#french countryside tomrry

[ferryboatpeak]

chapter 6.2

time for some more tom/harry/ben/meri! turns out this took so long to write because it is a very long chapter. infinite thanks to @lunarrua for the beta and @wanderlustwaning for the encouragement. only one or maybe two more chapters to go!

previous installments all linked here

As Tom’s getting Ruby up from her nap the next morning, gravel crunches under tires in the driveway. Ben’s been out late on night shoots this week; maybe he’s home midday to make up for it. Tom lifts a corner of the blackout shades to see if it’s the Range Rover. 

The driveway’s empty. Completely empty. At the end of the lane, the sleek tail of Harry’s black car disappears around the corner. Tom’s stomach lurches.

He turns back to Ruby, who’s halfway dressed and busily emptying a bin of toys. “Let’s go have a snack.” Grabbing the first sundress he sees in the drawer, he kneels behind her and snaps her into it while she plays. He sweeps a load of blocks and musical instruments back into the toy bin before tipping it back onto its base, and offers Ruby one of the blocks that remain scattered on the floor. “Can you help?” 

Ruby grabs a second block from the floor and wanders off toward the window. Tom hooks an arm around her waist and hauls her back to the mess on the floor. “Time to clean up, see?” He tosses another block into the bin. Ruby squirms and giggles. Tom gives up. Keeping Ruby contained with one arm, he gathers up the rest of the blocks with his other hand, and finally guides Ruby toward the bin to drop in the last two.

Tom glances through the open door of Harry’s room as they pass, just quickly enough to see a pair of trainers and a used set of workout clothes on the floor at the foot of the bed, and a black hoodie sliding halfway off the duvet above them. The panicky feeling under Tom’s ribcage subsides. Harry’s not gone for good. He’s not entitled to any information about Harry’s plans; soon enough, Harry’s going to go and be gone forever. Still, Harry seems like the kind of person who says goodbye.

Meredith’s standing by the sink in the kitchen, eating yogurt and granola from a teacup. She makes it look casually elegant, not at all like Tom eating cereal from a coffee mug because Carl didn’t do the dishes again. She smiles and sets her cup on the countertop when she sees Tom and Ruby. “Hello, sweetheart.” As Tom deposits Ruby into her seat at the island, Meredith leans over to kiss the top of her head. With a quizzical look on her face, she plucks at the strap of Ruby’s sundress. “That one’s getting a bit snug, isn’t it.”

“Maybe,” Tom says noncommittally. He supposes it was harder than usual to get her snapped in.

Meredith goes back to her yogurt. “When you’re packing up, can you separate out the things she’s outgrowing? No need to carry those back to London.” She scrapes the inside of the cup and licks the last bits of granola off the edge of the spoon. 

“Sure.” Tom hands Ruby her sippy cup. “What do you want me to do with them?”

Meredith rinses her mug and leaves it by the side of the sink. “Just leave them here. The maids can take them.”

“Oh, do they have kids?” Tom hasn’t talked to the cleaners. He’s usually been outside with Ruby when they come around every other day or so, bringing with them a different kind of awareness of hierarchy. They’re on the payroll just like Tom is, but after they bustle through the main house leaving the beds plumped and tucked and the scent of lemon and bleach in the scrubbed farmhouse sink, they clean Tom’s room too. The first time he came upstairs and discovered the fresh tracks hoovered evenly into the carpet, he’d walked carefully along the lines in his stocking feet, one foot in front of the other.

Meredith shrugs. “They may be able to use them.”

Tom’s no expert, but Ruby’s clothes seem nice. Soft fabric, prints that aren’t garish or babyish, some labels he recognizes from adult clothes. “Don’t you want to save them?”

“Can’t count on the next one being a girl.” Meredith pauses on her way out of the kitchen. “Wait. If the romper with the orange stripes is too small, save that one. And the hedgehog pyjamas.”

Tom nods. “Those are cute.”

“They’re my favorite.” Meredith presses a hand to her heart. “The rest of it isn’t worth the hassle. There’s enough to pack up as it is. I’ve got to start breaking down the office...” The words trail back to the kitchen behind her as she heads off to work, closing up the summer, box by box.

***

Harry lopes in from the kitchen as Tom’s coming downstairs at the start of Ruby’s afternoon nap. He’s fresh out of the pool, hair trailing in the same damp tail that Tom wrapped his fingers in yesterday. Harry ought to stay away from the pool, Tom thinks. He’s like one of those gremlins that gets dangerous if you let him get wet. Or more dangerous, at least.

“Hey.” Harry leans one hand on the end of the stair rail. He tucks his other thumb into the fold of the towel wrapped around his waist.

“Hey.” Tom stops halfway down the stairs, keeping a height advantage. The most defensible position. He’s tried to hold himself carefully away from Harry since the pool yesterday, and it’s only made him more conscious of how Harry takes up space, filling every room he’s in. Legs sprawling over the couch, index finger jabbing the air with every point he makes, always a hand on someone’s shoulder. Harry’s hard to avoid, but Tom did his best, tucking his knees up under him at the far corner of the sofa while they watched Queer Eye with Meredith last night.

By the end of the first episode, Harry was stretching out those legs of his over the cushions, poking his toes into the side of Tom’s thigh. Tom cautiously side-eyed him. Harry smirked and toed him again. The least awkward option was what Tom would have done all along: good-naturedly shove at his feet, elbow back when Harry kicked at him, let Harry’s legs wind up in his lap anyway. So that’s what Tom had done. He still doesn’t understand what happened yesterday, but apparently Tom’s forgiven. Or he’s forgiven Harry.

At the bottom of the stairway, Harry shifts from one foot to the other. “Do you want to go into town for dinner tonight?”

The nerve-jangling possibilities explode in front of Tom: dinner with Harry, just the two of then, a chance to get out of the house, a chance to figure out where they stand after yesterday. And then he realizes that Harry’s question wasn’t specific to Tom. It probably includes everyone.

“What’s Meredith think?” There are logistics, things that probably haven’t occurred to Harry. Will they have to bring a baby seat, will it be all right to eat early enough for Ruby to be home by bedtime, can all of the rest of them manage to eat while Ruby’s squirming and screeching and needing attention the way she does whenever they eat dinner with her at home.

Harry gives him a strange look. “You get off once Ruby goes to bed, right? We’ll go after that.”

“Yeah, but…” Tom should check, even if it’s not all five of them. Just to make sure. He dodges around Harry, heading for the office.

“Meredith!” Harry tips his head back, bellowing. Tom’s hand jerks up reflexively, trying to shush him before he wakes Ruby, but Harry ignores him. “Can Tom come out and play tonight?”

Tom cringes. He would never yell at Meredith from the next room. He darts toward the office, wanting to catch her before she has to get up from her work. 

“What?” Meredith calls back, just as Tom reaches the office door. She’s at her desk, sorting through an array of file folders spread in front of her.

“Tom and I are going out tonight and he wants your blessing!” Harry hollers it from the staircase almost gleefully. Ruby’s going to wake up, and Tom’s going to have to try to put her down again, and she’s going to refuse to sleep and she’ll be cranky all afternoon, and Tom really needs her to nap for an uninterrupted 90 minutes so he can clean up the kitchen and have a small meltdown about tonight.

Meredith looks up from the files with an expression of mild surprise. Tom’s face burns. “Sorry, I…” 

“Of course you should,” Meredith interrupts him. “You ought to get out of here for a night.” She waves him away. “Go on, have fun. Do you want me to put Ruby down?” 

“No,” Tom says quickly. “I’ve got it.” So Meredith’s staying with Ruby. He’s going to dinner with Harry. “We can go after,” he adds.

“All right, then.” Meredith reorients herself back to her work.

Tom blinks and turns to leave. His pulse is still racing.

Harry looks at him from halfway up the stairs. His towel has come untucked, probably from all the yelling. He’s holding it up around his waist with the fabric bunched in one hand. The hemmed ends fall open to frame the narrow triangle of paler skin at the top of his thigh. “All right?” Harry asks.

Tom nods. “See you tonight.” Somehow the words come out normally, casually, despite the swarm of bees that’s forming in his stomach. He’s going out with Harry, just the two of them. To dinner. Harry asked him. Almost like a date. Not that he should be thinking in those terms. But still.

***

When he comes downstairs after putting Ruby to bed, the sight of Harry doesn’t do anything to quell Tom’s nervous anticipation. Harry’s wearing a pair of white trousers Tom hasn’t seen before, just as baggy as his usual gray ones, and a short-sleeved black shirt with one too many buttons undone. Something glints around his fingers, and for a single irrational second Tom thinks Harry’s got a set of brass knuckles on. But it’s just a fistful of rings, all different shapes and sizes, blurring into each other to make his hand look armored. Harry was wearing them the day he arrived, Tom remembers, and he hasn’t seen them since.

It reminds him of how the sight of Harry naked used to set him on edge. How he lived for a week determinedly directing his gaze away from the pool, away from Harry’s narrow hips and broad thighs and the rivulets of water tracing down the defined lines of his back. How it made him feel under attack, jealous and jittery and wanting. But now Harry’s naked body is familiar, by sight and touch and taste. And it’s the sight of Harry clothed -- clothed like this, cleaned up and trying -- that scares him more than anything.

Harry smiles up at him. “Ready?”

“I’m just going to change.” He hadn’t planned on it, but with the way Harry looks, Tom feels underdressed in his usual shorts and sandals. He’s got to make some kind of effort, even though this isn’t a date. It’s just dinner. Dinner with someone he’s fucking. He’s had a lot of those dinners this summer. They’re not dates.

Up in his room, he ransacks his haphazard pile of clean clothes and the dregs of his duffle for something presentable. Trousers. A clean t-shirt. A plaid buttondown over it. He does up the buttons as an experiment, and then undoes them to leave the shirt open like he usually would. His boots are waiting in the closet, where they’ve sat untouched since the day he arrived. It feels like pulling a secret weapon from under a floorboard. Thick soles to buoy him through the evening, artificial confidence laced tight around his ankles. Armored, like Harry with his rings.

That makes him think of his pendants, which he stopped wearing as soon as Ruby decided they were fun to grab. It takes a moment to remember that they’re zipped in the side pocket of his duffle. He looks in the mirror as he loops them back around his neck. He hasn’t had a haircut all summer; the tails of it are sticking out behind his ears. He rakes his fingers through it instead of reaching for his brush, trying to scrape it into some sort of order that doesn’t look like he’s trying too hard. 

Harry’s waiting by his car in the blue-gold evening light when Tom comes back down. The sunglasses that were pinning his hair back are on his face now. Tom cuts diagonally across the terrace toward him. As he gets closer, he can hear the car key clicking against Harry’s rings as Harry works it through his left hand, fidgeting.

Harry grins at him. “You look nice.” The sunglasses steal the rest of his expression; there’s no way for Tom to tell if he’s serious. He should have said it to Harry first. Or nobody should have said it at all; Harry’s had his mouth on Tom’s dick too many times this summer for an all-purpose “you look nice.” That’s not what you say to a sure thing. That’s what you say on a first date. 

“Something without baby mess on it.” Tom twitches one of his shirttails to demonstrate, hoping his response works whether or not Harry’s serious. It’s too late to say you too, and anyway you too implies an equivalence that’s not reality. Harry, in his white trousers and loafers, looks nice like he ought to be strolling along the Riviera and Tom looks nice like Ruby hasn’t smeared applesauce on this particular t-shirt.

“Shall we?” Without waiting for an answer, Harry opens his door and slides into the driver’s seat.

The passenger door resists Tom. He tries the handle a second time. Harry’s disappeared, invisible through the dark glass, and for a moment it feels like he’s being tricked. Tom raps his knuckles on the blind window. A second later the door unlocks soundlessly, recognizable only by the smooth release of the latch he can feel through his fingertips on the handle. 

“Sorry,” Harry says when Tom opens the door. “Not used to this car.” 

“Thought you were going to drive away.” The passenger seat is tilted backward at an indolent angle, so that he’s looking at Harry from behind and below. He leans over his knees to feel for the lever to bring it upright, but the underside of the seat doesn’t have any mechanism. 

Harry cackles and zooms his hand forward to pantomime peeling out. “Go back inside, have some salad with Meredith.”

Tom laughs, as if that hadn’t been his exact fear ten seconds ago. He slips his hand down by his door and finds three different switches. He presses cautiously at the top of an oblong one. With a faint whir, the seat back rises to meet him.

The inside of the car is all black leather, punctuated with swoops of wood grain along the dash. There’s no trash on the floor, no coffee cups in the console, nothing that’s been tossed into the back to clear out the passenger seat for Tom. It doesn’t even smell like Harry.

Tom buckles his seat belt. “Is this your car?”

“It’s a rental.” The engine comes to life with a restrained purr. 

The gravel underneath them is barely noticeable as Harry pulls down the drive, even though Tom feels like he’s riding just off the ground. He tries to remember the last time he was in a car. Maybe some errand in town with Meredith and Ruby. Compared to the high and mighty Range Rover, any other vehicle would probably feel low.

“How does that work, renting something like this?” This car, sleek and soundless like a predatory sea creature, doesn’t seem like something they’d just hand over the keys to at the airport counter.

“I don’t know,” Harry says reflectively, as if it’s only just occurred to him that this sort of information would be possible to know. “I didn’t book it myself. They just met me at the train station.” Harry brakes suddenly at the end of the lane, just before the turn onto the country road, and looks over to Tom. “Do you want to drive?”

“Are you serious?” He hasn’t driven anything since the last time he was home, in the spring, borrowing his mum’s car, Molly singing in the passenger seat. He hasn’t ever driven a car like this. What’s Harry trying to prove?

“Come on.” Harry throws the gearshift into park with a flourish, and opens his door with the engine still running.

As Harry lopes across in front of the windshield, Tom scrambles to unbuckle his seat belt. The car pings with an unnecessary reminder about the door Harry left open behind him. Tom stands up with his hand still on the latch of his own door, blocking Harry’s path as he rounds the front of the car. “Are you sure?”

“Of course I am.” Harry rests his hands on the top of the open passenger door between them and leans toward Tom. “Do it.”

His eyes are still hidden behind his sunglasses. There’s no way for Tom to tell whether this is a gift or a challenge. “What if I put it in a ditch?” The possibility seems simultaneously remote and imminent. Nothing could disrupt the perfect lines of this glossy black machine, but also Tom is the very thing that might. 

Harry leans forward, pressing the door back toward Tom. Tom’s body flashes to yesterday: cool water and hot sun, Harry’s weight pressing him against the wall, Harry’s mouth on his. He swallows.

“I trust you,” Harry says. His face is inches away, inscrutable. Tom can see himself reflected in Harry’s sunglasses. The frame of the car digs into his shoulders and his calves as the door presses him back. He wants to punch forward, break the window between them, get his hands on Harry. The intensity of his want ought to shatter the glass all on its own.

He gently lets the latch go and slides out from behind the door. Without Tom’s resistance, the door lurches forward under Harry’s weight. Tom jams his forearm back into the opening just in time to stop it from closing on Harry’s fingers. “Easy,” he warns, elbowing the door toward Harry to extricate himself.

Harry takes the door from him and steps back to open it, hip-checking Tom as he passes so that Tom stumbles a step down the verge at the edge of the lane. Tom shoulders up into him, jostling Harry towards the car. His cheek connects with the sun-warmed back of Harry’s black shirt. Tom’s body sings at the contact, propelling him around the nose of the car to open the driver’s door with an assurance he doesn’t really feel.

The view’s different from the driver’s seat, disconcertingly on the wrong side of the car. He reaches for the seat controls as if he has any idea what he’s doing, moving himself forward until his foot connects securely with the gas pedal. Every inch is a reminder of Harry’s long legs. He checks the mirrors.

“Ready yet?” Harry asks, reclining back in the passenger seat.

Tom flips him off, and shifts into gear. At the tentative press of his foot, the car surges forward, faster than he expected but faultlessly smooth. He turns onto the country road and reaches automatically to flip the visor down when the evening sun hits him full in the face. The view is still searingly bright even with the worst of the sun shielded behind the visor. Tom squints and focuses on the road, second-guessing himself about which side he’s supposed to be driving on.

“Here.” A pair of sunglasses hovers in front of his face. Harry tries to push them up his nose one-handed. One of the arms pokes Tom in the cheekbone.

Tom swats his hand out, first at Harry and then at the sunglasses that Harry’s shoving into his face. “Trying to drive here.”

“Hold still,” Harry says, unperturbed. “The sun’s in your eyes, you can’t see.” The sunglasses disappear for a moment and return. This time Harry’s using both hands. The arms of the sunglasses trace past Tom’s temples and hook onto his ears.

“Because your hand’s in my face.” Tom tips his chin down to look over the tops of the sunglasses. Harry pushes them up his nose with a thumb at the bridge. The view darkens as the glasses slide into place. Harry pats him twice on the forehead.

Tom glances sideways. “Thanks.” Harry’s looking at him still, the corners of his mouth tucked up in a small pleased smile. His hair creeps toward his face without the sunglasses to pin it back. 

Tom snaps his attention back to the road. He’s the one who’s inscrutable now, his expression safe behind Harry’s lenses. The shift in gears as he picks up speed is imperceptible. Every slight movement of his foot on the accelerator tells him the car’s got more power than he expects. More power than he wants. He’s not sure what it’s good for, on this narrow country road. But oh, it’s fun to drive.

Tom takes a curve a little faster than he should, just to feel the car respond. It pushes against the turn like a cat arching its spine to be petted. The sun soaks a late-summer vineyard golden on one side of the road. On the other, the valley falls gently away toward the hills in the distance.  

Harry sees that he’s got his bearings. “What do you think?”

“Drives nice.” Secure behind the sunglasses, Tom tries to sound mildly, appropriately impressed. “What do you drive at home?”

“Um.” It doesn’t seem like a complicated question. “In London,” Harry starts, as if he’s collecting his thoughts. “Usually an Audi.”

“Usually?” 

“I have a few?” Harry’s voice tips up at the end, like he’s uncertain. Or embarrassed. “Mostly in LA, though.”

There’s a vastness to that answer that Tom’s not sure how to probe. “What’s your favorite?”

“Jaguar,” Harry says immediately. “An E-type. I wanted one forever.”

Harry tells a rambling story about the model year, buying the car from an aging hippie in the Hollywood Hills, but Tom loses track as they reach the clustered cottages at the edge of the village. The country roads that lasted an eternity with a fussy toddler yesterday pass in a matter of minutes. 

Easing off the accelerator feels like returning to solid ground, relief and disappointment at the same time. The signs of a summer town melting from day into evening are all around: dogs being walked, shops being shuttered for the night. Tom slows as they turn into the lane at the center of the village. “Where are we going?”

