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What are the odds?
Oliver used to play the game with his family. More specifically, his sisters if he had them. Because he doesn’t, it was an aunt or uncle that tried desperately to get his mind off the gruesome life he lived.
Now, he asks Felix.
It starts with a question posed early in their friendship.
“What are the odds you’ll help me clean up your mess?” The extreme tidiness is a bit of a front, but Felix living like a pig makes Oliver only that much less guilty over any upcoming slaughter. His room is always a mess and Oliver is always picking it up.
“What?” Felix scoffs.
“The odds. One in eight? One in seventy-three? You tell me the odds and then we’ll both say a number. If it’s the same, you have to do it.”
“Oh.” He blinks once. A cautious reset of the eyes. Oliver opens his mouth to tell him there isn’t a trick, but Felix beats him to speech. “One in twenty-one.”
Oliver counts them down from three.
“Eleven.”
Felix speaks over him, “Twenty.”
“Next time, then.” Oliver shrugs and throws another of Felix’s soiled shirts into a pile in the corner.
Felix laughs brightly. He likes the game and from then on, it is their game and that winner’s laugh of Felix’s becomes Oliver’s laugh. It doesn’t take Oliver too long to understand that ‘his’ laugh is Felix laughing at him, not the game, but he plays anyway.
He plays and plots and develops a language of probability.
The odds that Felix will hit on the new café worker are one in fourteen. They both say nine and Felix has a date with Amanda within the hour.
The odds that Oliver will steal a bicycle and ride it around the street during a drunk night out are one in fifty-two. Oliver says eight, Felix says thirty-one before jumping on the bicycle himself.
The odds that Felix and Oliver will go to a fancy dress dressed as a priest and a nun are one in ten. They both say seven, though when Felix asks what the odds are that Oliver will be the nun the answer is one in ninety-two. They both say forty-four. Oliver gets a ravaging head cold the week of the party and cancels at the last minute. Felix throws a few pills onto his bedside table and asks him what the odds are that he’s faking the illness. Truly ill, Oliver replies with one in a million. Felix does not take his chances.
Oliver asks himself the odds sometimes, late at night when he can think of nothing but Felix and how it must feel to be so snugly entrapped in Oliver’s web of lies. What are the odds this works out for either of them?
The game, so certainly uncertain, is sure to be used against them one day. Oliver should have expected it to be Farleigh wielding the ratio.
They’re out at a pub when it finally happens. They’re standing shoulder to shoulder to shoulder to tip of Oliver’s head next to Felix.
Farleigh is across the table acting foolishly. It’s the martinis he’s been ordering over the pints everyone else gets, Oliver is certain.
They catch each other staring, each one taking turns being predator and prey. Oliver feels himself being circled.
Farleigh points the cocktail pick that once held his olives between Felix’s eyes, then sticks it in his mouth. His smug smile is syrupy and no less dangerous while drunk.
“So,” Farleigh dangles the plastic spear between his teeth, “what are the odds you and your weird little stalker friend kiss?”
“Right now?” Felix laughs. It’s a joke, always a joke. Farleigh fancies himself a comedian and the best of his jokes is looking down the slope of his nose and wriggling his lips in a laugh at Oliver.
“Right now.” He nods. His eyes are alight as Oliver feels his own narrow and widen, focusing, always fucking focusing on looking normal.
“I’m not doing that.” Oliver sniffs. It’s bad enough that their little game has widened to include Farleigh, now he’s having it used against him. Odds that Oliver shows Farleigh just how unfunny he’s being: whatever Felix chooses. He always knows just what to say.
“One in thirty-seven.”
A large hand, perfectly large and made for handling a woman rough and a man so gently, clasps around Oliver’s shoulder. Felix is laughing. Thirty-six outcomes in which they don’t kiss; thirty six in which Farleigh once again lives without consequence. One outcome in which Farleigh doesn’t make it to his next class, his next final, possibly even his next sneering bout of laughter, and Felix is chuckling along with the titters of their classmates.
One outcome, Oliver shudders in his seat, in which Felix presses his mouth to Oliver’s in a joke, a dare, a minute plot point from Felix’s university years like his eyebrow stud or any of the dozens of girls he’s had.
