Work Text:
Nicaise stumbles his way into his Advanced Photography studio every Tuesday and Thursday morning with a 24-ounce coffee in his hand and a scowl on his face. Laurent had warned him about how miserable morning classes were, and Nicaise might have considered taking his advice for once if the course hadn’t been required for graduation. And so he finds himself rolling out of bed with a glare at the sleeping form of his roommate on the other side of the studio space every other weekday morning, barely bothering to flatten his hair or coordinate his clothing before leaving with just enough time to buy himself a coffee on the way to the 8:00 class.
Despite the unholy hour and his relative inability to function for the rest of the day, Nicaise actually enjoys the class. The first photography course he had taken had been an introductory course, spent learning the basics of exposure and aperture on Laurent’s old 35mm Canon, which he had sent to California with Nicaise during his freshman year. Now that he knows the basics it’s been easier to develop his own style in a medium that isn’t sketching or painting. It’s practically worth having to get up after endless nights of little sleep, spent staring into the darkness from his own mattress and carefully controlling his breathing.
So many things have gotten better in the last five years, but the insomnia never seems to go away.
Three weeks into the semester and Nicaise is finally starting to get used to the early mornings. On one particular Thursday, however, he wakes up from a fitful bout of sleep to find that it’s already 7:50, and that he has class in ten minutes. The jolt of panic is familiar but no less alarming, and Nicaise jumps out of the twin bed like the sheets are on fire.
“Shit,” he says, eloquently, and tugs on the closest pair of jeans he can find. The ratty shirt he’s wearing, something with a band logo pilfered from Damen’s closet when Nicaise had been seventeen or so, will have to do for the next two hours. The California weather is a blessing in mid-October, because it means that Nicaise can get away with shoving on a pair of the hipster sandals Laurent had bought him for his last birthday and running out the door with barely enough time to grab a plain, untoasted bagel from the apartment’s kitchen.
It takes him almost exactly twelve minutes to get to class if he strolls, so Nicaise doesn’t stroll. With eight minutes left to get to class, there’s no time to be wasted on traffic laws or the absolute unwillingness of LA’s drivers to give a shit about pedestrians, and so Nicaise cuts corners, walks on red lights, and counts in his head exactly how many times people honk and swear at him as he jogs in front of their unmoving, traffic-stuck car. It’s immensely satisfying.
He makes it to class at eight exactly, with his backpack and camera bag digging uncomfortably into his shoulder, and dumps them unceremoniously onto the table, just careful enough that his cameras won’t break. The boy next to him looks up from his phone with some amusement, and Nicaise doesn’t even have time to snap at him before the professor calls them to attention. He drops into his seat and runs a hand through his hair, pushing the strands away from his face. It’s getting long again, and he hasn’t yet decided whether he wants to cut it.
The class starts with a short lecture, and Nicaise blinks the remaining sleep out of his eyes firmly enough to focus on what the professor is saying. She’s a middle-aged woman with too many piercings on her ears to count, and shockingly blue eyeliner that stands out against her dark skin. Nicaise never gets tired of looking at her, if only because she wears something ridiculous every single day. Sometimes, though, listening can be exhausting.
She records the short lectures and publishes them online, so Nicaise doesn’t bother trying to take notes. He can’t type enough to keep up with her fast pace, and can hardly read his own hurried handwriting enough that it would be useful to jot anything down. Instead, he tugs out his folder and the prints he’d made last night, shots he’d taken for the last project that had been assigned. The professor is saying something about composition and Nicaise scrutinizes his own work, fingers tapping restlessly on the table. The boy next to him is actually taking notes, as usual, in a thick notebook that’s practically shedding loose-leaf papers from between the bound pages. It looks worn and well-loved, and Nicaise tears his eyes away before he’s noticed.
The lecture isn’t long, and Nicaise keeps his eyes firmly on the professor the entire time. The last thing he needs right now is to initiate a conversation with a boy he doesn’t know, and doesn’t intend on knowing. He has all the friends he needs, despite Damen’s constant insinuations that all he does at UCLA is sit in his room in front of an easel.
In Nicaise’s defense, most of the time it’s not actually an easel. He prefers sketchbooks.
He’s zoned out enough by the time the lecture ends that when the professor instructs them, more loudly, to take out the prints they’d brought, Nicaise startles enough that he knocks the folder off of the table, sending his prints scattered across the floor.
“Merde,” he swears, on instinct. No one really seems to care, but he still feels his face flushing as he forces himself to the ground to collect his prints. It feels more humiliating than it should. To keep his mind off of the pressure of his weight on his knees and his palm digging into the ground, he keeps spitting out soft swears in French. He only ever uses it to curse, anymore. And to insult Laurent.
Nicaise is so focused on gathering his things and getting up that he doesn’t notice the boy next to him until their hands meet, grabbing for the final print that had landed under the table. He jolts back at the touch, biting out a sharp curse that he hopes the boy won’t understand.
“Ça, c'est pas poli,” the boy says quietly, and Nicaise hates that the words send a jolt of nausea through his stomach. That’s not polite, Nicaise, he had been told too many times, a strong hand braced on his shoulder.
“Sorry,” he says quickly, not looking up from the print as he grabs it from his neighbor’s hands. He straightens up to find that everyone else is still shuffling around with their own prints, and that the boy is watching him.
“I’m Emile Ngo,” he says, and reaches out his hand like it hadn’t brushed against Nicaise’s just moments ago. Nicaise clenches his teeth and tries not to scream. He takes Emile’s hand, which is darker than his own by just a few shades, and shakes it as firmly as he possibly can. It doesn’t seem to dissuade Emile; his smile only widens, and it makes his eyes crinkle at the corners.
“I’m Nicaise,” he finally says.
“I know.” Nicaise tugs his hand away after possibly the longest handshake he’s ever had, and turns back to the jumbled stack of prints on the table. Everything is out of order and he can feel the frustration and shame and panicpanicpanic coloring his cheeks and Nicaise forces it down. He can deal with this. He’d had to convince his therapist and his foster family and Laurent of all fucking people that he could handle going across the country for university, and he can. He just has to—handle it.
