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As most things do it's a phone call that starts it: the beginning of the end marked by a ringtone he'd set when they had all been younger— but Paulo clicks on 'accept' without much thought, pressing the phone to his ear.
“Good evening,” he says. “You are still abroad, right? You're an hour ahead of us. What's up?”
Outside, the sun was close to finishing setting. It was dark but not dark enough for evening— there are golden rays dancing on the horizon, the mark of dusk.
There's a quiet breath on the other end.
As always, Paulo waits. Although for what he's waiting for? He wouldn't be able to tell exactly. His friends tended to do that. Sometimes it's a punchline of a joke, other times it's for advice, maybe something to rectify. It could also be a social call.
Of all the possibilities, Paulo can only cross out the last two.
What use would calling him have? Japan was about four hours and 1,883 miles away. He's sure that Ken has enough sense not to have him on dial for either.
“Pau,” is all that he gets for his troubles.
And, frankly, it leaves Paulo rather alarmed: partly because of how the pleasantries were brushed away and impulse dictates to him that it would be cause for half-hearted reprimand, although it is mostly due to the way that his voice came through raw.
It didn't seem like a good time to make jokes, so he doesn't. “I'm here, Ken. What's wrong?”
Again, there’s silence.
Paulo has done his waiting. This time when he speaks, it's to deliver a light knock on the door. “Ken?”
“Is it too late?” He asks. After it, like a dam that's given loose, the questions rush past. “Pau, do you think that it's too late to do it now? Was it pointless, the waiting?”
He goes on like that for a while, and Paulo allows it even when he doesn't catch most words. Ken slips into Bisaya every now and then too, an abundance of code-switching filling Paulo's ears. He listens to every word.
Ken releases a breath, shaky. He curses low, like he'd finally caught himself.
He doesn't get even the first syllable of any attempt at apology put before Paulo speaks, knowing that the initial panic has left.
“To do what?” So Paulo parrots back, puzzled. “You're going to have to give me a little more. What happened?” It was unlike him to be this disoriented, so disarrayed. They've all grown. And Paulo has found that there was a charm lying in the palms of adulthood: in the grief about who you'd been and the hope in what you have become and of all that is still to be. “What can I do for you?”
This time, the silence that follows— and what of it, if he is still able to tell Ken's silences apart—wasn't particularly deafening. It remains heavy, yes, but it was the kind that meant that he was thinking of what more to say.
“It's stupid,” he says.
Paulo latches onto the context clues easily.
“So there is something that I can do for you?” He mentions, kind as he can. “Well, carry on, then. I'll never know if you never ask. Unless it's a flight there. I can't just get up and leave.”
There's short laughter, the phone barely picks up on it. Maybe it'd be mistaken for a breath, but Paulo knew Ken well. The sound has Paulo unclenching his jaw, something that he didn't remember doing in the first place.
“I know,” he says, “you like things planned, yes. We've been over this many times.”
“I also like things straightforward,” Paulo tries. There's a huff on the other end, a petulant act that confirmed that he was deflecting after all.
“Come on, Ken, it can't be that bad.”
“I called you in a panic at six in the evening.”
Paulo snorts. “Fine. You have a point, you do, but you called my number. I'm not going to be sitting here pointing fingers at you for calling. You never call. It's good for you to reach out.”
And, oh, again with that contemplative silence. It was a pull of 'should' and 'should not.'
“I can't answer if you don't ask,” he reminds. “And we'll never know anything otherwise— although we can brush this off if that's what you want.” Paulo's lips curl as he shakes his head. What a funny thought that was. “But I would bet against that at any time.”
Then, a quiet admittance, grumbled below the speaking volume: “You know me too well.”
Paulo only waits. He knows the tell-tale signs that meant Ken was going to cave and this is among them. It was always so easy, with him. It was like revisiting an old poem.
“Pau,” Ken says to him, four hours and 1,883 miles away, “Write a song with me.”
