Archive of Our Own ^beta

In the first six months of Jean Moreau wearing gold and red instead of black and red, the USC Exy team is given their first ever seven yellow cards. All things considered, the Trojans’ game is really as clean as it’s ever been. But the dynamic has changed — everything has changed.

And it only takes the words raven scum being uttered on the court in the middle of a heated game for Jeremy Knox to step between Jean and Penn State’s feisty foul-mouthed striker. Jeremy’s helmet is off and his teeth going for the velcro on his gloves before he realizes what he’s doing. The Trojans’ eighth yellow card of the season is their own Captain’s, and it takes Jean getting involved again for it not to escalate to a red.

At the end of the match, Jean pulls Jeremy into his side in a clumsy and sweaty hug (Jeremy doesn’t realize until many hours later that this is the first time Jean ever initiates any form of physical contact between them) and says, in a low, conspiratorial tone, “We’ll make a fighter out of you yet, Knox.”

But Jeremy’s yellow card is the Trojans’s last. They make a lover out of Jean instead, and that is a much bigger achievement than making a fighter out of Jeremy. Growth takes time, adapting takes time, but it turns out Jean only needed a little unraveling, and a lot of being shown that he’d always have a safe place to land back on, people to support him and lift him up, no matter what. At the end of that first school year, the Trojans are stronger than ever and Jean is a Trojan through and through.

If the first few months of having Jean around were… challenging, to Jeremy, he doesn’t quite know how he’d describe the first few months of having Jean back for a second year.

Jean comes back to California after five weeks with the Foxes with his hair slightly too long and falling into his eyes, a smattering of fresh freckles over the bridge of his nose, and a new hobby.

(All that Jeremy brings from being home for the summer is a slight cold because he’d been caught out without a jacket on an unseasonably bitter evening, and deep exhaustion from listening to his mom count the ways he is a failure when compared to his siblings. The former leaves him with an uncomfortable wheeze for the first two weeks of practice. The latter is par for the course.)

Jean unpacks methodically like he always does — an uneasy contrast to Jeremy’s haphazard technique that usually takes at least two weeks — and as soon as his last stack of books is propped up on a shelf, in alphabetical order, he sits on the bed across from where Jeremy is still taking piles of hoodies and mountains of notebooks out of his suitcase, and pulls out a…

“What the fuck is that?” Jeremy was never good at keeping his curiosity quiet, and he’s already shuffling forward on his knees until he’s perched at the very end of his bed to try and get a good look at what Jean is up to.

Pulled taut in between two wooden hoops is a piece of white cotton, with the shape of a sunflower slowly appearing as Jean adds more shades of yellow and orange to it.

Content with his inspection, Jeremy allows himself one more question, seeing as Jean completely disregarded his first, “Where did you even get that?”

“Minyard.”

Jeremy is used to Jean’s short answers. This one, though, is ridiculous enough to leave him sputtering.

He would be better off focusing back on his job — there are a lot of hoodies to put away, and even more notebooks. Plus, he’d learned early on Jean isn’t a great fan of questions. He doesn’t want to be annoying.

But how is he meant to keep doing such boring tasks, when Jean keeps stabbing at the fabric with the same focus he hits a ball down the court? (Steady hands, tense eyebrows, lips slightly parted.) Jeremy watches instead: neat lines upon neat lines of yellow popping up on the fabric, a small gold needle gently held between Jean’s skilled fingers.

It’s soothing to watch, the hoop held in Jean’s left hand, the continuous motion of the needle in his right. But Jeremy’s self-control is non-existent, and Minyard wasn’t a clear answer at all — which one? He lasts less than a minute before he blurts out, “Guard dog or resting bitch face?”

That gets a laugh out of Jean. (Jeremy loves that laugh. It had taken a good four months of Jean being in California for it to make an appearance, the first time. Jeremy thinks that’s maybe what makes his head go fuzzy whenever he hears it.)

“The one who likes stabbing things, of course.”

In the grand scheme of things, it’s unimportant what Jean does in his spare time. He’s a good roommate — too good. Jeremy thought he was tidy (he was raised by a single mom, of course he’s tidy, he had no choice but to be tidy) but he realized quickly he had never seen tidy until Jean Moreau arrived in his life. Jean is… obsessively tidy. It makes Jeremy slightly sick whenever he thinks about it. Whenever he thinks about what it must have been like at the Nest — military precision when it came to everything — all under the watchful eye of people who controlled a whole team and yet cared very little for their players.

Precision is the keyword. Jean is great at timekeeping. He always turns his papers in with plenty of time to spare, he studies every single day, and he’s never late for practice. He never leaves without making his bed, no matter how early he has to leave for practice, or if they wake up in the middle of the night to travel to an away game. It really shouldn’t matter to Jeremy what he’s doing in his spare time.

In fact, Jeremy loves those easy first few weeks of the semester, getting dragged along fabric and wooden hoop shopping, bringing Laila and Alvarez too, learning about things he didn’t even know existed before, like heat-erasable fabric pens or needle threaders.

But the embroidery phase only lasts a few weeks. In the six months that follow, Jeremy slowly gets used to walking into their shared dorm to find Jean covered in paint (Jeremy owns several Moreau originals, two of which he insisted on hanging above his bed, either side of the yellow card he won himself on that match nearly a year ago), or caked in clay (his favorite mug isn’t food safe but Jeremy keeps his pens and highlighters in it and uses it as a bookend for the notebooks he keeps on his desk).

It doesn’t end there. For a handful of weeks, their floor is covered in wood shavings — the whittling phase coincides with a particularly stressful week of pre-Christmas exams and the constant grating sound of the knife against the wood nearly drives Jeremy insane, though he would never get rid of the wonky figurine of a tortoise and the entire abstract nativity scene that live on top of a stack of notebooks on his bedside table. That phase is immediately followed by a period that has their windowsill packed full with cooling freshly-poured candles at all hours of the day. His sister, Ash, gets one for her birthday and asks him if Jean has made any more at least once a week.

If he had to pick a favorite hobby of Jean’s thus far, it would be baking. Jeremy misses the seeded rye loaves and the chicken hand pies on a weekly basis. Origami he misses less, but that’s probably because he still finds small colored-paper creatures in the pockets of everything he owns. Just last week there had been a small sky-blue dinosaur inside his gear bag, stashed between a mouthguard box and a pair of gloves he doesn’t wear much. Miniature assembling is really cool to watch at first, until the day Jeremy walks back into their room, exhausted from practice, and steps on a tiny cash register that belonged in Jean’s tiny coffee shop fit for mice. Gardening is the only one Jeremy refuses to consider a phase, seeing as their dorm room is still home to more plants than he thinks anyone ever really needs.

They’re onto something new now, though.

