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When the blur of the action dissipates into heavy breathing and the aftertaste of chaos, Lance watches Keith hold onto his sword, and he feels – horror.
And just as suddenly, he can't believe he hadn't experienced this second-hand terror before. The sword is covered in blood and still Keith holds it, turning his head around the scene, the deathbed playground scene. Shiro calls him, and Keith walks over to him, sidestepping mechanic rubble and bodies his sword slashed into just minutes ago. His grip on the handle doesn't loosen; he doesn't wipe the dripping blood. The color of dark red looks indistinguishable from human blood. Lance's ears are ringing.
Keith is now talking with Shiro. They turn around in unison toward the foreign black ship that crashed to the side, just where it's blocking the mountain view. The peach-colored sunset behind it is turning destruction into a silhouette. The blade glistens a brilliant blinding gleam, just for a second, when it faces the right way, as Keith uses it to point at something. Mechanically, Lance's head follows its motion. His eyes cross the line between its shark-edge point, across the wavering air, the setting dust, the golden sunlight, until they land on the mess of rocks, organic matter, and metal parts.
Here, Lance gets confused – standing too far to hear what they are talking about, he can't tell what they're pointing at. Instead of trying to figure it out, he drops his bayard on the ground – gently, gently, as if to counteract its former violence – and then he drops his hands on the numb muscle above his knees and lets his head hang low and lets himself breathe in and breathe out as the planet of destruction moves around its star.
“Lance,” Shiro calls. Footsteps approach, one by one by one. A hand lands between his shoulder blades. “Are you okay?”
Lance takes the question for what it is: almost rhetoric. Or at least: skewed and distorted enough that the question becomes unrecognizable as its surface presentation. What Shiro means is, is it tolerable? Are you tolerating it? Is your body still in working order?
He thinks, my bayard is dirty, it will never be clean again. It's an object that belongs to me, only me, and now it's dirty. He lets the feeling of loss take over. It's easier to think about an object than about himself.
Keith throws his sword on the ground next to where Lance's retracted sniper gun lies in its subtle form. Lance can't help but stare.
He wants to lie down. It would be so easy. His knees are already waiting for the cutting of tension. He would fold backward until he's facing the sky, until he can pretend there is nothing but the sky, and he could pretend the star setting behind the mountain range is his sun, and perhaps he is home, and the breeze is less dusty and more perforated by the rustling of trees. If he lies still enough, he could pretend he's wearing nothing at all, or at least something else and not the aluminum plates of his armor. He could do it if he wanted. The urgency of the moment has given way to a specific brand of stillness Lance is coming to know well. He could lie motionless, and as if before falling asleep, he would lose his sense of proprioception. He would welcome the loss of his sensory self with open arms under the open sky.
“Lance,” Shiro says.
He straightens his back fast enough to give himself a headrush. Then, without preamble, he turns to Keith to find him already looking at Lance. The impenetrable sharpness of Keith's eyes makes him push his shoulder blades even closer together, stand up taller. He stares back, expressionless, in a silent answer to what he imagines Keith is thinking.
Don't be dramatic, Keith tells him in his head, even as the image in front of him stays quiet. Lance responds with, how can you do it? My weapon is so much more subtle than yours, even if the end result is the same, we are fundamentally different. We both create desolation with our hands, but I stay further away, and you do it from so close up, your eyes so intimately connected with the process of destruction. How can you do it?
But nothing about Keith has ever been subtle. He's an all-or-nothing agent. In comparison, Lance makes a habit of evading dichotomies. Next to Keith's determination, it sometimes feels like he can't make up his mind. Whereas Lance takes a million steps, one in each direction, hyper-aware of his possibilities, Keith's legs take him record-high with just a couple of strides. That, Lance identifies, is the root of his genius.
Metaphorically, Lance spits into the hand that offers to help him up from the ground. In reality, he's already standing; he prevented that very scenario in due time. In reality, he tells Shiro and Keith that he's fine; he picks up his bayard and cracks the tension out of his neck. He makes a display of his collectedness. Keith's eyes continue to stray to his. Lance continues to let the gaze sweep over him in tandem with the gusts of dusty wind.
*
It's only a couple of hours later that Lance starts getting impulsive thoughts related to fucking Keith. More accurately, he thinks about how he wouldn't want to fuck him just as Keith starts feeling unwell.
