Archive of Our Own

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Sometimes, Hunk forgot that they’d only known Keith for—a year and half? coming up on two? It sounded small, when he said it like that. It sounded like a misrepresentation of all that had happened in those almost-two years.

He tried to list those things, once.

He didn’t get very far.

That was okay.

It only really mattered when Hunk mentioned something that had happened pre-Keith, and Keith would look at him and say: “I wasn’t there for that.” And he’d smile his little Keith smile and Hunk would have a split-second of guilt and regret or whatever because honestly: it hurt, a little, to remember that he and Lance had memories without Keith and it hurt, a little, to think that Hunk was just automatically slipping Keith into those memories.

“You and I do things without Lance,” Keith said one day when Hunk mentioned this, and Hunk’s memory of the moment would forever be Keith frowning at the sink while meticulously washing mint and basil. “Lance and I do things without you.”

“I guess,” Hunk had replied.

Of course there were things Lance and Keith did without him. They had their coupley, lovey dovey stuff. Date nights and cuddling and holding hands and stuff. But maybe it had been a while since Hunk had really remembered Keith and Lance as a unit separate from him, because he had started to wonder. He remembered Lance-and-Alicia, though sometimes that got weird because he’d look at the way Keith rested his chin on Lance’s shoulder and sometimes just smiled at him and Hunk would remember Alicia leaning into Lance with her long hair streaming down her back and laughter on her lips.

This, whatever it was, was different.

Maybe it was because they were all guys. A trio of—bros. It was easier for them to just let Hunk into their bubble uncomplainingly and it was becoming easy for Hunk to tell them: “Hey, I’m a little lonely.”

Yes. Maybe that was it.

***

Maybe it was because he was so close to them that Hunk began to notice the little changes between them. Maybe it was his own growing self-awareness.

A week after Keith’s AFR’s visit (“Just call him

Adam

, please, I am actually begging—”) Hunk started to—catch them.

In the mornings when the three of them made breakfast together and Red sat in a blanket bundle on the table: Lance, brushing his fingers through Keith’s hair all light and easy; and Keith, leaning into Lance’s touch with a smile and a sigh that was less breath and more a shift of his shoulders and wrists and lips.

Once, at the grocery store: Keith’s laughter so loud Hunk had looked up to declare them both hooligans and instead froze and watched Lance sweep Keith into an awkward-shuffle of a dance to music Hunk only half-heard.

When Keith left for a match in Saskatoon: his hands lingering on Lance’s hips and Lance’s arms around Keith’s neck and they leaned together and didn’t seem to say anything at all.

Lance, leaving for one of his odd jobs around campus (an usher for an event, a calc tutor, an extra hand at the university bookstore), hovering by the door until Keith pulled him in for a kiss so quick Hunk blinked and missed it, and Lance’s smile brightening the hall.

Hunk never felt like an intruder. There was nothing grand, or too changed about them. Except that there was, and except that he did.

Keith locked the door and turned around with a smile playing at his lips and then paused when he saw Hunk, spying with his head poking out of the living room.

“What?”

“You guys seem different,” Hunk said, stepping into the little hall proper. He shrugged.

“Maybe we are,” Keith replied and took the handful of steps closer and tugged Hunk by his elbow back into the living room.

“In a good way?”

Keith hummed, dropping onto the couch with a sigh and a huff. He stretched out his legs. “I think so.”

Hunk considered this. He sat and pulled his legs up and hugged them and rested his chin on his knees and looked at Keith looking back at him. “I think so, too,” Hunk said eventually.

“Thanks.”

Keith lounged back against the couch, looking floppy and comfortable as he watched Hunk. The TV hummed, a little, like a reminder. Their bowl of mismatched snacks (gummies and chips and chocolate-covered nuts and maybe an apple) sat on the cushions between them, ready and waiting.

And maybe it was that Hunk didn’t know what to make of this shift in Keith and Lance’s relationship, and maybe it was that Hunk didn’t know what to make of him

noticing

that shift in the first place, and maybe it was that Lance—Lance, who he had known for so long and through so many crayon-nose incidents and food fights and arguments and late nights playing games—maybe it was that Lance seemed both very near and very far away when he was with Keith, and when he was with Keith with Hunk.

Yeah, maybe all that made him wonder.

“Should we get Red?” Hunk asked, his chin digging into his knees and his teeth clicking together.

“She’s sleeping,” Keith said with a wave of his hand. He snatched a fruit gummy from the bowl and popped it in his mouth. Hunk watched him chew.

And he wondered: where did he fit, with the new and improved Keith and Lance?

Keith’s voice cut through his thoughts: “What are you thinking about?”

Hunk blinked. Keith tilted his head.

“Nothing,” Hunk said, and pulled a blanket around his shoulders. “Movies.”

Keith considered him for a moment, and then he picked up the snack bowl and shuffled closer to Hunk and Hunk automatically shifted to share the blanket. Their elbows knocked together. Keith set the snack bowl on his lap and snatched up the remote.

“Let’s watch something fun,” Keith said.

Hunk looked at him, horrified. He reached for the remote but Keith pulled away, already clicking through his Netflix list. “I know what that means!” Hunk squawked.

Keith moved the snack bowl to Hunk’s lap and just said: “Eat that.”

“Nothing scary, Keith!”

“It’s good for your heart.”

“It is

not

!”

Keith put on something with houses and pretty things and normally that would sound okay, Hunk thought, but horror movies had a knack for making okay things very, very bad. He clutched the snack bowl and tried to crawl into the couch and Keith leaned against him, pleased as punch.

“I hate you,” Hunk whispered at the midway point of the movie.

“You don’t,” Keith hummed and took a huge bite of the apple.

***

(They were slumped over when Lance came home: Hunk, sprawled against the arm of the couch, and Keith, sprawled against Hunk’s side. Several blankets and the empty snack bowl were on the floor. Netflix was reprimanding them: “Continue Watching?”

What had they been watching?

“Nerds,” Lance said, scooping up the bowl.

“Go away,” Keith grunted and burrowed against Hunk, all pointy elbows and messy hair.

“I just got back!”

“Hi Lance,” Hunk groaned. He shifted. Keith went with him, and then they slumped back into the couch, a warm pile of limbs and snores.

“I repeat:

nerds

.”

“What does that even mean?” Hunk mumbled, and somewhere by his shoulder he heard Keith mutter an “amen.”

“At least go to the bed,” Lance huffed.)

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

The apartment was quiet, and still, and felt oddly muted. Like Hunk had crossed into something warmer and softer when he shut the door behind him and took a long, deep breath. A lamp in the living room was on, orange and dim and far away, and down the hall Hunk could see that the bedroom door was half-open. There was some squeaking, and then quiet, and then more squeaking. Red, he thought, running on her wheel. He could see, maybe, a glimpse of Keith’s elbow.

Hunk set his backpack on the floor. He shrugged out of his coat and dropped it on top of his bag. He toed off his shoes. He took careful, slow steps down the hall.

The door creaked when he pushed at it. Closer now, he could hear a soft crashing and roaring from Lance’s headphones—music, or noise, or a TV show.

Keith looked up and Hunk paused, his fingers dragging against the door.

They blinked at each other.

Lance was squished against Keith’s side, his headphones hooked around his neck and Keith’s left hand tangled in his hair—or maybe Keith had been playing with Lance’s hair, brushing his fingers through it and toying with the start of Lance’s curls. Lance had slung an arm over Keith and Hunk could see his hand clutching at the side of Keith’s shirt. Keith was reading a library book, with a blank and battered brown cover, holding it slightly away from his body with his other hand so his wrist looked defined and steady and strangely Keith-like.

Hunk frowned.

Keith snapped his book shut with a small

thwump

of the pages. Lance grunted, but didn’t wake.

“Hey,” Keith said eventually, softly.

“Hi.”

Keith set the book on his thigh, the tips of his fingers settling on the cover like he didn’t quite know what to do with himself. “You okay?”

Hunk blinked. He stepped inside and shut the bedroom door. He crossed his arms. “Probably.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know,” Hunk muttered and looked towards Red’s cage. She had waddled off her wheel and was shuffling through the shavings. “Is he sleeping?”

He looked back in time to see Keith look down at Lance, and in time to see the tiny smile play around Keith’s lips. “Yeah.”

“‘s early.”

“Maybe.”

Keith looked up again. His smile fell away. He opened his mouth. He closed it. And then he pulled his hand from his book and patted the bed.

Hunk hunched his shoulders.

Keith patted the bed again.

“I’m not a dog,” Hunk grumbled, but shuffled to the edge of the bed and sat, gingerly.

Lance sighed.

“Just come lie down,” Keith whispered.

Hunk didn’t, but he twisted to look at Keith and then at Lance, half-buried against Keith. “What’re you guys doing?”

It took Keith a moment, and then he said: “Nothing, I guess.”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing.” Keith paused. “Just—existing together.”

Hunk thought that should be less satisfying to hear than it was. He didn’t fight the loosening of his muscles, the slow release of his lungs, and he shifted to lie flat with his face pressed into the pillows.

“What happened?” Keith asked.

“Nothing,” Hunk said. “I was going home.”

“Okay.”

“Came here instead.”

Keith hummed. “I’m glad,” he said, maybe whispered, and then Hunk felt Keith’s hand settle against his shoulder.

Hunk thought about saying:

I should go home

. He thought about saying:

sorry for interrupting

.

But then Keith pulled his hand away and Hunk rolled enough to watch Keith pick up his book and to watch Lance’s hand tighten against Keith’s shirt. Keith found his place again with a practiced twitch of his fingers and a brief scan of the page—a well-established bookworm. If Lance was awake, he’d look at Hunk and grin and maybe tease Keith with the latest Lance-flavour of teasing that Hunk couldn’t always keep up with.

But Lance wasn’t awake, and Hunk started to wonder if it would be weird to ask his best friend’s boyfriend to play with his hair, too.

He settled for shuffling as close to Keith as he dared and he shoved away the voice that told him he was being strange.

And then Keith started to read, softly, and Hunk started to drift off.

“‘Rather than wishing to turn away from the world and create a new one, or to supplement the existing world with features it does not yet have, the imagination longs instead to be able to bring about things sensorially present in perception—’”

“That’s super boring,” Hunk mumbled.

