Perhaps Maybe by Silent Kid

(Disclaimed: 'Shape of My Heart', Backstreet Boys)

'Til the wells run dry,
and each mountain disappears,
I'll be there for you, to care for you,
through laughter and through tears.

So, take my heart in sweet surrender,
and tenderly say that I'm
the one you love and live for,
'til the end of time.

--'Til the End of Time. Music and Lyrics by Ted Mossman and Buddy Kaye

He didn't start crying until the fifth day and then it was like he couldn't stop, standing in the living room on the white carpet, too far from the couch to fall on it, and too weak to drop to the floor without hurting himself, just standing there, sobbing, with the damn cat, some blonde-torte thing rubbing itself between his legs, over, between, and around, like he was some sort of obstacle course for inline skaters while he cried alone in a room he'd never been allowed to be alone in in his life, not in his entire life.

Wait. Back up. Seven days ago when he'd answered the phone. Leonie always said, "Darren, we have caller ID for a reason," but he only checked if he was sitting next to it, which was next to never since it was in the kitchen. So he answered the phone and he couldn't say that he wouldn't have, if he'd known who it was, but maybe he wouldn't, if he'd known it was him. It took him a minute to recognize the voice, despite seven years of knowing, and that said more for their chasm, for lack of a better word, than anything. And as Daniel spoke, saying things he didn't know he wanted to hear, he heard something else. He stared at the phone. Daniel was silent, like he could hear him thinking. Except he wasn't thinking about what Daniel said. Well, he was, but not in that way. He wasn't thinking it over or anything because he wasn't sure he'd heard right.

"What?" He asked, finally, when it was clear Daniel wasn't going to interrupt his silence.

"I'm going to the Bahamas for a week. I need you to housesit for me. Can you do it?" Daniel said, not sounding at all irked that he'd had to repeat himself.

"Yeah, sure," Darren said before his subconscious could scream out the logistics of sitting for a house in Australia when the sitter resided in America.

"Great, I'll leave the key with the neighbor," Daniel said, and he was gone before Darren could think, 'why not just have the neighbor watch it?'

Leonie yelled at him for not using the caller ID, and again for saying yes, and again for not asking about the neighbor until he was ashamed for telling her at all and wished he'd just been quiet about it and taken his suitcase, which she was helping him pack, and gone off without telling anyone about it. She drove him to the airport and stood in the check-in line with him, but when he tried to hold her hand, she skillfully moved away. He stared at his shoes until she cleared her throat. He looked up and could barely meet her eyes. Her lips twitched, and he knew something terribly profound, or pissy, was about to be said. He felt the words, "you don't know fuck", form on his, pressing behind his lips, waiting...but all she said was "goodbye", and he licked his lips to wipe away the poised response, and could say nothing in return.

When he opened the door to Daniel's house, the smell hit him. Cedar and musk and something sweet. For the longest time he couldn't place it, blamed it on the cat, but on the third day he realized it was him, Daniel, that the whole place smelled like him and it was like he'd never left. He started getting sad that day, not terribly so, it was more a nagging than an emotion. Or maybe he was pissed because Daniel had never allowed him into his home before, unsupervised --and he'd always felt under the microscope when he was there in the past, what with all of Daniel's hovering. For someone so fucking laidback, he was like a damn hummingbird at home-- and now that he'd finally been given permission, been specially requested to be there, alone, he could still *smell* him and it was like he was being watched, a constant reminder that he shouldn't be there, and he had to keep telling himself that he had been *asked*.

He opened the drawer accidentally. Well, that wasn't entirely true. The fact was, he didn't know what housesitters did. He thought perhaps they cleaned, and then he thought perhaps they opened drawers, so he did the first and then he did the latter. He found three ARIAs in a desk and it pissed him a bit because he hadn't been allowed to keep any and Daniel was keeping a third of them in a desk, and not even in the top drawer, but in the second on the left, under a pile of stationery like he was hiding them. He pulled them out and went through the rest of the house, on the verge of red, wondering what else Daniel was trying to forget, to banish, to deny, from their years together.

He found the letters under Daniel's socks. He wasn't sure exactly why he was looking under Daniel's socks except he was opening every drawer. He knew he shouldn't be looking there since that's where everyone hides his secret things, but that may have been the reason anyway. There were about twenty of them, as far as he could tell, all bound up in blue twine and tied in a bow like something out of a movie when the war-widow pulls out the letters she got from her beau all those years ago. He saw his name on them and couldn't remember writing him twenty letters, not in all the years he'd known him and as he thought, the red faded from his mind and he realized the letters were to him, not from him. He almost tore the twine off. They were, after all, technically his, but he stopped. He'd gone to a psychiatrist once, ages ago, when Daniel had first begged him to let him leave and he'd begged him to stay, and the doctor had told him to write all his thoughts into a diary so they wouldn't fester inside him. He'd tried, he'd really and truly tried. Every night, sitting up in bed writing in his little black journal, "dear diary..." and then nothing until he was almost going mad, until he wrote in it and his hand changed diary to "Daniel" and then he'd written things he hadn't known, a secret letter to Daniel that Daniel would never read, would never know existed. He shoved the letters under the white ribbed socks and slammed the drawer closed.

