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The bathtub fills slowly. Even out here, surrounded by miles and endless fucking miles of water, the pipes heave with the effort, spitting, choking out mouthfuls of it, scalding, heated by the burning lungs of the house which lay somewhere beneath him.
Alfie sits on the rim and waits, patiently. Not the studied patience of his youth, the stilling of a body with something coiling within it, hungry and expecting. No; this is an older, quieter patience.
An exhale rather than an inhale. There’s a part of him that balks at this dawning age. He’s past the beginning of it, past the initial shock; it’s settled, now, resentfully into his bones, eating away at him. A slow deterioration.
Right, because old age should burn and rave at the close of day, and all that. Alfie’s still seeing the sun, though, so he doesn’t worry too much about it quite fucking yet.
The porcelain edge of the tub digs into the backs of his thighs, chilling his bare skin, raising goose flesh along his legs, all the way down, skipping the crinkled skin at the back of his knees, to his ankles. He watches the way the wiry, flaxen hairs jump out from his body, as if trying to escape.
Laid over the rim beside his left hand is a washcloth, cesious from use, neat hemming along the edges to stop the fraying, the same way his mother always did. Old habits– Rebekah’s only a little younger than she should be, now.
It’s not soft by any means, but it’s only rough if used that way. Alfie uses it that way, sometimes. Feels that he has to. Not as much anymore, though.
(It’s never been atonement he’s searching for, too Christian; cleanliness, more than anything. Sometimes the dirt and blood and gore only comes off if you make it.
Now, though, more than ever, his skin is soiled with something he can’t scrub off, so there’s no fucking point, is there?)
On the chair by the sink are his clothes, folded and piled in the same order as he takes them off: jacket, waistcoat, trousers, shirt, undershirt, socks, pants. Routine, familiar, the way he’ll be doing it until he shuffles off this mortal coil.
His rings make a faery circle about the bleached eggshell-colored sink, each gemstone or engraving poised to face the lightly rust-flecked silver drain at the center, as if they were waiting for something that were about to emerge, climbing up from the obscure, shadowed pipe depths. Over the sink handles, his bracelets, leather and corded like nooses hanging down into the scrubbed enamel basin.
Steam rises behind him, beading up his back, softening the hairs fanning across his neck, curling up behind his ears. The mirror’s collecting fog at the edges, the quid-edge colored gilt frame brightening under the yellowing lights. The bathroom reflects back out of it, softened at the edges: at the center, a tasteless little white-framed painting of a lighthouse overlooking dark waters with the gleaming eye of God reduced to smears of burning yellow on navy, surrounded by pale green wall, eu-de-nil, and the edge of his shoulder peeking in, filling one corner as a flesh-colored smudge.
Alfie can hear typical undressing noises from the room over, clinks of carefully done cufflinks, the shiver of fabric falling away from the body. There’s something voyeuristic about listening to it from behind a door, over the heavy rush of bathwater. He doesn’t know why Tommy wants to come in to help him wash, but the way he’d asked (didn’t ask, actually, didn’t so much as look up from the newspaper, just an “I’ll help,” around his cigarette when Alfie had announced his intentions) had halted Alfie’s thoughts a second too long, and God knows neither of them have ever really asked questions, too aware of the delicate thing balanced between them.
Back inside the bathroom, behind the door, Alfie sits naked, already stripped bare. Waiting at the edge of the tub, mute and trusting. Fairy tale princess in his enamel tower.
Or, well– that’s how it’s supposed to go, for the goyim. The fucking English. He grew up, right, personally, with a very different set of fairy tales, certainly none of them involving some princess sat around and chastely awaiting rescue. You don’t get saved that easily. And Tommy’s certainly no knight, for all his horse-riding and armor.
He wonders, not for the first time, about Tommy’s fairy tales, what stories, if any, the Gypsies pass amongst themselves like candles after dark.
They should have stories, Alfie thinks as he twists off the gold-accented porcelain tub handle. They seem the type. Story folk, like his own ilk.
Finally, the door opens.
Tommy steps in, pale and lovely and untouchable, the armor of his pretentious suits shed down to a deceptively plain but likely equally expensive white shirt. Cuffs rolled up, black trousers, feet bare.
