11 Laurie & Toby

Toby was gone. He'd run.

My first instinct was to go after him, but he'd…told me to get away from him. That he was done with me. And I wasn't sure I could bear to see him flinch from me again, his eyes full of something far too much like fear, far too much like hatred.

I'd argued with Robert. All couples argue. It was something you learned over time how to do without destroying everything. How to navigate each other's anger and pain. But I'd somehow forgotten how…how searing it could be, and how easily vulnerability to love became vulnerability to hurt. Toby had lashed out at me like some wounded creature, not just careless of my feelings, but deliberately striking where he knew he'd do the most damage, and it had come out of nowhere when I had only wanted to help him. I tried to muster self-righteousness and resentment, but I was too worried for him, and too afraid for myself.

What had I done? Had I lost him?

I tried to detach myself from panic and pain but—for once—it didn't come naturally.

Stay calm. Assess the situation.

If the patterns of his previous behaviour were anything to go by, Toby would come back to me. Even that very first night when I'd made him leave and he'd been unable to get home. That should have been reassuring. It meant I could reasonably rely on his common sense. He wouldn't do anything stupid. All I had to do was wait.

But I feared for him anyway and for myself.

What if it was different this time? What if he truly was sick of waiting for me?

And, oh God, why had I never told him I loved him? I'd thought it to myself often enough. Even noted the absurdity of it. Of being so helplessly, irresistibly, and undeniably in love with a nineteen-year-old boy. But giving Toby the words had seemed at once too much and too little, too easy at his feet and too difficult in the quiet, and so I'd kept my peace. And so he'd fled from me.

In case he came to his senses sooner rather than later, I decided to stay a little while in that shining, unfamiliar kitchen. When it became clear he wasn't coming back, I rang him. Went straight to his voicemail: "This isn't Toby. I'm too fucking busy or vice versa."2

I didn't know how to say what I needed to say, so I hung up.

And then rang again, a few seconds later, in the hope he would pick up. When he didn't, I blurted out something tangled about needing to talk to him, amid apologies and pleas. It wasn't dignified—it probably wasn't coherent—but I didn't care. I just wanted him to answer his phone.

So much for detachment. So much for calm.

Not wanting to get him into trouble, I checked the café was properly locked up, turned off the lights, picked up my door key from the floor, and let myself out of the fire door, making sure it closed behind me.

Maybe if I went home, Toby would already be there. Sitting on the front step just like always. He could have been on the Tube now, for all I knew, which was why I kept going straight to voicemail.

As I walked briskly towards Bethnal Green, I struggled with various burgeoning annoyances. I was annoyed at Toby for running away from me, and I was annoyed at myself for being so upset by it. But my mind kept throwing up images of loss and destruction—of Toby alone or frightened or hurt in the dark—and, much as I tried to rationalise them away, my heart had become a shrieking hysteric that wouldn't listen to reason.

It was an awful journey. I tried phoning a few more times, and still there was no answer. On the Tube I fretted constantly he was trying to phone me, but when I emerged there were no messages, no missed calls. And I still went straight through to his voicemail.

I texted him. All I wrote was, Toby, please.

I practically ran down Addison Avenue, not really expecting anything, but hoping.

The house was dark, and there was no Toby.

Inside, I phoned him again. Silence.

What was the point of giving people keys and phone numbers and all these promises if they were going to mean nothing?

And what if something had happened to him? A moment of distraction was all most accidents came down to. And would anybody know to tell me?

God. God.

I tried to remember if it had been like this with Robert and me, back at the beginning, before we had settled into the patterns of love. We'd surely had our own dramatic moments? Heart-crushing uncertainties?

But it was so long ago, submerged into my past like Robert was now, that even if I could scrape up incidents, they felt too distant to be real, the emotion that had led to them or underpinned them entirely lost to me.

There was only Toby and this hurt and this fear, this loss and helplessness.

As the empty hours dragged by, I dug up further frustrations to comfort me. What had I done or said that had been so terrible? He should have been thanking me, not running away from me. The problem here wasn't me. It was him, and his immaturity.

What was I thinking? It wasn't that he was immature—simply that he was young. His experiences and expectations of life were shaped differently to mine, but that didn't mean they were inferior or misguided. Had I ever recognised that before? Had I told him? Or had I just questioned, lectured?

