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Sea animals living on land. He isn't home in any place, now, and he'll have to make one. Everything has always been given to him but he didn't want any of it and it's gratuitous but not gratifying. Without the wanting the having is meaningless.
---
Kris looks at Adam. He's not sure about this roommate thing; it's an awfully big house but they still have to share, apparently, but Adam doesn't share his reservations. They've been playing twenty questions (so you're a newlywed, right?) for the past couple of hours and Kris has always been praised for his patience but he's bored with this."Yeah, why?"
Adam shrugs, disinterested and looking at his necklaces critically. "Just making conversation. Do you miss her?"
"Look, why don't you tell me something about your life."
Adam smiles. "I thought you'd never ask."
They were children. Not really, of course, it's been less than a decade, but he thinks he was young and stupid and that's youth, he knows. But also, it's been only less than a decade and he never could have thought he'd go that long, for anything or anyone. He hasn't yet, as irony would have it, but this time he wants to; the death of that ideal is painful, but he's well aware that it is past time. At the passing it is proven it was only ever a fancy but he's learned his role now and he'll play it out. He's older, not wiser, but older is going to be enough, because he does have the wisdom to know it won't be easy and that gets him the will and halfway.
---
Kris looks at Adam. He's not sure what he was thinking, lying to himself for weeks and months (not years, he remembers when Katy held this draw for him) but he didn't notice when his disregard for his wife rose high enough that he felt like he was drowning in it but he did notice when Adam was a shock of different and Kris doesn't remember, right now, how he explained to himself the pull and push and presence bringing them to here, now, and the fact that Kris and Adam aren't either of them thinking no.
So he's over and under and around and beside Adam and they're both laughing and breathing and living and it wasn't Providence that brought them here but something bigger, Kris thinks, because his marriage to Katy is holy and this is breaking that and it feels more than right.
The dice fell and they won and they won until they lost and they're still losing but he knows the dice are still rolling, somewhere, and he's counting on that because that's all he has left. He feels his age, not so great but still sometimes too long, in the lines of his shoulder and his neck where the chair pushes back against him because the whole world is fighting this but he thinks he may be winning again.
---
Kris looks at Adam, sleeping, and tucks himself down and in and resigns to hiding and running because he's never fought, he doesn't know how, but he's not going to stop this. It will hurt him one day, he knows, probably soon, and it will hurt Adam and Katy and his family and possibly everyone who knows them right now, but he's not going to stop this.
Can't, if he's going to stop lying to himself, so he does, finally, and he's drowning again but empathy is worse than apathy and he doesn't know who he'd save from hurt if he could. He loves in more than one definition and the ink's running that he wrote on them both to tell him which is which.
The pages were sodden messes, for all of them, and it hurt more and less and exactly as he'd thought it would. The shame was the worst, he knows, because it was the one sin he could ascribe only to himself.
---
Kris looks at Adam. He thinks that maybe this is all going to be okay, perfect even, because Adam's smiling at him and he can't do anything but let himself be pulled into the closet.
Adam presses him to the wall, presses into him. It's not fun or new or exciting. It's like breathing, or gasping, drawing in breath after drowning.
It's when he comes that he first understands that there's something wrong with a life being lived if every comparison to the feeling it brings is death.
Life kills everyone. He's only just realized that and it's the fact that weighs him down more than the living. If it all means nothing, what's the difference between meeting in the middle (preservation, shame) and taking what you want (breath, shame) if all of life ends up nowhere?
---
Kris looks at Katy.
Then he looks away.
He was too much of a coward (shame) to do anything but leave in the middle of the night. He's left so many times.
Lover. Love. Lover. Love.
He's not sure which one he left first, any more.
---
Kris can't look at Adam, with thousands of miles and years (he thinks) apart.
"I thought you'd come."
Kris is drowning, again, but it's not Katy's fault and he wishes it were an epiphany that life would always be painful, somehow, but it's a deadening throb, low in him somewhere, and he can't deal with this. Never could
"I told her." Adam reaches for him, and Kris can't let himself be enough of a coward to accept comfort. Won't. "I have to stay with her."
Adam is just quiet, closed and tense and an unhappy smile sounding over the line. "Yeah."
And he says goodbye (though Kris didn't expect him to). "Have a good life."
It was more than just a farewell.
The awkwardness from that moment had never gone away. They'd danced around it, never spoken about it.
Never spoken.
It was a year after that farewell that everything finally, finally broke.
---
Kris walks into Hollywood International Airport, shakes his head at lights and antiseptic smells. He doesn't know where to go but he figures forward will have to be good enough.
He stops.
"I didn't think you'd come."
But Adam falls into step beside him.