Title: Beyond Here Lies Nothing.
Author: jubilee3/starvinbohemian.
Rating: T.
Pairings: Sonny/Paul, Sonny/Will.
Characters: Sonny, Paul.
Summary: "The truth is that Paul has always loved Sonny just a little bit more than Sonny has loved him."
Beyond Here Lies Nothing
Sonny left him in Rome.
Barely two hours after being proposed to, Paul found himself staring at the empty half of their hotel bed and the blank space Sonny had left in the closet.
The bellhop was attempting to ask him something in Italian, but Sonny was the only one who had bothered to study up on the language before their trip. The one thing the bellhop definitely wasn't asking about was Sonny's sudden departure, because he had never known Sonny was there in the first place. No one knew Sonny was with him. It was as if he had never even been there at all.
Sonny had seemed almost calm as he packed his things, the evidence of his anger only evident in his stiff shoulders and in the tight set of his mouth.
Paul let him go in silence. He didn't argue. He barely even protested. It wasn't their first fight. Sonny had been pushing back more and more lately against the secrecy involved in their relationship. Maybe Paul thought Sonny just needed to make his token dramatic protest, and then they would move on. (As they always did.)
Part of him was angry, too. It hadn't exactly been easy to carve out time for this trip. In addition to the annoyance of scheduling conflicts, he'd had to explain to everyone from his family to his teammates to his managers why he suddenly wanted to go on a solo vacation to Europe and why he didn't intend to leave an address or phone number for where he could be reached.
More than that, Paul was annoyed because he thought that Sonny understood. Paul's career was important to him. Baseball was his first and greatest love. He owed everything to the game. He and Sonny wouldn't have even met if Paul hadn't of been on a "work date" with an influential reporter from ESPN at that party in San Francisco. If he weren't Paul Narita: Baseball Star, would Sonny have even smiled at him from across the room and given spark to this whole thing?
Paul couldn't marry a man and still be who he wanted to be. Someone would find out. There would be a paper trail or a witness. There legally had to be witnesses, didn't there? They couldn't share a home. Paul wouldn't be able to wear a ring. How could they be married? Sonny knew he loved him. Why couldn't that be enough?
According to Sonny, it wasn't. Not anymore. Paul didn't believe him.
And so when Sonny left, Paul tilted his chin stubbornly and said nothing.
He waited a few more days in Rome before giving up and returning to the states.
Pride kept him from calling first. He jumped at every ring from his phone, though. It was never Sonny, but maybe Sonny was waiting to call because he knew how busy Paul was. Sonny knew he had to hit the ground running as soon as their vacation ended.
But as days turned into weeks and the excuse of a busy stretch of away-games, interviews, and photo-shoots abated… Paul's hope started to dim. He still waited.
After a whole month had passed— he knew they both could be stubborn but god— Paul finally broke. Sonny didn't answer the first time. Or the second. Paul left a message. Both times.
It took him an embarrassingly long amount of time to finally accept that Sonny wasn't going to call.
And once he had, the anger and frustration evaporated and the silence he'd chosen that day in Rome settled, cold and hard, in his heart.
Later, Paul would marvel at how he could have so grossly misunderstood the situation.
Before that last day in Rome, Sonny thought there wasn't anything he couldn't say to Paul.
From the first time their eyes connected across the room at that party, Sonny's heart had been completely open to Paul. There were times when Sonny looked into Paul's eyes, and he could feel the lines between them blurring. It made his heart flutter.
Faith in their connection sustained him through all the lonely days and nights when Sonny couldn't let anyone know he had a boyfriend, let alone that he was missing Paul in particular. The fact that they were living a lie wasn't even the worst part. It was that Paul was so often gone. More often than not, he was standing directly under the spotlight where Sonny couldn't follow.
It could be hard sometimes, but Sonny believed in them. Paul knew him. He knew him so well that he usually knew what Sonny was thinking even before Sonny did.
But if Paul knew him so well, then why didn't he know that Sonny was going to propose? Why did he react with so much surprise and resistance? The proposal might have seemed impulsive, but it wasn't. The idea had been percolating in his mind for a while before it had— yes, impulsively— slipped his mouth.