Of the many possibilities this call could have led to, that wasn't one that Paulo entertained. The notion itself was almost contradictory and laughable, there was a reason they'd put it off for so long, but if that was what Ken needed… Well.
And Paulo had thrown his head back, laughed, and thought Finally, but to Ken all that he says is: “Sure.”
A knock on the door, the twisting of the knob.
“Welcome back,” a grin. “It's good to see you!”
It's a smile that was no less charming than it'd been all those years ago, although there is not much of him that youth has pressed goodbyes to. They were grown, and though they're older, are growing still.
“I'm not late, am I?” He asks, and Paulo is just as easily reminded of a phone call at five, six. There'd be none of that now when they will be sharing every minute.
He is also reminded of having to scold him for being late, how Paulo had spent most of their early days waiting for people to show up.
Today, Ken's early.
The hour hand is yet to reach ten.
“I don't know,” Paulo says, moving to the side to let him in. “I think you're right on time.”
“Oh, that'll be interesting,” Justin had said. “If you two end up fighting to the death in there, can I keep Dusty and your cats?”
“No,” they'd told him in unison, and laughed when they realized what they'd just done.
Justin had frowned, crossed his arms, but his lips were twitching upward and his eyes were crinkled: a very telling sign of his happiness. Almost as if he, too, was looking forward to it.
Stell had all but whistled, his smile wide as if he knew something that Paulo didn't yet, and said: “I'll look forward to hearing from you two. Ken, for once in your life open the group chats. Text. React. And Pau? Just know I'll be here for you at any point. For any realizations. Just saying.”
Paulo replies to it with gratitude. Ken rolls his eyes. “Aren't you going to give me that sort of assurance?”
Stell smiled, honey sweet. “No!”
“Some people have been waiting for a while,” Josh had then turned to look at Paulo to ask, “Well, what finally brought all of this about?”
“He asked,” Paulo says, as if it were so simple, “so I answered.”
“He said yes,” Ken helpfully supplies.
Josh had laughed at them both. “Right, then I'm telling everyone to keep away from our studio for a while— who knows what they'll be walking in on?”
That night he goes to Josh, asking, “Why does it feel like everyone's so anxious for it, the song?”
“I don't know,” Josh says, setting down his cup of coffee. He was wearing a shirt from Stell's wardrobe and pants that Justin had picked out. Paulo doesn't ask about them, just knows it's an arrangement the three are happy with now. “Maybe it's not necessarily the song?”
He rolls his eyes. “We're not going to fight like that again. Will there be tense stand-offs? Yes. Will there be frustration? Definitely. Will there be screaming? God, I hope not, but probably.”
“You think they're worried about you fighting ?”
“Are they not? What else is there?”
“You can be so dumb for someone so smart,” Josh says. He looked at Paulo like he, too, was in on whatever Stell and Justin were. “Just tell me how it goes, when you figure this all out— you're good at that, aren't you? Waiting.”
Paulo points his spoon at him, lifting it up from his coffee that he'd been stirring. “Oh, how low, even for you, Jaskalen. That's low.”
Here is what Paulo doesn't make a habit of saying too much: he falls in love fast, hard. Love came to him so easily.
He falls in love with people and with music, with basketball and instruments, and then: sometime between the pandemic and Ken's first solo act, he falls in love with him, too.
It was probably why he'd mentioned him so much. He saw Ken in everything and saw his presence everywhere. When he wasn't there, he yearned, and when he was close enough? Oh, Paulo ached all the more to tell him.
But they were both so young, and Ken was younger, and they were all trying to steady themselves both in life and the music scene. There were much bigger things than trying, which is why Paulo had stopped asking Ken anything.
Maybe next time, he could.
Maybe next time, it'd be easier.
He only ever tells this to Josh, who tells him, “You're like that one quote from Pinterest.”
Paulo had laughed between tears, cursed at him, then made him promise not to tell any other person about it.
He promises, because where Paulo was good with waiting Josh was good with promises— there are albums on his phone dedicated to the five of them, but Paulo has been shown Josh's most recent.
