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It’s an innocent question. Or at the very least, it should be.
The exy match Kevin had been watching ended about half an hour ago, so the TV in front of them is on mute, playing highlights from a baseball game. He’s not watching it even a little, his attention instead on carding his fingers through the blond hair of the man with his head on Kevin’s shoulder.
It’s a rare weekend that it’s made sense for Aaron to come to Chicago - no exy games on either of their accounts, and Aaron’s fifth year courseload has finally settled down. He’d actually had an even better excuse to book the flight up this time: admitted students weekend at Northwestern. There are a bunch of informational packets from the day littered all over Kevin’s coffee table, but they’re abandoned in favor of relishing a rare dose of zero pressing responsibilities.
Then, out of the blue, Aaron tilts his head up to meet Kevin’s eyes.
“Who made you realize you were bi?” his boyfriend asks. There’s no tenseness in Aaron’s shoulders, the question posed breezily. It’s a matter of curiosity, not a perceived threat to their relationship.
“I know it was before me,” he continues. “I mean, no one who actually thinks they’re straight is walking around saying ‘it’s easier to be heterosexual.’”
The answer to the question is an easy one to answer, but it gets stuck in Kevin’s throat nonetheless. Because while the answer is straightforward, but everything else about it is not.
Aaron continues his monologue - he’s always more talkative when it’s just the two of them than he ever is in group settings. “It has to have been someone exy-related, right? It’s not like you socialize with anyone else, so…”
He thinks it over for a second, then goes, “It was Jeremy, wasn’t it?”
Kevin flinches. He honest-to-god flinches, and Aaron is so close that he cannot help but witness it.
Kevin admires Jeremy deeply, and anyone with halfway-functioning eyes can acknowledge that the former USC striker is wildly attractive, but that connection has never been anything more than hero-worship turned solid friendship. Maybe there’s a world where it could’ve been something more than that, but there’d never been a chance for it. There was only one man before Aaron, and it wasn’t Jeremy.
But thinking about Jeremy makes him think about Jeremy’s partner.
Aaron reads him like a fucking book, as if every single thought fluttering through his mind has been inscribed across his cheeks. “Oh,” he says softly. “Jean.”
Kevin’s breath catches, and suddenly inhales feel extremely hard to come by. It’s not any lingering feelings that give rise to the tightness in his chest at Aaron’s murmur of Jean’s name - the thing between him and Jean was in many ways a product of their circumstances, and there’s no doubt that both of their current partners are much better for each of them - but thinking about what he once felt for Jean can only ever unleash a tidal wave of emotions that he normally tries his level best to keep locked away.
He left him. He loved him, and he still betrayed him. He still left him.
There are hands on either side of his face, ones that he can immediately recognize as Aaron’s characteristically cold ones, and suddenly Aaron’s face is in front of his, his knees pressed against the outside of Kevin’s thighs as he straddles him.
“Shit,” Aaron swears, “I didn’t - I didn’t ask you about him to upset you, I wasn’t trying to - ”
“I know,” Kevin answers, but it’s ragged, sounding as if he’d just finished a round of conditioning rather than cuddling on the couch with his boyfriend.
Panic attacks are always a double-headed monster for Kevin, because in addition to the panic itself, he’s also bowled over with a sudden desperation for a drink to dull its edges. He’s been mostly sober - with the occasional celebratory social exception - for nearly two years now and the cravings are gone most of the time, but they roar back to life with a vengeance in moments like this.
“Breathe with me, yeah?” Aaron asks, one of his hands slipping into Kevin’s hair, the gentle but firm tug at the roots grounding him in the sensation.
They’ve been through this song and dance many times before - Aaron knows exactly what Kevin needs in these moments, just as Kevin knows exactly what Aaron needs when he overworks himself to the point of burnout. This care for each other is its own form of intimacy, perhaps the most precious one they have.
Kevin follows Aaron’s breathing pattern, slowly pulling himself back into something approaching normalcy. The panic abates, but the itch for that familiar burn of vodka down his throat and the numbness it promises doesn’t. It won’t for a while, not until his nerves are less frayed, so Kevin just lets his head fall forward, resting his forehead against Aaron’s chest, trying to ground himself in feeling, however uncomfortable it might be.
