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Stewy takes note of how well the sun carves out Kendall’s face.
They’re sitting in the car en route to Caroline’s summer house, the one in Palm Springs—Kendall against the window, Stewy right beside him. It’s Shiv’s turn to play music in the car, so they all bob around like apples in water as Joni Mitchell croons against the static-y car radio. Stewy, bored out his fucking mind, tries to see how close he can get to touching Kendall’s hand without “making it weird”. (Kendall’s words. Stewy remembers it from when Kendall helped him back. Caroline’s weird. She’ll be weird if you make things weird. Don’t make it weird. )
But Stewy can’t help it. That’s the thing about love, he assumes, you just can’t help it. Stewy is so full of this love that it begs to be let out from his fingertips, begs to be put somewhere , and now Stewy’s fingernail traces the outline of Kendall’s pointer finger. And Kendall notices because when Stewy’s fingernail makes its way to the apex, the small curve of his finger, Kendall’s hand swallows it. So now, they sit, quiet, lip-bit like middle schoolers, as Kendall’s rests wrapped around Stewy’s pointer and middle finger. Hand-holding without commitment, without going all the way.
It ends fast, tumbling, like most things they do when Roman looks over. Brow scrunched, he asks, “What the fuck are you guys doing?”
They jolt apart. Stewy meets Kendall’s gaze for a beat and it all feels like lightning.
Kendall grumbles, “Nothing, dude, fuck off.”
They pull into the driveway, ornate yet with a gutting feeling of emptiness. Stewy knows better than to question it now. These are the Roys, that’s just who they are. As Kendall walks around the back of the car, their eyes meet and Stewy finds comfort in the warmth that sits deep in the dark of Kendall’s eyes.
“Hello, my darlings,” Caroline performs, holding her arms out wide and expecting.
Roman greets her first. “Hey, Mom,”
Stewy watches as the rest shuffle into this mechanical routine to greet Caroline. It feels weird, almost voyeuristic, to watch. Kendall gives her a clipped hello and a side-hug, Shiv hangs back, giving a curt, unenthusiastic wave accompanied with that smile white people do.
“Hello again, Stewart,” She mutters, smoothing down her pants before giving a tight-lipped smile.
“That’s not what it’s short for, actually,” Stewy replies, earnest. He catches Kendall’s eyes widen in his periphery.
“Oh,” Caroline says, eyes flicking to Kendall. “Pardon my asking, what else would it be short for? Is it… well, you know…” her hands circle around each other as she searches for the word, “ethnic?”
“Mom,” Kendall cuts in, his tone sharp.
“Oh, Kendall, darling, he looks the part. I wouldn’t be surprised. What, is it Indian? Arab? Turkish?”
“Persian, actually.”
“Oh, Persian ! I love your people, such hard workers! You know, I have a friend in real estate—do you know him? His name is Reza.”
“Mom! ” Kendall heaves, his hand, almost instinctively, Stewy thinks, finds its way to his back. “You can’t, like– just say that. You’re making him uncomfortable.”
“I’m just making conversation, darling,” her gaze, hawk-like, moves to Stewy and he feels this intense piercing in his chest, “Stewart, am I making you uncomfortable?”
Stewy remembers his father at this moment, how sometimes, you need to look down, Sadegh. “No, no, you’re all good.”
Caroline smiles again, the cold thing. “I knew it, just playful banter. Should we head inside now? I’ve got a lovely new piece straight in from Paris.”
The walk into the foyer is quiet-stiff. Shiv, as she passes by Stewy, whispers an apology. Roman only glances at him, an almost sympathetic light dancing in his eyes. Kendall stays with him, and the continued feeling of his hand on Stewy’s back burns on his skin. Stewy revels in it, quiet.
She takes them all around the house. (“We have a guest, after all.”) It’s open, the pieces of art and sculptures she had meticulously placed in the sun-bitten parts of the house are luxurious and to Stewy, have no meaning. Art for people who have a fuckton of money to spend, like a high-end hospital. And it all just feels so empty, so soulless, and he wonders if it’s an effect of knowing Logan. Once, Kendall said to him, sobbing and high on coke, “It, fuck, shit, drips through. The poison drips through.” He wonders if it’s here too. Stewy runs his hand along a blank white wall, it drips through.
Dinner is uninviting. It’s sliced chicken breast and asparagus, both boiled—Caroline feels the need to go into excessive detail on the dangers of oil and spice and anything that gives anyone any shred of happiness. This is miserable, everything is miserable, his stomach is kicking at him and begging for food and he’s eating some cave-man shit and he—he wants a mango.
He thinks back to last month, when he took Kendall back home. He thinks of the dishes, ghormeh sabzi, falafel, black tea with cardamom, he thinks of the life . His mother brought out a platter of mangoes to start and she pinches Kendall’s cheek and insists he eats, that he’s a growing boy and he’s too skinny. Stewy remembers it all, the way Kendall let the juice of the mango drip down his chin.
—“So, what’s new with you all, then?” Caroline asks, glancing at each of them. “Kendall, have you got a girlfriend?”
“Something like that,” Roman mumbles, smirking up at the two of them.
“Come on, Rome,” Shiv whispers, bumping her knee against his. She gives Stewy and Kendall an almost-apologetic look. “Don’t be like that.”
“What do you mean? Oh, do you think Ken’s the girlfriend between them? That makes more sense, actually. Thanks, Siobhan.”
“Roman,” Kendall warns, glancing at where his brother sits beside him. His hand, which has been resting on Stewy’s knee throughout dinner, tenses almost immediately.
