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It’s 9:17 PM on a Tuesday night, and Keith’s currently screaming into his pillow.
Lance, who’s hunched over his laptop at Keith’s standard-issue dorm room desk, looks up from his typing. His thin face softens with sympathy as he takes in the other boy’s scrunched-up expression of absolute rage.
“C’mon, Keith,” he attempts at soothing. “You’ve got this, bud.”
“Hnuuughhh,” Keith retorts, accompanied by a dramatic eye roll over the top of the pillow.
Lance chuckles, unfolding his bony knees from where they’ve been squished between his chest and the desk’s edge. “How many more chapters?”
“Hrrrmmmehhh,” Keith complains, glaring down at his heavier-than-a-brick astrophysics textbook.
“I don’t speak Whinese, jefe.” Lance winks at him before tipping back in Keith’s desk chair, assessing his laptop screen with a tired squint and a bitten lip that Keith doesn’t want to make eye contact with.
Because ugh. He hates it when Lance calls him that — “jefe.” Back in their good old days of prep school and summer camps, when things had been easy because they’d kind of hated each other’s guts, Keith had thought that it meant “chef.” It made no sense to him at the time, like it was some kind of bafflingly niche inside joke that everybody else and their mother was in on… except for him, that is. Because even Lance’s little clique (the clique that he’d eventually been absorbed into, and with dubious consent at that, mind you) had referred to him that way, too. And in short, it’d definitely contributed a great deal to his feelings of general pissed off-ness whenever the other boy entered his line of sight.
But it turns out that “cocinero” means “chef.” And “jefe?” It means “boss.” Still not totally clear on that one in the scheme of Lance’s string of increasingly bizarre nicknames for him. Not that Keith minds being a boss, per se. He’s pretty sure that it’s a compliment. How couldn’t it be? I’m not bossy, he imagines Beyoncé chanting in his ear. I’m the boss.
Still, there’s something about the way that Lance says it — “jefe” — with a soft flick of his tongue, and sometimes, even this stupid little smirk that only he can do, that makes Keith’s heart want to jump down his throat and drown in his gastrointestinal juices.
(Or something gross and stupid like that.)
“I’ve got three more,” Keith finally answers Lance’s question, peeling his pillow off of his face. His bangs are hanging lifelessly in his eyes as a result of all of the pillow smushing, and they’re beginning to itch his forehead, so he blows some breath upward with an annoyed huff, his lower lip stuck out in what’s probably a childish sort of pout.
Suddenly, he hears a strange noise, almost like a cough. He looks up just in time to catch Lance staring at him, mouth slightly open, blue eyes wide. Like Keith’s suddenly sprouted a set of horns (Lance had called him “the devil incarnate” during one particularly hostile bio lab back in seventh grade). Or an extra head. Or something.
This has been happening a lot lately. Keith doesn’t know why, but he does know that it makes him feel weird, and it’s been throwing him off balance in a way that he can’t quite explain. He wishes that he could talk to somebody about it — a human soundboard for this most burning question of, “Why does Lance look at me like I’ve spontaneously grown an extra head?” — but Shiro’s back home in Miyako with their grandparents for the month with his phone on Do-Not-Disturb-Unless-It’s-An-Emergency, and Hunk’s off at state tech learning how to do cool things like building shit and then blowing it up (and then rebuilding the same shit again just to blow it up again), and last that he heard from Matt, Pidge is buried within the hell that is the GRE (because of course she’s on her way to her masters before he’s even done with his junior year of undergrad).
He could try Allura, he guesses, but even though she’s been married to Shiro for almost a year now, Keith just… can’t. Because she’s Allura. And every time that they have one of her signature Deep Talks™, his sister-in-law always manages to tell him something about himself that he could’ve gone his whole life without knowing, but now he’ll have to think of it every single damn day of the rest of this hellish existence (and probably then some). She’s scary like that.
“Snacks?”
Keith snaps out of his wallowing brain. Snacks. That sounds good. Snacks are always good.
“I’ve got some points left, somehow,” Lance says in this sort of awestruck tone, and Keith’s pretty impressed, too, because he probably spent all of his points within the first five minutes of the new semester. Points are far superior to meals in terms of the school dining plan. In fact, they’re probably Keith’s favorite form of currency.
“I can get us some mozzarella sticks from Late Night downstairs!”
Right on cue, Keith’s stomach lets out a gargantuan gurgle, and Lance nearly falls out of Keith’s chair laughing. Another thing that Keith can’t watch — the exposed neck, the quirked mouth, the crinkled-up eyes — because now his heart’s doing laps in that gastrointestinal juice pool of his, and man, is it alarming.
