#aarobron

He should have wanted that to be the case. Aaron should have wanted the story to go that way – for Robert to meet someone new, and for him to leave Aaron, and John, by association, alone – but he hated the idea so much it had him up until all hours of the night, his sleeping husband completely unaware as he snored next to Aaron.

(John snored so fucking much – it made Aaron long for Robert’s tendency to kick in his sleep, remember those nights when Robert would toss, and turn, and the only way to stop it was to wrap his own legs around Robert’s restless ones, Robert more delighted by being wrestled into being the little spoon than he’d ever admit).

Aaron hadn’t meant for it to happen the way it did – but a week after he saw Robert on a third date in the Woolpack, he let himself into Victoria’s house, and he kissed him, and just like the last time, the rest was, well, history.

“Robert?” Aaron squinted, groggy as he roused himself from sleep. The right side of the bed was empty (the right side, not the left, John insistent from the beginning of their relationship that he had to sleep on the left, leaving Aaron disjointed as he slept on the side he’d come to know as Robert’s, regardless of what bed he was in), Robert sitting by the window, jumper pulled down over his wrists, his pale legs bare and glowing in the moonlight sneaking in the gap in the hotel curtains.

“Robert?” Aaron repeated, swinging his legs out of the bed, padding across the carpet to where Robert was sitting. The hotel was a far cry from the plush hotels they’d met in the first time around, Robert still married to Chrissie, but Aaron couldn’t spend that much money without John noticing, and Robert had only managed to get himself parttime hours with Caleb, so it wasn’t as if he was flush with cash. Life was different, now. “Are you alright?”

Robert turned his head, and Aaron’s heart sank as he realised that those perfect blue-green eyes he’d come to love so much – the ones that looked like the sparkling waves of the Welsh coast where they’d gone for a week every summer, when they were together – were filled with tears.

“You know,” Robert heaved out a breath, a different man to the one who’d gone to prison all those years ago – tired, and frightened, a lot of the time, but more open, in a strange way, honest in a way that still unnerved Aaron sometimes. “I never appreciated how hard it was for you to be on the other side of the affair, all those years ago.”

“Robert…” Aaron trailed off, chewing the side of his lip. It was sort of uncharted territory, this, neither of them willing to address the John-shaped elephant in the room as weeks turned into months and this rendition of their affair ran as long as it had the first time around.

“I never understood how much it must have hurt you, to watch me leave, and go back to Chrissie, over, and over, and over,” Robert wiped roughly at his eyes, looking younger than his near-forty years old, his hair free of product and flat against his forehead. Aaron was trying to forget all the times he saw that same hairstyle on Robert from across a prison visiting table. “But it hurts – it’s like this ache, deep in my chest, and I can’t do anything about it. I feel – I feel powerless. Is that how I made you feel?”

Aaron didn’t think about their affair – their first – all that often, anymore. His memories of stolen kisses in barns and clandestine meetings in hotel rooms had long since been replaced with sweet kisses in the Woolpack and a shared nightly routine in the Mill. The affair wasn’t what Aaron missed, about Robert, when he was inside – Aaron missed the version of Robert had had married (twice), the one who loved him so openly, unashamedly.

But if he thought about the affair, about the younger version of himself who had been so desperately in love with Robert that he had been willing to accept scraps, then –

“Yeah,” Aaron admitted, his voice hoarse. “That’s how it felt for me then.”

Robert offered him a sad smile. “I guess I finally know how you felt. Maybe it’s the universe finally getting me back for all the ways I hurt you, back then,” he said, and Aaron hated that there was so much truth in that – as much as he and Robert had loved each other, and Aaron loved the bones of Robert Sugden, even when he pretended he didn’t, they had always been just as good at hurting each other as they were at loving each other, knowing what words would hurt the most, how to dig the metaphorical knife in and make each other bleed.

They deserved each other, for better, and for worse.

“Every time I have to watch you go back to him, it feels like a part of me dies,” Robert admitted, glancing out the hotel room window. “And yet, I still keep coming back for more, Aaron.”

