Track Seven: “Waffle House”

Alfie woke slowly, and for a while did not open his eyes, because there was no reason on any world to.

The balcony doors were still open from the night before. The sea air moved through the room, cool and salted, and it should have been cold against bare skin, except that Jordan was curled warm against his side, head on Alfie’s shoulder, one arm slung across his chest and a leg thrown over both of his, the two of them tangled together exactly as they had fallen asleep, slow breath against the side of Alfie’s neck. Alfie lay on his back in the warm dark of it and counted, the way he did most mornings now, how many mornings were left before final year and posting and the long uncertainty of everything after, and then, the way he did most mornings, stopped counting.

“You’re awake,” Jordan mumbled, not awake.

“So are you.”

“Only technically.” The arm tightened. Jordan pressed his face against Alfie’s chest and kissed it, light and half-asleep. “We’re not moving. It’s a rule. I’ve made it a rule.”

“You can’t just make rules. You’re not the captain.”

“I made the stateroom rule and look how that went.”

Jordan lifted his head, and shifted, and drew himself up and over until he was lying full length on top of him, the whole warm naked weight of him settling in like something that belonged there, face to face at last with the man he was going to marry. Alfie got his arms round him and held on. The light came up gold through the curtains. Jordan’s eyes were still shut. He was smiling anyway.

Then he started kissing him. A slow one to the middle of Alfie’s chest, and another to the ridge of his collarbone, and one to the side of his neck that made Alfie’s breath go, and then his cheek, and the corner of his jaw, working his unhurried way up until he reached Alfie’s mouth and stayed there.

“Morning,” Alfie said, when he could.

“Morning.” Jordan kissed him again, deeper, and settled in, and for a while there was nothing in the room but the sea air and the two of them waking each other up properly.

Alfie surfaced some minutes later with a thought.

“Are you honestly alright with this?” he asked, against Jordan’s mouth. “Me being gone most of the day. It’s our holiday, and I’m spending a chunk of it walking into the sea with my brothers, and you’ll be here on your own, and I don’t want you thinking I’d rather—”

“Alfie.”

“—because I wouldn’t, it’s just that Theo’s got this thing he needs to get out and it has to be the three of us, and I keep thinking about you sat by a pool while I—”

“Alfie.” Jordan pulled back and looked at him, one eyebrow up. “I love you. Enormously. And right now, in this bed, with your leg where it is and your hand where it is, I did not want a conversation about your brother. I wanted a completely different kind of morning, and you have talked straight over the top of it.”

“I’m checking in. It’s healthy for our relationship. Counsellor Parker says—”

“I don’t want to hear what Counsellor Parker says either.” Jordan kissed him to stop the sentence, then drew back. “Stop talking. Please. I’m trying to get into a delicate frame of mind, and every time you open your mouth I have to start again.”

“So I’m ruining the mood.”

“Yes.” Jordan didn’t even pause. “You’re a mood hazard, you always have been, and I am extremely worked up and running out of patience. So shut up. Shut up and let me enjoy that sexy body of yours in peace, before its owner abandons me for a mudflat.” His hand slid down Alfie’s back and settled low. “I have got you naked, in a huge bed, with soundproof walls, and all I want is to kiss every gorgeous inch of you until neither of us can think straight. And frankly it’s only fair, because you had your way with me last night, thoroughly, twice, and I did not hear you complaining then. So now it’s my turn. So please. I am begging you. Stop talking about your brother while I’m trying to do it.”

“You know what the problem is,” Alfie said, because he could not help himself. “You’re going to be lying here all day with nothing to do, thinking about the three of us out on that beach. Wet. Shirtless. Practically identical.” He grinned. “You’ll be picturing it. Admit it. Having a lovely little fantasy about Theo, or Henri, or, knowing you, both, and telling yourself it’s basically me anyway. The McCallister loophole. I always knew you’d find it.”

Jordan groaned, low and despairing, the sound of a man watching his morning slip away one sentence at a time. He didn’t answer with words. He answered by shifting down and setting his mouth to the side of Alfie’s neck, at the spot he knew worked, and then along it, and out to the curve of his shoulder, kissing his way across the skin as though he could shut Alfie up through sheer devotion.

“I am not,” he said against the skin, “having a fantasy about your brothers.”

“You’d be within your rights. It’s essentially me with better cardio and worse taste in shirts.”

“Say one more word,” Jordan murmured against his collarbone, not lifting his head, one hand flat against his ribs, “and I swear I will roll over and go back to sleep. Or, worse, I will get up, walk down that corridor, and do all of this to Theo instead. He’s prettier in the mornings anyway, you said so yourself.”

