Chapter Text
The hand in Alhaitham's was warm, self-assured, so much bigger than his own.
He didn't want to let go, no matter what they said. But, should he?
Alhaitham tried to pull away, ashamed of the attention that his simple act had brought their way, but the hand holding his would not budge. It gave a shake in response, as if to say, 'cut that nonsense out.' Its owner stood in front of Alhaitham in the Akademiya's main hallway, blocking him from the view of the growing crowd.
"How about you shut your pie hole, Ikram! It's obvious you're just jealous. No one wants to hold hands with you because you smell like a barn--
"Hey! Watch it, Kaveh!" Ikram, a boy the same age as Kaveh but who appeared to be about three years ahead of Kaveh on the puberty cycle, had become used to getting his way through physical might. He needed very little encouragement towards violence.
"--but that has nothing to do with us!"
"I just said, seems pretty gay, the way that kid hangs on you all the time. If it doesn't ick you out, what does that make you?"
"Ah, see this, Haitham?" Kaveh looked back over his shoulder, adopting a professorial air. "Here, we have a prime specimen of a Troglodyte, come out from his natural cave-dwelling habitat to spew uneducated filth. Take care it doesn't get on your shoes. The mess will never come out." The crowd snickered at Kaveh's rapier-sharp tongue found a worthy target.
"Dude, what is your problem?"
"Your mouth is my problem!" Kaveh stamped his foot, properly angry now. "Lobbing identities like they're insults is both offensive and lacks a sense of imagination! If you want to insult me, call me by your name-- I'd likely die of embarrassment from the association!" At that pronouncement, he wheeled on his heel, tugging Alhaitham along behind him. "Come on. Let's get out of here while he's working out the complex sentence structure."
Light and shadow, light and shadow punctuated the hallway as they ran, the afternoon sun streaming in the large windows. They spilled out into the gardens, past a gaggle of girls who called out to Kaveh, begged him to stop and give his opinion on an outfit choice, or a new book, or some tasty piece of gossip. Kaveh was too preoccupied to indulge them today, pulling Alhaitham down the winding stone path set into the Divine Tree and out of town.
It was quiet here, in their usual secret spot overlooking the river below. A large moss-covered log provided a natural bench at the cliff's edge where they'd frittered away many an afternoon, the cusp of adulthood butting up against the lazy, never-ending days of childhood. Kaveh plopped down on the log, yanked on Alhaitham's hand until he sat down beside him, and gave a dolorous sigh.
Alhaitham did not yet have 15 years of experience extracting meaning from Kaveh's every expression. Emotions, generally, were not his bailiwick. The best he could tell, Kaveh had been set off by something that Ikram had called Alhaitham.
But the words seemed fairly normal. Didn't they?
He scrunched up his brow, trying to parse what he'd heard. They did not appear to be insulting, at least not on their face. But there did seem to be some dark undercurrent shifting behind the phrases that, at ten years old, Alhaitham did not have the life experience to understand. He'd have to take his cues from Kaveh, who was two years older and therefore a million years wiser.
"Sorry." Alhaitham started, staring at their intertwined fingers. "I...grabbed your hand without thinking. I didn't know--"
Alhaitham's family had not been the touchy-feely sort. They did not hug each other good night. There were no goodbye kisses before work, no cuddly Sunday nights piled up on the Divan with snacks between them.
Except for this. His grandmother's hand, telling him to hold tight as she drifted in between the rowdy crowds in the market. Despite how paper-thin her skin was, how bony her fingers, her hand was indescribably strong. As long as he had that hand to pull him along, Alhaitham thought, he'd always make his way home.
He was sure he'd lost that feeling forever when she'd left. But there it was again, swelling in his boyish heart on a nondescript day when he finally looked up from his book and found that head full of sunshine staring across the library table at him.
He'd started reaching for Kaveh's hand shortly thereafter. Wasn't that how it worked? If someone brought you comfort, you ought to hold onto them. Right?
"What're you sorry for?" Kaveh pouted next to him, his cheeks round with baby fat that had not even begun to melt, those sharp cheekbones and kohl-rimmed eyes years away. "Don't listen to them. They're an echo chamber of trolls whose frontal lobes won't fully develop til they're thirty."
"Trolls? They're your friends, aren't they, Senior?" And the way that Alhaitahm said 'Senior,' like Kaveh had actually climbed a ladder to the stars and nestled the moon between them, would entirely disappear as he grew up and learned to hide his feelings under layers of snark.