They have been paired up to walk along the canyon, all along the crevices up until they reach the entrance to the cave system, to scan the geographic properties of the landscape. Each of them is holding a palm-sized scanner. Every now and then they stop and take a scan, ducking under cave rooftops and walking around sandstone pillars. Ironically, Lance has the American national anthem playing in his mind all along.
“I'm feeling very hot, suddenly,” Keith says, sounding irritated and uncomfortable. It comes so out of nowhere that it takes Lance by surprise. As much as he's almost too close to forgetting he's not crawling around the Grand Canyon on a summer day, it's not actually hot outside. The air is fresh in a foreign, chalky way.
“It's not that hot,” Lance says, because for him it's true and because he enjoys being difficult.
To his demise, Keith doesn't acknowledge him. Instead, he grabs his jacket and pulls it off with enough force Lance almost expects the fabric to rip. It doesn't seem to help; Keith's eyebrows keep wavering in a dissatisfied oceanic movement.
“Calm down,” Lance raises his eyebrows at the sudden action. He looks up at the too-white sun. “Sheesh.”
“I feel like I'm burning.” Keith lifts the hem of his t-shirt and flaps it back and forth, back and forth.
Lance involuntarily becomes transfixed by the vague impression of skin he gets, confusing and short-lasting, like light through a double-slit experiment. And then he becomes the involuntary recipient of a new vision, one where his body becomes intricately linked with Keith's skin and limbs. He thinks, I wouldn't really want to have sex with him because he can be so detached when his attention is not captured fully. Keith's scope of care is limited to a neatly confined itemized list. Lance will never be so organized. What if they had sex and at the end, the detachment would leave him feeling hollow, as if they hadn't done anything at all, like the time hasn't passed, or as it has but the actions contained within their time frame are as good as two-dimensional printouts, moments existing without any substance. Lance would feel like a sell-out. And it would be him who has to deal with the leftover liquids. Or even worse, he would have to watch Keith deal with it because Keith is practical like that, he does what needs to be done, and Lance would lie still and watch and feel terrible.
So really, what he's thinking is: if you get Keith's attention onto you successfully, then perhaps sex with him is not so terrible at all. But this really, really isn't what he should be thinking at this moment. He checks his surroundings, but he just took a scan, so he lets his hand return to its idle position.
“Hey,” he starts, a master of distraction. “You know what I've thought before? At unpredictable times, kind of? When I – don't take your shirt off,” he says, lighting-fast.
“I won't,” Keith snaps.
He has a restless energy about him. Lance is used to having only a fraction of Keith's attention. It's a hard-won thing, a delicate energy, unless you are the right type of person. Like at a job interview, Lance feels lacking.
So really, maybe he would do it. Maybe he wants to. He thinks Keith is so intelligent, and as much as he is usually unavailable, he can be so incredibly focused, and Lance thinks if he got all this attention to himself, even if it's coming from one single person, he would die. And Keith has this way of smiling at you right at the moment when you least expect it, but need it the most. He's so unaware, but he's also a mind reader, or else is Lance just so easy to read? He tries to make himself interesting, he's tried to be mysterious, but God knows he wants to be split open by a watchful sharp gaze and devoured, all of him, his beating heart and his horrible thoughts. He's not like Keith; mystery doesn't come naturally to him.
He goes on. “Sometimes when I'm flying Blue I think I'd be fine with dying. Like, I would accept it in my final moment. If I knew I was going to die.”
“Me too,” Keith says.
“No," Lance looks at him, dissatisfied with the reception. “I usually think it would be very tragic. I think of my mother and my sister and my empty fucking room in my mother's beautiful house and then I have to stop thinking about it.”
The sky is so blue it could be almost Earth. Lance knows for a fact it never gets as saturated, though; he always researches the atmosphere before stepping foot on a planet. Or better yet, he researches the subjective experience of it. Of course, residents of every planet think their sky is beautiful, but he's grown up a picky eater, and he's too ambitious for his own good, so the skies never satisfy him fully. The missing piece stays outside reach.
“I think about myself as a teenager,” he squats down, still examining the sky, the pink clouds occupying it like candy disease. Then he lets his balance slip until he is sitting on the ground.
Then, finally, he turns towards Keith again. “Sit down,” he pats the rocky surface. “Stop moving. You can also remove your shoes if you're that hot.”
Keith follows him to the ground, but he keeps his shoes on.
“Anyway, I remember what I was like as a teenager. I understood much less about the world than I do now, and yet I was so confident. It's actually unbelievable how confident I was.”
