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Kevin feels a little untethered today, like all of his bones fell out when he was sleeping. He drags himself through afternoon practice, the coaches watching him constantly on the sidelines for any signs of slippage, but Kevin has spent his whole life wallpapering over his own pain. It’s nothing new for him; he runs the drills, plays the scrimmage, doesn’t wince when he gets checked lightly against the wall and stands a little too long under the hot water in the locker room.
It makes the drive home longer, the impending darkness of winter less tolerable to think of. His hand shakes when he opens the door to their apartment; his eyes ache when they try to adjust to the darkened hallway. All those years of darkness and he still struggles now to see through it.
Katelyn’s on the couch, when he finds her; the TV spilling blue light over her sweats-clad form. She’s a week into her leave cycle — days at the clinic abandoned in favour of sleeping in and lazing around the apartment, a rarity these days of their lives. Aaron must still be at work; his trainers are missing from the door and his hand is missing from where it usually finds a home in Katelyn’s hair when they’re on the couch. It’s seven, now. He was supposed to finish shift change at four.
“Hey,” she says, with the kind of lightness that only beautiful people seem to possess. Her eyes are dark even with the reflection of the screen, eyelashes soft and soot-like against her cheeks when she looks up at him from across the room. “Good practice?”
“Something like that,” he tells her, dropping his gear bag by the coat-rack with a promise to himself to put it away properly later. He can’t quite imagine bending over to fold his training clothes, to empty his bottle; instead, he leaves it for a later version of himself and lifts Katelyn’s legs so that he can slot himself underneath them on the other end of the couch. She’s warm; the blanket that she’d dragged from her parents house all the way here is draped over her legs, and now, by extension, Kevin’s.
“You’re cold.”
“Tragically, some of us had to leave the house this morning,” Kevin tells her, shifting further until Katelyn is taking most of his weight. She doesn’t even withdraw at it; wedges her shoulder underneath his arm and wraps an arm around him. She’s in a jumper that is definitely stolen from Aaron, the sleeves puddling at her wrist where the shoulders are too wide. For all they’re the closer in height between the three of them, nothing ever quite fits right. “When did you end up getting up?”
“Nine-ish. I did the laundry.”
“It was my turn to do it though.”
“Yeah, well,” she yawns, “sucks to suck.”
“Are you five?”
“Don’t make this weird,” she mutters, before laughing at whatever reaction she sees on Kevin’s face, twisting to the side to see him. When she reaches out to brush hair off of his forehead, he doesn’t flinch. Her eyes soften for a moment, before he raises fingers to her chin to turn her face back to her show.
When he tries to follow her gaze to the television he winces at the brightness and raises his hand again to scrub at his eyes, trying to will away the blurriness. It’s nearing winter, but it’s not yet there — the sky outside is still a dull grey this time of day, and it means the dark apartment takes longer for his eyes to adjust to.
“You should be wearing your glasses,” Katelyn murmurs, when he pulls his hand away. “That’s why your eyes hurt.” Her voice is just loud enough to be heard over the television; it’s playing some science fiction show that she’s been following for as long as Kevin has known her, and the two of them sit there silently while the main characters argue over using the warp drive.
“They’re fine,” Kevin argues half-heartedly, and shuts his eyes again against the brightness of the television. It feels a little like the light is needling into his head like a fucking corrosive, like that time Nicky made them use the flat soda bottles from a party to make bottle-rockets that had somehow ended up melting the plastic from within. He tries to snub it — pushes past the pain, focuses on what he knows. Katelyn’s voice, the heater humming somewhere in the background, the worn leather of the couch under his skin. Like this, he can pretend there’s no pain; or if not pretend, then actively ignore it.
“I’m sure. Why get them if you won’t use them?”
“They look stupid.”
“I beg to disagree,” Katelyn tells him, and when Kevin grumbles then beg as a response, she lets out a quiet, choked laugh, before he tips his face into her shoulder as if to hide further from the world for just a minute more. He’s always seeking them out for it, really. Has been even before this started all these years ago. Aaron in college, someone to sit beside in silence and read with instead of getting pulled into more violence; Katelyn, once they ended up in med school in Kevin’s pro city, offering him a warmer apartment than his own. They’ve always been willing to indulge him. It’s mutual, of course, but he thinks sometimes he takes the offers far more often.
