Part the Twenty-First

“We need to talk.”

Thom caught Colin's elbow as the other man emerged from the loos. The afterparty was in full swing, loud music pouring from an unseen surround sound, and he knew they would go largely unnoticed; Ed and Phil were distracted with keeping Wesley and Jonny a safe distance apart, Jonny was too busy trying to disappear into the walls, and Wesley was... he was Wesley. He was still wearing that smirk, like he'd done nothing wrong, and on reflection Thom knew that he hadn't unless you could class existing as a misdemeanour.

He'd expected, when Wesley had the gall to show his face after the gig, that Colin would have jumped at the chance to rearrange it for him, but Colin had been strange, almost evasive. He'd passed it off with a weak smile and headed straight for the bar, and that was when Thom knew that something was really wrong. He'd never known Colin to stand down from a confrontation before, especially not when Jonny was involved; and that he would be leaning on the crutch of alcohol to deal with his problems was more worrying still. Of course Colin enjoyed a drink now and then, just like most of them did, but he was not a heavy drinker by any means and the way he was knocking back shots of God-knows-what with the careless abandon of a man who does not care whether he becomes drunk or not was uncharacteristic of him. There was something about Wesley that had deeply rattled his friend in a way he'd known no other individual to do, and he was determined to get to the bottom of the problem.

Colin put up little more than token protest as Thom pulled him to an unoccupied box room where the thumping music of the party was muted enough that they could hear each other. Colin stood uncertainly before him, swaying slightly, until Thom pushed him down on a crate and pinned him with his steeliest gaze.

“Coz – look at me, all right?” Colin was examining his hands, clasped in his lap with intertwining fingers, and only reluctantly raised his eyes to meet Thom's at the sharp admonishment. “OK... right, I know you and Wesley aren't supposed to be any of my business. Yeah?”

He didn't imagine the involuntary twitch of Colin's jaw, he was certain of it, but Colin merely shrugged and schooled his face into a picture of absolute nonchalance. “He can be your business if you want him to be, Thom.” Colin's voice, usually faultlessly precise, was slurred by the alcohol; he himself seemed puzzled by the inaccuracy of his speech, and frowned, as though it had been unexpected. “You're... your own man, after all...”

“Oh, for fuck's sake.” Thom resisted the urge to grasp the other man by the shoulders and shake him hard, settling instead for crouching down in front of Colin, separating his hands and taking each cold, small fist in his own warm ones. “What's going on with you and Wesley? You're acting like... I don't know. A kicked puppy, or something, around him.” His mind was working overtime, trying to catch up to his mouth as pieces of the jigsaw fitted into place. “Like you're afraid of him,” he realised suddenly.

Colin laughed, a sound that hurt Thom's head and heart all at once. “'m not afraid,” he murmured, his fingers attempting to flex within the hot cage of Thom's palms. “Well. Not for me. For... for Jonny.”

“Why don't you say anything about him and Wesley, then?”

Colin's mouth was trying to form around words that it seemed hard for him to voice. He tried once, twice, and on the third attempt: “Because he likes it.”

“That doesn't mean it's good for him.” Thom shifted uncomfortably; staying in this position for too long made his knees hurt. “I just don't understand why Wesley is so special. I mean... to you, why should he be any different to me? You're not afraid of me, are you? You saw what I did to Nat. I could have done that to Jonny, it would have been worse than anything Wesley could do.” Colin flinched violently at that, but Thom held on. “I'm just someone you fucked around with, like you did with Wesley, someone you could manipulate, someone who moved on to Jonny after you were done. Why is Wesley different?”

“Thom -” Colin began.

“You've never been bothered by Jonny being hurt before.”

“Thom -”

“Who do you trust, me or Wesley? Or no one? I don't get it, Wesley's never done anything to him that you wouldn't do yourself -”

And Colin wrenched his hands free of Thom's grasp and stood abruptly, knocking Thom off-balance to sprawl inelegantly on the floor. His thin chest was heaving as though he had run a marathon, huge eyes all of a sudden overbright as he stared down at Thom and trembled like a shaken leaf. “You have no idea what you're talking about,” he proclaimed loudly into the silence that followed, and before Thom could do or say anything else Colin had swept past him and out of the door, letting it bang shut behind him.

He lay there a few moments longer, half-propped on grazed elbows, considering whether to pursue Colin and draw some real answers out of him, but he knew defeat when he saw it and rolled over onto his front, grinding the heels of his hands against his eyes as though it would force clarity into them. Eventually he hauled himself to his feet, dusted off his trousers and stumbled outside to rejoin the party. The decision, frequent as it had become, was easy, a mere formality: it was time to get drunk.

His eyes sought out the familiar faces as he headed for the bar. Phil was absent: he often was, these days, tiring of the circles the others ran round each other and instead retreating to his room to call his wife. Thom sometimes envied him for having something so mundane to go back to when life on the road was too much; it probably explained why Phil was the most emotionally balanced member of the band. Wesley hovered by the nearest exit, well away from Jonny and Colin, keeping one nervous eye on Ed; Ed who was watching Wesley in turn, and also, it seemed, looking out for Colin, who was studiously avoiding everyone. And Jonny... Jonny simply drifted through the room as he always did, neither part of the crowd nor entirely detached from it, followed occasionally by all of them.

He wasn't surprised to see Jonny quietly leaving the party after a couple of hours, or Wesley following him soon after, but he was surprised to find that he didn't actually care. He wasn't sure whether it was a result of too much alcohol or his conversation with Colin, that the thought of what the two of them would inevitably be getting up to left him completely cold. As far as he was concerned, they were welcome to each other, and he would be glad if for the rest of his life his romantic liaisons never strayed into the realm of Greenwood again. He knocked back another drink and wondered whether he had imagined the sudden relief that pervaded Colin's expression once Wesley had left.

There was a strange kind of creeping doubt lurking in the back of his mind. The way Colin had responded to him when he suggested that Wesley was no different to any other one of his conquests had left him with too much to think about. From the dismissive way in which Colin was able to treat his other lovers – if 'lover' could be considered an appropriate term for what they shared – it jarred that he should react so strongly whenever Wesley was mentioned. Colin's control did not slip often, yet the blond disrupted it in ways Thom had never seen before.

The notion seemed laughable as soon as it occurred to Thom, but the longer he considered it the more sense it made. Was it possible – however ridiculous it sounded as he said it inside his head – that Colin was in love with Wesley? That he couldn't admit it because of his brother? As soon as he thought it, he wanted to shrug it off, but it was so coldly logical: Colin's apparent resentment of Jonny and Wesley's relationship, yet his ongoing tolerance of it, perhaps realising that his chances were shot and only wanting them to be content; the way he was skittish around Wesley, barely able to meet the other man's eyes; his relief in Wesley's absence. Wesley had asserted that Colin wasn't interested in an emotional engagement, only in control, and perhaps at one time Thom would have accepted such a simple explanation, until he had seen the many complex layers of deceit and misdirection his best friend had constructed around himself.

In love with Wesley, of all people.

It was almost four in the morning by the time he stumbled through the door of his and Ed's room. Ed was unexpectedly perched on the edge of his bed, folding socks – it didn't really strike Thom what an odd undertaking that was – and he looked up as Thom flopped bonelessly onto his mattress, giving him a brittle smile.

“I'm never drinking again,” Thom proclaimed loudly into the oppressive silence.

Ed nodded and went back to his socks. There was a muscle working in his jaw, Thom could see; he wasn't sure what Ed's problem was. It wasn't as though the man he loved had left him for dead. He tried to concentrate on the ceiling, because it was the only thing around him that wasn't moving.

There was a loud cry from next door.

He sat bolt upright and stared at the partition wall separating them from the adjacent room. The hush that had fallen after the sound almost convinced him that he'd imagined it, and he looked over at Ed, seeking confirmation; but Ed remained resolutely focused on his socks, a sudden flush of colour rising in his cheeks. Thom was fully prepared to dismiss it as a figment of his overactive imagination, but no one could have imagined the following noises: Jonny's voice, distinct in its pleading tone; the protesting squeak of mattress springs; and the low, rhythmic thump of a bedstead against plasterboard.

“You're fucking kidding me.” Thom chanced a glance at Ed again, and the other man returned it with a weak twitch of his lips, what Thom supposed was a watery grin.

“Yes, the walls are that thin,” Ed murmured, putting aside his last pair of socks and starting on his underpants.

“But... shouldn't I... everyone can hear them!”

Ed raised an eyebrow. “And? It's not anything we didn't know already. What are you going to do, go break down the door and demand they stop? Jonny's old enough to make his own choices, you and Colin can't hold his hands for ever.”

Thom wasn't prepared for how right Ed was. He'd done his part, he'd shown all the concern he could for a friend making (in his eyes) a stupid decision, and Jonny still went back to the man who reduced him to a nervous wreck. If he wanted it there was nothing Thom could do. He didn't care, he told himself, it didn't mean a thing to him: after all that time imagining what passed between the two, after seeing it, after trying his very best to help, it didn't move him at all. But even as he thought about it, settling back against the pillows, listening to Wesley's guttural moans and concentrating on not throwing up, he wondered what sort of penance Colin would have planned for his brother when they went home.

Part the Twentieth

Thom was sitting cross-legged at the front of the stage, guitar resting in his lap, picking at a bit of tape stuck to the floor in front of him. It felt odd to play in Cambridge, and it would never stop being odd; it was a place he still associated with their university days, visiting Colin, doing ridiculous things like punting on the Cam, and making unfavourable comparisons with Oxford.

He hadn't spoken properly to either Jonny or Colin since the disaster at the hotel in London, and as for Wesley, he was doing his best to pretend the other man didn't exist, despite the blond's knowing smiles and pointed remarks thrown in his direction. He'd even moved out of his and Jonny's shared room and into Ed's spare bed, not sure what he was trying to prove; Wesley had taken this as a clear sign of forfeit from Thom, and had promptly turned it into what seemed like a permanent arrangement. If Phil and Ed had any objections to Wesley's presence, they were keeping them to themselves. Thom pretended he hadn't seen the trapped expression on Jonny's face when he'd invited Wesley to join them, and he pretended he couldn't feel the niggling sensation of doubt gnawing away at his insides when Wesley and Jonny's hotel room door had slammed shut earlier in the afternoon, at check-in. And as for Colin...

