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1.
Nick wakes up on a Saturday morning in the wrong room, with a warm, and notably body-sized, weight pinning him to the inadequate mattress. It is, if he thinks about it, not exactly the wrong room, in that it’s definitely the room he remembers starting to fall asleep in, after the last episode of their show had rolled to the credits. It is Charlie’s room, where Nick has already spent a number of Friday nights watching films and TV shows while swiping away a barrage of messages from his mates asking why he hasn’t yet reached the uni tavern. Forgive him for wanting to relax instead of spending money he doesn’t have drinking beer he doesn’t really like trying to talk to people whose voices he can’t actually hear over the din.
The only person he ever actually managed to strike up a conversation with at the Tav was Charlie. That night, early in his second semester, Nick had trailed Otis out to the smoking section, the two of them headed there not because he or Otis smoked but because a first-year called Trish and her friend did. After being suddenly dropped by Trish’s friend as she spied someone she had to talk to across the garden, Nick’s eye had met that of another man, who from the looks of him, had to be another fresher. He was putting on a brave face but it was clear that he was absolutely freezing; shivering in place as the night air cut through a jumper that was much more stylish than warm. For some unknown reason, their moment of eye contact had prompted Nick to tease him about how cold and pathetic he had looked. Charlie had sassed him back, and they’d talked for the rest of the night.
Nick and Charlie had zero classes together, were in different years, spent the day on different campuses and had hobbies completely alien to the other. (Nick didn’t think playing in a rock band was that otherworldly, but he’d never yet managed to face the prospect of attending one of Charlie’s gigs when he had practice so bloody early in the morning. Charlie, though, acted like rugby was the pastime of science fictional beings rather than a staple of British sport.) Nick and Charlie probably should never even have met during their time at the same university, but somehow, they had … and now, they spent every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon studying over the same table in the arts library, every Wednesday lunchtime finding each other on the lawn, and every Friday night perched over the covers of Charlie’s bed, watching something or other on the laptop until the night was morning.
Nick is not over the covers now. He is bundled very snugly under them, or at least, his back is wrapped in the covers, although they have fallen down below his waist on the other side where his arm is tucked over the top of a warm person taking up their place.
Nick is in Charlie’s room, in Charlie’s bed, which would make the person that he is currently spooned around Charlie. Nick sort of dozes off as his brain finally puts all of this together and comes up with and it’s very warm and comfortable. Hair is tickling against his nose. Charlie is warm, and Charlie’s hair smells as good as it always does, and Nick feels himself drift almost all the way back to sleep. It’s only when Charlie himself starts to stir and mumble something that Nick realises Charlie might want to know what the fuck Nick is doing.
“I’m sorry!” Nick whispers, panicking and still waking up at the same time. Charlie lets out a little chuckle, relaxed and still rusty from sleep, and it makes sweat break out on the back of Nick’s neck.
“You’re sorry, but you haven’t stopped using me as a teddy bear,” Charlie teases.
“I—" Nick’s arms go tense, then relax. “I had a toy donkey,” he mumbles into Charlie’s T-shirt-covered shoulder. “Not a teddy bear.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have left it back at home.”
He can hear the smile in Charlie’s voice.
“Who says I did? Maybe Onkie is hiding under the covers back in my room.”
This time Charlie lets out a little giggle, before muttering Onkie under his breath. Nick feels the giggle in Charlie’s stomach against the underside of his wrist.
Nick should be letting go. He should be scrambling out of this situation, red-faced and stammering. He should at the very least lift his arm up a little to be not so heavy a weight. But it doesn’t feel wrong, is the thing. It feels right. Feels nice, and kind of sleepy and comfortable and relaxed, to lie here warm from sleep with one arm curled around Charlie’s waist and his other hand tucked up under Charlie’s hand over Charlie’s heart. It feels comfortable to have his warmth radiating into his front. Even the smell of Charlie’s hair feels like it’s winding him in strawberry-scented comfort. Nick lets his eyes fall closed as he tries to steal another minute of the warmth and the closeness. Charlie doesn’t seem to mind.
2.