Instead of acknowledging Emile, who’s still looking at him, Nicaise starts to reorganize his prints. The few portraits go on the bottom, some of the more experimental shots go on top. It only takes a few minutes but when everything is back in its original place, Nicaise can breathe a little easier. The sound of photo paper shuffling has faded, and the professor is standing in the front of the room with her hands clasped in front of her, half a smile tugging at the corner of her lips.
“Turn to the person sitting next to you,” she says, rich voice reverberating throughout the room. “Introduce yourself, if you haven’t yet, because this is who you’re going to be doing your next project with.”
Emile hasn’t stopped looking at him. Nicaise lets his eyes dart back up to his smile, to the dimple on his left cheek, and feels his cheeks flush again for an entirely different reason. Christ—he feels like Laurent, blushing at everything. Emile doesn’t look upset about being paired with him, but Nicaise has known men who were better actors than any of the theater students he’s met in the last two years.
He wishes, irrationally, that he had let himself sleep through class this morning.
“So where did you learn French?” Emile asks that Saturday, crammed next to Nicaise in the back of an Uber. The driver has been silent the whole time, and Nicaise almost wishes that she would talk if it gave him an excuse to ignore Emile’s thigh pressed—mostly on accident, he thinks—against his knee.
“Where did you learn to mind your own business?” He shoots back, tapping out a message to his roommate and doing his best not to look up at Emile and his fucking smile. “Because clearly you failed the course.”
Emile laughs, sharp and surprised, and leans over to drop his head onto Nicaise’s shoulder. Nicaise jerks back instinctively and Emile moves away again, seemingly unfazed. He’s a physical person, Nicaise has learned in the hour that they’ve now spent together outside of class. He likes to touch Nicaise’s arm and rest his head on Nicaise’s shoulder (once, he had dropped his chin on the top of Nicaise’s head and it had taken everything he had not to throw his elbow back into Emile’s ribs). The touches are confusing, because Nicaise can’t force himself to hate them. They’re annoying and uncomfortable and unfamiliar, but Nicaise can’t fall back into the familiar loathing of someone touching him.
“I learned from my grandparents, back in Vietnam. No one really speaks it anymore except the old people, but my grandmother made me take lessons when I was really little, and my parents kept me in them when we moved here. Now when I call back home, she always makes me talk in French instead of Vietnamese.” In the last hour, Nicaise has also learned that Emile loves to talk. “Did your family teach you? Where are they from?”
“My family’s dead,” Nicaise says, before he can really think about it. For the first time maybe since Nicaise had spotted him in the coffee shop they’d agreed to meet at an hour ago, Emile goes completely still.
“Nicaise—”
“It’s fine.” The silence is uncomfortable. The Uber driver even looks a little uncomfortable, from what Nicaise can see of her profile. At least the car is nice. “My parents were from the Philippines. They met in university and moved to France together before they had me. It’s where I grew up.”
Nicaise stares down at the dark face of his phone, at his horrendously misspelled name scrawled on the side of the empty coffee cup next to him. Emile is still quiet, still looking at Nicaise in that way that everyone does when they find out.
“It’s fine,” he repeats. “It was more than a decade ago.”
“I’m sorry,” Emile says, because he can do basic math. Nicaise is on the tail end of twenty, now; as much as he hates to think it. His voice is deeper than it had been and his limbs are as long as they’re going to get and sometimes in the morning he wakes up with a fine layer of stubble on his cheeks. It makes him sick.
“We’re almost here,” Nicaise says, because he can’t stand Emile’s almost-silence. “You still haven’t told me what the fuck we’re doing.”
“Professor Balewa told us to pick a theme for the project and figure out a way to combine our styles. I thought we could do ‘horizons.’”
The car pulls to a stop at the curb and Nicaise jumps out as soon as his seatbelt is undone, breathing in a deep lungful of salty air. Emile is slower to follow, taking the time to thank the driver before stepping up next to him on the curb. He can hear the crashing of the waves already, feel the breeze against his skin. The sand is soft in California, not like the pebbled beach in Marseille he had been to, once. It’s not a fond memory, anymore.
“That’s a stupid theme,” he says, shouldering his camera bag. “Let’s do it.”
He’s not looking at Emile on purpose, he’s not, but Nicaise watches the smile bloom across his face anyway.
The beach is mostly empty for the first time in a while; the waves are choppy and dark in the overcast light. The morning had dawned foggy and uncomfortably humid, and the heat has eased down just slightly enough that Nicaise could get away with wearing a shirt with sleeves. He hates the tank tops that everyone wears around here, too loose and with armholes that expose half of his ribcage. He owns a few out of necessity, but can barely stand wearing them even when the heat tops a hundred degrees.
“I know you like your experimental stuff, but I thought maybe we could just warm up with some basics,” Emile suggests. Nicaise shoots back the suggestion of a smile, which seems to throw him off.
“I can just make all your clean-cut pictures of the ocean weird in Photoshop,” he promises. Emile grins at him, and lifts his camera to snap a picture of Nicaise before he has the chance to throw a hand in front of his face.
Nicaise suppresses the urge to grab the camera from around Emile’s neck and delete the picture. It’s not the same, he tells himself. It’s easier to believe than it used to be, when an older student had asked to take a picture of him for whichever project he had been working on. That had only been a picture of his face, but at eighteen Nicaise had still woken up with too-familiar nightmares for days afterward.
“I like your weird stuff,” Emile says, shrugging, and turns the lens toward the jetty and the port behind it. “We can work with it.”
“What about your weird stuff?” Nicaise asks, and drapes his own camera around his neck. It’s brand new, because Laurent had insisted on buying him a fancy digital camera after Nicaise had told him about renting one from campus last year. He can’t say he hadn’t fallen in love with it the moment he’d torn away the packaging, but he’d rather die than tell Laurent that. Emile shrugs.
“I don’t really do much weird stuff. That’s why I wanted to work with you.” His hair is whipping around his face in the wind, eyes squinting against the vague light of the sun behind the clouds. He’s wearing a regular shirt too, Nicaise notes. The sleeves go halfway down his forearms, and it’s looser on him than he’s seen other people wear.
