Chapter Text
The thing was, they’d always been all over each other. It wasn’t something Miles had ever questioned because it was just an inherent part of the way they related; warm, easy arms slung over shoulders, sleepy foreheads pressed into shoulders, feet resting lazily across thighs. Tactility wasn’t particularly characteristic for either of them individually, but, as with so many other things, it just seemed to naturally come into being when they were together. And it made sense: Miles had never felt completely sure where he ended and Alex began, whether it was lyrics, laughter, or body heat.
If someone had described their friendship to him before he met Alex, Miles was pretty sure he’d have hated the sound of it. He’d always been a people person, sure – but he’d also always prided himself on being totally independent, his own person. Only Alex had never felt like someone other. Right from the beginning, Alex had felt less like a stranger and more like he was somehow part of that own person Miles had kept so carefully hidden away from everyone else. At its core, his friendship with Alex had always been different – so he’d never questioned that the way they related with each other was different to the way they related with everyone else. It had to be.
Other people questioned it, of course. The press, fans, and most of their collective friend group at one time or another. But that was just background noise; Miles had always been too wrapped up in Alex to do anything other than let the comparative insignificance of other people’s questions wash over him.
And then Oslo happened.
It was a handful of shows into their Eycte tour, and it about twenty minutes before they were due onstage. Miles was out back leaning against the wall in the lot, green light from the fire exit sign casting a sickly tone over the black concrete that stretched out beneath his pointed boots. The silence of the cool night air should have been soothing, but under his skin he felt restless, irritated by the serenity of the evening. He sometimes got wound up like this before shows, but tonight it felt like there was something under the pre-show jitters making his bones itch – something that had been quietly building underneath the surface since they’d hit the road, if he was being totally honest with himself, and that he didn’t really feel like looking at too closely. Taking an impatient drag of his cigarette, Miles flicked ash at the ground and let out a frustrated sigh.
The sound of the backstage door opening to his left made him glance around sharply, something tightening hopefully in his chest – but it was just one of their sound techs, who threw Miles a brief smile as he passed and disappeared into the lot. Behind him, the door slammed shut, punctuating Miles’s solitude. Some nights, Alex would come and stand silently beside him, smoking cigarette after cigarette and starting up at the starless sky with restless, pensive inscrutability. More often, he’d stay holed up in their dressing room, practising the songs he already knew off by heart, as though he was afraid that they might shift into something unfamiliar if he didn’t keep his fingers on the chords. Together or not, they didn’t tend to talk much before shows – they’d always dealt with their pre-show nerves differently – but Miles still found himself quietly craving Alex’s presence.
Crushing the last of his cigarette under the heel of his boot, Miles drew in a deep lungful of the inky night air and made his way back inside, the thread of Bad Habits unspooling in the background of his thoughts. He hummed along to it absent-mindedly as he went down the green-carpeted corridor towards their dressing room, drumming his fingers against the fabric of his jeans and vaguely wondering if Alex would be there – or if he’d wandered off somewhere by himself like Miles for a few moments of stillness before the storm. Miles found himself thinking about how he was going to reach out and ruffle Alex’s freshly styled hair when he saw him to pull him out of his pre-show overthinking, soft brown against his fingers and Alex’s half-indignant, half-amused look levelled at him. The bulbed metal of the door handle was cool under his palm as he grasped it and stepped inside.
Miles froze on the threshold, all thoughts reduced to white noise.
Alex was very definitely there; he was backed up against one of the full-length mirrors, head thrown back and eyes fluttered shut as the girl from the merch table sucked him off with enthusiasm. His faded black jeans were still on, but the silver buckle of his belt swung loose, resting against his thigh as eyebrows drew upwards together in evident pleasure. His shirt had ridden up slightly, exposing an angular sliver of pale hipbone. He had one hand resting lazily in the merch girl’s long, wavy brown hair, the other hanging loosely at his side like he was waiting for someone to take it.
