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It takes them until the end of their first semester, the closing night of the college’s production of Romeo and Juliet (of course) in which Darren, still in the throes of his brief acting phase, played the Tybalt to Geoffrey’s Mercutio. When the two of them return dishevelled to the afterparty at one in the morning, their Juliet takes one look at them and says, “I cannot fucking believe it took you two this long.”
Apparently the cast have been placing bets.
It happens like this: they’re backstage watching until the end of the play, exhilarated and exhausted both, neither of them bothering to change out of costume despite the red stains beginning to seep through their shirts, Darren with his lit cigarette, tapping his ridiculous heeled pointed shoes on the floor, one-two-three like he’s listening to a waltz. When the curtains close Darren says something about how that night’s crowd had consisted entirely of imbeciles and philistines and the fruit of the unholy unions of both, and so Geoffrey practically has to follow him back to the (deserted) dressing room to argue with him about popularised contemporary opinion of Romeo and Juliet.
And at one point Darren says “You’re overstating the sexuality of the text, Geoffrey,” (of all things!) and Geoffrey just looks at him, and to this day neither of them is sure which one moves first, but their kiss is biting and desperate and long, long overdue.
That night Geoffrey learns that Darren Nichols fucks angry and vicious, doesn’t care whether he’s biting on Geoffrey’s lip or his own so long as he can taste the blood, bruises easy, and comes with his fingers digging hard into Geoffrey’s hips and Geoffrey telling him I want to feel it later.
--
Geoffrey can see the bruises he left on Darren’s neck and collarbone last night. They show up stark, chiaroscuro in the moonlight (okay, that part’s a lie, the quandrangle is artificially lit- it’s only midnight, after all, the night is yet young) as Darren pivots on his heel-- ‘theatrically’ should be taken as read-- and aims his blade right at Geoffrey’s throat.
--
“Are you drunk-calling me, Geoffrey? How gauche.”
“Did you know I’m at New Burbage now? This is boasting, by the way. I’m boasting.”
“Yes, you utter prat, I did know. I’ve seen your reviews.”
“Have you been clipping them out of the papers, Darren? That’s sweet. Do you pin them to your wall?”
“Ha ha. Every misguided word of praise for you from the pen of every unseasoned, simple-minded critic wounds me, darling.”
“And you read them anyway? How masochistic of you.”
“Well, you’d know.”
--
Darren turns up at New Burbage halfway through the season’s run of Much Ado, with his newly-acquired MA and his increasingly terrible scarves and that sneer of his that evolves a little in its superciliousness every time Geoffrey sees it. He just walks into rehearsals at the end of the day as though he’s supposed to be there, waits for the cast to leave, and then stalks up to Geoffrey and tells him, “Mediocre, Geoffrey, entirely mediocre. But then I suppose it’d be optimistic to expect anything more.”
“What, my dear Lady Disdain!” says Geoffrey, “are you yet living?”
They get into Geoffrey’s beat-up old car-- Darren, sitting in the passenger seat, crosses one leg over the other and keeps his arms tight in his lap as though to avoid touching anything as far as is physically possible-- and they drive back to Geoffrey’s beat-up old apartment.
There’s a photo on his kitchen table of the whole cast in rehearsals: Ellen (who is still not returning his calls) standing next to him as Beatrice, smiling all wry and cynical; Geoffrey himself grinning, caught in the motion of undoing the top button of his shirt; Oliver behind them with a hand on each of their shoulders. Geoffrey picks it up and deposits it on the pages of a copy of Hamlet he has sitting around, shuts the book (gently, though) to hide the image away.
Darren lights a cigarette and smokes it, and Geoffrey goes down on him when it’s still in his hand, until Darren’s arching against the kitchen chair and hissing obscenities between his teeth, his hand tangled in Geoffrey’s hair with his fingernails tenting sharply inwards. After Darren comes, his hips shaking and his fingers tight, he puts out the smoking stub of his cigarette on the thin skin of Geoffrey’s inner wrist. It hurts like hell, perfect and precise and vicious, and oh, Geoffrey thinks, it has been far too long.
Later that night they lie next to each other in Geoffrey’s bed, the sheets like crumpled discarded stage-notes around their ankles. Geoffrey’s completely fucking exhausted, his wrists red and sore, blood on his teeth. Darren looks infuriatingly pleased with himself, his head thrown deliberately back so the darkening bruises on his neck draw the eye, tilting a pilfered glass of the best wine Geoffrey owns back and forth in his hand and sipping it with pursed lips.
“What’s next, then, for the illustrious Geoffrey Tennant?” Darren drawls.
Geoffrey sighs, pushes his hair back off his forehead with a still-sweaty palm. He should ask Darren to leave. He doesn’t think he will. “Rehearsals for Hamlet start in a month and a half,” he says.
“Ah,” says Darren, dryly, “I suppose I ought to wish you all the best.”
--
Darren sends postcards from Berlin.
They understand me here. I doubt such a place exists for you, darling.
Geoffrey, reading them from his hospital bed, can’t help but agree.
--