Shit. Kevin watched as Patrick walked away, awkwardly clutching that...fucking ridiculous leather vest. Was he seriously going to wear that to go clubbing, tonight? Fuck. He was going cruising, wasn't he, out on the prowl, and in that vest...Not that it was any of his business. He wished Patrick luck.
And since they had decided to call it a night, Kevin should pick up some food, go home and have a nice evening with Jon. Who was probably awake and waiting for him. In their home. That was what Kevin should be focusing on. The fact that his boyfriend, who he hadn't seen in three weeks was finally here, and that the next stage in their life together looked like it was finally going to start. There was little doubt that Jon would ace the interview he had tomorrow, and then it would only be a matter of a few weeks at the most before he was down here permanently. That was just...fantastic. Really exciting. Couldn't happen soon enough.
Kevin should be grateful that Patrick had chosen to meet his friends tonight rather than stay here with him. No-brainer really. They weren't getting anywhere with the game tonight and he should have already canceled the presentation, so why drag the evening out when he could be having a nice intimate evening with Jon, and Patrick could be partying with his buddies, getting drunk, dancing, flirting with nameless strangers, fucking his brains out with some random hookup...
Kevin squeezed his eyes shut to stop his train of thought.
'Put your big boy panties on, you dick'. He looked at the clock on his screen. Jesus. He had totally lost track of the time. They had been here for hours. With nothing much to show for it either.
It wasn't the fact that Patrick had left that was bothering him, it was just that it was so...sudden. One moment they had been laughing, teasing, just being silly, and then the next, he was up and gone. And even though the work on the game had gone spectacularly badly, they had been having a really good day.
Except for that one moment, when he had rushed back from getting Jon settled, it wasn't fair to leave Patrick working on a Sunday all by himself, and he had seen him standing there, in that vest. It was only for a few seconds but for that small amount of time, Kevin had felt...dangerously off balance...again. Like the world had tilted suddenly and he had lost his footing. He had pulled himself together almost instantly and thankfully Patrick didn't seem to have noticed, but then he was too busy trying to cover himself up. But who wouldn't be affected by the sight of a practically naked chest, framed in black leather, standing right in front of you? That's what the vest was designed for, to draw attention to the body wearing it. Patrick's body. It was probably drawing a whole lot of attention at some club somewhere right this minute. Good for Patrick...
'You stupid fuck' Kevin laughed bitterly.
Why spend all this energy lying to himself. He was jealous. He didn't want Patrick out at some bar, flaunting himself, advertising his availability. He wanted Patrick's attention, all his focus, on him. He had even left Jon at home and hurried back here to spend as much time as he could with Patrick and now, absurdly enough, Kevin felt...betrayed. Betrayed that Patrick would choose to spend time with his friends, choose to spend time looking for a hook up or possibly a boyfriend, over the chance to...play video games with HIM.
This crush was getting ridiculous. Kevin felt like he was 17 all over again, obsessively parsing every word they had spoken, every look that had been exchanged... God, when Patrick had called out 'cheers', mimicking him, Kevin had felt giddy, like a school girl. It was their little private joke, Patrick trying to pull off Kevin's Essex accent. That's right, a teenage crush, private jokes, a heart aflutter over the sight of a hairless chest and the littlest peak of a nipple...he was fucking pathetic. Next he would be passing notes to Owen asking him to ask Patrick if he 'liked' him, writing their names on paper surrounded by little hearts.
He needed to snap out of this. He needed to get back to Jon. Needed to spend some quality time with his boyfriend, who was smart, caring, kind, and hot...he needed to remember all the things that he loved about Jon, and about their life together.
He had told Patrick that it was hard getting used to having someone around again when you'd just got used to being apart, hard to maintain a relationship with someone who didn't understand the business they were in, but he was only making things worse by hanging around the office when he should be home, taking the first steps to building this new life with Jon, enjoying his company, enjoying the simple daily pleasures they used to share, like having a meal together, planning their weekends, spending time with friends, having sex...
Kevin dropped his head in his hands as he thought about what was waiting for him at home. Jon had been pissed when he had arrived at the apartment, annoyed at the misunderstanding about the cars. It wasn't a particularly joyous reunion but he had eventually stopped sulking and remembered that he hadn't seen Kevin in three weeks, and then his mood had become distinctly more amorous. But Kevin had put him off. Work was pressing, he had a critical presentation, looming deadlines, colleagues who had volunteered their time. So, he had suggested Jon relax, take a nap...a nap for god's sake, in the middle of the day, like a child. He didn't want to have sex with Jon right this minute. Later, sure, but now... he wanted to go back to the office and play with Patrick, as if Patrick was a special toy that he had to share all week with others at work, but was all his own on the weekend.
Not that he didn't enjoy the week days, because working together was so fucking good. They had this amazing chemistry, where they really understood each other's design sensibility. The creativity was off the charts, and the game development was about the best Kevin had been involved in in years. The team was fantastic, and at it's heart, Kevin and Patrick's rapport was pure game magic. MDG would be fucking thrilled with the product, once all the glitches were worked out.
He hadn't worked so intensely, such long hours, in a while, and when he had mentioned that he would be in this weekend, Patrick had jumped at the chance to offer his help, which had made his stupid heart stutter. It was those little things, the way Patrick seemed keen to spend his spare time with him, the way Patrick managed to gravitate towards him while the team shared lunches in the conference room, or the way Patrick seemed to seek him out just to share a joke or a comment about...whatever the fuck he was thinking or working on...even if they were just passing each other on the way to the snack room, they always had something to say, some reason to stop for a moment and chat, or even just share a smile.