"Maybe once. But it seems I misjudged their characters."
How? Alhaitham wanted to ask, but the whole thing seemed delicate, if the way Kaveh was worrying at his lip was any indication. He tried to suss it out on his own for a bit, hitting the same impasse over and over again in his analysis. "What does that word mean?"
"U-um. Really?"
"No. Well.. I know what it means when I read it. Happy. Joyful. Sprightly, depending on context. But the way they said it doesn't seem to fit."
"Haitham! Your grandmother never talked to you about any of this?!"
"About what?"
Kaveh smacked his forehead with his palm. "Ughhhh. Fine. It means.. It means a guy who likes guys, ok?"
"Oh. Is that all?"
"Huh? What do you mean?"
"But... Isn't that everybody? I mean, you're a guy. I'm a guy. I like you." Alhaitham said, and Kaveh's jaw went slack, mouth open in an O. "After all, isn't that what it means to be friends? And, you always say we're friends. We are friends, right, Senior?"
"Oh." Kaveh's brain caught up. Wasn't this kid supposed to be a genius or something? Well, now that he'd begun, he couldn't very well just stop. "It's not... No. I mean, yes, friendship is like that. But being gay is different. It means you like like guys. You know? Rather than girls. Or sometimes in addition to girls. I don't know -- the whole girls and guys thing is pretty complicated in and of itself, and I'm still trying to work that whole thing out--"
"Like like?"
"Mm. Like... Romantically."
Alhaitham digested this information for a while as they wordlessly watched a family of shroomboars snuffle around in the undergrowth at the bottom of the cliff face.
"You know..." Kaveh started, the beginnings of the sunset turning him into a bronzed statue, "It would be fine if you were. There's nothing wrong with it. It wouldn't like...bother me or anything."
"Oh. Ok."
"Just ok?"
"I mean, yeah? Why would it bother you? Why would it bother anyone?"
"Good point." Kaveh chuckled. Then cleared his throat. "Are you?"
Alhaitham gave the question serious consideration. He tried looking within, searching for the corner of himself that might contain such information. "Hmm. I guess I don't know. How can you tell?"
"I -- Um. I don't know, either, really. I think it's just like, you like guys and that's that. I think it should be easy to figure out.
"Then I don't think so." If that was the rubric, Alhaitham thought, perhaps he was nothing at all.
"Oh." Kaveh said, and when Alhaitham ran this memory back a decade later, he couldn't decide if Kaveh actually had sounded sad, or if he was just laying his own feelings overtop of the memory.
"Are you?" Little Alhaitham asked.
"W-why would you ask me that?!"
"Because your former friends... Weren't they saying you might be? After they said it to me, I mean. Hey, why do you look so panicked? If it's not bad--"
"It's not bad! I just --- I--" Kaveh had yanked his hand out of Alhaitham's, reflexively burying his face in his palms. Between his fingers, Alhaitham could see the blush working its way up to his temples, heating his ears. He cleared his throat, obtaining a modicum of control over himself despite the tomato red of his cheeks. "No. I'm definitely straight. Very... er.... Very into girls. I mean, I have posters of musical theater starlets all over my room! How could I be anything but straight?!"
For some reason, this pronouncement did not seem like the peak of logic to Alhaitham, especially because he'd seen the posters of girls bulky jerks like Ikram posted on their dorm walls, and his Senior's seemed to be... somewhat different. More clothing and less behinds, for starters. But at the end of the day, if it wasn't a bad thing, if it didn't make a difference to his Senior either way, then it was none of his concern. "So. Not gay. How does that affect this, then?" Alhaitham reached out and took Kaveh's hand in his again. "Seems like it gives people the wrong idea."
"I... Don't care about that." Kaveh gave Alhaitham's small hand a squeeze. "Let them think whatever they want. That is, unless...Do you care?"
"No. If the choice is between worrying about what other people think or holding your hand, then, I'll take your hand."
Kaveh smiled, always so charmed by Alhaitham's openness, like his heart was made of glass so clear that Kaveh could see straight through. "Then, hold my hand whenever you like. I'll deal with the bullies as they come."
,**************************************************
It turned out it was fairly easy, after all, to figure out if you liked boys. At least, it was for Alhaitham.
Or rather, it was easy to figure out if he liked a boy. One in particular.
