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Ashton sounds strangely sincere when he asks Calum if him not liking football makes Calum like him less. He asks the question like he’s genuinely unsure of what Calum’s answer might be, and the thing is - Luke can’t blame him.
It’s football, and it’s Calum, so Luke probably wouldn’t be all that surprised if Ashton’s ambivalence for the beautiful game really did make Calum like him less.
Calum is the most freely and generously loving person Luke has ever met, but this is footie they’re talking about, and if anything is going to confuse and upset him, it’s this.
But when Calum brushes Ashton’s apologies off with a half hearted eye roll, gaze still locked on the game even though they’re mid-Twitcam, here, Luke knows him well enough to know that he’s not really bothered by his bandmate not sharing this one passion of his.
Luke also knows that Twitcams are not the time or place for serious thought, but he can’t help it, then; he thinks about Ashton asking if Calum likes him less now, thinks about Calum’s total lack of real response, thinks about the fact that he for once in his life could not predict Calum’s answer in advance until it’s all he can think about; all that matters at all.
If footie isn’t something that Calum’s gotta share with the people he loves in order to still love them just as much, is there anything at all that could change the way Calum feels for his friends?
Is there anything Luke could do or not do that might change how Calum feels about him?
Could there be some pattern or change in behavior that would make Calum stop seeing Luke as his friend?
Because Luke doesn’t ever want to not be Calum’s friend.
But pretty often, Luke finds that he would really, really like it if they weren’t just friends, anymore.
____
They’re stuck in customs, as usual, always caught up at UK border control for longer than is humane or right, but today is different because they might actually be late for their show because of this hold up.
Michael is tucked away into a corner in a tangled jumble of limbs, attention totally trained on whoever he’s facetiming, and Ashton is sitting with their minder for this tour, a not exactly hulking but still totally terrifying guy called Brian. Luke can hear them running through different scenarios for what’ll happen if they miss their show, but his being able to hear them de-stresses him a little bit; if Ashton was really worried, he’d get quiet about it, he’d be still for once in his life.
Calum is curled up not quite next to Luke, but closer to him than anyone else, which is a distinction that Luke finds important to make. He’s lying mostly under a seat, elbows propped up on it, holding a comic book, and he’s got his earbuds in but Luke can tell from how he isn’t drumming his feet against the floor that he’s not listening to anything.
It takes about three minutes and some pretty impressive gymnastics, even if Luke does say so himself, but with effort he manages to fold his body into a mostly mirroring position under the seat next to the one Calum has claimed. The difference is that Luke lies on his side, looking at Calum rather than up at the ceiling.
It takes about three seconds of silently staring at the side of Calum’s head before he turns to Luke, folding his arms up onto the seat they’re resting on and tossing his comic book aside.
“Hey, mate,” he says, like he just bumped into Luke on the street or ran into him after a night spent sleeping in different hotel rooms. It makes Luke smile, for some reason. He likes to think that he doesn’t have to work as hard as some people might to instantly have Calum’s attention. “You okay?”
“Bored. Stressing out,” Luke tells him, because he doesn’t know how to be anything other than brutally honest with Calum. That doesn’t mean he finds it easy to do, though. It doesn’t mean he ever knows how to go into detail about what he’s feeling and why.
“Lucas, Lucas, Lucas,” Calum croons, lifting one hand to push his fingers through the front of Luke’s hair, and Luke hates people touching his hair, but it feels good right now, it feels like what he needed, somehow. “Everything’s gonna be fine. It always is, ey?”
“If you say so,” Luke says, tugging his hood up and shuffling closer to rest his head on Calum’s shoulder. He’s been tired since he woke up, but he hadn’t felt up to managing a nap until now.
As he falls asleep he distantly registers Ashton and Brian still deep in conversation and the bright burst of sound that’s Michael’s laugh. The airport is loud around them, a constant buzz of intercom announcements and flight calls and radio crackles and harried voices, but Calum has one arm around Luke’s shoulders, the other groping for his comic book again, and everything else fades into the background.
____
After the show, Luke grabs Calum in a headlock and tries to wrestle his face right into his sweaty armpit. All in the name of camaraderie and brotherhood, as he loudly protests over Calum’s struggling and swearing.
Calum breaks free eventually, but before he darts away to strip off and probably try to put his junk on someone who unfortunately probably won’t be Luke, he takes the snapback he’d been wearing off and sets it backwards on Luke’s head.
It totally messes up his hair, and Luke couldn’t care less.
“I like you so much I think I even like your ball sweat,” Luke tells him, fixing the hat until it’s straight and trying to figure out why the fuck he said that out loud, watching with a pounding heart as Calum’s face goes totally still for a second, his eyebrows drawing close together and his mouth pinching in at the sides.
“Does that make you like me less?” Luke asks, because he might as well at this point, he’s in it up to his neck as is.
Calum laughs, a genuinely amused little braying thing that spreads through Luke and soothes his nerves, stills the roll of his stomach.
“You kidding? That’s exactly what I’m looking for in a life partner, Hemmings. You’re officially the fore runner, even though you being thirteen point three feet tall is terribly emasculating for me. You’ll have to spend a lot of time on your knees, but I think we could make it work.”
Luke blinks at him, about ready to ask if that’s all it’ll take to seal the deal, but Calum is darting in to kiss him wetly on the cheek and then spinning away in the opposite direction, dragging Michael with him and shouting loudly about needing to press his arse against Ashton’s section of the dressing room mirror.
This leaves Luke standing in the middle of a room wearing Calum’s snapback, probably looking gobsmacked, touching the palm of his hand to his own cheek like some kind of swooning idiot.
At least that begins to answer that question, though.
____
Luke doesn’t love early mornings, but he loves the ones when Calum decides to wake him before his alarm can.
“Up and at them, sleepyhead,” Calum is saying somewhere in the vicinity of Luke’s ribs and when he opens his eyes and looks down he realizes that this is because Calum has climbed onto his bed and wrapped himself right around Luke, arms curled in a loop at his middle and holding on tight.
Luke closes his eyes and pulls his arms free of the covers, reaches until he has a hand banded around Calum’s elbow and his arm around his shoulders.
“Are you trying to wake me up or convince me to stay in bed forever? Because nothing about this makes me want to move today, just so you know.”
Calum’s hold tightens even further, and Luke becomes a little bit more serious about staying like this for the rest of the day. If he could just coax Calum inside the covers with him, this would be pretty close to perfect.
“I think I intended to get you out of bed,” Calum mumbles, sounding drowsy now himself, “But then I came in here and you were all tucked up and snug and I decided I wanted in, instead. Your face ruins everything, Lucas.”
“Awww, I love you too, Cal,” Luke says, smiling with his eyes still closed because he doesn’t have to be looking at Calum to tell when he’s smiling, too.
“If you loved me you’d share the covers,” Calum grumbles, and this is shaping up to be such a good day already.
“C’mere, then,” Luke tells him, wriggling until Calum shifts enough that he can pull the corner of the duvet out from under him and hold it out.
Calum crawls in next to Luke and patiently lets him wrap them up again, stays still for it when Luke tucks his chin down into the dip of his shoulder. Luke can’t help the hum of approval he instinctively makes when Calum snuggles back against him, his back pressed right into Luke’s chest, snug inside the larger, broader bracket Luke’s shoulders make for him.
When Ashton comes in to find them some time later, they’re both asleep.
“Never send a boy to do a man’s job,” is all Luke hears before the covers are being pulled off the bed and tossed across the room.
“Ugh,” Luke says, emphatic, squinting into the glare of sunlight when Ashton rips the curtains back too, for good measure.
