fic: The Dangling Conversation, Part III
Title: The Dangling Conversation, Part III + epilogue
Author: pulaski_casimir
Rating: R, for the usual reasons
Summary: In my head, I go back to that first conversation in our bedroom, the morning after our second time, the moment you made it into the finale, the day you left, the phone call. It all hits me at once, and suddenly I realize that this is you trying to tie up the loose ends between us, your flag of surrender, your last great, desperate attempt to make this make sense to you.
Notes: Sorry this took so long! With all the drama/excitement of finale week, I just couldn't get anything good down. This is now AU, since our dear Kris ended up winning instead of Adam (sorry for not having more faith in you, honey! now stop googling yourself and go do something productive, like making out with your boyfriend.) I'm also glad to say that it's pretty apparent that none of this angst is happening between them right now (seriously, guys, feel the luuurve), so that part is AU as well.
Also, this is the last installment of the series.
If you haven't read them, here's Part I & Part II
The stagnant night air is clinging to my bare back, and I know as soon as it happens that it’s one of those tiny, insignificant moments that I’ll remember in perfect, unflinching detail until I know why it matters. I won’t remember the seven hours I spent writhing in my bed, wrapping the digits of your phone number around my wrists and fingers, agonizing, agonizing, agonizing. I won’t remember how the phone felt impossibly heavy in my hand as it rang one, two, three times, or how my mind played back the sounds of the last time I saw you between the rings-sobs driving splinters into your throat, my heart beating sluggish and defeated against my ribs. I’ll remember how I expected you to be half-asleep and distant, but when you finally pick up the phone, you sound about as far from sleep as anyone has ever been and closer to me than I can stand right now. I’ll remember the small, preparatory breath you take before you speak, the one you must not think that the phone picks up, the one that shudders and dies halfway between your lungs and your mouth. You don’t even say hello, but your voice falls helplessly into the shape of one word, like a lost child, like a last breath, like a prayer of forgiveness.
“Adam.”
All at once, I can feel my heart pitch itself against the back of my throat, striking up fires behind my eyes, pulling hard at every nerve in my body to get out of bed and out of this apartment and out of this life, to show up on your doorstep and grab you by the waist and prove to you that this, this, this is everything. I can hear the mattress springs creaking beneath you as you sit up in your bed, and I can sense your back bowing under the ghost of my weight pressed warmly against you, and somehow I feel like you wouldn't stop me.
But then I hear it. The slight rustle in the bed beside you, the tiny hum of a female voice. And before I can help it, I’m imagining Katy pretending to be asleep while you hunch over your phone three feet away, and I’m seeing the way you must have smiled at each other before I came along, and I’m picturing her leaning over your kitchen counter, prim fingers tugging at her apron strings, empty-eyed and untouched and needing you the same way that I do. And I know that I can’t do this.
So I snap the phone shut, and I bury my face in my hands.
That’s the last time I hear your voice before rehearsals.
Well, no, that’s a lie. I still listen to your songs, the manufactured studio recordings that can't quite kill the raw emotion in your voice and the rough little melodies from before you met me. That's an indulgence of mine that's one part masochist, two parts nostalgist, and about a hundred parts raving fanboy. I still record all your interviews and save them for the empty hours between home-too-late and up-too-early, and I watch them with my dignity swilled into the gin-and-tonic in my hand, waiting, hoping for a mention of me, weighing the pauses between your words, checking every movement and mannerism for the remnants of my influence. And I still replay all your words in my head every spare moment (This is what I want, I'm going to miss you, I can't remember the last time I was this happy, oh my God oh my God Adam please don't stop) and I can still hear them just as pitch-perfect and vivid as they were the first time around. I test those words between my hands now, and they still don't feel like lies. But I guess it doesn't really matter anyway, because we're not anything anymore.
