Chapter Text
Connor didn’t know what he expected, but the dread that drenched him as he woke up alone, with only his own clothes scattered across his floor, must’ve said what he himself did not. His fingers grazed his sheets, his eyes scanning, for some physical manifestation of its reality. All that was left were a cold bed, a groggy weight in his limbs, and regret that festered. Perhaps the curtains were shut when he thought he’d left them ajar, or that his bedroom door was shut when he didn’t bother to do so much anymore. But then what would that make him if he considered these things? He was never meant for that sort of thing, hence the fantasy of it all.
There was a secrecy and a clandestine air about the moon, setting the stage for the unusual and the illicit to occur under its watchful gaze. The day, however, lay secrets bare in its brazen way. It allowed for eyes to observe you, for context and circumstance to stifle the reverie. Connor knew this, and so he pulled himself up and got dressed. Who was Connor to challenge truth? He was grounded enough to move in line with the stream of what was fated rather than resist. No truth, however, could allay the ache that began to set in. He thought he had him.
“Hey, you’re up.” And, yet, there stood Price in the middle of his kitchen, hastily dressed, hair mussed, and setting a kettle to boil.
Connor could only stare at him blankly. “You’re here.” He thought his voice sounded odd, regardless of the alcohol and the late night. The obvious bewilderment was there, but edged with disappointment, quenched with relief. Outcomes were as absurd as ever when it came to Price.
“Yep.” Kevin grinned, shrugging, and leaned against the counter, tired eyes looking out the window. He lightly kicked one of Connor’s dining room chairs away from the table as an offering to sit. Connor noted the anxious bounce of his knee as he relied on his hands on the counter for support, wondering (as he always did) what went on inside that head. “Sorry if I woke you. Sorry for also using your kitchen without asking. I didn’t want to wake you and Pop Tarts insisted.”
“No, you didn’t wake me— Pop Tarts?”
“Yeah, he called and said I was free to make coffee since he, apparently, pretty much lives here too and told me where to find everything.”
Connor hesitantly sat on the offered chair with his arms folded over the table. Kevin’s insistent good mood wasn’t something he was prepared for, not that he was prepared for any of this. “How does he even know you’re here?”
“
That
, I don’t know. Nor did he answer when I asked.” With Price’s gaze sweeping around the room, Connor felt too much like he was being studied. Who was he to fault Price in doing so. What he wouldn’t give to trail the ins and outs of Kevin, to feel at home inside his mind, to accompany him in the disarray. A mug was placed in front of him. He didn’t notice it until Kevin asked, “Coffee or tea?”
He looked up at him and shook his head with a smile. ”What are you doing trying to serve me in my own home? Go sit, I’ll handle everything.” To his surprise, Price did stop and sit, right across where he sat. Connor pulled out another mug and made a whole show of looking for something, stalling the air of confrontation around the man sitting at his table. He toasted some pop tarts stored in his cupboard, anything to look too busy for questions he didn’t want to answer. He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t favor spontaneity but he couldn’t prepare for whatever was to come if he had no idea of it. “Do you want a pop tart?”
“Yeah, sounds good. Thanks.”
Connor nodded and shut the stove, pouring water into their mugs, scrambling for some way to direct the conversation. He placed Kevin’s in front of him with jars of sugar and creamer. “Help yourself. Sorry we’ve only got instant here,” he joked.
Kevin huffed a laugh and frowned and grabbed the mug to assess it, humming discontentedly for effect, “I’ve tasted better instant coffee.” He grinned with a small laugh. “I’m kidding, this is good. But thank you, Connor, for letting me stay over and eat and everything”
“Of course, how could I not?” Connor smiled at him, pulled the pop tarts out of the toaster and placed them in front of Price. He sat down with his own coffee in hand. Sitting would consume at least a little more time, and so would mixing his coffee. “Is there something you still need?” He asked, hoping to have napkins or water or something to look for a little too long.
“Sorry for the shit segue but I can't til I— I have questions.” Kevin began and he shuffled in his seat. Connor gripped onto the handle of his mug and reigned his face into neutrality. “It’s just that there’s so much I still don’t know. About what you said when we got here this morning. Did you really have something to tell me or was it an excuse to get me in here or were you just feeling nostalgic? I don’t know.”
Connor opened his mouth to reply but couldn’t find the right words, all his thoughts coming to a grinding, eerily quiet halt. Kevin looked dismayed at the lack of response, so Connor elected to at least try. He really had nothing to say when he invited him in, hoping Kevin would speak well enough for both of them (as he was doing now, Connor supposed) but it wasn’t an excuse to get him. Only when Price asked to kiss him did he entertain that possibility. He wanted an excuse to continue talking to him, hoping they’d end with clarification and, instead, they had even more unanswered questions. “I wanted to know,” he grew conscious of his breathing, the push and pull of tidal waves warring with the rising waters, “what it meant to you then and what it means to you now.” It was the only question he could come up with.
Kevin’s eyes widened, then softened in something akin to fondness. “I meant it when I said that I loved you then. Misguided and doomed as it was, I did.” He trained his gaze on his hands, not seeing the surprise on Connor’s face.