It's a new one, steadily growing, and it's been labeled with a small heart. It's full of Stell and Justin, of the three of them. Paulo doesn't ask about it, but Josh says he may as well talk too.
In the end, it is always a story about love.
The morning after, there is that one quote from Pinterest staring back at him in his messages. It was an excerpt from Madeline Miller's work, the one titled The Song of Achilles.
And on it, in sans print, the photograph said: “I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.”
And, at the end, Josh tacks on: “He loses him, still, by the way. You know your Greek Myths.”
Paulo replies to it with a middle finger emoji. He shows up to work with a copy of the book the next week.
But that was then.
The song writing goes exactly as Paulo had expected it to.
They're seconds away, with no miles to be crossed—and so it is inevitable that they'd cross each other's lines instead.
Say, what if there was a universe somewhere where an unstoppable force and immovable object existed? And what if they were to meet, what if they were to collide?
Which would give up and what would yield? After all, by definition if a force truly happens to be unstoppable, then the object must yield and conversely, if the object were in actuality immovable, then the force cannot affect it.
They were a lot like that, Ken and Paulo.
It is reminiscent of prior attempts at their collaboration before, something that they talked about multiple times. Many, in fact. They'd been so young. They didn't know a quarter of the things that they did now.
There have been many times when they would clash in both belief and desire, some of which particularly explosive, but they have grown— and so at most, all that happens is a set of two raised voices in heated exchange at the studio. It's a tremor in Paulo's hands and the ravaging ocean in Ken's voice.
In theory: there was no universe wherein an unstoppable force and an immovable object could co-exist, as they'd negate each other's existence completely.
But in this one, Paulo releases a breath and tidies up the papers that had ended up being scattered, while Ken picks up the pencil that had rolled down the table.
In this one, they apologize. In this one they both make a choice to yield and settle upon compromise; in this one there is neither an unstoppable force nor an immovable object, because Ken looks at Paulo and says: “Again?”
And Paulo takes the pencil that's handed to him, crosses over the lines they'd both had reservations with. He writes down what the two of them suggested at the corner.
“Again,” he says, because Ken was seconds away and there is no mile separating them from trying once more.
Outside, it was dusk. They had all the time in the world.
“Ah,” Ken frowns. The pencil on him broke again. He'd gotten too excited that it had snapped, losing its edge. “Can you—”
A hand on his. Fingers pry the pencil away, passing him a new one. “You have time for now, you know.” Paulo takes the one with a broken end and sharpens it. “You shouldn't rush so much. You should quit it, in fact.”
“Is that a pun, Pau?” He asks, raising a brow. He's holding onto the pencil tight in his hand. “And what if I wait and lose the flow? What if I've waited too long and missed the chance?”
“Don't be stupid,” Paulo says, “you'll be fine. You'll find it again, if you lose it at all. Time's fleeting, but there is merit in waiting.”
Paulo sets the sharpened pencil on the table. “You’re here now, aren’t you?”
“Ayoko pang mamatay,” Ken says. His writing was neat. “Do you think that it's too raw, or..?”
Paulo hums, just above his ear, having stood up and leaned to overlook the paper that he was writing on. He read through it quickly.
“No,” he says, “I think it'll do. It's just right.”
When he leans back to return to his own seat, he catches Ken releasing a breath, a palm on his chest and rubbing at it as if he'd been left uncomfortable. Or, better yet, flustered.
And Paulo thinks quietly to himself, Huh.
Paulo wakes up to something cold on his neck.
“Drink,” Ken says, pressing the water bottle to his hand instead. “You fell asleep on me. I can afford to be here alone for a while, instead of you rushing back and forth between your own schedules. I get that it's not exactly the most, say, well-paced creative process.”
Paulo unscrews the bottle cap open. “I could, but it's our song. I want to be here for it. You should have woken me up earlier.”
“It was an hour, I can afford to wait a little,” Ken shakes his head, smiling as if he'd said something unbelievable enough to be funny. “And, what, at 3AM, when you're fresh from a meeting?”
