Chapter Text
So Harvey has this body -
He's sixteen, and too tall, too big, taking up too much space no matter where he is, his spine always hunched in this insecure curve. He has this body, and Sabrina has this body, a waist he could span with his hands, always warm to the touch. She curls up beside him in the bed of his truck, the moonlight making her hair look paler than it is, and only the dark colour of her sweater and jacket melting with the shadows can belie how delicate she feels next to him, above him, when she presses up against his chest and tips their mouths together.
It's a slow, unhurried kiss, the best kind, the kind where he can forget himself and get lost in it. It's just that, the warm but constant press of her mouth, moving at a rhythm he could almost sing he knows is it so well. Because it's not Sabrina's body and Harvey's body, all fumbling and awkward and their heights so disparate. It's rhythm, easy as anything.
Her locket - his locket - brushes against his chest when she moves, tapping at his sternum like its own little heartbeat. He smiles into the kiss, pleased with himself, pleased with how he's found a way to fit her, a little piece of Harvey nestled beside Sabrina's heart.
When they pull back, numb-mouthed and glassy-eyed he offers to walk her home, but she just smiles at him, her lipstick worn away but her mouth swollen red. "The woods are lovely, dark and deep," she tells him, and kisses him one last time on the cheek.
His dad is three sheets to the wind when he steps inside, a cruel slant to his thin mouth. He has to lean against the door frame just to hold himself up. "That girl's got your balls in her back pocket, boy." He sneers, body swaying. "And wash that shit off your face before I slap it off. No son of mine -"
Discomfort coils in Harvey's stomach but he keeps his gaze solid, doesn't give him the satisfaction. He's fixing for a fight, the routine so well worn Harvey might as well have speak up, boy, branded across his chest.
Harvey just steps around him and edges up the stairs, his dad's voice like static behind him.
Still, there's something about catching his own gaze in the bathroom mirror that makes his stomach clench. Harvey watches himself, his mouth the colour of split berries, of a split lip. He hears himself say, "Oh," somewhat absently, watches the shape it makes of him. Oh, on this phantom mouth.
Then he's scrubbing it off furiously with damp toilet paper, trying to erase the memory of himself as an alien thing, comfortable in borrowed colour. He pulls off his shirt and reaches for his pajamas, consciously avoiding the cropped football jersey balled at the end of his bed.
It takes hours for Harvey to fall asleep.
Nick Scratch feels incongruous in Harvey's living room. It's the only way he can put it, incongruous, the two dollar word feeling almost sticky in his mind.
He keeps looking at Harvey, the way he can't bury the panic or find the thrill in the eye of danger that all of his friends seem to thrive on, as though he's some alien creature he'd love to dissect. Harvey keeps looking back at Nick, pushing past the nerves and the bitter taste on his tongue, the taste of Sabrina, and witchcraft, and fear, and tries to pin down the shapes of him. The curve of musculature hiding under his shirt, the way his hair is so determinedly tucked back despite the ease with which he holds himself.
Harvey can disassemble, like a nervous tick. He can see how he could sketch someone and find the shape of their movements, the roll of their walk. Nick does that. Rolls. Glides by in a way that's too easy not to be rehearsed, and that feels like something he should retain, should notice, should covet. Harvey could rehearse, too, if he wanted.
Nick touches the shotgun on the table with a fingertip. "You ever used this, witch-hunter?"
He says it lightly, no weight at all, and yet it still curls up in Harvey's ribs.
"On cans, in the backyard." He says, and doesn't let his mind wander back to Tommy, vacant and silent. Nick almost smiles, but then he shakes his head.
"You think witchcraft is so scary, and you can hold death in your hands playing games in a garden." He laughs darkly, his head thrown back, the same preternatural comfort in himself Harvey has looked upon in Sabrina's cousin with careful wonder.
"Mortals," Nick mutters under his breath, but never completes the thought.
After, when they're pressed back against the barricaded door, fear lighting up the dark thing in Nick's eyes, the same as he sometimes catches in Sabrina's, Nick's thigh is pressed up against his, his whole body a tight sharp line. Harvey thinks, I get it , and then the room begins to shake.