The cat slid between his feet and mewled. He let it out the backdoor. The damn thing was trained to pee in the yard, or maybe it just preferred that since he didn't think a cat could be trained. It was a nuisance, letting it out, but maybe that was better than smelling litter all the time. He was starting to get drunk off the Daniel-smell. At night the cat slept with him. He tried to avoid it, but the other option was having it yowling outside the door. It curled up on his pillow, and pressed its back into his nose. He coughed, but it kept him from smelling Daniel, so he didn't mind too much. In the morning some days the cat would be facing him and have a paw on his neck like it was was checking his pulse, and he would take deep breaths to show it he was alive, and some days it would be stretched out a few inches away so he could just see the back of its mussed-up head and he'd think, 'Daniel, your head's shrunk,' before realizing it was just the cat.

He sat down at the piano on the fourth day. He'd been scared to touch it until then, had been since Daniel had tried to teach him to play it years ago, but he was feeling strange and maybe it was magic and it would make him play for real, like he always wished he could. The cat sat on the bench and wagged its tail. He plunked out a few notes but there was nothing fantastic, in either sense of the word, in them. The cat tried to help, then, hopping on the keys and he stopped when he realized the cat could play better than he. He tried writing some lyrics, but the place was like a pit that sucked up words and the most he could muster were "anything but empty rooms" and "hide all the world from me" which had already been used. He half wondered why he wasn't trying to steal Sondheim's work as his own, instead of Lloyd Webber's, before it occurred to him that he should be wondering why he wasn't thinking of his own words in the first place.

He lifted the top of the piano bench and found the Vogue magazine. It was the shoot that Daniel had "missed." The one he'd hidden from, and Darren had acted like nothing was wrong, gotten everyone to go on and do it and all the while he'd been so pissed at Daniel because it wasn't like him to be irresponsible and he was worried because of it, that maybe something had happened to him so he'd been even more upset when he found him later, in perfect health, and he'd said, "I just didn't feel like it." He'd wanted to hit him, almost had, and the only thing stopping him was Daniel because then he said, "I can't do this anymore," and he'd started crying and then all Darren wanted to do was hold him, except you don't do that with Daniel so he hugged him, three seconds, break, and promised to "see what I can do". It was something of a poetic justice that the magazine now resided under Daniel's ass. He put it back and closed the bench. He thought about the time Daniel had told an interviewer, "I love him like a brother. I love him so much it makes me cry." Wait, he hadn't said that last part. Great. Now he not only was plagiarizing bad musicals, he was concocting false quotes. The Daniel-smell was seeping into his brain. He blinked and it stung.

He jumped when the phone rang. He glared at the cat, like it was its fault, and the cat stared at him--are you going to get that or what, dumb ass? He picked up, figuring that was what housesitters did. He said 'hello', and it was almost a croak. The house sucked up words and sound. He hadn't realized until just then that he hadn't spoken, except to hiss at the cat, since he arrived.

"Honey?" Said the voice on the other end, and he relaxed.

"Hello, mummy," he said and he couldn't remember the last time he'd called her that but it felt right. If his mother thought it strange, she didn't say anything.

"Mrs. Jones told me you were watching the house for Daniel. Why didn't you call me? Your father and I would like to see you."

'Mrs. Jones'.' She always called his friends' parents mister and missus when she spoke to him, like he was a child (respect your elders) even though he was nearly thirty and had long ago stopped with the titles.

"I'm sorry, I meant to call," and it wasn't exactly a lie because he did mean to, but not until he was back in San Francisco. He rubbed his nose against the Daniel-smell and didn't think about how it made him not want to do anything. "How is she?" He asked, meaning Daniel's mother.

"Oh, she's fine. Worrying about her boy, you know, since you made the announcement. I've been worrying about my boy, too," she said.

He cringed. "It wasn't exactly an announcement. It was more a leak."

"Well, it was unfortunate, dear, the way it came out. Mrs. Jones said Daniel was quite upset over it," she said, confirming what he'd never wanted to know.

"Is...is Daniel mad at me?" He asked.