At the sound of the door opening, his eyes flickered open and immediately caught on Miles’s. They were all dark pupil the way Miles was used to seeing them in sweaty clubs when Alex leant in to say something indistinct over the thumping music, both of them a various combination of high and drunk. A momentary flicker of something like surprise registered in them, before they were subsumed by desire again, a little darker than before. Distantly, Miles felt aware that he shouldn’t be on this side of the door – but he felt strangely separate to his body, and wasn’t sure how to make himself move. He watched helplessly as Alex’s eyes darkened imperceptibly further and his free hand clenched itself into a fist, mouth falling slightly open as the merch girl leant forward, taking him deeper into her mouth. A strand of chestnut hair fell across his forehead, and Miles remembered how before he’d walked in, he’d been thinking of ruffling it out of the style it was already falling out of. He found himself feeling vaguely cheated that it hadn’t been him to do it.
Alex’s eyes didn’t flicker shut again; they held Miles’s gaze as though daring him to be the first to look away, the same way he did every night onstage when he’d get so close that he was all Miles could see, dark irreverent eyes and faintly curling smirk. There was a hint of the smirk now, Miles thought – and it pulled him in as much as it did under the heat of the stage lights.
The merch girl made a low, appreciative noise in her throat that made Miles’s cheeks flush hot, even as he found himself still unable to break Alex’s gaze. They’d talked about her the other night, he suddenly remembered, in some dimly lit French bar. Miles had carelessly mentioned something about thinking he might try and take her out after one of their shows, while Alex had stared down at the dark wood tabletop and swallowed his whiskey in seemingly indifferent silence. Now he had her down on her knees and wasn’t even looking at her, just holding her loosely in place with a kind of offhand appreciation as he stared across the room at Miles like it was just the two of them, like it always was.
Something hot and uncontrolled rose in Miles’s throat, and his pointless, overwhelming thought was that Alex could probably find the words to describe it better than he could. That’s how they worked when they were writing; Miles with bursts of untameable emotion, Alex with quiet focus and patience, somehow taming the things that were mysteries to Miles through the scrawl of his pen. But whatever it was, it was tinged with enough arousal to jolt Miles sharply back into reality, stumbling backwards from the dressing room in a daze, his heart pounding so hard he could no longer hear the distant roar of the crowd that was waiting for them.
Okay, so it wasn’t exactly the first time he’d caught Alex in a compromising position – there’d been a couple of nights in the early days of their friendship where Alex had brought girls back to their bus and had been too drunk to subtle about it, and another time when Miles was playing a show with the Monkeys where he’d found Alex with his hand down a girl’s jeans backstage. But tonight – Alex staring unflinchingly at him with dark gaze and curled fists – felt like something else entirely. Or, if Miles was being completely honest with himself, maybe not something else entirely. Maybe something that felt more like looking directly into the sun for the first time after years of only seeing its hazy, nebulous glow behind grey cloud. Miles tried closing his eyes against the searing brightness of it, but in the private darkness behind his eyelids, Alex’s face still stared back at him, slack-jawed and quietly blazing brown eyes that were familiar and not all at once.
Even the blinding lights onstage fifteen minutes later weren’t enough to dull the image. Under the deep cherry glow of Miracle Aligner with Alex at his side, Miles should have felt at home – but instead he felt as though his world had shifted on its axis, sending him spinning off balance into the unknown where suddenly all he could think about were all the questions everyone had always asked.
Alex was behaving exactly the same as always, which somehow made Miles feel worse. He watched helplessly as Alex riled up the crowd and ran his hands performatively through his hair, singing as though the very act of it was transporting him to a separate, higher plane of existence. He nudged his bare shoulder playfully into Miles whenever he passed, and draped himself over Miles during the choruses like they were one person rather than two in the midst of the music they’d created together. Most nights, Miles felt like they were. But tonight, even with Alex pressed up behind him, all hot slick skin and warm breath as he leant over Miles to croon into the mic, Miles had never felt further away from him. Alex’s hand was pressed against the flat of Miles’s chest in a showy, possessive gesture, and Miles stared down at it, unable to banish the image of it curled lazily in the merch girl’s long hair less than half an hour ago. He swallowed at the unbidden curl of arousal that unfurled through him at the reminder, at the connecting of that Alex and the one holding him now.
