Chapter Text
At Feuilly’s request, Bahorel and Jehan agreed not to tell anyone what was going on between the three of them. Which was just as well because most of the time, they didn’t know what was going on between them either. After Bahorel’s very abrupt admission of his romantic feelings toward Feuilly and Jehan’s quieter, more confused admission that he felt something as well, Feuilly had hesitantly admitted that maybe there was something between the three of them that was different than his relationships with other people. Maybe. He really had no idea. He’d never done something like this before.
In the days and weeks after they got everything out in the open, he realized, though, that Bahorel and Jehan hadn’t done anything like this before either. They both knew how to handle romantic relationships and also normal platonic relationships, but they had agreed that this was more—or at least different—than their usual platonic relationships with the rest of their friends, which meant that this was new territory for all three of them.
Feuilly wasn’t sure if he felt better or worse knowing that none of them were really knew what they were doing. In public, absolutely nothing had changed, and Feuilly clung to that stability because things at home sometimes took him by surprise.
A month into their…experimental relationship, the three of them were relaxing in the living room together, watching a movie while Bahorel knit. It’d been a rough week for all of them. Feuilly was picking up more work as a freelance graphic artist, but he'd also been getting more hours at his two retail jobs as the students he worked with took time off to prepare for finals. He'd been cutting back on sleep to try and meet his freelance deadlines and his body was starting to feel it. The impending end of the school semester brought an increased work load for Bahorel and Jehan, and very few things made Bahorel hate law school more than dealing with end-of-semester papers and projects. The end of the semester had collected its own toll on Jehan, who was only just starting to come out of a melancholic spell that had lasted more than a week. All three of them needed a quiet weekend and Feuilly thought that a movie together was a promising start, but when Jehan came back to the living room after taking some dishes into the kitchen, he hesitated for a moment. Instead of returning to his spot next to Bahorel, he sat next to Feuilly on the floor. For someone who insisted on his personal space with people he was unfamiliar with, Jehan was surprisingly tactile with the people he was close with and this was hardly the first time Jehan had curled up next to him instead of Bahorel (and it usually was when Bahorel was knitting or crocheting and Jehan would complain that Bahorel was moving too much for him to get comfortable).
But this was the first time that Jehan held Feuilly’s hand when he sat next to him. The gesture had seemed natural coming from Jehan, who tucked his hand against Feuilly’s and wove their fingers together and didn’t call attention to it at all. Just testing the water.
Jehan did things like this often. They were his attempts to sort out the new boundaries of physical affection between them. Normally, these attempts didn’t feel quite so awkward. Feuilly couldn’t remember the last time he’d held someone’s hand—maybe when he was a child?—and he couldn’t ever remember interlocking fingers with someone like this. It didn’t feel right but he hesitated to pull away immediately.
He never had learned to assert his boundaries properly.
Luckily, after a minute or so, Jehan looked at him. “Is this as awkward for you as it is for me?”
When Feuilly nodded, Jehan laughed and pulled his hand away.
“We’ll just add that to our out-of-bounds list, shall we?”
They had spent the last month sorting out what was out-of-bounds and what wasn’t through a series of small experiments like this, and they had found other ways to express affection—both physical and not. Hugs were fine—even welcome. Feuilly hadn’t been much of a hugger growing up—foster homes weren’t known for their physical affection—but he found that it was…nice just being held at the end of long day. No demands or expectations, just the comfort of another body against his. Jehan was prone to snuggling up against Feuilly’s side when they watched TV or movies, though spooning and lap-sitting were (thankfully) reserved for Bahorel. Feuilly was fine offering up shoulder massages to both Jehan and Bahorel (who always carried tension through his neck and shoulders), but being on the receiving end of a massage felt weird to Feuilly. It was intimate in a way that he wasn’t comfortable with and neither Jehan or Bahorel had pushed the issue when he said he wasn’t comfortable with it.
And that was mostly how things were between all three of them. They tested new boundaries, but by and large, things were as they always were…until they weren’t. Until Jehan slipped his hand into Feuilly’s. Until Feuilly caught Bahorel watching him with the same look of adoration he usually reserved for Jehan. Until Feuilly avoided going home till late at night because he worried that Bahorel and Jehan didn’t have enough time alone together. Until Bahorel’s hand lingered on Feuilly’s shoulder longer than it used to and Feuilly panicked internally over what Bahorel meant by that. Until Jehan’s normally buoyant mood slipped into melancholic territory and Feuilly worried that he was the cause because Jehan barely made eye contact with him for a week.
