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Everything is always just that little bit tauter the night before the full moon, and by unspoken agreement they never do anything particularly interesting, or social...not that they're social, at all really.
So they're on the sofa, sharing the space and occasionally crisps and watching David Attenborough attempt to increase the nations love of lizards.
George is only half concentrating, this close to the full moon his attention is falling from one distraction to another, tiny sounds, smells, the way his sleeves irritate his wrists. But he's watching the television anyway, because watching the television is what you're supposed to do, it's normal, and he can do that. Even if his skin and his nose and his ears are determined to drive him mad by pointing out every little thing...and there are a lot of little things.
Mitchell rolls his head across the back of the sofa, and the movement is slow and lazy but drags George's attention away from the screen nonetheless, distracted in a way which has nothing to do with normal.
It's always worse this close, always worse right near the edge, right on the brink where smells are almost tangible. Where, if George just inhales deeply enough, he'll be able to know things he'd never find out any other way. Be able to know things other people couldn't.
But he never quite can, not like this, and being on the edge is impossibly frustrating.
Sometimes you had to give in, a second here or there where George lets himself think about it, lets himself live in that moment, and it's better to do it here, better to do it somewhere safe, somewhere he doesn't have to hold on so tightly.
He turns his head sideways, just a little, and it's enough. Mitchell is sprawled next to him, one leg thrown over the arm of the couch, head tipped sideways just a fraction, giving the impression that the television is only holding his attention until such time as it fails to be entertaining.
But George isn't interested in looking.
Mitchell doesn't smell like ordinary people. Oh he carries the everyday human being smells around him like a slowly disintegrating coat. But underneath the surface underneath the dust, fairy liquid, biscuits, polish, soap, coffee and the stray drift of chocolate, he's smoother, sharper, far more interesting. There's a flicker of cold metal and blood and a trail of something which is, without doubt, death but that's a part of Mitchell that George has become familiar with.
Then there's something else, something all the way underneath, something hot and familiar and very faint, something that whenever George is close enough, whenever his nose is good enough he always finds himself leaning to catch, frustrated and curious.
He wants to hate this part of him, the way everything is so rich and huge and alive. The way people are so much more. He wants to hate the way the world vibrates and everything has a flavour and something like an internal clock, smells changing as the hours drag past and back.
George wants to hate it but he gives in to it more than anything else, when it intrudes on his normal life, sudden and jarring and demanding, and Mitchell is part of that strangeness, Mitchell is something rich to be turned over and over. It's like tasting something and trying desperately to work out the ingredients. Only this is not dead and cooked, this is like tasting something alive, something that's moving under your tongue and there are no proper words to describe it but it's impossible, absolutely impossible to ignore.
It's not particularly easy to surreptitiously smell someone, but George has had occasions to practice, and Mitchell has always been willing to turn a blind eye to some of the more curious, to some of the downright weird, things that George is compelled to do.
Which George is ridiculously grateful for.
The sofa doesn't make a noise when he twists his head a little farther, the leather quiet for a change, and George doesn't quite know whether to feel guilty about that or not.
The closer he gets the more the everyday smells fall away, leaving that unique background that is Mitchell, a collection of basic scents that wind together like DNA. It's a smell George would know without looking. Mitchell's skin holds it like his own holds warmth, and it's stronger against the curve of his neck, where the skin is fine and close.
George knows it would be stronger still behind the curve of Mitchell's ear, in the dark edges of his hair, and he can't resist stretching just a bit further.
There's something familiar in that, the urge to press your nose against something new and interesting and delicious and inhale. Just because you could, and that isn't strange at all. He's seen people doing that in the supermarket, and he's so very close, skin touching skin for a fraction of a second and all he has to do is inhale.
And that's when it occurs to him that he's far too close, that's he's far too close and one stray thought away from doing something ridiculously inappropriate.
George pulls away, a quick movement that does make the bloody sofa creak protestingly.
He pushes back into it, heart thumping crazily in his ribcage, pretending furiously that he wasn't just an inch away from burying his nose in Mitchell's hair.
Mitchell is poking about in the tube of Pringles he's holding, until he can recover a suitably large handful, and George can't decide if he's carefully ignoring George's brief moment of insanity or whether he just didn't notice.
George knows Mitchell well enough to presume it's the former.
David Attenborough is still talking about lizards in a way that seems jarringly normal. Though George suspects David Attenborough is jarringly normal all the time.
Without saying a word Mitchell waves the tube vaguely in his direction. George doesn't dare try and speak because he honestly doesn't know what would come out. He shakes his head roughly instead.
He stays silent, stays silent and still, pressed into the couch.
The pace of his heartbeat is not entirely to do with adrenaline, in fact it occurs to him that it is instead almost entirely to do with the way Mitchell smells and he needs a moment to get a handle on that, a moment to process that thought.
He just needs a moment.