Adam’s idea of being helpful in the kitchen is sitting on his ass on the counter and not getting in anyone’s way. They don’t need his help anyway, he reasons, watching them from his perch. Neil is almost done setting the table, and there’s nothing else Adam would even be allowed to do. His mother hasn’t let him touch the stove since he was fifteen and almost burned down the house trying to make an omelet—which is a shame, really, because Adam had learned a lot about Italian food from Keith, his last boyfriend, who apparently came from a long line of chefs. If Keith hadn’t turned out to be a backstabbing bitch, Adam would’ve wanted his mother to meet him. They’d have liked each other.

Adam steals another carrot from the salad and then rearranges the remaining ones to hide the fact that he’s eaten most of them already. But it isn’t his fault; he’d had only half a bagel for breakfast, and the lunch his family had planned is apparently turning into dinner—which technically, it could be argued, is his fault for being three hours late, but how was he supposed to know that the cute guy from Starbucks would ask him out today?

“The cute guy from Starbucks asked me out today,” he announces to the room in general.

Neil snorts. “I knew you were out fucking someone.”

“I wasn’t—”

“Neil, language!”

Neil rolls his eyes at Adam. Checking to make sure his mother has turned back to the stove, Adam sticks his tongue out at him.

“We just talked,” Adam explains after a beat. “And had coffee.” He puts a hand on his roiling stomach—maybe a little too much coffee.

“So?” Leila prods, sneaking a glance at him. “What’s he like?”

Adam shrugs.

“What does that mean?” Leila asks, mirroring his shrug.

Adam shrugs again. “He’s nice, I guess. But I don’t know if it’s worth the effort. I’m busy enough as it is, and the guy’s name is Martin.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, not that again,” Neil says under his breath. Leila looks between the two of them, clearly waiting for an explanation. Adam opens his mouth to offer one, but Neil beats him to it. “This idiot went to a fortuneteller and she told him some nonsense about—”

“It was not nonsense,” Adam protests, hopping down from the counter and pulling out a chair to sit at the table. The food smells wonderful and Adam is pretty sure he’s going to faint if they don’t eat soon. “I think she was a witch.”

“Of course she was,” Neil says, obviously making fun of him. Adam looks up at his mother—who is, thankfully, finally bringing the spaghetti his way—for support, but she looks doubtful, as well. His family is full of skeptics. It’s so disappointing.

“Well, believe it or not, but everything she told me has come true so far.”

“What does that have to do with Martin?” Leila asks, setting the saucepan on the table, as far away from Adam as she can. Seriously, he’s not that much of a klutz.

Neil snickers. “She told him some story about his soul mate, and get this, his name is supposed to start with a K.” Adam is too busy stuffing his face to talk, so he makes do with a glare instead. “So this idiot has been working his way through the Ks in the phone book.”

Adam picks up a carrot to throw at Neil’s stupid smug face, but then thinks better of it and eats it instead. Then he carefully picks up a soggy slice of cucumber and throws that. It hits Neil on the nose and slides down to land in his plate with a splash of sauce, making Neil jerk back in his chair.

“Children,” Leila admonishes them, making disapproving mom noises.

“I am not working my way through the Ks, okay?” Adam feels the need to defend himself. That’s not how fate works. You can’t cheat and try every K in the book. It has to happen naturally. “In fact, I already met the person she was talking about.”

That’s news to Neil as well as their mother, and Adam watches with satisfaction as Neil’s face shows his surprise. Adam is not as transparent as people think he is. He has depths and secrets and stuff. “Yes,” he says, nodding at his mother, who seems curious now. “I met him three times, in completely random places.”

“I feel a story coming,” Leila teases with a smile. Adam smiles back. It certainly is a great story. He hasn’t told it to a lot of people, because he has this irrational fear that the magic will wear off if he tells it too many times, but this should be okay. Surely telling his family should be safe.

“The first time we met, I kissed him.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Neil says around his fork. Adam ignores him.

-

Kris welcomes the relative sanity of the bar, grateful for it after the pandemonium of the open mic night next door, which apparently everyone and their mother had decided to attend. He sits on his stool, minding his own business, and sips from his club soda. His phone keeps vibrating in his pocket, but he ignores it. He knows it’s Daniel, angry and probably a little worried, but Kris just isn’t up for the scolding he knows he’s likely to get.