Had I failed to get him, just as he'd claimed?

If I'd said the words—if I hadn't taken it for granted that he must have known I loved him—would he be with me now? Safe in my arms and I safe in his? If he had truly understood how I felt about him, if he had known he had dominion over my heart as well as body, he could never have feared I would think less of him for…anything. But I had never given him reason to trust me. And everything I had given had been too little, offered too late, at a time when the world had already stripped him of too much.

I deserved this pain. I deserved his anger and his mistrust.

I'd just…thought I'd have more time to prove myself to him. To show he was loved and treasured and valued. But then I'd thought that with Robert too. Waiting to heal, to change, to move on, to find ourselves again, and he'd already left me.

I found myself—of all places—in the kitchen, where the warmth from the AGA Toby loved so much wrapped around me like a hug. Still clutching my phone, just in case, I sat on the table and waited. This room was full of Toby. To say nothing of the depraved and imaginative things he had done to me in it. I'd cleaned the table afterwards, blushing and aroused, but the memory was whorled in the wood now, as it was in my skin.

There were other memories too. Everyday ones. Toby telling me some slightly incoherent story, gesticulating wildly with one hand, as he put on the kettle for tea. Coming down with him at midnight for toast. Watching him lick shiny, melted butter from between his fingers. Carrying him back to bed again after.

And this was where he'd told me about his D.

Something else I'd handled badly, assuming it wasn't important. No wonder he hadn't wanted to talk to me about any of this. You're supposed to be on my side, he'd said then. And I hadn't been. I hadn't really listened or tried hard enough to understand. Which meant I'd treated his choices as if they were mistakes, and his fears as if they were nothing.

And now…I didn't even know where he was.

I tried phoning him yet again, mortified to think my name was probably in double figures on his missed-call list. But I didn't know what else to do. What if he didn't come home tonight? What if he didn't come tomorrow? What if he never answered his phone to me again?

All because of one conversation?

Or did it go deeper than that?

The truth was, the years between us mattered. Not—as I had thought—because of how other people would judge, but because while some of the bridges between us were instinctive and effortless, love and sex and faith, others had to be carefully built. And I'd failed not just to build them, but to notice they were needed.

I put my head in my hands, hating myself, terrified that it was too late. It was true he'd always come to me before, but maybe this time he wouldn't. And I didn't know how to go to him. It might almost have made me laugh, remembering how enormous asking for his phone number had seemed. But it was nothing, a string of numbers that no more connected me to Toby than a flare shot into the sky.

* * *

I run for the Tube in case Laurie follows me.

He doesn't.

Of course he doesn't.

Why would he? After everything?

And I'm such a fucking mess because all I want is for him to hold me. Which he was doing until I shouted and cried and threw things at him like the insane freak I am. But I want him to fight for it too, even if that means fighting me. I'm just so…tired of everything being so careful. Uncertain. Fragile. A compromise. Everything that isn't sex, anyway. It's not so much the kink I want, but the way it feels. Like we fit and I'm his and this is right and I can do anything.

But right now I don't know where I'm going or what I'm doing, and nothing's right, so I go home.

Mum's there and so's Marius. When we'd moved in, we couldn't figure out how to get a sofa up to the loft so we have these silk scatter cushions that drive me mad, and he's sprawled over them, looking gorgeous and fantastical, like something from the Arabian Nights. And Mum is, well, Mum.

I must look completely wrecked because the first thing she says is, "What happened to you?" in this slightly bewildered tone.

I tell her because…why not? I'm too miserable to pretend anymore. "Broke up with my boyfriend."

"Probably for the best, love. You know relationships are ultimately an ideological construct designed to limit our freedom."

This is so not what I need to hear right now. "I know."

"Far better to live a whole and self-determined life than lose yourself in the illusionary transcendences of romantic love."

"Yeah." Why the fuck can't she just…like, hug me or something? But it's not what she does. Granddad does…did that stuff. Mum's the one who yells at teachers about Key Stage 4 being intellectually moribund. She's the one who bursts into PTA meetings when she decides the school is unconsciously reinforcing homophobic paradigms. Kind of embarrassing really, except embarrassment just sort of doesn't happen to her. My mum in action is like nothing any normal person could prepare for: imagine the Toni Collette role in a Britflick, played by Eva Green. That's my mum.

