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The fun goes out of your own birthday somewhere between twenty-five and having your first kid. That’s fine, mostly. You just have different things to worry about. I think with the pandemic it’s got a little more complicated—time sort of shredded itself after the first lockdown, so I’m both fifty and fifty-three at the same time. Doesn’t matter. I only feel old anyway when I’m looking at my girls.
A birthday during filming can go so many ways. Sometimes in the past I’ve brought cupcakes just to be a good fucking sport. Sometimes some tosspot gets it into their head that what we all really need is an awkward party about it with dry catered cake, no offence, caterers, please don’t poison my coffee. Every once in a while what you get is a card meant for a four year old and a good ribbing from a friend who knows you well enough to remember it but to not make a big fucking fuss.
If you’re very lucky, your birthday will do you the immense favour of falling on a day you aren’t on set. Thank Christ.
The first call comes early and mostly features toddler babble and logistics talk. The omicron variant means things are a little more strict than I’d like, and I’m stuck in Scotland for another few weeks before I can get home. I feel ancient and homesick for about twenty minutes before they ring off. The second call will come later, after LA wakes up, and will probably also feature a lot of toddler babble and logistics talk because she’s funny like that. I will feel ancient again, and homesick for palm trees of all fucking things, and probably end the day feeling damned sorry for myself. Fifty-three.
I miss everyone so much I just want to open a window of this hotel and shout. Just a fucking primal, belly-deep shout. I don’t know. Scotland—maybe they wouldn’t mind.
I don’t do it. Instead I get up and take a shower like some kind of responsible adult, which at this age I ought to be. Never got the hang of it. Going out for breakfast seems abysmal so there’s a protein bar instead. Should probably look through the scripts for next week. Answer some emails. Call my parents.
I’m laying in the middle of the unmade bed, half-dressed, when there’s a knock on the door. Maybe if I just keep laying here, quiet-like, the sod will fuck off.
“I’m not going to fuck off,” a voice calls through the door. “So you might as well open it.”
His accent is thicker up here, and it’s worse when it’s early. Through the door it’s half-garbled; he’s a mess.
That’s reassuring, actually, and makes it feel marginally more acceptable that I don’t bother to put on real trousers before I open the door. “I should just give you a key, you fucking child.”
David grins, crooked. His nose and cheeks are pink with cold under the dark frames of his glasses, but he’s carrying two huge cups of coffee and a pastry bag. I could kiss him.
“Happy birthday, you fucking hag.” He shoulders past, flicking that brilliant red hair in my direction. His crooked smile flirts with a smirk. I could kick him.
Maybe both.
“Figured you were up here feeling sorry for yourself,” he goes on, shimmying out of his dark winter coat. Underneath he’s wearing a hoodie with the neck all stretched out and a pair of jeans that have seen one too many fingerpainting sessions. If it weren’t for the hair as a dead giveaway right now, he could be someone else entirely. He is someone else entirely. “Hate doing a birthday when I’m not at home, everyone always gets all fucking weird about it.”
“I’m not—fuck off, hand me that coffee.”
He does, grin widening. Kicking sounds good. “Croissant?”
“It’s my fucking birthday and you brought me a croissant? You couldn’t even spring for a danish?”
“Don’t whine, it’s unbecoming at your age,” he says, in a voice more used to speaking to the under-10 crowd. The pastry bag comes hurtling over anyway, and of course I’m old now so it hits me in the chest. “Save me one.”
They are danishes. Fuck, there’s a raspberry one. He’s not getting shit from me.
“Fuck off, you should’ve brought your own.”
David finally gets the other shoe off and flops, limbs akimbo, onto the bed next to me, which must be uncomfortable because he lands right where the blankets are all bunched up, but he’s like fucking Gumby all the way down to his bones so I guess it doesn’t bother him. I fend off a hand for a minute out of principle, but eventually he snags one of the danishes anyway.
“I brought all of them,” he says, shoving it into his mouth like I’m going to snatch it away on a moment’s notice. “You should be grateful.”
“Don’t be disgusting. And you brought them for me. Did I say I wasn’t grateful?”
“Didn’t say you were.”
“I’m grateful, dad. Don’t you have enough kids to parent without bringing it in here?”
He laughs. “Spent half an hour on the video call with them this morning. I think they’ve multiplied while I’ve been gone.”