But none of them ever talked about about the parts of this relationship that weren’t sitting right, which was maddening because normally Feuilly couldn’t get the other two to shut up about their feelings. Not that he had ever wanted them to shut about their feelings because being around people who were so emotionally expressive, who didn’t make him guess at what was going on in their minds was so refreshing. After a childhood of being shunted from foster home to foster home—a few of which had been healthy homes but the majority ranged from dysfunctional to flat-out abusive—Feuilly didn’t have the emotional vocabulary to just say that something about this was bothering him. And in the past—back before they had decided to explore the boundaries of their relationship—both Bahorel and Jehan had been good about checking in with him, about creating opportunities to get something off his chest when he needed it because they knew he wasn’t comfortable instigating those conversations. Jehan had knack for knowing when Feuilly was upset about something and knew just the right way to phrase a question so that Feuilly never felt like he was bothering when the other man when he vented about whatever was on his mind. And Bahorel…well, for as long as Feuilly had known him, Bahorel barreled in to difficult conversations with the assumption that it was better to stir up hurt feelings if it meant getting them out in the open instead of letting him fester.
The fact that neither of them had mentioned feeling the tension between them or had checked in with Feuilly made him wonder if he was the only who felt it. If he was the problem in this trio of theirs.
And he hated that. He hated the idea that he had soured a perfect thing—because they’d been doing so well before all of this. There had been a balance and a flow to their lives together that had been a source of strength for him and now that source of strength was just a knot of insecurities because he constantly worried that Bahorel wanted more from their relationship than he was willing to give and he was never certain that Jehan was entirely on board with this whole situation and was just putting on a good show.
And despite that all of this was churning in his gut, he kept quiet. He let Jehan snuggle against him during the rest of their movie, unable to shake the fear that Jehan was sitting there thinking that he’d rather be sitting next to Bahorel. He pretended to not notice that Bahorel watched them more than he watched the movie, and he definitely pretended that he didn’t suspect Bahorel was thinking of all the things that he had with Jehan but didn’t have with Feuilly. And when the movie was over, he excused himself. He said that he was tired and really did need to turn in. He hurried to get ready for bed and turned out his lights before either of his friends even had the chance to ask if he were feeling all right.
Because he wasn’t all right. He hadn’t been this not all right in a while, but he didn’t know how to say any of it. He didn’t want to cause a problem where the other two didn’t see one. He didn’t want to upset the two men he cared so much about and risk pushing them away.
So he laid in bed alone in the dark, and when he heard the first rumblings of an argument from the other bedroom, he tried very hard to pretend he wasn’t ruining everything.
As Jehan brushed his teeth, he could see Bahorel getting ready for bed in the mirror. Except his boyfriend wasn’t getting ready for bed. Not really. He was doing that obnoxious thing where he felt the need to aggressively organize their bedroom right before they went to sleep. He cleared off their shared desk and tried to put away Jehan’s books on the bookshelf despite the fact that he had never mastered Jehan’s book sorting scheme—divided by genre, then sorted alphabetically by author. Bahorel huffed when he couldn’t fit a book on the shelf and then dumped it back on the desk. He tripped over a pair of his own shoes which had been left by the bed, and made an irritated noise when he tossed them in the closet.
Jehan spat his toothpaste into the sink and rinsed out his mouth. “Are you going to tell me what’s bothering you or are you going to make me guess?”
Bahorel paused in the middle of sorting his shirts by color in the closet. He hated the way Jehan put away their laundry but Jehan had said that as long as he was the one doing laundry, Bahorel wasn’t allowed to complain how it was put away. “Nothing’s bothering me,” he said.
“Okay, we both know that’s a lie,” Jehan said. He put his toothbrush aside and climbed onto their bed. He patted it as an invitation for Bahorel to come join him. It wasn’t unusual for Bahorel to engage with his problems physically—hence the late-night room reorganization—but it was very unlike him to deny that anything was wrong. Jehan had gotten the sense that something was festering in the house, but he was coming out of a melancholic spell and thought that those worries were the product of an overly-anxious mind.
He was beginning to think that wasn’t actually the case.
“What’s going on?” he asked. “Talk to me.”
“I don’t want to upset you,” Bahorel said from the closet.
Jehan rolled his eyes. “That’s not how things work between us,” he said. That was a rule established early in their relationship—that each had the freedom to say what they felt, even if it risked hurting the other one. They did their best to handle those conversations delicately and even though delicacy wasn’t Bahorel’s strong suit, he did have a big heart and it was never his intention to deliberately hurt someone—particularly someone he cared about. “Say what you need to say.”
“Your mood has only balanced out in the last week and I don’t want to make things hard for you.”
“Bahorel, hon, I’m not going to break,” he said. “And frankly, I find it a little insulting that you’re using my mood disorder as an excuse to hide from your problems.”
He didn’t have a mood disorder in the clinical sense, but he was prone to depressive episodes from time to time. The problem was that he felt things too strongly, so what would be a passing sadness for most people had a tendency to cling to him for days or weeks and he had the hardest time shaking it. And Bahorel wasn’t wrong to worry that he hadn’t shaken the mood entirely, but he was wrong to use that as an excuse to avoid addressing whatever was bothering him.
“It’s nothing I want to bring up before bed. I know you don’t like hashing things out when you’re tired.”
“Would you stop making this about me?” Jehan said. “Something’s upsetting you and I want to know what it is.”