The drive to the first day of rehearsals for the tour is the longest damn drive of my life. I want to see you so badly it burns in my fingers on the steering wheel, pounds in the pulse at my temples, buzzes in the joints of my foot on the pedal, aches in every inch of my body, but it's all useless. I'm back to believing that I can't act on this, because you have a wife and you have a future without me, and God knows I'll probably never understand how you're feeling, and you'll probably never explain it to me. That's why I don't have anything to say when I see you in the parking lot, and that's why you turn away without waiting, slamming the trunk of your car shut behind you and making the barrier between us concrete with the bag over your shoulder. We walk inside together, silent, disconnected, and I guess this is all that's left of us now.
This would all be so much easier if I could just shake the sound of your voice when you answered the phone.
Everybody else seems like they're having the times of their lives on this fucking tour, and I just can't help the resentment. I just want to be with you like I used to, back when we didn't care about consequences, back when it was enough just to have another week with each other, back when I could dance with Allison and laugh at Matt without feeling the bruises of your absence. And goddamn it, it’s all so heavy, and I should be fucking happy right now, but you’re still not talking to me, and every time you twist your ring around your finger, you’re screwing my heart farther into my chest. It's getting harder by the day, and it's exhausting. I don't know how I'm going to make it through this summer, living two feet and a million tiny injuries away from you.
But I know it's not real anger. I know rejection too well.
There’s one time backstage, the Glendale concert, when it’s too dark for us too see where we’re going, and I reach blindly out in front of me for something to guide the way. My hand finds your shoulder in the dark, and for half a moment, you relax into my touch, tilting your head instinctively towards me. I swear I'm not imagining the fleeting look of relief on your face or the way that your breath is coming like guitar chords, vibrating over the hollow space in your chest where I used to be. Maybe it’s just wishful thinking, but I swear the sound is muffled, as if you haven’t quite been able to sweep my presence up out of the corners, as if the dust we left behind has settled into the cracks and won’t let the sound come out whole. But just as quickly, your muscles spring back into tension, and you're drawing yourself up and away from my reach, and that look of suppressed want that flashes across your features is salt in the wound. I don't know how long we're going to have to keep fighting this, but it's getting entirely too bloody for me to handle.
There's a party that night after the show, but you're missing in action, and I can't see the point of this anymore. When I sneak back onto our bus, I find you in my bunk, cross-legged and barefoot, guitar in your lap, strumming softly. You don’t look up at me, don’t miss a beat, but I feel sure that you’ve been waiting for me, that you knew I would come and find you. You look exhausted, deflated, your shoulders slumped and your fingers almost limp against the frets, but you keep playing, keep waiting, keep sitting here with my sheets clinging to your legs. The whole thing should feel strange and unsettling, but really it just feels like oh, this is it, this is how it is, this is how it's going to be and I don't have the energy or strength to fight your gravitational pull anymore, even if I wanted to. So I amble over and climb up into my bed with you and listen.
The song is melancholy, a Simon and Garfunkel tune I remember from one of my dad’s old vinyls, and your head dips down low as your mouth lets the words escape.
“And I only kiss your shadow, I cannot feel your hand. You’re a stranger now unto me, lost in the dangling conversation and the superficial sighs in the borders of our lives.”
The lyrics hit hard. In my head, I go back to that first conversation in our bedroom, the morning after our second time, the moment you made it into the finals, the day you left, the phone call. I rewind and replay a thousand moments-microphones, broken glass, toothpaste, confetti, bedsheets, stage lights-tracing my fingers through the brambles along the path between where we used to be and where we are now, this worn-out sketch of the lives we want, the cracks spiderwebbing across the thin ice we've been treading on for so long. It all hits me at once, and suddenly I realize that this is you trying to tie up the loose ends between us, your flag of surrender, your last great, desperate attempt to make this make sense to you. Oh, my Kristopher. I don’t understand you.
“You left me,” I say. I mean the words a thousand ways-an accusation, an admonition, an attack-but the only way that comes out is tentative and wounded and scared.
