I was wondering why Phil giving Dan head pats in post-HL videos (especially when reassuring him) felt so familiar…🤔
and I realised… it’s because of Phil’s solo part during TIT — specifically when he talks about Dan expressing how he needed a mental health break and in turn how Phil was ‘of course very supportive’ towards Dan at this time. As Phil says ‘ok buddy’ here, he mimes basically the same head patting gesture as above… 🥹
It’s now so easy to assume… or just 🥰 imagine 🥰 back then (pre-interactive introverts?) a guilt-ridden Dan talking about needing his break from everything… only to be met with Phil in return not hesitating to be there for Dan, through of course comfort and support —but also through much needed reassuring head pats 🫂❤️🩹✨
“Do y’fold knickers?” Sitting on the living room floor, Liam holds up a clean pair from the laundry basket, tilting his head and narrowing his eyes as though he’s studying a piece of abstract art; like that time he’d accompanied you to an art museum for your birthday, and nearly got kicked out for munching too loudly on the packet of crisps he’d tucked into his coat pocket to keep him occupied through all the oil paintings.
“I hate that advert.” You say, nodding towards the television and waiting for him to commentate too, in the way Noel had once compared to two old ladies gossiping in an old people’s home, though Liam’s too busy sorting through clothes to notice. Within the first week of living together, you’d both been designated different weeks for different chores, and Liam had defied all odds by being a good flatmate and sticking to it.
“Quit being deaf.” If you weren’t covered in the duvet you’d lugged in from your room for the extra warmth, Liam would’ve dug his fingertips into the back of your knees where he knows you're especially ticklish, uncaring that it’s usually a surefire way to earn himself a smack against the arm; the other day at a coffee shop, you’d worn a skirt and he’d done it under the table, making you spill the last of your cappuccino all over the floor. “Gonna wear these on your date, yeah?”
“Shut up.” The teasing comment gets your attention, and your hand reaches out to grab the faded pair from his grip. Even under the low light of the television, he can still make out your disgruntled expression, with your eyebrows furrowed and a blob of spot cream still sitting by your chin; there's a matching patch of it on Liam's own forehead from where he’d stood at your bedroom door earlier begging for that ‘weird magic cream’, annoyed that a rare blemish had appeared after years of being spoiled with clear skin. “Mind your business.”
“Wear your pink ones.” Liam shrugs, giving his unsolicited advice since you always seem to ask for it when you have a date coming up; suddenly insisting he could dissect the true meaning behind the voicemails left on the answering machine by your ‘boyfriend-not-boyfriend’ because he had the advantage of ‘speaking boy’, unlike the majority of your other friends who were girls in serious long-term relationships who were now looking to move in with their sensible boyfriends.
“Vague.” Dipping your hand into the packet of sweets you’d bought on your way home from work, you scoff. Though you’d both adopted each other's mannerisms and vocabulary from being around one another so much, you still had to remind Liam that it didn’t mean you could also read his mind, and that he actually had to explain what he was talking about instead of automatically assuming you were on the same page.
“The frilly ones.” They’d been burnt into his brain from the moment your summer dress had blown up at the park, when he’d graciously spent most of the afternoon holding the hem down whenever you bent over to wipe the grass off your knees; the image of the pink cotton stretched over your backside would pop up at the worst times, like a recurring intrusive thought that never failed to make him shift in his seat. “The ones with lace, or whatever it’s fuckin’ called.”
“Yeah, it’s lace. Here, have the last red one.” Unbothered by the conversation, you hold the sweet out for Liam to grab it between his teeth. Though he’d only mentioned it once in passing when you first started living together for the sake of making small talk, you never failed to remember that the red and purple sweets were his favourites, and ever since, you’d formed the habit of saving them just for him.
wednesday
Liam knows it could be considered strange, and that the average person might feel some sense of humiliation or guilt about doing such a thing, though in his mind, it just seemed like the next logical step. He’d compartmentalised it as a sort of natural progression, inevitable considering your shared closeness, so logically, at least in Liam’s world, wanking to the thought of you wasn’t the most far-fetched idea.