Everything about him is careful, perfectly sculpted, face blank and shoulders drawn rectangular, the position of his body as the door closes behind him completely neutral, neither asking nor offering anything. It’s like this every time he enters a room, no matter how much Alfie takes it apart once he’s walked inside, no matter how much he tries to make this house and all of its rooms a haven for Tommy when he visits.
(Thomas fucking Shelby, OBE, ladies and gentlemen. Won’t even lower his guard in heaven.)
Alfie doesn’t move, lets Tommy look at him for a moment. He can feel the heat radiating up, razor-edged near the swell of his arse sticking out over the rim. He’s still thinking about Gypsy fairy tales. There’s a picture in his mind of a young Tommy sitting at his faceless mother’s feet, surrounded by his equally faceless siblings, listening to her spin some fantastical tale. Something about horses, right, or fuck knows.
Tommy’s face is hard to visualize younger, still baby-soft. Seems wrong to think he hasn’t always had those cheekbones. Alfie keeps seeing a skeletal thing with ancient blue eyes fixed hungry and unblinking on the woman above him.
He doesn’t lift his head as Tommy comes to stand over him. The mirror he can still see past Tommy’s hip has completely fogged up, and the white-shirted, pale body in it looks like a ghost.
“Alfie,” Tommy says quietly.
Alfie doesn’t believe in ghosts. He doesn’t think Tommy does either. Ridiculous idea, ghosts. The dead are gone. Off to Heaven, if you believe in that sort of thing. Or Hell, if you believe in that one too.
Alfie doesn’t– he knows Gehinnom is really just another valley of bloodstained earth, regardless of a couple of rabbis’ mythologizing. He thinks Tommy does, though, because he’s certainly not tactful enough to not have said something by now, for all they talk of it.
There’s a short sigh, like he’s exasperating poor Tommy. “Get in the bath, eh?”
Alfie looks up at him. Tommy appears to be exhausted as he always does nowadays, and Alfie’s maybe starting to think that age is eating at him too, carving out the hollows of his face, sucking out what little flesh there was to begin with in his cheeks. His body was solid with lean packed muscle once, the tough kind but still juicy enough to sink your teeth into. Now when he runs his mouth along the base of Tommy’s neck Alfie thinks he’ll be gnawing at bone.
When he pulls himself to a stand, their chests bump a little. Tommy doesn’t step back, because of course he doesn’t. Alfie almost smiles at the pointless stubbornness. Instead he places a firm hand on Tommy’s shoulder and pushes, ever so gently.
Tommy gives him enough space to turn around, though just barely, and Alfie can feel the brush of Tommy’s clothed hipbone against his, the bump of his cock scraping Alfie’s thigh, their biceps barely bumping together. It’d be awkward to anyone else watching, but Alfie doesn’t mind these little rituals Tommy forces them both into, ridiculous and unwieldy as they are, not if it means he gets to touch him more outside the fucking.
(And that’s another thing being older is deteriorating: Alfie’s not done by any means, but more and more does he find the urge to simply be with another, body and body. Nothing vapidly sentimental or sickly sweet like cuddling together on a fucking rainy day– he’d go stir crazy and so would Tommy.
Just. Resting his hand on Tommy’s thigh as they sit together, reading, or holding him by the neck as he sips his whiskey, feeling the way he works his throat and moves his head as he speaks.
It’s a preposterous notion that’s becoming less preposterous the more Tommy comes to Margate, but misguided all the same. And Tommy hasn’t quite caught on yet, clearly, still randy as a mare in heat half the time, he is.
Alfie’s happy to oblige, of course; when you’ve got a creature as needy and ethereal as a horny Thomas Shelby in your lap, you don’t say no.)
He takes his hand off Tommy as he lifts his leg to step in. Yeah, he’ll take help when he absolutely fucking needs it, but not before.
He’s got his dignity, alright? He’s still Alfie fucking Solomons. If his hands are going to tremble then at least he’ll make sure Tommy doesn’t feel it.
The water radiates heat as he hovers his foot over, contemplating the placid, undisturbed surface. It ripples, twice, around the sole, the toughened skin of which barely acknowledges the burning wet, calloused by years of running around barefoot on London cobblestone.
