Unfortunately, Wales' extensive preparations in anticipation of France's visit have robbed him of his best prospects of occupying himself for any length of time.
Beyond vaccing up the mud Scotland had tramped across the hall and washing last night's dishes, there isn't anything that needs doing in the house, and his garden, which is usually engaged at this time of year in a spirited attempt at returning to a wild, untamed state somewhat reminiscent of a jungle, requires no more than a quick spot of weeding to return it to perfect order.
In desperation, he calls all three of his bosses, but none of them can scrounge up a single scrap of either paperwork or busywork they might need him to complete, presumably due to his short-sighted industry of the previous two weeks.
He spends the next two hours alternating between staring at a blank sheet of paper and the blank wall behind his desk, failing to write a poem, until the sound of his doorbell chiming offers a welcome reprieve from frustrating tedium of the exercise.
His visitor is Janice, come to drop off another freshly baked cake and a bottle of her damson gin. "For Francis," she tells him as she presses the bottle into his hand, though she does magnanimously allow him to pour himself a little to sample.
Just a thimbleful at first, barely enough to wet his mouth, but when he praises it anyway, she urges him to fill a glass and one for her, too. It's sharp, flavourful, and ruinously strong, and when they reach the bottom of those glasses, Janice decides that they've drunk enough of it that the bottle is hardly a fitting gift for France anymore, so they might as well finish it themselves.
"I'll bring another bottle round for him later," she says, topping up Wales' glass with a generous measure. "I'd hate for him to go home without one. He said it was the best he'd ever tasted!"
Wales suspects that it could well also be the only homemade damson gin France has ever tasted, given his longstanding aversion to spirits, adulterated or otherwise, but the compliment must have been very convincingly delivered, nonetheless, as Janice is sent into raptures by the memory of it.
She pronounces him 'charming', 'delightful', and a long list of superlatives besides, before capping them off with an airy sigh and: "Your brother's a very lucky man."
Which is a subject Wales doesn't care to dwell upon even at the best of times, much less when he has yet another disastrous night with Romano behind him and a bellyful of alcohol inside. He nods curtly.
"And so are you!" Janice says, clearly ascribing the morose downturn of his expression to a completely different strain of envy. "Your young man's lovely, too, and he's obviously head over heels for you!"
Wales almost chokes on his gin. "What?" he splutters. "I don't think—"
"He is," Janice insists, folding a hand around his and squeezing it gently. "When you get to my age, you can just tell these things."
Wales is more than thirty times her age, and he has no idea what she's talking about; what she might have seen. He ruminates upon it long after she's left, replaying every interaction Janice has ever had with Romano through his mind, trying to find an angle which could transform Romano's glares and his scowls and his brusqueness into something that even resembles tolerance for Wales' company, never mind love.
It's impossible, but then again Wales mind has always worked better with words than images. So, he sits back down at his desk and writes his first poem dedicated to Romano.
Or, at least, he attempts to do so, but there doesn't appear to be a combination of letters in either the English language or his own that exists which can help him make any sense out of it all.
He works on through France and Scotland's brief, noisy return to the house, through their equally noisy departure to the theatre, all the way on to the dreaded hour of seven o'clock, whereupon the increasingly rowdy complaints of his empty stomach force him to take a break and eat.
He heats up the sparse leftovers from yesterday's dinner, and mindlessly shovels them down at the kitchen table whilst scribbling notes on the back of an envelope. When he fills that up, he starts on the front, writing straight across the thin plastic window that had displayed his address even though it seems to actively repel the pen's ink, and thereafter the inside of a cereal box he fishes out of the recycling bin at the end of the counter.
He writes on through half-seven, then eight, and it's approaching nine o'clock when he hears Romano letting himself in the front door with the spare key Scotland must have lent him that morning. His footsteps shuffle down the hallway, pausing just outside the kitchen door. He inhales deeply before entering the room.
