D'amour et de Café

It all started at the coffeeshop.

It wasn’t much – tiny and just a little bit dingy, crammed into an insufficiently small space between a block of accounting offices and a fashion boutique so overpriced it was nearly a museum, popcorn-plaster walls a vague orange color that had dulled as years of city smog passed it by.

Even so, it was homey inside, small and warm and bedecked with paintings and hospitality and the sort of charm that made you think of grandma’s house and maybe a little bit of the old-fashioned French countryside that had once been the home of the friendly elderly couple that owned it.

Homey enough, quiet, and welcoming – it was the perfect refuge for an overworked college student with a mountain of assignments overshadowed only by his even more extensive will to not do any of it. So there he sat, shaggy ebony hair askew, dark-rimmed glasses pushed to the end of a sharply defined nose as he pored over a stack of papers so tall he had to arch his neck to its limits just to see over the top of it.

His name was Max, and he was currently in a state of half-panic because he had three essays due in various classes within the next week and, true to his rather infamous reputation as procrastination incarnate, he had yet to start on any of them, much less the slowly cooling coffee that sat in front of him.

With a groan of defeat, he dropped the papers that had been clutched in black-painted nails for the last half-hour – government or economics or something of the sort, just a filler class…like most of the rest he was taking. Hell, college was a filler class for him, really – music and stagecraft was his one true love, the destiny he was determined to follow, family’s expectations be damned. But his mother’s wailing was one other thing to be damned – damned straight to hell for condemning him to this one.

College fucking sucked, but he needed money, he needed a place to stay – he couldn’t survive on his Saturday-night guitar set tips alone, as much as he sometimes wished he could. Guitar and coffee for the rest of his life – it was romantic, right? Well, he didn’t really like coffee, but caffeine was something he absolutely could not go without these days, so he’d take what he could get.

“You look like you’re enjoying yourself.”

Slim pale hands jerked with fright as he realized he was no longer alone. A young man, looking about the same age as him, had appeared in front of him, lounging lazily in the wicker chair across from his own, tattooed elbows resting nonchalantly on the weathered wooden table between them.

His appearance was the picture of trouble. Long, shaggy black hair reached past his shoulders and spiked up above his head in an evidently artificial style, falling over lively, almost wild eyes as brown as the milky coffee Max still had yet to touch and lined in eyeliner thicker than Max had ever seen in his life. The leanly muscled arms, exposed by his half-shredded, obviously DIY “A Static Lullaby” tank top, were coated in tattoos, some half-finished and uncolored. Full pink lips pulled upwards at one corner into a knowing smirk, tipping Max off that the once-over he hadn’t even realized he’d been giving this stranger was a reaction he got often.

“Who’re you?” He blurted, more shocked than anything at the fact that this boy had just sat down and started talking to him, a complete stranger. Who did that?

The smirk grew wider. “Ronnie. And you are?”

“M-Max.”

Why the hell was he telling this guy his name? Why not just tell him to get lost and finish the goddamn essay already?

That sounded like a good idea.

“Look…” Max began, “I’m sure you’re a very interesting person and all but I really have a lot of-“

“Work to do?” The stranger cut him off. “I can see that. Look at you. You look like you haven’t slept in weeks.”

Max blinked in shock, the words dying in his throat – he honestly had no idea how to respond to the flat-out forwardness this boy was displaying. Then again, he supposed it wouldn’t be that hard for anyone on the outside to take notice of how stressed he was – he hadn’t bothered to put on makeup, dress properly or even brush his hair this morning in his frantic rush to get out of the loud, active atmosphere of the dorm and to somewhere quiet where he could work. He suddenly became very self-conscious, fiddling awkwardly with the bottom of the too-big Marilyn Manson t-shirt that he’d very obviously slept in the night before, which was paired with a rumpled pair of sweatpants – again, à la pajama.

Well, for the three or four hours of peaceful rest he’d managed to get, anyways.

“I thought so,” The boy chuckled, before reaching down and into the pocket of his jeans, withdrawing something Max couldn’t see over the barricade of dog-eared pages between them.

