red right hand [liam]

"Of course not!” Liam replied hurriedly. “Fuck.” Some part of him would’ve liked to jump at the chance, of course, to gloat about Oliver’s lips and thighs and stomach tattoo, but not to someone who wouldn’t understand. Not to someone who looked as disgusted at the thought as Charlie. “There’s no need to strain yourself,” said Liam, staring across at his friend’s uncomfortable face. “Merlin’s sake. I’m just saying—why on Earth would you care what he’s like?”

The fear that his friends would find him too repulsive to stand by had been irrational; Liam had known that the whole time. But the fear that they would treat him differently had been all too justified. “C’mon, mate,” he said softly. “I’m not, like…” He wasn’t sure what exactly he wasn’t, still wasn’t educated enough to know. But he was no different, culturally. He had no desire to be. “I’m still, y’know—me, and shit.”

Liam fidgeted with his glass, nudging it in a circle with his fingers. “”We’re not a couple or anything, alright?” he said. “I like him like he’s my mate. That’s what I meant.” He shrugged, doing his best to project some kind of nonchalance about it all that he wished he possessed. Like Ollie, but less romantic… Like the manner Ioan had had. A flippant little explanation the older man had once given him crossed Liam’s mind. “That’s what it all is, really,” he said with another shrug—was that too many shrugs? “Being mates, except—y’know—he’s fit and gets me off.”

He shifted awkwardly on the bar seat, eyes well averted. If he didn't want Charlie to treat him differently, he couldn't let on how different this was.

Charlie, meaning well, said he wouldn’t tell Sam, but Liam groaned deeply and rolled his eyes. “That mean I have to do this again?” He didn’t like the thought of keeping this a secret from just Sam. They were a team, the three of them--just  because Charlie was his primary confidant didn’t mean Liam felt comfortable leaving him his only one. But the thought of Sam offering to listen to play-by-plays of his homosexual encounters was utterly intolerable.

He’d cross that bridge when he came to it. Probably.

“What?” Liam shook his head. “No, I knew him before. We just went down there for the show. And I mean, well—” He laughed weakly, an awkward heavy exhale. “Maybe to show off a bit, you know how it is.” He hadn’t wanted to draw this conversation out any longer than he had to, but he and Charlie hadn’t talked like this in a while. If anyone understood the ins and outs of trying to get laid as a celebrity, it was the man across from him. Liam had drunk too much now to resist a chat with his best mate.

“Right, good. I mean not—” he picked up his glass; sighed, “you know what I mean,” he finished weakly, taking a swallow. He shook his head, shrugged, held a hand out openly – all at once in his urgency to appear cool with everything. “I dunno, it’s normal to ask about a bird, innit?” he said, his voice a little higher, defensively. “I just meant,” he paused. “Nevermind, I don’t know what I meant.” He didn’t know what he wanted to know about Oliver. All the usual things he’d be interested in – physical attributes, namely -- were of markedly less interest when it was about a bloke. Well, so he’d say to Liam, anyway.

Charlie cleared his throat softly. “Yeah, I know.” He met Liam’s eye and felt guilty for already treating him differently, even without meaning to. “I know, I’m sorry it’s just – fuck, mate, it’s a lot to just... ” take in. He exhaled slowly. “Half hour ago you were up to your neck in,” he inclined his head in the direction of the waitress as she walked past. “I need a minute to wrap my head around it, you know?”

Charlie kept his eyes on Liam. They weren’t a couple – but if he wasn’t fucking anyone else (male or female) mightn’t they as well be? He’s fit and gets me off. Charlie lifted his gaze from where it had briefly fell to the table back up to Liam’s face. “Right.” He cleared his throat again, tugged absently at the collar of his t-shirt as he sat upright. “Fair enough,” he said.

