“Lucky me,” he nods, fishing his keys from his pocket and lifting them in surrender, waving them like a white flag. The metal glints under the sunlight as he smiles, tired and soft around the edges. “Let’s get you washed.”
Following Wyatt upstairs feels like stepping into a time capsule.
The railing has a chipped patch of paint where Eric can envision catching his sleeve and cursing under his breath. The hallway light flickers before settling into its dull, yellow glow. It’s disorienting, moving through a space seems to hold so many versions of himself—what he had been, what he had wanted to be, what he never quite managed to become.
They didn’t make out against that specific door, but if Eric concentrates, he can see it anyway. Their silhouettes tangled against the wood, mouths crashing together between bursts of laughter, hands everywhere and nowhere at once, fumbling for friction, for keys, for excuses to keep touching. It had always been like that with Wyatt.
The apartment is another problem entirely.
He remembers a different flat. Smaller. Windows also perpetually open, curtains fluttering like they were trying to escape. Mismatched furniture scavenged from secondhand shops and generous friends. Cups that never matched, plates with chipped edges, a couch that sagged permanently in the middle.
He remembers how none of that had mattered.
He remembers thinking, with terrifying certainty, that he wouldn’t mind spending the rest of his life drinking from the wrong mug if it meant coming home to Wyatt after every shift. He’d carried that certainty like a talisman, convinced himself it was unbreakable.
He also remembers the exact moment it shattered. Ripped out at the root.
Eric knows there will never be a right time. There never was. There never will be. Their lives have always been a series of almosts and too-lates and maybes that collapsed under their own weight. Still, he is content—if that’s the right word—with the knowledge that, once, in a finite moment, he had been held by Wyatt like nothing else in the world mattered. That, once, they had hidden together from the future and called it love. That, once, he had his happily ever after.
He clings to that memory until he can crush the dangerous thought that maybe those feelings are still alive, crawling just beneath the surface, refusing to die.
"What's mine's yours," Wyatt says with such sincerity thar Eric can’t bring himself to call him foolish too.
Two dogs chewing the same old bone until their teeth fall out.
“We both know I can’t be still for over ten seconds,” Eric replies lightly, forcing motion into his body before his thoughts can trap him. He wanders into the kitchen, touching things he hasn’t earned the right to touch anymore. Cabinets. Counters. Memories. He finds an apron and ties it over his scrubs. Too tight. Then too loose. Shit. He should’ve changed clothes. He definitely should’ve thought this through. “At least this way I can help you out. Meal prep and all that jazz.”
A twitch of Wyatt’s hand. A small, fond smile. Eric feels his jaw clenching until it hurts. He should’ve kept his distance.
"Whatever the doctor orders."
Eric is still staring like an idiot.
It’s that carefully teasing smile, the kind that feels like plausible deniability you could tug between your teeth.
It takes several long, humiliating seconds before Wyatt finally disappears into the bathroom. Only then Eric blows out a harsh breath, sighing as he leans forward on the counter, gripping the edge, trying to collect himself. He needs to be grateful for the moments he gets. He needs to be present. He needs to stop catastrophizing every interaction like it’s the prelude to emotional ruin, because he doesn’t know when this whole thing will come crashing down around him.
The doctor will prescribe himself a “chill the fuck out” pill.
His gaze drifts across the apartment, tracing the layout like a map. The place feels like a hug, if he’s honest. He knows scientific evidence suggests that scent is the strongest, most vivid, and most emotional trigger for memory among all human senses. Unlike other senses, olfactory signals bypass the thalamus and travel directly to the brain's amygdala and hippocampus, which are responsible for processing emotion and memory. Nostalgia and pain, all bundled together.
If Eric happens to have a pine cologne back at home, tucked away in the bottom of his drawer, it’s nobody’s business but his own.
He takes Wyatt’s coat from the back of a chair and, before he can overthink it, brings it to his face and inhales. Maybe he should ask Wyatt about it. He liked the cologne, fabric softener or whatever brought that smell. He tells himself it’s normal. People like familiar smells. It’s human. It’s fine. He remembers falling asleep in Wyatt’s shirts once, wrapped up like a caterpillar in a cocoon, convinced nothing bad could touch him there.
Maybe insomnia is a good enough excuse to revisit that.