Then he held it up. A flask, silver and coated in ornate designs, which the stranger – Ronnie –unscrewed the cap to in a deft motion and poured a little bit into Max’s untouched coffee, who gaped silently at what he was doing for a moment before giving an indignant squeal.

“W-what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Ronnie laughed, screwing the top back on the flask and slipping it back into his pocket. “You look like you need it.”

Max growled quietly to himself – who the hell did this guy think he was? – before very pointedly pushing the cup away from him.

“I most certainly do not!”

Another laugh, this one louder than the last.

“That just proves my point, sweetheart. You need to relax.”

Sweetheart?

Okay, now Max was just plain annoyed.

“Look, dude – Ronnie – I don’t know who you are or why you’ve decided I suddenly need your company, but I don’t. I have a lot of work to do and frankly, you’re creepy. Screw off.” He snapped, irritation in every syllable.

Instead of getting up and leaving, or even getting mad, as Max had suspected he would, Ronnie just let out another chuckle (did he ever stop laughing?) before shaking his head.

“No.”

“W-wha…” Max was positive he was doing a rather flawless impersonation of a goldfish at the moment, mouth gaping open and closed as he stared in disbelief at the young man before him.

Ronnie leaned forwards with a secretive grin. “You wanna know why?”

Max had managed to shut his mouth at this point, but hadn’t quite been able to find his vocal capabilities again, so he simply folded his arms and narrowed his eyes at the other boy in response. Ronnie seemed to take this as a good enough reply and continued.

“Because you’re an idiot.” He said bluntly.

If Max hadn’t been in such a state of shock, he probably would have punched him.

This boy was the definition of nerve.

It took him a good minute to find his voice again, at which point, instead of the venomous tirade building up in his throat and just begging to be released, he only managed to stammer out “How?”

Ronnie’s smile showed all his surprisingly white teeth this time, as though he’d been expecting Max to ask that question.

“Because,” he said simply, leaning back in his chair, “You’re doing this.” A decorated hand gestured to the piles of paperwork between them.

At the look of slightly irritated confusion through thick-rimmed glasses, he elaborated. “You want to be a musician, and you’re a damn sight on the guitar, but instead of actually putting anything into chasing that dream, you’re here, dealing with…” he picked up one of the discarded papers “…foreign finances.”

Max felt as though all the breath had been knocked out of him. “H-how did you know I wanted to be a musician? Or that I play guitar, for that matter?”

Ronnie looked slightly surprised, then he laughed. “Wow, I guess I don’t give you enough credit. You must really be exhausted.” He held out a hand in a mock handshake, though they’d been introduced much earlier, “I’m Bobby’s nephew.”

Max’s eyes widened in surprise as he gingerly touched the other boy’s hand with his own. Bobby Anderson ran the small, nameless club a few streets over, where Max played short acoustic guitar sets on Friday nights. They were friends – or, as friendly as a person could be with a man over twice their age. Even so, he was damn sure that he’d never seen the face in front of him before – he didn’t recall Bobby ever saying anything about a nephew to him, either.

“Never mentioned me? I figured.” Ronnie laughed, “My dad isn’t exactly on the best of terms with him…but he lets me come around without a fight, so I don’t care much.”

Max could do nothing but nod slightly, admittedly just a little bit more curious with every word that escaped the other boy’s mouth.

“H-how…” He swallowed once, throat dry, and realized that he hadn’t had anything to drink since dinner the night before, “How did you know I play guitar?”

Ronnie smiled then, the first genuine smile Max had seen on him since he’d caught the smaller boy’s attention, his expression untainted by cockiness for a few seconds while he said, “I’ve dropped by a few times…seen you play once or twice. Bobby’s talked about you, too – about how all you want is to play music, that you work yourself too hard, blah blah blah…that’s why I wanted to talk to you when I saw you here. I was curious as to why you forced yourself through all this,” another nod to the papers, “when it’s not even what you really want to do.”

Max shrugged, “I have to. Family matters and all that.”

He didn’t elaborate, but by the look on Ronnie’s face, he didn’t need to.

The other boy sighed, an understanding look in his eyes but hardness in his mouth. “That’s bullshit.”

Max frowned but said nothing.

“They’re your family,” he continued, “not your conscience. They don’t control you.”