"You boys always played so well together," she said, like he and Daniel were in kindergarten and had suddenly started hitting each other with their sandpails.

"Yes, mummy," he said, and he couldn't tell if his voice was cracking due to its disuse or something else.

"Well, I love you, dear," she said, and he wanted to hug her for not saying anything about it.

"I love you too, mummy," he said. Three times calling her 'mummy' and now he didn't think he could stop if he'd wanted. He was too old for this.

"Give us a ring when you want to come over."

"Okay, mummy. Mummy? I love you." Damn. Twice in the same sentence. And 'I love you' twice in the same conversation. He was definitely losing it.

He could feel his mother smile and knew he'd done nothing to allay her worries. "I love you too, dear," she said, again, before ending the call.

He dropped the receiver into its cradle. He lay down on the couch and the cat came and sat on his head. "Is this real?" He asked. He couldn't help thinking that maybe this wasn't Daniel's house at all. This was some fake house with mementos hidden like some Finders Keepers game for the guilty. The real Daniel House was probably up the block, pleasantly devoid of sentiment. The cat stuck its paw into his mouth and he shut up. He almost wanted to leave, go home, or go in search of the other house, but he'd been asked to watch this one and he wasn't one to shirk his duties, not like another he could mention. He thought about the time he'd found Daniel shaking in a hotel closet because he hadn't wanted to go on an interview. If he'd been in Darren's closet, they never would have found him, but Daniel's closet was empty and all Darren had to do was open the door and look down. Maybe it was best that he found him because he could sit with him and pat his knee, just once, and promise, again, that he'd never have to do another interview, not if the thought made him hide in a closet. He bit the inside of his cheek for thinking bad things about him. It wasn't Daniel's fault, really, that they were such opposites.

He could have slept. It was preferable to thinking about all the stupid things he'd done, even if they were in response to Daniel's cues, so maybe it was Daniel's fault for giving him the wrong ones, or his fault for misinterpreting them, but the cat jumped off him, leaping off from his chest so he coughed but it didn't disguise the crash that followed, relic of the cat's nightly insane run in which it flew around the house and knocked anything it encountered to the floor. He thought about ignoring it, but had visions of broken ceramics, and slowly roused himself to look behind the couch. The cat had toppled a rickety table. He went over to it and touched a leg. It wobbled. He flipped the table upside down to see if he could tighten it. The underside was lined with papers. He thought, briefly, white trash, and bent to remove them. He squinted and saw words, faded, but still readable.

Dan, if I offended you last night, I'm sorry.

Daniel, I think you are mad at me. I'm sorry.

Daniel, I'm sorry.

Daniel, are you mad at me? I'm sorry.

His fingers touched them, traced them. He knew them all. He knew exactly why each one had been written. Notes he'd written on tour and shoved under Daniel's door. And Daniel had saved every last one of them. Daniel, who would knock on his door the morning after, wave the note in his face and say, "asshole", and walk off muttering to himself. He'd never asked where the notes went. He assumed they were thrown out. Now the evidence that they weren't glared up at him and it was perfect for Daniel. Sentiment hidden under a table in the back corner of a room. How fucking fitting. Darren stood up and wondered if Daniel hadn't set him up and he felt stupid. Then he felt guilty because if Daniel wanted him to find them he wouldn't have put them there, and if Daniel was overly sentimental he wouldn't have shoved their ARIAs into a drawer, but maybe that's why he did it. Darren blinked. The Daniel-smell was burning his eyes and he sniffled when a tear slid out of them. He didn't rub them because that made it worse and that was how he came to be standing in the middle of the floor, sobbing, with the cat sliding between his ankles.

He didn't do anything after that. No more snooping, anyway, having found enough to keep him feeling guilty for a decade. He cleaned, again, and cried, a lot, and sometimes he got mad at Daniel and that just increased his guilt until he was nothing but a mess of emotions and couldn't tell if would cry or yell from minute to minute. He shoved the ARIAs back into the desk drawer one minute and pulled them out the next. It pissed him off to hide them and made him cry to keep them out.

He was in one of the red moods when Daniel returned. When Daniel opened the door, the sun was behind him and it backlit his wild hair, made it look like he walked in flames so Darren forgot he was mad and only remembered he was guilty. Daniel dropped his suitcase and smiled at him. "I'm home," he said and Darren knew he should say something in response but he couldn't remember what that was. He just stared at Daniel and the fire behind him, stared at his friend--he could still say 'friend', couldn't he--and said, "I'm sorry."