He looks exhausted, his suit and shirt both crumpled, and his normally bright skin ashen. His eyes look glassy when they briefly flicker towards Wales before his gaze settles on the cardboard spread out on the table. One of his eyebrows rises an infinitesimal degree.
"What are you writing?" he asks, in a dull, leaden, thoroughly disinterested tone.
"A poem," Wales says, and a small, masochistic part of him wants Romano to ask what it's about, but, of course, he doesn't.
He just nods, and then practically collapses onto the chair beside Wales' as though his legs have suddenly given out beneath him.
Wales watches him out of the corner of his eye, hoping to catch him in an unguarded moment of seeming in any way pleased to be back here, to see Wales again, but he only stares vacuously down at the top of the table as the silence between them lengthens, deepens, and grows so uncomfortably weighty that Wales eventually has to flee from it.
"Would you like a drink?" he asks, already halfway up from his seat.
Romano nods again.
"There's cake, too," Wales says. "Janice dropped some more off earlier."
Romano raises both of his eyebrows this time. "What kind?"
"Chocolate and beetroot." When Romano wrinkles his nose at that, Wales is quick to add, in defence of Janice's culinary honour, that: "It's nicer than it sounds. Very moist."
Romano still looks unconvinced, so Wales cuts him only a tiny sliver of cake to accompany his coffee. He seems neither pleased nor displeased by it, chewing on it stolidly and expressionlessly in between giving monosyllabic answers to the questions that Wales doggedly persists in asking about his day at the consulate in yet another of his sad, pathetic attempts at a normal conversation with him.
He runs out of both stamina and ideas by time they've finished their drinks, and can only think of suggesting that they watch a film afterwards, to give them a good excuse for not having to talk to each other for a couple of hours.
"I'd rather just go to bed," Romano says, shaking his head.
Wales' stomach pits cold. "Okay," he says shakily. "You… you go on up. I'll be up in a minute."
Or an hour, if he can swing it. If Romano is as tired as he looks, he'll be asleep long before then.
But even though he procrastinates in the kitchen for as long as he can bear, and then in the bathroom, just as he had last night, Romano is, yet again, awake when he creeps trepidatiously into his bedroom, still wearing an undershirt and boxers and seated at the end of the bed, just as he had been last night. It almost feels as though they're stuck in some sort of time loop; as though the entire day hasn't happened, and Wales is doomed to repeat the same horrible, humiliating moment over and over again.
This time, however, Wales kisses him first, mostly just to get it over with.
And that feels just the same, too. The same stumbling fall on to the bed, Wales' heart pounding out the same, frenzied rhythm, the same, all-consuming heat building until—
Romano turns his head aside, breaking the kiss, and splays one hand out across Wales' chest, pushing him back.
Wales scrambles off and away from him, to kneel by his side on the mattress. "Are you okay?" he asks, anxiously searching Romano's face for any sign of discomfort or distress.
There's warmth in the soft curve of his lips, though, and wound around and through his words when he says: "Do you think we could take off our clothes this time?"
"Right," Wales says. "Of course." The question shouldn't surprise him, because it's a perfectly normal thing to want in bed – not to mention a perfectly normal part of Wales' usual repertoire there – but it does all the same, and he hesitates for a moment before reaching for the first button on his pyjama top. "I'll just…"
He manages to get to the third before his nerves give out and he can't go on any further, because Wales' has never got over his youthful self-consciousness about his body, not really, he's just learnt to pretend it doesn't exist, ignore his shyness, which is impossible to do when Romano is watching him so keenly, eyes transfixed on Wales' hands.
Wales sighs and leans over to turn off the bedside lamp.
Romano grabs his wrist, holds him still. "Don't," he says firmly.
Wales blinks down at him in confusion. "Why?"
Romano's face flushes, his lips purse, and for a long while it seems as though he won't answer, but eventually he spits out, harried and rough, "Why do you think?"
Honestly, Wales can't think of any reason – none that isn't ludicrous, anyhow – until Romano gives him a long, slow, deliberate once-over that seems, unbelievably, as though it's meant to be an answer in and of itself.