“You hung up.” You press softly on the words, but there’s a solid weight behind them, a weight made of too much lost sleep and too much hurt and the things I know you must remember-my breath between your shoulder blades, the taste of the freckles on my bottom lip, the blush that blossoms along the skin between my hip and thigh. You duck your head, and for the first time I realize that you’ve hurt yourself just as much as you’ve hurt me, and that maybe, maybe, you need me too.
“I just want you to be happy,” I tell you lamely.
And then you look me dead in the eye, and I can tell that you’re trying to keep that bottom lip of yours from trembling. “I don’t know how to be happy without you anymore.”
Your voice cracks, and your face crumples, and that’s all the invitation I need to push the guitar out of your lap and fold your body into mine. We’re both falling apart now, melting, unraveling, dissolving, and you hold onto me so tightly that the shape of your guitar pick is still pressed into the side of my neck an hour later when the guys finally start stumbling in. You’ve cried yourself to sleep on my chest by then, and I don’t bother waking you, because Matt and Anoop just shrug and continue on, and the look on Danny’s face isn’t enough to make me give up this moment.
The next morning, I'm half-expecting to wake up to your empty place in my bed for the third time, but you're right there, inches from my face, biting your lip and looking at me like I'm the only thing in the world. There are another hundred miles before we get to Dallas, and we spend them in a tangle of legs and fingers and hair, talking in low voices, drifting back together again from our opposite sides of the world, finally figuring things out. There are five other men in this bus with us, and neither of us can bring ourselves to care, because you're letting me hold you again and the words I don't think I love her anymore have just left your mouth and our hearts are breaking and mending and fusing together a thousand times over here in our little corner of the universe. And this all feels so impossibly, achingly, imperfectly perfect.
We finally let go of each other when we get to Dallas, but that's not nearly enough to ruin this. It's amazing how quickly we're falling back into our old rhythm, matching frequencies, perfect harmony and melody because with us it's always about a beat or a rest or a call-and-return. I still haven't kissed you yet, but the next three hours go by faster than any of the tour has, a blur of sound-checks and concealed smiles and familiar hands that can't stop finding their way back to me.
When I find you after the first run-through of my set, you're back in one of the equipment rooms, practicing "Ain't No Sunshine" on a grand piano lodged between two amps and a couple of set pieces. I slide onto the bench next to you, just as natural as you please, and lace my arm around your back, drawing the curve of your body into my side. It's even better than I remember, the happy little sound in the back of your throat when I bury my nose in your hair, the warmth that swells up in your voice when I bend down and kiss your hands, feather-light, knuckle by knuckle, as they keep on moving purposefully across the keys. Then the melody shifts and there's a new song.
“For us,” you tell me, looking up for the first time, your eyes giddy and alight, and I can’t help but laugh when I realize you're playing the opening bars of “We Are the Champions.”
“Kris,” I say before I can stop myself, “I think I might be in love with you.”
The instant the words leave my mouth, suddenly you’re seizing my face in your hands and tilting my head down, and you’re plunging madly forwards, and it’s our big crescendo, the sweeping violins, the cymbal crash, the fireworks, the glory note. When you kiss me, it’s square on the mouth and suddenly it occurs to me that my heart is far too big for my chest, and there’s too much air in my lungs, too much happiness coiled up in my muscles, so much want in the pit of my stomach that I don’t know what to do with it all. Somehow we end up on top of the piano, your shirt half-unbuttoned and pushed up around your waist, one of my knees crushing disparate non-chords into the keyboard in time to our the rhythm of our hips, and you’re practically laughing into the corner of my mouth by the time our bodies give in.
“Hey,” you murmur when we're done, your mouth burrowed into the sweaty swale between my neck and shoulder, “let’s never stop doing that again.”