The second time it happens, it already feels familiar. That’s part of the thrill when Nick wakes up, that delicious kind of slow wakeup that’s a drifting to the surface of consciousness and floating there. Only gradually does he let his consciousness expand and take note of the extra warmth of the legs tangled with his, the soft breaths against his forehead, pushing his hair so that it tickles his face, the warm chest that barely feels as though it’s rising or falling, because his own breaths are matched to the body under his ear.
Their warmth is the same and their breaths are the same, both of them rising and then falling together. This feels even better than last time, Nick thinks, feeling the softness of Charlie’s T-shirt give under his cheek. This time he has woken up with his head on Charlie’s chest and the feeling of an arm draped over him, heavy exactly where it feels nice for it to lie.
Maybe he should be concerned that he’s squashing Charlie under his weight, but he doesn’t worry, not when Charlie is so blissfully relaxed in sleep, his hands uncurled towards the ceiling.
Charlie’s hand, flung out from under the covers and away from their pressed bodies, is making him feel strange. Like he wants to grab it and bring it back towards him. Like it should be in his grasp. Nick, already covering and tucked into Charlie’s body, finds himself wanting to cover Charlie’s hand with his palm in the same the way he’s covered his chest with his own upper body. He stares at Charlie’s bare hand, an electric sort of field hazy around it. Nick wants to slot his fingers with Charlie’s the way their legs are slotted together warm under the covers. Is that a weird thing to think? Nick swallows and blinks sleep from his eyes.
As Nick wakes up further, his chest goes from feeling impossibly warm and relaxed to tight and then tighter. When Charlie wakes up, all mumbling and fluffy-haired and rusty-voiced, Nick’s belly swoops and his chest tightens and expands again at an alarming rate. Nick feels as though he’s being tugged between extremes of contentment and confusion until the contentment wears away. Except that he can still feel the softness in his body for the rest of the day. A buoyant feeling, when his mind drifts, that the way his day started was good. His mood is a bright bubble of happiness rising and then whisking away whenever his conscious mind notices it.
Nick’s mind is a whirl of anxious confusion in the hours until he sees Charlie again, for their next study date. When they’re seated across from each other, kicking each other’s trainers and rearranging each other’s books, all the thoughts and feeling settle down, under the steady sunshine of Charlie’s actual presence. It’s hard to feel on edge when he’s actually with Charlie, poking him to make him laugh at himself when he gets stressed, cracking bad jokes that Charlie jeers at in derision, until Nick accidentally hits on a good one that makes Charlie laugh aloud with unflattering surprise.
Charlie sets Nick at ease, always judging right between teasing and gentleness. He hasn’t made a misstep since that first time they’d hung out, when he’d made a too-sharp joke about thick rugby morons and had caught a glimpse of Nick’s face afterwards. Ever since then he’d been so gentle, adjusting the way he teased to the soft easily pierced inner core of Nick, not the brash and breezy front he puts out for the world. It would almost be insulting if it weren’t so necessary to him and so wonderful.
“Are you all right?” Charlie is asking him now, as gentle as ever, his blue eyes bright and inquiring.
Nick swallows. “Yeah, just … mind drifting,” he says, tracking his eyes over Charlie’s face.
“Has it been more than forty minutes since your last cuppa then,” Charlie teases, looking around over his shoulder to the counter of the café. They are studying on the ground floor of the library which holds the café and long tables where the students are allowed to eat and drink. It’s noisier than the rest of the library but quieter than a café proper, and Charlie insists they have to sit there since Nick can only concentrate with frequent breaks for either a hot drink or something to snack on, to restimulate his alertness. Charlie works with his headphones crushed over his curls, some of the time, unless they get to talking which they do … a lot.
“No,” Nick laughs, “I mean, maybe, but I’m just … yeah, really tired.”
Charlie’s face falls.