Roz is stretched out across his lap, her thighs warm against his, and it isn't like that, because her face is screwed up in the same tight, scrutinous way she saves for when she's fixated on a particularly sticky physics equation as she wields the delicate brush. Her touch is so very light across his eyelids, sweeping across in little butterfly flutters that tickle, but Harvey couldn't find a laugh in his chest if he jumped down his throat with a torch. Because it is like that, a little bit. His cheeks are warm under her stilling hand as she delicately defines his lashline with black kohl, just the right side of subversive to fit the tone of the gig. It's just Fright Club, just them and the five people who happen to be curled into the booths at Doctor Cerberus', but he can feel the squirmy insistent pulse of nerves already in the pit of his stomach.
Roz shifts her weight, a little, her fingertips teasing out the red shadow, and Harvey swallows, feeling his throat bobbing under her fingers. It's the warm body, the proximity, the novelty of hot girl in his lap. He wants to cup her hips but can't seem to lift his hands where they're flattened against his grey bedspread.
"Harv," Roz exhales, pulling back. He wants to say, no, come back, hold on , but he can't get past pulling his lower lip between his teeth and biting down. "Harvey," she says again. "You look like a rockstar."
She pulls him up and over to the mirror, and Harvey's breath stutters. It's artificial, of course, this wild streak of red across his eyelids, the dark ring around them. But it looks - it feels -
"You've done this with Sabrina, right?" His fingers are so light on the mirror as they trace his reflection, as if it were an anxious animal liable to bolt.
Something crosses Roz's reflected face, an expression he doesn't quite recognise. "Yeah," she says, a little distantly. "With Sabrina. Some girls at Bible Camp. It's good… practice."
"You're good," he tells her, finding his smile and testing it on this other Harvey's face. She preens, and he laughs, and neither of them dare look his father in the eye when they run downstairs, the adrenaline already hot in Harvey's blood.
They break up on a Sunday afternoon, a Cardigans vinyl skipping in the corner of his bedroom. A lost look and a curt nod and a laughing handshake on the words better as friends. She touches the collar of the flannel Harvey is wearing, soft, baby pink and purple in delicate lines.
"It looks good on you." Roz tells him. "Bright colours, soft colours. You look at home."
Harvey wears it to school on Monday morning, his Fright Club t-shirt underneath. Billy and Carl laugh brayingly at the lockers opposite his, Carl staring holes in Harvey's back but really - that could be about anything.
Harvey thinks about his flannels, staring at the hole in the wall he calls a wardrobe, overspilling with this workman's uniform. This Kinkle Man uniform. The tough material worn to scratchiness. The way he abrades his own skin every day and makes that comfortable. The way he likes things softer in the sanctity of his room, cotton t-shirts that barely cover his midsection but are airy on his skin.
He thinks about the way he spent a whole summer thinking of dying his hair black to look like Brian Molko. The way he spent the next playing Courtney Love on repeat, tearing holes in his better shirts and never letting anyone see. He shrugs on a neon pink t-shirt his brother came home with, once, the Sleater Kinney logo roughly print-screened on and draws until it's dark out, a page full of sharp eyes and bruised knuckles staring back up at him.
Roz bounds into the garage one day, a bunch of DVDs pressed between her hands and a determined glint in her eye. "Guys. Emergency movie night. My cousin Eric at Notre Dame has just got to the new queer cinema module of his film class." Theo perks up, and Sabrina leans forward a little bit, and Harvey fights the urge to fix his gaze on the floor. "Have you heard of the Teenage Apocalypse trilogy? It's prime Fright Club fodder."
She hands a slim DVD case over to Sabrina, who fingers it delicately. " Sex. Violence. Whatever," She reads, before looking up at Roz with impish glee. "Sounds like a party."
Roz is right, is the thing. It's perfect for them; the slanting, low budget camera work, trippy candy-coloured visuals, the sudden swerves into schlocky violence. They all spend the movies tilted forward in their seats, screeching at the dialogue and lusting over the costumes. Theo announces mid-way into Doom Generation that "I am gonna lop his dick off," is becoming a mainstay of his personal lexicon, and by Nowhere Roz proclaims Rachel True her next Halloween costume inspo and Sabrina throws her head back and laughs whenever someone abruptly loses a body part.
