Fic: 'Whistling In The Dark'
Title: Whistling In The Dark
Fandom: WLiiA? UK
Wordcount: 4,817
Rating: R
Character(s): Tony/John, Tony/Ryan, Stephen, Richard (Vranch), others mentioned
Disclaimer: This is merely a fantasy of mine which I’ve put down in words, not intended to be anything like a representation of the truth.
Summary: The dissolution of a relationship, from both sides.
Notes: “There is a depressive side to me. I just sometimes get very low, I think people who feel a compulsion to be funny often do so to keep the darkness at bay. It's whistling in the dark.” - John Sessions, quoted in an article by Lynda Lee-Potter.
That was the thing about gossip - viral. Word took no time to flit from person to person, around the London showbiz circuit especially. Green rooms buzzed with grapevine info; it was served up alongside the coffee and sandwiches.
“Oh, c’mere, quick... did you hear...?”
“In the toilets!”
“Really?”
John had mused upon the idea that actors, upon receipt of Equity card and at the first sniff of agency interest, cut open their own chests and, in a satanic ritual, offered their own heart to the Devil in order to ensure big-time success. In lieu of a pulse, they ran on hearsay and caffeine.
“...saw them out for drinks in Oddfellows and his hand was...”
“...not even like they’re trying to be discreet...”
“...they were all over each other the other night...”
John refused to play - was in fact the social equivalent of the boy standing with his back to the crowd, ears plugged and eyes squeezed tight shut - so it took longer than it might have with anyone else for him to realise exactly what was going on. But still, he would have had to have been actually blind not to notice the looks they were giving him. Fuckers.
In the end, it was because he was monopolising the cafetiére with his own Ecuadorian beans that he was forced to talk to Paul. He had been lingering amidst the steam and the coffee smell (none of the Nescafé over by the machine), head down, eyes closed, when something large and soft bumped into his shoulder.
He looked up sideways, through half-open eyes (it had been a late night; a late, gin-soaked night). Pale suit, hands in pockets, blandly scrutinising eyes. It was Paul.
“Hello,” John said, one eye on his coffee.
“All right.” Statement, not question. “You look a bit off.” Statement, but explanation expected.
John faked a wry smile and raised his head a little. (The lights were too bright in here.) “Late night.”
“Happens to the best of us.” Paul shrugged, looked down at his shoes, and then up again, those interrogative eyes once more. He opened his mouth, closed it, and then tried again. “Here, you and... uh...”
John raised his head properly now, and turned to face Paul, coffee not forgotten but at least put on a mental hold. “Sorry?”
“Sorry.” Hands very firmly in pockets and shoulders halfway to being hunched in some kind of atavistic defence mechanism, Paul smiled - then stopped, just as quickly. “You and Tony.”
John’s heart missed a beat. Fear or relief? “Slattery?” he fenced, face burning.
“Yeah. You and him. How are, you know, uh...” John surely was mistaken in believing that there was some pinkness creeping into Paul’s cheeks now, too - surely? “You and him.”
He knows. I don’t know how he knows, but he knows. Supplied as a newsflash in a mental representation of Tony’s voice. Why? John couldn’t say. “We’re fine.” Of course he knows, this in his sister’s no-nonsense tone, it’s the worst kept secret in London.
They were fine, weren’t they? How long was it since he had last had Tony ‘round his, or been ‘round Tony’s? His guts slowly liquefying as the timeframe escaped him.
“Right, right.” Paul nodded, the tip of his right foot transcribing little circles on the carpet. Now an attempt at feigned nonchalance: “He’s, uh, been going out a lot with that Stiles fella recently.”
“Stiles?” Margaret’s disembodied voice: You sound like a parrot, John, say something proper, quick, now. “The Canadian newbie?” Oh, for heaven’s sake.
“Yeah.” Paul’s eyes, which had been watching as if with detached interest the motion of his own foot, looked up now and found John’s. In the face of this sudden intensity (and was that a kind of pity there?), John found it a little hard to catch his breath. “Listen, mate - you must’ve heard the rumours...”
“I haven’t, actually.” Frosty.
Paul looked down again, and palmed his coffee mug in both hands, bringing it up over his chest as if that would shield him. “Right,” he said, more subdued. “Well, maybe you should take a listen. Or better yet, maybe talk to Tony.”
Take a listen. John’s heart missed not one beat this time, but seemed to be sinking in his chest. Lower and lower, impacting his other organs: lungs, stomach, already fluid and fearful viscera. Take a listen. “Yes, thank you for the suggestion.” He turned away from Paul, back to the coffee sitting black and potent in the cafetiere, filling the world with the sharpness of its aroma. His world, anyway. The little world which had seemed so average today, up until this point. “I’ll keep it in mind.”
“John?” Paul was a solid, lumpen spectre beside him. “Are you all right?”
“Quite all right, thank you.” His head snapped up again, finding Paul’s nose (not the eyes, not the eyes) and looking him squarely in it. He stretched his mouth into a smile. “Would you mind keeping an eye on my coffee, Paul? I’ll be back in a moment.” He didn’t wait for Paul to reply. Instead, turned and left the green room, hands in pockets, shoulders back, not meeting anyone’s eyes.
...
It had begun with Ryan’s first show, and they had been on fire. Tony had, at first, been surprised at how easily it came, this improvisation lark. He’d done it before, of course - who hadn’t? - but Whose Line? was a televised ad lib orgy, a riot of fart jokes, sex jokes, incredulity and bonhomie. Tony was addicted. It was hard to beat the high of applause.
“Good show!” He put the little twist of English mockery into his words and grinned. Ryan - gangly, sweat-shiny and fresh-faced - smiled, leaning against the wall off-set, all angles and Canadian ease. Tony had to crane to meet his eyes. “You’ll be back, won’t you?”
“That’s up to the powers that be.” Ryan cocked his head. “I hope you’ll be around.” Some inflection to those words that made Tony tingle. He shoved his hands into his pockets and shifted from foot to foot. He had been able to feel the places Ryan’s hands had been on him all the way through the filming.
“Listen, do you want to go - ”
As if from nowhere - frightening the life out of him in a jolting split-second - Ryan’s mouth was on his, cutting off his words in a hot smooth smother that startled Tony’s eyes closed and electrified that tingle, shooting it blood-hot down his spine, up his legs, arrow-straight to his crotch. Physical echoes of the games played shivered over his skin, the memories of Ryan’s hands.