Thom had almost given up trying to fathom the other man's reactions. He'd thought Colin would be pleased that Thom was encouraging Wesley's involvement with Jonny at the cost of his own relationship, but it didn't seem that way. The day before, when Wesley had announced Thom's 'kind invitation' over Jonny's birthday lunch at an expensive London restaurant, Thom had immediately looked to Colin for his approval, and seen none; outwardly, Colin had appeared happy, expressing his delight at Wesley's ongoing company, but he and Thom weren't old friends for nothing. Thom had seen the momentary clenching of Colin's jaw, the sudden flicker of confusion in his eyes as he'd inadvertently glanced over at Thom, and wondered if Colin recognised that he was starting to lose control of the little game he had set up for them.

He didn't want to admit it, but the thought of Colin losing control was genuinely frightening.

A roadie clomped past him, trailing power cables, and the sudden noise shook him out of his reverie. Jonny was standing on the far side of the stage, plugging in his guitar, and all around him the others were setting up in preparation for the soundcheck. He scrambled to his feet, pushing the tape back into place with the toe of his trainer, and tapped the microphone with one finger. “Is this thing on?” He turned a little to sneak a peek at Jonny, who caught him looking and gave him an encouraging smile that made his stomach clench. “OK then... right, I think we should run through You one last time...”

He kept a careful eye on Jonny all through the soundcheck. He'd half-expected that Jonny would show some outward signs of distress at the way he and Thom had ended, but he'd given no such indications, and Thom felt a little stupid. Perhaps he really hadn't meant as much to Jonny as he'd hoped – as Jonny had meant to him – and Jonny was just happy to have Wesley to go back to. Even if what Thom had walked in on at the hotel in London hadn't seemed like Jonny was happy to have Wesley at all.

Jonny was wearing another shirt that he appeared to have borrowed from someone four sizes bigger than him. Thom couldn't help feeling that he had something to hide, especially since it probably belonged to Wesley. He tamped down the dull ache of jealousy inside him at the thought and concentrated on remembering his lyrics, and when he was satisfied with the sound and they began to pack away in preparation for the support, he made his way over to the other man. He wasn't entirely sure what he was going to say to him, except that he needed to talk; but he was stopped dead in his tracks by the appearance of Wesley, who had clearly been waiting backstage all along, making a beeline for Jonny. He watched as the blond laid a careful hand on Jonny's shoulder, their heads, light and dark, dipping together briefly to exchange words and the vaguest brush of full lips over one high cheekbone, a blush rising in Jonny's skin as he looked around guiltily and caught Thom staring. And then the careful hand became proprietary, coaxing Jonny into the shadows beyond the bright stage lights, and Thom was left with the familiar sensation of being outmanoeuvred.

How could Jonny possibly be concerned about losing Thom when he had Wesley to go back to? Wesley was everything that Thom was not – confident, good-looking, self-assured, strong – and perhaps that was what Jonny really wanted: someone he could depend on to support him without being crippled by self-doubt. Someone who could be relied upon to take control. And the drugs... when he had overheard them arguing, it had sounded as though Jonny was used to it. And Wesley was the sparkly, glamorous aspect of that world, the aspect that seemed to draw strength from it, used it recreationally and to fuel self-indulgence. Thom couldn't compete with that; wasn't even sure why he was trying except that, to him, Jonny was worth it. He had to be.

He contemplated going back to the dressing room, but knew that the others would be there; if there was one person he wanted to spend less time around right now than Wesley, it was Colin. Instead he found himself taking a side door to the alleyway behind the venue, which was dark and windswept, lit only by the dull sodium glow of distant street lamps, the sort of place one could find all over the world, even in the comparatively middle-class civility of Cambridge. He fished a lighter and a crumpled packet of cigarettes from his pocket and, shielding the flame from the wind, lit one with shaking fingers and took a deep drag. Smoking was something he rarely did now – he'd given it up, for the most part, at Jonny's request as he remembered – but at that moment his nerves were in need of some serious calming. Within minutes his hands had stopped trembling, and he concentrated on the dim glow of burning tobacco as he leaned against the wall and tipped his head back to rest on the cool bricks, closing his eyes.

He wasn't sure how much time passed before he heard the door open, and looked over to see Jonny watching him. His shoulders were hunched against the cold, arms crossed over his front and long fingers bunched in his shirtsleeves; his lips were kiss-swollen, hair slightly tousled as though someone else had run hands through it. He smiled anxiously, kicking the door shut behind him and sniffing the air.

“Smoking?” he murmured. “I thought you were giving up.”

“Y'know how it goes,” Thom mumbled, looking away.

“Can I...?”

Thom thrust the packet at him, waiting until Jonny had lit up before speaking again. “Colin's bad habits rubbing off on you?”

Jonny's eyes were dark, sparkling as they raked over Thom's face. He'd never had an addictive personality, could give things up whenever he pleased, much to Thom's chagrin. “Why are you hanging around out here on your own?” he asked. “It's freezing. You'll lose your voice or something.”

“I just wanted some time alone,” Thom muttered. He watched as Jonny raised the cigarette to his lips, mouth pursing a little while he sucked in the smoke; he made it look so maddeningly elegant, with his graceful fingers holding up the cigarette like a signal flare, his hair and face limned in ghostly grey. And there, where his sleeve fell back to the crook of his elbow, the dusky purple-blue of new bruises ringed his arm like a delicate bracelet. “You've got...” Thom continued, nodding towards them. He wasn't even shocked to find that he was unable to be surprised.

Jonny looked down at his exposed wrist with mild, detached curiosity, and effortlessly switched the cigarette to his other hand, shaking his sleeve down to hide the injured one.

“Why do you let him do that?” Thom asked, after a long, awkward pause.

“You don't have the right to ask,” Jonny said sharply, suddenly terse, drawing deeply on the cigarette and stifling a cough. “You can't – no. It's nothing to do with you.”

“It is if you're being hurt.”

“It's only on the outside.” Ash fluttered to the ground around their feet as Jonny waved his hand dismissively. “You know it's what I want... you know what you gave up. You don't have the right to demand answers.” He dropped the cigarette to the paving and crushed it under his heel, raising his gaze to Thom's. “We'll be on soon. Come inside and get warm, at least.”

As Thom followed Jonny back into the building, they were met by Wesley, who drew Jonny aside with an odd glance between the pair of them; Jonny looked back at Thom apologetically as they disappeared down the corridor. Thom ducked into the dressing room, where Ed was going through some half-hearted warm-up exercises, Phil was sharing out the water bottles and Colin was perched on the edge of a table, alternating between biting on a thumbnail and swinging his legs distractedly. It was another thing he shared with his brother, a complete inability to sit or stand still, especially in the nervous moments before a gig; but Colin's nerves normally manifested themselves in non-stop talking, and this time he was unusually silent.

Thom claimed a water bottle for himself and sipped at it to clear his throat of the odd, tight feeling it had developed while he listened to Jonny. “Stop eating yourself,” he said quietly, pulling Colin's hand away from his mouth. “What's wrong?”

Colin looked up at him and gave a short laugh. “What? There's nothing wrong.” He sniffed. “I thought you'd given up smoking.”

“That was Jonny,” Thom said: it was half true, really. “Why's Wesley hanging around? Every time I look over my shoulder he seems to be there.”

Colin shrugged, his mouth pulling down at the corners. “I don't know. You ask him; you're the one who invited him along, after all.”

Thom couldn't miss the faint accusatory tone in his voice, but it was too late to ask any more questions.

---

The stage was the only place where Thom could let go of his insecurities. Once the house lights went down and the spotlights went up, he could stop being afraid, because those people out there on the floor – they were there for the music. For the band. For him. And being special became so much more than a wish.

Once, he'd been one of those kids, packed into too-small venues like so many sardines; to think that now he was one of those people, the ones that people had posters of on their walls, the ones people wrote thank-you letters to, just for being there, was something that would never grow old. Sometimes, there was almost a sense of being untouchable, and it took a fall to realise that you weren't.

Perhaps Jonny was on that downward spiral, he thought.

They'd started out well. Despite the tensions, knowing that something, however inexplicable, was wrong with Colin, knowing that Jonny was pulling away from him, knowing that Wesley was lurking in the wings, he thought they could keep it together. At one point in the first few songs, he'd glanced over at Jonny and shown him the same encouraging smile that Jonny had given him during the soundcheck; but Jonny was barely paying attention, his gaze continually drifting to the offstage silhouette that Thom knew belonged to Wesley. And then, a wrong note here, a missed chord change there, a late cue, a dropped pick. Did the audience notice, Thom wondered; did they care? They didn't seem to. But the rest of the band would notice; they would care. He looked over at Jonny again. The younger man's jaw was set, his head down as though he was determined not to screw up again. And beyond him... Thom could almost sense Wesley's coolly supercilious smirk as Jonny fell apart between them.

It continued in this vein until the end of the set. Wesley's presence was tearing Jonny's concentration to shreds, and when it came to the last song, Jonny almost threw his guitar down in his rush to get away from the stage, with Colin hurrying after him.

“Get him out of here,” Thom hissed to Ed, motioning in Wesley's direction before taking off in pursuit of the Greenwoods.

He found them in the bathroom at the end of the corridor behind the stage. Jonny was leaning over one of the sinks, his face shockingly pale beneath a curtain of sweat-dampened hair, while Colin held a paper cup under the running tap and tried to press it into his brother's shaking fingers. His free hand was resting on Jonny's back, moving in small, soothing circles, and Thom pulled up short at the display of tenderness as Colin lifted the cup to Jonny's lips and coaxed him to drink.

“Jon... what the fuck was that?”

The pair of them turned as one to look at him. Jonny was barely fighting back tears, whereas Colin was white with anger. “Wesley,” Colin snapped. “You shouldn't have brought him with you.”

“It's nothing,” Jonny protested weakly.

“He seemed pretty OK with Wesley from where I was standing,” Thom said, unable to keep the coldness out of his voice. “Unless those bruises were from a friendly little wrestling match and not from Wesley pinning him down and fu-”

“I'm fine!” Jonny interrupted, at the same time as Colin said, “What bruises?”

“It's nothing,” Jonny insisted, backing out of his brother's grasp and draining the cup of water, although most of it spilled onto the tiled floor as his hands trembled violently. “All right. Um. We have an encore to do.”

“You're not going back if he's -” Colin began.

“He's not, I think Ed's taking care of that,” Thom said. “Er... are you sure about this, Jon?”