“Promise,” I answer, smiling.
epilogue:
We're all sitting in the greenroom when it happens, but I won't remember much more than that. I won't remember Anoop sprawled out on the floor with one foot up on the sofa or Megan's rasp as she and Lil exchange stories of their children or Danny and Scott drumming out a bored rhythm on their knees. I'll remember sitting as close to the door as my chair will allow and clenching my thumbnail between my teeth and how I can't really take any of this in, because you are very much Not Here, and I know exactly where you are, and I can't afford to let myself think of anything beyond that. I know you promised, and I know you love me, but I'm still terrified that somehow, somehow, you won't be able to go through with this, that this is too much for you. I've never had trouble having faith in you, Kris, but this is... different. This is real. This is the end of life as you know it, and I can't be there to yank you into my arms and tell you that you deserve this, you deserve what you want, you deserve what makes you happy.
When the door finally opens, I almost can't stop myself from launching out of my chair. Your face is a picture of calm-the Adam Lambert School of Composure has done you well-but your hands are shoved deep in your pockets and there's a definite air of change, of finality, of breathless, tight-wired energy that you can't stop from permeating the room. A hush falls, and every eye is on you.
Slowly, deliberately, you pull your hands out of your pockets and uncurl your fists, and your ring finger is bare.
"Kris," I breathe, a pin-drop in the glassy silence.
You don't say anything, you just lean down and press something into the palm of my hand. Your wedding band. Your expression is unreadable when I look up at you, but there's a hint of a smile hanging around your eyes, and you keep looking back and forth between everybody else in the room and your hand, flexing it, testing out the feel of your naked finger. When you finally look at me, there's something downright dirty about the grin you give me, and that's when I know. At long last, you've finally gotten tired of treating things delicately.
"You know what?" you say, taking one last sweeping glance around the room. "Fuck it."
And then you jump into my lap and throw your arms around my neck and plant your lips on mine, utterly enamored and unashamed, right there in front of God and everybody, and I'll never forget the choked noise in Sarver's throat or Matt's catcalls or way you have to break away from my mouth to laugh when Allison rolls her eyes and says, "Jesus Christ, it's about time!"
ETA: I'm toying with the idea of rewriting the whole thing from Kris's perspective. Y/N?
Author: pulaski_casimir
Rating: R, for the usual reasons
Summary: In my head, I go back to that first conversation in our bedroom, the morning after our second time, the moment you made it into the finale, the day you left, the phone call. It all hits me at once, and suddenly I realize that this is you trying to tie up the loose ends between us, your flag of surrender, your last great, desperate attempt to make this make sense to you.
Notes: Sorry this took so long! With all the drama/excitement of finale week, I just couldn't get anything good down. This is now AU, since our dear Kris ended up winning instead of Adam (sorry for not having more faith in you, honey! now stop googling yourself and go do something productive, like making out with your boyfriend.) I'm also glad to say that it's pretty apparent that none of this angst is happening between them right now (seriously, guys, feel the luuurve), so that part is AU as well.
Also, this is the last installment of the series.
If you haven't read them, here's Part I & Part II
The stagnant night air is clinging to my bare back, and I know as soon as it happens that it’s one of those tiny, insignificant moments that I’ll remember in perfect, unflinching detail until I know why it matters. I won’t remember the seven hours I spent writhing in my bed, wrapping the digits of your phone number around my wrists and fingers, agonizing, agonizing, agonizing. I won’t remember how the phone felt impossibly heavy in my hand as it rang one, two, three times, or how my mind played back the sounds of the last time I saw you between the rings-sobs driving splinters into your throat, my heart beating sluggish and defeated against my ribs. I’ll remember how I expected you to be half-asleep and distant, but when you finally pick up the phone, you sound about as far from sleep as anyone has ever been and closer to me than I can stand right now. I’ll remember the small, preparatory breath you take before you speak, the one you must not think that the phone picks up, the one that shudders and dies halfway between your lungs and your mouth. You don’t even say hello, but your voice falls helplessly into the shape of one word, like a lost child, like a last breath, like a prayer of forgiveness.
“Adam.”