“How’d you get into this class without it? Balewa wanted to see our own ‘unique style’ in the portfolio we submitted.” Nicaise scoffs a little, and glares at Emile through his viewfinder. Of course, he’s stunningly photogenic. Not that Nicaise notices. Or snaps a picture of Emile with one hand buried in the hair at the nape of his neck, eyes narrowed and looking out toward the shore. He resists the urge to take off his shoes and bury his toes in the sand.
“I never said I don’t do experimental stuff,” Emile says, a sly smile tugging at his lips. “But I don’t do weird shit like you.”
“Hey!” Nicaise lets his camera hang from the neck strap, and kicks a chunk of sand at Emile’s stupid, smug smile.
“Stop! Stop!” He cries, wrapping his arm around his own camera. “You’re gonna get sand in Ceylon.”
“What?” Nicaise snaps, momentarily shocked out of his assault. Emile straightens himself and glares, only half-serious.
“Ceylon. My camera,” he says, like it should be obvious. Nicaise stares.
“You named your camera after a tea?”
“It’s a good tea!” Emile looks a little defensive, his finger stroking around the shutter of his Nikon. It’s a very nice camera, Nicaise has to admit, though it looks a little older and well-worn than his. “And she’s a good camera.”
He barely resists the urge to throw up his hands in exasperation. It’s something Damen does a lot.
“Can we please just get to work without you being creepy about your camera?” He asks, ignoring Emile’s sly smile. He smiles a lot.
“You haven’t named your camera?”
“No, because I’m not a sentimental moron,” Nicaise replies, and lifts his camera again. This time he focuses it on the waves, rising and falling against the odd grey of the sky. He can feel Emile watching him, can hear the aborted sentence that ends before it even begins. “We should get something done.”
“Okay,” Emile finally says. Nicaise shrugs off the conversation and focuses on adjusting his zoom, trying to find the best focus to watch the waves crash against the rocks of the jetty. He’s not sure what it has to do with ‘horizons,’ but he can figure that out later. Emile is quiet next to him, and Nicaise wonders if he regrets choosing Nicaise as a partner. Not that he’d had much choice in the first place. He tries not to let the thought sting; he doesn’t need to be liked, often doesn’t want to be liked, so this shouldn’t matter to him.
Nicaise isn’t sure why he can’t help but feel that it matters anyway.
The next Wednesday, Nicaise finds himself in the same coffee shop-slash-bakery with Emile again, both of them with their laptops open on the table in front of them. They’re both done with classes for the day, which means that it’s five in the evening and Nicaise probably shouldn’t be drinking as much coffee as he currently is, but he wasn’t planning on sleeping anytime soon in the first place.
“Send me your favorites, once they’re done downloading?” Emile asks, taking a long drink of his extra-large hot chocolate. The lid is off, and he has whipped cream on his upper lip that Nicaise keeps forgetting to tell him about. He makes a small noise in affirmation, glancing down at his laptop screen. When he looks back up, Emile’s face is about a foot closer than it had been a few moments ago, and Nicaise startles a bit. Emile grins.
”Regarde là-bas,” he whispers, tilting his head towards the counter. Nicaise looks, sees nothing out of the ordinary except a woman with wildly unkempt hair ordering a drink. And a large slice of the chocolate cake sitting nicely behind the counter. Emile continues in French when he looks back, eyebrows wiggling ridiculously. “I worked here last year. She’s a regular. Every other day she would come in, order the same drink, and then get in a fight on the phone with her husband.”
“I never took you for a gossip,” Nicaise says lightly, also in French, and takes another drink of his coffee. It’s a little too sweet, but he’ll manage.
“It’s fun.” Emile shrugs. “Besides, they can’t understand what we’re saying.”
“Do you know how many people on this planet speak French?” Nicaise asks. He doesn’t, not really, but it’s probably a lot. “And Spanish. They’re very similar.”
“Not that similar,” Emile replies. “Come on, Nicaise. Live a little.”
Nicaise doesn’t get the chance to live a little, because that’s when his phone starts vibrating in his pocket. He tugs it out, ignoring Emile’s exaggerated moan of disappointment.
The call is from Laurent, which means that no matter how many times Nicaise ignores him, he’s just going to keep calling. It’s not often that Nicaise picks up the first time, but if anyone knows patience it’s Laurent. The man works with screaming children every day of his life, and he has the patience of a saint, if nothing else.
“What is it?” Nicaise greets, as is customary.
“Hello, Nicaise,” Laurent replies, as is also customary. “How’s school?”
Emile still hasn’t leaned back in his chair, and can probably hear every word of the conversation. He rolls his eyes, mouths ‘family.’ Nicaise doesn’t deign him with a response.
“School’s fine,” he tells Laurent. “Is that all you wanted to hear? Can I go now?”
“Damen’s here on speaker,” Laurent reasons. “Don’t you want a chance to make him cry for the first time since you left?”
It’s very, very tempting. As far as he knows, Damen has been working on a case since late August, and it must have wrapped up recently. In any case, Nicaise hasn’t spoken to him since the airport when he left.
“Please don’t tempt him” Damen says, voice a little fainter than Laurent’s over the speaker. Emile huffs out a small laugh and Nicaise can feel the warmth against his face. And then Emile gets a look on his face that Nicaise has learned, in the first week of knowing him, means trouble.
“I’m in the middle of something,” Nicaise says, and tries to tell Emile using only his eyes that if he tries anything, he’s dead. Emile’s smile just widens, and he leans in a little closer.
“Tu penses que c'était une divorce difficile?” He murmurs, shrugging his shoulder back at the woman who has left the counter, and is now sitting with her head braced in her hands, elbows propped up on the table in front of her, and Nicaise’s eyes widen. Emile keeps talking for a moment longer, something about how the fights she had on the phone were always about her sex life, and—
“Stop!” He finally says, and feels his face heating up. On the other line, Laurent and Damen are unsettlingly quiet. Emile looks back at him, brow scrunched in confusion. Nicaise glares, as hard as he can, and silently hopes that Laurent isn’t going to say anything.
Of course, he’s never been that lucky.
“I see you’re making friends,” Laurent says, and Nicaise can hear the restrained laughter in his voice. “He does know that your family speaks French though, doesn’t he?”
Emile’s eyes go wide, and Nicaise feels some sort of satisfaction when he instinctively claps a hand over his mouth.
