Chapter Text
He was giving Paula his undivided attention. Or at least he thought he was.
Paula was filling him with details of his upcoming season, including a rundown of bonuses that were due his way once he reached a certain number of plays or kept his sacks down to a minimum. She was also going over the start of the preseason, and then the season itself, and when, per his contract, he was expected to be at the team’s disposal. Which, of course, was always.
He was nodding as she spoke, only vaguely taking in her words, but mostly taking in the sounds of the other diners in the restaurant.
His eyes kept wandering to the other side of the room and to a corner table in particular, where just a few short weeks ago he’d sat miserably nursing a drink, and Holden had walked in red-eyed from a fight with his father.
It had been the night that had changed everything, the night he felt he had finally won Holden over.
He took in the small table for two with the interior lighting hitting it at just the right angle, the chairs now occupied by two perfectly happy diners.
In the daylight it looked innocuous; the whole restaurant did. Nothing at all like the dark and ominous place in which he’d tried to come to terms with what he had then believed would be a very difficult life with Holden.
But it had all worked out.
The problem was, that was then and this was now. Now he had other, more... personal things on his mind. Namely, separation.
It was finally here.
A lot had gotten in the way of his thinking about it and what it meant for him and Holden. But what it boiled down to was that after a grueling offseason in which he had done all he could to make things right between the two of them, the conclusion was for him to get separated from Holden. For six months.
For two days now he had been telling himself to go easy, that they could handle it like they had handled everything else that had been thrown their way. And that if Holden was good at anything it was handling things.
And on their side, in terms of chances of getting together, were bye-weeks and Christmas and Thanksgiving, holidays which this time around he would have Holden be a part of his family’s festivities if he had to drag him kicking and screaming. And then after Christmas, it was only a matter of holding his breath until mid- or late January, depending on how well his team performed in the season.
So there. All by himself he had all but figured out how they were going to survive the next few months. All he had to do now was present it to Holden, whom he was sure in his new, all-for-it approach to their relationship, would be amenable to it all.
He paused as he watched himself shove his food around his plate.
So why, if he had it all so wonderfully worked out, was he sitting here having an obviously desperate conversation with himself?
His mind, thankfully, was gentle as it offered up its truth.
Because this was football season and there are— other things.
This was the time in which he left town and Holden...
Holden got to play.
“Sean, you’re not listening.”
“I’m listening.”
Paula resumed talking.
He lowered his fork and folded his hands. At that moment, Wolfgang, the restaurant’s celebrity chef owner and his self-proclaimed biggest cheerleader, showed up with their specially-made apéritif. He sat back with relief.
The lunch had been set for him by Paula’s office as a going away present, knowing his love for this guy and his talent for making food that made you feel not only happy, but truly special.
He smiled as the plates were placed before them, smiling as Paula, whose interest, coming off the kind of offseason he had had, in anything but his success was totally faked, expressed appropriate words of admiration.
Wolfgang started in on his annual farewell speech. The chef wasn’t always around when it came time for him to leave and sometimes had his other exec chefs deliver the speech, but it always got emotional. And Wolfgang’s carefully constructed words of advice—really thinly veiled threats on his opponents for the season—never failed to amuse him.
But this time as he picked up his fork and prepared to give his culinary verdict, trying to concentrate on not embarrassing himself when the brûlée would pop his tastebuds, he suspected that before this was all over his favorite chef wasn’t going to be the only one in need of a whole lot of TLC.
~*~
Holden had been asking persistent, increasingly personal questions of the sales associate from the moment they had walked into the wedding designer’s showroom.
It was still too early to start making decisions about the ceremony, but someone had recommended this place to Holden and Holden’s office being just down the road, they had met up in Beverly Hills after lunch.
Now after about ten minutes of the interrogation, the associat looked both flattered and genuinely confused. And who could blame her.
He had been telling Holden for years now that his approach to showing polite interest in other people’s lives was a little unusual, that unless they knew him personally, and could understand that it was partly from a need to answer questions in his own life—he didn’t tell Holden that last part, it only came off as either grossly bewildering or a massive come-on.
