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“We should’ve broken up sooner.”
Kyle doesn’t startle, he just turns his head in the snow to get a better look at the speaker.
There snow angeled beside him lies Jason Todd. Snowflakes are caught in the curls peeking from his red beanie and the lingering puffs of breath meeting the cold air drifts from his lips. He’s bundled up from head to toe. Scarf wrapped securely around his throat even as it was dragged away from his mouth, ear muffs nestled cutely over his ears, sturdy winter gloves adorn his hands, the kind that doesn’t allow his heat to be leached away even when it’s holding another hand. A jacket that hugs at least three layers to its wearer and pants that no doubt contain a thermal layer. If he were to take off his boots, Kyle bets he’d be wearing thick wool socks.
Undressing him in the winter was always a Matryoshka endeavor, peeling each layer away as much as he allowed it to get to the center.
It was fun, it was a game, it was his excuse to press closer to a man who seemed both disgusted and desperate for touch.
He could tell even then that Jason hated being exposed. Each sweet word accidentally spilling out would be humbled by a bite of something mean. Rather be covered head to toe than risk the cold.
But that was always their problem, wasn’t it? Jason could never stand being exposed, not even in the radiator warmth of their bedroom. And Kyle? Kyle thought love meant knowing and loving every layer.
Kyle huffs, a rueful smile half hidden in his little crevice in the snow. “With that logic, should we have even dated?”
It’s mean, Kyle knows before he sees the man drag his scarf over his face, but so was the question. As if they didn’t leave each other with skin beneath their nails through haggard efforts to keep the thing they had together alive. It was a mean and hurtful thing to say but just like their relationship it was all those things and true.
Sometimes Kyle looks at Jason’s tree trunk limbs and wants to cut them. He wants to see the spiral growth rings of the man’s body and figure out how many of those rings were his. To be able to point out rainy and dry seasons and scars and say that was me, I did that to him.
It would help, he’s sure, knowing that he made a mark even if it’s on a layer that no one will ever see.
He turns back to the falling afternoon sun, it skates along the snow and soon it’ll snuff itself out for the night. They should leave before it gets late.
Imagine who they’d be if they left before it got too late.
“I don’t regret it,” Jason says through the muffle of his scarf.
Kyle speaks to the sky, “All of it?”
There’s a beat of silence before he replies, the sun dips lower, their sunken bodies cast longer shadows. “Maybe I should regret it, the end if not the beginning, but I don’t think I do.”
And Kyle knows him. He knows how he tries to be gentle, but fails. Jason never held him like he did his books, but always like he would a mug of hot tea, clutched so tightly that the warmth teetered into a cold, into a burn. Because his love always looked more like a bloody heart than either of them would prefer, like it had to hurt to be real. If what they had had left Jason more open to him, it got Kyle too used to having their blood under his nails.
There’s a question between them, one that he knows Jason is going to ask because he is also a man who will choose the knife when it comes to hurting his own feelings, always trying to get his answers in the worst ways possible.
Kyle picks up the knife first. “We were not good for each other.”
“We knew each other,” Jason counters.
“We knew how to hurt each other,” Kyle corrects, but he knows what that translates to to the other man. You know how best to hurt the people you love. And maybe they had it after all, that love. The kind that drags, that pushes, that is a ceaseless momentum off the Grand Canyon.
“Do you forgive me for that?”
“Are you sorry for doing it?” It’ll be funny to hear that he is, because Kyle isn’t particularly sorry for what he’s done. The sky is dark, winter nights are always quick to chase away traces of the day. The stars are out now.
“No,” Jason says simply. “But I forgive you.”
Kyle snorts and raises his hands to the sky, his hands are cold, the snow having seeped in through the fabric. He hears rustling beside him and figures they’ll just have another conversation unfinished between them when a light weight lands on his stomach. He cranes his neck to see familiar insulated gloves.
And Jason is there, silent with his eyes closed to the beauty of every constellation as though he could imagine better ones behind his eyelids, and folded over his layers and layers are his bare hands.
Kyle exchanges his gloves for the warm ones thrown at him, the lingering heat of Jason’s hands warming his numb fingers as he settles back into the snow.
“Yeah, I guess I forgive you too.”