“Bad pain day?” she asks quietly, and Kevin hums. Already he can feel the exhaustion creeping back into his bones; not exactly the pain, but more the effort of keeping it at bay. “Do you want a heat pack?”
Kevin shakes his head, even as Katelyn shuffles her way out from where she’s completely propping him up.
“No, I’ll just go grab one now. Stay here.”
Kevin grabs lightly at her when she tries to get up, trapping her back against him on the couch. It takes effort to keep her there — even almost six years out of college, she’s retained the same unnerving strength that came from cheer. She’d tried to carry Kevin down the street once, a month into living with each other, on a day where his hip had complained for three hours through mini golf. Aaron had been in stitches behind them, unable to manage the sight of Katelyn carrying Kevin, almost a foot taller, down a dark city street. She’d succeeded, for twenty metres, before the two of them had to help him hobble the rest of the way, an arm over each of their shoulders. It’s always been less of her physical strength and more her conviction, though, a willingness to do whatever it takes to reach the goal she’s set in her head. It’s why she always wins arguments on what takeout place to call. Always the Vietnamese place.
“It’s fine,” he argues even as she tries to escape to the cupboard in the kitchen stacked with heat-packs and the locked safe with the medications in it. Aaron had been the one to suggest the lock, even if he knows the code. It’s always easier to ignore things when you think they’re out of reach. “Just stay here.”
Katelyn argues, but she’s always been part of the few able to understand the reasoning under his words — that it’s not a lack of wanting to ease the aches, but an understanding that sometimes the attempt makes it worse. It’s probably also Kevin’s grip around her waist that makes her give in, and he can feel the deep breath that she lets out when she concedes.
“Fine,” she acquiesces, settling back into where he wants her, “but tell me if it gets worse.”
“Yes, Doctor Lim.”
“Hearing that’s not as enjoyable as it used to be,” she sighs. “I got another text from my aunt about that skin thing she has today.”
“What a tragedy,” Kevin hums into her shoulder. She smells like his shampoo; no matter her own collection of hair products. “Forced to do your job.”
“I’m a neuro resident.”
Her hand eventually slides into his hair, and he shuts his eyes into the touch as she starts to carry her fingers through the roots, still rambling on about things that Kevin will always want to listen to, no matter how inane.
Kevin knows that the Nest had ruined him for many things — safety, a normal childhood, a normal brain — but this above it all is the more constant of it all. The understanding, years later, that relentless labour asked of a child is not good for a body, that the things they put him through have robbed him of a painless life, even now when he is not constantly exhausted and under panic. His whole body is a wound that never quite healed.
Katelyn keeps carding her hand through his hair, teasing out the tangles that have caught at the ends from the car’s headrest and Boston’s winter winds. It doesn’t take away the pain, but it does make it easier to bear; the weight of her body against his, the known offer of help, the understanding. He can put away the performance of painlessness.
“You’re missing the best part,” she tells him, the words ghosting over his cheek.
“Am I?”
“Mhm,” she hums, mock hurt. “Guess I’ll just have to explain it all later.”
“What horror. Just like you’re going to describe the entire episode to Aaron when he gets back?”
“Bold to assume he isn’t going to just fall asleep in the hallway,” Katelyn tells him, voice soft and low, as if trying not to disturb him. There’s no headache today, just the age-old aches, a sharp, spiralling pain starting in his knee, but he appreciates the offer of quiet. Her voice always breaks a little when she tries to keep it quiet, husky and stumbling, but he loves it all the same, even more so for the effort of making him comfortable. “He did that in first year, you know. I came over to return his jacket and I found him sleeping on his kitchen floor while his roommate cooked breakfast around him.”
“In the Foxes, too,” Kevin says. “I used to find him in the laundry room asleep against one of the machines because he’d tried to do homework while his washing ran.”
“I remember him saying that,” she agrees, distant as if trying to recall the conversation. Against his ribs, her voice is a slow rumble, “He said he used to wake up on the couch when he could have sworn that he’d been doing laundry.”
“Mhm. I wonder how that happened.”
“I wonder,” Katelyn laughs quietly, wondrously, and drops her hand back to his hair.
