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The frosty winter air is a lot colder here than Shiro remembered. In response to its bone-gripping chill he hunkers down further into his jacket, shoving his hands as far deep into its pockets as they can go. It’s something about the wind, he thinks. It’s biting, burning, bruising. It howls along the empty streets, ferocious and unmerciful, snatching the air out of his lungs before he can pull in a full breath.
The walk to the grocery store, too, is different from what Shiro recalls. He’d decided not to take the car because he always used to walk this street as a kid. It was what, a five-minute walk? Seven-minute walk? But Shiro’s already been walking for ten and he knows he still has to turn the corner onto the main street and then head down some.
And then there’s the grocery store itself. In his memory, a large, brightly-lit beacon of respite, well-stocked with whatever soda and potato chips he was buying to sustain him while studying for his tests. In reality? Five aisles plus a limited produce section, the single cashier leans against the counter flipping through a magazine, and the linoleum underfoot is cracked and scuffed. It closes at 8 pm.
It makes sense that Shiro’s memories of this town aren’t completely accurate. When was the last time he was here? Three years ago? Four? Even those were just weekends here, spent in the town’s single diner or down by the river, catching up with friends who’d long since scattered out into the world. Of course, though, not that much had changed about the place itself in the six years since he’d actually lived here. Small towns like this one have a way of freezing themselves like that, unaffected by the pull of clock hands and flipping calendar pages.
But Shiro finds himself here, surveying the pitiful selection of eggs in the back of a tiny grocery store in a disappearing town during on one of his precious three-day weekends. He checks for broken shells before slipping one carton into his basket, and turns to seek out the next item on his grandmother’s list (butter, salted), before pulling up short.
He is standing there next to the frozen foods display, dark eyes shocked wide. His hair is a little longer than Shiro remembers, curling out almost at his shoulders, shoulders that are broader and fuller. His face has matured. But there’s no mistaking someone who you’ve known for more than eighteen years, someone you bathed with before you were old enough to know it was supposed to be embarrassing, someone you snuck out on school nights with to ride bikes out to the river when you were in middle school, someone who sat with you the night before you left for college when you couldn’t sleep because your stomach ached so bad.
“Shiro?” he asks, breathlessly tentative, like he’s expecting Shiro to evaporate into thin air.
“Keith,” Shiro says, feeling a pent-up something wresting itself free and coalescing on his face in a smile. “It’s good to see you.”
There’s something in his voice that surprises himself. It’s a weird kind of soft.
“What are you doing here?” Keith asks, stepping closer and looking Shiro up and down, as if he can’t decide if he’s hallucinating him or not.
“I’m visiting my grandparents for the weekend,” Shiro says. They’re the only ones in his family who live here anymore. The only reason worth coming back. Or so he had thought.
“Oh,” is Keith’s entire response. Something in his face sends a twinge of guilt through Shiro.
“What about you?” Shiro asks. “I thought you went away for school. It’s been awhile since I heard from you, though….”
Two and a half years, to be exact, he thinks as his voice trails off. In the beginning Shiro had tried his best to keep in touch with Keith, texting him pretty regularly and making time to call when he could. But especially after Keith left for college, the effort was noticeably imbalanced. Eventually Shiro just figured that Keith didn’t want anything to do with him anymore and stopped putting the energy in as his classes got harder and his free time disappeared.
“Yeah,” Keith says. “I did.” He pauses. “Not anymore though.”
“Not anymore?” Shiro asks.
“Got kicked out,” Keith says, looking away. He shifts his basket from one hand to the other. “I didn’t know what else to do so I came back here.”
It’s Shiro’s turn to say, “Oh.” He feels bad for pressing now, which makes no sense. There’s never been anything left unsaid between him and Keith.
Well, maybe one thing.
“What are you up to these days?” Keith asks, still not looking at Shiro. It gives Shiro the impression that he’s asking because he feels like he should, and not because he wants to.
“I’m still in school,” Shiro replies. “I’m going for my Master’s.”
“In aerospace?”
“Yeah.”
Shiro has a million questions he wants to ask in response, but the air here is fragile. It doesn’t feel like the place to be having this conversation.
“Are you busy?” he asks. “Do you want to come over to my grandparents’? They’re cooking.”
Keith opens his mouth as if to respond, but for an extended moment, no words come out. His forehead creases. And then, “Uh, no thanks. I should get home.”
Shiro pretends this doesn’t tear at him, a little bit. Pretends like the parts of him that are already poorly healed over don’t break open at this.
“Okay,” he says, and his mouth feels numb but he uses it to smile anyway. “I’ll see you around then.”
“Yeah, see you,” says Keith, but in the kind of way that makes Shiro think he’s not planning on it.
He watches Keith turn around and meander down aisle three, the easiness of his gait just as appealing as it had been the last time Shiro saw it years ago.
Shiro forgets to buy the butter.
It’s eleven at night and Shiro’s exhausted from waking up early and driving all day, but he’s determined to get some class reading done before he dozes off. Here in his grandparents’ guest room he feels a little bit like he’s been transported back in time. He used to stay in this room on those exciting nights when his parents needed a babysitter until late and dropped him off here to play with Grandma.
He’s nodding off onto his textbook when a sharp rapping startles him upright. He glances around, bewildered, and it comes again, hard and impatient, rattling the window panes in their frames. Getting up from the bed, he throws open the curtain and cups his hand against the glass to see into the night.
Keith’s there, kicking at the frozen dirt, frowning. He looks away when he sees Shiro in the window.
“What are you doing?” Shiro asks him when he opens the window. The cold stings even more than it did earlier.
“Wanna hang out?” Keith asks begrudgingly.
Shiro grins.