“And at 3PM when I've only slept two hours, and at any other time between and beyond that,” Paulo says. He leans back into his seat. “How far along are we again? Which verse?”
Ken had a contagious smile, and he wears it even when he says they're far from done.
Paulo knew Ken, and so even when they were both working on lyrics, he knew him well.
Every twitch that signified his dissatisfaction, every frown that meant a verse just was not working out as he'd envisioned, Paulo saw it. These led to a, “We should take a breather.”
Often did Paulo find himself catching sleep in the room, or scrolling endlessly on his phone. Ken laughs when Paulo shows him his feed— and the tension is broken, whatever it is that's plaguing Ken like some monster vanishes.
Paulo keeps a habit of doing it. He's almost a hundred percent sure that his algorithm has, succinctly put, messed up.
But it was worth it.
People functioned best at their happiest and having a social media feed of memes wasn't much of a penalty or sacrifice. It could not be close to the sound of Ken's laughter.
Paulo knew Ken, and he has met him many times. They'd grown up together, watching each other. The five of them are planets on the other's axis, gravitating close enough with each other for their eyes to meet and keep meeting.
But one time, in the middle of rewriting the verse Paulo was meant to be singing, he had looked up and found a stranger staring back.
It wasn't the one quote from Pinterest that came to Paulo's mind, but another excerpt.
He doesn't speak it into reality, or think of it further than now, because Ken was staring— and it wasn't in a way that Paulo knew him to. How soft, yet how intense. How strange, then, to be on the receiving end of a gaze like water pushing against the confines of a container.
“What,” he'd began, “is something wrong?”
Ken shook his head. “No, nothing.”
His eyes had flickered to Paulo's face, again, before he turned away. This time he's the one saying it's time for a breather, Paulo agrees, only to soothe the way his heart pounded at his ears.
He sends Josh an image from Pinterest when he exits the studio.
Josh laughs at it and sends a voice message of, indeed, his loud laughter and a gloating tone. He promises to bother Paulo about it when he gets back from his schedules and shoots.
As Paulo types out a reply, the image lingers above his screen. It says, “He has looked at me a thousand thousand times,” in a default black, “but there is something different in this gaze— an intensity I do not know.”
“I guess that's it,” Ken says.
Paulo didn't get why he sounded so defeated. He was proud of his work, of their work? Even more so.
“You sure know how to make a guy feel good,” Paulo quips, the jab falling a little too sincere. He thought it'd worked out well, that they had met each other's standards. Was he mistaken? Did they not?
Ken's eyes grow wide, gaze pinning him still. “No, wait. I didn't mean it like that, Pau.”
He eyes him with caution. “Then in what way did you mean it? I'll have you know that this happens to be our first song together— and there's always the possibility of it being the last.”
Ken crosses his arms. He was frowning now. “That's it. That's what I meant. I can't believe that we're done.”
“What, you'll miss me falling asleep on you? You're going to miss me policing grammar?” Paulo eases. “You know, you can always call me. Or something. I don't mind carrying a sharpener around for a while. I can sharpen pencils for you anytime, if you'll miss it that much.”
It didn't seem to settle him, in fact, it made his frown worsen. “I feel as if I've finished a fight. Like the moment has passed and I'll never be able to have it again.”
Paulo didn't think it was the songwriting that they were talking about anymore.
“Not yet,” Paulo tells him, “there's recording it. Feedbacking. We'll probably change our mind. We'll redo whatever we have to. And there are all those other processes to immortalize it still waiting after that.”
Ken glanced at him. “You think that it'll last?”
“It'll outlive us, that's for sure.” He taps his shoulder. “But so what? It's our song, Ken.” Then, a grin. “We'll exist wherever it does. Although for now, good job. Let's go eat— there's the things we know and things we never will.”
He'd smiled, and Paulo thought, yet again: Finally!
“There you go again,” Ken pursed his lips together. “Stop slipping in songs already. Careful, you'll end up making dad jokes… Everyone's already calling you old.”