"Fucking hell." He snorts out a laugh; can't help himself. "Really?"
"Yes, really," Romano says, his eyebrows bristling in a frown.
"Jesus," Wales breathes shakily. "But I'm…"
Nothing at all like Spain. Nothing at all like the sort of man he would have expected someone like Romano to be interested in. He can't quite bring himself to put that into words, though, and just gestures towards himself vaguely, the wide arc of his hand meant to encompass him in his entirety.
Romano's eyes narrow. "I never would have kissed you in the first place if I was… fucking repulsed by you, or whatever."
In the first place, that first kiss, Romano had – professedly – just been trying to make Spain jealous, and Wales had always assumed that he'd been chosen as an unwitting accomplice to that enterprise simply because he was quite clearly unattached, and France had been dangling him in front of every nation of his acquaintance in the dim hopes that one of them might care to take an experimental bite.
"So you were" – Wales picks his words carefully, speaks them cautiously, still expecting Romano to laugh at him for the presumption of them – "attracted to me? Even back then?"
Romano's blush deepens, and he tucks his chin in towards his shoulder, hiding more of his face from Wales' view. "Before that," he admits to the pillow beneath his head.
Before that, he and Wales had had a couple of awkward, stilted conversations when Wales hadn't been assiduous enough in his efforts to avoid running into Romano during the Six Nations, and an awkward, angry conversation in a French hospital after Wales accidentally broke Italy's nose. Far from auspicious events and unconducive, Wales would have thought, to cultivating in Romano anything other than the same prickly aversion that he had inspired within Wales.
"Jesus," he says again. "And here I thought you didn't even like me."
"I like you, Galles," Romano says, his grip on Wales' arm gentling, fingertips skimming soft over the thin skin on the underside of his wrist and the fine bones beneath.
"Well, you've got an amazing poker face, De," Wales says incredulously. "I never would have guessed."
Romano's scowl returns. "You made it pretty clear you couldn't stand me. Your brothers hated me. How else was I supposed to act?"
A defence mechanism, then. Wales maybe should have recognised it, as England acts just the same way: snappy, sullen, and unpleasant if he thinks people have taken against him, so they never suspect for a moment that it might bother or upset him in any way.
"I'm sorry," Wales says on reflex, though, truthfully, he's not sure that he would have reacted differently to Romano's behaviour, if he'd known any earlier what was causing it. His distance and disinterest in everything Wales did, said and was, was no less alienating or hurtful even if it was deliberate or feigned in some way.
Romano shrugs. "You still don't like me very much, though, do you?"
"I," Wales begins, but he can't in good conscience continue with a lie, but nor can he bring himself to tell the truth, not when Romano is, for the first time in their acquaintance, being open. Has made himself vulnerable.
His silence is answer enough on its own, though, and Romano releases his hold on Wales wrist, letting his hand fall to rest on the mattress, his fingers still curled in towards his palm. "We can still do this, if you want," he says quietly, gesturing between their two bodies with a brusque flick of his other hand. "Even though…"
Even though his feelings are far stronger than Wales would ever have imagined. Certainly, far stronger than Wales' are towards him.
He's always been the one in Romano's position before, if there was any imbalance of affections, and this is so far from the normal, expected script of Wales' life and relationships to date that he has no idea how to respond to it. What the best course of action should be.
"Maybe," he says, because he's got no better answer than that to give. "But… But not tonight. I'll need some time to think about it first."
To make a decision now that everything that he thought he'd understood has been turned upside down.
"Okay." Romano nods tightly. "Do you want me to go?"
He starts pushing himself up into a sitting position before Wales has chance to reply, but Wales places a hand on his shoulder, holds him steady.
"You stay here; I'll take the spare room," he says. "We can talk about it some more in the morning."
And he smiles, tries to sound reassuring, even though he very much doubts he will have even been able get his head around it all by then, never mind anything else.