“Every assignment just takes so much longer than I think it will, and the ones that need references, half the time I’ve read them but I forgot to write anything down, or, or I’ve written down the right bits but I haven’t kept track of what bloody article they’re from … so I have to do it twice …” He groans. “I’m just so disorganised, and honestly I’m not used to training this much as well as playing games every weekend and my mates are on at me to go out with them and I don’t know how they’re not dropping on the street? It’s all, all been so much, it’s just been … yeah … um … overwhelming, lately,” he finishes, cheeks going hot in embarrassment over the rant. His hand finds the back of his neck. He notices that Charlie has been listening but that he looks nervous, his face all crinkled up. He seems unsettled, as he looks away over Nick’s shoulder and shifts in his seat.
“You must be sick of me,” Nick says, feelingly, and sees Charlie’s eyes widen in distress. “I’ll stop talking about it!” Nick hastens to say.
Charlie starts to say something and stops, hands opening and closing and then falling under the table. Poor Charlie. Nick decides to change the subject from his complaining.
“What are we watching on Friday, then?”
“What?”
“Well we finished our show, so … what’s next?”
A slow smile takes over Charlie’s face, and he seems relaxed again. “Well … I picked last time.”
“And it was a good choice, so you have to pick again.”
3.
The third time when he wakes up, Charlie is across the bed from him and he doesn’t know why. Charlie is already awake, looking at him, with a smile on his face, his head not raised from his pillow.
“Why’re you over there?” Nick mumbles. He wants to hunch himself, sluglike, over the cool part of the mattress towards the other person in the bed, but his limbs are still caught in sleep.
“We fell asleep”, Charlie whispers, in answer, a tinge of red on his cheeks. That’s not what Nick meant, and it doesn’t explain anything.
Nick spends the rest of the day feeling that the universe has cheated him of something. Even the long hug he gives Charlie when they say farewell doesn’t quite fill the empty spaces leftover from the night.
Nick doesn’t understand why Charlie inserted that unconscious distance, given the way he’d been close and comfortable the night before.
The night before, Charlie had leaned his head against Nick’s shoulder as they watched the movie, the smell of his shampoo and his sweat tickling Nick’s nose until he had to shuffle himself further back on the bed. Charlie had adapted to Nick’s shuffling by readjusting himself to tuck in even more neatly under his arm. Nick had given in to the impulse that had skated across his conscious mind so many times before. Tentatively, he had brushed just the tips of his fingers against the outermost edge of Charlie’s curls. When Charlie didn’t react, he feathered his fingers into the curls he could reach, and then as he felt Charlie sigh and melt into his side it felt natural to keep threading his fingers through, twirling soft curls that slipped against his skin and kneading his fingers on Charlie’s scalp to see if a sigh would slip out of him.
Nick spent the whole second half of the film like that, softly carding fingers through Charlie’s hair. And when the film was over, just before they moved themselves down into the bed to sleep, Charlie had turned his head and pressed a quick kiss against Nick’s shoulder, looking embarrassed afterward, like he simply hadn’t been able to help it. The quick peck through the fabric of his sleeve had filled Nick with glorious delight. His heart glowed with the warmth of being something to Charlie, someone special who was allowed access to him, his inner most life and rituals. Nick was someone who could win affection from him, and it made him giddy. It wasn’t too far to say that Charlie had become his favourite person.
Nick’s mood drops when he remembers waking up to Charlie on the far side of the bed. Charlie distant, if kind, in his farewells.
4.
The walk back to the halls was supposed to sober them up. Instead, it has turned into one of those night-morning walks that only reveals the true spinning heights of inebriation that have been achieved during the evening; familiar paths looping and receding around them. They fall into fits of no-reason giggles when they see the bus pull away just in time for them to miss it. Without even talking about it they start to stumble home on foot instead of waiting to see if there is a next one. They weave their way along, tripping over their feet even though they are hanging onto each other, hands interlocked, until they begin to get tired. As they slow, Charlie wraps both hands around Nick’s arm above the elbow, his face folding into his shoulder, which makes Nick’s chest burn with prideful sparks.
Charlie regains some energy in the form of fizzy giggles as they make it up the stairs and into the hallway, giggling that Nick’s sshhhs are louder than he is being, and protesting too loudly through the fingers pushed against his lips.
