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Then
The first time they do anything at all with each other Paul runs to the bathroom and closes the door behind him. Like a goddamn bird. John is fuzzy-headed and half-dressed, his heart throbbing. Paul isn’t the first boy he’s let touch him but he’s the first boy that John wants to keep close afterwards. Frightened and humiliated, he starts getting dressed again, patting at the sweat over his forehead with his white t-shirt bunched up in his fist. He can’t decide between running out the door and finding a roof to jump off of, or staying to pace back and forth in this tiny room in utter agony until Paul settles down.
In the end, he goes back to bed and sits there nursing an almost-empty beer bottle until the door swings open and Paul’s footsteps pad back towards him again. And when John sees him he remembers the first time he fooled around with another boy, how fast the both of them fled and how quick they were to forget each other once the school year was through. But this doesn’t feel like that at all. Because fooling around with Paul was different — weighted by attraction and connection that John has never felt with anyone else ever before.
“I thought I was going to-” Paul says, and then clamps his mouth shut. He’s only in his underwear, hair all mussed, pink-cheeked. He’s never seen Paul’s face go that colour, even in the heat of the summer they properly met. Even in the previous summer when he was just the canny paperboy John flirted with over the mailbox as the sun poured over them in a honeyed sizzle.
“Throw your guts up?” John supplies, keeping his face stoic and aloof while feeling absolutely none of those things. Truth is, he feels inclined to vomit too.
Paul shuffles towards him, pressing one reddened knee to the edge of the mattress, “No, it’s not that, I’m just not used to-”
And then he cuts himself off again, but this time with a laugh. Bashful, darkly amused by himself, eyes suddenly alight. John likes the sound, he likes the look. He likes Paul.
-
Paul saunters into band practice in his drainies and leather jacket, pleased with himself. He pats the pack of cigarettes he had taken from John’s room the day before into his hand, fingertips lingering on the pulsepoint of John’s wrist. The breath is knocked out of him. Dizzyingly thrilled by the danger of what could possibly come next.
-
He let it linger and fester. This vulnerability at his side, this queer bend in the rhythm of his life. The strange lode-bearing sunbeam that Paul had become for him. John got to thinking it was romantic. That it would last because it was so absurd, and John’s life was nothing if not absurd.
-
Dizzy with drink, they slump shoulder to shoulder on the hotel couch jointly nursing a transistor radio playing one of their very early singles. Paul’s voice buzzes out through the little tinny speaker, a strange tangle of something so familiar and something bright and new. John’s harmony emerges, fizzing like carbonation in a coke bottle — Paul the sweet dark syrup, John the icy cold slide of it down the throat.
-
On the last wobbly legs of their tour, it starts to feel like two politicians fucking in the office — most of the time, desire has very little to do with it. It’s a strategic move when Paul stretches out his legs over the coffee table with a little soft and strained hum, or when John goes quiet and thoughtful behind a notebook when he knows he’s already being admired. It’s all tactical — sharing hotel rooms, lifting glass bottles to bitten lips, fidgeting with the cuffs of their sleeves and the knots of their ties.
And it’s utterly cracked, they both know it. But it has to be done, this is how they work, this is how they’ve always worked. It won’t matter when they’re forty, enjoying the profits of the latest Greatest Beatle Hits! record that Brian would’ve cooked up to keep the wheels turning. But they need to do it now. It wouldn’t be them without it.
And still, there are moments within their calculated liaisons that act like electric shocks to his system — the light bulbs of his brain bursting into millions of tiny pieces of glass confetti, raining down sparks and glitter. Stupid pathetic moments where John feels his stomach curl inside out because Paul has this look on his face, totally entranced by him. After all this time. Pupils blown wide, mouth hanging open in a slack smile, watching John move with him like he’s the most incredible thing he’s ever seen. Sometimes he’ll smile all slack-mouthed and fond as he pushes John’s fringe back or rubs his thumb over a stripe of stubble that John had missed when he shaved that morning without his glasses on. Sometimes he’ll even spill praise and worship, and John drinks it up. It’s as primal as a crying need for a mother’s love or an ache for a father’s approval, a psychological malformation he’s more or less been feeding since they were teenagers.