“And that’s before we get to Maya,” Alfie went on, tilting his head to give Jordan better access without appearing to notice. “Don’t think I haven’t seen it. Two days and you’re thick as thieves. Whispering in corners and ganging up on Henri. I’ll go off for one afternoon and come back to find you’ve run away together. My fiancé and my brother’s girlfriend. It’ll be a whole thing. FNN will cover it.”

“Maya,” Jordan said, into his chest, not stopping, “is the best thing to happen to me since I met your family. If she asked me to run away, I’d hear her out.” His hand moved lower, and his mouth followed it.

“See? See? This is what I’m dealing with.”

“Mm-hm.”

“And that’s before we get to the rest of it,” Alfie continued, his voice less steady now but refusing to give in, “because you’ll be wandering round this villa, probably shirtless, because you’re always shirtless the second I turn my back, and there are four beautiful pop stars out there with nothing to do until the concert. What if Nael serenades you? What if Harren decides you’re worth an opinion? What if—” his breath caught “—what if you get pulled into whatever it is Harren and Luris have got going, because let’s not pretend either of us hasn’t worked that out, and I come back to find you’ve joined a band?”

Jordan lifted his head at last and looked down at him.

“Alfie. I want you to understand what’s happening here. I have been doing all the work. I’ve kissed my way down the entire front of you, I’ve found the spot, I’ve found the other spot, I’ve been patient, and at no point have you stopped talking.”

“I’m setting the scene.”

“You’re doing a threat assessment.” His head dropped onto Alfie’s chest. “I’m trying to have a slow, romantic, loving morning with the man I’m going to marry, and instead I’ve spent it being accused of running off with your two brothers, your future sister-in-law, and half a boy band. I’m exhausted. Not from the effort. From the allegations.”

“So you admit there’s effort.”

“There’s enormous effort, and I’m the only one making any. You’ve contributed a running commentary and one nice thing about my cardio.” Jordan pushed himself back up on his elbow, and there was a light in his eye now. “So here’s what’s going to happen.” He was grinning now, warming to it. “Like I said before, you are going to stop talking. And I am going to lie here and adore this ridiculous, gorgeous body of yours, at length, with all the romance I had planned before you turned a perfectly nice morning into a court-martial. Because contrary to your extensive allegations, I do not want your brothers. Theo has done something unforgivable to his hair, and I will not be touching him until it grows out. Henri has become far too muscular for my taste; he’d crush me, it’d be in the news. And I have no interest whatsoever in a single member of that band. I want you. I only want you. I want to marry you and keep you for the rest of my life. But right now, this second, before the day starts and before the Klingons decide to invade the system, I would simply like to enjoy a sweet, quiet moment with my fiancé.” His hand slid up. “So if you say one more word about my imaginary throuple, as I said before, I will get up, walk down that corridor, and do every single thing I am currently trying to do to you, to Theo instead. Bad haircut and all. Is that what you want?”

“That’s not really a threat,” Alfie said. “That’s kind of hot, actually.”

“Alfie.” Jordan closed his eyes briefly, a man at the very end of his patience. “Shut up. For me. One time.”

And then, before Alfie could get another word out, Jordan kissed him, hard, and brought the whole of his weight down on top of Alfie at the same time, pinning him flat to the mattress so there was nowhere to go and nothing to do but be kissed, and kept it there until whatever Alfie had lined up next dissolved completely. He stopped fighting it and gave in, finally, gloriously, and gave himself over to a much better use of the morning. He had a hand in Jordan’s hair and Jordan’s mouth on his and one leg hooked around him, and for a good long while the pair of them were entirely occupied with each other, and neither of them said anything remotely resembling a word about Theo, and it was going extremely well.

And then the door to the suite opened without so much as a chime.

Against Jordan, Alfie went still, and broke the kiss. Jordan rested his forehead against Alfie’s and let out a long, heartfelt sigh.

“Please let it be the Klingons,” he whispered, to nobody. “Please, please let them have invaded.”

Instead, Theo’s voice followed.

“Right, up, up, tide waits for no man and neither do I, we’ve got a two-hour window, and Henri’s already downstairs being smug about the canteen…”

Theo got three steps into the room before he saw them, and stopped dead. Whatever he had come in to say died on the spot. His eyes went wide, then wider, and his whole face performed a slow, appalled journey from cheerful to horrified as his brain assembled what it was looking at: his brother, his brother’s fiancé, a great deal of bare skin, and no possible innocent explanation for any of it. His mouth stayed open around the end of his sentence. One hand came halfway up, as if to ward the sight off. Nothing came out of him at all.