Daniel closed the door and suddenly he looked like himself again, but Darren was already chewing on his lip. The Daniel-smell had trebled in the five seconds since he'd entered. Daniel rolled his eyes, smiled, and said, "asshole", and Darren half expected him to stick his hands in his pockets and walk off muttering like he always did. He wanted to stop him, but he didn't move. He just stared at his feet and sucked in his lip. He thought about all the times Daniel had feigned ignorance to protect him from journalists and he wondered when he had ever protected Daniel. He glanced up and Daniel had stepped a bit closer to him, and his voice cracked when he said, "sorry", again. Daniel looked down. He wanted to hold him, but you couldn't do that with Daniel. The rule didn't apply to a Darren, though. It was quite alright, desirable, even, for a Darren to be held, so he sighed when Daniel's arms wrapped around him. He froze when Daniel kissed him, except his mouth was so warm that he had to kiss back, his lips, his neck, his ears, until he couldn't think and maybe he was holding Daniel too, but it didn't feel like it. He sniffed in the unfettered Daniel-smell and it didn't sting his eyes. "You're such an asshole," Daniel whispered and he knew he was smiling. Daniel kissed him again, little ones tracing his jawline up to his ear. If Darren's eyes hadn't been closed he would have blinked when Daniel whispered, "Can I fuck you?" with typical Daniel-ness. He thought maybe it was some sick 'asshole' metaphor but it didn't stop him from saying, "yes". He opened his eyes, then, to see if it was some joke and he'd just thrown the dregs of their friendship into the shredder, but Daniel was already taking his hand and leading him into the bedroom.

Darren didn't look at Daniel as he pulled his clothes off. He wasn't sure of the protocol, if he could be enthusiastic or just accepting. Daniel dropped his clothes and helped Darren unbutton his shirt. He kissed his neck. Darren supposed that settled the question. He hadn't slept with a man in ages, but it wasn't exactly something one could forget. He didn't know if Daniel ever had--it wasn't exactly something one asked. He climbed on the bed and knelt down with his ass in the air. He couldn't tell if this was a mercy fuck or something else and he didn't want Daniel to see his face if it was the former. Daniel probably didn't know they could do it face to face anyway. Darren pressed his cheek into his forearm and tried not to wiggle his ass. Daniel came up behind him and he felt lubed fingers press into him and he thought perhaps Daniel did know what he was doing. Darren moaned and Daniel pulled his fingers out and pushed his cock in. He grabbed Darren's hips and it was rough, but the movement was gentle and he rained kisses on Darren's back and shoulders until he thought maybe it wasn't a mercy fuck; maybe it was the real thing. His legs turned to jelly and he bucked up into Daniel, trying to get more of him. Daniel curled his arms under Darren's and sat back so Darren was on top of him. Daniel licked his neck and Darren howled something inhuman. He turned, as much as he could, and met Daniel's lips with his own. Daniel was past coherence. Darren wasn't much better. Daniel grabbed his cock and Darren almost shrieked. He closed his eyes and Daniel was all around him. He screamed when he came. Daniel sighed and the two of them fell over. Daniel slid out of him. They rolled away from the wet spot and Daniel spooned up behind him and draped a bony arm over Darren's chest. He was nearly asleep when Daniel asked, "how was your week?" Darren shifted so Daniel wouldn't stop scratching his chest and said, "Great," which wasn't completely untrue, seeing how it had turned out.

"Good," Daniel said. His voice was dropping into sleep range.

"But your cat is damn annoying, Daniel," Darren muttered. The scratching stopped. Darren froze, praying he hadn't offended him, hadn't ruined it by insulting the precious cat. He licked his lips and started to apologize but Daniel chuckled in that "oh, Darren," way of his and said, "I don't have a cat."

"You don't have a cat?" Darren asked, suddenly awake, but the only response was Daniel's gentle breathing in his ear. Darren laid still and let the sleeping Daniel hold him and thought about the cat until he couldn't get his head around it anymore and he fell asleep with his hand clutching Daniel's. In the morning they had flipped and he was behind Daniel. His first thought was that the cat's head had grown, but then he realized it was Daniel and snuggled up against him and waited for him to wake up or press his hand into his neck and check his pulse like the damn cat. Daniel rolled over and laid on top of him. His hair was under Darren's nose and Darren breathed him in thinking perhaps he could get used to this. Daniel put his hand on Darren's neck and smacked his lips. Darren breathed for him, as he had for the cat, and wondered if Daniel could get used to it, too. Maybe he already was. Let me show you the shape of my heart, he thought, and groaned. He rubbed Daniel's back. It was true, though. Someone else's sentiments made his own. As if he heard, Daniel's hand slid from Darren's neck to his chest and rested on his heart. Perhaps his words would return now. Now that Daniel was back in his life. Now that he was back in Daniel's.