Within two minutes Shiro’s outside with his hat pulled down tight over his ears. It’s freezing, but he finds that he doesn’t mind too much as he and Keith set off down the sidewalk side by side. Neither of them says anything for a long time, and Shiro lets Keith lead through the darkened empty town.
“So,” Keith finally says after what must be close to twenty minutes. “Everything going okay?”
“Yeah,” says Shiro. “Everything’s fine. There are always ups and downs, you know? But I’m doing okay.”
He waits to see if Keith is going to say anything else, but he doesn’t. So Shiro asks, “What about you? How are you doing?”
Keith shrugs. “Fine.”
Shiro stares at him, but his expression is impenetrable, and he keeps his eyes forward, on the sidewalk ahead of them.
“I’m sensing that you don’t mean that,” Shiro says.
Keith’s response is to scowl. Even with his forehead furrowed like that, Shiro can’t help but admire the shape of his face in the glow of a nearby streetlight. This, a thing that hasn’t changed either.
“Where do you live now?” Shiro asks, aware that Keith’s adoptive parents hadn’t really known what they were getting into with him. They probably weren’t putting him up in their house anymore.
“Over on Red Lion Drive,” Keith says. “Past the gas station.”
“What do you do?”
“Auto repair. I work for the mechanic in the next town over.”
Shiro bites his lip. He’s not surprised, exactly. There’s nothing wrong with that job, especially since he knows that Keith can drive like no one else he’s ever met, so being around cars is probably satisfying for him. But it seems like a waste of his brilliance, to be here in a dead-end town, working a stationary job.
These thoughts steal him away from how cold it is, but they don’t distract him from Keith himself. For a moment Shiro watches the way Keith’s breath billows out from between his chapped lips, white and thick in the cold, shrouding him. Keith still isn’t looking at Shiro, his eyes trained straight ahead, sharp and focused. The tips of his ears stick out from between the fall of his thick black hair, red-tipped with cold.
“I missed you,” Shiro blurts, entirely by accident.
Keith’s mouth curls into a frown.
But Shiro’s started now, and he might as well get this out there, while he has the chance. “I don’t really know what you were dealing with, Keith. But it was pretty hurtful when you stopped talking to me.”
“Says the person who left first,” Keith snaps.
Shiro stops in his tracks, baffled. “What?”
“Never mind,” Keith says quickly, speeding up, leaving Shiro standing still under a bare tree. “I don’t want to have this conversation.”
Shiro jogs to catch up. “No, it sounds like you have some feelings about this and I’d like to hear them.” Keith keeps walking, wordlessly. “Please talk to me.”
Keith says nothing. Shiro steps in front of him and puts a hand on his shoulder, blocking him from walking any farther, forcing Keith to look up at him in the darkness.
“Forget it,” says Keith.
Shiro stares at him. He searches his face, but Keith has turned his lips into a thin, impassive line, his eyebrows at their usual resting downward curve that make it hard to tell if he’s actually feeling anything or just thinking. Shiro tries to shift his awareness of the situation, put himself where Keith’s mind is. He’s out of practice with this, a bit rusty, but he’s a professional at it if anything.
“I’m sorry if it felt like I was abandoning you,” Shiro says. “I was hoping that if I kept in touch you wouldn’t feel like that. I guess I was wrong. I’m so sorry, Keith.”
Keith seems to physically soften under his hand. Not entirely, but enough.
“It’s okay,” he says, giving a little bit, averting his eyes.
Shiro lets go of his shoulder, and Keith steps around him. They keep walking.
It’s Keith who breaks the silence next, after a long stretch of what feels like consideration.
“I was kicked out for fighting,” he says.
He lets the silence drag out for long enough that Shiro begins to wonder if he’s supposed to ask or if Keith is going to provide eventually. The latter turns out to be the case.
“I was in a bad mood a lot and then I heard about your accident from your parents,” he says with a vague gesture towards Shiro’s arm. “I couldn’t sleep, and just lashed out one day. Some asshole was baiting me and I beat the shit out of him, in the middle of campus in broad daylight.”
Keith sighs. “Kinda wish I’d thought more about you in that moment. The shit you used to lecture me on, like patience.”
Shiro remembers that. Stopping Keith from erasing frustrated holes in his homework, grabbing him by the wrist to keep him from running out onto the frozen lake before checking how deep the ice was, yelling at him to stop sprinting laps around the school track before he threw up.
“We all have lapses in judgment sometimes,” Shiro says thoughtfully. “It happens, Keith. You always hope that they don’t come at times like that, but sometimes they do. You just have to get up and move on from it.”
Keith shrugs. “I already have. Didn’t like school much anyway.”
Shiro wants to wrap Keith in the kind of crushing hugs that he used to, but this Keith is so cold, closed-off, that he doesn’t think he could. So he just keeps walking at his side. And walking and walking and walking, silent, with Keith feeling like he’s getting further and further every moment, even though this is the closest they’ve been, physically, in years. Shiro just doesn’t know what to say to him, what he wants to hear, and this has never happened before.
Maybe too much time really has passed.
But then Keith snorts.
Shiro looks at him in surprise, and finds that there’s actually something like a smile on his face. His step falters and he almost trips on an uneven edge of the pavement.
“What’s so funny?” Shiro asks, and finds that a smile is spreading across his own lips in an automatic response, even if he doesn’t know what he’s smiling at.
Keith jerks his chin towards the side of the road. It takes Shiro’s eyes a moment to make out what he’s looking at, and another to recognize the significance. They’ve slowed to a stop next to the big fenced-off lot that used to hold the best climbing tree in town before it got blown over in a blizzard years ago. This fence and its “NO TRESPASSING” sign were no deterrents to a couple of boys with nothing better to do than scrape their elbows and knees.