Jeremy is sitting cross-legged on his bed trying to make sense of his Statistics homework when Jean comes back from class.

They’re a handful of weeks out from graduation, another handful out from the end of the Trojans season — if they make it to the finals — and every last paper, every last exam, every last little bit of homework has Jeremy on edge. It doesn’t help that he is very aware of what graduation means: something new, a job, a career. Things people have been asking Jeremy about all year, things his mom has been asking him about ever since he turned sixteen. He’s still trying to figure out the answers.

As well as his backpack, Jean brings back a large plastic storage box full of stuff — heavy, judging by the way his biceps bulge. Jeremy doesn’t ask. He knows what it means — a new hobby is brewing. He’ll know about it soon enough.

“Hey,” Jean says.

“Hello.”

“Can I make you a notebook?”

“I’m alright, how was class— wait, what did you say?”

Jean laughs. Jeremy does too, though less boldly. It’s shitty of him to get distracted like that. He has been getting worse too, the closer it gets to graduation.

“I asked if I could make you a notebook. You… seem to like them?” Jean waves a hand in the vague direction of Jeremy’s desk and shelves, where different notebooks in countless colors, shapes, sizes, and materials sit.

The thing about Jeremy is… he’s not very good at most things. His memory is a bit crap. He’s not a bad student (he’s made it this far!), but he’s not a good one either. He’s not dumb, but he’s not a genius. His older brother had been stupid, but he made it into the army, got himself shipped out to Iraq as soon as he was old enough for it. His little sister is the kind of brilliant they make movies about — able to figure out numbers with so many digits Jeremy doesn’t even know how to read them.

And Jeremy is Jeremy. He’s always been the way he is: kind, gentle, friends with the downstairs neighbors, always running away to play with the kids from the apartment across the landing, helping Mrs. Liu upstairs with her groceries when her arthritic hands couldn’t handle the way the plastic shopping bags dug into the skin anymore. Jeremy was always a good kid, but he ended up sandwiched between heroics and brains. Being nice was never quite enough.

So he turned to notebooks. It was an accident, at first. He doesn’t remember when exactly it started, sometime between middle school and high school, probably. He does remember thinking that if he wrote enough things down, if he didn’t forget, it would all be easier. It started with one, for everything. But he still forgot. It wasn’t good enough. He thought that getting more, diving them into categories would solve it all. He wrote down dates, deadlines, present ideas; favorite foods and favorite places, the rare bits of information his mom let slip about his dad. He took to constant scribbling, and mostly to hoping that it would do something — that this would be his saving. It didn’t do much when it came to his mom’s constant disappointment and resentment, but it did change his life, in a way.

He doesn’t quite know how, but it just bled into the rest of his… well, the rest of his everything. He didn’t know how to function without them, anymore. Notebooks for every small thing, every part of his life: for school, for Exy, for errands, for ideas, for shopping lists, for holiday plans, for birthday presents, for doodling.

Notebooks were his thing. And now Jean wants to make him one.

“I do,” he starts, still unsure. “I like them.”

“Great. I’ll make you one.”

Because that’s a normal thing to say. I’ll make you a notebook.

Jean doesn’t just make a notebook, though. The next day, Jeremy comes back to their room to find him hovering around his desk, until Jean finally asks, “Can I look at some of your notebooks? Your favorites?”

Jeremy’s hand is somehow already deep in his backpack, rooting around for his most well-loved notebook — it’s not one of his school ones. It’s his everyday notebook, where he jots down immediate tasks he can’t forget — the important stuff —, his shopping lists, where he draws Exy strategy plays, and where he doodles when he’s on the phone with his sister. He has bought the same model, same brand for years now. Ever since high school, he’s been buying these notebooks.

Of course, Jean doesn’t just look at it. He asks about why Jeremy likes it, what makes it good, why the paper feels nice to write on, why he likes that size instead of a bigger or a smaller one. He pokes and prods at it, inspects the stitches on the spine, the middle page, feels the rough edges against the palm of his hand.

Jean has beautiful hands.

This isn’t the first time Jeremy notices. In fact, he’d go as far as saying he’d definitely noticed before this whole hobby thing. Jean’s glove-clad hands, grabbing an Exy stick, casually twirling it during practice, throwing a ball down the court to Jeremy.

Back then, he wasn’t noticing it the way he does now, though. Now, he’s thinking about what Jean’s hands would feel like on his bare skin, what it would feel like if Jean ran his finger gently down Jeremy’s spine like he does the spine of his notebook, if he wrapped his hand around his—

No.

And that’s the other issue on top of the dreaded impending graduation: Jeremy may have developed a bit of an ill-advised crush on his roommate, and a definitely bad obsession with his hands.

“I have more notebooks,” he says, desperate not to sound panicked, desperate to clear the images his brain is forming against his will. “You can look at all of them.”

Jean raises an amused eyebrow at him, the spine of Jeremy’s favorite notebook still resting against the palm of his hand, his fingers splayed against the back of it, his other hand still caressing the pages gently.

God.

“I am aware of your obsession with writing everything down, Knox. I wouldn’t be making you a notebook otherwise.”

Jeremy swallows, trying to make his jitters go away.

“Right. Yeah. Of course. Well. You can keep that one for now. I don’t need it right now.”

“Thank you.”

Jeremy doesn’t want the notebook to become as much of a thing as it does. The notebook wasn’t the first creation of Jean’s that Jeremy would have. He has so many — more than he needs, really.

But they weren’t for Jeremy. They were things Jean made for… fun, maybe? Jeremy isn’t sure fun is the motivation behind Jean’s increasingly long list of hobbies. He had asked once, at the very beginning, and apart from telling him, “Minyard picked it up from his therapist… apparently it’s good for your brain,” Jean had only said, “It’s… interesting. I don’t have to be good at these things, I just want to try it out.”

He didn’t say: I don’t have to practice to be perfect every waking hour of every day. He didn’t say: It means I can do something that Riko has never touched. He didn’t say: This is mine and I can do with it whatever I choose because I have free agency.

He didn’t have to. Jeremy understood. He didn’t say any of that, just like Jeremy didn’t say: I’m glad you have this, I wish you had more things he never touched, and smiled instead and said, “I think that’s really cool.”

He still thinks it’s really cool.

The notebook becomes a thing. It was foolish to believe it wouldn’t. It’s impossible to think this is like everything else Jean made before, that it would be offered as an afterthought. This was for him — his from the very start, his before it’s even real. The thought had burrowed itself into Jeremy’s brain to the point his whole body itched with it.

Jean was making it for him.

That meant something. That made it special. That meant that even after graduation, Jeremy would carry a little bit of Jean with him.

Making a notebook does not look anything like Jeremy imagined it would. Well. Not the Moreau way anyway. The Moreau way involves at least seven more steps than Jeremy figured would be necessary.

