Work Text:
Had Kevin ever put any amount of time into thinking about what a gay person would hypothetically be like, he wouldn’t have come up with a person like Connor McKinley. Connor was much like Kevin; similar build, similar height, a smile like Kevin’s, a temperament similar to Kevin’s, a Mormon like Kevin, and all in all, a man like Kevin.
No, Connor wasn’t what Kevin expected when he thought about someone gay, or at least someone who had gay thoughts. Connor found it very important to focus on the distinction between the two, and Kevin wasn’t about to argue. Thoughts and actions could, hypothetically, denote different things and even though Kevin had always acted on his feelings, wearing his heart on his crisp white shirt sleeve, he could respect Connor’s decisions, if not understand them.
And yes, Connor did embody some clichés; he danced and he sang and his suitcase was pink and he always smiled at Kevin in a certain way. But, that was who Connor was, and not what he was.
People aren’t as they seem, they’re simply as they are.
Becoming less diluted, more pure under the heat of the Kitguli sun and the pressures of a crumbling Church. Like a diamond.
They became the exemplaries of themselves after it crumbled, and they were forced to start anew.
Connor stopped using the caveat of thoughts. Kevin started doubting.
People seemed different, but they weren’t. They simply were.
Arnold had seemed annoying when Kevin first met him, all those years ago back at the training center before everything started, and everything ended, and everything began again. And in truth Arnold was annoying, even after everything – but that wasn’t the sum of his character or his heart.
He was annoying, but he was Kevin’s best friend, and also a person of unconventional reason and logic, and such kindness.
(And a piece of paper tucked away in a worn copy of The Hobbit, worn and old and loved, and lent to Kevin with gusto, with words and acronyms explaining why he was and that comforted him to know. Kevin had tucked the paper back where he had found it and never mentioned it, instead asking whether Bilbo or Thorin was the real hero, knowing that the answer would last for hours.)
And Arnold might have been annoying, but Kevin hadn’t been the nicest person either back then. He had changed, but also he hadn’t. Thinking back to that time it was as though Kevin was looking at a picture through frosted glass and then without, the same, except different.
America was both busier and quieter than Africa, New York and Kitguli were more similar than Kevin could have thought before experiencing both. Friendships had been forged, and enemies made and reconciled. And then some things couldn’t change.
Connor was still who he had always been, before admitting it. Kevin could still be cruelly kind. Arnold and Nabulungi were still in love, almost immediately at first sight. That first look, that first smile. Kevin had been there to witness the making and shaping of Arnold’s heart.
Arnold hadn’t been very good at resisting temptation. He had said as much, phrasing it as greed. Arnold had always been greedy, for friends, for people to love him, for people to choose him.
Privately, Kevin didn’t constitute that as greed, but he understood Arnold’s concerns about temptation.
Kevin had always excelled at resisting temptation.
Nabulungi had been pretty – was made more beautiful by happiness and Arnold, Arnold made her radiant, but so was his mom, stunning and smiling, and Connor too in a way. If men could be pretty. Kevin supposed that they could, there was something in Connor’s attitude, in his grin and his talents that could only be pretty. Kevin wondered whether that made him pretty. Well, he had always excelled in many things, why, if a man could be pretty then Kevin was quietly confident that he would be too.
No, Kevin had never been tempted. There had been Jayne Young back in high school – black hair, pale skin, looked like Snow White. And, nothing.
At the time Kevin had supposed that that was good, that he was being good and adhering to the rules. But now, looking back through the lens of Arnold’s giddy joy at existing in the same space as Nabulungi, how his face flushed and he clapped his hands in excitement at her presence, perhaps it simply wasn’t the same. There hadn’t been anything there.
Temptation had been a blank.
To say that Kevin had resisted temptation was factually inaccurate. It was like congratulating himself for never having crashed a jumbo jet when he didn’t even know how to fly a plane.
Kevin had always been competitive, and the solution was clearly at hand. Kevin had to tempt himself in order to prove he could resist that same temptation. (Seeking temptation to prove himself as able to resist temptation, was a virtue, and not a sin.)