“Turn left.” Harry directs him around one corner and then another. The streets are narrow and cobblestoned, predating cars and not quite friendly to them. Fiats and Citroens are neatly packed into any available parking spot. Tom glances in the mirror, anticipating the dimensions. He’s not sure what would be worse, trying and failing to parallel Harry’s posh car into a tiny slot on what may or may not be the wrong side of the street, or giving up and turning the driver’s seat over to Harry.

Harry points ahead. “There, on the right.” It’s barely a car park, three spots with tufts of grass poking up between the paving stones, tucked between two brick shop fronts. Tom pulls haltingly into the only open space. Tendrils of ivy from the side of the building practically brush the car door. Gratefully, he shifts into park and cuts the engine. The blocky key fob is unbalanced in his hand when he pulls it out of the ignition.

“Nice.” Harry slaps Tom’s palm and scoops up the key. He folds the business end down with his thumb, and it disappears back into the fob with a click.

Tom opens his door cautiously, trying not to scrape the edge against the wall under the vines. Leaves brush the backs of his legs as he eases himself along the side of the car. Harry’s waiting at the front of the ivied building, at an entrance marked by a tented chalkboard on the cobblestones. The specials chalked onto it are all in French. The only word Tom recognizes is beurre.

The door to the restaurant is painted a cheery yellow. There’s a rush of sound as Harry opens it, and when Tom follows him inside, he has to remind himself that this is exactly what a restaurant is supposed to be. There aren’t even that many customers – maybe thirty, forty? -- and they’re not being unusually loud. Parents with summer-blonde children. Four women about Meredith’s age, erupting into laughter. Older couples finishing their meals. A child bent over a tablet at the end of a table full of adults. Tables pushed together in the back corner for a group of families on holiday together: dads with sunburned scalps, teenagers surreptitiously glancing at their phones under the table. Two older daughters, maybe university age, bare-shouldered in strappy sundresses and holding their wineglasses with a casual assuredness that suggests they’re French. It’s the most people Tom’s seen in two months, and the clamor of dozens of conversations trapped underneath the low beamed ceiling makes it hard to think.

“Harry!” A man in a chef’s jacket hails them from across the dining room, his voice cutting through the cacophony. He has thick-framed glasses and unruly gray hair and a general air of being in charge. He weaves through the tables toward them.

Harry shakes hands like he means it, sticking his elbow out to swing his hand into the grip with enthusiasm. Like he’s deeply excited about this particular handshake. Tom wonders if Harry’s that way about every hand he shakes. He can’t remember if he shook his hand when they met. Probably not. Tom’s hands were probably busy with Ruby.

The proprietor greets Harry in some combination of French and accented English that Tom can’t parse. And then Tom’s being presented, Harry’s hand warm and heavy on his shoulder. “This is Tom,” Harry says.

“Welcome, Harry’s friend!” The man shakes his hand enthusiastically. Tom mumbles a greeting, wondering how his own handshake compares to Harry’s.  He misses the proprietor’s name when Harry introduces him.

The man points toward the back of the restaurant, past the countertop that separates the kitchen from the dining room. A pair of glass-paned doors stands ajar. “I have your table out back.” Tom can see the glint of fairy lights outside. 

“Perfect.” Harry claps him on the shoulder, and they’re led through the dining room. From behind, the slight stoop of Harry’s shoulders is more noticeable. He walks like he’s keeping a secret, like standing up straight would require a burst of energy he’s conserving for something more important.

A woman in a striped apron catches sight of them as she slides a steaming plate over the kitchen counter to a server. She looks like the kitchenside counterpart to their host: same age, same enthusiasm. She waves energetically at Harry, and he presses his fingers to his mouth and flings his arm open wide to throw a kiss across the room to her. Her laugh as she turns back to the kitchen is lovingly dismissive.

The garden out back is surrounded by a stone wall thick with the same vines Tom parked the car next to. A strand of lights twines through them. The host leads them to the furthest of the three tables, tucked into the right angle of the wall. He produces menus, a wine list banded to a wooden backing, a lighted candle in a scarred red jar.

And then he leaves. The din of conversations filters out from the restaurant, and the other two tables in the garden have their own occupants. But it still feels like the most alone they’ve ever been. The farthest from anyone else’s oversight. Tom’s back is to the restaurant, and he can’t see anyone but Harry.

“Have you been here before?” The narrow folded menu sits untouched in front of Tom, laying in wait to confound him with French. He can’t think of when Harry would have eaten here. Nearly a month and Tom can’t remember him leaving the house before today.

Harry looks up from the wine list. “Scoped it out this afternoon.”

It’s a rush like Tom’s already emptied his first glass. Harry planning this. Wanting a table out back. Somewhere private. “You just met them today?”

“Came by, had a drink.” Harry shrugs. “It’s nice to eat where you know the people.”

“How did you…” Tom can’t think of the right question. Make friends? In French? Minutes after strolling into town for the first time? “They look ready to adopt you.” 

“They’re really nice.” Harry seems brighter with it, lit up by this small connection. “They’ve had this place for forty years.”

“Remind me of his name?” It’s embarrassing to ask, but he wants to be part of it, to reinforce Harry’s delight in being known by the proprietors.

“Luc!” Harry turns it into a greeting as their host returns to the table.

Luc slides a small plate between them. Two small toasts, topped with a triangle of something, a swoop of sauce, and a tiny cornichon. “From Anne-Marie.”

“The chef in there,” Harry gestures back at the kitchen. “His wife.”

Harry thanks Luc - in French - and Tom smiles and mumbles some echo of Harry’s thanks. Luc asks something and gestures toward the wine list in Harry’s hand, and oh no, it begins. Harry holds the list out to Tom. “Do you want wine?”

Tom doesn’t take the board from Harry, or even bother to look at it. It’s not like he can make sense of a French wine list any more than an English one. “Sure.”

Harry pulls the wine list back to his side of the table. “Red or white?”

“Either’s all right.” Harry looks ready to ask him another question and Tom cuts in before it turns into an embarrassing display of how little he knows about wine. “I’ve got no idea, I’ll drink whatever’s being poured.”

“All right, that’s easy,” Harry says, as if Tom’s position is convenient rather than ignorant. He identifies something in French, pointing to the menu. Luc approves. Tom’s able to get the gist of the response: he’ll be back with the wine, and to take their order.

Tom opens the menu gingerly, like it’s a mousetrap that might take off his fingers. At first, he’s relieved: French menu words are apparently portable enough that it’s not so hard to get a general idea of what each entrée might be. Poisson. Cassoulet. Haricots verts. The bigger problem is finding something he can pronounce without sounding like a complete idiot when it’s time to order. 

Luc returns with a bottle of wine in one hand and two small wine glasses in the other. He adds a glass to each of their place settings, produces a wine key from his apron pocket, and deftly uncorks the bottle. Tom resolves yet again to master the skill someday. He’s watched Ben open scores of bottles of wine this summer with a casual competence that’s devastatingly hot. He’ll have to practice, once he can afford the kind of wine that comes with a cork.

Luc pours a splash into Harry’s wineglass - not a full pour, just a mouthful - and lifts the bottle expectantly. Harry picks up the glass and takes a sip. His lips purse to one side, then the other. “It’s good,” he says, with a thumbs-up to Luc, and Luc tops off Harry’s class and pours for Tom. It’s like watching Harry arrange and light the candles in Ben and Meri’s bedroom - an unfamiliar ritual, one that has meaning to someone else but not to Tom.

Tom relaxes once it’s clear that the ritual doesn’t require his participation. In fact, everything’s easier once the wine’s poured and the hurdle of ordering is past. (“The pasta?” Tom says, fairly certain that there was a recognizable pasta on the menu, and Luc enthusiastically confirms.) 

Luc ties a napkin around the wine bottle and leaves it at the table, and Harry lifts his glass. “To... getting out of the house?” he says, his voice lifting in a question, as if he’s looking for Tom’s assent.

“To getting out of the house,” Tom echoes, fugitive and free. The clink of their small sturdy glasses seals the deal, audibly different from the throaty chime of the big red wine glasses at the summer house.

He really, truly has Harry to himself, without Ruby’s needs to interrupt them, without Ben and Meri to please. It’s just talking to Harry now, and it’s easy, like it used to be when it was the two of them on the lawn with Ruby, fitting in scraps of conversation while they let her pour them pretend tea. Harry’s funny, and thoughtful, and his answers are meandering, as if he starts talking without entirely knowing where he’s going to end up. His deliberate pace gives Tom enough space to think, so he never feels like he’s struggling to keep up.

“Did you take French in school?” Tom asks, after Luc delivers a basket with a baguette wrapped in a blue and white tea towel, prompting another exchange with Harry that’s part English, part French, part gestures.

“A little.” Harry separates a slice from the baguette. “But… a while ago. Too long to remember.” I stopped going when I was sixteen.”

“Really? Why?”

Harry brushes the spray of breadcrumbs to the edge of the table. “That’s when the band started. I finished up with tutors after that, so I never had to do a language.” He tears the slice of baguette over his bread plate and pops half of it in his mouth.

“So how do you…” Tom gestures back at the restaurant, toward Harry’s pals.

“Eh.” Harry chews and swallows the bite of bread. “Interviews and shows here, and we’d go out in the evenings when I was here for the film.” Harry’s mouth could carry on a whole conversation without any sound, twisting from one side to the other, corners turning up or exaggeratedly down. The tiny wine glass is dwarfed by his hand. Tom imagines a different world, one where he’d be noticing all of this for the first time, here, on a perfectly normal first date. He knows far too much about Harry’s mouth and hands for this to be a normal date. Or a date at all, really, no matter what it feels like. “You pick up phrases here and there,” Harry finishes. His rings clank against the glass when he sets it down.

“From your French ex?”  It’s impossible to think about Harry picking up French phrases without wondering about a French girl murmuring them in his ear.

Harry’s mouth quirks to one side, and he wrinkles his nose. “A little bit, I guess.”

Tom can’t stop himself from the questions he’d be asking if this was a date. A normal date where you get to know someone and try to figure out what their baggage is, whether there are any buried landmines you could blow yourself up on. “How long ago did you break up?”

Harry has to think about it. “Couple of months,” he says slowly, slow enough that Tom knows there’s more coming. “But it feels like longer. I was on tour all spring, so we were mostly long-distance.” Harry grimaces. “It didn’t work very well.”

Tom’s trying to formulate a follow-up question that will keep Harry talking, but Harry beats him to the punch. “When was your last relationship?” he asks, looking a little smug at turning the topic back around at Tom.

It’s startling to have Harry looking at him expectantly, waiting for the answer to a question like that. But he asked. He wants to know. Or he would, if this was a date. It’s getting harder to tell himself it’s not. “A year or so, I guess?” It’s hard to account for the passage of time in the outside world. “We graduated, he moved abroad for work.”

“Didn’t even try distance?”

“Nah. It was never going to be…” Tom trails off. Nicholas’s chief attributes – a smooth confidence right at the edge of dickishness, and being a head taller than Tom – were not the stuff of long-term relationships. It was a fun three months. He can’t remember if he’s texted him since Nicholas moved to New York.

Harry’s tilting his head just a bit to the side and watching Tom in a way that feels like he’s listening hard enough to hear everything Tom’s saying and some things he’s not. It’s unnerving. Tom deflects back to Harry instead of finishing his answer. If the door’s open, he’s going to ask about all the things they’d never talk about while hanging out with Ruby. “Have you ever been in a relationship with anyone who’s not a girl?”

“Eh.” Harry wavers his hand back and forth. His fingers are spread awkwardly wide around his rings. “Sort of.”

Tom’s pulse pounds in his ears. He rolls the hem of his napkin between his thumb and forefinger, pinching it into a tight point. “Sort of a relationship, or sort of not a girl?”

“Sort of a relationship.” Harry laughs like it’s not funny. “Definitely not a girl.” The way he draws out definitely creates a broad-shouldered strong-jawed kind of a picture.

“Why sort of a relationship?”

“I thought it was one, turns out he didn’t.” Harry reaches for the breadbasket and tears off the heel of the baguette with a sharp twist.

“We’ve all been there.” Tom inclines his wineglass toward Harry in a toast of sorts. “Straight guy?”

“Not too straight for me to suck his dick.” Harry smirks, but he sounds more bitter about this asshole than he does about the French girl.

“Too straight for breakfast in the morning?”

“Strangely, no.” The corner of Harry’s mouth quirks up at some remembered breakfast, and Tom wants to punch this guy. He’s not sure if it’s on Harry’s behalf or his own. “But definitely too straight to date me.”

“That put you off guys forever?” Tom tries to ask it offhandedly, leaning back in his seat, as if the answer doesn’t matter. As if it’s a casual thing to ask the guy he’s possibly on a date with if he dates guys.

“No,” Harry says, looking at Tom with an intensity Tom can’t escape, like he knows exactly how casual the question wasn’t. His voice is slow and low. “No, it didn’t.”

“Well,” Tom says, “good.” He takes a sip of wine, which turns into a gulp, because he can’t just keep looking at Harry, not when Harry’s looking at him like that. It’s like staring too long at the track of the setting sun on the sea - dazzling, disorienting.

“Yeah?” Harry asks, a note in his voice that’s pleased, maybe even hopeful.

Tom has to look at him then, beautiful and blinding, making sunspots dance in front of his eyes. “Yeah, good.” It could plausibly be an endorsement of the general concept of dating guys, a concept that Tom is broadly in favor of. But it feels a lot more specific.

 Luc picks that moment to deliver their dinner. The freighted moment is buried under steaming plates and shuffling silverware and inquiries about whether there’s anything else they need. Tom asks what Harry’s having, and Harry shares a forkful of his fish and steals a bite of Tom’s pasta, and the dinner conversation settles back into places less dangerous and thrilling.

Harry asks him about his thesis, and Tom tries to explain his graduate program to someone who has no concept of university. “When’s term start?” Harry asks.

“A week after we get back. I was supposed to go out to Croyde with my sister for a few days first, to surf.” He needs to talk to Molly about that. With an uncomfortable twinge of guilt, he remembers that he hasn’t talked to her all summer.

“Yeah?” Harry’s using his fork to separate his fish from its skin, a little bit at a time. “I’ve only ever surfed in California.”

Somehow it’s no surprise that Harry surfs. “Are you any good at it?”

“Terrible. Absolutely terrible.” Harry’s talking differently tonight, Tom realizes. He’s missing his usual loose-limbed big gestures, punctuating jokes with jerky swoops of his arms. But his hands are still constantly in motion, hovering in front of him, index finger jabbing to make a point, gestures weighted with his rings. “It’s hard there, though. Rough. You get pretty beat up.”

 “Do you have a house there?”

“Eh,” Harry pauses. “Sort of.” 

Tom snorts. “Sort of a house? Is that like sort of dating?”

Harry’s eyes widen a bit, like the joke hit too close to home. “I have the house… I have some stuff there… it just never really felt like I moved in. I usually stay with friends. Sometimes Ben and Meredith. I was staying with my girlfriend a lot, but…” Harry shrugs and takes a sip of wine.

Tom watches his lips against the wineglass and casts about for a change in subject. The reference to the Winstons reminds him. “What’s your and Ben’s show about?”

“It’s only sort of mine,” Harry says, and Tom can’t help laughing. Harry waves him off as soon as he realizes. “All right, all right, I get it,” and Tom laughs again. “But Ben and James put it together, mostly,” Harry says. “James Corden.”

Tom nods. It’s strange to think of Harry working with famous people. Ben must, with the kind of work that he does. Harry must, too. 

“It’s kind of based on when I lived with Ben and Meredith.” Harry rubs his thumb and forefinger over the thick stem of his wineglass. “But, like, not really. Just, sort of, loosely inspired. Popstar moves in with regular married couple…” Harry waves his hand in an etcetera kind of way.

Tom snorts. “So it’s X-rated, then?”

That shocks a laugh out of Harry. “God, no.” He presses his face into the palm of his hand and then looks back up at Tom, offended. “I was, like, a kid.”

A stray branch from the top of the wall is arched above Harry’s head. The Winstons feel far away from their birds nest here in the corner of the garden, snug between stone walls. “When, then?”

The candlelight catches on Harry’s rings as he reaches for his wineglass. “A while ago,” he says. “Like three years, maybe four? But, like, all before Ruby.” He doesn’t take a sip, just draws the glass closer on the tabletop and traces the tip of his finger in a half-circle around the base of the stem. “I was jealous of you, when I got here.”

“Yeah, sure,” Tom says easily. There’s no reason for Harry, rich and good-looking and favored, to be jealous of Tom. But when he thinks back to the week Harry arrived, it was a different Harry. Strutting around the pool, smug and mocking him from the dais of the master bed. Tom had all but forgotten the Harry who found Tom’s sore spot and poked at it, throwing his insecurities about the murky line between his job and his sex life in his face. He wonders whether it was unintentional, or whether Harry saw him that clearly from the start. But the question seems academic. He trusts the Harry he knows now - Harry insisting he drive, Harry towing Ruby around the pool, Harry sprawling on the couch for a romcom - not to do it again.

“No, I was.” Harry drags his finger slowly back and forth in a crescent along the base of the wineglass. “It had been... a while, and I thought they were just like, past it. Because of the baby or whatever. But then, it was kind of like, oh, obviously, they weren’t.”

How… Tom wants to ask, but he can’t quite get the question past his lips. How Harry knew. Whether Tom was painfully, embarrassingly obvious. Or whether Harry had to be told. The thought of the three of them discussing it, talking about him, makes him want to sink through his chair into the garden pavers. Welcome, Harry, glad you could visit. By the way, we’re sleeping with the au pair.

“But it all worked out, right?” Harry's voice brightens, exaggerated, and he waggles his hands out to both sides, like he’s just pulled off a magic trick. Ta-dah.

His smile’s big enough, bright enough, that Tom stops looking for the hidden trapdoor, the trick mirror, the scarf hidden up his sleeve. “Maybe it did.” Harry’s smiling back at him over the wine bottle and the empty breadbasket and the bud vase with its sprig of yellow flowers, and maybe it’s as easy as Harry makes it out to be. Maybe it all worked out.

Harry slides one foot forward under the table. “How did it happen?” Tom can feel the moment of connection when Harry rests his foot against the side of his boot, but he can’t tell through the sturdy leather whether Harry keeps it there. “With you, I mean. How did it, like, start?”

“I don’t know,” Tom says automatically. “How does anything happen?” It’s a lie. He remembers every single moment, every small smile of Meredith’s, every touch of Ben’s hand on his shoulder, each incremental stretch of the rubber band pulled tighter and tighter until the satisfying snap.