Green eyes rolled in their sockets and Max wondered why he was even trying to talk to this random stranger.

“I wouldn’t expect you to understand.” He said snippily, pointedly looking back down at his work, before a tattooed hand reached over and covered the sentence he was scanning tiredly, making him look up with a heated glare that was ignored by surprisingly soft brown eyes.

“Understand what? That you’re throwing away your dreams to make your family happy?”

Max stopped, eyes widening in spite of himself as he stared at the boy across from him. That strange, rough voice had just put voice, put force and reality into thoughts that had been niggling at the back of his mind for the almost year and a half that he’d been in school – doubts that wormed their way deep into his thoughts and clung and whispered into his ears when he was vulnerable.

It was true; music was his dream.

All he’d ever wanted, from as early as he could remember, was to be standing onstage with a guitar in his hands and his heart on his sleeve, putting voice and melody to thoughts and feelings that he just couldn’t express any other way…and having people hear, having them listen. Having people know him through the music he created.

But all his mother wanted was for him to go to school.

And who was he to refuse his own mother?

Hell, he’d never been able to refuse anybody, not even himself.

And maybe that was why he was stuck here, in this position – drowning in paper damnation while he weakly clung to a dream that wasn’t going anywhere.

Ronnie’s smile turned sympathetic, his eyes shining in a way that showed Max that he knew a lot more than he was letting on, but all the other boy did was pick up the spiked coffee and hold it out in Max’s direction.

“Go on,” he murmured with that same smile, “Drink up.”

And Max wasn’t quite sure why – maybe it was the exhaustion, maybe it was the temptation of caffeine (and booze), or maybe it was just the relief of finally finding someone who seemed to understand him, but he took the cup in one petite hand and raised it to full, pink, snakebitten lips, taking a sip and feeling the mixture of rather room-temperature coffee with a backbite of liquor slide down his throat – and, surprisingly, it was the best thing he’d tasted in years.

And they started talking.

This boy – man – was a complete stranger – a cocky, rude, irritating dick that Max had never met before in his life, but he found himself pushing his papers aside to focus all his attention on the odd charisma of the man before him. And that charisma seemed to be sucking him in – the more time passed, the more they talked, and Max found himself laughing and opening up to someone more than he had in years, though that might have had something to do with the fact that with every sip of coffee down his throat, the cup was refilled with double the amount of liquor – whiskey, he found out later. Either way, he was enjoying himself, and enjoying another person’s company for the first time in months.

So when he finally looked up at the clock and realized with shock that it was four in the afternoon and his classes would be starting soon, he felt a pang of reluctance to leave the man that had quickly become a companion in the three hours they’d spent together. So, standing up and gathering his books, a rather heavy buzz calming his ordinarily tense nerves, he’d blurted out a shaky question, “Will I ever see you again?”

A smile, secretive and playful, before the other boy leaned in close and said in his ear, “We’ll see.”

And then he was gone, and Max could do nothing but wander back to the dorm, consumed by thoughts of the eclectic boy that had left him behind as quickly as he had appeared, and how he was going to sober himself up in the fifteen minutes until his next class.



The next Saturday he was back.

Max had been stifling thoughts of him all week, nearly dying to ask Bobby about the mysterious wild boy he’d met that day at the café that had captured his interest, but when he’d been told that Thursday that there would be no shows on Friday due to Bobby out of the area – his mother was having mild asthma complications, the ticket boy had told him, nothing serious – he’d deflated almost immediately. That, coupled with the fact that nobody at school or around the city seemed to know who he was, forced Max to let it go with an odd tightness in his chest as he realized that, most likely, he’d never see Ronnie again.

But he wanted to.

Even so, he’d all but given up by the next Saturday, when he’d dragged his books lazily behind him to the coffeeshop once more, returning the plump, grey-haired female owner’s cheerful, heavily-accented greeting with one of his own exhausted waves before slumping into his usual seat. A grateful smile tugged at his lips when she brought him his favorite heavily-milked coffee, being repaid with the usual cost – cheap with the ‘student discount’ she insisted on.

He’d only had the books open for about twenty minutes, coffee still untouched, when the sound of a chair being pulled out grabbed his attention.