When Ryan broke away - he’d had to stoop - and looked at Tony from half-lidded eyes, the intimation made itself clear. There would be no drinks (not yet, anyway), no small talk, no dating. Want to play? New deal. Today only. No guarantees.
Tony, as a non-verbal answer to a non-verbal question, slipped his hands inside Ryan’s jacket and hooked his fingers in Ryan’s belt loops, and tugged him closer. (Brief thoughts of John, dizzying and disorienting, then pushed away.) The ghost of the studio lights’ heat was still an aura around both of them, charged with leftover laughter and the remnants of energy. Distantly, Tony was aware of offstage business going on, clatterings and shouts and murmurs and squeaks. The sound of the day being wound up. Outside, the night would be drawing in on London, cold creeping down the streets and windows lighting up, bars beginning to fill and offices beginning to empty. Out there somewhere, John would be, and drinks would be expected, and conversation. The thought of it was exhausting in a way Tony couldn’t define. “Shall we go somewhere more private?”
Ryan’s hands paused where they had been creeping around Tony’s waist, playfully tugging the shirt from his trousers. His fingertips grazed the bare skin there, and Tony’s breath caught in his throat. “Better had,” Ryan said, fingers travelling incrementally downward, to edge just under the waistband of Tony’s trousers. “Or they might never let me back on the show. They probably frown on traumatising technicians and all that.”
“Don’t be silly,” Tony said, voice miraculously even under the onslaught of Ryan’s touch, “traumatising techies is one of my favourite pastimes. I make a habit of - oh...” This last because of Ryan’s palm, cool and dry on his skin, inside his trousers. “Of... of...” It was useless now. His own hands found Ryan’s shirt, bunched it in his fists, pulling Ryan closer so that Tony was pressed back against the wall.
Ryan bent over him, one hand flat against the wall by Tony’s head, the other curled loosely around Tony’s erection, and pressed one more kiss against his temple (breath gently warming Tony’s cheek) before pulling away - extricating hand, buttoning jacket, and reassembling his face into something that wouldn’t shock grannies. “I know a place.”
...
Stephen’s. At times, the place was jumping with people, you couldn’t move for the hip young things crowding the living room, the hallway, the kitchen (at the best parties, drinking wine in the bath, or passed out, entangled, on the bed). At others, it was blissfully deserted, and Stephen would let John stretch out on the sofa or take up space at the kitchen table until he felt ready to face the world outside once more.
Today, it was somewhere in between. John hadn’t called before turning up, coatless and forlorn, at Stephen’s door. When Stephen had heard his voice, he had buzzed him up without another word. John wondered exactly how bad he sounded (or then again perhaps it was that uncanny intuition of Stephen’s, divining into the inflections in his tone and diagnosing as easily as a doctor looking at the measles). He took the stairs, running, two at a time, until his legs ached and his lungs burned, and he staggered, out of breath, into Stephen’s corridor.
He leaned against the wall, air wheezing in and out of his lungs and shredded throat and the plaster cool under his hands; until a gentle cough (Wodehouse’s ‘sheep clearing its throat of a blade of grass on a distant hillside’) jerked his head up.
Stephen stood, arms folded, shoulder against the doorjamb and one foot crossed over the other, in his doorway. His face was expressionless. Behind him, in the flat, somebody peered into the hallway before retracting their head again, hurriedly.
“Am I interrupting something?” John hauled himself upright and lifted his chin, defying Stephen to comment on the flush that was creeping over his cheeks (for the second time today, damn it). Some ten yards of carpeted corridor seperated them. John made no move to cross it.
“For heaven’s sake, Johnny,” Stephen chided, unfolding his arms and stepping back, leaving a clear space of doorway. “Come in, won’t you?”
By the look of the flat, John saw, it didn’t seem as if he was interrupting anything after all. Three men (he didn’t know them: one dark haired and gangly, one fair and stocky, the other utterly nondescript) sprawled in various states of disarray over the living room furniture amidst a forest of tea cups and wine glasses on the coffee table and in shabby little clusters about the floor. Stephen poked his head in at them and murmured something that John couldn’t make out; got a ripple of affirmation, whatever it was. He withdrew, and gave John an over-the-shoulder glance. “Come along.”
To the kitchen; slightly lacklustre. Coffee rings on the table, crumbs on the countertops. John picked up a couple of mugs from the floor beside the kitchen sofa, then stood, watching Stephen bustle about with a teatowel. “Twenty-four hour party people, I see.”
“Just an conversation that went on far too long.” Stephen swept the counter with the cloth, gathered it up and unfurled it over the bin, before dropping it into the sink and turning to John. “Now, what is it?”
“Christ, you’re a bit brusque,” John said, handing the mugs over to Stephen’s outstretched hand. “Do you have a pressing appointment? With your talkative colleagues, perhaps?” He resented the edge in his own voice, but couldn’t seem to quell it. He avoided Stephen’s eyes; instead leaned against the wall and rubbed his sore thigh muscles.
“No.” A flat syllable. John read the beginnings of impatience in it. “I simply would like to know what brings you halfway across London to hare madly up my stairs and into my apartment, only to have you then mincing about with a resolutely closed mouth. Would you like a cup of coffee?”
“I’d rather have tea.” The thought of coffee made him feel faintly sick. John gave in and collapsed onto the squashy kitchen sofa, letting his head fall back against the cushions. In the gentle quiescence of the kitchen - highlighted and punctuated by the soft sound of voices from the living room and the chink of teaspoon on china, the gathering hiss of the kettle as it built up a head of steam - he could breathe more easily. When he said “It’s about Tony,” he wasn’t looking at Stephen; but he sensed him stiffen.
“Oh?” Wary.
“Mm.” John was staring at the ceiling; the thin cracks around the edges of the walls. He had never noticed them before. One ran all the way along to the light fitting. “There’s been some rumours.”
“Really?” The same cautious tone. “Since when have you listened to rumours, Johnny?”
John sat forward suddenly, training his eyes on the back of Stephen’s neck. He hoped Stephen could feel it. “Did you know anything about this?”
“Since when have I listened to rumours?” Stephen turned and met his gaze evenly. “Really, John.”
“Oh, all right.” He slumped back into the sofa again as Stephen turned back to the tea. “Anyway: Tony. You know about he and I.”
“To an extent.”