Lingering in the kitchen after dinner, leaning just a bit too hard against Ben’s side. Bracing his hands against the countertop and tipping his head back against Ben’s shoulder as Ben brought him off. Closing his eyes against the intensity of Meredith’s oversight, chin propped on her palm across the island.

Ben had kissed him after, firm and confident, sliding his tongue into Tom’s mouth, prolonging the shivery reverberations still thrumming through Tom’s body. Meredith brushed his hair back from his forehead and kissed his temple and told him they’d see him in the morning. Then she and Ben disappeared upstairs, leaving Tom confused and desperate and elated. He’d wanted to do something, to be of use. He hadn’t actually understood until the other night, when he and Harry were kicked out of the bedroom, what they were using him for.

Harry’s looking at him expectantly. Tom gives him an honest answer, but probably not the spicy answer Harry really wants. “We were dancing.”

“Dancing?”

“I did ballroom and Latin back in school. Like, competitions.” He was a national champion, not that Harry needs to know.

Harry cocks his head to the side and looks at him consideringly. “That doesn’t surprise me.”

“Why?” It’s Tom’s most surprising thing, really, the ace that always makes everyone else drink when they’re playing two truths and a lie. I’m afraid of balloons, I’ve never broken a bone, I’m a champion ballroom dancer. Everyone always assumes that’s the lie. He can mix it up after this summer, though. He’s got some more unlikely truths now.

“You walk like a dancer, like… how you move.” Harry circles his wrist aimlessly, his fingers spread open, as if the explanation is a bird that will light in his upturned palm if he’s patient. “It’s like… you’ve always got everything under control.”

Tom laughs, startled. “I can’t believe you think that. I don’t have anything under control.”

“Yes you do.” Harry leans back in his chair and stretches his legs out, hooking his foot around Tom’s ankle. “You always know what to do with Ruby. Ben and Meredith love you.” Harry tilts his head forward in a way that makes Tom feel more intensely examined, like Harry’s turned up the focus. “I can’t ever tell what you’re thinking. That’s control.” His voice gets lower, slower on the last syllables. Tom watches his lips move around the words.

He flushes at the thought of Harry observing him, forming opinions, liking the way he moves, wondering what he’s thinking. “I don’t have anything about you under control,” he says, and realizes too late it sounds more like a confession than a statement of fact. 

He watches Harry carefully for a reaction. His mouth is so big that Tom can see the smile spreading over it, like watching a sunrise. The corners turning up, dimples blooming. “Yeah?”

There’s probably a joke that could water it down. An explanation that he meant Harry’s a force of nature completely outside the realm of Tom’s influence, not that Tom can’t control the dizzying intensity of the way he feels about Harry. Tom doesn’t take the out. “Yeah,” he acknowledges, face burning and Harry’s smile seeping through his veins like a serum.

The moment’s broken by Luc’s arrival, clearing their plates and asking how the meal was. “Wonderful,” Harry says, very seriously. “Thank you.” He looks as if he’d shake hands again, if their plates weren’t in the way.

Their host returns a moment later and holds out a small square menu to each of them. Harry pauses before taking it, looking at Tom. “Do you want dessert?” 

Tom hasn’t had dessert all summer. The entire genre doesn’t exist in the Winstons’ diet. He hadn’t thought to miss it. He could take it or leave it tonight. No, he’s about to say, and maybe even take me home, because he’s far more greedy for that than he is for tarte tatin. But going home with Harry still means going home, where the sound of Harry’s tires in the driveway will mean something to someone else. Where Tom will follow Harry into the main house, or Harry will follow him up the carriage house stairs, and either way someone else will know. As long as they’re here, tucked in their quiet corner of the garden as the evening fades to twilight, Harry only belongs to him.

“Sure,” Tom says, and orders creme brulee. Harry asks about the sorbet on the menu, and after a spirited discussion with Luc that doesn’t seem to result in much additional information about the two flavors, orders them both.

Of course Harry wants it all, wants everything at once, flings himself at it without a second thought. His perpetual too-muchness is the thing that’s most compelling to Tom, who can’t imagine being too much because he’s always trying to be just right. It’s all backwards that Tom saw it first in bed - Harry unselfconsciously sensation-seeking, wanting everything, pulling everyone with him, needing to be overwhelmed - and only now is he seeing it applied to something as prosaic as ice cream. But that doesn’t mean he can’t give Harry a hard time. “Is it that hard to choose?”

“Fuck off,” Harry says, cheerfully. “I love ice cream, I’ve barely had it this summer. Meredith doesn’t eat it.”

“What’s your favorite flavor?” Tom asks, and they’re still on the subject when dessert arrives, Tom defending simplicity and Harry enthusing about flavors of ice cream that Tom’s never even conceived of.

Harry’s trying to explain something called chocolate honeycomb when it happens. His eyes flick away from Tom, midsentence, catching on something over Tom’s right shoulder.

Tom waits silently, willing Harry’s attention back to him. He refuses to look. He’s not going to dignify this distraction by looking at it. He’s only going to project waves of hatred directly from his shoulder blades.

“Sorry.” Harry focuses back on him.

“Um…” Tom can’t remember what Harry was saying. As he tries to reorient himself, Harry looks away again, toward the back of the restaurant. “What’s…”

“Don’t turn around.” Harry says it casually, but Tom freezes all the same, as if Harry’s only going to give him back his attention if he’s good enough. Harry’s expression hardens into a stare, the intensity like a bullet directed straight over Tom’s shoulder. He shakes his head slowly from side to side, just once. Telling somebody no.

“What’s going on?” Tom’s neck is tense with the effort of not looking at whatever is drawing Harry’s displeasure.

“It’s not a big deal,” Harry says, but his shoulders are pulled up and in. “Somebody recognized me.”

“Someone you know?” Tom wonders who Harry could possibly know here, but apparently this afternoon was enough time for him to become the adopted son of a French restaurant. He could have made any number of other friends. Or not friends, based on his reaction.

“No.” Harry’s fishing in his pocket. “Did you see those girls, inside? Two of them.”

“I think so?” Tom vaguely remembers the big table, the holiday families, the girls in sundresses and glossy ponytails.

“They were trying to take a picture just now.”

“Of what?” The garden’s not that picturesque. He and Harry aren’t that interesting; to anyone not inside Tom’s head, they probably just look like two guys having dinner. Tom’s stomach tightens, his ever-present instinct for hostility kicking in. The heightened awareness that picks up on the bellow of “you cocksucker!” from across the pub and leaves him wondering whether the thick-necked guys in the booth are insulting each other, or whether it means Tom’s sitting too close to his boyfriend on their barstools.  Whether the shoulder check in the crowd transferring trains was accidental or whether it had something to do with the rainbow flag pin on his bag.

“Me.” Harry says it matter-of-factly, like this is just the course of things.

Tom gapes. He wonders why Luc and Anne-Marie aren’t stopping this, but that seems rude to ask.

Harry shrugs. “It happens.” He takes his hand out of his pocket with thumb tucked under his fingers, concealing something.  “Although I would have preferred not tonight.” He cups his palm on the tablecloth and slides it across to Tom, stopping at the tip of Tom’s unused salad fork. When it’s safely in Tom’s space, blocked by his body from view of anyone inside the restaurant, Harry lifts his fingers to reveal the black block of the car key. “I’m going to go take care of it. If you don’t want to… you know...” Harry makes a gesture that Tom can’t quite make sense of. Maybe it means you don’t want to deal with this. “You can meet me at the car.”

Harry cocks his head a bit to the left, and flicks his eyes in the same direction. Tom follows and sees a narrow wooden gate leading out to the alleyway behind the restaurant. Harry nudges the car key further toward Tom with a fingertip, clinking it against the tines of his fork. “I’ll get them inside.”

Harry’s chair screeches against the paving stones, and then there’s nothing left of him but the last melty bits of sorbet in their dish. Tom stares at the empty space and the garden wall behind it.

He can hear when Harry reaches the girls. “Hello,” he says, gravelly and plain, like that’s a reasonable way to greet someone taking photos of you at a restaurant. “I’m Harry.” There’s a noise in response - wordless, high-pitched - and Tom shoves his chair back and grabs the car key.

The garden gate has a funny latch. Tom fumbles and slaps at it and a moment later he’s alone with the bins in the narrow space between the buildings. It’s fully nighttime back here, unmitigated by the fairy lights and candles of the garden. He slumps back against the wall to get his bearings. He was almost on a date. No, not almost, not by the end of it, not with Harry hooking his ankle around Tom’s as his smile bloomed in the candlelight. It felt like a good date, like a date that could go somewhere. And now he’s hiding in an alley, banished to sit in the car like a child.

Tom picks his way to the end of the alley and circles back around to the car, passing closed storefronts. There are planting baskets hanging from the lamp posts along the street. Droplets from under the pink and red flowers spatter on the cobblestones, as if someone’s recently been through for an evening watering, but the street is empty.

The car blinks its tail lights at him as Tom approaches, before he even looks at the buttons on the key fob, but the door handle on the passenger side won’t yield to him. He’s not going to take the driver’s seat. He doesn’t understand what’s going on, and the last thing he needs is to be in charge of the car. He stabs mindlessly at the unlock button and wrenches at the handle, letting his efforts cancel each other out until he takes a breath and lets the door go long enough for the lock to work.

The passenger seat’s still dropped back the way that Harry set it, a languor that’s entirely inconsistent with Tom’s mood. He sits up and jams his thumb against the lever beside the seat until it rises up to meet his rigid spine. The car key’s still smooth in his palm, like a river stone begging to be skipped. He presses the button at the corner and flicks the key out, snaps it back into place, again and again until Harry rustles through the ivy and opens the driver’s door.

“Sorry about that.” Harry sits and then swings his long legs into the seat through the narrow opening.

Tom holds the car key out to him.

“I had to…” Harry backs out of the parking space, smooth and quick, offering an explanation Tom hadn’t yet asked for. “Usually if you ask people… they’re pretty cool about it, if you ask them not to post anything, or at least they’ll wait a few days.”

Tom remembers Meredith’s warning about social media and understands now that it wasn’t just about privacy. In a few days Harry will be gone, off to Italy, or wherever. It won’t matter if anyone posts a picture of him in a French bistro, because he’ll be in Italy, or LA, or something. Somewhere far from Tom.

He pictures Harry talking to the girls, to their parents maybe, trying to convince them to keep his secret. “Does that happen to you a lot?”

“Sometimes.” Harry accelerates as they leave the village behind. The engine responds like it’s eager for the challenge, humming through the gears, smooth and powerful. Soon there’s nothing but their headlights and the road dipping in front of them.

There’s something Harry’s not saying. He’s distant, and Tom’s resentful and confused, and the evening’s ruined. Tom’s used to Harry’s silences. Usually they’re expectant, like he’s waiting for Tom to say something. That’s not how this one feels. Harry’s focused somewhere else entirely, or inside his own head.

Tom presses his cheek against the window. There’s a half moon making its way up over the hills. It’s golden, promising autumn. The same color as the creme brulee. The spray of stars around it seems chilly.

“Hey,’ Harry says, as they turn into the lane toward the house. “I don’t know if you’re on Instagram or whatever.” The hedge looms in front of them, lit up by the headlights. Gravel crunches as Harry pulls into the circle drive. “But you might want to go on private for a little while. Instagram, Twitter, whatever.”

“Okay,” Tom says cautiously. “Um. Why?”

Harry kills the engine. “If they post pictures, and anybody knows who you are…” The car’s lights go dark in front of them and the house winks out of view, shrunk to the small circle of the front porch light. “It can get a little weird, is all.”

“Weird like how?” Harry’s profile is shadowed next to him, lit from the front porch so Tom can’t see his face.

“Just… a lot of comments. People messaging you.” Tom doesn’t have to see Harry’s face to know there’s still something he’s not saying.

He undoes his seat belt and opens the car door. “Thanks for…” Suddenly Tom realizes he completely missed the tab when Harry shuffled him off down the alley. “Shit, did you pay for dinner? Let me give you some cash.” He fumbles for his wallet, even as he realizes it’s futile, he has no cash, has had no reason to carry any cash at all this summer.

“No, I got it.” Harry touches his arm.

Tom flinches without meaning to. Harry’s fingertips raise goosebumps up and down his arm, but Tom can’t get past the contrast between the warmth of their dinner and the reserve of the drive home. “You don’t have to do that.”

“I want to.” Harry drops his hand to his lap. “I had a nice time.” It’s polite, formal, a world away from Harry’s smile across the table and the pressure of his foot against Tom’s ankle. Harry’s not going to kiss him, and the obviousness of that fact fills the car, forcing all the air out of the small space.

“I did too.” Tom heaves himself out of the door. “Thank you.”

He looks back before he lets himself into the sanctuary of the carriage house. Harry’s still sitting in the car. Tom can’t imagine what he’s thinking about. 

He slumps back against the door after it closes behind him and lets the wild swing of emotions catch up with him. How, how did this evening get so fucked up. He trudges up the stairs. It’s not late, but he’s exhausted.

At the desk, he shoves aside a stack of photocopied sources and peels the sticky note with his most recent thesis to-do list off the screen of his laptop. Once the aging operating system comes to life, he opens his Instagram for the first time all summer. The photo at the top corner of his grid is from May, the day he and Carl cobbled together some packed lunches from the odds and ends in their fridge and drove out to Brighton. The selfie shows the wind off the sea blowing their hair to one side, chilly spring sunshine pale on their faces. There’s a new comment from Carl underneath it, a couple of weeks old. last known picture of tommy before his disappearance, rip.

Tom clicks quickly into his settings to get away from the post. He can’t deal with the guilt on top of everything else tonight. He ticks the box to set his account to private, and then hovers the cursor over the search box. Fuck it. harry, he types, and before he can get to the s the drop-down’s already offering him two different blue checks in Harry's name. For fuck’s sake. How is he the first Harry to come up? There’s a fucking prince.

Tom whistles at the follower count before scrolling down the page in Harry’s name. It’s impersonal, all professional-looking photos of Harry onstage and backstage. But aside from his bright costume-y suits, Tom recognizes all of it: the expansive way Harry flings his arms around, the unselfconscious lines of his body. His smiles, small and smug or wide and beaming. Harry shoving clothes into the same luggage Tom’s seen on the floor of his room.

All of it feels like the Harry he knows, until further down the page the camera pulls back to show Harry onstage, spotlit, the focal point of an entire arena filled with lights. Tom zooms in and blinks at it a few times, unsure if he’s seeing it right. It’s disorienting, like the time he opened the door to what he thought was the closet in Ruby’s nursery in London and it turned out to be an entire bathroom practically the size of his flat. 

He backs out and keeps scrolling down. More arenas, more crowds, more of the dizzying telescoping of Tom’s sense of scale, until he screeches to a halt at Harry on the cover of Rolling fucking Stone? After opening the post to make sure it’s not a joke, Tom abandons Instagram and types harry styles rolling stone into the search bar.

Instead of a fancy bathroom, it’s like he’s opened the closet door and found Narnia. One Direction, for fuck’s sake. Tom’s pretty sure Molly had their posters on her bedroom wall years ago. Somebody should have told him. Meredith should have warned him. Harry should have warned him. Tom’s mad, all of a sudden, about every story Harry’s told him about traveling. He’ll talk about the pasta he ate in Milan, the art museum he went to in Spain, the funny name of the soda backstage in Japan, and none of it’s given Tom any sense that the reason Harry’s been all over the place is that he has millions and millions of fans. Who will, apparently, sell his puke on eBay. Tom’s been wasting a revenue stream. Bet he could have gotten top dollar for the bodily fluid he’s had access to this summer.

Tom stands up and flexes his palms against the edge of the desk. Bent over the laptop, braced as if it might punch him, he keeps reading. Harry’s first album, Harry’s new band, Harry driving around Los Angeles in a Range Rover. He remembers Harry deflecting his question about what he drives at home. I have more than one. He should have asked. Maybe he would have learned enough to keep his guard up, not to get deluded by a candlelit dinner and a smile that felt like it was just for him.

The punch comes from an unexpected quarter. “Family,” answers Ben Winston. Tom jerks upright as if he’s been caught. He hadn’t thought googling Harry would lead him to Ben, but how naive that was. Of course they have a whole relationship in the outside world. One that Rolling Stone interviews them about, for fuck’s sake. Tom reads on, stomach quivering, as Ben brags about Harry moving into his attic, talks about Meredith, how they’d be in bed waiting for Harry to come home. All the girls Harry would bring with him.

Oh.

He’d thought he was pressing his luck tonight, asking Harry about his past relationships, ferreting out hopeful crumbs about his sexuality. What poverty of imagination. They’d even talked about his past with Ben and Meredith, and Tom never thought to put two and two together. Quite literally. What an idiot, to think he’s been the only one.

Tom abandons Rolling Stone, which doesn’t know shit, and searches harry styles girlfriend. The top result is the most recent, a tabloid headline. Model Camille Rowe and Harry Styles split after just over a year together. Ah. The French ex-girlfriend. Tom opens a new tab, leaving behind search results that promised a longer history of supermodels. The results of his camille rowe image search are all blonde hair and tanned skin and many more pictures of tits than Tom might have expected without intentionally searching for porn. He can acknowledge, objectively and painfully, that they are very nice tits. He wonders what Meredith thought. He wonders how it worked. Whether she went down on Meredith, what Meredith allowed Ben to do to her.

Fuck it. He switches to harry styles boyfriend. There’s more in the image search than Tom would have expected. He rejects Nick Grimshaw, who’s definitely gay enough to have a boyfriend. He spends a while on Louis Tomlinson, but the sources are too weird, the images too blurry and doctored, the rhetoric too strident. Something about it feels off. 

But there it is, well down the page. Harry and a guy hunched over their menus at a restaurant. Casual, like it’s brunch. Harry’s got long hair, but his sunglasses are pinning it back same as ever. Tom makes a mental note to follow up on the long hair after the extensive google search he’s about to conduct on Xander “definitely not a girl” Ritz.

Half an hour later Tom’s got a better idea of why Harry banished him to the car and told him to private his insta. He snaps the lid of his laptop shut, burying tumblr timelines and paparazzi pics and Harry flirting with his straight guy crush in front of entire goddamned stadiums of fans. None of it matters.

He unlaces his boots and throws them halfheartedly toward the corner of the room. One of them leaves a scuff mark against the creamy walls but Tom can’t bring himself to care. The security deposit isn’t his.

He brushes his teeth without looking in the mirror and turns out the lights without slitting the blinds to see if Harry’s still in his car. In bed, he curls on his side with the duvet up to his ear and tries to calm down, to talk some sense into himself.