“You’re not my family.” It’s a weak argument, and he doesn’t really mean it.
“You still could have mentioned it,” Damen remarks, and he’s clearly not trying as hard to hold his amusement back. Nicaise contemplates throwing his phone out of the window of the coffee shop, and then decides that they would probably make him pay for the new one.
“Shit,” Emile says, eloquent as always. Nicaise has to hold back a vindictive snort.
“Goodbye, Laurent,” Nicaise says, and takes the phone away from his ear.
“Call me back!” Laurent says before Nicaise can press ‘end.’ He probably will, later, but Laurent doesn’t need to know that.
When he looks up from shoving his phone back into his back pocket, Emile has his face in his hands. His shoulders are shaking, and Nicaise can hear the muffled laughter from across the table.
“You might be even more of a train wreck than I am,” he muses. Emile snorts, and drops his forehead onto the table.
“I think this is my punishment. Death by bad first impressions.”
“You deserve it,” Nicaise says flatly, and downs the rest of his coffee. For the first time in a while, he feels the strong need for a drink. Emile doesn’t stop laughing though, and eventually Nicaise can’t help but join him just a little. He’s going to get questions from Laurent about it later, but it’s fine. Talking to Laurent is fine.
The photos have finished downloading onto his laptop, but Nicaise can worry about that later. For now, he just lets himself sit, and watch Emile try (and fail) to compose himself. The coffee shop is pleasantly empty, filled with only the faint buzz of conversation and the overwhelming smell of coffee, and Nicaise settles himself back in his chair with a small sigh.
Emile looks up, then, and wipes briefly at his eyes. His face is caught in the golden light of the setting sun from through the window, and he holds up a hand to block the rays from his eyes, squinting a little until his eyes adjust. The laughter has subsided, by now, and his face has settled into something a little more serious; an expression that Nicaise hasn’t seen often.
“Sorry about that,” Emile says. Nicaise half-smiles, shrugs one shoulder.
“You didn’t know. Besides, it got them off my back.” Emile’s forehead scrunches again. It’s not cute. It’s not.
“Do you not get along with your family? Whoever those two were.” He doesn’t ask in a way that makes Nicaise feel like he has to answer. It’s like—Emile actually cares, which is stupid. Nicaise doesn’t need people to care about him. He doesn’t want anyone to care about him. He looks down at his empty mug, and wishes that he had thought to save a little before drinking the rest.
“It’s complicated,” he finally answers. Emile keeps looking at him, the top of his face still shaded by his hand, dark hair spilling onto his forehead. “Laurent is—he’s not related to me.”
“Family doesn’t have to be related to you,” Emile says. Nicaise drops his gaze again. It hurts to admit, but after all this time, Laurent is the closest thing he has. His foster family—Joshua and Gabrielle—had been nice, and he still talks to them, but—they hadn’t been the same. Nicaise has no one, really, except Laurent and Damen. He stares down at his hands, at the careful curve of his fingernails against his palm.
“I grew up with him, kind of,” he finally says. Of course, at the time, Nicaise had thought that he’d been an adult already. He’d thought—a lot of things about Laurent, most of them unkind. “I didn’t like him much, for a while. But he’s helped me a lot.”
He remembers crying, the first night Laurent had kept him in his too-empty apartment, away from the estate and the cooks and the servants and the too-big mattress waiting for him in the master bedroom. He remembers screaming at him, flinging awful words and every insult he could think of at Laurent because he thought—
“He loves me,” Nicaise remembers saying. He remembers believing it.
“He’s an asshole,” he says firmly, shaking himself out of the spiraling memories. “But he tries, I guess. And his stupid husband is fun to insult.”
Emile laughs, softly, and reaches across to cover Nicaise’s hand with his own. It’s warm, and soft, and Nicaise doesn’t feel like he has to pull away, doesn’t feel the familiar lurching panic. Emile’s eyes are warm in the sun, and his dimple is soft on his cheek, and Nicaise can’t make himself look away again.
Well. Shit.
“Congratulations,” Emile says, and taps his glass lightly against Nicaise’s. Nicaise makes a small noise of affirmation, and takes a long drink of the champagne. He hasn’t had it in years, but Emile had insisted on ‘taking him out’ the night after they’d turned in their joint project, after almost a full day of sitting next to each other on Nicaise’s tiny bed, editing their photographs together. The restaurant is fancier than Nicaise had expected, and he feels a little out of place in nothing but a dark gray button up and decent jeans. Emile is wearing a suit coat, and most of the men in the restaurant are wearing ties. He needs the liquid courage, for tonight.
Emile looks really nice in the coat. He’s trying not to keep noticing it.
It’s blue. And tailored.
“I hope you like sushi,” Emile had said to him, standing outside of Nicaise’s apartment about an hour earlier, all ready to go in his coat and nice jeans and neatly-combed hair (for once). Nicaise does like sushi, fortunately, because Emile had already made the reservation. A week and a half ago.
“You know you didn’t have to do this, right?” Nicaise asks him, and takes another sip of champagne. It’s not as bad as he remembers it tasting; Nicaise finds himself enjoying the alcohol more than he thought he might, after so many years. He hasn’t had the inclination—or the ability—to buy it in a long time. He’d learned, over the last two weeks, that Emile had turned twenty-one in April. Nicaise’s birthday isn’t until Halloween.“We have a project like every single month. Are you going to wine and dine me after all of them?”
He regrets the words as soon as they leave his mouth. Emile winks.
“Only if you want me to.”
“Shut up,” Nicaise manages. He can feel his face going red. The conversation stalls, but Emile refuses to look away from Nicaise, even to peruse the menu. Nicaise does the exact opposite; he reads and rereads each page until it feels like the letters are swimming behind his eyes, and finally snaps the plastic menu shut.
“Do you know what you want?” Emile asks. Nicaise’s stomach turns, a little. He hasn’t had sushi in years. He had been allowed to order anything and everything he wanted, and never had to limit himself to one dish. Now, though, they’re eating on students’ budgets, and Nicaise doesn’t think that he would want to indulge himself anyway.
“Pick something for me,” he finally says. Emile’s eyes widen almost imperceptibly; he pauses with his champagne glass pressed against his lower lip.