-
It’s a release, a burst of something beyond everything. He can’t explain it without drifting to dreamy metaphors, because it’s not quite of earth. It’s not quite real.
-
When he’s touring, his dreams are quick and flighty and dissolve at the slightest flinch of lucidity. He describes his latest to the lads over a hotel breakfast, poking at a plateful of scrambled eggs with his fork, “We insisted on stuffing a piano into the nine seater with us, and it was too heavy so we started to plummet.”
“I had a similar one a few nights ago,” George says with a wince, and then gestures between John and Paul, “And you two were demanding we keep the piano.”
“Funny, in my dream it was only Paul that was protecting it,” John smirks, throwing a glance over to a frowning Paul.
“So I’m the villain in both of your dreams?” he mopes, putting on a performance of it that John knows holds a pit of sincere hurt.
“You’re the hero in mine, Paul,” Ringo chimes in with a pat of Paul’s sharp shoulder. That mostly settles him, content like a cat being petted.
“And then what happened?” George asks.
“Don’t know, I woke up just as I started screaming at him,” John makes a vague gesture towards Paul, who puts on an empty laugh that all of them see through but show mercy by not making fun of him for it.
Later, as they file into their rooms in pairs, John touches Paul between the shoulder blades.
“It wasn’t just the piano,” he says, trying to starve off his own awareness of why he’s telling Paul this, speaking in a quiet quick murmur, “We were fucking on it, and we kept sinking into the keys like we were in a Dalí painting. And then the engine burst, and it felt like our fault.”
Paul’s body hums with electric pulses under John’s feather-light touch. A stiffening of the muscles in the middle of his back, a slight tightening of his shoulders.
“Our fault,” Paul echoes, voice hollow.
John blinks, retracting his hand as they slip through the door, “Perhaps it’s a bad omen.”
“I don’t believe in those,” Paul says, over his shoulder. Empty. An airy eruption from a depleted source.
“So why are you all funny now?” John challenges, door clicking shut behind him. Only at the metallic snap of the lock that Paul turns and looks at him. The crisp white of his shirt bounces up to the pale of his face.
“I’m trying to forget what you just told me,” Paul tells him, so matter-of-factly that it makes John laugh in a way that makes his shoulders shake. It delights him when Paul goes blunt and unvarnished, that pointed underside to a smooth glassy surface. It dislodges the knot of want and need John’s been keeping locked in a tight fist in the shadows of his mind. It shakes loose and warm, flooding out through his bones and stretching out to the tips of his fingers. Aching, and mindlessly giddy with it, he’s pulled forward by something he’s only ever been able to tame in stops and starts.
-
Paul’s long body is loose and placid, stretched over the settee with his arms up behind his head. He’s giggling to himself over nothing, eyes glistening. John can’t bring himself to look away. Dylan is rambling, Brian is hysterical with laughter, Ringo is in the corner with his head in his hands, George is slumped in an armchair staring at the joint pinched in his fingers with a crooked grin. Paul just keeps giggling. Seeing things in the ceiling that John can read through the shine in his eyes.
-
They’re in Paris. John had come running to him after a blank slate of wandering. They hadn’t done this in a while, neither of them wanting to be the one to give in first. The tension of recording and growing older and into and apart from each other had burst the pipes. Neither of them really knew why. John had been brooding over it, flirting with people at parties and sauntering into strange bedrooms to watch couples fuck each other, empty empty empty. He used to get a thrill out of it not too long ago, when Brian would escort him to tucked away bars, presenting him like fine art to eager eyes. Wandering through Lionel Bart’s mirrored hallways and sitting himself down in a chair across from a king sized bed, half hard as he casually smoked and watched men keen into each other, their bodies flushed from exertion and attention. But now even flirting with Mick isn’t fun anymore either. Maybe this is what you get when you make it to the end of the line — nothing. Maybe he did exhaust himself, all those folk tale warnings about great riches were right. Maybe he is corrupted and spent.
