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Seiji wakes up sweaty, facedown into his pillow, and with the worst headache he’s ever had, even rivaling the one the morning after several long, likely mortifying rounds of Fuzzy Duck and Eugene’s whiskey sodas.
There’s a gentle hand on his shoulder, shaking him awake. Nicholas’ fingers brush against the side of his neck, and Seiji shivers once before he turns over.
Their dorm room is still dark, except for the warm glow of the salt lamp on the bedside table. Nicholas is standing over him, a bit blurry and unfocused, but Seiji can still tell he’s smiling.
After a few moments of staring at each other, Nicholas whispers, “Hey.”
“Hello.” Seiji’s throat stings and his eyelashes feel glued together. Blinking away sleep, he notices Nicholas has already dressed into his tracksuit for their early morning practice. “What time is it?”
“Ten minutes to five, you slept through your alarm.” Nicholas’ hand has drifted from his shoulder down to his bicep, his fingers toying idly with the sleeve hem of Seiji’s shirt as he talks. “I let you sleep a little bit longer.” That lopsided grin grows bigger. Seiji feels like he’s becoming sweatier by the second. “You were snoring.”
Seiji scoffs and immediately regrets it. His throat is definitely hurting now. “I highly doubt that. I think you just enjoyed being the first one awake for once.”
Nicholas laughs, and pulls out his phone, waggling it in Seiji’s direction. “You totally were and I have solid proof right here, but maybe I’ll just save it for myself instead of sharing with the group chat if you can beat my mile today.”
Closing his eyes, Seiji massages his temples, but it doesn’t do much to relieve the pulsating pressure in his skull. He’s trying to remember if he drank enough water yesterday. “It’s not the worst blackmail material they have of me.”
“Yeah, I mean, it’s probably one of the cutest though.”
Seiji's eyes snap open. Even if every part of his body didn’t somehow hurt or ache, Seiji already knows he wouldn’t have the finesse required to formulate a response to that right now. Nicholas’ teasing isn’t new, but it’s transformed into an entirely different thing over the last couple of months. They’ve come a long way since they met at opposite ends of the piste, Seiji can’t exactly pinpoint when it started to change, but it did, and now he’s toeing all the lines he told himself he’d never cross again.
And he feels a little selfish. This year has already given him so much he thought he’d never have; friends, a team like a real family. He wants this, too.
“We should probably get going in a few, if we rush our warmup we can still get a full hour in the salle before breakfast.”
Nicholas is sitting at the end of Seiji’s bed lacing up his shoes. They’re the nice, expensive ones Harvard had gifted the team before their first away match, the ones that Coach Dmytro got angry about because the brand conflicted with one of his current sponsors.
Seiji pushes himself up. His nose instantly begins to drip. Sniffling, he reaches for his phone on the nightstand and squints down at the screen. If he takes some Tylenol now, it should kick in by the time he and Nicholas are done with training. He’s suffered through worse.
“Hey, you okay?”
He’s blindly swiping away expired alarm alerts, and about a dozen TikTok notifications from Aiden, when Seiji looks up. Nicholas is standing at his bedside again, profile illuminated in orange and pink. He’s watching him closely, a rare frown pulling at his mouth.
“Yes, but,” Seiji reaches out, tugging gently on the sleeve of Nicholas’ sweatshirt, like he was doing to him earlier. Nicholas immediately shifts and slots their fingers together. Seiji feels his eyes flutter shut. “I need to take some medicine before we go.”
“We’re not going anywhere. Seiji, you’re shivering.”
Seiji keeps his eyes closed as Nicholas squeezes his hand once, before letting go and pressing his own against Seiji's forehead, his neck. He's ridiculously hot-blooded, Seiji has known this for months; they used to fight over their dorm's thermostat so often that Harvard had to intervene, and manually set it to a temperature neither one of them could change. Away matches were like sharing a bed with a space heater. Just the other morning, Seiji woke to find the room frigid with the first snow of the season, and Nicholas had kicked his duvet off during the night and left it pooling by his bare feet.
But Nicholas' hands are warm and feel good against the clammy chill of his skin. They're cupping his face now, and Seiji leans into the warmth and pressure, putting his own hands on top of Nicholas’ to keep them there. It’s a selfish thought, but maybe they can just do this instead of practice.
Nicholas is telling him something that sounds important and suddenly it's very hard to focus. “–a fever. Here, lay back down.”
The room spins a little as Seiji’s head hits his pillow. It’s been flipped over to the cool side. The blanket is pulled up to his chin and then he watches Nicholas scurry around their dorm in the half-light of the salt lamp, digging around in their dresser drawer for the Tylenol bottle, opening their mini refrigerator and retrieving one of his bright, sugary drinks that never fails to remind Seiji of nuclear fallout.
He tries making a face, but Nicholas only laughs softly and unscrews the lid for him. “Electrolytes are good for when you're sick. Bottoms up.”
Seiji sniffs once, miserably.
After taking the pill and swallowing more than a few sips under Nicholas’ discretion, Seiji relaxes back and pulls the duvet tighter around him. Nicholas crosses the room again to bump up the temperature, and the heat kicks back on. The pipes rattle loudly in the ceiling.
