1/3 when tyrell rolls over to check his watch where he left it on the bedside table, it's 3am. he lies still, watches the second hand make two full rotations and then pushes the blanket away, sits up and swings his legs out of bed. when he stretches his arms up over his head a joint somewhere clicks and he winces. he pads through to the kitchen, opens the fridge, and just stands with his cheek pressed against one of the shelves, trying to cool down. it’s hard for him to sleep in unfamiliar beds.
he stands there until the fridge starts chiming at him, politely, and he shuts the door. if he didn’t wake joe up getting out of bed he must be awake by now. tyrell takes a tall glass from a cupboard, fills it with water and has a few sips. when he gets back to the bed he places the glass by his watch and lands heavily on the mattress, full-body exhaustion suddenly catching up to him. the side of his face squashed against the pillow, he shifts onto his stomach, one arm flung out haphazardly over the space between them on the bed. ‘sorry,’ he says, plaintively, voice muffled. ‘i was thirsty.’ his fingertips brush joe’s arm by accident when he shifts a little, and then again, on purpose.
joe sleeps like the dead. it takes a little while to reach the cognizance required, to pull his limbs together and relight sleepy nerves; when he does, he reaches for him, touching the hand that touched him and then moving past that, the small of tyrell’s back, the curve of his spine. he touches tyrell in the same way he wakes up. a bit at a time. not quite all at once.
‘did you find something to drink?’ he turns onto his side to look at him - only lit by the moon, by the city, what light filters through into joe’s bedroom. he’s indistinct. he maps his way to tyrell’s shoulderblades, the notches of his spine. he can still taste tyrell in the back of his mouth. he might be imagining it but he’s thinking about it.
he moves and mouths against tyrell’s shoulder, just for a moment, says against his skin, ‘do you need anything?’ an open-mouthed kiss closer to his throat: ‘do you want anything?’