“Whatever.”

He woke up later to Keith snoring and Lance leaning over Keith to look down at Hunk.

“When you’d get here?” Lance asked, grinning.

And Hunk could only gape up at him.

***

(And he wondered.)

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

He googled: “what is a crush.”

He closed the browser before the search results came up and frowned at his hands. He remembered Lance’s first crush and the way Lance had gotten ridiculously loud around her and the way that Lance had held onto Hunk’s arm anytime she walked by.

He’d known Lance for way too long.

He packed up his things and trooped from the library to meet Keith and tried to stop thinking about it.

Except the moment Keith lowered his phone long enough to look at Hunk and frown at him, he said: “What’re you thinking about?”

They were standing just on the edges of the massive Subway line. Hunk could smell nothing but that distinct Subway smell: lettuce and mayonnaise and pickles but was it really any of those things, or had he just fallen into the Subway trap that made him think cardboard was real food?

“Subway,” he replied.

Keith blinked at him.

“It’s the smell, okay!”

“The Subway smell?” Keith said.

“The Subway smell,” Hunk sighed. “Is Lance coming?”

Keith glanced down at his phone and tapped his thumb against it once. There was a twitch of his mouth that Hunk was starting to recognize, even if he couldn’t define it: something in between a frown and a huff, and not quite a tremble. “No,” Keith said eventually. “I don’t think so.”

“Oh.”

Hunk didn’t quite know what to do with that, with the disgruntled tone of Keith’s voice or the second tap of his thumb or the way Keith shrugged and shoved his phone in his pocket, or the way Keith continued: “He’s busy. We’ll see him later.”

“Tutoring?” Hunk asked.

Another shrug. “Yeah,” Keith replied. “Someone wanted an emergency session or something. Before a midterm.”

“‘tis the season,” Hunk said, aiming for light but coming out strained. He grimaced at his own voice, but Keith seemed to appreciate it because he laughed and reached for Hunk’s arm and pulled him away from the Subway line that kept growing, and growing, and growing.

“Let’s go find food,” Keith said.

“There’s Subway.”

“Let’s go find food that isn’t Subway.”

Hunk thought about asking Keith, firstly, if he was okay, if his sometimes jealous leanings were distracting him or making him grouchy; and he thought about asking Keith,

hey what does a crush feel like

?

Lance was clumsy around Keith, at first. Twitchy.

And Keith—

Well.

He always did his best for them, didn’t he? Met them partway.

He was good like that. Wonderful, even.

Lance was lucky to have him.

“Lance is lucky to have you,” Hunk said as Keith tugged him through the crowds and out of the students’ union building. It was fresh outside. Warm. Also—cool, like winter was dragging its heels but spring was putting up a valiant invasion effort.

“Is he?” Keith said over his shoulder while Hunk thought of battles and snow and the easy way his best friends leaned towards each other. “I think I’m lucky to have him.”

“I’m lucky to have you,” Hunk continued, and he didn’t quite blurt it out and he didn’t quite say it but, somehow, there it was: out in the universe.

And Keith squeezed his arm, quick and warm, and glanced back to smile again, and he said: “I’m lucky to have you, too.”

This made something loosen, in Hunk. He didn’t know what it was. He didn’t know who had wound it so tight, or how Keith’s words—firm and honest—had reached it. He felt it, all the same, and wasn’t it something?

***

“Let’s go for soup,” Keith said.

“Soup,” Hunk said.

“Soup,” Keith repeated.

***

They walked off campus, to the bustling arts district with its piles on piles of restaurants and its piles on piles of memories. On one corner, the distinct memory of Lance dragging Keith away from a shrieking preacher and his hateful signs. Across the street was the cafe where Keith had hunched over his laptop and typed furiously for several hours, while Hunk and Lance watched with a mixture of awe and fear. Further away was the spot by the now-closed bookshop Keith had loved, where Hunk had cheerfully snapped a picture of Keith pressing a loud kiss to Lance’s cheek and Lance laughing Hunk’s name while Pride erupted in colour and light around them.

The photo hung in a magnetic frame on their fridge. It was one of Hunk’s favourites. He liked the way Lance brushed his fingers over it, idle and sweet, when he closed the fridge. And he liked the way Keith sometimes stood on wobbly feet in the morning, clutching his coffee and looking over the mess of photos and magnets and haphazard lists smacked to the fridge door before finally reaching out to tap the corner of the frame or the edge of Lance’s wide smile.

Hunk liked the way Keith stepped over cracks in the sidewalk when he was distracted, or disturbed, or tired, and he liked the way Keith rolled his eyes and showed Hunk when Lance sent a few too many emojis in a text message. Hunk liked the way Keith crossed his arms right before he decided where he wanted to eat, and the way he’d point his nose at the sky and rock on his feet and then say: “Let’s go

here

, Hunk.”

He liked that he knew what Keith meant when he said soup, and the way it reminded him of the quiet, Sunday-afternoon admission: “That’s just what my dad called it.”

(“Yeah?” Hunk had said.

“Yeah,” Keith had replied, with a hunch of his shoulders. He had tugged at his hair and looked at the corner of the table and Lance had, very slowly, looked up and at Hunk with the smallest of smiles.

And Hunk had stored it all in the back of his head, in an imaginary box lined with soft padding and a bundle of mint.)

***

They’d been to the restaurant before. All three of them liked the bustle and noise of the place, the soft (and at the same time intrusive) instrumental music that played overhead and the comfortable benches Lance liked to squish himself against. The tables always had this clean sort of stickiness, and the sign on the door made flashy promises of real fruit bubble tea that none of them had tried—yet.

Most of all, they liked the enormous bowls of

phở

.

“Lance is going to be mad we came without him,” Hunk said as he slid into the bench and dragged his palms against the tacky surface of the table.

Keith plopped down next to him. Their shoulder bumped and the leaned over the menu they knew too well and ignored the other, empty side of the table.

“We’ll bring him salad rolls,” Keith muttered with a nod of his head that made his hair bounce, just a little.

To no one’s surprise, this was not enough to appease Lance.

“IM COMING,” he sent in a text message to Hunk.

“DONT YOU DARE EAT WITHOUT ME,” he sent, four times, to Keith.

“You’re missing one,” said the spiky-haired waitress who always had a wide smile for them. “Where’s your boyfriend?”

“He says he’s coming,” Hunk said.

“He’ll have number twenty-three,” Keith said. “Probably.”

“He should stop texting when he’s supposed to be working,” Hunk said when Keith’s phone buzzed again.

The waitress laughed and tapped the table once as she turned away.

Keith’s phone buzzed again. Keith sighed, enormous and loud, but he was smiling like he’d won a tiny victory.

“You’re diabolical,” Hunk said and shrugged out of his jacket.

“I did nothing.”

Hunk draped his jacket over Keith’s head.

His stomach growled.

Keith’s replied in earnest.

And they snickered with bowed heads.

***

Lance ran.

He burst into the restaurant.

Keith still had Hunk’s jacket on his head.

“You,” Lance said with a huff and grumble and his hands on his hips.

“Me?” Keith said, leaning his elbows on the table.

“Or me?” Hunk piped up, smiling wide.

“Both of you!”

Lance threw himself into the bench on the other side of the table.

“You had to work,” Hunk said.

“You could’ve waited!”

“We were hungry,” Keith sniffed.

“Oh please,” Lance grunted. He leaned back with crossed arms and flushed cheeks and an exaggerated roll of his eyes. “You two take, like, an hour to decide anything.” He paused. “And then you probably walked here.”

“It’s a nice day,” Keith said. He shrugged.

“My point,” Lance said, or maybe howled. “You could’ve just waited! Or, I don’t know, eaten Subway.”

“Keith wanted soup,” Hunk said.

“Keith always wants soup.”

“I do not.”

“Well,” Lance huffed and squirmed to reach into his jacket pocket. He slammed a fistfull of bills on the table. “Lunch is on me, my main dudes!”

Keith grimaced with his whole body. Hunk snorted tea out his nose.

“Whatever!” Lance’s flush became a full-on blush, heated and making his eyes sparkle. “You guys try making sense after tutoring and then, you know, booking it over here to have lunch with a couple of traitors!”

Their waitress re-appeared with a smile and steaming bowls. “Ah, hello boyfriend,” she said to Lance. “I have a number twenty-three for you.”

The sparkle in Lance’s eyes intensified.

“Really?” he said, with more emotion than seemed strictly necessary.

***

Hunk liked the way Lance sparkled, and he liked the way Keith smiled at Lance’s sparkle, and he liked the way Lance sometimes kicked them under the table when he got too excited.

***

Keith <3: are you home yet

Keith <3: you should’ve just come home with us

Lancey: Ignore him

Lancey: Youre welcome

Lancey: Thank you for looking after Keith

***

Hunk flopped back on his bed and ignored the way the skinny mattress squeaked and the worn bedframe grumbled. Someone across the hall was yelling. Someone down the hall and in the lounge dropped something heavy and loud.

He blinked up at his phone screen. He flipped between the two conversations: Keith, with his inconsistent messaging, with the sometimes huge blocks of text and sometimes single-word replies; Lance, with his reliance on caps-lock and emojis and the way Hunk could sometimes

see

the way he shrugged at auto-correct.

Hunk breathed in. He breathed out.

That thing inside him still felt loose. Relaxed. Warm. Like a—hug, really. He couldn’t name it, still, but he was starting to think it felt a little like the way Lance threw his arms around Hunk’s neck and clung on in a hug that was loud and familiar and unchanged. Or, a little like the casual and still-new way Keith leaned against him, or made room for him in their bed. Or even like the slight weight of their key in Hunk’s pocket.

Smiling, he typed out his replies: first to Keith, and then another “thank you for lunch” to Lance.

No reply from Keith, and then several cake-emojis from Lance.

Hunk tucked his phone under his pillow and settled back against his bed with his hands folded on his stomach and the smell of

phở

lingering in his nostrils.

He closed his eyes. Relished in the feeling of his own smile.

He sighed.

He opened his eyes, his breath caught in his chest, and stared up at his ceiling.

