Both Sides of the Bed

Felix Naylor has loved his best friend since they were fourteen.

He's catalogued it, conjugated it into dead languages, filed it under things that will never be said. Twenty years of friendship, three of flatshares, one double bed bought sixty quid off Gumtree, and a silence he's spent his whole life perfecting.

Joel Dearden thinks he's straight. He also reaches across Felix in the kitchen without thinking, learns Sappho by heart without knowing why, and can't explain the thing his body does the second Felix walks into a room.

Then one cold night on the Yorkshire moors, twenty years of careful distance collapses in eighteen inches of mattress — and nothing about the morning after can be filed away. But wanting your best friend is the easy part.