“Mmm. Send my love to Georgia, then, if you can find her, God knows she’ll need it.”
“She called you my other wife again, this morning.”
Ah, fuck.
This has become sort of an ongoing thing, and I’m never quite sure what to make of it. Sure, I’ll laugh it up on Twitter and send Georgia or Anna back a few texts in the same vein, because it would be fucking weird if I didn’t. But there’s also a thread of something else in it—a thread of something that makes me wonder how much they know.
I’m fifty fucking three years old, Christ’s sake. Can’t a man have a crush in peace like a fifteen year old again?
And the way David says it, here and now, a mess of red hair and unlikely limbs in the bed next to me: mild, like he’s just leaving it on the table for me to decide whether or not to take it. If he were to say it laughing, that’d be easier, because I could just laugh back. But he doesn’t. He says it almost like a question.
What am I supposed to say to that?
Aim for a middle ground, I suppose. “I expect I’ll find that on Twitter later.”
“I expect so.”
“Tell her I’ll have your ironing done by the end of day, not to worry.”
“She doesn’t worry.”
He looks up at me, and fuck me, he shouldn’t get to look at anybody like that. Flopped onto the bed, that stupid red hair all over the place. It’s long now, spread all over my pillows. I’ll be finding red hairs in my white sheets for days. Like he’s the fucking Little Mermaid. He lays there next to me, looks up where I’ve had half a danish in my mouth, and says that all significantly. She doesn’t worry.
I’m not entirely sure I know what that means. Not the way David’s looking, as he says it.
“Course not,” I say just for something to say, and reach for my coffee.
David’s hand on my thigh stops me. I’m not dressed enough for him to be touching my thigh. Boxers, t-shirt. Nothing he hasn’t seen before, of course, especially during filming—we have our own trailers, sure, but sometimes there isn’t time for that level of privacy, and he doesn’t usually go around touching my thighs at any level of dress.
“What I mean is,” he says, slow and deliberate, the roll of his accent thick in his hushed mouth, “she doesn’t worry. She’s not—she’s not the jealous type.”
Jesus Christ. I still have no idea what that means, but I know what certain aspects of me want that to mean. Fifty-three is way too old for the rush of blood happening. I must be burning hot under his hand, and if he glanced away from my face he’d see I’m not entirely in control of myself. Which is stupid. Embarrassing. Humiliating. I feel like eating my entire hand off to get out of this conversation before it crashes and burns somewhere between that thigh and my fucking stomach.
“Michael,” he says.
“David,” I say.
“She says I ought to remember to give you a birthday kiss.”
His hair on my pillows. His hand on my thigh. I think about being seventeen again, going to bed for the first time with another man. I think about being twenty, twenty-two, twenty-four, when I didn’t go to bed with men I’d have liked to because you just didn’t know, you didn’t know back then. I remember being thirty-three, on the set of Bright Young Things, where I saw David for about three minutes wearing the worst fucking moustache I’d ever seen somebody put on, and going home and fucking my own fist about his spine for three days.
He was in Casanova, right after that. I nearly wanked myself to fucking death.
It had cooled off, after that. Rising and ebbing like the tide, I guess. I was in LA and he was in London. We weren’t friends—I probably would have said hi had I met him at a craft table but I wouldn’t have sought him out, palled around. He got married. We both had kids. Just another face in the history of faces.
And then Good Omens. And he wasn’t just another face after all.
Stupid. Embarrassing. Humiliating. It was a damn good thing I was supposed to look besotted with him all the time when we were filming or else I’d have to pulverize myself into a fine sparkling little dust and toss myself into the fucking river.
And it was pretty clear that Georgia knew it, and if Georgia knew it, Anna knew it, and if they knew it . . . well, here was David, on my bed, on my birthday, with a hand on my thigh, talking to me about a birthday kiss.
“Oh, thank you kindly,” I say, light and teasing, and I lean down to smack a great big kiss onto his cheek, the way that makes toddlers and babies yell with delight. “Happy birthday to me.”
David does not yell with delight. He blushes, then sits up in the bed next to me. One hand still on my thigh, balancing himself. His eyes are dark behind the frames of his glasses. There’s a crumb of the danish still lingering at the corner of his mouth.
“Stop me, if this isn’t,” he says, and then he leans forward and kisses me.
Just like that.
