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The slam of the Music block doors must have shifted the earth on its axis slightly, because the ground below Nick’s feet suddenly feels tilted. Unsteady.
He can’t imagine how Charlie feels.
“Did you hear all of that?” he asks, voice small, face smaller. Charlie’s not short, but he looks so small. There’s a tear, smeared and glittering, in the hollow just beneath his left eye.
Nick chews on the inside of his lip. “Most of it.”
It’s hard to meet Charlie’s eyes. He’s not sure how he’s supposed to feel, so he takes stock. Or tries to. Everything’s all swirly in his gut.
“I just—you seemed kind of like something was up while we were getting changed, so I… I wanted to check everything was okay.”
Angry. He’s angry. Not blind with it, not now Ben’s out of his sight, but simmering. Sick to his stomach. Glad he was there. Horrified at what he heard. Vaguely guilty, as if he was intruding.
He’s scared for his friend.
“Sorry,” says Charlie softly.
The floor tilts further: first right, then left. Nick shakes his head, slowly. “You have nothing to be sorry about.”
“Sorry.”
The first apology confused Nick a little. The second puts a chip and a little crack in his heart, like a floral china teacup dropped and caught too late. He imagines Charlie’s heart as a cup in worse repair, drawing beads of blood from Charlie’s finger as he goes to pick up the pale shattered pieces, then mentally shakes himself. If the last weeks have shown him anything, it’s that Charlie is nowhere near that fragile.
“You say sorry a lot,” he blurts, before he’s thought about it. He didn’t mean to make light of the situation, exactly, or make Charlie feel self-conscious. Fortunately the grey misty layer over Charlie’s face lifts a little and he almost smiles, scrunching the corner of his mouth in a way that’s so deeply endearing Nick wants to remember it forever.
His lips part slightly, as if he’s about to say something, but Nick cuts him off.
“Don’t say it.”
Charlie smiles wider. “I kind of wanna say it.”
Nick laughs despite himself. “Don’t!”
Charlie giggles softly before the smile drops. Nick has a sudden urge to offer real comfort—he thinks maybe his uncertain words haven’t been that helpful—but his body feels heavy and clumsy. He stretches out an arm and watches as his hand settles over Charlie’s bicep and pats twice. It’s both too hard and too gentle, too tender, too brutish, and all at once he regrets the action and regrets letting go.
Charlie scrunches his mouth again and Nick feels his heart rate pick up.
“We should get out.” His voice comes out breathless. Is he breathless? “We’ll get locked in if we stay in much longer.”
“Yeah.” Charlie’s footsteps follow him down the scuffed vinyl corridor, somehow steady despite it all. Solid and rhythmic.
Nick bends to pick up his bag, hastily discarded at the chilling edge to Ben’s voice, then tries the door.
It’s locked.
He tries again.
It’s definitely locked.
“Fuck,” he mutters, then glances at Charlie, whose eyes are wide in the last dregs of amber-gold sunset dribbling through the panes.
Nick tries one more time, just in case, putting his body weight into it. It might just be jammed. When did they start locking the doors at five?
“Oh,” says Charlie quietly, when the door doesn’t give. There’s no panic in his voice. Only defeat.
Nick drops his kit bag and jogs to the eastern end of the corridor, then jiggles the handle uselessly. The sky is beginning to darken outside, turning purple and grey at the edges, and spindly deciduous trees shake back and forth forbiddingly in the wind that’s picked up.
When Nick turns back around, it’s to see Charlie sinking to the floor with his back against the wall and his backpack beside him. He’s on the other side of the wall where Ben…
The sick feeling is back. Nauseated, not nauseous, he remembers from English last week. Ben is nauseous. Nick is nauseated.
The nausea and the anger must be related, Nick decides, because suddenly he wants nothing more than to punch that wall. He won’t, but he wants to. Instead, he takes a few steps and sits beside Charlie, trying to regulate his breathing, hoping that if he tries hard enough he might be able to regulate Charlie’s too. In for five, hold for four, out for… is it seven? He can’t remember.
He doesn’t want to touch him. He doesn’t think that would be the right thing to do after what Ben did. He’s not sure if he should have touched his arm earlier, either. He’s not sure.
Charlie is silent. He seems oddly calm, staring into space with his arms wrapped protectively around his knees. Nick is keenly aware of just how cold the air is, even inside, and how much colder it’s growing. The radiators must have shut off. The layer of air between their bodies feels colder than the rest of the atmosphere.