His relationship with the Church was strained, this much was true. Made into a solid truth by avoiding the Church where he could – there was such a wide world in New York, that he had so many things to do, people to see, lives to live instead of going back to the Temple. But that couldn’t change who he was. And Kevin had challenged himself.
Kevin had known pretty women, beautiful women, and men. There were pretty men in the world. Objective fact dictated this, and Connor. Well, strangers smiled at Connor on the street. And sometimes he smiled back.
The goal was to ultimately resist, and if Heavenly Father existed then he certainly didn’t mind Connor being what he was, and thus he wouldn’t mind Kevin trying out all the options, just to see if he could resist.
Kevin thought about many things, and about Connor. He was kind and clever, if abrasive sometimes, and his eyes twinkled and he was always very familiar, comforting pats and gestures, and that had always been so soothing. Even back in America, it was good to have Connor around.
Kevin liked having Connor around, in a way that was different to say, Arnold and Nabulungi. There was a comfortable silence with all of his friends, but perhaps it was the casual intimacy that Connor extended to everyone. Kevin had never been an incredibly tactile person growing up – and he was still growing, he knew that now, he wasn’t who he used to be, or who he thought he was, he was learning what it meant to be Kevin Price. And part of being Kevin Price, he now knew, was to want to be close to Connor.
And he thought about using that to his advantage. Connor was kind, tactile and on a different level of friendship than Arnold. He was also gay. Somehow it didn’t feel too much like an imposition to try and think about Connor in a way that he would never think about Arnold. Connor would understand, he always supported Kevin’s attempts to better himself, this would just be an extension of that support. An extension that Connor would never, ever find out about.
He tried to think about what it would be like to have sex with Connor McKinley. Hypothetical scenarios which necessitated sex, and then the physical process. Kevin lay in bed of an evening, arms folded across his chest and he thought. He was imaginative, if not to Arnold’s level so he thought that he’d have a good idea of what was supposed to go on, at least in theory, and the thoughts that emerged, the scenarios which he thought of alone and in a cold bed were clinical, practical, a means to an end, but nothing inspiring .
He knew what should happen.
It just didn’t.
Temptation, it seemed, was harder to grasp than anticipated.
It didn’t stop him from watching Connor, looking at him out of the corner of his eye and wondering what if, though. As though thinking about thinking about it would cause something, anything to happen.
Kevin didn’t fail often.
The problem was, Kevin realised, was that as he was looking, he was also being watched.
It had been weeks of Kevin trying and failing to be tempted, but looking, looking anyway. Looking and wanting to want, and looking to see if there was a secret to it. Arnold and Nabulungi spent half their lives just admiring the other. Perhaps that was the key. That it wasn’t the action, but the looking that made it so.
Kevin started when Connor sat down opposite him, hands cradling a coke. Kevin’s coffee had gone cold, and he hadn’t noticed Connor walk over to him.
“Elder Price,” and Connor only called him that half wistfully and half in jest, although he looked deadly serious now, “are you attracted to me?”
“No,” said Kevin, decisively. And even though it was the right answer, Kevin blushed and looked away, as though he was lying.
“Oh,” Connor said, face paling even as his smile widened, “that’s good.”
“Not for want of trying though.”
Kevin crumpled, Kevin explained. It was like a tidal flow of emotions. And for that moment, for a moment when they were just boys, just friends sitting together and talking, it was like they were back, back in the time before when Kevin’s thoughts were entirely ordered around the Church, and when it was Connor’s responsibility to take on all the pains of the world onto his own browbeaten shoulders and to make them all better. They both sat up straighter, hands falling from their rule-breaking beverages, almost unconsciously.
As though the unburdening of Kevin Price was a holy mission.
“Let me get this straight,” Connor said lacing his fingers together on the table between them, with a face of composure and the stance of a District Leader, “You’re trying to force yourself into gay thoughts?”
Kevin shrugged, caught out and noticing the inconsistencies in his logic when delivered to him organically. It seemed… contrived, and yet.
“No, just… any thoughts. Otherwise how else would I know if I could resist them?”
