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The first few times they sleep together after Robert gets out of prison, there's a sense of urgency about it. It's not unlike like the beginning of it all, when their relationship - if you could call it that - consisted of rough, desperate fucking. Back when they stole moments together like a suffocating body might steal breaths, heaving in as much of each other as they could before the opportunity was lost. They don't take the time to take each other in slowly, to map out their bodies, charting new freckles and old moles. It's all they can do to hold each other for a minute or two in the afterglow, before being dragged unwillingly back through the veil to their separate realities beyond.
Even when they have hours. Even when the doors are locked and there's no chance of anyone - be that an unstable prison spouse or a family member with an aversion to knocking - walking in on them. Even then, there's still a distance between them. It's not physical, because if they were physically any closer to one another they would merge into a single being, but rather a distance between their hearts. An unspoken fear that, if they stop and look at each other, take the time to really feel the unfamiliar undulations of a familiar body, the years they spent apart might crack open like a chasm between them.
It's a fear that, once they acknowledge the distance, they might not know how to find their way back to one another.
It's not until that brief reprieve - after Kev disappears into the Dales and before John makes his unwelcome return, in those weeks spent in an unfamiliar bedroom in an unfamiliar town - that they let that invisible barrier crumble away, and they begin to really see each other again.
**
Aaron is no stranger to scars. He knows the shame of hiding them and the anxiety of revealing them. He know what it's like to have curious eyes trace over the uneven plains of his skin, catching on raised pink lines. It doesn't matter who is looking, whether its a stranger on the bus or a lover in his bed, the look they given him when they notice his scars is always laced with the same question.
What happened to you?
He hates it. He hates the curiosity and the pointed concern. He hates the pity. He hates being looked at like he's a wounded animal that has limped in off the street, dragging an injured leg behind him.
And he hates that, when he and Robert lie together, naked bodies flush in the dusty morning light, and his hand runs across a thin line of puckered skin just above Robert's belly button, the first thing he does is silently ask that one question he can't stand.
Robert, what happened to you?
He knows some of the truth. The truth that Robert can bear to tell him. But he knows him well enough to assume that he's holding at least something back. One of those lies of omission that Robert falls back on so easily, even when his only intention is not to cause hurt.
When Robert's carefully guarded demeanour trembled a few weeks ago, and he'd finally shared what happened to him in those years that he was locked away, Aaron could already tell he was being evasive. He didn't say anything though, because what kind of partner would that make him?
Thank you, Robert, for reliving all of those horrific memories for me. I really appreciate you laying bare what keeps you up at night, but I can't help but think there's something you're not telling me. Something so terrible that you can't vocalise it. So, if you could just spill the beans, that would be great.
No, that would be, quite frankly, psychopathic behaviour.
Instead, Aaron is left to collecting the missing pieces and putting them together himself, as if he’s trying to assemble a puzzle without knowing what the picture is. He reads significance into everything, from the way Robert’s shoulders stoop when he’s in a crowded pub or supermarket to the way he sleeps curled in on himself, instead of sprawled out across the bed as he did before. It’s like he doesn’t know how to take up space anymore, and the new emptiness around him just leaves room for more unknowns.
Aaron so often finds himself lying awake at night, in the rare silent moments where Robert isn’t tossing and turning or murmuring to himself in his sleep, running through every possible scenario, everything that could have shaped Robert into the man he is now. The images he conjures up - curl fists and gasping hands and Robert’s wide, terrified eyes - have more than once sent him spiralling down into a panic attack, and it’s all he can do to shove his fist between his teeth to keep from crying out.
As time goes on, and he loses more and more sleep to his worries, he has to learn to talk himself down. Sometimes, a look is just a look, a sigh is just an expelling of breath, and a trembling hand is just a reaction to the cold.
The scars, though, are harder to rationalise away.
When he and Robert first had sex again, he’d expected a different body to the one that slipped through his hands six years earlier. And he’d been right. Robert’s shoulders were broader. His arms, stronger. He had wrinkles - smile lines and crow’s feet, somehow, despite the last half decade giving him very few things to laugh about.
If he’s being honest with himself, Aaron noticed the scars then. They were hard to miss; jagged mountains and sheer crevices his fingers stumbled across as they travelled across the terrain of Robert’s body. But he put it to the back of his mind, along with his then-husband and the desperate fear in Robert’s eyes only hours earlier.
In their following trysts, he doesn’t have time to think about it. Or he doesn’t make time, because all he wants to do is take in the moment, the elation of finally, impossibly, having Robert back in his arms again. Whenever he notices Robert’s scars, he redirects his attention back to the weight of his body, the soft press of his lips and the vice-grip of hands hands around his arms.
But then they leave the village, book an Airbnb in some unfamiliar Midlands town and disappear into one another. Suddenly free of distraction, they spend entire mornings in bed together, a tangle of naked limbs, alternating between fucking and dozing and just breathing together, becoming familiar with every inch of the other all over again.
At some point, Aaron stops ignoring the scars and starts seeking them out, following the rise and fall of them like a topographic map of the past few years.
There’s a thick, jagged seam that smiles across the left side of his ribcage.
A barely-there pit on the line of his jaw, which could be mistaken for a ghost of childhood chicken pox of teenage acne, to someone who didn’t know Robert’s face as well as Aaron does.
A dip in the flesh of his shoulder.
A tiny lump on the underside of his top lip.
Ghosts of scratches up and down the inner side of his left arm.
Aaron can’t linger on them for too long, because if he does, Robert will move away, twisting in his arms like an animal trying to wriggle its way out of a trap. So he’s careful, subtle, disguising searching hands as caresses.
He knows he could ask, and at the right time, if Robert feels safe enough, he’ll answer.
But part of Aaron is too scared to ask, because he’s scared that the truth might be too terrible to bear.
So he searches, and extrapolates, and worries himself sick in the dead of night.
And he asks, silently, on every shared breath in that dim, unfamiliar room.
Robert, what happened to you?