For nearly eight years, he and Lance had been at each other’s throats, arguing about pretty much everything — nothing was safe, not even the most menial, pointless shit (“Only serial killers wear socks to bed, Keith!” and “The Star Wars prequels aren’t meant to be watched, Lance!” are two particularly memorable debates). The whole nickname thing had been just the tip of the iceberg when it came to their many, many clashes.
But ending up at the same college — which, at the time, seemed like the universe’s biggest cosmic punch to the gut possible — had changed things between them. In the beginning, it’d been a permissible relief to at least know somebody on the vast campus, even if that somebody was Lance McClain. So, Keith had put all of his newly-formed warm/fuzzies down to that and thought it explained away.
Soon, though, his frenemy dropped the “enemy,” and over and over and over again, they were studying together, eating meals together… laughing their asses off together. Turns out that even though they don’t always agree on Star Wars, they do think that Boba Fett deserves his own movie. That pineapple doesn’t belong on pizza, and it deserves to rot in hell. That Ross really was the worst, and Rachel shouldn’t have given up on her dreams to go to Paris just for the sake of his selfish ass.
And pretty much everything about being with Lance is so easy, so incredibly simple, that sometimes, Keith finds himself terrified out of his goddamn mind that one day, he’ll lose the very last bit of his already tremulous self-control and just up and—
“Maybe some chicken tenders and onion rings, too, huh?” Another wink. “Gotta feed the beast over here, am I right?”
Keith stares down at his hands. They’re clasped very tightly around his ankles — his knees are nearly colliding with his chin. “O-Okay—“
Lance is gone before he can even add something like, “Thanks.” Or, “That’s really nice of you.” Or, “If you’re spending fake money on artery-clogging junk food for me at 9:22 PM on a Tuesday night while we crash and burn at studying for Iverson’s final together in my bed, does this count as a—“
Oh, shut the fuck up, his over-exhausted brain grumbles at his heart… which is currently doing a messy backstroke around the splashdown juice pool within his audibly hungry stomach.
Suddenly, his phone’s vibrating. He immediately drops his book to his bed, grateful for even the smallest distraction from general relativity concepts. A single swipe reveals a text from Lance.
Except, is it really a text when all that it consists of is a teeny pixellated yellow face with closed eyes and a drooling mouth? The other boy’s an emoji fanatic. It’s kind of a useless communication technique when it comes to conversations with Keith, because he knows pretty much zilch about hip texting lingo, but he guesses that he’s virtually alone in that sense among their friend group. Even Hunk, a staunch grammarian, goes crazy with extra commas in their Discord while they’re in the midst of yet another Fortnite bender…
Keith: What does that even mean?
Lance: It means, this place smells amazing and I want to be buried in it.
Keith: You can’t be buried in the dining hall, Lance.
Keith: People eat there.
Keith: It’d be unsanitary.
Lance: But I’m tasty, tasty!
Lance: Straight-up Fergalicious!
Screw screaming into a pillow. Keith might as well drop to the floor and start rolling around on it. Because he’s basically on fire right now.
“Which two sets of equations are used to describe MHD?”
Keith nearly stabs his thumbs into his burnt-out eyeballs as he thinks and thinks and thinks. It’s nearly midnight at his point, and his extra work-study shift at the campus gym had prevented him from taking his usual midday nap, so his brain’s basically mush at this point — not very conducive toward studying for his most difficult final exam.
“Maxwell’s electromagnetism and… and…”
“Fluid dynamics,” Lance prods. “Think fluid dynamics—“
“O-Oh, uh… Navier-Stokes! Navier-Stokes!” Keith flaps his hands wildly in the air, and when Lance eagerly nods, he falls backward onto his bed with a fist pump and a triumphant, “Yes!”
Lance grins widely, handing him back his textbook — Keith can legitimately feel his own fingertips buzzing where they brush up against the other boy’s.
Okay, wow, body. Why you gotta betray me like that—
“Nice job, jefe,” Lance says. “Seems like you’ve got this chapter hook, line, and sinker!”
Keith rolls his eyes at that cheesy declaration, but it’s easy to offer Lance his grin back. “Thanks for your help. I… I really appreciate it, Lance.”