Paulo hits him on the arm. “Old? What old!”
Paulo didn't know what he was expecting.
But it wasn't this: it wasn't Ken still staying, lingering as shadows would to lightsource.
The phone call had been one thing and the song another, but being at each other's side when they didn't need to and being sought? Actively sought after?
When he'd received the first good morning text, marked with social calls? He thought himself dreaming.
It wasn't that Ken was a bad friend but rather that they'd both been busy and most of what served as their bonding time ended up being part of work.
These days it was coffee together, having it delivered when their taste didn't quite match, and most times it's a quiet silence in proximity.
Paulo overhears the staff mumbling about it being an open secret, if it was one at all, that their resident moons wouldn't be gravitating far from each other's axis. There's something in the finer print, Paulo is sure, but he thinks it's not up to him to name it.
Justin had walked in on them lounging like so, once. Paulo had knelt on the floor and tapped away at the glass table, while Ken had been all but strewn on the couch like a dog.
He took one long glance at Paulo, who waved, and even longer at Ken who raised a brow.
“Coffee?” Justin tries, raising the cup he had.
“No need,” Paulo says. “Ken and I are going to get ours delivered later. If he drinks any of the stuff now, he'll mess up his sleeping schedule. He'll never wake up on time for our interview tomorrow.”
Justin looked like he had a lot to say about that, but instead, he nodded. “Right, right. Sure. Yes. Sleep schedule.” His gaze flickered between the two of them again. “Right. Anyways, I think that I forgot to mix my coffee. It's too sweet. I'll, uh, go back first.”
“What is he talking about?” Paulo mumbles.
Ken shakes his head. Justin was holding a cup of coffee from the nearby café. It didn't need any form of mixing. “Do you really want to be in the know?”
“Fair enough.”
Before Justin leaves, he turns back at them and asks, “By the way, you two, is it still a no on the offer I made?”
“For the last time, Jah,” Ken drawled. “You are not getting your hands on Dusty. You are not getting your hands on our cats. Unless we've both become too busy to take care of them it just isn't happening.”
He huffed.
“You'll take me up on it eventually.”
Stell, on the other hand, was a little forward.
“You two have been hanging out a lot lately,” he says. He sits down across from Paulo— there's a text from Ken that says, going and there's another string of laughing emojis across Paulo's messages with Josh—and he looked like he'd come for a reason. “You. There's been a Ken tied to you like a shadow.”
Paulo tapped on the screen of his phone to switch it off. He wasn't sure about this one: about confiding. It was a lot more than he'd known to explain in detail, anyway.
“He keeps asking,” is what comes out instead.
Stell tilted his head. “And you keep saying 'yes.' I'm sure half of the staff has noticed this.”
Paulo tapped a finger on his phone's casing. “Apparently. I've become more spontaneous over the years, haven't I? It suits me.”
He laughed a little. “Oh, it suits you, alright.”
He had a feeling that Stell wasn't necessarily talking about spontaneity anymore.
“But you are good, aren't you, Pau?” He asks. His voice was soft. “Nothing has made you uncomfortable these past two months back? You're alright?”
“I am,” Paulo immediately replies. “I'm good. Don't worry about me. I'm happy.”
Stell grins. “Well then, as long as you know.”
The door swings open. In one second and the next Stell excuses himself from them both, and Ken takes up the empty space beside him.
Paulo turned to another page. Ken remained on the couch scrolling through his phone with little need for words, and if there is already a growing album on Josh's phone titled Morons that's full of them, then Paulo can only turn a blind eye to it.
He also attempts to turn a blind eye to the notification that he receives. Except Ken had turned to him, expectant, and he put down what book he was holding to check it out.
“Who is it?” Ken asks, “Work again? Or is it from the café that we'd ordered coffee from today?”
Paulo sends the middle finger emoji in reply.
“No and no, unfortunately. It's a secret, worse third thing: Jaskalen with another quote from Pinterest.”
