Rhapsody on a Theme

Chapter 4-1

Chapter 4

They got home at quarter past ten on Sunday morning.

‘Home’ was a little house in a quiet street in Cosham, just north of Portsmouth. It was technically a three-bedroom semi-detached job, but the attic had been converted into a fourth bedroom, which Jayden had immediately decided was theirs, tucked right up into the eaves with a beautiful sky swimming above the bed from two skylight windows. Jayden could lie for hours falling into that sky, and once he had talked Darren into slow, slightly drunk s*x and stared at the stars overhead and had felt so impossibly immortal.

They had moved right after Jayden’s graduation, from the little flats in Southampton to this little house in Cosham. Rachel had been commuting into Portsmouth for a year to a new school after getting on a part-time PGCE course to become a full-time primary school teacher; once Jayden had gotten the job offer from the paper, Darren had simply applied to transfer to the CID unit in Portsmouth instead of Southampton.

It had felt frighteningly adult, at first, to apply for the mortgage and go to a meeting with Darren’s bank manager and sign the dotted line to have a joint mortgage with him, but…but then it had been a wonderful feeling too, to have their own house and to lie in their bed looking up at the stars and thinking, This house is mine, this man is mine, this life is mine.

Technically, Rachel didn’t pay rent. There was a thing in their mortgage contract about subletting, so they got around it by Rachel paying the household bills but no rent. She had the bedroom next to the bathroom, as far from the attic stairs as possible ‘so I don’t have to hear you two!’ and the cat, a black-and-white juvenile that she’d adopted from an animal shelter the moment they’d offered her the no-rent-but-bills deal, had decided her bed was its own too.

It was a home. It had been a home since July, and Jayden was still dizzy with the ramifications of the whole thing. He had half a mortgage p*****t going out every month, and he’d signed it with Darren, and this was permanence, right here. This was them, forever, creating a unit. Like a family. For good.

They arrived at quarter past ten, catching a bus from the train station and walking from the high street after getting off to buy Pepsi. It was a short walk if they cut through the parks, and in the lonely light of Boxing Day, they did. The cat—Paganini, though Darren called her Pog—was washing herself on the doorstep, and rubbed around their ankles pleasantly, but declined to come in. Rachel was out, her coat and boots absent from the mat in the hall and her car missing from the road, and Jayden peeled Darren out of his coat and kissed him on the doormat.

“What’d I do?” Darren asked, smiling against his mouth for the second assault, and Jayden laughed.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he admitted. “Something. Want some tea?”

“Go on, then,” Darren said, shedding his boots.

Jayden left him there to put the kettle on, and as he was fishing teabags out of the haphazard cupboard, Darren rejoined him by sliding arms around his waist and propping his chin on Jayden’s shoulder again. It was one of his favourite kitchen positions. s*x notwithstanding.

“Hello,” Jayden murmured, reaching back to scratch his hair.

“If I could purr, I would.”

“Mm.” Jayden smiled, and Darren kissed the top of his shoulder. “You know what? We should take a holiday.”

“Where?”

“Somewhere sunny and hot and everything. Next Christmas.”

“Why?”

“I want to see you freckle,” Jayden admitted. Darren freckled a little in British summers, but there were pictures of him on f*******: in China and America and South Africa and all these other places as a teenager with his family, and he had outbreaks of them.

“That’s only because you have some weird kinks.”

“I do not.”

“Excuse me, Mr. My-Boyfriend’s-Eyesight-Sucks-And-That’s-Awesome.”

“That is awesome,” Jayden said, running a finger along the cool leg of the glasses. “You look sexy with glasses. Sexier.”

“Once, you were virginal.”

“Once, you were nice to me about that,” Jayden parried, pouring out the boiled water.

“You’re still kind of prudish, you know.”

“I am not.”

“Please. You still object to me sleeping naked.”

“Because maybe I don’t want to wake up to being hugged to death, or worse.”

“Hugged to worse?”

“Oh, shut up,” Jayden sniped, prising himself free and pushing one of the mugs into Darren’s hands. “You know what I mean.”

“I know you’re a prude.”

Jayden huffed and kissed him sharply before retreating to the living room. It was a bit squashed, all things considered: an old upright piano that Rachel had bought off their previous landlady was jammed into the corner and the top of it used as a shelf. The stairs rose out of the living room too, hanging over the sofa threateningly, and the TV was wedged between the back door and the flat-pack bookshelf that Darren had constructed from Japanese instructions. Somehow it had worked.

“I don’t know why I love you,” Jayden muttered snottily, curling up on the sofa. Darren grinned, sitting on the floor in front of him and dropping his head back against the seat cushion to eye him almost upside-down.

“Because I played the violin in your mad production,” Darren said. Jayden flushed and regretted ever telling him when exactly it had happened. “I’m just in it for the twice-weekly s*x life we got going here.”

“You’ve had your twice this week.”

“Yeah, but it’s Sunday. Restarts at midnight.” Darren grinned.

“Not if you’re going to say things like that it doesn’t,” Jayden said tartly. He put his mug on the floor and leaned forward to wrap his arms around Darren’s neck and kiss his forehead. “You love me.”

“We-ell.”

“You do. You love me more than anything,” Jayden insisted, turning Darren’s head forcibly and kissing the bridge of his nose. His elbow cupped around the back of Darren’s skull, and the victim twisted into the movement, abandoning his own tea in favour of not wrenching something important in his spine.

“I like you?”

“You love me,” Jayden insisted, kissing those springy curls and tugging until Darren twisted around to face him properly. “You do,” he murmured, kissing that mouth the second it was within reach, and Darren stroked a single finger down the shell of Jayden’s ear.

“Maybe.”

“There’s no maybe,” Jayden murmured, pressing fleeting, open kisses to Darren’s jaw and mouth. “Not even a probably. You do.”

“Okay,” Darren ceded lowly, wrapping an arm over Jayden’s chest to press him back into the cushions and kiss him soundly. “Okay, I love you,” he whispered into the lack of space between them, and smiled into the kiss. “A bit.”

Jayden tugged on a handful of curls, but didn’t break the kiss.