This is not a fucking toddler kiss. This isn’t even a happy birthday, honey, have a laugh, type kiss. This is an awkward, uncertain, serious type kiss, a press of something new and unsure of itself, testing a boundary, crossing a limit. Like a twenty year old forgetting how to be suave right at the second it might’ve mattered, and just going for it.
I’m not sure I’ve ever been kissed like this.
I barely have time to think all this through before he’s pulling away again. Hand on my thigh, red hair around his face, heavy-lidded. He’s not sure if that well went or not. I’m not sure if that went well or not. I’m not even sure it fucking happened. He pats my thigh awkwardly and says, “Well, you know, happy birthday.”
“Fuck off,” I say, and kiss him again.
I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel, here, but things go from awkward and uncertain to slightly less awkward and a lot less uncertain quick enough that I barely know what I’m doing with my mouth, much less my hands. He tastes like a cheese danish and like coffee and his nose is still cold and I think I’m holding onto his face a little too tightly, both my hands cupped around his jaw. He makes a noise in the back of his throat and I’m reaching for it before I can think not to, licking into his mouth after it. His glasses are in a way a little and I must be rubbing his skin pink with my two-day stubble and he still smells like the cold air outside and I can hardly breath and I’ve definitely never been kissed like this.
“Right,” I break off, abruptly, leaving his mouth and his face and his skinny waist and his knee pressing into my thigh because Jesus fucking Christ, what if that wasn’t what he meant? “Happy birthday to me. Fifty-three.”
It is what he meant.
I know it’s what he meant, because in the next moment, he’s there again, breathing, “fuck,” hot against my jaw and pulling me back in. He kisses like a man not quite used to kissing new people without an intimacy coordinator these days, and fuck, I probably do too; I imagine the last coordinator I worked with standing at the end of the bed, directing my hand to his hip. She’d had blonde hair and a soft-spoken voice and had made my partner and I hug half-naked before we started the scene, “to get the nerves out of your skin.” It had helped. I wish I’d had a chance to hug David half-naked before all this to get the nerves out of my skin now because I felt like I was going to shake right out of it.
Hand on the hip. Pull close, gently—enough of a pull to guide, not to force. Think about tenderness like snow. You love him, and you’re finally getting to kiss him after all this time. You aren’t sure you’ll ever be able to kiss him like this again. Keep your faces open this way a little more, so we can see, there you are, and don’t go for too much tongue or it’ll get wet, now Michael, you can put your hand on his waist and gently see if his body wants to move closer—
“We’re not on set,” David says, suddenly, laughing.
The skin around his mouth has gone red. His eyes are doing that fucking thing, with the laugh lines. I’m so warm I think I’m going to melt right into the mattress beneath him.
“We’re not on set,” he says again. “You don’t have to kiss me like that.”
I stare at him. I can’t stop staring at him. “Like what?”
“Like—focused, like that. You kiss like you’re taking stage directions.” He leans in again, softening his mouth against mine. Three rapid kisses in a row—you never kiss like that on screen, it looks too uncoordinated, too messy. He sticks his tongue out and licks, actually licks, the corner of my mouth. You never kiss like that on screen either. “Just kiss me like you normally would.”
“I have no idea how I would normally kiss you,” I tell him, a little annoyed at how right his critique is, and extremely annoyed that he seems to have himself together better than I have myself together. “You’re not the person I’d normally kiss.”
I give it another go anyway, and this time I stop thinking about the blonde coordinator and start thinking about the solidity of him: hips and ribs, arms and shoulders. Parts of him I’ve watched and never touched. One hand slips around his back to trace up the length of his spine, that fucking spine, how many times have I fucking thought about that spine. He stretches himself into the touch, too, pressing his belly closer to arch against my fingers, his head tipping back. His neck is so long and so hot. He tastes like fucking lotion but I can’t stop kissing at him anyway, open-mouthed, sucking just a little. Just a little.
He’s hard, when he arches close enough I can feel it. It feels unreal. Real and unreal. This can’t be happening.
“There’s no obligation, if it’s not what you’re normally into,” David is saying, breathless. The stretched neck of his hoodie is being stretched out even more. He’s laughing, though. “M’happy to go back to the danishes.”
His fingers delve up under my shirt. They’re so fucking long it’s like being touched everywhere at once, or maybe that’s just the want for them to be everywhere. His neck goes on forever. His collarbones go on for miles after that. He’s not wearing a shirt under this hoodie, David, what the fuck.