“Why even buy the coffee if you’re not gonna drink it?”

And there, sitting in front of him, grinning as widely as he had been a week ago, was the wild boy himself.

“Ronnie!” Max said with a smile, placing his book down on the table.

Ronnie laughed to himself. “Hey there, Max. Why’re you so excited to see me all of a sudden? If I recall, last time I was here, you glared at me for half an hour straight until I managed to get some booze into you.”

Max closed the book with a snort and a roll of his eyes. “Well, if a stranger just sat down and started prying into your life for no reason, wouldn’t you be a little annoyed?”

There was that smirk again. “True. But technically, we’ve only known each other three hours.”

Max shrugged. Ronnie was irritating as hell at first, but there was just something about him that was too interesting to pass up.

“Maybe so…but in those three hours you understood me better than anyone I’ve met in my entire life.”

Ronnie’s smile grew into a Cheshire grin, and Max showed up half-drunk and smiling to his class that afternoon. As well as the one the next Saturday. And the next. And the next.

As the months passed, every Saturday was spent that way – talking over coffee (often spiked by Ronnie and that mischievous grin of his), laughing, and getting to know each other in a way that was somehow deeper and more intimate than any connection he’d ever had with someone before. He’d told Ronnie that already, but the day Ronnie told him the same was the day Max felt his heart start jumping in his chest at the very thought of him.

“You know me better than anyone else, Max. You really do.” Ronnie’s voice was soft, raspy and playful as usual, the words so casual it was like they were discussing the daily news. But to Max, smile hidden behind his surprisingly untainted coffee, they meant something entirely different.

That was the day he started really noticing Ronnie.

Everything about him was suddenly a magnet to Max’s eyes when they were together and thoughts when they weren’t. The way his lips pulled back from his teeth when he laughed, the way his fingers drummed on the table twitchily when they’d been sitting still for too long, the way he always smelled like a mixture of cigarettes and cologne and something else uniquely Ronnie. The way his eyes sparkled when Max complimented his amateur singing efforts (his own dream, as he’d shyly told Max once, who’d supported him unconditionally ever since), the way his eyebrows pulled together into a sulky frown whenever Max asked him to help with his college work (Ronnie was an unabashed high school dropout), the way he just was.

And Max’s attention to Ronnie’s very being was not something that went unnoticed by the other boy.

So one morning in late October, Max’s latte spiked with both pumpkin spices and a rather large amount of Ronnie’s favorite whiskey, Ronnie looked at Max and asked if he could kiss him.
The resulting splatter of liquor-tinged coffee on the stained tabletop sent Ronnie into a fit of giggles as Max choked on shock. When they’d both calmed down, Max asked him shakily why the hell he’d said that, and Ronnie simply shrugged and replied that Max was beautiful and he wanted to kiss him.

So Max let him.

And so, as the days got shorter and the weather got colder, as leaves dried and brittled and turned to frost, every one of their coffee breaks ended with a kiss. Sweet and simple, lips on lips and nothing more, the purest thing Max had ever been a part of, until one day in mid-December when Ronnie took him home.

He’d had a bit more to drink than usual that day – Ronnie had come with a full bottle of whiskey in his thick coat that he was more than happy to fill Max’s cup with several times over, something Max didn’t think was a problem until it was four once again and he tried to stand up and realized that the planet must be spinning quite a bit faster than it had been before those last few drinks.

Ronnie had laughed and slid an arm around his waist supportively, something to cling to while Max waited for the room to stop tilting, and suggested that it wouldn’t be the best idea for Max to show up in class in this state, a notion readily agreed to by sleepy green eyes and cheeks flushed with drunken heat. So Ronnie had stood up, Max under one arm and his books under the other, and suggested they go back to his place.

And Max had agreed, half for comfort and half because goddamn, booze really brought out the lust in him and had stumbled along beside Ronnie the first couple blocks, then walked the last few as steadily as he could as the biting winter wind blew his inebriation away to a strong buzz.