“Shhhh,” Calum says, groping for Luke’s arm until he finds it and pulls it back around his waist, “Some of us are trying to sleep.”
“Wow,” Ashton says, hands on his hips in the middle of the room, looking down at them with interest. “We’re a pretty gay band, but this is super gay. Are you two gonna get married? Luke, are you my new daddy?”
“That’s sick, Ash,” Luke tells him, because it is.
“And when we get married you’ll know about it, because I’ll make sure to ask Michael to be my best man right in front of you,” Calum mumbles into the pillow, though Ashton has to hear him, because he takes his shoe off and throws it at them.
“Stop being gay for each other in the privacy of your own rooms and come be gay for all of us in front of some cameras,” are his parting words, and Luke shakes his head fondly, rolling away from Calum to start stretching out and getting ready to get up. His back pops a bit, but otherwise he’s feeling good; certainly more alert now than he’d been when Calum had come to allegedly get him up.
“Do you think there are different kinds of being gay for someone? Like different levels?” Luke asks, lying flat on his back and staring at the ceiling, knowing only by the tilt of the mattress that Calum does the same, after a moment of silent and solemn contemplation.
“You mean like … how we’re gay for the band, and then how Michael is gay for Harry Styles?”
Luke doesn’t like that distinction, doesn’t like how it sets his gayness for his band and everyone in it at one fixed and equal point.
“Yeah but …” he folds his hands between the sheets and the low curve of his spine, lifts his shoulders towards his ears a little bit and hopes it looks more like his routinely weird morning routine than the defensive, nervous gesture that it really is, “Are the two like … exclusive?” He takes a deep breath and holds it, feeling reckless and too brave for how the warmth of Calum’s body against his still hums hot and sweet all over him, “What if I was gay - really gay - for someone in the band. Would that make you hate me?”
It’s a make or break kind of moment. A big one that could potentially blow right up in his face to become huge and insurmountable if it doesn’t go the way he wants it to; if it doesn’t go the way he thinks it will.
But he knows Calum exactly as well as he had hoped, after all.
“Dude, of course not,” Calum is quick to say - so quick that Luke doesn’t even really have time to worry, doesn’t have to give the possibility that he might be about to throw up a second thought.
Calum rolls over to face him, grinning so brightly it makes Luke’s blush burn a little less.
He smoothes a hand across the bare skin of Luke’s belly, his palm and fingertips rough enough to drag goosebumps in their wake, and Luke hopes Calum can’t feel how his stomach clenches under the touch.
“But if it’s Michael, you’d better tell me now, because we’ll need to prepare for battle. Us versus 1D. I’m confident we can take them, but still, we shouldn’t turn down the advantage.” He curves his whole body in along Luke’s side, his head on Luke’s shoulder and his eyes impossibly sincere when he asks, “Do you intend to start an inter-band war, Luke Hemmings?”
Luke blinks at him.
“It’s not Michael, Cal.”
Calum smiles, something in the expression that Luke can’t read.
This could be it, he knows. This could be the closest thing to a perfect opportunity he gets.
Luke shakes the invisible weight of sleep from his legs, careful not to dislodge Calum from where he’s moulded himself to Luke like he’s trying to fuse them into one person, and he smiles back at Calum, heartbeat thumping so hard that it rises in his throat, weighs his tongue down and takes up the space between his teeth that might otherwise, in this moment, fill with words that Luke means but doesn’t know how to say.
Luke knows how he feels and Luke knows what he wants.
He is brave, but he can also be patient.
Everything Luke wants is right here already, and it’s worth waiting for.
____
The next time they’re onstage together, everything feels different to Luke.
It’s a good kind of different; like all the things that were there before have shifted out of place and then fallen back together in a way that makes more sense; feels better somehow even though nothing is new, not really.
It will never not blow his mind to hear people shout the words to songs they’ve written right back at them, so loud that Luke can’t hear himself or Calum or Mikey over the wave of sound that the crowd rolls over them.
But once upon a time, it was something that frightened Luke, almost. He’d hear other people sing along to words he’d written like they meant more to them than they could say themselves, and he’d feel that pressure in bodies on his back, responsibilities who were his to carry, now.
Tonight, it’s blinding to him, how far he’s come since then. How different he feels, and why.
The kick of Ashton’s bass drum rides up his spine, starting hard in his heels and making the hair on the back of his neck stand up.
Michael’s whirling and jumping used to make Luke tense, back in the very beginning, and now it’s nothing but normal - comforting, even - to see him as a blur at the corner of his eye, a twist of colour and movement that perfectly matches the sounds he’s making, committing his body to the music his hands create.
When they all sing together, Michael and Calum and Luke syncing up and slotting into place for harmonies on choruses, Ashton yelling along behind them, Luke feels indestructible. He feels vast, because they’re together, and they’re one.
Late in their set and late in the evening, with stage lights making him look like something Luke could only ever see in museums, Calum sits on an amp with his bass slung behind his back and claps along to Ashton’s drums, his eyes never leaving Luke’s face as he sings his heart out to a song that is ostensibly about a girl, a one night stand, but in reality isn’t about either of those things at all.
Now that he has everything he’d never for one minute thought to try to have, Calum is all that Luke wants. And he wants him for keeps.
Michael comes across the stage to sling his arm around Luke’s shoulders, and Luke leans into it, staring out into the crowd and letting Calum drift into his peripheral vision, knowing without a doubt that Calum will always stay close.
He’s wrong, it turns out, because Calum doesn’t stay close, isn’t where Luke expects him to be when he finishes his line and glances back at him, habit and pure instinct.
Calum is right next to him all of a sudden, bumping his hip in against Luke’s and throwing his arm up on top of Michael’s. He’s grinning at Luke, the happy curve of his mouth making Luke’s fingers stumble, clumsy on his strings, when Calum brings their foreheads together, puts a hand in Luke’s hair and keeps him there, like Calum doesn’t realize that Luke couldn’t ever look away.
Once again, Luke’s hair is a total mess and Calum has stripped him down to bare bones, to stand next to him built of all the places where Calum could fit - where Calum belongs - and Luke trips over his lines, gets his feet caught in wires he’s been stepping over without thought for months.
They bow together before they leave the stage, and Calum’s hand is sweaty in Luke’s until they’ve disappeared deep into the maze of backstage, far away from noise and eyes and camera flashes and bright, blinding lights as they head together into the dark.
____
Luke still can’t legally drink anywhere in the world, but he’s both closest to it in Europe and the furthest from prying eyes that he’ll ever get, so when they’re banding in countries where they’re not as popular, not yet, they tend to let loose a little harder.
Some nights they have a couple of beers once they get off stage, but tonight instead of following that up with some high energy hotel room hijinks before bed, they follow those post-show drinks with drinks at a bar, drinks at the club they end up in.
It’s loud, and it’s dark, and Luke isn’t as drunk as he’s ever been, but he can’t exactly feel anything between his throat and his hips anymore, and no one is looking at him strangely or taking pictures of him without asking, and his band are here, and he is happy.
Ashton is flirting like the shameless flirt that he is, and Luke’s pretty sure Michael has already hooked up and gone back to their hotel, because Michael is single-minded about getting what he wants, and that’s a quality that people seem to find irresistible. Luke has seen him in action. Luke gets it.
Calum is on the other end of the lounge Luke is sitting on, and he’s talking to a guy that’s taller even than Luke is, and Calum is smiling and Luke is happy that he’s happy, he’s glad just to be close to him. Luke is perfectly content to sit by himself and talk to anyone who wants to talk to him, even if it’s just to come up and make small talk until Luke runs out of things to say, but the next time Luke looks over to reassure himself that Calum is still having a good time, the tall guy he’s talking to has his hand on Calum’s leg, above the knee, and the baseball cap he’d been wearing is on Calum’s head now. Calum is still smiling, but Luke is not.
