Disclaimer: Queer as Folk is not mine, it’s Showtime et al’s. I’m just borrowing them to play with.

On nights like tonight I lay rapt with the rise and fall of his chest, studying the harmony of his breath as it whistles between slightly parted lips. His beauty astounds me; it utterly astounds me. To be lying here next to him, cool now from the sweat evaporating on my still-tingling skin, is heaven.

And I think I’m losing him.

Of course, that presumes that I have him now, or I ever did, that he ever actually left the grasp of the Adonis he calls an ex-boyfriend. What better way to show a man the error of his ways than to give him a taste of the alternative?

He’s turned in his sleep and the whistle has become a snore. I don’t mind, the rhythm of it comforts me on nights when I can’t sleep. It drowns out the sounds of the city – car horns and slammed brakes, clanging pipes and the archaic furnace, barely audible curses as another relationship falls apart somewhere nearby. Justin, even more now than the music, takes these things away.

When I think of him and Brian together, it rips me apart. He owes Brian so much – Christ, he owes him his life – and he hasn’t let him forget it. He’ll be beholden to him forever for the tuition (he's a piss poor liar) and there’s bound to be a price. He says Brian never loved him but I know that’s not true. It emanates from him like heat from a candle whenever they’re in the same room. Besides, who wouldn’t love him? Who could help it? I can’t.

And what does he owe me? A few grand romantic gestures and the illustrious digs of a poverty-stricken busker. I don’t know that I’d have chosen as he did. But he says he loves me, and I know it to be true. He does. I know it.

I get up to close the window as the chill midnight wind is giving me goose bumps. When I turn back towards the bed he’s propped up on an elbow, watching me. I feel oddly self-conscious as I remember that I’m naked. I quickly return to my place beneath the blanket. “I’m sorry, did I wake you?”

“I don’t mind,” he replies in a voice thick with sleep. “You okay?”

I smile dismissively, hoping the dim light cast by the moon and the streetlamps will mask my distress. “Fine. I just got a chill and I didn’t want us to get sick, so I closed the window.” It works, apparently, as he returns his head to its burrow in the pillow.

“Goodnight,” he mutters.

“I love you,” I say, and he’s already asleep.

I stare up at the ceiling, the ticking of my alarm clock now dominating the sound of his breathing. Just as I close my eyes, I’m accosted by the screech of tires and the clash of metal, muffled through the fastened window. “I love you,” I whisper, and will myself to sleep.

end