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It’s strange being back in the flatshare, Lovro thinks, and it’s even stranger being back here with Ivan, sitting on the floor between his outstretched legs, leaning back against his chest, and none of his friends batting an eye.
Eva is watching old footage on the video camera, fiddling with the settings, and Jakov is watching her, unsubtle as ever with a lovesick smile that Lovro would poke fun at him for if he wasn’t now known for similar expressions. Nora is scrolling on her phone, seemingly in her own world, when suddenly she sits upright and points directly at Lovro.
“You,” she says, almost accusingly, “I need your help before I forget. I found a few things in my room when I moved back in that I think you might have left.” She holds out a hand to pull Lovro up off the floor and drags him towards her bedroom. Wordlessly, Ivan gets up and follows. He gets on well with Jakov and Eva, and is already considered one of the group, but Lovro can tell that he doesn’t quite feel comfortable being alone with them just yet.
They follow Nora into the golden light of the bedroom, and if Lovro thought having Ivan in the living room of the flatshare was strange, it’s nothing compared to having him in the room that was technically his for a number of weeks. It was in this room that Lovro let himself think about Ivan as more than just a friend, where he typed out and deleted messages about wanting to see him, where he confessed to Vito that he felt something for Ivan, and where Nora held him when he doubted that any of it was real.
“I don’t know if this is yours or not because it doesn’t really seem like your thing,” Nora says, rummaging around on the table in the corner of her room, “but it definitely isn’t mine, so you might have a better idea of who it belongs to.”
She turns around, a familiar black square shape in hand, and Lovro immediately understands what it means when people say that the floor fell out from beneath them. His stomach twists, in embarrassment rather than discomfort, and he swears Josipa Lisac winks at him from her photo on the front of the vinyl.
“You’re right,” comes Ivan’s voice from behind them. It’s smooth and steady, but Lovro has heard it enough by now to recognise the smugness that coats it. “That definitely isn’t Lovro’s thing.” Lovro doesn’t need to turn around to know that his boyfriend is smirking.
“Nora,” Lovro says, voice strained, “Please could you give us a moment?”
If Nora is upset about being kicked out of what is now, once again, her room, she doesn’t show it. Instead, she raises a singular perfect eyebrow, clearly wondering what she’s missed, but retreats without a word.
The second the door closes with a soft click, Lovro takes a deep breath, preparing himself for the inevitable onslaught of questions and jibes. But, before he can turn around, strong, familiar arms encircle his waist from behind, and Ivan’s body presses against his back.
“How long?” Ivan says softly. Lovro can feel his smile when he presses a kiss to the underside of his jaw.
“What?” Lovro breathes, a monumental task to keep his voice steady.
“How long have you had that vinyl?”
Lovro shrugs, eyes trained on the record that Nora has left propped up on the turntable, exactly where the sleeve was left when he played it for the first time and imagined his arms around Ivan. Now, Ivan’s arms are around him, where they have been for the best part of three weeks, and he’s struggling to breathe. “How do you know it’s mine?”
“Because,” Ivan says, kissing Lovro’s cheek and gently running his thumb over where Lovro’s shirt has hiked up slightly, “you won’t look at me. Kinda screams ‘guilty’.”
As if to prove a point, Lovro turns around in Ivan’s grip, Ivan’s hands settling on his lower back instead. “I am looking at you.”
“Yeah?”
Lovro swallows. When he meets Ivan’s gaze, there’s undeniable mirth glittering in his eyes. The corner of his mouth twitches, as if he’s trying not to laugh and only just managing. In a bid to prolong, or entirely prevent, this conversation, Lovro opts for the tried and tested strategy of distraction. He leans up, threading his fingers through the hair at the back of Ivan’s head, and presses a firm kiss to Ivan’s infuriating, and inconveniently attractive, smirk.
Ivan kisses him back without hesitation, tongue almost immediately running over the seam of Lovro’s lips, and for a brief moment, Lovro thinks he’s won. Just as he’s about to deepen the kiss, to pull Ivan’s bottom lip between his own, Ivan pulls back with a shit-eating grin.
“Nice try,” he says, tilting his head back so that his mouth is just out of Lovro’s reach, “but it’s not going to be that easy.” Ivan looks awfully pleased with himself, and as much as it suits him, Lovro wants the ground to swallow him up.
