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It made her a pretty easy act to follow.
He tried not to overthink his own song choice, ignoring the conversation Jordan and April had been having earlier about how your go-to karaoke song is even more telling than your zodiac sign, and just went for the first pop song that came into his head. He tried not to look directly at Patrick as the song began, but felt his eyes on him, as warming as a spotlight.
“You think I’m pretty without any makeup on…”
They were under a dozen people in a hotel suite, but it was hard not to fall back into performing mode, and by the second half of the song Will was adding riffs and runs. As the final chorus dropped, so did he, right into a split. The crowd—all ten of them—went wild, and Will stayed on the floor as he finished the song, rolling around until he was entangled in the microphone cable and Patrick had to help him extricate himself.
“You’re unbelievable,” Patrick said, once they had moved aside to make room for Jordan and April’s “Elephant Love Medley.” “I stan you.”
“I should’ve stretched first!” Will groaned, rubbing a sore adductor. “Still. Far from my worst gig.”
“And here I am, without a single to tip you.”
“Oh, honey.” Will leaned in closer. “I want more than just the tip.”
“Harlot.”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
“I’m starting to get a pretty good idea.” Patrick pulled him closer. “I’m low-key obsessed.”
“Careful,” Will whispered. “You’re starting to talk like a little F-word.”
“You’re a bad influence. I’m clearly spending too much time with you.”
“Not much time left now,” said Will, focusing all of his attention on a wisp of fluff that had drifted onto Patrick’s shirt. “Two more weeks, right?”
Patrick’s expression sobered. “Yeah,” he said. “Will, I—”
“Let’s not talk about it.” Will forced a smile. “I don’t want to think about you leaving just yet. This is a party. Let’s just enjoy each other for as long as you’re still here, OK?”
Patrick returned the smile. “Deal,” he said. “But how about we ditch these guys and have a party of our own? Say, in my room?”
Will’s grin broadened. “Race you there,” he said.
* * *
•••••••••
Sneaking around wasn’t so bad, Will thought. It was actually kind of fun, like the two of them were playing some kind of game against the rest of the world and only they understood the rules. For the last week of filming, Patrick procured a key card from the hotel staff that granted Will access to the building from the rear—he was proud of himself for only making one crass joke to that effect—and use of the staff lift, enabling him to reach Patrick’s room with little to no interference. When Will raised the idea that this was a pretty big breach in hotel security, Patrick had simply shrugged and said, “People don’t like to say no to me.” Will had thought this an uncharacteristically arrogant thing for him to say. He also found it incredibly hot.
Evading the paparazzi had also become a lot easier now that they had willing accomplices. Corey was a game enough ally: If he wore a large pair of aviators and smoothed his scruffy hair into a side parting, his resemblance to Patrick went from passing to, well, passing. He was more than happy to play decoy for them, donning his Patrick drag and going for public walks around the Jewellery Quarter and Brindley Place, stopping for dumplings in Chinatown, tailed by photographers like he was in a really low-stakes spy thriller.
Once they’d succeeded in their subterfuge, though, Will and Patrick enjoyed relative freedom. The search for the Omega Issue had been called off without either of them actually saying as much, almost as if they both accepted it had only ever been a pretext that they no longer required. Instead they hunted for time: gaps in Patrick’s schedule where they could steal half an hour together, nights when Grace wouldn’t be missed from the Village and Will could use his misappropriated key card. He feigned illness to Faye to get out of a story hour and eat craft services in Patrick’s trailer between takes. Skipped movie night with Jordan and April so he could be waiting in Patrick’s room when he finished a night shoot. The end of production loomed ever closer, and Will’s old life would still be waiting for him when his time with Patrick inevitably came to a close.
Will never ceased to be surprised by how completely ordinary their time together felt. At some point when he wasn’t paying attention, he had stopped being quite so dazzled by Patrick’s good looks, and that awe had been replaced by something else, sublimated into a kind of loving familiarity. He smiled at the very thought of Patrick’s face, not just because it was so pleasing to look at, but because of the way he jutted out his bottom lip when he was trying to be cute, for the intensity of those blue eyes when he was really listening, because now he knew the real man in all his complexity, and that goodness shone brightly through the surface, only making him even more handsome. It was like Will’s affection had painted Patrick in newer, richer colors, and that in being so seen and known, he opened up even more, a flower in full sun.
Now Will’s favorite pastime was charting the parts of Patrick that the rest of the world didn’t see. There was a smattering of freckles across Patrick’s shoulders that he hadn’t immediately noticed but that he was now obsessed with. He liked to trace over them with his fingers in those moments before sleep. He wondered if he were to take a Sharpie and play connect-the-dots what kind of constellations he might make, what kaleidoscopic patterns would dance out across his lover’s skin.
On one such night, fingers tiptoeing from one freckle to another, Will whispered: “Tell me something the magazines don’t know.”
Patrick grunted, an amused kind of hum, which Will had recently learned meant he was on the edge of sleep. He was silent again for long enough that Will assumed he had drifted off, then said: “I used to have a stutter.”
Will didn’t reply, his fingertips’ continued exploration of Patrick’s freckles confirmation enough that he was listening.
“Not a terrible one,” Patrick continued. “I mean, I could make it to the end of a sentence fine. But the way I’d trip over certain words, get all flustered and short of breath, made everything I said sound like a question. My dad hated it. A perfectly natural speech impediment, but I knew he thought it meant something more. About me. Or maybe about him, and the kind of son he’d produced.”
“So what changed?” Will asked.