Tommy probably went barefoot as a child as well, Alfie thinks indulgently. Different reasons, maybe. Or not. He’d like to imagine Tommy as a rebellious little shit like himself. Maybe they’d have gotten on.
His foot lowers, slipping in fully, allowing Alfie to fully appreciate the hot bathwater soaking his ankles, then his calves, then slowly, slowly, his arse, and up to his torso. He can feel every part of him deflate, melting into the water.
Bliss, is what it is. A godly offering of distilled goodness, pure and cleansing, reducing him to the amoral beast from which all humans are descended. He lets himself lean back for a moment, sinking into the gentle embrace, until every part of him is under the surface but his face.
Water softly envelops his rotting body. It feels almost like touch.
He pictures himself in the bathtub, the strange island of his face in the water. Delicately, ever so slowly, his body dissolves, rot loosening the seams and freeing his limbs, floating apart the way autumn leaves drift in a pond.
Then the water drains away, and his many pieces are pulled down into the dark maternal squeeze of the pipes.
All gone.
When he opens his eyes, Tommy is staring down at him. Crystalline blue, even in the shitty yellow light of the bathroom.
There’s that expression on his face, the little twist of his mouth and the set of his brows, the one caught between impatience and indulgence. Alfie’s seen it a million times. Saw, years ago, the little heartbeat between frustration, resignation, and something warmer he leaves unnamed, and made a home there. Far from granting him any sort of immunity, right, but he gets away with more like this, because Tommy lets him.
“That eager to wash my back, Tommy?” Alfie asks, voice easy and low. Tommy’s face doesn’t so much as twitch.
Alfie pulls himself upright, using the rim of the tub for leverage. He realizes, too late, that he’s ended up facing the wrong way, blind eye to Tommy, leaving him open unless he keeps his head turned to the left. He can already feel the twinge in his neck.
Tommy’s got the washcloth in hand, neatly folded. Gracefully, he sinks to his knees beside the tub, gaze flicking downwards, fanning those long eyelashes across the diamond cut of his cheeks, over the dark smudge of unwell beneath his eyes. There’s something demure about it, which is so fucking far from what Tommy is, and yet… it suits him.
(And at the same point it doesn’t, at all. There’s very little soft or submissive about this jagged-edged shell of a man whose broken pieces were glued back with all the sharpest bits pointing out, and Alfie sees this and accepts what the world has made of him, the same way he accepts what the world has made of himself.
But– yeah, some part of him wants to smooth those edges, the furrow of his brow and the sting of his tongue. Make him easier to hold, certainly, less of him cutting into flesh, but also for less selfish reasons. Reasons he can’t let himself think about too long, lest Tommy sniff out the strains of sentiment like a bloodhound tracking some injured thing.
Alfie thinks he could be sandpaper. But he looks at his hands and the heavy metal of his rings glint back. They will die more broken than when they began.)
Tommy raises the washcloth, so pointedly Alfie almost thinks of it as a warning, and carefully dips it in the water by Alfie’s thigh.
Almost as soon as the water touches his skin, Tommy sucks in a hissed breath like he’s been cut and nearly drops the washcloth as he recoils. Alfie reacts, reaching up before he can figure out exactly what’s happened, and together they fumble the cloth into laying, wet and haphazard, back onto the rim, Tommy’s arm pulled back protectively against his chest and Alfie’s hovering, uncertain.
“Whoa, you alright there, mate? Water didn’t bite you or anythin’, right? Because that is a cause for concern, that.”
Tommy’s face is carefully neutral, so Alfie can tell he’s embarrassed. He gives Tommy the silence he needs.
“Water’s too fucking hot,” Tommy mutters at last. Alfie blinks.
“Too hot?” he echoes. He thinks about laughing, but Tommy looks a bit like he’s rethinking and is about to make his escape, and Alfie doesn’t want that at all, does he? Poor thing’s like a horse sometimes, far too easily spooked. Alfie doesn’t know which is harder to handle: the horse or the snake.
He raises his arm off the rim where it’s been resting. “Give me your hand, Tommy.”