The question shouldn't have surprised him. Sonny thought they were on the same page. They were in love. Paul told him that the secrets and the hiding wouldn't last forever, but that he and Sonny would last forever. Sonny took that for a promise. When Paul looked into his eyes and told him that he was everything to him, Sonny believed him. He never even doubted it.
But as he watched Paul pull away, his expression closing off to him for possibly the first time, it hit Sonny with the force of a blow: Paul had lied to him.
Paul never intended to bring their love out of the closet. If Paul had his way, then Sonny would always be his dirty little secret, kept locked away in the dark of impersonal hotel rooms. He would always be the guy who had to sneak in through the kitchen even at Paul's own home.
Paul's historic San Francisco mansion, with its minimalist décor and distinct lack of color, had always felt as disconnected from Paul as it did from Sonny, who spent so little time there beyond Paul's bedroom that it felt as impersonal to him as any hotel room. Sonny never saw himself there. But he saw himself with Paul, and they could have lived anywhere so long as they were together. He never doubted that they would be.
Until Paul said no.
For the first time, Sonny felt young and stupid. Maybe even taken advantage of. He felt himself shrinking under Paul's indignant gaze. He was looking at Sonny as if he had insulted his mother.
Sonny knew how much Paul loved baseball, but he had truly believed that Paul loved him more. Nothing mattered more to Sonny than Paul. From the first night forward, Sonny couldn't imagine his life without Paul. Paul was home. Paul was forever. To him, forever meant marriage and a home and eventually a family.
He never thought Paul would say no.
Strangely, Paul never thought Sonny would ask.
They were both wrong.
Sonny put a lot of things on hold when he fell in love with Paul.
Being in love with Paul took up most of his time. If he wasn't with Paul, then he was conspiring with Paul about how they could meet up again. How Sonny could sneak into this place or that place or who Sonny could pretend to be to get into wherever Paul was. The game was both time consuming and emotionally exhausting. He let a lot of other things fall by the wayside. He had barely seen his family in the past year. For Sonny, that was no small thing.
After Rome, after Paul, he was anxious to reconcile the other loose threads in his life.
He went home. And not to Dubai or Texas.
He went to Salem, where his parents currently resided and where the roots of his family planted deepest.
Salem embraced him as a lost son who had returned to the fold. Thanks to his family's prominence, people seemed to already know who he was when they met. Sonny slid easily into his place as if it had always been there waiting for him. His return was as comfortable as putting on a favorite pair of gloves.
It would have been easy to pretend, if only to make the transition smoother. But after Paul, he was more determined than ever to live an authentic life, free of hiding. He wouldn't be someone's dirty secret ever again. He wanted to be seen and known, no longer stuck hiding in the background of someone else's life.
Sonny was already out to most of the people that mattered, but he had saved the biggest hurdle for last: Uncle Victor. He had always respected his great-uncle as the tent-pole of their family and as a self-made man. His opinion meant a great deal to Sonny. He was also the toughest to impress and the most unpredictable in his moods. It took more courage to come out to Uncle Victor than it had to climb K2.
And when Uncle Victor accepted him with open arms, it set the tone for Sonny's return to Salem and for the next stage of his life.
He could have closed himself off after Paul, could have dragged himself back to Salem in defeat and hidden in the Kiriakis mansion until the pain and loss became safer and more manageable. But Sonny refused to hide or wallow. He wanted to feel real again. He wanted to live and create and share himself with other people.
With his head full of optimism and new venture ideas and a potential return to college, it was surprisingly easy to move on. Only his parents had known about Paul, and he gave them no reason to think he still dwelled on the break-up. Because he didn't. Sonny wanted to move forward. He was determined to move forward.
And when he met Will Horton, with his cornflower-blue eyes and heartbreaking smile, the universe seemed to reward him.
As much as it hurt, Paul didn't lie down and die after Sonny left him. Not even after he realized Sonny really meant it when he said they were over.