He gathered himself. Best put bluntly, John supposed, so: “There’s been rumours about him and someone else.” He clenched his fists on his knees, watching Stephen’s back as he poured - perfect English gent - from the teapot.
“Oh.”
“Oh? Is that all you have to say?”
“No.” Stephen de-bagged, milked and sugared, and turned to John, a mug in each hand and one eyebrow raised. “I also meant to ask what, exactly, Tony Slattery means to you.” Each word enunciated so delicately, John could hardly take it badly. Stephen set his own mug down on the floor beside the sofa, sat, and turned John’s so that the handle was facing him. John took it as proffered, and bit his lip.
“He was fun.” He raised the mug to his lips, but didn’t drink. The warmth billowed over his chin, his nose. Made him remember how cold the rest of him was. Warming now, though, in Stephen’s central heating. “I liked it when he was around. His eyes - his smile - all so much brighter than anybody else’s.” He could have gone on: his boyish edginess, his silliness; how tight he wore his trousers; the way he smiled after he’d sucked me off. The entire kitchen seemed to lean in around them, listening for the magic words. “Well, it certainly wasn’t love,” he said, perhaps a little too loudly, glancing around. The world withdrew again.
Stephen’s gaze didn’t waver. He took a sip of his tea, meditatively. His shoulder was touching John’s, his knee against John’s leg. Reassuring touch. “You realise you’re speaking about him in the past tense?”
John closed his eyes. “Yes. I suppose I am.” He sighed, and curled both hands around his mug (not quite hot enough to burn his palms), and slipped down in his seat. He laid his head on Stephen’s shoulder. “Fucking hell.”
Stephen’s hand, warm and solid, fell upon his knee, and stayed there. A faint squeeze. “I know, John. I know.”
...
“You know what they used to call me?” Tony asked, eyebrows raised caricaturishly and wineglass tilting dangerously in one up-raised hand. “They used to call me Sessions’ little puppy-dog. Because I’d follow him around. Because he could wind me around his little finger.” Wild inflections, ups and downs, and beginning to slur the words. Ryan’s spectacularly uninterested eyes; everywhere but on him.
“Uh huh.”
“But now I’ve got you!” Tony grabbed one of Ryan’s wrists, suit jacket sleeve crumpling under his fingers, and grinned. “And he’s... he’s...” John was - where? A long and sticky history of evening hours smeared together all through Tony’s mind. Party at Griff’s, and before that: pre-party drinks at the bar, and before that: a pre-social nerve stiffener - vodka, just a snifter, a little insurance policy towards lubrication.
“Tony...” Ryan was extricating himself from Tony’s grasp. Something dark and edgy in his tone made Tony want to shiver. “Just calm down, okay? I don’t want to hear about John Sessions.”
But where was John? Was he near? Was he gone? Worse yet, had he copped off with some bloke, some brazen young Grecian statuesque type, limber and virile in his early twenties? Tony couldn’t see him. Paul there, entwined in Playboy bunny knockoffs, two sets of boobs up under his chin; Jonathan there, drifting by; Stephen halfway across the room, tense and restless in conversation with someone Tony didn’t know. Griff’s was crowded, full of people who sparkled and laughed and drank in moderation, and where was John?
“Right.”
Tony looked around. Ryan had set down his empty glass on a nearby table with a decisive click.
“I’m sick of being a wallflower.” Ryan looked Tony up and down one final time, and Tony didn’t like the expression on his face. “I’m going to find Colin. I’ll see you around.”
Before Tony could blink, he was gone. His fingers closed on empty air where they had held onto Ryan’s sleeve. A mental narrative tried to start up, turning over and over like the engine of an old car: Well, that’s just... It choked and died before it could begin properly, leaving him silent and open-mouthed, staring after Ryan - or rather, the space where he had been. The crowd had swallowed him up without a trace.
Now what?
Puppy-dog.
Tony shook his head - if only it would come clear! - and closed his mouth. His own glass was almost empty. He considered it briefly before tipping his head back and swallowing the last of it - it slipped sickly sweet down his throat, and he tried and failed not to make a face. Right. Now then. He pushed himself away from the wall and stumbled forwards. Griff’s house curved and bent around him. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t seem to edge between people without jostling them. Bad vibes clouded around him like smoke. Fuck it. Need Stephen.
He veered between dancers and talkers and laughers, people he knew and people he didn’t, hardly trying not to knock into them. Where was Stephen? Hugh, too, for that matter? Why did this always happen?
“Oi!”
A hand on the scruff of his neck dragged him backwards. His collar tightened around his throat - the world seemed to reel - and then he was falling backwards, stomach dropping and arms flailing desperately trying to catch something to hold him up. Close by, squeals, shrieks, faces glaring down at him. He hit the floor hard and sprawled, hands glancing uselessly over a forest of ankles. Somewhere, he had heard his glass drop and shatter.
“Oi, you!” Somebody - the somebody who had caught him by the neck - bent down over him, shoving their pudgy bald face into his. “What do you think you’re doing, eh? My drink -” That was as far as he got, the rest of his words smashed into a gout of vowels and pain as Tony’s forehead impacted with his nose.
The man (who Tony didn’t know) staggered backwards, hands flying up to his face - drink forgotten, left somewhere, spilled half down him - and a bright spatter of blood on his shirt, chin, lips. Around them, the up-bubble of noise and backwards scuttle away from the locus of violence. Tony’s head seemed to have acted independently of intention; an arrow of silver fear shot deep down into his gut, and he tried to scramble to his feet - but then there were arms holding him down, and faces he didn’t know hovering over his, and the soft, fleshy parts of him - stomach, groin, backs of his legs - tingled with vulnerability. He tensed, heaved one superhuman throe that almost dislodged his captors, then gave up, folding underneath them. Words began to filter through - leave it, just leave it will you? not worth it, for heaven’s sake, Tony...
Tony’s head felt heavy. It throbbed where he had connected with the other man’s face. He let it drop, skull hitting the wooden floor with a hollow, painful sound, and let the ceiling dance and swim above him. He avoided looking at the people crowding around him.
It had been a lie to think he didn’t know them. He could name every single fucking one of them that stared down at him right now. He closed his eyes. A lost and desperate strata of bright young things, craving the limelight and the stardust. His brothers and sisters.
He barely noticed a thing when arms - different arms - slipped around him and under him and heaved him to his feet, shakily, before he was moving - shadows and light against his eyelids, fluttering somewhere between open and closed. Murmurs in stereo. Then a blast of cold air, and the lights receding, and the pressing and sudden intimation - via the variable smell of grass and exhaust fumes - that he was outside.