“Oh,” he managed. “Oh, no. Oh, no.”

“I told you!” Henri’s voice came from the corridor, delighted, and then Henri himself appeared in the doorway. He got one clear, unobstructed look at the scene, and his brows shot up, and his mouth opened, and for a second he simply stood there, caught somewhere between shock and bemusement, blinking at the two of them as though he could not quite make the picture resolve. Then it resolved. He made a small strangled noise, spun on his heel, and turned straight back out of the doorway. “I told you. I said don’t just walk in, and you said they’ll be asleep, it’s the morning, and I said, Theo, it’s their honeymoon suite in all but name—”

“You did say that,” Theo admitted, one hand clamped over his eyes. “You did say that. I take it back. You were right. You’re always right; it’s your worst quality.”

“And now we both know,” Henri added from the safe side of the doorframe, “exactly why Jordan walks around this villa as if he owns it.” He paused, as though something else had just occurred to him. “And, come to think of it, why Alfie’s had that stupid smile on his face since he got here.”

“HENRI!” Alfie roared.

“I’m only saying. Confidence like that comes from somewhere.”

“Get out!” Alfie was trying to squirm out from under Jordan and drag the single bedsheet up around himself at the same time, and losing badly at both. “Both of you. Out! OUT!”

Jordan, by contrast, had made no attempt to cover anything. He had rolled onto his back, thrown an arm across his eyes, and given up entirely to laughter, shaking with it, howling at the sheer cosmic unfairness of a morning he had planned so carefully and been so thoroughly denied.

“Morning, both,” he managed, between wheezes, and then, because the irony of it was simply too much to let pass, he lifted the arm off his eyes and grinned up at the ceiling. “Theo. Perfect timing, honestly. I was only just saying to Alfie that if he didn’t stop talking I’d come and do all of this with you instead. So. Here you are. Fancy it? Save me starting over.”

Alfie’s glare could have stripped paint.

“I’m flattered,” said Theo, with immense feeling, one hand still clamped over his eyes. “Genuinely. But I think, on balance, that I would like to keep my brother on my side today, and accepting that particular invitation feels like it might cost me. So I’m going to say no. For now.”

“Such a tease,” said Jordan, to the ceiling.

“Do not,” Theo went on, backing towards the door with his eyes still covered, “talk to me. Either of you. I need you both to know that I have now seen far too much of my future brother-in-law and my own brother, and I will be carrying it to my grave. That’s not to say I don’t support this relationship. I do. Very much so. Jordan, you are the best thing to have happened to my brother. But this has all been too much for my delicate eyes!”

“Agreed,” came Henri’s voice from the safety of the corridor. “Far, far too much.”

“So.” Theo found the doorframe by touch. “Alfie. Finish, ah, seeing to your man and his needs, and then get your backside downstairs. Fifteen minutes.”

“Half an hour,” said Jordan.

There was a pause from behind Theo’s hand.

“…Twenty,” he countered.

“Half an hour, Theo, you’ve set me right back to the beginning.”

“Fine. Half an hour.” Theo pointed vaguely in their direction, still not looking. “On the single condition that I do not, at any point, see one more inch of a naked Jordan Duncan-Court for the rest of this holiday. The tide does not care about any of this, by the way. It is a physical force. It will leave without us.”

“OUT!” Alfie shouted.

Theo made it into the corridor, then leaned back around the doorframe, eyes now open and fixed firmly on the ceiling.

“One last thing, and then I’m gone. Alfie, well done. Genuinely. I’m not going to describe anything I saw, out of respect for your future husband, but I’ll say this: well chosen. Extremely well chosen. On a number of levels. Fair play to you and good for you, bro! Enjoy that!”

The pillow hit the closing door with a bang, and Theo’s laugh went off down the corridor with Henri’s behind it, and then it was quiet again, and Jordan was still chuckling to himself beside him, thoroughly pleased.

“Well,” he said, wiping his eyes. “At least one McCallister-Reyas brother appreciated what I had on offer this morning. Your brother reviewed me. From a doorway. Extremely well chosen, apparently.” He grinned at the ceiling. “I’m putting it on my Academy record.”

“I’m going to kill him,” said Alfie, and let the bedsheet fall away from around his waist, and climbed straight back on top of Jordan, pinning him where he had pinned Alfie a few minutes before. “That’s the adventure. That’s what today is. We walk out to sea, and only two of us come back.”