The two very blue and very confused eyes he gets in return should not look as panicked as they do. Alfie is a little offended, really, at the wariness, but one can’t expect too much of Thomas Shelby, and anyway he can acknowledge that the situation is more than a little strange, what with him in the bath and all.
But Tommy does give him his hand. After what is probably a solid minute and a half of statue-still staring, yeah, but the point is that Alfie’s got his hand now.
His own hands are wet as they cradle Tommy’s. And Tommy’s hand is so fucking cold, like a goddamn cadaver or one of the smooth, ocean-chilled stones dotting the beach. It always is, Alfie knows, has had these freezing hands over the many planes of his body, but the air is warm and damp around them and the first touch is an unpleasant shock. No wonder he found the water to be burning, fucking hell.
Not ungently, he begins rubbing Tommy’s corpse-stiff hand, tight circles with his thumbs, cupping the meat of his palm between his two own. He feels the bump of each knuckle, the sleek flats of his nails, the miniature canyons of his cuticles, the callouses tucked away amongst his fingers, ones he recognizes and ones he doesn’t. The muscles are hopelessly tense for the longest time, twitching ever so slightly before they finally go limp.
When Alfie looks up, Tommy’s face is so changed he almost doesn’t recognize him. Impossible to describe, the expression he’s got, but Alfie’s never seen him holding his face the way he is now. It makes him want to do something inadvisable, and he’s all too aware that he needs to be careful right now. So he lets his movements gradually still –he can fucking do subtle when needs be, fuck whatever Tommy would say about it– never looking away from Tommy who seems to be both seeing him and not seeing, eyelashes clumping slightly from the steam in the air.
Everything in the bathroom is warm now, even Tommy’s hand. Alfie cups it for one moment longer, then pats it with his fingers, once, and says, “There we go, mate. Just needed to get the circulation going, ‘s all.”
Tommy looks at him like he’s just woken up from a dream.
“Should be better now,” Alfie tells him, a bit unnecessarily.
His face shutters immediately, blinds over a window, and Alfie waits until he’s picked up the washcloth again before he lets his body begin moving again, like he’s dealing with some wild animal– the hard in Tommy’s eyes is closer to glass than steel, and Alfie’s tired of him running away.
Again, from the top: washcloth dips into water, and this time Tommy doesn’t flinch away. The way the soaked towel touches his shoulder feels at first like a hesitant hand, but then the rasping cloth texture of it reveals itself as it smoothes down his arm in one fluid motion.
It’s not slow, exactly, the measured way Tommy begins working on his left shoulder, but it’s systematic; the way lawns are mowed, Alfie thinks to himself, mildly amused. A line up, a line down, neat little rows of water trailing down his bicep, diverted by the grooves and ridges of his numbering scars and the natural curve of the muscle. They’re both silent, water splashing and dripping out the only noises between them.
Alfie feels back at the hospital, scrubbed down by one of the gentler nurses. It’s so fucking typical, isn't it?
He realizes he didn’t really know what he was expecting from this, this little experiment of Tommy’s, but it seems so fitting that he’d take such a clinical approach to something done out of tenderness. There’s a laugh bubbling in his chest that he’s careful not to let escape, but he can’t stop the twitch of his lips, or the sliver of bitterness that pulls them lopsided. He doesn’t want tenderness from Tommy, really, can’t see it working at all, but.
But.
The washcloth stutters a little as it curves down along his inner arm, where the skin is leathery, and becomes noticeably more careful as it runs over the mildly inflamed patch of his inner elbow, scraping off bits of flakes of dry, dead dermis. It’s a strange feeling, because Alfie is never so gentle with his eczema-ravaged skin, has no patience for the deterioration of his body.
Tommy moves back up to work across his shoulders, over the planes of his back, the canyon of his spine, and Alfie lolls forward, just a little, because it feels fucking nice, alright, to have someone do this for him again. Doesn’t matter that it’s clinical as a fucking trial, does it, not when it’s his own house, his own bath, smelling of tea and ocean and cigarettes rather than hospital ward disinfectant. He keeps his chin hooked on his own shoulder, face turned toward Tommy even though he’s not looking at him directly; he’s watching the shine of water residue on the porcelain as the edge of it laps against the sides, the pale working of Tommy’s arm above it and the shock of dark hair in his peripherals.
