Page 39 of Comfort Read

On the other hand, Kit thinks grimly as he watches Sage prowl around the room, probably they could have started with something less mortifyingly personal. Kit’s pretty sure that, given the choice, he would have preferred to have Sage sit in on a few therapy sessions, or watch him get a colonoscopy.

Instead of saying this, he crashes down onto the full-sized bed, throws a hand over his eyes, recognizes this as a hyper-dramatic pose he often adopted as a teenager, and hastily drops said arm to his side. Then he waits. The various books, photographs, band posters, and terrible drawings are all bad enough, but any second Sage will find⁠—

“Oh my God,” Sage says to his left, and starts laughing so hard he can barely speak.

Kit doesn’t even have to look over to know what he’s found; Sage is standing in front of the closet door, and this is exactly the moment Kit’s been dreading ever since his mother insisted they stay the night. “In my defense, I was a big fan. Emphasis on was. I was young! And—and a very passionate amateur artist! And less than a year after I drew it, I started dating Emerson and left such childish pursuits behind me, okay, this doesn’t have to be weird!”

“Oh my God,” Sage says again, his laughter only barely held at bay. When Kit, sure he’s the color of a tomato, dares a glance at him, Sage is looking at him with so much amusement in his eyes that Kit, all of a sudden, can barely catch his breath. “You submitted this, didn’t you? To that contest they held during the last season? God, I even remember seeing it⁠—”

“Don’t say that.” Kit says, desperate, closing his eyes briefly in horror. “Don’t say that to me, don’t tell me you’ve seen it before! I can’t bear it. I’ll die.”

“Oh, come on, Kit,” Sage says, still chuckling. “It’s not that bad.”

Kit calls this bluff and forces himself to look at the offending object. It’s a poster-sized drawing of the cast of Gowanus High, drawn in the style of what had, at the time, been Kit’s favorite manga. Contrary to Sage’s position, it is that bad, worse even that Kit remembered it. Sage is dead center, first of all, despite having been one of several main leads on the show. He’s roughly forty-five percent larger than everyone else in the composition, and no one, very much including him, is rendered well. Also:

“Your hands are the size of dinner plates,” Kit moans, closing his eyes again. “We’re well past yaoi hands territory and into, like, a situation that would necessitate the X-Men if it was what you really looked like. And look at that face you’re making! Why did I draw you like that?”

“In your defense, I did make that face a lot.” Kit feels the mattress dip under his back as Sage sits down. “The director called it my Sexy Boy Pout, and we never got through shooting an episode without someone making a Zoolander joke. I had a lot to learn about subtlety.”

This forces Kit’s eyes open, if only so he can deliver the full weight of an incredulous look. “You had a lot to learn about subtlety? You did?”

This makes Sage crack up again, the bed shaking slightly with the force of his laughter. After a second he lists over to one side, collapsing back against the pillows next to Kit with mirth spilling out of him, obviously unable to stop.

Kit sighs, but decides he might as well make his peace with it. It’s not like he can do anything else. He waits for Sage to stop laughing, surprised and embarrassed to realize the sound is contagious—in spite of his horror and shame, Kit finds he’s smiling, too, after a moment. It is pretty funny, in the circumstances. Mortifying, but funny.

“Sorry,” Sage gasps eventually, wiping his eyes. “God, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to laugh at you—I wanted to thank you, actually.” He rolls over to face Kit, and instinctively Kit mirrors him: Suddenly they’re a set of closed parentheses, holding the weight of this strange, impossible situation between them. “I’m sorry we have to sleep in your teenage bedroom, and I’m sorry you’re embarrassed about it, but this was nice, tonight. My mom and I don’t usually—well, thanks, that’s all. For having us.”

“Sure.” It comes out as nearly a whisper, though Kit’s not sure if that’s due to embarrassment or the heat that’s building within him, inching insistently up the base of his spine. Mortifying circumstances aside, he can’t deny that he is, right now, sprawled across an actual bed next to Sage actual Ballard. “I should be thanking you, really. For coming.”

All the amusement slides off of Sage’s face at the word “coming.” His gaze flicks down to Kit’s mouth and then lower, skating across his neck and over his collarbones, down over his hips, lingering before he rips it up to Kit’s eyes again. At least Kit thinks it does; maybe he’s imagining it.