Behind him, Alex nudged his nose against Miles’s cheekbone, open mouth hotly brushing Miles’s skin. Miles’s heartbeat was a roar in his ears, and his fingers fumbled on the strings of his guitar. He felt as though he was still standing in a doorway watching something secret, seeing the intimacy of it for the first time. It had always just been something they did: amping up their usual closeness for the crowd. Miles couldn’t remember when it had started, or who had initiated it – it was just an innate part of the way they performed together. He’d never thought consciously about it, the same way he never thought consciously about the mechanisms of breathing, or blinking. But now, under the luminous blue glow, it was suddenly all he could think of – and, as with breathing or blinking, the moment he thought about it, it fell out of sync and ceased to feel natural at all.
He missed the timing of his solo in Used To Be My Girl, and angrily wrenched his straying thoughts back towards the music. He didn’t know what was wrong with him. Okay, so he’d seen Alex in a private moment – so what? It wasn’t the first time it’d happened, and it probably wouldn’t be the last either. It had nothing to do with him, or their friendship. The fact that Alex was behaving totally as normal should have erased any doubt in his head that was the case. But Miles couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something else layered deeper – something that he didn’t understand and couldn’t get out of his head, but which he suspected now he’d had glimpses of before. Quiet, fleeting glimpses over the years that some subconscious part of him had turned away from, because the implications were too big to comprehend.
Thousands of people were singing along to the words he and Alex had written, waving lighters and open palms – but, for once, Miles barely noticed them. He couldn’t stop thinking about how, only a few moments ago, Alex had held him with far more intimacy than he’d touched the girl going down on him; how Alex acted as though that was something totally normal. Which it was, for them – but Miles was suddenly filled with the urge to ask those same questions everyone else had always asked. Why was it normal for them? Why, when they were like this with no one else, were they like this with each other? Why hadn’t Miles turned away and closed the door behind him the moment he walked in?
Any of the possible answers to these questions felt too daunting, so Miles pushed them down and his did his best to focus on the music. It wasn’t the best he’d played by a long stretch – but the thrill of the screaming crowd and the rush of playing dulled the sharp corners of his questions enough that by Standing Next to Me, it felt almost like a normal show. Despite himself, Miles grinned at Alex capering about the stage with his tambourine, starting to be able to half-convince himself he’d had nothing more than a momentary, weird blip of overthinking. Even when Alex came up and pressed his sweaty forehead against the stubble of Miles’s cheek to sing the last verse, it was okay. It was just him and Alex against the world, the way it had always been and always should be, and honestly, who gave a fuck about what other people thought or did with their friendships.
And then Miles turned his head.
He didn’t know why, he just did – the same way that as a kid, he’d glance directly up at the sun just to see whether it really would burn his gaze. Close up, Alex was all dark eyes and nose, the stage-lights catching the sharp lines of his face softly. His mouth was so close Miles could taste the heady undertone of alcohol and mint in his breath, feel the warmth of it brush his lips. The startling intimacy of it send Miles’s head spinning, as though they hadn’t been doing this night after night for the last several months, and he clung helplessly to his guitar in a vain attempt to ground himself.
Alex was still singing, low and sinfully gravelly – but his eyes had found Miles in the endlessly fluctuating hues of gold and red around them. His expression should have been familiar, full of the irreverent, sardonic humour Miles knew so well; sometimes Alex got so amused by their antics onstage that he’d hide hot little puffs of laughter into Miles’s neck when the lights went down between songs. But it wasn’t familiar, or humorous – or even the challenging, heated gaze that he’d levelled at Miles across the dressing room earlier that evening. It was quiet and intent, sincere in a way that made Miles’s heart fumble a beat. There was a question in it that Miles couldn’t interpret or answer, but still felt the weight of. He felt himself getting pulled into the depth of its orbit, fingers fumbling his notes and mouth falling open even though he wasn’t singing. He watched as a glimmer of the heat Miles had seen in the dressing room came into Alex’s expression, and the answering heat that burned through Miles was as instantaneous and irrevocable as struck match.
The shock of it felt like a punch that left him reeling. Miles knew, distantly, that he was meant to be playing chords – but for the first time he could remember; they felt irrelevant. Every beat of his heart hurt with its own intensity, and his cheeks flared with heat. The ache in his chest was terrifying, tugging so powerfully that he didn’t understand how he couldn’t have noticed it before.