Tommy makes to shift behind him, to reach the other side, but Alfie leans forward instead, turning to face him more fully, unwilling to let Tommy out of his eyeline quite yet. He’s always been a paranoid bastard, admittedly, but he feels justified in this instance, what with this being the very same bastard who lost him the eye in the first place, nevermind that they’re fucking. Tommy doesn’t say anything, of course.
Alfie thinks about talking, the million things he could be saying, but the air is wet and breathless and unawkward between them, and Tommy’s shoulders have given up their quest to become rectangular in favor of a rectangle with rounded corners, so he lets be.
(There is, occasionally, some merit in the quiet, he’ll allow, but only occasionally– wouldn’t do to be letting Tommy think he’s right all the time, his ego would finally crush him under its immense weight, and then what would Alfie do.)
He returns, again, to fairy tales. An English thing, fairy tales. The tales he knows have no fairies. Witches and talking animals, yes, and miracles and burning bushes, but none of the wee fae folk.
Do Gypsies have fairies in their stories? Or are they more the talking animal sort as well? Not the bears and golems he knows, is his guess; birds, more likely, cats and dogs, and, of course, fucking horses. He pictures that emancipated child with Tommy’s blue eyes cross-legged on the floor, hearing tales of horses that speak in riddles and barter wisdom for sugar cubes.
Not that Alfie can imagine horses having much useful to say, to be honest.
Lost in such thoughts as he is, the first touch of the washcloth to his face takes him by surprise. It presses tidily against his forehead, reminiscent of a fever cloth, and the warmth of it provides the fever. It wipes forth and back, slowing a bit at the hairline where Alfie’s skin peels red.
Alfie looks at Tommy. Tommy looks at the washcloth. The washcloth trickles water down the sides of Alfie’s face, temporarily obscuring his vision with each sweep across, brushing over the bump of his nose.
Tommy’s sharp gaze catches on the left side of his face. The scar, Alfie remembers absently; the serrated, puckered thing marring his cheek.
Tommy’s own handiwork.
The washcloth has frozen against his temple, fever bleeding out into wet, vaguely itchy skin, water running quiet rivulets down into his beard, filtered out through the straggled strands at the bottom. Cautiously, it slips down, down, over the greyed scar tissue, so light over the dead skin that Alfie can’t feel it at all. Tommy still won’t meet his eyes.
And Alfie realizes, suddenly, embarrassingly late, the why. Obvious now, really.
Tommy, barefoot and stripped down to a single layer, on his knees before him. Washing his back and arms and chest and face, delicate with the scar like it’s an apology, reverted eyes. Bathroom lights bright and yellowed like a holiness rotting from the inside out pouring over them. Steam clouding around their heads.
But fucking hell, Tommy’s never been a good Catholic boy, has he, keeps his head unbowed and his hands unlingering; so it isn’t quite atonement, godless thing that he is. Just as it wasn’t quite anger that pulled the triggers on the beach, or desire that made Alfie kiss him, that first time.
(Atonement’s a ridiculous concept anyways, as far as goyim make it out to be. You do what you do and make your apologies to God or whoever, and then you go on with your life.)
Silly boy, Alfie thinks, fondly. There’s better ways to get on his knees.
He’s overcome, then, by the urge to hold Tommy, that whispered desire that’s crept upon him like ageing, insidious in its strength. That dazed, unnameable look from earlier comes back into his mind, the way it’d melted the edges of Tommy’s face, just slightly, made him a little less carved out, little less devoured.
Alfie wants it back. Wants to take the pretty puzzle of Thomas Shelby and rearrange it, put those sharp pieces in the order that suits him best in Alfie’s eyes. Like a feast made up for him; wants to be the one that devours. It’s not a nice thought, not nice at all, but Alfie’s far from nice.
“Come on,” he says. Tommy meets his eyes finally, and when he does they’re blue and wide, startled horse again. This time Alfie gentles him, brings his hand up from where it’s resting in the water to hold the bony elbow of his outstretched arm. Lets his thumb twitch over the jut of bone, into the hollow dip, back over the bone. “Come on then, mate.”
“What?” Tommy asks.