As he’d first heard it hours earlier on the balcony, Connor didn’t know what to make of that fact. It made sense in the grand scheme of things, and made him regret how he’d handled it. Pragmatism wasn’t inherently the more “correct'' route. Being pragmatic for the sake of sparing feelings had the necessary byproduct of disregarding those feelings, no matter the weight of its consequences. Considering he knew well how that felt, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that it was, too, the way it turned out for Price. “I’m sorry. If I knew then, I,” Connor reconsidered, and admitted, “I don’t think I would have done anything differently. I’m sorry.”
He smiled somewhat ruefully. “Why did you do it?”
“Because I loved you too.” Connor thought the words would graze his throat and burn, the way a bullet flew through the barrel of a gun. Instead, it was the first drop of rainfall, simple and unassuming, but you could drown in a pool of rainwater. He was opening the door to something he couldn’t predict. “Or at least that was what I told myself. I wanted you to hate me so it wouldn’t hurt you when I’d have to leave you, not considering perhaps it was a little by my own hand that I’d have to have left you. An otherwise was never considered when it should’ve been.”
Kevin quiet was always unnerving. His old habit of teasing him for his near constant talking didn’t spawn out of nowhere after all. But his relief was short when he heard, “Knowing that, I still wouldn’t have wanted it to go any other way.”
He stilled, wary of whatever was stirring in Price. “Is that a good thing?”
“If I say it’s because I like you more now, would you say it is?” Kevin relented and relaxed the tenseness in his shoulders, seemingly satisfied with Connor’s response. The look on his face grew playful, but he remained serious. He liked to think Price needed his answer the way Connor needed to say it. He appreciated then what had become of them in their time apart. Time healed, as was always said, yes, but that aphorism was myopic to time’s ability to change whatever was under its charge. Healing was a form of change after all. Time had been kind to them, however, to allow them this after it had its way with them.
Without breaking his gaze, Connor replied in earnest in an effort to make known the fervency of his desire for a transparency between them and for what it could catalyze into fruition, “Yes, I would.”
Kevin took a long, considering sip of his coffee, the steam rising to his lax face. “Did you ever wonder why I came into your room that night?”
Wonder, he did do, long ago, someplace else far away from here and far from everything that happened between then and now. “I did, a lot,” he admitted, “It was almost a game for me to wonder what was going on inside your head because I thought I would never know for sure.” Connor bit back a cringing laugh, shaking his head. “Saying it out loud just makes me realize how bad it was. I thought you were lonely. Maybe you craved a new dose of validation and a new sense of belonging, or a new way to rebel against the Church. I couldn’t think of any other reason.”
Kevin peered at him curiously and in surprise, half grinning. “I don’t know what that says about me. Or what more that says about you.”
“Not exactly the kindest image of you, I admit.”
“I get it, don’t worry.” Connor watched as Kevin rolled his shoulders back and rested his elbow against the back of the chair, drumming his fingers on the wood as he seemed to stall. “When you’d asked me if I was happy, I thought that you were the only person who could ever want me, or that you actually already did . The fact that you still cared to know after everything I’d said and done, I thought there must’ve been no other possible reason why you would. It just—” Kevin shook his head and made a face at his hands, pulling off loose crumbs off of his pop tarts, “If what you thought said a lot about you, that said a fuck ton about me for sure”
Connor could only blink at him. “It sure does.”
He shrugged, but smiled a genuine one. “But then that got me thinking,” Kevin readjusted himself, sitting a little straighter, but his hands continued to fidget, “With how little thought I put into deciding to kiss you and in all my desperation, I never stopped to wonder if you’d actually liked me, but I can’t imagine that’s the reason why you,” his brows drew together, “let me stay.”
The answer to that was something he’d known and refused to acknowledge once. “I kissed you for the same reason I asked if you were okay, I was curious. I wanted to find out who you were,” Connor met his eyes, finding his gaze easy to hold, “I just didn’t expect to end up appreciating what I'd found, no matter how much I’d wished I hadn’t.” Maybe Connor could afford fantasies. Maybe he deserved their happy ending even after it all. Maybe love had always been a privilege that included him in its select few.
With the bigger pieces at play and in place, he could finally grasp whatever happened in those ten months two years ago, the messy amalgamation of misunderstandings and self-indulgence, borne out of unfortunate circumstance and a result that couldn’t stand on its own two feet. With retrospect, they could shine a flashlight against the back of the newly assembled puzzle and watch as the light filtered through the cracks. Something like a constellation, the pattern of the result would preface a name, shape, and story to be dictated. What to make of that remained was up to them.
“What now then? I can’t keep pretending to have never known you.”
“Then don’t,” was simpler said than done, for both of them, in fact. It was easy to no longer try to forget the other, but to commit to its implication was another matter. To come to terms with it but to not act on it was as evasive as denying it entirely. He paused to gauge Kevin’s face, in its hesitation dashed in restrained hope. “I want to make it right and let us have what we weren’t supposed to, to do right by you after all I’ve done.” Kevin shut his eyes. Connor experimentally rested his fingertips on the other man’s hand. With no hint of resistance, he continued, “I loved you, you know, and I'm not entirely convinced I don’t anymore. I’d like to try again and try and do better for you this time if you’d let me. But say the word and I’ll go.”