In a winding rush, Luke can feel the space between his collarbones and his belly again, and it feels full with the emptiness he finds, a hollowed out space that hurts for the lack of anything there.
None of them are particularly straight, not that they’ve talked about it, not that they haven’t all gone home with girls before, but that was before, and this is now, this is different. Maybe not for Calum, because Calum doesn’t have a reason not to hook up, but Luke does, and his reason looks about ready to go home with someone who isn’t him.
Luke looks away and sits forward, reaching for another drink, and his hand is shaking so hard, why is his hand shaking so hard, he almost spills his drink, but another hand appears out of nowhere to wrap around his, and Ashton is there and Luke feels better, but Luke also takes what could only be considered a gulp of his drink, he doesn’t even know what it is, but maybe it will make him feel better, maybe it will help.
“You okay, buddy?” Ashton asks, and he’s sitting down next to Luke and throwing his arm up over the back of the lounge, almost touching Luke’s shoulder, and his closeness makes Luke feel better than an entire table full of drinks could, he thinks.
“I’m fine, Ashton. I am fine,” Luke tells him, and that’s not even close to true, but Luke tells white lies all the time without anyone noticing, so who is to say a great big black one won’t slip by unnoticed too?
“Alright, okay,” Ashton says in a way that Luke doesn’t like, but he isn’t saying anymore, and Luke will take his silence for now, he’ll take it and be grateful for it.
They sit together, sipping their drinks and occasionally laughing about nothing at all, both drunk and starting to get a bit messy for it, and that’s how the One Direction boys find them when the VIP curtain is pulled aside for Niall and Harry.
“Boys!” Harry shouts, rubbing his hands together and glancing around like he’s deciding where he fits before he nods and squeezes in beside Ashton.
“Lads!” Niall adds in greeting, plopping himself down right on top of Luke and Ashton without hesitation.
The sweet, foamy grin Niall gives them both makes it plain that 5sos are not the only ones who pregamed before they got here.
“Where are the rest of ye?” Niall asks, his knees between Luke’s and Ashton’s respectively, his arms around their necks.
“Michael is -” Ashton makes a blowjob gesture with his tongue and his cheek, one that his dimple makes more obscene than it needs to be, Luke thinks. “And Calum is - over there,” Ashton waves a hand in the vague direction of the other end of the lounge, which feels even longer than it really is, space for at least what’s missing of their bands clear between Luke and the person Calum’s going to take home later.
“Ah,” Harry says, making it seem philosophical, somehow, making it encompass far more than such a small word should, but then instantly steering the conversation toward the topic of some uber indie British band that only he and Ashton have been or ever will be fans of, apparently, because they’re both awful hipsters and kind of Luke’s heroes.
“You doing okay, Luker?” Niall asks, shifting so he’s more on Luke’s lap than Ashton’s, and Niall is a good friend who loves them and their band, so it’s easy to let himself get wrapped up in everything he has to say, even when that extends to invitations for Luke to ‘shake it’ with him on the dancefloor.
Luke doesn’t dance, but he will with Niall, when he’s in a part of the world where no one knows him, when he’s drunk and could turn around at any minute to find Calum kissing someone. Kissing someone else.
“Lead the way, my friend,” he tells Niall, and Niall beams.
____
Luke is sweating and pretty close to sober again, by the time Calum comes to find them on the dancefloor.
He doesn’t look debauched, when he winds his arms around Niall’s middle and props his chin up over his shoulder to smile at Luke, and Luke would know because he stares at Calum’s mouth so long and hard that he gets dizzy with it. Maybe that guy hadn’t been Calum’s type after all, though Calum is still wearing his hat. Maybe Calum needs something more long term, something with someone who understands what his life is like every day. Calum turns his face into Niall’s neck and Niall grabs for his hands and maybe Calum came looking for them because Niall is what he wants. It makes sense to Luke.
But Calum stays, and Calum dances with them like there’s no one else here he’s even aware of, and he might grind up on Niall for quite a while, but he also does the same to Luke, breathlessly laughing in Luke’s ear when Luke tries to wriggle out of the hold Calum has on his hips because he likes it too much, wants it too bad.
By the time they’re being herded out of the club and outside into a minivan, en masse, Ashton has had the great idea to make a drunk train, each of them holding onto the waist or shoulders of the person in front of them so they don’t get separated in the crush, but Calum has his own ideas, wrapping one arm around Luke’s middle, the other high up around his chest, his hand in Luke’s armpit and his forearm banded over Luke’s heart.
He sticks to Luke like he’s physically incapable of leaving his side, practically sitting on him on the way back to the hotel, and so when they get there and pile out into the lobby, bands splitting up to go to separate floors, Ashton splitting off to duck into his own room, Luke isn’t surprised that Calum stays with him, follows him down the corridor to Luke’s room.
Calum doesn’t say anything the entire time, just silently strips off next to Luke’s bed and then stands patiently watching while Luke follows suit, and isn’t that just the worst thing that could happen to Luke before he’s expected to slide into bed next to his best friend and his crush and act like nothing’s wrong, act like this is enough for him.
“Did you have a good time tonight?” Calum asks eventually, when their heads are on their respective pillows and Luke is staring at the ceiling, feels Calum staring at him.
“Yeah, sure. Did you?” Luke asks politely, because he really doesn’t want to know, doesn’t want to think about the baseball cap that’s on the floor next to his bed even though Calum is right here in it.
“It didn’t seem like you did,” Calum says, sidestepping Luke’s question neatly, “Not at the beginning, at least. Didn’t you see anyone you wanted to hook up with?”
Luke’s stomach falls right through the bed.
“No, not … not tonight. I’m not really into that right now. I maybe … never have been? But it’s cool. I don’t mind going out with the rest of you. I don’t mind coming back by myself.”
“But you didn’t,” Calum points out, and Luke can’t help himself, he has to turn to look at him. “You came back with me.”
“You came back with me, I think you’ll find,” Luke says, trying to laugh, trying to play this off before he gets them both in over their heads. “Wasn’t there anyone there you wanted? What about the tall guy, with the hat?”
Calum frowns, and Luke hates how good he makes it look when he’s lying next to Luke, stripped down to his boxers, the heat of him bleeding across the sheets and warm under the palms Luke has pressed to the bed to keep them to himself.
“He was nice, but we just chatted. I mean … was he even good looking? I can’t remember, I wasn’t paying attention.”
Luke wonders if Calum really means that. Wonders how he possibly could.
“He was pretty cute. Very tall, if you’re into that.” Luke isn’t fishing, he isn’t.
“I’m into tall, but he wasn’t the right kind of tall. He can’t have been more than a six if I didn’t even think about him that way.”
Calum is still frowning, putting serious thought into this now, and Luke can’t help but smile, because he loves that wrinkle that appears between Calum’s eyebrows when he concentrates, and he loves hearing about how Calum wasn’t thinking about taking other people back to his hotel room tonight, after all.
“So tall and more than a six is your type?” Luke asks, trying to play this all off, still, trying to talk through the frantic, fearful, ecstatic and painful thump of his heart.
“Definitely,” Calum says decisively, rolling right over and tucking his face in against Luke’s shoulder, rubbing his nose across Luke’s bare skin.
“But what number are you?”
“I’m a solid five, mate. Maybe a five and a half on the days when my hair does what it’s told. You know this, Lucas, you live with me.”
Luke thinks Calum is a ten every single day, but he will say so only on pain of death, because god help him he’ll fight for this friendship until he can’t, anymore.