“He sends you quotes? Quotes from Pinterest?”
He eyed him meaningfully. “You know that I can hear the judgement in your tone, right? He's relentless with them. I don't think that there's been a week that's passed without a Pinterest quote being sent to me.”
Ken sat up, turning his phone off and then holding a palm out. “Let me see?”
“It's from a book,” he says. “Madeline Miller's.”
Paulo hands him the phone and lets him read.
“A surety rose in me, lodged in my throat.” Ken recites, voice filling the otherwise quiet room, “I will never leave him.” And again, equal parts awe and sincerity, he continues: “It will be this, always, for as long as he will let me.”
“What, is it not as funny as you thought?”
Ken met his eyes and shook his head. No, then. “I don't think there's anything funny about it, except the part you have him nicknamed as old man when you're also—”
“Ken!”
“I probably won't be able to meet you in the morning as always,” Paulo says, setting his hands at the top of the revolving chair they keep at the studio. “I've got plans.”
Ken raises a brow at him, looking up into his eyes. His lashes are long. Paulo really should stop picking up on these things.
“Plans? Did I miss a message again or..?”
“I have plans with my friends,” Paulo explains. “We're going to play basketball.”
Ken cracks a smile. “You and your late-night tendencies. What kind of cravings is that, Pau? Basketball at…” his gaze slid to the clock. “Eleven in the evening.” He scoffs, “Of course. Why am I surprised?”
“It's the only time we're free,” Paulo protests, almost whining. Josh was never going to stop laughing when he heard about this tomorrow. “You know they have their own schedule and we have ours. Just say you want to come and stop bullying me for it already.”
And against all the odds, Ken asks, “Can I?”
Paulo tilts his head to the side. “It'll be late, though. We won't finish for a while.”
“I'm all for it,” he says, something he wouldn't have back then. And it shouldn't make Paulo's heart skip a beat but it does just that. “Are you planning on driving your motorcycle?”
“No,” he says, “A taxi, maybe.”
“If you're willing to wait for me, I have my car.” Ken points out, “I could always drive you there if you're sure that they won't mind a tagalong.”
And Paulo has never been one to deny Ken.
As always, Paulo waits. This time, Ken doesn't keep him waiting that long.
Ken takes the backpack away from his hands. “Go,” he says, “I'll put it in the back. You have your slippers in here, right? You won't need it until later when we're heading back home?”
Back home, he'd said.
Paulo nods. “How'd you know?”
He shrugged. “You're already wearing your basketball shorts and your jersey. At most, you'd just have spare clothes or slippers in here.” His eyes flicker to Paulo's. “You don't really like packing a lot for short trips.”
“I see,” Paulo hums. His lips curl upwards. “Then, what, have you been paying a lot of attention to me lately?”
Ken closes the door of the car on him and presses on the built-in child safety lock, announcing, “Alright, hang on tight buddy. Stick around until your parents come by looking for you.”
Paulo laughs loud as he can over his beating heart, and over the red tint on Ken's cheeks.
“You know,” Paulo says, as the song on the radio begins to die, “you've changed a lot.”
Ken shot him a smile from the mirror, before his eyes returned back to the empty roads of the city.
“What, now that I have a car?”
Paulo shook his head. No. He stared at Ken intently and wondered what else had gone, what stayed. “Not like that, just that you've changed. But it's alright,” Paulo leans back, closing his eyes as he takes in the sound of Ken's engine and the beginning of a guitar. “Really, if anything, it looks good on you.”
Softer, too, Ken asks: “In what way, then?”
“You seem braver,” Paulo hums into the darkness, “I'm really proud of you, Ken.”
He catches the quiet, “Thank you,” and contents himself in having heard it at all. There'll be time to talk about everything, Paulo's not in any rush.
After all, Ken didn't seem to be in a hurry to go.
He didn't promise he'd stay, but he certainly seemed like he was going to.
As he'd established, something has changed.
