FOUR MONTHS AND TWENTY-ONE DAYS AFTER THE DEATH OF OLIVER SALLOW

Finn always thought it would last longer.

Maybe that's because he was sixteen and naïve. Maybe it's because he got so swept up in Oliver Sallow's gravity that he lost sight of the bigger picture, starry-eyed as he ignored the red flags in his periphery.

Or maybe they really were that serious—because they were teenagers, because they were each other's firsts—and it's just easier to tell himself they weren't. A way to make sense of a punctuation mark that felt, to him, like it appeared in the middle of a sentence.

Cut short, he couldn't understand its contents at all.

He still can't, if he's being honest. He doesn't know why Oliver broke up with him on a random day in May, or why they never spoke again after that. He's not sure he ever really did.

With a groan, he buries his face against his pillow. The glow-in-the-dark letters on his alarm clock tell him that it's two a.m. by now. The perfect time, apparently, to dig out all the memories he's spent the last year burying.

Accepting that sleep won't come anytime soon, he picks up his phone. Oliver's playlist is still playing softly—Finn has a hard time falling asleep in total silence—a gentle guitar filling his room. It's not the kind of music that Oliver would ever listen to. It's a playlist curated specifically for Finn; full of the kind of mellow indie music that he likes, only more niche, the stuff you only find when really digging through obscure Spotify playlists. Even now, the idea of Oliver forcing himself through hours of songs outside his preferred genre for Finn makes him feel warm.

Squinting at the screen in the dark, Finn checks his messages, then scrolls through an Instagram account with football memes for a while. Eventually, he returns where he always does: to Oliver Sallow's phone number.

Finn's thumb hovers above it as he breathes shakily into his dark room. Over a month, he's gone without seeing him. It should be easy by now to lock his phone and set it back down, find something else to occupy himself with until his head stops buzzing.

Except Finn feels off-kilter tonight. Something about comforting his mum and then fighting with his dad has left him feeling raw. He knows he can't talk about it with Aarun and Kavi or any of his other mates—something about that feels like betraying his mother's trust. But Oliver... he already knows all about this.

Before he can think better of it, Finn presses Call.

He holds his breath as the familiar beeping sounds and the eerie choir announces that Oliver will be there shortly. In the few seconds he has, he takes quick stock of himself: he's wearing only boxer shorts and an oversized shirt with a hole near the collar, and his hair probably looks like something nested in it.

Probably he should have thought about this prior to calling, but before he can regret his decision (or do much about his outfit), a dark silhouette appears at the foot of his bed.

Its sudden appearance is every bit as menacing as one would imagine. Instinctively, Finn scrambles for the lamp on his bedside table, almost knocking his meds to the floor in the process. His heart only settles when light floods his bedroom and he looks up to find Oliver staring at him like a deer in headlights.

For a long moment, neither of them speaks.

Then: "Did you mean to—"

"I'm so sorry, you probably—"

They both break off at the same time.

Oliver swallows. "Did you mean to call me?"

"I..." Finn's cheeks feel hot as he sits up, his legs tangled in his blanket. "Yeah. I did."

With the shadows the light is casting on his pale face, Oliver's expression is hard to read.

After a beat, Finn tentatively gestures at his bed. "Do you want to sit?"

"Yeah. Okay." Slowly, Oliver nears the bed. It creaks as he settles on its very edge, somewhere around where Finn's shins are. His hair is a curtain hiding his face. "Did something happen?"

Finn could tell him about his mum's panic attack or the fight with his father. But watching Oliver sit there, his shoulders a tense line, he suddenly doesn't want to talk about any of that. He just wants to... he just wants to be with Oliver.

"I'm sorry," Oliver suddenly says when the silence drags on.

Finn blinks at him from across the bed. "What for?"

"For the way I acted the other night." He draws in a breath, gaze fixed on the rings on his fingers as he fidgets with them. The gesture is so painfully familiar it makes something inside Finn ache. "I didn't mean to be so cold. I never do."