He mumbles under his breath, hoping that by some miracle, it’ll be answer enough and Ivan will drop it.
“What was that?” Ivan says, eyes trained on the furious blush that Lovro can feel spreading across his face, moving his hands from Lovro’s back to hook his fingers through his belt loops and pull him forward slightly.
“I’ve had it a while,” Lovro concedes, looking down at the floor. “Since after karaoke.” Karaoke, he says, not: when you took me to your place, played that stupid song and completely altered the trajectory of my life - but it's most definitely implied.
“Before or after?” Ivan says softly after a moment. He doesn’t have to clarify what he means. Before or after. Before or after they watched each other kiss their girlfriends across a crowded room. Before or after Ivan looked at Lovro like he’d hung the stars. Before or after Lovro pushed him away when the fear got too much and fooled Ivan into thinking he didn’t want him too.
“Before.”
“Wow,” Ivan breathes, lifting a hand to run a thumb over Lovro’s cheek. He looks stunned, almost awed, before his face morphs into something far more smug and familiar. “You didn’t even last a week.”
Lovro can’t help but lean forward and bury his face into Ivan’s shoulder, almost melting when Ivan pulls him closer. “Don’t laugh at me. It’s not funny.”
“Oh, of course not,” Ivan says solemnly, thumb tracing circles on Lovro’s back in the way that he knows drives him crazy, “This is very serious stuff. My boyfriend is a secret Josipa Lisac fan and I didn’t know? Do I know anything about you? Is Lovro even your real name?”
“Fuck off,” Lovro groans, removing himself from Ivan’s arms and pacing the narrow stretch between the end of the bed and the wall before ultimately collapsing onto the duvet. And then, because it somehow seems like the most important distinction to make, “I am not a Josipa Lisac fan.”
“Right,” Ivan nods in mock-seriousness, standing at the end of the bed and peering over Lovro with a devastating smile that Lovro wants to kiss right off. “So you bought a vinyl for some unknown reason and never listened to it?”
“Of course I listened to it. Why waste the money if I’m not going to listen to it?”
“So you bought a vinyl so that you could listen to music that you don’t like?”
“Yes.”
Ivan nods, so patient, hands on his hips as he tilts his head. “And what were you doing whilst listening to this vinyl of music you don’t like? Because it can’t have been very enjoyable for you.”
For a very brief moment, Lovro worries he’s somehow missed the fact that his boyfriend is actually an idiot, until he looks up at Ivan’s face and realises he’s being baited.
He covers his face with his hands, in part to hide his blush and in part so that he’s not tempted to look at Ivan. “I was thinking.”
“Thinking?”
“Mhm.”
“About what?” The bed dips and creaks slightly as Ivan settles down next to him, and even though they’re not touching, Lovro feels like his skin is on fire from just the proximity.
“Don’t make me say it.”
He doesn’t see it, but he hears Ivan roll onto his side and feels an arm drape across his stomach, the weight familiar and comforting. “Please?” Ivan says, light and teasing, bordering on a whine, and for reasons that Lovro refuses to think too hard about, that's enough to break him.
“You,” he says, his voice a whisper, somehow finding the bravery to remove his hands from over his face. Ivan is watching him with an unreadable expression. He surely must have known what Lovro’s answer would be, but he looks as if he can’t believe it. Then, he raises his eyebrows in the ridiculously endearing way that he does, a single, quick, up and down movement that seems more like a knee-jerk reaction than something intentional.
“Me?” he muses, a grin splitting his face. “You’re telling me you listen to love songs and think of me?” He waggles his eyebrows suggestively, and Lovro’s stomach flips.
“No!” he says quickly. “I mean, yes. But not like that.” He twists his hands together until Ivan lays his own over them to stop him. It’s something he does a lot, Lovro has noticed, ever since the time they met behind the canteen and Ivan somehow knew that it was exactly what Lovro wanted. Maybe even what he needed. Ivan has always had a way of working out exactly what Lovro wants before he does. There’s a good chance that that’s what this is: that a part of Lovro wants, needs, to come clean about this, and that Ivan is just, however irritatingly, providing the opportunity.