Tony came to, properly, on all fours in Griff’s cramped back garden, scantily shrouded in the shadow of the shed, heaving up his guts into the grass. The ground span a little under his hands, then settled down. The breeze moved against the bare skin at his wrists, his neck, and cooled the tear-wetness on his cheeks. He retched, dryly, one last time, and looked up.
A golden glow from the house - a rented three-storey thing, with people-shadows moving in the windows, and the doors flung wide open - and the cold stretch of starry sky above it; and semi-silhouetted between this and him was Richard Vranch, cross-legged on the grass like a svelte buddha. Beyond Richard, Stephen sat, a collection of elegant limbs arranged on a squat wall beside the house, smoking and looking away from them both.
“What came out of you then wasn’t your lunch or your dinner,” Richard quipped, the beginnings of an easy smile spreading over his face. “What came out of you was your pain.”
“Don’t even start, Richard. I’m not...” Tony sat back on his heels, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Taking a shaky in-breath, he discovered he didn’t know where to go from there. Instead of finishing, he just shook his head. Richard nodded.
“All right. I know.”
Deep breath in, out; in, out. “Where’s Griff?”
“Being a host.” Richard watched him, sans expression. His eyes weren’t hard to meet, though. “My God, though, Tony - you were babbling some fantastically deranged half-literary nonsense for a while there. What on earth have you taken?”
“Oh, you know.” Tony flapped a hand, weakly. “The usual.” The memories coming back to him now, further than he had admitted to his own recollection: not only stations of drink but a little scatter of white pills.
“I know.” Richard rested his elbows on his knees and cradled his head in his hands. “Same here. The trick is...”
“Moderation, I know. Shut up for a bit, will you?”
Richard, obligingly, shut up. Tony turned his head back to the grass and closed his eyes, scrubbing the tears from his cheeks with the heels of his hands. He didn’t look up until he heard the soft sounds of movement beside him. Another shadow fell across his field of vision.
Stephen had left his spot on the wall to come and crouch beside Richard. His face was in shadow; in his hand, his cigarette smouldered dully. “Tony.” Dark overtones. Tony didn’t meet his eyes. He saw Stephen open his mouth to speak again, and cut him off.
“Stephen?” Eyes trained somewhere amidst the grass blades and the vomit. “Where’s John?” Was that really how his own voice sounded? That pitiful, as he knelt here dazed over his own sick?
“I can’t tell you that, I’m afraid.”
“But - ”
“No buts.” Stephen took a long drag on his cigarette; and when he spoke again it was in little puffs of silvery smoke. “Perhaps in the morning, when everything has calmed down a little and we’re all thinking clearly.” The smoke drifted away, thinning, into the night. Stephen paused, and glanced at Richard; then back over his shoulder, back at the house. Richard wasn’t looking at either of them - he was staring at his own hands in his lap. Stephen sighed, and reached out one long-fingered hand to pat Tony on the shoulder. “Happy new year.” He got up, turned, and began to walk back to the house.
...
John listened to the notes of a bellowed Auld Lang Syne drifting up through the floorboards, muted by space and structure, with his head laid against the blessedly cold glass of the window. It breathed night against his skin. Nothing but darkness, as long as he kept his eyes closed.
Griff’s fourth-floor attic was empty, and still. John had retreated here when chaos had broken out - in little pockets, infecting the rest with a virulent unease - downstairs. Fights and flirtations and jealousies and drama-queenery - the inevitable bohemian climax of an actors’ party. It would all be made up within the next week; if not, Shakespearian feuds would erupt, and simmer, and divide; and if not one-night stands, then vivid and flamboyant love affairs.
Yes, he had been aware of Tony’s episode. And yes, he had seen he and Ryan arrive together. And he had been expecting the Spanish Inquisition from Stephen, but it had never come. Stephen had been tightly coiled and tense, legs plaited and arms crossed, chain-smoking cigarette after cigarette; had closeted himself with Hugh as much as possible. John had taken this as a kind of reprieve, and drunk screwdrivers, and people-watched.
And where had it got him?
Auld Lang Syne had dissolved into laughter and cheering below. John opened his eyes. His breath had formed a mist on the windowpane. He drew a finger through it, idly. Outside, beyond the breath-fog, beyond the glass, down in the garden, two dark figures were blots against the grass.
Behind him, quietly at first then growing in volume, John heard a familiar opening whine of strings and pipes. He smiled against the glass - he couldn’t help it - and turned.
Stephen stood at the other side of the room, tall and slender, with his head cocked, hint of a crooked smile making his face boyish and mischievous. The fingers of one hand lingered beside the tape deck.
“ABBA, Stephen?” The smile wouldn’t leave John alone.
“Don’t give me that look,” Stephen said, and his voice was solid and smooth and reassuring in the dusty coldness of the attic. “It’s Griff’s cassette.”
Fernando swelled into sentimental lyricism and twinkling chords; slightly distorted by the bad tape so that words warped and notes bent oddly. Stephen took a few steps towards John’s seat on the windowsill, and held out a hand, palm up.
“Would you care to dance?”
John glanced from hand to face to tape deck and back again, smile widening. “Are you serious?”
Stephen didn’t answer. He just raised an eyebrow, hand still extended. John shook his head, grinning - but found himself getting to his feet, leaving the misted window behind, and taking Stephen’s hand.
Stephen pulled him closer, so that John’s body pressed up against his, one arm wrapped loosely around John’s waist. Stephen still had the aura of night coolness around him, faint and sensual on his skin and his clothes. This close, John could see the dark shadows under Stephen’s eyes, the hardness in the set of his jaw. He lifted one hand, drew a thumb gently across Stephen’s cheek. “Are you all right?”
“Oh, yes.” Stephen smiled, but it was tired. “I’m as all right as anyone else here, which doesn’t say much, but...” He closed his eyes - one second, two - and opened them again, looking down at John. “Well, we’ll all be all right if we stick together. Don’t you think?”
John was sick of craning to look Stephen in the face. He curled one arm around Stephen’s back, the other hand clasped in Stephen’s. He rested his head against Stephen’s shoulder. “I hope so.”
They swayed together, in silence, to Fernando, for a few moments. Then Stephen pressed a kiss to the top of John’s head, and said “Happy new year, Johnny.”
