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By the time they get back from Atlanta, it’s late enough that the sky blushes morning at the edges and everything softens under this weeping grayscale. Kevin tugs him up the stairs, laughing, as they trip over themselves, their clothes, each other. It’s familiar, this rush, this need to feel skin against skin, to reaffirm themselves in that electricity that wells in the space between them. And he wants this now. He wants to wrap his legs around this man and drag him so close that they can hardly breathe. He needs those hands, that mouth, the weight of a body and how it crashes into his, how it holds him together. Here he feels unconstrained, limitless. This kind of intimacy makes him feel like he is more than his body, like he extends passed his toes, his hands, like he is the sun eating up all those fading stars, like he is the murmur and sigh of the house’s night sounds, and he is the way Kevin drops his forehead into the crook of Will’s neck and presses ininin hard and wanting and breathless. It used to terrify him but now all Will wants is for Kevin to be in him, around him, weighing him down.
“Fuck,” Kevin says, voice cracked through with need, with reverence, all tender and awe. “Will.”
And all Will can do is lose himself in this coming together, this press and release, this ache, until he is the thrum of his body, a kind of rhythm that’s known only by them.
The first time they slept together Will split open, splintered, under the weight of another body and Kevin put him back together over and over again until the flickerbeat of fear, that panic, which settled in his chest, subsided. Until the only things that were left were heat and skin and their bodies coming together and breaking apart. Until they were something terrifying and good. Will may have fallen a little in love with him in the wreckage, in the quiet, when fear turned into doubt, into regret that bubbled up his trachea like heartburn, and all he wanted to do was push the other man away, to say this is not me over and over again like some sort of mantra, but Kevin pressed his lips to his temple, draped an arm across his chest, a leg across his hip, and became an anchor, a grounding rod, while he fought against himself. Kevin’s voice broke when he whispered it’s ok, Will, you’re ok, into his skin like a prayer and Will, in that moment, with his body an aftermath of want, believed him. When he woke the next day with the morning light all golden and warm around him, Kevin smiled and melded their mouths together, sweet, slow, morning breath and all.
He comes back to his body when they are still tangled together, when his heart still feels like it’s throwing punches against his ribcage, and all he can do is blink the haze out of his eyes, let the roar in his ears settle. Kevin’s got his forehead pressed to his clavicle, head tucked just under his chin, and he can feel the other man breathe, in and out and in and out and in and out, and he thumbs the bones of his spine over and over and over again until he knows the distance between each bone, each breath, each other like some kind of strange topography. They’ve always been good at existing in the silence, in between these walls, like they are the only ones in the world but Will knows that this little world is as breakable as bones in the body, knows that they can’t stay tucked away between these sheets. Kevin slips to the side, presses his lips to the skin just above his heart.
“Well,” Kevin says, all gravel and soft. “Hell, we’ve always been good at that.”
Will is laughing, loud and hard,even before Kevin finishes his sentence. Soon he’ll get out of the bed and clean up their mess. He’ll swallow the questions that bubble up under his skin: Do you know that I never stopped loving you? Do you know how much I missed you? How hard it was to do all this without you? Will you stay? For now, though, he will roll on top of the other man, pin his hands over his head, kiss that laughing mouth, deliberate, slow, and persistent.
He’s drifting in that space between sleep and consciousness, all sated and warm, when his phone vibrates on the nightstand for the first time. The late morning sun slants hard through the blinds and Kevin stirs.
“Gonna answer that?” He asks, lips brush against his shoulder blade.
Will hums, presses back into the body that brackets his, and tugs Kevin’s hand up to his chest. “Nope.”
Kevin huffs against the back of his neck and nuzzles closer. They’re both still sleep slow, a little fuzzy, and he wants to stay like this, just the two of them tangled together and safe, but his phone lights up again, persistent against the wood.
“Just get it, Will.” Kevin says as he stretches out the kinks in his limbs.
Will turns and watches the way his muscles flex and release, the way he moves so surely, so comfortably in his body. Will likes him best like this -- ruffled and soft, wholly his to stare at, to understand. Kevin grins then, quirks an eyebrow, and he blushes hot at being caught even as the other man leans over and kisses him, soft, just a lingering brush of his lips, and Will smiles into it. The phone rings again and Will groans as Kevin reaches over him and snatches it off the table.