Liam seemed unimpressed by Charlie’s offer of secrecy – he momentarily considered that maybe offering to keep his best friend’s newly revealed sexual preferences a secret was offensive, somehow, too. “Well,” he began, “I can’t really tell him, mate.” The potential was there for Sam to think it was all a joke, or that Charlie was getting one over on Liam in some way. “You know you don’t… you don’t have to tell anyone, right? Like if you’re not bothered just, do what you want. It’ll come out in ‘wash. If you don’t want it to be a big deal.” Unseemly as it was that Liam would ever want anything about himself to not be a big deal.

Before. Charlie attempted to quickly work out how many weeks that was now, but gave up quickly in favour of focusing on what Liam was actually telling him. Charlie smiled, finally, his lips curling up at one corner of his mouth. “Been a while since I’ve shown off,” he said to appease his friend, preferring to keep this more upbeat camaraderie going now they’d dipped a toe back into it. Charlie had never been the type to take anyone he was ‘showing off’ to back to his in the first place; he preferred to keep his home as his – with a few notable exceptions. Hotel rooms were his No Man’s Land – safe from behind enemy lines, and from letting anyone too close before they’d earned it.

“So he— Oliver, he like LA? Or did he even get to see any of it?" Charlie smirked.

“Sorry,” mumbled Liam. He had a feeling he’d have been defensive no matter what Charlie did. He’d spent ages cultivating this big secret, building this up into a whole thing in his mind, that he felt it ought to be a struggle to be honest, somehow. If it was easy, then what had he been doing this for all these years? “Thanks for, y’know, trying and shite,” he said. “I know it’s—” He appropriated Charlie’s description. “A lot.”

Just seeing Charlie make an honest effort truly meant more than he could say. If they weren’t separated by the booth table and having a discussion about the weirdness of male-on-male intimacy, Liam might have given him a hug.

“Worth noting I didn’t exactly tell you by choice,” he said with a sharp look, and then a chuckle. Merlin, they were both so fucking stupid. Looking down into his whiskey, he considered Charlie’s advice anyway. A nice thought. But… “Doesn’t it matter, though?” Liam shrugged. “If I start snogging men in public, people’ll have questions.”

He felt a little stupid at once that he’d said this to Charlie—his friend had always been more steadfast about refusing comment than Liam had. “Guess I’ve just got to learn to tell the Prophet to leave me alone,” he said. “Or just—draw their own conclusions with that, I s’pose.” He indicated the waitress. “Hell, maybe this bird’s an undercover reporter for Witch Weekly and it’ll all be over tomorrow.” The thought of that was peaceful, somehow. Liam thought he’d put up with anything as long as it was out of his hands.

He finished his drink. That was as close to letting things go as he got.

Liam rolled his eyes as Charlie reminded him he was married, and he prepared to shut up, but Charlie seemed to have an interest in the topic anyway. Or, at least, in teasing him. “Fuck off,” Liam muttered good-naturedly, with a feeling he’d turned a little pink. “He saw enough.” He pondered the rest of the question—how to explain Ollie to his friend, without letting on that he was around Kate’s age. Charlie would never let him live that down. Theoretically it would come out sometime, but Liam felt compelled to believe it was possible it never would.

“We were around,” he said eventually. “He’s sort of in awe of all the, y’know, celebrity stuff. Fun to watch. Got these big ol’ eyes.” He laughed softly, flicking his eyes at the ceiling. “Hufflepuff.”

Liam apologising – for anything, let alone for this – was jarring enough that Charlie immediately waved him off. “Don’t, mate— I know.” He didn’t, but he thought he could imagine what this was for the man across from him. Suddenly all of the extravagant stories and wily tales made sense – not logical sense, of course, but it struck Charlie that perhaps Liam had known how he felt for a lot longer than a few weeks and had been laying false breadcrumbs for, possibly, their entire friendship. Charlie’s first instinct was to be pissed off, if that was indeed the case, but immediately following that anger came another emotion: guilt. Liam had hid this – whether it was for weeks, months or years – and hadn’t felt comfortable even telling him or Sam. What sort of shitty friends were they if he didn’t feel like he could tell them?
 