—
In winter it’s always worse; the pain and the aches all creep up on him earlier, agitated by the cold. Kevin tries to surreptitiously shake out the pins and needles in his leg, twisting his ankle right and then left to try and dissipate the pooling discomfort that comes with wearing these specific dress-shoes.
“You alright?” Aaron asks, hands nursing a half-drunk glass of scotch as he takes a half-step closer to Kevin. Across the room, Katelyn is caught in an animated conversation with one of her co-workers, the deep red of her dress catching the low-light of the bar’s dying bulbs. It’s fitted tight at her back where it sits just below her shoulder blades, and Kevin had needed to zip her into it before they left, Katelyn unable to reach the back. Hidden just below the hem are light bruises; further beneath it are darker ones with teeth. Kevin has to drag his eyes away from it to look at Aaron, who’s staring at Kevin with a narrowed gaze that spells out I know what you’re doing and I’m going to spit medical information at you for the next hour if you try to deny it.
“Why?”
Aaron waves a hand vaguely, before he thinks better of hypotheticals and presses his hand to Kevin’s hip, his palm flat over where the joint lies. “You aren’t putting any weight on it.”
“I—“
“Don’t lie.”
Kevin sighs, leaning into the touch. Aaron is perpetually warm in the same way that Katelyn loses heat the moment she steps outside, and the heat of his hand over Kevin’s dress pants is a balm. He turns away from the shelves behind the bar to properly face Aaron, who has only had one drink but is already pink in the cheeks from it. It’s July and it brings with it the annual event for Katelyn’s residency unit, a mix of students and residents and attendings that Kevin knows approximately three of and therefore is hiding in the corner about. Aaron knows most of them, but he’s still standing here with Kevin instead of socialising.
“I wasn’t going to,” he says. “I just did something at the gym yesterday that it wasn’t a fan of.”
Neither of them point out that it is less of a singular and more his entire body — one extended, failing system.
“We could—”
“I don’t need a cane.”
“I know,” Aaron says, always surprisingly calm in the face of Kevin’s need to destroy himself further in the pursuit of his own pride. He knows it’s unhealthy, but it’s one of the few things he’s ever been able to hold onto. “Do you want to leave early?”
He always says it so simply. As if Kevin has never been an inconvenience with a one-track mind and shitty knees. There’s no sympathy on his face, really, just a question behind his own glasses, the wire-rimmed frames an addition to his everyday wear starting in his third year of medical school. They catch the lights when he tilts his head, waiting on an answer, and flash the same bronzy colour that Aaron’s eyes are, a dense, sticky pool of copper in the bar lighting.
Kevin shakes his head. “No, it’s fine, I want to stay. I just need to sit down.”
“Then sit.”
Aaron pushes him into a chair at one of the tables near the window with a hand at his waist, and watches Kevin wash down two painkillers pulled from his wallet with a glass of water.
It’s almost the end of the season for him; two games left, not counting exhibitions. His debt has been paid as of three years ago when a force beyond Kevin’s understanding wiped everything he and the others owed to the Moriyamas, but it was never the money that kept him on the court. Aaron and Katelyn argue about it with him with every contract renewal, but the pain is nothing new and nothing bad enough to ever make him quit playing. Just something simmering, constant — like grief, or love, or memory. An annoyance. Just another bump in the road.
“Did you call Andrew?” Kevin asks, once he’s put the glass down on the table with a dull clack of glass against veneer. He doesn’t think about why the surface is sticky. He doesn’t think about actually wanting to go home, because then Katelyn would argue her way into leaving as well, and the last thing Kevin intends to do is have her leave her own team’s function.
“Why?”
“About his trade.”
Aaron scoffs. “What am I supposed to say to him? ‘Congrats on getting traded to the same team as the most infuriating person I’ve ever known after spending six years on literally the worst team I’ve ever seen play in the pro league, if you get married I don’t want an invite’?”
“Exactly that?”
“Fuck off,” Aaron says, pushing lightly at Kevin’s shoulder, before he drops into the chair beside Kevin, legs outstretched. The fabric stretches over his thighs, warping the striped pattern, before Aaron pulls his feet out of someone's way as they stumble away from one of the groups that scatter the room. “Seriously?”
“I mean you could cut out the insults to Neil. And the wedding thing, I know you’d throw a fit if he actually did that.”