“What are you saying, Roman?” Caroline asks, weary.
“Like, they’re fucking, obviously,” He says.
“Jesus fucking Christ, Roman,” Shiv bellows, dropping her silverware.
It’s silent for a few moments, almost unbearably tense. Kendall’s eyes stay trained on his plate.
“So, does your father know then, Kendall? About you and… your friend.” Caroline says, her face grim. She watches the two of them over the rim of her martini glass. “I can’t imagine he’d be too pleased,”
“Um– no, well,” Kendall stutters, his hand falling from Stewy’s knee. “We’re just… I don’t know– uh,”
“He already knows, dude,” Roman bellows. “Like, he definitely already knows.”
“ Rome, ” Siobhan glares at Roman from across the table. Caroline just watches, her eyes darting back and forth like she's at a tennis match. “Come on, stop it, we talked about–”
Roman carries on, his voice gruff and low. It’s something scarily reminiscent of Logan’s own and it really shows when he gets up, slow with a looming sense of power. “My son,” he stares at Kendall. “Has been acting like a fucking queer– ”
It’s so fast, for a minute, it’s like it didn’t even happen. Kendall rises from his seat, abrupt, and there’s a flash of touch, this blur of candle-lit skin. Stewy doesn’t really register what’s happening until Roman staggers backward, hand pressed against his nose. There’s a beat of silence, punctured by a heavy inhale from Roman. He moves back and then leaps forward, swift.
Shiv and Caroline scream as Roman somehow successfully leaps over the table, arms out, hands posed like claws, and crashes into Kendall. They scratch and hit at each other, a punch at Roman’s jaw, a tug at Kendall’s hair, and they writhe against the terracotta floor. It all comes to a head when Kendall yells as Roman’s teeth sink into his knuckles.
Caroline asks no questions when Stewy swipes the keys from the hutch and starts the car. They drive in a perfect silence to the nearby hospital. So they sit there, in the fucking emergency room, waiting for Kendall’s hand to be stitched up and and his thumb to be set back in place.
Siobhan won’t stop pacing back and forth in the doorway, and it’s driving Stewy insane . She’s basically dripping with teenage angst and clouded in CK One. Her heels (heels! At the hospital! ) click against the linoleum, and he wants to rip his goddamn eyes out.
“Hey,” Kendall whispers, reaching out. His thumb (the good one) pushes into Stewy’s wrist, the beat of his pulse. “It’s okay,”
“Yeah?” Stewy whispers back, brushing his knuckles over Kendall’s jaw, his cheekbones, the front of his brow. It’s soft and caring, a rare moment of intimacy and kindness. “You really fucked your hand up,”
“It’s all good,” He smiles. “I’m good, are you good?”
“I’m good, Ken,” Stewy laughs. He’s vaguely aware that Siobhan is watching them, cataloging what she sees for future use. “Just worried about you.”
I always am, goes unsaid.
“Nah,” Kendall groans, stretching his fingers out in front of them both. “Don’t be. It looks cool, right?”
There's something there, in his voice, that Stewy picks up on immediately, that Stewy knows far too well, this unwelcome guest, something that says I’m not worth worrying about anyway.
“Don’t do that,” Stewy says, reaching out and grabbing his hand, bruised and crusted in dried blood. “Come on,”
He runs his thumb along busted knuckles and aching bones, taking care to avoid the gash on the top of Kendall’s hand.
“What are we going to tell Dad?” Shiv’s voice cuts in suddenly, sharp, anxious.
“Nothing,” Kendall groans. “He wouldn’t care, anyway.”
“Okay. Okay.” Siobhan breathes. Her eyes meet Stewy’s: this is my brother . “I don’t care, you know. That you guys are together, like, it’s fine.”
“Sure, yup,” Kendall whispers, smiling at her. “Thanks, Shiv.”
“I’m gonna, uh…” She tries, her hands moving senselessly around themselves. She walks out of the room, her heels clicking as she goes down the hall.
Another pause. Kendall and Stewy stand near-frozen in the hallway. Stewy, who decides they’re well past making it weird , and wordlessly slides his hand back over his.
“It really is okay, you know,” Stewy says. “Even if your dad doesn’t think so. He’ll be dead soon anyway.”
“Ha, ha.” Kendall deadpans. “He sees everything, man.”
“Stop thinking for a while,” Stewy whispers, leaning down to ghost his lips over the shell of Kendall’s ear. “Doret begardam.” He presses a kiss to his ear. As he pulls back, he notices that in this moment, the fluorescent light feels like the sun. How here, too, the light carves out Kendall’s face. “I will walk circles around you. Forever.”
“I know,” Kendall sighs, his eyes falling shut. “You’re it for me, you know that?”
“I do,” Stewy exhales. “I do.”
Deep in Stewy’s bones, in the marrow of it, he knows that this isn’t going to work.
And it’s not like he’s a pessimist or anything. He’s Stewy-fucking-Hosseini . He’s like, the Houdini of business, the Eminem (Christ, that is the most Kendall thing he has ever thought) of business. He steps in and it’s clockwork. It’s magic. It works every time. People ask him how he does it and he smirks into his white wine and calls it his Persian charm. The wine flows down his throat and he’ll hate himself for saying that in the morning. A charm comes with a curse, he drinks but he can’t figure out how to forget.
And like clockwork, like magic, like his Persian charm, he wakes up the next morning. His brain wants out of his scalp, he momentarily thinks of the Greek history course he took (the birth of Athena, tearing through the skin of Zeus’s forehead). And he hates himself.