Jonny pushed his hair out of his eyes and nodded. “I'm fine. Really.”

But later, on stage, Thom couldn't help but notice that even with Wesley nowhere in sight, Jonny kept his head down, and that Colin's gaze never left his brother's back.

Part the Nineteenth

He woke to the morning sunlight knifing through the open curtains, landing directly on his pillow. From the bone-deep ache in his head and limbs, he could tell that it was still early; rolling over, his eyes fell on Jonny's unoccupied bed, and his heart sank like a stone inside him.

Showering and shaving made him feel only slightly more human, and by the time he made it downstairs to find the others at the breakfast buffet, he'd had time to remember a few important things: they were in London, and would be until the following day; it was Jonny's birthday; the combination of the two probably meant that Ed and Colin had a night of determined debauchery planned for them; and Thom had given Jonny the worst present he could possibly have received.

He would rather have gone crawling back to bed and pretended the day wasn't happening, but Colin had already spotted him and was waving him over, pushing a basket of rolls across the table. Thom sat down reluctantly and took the jug of orange juice that Colin passed to him, noticing Jonny's absence. When he bit into his roll he felt so miserable that the food tasted like ashes in his mouth, and he swallowed it with a grimace and discreetly pushed his plate to one side.

“Where's Jon?” he asked nonchalantly, as Phil reached over and snagged the remains of his roll. He thought he saw the drummer exchange the briefest of meaningful glances with Colin, but if Colin had noticed, he didn't let on.

“Taking a phone call,” he said guardedly, spreading a neat layer of jam on a slice of toast. “It's probably Mum,” he added with a shrug. “Calling her ickle birthday boy. Did the two of you sort things out last night, by the way?”

It took Thom a few moments to understand what Colin was asking, and when he did he couldn't help the blush rising in his cheeks. Ed was looking curiously between Thom and Colin now, and Phil's eyebrows were raised almost high enough to graze his receding hairline. “Yeah,” he mumbled, yes, I let go of the one person I think I could ever have really loved.

“Good,” Colin said lightly. “Are you all right? You don't look very well.”

Thom shoved his chair back and stood up. “I've been losing sleep,” he said. “I think I'm going back to bed.”

“What about J-?” Colin began, but Thom cut him off.

“He's a big boy, Coz, I'm sure he can do without me,” he said pointedly, which was enough to shut Colin up for once.

His stomach growled in protest, but he had no other option than to go back to his room, miserable and unfed. He could feel Ed and Phil's eyes on him as he left the table, silently questioning; but as he ascended the stairs, he thought that it was really Colin's task to provide them with answers, considering he was the one who had manoeuvred Thom into this mess in the first place. Because of course you didn't have any other option than to go along with it, said the mocking Colin-voice in his head, and he ground his teeth in frustration.

He was almost to his hotel room door when he noticed that it was slightly ajar, the gentle murmur of the hushed voices within drifting out into the corridor. As he drew closer, putting one eye to the inch-wide gap between the frame and the door, he could see the two figures wavering in and out of view as they moved: Jonny, pacing around his bed, followed by an unexpected visitor with wavy blond hair and piercing blue eyes.

Wesley. Thom's stomach flipped over. He was half-tempted to barge straight in and demand to know what the other man was doing in their hotel room – his hotel room! - but then he remembered that he'd given up any claim he had to Jonny, and that Jonny might just have invited Wesley himself, and that there was nothing sinister in that. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to just step away from the door, pretend he'd never been there, but instead he stayed there, frozen in place as snatches of Jonny and Wesley's conversation reached his ears.

“... doesn't matter, anyway,” Wesley was saying, trailing on Jonny's heels as Jonny began another circuit of his bed. “It's really rattled you, hasn't it?”

Everything about Jonny's posture screamed 'defensive' to Thom, who had years of experience in how to read his younger bandmate; his head was down, avoiding Wesley's sharp gaze, and his arms were crossed over his chest, each hand cupping the opposite elbow. His voice, when he spoke, was strained.

“I don't want to talk about him,” he murmured, barely loud enough for Thom to hear. It was clear enough that he and Wesley were discussing Thom. “It was a mistake. He doesn't understand the... the...”

“Rules of engagement?” Wesley said with a knowing smirk. “He was playing Colin's games well enough. What changed?”

Jonny sat down heavily on the bed; his body was angled away from Thom, but Thom could see Wesley pausing in front of him, Jonny's face lifting to finally look at him. Wesley ran a hand through the shiny dark hair, a gesture that at first appeared affectionate until his fingers splayed out at the base of Jonny's skull and held him there, staring up at Wesley in supplication.

“He wants... more,” Jonny said eventually. “He knows about you, and Colin, and he wants me to give that up.”

Thom wished he could see Jonny's face, but instead had to settle for Wesley's and the strange expression that crossed it at Jonny's words. “You love him, don't you?” His voice was oddly muffled – strangled, Thom thought - as though he wanted to raise it but didn't dare for fear that someone would hear them.

“You know I do. But...”

“But...?”

“I can't. I can't let go of Colin. I couldn't do it for you and I won't do it for Thom.”

Whatever Thom was expecting by way of a confession, that hadn't been it. No wonder that Wesley had told him not to judge the brothers, that night at the Club; he had known the true depth of the feeling between the pair, and was afraid that Thom would realise it was something more than just sex. To think of it... it was almost more shocking to learn the true nature of their relationship. Sex was easy; sex could, if not be excused, be understood. But he should have known that for the Greenwoods, close as they were, intensely passionate in their own ways, nothing would ever be as simple as plain sex.

Wesley seemed to accept that. He appeared happy enough in his own role, whatever that was: providing what Jonny wanted, the foil to what Jonny needed. In this picture, Thom couldn't see room for himself.

“It's his loss,” Wesley was saying; Thom came out of his temporary reverie to find that Wesley was pushing Jonny back onto the bed, leaning in to claim his mouth in a bruisingly hard kiss. “He doesn't want you now he knows what a slut you can be.”

Jonny whimpered something, presumably in denial, too quiet for Thom to hear; Wesley laughed, a low, threatening rumble, and kissed him again. “Tell me to go away, then. Go on. You can't, can you?” As Thom watched, Wesley dragged himself fully onto the bed, straddling Jonny's thighs; Jonny lay passively beneath him, his eyes wide and almost frightened, Thom thought. “I told Thom all about you, you know. The piano lessons...” He slipped his hands under Jonny's shirt, sliding it up to reveal an expanse of pale flat stomach, and Thom pressed himself even closer to the gap in the door, breathing hard enough that he was sure one of them would hear him. “How you'd run off with anyone who asked you to. Like a common whore.” He pinched at a nipple; Thom heard Jonny hiss with pain, his slender body arching off the bed beneath Wesley's weight.

“You know why,” he murmured.

Wesley cupped Jonny's face with one palm, a strange moment of tenderness amidst the harsh urgency of the encounter. “I know. But he doesn't. He thinks you did it because you liked it.” The blond head dipped again, stealing another kiss, and Jonny let out a low moan deep in his throat that went straight to Thom's cock. “If I didn't know you so well, I'd think you did it because you liked it, too. Whore.”

Jonny muttered something inaudible and sat up abruptly, dislodging Wesley unceremoniously onto the mattress beside him. “Stop it. I knew there was a reason why we split up. You can't just – just charge in here and start acting like you own me -”

“- I do, though, don't I?” Wesley was trailing a possessive finger up the line of Jonny's neck, and Thom was seized by a sudden, almost overwhelming urge to throw the door open, stride to the bed and slap his hand away, ask him what right he thought he had to touch Jonny when Thom couldn't; but Jonny didn't seem to mind despite his previous declaration, leaning back into the gesture like a cat being stroked. His next words, when they came, were choked and bitter.

“I hate you.”

Thom couldn't see Wesley's face, but he could sense the smug expression on the blond's features. “Yet you still keep coming back to me. If you want to be punished I think I could manage better ways than this, don't you?”

Jonny sat back at that; Thom could see the sharp profile of his face now, a flush of colour splashed high on his cheeks, his brow creased in a frown. “Why are you here?” he asked. “Don't you have a job?”

“Yes, but it's not half as fun as you are,” Wesley retorted, closing the gap that had opened between them. “Can't I come along and give you your birthday wishes too? Or is that just for Colin and Thom? Come on, Jon, it's London, I can think of a million places better than the Club where we could do whatever we like -”

“You're on something,” Jonny said with dawning realisation, the disgust in his voice clearly evident. “Jesus Christ, Wes – you promised you were going to stop doing this! Just go home. I don't want you around if you're going to be like this.”

As Jonny made to get off the bed, Wesley hauled him back by the shoulders and crushed their mouths together, muffling whatever protest Jonny was trying to voice. Watching the brief struggle, Thom made up his mind; he pushed the door open, determinedly arranging his face into an expression of shocked bewilderment as he pulled up short and the pair on the bed jumped apart like guilty schoolboys.

“Thom!” Jonny exclaimed with the false over-brightness of the desperate. He smoothed down his hair and wiped his lips as though Wesley might have left a visible trace there; Wesley, on the other hand, looked utterly composed, wearing a coolly supercilious smile as he lounged back against the headboard.

“Happy birthday, Jon,” Thom said flatly, deciding in an instant to pretend that he didn't care at all. “Just carry on as you were – I'm going back to bed, don't mind me.”

“Didn't sleep enough last night?” Wesley asked innocently, casting a sly glance at Jonny. Close to, Thom could tell that there was something off about his speech, although he couldn't quite put his finger on it; but he'd spent long enough around people who were off their faces on God-knows-what to recognise someone under the influence, and Wesley definitely was.

Looking between the two of them, something small and vicious prickled at the back of Thom's mind. He should have been done with this shit by now. He'd turned Jonny down, so why should he give a damn what he and Wesley were getting up to in their spare time? But when he'd seen Jonny struggling in Wesley's grasp, far from triggering the sense of almost brotherly overprotectiveness that Thom had used to feel for the younger man, it had awoken in him a desire to do the same; a queasy, roiling sickness twisted in the pit of his stomach at the thought, and before he could catch himself the half-formed idea in his head was spilling out as words into the sudden silence.

“Wesley... you know, we're on tour right now.” He glanced at Jonny's stricken face, and his resolve tightened. “Do you want to come along for the ride?”

Part the Eighteenth

Thom was remembering.

