Chapter Text
Aaron would have liked to say that everything went back to normal after that, but it obviously did not. Kevin knew now, and there was really no going back from that. There was no going back from the best sex Aaron had ever had in his life. How was he supposed to look at Kevin the same? And god, how was Kevin supposed to look at him the same?
It was easier just not to look at each other at all.
That was mostly what they did. There was no way to avoid each other completely, but Aaron had told Kevin to leave him alone, and Kevin had listened. They went to practice together, rode in the car together, and spent evenings with the team and their ragtag group of friends, but they went out of their way to barely acknowledge each other. It wasn’t that they were rude, exactly, they just lost the familiarity and closeness that they’d slowly and painstakingly acquired. It was like they went back in time to years before, when they were nothing but tense, wary acquaintances.
Andrew and Neil knew as well, but they didn’t mention it. They didn’t act like anything had changed at all, and for that Aaron was infinitely grateful. He didn’t know whose benefit their discretion was for, but he didn’t care, not when it was making his life so much easier. Somehow Nicky had missed the entire production that morning which meant he was still out of the loop, and the rest of the team was as well. This was a stifled and painful secret held just between Aaron, Andrew, Kevin, and Neil, which may have sucked, but was better than the whole world knowing.
Time passed forward. Days turned to weeks. Everything was the same, except for the way that everything was different. Aaron just couldn’t shake the lingering embarrassment about the whole ordeal, and the underlying anger at himself for being so ineffective and disastrous as always.
But most of all, he was sad because he missed his best friend. Somewhere in the span of one of the worst years of his life, he’d found the person who made it all feel okay. The person who made him laugh and smile and feel lighter than he could ever remember feeling before. And now that person was gone, ripped away through the fault of no one but his own. He’d gotten greedy and reached for something he didn’t deserve, and these were the consequences.
About three weeks after the incident, their group was crowded in the common room of Andrew, Kevin, and Neil’s dorm hanging out. Aaron had wanted to bail, but he hadn’t in the service of trying to behave as normally as possible. He didn’t want Kevin to think he was as affected by this whole thing as he was, and he didn’t want Nicky to know anything was amiss at all. So he sat on the couch, trying desperately to focus on the video game he was playing with Andrew instead of the thousands of pieces of invisible string tugging him toward the person sitting only a foot away.
He was just trying to pull himself back into the game so Andrew would stop miserably kicking his ass when Nicky said, “When is Thea getting here?”
Aaron’s hands stopped moving on his controller. Andrew killed his character in about 0.2 seconds, but Aaron didn’t care. Not when he was playing back the words Nicky had just said and the things they implied.
“Thea’s coming?” he asked, putting every ounce of his energy into keeping his voice steady.
Kevin turned and met his eyes, and the look in them was vacant and cold. It was how he’d looked at Aaron for over a year, but not in so long. It made Aaron’s chest hurt just to see it.
“Well, she is my girlfriend. So,” Kevin replied.
Aaron’s stomach twisted into knots. Of course Thea was Kevin’s girlfriend. He’d known that. He’d been the one to remind Kevin of that fact, actually. But it stung to be reminded. To be reminded yet again that their drunken hookup changed nothing. Was nothing more than a mistake.
Kevin’s cold eyes left Aaron and turned back to Nicky. “She gets here Thursday. She’ll come to the game Saturday and then leave Sunday night.”
“She staying here?” Nicky asked.
“No, we’re getting a hotel room.”
More knots in Aaron’s stomach. More reminders. This time not just of Thea’s presence in Kevin’s life, but of the things the two of them did with each other. Would do with each other again.
He zoned out the rest of the conversation and went back to his own room to sleep earlier than usual. He just couldn’t get his hands to stop shaking, or stop the tightening in his chest. He couldn’t sit there with Kevin, thoughts spiraling out of control. He thought if he did, he might just go insane.
Thursday came faster than Aaron would have liked. He went to practice, and he tried to pretend Kevin wasn’t there. He changed out in the locker room and rode home in the Maserati, and he tried to pretend he couldn’t feel Kevin sitting next to him. He went to his room and he put on headphones and he tried to ignore the fact that Kevin was probably next door packing up a bag to head to a hotel. To meet Thea. To touch her and kiss her and sleep with her, because of course that was what he’d do. She was his girlfriend, and Aaron had no right to be upset by that fact. He had no right to be upset at all.
Aaron tried to go to sleep sometime around nine, but it didn’t stick. His mind was whirring at a thousand miles per hour, images swirling behind his eyes so vivid they nearly burned. Thea’s hands in Kevin’s hair. Kevin’s hands on her chest. His lips wrapped around her nipple. Her lips wrapped around his cock. Kevin moaning the way he’d moaned when Aaron had touched him.