Certainly he’s imagining it, because Sage could not possibly be into Kit in that way, the way Kit’s into him—the way Kit has, if he’s going to be honest about it, been into him since he was the horrific little teen ghoul who drew that fan art. Sure, there have been some… charged moments, or whatever, between them, but Kit knows that’s just proximity, the sort of half-formed, ephemeral attraction that can happen when two men of certain proclivities spend a lot of time together. There’s maybe also an element of starvation on Sage’s part, given how long it’s been since he seriously dated—Kit doesn’t know, didn’t ask, what Sage has been doing for sex during his last six years of romantic reclusion, but he has to imagine there hasn’t been a ton of it. That’s the only thing that would explain the dark flush rising up from Sage’s neck to color his cheeks, or the way he can’t seem to bring himself to meet Kit’s eyes.

You could just try it, you know. See what happens. Why not? This is not only a dangerous thought; it’s the sort of dangerous thought that has preceded, to a one, all of the worst decisions of Kit’s life. He thought it as a child mere seconds before climbing onto a piece of equipment that was making an unsettling noise; he thought it as a teenager before submitting a copy of that stupid drawing to the Gowanus High fan art competition; he thought it less than two years ago, when he saw the listing saying Sawyer’s was up for sale. He’s thought it every time he’s ever done something stupid, impulsive, ill-considered, before every big swing that turned out to be a miss. He should know better by now than to even entertain it. He should consider its appearance in his mind to be the equivalent of an ear-splitting alarm.

But…

He could just try it. He could see what happens. He could put a hand on Sage’s neck, and then, if Sage didn’t immediately shriek at the top of his lungs, shove Kit out of the bed, and run screaming out into the relative safety of the snowstorm, he could lean closer. He could ease his own bitten, thin lips over Sage’s full ones, which always manage to look as though he just finished shooting a thirst trap ad for a ChapStick company. He could inch his body across the bed until it was flush against Sage’s, until Sage could feel every ounce of Kit’s desperate, choking attraction pressed against him, hard and undeniable and insistent. He could do it. He could see what happens. Why not?

Because this is all fake and you’re an idiot, Kit reminds himself, and crushes the impulse down so hard he feels something within him shatter.

“I have to go,” Kit says, scrambling up out of the bed and avoiding Sage’s gaze. “Get, uh. Stuff. Water! I promised my mom I’d, uh, I’d replace the jug. On her cooler. Be right back!” He dashes out of the room before Sage can reply, breathing heavily and trying not to think about the bewildered, almost hurt expression in his eyes.

FIFTEEN

Kit realizes a second after closing the door behind him, his heart pounding in his throat, that his escape choices are limited. With the kids in the basement, every bedroom occupied, and Rick on the living room couch, Kit’s only real option for somewhere to be alone is the attic. It’s not exactly cozy up there—his parents have sarcastically referred to the half-finished space as “The Library,” for years, a reference to the corner full of bookshelves, housing volumes that don’t fit anywhere else. The Forrests have always been big readers, and the attic is the perfect place for Tom’s old psychology texts, the various books on ancient civilizations that Justin dumped here after grad school, and Cheryl’s enormous collection of Danielle Steel novels. Two old armchairs, demoted from their original places in the living room sometime in the early 2000s, complete this section of the attic, which is otherwise a graveyard of old boxes, cobwebs, and dust.

To Kit’s dismay, one of the armchairs is occupied by Maggie, who raises an eyebrow at him over a steaming mug of what Kit assumes is tea. “Couldn’t sleep?”

“Nope,” Kit says, instead of explaining that, in fact, he’s fleeing from the crushing weight of sexual tension between himself and the movie star he’s currently pretending is his boyfriend. There are some things one simply cannot discuss with one’s sister, even setting secrecy agreements aside. “You?”

“Oh, I’ve been a bad sleeper ever since Riley was born,” Maggie says, gesturing for Kit to take a seat in the armchair next to hers. “I barely manage in my own bed most nights; here? Forget it. I’m glad I caught you, though. I wanted to talk to you about something.”

Kit eyes the armchair with trepidation. The last thing he wants to do right now is have a heart-to-heart with Maggie, especially since his own heart seems to have remained downstairs in his childhood bedroom, staring at Sage with upsettingly desperate longing. However, his next best option is the living room, where Rick is inevitably only half-asleep in front of the television. If Kit goes down there, he’ll no doubt be subjected to some sort of conversation about sports, or poker, or—horror of horrors—fishing.

Figuring it’s the lesser of two evils, he takes a seat. “Okay: Shoot.”

Maggie does not shoot, which is worrying. Instead, she gives him a hard look, and then takes a long sip of her tea, and then sighs, setting it down. Finally, hesitantly, she says, “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, Critter⁠—”