It had all started so domestically, trudging into the bathroom and tutting at the cluttered mess you’d left, scanning over the products littering the countertop and kicking a pile of clothes out of the way; the outfit you’d presumably worn on your date sitting there like you’d melted and left it in your wake, with your knickers, the ones he’d suggested you wear, laying against the bathmat in all their pink glory.
At first, he doesn’t think twice about it and reaches for his toothbrush, putting all his energy into squeezing toothpaste from the tube because it had all solidified where he’d forgotten to put the cap on. While he’s brushing his gums, he finds himself looking again, noticing the way your slick has made the fabric a few shades darker, and though all he can taste is mint, he starts wondering what the material would feel like pressed up against his tongue.
Suddenly twitching in his trousers, and too exhausted to go through the rigmarole of being hard and trying to come, he quickly picks up the bottle of face wash sitting by the sink and tries to focus on reading the instructions for some semblance of a distraction. He goes over the same line again and again, something about stripping oil from pores, but all he can think about is the mess he’d make between your thighs; the filthy mixture of his saliva and your arousal that would coat his lips like that shiny lip gloss he sometimes sees you reapplying in the mirror.
Thudding the bottle down, Liam prematurely spits his toothpaste into the sink, running the water and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Then, like he was relieving an itch he’d been desperate to scratch, he leans down to pick them up off the floor. Although he’s sure it’s probably more his overactive imagination than anything else, he swears they still feel warm against his fingers, like how you always seem to radiate heat whenever he presses his face into your neck to fall asleep against your shoulder.
Bringing them up to his mouth, he experimentally grazes his teeth against the lace on the sides, biting down. He wonders if that would turn you on, if someone pulling your knickers down with their teeth would appear in the fantasies you probably conjure up while trying to get off; there’d been a handful of times when he’d heard your whimpers through the wall and tried to fall back asleep, ignoring your whines in favour of snoring with his cheek squished against the pillow.
He sighs, moving hastily to undo the button of his jeans and pull down the waistband of his boxers as though he had no other choice but to touch himself. Saliva still minty from the toothpaste, he collects some of it against the roof of his mouth and watches the glob of spit fall lewdly into the middle of his palm. An unintentional moan leaves the back of his throat, all guttural like it’d been sitting there in his chest forever: “Shit.”
Trying to multitask, he strokes himself and lets his tongue dart out, almost kissing the cotton material the same way he always pecks the top of your head when he says ‘thank you’. Truthfully, he could never imagine actually kissing you properly; that would seem like too far, though the thought of bending you over or falling asleep without pulling out filled him with an alarming sense of ease, as though it were just an extension of you both cuddling on the sofa or sitting on his knee when there were no more chairs left.
“So wet.” He mumbles out loud, to no one but himself and the bathroom tiles, as the line between fantasy and reality blurs with the pleasure: imagining your face scrunching up as he bottoms out, embarrassed by the filthy skin slapping noises as he reassures you that it’s just him, the same old Liam who skips and does roly-polys with you in the street when you’ve had to much to drink, and who had looked after when you were ill with the flu and had to vomit every twenty minutes.
Grabbing the side of the countertop to steady himself, his whimpers are muffled by your underwear being between his teeth and hanging from his mouth like a puppy that’s refusing to drop its favourite chew toy. It’s borderline shameful how quickly he’s finishing, thinking about coming all over your stomach and watching it drip down by your belly button. His chest heaves like he’s been running on a treadmill, and before he can stop it, he’s coming, and out of habit, he instinctively wipes the mess away with the nearest thing, this time it being your knickers.
“Ah, fuck.” Liam swears under his breath, staring at the sticky mess he’d made and suddenly wondering how on earth he’d be able to get the stains out without you growing suspicious. Illogically, his first thought is to look for the label; if he finds out where you’d bought them, surely he could go and get the exact same pair tomorrow to replace these, as if nothing had happened. Yet, despite his vigorous searching, he finds nothing. “Fuck sake.”