All at once, I can feel my heart pitch itself against the back of my throat, striking up fires behind my eyes, pulling hard at every nerve in my body to get out of bed and out of this apartment and out of this life, to show up on your doorstep and grab you by the waist and prove to you that this, this, this is everything. I can hear the mattress springs creaking beneath you as you sit up in your bed, and I can sense your back bowing under the ghost of my weight pressed warmly against you, and somehow I feel like you wouldn't stop me.
But then I hear it. The slight rustle in the bed beside you, the tiny hum of a female voice. And before I can help it, I’m imagining Katy pretending to be asleep while you hunch over your phone three feet away, and I’m seeing the way you must have smiled at each other before I came along, and I’m picturing her leaning over your kitchen counter, prim fingers tugging at her apron strings, empty-eyed and untouched and needing you the same way that I do. And I know that I can’t do this.
So I snap the phone shut, and I bury my face in my hands.
That’s the last time I hear your voice before rehearsals.
Well, no, that’s a lie. I still listen to your songs, the manufactured studio recordings that can't quite kill the raw emotion in your voice and the rough little melodies from before you met me. That's an indulgence of mine that's one part masochist, two parts nostalgist, and about a hundred parts raving fanboy. I still record all your interviews and save them for the empty hours between home-too-late and up-too-early, and I watch them with my dignity swilled into the gin-and-tonic in my hand, waiting, hoping for a mention of me, weighing the pauses between your words, checking every movement and mannerism for the remnants of my influence. And I still replay all your words in my head every spare moment (This is what I want, I'm going to miss you, I can't remember the last time I was this happy, oh my God oh my God Adam please don't stop) and I can still hear them just as pitch-perfect and vivid as they were the first time around. I test those words between my hands now, and they still don't feel like lies. But I guess it doesn't really matter anyway, because we're not anything anymore.
The drive to the first day of rehearsals for the tour is the longest damn drive of my life. I want to see you so badly it burns in my fingers on the steering wheel, pounds in the pulse at my temples, buzzes in the joints of my foot on the pedal, aches in every inch of my body, but it's all useless. I'm back to believing that I can't act on this, because you have a wife and you have a future without me, and God knows I'll probably never understand how you're feeling, and you'll probably never explain it to me. That's why I don't have anything to say when I see you in the parking lot, and that's why you turn away without waiting, slamming the trunk of your car shut behind you and making the barrier between us concrete with the bag over your shoulder. We walk inside together, silent, disconnected, and I guess this is all that's left of us now.
This would all be so much easier if I could just shake the sound of your voice when you answered the phone.
Everybody else seems like they're having the times of their lives on this fucking tour, and I just can't help the resentment. I just want to be with you like I used to, back when we didn't care about consequences, back when it was enough just to have another week with each other, back when I could dance with Allison and laugh at Matt without feeling the bruises of your absence. And goddamn it, it’s all so heavy, and I should be fucking happy right now, but you’re still not talking to me, and every time you twist your ring around your finger, you’re screwing my heart farther into my chest. It's getting harder by the day, and it's exhausting. I don't know how I'm going to make it through this summer, living two feet and a million tiny injuries away from you.
But I know it's not real anger. I know rejection too well.
There’s one time backstage, the Glendale concert, when it’s too dark for us too see where we’re going, and I reach blindly out in front of me for something to guide the way. My hand finds your shoulder in the dark, and for half a moment, you relax into my touch, tilting your head instinctively towards me. I swear I'm not imagining the fleeting look of relief on your face or the way that your breath is coming like guitar chords, vibrating over the hollow space in your chest where I used to be. Maybe it’s just wishful thinking, but I swear the sound is muffled, as if you haven’t quite been able to sweep my presence up out of the corners, as if the dust we left behind has settled into the cracks and won’t let the sound come out whole. But just as quickly, your muscles spring back into tension, and you're drawing yourself up and away from my reach, and that look of suppressed want that flashes across your features is salt in the wound. I don't know how long we're going to have to keep fighting this, but it's getting entirely too bloody for me to handle.