Something in Alex’s gaze flickered, as though whatever he wasn’t prepared for whatever he was seeing in Miles’s face. Miles swallowed, trying to regain control over his expression, but he suspected that Alex had seen more than he’d understood in himself, because something in Alex’s face shuttered – and then he was grinning wide and tongue-in-cheek, spinning off across the stage like nothing had happened. Maybe it hadn’t; Miles couldn’t think of any words to describe what had just passed between them, or for what he was feeling. Only the frantic thud of his heart and the itch in his bones that had been there for longer than he could remember told him that it was something.
-
As soon as the lights went down at the end of the show, Miles thrust his guitar at one of the sound guys and ducked into the disorientating darkness of the wings. If Alex felt like anything was off, he certainly wasn’t showing it: he pulled Miles into a affectionate, sweaty hug and murmured “great show” into his ear, before disappearing down the corridor with a couple of the violinists.
Miles watched his retreating frame for a moment, before scrubbing a hand over his face and following. He didn’t go into the dressing room; he skirted down to the end of the corridor and escaped out of the fire exit into the unchanged quiet blackness of the lot. The silence of it rang in his ears more loudly than the crowd. Miles found that his hands were trembling as he fumbled for his cigarettes, having to flick his lighter several times to try and light the one between his lips. Drawing a deep breath in, he stared out at the parked vehicles, the dull orange gloss of the streetlights sliding over them, softening their corners into shadow. His heart was still thumping painfully, hard and fast and hot against his ribs like he’d been running without knowing it and suddenly come stumbling to a halt.
Okay, so walking in on your best mate getting a blowjob was always going to be a bit weird, but Alex hadn’t freaked out about it, and he’d been the one with his dick out – so why was Miles’s head suddenly spinning with all these questions he didn’t want to answer? Why did he somehow feel as though he’d been the one who’d got caught out? He realised now that had been the overwhelming feeling onstage as Alex gazed inscrutably into his eyes, less than a breath away. It had felt as though Alex had caught him out with something in his gaze that he couldn’t name or understand, and therefore didn’t know how to hide. Not that Miles had ever been that good at hiding stuff. He wore his heart on his sleeve, but, unlike Alex, he also didn’t always look too closely at his sleeve.
He was being a fucking idiot, Miles decided, lighting another cigarette and pulling his leather jacket more closely around himself. It was just Alex. Alex, who knew him inside out and still hung on his every word and trusted him with his thoughts the way he only trusted his notebook and pen. If he was okay, then there was nothing wrong. Their friendship had always been intense, and so what if tonight had been just a little more intense than usual? There was nothing worth standing out in the cold over. Miles tossed the last of his cigarette to the ground decisively, shutting his thoughts carefully away into the back of his mind as he went inside in search of alcohol. Because yeah, he was being a fucking idiot, but maybe he still needed a beer before looking Alex in the eye again.
-
In the dressing room, Alex was slouched on one of the low settees, sweaty hair slicked back from his face, index finger and thumb tapping a restless rhythm on his thigh; the last of the post show adrenaline clearly not fully faded. He glanced up at Miles’s entrance, a lazy smile on his lips as he nodded in the direction of Miles’s beer. “Got another of them for me?” Miles shook his head, taking a sip and returning Alex’s smile with more ease than he’d expected amidst the turmoil of his thoughts, “Nope, sorry. It were the last one. I pinched it from the support band, anyway.”
“I can always rely on your thoughtfulness and generosity, can’t I?”
“Always,” Miles grinned, taking a deliberately long swallow of the beer. His smugness was only somewhat marred by Alex aiming an uncoordinated kick to his ankle. He looked down in mock indignation. “This is workplace violence. And there I was, goin’ to share it with you purely out of the goodness of me heart. That’ll teach me to try being bloody nice to you, won’t it?”
Alex stretched his leg out and hooked his foot around Miles’s ankle, making him topple onto the couch beside him. “If I said I was very very sorry, would that help?” Alex asked in a low voice, dark eyes glittering with amusement as he leant forward into Miles’s space, all warm skin and post-show pliability. Miles could taste the heady musk of his sweat, and he was suddenly back onstage, heart and mind racing each other towards potentially devastating conclusions.
Pushing down the mess of unexamined feelings and shifting back slightly, Miles rolled his eyes and passed Alex the bottle. “Go on then. But don’t finish it for me.”