The thing inside him tightened in a panicked furl, like whiplash, like screaming, like the roar of a rollercoaster or the fright of a jumpscare or the bruising of an apple.

He rolled to his side and pulled his phone back out from under his pillow and he stared at its dark screen.

And he stared.

And he stared.

And he unlocked his phone and he swiped back to Keith’s messages and he scrolled through them with careful, slow swipes of his thumb.

“i’m always worried,” Keith had written the previous Thursday. “he can’t be trusted you know. he goes out and he runs around and he probably tries to befriend the squirrels in the trees and one day he’s going to bring home a coyote and say something like honey i know you love dogs and then that’ll be my life, hunk. a coyote and a hamster. he’ll name the coyote brown. it’ll eat my nose.”

Hunk huffed out a laugh, trembling and short, and he scrolled further back.

“just come over,” Keith had written last month, short and sweet and it had been enough for Hunk to drag himself out from under his desk. “you can be with us,” Keith had continued ten minutes later.

“lance wants to get red a sibling,” Keith had written even further back. “i’m very fond of him. don’t tell him.”

“the film club is doing a screening of totoro in the humanities centre tomorrow night and you and i are going make no other plans thank you.”

“ok but how about you ditch math and come make brownies.”

He shoved his phone back under his pillow.

The thing inside him tightened and tightened and tightened.

Panic.

It was panic.

He swallowed.

He chewed the corner of his pillow.

No.

He thought: no.

He pulled his phone back out and blinked at the screen and then with his jaw clenched and his stomach roiling, he deleted the heart next to Keith’s name.

***

He got up and studied productively until his neck hurt and he had forgotten the rising stress inside him. He stretched and he yawned and he plugged in his phone and he turned off his lights. His phone flashed and buzzed on his desk.

Lancey: GOOD NIGHT HUNK WE LOVE YOU <3333333

And then came a picture of Keith holding Red in his hands and looking grumbly.

Hunk twitched a smile at his phone and flipped it over. He tossed himself back into bed with a groan.

And he made himself stop wondering.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Lance had his hands in his hair and his elbows on the table on either side of his biochem textbook. Hunk tried not to look at it. Lance tried not to look at it.

Red was dozing in a towel bundle between them, in the middle of the table. A perfect, fluffy centerpiece.

Lance had been kicking at Hunk’s shin idly, until Hunk had grunted and kicked back.

Yes, they’d known each other too long.

It was early April.

Hunk tapped at the screen of his calculator, idle and thoughtful. He could see Lance mouthing curses at his textbook, and the drag of his fingers against his scalp when his frustration overflowed, and Hunk imagined he could even feel the anxious bounce of Lance’s leg under the table.

He reached for one of the pack of brightly-coloured post-its in the middle of the table—a pseudo-horde for a hamster—and pulled it slowly away. Lance continued mouthing at his textbook. His leg continued to bounce. His left eye twitched, once. Hunk uncapped one of his markers (actually one of Keith’s, but who was paying attention anymore) and scribbled his message, quiet and quick.

And then he tossed the pack at Lance.

It bounced off his head.

Lance looked up, his hands falling from his hair.

“What,” he said.

Hunk shrugged.

Lance rolled his eyes and snatched up the pack of post-its and read the message over once. The black on the blue looked bold, and made Hunk’s handwriting look steadier than it actually was.

U CAN DO IT LANCE

“Why didn’t you just write ‘you’?” Lance said, sounding grumpy but his smile twitched into place.

Hunk shrugged again, grinning. “I did.”

“Wow.”

Hunk watched Lance peel the post-it free and stick it to his palm. He held his hand up to his face and blinked at the note, his eyes going slightly wobbly.

“What’re you doing?”

“Studying a message from an angel,” Lance replied.

Hunk snorted.

Lance’s smile grew a little more. He stood and stretched, yawned, and wiggled his fingers, and then walked to the fridge and slapped the post-it to the door.

Slap.

Lance stepped back, hands on his hips. Hunk leaned an elbow on the table and his chin in his palm and blinked twice at the bright blue of the post-it.

“The fridge is a mess,” he said.

“It’s perfect,” Lance sniffed.

“Cluttered.”

“Perfectly cluttered.” Lance turned back, flashing his teeth at Hunk in a wide smile. “Want a snack?”

“No, thanks.”

“Let’s have some ice cream.”

“No, thanks.”

“Ice cream sandwiches!”

Hunk sighed. Lance returned to the table with four paper-wrapped sandwiches and dumped them on Hunk’s notes. Hunk frowned. Lance dropped into the seat next to him, still smiling.

“Why are you like this?”

“Why am I amazing, you mean?”

“Maybe,” Hunk huffed and picked up a sandwich.

Red lifted her head to blink her little black eyes at them.

They finished their first sandwiches and balled up the wrappers and shoved them under some of Hunk’s notes. Lance leaned back in his chair, hugging one knee and swinging his other leg idly.

Hunk, unwrapping his second sandwich, blinked at him.

“What?”

Hunk shrugged.

“Don’t comment on my hair.”

“Your hair looks great.”

“You’re a good friend.”

“Yes,” Hunk sighed. “I am.”

Lance shook his head but unfolded long enough to shuffle and slide his chair a little closer, so their shoulders knocked when they both stared out the window above the sink. The sky was blue. It looked chilly, but not the late-winter freeze kind of chilly but the early-spring damp kind of chilly. Like rain was coming.

Hunk glanced at Lance.

Lance nibbled at the edge of his sandwich, looking thoughtful. He licked a smear of ice cream from his lips.

It made Hunk think of a late summer day years and years ago, when they’d snuck to Isabel’s ice cream sandwich stash and eaten until they were both sick but pleased. He remembered Lance laughing with chocolate on his teeth and a ring of ice cream around his lips and his fingers sticky and sticking to anything and everything.

Hunk bumped their shoulders together, deliberate and loud in its silent sort of way.

Lance pressed his head, briefly, to Hunk’s shoulder, like he was remembering, too.

They went back to looking out the window.

Hunk finished his sandwich and licked some melted vanilla ice cream from the wrapper, and said: “Question.”

“Uh huh?”

“Why do you always smell good?”

Lance huffed. “I bathe.”

“Is it your shampoo? Or your face stuff?”

“My face stuff?”

“Yeah. The stuff you put on your face.”

“I’m going to put some stuff on your face.”

Hunk balled up the wrapper and leaned forward to shove it under his notes with the other two. “That doesn’t even make sense.” He paused. “Is it stuff you put in your hair?”

Lance scowled at him.

“I’m serious!”

“I don’t know,” Lance grumbled into his sandwich wrapper.

“You just—magically smell good? All the time?”

“Have you been talking to Keith?”

Hunk blinked. Lance shoved the rest of his sandwich into his mouth. “What?” Hunk said.

Lance shrugged and tossed his wrapper to the table and licked the pads of his fingers. “Keith mutters about how I smell a lot.”

“Oh,” Hunk said, and through the lingering sweetness of the ice cream he felt something a little dry.

A little dreadful.

“You guys could, I don’t know, comment on the excellent glow of my skin. Or, like, my tattoos.”

“You have nice tattoos,” Hunk said flatly, distracted.

“I do! And you know what? I put work into this face and my nebula.”

“Yeah.”

Thrum thrum thrum, at the back of his head. Something saying: wait, wait!

“Instead I hear about how I smell. God, that’s weird just to say, hello!”

“Lance,” Hunk blurted. “How do you know you like Keith?”

A bird flew by, a streak of something dark by the window.

Lance turned to look back at Hunk, blinking his bright eyes and frowning with a crumbling of chocolate cookie on the corner of his mouth.

“You’ve got—” Hunk swiped at the edge of his own mouth.

“‘kay,” Lance said. “What do you mean?”

“From the sandwich.” Hunk swiped at his face again. “You made a mess of your face.”

“First of all,” Lance said, finally rubbing the cookie crumble away. “That’s an exaggeration. Second of all, I don’t like Keith. I love him.”

Hunk let that hang in the air for a moment.

Lance, predictably, turned pink.

Hunk wished he had the presence of mind to enjoy it.

“Okay, but no,” Lance continued, waving his hands for a moment before shoving them under his armpits. He hunched. “For real! Like, I don’t like you—I love you. You know what I mean?”

“Oh my god,” Hunk groaned.

“You started this!”

“This isn’t what I asked!”

“I want to eat his shoulders!” Lance snapped, and then Hunk swore he could see something pop behind his eyes.

“Oh my god,” Hunk said again. “What does that even mean?”

“It means what it means!”

“Do you want to eat my shoulders?”

“No!”

They stared at each other.

Hunk had the feeling they were wearing similar expressions of—horror.

Yeah.

Horror.

“This is terrible,” Hunk said.

“You brought it up.”

“I didn’t know what would happen!”

“What did you think would happen?”

“I don’t know!” Hunk dragged his fingers against his chin and fought, uselessly, to keep an empathetic blush from rising in his own cheeks. He was sweating, a little. “I didn’t think you’d talk about—about—cannibalizing Keith!”

“Oh my god!” Lance said. Shrieked, really. “Hunk!”

“Lance—”

Lance slammed his hands on the table.

They both stared down at them.

Another bird flew by, squawking.

Red poked her head out of the towel bundle and seemed to glare at them. She disappeared with a huff and a squirm of her back.

“It’s like this,” Lance said eventually. “You know how, like, there’s us, yeah?”

“Lance—”

“Just hang on, okay!” Lance drummed his fingers against the table. “Yeah, there’s us. And there are other people. And other people are okay, but we prefer each other?”

“We do?”

“Holy actual Jesus, Hunk.”

“You aren’t making sense.”

“Ugh,” Lance said.

“I’m pretty sure,” Hunk said. “That that’s my line.”

“Okay, god, like—I see Keith and I want to eat his shoulders.” Another drum of Lance’s fingers. “And my stomach gets all pissed off and fluttery—”

“Still?”

“Yeah, still! It’s love, Hunk. Love is fluttery.”

“And pissed off?”

“You’re going to make my eyes pop out of my head.”

“Okay, okay.” Hunk squirmed in his seat. Lance dragged his hands from the table. Red shuffled about in her bundle. “So—fluttery?”