“Join me,” Alfie presses upwards against the underside of his bicep. “Up. Get your kit off, go on.”
It feels dangerous, the little terror thrill of it jarring in his chest. Back to their push and pull, the choice between kiss and bite. Tommy could say yes. Tommy could say no. Tommy could leave and never come back. Tommy could get his gun and finish the job, leaving the rotting corpse of Alfie Solomons to be forgotten by all except poor Rebekah who finds him the next morning.
Tommy could say yes, or no, or remind Alfie there’s always a third option by saying nothing at all. Scared to make the choice so he doesn’t make the choice. Gives Alfie a critical look, almost hilariously bewildered and wary, the way people look when they’ve concluded he’s a sight touched in the head.
Alfie’s waiting for that expression again, the one that tells him he can keep pushing. Half annoyance, half surrender.
There it is.
Alfie keeps pushing.
“There’s plenty ‘a room,” he tells him. “Plenty ‘a room, in fact, you could probably fit a dolphin in here, and those things are massive, Tommy. Sizeable creatures.”
There is, actually, plenty of room. What with baths being one of the few sources of relief left for his rotting body, Alfie was not about to skimp on comfort when buying himself a bathtub. It’s his retirement, isn’t it? Extra large, fine porcelain, gold burnished accents. Tommy can have his palatial estate, his acres and horses and overpriced suits, and Alfie will have his nice little house and his nice big bath.
“A dolphin?” There’s a curl to the words that bely amusement, which tells Alfie that there’s hope, possibly, in this exercise. Might not get a yes, but he might keep Tommy here a bit longer.
“Dolphin, yeah. Great big thing, seen a couple of ‘em off the coast. Bigger than two grown men,” Alfie nods seriously. “Come on then, Tommy. Let’s get that shirt off.”
And then Tommy does. Stares at him a good long while first, as Alfie has concluded is his SOP with all things, and Alfie evenly holds his gaze. He’ll meet those timeless, blue, blue eyes as long as he needs to. As long as Tommy needs him to, until he can drop the washcloth on the edge of the bath, worn, faded towel over the porcelain, and bring those not-cold, clever hands to his chest and undo the tiny pearlescent buttons, one by one.
Alfie rubs absentmindedly along his legs in the water, where Tommy didn’t get at. He has to keep his head turned a good forty-five degrees at least so Tommy stays in his line of sight, watching the skinny ripple of his familiar freckled back as he folds the shirt over his arm and starts tugging at his belt. As he bends to pull his trousers off, Alfie admires the tenuous skin pulled tight over his ribcage, the swell of his arse, the wave of his spine.
Pretty, is what he is. And there is, again, that demure dip of his eyes as he turns back to the bath, clothes folded and piled at his feet, that makes Alfie want to do terrible things. Awful, screaming things.
But it is with gentleness in his heart that he watches Tommy approach the bathtub and stand pale and nude as a marble statue, admired and ancient and shaped by lustful hands. (The god he thinks himself to be. As if gods and statues can’t so easily be torn down and destroyed.) Alfie is awash in the warmth of the water and the trust Tommy gives him.
With all the simultaneous grace and awkwardness of a newborn calf, Tommy steps in. Alfie has to make a very serious effort to restrain himself from stroking the thin ankle as it descends, the slim calf, the deceptively strong thigh. A shiver goes through Tommy as he folds himself down into the space opposite Alfie, as if overwhelmed by the heat, and the sadistic part of Alfie delights in it, shifts his body to stir the water slightly and see Tommy tremble a bit more.
He stares at Alfie like he knows exactly what he’s doing from over the shield wall of his bent knees. His shoulders are back to their performance as a rectangle, and doing quite well, so stiff it makes Alfie ache to look at them.
Whatever was in the air before that made the space feel shared has become impenetrable around Tommy. Like two strangers sitting beside each other on a train. The impersonal intimacy of men at war.
Alfie hates it.
“Isn’t this nice?” he asks.
“It’s what you wanted,” Tommy replies.