“Aiming above your own bracket, hey Cal? Good on ya,” Luke says, resisting the urge to curl up into Calum, but indulging himself a bit, shifting his weight so he’s tilted towards Calum, at least.
Calum yawns big and loud, and it’s contagious, Luke echoes him until his jaw cracks.
“Hey, what am I, then?” Luke asks, not really thinking about the implications through his kind of drunk, completely wiped brain state.
“You, my tall and lovely friend,” Calum says, quiet and solemn, “Are a sure twelve.”
Luke laughs, but Calum doesn’t, and Luke probably falls asleep wondering about that, but when he wakes up the next morning all wrapped up in Calum, all he remembers is that Calum came home with him, and that Calum thinks he’s lovely.
Michael ends up wearing the hat from the night before, when he comes in to wake them and trips over it on the floor, but Ashton swipes it at breakfast and stuffs it into a garbage can on their way back upstairs, carefully avoiding eye contact with anyone as he does.
A lot of the time, Luke’s band are entirely awful, but today, he finds, he loves them all.
____
Mid-week Premier League football games are played in the evenings in the UK, which is generally somewhere in or around early afternoon in the US.
Luke would know this even if it weren’t for how Calum slaps his palms against the sides of all the bunks as he passes through the corridor on his way to the back lounge, yelling about how the game is about to start and how attendance and raucous cheering for Manchester United is mandatory for everyone who wants to stay on this bus and in Calum’s heart.
Luke is, naturally, on his feet before the door to the back lounge even bangs open in the wake of Calum’s enthusiasm.
When half-time rolls around, Calum is sitting forward with his arms folded across his knees, paying rapt attention to a 1-1 game, and Michael and Ashton are curled up together on the other lounge, phones in hand, ‘yay’-ing in varying degrees of lack lustre, late enthusiasm whenever Calum gets excited about something. Luke is next to Calum, his attention split between the screen and Calum himself because jesus christ, he is beyond hot when he’s watching football - he’s serious and he’s focused and he’s vicious about the other team, bloodthirsty in his desire to see United win and making no effort to hide that. Luke half wants Man U to lose just to see if he can convince Calum to expend some of his barely pent-up frustrations on Luke himself.
Niall tumbles through the door, Harry and Zayn not far behind him, and they’re lucky that they timed their arrival almost exactly to the half-time whistle, because otherwise Calum might have tried to kick them off their own tour. Given the strength and magnitude of Calum’s feelings about football, Luke’s not sure he’d bet against his success, there.
“Lunch, lads?” Niall asks, and Michael and Ashton are rolling to their feet like a particularly coordinated, very generously limbed creature, cracking their knuckles and already arguing about where they want to eat. Zayn and Harry referee, expertly steering the decision in the direction they’ve clearly already decided on, and Niall looks at Calum and Luke expectantly. Well, at Luke, because Calum is only paying attention to the half-time analysis.
“Um,” Luke says, torn, because he could always eat, but football hangs are a big deal to Calum, and Calum is a big deal to Luke. “I’ll go grab something to bring back for us before the second half starts, hey?” he says, nudging Calum gently with his elbow, and miracle of miracles, Calum actually turns away from the TV.
“That’d be great, thanks Lukey,” he smiles, and Luke’s love for him rises like a tide, because he says it like he’s pleased and grateful, like he’s genuinely pleasantly surprised by the lengths Luke will go to to take care of him.
During his entire walk back to the bus, food for both of them in hand, Luke thinks about that smile on Calum’s face, and the quality time they’re going to get to spend together, just the two of them.
It has become very important to Luke that Calum like him. Not just a lot, or very much, but the most. More than anyone else.
Luke is prepared to work to earn that.
He’ll do whatever it takes to be Calum’s favourite.
(He knows it’s not going to entail bringing Calum lunch every day or running his errands. He knows that Calum will look at him in gratitude today because he appreciates that Luke realizes and respects how important football is to him, still. Luke has always paid attention, maybe more so to Calum than to everyone else, and in the beginning he couldn’t have known why that was, not for sure, but he sees his focus for what it is now. Maybe it’s time for Calum to see it for what it truly is, too. Showing and telling are two very different things, and Luke isn’t ready, not yet, but he’s always been brave.)
____
Aside from Luke’s inability to stop helping himself to his friends’ underwear, the thing the band argue over most is probably music. They share a pretty central taste in what to listen to, but at any given time at least one of them will be waist deep in whatever weird obsession is gripping them that week - glorious, cheesy r’n’b for Calum, nineties pop or eighties punk for Michael, obscure hair metal bands for Ash, underrated emo / pop punk from the early noughties for Luke - as a broad but general rule.
There are, however, some things that they will always come together on, and the absolute necessity of blasting at least three tracks from Blink-182’s self titled album is one of those things.
So when one pops up on shuffle when they’re all sitting around waiting to go onstage, everyone dutifully pauses in whatever they’d previously been doing, pockets their phone, and assumes whatever is their default position for the situation at hand.
For Ashton this is lying on the floor with his legs up in the air, air drumming like his life depends on it.
For Mikey it’s grabbing the nearest guitar-shaped thing he can get his hands on and leaping up onto a chair or table, shredding like he’s the next and one true incarnation of Tom DeLonge.
Luke has taken to sitting up on an arm of a lounge, one knee on either side, pounding on the sides of it with his feet and his fists, making as much noise as he possibly can to add to the words he’s singing at the top of his lungs. It’s his own special version of a vocal warm up, and it hasn’t failed to get him pumped and ready, yet.
Calum isn’t here right now, off hiding from a headache in a dark corner of the stadium somewhere, but if he were here, nothing and no one would be safe. Unlike the rest of them, Calum doesn’t have a default, because he likes to keep them on their toes in all things and at all times. Calum could decide that he wants to be Ashton’s drums one night, could climb up behind Luke and yell into the back of his neck another. Sometimes he runs and jumps with Michael, sometimes he pulls them all up into the world’s worst conga line, sometimes he sits quietly and simply sings along, low and sincere. It’s hard for Luke to pick a favourite, but some days it’s not hard at all.
One thing’s for sure, it’s just not the same without Calum there, and after roughly three minutes of singing his heart out, Luke has to go off in search of him, trailing through the maze of corridors knotted with people backstage, the song still making his pulse pound, making his blood hot, making it seem suddenly imperative that he reach Calum before this feeling fades, before he forgets that when the music he loves is lighting him up like an electrical charge, it’s Calum he wants to get to.
It doesn’t take very long to find him, maybe because Luke knows Calum well, or more likely because they’re both lazy in the ways that don’t really matter.
When Luke pokes his head into the hair and makeup room it seems empty; quiet and still for once, but Luke instantly recognizes the beat up Vans sticking out from between the lounge and the wall, and he definitely knows Calum’s habits enough to know that when he’s tired or hurting, he always heads into small spaces.
Calum isn’t asleep when Luke peers down over the back of the lounge at him, he hasn’t even got his eyes closed, he’s just staring up at the ceiling, and then at Luke when he inadvertently takes up his view of nothing at all.
“Hey!” Luke says, trying not to be too loud in his enthusiasm, because he is a kind and considerate friend and he would probably make an excellent boyfriend, he’d give it everything’s he’s got, “Are you feeling better?” He drops into a whisper, not sure how bad this headache is and knowing that Calum can get some really terrible ones, sometimes.
“Better now,” Calum says, reaching up to tug at Luke’s shoulder until he acquiesces and climbs carefully down to lie on top of Calum, hugging him as best he can in the tight space they’re squashed into; Luke lying mostly between Calum and the wall, his body slotted sideways behind Calum’s.