He doesn’t feel like performing tonight. To be honest, he doesn’t feel like performing at all anymore. There’s only so much rejection he can take before he has to admit that when you look at the big picture, he’s just a guy in plaid who can play the guitar and sing relatively well. He’s one of millions. There’s nothing unique about him—nothing that sets him apart.

There’s no use denying the obvious; he needs to let go of the dream. He should go back to college, get a real job, and build a life that doesn’t revolve around auditions and rejections. He’s pretty sure he can do it. Everyone does it. It can’t be that hard.

Besides, Katy won’t wait around for him forever.

“Oops, sorry,” the guy standing next to him says when he jostles Kris’ drink. He’s bent over the bar, rummaging behind it for something. All Kris can see is the back of his head—black and sparkly hair—and a jacket with metal spikes on the shoulders.

“It’s okay,” Kris mumbles.

Everyone in this city is more interesting than him. It’s no wonder they don’t take him seriously. Maybe he’d have better luck getting a gig if he shaved half his hair and dyed the rest a bright pink.

“Whew,” the guy says, standing back up and swallowing a shot of whatever’s in the bottle he retrieved from his secret place. Then he turns to Kris and smiles, and Kris has to blink at the force of it. He never knew a guy in make-up and platform boots could look so genuine. “Celebrate with me!” the guy says, pouring an extra shot and pushing it towards Kris.

“Uh. Okay?” Kris sniffs the purplish liquid. It burns his nostrils. “What are we celebrating?”

“We are celebrating the fact that I am over the bastard and I don’t care anymore.” He nods decisively, looking into Kris’ eyes with the kind of solemnity that only a man swaying on his feet can achieve. Kris puts a hand on his arm to steady him. He’ll probably end up breaking his ankle if he falls in those boots.

The man shoots back his second shot. Kris follows him, but slams his glass back down on the bar almost reflexively when his insides catch fire as the liquid makes its way down his throat. “Woah,” he exclaims, expecting flames to erupt from his mouth with the sound.

The man chuckles. “Good, yes?”

Kris opens his mouth, but closes it again without a sound. That’s certainly one word for it. He wipes the moisture from his eyes with the back of his hand. “Woah,” he says again. He isn’t a big drinker, but that was something.

When Kris turns back to him, the guy with the boots is leaning towards him slightly, his folded arms resting on the sticky-looking surface of the bar. “You’re like—”

“Adam!”

The guy—Adam?—looks around. There’s a man in a pair of unseasonable white jeans, waving at Adam and trying to make his way over to them through the crowd; judging by the groan Adam lets out, he is very much unwelcome. Kris guesses that this is the bastard that Adam is supposed to be over. He starts to ask, but then glances up at Adam and thinks better of it.

“Adam!”

The man’s voice is kind of shrieky and annoying, and Kris can see Adam lowering his head with every shriek until he’s almost one with the bar. Kris wishes he could stage a rescue, but they aren’t even remotely close to the exit, so there’s no running away from this one.

“You know, you shouldn’t let him get to you—” Kris is good at platitudes and even believes in them most of the time, so it’s not a hardship to offer some here, but before he can get the words out, Adam stands up—and man, is he tall in those boots—and grabs Kris’ chin in a surprisingly strong grip.

“I’m sorry about this. Please don’t bite me,” he says, and smashes their lips together.

Kris freezes, his hands balled into fists on his thighs, and a startled sound escapes his throat. Adam pulls back slightly to give him a reassuring squeeze on the arm and almost-whispers against his lips, “Please?”

‘Please, what?’ Kris has no idea, but Adam’s eyes are huge and pleading and very, very blue from this close, and when he kisses Kris, it doesn’t feel like an assault. It’s strong and deep, but not overpowering. Kris knows he can pull back any time he wants—he can tell that Adam will let him go without a fight—but for some inexplicable reason, he doesn’t budge.

One of Adam’s hands settles on Kris’ neck; the other cups his cheek. His hands are warm and soft against Kris’ skin, and even though they just met five minutes ago, his touch doesn’t feel strange. Kris decides to blame the purplish shot for that one. And for the not-pulling-away-from-the-kiss thing as well, while he’s at it. Kris is an easygoing guy, but not like this; not normally, anyway.

“Adam!” the white-jeans guy exclaims disapprovingly; Kris can almost hear the pout in his voice. Adam pulls back to look at him.