But then Lance is biting at his lip and looking away, down into his lap where he’s currently perched atop Keith’s desk, a shadowy place lost between the crooks of his knobby knees. “I mean, I’m studying for the same test, too, so it’s not like—“
“Just take the gratitude, won’t you?” Keith cuts him off, trying but failing to keep his tone light. It’s already bogged-down once again by that feeling, that sudden surge of something in his gut. He steals another onion ring from the paper platter that Lance had brought back up to his room for them to share.
“But it’s not like I really need to be here,” the other boy mumbles. “You’d do fine without me… More than fine.”
And there it is. Keith swallows a bite, but the fryer grease has made it go soggy and cold, and it sticks in his throat. He hacks out a particularly ugly cough, then glares at Lance from across the small space between them.
“You can’t be serious, Lance.”
“You’re top of our class!” the other boy pushes back. “Why in the world would you need me—“
Keith’s on his feet before Lance can finish his sentence. He grabs what remains of the platter and practically shoves it into Lance’s chest. “Here. Take a waffle fry, stick it in your mouth.”
Lance’s thin eyebrows have shot past his broad forehead, rocketing up toward his floppy hairline. “Keith, what—“
“Take it and just… just shut-up for a minute, okay?” Once again, Keith’s having trouble making eye contact with the other boy’s shocked expression, all big-eyed and wide-mouthed, but he plows forward with his little tirade anyway.
“And while you’re chewing, think about all those color-coded lecture notes you brought me that time I had the flu and missed classes for three days in a row, and the alphabetized one hundred-count Quizlet flashcard sets you link me every midterms week, and those wild animal stickies that you always put in my lab manual — where the sharks mean ’important vocab word here’ and the hippos mean ‘this’ll probably come up on the next pop quiz.’” Keith pushes the greasy platter forward just a little bit harder, as if its physical positioning will be enough to emphasize his point.
“Think about all that crap you’ve shared over the past three years of me on the verge of tearing my hair out over data management and astro labs and CS. And after you’re done thinking about all that, and I mean really thinking, then, and only then, can you try to convince me that I’d do just fine without you.”
The last part rings out like a shot, and Keith realizes that even though Lance had, in fact, taken the French fry from him, he’s never actually finished chewing it. It’s a pretty gross thing to see, just hanging there in his mouth getting all mushy and stuff.
But Keith doesn’t care about that right now.
“Do you understand?” he asks softly, poking Lance square in his bony shoulder.
The other boy nods and swallows the fry. Why are his eyes so fucking blue? Keith thinks to himself disgustedly (and not for the first time) as he watches the other boy’s Adam’s apple slowly bob in his throat. Who gave him the fucking right?
“G-Good,” is what he murmurs aloud instead, because that’s a much more socially acceptable response. And he puts the platter down.
Suddenly, though, his throat feels maddeningly dry. He zeros in on his water bottle, squatting atop his dresser, and with what he hopes isn’t too dismissive of a wave, dashes out into his floor’s hallway, barreling straight for the oasis that is the dinged-up communal water fountain.
Keith re-enters his room holding his cell phone in the air like a crossing guard would wave a stop sign. “Dude.”
His friend has sat back down, only this time… he’s on Keith’s bed. Even though it’s a twin XL, his long legs are dangling off of the end, and Keith can see that beneath his fuzzy blue socks, his toes are curling.
“Hmmm?” Lance asks, looking up at the phone with eyes innocent but smile far too crooked.
“You’ve gotta stop sending me all these emoji thingies,” Keith complains, trying his hardest not to think too much about the fact that Lance McClain is currently lounging around in his bed. His bed. And straight-up like he owns the place, too.
“What do they even mean? Language was invented for a reason, y’know.”
That damn smile crooks even further. “Emojis are a language.”
“No, they aren’t,” Keith replies flatly.
“Then why do they have their own keyboard?” Lance counters.
“George Orwell’s rolling over in his grave right now,” Keith mutters as he stalks to his bed, falling onto it with a depressed sort of whumpf, the back of his head now somewhere within the vicinity of Lance’s skinny hips (oops). “So’s Neil Postman.”
He knows that Lance is full-on smirking as the other boy says, “I’ll take that as a win, then.”
“You can have it,” Keith declares, staring up at the popcorn ceiling. “I’ve already filled my winning quota for the week anyway.”
“That round of Jenga doesn’t count!” the other boy argues, leaning toward Keith in a way that makes the bed roll slightly. His smooth forehead comes into sight, blocking Keith’s view of the ceiling’s many bumps and lumps. “Matt breathed on that last block weird! He cheated.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Don’t you ‘uh-huh’ me, jefe—“
“Well, if Matt’s the one that cheated,” Keith cuts him off, rolling onto his side so that he’s really looking up at Lance, “then why did I win?”
