The Story Of Us

by Marina Lander

  Anthony grins at him. "Only the best for you, darling."

  ***

  "Are you telling me that this jet belongs to Frederic? The Frederic, heir to that massive cosmetics fortune?" Noah says faintly.

  "He's an old family friend," Anthony says dismissively.

  "It's like you come from another planet," Noah says in utter disbelief. Even on actual business trips, Vernard makes him fly coach, and he's only upgraded a few times. Noah knows that the flight isn't going to last forever, and it seems impractical and rather wasteful to spend so much money on a little extra leg room. He'd much rather have a new suit or a pair of shoes -- Noah's finances, after all, are not inexhaustive, and he has priorities.

  Still, he'll admit the private jet is rather nice, even if Anthony is rather shamelessly trying to get him drunk. "It's going to make me fall asleep," Noah accuses.

  Anthony taps the cover of Noah's laptop. "Go to sleep, then, pet. You can have a nice long nap before we land."

  Noah frowns at him. "What about you?"

  Anthony looks over the rims of his reading glasses, and the sight is so familiar and intimate that Noah feels a dangerous rush of affection. "I'm in the middle of something," he says, fingers tapping steadily at his laptop. "Sleep well, darling, and if you can arrange to dream of me -- well, tell me about it when you wake."

  "Oh, please," Noah says, and settles back in his seat and closes his eyes.

  Chapter 8

  Munich is bright and beautiful and appealingly tidy, and Noah thinks he's a little bit in love.

  The cab deposits them in front of a hotel, and Anthony has the gall to guide him inside with a hand hovering at the small of his back, but Noah is too busy trying to take everything in to really care.

  He revises that opinion when they reach their hotel room, which only has one bed.

  "Right or left side?" Anthony says.

  "Are you absolutely serious?" Noah demands.

  "Please try not to be so American about it, darling," Anthony says.

  Noah raises an incredulous eyebrow.

  "What if I wake up in the middle of the night and urgently need to discuss an idea with you?" Anthony tries again.

  "Wake me up for that and I will murder you," Noah says, and puts his bags down on the right side of the bed.

  "Does that mean I can wake you up for other things, pet?" Anthony asks, and his voice drops down to something sinful and warm and Noah has to mentally shake himself.

  "You can wake me up if you win the Booker Prize," Noah says, which is admittedly a little mean since Anthony was shortlisted last year and is still extremely upset about it.

  Anthony dumps his luggage on the left side of the bed. "I'm going to win it this year, darling. Fucking Salman Rushdie, must he win everything?" he mutters, and stalks off to the bathroom.

  ***

  Noah gives Anthony exactly zero choice about their destination that afternoon, and drags him off to a cafe on the Marienplatz.

  "Okay," Noah says. "People time travelling in memories. How?"

  "Mmm," Anthony says, taking a sip of coffee. "What if you could share memories? Not like retelling them, directly experiencing them in someone’s mind."

  Noah frowns and looks off at the direction of the Neues Rathaus, with brilliant red blossoms hanging like clouds off the facade. "Like going into someone's head?"

  "Don't go all Donnie Darko on me, darling."

  "You're the one who's talking about time travel," Noah huffs, because he still regrets letting it slip to Anthony that he's seen the entire series, even the last season. "Anyway, how would it work?"

  Anthony appears to be looking at Noah's hands where they are cradling his coffee cup, but Noah can tell from the unfocused look in his eyes that he's a million miles away. "If the mind holds memories, couldn’t you find out anything about anyone alive, provided you could get close enough?"

  "But how would you know where to find them? Couldn't anything happen in a memory? What is they had alzheimer's or schizophrenia?" Noah counters, brow furrowed. His eyes are drawn back to the Mariensäule, with its golden Madonna and Child crowning the column, soaring far above the winged putti battling beasts at the base, and the thought of creating architecture like that spurs him on to say, "What if - what if somehow memories and time were bound together??"

  Anthony' head snaps up at that, and he says thoughtfully, "As though changing the memory changes what really happened."