Keith throws himself back, which is a good idea because the rocks underneath are cool.
“The rocks are not warm, so it can't be that hot,” Lance tells him. “I don't know why you're feeling so hot.”
“That's what I'm saying,” Keith murmurs into the space between his mouth and the sand. Lance almost wishes he would glare; at least that would involve a sort of commitment. “It will probably pass.”
“Okay.” Then it's quiet. Too soon, he can't stand the stiff silence anymore. “I'm usually strongly against monologue-style conversations, but I get anxious if my company is too quiet.” In the face of being in charge of the conversation, he's suddenly comfortable with being confessional. “And I'm also generously trying to distract you from your imaginary heat.”
Keith folds the hems of his trousers. Lance wonders if the additional exposure to air even counteracts the exposure to direct sunlight.
“Anyway, I was so ambitious as a teenager. If teenage me saw me die, regardless of the cause, no matter how heroic, he would think it was unbelievably tragic. Like, all this effort for nothing? For it to end, just like that? All my studying for exams and building my family relationships with my problematic aunt just for this?”
He picks up a rock and throws it into a crevice. Instead of skipping or sliding, the rock lodges itself into the sand, like a small meteor crater. “I still feel like this most of the time. Maybe it's narcissistic to think this, I don't know. But every now and then I feel like it would be perfectly calm to die. Like there's not much to it.”
“I feel like this all the time,” Keith says.
“That's not healthy, Keith.”
Keith pulls his hair back as if to make a tiny ponytail. He has nothing to tie it with, so he lets the hair fall back down. “I think,” he starts, slowly, looking distracted. “That people often feel this way when they're happy with friends,” he says, shocking Lance into stillness.
Lance abandons any pretense of looking elsewhere in favor of staring at Keith, as if to gauge whether he’s being sincere. Instead of giving him confirmation, or any answer, Keith keeps switching positions, he leans on his arms straightened behind him, and then he folds onto his knees.
“Do you feel that?” Lance asks. “With friends?”
With us, he doesn't say.
“Not really,” Keith admits.
“So you're special,” Lance concludes, bitter once more.
Then Keith folds over and begins throwing up.
*
Lance should have probably waited for longer after Keith was declared non-contagious, or possibly forever, before asking him to sleep with him.
But he had grown bored with his thoughts to the point where he couldn't stand them anymore. When he told Hunk about how his thoughts can never fully develop into something interesting while multitasking, Hunk was surprised. Really, he asked him. I'm always overthinking. Again, Lance felt misunderstood. He tried to clarify that he's also thinking, always, but it doesn't lead anywhere satisfactory. Huh, Hunk said. Maybe you should write a journal, but Lance interrupted, I do, the problem is that I'm always working, so I'm always focusing on something that is not myself, and when the task is manual enough to think, I suddenly can't. And then embarrassment flushed over him like high tide, because who cares what thoughts he's having in the middle of war? Who cares whether he's doing something for himself?
It goes like this: time starts feeling increasingly surreal, and along with it, so does Lance. The vacuum black everywhere around consumes him. He trains and he trains and he trains and he studies harder than he did for his Galaxy Garrison entrance exams, and that's really saying something. He stops feeling like a person.
Along with the loss of time and the loss of self, Lance loses sleep. It feels so inevitable: like insomnia has been waiting for him around the corner all this time. Like it has been waiting under his bed, observing him when his eyes are closed, ripening at night.
There's something miserable about being awake in the kitchen past your bedtime. Reason number one: an acute feeling of defeat. Lance lies on my side, eyes open, eyes closed, open again, until closing them becomes an exercise in deceit. He gets up; it's louder than it should be. The refrigerator is loud. The clock on the wall is louder. He's tired, let him sleep. The second hand in this ceaseless persistent clock will drive him insane. He tries to facilitate sleep and yet it's rejecting him. Several times a night he's woken up by restlessness permeating his feet, until he gives up and makes space for himself in places he shouldn’t occupy at that time of night.
Of course, this is when Keith finds him by accident.
“Lance,” he says, clearly not having expected anyone, “you look unwell.”
“You were the one throwing up for no identifiable reason,” Lance calls back. It's almost narratively suitable that a mystery person like Keith would get a mystery disease.
“Why are you awake?”
“What are you doing at the devil's sacrament,” Lance murmurs.
“What?”
“Nothing.” Lance stands up, ready to leave. Then he changes his mind. “Actually, I was here first. You leave.”