“Just remembering the first time we hopped the fence,” Keith says. “You felt so guilty afterwards that you cried and told your mom.”
“I was ten,” Shiro says in protest. “And the owner of the lot saw us and shouted that he’d call the cops on us. I was scared.”
Keith walks towards the chain-link and grabs onto it with both hands. He hoists himself up and drives his feet into the spaces, three feet off the ground. The fence clangs noisily against its posts, and Keith looks down at Shiro.
“You were the first one over the fence, though,” Keith says. “I thought you were so cool.”
He scrambles the rest of the way up, and then easily lets himself drop over the other side. He turns and peers at Shiro through the rounded diamonds.
“Coming?”
Shiro swallows, and looks between Keith’s expectantly raised eyebrows and the bold block letters of the sign. He’s a twenty-four year-old man, for crying out loud. He shouldn’t be hopping fences in the dark.
Shiro has no problem scaling the chain-link, even with his gloves on and his uncooperative bad arm. He lands with a thud next to Keith, who leads him to where the old tree once stood. They sit on the cold ground there, over the scarred earth.
“So actually tell me about your life,” Keith says.
Shiro relaxes, a little bit, encouraged by the comfort of the location, the change in Keith’s expression. He starts talking about school, but really he’s talking about anything. Everything. Kind of like he used to. Their conversation quickly gains the timbre that it always has had, easy and intimate, a warm and lilting call-and-response. He laughs more than he has in a long time.
Keith laughs, too, and Shiro’s delighted to find that it’s the same magical sound that he thinks about sometimes when he feels like the world is a little too full for him. This, right here, it’s a homecoming, soft and welcoming.
It’s four AM and many varied topics later before Keith stands up and brushes himself off. “I’ll walk you home,” he says once they’re both safely back on the other side of the fence.
“Excuse me, I will walk you home,” Shiro says, hoping his tone is the kind that does not permit anything besides acceptance.
It seems to work. Keith shrugs and starts towards his house.
They brush arms as they walk. They talk, they joke. Keith’s grin steals Shiro’s breath more than the cold does, somehow. It’s the same exact one that he’s always remembered all these years. How could he ever forget that? It’s just like the way Keith take peeks at him out of the corner of his eye when he thinks Shiro isn’t paying attention. But that’s just the thing: Shiro is always paying attention. He always has been.
Keith stops in front of a small house. Shiro wouldn’t think it’s an exaggeration to call it a shack, really. It sits removed from the street by a winter-deadened, unkempt lawn. Somehow, it feels like Keith. There’s a motorcycle parked on the street out front.
They’ve turned towards each other, close enough that the clouds of their breath mingle when they breathe. Shiro doesn’t know what to say, and if the silence is any indication, Keith doesn’t either. It’s a terrifying flurry and a flutter in his chest when he realizes he doesn’t want to leave.
He never wants to leave this, not again.
“Well, I’ll see you around then,” Shiro settles on eventually, because he has to.
“Yeah, see you,” says Keith. This time he means it, Shiro is positive, and that makes it okay.
Neither of them budge.
“Goodnight,” Keith says after a moment, something like a teasing smile on his lips, still motionless.
“Goodnight,” Shiro echoes.
He takes a half step backwards to interrupt whatever powerful force is holding them here. It breaks the spell, and Keith gives him a little wave over his shoulder as he turns and heads towards his front door. Shiro watches as he unlocks it and slips inside, and waits for the lights in the front room to turn on before walking home himself.
Shiro stares at the ceiling in his grandparents’ guest room for awhile before he can fall asleep. His body beats with energy. He hasn’t felt like this in years.
His cell phone alarm goes off at seven AM, regardless.
Ten minutes later he’s hitting the sidewalk in his running shoes, properly dressed for cold-weather jogging. The wind still nips at him but in just a few minutes he’ll be working up a sweat and won’t even feel it anymore. There’s this old route he used to take, one that’ll bring him all the way out to the bridge over the river and then loop around back by the middle school.
Which means that first he has to pass his old house, down at the end of the street. Shiro doesn’t like to look at it too hard. It’s pretty alien at this point, the curtains in the windows not the ones his mother picked out, the lone basketball left outside the garage doors not the one that he played with as a kid. There are still the permanent things though, of course. The tire swing on the tree in the front yard that Keith fell off of at thirteen and broke his arm. The slab of concrete under his feet that has both of their names sloppily immortalized in its surface. The rose bush that Shiro almost picked the flowers off of when he thought about asking Keith to his senior prom. As friends, of course.
That’s a lie.
He might’ve been able to frame it as friends, but it hadn’t stopped him at that age from fantasizing about what it would’ve been like to show up at Keith’s house with a corsage for him and see him all dressed up. To get to walk into the venue with Keith on his arm. To invite him to dance when the slow songs came on, and pull him in close as they rocked back and forth with their foreheads pressed together.
Shiro had gone to his senior prom with some pretty girl who’d asked him early on. He’d been too nice to say no. They’d been named prom king and queen. Keith wouldn’t stop calling him “Your Highness” in a tone that was just this side of scathing for a month.
Now he’s already jogging by the high school itself. He can see the football field from here. It looks like they’ve replaced the bleachers, which is nice, because the old ones were wooden and Shiro swore that someone was going to step clean through one of the rotting planks one day. He wonders if there are still empty beer cans and used condoms scattered around underneath. There must be. High school students are high school students, after all.
He remembers sitting there in that space himself, tucked in their shadows one sticky summer night, an illegally-obtained six pack of beer sitting between him and Keith because, “You can’t go away to college without at least trying beer first.” They both spat out the first mouthful they took, shocked by the bitter taste. They each finished their allotted three though, and then sat there talking for another few hours. Shiro still remembers how beautiful Keith looked with the glowing stripes of pale moonlight falling between the slats of the bleachers onto his face and across his throat. They’d sat too close together, and every muscle in Shiro’s body had ached to follow those lines of glowing light with his lips.
