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Lance brings it up first.
“Have you ever kissed anyone before?” he asks nonchalantly, his arms behind his head. They’re in what might be considered the living room—at least, that’s what it’s been used for the past six months. Lance is lying down on the couch, taking up more than half the space while Keith sits a few feet away. He’d put as much space as he reasonably could between them.
“What?” Keith says, not entirely listening. They’re cooling down, having just finished a sparring match, and Lance’s shirt sticks to him with sweat.
“Have you ever kissed anyone before?”
“...Why?”
He sits up so he’s facing Keith instead of lying down, waving a hand around to get his point across. “Friends are supposed to know that kind of stuff about each other, man. You don’t have to be embarrassed about it, I can even answer back.”
Keith frowns. “I’m not 'embarrassed' about anything.”
“Then you shouldn’t have any problem answering.”
“No, Lance, I haven’t kissed anyone.” He rolls his eyes, but most of it is so he doesn’t have to look at Lance anymore. He’s not embarrassed, not really; there’s nothing wrong with him never having kissed anyone, he thinks. He’d never had much interest in dating while he was at the Garrison, so of course he hasn’t kissed anyone. He just doesn’t like this line of conversation. It makes him think too much about—about Lance, and about kissing in relation to Lance, and he doesn’t like that.
“What, really? Never? Not even, like, a super boring one in middle school?”
“Uh, no?” Keith shifts on the couch a little. “Why’re you so surprised by that?”
“No reason,” Lance says cryptically. After a pause, he continues, “I just would’ve expected you to, you know, have a few exes from high school or something.”
“No,” Keith says again.
“Did you ever date, then?”
“Why do you care so much?”
“I told you, it’s a thing you’re supposed to know about your friends. I mean, I know in excruciating detail anything and everything about Hunk’s love life, and vice versa. I know Pidge’s too, but hers is pretty boring, so.” He shrugs.
“So you want to know mine too.”
“Pretty much.”
Keith huffs. “I already told you. I’ve never dated anyone, and I’ve never kissed anyone. That’s all there is to it.”
Lance frowns. He leans back on the couch, slinging one arm over the back. The two of them are closer now that he’s sitting upright. “You’re worse than Pidge.”
“Sorry I’m not as experienced as you,” Keith huffs. He’s not really upset about it, and he’s never been insecure about his lack of “experience,” but for some reason, he doesn’t like Lance rubbing it in. It bothers him more than he thought it would. Not that he’s going to admit that. “What about you? You said you’d answer too.”
“I was getting there. And I haven’t either.” Lance shrugs like it’s no big deal, but he reads like an open book and he’s clearly insecure about his answer. Keith doesn’t say that he hadn’t expected that answer, that as much as he would’ve teased Lance about that months ago, it isn’t months ago. All he says is, “Huh.”
He wonders what it would be like to kiss someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing, either.
--
It’s after their conversation that it starts.
“It” being Keith’s sudden and inexplicable obsession with—hypothetically—kissing Lance. He thinks about it, not consciously, but it’s there, frequent and odd and very distracting. He’ll space out, and his eyes will wander to Lance sitting next to him. In the living room, in the kitchen, at dinner, when they’re training, when they’re talking. Lance’ll grin, showing teeth, and Keith will want to know what it’s like to kiss someone while they’re smiling. If it’s nice, if it’s weird, if he can feel the other person as their lips stretch into a smile, if he’d smile too.
Or they’ll be arguing, goading each other on and breaking all rules of personal space, and there will be a lull and a silence, and the retort Keith is about to spout will die in his throat because he’s so close to me and what would happen if he just—leaned in right now? How would Lance handle that? Would he kiss back, would he freak out, would he run away? Would he taste differently right after an argument?
Sometimes it’ll be as mundane as passing each other in the hallway and Keith will still think about it. What about when Lance’s lips are chapped? What about after a battle? In the morning, when they’ve just woken up? Before going to bed? At a celebration, in front of hundreds of strangers who view them as heroes? What about then?
Somehow, “I wonder what it would be like to kiss someone” turns into “I wonder what it would be like to kiss Lance.” He blames their conversation for this.
It gets annoying after a while. It’s interfering with his concentration, especially if Lance is in the room. He loses twice to Lance while they’re sparring because every time they’d get close, he’d think about ending the fight here and just—leaning in. He tries to ignore it, but Keith’s curiosity grows with every passing day that he turns away, avoids eye contact, and doesn’t act on the impulse.
--
“Do you want to kiss someone?”
