"So Arthur, how come you write so much about people just laying in bed together?" And Arthur's smile wavers. He thinks about nights spent kissing the stars with smoke behind his teeth, breathing in someone else, finding red hair in the drain and trying desperately to find some poetic beauty in it while his heart goes off like a shell in the middle of a war. There are splinters of the man he loved all over his hands, where he touched him; everything is softer against the warm sheets but you can't tell a reporter that. He'll sell Arthur's tragic love, will paint the walls with Arthur's broken heart and pretend like he makes it justice.
Arthur laughs uneasily and knocks back the last of his water like it's a shot, tries to find his footing. "Well, isn't that a special place for couples?" No one wants to read about dirty dishes and half-drunken kisses in front of a shitty tv that hurt more than soothe after a bad argument. Arthur is stuck on repeat, because no one wants the bad things. Everyone wants to breathe in love in top of a bed, fuzzy edges and half-whispered confessions of fears.
The reporter (Arthur forgot his name, he always does) shakes his head with a smile and leans forward, eyebrows raised. "What about the beach, on the café where they first met, isn't that also special?"
There is no way he will understand, and Arthur thinks of his hands on Alasdair's bruised hips, Alasdair's lips on Arthur's neck, the man he was lucky enough to love. Alasdair's voice, rough in the morning sun. Alasdair's freckled back, the soft snores that came with his sleeping.
"I guess you're right," Arthur says, absentmindedly touching the scar on his thumb where Alasdair kissed him before leaving, "beaches make more sense."