He hadn’t. But Keith hadn’t leaned in to kiss him either, despite the hungry spark Shiro had sworn he’d seen in his eyes.
The sound of the river rushing by reaches Shiro’s ears. It’s cold, but not cold enough for it to freeze yet, apparently. The bridge is a big, sturdy thing, one lane in each direction and wide sidewalks on both sides. There’s a bench right in the center of the path, looking out over the water. Shiro sat on it the first time he came back from school to visit. Keith had pressed up against his side while he’d explained what college was like, and Shiro had ignited with the idea that he could put his arm around him, draw him in closer.
Obviously that would’ve been a bad idea. Shiro was only going to be here for a few days, only to visit, since his parents had already moved into the city by that point. And as much as Keith silently, mentally tugged at him, they both knew that something like that only meant trouble. They wouldn’t survive that. If that was ever even an option, anyway.
Shiro turns around, runs the way he came, but splits off to loop around at the park. There’s an old man walking his dog. Everything is mottled gray and brown right now, and Shiro thinks of how the park looked in the spring, with the trees in bloom, or in the fall with the orange leaves swaying overhead. And how it was the one summer night he’d strolled here with Keith, the night before he left for school.
Last chance, something desperate inside of him had repeated over and over.
He couldn't do that to Keith though. He couldn’t give him something like that and then leave him. So he didn’t.
Shiro had been under the impression that he’d go away to school and forget about Keith. Not actually forget about him, but lose the sharp awareness of how Keith made him feel. Out of sight, out of mind, or something like that. That was how these things always worked, right? No one ever actually stayed in love with their childhood best friend, especially when there was distance involved.
That was what Shiro had thought at the time, at least.
He cuts his jog short, turning home early. He needs to shower, and maybe take a nap. Spend some time with his grandparents. Not think about things that are in the past now, as much as they try to creep into his present, even just for a little while.
But now that he has the chance, maybe it’s time to put this to rest once and for all.
Keith’s door looks kind of battered, the dark finish rubbed off in places. It’s neither a pretty thing, nor does it look very sturdy. When Shiro knocks on it, he’s a little worried that it’ll splinter under his knuckles. It matches the rest of the exterior of Keith’s house though: worn and weathered, streaked with dirt and its structure not meeting entirely well in some places.
Shiro doesn’t hear any sounds from within so he strolls along the front of the house. There are two windows, both with heavy curtains drawn over them. It’s honestly not the most inviting place that Shiro has ever seen, but of course that’s fitting for its occupant. He walks back to the front, and takes a deep breath before knocking a second time.
As he stands there he realizes that part of him is a little glad that Keith’s not answering. What would he say, anyway? What would give him the courage to put years worth of carefully-buried feelings into words to Keith’s face? What was he trying to accomplish, anyway?
Keith should probably know about this, though. That seems to be a moral obligation, at least. Plus maybe it would provide Shiro some closure. Exterminate the dull ache that’s made its home in his chest for the past few years. Maybe then he can finally move on, not in the superficial way he’s been throwing a sheet over it like the broken furniture in the corner of his house that he can’t bare to part with, but in a healthy, full way. Maybe the next time he tries going on dates or meeting new people he won’t feel like he has shackles around his ankles, pulling him back.
Plus he knows that these things drag at Keith too. He remembers the way Keith had said it last night. “You were the one who left first.” Maybe Keith needs closure too. It’s about time.
When Shiro turns to leave he notices the motorcycle isn’t parked on the street. Keith just went somewhere. He’ll be back later.
So will Shiro.
Sitting in the nostalgic warmth of his grandparents’ living room, Shiro lets his mind wander as he opens his laptop on the couch. He should be answering emails, or doing reading, or something productive, but he realizes after he’s accidentally closed his inbox for the third time without actually reading any of his emails that focus simply isn’t coming to him right now. He attributes this to the press of memories that seem to be closing in on him.
There’s a guilt here. An excitement to see him, absolutely, but a pressing guilt as well. How often had Keith told him how much he hated this town, growing up? That he was terrified of its frozenness, that he wanted to reach further than its forested borders? Shiro had taken it for granted at the time that they would break out easily, go somewhere else, make it away without an issue. And he had never kept that a secret from Keith, talking about their futures outside of this town.
He knows it’s not his fault that Keith is here, not really. And what else could Shiro have done after high school? It wasn’t as though he could’ve waited the two years between them for Keith to graduate. But he thinks now about the promises, the things that lived between them without ever being addressed, the way he left this little town behind as if it had never been anything but a holding cell. When in reality, he knew it was Keith who felt that way more than he ever had.
And despite how he felt, he had put that distance there. Been the good boy his parents had always wanted, expected him to be. Broken out into the world, studied hard in college, dated nice girls, put himself on a successful path in life. He had never wanted to push Keith away, not with the way he made Shiro’s face break into a smile with every text or phone call he received from him. But maybe he’d done that anyway, just by leaving.
Shiro has missed him. Shiro has always missed him, all this time, in a way that seems proportional to their relationship and simultaneously wildly inappropriate. Either way, Shiro knows that neither of them can really continue thinking of each other as they have. It’s time for this to be over.
The nighttime makes Keith’s dark door intimidating, but at least the light spilling out from inside and the motorcycle parked against the curb tell Shiro that he’s home. Shiro takes a deep breath of the frigid air, knocks twice, and listens as footsteps come after a brief silence.
Keith opens the door and looks up at Shiro. He’s standing there barefoot, in a smudge-ridden white shirt and jeans, hair thrown up into a tiny ponytail, and Shiro feels a twinge of something tight and hot in his chest.