John closed his eyes. “Happy new year.”
Fandom: WLiiA? UK
Wordcount: 4,817
Rating: R
Character(s): Tony/John, Tony/Ryan, Stephen, Richard (Vranch), others mentioned
Disclaimer: This is merely a fantasy of mine which I’ve put down in words, not intended to be anything like a representation of the truth.
Summary: The dissolution of a relationship, from both sides.
Notes: “There is a depressive side to me. I just sometimes get very low, I think people who feel a compulsion to be funny often do so to keep the darkness at bay. It's whistling in the dark.” - John Sessions, quoted in an article by Lynda Lee-Potter.
That was the thing about gossip - viral. Word took no time to flit from person to person, around the London showbiz circuit especially. Green rooms buzzed with grapevine info; it was served up alongside the coffee and sandwiches.
“Oh, c’mere, quick... did you hear...?”
“In the toilets!”
“Really?”
John had mused upon the idea that actors, upon receipt of Equity card and at the first sniff of agency interest, cut open their own chests and, in a satanic ritual, offered their own heart to the Devil in order to ensure big-time success. In lieu of a pulse, they ran on hearsay and caffeine.
“...saw them out for drinks in Oddfellows and his hand was...”
“...not even like they’re trying to be discreet...”
“...they were all over each other the other night...”
John refused to play - was in fact the social equivalent of the boy standing with his back to the crowd, ears plugged and eyes squeezed tight shut - so it took longer than it might have with anyone else for him to realise exactly what was going on. But still, he would have had to have been actually blind not to notice the looks they were giving him. Fuckers.
In the end, it was because he was monopolising the cafetiére with his own Ecuadorian beans that he was forced to talk to Paul. He had been lingering amidst the steam and the coffee smell (none of the Nescafé over by the machine), head down, eyes closed, when something large and soft bumped into his shoulder.
He looked up sideways, through half-open eyes (it had been a late night; a late, gin-soaked night). Pale suit, hands in pockets, blandly scrutinising eyes. It was Paul.
“Hello,” John said, one eye on his coffee.
“All right.” Statement, not question. “You look a bit off.” Statement, but explanation expected.
John faked a wry smile and raised his head a little. (The lights were too bright in here.) “Late night.”
“Happens to the best of us.” Paul shrugged, looked down at his shoes, and then up again, those interrogative eyes once more. He opened his mouth, closed it, and then tried again. “Here, you and... uh...”
John raised his head properly now, and turned to face Paul, coffee not forgotten but at least put on a mental hold. “Sorry?”
“Sorry.” Hands very firmly in pockets and shoulders halfway to being hunched in some kind of atavistic defence mechanism, Paul smiled - then stopped, just as quickly. “You and Tony.”
John’s heart missed a beat. Fear or relief? “Slattery?” he fenced, face burning.
“Yeah. You and him. How are, you know, uh...” John surely was mistaken in believing that there was some pinkness creeping into Paul’s cheeks now, too - surely? “You and him.”
He knows. I don’t know how he knows, but he knows. Supplied as a newsflash in a mental representation of Tony’s voice. Why? John couldn’t say. “We’re fine.” Of course he knows, this in his sister’s no-nonsense tone, it’s the worst kept secret in London.
They were fine, weren’t they? How long was it since he had last had Tony ‘round his, or been ‘round Tony’s? His guts slowly liquefying as the timeframe escaped him.
“Right, right.” Paul nodded, the tip of his right foot transcribing little circles on the carpet. Now an attempt at feigned nonchalance: “He’s, uh, been going out a lot with that Stiles fella recently.”
“Stiles?” Margaret’s disembodied voice: You sound like a parrot, John, say something proper, quick, now. “The Canadian newbie?” Oh, for heaven’s sake.
“Yeah.” Paul’s eyes, which had been watching as if with detached interest the motion of his own foot, looked up now and found John’s. In the face of this sudden intensity (and was that a kind of pity there?), John found it a little hard to catch his breath. “Listen, mate - you must’ve heard the rumours...”
“I haven’t, actually.” Frosty.
Paul looked down again, and palmed his coffee mug in both hands, bringing it up over his chest as if that would shield him. “Right,” he said, more subdued. “Well, maybe you should take a listen. Or better yet, maybe talk to Tony.”
Take a listen. John’s heart missed not one beat this time, but seemed to be sinking in his chest. Lower and lower, impacting his other organs: lungs, stomach, already fluid and fearful viscera. Take a listen. “Yes, thank you for the suggestion.” He turned away from Paul, back to the coffee sitting black and potent in the cafetiere, filling the world with the sharpness of its aroma. His world, anyway. The little world which had seemed so average today, up until this point. “I’ll keep it in mind.”
“John?” Paul was a solid, lumpen spectre beside him. “Are you all right?”
“Quite all right, thank you.” His head snapped up again, finding Paul’s nose (not the eyes, not the eyes) and looking him squarely in it. He stretched his mouth into a smile. “Would you mind keeping an eye on my coffee, Paul? I’ll be back in a moment.” He didn’t wait for Paul to reply. Instead, turned and left the green room, hands in pockets, shoulders back, not meeting anyone’s eyes.
...
It had begun with Ryan’s first show, and they had been on fire. Tony had, at first, been surprised at how easily it came, this improvisation lark. He’d done it before, of course - who hadn’t? - but Whose Line? was a televised ad lib orgy, a riot of fart jokes, sex jokes, incredulity and bonhomie. Tony was addicted. It was hard to beat the high of applause.
“Good show!” He put the little twist of English mockery into his words and grinned. Ryan - gangly, sweat-shiny and fresh-faced - smiled, leaning against the wall off-set, all angles and Canadian ease. Tony had to crane to meet his eyes. “You’ll be back, won’t you?”
“That’s up to the powers that be.” Ryan cocked his head. “I hope you’ll be around.” Some inflection to those words that made Tony tingle. He shoved his hands into his pockets and shifted from foot to foot. He had been able to feel the places Ryan’s hands had been on him all the way through the filming.
“Listen, do you want to go - ”
As if from nowhere - frightening the life out of him in a jolting split-second - Ryan’s mouth was on his, cutting off his words in a hot smooth smother that startled Tony’s eyes closed and electrified that tingle, shooting it blood-hot down his spine, up his legs, arrow-straight to his crotch. Physical echoes of the games played shivered over his skin, the memories of Ryan’s hands.
