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It took three days until Phil had to flee his parents’ house, the buzzing at the back of his head having reached its peak. Honestly he was surprised it had taken this long — he loved his family, he truly really did, but he’d known from the moment he’d passed the front door and his mum had hugged him tight that he’d come here to find something that just wasn’t there anymore. Might not have ever been, really, if he wanted to be deep about it, but he wasn’t the half of the equation that liked to torture himself with introspection usually.
Usually.
He was still self-aware enough to realize he couldn’t just burst into tears in the middle of his parents’ living-room saying I want Dan, where is Dan, as if he were still a child having lost his favourite blanket, when he fully knew where Dan had been when he’d left him. The problem was that, like being introspective, that wasn’t how the script went, usually. The very few times they’d toyed that precipice, before, it was Dan who’d gone away ; Dan who’d shut the front door a little too harshly, hands trembling and eyes still red-rimmed ; Dan who’d come back, after only a few hours or, the worst time, a day and a half later, with pleas on his lips and claws for arms, clinging to Phil as if there was any chance that Phil would push him away.
Phil stayed. That was Phil’s whole thing — he was an anchor amidst Dan’s storms, steady and patient, moving through the tides with an ease born out of both habit and, in Dan’s own words, “the beautiful quality of being a weirdo who doesn’t give a shit about my shit”. For a long time Dan had said it gratefully; he’d meant it as a Thank you for understanding that whatever I’m dealing with is not everything I am and is certainly no fault of yours. Since last year it’d started to sound more like: don’t you care, Phil? Don’t you?
Phil liked to think he didn’t take offense about much, when you considered the general madness of his life, but being accused of not caring about Dan, of all things, it was just —
So three days ago he’d left. And he still hadn’t come back. Did that make it officially the worst they’d ever been? Had he done that? Was it his fault, for rewriting the story, or was it Dan’s, for asking about the different houses again?
Was it Phil’s fault for still being on a beach miles and miles away from home after three whole days of misery, or was it Dan’s for still being quiet the way he’d never, ever been, in any of their previous fights?
Come back, Phil wanted to text, nonsensically. I can’t think when you’re away, just come back already.
But that wasn’t what the person who left could say, and he just wasn’t ready to say sorry. He didn’t even know if he wanted to say sorry about this. He wanted Dan, and yet he was so angry with Dan that if he saw him he had no idea what he might do and regret later.
He sobbed with his arms around his knees for a good hour, hating every second of it, until it grew too cold to ignore how much he was shivering. Maybe I’ll grow ill and then he’ll be forced to come see me on my death bed, he thought, first viciously, and then with a tinge of stupid nervosity. It just sounded too much like something that might happen to him, randomly discovering he’d caught some rare case of tuberculosis or something just after his first big fight with his boyfriend of ten years.
Don’t google it, said the Dan in his head. Don’t be daft, just come here before you spiral, doofus.
You’re not here, Phil answered — sometimes they joked about this, how even when they weren’t in the same room they could hear the other, and maybe there was something to this psychic bond of theirs, and now he wondered: You’re not here. Can you hear this? Can you hear me?
The wind picked up, loud and unforgiving, pushing him back to his parents’ house. Nothing else came through but, still, Phil stayed away from Google. He didn’t think he’d be able to handle another crisis on top of the big one he was living right now.
*
On day five, Martyn and Cornelia arrived seemingly unannounced as well. Phil could have told his parents that none of the Lesters were good enough actors to pull that off, but he couldn’t deny that, for a whole ten minutes, it felt really good to fall into Martyn’s arms.
A few years back Phil had had to come to the same horrid realization that every young adult goes through: his parents were still people, flaws and mortality and all, and that had broken something very small in him that he’d yet to get back. Martyn, though, had always been a person. Only he was a cool person. The coolest person Phil had known since infancy, someone who’d been aware of every strange thing Phil had ever done or said and, without ever fully understanding any of it, had accepted and protected it through and through.
“So it’s really bad, huh?” Martyn asked, sitting next to Phil as they pretended to watch TV, everybody else having found something else to busy themselves with.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Phil said.
“Mum said she rang him and he didn’t answer,” Martyn continued.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Phil repeated between his teeth. “Why did she do that?”
“‘Cause you won’t talk about it, you idiot. And you guys don’t fight.”
Phil snorted. “We fight all the time.” then: “I said I don’t want to talk about it. Stop it.”
“Was it about the quitting Youtube thing?” Martyn asked.
“Why do I have to talk about it?” Phil whined. “It’s not —”
It’s not me. It’s not fair. It’s not something I can put into words because I live my emotions, I don’t intellectualize them to the point of thinking that feeling without a reasoning behind it is pointless and frivolous —
“Phil,” Martyn said, very gently, pressing his shoulder against his.
