Stray Cat

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Dan fell asleep almost immediately. Phil was no stranger to falling asleep after sex, but his nerves were jangling and his mind was racing – it would have been impossible to sleep right now, so he just lay there, content to do nothing as the Neko snored softly, half pinning him beneath his warm body.

Or Phil would have been content, if it weren't for his brain – he believed his thoughts must be going so fast that his brain was making whirring noises loud enough to wake Dan. Phil couldn't exactly put his thoughts into concrete words. It wasn't like he was working on a math problem where all he had to do was focus so that he could come up with a solution. No, his thoughts were scattered – they were just flickers of images and emotions.

It took Phil some time as he was lying there, staring at his bedroom ceiling, but eventually he had a name for some of the emotions that were coursing through his body. It seemed odd to him that he had to take time to think about it to realize what he was feeling – who has to do that, you just feel, don't you? But then he realized why this was. He was lying here beneath the boy he loved, so he thought that he should feel completely happy. So, it was hard to comprehend feeling something else. He had pictured this moment so often. Not just the reunion with Dan, but also being in bed with him, and he had always been ecstatic during these fantasies.

Now that it was a reality, he was happy, but he was something else too. He closed his eyes, and his whirring brain brought forth an image of Dan in a cell, the bars parting them. Phil felt terrified. Phil heard his mother, as she spoke to him the for the first time about Dan, when she thought that Dan was a bad person. Phil felt apprehensive, knowing that she would be meeting Dan for the first time in the next few days. Phil thought about his dwindling bank account. He felt uneasy.

More than anything, Phil pictured awful things happening to Dan, and he pictured random people he knew from his hometown. A man who sold ice-cream insulted Dan. A bully Phil knew from high school shoved Dan. The Reverend in the church that Phil attended as a boy made a scathing sermon about Dan. A librarian refused to issue Dan a library membership card. A boy who worked at a sandwich shop spat in Dan's food.

Phil pictured all of these things happening to Dan when he moved back home with him, and he didn't know what to do. There was a reason why he had never seen a Neko before moving to London – Rawtenstall was a small town, and Phil doubted that anyone else who lived there would have met someone like Dan before. All they would know about him were the stereotypes gleamed from tv and movies.

Phil wanted Dan to be safe and happy, and he was afraid that wouldn't be possible in a small town. Yeah, afraid was a good word to sum up Phil's feelings at the moment. He wanted to be happy and this moment – lying in bed with his boyfriend – it should be perfect, but he was so afraid for the future that he couldn't feel it. He was afraid that Dan would be miserable in Rawtenstall. He was afraid that someone would take Dan from him again, like Neko House had. He was afraid that he was dreaming right now and that he would wake up to the reality that his mother hadn't given him the money in time to buy Dan before someone else did.

Dan shifted on his chest, and Phil tried to slow his thoughts, convinced for a moment that his brain actually was making a noise loud enough to wake him. Dan murmured something incomprehensible against Phil's chest. Then he looked up, blinking at Phil. "Did I fall asleep?"

"Yes. You were only out for about 15 or 20 minutes though."

Dan groaned. "You make me feel like a cat, you know that?"

"No, what do you mean?" Phil laughed.

"Have you seen the comic strip in the newspaper with the cat? The fat orange cat with stripes. There's this thing that happens to the cat whenever he steps into a sunbeam – he melts into a puddle of cat on the ground and starts snoring contentedly. You're a ray of sunshine, you know that? And you make me feel like a cat."