Charlie grinned lopsidedly, trying to push his conscience aside temporarily in favour of keeping Liam’s coming out a positive experience. “Don’t thank me yet,” he teased. “I’ve put up with you giving me shit for a decade, you think I’m letting you off easy?” In another parallel train of thought, Charlie was trying to work out any and every instance where Liam had seemed… off; overcompensating (daily occurrence) or exaggerating (also almost a daily occurrence). It was no use – he wouldn’t be able to pinpoint a moment in time where it had been obvious, nor should he. People didn’t just turn gay suddenly, he knew that. Liam had felt this way from the beginning, whether he’d been conscious of it or not.

Charlie met Liam’s gaze and his expression fell momentarily, before the older man relaxed and allowed Charlie to do the same. He shrugged. “I dunno, does it?” Charlie drank, cut himself off halfway through a swallow; “I snog women in public and it ends up in t’ papers,” he countered, mostly joking – he knew it was different. If he was seen pashing a bloke he’d keep the Prophet in circulation for another year, most likely.

Charlie had been on the precipice of saying If they have questions, fuck ‘em when Liam continued with his stream of consciousness. “Leave you alone? Tell them to get fucked. They’re gonna write whatever they want no matter if you give them the story or not.” Charlie had learnt that the hard way – he’d tried to play ball early on and it had bit him in the backside, and from that moment had resolved not to divulge anything he didn’t want to see in bold print. Liam and Sam had both had their fair share of press attention too but Charlie had always been the golden ticket in the band – he had never stopped to consider that this was perhaps as much down to his life choices as it was his position as frontman.

“Honestly, mate, if you don’t want to fucking announce it, don’t. You don’t owe them anything.” He rolled his glass in his hand, watching the liquid swirl. He circled back to Liam’s earlier question and paraphrased it back at him: “Does it matter to you? What do you want?” He paused. “What does Oliver want?” he asked, more quietly – vaguely aware of what an up-and-comer could have to gain from this, and what Liam could have to lose.

Charle knocked his glass back then topped them both up to save himself from casting any doubts in Liam’s thoughts.

The Yorkshireman smirked, his dark eyes lit up. “Enough of what, LA or you?” He grinned, then laughed. “Is he really? Christ.” It was novel, this. Liam acting this way. Somehow it fit, in Charlie's mind, that he had never been this way about a woman, if he'd never felt what it was he was feeling now – something Charlie had felt time and time again, only for it to slip away. Charlie frowned softly, glass held near his mouth.

“Was he above or below us?” he asked, trying to recall any Oliver’s they knew (other than Oliver Wood, who was, firstly, a Gryffindor and, secondly, the last person on earth – man or woman – Charlie could picture Liam wanting to shag). 

Whenever Charlie paused, Liam’s nerves tensed, and he was looking contemplative now for far longer than Liam’s liking. He shifted again on the bench and tried to put it out of his mind. No one could blame Charlie for not knowing how to take this, of course. Liam felt like he’d told Charlie a lot of contradictory things about how he felt about it all, and for that matter, had a lot of contradictory feelings. He wanted to still be himself. He wanted it desperately, feverishly—but then he’d felt himself going on about his boyfriend’s eyes.

Or his, y’know, whatever’s.

“Whatever, mate.” Liam inspected his empty glass, past feeling stupid and now all the way to ashamed. He’d always thought of himself as confident. But this? Charlie’s nonchalance felt loomingly unattainable. “What people think might not matter to you, right,” he said, “but I dunno. It matters to me.” 

Charlie asked then what Ollie thought, which made Liam feel like even more of a shithead when he didn’t have an answer. “We haven’t really talked about it,” he admitted. He could imagine that was no surprise. “I mean, he knows not to tell anyone, but I don’t think he’s got the same…” Liam gestured vaguely and shrugged. Sometimes whiskey made the words flow easier, sometimes it got him stuck. “He’s a bit more, y’know...” Out? That time it was the term, he knew—but it still didn’t feel like he had clearance to use it.