"Oh." Finn shifts a little. "It's fine. I didn't expect you to say it back, either way."

At that, Oliver suddenly looks up. "No, but that makes it even worse," he whispers. And there it is again: that familiar gravity, his gaze so heavy Finn doesn't even think about tearing his away. "Because I do. Miss you, I mean." He swallows, hard. "I miss you every time someone mentions football. I miss you every time I read Hamlet. I miss you every time I see a bird. Do you know how many stupid birds there are in Dover?"

"I really wish people would let the bird thing go," Finn says. It comes out as more of a sniffle, but he can't even be embarrassed about that. Oliver has explicitly prohibited the general feeling of shame in his presence. It's ingrained in Finn as deeply as the offside rule.

Maybe this is the reason he manages to ask: "Ollie... Why did we break up?"

In the short moment of silence, Finn can see the entirety of their relationship unfold behind Oliver's hazelnut eyes. He braces for all kinds of horrible responses. Like I didn't have feelings for you. You weren't enough. I wasn't as happy as you were and didn't have the heart to say it.

He's not prepared for "Because I was scared."

Finn's breath catches almost painfully in his throat. "What?"

"I was scared," Oliver softly repeats. He brushes his hair behind his ears and finally twists so that Finn can make out the entirety of his face. "I was convinced we wouldn't last more than a few months. Even if you decided you really wanted to be with me that long—which felt like a pretty big if—then I'd probably move somewhere else before the year was over. And I didn't want to do that." He presses his lips together and for the first time, Finn thinks Oliver might be about to cry. His voice comes out hoarse as he adds: "I couldn't do that. So I ended it before anyone else could take it all away."

"Ollie," Finn whispers. And then, he does the one thing he's wanted to do ever since this boy appeared on his doorstep like a ghost: he shuffles across the mattress and wraps his arms around him, tight.

Part of him expects Oliver to freeze, to slip away again. Instead, he suddenly melts, his face dropping into the crook of Finn's neck as his fingers curl into his ratty sleep shirt. "I'm sorry," he says into Finn's shoulder. "I'm so sorry."

Tentatively, Finn rests a hand on the back of his neck, and all of a sudden he's back on the football field, holding that little bird. The shaking, the fine bones beneath his fingertips. The feeling of holding something so delicate he's not sure he could forgive himself if anything happened to it.

"I wish I'd known," he murmurs. I wish I'd known you were as afraid as I was. I wish I'd known you were already running again. I wish I'd known to hold you tighter when you told me to let you go.

He can feel the salt on his neck as Oliver cries silently, the hitch in his breath his only tell. Finn wants to tilt his head up and wipe the tears away, card his fingers through his hair like he's done so many times before. Instead, he only wraps his arms tighter around him.

"I don't know if it matters now," he softly tells him, "But I don't think they wanted to get rid of you. They loved you."

The laugh Oliver lets out is a wet, shuddery thing. "A few of them loved me. The result was still the same, wasn't it?"

"You've never spoken much about the other families."

"I guess not." Rubbing at his eyes with his sleeve, Oliver leans back. Belatedly, Finn drops his arms and scoots back a little, giving him space. "I don't really like to think about them."

Finn blanches as the horrible news stories his mum sometimes brings up flash in his mind.

Catching his expression, Oliver shakes his head. "Nothing like that. I got lucky, I suppose." He tries for a wry smile, but it doesn't hold, so he drops it. "Most of them weren't so bad. There were some that were really nice, honestly. But those were the worst ones." His thumb brushes over the wet spot on his sleeve where his tears have soaked it. "They make you believe it's real. They say welcome home and give you your own room and make you think they mean it. At ten years old, you don't hear the countdown ticking down in the background. Every time they make you pack up your things feels like the first time again."

There's a slew of I'm sorrys on Finn's tongue, but he swallows them down, eyes burning. He gives Oliver back what he offered. A truth for a truth. "The reason I wasn't ready to come out wasn't that I was ashamed of us. It was because I was worried for my mum."