He sets the coat down and turns to cooking before he can spiral further. Wyatt had taken a good beating, so he needs to rest. Eric busies himself, chopping vegetables with surgical precision, seasoning meat, stirring sauces. Tastes, adjusts, tastes again. Makes a mental list of spices Wyatt desperately needs. How did the British colonize half the planet for seasoning and then use none of it? Absolute skill issue.
He hums Careless Whisper under his breath for an embarrassingly long time. Containers stack up. Freezer fills. Dishes pile, then disappear under his hands. Dinner simmers on the stove. Then the bathroom door creaks open and the smell of soap floods the place. Eric feels like he can taste it in the back of his mouth.
Water dripped from Wyatt’s hair, tracing lazy paths down his neck, catching briefly in the hollow of his collarbone before disappearing beneath the line of his hips. His skin glowed faintly from the heat of the shower, flushed and alive, like he’d been freshly assembled just to ruin Eric’s evening. A towel was slung low around his hips, precarious in a way that suggested it had been secured with nothing but optimism and prayer.
“Do you need any help? The food will be ready quickly,” was the sentence Eric meant to say, the polite, socially acceptable sentence that existed clearly in his brain right up until the exact moment Wyatt walked out of the bathroom looking like a Greek statue carved by someone with very personal opinions about shoulders.
“D’you need a quickie?” is the stupid reply he blurted out, covering his mouth in the same second. Great. Fantastic. At this point, should he just go all in? Confess to sniffing Wyatt’s coat like a deranged bloodhound earlier that evening? Admit that he’s been thinking about that lovely crooked smile for years now? Or maybe he should save that for dessert to really round out the humiliation with a dramatic three-course reveal.
“No, sorry. No. I mean—” He drops his hand and starts gesturing wildly, like his arms might physically grab the words and shove them back inside his mouth. “I meant to mean that the food will be… y’know. Cooked. Yes. Cooked. In a sex— sec! In a second.”
Eric briefly wonders if embarrassment can actually kill a person. Because if so, he’s living on borrowed time. He feels overheated, like someone’s cranked his internal thermostat to “surface of the sun.” The windows are wide open, cold air flooding the kitchen, and it does absolutely nothing. His shirt clings damply to his back, fabric sticking to skin, making him painfully aware of his own body. It's weird. And mildly concerning. Is this a thing? Does being in love come with somatic symptoms? Excessive sweating? Dizziness? A sensation suspiciously similar to imminent death? He tries to remember if he’s ever read about it. His brain, however, is currently soup. If this is love, it’s wildly inefficient and deeply hostile to human survival.
Eric really needs a glass of water. Or some essential oils. Or a lobotomy.
“I hate to limit your freedom in your own home,” he says, words tumbling out with strained politeness, “but would you mind getting dressed? I can’t quite think when you’re…”
Naked? Dripping over the floorboards? In front of me?
Maybe he isn't in love with Wyatt. Maybe, it made more sense that he’d been having the world’s longest, slowest heart attack this entire time. Eric might actually have a better chance of survival if that's the case.
“It was a slip of the tongue,” he adds quickly, staring very hard at the pot in front of him. “English is a stupid language and it’s not even my first.”
He turns back to the stove, clinging desperately to the safety of the apron and the blessed anonymity of facing away. He squeezes his eyes shut, as if that might erase the mental images currently staging a hostile takeover of his brain.
That was probably the worst part.
Eric had always had a creative mind. It was useful for diagnostics, for problem-solving, for noticing patterns other people missed, for making sure no one would notice features mixed to the point of incoherence inside his mind. Unfortunately, it was also extremely good at filling in gaps. When it comes to Wyatt, it does this with brutal efficiency, recalling the heat of his skin under Eric’s palms, mapping corded muscle, tracing scars and moles down to Eric’s prize. Every detail filed away, catalogued, impossible to forget.
Memory has always been a hit man, barrel of the gun warm against Eric’s temple, whispering: bring back the dead.
Ten years ago, this full 1950s-housewife spiral would’ve been rewarded with Wyatt pinning him against this exact counter, breath hot in his ear, hands everywhere, which is profoundly unhelpful information to recall right now. Wyatt is not even fully undressed. And even if he were, Eric is a fucking doctor, for crying out loud! He saw more naked people in a week than most people saw in their entire lives. Old people. Sick people. People in various stages of undignified distress.
“I’ve made you food for a week,” he blurts, stirring the pot just to give his hands something to do. “It’s in the freezer. Labeled. You need spices.” He clears his throat. “And rest. Doctor’s orders.”
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