“Yeah?” Kris hears Adam say in a hoarse voice. His vision is kind of blurry and he’s maybe a little frozen in his spot; from this angle, all he can see is Adam’s ear—and a lock of his hair that’s brushing his cheek and smearing glitter on his skin—but he can’t make himself turn his head to take in the whole picture.

“What do you want, Kit? I’m kind of busy here,” Adam says, working an arm under Kris’ jacket to grab him around the waist. Kris considers kicking him in the shin—he’s on a stool, he totally could kick him with both feet—but as annoying as Adam is, Kit, for some reason, is the enemy, and Kris thinks any shin-kicking should be saved for after they’ve dealt with that one.

“You owe me a dance,” Kit whines, and it’s annoying, Jesus, so unbelievably annoying, and Kris can’t for the life of him understand why Adam would ever have trouble getting over a guy this fake.

“He said he’s busy,” Kris finds himself saying, and both Kit and Adam turn to look at him with wide eyes. Kris would look at himself with wide eyes if he could, because seriously, what the hell? But Adam recovers before Kris can apologize for interrupting their conversation and offer to get Kit refreshments or something, and leans closer to kiss the side of Kris’ mouth.

“Yeah, where were we?” he whispers, and promptly proves that he doesn’t need be reminded. There, that’s exactly where his tongue was when Kit interrupted.

A woman pushes Kris further into Adam, apologizing to his back; the music changes to a Rihanna song; Kit leaves in a huff at some point, and Kris’ lips grow numb from either the kissing or the suspicious-smelling purplish shot, or possibly both; but none of those things manage to make him pull back from the kiss—not until he hears Charles’ voice.

“Dude, seriously?”

-

“And?” Neil asks, making a rolling motion with his fork that says carry on.

Adam shrugs. “And then his friends came and whisked him away.”

Neil blinks. “And you thought he was your one and only, because…?”

“I didn’t. Not then. It was just… It was different, you know?” Neil doesn’t look like he knows what Adam is talking about at all, so Adam looks to his mother for help. “Like, you know how sometimes you kiss someone and it’s just a kiss, maybe even a good kiss, but still a kiss. And then you kiss someone else and it’s… like… different?”

His mother shakes her head fondly. Adam sighs. Okay, so it’s not something he can describe. That’s another reason why he doesn’t tell people this story. They just don’t get it.

“Whatever. It was just a feeling, but I knew it was big. I didn’t connect the fortuneteller thing to him until the second time, though.”

“When was this?” his mother asks, reaching for the breadbasket. Neil hands her a slice.

“The first time was four years ago in September—”

“Woah,” Neil says, his eyes opening comically wide.

“—and the second time was the summer after that, when I went to New York to audition for that vampire thing.” He didn’t get the part, but he stayed in New York for two weeks. He remembers having a lot of fun with Brendon and Dana; it was a good trip. “I was at the airport, and I saw this guy sleeping on the floor.” Adam smiles at the memory. He should’ve taken a picture of that scene. It’s one of his favorite memories of Kris—not that he has a lot, but still. “He was hugging this battered, old guitar case, and his face was buried in a backpack, but I could see his hair peeking out, and I recognized him.”

“From his hair?” says Neil’s doubtful voice.

Adam grins. “Yeah.”

-

Kris wakes up with a start. They’re making a gate change announcement, but he can’t make out the words. He checks the time frantically—he doesn’t have a watch, so he has to hunt down his cell phone—but there’s no need to panic. He still has half an hour until boarding time.

“Here,” someone says, and a large cup of coffee appears in his line of vision. The hand holding it out wiggles the cup when he doesn’t take it. “I got this for you. You look like you need it.”

Kris takes the cup gratefully—he does need it, and right now, he can’t really afford it—and looks up to thank the goodhearted stranger, only to meet a pair of very familiar blue eyes.

“Thank you.” It escapes his lips before he can stop and change it into ‘Adam, right?’ or a cool ‘Have we met before?’ or maybe even ‘Do I know you?’, but in the end that’s probably a good thing, because on second thought, Kris isn’t sure if he’s supposed to acknowledge an acquaintance that odd. Surely Adam must have forgotten a stranger he kissed while drunk; it’s been almost a year now.

“You’re welcome,” Adam says, sitting cross-legged on the floor next to him. Their thighs brush, making Kris freeze and squeeze his styrofoam cup a little too tightly. He makes himself relax by thinking very hard about how suave it would not be to burn his hand right now.