Keith almost drops his Bayard. Lance takes his moment of weakness and ends up disarming him. The sword goes skittering across the training room, and Lance is just looking at him, his face flushed. Keith stares back.
“Looks like I win,” Lance taunts, but he doesn’t sound too happy about it. He retrieves Keith’s Bayard, and when he passes it over, Keith notices how careful he is that their hands don’t brush.
It takes a moment, but Keith finally manages to ask, still catching his breath, “What are you talking about?”
“Forget it,” Lance says hurriedly, already starting towards the door. His face was already red from exertion, but Keith can tell the pink on his ears isn’t from that. “I’ll see you at dinner—“
“Lance!” Keith catches up to him and falters as he’s about to grab Lance’s wrist and tug him back around. But it’s only a second, and he tugs Lance around to face him. It’s a lot gentler than he’d intended it to be. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I told you to just forget about it.”
Keith frowns. “You wouldn’t bring it up if you wanted me to forget about it.”
It’s not even like it was a—a particularly weird question to ask, anyway. Lance’s response is what’s really making Keith nervous. Don’t you ask your friends that? If they have crushes on people or want to kiss people or whatever? And as Lance has made clear, they’re friends. So it shouldn’t be weird. But he’s making it weird, and of course now Keith has to know why.
Lance avoids meeting his eyes. “I just asked if you want to kiss someone. It’s stupid.”
“It’s not that stupid,” Keith mumbles. “Why do you want to know?”
“No reason.”
The expression Keith wears makes it clear that he doesn’t believe that answer for a second. Lance meets his eye for a split second before he glances back away, finding some spot to the left of Keith’s face that’s apparently incredibly interesting.
“Lance,” he says again, sterner this time.
“I mean—I just wanted to know, because, if you do, and I mean—both of us have never kissed anyone, you know? And we’re out in the middle of space billions of light years away from home and Earth and we’re not gonna be back for who knows how long and I don’t know about you but my experience with picking up alien chicks hasn’t gone too well—“
“I noticed,” Keith interjects.
Lance runs a hand through his hair, his Bayard in the other. “Yeah, thanks for that.”
“So,” Keith says, “you want for us to kiss.”
“You don’t have to say it like that—but, I mean, yeah. If you want to put it that way. Yeah.”
Keith is a lot more composed summarizing Lance’s request than he actually feels. He already can’t breathe well, his binder making it hard and his heart rate still up from sparring, but he’s just thankful that he can play his breathing off as from that and definitely not the conversation. But his voice is deceptively steady when he says, “Okay.”
Lance seems to stop breathing. “Okay?” Then he starts again. “What do you mean, ‘okay’? Okay, like, okay, we can do that, or okay, you’ve got your point across and we can stop talking about it?”
“Okay as in, okay, we can do that.”
They look at each other for a moment. It’s the first time this entire conversation that Lance has made eye contact.
“You’re serious,” Lance says.
“I’m serious.” Keith blinks, looking away. He shifts his Bayard from his left hand to his right for the sake of something to do. “I mean, unless you aren’t—”
“No, no, don’t worry, I’m—“ A pause. “I’m, yeah, I’m serious. And you are too?”
“I think we just went over this.”
There’s another one of those horrible, eye-contact-ridden silences, and then Lance is laughing. It’s not even the uncomfortable kind; he’s just laughing, full and happy. Maybe it’s from the ridiculousness of it all, or maybe he’s just glad that Keith said yes. Keith doesn’t know. He manages to smile back, though.
“That’s settled then,” Lance says once he’s stopped laughing. He rubs the back of his neck, his ears still red. “So…when do you want to…?”
“I don’t know. Whenever you want to? You’re the one in charge, I guess.”
That seems to give Lance some of his usual composure back. “Oh, I’m in charge, huh?” he teases, wiggling his eyebrows.
Keith just rolls his eyes and hopes Lance doesn’t notice that he’s blushing. “Don’t make it weird, Lance,” he says.
“It’s already weird. It can’t get worse from here.”
“This was your idea.”
“No, I know,” Lance assures. “But anyway. Now’s…I mean, we’re both, like, super sweaty and gross, so…”
A pause. Keith realizes he’s supposed to say something after that. “After dinner maybe?”
“Yeah. Yeah, that’s fine. After dinner.”
“Alright.”
Lance starts back towards the door. He pauses at the threshold, turning back around and waving a hand towards Keith. “I’ll…see you. After dinner, I mean.”