The answer became painfully apparent when Alhaitham started to wake up every morning covered in the sticky evidence of his midnight emissions, the same blonde head of hair swimming before his bleary eyes. By the time he was fourteen, Alhaitham was extremely sure his sexual orientation went only one direction, and that was in whatever direction Kaveh was currently standing.
Which was, unfortunately, made entirely irrelevant by Kaveh's clear and overwhelming and often emphasized straightness, so very apparent as Kaveh churned through a number of girlfriends on a monthly basis. He therefore never mentioned this new understanding of his identity to anyone, and certainly not to his best friend.
Of course, anyone with a smidge more experience in the love department and a smidge less self-deprecation may have deduced that Kaveh's jaunt through half of Sumeru's eligible young ladies was a classic case of the boy doth protest too much.
The second clue should have been the type of girls Kaveh was always after.
Silver-haired ladies.
Sliver-haired ladies who were just a bit mean, who liked to argue just a bit too much.
And then, once Alhaitham hit his growth spurt to outstrip his Senior by a few inches, silver-haired, argumentative, mean ladies that were taller than Kaveh, without heels.
"You know, it's a pretty specific phenotype," Tighnari ventured to Kaveh one day, testing the waters of a hypothesis he'd developed some time ago.
"Hmm. Is it? I hadn't really thought about it."
"You don't say," Tighnari said, trying to stuff down a nearly automatic eye roll. "Well, now that it's been brought to your attention, do you think it maybe, I don't know, sounds familiar?"
"What?" Kaveh finally looked up from his sketchpad. "Really? Familiar how?"
Archons above, it's worse than I thought. "Oh, nothing." Tighnari turned his focus back to snipping dead spikes off a sickly Saurian Claw Succulent. "Must be my overactive imagination."
And no matter how Kaveh pestered Tighnari after that, Tighnari simply wouldn't finish his thought.
Things went on in this unexamined way for a number of years. By the time Alhaitham was sixteen, Kaveh had run through all of the native Sumerian girls who met his exacting description and was picking up any and all exchange students who fit the bill. His most recent relationship had foundered on the rocks, however, when he failed to successfully navigate the festivities surrounding July 9.
"Why?" Kaveh blinked, failed to pick up on the fury rising in his girlfriend's teal green eyes which, for some reason, were not quite as pretty as he'd thought they were when he first saw her. "Why do we have to go out today?"
"Because it's your birthday!" Kaveh's current girlfriend -- Samantha? Sereena? Samaya? -- could not have been more incredulous had she lived her life under the dictionary definition of the word.
"Yeah, and doesn't that mean I should do what I want? It's my day, right?"
"Well, yes, but what you should want is to hang out with your girlfriend!"
"I should probably --" Alhaitham, feeling a storm coming on from yet another one of Kaveh's conquests, tried to exit stage left, but was stopped, as always, by the firm grip of his Senior's hand.
"But I always spend my birthday with Haitham." Kaveh pronounced, brooking no argument.
"Senior, this appears to be a private conversation." Alhaitham tried again. "I'm going to head to the House of Daena--"
"Oh, will you come off it?" Kaveh turned the full force of that beautiful face directly on Alhaitham. "What, trying to get out of buying me dinner? Don't worry. I won't ask for anything too expensive. Your Senior is satisfied with just the bare minimum --"
And Alhaitham couldn't help it, so taken in by the lilt of that smile that he forgot he was in a crowded hallway, the press of people melting into the background all around them. "Oh, turning over a new leaf in your old age? So does that mean I can stop buying you those expensive hazelnut coffees every morning?"
"Of course not! You're the one that got me addicted to them in the first place. Now that I can't wake up without them, you are required to take responsibility--"
"Kaveh!" Kaveh's purported girlfriend elbowed herself back into the bubble of Kaveh and Alhaitham's world. "Stop that!"
"Stop what?"
"Holding his hand!! You're always doing it! It's weird -- I mean, you won't even let me do that!"
Kaveh raised the hand in his, gave it a small squeeze out of force of habit. "But, I barely know you. I've known Haitham for forever--"
The girl threw up her hands. "Ugh! That's it!"
"H-hey! Where are you going?!"
And that was the end of that two-week love affair.
Kaveh's heart must have been made of rubber for the way he bounced back, though. Just five days later, he had a first date with a graduate student that had newly transferred in from Mondstadt. And if the clock on the wall was any indication, this date must have been going much better than the last few.