It was late spring, and Jonny was studying for his GCSE exams. The others were still away at university, scattered across the country and not to be expected back for at least a month; so it was that on a warm May afternoon, Thom found himself sprawled on Jonny's bed in the stuffy attic room at the Greenwoods' house, while Jonny sat cross-legged on the floor with his back against the cold radiator and tried to memorise biology notes. Document was on the turntable, Michael Stipe singing in the background of how it was the end of the world as they knew it. Ostensibly Thom was helping Jonny to revise, but Thom had always been rubbish at science, so instead he was passing Jonny's textbooks when he was asked, scribbling lyrics in his notebook, and mostly watching the younger boy out of the corner of his eye.

Jonny was dressed in a tatty grey sweater that was several sizes too big for him, a relic of one of Ed's visits – Ed always left things behind – and although the collar, elastic stretched and wrinkled through years of wear, was darkened by sweat, he showed no inclination to switch for something cooler. Hunched over his papers, a scrawny, leggy, awkward scarecrow with a cheap haircut and too-long fingers curled round his pen, Thom was nonetheless reminded of a five-year-old caught in his father's clothing. Every now and then, Jonny would sigh and lift a hand to push his fringe out of his eyes, and the sleeve of the sweater would bunch up at his elbow, revealing a pattern of multicoloured bruises and raw red chafing on the thin wrist; he would glance hastily up at Thom, shaking the sleeve back down to cover his hand, and Thom in turn would look away and pretend he hadn't seen, because Jonny was old enough to have his own secrets.

It was, he supposed, the first time he'd ever really, truly noticed Jonny for the boy he'd become, rather than the musician he was.

It had been a long, slow evolution. There was the terrified first-year in Colin's hand-me-down uniform, the kid Thom had almost dismissed as Colin's less eloquent yet equally strange shadow, the boy who'd already shown he could be better than any of them, and now... now, the young man who was Thom's closest friend and confidant, who wore his hidden bruises and clung to Thom's presence like a lifeline. Jonny was chewing on the end of his pen as he frowned at a complicated diagram that made no sense to Thom. He had Tipp-ex on two of his fingernails.

“Did you know that male ceratioid angler fish mate for life?” he said suddenly, looking up at Thom with an odd smile on his face. His features seemed to shift and shimmer in the bright sunlight streaming through the open window, and Thom swallowed and shifted uncomfortably on the bed, picking at a hangnail.

“No, I didn't,” he admitted. “Where'd you get that from?”

“It was on TV,” Jonny said. “It was quite sad, really. The – the male fish, they have a highly developed sense of smell for detecting scents in the water. When they become mature, their digestive systems degenerate and they can't feed independently, so they use their sense of smell to detect the female pheromones and find a female fish before they die. And... when he finds her, he bites into her skin, and it releases an enzyme that digests the skin of his mouth and her body and fuses them together. But then his body atrophies, until it's just a pair of gonads attached to the female, and when her hormones are right they release the sperm for fertilising her egg release, so she can move on to the next mate immediately.”

Thom cocked his head to one side, squinting at the other boy. “It sounds fascinating,” he said drily.

Jonny looked down at his hands. “Sometimes I feel a bit like one of those females.”

Thom wondered briefly when he had shifted from remembering to dreaming, and at the realisation that he was dreaming, he awoke with a start. It took him a good few moments to recall where he was, or why he was there: flat on his back in bed, staring at the ceiling of a London hotel room in the early hours of the morning after a gig. He wasn't sure how it was possible to ache this much. Every inch of him, from his head to his eyes to his neck to his back to his knees to the soles of his feet, hurt with a slow, dull, pounding throb that made him feel sick to his stomach. Colin had plied him with aspirin through much of the previous day, making sure he had the reserves to get them through the concert if nothing else, and Thom wondered how much of his present condition was merely psychosomatic, a response to the revelations of yesterday.

“Nightmare?” asked a voice at the end of the bed, and he raised his head to see a shadow curled up on the sheets by his feet. Jonny's face was white in the darkness of the room, picking up the meagre light from outside that set their curtains aglow, his eyes wide and shining as he watched Thom. His chin was resting on his knees, his arms clasped around himself, and Thom could tell even in the gloom that he wasn't wearing anything.

“What?” Thom murmured, pushing himself up on his elbows. He winced; it felt as though something had crawled into his throat and died during the night. His sense of unease wasn't alleviated by the thought that Jonny had been staring at him while he slept, and he fought down an involuntary shudder.

“You were talking in your sleep,” Jonny said. “About teeth.” He edged up the bed a little, like a large, pale spider, and Thom backed up against the headboard until he found that he had nowhere left to go.

“Angler fish,” he explained. It was some stupid documentary Colin had made them watch the other week. Jonny blinked at him curiously, before his hands came down over Thom's and he was pulling himself into Thom's lap, leaning forwards to let their lips brush together. His hair fell like a heavy curtain around their faces, slightly damp and smelling of cheap shampoo and the fabric softener in the bed linen, but his mouth and naked skin was oddly cold and just the sensation of their bodies pressed against one another made Thom feel vaguely ill. He seized Jonny around the wrists and pushed him away, turning his head so he wouldn't have to look at the boy's face.

“Thom, what's wrong?” Jonny asked. He shifted against Thom's thighs but made no attempt to free his wrists.

“I can't do this,” Thom said to his shoulder. Jonny twisted out of his grasp then, cool fingers taking hold of Thom's chin and turning his head until he had to meet the other man's gaze, and what Thom saw there made his stomach roll with discomfort and guilt.

“What did Colin tell you?” Jonny asked quietly.

Thom shrugged, an awkward movement in his position. “He didn't need to tell me anything. I saw you and Wesley after the party.”

Jonny stiffened, and his fingers tightened on Thom's jaw. “You saw us... what?”

Thom snorted. “Don't be coy, Jon, it doesn't suit you. I saw you at your house with him -”

“- you followed me?”

“- and I saw exactly what you were doing. And... I can't let us carry on. I can't do this knowing that it doesn't mean anything to you.”

Jonny released his grip on Thom's face, his hands falling to his lap. His eyes looked strangely damp. “I know about you and Wesley,” he said simply. “And it doesn't matter to me. I know about you and Colin and that doesn't matter either. We still have each other, either way. Why,” he stroked a hand gently across Thom's chest, making the smaller man shiver and pull away, “why can't that be enough?”

“Wesley was a mistake,” Thom muttered. “I – I didn't mean for it to happen.”

“He forced you?” Jonny's voice came quickly, sounding odd, some deep emotion tamped down within it as though he was afraid of Thom hearing it.

“I didn't say that. It just... happened. We hardly know each other. Not like you and I.”

Jonny shifted forwards again, until their faces were barely an inch apart. His hands splayed out across Thom's stomach, their coldness burning him through the thin material of his t-shirt. “What do you want, Thom?” His hair tickled Thom's cheeks, his breath citrus-sharp and his skin like a cooling balm as their foreheads pressed together.

It was a simple answer, in the end. “You.”

He could sense, rather than see, Jonny's smile. “You have me. I'm not going anywhere.”

“I don't have you, though. Not really. Not when I know that tomorrow you could be spreading your legs for someone else.”

One of Jonny's hands slid lower, to the waistband of Thom's boxers, and hovered there as though asking for permission to go further. “That doesn't mean that this is nothing to me,” he said, clever fingers tracing the thin line of hair that arrowed downwards from Thom's navel.

“It feels like it does when I know I can't give you what you want,” Thom confessed. “What Wesley gives you. What Colin gives you. I can't hurt you just because you ask me to.”

“What if I begged you to?” Jonny said with a low laugh, the tips of his fingers hooking inside Thom's pants and drawing them slowly down. “It is my birthday, you know.”

“It's not a joke, Jon. All I want is your... your fidelity, I suppose.”

Jonny's hand slipped fully inside his boxers, and the contrast of his cool palm on Thom's heated flesh made Thom squirm beneath him. “You want me to belong to you?”

“It's not the same,” Thom protested. “I don't want to own you. I just want to know that I could be enough for you, that you wouldn't have to turn to someone else when you couldn't have what you wanted from me.”

Jonny sighed as his fingers wrapped around the base of Thom's shaft. “You know you can't ask that of me.” He began to stroke Thom lightly, a gentle touch that wasn't quite enough to satisfy, and Thom's hands fisted in the bedsheets on either side of him. “I have obligations to more people than you. You... you can't ever be the most important person to me, Thom. You can't have that.”

Thom seized his wrist then, pulling Jonny's hand away from him even though it nearly killed him to do it. “I was right, then. I can't do this.”

At his tone, Jonny rolled off his lap, landing gracelessly on the carpeted floor while Thom disentangled himself from the sheets and scrambled to his feet, breathing hard. “I'm sorry,” he said in a small voice, watching as Thom crossed the room to the ensuite, slamming the door and locking it behind him.

He leaned his head against the cold surface of the mirror over the sink and thought that he'd never hated himself as much as he did at that moment, standing there and willing his erection away as he tried to fight the bile rising in his throat. How much of the person who had just torn Jonny to shreds out there was himself, and how much of it was the quiet, endlessly rational voice, ever-present at the back of his mind, that he'd come to recognise as Colin? Colin's intention was clear as day, in hindsight: he wasn't prepared to lose his brother yet, just because Thom had finally sat up and started taking an interest.

With shaking fingers, he ran a glass of water from the tap and drank it, then splashed his face to rid himself of the nervous sweat beading his brow. He felt as though he had been thoroughly outmanoeuvred. When he eventually unlocked the door and went back to his bed, Jonny was nothing more than a mound under his duvet facing the wall, although Thom knew better than to believe that he was asleep. He slid beneath the sheets of his own empty bed, curling his arms around himself, and finally, not caring whether Jonny could hear him or not, he allowed himself to cry.

Part the Seventeenth

How he made it back to his own home was something of a mystery; he only knew that when he woke in the early hours of the following morning, in the same soiled trousers and shirt he'd been wearing the night before, it was to the knowledge that he had possibly the worst hangover in the history of mankind, that he had to do a gig in London that very night, and that Colin was standing at the foot of his bed. He let out a scream that was rather less than masculine and scrambled up the bed to the headboard, where he pulled the quilt up to his chin as though it could protect him from what he assumed would be Colin's wrath.

It took him a moment to realise that Colin didn't look wrathful at all; it was something of a relief, given his attitude the previous evening.

“How the fuck did you get in?” he asked.