But it feels different to him. Somewhere between Rose McGowan being pressed in tightly between her two boys' bodies and the unmistakable sounds of what they tumble into and James Duvaal shirtless in bed dripping with another boy's blood his breath begins to stutter, this warm uncomfortable feeling he can't articulate knotted at the base of his throat.
Sabrina smiles at him, after, the alien-ness of her clearer than ever in the evening dark. "You okay, Harv?"
He nods, because language has promptly left his body, and because if he opens his mouth he might have a panic attack or he might explode and neither feels worth the risk. She peers at him, her eyebrows lowered, her mouth pursed, and Harvey has a thousand thumbnail sketches of that on the back of geometry papers and cafe receipts, so it shouldn't have any power left over him, but.
"Okay," she says, slowly, looking straight through his skull. "Sure."
That becomes a routine of its own, a ritual as regular as Harvey's night time habit of gravitating towards more delicate clothes.
They have movie nights, girls on one couch, boys on the other, eating popcorn and carefully nursing beers to the point of genial companionship and never beyond - his stomach turns long before the alcohol has time to settle this one time when he spills beer across his sketchpad and has to sit on his hands to keep from hurling the can at the wall.
Each week someone picks a film - Sabrina always edging for the macabre, Roz for the arthouse, and Theo for whatever low budget cult classic he's most recently stumbled onto. This week he brought in Hedwig, with a sharp turn to his smile.
"We're gonna end up a movie covers band by the end of this one," he tells Harvey, nudging him between the ribs.
And, okay. Harvey spends most of the movie in a daze, his fingers tapping along to the rhythm of the songs, beer tepid on his breath, his skin feeling overwarm and ill-fitting.
He's singing Wig In A Box in his truck the next evening, on his way to the mine, but doesn't let himself think much farther beyond, thank god no one is listening.
Roz says, "I've met someone," quietly to him in the library before the others arrive. "Is it weird to tell you that? I thought you should know."
They had made sense, at the time. Roz and him. When Sabrina had become something he only half-recognised, the wild in her eyes becoming stronger than he could keep up with. Roz was safe, the bedrock of familiarity making it easy to like her, to want her, though he doesn't particularly like the way that makes him sound in retrospect.
"No," he says, hand stuffed so deeply into his pockets he's scared he might push through the lining. "No, I'm glad you still wanna tell me things. Who's the lucky guy?"
And there's that expression again, the one she'd get sometimes when they were watching movies with girls going to the dark side, zipped into skin tight leather, or covered in enemy blood.
She swallows, then looks at her hands where they splay open across a hardback book. She's reading Fried Green Tomatoes , which was one of his mom's favourite movies. "It's actually, um, a girl. Another cheerleader. She might be why I joined in the first place, even if I didn't quite, um, know that yet."
Harvey feels hot, all of a sudden, and he wonders if she can see it, the colour on his cheek like a flashing sign, me too, me too.
What he does is smile at her, pressing one of his hands above hers on the book. "I'm glad for you, Roz. Thank you for telling me."
He kind of wants to kiss her on the cheek, but that still feels a step too close to intimate, so he just leaves his hand on top of hers until the others arrive, like a weight planting them both on the earth.
Harvey brings The Lost Boys to movie night, thinking it's a safe bet. They've all seen it enough times that it's practically memorised. They can quote along, Theo habitually throwing popcorn when Star and Michael have sex in a bluster of bedsheets and soft focus and fanning hair.
It's safe, familiar, well-trodden ground, except -
Sabrina brings Nick.
One thing about Greendale I never could stomach , he thinks, darkly, all the damn - whatever.
There's something more than just the dip in the couch beside him, Nick clad in knowing leather, the warmth of him beside Harvey an insistent reminder of the night the Greendale 13 came and they had practically clung to one another on his living room floor. He's different, these days. Nick holds himself more deliberately, less of that fluid swagger Harvey had fixated upon all that time ago. Sat on the couch, his arms spread across the back, his hips tilted forward, Nick is doing it on purpose.
Harvey decides to fixate on the movie, which might be just as much of a mistake, because in the dark hush, the fact of the supernatural heavy in the room, it feels like something entirely different to what he knows.