And still, songs from the very core of him, songs that sound like his dreams laid out from end to end, tumble out. And then the telegram came through. Paul wanted him, and he wanted him in Paris.
And so they wined and dined for as long as they could stand to dance around the purpose of the cosmic tightening of their conjoined stitch.
“You suit Paris — it’s good for you,” Paul tells him, eyes soft with utter certainty.
“We both do,” John murmurs, because he knows that’s what Paul meant to say anyway, “Maybe we’ll land here when the bubble bursts.”
“A second act,” Paul muses, but John pins down the slight detachment that lifts his tone from the ground and up into the air above their heads — he’s never been able to sit with the idea that the Beatles would ever burst, that it could ever be compared to a temporary flimsy floaty thing. John thinks it’s naive, Paul would probably think it’s romantic. And John likes that enough to excuse it.
“Come and go with me, monsieur,” John’s fingers rake through Paul’s hair, the glossy locks of it that sway and fall just over his ears, “Let me peel your leather off.”
Paul snickers, placid and warm at John’s side.
Later, breathing warm and heavy against the base of John’s jumping throat and kissing aimlessly, “Don’t stop.”
John doesn’t. Never could.
-
“I know you by the taste of your sweat,” Paul says to him in the sun-splashed kitchen at Cavendish — buoyant and utterly oblivious.
John laughs, stunned, a small portion of hysteria bubbling up from his fluttering heart.
“What?” Paul chuckles, a nervy little sound. John would kiss it if he could hold it in his hands.
“Nothing, nothing at all, dear,” he gives a bewildered shake of his head and a smile, his heart throbbing wildly. Paul thinks he’s brushing him off, John is sweeping it into a quiet memory he’ll cherish forever.
-
He’s high, sitting by the window in his silk robe. Maybe if he painted something every day, he could line all the canvases end to end and see his days as shapes and colours, maybe he would understand his own rhythm. Millions of white gleaming eyes swimming through rivers of charcoal and red, open and glittering with tears of tension and then relief.
Later, or was it before? Anyway. He runs his thumb over Paul’s bottom lip — a cool red. He runs the tip of his finger down the straight line of his nose — speckled with faint spots of golden sun. He kisses him, aching for tenderness he never finds in anything or anyone else. Blissful crisp blues and forest greens, a touch of cloud-white at the edges of a dream.
-
Paul’s all keyed up, bouncing from place to place, from thing to sparkling thing. Incense-smoked ideas and fountain pen doodles and electronic sounds and groovy happenings where the pulsepoints are toilet stalls populated by coke-sniffing ponces. He’s jittery and mentally chained to the studio, but he tells John he’s the most free he’s ever been. His mind is not really there, and it grates against the closeness they’ve been enjoying in the buzzing cosiness of Cavendish. It’s a sour taste in his spoiled mouth, but it’ll have to do. Paul gets like that every now and then, and John has always had to learn not to be hurt by it.
Paul pulls him over his warm sleep-loose body in the mornings, groping at him like the mere hours of sleep he had had starved him. He presses into John’s back at the kitchen just before lunch, murmuring dirty nonsense into John’s temple, lips trailing down the fuzzy stripe of his sideburns. He sits himself down on a stool in the studio, legs spread open, eyes boring into John like he wants to eat him alive. John blows him in the toilet stall, trying to squeeze the tension out of his shaking thighs. Paul’s face hovering in front of John’s, fucking him with his eyes rolling back. There’s cocaine caught in his moustache and a film of glassiness over his eyes. Pawing at John, fucking him with a different frantic rhythm, talking filthily without shame and regret lurking around the corner. Paul is keen to drag him out of bed, off the floor, from the kitchen table, and take him out somewhere to work himself up again. All John really wants is to stay in, turn off and tune in and make love for hours. Hours of feeling it right in the core of him. He wants to be fucked so he can feel it for days, he wants to live in it.