Colin smirked. “You were so out of it last night that you didn't even lock the door when you got in,” he said, coming round the side of the bed and picking up a glass of water and two white pills from the table. “Aspirin,” he explained, tipping the pills into Thom's lap and holding out the glass, which Thom took uncertainly with a mumbled, “Thanks.”

“So,” Colin continued, sitting down at the foot of the bed, his tone suddenly brusque and businesslike, “did you protect the poor damsel in distress?”

Thom coughed mid-swallow and dribbled half of the water down his front. “What?”

“Jonny,” Colin clarified. Thom was painfully reminded of the state of his boxers, and he shifted uncomfortably, feeling his face flush bright red.

“He wasn't much in distress,” he admitted, finishing the water and putting the glass back on the table. “I... um... you know about him and Wesley?”

Colin gave him a sharp look. “It depends on what you mean by know. How much do you know about them?”

Thom swallowed again, his throat suddenly very dry despite the water. “Um... well, I saw them. Last night. They were... er... you know...”

“Fucking?” Colin said matter-of-factly. “I know that much, Thom. There's no need to be coy about it. As I said, I'm not my brother's keeper; and Wesley was there first, after all.”

Thom felt his jaw drop. “He... what?”

Colin snorted. “They were dating all through Jonny's fifth year,” he said. “Didn't you even notice, Thom? It drove me to distraction while I was away in Cambridge, but I thought it would be all right, because you were there to keep an eye on him... and you didn't know. Did you? You never even thought to ask -”

Thom thought that was a little unfair. “We spent that whole year concentrating on the band, Coz,” he began. “I didn't even think he had a sex life. He was still just your kid brother back then.”

But that wasn't strictly true, Thom reminded himself. At first, he and Jonny had been forced together largely by necessity; Jonny missed his brother, Thom missed his best friend, and each had clung to the other as the closest connection to the absent piece of their puzzle. But at some time during those first awkward couple of months, Jonny had stopped coming over just to talk about the band or practise songs, until eventually Thom had started to forget why he'd only barely tolerated Jonny's presence in the first place. And all that time, Jonny had been doing... God knows what... with Wesley.

“When I came back for the Christmas holiday, he told me all about it,” Colin said, his expression turning misty. “He was always strange like that – so shy around everyone else, so open with me. That was how it started. The pair of us, I mean. He was scared, and he knew I'd dated boys, that I knew what to do. It's really not that strange, is it? Older brothers give their younger brothers advice like that, don't they? About girls... how to treat them, what they like, what they want to do, how they respond... but we both realised from the beginning that there was something else there, nothing to do with Wesley at all.”

“He didn't just want your advice,” Thom said quietly.

Colin glanced over at him, and for a brief instant Thom saw something strange in those dark eyes; fleetingly, the most vivid impression of human suffering Thom thought he would ever witness. It was gone in a second, lingering only long enough for Thom to have been certain that it was there; in the next moment, Colin had composed himself again. “I suppose that if you watched them last night, you will understand enough about how they both prefer their... liaisons... to be played out?”

Thom thought about the fighting, the complete disarray of Jonny's front room, the bruises Wesley had sported, the way Wesley had held Jonny down when they'd fucked... “Jonny likes to give up control,” he said slowly. “And Wesley... he likes to take it.”

Colin rubbed a hand over his face, nodding. “Jonny was only sixteen. He was sheltered from those things. And he told me about this boy, this handsome, talented older boy who had shown an interest in him – it had started out innocently enough, piano lessons, would you believe – and all of a sudden he was telling me about how this boy had fucked him over the piano in one of the music practice rooms at school -”

Thom felt a violent jolt in his stomach. “Wesley told me about that,” he said. “And then he told me he was lying...”

Colin shook his head ruefully. “Not a lie. It sounded like a strange kind of dating to me, even at the time. Perhaps if it had been a girl it might have been different, but because I knew what it was like, I knew about boys, it was too odd. And Jonny was telling me that he liked it, and that he liked the other things Wesley liked to do – holding him down, tying him up with his belt or his school tie or scarf, even slapping him – and that Wesley liked him to struggle, that it seemed as though he couldn't enjoy it otherwise, and Jonny was happy to oblige him. And... Wesley was asking him to do other things... controlling everything he did... and he was afraid that he wasn't going to be good enough and Wesley would give up on him. He wanted me to teach him.”

“And you did.”

Colin sighed. “And somewhere along the line I found that I'd fallen for him as hard as he'd fallen for Wesley. I wanted to protect him... it was the best way I could see of doing that. And somehow it never stopped.”

Thom knew then why Jonny had so emphatically protested the notion that Thom needed to be worried about his situation with Colin. Perhaps Colin had hurt his brother, but only physically, and only because Jonny had wanted it – had asked for it – and, as Jonny had said, Colin could never refuse him anything. He could see in that instant precisely where the balance of power lay in their strange relationship; Colin might have held the cards, but it was Jonny who dealt them out.

“You said they dated all through Jonny's fifth year,” he pressed. “What happened?”

Colin looked down at his lap, picking at a fingernail, uncharacteristically reticent all of a sudden. “I think that's something you should ask them,” he said after a moment. “As far as I know, they hadn't even spoken to each other in years, until a few months ago. Jonny learned about the Club from him, it's how I ended up joining it. I don't know any more than that.”

Thom could see that he wasn't going to get any further on the matter, so he changed tack. “Wesley knows I saw them,” he confessed. “I think... when we were, um... he was trying to pretend I was Jonny all the time. But he knows about Jonny and I. And... he knows about you and Jonny, doesn't he?”

Colin's head jerked up sharply. “How do you know that?” he snapped.

“He said something the other day... I just wondered. Jonny started things with you, and he started things with me, and yet Wesley was there first... why can't he just stay with Wesley?”

Colin gave a hollow laugh. “Jonny's inability to stay faithful is one of the reasons he comes to me asking for punishment so regularly,” he said. “Or were you labouring under the delusion that he considers monogamy one of his virtues? Oh, he has his reasons, sure enough, but this notion that my brother is some chaste innocent little flower... wholly misguided. It's the pretty face, isn't it? The doe eyes? You can ask Wesley, he'll tell you the same thing – Jonny might not mean it, but whether or not the intent is there, he's little better than those groupies who kept showing up naked at his hotel door in America.”

Try as he might, Thom couldn't get this thought out of his mind. Having been used to the facets of his character that Jonny chose to project, he knew he'd been surprised at the things Jonny kept hidden; the makeup and stockings, the boy who would dress as a girl at his brother's whim, who would suck off his best friend in a roadside bathroom, who would blush at a birthday cake before going home to be fucked over his sofa by a man with fantasies of dominance that had warped him before he should have known of such things.

“You shouldn't condemn him for how he is,” Colin warned, and Thom jumped; he'd almost forgotten Colin was in the room at all. “He was made like this by the way he grew up. You know, until the day he asked you if he could join the band, I don't think anyone had ever denied him anything. He was the baby of the family, the teachers' pet... not that he was a brat. I didn't really mean that. Otherwise I could have felt justified in hating him, perhaps, but I never did... I never would. I think that's why he was always fascinated by you, because you'd finally given him a reason to fight for something. And now I think it's hard for him to say no to anyone else, because he learned that distinction so late in life.”

Thom was reminded vividly of something Wesley had said, when he had told Thom about he and Jonny and the piano lessons. He couldn't say no. Probably bent over for half the school. It was that, more than anything else, that convinced him Wesley had been telling the truth; at the time, he thought Wesley had just been saying it to get him off, but now it sounded as though the other man had been trying to warn him.

Thom wondered whether Jonny told all of his conquests that he loved them, too.

“I've been stupid, haven't I?” he said dejectedly, feeling horribly naïve.

“Not at all,” Colin reassured him, in what was clearly intended to be a consoling voice. “Just... let him down gently, when you tell him, all right?”

Thom stared at him, his mouth suddenly feeling as though it had been stuffed with cotton wool. “Tell him what?”

Colin's eyes were narrowed dangerously, and alarm bells started to ring in the recesses of Thom's skull, too late for him to escape. “That you can't possibly stay with him, because you can't trust him to be faithful,” he said simply. There was a measured coolness to his tone which told Thom that he'd been building to this throughout the entire conversation. “It will hurt him, at first... it will hurt both of you, I trust. But you've said no to him in the past, haven't you? It'll be easier this time. And...” He paused, allowing himself a small smile. “You know that, in the end, it will be for the best.”

He got up from the bed then, and clapped his hands together, as Thom continued to gape at him in a stunned daze. “Right! Coffee first, I think, and then something to soak up all that nasty alcohol. We've got a long day ahead of us, haven't we, Thom?”

Part the Sixteenth

The sight cut through his drunken haze like a bullet. Jonny's face was turned towards Wesley's, tilted up as he listened to whatever the taller man was saying. One of Wesley's broad hands was resting in the small of Jonny's back, subtly steering him in the direction of the door; Jonny paused, leaning on Wesley as thought for support, and Wesley used his other hand to stroke a stray frond of dark hair away from Jonny's forehead. They smiled at each other, and Thom felt sick to his stomach. And then they were out of the door and into the night, and someone was tapping on Thom's shoulder. He looked round; it was Colin.

“Aren't you going to ride in like the proverbial knight in shining armour and rescue him?” he said acidly, plucking the glass from Thom's slack hand and setting it down on the bar. “After all, you've done a very good job of rescuing him from me.”

“I – wasn't -” Thom slurred. He didn't know how to explain to Colin that he and Jonny had just happened, or that Jonny had made it clear to him how important Colin was, or that Thom had no intention of breaking apart whatever strange thing it was that the two brothers shared. “What about you?”

Colin smiled, an oddly serene expression on his otherwise stormy face. “Thom, there are so many things you don't know about Jonny,” he said cryptically. “You think you're his best friend, you think you know him better than anyone else, but you don't have a clue. Perhaps you should ask him, one day, when the two of you get around to engaging your brains rather than your cocks. Ask him why he plays the innocent when he's anything but. He's not my responsibility, Thom, I can't control him. He's free to make his own mistakes; he knows what the repercussions of those mistakes will be.” Colin's eyes grew dark, and he glanced over at the door. “They'll be going to Jonny's house. They always do; Wesley cares too much about his own furniture. You should probably call a taxi, you won't get far in that state.”