"In other words," she was saying, "fuck him. Are you cooking tonight or shall we order in?"

I give her a blank look. "Maybe get a takeaway?"

"How long were you together?" I've almost forgotten Marius is there until he speaks.

I don't want to be having this conversation with a stranger who may or may not have fucked my mum…but that's all I've got right now.

"Um, depends how you count it." Three months since he first threw me out of his house. Three days since he gave me his door key.

"He's been mooning about since before Christmas."

Great, now Mum notices stuff? "Yeah, well. Won't be doing that anymore, will I?"

"I don't know." She gestures as if to encompass my general mien. "What do you call this?"

"How about"—my voice goes all shrill and adolescent—"having a broken heart?"

There's this silence. Which I eventually break by sniffing.

And finally Marius says, "I'm sorry. I take it he was your first boyfriend?"

I nod.

He sits up and he's looking at me, so I kind of have to look at him back. He's got this overt, effortless sexuality to him—or maybe that's just his very pointy shoes—that makes it hard to imagine him with the quiet librarian. But then I remember that guy had an intensity to him as well, just inward-turned, rather than extrovert. They'd have made a scarily hot couple. Smouldery types smouldering at each other.3

So I tell him out of nowhere: "I think I met your ex in Oxford."

"Edwin?" His eyes—which are sort of honeyed, like whisky in candlelight—go wide behind those long, dark lashes. "How did you… I mean… How was he?"

I shrug. "Seemed okay. We didn't talk much."

To my surprise, that makes him laugh, though not in a happy way. "No, I don't suppose you did." His mouth curls into a crooked half smile, the shadow of a dimple flickering in his cheek. "You should be careful of first love, Toby. It's very powerful and very dangerous."

"Sure. Whatever."

I just can't be doing with people right now. I retreat to my room, but then I realise I'm going to have to hear them all night, talking and laughing and being passionate about art and shit. And God help me if they get creative. When Mum's on an inspiration kick, you may as well cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war.

I sit on my bed and take out my phone, which is old and crappy and ran out of battery midway through Sunday. I think about plugging it in, but why bother? He's not going to call me. Why the fuck would he? Laurie doesn't do that. I'm the one who frets and begs and demands and waits and pushes and needs and loves.

He's just…there.

Through the partition that's supposed to be my bedroom wall, I hear a cork pop. Voices. Footsteps. The clink of glasses.

Fuck. I don't want to be here. But I don't have anywhere else to be. Nothing in this whole fucking city belongs to me.

So I go to the last place I remember feeling okay. The last place I knew I was loved. The last place that felt like home.

I get the last Tube to St. Anthony's.

* * *

I wanted to cry, and it was ridiculous. Probably in a day, or a couple of days, I'd hear a knock on the door, and Toby would be there, a little bit hurt, a little angry, and ready to talk.

But that didn't feel like an answer. It felt like no solution at all.

"Why's it always me?" he had asked me.

I hadn't realised at the time, but it cut both ways. Now I wanted to be the one who acted, not the one who waited. But I didn't know how.

Detach. Think. Stay calm. Assess the situation.

If not here, if not me, where would Toby go? To a friend's place, perhaps? If so, I had no way of finding him. But he was vulnerable and upset, and he'd want to go somewhere he felt safe. From what he'd said, I wasn't sure he had many close friends at the moment. Home, then? To his mother's? That seemed most likely.

I checked my watch. It was late. Probably too late.

But fuck it. I wanted Toby, and I wanted him to know how much. He'd sat on my doorstep enough. Now it was my turn. My turn to fight for him. To show him he could depend on that. Depend on me. To show him he was loved.

And that we weren't done.

That we were only just beginning.

I was sure he'd told me where his mother lived. Not specifically, but there'd been enough passing mentions for me to work it out. If I could only remember.

Detach. Think.

A loft? In a converted factory.

A tobacco factory? In Shoreditch.

Tabernacle Street?