“It’s Gunnar.” He drops the phone onto Will’s chest. “You know he’s just gonna keep on calling until you answer.”
He watches as Kevin slips out of bed and disappears into the bathroom before he sits up against the headboard. The shower starts, he drags a hand down his face, and sighs. “Yeah, Gunnar, I’m here.”
Sometimes, he thinks that their weekend at the lake house was a kind of antebellum for a war he didn’t know was coming. He remembers moments of that weekend as if they were photographs he developed and kept tucked away -- how much younger Kevin looked with his dark hair falling in front of his eyes, the way weak winter light skipped off the lake and doused everything in a pale gold, how Kevin’s smile reduced everything to a haze of warmth and light, how he stopped looking over his shoulder, how easily he could breathe in those pine trees, how they never stopped touching. Will wanted to live in those moments. Hell, he fell in love in those moments. When they broke up, when Kevin left him battered and aching in that alley behind the bar, when he hated himself more than he anything else, he blamed the lake house for giving him a glimpse of a life he wasn’t allowed to have, for ruining everything he did have, for making him want to have something more than just a weekend away from the mess of this world. Now, though, he follows the gurgle of the percolator into the kitchen and wraps his arms around the man standing in just a pair of worn pajama pants, hair still damp from the shower. This little house feels as quiet, as safe, as a fortress, he thinks, before Kevin turns in his arms and Will steals his cup of coffee, before he kisses him.
Part of him wants to stay locked inside this little yellow house, to wrap himself around Kevin and not let go until he knows the map of his body as well as his own, but he wants things to be different this time so he bites his lip and asks if Kevin wants to go to Gunnar’s place that evening for some BBQ.
“It’s not a big deal,” he shrugs as he reaches past Kevin and pours more coffee into his mug. “Just Gunnar and Scarlett. Avery, probably. Gunnar said something about celebrating the fact that they were rid of Autumn Chase.”
Kevin leans back against the counter, hand still splayed over his hip, and watches as Will scrapes his teeth over his bottom lip, ducks his head, and flushes.
“Hey, Will” Kevin says, voice soft, as he squeezes his hip, thumb stroking over the bone. “I’d love to go.”
He glances up at the other man. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” He traces over Will’s cheekbone, over the turn of his jaw, his bottom lip. A smile splits his face wide and hard and he knows he shouldn’t be surprised but he is. Kevin furrows his brow and pulls him closer. “I want this. OK?”
He kisses him, then, because Will doesn’t know what to say, because he can.
He’s still afraid to touch Kevin in public. Sometimes, he thinks about what it would be like to hold Kevin’s hand, to wrap an arm around him, to not think about other people as they did errands, as they went about their lives. It’s a defensive tactic, a habit, he knows, to shove his hands in the front pocket of his jeans, to cast his eyes down and away from anyone that glances in their general direction, to keep a few feet between him and Kevin as they pick up the beer and liquor that Gunnar demanded. When Kevin steps in close, brushes a hand down Will’s arm as he contemplates the bourbon selection, he flinches away from the other man, an I’m sorry, I can’t already on the tip of his tongue. It’s what he does to survive and he hates it. Kevin catches him by the wrist as he walks around to the passenger side and pulls him close.
“Hey,” Kevin says, voice low, a softness that’s just for him. “It’s OK. You know that, right?”
He knows, in theory, that it will get better, get easier, but, when he is tired of fighting himself and the world, it’s hard to believe. Kevin keeps him close, thumb tracing over his pulse point in an easy rhythm, until Will nods. In the car, Kevin grips his thigh like some sort of ballast, an anchor against himself.