Thom barely had time to process the significance of Colin's words before the other man had given him a gentle push towards the door and then gone back to his corner seat at the bar. He fumbled in his pocket and came up with a five-pound note, cast a look back at Colin, who merely stared coldly at him, and then he weaved the steadiest line he could across the room and out onto the pavement.

There was a light drizzle falling, the kind that got you soaked without you even realising it. Jonny and Wesley were already nowhere to be seen, and as Thom waited for the next passing cab, he pondered what Colin had meant. That Wesley and Jonny would be going to Jonny's house... they always did. And he thought about Wesley's sly, meaningful glance at him in Ed's kitchen, and what that had meant. And then he remembered Wesley's little story about the piano lessons, he and Jonny and the music room at school and the almost exact re-enactment of that scenario which had played out in Thom's front room over his own piano, and he started to wonder whether Wesley had been telling the truth after all. He'd told Thom what he needed to hear; Thom had needed to hear that the story was a lie, so Wesley had told him that it was.

A taxi approached, and he flagged it down and gave Jonny's address. Sitting back and trying to gather himself, he started to fit all the little pieces of the jigsaw together. If Wesley had been telling the truth... both he and Colin had said that Thom didn't know Jonny very well at all. Had that been what Colin meant – that Jonny was just easy like that? Wesley had implied that Jonny didn't even know how to say no (although he had done to Thom only the day before, so where did that leave him?) and that Jonny in sixth form had been little more than a slut who'd bend over for half the school. At the time Thom had dismissed the comments, especially when he'd thought Wesley was lying to get a rise out of him; now he was seeing them in a new light. Jonny had started sixth form just as Thom had gone away to university – in fact, just when he'd been left behind in Oxford utterly alone for the first time. If Colin was to be believed, he'd taken Jonny in hand the summer before that, and there had been Thom around to keep the younger boy in check, but it was hardly such a stretch of the imagination to think of Jonny going off the rails in light of what he must have seen as being abandoned by his older bandmates. Not now that he knew much of Jonny's apparent innocence was just a projection, a screen to hide the boy who sucked off his friend in a service station toilet, who went to rehearsal with a dildo up his arse, who... Thom swallowed. Who liked to be beaten. Who enjoyed being beaten.

He thought of the belt marks he'd seen on Jonny's skin, the scratches and bruises on Wesley's arms and face, and Wesley's hand lying proprietarily on Jonny's back. Once he'd learned of the relationship between Jonny and Colin, he'd thought the marks had been put there by Colin, but now... Wesley fucking him over the piano and asking him to say that he didn't want it... he wondered whether he'd made a mistake.

The taxi pulled to a stop outside Jonny's house, and Thom clambered out, shoving the money at the driver and not waiting to collect the change before he ran up the front path. It was raining properly now and the stone flags were slippery under his feet. There was a light on in the hall, another in the living room and one in an upstairs window which was Jonny's bedroom, and the porch light came on as he ascended the steps to the door, reflecting off the wet ground with almost dazzling brightness. He was just raising his hand to ring the doorbell, wiping his damp fringe out of his eyes, when there was a resounding crash from the front room. He could hear raised voices, someone yelling something at somebody else, although he couldn't make out distinct words; there was a heavy thud as though something heavy had been overturned, and then scuffling sounds, like a struggle was taking place.

He pounded hard on the door, but whoever was inside was making so much noise that they clearly couldn't hear him above the racket. Running around to the front of the house, he could see that the windows were all shut and locked – it was early November, after all – but the curtains were partly open, and as he pressed his face to the glass, he could see through into the room beyond.

He realised what Colin had meant when he said Wesley cared too much about his furniture for them to go to his house.

Jonny was sprawled across the glass-topped coffee table, shirt half off his shoulders and pulled up past his waist to reveal his stomach, with Wesley bent over him between his spread legs. Wesley's large hands were wrapped around those thin wrists, pinning them against the hard surface at Jonny's sides, and their mouths were crushed together savagely; Jonny was twisting and struggling for all he was worth, but even from Thom's vantage point he could see the delirious smile curving his friend's lips, the wild light in his eyes as Wesley used his full strength to hold him down. The room looked like a whirlwind had passed through it: a potted plant by the door had been knocked over, spilling soil across the carpet; the stack of music magazines Jonny kept next to the sofa was scattered all over the floor, and a box of records that usually stood next to the turntable on the side cabinet had been upended. The throw on the sofa was rumpled and the cushions were everywhere, as though someone had been throwing them, and here and there a photograph hung crooked on the wall.

Jonny had managed to work a knee between his and Wesley's bodies as Thom watched, and he shoved the other man backwards; Wesley landed hard against the arm of the sofa and slid to the floor, where Jonny pounced on him, straddling his waist and tangling his hands in the wavy blond hair. He had his back to Thom now, and where his shirt had ridden up Thom could see fresh scratches on the pale skin, running across the multicoloured bruising of Colin's handiwork and the older, fading belt stripes. He couldn't tear his eyes from the line of Jonny's slender waist and the ridge of his spine, the curves of his arse in his tight jeans and the way Wesley's fingernails dug into the skin above Jonny's hips as he flipped the pair of them over, using his knees to pinion Jonny's thighs under his weight. Jonny was screaming as Wesley started to unbuckle his belt, but laughing as well; Wesley had managed to work both their trousers half-off by the time Jonny squirmed out from beneath him and kneed him in the groin, and Thom wondered abstractly if Jonny even knew the meaning of the curse that slipped from Wesley's lips as he scrambled to his feet, Wesley tripped him with his legs, and they both tumbled over the back of the sofa.

All of a sudden, Thom knew where Wesley's bloodied nose and bruises had come from. His breath fogged the window, and he had to restrain himself from pounding on the glass as Wesley delivered a slap to Jonny's face hard enough to leave Jonny limp and half-senseless in his arms. Then he bent Jonny over the arm of the sofa, spat onto two of his fingers and reached down between Jonny's legs, using his forearm to pin Jonny's hips in place while he pushed the digits inside him.

Jonny's head snapped up, and he gasped something that Thom couldn't quite make out, turning towards Wesley. In an odd moment of tenderness, Wesley kissed his cheek where a bright red handprint was blossoming, and stroked the soft dark hair while his fingers worked frantically between them, the two of them whispering inaudibly to each other; then Jonny was pulling something from behind the cushion he was propped against, a familiar-looking tube, and handing it to Wesley, who uncapped it and squeezed a small amount of the gel into his palm before slicking himself, holding Jonny open and pressing inside him in one long thrust. As Jonny's neck arched back on a drawn-out moan, Wesley braced his hands on the younger man's shoulders, and as he did so his piercing gaze met Thom's startled one over Jonny's head; Thom froze, his breath catching in his throat, and Wesley fixed him with a knowing grin as his hips snapped back and he drove into the man beneath him so forcefully that all the breath must have been knocked from Jonny's body.

All of Thom's instincts were telling him to run. He didn't have to watch this – every second of it set his nerves on edge like nails scraping down a blackboard – but at the same time he couldn't pull away, his morbid fascination effectively pinning him there with Wesley's eyes boring into his. Wesley coaxed Jonny up into a kneeling position, their bodies moulded together, Jonny's fingers tightly clenching the arm of the sofa while one of Wesley's hands closed possessively around his cock and started to stroke it in counterpoint to his driving thrusts, and his other roamed over every last square inch of skin he could reach. When it seemed as though Jonny was coming close to the brink, Wesley slid his fingers around the base of his erection and squeezed hard, drawing an agonised cry from Jonny's throat that went straight to Thom's own cock; then he pulled out, rolled them over onto the floor with Jonny on his back, pressed Jonny's jean-clad legs to his chest and thrust in again. Jonny thrashed underneath him like a dying fish, Wesley's hands having abandoned his cock to hold his upper arms down in the carpet, and although it couldn't have been more than five minutes of struggling and screaming and cursing before Wesley pushed in as deep as he could go, holding himself there and shuddering from head to toe as he shot over the edge, to Thom it seemed like an eternity. Wesley stayed like that, thrusting slowly and shallowly until, with a naked, fractured moan, Jonny joined him, lips parting for Wesley to claim his mouth.

They sank into each other, Wesley still inside, and Thom turned away from the window, the damp stickiness into his trousers only punctuating the devastating sense of loss that swept over him.

Part the Fifteenth

They had reached a point of no return.

Thom hadn't gone back to his bed that night. He stayed there, locked against Jonny, until he could sense that the boy had recovered; then he went to the bathroom and retrieved a damp flannel, using it to clean them off before they drew the covers up around themselves and Jonny, at least, slept, his head resting against Thom's chest and one arm thrown over his waist. Thom, however, couldn't switch off: every inch of his skin seemed over-sensitised, Jonny's body where it touched his was unbearably hot, and the realisation of how far they had come was only just now beginning to sink in.

He started to worry about Colin. It was only going to be a matter of time before he found out – he had known from the start that there was something between Thom and Jonny, as though he had some kind of sixth sense where his brother's romantic liaisons were concerned. He thought about Colin and Florian, and what Colin had said to Florian before the boy had left them; he had said something about 'doing as he was told', and had then dismissed him as though he meant nothing. He didn't know what Florian had done to deserve such treatment, but he was fairly certain that it was nothing to what Jonny had done in pursuit of Thom. Whatever Jonny had said about enjoying being disciplined, he didn't want it to happen on his account.

Morning saw them back on the coach, heading for Oxford, with two days to kill before the next gig. Jonny sat beside Thom, and Thom couldn't miss the challenging glances that passed between the Greenwoods, or the odd expression on Colin's face when Jonny slept with his head on Thom's shoulder; it was almost pained, jealousy and anger and something else all mingled together on those familiar features. Thom felt an unexpected stab of guilt. He didn't want to hurt Colin any more than he wanted to let Jonny go now that he had him; it occurred to him that Colin had been relentlessly selfless to Thom, showing him everything that he had been missing and never asking for a thing in return. It had seemed to him that someone in Colin's position – with a clear hold over his brother, over Thom, and over the boys Thom had met at the Club – would be content to take from everyone without a thought for giving; but Colin had done the exact opposite. Jonny said he'd asked Colin to hurt him, and Colin had done it, even though it must have been against his instincts as an older brother. He was afraid that he was going to lose Jonny to Thom... it gave Thom an odd thrill to think that he could even come close to rivalling Colin in Jonny's affections.