He knows what it is because he’s taken psychedelic trips around the globe of his own mind enough times to realise how delicately he balances on the cusp of a life that he wants but is incapable of holding. Not that the universe or God or whatever it is would ever give it to him in the first place. And he won’t ever ever say it. He won’t let himself think it, either, not without a dreamy cushioned high to fall back on.
“It’s sort of funny,” Paul chuckles like he’s amused and not frightened, “That we’re not sick of it after all this time. It still gets us off. It’s amazing, y’know. We just never stop needing it.”
“Well, Paul, that means a lot,” John coos with mock-sentimentality. Paul smiles around his smoking joint.
He means it with every aching particle of him.
-
He never says no, but the slight pull at the corners of his mouth and the busy ticking of his mind visible through glass-cold eyes gives him away.
John folds the hurt of it like a little piece of paper, tucking it between his ribs for safekeeping — it’ll otherwise end up flying from his barbed tongue.
-
Ever since his youth, his ego pings off the walls in his soul like a marble — clanging from shriveled passivity to bold bright pride. Paul used to be the balm for his wounds, he used to lift John’s heels from the quaking cracked earth of his own pain. It was a stupid thing for John to do — to rely on a cloud.
-
For all that talk of a starry fated karmic romance, they were always calculated about it.
Paul had John worked out right from the start. He saw himself through John’s eyes and knew that he was hot shit. All the other junk was more or less consolation prizes he could dish out to placate him in the meantime: Here, have the leader title. Be Brian’s favourite. Write your books without a peep from me. Everything John had could easily be Paul’s. All this time John thought he had a choice in the matter, that he had an even-handed grip on this thing, that he was doing it out of the spirit of partnership and whatever it was that was burning like an Olympic flame between them since a teenaged summer in Liverpool. Love, if he absolutely had to categorise a nebulous insurmountable thing.
-
“You’re not entitled to me, I’m not obligated to carve out pieces of my day to feed to you,” John tells him, very matter-of-factly but still pinched in tone, something Paul instinctively tunes into.
But Paul hardly bristles, “Says the fella that moped around for months ‘cause I didn’t want to live on a deserted island with him.”
John winces, Paul wouldn’t have said that if he hadn’t been truly stung — he doesn’t bite back with venom unless John has rammed a verbal fist into a tender nerve. “I got over it, didn’t I?”
“Did you?” Paul raises a brow. Infuriatingly absent in the eyes after the syllables slide through the air, giving John no time to snip back before it hits a brick wall.
“Well, why are you even here, then? If I’m so demanding, exhausting your engine and diverting your artistic eye? I don’t need your pity, Paul, I’m quite alright as I am without you.”
Paul’s mouth twitches the way it does when he’s suppressing a boyish roll of his eyes, “It’s not pity, and who’s saying that you do all that? I didn’t, I’d remember it if I had.”
“All that pot you smoke, there’s no chance,” John breaks into a smile, and takes a small soothing slip of relief at the sight of Paul’s body language easing and the mechanical effort he’s making not to smile. So slight to the eye, negligible invisibility, but John sees it and still finds himself elated by his ability to do that. Relieved, really, that he still can.
-
This gallery is filled with fragile things. Glass and thin ceramics. They shiver at a heavy step, at a booming voice.
His incisors puncture the skin of the apple, driven through sweet acidic flesh, juice dribbling onto his tongue.
In a place like this, everything is bound to break.
-
The break down and break up of themselves confirms every single one of the innermost fears that has festered in John’s psyche since childhood. Like balloons popping on an electrical wire, one by one.
-
He saw it while tripping on the furry rug on the floor of Paul’s home in the summer of ‘68. Paul as the chainlink between the parts of John that he wanted the world to see and the parts he desperately battered down to hide away.