But Holden had never listened. And now he was watching yet another poor person get inadvertently romanced, as Holden had long since moved on from discussing the reasons they had entered the shop to Farrah’s—that was the sales associate’s name—own recent engagement to her boyfriend of six years.
Farrah kept shooting looks in his direction, as she was clearly trying to figure out what his role in this strange dynamic was, in which he was clearly part of the equation, and whether she was simply misreading things. He knew better than to get involved and didn’t make eye contact.
He only quietly enjoyed the scene, occasionally sneaking peeks to marvel at Holden’s ability to navigate the displays of china and crystals despite his enormous feet and his penchant for bumping into things.
He would miss this very much.
He’d spent the last few weeks not thinking about the next few months, but he was falling harder for Holden as Holden spent each passing day opening up to him a little more. But rather than give him comfort, as the day approached for him to leave it made his heart beat more painfully. Because the truth was that for three football seasons, he had cheated his own heart.
While on the road, he had regarded his relationship with Holden as being on “hold.” Meaning, while separated they had considered themselves free agents to do whatever, and whomever, they wished. Until the day he returned in January and they decided whether or not to resume their relationship, which they always did, neither of them could make any kind of claim over the other.
It had, of course, been based on Holden’s rules, and at the time he had acted as though it made sense. No one, after all, could control the actions of another, how much less from afar.
And by and large it had worked. Holden had always been free to call him whenever he wished. Simply because he had nothing to hide; he had fallen in love and his heart had no longer been his to give. However, he himself had never been allowed to call without first being given a specific time to do so. And they had stuck with it for three years. Only once had he broken that rule and in return had received a slap from harsh reality, when one desperate night he had called without invitation and someone else had answered Holden’s phone.
Briefly closing his eyes, he looked away, no longer tracing monograms on guest registers as he waited for the pain that always accompanied that memory to pass.
It had been the first and the last time he had flaunted the rules.
But Holden hadn’t been a hundred percent at fault, as he definitely shared half the responsibility for that asinine arrangement. And it certainly hadn’t all been bad.
Holden had treated him like the only man in the world whenever they were together, and he had sometimes left voicemail that he would listen to over and over like the lyrics to the most beautiful song. Usually the messages were about having recently seen him in a photo spread in some men’s magazine and being reminded of what a gorgeous monster he was, where was he and when was he coming home, and in the meantime for him to “go get ‘em.”
Whenever he found himself suddenly facing a jarring moment, those adorable voicemails and the way Holden would look at him when he did finally return home, had been the things that had refused to let him close the book on their relationship.
And it was precisely because of that inability to forget that three years on his mind could now flood him with familiar and unsavory memories.
Familiar and unsavory reminders.
He pushed at the guest registers and at his feelings at the hated word, wanting but never able to drop it from his mental vocabulary.
It was what this time of year was about. Reminders of him not being in L.A., being gone from Holden’s life and therefore without the right to speak.
For years all he had wanted was to know why. Why Holden hadn’t felt the same way when his own heart had been so completely steamrolled. When their times together had been so unfailingly beautiful and he couldn’t have imagined being with someone else if his life depended on it.
The memories, those feelings, followed him around like eyes in the dark.
But after everything that had happened that summer, after Holden having said yes to marrying him, he knew now what he had suspected back then: that Holden hadn’t trusted himself with the ability to maintain a commitment. Forget being on the same team, they hadn’t even been playing in the same game.
He dropped his hand and told himself to stop thinking about any of it. He was trying to rationalize stupidity, and there was simply the insistent begging of his heart to put it all out of his head no matter their reasoning at the time. He didn’t want to understand any of it.
Holden finally began beckoning him over, and he acknowledged, going over with more relief than he would have cared to admit.
He placed his hand on Holden’s lower back as he reached him, nodding and making an effort to look interested when Holden started pointing out and explaining an array of lavender colored...stuff.