“Shiro?” Keith asks.
“Hey Keith.” The smile that Shiro finds on his face seems to have gotten there by some instinct. He hopes it looks friendly and not goofy. “Are you busy?”
“Not really,” Keith replies. He glances over his shoulder into his house. “Wanna come in?”
“Sure,” Shiro says.
It’s not an absolute disaster. It doesn’t look like it’s recently suffered a tornado or a magnitude 7.3 earthquake. But the inside of Keith’s house isn’t exactly clean, either. Shiro’s been in worse bachelor pads and it seems fitting somehow. The tight stacks of bills and magazines taking up the surface of the kitchen table. The books and dirty spoons scattered over the counter. The pair of socks left abandoned in the corner.
“Nice place,” says Shiro, though by many definitions it wouldn’t be. It’s clear that it’s old and at some point someone had failed miserably in its upkeep. The floorboards are uneven and the window frames all have water damage. There’s a draft, and no decorations on the walls or personal touches other than the mess. But it’s somehow cozy, and the smell of it reminds Shiro of Keith.
Keith shrugs. “It’s got a roof.”
He then falters next to the sink, looking at Shiro like he’s trying to access some long-buried memories of how to treat guests.
“Can I get you anything?” he finally asks, all in a rushed mouthful. “I only have water and shitty beer though.”
Somehow it’s hard to not find this endearing. Shiro tries to anyway.
“I’m good,” he replies. He wonders if anyone else has ever set foot into this house while Keith was living here. And if so, then why. “I stopped by earlier and you weren’t here.”
“I was at work,” Keith says as he wanders over to the table. He sits, so Shiro follows his lead and claims the only other chair. Keith stares at him.
“Why are you here?” he asks.
Well, if Keith is going to get straight to the point, in that bold way he’s so practiced at, why should Shiro beat around the bush? It doesn’t seem fair to drag this out any longer than it has been already.
“I wanted to talk to you about something,” Shiro says.
Keith leans back in his chair and crosses his arms. “What’s up?”
“I was just wondering if you wanted to discuss….” Shiro pauses, trying to find the correct words to use. None of them seem to want to work very well, so he settles. “The way things were before I left.”
There’s a long moment of silence in which Keith just stares at him. It seems to Shiro that Keith knows exactly what he means, even if he asks, “What are you talking about?”
If Keith wants things in plain language, then that’s the least Shiro can do for him right now. They can talk about this like mature adults, because they are mature adults.
“I’m pretty sure that you realized how I felt about you, Keith,” Shiro says. “And please tell me if I’m wrong, but I got the idea that the feeling was mutual. It just wasn’t—”
“It’s in the past,” Keith cuts in, his voice too loud for the conversation.
Shiro recoils, a little bit. “What?”
“It’s over,” Keith bites. “I don’t think about that anymore.”
Something lodges itself in Shiro’s throat, but he ignores it and plows on. “But would it help to talk about it? Even if it’s in the past, I don’t think either of us handled it very well, and I think it would help if we—”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Keith says, voice rising, and Shiro sees a fire in him that’s rarely ever been flashed in his direction, even as children. Shiro swallows hard against whatever’s happening in his throat. Keith very visibly takes a deep breath, and then says again, “It’s over.”
Shiro nods, once, though his head feels like it’s not entirely there. “Okay. If that’s what you want, that’s fine.”
“Yeah.” Keith seems to have suddenly curled in on himself, his shoulders slouching forward. “I’m pretty tired. I think I’m gonna head to bed.”
Shiro doesn’t comment on the fact that it’s 8 o’clock. Instead he stands up. His hands shake, a little bit.
“I’ll go home then,” he says. His voice sounds strained in his own ears.
Keith just nods, and doesn’t move to show him out. So Shiro walks to the door himself.
“I’ll see you around then,” Shiro calls back into the house, his hand on the doorknob.
“Bye,” is the only answer he gets. So he heads out into the cold night alone.
When he gets home his grandmother is waiting for him in the kitchen. She has a stack of photo albums on the table next to her and two already open in front of her, and Shiro immediately knows it’s going to be a long night.
“Take a look at this,” she coos, beckoning him over. “This was your fifth grade graduation, do you remember?”
Honestly, no, Shiro doesn’t remember his fifth grade graduation. He hadn’t even been aware that his fifth grade had a graduation. But there he is in the photograph his grandma’s pointing out, all of ten years old, a tie around his neck and dress shoes on his feet, smiling at the camera.
His attention flows quickly to the picture below it. Here his dress shirt is rumpled, his tie’s uneven, and his mouth is open wide in laughter. In front of him a runty kid in overalls is standing on the seat of a swing, looking down at him, his mouth stretched into a smile. The head of unruly black hair is unmistakable.
Shiro sits down at the table across from his grandmother and pulls a photo album from her pile. It’s not that old, and he’s surprised that his grandparents were still taking their pictures to get printed at this time. Based on what he’s wearing in these pictures he guesses that it’s from around his junior year of high school.
He flips aimlessly through the pages for a little while. The contents are unsurprising, focusing on what serves for interesting events in a town like this: the time his high school baseball team made it to regionals with him as the star pitcher, his smile big and bright as he held up his new driver’s license, gathered in front of a cake with his family at his mother’s forty-fifth birthday dinner. He knows all the faces in the photographs, feeling those familiar pangs of nostalgia when he catches sight of an old classmate or the inside of his childhood home.
But it isn’t until almost the end of this album that he finds what really interests him.