“Go on,” he says quietly. “If you want. It’s your birthday.”
It’s my birthday.
Trying to put my thoughts back into some kind of order is like trying to build a house of fucking cards. He doesn’t even look like himself with his hair that red. I don’t look like myself either, right now, I’ve just remembered.
Are we David and Michael? Or are we both someone else? Am I Michael, alone here with a stranger, gifting me something he thinks I want because it’s my birthday?
“If you’re doing this because of that,” I say, pulling away, loosing my hands from the zip of his hoodie where I had started working on it.
“Shut up,” he says, still quiet like that. “Of course I’m not.”
“I couldn’t,” I tell him. “I couldn’t, not just for that.”
It’s too much a confession, I know.
David sits up a little. I hadn’t even realised that I’d been pressing him down, into the bed, into my pillows. My sheets will smell like he smells. The imprint of him in that pillow will last as long as I want it to.
“Michael,” he says. I look at him. He’s gone a little softer in his jeans again, though my eyes still find the bulge without question even as I try not to look. He’s disheveled, a mess. His accent is so thick right now he’s practically singing with it, turning each word in and out as he speaks. “It’s a good excuse, a birthday. You know. If I said something, and it was just going to all be a joke, it would’ve been fine. Easier to do, I think, on a birthday. Easy to laugh off if you wanted. But you didn’t.”
“I did a bit.”
“You tried to. You weren’t very good at it.”
Well, that’s embarrassing too. Add it to the list. Fucking actor, not very good at it. I press my palms into my eye sockets. Try to stop thinking about him, warm and solid and real barely a hands-breadth away.
“It’s not because of your birthday,” David goes on. “It’s because I wanted to. And I thought maybe you wanted to too. And I thought it would be a good time to give it a go.”
He makes it sound so reasonable. He makes it sound so easy.
“And after today?”
“Well. Georgia will want to know if you really got my ironing done, I s’pose, and Anna’s been talking about a getaway for a weekend if we can manage it, at the end of filming. All of us together. Could just—go on like that, you know. All of us together.”
“Are they—”
“Er, you know, I don’t know really? Maybe. Georgia yes, Anna, probably not cottoned on yet. But this, here—” he gestured between us. “They’re fine with this. Talked about it a lot, actually, the three of us, I wanted to get everything sorted before I—before we—anyway. Might take some negotiation, get everything all sorted, and you’ll be in Wales anyway, but—”
He shrugs. Looks away for the first time, a wave of uncertainty rising again. “It’s here if you want it.”
I’m trying to imagine the three of them on that call. David, fluttering, a little anxious. Georgia, soothing, matter-of-fact. Anna. I can’t imagine if she was surprised or not, to have David Tennant asking for permission for this. If I’m entirely honest, I can’t imagine she was too surprised. It’s never been discussed, really, but it’s been teased. It’s been—acknowledged.
Relationships get weird, when you’re away from home for a while, when you’re with other people, doing other things. Nothing is as straightforward as it is in real life, cut and dry, and it’s not unheard of, this kind of flexibility. I’ve had it once or twice before, on my side or theirs, and there are words now that I like, even if I don’t use them. Queer. Bisexual. Polyamorous. Love in different dimensions, different directions.
One doesn’t do multiple seasons about sex research and not do a little sex research, after all. I like to be thorough.
“I cannot believe,” I hear myself saying, “that you opened this conversation up with an other wife joke.”
David laughs, really laughs, and I laugh with him.
He’s still laughing when I kiss him again.
This time I don’t stop kissing him. I know what I want. I’ve spent a long time wanting it.
I want to touch him. I want to feel the muscles in his waist. I want to feel the movement of his jaw. I want to get this fucking hoodie off him and run my fingers through his chest hair, which I already know is broad across his chest, and a little thick, because I keep watching these scenes in which he’s not got a shirt on as if they were filmed specifically to torture me. I want to put my tongue in the hollow of his clavicle and I want to know how his hips fit into my hands.
I find out. I find out and find out and find out.
The hoodie fucks off. So does my shirt.
There are things he wants, too, and the realisation of that rises in me bit by bit until suddenly he’s biting gently at the swell of my chest and I’m gasping for air. The curve of his nose, beautiful, pristine, presses into my breastbone just a little too hard, and I’ve always wondered what that would feel like there. It feels like he’s taking everything with him.