Adam takes a sip from his own coffee and melts against the wall behind them with a sigh. Kris pretends to be engrossed in his phone, but instead studies Adam’s remarkably-more-normal clothing choices from the corner of his eye. Adam is wearing black jeans, a black t-shirt with a sort of v-neck (Kris doesn’t know whether it should still be called a v-neck when it looks like it may have been ripped open), and he has a couple of pendants hanging half in and half out of his t-shirt. His hair is not glittery this time, or all up in the air; instead it has purple streaks and looks limp and wet, like he didn’t bother drying it before he left home.

“Where to?” Adam asks, his eyes suddenly fixed on Kris. He looks friendly, but the way his eyes narrow as they focus on Kris’ face is unnerving.

“Little Rock,” Kris says, giving him a polite smile. “Arkansas,” he explains when Adam looks confused.

“Oh,” Adam says. “Home?”

“Yeah.”

“Home as in ‘mom’s cooking’ or ‘empty apartment’?”

Kris’ smile widens. “Mom’s cooking. The real kind of home.” Then he remembers that he probably won’t even have time to enjoy an apple pie with all the rush, and the smile falls off his face. “But not for long. I only have a couple of days before I have to leave again.”

Adam arches an eyebrow in question. Kris takes a moment to admire the dark curve of it; it’s quite lovely.

“Going to Zimbabwe,” he says finally.

Adam chokes on his coffee. “What?”

“It’s a church thing,” Kris says, running a hand through the hair at the back of his neck and hoping he’s not blushing. “I’m between jobs right now and a friend of mine asked if I could help, so…”

Adam looks shocked, and Kris can’t tell if it’s a good shocked or bad shocked. Not that it matters, he reminds himself firmly. Adam is just…someone Kris has now met twice and probably won’t ever see again.

“What are you going to do there?” Adam asks; his eyes fall on Kris’ guitar. “Play for them?”

Kris huffs out a nervous laugh. He hates talking about this stuff. “Maybe, yeah. The trip is for AIDS orphans, and children in orphanages can always use cheering up.” Adam is looking at him all weird now. Perfect. Talking about AIDS and orphans and church—that’s just the way to spend fifteen minutes with a stranger. “I like children,” he says with a shrug, hoping to end this conversation without turning things even more uncomfortable.

They sit in silence. Adam looks sort of bewildered, staring off into space. Kris takes another swallow of coffee—just something to do while he mentally kicks himself for torpedoing the conversation—and gets up when he finds his cup finally empty. He should go and find his gate, anyway. It wouldn’t do to miss his flight when he can’t even afford to spend a couple hours at a motel.

“I should go,” he says, juggling his backpack, the guitar case, and the empty coffee cup. “Thanks for the coffee.”

“Sure,” Adam says.

Kris stares for a second, not sure what he’s supposed to do, and then turns around to leave. He’s supposed to get on his flight, go home, sleep in his own bed for a couple of days, and then go to Africa. That’s what he’s supposed to do.

“Hey, wait,” Adam says, and Kris jumps, his heart thumping madly. When he turns around, he finds Adam on his feet, holding out a piece of paper. “This yours?”

It’s his boarding pass.

“Right,” Kris says, taking it from Adam with a nod. Their fingers brush and Kris yanks his hand back as if burned. “Thanks,” he says.

Then he turns around and leaves.

-

“I don’t get it,” Neil says. “What exactly did this fortuneteller tell you?”

Adam opens his mouth to answer, but Neil interrupts him with a calming gesture before Adam can spit out what will probably be a pretty defensive argument.

“I’m just trying to understand why you think this guy is the guy she was talking about, that’s all.”

Adam closes his eyes and tries to remember the exact words, but he’s thought about this so much, turned it sideways and inside out to try and interpret it, that now he’s not even sure exactly what she told him. But even if he changed the details the way he wanted them to be, he knows he never touched the basics. “She said I’d meet him soon, but I’d have to be patient and wait until it all works out. And she told me that he’s a musician, and he has a good heart, and that his name starts with a K.”

“What’s his name?” Leila asks before Neil can start with his smartass comments again.