Nick is impressed that Charlie can be this tipsy and trip-likely and still go through the motions of getting ready for bed. Charlie is shoving them both back out the door towards the bathrooms to clean their teeth (Nick with toothpaste and just his finger on his teeth, complaining) and to pee and splash water on their sweaty faces, tipsy ablutions that earning them a shouted shut up you wankers from behind someone else’s door.
It goes a bit hazy and pulsing when they get back to Charlie’s room, together, and Charlie, undressed to his pants, starts pulling at Nick’s shirt, telling him earnestly he can’t go to sleep in buttons. Nick stops laughing for the first time in hours, his stomach doing something strange, and sharp, and nothing to do with being tipsy, as Charlie blinks up at him with slightly fogged eyes of very beautiful blue.
Charlie scowls and tugs, defeated by the shirt and groggily unsure why. Nick puts his hands over Charlie’s, noticing, suddenly, the flutter of his pulse in each of his wrists. Nick explains buttons need unbuttoning before the shirt can come off and promises he will do the unbuttoning, and Charlie lets him go, apparently satisfied, and swings his hips as he turns around to find a T-shirt – a clean one, from a drawer, that unfurls from a neatly folded square as he lifts it out – and he pulls this down over his head of dark hair and over his bare back as Nick watches. He turns around and giggles, again, and Nick’s stomach twists or maybe it’s his heart or maybe both or maybe, lower, as Charlie is up against him again, pushing his shirt off his shoulders so it floats to the floor. Like a superhero’s discarded cape. Or an angel’s discarded wings.
Then Nick is surprised into a huff of something like a laugh as Charlie winds a hand in Nick’s T-shirt and pulls him over to the bed, taking a step backwards. Nick is staring down at his face until the bedside lamp is switched off and busy hands are tugging and pushing him into place in the bed, arranging the covers over them both. Charlie’s giggles turn into singing, a snatch of lines from a song they’d been dancing to, earlier, in the middle of the party. Nick feels overwhelmed by a rush of happiness and relief.
“Oh my god,” he groans, “… isn’t the best thing about a night out when you’re finally back from it and in your own bed again?”
This makes Charlie giggle. “You’re in my bed, though,” he says, and Nick’s eyes have adjusted just enough to see him propped up on one arm where he can look down at Nick on his pillow.
“Even better,” Nick says, happily, drunkenly, and he stretches out both arms at once and pulls Charlie down to land with a smack on top of him.
“Ow,” Charlie says, in a tone of contentment, as he pushes his head up under Nick’s chin and settles himself on Nick’s chest. He draws patterns with one hand on Nick’s shoulder, and his arm, and his collarbone. The tracing movement of his fingers and thumb is the last thing Nick remembers as he goes to sleep.
Charlie isn’t in his arms the next morning because he’s in the bathroom down the halls, throwing up. When he staggers back he has water in a tall glass for Nick, but he deposits himself gingerly, his back raised up on pillows, one arm over his eyes. All Nick can think about is drinking the water, finding more water, dragging himself into a shower and standing there for he doesn’t know how long before he even remembers to use some of the body wash that smells like Charlie, and then his sluggish brain takes up the calculations of whether he can make it back to his own room to crash, and dear god hopefully sleep off this feeling.
He replaces the glass of water, even though looking at it makes Charlie shudder, and gives the black curls an infinitesimally gentle brush of fingertips along with his hoarse goodbye.
5.
Nick smiles without opening his eyes and nuzzles his cheek into soft fabric. He is cuddled on top of solid warmth, a heartbeat ticking under his ear. It’s impossible not to feel perfectly content, waking up like this.
They must have fallen asleep again. Well, they’d sort of planned, this time, for Charlie to stay over. He’d brought a toothbrush, which had made Nick’s stomach feel a bit odd when he noticed it, and he’d chided himself for the vestiges of homophobic discomfort he couldn’t seem to root out of himself. Honestly. Why shouldn’t his best friend, his gay best friend, sleep over in his room.