  Noah tries to sip his coffee calmly, but he can't deny the frisson of excitement running down his spine. It's a measure of how long and how well they've worked together, Noah's bitching notwithstanding, that Anthony feels comfortable using Noah as a sounding board. Noah wonders who Anthony talked to before he came along, but maybe he didn't talk to anyone. His first manuscript came to Noah as a completed draft, so Noah didn't actually go through the genesis of a story with Anthony until his second novel.

  Anthony had been hesitant then, at least until Noah had told him in no uncertain terms that if he was having trouble writing, then he needed to sit the hell down and walk Noah through it. Anthony fleshed out the story as he talked, and Noah course-corrected with questions and suggestions until Anthony disappeared into his office to write.

  He doesn't have to pry anything out of Anthony now, and hasn't in years. Anthony sends his not-outlines to Noah, and emails him with an overabundance of exclamation points and truly obnoxious emoticons, and keeps Noah in his penthouse well into the night as he wanders around, thinking aloud.

  "Blueprints," Noah says thoughtfully, still looking at the Mariensäule. "An architect. Someone builds the dream, and then the others are pulled in."

  Anthony' fingers are tapping on the table, like he needs his laptop right now. Sure enough, he says, "Stay if you like, dear, but I need to--"

  "Go on," Noah says. "I'll bring dinner."

  Anthony stands, then, and gently touches Noah's shoulder as he leaves to cross the expanse of the Marienplatz on the way back to their hotel.

  Noah goes to Peterskirche and spends some time looking at the Zimmerman ceiling fresco and the Gothic paintings by Polack, before forking over a number of Euros at a grocery store for bread and cheese and fruit. Anthony will eat while he writes, so long as he doesn't have to spare his attention from his laptop to do it. Noah feels very sure that Anthony would have starved to death during his third novel if Noah hadn't come by on an extremely regular basis to feed him.

  When he gets back to the hotel, Anthony is sitting at the desk, glasses on, and his fingers are flying over the keys. Noah has worked with a number of authors, but he is still astonished by how quickly Anthony writes when he puts his mind to it.

  Noah piles pillows against the headboard and settles on the bed with his own laptop to go through some proofs of an article Anthony wrote a few months ago, and when he takes a break to put some food on plates for the both of them, Anthony acknowledges the food at his elbow with an absent-minded, "Thank you, darling," before returning to rapid-fire typing.

  The typing halts, eventually, and Anthony commences staring out the window. Noah knows to leave him be, and reads part of a manuscript before sending it Abdul's way, since Abdul is all over this werecreature bullshit. Even if Noah were not tied entirely to Anthony, he would still rather stab himself then spend his waking hours forcing the author to at least develop an internally-consistent worldview about scent-marking, for Christ's sake.

  He changes into a t-shirt and worn pajama bottoms before going to bed. Anthony will sleep when he sleeps, and Noah has stayed up long enough in the attempt to reset his internal clock to local time.

  Anthony is still staring on the window into the night when Noah's eyes close.

  Chapter 9

  He wakes up with his face basically mashed into Anthony' hip. Anthony is sitting up in bed, computer on his lap, and he appears to be reading a Wikipedia article about the kakapo bird.

  "Morning, pet," Anthony says, and the rumble of his voice makes Noah want to do something wi
ldly inappropriate, like nuzzle Anthony' hip and close his eyes again. It's stupid and dangerous, because to the best of Noah's knowledge, there has been no one for Anthony since they started working together. Noah sometimes catches himself fruitlessly wondering who the love of Anthony' life was, and how they could burn and salt the earth of his heart and leave him behind. He wonders what kind of person could inspire the dizzying, wide-eyed wonder of Anthony' first novel and the gut-wrenching heartache of the second, and though he knows he has never loved as Anthony has loved, he can't imagine it's the sort of love one just gets over.

  Anthony sinks his fingers into Noah's hair, one thumb rubbing against his temple. "Are you truly awake, I wonder?" he asks, teasing.

