The room had seemed entirely dark when Marc had woken up that night, not exactly startling but still so distinctly uncomfortable and disoriented that he had known instantly that he'd been dreaming. He couldn’t remember any of it, though, and lying still on his back, focusing on his breathing and staring out of the roof-light above him, he calmed down quickly. It wasn’t really dark; a faint glow from the lights out on the street was illuminating the room and Marc bid farewell to any hope of falling asleep again. Roman wasn’t a fan of curtains. He thought they were pointless since no one could peek in anyway, and besides, he liked waking up with the sun shining in his face. Marc didn’t; he always had trouble falling asleep here, being used to the absolute darkness of his own apartment. But this was Roman’s place, the first place that was truly his, and so Marc wasn’t going to argue. If he was honest with himself - and he had sworn to be, more often – the light wasn’t the reason why sleep was out of question right now. Now that he was awake, he couldn’t help thinking, and once he had started with that it was hard to pull himself out of it again.

Marc turned his head slightly towards the familiar silhouette of his boyfriend next to him. Roman lay with his back to him, curled up in a ball, breathing steadily and peacefully. Feeling a sudden urge to see his face, Marc carefully reached over and caressed Roman’s bare shoulder with the tips of his fingers dancing lightly across the warm skin, barely touching. Roman responded like he always did. With a muffled sigh, he stretched his legs, turned and shifted until he came to rest on his back, arms at an odd angle that really shouldn’t be comfortable. He never woke up from any of this. Marc couldn’t help smiling, despite his ambivalent overall mood. Roman looked so ridiculously young, especially when he was asleep. His face, which could change expressions from laughter to sadness, from anger to lust within the blink of an eye when he was awake, was still now; he looked relaxed, a half-smile curling his lips, his hair tousled every which way. One hand still clinging to the sheets was the only indication of the tautness that never quite left his body these days, not even in his sleep. Marc leaned over and lazily planted little kisses on the knuckles, one by one. The hand’s grip loosened a bit, and Marc chuckled. By now, they knew each other quite well, physically.

With a sigh, he sat up. Although he was barely twenty, he sometimes felt quite old these days. It was something that he had trouble getting a grip on, something he couldn’t really name, but it was still there and occasionally reared its head despite all his efforts to push it back. It made him feel tired at any rate, that much was certain. Tired of trying his best to live up to everyone’s expectations: his family’s, his trainer’s, his friends’ and yes, Roman's as well, to a certain extent. Tired of being there for everyone at any time of day; of being the perfect athlete, the perfect son and the perfect lover, never having any needs or expectations of his own, and most of all tired of being too goddamn understanding all the time.

He ran his fingers through his hair – he had started growing it a little longer these days, so it fell down to his forehead and hid the fact that his hairline was already starting to recede – and scolded himself for being so pathetic. Who was he to complain, after all?

Marc shook his head, smiling at himself, then leaned in closer to Roman. He wasn’t sure if he actually intended to wake him. What he did know was that he needed to touch him, now; needed to make sure he was really there and not going anywhere. He started with the inch of bare skin right below Roman’s collarbone, palm flat against soft skin, feeling the even heave and fall of his chest. Marc proceeded to move his hand just a little, not quite stroking, not quite resting, enjoying the sensation of sleep-flushed, warm skin beneath his fingers. Ever so slowly, he leisurely dropped his hand lower, pulling back the covers a little, baring more of Roman’s body to his touch. His fingers encircled but not quite touched Roman’s left nipple before travelling further down, tracing hard muscles along Roman's stomach and the fine, almost invisible line of hair beneath his navel. It was when he leaned down to add the touch of lips and tongue against the dip above Roman’s collarbone that the figure beneath him started to move. One hand came up to touch Marc's head, clumsy and still far from awake, and he had to duck away to avoid having his eyes poked out by questing fingers. Roman made a noise that sounded like a combination of yawning and groaning and attempted to roll over and go back to sleep entirely; but Marc wanted, needed him to be awake now.