Paulo isn't sure what just yet, but there are more pressing matters to worry about now than Ken's sudden interest in taking part in late-night basketball games, and so he does not make an attempt to make sense of him: deciding to continue feeling it instead.
He does have a hunch of his own, of course, but for now he raises his hand and knocks on Ken's door. He smiles when it opens, asking: “Let's go?”
And mere seconds away, all but inches apart, Ken nods. “Let's.”
It keeps happening. They hang out more often, even when there's nothing obligating them to. Every call becomes a social call and every text, a check-in.
Paulo has a box of tissues permanently stored in Ken's car, his slippers taking up space in the compartment. He has Ken's towel stored in his bag and more often than not, it ends up at his place because they'd forgotten about it.
As with most things, it spirals. It spirals into Paulo being lent a spare sleeveless shirt and him handing it to Ken the next morning. It became a debate of who was going to be on wash duty, who'd take home the shirts from their game and wash it for them both.
He can barely remember when they were last hours away from each other, when there were miles between them that actually mattered. Paulo tries not to think about this too much.
Einstein, although he's sure it's debated upon, once said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
These days, even if the opposite is happening, Paulo did feel as if it were best summed up as that: insanity. He wouldn't be able to believe you if you'd told him he'd find himself here— together with Ken, of all people.
There's a highlight reel on Ken's Instagram that has Paulo in it, and that very day Justin very seriously grabs him by the shoulders and says, “You know, just in the case you'd need me to, I'm good to watch Dusty and the cats.”
Stell keeps gesturing at Ken when he thinks Paulo isn't looking—and joke's on him, Paulo had a habit of scanning the room—and Ken's always glaring, or raising a middle finger up. It's somewhat highschool, it's somewhat not. He's caught Justin doing the same.
It's never to him, just to Ken, and Paulo thinks he has a good idea of what this all meant.
He wonders how long Ken will decide to wait.
But Josh is different, because he is the oldest, and Paulo runs to him when there is nowhere else to go and nothing else to be done.
It is easiest to fall with an older brother around and for Paulo, Josh had been that for a while. Maybe it was when they'd clicked that night all those years ago, or it was the time that they had shared food with each other when they'd both had little of it at all, but it didn't matter.
Here, he is just Paulo.
“I'm pretty sure,” Paulo says to him when they have the place to themselves, “that it's not the song that we were talking about. Or it was— partly, maybe it was.”
Josh grins at him, opening the door wider. “Took you long enough. I was waiting.”
“You aren't the only one,” he responds, dryly.
Josh laughed. “It's fine though, isn't it? You deserve to be waited upon too, Pau. It looks good on both of you: waiting, and loving.”
Sometime after that, Ken tells him, “You know, I keep thinking about it. That one quote from Pinterest that Josh sent you before.”
Paulo had given him his undivided attention, hummed to let Ken know he was listening.
“Is it alright to feel that way about someone?” He wonders, outloud, vulnerable as he was on that night. “To be certain that you'd want to be at their side. To be scared to lose them. To feel like it's death to exist where he does not?”
“Well, we're human, aren't we?” Paulo smiled. “In the end, it is always a story about love— without it there would be no song, no dance. Not to the point of obsession, but yes. It is.”
Ken had a look on his face again, the one that Paulo did not know the name of yet, and again he looked to be deciding on something.
“Always a story about love, huh? Maybe it is.”
Two mornings after, there is another familiar quote staring back at Paulo on his screen— another excerpt from Madeline Miller's work, The Song of Achilles. This one didn't look to have been taken from Pinterest.
After all, this wasn't a message from Josh.
And on it, in sans print, the photograph said: “We reached for each other,” it was neat and written by pencil, “and I thought of how many nights I had lain awake loving him in silence.”
And, at the end, Ken tacks on: “He finds him, still, by the way. At the end, in death. He does. Last night, I stayed up to read it.”
Paulo doesn't know what to say to any of that, so he doesn't, and he sits with his thoughts 'til the words finally come.