He’s sealed himself in the idyllic bubble of the summer so effectively, resolutely refusing to think about what his life will be like once the summer’s over. The summer house has been his world, small and complete and perfect. Harry disrupted it, until he was absorbed into it, and Tom’s forgotten that Harry exists outside the bubble too. He’s understood only generally that Harry’s rich like the Winstons are rich, and that Harry’s a musician. Here, where there’s nothing to spend money on, he’s had no reason to connect the dots, to realize that if Harry’s money comes from music, Harry must be a big deal. The kind of big deal who gets stalked at restaurants. The kind of big deal that dates supermodels. There’s an entire world of Harry out there, an entire world that Harry and Ben fit into together, and Tom was crazy to ever think he had a place in it.

[ferryboatpeak]

chapter 6.1

find all previous installments of french countryside tomrry here. thanks to @lunarrua​ for sticking with this verse! we’re in the home stretch (although first we’ve got a little more angst and miscommunication to get through)

***

The rest of the night is fractured. Some protective instinct jerks Tom awake whenever he feels himself slipping into a dream. Harry tiptoes back into the room, trying not to wake Tom, and Tom doesn’t reveal his efforts are futile. In between jagged stretches of sleep, he stares hard at the contours of the room, waiting for the first signs that grey dawn is bringing them into view. When the light’s only just turned, Ben’s footsteps pass through the hallway. Tom waits for the reverberation of the front door closing behind him, and slides out of Harry’s bed as soon as it does.

As he gingerly steps from the rug onto the creaky floor, Harry sighs in his sleep. Tom freezes for a moment, but there’s no movement other than the slow resettling of Harry’s shoulders, black and grey in the dawn. He tiptoes toward the door and slips out before Harry can stir again.

In the kitchen, he flicks on the back burner and leans on the windowsill while he waits for the kettle to boil. Wind scallops the surface of the pool. The morning is grayer than usual, dampened by a layer of clouds. No wonder it seemed almost still dark when Ben got up for his workout.

Tom carries his coffee up to the carriage house and digs into a new section of his thesis, feeling productive. It’s easier to focus without dazzling blue sky. Or easier to focus when the next meeting with his advisor suddenly seems perilously close. He’s got to have some evidence of productivity, some way to avoid any questions about what distracted him this summer.

Grey skies make it easier to get Ruby out and about as well. They’ve mostly been spending daytime in the shade or in the pool, with the weather too hot to bicycle on the exposed country roads. It’s a good day to bike into the village and kill some time at the playground.

The hypnotic rhythm of pushing Ruby on the swing lets Tom’s mind wander. He can’t figure out when it started to seem like the summer would last forever. At first, every time with Ben and Meri felt like it could be the last time. Tom assumed that at some point they’d come to their senses, or simply get tired of him, and the whole thing would be neatly boxed up and put away, just a memory for Tom to pull out of storage to be occasionally marveled at. But he lost track of that pessimism sometime after Harry arrived. 

It’s going to end, he reminds himself now, and considers -- for the first time -- the possibility that it’s not going to end neatly. They blocked him out so easily last night. They can do it again. Harry can, too. What if everyone else locks the summer house behind them and walks away, and Tom’s still trying to stuff too much debris into a too-small packing carton?

A ray of sun spears through a gap in the clouds, hitting the slide on the other side of the playground. As Tom pushes Ruby again and again, the gap widens, and the patch of sunshine spreads across the bark chips to the swings. The clouds are thinning and receding. He gives Ruby one last push and walks around the end of the swingset to catch her at the top of her arc. “Gotcha!” 

Ruby squeals, and Tom makes a noise that could charitably be interpreted as an airplane descending as he lowers the swing. “We’re going to head for home before it gets too hot, all right?” He boosts Ruby out of the swing and lets her toddle across the playground. As she takes a circuitous path back to the bicycle, climbing up and over the park’s two play structures on the way, Tom glances up at the rapidly brightening sky. He didn’t bother to bring sun cream. Ruby’s got a cardigan on, but her legs are bare. He’s going to race the sun home, and he’s going to lose.

The last scraps of cloud wisp away on the horizon as they reach the edge of the village. Once they leave its narrow streets behind, there’s no respite from the sun. It weighs on the back of his neck like an oven-baked brick. Sweat trickles down his breastbone. Ruby’s whimpering and squirming in her seat, unhappy in her cardigan and helmet and ready for a nap besides. Her displeasure increases the longer they’re on the road. None of Tom’s soothing platitudes -- we’ll be home soon, we’ll get in the pool, think how nice it will be to splash in the cool water -- are enough to keep her from disintegrating into tears when they’re still a good distance away from the house. 

Ruby tugs at her helmet, digging her fingers under the strap. Tom clamps one hand flat on top of the helmet, preventing her from pulling it askew. He braces the other against the handlebars as he pedals the last couple of kilometers as fast as he can, breathing hard, straight up the driveway and onto the terrace. He leaves the bike at the side of the house and unbuckles Ruby from her seat. She wails in his arms. “Almost there,” he tells her, working one arm out of her cardigan as he walks.

Harry’s swimming laps, churning through the water fast enough that he ought to be oblivious to their arrival. But Tom cringes at the sight of Meredith on one of the lounges, typing something on her phone. She looks up at the sound of Ruby crying.

“Everything okay?” She sets her phone to the side and shifts as if she’s about to get up.

“Just hot and tired.” Tom snatches up Ruby’s swimsuit from the chair where he laid it out to dry yesterday. “Thought I’d get her in the water to cool off before her nap.” The swimsuit falls out of his hand as Tom fumbles with the straps on her sandals. He bites back an expletive. Poor thing, she’s so uncomfortable and Meredith must see it’s all Tom’s fault. He misjudged the weather; he gave in to the compulsion to put some space between himself and the compound.

Tom makes himself slow down and pop the snaps on Ruby’s romper one by one with his thumbnail instead of ripping them open by the handful. He leaves her clothes and nappy in a heap on the flagstones and wrestles her into the swimsuit, cursing inwardly at how hard it is to tug up the tight casing and fit her arms through the straps. He’s too nervous to look over at Meredith, but she must be watching him, losing more faith in him every second that Ruby’s still crying.

Once Ruby’s finally kitted out, Tom picks her up by her armpits and lowers her onto the top step of the pool. “See, isn’t this better?” Ruby sniffles and reaches down to pat at the surface of the water around her knees. “Good,” Tom encourages. “All cool now.”

When she stops crying, Tom lets her stand in the water on her own so he can strip off his shoes and ball up his sweaty socks to stuff inside. He sits on the edge of the pool and rests his feet underwater on the top step. It doesn’t come close to cooling him off, but it’s a start. Ruby wobbles forward and Tom hauls her back with an arm around her waist before she plunges toward the second step down. 

Next to them, Harry finishes a lap and spots Ruby when he comes up for air. “Hello!” He flips his hair out of his face with a shower of droplets. Plunging forward towards Ruby, he gapes a wide smile at her. “Can I?” he asks Tom, making grabby hands toward the baby. When Tom nods, he swoops her up and carries her deeper, bobbing her up and down in the water to the tune of Baby Shark.

Tom leans to the side and dips a handful of water to splash over his face. He rests his hand on the back of his neck and closes his eyes, letting the last few cool drops trickle down his collar.  He can hear Harry halfway down the pool, swishing Ruby back and forth and parroting her delighted screeches back at her.

Tom splashes another handful over his face. When he wipes his eyes, Harry’s looking at him. “You should come in,” he calls.

“I’ve got to put her down.” Tom beckons for Ruby, who’s smiling and soaked in Harry’s arms. “If she’s cooled off, I can take her.”

“I’ve got it.” Meredith’s walking toward him, sandals smacking on the flagstones. “Have a swim, I’ll put her down.”

“Are you sure?” Tom gets to his feet. He’s on duty; he’s supposed to be sparing Meredith that kind of stuff. He can’t do anything right lately, anything to show them he can be trusted. He couldn’t have picked a worse day to take Ruby out in the sun.

“Of course.” Meredith waves him back down. She shakes out a blue and white striped towel from the basket by the door and holds it open. “Come on, love.”

Harry sloshes to the side of the pool and passes Ruby up to Meredith. She bundles her in the towel and kisses the top of her head as she carries her toward the house. Tom’s eyes follow until the kitchen door closes behind them.

“What are you waiting for?” Harry smacks the surface of the water, splashing Tom’s knees and the hem of his shorts, jerking his attention back to the pool.

Tom stands up and kicks water back at him. “Let me get my trunks.” He’s got to swim now, it’s what Meredith’s expecting. It’ll be nice to cool off, anyway, if he can manage not to freak out about Meredith taking Ruby. He starts toward the carriage house.

The baking flagstones are warm under his wet feet as he walks down the long side of the pool. His line of footprints starts to evaporate behind him before he’s even reached the deep end. Suddenly, something splashes out of the water and smacks into his back, soaking his shirt and sending trickles down his calves. Tom jumps at the shock and the soggy mess that’s hit him lands on the flagstones with a splat.

“Take mine.” Harry’s grinning up at him from the pool when he turns around. His swimsuit is puddled at Tom’s feet. Water seeps out over the flagstones and trickles warm under Tom’s toes. Harry bobs upright, keeping himself afloat with lazy breaststroke arms. He stretches an arm toward the shallows and kicks on his side The refraction of the water distorts the particulars of his body below the surface, but as he kicks on his side toward the shallows, the unbroken stretch of skin from his shoulder through his hip down to his paddling feet seems impossibly long.

“Fucker.” Tom peels the wet patch of his shirt away from his back and strips it off.

Harry cackles. He’s standing chest-deep in the middle of the pool, shaking the water out of his hair like an irish setter. Naked. A moment ago he had a swimsuit and now he’s naked, and urging Tom into the water. Tom kicks awkwardly out of his shorts and boxers, wishing he had Harry’s talent for stripping in a flash.

He leaves his clothes tangled on the flagstones behind him and launches himself into the pool with a running start. His cannonball hits the mark: right next to Harry, splashing him full in the face. Harry’s yelp cuts off as the water closes over Tom’s head. The dust and sweat of the bike ride melt away and he immediately feels good, good, equilibrium restored, buoyant.

He surfaces into the sunshine, wiping his eyes and blowing droplets off his lips. Harry’s sunk down into the water. He watches Tom with dangerous eyes just above the surface, lurking like a crocodile. Just as Tom catches his breath, Harry shoots upwards and strikes, shoving him down into the water with a firm hand at the base of his neck. 

The abruptness of the force is euphoric. Being overpowered by Harry gives him a counterintuitive strength, a sense of confidence in his body. He wonders if he could have resisted if Harry hadn’t caught him by surprise, or if Harry’s strong enough to duck him either way. He digs his heel into Harry’s side, and comes up slicing his arm over the surface, swamping Harry with a wave.

Harry lunges at him, sputtering. Tom tries to dodge, but Harry traps him under his arm in a headlock and ducks him under the surface again. Harry’s advantages are apparent: he’s got a couple of inches on Tom, and all that planking he does must be good for something. Tom tries to straighten up, but it’s impossible to force his way out of Harry’s grip.

Finally, he manages to wriggles his arm out from where it’s pinned against Harry’s side. He drives his elbow back into Harry’s stomach. Harry drops him, and Tom gets his footing, splashing backwards out of range.

Harry flicks his wet hair back from his face. “Think you can take me?” The surface of the water bisects his butterfly tattoo, distorting the bottom half of its wings. 

“Not ruling it out yet.” Tom circles him slowly, moving to shallower water to limit Harry’s height advantage. He thinks back to wrestling with Molly when they were kids. He never managed to outmatch her by much despite having three years and two stone on her. What was his little sister’s secret weapon?

As soon as it comes to him, he darts toward Harry and jams his fingers into Harry’s armpit. Harry shrieks and doubles over, trapping Tom’s hand but not so tightly that Tom can’t wiggle his fingers just enough for an effective tickle. He hooks his other elbow around Harry’s neck. Maybe he can’t duck him, but he’s got an idea for some pro wrestling kind of move, throwing himself backwards to drag Harry underwater with him.

To do that, he needs his other arm to reinforce the headlock. But as soon as Tom wrenches his hand out of Harry’s armpit and grabs his wrist to lock Harry’s neck in the crook of his elbow, Harry recovers. He stands up into Tom’s grip, forcing Tom upright with him, his arms still linked around Harry’s neck.

Tom tries to throw himself to the side, but the angle’s all wrong now. Harry’s impossible to move. All he’s done is put his face in dangerous proximity to Harry’s. Still, he hangs on to the headlock, hoping to salvage his advantage somehow.

Harry doesn’t immediately throw him off, although he probably could. He shifts his body slowly against Tom’s so they’re chest to chest as well as face to face. All the warmth in Tom’s body pools in his belly so he shivers in the water. Harry can probably feel it. Tom keeps his arms locked around Harry’s neck anyway.

Harry tilts his head closer, eyes on Tom’s, leaving just enough space between their mouths for Tom to fill with a no. Tom doesn’t breathe, doesn’t move except to tip his chin just enough to anticipate the angle where Harry’s mouth will find his. Later, his memory builds in sound effects: the deafening concussion of an explosion, a high whine of acceleration, a conflagration’s roar. Something to match the feeling of everything breaking wide open. Something more than the insistent catch and release of their lips and the water lapping softly at their skin.

Harry’s big hands skid down his back underwater and spread over the dip at the base of his spine, pressing Tom’s hips against his. He’s like a drain, funneling all the water in the pool toward him, drawing Tom inexorably up in the current. Tom tightens his grip and he’s still not close enough, not until he pulls his legs up to wrap around Harry’s waist. 

Harry staggers back a step under his weight. In a panic, Tom tries to kick away, but Harry’s got his hands under Tom’s arse, holding him up. He lurches sideways, crashing Tom against the long side of the pool, not letting their mouths part.

Tom gasps at the welcome force of Harry pressing him tightly into the pool wall. Caught, he surrenders his hold on Harry, letting his legs drop and his hands wander, pressing his thumbs into the damp hollows beneath Harry’s collarbones, wrapping his fingers in the wet tail of hair at the nape of Harry’s neck. The low hum in Harry’s throat almost sounds like relief.

The midday sun scorches the top of Tom’s head, sucking the moisture out of his hair so it tightens on his scalp. He’s going to burn up from the top down, heat the water around him to boiling and dissolve into it. Harry’s mouth skates past the edge of his lips and under his jaw, tracking kisses along the line of his jawbone. Tom drops his head back to open his neck to Harry.

It doesn’t feel like a competition any more, not like it did when they were wrestling a moment ago. Not like it did the first time they were together, Tom just as outmatched in the turf war for the Winstons’ bed as he was at wrestling. It feels like they both want to be here, to do this, even if there’s nothing to prove. Even if nobody’s watching.

Unless. Unless someone is. With his head tipped back, the window of the master bedroom hovers in the corner of his vision. Meredith could be there. Watching. Maybe with her hand between her legs like she does sometimes when she’s watching Ben fuck.

The instinct to flinch, to deflect, to cover up, registers as something foreign. In less than two months he’s almost conditioned himself out of the instinct that intimacy should be private. He leans into the buried reflex, testing its limits. With his arms wrapped around Harry and Harry’s mouth at his throat, it doesn’t seem impossible that it could be just the two of them.  Maybe there’s nothing wrong with wanting that. He tucks his chin so he can brush his lips against Harry’s cheekbone, nudging their faces together until Harry lifts his head to kiss him again, again.

He wishes Meredith wasn’t watching, before remembering he’s got no way to know whether she is or not. It registers as a chilly trickle down the pool wall behind him: what if she’s not watching them, but she’s meant to be? This could be exactly what she expected, when she told him to have a swim with Harry, right in the middle of his workday. If they’re meant to be putting on a show, have they left enough time for her to get the baby down? Or are they supposed to be waiting for her, warming up the pool before she joins them. What if this is the au pair equivalent of stealing paper clips from the office supply closet, or pouring a shot from the bar while he’s closing at the restaurant? As if him getting off is a commodity his employer’s entitled to. Suddenly he remembers Harry leering at him from the Winstons’ bed. Off the books? Or is this actually your job? The flagstones at the edge of the pool scrape his back. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands anymore.

“What?” Harry’s hand falls from Tom’s face as soon as Tom goes still.

He jerks his chin toward the upstairs window. “Meredith…”

Harry props his hand on the edge of the pool, next to Tom’s shoulder. His eyelashes are stuck together in wet spikes.  “What about her?”

“Is she…?” Tom trails off. It should be easier to breathe when the pressure of Harry’s body lifts, but it’s only harder. Their legs are still slotted together. Harry waits, eyebrows raised, for Tom to finish his sentence. Resentment stabs at Tom. Why couldn’t Meredith tell him what he’s supposed to do? “Should we wait?”

Water rushes into the opening space between them. He’s still close enough that Tom could clutch at him. “Never mind,” Harry says. He takes a step backwards.

“I’m at work,” Tom blurts, reaching toward Harry, but it’s a moment too late. Harry’s already flipped under like a dolphin. The surface of the water licks up Tom’s chest as Harry kicks away from him into a determined crawl stroke.

Tom slumps back against the wall. The pool has two lane lines down its length, set into the floor in the same glazed cobalt tile that forms a stripe around the pool rim. Harry’s fallen in line with the lane on the opposite side from where Tom waits. When he reaches the far end, he kicks off against the wall without pausing. The pool goes silent for a moment as he glides underwater. He surfaces with aggressive strokes that take him back down the lane in a blur of churning water.

The row of tile is chilly against Tom’s shoulders, just below the biting edge of the flagstones. Harry finishes another lap, and then another. He comes up for breath before he reaches Tom, and after he passes him, but never in front of him. Tom sinks under the surface and opens his eyes. Harry’s body is obscured by trailing bubbles as he kicks and strokes his way down the length of the pool, no clearer under the water than he is atop it.

Tom imagines reaching out to stop him. His hand glancing off Harry’s skin as Harry kicks away, oblivious. Or worse, surfaces with an expression that makes it obvious he didn’t want to. And what for, anyway? Tom doesn’t have any explanations, only questions. Questions that sound ridiculous when he tries to put them into words. Are we supposed to be having a threesome right now? Would you still kiss me if no one was watching?

Tom surfaces, blowing water off his lips. They’re still raw and throbbing, as if they’ve had a bandaid ripped off. He starts toward the steps, moving slowly against the resistance of the water, trailing an arm behind him, willing Harry to notice.

Harry doesn’t. Or else he notices, but he doesn’t care. Tom’s perversely grateful for the clear message. At least he knows what he’s supposed to do now. The rhythm of Harry’s strokes doesn’t let up as Tom climbs dripping from the pool. He unrolls a towel from the basket and wraps it tightly around his waist. Clutching the fabric in one hand, he scoops up his clothes with the other.