Oliver's eyebrows pinch together as he tries to follow the abrupt change of topic. "What...?"

"I talked a lot about it with my therapist," Finn says, "And I think I was scared that if the entire town knew I liked boys, they would start to talk. And that, when my mum decided to leave the house again, they would come up to her and pester her about it and make going out even harder for her."

Oliver's lips part, but Finn cuts him off by rushing to add: "I know it's a stupid reason. It just... it all felt so big back then. Liking a boy. Everything we had." He breaks off. "I don't know."

"It was big," Oliver says, earnest as ever.

"Yeah. I guess it was." Finn lets out a breath. "Maybe it still would be, if we'd just talked."

"We were really, really young," Oliver murmurs.

"So young," Finn says. There are only two years between him and the Finn who first fell in love with Oliver but somehow they feel like decades. At sixteen, everything felt so serious. Not just his feelings for Oliver. It's like everything he felt back then, good or bad or scary, was dialled up to three times what it is now.

As they sit there, he feels a strange relief at the knowledge that he will never be that age again—never again so lost. He thinks that Oliver might be thinking the same thing.

Into the silence, he asks: "Do you want to stay for a bit?"

Oliver thinks about it for one, two, three seconds. Then, he tips his head in the faintest of nods and shrugs off his coat.

Finn lifts his blanket and scoots to make room. Oliver gingerly settles down next to him, his cheek pillowed on his arm, their faces only a breath away. Even with his eyes still puffy and his lip bitten raw, the sight of him this close makes Finn's chest feel tight.

"You have a new piercing," he realizes.

Oliver scrunches up his nose, his lips twitching into an approximation of a smile. "Yeah. D'you like it?"

"It's cool." Finn smiles back. His ankle brushes against Oliver's shin as he adjusts his position. Gaze directed at Oliver's collarbones, he says: "I talked to Gabby at the store the other day. She invited me over for dinner."

Here, seventeen-year-old Oliver would've frozen, all defences rising.

Nineteen-year-old Oliver only hums quietly. "Are you going?"

"I think so." He hesitates. "I thought maybe you'd like to come with."

This close, he can hear the click of Oliver's throat as he swallows.

"That's possible, right?" Finn asks when he doesn't respond right away. "You can go anywhere I am?"

"Yeah," Oliver whispers. And then: "Thank you."

Two words, and relief drapes over Finn like a blanket. He presses his cheek into his pillow. "Sure."

Against his will, his eyelids flutter shut. In the darkness behind them, he can hear Oliver's steady breathing, the click of the light switch as he turns off the lamp on the bedside table. Then, a hand tugs the blanket up over Finn's shoulder and lingers there, his palm a steady weight against Finn's shoulder blade. And Finn knows that nothing will come out of it, that it's all borrowed time, but for just a moment he allows himself to pretend that November never happened. It's easy when he has Oliver in his bed like this, warm and solid and real. The opposite of a ghost.

"This is the first time we're sharing a bed," Finn murmurs.

This time, he can hear a real smile in Oliver's voice. "Better late than never."

Finn's agreement gets lost in a yawn. A tiny shift, and his forehead is resting against Oliver's chest, their legs entangled under the blanket. He doesn't know if this is allowed, but any idea he might have about moving away dissolves when a hair settles in his hair.

It should be awkward, given everything that happened, but it's not. Finn fits as perfectly under Oliver's chin as he always has; Oliver holds him like he never stopped.

"Thanks for coming," Finn says.

Oliver's knee softly nudges his. "Thanks for calling."

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i love the sharing a bed trope so much. these boys are so SOFT

i hope you enjoyed this bitter-sweet chapter!! i can't wait for you to read the one when ollie meets his foster family again :,)

today's song is intertwined by dodie!! it's such an oliver x finn song it makes me want to weep

until next week!!! much love mwah