The way the hand in his turned to hold him back said something that relieved Connor, so he brought their entangled hands to his face and pressed his lips against Kevin’s knuckles in response. As lost as ever in intimacy, he fumbled blindly the way he always did. Price, however, was ever a kind recipient, laughing quietly at him. “As much as I want for nothing but to say yes, you get why I hesitate to do that, right?” Despite his next words, the humor lingered in the catchlight of his eyes. “No amount of understanding will dim paranoia. I don’t want you deciding for both of us. I don’t know what’ll happen next or what you’ll do, and it scares me. I need to know you won’t do it again.”
“I’ve always hated that, not knowing things,” Connor spoke slowly, reaching for the right things to say in his fulfillment of his promise to do better for him, “but if it’s any comfort, whatever happens, I don’t plan to leave you, even when it would be the easier option. There are few things that could compel me to leave you now. I don’t think it’s not in me to be able to.”
Price’s finger traced the rim of his cup in consideration. Connor could see the nervous gnawing of the inside of his lip. “How do you know that?”
“No matter how hard I try not to be selfish, I want you, and if I had you again, I don’t think I could ever bring myself to let you go.” Unabashed honesty fit better than he thought it would. Before he could even register that Price had leaned over the table, a hand was already cupping his jaw and a pair of bright eyes were trained on his face, but the man made no move, and, in a moment of impatience that startled even himself, Connor plead, “Please, please let me kiss you.” And he did. Thank God he did. Something settled within him then, an insistence abated.
As he pulled away with a toothy, lopsided grin, bent over the table resting on his elbows to reach him, Kevin sighed, “You’re so sentimental it might kill me. And so would the taste of coffee and morning breath too apparently.”
“Oh shut it,” Connor shoved his hand against that smug smile of his, “and get off the table and come over here, will you? That doesn’t look very comfortable.”
He tutted, but made no move to pull away. “At least buy me dinner first.”
“I thought we were long past dinner.”
“Long overdue is more accurate. I’ve got to get to know this mysterious redhead before I can let him bed me,” he began and Connor took it with an exasperated smile. He’d ramble on and Connor would kiss him through it. Time, the once incessant click until the alarm blared, was a luxury to leisure in til they grew sick with it.
“If you keep at that, you’ll need a miracle for me to take you out at all.”
“I used to think it would take a miracle for you to kiss me, call me back, and say you loved me.” His tone was deceptively matter of fact, simple, and sweet as he hung his arms loose around Connor’s shoulders. “Evidently, we’ve got a certain luck when it comes to those. And I’m willing to push that luck.”
He warned him in a voice fonder than he thought it was, “Overtly sucking up to me isn’t helping your chances.”
“It’s not sucking up if you’re a sucker for sentiment.”
Connor smiled in acquiescence. “Looks like you’ll be getting that dinner you wanted anyway.”
“As I should, of course.”
He thought a little more about what he had said. “I never realized until now that we skipped the pining, the flirting, second-guessing, and all that.” He partly regretted it, wondering what it would’ve been like if they hadn’t. “If you’d gone in my room to tell me you liked me instead of going right into kissing me, all of it would have gone somewhere else entirely.”
Kevin found that funny at least, allowing Connor to maybe find his own amusement in it. “Maybe it’s not so much that we skipped it. It’s more like we fucked up the order. I could define pining as last night when I looked for an opportunity to talk to you and when I hoped you’d say you loved me too. Flirting is just you insulting me and me being a little shit, and second-guessing is everything in between,” he guessed with a half shrug. “And if I somehow knew the magic of communication when you still hadn’t then you would’ve punched me.”
Connor grinned. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say punched, but I won’t say that violence wouldn’t have been completely off the table.”
“See? Retrospect isn’t so bad.”
“I guess it’s not.” Their phones chimed one after the other. Attached in the District 9 group chat was a screenshot of a private conversation with Pop Tarts where he marveled at finding out that Price was at Connor’s home. Following the attachment (sent by Neeley) was a text (also sent by Neeley), which read,
100/100 we mcfucking got them guys mchappy ending 💅😿🙏
“What the fuck? How did— did you just screenshot it?”
Connor tried to mask his panic and hide the way he instinctively muted his phone.. “A friend in Italy would want to know about this.”
Kevin squinted at him, amused. “A friend in Italy? What’s happened since we last spoke?”
“It seems I keep finding myself close to some interesting people, you included.” He shrugged. Wow, did he have a type. “Anyway, where do you want to eat?”
“Now?” He gestured at his coffee cup and pop tart, but open to the suggestion.
“I don’t think I could wait til dinner. I’ve gotten sick of waiting.” God, blatant honesty felt good. Connor didn’t know how he would once brush Price off, was passive and evasive and disregarding of the man and his feelings, when all this time, he’d kill for that smile.
“You sap,” lips met his for the first of many times. “Let’s go.”