“You’ll have to catch him first. He’s fast for a pop star.” Jordan’s hands settled at Alfie’s hips, delighted at the turn of events. “Now, as I was saying, before we were so rudely—”

“Shut up,” Alfie told him, and kissed him.

Jordan growled against his mouth, low and pleased, and dragged him in closer, and kissed him back just as hard as he had the first time, when it had been Alfie doing all the talking and Jordan begging him to stop.

---

They set out an hour before the low, which Henri said was the right time, and Henri had spent half the night before reading the tidal tables the way other people read novels, so he was allowed to be in charge of this one thing.
They went out dressed for nothing in particular, and the three of them managed to look completely different doing it. Henri wore a grey sleeveless training vest and navy shorts, a battered cap turned backwards on his head. Alfie had on a faded blue Academy t-shirt, stretched at the collar where Jordan had stolen and worn it half to death and never quite given back, and which still smelled faintly of him, which was most of the reason Alfie kept it. Plain black swim shorts, his sunglasses pushed up into his hair. Theo wore a crisp white linen shirt left open all the way down, showing off a lean, near-flat chest, over coral swim shorts printed with tiny white palm leaves that had almost certainly cost more than the shirt.

They made it two hundred metres before Theo started.

“So,” he said. “I have questions.”

“Don’t.”

“One question, really. Why, when I walked in, was your fiancé talking about me? Because I distinctly heard my own name as I approached the door, which means your room’s soundproofing is either really bad, or Jordan talks too loudly when you two are having naked-cuddle time! There I was, minding my business, and I opened a door to find Jordan mid-whatever-that-was, saying he’d come and do it all with me instead. During. While actively occupied with you.” Theo shook his head. “That’s not a compliment to your technique, Alfie, is what I’m saying. If he’s got the spare capacity to be thinking about his brother-in-law, you are not holding his attention.”

“Theo.”

“I’m only concerned for you. I do not want the wedding being called off because Jordan has fallen for me and I have to break his heart and tell him I’m not interested in him.”

“Stop.”

“And, honestly, as a professional observation from your older brother,” Theo went on, warming up now, “I have real concerns about you as a Starfleet officer. If you want to go into security, then you would suck at it!l Your whole morning routine is to lie naked in an unlocked room with your guard completely down and let two full-grown men walk straight in on you before you’ve so much as reached for a sheet.” He tutted. “Any half-decent intruder would have had you. You’d be the worst security officer in the fleet. ‘Sorry, Admiral, I couldn’t stop the boarding party; I was compromised, my fiancé had me pinned.’”

“He’d have heard the boarding party,” Henri put in, from a pace behind, “if a certain someone had knocked first instead of walking straight in.”

“I’m aware of my failings, Henri, thank you. I’m working through them in order.”

“Just saying. If we’re assigning blame.”

“You walked in too!”

“I walked in second,” said Henri, unbothered, “having warned you, and I looked at the floor the whole time like a gentleman. You’re the one who did colour commentary on the way out.”

Alfie walked between them and let it go over him, and to his own surprise found that he did not mind at all. This was the sound. This exact sound: the two of them talking across him, about him, at his expense. He had gone eighteen months without it and had not understood how much he’d missed it until it started again.

“You’re both jealous,” he said when there was a gap.

“Of what?” Theo demanded.

“Of me having someone.” Alfie shrugged. “Two years with Jordan and neither of you had anyone the whole time. Now one of you’s got a secret girlfriend he won’t tell his parents about and the other’s married to a stadium, so forgive me if I don’t take notes from either of you.”

“Married to a stadium,” Theo repeated. “That’s quite good.”

“It’s the best you’ll do all week,” said Henri.

“And you,” Alfie went on, rounding on Henri, because attack was the only defence that worked in this company, “don’t get comfortable. Explain to me again how a man wins a soccer scholarship. A full scholarship. To Lakeside University. For being, and I’m quoting this, the most promising forward Cestus had produced in a decade. And then quietly switches to a sport where you spend your whole life soaking wet, wearing nothing but a napkin.”

“It’s a legitimate athletic transition.”

“You were going to be a footballer, Henri. Grandad still thinks you’re a footballer. Grandad’s told everyone at the hotel his grandson plays for Lakeside F.C. Instead, you’re in a pool in a hat throwing a ball, in shorts that leave absolutely nothing to the imagination, or you’re jumping into it while doing some fancy spinning mid-air!”

“Diving is more complex than that, and water polo is one of the most demanding—”

“You changed to a sport that is ninety per cent being wet. You used to hate baths. Dad had to bribe you into a bath. And now you’ve built an entire Olympic career on never once being dry, and I want to understand the psychology.”