Extra practice with Laila and the rookies is hard. They’ve been doing it all year — the passing of the torch, so to speak. But the closer they get to the end of the season, the more real it feels. Laila will be Captain next year, and Jeremy will be… some guy who used to play Exy in college.

He showers at court until his skin is red, and sacrifices his usual long walk around campus and post-practice coffee so he can make it back to the dorm quicker.

The first step of Notebook Making with Jean Moreau is apparently to make paper. Anyone else would, of course, have bought paper. Not Jean though.

So when Jeremy gets back, it’s to find Jean kneeling on the floor, in the small space between his bed and the closet, with his hands and forearms deep into a vat of murky water. Jeremy is so tired he nearly laughs.

Of course, he has no doubts that this will eventually become a notebook. If anyone can do it, it’s Jean. But right now, it looks like the spicy egg drop soup Mrs. Liu used to make when Jeremy or his siblings were sick as kids.

The room is warm, though not stifling. Jeremy is glad to take off his jacket and change into a pair of shorts. The routine is the same as many other evenings: Jeremy sits in bed pretending to study, while he watches Jean do whatever it is he’s doing.

He tries to pay attention to his homework. He really does. But his focus keeps following the movement of Jean’s arms, the sloshing sounds of the water in the tub, the rubbing of Jean’s pants against the plastic tarp he always covers the carpet with whenever he works on his projects.

The next day, Jean is at it again. Jeremy is fascinated. He never knew a soup blender was a tool needed for paper making. (If he’s being honest, he didn’t know people could just… make paper.)

The day after that, Jean drains all of the mushy paper, just to turn it into soup again.

Slapping his book closed, Jeremy gives up on studying, and lies on his front, head hanging from the edge of the bed, as close to Jean as his bed allows him.

He doesn’t say anything, and Jean doesn’t either, though he does look up after a few minutes, eyes flickering up to Jeremy’s for one second before going back to his paper soup.

It’s only a few more days until the paper starts to actually resemble paper. Jean spends ages doing several things Jeremy is frankly too scared to ask about. There are dried flowers, towels, sponges, and even a blow-dryer involved.

Jean’s papermaking gets weirder and weirder and Jeremy’s world gets smaller and smaller — it starts about the size of the room, then it becomes approximately 6ft5 tall, then whatever the width of Jean’s shoulders is, and slowly but surely, it becomes about the size of the infinitesimal space between Jean’s thumb and forefinger as he rubs the dried flower petals and breaks them apart into the paper soup.

It’s a lot.

On the Friday, Jeremy doesn’t even open his textbook. It’s the weekend, he tells himself as he lies back on his bed and watches Jean work for a good hour.

At which point Jean stops, dries his hands on one of the towels, and grabs his water bottle. Jeremy watches as he drinks deeply, eyes following the movement of his Adam’s apple. Just as he’s turning back to his task, Jean looks up and asks, earnest as always, “Are you learning anything?”

And Jeremy blushes — he’s sure, there’s no way that much heat can rise to his face without it being visible — and realizes just how long he’s been lying in silence, watching Jean. He gets up, grabs his notebook (made of normal paper, thank you very much), pencil case and the first book he can reach for, and rushes out of the room with a panicked, “Oh, I forgot I needed to ask Laila something.”

The only thing Jeremy forgets is his shoes, but he refuses to go back in the dorm for at least a couple of hours. The girls let him use the table in their dorm to study, and don’t even ask about his socks-only situation.

They have an away game as soon as the paper is finally ready, so it takes Jeremy a few extra days to learn what the next step in notebook-making is.

They fly to Nebraska for a match against the Huskers. It’s a rough one that they win — though just, and Jeremy is dragging his feet down the hotel lobby by the time they get back.

“Well done, everyone,” he says, for what feels like the hundredth time. “Get some rest now. Breakfast at 8 before we leave for the airport.”

They’d left Coach to sleep on the floor below, so it’s Jeremy’s job to repeat the information one last time.

There’s the quiet hubbub of goodnights being whispered, the tired shuffling of feet on the floor, of too-heavy gear bags being dragged along. The doors click closed one after the other — click, thump, click, sigh, click, whoosh — Jeremy counts them all, until he’s satisfied enough doors have closed.

His team is exactly where they should be, so Jeremy turns to his own roommate, and they walk down to their room together.

“I think that last shot would have gone in if you didn’t stop it, you know? We won because of you,” he says, just to say something, digging through his duffle bag for the room key. He always forgets about how good Jean is at Exy until he sees it in action. No matter how much they practice together, it’s different when it’s a game, when it’s real. Their goalkeepers have had a lot less work since Jean joined; the ball rarely makes it beyond his line.

Jean pulls his own card out of his hoodie pocket with a tired smile. “Well,” he starts, opening the door and gesturing for Jeremy to go in first. “We definitely wouldn’t have won without your goals. It’s not a personal victory. We all worked for it.”

Air leaves Jeremy’s lungs all at once. Only last year Jean would have never said anything like that — nor would he have sounded so sincere about it. It takes Jeremy a minute to recover, but he plays it cool, putting his bag down and shedding his jacket and sneakers. He taught Jean that — they all did.

“Jean Moreau,” he says, replacing his shock with dramatics. “You’re a real Trojan.”

Jean laughs, softly. He’s sitting on one of the beds now, taking his own shoes off.

“Jean Moreau,” he repeats. “My name always sounds so funny in your accent.”

Jeremy frowns. “I’m sorry. I do try.”

“No, no. I meant it. It’s funny, in a good way. I like it.”

Lost for words and too tired to figure out why his heart has taken a sudden interest in tap dancing, Jeremy smiles, and goes into the ensuite to get ready for bed. He splashes his face with cold water after brushing his teeth and makes his way back to the room.

Surrounded by the white duvet and half-sunken into a frankly ridiculous amount of pillows, Jean is sitting right in the middle of his hotel bed, shirt off but pants still on, embroidering something.

Jeremy stops in his tracks at the sight. It’s not entirely unusual to see Jean without a shirt on. They have quite conservative boundaries in their bedroom but they change in the same locker room on a near-daily basis. It shouldn’t be different. But it is. It is because they’re in such an intimate shared space, and Jeremy is too tired to keep his thoughts pure.

It doesn’t help that he hadn’t seen Jean embroider in months. He’d forgotten about what the delicate needle between his big fingers looked like, the grip of his large hand around the wood of the hoop, the flexing of his arms — on and off and on and off and on…

Shit.

Jeremy shakes the thoughts away as much as he can and rushes to slide into his own bed, turns his bedside lamp off and says, “Goodnight, Jean,” all within the next thirty seconds.

This shit can’t be happening.

Surely not.