He’s warm, he’s so warm. I don’t know if I’ve ever had somebody so warm.
The boxers go next, and I’m not prepared for the rush of cool air or for the sharp gasp in his throat. He pulls back and looks, staring like he means to memorise. Like he’s measuring how I might feel, how I might—Jesus fucking Christ—how I might fit.
“David,” I say, helplessly.
“Yes,” he says, and then he’s back, here again, there again, those long hands finding my thighs again, skimming the skin between my legs as he teases upward. The seams of his jeans are too rough against my skin, but it doesn’t matter because in the next moment I’m fumbling for the button and they’re opening anyway and they’re opening and I’m tugging and how the fuck he fits a pair of boxer briefs in these fucking jeans I’ll never know, if I’d ever had to guess before now I would have guessed he was wearing, I don’t know, fucking Spanx or something else ridiculous, but it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter because he’s springing forward and he’s groaning like it feels good to move and he’s shoving at the jeans and the pants together, and I have to laugh because they’re all over the bed now and he’s doing this outrageous little shimmy and I think in a moment—yes, he is, he’s flapping his feet to get the damn things off and I’m laughing so hard I can barely breathe and he’s shouting at me to knock it off, and then they go, they go and I bury face in his stomach just to buy myself a moment because if I look at him right now I’m going to pop off like a fucking firework.
His stomach is warm, rumbling still with the laughter. I can feel the presence of his cock below, looming. It should be funny too, and ridiculous, but it doesn’t feel that way, with my face pressed here. It feels serious. It feels close.
“Like the way you feel,” I tell him. “You’re firmer than I expected.”
He snorts. “Oh, sure, thanks a lot.”
“No, fuck off. I mean you’re not the will o’ wisp you look like.”
“I’m not sure that’s better, sweetheart.”
I turn my face to look up at him. “Sweetheart?”
One dark eyebrow raises. He’s still wearing his bloody glasses. I’m going to fuck him with his stupid bloody glasses on. “That all right?”
Nobody’s ever called me sweetheart before, not like this. Babe sometimes. Mostly, I guess. Honey, if I’m being a tit, and rightly so. Anna says älskling, darling. Duckie, been called that. Love, lovey. Dove, when someone else is being a tit about the hair thing.
Sweetheart. Fifty-three years, and David is a novelty.
No, not a novelty. Something more than that.
“Yes,” I say, and I don’t need to look away to take his cock into my hand, so I don’t. It’s been a long time since there’s been a cock in my hand other than my own, and there’s that brief moment of getting used to the differences, that initial feeling of oh, wait, is that—but it is right, it’s so right. David is longer than I am, the shape of his head more narrow, the path of the veins just a little different. I learn the feel of him by hand long before I know him by sight, and I learn the places he likes to be touched from the jump of his adam’s apple and the scrunch of his eyes and the squirm of his hips and the perfect, intoxicating breath of air he takes when I’ve got just the right spot.
I touch him slowly, and I think about 2003. Miles Maitland, what was his character’s name? Ginger something or other. That idiotic little moustache he’d had. I’d been envious of Miles, and pitying at the same time, just like I had been with Robbie Ross, but Miles cut a little closer. I was never going to be that kind of queer, not even if I wanted to. He taught me how, a little, even though I’d been to bed with men before. He also taught me why not.
David’s spine, leaning over the crafts table, looking for a biscuit. I’d been to bed with men, but I’d never—that was a different kind of wanting.
David is panting beneath me now, trying to move his hips gently enough that he doesn’t disturb my head, still laying high on his stomach, while still trying to fuck into my hand. I press myself down a little harder, to keep him still.
I think about Kate and Sarah, and the knowing way they’d both teased. I think about the first time I met Billie Piper, and asked, embarrassed of myself, if he was really—“Yes, he’s really that nice, can you believe it? Fucking wretch.” Seeing him here and there at auditions, him polite, me a coward. The first read of Good Omens together, knowing that Neil was set on us both, knowing it might not get made at all if I couldn’t stop being myself and make it work. We’d never read together before, not like that, not just the two of us. When the girls were born, and he texted me those pictures, proud as can be, Georgia’d kill him if she ever knew. Staged, after that, and hours and hours and hours of his face, lighting up next to mine when everything was at its lowest, hours we filmed nothing at all, talking about the kids—his fears, as his oldest started getting into acting, mine, as my oldest grew up so far from me—and the places we wanted to go when it was all over, the people we wanted to see. Laughing when it seemed like there was nothing left to laugh about. Under Milk Wood went onstage, terrifyingly, and Around the World and Last Train, and he was there when he could be and I was there when I could manage it, and suddenly in between there were trips to the beach and bottles of wine and dinners out and I’d woken up one day, fifty-two and a half years old, and realised I couldn’t do without him.