“He likes the wetsuit,” Theo offered.

“There’s no wetsuit in water polo.”

“The lack of wetsuit, then. That’s the psychology. He found the one sport where the uniform is essentially a suggestion and built a life around it. Honestly, Henri, good for you; it’s the most McCallister thing any of us has done. Alfie ejected a warp core, I fill stadiums, and you found a legal reason to be half-naked and damp in front of an international audience.”

“I hate you both,” said Henri, without heat.

“You love us both. It’s your worst quality after always being right.”

The villa shrank behind them. The sea had drawn itself down into a bright line, and the line was still moving away.

The reef flat was a low spine of dead coral and packed sand standing a metre proud of everything around it, warm as a hearthstone, dry on top, ringed by pools the sea had left behind in a hurry. Small fish went about their business in them. The three of them sat along the spine in a row, facing back the way they’d come. The coast was a low green line, the villa a fleck, and in every direction an enormous quantity of nothing.

The jokes ran down of their own accord, the way they always had. There was a stretch of quiet. Then Theo put his hands behind him on the coral and looked at the sky.

“Right,” he said.

Nobody helped him.

“Right,” he said again. “Sorry. I’ve done this speech four hundred times in my head, and every version starts with something clever.”

“Don’t be clever,” Henri said. “You’re bad at it.”

“I’m the funny one.”

“You’re the loud one. Alfie’s the funny one. I’m the one who gets things done. Alfie, tell him.”

“He’s the loud one,” Alfie confirmed.

“Twenty-one years,” Theo said, to the sky. “Twenty-one years of this.”

But his shoulders had come down half a centimetre, and Alfie understood that Henri had done that on purpose, and had probably done it before, and that his brother had been managing this for a while without anybody telling him.

Theo drew a breath.

“I’m going to tell Mom and Dad,” he said. “About the university. Before the concert. I’ve decided.” He turned the words over as if checking them for cracks. “That’s the thing I couldn’t say on the beach.”

Alfie went very still. “Tell them what, exactly?”

“That I left.” Theo’s jaw worked. “They don’t know, Alf. That’s the whole thing. That’s what I’ve been carrying. They don’t know I dropped out.”

The tide went on retreating. Somewhere in a pool, something small made a plopping sound.

“They think you’re deferring,” Alfie said slowly. “You told them you were taking a year out. You said it in a letter. I read that letter, Theo; you sent it to all of us. You said Pike City had agreed a year’s suspension and you’d go back when the tour finished.”

“Yeah.”

“Theo.”

“There isn’t a suspension. There was never a suspension.” His voice had gone flat, his eyes on the horizon. “I withdrew. Completely. There’s no place being held for me; my file is closed. And every letter Mom’s sent me for a year and a half has a line in it asking how the deferral’s going and what I’ll pick up when I go back, and I’ve answered every one of those lines with a lie.”

Alfie had nothing to say.

“That’s the bit,” Theo went on. “Everyone thinks the hard part is the dropping out. It isn’t. The hard part is I’ve been lying to our parents for eighteen months, and the distance makes it worse, not better, because it isn’t one lie. It’s one lie every four weeks, and each one has to hold up the last one. And now I have to stand in front of them the day before I go on stage in front of fifty thousand people and tell them their son’s a liar as well as a dropout.”

“Hey,” said Henri.

“It’s accurate.”

“It’s not accurate; it’s theatrical, which is worse.” Henri leaned forward on his knees. “Alf, he’s been at this for months. Every message, every call. He says he’s going to tell them, and then he finds a reason it should be next month. About six weeks ago I stopped arguing with him, because I could hear it wasn’t landing.”

“You knew,” Alfie said.

“I knew.”

“Since when?”

“Since it happened. I was there. We were living four streets apart; I saw the withdrawal notice on his desk before he’d even told the band.” Henri met his brother’s eyes. “And I’ve been telling him, for a year and a half, that Mom and Dad are going to be fine. That they’ll be hurt about the lying and get over it in a day. That the version of them he’s got in his head is not the actual pair of people who raised us. And he doesn’t believe me.”

“Because you’re not the one who has to say it.”

“No. I’m the one who has to listen to you not say it, which is its own event.”

“Don’t.”

“I’m not doing anything.”

“You’re doing the thing where you make it small, so it stops being frightening. I know that’s kind, Henri, I know it’s you being kind, but it doesn’t work on me. It just makes me feel stupid for being frightened in the first place.”

That landed. Henri sat back. “Alright,” he said. “That’s fair.”

The three of them sat with it.