Half past ten.
Kaveh, who always bounded down to Alhaitham's dorm to brag after every amorous rendezvous, was late.
Not that Alhaitham was staying up to wait for Kaveh.
Staying up and waiting on a man that one was in love with, while that same man was currently out dating someone of the opposite gender, would be something only a fool would do. Alhaitham was many things, but he was not a fool.
If it looked like he was waiting, reading the same paragraph over and over and over again in a book that he wasn't even really all that interested in without a single word absorbing at all, well, that would be an incorrect opinion based on an incomplete dataset.
He rolled his shoulders against the hard headboard of his bed, keeping one eye trained on the dark quad outside his bedroom window, as he desperately tried to ignore the dull ache that settled in his chest when Kaveh was romantically entangled with another.
20 minutes. No Kaveh.
Another 30. Still no Kaveh.
Strange.
He was never usually out this late without Alhaitham at his side.
15 more minutes.
Alhaitham drummed his fingers on the windowsill, trying to quell the panic that was rising from the bottom of his stomach.
Had the Quad always been this dark at this time of night?
11:45.
That did it.
Alhaitham stood up, grabbed his coat, prepared to dash out into the night and turn over every bar stool, scour every back alley until --
A rock ricocheted across the courtyard, kicked with force by a frustrated foot, as the luminous moon landed on a head of fluffy blonde hair. And Alhaitham finally unclenched his balled fists.
He deposited his coat, scrambled back on top of the covers, rearranged his face to mask all the fear and impatience the last hours had given him, counted the seconds before the door busted open.
"UGH! What the fuck was that?!" Kaveh charged in, barely acknowledging Alhaitham's presence as he barreled his way across the dorm room and flung himself down on Alhaitham's bed. The chill of autumn hung on his coat, making Alhaitham want to bundle him in the comforter, work some warmth back into him.
But Alhaitham made no move. He'd learned to cover his deep affection with a spackle of annoyance in the years since he first realized he was in love, and so he let his brows knit together as if he was too terribly interested in his book to be bothered.
"Godsdamnit. Is it me? Am I the problem?!" Kaveh flopped over on his stomach, buried his head in the crook of his arms.
The stoic did not take the bait, still pretending to be engrossed on the same paragraph that had not penetrated one iota into his brain.
"But... It can't be... Can it?" Kaveh kicked his feet about sullenly. "Surely not! People say I'm a charmer. Handsome. Sexy, even."
Alhaitham, who would tend to agree, struggled to not respond.
"Hey. Are you listening?"
One poke into Alhaitham's bicep.
"I'm having a very important crisis over here!"
A tug on the cuff of Alhaitham's sleeve as Kaveh scrambled up into a sitting position.
"Haitham, come on. You know I don't like to compete."
Alhaitham flipped the page.
"Fine, then. But you asked for it."
And the blush rushing up Alhaitham's neck was surely going to cause him to boil over. Kaveh splayed his fingers across the pages of Alhaitham's book, looked up cheekily from his new position on Alhaitham's lap. "What the hell, Kaveh," Alhaitham ground out, forcing the arousal down.
"Can't ignore me now, can you?" Kaveh smiled, the curve of his mouth and his hips and his eyes all Alhaitham could think about, and Alhaitham could feel the shape of him, pressing down. Gods, as if Kaveh could ever be ignored.
Alhaitham rolled a false note of exasperation out of his mouth, trying to sound tired rather than thrilled at the delectable weight in his lap. "Like I have any other choice, what with all the racket you're making."
"It's not a 'racket.' It's an emergency!"
"Date went that badly?" Alhaitham tried not to hope, tried not to wish for another girlfriend's downfall. It wasn't sporting since, from some angles, he had more in common with each of Kaveh's jilted lovers than he'd like to admit.
"Terribly?" Kaveh winced, laying Alhaitham's book aside. "I -- I guess it depends on who you ask. Haitham, how long have we known each other?"
"Hmm... Six years or so." Six years, 247 days, and 24 minutes, if one was being precise. But who's counting?
"Am I... secretly boring?"
"What?" Alhaitham almost let the squishy mess at the center of his heart slip in a rare moment of candor. "Kaveh, if you were any more interesting, you'd kill me."
"Ah... Maybe interesting isn't the right word..." And was that something less than the sheer, brazen confidence that defined Kaveh coming to the surface? Kaveh's shoulders seemed to drop, something unsure in his stance. "Well, I mean... Am I the kind of person that you would want to... Er -- do I strike you as the kind of person who would be good at kissing?"
