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It’s too wet, and uncomfortably hot, and everything smells faintly of ferns. Keith is not, in fact, exploring a misty jungle on an alien planet, but is instead having his mouth explored by one Lance McClain’s tongue.
Really, the whole thing is appalling – Lance is breathing hard into his mouth, and his breath smells like what he ate for breakfast (last night’s leftover pizza). He keeps getting blinded by his own hair, because Lance had tried to pull it out of his hair tie, but had gotten caught in summer-tangled strands, succeeding only in messing it up further. Similarly, his bangs keep getting mashed into his eyes by the movement of Lance’s head, because this particular summer afternoon is unbearably hot and it makes his hair lank, heavy and uncooperative.
Also due to the heat, but mostly due to Shiro’s insistence that they lug heavy, textbook-filled boxes from the backyard door to the truck parked out in the street, they are both sporting unattractive stains in the armpits of their t-shirts and around their collars. This is disgusting and not conducive to wanting to kiss in the first place, but just to make it worse, Lance has him pushed down into the grass, and dirt is sticking to those rings of sweat, while small twigs and rocks bore into his back.
Lance doesn’t seem to care about any of this, hazy, ocean-blue eyes glazed over as he licks between Keith’s lips heavily, and every time he leans half an inch back Keith can feel the spit strung between them. Half of his body is being crushed awkwardly beneath Lance’s, and he’s pretty sure his arm has fallen asleep, because it’s sending numb, unpleasant prickles down to his fingertips, which are utterly trapped between the other boy’s chest and his own shoulder.
What is more appalling than even all of this together is the fact that he’s starting to enjoy it.
After all, he’s earned this. It’s truly astounding to think about, but Keith has willingly run the gross-and-nasty gauntlet to find himself at this very spot, getting ants in his shorts.
He supposes one could compare the learning experience to swimming, or martial arts, but really it’s in a class all on its own. When one is building their stamina for martial arts, there are set exercises to accomplish, footing to be memorised and replicated (it’s a useless comparison, Keith realises, since when he’s with Lance he rarely manages to find his footing.)
Swimming is maybe a little more similar (mostly in the way that Keith consistently feels like he is running out of air), but it’s still much more straightforward – one learns to float, and then to doggy paddle, and then to backstroke. All the steps link together quite naturally, and there is a sense of accomplishment to be found when one finally steps on the diving board for the first time (with the whole pool at his cannonballing mercy.)
The kind of stamina he’s had to build for – for whatever he and Lance are doing now, for whatever he and Lance are now – centers mostly on a tolerance for things that he doesn’t understand, finds awkward or indecent, or annoy him. The steps don’t seem to come in any proper order, either, and Keith wonders if he’ll ever find a method to the madness (if he’ll ever even see the diving board).
As it stands, there isn’t a lot in common between Lance accidentally sneezing in his hair, and the warmth Keith finds between their pressed together palms. There isn’t a lot in common between those pathetic, perverted magazines Pidge bought Lance online as a gag gift for his last birthday, and the unfamiliar heat Keith finds in his stomach at the most unexpected of times. There isn’t a lot in common between how Lance clings to his side like a ridiculous scaredy-pants little girl on Halloween night, jumping at every noise in the dark, and the way Lance comes up with the most hilarious, most creative insults against substitute teachers that Keith has ever heard in his whole life. There isn’t a lot in common between the time Lance cried against his neck, really cried (the kind of crying they don’t show in movies, all spit-bubbles and runny noses and awful hiccups), and the time they fought, really fought (the kind of fighting they don’t show in movies, all cracking voices and gushing bloody noses and tripping on their own sneakers).
It’s only in retrospective that Keith ever finds any collective link – it’s all bodies, he supposes. It’s all a kind of biology.
The description doesn’t explain things as neatly as Keith might like, and it doesn’t leave him feeling better prepared for running any future gross-and-nasty triathlons. He’d sat in the back of the public library once, reading an extremely embarrassing book for at least two hours, just to see where all this heavy mouth-breathing and inconvenient body-smushing was headed. He’d needed another book just to understand the mechanics, and an enormous atlas of ancient Greek cities to prop in front of his face, because he just couldn’t stop blushing for another hour following.
Of one thing he is certain. If anyone had asked him, a few months prior (to the way their eyes suspiciously started meeting upon realizations that they were alone, to the stupid flips his stomach does when Lance bossily grabs hold of his hand), if anyone was curious as to why he’d ever of his own volition want anything to do with Lance’s spit, and Lance’s sweat, and Lance’s big mouth and rude imagination, he knows he wouldn’t be able to answer with the excuse of biology.
He wouldn’t be able to answer because there isn’t any science, not at the very root of it. Nothing could be evaluated or counted to explain that even with ants crawling up his shorts, even with the line of drool down the side of Lance’s mouth, Keith doesn’t want to be anywhere else.
Keith isn’t certain of very much, but he knows for sure that it only starts with gross-and-nasty bodies – it ends with hearts.
And with or without biology, this is the best day of summer (until tomorrow).