Aaron steadfastly ignores the last part, fiddling with the hem of his blazer. “Not that he was on a shitty team?”
“Oh no,” Kevin says. He can’t help the mean grin that he gives with the words, the amusement of the conversation. ”Definitely tell him that. The Chiefs are terrible, I told him so.”
“They were close by, though,” Aaron says, with a pointed look at Kevin. It’s tentative, the comment; testing the waters as to Kevin’s reaction to Andrew moving.
Andrew had, against everyone’s better wishes, taken a contract with a solidly middle-ranked team in Indiana that had landed him almost exactly between Kevin and Neil after graduating, and stayed even when Neil signed to a team in California. Kevin had been furious — Andrew had argued that Kevin had no say in his choices. Neil had also been furious. Kevin had watched him emerge from their dorm with a choker of bite marks and a look that was both annoyed and acquiescing to Andrew’s argument.
“Pushover,” Kevin had told him.
“Princess,” Neil had retorted, and kicked him in the shins. Neither of them had said anything about how the three of them were about to be separate for the first time in four years.
Aaron doesn’t say it either, but he does comment: “He’ll be further away now.”
“Yeah, well,” says Kevin, “we’re adults. I haven’t needed him to play babysitter in a long time.”
Aaron hums, and reaches for where he’d left his glass, the ice having melted while they’ve talked, leaving a thin layer of clearwater over the amber that’s visible from where Kevin sits. With a glance at him, Kevin mentions, carefully, “He’ll be further away from you, too, though.”
Aaron swallows, jaw set. “I guess.”
Kevin offers him the silence; looks up at the dimming lights for a moment before his gaze drifts back, like always, to Katelyn across the room. She’s moved conversation groups and is now caught in something that looks serious between her and an older woman in a sleek jumpsuit and hair the colour of spring stormclouds. As he watches, she waves a hand in a motion mimicking something he never studied the content needed to understand, and the other woman nods an agreement; Katelyn’s face breaks open into a wide, pleased grin, her eyes crinkling as she does. She’s beautiful, like this — always, but moreso when she’s happy and even moreso when she’s in her element.
Kevin looks back to Aaron, who’s staring in the same direction, the two of them converging in their almost child-like crushing. Hard not to. Kevin and Katelyn do the same to him.
Kevin will not ask him here, about what Aaron thinks of the fracturing of their little group into different corners of the world. Nicky is in Germany. Andrew had been far away, but not the other side of the country. A three hour flight is long, but seven is longer. He reaches across the gap between their chairs, instead, tangling their fingers together.
“Call him,” Kevin says, fiddling with the indented scar at the side of Aaron’s knuckle, something he’d earned in fifth year when another team’s striker had forced his finger too-far back with their racquet. Kevin had watched the game from his apartment in Boston, and sent a barrage of texts to Aaron about how to tape it best to keep playing the season. “Tomorrow or something. Don’t you start late?”
“At noon.”
“There you go then.”
Aaron sighs, tugging his gaze away from where it’s stayed stuck on Katelyn. “You’re awful.”
“And you still love me, so what does that say about you? And before you say anything smarmy, you’re gonna’ be implicating Kate in it.”
Kevin earns himself a mean look from Aaron, and he only grins in response, something honest that he’s learned in the last few years. It’s the smile that’s in all their photos — the ones on their walls, the one on his phone's lock screen, the one that Abby keeps in her house from Kevin’s graduation. He’s always thought it looks wonky. Katelyn says it looks real.
For that, or for something else, or for nothing at all, Kevin finds himself tugged down to meet Aaron’s mouth, the kiss nothing much more than a harsh press of lips at first until Kevin gasps into it and gives Aaron the space to deepen it. It always feels like the first time, kissing either of them — like Kevin’s twenty-four again and in that fucking public park at 2am, like it’s all new again.
It’d been a long time coming, really, with Aaron; Kevin’s known him for eleven years, wanted him for—most of those. Been wanted back for the most recent five. All the way back to the Foxes and their shared gen eds, and falling for him right there in SCI101 the way friends don’t do. There was no other ending for him, really.
When Aaron pulls away, Kevin keeps him close with a hand at the seam along his shoulder, a little stunned, a little more than breathless.