“Fluttery,” Lance sighed. He leaned back and crossed his arms and looked slowly up from the table and back out the window. “When I see him, my whole body lights up. And when I wake up without him, I miss him so much I feel sick. And I like his shoulders.”

“And Keith likes the way you smell,” Hunk said.

“Yeah,” Lance said, sounding thoughtful. And then he turned back to Hunk with a small smile on his lips and added: “That’s how I know I love him.”

And Hunk, before he could think better of it, asked: “How do you know you love me?”

And at that, Lance didn’t seem surprised, or concerned, or embarrassed. His smile grew and his arms uncrossed and he reached out squeezed Hunk’s wrist and, with ice cream sandwiches on his teeth and lights in his eyes, he said: “You’re my best friend. My life’s better with you in it.”

“Yeah?” Hunk said, and the panicked knot inside him started to loosen again.

“Well,” Lance said, and his smile grew some more until it was a toothy grin. “I can’t remember not having you in my life, so.”

“I love you too, Lance,” Hunk sighed.

Lance squeezed his wrist again.

The front door opened.

“Where have you been?” Lance called.

“Stopped for groceries,” Keith yelled back.

“Oh good,” Hunk said.

They listened to Keith kick off his shoes (bang-kathunk, kathunk-bang) and then to him pitter-pattering down the hall towards them. With Lance’s hand on his wrist and the early-afternoon slipping like a ghost through the kitchen window, Hunk couldn’t remember to be nervous, couldn’t remember to be panicked or uncomfortable at the sound of Keith’s voice.

He couldn’t remember, so he forgot, and then Keith was standing in the would-be doorway of the kitchen with something green and vaguely inappropriate clutched in his hand.

“Hi Hunk,” Keith said and thrust out his arm with his special Keith-brand of intensity. “I got this for you.”

“Oh,” Hunk said. “It’s a zucchini.”

Keith came a couple of steps closer and set the zucchini on the table.

“I cannot believe this,” Lance said.

Keith shushed him.

“Uh,” Hunk said, looking down at the zucchini and then back up at Keith. Keith squinted at him, leaning close, and then back with his hands on his hips and his lips twisted into something that was neither a frown nor a smile. “Thank you.”

“It’s a zucchini,” Keith said.

“He knows what a zucchini is, Keith,” Lance said, maybe hissed.

“Does he? Does he really?”

“You go on the internet for ten minutes and suddenly you’re a freaking expert—”

Hunk poked the zucchini. “We could steam it,” Hunk said. “Did you buy any cheese?”

Lance glared up at Keith. Keith hunched, a little.

“No,” Keith muttered.

“Tell us the truth, Keith,” Lance said, sharp and accusatory. “Is that the only thing you bought?”

Keith’s mouth twisted some more.

“You’re impossible,” Lance muttered.

Hunk poked the zucchini again. “I think I read a recipe for zucchini lasagna. But I think we’ll need more than one.”

“You could’ve picked up some milk, at least,” Lance said.

“I forgot!”

“We were talking about your shoulders,” Hunk said, looking back up at Keith. “Lance wants to eat you.”

“Oh,” Keith said. “Yeah. He’s bitey.”

“Both of you are cancelled!”

***

They went to the grocery store together. Lance grabbed another box of ice cream sandwiches. Hunk grabbed some more zucchinis. Keith grabbed too much cheese.

And they went home and made dinner together.

Keith and Lance bickered and Hunk did his best to make sure they didn’t see him smiling

And he kept forgetting, and forgetting, and forgetting.

***

“Take the bus!” Keith grumbled, facedown on the couch with his essay notes scattered on the floor.

“Go back to sleep,” Lance said, fond and quiet, and threw a blanket over him. “I’ll be right back.”

“It’s late,” Keith groaned.

“Uh huh. I’m going to walk him to the bus stop.”

Keith sighed something that sounded like “You’re good, Lance.”

“I can take myself to the bus,” Hunk said quietly when they walked to the door. He watched Lance slip on his shoes, blue and comfortable and worn. “You know, I might even walk the fifteen minutes home.”

“If you don’t take the bus, that Keith of ours is going to hunt you down and throw more vegetables at you.”

“I didn’t know Keith liked zucchini.”

“Keith likes food,” Lance sighed, and there was something distracted about the way he stretched and grabbed his keys and ushered Hunk out the door. Maybe it was something about the way he wouldn’t, exactly, look at Hunk, or the way he peeked back into the apartment before he shut the door, or the way he shoved his hands in his pockets and led the way down the stairs.

The collar of his shirt was loose, like he’d been tugging at it in his study-induced stress, and it flopped a little as he all but bounced his way down each step. Hunk could see some of Lance’s nebula, startlingly bright against his skin.

What would it look like, when it was done? Really, truly, honestly done? With white stars scattered against the purple and the blue and the red? With the lion that would be Hunk crawling over Lance’s ribs and the stars that would be Keith, somehow, dancing on his skin?

He wanted to ask. Just say: have you decided about Keith, yet?

And he started to remember that something wasn’t quite right. With him. With them?

They walked quietly, for a bit. Lance hummed and shivered at the night air, briefly. Hunk stepped carefully into the pools of light on the sidewalk, shining from the street lamps and making the street look otherworldly. Cinematic, maybe.

They didn’t have far to go.

“Lance,” Hunk said when they spotted the bus shelter with its recently-replaced glass, barely a block away.

“Yeah?”

“Have you—” Hunk broke off. He collected himself. Stepped through orange light. “Have you ever liked more than one person at once?”

“Oh yeah,” Lance said absently, scuffing his shoe against the sidewalk. “Crushes are kind of like that, aren’t they?”

Were they?

“I guess,” Hunk said.

Lance glanced at him. Hunk shrugged.

“Who’re we talking about?” Lance said, too casually to really be casual.

“No one.”

They reached the shelter and Lance flopped onto the bench, stretching his legs and grinning up at Hunk. Hunk dropped down next to him.

“Keep your secrets,” Lance teased. “I’ll figure it out eventually.”

“I hope not.”

“Rude,” Lance said, and banged his left knee against Hunk’s right. “You’ll have to tell me, though. I don’t remember what Hunk-in-love looks like.”

“It’s not like that.”

Wasn’t it?

“Yeah?” Lance said, some of the humour slipping from his voice. “There’s nobody with shoulders you just want to chow down on?”

“Gross, Lance,” Hunk sighed.

“No one who smells so good you just want to lick them like an ice cream cone?”

“Ugh, yuck!” Hunk leaned away, grimacing. “Has Keith actually said that to you?”

“No. He’s better than that.”

Hunk didn’t know what to say to that, so he looked at his feet.“Hunk,” Lance said.“Yeah?”When Lance didn’t continue, Hunk looked up.And there was Lance, looking right back at him with his face blank and
his eyes bright, and Hunk knew that look like he knew what Lance looked like when his stomach was upset, or like he knew what it looked like when Lance was ready for a fight with his shoulders squared and his chin tilted, or like he knew Lance’s voice so well he could pick him out of a crowd with ease.But he couldn’t name the look.“Lance?”He could hear the bus coming, roaring its way down the quiet, nighttime
street.“Why’d you delete the heart?”And Hunk froze. Felt all his muscles tense and clench. And he felt foolish.And frightened. And vaguely ill. Loudly nauseous.“I didn’t,” he blurted.Lance blinked, slow like an owl, like a bird of prey, like the boy Hunk had
grown up with and loved all their lives. “Liar,” Lance said.Hunk scowled and stood.Lance kept looking up at him, unchanged and unmoving except for the
slow blink of his eyes. “Hunk,” he said.

The bus pulled up. The doors squeaked open.

Hunk scrambled for his ID, scraped his fingers over the slowly-wearing edges of the sticker that served as his bus pass. “I’ll text you when I get home,” he said.

“If Keith finds out, he’ll be sad.”

Hunk didn’t look back as he boarded the bus, his shoes squeaking against the floor and the bus driver giving him a blank look as he flashed his bus pass. The doors squeaked shut behind him and he wobbled to a seat as the bus roared back into motion, and he didn’t look out the window.

***

“It sort of feels like something pulling you towards situations with said person? That uncontrollable desire to be around someone? For me its the equivalent of someone poisoning you, its not a present experience.”

Hunk frowned. He pulled his blankets tighter around his shoulders and shuffled further into his pillows and scrolled a little further down the message board.

“To me a crush is a desire to see and spend time with a person you find either aesthetically, intellectually or as a whole captivating,” the next person had posted. “I have had plenty of crushes, and I have always built elaborate stories in my head of how a romance would work out. I never do anything with the crushes and it goes away, but that feeling of thinking of someone more than yourself is interesting and pleasant sometimes.”

Hunk chewed at his thumb. He scrolled up. He scrolled back down. He huffed at his screen, and then dropped his tablet against his chest and looked up at the darkness of his ceiling.

Captivating, huh.

The unsettled, disquiet feeling he knew so well was creeping through his insides, up along his ribs and tickling at his elbows. It would normally be enough to have him throwing himself out of bed and trekking his way to Keith and Lance, who would shove aside and make room for him in their bed and Lance would pat at his face sleepily like they’d never had the—the strange exchange at the bus stop, and maybe in the morning Hunk would feel stable enough to add the heart back next to Keith’s name and everything would be alright.

He rolled over, clutching his tablet, and closed his eyes.

He’d call Lance in the morning.

***

Maybe he’d say: “Lance, have I always liked you? Is it ‘cause we’ve always been together? Am I really just noticing now?”

Or maybe he’d say to Keith: “I’ve never had a friend like you.”

And maybe they’d both smile and shake their heads at him and Keith would say: “Just come over.”

***

He didn’t call Lance in the morning.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

The day before his last exam, Hunk rolled over and blinked up at the ceiling of his little room and tried to count his breaths.

One, two, three, four—

He rolled back to his side and closed his exhausted eyes and tugged the blanket over his head and wished he had taken up basket weaving. What was math. What was numbers. What was—anything. He’d make a fine—salamander wrangler. Or something. Anything but this.

Normally, he’d call Keith and he’d say this. He’d mutter into his phone about the dangerous stresses of school and how he’d like to eat his calculator and burn his textbooks, and Keith would say something like: “You sound like you’re suffering.”