He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting – Ronnie’s apartment had been nice, small and cramped but cozy, a two-story flat with windows looking out over the snow-dusted street outside, a half-decorated tree by the living room window – but it didn’t really matter, because as soon as they were inside Ronnie’s hands were on his hips and Max knew he was going to ask if he wanted to because that was Ronnie, always the gentleman, but he shut him up with a kiss because of course he wanted to, now shut up and make love to me.

And so Max’s attendance marks on his Saturday afternoon classes changed from irritated notes about his slightly altered mental state to flat-out absences, resulting in him being dropped from the class less than two weeks later.

Max didn’t mind.

Even so, there was something unspoken between them – something Max was just dying to put voice to, a phrase he knew from fall days over coffee would never fall from Ronnie’s lips without a fight, because after all, not everything comes as easy as they did.

Still, with every week that passed, every day that the pattern became more blurred – Tuesday dates, Thursday night phone calls, proudly shining deep brown eyes at the front of the crowd at every one of Max’s slowly expanding concert opportunities – Max felt the need coursing through his veins, below his skin, nearly bursting out of his body, he had to say it, he had to-

The next Saturday, the café was empty.

Three hours he waited – three hours of narrowed eyes and shaking hands and sympathetic, pitying glances from the plump Frenchwoman at the cash register.

Four days of missed phone calls before he was finally notified that the line had been disconnected.

Five hours of sitting outside the locked door to Ronnie’s flat, finger glued to the doorbell but eyes turned away from the darkened windows inside.

Three weeks of ”I’m sorry kid, I know he’s my nephew, but I honestly can’t help you.”.

Three weeks, four days, and eight hours until Max finally had to accept that Ronnie was gone.

And so the months continued to pass.

Max never returned to the coffee shop – it was just too much, too hard. The owners would understand. They seemed to, anyways, better than anyone else – the people passing in the hallways, first concerned, then annoyed, now uninterested; the teachers, anger coming first, then concern, then he melded into one with the walls and no one cared anymore.

Even he didn’t care anymore.

He should have known that something so pure couldn’t last. He’d never come across anything like it, like him, like them in all his years of living, and now that it had slipped through his fingers like a silken ribbon too perfectly woven to grasp, he looked and looked and he just couldn’t see them anywhere. They had been one of a kind. There was nothing like it.

And for a few months, drenched in cold weather, he’d thought it could last.

Max always had hated the spring.



It was almost a year before Ronnie came back.

The grey of the winter sky still clung to Max like a shroud – his eyes were still dull, endlessly, almost unconsciously searching for Ronnie’s equivalent in the world around him, always fruitless. Still, he had fought his hardest to put it all behind him, to move on, to be alive again.

His guitar was locked, abandoned and dusty, in the corner of his near-empty closet.

Moving on hadn’t worked too well.

Even so, sometimes now he could go whole days without thinking of him – that made it worse though, somehow, as though being suppressed for so long made the memories of shining brown eyes and hands all over him more vivid, stronger and more vicious as they assaulted his dreams and his waking stupor.

He blamed it on the fact that his dorm room ceiling looked quite a bit like Ronnie’s.

And then, one day, it happened all over again.

It was a very simple thing. It was a late Saturday morning, and Max wanted a coffee.

So he went.

It was a bit masochistic, he thought, the way he behaved at times – taking detours to slip past Ronnie’s flat, just in case the lights were on – popping into the coffee shop for a pastry, sitting down and inevitably forced up before the conclusion of his meal by lingering memories – even so, in some odd way, it helped.

And that was how he found himself, at exactly 12:20 on a Saturday afternoon, sitting in the same wicker chair he’d sat in all those months ago, glasses perched on his hair as he flicked through the pages of his music theory textbook.

The chair in front of him was pulled out.

“Your hair’s gotten so long.”

The textbook dropped to the floor with a loud bang that caused the woman at the register to jump, and a grey haze began fading like morning mist from piercing green eyes that rose to meet tentative brown ones.

Max stared.

And stared.

And stared.

Ronnie smiled slightly.

Max didn’t even realize he’d slapped the other boy until he saw shock in Ronnie’s thickly lined eyes and felt a stinging in his own outstretched palm. He stared in disbelief, eyes accusing and teeth gritted as he looked straight into the irises of the man that had walked out on him all those months ago.