Alex put the bottle to his lips and tilted his head back to take a long swallow, throat working. Then he handed it back to Miles, fingers a fleeting brush of heat in contrast to the cool glass. “Ta. Very generous as always, Mr Miles Kane. Whatever would I do without you?”
“Pinch your own drinks?”
“Haven’t you heard? I’m far too egotistical for that. I need someone to do my dirty work for me.”
Miles laughed, and passed Alex the bottle again. Alex was probably the least egotistical person he knew, but he could do a great impression of it whenever he fancied messing with the press. Miles knew he preferred them to attribute a constantly fluctuating range of unflattering caricatures to him than have any grip on his reality. He was almost eerily skilled at slipping in and out of different personas and emotions; abruptly, Miles was reminded of the sudden change in Alex’s expression onstage, sure that no one else but him could have detected anything insincere in it.
“Well, I ain’t planning on going nowhere,” Miles promised, distractedly.
“I am very glad to hear that,” Alex said, tone rough and deep around the edges, part sardonic but more sincerity than anything else. His eyes met Miles’s, warm, dark brown in the low light of the dressing room, and he suddenly seemed impossibly close. There was a pause during which Miles resolutely ignored the thrum of his heart, before quickly looking away and picking restlessly at the label of the beer bottle with his already bitten down nails. Christ. It wasn’t like him to get so in his head about something – but now the thoughts had started they didn’t seem to have any intention of stopping.
“What time we gotta be back on the bus?” he asked abruptly, sitting up and leaning forwards with his elbows resting on his knees so he wouldn’t get pulled down deeper into the sofa with Alex. The floor stared up at him, flecked sage green carpet and his and Alex’s boots side by side.
“Dunno,” Alex replied lazily, “Soon, I think.”
“Maybe we should head, then,” Miles heard himself say. Normally, he’d be waiting until the last minute possible before getting back on the bus – he loved post-show Alex, who was more relaxed and careless than usual, loose-limbed and warm and easy. But right now, it felt too much. Miles needed to be somewhere to clear his head – somewhere where Alex wasn’t right next to him, all familiar body heat and sharp, teasing humour, almost as close as if they were still onstage.
Alex looked at him inscrutably for a moment, but then shrugged, “Alright.”
-
After shows, they often stayed up talking until the sky rolling past was turning light, high on the thrill of performing with each other to thousands screaming their words along with them. Alex would sprawl back on the couch with his feet resting on Miles’s lap, one hand gesturing dreamily in the air as he put the innermost workings of his mind into words for the first time, hair falling back from his face, chin a sharp, angular line in contrast to the wide, earnest darkness of his eyes. They’d lose themselves on tangents of things only the other seemed to understand, caught up in the exhilaration of being understood on levels neither of them had been able to access even within themselves before.
Some nights, they’d keep drinking until their tongues were heavy and the laughter unstoppable. Others, Miles would drink coke or red bull because he didn’t want to fall asleep and miss a moment, and Alex would drink mugs of green or mint tea because he actually liked that kind of shit. Sometimes if they were tired, especially if they’d just played several nights back-to-back, they’d lean against each other on the crappy bus couch and watch stuff, or Alex would scribble away in his notebook and Miles would strum lazy, experimental chords on his acoustic guitar.
That night, Miles only stayed in the little lounge area of the bus long enough to mumble some excuse about being tired, before retreating to his bunk and drawing the little curtain closed behind him on the soft light. Almost immediately, Miles wished he’d stayed outside with Alex like normal; the close, quiet space of his small bunk instantly made everything that had been running through his mind all night feel far too loud. Out in the communal area of the tiny kitchenette, he could hear Alex moving about, the hiss of the kettle as he made a cup of tea and the distinctive creak of the couch as he sat down. Then it was silent, apart from the rush of the road underneath the bus’s wheels, and Miles was left with nothing left to distract him from his own thoughts.
