situation. He pushes himself upright though, curls trembling fingers into his palms.
“Look at me,” he whispers, and his voice is shaking and breaking, “Nick, please just look at me.”
It’s like dropping a glass, what happens next; Nick shatters and Lucas has never seen anyone cry like that, these deep, angry sobs that sound like something ripping, aching and repetitive and so fast Nick can barely breathe, and Lucas has no idea what to do with that level of raw devastation in front of him.
The door bangs open; Caleb looks at them for a long moment and then takes off his sunglasses, breathing: “Jesus Christ, you two.”
Lucas looks at him pleadingly because he doesn’t know what else to do, and Caleb sighs and says: “get out.”
Nick doesn’t move and Lucas doesn’t want to go and doesn’t want to stay and Caleb glares until Lucas gets off the bed. He’s shaking all over and his head is swimming and Nick still won’t look at him and in the end he walks out because there’s nothing left to do. Caleb closes the door behind him and Lucas leaves the party, bumping into people and tripping over his own feet, and manages two and a half blocks before he throws up in someone’s garden. He sits on the kerb until the sun rises, and no one says anything when he finally makes it home and passes out.
xi.
The next week is very long and very quiet and very scary. Lucas lives in almost permanent fear of running into Nick even though he knows his haunts and is consequently avoiding them, and Caleb informs him bluntly that he will never need a ride home from his pottery class ever again.
“Are you mad at me?” he asks when Caleb brings over black coffee and Red Vines.
“Not as mad as you are at yourself,” Caleb responds on a shrug, lighting a cigarette even though he knows Lucas doesn’t like him smoking in here.
Lucas sighs and reaches for a coffee and fights not to ask if Nick’s said anything and if so, what it was.
A few days later he gets a text from Nick: am I avoiding you or are you avoiding me?
Lucas hesitates before he replies I don’t know anymore.
They meet in a park the next afternoon; Nick looks tired, worn, and his smile is real but broken. He pulls Lucas into a hug, shaking and desperate, and they cling to each other for a few minutes, breathing each other in. Lucas keeps his eyes shut because he feels like whatever they say next isn’t going to end well and he didn’t even know it was possible to miss someone as much as he’s missed Nick.
“This... there’s no easy way to say this,” Nick says later. He’s got his eyes on his knees and his hands are trembling.
“Just say it,” Lucas replies.
Nick looks up, catches his eyes. “It’s... it’s not...”
“I know,” Lucas tells him. “But say it anyway.”
Nick shuts his eyes and says: “you make me want to relapse.”
The words are like being punched in the stomach; they take all the breath out of Lucas and they hurt, oh dear God they hurt.
They’ve cried at each other enough for a lifetime so he bites the inside of his mouth until his vision stops blurring, and says: “I know.”
Nick’s twisting his fingers together and Lucas wants to tell him to stop but he can’t, so he just sits and waits until he can’t stand it anymore and says: “what do you need?”
“My therapist says you’re bad for me,” Nick says. “And I’ve been trying to hide in a hundred different games and that’s not working out too well either.”
Lucas sighs. “So basically you need not to see me again.”
“You said it, not me,” Nick tells him, soft and sharp.
Something splinters.
“You’re a fucking coward,” Lucas snaps. “That’s all you are, really, you’re a fucking coward.”
Nick’s head shoots up and he stares at Lucas with hurt eyes but that doesn’t even matter because he doesn’t know the meaning of hurt.
“Well,” Lucas says, voice and body shaking, “one of us has to be brave here.” He scrubs a hand through his hair, laughs awkwardly, and says: “I’m in love with you.”
Nick’s eyes widen and his lips open like he’s trying to think of a response, and Lucas gets up and walks away.
“Lucas!” Nick yells, cracking, but Lucas doesn’t turn around. “Lucas!”
Caleb raises an eyebrow when he opens his door, and Lucas says: “I want whatever it is you take that makes you so fucked up all the time.”