"What" Alhaitham's consciousness winked out, a thousand-yard stare crossing his face as the words kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss, kissssss floated through the emptiness of his mind.
"Oh, don't look at me like that! Just... Give it to me straight. What do you think it would be like to kiss me?"
Alhaitham shook his head. "I..." Like being at the center of a sonic wave. Like stepping into fire and begging to be burned. Like having the power of creation in your hands -- "What nonsense are you on about now?"
Kaveh huffed and crossed his arms, the small adjustment causing his lower half to bounce ever so slightly on Alhaitham's lap. "It's just that I keep dating these girls... Objectively cute girls, right?"
Alhaitham gritted his teeth, tried not to think about the way that bounce felt. "Apparently."
"But when I kiss them, there's no... you know, spark. Nothing like the romance novels. Just dull, and wet, and messy, but not in a good way." The words rolled out of Kaveh like a confession as his hands began moving as fast as his mouth, more animated by the second "I --I mean, what on earth is wrong with me? It can't be me, can it? But I've kissed so many and it's all the same. I'm starting to think, is it possible that maybe I'm the one that's bad at kissing?"
The only response to the combination of raging jealousy and confusing horniness was a total and complete shutdown.
Alhaitham grabbed his book, flipped it back open.
"Haitham! Hey! I asked you a question!"
"One that I am totally unequipped to answer, Senior." Alhaitham clenched his jaw through the red he was seeing, his mind painting unhelpful pictures of Kaveh wound around a hundred different girls in a hundred different bars. "How could I possibly judge your kissing skills? It's not like you've ever kissed me. Now, get off me and --"
Kaveh tilted his head to the side. "Huh. There's an idea."
"Pardon?"
"I mean... It's not a bad one. You've got no filter. You wouldn't spare my feelings if it turned out I was terrible at it, after all."
And who at sixteen would not take even the flimsiest of excuses to get their heartsick hands all over their crush, even if the excuse barely made any sense at all?
Alhaitham affected skepticism, raised an eyebrow. "What, exactly, are you proposing?"
"Don't be weird." Kaveh punched him lightly on the shoulder. "After all, what's a kiss between friends?"
"You think I'm being the weird one here?"
"Haitham," Kaveh whined, and Alhaitham's heart squeezed, hard, as other hard parts of himself grew hot at how it sounded for Kaveh to whine his name. "Can't you just do me this teeny, tiny little favor? Pretend it's for science, or something."
Yes. As many times as you like, yes, every muscle in Alhaitham screamed. So he was surprised by how cool he managed to sound when he said, "if I say no, you're never going to stop wheedling at me, are you?"
"Probably not."
The anticipation ran hot through Alhaitham's body, twisting in his belly as he rolled his eyes and pretended to be unaffected. "Fine. Hurry it up, then."
Maybe Kaveh hadn't been expecting a yes, no matter how hard he begged. Maybe he had intended to pass it off as a joke. He froze, seemingly stunned at Alhaitham's answer. "Ok?"
"Yeah. Ok."
"Well..."
Alhaitham harrumphed. "I can tell you your first problem, Kaveh. In order to kiss someone, you have to actually take some initiative."
"You!" The insult snapped Kaveh out of his nervousness, as Alhaitham knew it would. "I was just giving you a moment to prepare yourself! You're probably going to be a shaking mess by the time we get done!"
"Ah. Make a mess of me, then, Senior."
"I-I will!" Kaveh pitched forward, closing the angle between their bodies. His hand found Alhaitham's cheek, his thumb arcing back and forth across skin. "So. Um... Here's where I usually say something."
So close. Kaveh's breath fanned over Alhaitham's cheek. The pressure in Alhatiham's chest was overwhelming, his heartbeat following the movement of that thumb. He dared not meet Kaveh's gaze, turning his face away a fraction of an inch at a time. "Yeah? Like what?"
"Like... Hey, look at me." And Alhaitham was pulled, pupils flitting back to Kaveh's face, totally out of Alhaitham's control. All he could see was Kaveh's mouth, plush lips, where soon Kaveh would -- would -- "Like... Your eyes. They're all I see when I fall asleep at night. Did you know there's a diamond in the center of them, Haitham? Do you know it's the exact color of the desert at sunset? I've never seen eyes like that on anyone else, no matter how hard I search."