And he knew Patrick wasn't coming on to him anymore. The bumbling awkwardness had gone, and in it's place was just...It wasn't so much flirting as just...Patrick seemed to genuinely like him. And he had an ease about him now, now that he was relaxed around Kevin and they were so immersed in work.
Kevin was stupidly fascinated to see the real Patrick emerge. Intelligent, witty, still childishly enthusiastic and naive, but it didn't make him foolish or gullible, just...charming. And he was a fucking good sport. Owen made fun of him the whole time, and he took it all with such good humor, and when he was complimented, or praised, his whole face lit up and he blushed like a shy teenager. But then he would give that sly smile, or make a wry comment and you would remember that he wasn't a teenager at all, but a very adult, very sexual being...who was making Kevin's life very difficult.
Kevin sighed. He knew that this was just a phase that would pass. It had to be. Anything else was...unacceptable.
A crush didn't invalidate the deep feelings he had for Jon, especially since he had no intention of acting on it. And Patrick, thank god, seemed to have drawn a line between them too, so the flirting and the banter had remained mostly non-sexual between them. There was no real harm being done...as long as both of them kept within the boundaries of a simple school-boy infatuation.
Except Kevin had left Jon alone when he really should have taken him to bed and jumped his bones.
And it was Patrick, not him, that had the sense to call it a night, as if he suddenly realized how...absurd it was for the two of them to be alone, late on a Sunday evening, with no legitimate reason to be there...it was Patrick who had the will to leave. Not Kevin.
Ok. So that happened. So... he would make up for it now. Patrick was off in some bar probably being dragged into the toilets for a quick feel up by some leather-fetish stranger, so Kevin would go home and charm the pants of his boyfriend, and show him what three weeks of pent-up sexual frustration felt like.
It wasn't a chore. It wasn't. It was just two years of familiarity versus the new and exciting. He just needed to keep in mind that this would pass.
Crush, infatuation...that wasn't love. Nowhere near.
Early hours of the next morning
Kevin lay on his back, next to Jon, wide awake, listening to him snore. He didn't mind the snoring tonight. It was comforting, he'd almost missed it, though he knew that in a couple of nights it would start driving him crazy again. Of course by then Jon would be gone again.
But he was coming back, and soon with any luck. Kevin smiled as he turned to look at his boyfriend, sleeping. It felt good to have him here. And though it sometime felt stiflingly safe, predictable as any relationship would be after this length of time, with that also came comfort, fondness, a real genuine and mutual caring for someone else's wellbeing.
And that caring was driving Jon to make some pretty huge sacrifices for him. The concept of family, of roots, of home had never meant that much to Kevin, seeing as his had pretty much disintegrated when he was just 14, and moving away to college, then to London and finally on to the US had been nothing more eventful than booking a ticket and packing. But Jon, he had deep roots. He had a family, a typical un-ironically Norman Rockwell perfect WASP family, with beautiful, successful children, supportive and adoring parents and grandparents, long time family pets they were devoted to, and a whole store of traditions and history that they looked back on with fondness and nostalgia. They expressed their love and their affection for each other with ease, and they had taken Kevin in as one of their own. It was as simple as them being happy to see Jon happy. It still blew Kevin's mind. The acceptance, the openness, the sheer...normalcy. A family like that had seemed like some Americanized fantasy, too good to be true, but...Jon really had that growing up, and it had made him the secure, fearless, confident and basically good man that he was.
Had growing up in shitty Romford with a weak, lazy, bitter, but mostly indifferent father and an absent mother, who had escaped the dreariness of her life at the first chance she could, and who remained somewhat of a mysterious stranger to Kevin, had that made him the cynical, ambitious, smooth-talking charmer he was? The man who liked to observe from a distance and not give away too much of himself? Figuring out how to get as far away as possible from his home had been the driving goal of his youth. And it had taken him far. It had brought him all the way to San Francisco, as one of the brightest and most respected stars on the MDG management team. He had escaped Romford and he was happy never to look back.
But Jon...Jon would miss his family. His circle of friends that he had been close to since childhood. And his own career, that he had so carefully cultivated and nourished since deciding to follow in his father's footsteps, and his grandfather's before him and become a doctor. To be at the top in his field of sports medicine at 37 was simply phenomenal, and yet Jon was ready to leave behind the reputation he had built in Seattle and was willing to basically start again here, in California...for Kevin.
The sense of that responsibility weighed heavily sometimes, but then, Jon assured him, that's what people did in relationships. They made sacrifices, compromises for each other.
In the quietest parts of his mind that he only occasionally visited, Kevin sometimes wondered how he would have fared if he had been asked to do the same for Jon. If Jon had flat out refused to move to California, would Kevin had given up his chance of taking the next big step in his meteoric career, just to stay with him? Thank god that he hadn't really been tested, because Kevin feared that the ability to always...walk away, leave behind and not look back in the pursuit of what he wanted, or in the need to escape what he didn't want, had been ingrained in him, and it would take a fucking cosmic shift to break that habit.
So far his love for Jon had kept him tethered down though, and he was enjoying that, that feeling of belonging, of being part of something bigger than just the two of them, and by some miracle he'd been able to keep both his lovely new job, and the promise of Jon and his deep roots, thanks to Jon's willingness to move here to be with him.
As always, nothing much good came of dwelling on the past or on alternate versions of the future. This was the life he was living, and Kevin liked this life. He was in control of his destiny and he had a partner to share this journey with that was dependable, stoic, mature and who loved him.
So, no more naval introspection...he was becoming too bloody American. They loved to dissect and discuss and deconstruct every decision and emotion. Enough of this bullshit. He had just had good sex with his handsome boyfriend, and in the morning he was going to work at his dream job. How much better could life get?
Time to put away strange, unnameable, unrecognizable childish yearnings for something...different.
Time to remember he was a grown up, and start behaving like one.