As most things do it's a phone call that ends it: the ending is marked by a dial tone— but Paulo continues to wait without holding reservation, pressing the phone to his ear.
Ken doesn't keep him waiting too long.
“Good evening,” he says. This time, he was going to be the person with the questions. “What was it that sent you into a panic that night? When you called me at six o'clock in Japan, what were you thinking of?”
“We're doing this now?” Ken laughs, all soft.
“Don't,” Paulo warned. He knew how Ken was, just as well as before if not better, and it was a constant battle of deflection with him. “Ken.”
“Pau,” he replies, and then nothing else.
It has Paulo sighing. “Am I going to have to pry this one out of you, too?”
“I already gave you my answer,” he says to him. “Pau. It was you. That night when I called? You. The source of my terror? You. Paulo, even back then and before that, I was thinking of you.”
“You're going to have to give me more.”
“It's stupid,” Ken says, reminiscent of before, but he knew Paulo better now too. He knew it was guaranteed that Paulo would listen to his words regardless of what they may end up being. “I had a dream that the world was ending and you were all the way here, while I was there— and I thought I'd lost time. I don't remember a lot of it, I don't. Only that—” his voice wavered, “—just that I was trying to get home to you.”
“Where are you?”
“What?”
“Where are you?”
“I'm in my room.” Ken pauses. Then, voice much higher he asks, having picked up on whatever sound Paulo putting on shoes is making: “Paulo, are you heading here?”
Paulo says, “I like things straightforward, Ken. But I'm not going to do this over the phone so here's what we're going to do: you're going to wait while I drive Dusty—”
He closes the door to the room he'd slept in. On the other line, Ken forces out an 'okay'.
“—and you will ask me the things you did on that phone call, in the way that you mean to, and you will have your answers.”
Ken opens the door before he gets a second knock in. They're outside, then they are not, and then Ken is shakily pouring water into a cup for Paulo.
As always, Paulo waits.
As always, Ken doesn't keep him waiting long. When he turns around with trembling hands, it's to ask him: “Is it too late?”
“It's not.” Paulo crosses over to him. He takes the cup from Ken. Drinks from it and leaves it half-full. “So ask me. Ask and do it for real this time— we'll never know anything otherwise— I'll never know what you mean if it's not said.”
There's no pointing out the song lyric slipping, like there was no pointing out how Quit was a projection of a nightmare of a crumbling world where Ken thought of home and Paulo to be a pair of synonyms: how it was terrifying enough that he'd called, four hours and 1,883 miles off.
“Pau,” Ken says to him, four seconds and a few inches away, “won't you go on a date with me?”
“Haven't we gone on many, at this point?” Paulo humors, amused. His eyes crinkle. “Although, are you asking me out to just another one? Singular?”
“Then go on dates with me. On as many dates that we feel like, that we can. Be it on court or here, or with coffee. Do the boring things with me and have fun with me. Let me drive you to places, let me wash your clothes like mine.”
Paulo rattles of a yes to every single one.
Ken held onto his wrist with desperation, and only now did Paulo know what his gaze meant. “Pau, make music with me.”
Outside, from Ken's window, Paulo could see the evidence of sunlight on the evening sky.
And Paulo had thrown his head back again, had laughed, had thought no more and set warm hands over warmer cheeks, promising: “Sure.”
And in the morning after, there's a picture from Josh yet again. It's one taken from Pinterest.
Below it there were messages from Stell and Justin, both of whom asking where Paulo had gone since something came up, before then followed by oh god nevermind do NOT tell me but does this mean i get to babysit the cats? and FUCKING FINALLY, THANK GOD.
Paulo will worry about those two later.
For now, he clicks on Josh's message and then shows it to Ken—who laughs, throat purple, expression glowing bright as sun in evening dusk— saying, “Those three are never going to let either of us live this down.”
In the darkness, two shadows, reaching through the hopeless, heavy dusk. Their hands meet, and light spills in a flood, like a hundred golden urns pouring out the sun.
—Madeline Miller,
The Song of Achilles.