Lance opens his mouth, as if he’s about to actually start in with Keith, but then… he freezes. And he’s just looking back at Keith in that way. That spontaneous head-sprouting way.
It makes Keith want to scream.
“Lance,” he hears himself say, but it’s almost like a question—
“N-Never mind!” the other boy practically squeaks, as if that makes any sort of sense as a response. “Moving on!” And he practically tears a page of Keith’s textbook in half as he rapidly searches for the start of the next chapter.
“Whoa,” Keith says, surprised, and unthinkingly, he reaches out a hand to (hopefully) disrupt Lance’s frantic air. It settles somewhere around Lance’s knee (oops again). It shouldn’t be all that weird in the scheme of things — they’ve known each other for, like, a decade. They’ve touched before, loads of times.
But right now—
“You okay, man?” Keith asks, perhaps a little bit quicker than he meant to, but it's worth a shot.
Lance gulps. Long and languid. Yet another thing that Keith has to force himself to look away from, the rise and fall of the other boy’s smooth, smooth throat. “Y-Yeah.” He breathes out through his long nose, then offers Keith a wan smile.
“Yeah, one hundred and fifty percent.”
“O-kay,” Keith says slowly, and then he lets go. But Lance still hasn’t answered his first question, and he holds onto that. Because he's got a death wish.
“So… about that emoji.”
Because while he’d been filling up his water bottle, the other boy had sent him — drumroll, please — the kissy face.
And as he sits in his bed with Lance, their knees with only a breath’s space between them, he doesn’t know what that means… except for maybe the obvious. But that’s not within the realm of possibility — not in hell or high water. Because even if Lance has been occupying his sights, he’s absolutely certain that he isn’t even a blip on the other boy’s radar. Not while he’s been chasing down long-limbed and sun-kissed brainiac chicks, the ones like Nyma from their lab. Or nose-ring Rolo, their PI — who gave that dude a PhD, anyway? He’s way too cool for school—
Keith, his brain warns him once again. Don’t get started, now—
"Wh-What about it?" Lance asks, voice still unusually squeaky. He ruffles at the back of his neck, and Keith knows that a decent-sized cowlick will be forming there very shortly.
"You sent me a friggin' kissy face," Keith reiterates, rolling back up to his knees atop the bed. The reminder snaps through the air between them. He doesn't mean for it to come out that way, he really doesn't, but despite his brain’s best advice... he's starting to get impatient. Again.
"I told you, I don't... I don't know what it means," he says quietly.
The pause is too long for comfort, but then Lance replies with, "It's like, uh... Thank you!” He spreads his arms wide, and his other hand almost collides with the wall.
"Thank you, jefe! You made me feel better in a moment of emotional distress! So… my hero! Mwah!"
Keith gives him a long, long look.
"Wh-What?" Lance asks defensively. "What's, why're you—"
"Sounds fake, but okay," Keith mutters before he can stop himself.
Because currently, his blood is a mixture of iced coffee and Red Bull, his astrophysics exam is hurtling toward him like a meteor on an apocalypse-inducing crash course, and his common sense is apparently god-fucking-damn useless. So he might as well let this complete lapse in judgment happen, he thinks as he steals his textbook back from where it's squatting between their laps, then halfheartedly flips open to the second-to-last chapter (but not taking in a single syllable of it).
"Y-You don't believe me?" the other boy exclaims as Keith pretends to examine the vocab list, bolded in the middle of the chapter's first page.
"Whatever," Keith grumbles into the textbook. "What do I know, you're the emoji expert, not me.“
"What do you…" Lance pauses. Keith knows without looking that the other boy's chewing a hole through his lip.
"What do you want it to mean, Keith?"
Keith's head whips up so quickly that he fears whiplash… and suddenly, he’s smack dab in the middle of the most intense staring contest that he's ever had the uncomfortable pleasure to be a part of. Lance's eyes are dark, slightly bloodshot by the growing hour. His eyelashes are way too long — they look like a girl's eyelashes. They’re absolutely ridiculous.
"So?" The other boy's face is pink, but his voice is steady.
A challenge.
Keith takes a deep, deep breath. Before, he could barely stand to even make eye contact with Lance. Now, he doesn’t think that he’ll ever be able to look away.
(And after all, he’s always loved a challenge.)
