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and the way Harry smiles at him makes the nickname apt.

They eat breakfast at the table, tea and toast and cold feet knocking

together. They‟re quiet, and Louis finds himself just watching Harry. It

feels silly, that just watching someone else eat breakfast could make his

heart swell, but Louis is starting to feel like he‟s going to be spending a

long time being very silly indeed.

It‟s just that Harry is a real person—who takes his tea like an idiot and

uses two separate knives for the butter and the jam—and he has flaws

too and he gets scared too and he loves too, loves with that same

screaming intensity as Louis does. He‟s just had more practice, or

maybe less. Louis watches Harry eat breakfast and doesn‟t want to go

home tonight with anything left unsaid.

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“Want to see something cool?” Harry says out of the blue, and Louis

can just nod, because he‟s in love with a toddler.

Harry doesn‟t explain further, just nods happily and clears the table.

They get dressed quickly, Louis putting on his own trousers but

slipping into one of Harry‟s shirts, a soft cotton long-sleeved number

that‟s loose around the collar and has Harry looking at him with

promise in his eyes. He grabs his camera bag and an umbrella, and then

they‟re out the door.

Louis expects for them to head towards the tube again, but they walk in

another direction, Harry‟s arm tight around his waist to keep them both

under the umbrella.They walk for less than ten minutes, winding

around corners and crossing streets, until they reach a massive block of

flats. It‟s covered with graffiti and could only generously be described

as upright, and Louis is beginning to question Harry‟s common sense.

“As romantic as this is, love,” he says, shivering slightly in the rain.

“I‟m not sure we‟re at the „drug deal‟ point in our relationship. Don‟t

wanna rush that, that‟s really a second anniversary sort of thing.”

“Piss off,” Harry says, nudging Louis with his shoulder, and steps up to

the door, keying in the access code.

“Do you also live here?” Louis says, peering over Harry‟s shoulder as

they walk through the door. “Do you have secret identity? Are you a

superhero with a shit real estate agent?”

Harry just laughs, slinging an arm around Louis‟ neck and pulling him

towards the elevator. “Got it in one, Tommo. We‟re heading to my

lair.” He presses floor number 14, and they‟re headed up.

When Harry actually has a key to number 1426, Louis starts to actually

get a little nervous. “If you have, like, a secret wife or something, this

is really not the way to tell me,” he jokes, leaning against the doorframe

and watching Harry struggle with the lock. The whole hallway looks

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like it‟s falling apart, peeling paint and bare light bulbs like a horror

movie set.

With a victorious laugh, Harry finally gets the lock to work, letting the

door swing open. Before he walks in, though, he turns and pins Louis

against the doorframe, kissing him with a thorough sweetness before

dropping one last peck on his cheek. “I haven‟t got a secret wife,”

Harry says, and then grabs his hand and pulls him inside.

It‟s just a normal flat, clearly lived-in, but Harry pulls him past the bed

in the main room and towards what should be the bedroom. “This is my

friend Benji‟s flat,” he says. “He was in the photography department at

Manchester and moved out here at around the same time.”

“Why do you have a key to Benji‟s flat?” Louis asks, watching Harry

pull out another key to open the door of the not-bedroom.

“This is why,” Harry says, and lets the door swing open. It‟s dark, and

Louis steps cautiously inside. When his eyes adjust, he realizes why

Harry hasn‟t turned the light on.

It‟s a darkroom.

There aren‟t any prints up now, which must be why Harry was able to

open the door and let the light of the flat inside, but Louis can still

recognize it for what it is. There are sinks and trays and stacks of photo

paper and bottles of chemicals that Louis couldn‟t identify with a gun

to his head, all surrounded by criss-crosses of string and clothespins for

prints to hang later.

Louis spins and looks at Harry accusingly. “You liar,” he says with a

grin. “This is totally your wife.”

Harry laughs, stepping inside the room. It‟s small, but there‟s space for

the two of them. “Ah, but you said secret wife. You can‟t pretend to be

surprised.”

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“I suppose that‟s fair,” Louis says.

“Don‟t worry,” Harry says, taking his camera out of the bag and setting

it down on the bench. “She‟s Benji‟s, really. I just get to come by when

he‟s away.” He pulls the door closed, plunging them into darkness. “I

was thinking I would develop some of the prints from yesterday in the

park?” he says. In the pitch black his voice seems somehow louder.

“The first bit has to be in the dark, sorry.”

“S‟alright,” Louis says. “What shall I do in the meantime?” He feels a

bit at sea. He knows the room is small, but standing alone, touching

nothing in the darkness, he could be in outer space.

“There‟s cushions in the corner if you‟d like to sit,” Harry says, and

Louis can hear the sounds of him fiddling with equipment. “Or if you

want—I could sort of tell you about what I‟m doing?”

“I‟d like that,” Louis says, “Though I can‟t really see anything.”

“C‟mere,” Harry says, and Louis jumps at the sudden feeling of Harry‟s

hand finding him in the dark. His hand fumbles until it reaches Louis‟

and he pulls him closer. Lacing their fingers, Harry reaches down until

both their hands find the camera. “Ok, so this is where you start,” he

says, opening the back and taking the negatives out clumsily with

Louis‟ fingers still tangled in his.