Adam can’t fight off the smile. He can see the boarding pass like it was in his hand yesterday. He knows the flight number, gate number, boarding time—it’s quite freaky actually; his memory normally sucks. “Kristopher Neil Allen,” he says, savoring each syllable. He likes this name. It’s a special name. “It’s Kristopher with a K,” he adds. “I mean, who spells Kristopher with a K? If that’s not fate, I don’t know what is.”

“It’s called a coincidence,” Neil says.

“I don’t believe in coincidences.”

“Well, I don’t believe in fate,” Neil says, crumpling his napkin. “She was being vague on purpose and just making guesses. That’s what they do. You’re obviously gay, so she says it’s a guy. You’re a musician, so she says he’s a musician. She says he has a heart of gold—well, it’s not like you’re going to go out with someone unless you think he’s at least decent. Then she picks a random letter, which makes you specifically date guys whose names start with that letter, and voila! It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

“That doesn’t explain why I keep running into him. I met him three times, but I saw him around at least a dozen times—maybe more! He was in the audience at Wicked, he was buying hot dogs around the corner from Brad’s place, he was at a bus stop in New York—I couldn’t catch up with him those times, but he was there.”

“And how many of those times were you high?” Neil asks, handing his plate to Leila who’s gathering the dishes.

“I wasn’t—”

“Because, you know you’re prone to hallucinations when you’re high.”

Adam glares at him. You hallucinate Little Red Riding Hood once and they never let you hear the end of it. “I didn’t see him in a red cloak skipping on my ceiling. He was real.”

“You said there was a third time?” Leila says, clearly trying to stop their bickering. She puts the pie (she must have bought it, there is no way she can bake something that delicious-looking) on the table, and slaps Neil’s hand away when he reaches for it.

“Yes. In Vegas. January, last year.”

-

Kris’ hands are taken up with his backpack and his latte, so the hat he’s about to buy, pink and frilly though it is, ends up on his head. He simply has nowhere else to put it. That’s the freedom of being a tourist, he thinks as he pays. You get to be as eccentric as you want, and there’s no one around to make fun of you.

Of course, that’s when he hears a familiar voice. “That’s not really your color.”

He knows who it is before he turns around to look—and isn’t that just completely insane?

He offers Adam a tentative smile. “You don’t think so? I think it brings out the color of my eyes.”

Adam leans in close, bending down to see his eyes from under the hat’s brim. Kris holds his breath.

“Hmm.” Adam studies Kris’ face with worrying intensity for a long moment, then switches his gaze to the selection of hats on the wall. He takes the pink hat off Kris’ head and drops a large safari hat in its place. “Maybe something like this,” he says critically.

It’s way too large. It falls down to cover half of Kris’ face.

“I don’t think this works,” Kris says, completely blinded by the hat. His nose, though, is working perfectly well, and he catches a distinct, familiar scent as Adam stands close to him to ask the clerk about—the black one, in the back, yes, the one with the feather. It’s ridiculous that he would remember the way Adam smells, but his nose is pretty certain about this. Adam’s scent is both sweet and spicy, reminds Kris of peaches and vanilla and cinnamon, and it’s so obviously Adam, which—which makes no sense.

“How about this?” Adam says, handing the safari hat back to the clerk and offering Kris a black fedora instead. Kris shakes his head.

Adam pouts, putting the slighted fedora on himself. His hair has so much product that not one strand moves under the hat’s weight. It’s a ridiculous sight.

“This is cool,” Adam says, showing him a blue beanie. Kris reaches over to take it from him, but Adam pushes his hand away. He puts the beanie on Kris himself, tugging at it here and there to make it fit, sliding his fingers under it to fix Kris’ hair.

Kris blushes furiously; at least, that’s what it feels like. All the blood is rushing to his face, and there’s no stopping it. He’s not embarrassed—this isn’t about shyness at all—but he can’t admit, even to himself, what it really is about, because he came here to buy a hat for Katy, and Adam is—well. He’s not just a random stranger who doesn’t matter; that’s for sure.

“There,” Adam says, bending at the knees a little to look at Kris’ face. “Perfect.”

His fingers trail down Kris’ cheek, too slow not to be intentional, and it jolts something inside Kris. Katy’s waiting for him at the café. He can’t—he shouldn’t—

He takes off the beanie and throws it on the counter. “I have to go,” he says to Adam with what he hopes is an apologetic smile. He takes the pink frilly hat from where Adam has dropped it and asks the clerk for a bag.