Charlie glances at him. “What do we do?”
Nick blows out a breath and watches the little cloud of air as it condenses. “I don’t know.” He shrugs weakly. “I’ve never been locked in the Music block before.”
Charlie chuckles softly. “Me neither.”
“Gonna call my mum.” Nick pulls his phone out of his pocket. “Um, do you… do you have someone you can call?”
“My parents are working late. I usually get the bus home after practice.”
“Oh,” says Nick. “That’s…”
“It’s fine.” Charlie’s voice is prickly, defensive, like he’s pre-empting sympathy.
Nick frowns. “Okay.”
Charlie sends a quick text to someone, then buries his face in his knees. Nick rings his mum. She says she’ll try to contact the school and be there soon to pick him up.
“Someone should be here to let us out soon,” says Nick, once he’s hung up.
Charlie nods.
They sit there for a while. The silence is thick with a kind of tension that makes the churning in Nick’s stomach worse. He’s waiting: for someone to come and open the door, for Charlie to say something, for his own head to magically provide him the right words to say to make Charlie seem less small. The sun sinks lower still.
The bluish fluorescent lights overhead flicker off, leaving them in rapidly-gathering darkness. Charlie glances up at the ceiling, then looks down at his feet, running the toe of one scuffed black Converse along the instep of the other. They’ve been so still for so long that the motion sensors have timed out.
Nick puts his hand in the air and waves it around a little, then more wildly, trying to get the lights to turn back on. Charlie glances back up at the movement and laughs. Properly. Nick feels proud of that laugh, and can’t help but grin as their faces are once more flooded from above by harsh blue-white light.
“Thank you,” Charlie whispers. It’s not clear if he’s thanking Nick for getting the lights to turn on, or for… the other thing.
Statements and questions and comforts write themselves in Nick’s mind, then delete, letter by letter. He’s petrified of saying the wrong thing and making this worse, so he stays frozen.
A niggling need to help, to try and understand how Charlie must feel, chips away at the ice. “Are you feeling okay?” he asks, before he can overthink it any more than he already has.
Charlie looks up in surprise, blinking rapidly. “Yeah,” he says reflexively. “I’m fine.”
“Oh.” Nick’s brow creases. “Are you sure?”
Charlie looks taken aback. As if he wasn’t expecting a follow-up. “Um…”
Nick tries to be patient. Charlie says no more, but he shifts infinitesimally closer to Nick and rests his hand on the floor. Nick can see it out of the corner of his eye, and it’s as if it’s pulling at him, dragging his gaze down to look at the way his fingers sit flat on the dusty linoleum. He places his own hand down, beside Charlie’s, but about an inch away.
Charlie glances down at their hands and smiles a little. This gives Nick a little flutter of sparks in his stomach that he doesn’t think he’s supposed to be feeling right now.
When minutes pass and still Charlie hasn’t answered him properly, Nick tries again.
“Has he done that before?”
Charlie looks a bit stricken. Nick wonders whether he should have asked.
“No,” says Charlie, slowly. “I mean… not really.”
“Not really?”
“Not… not like that.”
“Okay.”
Charlie taps out a careful, measured rhythm on the floor with his fingers. His thumb is the bass. It helps to steady Nick’s breathing.
“Do you think you should tell someone?” Nick asks, when it occurs to him.
Charlie shakes his head. “No,” he says too quickly. “No, I don’t want to—” he trails off and looks over at Nick. “It’s just—”
Nick feels wrong for pressing, but he can’t help but frown. “He assaulted you, Charlie. That’s really serious.”
“I know!” Charlie’s rhythm stops. “I know. But I know what it’s like to have people… talking about that stuff before you’re ready. I don’t want that for anyone.”
Maybe Charlie is a better person than Nick, because Nick wants the ninth circle of Hell for Ben. “He hurt you,” Nick says quietly. “He would have kept going.”
“I know.”
He sounds so tired.
Nick searches for what to say next, fingers catching in this web of complexity he’s never had to worry about before. He comes up empty. He feels older.
“I could have been anyone.” Charlie’s voice breaks.
Nick turns to look at him, to look at the way the fading twilight pulls his cheekbones gaunt.
“I could have been any pathetic gay boy in the history of pathetic gay boys. He made me feel special and none of it was true.”
“Charlie…”
“And I fell for it. Like a total fucking idiot.”