Murmuring equally appropriate sounds of interest, he pressed a kiss to Holden’s temple, and winked a little salaciously at the completely confused Farrah.
“A-are you the groom?” she asked unsteadily.
“Right,” he mouthed, while Holden obliviously nodded, saying chipperly, “We both are.”
“I-I see. Congratulations.”
“Thank you,” he said warmly.
“W-well, let me show you some more of our other options.”
He smiled, trailing Holden around, and taking a tragic amount of pleasure in being the long-suffering fiancé to Holden’s perfectionist bride-to-be. Though he’d have to stuff his own dirty socks in his mouth before voicing any such words to Holden.
And though Holden threw confounded looks at his slightly dopey stares, he paid no attention and only concentrated on mooching off as much sweetness as he could handle before he had to leave and face reality.
~*~
“All things being equal, would you rather do it sooner rather than later?” It was Holden speaking from the bedroom. “Or vise versa?”
He didn’t have to think about it. “I’d do it tomorrow if I could.”
There was silence from the other side. Even through the walls he could see the look Holden was giving him.
Seated on his living room couch, staring at the blank entry in journaling program, he snorted under his breath.
“We’re not getting married tomorrow,” Holden called quietly.
“I know, sweetheart. It’s just— you know I’m not one for those big events with hundreds of people. It’d be nice to just go down to the courthouse and get a license and do it.” He smiled at the thought. “Kinda sexier, you know?”
“Not really.”
“Aw, come on. You’re saying small and intimate doesn’t sound a whole lot better than big and loud?”
“It’s not happening, Sean, so stop trying to say it casually. There’d be thousands there if I knew that many people.”
He grimaced. He couldn’t help it.
“I saw that.”
Chuckling under his breath, he rubbed a finger across his temple, and continued staring at this frustrating hiccup in his plans. Journaling was always the last thing he had to do before heading down to San Diego.
And usually, it was easy. At summer’s end he would sit down and log the important events that had happened to him in the year. Events he felt had defined what the year meant to him: His first real salary bump, buying his house, the media ups and downs about his career; his sister’s pregnancy and his niece’s birth; the weekend he had met Holden. Even their breakups. It was all in there.
It was a surefire way to clear his head and get some perspective for the start of what was always a brutal football season. Otherwise, he would find himself entering the season feeling adrift among external opinions and risk facing mental struggles that could chip away at him.
Journaling discharged, he would then pack up the house, set up his housesitting services, and happily drive down to San Diego prepared for the football season.
And for six years he had successfully done it.
But in this year, in which not merely life, but life changing things had happened to him, he found he couldn’t put a single word down, and it had in fact taken up most of his willpower just opening up the program.
What a joke life sometimes was.
It all felt too real, too raw, as if by typing out the words he would begin reliving the moments and get trapped inside the insecurities again.
He had procrastinated following his normal schedule for so long that Holden had noticed and had offered to help him pack, which was why Holden was in the bedroom.
The rest of the team, including nervous rookies looking to actually make the team, were already down at camp and had been for a few days. Coach Turner was giving veterans a little more leeway, expecting them to be in just as soon as they could, still he was pushing things, and had to light a fire under his ass before Paula tore him a new one.
They’d cleaned out his fridge, turned off his pool filtration system, talked to Gio next door—she had been so happy to see Holden, who had blushed almost guilty, briefly piquing his interest. They had even deleted his TiVo queues. To make room for more shows whose presence in his queues he could never account for and certainly never watched, not the least of which was that show Holden made him sit through because Holden thought one of the doctors looked like him.
So all was done and all he had to do was perform this last act. Just start typing out his thoughts.
He trailed his fingers back and forth across the track pad, and after a moment called toward the bedroom.
“What if we did it on one of those South Pacific islands? You know, one of those paradise hideaways you’re always selling for all that money?”
Silence greeted his words.
