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“I’m gonna take a shower.”
They’re barely inside the apartment when David lays the sentence between them like a yardstick, moving away from Patrick as he kicks the door shut.
They had stayed at the cafe until they had to leave, and five minutes after that too, Twyla sweeping them outside with the streamers and wishing him a final, cheery happy birthday. They had wobbled home, champagne happy and close, plumes of white blossoming in front of their mouths when they bubbled over with laughter, breath warm against the cool night air. They had taken their time getting back to the apartment, and he hadn’t thought David had minded, had thought he’d felt just as buoyed, floating through the midnight streets, tethered only to each other.
He feels the distance now, feels the loss of the warmth of David’s hand on the back of his neck, where it had stayed all the way home, as it skims across his shoulder and away. He watches David gesture awkwardly to the bathroom, watches him reach down to pick the crab cakes and crepe paper gifts from Patrick’s hands, and he feels the loss of their weight too. He wants to feel him again. He wants to pull his hand close and put it against his chest, so David can feel his heart, feel it beating new. He wants to press him closer, wants his hands at his waist and his head against the door, wants David’s hips against him, and his thighs, and his mouth. He wants to know if he’s okay.
“Okay,” he says, instead.
“Okay,” David echoes, mouth screwed tight in a smile, and Patrick lets him go, dropping bags on the kitchen table as he passes. He’s in a hurry, reaching to his waist to yank his sweater over his head with uncharacteristic haste, and it’s clutched in his hand when he closes the bathroom door behind him, a monochromatic farewell.
Patrick is unsurprised by the retreat. He knows David well enough to know that he just needs a minute, sometimes, that even the best big nights are set around his bones like concrete and Patrick can’t help him shake them loose.
He knows that David is trying to give him a minute too, a minute to himself, a minute after a day filled with other people to get a bearing on his shifted paradigm. He supposes he should start.
He supposes he should move now. He supposes he should lock the door, close the blinds, put on the kettle, make more noise than the dull thud of David’s clothes on the bathroom tiles. He’s itching to go to bed, to take the day off with his shoes, but he can’t. He can’t move. Roots have grown from the soles of his oxfords into the hardwood floor, and the effort to pull himself free feels too much to bear.
Instead he can feel the roots growing around the roots he’s made here, creeping underneath him, and above his head, behind the frames and the wallpaper and the mortar between the exposed brick. They tangle around his guitar strings too, and the coat hanging from its stand, and the bed, and the couch and the kettle and the bathroom door, keeping David in there, and he doesn’t want that, and he doesn’t want him to feel like he can’t stay in there, forever, either.
He’s beginning to think of taking up residence in the spot where David left him, when the bathroom door swings open again.
David hasn’t showered yet, hasn’t even really undressed. Dark strands of hair have broken rank at the crown of his head, short truant curls poking this way and that, as he fixes Patrick with an anxious stare. His jeans are on the floor behind him, and his undershirt has ridden up to show the fragile skin at his hip, and the remaining shoe on his left foot is coming apart at the shoelaces. He looks undone. He looks exhausted. He looks the way Patrick thinks he should feel, but he pokes around inside his chest while David watches him, and finds he can’t feel anything right now.
David looks like he’s going to say something, the words clenching at his jaw while he tries to put them in the right order, but they come out in short bursts of explanation instead.
“It’s not - ”, he gestures between them, and Patrick nods, and David presses on. “It’s not. I just need - ya know?”
“I know,” Patrick says, as David pushes his hands quickly down and away from his body, like he’s trying to wash the day off him this way, but can’t quite manage it. Patrick says he knows because he knows , because he knows David. Patrick has watched him go to bed early on bad days, and get up late on worse ones, bleary-eyed through waking hours but better for the sleep. He’s watched him drink too much coffee, and known that he knows that there are worse vices to have. He’s listened at this apartment and at Ray’s, and a few times at the motel, as David washed an afternoon away in the bathroom, and seen him wrapped in a towel after, softer and fuller than he was before. He knows because when that doesn’t work, he’s felt David shivering against him, his broad back against Patrick’s broad chest, and his tense shoulders beneath Patrick’s hands, bodies pressed together under the shower head until the water turns cold.
“Okay,” David says, a smile passing more confidently across his lips, and Patrick returns it in kind as David closes the door between them again. And then he showers.
He showers and showers and showers , and Patrick imagines David’s head propped against the tiles, imagines the water scrubbing the messy parts of the day from David’s skin and disappearing into the drain. If he watched long enough Patrick would be able to see steam escaping under the door, and would think about sending a prayer out for his water bill, but he’s moving across the apartment instead, like he was never stuck to the floor at all.
There’s a lily standing tall in the middle of the bunch of flowers on his table. He remembers arranging them in the vase earlier on in the day, remembers trying to distract himself from the pit in his stomach. David had kissed him as he left with a slice of pizza, had kissed him and said that everything was going to be okay, soft and confident against Patrick’s lips, like he could taste the worst case scenarios working their way up Patrick’s throat like bile.