“What was that for?”
“Just wanted to,” Aaron shrugs, but Kevin can see the pink over his ears even as he tries to play it nonchalant, wiping his hands on his pants. “Finish your drink. You think they take song requests?”
“I’m not dancing,” Kevin warns. “With or without pain.”
“I’ll go drag Kate in,” he says. “It’s a function, not a conference. Might as well force her to have fun. You can sit here and be a bitter old man.”
“Oh, says the person who said he’s too old for mini-golf like a week ago.”
“Are we just going to sit here and argue or are you going to let me try and pry our girlfriend away from where she’s definitely doing that student’s homework for them over there?”
The night is still young, still teething in the dark. Kevin grins again, another sharp flash in the bar lights, and reels Aaron back toward him, his glass empty and still tasting like every single one of Kevin’s vices, both old and new.
—
Abby had been the first one to realise — or if not to realise, the first to bring it up. To explain that pain should not be constant, and that exhaustion should not be constant, and that things like sore eyes and frequent headaches and an affinity for hairline fractures are not normal things for a body to experience. That people do not often struggle to keep weight on, or to simply eat a normal amount.
Kevin had been unwilling to accept it. Well. Kevin had thrown what he now understands to be the world's biggest hissy fit, promptly had three consecutive panic attacks underneath Abby’s nursing desk, and then refused to acknowledge anything else she tried to point out. Because Kevin Day does not have joint issues. Kevin Day does not have chronic complications from childhood malnutrition. Kevin Day does not have anything wrong with him, and he had announced that quite loudly and magnanimously to Abby before he had a fourth panic attack.
Kevin, though — just Kevin, the person he had to relearn being — was more willing to understand. That while he would not give up Exy, there were ways of being kinder to his body. Ways of working to make things hurt less, or less often. Heat packs and painkillers and better stretches; an eye-test that was horrifying to see the results of and ended with an neurology ophthalmologist referral. An understanding that some days would always be harder than others.
It wasn’t always like this. But , Abby had tried to remind him, it won’t always be like this.
It’s hard to remember that some days — curled around his hand in the backseat of his car while Aaron frets beside him, the reminder of a place he had left something almost more painful than the staying. Biting back tears from a headache that feels like a drillbit in his head while Katelyn tucks herself against his back in dead silence, the curtains taped shut.
It’s easier to remember on others, though. The Olympics week, dragging himself single mindedly through games until he won gold; both the first year and the second year, too. Matt and Dan’s wedding, where Kevin had ended up sat next to Katelyn and Aaron who had decided then, of all times, to invite Kevin for a drink when they were all back in Boston. Taking Abby hiking through the Foothills for her fifty-fifth. The first day of Katelyn’s residency where she came home and immediately fell asleep on Kevin’s lap; trailing Aaron through a mall at eight am in between shifts while he looked for toys to keep stored under his desk in the paediatric area of the emergency department for Christmas season shifts. The two weeks in the offseason that they spent in Europe, where the sea was so buoyant from salt that Kevin experienced the first moment of no joint pain he’d had in his life. Loose and laughing on the bed they share while Katelyn fights with her own bra straps.
Chronic pain plays the long game. So does life.
—
Over the years, Kevin’s learned there’s different kinds of pain. Some are physical; some are not. Some are dull, like a slow corrosion. Some are like a dart hitting a bulls-eye, over and over again. One is immediate, irrationally intense, and unrelenting. The closest Kevin will ever come to seeing the blue of a flame from within the fire.
Tonight’s is a domesticated kind of pain, fussy and colicky and easier to manage because he has been doing it for so long. When he manages to untangle himself from Aaron, his body immediately complains at the loss of the heat over the invisible wound, before Kevin ignores it in favour of watching Katelyn immediately fill the space he had left — reaching for Aaron like she’s incapable of leaving one of them alone, even in unconsciousness. Her hair is dark and splayed over the pillow even in the braids she leaves in to sleep with; she’d stopped dying it in her second year of med school, even though Kevin had offered either to pay for the appointments or to attempt doing the bleach himself in the apartment he was still living in on his own. No one had told him yet that those weren't things people who were just friends usually offered to each other. No one had told him yet what a year later might look like.
Neither of them stir when he pushes the door open, the hallway dark as he leaves them to sleep tucked together.