He wonders if it was always this visceral, David's broad-shouldered masculine flamboyance, the silver glint of Michael's earring, Star, delicate and alien all at once. Was Michael always a pendulum swinging between two creatures of the night?
He swallows, sweat prickling along his spine. It's so warm with an extra body in the garage, unbearably so. He has his flannel halfway unbuttoned before he remembers the rush to get out of his house when he heard the rumble of his dad's truck outside, how he'd just thrown it on over what he'd been wearing to do his homework. His fingertips hit the bare skin of his stomach, just above his bellybutton. He should be okay here, despite the warning light flashing inside his head. Theo wore dresses for fifteen years, Harvey can reveal his midsection. Two of the people in the room have already touched it, softly, delicately, pressed back into his bed.
It really is unbearably warm - how is Nick still curled into his leather jacket?
He grits his teeth as he slips free the last two buttons and shoves the shirt off before he can lose his nerve. It's a blue t-shirt, at least, as if that slight semblance of masculinity makes a difference.
He shifts in his seat, arms crossed over his torso, angling for something a little less uncomfortable when Nick glances at him.
He knows that look, the mundane fascination, like Harvey is something to be studied - he's sure it crosses his own face when he has a pencil hooked between his fingers, trying to disassemble something with his eyes to better translate it. Nick looks at his body, then looks at his face, and doesn't say anything.
The expression burns it's way into his skull. Is still burning there when he's in bed that night, his own hand hot on the exposed lines of his stomach, and then lower down than that.
He forces himself into unconsciousness, after, before he can think about what he's done.
The next time Nick joins them for movie night, he's wearing this thing, this black mesh thing that barely reaches his bellybutton. He's holding himself at Sabrina's side, his head lifted, his shoulders down, with a hard-fought ease. He kind of nods at Harvey, a smile playing on his mouth, his canines sharp against his lower lip. "Harry, if you don't stop looking at me like that I may be tempted to blush."
Sabrina swats him on the arm, both of them bolstered by the other's otherness. He wonders if they don't glow, faintly, in the dark, nocturnal animals that they are.
Harvey nods back, his cheeks stinging with warmth, and he thinks you bastard over and over again. "Don't be so full of yourself," he says a beat too late for it to land, but Nick grins anyway, stretching his arms above his head and making the mesh top shift across his musculature.
Sabrina brought Suspiria, a morbid side effect of the childhood ballet lessons, the same way Nick's presence is a side-effect of the desire for solidity. Harvey notices that, too, the way he always seems reluctant to let go of Sabrina's fingertips, even if it's just to sit on separate couches. He's tempted to be offended by that, but then he glances at him again, the way the criss-crossing of black across his chest looks crosshatched to highlight his muscles and suddenly he's not so keen to be sat so close to him.
It does things to a guy's ego, you see.
Harvey's getting better with the darker fare, since facing it down in his own home, but he still flinches at the jump-scares, even as Sabrina's laughter pierces the dark. Nick does too, just the once, ends up leaning a little closer to Harvey on the couch. Harvey can feel the heat radiating from him, see how his body is tensed like a wire.
"Hey," he whispers, as Nick turns to him, glassy-eyed. "Are you okay?"
He changes, then, that well worn smirk settling back on his face. "Harry, it's fiction. I've stood in the devil's jaws, I think I can handle a scary movie."
He doesn't move out of Harvey's space, though. Their shoulders almost brush by the time the credits roll.
Next movie night, Roz brings Barbarella and Harvey wears his Sleater Kinney shirt, the colour insipid, the cut only barely stretching over his skin.
Nick quirks his brow, and Harvey does it back and Sabrina smiles slyly between them.
"Girls, girls, you're both pretty," she says, and Theo nearly snorts out his beer.
Sabrina is different, too, since bringing Nick back. Since claiming her seat in hell.
She's more… certain. Her eyes harder, more unflinching. Harvey is drawing them a lot, catches them peering up at him from the corners of his history textbook without quite meaning to. She's closer, in a lot of ways, than she's been in a long time, but she's also never felt further away.