A crush is fine. He can deal with that. He can deal with Jean’s attractiveness being more than objective these days. He can deal with the fact that sometimes he thinks about how nice it would be to just tuck a stray strand of Jean’s hair behind his ear, to get to the room after class and fall into Jean’s arms, to curl up against him to nap before a game, to hold his hand — just for a second— when they’re both nervous before a match… He can deal with the fact that whatever crushes he’s had before didn’t feel like this at all. He can even deal with the pit in his stomach that grows whenever he thinks about Jean and him going their separate ways after graduation, slowly losing contact; about Jean becoming someone he once knew.

He cannot, however, be popping boners every time he gets a look at Jean’s chest — let alone just his hands.

This is Jean.

Jean with his half-mumbled revelations of the shit he suffered through back with the Ravens. Jean who hasn’t ever shown any interest in sex, or dating — whether it be Jeremy or anyone else. Jean who Jeremy worked so hard to make feel happy and accepted and safe with the Trojans.

No.

He can’t.

He can’t throw it all out of the window.

This whole thing just needs to go away. He needs to stop his feelings before they get even bigger.

He needs to get laid.

As if inspired by that thought alone, his dick — treacherous thing — twitches again.

No. Not now.

Focusing on his breathing, Jeremy starts going over the plays from the game earlier. It’s the opposite of what he should be doing — trying to relax and unwind after the match. But he can’t trust his thoughts to actually relax, so this will have to do.

It’s not long until Jean leaves the room, leaving Jeremy to finally flop on his back and try to clear his head now he can’t feel Jean’s presence quite so suffocatingly close. But, of course, that doesn’t last. Eventually, the toilet flushes, Jean’s electric toothbrush stops its buzzing, the water cuts off, and the hinge on the towel holder creaks ominously. Jeremy doesn’t wait to hear the door to the bathroom open. He rolls over and faces the window again.

Jean is quiet. Jeremy tries not to think about his bare feet padding softly on the carpet, his strong hands pulling the duvet back carefully. He starts breathing normally again when the shuffling has ended.

Jean is tucked in bed and Jeremy can sleep again and forget this whole exhausted nightmare.

“Jeremy,” Jean half-whispers.

The world hates Jeremy. He is sure. Why is Jean trying to talk to him right now?

Jeremy does not dare move, not with the way his dick decided to react to his name in Jean’s mouth. Jesus Christ, he had just gotten it under control again.

“Do you mind if I keep my light on a little longer?”

“S’fine,” he mumbles, still facing away from Jean.

“Thanks.”

It’s in Jeremy’s best interests to not think about Jean right now. The problem is that it’s quiet — the whirring of the aircon unit is not loud enough to mask the sound of the needle going into the fabric, or the pop of it coming out on the other side. The hypnotizing rhythm of skin against cotton, and thread against steel, and thread going through cotton…

Until this moment, he hadn’t realized how acutely intimate he was with the act of embroidering. But from the sounds alone, he can picture the way Jean’s body moves with each stitch, the way his arms tighten as he moves — the contrast between how large he is (the definition of tall, dark, and handsome, Jeremy had thought years ago, the very first time he saw Jean Moreau) but how delicate the work is, how much care he puts into it.

Just before the digital alarm clock on his bedside table and its horridly bright green numbers show him midnight, Jean puts his hoop down with a clack of wood-on-wood, then shuffles into the bed softly, and the light finally (finally!) goes off.

One hour later, Jeremy is still alert, though Jean’s breathing eased off into his gentle sleepy inhale-exhale tempo ages ago. Jeremy’s dick, unfortunately, is still alert too.

No matter what he tries, his thoughts keep going back to Jean — Jean shouting his name before he throws a ball down the court at him, Jean’s careful, hesitant laughter when he’s on the phone with Kevin, easy French flowing between them, Jean fingers caressing the pages of Jeremy’s notebook, Jean, Jean, Jean, Jean…

Half of it is not even objectively hot. It’s just… Jean being Jean. And yet, it all somehow contributes to Jeremy’s unrelenting boner.

He needs sleep, desperately. He is tired, achey. And in the morning he’ll remember that there are classier, much less creepy ways of dealing with this whole ordeal, but instead, he just licks the palm of his hand and unceremoniously shoves it down his boxers.

It is a truly desperate affair. He pushes his whole face into the too-fluffy pillows to keep himself quiet and works himself hard and fast. The wild thought of letting his other hand reach behind him to open himself up — flashes of Jean’s elegant, long fingers right behind his eyelids — is enough to have him spurting all over his hand inside his boxers in no time whatsoever.

Guilt settles right after, not giving him so much as a minute to enjoy that high. He wipes his hand on the bedsheet, turns his body away from the small puddle (thank god for big hotel beds), and tries not to think at all, until exhaustion finally wraps him up in its comforting arms.

The next morning, he avoids Jean’s attempts at eye contact. Getting ready, leaving the room, boarding the plane, dropping their gear back at court… the shame from the night before crawls up his throat in the form of bile every time Jean even looks his way. Jeremy thinks he may actually throw up when Jean’s hand reaches out to hold his elbow, as soon as they walk back into their dorm room.

“Hey, did I do something wrong?”

Inside his chest, Jeremy’s heart goes into a frenzy.

“No,” he says — too high-pitched, too quickly. “Of course not.”

Jean doesn’t let go.

“Because you’ve been acting weird and cold, and I’d like to know. If I did. So I can fix it.”

God.

He’s a complete and utter fuck up.

“I’m sorry. I’m just really tired… didn’t sleep well.”

It’s not a lie, but it doesn’t feel like a truth either.

Jean makes a sound like he doesn’t believe that, but he finally lets go of his arm. It’s a relief for about 0.3 seconds, after which Jeremy misses his touch desperately.

“Well. Okay. If I did, though… you’d tell me, right? You wouldn’t just shut me out.”

It takes all of Jeremy’s strength not to let tears rise to his eyes.

“Jean… of course I wouldn’t. I am sorry it felt that way.”

Jean nods, and turns back out of the room, leaving Jeremy to deal with his feelings.

The nature of time is that it passes. For better or for worse, there’s no stopping it. And while Jeremy wishes it wouldn’t all go so quickly, at least he doesn’t have to think about his feelings, and instead he buries them under the ever-growing pile of items on his to-do list. There are classes to attend, papers to write, books to read, notes to study until his eyes feel sandy, and practice to run to between all of those other things. Jeremy doesn’t have a lot of free time but when he has it, he spends it in the girls’ dorm staring at the ceiling and trying to forget about scouts coming to matches, about news starting to break regarding players being approached by pro teams, about changes to the USA court roster system and general functioning and what that could mean to college players.

He also tries to forget about Jean, but that’s even harder. Hard to forget about someone you see every day, first thing when you wake up and last when you go to sleep.