But it doesn’t matter now. If Paul was the chainlink — brittle and cold and metallic — he and Yoko are a dovetail joint.
-
And when he thinks he’s fucked things with Yoko beyond repair, he goes out and drinks and drinks and drinks to douse out their names and their faces. All in an attempt to loosen the crushing hold his love for people has over his broken lonely heart.
-
He bites into the apple right in front of her, testing. Always testing. It’s never kept him safe, but he couldn’t bear not to try.
-
He’s tight-throated and buzzing with drink and something volcanic as he watches this canny Allerton boy with a pink carnation in his pocket retune his guitar.
“Go on, then, show us.”
And then he does.
-
Sweat-slick palms planted on either side of his headphones, lips hovering over a spit-splattered mic, “I want it the way it felt back then, you know? You remember, don’t you, Phil?”
“Yeah, sure John, I remember,” Phil’s yank drawl bursts from nowhere, tired and strained and bemused.
Of course John is thinking about it. The song always swings into his mind in tandem with that memory, twisted up together like a strand of DNA.
-
“Paul and Linda will be there.”
There’s no weight in how May says it. Airy, sunny, free. Like a cloud passing through. The way John wished it was.
-
The paperboy has an unsettling beauty about him. His brows are asymmetrical — one sits in a relaxed slight curve, and the other points in a dramatic arch. His face is simultaneously smoothly rounded and sharp. His movements are nervy but still somehow airy and loose. His smile, his genuine smile, is all front teeth and a peek of tongue. His shining eyes crinkle at the sides when he laughs. For the first time in his life John sees imperfections he doesn’t wish were hidden away for the sake of his own spurring guilt-ridden mind.
-
He steps out into the sunshine by the rooftop pool, bare feet burning on the sun-soaked pavement when he sees him.
Joint pinched in his fingers, head tipped to one side, hooded eyes and languid-mouthed. His eyes lift, because he senses him. Maybe it’s the scent of the sweat crowding at the back of John’s neck, maybe it’s the familiar soft beat of his heels in step, maybe it’s his soul vibrations.
Still helplessly tuned in, hardly dimmed by the cavernous years torn through them.
-
There’s a boy staring at him from the corner of the fish and chip shop. Through the blurry haze of John’s myopic vision he admires the careful sugar-water sculpture of his raven hair, the strong line of his shoulders under his school blazer, the cousin-of-Elvis structure of his face. He gives John the eye. John gives it back, pulse jumping.
-
Now
The smiling synchopat asks them, “If you had to do it all over again, what would you do different?”
They look at each other with the slightest quirk of questioning, a defensive brace and a strategic pause lurking behind performed amusement.
There’s a joke he could make, about sending himself straight to an asylum with a packed bag and a painting kit, but it sits flat on his tongue. He waits.
Paul’s fingertips are smoothing over his lips, face flushed from drink and sun. John catches sight of his exposed ankles crossed together and thinks about sitting cross-legged in front of him in London and in Rishikesh. What would you do differently?
What power did they have to change their fate, anyway? John pictures the two of them in off-colour recreations of what they were — vague imagery of him leaning more into Paul’s world, Paul dipping into his. Bohemians in New York or radicals in Paris, or perhaps the seven year itch is simply inescapable destiny. What would you do differently?
He could comb through songs he wished he pushed further musically, lyrics he could have bettered with wisdom and confidence. He could take back all the shit they put George through. He could have read more, read less, fucked without guilt, talked to Brian, gotten his head straight, kept painting, walked out of the band sooner, never walked out at all. Even after all this time, he doesn’t know the answer. No regret rises because his memories are weighed down by the reality of how fucked he was from the start.
“We shouldn’t have let Mick sing on so many songs, it went to his head,” he quips after a pause, watching Paul’s amused chuckle seep through his busy fingers.
“Pete Forever, Micky Jag Never,” Paul hums lazily, eyes drifting up to the sky, “Funny, I thought you were going to say something else.”
John fidgets with the sapphire blue anklet that May braided for him, “Yeah?”