If anything, Paul was almost obnoxiously defiant in the way he pushed forward. He trained harder, played harder, dated more models and celebrities than ever before, pushed his brand higher, and more or less became the superstar people thought he was.
It felt good.
It even occurred to him that maybe all the time he had spent obsessing about Sonny had been holding him back from achieving his true potential. So what if he felt lonelier than he ever had before in his life? He would get over it. There were other fish in the sea. Everything else in his life was aligning, so why not that?
He was doing well.
And he was fine for the most part. For months, he was fine. He was fine right up until the night he found himself having an unexpected drunken meltdown at a party in L.A.
One minute, he was the life of the party and having a great time with his teammates and then— several drinks later— he was outside being consoled by a friend-of-a-friend whose name he didn't even know.
The only thing that kept him from leaving one of those sad, drunken messages on Sonny's voicemail— the kind he was familiar with receiving but never before leaving— was the guy in front of him, offering sympathetic noises and rubbing slow circles on his arm.
The guy was well-meaning, but knowing he couldn't even explain why he was upset only made it worse. Paul let the guy— Alex? Steven?— assume he was upset over the latest model he had dumped, and he repaid the guy's kindness by throwing up on his shoes. Later, there might have been a drunken kiss, but Paul woke up alone the next day, and he never heard from the guy again. That was definitely for the best.
He learned his lesson after that. He needed to avoid the vulnerable points. What had he been thinking about just before he started drinking?
Sonny. Always Sonny, even when he pretended it wasn't. He had been wondering where Sonny was that night, what he was doing, and if he was thinking about Paul, too.
He was wondering what he would have been doing that night if he had said yes instead of no. If he and Sonny would have been curled up together on the couch in his place, maybe planning their wedding or their honeymoon. Maybe Sonny would have fallen asleep on his shoulder as they watched television, and Paul would have been running his fingers through Sonny's hair as he watched him sleep.
It was a waste of time to wonder. Sonny was gone. Wherever he was that night, he wasn't with Paul.
The night Paul was throwing himself a drunken pity party, Sonny was on a date with a man named Adam that he had met at the Spot. Adam was nice and attractive, and Sonny assumed that they would be taking this party back to Adam's place before the night ended.
Sonny smiled and nodded throughout the conversation, but he was thinking about Will.
Paul had a lot of time to think about what went wrong between him and Sonny. He couldn't believe it was as simple as Paul not wanting to get married.
When they first started spending time together, Paul was elated to discover that he and Sonny had so many things in common and were generally so similar in temperament that being together could be as easy as breathing. On the rare occasion that they clashed over something, it took them both by surprise.
But for all that they had in common, there was a key difference between them that only Paul seemed to see: they had very different upbringings that informed who they were as adults.
Sonny grew up with the kind of privileges that Paul had spent his life scraping and fighting for and that he was still fighting to keep.
Sonny had his own struggles as a closeted gay kid growing up first in Texas and then in Dubai, but he had never known economic hardship. He came from money. Paul knew the burden of being the only son of a poor woman intimately. He remembered the first time he felt responsible for his mother struggling to stretch a paycheck. Eager to contribute, Paul got his first job at a fast food restaurant two days after he turned eighteen. (His mother wouldn't allow him to work before then because his schoolwork was the most important thing.)
Sonny was the baby of a wealthy dynasty. More than that, he was a miracle baby to parents who thought they would never conceive. Cherished from the get-go, he always had freedom to explore his whims with the security of an ever-present safety net. At eighteen, Sonny was backpacking around Europe.
Paul loved that Sonny was a free spirit, but Paul hadn't known the luxury of being one himself. Duty, obligation, and hard-work were his tenets to live by. And so he felt that he understood the real world a little better than his idealistic better half. He understood the tenuous nature of fame and wealth and that he was always one scandal away from losing everything.
Sonny didn't understand that because love and security were always firm constants for him. He might have worried about his family's reactions when he came out to them as a gay man, but he couldn't have truly believed that they would ever stop loving him. He didn't grow up in a conservative, traditional Japanese household where the threat of being disowned was very real. Paul did.