“You missed Feeling This,” Luke whispers into the side of Calum’s face, trying his best to make it sound like the song had been an important moment for them as a band, trying to shift his focus from how the song had made him feel personally, how it seems far more important to him to be exactly where he is right now, feeling this.
Calum only hums, folding his arms up across his own chest and dragging one of Luke’s arms with him to add to the pile.
Calum hadn’t turned on the lights in here, only the bulbs around the mirrors faintly lighting the room, and they’re in the shadows behind the couch, hidden away tucked up together in the dark.
“I missed you. I like you the most,” Luke whispers there, where it feels safe and small, and he feels Calum’s mouth lift into a smile when he kisses his cheek, breathes out a sigh of relief when he presses a kiss that never really ends to the back of Calum’s neck and only gets Calum gripping his hand tighter, in response.
____
They’re pretty often asked who out of the band they’d date, in interviews.
Luke wouldn’t go so far as to say he expects most of them to say him, but that’s the way it tends to play out. Luke figured out a long time ago that this is because out of all of them, he’s the least likely to tease anyone for giving his name in answer.
So he is almost expecting Calum to say he’d date Luke, and he is completely thrown when Calum says Ashton instead, today.
“Luke definitely has the best legs, by far, but I feel like Ashton would like … woo me? And I’d want to be wooed.”
Luke is, understandably, very put out by all of this. Not because he feels like Calum should or ever would want to date him, but because hearing Calum say this could be the case in another universe was quite likely the closest Luke would ever get to that, and somewhere along the way he’d become attached to hearing Calum say it.
“I’d woo you!” he protests loudly, without thinking, and Ashton instantly starts to debate their relative smoothness, their respective dating histories. Michael laughs, but Calum only looks at Luke with his eyebrows raised, his mouth pinched into something that might be a smile he’s struggling to keep under wraps.
Luke hates his entire band.
“I wouldn’t date any of these losers,” he declares when he’s called upon, and no amount of wheedling by the interviewer or Michael will get him to change his answer.
Luke’s band sucks, and it’s really no coincidence that Luke’s life does, too.
_
Calum and Ashton are all chummy for the rest of the afternoon, all about cuddles and sitting on one another’s laps even though Ashton can never sit still long enough and Calum needs that in a cuddle partner, Luke knows so from experience.
Luke puts up with The Cashton Show for all of six minutes before he has to get up and leave, not looking at anyone or offering any kind of explanation as to where he’s going or why. He curls up in his bunk with his headphones on and the hood of his sweatshirt pulled up over them, and he thumbs through shuffle without focus or patience, only pausing for the loudest, angriest, angstiest songs he comes across. He kind of feels like punching something, and he’s without a doubt the least violent or athletic member of the band.
It takes considerable effort not to slap away the hand that appears on his shoulder, but it turns out to be Michael’s, so Luke is glad, in hindsight, that he gave it his all.
“Any idea when your sulk fit is going to be over? Calum wants to play FIFA later and you know he’ll get bored of beating me after five minutes.”
“M’not sulking,” Luke says, turning his back to Michael again but not turning his music back on yet, because he’s sulking, but he isn’t going to be rude about it.
“Listen, Lucas. There’s really no need for all of this carrying on.” Luke feels it rather than sees it when Michael sets his forearms along the edges of his bunk, but he knows without a doubt that he’s in for a lecture, here. He refuses to turn around.
“If you like it then you should have put a ring on it, mate. And if you’re too chickenshit to put a ring on it then you can’t throw a fit every time it looks like someone else might put a ring on it. There are no rings at play here, Luke. So while I appreciate that you hurt in your squishy places right now, it’s not like anyone threw any rings back in your face, you know? You’d have to actually have the nerve to put one on someone, first. So think about that, yeah? And like … get on it. Time waits for no man. Or boy, in your case.”
With an overly dramatic swish of Luke’s curtain, Michael is gone, and Luke has no greater sense of understanding than he did at the beginning of this conversation he so smartly refused to take part in.
If he had to hazard a guess, he would say that Michael just told him to make a move on Calum before someone else does. Because plenty of other people are likely to.
And therein lies the problem, though Michael doesn’t seem to see it.
Calum could have anyone he wants. Why on earth would he settle for Luke?
____
Luke has a personal phone for back home, one for work stuff when he’s there, and the same set up for the US and the UK.
He’s 18 and he has six phones and he’s pretty sure Calum’s number is the one most dialled on every single one.
He knows that’s the case for his LA work phone, today especially, because they have a day off but they’re still mostly cooped up in their hotel, and the novelty hasn’t totally worn away for Luke, but no matter where they are in the world or what they’re doing or why, his first instinct will always be to pester Calum as much as he possibly can.
Some things are just sacred.
Ever since Luke had come to the startling realization that he and Calum were friends, bothering Calum is something he loves to luxuriate in. Mostly because Calum indulges him, and Luke still can’t quite believe that he does - finds that almost as difficult a reality to come to terms with as the one where the two of them are friends and this somehow hadn’t upset the social status quo in their high school; one of their year’s most popular students friends with Luke, the loner.
Calum never treats Luke like he is or ever was a loner. He lets Luke know when he’s annoying him, but even then he says it like it’s simple fact, doesn’t ask Luke to stop or leave him alone.
He entertains it when Luke gets needy and refuses to hide how proprietary he sometimes likes to feel about Calum’s time and attention, and this makes the teeth of how hard Luke loves him close a little further together, sink deeper just so.
“What now?” Calum sighs when Luke facetimes him from the next room, but he answers the call and he’s smiling as he says it. Luke sometimes thinks that maybe this could be enough. This assurance that no matter what he wants or needs from Calum, Calum will always give him this, at least. Will always answer his calls. Will always be there. Will always have time for Luke.
“I miiiiiissss youuuu,” Luke warbles into the phone, not lifting his head from the pillow half from laziness and half as a defensive measure. Just Calum’s voice is enough to make him smile, and he wonders how much longer he can keep playing that off as something else before someone picks up on it; before Calum figures it out.
“I’m like ten feet away from you, Lucas,” Calum says, and from the looks of things he’s lying on his bed too, is maybe in it, since all Luke can see is bare, tanned shoulders and white sheets.
Luke wants to protest that ten feet away is nowhere near close enough, that having Calum right beside him still isn’t enough.
“But I’m bored,” he says instead. “Come over? We can play FIFA?”
Truth be told, Luke doesn’t care what they do, once they’re doing it together.
“Maybe later, mate, but I’m kind of busy right now.” Before Luke can ask, he gets one last look at a cresting smirk on Calum’s face before the screen pans away to a long shot of the bed, pausing pointedly on the fold of the covers where Calum’s arm disappears beneath it, the muscles in his shoulder and his bicep already flexing with a fluid, easy motion that Luke instantly recognizes.
Luke’s mouth goes dry.
His tongue clacks against the roof of his mouth when he tries to talk, tries to say something normal before he says something true instead, turns his head further into his pillow like the less he sees the less the thought of what Calum is doing will drive him out of his own mind with want.
It’s a futile effort, Luke knows.
“You - uh - you couldn’t have waited? Or like … not answer the phone?” Calum’s laugh is almost breathless, and Luke’s stomach drops through the bed, plummets right through the thirty or so floors of the hotel that stand beneath him, because he can’t breathe, he can’t think. He fists his hands in the sheets of his own bed and what he wants more than anything is to be in Calum’s bed, to be next to Calum or under him or over him, their fingers locked together, their bodies overlapping. He accidentally gasps, and Calum laughs again, sounding something like delighted.
“To be fair, it’s not like I planned this. I was gonna jerk off, you facetimed me, and it was too perfect an opportunity to waste.”