“That you never have regrets.”
“I regret not saying that.”
Paul smiles, reaching out for a joint provided by a passerby, “I wouldn’t change anything either, actually.”
John’s stomach twists. Suddenly aching, he looks away, “I never said that.”
A heavy pause, Paul plays it cool, “Defamation of character.”
They look at each other directly now, a moment where the curtain is drawn back before it falls again in a cloud of grey-blue smoke obscuring Paul’s glassy eyes.
John licks his lip, “I do that to myself. Regularly.”
Paul smirks, “With a little help…”
“From my friends,” John finishes, accepting a drink being passed to him.
There’s other people around, dozens of them. It’s a biblical revelation.
-
They find each other in the late hour by the pool. No one else is around.
John can’t say it, it would be daft and lame and dangerous, but he’s missed those quiet moments he’s had with Paul over the years. The two of them seeking refuge from the crowds and ending up shoulder to shoulder in a bathroom or on a balcony. Talking for hours. Nonsense and brutal truths, wrapped in language constructed from years of self-referencing and knowing what crawls under each other’s skin.
He remembers a night in ‘63, Paul taking him to the roof of some bar and the two of them sitting and smoking the noise out of their heads. John had wanted to start kissing him again, they hadn’t done much of that since Brian had come into the picture and they had more eyes on them than ever. He ran a spider-hand from Paul’s thigh down to his knee, and when he stopped to splay his hand over in a soft drape around it he watched Paul stare at his hand — a face carved out of marble. Later, Paul told him that he didn’t try anything because he didn’t think John wanted him anymore. And John thought surely that was just twisted punishment for the aftermath of Stu and the entry of Brian and the almost final exit of Wooler. Mind games, Paul playing thick with a cool vengeance. But he could almost believe it when Paul looked at him like that, when he lowered his voice to that earnest murmur and spoke through lips worried down to shredded skin. Maybe he was telling the truth, John reconsidered years after his first bitter reassessment of the matter. Maybe they were both clueless.
Paul is smoking a joint, laid out on a lounge chair pulled up to the very edge of the pool. Shirt completely unbuttoned, linen pants draped around his long legs. When the breeze rustles in, John mirrors him on the chair to his left.
“I thought of something I would do differently,” John tells him.
“Yeah?” Paul hums, totally out of it. His eyes are red-rimmed, almost making John sore to look at.
John clasps his hands behind his head, “I’m not telling you what it is.”
Paul flips him a languid V. The pool water shivers as another breeze rolls in.
John smiles and closes his eyes, “Remember that pool… Christ, don’t even know where anymore. Miami, perhaps. And you swam naked for hours just about, and I was sitting on the side and chain-smoking because I was trying not to fuck you. Or have you fuck me.”
“Which I did,” Paul says, slightly pleased voice lazy and low, “That very day.”
John tries not to smile at that, “I think that’s when I realised, you know.”
“What?”
“That it would be my whole life. You peacocking while I crumbled.”
Paul doesn’t speak for a long moment. John hears him huff smoke rings.
“Sometimes I enjoyed it,” John reasons. Diplomatic. The smoke rings dissipate over his head.
“You’re such a shithead sometimes, John, honestly,” Paul sighs, “You really don’t think it ever happened the other way around? I thought this whole thing was you realising that.”
John scoffs. He can hear Paul shuffle in his seat, presumably lifting himself upright to sit at the edge of the chair. Presumably not looking at John, but burning a stare up to the burning stars.
“You did it first,” Paul presses, “You did it for a long time before I ever got the nerve to play the game.”
“Alright, Paul,” John says, laying a palm to rest flat against his forehead, “I know, okay? I know.”
John looks at him, the jittery state of him. He’s got the joint pinched in a hand that could probably start trembling if John pushed a little further. But he doesn’t want to this time.
Paul glares at him and then turns his face away, eyes cold and glassy, “You’ll never know, actually.”
