Work Text:
New York City, New York, was different than Provo, Utah. It was loud and brash and bright, and as he sat in his brother’s apartment – a cluttered and worn place that smelled of new books and something tangy – Alexander Price felt like he’d been punched in the gut.
He shouldn’t have been so upset, not after he had spent almost three years desperately wishing to get out of his religious household. It shouldn’t have been a shock, not when he’d run away in the middle of the night, barely a month before his nineteenth birthday, leaving nothing but a note and an empty bed. He shouldn’t have felt confused, not when he had spent nearly six hours on a plane, not when he’d met his brother and his brother’s boyfriend at the airport, gotten into a taxi with them, and walked into their home.
But he did. His stomach was curled into knots and it was getting hard to breathe. His heart was beating faster than he could recall it beating before, and his hands were wet with sweat. He felt faint, and the lamp beside him was suddenly too bright, the couch too soft, the room too warm.
Careful arms wrapped around his shoulders, and his entire body went taut in surprise, before his brother’s voice filled his ears with calming whispers, and his muscles didn’t so much relax as give out.
“I ran away,” he moaned, “I ran away.”
Kevin pulled him in further, arms tight around him in a hug, “yeah… yeah, I know Alex.”
He buried his face into his shirt and let out a web sob into his brother’s shoulder.
He hadn’t changed his phone number.
Nobody ever rang.
The first few days in New York were the hardest. His brother’s apartment was small, and he didn’t have his own bed, rather Kevin had pulled out the couch and covered it in sheets and pillows. He’d always been a light sleeper. The walls were thinner than the walls back in Utah, and he would often wake in the middle of the night to muffled voices and it’d always take him a second to place them as those belonging to the neighbours, separated by a wall, rather than a yard. He’d awake confused and unrested in the morning, staring up at the ceiling that wasn’t the right shade of cream, before it’d all come flooding back with a punch to the gut.
“You okay?” Kevin had asked, two days after his arrival, over breakfast. Alex had been eating toast with too much jam, distracting himself from the world by trying to avoid sticky fingers. Kevin’s tone had been concerned. Alex didn’t look at him, busying himself with his toast. His brother didn’t say anything after that. He’d left Alex with a squeeze to the shoulder and a smile that he’d made sure was had seen.
“How did you deal with it? When... I-I mean… I left. You… you were…”
“Slowly. I still get… sad… sometimes… but it gets better. I promise.”
Connor wasn’t really what Alex had been expecting. In his head, however ashamed of it he was, Connor hadn’t been… good. It was hard, he thought, to distance yourself from years of conditioning, and even though he knew that Kevin, regardless of his sexuality, was a normal person, Connor had always been… not that. Connor had been faceless and ensnaring. He’d been scary; the person that had snatched away his brother. The tempting homosexual. The word still made his stomach turn.
Connor, outside his mind, was much less terrifying. He had a bright smile, wore colourful ties, and danced around the apartment to showtunes. It was hard to believe that he’d ever seemed scary in the first place, especially after he’d seen the man twirling around the kitchen in brightly coloured pyjamas.
Even though, sometimes, when Connor would brush up against Kevin, or plant a kiss on his cheek, and Alex would feel queasy, he decided he quite liked Connor. He made something once blasphemous into something special. He was happy and cheerful, and had more character than Alex could remember from anybody back in Utah.
And he loved his brother. Any fool could see that.
“Are you settling in alright?”
“I… yeah. Yeah I’m… I’m fine.”
“You need anything and you tell me, okay? We’re family now.”
He found a job three weeks after his arrival in New York, serving at a diner not too far from Kevin – and Connor’s – apartment. He took up as many shifts as he could. His feet were swollen, and his checks hurt from smiling for customers, but the less time he was imposing on Connor and Kevin the better, he figured. They’d done so much to help him, and it had begun to weigh on his conscience, even after Kevin had told him that he could take as much time as he needed.
He needed to do things. To move. To feel useful. The word was moving at a million miles an hour and he was done standing still. So he carried on, shift after shift, even if it payed peanuts.
“So, you’re not from New York, right?” A work colleague asked a couple days in.
Alex continued to wipe down the table in front of him and shrugged, “it’s home now.”
“You need to eat more. And sleep more.”
“I’m fine, Kevin.”
“Seriously, go to bed. I don’t think you’ve slept properly since you got here.”
Sitting on the floor, head leaning on his brother’s legs, and eating Chinese takeaway wasn’t at all how he would have spent an evening in Utah.
Kevin was in two-day old sweatpants. Connor was bitching about whatever reality show was on TV. It was cold and the blanket was on the other side of the room. There were five empty coffee mugs on the table.
Alex couldn’t remember being so utterly deliriously happy before in his life.