“You can ask me to hold you, birdie,” he murmurs. “I won’t turn you away.”

“It’s too hard.” Silco’s voice is choked. 

Vander hums and dips his fingers beneath Silco’s collar, massaging the back of his neck. Silco shudders, squeezing at his thick sides.

“I always want to hold you,” Vander says, like a confession. “Is it alright when I reach out and touch you?” 

Silco nods against his chest.

“And you’ll tell me if you want me to leave you alone,” Vander prompts.

“I’m quite capable of being mean to you.” Silco tries to lilt his voice with irony, but he sounds weak and quavery.

“It’s not being mean,” Vander insists. “Please be honest with me if you don’t want something. You can always turn me down. I want to be close to you, in whatever way you want.”

Silco shudders against him, tension rippling through his torso and limbs. Vander holds him tighter, wrapping their legs together and squeezing his sides. Eventually, Silco’s trembling slows and his tension releases, his muscles going loose and pliant. Vander nuzzles at his temple.

After a long moment Silco speaks.

“My safeword shall be ‘Zaun,’” he says languidly. 

“That’s a terrible safeword,” Vander protests. Silco can hear the smile in his voice. “You say it all the time! You should pick something you wouldn’t normally say, like ‘eucalyptus,’ or something.”

“Eucalyptus?”

“Or something!”

“My safeword shall be, ‘Leave me alone, you distracting oaf, I’m trying to work and you’re talking to me about eucalyptus.’”

Vander laughs. Silco feels it vibrate through his chest and belly. His breath releases in a gasp.

“I love you,” Vander says against his temple.

“...’love you,” Silco murmurs.

Vander watches Silco from behind the bar throughout the night on Schemer’s Eve. His eyes stray repeatedly to Silco’s waist and tight trousers, though he does his best to behave. 

His friendship with Silco has always been this huge, incomparable part of his life. He would never risk it for his own selfish gratification. But for a long time, Vander refused to even acknowledge to himself that he was sexually attracted to him. 

His denial had been intense. And he’d been perpetually horny, hadn’t he? Down to fuck any woman that made eyes at him. One night stands helped tame the beast, for a while.

It would have been one thing if Silco had said he was interested. Vander can’t imagine him doing that, though. More likely, he would ignore his feelings as long as possible until he snapped and jumped him or something. Just laid a kiss on him out of the blue…

Vander’s heart starts to pound. He fiddles with a glass in his hand, blinking at it sightlessly. Silco had spontaneously kissed him one night. It was a little before everything went to shit, wasn’t it? Powder’s third birthday. They were cleaning up.

Vander has drifted back to that memory once, twice, or more in the intervening years. He’d been sitting at the bar. Silco had pushed himself from his stool to stand between Vander’s legs, falling against his chest. Then Silco wrapped his fingers around the back of his neck and pressed warm lips to his. 

Vander has spun a few daydreams of how he might have responded if Silco had meant it seriously, if he hadn’t been drunk. He’d have held him by the waist and pulled him on his lap, spread his fingers through his hair and sucked on his tongue. He wouldn’t have stopped there.

Something about the memory feels unreal, a hazy fantasy that only happened in his mind. But he remembers the mortification that Silco tried to hide when Vander brought him back to reality. When he stopped him from doing something he’d regret later, when he gently pushed him away.

When Vander pushed Silco away. After Silco tried to kiss him.

Suddenly Vander sees the memory in a different light. Has he never considered the possibility that Silco had kissed him… because he wanted to? When did Silco make personal overtures that he didn’t actually mean? He hardly made them at all.