He’s never had the chance to admit this, but the first word he’d ever read was, what he thought was pronounced re-fudge-ee, which he’d later learn is actually pronounced as reh-few-gee. Refugee. Three syllables. It’s the subject of his Harvard admission essay, a fact he keeps so tight to his chest that it almost hurts. It’s the shit he and Kendall make fun of, some soapbox liberal bullshit that only scholarship kids do. But it’s Stewy’s reality. The truth. He remembers Iran with lush trees, tangy olives and the distant song of the radio, wrinkled yet strong. He remembers a cacophony of voices and the rumble of cars. Starchy clothes. He blinks and it’s gone. He blinks and he’s here, and he dances around what he knows. (“Uhhh, I don’t know man. It was like, hot, I guess? It smelled really bad.” That wasn’t even true.)
But he doesn’t have to pretend. Not really, not anymore. Because Kendall is gone, and that’s how he knows it wasn’t going to work. It’s not going to work, so Stewy calls his dad while writing his grocery store list.
“Sadegh, my son, how are you?” Eggs.
“Hey, baba,” a punctured exhale, “yeah, I’m good.” Oat milk.
“You’ve eaten?”
“No, not yet.” Garden salad mix.
“Your mother made ash reshteh for you, did you eat it all? She made more for dinner tonight. Oy vavoy, Sadegh, she is like–like a machine . Never stops!”
Stewy laughs at this. A good laugh, head tipped. “Yes, baba, I–” a second exhale, full, “–I finished it all yesterday. But Mama’s ash reshteh is good, no?”
“Very good. Eat well, son. We are the luckiest men in New York. Good food and for free!” Rice. Chicken.
Stewy smiles at this, a happiness so fragile that it quickly turns into this slight resentment. Stewy learned to make ash reshteh, morghe zaferani, how to grill a good kebab. His hands, heavy with the knowledge of his own culture, his food, and once they made him feel strong. Liberated. But now he feels weighed down—what good is this knowledge if there’s nowhere to put it?
(He thinks back again. Him, Kendall, three months ago. They’re walking and Stewy points out his favorite part of campus, the falafel food truck. And Kendall says nothing but gives this contained yet displeased look. He raises his brow at Stewy and says, “You sure?”)
Stewy had always learned to give in abundance. Now, here, he has nothing to give Kendall. If he stays, he’ll cut his hands off.
“—Are you tired?”
“Huh? Yeah, I’m sorry baba. Long day.” Back to the list: turmeric. Arm and Hammer Toothpaste.
“It’s okay. I am happy when you call. Shab bekheir, my son.”
“Night, baba.” Stewy hangs up.
Stewy looks at his phone. He hasn’t been able to do this, not really. He goes through his notifications—girl he hooked up with when he was high, spam calls, a fuck-ton of emails. He doesn’t care about any of that. He cares about this. 18 messages from Kendall Roy. 7 calls, 5 voicemails. He opens the messages.
stewmann where r u???? saved u a spot
want 2 get lunch :-)
busy? i get it ttyl stewmann
hiiiiuuu stewdyyy imssooo drujk n miss uuu prtyss lame as SHI T :-(((((
ignore that sorry
miss u btw
haha did ur phone die? chng numbers?
whats going on w u?
Stewy can’t be bothered to read the rest. It’s not going to work. He knows this, he knows, he’s whispering it like it’s a prayer. But the begging is loud. He’s pleading to no one and he just wants this to work. He gives in abundance, he’ll give up anything just to make this work. Deep in the vein of his heart is a want, this is beyond him. Biological.
He’d give it all. Anything for quiet sun drunk summers in the Hamptons, for sweetcrisp falls upstate. Anything for belly-deep fits of laughter during dinner with his parents. Anything for the warmth that Christmas has in the movies, innocent and light. Him, Kendall, thick sweaters they got from Caroline—anything to get Caroline to love him, Roman, and Shiv, too! Anything to be beyond this plush fantasy, beyond the man who can promise a good business deal, a good contact, and a good fuck.
Anything to be a part of his family. And he doesn’t have to take up too much space, no, not at all. He fits nice into the passenger seat, he breathes in the silence like it’s air. He can be casual, he’s so fucking good at casual–this bit, the not-really-talking-about-much-of-anything. He’d kiss Kendall’s eyes. Again and again and again. The solution is this (this could work), the missing step, the end: He’d kiss Kendall’s eyes again and again if it meant that he could lay in Kendall’s lap while he cries. It could happen. It has happened. He can make it happen.
He is, after all, Stewy-fucking-Hosseini. He’s never been a pessimist.
Stewy types up a message: sorry busy haha. lunch 2mrw? ur paying >:-)
He presses send.
Kendall’s Christmas tree, the one Stewy had begrudgingly let into their home, has left a goddamn circle of pine needles on their floor, and the cat — also Kendall’s — will not stop eating them.
She’s thrown up on Stewy’s shoes, his (Ken’s) Buckley sweatshirt, his (their) bed, and the obligatory last-night-of-Hanukkah gift his sister had sent him from the kosher market in whatever country she’s vacationing in this time.
“Okay, okay, I’ve got another one,” Kendall says, his socked feet thrown over Stewy’s lap in a picture that is nauseatingly domestic.
“Come on man, I’m sick of this, what’s with this fascination with riddles you’ve suddenly got? Have you stopped taking your Seroquel or some shit?”
“What gets wetter as it dries?”
“A towel,” Stewy sighs, dragging his nails up and down Kendall’s bare shin. “Come on, Ken.”