Fuck. What on earth did Kaveh need Alhaitham's help for? He was too terribly talented at this flirting stuff. "Trite," he covered, clearing his throat.
"No, act charmed." Kaveh bent closer to him, his nose less than an inch from the junction of Alhaitham's neck and jaw. "My dates always do."
"Then... Perhaps I'd say something like, it must be from looking too much at you, they've changed to match the red in yours. Isn't that a sign that we're meant to be together?" The unvarnished truth laid out in front of Kaveh, raw, gone from Alhaitham's mouth before he could catch it and claw it back.
"Damn," Kaveh's breath hitched, his fingers settling in Alhaitham's hair, his lips ghosting over Alhaitham's collarbone. "I'm filing that one away."
"Will you get on with it, Senior?" Every place Kaveh touched was sizzling with heat. How much more of this could Alhaitham take before he became shamelessly, obviously hard? Kaveh would feel it, through where they were so lewdly connected, and then there would be no denying it. He squirmed, trying to put distance, trying to escape as he turned his face away--
"What an impatient Junior you are." Kaveh's voice was lower than Alhaitham had ever heard it. The vibration made his stomach clench, made him stare at the ceiling, count the tiles. "Haitham, I said look at me."
Alhaitham startled, drawn in, and was caught by carmine.
A moment's hesitancy in Kaveh's eyes before he crashed forward, wild.
And it clicked.
A lock in a key. A hand in a glove.
A spark. Electric, the friction between them.
Kaveh's lips pressing against Alhaitham's was right, so right. It felt like the whole world had turned outside-in, downside-up, and something solid was beneath them for the very first time. It flew through Alhaitham, took him away with such force that he gasped.
Kaveh leaned back at that small, startled noise, just a half an inch, his eyes blown wide with the same shock written across his face. And what he saw in Alhaitham's expression must have pleased him because he smiled, tender, like he couldn't quite help it.
No hesitancy now. Gravity, the pull of their want, had them crashing back together again. Kaveh moaned, rising up on his knees to get closer, as Alhaitham pulled him in turn.
Alhaitham felt effervescent, drunk on the permission to touch, running his hands up Kaveh's thighs, to his waist and down again as Kaveh pressed, hungry, against him. A little moan, a puff of air, a tongue - whose? Unclear. Doesn't matter - darted out, and it was not the voice of experience but pure instinct that told Alhaitham what to do next. He opened, the greed rising in him to dominate, sweeping into Kaveh's mouth as Kaveh fisted his hands in Alhaitham's shirt and the kisses turned deep and fast and then slow and hot and --
These things always have a way of making time fall off the clock.
A clang, and Kaveh's shoulders jumped, startling them both out of whatever pocket dimension they'd created between them. That ancient bell in the observatory, tolling midnight, reminding them both that Kaveh was now woefully past curfew and the doors to his dormitory would most certainly be deadbolted.
He didn't seem to care, melting back into Alhaitham's lap with a dazed look in his eyes, his lips swollen with the crush of what they'd both done. It was irrefutable proof that Alhaitham hadn't dreamed it and he reached out, lazily, to press his thumb to the center of Kaveh's bottom lip.
"I knew it." Kaveh breathed, kissing that thumb in return.
Panic flared in Alhaitham's bones. Knew what?
Shit. It was unmistakable, wasn't it? This messy, stupid love pouring out of Alhaitham's mouth must've dripped directly into Kaveh's, carried on the force of his kisses.
But... Alhaitham considered, Kaveh had kissed him back in the same way, hadn't he? And Alhaitham's analytical brain, apt at thinking through even the most complex of strategies at sixteen, knew that could mean only one thing.
Kaveh felt the same way. With 100% accuracy, Kaveh felt the same way ---
"I knew it wasn't me." Kaveh beamed, that pretty pink blush flushing his cheeks.
The gears in Alhaitham's mind jammed. "What are you --"
"I'm a good kisser after all, aren't I, Haitham? Even you'd have to admit it. Turns out I just need to pick better girls to date, ones with more spark, I guess." He patted Alhaitham's chest, self-satisfied, as he swung off the bed. "Now, let's see. I'm stealing a pair of your pajamas since I'm locked out again --"
Wait. No. That wasn't right.
Alhaitham shook his head, dislodging the cobwebs.
Which one of them was the bigger idiot, here?