I didn’t have to. He’d been right there, slinky and sexy in those fucking leather trousers on Good Omens, passing me a cup of tea and straightening my bow-tie.
It would be a damned cliché to think it was like magic.
So I don’t. I don’t think about magic at all. I think about the weight of him under my head and the weight of him against my palm and I stroke and I touch and I watch him come so slowly apart.
“I don’t know what you’re thinking,” he says finally, gasping, his hands clutching at my thighs, my wrist, petting ineffectively at my head sometimes, “but if you don’t come up here and kiss me again while you think it, I’ll kill you.”
David wouldn’t even kill a spider in the house, but I went anyway.
I wish I could say it all falls into place, just like that, puzzle pieces snapping together, but the truth is two men out of practice are two men out of practice. It’s awkward. I knee him in the thigh, and he doesn’t have the meat to cushion the blow. He pinches a nipple, and I haven’t told him how sensitive they were. Face hot, teary-eyed, I tackle him down, hold him in place trying to line the both of us up into one hand. Jab him a little with my cockhead. There are two many hands involved, far too many elbows. It’s hard to get the rhythm right; we’re both used to setting it ourselves, for the most part. I hadn’t thought to grab the fucking lube from the bathroom, and it was hard to get the slide moving.
It’s perfect. It’s perfect.
He wraps his legs around me, those mile-long things, and I fuck into my hand where both our cocks are trapped together. There’s a lot of sweat, and a good amount of spit, and he leaks like a fucking faucet when the rhythm really starts ramping up. I wonder how much he’d leak if I were inside, against his prostate, milking him endlessly. It’s a filthy enough thought to send me groaning, hips snapping faster, and he gets almost wild underneath me, like he can see the vision of it, like he wants that too—he claws at my shoulders, he bites at my collarbones, he tips his head back and heaves his chest and says fuck me, oh, god, Michael, fuck me, like he’s been thinking about that fucking craft table since 2003 too, and I want him and I have him and I know this isn’t just here and now because it never has been, not for me.
“David,” I say, and I love you, I think, exactly what he’d wanted me to think, and I kiss him like I mean it because I do, I do, I do.
“Michael,” he smears against my mouth, “Michael, please,” and then he locks around me as he comes, wet and hot between us. I fuck him through it, gentling, gentling, until he can breath again, and then it’s his hand knocking mine to the side and his grip learning the differences between us and his stroke undoing me at all my seams.
“Michael,” he says again, and it sounds exactly like what I had meant when I’d said his name, and I come off after him, so hard it’s like a punch to the gut, coming so hard and for so long that I can’t breathe until he fits his mouth back up against mine and kisses the breath back into me.
Or something. I’m fifty-three, it could be a lot of things.
I’m fifty-three, and David is here with me.
I’m fifty-three, and when he says my name, he says it like he means it.
I’ll tell him, someday. About 2003. About Casanova, and about Staged, and about the vastly different but vastly significant things those eras both meant to me. I’ll tell him about Miles Maitland, and Robbie Ross, and how and why not, second-guessing, wanting and not having. I’ll tell him about going to bed with a man for the first time in the 1980s and wondering if I’d just ended everything. About trying not to go to bed with other men. About Aziraphale, and wondering if I was going to ruin everything by already being in love with my Crowley.
As it turns out, I didn’t ruin anything. And I am not Aziraphale. I am not Robbie Ross, or Miles Maitland, or William Masters, or Tony Towers, or anybody else. I am not a stranger in my own life. I’m right here.
I’m Michael. I’m fifty-three. And my life is so full with people I love. Different directions, different dimensions.
One of them is a man who, I think, loves me back. And he’s right here with me.
I’ll tell him, someday.
I’m only fifty-three, after all, and there are danishes to finish in the bag on the bedside table. There isn’t any rush.
*