Keith just nods. Lance almost trips over his own feet getting out.
Once he’s alone, Keith sits, pulls his knees to his chest and lets his head bang against the wall behind him.
“That just happened,” he mumbles to himself. God, this is going to be a train wreck.
--
It’s a train wreck.
At least, the beginning is. First, they can’t decide where to go. Lance wants to go to his room but there’s just something—too weird, too intimate about going there, and Keith would rather do it in his. Lance doesn’t actually have any qualms with going to Keith’s, he’s just a stubborn jerk, so they waste ten minutes arguing over who’s to go to.
Eventually, Lance gives in, throwing his hands into the air dramatically, and they make their way to Keith’s. And that’s a little weird because Keith didn’t clean—he never has anyone in his room, why would he think to?—and he’s never been insecure about his messes, but here he is now, standing in the doorway, shifting awkwardly and hoping Lance doesn’t mind that his bed’s unmade and he’s got dirty clothes covering most of the floor space.
Lance doesn’t say anything about it, thankfully, and only makes his way to the bed, plopping down as if it’s his own. He’s being as casual about the whole thing as he can, but again, Keith reads him easily. Not to mention, he was tense and a little too red during the entirety of dinner. Allura asked him twice if something was wrong before Lance finally managed to go back to acting normally.
“So…” Lance says, drawing out the ‘o’ and glancing around the room. “What now?”
“I don’t know.” Keith feels like he’s said that quite a lot the past few hours. “Do you know how to do this?”
“Kinda.” Lance grins. “I think the first step is for us to not be ten feet away from each other.”
Keith takes a step further into the room, huffing, but pauses as he’s about to sit down on the bed. It’s…a small bed. Not a lot of space. The past couple of weeks, he’s gotten good at finding ways to sit a little further away from Lance, just so his brain will stop conjuring up images he doesn’t want to think about during polite conversation. But he guesses it doesn’t matter now, considering they’re supposed to be making those images a reality. He sits down and tries to relax.
It apparently doesn’t work. “You look like you’re about to throw up.”
“I’m not,” he snaps.
Lance raises an eyebrow. “Defensive.”
“Sorry.” Keith releases a breath, somewhere between a sigh and a huff. “Sorry. I’m just…”
“Yeah. Me too.”
Quiet again.
Lance turns on the bed so he’s sitting sideways, facing Keith. “The second step would probably be to actually look at each other.”
Keith snorts but shifts on the bed. He feels himself relaxing a little. “So what’s the third step?”
Lance shrugs. He’s got both hands on the bedspread, sitting there like he’s not quite sure what to do, and his eyes flicker down to Keith’s lips. “Probably just to go for it.”
“Oh.” Keith’s can hear his heart thumping in his chest. “Okay.”
Neither of them moves for a moment, but eventually, Lance leans in, and Keith’s eyes flutter shut in anticipation. The first kiss misses its mark by a few centimeters, presses to the edge of Keith’s lips, barely brushing. Lance pulls away and after a second, he opens his eyes again. Both of them are blushing and completely unsure what to do next.
Keith says the first thing that comes to mind. “You missed.”
Lance frowns and looks away, crossing his arms over his chest. It’s supposed to show that he’s offended, probably, but the movement just looks like it’s for comfort. “It’s harder than it looks, okay? You try then, if you’re so good at it!”
“I never said I was good at it,” Keith mumbles, but he kisses Lance. He doesn’t miss that time, and he counts it in his head as his real first kiss.
It’s soft. Their noses squish together, and after a second, he figures out to tilt his head and that’s when it’s actually sort of enjoyable. He had barely felt the first one, but this one is solid, closer to what he sees in movies. Lance figures out what to do with his hands, and they settle on Keith’s shoulders—hesitantly at first, then with more confidence. One kiss turns into another. Keith doesn’t remember getting closer, but he feels his legs brushing Lance’s, feels how little space there’s left between them.
Keith pulls away, just enough to see Lance’s face. His eyes are closed, but he opens them slowly, staying lidded. His face is flushed, and he looks a little out of breath. Keith can relate.
“How was that?” Keith asks. He hopes that Lance doesn’t catch the way his voice cracks slightly on the first syllable.
“That was…” Lance pauses. He still looks out of breath, but a small grin starts at the corner of his lips. Keith thinks again about kissing someone as they’re smiling, and he realizes with a start that he could do that now, and it might be okay.
He doesn’t let Lance finish that thought. Keith kisses him again, and a grin really does spread that time, teeth and all.
Keith smiles too.