“Hey, sleepyhead," he whispered.

Roman sighed, and though Marc couldn’t see it, he was pretty sure that he opened his eyes, blinking into the darkness. “Whassup?” he heard him mumble.

“Couldn’t sleep, you know," Marc explained, ever the eloquent one. “I’ve been thinking.” Without warning, he scraped his fingernails across the sensitive skin above Roman’s hipbone and delivered an almost playful bite to his neck. Roman inhaled sharply, indicating to Marc that he was probably awake enough to listen now.

“What is it?”

Marc let his tongue travel lower, dipping briefly against one nipple in order to have some time to find the right words; to say what he wanted to say without raising the same old discussion. He understood by now that there were some things that Roman couldn’t do for him – or didn’t want to, an ugly voice in the back of his mind said – but that didn’t mean that he’d necessarily accepted it or that it would stop nagging him. “I need you to…” he interrupted himself, “we need to spend more time together.”

He could feel Roman shrug. “We spend plenty of time together. You’re here every night. And some quality time it is, I might add.” The cheeky grin in his voice was unmistakable, but Marc interrupted him, somewhat harshly.

“That’s not what I mean and you know it.” He immediately regretted lashing out and tried to make his voice sound reconciliatory. “Look, it’s going to be Christmas soon enough… I thought we might spend it together.” It was a compromise, really, nothing big to ask for, Marc told himself; nothing that would require them to leave their solitary comfort zone. While speaking, he let his hands travel even lower until his fingers stroked Roman’s cock, teasingly, with not nearly enough friction. He could be quite persuasive, he thought to himself as he scraped his teeth against the neglected other nipple.

Roman hissed briefly, but only to lower his voice again immediately. “You know I can’t. I’m going home for Christmas. I always do.”

Marc did his best not to let his disappointment show. Of course, he'd known. Still… “Because you want to or because you have to?”, he teased, sounding sharper than he'd intended to, briefly interrupting his tongue’s downwards progression across Roman’s navel, then lower still.

“They’re my family, Marc, of course I want to see them.”

It wasn’t quite an answer and Marc knew it, but he also knew better than to keep teasing his boyfriend. Arranging himself between Roman’s thighs, he looked up briefly, not entirely able to make out the younger man’s features in the darkness of the room. He tried to smile but felt himself that there was a nasty shade to it. “Tell me about Christmas at home.” He lowered his head to briefly lick across the head of Roman’s hardening cock.

Roman sucked in air between his teeth. “Marc, what the fuck is this about?”

“Nothing," Marc replied. “I just want to know.” This was twisted and not helpful to anyone and he was quite aware of it. He knew that Roman didn’t like talking about his family and his childhood. This didn’t belong here; Gunzenhausen was another life for Roman, and it had no business interfering with his life in Cologne. Marc knew all that. He just couldn’t bring himself to care right now. He steadied his grip on Roman’s hips and dipped down to take Roman’s length into his mouth, licking along the shaft. Roman thrust forward and gave in.

“Well," he started, voice slightly strained but otherwise sounding pretty normal, as if this wasn’t the weirdest situation ever. He was probably getting used to Marc’s mind-games when it came to this particular topic. “We usually decorate the Christmas tree on the evening of the 23rd. Pretty late at night, when Flo’s asleep because…” – he quite obviously had to bite his lip to keep in a moan – “… because Mom likes him to believe Santa does it, or some fairies. It’s kind of ridiculous, thinking about it. Anyway, we also put the presents underneath the tree then. So they lie around all day on Christmas Eve…” He interrupted himself.

Marc had continued to suck Roman off, one hand moving up his torso while the other one was tugging lightly on his balls. Now he withdrew. “Well," he said, perfectly innocent, “do go on.”

