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Steven compartmentalizes. It’s how he deals with everything; it’s how he gets through his day to day life. He knows it will likely come back to bite him in the ass one day, but he’s too far in now to be able to do anything about it without serious professional help.
He pictures his mind like a long hallway with hundreds of doors. Behind each door is a thought, memory, or emotion that he just can’t bring himself to deal with. Behind one door is his dog dying when he was 14, behind another is accidentally calling his teacher “mom” in middle school. When something unbearable happens he picks it up, packages it up, and finds a room for it. And there it stays.
Andrew has his own wing in Steven’s labyrinth of compartmentalization. Fairly close to the front of his mind are the things that are brought up quite frequently in his everyday life, things that require quick re-compartmentalization. Andrew’s arms - god, his arms. Andrew’s voice in the morning when he just gets into work, still groggy. Andrew’s eyes.
Further down, where Steven rarely ventures, is reserved for the most serious incidents. The things that would seriously make him question himself, his identity, his whole life. The things he can’t possibly bear to address. Andrew and Andrew related thoughts have their own wing there too. A quick peak of Andrew’s stomach when he stretches. The way Andrew lets him lean against his shoulder if he’s drunk or tired after a shoot. The tender way Andrew sometimes looks over at him while they’re filming. Andrew’s hand gripping a beer bottle. Andrew’s sharp, defensive tone when someone goes a little too far in joking around with Steven. Dreams about Andrew that leave him waking up hard in the early hours of the morning. The realization that Andrew is taking over his little hallway, foiling his carefully constructed coping mechanism, gets compartmentalized too.
Andrew’s bisexuality is also relegated to this furthest recess of his mind. Andrew’s sexuality is not a secret, everyone in the office knows, and everyone is chill about it - obviously. So is Steven – obviously. Obviously he is. It’s just… once he learned that fact about Andrew, he could not stop thinking about it. It had to be banished to the hallway, because it was disruptive. And he’s not homophobic, or biphobic, or anything. Really, he’s not. He just values his sanity, and productivity, and sleep. And for reasons yet unexamined, the knowledge of Andrew being bisexual interrupted each of these things, significantly and repeatedly.
And, between them, Andrew’s sexuality never comes up. Steven never brings it up. He never brings up any kind of attraction at all. Andrew never brings it up to him, even though he’s heard him discuss it with others in the office. He really hopes Andrew doesn’t avoid the topic because he assumes Steven wouldn’t be okay with it. He would be okay with it, so okay with it – obviously. He on some level wants to reassure Andrew of this, but knows that he could never bring himself to do so. So they don’t discuss it.