“I don’t think-” Caleb begins, and oh, now, right, now he’s suddenly got a conscience.
“Either you give it to me or I’ll go and find someone else who doesn’t have any interest in my welfare at all and we’ll see how that ends,” Lucas tells him.
Caleb sighs, and says-
Lucas wakes up in the hospital.
xii.
“I brought grapes,” Caleb says. “I mean, like, I don’t know what they’re going to do to fix your arm, but, like, it’s what people do, right?”
“It is,” Lucas agrees, and watches Caleb dump the grapes with the cards and the flowers and the merciful lack of soft toys.
The doctors don’t know how he broke his arm and Lucas has absolutely no interest in finding out. He doesn’t remember anything of that night but that’s okay; he’s checked his phone and he knows with absolute certainty that he didn’t call Nick while under the influence of fuck-knows-what and that’s the important bit. That’s the only part that matters, really.
“It’s a hospital,” Lucas says as Caleb sticks a hand in his pocket, “you can’t actually smoke in here.”
Caleb shrugs and sits in the chair next to his bed and Lucas fights the urge to try and move his morphine drip somewhere out of reach.
“I don’t know how you guys do this,” he remarks eventually. “I mean, Jesus, I had one try at recreational drug use and I’ve got a broken arm.”
“What you were doing wasn’t recreational,” Caleb informs him, opening a box of chocolates that Lucas is pretty sure came from a one night stand. He’s not sure because he doesn’t quite recognise the name. He’d be ashamed but he’s too tired for it. “And it’s pretty simple. I don’t hate myself, so I have fun. Nick hates himself so he doesn’t have fun. And you hate Nick, so you screwed up completely.”
Lucas thinks about saying I don’t hate Nick and then remembers that Caleb always calls him out when he lies.
“I don’t only hate Nick,” he says instead.
“No,” Caleb agrees, “and that’s the tragic part. Can I write on your cast?”
Everyone else who’s come to see him has, so Lucas obediently holds his arm out and Caleb scribbles with a sharpie on his elbow, where he can’t see.
“I’ll be back tomorrow,” he informs Lucas. “I’ll bring beer.”
“No, you won’t,” Lucas replies.
Caleb glances blearily around, like he’s taking in where they are for the first time, and says: “fuck. No, I won’t.”
Lucas has been in the hospital for about a week; there was some stuff involving a concussion and some cracked ribs and he apparently walked himself into the ER, which is nice because it means that at least he’s got some shreds of self-preservation left somewhere inside him. They’re due to discharge him in a couple of days.
“It’s alright,” Lucas tells him. “I think this is known as a wake-up call.”
Caleb looks thoughtful. “Yeah,” he says, “but who for?”
When he’s gone, Lucas finds he’s left a white plastic poker chip on the covers by Lucas’ thigh. He frowns, turning it over with the fingers of his right hand, and it’s probably deliberate because Caleb might be crazy but he doesn’t generally have poker chips falling out of his sleeves. Unless that’s his new thing. Later, he does some awkward twisting in the bathroom mirror and finds that Caleb’s written DAY ONE on his arm.
His phone goes off at three in the morning; Lucas is awake anyway and he doesn’t need to look at the number withheld on the screen to know who it is.
He doesn’t say anything, and neither does Nick, and they just listen to each other breathing.
Lucas hangs up first. When he looks at the screen, it tells him it’s five forty-five a.m.
xiii.
The next time Lucas sees Nick, it’s three and a half months later and he’s just got out of a physiotherapy session.
Nick stops dead in the middle of the street and his expression is the most beautiful and terrible thing Lucas has ever seen.
(“He wrote a story about you,” Caleb informed him, cigarettes and alcohol and one of Lucas’ painkillers. “It was kind of incredible. The whole class cried. The teacher cried.”
Lucas thought about his answer for a while. “Did you cry?”
Caleb looked at him over his sunglasses. “Baby, I’ve done all the crying over you I’m ever going to do.”