Aaron knew how that felt, too.

Crouching in front of Robert, Aaron placed his hands on Robert’s knees, the touch slow, and gentle. Slow was the most important thing, about this new version of Robert, Aaron had discovered – he needed to know there was time to get away.

Robert didn’t move.

There was a scar on Robert’s knee that hadn’t been there before prison – long, and jagged, the scar went as far as his calf, the skin silvery, and white, as though the wound was long healed. Maybe it was, physically, but Aaron knew the emotional scars ran deep, that Robert went through more inside than he’d even admitted to Aaron – and Aaron was the one person he had been unfailingly honest with.

Taking one of Robert’s hands in his own, Aaron pressed a kiss to the cold skin of the back of Robert’s hand. He was always cold, was Robert, hands and feet icy. It had annoyed him, once upon a time, but he missed it now, craving the way Robert used to shove his hands up Aaron’s pyjama top at night as he lay next to John, his current husband an unbearable furnace to sleep next to. “I’m sorry,” he said, and maybe that wasn’t entirely honest either – Aaron wasn’t sure if he’d ever feel sorry about wanting Robert, about taking what he wanted, what he needed, from the man he’d once promised to spend his life with.

“You’re not sorry, Aaron,” Robert returned, and the tone wasn’t accusatory – it was sad, more than anything, accepting of the reality of the situation they were in, a situation that wasn’t at all unfamiliar: it was just that this time, Aaron was married, and Robert was the one begging for more.

Maybe that was just what they were destined to be – mirror images of each other, good and bad, destined to repeat their mistakes over, and over, and over, until finally, someone caught in the crossfire of the great Aaron and Robert love story has enough, and burns it all down on their behalf.

(Sometimes – sometimes Aaron worries that John might be that person. That their luck has run out and the man who’d put the gold wedding band on Aaron’s finger might be the one responsible for his downfall.)

Robert gave his hand a squeeze. “I can’t go on like this, Aaron,” and Aaron knew it was the truth – that Robert was tired, was exhausted of the sneaky kisses and secret hotel stays, of their love being hidden all over again. Aaron knew, because he’d felt it all before, when he was in Robert’s place – and that’s how he knew, that as truthful as it was, as much as Robert meant it, Robert would still come, when Aaron called. He knew, because he’d always come when Robert had called him, once upon a time.

In a strange way, doing this, sleeping with Robert behind his husbands back – it made Aaron feel oddly sympathetic to a version of Robert he’d once hated, the one who’d kept going back to Chrissie, who had worn the weight of a wedding ring on his finger even as he’d used those clever hands to take every inch of Aaron apart. It hadn’t been easy to be the dirty little secret, but it wasn’t easy to be on this side of it, either.

Leaning in, Aaron pressed a soft kiss to Robert’s already kiss-bitten lips, the other man relaxing into his embrace. “Come back to bed,” he pleaded, because talking about this was never going to get them anywhere – Aaron had lived through it all before, and he knew how this ended: with him, and Robert, standing amongst the wreckage of their lives, of all the lives they’d managed to ruin because they’d never learned to love each other the easy way.

Aaron didn’t know how to fix it, how to end it with John, how to want to end it with John and chose Robert, knowing Robert had never been the safe choice – but had always been the best choice he’d ever made.

Nodding, Robert allowed Aaron to pull him up out of the chair, and led back to bed, Aaron sneaking his hands under Robert’s jumper as they burrowed underneath the duvet, palm pressing to the curve of Robert’s belly, the skin there warm.

“I love you,” Aaron said, and he knew Robert wouldn’t say it back – Robert never did, these days, and Aaron didn’t begrudge him that either, not when he’d done the same himself all those years ago. “I love you,” he repeated, burying his face in the space between Robert’s face, and shoulder, breathing in the familiar scent of Robert’s cologne, the same one he’d worn before he’d gone to prison.

(Some things never changed).