That always made Hunk feel better: the simple acknowledgement of a friend.

He sighed against his pillow.

When he finally dragged himself out of bed and back to his desk, he was sagging a little and felt like taking a long shower or a hot bath or just running until his legs gave out. He shook out his hands. He cracked his knuckles. He reached for his abandoned pencil case and carried on with the practice questions that had eaten most of his night.

His phone sat, face down and off, at the edge of his desk.

It had been four days since he’d talked to Keith or Lance.

He missed them.

It felt so small to say, like doodles in the margins of his notes: he missed them. So he didn’t say it. He didn’t write it. He wanted to keep from thinking or feeling it.

Maybe he could suffocate it, whatever it was. His little crush on his best friends, made worse because he apparently couldn’t just like one of them but both of them.

Hunk groaned and leaned heavily against his desk and sighed a huge sigh that he felt reverberate along his ribs and then into his throat. He wondered if he could take a nap, if he could sacrifice a couple of hours of study time to help his brain relax. Rest.

Dream.

It had been days, too, since he’d dreamt of anything. His sleep was short and strained and dark and empty, unrestful and never deep.

Maybe he’d drop out of school and go home and beg his mother to make him a cup of her favourite tea.

“Soon,” he scribbled into the corner of his textbook, the lead of his pencil squeaking against the glossy pages, and then he dropped the pencil and reached for his phone and turned it on.

Bzzt, bzzt, beep, and a flash of the screen. Hunk pressed his face to his desk, his textbook, felt his highlighter smear against his cheeks and blinked at his phone as he waited for it too boot up, and his mind was mercifully blank.

One, two, three, four—

Thirty seconds later, he had a notification for three hundred and twelve messages, and thirteen missed calls—four from Keith, nine from Lance. There were so many notifications his phone didn’t even offer him a preview of the messages. No hint of Lance’s emojis, or Keith’s concern, or the strangely loud way Lance could make a text message seem. No pictures of Red, no misused chat speak, no accusations of neglect.

He swiped the notification bubble away, and all three hundred and twelve messages disappeared. When he unlocked his phone, the missed calls became a little bubble of red at the bottom of his screen: easily ignored (neglected).

He checked Messenger.

Nine hundred and eighty messages from Lance. The most recent preview: “Lance F. sent you a sticker.”

Thirty-four messages from Keith. The most recent preview: “We just want to know you’re…”

Their group chat untouched since the day of Hunk and Lance’s study date.

Two messages from Rebecca.

Hunk tapped her name.

***

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been to the math building’s downstairs cafeteria without Keith and Lance. Collectively, they hated the place: loud and cold and smelling like fried food; but the tables were big, when they could get one, and the plug-ins were plentiful, and no one loved onion rings more than Keith and Lance and there was nowhere else on campus that made them so well .

Hunk stuttered to a stop at the bottom of the stairs, sagging under the weight of his backpack and his exam period exhaustion. Someone darted around him, skidding across the tiled floor.

It was raining.

He tried not to think about that.

Rebecca clambered onto a table at the end of the cafeteria and waved her arms, roaring across the room: “ Hunk! ”

Like he’d miss her. She had dyed her hair bright pink and still had her umbrella open (yellow and covered with tiny rabbits, an obvious mismatch to her enormous black boots and her worn-out laces and torn jeans).

He shuffled her way.

She all but fell off the table.

“Want some onion rings?” she said, shoving the too-large container to the middle of the table as Hunk came closer.

His stomach rumbled. He sat. “No thanks,” he muttered.

Rebecca shrugged. She hoisted her backpack off the floor and pulled out a thick package of paper and dropped it in front of Hunk with a thunk and a slap. “I’m officially your best friend,” she sighed and cracked open an energy drink.

She drank, maybe, half of it in one go.

“Have you slept?” Hunk said, sliding the package closer. “Like, at all?”

“I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” she deadpanned. “I might be dead.”

“This time tomorrow, we’ll be free,” Hunk said with more hope than he really felt.

“I quit,” Rebecca continued. “I’m dropping out. I’m going to become a nun.”

“A nun?”

“A nun.”

She guzzled back the rest of the drink and smashed the can against the table.

Hunk shook his head and shrugged out of his backpack. “Thanks for getting me a copy,” he said, tapping at the practice exam in the package, before bending to drag his notebook and tablet out of his backpack.

“No problem,” Rebecca said, drumming her fingers against the table. She reached for an onion ring. “I mean, some problem. It took some minor coercion to get Cooper to give me an extra copy, so you’ll have to work through it with me.”

“Deal.”

Rebecca crammed the onion ring in her mouth and pulled another energy drink out of thin air.

Hunk pulled it from her hands.

It took him a moment more to get settled, to arrange his notes just right and wipe a smear of eh-who-knows-what from his calculator and to numbly nibble at a granola bar he dug out from the bottom of his bag. Rebecca ate four more onion rings and eyed her energy drink with hunger and desperation, until Hunk unlocked his tablet and her eyes flicked down.

“Oh,” she said.

“Don’t be nosy,” Hunk said, and swiped away from the message board.

“I’ve been there,” Rebecca said, pointing haphazardly at his screen. Hunk blinked at her. She shrugged and pointed at the pendant hanging around her neck, with its dark purple streaks. “I’m ace, too.”

Hunk blinked some more. “Oh,” he said. “Yeah. You’re pretty great.”

She frowned at him.

Hunk hunched his shoulders. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he mumbled.

Rebecca drummed her fingers against the table one more time. She tilted her head. “Sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t make assumptions.”

“It’s okay?” Hunk said, his thoughts spinning. “I just—don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“That website’s URL is literally asexuality.org,” Rebecca said, her lips quirking. “You’re in the right place to figure it out.”

“Oh,” Hunk said. And then: “Oh! You’re ace .”

“Yeah,” Rebecca said. “I’m pretty great.”

Hunk rolled his eyes and Rebecca grinned at him, and he took an onion ring and didn’t listen to the rain hitting the windows above.

***

Lancey: hunk i dont know what to do i was just trying to get you to talk to me and ok i get it that was pushy but ignoring us is mean

Lancey: not that im mad or anything im just worried

Lancey: ok im kind of mad i lied a little but can u please just call me back

Lancey: hunk

Lancey: are u even reading these

Lancey: come on

Lancey: hunk im going to call your mom

Lancey: ok i wont i lied again i just want to talk

Lancey: do u want space

Lancey: u have to tell me if you want space

Lancey: im persistent and emotional

Lancey: hunk

Lancey: please

***

Keith: Lance is really upset. Please call him.

Keith: i’m upset, too

***

They were two hours into the practice exam. Rebecca had won back her energy drink and bought two more. Hunk feared for her life.

He bought and ate three burgers and ignored the ticking time bomb of his bank account.

“Almost there,” he kept muttering to himself to fight the growing throbbing at his temples.

“I’m going to die,” Rebecca kept replying.

“Stop that!”

She pressed her face to her scattered pages and blinked owlishly up at Hunk. “Hunk,” she moaned. “Kill me.”

“Seriously,” Hunk said, stealing the last of her now very cold onion rings. “Stop that.”

Rebecca huffed and squirmed upright again, leaning her elbows on the table and staring blankly past Hunk. She blinked. She huffed another breath, and said: “It’s your volleyboy.”

“My what?” Hunk said, scratching idly at their current page of the practice exam.

“And the tall one,” she added. “I guess they’re both tall.”

“Uh huh,” Hunk said absently, and then—click.

“Lance is good at math, isn’t he?” Rebecca was saying, straightening some more and starting to lift her hand. “Maybe—”

“Don’t,” Hunk squawked.

Rebecca slammed her hand to the table, staring at him.

Hunk flushed.

“Just—don’t.”

Rebecca tilted her head, and something strange and strained passed over her face. And then: “Okay.” She nodded over Hunk’s shoulder. “They’re over there.”

Hunk swallowed.

And then he twisted in his seat, slow and clutching the edges of the exam. It took him a moment to spot them. No one was climbing up on a table to wave at him, and they looked the same as they always did, and they were crowded so close together they almost looked like one person. They were tucked at the bottom of the staircase, almost out of sight, but Hunk could see Lance’s head bob as he spoke and the slight flail of his hands, and the focused way Keith was listening with his eyes trained on Lance. A breath later, Keith caught Lance’s hands and twisted their fingers together and pressed a quick kiss to Lance’s cheek and Lance finally, finally, stilled.

Hunk had the feeling they were talking about him. He had a feeling that the bow of Keith’s head, like he was speaking quietly just for Lance, was about the silence between them and all the unanswered messages on his phone.

Lance leaned in and, with a slump of his shoulders, pressed his face to Keith’s neck, and Keith released his hands to wrap around his arms around him, and Hunk could see the start of a smile on Keith’s lips as he continued to speak quietly into Lance’s ear.

Hunk turned back to his work and dragged his fingers along the edges of the paper.

“They’re a couple of nerds,” Rebecca said quietly and scribbled at the edge of one of her scrap pieces of paper.

Hunk looked up at her and realized they were both smiling, and he said: “Aren’t they?”

***

He didn’t watch them leave, but he did wonder if Keith had bought Lance a strawberry milkshake to cheer them both up.

***

He fell asleep eventually, that night, and it wasn’t deep enough or long enough to let him dream, but fitful and anxious with his exam looming in the morning.

But if he’d been able to sleep—really, truly sleep, and really, truly dream—if he’d been able to sleep, he would have dreamed of Lance and Keith’s wedding, with celebrating thunder crashing overhead and Lance’s smile so wide he outshone the lightning. And he would have dreamed of pulling them both in for a hug and of the loud way Keith thanked him for being there, just for being there.

***

He was almost late.

Nico banged on his door.

“Hunk!” Nico yelled. “Hunk, your test!”

And Hunk, channeling his dearest friends, rolled out of bed and landed hard on his elbows and swore at his musky carpet.

“Thank you,” he shrieked at Nico as he ran by him on the floor’s lounge.

“Good luck!” Nico yelled with a wave.

