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.