Keith raises his eyebrows at him. “It's a shared kitchen. Can't we both be here at the same time?”
With nothing else to occupy him, not professionally, but him, as a person, he has started observing Keith. Keith has become something even more alluring, something mystified, not so much by means of his own actions as by means of Lance's.
“Sure,” he watches as Keith moves across the room, opening and closing cupboards. “Let's chit and chat.”
“Sure,” Keith surprises him by saying, “you start a topic.”
“What are you looking for?”
“Nothing.” He seems to give up on his search, because he closes the final drawer and then leans on the counter. “That was a very exhaustive topic.”
“That would never be my choice of topic, sweetheart,” Lance copies him and leans on his arms. “I'm way more intense in my conversations. Haven't you noticed?”
Keith tilts his head, so Lance goes on, “For real, haven't you? You never really pay attention to me. Like, to my existence.”
“Literally what,” Keith says, slowly, with emphasis, no longer leaning back, “are you talking about? We work together every day, every hour.”
“True,” Lance can't disagree, but: “You never seem interested in me, as a person.”
“That's not true,” Keith disagrees. “Why do you think that?”
“I don't know.” He couldn't deny having the attention now, and now that he has it, he almost wishes he didn't; it feels like so much. “You never really ask me anything.”
Keith falls into silence. When Lance looks up, Keith is looking at him intently, eyebrows in a delicate frown. “I'm not good at conversation.”
“Sure,” Lance says, ready to let it pass. But he can't, that's not who he is, so he says, “I just think you're really cool. It's strange to like a person and not be seen by them.”
This time he keeps his eyes keenly on Keith, so he sees him go through a mix of emotions he can't describe, yet he still gains satisfaction from. Keith seems almost paralyzed, by how still he stands. Lance refrains himself from going on, becoming too much, saying, do you like me back? Have you ever thought I was cool? Do you think I'm attractive? Are you going to stop talking to me now that I've said that? I wouldn't want that, I already feel so alone, you don't know that but I've been losing it lately.
Finally, Keith breaks the silence. “I think you're really smart,” he says. “Of course I think you're g- you're interesting. And I don't even know how you learned to shoot like that.”
“Soft skills, hard skills, check,” Lance makes a check gesture in the air. “So you like them smart,” he says, and then immediately realizes the implications of it and wants to disappear into the pits of hell. He sees the sentence land in real time, notices the minute widening of Keith's eyes. Takeback, takeback, he opens his mouth to remedy the moment when Keith beats him to it.
“I guess I do.”
Keith's eyes glow under the fluorescent overhead light. Lance has always despised overhead lights, the killer of atmosphere, fabricator of liminal spaces. He jumps off the counter. “Wonderful talk,” he moves towards the door. “Let's do it again sometime. Goodnight.”
Keith seems surprised, but he stays motionless as Lance walks past him. Huh, Lance thinks. He stops.
He turns back towards Keith, finding himself closer than before. “Look,” he starts, “there's no way of saying this without sounding crazy. Actually – where are you going after this?”
“Now?” Keith seems surprised. “At two in the morning?” Then his appearance changes in ways Lance couldn't describe, and abruptly Lance feels like he's in on the joke. It brings him a startling burst of energy.
“I shan't say,” Keith narrows his eyes.
“A man of mystery.”
“I can't share my whereabouts,” Keith goes along, wow, he goes along with Lance's stupid – is this flirting? “Or else my wave function would collapse.”
Is this flirting? Is he flirting? Has Lance lost it fully, completely? “Understandable,” he says. “Have a good night.”
“What did you want to say? Before?”
Oh. “Never mind,” he replies quickly, already on the move.
“Wait,” Keith moves to follow him. “I'm interested.”
“Nothing, ignore me.”
“Lance,” Keith says, exasperation – fond exasperation? Is this fondness? Fond exasperation overflows his voice. “Just say it. It's just me.”
Just you, Lance thinks.
“It's okay,” he says again. “Never mind.”
Keith's patient silence works – has Lance been misinterpreting his silences? Has he?
“Do you happen to be looking for a hookup?” he finally asks, in a now-or-never mindset, mouth loosened stupid with the viscous looseness of nighttime. Actually, he knows the answer to that, so he readjusts the question to something even more stupid, something he will definitely regret at some point, but his stomach has opened into an empty ravine, he needs to feel like a person again, the night has eaten him alive and buried him with the stars. “Would you be interested in having sex with me?”