“It was… him,” Kevin says finally, still unable to say Jean’s name.
“We don’t have to talk about it.” Aaron’s hand is running through the hair at the nape of his neck now, drawing small circles along his scalp with his fingers. “Not unless you want to.”
He doesn’t particularly want to dredge through that history, but he wants to give Aaron more of an explanation than a half-baked panic attack at the mere mention of the first man he’d ever fallen for.
“It was the Nest,” he says without changing position. “We were trapped in there together, and he was basically the only person I knew I could trust. My sophomore year, after Thea graduated and I was technically single again… I mean, we barely did anything physical, we were both too terrified of being caught by Riko to take that risk, but he was everything to me. I know he comes across as a grouchy motherfucker, especially when you’ve got Jeremy next to him as the point of comparison, but he was the one bit of light in that place.”
Jean, beautiful Jean, subjected to cruelties he never deserved and fighting for his life to hang onto his humanity in the wake of such treatment. Their relationship never even had a title to it, which feels almost comical - that he and Thea, with their nearly-transactional connection, somehow carry a more official label than he and Jean do.
“I paid him back for that kindness by damning him to Riko,” Kevin says, his voice barely above a whisper. “He trusted me, risked Riko’s wrath by teaching me French for no other reason than because I fucking asked him, and I panicked and used it against him in the end. I betrayed him and left him behind and he damn near died for it.”
Jean never would’ve left then, has told Kevin as much himself, but some part of Kevin will always regret that he was so obsessed with his own escape that he didn’t fight to take Jean with him anyway. Would they both have made it out, or would they both be dead? Either way, Kevin will never know, will forever have to live with his selfishness that night.
He takes a deep breath, and the exhale releases the darkest truth. “What if all I know how to do is betray the people I love?”
There’s a hand under his chin, and suddenly his head is tipped back and he’s looking into Aaron’s hazel eyes. He expects a look of horror at the truths he’s just unearthed, and is surprised to see something soft there instead.
“That’s not true.” Three words, spoken with absolute certainty. “The circumstances were drastically different then. You were terrified for your life, and in immense amounts of pain.”
“You don’t need to coddle me to make me feel better.”
“That would imply I am capable of coddling, and I think both of us know I am not. What I am capable of, however, is scientific analysis, and what I’m saying is that the variables are very different now than they were back then. Your conclusion is faulty.”
Aaron making things into science metaphors is more comforting than it has any right to be.
He runs a thumb along Kevin’s jaw. “I’m not telling you what you did was right, but I am telling you that the decisions you made were under an insane amount of pressure and fear, and you were barely an adult. You aren’t that person and that’s not the world you’re living in anymore. I think Jean is within his right to hold what you did against you, that’s his prerogative, but I won’t.”
“But - ”
“Did you know I don’t flinch anymore when it’s you?” Aaron asks, and his voice has a harder edge, a forced casualness. “When people move too quickly, too close to me. It’s an instinct I’ve tried for years to break, but it’s never quite left me completely. Someone in cadaver lab the other day was walking by to get a new scalpel and they passed a little too close in my periphery and I jumped.” He’s twirling a loose thread from Kevin’s collar around his fingers now, his gaze focused on that instead of meeting Kevin’s eyes. “That doesn’t happen with you - it hasn’t for a while. My subconscious just… knows.”
Aaron could’ve gone the simple route, could’ve just claimed that he trusts Kevin. But this confession is so much more, and Kevin feels bowled over by it.
“I would never,” he whispers.
“I know,” Aaron replies. “That’s what I’m saying: I know.”
There isn’t room for words after that, just Kevin holding Aaron to him fiercely and Aaron returning the favor. The embrace doesn’t end so much as soften - Aaron melts into Kevin until they’re a mess of limbs on the couch, falling all the way into sleep that way.
When Kevin wakes up the next morning, there’s a strange lightness in his chest, one he doesn’t entirely recognize. It feels something like hope.
Who he is now is not who he’s been, and the blond he has to gradually extract himself from is proof of that. He’s not in the habit of thinking he deserves much, but perhaps he owes it to both himself and the people who care about him to try and move forward.
And so on the way to the stadium, he picks up a cheesy Chicago postcard from a convenience store. And after practice that afternoon, he writes.