When Ryan broke away - he’d had to stoop - and looked at Tony from half-lidded eyes, the intimation made itself clear. There would be no drinks (not yet, anyway), no small talk, no dating. Want to play? New deal. Today only. No guarantees.
Tony, as a non-verbal answer to a non-verbal question, slipped his hands inside Ryan’s jacket and hooked his fingers in Ryan’s belt loops, and tugged him closer. (Brief thoughts of John, dizzying and disorienting, then pushed away.) The ghost of the studio lights’ heat was still an aura around both of them, charged with leftover laughter and the remnants of energy. Distantly, Tony was aware of offstage business going on, clatterings and shouts and murmurs and squeaks. The sound of the day being wound up. Outside, the night would be drawing in on London, cold creeping down the streets and windows lighting up, bars beginning to fill and offices beginning to empty. Out there somewhere, John would be, and drinks would be expected, and conversation. The thought of it was exhausting in a way Tony couldn’t define. “Shall we go somewhere more private?”
Ryan’s hands paused where they had been creeping around Tony’s waist, playfully tugging the shirt from his trousers. His fingertips grazed the bare skin there, and Tony’s breath caught in his throat. “Better had,” Ryan said, fingers travelling incrementally downward, to edge just under the waistband of Tony’s trousers. “Or they might never let me back on the show. They probably frown on traumatising technicians and all that.”
“Don’t be silly,” Tony said, voice miraculously even under the onslaught of Ryan’s touch, “traumatising techies is one of my favourite pastimes. I make a habit of - oh...” This last because of Ryan’s palm, cool and dry on his skin, inside his trousers. “Of... of...” It was useless now. His own hands found Ryan’s shirt, bunched it in his fists, pulling Ryan closer so that Tony was pressed back against the wall.
Ryan bent over him, one hand flat against the wall by Tony’s head, the other curled loosely around Tony’s erection, and pressed one more kiss against his temple (breath gently warming Tony’s cheek) before pulling away - extricating hand, buttoning jacket, and reassembling his face into something that wouldn’t shock grannies. “I know a place.”
...
Stephen’s. At times, the place was jumping with people, you couldn’t move for the hip young things crowding the living room, the hallway, the kitchen (at the best parties, drinking wine in the bath, or passed out, entangled, on the bed). At others, it was blissfully deserted, and Stephen would let John stretch out on the sofa or take up space at the kitchen table until he felt ready to face the world outside once more.
Today, it was somewhere in between. John hadn’t called before turning up, coatless and forlorn, at Stephen’s door. When Stephen had heard his voice, he had buzzed him up without another word. John wondered exactly how bad he sounded (or then again perhaps it was that uncanny intuition of Stephen’s, divining into the inflections in his tone and diagnosing as easily as a doctor looking at the measles). He took the stairs, running, two at a time, until his legs ached and his lungs burned, and he staggered, out of breath, into Stephen’s corridor.
He leaned against the wall, air wheezing in and out of his lungs and shredded throat and the plaster cool under his hands; until a gentle cough (Wodehouse’s ‘sheep clearing its throat of a blade of grass on a distant hillside’) jerked his head up.
Stephen stood, arms folded, shoulder against the doorjamb and one foot crossed over the other, in his doorway. His face was expressionless. Behind him, in the flat, somebody peered into the hallway before retracting their head again, hurriedly.
“Am I interrupting something?” John hauled himself upright and lifted his chin, defying Stephen to comment on the flush that was creeping over his cheeks (for the second time today, damn it). Some ten yards of carpeted corridor seperated them. John made no move to cross it.
“For heaven’s sake, Johnny,” Stephen chided, unfolding his arms and stepping back, leaving a clear space of doorway. “Come in, won’t you?”
By the look of the flat, John saw, it didn’t seem as if he was interrupting anything after all. Three men (he didn’t know them: one dark haired and gangly, one fair and stocky, the other utterly nondescript) sprawled in various states of disarray over the living room furniture amidst a forest of tea cups and wine glasses on the coffee table and in shabby little clusters about the floor. Stephen poked his head in at them and murmured something that John couldn’t make out; got a ripple of affirmation, whatever it was. He withdrew, and gave John an over-the-shoulder glance. “Come along.”
To the kitchen; slightly lacklustre. Coffee rings on the table, crumbs on the countertops. John picked up a couple of mugs from the floor beside the kitchen sofa, then stood, watching Stephen bustle about with a teatowel. “Twenty-four hour party people, I see.”
“Just an conversation that went on far too long.” Stephen swept the counter with the cloth, gathered it up and unfurled it over the bin, before dropping it into the sink and turning to John. “Now, what is it?”
“Christ, you’re a bit brusque,” John said, handing the mugs over to Stephen’s outstretched hand. “Do you have a pressing appointment? With your talkative colleagues, perhaps?” He resented the edge in his own voice, but couldn’t seem to quell it. He avoided Stephen’s eyes; instead leaned against the wall and rubbed his sore thigh muscles.
“No.” A flat syllable. John read the beginnings of impatience in it. “I simply would like to know what brings you halfway across London to hare madly up my stairs and into my apartment, only to have you then mincing about with a resolutely closed mouth. Would you like a cup of coffee?”
“I’d rather have tea.” The thought of coffee made him feel faintly sick. John gave in and collapsed onto the squashy kitchen sofa, letting his head fall back against the cushions. In the gentle quiescence of the kitchen - highlighted and punctuated by the soft sound of voices from the living room and the chink of teaspoon on china, the gathering hiss of the kettle as it built up a head of steam - he could breathe more easily. When he said “It’s about Tony,” he wasn’t looking at Stephen; but he sensed him stiffen.
“Oh?” Wary.
“Mm.” John was staring at the ceiling; the thin cracks around the edges of the walls. He had never noticed them before. One ran all the way along to the light fitting. “There’s been some rumours.”
“Really?” The same cautious tone. “Since when have you listened to rumours, Johnny?”
John sat forward suddenly, training his eyes on the back of Stephen’s neck. He hoped Stephen could feel it. “Did you know anything about this?”
“Since when have I listened to rumours?” Stephen turned and met his gaze evenly. “Really, John.”
“Oh, all right.” He slumped back into the sofa again as Stephen turned back to the tea. “Anyway: Tony. You know about he and I.”
“To an extent.”
He gathered himself. Best put bluntly, John supposed, so: “There’s been rumours about him and someone else.” He clenched his fists on his knees, watching Stephen’s back as he poured - perfect English gent - from the teapot.