“…I guess I deserved that.” Ronnie murmured, turning back to Max with a hand on his cheek, all sense of bravado gone as he looked down at the tabletop with a guilty expression.

“Damn right you did.” Max spat, fingers clamped around the rim of the table so hard he was actually afraid he might break it, “What the…what the fucking fuck?!”

Silence. Heavy, guilty silence.

“Is…is it really you?”

Max’s words were softer now, full of disbelief, yet somehow the way the heaviness that had plagued him all these long, bright months was beginning to lift from his shoulders.

He felt more alive, furious in the presence of a man who’d left him alone in the world, than he was with anyone else.

And he just couldn’t be angry about that.

“Yeah…yeah it is.” Ronnie murmured, looking up at the angry college student across from him with heavy brown eyes that were missing the sparkle that Max still loved so much.

More silence.

“How fucking dare you.”

Ronnie bit his lip hard, hand dropping from his cheek as he looked at Max with a soft sigh, “Max-“

“Shut up.”

Shocked silence.

“How dare you do this to me! How fucking dare you! After everything we…who the hell do you think you are?!” Max’s voice was steadily approaching a shriek.

“Max…Max! Please…. I can explain.” Ronnie gave a soft half-smile at the look on Max’s face, before amending, “I’m not promising it’ll be a good explanation, and you have every right to be pissed at me, but…please, just let me talk?”

Max folded his arms and leaned back in his chair, sharp glare a mirror of the one he’d directed at the man before him the day he’d come barging into his life and changed it forever.

Ronnie took a deep breath. “I know I’ve been gone a long time…and I know I just walked out on you with no explanation, and I know it was so fucking wrong of me to do and that I hurt you so fucking badly…but Max…” there was a sigh, “Do you remember the first day we met?”

Max stared at him in bewilderment. Of course he did, he wasn’t an idiot! Ronnie was trying to avoid the conversation, wasn’t he?

Against his better judgment, Max’s only response was a short nod.

Ronnie’s smile looked a little more real this time. “And do you remember what I told you?”

Max snorted. “You told me a lot of things.”

The boy across from him nodded. “I know I did. But do you remember what I told you…about your family wanting you to go to school?”

Max cringed slightly at that, remembering just how far from Ronnie’s advice he’d forced himself to stray in his fruitless attempts to get over the older boy.

“…that I need to stop trying to make everyone else happy without thinking of myself?” His voice was unsure.

A smile and a nod from his companion. “Exactly.”

Max raised an eyebrow stubbornly, determined to get the conversation back on track. “Okay. So?”

Ronnie sighed softly and ran decorated fingers through his hair. It was a few inches longer now, and his arms and neck were a bit more colorful and decorated than before, but other than that, Ronnie looked pretty much the same.

He was still beautiful.

“So…Max…” another sigh, “I’m not perfect…no one is. But you know…I told you…a lot.” He breathed, evidently struggling for words, “You know I’m…damaged.”

Max couldn’t help but feel his heart pang at the reminders of Ronnie’s heartbreak, the heartbreak he’d shared with Max over his family and friends that had festered in the other boy’s chest for years since.

“I mean, hell,” Ronnie snorted, “I used to flinch at the word ‘love’. Who the fuck does that?”

Max hardly noticed that his arms had come unloosened from across his chest and he was leaning forward, and he took just a second to notice the way Ronnie was once again before snapping his mind back to the conversation at hand.

“But you…” He looked at Max, his eyes softening in a way they’d never fully been able to before, and Max felt Ronnie’s own comforting warmth melting him the same way he used to before he'd left, “You don’t deserve that. You deserve so much more.”

Green eyes widened in stunned bewilderment at the words as something stirred deep inside Max's chest. This was not at all where he thought this conversation had been going.

“You’re one of a kind, Max.” Ronnie’s smile was love with a dusting of apology on top, mixed with something else Max just couldn't place, “You’re perfect, and you deserve equal perfection.”

He’d spent so long looking for someone like Ronnie, but Ronnie was one of a kind – Ronnie was perfect. So what was this bullshit he was spewing back onto Max?

“Max…I left for me, but…I also left for you. I’m sorry it had to happen that way, but it was better for both of us that I just leave than the alternative-“

“How do you know that?” Max interrupted.