Nicholas dims the salt lamp until the orange pink glow is almost nothing in the dark. Then he looks down at Seiji and gently puts a hand to his forehead again, brushing the damp, disheveled hair off his brow. Outside, the wind blows hard against their window and shakes the glass. It’ll snow more tonight. Nicholas’s hand is still there. Seiji swallows and hears his throat click.
Nicholas smiles. "Try to get some sleep. I'll be right here when you wake up, okay?”
“What about practice? You can still go without me.” He could. Seiji would fall asleep, maybe even before he left. It wouldn’t even matter if he was here or not.
“C’mon. You know the only reason I started waking up at like four in the morning every day was because of you.” His thumb is drawing little circles into Seiji’s skin. They’re light, barely there, but they might as well be a brand. “Without you there’s sort of no point.”
Seiji feels himself flushing and he knows it isn’t just the fever. “The point should be perfecting your riposte.”
Nicholas scrunches his nose at him. “Maybe that too.”
The hand leaves his forehead, his hair, and Seiji comes to a decision. If he decides to regret it later, he can blame it on his lapse of health and just pretend he doesn’t remember anything at all. Nicholas would give him that.
He shuffles over on the bed until his back touches the wall, and then lifts the corner of the duvet. Nicholas stares down at him with such an honestly raw look of astonishment, Seiji bites the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling, and feels it slip out anyway.
"Hurry up, I'm cold."
Nicholas laughs and kicks his shoes off, half stumbling into the bed in his haste to join Seiji under the comforter. He slips in carefully, as if not wanting to jostle him around too much, and Seiji holds his breath, suddenly very aware of his body as Nicholas stretches out beside him.
Together, they wrap the duvet around themselves.
Nicholas is facing him, silhouetted in sunset colors from the salt lamp. Seiji can’t make out his face, but he doesn't think Nicholas is breathing either.
Nicholas whispers, "Is this okay?"
“Yes.”
It feels intimate, like Seiji knew it would, different from all the times they’ve shared a bed away from school at competitions. Eugene isn’t snoring from the pullout couch, his hand slack around the television remote. Harvard and Aiden aren't in the other bed murmuring softly to each other. Campus isn’t awake yet, and their dorm room is quiet and dark. Sometimes, Seiji had woken up to Nicholas clinging to him, his face buried into the crook of Seiji’s neck, and he wonders if this time it’ll be like that too.
Nicholas shifts slightly. “I thought you were cold.”
“I am.”
A smile is in his voice. “Then come here.”
They’re both sharing a single pillow. Seiji can feel more than see Nicholas watching him in the low light as he reaches out for Seiji’s hand. He pulls it close to his chest, holding it in both of his own, as if trying to keep it warm, but does no more than that. He’s waiting for Seiji to decide how far this is exactly going to go. Pulse thrumming, Seiji traces a stubborn fencing callus on one of Nicholas’ knuckles with his thumb, trying to remind himself that he already knows how Nicholas’ body feels against his, has long since grown familiar to all of his little touches.
With a start, Seiji realizes he isn’t feeling anxious or uncertain. There isn’t any reason to be. This is Nicholas. An excited, fluttering feeling lodges itself in his chest and doesn’t leave.
He wriggles forward, Nicholas already lifting an arm for him, and then they’re holding each other tightly, fingers still tangled together and trapped between their chests. It takes a few minutes for both of them to find a comfortable position; Nicholas accidentally knees Seiji in the hip and when they laugh after Seiji hisses a curse in French, Nicholas gently puts his hand there and rubs at the spot apologetically.
Eventually, Seiji’s head ends up tucked under Nicholas’ chin. For what seems to be a long time, they’re curled up together underneath the heavy duvet listening to the wind whistling outside and rattling their window. Nicholas smells like the cinnamon vanilla bath soap Aiden had gifted him just because, and he’s ridiculously warm. The headache, the sore throat, are all a dull, distant throb in the back of his mind. Seiji feels the soft edge of sleep creeping in.
Suddenly, he jerks into full awareness. Nicholas’ arm around him tightens, pulling them, impossibly, closer together.
“Fuck,” Nicholas exhales in a rush, sounding like he was dozing off as well. His hand gently cups the back of Seiji’s neck, fingers sliding through his hair. “What’s wrong?”
“I just realized that,” Seiji sighs and then sniffles into the soft material of Nicholas’ sweatshirt. “I’m going to get you sick.”
A long moment, and then Nicholas laughs, and Seiji can feel it against his temple. “Maybe. But that’s okay with me.”
“I’m sorry,” Seiji says, and he is, but maybe not as much as he should be. He wanted Nicholas to stay, and it’s hard to have regrets about any of it when Nicholas is in his bed, keeping him warm, his fingers trailing aimless shapes into Seiji’s skin.
Nicholas yawns obnoxiously into Seiji’s hair. “Seiji, don’t be, seriously. This is way better than practice. I was literally going to volunteer myself to be your personal space heater before you beat me to it.”
Seiji rolls his eyes. Nicholas squeezes him once like he can sense it. “Like how I’m going to beat your mile when I’m back to normal?” He still has that video of him snoring. Allegedly.
Nicholas coughs pitfully, twice, and groans for good measure. “No more talking about practice or potential blackmail material now. We’re super sick.”
Seiji is fighting back sleep at this point. Eyes closing, he curls himself further into Nicholas. “Will you stay until I wake up?”
Seiji swears he feels lips brush against his forehead. “I’m not going anywhere.”