He feels regretful that he can’t stay here and watch Charlie as he sleeps, but nature is calling. Nick stumbles out of the bed, feeling never so loud as he is while he’s trying his best not to make any noise that might wake Charlie up. His friend doesn’t stir, though, except to curl a little bit tighter into the space where Nick was, as if into the body-warmth left in the bed. It makes something in Nick’s gut curl too.
On his way back from the bathroom he ducks into the communal kitchen for a glass of water. Otis is there, sitting up on the counter eating some kind of leftovers from one of their four bowls. He watches silently as Nick drinks and refills the glass, then lifts it full to take with him. His roommate waggles his eyebrows at Nick.
“So … what happened with Charlie last night?”
Nick smiles, rolls his eyes at his friend. “We just fell asleep together. We’ve done it before, it’s honestly nice.” Nick shrugs. “We were just watching a film and it was late.” He shrugs, again. That might be too many shrugs. He tries to tell his shoulders to be chill. “Charlie can stay over,” he tells Otis.
“Yeah, of course.”
Otis busies himself washing his now-empty bowl. Nick thinks he’s dropped it, until Otis, clinking the cleaned bowl into the drainer, turns back around and clears his throat. “I like Charlie,” he assures Nick. “But, um, mate …” Otis is looking at him strangely. “… aren’t you worried that Charlie will get the wrong idea?”
Before he can stop it, he’s shrugged again. “Charlie’s a very direct person. He’d just ask, if he thought I—” Nick’s words stutter to a halt.
“I dunno, Nick,” Otis says, doubtfully, “people get stupid around people they like.” He gives a shrug of his own. “And I think Charlie does like you.”
“You’re just saying that cos he’s my friend, and he’s gay,” Nick scoffs.
Otis fixes him with a look. “Not really, Nick.” He leans past him to lift the kettle from its stand and fill it up with water. Nick lifts an eyebrow at him.
“I know you really like him,” Otis says, as he clicks the kettle back in place. “So, like … be careful with him. What I mean is, he deserves for you to be careful with him. Okay, mate?”
They both stare at the kettle, light glowing on the side as it silently starts to boil, and Nick doesn’t know what to say.
+1
The next Friday, Charlie’s messages casually refer to Nick sleeping over that night, as if it’s already the plan. He sends Nick an apology in advance for needing to set an alarm so he’s awake enough for his after-lunch call with his family. Nick demands to know just how long they plan to stay up for? His heart starts to race as he stares at his own message, seeing how flirty it looks, imagining Otis’s frowning expression; the reminder to think about what he's doing.
Ted Lasso is as endearing as his mum and Charlie’s sister’s not-a-boyfriend and everybody else said it would be, but they don’t actually watch that many episodes before Charlie declares that he is too sleepy to continue. He pushes the laptop closed, one-handedly picks it up, then leans over to tuck the computer safely under the bed. The movement dislodges Charlie from Nick’s shoulder, from where they’re pressed close, arm to thigh, in the bed.
Nick scrambles to sit up again, crossing his legs and dragging the sheet up to the edge of his knees. He tucks a piece of the sheet into the fist of each hand so that the material stretches flat over his crossed legs. Nick watches Charlie, half-turned over and then turning back, with a smile glowing in his blue eyes, and his heart stops.
Charlie’s brows contract just slightly and his mouth tips up at the corner, as he flicks a glance at Nick’s pose and then back to his face. He tips his head onto his hand with his arm bent at the elbow, as he looks up in question. Nick feels heat rise against his neck.
“We probably … shouldn’t keep falling asleep together,” Nick blurts out.
“Why not?” Charlie blinks at him, sooty eyelashes touching his cheek, and Nick sucks in a breath.
“Oh …” he has to close his eyes. “It’s the kind of thing that, like … your boyfriend wouldn’t like.”
Charlie chuckles. “I don’t have a boyfriend.”
Nick opens his eyes. “Just … if you did.”
Charlie just looks at him. “Hmm, but I don’t.”
Nick is gazing at his face, eyes flickering from his eyes to his other features, nose, cheek, chin, jaw, eyebrows, mouth, bright blue eyes.
“Neither do you,” Charlie says.
