“I like it when you’re on top of me.” Martin wondered when saying things like that would stop feeling so bold.
“I know,” Will said, with a roughness in his voice that made Martin wonder how many other things Will had guessed for himself. Did Martin have no secrets? He ought to have known that Will would see him exactly as he was. “I like when you’re underneath me,” Will went on, moving his hips. “So I suppose that works out well.”
“Yes,” Martin said. Will got a hand behind Martin’s knee and hitched it up, and then Martin (again feeling idiotically bold) did the same with the other side, so his legs were wrapped around Will’s middle as Will gently rocked against him. They were pressed together, safe and alone in the moonlight, neither of them particularly well but both were something like happy and it felt like a miracle.
Chapter Thirteen
“We’re getting crumbs all over the bed,” Martin said, tearing off a piece of bread and popping it into his mouth, then doing the same for Will.
“True,” Will conceded after swallowing. “But I’m not moving.” They were reading in bed at an hour they probably ought to be embarrassed to not yet be up. But Will’s head was very comfortably cushioned on Martin’s lap while Martin stroked his hair, and yesterday’s bread had not yet gone stale, so as far as he cared there were very few incentives to go anywhere. If he turned his head just so he could see the cup of primroses on the table. From time to time he caught Martin looking down at him with a sort of dazed contentment that made Will feel smug in about a dozen different ways.
“We could shake the sheets out later,” Martin said, as if puzzling the matter out. Watching Martin discover housework was a source of never-ending delight. “We could even put fresh sheets on the bed.”
“That’s right, love,” Will said absently, and felt Martin’s hand momentarily still in his hair. The word had come out absently, as it had dozens of times in the past. He hadn’t meant anything by it. And of course he loved Martin—he had loved Martin for years, and assumed Martin loved him in return, in the way friends did love one another. This—hair petting and flowers—this was something different, though. This was something both tender and sharp that had been growing and growing in the pit of his belly. He had tried not to think too much about it, afraid that whatever this thing was, it would change his life irrevocably once he acknowledged it. But hearing the word love come out of his mouth had made it impossible to hide from the truth.
Martin’s hand had long since stopped carding through Will’s hair, and when Will sat up he found Martin glaring at him.
“What?” Will asked.
“Don’t you dare,” Martin said. “Don’t you dare act like you’re figuring it out now. Like you just realized there’s a name for this. What did you think it was?”
“I didn’t—”
“Did you think I just wanted to get off with someone and thought, oh, I’ll vanquish all my bizarre sexual inhibitions with my best friend on a lark? That was all fucking difficult.”
“You said you didn’t want to wait anymore,” Will protested, not entirely certain what they were fighting about.
“I wasn’t talking about sex. I was talking about letting myself love you, you arsehole. Letting myself be loved by you. I thought you understood.”
There it was, the thing he hadn’t wanted to think about. This wasn’t just love: it was being in love, and it made him greedily hungry for things he couldn’t have. “You’re going to get married!” Will said, seizing on the first and most obvious problem. “You told me so.”
“Not tomorrow! Not even this year, if I can avoid it. And even when I do, it doesn’t mean—”
“Yes it does,” Will said, his teeth clenched. He had told himself that he could walk away from the physical part of their friendship when Martin ultimately got married, and so he could. He couldn’t walk away from this, though—this feeling, grasping and needy, was going to follow him wherever he went. “It fucking does. How is it that you’re allowed to be jealous but I’m not? What does it matter whether it’s tomorrow or next year? It’s worse if it’s next year, or two years from now, or even further. Don’t you see?”