He puts the glass down, and smiles. Of course, he’s almost always smiling, but this one is different. It’s slower, more thoughtful, like he’s had time to process the words and realize what they mean. He doesn’t know what Nicaise is trusting him with—how could he?—but it’s enough that Emile isn’t just brushing it off.
“I’ll do my best,” Emile promises. Inexplicably, Nicaise believes him. He takes another small drink of champagne, and doesn’t drop his gaze.
Emile doesn’t disappoint. When their dinner comes, they share; the platters of food sit between them and Nicaise and Emile take turns picking out the different items with the chopsticks. The conversation mostly dies down, but in between bites, Emile still manages to tug a few words out of him.
The food is good, and as much as Nicaise hates to admit it, the company isn’t bad either. They split the (not insignificant) bill, at the end, and Nicaise finishes off the last of his champagne before rising from his seat. Emile does up the buttons on his coat as he rises; it takes more will than Nicaise wants to think about to tear his eyes away from the slight curve of Emile’s waist.
“Want to go get dessert?” Emile asks. They step out into the night, lit by headlights and storefronts, and the shadows cast harsher lines over his soft cheeks. Nicaise shoves his hands into the pockets of his jeans and watches the cars pass slowly by.
“Sure,” he replies. “Your treat.”
Emile just smiles, and loops his arm through Nicaise’s. Little Tokyo is still bustling, and Nicaise presses himself slightly closer to Emile to keep from bumping into tourists and locals alike. Emile doesn’t seem bothered; in fact, he looks a little relieved as he tucks himself against Nicaise’s side.
“This is the worst part about LA,” he comments, under his breath.
“Where did you grow up, if there weren’t crowds like this?” Paris had been worse, almost, because the people in Paris were insufferable. Boston hadn’t been much better, if Nicaise were being honest, but he didn’t get out to see it much. LA seems at least tolerable, especially around campus.
“San Jose,” Emile replies. “I grew up in Little Saigon, after we left Vietnam. It was crowded kind of like this, but at least everyone there was—you know. Speaking my language. It felt like home. This, though...not so much.”
They pause at a traffic light, and Nicaise takes the chance to look at Emile’s face, just inches away from his own. He looks a little sad—homesick, maybe. He catches Nicaise’s eye and instead of looking away, Nicaise holds it. The ever-present smile comes back, but this time it looks softer, quieter.
“What about you? You said you grew up in France, what was that like?”
Nicaise breaks his gaze away. The light turns green, and he tugs Emile along with the throng of people crossing. Emile is still waiting for an answer, he can tell, but he can wait until they’ve gotten out of the way of certain death, if they stall half a second after the light changes. Finally, they’re back on the sidewalk, and Nicaise has run out of mental excuses.
“I don’t know,” he says, as casually as he can manage. “We were in the middle of Paris in a shitty apartment because my dad needed to work, and then they died. They never wanted me to talk to the neighbors, so mostly I just went to school and to the store for my mom. I didn’t get out much until then.”
He’d spent an awful month on the street, sitting on the steps outside fancy hotels praying that some fancy foreigner would feel bad enough for him to spare a few euros. One awful month, and then a man had stopped in front of him one frigid November morning, and Nicaise’s life had been changed forever.
“I don’t like to talk about it,” he says, abruptly, and tugs his arm out of Emile’s hold. “Where are we going?”
Emile looks at him strangely, but takes the hint and steps a few inches away from Nicaise’s side as they walk. “There’s this dessert place just a few blocks down. The first time I had their shaved ice I swear I saw God.”
“It can’t be that good,” Nicaise argues, just because he can. Emile turns that dazzling grin back on him, and gestures down the street with a tilt of his head.
“I guess I’ll get the chance to prove you wrong, then.”
The line is almost out the door, but Emile wheedles Nicaise into waiting, with a ridiculous pout that absolutely doesn’t manage to draw attention to his lips. Nicaise crosses his arms across his chest and leans against the exterior of the building, wishing in the sudden chill that he’d thought to bring a coat.
“Are you cold?” Emile asks. Nicaise shakes his head and tries to shake his hair in front of his face. The last thing he needs is to be offered Emile’s coat.
They finally make it inside the store, and Nicaise is overwhelmed by sweet scents that he couldn’t identify even if he tried. It’s warm inside, and the people behind the counter are serving people fast enough that Nicaise barely has time to decide what he wants from the menu before they’re pushed to the front of the line. True to his word, Emile pays, and not five minutes later, Nicaise finds himself sitting at a tiny table, facing across from Emile yet again. His mango shaved ice is staring up at him so invitingly that he can’t find it in himself to care.
“It’s good, right?” Emile asks, right as Nicaise shovels the first spoonful into his mouth. He swings a blind kick underneath the table, and smiles around the mango chunks as Emile swears and leans down to rub at his shin. “You’re welcome, by the way.”
“Thank you,” Nicaise says as soon as he finishes swallowing, as sweetly as he possibly can. Emile glares, but nudges Nicaise’s foot under the table playfully.
“If you wanted to play footsie, you could have started it off without leaving a bruise.”
“You’re insufferable.”
“You’re the one who agreed to go out with me,” Emile points out, and Nicaise pauses with his spoon halfway to his mouth. Is this—is that what Emile had meant—a date? The thought makes him feel a little sick. Nicaise knows what comes after dates, knows what people expect, and he hadn’t thought—he doesn’t think he could force himself to go through with it even if Emile doesn’t seem like he would—make him. Emile’s face falls, fractionally, and he lets go of his spoon. “Oh—Nicaise, did you not—”
“No,” Nicaise cuts him off, suddenly. “No, I just thought—you didn’t—”
This is maybe the most awkward situation Nicaise has ever been in. He’s choking down panic now because as terrifying as it sounds, he can’t bring himself to say no, it’s not a date. He doesn’t know if he wants it to be, but he also doesn’t know if he doesn’t.
“I just assumed,” Emile starts, and now he looks guilty and almost sad, and Nicaise doesn’t know much for certain right now but he knows that seeing Emile sad is the last thing he wants.
“It can be a date,” he blurts out, without permission from his brain. Emile looks back up at him, his gaze having fallen down to his shaved ice. “If you want. This to be a date.”