Something bends within John. He’s taken back to that rooftop smoke, itching for Paul to do something. Waiting too long and realising only during their second Parisian getaway that Paul would only wait for the version of John that curled at his side to soothe him in the sun-blushed room they first fooled around in. The John that laughs and cries into his shoulder and no one else’s. The John that became Paul’s. The same way John starves for the Paul that became John’s. The Paul he’s mourned but sees and hears the ghost of everywhere he goes.
John sits himself up, looking down at Paul’s sandaled feet pointed towards his own.
“Actually, I was remembering that time we were sitting by my pool. You were visiting me just to watch me trip.”
Paul’s eyes drift back to him, less cold. A little broken and a little open.
John looks right at him, feeling softer and warmer, and a little broken and a little open too, “All those times you did that. You played me songs and let me look at you.”
Paul’s eyes roll down, “Let you look at me?”
John’s throat wells up with emotion, “You let me in.”
Paul’s mouth twitches, and John expects a sad and bitter “And what good did that do me?” and he would deserve it. He knows deep down that he’s thinking it. But Paul just takes a breath and says very plainly, “I did.”
John’s hands tighten in a nervous clasp between his knees, “I’ve missed you this whole time.”
Paul doesn’t flinch, still staring at the ground and thinking. He looks as tortured as John has ever remembered seeing him, even at twenty-six as the band was burning up, looking like the air had been pressed out of his lungs and he felt it too impolite to ask for any of it back.
John blinks back the faint gathering mist in his eyes, “We were just kids.”
This makes Paul react, a subtle jolt from somewhere deep within. His posture straightens a little, he takes another hit. Neither of them speak for a while. John watches the water, Paul watches everything else.
“If you change your mind tomorrow,” Paul lifts himself up, “I’ll still feel the same. That’s how it’s always been.”
John studies his face, desperate to commit him to memory before they split paths for another five years. The same eyes that he gave John all those times he’d plunged the knife in, purposefully or not. Cool eyes, shifting and shimmering like the glittering surface of a swimming pool.
“I could think differently, but I’ll always feel the same,” John tells him. Maybe it comforts Paul, maybe he earnestly hadn’t realised that in all these years.
He gives nothing away as he passes his joint to John.
“I’d quite like to be an optimist tomorrow,” he says, his tone coasting on some kind of facetious levity but falling flat even at that, “Not just play at it, but be it.”
“You’re a capable fellow,” John says with a half-smile he mostly has to force. It’s gentle. Paul holds it for pause.
“I used to think so,” Paul says, “I’ve had my faith shaken. Stirred.”
John reaches out and touches his hand. Just a brush of contact, just anything at all.
“Can I go with you? I want to,” John’s voice is soft.
“I’m leaving early,” Paul says. And it’s so utterly him. To lay out unabashed invitations at every turn for years for John to consider, for John to agonise in indecision over, only to end up here. There but not quite. The two of them in that room in New York, side by side but far away. John needing him to say something but not knowing what, and Paul being unable to speak at all. It’s both of them, it’s their conjoined fault.
But he loves him. He can't ever not love him.
“Is that a no?” John stands up, watches Paul watching him.
Paul looks him up and down, “No. I’m just telling you. And reminding myself.”
-
When Paul leaves in the morning, John can hear the stirring of sunny voices downstairs. He pulls himself out of bed. He has a choice to make. He can go sit by the window to watch the car drive off, have a smoke or maybe not. He can lock himself in the bathroom, have a smoke or maybe not.
When he looks over to the bedside table he finds that Paul has taken his cigarettes. He smiles, the first real sunray of a smile he’s had since he got here, and slips back into his jeans and goes to perch at the window. Linda’s curtain of blonde hair sways in the visible slip of an opened car door, and for a moment John assumes that he’s missed him. But no, Paul bounces into view — lit cigarette dangling from his mouth. John doesn’t just imagine the unsubtle glance up to the window he’s haunting. He knows what it means when Paul winds down the car window to let his hand hover outside as they drive away.