Still, he couldn't help feeling bad for Colin. If he wasn't already hopelessly addicted to Jonny's company, it might have been easier. Jonny had been quiet last night, he remembered; nothing like Nat, who had been the nearest Thom had come to Jonny until that point. Thom couldn't stop thinking about Jonny's soft exclamations as Thom's mouth and hands had roamed his body; the sharpness of bones that were normally hidden from view; the way his hair had stuck up at the back, clinging damply to Thom's fingers; and how extraordinarily vulnerable the other boy had looked in the few moments before and after he came. He was used to Jonny being easy to read, so the way he had closed up utterly after that initial emotional onslaught was completely unexpected; it was as though he was overcompensating for the utter loss of control at the peak of climax. And it just made Thom love him more.

As they turned off the M40 towards Oxford, the early afternoon shadows already lengthening as the sun crept towards the horizon, Jonny stirred against Thom's arm and looked up at him sleepily. “Are we nearly there yet?” he asked, like an impatient child in the back seat, and Thom grinned at him.

“Almost. Enjoy your beauty sleep?”

“I enjoyed the company,” Jonny murmured, rubbing his cheek against Thom's shoulder like a cat. Across the aisle, Colin gave Thom a significant look, which Thom did his best to ignore.

“Jon... I don't know if this is presumptuous or not... but, you know, you don't have to go home tonight,” Thom told him quietly, in a rush. “I mean... I've got plenty of space, there's a spare bedroom and... well... I've got a double bed...” He trailed off at Jonny's gentle smile. “What?”

“Just... you,” Jonny whispered. “The fact that you think it might be presumptuous should be enough to tell you that it is. I... I can't. Not now. Last night was... it was perfect, you know that? But this is too fast. I said we need to go slowly.”

Still, Thom's heart leapt at the thought that Jonny hadn't dismissed the notion out of hand. “That's OK, really. And... what are you going to tell Colin? He knows there's something happening, he isn't stupid. And you draping yourself all over me isn't going to help, not that I'm complaining.”

Jonny sat up straight then, carefully removing his head from Thom's shoulder with a small smile and folding his arms demurely across his chest. “I'll tell Colin something,” he promised. “I have to explain to him... well. You don't have anything to worry about, if that's what's concerning you. He'll just be pleased to know that we're happy.”

Thom couldn't help but feel – since Jonny was a shit liar – that Jonny wasn't telling the whole truth about that.

---

The next day was something of a blur. Ed called Thom at five in the morning to help with arranging an 'impromptu pre-emptive celebratory bash' at the Jericho Tavern for Jonny's birthday, since it would fall while they were away from home on tour; consequently, because no party arranged by Ed would ever be the same without a bit of gratuitous obscenity, Thom found himself press-ganged into trawling the bakeries and supermarkets of Oxford looking for a cake in the shape of a pair of oversized breasts.

He didn't have a chance to find out if Jonny had spoken to Colin – he hadn't seen the Greenwoods since they left the coach the previous afternoon, and Ed had apparently given Colin the task of keeping Jonny in the dark about the evening's festivities, which presumably meant that the two of them, wherever they were, were together. Thom tried to tamp down the overwhelming sensation of jealousy that swept through him at that thought, with little success; somewhere out there, Colin had Jonny's company, and Jonny had Colin's, and they were doing... what? He couldn't help the flood of mental images his brain willingly supplied him with. If Jonny had told Colin what he and Thom had done, would Colin see fit to discipline Jonny as he considered necessary? Would Jonny have begged for his brother's forgiveness, offered to make it up to him in any way Colin wished? Thom thought of the black chaise longue in the Red Room at the Club, and Jonny, slender white wrists caught in the heavy, crude-looking leather cuffs, bent over it, and Colin with the cane, tracing it over his brother's skin... and then he thought of the wooden cross, Jonny spreadeagled across it with the thick straps biting harshly into his flesh, and what Colin could have done with Jonny helpless to prevent him... and then his mind settled on the shackles suspended from the ceiling, and Jonny hanging in those, slim body twisting and arching as he struggled to get free while Colin...

He shook himself. He was never going to be able to face either of the Greenwoods ever again if he carried on with that train of thought.

Mid-afternoon, he arrived at Ed's house carrying a cake fashioned into the largest pair of comedy tits he'd ever seen, and found Ed in his kitchen talking to the very last person Thom wanted to run into right then. Wesley raised his can of Kronenbourg in a silent salute, wiping his top lip, and Ed grinned expectantly at Thom as he deposited the cake on the worktop. There was a distinct smell of freshly-smoked pot hanging in the air, and both Ed and Wesley looked a little too merry for three o'clock.

“Bugger me,” Ed said blankly, gaping at the fondant breasts spilling out of their chocolate brassiere. “Oh – Thom, this is Wesley Francis-Taylor, we met at the pub earlier. We've been catching up on old times – he was in A Midsummer Night's Dream when we did it at school, do you remember him? He's an old friend of Jonny's, apparently, I've invited him along for tonight, I hope that's OK...”

“We've met,” said Thom shortly. Wesley's gaze fixed on him felt a little too much like being stripped naked and plunging into a freezing lake. “Ed... are you really sure Jonny's going to appreciate this? He's not exactly the party type.”

Ed waved his hand vaguely, losing a few drops of Kronenbourg in the process. “Thom, they're tits. Of course he can appreciate tits. And it's not really a big party, anyway. It's just an excuse for a few drinks and Phil doing karaoke. Besides, Jonny's hilarious when he's pissed, you know how funny it is when he wakes up the next day and you can tell him how much he humiliated himself...” Ed trailed off on some rambling reminiscence, and Wesley gave Thom a sly sideways glance, eyebrows raised. Thom felt a shock, because in that simple look, Wesley had communicated more than enough: he knew about Jonny and Thom, but more importantly, he knew about Jonny and Colin. There was no other way he could have understood the significance of Ed's remark about humiliation.

Thom looked away, swallowing hard.

“... and they're tits,” Ed repeated, coming out of his reverie. “What's the matter, do you think he's allergic to them or something?”

Wesley snorted into his can of beer, and Thom forced a smile. “I'm sure he'll like them just fine,” he assured Ed. “Um... I'll leave you two to catch up, shall I? I need to get home, wrap Jonny's present and...”

Wesley linked an arm through his, his smile knowingly shark-like. “Aww, won't you stay?” he asked, pushing out his bottom lip in a pout that strongly (and, probably, intentionally) resembled Jonny's. Thom shivered at the casual touch – the memory of Wesley bending him over the piano in his sitting room was still too raw for him to bear – and carefully retrieved his arm from Wesley's grasp.

“No, I need to shower and stuff,” he protested, heading for the door. “I'll see you later, right?”

He couldn't shake the feeling of Wesley's chilling blue eyes on his back when he got home, turned on the shower as cold as he could stand it and stepped under the spray. His cock might have been interested at the pleasant scenarios his mind had conjured while he was buying the stupid cake, but he wasn't going to let it get the better of him, and the near-freezing water saw off that potential problem with a vengeance. He was determined to make an effort tonight: he was going to show Colin that he was good enough for Jonny, and he was going to show Wesley that one quick fuck didn't mean a thing to him. With that in mind, he picked out his favourite shirt – navy with vertical stripes, something Jonny had bought for him a while ago after complaining that Thom was always stealing his clothes – and his least scruffy jeans, forced his hair into something approaching tidiness, brushed his teeth three times, flossed, gave up on cutting his fingernails because they were too bitten for it to matter, flossed again, and by the time six thirty rolled around even he couldn't find anything to criticise about his appearance, which was probably a first.

The Jericho Tavern was where they'd played their first ever gig, and his recollections of the place were a mix of fondness and mortification. Over the years it had been dressed up a little – the downstairs ceiling no longer swayed when people walked across the bar area, and the general fug of stale cigarette smoke and vomit that had pervaded the very walls when they'd frequented it as kids was nothing but a distant memory. As he stepped inside, he wondered whether they even knew half of the people gathered in the main room; Jonny certainly wouldn't have, his address book was even thinner than Thom's. He half suspected Ed had just invited in random strangers from the street, but since he had volunteered to pick up the tab, Thom wasn't greatly concerned.

He found Jonny at the bar, dressed in a stupidly large knitted jumper, being plied with some foul-smelling blue concoction by Phil's girlfriend. He already seemed a little tipsy – Jonny hated drinking in large groups for precisely that reason – and his smile was open and uninhibited when he turned to Thom as Thom gently touched his elbow.

“Hey you,” Thom murmured, taking the glass of blue liquid and sniffing at it. “What the bloody hell is that?”

“Apparently it tastes like raspberries,” Jonny said, taking the glass back and pressing it to Thom's lips. His lisp was more pronounced than normal, which was always a warning sign. “Here.” He tilted it, and Thom opened his mouth; a trickle of wet stickiness slid down his chin as Jonny took the glass back, and he grimaced.

“Urgh. I'll stick to things I can identify... shit,” he exclaimed, as Jonny ducked his head and licked up the spilled alcohol from his jaw. Looking over Jonny's shoulder, he could see Colin on the other side of the bar, talking to Ed; the other man's gaze was locked on the pair of them, his eyes like chips of stone. “Jon. Jonny. Sit down.”

He grasped Jonny's shoulders and forced him into the nearest seat. Jonny blinked up at him innocently, running a tongue over his lips; when Thom's cock stirred at the picture this presented, he made his decision. It was time to get drunk. Very drunk, and hang making a good impression.

He lost track of how much he'd consumed by the time Phil brought out the cake Thom had bought, complete with a candle stabbed into each nipple, and the room burst into a loud, off-key and drunken chorus of 'Happy Birthday' with various, predictably pornographic additions. It took Jonny a couple of attempts to blow out the candles, but Thom hardly noticed; Jonny's lips pursed to extinguish the flames filled his head with the memory of what Jonny's mouth had looked like as he knelt at Thom's feet on the floor of a toilet cubicle in a service station somewhere on the M1. He needed to get more drunk. Around nine o'clock Wesley showed up and made a beeline for him, and his head was fuzzy enough that he couldn't quite remember why he should object to the other man's presence; between them, they watched Jonny blushing as Ed photographed him with the cake, and they watched Colin making predatory circuits around the room, and Wesley stole a few sloppy kisses when they both thought no one was looking, and Thom thought that he should be protesting though he wasn't sure why, so he pushed Wesley away and went to do karaoke with Phil. He could see Jonny laughing at him, and then Jonny sliding off his seat onto the floor and still laughing, and Wesley picking him up, and something sharp and hot and sour boiled in the depths of his stomach.