The thing is Will grew up wearing fear like a second skin, like he couldn’t be himself without it and, now, as he stands in the loose gathering of people, of friends, he doesn’t know who he is without the threat of his secret draped over him like a wet wool blanket. Kevin’s standing close enough that he can feel a thin line of heat from shoulder to elbow, can feel the way he sways and shifts, dynamic and alive beside him. They’ve never done this before. Never hung out together with friends, never had the chance to, really, and he is, at this moment, terrified of letting him down, of not being good enough so he bites his bottom lip and smiles at whatever Deacon said that has everyone laughing. Maybe it’s too soon, maybe he isn’t ready to be this person yet, he thinks. Kevin shifts beside him, leans further into his space, and Will knows that he’s going to ask if he is OK, knows that Kevin worries about him, so he shifts away and mutters something about the bathroom before he steps away and retreats towards the dim quiet of the house.
When the sliding glass door closes behind him and the noise outside mutes to a dull hum, he can finally breathe. After he came out, after everything changed and he didn’t know who he was without the weight of his secret holding him down, people called him brave. The thing is he never has been brave. He didn’t chose to stand on the front lines and fight for being treated like he was a fucking person. No, he was dragged there by the media, by his fans, by the weight of a whole community, by Kevin who wanted him to be so much more than what he thought he could, and, now, he doesn’t really have a choice and he is goddamn tired of being told he is brave. The house sighs and shifts around and he lets that movement, this natural rhythm, ground him. He grabs a bottle of water from the fridge and leans against the kitchen counter.
“You alright, man?” Avery says as he enters the room, phone still clasped in his hand.
Shrugging, he gulps down half of his water. “Where did you disappear to?”
The other man leans against the counter and gestures towards his phone. “Told Juliet that I would help sing Cady to sleep tonight.” There’s an expectant look in Avery’s eyes that makes Will fidget, fingers working on tearing the label on the water bottle. “You hiding in here or something?”
He wants to ask how the other man has been able to hold everything together when his own little family was fighting their own war. He wants to ask how do I not fuck this up or how do I not be so afraid but he can’t meet Avery’s eyes so he worries his bottom lip and stays quiet.
The other man shifts and sighs. “You know what this whole thing with Juliet has taught me, Will? It’s taught me that it’s OK to stand back, to not worry about what’s going to happen tomorrow or next week or the week after that, and be content with what’s happening in this moment or else you’re going to miss out on all of the good stuff. You’ve got to choose to be happy, man.” He pauses and points to the backyard. “That out there, those people, your friends, are the good stuff, Will, and all you’re doing is hiding.”
The clock ticksticksticks its forward march and the house shifts and moves in its own rhythm as Will considers the man braced against the far side of the kitchen island, brow furrowed and serious. Avery is right, he knows. He’s already wasted so much time fighting himself, fighting other people, the world, but he doesn’t know how to stop, how to stay still long enough to change. He drags a hand down his face,
“It’s hard–” he starts, words clumsy. He lets the rest of them die on his tongue.
Avery laughs, ruefully, as he pushes off the counter. “Ain’t it always.”
It’s late enough that everything feels slow, loose-limbed, and tipsy like the night has had two too many beers. He lounges in a sturdy wooden chair next to the fire pit, beer clasped in one hand. It’s too hot, really, to warrant a fire but a night like this deserves one, he thinks. He closes his eyes and listens to the flames hiss and crackle, to Scarlett shaking with laughter next to him, to Kevin whose voice has deepened into a softly lilting country drawl that he first heard late one night at the lake before everything changed. Avery’s plucking out some random chords on an old acoustic someone dragged out earlier that night and he thinks this sounds a lot like happiness.
“You still with us?” Gunnar asks from somewhere over his right shoulder.
He nods, cracks open his eyes. “Yeah, I’m just” Will pauses, gestures with his beer, “trying to take it all in.”
“You look good, man,” he says leaning against the arm of the chair as he, too, scans the mess of laughing people, their little family, in front of them. “Happy, I mean.”
And, he is happy, at least as happy as he knows how to be. The thing is he never learned how to be happy, that he deserved to be happy, that he needs happiness like air, and he’s spent so long hating himself that, sometimes, he can’t help but think that he hasn’t earned any of this no matter what Kevin tells him, what any of his friends tell him. He catches Kevin’s eye for a moment and the other man grins, free and easy, arches an eyebrow, and he feels this thing like happiness, like contentment, settle warm in his belly. Heat crawls up his neck and he ducks his head and he can hear Kevin laugh above everything else.