There's a party that night after the show, but you're missing in action, and I can't see the point of this anymore. When I sneak back onto our bus, I find you in my bunk, cross-legged and barefoot, guitar in your lap, strumming softly. You don’t look up at me, don’t miss a beat, but I feel sure that you’ve been waiting for me, that you knew I would come and find you. You look exhausted, deflated, your shoulders slumped and your fingers almost limp against the frets, but you keep playing, keep waiting, keep sitting here with my sheets clinging to your legs. The whole thing should feel strange and unsettling, but really it just feels like oh, this is it, this is how it is, this is how it's going to be and I don't have the energy or strength to fight your gravitational pull anymore, even if I wanted to. So I amble over and climb up into my bed with you and listen.
The song is melancholy, a Simon and Garfunkel tune I remember from one of my dad’s old vinyls, and your head dips down low as your mouth lets the words escape.
“And I only kiss your shadow, I cannot feel your hand. You’re a stranger now unto me, lost in the dangling conversation and the superficial sighs in the borders of our lives.”
The lyrics hit hard. In my head, I go back to that first conversation in our bedroom, the morning after our second time, the moment you made it into the finals, the day you left, the phone call. I rewind and replay a thousand moments-microphones, broken glass, toothpaste, confetti, bedsheets, stage lights-tracing my fingers through the brambles along the path between where we used to be and where we are now, this worn-out sketch of the lives we want, the cracks spiderwebbing across the thin ice we've been treading on for so long. It all hits me at once, and suddenly I realize that this is you trying to tie up the loose ends between us, your flag of surrender, your last great, desperate attempt to make this make sense to you. Oh, my Kristopher. I don’t understand you.
“You left me,” I say. I mean the words a thousand ways-an accusation, an admonition, an attack-but the only way that comes out is tentative and wounded and scared.
“You hung up.” You press softly on the words, but there’s a solid weight behind them, a weight made of too much lost sleep and too much hurt and the things I know you must remember-my breath between your shoulder blades, the taste of the freckles on my bottom lip, the blush that blossoms along the skin between my hip and thigh. You duck your head, and for the first time I realize that you’ve hurt yourself just as much as you’ve hurt me, and that maybe, maybe, you need me too.
“I just want you to be happy,” I tell you lamely.
And then you look me dead in the eye, and I can tell that you’re trying to keep that bottom lip of yours from trembling. “I don’t know how to be happy without you anymore.”
Your voice cracks, and your face crumples, and that’s all the invitation I need to push the guitar out of your lap and fold your body into mine. We’re both falling apart now, melting, unraveling, dissolving, and you hold onto me so tightly that the shape of your guitar pick is still pressed into the side of my neck an hour later when the guys finally start stumbling in. You’ve cried yourself to sleep on my chest by then, and I don’t bother waking you, because Matt and Anoop just shrug and continue on, and the look on Danny’s face isn’t enough to make me give up this moment.
The next morning, I'm half-expecting to wake up to your empty place in my bed for the third time, but you're right there, inches from my face, biting your lip and looking at me like I'm the only thing in the world. There are another hundred miles before we get to Dallas, and we spend them in a tangle of legs and fingers and hair, talking in low voices, drifting back together again from our opposite sides of the world, finally figuring things out. There are five other men in this bus with us, and neither of us can bring ourselves to care, because you're letting me hold you again and the words I don't think I love her anymore have just left your mouth and our hearts are breaking and mending and fusing together a thousand times over here in our little corner of the universe. And this all feels so impossibly, achingly, imperfectly perfect.
We finally let go of each other when we get to Dallas, but that's not nearly enough to ruin this. It's amazing how quickly we're falling back into our old rhythm, matching frequencies, perfect harmony and melody because with us it's always about a beat or a rest or a call-and-return. I still haven't kissed you yet, but the next three hours go by faster than any of the tour has, a blur of sound-checks and concealed smiles and familiar hands that can't stop finding their way back to me.