I nearly cried again, but this time it was pure relief. I turned on my computer and fired up Google Maps, squinting at satellite images until I managed to locate what I thought was likely to be the place.

I called a cab. Stuck a note for him on my front door just in case. Toby, my darling, I have gone to find you in a city with eight million inhabitants. If you're reading this, please call me. I'm sorry.

The taxi driver wanted to know where in Tabernacle Street I was going and eyed me a little dubiously in the mirror when I said he could just drop me anywhere. That was when I realised I'd left the house without a coat, and it was cold. My reflection in the window stared back at me with hollow eyes.

This was such a bad idea.

Nevertheless, I tipped the man apologetically and scrambled out onto a narrow, poorly lit road, lined by an architectural miscellany of offices and warehouses.

I hurried up the street, looking for something I recognised from the map, hoping inanely that Toby would be walking the other way or looking out of his window, and we'd rush in slow motion into each other's arms, and everything would be fine again.

My footsteps echoed in the silence. Some of the more modern buildings had mirrored windows that reflected a haze of moonlight. There was no sign of him.

I passed a corner pub, offices to let, a pizza place, everything already closed and locked up tight. And then I found it. An old tobacco factory that had been converted into trendy flats.

This had seemed a lot more romantic and a lot less awkward in my kitchen. For long minutes, I did absolutely nothing. I just waited in an empty street, trying to find the courage to do something stupid. Then I stepped up to the door, found the buzzer for the top floor, and pressed it.

Sweat prickled on my spine. My heart pounded.

"Hello?" came a voice that certainly wasn't Toby's.

"I…I'm looking for…Toby. Toby Finch." Oh God. It sounded bad, on the wrong side of midnight, stripped of all context. Had our positions been reversed, I might have seriously thought about calling the police.

But after a moment, the answer came: "You've just missed him. I think he's probably gone to his boyfriend's."

Which meant this husky, East London voice belonged to Toby's mother. Fuck. "Um, I am his boyfriend."

There was a crackly pause. Then, "You'd better come up."

It was a long climb, but I took the stairs two at time, and arrived—hot and aching—at the loft in a matter of minutes. The door was ajar, but I knocked anyway, not wanting to barge in on Toby's mother when she was at home by herself.

"It's open."

"Sorry." I stepped inside and—"Oh God, you're naked." Except for a curl of paint over one breast.

"Why, do you have a problem with the female body?"

"N-no…I was just startled." I still wasn't entirely sure where to look. If it would be more or less impolite to look at her or away from her. "Do you, um, not believe in clothes?"

"Not when I'm painting in the privacy of my own home, no." Toby's mother put down her palette and brush and sighed. "I'll put on a robe."

There was something long and silk and vaguely oriental in pattern tossed over a nearby chaise. She picked it up and draped it over her shoulders, which more sort of framed her nakedness than covered it.

I couldn't help searching for Toby in her face, but I couldn't find him. Coal was tall and long-limbed, willowy even, whereas he was short, restless, and graceless. She shared his colouring though, pale and dark, except her eyes were sloe-black to his blue, and her hair was darker too, falling almost to her waist in loose, paint-and grey-streaked waves. Truthfully, she was beautiful in all the ways Toby wasn't, her certainties and carelessnesses implacable somehow.

"So," she went on, regarding me with only the laziest interest, "you're the boyfriend."

I nodded, feeling helplessly gauche, and wondering if I should offer my hand. "Laurence Dalziel."

"Yes, he said." She strolled across the loft to the corner kitchen, dragged a carton of milk out of the minifridge, and drank it straight from the container. "He didn't say, though, that you're older than me."

Ah. I glanced away from Toby's naked mother to the canvases of Toby's naked mother, and—since there didn't seem to be any available escape routes—back again. "Uh…yes…I know it's unorthodox, but I can assure you…" God, I sounded so desperately pompous. "The thing is, I really love him," I finished piteously.

She dropped the empty carton in the sink. Toby would hate that. "I had Toby when I was fifteen. Who am I to judge his choices?"

"Um, his mother?" I offered.

She gave me a look, proud and fierce and bright-eyed, and all of a sudden I saw Toby there. "Considering you're fucking my son, I don't think you get to tell me how to raise him."

God. I deserved that. "I'm sorry."

