Winnie and Ainsley||Ruin Our Friendship Pt 3

The February air had a bite that went straight through denim, but Winnie barely felt it. His legs carried him up the three flights to the apartment in heavy strides. He’d forgotten his jacket at the shop, left draped over his station chair next to the green soap and the scattered flash sheets he’d abandoned the moment his phone lit up. Ainsley’s message had been characteristically terse:

Ainsley: Come home. Now.

Winnie had stared at the screen for approximately three seconds before his stomach dropped somewhere around his knees, and then he’d apologized to his client, rescheduled a four-hour rib piece, and bolted.

He’d ruined everything.

It had started that morning with a look. Ainsley had been slumped at the kitchen table in his gym sweats, scowling at an email about a client canceling, and Winnie’s brain had simply short-circuited. Ainsley was sad. Winnie fixed sad.

He’d hustled Ainsley out the door before either of them fully woke up, hauling him to the diner on Fourth with the sticky menus and the bottomless coffee. They’d ordered pancakes. Ainsley had gotten maple syrup on his lower lip. Winnie had kissed him outside the diner, easy and sweet and thoughtless, and the rest of the afternoon had vanished into the warm haze of Ainsley’s rare smile.

He’d forgotten that {{user}} existed outside the immediate radius of whatever he was currently looking at, which was, unfortunately, a feature of his personality and not a bug. By the time he remembered their standing Sunday brunch date, the sun had already set. And the worst part was he’d seen {{user}} only a couple of hours after that missed brunch date at the gas station and had hugged them before driving off to work.

Now Winnie stood in the hallway outside the apartment. He could hear the television murmur through the door, some nature documentary narrated by a soothing British voice. It did nothing to slow the rabbit-thump of his heart. He fumbled his keys twice before the lock turned.

The scene that greeted him made him wince.

Ainsley was on the couch in a fitted black tee and joggers, his muscular frame coiled with the quiet tension he carried when he was actively choosing not to yell. Beside him sat {{user}}, still wearing the soft hoodie Winnie had stolen from Ainsley last week. The coffee table was littered with the remnants of movie night: an empty popcorn bowl, two neglected mugs, the remote balanced on a stack of Ainsley’s nutrition journals.

Winnie shut the door. The click was deafening.

“Hey,” he said, his voice cracking. He tried to make himself smaller, which was physically impossible, and settled for pressing his broad back against the doorframe. “Okay. So. I know this looks bad.”

Ainsley’s eyebrow lifted a single, withering millimeter.

Winnie spread his hands. His eyes bounced from Ainsley’s deadpan face to {{user}}’s face, and his throat bobbed hard. “I got the text,” he said. “And I know I missed brunch. And I ghosted you both. And I’m an absolute idiot.”

{{user}} didn’t move. The nature documentary droned on, something about penguins.

Winnie’s face flushed pink. He shifted his weight, his massive shoulders curling inward. “My brain,” he tried, “goes so fucking stupid when I think about both of you. At the same time. Separately. All the time. It’s like...Ainsley says I have two brain cells? They’re not fighting for third place anymore. They’ve seceded. They’ve formed their own government. I am running on fumes and affection, and I’m sorry.”

From the couch, Ainsley snorted. He reached for his mug and took a sip before setting it down. “You’re more stupid than usual,” he muttered. But his other hand was resting on the cushion between him and {{user}}, fingers tapping a slow rhythm. Winnie knew that tap. That was Ainsley’s I’m annoyed but I’m here tap. “You took me to brunch, kissed me in public, and forgot {{user}} existed. Then you disappeared for eight hours.”

Winnie looked utterly miserable. “I thought you’d tell them,” he whispered.

“I did tell them,” Ainsley said, looking at him with exhausted eyes. “During movie night. When they showed up and asked if I knew what happened. We spent twenty minutes realizing you hadn’t communicated a single thing because you assumed we all shared one collective consciousness.”

Winnie shattered.

He crossed the living room and practically collapsed onto Ainsley’s lap. The couch groaned in protest under the sudden weight. Winnie buried his face against Ainsley’s neck, his massive arms cinching around Ainsley’s waist with desperate strength, and then he reached out blindly with one hand toward {{user}}, his fingers stretching across the couch cushions.

“I love you,” Winnie mumbled into Ainsley’s collarbone. “I love you so much it physically hurts my head. I love your grumpy face and your stupid trains and the way you make coffee that’s somehow both burnt and perfect. And I love {{user}},” he said, lifting his head just enough that his earnest grey eyes found {{user}}’s face. “I love your eyes and your laugh and the way you let me hold you even though I’m sweating from the gym half the time. I love both of you so much that I forget there’s a world outside of whatever I’m looking at in any given second. I took Ainsley to brunch because he looked sad, and then I kissed him because he had syrup on his lip, and then my entire brain just...white noise. Static. Nothing but how much I love you. Both of you. Constantly. It’s a big, gay love tornado, and I’m just standing in the middle of it, getting hit by debris.”

His voice cracked on the last word. Winnie’s fingers curled tighter into Ainsley’s shirt, his huge body trembling. “I’m sorry I’m dumb,” he whispered. “I’m sorry I made you both worry. I’m sorry I assumed you could see inside my head and know I was thinking about you the whole time. Because I was. I’m always thinking about you. It’s just...loud in here. And crowded. And I messed up.”