When I find you after the first run-through of my set, you're back in one of the equipment rooms, practicing "Ain't No Sunshine" on a grand piano lodged between two amps and a couple of set pieces. I slide onto the bench next to you, just as natural as you please, and lace my arm around your back, drawing the curve of your body into my side. It's even better than I remember, the happy little sound in the back of your throat when I bury my nose in your hair, the warmth that swells up in your voice when I bend down and kiss your hands, feather-light, knuckle by knuckle, as they keep on moving purposefully across the keys. Then the melody shifts and there's a new song.
“For us,” you tell me, looking up for the first time, your eyes giddy and alight, and I can’t help but laugh when I realize you're playing the opening bars of “We Are the Champions.”
“Kris,” I say before I can stop myself, “I think I might be in love with you.”
The instant the words leave my mouth, suddenly you’re seizing my face in your hands and tilting my head down, and you’re plunging madly forwards, and it’s our big crescendo, the sweeping violins, the cymbal crash, the fireworks, the glory note. When you kiss me, it’s square on the mouth and suddenly it occurs to me that my heart is far too big for my chest, and there’s too much air in my lungs, too much happiness coiled up in my muscles, so much want in the pit of my stomach that I don’t know what to do with it all. Somehow we end up on top of the piano, your shirt half-unbuttoned and pushed up around your waist, one of my knees crushing disparate non-chords into the keyboard in time to our the rhythm of our hips, and you’re practically laughing into the corner of my mouth by the time our bodies give in.
“Hey,” you murmur when we're done, your mouth burrowed into the sweaty swale between my neck and shoulder, “let’s never stop doing that again.”
“Promise,” I answer, smiling.
epilogue:
We're all sitting in the greenroom when it happens, but I won't remember much more than that. I won't remember Anoop sprawled out on the floor with one foot up on the sofa or Megan's rasp as she and Lil exchange stories of their children or Danny and Scott drumming out a bored rhythm on their knees. I'll remember sitting as close to the door as my chair will allow and clenching my thumbnail between my teeth and how I can't really take any of this in, because you are very much Not Here, and I know exactly where you are, and I can't afford to let myself think of anything beyond that. I know you promised, and I know you love me, but I'm still terrified that somehow, somehow, you won't be able to go through with this, that this is too much for you. I've never had trouble having faith in you, Kris, but this is... different. This is real. This is the end of life as you know it, and I can't be there to yank you into my arms and tell you that you deserve this, you deserve what you want, you deserve what makes you happy.
When the door finally opens, I almost can't stop myself from launching out of my chair. Your face is a picture of calm-the Adam Lambert School of Composure has done you well-but your hands are shoved deep in your pockets and there's a definite air of change, of finality, of breathless, tight-wired energy that you can't stop from permeating the room. A hush falls, and every eye is on you.
Slowly, deliberately, you pull your hands out of your pockets and uncurl your fists, and your ring finger is bare.
"Kris," I breathe, a pin-drop in the glassy silence.
You don't say anything, you just lean down and press something into the palm of my hand. Your wedding band. Your expression is unreadable when I look up at you, but there's a hint of a smile hanging around your eyes, and you keep looking back and forth between everybody else in the room and your hand, flexing it, testing out the feel of your naked finger. When you finally look at me, there's something downright dirty about the grin you give me, and that's when I know. At long last, you've finally gotten tired of treating things delicately.
"You know what?" you say, taking one last sweeping glance around the room. "Fuck it."
And then you jump into my lap and throw your arms around my neck and plant your lips on mine, utterly enamored and unashamed, right there in front of God and everybody, and I'll never forget the choked noise in Sarver's throat or Matt's catcalls or way you have to break away from my mouth to laugh when Allison rolls her eyes and says, "Jesus Christ, it's about time!"
ETA: I'm toying with the idea of rewriting the whole thing from Kris's perspective. Y/N?