Chapter Text
Shepard was wearing the first t-shirt Kaidan had ever seen him in, a James Bond thing, 007, and Kaidan decided he was going to ask him out. Actually, finally, on a date; it didn’t have to be anything more than what they usually did, just as long as they called it what it was. Or what it could be.
Or what Kaidan wanted, really badly.
Pizza and a movie and coffee after, Kaidan’s treat; a long walk between bus stops with their knuckles bumping not just by accident, not ever holding hands, but even without that the feeling was still pretty great. Kaidan had a name for it—the name was almost. And it drove him crazy, but he kind of didn’t care.
He didn’t make sense when he was with Shepard and he made more sense than ever when he was with Shepard. He couldn’t explain that in five hundred words or less, circle the answer closest to the definition he’d studied—but he felt it every morning he woke up and rolled over and grabbed for his phone before he even grabbed for his glasses, rubbing one eye while he checked the messages from Shepard overnight.
Good mornings were when he got more than one. Just got off, cya tomorrow probably meant Shepard was too tired to say anything else, not that he’d run out of things to say, but sometimes he just sent hey, at two or three in the morning, and Kaidan pictured him in a room he’d never been invited back to, leaning over a desk Kaidan had never seen or on his back in a bed Kaidan had never flopped down on.
Mostly, he pictured Shepard thinking about him, wishing he knew what that looked like.
All the time, every day. That one afternoon Kaidan hadn’t meant to fall asleep but he must have, because he woke up with Shepard’s fingers in his hair.
He’d pretended he was still out just to feel it, Shepard’s callused fingertips running along the back of Kaidan’s ear, Shepard’s pulse in his thigh, through his jeans, pressed against Kaidan’s temple, everything amazing—until Kaidan realized he was still wearing his glasses and they were smashed into his cheek.
There was always something. Even when he yawned and stretched and tried to fix his hair, it didn’t exactly come across the way he wanted, since Shepard had told him he sounded like a Wookiee.
And he still couldn’t think about that night, when he’d tossed Shepard a sweater to wear on his way home, not just because he wanted Shepard to stay warm—he did, but that wasn’t the only reason. When Shepard gave it back to him two days later, after the weekend, it smelled like Shepard smelled: the room Kaidan hadn’t been in, deodorant and sweat and maybe toaster waffles. There was a stain on it, too, but it wasn’t something Kaidan wanted to wash off.
He cared for all the wrong reasons and didn’t care for all the right ones. He still hadn’t washed that sweater and it was in his room right now, the one messy thing in there, along with the bed he’d made and the books he’d straightened up, the three pairs of shoes he wore the most outside his closet instead of in.
Kaidan looked over to where Shepard was kicking a pebble, keeping it from skittering off the street. Controlled, carefully timed, but still totally casual. There was a hole in the 007 t-shirt, so small it was only a thing Kaidan could’ve seen. He wanted to reach out and tug on it, to let Shepard know what he knew, but he grabbed his cell out of his back pocket instead.
‘Thought it was vibrating,’ he said.
Not, Hey, you want to go out sometime?
Because they went out all the time—with Garrus and Joker and Liara, drinking the imported beers Liara managed to snag, eating McDonald’s at one in the morning on Friday nights. Kaidan got the feeling it would’ve been later but he was the one who had to be home at two, otherwise Mom wouldn’t trust him with an extended curfew on the weekend, and Kaidan had no idea what Garrus and Shepard got up to after that, always trying to see where they were headed even if it was too dark to know for sure.
It was somewhere else, and that wasn’t the kind of going out Kaidan was thinking about, anyway.
I mean, go out go out, he revised, scrolling through old messages to keep his hands busy, Shepard’s pebble skimming the sidewalk. It clattered into a gate and Shepard managed to rescue it before it passed into someone’s front yard, one of his laces about to come untied.
That wasn’t going to work. Kaidan was pretty sure the way he’d told Shepard he liked him was that tactic, too—just repeating the same phrase with a different emphasis until Shepard told him he was drunk and let him kiss his neck for a while.
If Shepard was the kind of guy who’d ever say You’re being pretty quiet it might’ve been easier to pick up the thread of the conversation, any conversation, and turn it into something—but Shepard was playing this game of kick-stone with himself and Kaidan would’ve tripped if he tried to join in, anyway.
‘Hey,’ he said. ‘You want to come to dinner tonight, maybe? Mom always makes extra, that’s just… I mean, you’ve seen the fridge.’
‘Paintball,’ Shepard replied, not missing a beat or a kick. ‘With Garrus.’
‘Right,’ Kaidan said. ‘Yeah, of course. You told me that already.’
It wasn’t the end of the world, obviously. It was a missed opportunity, one of so many Kaidan had to stop keeping count. And one day, maybe, Shepard would finally stay for dinner, and Mom would finally get to say more than three words to him, and Kaidan could finally tell her what Shepard was, instead of stumbling over the word friend or just sticking to Shepard. Like there was only one way to define him, and Kaidan was missing the most important part of the definition.
The pebble bounced a couple of times, too high for Shepard to keep his rhythm, and he kicked it, hard, into the middle of the street.
‘You want to hang out in the treehouse for a while?’ Shepard asked.