“Oh,” Emile says, again. His infuriating smile still hasn’t come back, and Nicaise finds himself wishing that it would. “If you—want? I’d like that.”
He sounds shy, now. Insecure like he hadn’t been all night until now. Nicaise looks down into the yellow mess of his shaved ice and tries to ignore the blush on his cheeks and the nausea twisting his stomach. It’s just a date. It doesn’t have to be anything else. Besides, if he were to go on a date with anyone, Emile wouldn’t exactly be his last choice.
“Yes,” he says, and hopes that he sounds more confident than he feels. Emile blushes, barely visible against his dark skin, and takes another bite of his Oreo cheesecake shaved ice. To Nicaise it seems almost revolting, but he’s not the one who has to eat it.
“Is that why you were so thrilled to get paired up with me?” Nicaise half-grumbles, trying to wrangle a few more chunks of mango onto his spoon. The shaved ice is good. He’ll tell Emile later. Emile makes a vague noise around his spoon, and shakes his head. “Because you had some stupid crush?”
“I thought you were cute, but I wasn’t lying before; I really was interested in your weird shit. And I’m pretty sure it’s gonna pay off.”
“Don’t get a big head, it wouldn’t look good on you,” Nicaise warns. Emile grins at him, cocky.
“Everything looks good on me, honey.”
“And don’t call me honey.”
It takes them a long time to meander back to campus, and when they finally slow to a stop outside of Nicaise’s apartment building, he finds himself not wanting to go inside. It’s almost one in the morning, and he’s not going to sleep anyway because he’d managed to catch a half-hour nap in the library earlier without waking up screaming. He can see Emile losing steam though, can feel it in the way Emile’s fingers have gone loose and pliant between Nicaise’s.
Emile had smiled when he took Nicaise’s hand in his, on their way out of Little Tokyo, and Nicaise had tried to ignore the way his pulse picked up at the touch. It wasn’t bad; it was the opposite of bad, and it was terrifying.
“I feel like a high schooler,” Emile says, standing with his shoulder pressed against Nicaise’s. “Like we’re standing outside your house and your family is watching is from a window.”
“I didn’t date in high school.” He says it without any real emotion; no one would have wanted to anyway, he’s sure, even if he hadn’t been a giant ball of hormones and anger and whatever else Laurent had probably played him off as to the guidance counselors. Emile hums a small noise, and rests his head on Nicaise’s shoulder. Emile isn’t actually that much taller than him; an inch or two at most, and something about it makes Nicaise a little more comfortable than he thinks he might have been otherwise.
“I bet you went wild your freshman year, then,” Emile jokes, squeezing Nicaise’s hand slightly. Nicaise shrugs a little, with the shoulder that isn’t supporting Emile’s head. He makes a quiet, noncommittal noise, and hopes that Emile takes it as agreement. A car passes by behind them, lighting up the street as it goes, and Nicaise stares at the building in front of them.
“Nicaise,” Emile says, suddenly, without taking his head off of Nicaise’s shoulder. “Can I kiss you?”
Neither of them move for a long moment, after that. It feels like Nicaise has been frozen in place, barely breathing even as Emile stays quiet, giving him time to think about it. He doesn’t—not want to. The thought doesn’t turn his stomach, doesn’t make him want to run or fight or anything else. Nicaise doesn’t know if he knows what wanting it would feel like.
“Okay,” he says. It comes out of him in a rush of air, breathy and uncertain. He almost wishes he hadn’t said it but doesn’t want to take it back; expecting Emile to move as soon as the word leaves his lips. Instead, Emile just squeezes his hand again and tilts his head on Nicaise’s shoulder, looking up at him with wide eyes.
“You sure?” Nicaise glares at him, because it’s easier than trying to say anything stupid with his eyes like Laurent and Damen do all the time. Emile smiles a little, like he’s tired. He probably is; normal people sleep, Nicaise reminds himself. He should let Emile get to sleep.
“Yes.”
Emile lifts his head, and Nicaise cannot stop himself from looking at his lips, and then Emile is turning to face him and his head is backlit by the apartment in front of them, throwing his face into shadow and all Nicaise can do is watch helplessly as Emile gets closer and closer and—
Emile kisses him. It’s short and soft and barely more than their lips pressed together for one second, two, three, and then Emile pulls away fractionally enough that their noses are still brushing, breath heavy in the inch or so between them. Nicaise doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do—his heart is pounding against his ribs, his eyes still open and watching Emile watch him. He doesn’t want to let go of Emile’s hand.
“We should do that again sometime,” Emile breathes out, and Nicaise brings his free hand up to shove him in the shoulder in the time that it takes Emile to crack his familiar smile. “What was that for?”
“Because I felt like it,” Nicaise answers. He doesn’t really know what else to say. “But—yeah. If you want.”
“Trust me, I want.” Emile’s breath is so warm, and his right hand is barely brushing Nicaise’s waist.
“That was—I’ve never done that. Before.” It takes everything inside of him just to force the words out. It had always been lips pressed against his forehead, or his cheek, or—worse, so many times, until he’d forgotten that there was always one place that he’d never been kissed. By the time he had remembered, screaming at Laurent trying his best to hold back tears, it had already been too late. Emile closes his eyes, and rests their foreheads together.
“Was it okay?” Everything feels so fragile, standing out on the sidewalk where anyone could hear them. Nicaise huffs out a small laugh, and closes his eyes.
“I guess,” he says, and because his eyes are closed, he doesn’t see the solid punch that Emile aims at his shoulder before it lands.
“Shut up.”
“You asked!”
Nicaise unlocks the door of his apartment five minutes later, and dodges the pillow thrown at him by his roommate with practiced ease. He returns it without a word, and sets about stripping himself off in the dark. He’d gotten over that freshman year—too terrified to change in the bathrooms and too apathetic to wait until his first roommate had left. He sits on top of his immaculately-made bed, dressed in Damen’s old tee shirt and sweatpants too long in the legs, and stares out at the darkness of his bedroom.
He doesn’t sleep that night, beyond a few short bursts that come only in the most silent parts of the early morning. Nicaise can still feel the press of Emile’s lips against his, the weight of Emile’s hand around his own. He can still see the way Emile had smiled at him before he’d left, the dimple on his left cheek deeper than Nicaise had ever seen it.