“Well, if it’s so important to you to drag this all out before bed, I’m pissed,” Bahorel said. He stepped away from the closet, but he didn’t join Jehan on the bed.
“About?”
“It’s not fair.”
“It’s late. I’m tired. You’re going to have to be more specific.”
“It’s not fair that you can hold Feuilly’s hand, that you can snuggle up against him, that the two of you can do whatever the hell you want and I can barely touch him now without him flinching away.”
“What?”
“Oh, come on, surely you’ve noticed.”
“No,” Jehan said, trying to recall a single example of Feuilly flinching away from Bahorel. “I haven’t noticed anything like that at all.”
“I don’t buy that,” Bahorel said. “You had to have noticed something. The whole apartment’s been off for the last month because I had to open my fat mouth and ruin everything.”
Jehan felt the self-loathing that came with those words and he patted the bed again, hoping Bahorel would join him so he could do something about that negativity. “You didn’t ruin anything,” he said. “You were honest about how you felt.”
“And now my best friend doesn’t want anything to do with me.”
“I don’t—I haven’t seen any of this avoidance you’re talking about.”
“He flinches when I throw my arm around his shoulders like I used to. He avoids being alone with me. The other day we ran laps at the gym and afterward he wouldn’t change in front of me in the locker room. Like what the hell? I’ve told him over and over that my damn feelings don’t change anything between us, that I don’t expect anything from him, but that doesn’t matter because everything’s broken anyway!”
“Have you talked to him about this?”
“Did you miss the part where he’s been avoiding me?” he snapped, his voice almost cruel. He winced immediately. “Sorry. I don’t mean to take this out on you. I don’t want to upset you.”
“I’m not upset,” Jehan said. “But you need to talk to him about this.”
“It’ll just make things worse,” he said. “I already ruined enough—”
“You didn’t ruin anything!”
“Keep your voice down. You’re going to wake him up.”
“You don’t think he should be involved in this conversation?” Jehan asked. “If whatever the hell this is is going to work, we all need to be talking about it!”
“But I’m the one with the problem, not the two of you! These are just my stupid issues to work through because I went and fell in love with my best friend.”
“That’s not how this works! You don’t get to walk around in a bad mood and refuse to address it because you think it’s only about you. You’re in a relationship, Bahorel. Your moods don’t just affect you anymore!”
“I don’t want it to affect the two of you! I don’t want it to affect me! I want it to be a non-issue!”
“Well, that’s backfired rather spectacularly, don’t you think?”
“See, this is why I didn’t want to get into this tonight. I didn’t want to upset you!”
“I’m not upset!”
“Then why are you shouting?”
“Because this is stupid! There is a solution to this problem and it involves you walking down the hall and knocking on Feuilly’s door instead of prowling around in here!”
“That’s not going to fix this because he doesn’t want this to work!”
Jehan sat back. He’d been worried about that. That Feuilly felt pressured into redefining their friendship because of them and it made Jehan sick to think that he might have said as much to Bahorel without either of them talking to him about it as well. “Has he said that to you?”
“He doesn’t need to! And don’t sit there looking so shocked—it’s not like you were on board with this from the beginning.”
“Bahorel, what the everloving fuck are you talking about? I’m all in. I’m invested!”
“You told me you don’t love Feuilly like I do! You told me that you were feeling insecure about us for the last month! Because not only did I ruin my friendship with Feuilly, apparently I was on the verge of ruining my relationship with you! I’m the only one who wanted this to work and I dragged the two of you along with me—”
“Seriously?” Jehan said, getting off the bed because now he was upset. “I told you I was feeling insecure because I was feeling insecure and I wanted to sort it out before it complicated things between all three of us! You don’t get to use my feelings as an excuse to self-sabotage!”
“I’m not—”
“This is textbook self-sabotage, Bahorel! You’re hoarding all this negativity and refusing to do anything about it even though the solution is just walking down the hall and talking to someone!”
“Oh, you’re one to talk about hoarding negativity!”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“I asked you over and over again when you were starting to slip the other week what was going on, and you refused to tell me anything! You just shut me out—”
“I didn’t know what was upsetting me!” Jehan snapped. “I’m not you! I don’t have the words to describe how I’m feeling the minute I feel it! I need time to sort it all out—but once I figured it out, I told you! I wasn’t shutting you out to make a point! Fuck, Bahorel, who do you think I am?”
Before Bahorel could answer, there was a knock at the door.
“Great, now you’ve woken up Feuilly,” he muttered, stomping towards the door.
Jehan rolled his eyes, not feeling terribly sympathetic towards anyone at the moment. “He’s not our child,” he muttered. “We don’t need to argue behind closed doors to protect him.”
Bahorel yanked open the door, and Feuilly stood in the hall in his pajamas. His jaw was tight and he looked like he might be ill.
“Did we wake you?” Bahorel asked. “I’m sorry.”
“No, I was awake,” Feuilly said, his voice was quiet but firm. “But I think we need to talk. All of us. Now.”