He swallows a mouthful of beer and glances at Gunnar. “I really am.”
“You deserve it.” Gunnar clasps him on the shoulder.
Will nods and doesn’t say that it all feels so fragile, so breakable, like it may snap in half and go up in flames at any minute. Instead, he downs the rest of his beer and stands. “C’mon, I need another drink.”
They leave when the fire is no more than a few glowing embers, when Scarlett’s saying no,no I’m awake, even as she nods off on Gunnar’s shoulder, and the night twirls and dips around him.
Kevin presses close, rubs a hand across his shoulders and down to the small of his back. “You ready?”
“You know,” Gunnar says as he wraps an arm around Scarlet. “Will’s still got a room here. You guys could stay and not worry about driving back.”
Kevin turns towards him, the corner of his mouth ticking upwards, eyes soft, and shrugs.
“I think we’re gonna head home.” He says even though this house and these people have been more of a home than he has ever known before, more of a family than he has ever had. The word is foreign, thick and awkward, on his tongue like he has never said it out loud before now and, maybe, he hasn’t. Maybe he shouldn’t think that Kevin’s house feels more like his home than anywhere else. Hell, they just got back together and there’s still a little bit of hurt that lingers like ghosts or memories but Will always falls fast and hard and he’s kind of drunk and Kevin is a warm, steady presence against his side.
“Be safe, ok?” Scarlet says, slurring slightly, as she wraps her arms around Will.
He pulls away and nods. Be safe, he thinks as they make their way to the car, as Kevin reaches over the center console and tangles their fingers together. He knows that it's not just about tonight, about getting home. Houses, shadowed by the night, drift past and he watches the way their headlights bounce and reflect off of windows, curtains stirring in the air-conditioned breeze. The truth is, he’s standing on the frontline of a war that’s not ending anytime soon and he’s bruised and tired and he doesn’t know what safe looks like anymore. Be Happy. Be safe. The car eases to a stop at a light.
“You OK?” Kevin’s voice is loud in the confines of the car, in the stillness of the night.
Will turns towards him and smiles. “I’m good.”
Kevin raises his eyebrows as if to ask if he is sure, as if he doesn’t quite believe him. The war still rages on around them and he’ll keep fighting. He doesn’t know how to do anything else. But, right now, in this little car he is safe and he is happy. That is all that matters.
The light turns green and presses his lips to the back of Kevin’s hand. “I’m really glad you came tonight.”
Kevin glances at him and smiles, a small, private smile that is just for him. “Me too.”
The city jumbles together in flashes of color and smoothes past them in a blur of steady motion. He’s always thought the city was beautiful at this time of night when everything was doused with sleep. Kevin, too, soft and a little fuzzy, bathed in the light from the streetlights.
There’s a scar that stretches tender and pink across the bridge of his nose. This is what he took away from that night at the bar: a bottle broke against skin, broke bone, the taste of blood as it coated his mouth, as it stained his shirt, as it dripped onto his guitar. The next night he wore his black-eyes, that jagged, swollen skin, played his guitar flecked with blood, and sang his song so the audience had to listen to him. He clenched his jaw and stared them down and he wasn’t sorry. I am here and this is who I am, he thought, as he swallowed down the burn of fear, the pain that seems to have formed him. In Atlanta, he wore that night like a battle wound, like some tangible proof that he can survive, has survived, and, later, when it’s just them and the shadows, Kevin reached out and traced the thin, raised skin so gently that Will could only feel the ghost of pressure and heat. Now, Kevin backs him against the kitchen counter, water glasses forgotten, fingers the hair at the nap of his neck, and presses his lips to that scar. Later, when they’re tucked away in the safety of their room, their little world, Kevin whispers I’m sorry. Will can feel it rumble through him more than he can hear it. It resonates in him, settles in his bones, a little bit defiance, a little bit survival, some sadness, too, because that little scar, the way bone knits back together to make a stronger bone, has to be bigger than he is, than they are. He kisses Kevin, then, messy and a little uncontrolled, because he can, because he doesn’t want to get used to it.