He doesn’t sleep that night, but Nicaise goes to Photography the next morning with a coffee clutched tightly in his hand, and a small smile on his face.
The next Monday is Halloween. The campus is loud and jam-packed with students—drunk and sober and everything in between—well before dusk, and Nicaise locks himself into the apartment and sits on his bed in the very corner of the room with his headphones in playing the loudest music he can handle and his back against the wall.
He’s been like this all day. Laurent hasn’t called—he knows better, has always known better—but he texted, early in the morning when Nicaise had slipped into a short bout of troubled sleep. He didn’t say happy birthday, didn’t make any jokes about Nicaise finally being twenty-one. Instead, the message had been short and to the point: take care of yourself today.
Nicaise doesn’t know if he knows how, anymore. His roommate is out partying, probably; had left earlier in the day with his jacket and a costume slung over his shoulder. He’s probably not coming back, but Nicaise isn’t sure that he’d notice if he did. His eyes are closed, have been closed for a long time, his muscles tight from being coiled in the same position for hours. It’s uncomfortable, and Nicaise’s body aches, but he’d rather feel the pain tomorrow than let himself loosen and feel hands on him where he wishes he could forget.
Birthdays had always been special, until he’d started to understand what they meant. Meant getting older, meant falling out of favor, meant risking the fate of the hollow-eyed teenagers Nicaise had sometimes seen around the property. For a long time, he hadn’t taken it seriously, and then suddenly he’d had to.
Losing track of time is easy. Everything else—moving, thinking, breathing—is almost impossible. He settles for counting his breaths until he loses track somewhere in the four hundreds, and then starts over again. He only gets to sixty, this time, before there’s a knock on the door that he can hear even through his headphones.
“Go away!” He shouts—or at least, he thinks he does. His voice breaks, his throat raw from disuse or maybe screaming, at some point. The knock comes again. He can’t move to answer it, he can’t move, he can’t—
“Nicaise?” Emile asks, and Nicaise’s panicked breaths break on a sob. He buries his head in his knees and tries to force back the shaking, the awful feeling in his chest and his throat and his eyes. “Can I come in?”
It’s locked, he wants to say. It’s locked, I can’t move, go away.
“Look, I saw Justin and he gave me his key, told me that you weren’t looking good earlier. I just want to know that you’re okay.”
Nicaise isn’t okay. It doesn’t matter, though, because Emile has a key and he’s probably going to come in anyway no matter what Nicaise says. All of the lights are off and Nicaise can’t tell the difference between when his eyes are closed and when they’re open, the darkness in the apartment so complete that he can’t even make out the shape of the other bed just a few feet away. Emile has gone quiet, like he’s trying to listen for a response.
Swallowing the lump in his throat takes longer than it should. Finally, when his breaths have stopped shaking so much and his mouth isn’t as dry as it was, Nicaise pushes out out a thin “yes” that takes almost all of his energy. It’s not going to end well, he knows somewhere in the rational part of his mind, but it’s like he’s watching himself from the ceiling. Nothing he thinks makes a difference.
He can tell his eyes are open now, because he can see the sliver of light shining through the door when it opens, can see Emile silhouetted in the yellow light of the hallway. The imprint of the light lingers in the dark after Emile shuts the door.
“Nicaise?” He sounds closer, his footsteps quiet in the empty apartment. Nicaise makes a small noise, one he doesn’t even really register. The mattress underneath him dips a little, but he can’t tell from which direction. He doesn’t know how close Emile is, doesn’t know if his hands are reaching out—Nicaise thinks, without really thinking at all, that if Emile touches him right now he’s going to start crying.
“Don’t,” he manages, even though he doesn’t know what Emile is doing, doesn’t know—
He’s breathing too fast. He can feel his head spinning almost from a distance, the tips of his fingers numb where they’re gripping onto his legs. He can’t stop, can’t stop gasping in breaths like lungfuls of water and it hurts, his chest hurts for reasons he can’t understand.
“Hey,” Emile says. He sounds—panicked, like he doesn’t know what to do. Nicaise tries, he tries to make himself stop because he knows that he can’t—shouldn’t—he knows, remembers, what happens when he’s caught like this.
It had only been once. Once had been enough.
“Nicaise, can I—” The weight on the bed shifts, dips closer to him this time, and Nicaise draws his knees closer to his chest. Pressure, near his foot. Emile doesn’t seem to know where he is either; what must be his hand moves a few times, until it settles close enough that Nicaise can practically feel it. “Do you want me to go?”
Everything feels trapped inside him—the words, the frustration, everything spiraling and mixing until Nicaise doesn’t know what he wants anymore. He shakes his head, harder than he’d intended, and clenches his jaw. Emile likely hadn’t seen the movement, but he must have heard it. His hand moves the fraction of an inch, and brushes against Nicaise’s foot, and Nicaise makes a strangled noise that not even he knows how to decipher.
He’s shaking. He can feel it now, in a way that makes him wish he couldn’t. Against the steady warmth of Emile’s hand, he feels so insubstantial that he might be fading away already. Nicaise doesn’t push the hand away, can’t bring himself to ask for more. His music is still playing in his headphones, the sound of the piano drowning out Emile’s breaths. It’s easier to breathe, maybe, than it used to be.
“I’m right here,” Emile says, quiet enough that Nicaise has to strain to make out the words. Emile’s shoulder bumps against his; slowly, his head drops down to rest on Nicaise’s shoulder. “I’m here, okay?”
Nicaise doesn’t answer, but he lets out a long, shaking breath that feels like it drags out something from the very bottom of his stomach. He presses his face into his knees and lets his cheek rest minutely against Emile’s hair, and closes his eyes again. In the dark, Emile’s hand slips from his foot and finds its way to Nicaise’s fingers curled around his knee.
They sit like that, in the dark, long after Nicaise’s playlist runs out.
He wakes up with a jolt an indeterminate amount of time later to find Emile’s head in his lap. Nicaise’s head is clear, if throbbing; his throat is parched, his muscles weak from a day spent hiding in his bedroom. Justin’s bed is empty and rumpled, light filters in the room from either side of the closed blinds. It is firmly morning.