“Have … have a boyfriend?”
“Or girlfriend.”
“No.” It comes out like a sigh. Nick stares down at Charlie, entranced, but with his panic and his worry that he’s misstepping not quite set at bay. He grabs a breath, and lets go of the sheet, to gesture between them. “So … we can do this until one of us has a boyfriend? … Or, girlfriend?”
“Sure,” Charlie says, and he lays down and rolls himself over so his sharp shoulder creates a line between him and Nick. “Unless your boyfriend turns out to be me, I guess. Then you might have to reconsider. Or it could get awkward.”
He’s saying this, the cheeky shit, as Nick is sliding an arm over the dip above his hipbones, his body already crumpling back towards him, moving on autopilot. At this, Nick fumbles, pushes his hand into the mattress at a weird angle. He lets out an ungentlemanly squawking sound.
“Be me … be you … Charlie,” he whines, trying to turn Charlie over to face him. Charlie resists, his face buried in his own pillow now. Nick can see the back of his neck is flushed pink. Nick untangles himself from Charlie and draws back, propping himself up on his side. Not quite as far away as before.
“Charlie,” he says again, in a whisper. “Is that an option?!”
Charlie mumbles something into the pillow. Nick shouldn’t be able to understand a word he’s saying, but he does.
Do you want it to be? he’d asked.
Did he want Charlie to be his boyfriend? Did he want not a girl at all but a boyfriend? Fuck. Of course he does.
Nick’s heart takes up a frantic hammering in his chest. He tries to think of a good line, something that is the exact right thing to say to get Charlie to unbury himself from the fucking pillow and actually look at him. But nothing comes out, and all he does is brush Charlie’s shoulder, with his hand, and say his name again, completely ambiguous and nothing Charlie can put any faith in at all.
Somehow, he turns around anyway, flipping himself on his back again, looking nervously up at Nick with blue eyes as he chews on a red lower lip. Nick feels himself go soft, and his cheeks go all smiling, and his breath get all shallow. Wow. Charlie is insanely gorgeous, laid out on his pillows, and he might be Nick’s boyfriend in a second once Nick can get some words out again.
But he really is completely useless, because he just does what Charlie did, and hides his face, although Nick hides it in Charlie’s T-shirt, dropping on top of him in a dramatic heap.
Charlie chuckles, again, that sound that always does things to the back of Nick’s neck. He lifts his head up as he feels Charlie’s hand slide into his hair, and he meets Charlie’s eyes. There’s so much there, amusement and fondness and softness and receding fear, and Nick doesn’t know how it happens, but all of a sudden his lips are on Charlie’s.
He still hasn’t said anything. He starts back from the kiss, and Charlie makes a noise of resentment that flashes along his spine.
Nick feels himself smiling to hurt his face. He runs his hand behind Charlie’s head, into his hair.
“I want it to be you,” he says, hearing it come out shy.
“Okay,” Charlie answers, with a cute air of determination, and then he’s yanking Nick back down towards him, and their lips meet, and then they’re really, finally kissing, hands finding each other’s warmed bodies, coasting over soft nighttime clothes and trailing through pillow-mussed hair. How were we ever not doing this?
“Don’t ask me,” Charlie laughs, and his thumb presses in against that spot high on the inside of Nick’s shoulder, the first place he ever left a kiss. He laughs again as Nick cranes his head to kiss Charlie’s thumb where he’s holding him.
“Can we go out after you chat with your family?” Nick asks a little breathlessly.
“You won’t be sick of me by then?” There’s a beautiful blush over Charlie’s cheeks.
“What do you think?”
Their lips meet again before either can make an answer.
+2
When Nick shuffles out of bed to start the kettle, late on Sunday morning, Charlie shuffles out with him, and stays leaning against his back, one arm tucked loosely around his waist, as Nick makes the tea for the two of them. Charlie blinks sleepily and bobs his head at Otis as he shuffles back, hands cupped around his mug of tea, to Nick’s room to nurse it there. Otis winks at Charlie, as he passes, and then looks back at his phone.
“That’s more like it,” he tells Nick.