“Oh,” Connor repeated but with more conviction this time.
And then he unlaced his fingers, shoulders dropping back into Connor-his-friend as opposed to Elder McKinley, his district leader.
Sometimes they still all deferred to Connor on house decisions, on foolish things like who should have to call their landlord, or who needed to settle an argument about taking the garbage out. They were trying not to, trying to remove the weight of responsibility. But old habits died hard.
Sometimes Kevin still heard Connor mutter ‘turn it off’ under his breath. Things changed, but then they didn’t. People were simply as they were, for better or for worse.
Connor sounded almost small when he next spoke.
“Why me?”
Kevin didn’t want to say that it was because Connor was pretty, although, at that moment it was all that he could think to say. Because what sort of logic was that, but, turned around that didn’t sound like Kevin had been avoiding temptation at all. Instead, thinking of his reasoning for choosing Connor, Connor, his friend and one of the few people who understood this mad world of transition from there to here, that sounded like finding temptation and sinking head first into it. Connor was pretty, but, that wasn’t why.
“Because I like you and you’re my friend, and I know that Arnold or Nabulungi would be uncomfortable with something like this and I’d be uncomfortable thinking about them,” and here Kevin hesitated, concerned, suddenly about hurting Connor’s feelings. Connor was on a precipice of sorts, jawline taut, eyes shining but still, he was waiting, waiting for Kevin’s judgement, but he continued. He had to. “I can’t think about you like that, even though I’m trying to and I don’t even know if I’d want to.”
“Kevin,” Connor started, eyes darting from Kevin’s face, to his mug and back down to his own hands – a flight or fight response, Connor was about to make a decision, Kevin should have thought about something else, someone else, because now everything was going to change. But things don’t change, they stay the same thing – better, or broken – but the same, until they were gone. Kevin wasn’t ready for this reality to be gone.
“Kevin, listen to me. Feelings, temptation, certain thoughts… lust, whatever it is that you think you need to be feeling right now. That isn’t something you can force. When I first started having my-” Connor paused, taking a mouthful of what must be flat cola by now, and Kevin knew that he was avoiding the word. A word that Connor had come to embrace, but he was avoiding the word gay as though not to spook Kevin. It would have been a kindness, but Kevin could only see how uncomfortable the self-censoring was making Connor himself.
“- thoughts,” Connor continued, “I was eleven. I wasn’t thinking about lust, or temptation as you call it. I was just being me. All of that, it came later. It wasn’t forced. That’s not how people work, Kevin. It has to be about what you want , not what you think you should want. I learnt that the hard way.”
Kevin sat impassively still, letting his mind do the moving – leaping from thought to thought at a speed that he was sure wasn’t reflected in his face. But his lips twitched a little, and he saw how that motion eased Connor’s shoulders back more. The tension lessened.
What he wanted. He’d wanted to prove that he was better than temptation, that Kevin Price could do anything. But that may have been the token objective, but he hadn’t gone about it in a logical way for that to have been his motivation at all.
Connor would make an excellent counselor.
“I want to be more than friends, I think, I want to be with you just not with you. ”
Connor nodded, determined. And there it was, that threat of change in the air.
“Okay, tell me if at any stage you don’t want this, but, this stuff isn’t necessarily theoretical Kevin. Can I kiss you?”
Kevin would always remember that he was the one to lean forward first, cutting off Connor’s momentum and the tail end of his question. The table was between them, and one of Connor’s hands was lightly gripping at his sleeve. It may well have been around his heart.
It was a gentle kiss, neither short nor long, neither wet nor dry, neither aggressive nor passive.
It was surely, in every case, to Kevin like a kiss. He had no words to describe it, no point of reference or understood intended meaning. It was like flying a jumbo jet.
“Just that,” Kevin said, muffled by the proximity of Connor’s breath. When Connor breathed out, Kevin breathed in. It was invigorating. He hadn’t been able to imagine that. It was a richer form of hedonism, more active and more intimate. And thoroughly enough. He could experience life from that alone, the ghosting of Connor’s smile.
“Okay Kevin, we’ll do just that.”