Jeremy doesn’t particularly want to forget about Jean. He just wants to forget about the conclusions he is slowly coming to. The too-late realizations that shed some clarity on why watching Jean go through hobby after hobby had become his favorite activity, why it was so much easier to practice when he was around, why Jeremy felt the constant pull to watch, and look, and touch — to be near him. Why Jeremy had kept all of his creations, and displayed them proudly, even when they weren’t made for him.

It turns out that there was more to the fact that maybe somewhere between embroidery and pottery, Jeremy had caught himself watching the way Jean’s corded forearms flex as he pushes the needle into the fabric, the way his eyebrows furrow when he focuses hard on where to carve the wood to make it into exactly what he wants, the way he doesn’t care when paint splatters against his shoes, the way his fingers sink into the malleable clay and work it into different shapes.

Maybe somewhere between gardening and miniature assembling, Jeremy started paying more attention, listening to Jean talk about his hobbies, realizing that Jean had never had anything like this — the freedom to just try, the time to dedicate to something he doesn’t have to be the best at, he can just enjoy doing.

Maybe (maybe, he tells himself — because it’s easier if he poses it as a hypothesis and not a certainty) since the moment Jean came back from South Carolina, Jeremy has slowly but surely not just developed a crush on his roommate but instead has fallen thoroughly, life-ruiningly in love with him.

He doesn’t know what to do about it. So he decides he won’t do anything.

Graduation approaches scarily fast, the Trojans maintain their spot on the leaderboard as best they can, and most days, while Jeremy sits on his bed and studies for his last final, Jean sits at his desk folding his recycled paper.

Between normal practice, extra practice with the rookies, and strategy sessions with Coach and Laila, the Foxes’ impending California visit takes a lot of Jeremy’s time. The Foxes have always been different, a wildcard — and the Trojans know this, especially since their loss to them two years ago when they played an even-player match against them with no substitutions. To this day, Jeremy still doesn’t know how they do it. They do have two of the best strikers in the league, not to mention Andrew Minyard and his baffling ability to stop a goal like his stick has magical magnetic properties that make all and any throws just want to fly into it instead of into the goal behind him.

Jean is jittery — he always is before a match, but especially one against the Ravens, or if he’s up against Kevin.

That friendship is mostly mended, but Jeremy realizes how fragile it all is still. Jean doesn’t talk about it much, and Jeremy doesn’t ask.

The night before the match, Jeremy plops himself on Jean’s bed and watches him stack up the paper he’s been folding.

He picks up the tool Jean’s been using off the desk and asks, “What’s this?”

It’s a long and thin white thing, heavier than it looks at first glace. A skinnier, pointier version of those sticks doctors use to press on your tongue.

“Bone.”

“Uh?”

“It’s called a bone folder. For folding the pages neatly without marking them.”

“Oh. Show me how?”

He doesn’t know why he says it. He would have never said it months ago, despite having wanted to figure out how whittling works, or take a closer look at the miniature kits — the Exy court one Jean had built had been a particular favorite.

“Uhhhh,” Jean starts, hesitantly.

Fuck. That was exactly the opposite of what Jeremy wanted.

“No, sorry. It’s your thing. It’s not my thing. I’m sorry.”

“No, wait. Come here.”

Jean stands up and pushes his desk chair to the side so Jeremy can join him next to the desk. “So this is what I’ve been doing to make the pages for your notebook.”

This was a mistake, Jeremy realizes, as Jean starts rolling the sleeves of his shirt up, revealing the thick veins on his arms, the subtle muscle on them.

It’s all too easy to get caught up in his movements — Jeremy merely a fly in Jean’s spiderweb.

Jean folds the piece of paper in half, carefully aligning the corners, pushing the middle down together. Then he takes the bone folder and swipes it down the folded edge — once towards the right and then towards the left. He flips the paper, and offers the tool to Jeremy.

“Wanna try?”

This would all be easier if Jeremy didn’t spend the last week or so jerking off to the thoughts of what those hands could do…

“Sure.”

He doesn’t completely lose his edge. He smiles, and copies the motion Jean had made earlier. He presses the dull edge of the thing against the paper and then swipes: once to the right, once to the left.

“Yep,” Jean says. “That’s basically it.”

“What do you do next?”

Why do words just keep coming out of his mouth!?

“I thought I was making your notebook. Are you trying to help me?”

Jeremy laughs. That helps. The teasing helps. They’re friends. They’re just friends. They can still be friends, despite the feelings bursting inside his chest.

“I wouldn’t even try. You’re so good at all these things, and I’m not good at anything. I was just curious. I don’t know many people who make paper… or notebooks, for that matter.”

A sudden change happens to Jean’s expression, like a raincloud appearing out of nowhere on an otherwise blue sky. His eyebrows furrow slightly but this time in concern, not concentration. “What do you mean you’re not good at anything!?”

Oh.

“Oh. Just… you know. You have Exy, and you always get amazing grades, and you’ve been doing all these hobbies that you’re incredibly skilled at.”

“Jeremy. What the fuck are you talking about?”

“And I’m just me, you know? My only skill is being a nice guy.”

“What!? Jeremy. You have Exy!”

He’s always liked his name in Jean’s mouth. The accent, the slow way his tongue caresses the vowels, so different from how it sounds in his own mouth, or his mom’s, Ash’s, Coach’s… He doesn’t like it now. He doesn’t like the way Jean repeats his name with every sentence he says.

Jeremy doesn’t do this. Jeremy doesn’t talk about this. Jeremy leaves his insecurities at home. Always has. He promised himself when he came to college that he’d leave that behind, that he’d be exactly who he was meant to be: someone kind, someone helpful, a friend people can lean on. That’s who Jeremy is. He isn’t the angry middle child of a single mom who asked too much of her children — only ever out of love, but still too much.

But Jean’s words strike a heartstring, somehow hit too close to home.

Jeremy doesn’t have Exy, not like…

“Not the way you do — not like, a career. Sorry, I was just saying, I wasn’t, like… complaining.”

Jean puts the bone folder down, and pushes the pile of papers away. He takes a very deep breath.

“If you think you’re anything but one of the most incredible, exquisite, and talented people on this earth, Jeremy Knox… you are out of your mind.”

Why is it so hard to hear something you’ve been hoping to hear for months? Why does it have to be said in this context? Jeremy sighs, ready to put an end to it all.

“No. No, stop that. I don’t want, like, your compliments. It wasn’t like that.”

“It was—”

“Jean,” he says, ashamed of how desperate he sounds. “I really don’t want to have this conversation.”

Jean turns around, facing the wall instead. There’s some muttering in French.

“Yeah. Yeah. I’m sorry.” He grabs his backpack, and turns to the door. “I’ll see you at the court later?”

“Sure.”