When he got to the engineering quad, with its towering buildings and scattered rabbit poo, his lungs were burning and his backpack had banged a bruise against his spine. He tore his way through the doors and up one more flight of stairs and arrived at the exam room with minutes to spare.

“Geez, Hunk,” Professor Cooper said when he stumbled through the door. “Are you okay?”

Hunk wheezed.

Rebecca dragged him into a seat.

He took the first few minutes of the exam to catch his breath, and then entered a whole new world of suffering.

***

Four hours.

Hunk wondered “what the hell” eight times.

***

All nineteen of them were stuck in the room, scrambling to finish the exam right up until Professor Cooper heaved a huge sigh and said: “Okay, folks, time to get out.”

He wrestled the exam from Rebecca. Hunk surrendered his with something bordering on a pout.

And then they filed out.

James, just behind Hunk, said: “Fuck.”

And then he said it again.

And then he turned and walked towards the nearest bathroom.

“Well,” Rebecca muttered, stretching her arms over her head. “That sucked major ass.”

Hunk nodded and they turned the other way to go back towards the main staircase, and the wafting smell of pizza and donuts from below, and he was about to say something like, “I never want to take another exam again”; or, “I think that’s a new brand of torture”; or—something, and then he saw Keith, leaning against the rail and looking down over the stairs and the scattered spots of studying students and the groups of shuffling would-be engineers making their way towards lunch.

Hunk stopped.

Rebecca took another step, and then looked back at him, and then towards Keith. “Hey, volleyboy,” she said, casual and strangely Lance-like.

Keith looked up and towards them, then pushed away from the rail and stood like a roadblock with his shoulders squared and his arms crossed.

The guilt that roared through Hunk was enough to make his knees shake.

“Hi,” Keith said. “How was the test?”

“Terrible,” Rebecca replied. “Awful. The very worst thing imaginable. How’re you?”

“I’ve been better,” Keith said. “How about you, Hunk?”

Hunk gaped.

Rebecca patted his elbow.

“Well,” Rebecca said, and stretched again in a strange and forced mirror of just moments before. “I’m going to go get lunch. See you guys later.”

“Bye,” Keith said.

“Bye,” Hunk choked out, and then she was gone, whistling her way past Keith and bouncing her way down the stairs.

The rest of Hunk’s class had already dispersed.

Professor Cooper emerged with the box of exams clutched to his chest and his glasses half-falling off his face. “Have a good summer, Hunk,” he said as he shuffled past.

Hunk didn’t move.

Keith didn’t move.

Hunk thought about running.

He thought about apologizing.

He thought about grabbing Keith and hugging him.

And then the tension slowly bled from Keith’s shoulders and he uncrossed his arms and let them fall to his side and he looked at Hunk like he looked at disorganized bookshelves: with a little wonder, with a little irritation, with a little sadness.

“I’m kidnapping you,” Keith said, finally. “Don’t fight it. I’ll win.”

“I need to go home,” Hunk said.

“Later.”

“I haven’t even showered in, like, three days.”

“Yeah, university’s hell, I don’t know how any of us do it, and so on.”

“I’m not coming with you,” Hunk said, firmer than he knew he could be.

Keith studied him for a moment. Hunk tried to count the beats of his heart: one, two, three, four—

“Lance hasn’t slept in days,” Keith said, and Hunk’s shoulders slumped. “He calls his mom and then he hangs up and my first conversation with her has been me reassuring her that Lance isn’t losing his mind. He isn’t studying. I drag him out of the apartment to make him eat. And he sits up in the middle of the night and he cries and that makes me—” He broke off with a grunt and a restless shuffle of his feet.

“Keith,” Hunk started.

“And I’m—” Keith shook his head. “We need to talk.”

“Okay,” Hunk said.

Keith frowned at him.

“Okay!”

***

He followed Keith to the apartment, and he remembered the way Lance had cried when Alicia Lee had broken up with him, and he remembered how Marco had crowded blankets around Lance and he remembered how they had ordered pizza and crowded together on Marco’s floor and he remembered how wonderful it had been to hear Lance laugh, hours later.

***

The apartment was quiet, and cool, and dark. Keith kicked off his shoes and made his way to the kitchen and Hunk had a split-second where he knew he could leave.

But he knew, also, that if he left now, Keith wouldn’t come and find him again.

He toed off his sneakers and wiggled his bare toes and started after Keith.

Neither of them spoke.

Keith started some coffee, and then the floral tea that Hunk loved and kept in their cupboards. Hunk sat at the table and slouched as the exhaustion of the exam period started to weight on him, and he hugged his backpack against his stomach and he watched Keith. Neither of them turned on the overhead lights. A bird whistled outside. Someone was barbequing something nearby, and the smell of grilled meat and fire wafted into the kitchen.

Keith put some rice cake on a plate and set it on the table. He sliced up two apple pears and laid the slices in a delicate circle on a pretty, cerulean plate that Lance had found at a thrift store months earlier. He set that on the table, too, and then the teapot and Hunk’s favourite mug. The coffee finished and he poured a cup and he paused at the counter and stared at it, and then he reached into the tea cupboard and pulled out the box of dehydrated mini marshmallows Lance liked to snack on and he tossed a handful into his coffee.

Hunk didn’t move. He dragged his nails against the vinyl of his backpack. He realized he had forgotten his phone, with all its messages and missed calls, and he realized he was hungry enough to eat Keith’s head.

Keith turned around, cradling his mug and tapping his fingers idly against it, and studied the table.

Hunk took a slice of apple pear and nibbled at it.

And Keith, apparently satisfied, came and sat in the seat next to him.

“Hunk,” he started, setting his mug down.

But nothing followed, so Hunk finished his slice and watched the steam rise from the spout of the teapot.

“Hunk,” Keith started again a moment later.
“There’s something I’ve been wanting to talk to you about.”

Hunk breathed out, long and slow.

“And part of the problem is that I don’t know how to talk to you about it, and I’ve been trying to find the language for—it.”

“You know I like you,” Hunk said, feeling resigned and cold, and he lifted his head and he looked back at Keith.

Keith tilted his head. He pulled his hands away from his mug and he leaned back in his seat. “You like me,” he echoed, blank-faced.

Hunk swallowed.

“As in,” Keith continued, slow and dragging out the syllables. “You’re in love with me?”

Hunk went cold all over. He squeezed his backpack and waited for his eyes to fall out of his head and his nails to leap off his fingers. “I mean,” he choked out.

“Okay,” Keith said, placating and quick. “You mean you have a—a crush on me.”

“I guess.”

“And maybe,” Keith continued. “On Lance, too?”

Hunk thought, briefly, about flipping the table.

He hunched his shoulders. Dug his fingers into his backpack.

“Maybe?” he managed. “I don’t know. It’s harder to tell. Maybe I’ve always liked Lance. Maybe if I didn’t like you, I’d hate you because jealousy is a thing that is bad and I—don’t know where I’m going with that.”

Keith blinked at him.

“But if I just like you then maybe I’d be angry with Lance? Because—jealousy is still a thing? But I don’t want you guys to break up, like, ever. That’s—that would be the worst thing. I mean, unless you were really unhappy but you’re obviously not and—”

Keith blinked some more.

Hunk hunched some more.

“Dude,” he moaned. “Please stop me at any time.”

“Not a chance,” Keith said quietly. “Not when you’re finally talking.”

Hunk stared at his knees. He breathed in through his nose, out through his mouth; in, and then out; in, and then out.

“Hey,” Keith said, still quiet in the dim, early-afternoon world of the kitchen.

“What?”

“I’m going to try something.”

“What?” Hunk said again, and he forgot to be suspicious as he lifted his head and frowned at Keith, and then Keith kissed him.

***

(There were habits Hunk noticed.

Like, if Lance wore a shirt that lifted when he moved, Keith liked to touch the tips of his fingers to the small of Lance’s back, at the little peek of skin—maybe because he liked the way Lance looked at him, accusatory and pleased all at once.

Like, the way Keith kissed the same spot at the back of Lance’s neck whenever he could—just quick, just small, and usually with a smile and sometimes long enough to make Lance shiver and then pull away like he didn’t want anyone to see that moment of vulnerability.

Like, the way Lance reached for Keith, wound his long fingers around Keith’s wrists to drag him close like he’d missed him, like it had been days instead of hours since he’d seen or touched Keith.

And then there were days like the ones after they had tried to be intimate for the first time, because that was how Lance had described it when he cornered Hunk and babbled about the difficulties of being intimate with another person, and because neither of them had been able to look at each other for days and Hunk had had to act as an uncomfortable mediator and had had to endure Lance sleeping in his bed because he looked ready to faint every time he looked at Keith—

There were habits, and things, that Hunk noticed, and he never quite knew how to grapple with what he was seeing.

“You’ll understand one day,” his mother said, almost every time he called her to complain (or to marvel) at the curiosity that was Keith and Lance (“Klance,” they cheerfully called them when neither were around to hear it).

And Hunk had always believed her.)

***

“Uh,” Hunk said when Keith pulled back.

Keith studied him.

Hunk licked his lips.

“Well?” Keith said.

“Uh,” Hunk said again.

“Do you want me to do it again?”

“Do I want you to kiss me again?”

“Yes?”

“Uh.”

“I’m going to kiss you again.”

So he did. And Hunk noticed that Keith had soft, warm lips, and that he smelled like coffee and the chapstick he and Lance shared (or that Lance liked to force on him).

And of course that was when Lance appeared in the doorway, with his hair mussed and his clothes rumpled.

“Uh,” Lance said.

“Uh,” Hunk said.

Keith leaned back in his seat and crossed his arms and studied Hunk with a lift of his brow.

“What the heck?” Lance said after a moment. Or, sputtered.

“We’re working something out,” Keith said without looking away from Hunk. “Want some cake?”

“I mean—sure, I guess.”

“This is bad,” Hunk said.

“Is it?” Keith sighed.

“Are you calling my boyfriend a bad kisser?” Lance grumbled, plopping into a chair across the table. He splayed over the surface and pulled the plate of rice cake closer and slowly stuffed a piece in his mouth.

He looked tired.

“Were you here the whole time?” Hunk asked.

“Why?” Lance replied around a mouthful of sticky rice cake. “Did I miss something?”