“Come on, man, fuck you,” Kendall groans. “Let me get at least one,”
Stewy almost laughs at that, but he’s gone too soft these days. He’s too pliant, too soft, too willing. Instead, he gives an exasperated sigh that doesn’t come out right. Too mechanical, too forced.
For a moment, he thinks that his father would be beside himself, too old and set in his ways to accept that his son would want something like this, something so domestic. But he knows that’s not true. His father, who emails him updates on Queer as Folk , would never act like that. It’s him, he realizes, it’s him that can’t admit to wanting this — to wanting Kendall . Not fully, at least.
But that — that thought, about not wanting Kendall — isn’t true either. He’s always known what he’s wanted, too overly decisive to be polite, and it’s manifesting here, now. He wants Kendall, he wants to experience everything he can with him. He wants lazy Sundays and apple picking in Autumn and summers in Lake Como and a hyphenated last name, if it becomes legal. (Hosseini-Roy, or Roy-Hosseini, he isn’t picky.)
The problem there is this: he knows that Kendall doesn't want that.
Instead, Kendall wants this — this thing, or whatever — to stay between them, behind closed doors. He wants quick fucks and cocaine (so long as someone else is paying for it) and American Spirit Yellows. Parties lit by a dying yet colorful glow. Kendall wants it fast, wants it now. Nothing Stewy wants can exist now. It’s a two hour drive to the nearest apple orchard.
“Okay,” Stewy whispers, now dragging his nails from Kendall’s ankle to the hem of his shorts. He smiles, and it’s quiet. Slight. He presses a kiss to the back of Kendall’s hand, watches his face go red, relishes in the twitch in his jaw. They’ve been here before, countless times over the past five or six years, dancing in the blurred lines of their friendship-romance-fuckbuddyship. Stewy hates how it never feels exactly right. “Make it a good one this time.”
That gets a smile out of Kendall, something real and raw. It’s all teeth, thick, dark hair falling in his eyes, nose wrinkling. He could – has – stared at it for hours. He wishes he had a camera on him.
Stewy could get used to this, he thinks. If Kendall would let him. See him as something tangible, something human, with flesh and bones and a beating heart.
What is this? What am I to you? Some weird fucking stereotypical bi-curious fantasy? Are we that fucking cliche?
No, man, come on. It’s just… we’re… we’re us, you know?
“Okay, yup… okay, uh,” Kendall laughs, gentle and carefree. “Okay, what has a head and a tail but no body?”
A coin.
“Fucking… a monkey skeleton? Some kind of animal skeleton, for sure,” Stewy breathes, nonchalant and confident in his purposefully false answer as he squeezes just above Kendall’s knee. “That one wasn’t hard either, man,”
He watches as Kendall’s face shifts, as his eyes light up. He thinks of his sister's joke book, one of the first English books they’d learned how to read, and how they’d read them to their father and watch him pretend not to know the answer.
“No, man,” He chuckles. “No, uh, it’s a coin, ”
“No,” Stewy feigns, taking the paper out of Kendall’s hands and tossing it on the coffee table. “No, surely not, Ken,”
“It’s a coin,” he beams, pushing up on his elbows, pulling Stewy forward, drawing him in. “You got it wrong, dude,”
“Well,” Stewy swallows, eyes darting around Kendall’s face, committing it to memory (as if he hasn’t already.) “How about that?”
Stewy shifts, puts his whole body weight on Kendall, one hand on his thigh and the other on his chest, over his heart.
Kendall tastes like fire, like smoke rings, like driving 100 miles an hour down the highway — out to Montauk.
He drags his teeth over spit shiny lips, day old stubble, sunken collarbones. He smells like fresh laundry, like himself.
Then, a call.
“Ignore it,” Stewy breathes, burying his head in Kendall’s neck. He listens to the sound of him blinking, the soothing motion of hands on Stewy’s back, the rhythm of his breath. The small movements throughout his body, the twitch of his left hand, of his shoulder. It makes Stewy feel small, disgusting in some way. Like he’s a blanket Kendall’s desperate to throw off.
“Hold on,” Kendall groans, reaching for his Blackberry.
Stewy watches his face drop, there’s a hundred possibilities. A thousand. A million.
“What’s wrong? Who is it?” He asks. “Ken? Babe?”
“Fuck, uh—” Kendall spins around on his heel, ducking into his (read: their) bedroom. “It’s fine, I just.. I need to— I need to get this, Stew, sorry,”
He pushes Stewy off of him, his palm at Stewy’s solar plexus, and leaves him splayed out and lonely on the couch.
“Hey there,” He hears Kendall whisper. “Rava, how are you?”
Stewy listens to the rest of Kendall’s call in a daze, it’s all Rava, Rava, Rava. He’s heard her name before, of course, casually thrown into conversations about Kendall’s father and what Logan wants his future to look like.
And she’s not even— like, she’s a good person, is the thing. It makes Stewy fucking furious, because he can’t even be mad at her. He has no reason to. They’re not dating, him and Kendall, not technically, at least. He has no claim to him, nothing to be mad about.
And objectively, Rava is fine. She’s great, even. She’s nice enough, she seems to actually like Kendall for something other than his money, and she even wished Stewy a Shabbat Shalom when they ran into each other at a party a few months ago and urged him to check out JSA.
So, he guesses she’s fine. Whatever. A classic Nice Jewish Girl.
And, like, Kendall can do whatever he wants, obviously.
“Sorry, man,” Kendall says when he comes back in, face flushed red with something unrecognizable. “That was, uh, some girl in my women's studies class.”