She flashes away, mid-conversation, or trails off to stare into space, like a ghost always haunting the edge of his vision. It's only curled in the garage banging out songs together or glued to the TV that she feels substantial - that they all feel substantial, an echo of before, with the addition of Nick, skulking on the sidelines. And even that -
Even with their little game of sartorial one-upmanship (Nick is in a red shirt tucked into leather pants, today, a faint black outlining his eyes; Harvey in a white vest beneath an electric blue button-down, spattered with gold stars) like an unspoken back and forth, Harvey, god help him, is coming around on the guy. Maybe it's just the habit of him, or the way Sabrina feels more at ease when he's in touching distance.
(And they do. Touch, that is. Curling up in the corner whilst Roz, Harvey and Theo play through the regulars, or Nick crawling up to her when the movie ends, letting her pull him up and against her to meet in a punishing kiss.)
Or, perhaps it's because when Harvey has his hand curled around the mic stand, muttering the words to Awful by Hole, Nick tilts it towards himself and finishes the line. It's not Sabrina's style, not really, so Harvey can only assume he's picked it up from repeatedly listening in. His heart skips a little bit when Nick grins at him, passing the mic back, and Harvey thinks oh no, and promptly forgets the rest of the song.
"So," Harvey says to Roz at lunch, his fingers playing with the strap of his satchel bag. "How are things with…"
"Amanda?" Roz smiles this private little smile and tips her head onto his shoulder. "I'm furious with her because she beat me at Scrabble."
"That good huh?"
She grins up at him. "It's the cheerleading. Lots of spelling practice."
Harvey has always just kind of written off the letterman jacket gang as assholes, Theo notwithstanding, but he likes Amanda. She has that number-one-girl-ism, type A thing that Roz radiates and Sabrina wears like a well-placed accessory. She and Roz have their horns locked over the top place in Wardwell's English class, and he's starting to wonder if their debates aren't just a nerdy kind of foreplay.
He runs his nail along the strap of his back until it begins to catch. "Hey Roz?"
She twists around to look at him cautiously. "What is it?"
He screws his eyes shut for a moment, hard enough that colour bursts across his vision. "I think I might. Um. Be bisexual?"
Roz throws her arms around him and squeezes. "Oh Harv."
"It's whatever -"
"No," she tells him, sitting up. "It's huge, thanks for telling me. Though I can't say I'm hugely surprised. Like frankly it'd be weird if you weren't."
He kind of stiffens without meaning to, clinging to her sweater. "What do you mean?"
"I mean look at us. We're a kitschy garage covers band who watch cult classic midnight movies. Between me, and Theo, and 'Brina -"
"Hold on," he says, feeling his palms start to sweat. "What about Sabrina?"
"I just kind of. " Roz tilts her head at him. "Do you not get the vibe that witches are just kind of… sexually fluid by nature? The aunties, Ambrose, Prudence, Nick , for god's sake. They all just kinda seem…" She slaps her hands down on her thighs and nods. "You know what, it's not my place to be ascribing sexualities to anyone. I was trying to say you're not alone, Harv. And we love you whatever you are."
She kisses him on the cheek, then, braver than he had been, but he can't quite get past what she said about witches, his mind reeling, his mouth going dry.
When they work out that Nick has never seen Rocky Horror there is a mad dash to get a movie night pencilled in. It's hard, between the girls cheerleading and Theo's games and Sabrina's ownership of hell, though Harvey never really struggles to make the time. He feels like a video game character, sometimes, constantly respawning at school, home, and the mines with little else of the map uncovered.
Still, when the day comes, it has a different tone to before. Because he's said it out loud, now, that he isn't straight. That the things he likes aren't just an unlikely anomaly but part of a rich cultural tapestry to which he belongs. He feels looser in his skin already.
It's easier, somehow, to tug on his tightest jeans and this little red t-shirt that only barely fits - hidden beneath his leather jacket for the treacherous journey downstairs. He lines his eyes in the truck's wing mirror, the delicate light from the porch the only thing illuminating him.
He's feeling cautiously comfortable with himself when he pushes open the door, just on the knife's edge of audacious, so of course the first thing he sees is Nick Scratch in a black corset.
"What do you think, Harry? Is it becoming on me?" He leans in the doorway welcoming Harvey inside, the heat radiating from his golden skin. Sabrina and Roz are already curled on their couch, dressed loosely as Colombia and Magenta, respectively, and Theo has his legs up on the boys sofa, the matching leathers marking him out as Eddie.
