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?”