“Bull, you haven’t even gone to that class since the start of the semester.”
“Wh- huh?”
“I know it was Rava, dude, it’s fine,” Stewy sighs, standing up and clearing their takeout boxes. “Fuck whoever you want, I literally couldn’t care less.”
If it’s even possible, Kendall’s face gets redder.
“No, that’s not—“
“It’s fine, Ken, really, I don’t care. We’re not together. We’re just dude-bro best friends who share a bed and fuck after a few lines of coke.”
“Come on, man, that’s not true,” Kendall reaches for him, like he always does. Stewy takes a few steps back. “Stew,”
“I can’t keep doing this with you, Kendall,” Stewy whispers. The tone in the apartment has immediately shifted to something darker; sullen. He makes a move to start gathering some of his things, none of which – including Stewy – have actually been back in his own apartment for the better part of a year and a half. “You need to make up your mind on what you want,”
He grabs his weekender, fills it with strewn-about clothes, expensive toiletries, and his textbooks. Kendall just watches him, shoulders slumped and eyes cast downward.
“You need to pick between a life with her – which was fucking handpicked by Logan, by the way, or a life designed by you. A life with me.” Stewy says, and it almost sounds final. He’s giving Kendall a choice here; her or me. He knows it's unfair to ask that of him, but at this point, it barely matters. He barely even wants to wait around to hear the answer, but he’s never had his own best interest at heart. Maybe he should.
Kendall is quiet, mumbling non-answers and avoiding eye contact.
“Yeah,” Stewy sighs, slipping his shoes on at the door. “Yeah, I thought so.”
With that, he leaves. He vaguely hears Kendall chasing him out onto the sidewalk, and decidedly shuts his car door before he can reach him.
He doesn’t go back to his apartment, cold and empty and waiting. He thinks about his father. He thinks about the cat. He thinks about cocaine and acid and dropping out of business school before it’s even started.
He drives to his father's vacation house-way out on the Cape-and bangs on the front door like he has nowhere else to go (he doesn’t.) His father answers quickly, hair messy, robe rumpled, and slippers on the wrong feet.
“Oy vavoy, Sadegh,” His father, a tall man, slumps down and drops the baseball bat he was holding by his feet. “You are trying to give me a heart attack, you are trying to kill your father,”
Something about this – seeing his father now, in his house, eyes clouded with sleep makes Stewy feel like a child. He feels like he’s nine again, holding his fathers hand as he pulls him through the airport in a frenzy.
“Baba,” Stewy chokes, not daring to move. “Baba, can I come in?”
His fathers face softens at once. “Yes,” He whispers. “Yes, matok, come inside, my son.” He opens his arms wide, beckoning.
His mother comes down not long after, fumbling with her glasses and tying up her hair. “My baby,” she says. “My love, come,”
Stewy collapses into his mother and father, crumbling, sobbing the way he did as a child.
He doesn’t talk to Kendall at graduation, doesn’t clap or cheer with everyone else when they call his name and almost falls off the stage. They don’t talk on their first day at Harvard Business, almost determined to ignore each other. They don’t talk for another two years, until a wedding invitation – Kendall fucking Roy’s wedding invitation – arrives at his door, like no time had passed. Like they’d never been anything.
He thinks about throwing it out, and he almost does, until he sees the handwritten note on the back.
Need you. Call me. Please
Stewy can’t help the burn in his chest. He punches in Kendall’s number by heart, and hits call .
Stewy finds out — because of fucking course he does — from the news. It’s still early out, a barely blue sky and morning sunlight spilling through the crack of his blackout curtains.
It almost doesn’t register for a second, what Kendall’s saying, because all Stewy can think about is how fucking awful he looks. His eyes stand out, sunken in and dark. He’s pale and gaunt. Haunted. Ghoulish.
But then it clicks, and his concern turns to blind fucking rage. He swears he might black out, and he barely even registers the sound or feeling of his coffee cup shattering below him, because what. The. Fuck.
He gets a call, and another, and another. He has fifty texts, a hundred, a thousand.
KENDALL ROY: “THE SHAREHOLDERS WERE BEING IGNORED”
He feels like a maniac, calling Kendall over and over and over and over.
Kendall picks up on the last ring of the twenty-first call, and there’s fire in Stewy’s throat, white hot, choking him.
Kendall has made an Isaac out of him. He’s bound him, placed him on an altar, and raised up his hand to sacrifice. He, who Stewy had loved. He, who wanted a sacrificial lamb — a scapegoat. He, who has always been more like Cain. A brother scorned. Unafraid to do anything to feel more than. To feel worth something.
“Stew,” Kendall breathes, and Stewy can hear the fear lodged in his throat. That’s fucking right, he should be terrified. “Hey, man, hey— so, it’s—“
“What the fuck,” Stewy shouts. He can see Kendall now, phone pulled away from his ear, eyes crinkling. “Is there something wrong with your fucking head, Ken? What the fuck is going on?”
“Yeah,” He says. “Yeah, so, okay—“
“What happened, man?” Stewy begs, suddenly overcome with worry. This isn’t a good sign, Kendall doesn’t act like this – timid and shaky – when he’s okay. “What’s going on, is it– are you okay? You have to tell me if something happened to you,”
“I’m fine, man, I just–” Kendall rasps, something hidden and alarmingly unfamiliar in his voice. “I’m fine.”
