#kjop

Hmm I think what I was trying to explore with Owen and Kent in Good Company was a relationship built on friendship but also convenience and like....expectation? almost? and how sometimes the blurred boundaries between friendship and a relationship mean you don’t know where you stand with each other. I had a line from Kent that was like ‘you can’t make a relationship out of an assumption’ --- like just because you’re friends and have hooked up and care about each other and everyone expects you to, doesn’t mean that you should. For my versions of Owen and Kent it’s the fact that they don’t communicate and try and define some of this stuff and move their relationship purposefully to the next level that’s the trouble.

BUT they are, at the center of that, genuinely very good friends. Similar! (Maybe too similar?) Owen tells Kent he loves her because he does! but also because he feels like he should, that’s what is expected of him, and because he likes the idea and ease of sticking with and making it work with Kent and hasn’t worked out the difference yet. Which is why Kent, who HAS realized that difference is the first to move away and move on. I think when Owen finds out about Nick and Kent he’s shocked not necessarily because it’s Nick (although that’s certainly part of it) but because he’s taken Kent for granted up till that point. I think it takes him a while to get used to it, because in a period of massive change in all their lives, Kent was someone he was trying to use as a constant, even subconsciously, and now he’s having to readjust everything there, too.

I think once he gets over that, gets more comfortable in Buffalo, sees how happy Nick and Kent are, and has the opportunity to talk to Kent a little more candidly about it (tipsy, in a bar back in canada over the offseason) he apologizes for the way they went about stuff and how much space he needed. But Kent gets it, and recognizes that the reason they didn’t work out in college was on her, too. She didn’t push enough, and maybe that was a sign. Conversation is excruciatingly awkward, but necessary! and they get through it!