Louis presses up against Harry‟s back and slides his other hand down

Harry‟s other arm until he finds his hand. He rests his head against

Harry‟s shoulder and feels him move, listening to the soft sound of his

voice and feeling the vibrations of it through his ribs. He listens to what

Harry says as he narrates what he‟s doing, he really does, because he

wants to understand, but he finds himself distracted by the way Harry

floods his senses in the dark. The clean sweat boy smell of him, the

living warmth coming through his t-shirt. Every hitch of his breath,

every shift of his shoulderblades is telegraphed to Louis as he does this

thing that he loves. It‟s not sexual, but it feels a lot like sex. It‟s

intimate.

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Harry clears his throat after some time, and Louis blinks back to

alertness. “This next bit doesn‟t have to be in the dark,” he says,

shifting away from Louis and moving back toward the door. “Careful

of your eyes.” He flips a switch.

The room comes alive with dark red light, Harry reappearing before

Louis‟ eyes picked out in crimson. Like magic.

“There‟s still a decent bit left to do,” he says. “If you‟re bored we can

do something else?”

Louis thinks suddenly of the first time he set foot inside Harry‟s flat in

Manchester, the feeling he had that he was standing inside Harry‟s

brain. Here, bathed in dark red light, he thinks he might be inside

Harry‟s heart.

“I‟m not bored,” he says, leaning in to kiss the corner of Harry‟s mouth

as it curves into a smile.

He moves back and settles into the corner, curling up on the few

cushions that have been piled there, and watches idly as Harry goes

back to work. He can‟t pretend that he follows what Harry is doing,

what causes him to move pieces of film from one chemical to another

or how the picture ends up on the photo paper, but it‟s nice to just

watch Harry be in his element, just like it was nice to feel him earlier.

It‟s remarkably similar to how Harry is in the kitchen, now that he

thinks of it: puttering around, starting sentences he‟ll never finish,

singing snatches of songs that Louis half-remembers. Safe, Louis

thinks, and opens his mouth.

“Can I tell you the stuff you wanted to know?” he asks, sitting up on

the cushions. “The stuff I said I would tell you.”

Harry turns, putting down a set of tongs. “Yeah, of course,” he says,

starting to peel off a pair of gloves. “As long as you—”

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“I‟m sure,” Louis says, biting down on his cheek to keep from smiling.

“And you should keep working. I want you to, actually, it makes it

easier for me. If you‟re doing something else.”

“Okay,” Harry says, looking a little unsure, and rolls the gloves back

down his hands before turning back to work.

Louis tries to collect his thoughts, to figure out what he wants to say,

but can‟t quite find the words. So he starts there, instead, starts from his

own hesitancy. “Have you ever had things that you didn‟t talk about,”

he says, voice small but loud in the tiny room, “Because it felt like too

much? Like, it felt like it was the stuff that defined you, defined your

life, and so there was no point to talking about it because it was like—I

don‟t know, like it was more than could ever be explained to anybody

else. Like a fish trying to explain what water is.”

Harry sort of nods, but doesn‟t turn around, and Louis thanks him

silently for giving him the space to do this his way.

“And then you try to talk about it,” he continues. “And it just—when

you put it into words, or even write it down, it just feels so small. Like,

it doesn‟t matter that it felt like the world was ending. The second it

comes out of your mouth it feels small, and stupid, and like you

shouldn‟t even be complaining at all. And like it shouldn‟t have

mattered, that if you were better it wouldn‟t have mattered. So when

you talk about it you‟re just giving yourself away, you‟re just showing

people how weak you are.”

Harry is gripping the edge of the sink hard as he flips a print over, but

still doesn‟t turn. Louis loves him so much.

“There‟s a lot of stuff like that for me, stuff that matters and hurts and

is important, but I never really talk about it. Not just because it hurts or

because I don‟t trust people, but because—it doesn‟t make me feel sad

anymore, not like it used to. It makes me feel stupid. I feel stupid that it

happened, and I feel stupid that I cared, and I feel stupid that I still care

now. But I think that maybe you‟ll be nicer to me than I am. You have

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a habit of doing that. And it still is important, to understand why I do

some of the weird shit that I do, so I want you to know it. Even if it

feels small.”

He takes a moment to catch his breath, watching Harry begin to pin

prints to the line with barely-shaking hands, and then he begins.

He starts from the beginning, the story of little teenage Louis

Tomlinson in his closet made of paper. Harry‟s already heard most of

this part, because it was always relevant to the whole Stuart

conversation they sometimes used to have, and his high school years

feel somehow detached from everything that came after, so talking

about that time never seemed quite so dangerous. He talks about how

he‟d wanted to just be normal, to be liked, to make his parents proud of

him, even though his dad had been out of the picture for years and

Mark was about as close as he had to an actual father figure.

He came out to his mum when he was eighteen, and he‟d hated himself

for putting that on her when she was only beginning to process the

divorce, but lying to her felt even worse. She‟d been wonderful about

it, told him she loved him always and that it never made a difference to

her, made him promise to bring any suitable boys „round for her to

meet them. That had been the one great mercy of that whole situation,

how much closer he felt to his mother after telling her.

The end of sixth form was great, though, because it was finally

finishing school and feeling like the whole world was spread out before

him waiting for him to wreak havoc. He tells Harry about landing the

starring role in Grease, which he‟d loved since childhood (John

Travolta in tight trousers had perhaps been a revelatory experience),

and how much it had boosted his confidence. He remembers joy back

then, despite everything else, because he was young and on top of the

world and anything was possible. And he wanted to fall in love so, so

badly.

After graduation it was off to university with Stan in tow, signed up on

a three-year plan for an extended diploma in musical theatre. They

decided against rooming together, but they did live on the same hall

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