At a first glance, Rupert imagines he must appear as emotionally repressed as ever; it’s only if one looks a little closer that the chinks in his armour start to show. He’s nervous. It’s not in a bad way, quite the contrary. It’s excitement mostly – the Christmas morning, birthday cake kind – but he’s trying his best to mask it. Beatrice has been the only one who’s noticed his change of mood – how giddy he’s been as of late, how he’ll fling himself across furniture whenever his phone pings to grab it, ignoring her in favour of grinning at messages from Felix. It’s foolish, really. They’ve never even met – an oversight they’re correcting today with a café meet-up – but he feels like a schoolgirl dreamily doodling the name of a crush in the margins of their notebook. The three dots of Felix typing a message never fail to make his heart burst. He can’t recall the last time someone captured his attention – and imagination – like this, the last time he spared more than a passing fancy for a boy. His lofty expectations and general aversion to men are both well-documented, but Felix, miraculously, has managed to keep him hooked. It’s been strangely comforting, to know there’s someone he can call, a voice in the darkness. Fee has become something of a lighthouse to Roo – the harbour he can return to when the sea gets too rough, the daydream he can indulge in when family gatherings get too tedious. They speak about everything, from art to the future; it feels like no topic is off-limits and, for Roo, speaking about his hopes and dreams feels far more intimate than anything he’s done with all the men who’ve graced his bed.
His heart betrays him, hammering away like a startled rabbit as he waits for Felix to arrive, hidden at a table in the corner and forgotten in amongst the sounds of chatter, clinking spoons and the hiss of an expresso machine. He’s ordered tea but has let it go cold, too distracted to remember to drink it, his eyes darting around for Felix. He doesn’t know what he’s going to say when he meets him; he can only hope it’ll be something clever, a Wildean quip that’ll make him seem older, cooler, more philosophical, than he actually is. He wants to impress him. Roo can bear anything, he thinks, but he can’t bear the idea of Felix being disappointed by who he meets today.
It’s a cruel cosmic irony then, that when Felix does show up, words fail Roo entirely. There’s no Wildean quip. There’s not even a hello. It’s a torturous, love-struck silence, his lips parting in preparation to say something but nothing coming out. He stares up at him, with a shyness he’s wholly unused to experiencing, before the beginning of a smile starts to bleed through. It’s bashful – and it’s clumsy, a far cry from the smooth smirks he’s perfected in his socialite circles. It’s too toothy to be smooth, with dimples cratering his cheeks, but there’s an innocence to it.
“You’re taller than I thought you’d be.” Okay, perhaps not the smoothest opener, but Roo will take any words he can force out. Besides, when it feels as though an imbalance in your whole universe has been corrected by the sight of someone, you’re allowed to be a little bit weird, surely. His smile won’t budge. It’s ridiculous. He’s ridiculous but, for once, Roo can’t find it in himself to care. “Sorry. Let’s try that again.” The smile breaks even further, becoming a foolish – such a foolish – grin, as he holds out a hand for Felix to shake. “Hello.”
Rupert Ambrosia. Fee was on his way to meet a pretentious snob of an artist called Rupert Ambrosia. He wasn’t one to judge on names alone, but he could judge based on the trillion and a half conversations they’d had the past few weeks, and the words ‘pretentious’ and ‘snob’ were absolutely correct to describe this boy. He was the kind of person that Felix tried to avoid like a plague - although he usually didn’t have to try very hard, as those kind of people usually avoided him just as quickly.
All that being said... this pretentious snobby artist with his pretentious snobby name, and all the big words he used, and the casual mentions of his trips to Paris... had slowly crept his way into Felix’s heart. At first they’d only spoken about art... but both of them knew that talking about art was just a roundabout way of exposing your soul. If you did it right, anyway. And Lord, did Roo do it right. One by one, the layers of pretentious snobbery fell away, and though the boy still had walls up like a medieval city, he was slowly putting in doors and choosing to let Felix through.
He’d given names to emotions that Felix had always felt, he’d given colours to moments he would have painted black, he gave light where there was none, and saw shadows in the darkness, Roo just came in and changed the way Felix saw the entire world... and without even ever seeing his face, Felix realized - just now, as he turned the corner and saw the sign for the coffee shop - that he was already a little bit in love with Roo.
It was stupid, of course. In fairytale terms, Fee would be the Cinderella of the story. Horrifically low class, just an unbelievable untamed mess with no fairy godmother for help. He was more like Tarzan, really. He caught his reflection in the window of a flower shop and thought that even Tarzan had a cleaner shave than he did. Most boys he’d been with didn’t care, they looked worse. Most girls he’d been with didn’t care either, because they were every inch as high as he was. But Roo would care. Appearances mattered to people like Roo.
Fee had showered at the gym by the shelter this morning. He was wearing his best clothes, although they were a bit ratty, but no holes in them or anything, and they were clean. He tried to fix the mess of curls on his way, looking into shop windows, but at the last one, he looked past his reflection and saw the boy he’d come here for.
It had to be Roo. The boy was sitting up painfully straight in his seat, looking frantically around for something, or someone. He was dressed absolutely perfectly, from what Fee could see from out here. A ruffle? Some glitter? Or velvet, maybe? Who knew, but it was beautiful, and it made Fee smile for the first time all day. The anxiety washed away and pure excitement was left in its place.
He rushes into the cafe, causing the little bell above the door to jingle entirely too loudly, and everyone is looking in Fee’s general direction, but he doesn’t notice at all because all he sees is Roo. He walks over in what feels like slow motion, taking him in. The eyes he’d been longing to look into since their first messages online. The mouth he’d used to speak poetically to Fee about art and about life and about nothing and everything. He was smiling, which was unexpected - he didn’t come across as a big smiler on the phone - and he was absolutely, incomprehensibly perfect.
Roo makes a quip about Fee’s height, and now Fee can’t stop smiling either. If people are still staring, they could be thinking all sorts of things about these two bumbling idiot boys smiling without saying much, but whatever they thought, it didn’t matter. Fee didn’t even think he possessed the ability to think right now. His heart was doing everything entirely on its own.
His heart temporarily took control of the muscles used to sit down, and to smile, and to blush, and to take Roo’s outstretched hand. He was meant to shake it, he knew that (his brain was in there somewhere) but the heart just wanted to take it and run. And just never let go.
This was insane. They’d just met today.
They’d known each other in a million lifetimes, sure, and there were the weeks of talking online and on the phone, but they’d just met. Just now. And Fee had to bite his tongue to keep from saying something far too soon.
“Hi,” he said, finally. “I’m Felix. It’s good to meet you, Roo.”
Understatement of the century.
“Have you been here long? Has your tea gone cold? Was I late? Did you bring a book?”