It’d been a day in July, the summer after his junior year he thinks, when his family had decided to all pile into the minivan and head into the mountains for a weekend camping trip. Shiro had brought Keith along of course because that’s just what he did. He doesn’t remember details of the trip, like what campsite they stayed at, or what they ate, or even what their sleeping arrangements had been like, but he’s holding a few captured moments here in his hands.
Like this one of his family playing volleyball. Keith’s a little fuzzy, a little out of focus in the background, but Shiro can see the expression of hard concentration on his young face as he gears up for a serve. Or this one, a little skewed, where he and Keith are squatting side-by-side, poking at what looks like a massive slug in the dead leaves. This one of his family on a trail in the woods, Keith and Shiro all the way in the back. Keith’s wearing a sweatshirt that falls far too long on his arms that might’ve belonged to Shiro once, and Shiro relates the expression on his own face as he gazes at Keith in the picture to this hopelessness he feels now.
The last picture in the entire album is one Shiro must’ve taken himself, he thinks. He can tell because it’s a little blurry and too dark to really make out much, but what he can see is the side of Keith’s face illuminated by the campfire. The orange glow forces the curves of his face into sharp contrast, his eyelashes casting shadows on his cheeks, his dark hair blending in with the night.
Shiro knows what he was trying to capture in this picture. It feels like one of those things he could never get his hands firmly around, really, like when his bad arm starts acting up and his fingers don’t tighten the right way and it all just slips through.
It’s always slipping through.
The morning light is gray and sharp through the window. Shiro isn’t sure how much sleep he actually got, but he’s waking up now which means he must’ve been asleep at some point. He feels groggy, disconnected somehow. His bed is warm but it’s his last day here and the morning isn’t going to stop for him.
He eats breakfast with his grandparents and sits and talks with them until they go off to do old people things, like watching daytime TV and scribbling at crossword puzzles. Shiro would stick around but he wants to shake the feeling that he’s woken up with, this sticky, dragging thing that’s like his limbs are weighed down. The wind isn’t so harsh today, the temperature of the air a little less like barbs sinking into every inch of bared skin, so he shrugs on his coat and hat to walk around a bit.
He pulls open the door to step outside and freezes in his tracks.
Keith is standing there on the porch, one hand half-raised as if to knock, his eyes grown wide. Slowly, he lowers his hand to his side.
“Good morning,” Shiro says, and steps diagonally out of the house, around Keith, to close the door behind him. He purposely is careful not to brush again Keith, doing his best to stay out of his space.
Keith is quiet for a moment, looking at Shiro with furrowed eyebrows. His cheeks are flushed from the wind and his lips are dry and cracked. He glances away, towards the street.
“Can we just...hang out,” Keith asks quietly, looking everywhere but at Shiro.
“Sure,” Shiro agrees.
They get into his car, a black sedan he bought used with his parents’ help as an undergrad. It’s not the nicest car and the interior’s stained from years of use, but somehow it seems nicer with Keith in it. He looks good there, sitting back against the beige passenger’s seat, his pink hands hovering over the vents as he works warmth into them.
Almost on autopilot he takes them to the one diner in town. At this time on a Sunday it’s already pretty full, but the hostess seats them in a two-person booth in the corner. Shiro tries for small talk and learns that Keith doesn’t have to work today, that he doesn’t really care that it’s a little warmer than it has been, that his favorite thing to get here is still the bacon cheeseburger even though the diner changed owners last year.
By the time the food comes out, Keith has softened a little bit. He protests when Shiro swipes some of his fries, taking his revenge by stealing pouty sips of Shiro’s milkshake. They fall into an easier conversation, Keith talking about day to day life at the auto shop, Shiro talking about the research he’s involved with.
It doesn't feel any different when he’s with him like this. It feels like the gaping chasm of empty years between them has closed up, sealed itself nicely shut. It’s a kind of home. The hint of awkward bitterness that the night before had laced their conversation with still hangs in the back of Shiro’s mind, because it’s an issue he’s still working through himself. But if Keith just wants to hang out today, Shiro will pretend like he can’t hear Keith’s “It’s over” echoing around the inside of his skull. And he can enjoy their friendship, because Keith has always been, first and foremost, Shiro’s best friend.
Then tomorrow he can go back to school and forget about any of this. Revert to his half healed-over state. Pretend he’s not in love with someone he may only see once or twice again in his lifetime who doesn’t want anything to do with him except maybe in the next twenty-four hours.
It’s fine. He has his best friend right now, which is more than he’d expected ever again.
“Anywhere you wanna go?” he asks Keith when they get back in his car. In his head he’s praying that Keith will say anything but back home, though if he does Shiro will take him there, no questions asked.
He doesn’t. Instead he looks out the window. “Not really,” he says. “Anywhere is good.”
For all his years of deciphering Keith’s moods, Shiro doesn’t really know what he means by this. He starts his car up and pulls out of the parking lot.
For a little while, “anywhere” is just the streets of the town. Shiro sticks to the speed limit, agonizingly slow when he’s alone but it feels right now, when he’s just chatting with Keith. He notes the things that have changed, like the new stoplight at the intersection of Spruce and Hill, the paint job on the drugstore, the trees that were planted along the main street that runs through the middle of town. Keith nods and explains about how the owner of the flower shop who used to give them candy passed away late last year, which of their classmates were married and pregnant and settled down in town, how after the big blizzard last winter the hardware store’s roof had collapsed in and it had never reopened.
It’s around when he’s driving past the high school, asking Keith if he remembers the time they snuck onto its roof at night, that he realizes Keith probably didn’t mean this when he said anywhere. Shiro turns the car towards the river, speeding up a little as they approach the bridge.
“Where are we going?” Keith asks, though his voice is covered with a thin film of disinterest.
“Anywhere,” Shiro says, and turns off down one of the mountain roads.