It was suffocating him.
After god knows how many hours, he finally resigned himself to the fact that he wasn’t getting any rest. He slipped out of his bed and creeped out of the bedroom, quietly so as to not wake Nicky or Matt, and headed out into the common room. He didn’t know what he was going to do; he just knew he couldn’t lay there any longer thinking those awful thoughts. He ended up turning on another episode of Grey’s Anatomy, because even after all this time, he still wasn’t caught up.
The first episode was ending just as he heard a knock on the door.
He wasn’t sure what he was expecting. Andrew coming to say something cryptic to him, or Josten coming to torment him some more. Maybe Dan coming to get something she’d left there. There were many possibilities that Aaron would have considered reasonable.
What he hadn’t been expecting was to open the door and find Kevin standing on the other side.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, his voice laced with disbelief.
Kevin pushed forward into the room, shutting the door behind him, and then he looked up to meet Aaron’s eyes. The coldness in them from before was gone, and instead they looked like they were burning. There was so much contained in those eyes, even if Aaron didn’t have the skills to decode what they meant.
“I broke up with Thea.”
Huh?
“You what?” Aaron said.
“I broke up with Thea,” Kevin repeated like the issue was that Aaron hadn’t heard him.
“Why?” Aaron squeaked.
Kevin ran a hand through his hair in frustration, making it even messier than it’d been when he came in.
“Because I could barely even touch her,” he growled. “It was like every time her hands were on me, all I could think about was the way you’d touched me. Every time she kissed me, all I could think about was the way you’d kissed me. God, Aaron, it was like I could still taste you.”
Kevin sounded angry. He sounded defeated. He sounded like the words were being wrenched out of him, desperately and furiously, like he was powerless to keep them inside.
“I haven’t wanted to be with Thea for so long,” Kevin added. “I’m not even sure we even were together, really, but it didn’t matter because I didn’t want her. I wanted you, and then I fucking got you, and then you were gone, and I thought I could do it. I thought I could just ignore it and pretend and be with her instead, but I couldn’t. I can’t, Aaron.”
Aaron could barely wrap his mind around all the information Kevin was dumping on him. It was overwhelming and disorienting and shocking and–
“You wanted me?”
“Yes,” Kevin said, lightning-fast and definitive.
“Since when?” he asked, his voice hushed and shy.
“I have no idea. Months. Probably longer. But when the trial was happening and there was a chance I was going to lose you, that was when I realized.”
Months. The trial. Kevin had been wanting Aaron for as long as Aaron had been wanting him. It was unbelievable.
Kevin huffed. He looked down at the ground and took a breath. And then he looked back at Aaron.
“I know that you…you don’t want me like that. But I need you to know that that night wasn’t a mistake to me. It wasn’t because I was drunk or because I was horny. It was because I wanted you. Because I want you. Still.”
Aaron’s heart stopped beating in his chest. Everything he’d ever wanted was standing right in front of him, and Aaron didn’t know how to take it.
Well, he figured a good place to start was with the truth.
“It wasn’t a mistake to me, either,” he said finally. “Not at all.”
“It wasn’t?” Kevin echoed, his voice uncertain.
“No.” Aaron took a cautious step towards him. “I’d wanted you. For an embarrassingly long time.” His voice dropped to a whisper as he added, “I want you, too. Still, Kevin.”
He watched as Kevin’s eyes dilated, as his tongue darted out to lick his lips. “You want me?” he asked.
“Yes.”
Kevin was across the room in a second, pulling Aaron into his arms and crashing their lips together with the intensity of a man who’d been starving. The last time they’d done this, they’d been hidden beneath the cover of drunkenness, but they were both dead sober now. There was nothing to hide behind. There was just Kevin’s lips on his and the absolutely unbelievable realization that he wanted this too. The unbelievable realization that Aaron got to actually have this.
Kevin walked them backward until he was gently pressing Aaron down onto the couch, climbing over him to pin him with his whole body, lips still working furiously against each other. Aaron lost minutes, hours, days like that, with a pure feeling of happiness blossoming in his chest.
They kissed for a very long time. After what Aaron assumed must have been hours, he broke away and said, “Kevin, don’t you think we should maybe stop?”
“Nope,” Kevin replied, pressing his lips to the spot below Aaron’s ear that made him see sparks. “I want to kiss you until I can never get the taste of you off my tongue.”
And really, who was Aaron to say no?