She shrugged. "My parents were bloody strict with me. Wouldn't let me do or say a damn thing I wanted. No way I was doing that to my own kid. Speaking of which, where did he go, if he's not with you?"

"I don't know," I wailed. "We had a…a…fight, and he ran away, and now he's not answering his phone."

"Oh, then he could be anywhere."

I stared at her. "Doesn't that worry you?"

"Not really? He's got a mobile, a credit card, a brain."

"So," I asked impatiently, "you have no idea where he might be?"

"Well, neither do you, so stop judging." She swept back to the canvas she was working on, which took up most of one wall, and gazed at it, her head tilted slightly quizzically to the side—something else that reminded me of Toby.4

After a moment or two, when it became evident she wasn't going to say anything else, I tried, "Isn't there someone I could call or something? A friend? A family member?"

She glanced over her shoulder. "I can't tell if you're sweet or clingy."

The worst of it was, neither could I. "It was the first time we've argued quite like that."

"Yeah?"

She sounded profoundly uninterested, but I was terrified and confused, so I told her anyway. "I just wanted to know why he was working at that horrible café instead of…doing something more suited to his talents and abilities."

"I always assumed he liked it."

"I…um…I'm not sure he does."

"Then he should stop." She picked up her brush again. "Now unless you want to be the man from Porlock, I'd like to finish this."5

I had no idea what she was talking about, but I recognised dismissal, and my heart shed its last few hopes. "I'm sorry. Um…could you maybe tell him I stopped by? Or…ask him to… I don't know…"

"You should wait for him. As long as you wait quietly and stay out of my way."

"Really? I… Yes…thank you."

"Shh."

I put my hand over my mouth before an instinctive "sorry" could escape.

Coal's loft was mainly a space and a view. Spectacular, but I wasn't sure I would have been entirely comfortable living here. There was a tiny kitchen tucked into one corner, what looked like a portioned-off bathroom, and a curtain that I tentatively drew aside to reveal what must have been Toby's bedroom. I felt awkward for trespassing, but there wasn't really anywhere else I could go.

Toby's little bit of home was surprisingly austere: just a rack for his clothes, a futon to sleep on, a little bookcase stuffed mainly with poetry and cookery books, and a cuddly honey badger sitting on top of his pillow. The walls were haphazardly plastered with the accumulated passions of all his nineteen years. From the number of starscapes and earth rises and maps of the solar system, it seemed that once upon a time Toby might have wanted to be an astronaut. Or perhaps, from the dinosaur evolution charts and fossil guides, a palaeontologist. There was also a biodiversity poster of Western Australia's deep sea, a National Geographic spread of angelfish, and a cross section of a coral reef from what was presumably his marine biologist phase.

Oh, Toby. Toby.

Less easily classifiable were the cover art for the Penguin Dorothy Parker, a film still of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers I recognised from Swing Time, a concert poster for Rufus Wainwright—5 Nights of Velvet, Glamour, and Guilt at the Royal Opera House, and a Dr. Seuss verse: "Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You." And finally what turned out to be a detail of Saint Sebastian from Titian's Averoldi Polyptych—something I only knew because it was written on the bottom of the print. It showed a particularly muscular and slightly wild St. Sebastian struggling with the arrows that pierced him.

I could see why he liked it.

I took off my shoes and sat cross-legged on Toby's futon, staring at the image and wondering if he had stared at it, dreaming of a man on his knees and yearning for the real thing. I reached into my pocket and checked my phone. No messages. No missed calls. Tried Toby again and got only his recorded voice while I sat in his empty room.

Time passed slowly. The sky through Toby's sloping window turned pearly grey.

Eventually I lay down. The pillow smelled of his hair product.

I thought maybe I could cry now, but I was afraid that might constitute a disturbance of his mother, so I cuddled his honey badger instead and waited for him to find me.

* * *

I end up at Granddad's room before I remember it isn't his room anymore.

The door is slightly ajar, which is what stops me barging in on some strangers. It's like looking into Narnia or something. This unfamiliar world, full of wrong things, when I'd got used to it being his. Ours.