It was less You want to go out sometime? and more You want to make out sometime? But Kaidan said yeah; of course he said yeah. He stuffed his phone into his back pocket and climbed up first and hoped, in this stupid, hopeless way, that Shepard was watching him.
They made out for a long time—Shepard didn’t ask, it just happened—with Kaidan in Shepard’s lap, knees on either side of his hips, Shepard’s hands up Kaidan’s shirt. Kaidan had the chance to touch the little hole in Shepard’s shirt and he did, but it wasn’t something obvious, and Kaidan untucked it from Shepard’s shorts to touch the skin underneath instead of through. His glasses kept bumping Shepard’s nose until Shepard took them off, and Kaidan needed to blink to bring him into focus—at least until he closed his eyes.
There was honestly nothing that felt better. Kaidan was hard and that made his jeans feel too tight, the seams pressing against the insides of his thighs. Shepard took a while to get his hands on Kaidan’s ass but when he did it was worth waiting for, the planks beneath them squeaking.
‘We’re going to bring this thing down someday, you know,’ Kaidan said, breathless.
‘Cool,’ Shepard replied.
Of course he’d say cool.
Kaidan kissed him again and Shepard went down on his back and then they were just lying there, Shepard staring up at the rain-stained boards above him, Kaidan staring at the distorted numbers on Shepard’s chest. And one of Shepard’s hands was still on Kaidan’s ass, thumb hooked into his back pocket next to his cell phone, rubbing the thin denim.
‘I could call you tonight,’ Kaidan said. Impulsive, not asking Shepard out on a date, but at least he’d said something, actual words that weren’t about having dinner with his mom.
His breath got caught on the cotton of Shepard’s t-shirt, warm against his face and making Shepard twitch.
‘I guess.’ Shepard shifted, rolling his hips. Kaidan felt like being brave, like touching him, until suddenly he didn’t anymore. ‘You know we usually stay pretty late.’
‘I could call you pretty late.’ Kaidan settled for almost getting a splinter in his finger, trailing his thumb over the wood instead of over Shepard’s stomach, following the line of hair above and then under his fly.
‘I could call you,’ Shepard said. ‘Just put your phone on vibrate or something so if you’re sleeping—’
‘I won’t be,’ Kaidan said.
He’d nap after dinner or make some espresso or eat the chocolate covered beans that one of Mom’s friends had brought over the other day.
‘Okay,’ Shepard said.
‘Yeah,’ Kaidan replied. ‘It’s a date.’
He kicked himself over that one after they got down, and after Shepard leaned too close to him before he pulled away, and after Kaidan headed back inside, grabbing a bowl of granola, going up the stairs and falling onto his bed face first.
A date. The whole point of everything, only now the word didn’t mean what it was supposed to. Kaidan thought about texting Shepard, telling him to have fun; then, he thought about how it was too much, how he’d just been in Shepard’s lap, how Shepard’s hands hand been in his back pockets and how his tongue had been pushed against Shepard’s bottom lip.
He was overthinking things. He texted Liara instead to ask how she’d done on that history test and the answer was three points of extra credit to Kaidan’s two. Better luck next time, she added, and Kaidan texted back, I wish.
She didn’t know what that was about, though. Kaidan was only obvious as hell when he was alone in his room and it didn’t count.
Thinking about you, Kaidan typed, then waited. There were so many drafts to Shepard in his phone that it wasn’t even funny, and if he got hit by a bus on his way to school and the authorities had to go through his cell phone, the real tragedy wouldn’t be Kaidan’s untimely death so much as all the stuff he never sent, all the stuff he’d wanted to, and how much of a creep it’d make him look like.
I never knew, Shepard would say.
I totally knew, Joker would reply.
‘No plans tonight?’ Mom asked, Kaidan setting the table for two when he made it downstairs, without his cell phone, the temptation, the reminder of his failure to communicate.
When he folded the paper napkins next to the plates he realized, running his thumb along the crease, that he did have a splinter after all.
‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘I don’t know yet. Probably homework or stuff with Joker.’
Mom shook her head. ‘I just hope someday everyone’s as good at making money in the real world as they are farming for gold.’
‘Yeah, but then your inventory might get too full,’ Kaidan said. ‘…Okay, never mind. Pretend I didn’t say that.’
‘Must’ve been the wind,’ Mom agreed. ‘The really dorky wind.’
She didn’t ask where his friend was. Friend. Shepard. So Kaidan didn’t have to explain how he’d asked and Shepard was shooting his actual best friend with paint all night long instead, or that it didn’t make sense—that they weren’t best friends, but they weren’t anything else yet, either.
‘Don’t think too hard,’ Mom told him on his way back up to his room. ‘I can see it happening. Like your eyes are about to explode.’
Kaidan grabbed his phone and hit send. It was just three words, Thinking about you, the understatement of the year. All the time, he could’ve added, and none of it ever makes sense. I really like you, Shepard.
But if he couldn’t ask him to see a movie then it was obvious saying something like that was never going to happen, at least not before he’d had some imported beer in the chilly moonlight. Kaidan put his phone down next to his laptop and did some of his reading for next week early, which wasn’t even the lamest thing he’d done that day.
*