“Ah,” Ivan says, letting his fingers trail across Lovro’s stomach, up and over his chest, “So you don’t think of me like that?” He gives a shy smile, possibly Lovro’s favourite of all Ivan’s smiles, despite how often he teases him about it. “Well, this is awkward, because,” he leans across, just enough, kissing Lovro’s cheek and lingering, “I have to admit that I do think of you like that. But I think you knew that.” Lovro knows that Ivan knows exactly what he’s doing, what he’s doing to him. His stomach flips, skin growing hot, even more so when Ivan fixes his mouth on the underside of Lovro’s jaw, leaving a hot trail of kisses that reaches his neck, before pulling back and looking at Lovro with a smile that’s halfway between self-assured and sheepish.
“I-” Lovro starts. He doesn’t want to lie to Ivan, but the thought of telling the truth - even after Ivan’s own admission - that thinking of Ivan like that is all he seems to do recently, makes him squirm uncomfortably. It’s not like Ivan doesn’t know, God knows how many times they’ve talked about it, and there’s been enough makeout sessions abruptly ended with them lying side by side, trying to catch their breaths and giggling awkwardly when they met each others’ eyes. “I do. Obviously.” He catches a flash of Ivan grinning with teeth in his peripheral vision “But not then. I was just, y’know…”
“You were just?” Ivan isn’t teasing anymore. He sounds curious, almost flustered.
Lovro rolls onto his side so that he’s facing his boyfriend, tracing Ivan’s nose and cheekbones with his finger. “Just thinking about you. About us.”
“What were we doing?”
Lovro flushes. “It’s embarrassing.”
“No it’s not,” Ivan says, lightning quick. “It’s not at all. God,” he catches Lovro’s hand and holds it to his chest after pressing a kiss to his fingertips, “It’s kind of incredible.”
“I thought about us on the Tomos. Ridiculous I know,” Lovro says as Ivan’s mouth falls open slightly and his eyes sparkle with an emotion that Lovro can’t quite name, “since it was something we’d done when we first met. But in my head I got to touch you and hold you like I wanted to. Or, I guess, that’s when I realised I wanted to.”
One moment Ivan is blinking slowly, as if he can’t process Lovro’s words quick enough, and the next, he’s launching himself over to Lovro and kissing him with enough force that Lovro gasps, immediately cradling the back of Ivan’s head and letting Ivan cover his body with his own, propping himself up on his forearms without breaking the kiss. Lovro can’t help but pout slightly when Ivan pulls back and rests his forehead against Lovro’s, their noses slotting next to each other as if they were made for one another, which Lovro is starting to believe might be true. “I knew it,” Ivan says softly, so close that he’s practically speaking into Lovro’s mouth, and Lovro swallows his words like they’re oxygen.
“Knew what?” Lovro asks, stealing and melting into another kiss whilst Ivan isn’t saying anything.
“That you’re a hopeless romantic.”
“Look who’s talking,” Lovro teases, giggling as Ivan kisses his cheeks, one at a time, before pressing a featherlight touch of his lips to his forehead, each eyelid, and finally his lips. “Mr ‘Until You Hear That You Have No Idea What Love Is’.”
In a movement so swift that Lovro doesn’t know it’s happening until it’s over, Ivan rolls them over so that Lovro is above him. He rests one hand on Lovro’s hip and keeps the other on the back of his neck, and when Lovro looks at him, he looks almost nervous. “Do you?” he says quietly.
“Do I what?”
Ivan swallows, looking away as if to hide the beautiful flush that’s covering his cheeks. Lovro runs his thumb along the warm skin. “Do you have an idea of what love is?”
Lovro looks down at the boy below him, unable to ignore the way his heart clenches at the sight, and no longer wishing to. He leans down to kiss him, trying his best to put all the words he wants to say into the way he pulls Ivan’s bottom lip between his teeth, the way he opens Ivan’s mouth with his tongue and is rewarded with the feeling of Ivan’s own tongue against his.
“I didn’t need the song for that.” Lovro relaxes, resting his head on Ivan’s chest and tangling their legs together. “I already had a pretty good idea of it from the minute I saw you.”
Ivan kisses the top of his head. “But a bit of Josipa Lisac never hurt anyone, right?”
“Shut up.”