Hair still clinging to his sweaty forehead and with the zipper of his jeans still undone, Liam hurries to wash the material under the sink, trying to copy what he’d seen you do to try to get period stains out; hurriedly pumping the hand soap and rubbing the fabric together under cold water. Finally, he hooks them over the towel rail to dry, and for the first time in his life, Liam finds himself cursing the fact that he wasn’t doing the laundry two weeks in a row.
thursday
“Got one.” Grinning proudly like he’s holding up a gold medal on sports day, Liam displays the foil packaging between his thumb and index finger, letting his bedroom door fall shut behind him. In the morning, he’d add condoms to the long list of things he needed to buy when he next went to the supermarket, along with more of your favourite cereal because he’d finished the last of it that morning without asking.
“Thank god.” She sighs, looking up at him as though he were a hero from an old fairytale story returning from a long mission, when in fact, he’d just stomped into your bedroom and rummaged through your bedside drawer, shoving past the half-empty packets of ibuprofen and the vibrator you pretend you don’t own, before a box of them gleamed up at him like a prayer being answered.
“C’mere.” Crawling back onto his unmade bed, Liam pulls her in for another kiss. In the taxi on the way back from the pub, and while tumbling through the front door with all the grace of a baby elephant, Liam had tried to explain to her why he was a famous rockstar still living in a flat above a corner shop, though luckily, his nonsensical explanations were muffled by her tongue being in his mouth, smearing mauve lipstick all the way down his chin.
“You smell of shampoo.” She comments, and with his nose pressed up against her throat, he can feel the vibration of her words. Truthfully, they’d been in this exact same position from the moment they’d been introduced by a mutual friend, with an obligatory joke about the cliché of a model hooking up with a rockstar; Liam’s face had been buried by her ear, flirtatiously toying with her dangly earrings and kissing her neck until they decided to get a cab and go to his place. “It’s like coconut or something.”
“Stole my flatmates.” Resting his chin against the zipper of her denim skirt, he can feel her perfectly manicured nails digging into his scalp. To your face, Liam pretends as though he would never do such a thing as use your shampoo, or your body wash, or your expensive face cream, though you’d always counteract him with the fact that everything was mysteriously running out twice as fast, and that it certainly wasn’t the work of ‘ghosts’, like he would sometimes imply with a disinterested shrug.
“You’re so cute.” Though the compliment feels nice coming from someone who had been on the cover of at least three fashion magazines in the past month, it still feels hollow in comparison to the way you use the same phrase; hearing you utter it when you saw him with a face mask smeared all over his cheeks, or with his tongue poking out the side of his mouth in concentration when he was cutting up vegetables for dinner, always seemed undoubtedly sincere.
“Fuckin’ hell.” There, under the dim glow of his bedroom lamp, Liam feels like the universe is both working for and against him. Pulling up her designer skirt, he’s met with a pair of knickers that look eerily similar to ones that have been driving him borderline mad for the past forty-eight hours; if he really tried, he's sure he could almost convince himself they were exactly the same as yours, despite the shade of pink and the lace being slightly different. “Can you keep these on?”
“I mean, yeah. If you want to.” With her shiny hair spread out over his pillows, Liam finally recognises her from that famous swimsuit advert he’d seen in Times Square while the band were playing in New York; something he maybe would’ve realised earlier if he’d been concentrating properly, and not putting all his attention towards nibbling at her neck and silently wondering if it was too late to call the flat and ask if you’d changed your mind about not coming out to drink.
“Yeah, thanks.” Liam’s heart suddenly hammers twice as hard in his chest, and he feels himself practically drooling at the thought of pretending like this was you letting him put his head between your thighs. Already, he was anticipating how quickly he’d come at the thought of you, and the inevitable article that would probably end up in some gossipy newspaper about how he’d finished during foreplay, still clutching onto the abandoned condom and continuously moaning out the name of another girl.
u should think of tiny megu. To keep the stress at bay. You should draw him actually. Ooooo you wanna draw tiny megu getting the love he deserves so bad /j