To nobody's surprise, Keith falls silent again, as if he can't decide if Lance is being serious. Lance wonders if the intimacy of timelessness doesn't embolden him in the same way. Is emboldened Keith's perpetual state? Fearlessness? Confidence?
Finally, Keith speaks. “Why do you ask?”
Encouraged, he replies with honesty. “Because I want to have sex with you.”
“Why?”
“Why,” Lance mimics him. “Never mind. It's okay. See you tomorrow.”
“Lance,” Keith says, urgency lacing Lance's name, giving it a new flavor. “Wait.”
*
This is how they end up with the current predicament: Keith lying on the mattress, face to the sky, Lance on top of him, facing Keith, having to witness the hypervigilance extending from Keith's expression down to his limbs.
It's Lance's mattress Keith is lying on. That's an important detail.
Lance wanted to do it fully awake, fully alert, so they waited. Lance wanted to feel impossibly alive, rooted in his body, fully seen, and Keith agreed, without them ever speaking about that last part. Lance didn't want Keith not to want it, so he asked if he was sure so many times Keith got annoyed and almost canceled their agreement. He wanted this, the awkwardness, the logistical difficulty of unfamiliar limbs. Now that he has it, it feels like almost too much to handle.
“Do you like kisses on your neck?” he asks Keith.
Keith shrugs, a small, short-lived action, without breaking eye contact. “Let's see.”
“What do you like?”
Keith’s hands press onto his back, impatient. “I'm not sure, let's find out.”
So Lance follows. He lets more of his weight drop onto the warm body underneath him. The sound of his heartbeat is so loud that for a second he's almost convinced their hearts are beating in tandem, reinforcing each other in resonance. He drops one innocent, close-lipped kiss on Keith's temple, then his jaw. The back of his mind registers how strange it is that Keith keeps his eyes open, watching him. Still, he follows the trail of tendons and kisses Keith's ear. Keith gasps quietly.
Lance opens his mouth. The next kiss on Keith's neck is wet, like the inside of a fruit. He thinks he tastes sweetness on his tongue.
Then he pushes himself up and pins Keith with a stern gaze. “What do you mean you don't know?”
“I just don't know.” Keith seems so open like that. “I've never done this before.”
One moment of stunned silence, and then Lance is scrambling around until he's sitting on his haunches on the side of his bed. “Holy Christ. You never told me that,” he accuses, but he never asked, did he? Trust Keith that he would rush into an idea blindly. Blind with rage, blind with single-minded focus, he's always so rash, what even is he doing?
But Lance never asked, did he? He never made sure. It seemed too vulnerable to talk about past lovers. He should have known. Keith seems to be thinking similar thoughts; he looks annoyed again as he sends Lance a look that says, I know what you did. And Lance feels like he committed a crime.
“It doesn't matter.” Keith sits up; they are eye to eye again.
“But,” Lance starts, gesturing around, exasperated. “What even are you doing?”
“Why are you acting like this? It's not a big deal. You literally explained the ways in which this is casual sex for you.” Lance is aware of his shirtlessness, and Keith's shirtlessness, both of them in his very own private room, and this wasn't a great idea at all, but Keith continues talking, confusion or irritation weaving between his words. “You said how you wanted to explore different sensations and see what it's like to have casual sex with somebody in broad daylight, without a prior sexual connection.”
Yes, yes, all true, but Lance didn't want to try this with just anyone. He wanted to see what it's like to expose himself so totally in front of Keith. It was his relationship with Keith he was interested in.
“Which is not casual at all, by the way,” Keith adds. “I might have never done this before but I don't think this is how anyone does it. It's almost – clinical.”
“Anthropological sex,” Lance says.
“Yeah, whatever.” Keith pulls his legs towards his torso, then rests his elbows on his knees. “You're so strange.”
Look, Lance knows Keith must have meant it – not necessarily as an insult, but perhaps as a bare statement. A statement of neutral valence. All the same, he feels oddly satisfied, because Keith finding him strange means he's not totally predictable to him. More so, it must mean he's unlike anyone else Keith knows, that he's special. And since he's been competing with Keith's genius, with all the attention Keith managed to accumulate without even trying, for the last couple of years – a part of him preens at the comment because surely that places him on equal footing? In a way? Because surely Keith finds him interesting, then? He said he did, and he doesn't lie – at least not that Lance knows – so he must, but now, he must. Lance really wants him to.