“Don’t give me some bullshit-fucking-excuse, I know you better than that,” I know you better than anyone. “You’ve fucked me,”
“St—“
“Like, royally, Kendall,”
“Right,” Kendall whispers, and Stewy knows he’s on the verge of tears, or about to kill himself with coke, or something. “Sure, sure, uh… look— Stewy, can I— can we talk about this la—“
“I’m done,” Stewy breathes, and it almost feels final. “Enjoy fucking Iceland or Sweden or wherever the fuck he sent you this time, you traitorous motherfucker.”
He hangs up, throws his phone across the room.
Two days later, theres some fucking dinner that Sandy needs him to go to with Logan. He doesn’t even need to be told that Kendall will be there, too. Wherever Logan goes, Kendall follows. ( Like his goddamn shadow. Barf.)
Truthfully, he really fucking hopes Kendall doesn’t show up, that he’s in his right mind enough to know that one shitty phone call doesn’t cut it, that forty two phone calls with one thirty second yelling fit from Stewy sandwiched in the middle does not constitute a reconciliation.
“Okay,” Stewy breathes, chest nearly caving in when Kendall walks in – alone. “Hello, Kendall.”
“Uh, my dad’s on his way,” He says. He’s avoiding eye contact, because of-fucking-course he is. He’s never been bold enough to look someone in the eye after fucking them over. It almost makes Stewy feel bad for him. Almost. “He— he had to make a call.”
Jesus fucking Christ.
“He had to make an important call? That’s like a 1987 power move, dude,” Stewy rambles, incredulous and sarcastic, ducking down in a futile attempt to get Kendall to just look at him. “That’s exciting. What are you, like, his sherpa now? You’re like the skull, like, tied to his belt? Cause I’m fucking scared.”
As much as Stewy hates to admit it, it’s always been like this. Stewy, chasing the fight, trying to make it work; Kendall, too scared of the fallout and always trying to appease, and he still won’t fucking look at him.
“Yeah,” Kendall whispers, eyes trained on the floor like it’s the most interesting thing in the world. “Well,”
“So you’re gonna come in here with ‘yeah, well’?” Stewy bites. “Hm? With your whole face, and everything? And you’re saying no to all my calls? No, Ken, you’re gonna have to give me something, tell me what the fuck happened,”
Kendall finally – finally – looks up at him.
“Yeah, just, um, I, you know I’m just not sure our visions aligned in the end,”
Kendall Roy has some fucking nerve, Stewy thinks, coming here and lying to his face like they haven’t known each other better than anyone else for thirty-plus years.
“Yeah, fuck you, too,” Stewy says, spinning on his heel. He almost walks away, and if he had any sort of common sense left, he would have. But nothing has changed, not really, because Kendall is still Kendall, always pulling him back in. “That doesn’t even mean anything.”
Kendall just looks at him, weak and bleary eyed like a kicked puppy left out in the rain. He wants to reach out, to take his hands and crumble this well constructed façade Kendall’s got going right now. But apparently, Stewy’s not worth enough to get the truth, even after everything. But then it clicks, and Kendall’s clenched fists and sullen tone, his slumped shoulders and dead eyes make sense.
“How did he get at you?” Stewy asks, and it’s almost like this is his final holdout, his last resort.
Kendall’s answer comes fast – rehearsed. “I just reassessed.”
“There's a friend card here, if you want to play it. You know that, right?” He almost feels like he’s going to cry. Kendall’s always been the one to cry in Stewy’s lap and ruin his suits, and it’s about damn time he returns the favor. “There’s a human thing standing in front of you. You can talk to me. We had the whole world in our hands, and you fucking walked, man. Why?”
They could have done this, Stewy knows that they could have done this. They could’ve been the stars in Heaven, the salt in the fucking sea. And at times, Stewy can't help but think: weren't they?
“Yeah, I– I, I saw your plan,” Kendall recites, and the eye contact drops again. “And, uh, my dad’s plan… is better.”
He feels like there’s this rock, massive and imposing, that’s been dropped in the middle of their river. They’re splitting in two now; being torn from each other, ripped apart at the seams.
“Uh huh, fuck you too, you pusillanimous piece of fucking– fool’s gold , fucking silver-spoon, fucking… asshole.” Stewy sighs, fruitlessly trying to regulate his breathing, because this is all so fucking ridiculous.
What could Kendall possibly have done, what could he have done that was so bad that he just couldn’t say no to Logan, just this one time.
But then again, it’s Kendall. He doesn’t have to have done anything. This could just be another one of those things, like when Logan made him marry Rava, like when he made him go to Shanghai, to rehab, to all these fucking places where he would stay under his thumb.
Kendall’s phone rings.
“Don’t answer it,” Stewy pleads, finally–finally–reaching out. He grabs Kendall’s wrist, pushes his thumb to his pulse. Grounding. Nostalgic. “Didn’t you believe in me?”
“It’s not about that,”
“Then what is it about, Kendall?”
“I just… I saw your plan–”
“Sure,” Stewy exhales, pulling away. “You saw my fucking plan, sure, man.”
There’s an air of tension between them, unfamiliar and new, and suddenly, Kendall’s crying. He’s not being quiet about it, either. His body is wracked by these big, overwhelming sobs, and something in Stewy breaks.
He’d been prepared to come here and tell Kendall that their friendship, situationship, whatever it is, was over, but then he’s dragging Kendall by his arm into the bathroom and locking the door behind him. He pushes Kendall against the door, slides him down and onto the cool tile of the floor.
“Ken,” He whispers, arms braced on both of his shoulders. “You have to tell me what’s going on, you can trust me,”
“No,” Kendall sobs, leaning his head up onto the door and trying his best to make eye contact. “I can’t, man, I– I can’t,”
Stewy’s hand finds its way onto Kendall’s forehead, into his hair, onto his jaw. It’s a picture that thrusts them both back in time, before Rava and Sophie and Iverson, before graduation, before everything .