He realised precisely how drunk he was when he stepped down from the stage to raucous applause and someone pushed another drink into his hand. He might have been drunk enough that walking in a straight line was a challenge. He might have been drunk enough that even standing up straight was pushing his physical limits a bit. He might have been drunk enough that holding his glass steady enough to sip from it without spilling anything was nigh on impossible. But he wasn't drunk enough to miss the fact that, on the other side of the crowded room, Wesley was leaving the pub, and Jonny was leaving the pub, and they were leaving the pub together.

Part the Fourteenth

During the gig, Thom watched Jonny even more closely than he usually did. He seemed calmer, more subdued than normal – although Ed was clearly mopping up any enthusiasm overspill – and Thom noticed that he was moving a little awkwardly, some of his natural grace lost. Not that it affected his playing at all, but Jonny was generally quite good at playing the role of 'invincible rock god' on stage, and tonight he seemed... vulnerable.

When they retired to a nearby bar afterwards, Thom noticed that Jonny had made himself scarce. He, Colin and Phil drew straws for who'd have to share the hotel room with Ed – because no one ever wanted to, since Ed talked in his sleep and was prone to violent night terrors – and Thom could almost have danced when Colin picked the short straw and Phil, with a meaningful glance at Thom, said he would share with their tour manager, leaving Thom to room with Jonny.

He didn't stay to get as drunk as he might normally have done. Colin wasn't being outwardly hostile, but his manner was cool enough for Thom to know that he wouldn't forget his grievances; so it was that not long after midnight, on his fourth attempt, Thom finally managed to get his key into the lock of his hotel room door and let himself through into the darkened room beyond. The only light came from the bathroom, where the shaving lamp over the mirror had been left on, and by this Thom could see the shape under the covers of the bed nearest the window, dark hair scattered over the crisp white pillow, apparently asleep.

He toed off his shoes and slid out of his jacket, tried and failed to locate a hanger on which to put it, and instead left it draped over the edge of the desk chair. He helped himself to a pack of the complimentary shortbread biscuits in a bowl next to the kettle, drank three glasses of water, and was feeling a little more sober by the time he finally kicked off his jeans and slid into bed, without bothering to shower or properly undress. He lay there under the sheets in the dark, reliving the feeling of lips and tongue on him, and grew frustratingly hard as he listened to Jonny's irregular breathing from the other bed.

“I know you're not asleep, Jon,” he said aloud. “You're as bad at pretending to be asleep as you are at lying.”

“'M 'sleep,” Jonny mumbled. Thom heard the creak and groan of mattress springs as the other man shifted in bed, and then there was a burst of light as the bedside lamp flicked on. Jonny was blinking at him, and something twisted painfully in the pit of Thom's stomach. His hair was ruffled and messy on one side where he'd apparently showered and gone to bed with it still damp, and he was wearing one of those stupid oversized Astroboy sweaters that looked as though he'd borrowed it from Ed, the yellow fabric hanging in drapes off his thin frame and the sleeves almost obscuring his hands as he raised one to rub his palm over his face. He was clearly exhausted, and Thom felt guilty for the thrilling buzz of energy coursing through his own body. “What do you want?”

Thom propped himself up on his elbows and gave Jonny a proper look. The boy was just too appealing for his own good, that was the problem; if he didn't care about their friendship he'd have already been fucking Jonny into the mattress, and hang Colin's consequences. “Nothing... just, you know. I was worried about you. Didn't see you at the bar earlier with everyone else.”

“I was tired,” Jonny said defensively, flopping back down onto the mattress and staring at the ceiling. “Besides, I've seen Ed and Phil doing drunken karaoke enough times over the years to know that I'd rather stay away.” He managed a very forced laugh, and then rolled onto his side to gaze over at Thom. “Look... about today...”

“It was nothing, I get it,” Thom said shortly. “A stupid little mistake. And it won't happen again.”

“That wasn't what I was going to say,” Jonny said quietly. “It... it wasn't a mistake, was it? We both knew what we were doing. And... it wasn't nothing. It meant a lot. I hope.”

“It did to me,” Thom snapped. “But what about Colin? He's hovering around like a fucking vulture waiting to peck out my eyes for so much as laying a finger on you. I can't deal with that. And... you know, it's fucked up. The two of you are fucked up. I know you told me Colin wasn't your keeper -”

“He isn't!”

“- and yeah, you were right. He's not your keeper. He's your owner.”

Jonny fell silent. When Thom finally summoned up the courage to look over at him, he could see the tears glistening on the other boy's cheeks in the lamplight, and Jonny's voice was wavering almost out of control when he next spoke. “You won't understand, Thom – I don't expect you to, and I'm not asking for that – but I owe Colin more than I could ever owe you.”

“And that makes it OK for him to control your entire life? To humiliate you and beat you into submission whenever he feels like it?”

He couldn't miss the way Jonny's fists clenched tightly on top of the sheets. “He doesn't control my entire life. I'm still my own person, Thom. And as for the other things... he does those because I asked him to.”

“You... what?”

“I know in your head you're trying to paint Colin as some kind of monster, who gets off on that sort of thing, but you're wrong. It's never been about sex or anything like that. It's not just that he likes to be in control... he needs to be. And please don't question that; it's just Colin, it's just how he is. If he beats me, or makes me wear women's underwear, or ties me up... it's because he knows what I want, and he's never been able to refuse me that.”

Thom's mouth was dry, and he felt as though his brain was working at half its normal pace. “So he'd never... he'd never make you do something you didn't want...?”

Jonny's expression was as cold as ice. “Colin would never force anyone.”

And Colin had said as much, so Thom believed him.

“Why is he so angry about you and me, then?” he asked. “Shouldn't he be happy for you? I mean, it's not like I'm going to suddenly steal you away...”

Jonny let out a short laugh. “That's exactly what he's afraid of, I think. Perhaps that's why he invited you to join the Club in the first place, to work out whether or not you were a threat. And he's obviously decided that you are – you're really the only person I've been close to for anywhere near as long as him. But...” He gave Thom a shy sideways glance, and started to push the covers down over his legs. “Colin doesn't have eyes everywhere. What he doesn't know... it can't hurt him. Or you. You know, you don't have anything to be scared of, with him. I'm the one he'll punish, not you.”

Thom moved to the edge of his bed, swinging his feet over the side. “I'm done with feeling guilty, though. I don't want him to hurt you because of me... it isn't fair.”

Jonny's laugh was genuine this time. “Fair doesn't even come into it, Thom. He won't hurt someone unless they like it... and it's the best possible kind of pain. I promise. Come here.”

Jonny's words sent a bolt of blind lust straight to Thom's cock, and he almost moaned out loud. Whether it had been calculated or not, the effect was the same; his pulse was racing, the sound of the blood rushing in his ears almost deafening him, and he finally slipped out from beneath his duvet and moved over to sit on the edge of Jonny's bed. The desire was almost a physical ache; he wondered how any pathetic imitation of the boy before him could ever have been enough to satisfy. The damp waves of Jonny's hair, spread on the white cotton, caught the low light; his skin, which had always seemed so pale of late, was warmed and coloured by the gentle glow. He and Colin had the same eyes: an almost wholly unremarkable brown until you looked closer and saw the green and gold flecks captured in the darkness. Thom knew he'd been right when he told Jonny he was beautiful. “You're beautiful,” he said, just to see the blush that crept into Jonny's cheeks and hooded his eyes. “What do you want me to do?”

“Just...” Jonny took hold of his wrist, used it to place Thom's hand on his hip, the sharp arch of which Thom could feel through the thick material. “Go slowly.”

And slowly he did.

He eased himself into the bed, shedding his t-shirt and boxers on the floor as he did so, and moved to straddle Jonny's legs, resting both his hands on the knife-edge hips and pushing Jonny down into the mattress. Jonny hissed and winced a little, the evidence of Colin's discipline from two nights ago making itself known, but he didn't pull away or tell Thom to stop, and Thom was glad for he wasn't sure he could have done even if Jonny had asked. The lace on the stay-ups tickled his sides as he lowered his body atop Jonny's and started to push the sweater up to the other boy's waist, pressing kisses to hot skin as it was gradually revealed while carefully avoiding the semi-erect cock that nudged his throat as he used his tongue to taste the neat line of hair that ran from Jonny's navel to his groin. The nylon felt slippery and strange against his calves as he hooked his legs around Jonny's, pushing the sweater higher to kiss the valleys and ridges of harshly delineated ribs; Jonny never looked this skinny when he was fully clothed, and sometimes Thom forgot how young and fragile his bandmate still was.

“Are you OK?” he asked, as his hips fitted neatly into the hollows beneath Jonny's and his cock pressed up between Jonny's legs.

“'M great. You're great,” Jonny murmured, lips curving into a lazy smile as Thom licked one flat nipple. “Oh.” Thom had gripped the hardening nub of flesh and pinched as roughly as he dared, and Jonny's body jackknifed beneath his, almost dislodging him. He repeated the action on the other nipple, enjoying the muffled curse that slipped from Jonny's mouth and the way his cock jumped between their stomachs, and then sat back a bit to tug the cumbersome sweater over Jonny's head and drop it to the floor, leaving the boy's hair mussed and sticking out at angles.

If he had his way, no one would tell Jonny he was ugly ever again.

He draped his body back over Jonny's, relishing in the full contact of skin against skin, and left a line of bites up the sweeping collarbones, just hard enough to leave marks. Jonny wriggled, his hands sliding up Thom's back until Thom caught his wrists and mashed them into the pillow on either side of his head, using them for leverage as he lifted his hips and his cock slid backwards and forwards between Jonny's thighs, its passage eased only by precome and sweat. Jonny locked his ankles together in the small of Thom's back, his heels digging into Thom's flesh as they both forgot their agreement to go slowly; the action spurred Thom to move faster, feeling the flex and resistance of the tendons in Jonny's wrists as he held them down, and he muffled his cry in the other boy's neck as he came over Jonny's arse and thighs and the mattress beneath them, his hips continuing to move of their own accord until Jonny stiffened and gasped and Thom felt the warmth spill between their bellies, the sensation of skin sliding against slickened skin almost too much to bear. He rested his head on Jonny's shoulder as their heartbeats subsided together, and could feel from the tremor of the body under his that Jonny was crying again, however hard he tried to hide it.