He rolled his eyes through Charlie’s amusement until he asked a real question. “Dunno, below somewhere,” said Liam casually. He scoffed at once. “What, you planning to ask all your friends? See who knows Ollie Rigby?” Liam had done exactly that loads of times, of course. Everyone was a friend of a friend in a community as small as theirs. He was going to make fun of it now, though. If there was any lover of his he could fault Charlie for taking a nosy interest in, it was the man.

His drink had been refilled. Liam picked it back up. They’d been downing glasses on end for almost half an hour now, but Liam sort of fancied not remembering this. Maybe he could get Charlie to black out? It was an option if he made any more of a fool of himself.

Charlie laughed, a little unsympathetically. Did Liam really think what was written in the press about him didn’t bother him in some way? Even if it didn’t affect Charlie personally, it tended to affect the people he cared about and that was enough for it to be a pain in his backside. “It does matter to me,” he admitted, “but if I think about it too much I’d never do anything, and if I give them an inch they take a mile, so I can’t win anyway. It’s better if I just try and ignore it, you know?” Kate had struggled with it in the beginning, particularly when Charlie still hadn’t confirmed they were an item, and then, when he had.

Charlie stared at Liam, biting his tongue metaphorically if not literally. They hadn’t talked about it, but he knew not to tell anyone. Why did that sound so bloody familiar? Charlie dropped his gaze to sip at his whiskey.“A bit more…?” he repeated, then; “Oh, right.” He nodded. He thought he caught Liam’s drift. “Maybe you should talk about it, then,” he offered. “Speaking from experience,” he added, sitting up a little straighter in his seat and running his fingers through his hair. Not that Liam had ever been one for taking advice (he was more suited to being an imparter of wisdom), but maybe, now, he would.

He scoffed. “Yeah, that’s exactly what I was gonna do,” he joked. “Nah, was just wondering.” He paused. “Making conversation, better than asking what he’s like in bed,” he smirked softly, harking back to all of a few minutes ago when Charlie had stumbled blindly into asking his newly-out (to him, at least) best friend what his boyfriend (he was his boyfriend, wasn’t he?) was like. “Normally would, you know,” he said, tentatively; it was the first topic of discussion when it was about women they were ‘seeing’ (sleeping with), but Charlie was sort of grateful that Liam hadn’t given him details of however good Oliver -- Ollie -- was. Sort of curious, too, he supposed.

Charlie picked up his glass again and took another large swallow. Lowering it to the table a sly grin spread across his lips, eyes lit up. “You up for a big night then? Can finally keep the girls to meself now that I know you’re not in the market.”


OUT

“Yeah, sure, maybe,” Liam mumbled vaguely. “Don’t need to make it easy for ‘em, though.”

Charlie advised he and Ollie ought to have a talk. “Eugh,” muttered Liam, making a face into his glass. Like fuck they were going to talk about it. He found, in part, that the unspoken understandings were something he liked more about men in the first place. Liam talked a lot, he knew—but he’d never been good at it. Not about this, at any rate.

“You’ve got experience?” he replied instead, with a snotty little smirk.

Making conversation. “Oh, yeah, I know, obviously,” said Liam with a matter-of-fact nod. “Sorry I’ve gone and ruined the best bit, mate.” After a long sip, he inclined his glass toward Charlie “Maybe if you get me drunker I’ll still tell you.” He chuckled. “Hell, maybe if you get drunker you’ll want to hear.” He finished off his drink and shrugged airily. “Never know what you’re missing, y’know.”

He picked up the bottle and sloppily filled both their glasses again. “Of course I’m in.”  Liam reached across to twist Charlie’s wedding ring. “If girls still look at you with this fucking thing on, that is.”