Harry’s sodden swim trunks are next to his shorts, haloed on the flagstones by a half-evaporated patch of water. Tom nudges them out of the way with his toes and walks quickly to the carriage house. The sounds of Harry cutting through the water are finally blocked by the door closing behind him. At the foot of the narrow stairway to his apartment, Tom tosses his trainers onto the doormat and sinks down onto the second step, trying to figure out what just happened.

[ferryboatpeak]

Can you share a lil snippet?

anon, i’ll give you the whole damn meal

tom/harry/ben/meri, chapter 5

[previous installments gathered here]

Harry’s at work all the time now. He’s on his laptop by the pool, or pacing around the garden taking calls at odd American or Japanese hours, or in the office with the door closed to dampen the squawking of a Skype meeting. Tom can’t quite reconcile it with the Harry of the first couple of weeks, lazing serenely by the pool like he was docked, recharging, and now he’s back in service.

Tom can hear his voice in the office after he puts Ruby down for her afternoon nap. Meredith’s, too, so Harry’s not on a business call. Over the last few days, Tom’s been good about heading straight up to his room to dig into his thesis while Ruby naps, as if Harry’s setting some kind of productivity standard he has to live up to. Today, he detours into the kitchen. There’s laundry to get out of the dryer, anyway. He leaves the hissing baby monitor on the island, facing his direction.

The dull background of white noise doesn’t quite muffle the footsteps in the kitchen. Tom leans back to peer out from the laundry alcove as he rolls a pair of small striped socks together. Harry’s filling one of his ubiquitous plastic water bottles at the sink. A clip perched on top of his head doesn’t quite manage to hold back his hair, leaving stray pieces sticking out behind his ears.

Tom stacks up the folded laundry and goes to grab the monitor. He resists the temptation to poke at the battered leather notebook that’s now sitting on the countertop next to it. The edges of the pages are unevenly worn, and the covers bulge slightly, as if it’s pregnant with something.

Harry downs half the water bottle and screws the cap back on. He tilts his head in the direction of upstairs. “Ruby down?”

“Yeah, just went down.” Tom hooks the loop of the baby monitor with his finger, balancing it with the stack of rompers and sundresses in his arms.

Harry boosts himself up to sit on the counter next to the sink. “What are you up to today?” 

The era of tea parties seems to be over. Harry’s not hanging around with them on the lawn during Tom’s shifts with Ruby any more, although his presence is still inescapable - an emphatic phone conversation heard through the open office window, or a fragment of melody floating back to them from the far end of the garden, where Harry spends hours hunched over his guitar, stopping to make notes in the fat and mysterious leather book.

“Went to the playground this morning.” Tom shifts the laundry to catch a pair of socks in the crook of his elbow before it falls to the floor. “Probably just stick around here later.” 

It’s too hot to bike anywhere in the late afternoons. And anyway, when he and Ruby stay around the house, sometimes they’ll get pulled into cocktail hour instead. Harry will beckon them over to where he and Ben and Meredith are drinking gin and tonics under the trellis, making grabby hands for Ruby until Tom gives her up. There’s enough time, sometimes, for Tom to pull up a chair and join them. With no drink in his hand and the clock ticking away toward Ruby’s bedtime, Tom’s role as the hired help is prominent in a way it won’t be at dinner, or after. But it’s nice, to see Harry toss her around until she’s giggling and then set her on the terrace to run back and forth between the four of them. It must be nice to grow up like that, surrounded by so many people ready to take care of you.

He gestures at the notebook. “What are you working on?”

“Little bit of this and that.” Harry flutters his hand vaguely, brushing the question away like it’s a gnat. 

“Is it hard?” Tom doesn’t know how to put it, exactly. Harry’s got so much going on… movies to be in and music to write and this television project with Ben and the packages that keep arriving with fabric samples and photos and sketches… and he seems to throw himself at all of it with his whole focus. How are you doing all of this at once, is what Tom really wants to ask. 

“Writing an album?”

“If that’s what you’re doing.”

Harry half-laughs. “Doesn’t always feel like it,” he says wryly.

“Like what, then?” It’s so hard to figure out the right question to ask Harry. The more specific the question, the vaguer Harry answers it.

Harry uncaps the water bottle and takes another drink, tipping his head up and away from Tom. Tom waits. After he finishes, Harry gestures wordlessly, bottle in one hand and cap in the others, before a slow answer finally starts to come. “I guess I wouldn’t say it’s exactly hard.” He bounces the heel of one of his trainers gently against the cupboard door. “Or it is, sort of, but hard like a workout, or, like, getting a tattoo. Where it hurts but it feels good, you know?”

“Sure.” Tom doesn’t know, not exactly, but it’s the closest thing he’s ever gotten to a straight answer from Harry.

Harry hops down from the counter. “They always say you’ve got your whole life to write your first album and a year to write your second.” He scoops up his leather book on his way to the back door.

“When was your first?” Tom asks the first thing that pops into his head, willing Harry to keep talking.

Harry pauses with his hand on the knob of the back door. “More than a year ago.” It sounds like this isn’t the first time someone’s reminded him of that timeline. 

“Pressure.” Tom says, shifting his arms around the stack of clothes again.

“Eh.” There’s a shrug in Harry’s voice. “Hey, Ben’s shooting tonight.”

“Okay.” Tom looks back over his shoulder, already halfway to the stairs with his load of laundry. He envies the easy access Harry seems to have to Ben’s schedule. Tom never knows what kind of an evening to anticipate until cocktail hour rolls around, and Ben’s either home or he isn’t.

Well, at least he can use tonight to make up for dragging his heels on his thesis this afternoon. And it’ll be a nice companionable dinner with Meredith and Harry and Ruby, anyway. Everything’s a little louder and looser with Harry involved, but Harry’s clearly in on the unspoken understanding that nothing happens with Meredith without Ben involved. It’s one of the rules that comforts Tom, one of the gridlines he can follow to assure himself that there are boundaries, that he’s not navigating through dangerous lands without a map. 

“Meredith and I were going to watch a rom-com, if you want.” Harry’s all the way outside now, leaning back into the kitchen with his elbows on the bottom half of the Dutch door.

“A rom-com?” This is unexpected, and therefore treacherous. It’s not going to be the usual evening of slotting himself into the occasional spaces in Harry and Meredith’s banter and convincing Ruby to eat green beans. He’s going to have to be on alert, trying to decipher a new set of rules.

“Yeah,” Harry says, breezily, as if there’s no explanation necessary as to what film he has in mind, or what Tom should be prepared for, or what Ben would make of any of this.

***

It doesn’t turn out to be so hard. Dinner’s the same as it always is with Ruby, one long series of interruptions as she drops her cup onto the floor or demands more bread or wants to jabber half-baked sentences at them. Tom carries her off for her bath afterwards, and brings her back downstairs to say goodnight once she’s shampoo-scented and cuddly in her pajamas. By the time he finishes putting her to bed, the others have cleaned up the kitchen, and Meredith’s carrying a mug of tea into the main room.

Tom claims a spot one cushion out from the end of the sectional, not so far that it looks like he’s fleeing, not so close in that it looks like he’s expecting anything. Colin immediately jumps up next to him and curls up in the space between the arm of the sofa, resting his head on Tom’s leg. Tom scratches his ears. The dog chose him. The dog’s on his side.

Harry’s at the intersection of the sofa’s two halves, settled into the corner with his bird feet tucked underneath him. “You traitor,” he says to Colin, with indignation that might actually be real. “You’re supposed to be paying attention to me.”

“Sorry,” Tom says smugly. Colin has clearly discerned that he needs a lapdog more than Harry does. Brilliant creature.

Harry shifts onto his hands and knees and crawls down the couch toward Tom. Tom curls both arms around Colin. “You’re not taking the dog.”

“I’m not,” Harry says cheerfully, flopping on his side to face the television with his head on the remaining half of Tom’s lap. “Scratch my head,” he demands.

“You’re worse than the dog.” Tom flicks Harry’s ear. Harry just asks for what he wants, with a straightforwardness that Tom reacts to with an uneasy combination of awe and horror. His head is warm and heavy on Tom’s leg.

“Not at all.” Harry swats at Tom’s hand and wriggles into the sofa until he’s found what looks to be a comfortable position. Maybe it’s easier to ask for what you want when the world’s answer is always yes. It doesn’t seem like people tell Harry no very much. Only Ben, and only because he knows it’s what Harry wants to hear.  

“Let’s search romantic comedies on Netflix and see what we find,” Meredith says from the other end of the sofa, brandishing the remote. Harry’s shoulders shake with laughter. Some inside joke Tom can’t ask about without underscoring that he’s outside of it.

Tom scritches at the crown of Harry’s head just behind his hair clip, the same way he’d scratched Colin’s ears. Harry sighs. Tom gingerly releases the clip and clamps it to Harry’s sleeve so he can rake his fingernails all along Harry’s scalp. His fingers find the edge of Harry’s ear, the contour of his hairline, the base of his skull, all the inconsequential places he’s never touched before. The rom-com that Harry and Meredith decide on might as well be the white noise from the baby monitor.

Harry doesn’t move out of his lap, not when Tom starts to work the tangles out of his hair from roots to ends, not when Tom runs out of reasons to prolong the headscratching and settles his arm on top of Harry instead. Later, Tom washes his hands in the hottest water he can stand, but it doesn’t stop him from unconsciously brushing them past his nose, as if they might still hold the scent of Harry’s hair.

***

Ben’s on set again the next night, and several others after that. It’s almost enough time for Tom to get used to a weird new normal where the three of them put off dinner until the baby’s down, and carry their plates to the sofa to eat in front of a movie. It’s an unexpected halfway point between the ease of the dinner ritual with just Meredith and Ruby, and the late-evening adult dinners that Tom’s lived for. 

There’s work he should be doing on his thesis, but he can’t stop testing the strange suspended feeling of Harry casually leaning against him on the sofa or propping his skinny calves across Tom’s lap while yet another rom-com spools out predictably on the screen. Touching Tom without expectation. Touching him, Tom assumes, because Harry’s not supposed to touch Meredith. He rests a hand on the uneven handwriting inked over Harry’s bony ankle and concentrates on keeping still, fighting the impulse to rub his thumb along the smooth depression behind Harry’s anklebone. 

Tom’s reading Ruby a bedtime story the next time he hears the Range Rover pull into the gravel driveway before dark. He turns the board book face-down on the arm of the nursery chair and stands up to hoist Ruby onto his hip. “Let’s go say goodnight to your dad, all right?”

She’s wide-eyed at the unexpected interruption to her routine as they descend the stairs and follow the cacophony of Colin’s joyous welcome toward the kitchen. When they round the corner, Tom realizes too late that the commotion muffled the sound of his approach. Ben’s leaning back against the kitchen island with Meredith in his arms, kissing her in a way that doesn’t seem meant for Tom to see. Colin’s barking at their heels, ignored.

Tom freezes. He ought to back out of the room before he’s seen, but he’s held to the spot by the fear of missing out, the possibility that he deserves to be included. Ruby squirms in his arms.

Colin starts to jump and paw at Meredith, and she opens her eyes to look at Ben with fond exasperation, her arms around his neck and her face still close to his. 

Ben smirks at her. “Guard dog.”

“Cockblock.” Meredith pushes the dog back onto all fours and toward the door. “Go!”

“Mama!” Ruby squeals, just as Tom speaks up, a little too loudly. “Ruby wants to say good night.”

“Oh…” Meredith pulls back from Ben as he straightens up, opening space between them even with his arms still around her waist. “Thanks, Tom.”

She and Ben each hold out an arm. Tom hands the baby to them and they fold her into their tight circle. “Hiya, sweetheart,” Ben says, kissing Ruby’s head.

Tom takes an awkward step back. Every time he shepherds Ruby through cocktail hour, there’s a moment when she’s handed back to him so he can whisk her upstairs to go down for the night. Maybe he’s supposed to wait. But he feels frustratingly unnecessary.

Meredith glances at him. “We’ll put her down.” She’s smiling, but the dismissal’s as clear in her tone as it is in her words. Her attention’s back to her family before Tom can even react.

“Thanks,” Tom says. None of the Winstons acknowledge him. He bolts for closest exit. On the back steps outside the Dutch door, he pauses, a little dazed. Harry’s on a lounge on the far side of the pool. He’s got a paperback book in one hand, folded around on itself. Tom wanders toward him, his feet not knowing what else to do. “Ben’s home,” he says, as Harry looks up at his approach.

“Oh yeah?” Harry swings his feet over the side of the lounge, poking his toes around in a search for his loafers. His sunglasses slide forward off the top of his head, landing crookedly on his nose. He pushes them back as he stands up, keeping his hair at bay.

“Um.” Tom doesn’t know how to warn him. Danger: kissing. “Maybe not right now…”

Harry’s already halfway to the kitchen door as Tom searches for the right words. “I think they took Ruby up,” Tom finally says, just as Harry looks into the kitchen.

“Yeah, they’re not in here.” Harry looks back at Tom, his hand on the door. “Want a drink, then?”

Tom shrugs. “Sure.” It’s all topsy-turvy for him to be starting cocktail hour with Harry, but it’s clear he’s done with Ruby for the night. No reason to wait on a drink now that he’s off duty. No reason at all, and god, could he use one.

Harry’s looking into the refrigerator when Tom catches up to him in the kitchen. “White OK with you?”

“Sure, fine.” As if Tom’s said no to anything anyone’s offered to pour him this summer, every last drop of it better than anything he’s ever drank on his own budget. He retrieves two wine glasses from the cupboard and lines them up on the island across from Harry.

Harry works his way down the island, opening and closing drawers. “I can’t ever remember which one the corkscrew’s in.” 

“Other side, under the glasses.” Tom points out the right spot. Harry tucks the wine bottle under his arm, and Tom watches his hand as he twirls the corkscrew expertly and tugs out the cork, the flimsy wine key tucked in his palm. He leaves the tool on the counter with the cork still screwed in, and adds a modest pour to the first glass before he slides it across the granite to Tom. 

Tom takes a drink even before Harry’s filled his own glass. The wine is crisp and cold and doesn’t do anything to stop his head spinning.

“Chin-chin,” Harry says, holding out his glass toward Tom in an unspecified toast.

“Yeah, cheers.” Tom chimes his glass against Harry’s and takes another sip. It’s a strange state of suspended animation, drinking alone with Harry, waiting for Ben and Meredith to appear. He reaches for the corkscrew and works the speared cork loose. With his fingernail, he pushes the divot on the end of the cork back into place and tries to stand it on end. It tips over and rolls toward the edge of the counter. With a loud smack, Harry slaps his hand down on the countertop to catch it before it goes over.

Tom jumps. “Jesus.” Harry flicks the cork across the counter toward him.

“Have you ever…” He trails off. Have you ever seen them kiss, he was about to ask, but of course Harry has. Tom must have too, casually passing each other in the kitchen or Ben arriving home at the end of the day. He can’t understand why it’s never registered until now. Have they ever left you out, more like.

“Have I ever what?” The wineglass seems small against Harry’s mouth. 

Tom looks away. “Never mind.”

Moisture beads along the sides of the wine bottle. It’s been long enough to put Ruby down. Tom was already at the end of her bedtime routine, just needed to finish up her book and turn out the light. Maybe she’s fussy. Maybe they need help. Maybe he should go upstairs and see.

“You okay?” Harry’s looking quizzically at him.

“Yeah.” Tom turns the stem of his wineglass between his thumb and forefinger. The glass scrapes against the countertop.

Harry glances around the kitchen. “We should start dinner.”

“Do you know what it is?”

“There’s this fish.” Harry’s peering into the refrigerator again. “And stuff for salad?”

They work in silence. Tom sets out salad plates and heaps arugula on them, Harry chops rosemary and slices lemons. Tom rummages in the cabinets for another cutting board, but the broad wooden board that Harry’s working from is the only one. When Harry scrapes the pile of rosemary into his hand, Tom holds up a pear from the fruit bowl. “Okay if I…”

“Sure.” Harry pushes the lemon slices to one side, leaving Tom a patch of space on the cutting board.

Tom moves next to Harry, shoulder to shoulder over the cutting board. The fragrance of the chopped rosemary mingles with Harry’s cologne. He slices the pear and divides it among the salad plates, hoping it won’t go brown before Ben and Meredith reappear. What are they doing? Is everything all right?

They hear Meredith’s light footsteps on the stairs first. She slouches into the kitchen in the pajama pants and tank top she’s been wearing for their movie nights, instead of one of the summer dresses she’s usually got on for dinner.

“Oh, you got dinner started.” She tucks a strand of loose hair behind her ear. “Thanks, guys.” She leans an elbow on the island with a casualness that seems forced. “What have you got going, Harry?”

“I thought the fish, is that all right?”

“Perfect,” she says, with a bit more enthusiasm than a piece of halibut warrants.

Ben comes up behind her an rests a hand on her shoulder. He’s shower-damp around the ears, and the sport coat he came home in has been swapped for an untucked t-shirt and shorts. Meredith leans back against him. 

Tom’s stomach swoops as he realizes: they’ve just fucked. Just the two of them, while he obliviously sliced fruit in the kitchen. He tries to catch Harry’s eye, wondering if it’s as obvious to him, but Harry’s focused on arranging slices of lemon on top of the fish. Why couldn’t they wait? Or come downstairs to get them? Why leave them out?

“Ready to go?” Ben moves to slide the pan of fish out from under Harry.

“Hold on.” Harry twists the peppermill over the top of the fish. “And, you’re good. Want a glass?”

“Bring it to me?” With the fish in one hand and the grill tongs in the other, Ben uses his elbow to nudge open the Dutch door. “I’m going to get this on.”

Harry fills another wineglass from the cupboard and follows Ben out the door, with his own glass in his other hand. Tom gathers up placemats and silverware and trails behind them. He furtively watches Ben and Harry at the grill as he lines up the place settings on the table.

“Get right after it, eh, tiger?” Harry leers.

“Shut it.” Ben pokes him in the arm with the tongs. “You’ll get yours later.”

Harry drapes himself over Ben’s back and says something into his neck. Tom can’t quite hear, but he can only assume it’s something like, “I better.”

***

Tom thought that Ben’s return would feel like finishing one of Ruby’s stacking toys, the last missing layer sliding into place so that all the pieces fit smoothly. Instead, there’s a bright sharp edge to the evening, as if Ben’s making up for lost time, or reasserting something. 

“Arse up for me.” With a hand between Harry’s shoulder blades, Ben bends him over the foot of the bed. 

Tom scoots back until he’s up against the headboard next to Meri. She’s still in her pajamas, self-satisfaction radiating off her. Tom’s clothes have come off somewhere along the way, but to what end he’s not sure. Harry’s the center of attention, even more than usual.