“I’m pissed at him,” Phil said. “I’m bloody mad at him. There. I said it.”
His heart immediately jumped to his throat, the admission sitting heavy and wrong in his stomach. He hadn’t realized he hadn’t said it out loud before, but now it laid there, real and concrete, and he hated it, he hated it —
“That’s rough,” Martyn said. “The first time it happened to me and Cornelia, I didn’t know what to do. I went to a pub and got really drunk with my mates and sang all the angry songs I could remember.”
We’re not like you and Cornelia, Phil thought. Probably all couples thought they were unique like that though, so instead he muttered: “I don’t go to pubs.”
“Guess we’ll get drunk in our rooms instead,” Martyn shrugged. “And if that doesn’t work, we’ll find something else.”
That was Martyn for you: calm, practical, pragmatic, ready to help fix things. If Dan had been here, he’d said Phil doesn’t want to fix it. He’s already living in the beautiful world where it has been fixed three weeks ago and Phil would have laughed and said: it’s you all who always think something was broken in the first place.
He picked up his phone.
Answer my mum you prick, he wrote, and then he threw it away again.
*
It was four am by the time he caved in and called and it felt both like a victory and a defeat. Earlier that evening Cornelia had petted his hair, saying you two are always in each other’s pockets, maybe it is healthy to have a breather, here and then, and he knew she meant well and he knew that it was what other couples did, but it was just a hair too close to what Dan had said, or so it’d felt like to Phil’s mind after he didn’t know how many drinks, and so here he was, back in his bed, drunk and exhausted and miserable, calling.
There was no surprise when Dan picked up, despite the ridiculous hour. The wifi here was shit, and his image froze almost as soon as it appeared, but Phil’s eyes filled up with tears anyway at his sight. Dan was not in their bedroom but the other one, the light of his screen just bad enough to illuminate the dark bags under his eyes and the horrible state of his lips.
“You shit,” Phil said, his voice shaky and furious as if they were still in the middle of their argument. Which — they were, he supposed, technically, even with six days of silence in between.
“I can’t believe you’re drunk,” Dan said, with something close to wonder in his tone.
“You shit,” Phil repeated. “You don’t — you don’t get to be the sad one.”
Dan’s eyes fluttered; the image froze again with his eyelids half-closed, mouth twisted in a slight grimace, perfectly idiotic and unattractive and perfect, and Phil remembered suddenly being twenty-two and skyping, wishing he could just grab his new beautiful silly boyfriend through the screen and yank him back in his bedroom to kiss him breathless.
“We’re taking turns then are we?” Dan asked, very quietly, bringing him back to his sad, stupid reality.
“I’m so angry, and sad, and sad and I wasn’t supposed to be,” Phil told him. “We weren’t supposed to be. Not about this.”
Dan, who was already looking so small through the screen, hunched further back into Phil’s hoodie, wincing. “I know,” he said. Still he stared through his eyelashes, intense and hopeful and desolate. “Are you coming home?”
“No,” Phil answered before he even thought about it.
Dan opened his mouth. Closed it. They both stayed quiet because, Phil assumed, neither of them knew what to do with this — this wasn’t the script. This wasn’t who they were. Dan’s image froze three more times until, after a very long minute, Dan asked:
“Do you want me to chase after you?”
Phil’s heart stuttered. A few bold tears escaped the corner of his eyes. “Okay,” he said. “Yeah. Yes.”
Dan nodded. “Okay,” he repeated. “Now go to bed, you oaf, have you forgotten what alcohol does to you?”
*
“The things you put me through, children,” Phil’s mum tutted the next day.
Phil thought about saying it was all Martyn’s fault — it was — and that it’d been entrapment in the first place — it was — and also that it was patently unfair that Martyn and Cornelia, who were both older than him, were doing fairly okay with their hangover after two coffees and a hefty breakfast, while Phil was stuck to the couch, his head pounding, unable to get up without feeling intense bouts of nausea. Instead he made a pathetic little noise. Where’s Dan? He almost asked. Dan would laugh at him, but Dan would also hold him and massage the back of his neck and Dan was also an asshole who’d said I know you don’t care but I do —
He must have lost track of what was going on around him because It startled him when his mother suddenly gripped his ankle, standing right in front of the couch, phone to her ear.
“Oh, Dan, love, of course,” she said and then: “Never, you foolish boy,” and then, shaking her head at Phil, as if it was Phil’s fault again— “Children,” she sighed. “I’ll send Nigel, alright love? And yes, of course, I’ve already given Phil the medicine; I have raised him I’ll have you know —”
Phil said: “I’m a grown-up man.”