“Oh.”
“Oh? Is that all you have to say?”
“No.” Stephen de-bagged, milked and sugared, and turned to John, a mug in each hand and one eyebrow raised. “I also meant to ask what, exactly, Tony Slattery means to you.” Each word enunciated so delicately, John could hardly take it badly. Stephen set his own mug down on the floor beside the sofa, sat, and turned John’s so that the handle was facing him. John took it as proffered, and bit his lip.
“He was fun.” He raised the mug to his lips, but didn’t drink. The warmth billowed over his chin, his nose. Made him remember how cold the rest of him was. Warming now, though, in Stephen’s central heating. “I liked it when he was around. His eyes - his smile - all so much brighter than anybody else’s.” He could have gone on: his boyish edginess, his silliness; how tight he wore his trousers; the way he smiled after he’d sucked me off. The entire kitchen seemed to lean in around them, listening for the magic words. “Well, it certainly wasn’t love,” he said, perhaps a little too loudly, glancing around. The world withdrew again.
Stephen’s gaze didn’t waver. He took a sip of his tea, meditatively. His shoulder was touching John’s, his knee against John’s leg. Reassuring touch. “You realise you’re speaking about him in the past tense?”
John closed his eyes. “Yes. I suppose I am.” He sighed, and curled both hands around his mug (not quite hot enough to burn his palms), and slipped down in his seat. He laid his head on Stephen’s shoulder. “Fucking hell.”
Stephen’s hand, warm and solid, fell upon his knee, and stayed there. A faint squeeze. “I know, John. I know.”
...
“You know what they used to call me?” Tony asked, eyebrows raised caricaturishly and wineglass tilting dangerously in one up-raised hand. “They used to call me Sessions’ little puppy-dog. Because I’d follow him around. Because he could wind me around his little finger.” Wild inflections, ups and downs, and beginning to slur the words. Ryan’s spectacularly uninterested eyes; everywhere but on him.
“Uh huh.”
“But now I’ve got you!” Tony grabbed one of Ryan’s wrists, suit jacket sleeve crumpling under his fingers, and grinned. “And he’s... he’s...” John was - where? A long and sticky history of evening hours smeared together all through Tony’s mind. Party at Griff’s, and before that: pre-party drinks at the bar, and before that: a pre-social nerve stiffener - vodka, just a snifter, a little insurance policy towards lubrication.
“Tony...” Ryan was extricating himself from Tony’s grasp. Something dark and edgy in his tone made Tony want to shiver. “Just calm down, okay? I don’t want to hear about John Sessions.”
But where was John? Was he near? Was he gone? Worse yet, had he copped off with some bloke, some brazen young Grecian statuesque type, limber and virile in his early twenties? Tony couldn’t see him. Paul there, entwined in Playboy bunny knockoffs, two sets of boobs up under his chin; Jonathan there, drifting by; Stephen halfway across the room, tense and restless in conversation with someone Tony didn’t know. Griff’s was crowded, full of people who sparkled and laughed and drank in moderation, and where was John?
“Right.”
Tony looked around. Ryan had set down his empty glass on a nearby table with a decisive click.
“I’m sick of being a wallflower.” Ryan looked Tony up and down one final time, and Tony didn’t like the expression on his face. “I’m going to find Colin. I’ll see you around.”
Before Tony could blink, he was gone. His fingers closed on empty air where they had held onto Ryan’s sleeve. A mental narrative tried to start up, turning over and over like the engine of an old car: Well, that’s just... It choked and died before it could begin properly, leaving him silent and open-mouthed, staring after Ryan - or rather, the space where he had been. The crowd had swallowed him up without a trace.
Now what?
Puppy-dog.
Tony shook his head - if only it would come clear! - and closed his mouth. His own glass was almost empty. He considered it briefly before tipping his head back and swallowing the last of it - it slipped sickly sweet down his throat, and he tried and failed not to make a face. Right. Now then. He pushed himself away from the wall and stumbled forwards. Griff’s house curved and bent around him. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t seem to edge between people without jostling them. Bad vibes clouded around him like smoke. Fuck it. Need Stephen.
He veered between dancers and talkers and laughers, people he knew and people he didn’t, hardly trying not to knock into them. Where was Stephen? Hugh, too, for that matter? Why did this always happen?
“Oi!”
A hand on the scruff of his neck dragged him backwards. His collar tightened around his throat - the world seemed to reel - and then he was falling backwards, stomach dropping and arms flailing desperately trying to catch something to hold him up. Close by, squeals, shrieks, faces glaring down at him. He hit the floor hard and sprawled, hands glancing uselessly over a forest of ankles. Somewhere, he had heard his glass drop and shatter.
“Oi, you!” Somebody - the somebody who had caught him by the neck - bent down over him, shoving their pudgy bald face into his. “What do you think you’re doing, eh? My drink -” That was as far as he got, the rest of his words smashed into a gout of vowels and pain as Tony’s forehead impacted with his nose.
The man (who Tony didn’t know) staggered backwards, hands flying up to his face - drink forgotten, left somewhere, spilled half down him - and a bright spatter of blood on his shirt, chin, lips. Around them, the up-bubble of noise and backwards scuttle away from the locus of violence. Tony’s head seemed to have acted independently of intention; an arrow of silver fear shot deep down into his gut, and he tried to scramble to his feet - but then there were arms holding him down, and faces he didn’t know hovering over his, and the soft, fleshy parts of him - stomach, groin, backs of his legs - tingled with vulnerability. He tensed, heaved one superhuman throe that almost dislodged his captors, then gave up, folding underneath them. Words began to filter through - leave it, just leave it will you? not worth it, for heaven’s sake, Tony...
Tony’s head felt heavy. It throbbed where he had connected with the other man’s face. He let it drop, skull hitting the wooden floor with a hollow, painful sound, and let the ceiling dance and swim above him. He avoided looking at the people crowding around him.
It had been a lie to think he didn’t know them. He could name every single fucking one of them that stared down at him right now. He closed his eyes. A lost and desperate strata of bright young things, craving the limelight and the stardust. His brothers and sisters.
He barely noticed a thing when arms - different arms - slipped around him and under him and heaved him to his feet, shakily, before he was moving - shadows and light against his eyelids, fluttering somewhere between open and closed. Murmurs in stereo. Then a blast of cold air, and the lights receding, and the pressing and sudden intimation - via the variable smell of grass and exhaust fumes - that he was outside.