As Ben rolls on a condom, Harry gets his knees up on the mattress and buries his face in his arms.

“Slut.” Ben says it fondly, but the hairs on Tom’s arm stand up. Harry’s posture goes a little more melty and he presses his hips back into Ben’s grasp. With his mess of hair obscuring his tattoo-scrawled arms, all that’s visible is the clean line of his back, laid out over the white sheet like a sacrifice.

Ben’s fingers leave dents in Harry’s skin as he pushes slowly inside him. Harry groans, deep and fulfilled, when Ben’s hips are finally flush with his own. The sound goes straight to Tom’s dick. He shifts incrementally against the mattress, almost squirming with the need to be touched, to touch himself. But Meredith’s leaning lightly against him, and if he was supposed to be doing anything, she’d be telling him. So Tom waits, and watches. 

If he was Harry he’d probably have his fingers inside Meredith right now, or his tongue. But he feels a guilty relief at being excused. It’s obvious that Harry’s better at it, coaxing the kind of blissful sounds out of her that Tom had never heard before Harry’s arrival. He wonders if Ben even bothers to go down on his wife any more, or if he just leaves it to Harry. Harry’s got the kind of enthusiasm for oral sex that Tom hasn’t experienced since his first teenage boyfriend, drunk on each other and half-convinced they were the first boys in the world to discover that sucking cock could feel like this.

Ben rolls his hips for another slow thrust, forcing another noise of primitive satisfaction from Harry. Harry pushes himself up, arching back into Ben’s rhythm, getting his hands under him. Lips parted, eyes closed, every exhale a noise of pleasure. The more Tom sees of Harry, the more he realizes Harry is the same in bed or out of it. Wanting everything, wanting it all at once, opening his arms wide and joyously pulling it all in. It would seem selfish or greedy if it was anybody else, but on Harry it just seems scaled, like the bigness of what he wants has to match the bigness of what he is.

“Tom.” Meredith lips brush his ear. “Harry needs something to do with his mouth.” Harry opens his eyes at that and looks up at Tom and Meri. The tip of his tongue drags across his bottom lip, slow and obscene. Maybe that’s Ben’s plan, to make Tom come just like this, his charred remains burning a hole into the headboard as he immolates at the sight of Harry, gorgeous and filthy.

Meredith nudges Tom’s shoulder. He shifts forward, bending until he can meet Harry’s mouth with his own, an awkward missed connection of a kiss as Harry rocks with Ben’s thrusts. Their chins collide and Harry’s mouth smears the corner of his. Tom leans in further and further, chasing Harry, dark-eyed and wanting. Ben stills for a moment to let Harry press forward, tongue plunging hot and wet into Tom’s mouth, before hauling him backward into a rough thrust that makes Harry gasp.

Without warning, Ben smacks Harry’s arse. For a panicky second, Tom doesn’t know how to react. But Harry dips his head, lowering himself, inviting Ben to give him more. The part of Tom’s brain that’s still trying to keep score starts tallying the balance, testing for the jealousy that’s always there when Harry’s given something he’s not. He straightens up onto his heels, instinctively taking space to size up this new strangeness.

“I’m going to make you come with a cock in your mouth.” Ben’s palm connects again, deepening the red mark flushing Harry’s skin. “Your filthy… slutty… mouth.” He thrusts into Harry to emphasize each word. Harry moans from some deep secret place that Tom’s never glimpsed before.

The hot rush through Tom’s body has nothing to do with jealousy. This isn’t the firm authority he gravitates to. He wants to be directed, not degraded. But it’s desperately, shamefully hot to watch it happen to Harry. To see the way it makes him dip his head into the mattress, set his teeth against his forearm, arch back into the sting of Ben’s hand.

“You want to suck Tom’s cock?” Ben looks up at Tom as he says it, checking for permission.

Tom burns. Yes, yes, oh god yes. He inches forward on his knees, into Harry’s space. 

Harry looks up at him, face transparent with want. “Yeah,” he breathes. Tom moves closer, closer, until he can feel Harry’s hot breath on his thighs.

“Say it,” Ben demands. 

“Yes, please,” Harry keens through gritted teeth, and Tom can’t tell whether the supplication is to him or Ben.

Ben fucks Harry forward until he almost lands in Tom’s lap, his nose colliding with Tom’s crotch. Harry feels out Tom’s cock like a blind person, lips and tongue messy and tantalizing until he presses his forehead against Tom and takes him into the wet heat of his mouth, and Tom wants to cry and gasp and yell all at once at how impossibly good it feels.

He tries to cup Harry’s head in his hand, to steady him against the force of Ben’s thrusts, but he’s got to lean back on both hands to hold himself in place as Ben keeps forcing Harry forward. Ben fucks Harry harder and faster, driving his face into Tom’s belly and his cock down Harry’s throat. It’s uneven and messy and so, so hot, to have Harry caught between them, to watch him split on Ben’s cock as he swallows Tom down, Ben’s strong hands on Harry’s hips and his face screwed up with the effort and pleasure of fucking Harry just right, of making him moan around Tom.

There’s too much sensation to parse out, the ache in his bent legs and the softness of Harry’s hair in his lap, the scrape of Harry’s teeth interrupting the perfect lushness of his mouth when Ben jolts him unexpectedly, Ben’s grunts and Harry’s muffled cries and the broken moan, the gasping incredulous jesus, fuck, that Tom realises are his own, pulled from him without consciousness or intention. 

Tom could get lost in this, could drown without even trying to come up for air. He’s been close, achingly close, since the first brush of Harry’s lips, and now he’s gritting his teeth and clinging to the edge, determined not to let go until Ben and Harry are done with him.

“Ben,” Meredith’s saying, and it takes a moment to reach Tom inside the entire world that is Ben and Harry. “Ben.”

Ben looks up at that. Understanding crosses his face. Harry, stilled for a moment, curls his tongue along the back of Tom’s shaft and Tom comes as if it’s being exorcised from him, pulled from his body by Harry’s inhuman mouth. 

“Sorry,” he gasps, “sorry,” but Harry’s coming too, streaking the inside of Tom’s thigh as Ben pulls back on his hips with one hand and works the other around Harry’s cock. Harry lets Tom fall from his mouth and rolls away, breathing hard.

Tom stretches out alongside Harry, letting feeling seep back into his numb legs. He rests a hand on Harry’s chest. Okay? he wants to ask. Harry reaches a hand over his head toward Meredith, and Tom realizes she’s not there.

“That’s it for tonight.” Ben’s standing at the foot of the bed, stripping the condom off his still-stiff cock. Orgasm-drunk and still breathless, Tom can’t process the contrast between Ben’s words and his erection. As he lets his head fall toward Harry’s shoulder, he catches sight of Meredith, next to the bed, one knee resting on the mattress. It takes him a moment to connect the neat triangle of her bush with the realization that she’s shed her pajama pants.

“Take yourselves to bed, boys.” Meredith touches Harry’s shoulder. He opens his eyes, and immediately gets to his feet.

Tom’s left on the mattress alone, cold and abandoned. “What?”

“Come on.” Harry beckons to him.

“Why?” They’re all supposed to be recovering with him, piled into the bed warm and crowded and drowsy. Come back.

“Let’s go, c’mon.” Harry’s talking to him with the patient encouragement he’d use with Ruby. Tom pulls himself to his feet, confused and embarrassed. He looks to the floor for his clothes, but they’re gone.

“Got them,” Harry says, bundling shirt and shorts and sandals into Tom’s arms. He guides Tom toward the door with a hand on his bicep. Tom’s half tempted to dig in his heels like Ruby would. He looks over his shoulder. Ben’s on his back, pulling Meredith on top of him. He pushes at the hem of her tank top, and she crosses her arms to tug it over her head as his hands slide up to her breasts.

Harry reaches past him to pull the door closed, bumping Tom’s heels so he stumbles the last few inches out of the room. One of Tom’s sandals slips out of his hand. When it hits the floor, it takes him a moment to recognize the source of the thud. Harry picks it up and tucks it back under Tom’s arm. “Come on,” he says, again. His own clothes are wadded up in one hand.

Tom watches wordlessly as Harry pads down the hallway with the careful gait of the well-fucked. He’s still standing there, dazed, when Harry reaches the door to his room. He looks back at Tom. “Sleep in mine?”

Tom can’t think what else to do. He’s unsteady on his feet as he follows Harry, queasy with the hairpin turn from orgasm to eviction. In Harry’s room, he crawls gratefully under the duvet and curls onto his side. He’s still damp between the legs; he should have put on his boxers instead of mindlessly dropping them on Harry’s floor with the rest of his things. For all the motivation Tom has to get them, they might as well be in London. He stays where he is, eyes closed, trying to let his heart rate slow, while Harry cleans up in the bathroom.

He can’t believe it’s never occurred to him. Tom’s been having sex with them for weeks now, and somehow he hasn’t noticed that they never have sex with each other. Or never when he’s with them, at least. He thought they’d let him into their life, but he’s barely stood on the front porch. There are rooms and passages he’s never known existed, whole levels of intimacy he was never meant to see.

Tom thinks back, suddenly, to the first time Ben touched him. Got him off right there in the kitchen, his hands braced on the granite, exposed and wanting and desperately glad that the thing he could hardly believe was building among the three of them was finally bursting open. Meredith watched from the other side of the island with the corners of her lips tucked into a small smile. And then she’d kissed his cheek and said good night before she led Ben upstairs, sending Tom off to bed confused and elated.

He hadn’t understood then. He’s just an appetizer, a wholly optional accessory to whatever they have together. Him, and Harry? The scale in Tom head tilts back and forth, enviously weighing. What’s Harry been allowed that he hasn’t?

The light in the en suite clicks off. A moment later, Harry slides into bed. Tom watches his dim silhouette as he prods pillows into place, tucking one under his arm to sleep on top of. He sighs into it once he’s got everything arranged. The line of his body relaxes.

Tom’s never once asked Harry about the Winstons. Asking would be a concession that he cares, that it’s relevant, that Harry knows something he doesn’t. He’s never needed to know any of it badly enough that he’s been willing to ask. But it’s easier to ask questions in the dark, or else there’s finally something he can’t live without knowing. “So,” Tom starts quietly, half-hoping that Harry’s already passed out. 

“Hmmm?” Harry opens one eye, on the side of his face that’s not pressed into the pillow. 

“Has that ever happened before?” Tom asks softly in the dark. It’s too embarrassing to name it, to say out loud that he was dismissed, discarded.

Harry shifts so that his mouth’s not completely buried by the pillow. “Has what ever happened?”

Oh. A whole lot just happened. All Tom can think about is their banishment. It’s an effort to summon the memory of Harry caught between him and Ben, Harry’s forehead forced into his belly, the messy urgency of Harry’s mouth. Ben and Meredith are cheating him out of the hottest thing that ever happened to him. The latest hottest thing, at least. So many moments this summer have held that title fleetingly, barely long enough for Tom to knead at the memories before they got flattened by another night, another invitation upstairs, another pleasure he’d never even thought to fantasize about. This summer just keeps setting the bar higher. Tom sees the end approaching like a brick wall blocking a car chase in a film; no choice but to crash though full speed.

He’s got to say it now, even though Harry’s wary tone makes it harder. “Have they ever kicked you out before?”

“Oh,” Harry says, sounding relieved.

Tom remembers the sound of Ben’s hand connecting, and flushes at the realization of what Harry may have thought he was asking. “Yeah, that… not…” The last thing he wants to do is review Harry’s sexual resume.

“Um…”. Harry gives the question some thought, as if it might not have registered if Ben and Meri had cast him aside before. As if something like that wouldn’t even matter to him. “No, I don’t think so,” he says eventually, sounding unbothered.

Harry’s answer is actually the inverse of what Tom’s afraid of. If they’ve never kicked Harry out to have sex, there’s another possibility. “Have you ever seen them…”

“Sort of.” Harry laughs, sparing Tom the rest of the question. “There was one night, while I was sort of still living there, but I was supposed to be staying” – he pauses – “some place else.” Tom immediately wonders where that might be. “But I ended up coming home, and they were on the sofa…”

Tom waits, hungry for the story. Maybe this is how it started with Harry.

“I didn’t, like, see anything, but obviously I interrupted something.” Harry kicks at Tom’s ankle. “It was a little bit awkward at dinner for a few days.”

“Just, like, a roommate fuckup?” It’s so hard to picture Harry having roommates, the way Tom has roommates. Hard to imagine Harry, who takes up all the space in any room he enters, sharing space with anybody. Navigating the unspoken ways roommates pretend that there’s some semblance of privacy around everyone’s sex life. Making extra noise with the key in the lock when he comes home early; lining his bed up with a wall that doesn’t border George or Carl’s bedrooms; knowing when their class schedules will give him two hours with the flat all to himself. Tom imagines Harry and Ben and Meri arguing over who took the last of the milk and who’s going to do the dishes and who used somebody else’s bath towel to wipe up something nasty. “Not, like, with you?”

Harry’s response is puzzled. “No, why would they?”

“Why wouldn’t they?” He’s done everything with them, things he never even thought he’d want to. Why wouldn’t they let him in?

Tom rolls onto his back abruptly. He rubs at the stiffening streak on his thigh, flaking off Harry’s dried come. He can feel Harry watching him, one-eyed.

“It would be weird if they didn’t have some stuff that was just them,” Harry says after a while.

Tom stares at the ceiling silently, clinging to a position he doesn’t understand how to defend. The end of the summer seems perilously close, the brick wall filling his windscreen, no alleyways in his peripheral vision. He should have hit the brakes when he had the chance.

“I always used to get asked who my relationship role model was.” Harry’s voice is slow in the dark. “I’d always say Ben and Meredith. I like what they have. I wouldn’t want to, like, be in the middle of it.”

Relationship role models. Tom closes his eyes. He wonders if that was before or after Harry started fucking them. “That’s what you want?” 

“Sure.” Of course it is, of course that’s what Harry wants, Harry with his French girlfriend and his tongue in Meredith’s pussy, of course it is. A wife and a baby and a dog and the possibility of some dick on the side. “Doesn’t everyone?”

“Not me.” It’s a clipped, emphatic end to the conversation. Tom wants what Ben and Meredith have, directly, a share of their life, not some hypothetical where he builds his own castles with an unfathomable future wife. Not any kind of future with a wife.

***

Tom’s finally trapped just the way he longs to be, belly down against the mattress, breath pressed into shallow gasps. Harry moves inside him without letting his weight off Tom’s back, small rolls of his hips that keep Tom pinned down and filled up.

He didn’t know to want this but it feels so good, Harry’s body heavy and close and warm, crowding him, constraining him. Tom ignores the faint sounds of Ruby crying in the distance. Just a little longer, he’s so close, she can wait just a moment or two.

The sheet under his nose smells of soap and vanilla and a musky tang that Tom recognizes as Harry, sex with Harry. He can’t move against the mattress under Harry’s weight; pressure more than friction filling his belly with warmth. Why is the baby crying, why now of all times, why can’t she give him just one more minute?

Harry’s slowing, fading. Tom spreads his knees out over the sheet, stretching his legs open for him. Just once more would be enough, he just needs Harry to slam into him once, hold himself deep inside, finish them both. Tom strains his hips back, and doesn’t meet any resistance. Harry’s gone, dissolved, and Ruby’s lonely cries are getting more insistent.

Why is he able to hear Ruby? Tom startles awake into a defensive curl. Pleasure evaporates into sickening adrenaline. His cock throbs painfully, and Tom recognizes the small mercy: Ruby’s kept his humiliating sex dream from turning into the waking nightmare of nutting all over Harry’s sheets. 

There’s no sound from Harry’s side of the bed. Tom waits before turning toward him, hoping desperately that he’ll find him deep asleep. He’d settle for plausible fake sleep, if it signaled an intention to pretend Harry doesn’t know anything about this. 

Ruby’s still crying, muffled but unmistakable through the thin walls of the old house. He wonders why Meredith hasn’t gone to soothe her yet. Maybe it’s harder to hear from their side of the hallway. Or, he thinks bitterly, maybe she and Ben are preoccupied.

Well, it’s not his job. Not now, not in the dark of the night. Ruby’s not his to tend to until tomorrow morning. Meredith can get her.

The mean satisfaction he feels at the idea of Ruby interrupting their night, forcing Meredith to leave Ben alone in bed, is immediately replaced by guilt. He can’t root for Ruby to come between them. And now that he’s awake, he can’t just lie here and let her cry, alone in the dark, far from home. It probably wouldn’t take much to get her back down. He could sleep in the bed in her room, if she wants company. It’s the right thing to do. Ben and Meredith will be grateful, maybe, that he let them sleep.

Tom slides out of bed slowly, trying not to disturb Harry, and then realizes that Harry’s gone. His stomach falls. What if Harry heard something, saw something, while Tom was dreaming? Has he been making noises, twitching his hips against the mattress? Did Harry guess what was happening inside his head and flee the room in horror? What if he’s back in Ben and Meredith’s room, telling them how he had to take refuge from Tom’s creepiness? He almost hides back under the covers thinking about it.

But that’s not fair to Ruby. He finds his boxers and t-shirt on the floor, and takes the few steps down the dark hallway to Ruby’s room. He opens the door slowly, so as not to startle her, and the dim glow from the nursery lamp spills out to greet him. The stars and planets cast by the lamp wheel slowly around the room, drifting bright spots over the empty crib. 

Harry’s standing at the window with his back to Tom. Ruby’s in his arms, her tears slowing to whimpers as Harry sways back and forth. He’s singing something to her, too low for Tom to tell what it is over the fuzz from the white noise machine. She lets her head fall into his neck. As Tom watches, frozen, a single star from the lamp traces a bright path over Harry’s bare shoulder.

Tom backs out of the room and keeps his hand on the doorknob, letting the latch slide into place slowly and soundlessly. He leans his shoulder against the wall. He can’t get any of it out of his head, not the heavy satisfying weight of Harry from his dream, not the image of Harry tender with Ruby in the starlight.

Only the fear of being caught in the hallway forces him to propel himself back to Harry’s room. It’s like walking through quicksand. He’s stepped beyond his limits into a hazard he didn’t know was there. Now it’s pulling at his ankles, climbing up his body, dragging him into depths he never had a chance to avoid.