Phil’s mum said: “Drink your water. Your boyfriend will be here in five hours, thank god.”
*
By the time the car pulled into the driveway, Phil wasn’t feeling much better. If it’d been a better story, he’d have been ready to welcome Dan like the scorn lover he felt he was, draped in his sadness and dignity, but it did feel somewhat more fitting to who they were that as soon as Dan stepped inside their eyes locked in and Dan hurried to take his shoes off but forgot about his jacket or his backpack, rushing to Phil.
“Shut up,” Phil said and held out his hand towards him.
“I can’t believe you were drunk,” Dan repeated.
He took Phil’s hand, falling on his knees in front of the couch like Phil was some sort of victorian maiden on the brick of death after all, and buried his nose into Phil’s chest. Phil’s dad cleared his throat, glancing at Phil.
“We’ll give you lads some time, then,” he said, gentle and awkward, and disappeared into the kitchen.
Phil’s free hand rose without his consent to Dan’s hair. “You’re here,” he said.
“It’s the only place I want to be,” Dan breathed, nuzzling his shirt, blatantly oblivious about the fact they were in the middle of Phil’s parents’ living-room and they did not, as a rule, do those sort of mindless affectionate touches anywhere they might be caught, not even by loved ones.
Phil tried to remember his heartache; he thought about making Dan truly work for it, except Dan was here and he’d been wanting Dan for the whole week they’d been apart now. They were going to have to talk about it, which he already hated, but he was still struggling to keep his eyes open without his head killing him, so he tugged Dan’s hair and whined:
“I feel like shit.”
Dan snorted. “Of course you do, what did you even expect?”
“Martyn said when he got angry at Cornelia he had drinks with his mates.”
“So?” Dan said, slowly raising his head to stare at Phil, bewildered and fond. “We’re not Cornelia and your brother, Phil. If you wanted to do normal couple fight shit, you could have just gotten ice cream.”
Well, when Dan put it like that.
“Get me some ice cream, then,” he said. “And come back to cuddle me properly after, asshole.”
There were little tears at the corner of Dan’s eyes when he muttered: “God I love you, you needy fuck.”
*
Phil had always avoided fighting with Dan if he could. It wasn’t just a Dan thing, that part — he didn’t like fighting in general, confrontation made him sick to his stomach, doubly so when he had to confront someone he loved, and it just so happened that Dan was the person he loved most in the world. What was different with Dan was that Dan knew exactly how Phil was and how Phil thought, understood him to a level that nobody else had ever achieved, and since it went both ways, it was just rare for them to have real fights, because they caught the signs beforehand and they quietly adjusted their behaviours without spending ages arguing about it.
They still got irritated at each other, some days, because they lived together and they worked together and that came with its inconveniences, but even when they snapped at each other they rarely were truly mad at one another. So Phil had a hard time realizing that, even though Dan was here, even though they’d gone to sleep together after spending a slightly stilted but overall nice dinner with Phil’s family, he still felt a tinge of anger and sadness when they woke up the next morning.
“How do you feel?” Dan murmured against his skin.
He’d clearly been awake for a while, and yet he was still clinging to Phil like Phil might have tried to disappear in his sleep. Phil nudged him until Dan was properly spooning him and stared at the wall in front of him.
“You love me,” he told him accusingly.
Dan tensed up. “Of course I do.”
“It’s not a bad thing,” Phil continued. “Why are you so determined suddenly to act like it’s a bad thing? It was never — This was never supposed to be a bad thing.”
Somehow, despite all odds, despite everything that could have made it terrible instead of the beautiful thing that it’s been since we found each other, he didn’t add. He didn’t have to, because Dan had said that to him before. When they’d taken steps to hide the relationship properly. When the stalking had gone insane. When the BBC had gotten too much, when Dan’s depression had reached frightening levels of dangerous, when Phil’s migraines had worsened, when Dan had said he couldn’t do Youtube anymore — Dan had kept saying sometimes things are shit, yeah, but I have you.You have me. We have each other. Everything could disappear tomorrow and it would be fine as long as we’re together, you know that, right?
“Of course it’s not a bad thing,” Dan said now. “I didn’t mean — I never meant —” he sighed against Phil’s neck, frustrated, probably at himself. “It’s not that It’s a bad thing,” he started again, slower. “It’s that maybe it’s — it’s the opposite of that. I’m a fucking mess, Phil, and it’s always there but I never deal with it because everytime it gets too real I get to hide with you. And maybe I just — I just wanted — I just want to feel like I’m progressing. I want to stop feeling worse every single year. I want to deal with it and that means —”
“Making me miserable?” Phil asked.