Luke is not touching that. He has no idea what Calum means, but he has a feeling that if Calum sat him down and explained it with finger puppets and helpful diagrams he still wouldn’t be able to process anything that isn’t the image of Calum with his hand on his own dick, right now.
“Yeah, well. Come over after, or whatever. Like … way after. In an hour, or something.” Luke hopes his paltry attempts at sounding vaguely grossed out somehow adequately cover the fact that he’s still totally losing it here, not to mention the likelihood that he’s going to jerk off to the thought of Calum jerking off just as soon as Cal puts him out of his misery and hangs up.
“Awww, don’t you wanna watch? I’m pretty sure I can figure out a sweet camera angle, I have a free hand and everything.”
And like - yes, duh, obviously, of course Luke wants to watch, but also;
“What!?”
Calum sighs, shifting in a way that’s somehow audible, and Luke wishes he could end this call, but he knows to his bones he can’t and won’t.
“Fine, be weird about it, I still love you anyway,” Calum says loftily, like the knowledge that Calum just told him he loves him while he’s still fucking jerking off isn’t the best thing that’s ever happened to Luke, something that’s going to stay burned into his brain for approximately forever. “In fact, I’m such a good dude, I’ll even try not to think about you entire time.”
Luke’s grip on his phone is so tight the plastic actually groans in his palm.
“What?” is still all he’s capable of saying, but Calum doesn’t seem fazed, only laughs again.
“Hey, don’t hate me because you’re beautiful,” he says and hangs up, pursing his mouth at the screen like some awful imitation of a kiss before the screen goes dark, just like Luke’s mind.
It’s only after - when Luke is lying flat on his back still trying in vain to catch his breath, vaguely thinking about what he’s going to do with the mess he’s made in his hand but truly more focused on how he’s just come but still can’t stop thinking about Calum, thinks wantingly of what it would be like to use his own come to finger Calum open, to lick the taste of himself right back out of him - it’s only then that Luke wonders if Calum might happily start to jerk it when he’s on the phone to Ashton, or mentions as much when he’s texting Michael.
Calum has given Luke something that he wants, some small part of what he needs, and Luke can’t help but wonder if Calum has any clue what he’s doing, or what it’s doing to Luke.
He hates himself for it, but he finds himself once again wondering if he ever was or ever could be special, to Calum.
____
Mostly, they’re so busy that Luke doesn’t have time to think about it, and that’s pretty often a good thing.
It’s something like some kind of relief, to get to spend every day by Calum’s side, their best friends right there with them, worrying only about where they’re supposed to be next and what’s expected of them there; when they’ll next get time to hole up and write out the riot of things that are happening to them, rolling right through them, flaring up between them.
Writing is one kind of therapy, but being busy is another; one just as important.
Luke could do this for weeks, for months at a time, and he does; they do. It’s night after night after night spent in unfamiliar beds made unstrange by the presence of all of them there together, early mornings and late ones that become early mornings once more in turn. It’s talking and singing and playing guitar and looking here and there, standing where they’re put and smiling like they mean it because they do. It’s Calum and Ashton and Michael everywhere Luke is and exactly where he needs them to be.
He doesn’t have to worry, for a while, if this will ever be enough, because in the here and now when he doesn’t have time to hope for anything else, it already is.
____
It’s pure coincidence, that the next time they’re in LA is also the next time Luke comes face to face with what he can never avoid for long.
It’s late. Too late. They have to be up and out early in the morning, but Luke’s alarm has been set for hours and he’s no closer to sleep now than he’d been when he’d toggled the alert on. It’s summer, and there’s a heatwave, and Luke couldn’t sleep if his life depended on it.
By 2am he has mostly given up on trying. He’s thirsty and he’s exhausted and he’s sweating even though he doesn’t know how his body has the energy to, so his heart isn’t really in it when he trails barefoot through the house toward the dim light of the kitchen.
When he steps in onto the blissfully cool tile his heart makes a sudden and wrenching appearance, climbing up into his throat and falling back down into his belly like his spine is a ladder made of rungs to be missed.
Calum is sitting up on the kitchen counter on the far wall; his bare feet hooked across one another but his thighs splayed wide open on the granite, his boxers dark like the messy pull of his hair, the stark draw of tattoos that Luke can see all at once because Calum isn’t wearing anything else. He has his head tipped back against the wall behind him, and his throat stretches out for miles, for years, for pages and pages and pages that Luke feels flicker under his fingers; years old and still yet to be written.
Luke can’t say anything, stands frozen in the doorway, weighed down in place by how much he wants to cross the kitchen to get to Calum, wants to go to him and climb up onto him; into him.
He moves when Calum lifts his head to look at him, smiles at him like he’d been expecting him and is pleased that he’s finally here.
Luke doesn’t allow himself much, in the grand scheme of this, but he is powerless then to do anything but pull himself up onto the counter next to Calum, their thighs brushing, their ankles knocking together in a way that’s probably painful.
Calum doesn’t say anything, just tilts to one side until his head is resting on Luke’s shoulder, and the touch of his temple to Luke’s skin is like a password, some kind of instant release for secrets Luke didn’t know he’d been carrying around, all this time.
He grabs for Calum’s hand, holds it tight between both of his, and says things he doesn’t mean to say, but means to his bones nonetheless.
“This is all I want, you know? Just this. Is that dumb? Am I supposed to want something else?” he thinks about how he could or should have said ‘something more,’ but he knows why his tongue dismissed that word before he could think to. Calum’s hand is clammy and lax in his, and there is no ‘more,’ this is his everything.
Calum, to his credit and Luke’s surprise, doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t say he doesn’t understand or ask for clarification or tell Luke he’s a sleep deprived lunatic who doesn’t know what he’s saying.
He lifts and turns his head to rub his nose slowly against the round of Luke’s shoulder, and then he presses his mouth carefully, painstakingly precisely, into the skin above Luke’s collarbone.
Luke doesn’t know how to ask what that means. Luke is afraid that if he figures out how, what he hears will be the end of this; will kill whatever frail and temporary kind of hope he lets himself have, sometimes.
So Luke sits and holds onto Calum’s hand, and Calum rests his head on Luke’s shoulder in silence, and when the sun comes up it dawns on their bodies inch by inch, starting at their bare toes and rising until it blinds them.
Only then do they move, hopping down from the counter and moving around one another with ease, with familiarity, making breakfast for themselves and for Ash and Michael, who will appear any minute now, rubbing at their eyes and scrubbing sleep stiff fingers through the mess of their hair.
Calum finally looks at Luke over the rim of his mug of tea, and though Luke thinks of little else for the rest of the day, he still can’t figure out what Calum had been trying to say, with the look. He hadn’t been looking at Luke in confusion, or with expectation. He’d looked at him like there was something there Luke was supposed to find; something he ought to recognize, almost.
Luke doesn’t find horror or concern, there, and that’s what counts.
He could handle almost anything else, he thinks.
He’s confident that no matter what happens in the end, he’ll get there and make it in one piece once Calum is right there with him.
____
Luke needs to go home, this time.
They’re always happy to get back to their families and friends, real time off and their childhood bedrooms, small spaces that they comfortably fit inside before everything around them got huge; spaces they’ll happily fit right back into once they step onto a plane and leave all the hype behind.
Michael is scribbling away in a notebook, writing lyrics, Luke guesses, and Ashton is on his phone, has his headphones on and is drumming his fingers on the arm of his seat.
Their flight boards in fifteen minutes, and Luke feels the shiver of what could be fear.
He lets his head drop back until he’s craning over his seat, catches the attention of Calum who is sitting in the row behind him, one seat over like he needs space, but not that much.