  Noah closes his eyes for just a moment then, luxuriating in the gentle scratch of Anthony' fingernails against his scalp. Then he sighs, rolls over, and levers himself out of bed, because he really shouldn't do this to himself.

  ***

  Obviously, Noah has been entangled in Anthony' creative process before, but he's never been quite so intimately entwined. The hotel room should feel claustrophobic, since Anthony seems to permeate and dominate the space, shuffling between the desk and the bed with his laptop never out of reach. But Noah has had years of exposure to Anthony, and he sincerely doubts that he's in danger of overdosing now.

  Noah goes out into the city and walks around, retrieving coffee and foraging for food, drinking in the sight of extraordinary rococo architecture and the everyday newspaper stands. When he comes back, Anthony has passed out on the bed, face-first. Noah allows himself the small indulgence of flipping the half of the bedspread that Anthony isn't lying on over him, but Anthony doesn't stir and just sleeps on. He's going to completely fuck his sleep schedule, at this rate, but since Anthony can do that while writing without the excuse of a different time zone, Noah doesn't think it much matters.

  Noah goes back to reading a not-outline of Anthony' next foray into wretchedly filthy pornography, which -- how is this his life? He shifts uncomfortably in the desk chair, because Anthony has put a lot of very explicit thought into this, and Noah isn't to be blamed if his brain starts to run together all the things that Anthony wants Noah the character to do, and the things he actually asks Noah, although the latter seems nearly as salacious as the former:

  the first round should be feverish and fast, they're both wound up from jealousy and fucking desperate for it, and afterward, when Noah is all fucked out and sprawled on the bed, stephen tells him there's no one else and then they should fuck again, bareback and messy and slow and hard, Noah lying on his side and gasping every time stephen bottoms out and wait back up, there should really be some quality rimming in there, maybe after round one when Noah is still quivering after having come against the wall, and stephen can push him down on the bed and eat his arse out -- if you make me write ass instead of arse, darling, i suppose i will live but i really think this is an important question of artistic integrity--

  Noah should really stop reading it because he's painfully hard, and the only place he can jack off is the bathroom and he's pretty sure Anthony would hear.

  As if on cue, Anthony makes a soft sound and surfaces from sleep. He cranes his neck around to find Noah, and then, apparently satisfied that Noah's been accounted for, wrestles himself out of the bedspread and staggers off to use the bathroom.

  Noah hears the shower start running and has a very serious conversation with himself about how he is a professional and therefore is absolutely not going to furtively get himself off while Anthony is busy being naked and wet in the next room. He's not.

  "I am so fucked," he mutters to himself, and pulls his cock out of his pants and comes in a few short strokes, biting his lip as he spills into a tissue. By the time Anthony emerges from the shower in his hideous bathrobe, Noah is perfectly put together again. If Anthony notices his flushed face, he doesn't say anything about it.

  Chapter 10

  He is literally wrapped up in Anthony' work now, and he's not sure how the actual fuck this happened.

  "You have your own computer," Noah reminds Anthony.

  Anthony is a heavy weight against his back, his chin tucked over Noah's shoulder as he reads Noah's laptop screen. "Shush, pet, I'm researching."

  "Which, again, you could do on your own computer," Noah says, and he's surprised his voice sounds that firm when Anthony' breath is tickling his ear, and god, he can smell him, if he just turned his head he could bury his nose behind Anthony' ear and just breathe him in.

  "We both need to know about this," Anthony says reasonably. "I would just have to make you read it anyway so we could talk about it, so we may as well do it together. Click on that link for Google Glass, there's a love."

  Noah clicks on it and tries mightily not to grind his teeth.

  "You're very tense," Anthony says, and one of his hands comes up to grip the nape of Noah's neck.

  That's it. Noah abruptly shuts the laptop. "Let's go have dinner. I passed a restaurant earlier -- you can't stay cooped up in here the whole time."

  "Oh," Anthony says, sounding pleasantly surprised. "Well. My legs could do with a stretch, I suppose. You have the best ideas, darling."