Nicaise feels hungover. There’s not really a better way to describe it—the emotional exhaustion that comes after nights like those. His whole body feels battered, like he’d been dropped in a river and battered by the rocky bottom and then hung up on a clothesline to dry. Emile doesn’t look much worse for wear; his hair is sticking up between his head and the blanket over Nicaise’s hips—which he doesn’t remember pulling over himself—and his face is smooth in sleep. His mouth is partly open, drool staining a dark spot under his cheek. Nicaise can’t bring himself to be annoyed at him.
His turned-off phone is just within arm’s reach of where he’s sitting up with his back against the wall, and he powers it on it to find that he has a few missed texts from his classmates, including one from Justin telling him that he’d passed his key on to Emile at around nine. Nothing from Laurent, or Damen, or his old foster parents. Normally, he would barely consider calling them, after something like this. Some things he just needs to deal with alone. Today, though, waking up with Emile sleeping on him like the most infuriating type of cat, has almost unsettled him.
Laurent picks up the phone on the second ring. He doesn’t try to say anything, doesn’t immediately start asking questions about why Nicaise is calling. He just breathes down the line like he’d been running, and Nicaise holds the phone to his ear just a little bit tighter.
“Shouldn’t you be in class?” He finally says, and realizes the hypocrisy of it as soon as the words leave his mouth. He and Emile have both already missed their photography class this morning.
“I asked Vannes to cover for me for a few minutes. She merged our classes until I get back.”
“Will she make it out alive?” Nicaise asks, falling back into old habits with Laurent on the phone.
“Hard to say,” Laurent replies. He sounds more even now, less winded, voice as warm as it usually is whenever he calls. “What about you?”
“Will I make it out alive?”
“Have you so far?” There’s silence, for a moment. Nicaise doesn’t know where to put his free hand; Emile is spread across the twin bed like he lives on it, every part of him managing to be both covering every inch of available service while also invading Nicaise’s space. It should be more annoying than it is, really.
“What does Damen do, when you get like that?” He asks, instead of replying. “When you can’t think.”
“He talks to me,” Laurent finally answers. “The first time, instead of panicking or yelling or—anything, he just started talking to me. Trying to pull me out of my own head.”
“And when that doesn’t work?” Emile makes a small noise, his forehead creasing as his cracked lips smack together. Laurent takes a moment, and Nicaise can hear his own pulse in his ears.
“Sometimes, he just holds me. Until I can think again.”
It’s not hard to imagine. Damen was probably sculpted by some benevolent god to be the most huggable person on earth, and Nicaise lives with them periodically, over breaks. He knows how much they like to touch each other, even just in passing. He’s seen the way Damen holds Laurent, like he’s the only thing that matters to him.
“Thank you,” Nicaise says, and the words aren’t as hard to spit out as they usually are.
“I know it doesn’t feel like it but Nicaise—it does get easier. Not better, or less awful. But it gets easier, in a lot of ways.” Laurent doesn’t sound like he’s spouting platitudes, doesn’t ever talk like that to him. Nicaise finally puts his hand down, wrist resting on top of Emile’s shoulder.
“It never goes away, though,” he says. It might be a question if he didn’t have has answer anyway. Laurent knows it as well as he does; it’s always going to be there, hanging over him like a cloud. “Get back to class.”
“Are you sure? I can wait a few more minutes, if you want to—”
“I don’t,” Nicaise cuts him off. Laurent pauses.
“Okay. Take care of yourself.”
“I will,” Nicaise promises. He looks down at Emile again, at the soft place on his cheek where his dimple forms when he smiles. “Goodbye, Laurent.”
He hangs up without letting Laurent say goodbye. Emile doesn’t seem to have noticed the conversation; he’s still dead asleep on Nicaise’s lap and his bed, and the weight on his thighs should be uncomfortable but it really isn’t. He doesn’t look like he’s going to be waking up soon, so Nicaise wipes off the screen of his phone and opens up a few separate apps, checking for notifications he had missed over the course of the last day.
Nicaise wastes good time like that, ignoring the hunger gurgling in his stomach and the way his left leg is starting to fall asleep, because Emile looks so peaceful and waking him up just seems cruel. It’s almost forty minutes before Emile starts to stir; he pushes himself up on one elbow with a loud groan that almost makes Nicaise drop his phone on Emile’s head. After a long moment of stretching out every muscle in his body, Emile seems to remember where he is, and he twists so suddenly to find Nicaise that he almost topples off of the bed.
“Shit,” Emile swears, and sits himself firmly down on the side of the bed, his feet resting on the floor. His hair is a mess, and he still has a spot of drool drying on his cheek. Nicaise doesn’t mention it.
“Morning,” he replies, as casually as he can manage. Emile blinks at him, looking at his likely red-rimmed eyes, the wild state of his hair. Nicaise stares back, hoping his glare actively conveys that he really doesn’t want to talk about it.
“Morning.” Emile looks like he wants to say something else, lips parted slightly, but Nicaise’s stomach cuts him off with a sharp growl.
“Are you hungry?” Nicaise asks, and Emile closes his mouth on something that isn’t an answer.
“Yeah,” he finally says, and Nicaise reaches out a hand to him, letting Emile tug him up from where he’s been sitting for hours.
They walk down a block and a half to get breakfast sandwiches smothered in cheese, both of their hair still absolutely ridiculous, and sit at the tiny booth for much longer than it takes them to finish their meals. Nicaise thinks that maybe, this is what Laurent had been talking about when he kept telling him to take care of himself.
Sitting with Emile across from him and their legs touching underneath the table, laughing at nothing in particular in nothing but sweatpants and loose tee shirts, it’s hard to remember that he’s only known Emile for a few weeks. It’s hard to remember that at the beginning, he didn’t want to care about somebody else.
Nicaise isn’t someone who likes to admit that he’s wrong, but he thinks that sometime in the future, when Laurent and Damen fly in to visit in the fall, he might owe Laurent an apology for all the times he’d insisted that he didn’t need anyone, not like Laurent needed Damen.
Maybe he and Emile aren’t quite there yet; maybe they’ll never get there. But for the first time in what feels like his entire life, Nicaise is okay with whatever the future might bring.
After all, he’s made it alive this far already.