“You can,” Stewy breathes, legs burning in a squat that creases his new Armani shoes, but he couldn’t care less. “You can tell me anything.”
“There was— there was this kid… and we— we went into the water, I think I tried to save him—”
Oh. Oh.
“Ken,” Stewy says, quiet and cautious. “Did you kill someone? Is he dead?”
“He’s– Dad’s holding it against me, he’s never going to let me go,” Kendall chokes, hands reaching out and grabbing the lapels on Stewys jacket. “He won’t let me go.”
“Okay,” Stewy exhales, furious and sad and desperate. “It’s okay, you’ll be okay,”
Kendall’s head falls onto Stewy’s shoulder, tears staining his jacket. They sit there for a long while, Ken shaking and sobbing and rambling as Stewy holds him like he did at Harvard.
“I’ve got you,” He whispers, holding his hand on the back of Kendall’s neck. “I’ve got you.”
The rock in their river, massive and imposing, gets swept up in the current.
The Bridgehampton Candy Kitchen. 1987.
Kendall Roy is seven and he’s old enough to know what he wants and where he belongs. He refuses when the nanny offers a fun day at Central Park and opts for classier things. Operas (though he doesn’t understand them), debutante balls (which, deep down, he finds very boring), charity events (stressful). Kendall Roy is seven and his father, bent awkwardly in the stool, promises him Waystar as Kendall shovels mouthfuls of chocolate chip ice cream.
“All of it, Kendall.” Then, a frown. “You eat like a shit-eating pig.”
Kendall leaves the spoon in the cup and wipes at his mouth with a napkin. But that’s a given, he’s not an animal. Not anymore, not since he was four, not since his father said so at Roman’s fifth birthday party.
“Sorry, Dad.”
It’s only when he gets older, when he gets into Harvard, that he realizes how wonderful “normal” things are. How accessible they make you, how easy it is to connect. You can get your share in the hot new start-up software from those virgin overlords in the computer science department if you vaguely hint at knowing what Dungeons and Dragons is. You can get one of those esoteric artsy girls with fucked-up looking bangs to run a piece on you in the campus newspaper if you mention Joni Mitchell (Thank you , Shiv!). Now, it’s the one thing he has over everyone in that starch-fuck building, over everyone at Waystar. Palatability.
We must overthrow the culture of corruption that silences women, he tweets while he eats half a bagel. And people believe it! People love it! It gets like, 300k retweets and people love him. The normal Roy sibling, the good one. And it’s not like he doesn’t believe the things he says. Like, yeah, women shouldn’t be silenced. But sometimes he wonders if it’s as deep as people say it is. Or, if instead, it’s a hole that looks deep, and since it looks deep no one’s really willing to jump in, but it’s actually, like, really shallow.
(Stewy said to him when Kendall, stoned out of his fucking mind, admitted this, “Dude, you’re so fucked up.”)
But, aside from when he’s high, he keeps that all in. He keeps everything, really, in. So much to the point that at times, he doesn’t really feel like a person. But rather, someone pretending to be one, the vague impression of a human being. He smiles when he’s supposed to and he listens to the same shit as every other cool, with-it tech-friendly businessman. He’s cool at best, a try-hard at worst. He knows he is, this is all a really intense purge and rebuild of who Kendall Roy is. He leveled himself flat and he built himself into the perfect Waystar CEO. The modern, compassionate-esque media conglomerate ruler. He thinks back to the one lecture he attended for a class in college that he signed up for purely to get that freaky bisexual girl humanities major action, Intro to Shakespeare’s Folio : King Hamlet, the one who dies at the beginning. Fair and just.
In that sense, he’s still, even at 40, just like King Hamlet. Tragic fall from grace caused by some gay fucking snake who isn’t even supposed to be there. Listen, he hated Tom Wambsgans from the start. He was weird, he stood like he had no control over his legs, he sounded like a muppet, and deep down, Kendall always thought Shiv liked– never loved, make no mistake –him because he was the most normal guy she could tolerate. But now Tom’s not normal, so the whole marriage is built on a sham anyway. He’s not normal, who can be fucking normal and the CEO of Waystar? Not Tom, not anyone. Once, Shiv told Kendall, wine drunk enough and whispering, that she feels like she’s running from Caroline all the time.
(“Like from her physically? You think she’s fucking, like, chasing you?”
“You’re being an idiot. Like, the quintessential idiot. The grand chancellor of dumbassery. If there was like, some fucking prize for being an idiot, you’d have to get a shelf installed in your office.”
“Overkill, Shiv.”
A pause.
“But it’s not that. It’s—I don’t know, I’m scared of being her.” She looks up at him: this is my brother.
“There is no way Tom is ever going to be CEO, if that, like, helps.”
Laughter.)
But he was wrong and Shiv is living out her worst nightmare. He hasn’t seen her in the flesh, not since the announcement, but he saw her in the latest issue of GQ with Tom. She’s doing the thing she does when she’s unhappy but pushing it down, he remembers the mannerisms from the pictures of her 13th birthday, Shiv in the custom Valentino leaned over the white-cloth dinner table. (Shiv wanted to splurge at the mall, Caroline wanted a nice dinner. Guess who won.) A smile that doesn’t reach the eyes, her free hand curled into a fist so tight that he can imagine the marks that her nails left when they dug into the meat of her palm. A slight scrunch to the nose—Shiv Roy is in hell .