Maybe he can use the timing as an excuse for his dumbass heart’s sudden decision to throw every single one of his ever-suffering brain’s repeated cautions out of the goddamn window? After all, it’s past midnight. All bets are off on Keith's judgment when it comes to past midnight — it's like his impulsive streak quadruples in its strength. A well-known fact among those who know him!
Yeah, that's an absolute fact. And Lance? He definitely knows.
Aw, hell, goes his brain crossly.
"You sent me a kissy emoji," Keith reminds him. Once again, he’s aiming for light and breezy, joking, even. But once again, it comes out far too defiant to pass as casual.
"I... I did," the other boy confirms, just as slowly, seemingly trying to match his tone. Light and breezy... except not really at all.
"So..." Keith takes another deep breath. He probably sounds like an asthmatic at this point. An even likelier possibility — he’s breathing heavily like that because he’s straight-up deranged. Certifiable. With a death wish to boot.
Aw, hell.
"Pay up,” he hears himself say. And it's as if it's from very, very far away. Like he's outside of himself. Because this isn't himself—
"You..." Lance is still staring at him. (Okay, Keith was wrong — this whole eye contact thing is way too difficult. It should be legally banned in all fifty states. And Puerto Rico.)
"You can't be serious."
Yup. Exactly what he'd expected. Why'd you even try? his brain groans at his heart (which is now sadly drowning itself in those effing gastrointestinal juices).
So he shrugs. Light and breezy. Play it off. Pretend that it was some kind of bizarro joke. Ha, ha, ha.
"Kidding," he mumbles, and even though he's back to squinting at his textbook, he's still taking absolutely none of it in. "Juuuuust kidding—"
But then he hears it: “Okay. Okay, fine. Fine.” What’s probably a squaring of shoulders. “It's just a kiss. Just a—“
“Lance,” Keith interrupts, and he can register that there’s some kind of terror in his voice, because abort mission! Abort the fucking mission!
“L-Lance, it’s okay! Dude, r-really, you d-don’t have to—!“
His first kiss with Lance is a little bit messier than first kisses normally go. At least, he thinks so, as his teeth accidentally clack against the other boy’s. Pretty much everybody that he’s ever kissed over the past few years has been really, really drunk. (He was probably really, really drunk, too, all of those times, come to think of it — college hasn’t exactly been kind to his poor liver.)
So, to be honest, he isn’t much of a serious kisser. He might be a touch-and-go type of guy, but kissing? Straight-up, spontaneous kissing? That’s not a touch-and-go type of thing for sober Keith Kogane. To avoid unnecessary teeth-clacking and general discomfort, some sort of preparation is probably required, maybe an explicitly-stated warning, even—
Wait.
Wait just a fucking minute.
He’s kissing Lance.
Lance is kissing him.
Holy motherfucking shit! his heart hollers back at his brain. It’s currently doing what feels like a dolphin leap-thing out of the gastrointestinal juice pool. Kiss him back, dude!
He hears Lance’s voice in the back of his head — it’s just a kiss — but this doesn’t seem to be “just a kiss.” Because one of Lance’s hands is tangled in his hair, and the other one’s cupping his jaw, a little too warmly and tenderly for Keith’s racing heart (which has somehow shot back up into his ribcage, thumping around like it’s trying to break straight out of it).
And Lance’s mouth — well. It’s doing a lot of things. Lance is a really good kisser, Keith realizes. He probably doesn’t need stuff like explicitly-stated kiss warnings to achieve a successful interfacing experience. When the other boy bites hugely at his lip—
Well. The noise that it draws out of Keith is downright embarrassing. He didn’t even know that he was capable of making that noise! Where in the flying fuck did that come from—!
Oh. Shit.
They aren’t kissing anymore.
Lance’s hand slowly slips down Keith’s jaw. His fingers gently untangle from his hair. Keith belatedly realizes that one of his palms is flat to Lance’s chest — the other had subconsciously resettled on the other boy’s knee. Where it’d been just minutes ago… or maybe an entire universe ago.
An entire universe ago, where never in a kajillion years could Keith have imagined that he’d get the chance to kiss Lance McClain like that.
“Uhhh…” he says, very intelligently.
Lance’s hands drop from him, back down to the blanket. Then they go tense, clenching like white-knuckled vices atop its soft surface. “Oh. Oh my God.”
“Lance—“
“Damn, I, uh… Keith, look. I’m, I’m…“ The other boy’s long and lanky legs are already swinging off of the bed.
“I’m. I should… I should j-just go. Because I’m, uh. It’s, like, y’know—“
“Lance—“
“—past my bedtime—“
“Lance.”