“You, me, a gorgeous sunset on the ocean...” He lowered his voice seductively. “The warm sand beneath our feet? That hot, sweet smell of tropical flowers... Hotter sex afterwards?”
Crickets were chirping.
After a moment, Holden said, minimally, “I like the sex part.”
He laughed to himself. “So that’s a yes?”
“That’s a definite no. No beach wedding, no justice of the peace wedding, no getting married while jumping out of an airplane. It’s a full-on traditional wedding for you, big guy. So learn to live with it.”
His smile expanded while he tapped idly on the keys, liking the way his cock responded to Holden calling him “big guy.”
Deciding he was having a much better time teasing Holden, than trying to sort out his feelings, he asked casually, “Are you open to a suggestion?”
“Sure.”
“How ‘bout... you come out here and sit in my lap, and we can discuss this without having to talk from different rooms.”
The silence resumed.
“You know,” he said evenly. “Man to man.”
“Is that meant to confuse me?” Holden asked eventually.
“I don’t know. Are you confused?”
“About why we’re still having this conversation, yes.”
He went on smiling, by this time reduced to just striking and deleting random letters. “If you loved me you’d do it.”
And this time he felt an answering smile through the wall.
“Would I?”
“Yeah. And fuck a beach wedding, you’d go all the way. Let go of all your worldly possessions and move into a mountaintop cabin in Kauai with me.”
Holden had started laughing very quietly.
“There’d be no running water or electricity, and we’d have to set bear traps just to be safe at night.”
“There are no bears in Hawaii,” Holden said, amidst his laughter.
“Doesn’t matter. It’d be us against something. We’d sleep on a tiny cot and breathe each other’s air, and stare into each other’s eyes, and nothing would make sense unless we said it to each other.”
Holden was falling apart in there, his quiet gasps carrying through the open doorway.
“And what would we do for takeout?”
He chuckled, shaking his head. “You haven’t been listening, sweetheart.”
“Oh, right. We’d be living off our love.”
“There you go.”
He listened to the sound of his sweetheart’s laughter and wondered what was so difficult.
Moving the cursor to the top of the screen, he took a slow, deep breath and tapped the cursor into position.
Then he sat there staring at the blinking vertical line.
He loves me, he told himself firmly. And football season can’t change that.
Holden spoke quietly from the bedroom.
“You shouldn’t want to deprive your family of the joy of seeing you get married, Sean.”
“My family?” he said in surprise.
He had somehow kept his voice to a mutter, thankfully. Louder, he said, “My family’d be okay with whatever I wanted.”
“No they wouldn’t. They’d say that, but trust me, they’d be a little hurt.”
He tilted his head, silently absorbing the logic of that. Holden had a better gauge for people’s needs anyway, so he was probably right. But besides which, he was pretty sure his sister would murder him if he got married and then told her about it.
“I’m almost done in here,” Holden said.
“Sounds good.”
“Are you almost done out there?”
“Y..eah.”
He trailed his fingers over the keys.
Then, of their own accord, his eyes drifted to the upper right corner of the screen, to where the entires for the previous years were situated. Specifically, to 2007.
He stared at the date entry boxes, his heart beating steadily. Then slowly, helplessly, he slid his fingers, and the cursor, across to the month of October.
He knew the precise date, could even hear the buzzing on the other end of the line as the phone rang. What he couldn’t understand was why he was about reliving it.
Tapping the date, he waited, still as stone, as a small window popped up containing a brief entry:
He had another guy there. I shouldn’t have done that.
He rubbed his temple, staring at the words. He took a deep breath.
Just then Holden came out of the bedroom, and glanced at him as he headed into the kitchen.
“You need some more time?”
“Nope. TiVo’s all set.”
“’Kay. Hey… do you still have that— you know the show with the—”
“All queued up and ready to go.”
“Perfect.”
He tapped at the keys, half listening to Holden rummaging through mostly empty cupboards. All that was left to snack on, Holden’s regular mission in any kitchen, were the gourmet cookies from Whole Foods he had bought earlier and which Holden swore by. He’d find them soon enough.