The whole thing derails their game with the Foxes. Jean is in a mood, Jeremy is all over the place, and if that wasn’t bad enough, Jeremy finds Kevin and Jean in a heated argument he doesn’t understand a single word of after the game. Jean is… scary, expression closed off. It shouldn’t be hot, but it is and he’s upset and turned on all at once, so he walks back to the dorm the long way, and tries not to wait up for Jean.

He does. He’s worried. Jean is never fun to be around after he argues with Kevin — which is often — and Jeremy was already stressed about their own small disagreement earlier. Jean doesn’t say a word to him when he gets back, but he falls asleep quickly, and Jeremy follows soon after, with the melody of Jean’s breathing as a lullaby.

The loss to the Foxes isn’t fatal, but the loss to the Jackals, two weeks later, is. The Trojans are officially out of the tournament, and have instead to focus on school — and, for some of them, on the whole ordeal of graduation.

Jean’s voice is gravelly and sad when they get back to the dorm after the match, and he says, clearly attempting to lift the mood, “More time for me to finish your notebook, I guess.”

The next step is attaching all of the paper Jean had made together. Free from his last exam, Jeremy goes back to watching. None of it matters, anymore. They’re just killing time, waiting for the inevitable.

Each folded piece of paper gets placed on top of the next, and weaved together by Jean’s careful hands.

The needle for this is different than the ones Jean had used for embroidering. It’s longer, and slightly curved. Jeremy watches him, day after day — those gorgeous hands pulling those pieces of paper together, stitching it tightly.

“Sorry I didn’t ask if you wanted to help with this bit,” Jean says, when he finally ties the last bit of thread together, securing all the pages. “You seemed interested, the other week.”

Jeremy doesn’t mind. He’d much rather watch, anyway. Though it had been nice, for a minute, to be that close to Jean, to fold the pages alongside him.

“Oh. Yeah. We ran out of time, I guess.”

Completely and utterly out of time, he thinks, miserably.

“Yeah.” For what it’s worth, Jean seems as uncomfortable about this whole exchange as he feels. It hasn’t been easy between them, since that argument. As if reading Jeremy’s mind, Jean continues, “You know. That evening. Before the game against the Foxes… you never let me finish.”

“Jean… I was tired, we were stressed. There was a lot going on. I think I said a lot of things I didn’t mean and you took them to hear—”

“You meant it though,” Jean cuts in. “You always mean it. You think no one notices, but I know it’s like that. You think you can hide behind being nice, you think that’s all you have, that’s all you are — which, by the way, is an incredible skill to have. Being kind is hard work, Jeremy. It is why most people don’t do it. Sustaining that amount of loveliness is hard work, and I see how much you put into it. But it’s not all you are.”

“But—”

“No. Listen.” Something in Jean’s voice makes him stop. There’s an edge to it, something Jeremy hasn’t heard in over a year — something of Raven Jean in it, something hurt and broken and sad. “I was a mess when I got here. I was… I wasn’t fit to be a person outside of Evermore back then. I didn’t know how. The things I saw, the things I— I… the things I did, the things they made me do, I didn’t know how not to carry them with me all the time. I was rude, I was beyond rude, I was an asshole, and there is no excuse for the way I treated you and the team, but especially you, because I know — Kevin told me — you didn’t even have a roommate before, you traded a room where you could do whatever you want to room with me and to this day I still don’t know why you would do that.” Jean falters, almost like he has to force the words out of his mouth. “There is no reason why you should have done that, but you did, you traded everything to look after me, to take me in. You sacrificed an entire team dynamic, you sacrificed an entire NCAA career without a single yellow card, Jeremy. And you can’t tell me it’s not true.”

Jeremy’s whole body thrums with an unfamiliar feeling — like he wants to run, wants to look away, but is stuck in place, unmoveable, kept exactly where he is by the sheer force of Jean’s gravitational pull.

“Your kindness isn’t all you are. But it’s part of you, and I can’t— I wouldn’t be here if you didn’t give that kindness to me, if you weren’t patient and fundamentally good. And it kills me that you think you’re good for nothing when you are so. very. good.”

Breath stuttering, Jean looks away. It’s reassuring, in a way, that Jeremy isn’t the only one torn to pieces by this conversation, though knowing that doesn’t help stop the tears from forming in his eyes.

Jean takes a step forward.

Oh.

“It is infuriating. I can’t, I don’t have the words. I have been trying and trying and trying but it’s me — I am the one who isn’t good. I have spent months making tiny little things to keep my mind occupied, to keep my hands busy, to keep the thought of just… going on to play Exy and never seeing you again out of my mind. Making you stupid little things you don’t care for because I don’t know how else to tell you…”

“Tell me what?”

“What the fuck do you think?”

Jeremy’s heart is beating very, very fast, but he can’t stop his body from moving, his feet from carrying him forward, his hands from grabbing Jean’s hands (Jean’s hands!) in his own.

“Tell me what,” he says, in a broken whisper. It’s not a question, this time. It’s a request. A prayer.

“That I love—”

Jeremy pushes up on the balls of his feet and his lips are on Jean’s before he finishes his sentence.

All this time…

All this fucking time.

He doesn’t want to do the wrong thing, so he doesn’t linger. It’s a close-mouthed, soft thing. When he pulls back he’s laughing, a weight he didn’t know he was carrying suddenly lifted.

He hadn’t even known Jean liked men… or anyone, really.

“Jeremy… You don’t have to.”

“What?”

“Pity me.”

“Oh my god. Jean. You think I kissed you because I pity you?”

“Hmm. Yeah?”

“You just shouted at me for ten minutes because of my lack of self-esteem and you think I kissed you because I pity you.”

“Uh…”

“I want you so much. I have, for so long. Longer than I really let myself think of. You have to believe me, Jean.”

“But, like I said… I am all broken. I don’t know how to do this.”

“It’s okay. We can figure it out. If you want.”

“I… I can’t promise to be good.”

“Good thing I didn’t ask you to.”

“I’m serious… I… I don’t know how to do any of it. Love, be loved… My parents gave me away to settle a debt, and then Riko… never mind. And Kevin left—”

His voice breaks at the mention of Kevin more than at the mention of his parents, more than at Riko. After that, it’s a torrent of half-panicked French Jeremy doesn’t catch a word of.

“Jean,” Jeremy says. “Jean.”

“Uh?”

“Kiss me.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

Jean’s hands (Jean’s hands!) cup Jeremy’s face.

“I thought about doing this for the last… 600-ish days.”

“What are you waiting for th—”

Jean doesn’t kiss Jeremy the way Jeremy had kissed Jean.

Jean kisses Jeremy as if he… well. As if he thought about doing it for the last 600-ish days.