Lying back, he scrubbed a hand over his face as if in the hope he could somehow wipe the thoughts away. It wasn’t in his nature to get caught in a tangle of thoughts the way it was in Alex’s, and so whenever he did, he had much less patience and experience in how to deal with it constructively – or deal with it at all. The rare times it had happened, he’d always turned to Alex to help him hash it all out. But now – he could hardly go to Alex about this. What would he say? Hey, Alex, seeing you with that girl earlier made me feel really weird and now I can’t stop thinking about whether all the stuff people say about us is true, or, Alex, I’ve been doing a really good job of not looking too closely at things for a while and I’m scared it’s about to catch up with me, or Al, I can’t stop thinking about the way you looked at me tonight. The idea of saying anything along these lines made Miles recoil, screwing his eyes shut and rubbing a hand over his face again. He knew exactly how it all sounded.
It wasn’t even like Miles had ever been into guys or anything – not really. Okay, so there had been that friend in sixth form who he’d drunkenly made out with a couple times at parties, but that didn’t count, everyone messed about like that at seventeen. And yeah, he hadn’t dated anyone for a while, but that was just because he tended to find that touring with Alex and maintaining a relationship didn’t go well. Maybe that was part of the problem – maybe he was just feeling a bit pent up from being single for a little bit, and that’s what had got him overthinking this stuff. He knew that Alex was attractive, of course. He wasn’t blind. He played with him onstage every night and got as twisted around his little finger as the crowd. Alex just had a kind of magnetism about him that was inexplicable and irresistible to everyone; it didn’t mean that Miles was attracted to him. At least, that’s always what he’d told himself in those moments where he’d found himself leaning a little too close to the sun, drawn in by its inimitable warmth.
Now, though, Miles suddenly wondered how much he’d really examined that line of thought – and why he’d been so careful to push it down whenever it’d come up before. The idea that he might actually be attracted to his best friend send his heart pounding against the confines of his ribs, and he swallowed nervously. Closing his eyes, he tried to picture Alex as he was right now – not onstage with his slicked-back hair and charisma, but probably sitting at the little kitchenette table, quietly hunched over his notebook with an intent expression and a hand threaded through his hair. Unwillingly, Miles felt his cheeks heat up with embarrassment, like he was somehow wronging Alex by thinking about him secretly like this, exploring the question of how he felt without Alex’s knowledge. Even inside the walls of his imaginings, it felt like too much of an invasion of Alex’s privacy. With a groan, Miles grabbed his headphones and turned up the volume, hoping that The Strokes would drown out the direction of his thoughts and allow sleep to take over.
The thing was, he wasn’t an idiot. He knew there was something more between him and Alex than there had been in any of the friendships he’d had before – but Alex was just in a different category. It had nothing to do with sexual attraction. Or at least, this was the thought he tried to console himself with as he drifted further towards sleep. The last thing that crossed his mind before he finally dropped off was of Alex’s expression when Miles had opened the dressing room door and not immediately walked out again, and how there was something in it that was lighter than the obvious desire. Purer. A tiny flicker of something almost like quicky-concealed hope.
-
“You remember to get out on the right side of your bunk this morning?” Alex was sitting at the small table in the kitchenette when Miles got up the next morning, notebook open and soft, unstyled hair falling across his forehead as the pale pink sky of the motorway rushed along behind him. Faint purple smudges shadowed his eyes, and his voice was still a little gravelly, suggesting he hadn’t been awake much longer than Miles, or that he maybe hadn’t slept much at all.
“What?” Miles rubbed a bleary hand over his face, gravitating instinctively towards the pot of coffee sitting on the bench. He’d slept like shit and his eyes were gritty with exhaustion, the only saving grace of which was that the thoughts he’d tried to push down last night lay dormant, hazy and vague in the back of his mind.
Alex shrugged, scored something out, and closed his notebook. “You seemed kind of off, last night. Y’know. After the show.”
“What? Oh. No, I were just tired,” Miles lied, leaning back against the counter and taking a swig of coffee. He was finding it difficult to look at Alex; instead, he focused on the collar of his t-shirt. It was a faded black one that Alex wore a lot. An old Rascals one. “It can get terribly exhausting, you know,” he quickly slipped into their faux-dialect, arranging his features into what he hoped was an approximation of their usual humour, “Having to listen to thousands of people cheering your name, night after night. The grating repetition of it. Don’t you find?”