[ferryboatpeak]

hey @dinoflangellate tagged me to post the last line i’ve written and for once i’m in a decent place to answer

The surface of the water licks up Tom’s chest as Harry kicks away from him into a determined crawl stroke.

tagging all my writing pals

[ferryboatpeak]

Tom GC posting Tracey Emin's 'I want my time with you' after (presumably) getting off a train from France gives me such emotions about French Countryside Tom coming home after that heady summer.

oh no oh no oh noooooooooooooo 😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱 i hadn’t realized that train station pic would be him getting home from france but of course you’re right and oh god this is exquisitely painful to me thank you so much anon!!!!!!!!!!!! 😱⚔️⚰️🛀🚿🔌

[ferryboatpeak]

Your latest chapter of tomrry is so heartbreakingly good and I just reread it and JFC it's so 🔥! But this line, this line is perfection "Harry is the same in bed or out of it. Wanting everything, wanting it all at once, opening his arms wide and joyously pulling it all in. It would seem selfish or greedy if it was anybody else, but on Harry it just seems scaled, like the bigness of what he wants has to match the bigness of what he is."

oh, gosh, thanks! I thought that bit might be Too Much so I really appreciate hearing that you liked it.

[ferryboatpeak]

"i just want to discharge my tom gc obligations and write hazoff forever" 😒😒😒 (nooooooooooo you cannot leave tom in his state of inner confusion and turmoil!) (please)

by discharge i mean FINISH, i’m in way too deep to abandon this one now. Here’s what’s next:

Harry lopes in from the kitchen as Tom’s coming downstairs. He’s fresh out of the pool, hair trailing in the same damp tail that Tom wrapped his fingers in yesterday. Harry ought to stay away from the pool, Tom thinks. He’s like one of those gremlins that gets dangerous if you let him get wet. Or more dangerous, at least.

“Hey.” Harry leans one hand on the end of the stair rail. He tucks his other thumb into the fold of the towel wrapped around his waist.

“Hey.” Tom stops halfway down the stairs, keeping a height advantage. The most defensible position.

Harry shifts from one foot to the other. Tom can see him swallow. “Do you want to go into town for dinner tonight?”

[ferryboatpeak]

tom/harry/ben/meri ch. 4

massive thanks to @lunarrua for sticking with this beta and catching all my continuity errors, and to @1000-directions for providing the necessary marvel background.

previous installments of this WIP are collected here.

***

The angle of the light is all wrong when Tom wakes up. He's used to it coming at him straight on, glowing through the blinds on the windows across from the foot of his bed. The carriage house is a confusing product of modernity, either a new addition to the property or a complete reconstruction of some ancient structure. Whatever the mechanism, the modern era has brought Tom’s room a broad swath of eastern-facing windows. But in Harry’s room, the morning light filters in from one side, through a narrow set of paned windows that were probably framed in the stone wall centuries ago. The windows are so dimmed by the ivy clustering around the edges that it takes Tom a few minutes to realize it’s properly daylight, not the muted dawn he wakes to in the master suite when Ben’s the first out of bed. With a pang, he realizes he must have missed Ben leaving for the day.

He tilts his head cautiously to the side. Harry’s still on his stomach, face half-buried in the pillow he’s clutching beneath him. The flashes of red on his skeleton tattoo are the brightest thing in the room. Tom watches the gentle rise and fall of his unmarked back until he’s satisfied that Harry’s sleeping. Then he parses the tattoos visible on the back of his arm, puzzling over the Hebrew lettering and trying to decipher the fuzzy script. On Harry’s shoulder, just above the hem of the duvet, there’s something that looks like a pear, or a peanut. None of it makes any sense, individually or collectively.

Looking away from the untranslatable scrawl of Harry’s skin, Tom stretches his legs out as imperceptibly as possible. The sheets are cooler at the foot of the bed, further from Harry’s radiating warmth. It feels like he’s slept for a long time. Like he’s a plant that’s stretched tentative overnight roots down into whatever very expensive fibers this mattress is made of.

There’s no clock in view. No way to tell how long he’s got until he’s supposed to be at work. He holds his breath, straining to catch any sounds that might be coming from the rest of the house. Meredith and Ruby are probably awake. What if it’s late enough that Ruby’s already back down for her morning nap? Meredith could be waiting to hand the baby monitor off to him. He’s got to get up.

He wonders if it’s possible to slip out of bed without disturbing Harry. He could grab his clothes, dress in the hallway. That might work, if only Harry hadn’t closed the door last night. Surely he’s going to wake up at the sound of his bedroom door opening. What’s Tom supposed to say if he does? Staring at the ceiling, he tries to think of something that’s casual or witty or cool enough. He can’t get out of bed unprepared.

Next to him, Harry stirs.

Tom’s eyes snap shut reflexively. It’s hard to keep his breathing sleep-steady when his heart’s pounding. But pretending to wake up seems harder than pretending to be asleep. The sheets tug against him as Harry turns, or stretches. Then, a long silence. Maybe Harry’s fallen back asleep. Or else he’s awake, silently watching Tom. Tom resists the impulse to squirm down under the covers and hide.

A minute ticks by. Maybe two, maybe more, each second interminable. Tom breathes in and out, slow and even, modeling it after what he just observed of Harry sleeping. What if Harry tries to wake him? Maybe Harry knows he’s faking and he’s waiting to catch him. Harry’s in no hurry. He doesn’t have to go to work. He can stake Tom out until he cracks. He listens for Harry’s breathing, trying to determine whether it’s unconscious.

Finally, the mattress shifts and Tom understands that he’s alone in bed, sensing Harry’s absence even before the floorboards creak under the rug as Harry’s feet hit the ground. Tom holds himself carefully still, listening to a muted popping of joints that makes him think of bony knees, knobbly vertebrae, Harry linking his hands above his head and stretching his body into a long naked line. It would be a nice view to wake up to.

He rolls onto his side and blinks with what he hopes is convincing bleariness. But Harry’s muffled footsteps recede across the rug, outpacing Tom’s convincingly slow awakening. He focuses just in time to see Harry’s arse disappearing into the en suite.

Tom exhales with relief and slumps momentarily back into his pillow. Then he scrambles out of bed, dressing quickly and quietly and slipping out the door before the recognizable echo of a morning piss fades from the bathroom.

As he shuts the bedroom door gently behind him, he can hear Ruby’s chatter in the main room below. He looks back at the window at the opposite end of the hall. The ivy might be sturdy enough to climb down. He could reemerge at ten o’clock, strolling back into the house to start his workday, like he used to. Skulking through the kitchen and up to his room at dawn while Meredith slept and Ben worked out was so much better than this. Waking up late, with Harry, and having to exchange morning chit chat with Meredith is painfully visible. Messier.

But probably not as messy as detaching a clump of ivy and landing on the lawn with a broken leg. Tom squares his shoulders and heads downstairs. It’s not a walk of shame if he didn’t have sex. Except he did. Just not with Harry. Or not only with Harry. Maybe it’s not a walk of shame if the only witness is somebody else you sort of had sex with.

Meredith’s kneeling at the coffee table in the main room. The freckles on her shoulders are visible through the criss-crossed straps of her yoga top. An assortment of doll-sized furniture is arranged on the tabletop between her and Ruby. Ruby, concentrating on tipping a small teacup toward a doll’s immobile mouth, doesn’t look up when Tom reaches the bottom of the stairs. For a moment, he thinks he might be able to pass through the room before Meredith turns around.

But Colin scrambles up from his dog bed and bounds past the coffee table toward Tom. As he darts around Meredith and Ruby, his plumy tail knocks over a doll’s chair and sweeps several pieces of the tea set onto the floor. Ruby howls in despair.

“Goddaaaa....” Meredith extinguishes the curse halfway and shoves Colin’s hindquarters away from the table. “Dog!” She kisses Ruby on the temple and perches the toppled doll back on its chair. “It’s all right, sweetie, we can put it all back, see? Colin didn’t hurt her.”

“Hey, doggo.” Tom bends down to encourage Colin in his direction. “Want me to take him out for a bit?”

“Please, yes.” Meredith looks up from the scattered toys and crying toddler. “If you don’t mind,” she adds, an afterthought.

“Happy to.” Colin props his paws on Tom’s thighs, and Tom scratches his ears. “Who’s a good boy?” He generally restrains himself from offering to walk the dog because it’s such a transparent act of self-interest. Dogs make him happy -- their uncomplicated adoration, their ready enthusiasm, their pure delight with nothing but food and affection and a cushion to claim -- and it’s been a treat to have a dog in his life this summer. It’s obvious that Colin’s one true love is Ben, but in Ben’s absence he’s been more than willing to curl up on the sofa with Tom instead. As Colin pants happily up at him, tags jingling with the vigor of Tom’s ear-scratching, Tom’s heart rate calms.

Meredith balances a upside-down teacup on Ruby’s head, and Ruby’s tears end with a hiccup. “Ben walked him this morning, but he’s been going crazy.” She catches the teacup as it slides off. “Thanks for taking him out.”

“My pleasure,” Tom says, with sincerity, clipping the lead from the table by the door onto Colin’s collar. Upon the joyful realization that a bonus walk is in the offing, the dog jumps around Tom in circles of delight.

Outside, Tom passes the lead from hand to hand, keeping it untangled as Colin does his best to trip them both. “Quick stop upstairs, all right lad?” He unclips the lead once they’re inside the door, and Colin bounds up the stairs, needing no further invitation. The stairway runs along the back of the carriage house, under the eastern windows, straight into Tom’s room. When Tom rounds the end of the stairwell wall at the top of the stairs, Colin’s already established himself on Tom’s unmade bed. He looks at Tom with an expression of entitlement, which Tom does nothing to disabuse him of. There’s a proprietary pleasure in seeing the dog make himself at home in his room.

Colin’s the only visitor he’s had this summer. Ben and Meredith don’t come to his room, and he’s never brought Ruby up here. The cleaners - never seen, their presence every Tuesday marked only by the faint scent of lemon and bleach, the neatly made bed, and the even pile of the hoovered carpet - hardly count.

He kicks off his sandals. “Make yourself at home, then.” Colin rolls onto his side, tongue lolling. Tom scratches the dog’s belly. “Can you hang out while I have a shower?” Colin shows no inclination to move. Tom strips off last night’s clothes and leaves the bathroom door open so he can see Colin on the bed if he wipes a portal through the steam on the shower door. But as soon as he steps under the hot water, Colin jumps down from the bed and trots into the bathroom, sitting at attention on the bathmat, watching Tom. “What a good boy,” Tom tells him through the shower door, closing his eyes and sudsing his hair. “The best guard dog.” His voice echos off the glass. It’s strangely comforting that Colin wants to keep an eye on him.

He hurries through rinsing himself off, not wanting to keep the dog waiting. The shower doesn’t feel like the fresh start it usually does, as if he’s carrying something today that won’t rinse down the drain. It drives him across the field behind the house and up the gradual rise of vineyards on the other side, calves burning. Trying to walk it out, whatever it is. The morning sun dries his hair and then dampens it with sweat. Following a cowpath up a rocky hill, he pushes his pace faster. Colin gamely trots along beside him.

At the wind-scrubbed top of the hill, he sinks down to sit on the lone patch of weedy grass. The valley spreads out below him. The house is tiny in the distance, the pool a blue shard glinting between the poplars. He puts an arm around Colin and lets the dog lick his face. The strange settled ache of waking up next to Harry feels as distant as the house, and he’s glad to have walked it out, sweated it clean from his pores, baked it off in the sun. It wasn’t something meant to take root. He tries not to think about the kind of space it could take up, the other things it could choke out.

The pool is calm and unoccupied when Tom and Colin return through the gate at the bottom of the garden. The too-smooth surface of the water seems as if it’s holding its breath, waiting for something. Tom veers away from the edge as he leads Colin to the kitchen door, shying from the possibility that one of them might disturb the surface with a stray pebble.

He unclips Colin’s lead and nudges him into the empty kitchen before retreating to his room. The second shower is lonelier without Colin happily hanging out on the bathmat, but it’s longer and colder and reorients him more effectively than the first one did. By ten o’clock, he’s ready to go to work. Another day at his summer job, that’s all. Easy. Downstairs, across the terrace, and into the house to find Meredith in the office and take custody of the baby monitor. Just like every other day.

In the kitchen, he flicks on the kettle and measures beans into the coffee grinder. He leans his elbows on the countertop, looking out the window at the undisturbed surface of the pool. As he crossed the terrace, he could see Harry’s car still sitting in the drive like a preening cat. The knowledge that Harry’s likely in the house makes Tom conscious of every move. He tucks a stray plate from breakfast into the dishwasher, wipes toast crumbs off the countertop into the sink, his hands skimming over surfaces looking for something to do. Despite his heightened awareness, a yelp of laughter coming from the direction of the office makes him jump as he’s pouring the kettle, splashing water out of the filter and onto the granite.

He wipes down the counter again and bins his coffee grounds. It’s almost ten, time to find Meredith. He walks toward the office with both hands wrapped around his mug, as if it’s a talisman protecting him against the unexpected. Meredith’s at her computer with Colin sprawled next to her desk as usual. Harry’s set up at the table behind her, facing the opposite wall, his phone pressed to his ear. A pink MacBook is open in front of him. He’s leaning back in the office chair at an angle Tom didn’t know office chairs could extend to, one ankle propped on his other knee.

“It’s only a couple of weeks,” Harry says as Tom hovers in the doorway, uncertain whether checking in with Meredith would interrupt Harry’s phone call. “Change my ticket and I can meet you in Italy. Wait...” Harry cranes his neck around, rotating his chair halfway to look at Meredith, and angles the base of his phone away from his mouth. “Is Ben going straight to the Google thing from here?” He tilts the phone back to his mouth. “I could go with Ben,” he says into the phone.

“That’s the plan…” Meredith starts, turning around in her chair. She catches sight of Tom in the doorway and waves a silent greeting.

Harry’s attention is back on his phone. “Ah, forgot about that fucker,” he says, and then, to Meredith, “Never mind, won’t work...”

Tom points at the monitor sitting on Meredith’s desk and raises his eyebrows. Can I take it? Meredith holds up a finger: just a sec. Tom crouches down next to Colin to wait for the handoff, scratching gently between the dog’s ears. Colin gets to his feet, shakes himself, and rests his chin on Tom’s knee. “Good boy,” Tom mouths at him, as if Colin can read his lips. He sinks to the floor and lets Colin climb halfway into his lap.

Above his head, Harry’s conversation is still going on. “Right here, want to say hello?” Without waiting for a response, Harry taps at the phone and holds it out toward Meredith. “You’re on speaker.” He focuses on Tom for the first time, waving a cheery good morning at him.

“Hello, Jeff,” Meredith calls over her shoulder, a smile in her voice. “We’d love for Harry to stay if he can.” She grins conspiratorially at Harry. Harry flashes her a thumbs up.

“Hi, Mer.” The voice on the other end of the line has the unmistakable tone of one who has suffered long. “Don’t encourage him.”

Jeff. Tom files the name away. He smooths his hand along Colin’s side.

“But it’s so nice here.” Meredith stands up to take the phone from Harry, turning off the speaker and putting it to her ear, and leans back against her desk to talk. Tom focuses on her feet, bare and tanned. “You should come for a couple of days before Harry leaves.” Her toenail polish is chipless and glossy. It matches the red poppies in the pattern of the rug. “Is Glenne going to Italy?” She listens, and makes a disappointed noise. “Have to see you when we’re back in LA, then.” She  points and flexes one foot, stretching her calf. “Tell Glenne I said hi.”

Meredith hands the phone back to Harry and returns to her seat. She passes the baby monitor down to Tom, the ritual changing of the guard. “Thanks,” she mouths. She pauses open-mouthed while Harry says something into his phone, waiting for an opportunity to say something else to Tom, but closes it as Harry works his way through a sentence that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere fast.

The monitor hisses evenly. Ruby’s still napping. Tom ought to head out to the kitchen, start fixing a snack for when she wakes up. He can come back later to find out whatever it is that Meredith needs to tell him. There’s no good reason for him to wait here, listening to Harry’s conversation.

“It’s just two weeks,” Harry repeats into the phone, turning back toward his laptop. The cursor skates aimlessly around the screen as Harry runs a fingertip over the touchpad. Going by the colored blocks unevenly checkerboarding the image, it looks like his calendar.

Tom squints at the far-away text on the screen. He places the monitor on the floor next to his coffee mug and takes hold of one of Colin’s hind paws, stroking his thumb along the narrow bones. Colin lets him, just like Neesha always does at home. There’s something comforting about a dog trusting him.

“I can skype in for that,’ Harry says. Tom can’t hear the words on the other end of the line, but the tone doesn’t sound like Jeff’s agreeing. Harry highlights one appointment on his calendar, then another. It’s not the calendar of someone who’s on vacation.

Tom’s been wondering about this since the day Harry arrived and cracked open his summer like a geological event, shifting the plates of the earth underneath his feet. But there’s been no good way to ask. He can’t trust the tone of his voice. A matter-of-fact “How long’s Harry here for?” might come out petulant; a casual “How long are you in town?” might reveal that he cares about the answer.

“That doesn’t have to happen this month,” Harry says, drumming his fingers on the tabletop. “Reschedule it.” He leans further back in his chair, tipping his head over the top of the seat. The voice on the other end of the line is insistent. Harry lets his chair spring back to an upright position. “Have them send the samples here.”

Tom waits silently on the floor. Why’s Harry’s going to Italy, and what does Ben has to do with it? Maybe it’s about their television show. Italy doesn’t sound like the kind of place you go to make a television show, but what does Tom know. Harry stands up and paces toward the office door. As he passes Tom and Colin, he pokes Tom with his foot and grins at him. Tom nods, not knowing what else to do that won’t interrupt Harry’s conversation.

“I know.” Harry stops by his chair and scrapes a hand through his hair, sighing. After a pause, he adds, “I want to write a little.”

The tone on the other end of the line shifts. It sounds like Harry’s played some kind of trump card. Harry’s posture relaxes. “Thank you,” he says. “I appreciate it.” He leans back against the table and thumbs the phone to speaker again. “Mer, do you know the address here?”

Meredith pulls a sticky note off the wall behind her computer and turns to read aloud from it. The voice on the other end of Harry’s phone repeats it back to her, spelling out the name of the village. Tom immediately feels dumb for never having considered that the country house must have an address, a physical location in the real world. He arrived in the backseat of the Range Rover, passing a rotating series of toys toward Ruby’s car seat next to him. There was never any need to know the address. But of course there is one. It’s not just some summer kingdom that exists only in his head, a fairy tale he’ll emerge from in September to learn that centuries have gone by.

Harry settles back in his office chair as the conversation turns to logistics. Tom gleans what he can from Harry’s end of the conversation. The car is getting taken care of. Someone named Luis is packing up something in London. A guitar is being messengered. Plane tickets are being changed. He catches the flight date, and realizes it’s two days before he and Meredith and Ruby travel back to London. Barely two weeks until the end of the summer, until the drawbridge is lowered and Tom trudges back to a reality where there’s no freshly ground coffee, no wine he can’t pronounce, no pool out back, no Ben and Meredith. No dog. No Harry Styles.