He remembers untangling the bunch of flowers, and the lily, completely unfurled, its fragile petals facing him and proud orange stalks coming from its centre. He touches them now, and they stain the tips of his fingers, stain the fabric of his jeans where he tries to wipe it off. The pollen bleeds bright against his pink skin, like a birthmark, like he’s being made new, his first birthday on his thirtieth, and he has to learn every inch of himself again, and he doesn’t know where to start. God , he wants David. David would know where to start.
He finds himself sitting on the end of his bed, thinking about whether or not to take off his shoes, when David emerges from the bathroom. A towel is wrapped around his middle, and it catches little rivulets of water that work their way down his body. He looks all fresh and pink and guilty, his lip worried between his teeth like he’s working up to an apology, like he’s about to say he fucked everything up today, when in reality he’s done the opposite. In reality, everything was fucked and David un-fucked it. David stood between Patrick and a storm that never rolled in, catching chaos in his fingers and tying into a neat bow, like he does. Patrick wants to do that for him now, be steady like him, but he doesn’t know how, and he’s so tired.
“I love you,” Patrick says, as he unties his shoes, and because the words had formed quickly in his head he thought they would sound easy in his mouth, but instead his voice is brittle.
David is across the room in three strides, his bare toes against the tip of Patrick’s shoes, his hands framing his face. He feels David’s fingers brush over the stubble at his jaw, tug gently at the lobe of his ear.
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
Patrick offers him a wobbly smile before he leans forward, lets his forehead rest against the damp skin of David’s stomach, lets the day wash over him, all at once. He feels exhausted, ecstatic , like he’s been dragged over broken glass, then sent skyward to walk across clouds. He feels punch drunk, and on the edge of tears, and he can’t muster the energy to hold back a harsh sob, muffled in the soft fabric of the towel tucked at David’s waist.
David cradles him closer, lets him unravel without letting him fall apart, fingers carding through the ripples of short hair Patrick had nervously combed into shape earlier in the night. He had felt like a kid again, getting ready for the party, that juvenile eagerness to impress driving him to distraction, making him fixate on his hair, iron his shirt, polish his shoes. He’d felt ridiculous. He’d felt like he was getting a do-over, like the universe decided it owed him the missing parts of his adolescence - his boyfriend, his surprise party, his parents, knowing every inch of him.
Now that it’s over he’s a little bewildered. Maybe tonight was too much for one man, maybe he should have measured out his happiness in teaspoons rather than stuffing it in his body with the birthday cake and underestimating the anti-climax. Maybe he was ready for a fight, steeled himself for something that didn’t come, and now the tension collected around his shoulders has nowhere to go. Maybe he wasn’t prepared to feel this free , and he’s not going to know how to not hide parts of himself away, anymore. Maybe he’s overthinking it.
“Hey,” David interrupts, as if he can hear the haywire, gently tipping Patrick’s head back so their eyes meet.
It’s nothing extraordinary, when David kisses him then. He’d expected everything to feel new, he thinks, for everything he does to be tinged with the same magic that swirls around what he did tonight.
Actually, no, that’s not entirely true. The truth feels ridiculous now he’s thinking about it.
He’d expected everything he did to feel gay , and everything gay he did to feel monumental , like it’s the first time, like he’s invented kissing men. And it does, a little, but mostly it feels ordinary. It feels like every other time, every other kiss, every morning, afternoon and midnight time, every sloppy, happy, tense, drunken, clumsy, caffeinated, leisurely, late, lunch hour kiss. David’s fingers are steepled at the nape of Patrick’s neck, and David’s body is warm and solid and bare against him, and when he leans forward Patrick feels his heart shifting into place inside his chest, like he always does. A strangled noise escapes from the back of Patrick’s throat then, and he grips the front of David’s towel so clumsily it comes apart.
Patrick breaks the kiss to grab the towel from the floor, to try and knot it around David’s waist again, and he feels a soft huff of laughter just above his head.
“Do you wanna shower?” he asks, collecting Patrick’s fumbling hands in his. The towel has fallen in a heap around David’s feet again, but he doesn’t seem to have noticed, preoccupied instead with the flower marks left on Patrick’s skin. Patrick thinks about asking if there’s even hot water left, but everything dies on his lips as David brings Patrick’s hand up to his, kisses the orange tips of his fingers. It’s all he can do to nod.
David’s hair gets wet.
It’s all he can think about as they shift underneath the shower head, his shoulders tense against the barrage of water, his heels knocking David’s feet. David doesn’t like to get his hair wet outside of schedule, says it messes with the oil balance or something, and Patrick is leaning back to remind him of this when he feels David’s wet hair tickle the crook of his neck, feels warm lips against his skin. David’s hands find Patrick’s, and he tangles their fingers together, and then he moves, moves side to side, moves until he’s swaying, and so is Patrick, like some sort of backwards, naked dance under the cooling shower. Patrick pulls their hands against his stomach and tucks his body against David’s, and closes his eyes, lets the water hit every inch of him.