“Oh yes,” Alex didn’t miss a beat, replying in his own nasal mocking tone, “So terribly exhausting.” Then, switching to his normal voice, added, “What’re you standing about over there for? Come on, come sit down,” in a tone that was a little easier, the trace of tension or hesitation that had been in his initial greeting gone. He pushed his notebook to one side and briefly removed his legs from the seat to allow Miles to sit down, before draping them over Miles. He was wearing odd socks, one a faded wine colour, the other a black one with a white cuff that was definitely one of the brand-new ones Miles had brought specifically for tour. Miles pinged the elastic of it companionably.
“What’s in the notebook you so carefully closed when I walked in?”
“Nothin’ special, just a few thoughts I’m workin’ on,” Alex said dismissively, pushing a hand through his hair and yawning widely. “For a song and that.”
“So evasive, Mr Turner. You’ve got me intrigued.”
“Only because I closed the notebook,” Alex grinned lazily, “Can’t stand bein’ told somethin’s out of bounds, can you? If I’d left it wide open on the table you wouldn’t have given it a second glance.”
“’Course I would,” Miles protested, “I’m always interested in what’s goin’ on in that brain of yours.”
“Just the same old things on repeat,” Alex said, carelessly. He’d started rolling a cigarette; Miles watched it form under his expert fingers.
“Like how you’ve run out of your own socks so you decided to steal mine? And only one, at that. Who only steals one sock?” Miles asked incredulously, pinging the elastic of it again. Alex dug his heel into Miles’s thigh in retaliation, but didn’t bother to defend himself. “And not only are you stealing them, you’re then wearing them brazenly in front of me, flaunting your theft.”
“You neglect them, it ain’t my fault.”
“It’s not your fault you stole my sock?”
Alex made an effort to shrug carelessly, but Miles could see the hint of an amused grin pulling at the corners of his mouth. “No one’s stopping you taking it back.”
“Oh yeah?”
Miles dove at him, and immediately Alex curled himself up into a defensive ball, emitting laughing protests whenever Miles tried to prise the sock off his foot. His hair was strewn back against the leather of the couch, hazelnut brown against black, and the hem of his t-shirt had ridden up slightly, exposing a warm expanse of skin and the sharp line of hipbones. They were both laughing too much for either attempt to be remotely effective, but Miles eventually managed to get the upper hand, pinning Alex to the sofa with his thighs as they wrestled each other, the offending sock forgotten.
“Okay, I submit, I submit,” Alex held his hands up in mock-surrender, cheeks pink and eyes bright from laughing. “Jesus. Take the bloody sock.”
He was warm and solid under Miles, all familiar skin and lithe limbs – and Miles was suddenly finding it hard to breathe. He froze, still poised over Alex. It felt as though everything was in slow motion, except the frantic beat of his heart. He watched the laughter slide off Alex’s face like water and his hazel eyes become intent and watchful, reminiscent of the expression Miles had seen in them last night. Like then, Alex didn’t look away – but his gaze went careful and impassive in the way it always did when there was a myriad of emotions brewing behind them. It always unsettled Miles when it happened, because it was one of the only times he couldn’t read Alex – and it unsettled him more now, because, for the first time, he wondered if he understood a glimmer of what might be behind it. Miles swallowed. The air between them was heavy with loaded silence, Alex just looking and looking at him – until Miles couldn’t take it anymore. Alex’s mouth was soft and pink and slightly open, and the rise and fall of his chest was as uneven as Miles’s felt; he could feel it under the flat of his palm where it was still placed on Alex’s ribs. Alex’s heartbeat was unsteady too, fluttering.
Abruptly, Miles stumbled up, backing away until the table was between them. His own heart was thumping so hard it felt like he was being punched.
“Uh – I’m just gunna go get ready,” he said, and his voice didn’t sound remotely like his own.
“Okay,” Alex replied, low and gravelly, pushing himself back up into sitting position. “Yeah.” He raked a hand through his hair and straightened his t-shirt, eyes watching Miles inscrutably. To an outsider, he might have looked cool and impassive, but Miles knew Alex well enough to know that it was when Alex seemed at his coolest that he was overthinking the most.
Normally, when he could tell that Alex was overthinking, Miles would just elbow him gently in the ribs and ask what was up – but right now he was too afraid to look Alex in the eyes, let alone ask him what was going through his head.
He was afraid that Alex might tell him.