Oliver bites the inside of his cheek until he tastes blood. Eleven, he thinks.
“Twenty-four.”
“Twenty-four.”
Felix and Farleigh speak in unison. Together, too, they fall back into their seats and laugh and laugh and laugh. At him. At Oliver. At the game that was his and then theirs and now is shared with people like Farleigh and the flat-chested girl they picked up at a different pub the week before that’s pressed just as close to Felix as Oliver is.
“Mate, I think you know what we’ve got to do.”
“Don’t I have a choice?” Oliver doesn’t need Felix to save him, but as always, he’d like to see just how bright that fool’s gold halo can shine.
“You want to.” Farleigh says under his breath. It doesn’t matter.
Felix looks into Oliver’s eyes and none of it matters. The pub and the entire world outside of it could burn down, but if Oliver was looking at Felix and Felix was looking back at him, he wouldn’t care until hazy smoke broke their gaze.
“You always have a choice.” Felix smiles, all pearly white teeth that are too blunt to ever hurt him.
Oliver swallows. He breathes. He opens his mouth to—
Felix’s lips are on his for less than a breath. His lips are boy chapped. His breath is hot, not warm. His nose is a sharp point on Oliver’s cheek. His eyes close for a half second, barely longer than a blink, but they shutter in quick succession as Felix pulls away. It’s like a camera flash. Oliver notices. His lips, his breath, his nose, and the picture they’ve just made.
“Sorry.” Felix squeezes his shoulder before leaning back in his chair. “I thought you might pull away if I gave you the chance.”
Felix doesn’t know. He doesn’t understand. He doesn’t even notice. Oliver couldn’t have pulled away if he wanted to. There’s a magnet embedded deep within him, and every drop of Oliver’s blood is attracted to it. He’ll rip it out with his teeth one day, tear away at his tongue or throat. He’ll go through the ribcage or stab him in the back to get to it if he must.
“Yeah.” He replies lamely, after a beat. “You were probably right.”
Farleigh looks down at him again, not just the difference in their stature, but down the immeasurable difference in class and social status, too. He looks at Oliver like he sees the way his blood sings for Felix. Sometimes, he looks like he would like to know what that type of yearning tastes like. Tonight, he looks mostly bored of the game.
Good. It was never his to play.
Felix throws a wad of bills down on the table, playing the kind benefactor to his mates for the evening, and lobs his arm around Oliver’s back to lead him back to his room. Oliver walks Felix home drunk every night he doesn’t have a woman do it for him. He doesn’t do it very often.
“You’re not going home with Gemma?” Small-tits’s real name sours even his most benign ponderings.
Felix shakes his head. He purses his lips -dry, childishly so, boyishly so- and scrunches his nose -pointed, the type that drags along a cheek during a kiss-, before sighing.
“I’m a bit bored of her, to be honest. You know how I am.”
“All too well.” Oliver whispers into the trees that whistle night harmonies with the wind.
Off and on, Oliver supports Felix’s drunk body weight for the rest of the short walk. Felix’s last pint hit his blood stream with the early spring air on his face. By the time they’re up in his room, Oliver is sure Felix will wake up the next morning complaining about a black spot where his memories of tonight should be.
Felix strips. Oliver doesn’t look. He knows what there is to see. Large grasping hands push down dirty jeans and dirtier boxer shorts and tug a downright filthy t-shirt over a crown of messy brown hair. Lips, dry and pink and stained with the taste of beer part in a yawn while his arms stretch open wide. His wingspan is practically enough to hold the whole world, or just Oliver.
Felix climbs into bed. Oliver follows him to the edge to make sure he’s safe.
“What are the odds you remember what happened tonight?” Oliver asks as he pushes Felix onto his side. Can’t have the man dying from the booze this early in his plan, can he?
Felix laughs. At him. At him. At Oliver.
“One in a million.”
“Eight hundred twelve.” Oliver mutters.
“Eight hundred thirteen.” Felix slurs.
It’s close, but he’ll never get it. Never. Never. Never going to be given what he wants.
What are the odds he’ll take it instead?