Tony came to, properly, on all fours in Griff’s cramped back garden, scantily shrouded in the shadow of the shed, heaving up his guts into the grass. The ground span a little under his hands, then settled down. The breeze moved against the bare skin at his wrists, his neck, and cooled the tear-wetness on his cheeks. He retched, dryly, one last time, and looked up.
A golden glow from the house - a rented three-storey thing, with people-shadows moving in the windows, and the doors flung wide open - and the cold stretch of starry sky above it; and semi-silhouetted between this and him was Richard Vranch, cross-legged on the grass like a svelte buddha. Beyond Richard, Stephen sat, a collection of elegant limbs arranged on a squat wall beside the house, smoking and looking away from them both.
“What came out of you then wasn’t your lunch or your dinner,” Richard quipped, the beginnings of an easy smile spreading over his face. “What came out of you was your pain.”
“Don’t even start, Richard. I’m not...” Tony sat back on his heels, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Taking a shaky in-breath, he discovered he didn’t know where to go from there. Instead of finishing, he just shook his head. Richard nodded.
“All right. I know.”
Deep breath in, out; in, out. “Where’s Griff?”
“Being a host.” Richard watched him, sans expression. His eyes weren’t hard to meet, though. “My God, though, Tony - you were babbling some fantastically deranged half-literary nonsense for a while there. What on earth have you taken?”
“Oh, you know.” Tony flapped a hand, weakly. “The usual.” The memories coming back to him now, further than he had admitted to his own recollection: not only stations of drink but a little scatter of white pills.
“I know.” Richard rested his elbows on his knees and cradled his head in his hands. “Same here. The trick is...”
“Moderation, I know. Shut up for a bit, will you?”
Richard, obligingly, shut up. Tony turned his head back to the grass and closed his eyes, scrubbing the tears from his cheeks with the heels of his hands. He didn’t look up until he heard the soft sounds of movement beside him. Another shadow fell across his field of vision.
Stephen had left his spot on the wall to come and crouch beside Richard. His face was in shadow; in his hand, his cigarette smouldered dully. “Tony.” Dark overtones. Tony didn’t meet his eyes. He saw Stephen open his mouth to speak again, and cut him off.
“Stephen?” Eyes trained somewhere amidst the grass blades and the vomit. “Where’s John?” Was that really how his own voice sounded? That pitiful, as he knelt here dazed over his own sick?
“I can’t tell you that, I’m afraid.”
“But - ”
“No buts.” Stephen took a long drag on his cigarette; and when he spoke again it was in little puffs of silvery smoke. “Perhaps in the morning, when everything has calmed down a little and we’re all thinking clearly.” The smoke drifted away, thinning, into the night. Stephen paused, and glanced at Richard; then back over his shoulder, back at the house. Richard wasn’t looking at either of them - he was staring at his own hands in his lap. Stephen sighed, and reached out one long-fingered hand to pat Tony on the shoulder. “Happy new year.” He got up, turned, and began to walk back to the house.
...
John listened to the notes of a bellowed Auld Lang Syne drifting up through the floorboards, muted by space and structure, with his head laid against the blessedly cold glass of the window. It breathed night against his skin. Nothing but darkness, as long as he kept his eyes closed.
Griff’s fourth-floor attic was empty, and still. John had retreated here when chaos had broken out - in little pockets, infecting the rest with a virulent unease - downstairs. Fights and flirtations and jealousies and drama-queenery - the inevitable bohemian climax of an actors’ party. It would all be made up within the next week; if not, Shakespearian feuds would erupt, and simmer, and divide; and if not one-night stands, then vivid and flamboyant love affairs.
Yes, he had been aware of Tony’s episode. And yes, he had seen he and Ryan arrive together. And he had been expecting the Spanish Inquisition from Stephen, but it had never come. Stephen had been tightly coiled and tense, legs plaited and arms crossed, chain-smoking cigarette after cigarette; had closeted himself with Hugh as much as possible. John had taken this as a kind of reprieve, and drunk screwdrivers, and people-watched.
And where had it got him?
Auld Lang Syne had dissolved into laughter and cheering below. John opened his eyes. His breath had formed a mist on the windowpane. He drew a finger through it, idly. Outside, beyond the breath-fog, beyond the glass, down in the garden, two dark figures were blots against the grass.
Behind him, quietly at first then growing in volume, John heard a familiar opening whine of strings and pipes. He smiled against the glass - he couldn’t help it - and turned.
Stephen stood at the other side of the room, tall and slender, with his head cocked, hint of a crooked smile making his face boyish and mischievous. The fingers of one hand lingered beside the tape deck.
“ABBA, Stephen?” The smile wouldn’t leave John alone.
“Don’t give me that look,” Stephen said, and his voice was solid and smooth and reassuring in the dusty coldness of the attic. “It’s Griff’s cassette.”
Fernando swelled into sentimental lyricism and twinkling chords; slightly distorted by the bad tape so that words warped and notes bent oddly. Stephen took a few steps towards John’s seat on the windowsill, and held out a hand, palm up.
“Would you care to dance?”
John glanced from hand to face to tape deck and back again, smile widening. “Are you serious?”
Stephen didn’t answer. He just raised an eyebrow, hand still extended. John shook his head, grinning - but found himself getting to his feet, leaving the misted window behind, and taking Stephen’s hand.
Stephen pulled him closer, so that John’s body pressed up against his, one arm wrapped loosely around John’s waist. Stephen still had the aura of night coolness around him, faint and sensual on his skin and his clothes. This close, John could see the dark shadows under Stephen’s eyes, the hardness in the set of his jaw. He lifted one hand, drew a thumb gently across Stephen’s cheek. “Are you all right?”
“Oh, yes.” Stephen smiled, but it was tired. “I’m as all right as anyone else here, which doesn’t say much, but...” He closed his eyes - one second, two - and opened them again, looking down at John. “Well, we’ll all be all right if we stick together. Don’t you think?”
John was sick of craning to look Stephen in the face. He curled one arm around Stephen’s back, the other hand clasped in Stephen’s. He rested his head against Stephen’s shoulder. “I hope so.”
They swayed together, in silence, to Fernando, for a few moments. Then Stephen pressed a kiss to the top of John’s head, and said “Happy new year, Johnny.”
John closed his eyes. “Happy new year.”