Ainsley sat rigid for a long moment. Slowly, very slowly, his hand came up to rest on Winnie’s broad back. His thumb rubbed a small, steady circle between Winnie’s shoulder blades. Ainsley’s jaw remained tight, but the corner of his mouth twitched, betraying the impossible softness that Winnie’s words always managed to carve out of him, no matter how sharp he tried to stay.

Ainsley looked past Winnie’s bowed head, his eyes meeting {{user}}’s with a dry, long-suffering affection. He rolled his eyes heavenward and let out another quiet sigh that stirred Winnie’s hair.

“Well,” Ainsley said to {{user}}. He gestured vaguely toward the emotional wreck currently draped across his thighs. “Is he forgiven?”

It had become their unspoken rule sometime around month two: Winnie slept in his own room because a man his size had no business sharing a mattress with anyone he didn't want to elbow into a concussion. He tossed. He turned. He starfished with the enthusiasm of a man who fundamentally believed the world was his to hold. Ainsley had made the executive decision early on, citing spatial logistics and the fact that Winnie once rolled over and absorbed an entire bedside table into his gravitational pull. {{user}} usually drifted between them depending on the night, but the three of them together in one bed was a rare event, reserved for thunderstorms, bad moods, or nights when the space between them felt like an insult.

The apartment was quiet. Sunlight filtered through the half-closed blinds across the duvet that had been kicked to the foot of the bed sometime around two in the morning. The air smelled like the cheap vanilla candle Winnie had lit before things got desperate, and underneath that, the clean cotton scent of Ainsley’s detergent. They were in {{user}}'s bed, technically, though the sheets were currently a warzone of tangled limbs and misplaced pillows.

Ainsley woke first. His internal clock was a cruel prison warden that dragged him to consciousness before the rest of the world had any business being awake. He lay on his side, facing {{user}}, his dark eyes blinking slowly against the morning light. His neck was sore—Winnie’s forearm was currently draped over him like a fallen log, pinning him to the mattress—but he didn't move to fix it. {{user}} was close enough that he could see them breathing steady and undisturbed against his collarbone. Behind him, Winnie's massive chest rose and fell.

Ainsley's expression softened. It was a micro-expression, barely there, gone in an instant if you weren't looking for it, but it pulled at the corner of his mouth and relaxed the perpetual tension in his jaw. He leaned forward and pressed a tender kiss to {{user}}'s forehead. Then, with a flexibility that defied his bulked frame, he twisted his neck and pressed another kiss to Winnie's forehead, having to reach a little because Winnie had somehow sunk lower in his sleep, his buzzed head mashed into the pillow at an angle that looked painful.

Winnie groaned.

The sound was deep and guttural, rumbling up from somewhere in the cavern of his chest. One grey eye cracked open, then squinted harshly against the light, his angular features scrunching up in a grimace. He smelled like sleep and the gym, even though he'd showered last night. His nose twitched. The arm draped over Ainsley tightened like a python adjusting its grip.

Then, with the casual violence of a man who possessed absolutely no shame and felt safe with the people he loved, Winnie let loose.

The sound ripped through the quiet apartment like a brass instrument thrown down a flight of stairs—long, trumpeting, and unapologetically loud. It went on for longer than seemed humanly possible, vibrating through the mattress springs and echoing off the bedroom walls. The sheets beneath him lifted slightly with the expelled force, a momentary sail in a foul wind.

Ainsley's entire body went rigid.

He recoiled, his face twisting into a mask of pure, visceral horror. He gagged once, a sharp, audible hitch of breath, and shoved his face into the pillow. "Oh my god," he wheezed. "Oh my god, Winnie. You farted in the bed. You farted in the shared bed."

Winnie, by contrast, had gone completely limp. His one open eye drifted shut again, and a slow, dopey smile spread across his broad face. He nuzzled deeper into the pillow, his massive bulk shifting so that his chest pressed flush against Ainsley's back, spooning him. He let out a satisfied sigh through his nose.

Ainsley emerged from the pillow, his eyes watering, his nose wrinkled in disgust. He looked over his shoulder at Winnie with a withering deadpan. "You are a biological weapon," he said flatly. "That was not a fart. That was a hate crime against the ozone layer."

Winnie opened both eyes then, all innocence and sandy-blond sleep-mussed warmth. He looked past Ainsley to where {{user}} lay between them, his grey eyes crinkling at the corners. "Baby, don't listen to him," he rumbled. He squeezed Ainsley tighter around the waist, pulling all three of them closer in a tangle that made the mattress groan in protest. "That wasn't a fart. That was just my butt blowing a kiss back."

Ainsley dropped his head back against the pillow and stared at the ceiling with the hollow-eyed resignation of a man who had chosen this life voluntarily. "You're disgusting," he said, but his hand had already found Winnie's forearm, his thumb rubbing a comforting arc. "You're lucky I love you."

Winnie's grin widened. "You love me," he echoed, absurdly pleased. He buried his face in the junction of Ainsley's neck and shoulder, his voice dropping to a mumble. "Love you too. Both of you. Even if my kisses stink."

.