Lance is halfway through shoving his laptop into his backpack, but he can't quite get it to fit at the right angle due to his slightly shaky hands. His head is hanging low, his long chin almost touching his chest.
“I’m… I’m so sorry. Keith,” he whispers. He sounds… hopeless. And maybe, just maybe—
“Don’t.” It’s out of Keith’s mouth before he can stop it. “Just… don’t.”
“Don’t… what?”
“Just…”
Fuck it.
He grabs for Lance’s wrist. “S-Sit down,” he somehow chokes out. And then he tacks on a flustered, “Jesus.” (For good measure. Or something.)
With absolutely zero complaints, Lance pulls Keith’s desk chair back out and sits. Whoa. Okay. That could be a good sign — no arguing, no refusal, no nothing.
But Keith knows that he shouldn’t get too far ahead of himself. Just because they’ve done something that felt suspiciously like furiously making-out doesn’t mean that anything’s actually happening here—
“Your lip.” Lance sounds surprised. “It… It’s bleeding.”
“O-Oh.” Keith swipes his tongue at it and tastes something like how pennies smell — oops times three. He thinks that he hears Lance’s breath hitch, but he’s still not getting too far ahead of himself, so he ignores it as best as he can, too.
“I’m sor—“
“Stop apologizing!” Keith exclaims. “Dammit, why’re you—!“
“Because I friggin’ kissed you!” Lance exclaims back. “Unless I’m sorely mistaken about societal norms, that isn’t something friends usually do!“
“I told you to kiss me!” Keith practically bellows. “And maybe we aren’t friends! Maybe I don’t want to be friends!”
It hangs in the air between them… and Lance is frozen. Eyes shocked wide. Hands still fisted, but in his jeans instead of Keith’s blanket. He’s the picture of utter dismay. It hurts to look at it, hurts harder than any gastrointestinal juice pool ever could.
Keith immediately backpedals. “Shit,” he mutters under his breath. “I’m. Uh. L-Look, I’m real shitty at this, this stuff, okay, s-so—“
“You…” Lance’s hand is beginning to ruffle at the back of his hair again.
“You aren’t shitty at anything, Keith,” he mumbles. “And I… I shouldn’t’ve done that. I never should’ve done that.”
Suddenly, it’s like Keith’s falling. Free-falling. The longest rollercoaster drop known to man… but this time, he isn’t wearing a seatbelt. “But—“
“If I’ve, like, totally ruined our friendship—“ the other boy’s voice rises.
“Lance,” Keith says again, almost warningly this time.
“…Yeah?”
He could just kiss him again and hope that Lance understands. But that seems like the kind of thing that only works in overdramatic YA novels — communicating very important things with very intense kisses, with not even a word or two thrown in for clarification. They don’t exactly belong in the Young Adult section anymore, anyway.
Or he could say something simple, like, “I really like you” — because goddammit, he does. He really, really does. And maybe, just maybe, that’d be enough.
But this is Lance. He’s a cheesy, sentimental goofball. The portrait in the dictionary next to “hopeless romantic.” So Keith knows that he needs to try a little harder than just a cliché or a cop-out.
Keith takes a deep, deep breath.
And then he finally, finally works up the courage to look up.
“Remember when we were kids at space camp,” he begins, never straying away from Lance’s face, not even for a single heartbeat, “and you told me you were gonna touch the stars someday?”
Slowly, the other boy nods. He seems to be holding in his breath.
“And I called you an idiot because we were learning about how stars are masses of incandescent gases—“
“—gigantic nuclear furnaces,” Lance cuts in, automatically singsong. “Where hydrogen is built into helium—“
Keith gives him a look. “Dude. I’m trying to make a point here.”
“R-Right. Sorry.”
“I called you an idiot,” he plows on, “but really, I think I was just afraid that one day… you’d actually manage to do it.” He pauses. His mouth feels awfully dry. But his water bottle's out of reach...
...and there's nowhere left to turn to.
“You… You’ve always been so fearless, Lance," he says quietly. "You never give up, no matter what comes your way.”
Lance exhales.
“And even though I kept telling myself how much you annoyed me, how much you pissed me off…"
Okay. He's going to admit it. After nearly a decade, he's going to Do The Thing™.
"There was one day when you didn’t show up, I don’t remember why, maybe you were sick or something. But I clearly remember how all I could think about that entire damn day was how weird I felt without you being there to poke at me and whisper incessantly in my ear and spout off your usual pompous bullshit and all that.”