There's someone asleep in the bed. This frail, person-shaped outline, breathing too faint, too shallow. I recognise that fractured rhythm. It's the way you breathe when your body thinks every breath might be the last. And there's two women, hand in hand, waiting there, one of them dozing in an oh fuck, your neck is going to hurt tomorrow slump, and the other reading on a Kindle. She glances up, and I'm stuck standing there, feeling awkward and intrusive and creepy as fuck. I mouth sorry and she smiles, and I back away.

I wander the silent, shadowy corridors a bit and end up in the sunroom. It's empty, of course, since it's gone two. It's weird in there at night: surrounded by dark glass and the sheen of moonlight. I grope my way over to the chair I'd sat in when Granddad was having a super-good day. What with him dying during the winter, we'd never actually got much sun in here, but it was light and he liked being able to look at the garden. Not much to see there, either, to be honest. Dark soil and bits of green. And right now, nothing at all.

I take off my shoes and curl up.

My own reflection in the windows makes me look like a ghost.

I guess I fall asleep. I don't really remember, but the next thing I know there's a hand on my shoulder, shaking me gently awake.

"Wuzzat," I say. Someone's switched on a lamp and even that's enough to dazzle me. Eventually though, I knuckle my eyes clear and discover Marwa—one of the nurses—leaning over me.

"What are you doing here?" It's a fair question and she doesn't ask it unkindly.

Unfortunately, I don't have an answer. "Um…I just… I…"

She doesn't say anything for a bit, and I wonder what I'll do if I get thrown out since the Tube isn't running and—as usual—I've got no money. But then she holds out a hand to help me out of the chair. "I was going to put the kettle on. Do you fancy a cuppa?"

I nod and follow her to the staff kitchen, and she makes me the sort of tea you're not supposed to like, all full of milk and sugar. Except I do like it. And even holding the mug feels good, my hands coming slowly to life in the warmth. Then we sit down at this rickety little table, and for what seems like ages we don't do anything. Just drink our tea in the quiet.

"Must feel strange," she says. "Not coming here every day."

I shrug. I hadn't come every day. Just most days. And it wasn't a chore.

She gives me this wicked little smile. "And what are we going to do without your cakes?"

I used to like her smile—she was Granddad's favourite—but now it just hurts in this unexpected way. I don't know what to do, how to handle it, and shrug again.

"I know you miss him."

There's part of me that wants to be all like, Well duh. Except that part's a dick. So I just nod. And then the words start squeezing out of me. "I do, I really do. He…he wasn't just my granddad, y'know? He was almost kind of…my dad, except I don't know what that would be like, so more kind of…my friend. Which is totally pathetic, but…it is what it is, and…I–I don't know what to do." Whoa. Breathing. I should try that.

She picks up my empty mug and takes it to the sink. Glances over her shoulder and tells me, "It'll get easier."

"What will?"

"Living, Toby."

I think of school. University. My moved-on friends. Laurie. And mumble, "I'm not very good at that."

"Well." I catch the edge of her smile as she turns back to the washing up. "You've got a lifetime to figure it out."

"I guess."

"It's good you stopped by, though. Most of your granddad's things have gone into storage, but there's a box I was wondering how to send to you."

Death: how to turn a life into pieces. Granddad is…in storage. In boxes. In an urn. On a memorial stone. Nowhere. "Thanks."

"You can wait in the staff room until morning."

I'm too tired and battered to put up any sort of fight. I let her lead me off and tuck me up on a sofa.

She pushes the hair out of my eyes. "Don't take this the wrong way, Toby, but I don't want to see you here again."6

I just yawn. It feels wrong and empty and scary, but she's right, of course. There's nothing for me here.

I don't really sleep. I more sort of drift through a couple of hours, vaguely aware of people trying very hard not to disturb me. Every now and again I sneak my hand out of the blanket and let my fingers brush the edges of the box Marwa left beside me.

I peek inside the next morning when I'm on the Tube heading back to Shoreditch. It's very neatly packed, lots of stacked papers and smaller boxes. I rummage a little, and then I see:

Frogs

Leaping in and out—

And I feel this…crack, right in my heart. For a moment, I can't breathe. But then I can. And I realise my heart is okay.

It always was.