The real kicker to all of this is that in Kendall’s eyes, being in hell was a lot better than her brother being CEO. Like, this is hell but super-hell is when Kendall doesn’t get what he wants. And he doesn’t get it. He really doesn’t. Yeah, he’s made mistakes but who hasn’t? Show me the man, sinless! Oh wait, there isn’t one ! And people are just blowing him out of proportion. He’s not a menace to society, he’s not fucking unhinged, okay? He earned that spot, he deserved that spot, he was born for the sole purpose of being the CEO of Waystar Royco. He’s the eldest boy!
A breath.
Bridgehampton Candy Kitchen. 1987. His father tells him he will have all of it. But it’s not 1987, and now Kendall is faced with the fact that everything he has ever done in his life means absolutely nothing, that nothing in his life has ever been permanent or promised, and that he needs to grow the fuck up and get over it!
He can’t. He’s desolate. Rava’s lawyer served him a fucking restraining order a week ago, he hasn’t seen Sophie or Iverson in months. He walks around the streets like a ghost, something so quiet and haunting that no one tries to come up to him. He walks, and he walks, and he walks, and now he’s here at Stewy’s penthouse.
He knocks, he had to have knocked, unless Stewy’s got some magical fifth sense or more likely, a Ring camera, because Stewy opens the door.
“Kendall,” Stewy breathes.
Kendall takes him in with his gaze, flitting his focus from his face to his clothes, to his— holy shit, socks and sandals? And Stewy lets him, lets Kendall’s eyes rove over him, hand twitching, mouth slightly open. He looks fucking terrible, honestly. He’s got eyebags now, dark ones. The glint in his eye is dull, he hasn’t trimmed his beard so now he’s got like, a whole fucking young Santa Claus thing going for him. Stewy, who Kendall has probably never seen in anything other than clean-pressed clothes, is wearing his old Harvard sweatshirt from like—what twenty years ago? Twenty five?
“How’ve you been, man?” Stewy breaks the silence, this moment being too tender for him to take.
“Dude, you look,” Kendall pauses to look at Stewy again, shrugging with a look of disbelief sitting light on his face, “you look like shit, honestly.”
At this, Stewy laughs. Kendall laughs with him. Stewy steps to the side, this quiet come in. Kendall has been searching for a home and doesn’t realize he’s had one for a while. But he feels it now, he breathes in the air in Stewy’s foyer, of the black tea and cardamom his mother makes, a smell he keeps letting himself forget. Kendall draws in a breath and it shakes in his throat, in his chest. His eyes burn, and his fingers curl up to dig his nails into his palms. He feels five, seven, thirteen all at once—like a monster.
Then, Kendall starts to cry, and he’s only taken a step into Stewy’s penthouse. Then he feels it—he really feels it.
Stewy. Here and now and he’s wrapping his arms around Kendall’s shoulders. And he realizes here that it’s always been that way. Stewy’s always been there. The river diverged but the water always comes back to itself, the river splits but never for long. Walk for five miles and watch it become one.
“I love you, man,” Stewy whispers and it’s so quiet that Kendall first assumes he’s hearing things but he hears it again: pin-quiet but drenched in it, the love. Kendall’s back in that car from his freshman year of undergrad, back basking in the sun, brokenly holding Stewy’s hand. “I love you.”
Kendall opens his mouth but the words don’t come out, how fucking predictable! Here Stewy is, here, really Stewy always has been, holding him the whole way through, and he can’t say it. He can’t say the words like he does. And it’s not that he doesn’t, oh God, no he doesn’t. Kendall loves him so deep in his heart that to stop would be for his heart to stop beating. He hasn’t said it out loud, he can’t say it out loud, because with that love is the fear. I’m scared, Sadegh, but I want to.
(Think back: “you fucking walked,”. I was scared, Sadegh, but I wanted to .)
So, Kendall says nothing. He can’t, he doesn’t want to. He says nothing, he talks of nothing. Instead, he loosens himself from Stewy’s arms and with a shaky kind of bravery, like it’s so strong he can’t stand it, he kisses at the curve of his brows. His eyes. His gaze drops to the floor, but he feels Stewy looking at him and some part of him revels in it. He wants, fuck he’s denied this for so long, he wants to witness his eyes looking.
And they go so long without saying anything, they move to the couch. They watch a movie on the Criterion Channel, some indie-French mindfuck that Kendall does not get at all, so he instead keeps track of how many times he feels Stewy’s eyes flit from the screen to him. It feels normal, for the first time. He’s no stranger to watching a movie, duh, but it always felt like a bit of a performance. A dance, an inverse. He’d say he loved all the things he hated, hated all the things he loved. Like, he raved about Everything Everywhere all at Once but he didn’t get it at all.
But that doesn’t matter now. He doesn’t have to explain himself here. He cries in Stewy’s lap while some not-sad shit happens in the film, and he doesn’t have to explain himself here.
And soon enough, he’s in Stewy’s car en route back to Kendall’s penthouse. He looks over at Stewy, how the sun breaks on his nose, and he knows what neither of them won’t say: not yet. One day I’ll kiss you like I’ll take you home, but not yet. Soon enough, he’s on the verge of falling asleep in his car, feeling the grooves of the road and though it’s 56 degrees, he feels the sun on his face. Here, with Stewy, he feels nothing and everything and there isn’t anything left in him to care. Here, for Stewy, he’d do anything.
He finally lets himself doze off, thinking back to one of the last conversations he had with Rava, about love leaving when it must. Maybe this is love arriving.