Sonny already knew what it meant to be loved before they ever met, had already said and heard the words before, but Paul didn't know that feeling until he met Sonny. He knew superficial adoration, but he didn't know what it meant to be truly loved for himself until Sonny smiled at him, as bright as the sun, and told him he was the one.
Secure with himself in ways Paul wasn't, Sonny understood what he wanted and what he deserved, and so he recognized when Paul was falling short of that. When he left Paul in Rome, it would appear to anyone that he never looked back.
Paul didn't have that luxury either.
For a while, Sonny jumped every time he heard someone say Paul's name.
And it happened more and more often as time went on and as Paul's star rose and rose. Sonny might have moved on, but Paul ghosted his every step, smiling at him from magazine covers and speaking to him over the television.
It was hard. At first. Sonny had no choice but to adapt and accept that Paul was always going to be there in some form or another.
Eventually, Paul's celebrity faded into the background noise of Sonny's life. He got used to hearing Paul's name. After about a year, he could even listen to Brady and Chad and anyone else discuss Paul's latest baseball game without crushing something in his hands or squirming uncomfortably with self-awareness.
Hearing about the women Paul dated still made Sonny frown, but he was generally too busy living his own life to ponder much on it. Paul had made his choice, and so had Sonny. He had made his peace with that.
But Paul's name never passed his own lips. The one, singular time that Will casually brought him up in conversation, Sonny quickly changed the subject.
December 31st, 2013: New Year's Eve.
When the clock struck midnight, Sonny was in bed, making love with Will. He didn't even realize midnight had come and gone until long after.
Paul counted the minutes up until midnight, eager for the evening to end. When the ball dropped, Paul dutifully kissed his date, Marley, an up-and-coming actress on a CW show. They drank champagne as they networked around an industry party. He got drunk enough that they ended up in bed, too.
Sonny told Will that he had wished all year for Will to fall in love with him. The smile on Will's face simultaneously broke and mended his heart into an all-new shape. When Will pulled him into a passionate kiss, Sonny knew he would cherish that moment for the rest of his life.
The next morning, Paul took Marley to breakfast, gave her the "It's not you, it's me" spiel, and then he never saw her again.
Three years.
Paul didn't hear from Sonny for three years.
It did Paul no favors to admit it, but during those three years Sonny could have come back any time he wanted. Paul would have taken him back in a heartbeat, his pride be damned.
Despite all evidence to the contrary, a part of him had always believed that Sonny would be back.
Instead, he moved on. He got married.
Their reunion, when it finally happened, was so far off from what Paul had imagined that it was laughable.
He wasn't expecting to find Sonny in Salem, but when he did, it felt as if fate had finally intervened. When he kissed Sonny, it was as if their years apart were all instantly erased.
Paul never would have thought Sonny capable of cruelty. Not Sonny. Not until that day when he stood before Paul and told him that he had never been happier than he was now being married to someone else.
Maybe Paul only imagined the subtle triumph he detected in Sonny's expression when he held up his hand to show off his shiny gold wedding ring.
Of course he was being unfair. Sonny wouldn't rub this in his face on purpose. What Paul saw was just a projection of his own disappointment and self-loathing.
It was hard to care about being fair, though, when Sonny was tearing the veil off of three years' worth of hopes and dreams and revealing him for a fool.
The truth was that Paul had always loved Sonny just a little bit more than Sonny had loved him.
After finding out about Sonny and Will, Paul had no choice but to accept that. The evidence was right there on Sonny's ring finger.
While it was true that Paul kept their relationship in the closet, he never really thought Sonny would actually leave him. It was selfish of him to count on that, to assume that Sonny's love for him would outweigh his dissatisfaction with their arrangement.
Paul wanted to have it all.
And therein lied something he would never tell Sonny, a truth he would keep to himself, and that truth was this: Paul could have lived in hiding forever if it meant he could have kept both Sonny and baseball.
Yes, he would have taken that half-life Sonny spoke so disparagingly of as far as he could have taken it, all the way to retirement and beyond. He would have juggled it all until the balls dropped.