The one who'd spent the last ten minutes kissing his best friend within an inch of his life and somehow still couldn't confess to him, or the best friend in question, who had just been kissed into a stupor by a boy and didn't think that warranted a single second of introspection on his own sexuality?
He watched Kaveh peel his shirt off, no sign of self-consciousness or jitteriness at getting naked in front of Alhaitham, like they were nothing more than friends after all. The pants went next, as Kaveh hopped around the room on one foot until he was standing in his boxers. He rummaged around in one of Alhaitham's drawers, mumbling complaints about Alhaitham's 'penchant for rough cotton potato sacks that only nearly passed for pajamas.'
Should Alhaitham just ... tell him?
Kaveh, it's not working when you kiss girls because you're in love with me.
Sure... That'd go about as well as when he tried to tell Kaveh last week that he was pouring salt directly into his coffee. Rather than be wrong, Kaveh doubled down, arguing that salted caramel is a known patisserie flavor, and why should coffee be any different? Alhaitham had enjoyed watching Kaveh choke down the concoction for half the morning, but still...
If Alhaitham told him outright, wouldn't Kaveh simply take the opposite position? Wouldn't it push him farther back into the closet than he already was?
"Bold claim," Alhaitham pronounced, his mind made up. If Kaveh had decided to be in denial about what had just passed between them, then Alhaitham was going to milk it for all it was worth.
"Excuse me?" Kaveh froze, his fingers halfway through fastening the buttons of the borrowed shirt.
"I said, bold claim, that you're a good kisser." Alhaitham snorted. "Seems to me I was doing most of the work while you flopped around like a wet noodle."
"Well, I never! How dare--" Kaveh bristled, the buttons long forgotten as he marched back towards Alhaitham's bed to give him an earfull.
Hook, line, and sinker, Alhaitham thought as he picked his book back up. "At any rate, how could anyone draw a conclusion from one data point? No scientific analysis can rationally be based on a single observable instance."
Kaveh stood over him, hands on his hips. "This sounds very much like you're simply angling for another kiss."
Alhaitham shrugged, unable to defeat the charge head on, as that was exactly what he was doing. "Suit yourself. But if it's not repeatable, then it's not measurable. Any scholar knows that."
"You pompous ass! Fine, then! I'll prove to you it's repeatable! I'll prove to you it's repeatable all night long, if I have to!" The bed dipped as Kaveh crawled across it, his brows twisted in indignation just as Alhaitham loved.
And so, Kaveh did indeed provide Alhaitham with additional data points, enough to fill a whole night's worth.
Thus began the wonderous portion of Alhaitham's life where Kaveh would simply accost him, in a quiet nook of the Akademiya gardens, in an empty classroom, in the stairwell, and kiss him until they were both breathless, leaning against one another for support.
Here he was, on one such evening, his teeth roaming up Alhaitham's neck after yet another failed first date that would not turn into a second, the girl's name long forgotten. He swept Alhaitham's pens, books, notes off the top of the desk in this disused part of the library as he slid on top of it, hooking his legs around Alhaitham's waist. "Gah, this is so frustrating! Give me your mouth."
Alhaitham couldn't help but smile at that, placing his hands on either side of Kaveh's hips and leaning into Kaveh until he was flat against the wood grain. These weeks had been good for Alhaitham's technique. He'd clocked a number of hours in learning to please one specific man and was now putting it to good use by taking Kaveh's bottom lip between his teeth.
"Mm," Kaveh wiggled on the desk as his mouth fell open, "they just don't -- mm -- kiss like you."
"Have you worked out why?" Alhaitham whispered, moving to a spot right below Kaveh's ear.
"I don't know! Because I'm bad at --ooh, there -- picking them? Because they've not had the practice you've had?"
"Maybe they're not supposed to." Maybe I'm supposed to be the only one who kisses you. Maybe it should be me on all those dates, not them.
"A-Ah-Haitham, what do you mean?" Kaveh's eyes were getting glassy. Alhaitham recognized it now, the look of arousal mirroring the want that must be so plain on his own face.
"Nothing. Hush. I can't kiss you when you're talking."
Alhaitham could wait. Kaveh was sure to figure it out, any day now...
There was no need to rush the inevitable, Alhaitham reasoned. It's not like they were on a deadline. It's not like there was some fixed point, some relationship-ending fight on the horizon that would derail everything before it had even properly begun, right? Right?