“Not for too long, I hope.” The barista’s smile had turned flirtatious, and Justin gave a wry little shake of his head. She was barking up the wrong tree with that, but she shot a wink at Justin which made him think that she probably knew that. She was young, and cute, and probably got hit on all the time. A gay guy, particularly an oblivious one like Ken, was the safest person in the world for her to flirt with casually.
As they walked out into the night together, Justin looked up. A silvery glow seemed to make everything around them shimmer, and he softly whistled as he saw why. The moon was full, or not far off of it, anyway, and it bathed everything in the sort of beauty that normally would have made his fingers itch for a pen so he could write about it.
Oddly, the urge this time was a passing one, and his gaze slipped back down to Ken, who was watching him with a sweet little smile on his face. Ken in the moonlight was beautiful, far more beautiful than the silver orb itself, even though Ken clearly belonged under the light of the sun.
“Uh, where’s your car?” Ken asked, averting his eyes, as though ashamed to be caught looking at Justin. The guy was just so adorable. Justin couldn’t get enough. He’d had crushes on people before, but none of them were really able to weather actually being around the other person as much as he was around Ken these days.
With Ken, though, he just wanted more, craved more, couldn’t get enough. Felt the urge to be around him more than he wanted to be around anyone, with, of course, the exception of his daughter and that was a very different thing.
“I walked over. It’s not far, just ten minutes or so,” Justin admitted, and Ken grinned at him and nodded.
“Okay. Well, in honor of our first date, how about I walk you home?” Ken suggested, and Justin felt his lips twitch and then turn up at the edges until his cheeks felt like they might crack with the unaccustomed movement. Ken made him smile and laugh, and no one other than his daughter could easily do that.
“Sounds good,” Justin murmured, then set off down the street which was still and quiet, for once. As they went, the light changed between the silver of the moon and the golden of the streetlights, and Justin studied Ken and tried to figure out which lighting made him more beautiful.
“So how did you end up with a daughter, anyway?” Ken asked, and then—adorably—he actually flushed a little bit when Justin looked at him with an eloquently raised eyebrow. “I mean, I’m assuming you did it in, uh, sort of the normal way. But where is her mother? Were you married?”
Justin felt his smile slip, and he finally glanced away from Ken, staring down at the cracked, dirty gray of the sidewalk. This wasn’t the sort of thing he talked about. Ever. He rarely let himself even think about it, much less put words to it.
“Too much? Everyone always says that I don’t know when to shut up.” Ken was trying to make his voice gentle, Justin realized. It was a strange sound for him, but he was trying, and that touched Justin’s heart in unexpected ways. He hadn’t noticed Ken trying to do that for anyone else, which hopefully meant that Ken cared for him as he cared for Ken.
Ken cared enough to ask, too, and that was something else. The guy seemed to be fairly self-focused, but he was asking about Justin’s life now, about his story, and for whatever reason, Justin felt like he could trust him.
“No, it’s fine. It’s just it’s been a long time. Jade’s eight and a half, and she hasn’t seen her mother in almost eight years,” Justin admitted, his voice so low that it was probably a good thing that there was no traffic to drown him out.
“So what happened?” Ken asked, and Justin raised his eyes and deliberately looked over at Ken, trying to figure out how much to say. But once he had started talking, once he trusted someone, it was pretty damn hard to get Justin to shut up. It was one of the reasons that he didn’t speak very often.
“She left. Found someone with more money,” Justin said bluntly. “Didn’t want me and Jade holding her back, I guess. We never got married, so she just walked away, it was pretty easy.”
How much of what Justin wasn’t saying was Ken picking up on? The fear, the absolute terror, that Justin had felt when he realized he was on his own, that he was looking at giving his daughter the same childhood of poverty that he had experienced himself?
“Pretty easy to walk away from her daughter? What a cow,” Ken commented, and perhaps as a way of breaking the tension, Justin found himself laughing softly. The comment wasn’t that funny, he supposed, but it struck him as amusing at the moment. Not to mention accurate. He could never, not in a million years, imagine walking away from Jade. Not since the moment that he had found out that his ex was pregnant.
“Yeah,” Justin agreed. As they walked, the back of his hand brushed lightly against Ken’s, and to his shock, Ken took Justin’s in his own and slid their fingers together into an intimate handclasp as they walked.
It was that touch that broke down even more barriers. Justin had so carefully closed himself off, tried so hard not to let himself feel anything, and yet Ken took all of that work and tore it down without even seeming to try. And the worst part was, Justin couldn’t even seem to mind that much.
“I mean, I guess that’s why I’m where I am today,” Justin admitted. “Because I had to work to get here. I grew up poor, and with a single mother, you know?” Justin glanced over at Ken, then shook his head. How could Ken, with his nine million siblings, and his loving, if overbearing, mother know that?
“Right,” Ken simply said, just that one word, plus Ken’s earnest face, encouraging Justin to continue on.
“I didn’t want that life for Jade. I worked all the time so that I could give her what she wants. I didn’t date, because I didn’t want to have people in and out of her life like my stepfathers were. Mom was always dating someone. Usually someone new every couple of months.”
Justin fell silent because he had said way too much already, hadn’t he? But Ken was nodding, just looking at him and letting him speak, and that helped.
“Well, you made it, right?” Ken commented. “I mean, you’re the biggest deal songwriter in the country. Jade’s doing good, isn’t she?” Ken actually seemed to care, and Justin shook his head, not in denial but in sheer wonder.
Somehow, he’d always thought if he talked about his past, people would pity him, not known what to say. But Ken had said the exact perfect thing, and for a moment, Justin couldn’t say anything around the lump in his throat.
The buildings had started to look familiar, and Justin realized, with some surprise, that they’d been walking for far longer than it had seemed to him. Ten minutes had passed like a couple of seconds, and he pulled Ken to a stop and gazed up at him, standing outside his condo building, still holding his hand.
Justin still couldn’t speak, and he could see worry dawning on Ken’s face. In a second, he somehow knew, Ken would start to babble, to ruin this perfect moment between the two of them, and that was something that Justin couldn’t allow to happen.
So he did the only thing that made any sense. He turned to face Ken, reaching up to hook his free hand, the one not cradled in Ken’s large, warm palm, on Ken’s neck. He stretched onto his tiptoes and pressed his lips against Ken’s. The kiss was supposed to be just a brief one, a brush of lips together, but then Ken’s tongue slipped out and into Justin’s mouth, and he lost track of time, of everything else.
“I can’t invite you to stay the night,” Justin admitted, finding that the kiss had melted away the knot in his throat that had kept him from speaking before. “But I do want to invite you in.
Did Ken know what Justin was asking for? Or how big a deal it was that Ken would let him into the house at all? It had been a long time since Justin had hooked up with anyone, and the few times he had had sex, he had done it away from his own house.
“Okay.”
It was just the one word, but it was spoken with a slight, seductive, understanding little smile. Whatever this thing between them was, it seemed that it was about to go to the next level, and that should have been far more terrifying to Justin than it was.