He never got the chance, though, because Sonny left him. There was some irony in that. If Sonny had just waited, then he could have had Paul as he wanted him. No matter what, Paul's torn rotator cuff was going to cost him his pitching career. If Sonny had just waited, then Paul wouldn't have had to choose between the great loves of his life.
But beautiful, impatient, impulsive Sonny couldn't wait.
Paul was supposedly the selfish one, but he wasn't the one who left. Sonny did that. And he didn't seem to care about what he had left behind.
God, Paul wanted Sonny to ask him.
He wanted him to ask about the vast emptiness he left behind and the dark-haired substitutes with sweet smiles that Paul tried to fit into Sonny's place.
He wanted Sonny to care. He should care. Because Paul had many lovers in the three years since they parted. He threw himself into debauchery with more ease than any man so entirely in love should have been able to.
Sonny should have asked him how he managed it. He should have asked about the frenzied thrusts, the scratches on shoulders and backs, and the way Paul would squeeze his eyes shut and pretend that the pleas and moans belonged to someone else. About the times he almost—almost— said Sonny's name, and the one time he actually did only for his hook-up to look curiously at him and ask, "Who's Sonny?"
When he told Sonny that there were others after him, Sonny hardly reacted. Paul hoped it was a mask, because otherwise the indifference was real. He wouldn't believe that. He couldn't believe that.
Sonny didn't want to tell Paul about his own substitutes in the time between Paul and Will. About the big, strong arms he sought out so he could pretend for a little while. It didn't sit well with him that he could deliberately use someone like that, and his guilt was only assuaged with the fact that he never slept with anyone during that initial rebound phase who wanted anything from him beyond the moment.
Paul never stopped to care, never even stopped to wonder about how his substitutes would have felt about the situation. He was so used to being used that it didn't occur to him to worry about someone else feeling that way because of him. Of course he was using them. They were using him, too. Before Sonny, mutual using was the kindest arrangement he could fathom, and after Sonny, he slipped right back into it.
Sonny didn't want Paul to tell him anything about their time apart. He thought he already knew. Paul basically told him that he could have anything or anyone he wanted, with the obvious implication being that he did.
(It hurt to hear that, but it wasn't as if Sonny didn't already know. He remembered— with some shame now— how easily Paul had him.)
Paul was obviously hurt and angry when he implied it that day in the hospital, but even later he admitted to Sonny that he wasn't exactly a monk during their separation. Sonny believed him. Believed every word, even the ones spoken in anger, because they didn't lie to each other. It was something they prided themselves on once, their inability to fool one another.
Paul had to wonder now if that was such a good thing or if it didn't just mean that they were constantly vulnerable to each other.
He only wondered briefly, though, because it didn't matter. He would humble himself over and over again if postulation would bring Sonny back to him. If that was what Sonny wanted, to see him humbled because Paul had rejected his proposal, then he could consider Paul humbled. Sonny had called his bluff. He left.
And now Paul knew exactly what his life was like without Sonny Kiriakis.
It was empty.
Paul never meant to destroy Sonny's marriage.
He didn't know who Will was when he slept with him. He didn't know that Derrick was going to tell Sonny about the affair or that Sonny would get stabbed in the park that night as he came to confront them.
He didn't know. He could repeat it forever, but who would ever believe him?
Hell, he knew the truth, and Paul didn't even believe it himself.
Everyone blamed Paul for what had happened with Will.
Everyone except Sonny.
He believed Paul when he said that he didn't know who Will was when… it happened. He believed him, so he couldn't blame him.
But Sonny couldn't deny that it changed things. What he'd done with Will took Paul out of the past and cemented him firmly in Sonny's present. And the present wasn't a place Sonny wanted to deal with at the moment.
Things Sonny had taken for granted as secure— his marriage, his family, his own identity— were shaken to the core by Will's affair. He lost faith in a lot of things, and he wasn't sure who he was without that faith.
He didn't know how to talk to his husband anymore. No matter how many times Will apologized and reassured him that he still wanted their marriage to last, Sonny doubted him. He was frequently angry and prone to lashing out at Will. Sometimes, he felt guilty. Sometimes, he didn't.