He turned his attention back to his laptop. At this point he had to put something down, anything, otherwise he’d go into the season feeling unsure.
He created an entry for August 4th and typed:
A lot has happened but I’m still here. And he’s still with me.
He looked at the words. Yeah, they felt right.
He closed the laptop and set it aside with a sigh of relief, ignoring the voice inside him deriding what an utter cop-out that entry had been.
Picking up the TiVo remote, he settled lower into the couch.
All of a sudden Holden appeared at his side, bumping his knee into the coffee table in an effort to sit down. The table wasn’t anywhere close to begin with. Bite-sized chocolate chip cookies sloshed from his bowl.
Holden moving within a confined space being a tricky proposition of avoiding getting clobbered, he sat still and waited, focusing on locating the right buttons on the way-too-complicated remote.
When the commotion finally died down Holden had arranged himself in his favorite position—up against the armrest with his legs coming across his thighs. He was now busy picking through the cushions for his cookies. He glanced over to see if he could help, and froze.
He blinked, not sure if he was seeing things.
The coy smile on Holden’s face assured him he was not.
Holden was wearing a San Diego Chargers T-shirt. A football T-shirt. Cobalt blue, yellow, and with the white thunderbolt streaking across the front, Reebok logo stitched into the sleeve.
Holden had the short sleeves rolled up, the Reebok logo hidden, but he could have reeled off the style and stock number, the availability of the T-shirt, in his sleep.
His thoughts scattered.
Instantly pulled back into the past, he was, for the hundredth time after a game, standing at the T-shirt section of the team store, staring at the piles of dark and light blue cotton blends. Stuck fast, he had been fantasizing about seeing his elusive boyfriend in one of those things, looking beautifully like someone’s property, and possibly waiting for that someone to come strip it off him… while whispering all the things his desperate boyfriend longed to hear.
And then the memories fast forwarded to the one time he had actually had the guts buy one, to give it to Holden… and the weary, wary look Holden had instead given him as his reward.
He now stared at Holden, at a total loss.
“Nothing to say?” Holden asked, dropping his cookies one by one into the bowl without looking at him.
“Uhh…”
The T-shirt had molded itself to Holden’s torso like it was carefully reading his thoughts, the dark blue making his eyes stand out in a way that was just plain wrong.
Holding his bowl close, Holden then leaned forward and reached for the coffee table, so that he was able to see the back.
The back of the T-shirt had his name and number on it.
He felt himself actually go stupid.
Was Holden trying to—
“Could you give me a hand with this, please?”
He dragged his eyes from the T-shirt to see what Holden was doing. Holden was having trouble pulling the coffee table towards them.
He mindlessly reached forward and pulled it over.
“Thanks,” Holden said, sitting back with a smile.
Holden placed the bowl on his stomach—not on the coffee table—and let his knees slowly drop open.
He stared in burning silence.
“You don’t have to sit there pretending you’re not turned on, you know,” Holden said playfully, ignoring the swelling between his own legs. “You can come over any time you want and put your hands up my T-shirt.”
Eyes shining into him, Holden picked up a cookie and popped it into his mouth, while he stared between Holden’s legs and T-shirt, trying to locate his higher faculties. “I know how you jocks like that.”
He pushed Holden’s legs from his thighs and plowed over.
“Careful of the cookies!” Holden cried, yanking his bowl toward his chest and sinking into the cushions, trying to repress his laughter. And when he obviously wasn’t going to, he cried, “Sean, stop! What’re you doing? You’re gonna crush all my cookies!”
He was having trouble speaking, shaking from the way Holden was writhing under him, accommodating him nonetheless, while he got between his legs and shoved his hand up the T-shirt, gritting his teeth when he felt Holden’s warm, aroused cock pressing into his stomach.
Holden’s darkened blue eyes shot up at him. “Should I take it off?” he half whispered, half laughed.