Roman raised his head, frowning. The fingers of one hand drew a line across Marc’s forehead. “Honestly, Marc, I’m not joking, what the hell are you doing here?” Confusion, arousal and – to Marc’s surprise – some sort of anger or annoyance mingled in his voice and made it sound hoarse and guttural. It seemed like Marc was onto something here, although he didn’t quite know what it was.

Instead of an answer, Marc leaned down and placed a sharp bite to sensitive skin somewhere above Roman’s left hipbone.

Roman hissed a curse. He seemed to be starting to understand the rules of this game, even though he didn’t have any idea where it was heading. Tell and I’ll suck you off, question and I’ll go away.

Frankly, Marc didn’t even know himself how they'd got here and what he was aiming at. He was about to stop the whole thing, about to withdraw, apologize and end this embarrassing situation when he heard Roman’s voice again, somewhere up there in the dark, starting to tell, caving for good.

He talked about church on Christmas mornings, about gifts that the grandmas would always send, about dinner with the family and his mom making the boys sing Christmas carols and his father laughing – not even in a mean way – and telling them that they were being sappy. The dirty little game seemed forgotten all of a sudden. It didn’t even matter all that much that at some point Roman came in Marc’s mouth with a ragged moan, or that Marc crawled up to him to kiss him on the lips, somewhat apologetically. Roman kept talking still; it was as if some dam had been opened and now pressure was slowly being released. Marc found himself somewhat twistedly enamored with what he had unlocked here.

There were moments when Roman’s eyes darkened and his voice grew more tense, when he was talking about his father’s digs in his direction, his mom looking away in these moments, not saying anything. That was when Marc crawled in closer and buried Roman’s head against his bare chest, fingers running through his hair. These were the stories he knew and that still made him furious and unwilling to accept that Roman wouldn’t just burn all his bridges behind him and be with Marc; that he was still clinging so desperately to his family, unable to tell his father to fuck off for good. That he was so afraid to lose them.

But there was something more that had been disclosed to him tonight, something that he would later realize made Roman more vulnerable to him than all the swearing about his father and about a stupid village full of goddamn homophobes and bigots in the deepest Westerwald ever could. It was in the way Roman occasionally started laughing in the middle of a story about his nutty aunt coming over on the 25th and always giving him knitted woolen socks that were so nastily scratchy and such an ugly color that he never wore any of them, except for directly after receiving them, because she insisted. It was in the way he turned his voice into a shrill high-pitched sound that sent Marc into hysterics when imitating how Flo would throw a temper tantrum sometime in the early afternoon because he wasn’t allowed to open his presents before dinner. And it was in the way he described curling up in bed as a kid late at night after the celebrations were over, stuffed with roast goose and Christmas cookies, more often than not with barely any space left in his bed because he had taken all his favorite presents along with him, and his mother coming up to his room, still humming a carol, to kiss him goodnight.

Marc had intended to pressure Roman, to make him spend time with him on Christmas this year, because he didn’t feel like going home and even less like being alone on the holidays. Despite his somewhat guilty conscience, he hadn’t really cared if this would involve guilt tripping. He had been convinced that it was for Roman’s own good at the end of the day, the same way he always felt when it came to the subject of Roman’s family. But by the time his head finally dropped back into the pillow, with dawn already breaking and faint daylight illuminating Roman’s face, he had come to understand something. This wasn’t really all as black and white, as good and bad as he liked to see it. Making Roman leave his family behind, making him forget the Westerwald for good and start a new life here wasn’t something Marc could decide on, no matter how much he wanted to. Because – this much he'd come to understand – in doing that he would also make Roman unhappy and ultimately he would also decide their shared future. It would be a lie to say this realization made him happy; not even close. But he had to admit that it was a necessary realization, and a good one. He’d have to wait for Roman to do this on his own account, one way or another; he'd have to take a step back once again, even if it killed him. Marc’s head was spinning, and Roman, of course, noticed.

He leaned over and their lips met briefly. “Will we be alright?” he asked.

Marc smiled wryly, but when he replied with his usual “Of course we will be," it was the first time in a while that he actually thought they might be.