They drive for what’s at least an hour or two. Shiro doesn’t have a destination in mind, really. He only knows that these mountain roads lead through tall gray trees and around sharp curves and just feel like somewhere different from the town they left. He and Keith don’t keep a constant conversation, but when they do talk it’s easy. Keith mentions exes, and the intensity with which Shiro burns on the inside at the mere notion of their existence surprises him, despite Keith’s claims that all of his relationships have been short-lived and unsuccessful. But Keith’s not dating anyone now. Shiro knows because he asks, ignoring the way Keith’s eyes cut over towards him, hard and daring, as he answers. Shiro’s, “No,” when Keith asks him the same is like a sigh of relief.
When they don’t talk their silences are comfortable. He’s had awkward silences with Keith in the past, but most of them were born out of things that wanted to be said that weren’t, rather than just a lack of things to say. Otherwise the quiet between them has always felt natural, simple.
It’s terrifying, when Shiro thinks about how this, this comfort, this hominess, was something he could’ve had. How it’s something he still wants. How he would treasure it as his own forever, if that was a possibility.
But it’s not. He leaves in the morning.
He’s cresting a hill when he sees it, tucked off to the side of the road. The shoulder’s wide here, big enough to park easily, and just beyond is what could serve as a lookout point. Shiro pulls his car to the side of the road, slides into a park, turns off the engine.
Keith doesn’t comment as he gets out of the car. Instead he walks straight towards the lookout, hopping over the barrier rather than going around it. Shiro can’t help the fond grin that fights its way onto his face as he follows, along a gently worn path.
This time of year, the view that stretches out before them isn’t all that impressive. They can see down into a shallow valley but the trees are leafless and spindly and pale. A few copses of pines dotted amongst them on the rises of the mountains opposite provide splashes of muted green, and the sky is dull and gray. The air is a little bit nippier out here, but not as cold as it was yesterday, and the wind seems to have died down. Shiro stands next to Keith as they silently take in the view.
After a moment or two, Keith sits down. Shiro sits next to him. Not as much next to him as would be ideal, leaving enough space that they could only touch if they both reached out. But this is how things should be now, probably.
They’re quiet for awhile.
“Keith,” Shiro says finally, all hesitancy and trepidation. He knows what Keith said yesterday, how Keith asked if they could “just hang out,” whatever that meant. But the sun is going to set over these mountains soon, and in the morning he’ll leave. It’s now or never, and he doesn’t want to pass up this opportunity. Again. “I know you don’t want to talk about it, but I think it would be helpful. For the both of us.”
Keith pulls his knees in to his chest and wraps his arms around them. Shiro wonders if he’s cold or if he just wants to feel a little bit smaller right now. He hope he’ll tell him, either way, but Keith is quiet for so long that Shiro thinks he’s just going to ignore Shiro’s statement.
Then, Keith asks, “Remember what you used to tell me?” His voice is low and quiet. “You always promised we’d get out of here one day. Together.”
Shiro’s chest aches. He remembers, of course he remembers. How even as kids they’d thirsted for more than the narrow streets and crooked trees contained by the hills surrounding the little town. How they’d gone outside and played at mountain climbers, sailors, pilots, astronauts, getting further and further away from here in their imaginations every time. How as high school students, the feeling had been suffocating, like the walls of their houses had been compressing in around them. How Keith had once admitted to Shiro that he was terrified of getting stuck here.
And how Shiro had told him that they absolutely would leave. That he would never leave Keith behind here.
“I knew it wasn’t gonna happen but I kinda hung on to that,” Keith says. “That how we felt about each other would be enough to get us both out.
“But you’re gone and I’m still here.”
“I’m sorry, Keith,” Shiro says, the raw ache audible in his tone. This conversation isn’t helping him right now. It’s not the one he meant to have, really, and it’s hurting, it’s burning, but if it’s helping Keith he’ll take it. He’ll take every bit of Keith’s simmering anger and betrayal and disappointment.
But Keith shakes his head. “It’s fine,” he says. “You did what you were supposed to.”
“By leaving you?” Shiro asks. “I don’t think—”
Keith snorts. “What, were you gonna abandon your dreams for some kid you liked at 18? Come on.”
“Keith,” Shiro sighs. “You know you were always more than that to me. And I could’ve been more understanding of your feelings, I could’ve—”
“It’s over,” Keith says. “It’s in the past, Shiro.”
Shiro lets those words fall around them for a long moment. Lets himself stew in them. Feels them cover the ground between them, forcing it wider, somehow. But then he frowns.
“I don’t think it is.”
He can feel Keith looking at him, but he doesn’t return the stare, instead tracing the outline of the mountains with his eyes.
“I still—,” he starts, and then pauses to gather his thoughts. He needs to say the right thing right now. “I thought things were better, but seeing you this weekend reminded me that my feelings for you are still…there. Strong. In the present circumstances I don’t expect anything to come of it, but I wanted to tell you, so that you know.”
“Yeah.” Keith’s voice is still lonely, isolated. “Yeah, me too.”
They go back to silence for a little while, after this. Shiro doesn’t know what Keith’s doing in his head, but he knows that Keith’s admission hasn’t made him any happier. If anything it’s made him more upset.
“I want to be with you,” Shiro finds himself admitting.
“But it’s not a good idea right now,” Keith cuts in before Shiro can say any more. His tone has an edge now, sharp as the knife that Shiro will bet anything Keith still keeps in his pocket. “I know. You don’t have to tell me.”
“I’m sorry,” Shiro finds himself saying again. “But with me so far away, I don’t think you’d be happy. We shouldn’t.”