“I sincerely hope that’s not for you,” Adam says, leaning against the counter with his hands in his pockets. Kris tries not to stare too obviously, but the small smirk pulling Adam’s lips to the side is impossible to look away from.

“It’s for my wife.”

And Kris still can’t look away as the expression on Adam’s face changes. It freezes for a moment and then grows incredulous. Adam’s eyes go to Kris’ left hand and find the ring, and then—well, Kris is probably reading it all wrong anyway. People always tell him he looks way too young to be married; that’s probably why Adam looks so surprised. They can’t possibly be on the same page, here. Kris is pretty sure they aren’t even in the same book.

“Oh,” Adam says, blinking and looking away. He twirls a plaid cap in his hand absentmindedly; Kris doesn’t tell him he used to have one just like it.

The clerk hands Kris the bag, and Kris hesitates before turning to go. But what can he possibly say here that doesn’t sound completely crazy and make him look delusional? He obviously is delusional; there’s no other way to explain the things going through his head.

“I’d better go,” he mumbles to no one in particular, and doesn’t wait for an answer. He should walk out while his feet are still cooperative.

As he exits the shop, Kris hopes that he and Adam will never run into each other again. He doesn’t like thinking about ‘what-might-have-been’s. Especially when they’re foolish and impossible like this one.

-

“He’s married?”

Leila sounds shocked, and looks the part, too. Adam shakes his head and looks down at his half-eaten piece of pie. He’s suddenly lost his appetite.

“It’s not like that.”

Neil snickers, but he manages to look horrified at the same time. “What is it like then?”

“She told me I had to wait. She didn’t say it’d be easy. That’s not life. Life is not perfect.”

Adam has had a long time to think about this. That day, after he’d left the shop, he’d run directly to his room and spent the night drinking. He found out later that he’d drunk-dialed half the people on his contact list. When he’d sobered up, he’d told himself that Kris just wasn’t it. There had to have been some mistake, or he must have misunderstood, and anyway, it wasn’t like he was actually invested in this non-relationship.

It took him almost six months after that to see that his life was never supposed to be a fairytale. After all, his first kiss wasn’t with a prince; his fairy godmother didn’t show up in time for prom; and it didn’t seem likely that he’d marry into the royal court. He decided that he didn’t really care about being anyone’s first; he just wanted to be someone’s last.

And he could wait.

“That’s fucked up,” Neil announces, downing his coke. Adam kind of wishes they had wine. If he’d known that the conversation would go this way tonight, he definitely would’ve brought a bottle. Or three.

He gets up, piling the plates up and taking them to the sink just to have something to do.

“Hey!” Neil says when he realizes his plate is gone.

“Were you eating that?” Adam asks sweetly just before upending the plate into the sink accidentally. “Oops.”

Neil narrows his eyes at him but holds his tongue. He’s not stupid enough to call him a bitch (which Adam can tell he’s dying to) with their mother in the room. ‘Love you, too,’ Adam mouths at him.

Adam turns on the faucet and starts rinsing the plates, turning his back on Neil and his stupidity. He’s not in the mood for mocking or fighting. He’s kind of tired. It’s been fourteen months since he saw Kris in Vegas, and as weird as it is, he finds himself missing him. He needs to give it time—he knows that—but dating guys when he knows it won’t work out, going through the motions again and again—it’s so tiring.

“Sweetheart.” His mother wraps an arm around his waist and leans her head on his shoulder. He doesn’t turn his head to look at her. He’s pretty sure the look on her face would make him cry. “You can’t do this. You’re talking about years. And he’s married.”

“I know that.”

“He made vows to someone else.”

“I know that.”

“Then you know you can’t—”

Adam turns off the faucet. “I know it’s a horrible thing to wait for a marriage to fall apart, but I’m not doing anything. I’m not—I know his name, I know where he lives, and I didn’t even look him up. I’m not trying to get his wife out of the way. I’m not doing anything wrong.”

“No, you’re right,” Leila says, placating. “You’re not doing wrong by him. But don’t you think that maybe you’re being unfair to yourself? As long as you hang onto this, you’re not going to take anyone else seriously. This Martin kid, you’re not even going to give him a chance—are you?”

Adam looks down and doesn’t say anything. He’s not. He doesn’t even want to.

“You can’t spend the best years of your life waiting.”

Adam shakes his head. He can. He’s supposed to. It feels right. But there’s no way to explain that to someone else. He braces his hands on the counter and squeezes the marble until his fingers hurt. This was frustrating enough for him already, and now his mother is looking at him all worried, and it’s all gone to hell.