It’s so, so good. It’s everything Jeremy hoped it would be and more. Once convinced Jeremy won’t escape his grasp, Jean lets go of his face and traces Jeremy’s jaw with his fingertips, then lets his hand slowly graze down his neck, until it settles on Jeremy’s chest, hand open and pressed against his beating heart. His other hand has him by the back of his neck, pulling him in, in, in.

This had happened a million different ways in Jeremy’s mind, but never this way. Never desperate and yet tender, never with a hunger that matches Jeremy’s own.

Jeremy has a half-closed fist pressed against Jean’s stomach, and he grabs at the fabric of his shirt, and pulls him in. They’re impossibly close but he still wants more, wants to crawl into Jean’s ribcage and make room for himself. So he pulls. Jean might be taller, stronger, but Jeremy knows what he wants. That’s usually half the battle.

It’s almost too easy, the way Jean lets Jeremy fall into bed (Jean’s bed, all cotton-scented laundry detergent and dark bedsheets) and climbs over him. There — tall and mighty, towering over Jeremy — he stops, and asks, “Is this a good idea?”

Is it? Jeremy isn’t sure. But he’ll take a bad idea if he can have this, at least once.

“Does it matter?” he asks.

“Matters to me.”

“I want this. I want you.” Jeremy is embarrassed about how desperate that comes out but that only lasts one second, because Jean is on top of him, and pulling him up by the back of his neck until he is sitting up, too. He pulls Jeremy’s t-shirt off and throws it over to Jeremy’s side of the room. Jeremy’s mouth waters as Jean works the buttons open on his white shirt. It’s like Christmas morning, but your present unwraps itself. “I have wanted it for a very long time.”

Jeremy stops him before he can slide the shirt off his shoulders completely. “Leave it on?” he asks. Jean — the fucker — throws him a smug smile, but leaves the shirt on.

He makes a show of it after, of undoing the cuff buttons and rolling the sleeves up slowly. This part is straight out of Jeremy’s fantasies. Jean’s hands carefully folding the cuff over, and then again, and again, revealing his arms. If Jeremy whimpers, he doesn’t really think he can be blamed for it at all.

It’s a bit of a blur, after. All “Can I?” and “Is this okay?” between kisses that turn into bites halfway through, all the eager learning touches of desperate new lovers.

It’s not long until Jeremy is somehow fully naked and underneath Jean — still in his open shirt and jeans. It should feel weird, but it doesn’t, because Jean has his hands on him and all of his blood flow is concentrated on his dick in a way that doesn’t allow for stray thoughts.

His entire focus is on how hot (so hot) all of this is, how hot (so fucking hot) Jean looks, and how hot (the hottest) it is when he says, voice impossibly low, “I’m going to touch you now, okay?” and just wraps his hand around Jeremy’s dick like that isn’t everything Jeremy’s has been dreaming of for weeks.

Jean’s hands are so big, his fingers tight around Jeremy, the circle of his fist making his head fuzzy with pleasure.

It’s different from his own touch. He tries hard, so hard, to focus, to remember. Wildly, he wishes he could catalog every movement of Jean’s in one of his notebooks. And then Jean goes slower, but harder, tighter, and he isn’t thinking about anything at all, anymore.

His whole world is, once again, reduced to the size of Jean Moreau’s hands.

Gently (so gently), Jean brings his mouth down to press a kiss against the inside of Jeremy’s knee, nudging it up with his nose as he does.

Half-gone, shameless, Jeremy pants, and then the words just tumble out of his mouth, at exactly the same time Jean speaks, too.

“Would you—”

“Can I—”

Jean laughs. It is definitely Jeremy’s favorite sound in the whole world.

“Yes,” Jeremy says. “Whatever you want.”

But his mouth falls open when Jean's free hand reaches for the little gap between his bedframe and mattress and produces a small bottle of lube.

It’s a truly heroic effort not to come right there and then, when Jeremy starts picturing exactly why Jean has a bottle of lube hidden behind his mattress.

And then it’s all over too soon. Jeremy is too familiar, at this stage, with the way time works, the way it moves: not stopping for anyone, not even for the syrupy and gentle nature of pleasure. It’s all quick snapshots of desire every time Jeremy is strong enough to open his eyes and look. He wishes time could stop — even if for a flash — just as Jean’s finger first circles the rim of Jeremy’s ass and then, finally pushes in; but time barrels on all at once, Jeremy losing all shame and control over himself and begging for more, babbling about how much he’s thought of this, how much he wanted it, how good Jean’s fingers feel.

One finger eventually becomes two, and his pleasure becomes less about the friction and more about the pressure. Once Jean finds Jeremy’s prostate and focuses on that, it’s all too much and too little at the same time, and before he can do anything about it — the ability to formulate words having completely left him — he’s crying out and tumbling over the edge of orgasm in free fall.

There are tears on his face, and come all over his stomach but there’s something to be said for the will of the horny, and the stamina of athletes, because it only takes Jeremy ten seconds of panting to press on Jean’s shoulder until he lets himself fall on his back.

If having a half-dressed Jean towering over him was incredible, he doesn’t know how he’d describe having a half-dressed Jean under him, at his complete mercy.

“I’m gonna put my mouth on you now. Yeah?”

Jean says something in French Jeremy can only assume is some kind of blasphemy. He wants to make Jean say it again. But the next thing Jean says is, “Yes.” And then again, because apparently Jeremy isn’t moving fast enough for his liking. “Yes.” And even more, “Yes, Jeremy. Yes. Please.”

And the politeness of it all nearly unravels Jeremy, but he has Jean’s shirt to help him out of, and his jeans to pull down his legs, followed by his underwear and socks. And Jean is still begging, but Jeremy has a naked Jean Moreau to enjoy — to devour — and god help him if that doesn’t do something to his brain.

He kisses Jean’s thighs, and bites his chest, licks his abs, runs his nails down his sides like he wants to carve him anew. Finally, content with his exploration of Jean’s body, and starting to feel rather sorry for how desperate he sounds, Jeremy licks the length of Jean’s cock, all the way from his balls to the tip, where he finally takes Jean into his mouth.

The sound that particular action punches out of Jean nearly makes him hard again. Jean feels heavy on his tongue. Jeremy never wants him anywhere further than 10 feet away from him again.

He takes as much of Jean as he can (not as much as he’d like, but he may be a little out of practice), and wraps his hand around the base to cover what he can’t take in his mouth. Then, when he comes up for air, he swirls his tongue around the head and Jean moans.

In that moment, Jean’s laughter becomes his second favorite sound.

“Jeremy.” His name has always sounded lovely in Jean’s voice, but never like that. “I’m not gonna last,” Jean says.

Jeremy lets go just enough to kiss up his happy trail, to his navel. “Good,” he says, “I want you to come in my mouth.”