He’s got to leave the room before the call ends. But as he’s shifting Colin off his lap, Harry hangs up. “Done,” he announces, standing up. He links his fingers together and stretches his arms above his head, as if he’s cooling down from a run. The hem of his t-shirt exposes the leafy tattoos slashing across his tanned stomach above the waistband of his track bottoms. Tom looks down at the dog and shifts his legs experimentally, trying to determine how firmly Colin’s entrenched. He can’t get up and leave now, or it’ll be obvious he was only lingering to eavesdrop of Harry’s phone call.

“All sorted?” Meredith asks. She holds a hand up toward Harry for a high five. Harry links his fingers through hers instead and waves their clasped hands back and forth in something like a victory celebration.

Meredith smiles up at him. “I thought I was going to have a boring summer, just me and Ruby knocking around this place.”

“I’m pretty boring.” Harry drops Meredith’s hand and returns to his chair, leaning back at an exaggerated angle and using his feet to rotate himself back to his laptop. He pauses just before Meredith’s out of his view, his head lolling back on the chair so he’s looking at her sideways.  “I can bore you later if you’d like.”

Tom grabs his coffee mug and stands up too fast, displacing Colin and almost sloshing coffee onto his hand. This feels too much like nighttime seeping into the sunshiny morning of his workday. He can’t tell if Harry’s voice is lower and slower than usual, or if Harry’s voice just naturally makes everything sound like sex.

“I’m sure you will,” Meredith says, laughing. She turns back to her own desk.

“Anything I need to know?” Tom curls his fingers tightly around the baby monitor.

Meredith looks up. “Oh…” Her brow furrows. “There was something…” She brushes it off, shrugging. “I’ll let you know if I remember. She went down at the usual time. No diaper yet today, watch out.”

“Got it.” Tom retreats to the kitchen, trying not to draw any comparisons between Harry’s job and his own.

***

Harry delivers that night, or so Tom would assume, if he was paying any attention. Meredith’s at the far edges of his consciousness, nothing but soft noises pressed into Harry’s neck and the shadow of the leg she’s canted upward for Harry’s fingers. They’re wrapped up in each other, and he’s got Ben underneath him, Ben all to himself, his legs spread apart over Ben’s hips and his body carefully stretching around Ben’s cock. He breathes in Ben’s attention like it’s a drug twining smoky tendrils through his nervous system, turning his skin raw and receptive. The purest form of a substance he hasn’t tasted undiluted since Harry arrived.

“Good boy,” Ben murmurs as Tom settles against him, sinking downward until the backs of his thighs press against the ridges of Ben’s hipbones.

He exhales slowly and thoroughly, pressing all the air out of his body. As he inhales, he reorients himself around Ben inside him, better than oxygen. Ben’s eyes gleam in the candlelight as he flexes his hips up once, slowly, against Tom’s weight pinning him down. Tom’s body opens, tightens, molding itself to Ben. Tom shifts his weight to his knees so Ben can move inside him. His body hums with the satisfaction of Ben’s gaze.

He straightens so he can brace his hands on Ben’s chest, spreading his fingers and digging the heels of his palms into his ribcage. “More,” Tom breathes. For a moment he thinks Ben hasn’t heard, but then Ben thrusts up hard and tightens his hands on Tom’s hips, and this time his breath comes out as a moan. “Yeah, more.” He leans closer and follows Ben’s rhythm, bearing down to meet each thrust as Ben fucks him harder.

The scant friction of his cock against Ben’s stomach isn’t going to get him off, but that’s a distant concern. Right now it’s enough to have all of Ben, all of his attention pouring warm and liquid over his charged skin. Tom wants to bathe in it, drown in it, be good enough and pretty enough and wanton enough to keep it.

He doesn’t register the mattress shifting underneath them, or realize that the redistribution of weight is what’s knocked them out of sync. Tom whines, squirming on his knees to find the place where Ben was meeting him just right. Ben overcorrects, almost slipping out. Tom tenses and leans back to drive his hips down against Ben’s, greedy and frantic.

He doesn’t clock Harry behind him until the shock of Harry’s mouth at the curve of his neck. Tom arches into the sensation instinctively, shuddering at the light trace of Harry’s tongue and then the sting of his teeth.

His reaction -- lips parted in a gasp, head lolling to the side to open his neck to Harry -- must tell Ben something. “Good, H,” Ben says, his voice rough, and Tom’s eyes fly open. For a moment, an elemental rage flickers at the edges of his pleasure. He should have known nothing is safe, nothing is sacred. There’s no power stronger than Harry’s need to be the center of attention.

Ben tightens his hands on Tom’s hips and holds him in place, shifting under him to make space as Harry knees his way into the array of their legs. Ben realigns himself with Tom before Harry’s finished making himself comfortable, and Tom’s lost to anything except the blistering buzz of Ben deep inside him, over and over.

It takes a moment for him to realize that Harry’s fitted himself against his back, moving so seamlessly with him and Ben that Tom might not have noticed if not for the unmistakable drag of Harry’s cock across the base of his spine. Harry spreads a hand flat over Tom’s breastbone to press their bodies together, and Tom’s skin lights up with the intensity of it, a conflagration that dwarfs the small flame of anger he’d felt at Harry imposing himself. A campfire rendered irrelevant by a wildfire taking down the forest.

Ben’s hands slide up from his hips, supporting him, keeping Harry’s weight from pushing him forward. Tom’s caught between them, Harry leaning heavy on his back and Ben’s hands on his chest, Ben inside him and finally a hand  -- Harry’s hand? -- on his cock in the close space between Tom and Ben. Everything is skin against his and hands on his body. Every bit of him is made to be touched.

Tom thinks of surfing, of aligning his body with a force he can’t control. The tension between the full-body engagement required to keep pace with the wave, and the complete submission required to let the wave take him where it’s going. It never seems possible, until the moment when suddenly, euphorically, it does. The swell propels him impossibly forward and forward until it overcomes him, throws him into the water breathless and exhilarated.

Tom slumps forward, panting. His hands are still braced against Ben’s chest, but they’re useless to support him. He lets Ben and Harry hold him up, melting in between them, until Ben comes with a noise that’s almost a growl. Harry stills behind him as Ben thrusts upward for the last time, deep inside Tom as he finishes. The line of Harry’s cock presses thickly along his spine. Tom wonders what Harry’s going to do about that, and then wonders if Harry’s going to push him forward onto his hands and knees, fuck him right there on top of Ben. The idea is potent and a little bit frightening. He’s still hovering his hand over the thought, like an electric wire he can’t quite bring himself to touch, when Harry scrambles away. His knee digs into the back of Tom’s calf, and the sweat starts to cool on Tom’s back without Harry weight pressed against him.

Ben draws his hands down Tom’s body. He moves Tom upward with a light touch at his hips, and slips out of him. With nothing else to keep him upright, Tom wilts into the space Ben leaves behind when he goes to bin the condom.

Meredith turns onto her side and cranes her neck to kiss the edge of Tom’s mouth. She lingers nose to nose with him, their faces sliding toward each other in the valley between the pillows. “God, that was hot,” she murmurs.

It feels like praise just for him. “Mmmm,” Tom manages, affirmatively. God, but it was.

Meredith settles onto her back. “Harry?” Her tone makes it more of a directive than a question.

Harry’s pawing through the duvet mounded at the end of the bed, looking for something. Tom watches the angles of his legs as he kneels, the hurried motions of his hands. He doesn’t get tired of watching Harry, now that he can. Now that he’s supposed to, even. He’s stopped mourning the balance he felt with Ben and Meri, as if he was a missing piece sliding into place in their bed, in their life. Harry doesn’t balance. He’s a source of gravity all his own, pulling everyone and everything into orbit. Harry’s need to be the center of attention has become more a source of fascination, less a source of resentment. There’s no point in resenting a law of nature.

Harry pulls a misplaced foil packet from a fold of the duvet and brandishes it triumphantly. Tom’s sated, his body gone pleasantly syrupy from overstimulation, but his tongue still flexes in his mouth as he watches Harry rolls on the condom. He imagines Harry kneeling on top of him, feeding his cock into Tom’s mouth instead of tracing two fingers over Meredith’s cunt to line himself up before he slides inside her in one smooth sudden motion.

“Oh,” Meredith breathes out, and Harry pauses, the curve of his arse tight, holding himself at the apex. Meredith’s toes dig under Tom’s shin as she spreads her legs and rolls her hips upward to let Harry in deeper. She wraps one leg around his waist. “Come on.”

Harry glances over his shoulder to confirm Ben’s whereabouts. Tom can’t see Ben’s side of their wordless exchange, but he returns to bed as Harry starts to fuck Meredith in earnest. The mattress dips as Ben stretches out behind Tom, propping himself on one elbow and draping his other arm over Tom. Tom presses his shoulderblades into the comforting backstop of Ben’s chest. He can feel Ben’s spent cock against him, where the tops of his legs are still smeared slick.

The motion next to them jostles him closer to Harry and Meredith, close enough to breathe in the tang of sweat and sex between their bodies. Close enough to feel more like a participant than a spectator. Ben inches forward with him, not letting any space open up. He reaches over Tom to take Meredith’s hand. Tom’s tucked between them like a handkerchief in a drawer, feeling just the right size.

He rests his cheek against the edge of Meredith’s shoulder and looks up at Harry. His eyes are closed and his head is tilted away from Tom, neck craning toward the place where Meredith’s other hand is twisted in his hair. The line of his jaw sharpens in the candlelight. He holds himself above Meredith on both arms, muscles working as he thrusts into her, hard enough to hear the smack of their skin.

As if he intuits Tom’s attention, Harry opens his eyes and locks them on Tom. A queasy thrill heats Tom’s stomach. He fights the instinct to duck his head against the intensity. Harry doesn’t look away, even as his pace increases with clumsy urgency, even as Meredith’s pitch keens upward. Tom holds Harry’s gaze as his body tenses and releases with each of Harry’s thrusts, responding without Harry even touching him, responding as if he’s the one Harry’s fucking.

***

At first, Tom doesn’t recognize the two-toned chime that sounds as he’s coming downstairs. His first instinct is to find the source and make sure it doesn’t wake Ruby from her nap. A second later, he realizes: doorbell. Nobody’s come to the door all summer. Tom hadn’t even realized the house had a doorbell. He leaves the hissing baby monitor on the entryway table and goes to answer.

There’s a DHL van in the driveway, bright and blocky behind Harry’s black-windowed car. The uniformed driver waits on the doorstep with a rectangular box tucked under his arm. Tom opens the door with a smile, hoping he won’t have to say bonjour and reveal his unpracticed accent. His strategy backfires when the driver says something in French and holds out a tablet toward Tom.

“Oui,” Tom says, exhausting at least a quarter of his French vocabulary. Fortunately, it doesn’t require any fluency to take the stylus and sign in the empty box on the screen. The driver says something else in French and hands over the package.

“Merci,” Tom mumbles, and waves awkwardly as the driver jogs back toward his truck.

Tom glances at the shipping label, expecting to see Ben or Meredith’s name. When nothing pops out, he searches the French-labeled form, wondering what term identifies the addressee. The only printing he can see that looks anything like a name says “Hershel Azoff.”

He swears under his breath and looks up, just as the delivery van disappears around the end of the hedge. He’s got somebody else’s package, and he has no idea what to do with it. He searches the label again, as if the French fine print is going to help. The address of the country house is correct, though. He could just leave the box in the office and hope that Ben or Meredith will find it and take care of the problem. But if they don’t, somebody’s going to miss their package. He walks through the house and out to the pool.

Meredith and Harry are in the shade under the trellis. She’s reading on a lounge chair, legs stretched out and ankles crossed. Harry’s next to her on another lounge, shirtless, with sunglasses tucked up in his hair. His laptop’s open on his lap.

He looks up as Tom crosses the terrace toward them. “Is that mine?” Harry asks, spotting the box in Tom’s hand.

Tom stops at the end of Harry’s lounge and looks at the label again. “Only if you’re Hershel Azoff.”

Harry and Meredith laugh, to Tom’s bemusement. Harry gestures for Tom to hand the box over. “That’s me.”

“Really?” Tom hesitates, an odd instinct to protect the mystery recipient’s package.

“Yup.” Harry claps his laptop closed and slides it onto the side table next to him. “Give it here.”

Tom hands over the package. “Why Hershel Azoff?”

“My manager’s family.” Harry rips the tab off the end of the box. “Easier not to ship stuff under my name.”

Tom suddenly remembers the conversation in July when Meredith had told him a friend of theirs was coming to stay. “It’s Harry Styles,” she’d said, and paused, waiting for Tom’s response. The name hadn’t meant anything to him, but he hadn’t let on, just asked if she needed him to do anything differently while their guest was in town. Just don’t post anything on social media, she’d said, nothing that might indicate he’s here. Tom agreed without thinking anything of it. It didn’t seem much different from her instructions when he’d started babysitting for them last spring: no photos of Ruby on the internet, ever. But this time, Meredith had emphasized: “Not even in the background, or a hand or a shoe or anything like that.”

The instructions turned out to be unnecessary. Tom hasn’t posted anything this summer anyway. He supposes he could have posted pictures of the house or the pool or the sunset light over the rolling hills in the distance, but what would be the point? This summer is something so separate, so special, not to be cheapened by reducing it to a couple of rows of incongruous sun-soaked photos on his Instagram

Harry upends the yellow box and slides out a stack of bound documents.

“Scripts?” Meredith asks, watching him.

Harry nods. “A little light vacation reading,” he says, wryly.

“You’ll find a good one,” Meredith says. “Is that Elvis one in there?”

Harry grimaces. “Nah, I read that one already.”

Her eyebrows rise above her sunglasses. “Not interested?”

“Absolutely not.” He stands the bundle of scripts in his lap and flips them down onto his stomach one by one, looking at the cover pages.

“You’re not an Elvis fan?” Tom asks, his curiosity piqued.

“Love him.” Harry looks up. “It’s just not the right time.”

“Why not?”

Harry taps his fingers on the back of the stack of scripts. “He’s just so…” He stares into the middle distance over Tom’s shoulder, searching for the right word. “He’s Elvis.” He refocuses on Tom. “It just feels kind of like, if I’m going to play Elvis, in a biopic, he deserves something good, and I don’t think I can do it right, at least not right now, and if I do it wrong…” Harry winces.

“So what if you do? At least you’re in a film.” It must pay a lot, starring in a film. Being Elvis Presley. It’s hard to see how anyone could turn that down.

“I can’t afford to mess up a film.” Harry holds up the scripts. “There’s plenty of other options, anyway.”

“Like what?” Tom can’t help but ask. What could be better than being Elvis?

“Come and see.” Harry swings his legs over the side of the lounge chair, making room for Tom to sit at the end. He fans out the scripts like a hand of cards and grins at Meredith. “Jeff says one’s a psychosexual thriller.” Harry says it with relish, rolling the word “psychosexual” around in his mouth.

Tom laughs. “Basic Instinct style? Are you going to be Sharon Stone?”

“Think I could?” Harry sets the scripts to the side and shifts to face Tom. He flips his hand over his shoulder, tossing back an imaginary mane of hair. He leans slightly toward Tom and fixes him with an unnerving stare. Tom wants desperately to break Harry’s intense eye contact, but he can’t look away. Slowly and ostentatiously, Harry crosses and uncrosses his legs, spreading them open.

“Shut up.” Tom kicks at Harry’s ankles. His face feels hot. Harry might actually be a good actor.

Harry cackles and suddenly he’s just some lazy guy by the pool again. “I haven’t read it yet. I’m probably not Sharon Stone.”

“What else, then?”

Harry hands him the stack. “Pick me a winner.” He tucks his feet up and settles back against the lounge, watching Tom page through the scripts.

One with a red cover catches his eye at the back of the stack. A square of notepaper with a black circle logo is paper-clipped to it. In spiky handwriting, the note says, “H- This is the Marvel one. Read for Wiccan.” Tom looks down at the typewritten cover. UNTITLED PROJECT. “Hey, you could be a superhero?”

“Is that the Marvel one? Does it say which character?”

Tom tips the cover with the note toward him. “Wiccan.”

“Oh, yeah.” Harry looks smug. “Jeff said something about that. He can manipulate reality. And he has a shapeshifting alien boyfriend.”

“Alien boyfriend?” Meredith looks up from her book. “That sounds more like the role for you, love.”

‘Heyyyyy.” Harry leans his head against the lounge, looking dolefully at Meredith. “Don’t I deserve an alien boyfriend?”

“Pity the poor alien,” Meredith says. “How’s he going to adjust to Earth if you’re his role model?”

“I’d be a great boyfriend,” Harry says. “He could wear my spaceboy sweater. Maybe he’d come on tour, in his spaceship.”

Tom pages idly through the script, ignoring the dialogue on the page as he listens to Harry riff on the possibilities presented by an alien boyfriend. Maybe Harry doesn’t only date French girls. Which is interesting, in a useless trivia kind of way. Like knowing duckbilled platypuses exist. Not very relevant to Tom, but all the same, it’s nice to know the world contains such things.

[ferryboatpeak]

[ferryboatpeak]

How is french countryside tomrry coming?

we have had a productive week! i made some good headway on the next chapter, solved a problem that needed to be solved before i could get into the next sex scene, and most importantly got myself back in the headspace where this fic is all i can think about.

[ferryboatpeak]

summer is over how will you wrap up french countryside tomrry?

by wasting beautiful fall afternoons sitting in bookstores writing skinny dipping scenes, that’s how

[ferryboatpeak]

That was really, really good. Filthy in the most delicious way but also heavy and a bit sad? Thank you 😘

thank you! embarrassingly, it did not occur to me when i started this that tom would have to start feeling not so great about the winstons at some point, and now i gotta write my way through that difficulty. so there’s a bit more sad to come, although on balance i think i feel better about the direction it’s going than i would if i’d stuck to my original goal of making the employer/employee aspect not too uncomfortable (and therefore not too realistic).

[ferryboatpeak]

wip phrase meme

Rules: List 10 words/phrases that have something to do with your work(s) in progress and then tag 10 people to do the same.

tagged by @nothanksweregood, thanks doll!

cannonball | camembert | colin | ivy | DHL | hershel | tequila | bistro | sex dream | dunk

tagging: @silveredsound, @lunarrua, @ticklefightharry, @harryseyebrows and skipping the people who’ve done it already but if i missed you please consider yourself tagged

[ferryboatpeak]

5/5/19 EXCUUUUUUSE ME???????

[ferryboatpeak]

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[ferryboatpeak]

Ben Winston posting multiple ig stories of his kid playing with his Emmys is an actually perfect distillation of everything I love to hate about him.