Lucas shoved him and then said: “did Nick cry?”
“I’m not going to tell you,” Caleb responded, “because you don’t want to know.”
“True,” Lucas agreed.
“It was called The Last Train Home,” Caleb added.
“Fuck.”
“Yep.”)
They’re on opposite sides of the road and Lucas puts his good hand in his pocket and fingers the poker chip; Caleb’s upgraded him to red and gold. He can’t work out if Nick looks better or worse than he did the last time he saw him; his memories have turned Nick into something like a god and something like a monster and as it turns out Lucas isn’t any less in love with him. It’s kind of sad to find that out, and kind of a relief, and Lucas wishes he was still angry because all he is now is tired.
He thinks about crossing over and then can’t and Nick’s clearly in the same position because he’s frozen too.
“We probably shouldn’t do this,” Lucas yells and several passersby turn around and he doesn’t care.
“We shouldn’t!” Nick calls back on a relieved grin.
Lucas gets four steps before Nick shouts after him: “By the way, I miss you.”
He turns back but Nick’s already rounded the corner and that’s okay, that’s fine, they’ve both probably said enough.
“The way this isn’t getting better is kind of astonishing,” Zoe says later, iced coffee and a grimace. “Like, I’ve never seen something this clusterfucked. Ever.”
“You’ve read The Last Train Home, haven’t you?” Lucas says.
“Everyone has,” Zoe shrugs.
Lucas spends a while processing that. “Did it make you cry?”
“Like a child.” Zoe toys with her straw for a minute and then says: “so where’s your masterpiece?”
Lucas rolls up his sleeve and shows her where Caleb, deprived of a plaster cast, has written DAY ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHT straight onto his forearm.
“It’s pretty,” Zoe remarks at last.
“Oh,” Lucas sighs, “I know.”
xiv.
Lucas ends up getting a job in the campus coffee shop; he has all this free time on his hands now and as it turns out he makes a mean latte.
It takes two weeks for Nick to come in, and when he does he looks totally floored. Lucas thinks about it and then starts making his usual.
“I was never very good at small talk,” Nick says. “And I know you’re about to tell me that I don’t have to talk to you at all, but I want to, because you’re still the best friend I’ve ever had.”
“If I wasn’t in the same position I’d tell you how lame and depressing that is,” Lucas replies. “Since I am, I’ll just tell you that your coffee’s ready.”
Nick sits on the counter with his drink and Lucas waits for his supervisor to tell him that customers don’t get to sit there but she doesn’t, and that means everyone knows what’s going on and that’s kind of terrible.
Caleb turns up fifteen minutes later when Nick’s giving Lucas a blow-by-blow of his hot literature professor’s latest lecture and says: “damn, you two do not learn.”
Lucas puts on fresh coffee for Caleb’s double espresso and rolls up his sleeve. Caleb hands him a blue poker chip to start him off before writing DAY ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-THREE onto his arm. Lucas is very aware of Nick’s gaze on him but he doesn’t look because he doesn’t think he can bear it.
“You may as well tell him,” Caleb says when he’s got his coffee, ruffling a lazy hand through his hair and leaving.
Lucas can feel Nick waiting, and he serves three customers to buy time. In the end, he says: “So, like, in certain AA meetings you take a poker chip announcing that you’re not going to drink for the next thirty days.”
“I wasn’t really aware you had an alcohol problem,” Nick says, tone light, careful.
“I don’t,” Lucas replies. “This one’s for sex.”
“Oh,” Nick says. And that’s all he says.
“Yeah,” Lucas murmurs, laughs uncomfortably, and adds: “I think you should probably leave now.”
Later that night, he gets an email saying: I think you should probably email me your work schedule.
Trying to avoid me? He wishes he could snap in email, shout properly.
Tell me you want to see me and I’ll be there Nick responds almost instantly.
Half an hour later, Lucas emails him his schedule.
