Page 49 of Someone Like You

“Get out my face before I do something we’d both regret.”

Do it, cried an anguished voice inside Phil.Do it before I do. Let me blame you. I’ll tell myself I couldn’t stop you. The guilt won’t bite so hard.

Ian took a tentative step back, but Phil’s body felt too heavy for his legs. He clung to Ian’s hoodie, leaning into him for dear life. Hejust wanted to get lost in that soothing warmth again. Just that. Just for a moment.

“Please,” he begged. “Just… just give me a minute.”

Ian’s gentle touch prepared him for rejection. He squeezed his eyes, dizzy and desperate, but then the most wondrous thing happened and within a blink he was getting engulfed into strong arms that took his breath away and the shaking in his limbs with it. Phil’s muscles went slack, relief and a joy he couldn’t describe shooting through his veins, healing a million little wounds Phil had lived with for years, thinking they were just an inherent part of himself.

He shattered completely when Ian’s large hand came to cup his face in a caress so hauntingly tender that something warm spilled out of the corners of Phil’s eyes, dampening the fabric beneath.

He wanted to laugh at himself: a grown man basking in another man’s embrace like a starving beggar hanging on to a scrap of food. Phil was no beggar. He had more than most human beings could dream of. He shouldn’t feel so starved. He shouldn’t feel sonourishedby Ian’s closeness.

They stayed like that for a long while, not a movement, not a sound uttered, both aware that they would never get anything more than this. Something stolen. Something they could never talk about.

But for those few minutes, it was good.

Then Ian’s hot breath skimmed Phil’s ear and his beard scratched his cheek, and Phil didn’t need him to mutter‘You should go’to know it was over.

“Yeah.” He wiped his wet cheek into Ian’s hoodie before letting go. It was torture, but Phil made himself do it, dusting the melancholy off by doing his best to pretend the loss of Ian’s arms around himself wasn’t killing him a little. “See you at the fountain at 6?”

“Aye.”

That was it. Case closed, back to normalcy. No questions. The stolen moment they’d shared would be a page ripped out of a journal, a piece no one would ever know was missing.

While Phil collected his stuff in the entryway, Kibble appeared out of nowhere and demanded goodnight pets, which Phil happily provided. He had the impression this cat understood more about him than most of his acquaintances ever had.

He took the bike down the short flight of stairs, then slipped the helmet off the handlebar. The scratches on the side were nasty. Without it, the fall would’ve scraped Phil’s scalp down to the bone, maybe worse. In that moment, when his head had hit the ground, his first thought had been that Ian was still taking care of him, even from afar, and that realisation had brought a smile to his lips.

He gazed back to the door: Ian was standing there with Kibble in his arms, her kneading paws partially hiding the dark stains Phil had left in the hoodie. It was right there, the thing he was missing, the remedy to the void that was consuming him from the inside. But Phil couldn’t say what he wanted to say, so he shoved it back as a gust of cold wind spread goosebumps all over his skin.

“In another life—” he began, but Ian knowingly caught his eye.

“We don’t have another life, Phil.”

They didn’t.

But dreaming cost nothing.

“In another life,” Phil stated more firmly, despite the searing pain in his heart, “maybe I’d meet you first.”

Walking away felt like fighting gravity, but then he heard Ian’s door close, locking away the temptation luring him back, and Phil was finally able to mount on his bike and put some distance between himself and the cause of his inner torment.

Maybe I’d meet you first.

It rang in his ears all the way home, as he pedalled through the city and its lights, the cool wind blowing in his face, all sounds and noises around him cancelled by the loudness of the echo of that one thought.

Maybe I’d meet you first.

Maybe I’d meet you first.

Maybe I’d meet you first.

But he couldn’t come up with a single scenario where he and Ian could’ve realistically met without a link to bridge the abyss between their separate existences. Phil would’ve never left Chicago on his own volition, let alone the US. Abby had crossed the pond to find him. He couldn’t imagine anything bringing him to Scotland without her. He wasn’t big in Europe, not enough for his publisher to invest in flying him here for a promotional tour.

He never would’ve met Ian without Abby.

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