True to his word, Jean does not last. He comes with a torrent of French on his tongue and his fist in Jeremy’s hair and it’s the hottest thing that has ever happened to him.

The next four days pass in the blink of an eye. They spend them hiding in corners and excusing themselves early and running back to the dorm so they can kiss, and kiss, and kiss. There’s too much to do, too many people to see, graduation outfits to figure out, parties and dinners and family plans to accommodate for.

Jeremy definitely cries when they go back to court for their last practice, and there’s still the team dinner to survive. He’s not ready, and everything seems so much easier when it’s just the two of them in their room with no clothes on. That’s where he wants to stay.

It had been easy, falling into bed with Jean, finally acting on all that pent-up want he’d been carrying around for months. But outside their room, Jeremy spends his time trying to break Jean’s barriers back down, trying to get answers from him, trying to understand how they got here and where they’re going.

The answers he does get are as blunt as they are mind-blowing, ranging from “Oh, I’ve been in love with you since you got that yellow card,” to “I never thought I’d have the chance. Kevin told me to forget about it,” via “I’m serious. I want to date you. Properly. If you’d like that?”

Jeremy doesn’t tell Jean when he fell in love — he doesn’t know — but he does tell him he would like to date him — very much so. After that, he texts Kevin to tell him to never, ever, give Jean dating advice again.

Graduation comes and goes.

Before they know it it’s their last morning in their room, which they should definitely spend packing but they spend wrapped around each other, Jeremy taking his time getting to know Jean’s hands and arms intimately, like he’s been hoping to for so long.

He finds out he likes Jean’s hands on his hair (to push it away from his face; to pull on while Jeremy blows him), on his face (a thumb caressing his cheek as he falls asleep, a thumb finding its way into his mouth as Jeremy rides him), around his neck (gently, pulling him for a kiss; forcefully, just before he tells Jeremy to come), on his chest (feeling his heartbeat under his palm, pinching Jeremy’s nipples until he squirms), on his navel, on his cock, in his ass… he’s yet to find out where he doesn’t like Jean touching him.

They’re pieces of paper folded together, piled on top of each other, interlaced by precise, skilled hands; pressed firmly inside the same cover.

It takes Jean three rounds of making Jeremy nearly cry for him to be satisfied and admit it’s time they clean up and get their shit together. He says so, but he doesn’t move so Jeremy doesn’t either.

Jean is using Jeremy’s bare leg as a pillow, his hair tickling the inside of his knee. They’d flopped back exactly where they were, as soon as Jean had finally let Jeremy come, and there they’d stayed — lost in their thoughts.

In a way, it’s just like any other morning they’ve spent in this room: the sun shines through the pulled curtains, bathing everything in gold. In many ways, it’s a morning unlike any before.

Their breaths are the only sounds in the room, a steady, matching inhale, exhale, inhale again. Otherwise, in their closed-off little world, it’s quiet.

It’s not quiet in Jeremy’s head though, it never is. He’s not ready to leave, to let go. So he says the first stupid thing that comes to mind, which is not ideal. It’s not the stupidest thing he’s ever said though. It’s a true, if unfortunate, fact, though he delivers it in the form of a question:

“Is now a good time to tell you I think I accidentally told Kevin we had sex?”

Jean whips up to look at him so fast Jeremy isn’t sure how his neck doesn’t crack.

“Oh,” Jean says. “That explains things.”

“Oh god, I’m sorry. What did he say? He didn’t say much to me… just enough to let me know he’d figured it out.”

“He didn’t say anything.”

Jean gets up, and pulls a pair of shorts on before grabbing his cell phone off the windowsill, pressing a few buttons, and passing it to Jeremy without a word.

The contact name at the top reads Andrew Minyard, and the text says simply: Did u finally get ur dick wet, then?

Jeremy giggles.

“I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be. I was gonna tell Kevin eventually.”

“You were?”

He hates how insecure he sounds, and he pulls himself to a sitting position now that Jean isn’t on his legs, and brings his knees up to cover his softening dick, feeling weirdly self-conscious.

“I was. I told you. We’ve had this conversation. And I meant it. Boyfriends, right?”

Right then, no man or god would be able to stop Jeremy from smiling big and bright.

“Boyfriends,” he confirms.

They take turns showering, returning to the room for fresh clothes in preparation for dinner. Despite the loveliness of the whole honeymoon phase of locking the dorm door and pretending they’re studying, right before graduation and on the back of their team’s loss is terrible timing for finally getting your hands on someone you’ve been lusting for for half a year — a year and a half in Jean’s case, apparently.

Jeremy still can’t wrap his head around that.

Across the hall, a phone rings loudly. A door slams. Someone shouts something. Judging by the familiar but rather distinct sound, an Exy stick is dropped on the laminate flooring of the hallway. Time goes on, indifferent to how perfect life is in that tiny dorm room, indifferent to how much Jeremy wants it to stop.

And he does want it to stop. He could look at Jean forever.

He is standing in the middle of the room, half naked, hair wet.

“My eyes are up here, mon ange,” he says. It makes Jeremy’s heart do a little somersault in his chest — that he can look now, and that Jean can react. Openly, happily.

Jean grabs a clean t-shirt out of his dresser and puts that on. Jeremy doesn’t know why that’s different now, when they’ve been dressing and undressing in front of each other for nearly two entire school years. It feels more intimate now. Jeremy knows what those shoulders feel like under the palm of his hand, what that chest feels like under his tongue, what that hair feels like when he runs his hand through it…

When Jean sits on the edge of the bed to put his socks on, he places one of his large hands gently on Jeremy’s bare knee.

“Is now a good time to tell you I’ve known for a couple of months we’re both being called up to Court?”

“You said you wouldn’t go—”

“They’re moving out of Evermore.”

“What!?”

“This… We’re not supposed to know this. But they’ve told Kevin because… they wanted his thoughts on naming the new stadium after his mom. My point is—” he stops, looking serious. He twists so he can look at Jeremy properly. “I am only telling you now because you’ve been freaking out over nothing. You’re good, Jeremy. And if it wasn’t Exy, it would be something. You’re not useless. I’m gonna keep playing Exy, because I need to pay the family my dues. But you? You’re free. You can do anything you want.”

No one had told him that before.

No. That’s not quite true.

No one had told him that before without strings attached, without wanting anything in return. When Jean says it, it’s because he means it. Jeremy knows this.

Something very bright — clarity, Eureka! — settles in him.

“What if it’s you?”

“Uh?” Jean asks.

“What if you’re what I want. Even if I don’t know what I’m gonna do for the rest of my days, even if I still have to figure that out. What if I say where you go, I’ll go. How would you feel about that?”

Jean cups Jeremy’s hands in his face.

“Pretty good, actually. Let’s do that. We can finish your notebook together, and then I’ll let you pick the next hobby. We can learn together.”

They do.