“Fuck,” he bit out, by way of trying to give an answer. His shoulder bumped into the bowl. Cookies went flying.
“Sean!” Holden wailed, scrambling to save his cookies. But Holden, lying against the sofa’s armrest, had his head thrown back and was laughing so hard he was crying. “The store’s closed! Can I at least put the bowl down!” All of Holden’s writhing had only made it worse. He had fisted the T-shirt and had Holden’s sweatpants coming off as fast as he could manage it. Then he bent and took in all of Holden’s cock in one swallow.
“Oh, God!” Holden howled, jerking and sending cookies raining all over his back. “Sean, you’re lucky I like you!”
One hand gripping Holden’s sweatpants, he pulled the T-shirt over his head, cocooning himself completely, and slid his tongue along Holden’s shaft, licking fast, then groaning hard, as he was already fantasizing about what it was going to look like when he did Holden from the back.
Holden turned the bowl over on his back, gripping his jersey with his other, and made frantic, encouraging noises as he rocked under him.
None of the cookies were going to make it.
~*~
On his back later on, lying against the warmth of Holden’s chest, he savored the last night of his 2010 offseason.
Offered an alternative, he couldn’t have thought up a better way to spend it.
The cookies were decimated and gone. Holden was re-attired in his sweats—the T-shirt had proved perfect in its stretchiness in his grip, had acquitted itself after years of being the focus of a fantasy—and was stroking his hair in an absent lull while staring unblinkingly at the screen.
“He looks exactly like you,” Holden was saying in a whisper, above his head, his voice soft with wonder. “Don’t you think?”
He stared disinterestedly at the actors on the screen, Holden’s heartbeat beneath his cheek the only thing he had been following.
“No?” Holden prompted, when he hadn’t said anything.
“He looks nothing like me,” he murmured, the thought making him chafe a little. “He’s got a beard, is all.”
But he could tell Holden was still staring in fascination at the screen. He had been it seemed for all the times they had done this.
“I don’t know how you can say that,” Holden said softly.
He let the subject evaporate. There were other things on his mind.
Separation, at last, was here front and center.
Packed up and done, in the morning he’d be gone.
But since first facing it during his lunch with Paula, he had been doing some thinking. And it was now or never.
But he had to broach the subject carefully. That much he knew by now.
He had come up with a way they might be able to make the next six months easier, but he knew that if he made getting together over this period sound like an obligation owed to him, or to their relationship, Holden would lash out, despite Holden’s desire to do the right thing. And then he would get a demonstration of how putting on a T-shirt didn’t mean taking on everything else in a person’s life.
It was only fair. He had never rearrange his life during the offseason to follow Holden around on business trips just so they could be together, and neither had Holden ever expected him to. So he couldn’t start acting as though his turn was the more important.
What he would do was be mature about it. He would ask Holden down for an afternoon at training camp, just a few hours to spend some time with him and make the transition less abrupt, and if Holden wasn’t bored within seconds and longing for civilization, then he would propose a weekend, and they could go from there.
And who knew? Before long Holden might be at every Sunday game he was playing, as well as down in San Diego spending NFL Tuesdays-off with him.
Okay, maybe that was a bit much. But the answer laid in moving the ball down-field one yard at a time. Training camp was the perfect way to start.
Suddenly, it dawned on him that the room had gone silent, the quiet dialogue from the TV the only sounds in the room.
He glanced up at Holden to find him staring curiously down at him.
“I miss something?”
Holden slowly shook his head. “I just said I think I prefer their old uniforms.”
“Oh.”
He shifted, Holden relaxing and releasing him, so that he moved into a sitting position at the other end of the couch. He set himself up as comfortably as he could before speaking.
“Hey, sweetheart,” he said, catching the words as they flew through his mind. “You care to come down to training camp for a night or so?”
“Sure.”
About to launch into his justification, he stopped and looked at Holden.
“What?” Holden asked, suspiciously.
“You’d do that even though you hate football?”