"We never said we were doing costumes." Harvey says, flatly edging around Nick and all that exposed skin of his.
Sabrina looks at him with faint amusement. "Nick insisted."
"Well," Harvey can feel his shoulders hunching, pulling up beside his ears. "It'd have been nice to get the memo."
"Wait," Roz says, "I think I left an old pair of glasses here."
Sabrina grins beatifically. "You'd make a charming Brad."
He can feel the heat of Nick creeping up behind him before he says a word. "I'd rather see him as Rocky."
Harvey narrows his eyes at him. "I thought you hadn't seen it."
"I read up," Nick replies with a pleased smile.
"Nerd!" Theo laughs from the couch, throwing and catching popcorn in his mouth. "Now will you two either pucker up or sit down so I can call this dude an asshole."
Nick raises his eyebrows in mock innocence. "What d'ya say, Farm Boy. Feeling frisky?"
Harvey's upper lip pricks with sweat. "Maybe you should have come as Brad, asshole."
Nick scoffs. "Well I never." He purses his lips for a split second then throws himself down onto the couch. "Your loss, Harry."
Harvey shucks off his jacket then, his dress not quite as scant as Nick's but still abbreviated. Sabrina wolf whistles, and Roz gives him this puzzling look, like she's just worked out the solution to a math problem and sinks her teeth into her lip. "Maybe it's yours," he mutters to Nick, sliding in beside him.
And Nick tilts his head as Late Night, Double Feature begins to filter through, looking Harvey up and down. "Maybe it is."
Harvey keeps feeling eyes on his back. He's switched out his old, dusty corduroy jacket for one in a pale blue, lined with the same soft sheepskin as before. Funny how something gentler in colour feels so much bolder. Billy gives him this look, once, in the hallway, his own shoulders hunched in his letterman jacket, and the cheerleaders track his movements in the halls.
"What's with that?" He asks Sabrina, leaning back against her locker whilst she feels around for a bundle of sage.
"You're a stone cold fox, Harv, didn't you know that?" She shoots him this stunning smile, one so clearly lined by the divinity in her, one hundred kilowatts and counting. "Plus," she tells him, leaning close, like they're sharing a secret. "You stand a little taller, these days. It looks good on you."
He feels it again, in biology, gaze heavy along his spine, but when he looks up, Sabrina is the only one looking.
Dr Cee books them again when the Cineplex is doing a Romero triple feature, and he can feel the butterflies chewing away at his intestines all week beforehand.
"I'm begging you," he whines down the phone. "You have to do my makeup again. There's no way I won't make it look like shit."
Roz giggles and tuts into the speaker. "Way to have self confidence, Harv. But if you must have a make up artisté you'll have to ask Sabrina. I promised Amanda I'd help her cram for her Spanish final before the show."
"Don't you do French?"
"Oui oui, mon cherie. Ask Sabrina."
She hangs up on him, and Harvey stares a hole in the wall. "Guess I'm asking Sabrina."
When Sabrina answers the door, she, Nick, Prudence and Ambrose are all wrapped in black feather boas, dancing to Love Potion No. 9 and passing around a dark bottle that might be wine, but is likely something far more potent.
"Witch-hunter," Prudence says with an unkind smile. "How lovely."
"Play nice," Nick scolds her, looping his boa around Harvey's throat. "You come in peace, don't you, Harry?"
Ambrose looks between them, something gold in his eyes, and smiles. "I think perhaps we should leave them to it." He swipes the bottle from between Sabrina's fingers and winks at Harvey. "Do have fun, children."
He and Prudence disappear with a sharp cackle and a flap of black feathers and Harvey releases a breath he hadn't known he was holding, finally meeting Nick's eyes. "I um. More specifically, I came for a make-over."
Nick breaks out in a toothy grin and tugs him in a little closer. "Trying to get a little closer to perfection, huh?" He tilts up his jaw, preening for Harvey's attention.
"Something like that," Harvey says, nerves pulling at his threads. He's smiling too, only his feels closer to the hysterical kind.
Sabrina pops her pale little head between them and laughs. "Let me get my brushes, and we'll glamour you up."
