FIVE
The truth was, Brett wasn’t asleep.
Not the whole time, anyway. When John came in, Brett was sound asleep. He must have been because he didn’t remember it happening. There may have been the faintest sense of someone settling in the bed with him, but he wasn’t even positive about that. It’s not like it was the most normal thing in the world for him, after all. He probably would have more than vaguely noticed it, if he had noticed it at all.
But he woke up, beyond any shadow of a doubt, when someone warm and strong and safe, someone who smelled and felt like home, rolled behind him and wrapped him up in big, sleepy arms.
He woke up, and he froze. He should have, he knew, told John that he was awake, but the truth was, it felt too good. John was probably sleeping, and if Brett said something, he might wake up. Besides, what would he say? What could he say?
John was gone before Brett could really fully comprehend that he had been there at all. Rolled away, but not out of the bed. Brett could feel John’s solid weight beside him, only a stretch of sheets separating them. He heard John’s breath, slow and regular, and his body tensed up with his nearness.
He was hard. Hard enough that, on his own, he would have immediately reached for his dick and started stroking. But not with John in the bed with him, that would definitely be crossing a line.
Why was John here at all?
He wasn’t going to say anything. He decided that as he drifted out of a thin, unsatisfying sleep, while John slept so deeply by his side. It was so rare for John to reach out to him, to anyone, and when he did, it was usually in much smaller, more subtle, ways.
Once, when he was little, a butterfly had landed on his hand. Brett had frozen in place, staring down at it, almost afraid to move in case it fluttered away again. John was, of course, not a butterfly. He was a huge, strong man, confident and assured. But at this moment, anyway, something about John coming to his bed reminded Brett sharply of that butterfly, and he didn’t move.
Until John sighed, then shifted in bed in a way that indicated that he was waking up. Only then did Brett roll over onto his side, facing his best friend, looking at him thoughtfully as John’s eyelids parted and awareness came into his face.
“Brett,” John whispered, his voice, and those big green eyes, so vulnerable with sleep, it was like Brett had never really seen John before. John was good at the act, and he was good at the bullshit. He was good at being a soldier, at being stoic, at pretending nothing was wrong, but he wasn’t pretending anything then.
“Why are you here?” Brett asked though he had promised himself that he wouldn’t say anything. But he was disarmed by the look in John’s eyes, by the night of too little sleep, and the words came out of him before he could decide not to say them and before he could agonize over the right things to say.
As it turned out, he probably should have listened to his instincts, because that openness, that vulnerability, in John’s eyes was gone, a steel wall slipping firmly into place behind them, so that no matter how hard Brett looked at him, he felt like he was always bouncing off the glassy surface of those eyes.
“Your couch sucks,” John grumbled. He pushed himself out of bed, the muscles of his back flexing as he sat, and Brett couldn’t see his face, but he could tell that there would be pain in it. Pain that John would rather no one else saw.
“I could help,” Brett finally said the words that he hadn’t dared to say for months. Way back in the beginning, as John’s back had mended, Brett had offered his services, but John had just laughed him off, and he hadn’t been brave enough to try again. The offer was out there, he had figured, and John could take it if he wanted to.
But that just wasn’t the way that John was. He would live in pain forever, rather than ask for help, the stubborn ass.
“Shut up,” John spoke casually enough, and Brett, confused, did. There was no malice, no real heat, in the two words, but they hurt nevertheless. Not because of any cruelty on John’s part, but because Brett loved him so much, and he was being kept from helping him, and it was driving him insane.
But that was just part of being best friends with someone like John, he supposed.
“I get the shower first,” John informed him, and then he was gone, disappearing off into Brett’s bathroom, while Brett tried to deal with the fact that he very much would have liked to say that his shower was big enough for two.
* * *
There was no money to hire movers, and no particular need to do so. John didn’t have that much stuff, a bookcase, a desk. The rest of his stuff, as he said, was far too crappy for him to bother moving it over. Let it go down with the building when they demolished it.
“You know, they didn’t have the right to kick you out like that. You were supposed to get at least a month’s notice,” Brett, who had looked into it, pointed out. But John just shrugged, and even without saying anything, Brett sort of got it. What was the point in clawing on to something when it wasn’t even a good place? When the building was almost deserted already?
Which just meant that the slumlord got away with it, of course. But John would be taken care of now. John wouldn’t spend Christmas, wouldn’t spend so much as one more night, in this depressing, mildew-infested, dilapidated place.
It took two trips, and the last one, Brett knew that John shouldn’t have come on. Brett could have easily loaded up the last few things himself, especially since John’s apartment was on the third floor and the elevator was broken. But John, of course, wouldn’t hear of it.
A few hours did it. John’s stuff was all safely in Brett’s house, in the house that he now shared with John. It was a bit of a funny thought that he could share a place with someone. He hadn’t, not since his parents’ accident.
It should have been a lot for Brett to take, but the truth was, it was sort of a relief. He knew that he was lonely, and even just having John there seemed to breathe a new sort of life into the house where Brett had lived for his whole life.
John, though, wasn’t doing so well. He was very pale, except for under his eyes, which was dark, bruised-looking. His head lay tilted onto the back of the couch, his lips parted with his breathing, which was deliberately slow and steady but just a little bit rough. His eyes had drifted mostly closed, just the slightest gleam of green revealed.
This was a man in pain.
Hadn’t Brett seen that enough in his life to know? He dealt with people in pain every day, that’s why people came to a massage therapist. John hid it better than most, but then, Brett had a lifetime of experience with his best friend. John was hurting, and Brett’s heart ached as he looked down at him.