“Charlie, please.” Nick can’t help it; he shifts closer and puts his arm around Charlie’s shoulder. It’s better touch; it’s honest. “I really, really think you are the least pathetic person I’ve ever met.”
Charlie makes a small noise of disagreement and leans into his side. His hair smells like peppermint. Not that Nick is trying to smell.
“I’m serious. You’re so funny. You’re so smart. You’re good at everything and you—”
“You don’t have to try and make me feel better.”
Nick starts; Charlie’s voice is thick with tears, the kind that crawl up from the depths of your insides.
“Do you want me to stop talking?”
There's a pause. Then Charlie responds with a sob.
“Okay,” Nick says. “Tap once if you want me to shut up. Twice if you want me to keep going.”
Charlie taps once on the floor. His shoulders shake and his breathing quickens. Nick holds him instinctively, rubs his shoulder, takes his hand and squeezes while it passes.
By the time Charlie surfaces, straightening up and scrubbing at his eyes with the heels of his hands, Nick has forgotten where he is.
“Tell me something,” says Charlie. He sounds older like Nick feels.
“Tell you what?”
“Don’t care. Anything.”
Nick looks outside. The wind has died down. The starless sky is a deep, still, buzzing blue; after twilight, but not yet night. The overhead lights have flicked off again. They could be in an aquarium or sat at the bottom of a swimming pool. Charlie looks soft, washed clean, red-eyed.
“L’heure bleue,” Nick says.
“What?”
“It’s French. The blue hour. It’s just a few minutes, really, not an hour, when the daytime has gone to bed.” Nick’s eyes close briefly; his dad used to tell him versions of this in French. It’s not a story, just a silly, soothing few sentences to get a child to sleep. “The daytime has gone to bed, the sun and all the animals, and the flowers and the wind in the trees.”
Charlie smiles. Properly. It’s such a relief Nick almost cries himself.
“And it’s quiet,” he continues, “because the night hasn’t woken up yet; the stars are closed and the bats are sleeping and the moon hasn’t turned ‘round. And the sky—” he gestures at the window, carefully so as not to turn the lights back on— “The sky is this empty blue. There’s nothing, and there’s everything, and it’s all just resting.”
They’re still holding hands. Nick realises this slowly, and takes the time to choose not to let go.
Charlie leans his head back against the wall. “That’s beautiful.”
The words, having come when Nick needed them most, have left again. He squeezes Charlie’s hand.
“I know what you mean about that colour,” Charlie says. “That blue. It’s Yves Klein blue.”
“Yves Klein?”
“He did this painting. It’s in the Tate. It’s just a blue rectangle. And everyone says, oh, I could paint that, modern art is bullshit, whatever. But that blue is… it glows. It’s like looking at a soul. It’s so sad and hopeful. It can’t be reproduced in a book or on a screen.”
Nick hums. “You’ll have to show me one day.”
Charlie looks at him, fond and a little disbelieving. “Yeah. I guess so.”
Chill air blasts down the corridor as the door flies open. “Nicky!”
They stand, and somehow, unfortunately, their hands unwind. Nick is actually, weirdly, quite disappointed to see his mum. He glances at his phone and sees a missed call and a string of texts about getting the Head’s receptionist to open the door.
They’re hustled outside and out of the gates. Charlie turns to walk down the street to the bus stop, then flushes when Sarah insists on giving him a lift.
“Really, it’s fine. I don’t want to be an inconvenience.”
Sarah poo-poos this, drags his address out of him and has him strapped into the back seat before he can protest further. Nick forgoes the front to sit next to him, which makes Charlie laugh a little and look at him adoringly.
Nick waits with his hands tight on his knees for his mum to ask how they ended up locked in a building they shouldn’t have been in in the first place. By some miracle, she doesn’t.
”I’m glad you were there,” whispers Charlie, so quiet Nick could have missed it.
”I’m glad I was too.”
L’heure bleue darkens to navy, then ink. Charlie seems reluctant to leave the warmth of the car, and he looks small again, outlined in streetlight orange against the front door to the Spring townhouse. Sarah waits until he’s inside before she pulls away.
Nick gazes out the backseat window at the sky. The stars open, one by one; the moon turns ‘round. Somewhere the bats are waking up. His phone lights up: a text.
thank you x
Nick's heart taps out Charlie's rhythm. Apparently, Yves Klein blue is an emotion.