“No.” Dan exhaled again, louder, nails digging into Phil’s skin. “But fuck, wouldn’t you just — wouldn’t you like it if your boyfriend wasn’t a depressed shit that can’t say the word gay out loud without having seven emotional crises at once?”
“...Not if you were gone,” Phil said, very quietly.
They both froze. The truth of it hung heavily in the air.
“I want you happy,” Phil added at last, tongue clumsy and too honest, “I always wanted you happy, but I want you happy with me. I’ve always been happy with you. I can’t — I can’t understand why being happy for you would mean being away from me, because being away from you is always the worst for me.”
“Phil,” Dan said and nothing else at all, his voice very fragile.
“Sorry,” Phil said, at last. “For being selfish.”
Dan’s nose pressed into his neck. “Don’t say sorry,” he murmured. “Please never say sorry for loving me.”
*
A couple of years ago, during their first tour, someone had told Phil, good-humoured and laughing: honestly, I’m impressed by you guys. If I spent all my time with the same person with no break, I’d go mad and kill them. Phil had grinned, glancing at Dan, who was only a few feet away and said: oh we’ve both planned how we’d kill each other and get away with it a thousand times and Dan, of course, had immediately added: I’m just waiting ‘til I need the insurance money.
Later that night, though, in the bed they were pretending not to share for the rest of the world, Dan had asked: are we weirdly codependent? Is it weird? Is it weird I don’t mind that we’re weird? And Phil, who was used to Dan latching on to random people’s opinions and spiralling about it, had merely replied: we were always weird, Daniel. That’s at least 60% why people love us. And when Dan, inevitably, had asked: Yeah? What’s the other 40%? Our ideas? Phil had said: No, my ass, which had made Dan laugh and distracted him successfully.
It came up again, here and then, the codependency — it had come up before. Very early on, Phil’s parents had worried a bit; further on, it’d been well-meaning friends, and also a couple of far less nice people, all of them asking: is it healthy, truly? Do you guys think you’ll die if you step away from each other for just a second?
The truth was Phil had never cared because he’d spent twenty-two years before Dan looking for that specific feeling of belonging. The moment he’d met Dan had felt like taking the first easy breath in his life, like he just hadn’t realized how difficult navigating people and situations had been beforehand. You’re like my glasses, he’d told Dan once, and Dan had laughed and said “is that a line? It’s a bad line, Phil” but he’d known what Phil meant, of course, because a few minutes later, in the middle of kissing, he’d muttered, so sweetly and with such painful sincerity the way only Dan could do: You’re my everything.
The codependency was fine, because they were both fine with it.
Phil had thought they were both fine with it.
After lunch they got out of the house, Dan wearing one of Phil’s old jackets because he was an idiot who’d jumped into a plane without thinking of the weather the moment Phil had agreed for him to come. They walked close together along the path that led to the beach where Phil had sobbed his heart out a few days ago, elbows brushing against one another.
“You proved your point, you know,” Dan said after several minutes, picking up the thread of the argument seamlessly as if they hadn’t spent the morning playing games with Phil’s parents after sending Martyn and Cornelia back home.
“Yeah?”
“It fucking sucked, without you. Couldn’t get out of bed at first.”
“You didn’t say,” Phil pointed out, still on edge despite himself. “You didn’t text.”
“I thought—” Dan faltered. “You never left before.”
“I wanted you.”
“You were so mad.”
“Yeah,” Phil stressed out. “And I still wanted you. I still want you. All the time. That’s why I was so mad.”
“I’m not leaving,” Dan ended up declaring in a rush. “It’s stupid, and I was stupid, and I want to work on stuff, I do, but the house — I want the house.”
Phil stopped walking, taking a deep shuddering breath. Dan leaned closer — not a hug, per say, not quite a kiss, but close enough for their heads to touch. It was easier, on the isle, on those little paths where nobody paid immediate attention to Kath and Nigel’s kid and his boyfriend.
“I want you,” Dan said. “I always, always want you too.”
When Phil started to cry, Dan was ready. He wrapped his arms around him and they swung together in the wind for several long minutes, hearts pressed against one another, answering each other with every beat: I’m here I’m here I’m here.
“Let’s never argue ever again,” Phil said, at last, once every last bit of his resentment and sadness were gone and all he was left with was the familiar itch of wanting to bite into Dan’s skin, mark him up everywhere he could just because. “Not about the house, not about us. Don’t make me sad about us, Dan. I hated it.”
“We are going to argue about the house,” Dan, the contrarian little shit, immediately pointed out. “Because the house is going to have cupboards and you’re never going to close them.”
“I’m leaving you,” Phil told him.
“I’m not going to let you,” Dan said. “Ever again.”