It kind of passes over him in a haze of glitter and eyeliner and those feathers, again. Nick spends the hour twirling around the room, picking through the pile clothes that Ambrose has clearly left for them, settling on an open, black silk shirt and those godforsaken leather pants, the boa coiled tight around his throat, whilst Sabrina pushes him back on her bed and uses her small, cold little fingers to make Harvey into something as fey as the two of them.
When they both tug him over to the mirror he can't stop swallowing, his mouth so dry he could sand a shelf with it. His eyelids are painted in streaking black and gold that shifts and glitters when he moves, and his lips are a matte black curve. He looks -
"Hot," Nick says, hooking his chin on Harvey's shoulder, his breath fanning warmly against Harvey's collarbone.
"I concur," Sabrina says, leaning into his side. "Very Velvet Goldmine."
Harvey isn't sure he can breathe, let alone sing. "Wait." He says, stumbling back, Nick's body solid behind him. "What's going on here?"
"We're seducing you, Harry, wasn't it obvious?" Nick reaches forward a little, his hand settling on Harvey's hip, where it's exposed by his gold tank top.
"Nick," Sabrina hisses, squeezing Harvey's hand. "We're not… that ." She says to Harvey's reflection. "Not entirely. We do have a show to get to after all. But, um. Would you be amenable at all, to the seducing?"
Harvey blinks a few times, waiting for the him in the mirror to catch up with the him in his body, the one that is vibrating in place. He kind of nods, because that's in his lexicon and Sabrina squeals excellent, before kissing him on the cheek, and then Nick does the same, because he's an ass, and absolutely fuck Harvey's life, how is he supposed to remember the words, now?
Stood on the makeshift stage, the midnight movie denizens peering up at him from beneath chalky cadaver makeup, Harvey feels alight.
The music moves right through him, Debbie Harry on his tongue, Prince in his gait. Roz and Theo harmonise, and Sabrina shakes her tambourine and Nick crowds up close to Harvey's microphone, cooing the words like a call and response. He's been watching me , Harvey realises for the first time, hip checking him away with a mean little smile, one he didn't know he could produce, as they blow through a cover of People Are Strange. Nick falls to his knees as the guitar solo kicks in, arching up into him, stuck on the song like some kind of magical rite, and Harvey's fingers almost stumble.
He needs the breather of Sabrina stepping up to the mic, tiptoeing through a haunting rendition of Come Little Children from Hocus Pocus as Nick pulls her two and fro, a strange and delicate pas de deux that has the crowd practically hypnotized, let alone Harvey. She curtseys, and Nick bows, and they both tug Harvey back into the spotlight so he might enter a trance of another kind. They close with a somewhat upbeat version of Lullaby by the Cure, Harvey growling his way through the hungrier lines and whimpering on the softest. Nick is once more waltzing Sabrina on the edge of the stage and Harvey thinks of Suspiria again, of movement as arcane invocation.
He doesn't notice Nick back by his side until he hisses out the final note, Nick's nose brushing warm against his cheek. He's caught up in it, the thrill of camaraderie his blood hot in his veins that he's a step behind his own movements, can't catch himself when he slumps back against Nick's side, laughter pulling open his mouth. Nick's holding him up, a hand on Harvey's shoulder, the other on his jaw, and he still doesn't see it coming when when the other boy nudges his head aside and kisses him so hard and fast spots litter his vision.
Harvey can't hear a thing over the roar of blood in his ears and Theo's drumsticks clattering to the floor. Nick's kiss is relentless, his thumbs stroking Harvey's cheekbones, his jaw, his mouth warm and shifting and hungry. He drifts on it for a moment, succumbs to the touch and taste and the Nick of it all, the adrenaline high of performance and the shock leaving Harvey almost insensate. He's only half occupying his body, only half in control.
Then panic pierces through.
He pushes himself back, mouth still dropped open, and whispers, "What the hell, man?"
Nick looks stricken, for a second, before he straightens his spine. "Harvey," Nick whispers back, drawing out the syllables of his name. "I have been stopping myself from doing that for weeks. I thought -" He shakes his head and ducks it down. "Never mind."
"No, Nick, wait," Harvey grabs for him as he inches back, but then Roz and Theo have closed in around him, Sabrina somewhere on the edge and Harvey is swallowed up in the leftover euphoria.