The apartment is the same one that he had moved into his first year with the Pythons, a two bedroom in the central city that the other two have inserted themselves into as easily as breathing. A life layered over what he had before them; Aaron and Katelyn’s medical texts crammed into the extra bookshelf that they’d had to buy when they moved in, thick blankets from Katelyn’s mom tossed over the backs of the couches that the interior designer who’d initially done the place up had bought. The art on the walls is replaced with photos and posters and a big white-board on a wall in the kitchen covered in tourist magnets that Kevin keeps buying at different airports.
He yanks one of the cupboards open to grab at a glass, ignoring the protest in his wrist, and leans over to the sink to fill it.
The years-long process of ‘getting better’, as his doctor had put it, was not about completely healing, and instead about learning new habits and accepting that his body, his first home, would never be the same – that he would never live in it without fighting it in some way. The best he can hope for is to make it his own.
It’s difficult to love something that doesn’t love you back, but Kevin had spent a childhood living like that. It’s muscle memory to him. On the worst days, it’s not hard to remind himself that it’s not impossible to live like this — that he has done it before and he can do it again.
Katelyn is the first to follow him into the kitchen, her sleep as bad as Kevin’s ability to accept weakness. “You left,” she complains, stealing the glass of water from his hand and sculling half of it in a single drink, before dropping it back to the table. “It’s too cold without you. Why’d you get up?”
“Just couldn’t sleep.”
Her motions loose and sleep-drunk, she reaches over the bench to press the back of her hand to his forehead, the crown of her ring digging into the skin over his eyebrow. “Are you getting sick?” she asks, tilting her head to the side in question until her braids fall behind her back. “Please don’t be, you’re really mean when you’re throw-uppy.”
“Sorry for not being in a good mood when I have food poisoning,” Kevin says dryly, but he’s so tired that it comes out as a whisper. “And I'm not. Just—a normal night.”
“It's not normal,” she says. Her sleep-shirt is slipping off her shoulder, and when he reaches out to fix it Katelyn grabs for it with both of her hands, keeping him trapped there. “Not this.”
“It is for me.”
“I don’t want it to be,” she tells him mournfully, open and raw in her exhaustion. “I wish it wasn’t.”
So much of being an adult is just learning how to live with things. Pain, annoying teammates, their building manager who will not reply to messages on days without a T in them. Neil and Andrew on a team across the country, tucked into their new apartment on the West coast; his father in Palmetto with Abby. Weeks where neither of the three of them will see each other because Kevin is at an away game and the other two are on opposing shift schedules for residency. For Katelyn, much of it has been reconciling that she cannot fix the past no matter the amount of love she pours into Kevin and Aaron. For Aaron, it’s that life is a constant cycle of leaving.
“But it is,” he tells her gently, shifting his hand out of her grip to brush hair out of where it’s stuck to the side of her face. Katelyn’s eyes drift shut at the touch, and she twists her head to stifle a yawn into the palm of his hand. “You can go back to sleep. You don’t need to—worry.”
“What are we worrying about, and can it wait until it’s not the middle of the fucking night,” Aaron grumbles, emerging from the hallway with bleary eyes and a jumper thrown over his shorts. “Why are you even awake.”
When he nears them, rather than waiting or any answers, he takes the glass from the bench and drinks the rest of it, before he reaches for the tap and fills it again to the top. “Drink,” he tells Kevin, pushing it into his hand.
Kevin does; finishes it while the two of them watch him blearily, and then sets it down in the sink.
He is forever haunted by the life he once lived; both the one he can barely remember and the one he wants to forget. The memory of it made physical, every day.
He knows this life is beautiful too, but sometimes he just needs a minute to sit at his own grave, though. To mourn what could have been; joints that are not attention-getting, headaches that don’t feel like a dinner guest that stays too long, awful and droning. A moment to turn to Katelyn and Aaron and ask, will you hold me, please? Will you hold me together, please?
On the days when it becomes okay that his body will never be whole, he’s learned still to make it home. One day, he will have to leave. He hopes he misses it as much as he misses this; Katelyn tilting back into his arms, Aaron leading the both of them to the couch with its pillows and blankets and dark, warm air even as a winter-storm rages outside the windows.