Sonny wondered what it said about him, that he could so easily forgive his ex-lover but not his husband.
It was a shame they couldn't lie to each other, because Paul wanted Sonny to tell him that he had never loved Will, not really, not as he loved Paul.
He desperately wanted to hear Sonny say that. He wanted Sonny to take away the harsh sting he felt that day in the hospital when Sonny said that what he had with Will was better than what they had.
How could it be better? How could anything be better?
How could Sonny stay with Will after all he had done?
Sonny couldn't and wouldn't tell Paul that he had never loved Will.
Because it would be a lie.
The absolute last thing Paul would want to hear from him was the truth. Because the truth was that Sonny forgot Paul when he fell in love with Will.
After Rome, he put all of the Paul memories and feelings deep inside a box that he locked and hid somewhere in the back of his mind. That boxed stayed closed right up until the day Sonny suddenly turned and found Paul standing right behind him.
While Paul's reappearance in his life definitely complicated things for Sonny, it didn't erase the three years that came before. The three eventful, painful, wonderful years he had shared with Will.
He loved Paul once. Loved him so much he couldn't imagine ever being without him. But he didn't marry Will because he couldn't have Paul. He married Will because he was so head-over-heels in love that he couldn't see anything else, and when he said "I do," he never once thought about Paul.
Well, maybe he thought about Paul once. But it was only to acknowledge that his beautiful wedding attended by family and friends never could have happened if Paul had said yes.
Paul didn't say yes. Will said yes, and for the first time since it had happened, Sonny felt grateful that Paul had said no.
And Paul would never want to hear that.
It was undeniable that Sonny forgot himself for a moment when he first saw Paul after three years apart.
He forgot Will, and he forgot himself, and Sonny kissed Paul. He kissed him as if he had been missing him just as much as Paul claimed to have missed Sonny…
Sonny had been missing him. For all that he told himself he hadn't been.
And maybe he would forget himself again and again throughout the next few months, possibly every time Paul looked at him with those sad, beautiful eyes and begged Sonny to reconsider, to remember them.
But Sonny couldn't tell Paul the one thing he really wanted to hear.
He couldn't tell Paul that he still loved him. Not because it wasn't true, but because it didn't matter.
He could love Paul now and for the rest of his life; yet, it wouldn't matter unless he did something about it. And he wouldn't.
But he thought about it. Once. It was only a thought, when he had been feeling especially lost and confused, and it only happened once.
Paul had been telling him for months that they belonged together. Everyone was questioning his marriage. He was questioning his marriage. All he and Will seemed to do anymore was fight.
That day, Sonny had looked at Will, and he realized that he didn't recognize him. He didn't know this man who was so paranoid about Paul that he had lied and schemed for all he was worth to keep Paul and Sonny from even being in the same city. The man who regularly lied and manipulated him. This wasn't the man Sonny had married or thought he knew.
Sonny was angry with him, but maybe Will was right to be paranoid. Because that day, that one time, Sonny had looked between Will and Paul, and he had briefly known himself, what he wanted, where his heart was… and that it wasn't with Will.
He could have left then. But he didn't. Because the moment didn't last. At least, the clarity didn't. The confusion remained, but that wasn't enough to make him throw away three years of love and commitment or the family that he had built with Will. It just wasn't.
He could never tell Paul about his moment of temptation because then Paul would never let him go. Paul would never get out from under the idea that Sonny was only one impulsive move away from coming back to him.
He wasn't.
Sonny had already made his choice, and he was determined to live with it. He would love Will again as he used to. If Will could be patient, then Sonny would forgive him one day, and they would move on. Will was the other half of him. There wasn't any other option.
So, it didn't matter if he still loved Paul. It didn't matter how Paul felt about him. Or how confused he could make Sonny feel just from a look or a brief touch.
Even if Sonny were still in love with Paul, he would never tell him. Not when he said the same thing to his husband and still meant it. He would lie and deny and take the knowledge with him to his grave, and Paul would eventually move on.
With nothing else to offer, keeping silent was the kindest thing Sonny could do for him.
Finis.