“Hey, we’re still gonna see each other once we’re back home, right?” Luke has heard the stories. Bands who go home after big tours and don’t see their bandmates again until they’re at the airport to head back to work. Bands who come to want that. Luke shudders with what is definitely horror. Though hopefully preemptive and unnecessary.
Calum looks at Luke like he has five heads, and holds the expression until it softens, slow and not sad, but something close to it.
“Duh,” he says, reaching over to fix Luke’s hood, somehow inside out. “Don’t tell the others,” he whispers, leaning in close, “But you’re kind of my favourite.”
His smile is small, contained in ways that Luke doesn’t know how to associate with Calum, but by the time he’s figured out a way to return it, Calum is thumbing the wheel of his ipod again, his admission apparently forgotten.
By him, at least.
Luke …
Well, Luke clings to it. He turns it over in his head until the shape of it is everywhere, a constant now.
He’s Calum’s favourite.
Calum likes him the most.
____
Being back home makes Luke think about what their lives were like before.
Every time he’s in a car he thinks about the nights when they took the long way back from Ashton’s place after practice; music still thrumming through them so much that they didn’t want to go home to silent houses, not yet.
They’d drive around for hours sometimes, Luke and Calum almost always relegated to the back seat as the youngest, though Luke couldn’t have cared less, even then, and Calum had never complained either.
Michael and Ashton would argue loudly about this riff or that, which lyric was good enough to build a chorus around, and they weren’t fighting, not really, this was the most productive part of their practices by far - this was when the work they’d done tonight was edited to mean something, to be as much as it possibly could; loudest and hardest, the most sincere, the most true.
Calum and Luke would sometimes sit leaning into their respective sides of the car, backs against their doors and their legs tangled up together in the middle, singing whatever was blasting from the cd player at one another rather than together. Sometimes they’d share the middle seat, as close to one another as they could get.
One of those nights had been when they’d decided to share lead vocals, to let everyone who wanted to be heard have access to a mic, and Luke had never minded; still loves listening to Calum’s voice more than he likes hearing his own.
Luke will always remember what Calum’s face looks like between the shadow of night and the intermittent caress of street lights that flitted across his face, soft little slants of bright that Luke still sees behind his eyelids late at night, sometimes.
They’re as happy now as they’d been then.
And Luke still wants just one thing: to be good enough to get to stay, good enough that Calum would want him to.
____
They do see each other when they’re back home, and by the time they’re back out on the road again, any change that Luke might have hoped could have happened between then and now is proving to only have made things worse.
Being back in Oz doesn’t give Luke any kind of new or different perspective. It doesn’t (as he had quietly hoped) make him think of Calum the same way he thinks of home: like something to come back to, something he doesn’t need to be able to touch to know is real and still there for him.
Luke wants Calum when they’re back home, top to tailing in the bed Luke slept in for almost all of his life, before he knew Calum and better still - after.
Luke wants Calum when they’re sitting together on a plane that’s taking them to London, knows he’ll want him when they’re settled back into their house there, when they leave it again, when they’re over the atlantic ocean or somewhere in the midwest of America with nothing else to do, nothing to see.
He wants him when they’re alone together. He wants him when they’re standing side by side on a stage faced by thousands of people. He wants him first thing in the morning when he has terrible breath and is in a worse mood. He wants him every night, wants him even in his dreams.
Nothing has changed, and Luke doesn’t know how to keep on hoping that it will.
____
And so, Luke mopes.
He isn’t proud of it.
He just doesn’t know what else to do.
He doesn’t know how to keep on hoping when he knows he’ll probably always be too terrified to try, petrified that his efforts will cost him everything he already has, leave him even further from what he wants. He doesn’t know how to call that brave when it could mean he loses Calum forever.
He’s still huddled deep in the misery of his cowardice, curled up tight into a ball in his bunk, when the root of all his problems comes to find him, climbing right in next to him like he’d been invited. Which he pretty much always is, but still.
“Hey, so you’re not entirely straight, right?” is Calum’s opening, and Luke has to give him credit for how almost anything else he could have said would have resulted in Luke ignoring him. Doing his best to, at least.
This, however, gets Luke’s attention in a chokehold. He uncurls a little, stretching out so he’s lying flat, facing the wall, Calum a long line of heat behind him, his hand hesitant on Luke’s waist for the first time Luke can ever remember.
“I’m - no. No, I’m not entirely straight.” Luke offers, holding his breath, waiting for the fall, waiting to become the punchline.
But it doesn’t come; that never happens.
“Cool,” Calum says, huffing a little before he continues, his breath hot against the back of Luke’s neck and making the hair there stand on end, “Because Michael and Ashton said that you wouldn’t like … kick me out of the band if I told you that I sort of have an epic crush on you, and I think maybe you’re having a hard time with the not-straight thing right now, so I figured this is as good a time as any to say … well. You’re not alone? And also sorry. That I’ve made things weird. I won’t let it get in the way of banding. I never have, you know? I promise things don’t have to change. And I’m. Sorry, again. Yeah. That’s … that’s it, I guess,” he winds down and his body goes a little more lax against Luke’s, like apprehension had made him stiff.
Luke has lost all feeling in and connection to his body. Time and space no longer hold meaning for him. Luke isn’t even sure if Luke is in fact actually his name or not, because;
“An epic crush? On me? You never have let it get in the way of - what. You what?” It is screamed in his head, but becomes audible in some flat, slow sort of disbelieving tone. An echo of the deafening noise that’s ringing between his ears.
He tries to turn around to face Calum, but Calum doesn’t let him, curls a forearm around his waist and tries to keep him still, though it’s the way Calum hides his face in against Luke’s shoulder blade that actually accomplishes the task.
“Please don’t … don’t hate me. I love you, and I need you to keep liking me, at least.”
Luke’s lungs feel like they’re made of candy floss. His hands are pillows and his feet are fading in and out of existence. His whole body reacts to what Calum is saying, processing it in a slow sweep of sweet molasses that rolls home in him cell by cell, limb by limb, until he’s all lit up by it, warm and safe and elated in Calum’s arms.
“I couldn’t hate you if I tried,” Luke says, slow and steady and measured, needing a moment to know that Calum loves him and that he loves Calum before he can tell Calum, before they deal with this together, because it’s been years and Luke just needs a moment.
He gets impatient after about a second.
“Actually, I don’t know that I’ve ever been anything less than completely in love with you. Maybe that first day, when you asked to borrow my calculator and then asked me to sit with you at lunch and I thought it was all some huge practical joke. I knew you were hot, but I was too terrified to be in love with you then, I think. Ever since, though. Like … every single day since …”
There’s silence for a moment. Just the quiet rise and fall of both their breathing, almost loud in the cramped quiet of the bunk.
And then Calum exhales so hard that Luke feels the way his body deflates with it, feels it in how Calum uses the movement to wriggle closer to Luke; what began as desperate clinging much more like a hug now when Luke reaches for Calum’s hand, drops his shoulder back so Calum’s is curved up over it, bringing him closer.
“So we …” Calum starts, his voice shaking, and Luke can’t listen to him be afraid, can’t lie still and listen to him sound uncertain about this of all things.
He turns in Calum’s arms and takes his face in both hands, meeting his eyes for a long, sure moment of wide, awed eye contact before he lets his gaze drop to Calum’s mouth, leans in to brush his mouth against Calum’s lightly, careful, his thumbs sweeping up under the lines of Calum’s jaw, holding him close like he’s something special, because he is.
“Yeah, we,” Luke assures him, murmurs between butterfly light presses of his lips to Calum’s, his lips to Calum’s chin, the bridge of his nose, the thin skin beneath his eyes.
Calum’s eyelashes flutter against his cheek, dark and thickly frantic, when Luke pulls back just enough to look at him.