“No, you don't get it,” he says to remove the bite from his description. “And, duh, why would you, I never said this before. But it's casual in terms of our relations, not me,” he clarifies.
“I don't get what you're saying,” Keith tells him blatantly.
“It's not casual for me.”
“What is it, then? I don't get it.”
“It's you specifically I want to sleep with.”
Keith's mouth forms a quiet oh, and Lance's brain repeats, yeah, oh.
“So, what,” he asks, looking at where Keith is playing with his fingers. “Is this a deal breaker?”
“A deal – you couldn't have just told me this instead. From the very start.”
Yeah, no. He couldn't have. He's already too much. But this is exactly what he wanted, and now he has it served to him on a silver platter: himself, a defined, contained person again, too much.
“So yes,” he concludes.
Keith throws himself onto the bed – Lance's bed, Lance's sheets, black hair spilling onto Lance's pillow – and covers his face with his hands, then he makes a long throaty noise Lance couldn't describe. Finally, after a minute of stillness – during which Lance watches him, then watches their sweatshirts on the floor, then looks around the room, anxiety climbing up his intestines – he lowers his arms to glare at Lance.
“This is so strange,” he begins. “And it's probably a horrible idea, and I don't understand you, but yes, let's do this.”
Which is how they end up in the following situation: Keith watches him as Lance grabs both of his hands, intertwines their fingers on top of each Keith's hip bone with incongruous tenderness, and swallows him. Keith's back arches off the bed. His lips are pressed together, and yet a sound escapes. His breathing is loud through his nose. Lance feels wide awake.
Afterward, Lance climbs up the bed to stare right at Keith's face from close up. They are both quietly observing each other. It's strikingly intimate. Keith had said he was okay with anything, that he was open to trying whatever Lance wanted to, and Lance knows this is true because Keith is uninhibited like that; which is why, despite Lance having swallowed, he waits for saliva to accumulate in his mouth, and then he places a hand on Keith's cheekbone. He lets his hand rest still for a second and then drags it down his face, over Keith's mouth. Then he opens the lips under his fingers and leans down, closer, until he spits into the precise center between Keith's teeth.
He leans back just enough to better witness Keith's reaction. Keith exhales through his nose, holding the saliva on his tongue. He keeps looking at Lance. Suddenly, Lance panics. What if he overdid it? Has he overstepped their ill-defined boundaries, did he make Keith feel bad? Is this degrading? He didn't mean for it to be. But what if he did, in a way, what if he wants to feel a type of power over Keith? Is this what he wants? He likes him, after all. He can't tell. He watches as Keith swallows, then breathes in through open lips.
“You're my yearnee,” he tells him out of a strange compulsion, to compensate for the feeling of guilt in his stomach.
“Yearning?”
“Yearnee,” Lance corrects him. “The one I yearn for.”
Keith is still lying so still, almost too relaxed. “I don't understand why you're suddenly like this.”
“It's just a fact. You can ignore it.”
Keith huffs. “Yeah, I don’t think I can.”
“Hey, are you cold? You want the sweater back?”
“No, I'm feeling pretty hot, actually.”
Lance widens his eyes in alarm.
“Not like that,” Keith rushes. “Just a normal amount. Don't worry, I'm not going to throw up or anything.”
Taking his word, Lance leans over him again, this time emboldened. He grips Keith's hair, tilts his head back, holds him in place. He licks into his mouth. Then he changes course and kisses the top of his pectoral muscle; next, he licks his shoulder. Keith's skin is so pleasantly warm. He's being quiet, and yet the sound of his breathing subtly quickened gives Lance a head rush. His fine reactions are astonishingly satisfying; the way he twitches when Lance bites his earlobe. The way he shifts his legs on the mattress to be closer to Lance when he starts running his palm over his hips again.
Lance feels high on endorphins. It was him who did that – who relaxed Keith like that. Nobody else has ever seen him like that, but Keith trusts him enough to do it with him. It's so special to be able to figure out whether Keith likes neck kisses. Lance feels oddly grateful. And Keith gave him a couple of compliments, not too many, but compared to the number Lance received from him before, he could now live off them for the rest of the year. Earlier, Keith told him Lance is good at being receptive, and said Lance is attentive, and he looked at him like – like a flavored puzzle piece. That has to mean something, right? Then, just before Keith finally closes his eyes, Lance catches a glimpse of his face.
“Keith, are you feeling okay?” Lance pulls back, cautious. “Your eyes look a bit yellow.”