Stan laughed again and turned to him. With his heels on, he didn’t even need to rise up onto his toes to press a kiss to Tone’s bearded cheek.
Tone blushed.
“Thank you for taking me out,” Stan said as he unlocked the door and let them inside. “Now, I need to get out of these shoes.”
Tone shoved the rest of the chips into his mouth and dumped the container in the bin, then waved absently behind himself as he made his way to the bathroom.
Stan collapsed onto the sofa, sticking his aching legs out in front of himself. He’d been right—the shoes were mayhem, but it had been good. And worth it.
He breathed slowly, the loud music still echoing in his ears in the quiet flat. He needed to make up the bed to get some sleep, because he was sure to wake early in the morning despite the lateness of his bedtime. But for a moment, Stan just breathed.
From down the hall, he heard the toilet flush and the sound of Tone’s door closing.
Stan sighed and reached down to undo the straps that bound the torture shoes around his poor feet. They fell to the floor in two distinct thuds, and Stan all but groaned. His feet throbbed, and he was sure there was a blister forming on his big toe.
That’s what happens when you wear heels after six months of abstinence, he reminded himself.
With the cool, fake-wood floors soothing his soles, Stan padded down to the bathroom. Before he could get there, Ben’s door opened.
He was wearing a creased T-shirt and his boxers, with his bed-hair rumpled and eyes adorably perplexed. When Stan smiled at him, he blinked the fog from his eyes.
“Hi,” Stan said. “Sorry if we woke you.”
“No, it’s fine.” Ben’s voice was rough. He’d been sleeping a lot since he came back. Apparently he’d been spending a lot of time in bed over the past few months, according to Tone. It had something to do with the insomnia. He couldn’t sleep, so he was exhausted all the time.
“Do you want to use the bathroom?”
Ben ignored Stan’s question and took a step closer, looking Stan up and down like he was confused.
“I like your dress,” he said instead.
“Thanks.” Stan grinned.
“You don’t dress up any more.”
“Not as much as I used to. Tone asked me if I wanted to go out, so….”
“You went to the Electric Ballroom?”
“Yes.”
“Looking like that?”
“Yes,” Stan said again. “Is that a problem?”
Ben blinked slowly. “You look amazing.”
Something fizzy rolled down Stan’s spine. “Thanks,” he murmured.
Neither of them seemed to want to move, the moment growing thicker between them. Stan thought any sharp motions would kill it. So he just breathed, as quietly as he dared.
He had been afraid of this. If they did what they were supposed to do and Ben got better, what if, at the core of him, there was still the man Stan had loved? What would he do then? Could he walk away again?
“Sorry,” Ben said, his voice low.
“What for?”
“You hate it when people stare at you.”
Stan laughed softly. “I hate it when strangers look at me like I’m a freak. I never minded when….”
“Hmm?”
“When it was you,” Stan finished.
Of course it was still there. Stan was a fool for pretending it wasn’t, for hoping Ben still didn’t have the power to completely destroy him. Again. If Stan’s heart had been broken all this time, then now it was delicately cradled in Ben’s hands, just waiting to be pieced back together.
“Oh.”
Stan turned away, hating how vulnerable he was right here, barefoot and exposed and caught in Ben’s aura.
“Hey,” Ben said, catching Stan’s fingertips with his own.
“Goodnight, Ben,” Stan said.
Ben traced his thumb over the inside of Stan’s wrist, whisper soft. “Goodnight,” he said.
This time when Stan turned away, Ben didn’t stop him, and their hands fell apart.
Chapter Eight
Something had changed.
Well, everything had changed.
Ben wasn’t prepared for that—emotionally or practically or in any other way.
Being this close to Stan again was messing with his head, though not necessarily in a bad way. Stan’s presence had always been enough to push Ben to be a better person. He’d worked hard in the early days of their relationship to be the type of guy who made an effort for his partner.
Whether it was conscious or not, he was doing that again now.
It wasn’t exactly a revolution to discover that he still carried a torch for Stan. It had taken a few months for Ben to really come to terms with the fact that Stan was really gone and wasn’t coming back. He’d buried the pain of that realisation under a haze of drugs, and his friends had quickly learned to stop mentioning Stan’s name when Ben was around.
He knew he needed to call the others in LA and at least tell them he was okay, and it took a few days to identify the heavy feeling in the pit of his stomach as shame. He wasn’t ready to face them yet. Not when he wasn’t sure what sort of reaction he would get.
Stan was out of the flat, disappearing well before Ben rolled out of bed. He had meetings or something. Ben guessed he’d put his career—his life—on hold to drag Ben back to London so he could sort himself out.
If Stan had done that for him, it felt like Ben should at least make an effort.
He spent most of the morning lying on his back, staring at the ceiling and thinking about how awful the idea of doing anything was. In the back of his head, he was able to identify this as depression—a deep, dark, sucking thing that took all the last wisps of his personality and left a really fucking dull creature behind. That didn’t make dealing with it any easier.
The twin-power protests of his stomach and his bladder finally got him out of bed, and he made himself take a shower without anyone else telling him to do so. The effort of that almost floored him, but he still had a growling stomach to deal with, so he dressed in whatever he found on the floor and went to the kitchen to make tea.
When that was done, Ben collapsed on the sofa and sipped it while watching terrible British daytime TV, because Stan was the last person alive who didn’t have Netflix. Ben did, but his laptop was in his bedroom, and he was taking today one thing at a time.
When the tea was finished, he set the kettle to boil to make another one, put two pieces of bread in the toaster, and went to collect his laptop. The restorative power of tea and toast gave him enough energy to pull up Google and search for a stupid fucking therapist in London.
The search results were overwhelming. How the hell was he supposed to pick one person to spill his guts to out of literally thousands of therapists who worked in the city?
With his head pounding, Ben opened a text document and started on a list of criteria.
Needed to be a bloke. Ben wasn’t sure he could talk about all the things he probably should be talking about with a woman, no matter how nice she was. Scratch that—if she was nice, it would be a hundred times worse.
Someone with experience dealing with addicts. Someone who didn’t work too far from Camden.
Ben used the new list to narrow down his search, then got up again to grab the phone from the kitchen and dialled the first person he’d found.