  Of course, Anthony totally disregards Noah's choice of restaurant and instead bothers the old man at the front desk, who speaks perfectly passable English and calls a taxi to take them someplace unpronounceable but apparently without equal. Noah would be annoyed except that it is excellent and Anthony keeps the promise he made before their trip, and they drinks a lot of wine. Or rather, Noah drinks a lot of wine. He doesn't mean to, but Anthony is sneaky and keeps filling up his glass when Noah turns his head or gets distracted while trying to tell Anthony about what he's seen on his walks around the city.

  At the end of dinner, when Noah is comfortably drunk and Anthony is watching him with an expression that Noah would be tempted to call fond, Noah's brain does that thing it does sometimes, and he says, "So they can see people’s memories. That’s great, but what if they could create new ones instead? Or remove unhappy ones?"

  Anthony stares at him for one long moment, and Noah says uncertainly, "Is that stupid? I mean, you don't have to-"

  "Noah," Anthony interrupts him. "Noah darling, you are so transcendentally brilliant sometimes that it's all I can do not to ravish you on the spot."

  It's a joke, Noah knows it is, Anthony has made it a dozen times over, but he blurts out, "I'm okay with that."

  Anthony actually laughs, and says, "You are brilliant, and also thoroughly drunk. Up we go, darling, I need to get back to work." He leaves some money on the table and helps Noah outside, keeping a firm hand on his elbow. They wait for what feels like forever for a taxi, and then a very pregnant woman and her friend exit the restaurant just as one pulls up. Anthony lets go of Noah to carefully help the pregnant woman inside, all perfect gentlemanly courtesy, and she smiles in thanks as he gently shuts the door. When he comes back to Noah, he says, "Next one, love, I promise."

  Noah's heart clenches then and he says, "It's fine," but he thinks he'd wait for a thousand cabs just for the pleasure of seeing Anthony be a good person.

  Anthony does indeed pour Noah into the next cab that comes, and when they're back at their hotel room, Noah falls back on the bed. "I think I've had too much to drink," he marvels. "I never have too much to drink."

  "It explains the stick up your exceptional arse, darling," Anthony says, but his tone is affectionate so Noah doesn't feel the need to protest. His hand touches Noah's knee, and he says, "Let's get your shoes off and make you a bit more comfortable."

  Noah leans up on his elbows to watch Anthony, who is unlacing his shoes with such a gentle expression that Noah doesn't know what to do except to say, "I hate whoever broke your heart."

  Anthony looks up him quickly, surprise and confusion writ large on his face. "What was that?"

  "You know what I mean," Noah insists. "I read your second novel -- oh my god, I begged Morgan and I practically climbed over Abdul and
Maria's shoulders to get the manuscript first. And I read it and I knew, and I wish they hadn't hurt you like that, because then maybe you would--"

  Anthony pulls off one shoe. "Maybe I would what?"

  Noah looks at him mutely, unhappily.

  Anthony' brow furrows, and then clears. "Darling. You are aware that I write fiction, aren't you?"

  Noah frowns at him. "But it happened to you. I know it did, you told me."

  "The heartache was real enough, darling, but not as bad as all that," Anthony says, and the twist to his lips is self-deprecating. "Why are we talking about my second novel, anyway? Did you want me to write another love story?"

  Noah wiggles his toes and tries very hard to concentrate. "Not one like that," he says.

  Anthony pulls off his other shoe. "Wouldn't do to repeat myself," he says agreeably.

  "No, you should," Noah says vehemently.

  Anthony's hand rests gently on his ankle, his thumb brushing over the top of Noah's foot, and he's smiling indulgently. "You're not making much sense. And this is why we don't drink and edit, darling."

  Noah scowls at him. "I meant -- I want you to write one. With me."

  Anthony hoists himself up and puts one knee on the bed while he reaches for Noah's tie. "Oh, love, haven't I already made perfectly clear that I only want to write with you?"