“Well, Keith kissed me.” Hunk paused. “Twice.”

“You don’t deserve kisses,” Lance mumbled, dragging the plate even closer and eyeing it with a frown that was half-pressed against the table. “You’re a big jerk.”

“I get that you’re mad at me but don’t call me names.”

“A big, big, big jerk.”

And Keith sighed, huge and interrupting.

Hunk and Lance looked at him.

“Well?” Keith repeated, irritation making his voice sharp.

Hunk blinked at him.

“That was—” He swallowed. He frowned. He looked at his feet and then back up at Keith. “Nice.”

“Nice,” Keith echoed.

Lance ate some more rice cake. “Kiss me, next.”

“Later.”

“Yeah,” Hunk continued. “Uh, nice. You kiss—nice.”

There was a moment where all Hunk could hear was Lance chewing, and then Keith breathed out through his nose like a freaking dragon.

“Sorry?” Hunk tried.

“It wasn’t earth-shattering?” Lance piped up. He yawned and ignored the way Keith glared. “It wasn’t like—fire? You weren’t afraid you were going to throw up in Keith’s mouth and scare him away?”

“Lance—”

“No?” Hunk said.

“Well, that’s that,” Lance said. “Now can we get on to you apologizing for being a big, stupid, jerk of a best friend?”

“I’m sorry?”

“That’s a crap apology, Hunk.”

“Leave him alone,” Keith cut in. “He’s thinking.”

“I am?”

“He’s not going to tell you you’re a life-changing kisser, Keith,” Lance mumbled. “That’s my job.”

“What is happening?” Hunk said.

And they looked at him. Lance propped himself up on his elbows. Keith uncrossed his arms.

“You tell us,” Keith said.

One, two, three—

“I thought it would better if I stayed away for a while,” Hunk said, and licked some leftover apple pear flavour from his teeth. “I thought—it’s not right to like people who are already—already—”

“Yeah?” one of them said, but Hunk couldn’t tell who.

His world shifted.

“Oh,” he said.

Keith poked his knee.

Hunk dropped his backpack, let it slide over his legs and ka-thunk to the floor.

Across the table, Lance sat up.

“Hunk?”

“I don’t think I like you guys,” Hunk said, and then frowned. “No. No, I’m pretty sure I do. Except—”

“Except?”

He looked at Keith with a grimace. “Don’t kiss me again.”

Lance snorted.

And Keith smiled. “Okay,” he said.

“But—okay, if I don’t—” Hunk broke off with a frustrated huff. He scratched the side of his head, felt his unwashed hair, and sighed. “What’s happening?”

“We can’t tell you that,” Keith said.

“You can’t?”

“No.” Keith squirmed in his chair. Lance made a vague gesture at him. Keith cleared his throat, and continued: “But we can tell you what we’re feeling, and what we want.” He paused. “I think.”

“You think,” Lance echoed.

“I’m doing my best!”

“You are,” Lance said, almost cooed, but it was the fondness in his voice that made Hunk start to relax, just a little. “You’re doing great, donut.”

Hunk laughed, quick and stifled. Keith rolled his eyes.

There was a pause, and then Keith seemed to make a decision and said: “Do you know what a zucchini is?”

Hunk stared at him. “It’s a vegetable?”

Lance collapsed against the table with a groan. “Keith, come on.”

“You do it, then!”

“Nuh-uh, no way. You’re in the driver’s seat, handsome.”

“You can’t just tack on a compliment to every sentence.”

“Watch me, mullet-of-my-life.”

“Guys!” Hunk waved his hands, flailing a little to get their attention. “What does a zucchini have to do with anything?”

“It’s—” Keith stopped again, gaped for a moment, and then slumped. “Hunk, do you know what a—a—”

He gaped some more.

Hunk sighed.

And Keith’s cheeks went slightly pink.

“Oh geez,” Lance said.

“I can do it!”

Lance rolled onto one elbow and propped his head up, sighing, like it was too much work just to keep his spine straight. He looked at Hunk. “He’s asking if you know what a queerplatonic relationship is.”

And Keith went from slightly pink to very red.

“Why! Why are you like this! You say way more embarrassing stuff all the time!”

“It’s different!”

“I don’t!” Hunk cut in, loud to cut off the bickering that he knew was about to rain down on the three of them. “I don’t know what that is!”

“Well,” Lance said. “Time for you to learn ‘cause that’s what we want!”

And it looked a little like Keith was going to die.

Just a little.

“You what?” Hunk said.

“We want a queerplatonic relationship,” Lance said, slow and clear. “With you.”

“That’s flattering,” Hunk said. “What does that mean?”

Lance looked at Keith.

Keith mumbled something.

“What?” Hunk said.

“He went on the internet,” Lance said. “He did the research. Now he’s afraid of saying the words.”

Keith scowled.

“Should—should I go on the internet?” Hunk said, and the room was spinning again. “I can say the words?”

“Can you, now.”

“Stop snarking and help,” Keith snapped.

“I am extremely helpful. I think I’ve been doing all the heavy lifting here.”

“It’s a commitment!” Keith said, maybe yelled. He was still very red. “Based on platonic love and what it’ll look like will depend on us, but my guess is that things will just go on like usual because when people call us “weirdly codependent” they mean—that.”

He lost steam at the end and slumped.

Hunk squinted at him.

“Wait,” he said. “What do zucchinis have to do with anything?”

“He read online that partners in a QPR can be called zucchinis,” Lance said. “Hence the zucchini.”

“Oh.” Hunk considered this. “That isn’t where I would have started this conversation.”

“Keith was really stuck on the zucchinis.”

“This is a really unproductive conversation,” Keith grunted, slumping a little further down his seat.

***

It went like this:

Hunk drank his tea.

Lance ate the rest of the cake.

Keith devoured the apple pears and finished the coffee.

Hunk used their shower and dug out some of his comfiest clothes from the drawer they had set aside just for him. He found Keith facedown in the bed, groaning while Lance rubbed his back and said encouraging things. Hunk watched them for a moment, left to change, came back and found them rolled onto their sides looking at him.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have run away.”

“We do a lot of running around here,” Lance said with a smile, but Hunk could see the exhaustion under his eyes and the relief in the drag of his shoulders and hands. “It’s okay.”

“We should have talked to you,” Keith muttered.

Hunk scratched his neck idly. “Maybe,” he mumbled.

“Sorry I kissed you.”

“‘sokay.” He paused. “It helped.”

“Do you want to kiss Lance next?”

They both grimaced at Keith and he grinned and rolled to the other side of the bed. Lance shuffled over and patted the spot between them.

Hunk hesitated.

“Take it this way,” Lance said softly in the dark room, with the covered windows and the comfy bedspread and Red asleep in her cave. “Us being your zucchinis means you can always count on us.”

“I knew that already,” Hunk mumbled.

“Yeah. But now it’s official.”

“Commitment,” Keith added and squirmed his way under the duvet.

“I haven’t said I’m okay with it yet,” Hunk said, shifting on his feet and eyeing the spot between them.

“Then say you’re okay with it and come nap,” Lance replied and flopped back against the pillows with a groan. “I’m tired.”

Hunk smiled. He darted to the bed and clambered up between them and days of tension immediately floated from his bones. “Well,” he said into a pillow. “I guess I’m okay with it.”