It’s fucking amusing, right, Tommy acting as if he’s doing this for some altruistic reason, out of some pity for poor, mad old Alfie, like he’s not as selfish a bastard as has ever lived. Fucking hilarious, sure. That Tommy can’t let go of that charming Catholic guilt, has to pretend he doesn’t want this too, for his own fragile comfort. Sat in the same tub as Alfie, as far from him as possible.
“Get out.”
A bewildered “what?” from Tommy that only serves to further frustrate Alfie. Fucking embarrassing, caring for someone.
“Don’t want to be here, mate, that’s fine by me,” he says, casual as he can make it, which is only so. He feels like an animal baring its teeth so it can be left to lick its wounds in peace. The ugly fear in his chest aches for blood, revenge for exposing the jugular of hurt in his voice. “You don’t want to be here, you fuck right off.”
Again the staring.
They’re both quiet for a long moment, water undisturbed around them, steam faded from the air and leaving everything stark and unblurred. Plain and painfully real.
Finally, Tommy murmurs, “Didn’t say that, did I?”
It’s a kind of undressing, the way their eyes meet now. For both of them. Alfie thinks about the softness in that look Tommy gives him that he still can’t name, even now. The way he scoffs at the old-age sweetness creeping into his heart, how he can’t let Tommy into his blind spot. Maybe they’re both cowards, in the end.
Two cowards sharing a bath, underbellies unwillingly exposed. A revelation in its own right.
Alfie carefully slides his foot forward over the smooth floor of the tub, below the water’s surface, until the thin, sensitive skin on the inside of his foot brushes Tommy’s hip, the little ruffle of folded skin right below the bone.
Tommy’s hand comes down over his heel, cupping gently; with the same slow caution it smooths up his calf, coming to rest just below the crook of his knee, fingertips brushing the flaking skin hidden there. His thumb rubs sedate circles along the side. His hand is warm.
On the other side, his foot comes forward, mirroring Alfie’s.
Alfie grabs him by the knee, almost gentle, and pulls him the rest of the way. Tommy makes a startled noise that’s swallowed by the slosh of the water between their bodies, pale imitations of waves breaking against their torsos and the porcelain sides.
Their knees knock together, Tommy’s hand still wrapped under his calf and the other gripping the rim, his eyes big and painfully blue, lashes dark and wet as they flutter in blink, and he looks so small, now, like Alfie could break him or gather up all those brittle limbs into his arms and hold him.
(And there’s the dilemma, in the end. Does he crush or caress? Tommy’s already a broken thing, so does he shatter him further? Grind him into dust, until there’s nothing left but that sharp skull with the pretty blue eyeballs left to be pecked out by the birds?
There’s no fixing him, Alfie knows. But what of collecting all the little pieces and cradling them carefully in his hands? Even when they cut?)
Neither of them say anything more.
Alfie’s hand runs up and down Tommy’s flank where he’s pulled him close, interlocked by their outstretched legs. His other hand hooks around the back of Tommy’s neck, feeling the buzz of shorn hair and work of the muscles at the nape as Tommy’s chin tips down. The feet tucked between them touch at the toes, knees resting together.
Tommy’s free hand stays on the rim like a lifeline to tether them both and keep this tangle of bodies steady in the slippery belly of the bath. The air is cool on Alfie’s skin now, as the water drains of heat and heads towards lukewarm, and every touch of their bodies feels like sunlight warming his flesh.
Their faces are too far to meet, but Alfie can smell the soap Tommy uses for his hair; over that, the tobacco smoke that gets caught in it. He lets his hand wander up to the base of Tommy’s skull, thumb resting in the delicate skin behind his ear, the dip behind the sharp curve of his jaw. His nails run through the short hairs.
Tommy lets out a barely-there sigh, a hush of breath that ghosts over their raised knees. It feels vulnerable. Alfie feels vulnerable.
He feels so vulnerable he thinks he might cry, or laugh. But his heartbeat is slow, limbs loose. Because it’s not just him, is it? They’re both exposed. To each other.
There’s something to this, something Alfie almost forgot about. It reminds him of his mother, the rare, stolen moments in the early mornings when they lay together, exhausted from working, living, existing in poverty. Alfie believes Tommy might know something about that, though they’ve both long moved past it.
Lived full lives, haven’t they? And now the softness of age.
They sit together in the bath and breathe until the water goes cold.