Caleb calls him up and talks to him until the urge to forget the damn promise he’s made to a piece of damn plastic has passed. He thinks about writing you make me want to relapse too but there’s already been too much oversharing and anyway, Nick’s got to know what they do to each other by now.
They’re taking bets in this bar I’m at as to which of you dies first, Caleb texts him later.
You go to the most fucked-up bars in the world, Lucas replies. After a couple of minutes, he adds: put a bet on Nick.
That’s funny, Caleb says, he said the same thing.
That isn’t funny at all.
No, Caleb agrees, it really isn’t.
xv.
“If this turns out to be one of your parties I’ll fucking kill you,” Lucas tells Caleb for the eighth time in the last half hour.
“Dude,” Caleb says, “I’m like your sponsor or whatever, sponsors don’t take their fucked-up recovering crazy people to their parties.”
“Am I going to find out after all this time that you’re actually secretly an awesome person?” Lucas asks.
“I’ve always been awesome,” Caleb shrugs, and takes another drag of his cigarette.
Parties like this are less fun when you’re sober and not planning on hooking up with anyone, but Caleb informed him it was an important valid test and Lucas supposes he was kind of right. Also, sober, he can tell that he’s easily slept with a third of the guys here, which isn’t really anything to be proud of.
“My life choices,” he says when he next runs into Caleb.
“I fucking know,” Caleb agrees.
He finds Nick in the garden, back against the French windows and eyes on the sky.
“Not drinking?” he asks.
“Learned my lesson,” Nick tells him, and Lucas sits down next to him. “What about you?”
“Next time I wake up naked in bed with someone I don’t know they’ll probably be selling my kidneys on ebay,” Lucas replies.
“Does that actually happen?” Nick asks.
“Caleb had a whole Powerpoint,” Lucas tells him. “I don’t know.”
You can just about find stars if you stare hard enough, and they pretend to pick out constellations for a while, while Lucas tries not to think about Nick’s skin and the way that he smells and the way that he feels when you’re pressed in desperate and close.
“What was the last line of your story?” he asks at last. He thinks he’s the only person on campus who hasn’t read it.
Nick sighs and plays with the fraying knee of his jeans and at last murmurs: “I don’t want to leave and I have no idea how to stay and oh, neither do you. Neither do you.”
Lucas pushes himself to his feet and offers Nick a hand which he reluctantly accepts. “I don’t want to be here,” he says, “and you definitely don’t. Come on.”
Lucas’ place is closer and they don’t look at each other as they shuck their jeans and climb into his bed.
“Clean sheets,” Nick mumbles, “it’s almost like you were planning this.”
“I never plan anything,” Lucas replies, and falls asleep with Nick’s heartbeat under his palm.
He wakes up in the morning to find Nick is watching him sleep, and he smiles a little in what he wants to be recognition and what probably looks like fear. Nick reaches to brush his hair out of his eyes, leaning closer, fingers curling against the base of Lucas’ skull as he presses their lips together. It’s careful and light and they’re both trembling when Nick pulls away, leaving Lucas’ mouth feeling bare and too-warm.
Lucas can see himself reflected in Nick’s eyes and it’s the most fragile, perfect sight, and there’s nothing to say anymore as he reaches for him, pulling Nick closer and guiding their mouths back together.
It’s a silent morning; Lucas’ housemates will all be asleep, passed out from last night, and Nick is a singing taut wire of fear and Lucas is pretty sure he’s not much better.
Lucas opens his mouth to Nick and tries not to hold him as tight as he wants to, so tight there’ll be bruises and marks and pain because he never, ever wants to let go. Nick moans, soft, breaking the moment and rolling so he’s on top, a jumble of limbs and weight on Lucas and Lucas doesn’t care if he suffocates here, wrapped up Nick, in the way he smells and tastes and feels.
Caleb finds them later, post-coital coffee and a silence easier than it ever has been, looks at their entwined fingers, and hands them each a white poker chip.
“Day one,” he says.