Holden gave him an indulgent look. “I don’t hate football,” he said. “I just don’t care to watch it. But I’ll come down, no problem. Cheer you on and all that.” He gave an easy shrug. “I’m a pro with jocks. Can’t you tell?”
He relaxed in slow increments. “That… that would be great.”
He basked in the quick and easy victory, overcome by internal relief.
After some moments of more silence, he looked at Holden. Holden was watching him with still, direct, and openly curious eyes.
“We good?” he asked evasively.
“Why are you hesitating to ask me something like that when we’re getting married?” Holden asked quietly.
He fell silent.
“You’re going to be only two hours away,” Holden pointed out. “I plan on seeing you as often as I can, not just at Christmas or whenever.” Holden paused, then said, “You know that, right?”
“Yeah,” he said immediately, and thought, And by often you mean…?
“So why’d you just say that?”
He stared at the moving images of people on the screen. Once again, the actors’ were the only sounds in the room.
“Sean.”
“I don’t know why I said it, sweetheart,” he heard himself saying, and then for God only knew what reason, added, “Once bitten, twice shy, I guess.”
A whole new kind of silence descended on them. This one deadened the sounds from the TV.
It stretched on.
Without looking at Holden, he silently and viciously cursed himself
What the fuck had he just said.
Holden slowly turned back to the TV. “Okay,” he said blandly.
“Fuck me, that came out wrong,” he whispered.
“It’s fine.”
He found he couldn’t speak around the way his heart was tearing twice as fast against his chest. “Sweetheart, I’m sorry,” he said quietly.
“I said it’s okay, Sean.”
Slowly, he shifted until he was back on Holden’s body, pressing his face into Holden’s neck and squeezing his eyes shut. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it to come out like that. As if— as if I don’t—” he swallowed, trying again. “What I mean is that I didn’t mean to make it sound as if you’re not— I mean I trust you completely, Holden, I trust that—” He turned his face into the cushions. “God damn it.”
“Sean, it’s fine. I get it. I didn’t exactly spend three years making you feel comfortable about our relationship, and now you’re going back into the football season and it’s perfectly understandable that you’re feeling this way.”
“No, it’s nothing like—”
“Sean, I promise you it’s okay.” Holden shifted, making him move so that Holden was now was gazing down at him. Still, he didn’t bring his face from the cushions, didn’t turn to make eye contact.
“You know I wouldn’t say it if it wasn’t true, right?”
He nodded without looking, feeling his face getting warmer by the minute.
Holden didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he relaxed against the cushions and gently ran his fingers through his hair. “My feelings aren’t hurt,” he said kindly. “I know what I put you through and I know it’s not going to go away overnight. So don’t beat yourself up just because you have residual anger over it.”
“I don’t have—” but he stopped.
And then he was cringing so hard he couldn’t breathe, because Holden hadn't interrupted. He had simply stopped himself.
“You still might,” Holden countered gently, matter-of-factly.
He tightened his grip on Holden’s T-shirt, enduring another hard flush, while Holden cupped his face, bent and planted a soft kiss on his cheekbone, beneath his eye.
“Sean, it’s totally okay that you feel this way,” he said softly. “If anyone needs to be doing any apologizing, it’s me for not acknowledging what I was putting you through. Sean, I knew you were different the first time we sat down together, but I was too caught up in my own bullshit to care.”
“Holden, I’m sorry,” he said with finality. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but this isn’t how I feel. I’m good. We’re good. You believe me, right?”
“Of course, Sean, always.”
They both were quiet.
“All right, look,” he murmured. “How ‘bout you tell me something about me you’re not cool with. I think that’d make me feel better.”
Holden started to laugh. “That’s not how it works.”
“Please just do it.”
He felt Holden smiling against his temple. There was a pause. Then, roughly, hesitantly, Holden said into his ear, “You make me think too much, Sean Jackson.”
He stilled. But before he could ask what him to elaborate, Holden laughed. “And no,” Holden said. “That’s not in response to your question.”
~*~