Because love is strong. Stronger than death.7

* * *

Mum's out when I get back, but she's definitely been working. You can tell from the carnage—the paint and the empty bottles. The half-finished canvas of…actually, I'm not going to look at it too closely. I think about tidying up, but the urge to fall face-first into my pillow is too great.

I pull back the curtain and have an epic Three Bears moment—assuming the three bears screamed camply and threw their shit on the ground—because there's someone sleeping in my bed.

"Oh God." Laurie sits up so suddenly he nearly hits his head on the eaves.

"Jesus, Laurie. You nearly gave me a coronary."

There's papers everywhere. And I'm so knackered that it takes a moment before it hits me.

Laurie. Laurie's here. In my room.

Waiting.

For me?

I stare at him. Just stunned. "W-what are you doing here?"

Laurie rolls off my bed and stands carefully. My corner of the loft isn't massively welcoming to the less sizeably challenged gentleman. He looks tired. Worried. Gorgeous. "You know what I'm doing here."8

"Um…" I'm not ready to start hoping again for nothing. "I might need you to tell me."

He reaches into his pocket and pulls out the key I threw at him yesterday. Takes my hand and folds my fingers round it. "I think you dropped this."

"Did I?"

"Yes."

I have to look up to meet his eyes. His gaze is so steady, so certain, I almost start crying. I don't know why being on the brink of—maybe—getting everything I've ever wanted should be bad, but my stomach is so fizzy I'm afraid I might be sick.

"I've made a lot of mistakes," he tells me. "I tried to provide solutions when I should have listened. And let things go when I should have fought."

"‘S'okay." I shrug. "I didn't really want you to know what a loser I am."

"You're not a loser, Toby. You're just lost. And it's okay to be lost."

I try to laugh, but it comes out shaky and weird. "It doesn't feel okay. Feels fucking awful."

He reaches for me, his hand closing over mine where I'm still holding his key. "Then we'll be lost together, and we'll figure it out together. Whatever that means. Whatever it takes. I'm with you, and I'll be with you for as long as you want me."

God. After everything, he still doesn't fucking get it. This bullshit isn't what I want at all. I don't want to be his project. I don't want him to take care of me. I want us to take care of each other. "That's, err, mighty charitable of you, but—"

"I'm not finished."

I pull on my hand. "Well, I think I am. Like I told you yesterday."

"For fuck's sake." Something flares in his eyes. A kind of savagery that I shouldn't like. But it reminds me of when I first saw him, so distant and cold and desperate. Like he was waiting to be tamed. To be mine. Not this patient grown-up person who wants to fix my fucked-up life. "This isn't charity."

And he goes to his knees.

Hands behind his back like the very first time.

I make this embarrassing choking sound. Because he's so perfect like that, and—even tired and sad and confused and messed up—I want him so badly it burns. But I don't know what it means that he's giving this to me now. Maybe he's telling me it's all he can give, and, yeah, I guess the last time he offered, it was all I knew how to want. But I'm done with working with what I've got. "Laurie, I—"

"This isn't submission."

"Isn't it?"

"No." He looks up at me, tired as well, but he's never looked more beautiful to me than in this moment, strong and open and unafraid like when he surrenders his body. "It's love."

* * *

It took Toby such a long time to respond. He was naturally such a graceless, restless boy that there was always something a little terrifying in his stillness. No more so than now.

When he'd first arrived—so pale and fragile in the thin morning light—there'd been no time for anything but reaction. But now that I was capable of thought, I was beginning to wonder if everything I'd done had been in any way…sensible. If it was too much. If it was what he wanted. If he would understand. Or if all I had done—running across London, waiting in his room, throwing myself at him like this—was play the fool.

But what did it matter? Some actions were worth their consequences, whatever those consequences might be. And of everything that had ever been spoken or written about love, I couldn't remember a single occasion on which it had been described as sensible.

I tried again, offering myself to him, without shame or hesitation, in the simplest, purest terms I knew. "I love you."

Toby drew in a breath so deep and shuddering it made his whole body shake. And then he was in my lap, his wet face pressed against my neck, his arms twined about me as tight as ivy. "Really? Oh my God, really? You love me?"

He was all edges and angles, but I gathered him up and held him close. "Yes. For a long time now. At least since Oxford. Probably before."