Shiro turns to look at Keith, and is surprised to find that Keith is already looking at him. The world around them is darkening, the sun a glowing sliver sinking between the two mountains across from them, but Shiro can still see the burning fire in Keith’s eyes, lined with the soft charcoal of his eyelashes. Shiro’s heart seems to stop beating then, clutched painfully tight by the strength of the longing that’s expanded in his chest.
“We shouldn’t—,” he repeats, almost mindlessly, but by then Keith has already sprung.
He’s got both hands fisted in the front of Shiro’s jacket, yanking him in, but when they collide it’s nothing but gentle, the strength of his grip completely negated by the way he trembles in the millisecond before their lips touch, letting the proximity rest for just a moment.
And then Keith is everything.
Shiro takes some time just to feel. He allows himself that much. The way Keith’s dry lips rasp against his own, and how that settles something too long stirred up inside of him. Keith’s scent, warm and familiar, floods his senses, becomes something he can taste when he opens his mouth to let Keith inside. One of Keith’s hands, burning against his skin, drops from the front of his shirt, goes to the side of his neck and slips up around the back of his head.
He’s spiraling, dizzied, into some depths of unawareness of anything but the warmth of Keith’s body and the way he moves his lips and the gentle nibble of his teeth and the slide of his tongue. It’s deep and desperate but also slow and savoring, like Keith is starving but taking his time to enjoy every mouthful. He’s pulling himself closer now, until he’s half in Shiro’s lap, their chests almost flush with only Keith’s hand still resting there to separate them. Shiro reaches out instinctively, finds Keith’s hips with a little too much urgency and need, holds him steady there.
They break apart, but don’t separate. Keith stays in Shiro’s space, breathing his air with shallow little sighs, finding his eyes, watching with a hard stare. Shiro winces, but doesn’t pull away. Instead he tilts his head forward to rest their foreheads together, and says what he’s thinking, even if it’s not the best thing to say right now.
“Thank you.”
Keith’s eyes widen, so close and so dark in color but bright in ferocity. “What?”
“I’ve wanted this for years, Keith,” Shiro says, his voice grating on a whisper.
“You have no idea,” Keith says back, all wild aggression, which he then channels into kissing Shiro again, and again, and again. Until Shiro forgets about grad school and small towns and years apart and unfulfilled promises. And what feels like eons of almosts and ungranted wishes and unmet desires disappear between them, as they come together.
Neither of them says a word the entire car ride down the mountain, but Keith’s fingers are slotted between Shiro’s on the center console, holding tight. Whenever Shiro glances over at him, he sees the outline of his profile highlighted in the blue glow of the dashboard lights, angled slightly towards the window as though he’s looking out it. Except that it’s dark out there, and every time Shiro meets Keith’s staring eyes in the reflection on the window, Keith glances away, smiling shyly.
Shiro takes them to the grocery store, where he picks out some pasta and tomato sauce. Then he parks in front of Keith’s house, and as soon as Keith’s put a pot of water on to boil Shiro grabs him by the waist, spins him to face him, pushes him back against the counter, kisses him. They don’t break apart until the sound of the pot bubbling over makes them. They laugh when Shiro tries to put the pasta in the water one-handed, the other preoccupied with how warm Keith feels clinging to it.
They eat crowded together at Keith’s tiny kitchen table, knees touching, and when they’re done they don’t even bother moving their plates from the tabletop. Instead Keith takes Shiro by the hand and leads him back to his bedroom.
“Stay here tonight,” Keith says, and it’s not necessarily an invitation to have him, but it is something deeply appealing to Shiro.
“Sure,” he answers easily.
Keith digs around his closet, pulls out two ratty t-shirts. Shiro recognizes them.
“You can sleep in this. It was yours,” Keith says, tossing one over to him, and then immediately starts to strip down to his boxers.
“So was that one,” Shiro says about the one still in Keith’s hand. The last time he saw these shirts, they were like new.
“I know,” Keith says, and pulls it on over his head.
It’s baggy. It hangs off of him in the most achingly beautiful way.
They settle down into Keith’s twin bed with Keith’s laptop pulled up on top of them, Shiro’s arms around Keith’s shoulders, Keith’s head pillowed against Shiro’s chest. Keith picks a movie but Shiro isn’t watching. He’s too busy trailing his fingers through Keith’s hair.
It’s a full hour into it before Keith angles towards him, smooth and sliding and slow like a lazy cat. He hovers barely an inch from Shiro’s mouth, teasing, eyes low and lips parted.
Shiro shuts the laptop and moves it to the floor before pulling Keith completely on top of him.
They don’t really sleep. If they do, it’s in bits and pieces. Shiro knows he has a fourteen-hour drive in the morning. But if he falls asleep at the wheel and dies in a car accident tomorrow, it’ll be knowing that he finally had one night where Keith was his. In the meantime his need to hear Keith’s laugh, quiet and intimate in his ear, completely outweighs any desire to sleep.
Despite all his prayers, the room slowly fills with light.
They watch it come in. Shiro’s resigned to it but Keith buries his face in Shiro’s chest like he can hide from it. If he can’t see it, then it can’t see him, or something like that. They lay like that, Keith curled in against Shiro, silent, for a time long enough that the light shifts from pale gray to harsh gold. Shiro’s hand runs the length of Keith’s spine over his shirt, feeling its ridges from top to bottom, again and again.
He can’t give this up, but it’s time to go.
“Keith,” Shiro says.
Keith tenses. Shiro can feel it in his whole body. Fingers curl in the fabric of his shirt, like if they squeeze hard enough they can anchor him there. Shiro sighs and closes his eyes. He leans in closer.
“Come with me,” Shiro whispers.
A bird chirps outside the window, the kind that Shiro used to hear from his bedroom as a kid. He doesn’t bother counting the years since he’s last heard it. He’s hearing it now, and that’s enough.
“Okay,” Keith says.