“Fuck,” Calum says when he looks at Luke again, eyes drifting down along the line of his nose, catching on his mouth, hot like a touch on the line of his throat.
Calum’s voice is still shaky, his hands trembling where they’re pushed up under the sides of Luke’s t-shirt, and Luke had never been masochistic enough to think about what this moment could be like, but he can’t imagine anything better than this.
Calum is looking at him, still, their eyes locked like it’s impossible to look away, and it feels that way now that they’re seeing each other like this, for everything that they truly are and want to be to one another.
Calum is looking at Luke like he’s something heavenly, someone to be cherished, and for the very first time Luke feels like maybe he is. He looks back at Calum the same way, not afraid to let every little bit of how he feels show on his face, finally, and Calum’s expression crumples slightly, seems to falter under the weight of Luke’s full attention.
“I’m kinda … this is scary,” Calum admits. “I never thought about what I’d do if you … I figured you wouldn’t ever want me. I don’t know if I can be what you need, I don’t think I’m enough to -”
Luke cuts him off with a kiss, and this one isn’t tentative or careful or small. He pushes Calum over onto his back and climbs up over him, onto him, his knees dug into the mattress on either side of Calum’s hips. He presses his advantage when Calum opens his mouth to gasp, probably in surprise, and thrills at how the sound goes low and satisfied when Luke licks into his mouth, touches their tongues together with a frisson that makes him shake. It would sound silly to say out loud, but it’s the most intimate thing that Luke has ever known. Their mouths open against each other’s and the need that’s nipped into lips by their teeth, the want that is now a physical, audible, palpable promise twists everything inside of Luke up, sets him right in a way that is brand new and huge, so much more than life-changing because it’s Calum that’s under him, Calum’s hands in his back pockets.
“You’re already everything I’ve ever wanted,” Luke tells him, and gets to watch up close as Calum’s expression rebuilds itself around Luke’s words, certainty making his mouth set full and sure, his eyes clear and determined, bright with purpose.
“I’m gonna be everything you’ll ever need,” Calum vows, and Luke hopes it’s as clear to Calum as he means it to be, when he reverently starts in on bringing a bruise as big as he can manage to the surface of the hot skin of Calum’s throat, that Luke promises nothing less in return.
____
[ “They’re making out, you owe me one hour of silence whenever I so choose to invoke it,” Ashton yells, presumably shouting at Michael, but almost deafening Luke and Calum, who are still tangled up together in Luke’s bunk, breathless and sweating, their shirts off and their jeans unbuttoned, things really starting to get interesting when Ashton picks his moment to interrupt.
“FUCK YOU ALL,” Michael shouts back, and then, “Actually, speaking of. Which one of you is going to bottom? Ash, who is on top?”
Ashton, to Luke’s pleasant surprise, has his hands over his eyes.
“I don’t know, I don’t want to know! Calum has his hand down Luke’s pants and I’m out, this is like walking in on my parents having sex.”
Calum is shaking with laughter, his face pressed into the space between Luke’s collarbones, and his hand is still in Luke’s boxers, but he has the good grace not to do anything with Ashton still standing there, simply leaves his fingers curled companionably around Luke’s dick like a friendly reminder that he can do this, now.
“I’m leaving now, maybe forever. Luke, if you get Calum pregnant dibs on being godfather.”
Calum is still laughing long after Ashton has left them alone, but Luke finds the moment cause for pause, to be slightly more serious, all things considered.
“He knows that’s not how it works, right?”
Because Luke knows that Ashton is far smarter than he sometimes lets on, but he’d sounded truly excited about the prospect of being godfather to their impossible children.
Calum only laughs harder.
“We can sit him down for a serious talk about the birds and bees later on,” he promises, already distracted by the now that comes before then, if the way he’s impatiently wrestling Luke’s jeans down off his hips is anything to go by, “But in the meantime, there’s no sense in not trying, at least. C’mon, Lukey, give it your best shot. Gimme all you’ve got.”
Luke grins at him, smile huge and happy, because this is exactly what he’s been waiting for.
This is the one and only chance he still has to take, and it’s one he’s without a doubt going to make. ]
____
Being walked in on by their bandmates becomes a sort of running theme, because Calum is relentless, and Luke will never know any kind of shame that extends to not indulging and encouraging that at every turn.
Ashton never does get his hour of silence from Michael.
But both of these developments come together in some kind of karmic harmony when it turns out that the only thing that actually can silence Michael is the sight of Luke on his knees for Calum in the back lounge, or Calum’s hand disappearing down the back of Luke’s jeans while they sit around waiting to leave for an interview or practice or song writing session, Luke squirming for his fingers, Calum just as breathless as Luke is.
“I’m traumatized. This band has traumatized me for life,” Michael says one day, dazed and distraught after walking in on Luke fucking Calum in his bunk, his feet planted on the ceiling, thighs spread wide around Luke’s hips.
“Hey, this is better than when they were pining for each other. At least we don’t have to watch them be miserable for no reason anymore,” is Ashton’s not at all sympathetic response.
Luke wonders if Ashton still feels the same way after he accidentally interrupts his and Calum’s first serious attempt at rimming.
Ashton’s face is ashen for at least two hours afterwards, and he’s as quiet as Luke has ever heard him be.
Luke would almost be worried, if it wasn’t for how later that night, as they’re climbing into bed together, Calum confides that Ash had come to find him after the show, asked him how he knew he was gay, how he knew Luke was the one he wanted.
“So what did you tell him?” Luke asks around a yawn, tugging Calum back into his chest and wrapping the covers snuggly around them, cocooning them tightly together in the middle of their enormous bed.
Calum twists back for a kiss.
“I told him about the time I spent six weeks agonizing over how to talk to you, and came up with breaking my calculator as my best chance.”
Luke is suddenly far more awake than he was a minute ago.
“Did you really?” he asks, astounded.
“Nah,” Calum says, burrowing his face further into their pillow, “I could’ve, but I don’t think that’s what he was looking for, so I told him about how you were all I could think about whenever I jerked off for three whole years. I told him about how just seeing you walk by in skinny jeans was enough to get me hard. Ash needs to figure out that he wants to fuck dudes, he’s not ready to be in love with one, yet.”
“And you … you are?” Luke asks, because he’s pretty sure he’s told Calum that he loves him, probably an embarrassing amount of times now, but Calum hasn’t said it since they got together, though Luke’s not entirely sure that that really makes a difference.
“That’s what I’ve been saying,” Calum mumbles, half asleep, and Luke doesn’t think he’s talking about right now, or tonight, or lately.
“Oh,” is all Luke can say. “Fuck.”
“Mmmm, maybe in the morning,” Calum mostly whispers, “So hurry up and go the fuck to sleep,” the last words he says to Luke before they fall asleep together, curled up into one another even when they’re not awake and determined to be.
____
“I’m definitely gay,” Ashton says fervently a couple weeks later, when they’re all laying around in the back lounge and Calum is perched in Luke’s lap, his hands fisted in Luke’s hair and his tongue in Luke’s mouth, lips sucking at Luke’s lip ring.
“Sure, you might be,” Michael says easily, not looking up from his notebook, “But I wouldn’t use this as a test. Everyone’s gay when that’s happening.” Luke doesn’t have to look to know that Michael’s waving a lazy hand in their direction, which is a good thing, because Calum has gotten impatient and started to grind down against the bulge in Luke’s jeans, and he simply doesn’t have the attention span to care about things that aren’t that, right now.
“I’ll help you figure it out later, if you like,” Michael adds, light, and there is a collective pause from the entire band.
“You might just be my favourite, I think I like you most,” Ashton tells him, and Luke tastes it when Calum grins against his mouth.
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