He pulled back a little and managed a faint, teary grin. "From the first moment you saw me, right?"

"It seems unlikely, darling. You were far too young and very rude."

"Must have been my magnificent grounds at Pemberley, then. Oh God…" His laughter vanished swiftly, and I regretted it, the shadows settling in his eyes afresh. "Laurie, are you sure? Like really sure? You've seen…well…you've seen my life. Is this honestly what you want?"

"I want you. Who you are. Not what you do or don't do."

He made a soft sound, almost a sob, and the relief in it pierced me with fresh guilt. But then he twisted his fingers possessively in my hair and mumbled, "Thank you," and happiness swept through me like summer heat.

"For what?" I couldn't resist asking.

He laughed, but when he spoke, his voice was steady, his expression utterly serious. "For getting me."

It was becoming uncomfortable on the floor, whatever the pleasures of being entangled with Toby. I made him stand and tugged him over to the bed with me. Even that small parting seemed to unsettle him, and as soon as we were seated, he curled into my side with a muffled sigh.

"But, Toby?"

A very small voice: "Yes?"

"You have to talk to me. You have to trust me."

"Isn't that my line?"

"Not anymore." I turned him gently. Wiped his tears and brushed the hair out of his eyes. "I mean it. You'll never have to wait for me again. And when I ask about your life, I'm not trying to be your parent or your friend or your careers advisor. I'm asking as your…boyfriend, lover, partner, the man who wants to be fucking you, the man who loves you."

"I just thought you wouldn't want to be any of those things if you knew what a mess I'd made of everything."

Some part of me was faintly irritated that some part of him thought I was such an utter monster. But then I had spent the last three months finding any excuse to push him away and hold him at bay, so perhaps I deserved it. And it was something I could only heal with time, with devotion, with unfettered love. For now, I kissed the damp tip of his nose. "That's because you're an idiot."

He scowled, but his eyes betrayed him. There was amusement there and hope. And after a moment, he pushed me onto my back, climbed on top, and kissed me so hard he ground my lips against my teeth. But I didn't care. The pain was beautiful, welcome, because it came from Toby. And we kissed for a long time, deeply and far too intimately on his childhood bed.

Afterwards he tucked his head against my shoulder again. "Um…Laurie…?"

"Yes?"

"You know that stuff you were saying about it being okay to be lost?" He tilted his face up to mine, his eyes as wide and blue as the sky beyond his window. "Did you mean it? You'll really help me figure this shit out?"

"I promise."

"Like…you really want to do that with me?"

"Yes. I want everything."

For some reason that made him smile. "Even the rubbish stuff?"

"Everything." I kicked his ankle gently. "But no more of that. That's my boyfriend you're talking about."

He rolled onto his stomach, watching me lazily from beneath his lashes. "Good point. Someone as awesome as you would never date someone rubbish."

"You said it, Junior."

We lay for a while in each other's arms, warm and quiet, and I came perilously close to falling asleep. Which, in turn, reminded me of something I had meant to ask. "Where were you last night?"

"Oh…uh. I kind of went to the hospice."

"You what?"

"I know. It was daft." He sighed. "But at least I picked up some of Granddad's stuff. I mean, before I threw it all over the floor."

"Sorry. I take it you didn't expect to find me here?"

"Hell no, but feel free to do it again. Whenever you like."

I gave him a slightly wry look. "How about the next time we argue, you just make me sleep on the sofa like a normal person?"

"How about we don't argue?"

"Oh darling, all couples argue. It's how you handle it that matters." He didn't seem entirely reassured, so I went on. "We'll figure it out."

He snuck his hand into mine. "Okay. But I can't imagine ever wanting you to sleep on the sofa."

I nearly said, Give it time. But love held my tongue.

After all, what harm did it do to believe him?

"What did you bring home?" I asked instead.

"Oh, um, mostly it's his medals and crap I made for him." His eyes skittered shyly away from mine. "Uh…I could…I could show you, if you want?"

"Of course I do."

We sat on the floor together so that Toby could gather up everything that had fallen and put it carefully back into the box. Sometimes he would pause over something or other to explain it to me, letting me hold, for a little while, these treasured pieces of his life he had once shared with someone else he loved.