“Honey,” his mother says, petting his hair like she used to do when he was a kid. “He is not waiting for you.”

-

Adam escapes with the leftover pie and two of his mother’s overdue rental DVDs.

“Drop them off for me, will you? It’s on your way, right around that corner, across the park.”

Adam doesn’t even whine. His mother looks weary and sad, and it’s all his fault, so the least he can do is drop off a couple of DVDs for her. She presses a big kiss on his cheek and hugs him tightly before sending him off.

It’s a quiet night. The weather is slightly chilly, but that’s the way Adam likes it, anyway. Even trying to take his time, he gets to the DVD place in five minutes. He drops the DVDs off, then tries to browse for a while, but his heart isn’t in it, and he finds himself standing outside again in no time, his feet still refusing to head towards his apartment.

He likes his apartment. It may not be in the best neighborhood, or have the best view, or a heating system that doesn’t break down every two days, but it’s his. It smells like him and looks like him, and Adam likes that. It feels like home. Right now, though, it’ll only remind him of what he doesn’t have. Sure, it’s easy to fill all that space (not that he has a lot of space, mind you, but he always finds himself instinctively leaving room for one more person inside whatever space he does have) with Martin only a phone call away, or Keith, or a hundred other guys, K-names or not. But that would be cheating. It wouldn’t be real. And it wouldn’t really be that much better than the void.

Adam wouldn’t say the void is Kris-shaped—not out loud anyway—but trying to fill it with an imitation or a stand-in can’t possibly be a good idea.

Adam’s feet take him to the park. It’s a small one, with barely enough trees to fill a backyard, and has a small playground which Adam knows is cheerful and multi-colored, but which looks gray and muted in the dark. He hears the creaking of a chain and follows the sound towards the swing set; he sees the guitar case leaning against the steel bar before he notices the figure sitting on a swing.

His heart starts thumping harder. It doesn’t go any faster, it’s not like it’s panicked or worried—it knows how this will go—but its sound resonates deeper, every beat shaking Adam to the core. This is important, it says. This is momentous.

His steps don’t falter as he walks closer, but the first word out of Kris’ mouth almost makes him stumble.

“Adam.”

-

That should’ve come out as a question, Kris thinks, but it’s too late to add a ‘right?’ after the name now. It’s just as well. Kris is too tired for even the slightest of pretenses tonight. He’s cold and his arms hurt from hauling his stuff around for hours and he is hopelessly lost. It hasn’t been a good day for him at all. To be honest, he hasn’t had a good day in a long while.

“You remember,” Adam says, stopping a couple of steps away.

Kris lets the swing move slowly back and forth, the chain still creaking. A part of him is surprised that Adam remembers him at all, but another part of him finds the thought of them forgetting each other absurd.

“Of course I do.”

Adam stares at him for a moment and then takes the empty swing next to him without a word. It’s a pretty normal-sized set, but Adam still looks a bit like a giant on the seat. His hands grip the chains, and he leans his forehead against the back of his left hand to look at Kris. Kris stops his swaying to turn and face him. They seem to have the same idea this time; no more looking from the corner of their eyes. Kris doesn’t know what, exactly, this is, but he thinks they’re both ready to be honest about what it’s not.

“What’re you doing here?” Adam asks, looking genuinely curious.

“I got lost.”

Adam’s smile is sudden and impossibly bright; Kris’ lips curve up in response to it. No one smiles quite like Adam.

Kris takes his phone from his jacket pocket and opens the email Fred sent him. “I was trying to get here,” he says, handing the phone over to Adam. “I’m supposed to be staying at a friend’s place, but my flight got delayed, and then I got on the wrong bus, and…”

“Yeah,” Adam says, looking down at the address on the screen. “You’re lost, alright.”

“Thought so.” Kris reaches over to take his phone back, but Adam grabs his hand and doesn’t let go. Two of his fingers trace the empty space on Kris’ ring finger.

“Lost your ring?”

Kris looks down, unable and unwilling to meet Adam’s eyes. He hasn’t been able to meet anyone’s eyes since the divorce. He and Katy had been so sure it would work—there had been no reason to doubt it. Kris had known he’d marry Katy since he was 17. They were good together. They made sense. But when they got married, the ring on his finger had felt wrong for all thirteen months of his wearing it; now that it’s gone, it feels wrong that it’s not there.