Lance’s tanned brow furrows slightly. “Um, okay, wow—“
“So, the point is,” Keith says, very quickly (because he’s realizing that now would probably be a great time to actually get to the abovementioned point), “when you’re with me, even after all these years…”
No turning back now, his brain groans at his heart as it clumsily throws itself at his ribs, over and over and over again—
“…you’re the only thing I see.”
The furrow disappears, but the confusion’s still there, stitched into every single one of Lance’s features, all wide-eyed and slack-jawed. Like he’s hearing Keith’s words, but he isn’t quite processing them.
“And when you’re not around… all I can do is think about how much I wish you were.”
Lance's face unstitches.
And then, he looks away. Rolls onto his stomach, away from Keith, so that he can reach for something in his backpack.
Keith sighs, rubbing at his tired eyes with the heels of his hands. Well, he’s certainly done it, hasn’t he?
But it’s really nothing new, he reminds himself despondently. Misread the situation, acted on impulse. Completely and totally ruined the best friendship that he’s ever had (Shiro doesn’t count), for forever and ever and—
DING.
Keith ignores it.
But then he receives a surprisingly sharp flick to the knee for his troubles, and it forces him to look back up into Lance’s face. Beneath the low lighting of his bedroom, the other boy's features are scarily unreadable.
“Check your phone,” he suddenly pushes. Figuratively and literally — his hand is back on Keith’s knee, the pressure insistent.
Keith gulps, but he does as told with only the slightest bit of hesitation. But then—
“Is that…” He squints a little bit closer at his phone’s screen. “Is that an eggplant?”
(There’s an emoji for a freaking eggplant? Since when? And why?)
“And a tongue,” Lance prods shamelessly. “Get it?”
“Get… what?” Keith asks slowly. Is this another one of their friends’ inside jokes? One of those meme things that they’re always hollering about in the Discord? How does a person even keep track of all of this internet junk? Is there some kind of instructive manual floating around somewhere out there that he can read to enlighten himself?
Lance sighs. “You’re hopeless,” he declares, shaking his head, but he’s wearing the widest smile on his face as he says it.
“Wh-What does that even — what! — I never—“ Keith splutters defensively. He never finishes his sentence, though…
…because suddenly, Lance is crawling up the bed toward him. Literally crawling.
Keith blinks, hard. Be cool be cool be cool—
“C-Can I help you?” he stutters inelegantly.
Oh. Oh, no. Definitely not cool—
Because Lance McClain is currently occupying Keith’s space. A very particular space. The space being, the gap between Keith’s knees. Which he’d left wide-open. Not a good look, not at all—
“Don’t move,” the other boy whispers into Keith’s mouth, warm air washing over his lips.
Sweet Jesus. Keith’s breath hitches in his throat. Of course he won’t move. Because it’s Lance, finally — finally — and because this is going to be—
The sound that Lance’s lips make when they smush up against Keith’s stomach is absolutely disgusting, but he explodes laughing all the same, nearly kneeing the other boy in the shoulder when he comes back up for air, a very Lance-like grin (re: unabashedly wicked) spreading across his thin face.
“S-Stop—!” Keith manages to gasp out, and he frantically grabs at the other boy’s armpits — romantic — to tug him forward, further up and onto his chest — anything to stop the sudden assault of mouth and fingers on his stomach. It all ends with that thin face poking into his sternum, but he doesn’t care about it in the slightest, because Lance’s breath is still fanning across Keith’s exposed neck and his eyes — sky blue eyes — are just… there. Looking at him.
And only him.
“Never would’ve guessed that the great Keith Kogane would be ticklish,” the other boy teases.
Keith huffs out a breath, gazing despairingly up at the ceiling. “Don’t get any ideas,” he warns.
“Who says I’m getting ideas, jefe?” Lance, voice affronted, lifts his chin up slightly, and its pressure vanishes from Keith’s very overheated skin.
“You’re always getting ideas,” Keith reminds him.
And he wiggles backward, but does it while holding Lance against him, and leans down just a touch to kiss him on the forehead, smack dab in the middle of where one sweet-smelling lock of hair flops forward and the one next to it, the one that seems to defy gravity and is always swept to the side. It’s a light press, but Lance seems to go momentarily boneless in his arms all the same.
“Okay, here’s an idea,” he murmurs into Keith’s collarbone. “Do that again.”
Keith does.
“One more time—“
“Lance—”
“For good luck,” Lance elaborates, but he doesn’t really need to, because in that moment, both he and Keith know that Keith would do it again in a heartbeat anyway. Zero luck necessary.