“What?”

“How do you know you up and leaving without a trace was better for me than the alternative? Because if my grades, my social life, my mental state, or my physical and emotional health have any weigh in on this, it wasn’t.”

Max was fighting to keep his voice from shaking, to keep his words from revealing too much, but from the sorrowful, purely guilty look on Ronnie’s face, he already knew.

“I know Maxie, and I am truly so, so sorry for hurting you like this…” Ronnie’s voice was shaky, trembling almost as though he were holding back tears, “But…I needed this, and you needed this…and honestly, if I’d told you that I was leaving you so I could learn to treat you right would you have let me?”

Max already knew the answer to that one, and he was sure Ronnie did as well.

“Max, I…I left…so I could let go of the things I needed to in order to be able to love you like you deserve to be loved.”

Max felt his heart jump into his throat as the world around them fell away. He’d been so convinced, so sure that after months upon months of silence, of solitude, that Ronnie had forgotten about him, that Ronnie hadn’t really cared for him at all, no matter what he had felt…but here Ronnie was, telling him that….

Ronnie took a deep breath, seeming nervous and absolutely sure of himself all at once.

“Max…” he murmured, reaching across the table to grasp the other boy’s shaking hands with his own, an action that Max made no move to fight, “I had to learn to tell you…that I love you.”

Max vaguely noticed that he had made a noise, a sort of stuttered ‘oh’ as the words he’d never thought he’d hear, especially not from those lips, pierced through the last clinging veil of loneliness hanging over him, setting him free, as he felt for the first time in what seemed like years – felt tears on his cheeks, warm and wet and blurring his vision until Ronnie looked just a little too much like an angel and he had to blink several times to make sure he was indeed real.

Ronnie looked frightened, worried, one shaking hand letting go of their joined fingers to brush the wetness off of Max’s cheeks.

“Max, what’s wrong?” He asked, words nervous and trembling almost as badly as Max was as he tried to fight down the sobs threatening to escape with the tears, “I’m so so so so sorry, I really am, and I’m being honest and truthful here when I say that I love you, I always have. So please don’t cry, I’m so-“

“It’s not that.” Max managed to choke past the sobs stuck in his throat.

“Huh?” Ronnie seemed adorably bewildered. “Th-then-“

“Do you know how long I’ve waited?”

Ronnie looked even more confused now, and still guilty, so Max was quick to clarify before he began apologizing again. “D-do you know how long I’ve wanted to hear that?”

Ronnie’s eyes softened, and his loving smile was back. “Do you know how long I’ve waited to say that?”

Max laughed softly, a watery sound. “Not as long as me, I bet.”

Ronnie grinned suddenly.

“You’re right.” He murmured, leaning in, lips right by Max’s ear so only he could hear, “I’ve waited longer.”

He pulled back, and Max looked deep into those familiar brown eyes mirroring the drink in front of him like they always did. He thought about coffee and whiskey and kisses and long nights together in Ronnie’s flat and snow and leaves and love and suddenly his hands were gone from Ronnie’s, instead cupping the taller man’s cheeks forcefully as he stood, knocking the chair over with a clatter and jostling the table as he kissed those lips he’d missed so much with all the force of missing someone in the summer.

Ronnie kissed back.

It seemed to last forever – hands and lips and sugar and coffee and somehow, though it was deep and sloppy and harsh, it still held that sweetness, that pure innocence that Max now recognized as the sort of thing you come across once in a lifetime.

And this time he had no intention of ever letting it go.

He pulled back, panting, breath mixing hot and heavy against Ronnie's, and choked out the words he'd been longing to say for so long, flowing off his tongue like spiked coffee:

"I love you too."

Ronnie smiled then, standing up and pulling Max into his arms, embracing him like this was the only chance they'd ever get.

"Hey Ronnie?" Max murmured after a moment, mouth right beside Ronnie's ear, basking in the warmth that had gotten him through the dead of winter.

"Hmm?" Ronnie glanced down at him, brown meeting green in a way that looked just a little bit like autumn.

"Promise me you'll stay through the spring?"

A smile, soft and sweet and loving.

"I promise."