“Didn’t work out,” Kris says, because that’s the line he always uses. He’s not ready to talk about all the crying and the fights yet.

“I’m sorry,” Adam says, enveloping Kris’ hand in both of his. Kris shivers. Adam’s hands are warm. “Are you okay?”

People have been asking him that a lot. Getting a divorce is like having someone close to you die; everyone wants to feed you and fix you, but nothing can really touch that cold spot inside your heart. And it gets annoying after a while, because they expect it to work, too. They keep waiting for you to get better, and it suffocates you to the point where you just have to escape. Kris lasted four months before he grabbed his guitar and ran. Now he thinks he should’ve done it sooner.

“Not really,” Kris says honestly. “But I think it’s getting better now.”

That makes Adam smile.

-

They sit there in the cold for another ten minutes before Kris starts to shiver visibly, and then Adam runs to the coffee shop down the street to get them both something hot to drink. He doesn’t let Kris get up and buy his own drink, and even though that’s kind of how his friends and family have been treating him, this time Kris enjoys the pampering.

“Here you go. Hot chocolate with extra marshmallows.”

Kris turns the thick cup in his hands, wrapping his fingers around it to get the maximum amount of warmth possible, and that’s when his eyes catch the scribbled name peeking from behind his thumb. He doesn’t know why he’s surprised. Of course Adam knows his name. Of course he spells it right.

“What?” Adam asks, his eyes going between Kris’ face and the cup.

Kris smiles. “You know my name.”

“Kristopher Neil Allen,” Adam says. “I do know your name. I know you took American Airlines flight 278 to Little Rock that day and you sat in 12B. I know you look cute in a blue beanie. I know you saw me in Wicked, and I know you were in New York last November.” He shrugs.

‘I know how your mouth tastes,’ Kris wants to say, but it’s not the kind of thing he could ever voice out loud. He bites his lip instead and looks down, but his eyes drift up to find Adam’s again before he realizes that they’re doing it.

“Would it—I don’t want to—” Adam cuts himself off and huffs out a frustrated breath.

It’s interesting to see Adam—the guy with the glitter and the spikes and the larger than life presence—unsure about anything, especially about talking to Kris, but it appears that he is. He’s running a hand through his hair and fiddling with his coffee cup nervously.

“Would it be completely creepy if I said you could stay with me?” he finally gets out, and then looks even tenser as he waits for Kris’ answer.

Yes, Kris thinks, that should actually be very creepy. But it isn’t. He shakes his head.

“It’s just—” Adam braces his feet on the ground and pulls his swing closer to Kris’. “I’ve been waiting,” he tells Kris, his voice soft and his eyes earnest. “I want to be done waiting.”

Kris should ask him what he’s talking about, because what if he’s getting it all wrong? But Adam looks anxious and weary, and Kris knows that he’d be heartbroken if Kris asked that question now. He figures that common sense is overrated anyway, and lets himself follow that tingly feeling in his chest instead; there is, after all, no reason not to this time.

He puts a hand on Adam’s cheek—stubble under his fingertips, how odd is that?—and brings their lips together. Adam’s lips taste of coffee (not alcohol and lip-gloss) and he kisses Kris softly, slowly, taking the time to explore his mouth and how it fits against Adam’s.

Even though it isn’t their first kiss, it feels like an introduction.

Then Adam pulls back, gives Kris a heartstoppingly bright smile, and kisses him one more time, this time with passion and fire and a promise for much more, and Kris realizes that they don’t have to say anything at all. He feels a kind of confidence he hasn’t felt in months rise up in him and he suddenly knows—he’s sure like he hasn’t been sure of anything in his life—Adam is done waiting.

And Kris is done searching. Finally.

He takes Adam’s hand and laces their fingers together.

-

Adam takes the backpack himself and leaves the guitar case to Kris so that they can hold hands as they walk. Kris blushes a little and looks down at his feet, but he doesn’t pull his hand back. It’s so very cheesy, and Adam is enjoying every second of it.

“Would you do me a favor?” he asks Kris, throwing the backpack over his shoulder and taking out his phone.

“Sure. What do you need?”

“Just. I need you to say hi to somebody.”

He finds the number and hits send.

“Hey honey,” his mother answers the phone.

“Mom? Hey. There’s someone I want you to meet.”