“I guess that wasn’t your worst idea,” Keith mumbles into the other boy’s hair.
Lance snorts. There’s a moment’s pause… and then he pipes up with a, “By the way, I really like you, Keith.”
Keith freezes.
A much longer pause. And then Lance sounds a whole lot more uncomfortable than before as he adds (with his face still pressed into Keith’s shoulder and the latter’s arms still circled around him, hands resting at the small of his back), “I-I mean, it’s like, I just… I want you. I mean, uh. Oh. That, that sounds bad, I didn’t mean… Well, y’know. I guess, I want you a little more than, like, a friend would—“
From the way that Lance is tensing up in his arms, Keith knows that it’s probably as good of a time as ever to do something about it. So he lives up to being his impulsive, hotheaded self and, in a single decidedly-awkward-but-overall-successful motion, Lance is now lying on his back atop his comforter.
And he’s staring up at Keith.
And everything’s quiet.
Keith lowers himself onto his elbows, hovering just above the other boy. He forces himself to ignore the fact that one of his knees is kind of shoved somewhere, well, indecent (God, that sounds like something that Shiro would say). The other one’s nearly falling off the bed — again, awkward positioning — but that doesn’t matter at all. Not with Lance beneath him, mouth currently rounded in an amusingly startled O.
“Lance,” he says.
“Y-Yeah?”
“I thought I was pretty obvious back there, but... I’ll say it as many times as you need me to," he promises. "'Cause I really like you, too."
Lance gazes up at him. And then, he’s smiling. Really smiling. His sharp nose is still a bit scrunched-up, though, and it takes everything that Keith has not to lean his head down just a bit lower and kiss its tip.
“No matter how much I annoy you?” the other boy asks. His tone is light, but Keith can tell from his furrowed brows that he needs exact answers. “No matter how much pompous bullshit I spout?”
Keith’s mouth is nearly touching Lance’s as he whispers, “I’ll really like you anyway.”
They do some more making out, which is pretty cool. At one point, Lance unapologetically grabs Keith’s butt, which is really cool. And when Lance reaches up to tug his hair, his foot involuntarily jerks outward, knocking his textbook clean off the bed.
Super cool.
“S-Sorry,” Lance pants into his mouth.
Keith noses his way up the other boy’s jawline, earning him this breathy little gasp that doesn’t do the noticeable tightening in his gym shorts any favors.
“’S’okay,” he mumbles back. “To be honest… I’m not really planning on using it for the rest of the night.”
Lance smirks up against him. “Oh? Is that right, jefe?” But then his taunting is cut off by Keith’s knee digging a little more deeply, a little more meaningfully, into the V of his legs.
“Maybe,” Keith replies nonchalantly. “Got a problem with that?”
Without warning, Lance clamps down on him like a vice, and mutters something like, “We’ll finish up tomorrow,” but it’s ultimately lost to the universe because the making out has now turned hard and fast. And Lance’s hands are everywhere, and his voice is in Keith’s ear, and of course he hasn’t stopped talking, the absolute motormouth, but oh my God Keith doesn’t want him to stop, ever. Because it turns out that the other boy’s words can go from zero to one hundred — disgustingly cute to deliciously dirty — really, really quick.
And that’s really, really hot.
(Exactly like Lance, come to think of it.)
That pent-up feeling is starting to drive him a little bit crazy, so he decides right then and there that he’s going to do something about it. Impulsiveness be damned... but he doesn't really think that Lance will mind.
So he starts to slide away from Lance’s mouth, his fingers simultaneously skirting the edges of the other boy’s t-shirt… which results in a surprised giggle.
“So we’re both ticklish, huh?” Keith asks accusingly.
“Oh, do your worst,” Lance bites back. “I won’t—“
Challenge accepted.
He ignores the last part of that heated declaration, and he shoves Lance’s t-shirt even further up, and then he’s kissing his tanned stomach, little kisses, just touches, really, and the other boy’s still laughing, and all that warm, brown skin, it’s absolutely gorgeous, absolutely perfect, and it nearly distracts him from his goal.
But he can save everything else that he wants to say — and there’s quite a bit of it — for later. He has to save it for later, because it turns out that Lance’s sweatpants are really easy to tug downward with just teeth, and damn, is the view nice—
“J-Jesus fucking Christ, K-Keith—!”
Now that he’s thinking about it — because the penny has finally dropped — the eggplant emoji does make sense after all.