Caught in Possession

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"Phi, you missed the turning", Gulf yawned through an achy, feline stretch as Mew took the wrong road branch out of an airport roundabout. Hungover and damn well fucked was a brutal potion to travel under the influence of, the younger had discovered through the course of an uncomfortable afternoon's flight - multiple humiliating, limped trips to that claustrophobic cuboid of a bathroom cabin before the probing eyes and barely concealed titters of his captive audience of teammates.

The two men had arrived into London territory separately, of course, 'discreet' remaining the operative word. Gulf via hellish plane journey, and Mew setting off earlier to drive his own car back down along a questionable satnav route over Snake Pass from the Lake District - collecting the other at the airport in lieu of the anonymously chauffeured car in which the footballer had already officially departed with Kaownah.

But why, now, was this substitute driver ignoring Gulf's words? Following the maze of signs towards 'Long Stay Car Park' in place of 'EXIT'? Mew was silent - seemingly focused only on the grey, tyre-worn tarmac that stretched out immediately beyond the barrier of the windscreen - yet didn't his hands grip the steering wheel a little too tightly? Weren't his lips pursed and his brow furrowed as he manoeuvred them, short moments later, into an unexplained parking space.

They sat, Gulf's body in the front passenger seat angled to face Mew - unspoken questions - and the elder still staring only straight ahead, eyes not seeing the silver bollards and neat, mechanically trimmed boxiness of the car park's boundary hedges, but busy with some other thing. Some other vision.

Until at last, he spoke, head drooping to bow as if shielding himself from Gulf's eyes (or answer):

"Will you come with me?"

"Alai na khrab? Come with you?"

A pause as the speaker struggled, wrestling match at full spectacle within the ring of his chest. Then...

"Ive been thinking all the way down...I have to go to her Gulf. Will you come? I...can't leave you. I won't. But I know I can't make you come, I have no right. SHIA!" - Mew slammed a clenched fist down into the steering wheel in rising anguish. He was tearing into two halves, right there behind tinted windows, beneath the dullest blanket of overcast skies. An ailing, suddenly aged and vulnerable lion, growling hyena packs of love and responsibility tugging, teeth piercing and gripping at earthly flesh to drag his parts in opposite longitude. East and West.

Yet Mew had only one lion heart. Which half claimed it? Or would it simply break?

He had to go. But he couldn't leave Gulf. But he had to go to...

"Stop. Stop it" - the elder was summoned back to the smooth leather of his car seat by Gulf's loudly authoritative voice, and the hand that jerked his chin roughly sideways as it forced him to meet those eyes at last. Transiently soft, brown, almond-shaped eyes. "What did I say to you? Stop pushing me back. I stand next to you, remember?"

"You mean..."

"I mean of course I'm fucking coming. Whatever it is. If you go, I go"

"It might not be safe..."

"We've just been held at gunpoint on the shores of a lake in the quaintest middle of nowhere. Tell me, where's safe? We're safest together. Mew, we knew from the beginning that we were both a mess. Isn't it time we started trying to clean up?"

"You sound like Pauline"

"I'm serious"

It sent a shiver of heat through the elder to hear Gulf talk that way, his body taking primal pleasure in that braveness, that pure ferocity. 'Us against the world'. It realigned him, cemented back his two mauled halves in therapeutic Kintsugi...