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Keith <3: we’re on our way home nowKeith <3: where are you
***
Hunk popped open the container of black tea and sucked in a deep breath of the floral, roasted smell of it. He shook it and listened to the tea leaves dance.The kettle beeped.On the stove, the pie was cooling while the soup was simmering.On a cutting board he’d pilfered from res were several slices of his sourdough bread—maybe a specialty, now; maybe just something he knew could make Keith smile or Lance laugh.And unwrapped and smelling glorious were the cheeses he’d splurged on from the tiny cheese shop Rebecca had mentioned the week before while they leaned close to each other in a crowded tea shop and talked through a million and one things.“Next year,” she had written in a message just an hour earlier. “We can go to some of the Q centre talks together. You can bring your vegetables. I WILL laugh at them.”Once the tea was started, he set the table with the embroidered placemats he’d found at the shop Keith loved, cheap since there were only three but that was all they really needed. He brought out the ketchup, for Lance, and the mayo, for himself and Keith—just in case. Three empty plates were waiting for sandwiches, three empty bowls were waiting for soup.Red sat in the middle of the table and twitched her tiny nose at him while he puttered around the kitchen. She looked comfortable in the little bundle Hunk had made for her. He figured she’d be asleep again, soon.His phone buzzed again.
Lancey: ok we stopped for beer but don’t WORRY my HUNK we got you that sparkly apple juice you likeLancey: tHUMBS UP EMOJI
Hunk huffed a laugh, poured the tea, and started the sandwiches.
***
“Do I need to come kill the boyfriend?” Marco had yawned when he picked up the phone.Hunk had scowled. “Don’t talk like that.”“Yeah, yeah.”“I’m serious! Lance’ll never forgive you if you’re mean to Keith, and Keith, frankly, doesn’t deserve—”“Yeah, yeah!” There had been a shuffle on the other side of the phone and then a puffy sound of Marco sighing. “What’s up?”And Hunk hadn’t known what to say, for a moment, so he had looked at his feet and then he had looked at the ceiling and then he had said: “How did you know?”“How did I know what?”“That you’re—”He had listened to Marco breathe for a moment, and to the sound of his own heart beating away in his chest and the thrum of his blood in his veins.“That you’re ace, I guess.”There had been another puff of breath from Marco. “I don’t know,” Marco had said eventually. “I guess I’d just always known. It was more like I had found a word to describe me, so I adopted it. Do you know what I mean?”Maybe.“Maybe,” Hunk had said.“Do you want to talk about it?“Maybe.”
***
Hunk heard Lance’s laughter from the street below.He poked his head out the window and watched Keith lean in and say something quiet and quick to Lance, and then he watched the way Lance threw back his head and laughed so hard he almost fell over.He ducked back into the kitchen, shaking his head. “Shenanigans,” Hunk mumbled with a smile.They came through the door a couple of minutes later, Lance still laughing and Keith’s voice carrying in a distorted mutter down the hall.“Wait,” Keith said. There was a thunk as they put something down. “I smell something.”Hunk leaned into the hall. “I made food.”Lance sniffed. “I smell pie, Hunk.”“There may be pie, Lance.”“Pie,” Keith choked out.Hunk stepped back. He rubbed his sweaty hands on his shirt and surveyed the mismatched set up on the table. Red lifted her head again, her ears twitching and her nose bouncing and her eyes bright.“Pie,” he heard Keith say again, down the hall.And Lance’s answering sigh: “Yeah, Keith. Pie.”They had a nice, late lunch together. Keith seemed to marvel at every bite, putting his sandwich down and staring intently across the table at Hunk until Lance threatened to eat his food for him. Red was settled and pleased, like a queen of a sunshine-filled castle, and Lance had to be talked out of eating the rest of the gouda Hunk had splurged on. Keith and Lance shared a beer. Lance made a big deal out of giving Hunk a wine glass full of sparkling apple juice.“How did you do this,” Keith asked, or—kind-of-asked, while stirring his tomato soup. “I don’t know how soup works.”“Magic,” Lance said and nabbed a smear of cheese from Keith’s plate.“I think so!”“Do you want some pie?” Hunk asked while Keith stole Lance’s crusts. “I was told it’s a very powerful recipe.”“Everything you make is powerful,” Keith said, earnestly enough to make Lance groan.They finished their drinks, and the tea, and the soup and every crumb from the plates. Lance sliced the lemon pie and gave Keith an extra-huge piece. Red got some hard-boiled egg from the fridge.“I’ll go apartment-hunting when we’re back,” Hunk said, licking a smear of lemon from his fork.Keith seemed to be dying in his seat and hadn’t said a word in several minutes.“Oh yeah?” Lance said casually, leaning one elbow on the table and looking at Hunk with his eyebrows raised and his eyes wide.Hunk squinted at him.Lance smiled.“I’m not moving in with you,” Hunk said.Lance’s smile fell.“Don’t do that!”“I’m going to eat some more pie,” Keith muttered and scurried back to the stove. Hunk and Lance watched him carefully slice a new piece, and then looked back at each other.“Why not?” Lance said, with something of a pout in his voice. “Zucchinis live in bunches, you know.”“I don’t think they do.”“Work with me!”Hunk tapped his fork against the table: one, two, three, four. He breathed out through his nostrils. Keith returned to the table, halfway through his second piece already.“If you eat that whole pie, I’ll never forgive you,” Lance said.“Worth it,” Keith all but whispered.Lance rolled his eyes, wobbled on his elbow, and looked back at Hunk. “If you lived with us you could see this every day.”“It’s nice to be appreciated,” Hunk allowed. His lips twitched. He set his fork down and looked at his empty glass, at the blue of the sky reflected in it.He hadn’t brought much from res. He didn’t own any of the furniture and he didn’t have a lot of clothes or books to start with. Everything fit in a neat set of boxes, lined up against the bookshelves in Keith and Lance’s living room and haphazardly unboxed as Hunk had carried on with his life, post-res. There was probably something poetic about all three of them, finally, being free of the dorms.He huffed another breath and looked back at Lance and shrugged. “I still need my space.”Lance blinked once, twice, three times at him. “I guess,” he mumbled, and he seemed to sink a little further into his own hand.“Leave him alone,” Keith muttered, head still bowed over his plate. The slice was gone and his fingers were drumming against the placemat.“Don’t you dare eat another slice,” Lance warned.“I’m going to eat another slice.”“You’re going to be sick!”Hunk didn’t bother to try and hide his grin.
***
“Do your friends know?” Rebecca had asked, casual and light and sneaky while her elbows slid across the rickety cafe table they’d claimed.“They’re not my friends,” Hunk had replied. “They’re—” He had stopped and wrestled with his discomfort, with the newness of the idea and the words, and dug up what he could of his surety.Rebecca had waited, smiling small and looking patient.“They’re my zucchinis,” Hunk had said eventually.And Rebecca had laughed, but a laugh that was warm and loud and sounded exactly like she should laugh, and Hunk had hunched his shoulders in half-embarrassment and smiled sheepishly at her.“Well then,” Rebecca had said, catching her breath and grinning wide.Yes, Hunk had thought. Well then.
***
While Lance put Red back in her home, Keith and Hunk started the dishes, their elbows knocking at the sink and Keith running the water hot enough to burn.“Don’t mind him,” Keith muttered without looking up from the sudsy water. He squeezed the scrubbie experimentally. “You’ll move in when you’re ready. All in good time.”Hunk considered this. “You guys don’t need me around all the time.”“That,” Keith said, handing him a plate. “Sounds like a challenge.”He looked up and they stared at each other for a moment, and then Hunk smiled and took the plate, drying it with slow strokes of a towel covered in small, green birds.Lance returned. “The princess is asleep again,” he announced.Keith snorted and continued scrubbing. Lance hummed and Hunk glanced over his shoulder to watch Lance start to roll up the placemats, careful and deliberate.“So,” Lance said, a little loftily, a little loudly. “Placemats. A great addition to our home.”“Drop it, Lance,” Keith said and handed Hunk the frying pan.“All in good time,” Hunk said, a little loftily, a little quietly, and he didn’t miss the quirk of Keith’s lips.“Is that your version of a ‘not yet’?” Lance huffed.“Who knows.”“You should!”
***
In truth, not much had changed. There wasn’t much they wanted to change. They helped Hunk move out of res and piled his stuff into their living room, just as they would have if there had been no talk of vegetables or kisses. They navigated boundaries that Hunk had maintained, even if he hadn’t been aware of them, but the moments Keith leaned on him when they watched a movie or just sat outside seemed to carry a little more weight and a little more sparkle.Maybe Hunk was easier in his affection for Lance. Maybe it was different. He had come to love coming up behind Lance and pulling him into a hug while Lance folded laundry, or made breakfast, or talked to his family. He had come to love resting his chin on Lance’s shoulder, and the way Lance carried on but leaned back into him like it was easy.Maybe he had a better appreciation for the weight that came with Keith saying, often and steadily: “I love you.” Maybe there was an honesty there that he hadn’t noticed before, or had never thought to notice before.Maybe he had always been happiest with Lance set comfortably between him and Keith, but now he could say to himself with confidence that this made him sure that Lance—Lance, who was generous and bright and loving and—that their Lance could be safe, and comfortable, and no harm could come to him with Hunk and Keith close by.And maybe their upcoming trip, and the upcoming wedding, was starting to hold more opportunity than Hunk had previously considered.But all in all—not much had changed. Not yet, or maybe never would. Maybe he’d never move in. Maybe he’d always be happiest with a little bubble of space between himself and them, somewhere he could retreat to when something became just a bit too much. Maybe this would be okay, because he’d always know he could come and find them and they’d welcome him with smiles and open arms.
***
They went to bed late, when Keith started to doze on the couch with a book slipping out of his fingers. They piled into the bed, Keith on one side with his pile of books on the nightstand, and Hunk on the other with the wall at his back, and Lance settled comfortably between them. Keith crowded close and wound tight around Lance, who made a big deal of suffering the attention but Hunk knew a pleased Lance when he saw one.“He’s going to drool on me,” Lance said.“Unfortunate,” Hunk whispered.He slid down the headboard and melted onto the pillows. When he turned his head, Lance was smiling at him while tracing idle shapes against one of Keith’s wrists. Behind Lance, Keith sighed sleepily.“Go to sleep,” Lance said.“I will,” Hunk promised. “Will you?”“Oh, probably.”They blinked at each other. A car roared by on the street below. A dog barked. Someone yelled from one of the nearby apartments, muffled and confusing.“I love you guys,” Hunk said, eventually. “I love being with you guys.”“But you don’t want to move in with us.”“But I don’t want to move in with you.”Lance sighed, but his smile remained.“I’m still me,” Hunk said. “I still need to be me. You know?”“Kind of.”“And maybe one day we won’t always be down the road from each other, right?”“Deciding that, are you?”“I’m serious.” Hunk shifted onto his side, tucking his hands under his head, so they were almost nose-to-nose, like when they were kids. Like when they had stayed up late to watch the stars or an anime that Hunk’s sister had lambasted, or just to be alive and awake.Keith and Hunk weren’t teenagers anymore. Lance would be twenty in a matter of months that was slowly becoming a matter of weeks. They seemed so young, and so old.“Okay,” Lance whispered. “Go on.”“I don’t know if I have anything else to say,” Hunk said, all but mumbling into the pillow and into his own arms. “Maybe just that—no matter what, we’ll always be us.”“No matter what,” Lance echoed.“Yeah. You don’t have to be afraid.”And Hunk didn’t know he needed to say it, and he didn’t know Lance needed to hear it, until the words had already left his mouth and became a gleam in his oldest friend’s eyes.“I’m not,” Lance muttered, borderline defensive.“Do we need to look up anxiety?”“Rude.”Keith snored, once and loud, and Hunk watched Lance bury a laugh against the bed.“Okay, okay,” Lance said. “I’ll stop nagging.”“Yeah, right.”“Just go to sleep!”Hunk closed his eyes and tried to swallow his own smile, but that lasted only a fleeting moment and then something restless stirred in his chest.He opened his eyes again.Lance blinked back at him.“What?” Lance said.“I want to tell you something,” Hunk whispered back.“Yeah?”“Lance,” he started, and continuing felt a little like a leap into a lake, like the moment before the rollercoaster dived, like seeing Keith waiting outside the exam room. But he did it all the same. “I’m ace.” He paused. “I mean, I think. No. No, I’m pretty sure. Yeah.” He breathed in, and out, and again: “Yeah. I’m asexual.”Keith snored again, smaller now and a little stuttered. Hunk saw the fluff of his hair bounce as he squirmed closer to Lance.Lance’s lips formed a small ‘o,’ and then his smile returned. “Yeah?” he said.And Hunk smiled back. “Yeah.” He squirmed, a little, against the bed. “And maybe aromantic, too.”“Okay.” And then after a count of one, two, three, four, Lance added: “Thank you for telling me.”And Hunk shuffled just a little bit closer, and they fell asleep together.
***
He’d tell Keith in the morning.
***
And he did.